In the making of the world that was Rome, ages combined.  Centuries unrolled in its dissolution.  Step by step it had ascended the path of empire, step by step it went down.  The descent completed, Rome herself survived.  The eternal feminine is not more everlasting than the Eternal City.  Yet, in the descent, her power, wrested from a people who had but the infirmities of corruption, by others that had only the instincts of brutes, left but vices and ruins.  From these feudalism and serfdom erupted.  Humanity became divided into beasts of burden and beasts of prey.

Feudalism was the transmission of authority from an overlord to an underlord, from the latter to a retainer, and thence down to the lowest rung of the social ladder, beneath which was the serf, between whom and his master the one judge was God.

The resulting conditions have no parallel in any epoch of which history has cognizance.  Except in Byzance, the glittering seat of Rome’s surviving dominion, and in Islam, the glowing empire further east, nowhere was there light.  Europe, pitch-black, became, almost in its entirety, subject to the caprices of a hierarchy of despots who managed to be both stupid and fierce, absolute autocrats, practically kings.  To the suzerain they owed homage at court, assistance in war; but in their own baronies, all power, whether military, judiciary, or legislative, centred in them.  They had the further prerogative, which they abundantly abused, of maintaining centuries of anarchy and intellectual night.  The fief and the sword were the investiture of their power.  The donjon-a pillory on one side, a gibbet on the other-was the symbol of their might.  The blazon, with its sanguinary and fabulous beasts, was emblematic of themselves.  Could wolves form a social order, their model would be that of these brutes, to whom God was but a bigger tyrant.  Their personal interest, which alone prevented them from exterminating everybody, was the determining cause of affranchisement when it came, and, when it did, was accompanied by conditions always hard, often grotesque, and usually vile, among which was the jus primae noctis and the affiliated marchetum, subsequently termed droit du seigneur, the dual right of poaching on maidenly and marital preserves.

With that, with drink and pillage for relaxations, the chief business of the barons was war.  When they descended from their keeps, it was to rob and attack.  There was no security, not a road was safe, war was an intermittent fever and existence a panic.

In the constant assault and sack of burgs and keeps, the condition of woman was perilous.  Usually she was shut away more securely and remotely than in the gynaeceum.  If, to the detriment of her lord, she emerged, she might have one of her lips cut off, both perhaps, or, more expeditiously, be murdered.  She never knew which beforehand.  It was as it pleased him.  Penalties of this high-handedness were not sanctioned by law.  There was none.  It was the right of might.  Civilization outwearied had lapsed back into eras in which women were things.

The lapse had ecclesiastical approbation.  At the second council of Macon it was debated whether woman should not be regarded as beyond the pale of humanity and as appertaining to a degree intermediary between man and beast.  Subsequent councils put her outside of humanity also, but on a plane between angels and man.  But in the capitularies generally it was as Vas infirmius that she was defined.  Yet already Chrysostom, with a better appreciation of the value of words, with a better appreciation of the value of woman as well, had defined her as danger in its most delectable form.  Chrysostom means golden mouth.  His views are of interest.  Those of the mediaeval lord are not recorded, and would not be citable, if they were.

From manners such as his and from times such as those, there was but one refuge-the cloister, though there was also the tomb.  They were not always dissimilar.  In the monasteries, there was a thick vapor of crapulence and bad dreams.  They were vestibules of hell.  The bishops, frankly barbarian, coarse, gluttonous, and worse, went about armed, pillaging as freely as the barons.  Monks less adventurous, but not on that account any better, saw Satan calling gayly at them, “Thou art damned.”  Yet, however drear their life, it was a surcease from the apoplexy of the epoch.  Kings descended from their thrones to join them.  To the abbeys and priories came women of rank.

In these latter retreats there was some suavity, but chiefly there was security from predatory incursions, from husbands quite as unwelcome, from the passions and violence of the turbulent world without.  But the security was not over-secure.  Women that escaped behind the bars, saw those bars shaken by the men from whom they had fled, saw the bars sunder, and themselves torn away.  That, though, was exceptional.  In the cloister generally there was safety, but there were also regrets, and, with them, a leisure not always very adequately filled.  To some, the cloister was but another form of captivity in which they were put not of their own volition, but by way of precaution, to insure a security which may not have been entirely to their wish.  Yet, from whatever cause existence in these retreats was induced, very rapidly it became the fashion.

There had been epochs in which women wore garments that were brief, there were others in which their robes were long.  It was a question of mode.  Then haircloth came in fashion.  In Greece, women were nominally free.  In Rome, they were unrestrained.  In Europe at this period, they were cloistered.  It was the proper thing, a distinction that lifted them above the vulgar.  Bertheflede, a lady of very exalted position, who, Gregoire de Tours has related, cared much for the pleasures of the table and not at all for the service of God, entered a nunnery for no other reason.

There were other women who, for other causes, did likewise.  In particular, there was Radegonde who founded a cloister of her own, one that within high walls had the gardens, porticoes, and baths of a Roman villa, but which in the deluge of worldly sin, was, Thierry says, intended to be an ark.  There Radegonde received high ecclesiastics and laymen of position, among others Fortunatus, a poet, young and attractive, whom the abbess, young and attractive herself, welcomed so well that he lingered, supping nightly at the cloister, composing songs in which were strained the honey of Catullus, and, like him, crowned with roses.

But Radegonde was not Lesbia, and Fortunatus, though a poet, confined his licence to verse.  Together they collaborated in the first romance of pure sentiment that history records, one from which the abbess passed to sanctity, and the poet to fame.  Thereafter the story persisting may have suggested some one of the pedestals that antiquity never learned to sculpture and to which ladies were lifted by their knights.

Meanwhile love had assumed another shape.  Radegonde, before becoming an abbess, had been a queen.  As a consequence she had prerogatives which other women lacked.  It was not every one that could entertain a tarrying minstrel.  It was not every one that would.  The nun generally was emancipated from man as thoroughly as the hetaira had been from marriage.  But the latter in renouncing matrimony did not for that reason renounce love and there were many cloistered girls who, in renouncing man, did not renounce love either.  One of them dreamed that on a journey to the fountain of living waters, a form appeared that pointed at a brilliant basin, to which, as she stooped, Radegonde approached and put about her a cloak that, she said, was sent by the girl’s betrothed.

Radegonde was then dead and a saint.  The dream of her, particularly the gift, more especially its provenance, seemed so ineffable that the girl could think of nothing else save only that when at last the betrothed did come, the nuptial chamber should be ready.  She begged therefore that there be given her a little narrow cell, a narrow little tomb, to which, the request granted, other nuns led her.  At the threshold she kissed each of them, then she entered; the opening was walled and within, with her mystic spouse, the bride of Christ remained.

At Alexandria, something similar had already occurred.  There another Hypathia, fair as she, refused Christianity, refused also marriage.  God did not appeal to her, man did not either.  But a priest succeeded in interesting her in the possibility of obtaining a husband superior to every mortal being on condition only that she prayed to Mary.  The girl did pray.  During the prayer she fell asleep.  Then beautiful beyond all beauty the Lord appeared to whom the Virgin offered the girl.  The Christ refused.  She was fair but not fair enough.  At that she awoke.  Immortally lovely and mortally sad she suffered the priest to baptize her.  Another prayer followed by another sleep ensued in which she beheld again the Christ who then consenting to take her, put on her finger a ring which she found on awakening.

The legend, which afterward inspired Veronese and Correggio, had a counterpart in that of St. Catherine of Sienna.  To her also the Christ gave a ring, yet one which, Della Fonte, her biographer, declared, was visible only to herself.  The legend had also a pendant in the story of St. Theresa, a Spanish mystic, who in her trances discovered that the punishment of the damned is an inability to love.  In the Relacion de su vida the saint expressed herself as follows: 

“It seemed to me as though I could see my soul, clearly, like a mirror, and that in the centre of it the Lord came.  It seemed to me that in every part of my soul I saw him as I saw him in the mirror and that mirror, I cannot say how, was wholly absorbed by the Lord, indescribably, in a sort of amorous confusion.”

The mirror was the imagination, the usual reflector of the beatific.  It was that perhaps to which Paul referred when he said that we see through a glass darkly.  But it was certainly that which enabled Gerson to catalogue the various degrees of ravishment of which the highest, ecstasy, culminates in union with Christ, where the soul attaining perfection is freed.

Gerson came later but theories similar to his, which neoplatonism had advanced, were common.  In that day or more exactly in that night, the silver petals of the lily of purity were plucked so continuously by so many hands, so many were the eyes strained on the mirror, so frequent were the brides of Christ, that the aberration became as disquieting as asceticism.  Then through fear that woman might lose herself in dreams of spiritual love and evaporate completely, an effort was attempted which succeeded presently in deflecting her aspirations to the Virgin who, hitherto, had remained strictly within the limits originally traced.  Commiserate to the erring she was Regina angelorum, the angel queen.  In the twelfth century suddenly she mounted.  From queen she became sovereign.  Ceremonies, churches, cathedrals, were consecrated uniquely to her.  In pomp and importance her worship exceeded that of God.  When Satan had the sinner in his grasp, it was she who in the prodigalities of her divine compassion rescued and redeemed him.

In the art of the period, such as it was, the worship was reflected.  The thin hands of saints, the poignant eyes of sinners, were raised to her equally.  The fainting figures that were painted in the ex-voto of the triptiques seemed ill with love.  The forms of women, lost beneath the draperies, disclosed, if anything, emaciation.  The expression of the face alone indicated what they represented and that always was adoration.  They too were swooning at the Virgin’s feet.

Previously Paul had been studied.  It was seen that a thorn had been given him, a messenger of Satan, from which, three times he had prayed release.  But the Lord said to him:  “My grace is sufficient to thee, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”  “Wherefore,” said Paul, “most gladly will I glory in my infirmities."

Precisely what the apostle meant is immaterial.  But from his words the inference was drawn that in weakness is salvation and in sin the glory of God.

The early Church had not interpreted the evangels with entire correctness.  It is possible that in the Graeco-Syrian dialect which the apostles employed, their meaning was sometimes obscure.  It is presumable for instance that the coming of the Kingdom of God which they proclaimed was not the material termination of a material world but the real Kingdom which did really come in the hearts of those that believed.  “Comprends, pécheur,” Bossuet thundered at a later day, “que tu portes ton paradis et ton enfer en toi-meme.”  The patricists were not Bossuets.  They were literal folk.  They stuck to the letter.  Having discovered what they regarded as a divine command for abstinence, asceticism in all its rigors ensued.  Subsequent exégètes finding in Paul a few words not over precise, discovered in them a commendation of sin as a means of grace.  The discovery, amplified later by Molinos, had results that made man even less attractive than he had been.

Meanwhile, between insanity and disorder, woman, indifferent as always to texts, had found a form of love which, however impossible, was one that in its innocence obscured the stupidities and turpitudes of the day.  Then, after the substitution of the Rosa mystica for the mystic lily, tentatively there began an affranchisement of communes, of women and of thought.

Hitherto it had been blasphemy to think.  The first human voice that the Middle Ages heard, the first, voice distinguishable from that of kings, of felons and of beasts, was Abailard’s.  Whatever previously had been said was bellowed or stuttered.  It was with the forgotten elegance of Athens that Abailard spoke, preaching as he did so the indulgence of God, the rehabilitation of the flesh, the inferiority of fear, love’s superiority.

Abailard, fascinating and gifted, was familiar with Greek and Hebrew, attainments then prodigious to which he added other abilities, the art of calming men while disturbing women-among others a young Parisian, Heloise, herself a miracle of erudition and of beauty.

Abailard at the time was nearly thirty-eight, Heloise not quite eighteen.  Between them a liaison ensued that resulted in a secret marriage which Abailard afterward disavowed and which, for his sake, Heloise denied.  It ruined their lives and founded their fame.  Had it been less catastrophic no word or memory of them could have endured.  Misfortune made immortal these lovers, one of whom took the veil and the other the cowl and whose story has survived that of kingdoms.

In separation they corresponded.  The letters of Heloise are vibrant still.  Only Sappho, in her lost songs to Phaon, could have exceeded their fervor.  “God knows,” she wrote, “in you I sought but you, nothing but you.  You were my one and only object, marriage I did not seek, nor my way but yours uniquely.  If the title of wife be holy, I thought the name of mistress more dear.  Rather would I have been called that by you than empress by an emperor.”

Abailard’s frigid and methodical answers were headed “To the bride of Christ,” or else “To my sister in Christ, from Abailard, her brother.”  The tone of Heloise’s replies was very different.  “To my master, no; to my brother, no; to my husband, no; his sister, his bride, no; from Heloise to Abailard.”  Again she wrote:  “At every angle of life God knows I fear to offend you more than Him, I desire to please Him less than I do you.  It was your will not His that brought me where I am.”

It was true.  She took the veil as though it were poison.  She broke into the priory violently as the despairful plunge into death.  Even that could not assuage her.  But in the burning words which she tore from her breaking heart the true passion of love, which nothing earthly or divine can still, for the first time pulsated.