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Good historic instances are the visions of Mechthild of Magdeburg or Angela of Foligno. The first contain all the elements of drama, the last cover a wide symbolic and emotional field. Those who have read Canon Streeter's account of the visions of the Sadhu Sundar Singh will recognize them as being of this type.
I see it with the eyes of my soul, and hear it with the ears of my eternal spirit, and feel in every part of my body the power of the Holy Ghost.” P. Gall. Morel, Offenbarungen der Schwester Mechthild von Magdeburg, oder das fliessende Licht der Gottheit, Regensburg, 1869. The general tenor of her writings is contemplative and prophetic.
How different is her sentiment from that of her brother-mystic, St. Francis, to whom the birds were his “little sisters,” and who “loved above all other birds a certain little bird which is called the lark.” But though, with apparent satisfaction, Mechthild saw no birds, she did see Enoch and Elias, and greeted the former by questioning him as to how he came there.
Mus. Cotton MS. Domitian. Hum. 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.
Holy Writ has supplied the only answer, “He walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” Having spoken thus of the Earthly Paradise, Mechthild goes on to tell of the Heavenly, where she sees, “floating in rapture, as the air floats in the sunshine,” the souls which, though not deserving of Purgatory, are not yet come into God’s kingdom, and to whom rewards and crowns come not until they enter that kingdom.
The Bishops give what is holy to the dogs, and pearls to swine.” But the poor beguine, Mechthild, was not in the same powerful position to stay, or even to modify, the resentment which her attacks occasioned. “For more than twenty years was I bound with thee on a hideous gridiron,” she writes, likening her anguish to that of St. Lawrence.
But where Mechthild seems to strike an original note for her time is in her insistence on God’s craving for the soul, as well as the soul’s craving for God. We find the same insistence in Meister Eckhart, who followed her closely in time, and perhaps, in this respect, in thought also. “God needs man,” says Eckhart, quite simply.
For my part, he that likes may pass the cap I'll shut my eyes and take no note of him. MECHTHILD. There hangs the viceroy! Your obeisance, children! ELSBETH. I would to God he'd go, and leave his cap! The country would be none the worse for it. Out of the way! Confounded pack of gossips! Who sent for you? Go, send your husbands here, If they have courage to defy the order.
During the thirty years which Mechthild spent as a beguine at Magdeburg, she lived an austere life, and one beset with difficulties, largely created by the fearless way in which she warned and denounced those in high places in the Church.
In 1235, at the age of twenty-three, Mechthild not without many a heart-pang, and prompted to this determination by a troubled conscience, a determination doubtless brought about by the preaching of the Dominican friars, who were stirring all classes by their impassioned zeal left her home and went to Magdeburg, where she entered a settlement of beguines.
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