man knows about as much of celestial matters as an ox
knows of discant singing.

His relationship to Mary is tender, intimate and familiar:

Within my heart concealed
There is a secret cell;
At nightfall and at daybreak
My lady there does dwell.
The mistress of the house is she,
I feel her love and care about.
If she denies herself to me,
Methinks the mistress has gone out.

In another poem he prays to Mary to allow him to tear off a small piece
of her robe, so that he may keep himself warm with it in the winter.

Like Cino da Pistoia, who commended his dying soul not to God but to his
loved one, Brother Hans commends himself to Mary:

Thus I commend my soul into thy hands,
When it must journey to those unknown lands,
Where roads and paths are new and strange to it.

And:

Oh, come to me, thou Bride of God,
When my faint soul departs from me!

There remains one more motif to consider, a motif which in a way
completes the picture of the celestial lady: As men love and desire the
women of the earth, so God loves the Lady of Heaven. St. Bernard first
expressed this naive idea, which makes God the Father resemble a little
the ancient Jupiter. "She attracted the eyes of the heavenly hosts, even
the heart of the King went out to her." "He Himself, the supreme King
and Ruler, so much desires thy beauty, that He is awaiting thy consent,
upon which He has decided to save the world. And Him Whom thou
delightest in thy silence, thou wilt delight even more by thy speech,
for He called to thee from Heaven: 'Oh! fairest among women! Let me hear
thy voice!'" etc. Here we have St. Bernard, the rock of orthodoxy,
representing God as Mary's languishing admirer! Suso is irreproachable
in this respect, but Conrad says that the colour of Mary's face was so
bright and made it so lovely,

That even the Eternal Sire
Was filled with sacred fire,
And all the heavenly princes....

Thus, at the turn of the fourteenth century the great celestial change
was complete: By the side of God, nay, even in the place of God, a woman
was enthroned. "The Virgin became the God of the Universe," says
Michelet, a thorough, though rather imaginative expert on the Middle
Ages. The people primitively worshipped idols. The clergy, headed by the
Dominican and Franciscan monks, introduced Lady Days into the calendar
and invented the rosary to facilitate the recital of the