CHAPTER IV

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
ST. HILDEGARDE—HELFDE—RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR —ST. BERNARD
Tue centuries following the close of the Patristic period give us the names of few mystics. We need not suppose from this that the mystical life died out, but merely that its experiences were seldom registered. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, a marked revival of mystical religion took place ; and here and there it became articulate, either in the form of a protest against the laxity of the average religious life, or as the effort of those who possessed a first-hand experi- ence of God to communicate their certitude and sense of obligation. Thus St. Peter Damian (1007-72) is chiefly known asa religious reformer, inspired by a more vivid sense of reality than his contemporaries possessed; and the fortunate survival of the Meditations of St. Anselm (1033-1109) reveals the deep reservoirs of mystical devotion, the fervour, humility and love, which fed the active career of that great statesman and ecclesiastic.
In the twelfth century three great names, among many less eminent, express three aspects of the Church’s mystical life: the German abbess and prophetess, St. Hildegarde (1098-1179); the
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Scotch scholar and contemplative, Richard of St. Victor (died about 1173), from whom all the medizval mystics took their psychology intact ; above all, St. Bernard (1091-1153), a worthy successor of St. Paul and St. Augustine in that line of great constructive mystics to which the Church owes the repeated renewal and development of her inner life.
St. Hildegarde is the first great figure in that line of women mystics—persons of marked intelli- gence and unquenchable energy—who so com- pletely refute the common accusations brought against mysticism, and so perfectly prove the thesis of St. Teresa that “the object of the spiritual marriage is work.”
Of abnormal psychic make-up, weak bodily health, but immense intellectual power, Hilde- garde’s personality and range of activities would be startling at any period. She founded two convents, wrote a long physical treatise in nine books, including a complete guide to the nature and properties of herbs, was skilled in medicine, deeply interested in politics, sternly denounced ecclesiastical laxity and corruption, and corresponded with and often rebuked the greatest men of her day. She was also a musician and poet, and over sixty hymns are attributed to her. In later life she travelled hundreds of miles in the course of her duties—a considerable matter for an elderly nun of the twelfth century. Yet she remained first and foremost a contemplative, whose actions were always dictated by inward commands, and whose sources of power lay beyond the world.
Thanks to the inquiries of her deeply interested
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disciples, and Hildegarde’s admirably lucid replies, we know much of her inward experiences. To her, God was Light ; and the light-imagery frequent in the medieval mystics certainly owes something to her. She gave in old age to the monk Guibert, her secretary and afterwards her biographer, an account of her mystical experience; from which we see that two distinct grades of spiritual apprehen- sion were involved in it. First and rarest, the ecstatic perception of that Living Light which was her name for God—her inspired letters frequently begin “the Living Light saith.” Next that diffused radiance which she calls the Shade of the Living Light, and within which her great allegorical visions were seen.
“From my infancy until now, in the 7oth year of my age,” she says, ‘‘my soul has always beheld this Light; and in it my soul soars to the summit of the firmament and into a different air. . . . The brightness which I see is not limited by space and is more brilliant than the radiance round the sun. . . . I cannot measure its height, length, breadth. Its name, which has been given me, is ‘Shade of the Living Light’. . . . Withm that brightness I sometimes see another light, for which the name Lux Vivens has been given me. When and how I see ¢4is, I cannot tell; but sometimes when I see it all sadness and pain is lifted from me, and I seem a simple girl again, and an old woman no more !”
This quotation alone places Hildegarde among the mystics ; that is to say, those who have experi- © enced an immediate apprehension of God with its gift of freshness and joy. Reading it, we are reminded of Ruysbroeck’s utterances concerning the distinction between that Everlasting Light which “‘is zot God, but is that light whereby we see Him,” and the sudden Light “‘ blazing down as it were a lightning flash from the Face of Divine
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Love,” bringing “‘so great a joy and delight of soul and body that a man knoweth not what hath befallen him” (The XII Béguines, cap. x). Indeed Hildegarde’s works—widely known and much rever- enced in succeeding centuries—may have provided the germ of Ruysbroeck’s idea.
The “Shade of the Living Light” stands perhaps for that lucid expansion of consciousness in which the seer and the prophet touch fresh levels of knowledge and understanding. MHildegarde, plainly an unusual child, says she first experienced this when only three years old, and at five began to understand the visionary world in which she lived, though a limited vocabulary prevented her from communicating what she saw. During child- hood and adolescence she had constant interior visions and premonitions of the future, accompanied by much ill-health. Before dismissing these stories as absurdities we should remember that her career proves her a woman of genius; and that such spiritual and psychical precocity undoubtedly exists, and is the raw material from which a certain sort of mysticism may develop. A long series of instances, from the call of Samuel to that of Florence Nightingale (visited by an imperative sense of vocation when six years old), warns us that we are far from understanding the conditions underlying human greatness.
Hildegarde’s account of her visions is unsensa- tional and exact. They were pictures, she says, seen within the mind, “neither in dream, sleep, nor any frenzy,” involving no hallucination an never interfering with her outward sight. “TI did not see these things with the bodily eyes or hear
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them with outward ears, but I beheld them according to God’s will, openly and fully awake, considering them in the full light of the mind, eyes and ears of the inner mind. How is this? It is hard for carnal man to understand. . . . When fully pene- trated by my light I said many things strange to those who heard them.”
She continued frequently and accurately to fore- see future events, but only confiding in a few of her fellow-nuns, till the beginning of middle age, when: she had been for some years abbess of her convent. Then her real prophetic period opened in a dynamic vision reminiscent of those associated with the calls of the prophets. “‘ In the year 1141 of the Incarnation of the Son of God, at the age of forty-two years seven months, a flaming light of marvellous brightness coming from a rift of heaven, penetrated my brain, heart and breast like a flame that warms but burns not, even as the rays of the sun strike the earth.” This light gave her a direct intuition into the spiritual meaning of Scripture, and commanded her to give her revelations to the world. She resisted from motives of humility and reserve, and the resulting conflict brought on a violent illness. Advised to obey her Voice, she began to dictate her revelation, and immediately recovered her health.
For ten years the great symbolic pictures recorded in her book of Scivias continued to unroll before her inward eyes, conveying spiritual teaching and prophetic denunciations of the corruptions of the age. She suffered much under the stress of these experiences, spoke often of ‘this vision which burns my soul,” and told St. Bernard in late life
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that since childhood she had never been free from trials. In 1147 another vision revealed the site on which it was ordained that she should build her new convent. She kept this secret, and psychic blindness and lameness at once fell on her. She told her vision, and was healed.
We might hesitate to call St. Hildegarde’s out- pourings and experiences mystical, were it not for her vivid sense of God and the creative quality of her spiritual life. She initiated a type of mysticism which was continued by her contemporary, the Benedictine Abbess Elizabeth of Schonau (1129- 65), and, in the next century, by three nuns of the Convent of Helfde—the fervent and poetic Mechthild of Madgeburg (1210-85), St. Ger- trude the Great (1256-1301), and her friend and director, St. Mechthild of Hackeborn (1240-98).
In all these women vivid pictorial visions of Christ and the saints—often directly inspired by the liturgy—or allegorical revelations concerning the mysteries of faith, were the principal media of spiritual apprehension. Thus St. Gertrude’s vivid sense of the self-giving love of God found expression in the beautiful symbol of the Sacred Heart. St. Mechthild, whose exquisite voice was one of the glories of Helfde, saw her vocation of praise crys- tallized in the charming scene in which Christ called her His nightingale. Mechthild of Magdeburg perceived, under romantic imagery which owes much to the secular poetry of the time, the whole course and consummation of the soul’s life. The nuns of Helfde lived, we may allow, in a world of imagination; but it was a world in which all the delicate beauties of Nature played a sacramental part,
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and which was lit by the Divine light. Their glimpses of heaven were full of birds and flowers. Immortal Love came to them, as Mechthild of Magdeburg says, ‘‘in the morning dew, in the bird’s song.” Their own prayers seemed to them like larks, soar- ing up full of music to God, and hovering before His face. Moreover, a frankly feminine interest in dress and jewellery found innocent satisfaction in many of these visions, with their constant and detailed descriptions of the magnificent robes and symbolic crowns of the saints.
Yet the Church would be the poorer, did an austere and impossible—indeed priggish—demand for ‘‘ pure reality” insist on the ejection of such visionaries as these from the ranks of the mystics. At their best they are poets and artists of the Ineffable : and, as with other artists, news of a beauty beyond the range of the senses is often given to us through their lovely dreams.
If the current started by St. Hildegarde tended towards a mysticism of a romantic and emotional type, there were sterner elements at work amongst her contemporaries. Equally important for the history of Christian mysticism is the self-effacing personality of the Augustinian Canon Richard of St. Victor (died 1173), the first contemplative to provide a psychological account of mystical states. Richard was a Scotsman, disciple and successor of the philosopher Hugh of St. Victor, a thinker with strong mystical tendencies. Both he and his master were well known in the religious world of the twelfth century, and had intercourse with St. Bernard, though their philosophy does not seem to have influenced him. Richard’s life was probably
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spent chiefly in the Abbey of St. Victor at Paris, and he became Prior of this house some time before hisdeath. Dante’s reference to him in the Paradiso, as a flaming spirit “who was in contemplation more than man” (Par. x, 132), proves that he was regarded by medieval theologians as a great practical mystic ; indeed, we recognize behind his impersonal utterances the note of personal ardour and certitude. His influence on later mystics was immense and beneficent, and the mystical theology of a Church which has now almost forgotten his existence remains deeply in his debt.
Richard, though he regarded merely secular learning with suspicion, and described it as “‘ taste- less wisdom,” was a person of great intellectual power. He definitely connected mystical with mental activity. By reason, he said, we can con- template visible and comprehensible things ; and thence the mind of the contemplative ascends, in an orderly manner, to the beholding of invisible things beyond the reach of reason, In this mystical apprehension he discovered three stages : first, the dilation of the mind, which thus realizes its own capacity for a wider and more wonderful span of experience ; then that uplifting of the mind into things above itself which is the essence of prayer ; and finally that snatching away or utter “‘ alienation ” of the mind to another sphere of reality, which constitutes ecstasy.
This doctrine is developed in three works : Benjamin Minor, or the Preparation of the Soul; Benjamin Major, or Contemplation ; and the lovely little tract on the Four Degrees of Burning Love,
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growth in love and prayer. ‘The first stage is nourished by meditation: he compares it to be- trothal. The second degree is the “ wedding,” which binds the human to the Divine spirit, and is expressed in the deep intercourse of the “ prayer of quiet.” The third degree involves that complete surrender or self-merging in which, as he mysteri- ously says, “the soul no longer thirsts for God, but into God,”’ and its prayer is, or may be, ecstasy. The final degree is a divine creativeness, the “transforming union,” in which “the soul brings forth its children,” and which is the real object of all that has gone before. In this doctrine Richard gives us a key to the lives of the great mystics, and demolishes any conception of mysti- cism centred on the soul’s mere enjoyment of God. All the great figures of Christian sanctity—Paul, Augustine, Bernard, Francis, Teresa—are in their last and life-giving stages triumphant examples of Richard’s “‘ divine fecundity.”
He made other gifts of great value to the develop- ing science of the spiritual life. He pointed to a rigorous self-knowledge as an important part of purification ; meaning by this knowledge not only of our sins, but of our possibilities. Such self- knowledge he compares with a high mountain, climbed with much effort. When we reach the top we discover a horizon so great that we realize our own littleness. Yet this discovery of ourselves in the atmosphere of reality is not to be confused with true contemplation : for though such discreet effort, devotion, and wonder all predispose the soul for the mystical experience, they will never
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said, given or ‘‘infused.’’ Richard was perhaps the first to lay down this distinction between natural and supernatural prayer. As we might expect in an Augustinian canon, after the Bible his chief source is St. Augustine, whose tradition of the spiritual life he carries on. We cannot read the mystics of the Middle Ages, especially of the English school, without realizing how great was his influence: how fully, in spite of the humble suppression of his own experiences, he conformed to the demands of “ divine fecundity.”
The effect of the Victorine teaching, however, was surpassed by that of St. Bernard, the dominant figure in twelfth-century religious life. Born in 1090, and entering the newly-formed Cistercian order at the age of twenty-two, Bernard’s greatness was so quickly ee that three years later he was sent to found the monastery of Clairvaux, remaining its abbot till his death in 1153. He thus doubled the careers of monastic founder and spiritual teacher, also exercising much influence on contemporary politics,
The early history of the Cistercian abbeys of Great Britain shows us the austerity, industry, and charity which formed part of St. Bernard’s ideal, and with which he inspired his sons. His personal attractiveness and shining example drew hundreds of novices, including his parents and all his brothers, to the religious life ; and at his death the Cister- cian order—barely existent when he entered it— possessed 350 abbeys and 150 dependent cells.
The life of this great creative spirit was one of ceaseless activities, many journeys, much administra- tive work. He rebuked the Papacy and preached
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a Crusade. Yet he retained the simplicity and radiant charm which are the prerogatives of those who share St. Catherine of Siena’s power of “‘making a little cell in the heart.”” The chance words of a visitor to Clairvaux give us in a phrase the real Bernard, warmed by a secret flame ; and explain his gift for making and keeping devoted friends. St. Bernard’s own cell, said this observer, was more fit for a leper than for an abbot : never- theless ‘“‘ he welcomed us joyously. We asked how he fared ; and he smiled at us in that generous way of his, and said ‘Splendidly !’”»1 ‘Thanks to this real, but not rigid, love of poverty, solitude and lowliness, he remained a pure contemplative ; and was fitly chosen by Dante as the initiator of the soul into the highest secrets of Paradise :
Quale é colui, che forse di Croazia viene a veder la Veronica nostra, che per l’antica fama non si sazia,
Ma dice nel pensier, fin che si mostra : Signor mio Gest: Cristo, Dio verace, or fu si fatta la sembianza vostra ?
Tale era io mirando la vivace carita di colui, che in questo mondo contemplando gustd di quella pace.?
Bernard’s love was of that living and generous sort which marks the creative mystic. He says
t Given by Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion, p. 321.
* As is he, who perhaps from Croatia comes to behold our Veronica, who because of its ancient fame is not sated, but says in thought, so long as it is shown ‘‘ My Lord Jesu Christ, true God, and was Thy countenance thus made?” Such was I, gazing upon the living love of him, who in this world by contemplation tasted of that peace. (Par. xxxi. 103-11.)
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that he who loves indeed will desire, beyond vision, the penetration of God into the very ground of the heart; and the earnest of this experience is to be its practical effect. Like Richard of St. Victor, he held that union with God must issue in creative- ness. ‘‘ Souls like holy mothers may bring forth souls by their labours, or by their meditations may give birth to spiritual truths.”” Moreover, he practised what he preached. Though a life of silence and prayer was doubtless what he loved, he never shirked the active side of existence, or failed to act up to his own declaration that the whole object of contemplation was to make men better shepherds of souls. We may be sure that he is speaking from personal experience when he says, in the forty-first sermon on the Canticles, that ‘‘ Often enough we ask for one thing and get another— long for the repose of contemplation and are given the laborious office of preaching—long for the Bridegroom’s presence, and are given the task of bringing forth and nourishing His children instead
. . the embrace of divine contemplation must often be interrupted in order to give nourishment to the little ones, and none may live for himself alone, but for all’ (Cant., 41).
St. Bernard’s mystical teaching is chiefly found in the little treatise on the Love of God—written when he was thirty-five years of age, and before the most strenuous period of his active life—and in the series of eighty-six sermons on the Canticles, preached to his monks at Clairvaux. In these, the whole course and character of a spiritual life and the love that informs it are analysed and described, with marvellous eloquence and surety of
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touch, with special reference to the symbolism of the Song of Solomon.
Imagery of this kind is apt to displease modern readers, who seldom possess the shining purity of soul which safeguarded those who first employed it. But his metaphors cannot obscure the simplicity, sanity and depth of Bernard’s mysticism; which continues Cassian’s solid doctrine of a deepening communion with Spirit, reached through self- discipline and the degrees of prayer. Bernard, towards the end of his life, tried, with the candour of the truly humble, to tell his own experience of this :
Bear with my foolishness for a little, for I want to tell you, as I promised, how these things took place in me. ‘This is indeed of no importance; I put myself forward only in order to be useful to you, and if you are helped I am consoled for my egoism ; if not, I shall have exhibited my folly. I confess, then, to speak foolishly, that the Word has visited me—indeed, very often. But, though He has frequently come into my soul, I have never at any time been aware of the moment of His coming. I have felt Him present, I remember He has been with me, I have sometimes even had a premonition of His coming, but never have I felt His coming or departure. . . . It is not by the eyes that He enters, for He has no colour; nor by the ears, for His coming is silent; nor by the nostrils, for He is blended with the mind, and not with the air; nor again does He enter by the mouth, for His nature cannot be eaten or drunk; nor lastly can we trace Him by touch, for He is intangible. You will ask then how, since His track is thus traceless, I could know that He is present? Because He is living and full of energy, and as soon as He has entered me, has quickened my sleeping soul, and aroused, softened and goaded my heart, which was torpid and hard asa stone. He has begun to pluck up and destroy, plant and build, to water the dry places, light up the dark places, throw open what was shut, inflame with warmth what was cold, straighten the crooked path and make rough places smooth. . . . In the reformation and renewal of the spirit of my mind, that is my inward
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man, I have seen something of the loveliness of His Beauty, and meditating on these things have been filled with wonder at the multitude of His greatness. But when the Word withdrew, all these spiritual powers and faculties began to droop and languish, as if the fire were taken from beneath a bubbling pot; and this is to me the sign of His departure. ‘Then my soul must needs be sad and sorry, till He comes back and my heart again warms within me as itis wont; for this is to me the sign that He has returned. (Cazt., 74, condensed.)
Such a mysticism represents, not so much an experience of transcendent Reality, as communion with the soul’s Strengthener and Friend ; and was perhaps the characteristic form taken by St. Ber- nard’s developed spirituality, compensating and supporting the ceaseless activities of his later life. He was well aware of its incompleteness, the extent to which it was limited by the human instrument : ““ So long as this poor wall of the body endures,” he says, “that ray of utmost brightness comes not in through open doors, but only through narrow slits ’”’—a phrase which brings to mind the loop- holes through which shafts of vivid sunlight from the outer world entered the gloomy castles of the twelfth century. But his rich consciousness of God could also express itself through another and more transcendental type of contemplation, charac- teristic perhaps of his earlier and more leisured years—that ‘‘ Fourth Degree of Love” in which the soul in utter self-forgetfulness seems merged in God, ‘‘ suddenly, and for the space of hardly a moment” (The Love of God, cap. x). Such capacity to “lose thyself as though thou wert not, and to be utterly unconscious of thyself and to be emptied of thyself’ (#did.) is, he says “‘ altogether divine and utterly unintelligible save to those who
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have experienced it... . Then the soul, trans- ported out of herself, is granted a clearer vision of the Divine Majesty, yet only for a moment and with the swiftness of a lightning flash ” (Cant., 41).
The influence of St. Bernard’s writings on the mystics of the later Middle Ages was great. ‘They constantly quote him and appeal to his authority ; and beyond this, their unacknowledged debts are considerable. Indeed, it is scarcely excessive to say that his teaching coloured the whole spiritual life of the medieval Church. ‘That beautiful cult of the Holy Name, which became prominent in English mysticism, finds its literary source in his fifteenth sermon on the Canticles. Reading it, we can hardly resist the conclusion that this sermon inspired at least the opening stanzas of the hymn Fesu dulcis memoria—once, though no _ longer, attributed to Bernard himself—which so decisively influenced medieval spirituality; providing a mould, at once intimate and poetic, into which its ardent Christocentric feeling could flow. As with St. Augustine, so here, many thoughts and images with which later mystics are credited have a Bernardine source. ‘Thus even Pascal’s most cele- brated saying—‘In that thou hast sought Me, thou hast already found Me,” repeats a phrase in Bernard’s Love of God—‘ Herein is a wondrous thing | None can seek Thee save whoso first has found!” and doubtless by far the largest number of such borrowings are still untraced. He was one of those creative spirits on whom succeed- ing generations feed : whose experience is not for themselves alone, but enriches the whole life of the Church,
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ILLUSTRATIVE WORKS
Bernard, St. Sermons on the Canticles. 2 vols. Dublin,
1920. The Love of God. ‘Translated by Edmund Gardner. London, 1916.
Butler, Dom Cuthbert. Western Mysticism. London, 1922.
Coulton, G. G. Five Centuries of Religion. Cambridge, 1923.
Gertrude, St. Prayers of St. Gertrude and St. Mech- thilde. ‘Translated by Rev. T. Alder Pope. London, 1917.
Hildegarde, St. Vie. Paris, 1907.
Révelations. 2 vols. Paris, 1912.
Mechthild, St. (of Hackeborn). Révelations. Paris, 1919.
Morison, J. Cotter. Life and Times of St. Bernard. London, 1868.
Pourrat, P. Christian Spirituality. Vol. ii. London,
1923. Taylor, H.O. The Medizval Mind. London, 1914.
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