Modern devotion to the Sacred Heart is closely associated with the name of St. Margaret Mary and popular practices such as the Nine Fridays and the Holy Hour, and its beginnings are not so well known. Yet it originated not at Paray-le-Monial but in the centres of medieval contemplative life, especially in the Benedictine, Cistercian and Carthusian monasteries. St. Gertrude, the famous mystic of Helfta, is perhaps its most striking representative.

Little is known of her outward life, which is not surprising, for she entered her convent at the age of five, never to leave it. She was long regarded as its abbess, and most pictures still represent her assuch. But, according to modern scholars, this view was based on an erroneous identification of her with her namesake, Gertrude of Hackeborn, who governed the monastery during the Saint’s lifetime. It is even doubtful whether she was a Cistercian or a Benedictine. The main source of our knowledge of her are her Revelations, written in Latin, which, after her death, remained hidden for a long time. One manuscript, however, seems to have been in the possession of Master Eckhart, and the Dominicans were the first to defend her doctrine, and translated her works in 1505. Their devotion was shared by the Carthusians, especially by Justus Lanspergius, who, attracted by her cult of the Sacred Heart, became one of her most ardent disciples.

Of the five books of her Legatus Divinae Pietatis, to give it its Latin title, only the second is written by herself, the remaining four are compiled from her notes by one of her nuns.

After a painful illness of nearly three months there died, at the age of fifty-two, on the Wednesday in Easter week (April 18, 1618), in the Carmelite convent of the reform of St. Teresa at Pontoise, soeur Marie de l’Incarnation, a lay sister, five years professed. Dr. André Duval, who wrote her life, has left some account of the manner of her death. “I arrived at Pontoise,” he says, “at about half-past five in the morning . . . when I got to the courtyard I met the turn sister looking for the chaplain to come and give extreme unction . . . they told the prioress that I had arrived, and she sent me at once a surplice and a stole; I went straightway to the infirmary . . . the doctor told me that it was advisable to anoint her and thereupon I began it; as I was doing so she breathed her last. The doctor having informed me that she was dead I ceased the anointing and began the anthem Subvenite with the prayers which follow . . .”.

This matter of fact account by the grave doctor of the Sorbonne hides the great reverence he had for her at whose deathbed he was present. Indeed we may wonder why he should trouble to journey through the night from Paris to minister to a lay sister in a provincial convent, even though he was one of the ecclesiastical superiors of that and all the other Carmelite convents in France.

Let us now see what moved this Lord to suffer such exquisite torture, and whether there was any self-interest in it. In reply I will quote a notable saying of Avicena Moro referred to by Saint Thomas Aquinas, which declares that God is by nature absolutely generous, and that no creature possesses this virtue in perfection. (I Dis. 18, art. 3 in corp.) For no one does good without any prospect of gaining by it, and the perfection gained by the creature when it acts solely according to its nature suffices for that. The Creator alone possesses this pre-eminence that by nothing he has done, or does, in this world has he acquired any new perfection. He is naturally and perfectly liberal because all he gives and does is done gratis, without reward. Therefore let us seek no other cause for God’s actions but his goodness alone.

This being so, let us ask our Lord why he drank a chalice of such sorrows. Thou, Lord, whose riches, whose glory, whose bliss, whose joys are so immense that though Thou shouldst create a thousand worlds they could not be augmented, why didst Thou will to subject Thyself to such tortures? Why choose to drink of this most bitter cbalice? Why should this most sublime, most simple Substance clothe Itself with flesh and incur the trials of our mortality? And if that was little, what hadst thou to do with prisons, stripes, blows and insults, thorns and nails and the Cross? Why didst Thou will to sink to such unfathomable depths?