The Gargoyle

VIII.

Growing up in Engelthal, I found my most difficult challenge was to keep my voice down. I understood that silence was an integral part of our spiritual welfare, but nevertheless I received many reprimands for my “excessive exuberance.” Really, I was simply acting as a child does.

It was not only sound that was muted at Engelthal, it was everything. All aspects of our lives were outlined by the Constitutions of the Order, a document so thorough that it had a full five chapters devoted just to clothing and washing. Even our buildings could have no elegance, for fear it might taint our souls. We had to sit in the dining hall in the same order that we took our places in the choir. During the meal, readings were given so we received spiritual nourishment as well as physical. We’d listen to passages from the Bible and a lot of St. Augustine, and sometimes The Life of St. Dominic, the Legenda Aurea, or Das St. Trudperter Hohelied. At least the readings distracted from the food, which was flavorless-spices were prohibited and we couldn’t eat meat without special permission, given only for health reasons.

Whenever I wasn’t in the central chapel for Mass, I spent my time in the scriptorium. Gertrud made it clear from the start that she didn’t appreciate my presence. Because of her position as armarius, however, it would have been improper for her to vent her frustrations directly. For this, she had her minion Sister Agletrudis.

Agletrudis was a chubby little planet that orbited around Gertrud, the scriptorium’s largest star; her every action was calculated to please her mistress by torturing me. Her only goal in life was to take over the scriptorium when Gertrud finally died. What was I, except an obstacle upon that path?

Well before I arrived, a financial consideration had infiltrated the scriptorium. It was common practice to produce books for wealthy citizens, often in exchange for land upon their deaths. Gertrud, despite all her self-professed holiness, never took offense at the economic terms of this arrangement but disliked the sale of books for a different reason altogether: it interfered with using the scriptorium to achieve her own ends. Early in her career, Gertrud had decided that she would produce one great work upon which her legend would forever rest: a definitive German-language version of the Bible. Though she never said it aloud, I’m certain she imagined it would come to be known as Die Gertrud Bibel.

This was the basic problem with my presence: I was a young girl-an incomplete adult-who would take precious time away from her real work. I remember Gertrud’s words when she put me under the tutelage of Agletrudis. “The prioress seems to believe this child will be able to offer something. Demonstrate for her some of the basics of the craft, preferably on the other side of the room, but she is not to touch anything. Those fat little fingers are undeserving of God’s instruments. And above all, keep her away from my Bible.”

So, in the beginning, I was only allowed to watch. You’d imagine this to be incredibly boring for a child but, as I’d spent much of my young life gathering information while sitting quietly in the corner, this was nothing new for me. I was hypnotized by the way the quills worked as an extension of the scribes’ fingers. I learned the recipe for ink and that adding vermilion or cinnabar would make it red. I watched the way the nuns used a blade to sharpen their nibs, whenever the lettering threatened to lose its definition. I knew instantly that I was in the right place.

Things that we take for granted today were extraordinary at the time. Take paper, for example. We didn’t make our own but received delivery from a local parchmenter. Then we had to ready the parchment for use. The nuns sorted it by quality and then arranged the sheets by hair and flesh sides, so the grains of the pages would match when the volume sat open on its spine, and sometimes Gertrud would instruct that the parchment should have some color added “just for a touch of drama.” A single book required the skins of several hundred animals. How could a girl not be fascinated by that?

I can criticize Gertrud for many things but not her devotion to the craft. If the work was a translation, discussions about the phrasing of a single sentence sometimes lasted for over an hour. Most nuns in that room, despite the grumblings about Gertrud’s dictatorial attitude, felt that she was completing a task God had specifically chosen her to do. The sisters never flagged, not even during the most intense periods of working on Die Gertrud Bibel.

There were a few scribes who wondered under what authority such a grand translation was being attempted and whether the undertaking were not sacrilegious, but these sisters knew better than to question the scriptorium’s armarius-or simply feared to do it. So they didn’t complain, but focused instead on the rare pages of the Bible that received Gertrud’s approval. While everyone had input into the process, she always had the final say.

Gertrud allowed only the most skillful scribes to work on the most perfect vellum. She hovered over the work, jerking her scrawny neck each time she feared that a word might be misspelled or that the ink might be smudged. When the final period was dotted on the page’s final sentence, you could see Gertrud’s shoulders let go and you could hear the air that had been trapped in her lungs exit in relief. Then she would loudly slurp in another mouthful.

These moments of relaxation never lasted long. Gertrud would take the leaf to the rubricator so that the chapter and verse numbers could be highlighted in red, and while this was being done, the illuminator would make dozens of trial sketches for the blank spaces on the page. When the final decisions were made, the image was laid into place.

The completed pages were magnificent. Gertrud would spend a good hour, checking and double-checking it, before she would file it away and start the next page. Leaf by leaf, the book was coming into existence, but there were always other jobs to be completed. Whenever we had a backlog of manuscript requests from the nobility, Gertrud would glance longingly in the direction of her first love. But she had her orders from the prioress just like everyone else.

Somehow word reached the prioress that I wasn’t being allowed to participate in any scriptorium duties. I imagine Sister Christina was probably behind this. With a great sigh of resignation and a lengthy explanation that she was against it, Gertrud explained that “under order of the prioress, I now have to allow your stupid little hands to start practicing.” She gave over some old parchment, ruined by copying errors, and told me to start my efforts.

I immersed myself in it. I worked on any discarded vellum I could find and, as my skills improved, I was grudgingly given better quills and greater leeway to practice my translations. I could already understand German, Latin, Greek and Aramaic, the Italian of Paolo’s prayer book, and some French. I was reading my way through every volume in the scriptorium and my development was a constant source of amazement to the sisters, although I never received a word of praise from Gertrud. Sister Agletrudis always took great pleasure in pointing out my every mistake and when I turned my back on my work, my inkwells would mysteriously tip over, my books would mysteriously go missing, or my quills would somehow mysteriously snap. Each time I pointed out these “coincidences” to Gertrud, she’d only smirk and vouch for Sister Agletrudis’ very fine character.

Eventually, however, Gertrud and her acolyte could no longer continue to deny my talent. I was becoming the most versatile of the translators, and I was also the fastest and most accurate. Agletrudis’ annoyance with me moved beyond simple dislike, into feelings of jealousy and threat, and there was a disturbed look in Gertrud’s eyes as she started to realize how valuable I could be to Die Gertrud Bibel. She was no longer a young woman, and if she wanted to ensure that the Bible was completed in her lifetime, she needed to hurry the process along. Eventually, she allowed me to start contributing.

There was also life outside the scriptorium. As I grew older, I discovered a way to climb over the monastery gates and finally gain access to the world outside. I wasn’t looking for trouble; I only wanted to see what was out there. Naturally my first stop was the small home that belonged to Father Sunder and Brother Heinrich. When I appeared, Father Sunder let his displeasure in my actions be known. He threatened to haul me back to the monastery and report me to the prioress, but somehow we ended up having a cup of juice instead. And then we had something to eat. And before he knew it, so much time had passed that it would have been awkward to try to explain why he had not brought me back immediately. So, after I promised not to come again, Brother Heinrich and Father Sunder allowed me to sneak back into the monastery. I returned the following night. Again I was severely chastised, but we ended up having more food and drinks. This pattern of my broken promises and their half-hearted scoldings continued for some weeks before we gave up the pretense altogether.

Each time I arrived at the ridge that overlooked their house, I was delighted. Their cabin became like a second, secret home to me. On summer evenings we sometimes played hide-and-seek amongst the trees. These were the best times for me, peering out from behind the brush at the two fatherly men in their fifties pretending they couldn’t find me.

Engelthal was a small community, so it was inevitable that others knew about my “covert” visits. I suppose no one could see any real harm in them and, although they were an open secret among the nuns, I honestly believe that Gertrud, Agletrudis, and the prioress never knew. If they had, my visits would have been put to an abrupt end simply for propriety’s sake.

The prioress died one night when I was in my teens, and a new prioress needed to be chosen as soon as possible. Dominican monasteries were democratic institutions; Sister Christina, who was just then finishing the Sister-Book of Engelthal and starting her Revelations, was elected in a nearly unanimous vote. Just like that, she took possession of the title Mother Christina. Obviously, I was pleased by this turn of events, but it was another matter altogether for Sister Agletrudis. How quickly events had turned against her, in regard to her desire to ascend as the next armarius. Not only had a wunder-kind appeared in the scriptorium, but the new prioress had long been the girl’s greatest champion. When I took my formal vows into the sisterhood not long after Mother Christina’s election, this must have been the drop that made Sister Agletrudis’ barrel overflow. I could feel the burning hatred in her eyes as I professed my obedience to the Blessed Dominic and to all the prioresses until my death.

In the eyes of the other nuns, however, I saw approval and affection. To them, it must have looked as if everything in my life was falling perfectly into place-but this is not what I felt. I felt like an imposter in the house of the Lord.

I had been raised in an atmosphere of intense holiness, but I felt anything but holy. So many of our sisters, including Gertrud and Agletrudis, had mystic visions, but I did not. This created a constant sense of inadequacy in me. I had skills with languages, yes, but that was what they felt like-skills, not gifts or revelations. It was not only a lack of communication from God that made me feel less worthy, it was also that the other nuns seemed so sure of their paths when there was so much I didn’t understand. I was bewildered in heart and mind; I was deficient in the certainty the others seemed to have.

Mother Christina assured me that I should not worry about my lack of visions. Each sister receives her message only when she is ready, she said, and it is not a matter of calling the Lord to oneself but of making oneself purer so that the Lord would want to come. When I responded that I did not know what else I could possibly do to make myself more pure, Mother Christina advised that I should prepare myself for the Eternal Godhead by losing the creatureliness that adhered to my soul. I nodded my head, as if to indicate that this explanation clarified everything, but in truth it left me feeling as confused as a cow standing in front of a new gate.

I’d been studying these ideas all my life, but that’s what they remained. Ideas, concepts. Vague generalities I couldn’t really grasp. Mother Christina must have seen the look on my face, because she reminded me that I did have my inexplicable ability for languages and while this capability was not a mystical visitation, it did make me unique. It was increasingly clear, she maintained, that God must have a wonderful plan for me. Why else would he bless me with such gifts? I promised that I would try to do better, and silently hoped that I would someday grow to have the same belief in myself that she had.

Shortly after I entered my twenties, I met Heinrich Seuse for the first and only time. He was traveling from StraЯburg to Kцln, where he was to study at the studium generale under Meister Eckhart. Though our monastery was not directly on the path, he said he could hardly pass up the opportunity to visit the great Engelthal. Those were his very words.

It was obvious that he knew what to say to charm Mother Christina, but Gertrud was another matter. As soon as she heard that Seuse was going to study under Eckhart, she refused to meet him.

The subject of Eckhart was a touchy one. Although an accomplished writer in Latin on theological matters he was perhaps better known, or more notorious, for the unusual sermons he gave in the vernacular German. When Eckhart spoke on the metaphysical sameness between God’s nature and the human soul, his ideas often seemed to stray from the orthodox path, and it was not a good time for ideas to do that. There was already much unease among the monastic orders and clergy because of the move of the papacy to Avignon.

When I came across Eckhart in my readings and asked Gertrud about him, her reaction had been severe. While she admitted that she hadn’t actually read any of his works, she stated emphatically that neither did she need to. She’d heard enough of Eckhart’s filthy views that she did not need to go to the filthy source. She spat his name out of her mouth as if it were rotten fruit. “Eckhart was a man with such promise, but he has allowed himself to fall to ruin. He will be found a heretic yet, mark my words. He will not even admit that God is good.”

Gertrud’s attitude worked out well for me, strangely enough. Because of her refusal to meet Seuse, it was I who was appointed to show him the scriptorium. I was shocked by his appearance. He was so slight that I could barely believe that his bones could support his weight, as little as that was. His skin was sallow and blotchy, and I could see every vein in his face running just below the surface. Dark bags hung under his eyes, and it looked as if he had never been to sleep. His hands, covered with scabs that he picked at habitually, were like fleshy gloves filled with loosely connected bones.

My description makes him sound gruesome, but in truth he was the exact opposite. The thinness of his skin only seemed to allow the light of his soul to shine through. The way he waved his slender fingers around while speaking made me think of saplings blowing in a breeze. And if it looked as if he never slept, the way he spoke suggested this was only because he was constantly receiving messages too important to ignore. While he was only a few years older than I was, I couldn’t help but feel he knew secrets that I never would.

I walked him through the scriptorium and then, later, through the outlying lands belonging to Engelthal. When we were safely removed from the ears that could be found in every corner of the monastery, I brought up the topic of Meister Eckhart, and Seuse’s eyes danced as if I had just handed him the keys to Heaven. He raced through everything he knew about the man who would soon be his master. I’d never before heard such a brilliant jumble of ideas fall from a mouth, and Seuse’s voice was wild with ecclesiastical joy.

I asked why Sister Gertrud claimed that Meister Eckhart would not even admit that God was good. Seuse explained that Eckhart’s position was that anything that is good can become better, and whatever may become better may become best. God cannot be referred to as “good,” “better,” or “best” because He is above all things. If a man says that God is wise, the man is lying because anything that is wise can become wiser. Anything that a man might say about God is incorrect, even calling Him by the name of God. God is “super-essential nothingness” and “transcendent Being,” said Seuse, beyond all words and beyond all understanding. The best a man can do is to remain silent, because any time he prates on about God, he is committing the sin of lying. The true master knows that if he had a God he could understand, he would never hold Him to be God.

That afternoon my mind opened to new possibilities, and my heart to new understandings. I could not imagine why Gertrud would want to prevent Eckhart’s writings from entering our collection of books. What some would call heretical, I saw only as reasonable suppositions about the nature of God. I came away convinced that the teachings of my youth had been limited. If the arguments of Eckhart had not been allowed to cross my ears, what else had I not heard? As Seuse said that afternoon, with a brilliant gleam in his eyes, “That which is painful sharpens one’s love.”

In a moment of candor, I confessed to Seuse that I desperately wished I could read something by Eckhart. This caused a slightly wicked smile to cross his lips, but he said nothing. I wondered if he was amused that I would speak a desire that ran contrary to the monastery’s stance, but I thought no more of it until he left us a few days later. I very much wanted to spend more time with him, but Gertrud, perhaps sensing this, ensured that my scriptorium duties were doubly heavy.

I was allowed to bid farewell to Seuse at the gates, as he set out again towards Kцln. When he was certain that no one was looking at us, he slipped a small book into the folds of my robe.