It was dangerous to let such sensations express themselves by explicit formulas; the Church could only tolerate them in the form of images. Catherine of Siena might say that her heart had been changed into the heart of Christ. But Marguerite Porete, an adherent of the sect of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who also believed that her soul had been annihilated in God, was burnt at Paris.
What the Church dreaded above all in the idea of the annihilation of the personality was the consequence, accepted by the extremist mystics of all religions, that the soul absorbed in God, and therefore, having no will, can no longer sin, even in following its carnal appetites. How many poor ignorant people had been dragged by such doctrines into the most abominable licence. Every time Gerson touches the question of the dangers of spiritual love, he remembers the excesses of the Bégards and of the Turlupins; he fears a truly satanic impiety, like that of the nobleman he mentions as having confessed to a Carthusian that the sin of lust did not prevent him from loving God; on the contrary, it inflamed him to seek for and taste more eagerly the sweetness of divine love.
So long as the transports of mysticism were translated into passionate imaginings of a symbolic nature, however vivid their colours might be, they caused but a relative danger. On becoming crystallized in images, they lost some of their noxiousness. In this way the exuberant imagery of the time, to a certain extent, diverted the most dangerous tendencies of the religious life of the epoch, however bizarre it may appear to us. Jan Brugman, a popular Dutch preacher, might with impunity compare Jesus, taking human form, to a drunkard, who forgets himself, sees no danger, who gives away all he has. “Oh, was He not truly drunk, when love urged Him to descend from the highest heavens to this lowest valley of the earth?” He sees Him in heaven, going about to pour out drinks for the prophets, “and they drank till they were fit to burst, and David with his harp, leaped before the table, just as if he were the Lord’s fool.”
Not only the grotesque Brugman, the serene Ruysbroeck, too, likes to represent divine love under the image of drunkenness. Hunger also served as a figure to express the relations of the soul with Christ. Ruysbroeck, in The Adornment of the Spiritual
