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In Mechthild’s time her world was engrossed with thoughts and speculations concerning the Hereafter, for Death, which at the end of the next century was to take dramatic and pictorial form in the weird and all-embracing “Dance of Death,” although its earliest known poetic form is of 1160, ever hovered near in pestilence, war, and tumult.
It would seem as if, in general, there are two conflicting tendencies in minds such as Mechthild’s, a tendency to tradition in her case, of course, church tradition and a tendency to definite self-expression.
Of all Mechthild’s visions, there is none that seems to reach a greater height of supreme beauty than that in which the loving soul learns the way to its Divine Lover. It is strangely reminiscent of courtly life and courtly poetry, translated into the ecstatic state, and etherealised into the very perfume of spirituality as the soul becomes one with God.
From these objective conditions which, whilst influencing Mechthild’s own thoughts and works, might and did, however differently, influence the work of others as well, we turn to the consideration of her work as the expression of her own poetic soul, welling up from depths filled with love for the highest and most divine things.
The world, in Mechthild’s day, was in a state of unrest and of looked-for change. Mankind was ever haunted by forebodings of the approaching happening of something momentous. Whole-hearted faith in the Church was waning, and although outward conformity still prevailed, there existed very diverse opinions, tolerated so long as they did not become too obtrusive.
The provost, or priest, is “Godly Obedience,” to whom all these virtues are subject. “Thus does the convent abide in God, and happy are they who dwell therein.” From this spiritual abode of the virtues we turn to one of Mechthild’s earliest recorded visions that of Hell, with its flame and flare. Whilst Death was perhaps man’s first mystery, the Hereafter has been his endless pre-occupation.
This may be partly because the personality of that supreme visionary and poet tended, as does all superlative genius, to cast a shadow over the lesser lights of both earlier and later times, and partly because, although Mechthild’s works were early translated into Latin, she wrote in Low German.
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