Now this way of love and ecstasy and summer heats has been attended throughout by grave dangers for the adolescent spirit; above all by the primary danger which besets the mystical life, of mistaking spiritual joy for spiritual reality, desiring ‘consolations’ and ‘illuminations’ for their own sake, and resting in the gift instead of the Giver. “Though he who dedicates himself to love ever experiences great joy, he must never seek this joy.” All those tendencies grouped by St. John of the Cross under the disagreeable name of ‘spiritual gluttony,’ those further temptations to self-indulgent quietism which are but an insidious form of sloth, are waiting to entrap the self on the Illuminative Way. But there is a way beyond this, another ‘Coming of the Bridegroom,’ which Ruysbroeck describes as ‘eternally safe and sure.’ This is the way of pain and deprivation; when the Presence of God seems to be withdrawn, and the fatigue and reaction consequent on the violent passions and energies of the illuminated state make themselves felt as a condition of misery, aridity and impotence,—all, in fact, that the Christian mystics mean by the ‘Spiritual Death’ or ‘Dark Night of the Soul,’ and which Ruysbroeck’s contemporaries, the Friends of God, called ‘the upper school of perfect self-abandonment.’
The mirror is now to be cleansed of all false reflections, all beautiful prismatic light; the thoughts stripped bare of the consolations they have enjoyed. Summer is over, and autumn begins; when the flowers indeed die down, but the fruits which they heralded are ripe. Now is the time when man can prove the stuff of which he is made; and the religious amorist, the false mystic, is distinguished from the heroic and long-suffering servant of God. “In this season is perfected and completed all the work that the sun has accomplished during the year. In the same manner, when Christ the glorious Sun has risen to His zenith in the heart of man and then begins to descend, and to hide the radiance of His Divine light, and to abandon the man; then the impatience and ardour of love grow less. And this concealment of Christ, and this withdrawal of His light and heat, are the first working and the new coming of this degree. And now Christ says spiritually within the man: ‘Go forth, in the way which I now teach you.’ And the man goes forth, and finds himself poor, wretched and abandoned. And here the tempest, the ardour, the impatience of love grows cold; and the hot summer becomes autumn, and its riches turn to great poverty. Then man begins to lament in his distress—where now has gone thatardent love, that intimacy, that gratitude, that all-sufficing adoration? And that interior consolation, that intimate joy, that sensible savour, how has he lost all this?”[47]
The veil that had seemed so transparent now thickens again; the certitudes that made life lovely all depart. Small wonder if the tortured spirit of the mystic fails to recognise this awful destitution as a renewed caress from the all-demanding Lover of the Soul; an education in courage, humility and selflessness; a last purification of the will. The state to which that self is being led is a renewed self-donation on new and higher levels: one more of those mystical deaths which are really mystical births; a giving-up, not merely of those natural tastes and desires which were disciplined in the Active Life, but of the higher passions and satisfactions of the spirit too. He is to be led to a state of such complete surrender to the Divine purposes that he is able to say: “Lord, not my will according to nature, but Thy will and my will according to spirit be done.” The darkness, sorrow and abandonment through which this is accomplished are far more essential to his development than the sunshine and happiness that went before. It is not necessary, says Ruysbroeck, that all should know the ecstasies of illumination; but by this darkstairway every man who would attain to God must go.
When man has achieved this perfect resignation and all tendency to spiritual self-seeking is dead, the September of the soul is come. The sun has entered the sign of the Balance, when days and nights are equal; for now the surrendered self has achieved equilibrium, and endures in peace and steadfastness the alternations of the Divine Dark and Divine Light. Now the harvest and the vintage are ripe: “That is to say, all those inward and outward virtues, which man has practised with delight in the fire of love, these, now that he knows them and is able to accomplish them, he shall practise diligently and dutifully and offer them to God. And never were they so precious in His sight: never so noble and so fair. And all those consolations which God gave him before, he will gladly give up, and will empty himself for the glory of God. This is the harvest of the wheat and the many ripe fruits which make us rich in God, and give to us Eternal Life. Thus are the virtues perfected; and the absence of consolation is turned to an eternal wine.”[48]
Lume è lassu, che visibile facelo Creatore a quella creaturache solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace.
Lume è lassu, che visibile face
lo Creatore a quella creatura
che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace.
Par, xxx. 100.
Par, xxx. 100.
And the Light floweth forth in similitude, and indraweth Itself in unity; which we perceive, beyond the reason, in that high point of our understanding which is bare and turned within.The Twelve Béguines.
And the Light floweth forth in similitude, and indraweth Itself in unity; which we perceive, beyond the reason, in that high point of our understanding which is bare and turned within.
The Twelve Béguines.
The soul which has endured with courage and humility the anguish of the Dark Night, actualising within its own experience the double rhythm of love and renunciation, now enters upon a condition of equilibrium; in which it perceives that all its previous adventures and apprehensions were but episodes of growth, phases in the long preparation of character for those new levels of life on which it is now to dwell.
Three points, says Ruysbroeck, must characterise the truly interior man. First,his mind must be detached from its natural inclination to rest in images and appearances, however lovely; and must depend altogether upon that naked Absence of Images, which is God. This is the ‘ascent to the Nought’ preached by the Areopagite. Secondly, by means of his spiritual exercises, his progressive efforts to correspond with that Divine Life ever experienced by him with greater intensity, he must have freed himself from all taint of selfhood, all personal desire; so that in true inward liberty he can lift himself up unhindered towards God, in a spirit of selfless devotion. Plainly, the desolations of the Dark Night are exactly adapted to the production within the self of these two characters; which we might call purity of intelligence and purity of will. Directly resulting from their actualisation, springs the third point: the consciousness of inward union with God.[49]This consciousness of union, which we must carefully distinguish from theUnitythat is Ruysbroeck’s name for the last state of the transfigured soul, is the ruling character of that state of equilibrium to which we have now come; and represents the full achievement of the Interior Life.
In many of his works, under various images, Ruysbroeck tries to tell us what hemeans by this inward union with God, this ‘mutual inhabitation,’ as he calls it in one passage of great beauty, which is the goal of the ‘Second Life.’ He reminds us again of that remote point of the spirit, that ‘apex’ of our being, where our life touches the Divine Life; where God’s image ‘lives and reigns.’ With the cleansing of the heart and mind, the heightening and concentration of the will, which the disciplines of the Active Life and Dark Night have effected, this supreme point of the spirit is brought at last within the conscious field. Then man feels and knows the presence there of an intense and creative vitality, an Eternal Essence, from which all that is worth having in his selfhood flows. This is the Life-giving Life (Levende Leven), where the created and Uncreated meet and are one: a phrase, apparently taken by Ruysbroeck from St. Bernard, which aptly expresses an idea familiar to all the great contemplatives. It is the point at which man’s separate spirit, as it were, emerges from the Divine Spirit: the point through which he must at last return to his Source. Here the Father has impressed His image, the Son is perpetually born, the Spirit wells up;[50]and here the Divine Unity dwells and calls him to the One. Here Eternity and Time are intertwined. Here springs thefountain of ‘Living Water’—grace, transcendent vitality—upon which the mystic life of man depends.
Now the self, because it is at last conformed to the demands of the spiritual world, feels new powers from this life-giving source streaming into all departments of its being. The last barriers of self-will are broken; and the result is an inrush of fresh energy and light. Whereas in the ‘First Life’ God fed and communed with him by ‘means,’ and was revealed under images appropriate to a consciousness still immersed in the world of appearance; now man receives these gifts and messages, makes his contacts with Reality, ‘without means,’ or ‘by grace’—i.e.in a spiritual and interior manner. Those ‘lightning flashes from the face of Divine Love,’ those abrupt and vivid intuitions which he enjoyed during illumination, have given way before the steady shining of the Uncreated Light. Though light-imagery is never long absent from Ruysbroeck’s pages, it is, however, the spring of Living Water ever welling up, the rills or brooks which flow from it, and take its substance to the farthest recesses of the thirsty land, which seems to him the best image of this new inpouring of life. He uses it in all his chief works, perhaps most successfully inThe Spiritual Marriage. Faithful to themediæval division of personality into Memory or Mind, Intelligence or Understanding, and Will,—influenced too by his deep conviction that all Divine activity is threefold in type,—he describes the Well-spring as breaking into three Brooks of Grace, which pour their waters into each department of the self. The duct through which these waters come, ‘living and foaming’ from the deeps of the Divine Riches, is the Eternal Christ; who ‘comes anew’ to the purified soul, and is the immediate source of its power and happiness.
The first of the brooks which flow from Him is called ‘Pure Simplicity.’ It is a ‘simple light,’ says Ruysbroeck in another place; the white radiance of Eternity which, streaming into the mind, penetrates consciousness from top to bottom, and unifies the powers of the self about the new and higher centre now established. This simple light, in which we see things as they are—and therefore see that only one thing trulyis—delivers us from that slavery to the multiplicity of things, which splits the attention and makes concentration upon Reality impossible to the soul. The achievement of such mental simplicity, escaping the prismatic illusion of the world, is the first condition of contemplation. “Thanks to this simple light which fills him, the man finds himself to be unified, established,penetrated and affirmed in the unity of his mind or thought. And thereby he is uplifted and established in anew condition; and he turns inward upon himself, and stays his mind upon the Nudity, above all the pressure of sensual images, above all multiplicity.”[51]
The second stream which pours out from that Transcendent Life is a ‘Spiritual Clarity,’ which illuminates the intelligence and shows it all good. This clarity is a new and heightened form of intuition: a lucid understanding, whereby the self achieves clear vision of its own life, and is able to contemplate the sublime richness of the Divine Nature; gazing upon the mystery of the Trinity, and finding everywhere the Presence of God. Those who possess this light do not need ecstasies and revelations—sudden uprushes towards the supernal world—for their life and being is established in that world, above the life of sense. They have come to that state which Eckhart calls ‘finding all creatures in God and God in all creatures.’ They see things at last in their native purity. The heart of that vision, says Ruysbroeck, is their perception of “the unmeasured loyalty of God to His creation”—one of his deepest and most beautiful utterances—“and therefrom springs a deep inward joy of the spirit, anda high trust in God; and this inward joy embraces and penetrates all the powers of the soul, and the most secret part of the spirit.”[52]
The third Brook of Grace irrigates the conative powers of the self; strengthens the will in all perfection, and energises us anew. “Like fire, this brook enkindles the will, and swallows up and absorbs all things in the unity of the spirit ... and now Christ speaks inwardly in the spirit by means of this burning brook, saying, ‘Go forth, in exercises proper to this gift and this coming.’ By the first brook, which is aSimple Light, the Mind is freed from the invasions of the senses, and grounded and affirmed in spiritual unity. And by the second brook, which is aSpreading Light, the Reason and Understanding are illuminated, that they may know and distinguish all manner of virtues and exercises, and the mysteries of Scripture. And by the third brook, which is anInfused Heat, the heights of the Will are enkindled with quiet love and adorned with great riches. And thus does man become spiritually illuminate; for the grace of God dwells like a fountain-head in the unity of his spirit, and the brooks cause a flowing forth of all virtues from the powers of the soul. And the fountain-head of grace demands a back-flowinginto that same ground from whence the flood has come.”[53]
So the Interior Life, now firmly established, is found to conform to those great laws which have guided the growing spirit from the first. Again, the dual property of love, possession and action, satisfaction and fecundity, is to be manifested upon new levels. The pendulum motion of life, swinging between the experience of union with God to which ‘the Divine Unity ever calls us,’ and its expression in active charity to which the multiplicity of His creatures and their needs ever entreat us, still goes on. The more richly and strongly the life-giving Life wells up within the self, the greater are the demands made upon that self’s industry and love. In the establishment of this balance, in this continual healthy act of alternation, this double movement into God and out to men, is the proof that the soul has really centred itself upon the spiritual world—is, as Ruysbroeck puts it, confirmed in love. “Thus do work and union perpetually renew themselves; and this renewal in work and in union,thisis a spiritual life.”[54]
Now the self which has achieved this degree of transcendence has achieved, too, considerable experience in that art of contemplationor introversion which is the mode of its communion with God. Throughout, training and development have gone hand in hand; and the fact that Ruysbroeck seldom troubles to distinguish between them, but accepts them as two aspects of one thing—the gradual deification of the soul—constitutes one of the great obstacles to an understanding of his works. Often he describes the whole spiritual life as consisting in introversion, an entering of consciousness into the supersensuous regions beyond thought; in defiance of his own principle of active charity, movement, work, as the essential reaction to the universe which distinguishes a ‘deified’ man. The truth is that the two processes run side by side; and now one, now the other, is in the foreground of his thought. Therefore all that I shall now say of the contemplative art must be understood as describing acts and apprehensions taking place throughout the whole course of the Interior Life.
What, then, is introversion? It is one of the two great modes under which the spiritual consciousness works. Plainly, any living sense of God’s presence must discern that Circle whose centre is everywhere, as both exterior and interior to the self. In Ruysbroeck’s own works we find a violent effort to express this ineffablefact of omnipresence, of a truly Transcendent yet truly Immanent Reality; an effort often involving a collision of imagery. God, he says, may be discovered at the soul’s apex, where He ‘eternally lives and reigns’; and the soul itself dwellsinGod, ebbing and flowing, wandering and returning, within that Fathomless Ground. Yet none the less He comes to that soul from without; pouring in upon it like sunshine, inundating it with torrents of grace, seizing the separate entity and devouring whilst He feeds it; flashing out upon it in a tempest of love from the Empyrean Heaven, the Abyss of Being, where He dwells. “Present, yet absent; near, yet far!” exclaims St. Augustine. “Thou art the sky, and Thou art the nest as well!” says the great mystic poet of our own day.
Whilst nearly all the mystics have possessed clear consciousness of this twofold revelation of the Divine Nature, and some have experienced by turns the ‘outward and upward’ rush and the inward retreat, temperamentally they usually lean towards one or other form of communion with God,—ecstasy or introversion. For one class, contact with Him seems primarily to involve an outgoing flight towards Transcendent Reality; an attitude of mind strongly marked in all contemplatives who are near to the Neoplatonic tradition—Plotinus,St. Basil, St. Macarius—and also in Richard Rolle and a few other mediæval types. These would agree with Dionysius the Areopagite that “we must contemplate things divine by our whole selves standingoutof our whole selves.” For the other class, the first necessity is a retreat of consciousness from the periphery, where it touches the world of appearance, to the centre, the Unity of Spirit or ‘Ground of the Soul,’ where human personality buds forth from the Essential World. True, this inturning of attention is but a preliminary to the self’s entrance upon that same Transcendent Region which the ecstatic claims that he touches in his upward flights. The introversive mystic, too, is destined to ‘sail the wild billows of the Sea Divine’; but here, in the deeps of his nature, he finds the door through which he must pass. Only by thus discovering the unity of his own nature can he give himself to that ‘tide of light’ which draws all things back to the One.
Such is Ruysbroeck’s view of contemplation. This being so, introversion is for him an essential part of man’s spiritual development. As the Son knows the Father, so it is the destiny of all spirits created in that Pattern to know Him; and the mirror which is able to reflect that Divine Light, the Simple Eye which alonecan bear to gaze on it, lies in the deeps of human personality. The will, usually harnessed to the surface-consciousness, devoted to the interests of temporal life; the love, so freely spent on unreal and imperfect objects of desire; the thought which busies itself on the ceaseless analysis and arrangement of passing things—all these are to be swept inwards to that gathering-point of personality, that Unity of the Spirit, of which he so often speaks; and there fused into a single state of enormously enhanced consciousness, which, withdrawn from all attention to the changeful world of ‘similitudes,’ is exposed to the direct action of the Eternal World of spiritual realities. The pull of Divine Love—the light that ever flows back into the One—is to withdraw the contemplative’s consciousness from multiplicity to unity. His progress in contemplation will be a progress towards that complete mono-ideism in which the Vision of God—and herevisionis to be understood in its deepest sense as a totality of apprehension, a ‘ghostly sight’—dominates the field of consciousness to the exclusion, for the time of contemplation, of all else.
Psychologically, Ruysbroeck’s method differs little from that described by St. Teresa. It begins in recollection, the first drawing inwards of attention from theworld of sense; passes to meditation, the centring of attention on some intellectual formula or mystery of faith; and thence, by way of graduated states, variously divided and described in his different works, to contemplation proper, the apprehension of God ‘beyond and above reason.’ All attempts, however, to map out this process, or reduce it to a system, must necessarily have an arbitrary and symbolic character. True, we are bound to adopt some system, if we describe it at all; but the dangers and limitations of all formulas, all concrete imagery, where we are dealing with the fluid, living, changeful world of spirit, should never be absent from our minds. The bewildering and often inconsistent series of images and numbers, arrangements and rearrangements of ‘degrees,’ ‘states,’ ‘stirrings,’ and ‘gifts,’ in which Ruysbroeck’s sublime teachings on contemplation are buried, makes the choice of some one formula imperative for us; though none will reduce his doctrines to a logical series, for he is perpetually passing over from the dialectic to the lyrical mood, and forgets to be orderly as soon as he begins to be subjective. I choose, then, to base my classification on that great chapter (xix.) inThe Seven Cloisters, where he distinguishes three stages of contemplation; finding in them the responses of consciousness to thespecial action of the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity. These three stages in the soul’s apprehension of God, are: the Emotional, the Intellectual, the Intuitive. I think that most of the subtly distinguished interior experiences of the mystic, the ‘comings’ of the Divine Presence, the ‘stirrings’ and contacts which he describes in his various books, can be ranged under one or other of them.
1. First comes that loving contemplation of the ‘uplifted heart’ which is the work of the Holy Spirit, the consuming fire of Divine Love. This ardent love, invading the self, and satisfying it in that intimate experience of personal communion so often described in the writings of the mystics, represents the self’s first call to contemplation and first natural response; made with “so great a joy and delight of soul and body, in his uplifted heart, that the man knoweth not what hath befallen him, nor how he may endure it.” For Ruysbroeck this purely emotional reaction to Reality, this burning flame of devotion—which seemed to Richard Rolle the essence of the contemplative life—is but its initial phase. It corresponds with—and indeed generally accompanies—those fever-heats, those ‘tempests’ of impatient love endured by the soul at the height of the Illuminative Way. Love, it is true, shall be from first to lastthe inspiring force of the contemplative’s ascents: his education is from one point of view simply an education in love. But this love is a passion of many degrees; and the ‘urgency felt in the heart,’ the restlessness and hunger of this spiritual feeling-state, is only its lowest form. The love which burns like white fire on the apex of the soul, longs for sacrifice, inspires heroic action, and goes forward without fear, ‘holy, strong and free,’ to brave the terrors of the Divine Dark, is of another temper than this joyful sentiment.
2. A loving stretching out into God, and an intellectual gazing upon Him, says Ruysbroeck, in a passage which I have already quoted, are the ‘two heavenly pipes’ in which the wind of the Spirit sings. So the next phase in the contemplative’s development is that enhancement of the intellect, the power of perceiving, as against desiring and loving Reality, which is the work of the Logos, the Divine Wisdom. As the cleansed and detached heart had been lifted up tofeelthe Transcendent; now the understanding, stripped of sense-images, purged of intellectual arrogance, clarified by grace, is lifted up toapprehendit. This degree has two phases. First, that enlargement of the understanding to an increased comprehension of truth, the finding of deeper and diviner meanings in things alreadyknown, which Richard of St. Victor calledmentis dilatatio. Next, that further uplift of the mind to a state in which it is able to contemplate things above itself whilst retaining clear self-consciousness, which he calledmentis sublevatio. Ruysbroeck, however, inverts the order given by Richard; for him the uplift comes first, the dilation of consciousness follows from it. This is a characteristic instance of the way in which he uses the Victorine psychology; constantly appropriating its terms but never hesitating to modify, enrich or misuse them as his experience or opinions may dictate.
The first phase of Intellectual Contemplation, then, is a lifting of the mind to a swift and convincing vision of Reality: one of those sudden, incommunicable glimpses of Truth so often experienced early in the contemplative’s career. The veil parts, and he sees a “light and vision, which give to the contemplating spirit a conscious certitude that she sees God, so far as man may see Him in mortal life.”[55]That strange mystical light of which all contemplatives speak, and which Ruysbroeck describes in a passage of great subtlety as ‘the intermediary between the seeing thought and God,’ now floods his consciousness. In it “the Spirit of the Father speaks in the uplifted thought which is bare and stripped ofimages, saying, ‘Behold Me as I behold thee.’ Then the pure and single eyes are strengthened by the inpouring of that clear Light of the Father, and they behold His face, in a simple vision, beyond reason, and without reason.”[56]
It might be thought that in this ‘simple vision’ of Supreme Reality, the spirit of the contemplative reached its goal. It has, indeed, reached a point at which many a mystic stops short. I think, however, that a reference to St. Augustine, whose influence is so strongly marked in Ruysbroeck’s works, will show what he means by this phase of contemplation; and the characters which distinguish it from that infused or unitive communion with God which alone he callsContemplatio. In the seventh book of hisConfessions, Augustine describes just such an experience as this. By a study of the books of the Platonists he had learned the art of introversion, and achieved by its aid a fleeting ‘Intellectual Contemplation’ of God; in his own words, a “hurried vision of That which Is.” “Being by these books,” he says, “admonished to return into myself, I entered into the secret closet of my soul, guided by Thee ... and beheld the Light that never changes, above the eye of my soul, above the intelligence.”[57]It wasby “the withdrawal of thought from experience, its abstraction from the contradictory throng of sensuous images,” that he attained to this transitory apprehension; which he describes elsewhere as “thevisionof the Land of Peace, but not theroadthereto.” But intellect alone could not bear the direct impact of the terrible light of Reality; his “weak sight was dazzled by its splendour,” he “could not sustain his gaze,” and turned back to that humble discovery of the Divine Substance by means of Its images and attributes, which is proper to the intellectual power.[58]
Now surely this is the psychological situation described by Ruysbroeck. The very images used by Augustine are found again in him. The mind of the contemplative, purified, disciplined, deliberately abstracted from images, is inundated by the divine sunshine, “the Light which is not God, but that whereby we see Him”; and in this radiance achieves a hurried but convincing vision of Supreme Reality. But “even though the eagle, king of birds, can with his powerful sight gaze steadfastly upon the brightness of the sun; yet do the weaker eyes of the bat fail and falter in the same.”[59]The intellectual vision is dazzled and distressed, like a man who can bear the diffusedradiance of sunshine but is blinded if he dares to follow back its beams to the terrible beauty of their source. “Not for this are my wings fitted,” says Dante, drooping to earth after his supreme ecstatic flight. Because it cannot sustain its gaze, then, the intelligence falls back upon the second phase of intellectual contemplation:Speculatio, the deep still brooding in which the soul, ‘made wise by the Spirit of Truth,’ contemplates God and Creation as He and it are reflected in the clear mirror of her intellectual powers, under ‘images and similitudes’—the Mysteries of Faith, the Attributes of the Divine Nature, the forms and manners of created things. As the Father contemplates all things in the Son, ‘Mirror of Deity,’ so now does the introverted soul contemplate Him in this ‘living mirror of her intelligence’ on which His sunshine falls. Because her swift vision of That which Is has taught her to distinguish between the ineffable Reality and the Appearance which shadows it forth, she can again discover Him under those images which once veiled, but now reveal His presence. The intellect which has apprehended God Transcendent, if only for a moment, has received therefrom the power of discerning God Immanent. “He shows Himself to the soul in the living mirror of her intelligence; not as He is in His nature, but in images and similitudes,and in the degree in which the illuminated reason can grasp and understand Him. And the wise reason, enlightened of God, sees clearly and without error in images of the understanding all that she has heard of God, of faith, of truth, according to her longing. But that image which is God Himself, although it is held before her, she cannot comprehend; for the eyes of her understanding must fail before that Incomparable Light.”[60]
InThe Kingdom of God’s LoversRuysbroeck pours forth a marvellous list of the attributes under which the illuminated intelligence now contemplates and worships That Which she can never comprehend; that “Simple One in whom all multitude and all that multiplies, finds its beginning and its end.” From this simple Being of the Godhead the illuminated reason abstracts those images and attributes with which it can deal, as the lower reason abstracts from the temporal flux the materials of our normal universe. Such a loving consideration of God under His attributes is the essence of meditation: and meditation is in fact the way in which the intellectual faculties can best contemplate Reality. But “because all things, when they are considered in their inwardness, have their beginning and their ending in the InfiniteBeing as in an Abyss,” here again the contemplative is soon led above himself and beyond himself, to a point at which intellect and ‘consideration’—i.e.formal thought—fail him; because “here we touch the Simple Nature of God.” When intellectual contemplation has brought the self to this point, it has done its work; for it has “excited in the soul an eager desire to lift itself up by contemplation into the simplicity of the Light, that thereby its avid desire of infinite fruition may be satisfied and fulfilled”;[61]i.e.it has performed the true office of meditation, induced a shifting of consciousness to higher levels.
We observe that the emphasis, which in the First Degree of Contemplation fell wholly on feeling, in the Second Degree falls wholly upon knowledge. We are not, however, to suppose from this that emotion has been left behind. As the virtues and energies of the Active Life continue in the Contemplative Life, so the ‘burning love’ which distinguished the first stage of communion with the Transcendent, is throughout the source of that energy which presses the self on to deeper and closer correspondences with Reality. Its presence is presupposed in all that is said concerning the development of the spiritual consciousness. Nevertheless Ruysbroeck, though he cannot beaccused of intellectualism, is led by his admiration for Victorine ideas to lay great stress upon the mental side of contemplation, as against those emotional reactions to the Transcendent which are emphasised—almost to excess—by so many of the saints. His aim was the lifting of thewhole manto Eternal levels: and the clarifying of the intelligence, the enhancement of the understanding, seemed to him a proper part of the deification of human nature, the bringing forth in the soul’s ground of that Son who is the Wisdom of God as well as the Pattern of Man. Though he moves amongst deep mysteries, and in regions beyond the span of ordinary minds, there is always apparent in him an effort towards lucidity of expression, sharp definition, plain speech. Sometimes he is wild and ecstatic, pouring forth his vision in a strange poetry which is at once uncouth and sublime; but he is never woolly or confused. His prose passages owe much of their seeming difficulty to the passion for exactitude which distinguishes and classifies the subtlest movements of the spiritual atmosphere, the delicately graded responses of the soul.
3. Now the Third Degree of Contemplation lifts the whole consciousness to a plane of perception which transcends the categories of the intellect: where it deals no longer with the label but with the Thing.It has passed beyond image and also beyond thought; to that knowledge by contact which is the essence of intuition, and is brought about by the higher powers of love. Such contemplation is regarded by Ruysbroeck as the work of the Father, “Who strips from the mind all forms and images and lifts up the Naked Apprehension [i.e.intuition] into its Origin, that is Himself.”[62]It is effected by concentration of all the powers of the self into a single state ‘uplifted above all action, in a bare understanding and love,’ upon that apex of the soul where no reason can ever attain, and where the ‘simple eye’ is ever open towards God. There the loving soul apprehends Him, not under conditions, ‘in some wise,’ but as awhole, without the discrete analysis of His properties which was the special character of intellectual contemplation; a synthetic experience which is ‘in no wise.’ This is for Ruysbroeck the contemplative actpar excellence. It is ‘an intimacy which is ignorance,’ a ‘simple seeing,’ he says again and again; “and the name thereof isContemplatio; that is, the seeing of God in simplicity.”[63]
“Here the reason no less than all separate acts must give way, for our powers become simple in Love; they are silentand bowed down in the Presence of the Father. And this revelation of the Father lifts the soul above the reason into the Imageless Nudity. There the soul is simple, pure, spotless, empty of all things; and it is in this state of perfect emptiness that the Father manifests His Divine radiance. To this radiance neither reason nor sense, observation nor distinction, can attain. All this must stay below; for the measureless radiance blinds the eyes of the reason, they cannot bear the Incomprehensible Light. But above the reason, in the most secret part of the understanding, thesimple eyeis ever open. It contemplates and gazes at the Light with a pure sight that is lit by the Light itself: eye to eye, mirror to mirror, image to image. This threefold act makes us like God, and unites us to Him; for the sight of thesimple eyeis a living mirror, which God has made for His image, and whereon He has impressed it.”[64]
Intuitive or infused contemplation is the form of communion with the Transcendent proper to those who have grown up to the state of Union; and feel and know the presence of God within the soul, as a love, a life, an ‘indrawing attraction,’ calling and enticing all things to the still unachieved consummation of the Divine Unity. He who has reached this pitch of introversion,and is able, in his spiritual exercises, to withdraw himself thus to the most secret part of his spirit, feels—within the Eternal Light which fills his mirror and is ‘united with it,’—this perpetual demand of the Divine Unity, entreating and urging him towards a total self-loss. In the fact that he knows this demand and impulsion as other than himself, we find the mark which separates this, the highest contemplation proper to the Life of Union, from that ‘fruitive contemplation’ of the spirit which has died into God which belongs to the Life of Unity.[65]When the work of transmutation is finished and he has received the ‘Sparkling Stone of Divine Humanity,’ this subject-object distinction—though really an eternal one, as Ruysbroeck continually reminds us—will no longer be possible to his consciousness. Then he will live at those levels to which he now makes impassioned ascents in his hours of unitive prayer: will be immersed in the Beatific Vision on which he now looks, and ‘lose himself in the Imageless Nudity.’
This is the clue to the puzzling distinction made by Ruysbroeck between the contemplation which is ‘without conditions,’ and that which is ‘beyond and above conditions’ and belongs to the Superessential Life alone. In Intuitive Contemplation theseeing self apprehends the Unconditioned World,Onwise, and makes ‘loving ascents thereto.’ It ‘finds within itself the unwalled’; yet is still anchored to the conditioned sphere. In Superessential Contemplation, itdies intothat ‘world which is in no wise.’ In the great chapter ofThe Sparkling Stone[66]where he struggles to make this distinction clear, Ruysbroeck says that the Friends of God (i.e.the Interior Men) “cannot with themselves and all their works penetrate to that Imageless Nudity.” Although they feel united with God, yet they feel in that union an otherness and difference between themselves and God; and therefore “the ascent into the Nought is unknown to them.” They feel themselves carried up towards God in the tide of His all-subduing Fire of Love; but they retain their selfhood, and may not be consumed and burned to nothing in the Unity of Love. They do not yet desire to die into God, that they may receive a deiform life from Him; but they are in the way which leads to this fulfilment of their destiny, and are “following back the light to its Origin.”
This following-back is one continuous process, in which we, for convenience of description, have made artificial breaks.It is the thrust of consciousness deeper and deeper into the heart of Reality. As in the stream of physical duration, so in this ceaseless movement of the spirit, there is a persistence of the past in the present, a carrying through and merging of one state in the next. Thus the contemplation which is ‘wayless,’ the self’s intuitive communion with the Infinite Life and Light, growing in depth and richness, bridges the gap which separates the Interior and the Superessential Life.
We find in Ruysbroeck’s works indications of a transitional state, in which the soul “is guided and lost, wanders and returns, ebbs and flows,” within the ‘limitless Nudity,’ to which it has not yet wholly surrendered itself. “And its seeing is in no wise, being without manner, and it is neither thus nor thus, neither here nor there; for that which is in no wise hath enveloped all, and the vision is made high and wide. It knows not itself where That is which it sees; and it cannot come thereto, for its seeing is in no wise, and passes on, beyond, for ever, and without return. That which it apprehends it cannot realise in full, nor wholly attain, for its apprehension is wayless, and without manner, and therefore it is apprehended of God in a higher way than it can apprehend Him. Behold! such a following of the Way thatis Wayless, is intermediary between contemplation in images and similitudes of the intellect, and unveiled contemplation beyond all images in the Light of God.”[67]
If, therefore, thou art become the throne of God and the Heavenly Charioteer hath seated Himself within thee, and thy soul is wholly become a spiritual eye and is wholly made into light; if, too, thou art nourished with the heavenly food of that Spirit and hast drunk of the Living Water and put on the secret vesture of light—if thine inward man has experienced all these things and is established in abundant faith, lo! thou livest indeed the Eternal Life and thy soul rests even in this present time with the Lord.St. Macarius of Egypt.
If, therefore, thou art become the throne of God and the Heavenly Charioteer hath seated Himself within thee, and thy soul is wholly become a spiritual eye and is wholly made into light; if, too, thou art nourished with the heavenly food of that Spirit and hast drunk of the Living Water and put on the secret vesture of light—if thine inward man has experienced all these things and is established in abundant faith, lo! thou livest indeed the Eternal Life and thy soul rests even in this present time with the Lord.
St. Macarius of Egypt.
We have seen that Ruysbroeck, in common with a few other supreme mystics, declares to us as veritably known and experienced by him, a universe of three orders—Becoming, Being,God—and further, three ways of life whereby the self can correspond to these three orders, and which he calls the life of nature, the life of grace, the life of glory. ‘Glory,’ which has been degraded by the usage of popular piety into a vague superlative, and finally left in the hands of hymn-writers and religious revivalists, is one of the most ancienttechnical terms of Christian mysticism. Of Scriptural origin, from the fourth century to the fifteenth it was used to denote a definite kind of enhanced life, a final achievement of Reality—the unmediated radiance of God—which the gift of ‘divine sonship’ made possible to the soul. In the life of grace, that soul transcends conditions in virtue of a Divine vitality poured in from the Absolute Sphere, and actualises its true being, (Wesen); in the life of glory, it becomes a denizen of that sphere, and achieves an existence that is ‘more than being’ (Overwesen). The note of the first state is contemplation, awareness; the note of the second is fruition, possession.
That power of making ‘swift and loving ascents’ to the plane ofOnwiseto which man attained at the end of the Interior Life, that conscious harmony with the Divine Will which then became the controlling factor of his active career, cannot be the end of the process of transcendence. The soul now hungers and thirsts for a more intense Reality, a closer contact with ‘Him who is measureless’; a deeper and deeper penetration into the burning heart of the universe. Though contemplation seems to have reached its term, love goes on, to ‘lose itself upon the heights.’ Beyond both the conditioned and unconditioned world, beyond the Trinity Itself, that lovediscerns its ultimate objective—the very Godhead, the Divine Unity, “where all lines find their end”; where “we are satisfied and overflowing, and with Him beyond ourselves eternally fulfilled.”[68]The abiding life which is there discoverable, is not only ‘without manner’ but ‘above manner’—the ‘deified life,’ indescribable save by the oblique methods of music or poetry, wherein, in Maeterlinck’s great phrase, “the psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God.” All Ruysbroeck’s most wonderful passages are concerned with the desperate attempt to tell us of this ‘life,’ this utter fruition of Reality: which seems at one time to involve for the contemplative consciousness a self-mergence in Deity, so complete as to give colour to that charge of pantheism which is inevitably flung at all mystics who try to tell what they have known; at others, to represent rather the perfect consummation of that ‘union in separateness’ which is characteristic of all true love.
This is but one instance of that perpetual and inevitable resort to paradox which torments all who try to follow him along this ‘track without shadow of trace’; for the goal towards which he is now enticing us is one in which all the completing opposites of our fragmentary experience find theirbourne. Hence the rapid alternation of spatial and personal symbols which confuses our industrious intellects, is the one means whereby he can suggest its actuality to our hungry hearts.
As we observed in Ruysbroeck’s earlier teaching on contemplation three distinct forms, in which the special work that theology attributes to the three Divine Persons seemed to him to be reflected; now, in this Superessential Contemplation, or Fruition, we find the work of the Absolute Godhead Itself, energising upon a plane of intensity which so utterly transcends our power of apprehension, that it seems to the surface consciousness—as Dionysius the Areopagite had named it—a negation of all things, a Divine Dark.
This Fruition, says Ruysbroeck, “is wild and desolate as a desert, and therein is to be found no way, no road, no track, no retreat, no measure, no beginning, no end, nor any other thing that can be told in words. And this is for all of us Simple Blessedness, the Essence of God and our superessence, above reason and beyond reason. To know it we must be in it, beyond the mind and above our created being; in that Eternal Point where all our lines begin and end, that Point where they lose their name and all distinction, and become one with the Point itself, andthat very One which the Point is, yet nevertheless ever remain in themselves nought else but lines that come to an end.”[69]
What, then, is the way by which the soul moves from that life of intense contemplation in which the ‘spreading light’ of the Spirit shows her the universe fulfilled with God, to this new transfigured state of joy and terror? It is a way for which her previous adventures might have prepared us. As each new ascent, new inflow of grace, was prepared by a time of destitution and stress—as the compensating beats of love and renunciation have governed the evolving melody of the inner life—so here a last death of selfhood, a surrender more absolute than all that has gone before, must be the means of her achievement of absolute life.
“Dying, and behold I live!” says Paul of his own attainment of supernal life in Christ. Ruysbroeck, who never strays far from the vital and heroic mysticism of the New Testament saints, can find no other language for this last crisis of the spirit—its movement from the state ofWesento that ofOverwesen—than the language of death. The ever-moving line, though its vital character of duration continues, now seems to itself to swoon into the Point; the separate entity which has felt the flood of grace pour into it to energise its active career, and theebb of homeward-tending love draw it back towards the One, now feels itself pouring into the Infinite Sea. Our personal activity, he says, has done all that it can: as the separate career of Christ our Pattern closed with His voluntary death, so the death of our selfhood on that apex of personality where we have stretched up so ardently toward the Father, shall close the separate career of the human soul and open the way to its new, God-driven career, its resurrection-life. “None is sure of Eternal Life unless he has died with all his own attributes wholly into God”[70]—all else falls short of the demands of supreme generosity.
It isThe Book of the Sparkling Stonewhich contains Ruysbroeck’s most wonderful descriptions of the consciousness peculiar to these souls who have grown up to ‘the fulness of the stature of Christ’; and since this is surely the finest and perhaps the least known of his writings, I offer no apology for transcribing a long passage from its ninth chapter: ‘How we may become the Hidden Sons of God.’
“When we soar up above ourselves, and become, in our upward striving towards God, so simple, that the naked Love in the Heights can lay hold on us, there where Love cherishes Love, above all activity and all virtue (that is to say, in our Origin,wherefrom we are spiritually born)—then we cease, and we and all that is our own die into God. And in this death we become hidden Sons of God, and find in ourselves a new life, and that is Eternal Life. And of these Sons, St. Paul says: ‘Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.’ In our approach to God we must bear with us ourselves and all that we do, as a perpetual sacrifice to God; and in the Presence of God we must leave ourselves and all our works, and, dying in love, soar up above all created things into the Superessential Kingdom of God. And of this the Spirit of God speaks in the Book of Hidden Things, saying: ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.’... If we wouldtasteGod, and feel in ourselves Eternal Life above all things, we must go forth into God with a faith that is far above our reason, and there dwell, simple, idle, without image, lifted up by love into the Unwalled Bareness of our intelligence. For when we go out from ourselves in love, and die to all observances in ignorance and darkness, then we are made complete, and transfigured by the Eternal Word, Image of the Father. And in this emptiness of spirit we receive the Incomprehensible Light, which enfolds and penetrates us as air is penetrated by the light of the sun; and this Light is nought else but a fathomless gazing and seeing. What we are, that wegaze at; and what we gaze at, that we are. For our thought, our life, our being, are lifted up in simplicity, and united with the Truth, that is God. Therefore in this simple gazing we are one life and one spirit with God—and this I call theseeing life.”[71]
Such a passage as this lies beyond our poor attempts at analysis. Those only will understand it who yield themselves to it; entering into its current, as we enter into the music that we love. It tells us all it can of this life which is ‘more than being,’ asfeltin the supreme experience of love. Life and Death, Dark and Light, Idleness, Bareness—these are but images of the feeling-states that accompany it. But here, more than elsewhere in Ruysbroeck’s writings, we must remember the peril which goes with all subjective treatment of mystical truth. Each state which the unitive mystic experiences is so intense, that it monopolises for the time being his field of consciousness. Writing under the ‘pressure of the Spirit’ he writes of it—as indeed it seems to him at the moment—as ultimate and complete. Only by a comparison of different and superficially inconsistent descriptions of this enhanced life—which must harmonise and fulfilallthe needs of our complex personality, providing inexhaustible objectivesfor love, intelligence and will—can we form any true idea concerning it.
When we do this, we discover that the side of it whichseemsa static beatitude, still Fruition, perfect Rest, is always balanced by the other side; whichseemsa perpetual and progressive attainment, a seeking and finding, a hungering and feeding, a giving and taking. These coexist; as the ever-renewed ‘coming of the Bridegroom,’ the welling-up of the Spirit, the stormy, eager, unsatisfied love of the soul do as a matter of experience coexist within that perfect and personal union wherein Love and Fruition, as Ruysbroeck puts it, ‘live between action and rest.’ The alternate consciousness of the line and the Point, the moving river and the Sea, the relative and the Absolute, persists so long as consciousness persists at all; it is no Christianised Nirvana into which he seeks to induct us, but that mysterious synthesis of Being and Becoming, ‘eternal stillness and eternal work’—a movement into God which is already a complete achievement of Him—which certain other great mystics have discerned beyond the ‘flaming ramparts’ of the common life.
The unbreakable unity with God, which constitutes the mark of the Third Life, exists in the ‘essential ground of the soul’; where the river flows into the Sea, the lineinto the Point; where the pendulum of self has its attachment to Reality.There, the hidden child of the Absolute is ‘one with God in restful fruition’; there, his deep intuition of Divine things—that ‘Savouring Wisdom’ which is the last supreme gift of the Spirit[72]—is able to taste and apprehend the sweetness of Infinite Reality. But at the other end, where he still participates in the time-process, where his love and will are a moving river, consciousness hungers for that total Attainment still; and attention will swing between these two extremes, now actualised within the living soul, which has put on the dual character of ‘Divine Humanity’ and is living Eternal Life, not in some far-off celestial region, but here, where Christ lived it, in the entangled world of Time. Thus active self-mergence, incessant re-birth into God, perpetual eager feeding on Him, is implicit in all spiritual life. Even for the souls of the ‘deified,’ quietism is never right. “For love cannot be lazy, but would search through and through, and taste through and through, the fathomless kingdom that lives in her ground; and this hunger shallneverbe stilled.”[73]
The soul, whenever it attends to itself—withdraws itself, so to speak, from theDivine Synthesis, dwells in itself, and beholds instead of being—feels again the ‘eternal unrest of love’; the whip of the Heavenly Charioteer, driving all spirits in towards the heart of God, where they are ‘one fire with Him.’ “This stirring, that mediates between ourselves and God, we can never pass beyond; and what that stirring is in its essence, and what love is in itself, we can never know.”[74]But when it dwells beyond itself, and in the supreme moments of ecstasy merges its consciousness in the Universal Consciousness, it transcends succession and centres itself in the Divine Selfhood—the ‘still, glorious, and absolute One-ness.’ Then it feels, not hunger but satisfaction, not desire but fruition; and knows itself beyond reason ‘one with the abysmal depth and breadth,’ in “a simple fathomless savouring of all good and of Eternal Life. And in this savouring we are swallowed up, above reason and beyond reason, in the deep Quiet of the Godhead which is never moved.”[75]
Such experiences however, such perfect fruition, in which the self dies into the overwhelming revelation of the Transcendent, and its rhythm is merged in the Divine Rhythm, cannot be continuous forthose still living in the flesh. There is in Ruysbroeck no foolish insistence on any impossible career of ceaseless ecstasy; but a robust acceptance of the facts and limitations of life. Man cannot, he says, “perpetually contemplate with attention the superessential Being of God in the Light of God. But whosoever has attained to the gift of Intelligence [i.e.the sixth of the Seven Gifts of the Spirit] attains this power, which becomes habitual to him; and whensoever he will, he can wholly absorb himself in this manner of contemplation, in so far as it is possible in this life.”[76]
The superessential man, in fact, is, as Francis Thompson said of the soul, a