When a voice from the thirteenth century comes to us amid the din of the nineteenth, it is difficult for those interested in the cause of human progress not to feel their attention strongly challenged. Such a voice appeals to us in a work which has now first appeared in an English version. [Footnote 59]
[Footnote 59: "The Life and Revelations of St. Gertrude, Virgin and Abbess." By a Religious of the Order of Poor Clares.]
We owe it to a religious of the order of Poor Clares; a daughter of St. Francis thus paying to St. Benedict a portion of that debt which all the religious orders of the West owe to their great patriarch. The book possesses a profound interest, and that of a character wholly apart from polemics. The thirteenth century, the noblest of those included in the "ages of faith," was a troubled time; but high as the contentions of rival princes and feudal chiefs swelled, we have here a proof that
"Birds of calm sat brooding on the charmèd wave."
Not less quieting is the influence of [{406}] such records in our own time. They make their way—music being more penetrating than mere sound—amid the storm of industrialism and its million wheels. Controversialists may here forget their strifes, and listen to the annals of that interior and spiritual life which is built up in peace and without the sound of the builder's hammer, much less of sword or axe. There is here no necessary or direct contest between rival forms of belief. Monasteries have been pulled down and sold in Catholic as well as in Protestant countries; and in the latter also are to be found men whose highest aspiration is to rebuild them, and restore the calm strength and sacred labors which they once protected. Such books are not so much a protest against any age as the assertion of those great and universal principles of truth and peace which can alone enable each successive age to correct its errors, supply its defects, and turn its special opportunities to account. It is not in a literary point of view that they interest us chiefly, although they include not a little which reminds us of Dante, and reveal to us one of the chief sources from which the great Christian poet drew his inspiration. Their interest is mainly human. They show us what the human being can reach, and by what personal influences, never more potent than when their touch is softest, society, in its rougher no less than in its milder periods, is capable of being moulded.
The "Revelations of St. Gertrude" were first translated into Latin, as is affirmed, by Lamberto Luscorino in 1390. This work was, however, apparently never published; and the first Latin version by which they became generally known was that put forth under the name of "Insinuationes Divinae Pietatis," by Lanspergius, who wrote at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. The work has appeared in several of the modern languages; but the French translation, by which it has hitherto been chiefly known among us, has many inaccuracies. The present English translation has been carefully made from the Latin of Lanspergius and the original is frequently quoted in the foot-notes. The "Insinuationes" consist of five books. Of these the second only came from the hand of the saint, the rest being compiled by a religious of her monastery, partly from personal knowledge and partly from the papers of St. Gertrude. Two works by the saint, her "Prayers" and her "Exercises," have lately appeared in an English version.
St. Gertrude was born at Eisleben, in the county of Mansfield, on the 6th of January, 1263, just sixty-nine years after the birth of St. Clare, the great Italian saint from whose convent at Assisi so many others had already sprung in all parts of Europe, and whose name had already become a living power in Germany and Poland, as well as in the sunny south. [Footnote 60] St. Gertrude was descended from an illustrious house, that of the Counts of Lackenborn. When but five years old she exchanged her paternal home for the Benedictine Abbey of Rodersdorf, where she was soon after joined by her sister, afterward the far-famed St. Mechtilde. When about twenty-six she first began to be visited by those visions which never afterward ceased for any considerable time. At thirty she was chosen abbess; and for forty years she ruled a sisterhood whom she loved as her children. The year after she became abbess she removed with her charge to another but neighboring convent, that of Heldelfs. No other change took place in her outward lot. Her life lay within. As her present biographer remarks, "she lived at home with her Spouse."
[Footnote 60: An interesting life of this saint and of her earlier companions has lately been published in English: "St. Clare, St. Colette, and the Poor Clares: by a Religions of the Order of Poor Clares." J. F. Fowler, Dublin.]
The visions of St. Gertrude are an endless parable of spiritual truths, as well as a record of wonderful graces. From the days when our divine Lord himself taught from the hillside and [{407}] the anchored ship, it has been largely through parables that divine lore has been communicated to man. Religious and symbolic art is a parable of truths that can only be expressed in types. The legends through which the earlier ages continue to swell the feebler veins of later times with the pure freshness of the Church's youth are for the most part facts which buried themselves deep in human sympathies and recollections, because in them the particular shadowed forth the universal. It is the same thing in philosophy itself; and that Philosophia Prima which, as Bacon tells us, discerns a common law in things as remote as sounds are from colors, and thus traces the "same footsteps of nature" in the most widely separated regions of her domain, finds constantly in the visible and familiar a parable of the invisible and unknown. The very essence of poetry also consists in this, that not only in its metaphors and figures, but in its whole spirit, it is a parable, imparting to material objects at once their most beautiful expression and that one which reveals their spiritual meaning. So long as the imagination is a part of human intellect, it must have a place in all that interprets between the natural and the spiritual worlds.
The following characteristic passage, while it shows that St. Gertrude made no confusion between allegory and vision, yet suggests to us that so poetical a mind might, under peculiar circumstances, be more easily favored with visions than another: