Part 4

This one phrase caught, repeated, whispered, half understood, misunderstood, often not understood at all, spread with the swiftness and authority of gospel among the Beghards and the Beguines of Europe. Soon in Italy, the vagrant sect of Apostolici, the followers of Segarelli, and the Franciscan Fraticelli in France, and the Beghards and Beguines of Northern Europe, all were murmuring together that one phrase, that key-word of pantheism, “_Deus est formaliter omne._”

It is not easy to prevent the growth of an idea among a community so widely spread, so constantly changing. Segarelli was burned at Parma all in vain. His doctrines had percolated everywhere. Inspired by the example of the mendicant orders, many of the Beghards and Beguines had returned to the vagabond life. Pious vagrants all in rags, staffless, scripless, they wandered through the country from beguinage to beguinage, begging for their food along the way. It was a change indeed from the early habits of the order, so busy, so hard at work, so pious, so responsible. But in the hearts of the lowest classes the secular fraternities were never so dear, never so much revered as now. In 1295 the Council of Mayence forbad them to wander through the streets, exciting public pity and crying, “_Brod durch Got!_” and Guillaume de St. Amour lamented that the people were blinded by the rags, the hunger, the false piety of these vagrants. This, of course, is the view of churchmen who did not entertain such strict opinions with regard to the merit of Franciscan mendicants. Indeed, much of the ill-favour with which the Church regarded the wandering Beghards and Beguines of these later days may be set down to a jealousy lest the piety of these irregular brothers should defraud the begging orders of their due. From one cause or another the thunders of the Church began to fall heavy and frequent upon the secular fraternities.

In 1310 the Council of Treves disposed of the pretensions of the Beghards in what appeared a sufficiently decisive manner. The Beghards were called an imaginary congregation, idle fugitives from honest labour, false interpreters of Scripture, mendicant vagabonds unsanctioned by the Church.

In 1311, at the Council of Vienna, Clement V. decreed the total suppression of Beguinism. But the sentence was severe. Too many innocent must suffer with the guilty. In the same year the Pope revoked his sentence, and allowed the orthodox and irreproachable among the Beguines to live “according to the inspiration of the Lord.”

But from this time Beguinism as an institution was at an end. The “orthodox and irreproachable” were Beghards and Beguines who had joined the Tertiary Order of Francis or of Dominic. The secular order was no longer secular; the aim of the Beguines was falsified and changed.

VIII.

In the year 1328 nearly fifty Libertines or Brothers of the Free Spirit were publicly burned at Cologne.

The persecution of the wandering Beguines and Beghards had thoroughly begun. In the history of the time, in the chronicles of any town along the Rhine or in the Low Countries, we may meet the dolorous little entry: On such a day so many Beghards were burned or imprisoned in perpetual _In pace_. A special German Inquisition was instituted against them.

It is the old cruel war of intolerance and heresy, the vain and shameful struggle with which six centuries are full. But there was here a more than usual excuse for the excessive severity of Rome. Europe was fast being ruined by these mendicant wanderers. Begging friars of St. Francis, Carmelites, Dominicans, numerous new orders which flourished for a while, and died, and are forgotten, all these flooded the country with pious vagrants for whom the impoverished laymen must provide. And in addition to all these orthodox idlers, there was now a countless horde of wandering Beghards, no less ignorant, no less incapable of warfare or of labour, and, in addition, pestilent heretics. Such was the view of the Church.

Fifty years before, Gregory X. had tried to reduce “the unbridled throng of mendicants, who are a heavy burden alike on Church and people;” but his efforts had been in vain. The poor of every nation and of every time are quick to ascribe piety to those who, ragged and homeless, assert that the life to come shall repay them for their sufferings here. Half starved, down-trodden, little better than slaves, the peasants of Germany would share their squalid meal thankfully with the wandering friar. It was little less than sacrilege to refuse a portion to the holy man. This was the natural attitude of the people. They gave, and did not complain.

They gave, and the friars took, and the Beghards took, and still the cry was “Give.” The Fratricelli, Apostolici, Beghards, Beguines, Brothers of the Free Spirit, overran the whole of Europe. These all must be fed no less than the orthodox fraternities. And year by year the number of the mendicants increased. The careless wandering life without responsibility or consequence, the absence of ties or of toil, the prestige in idleness, attracted the vagabond and lazy. And many of the pious really believed it the noblest human life. Since the idea of Divinity was simplicity, mere simplicity, then the more the saint was simplified and the less heed he took for apparel or for food the nearer he was to heaven. These men and women, strange descendants of the spinning sisters and the Fratres Textores, were like the lilies of the field inasmuch as they toiled not, neither did they spin. They thus fulfilled the popular ideal of piety. Year by year labour and forethought grew more discredited, as it was discovered that, if you did not feed yourself, a more worldly person would always feed you; until in 1317 we read in the sentences collected by Johann von Ochsenstein that no exterior motive, _not even the desire of the kingdom of heaven, should tempt a good man towards activity_.

It was in vain for even the Pope to preach, for Guillaume de St. Amour to attack all mendicants alike, for councils and bishops to thunder against the indolence, the mendicancy, the lax morals and loose opinions of these men. The mendicants grew more and more. The nations groaned under the holy burden. Then, about 1310, unable to contain her displeasure any longer, the Church bursts forth into interdicts and persecution. Fifty Beghards are burned at Cologne. At Magdeburg some Beguines are cast into prison. At Strasburg, at Constance, at Mayence, the Beguines and Beghards are punished unless converted within three days. It is war to the knife against the wandering heretics.

IX.

Under the pressure of a displeasure so severe, the greater number of the Beghards and Beguines accepted the rule of the tertiary orders. The mother became submissive to her children. The larger party of the fraternity, including all the Flemish beguinages, accepted the Franciscan rule; but the Beghards and Beguines of Strasburg, the most suspected of any, joined the Tertiary Order of Dominic. Thus the heresy of Beguinism appeared for a while overcome.

But at the same time a strange mystical pantheistic tendency became noticeable in many sermons and lessons of the Church herself. All this multitude of heretic Beguines, suddenly made orthodox within three days, all this vast accession of vague Almarician piety was not without an influence on the conquering faith. Among the Dominicans of Strasburg the mystical bent grew more decided year by year. These much-admired doctors and magisters were lights of the Church, men of influence and learning; but the mysticism which was orthodox in them was really identical with the neoplatonist theories of the Beghards. And, indeed, these men,—Eckhart, Tauler, Rulmann Merswin—went further in the way of pantheism than the heretic brotherhood had gone before.

It is impossible to exterminate an idea. It must live its course, grow, flourish, and die. Be it wise or foolish, orthodox or heterodox, let it but have some new aspect of truth in it; let it but be fresh, profound, and striking; let it be truly and verily an idea: it will live its life before it dies its natural death.

Thus the idea of the Beguines, arbitrarily suppressed, yet flourished only the more. Like a brier budded on a rose tree, it brought out its wild and fragile blossoms among the ordered beauties of the ecclesiastical garden. In the great Dominican mystics of Strasburg the central thought of heretic Beguinism (“_Deus est omnia_”) flourished more completely than before.

God is all: the world is nothing. This is what the mystics of Strasburg and the mystics of the Netherlands now began to preach to the world.

X.

From the year 1312 until 1320 Master Eckhart, the great Dominican preacher, was living in Strasburg. His deep and original mind, which so vastly was to influence the speculation of his time, was now itself brought under the influence of Beguinism. From 1312 to 1317 he preached and visited in the Dominican beguinages of Strasburg. Always a mystic and a neoplatonist, before that date he was not suspected of heresy. The theories of the Dominican Beguines agreed perfectly with the convictions of this singular being, who preached in accents of strenuous sincerity the doctrine of the unreality of matter.

Among the Beguines of his diocese was one whom Eckhart adopted to be his spiritual daughter. But the relation of the Beguine Sister Katrei to the great Vicar-general of the Dominican order was scarcely that attitude of submission which we expect from a penitent to her confessor. She leads him on to new audacities of faith, suggests new penances, refuses all restraint. She shows him how an earnest nature can reduce to practice his special tenet that the world is nothing, that God alone exists.

Katrei was the daughter of worthy Strasburg townspeople. Not necessity, but an enthusiasm for self-humiliation drove her to the beguinage. Ever in doubt of her own salvation, she multiplied her fasts and penances till even her director beseeched her to take some pity on her starved and shattered body. But Katrei would not be persuaded; not yet, she declared, was the old Adam slain in her; not yet was she “dead all through.” As Mechtild of Magdeburg is the great active type of the order, so Katrei represents the passive Beguinism. She had no reforming zeal; she belonged to the later school, to those who said: “Not even the desire of the kingdom of heaven must tempt a good man towards activity.”

To free herself from the world and the claims of the world, to leave behind the flesh and all the needs and desires of the flesh, this was the overmastering preoccupation of Swester Katrei. She left the sheltering beguinage, the faces too familiar to be easily forgotten, the neighbourhood of father and of mother, and set out alone upon the wandering Beguine’s life. With her she took neither staff nor scrip. “All that I ask of the world,” she said, “is a spring, a crust, and a garment” (_brunnen, brod, und ein rock_). So for many months she went, absorbed in her own soul, forgetting men and women, earthly pleasure, earthly love, and earthly duty, and at last returned to Strasburg to be known by no one there.

She was not yet satisfied. Her ideal was not yet reached. “Not yet,” she persisted, “am I dead all through.” “Nay,” answered the confessor (behind whose cowl we see the face of Eckhart), “not so long as thou rememberest who was thy father and who thy mother; not so long as thou shalt care if thy priest refused to confess thee or absolve thee; not so long as it shall disturb thee if thou mayest not taste the body of God; not so long as thou shalt grieve when none will shelter thee, and all despise thee; not until then, my sister, canst thou know the real death unto self.” Then again, Katrei retired into the wilderness, and for a long time she wandered to and fro across the face of the earth. When she returned she was strangely changed; even her confessor did not know her. At last, her cataleptic trances growing daily longer and more profound, she being permanently raised into a strange hysteric insensibility to pain or hunger, she lay the whole day long without food or drink or movement in a corner of the great cathedral. Now she was dead to outer things. “Now,” she said, “I am God.” Her father and her mother came and cried to her, half abashed at her holiness, half agonized at her condition. But Katrei did not know them now. She no longer recognized what she looked upon; the world and all within it was a blank to her.

At last, one day, the trance deepened; she ceased to breathe. Some people of the church, thinking her dead, took her away to bury her. But when they returned to the church with Katrei on the bier, her confessor, approaching, perceived she was not really dead. “Art thou satisfied?” he demanded; and she answered, “I am satisfied at last.” She would have let them bury her.

Quietism can go no further than this. When this singular woman died, between 1312 and 1320, though the Church already began to censure the mystical errors of Beguinism, yet her piety was deemed so great that Meister Eckhart wrote a memoir of her life as an example and an exhortation to the pious. She is the saint of the later Beguinism, even as the vigorous Mechtild of Magdeburg is the patron of the older style.

XI.

But sister Katrei had too many followers, and gradually the sense of the religious world revolted from this numb and dead ideal. Already, in the writings of Suso (1335), of Ruysbrock, and Rulmann Merswin, men whose idealist mysticism was little different from the Beguine heresy, the quietism of these “false freemen” is utterly condemned. Suso, in his Book of Truth, recounts how he met on a journey one of these wandering Beghards, who, to all his questions, responded much as Parsifal responds to Gurnemanz. Whence he came and whither going, the wanderer does not know. He is called the Nameless Savage. He is Nothing abysmed in the Divine Nothingness. Without will or desire he obeys his natural instincts, since any conflict with them would destroy the quiet of his soul. Such is the latest type of the secular brotherhood; but this, unlike Sister Katrei, meets no approval from the marvelling Church.

Indeed, the Beghards and the Beguines, with their lax morals, their mendicant insolence, had become an insupportable burden. So, in despair, in 1328 the Church, as we have said, delivered fifty of them to the secular arm, and these were burned, as an example, in Cologne. The persecution was now steadfast and continuous; but still in secret places, and by strange underground channels, the pantheist idea spread on unseen—pantheism which now was no longer vague and veiled. “_We do not believe in God, and we do not love Him, and we do not adore Him, and we do not hope in Him, for this would be to avow that He is other than ourselves._” Thus speak these heretics of the fourteenth century. So far have they pushed the phrase, God is all that exists.

From this time the cohesive force of Beguinism rapidly diminishes. In 1365 Pope Urban V. still speaks of the “children of Belial, Beghards and Beguines,” but their name slips gradually out of the chronicles of edicts and of councils. Or it is applied to any new sect of heretics. In 1373 we hear of “the Beghards or Turlupins,” and in the next century Beghard is frequently synonymous with Lollard. The great heresy of the Free Spirit was divided into a hundred unimportant divisions. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Beghards and Beguines were either orthodox communities of some tertiary order, or scattered hermits, living in woods and forests, and stealthily keeping red the few embers left of pantheistic heresy. It seemed as if the movement were really stamped out. But the phrase of Mechtild was not so easily confuted. No man can burn an idea.

We hear no more, it is true, of the Beguines or of the Weaving Brothers; but in the sixteenth century, when at Wittenberg and at Strasburg, at Basle and at Meaux, the great idea of the Reformation simultaneously awoke, in that period of spiritual ferment, the pantheism of the secular fraternities flamed out again, and more fiercely than before. The libertines, the anabaptists, and familists of the sixteenth century preserved in a coarser form the persecuted tradition of the Beghards and the Beguines.

THE CONVENT OF HELFTA.

The great ideals of the world save themselves by strange disguises. Though the advance of progress threaten their existence, none the less they perpetuate themselves in unsuspected shelter. If to-day we see religion mask itself as devotion to humanity, it is but the reversal of the great masquerade of the Middle Ages, when whatever impulse of good-will to man was destined to survive assumed for safety’s sake the garb of the Church. Benevolence, science, logic, philosophy, and all the arts put on the hood and cowl. And the time came when love also entered religion. Indeed, the convent was the one safe place of refuge in a struggling, dark, chaotic world—a world for which centuries of careful nurture had ill-fitted the sentiment of love. The Middle Ages had existed, one might say, for its development. During the century succeeding the invention of the Immaculate Conception (1134), the cultus of the Virgin became dominant in the Church, and, _pari passu_, the position of women grew nobler in the world—was, indeed, elevated and spiritualized to a dangerous artificial beauty. Then a thousand devices were discovered to hide from the yet imperfect man and woman the brutality of the one and the meanness of the other. The Courts of Love, where no husband might be the lover of his wife, the gross and strained devotion of the minnesingers, the worship of Mary and the saints, were expedients unreal or ugly in themselves, but they imposed on mere brutish passion a beautiful sentiment of reverence and service. For they showed the woman beloved as a creature aloof and apart, separated from the disenchantment of possession by the distance of heaven or the barriers of earth.

Thus through the Middle Ages love grew and flourished; a plant delicate yet and scarcely acclimatised, but watered and tendered and sheltered. Without this care it could not grow, being still young and not well-rooted. Then in the thirteenth century a terrible convulsion disturbed the world, and the fate of all tender, exquisite things hung for a while in awful balance. For in that eventful century, which rounds the old world and begins the new, the long-gathering jealousy of pope and emperor burst into a fearful storm. The tempest of over twenty years which destroyed the empire of the house of Hohenstaufen left Rome, though victorious, none the less a prey to her own champion, Charles of Anjou. For three years he would not suffer the election of a pope, holding the keys of Peter in his unrelaxing clutches; and even when the papal see was nominally filled, the Angevine adventurer guided its counsels and prompted its decrees. One shipwreck engulfed both papacy and empire, nor could any foresee that from those wrecks far nobler vessels should be built. The hierarchic and feudal order of things had fallen, and the spirit of law and federation was yet unknown. All over Europe spread darkness and confusion: Rome was paralysed, France crazed with superstition and communistic panic, Italy a mere disorganised prey for the next comer; and Germany, most piteous of all, with the convert’s earnestness and the loyalty of a serf, not yet fit for the sudden withdrawal of the hierarchy and the feudalism to which she clung for support, Germany reeled heavily. It seemed that the end of the world was at hand; and truly, in this terrible interregnum, the whole fabric of the Middle Ages began to crack and gape in ominous ruin.

Now that the Courts of Love were wasted, his tournaments battle-fields, his minstrels shouting battle-cries, what had become of Love? Where should his ladies, sung so long and honoured, look for their knights? They are gone to fight for God and the king; they are gone far away, but no longer to the Holy Sepulchre; they are gone to ravage and ruin distant cities, or to lay low the power of Rome. Many never return; some after years—ten, fifteen, twenty years—come home again, tanned and grey—swearing troopers, whose talk is all of battle, whose camp jests and lewd stories fall like filth into the pure fountain of a woman’s soul. What knight is this for a delicate lady to love! She must change the very nature of her love if this shall satisfy her heart. The frail ideal, nourished so long with care and patience, must die, so it seems. But, as in ancient legends, where the lustful lover pursues a pure nymph, gaining hold upon her, stretching out his hands for the prize, to find them empty, to find her out of reach, safe in the inviolable greenness of the laurel, even so the tender spirit of love, with one violent effort, set itself beyond the lusts of the imbruted world, sheltered, transformed into the mystical love of God.

A natural impulse was given to religion by the divisions and disasters of society. We have shown by what channels the mystical spirit of Alexandria permeated the religion of the West. The knight from his captors or his captives, the scholar from his studies, the monk from his perusal of the most popular of saintly authors, might all become imbued with a like spirit. Throughout the West there spread, partially, indeed, and not to all alike, a scorn of science and understanding, and a sense of mystery, an aspiration to ecstasy, a desire to merge all personality in the infinite. Such influences did not create, they did but direct the movement. They were—as M. Vacherot has shown us—a source of inspiration, a reserve of tradition for a natural instinct which, even without them, must have satisfied itself. Owing partly to these semi-religious influences, partly to the external condition of affairs, the movement—which might have established another School of Alexandria, might have believed in astrology or the philosopher’s stone, might have merely ended in jugglery and witchcraft—instead of this became a school for visionaries and ecstatics. How strong the movement was may be inferred by the length of its duration, and by our finding in its ranks not merely hysteric virgin saints, not merely the two priors of St. Victor, not merely the poetic Suso, the fervid Ruysbrock, the contemplative Tauler, but the wide intellect of Albertus Magnus, the strength of Eckhart, the practical wisdom of Gerson.

The doctrines of Neoplatonism, received through the medium of a saint, were translated into another sense by men of less intellect and stronger affections than the Alexandrines. Science is little to these later mystics, the inward spring of peace is much; they question with Bonaventura not doctrine but desire, not the human mind but heavenly grace. Not light they ask, but fire. By ecstasy they seek to unite themselves not only with the abstract wisdom, but with a supreme love. For ecstasy is to them the _ars amandi_, and to them the one thing needful not intelligence, but feeling. “Amor oculus est,” says Richard of Saint Victor, “et amare videre est.” To behold with this eye the things that are hidden from earthly vision; to die to the world, in order to live to Christ; to lose one’s soul; to drown self, conscience, reason, virtue, feeling, in a flood of ecstasy, this had become the ambition of the nobler spirits of the world.