Her vow is irrevocable; and thus free-will, the infinite in our nature, stands finally pledged to the "better part." In her life of mortification, and her indifference to worldly opinion, she reaches the utmost to which fortitude may aspire; yet she perfects in herself also the characteristic virtues of woman—love, humility, obedience.
The true monk also, while more of a man than other men, includes more of the virtues that belong least often to man. It is pre-eminently the soul within him that has received its utmost development, and become the expression of his being. The highest ideal of the antique world, mens sana in corpore sano, implied, not the subordination of the body to the mind, and of both to the soul, but the equal development of the former two, the soul being left wholly out of account. Such a formula, it is true, rises above that of the mere Epicurean, who subordinates the mind to the body, and makes pleasure the chief good. It leaves, however, no place for the spiritual. By the change which Christianity introduced, virtues which paganism overlooked or despised became the predominant elements in man's being. Purity, patience, and humility bear to Christian morals a relation analogous to that which faith, hope, and charity bear to theology. The former, like the latter, triad of virtues will ever present to the rationalist the character of mysticism, because they rest upon mysteries—that is, upon realities out of our sight, and hidden in the divine character. The earthly basis upon which they are sometimes placed by defenders that belong to the utilitarian school is as incapable of supporting them as the film of ice that covers a lake would be of supporting the mountains close by. These are Christian virtues exclusively, and it was to perfect them that the convents which nurtured saints were called into existence.
We know the hideous picture of monastic life with which a morbid imagination sometimes amuses or frightens itself. Let us frankly contrast with it the true ideal of a monastic saint. No ideal, of course, is fully realized; but still it is only when the ideal is understood that the actual character is appreciated. The monastic life is founded on the evangelical counsels, the portion of practical Christianity most plainly peculiar to the Christian system. It is obedience, but the obedience of love. It is fear, but the fear of offending, far more than the fear of the penalty. It is dependence glorified. It is based on what is feminine as well as on what is masculine in our nature; on a being which has become recipient in a sacred passiveness. It lives by faith, which "comes by hearing;" and its attitude of mind is like that indicated by the sweet and serious, but submitted, face of one who listens to far-off music or a whisper close by. In the stillness of devout contemplation the soul, unhardened and unwrinkled, spreads itself forth like a vine-leaf to the beam of truth and the dews of grace. In this perfected Christian character we find, together with the strength of the stem, the flexibility of the tendril and the freshness of the shoot. For the same reason we find the consummate flower of sanctity—a Bernard or a Francis—and with the flower the fruit, and the seed which has sown Christianity in all lands; for monks have ever been the great missionaries. The soul of the monk who has done most for man has thus most included the womanly as well as the manly type of excellence. It has unity and devotedness. It has that purity which is not only [{417}] consistent with fervor, but in part proceeds from it. It shrinks not only from the forbidden, but from the disproportionate, the startling, and the abrupt. It is humble, and does not stray as far as its limit. It regards sin, not as a wild beast chained, but as a plague, and thinks that it cannot escape too far beyond the infection. It has a modesty which modulates every movement of the being. It has spontaneity, and finds itself at home among little things. It is cheerful and genial, with a momentary birth of good thoughts, wishes, and deeds, that ascend like angels to God, and are only visible to angels.
Nor is this all. It is in the conventual life that the third type of human character—that of the child—is found in conjunction with the other two. In the world even the partial preservation of the child in the man is one of the rare marks of genius. In the cloister the union is common. Where the character is thus integrated by harmoniously blending the three human types—viz., man, woman, and child—then man has reached his best, and done most to reverse the fall. It is among those who have most bravely taken the second Adam for their example that this primal image is most nearly restored. We see it in such books as the "Imitation," and the "Confessions" of St. Augustine. We see it in the old pictures of the saints, where the venerable and the strong, the gracious and the lovely, the meek and the winning, are so subtly blended by the pencil of an Angelico or a Perugino. We see it within many a modern cloister. It has its place, to the discerning eye, among the evidences of religion.
In the north the world now finds it more difficult than in the south to appreciate such a character as St. Gertrude. If it is sceptical as to visions and raptures, still more is it scandalized by austerities and mortification. The temperament of the south tends too generally to pleasure; but the great natures of the south, perhaps for that reason, renounce the senses with a loftier strength. They throw themselves frankly on asceticism, leaving beneath them all that is soft, like the Italian mountains which frown from their marble ridges over the valleys of oranges and lemons. The same ardor which so often leads astray, ministers, when it chooses the soul for its residence, to great deeds, as fire does to the labors of material science. In the north, including the land of St. Gertrude, many of the virtues are themselves out of sympathy with the highest virtue. Men can there admire strength and industry; but they too often believe in no strength that is not visible, no industry that is not material. Mortification is to them unintelligible. Action they can admire; in suffering they see but a sad necessity, like the old Greeks, to whom all pain was an intrusion and a scandal.
Christianity first revealed the might of endurance. It was not the triumph over Satan at the temptation that restored man's race; though Milton, not without a deep, unintended significance, selected that victory as the subject of his "Paradise Regained." It was not preaching, nor miracle, but Calvary. Externally, endurance is passive; internally, it is the highest form of action—the action in which there is no self-will, the energy that is one with humility. The moment the Church began to live she began to endure. The apostles became ascetics, "keeping the body under," and proclaiming that between spirit and flesh, between watching and sloth, between fast and feast, there was not peace but war. While the fiery penance of persecution lasted, it was easy to "have all things as though one had nothing." There then was always a barrier against which virtue might push in its ceaseless desire to advance, and to discipline her strength by trial. When the three centuries of trial were over, monasticism rose. In it again was found a place for mortification— for that detachment which is [{418}] attachment to God, and that exercise which makes Christians athletes. There silence matured divine love, and stillness generated strength. There was found the might of a spiritual motive; and a fulcrum was thus supplied like that by which Archimedes boasted that his lever could move the world.
It is difficult to contemplate such a character as that of St. Gertrude without straying from her to a kindred subject—that wonderful monastic life, with its rapturous visions and its as constant mortifications, to which we owe such characters. Without the cloister we should have had no Gertrudes; and without the mortification of the cloister the ceaseless chant and the incense would have degenerated into spiritual luxuries. It is time for us to return, and ask a practical question: What was this St. Gertrude, who found so fair a place among the wonders of the thirteenth century, and whom in the nineteenth so few hear of or understand? What was she even at the lowest, and such as the uninitiated might recognize? She was a being for whom nature had done all nature could do. She was a noble-minded woman, pure at once and passionate, more queenly and more truly at home in the poverty of her convent than she could have been in her father's palace. Secondly, she was a woman of extraordinary genius and force of character. Thirdly, she was one who, the child of an age when the dialectics of old Greece were laid on the altar of revealed truth, dwelt habitually in that region of thought which, in the days of antiquity, was inhabited by none, and occasionally approached but by the most aspiring votaries of the Platonic philosophy. This was the human instrumentality which sovereign grace took to itself, as the musician selects some fair-grained tree out of which to shape his lyre. There was in her no contradictory past to retrieve. Without a jar, and almost without consciousness, she passed with a movement of swanlike softness out of innocence into holiness. Some have fought their way to goodness, as others have to earthly greatness, and won the crown, though not without many a scar. But she was "born in the purple," and all her thoughts and feelings had ever walked with princely dignity and vestal grace, as in the court of the great King. Her path was arduous; but it stretched from good to better, not from bad to good. She did not graduate in the garden of Epicurus, nor amid the groves of Academus, nor amid the revel of that Greek society in which the glitter of the highest intelligence played above the rottenness of the most corrupt life. She had always lived by faith. The spiritual world had been hers before the natural one, and had interpreted it. Man's supernatural end had ever for her presented the clue to his destinies, and revealed the meaning of his earthly affections. Among these last she had made no sojourn. She had prolonged not the time, but done on earth what all aspire to do in heaven: she had risen above human ties, in order to possess them in their largest manifestations. The faith affirmed that we are to have all things in God, and in God she resolved to have them. Her heart rose as by a heavenward gravitation to the centre of all love. A creature, and knowing herself to be no more, her aspiration was to belong wholly to her Creator. To her the incarnation meant the union of the human race, and of the human soul, with God. Her devotions are the endless love-songs of this high bridal. They passed from her heart spontaneously, like the song of the bird; and they remain for ever the triumphant hymeneal chant of a clear, loving, intelligential spirit, which had renounced all things for him, and had found all things in him for whom all spirits are made.