Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythm of this music. The hills and the sea and the earth dance. The world of man dances in laughter and tears....
Behold! my heart dances in the delight of a hundred arts, and the Creator is well pleased.”
The next is the German mystic and poetess, Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose writings are amongst the finest products of mystical genius of the romantic and emotional type. This Mechthild’s book, The Book of the Flowing Light of the Godhead, is a collection of visions, revelations, thoughts and letters, written in alternate prose and verse. The variety of its contents includes the most practical advice on daily conduct, the most sublime descriptions of high mystical experience. Mechthild was an artist, who was evidently familiar with the literary tradition and most of the literary expedients of her time. She uses many of them in the attempt to impart to others that vision of Life, Light and Love which she knew. I take, as an example of her genius, and a last specimen of the mystic’s creative art, the celebrated letter addressed to a fellow-pilgrim on that spiritual “Love-path” which she trod herself with so great a fortitude. It represents not only the rich variety of Mechthild’s literary resources, but also those several forms of artistic expression which the great mystics have employed. Here, concrete representation is perpetually reinforced by oblique suggestion; the imagery of the poet is double-edged, evoking moods as well as ideas. We observe that it opens with a spiritual love-scene, closely related in style to the secular and romantic literature of Mechthild’s time; that this develops to a dramatic dialogue between soul and senses—another common artifice of the mediæval author—and this again leads by a perfectly natural transition to the soul’s great acclamation of its destiny, and the crowning announcement of the union of lover and beloved.
The movement of this mystical romance, then, like the movement of ascending consciousness, goes from the concrete image to the mysterious and sidelong apprehension of imageless facts. First we have picture, then dialectic, then intuitive certitude. Here, too, we find both those aspects of experience which dominate mystical literature: the personal and intimate encounter of love, and the self-loss of the soul in an utterly transcendent Absolute. Surely the union of these “completing opposites” in one work of art must rank as a great imaginative achievement.
Mechthild tells her story of the soul’s adventure in snatches of freely-rhymed verse, linked together by prose narrative passages—a form which is not uncommon in the secular literature of the Middle Ages.[[1]] We are further reminded of that secular literature by the imagery which she employs. The soul is described as a maiden, the Divine Lover is a fair youth whom she desires. The very setting of the story is just such a fairy landscape as we find in the lays and romances of chivalry; it has something of the spring-like charm that we feel in Aucassin and Nicolette—the dewy morning, the bird-haunted forest, the song and dance. It is, in fact, a love story of the period adapted with extraordinary boldness to the purposes of mystical experience.
When the virgin soul, says Mechthild at the opening of her tale, has endured all the trials of mystical purification, she is very weary, and cries to her Love, saying, “Oh, beautiful youth! I long for thee. Where shall I find thee?” Then the Divine Youth answers:
“A gentle voice I hear,
Something of love sounds there:
I have wooed her long and long,
Yet not till now have I heard that song.