Matelda and the cloister of Hellfde

by of Magdeburg Mechthild

That to Christian life in each of the past nineteen centuries there is a dark side, is an obvious fact. But as the dark side has been constantly regarded as the bright side by the Christians of each century, our task in discovering it must not consist merely of a study of old records. We have to compare the facts related, and the praise and blame attached to them, with something less variable than the human conscience and human opinion.

The “piety,” attributed to the mediæval saints, even when, as in the case of the nuns of Hellfde, it actually existed, included a mass of heathenish superstition, of unwholesome excitement of the brain and nerves; of blank ignorance of the true meaning of a great part of the Word of God; and in most cases, of abject submission to a fallen and heretical Church.

The “best books” of which the Abbess Gertrude formed her convent library contained grains of truth in masses of error, and some true facts smothered beneath piles of legendary rubbish. To find the pearls at the bottom of the sea of superstition and senseless legend, is at times a despairing endeavour. Yet the pearls are there, and must have been there; for the gates of the grave have never prevailed against the true Church of God. Some there always were taught by the Holy Spirit of God, and believing in the midst of their errors and wanderings the great eternal truths of the Gospel.

If we are to find true faith, if we are to find truth at all in the Middle Ages, we must find it amongst innumerable human inventions, and shining like a gem in the dark caverns of human folly. Can we say that in the nineteenth century it is otherwise? It were well to consider, and use for the search-light we so deeply need, the unchangeable Word of the living God.

Apart from the error taught by “the Church” in those past ages—saint-worship, purgatory, the merit of human works, and many more—a bewildering element of confusion presents itself in the atmosphere of visions and revelations in which the “pious” perpetually lived, or desired to live. For to live what has been called in our times “the higher Christian life,” meant at that time to be a seer of visions, and a dreamer of dreams. The seeing of visions was an attainment as much to be desired as to live in temperance, or godliness, or honesty.

Whilst in our days the wholesome fear of being sent to a lunatic asylum serves as a check upon the wild imagination of undisciplined woman kind, the strangest performances and utterances might in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries procure for the unfortunate woman a halo in the pictures which perpetuated her memory.

It is well to look at the matter of visions and revelations in the light of Holy Scripture. That the servants of God have seen visions divinely shown to them, no one can doubt who believes the Bible; nor that they have from time to time received direct revelations from God. Also, we read as a promise made to Christian people, that “your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; and on My servants and on My hand-maidens I will pour out in those days of My Spirit, and they shall prophesy.”

In the first place, therefore, we must admit that visions and revelations are, in the cases here mentioned, a reality, and a special gift of God, in consequence of the exaltation of Christ to the right hand of God, This is the explanation of these facts given by the Apostle Peter in the 33rd verse of the 2nd chapter of the Acts.

But when we read the various accounts in the Acts of the fulfilment of this promise, or the accounts in the Old Testament of similar visions and revelations, we find one marked distinction between these accounts and those given in mediæval legends. In the Bible the point is, not the state of exaltation to which such and such a man or woman attained, but, leaving them out of the question altogether, we are simply told what it was God showed or revealed to His servants. The seeing of visions is never spoken of as being the highest state of Christian life in the New Testament, or of spiritual life in the Old Testament. On the contrary, God on some occasions gave revelations to the most unworthy, and simply used them to speak the words He put into their mouths, whether they would or no—a truth which he taught to Balaam by using an ass as an example.

But in mediæval times, a state in which the man, or more frequently the woman, became liable to visions, was the thing mainly to be desired. It was not as in the case of Amos, who was content to go on herding his cows and picking his figs till the Lord gave him his message. The mediæval saint was trained and wrought upon by fasting and watching, by the study of the wildest legends, and by a conviction that the seeing of visions betokened a state of special holiness. This preparation of the mind, and one may say mainly of the body, for an unnatural and unwholesome condition produced the desired effect. The attacks of catalepsy, of convulsions and other diseased symptoms, were hailed as supernatural signs, and the disorder of the brain as a work of the Spirit. And from one to another the infection spread, as the convulsions and delusions excited envy and admiration, and a straining of the mind after something of like sort.