MECHTILDE
106
MECHTILD
domna cantrix. All her life she held this ofBce and
trained the choir with indefatigable zeal. Indeed, Di-
vine praise was the keynote of her life as it is of her
book; in this she never tiroil, ilospite her continual and
severe physical sufferings, so that in His revelations
Christ was wont to call her His " nightingale". Richly
endowed, naturally and supernaturally, ever gr.acious,
beloved of all who oanie within the radius of her
s;iintly and charming personality, there is little won-
der that this cloistered virgin should strive to keep hid-
den her wondrous life. Smils thirsting for consolation
or groping for light .sought her advice; learned Domini-
cans consulted her on spiritual matters. At the be-
ginning of her own mystic life it was from St.
Mechtilde that St. Gertrude the Great learnt that the
marvellous gifts lavished upon her were from God.
Only in her fiftieth year did St. Mechtilde learn that the two nuns in whom she had especially confided had noted ilown the favours granted her, and, moreover, that St. Gertrude had nearly finished a book on the subject. Much troubled at this, she, as usual, first had recourse to prayer. She had a vision of Christ holding in His hand the book of her revelations, and saying: "All this has been committed to writing by my will and inspiration; and therefore you have no cause to be troubled about it." He also told her that, as He had been so generous towards her, she must make Him a like return, and that the diffusion of the revelations would cause many to increase in His love; moreover. He wished this book to be called " The Book of Special Grace ", because it would prove such to many. When the saint understood that the book would tend to God's glory, she ceased to be troubled and even corrected the manuscript herself. Immedi- ately after her death it was made pulilic, and copies were rapidly multiplied, ow-ing chiefly to the wide- spread influence of the Friars Preachers. Boccaccio tells how, a few years after the death of Mechtilde, the book of her revelations was brought to Florence and popularized under the title of " La Laude di donna Matelda". It is related that the Florentines were ac- customed to repeat daily before their sacred images the praises learned from St. Mechtilde's book. St. Ger- trude, to whose devotedness we owe the " Liber Speci- alis Gratiae " exclaims: " Never has there arisen one like to her in our monastery; nor, alas! I fear, wUl there ever arise another such!" — little dreaming that her own name would be inseparably linked w-ith that of Mechtilde. With that of St. Gertrude, the body of St . Mechtilde most probably still reposes at Old Helf ta though the e.xact spot is unknown. Her feast is kept 26 or 27 February in different congregations and mon- asteries of her order, by special permission of the Holy See. (For an account of the general life at Helfta and an estimate of the writings of St. Mechtilde. see Ger-
TKUDE OF H.\rKEBORN ; GeKTBUDE THE GREAT, SaINT.)
There is another honour, inferior certainly to that of sanctity, yet great in itself and worthy of mention here: the homage of a transcendent genius was to be laid at the U-x-X of St. Mechtilde. Critics have long been perplexed as to one of the characters introduced by Dante in liis " Purgatorio " under the name of Ma- t(dda. After ascending seven terraces of a mountain, on each of which the process of purification is carried on, Dante, in Canto xxvii, hears a voice singing: " Ve- nite, benedicti patris inei " ; t hen later, in Canto x.xviii, there appears to him (m llir i.pposiie bank of the mys- terious stream a lady, -nini r\ , I.. :nitiful, and gracious. To her Dante address. , Imn-i li ; ,^he it is who initiates him into secrets, which it is not given to Virgil to pene- trate, and it is to her that Beatrice refers Dante in the words: "Entreat Matilda that she teach thee this." Most commentators have identified Matilda with the warrior-Countess of Tuscany, the spiritual daughter and dauntless champion of St. Gregory VII, but all agree that beyond the name the two have little or notliing in common. She is no Amazon who, at
Dante's prayer that she may draw nearer to let him
understand her song, turns towards him "not other-
wise than a virgin that droppeth her modest eyes".
In more places than one the revelations granted to the
mystics of Helfta seem in turn to have become the in-
spirations of the Florentine poet. All writers on
Dante recognize his indebtedness to St. .\ugustine, the
Pseudo-Dionysius, St. Bernard, and Uichard of St.
Victor. These are precisely the writers whose doc-
trines hail been most assimilated by the mystics of
Helfta, and thus they would the more a[)peal to the
sympathies of the poet. The city of I'lorence was
among the first to welcome St. Mechtilde's book. Now
Dante, like all true poets, was a child of his age, and
could not have been a stranger to a book which was so
popular among his fellow-citizens. The "Purga-
torio" was finished between 1314 and 131S, or 1319 —
just about the time when St. Mechtilde's book was
popular. This interpretation is supported by the fact
that St. Mechtilde in her " Book of Special (inice " (pt.
I, c. xiii) describes the place of purification under the same figure of a seven-terraced mountain. The coin- cidence of the simile and of the name, Matelda, can scarcely be accidental. For another among many points of resemblance between the two writers com- pare " Purgatorio", Canto xxxi, where Dante is drawn by Matelda through the mysterious stream with pt.
II, c. ii, of the " Liber Specialis Gratia; ". The serene atmosphere which seems to cling about the gracious and beautiful songstress, her virgin modesty and sim- ple dignity, all seem to point to the recluse of Helfta rather than to the stern heroine of Canossa, whose hand was thrice bestowed in marriage. Besides, in politics Dante, as an ardent Ghibelline, supported the , imperial pretensions and he would have been little in- clined to sing the praises of the Tuscan Countess. The conclusion may therefore be hazarded that this "Donna Matelda" of the "Purgatorio" personifies St. Mechtilde as representing mystic theology.
St. Mechtildis, Liber .spcd'ah's ffratiw; St. GERTRnDis, Lega- tus divince pietatis; Preface to Revelationes Gertrudiana ac Mech- tildiance, I, II (Paris and Poitiers, 1875); Ledos, Ste. Gertrude (Paris, 1907); Ziegelbaueb, Hist. Lit. Bened. (Vienna, 1754); Preger, Gesch. deutsch. Mystik, I (Leipzig, 1874); RevUationa de S. Mechtilde (Paris and Poitiers, 1909).
Gertrude Casanova.
Mechtilde of the Blessed Sacrament. See Ado- ration, Perpetual.
Mechtild of Magdeburg, a celebrated medieval mystic, b. of a noble family in Saxony about 1210; d. at the Cistercian nunnery of Helfta near Eisleben, c. 12S5. She experienced her first inspirations at the age of twelve, when, as she herself states, she was greeted by the Holy Ghost. From that time, the greeting was repeated daily. Under this inspiration she desired to be despised by all without, however, deserving it, and ' for this purpose left her home, where she had always been loved and respected, to become a Beguine at Magdeburg in 1230. Here, under the spiritual guid- ance of the Dominicans, she led a life of prayer and extreme mortification. Her heavenly inspirations and ecstatic visions became more frequent and were of such a nature that they dispelled from the mind of her confessor all doubt as to their Divine origin. By his order she reluctantly wrote her visions. Shortly after 1270 she joined the Cistercian nuns at Helfta, where she spent the remaining twelve years of her life, highly respected as one signally favoure<l by God, especially by her namesake St. Mechtilde of Hackeborn and by St. Gertrude the Great. Mechtild left to the world a most wonderful book, in which she recorded her manifold inspirations and visions. According to her assertion, God ordered the title of the book to be " Vliessende licht miner gotheit in allu die herzen die da lebent ane valscheit", i. e. "Light of my divinity,- flowing into all hearts that live without guile" The work is commonly styled "Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit". She wrote her inspirations on separate
