'Beatrice'

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Introduction

It could be said that it is pleonastic to call any medieval European literature ‘religious’, because there is none which does not in some way reflect the all-pervading teachings of the Christian faith. The great Jesuit historian Thurston made this point with admirable succinctness, writing of a strange pseudo-Christ whose antics are recorded in English chronicles of the early thirteenth century, when he designates them as ‘... some sort of contortionist's or mountebank's trick which took a religious colour chiefly because the ideas and interests of that age centred round religious themes’. Though it may seem to superficial observers that there is no justification, other than that of mere chronology, for including in the same volume the Letters of Hadewijch and Mary of Nijmeghen, the times in which these two authors wrote did impose upon their work a unifying quality, since both were written in the knowledge that they could appeal to a profound and general assent. to the truths of the Christian faith.

The origins of medieval Dutch literature are obscure and for the most part lost, but it is manifest from the earliest verse which has been preserved, such as the Eneide of the Limburg poet of courtly romance, Henry van Veldeke, most of which was completed before 1174, that French poetry of chivalry and romance had made an early and deep impression in the Netherlands; and from the earliest surviving prose, notably Beatrice of Nazareth's Seven Marmers of Loving, it is clear that such mastery of prose as they display can only be explained by presupposing an intensive education, of women as well as men, in the Latin Scriptures and classics of the spiritual life, and an already flourishing tradition of lucid and flowing composition in the vernacular.

Beatrice and Hadewijch are the outstanding figures in the history of the evolution in the Netherlands of the Frauenbewegung, that great and victorious revolt of pious women, everywhere in Europe, against the reactionary traditions which would have condemned them in the cloisters as well as in the world to a role of subordination and silence, which would have withheld from them the benefits of literacy

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and learning, which would have denied to them any active part in the great spiritual revivals and innovations which today we associate chiefly with the names of St Dominic and St Francis, but to which others, notably St Bernard, contributed as much. This ‘women's movement’ has been faithfully and brilliantly chronicled in recent years for the Rhineland and Germany by Herbert Grundmann; and in his fundamental work on the origins and the spread of the Beguines in the Low Countries, Alcantara Mens has depicted how there, as nowhere else in Europe, the newly-emancipated women religious were able to evolve a way of life hitherto unknown in the West, free from monastic enclosure, observing rules which they themselves devised to meet the needs of individual communities, following lives of intense activity which might be devoted to prayer, to teaching and study, to charitable works, or to all three.

Beatrice of Nazareth, in Seven Manners, tells us nothing of herself. For such information we have to go to a very few sources, notably Chrysostom Henriquez's Quinque Prudentes Virgines; and there we learn that she must have been bom very soon after 1200, and that at the age of eleven she was sent to a house of Beguine s at Zoutleeuw. The chronicle suggests that her family sent her there in the first place for education; hut she was to live the rest of her life (she died in 1268) in such religious communities; and it is plain that she was enabled to cultivate to the full her great literary gifts. Judged solely on its artistic merits, Seven Manners is a great achievement, and her mellifluous fluency must surely have served in the next century as one of the models for the great Ruysbroek. She has been strongly influenced, as he too was to be, by St Bernard, the Victories of Paris and by William of St-Thierry; and already she shows preoccupation with those teachings and ideas which we associate with Ruysbroek, with Tauler and with Eckhart: that searching of the soul for God which will lead it towards a union with Him so close ‘that the soul no longer can perceive difference between itself and God’, a union in which it will experience annihilation, a union from which it will return to find the earth a dessert and human existence a torment.

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Though it is probable that Beatrice knew nothing of the Low German writings of her near-contemporary Mechtild of Magdeburg, their thought and their language are sometimes startlingly close. ‘And like the fish, swimming in the vast sea and resting in its deeps, and like the bird, boldly mounting high in the sky, so the soul feels its spirit freely moving through the vastness and the depth and the unutterable richnesses of love’ ... so Beatrice writes, inspired no doubt by St Paul; and in one of her prose poems Mechtild says that just as the fish must seek its natural home, the sea, and the bird find its freedom in the sky, so too must her soul find God.

To modern readers, not accustomed or sympathetic to the forms of medieval spirituality, there will no doubt be much in Beatrice which is distasteful if not repellant. Nourished as so many of us have been on the popular conception that religion should express itself in practical works, we may ask: ‘What good did she do?’ The next Netherlands writer to appear in this anthology, Hadewijch, is obviously conscious that such criticism could be levelled at such Beguines as Beatrice and herself; yet the answers which she provides will hardly be more satisfactory to the modern sceptic. Though she will often betray impatience with the religiosity of religious, as in Letter IV, and though she is convinced of the essentially apostolic and evangelical character of the contemplative vocation, as, of course, her own work witnesses, all of the Letters being in the form of instructions to a young Beguine, she is firm that the proper work of the contemplative is prayer and contemplation and nothing else. She and those like her ha ve a duty to the world and especially to fallen sinners, but that duty consists only in intercession. To do more than that is what she calls ‘needless involvement’, and such work, she is very positive, is not for them: though what she does not say here but seems to imply is that there are others, notably priests, whose proper work the pastoral care of the fallen is, and who can do it better.

The soul's true work, for Hadewijch, is deificatio, striving for union with God; and she too resembles Mechtild of Magdeburg, in that she tells us more of the sorrows and torments of the soul in this

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strife than of its joys and consolations. Doubtless she knew the famous passage in Hugh of St Victor, destined to be quoted and borrowed by countless spiritual writers, about ‘the play of love’, the ceaseless alternation of delight and pain for those who seek for God,

She uses the same metaphor when she writes, at the end of Letter I: ‘In the beginning my sorrows were great enough, and I longed greatly for what I could not reach; hut now it is as if someone were making sport of me, offering me something, and then, as I stretch, out my hand, knocking it away and saying, “Wouldn't you like it?” and taking back again.’ And in this same first letter she is playing on the concept of the love between God and the soul not as rest and peace and fulfilment, but contention and opposition and warfare as she says: ‘God has been more angry with me than ever any devil was.’ This may shock us, and doubtless it shocked those of her sisters who, she makes clear, opposed her teaching and her way of life, ‘our false brethren who pretend that they dwell with us in the one house of the Faith’, but we need not be scandalized if we will understand how profoundly her thought has been influenced, and how her language reflects the philosophy and the literary forms of courtly love, of Minne.

Mention has already been made of Henry of Veldeke, and recently Theodor Weevers has reminded tis in his admirable account of the beginnings of medieval Dutch poetry that Henry was higly praised by the German poets whom we regard as the masters of the craft of singing the songs of courtly love, Wolfram of Eschenbach and Gottfried of Strasbourg among them, who called him their master and themselves his humble scholars. And in such spiritual writers as Hadewijch we have further testimony that before the fourteenth century, when there appeared that strong reaction in the Netherlands, notably expressed by Jacob of Maerlant, against the poetry of courtly love as blasphemous Venus-worship with which no god-fearing man should have to do, the analogies between the Christian's love of God and the humble, patient, unrewarded, penitential service, which Minne demanded of those whom she has enslaved, had been perceived and assimilated so completely that no discord or paradox was seen.

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To say this is, of course, to heg many questions. No o ne has yet fully explored this field, to show us how much the concepts of courtly love, once they had found their way into the Mediterranean lands from the philosophers and poets of medieval Islam, became enriched and fertilized by Christian ideas and Christian devotion. We must be less prepared today than was, for example, Gilson a generation ago to assert that all the borrowing was by devout Christians from the neo-Ovidians who exploited these newfangled pagan notions as an act of rebellion against the Church's thinking and authority. None the less, in such a case as Hadewijch it is sufficiently evident that the analogy is something of this nature: I am bound to the service of the love of God just as any earthly knight knowingly and willingly enslaves himself to the service of that ideal love which ts embodied in his lady. She will reward him or prolong his servitude and sufferings, as seems good to her, and he must always be her faithful servant, to death, in sorrow as in joy, as so must I with God. It is only the base peasant who thinks that the longings of love merit a prompt satisfaction; and if I demand from God happiness and consolation as the return here on earth for my service in His love, I too should be base, peasant-like, a villein knowing nothing of fine amour. So Hadewijch says, in Letter VIII, of those lovers of God who are filled with fear: ‘They long to suffer for Love, and so they learn all the fine u sages of Love, for fear lest their words should be too churlish to reach the ears of Love.’

Yet none of this is for her mere empty fashionable talk. In the first place her whole system of a Christianized Minne is based on an accurate knowledge of human psychology, so that she can nonchalantly observe, for example: ‘It is a sign of love that the beloved's name is sweet.’ And she displays the practicality of her erudition when she at once links this with St Bernard's teaching on devotion to the Holy Name; and always she exhibits a down-to-earth sense in her approach to the idea that God is loved as Minne is served in courts and palaces: ‘We all want to be God along with God; but God knows that there are few of us who want to be man with Him in His humanity, to carry

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His Cross with Him, to hang upon it with Him, to pay with Him the debt of human kind.’

It is needless here to multiply examples of Hadewijch's justness of touch, of that shrewdness and good feeling which holds her back from the excesses of Brauttheologie, from those analogies be tween divine and human love which less balanced readers and followers of St Bernard were so to exploit. Each one of the twenty (about half of the total) of her Letters here translated will reveal some different facet of her personality; and perhaps the most difficult and yet the finest of them all will be thought to be her Letter XVII, the careful, patient exposition of her mysterious and intricate poem, ‘Seek after every virtue with a gracious zeal.’ When, at the end of this letter, she tells us that in a moment of illumination she ‘understood God's being.... Still I can find no language for what I have said,’ is she telling us that this revelation came to her, not as a vision seen with spiritual eyes, but as a poem heard with spiritual ears, which she has kept in her memory and come little by little to know the true meaning of? To many readers, no doubt, resemblances will suggest themselves between this strange document and, on the one hand, Julian of Norwich's Revelations, on the other hand Rilke's Duino Elegies.

With Ruysbroek's Book of the Sparkling Stone we come to the second generation, as it were, of the Dutch mystical writers. The fervours of the thirteenth century, and the great numbeers of female ecstatics, had produced much piety and devotion, but we cannot doubt that it also helped to encourage the many heretics who lived and taught in the Netherlands, of whom we remember chiefly the Brethren of the Tree Spirit and their mysterious leader, the Brussels prophetess ‘Bloemardinne’. (There was at one time a theory, first put out in the fifteenth century by Pomerius, that ‘Bloemardinne’ was a pseudonym of Hadewijch, but this was rank injustice to one of the very greatest of medieval European spiritual writers, who could only permit herself her extravagances of language and thought because she was fortified in her unimpeachable orthodoxy; and no one today would seriously advance this theory.) We know little of Bloemardinne and her wri-

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tings, except by implication: Ruysbroek, already a middle-aged man who had served Ste Gudule in Brussels for many years of holy obscurity, first entered public life when he undertook a great and, it would seem, successful preaching campaign against her; and when, soon after, he retired to the ‘desert’ of Groenendael where in 1351 he took religious vows and founded a house of Augustinian canons and began to write, his earliest works, notably The Spiritual Espousals, are deeply concerned with contrasting false mysticism with true. It was an English contemporary of his who called heretics ‘the devil's contemplatives’, and this is a dominant theme in many of Ruysbroek's treatises. The Sparkling Stone is, however, a later work, in which he is leass concerned to combat Manichaean Dualism, less anxious to re but quietism and pantheism, than to teach, positively, how men who are called to that extraordinary way can attain to that union with God which he calls, in the Espousals, ‘living and fruitful.’ This is not the place to write of the refinements of his doctrine or of his debt to hi s many great predecessors, from St Paul, St Augustine and ‘pseudo-Dionysius’ down to Hadewijch, whom he greatly reverenced; the best th at one can do here is to commend the Sparkling Stone as one of the very finest pieces of affective writing to appear in the literature of Christian mysticism.

It is not without interest that The Book of the Sparkling Stone was known in late medieval England, in an English translation of the Latin version made by William Jordaens, under its alternative title, The Treatise of Perfection of the Sons of God; and the last works in this anthology have also contributed before now to English knowledge of Netherlands literature. Mary of Nijmeghen, translated not in its original dramatic form but as a prose narrative, was printed in Antwerp in the early sixteenth century, for export to England, by John Doesborgh, who had presses both there and in London, and the translator may have been one Laurence Andrews, who did such work for him. And in the 1920S Max Reinhardt used Maurice Maeterlinck's version of Beatrice as the scenario for his theatrical spectacle, The Miracle, which created such a sensation in New York and London.

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Beatrice is preservel for us in a manuscript, now i n the Royal Library at The Hague, which can be dated c. 1375. The poem itself is probably of the fourteenth century, but it is derived partly from a pious legend narrated by Caesarius of Heisterbach in the early thirteenth century, and there are many other parallels and analogues.

We may today find the beginnings of Beatrice perfunctory and crude, with singularly little attempt to explore what would, for the twentieth century, be the most interesting aspect of the story, the conflict in the nun's mini before she decided to break her vows. Partly this is because the poet can make his effect by a very perfunctory appeal to the conventions understood and accepted by his audience: Beatrice was enslaved by Minne, and once she had been pierced by the dart of Love, there was no help for her; and, he naively adds, ‘We must not blame this nun, who was unable to escape from the love which held her captive, because the devil is always longing to tempt man....’ But this somewhat scrambled opening is best accounted for as we read on and discover where the poet's real interests lie. As he warms to his central theme, that the vilest sinner must not despair of God's mercy, the whole. temper of the poem changes, the artificiality and the conventions fall away, and the story moves easily and compellingly to its climax. Easily and compellingly, at least, for those who still share the conviction of the poet, and of his age, that man's greatest treasure is his immortal soul, which he imperils by mortal sin.

The same conviction informs Mary of Nijmeghen and th e modern reader is as little helped as he is in Beatrice to understand the predicament in which the heroine finds herself. Why should a well-brought-up, decent, pious girl be so affected by her aunt's abuse that she calls upon the Devil? The aunt's rages and her miserable end we can believe in: she may be a stock figure, a ‘humour’ rather than a character, but she is drawn with such vigour and zest that she compels us to think that she is real; but Mary simply does not come alive until the moment when the play within the play strikes contrition into her heart. There is true drama and true pathos in the closing scenes, and when in answer to the Pope's horrified questions she says, ‘Father, it was the good times,

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all the money and the presents which he gave me...,’ she is a forerunner of Gretchen, and speaks for all the poor foolish fallen girls in the world.

More perhaps than any of the other works here, Mary of Nijmeghen suffers and loses by translation. Whether or not it is the work of the Antwerp poetess Anna Bijns, it plainly was produced by one of her literary coterie, and the scenes at The Golden Tree, especially Emma-Mary's ballade in praise of rhetoric, have local and contemporary allusions which are lost on us today. The language of the original, too, with its exotic use of dialect and its constant crudity and obscenities, gives it an earthy strength which cannot be reproduced in English. It is only as the play reaches its climax that its appeal widens and becomes universal, so that we feel that we have in it one of the masterpieces of a great age.