A Marvelous History of Mary of Nimmegen Who for More than Seven Year Lived and had Ado with the Devil
9781465674470
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The miracle play of Mary of Nimmegen is one of the gems of Dutch mediaeval literature. Its heroine is a reincarnation of Beatrice, the runaway nun from a Brabant convent who, after wandering seven years with her paramour, and living other seven as a public woman, returned, a repentant sinner, to the convent to find that she had never been missed. For all those fourteen years the Mother of God had served, in her person, as sacristan, because Beatrice had never let a day go by without praying an Ave Maria. The love idyll of this early legend has been turned into a grotesque caricature by the author of our miracle play. The handsome youth whose seductions proved stronger than the nun’s monastic vows is changed into “an ill-favored devil of a man”, as he is described by one of the tipplers in the Antwerp tavern. Leering Moonen’s one eye is a mirror that distorts the smile of love into a grimace. His promise to satisfy the girl’s craving for pleasure and finery is the substitute magic whereby he works his charm upon her, and even that would have failed of its effect without the aid of Mary’s fit of despair. Despondency is the devil’s abettor. To us moderns, accustomed to the searching analysis of mental reactions, the girl’s easy surrender to both the fit and the fiend is not sufficiently accounted for. But the author of “Mary of Nimmegen” did not attempt to unravel the involutions of the mind. His aim was to glorify the ways of God’s mother to man, and the actions of man required no further exposition than sufficed to exemplify her divine mercy in its fullness. For that purpose the relation between cause and effect could be expressed in the simplest of terms, such as give force to the proverbial wisdom of those early days. Wanhope is the devil’s snare. That homely truth, a reflection of the mediaeval doctrine that wanhope was one of the sins against the Holy Ghost, is illustrated by Mary’s reckless invocation of “either God or all the fiends of Hell”, and Moonen appears on the scene at once in accordance with the Dutch adage which says that when you speak of the devil you tread on his tail. English sense of decorum, which shuns the mention of the unspeakable one, pretends to hear the flutter of wings when it speaks of an angel of heaven. Dutch love of realism, in scorning to barter the tangible tail under foot for the invisible wings over head, is truer to the experience of life, for weak humanity has always been more easily susceptible to the suggestive power of evil than of good. Mary of Nimmegen finds it so. Her “God or the Devil, ’tis all one to me”, is a vain pretence at impartial allegiance. Who stands at the parting of the ways to Heaven and Hell, waiting for God to call or for the Devil to snatch her, has already passed beyond the point of retrievement. The response to the divine summons will require a moral effort which the snatcher will spare her. The way of least resistance is the way to Hell. Mary is never in doubt as to the real nature of her one-eyed companion. “Ye be the devil out of hell!”, is her reply to Moonen’s introduction of himself, and in her first lament over the sinful life she is leading she admits to her own soul that “Though he saith little, I may not him mistake: He is a fiend or but little more.” The innocent maiden who lived a blameless life in her uncle’s home has, by one night’s experience, become a hardened sinner. It is difficult for a modern reader to believe in Mary’s sudden wickedness. But we must remember that the mediaeval playwright did not mean to show his audience the consecutive stages of her degradation. The action on the stage is an epitome of that mental process, condensing temptation and surrender into one simple scene, the intervening phases of mental struggle and agony being left to the imagination of the audience.
