OF SIX MEDIÆVAL WOMEN
darkness, knowledge without fruition, the very pain of Hell. Fruition can be reached only through Death." In one of her visions she, in an exquisite simile, describes how love flows from the Godhead to mankind, penetrating both body and soul. "It goes without effort," she says, "as does a bird in the air when it does not move its wings." In the same vision she sees the Holy Mother, with uncovered breasts, standing on God's left hand, and Christ on the right, showing his still-open wounds, both pleading for sinful humanity, and she adds that as long as sin endures on earth, so long will Christ's wounds remain open and bleeding, though painless, but that after the Day of Judgment they will heal, and it will be as though there was a rose-leaf instead of the wounds.[1]
Of Love, as she conceived it in relation to
- ↑ The first of these subjects—the Holy Mother and Christ pleading for sinners—is to be found in a miniature in King Henry VI.'s Psalter (Brit. Mus. Cotton MS. Domitian. A. xvii. circ. 1430, fol. 205), and the two intercessions separately form two of the subjects in the Speculum Humanae Salvationis (fourteenth century). Though the S.H.S. is of later date than the time of Mechthild the literary source of the subject appears to be a passage in the De laudibus B.M.V. of Arnaud of Chartres, abbot of Bonneval 1138-1156 (J. Lutz and P. Perdrizet, Spec. Hum. Sal. vol. i., Mulhouse, 1907), which might quite well have been known to her, especially if, as Messrs. Lutz and Perdrizet consider, the S.H.S. was written by a Dominican, who would naturally make use of Dominican teaching and tradition, and we know that Mechthild, even if not, as has been suggested, a tertiary of that Order, was in constant and close touch with it. The second subject, the reference to rose-leaves and Christ's wounds, seems to be a purely original thought, and one amongst the many fascinating ideas that have centred round the rose ever since Aphrodite anointed the dead body of Hector with rose-scented oil (Iliad, xxiii. 186).
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