"I cannot say, Father, I do not now remember that Office; but I recollect tolerably well the treatise on 'Union with God,' it seems to me more interesting than the rest, but you will admit that it is very short ... and then Saint Teresa has also elucidated that question of human renunciation and divine fruition; and, hang it then...!"
"Come," said the oblate, with a smile, "I give up the attempt to make you a fervent reader of the good Suso."
"For us," said Father Maximin, "if we had a little time to work, this ought to be the leaven of our meditations, the subject of our reading;" and he took down a folio which contained the works of Saint Hildegarde, abbess of the Convent of Rupertsberg.
"She, you see, is the great prophetess of the New Testament. Never, since the visions of Saint John at Patmos, has the Holy Spirit communicated to an earthly being with such fulness and light. In her 'Heptachronon' she predicts Protestantism and the captivity of the Vatican; in her 'Scivias, or Knowledge of the Ways of the Lord,' which was edited, according to her recital, by a monk of the Convent of Saint Désibode, she interprets the symbols of the Scriptures, and even the nature of the elements. She also wrote a diligent commentary on our rules and enthusiastic pages on sacred music, on literature, on art, which she defines admirably; a reminiscence, half-effaced, of a primitive condition from which we have fallen since Eden. Unfortunately, to understand her, it is necessary to give oneself to minute researches and patient studies. Her apocalyptic style has something retractile, which retreats and shuts itself up all the more when one will open it."
"I am well aware that I am losing my little Latin," said M. Bruno. "What a pity there is not a translation of her works, with glosses to help."
"They are untranslatable," said the father, who went on,
"Saint Hildegarde is, with Saint Bernard, one of the purest glories of the family of Saint Benedict. How predestinate was that virgin, who was inundated with interior light at the age of three, and died at eighty-two, having lived all her life in the cloister!"
"And add that she was as a permanent state, prophetical!" cried the oblate. "She is like no other woman saint; all in her is astonishing, even the way in which God addresses her, for He forgets that she is a woman, and calls her 'man.'
"And she," added the prior, "employs, when she wishes to designate herself, the singular expression, 'the paltry form.' But here is another writer who is dear to us," and he showed Durtal the two volumes of Saint Gertrude. "She is again one of our great nuns, an abbess truly Benedictine, in the exact sense of the word, for she caused the Holy Scriptures to be explained to her nuns, wished that the piety of her daughters should be based on science, that this faith should be sustained by liturgical food, if I may say so."
"I know nothing of her but her 'Exercises,'" observed Durtal, "and they have left with me the memory of echoed words, of things said again from the sacred books. So far as one may judge from simple extracts, she does not appear to have original expression, and to be far below Saint Teresa or Saint Angela."