Next perhaps in the power of provoking misunderstanding is the weight attached by Ruysbroeck to the adjectiveSimple. This word, which constantly recurs in his descriptions of spiritual states, always conveys the sense of wholeness, completeness, synthesis;not of poverty, thinness, subtraction. It is the white light in which all the colours of the spectrum are included and fused. ‘Simple Union,’ ‘Simple Contemplation,’ ‘Simple Light’—all these mean the total undifferentiated act or perception from which our analytic minds subtract aspects. “In simplicity will I unite with the Simple One,” said Kabir. So Ruysbroeck: “We behold His face in a simple seeing, beyond reason and without consideration.”
Another cause of difficulty to those unfamiliar with the mystics is the constant reference toBarenessorNudity, especially in descriptions of the contemplative act. This is, of course, but one example of that negative method of suggestion—darkness, bareness, desolation, divine ignorance, the ‘rich nothing,’ the ‘naked thought’—which is a stock device of mysticism, and was probably taken by Ruysbroeck from Dionysius the Areopagite. It represents, first, the bewildering emptiness and nakedness of consciousness when introduced into a universe that transcends our ordinary conceptual world; secondly, the necessity of such transcendence, of emptying the field of consciousness of ‘every vain imagining,’ if the self is to have contact with the Reality which these veil.
With the distinction between Essence (Wesen) and Superessence (Overwesen) I havealready dealt; and this will appear more clearly when we consider Ruysbroeck’s ‘second’ and ‘third’ stages of the mystic life.
There remains the great pair of opposites, fundamental for his thought, called in the Flemish vernacularWiseandOnwise, and generally rendered by translators as ‘Mode’ and ‘Modeless.’ Wherever possible I have replaced these tasteless Latinisms by the Old English equivalents ‘in some wise’ and ‘in no wise,’ occasionally by ‘conditioned’ and ‘unconditioned’; though perhaps the colloquial ‘somehow’ and ‘nohow’ would be yet more exactly expressive. Now this pair of opposites is psychological rather than metaphysical, and has to do with the characteristic phenomena of contemplation. It indicates the difference between the universe of the normal man, living as the servant or friend of God within the temporal order, and the universe of the true contemplative, the ‘hidden child.’ The knowledge and love of the first is a conditioned knowledge and love. Everything which happens to him happens ‘in some wise’; it has attachments within his conceptual world, is mediated to him by symbols and images which intellect can grasp. “The simple ascent into the Nude and the Unconditioned is unknown and unloved of him”; it is through and amongst his ordinary mental furniturethat he obtains his contacts with Reality. But the knowledge and love of the second, his contacts, transcend the categories of thought. He has escaped alike from the tyrannies and comforts of the world of images, has made the ‘ascent into the Nought,’ where allis, yet ‘in no wise.’ “The power of the understanding is lifted up to that which is beyond all conditions, and its seeing is in no wise, being without manner, and it is neither thus nor thus, neither here nor there.”[24]This is the direct, unmediated world of spiritual intuition; where the self touches a Reality that has not been passed through the filters of sense and thought. There man achieves a love, a vision, an activity which are ‘wayless,’ yet far more valid than anything that can be fitted into the framework of our conditioned world.
“In a place beyond uttermost place, in a track without shadow of trace,Soul and body transcending, I live in the soul of my Loved One anew.”
“In a place beyond uttermost place, in a track without shadow of trace,
Soul and body transcending, I live in the soul of my Loved One anew.”
Thus cries the great Sūfī poet, Jalālu’ddīn; and the suggestion which his words convey is perhaps as close as speech can come to what Ruysbroeck meant byOnwise. The change of consciousness which initiates man into this inner yet unbounded world—the world that is ‘unwalled,’ to use his ownfavourite metaphor—is the essence of contemplation; which consists, not in looking at strange mysteries, but in a movement to fresh levels, shut to the analytic intellect, open to adventurous love. There, without any amazement, the self can ‘know in no wise’ that which it can never understand.
“Contemplation is a knowing that is in no wise,For ever dwelling above the Reason.Never can it sink down into the Reason,And above it can the Reason never climb.The shining forth of That which is in no wise is as a fair mirror.Wherein shines the Eternal Light of God.It has no attributes,And here all the works of Reason fail.It is not God,But it is the Light whereby we see Him.Those who walk in the Divine Light of itDiscover in themselves the Unwalled.That which is in no wise, is above the Reason, not without it:It beholds all things without amazement.Amazement is far beneath it:The contemplative life is without amazement.That which is in no wise sees, it knows not what;For it is above all, and is neither This nor That.”[25]
“Contemplation is a knowing that is in no wise,
For ever dwelling above the Reason.
Never can it sink down into the Reason,
And above it can the Reason never climb.
The shining forth of That which is in no wise is as a fair mirror.
Wherein shines the Eternal Light of God.
It has no attributes,
And here all the works of Reason fail.
It is not God,
But it is the Light whereby we see Him.
Those who walk in the Divine Light of it
Discover in themselves the Unwalled.
That which is in no wise, is above the Reason, not without it:
It beholds all things without amazement.
Amazement is far beneath it:
The contemplative life is without amazement.
That which is in no wise sees, it knows not what;
For it is above all, and is neither This nor That.”[25]
If we would discover and know that Kingdom of God which is hidden in us, we must lead a life that is virtuous within, well-ordered without, and fulfilled with true charity. Thus imitating Christ in every way, we can, through grace, love and virtue, raise ourselves up to that apex of the soul where God lives and reigns.The Mirror of Eternal Salvation.
If we would discover and know that Kingdom of God which is hidden in us, we must lead a life that is virtuous within, well-ordered without, and fulfilled with true charity. Thus imitating Christ in every way, we can, through grace, love and virtue, raise ourselves up to that apex of the soul where God lives and reigns.
The Mirror of Eternal Salvation.
The beginning of man’s Active Life, says Ruysbroeck—that uplifting of the diurnal existence into the Divine Atmosphere, which confers on it meaning and reality—is a movement of response. Grace, the synthesis of God’s love, energy and will, pours like a great river through the universe, and perpetually beats in upon the soul. When man consents to receive it, opens the sluices of the heart to that living water, surrenders to it; then he opens his heart and will to the impact of Reality, his eyes to the Divine Light, and in this energetic movement of acceptance begins for the first time to live indeed. Hence it is that, in the varied ethical systems which we find in his books,and which describe the active crescent life of Christian virtue, the laborious adjustment of character to the Vision of God, Ruysbroeck always puts first the virtue, or rather the attitude, which he callsgood-will: the voluntary orientation of the self in the right direction, the eager acceptance of grace. As all growth depends upon food, so all spiritual development depends upon the self’s appropriation of its own share of the transcendent life-force, its own ‘rill of grace’; and good-will breaks down the barrier which prevents that stream from pouring into the soul.
Desire, said William Law,iseverything anddoeseverything; it is the primal motive-power. Ruysbroeck, too, finds in desire turned towards the best the beginning of human transcendence, and regards willing and loving as the essence of life. Basing his psychology on the common mediæval scheme of Memory, Intelligence and Will, he speaks of this last as the king of the soul; dominating both the other powers, and able to gather them in its clutch, force them to attend to the invitations and messages of the eternal world. Thus in his system the demand upon man’s industry and courage is made from the very first. The great mystical necessity of self-surrender is shown to involve, not a limp acquiescence, but a deliberate and heroic choice; the difficultapproximation of our own thoughts and desires to the thoughts and desires of Divine Reality. “When we have but one thought and one will with God, we are on the first step of the ladder of love and of sanctity; for good-will is the foundation of all virtue.”[26]
InThe Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, Ruysbroeck has used the words said to the wise and foolish virgins of the parable—“Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him”—as an epitome of the self’s relations with and reactions to Reality. First, all created spirits are called to behold God, who is perpetually ‘coming’ to the world of conditions, in a ceaseless procession of love; and in this seeing our happiness consists. But in order really to see a thing, we need not only light and clear sight, but thewillto look at it; every act of perception demands a self-giving on the seer’s part. So here we need not only the light of grace and the open eyes of the soul, but also thewillturned towards the Infinite: our attention to life, the regnant fact of our consciousness, must be focussed upon eternal things. Now, when we see God, we cannot but love Him; and love is motion, activity. Hence, this first demand on the awakened spirit, ‘Behold!’ is swiftly followed by the second demand, ‘Go ye out!’ for the essence of love is generous, outflowing, expansive,an “upward and outward tendency towards the Kingdom of God, which is God Himself.” This outgoing, this concrete act of response, will at once change and condition our correspondences with and attitude towards God, ourselves and our neighbours; expressing itself within the world of action in a new ardour for perfection—the natural result of the ‘loving vision of the Bridegroom,’ the self’s first glimpse of Perfect Goodness and Truth. We observe the continued insistence on effort, act, as the very heart of all true self-giving to transcendent interests.
Whilst in the volitional life drastic readjustments, stern character-building, and eager work are the expression of goodwill, in the emotional life it is felt as a profound impulse to self-surrender: a loving yielding up of the whole personality to the inflow and purging activities of the Absolute Life. “This good-will is nought else but the infused Love of God, which causes him to apply himself to Divine things and all virtues; ... when it turns towards God, it crowns the spirit with Eternal Love, and when it returns to outward things it rules as a mistress over his external good deeds.”[27]
We have here, then, a disposition of heart and mind which both receives and respondsto the messages of Reality; making it possible for the self to begin to grow in the right direction, to enter into possession of its twofold heritage. That completely human life of activity and contemplation which moves freely up and down the ladder of love between the temporal and eternal worlds, and reproduces in little the ideal of Divine Humanity declared in Christ, is the ideal towards which it is set; and already, even in this lowest phase, the double movement of the awakened consciousness begins to show itself. Our love and will, firmly fastened in the Eternal World, are to swing like a pendulum between the seen and the unseen spheres; in great ascending arcs of balanced adoration and service, which shall bring all the noblest elements of human character into play. Therefore the pivoting of life upon Divine Reality, which is the result of good-will—the setting up of a right relation with the universe—is inevitably the first condition of virtue, the ‘root of sanctity,’ the beginning of spiritual growth, the act which makes man free; translating him, in Ruysbroeck’s image, from the state of the slave to that of the conscious and willing servant of Eternal Truth. “From the hour in which, with God’s help, he transcends his self-hood ... he feels true love, which overcomes doubt and fear and makes mantrust and hope; and so he becomes a true servant, and means and loves God in all that he does.”[28]
So man, emerging from the shell of selfhood, makes—of his own free choice, by his own effort—his first timid upward beat to God; and, following swiftly upon it, the compensating outward beat of charity towards his fellow-men. We observe how tight a hold has this most transcendental of the mystics on thewholenessof all healthy human life: the mutual support and interpenetration of the active and contemplative powers. ‘Other-worldliness’ is decisively contradicted from the first. It is the appearance of this eager active charity—this imitation in little of the energetic Love of God—which assures us that the first stage of the self’s growth is rightly accomplished; completing its first outward push in that new direction to which its good-will is turned. “For charity ever presses towards the heights, towards the Kingdom of God, the which is God Himself.”
In the practical counsels given to the young novice to whomThe Mirror of Salvationis addressed, we may see Ruysbroeck’s ideal of that active life of self-discipline and service which the soul has now set in hand; and which he describes in greaterdetail inThe Adornment of the Spiritual MarriageandThe Kingdom of God’s Lovers. Total self-donation, he tells her, is her first need—‘choosing God, for love’s sake’ without hesitations or reserves; and this dedication to the interests of Reality must be untainted by any spiritual selfishness, any hint of that insidious desire for personal beatitude which ‘fades the flower of true love.’ This done, self-conquest and self-control become the novice’s primary duties: the gradual subduing and rearrangement of character about its new centre, the elimination of all tendencies inimical to the demands of Eternal Life; the firm establishment upon its throne of that true free-will which desires only God’s will. This self-conquest, the essence of the ‘Way of Purgation,’ as described and experienced by so many ascetics and mystics, includes not only the eradication of sins, but the training of the attention, the adaptation of consciousness to its new environment; the killing-out of inclinations which, harmless in themselves, compete with the one transcendent interest of life.
Like all great mystics, Ruysbroeck had a strong ‘sense of sin.’ This is merely a theological way of stating the fact that his intense realisation of Perfection involved a vivid consciousness of the imperfections, disharmonies, perversities, implicit in thehuman creature; the need of resolving them if the soul was to grow up to the stature of Divine Humanity. Yet there is in his writings a singular absence of that profound preoccupation with sin found in so many mediæval ascetics. His attitude towards character was affirmative and robust; emphasising the possibilities rather than the disabilities of man. Sin, for him, was egotism; showing itself in the manifold forms of pride, laziness, self-indulgence, coldness of heart, or spiritual self-seeking, but always implying a central wrongness of attitude, resulting in a wrong employment of power. Self-denials and bodily mortifications he regarded partly as exercises in self-control—spiritual athletics—useful because educative of the will; partly as expressions of love. At best they are but the means of sanctity, and never to be confused with its end; for the man who deliberately passed the greater part of his life in the bustle of the town was no advocate of a cloistered virtue or a narrow perfectionism.
Morbid piety is often the product of physical as well as spiritual stuffiness; and Ruysbroeck wrote his great books out of doors, with light and air all round him, and the rhythmic life of trees to remind him how much stronger was the quiet law of growth than any atavism, accident, orperversion by which it could be checked. Thus, throughout his works, the accent always falls upon power rather than weakness: upon the spiritual energy pouring in like sunshine; the incessant growth which love sets going; the perpetual rebirths to ever higher levels, as the young sapling stretches upward every spring. What he asks of the novice is contrition without anxiety, self-discipline without fuss; the steady, all-round development of her personality, stretching and growing towards God. She is to be the mistress of her soul, never permitting it to be drawn hither and thither by the distractions and duties of external life. Keeping always in the atmosphere of Reality, she shall bring therefrom truth and frankness to all her words and deeds; and perform her duties with that right and healthy detachment which springs, not from a contempt of the Many, but from the secure and loving possession of the One.
The disciplines to which she must subject herself in the effort towards attainment of this poise, will, like a wise gymnastic, produce in her a suppleness of soul; making the constant and inevitable transition from interior communion to outward work, which charity and good sense demand, easy and natural, and causing the spirit to be plastic in the hand of God. Such suppleness—the lightness and lissomeness which comes fromspiritual muscles exercised and controlled—was one of the favourite qualities of that wise trainer of character, St. François de Sales; and the many small and irritating mortifications with which he was accustomed to torment his disciples had no other aim than to produce it.
In the stage of development to which the Active Life belongs, the soul enjoys communion with Reality, not with that directness proper to the true contemplative, but obliquely, by ‘means,’ symbols and images; especially by the sacramental dispensation of the Church, a subject to which Ruysbroeck devotes great attention. As always in his system, growth from within is intimately connected with the reception of food and power from without. The movement of the self into God, the movement of God into the self, though separable in thought, are one in fact: will and grace are two aspects of one truth. Only this paradox can express the relation between that Divine Love which is ‘both avid and generous,’ and the self that is destined both to devour and be devoured by Reality.
In the beautiful chapters on the Eucharist which form the special feature ofThe Mirror of Eternal Salvation, Ruysbroeck develops this idea. “If He gives us all that He has and all that He is, in return He takes from us all that we have and all thatwe are, and demands of us more than we are capable of giving.... Even in devouring us, He desires to feed us. If He absorbs us utterly into Himself, He gives Himself in return. He causes to be born in us the hunger and thirst of the spirit, which shall make us savour Him in an eternal fruition; and to this spiritual hunger, as well as to the love of our heart, He gives His own Body as food.... Thus does He give us His life full of wisdom, truth and knowledge, in order that we may imitate Him in all virtues; and then He lives in us and we in Him. Then do we grow, and raise ourselves up above the reason into a Divine Love which causes us to take and consume that Food in a spiritual manner, and stretch out in pure love towards the Divinity. There takes place that encounter of the spirit, that is to say of measureless love, which consumes and transforms our spirit with all its works; drawing us with itself towards the Unity, where we taste beatitude and rest. Herein therefore is our eternal life: ever to devour and be devoured, to ascend and descend with love.”[29]
The soul, then, turned in the direction of the Infinite, ‘having God for aim,’ and with her door opened to the inflowing Divine Life, begins to grow. Her growth is up and out; from that temporal world to whichher nature is adapted, and where she seems full of power and efficiency, to that eternal world to which the ‘spark’ within her belongs, but where she is as yet no more than a weak and helpless child. Hence the first state of mind and heart produced in her, if the ‘new birth’ has indeed taken place, will be that humility which results from all real self-knowledge; since “whoso might verily see and feel himself as heis, he should verily be meek.” This clear acknowledgment of facts, this finding of one’s own place, Ruysbroeck calls ‘the solid foundation of the Kingdom of the Soul.’ In thus discerning love and humility as the governing characteristics of the soul’s reaction to Reality, he is of course keeping close to the great tradition of Christian mysticism; especially to the teaching of Richard of St. Victor, which we find constantly repeated in the ascetic literature of the Middle Ages.
From these two virtues, then, of humble self-knowledge and God-centred love, are gradually developed all those graces of character which ‘adorn the soul for the spiritual marriage,’ mark her ascent of the first degrees of the ‘ladder of love,’ and make possible the perfecting of her correspondences with the ‘Kingdom.’ This development follows an orderly course, as subject to law as the unfolding of the leaves and flowers upon the growing plant; andthough Ruysbroeck in his various works uses different diagrams wherewith to explain it, the psychological changes which these diagrams demonstrate are substantially the same. In each case we watch the opening of man’s many-petalled heart under the rays of the Divine Light, till it blossoms at last into the rose of Perfect Charity.
Thus inThe Seven Degrees of Love, since he is there addressing a cloistered nun, he accommodates his system to that threefold monastic vow of voluntary poverty or perfect renunciation, chastity or singleness of heart, and obedience or true humility in action, by which she is bound. When the reality which these vows express is actualised in the soul, and dominates all her reactions to the world, she wears the ‘crown of virtue’; and lives that ‘noble life’ ruled by the purified and enhanced will, purged of all selfish desires and distractions, which—seeking in all things the interests of the spiritual world—is ‘full of love and charity, and industrious in good works.’
InThe Spiritual Marriagea more elaborate analysis is possible; based upon that division of man’s moral perversities into the ‘seven mortal sins’ or seven fundamental forms of selfishness, which governed, and governs yet, the Catholic view of human character. After a preliminary passage in which the triple attitude of love as towardsGod, humility as towards self, justice as towards other men, is extolled as the only secure basis of the spiritual life, Ruysbroeck proceeds to exhibit the seven real and positive qualities which oppose the seven great abuses of human freedom. As Pride is first and worst of mortal sins and follies, so its antithesis Humility is again put forward as the first condition of communion with God. This produces in the emotional life an attitude of loving adoration; in the volitional life, obedience. Byobedience, Ruysbroeck means that self-submission, that wise suppleness of spirit, which is swayed and guided not by its own tastes and interests but by the Will of God; as expressed in the commands and prohibitions of moral and spiritual law, the interior push of conscience. This attitude, at first deliberately assumed, gradually controls all the self’s reactions, and ends by subduing it entirely to the Divine purpose. “Of this obedience there grows the abdication of one’s own will and one’s own opinion; ... by this abdication of the will in all that one does, or does not do, or endures, the substance and occasion of pride are wholly driven out, and the highest humility is perfected.”[30]
This movement of renunciation brings—next phase in the unselfing of the self—a compensatingoutward swing of love; expressed under the beautiful forms ofpatience, ‘the tranquil tolerance of all that can happen,’ and hence the antithesis of Anger;gentleness, which “with peace and calm bears vexatious words and deeds”;kindness, which deals with the quarrelsome and irritable by means of “a friendly countenance, affectionate persuasion and compassionate acts”; andsympathy, “that inward movement of the heart which compassionates the bodily and spiritual griefs of all men,” and kills the evil spirit of Envy and hate. This fourfold increase in disinterested love is summed up in the condition which Ruysbroeck callssupernatural generosity; that largeness of heart which flows out towards the generosity of God, which is swayed by pity and love, which embraces all men in its sweep. By this energetic love which seeks not its own, “all virtues are increased, and all the powers of the spirit are adorned”; and Avarice, the fourth great mortal sin, is opposed.
Generosity is no mere mood; it is a motive-force, demanding expression in action. From the emotions, it invades the will, and producesdiligenceandzeal: an ‘inward and impatient eagerness’ for every kind of work, and for the hard practice of every kind of virtue, which makes impossible that slackness and dulness ofsoul which is characteristic of the sin of Sloth. It is dynamic love; and the spirit which is fired by its ardours, has reached a degree of self-conquest in which the two remaining evil tendencies—that to every kind of immoderate enjoyment, spiritual, intellectual or physical, which is the essence of Gluttony, and that to the impure desire of created things which is Lust—can be met and vanquished. The purged and strengthened will, crowned by unselfish love, is now established on its throne; man has become captain of his soul, and rules all the elements of his character and that character’s expression in life—not as an absolute monarch, but in the name of Divine Love.[31]He has done all he can do of himself towards the conforming of his life to Supreme Perfection; has opposed, one after another, each of those exhibitions of the self’s tendency to curl inwards, to fence itself in and demand, absorb, enjoy as a separate entity, which lie at the root of sin. The constructive side of the Purgative Way has consisted in the replacement of this egoistic, indrawing energy by these outflowing energies of self-surrender, kindness, diligence and the rest; summed up in that perfection of humility and love, which “in all its works, and always, stretches out towards God.”
The first three gifts of the Holy Spirit are possessed by the soul which has reached this point, says Ruysbroeck inThe Kingdom of God’s Lovers: that loving Fear, which includes true humility with all its ancillary characteristics; that general attitude of charity which makes man gentle, patient and docile, ready to serve and pity every one, and is called Godliness, because there first emerges in it his potential likeness to God; and finally that Knowledge or discernment of right and prudent conduct which checks the disastrous tendency to moral fussiness, helps man to conform his life to supreme Perfection, and gives the calmness and balance which are essential to a sane and manly spirituality. Thus the new life-force has invaded and affected will, feeling and intellect; raised the whole man to fresh levels of existence, and made possible fresh correspondences with Reality. “Hereby are the three lower powers of the soul adorned with Divine virtues. The Irascible [i.e.volitional and dynamic] is adorned with loving and filial fear, humility, obedience and renunciation. The Desirous is adorned with kindness, pity, compassion and generosity. Finally, the Reasonable with knowledge and discernment, and that prudence which regulates all things.”[32]The ideal of character held out and described undervarying metaphors in Ruysbroeck’s different works, is thus seen to be a perfectly consistent one.
Now when the growing self has actualised this ideal, and lives the Active Life of the faithful servant of Reality, it begins to feel an ardent desire for some more direct encounter with That which it loves. Since it has now acquired the ‘ornaments of the virtues’—cleansed its mirror, ordered its disordered loves—this encounter may and does in a certain sense take place; for every Godward movement of the human is met by a compensating movement of the Divine. Man now begins to find God in all things: in nature, in the soul, in works of charity. But in the turmoil and bustle of the Active Life such an encounter is at best indirect; a sidelong glimpse of the ‘first and only Fair.’ That vision can only be apprehended in its wholeness by a concentration of all the powers of the self. If we would look the Absolute in the eyes, we must look at nothing else; the complete opening of the eye of Eternity entails the closing of the eye of Time. Man, then, must abstract himself from multiplicity, if only for a moment, if he would catch sight of the unspeakable Simplicity of the Real. Longing to ‘know the nature of the Beloved,’ he must act as Zacchæus did when he wished to see Christ:
“He must run before the crowd, that is to say the multiplicity of created things; for these make us so little and low that we cannot perceive God. And he must climb up on the Tree of Faith, which grows from above downwards, for its root is in the Godhead. This tree has twelve branches, which are the twelve articles of the Creed. The lower branches speak of the Humanity of God; ... the upper branches, however, speak of the Godhead: of the Trinity of Persons and the Unity of the Divine Nature. Man must cling to the Unity which is at the top of the tree, for it is here that Jesus will pass by with all His gifts. And now Jesus comes, and He sees man, and shows him in the light of faith that He is, according to His Divinity, unmeasured and incomprehensible, inaccessible and fathomless, and that He overpasses all created light and all finite comprehension. This is the highest knowledge of God which man can acquire in the Active Life: thus to recognise by the light of faith that God is inconceivable and unknowable. In this light God says to the desire of man: “Come down quickly, for I would dwell in your house to-day.” And this quick descent, to which God invites him, is nought else but a descent, by love and desire, into the Abyss of the Godhead, to which no intellect can attain by its created light. But here, where intellect must rest without,love and desire may enter in. When the soul thus leans upon God by intention and love, above all that she understands, then she rests and dwells in God, and God in her. When the soul mounts up by desire, above the multiplicity of things, above the activities of the senses and above the light of external nature, then she encounters Christ by the light of faith, and is illuminated; and she recognises that God is unknowable and inconceivable. Finally, stretching by desire towards this incomprehensible God, she meets Christ and is fulfilled with His gifts. And loving and resting above all gifts, above herself and above all things, she dwells in God and God in her. According to this manner Christ may be encountered upon the summit of the Active Life.”[33]
This, then, is the completion of the first stage in the mystic way; this showing to the purified consciousness of the helplessness of the analytic intellect, the dynamic power of self-surrendered love. “Where intellect must rest without, love and desire may enter in.” The human creature, turning towards Reality, has pressed up to the very edge of the ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ in which the goal of transcendence is hid. If it is to go further it must bring to the adventure not knowledge but divine ignorance, not richesbut poverty; above all, an eager and industrious love.
“A fiery flame of devotion leaping and ascending into the very goodness of God Himself,A loving longing of the soul to be with God in His Eternity,A turning from all things of self into the freedom of the Will of God;With all the forces of the soul gathered into the unity of the spirit.”[34]
“A fiery flame of devotion leaping and ascending into the very goodness of God Himself,
A loving longing of the soul to be with God in His Eternity,
A turning from all things of self into the freedom of the Will of God;
With all the forces of the soul gathered into the unity of the spirit.”[34]
Let whoso thirsts to see his God cleanse his mirror, purge his spirit; and when thus he has cleansed his mirror, and long and diligently gazed in it, a certain brightness of divine light begins to shine through upon him, and a certain immense ray of unwonted vision to appear before his eyes.... From the beholding of this light, which it sees within itself with amazement, the mind is mightily set on fire, and lifted up to behold that Light which is above itself.Richard of St. Victor.
Let whoso thirsts to see his God cleanse his mirror, purge his spirit; and when thus he has cleansed his mirror, and long and diligently gazed in it, a certain brightness of divine light begins to shine through upon him, and a certain immense ray of unwonted vision to appear before his eyes.... From the beholding of this light, which it sees within itself with amazement, the mind is mightily set on fire, and lifted up to behold that Light which is above itself.
Richard of St. Victor.
It is plain that the Active Life in Ruysbroeck’s system answers more or less to the Purgative Way, considered upon its affirmative and constructive side, as a building up of the heroic Christian character. So, too, the life which he calls Interior or Contemplative, and which initiates man into the friendship of God, corresponds in the main with the Illuminative Way of orthodox mysticism; though it includes in its later stages much that is usually held to belong to the third, or Unitive,state of the soul. The first life has, as it were, unfolded to the sunlight the outer petals of the mystic rose; exhibiting in their full beauty, adjusting to their true use, the normally-apparent constituents of man’s personality. All his relations with the given world of sense, the sphere of Becoming, have been purified and adjusted. Now the expansive and educative influence of the Divine Light is able to penetrate nearer to the heart of his personality; is brought to bear upon those interior qualities which he hardly knows himself to possess, and which govern his relation with the spiritual world of Being. The flower is to open more widely; the inner ring of petals must uncurl.
As the primary interest of the Active Life was ethical purification, so the primary interest of this Second Life is intellectual purification. Intellect, however, is here to be understood in its highest sense; as including not only the analytic reason which deals with the problems of our normal universe, but that higher intelligence, that contemplative mind, which—once it is awakened to consciousness—can gather news of the transcendental world. The development and clarification of this power is only possible to those who have achieved, and continue to live at full stretch, the high, arduous and unselfish life of Christianvirtue. Again we must remind ourselves that Ruysbroeck’s theory of transcendence involves, not the passage from one life to another, but theaddingof one life to another: the perpetual deepening, widening, heightening and enriching of human experience. As the author ofThe Cloud of Unknowinginsists that none can be truly contemplative who is not also active, so Ruysbroeck says that no man ever rises above the ordinary obligations of Christian kindness and active good works.
“We find nowadays many silly men who would be so interior and so detached, that they will not be active or helpful in any way of which their neighbours are in need. Know, such men are neither hidden friends nor yet true servants of God, but are wholly false and disloyal; for none can follow His counsels but those who obey His laws.”[35]
Nevertheless it would be generally true to say that, whilst the aim of the Active Life is right conduct, the aim of the Interior Life is right vision and thought. As, in that first life, all the perversions of man’s ordinary powers and passions were rectified, all that was superfluous and unreal done away, and his nature set right with God; now—still holding and living in its fulness this purified active life—he is to press deeper and deeper into the resources ofhis being, finding there other powers and cravings which must be brought within the field of consciousness, and set up those relations with the Transcendent of which they are capable. This deepening and enlarging of man’s universe, together with the further and more drastic discarding of illusions and unrealities, is the business of the Second Life, considered on its impersonal side.
“If thou dost desire to unfold in thyself the Contemplative Life, thou must enter within, beyond the sense-life; and, on that apex of thy being, adorned with all the virtues of which I have spoken, looking unto God with gratitude and love and continual reverence, thou must keep thy thoughts bare, and stripped of every sensible image, thine understanding open and lifted up to the Eternal Truth, and thy spirit spread out in the sight of God as a living mirror to receive His everlasting likeness. Behold, therein appears a light of the understanding, which neither sense, reason, nature, nor the clearest logic can apprehend, but which gives us freedom and confidence towards God. It is nobler and higher than all that God has created in nature; for it is the perfection of nature, and transcends nature, and is the clear-shining intermediary between ourselves and God. Our thoughts, bare and stripped of images, are themselvesthe living mirror in which this light shines: and the light requires of us that we should be like to and one with God, in this living mirror of our bare thoughts.”[36]
In this strongly Victorine passage, the whole process of the Second Life is epitomised; but inThe Spiritual Marriage, where its description occupies the seventy-three chapters of the second book, we see how long is the way which stretches from that first ‘entering in beyond the sense life’ to the point at which the soul’s mirror is able to receive in its fullness that Light wherein alone it can apprehend Reality.
Considered upon its organic side, as a growth and movement of the soul, this Way, as conceived, and probably experienced, by Ruysbroeck, can be divided into three great phases. We might call these Action, Reaction and Equilibrium. Broadly speaking, they answer to the Illumination, Dark Night and Simple Union of orthodox mystical science. Yet since in his vivid description of these linked states he constantly departs from the formulæ of his predecessors, and as constantly illustrates their statements by intimate and homely touches only possible to one who has endured the adventures of which he tells, we are justified in claiming the description as the fruit of experience rather than of tradition;and as evidence of the course taken by his own development.
It is surely upon his own memory that he is relying, when he tells us that the beginning of this new life possesses something of the abrupt character of a second conversion. It happens, he says, when we least expect it; when the self, after the long tension and struggle of moral purgation, has become drowsy and tired. Then, suddenly, “a spiritual cry echoes through the soul,” announcing a new encounter with Reality, and demanding a new response; or, to put it in another way, consciousness on its ascending spiral has pushed through to another level of existence, where it can hear voices and discern visions to which it was deaf and blind before. This sudden clarity of mind, this new vivid apprehension of Divine Love, is the first indication of man’s entrance on the Illuminative Way. It is introversive rather than out-going in type. Changing the character of our attention to life, we discern within us something which we have always possessed and always ignored: a secret Divine energy, which is now to emerge from the subconscious deeps into the area of consciousness. There it stimulates the will, evicts all lesser images and interests from the heart, and concentrates all the faculties into a single and intense state,pressing towards the Unity of God, the synthetic experience of love; for perpetual movement towards that unity—not achievement of it—is the mark of this Second Life, in which the separation of God and the soul remains intact. In Victorine language, it is the period of spiritual betrothal, not of spiritual marriage; of a vision which, though wide, rich and wonderful, is mirrored rather than direct.
The new God-inspired movement, then, begins within, like a spring bubbling from the deeps; and thrusts up and out to the consciousness which it is destined to clarify and enhance. “The stream of Divine grace swiftly stirs and moves a man inwardly, and from within outwards; and this swift stirring is the first thing that makes ussee. Of this swift stirring is born from the side of man the second point: that is, a gathering together of all the inward and outward powers in spiritual unity and in the bonds of love. The third is that liberty which enables man to retreat into himself, without images or obstacles, whensoever he wills and thinks of his God.”[37]
So we may say that an enhancement of the conative powers, a greater control over the attention, are the chief marks of the Illuminative Way as perceived by the growing self. But the liberty here spoken of hasa moral as well as a mental aspect. It is a freeing of the whole man from the fetters of illusion, and involves that perfect detachment of heart, that self-naughting, which makes him equally willing to have joy or pain, gain or loss, esteem or contempt, peace or fear, as the Divine Will may ordain. Thus is perfected that suppleness of soul which he began to acquire in the Active Life: a gradual process, which needs for its accomplishment the negative rhythm of renunciation, testing the manliness and courage of the self, as well as the positive movement of love. Hence the Contemplative Life, as Ruysbroeck knows and describes it, has, and must have, its state of pain as well as its state of joy. With him, however, as with nearly all the mystics, the state of joy comes first: the glad and eager reaction to those new levels of spiritual reality disclosed to consciousness when the struggles and readjustments of the Active Life have done their work. This is the phase in the self’s progress which mystical writers properly mean by Illumination: a condition of great happiness, and of an intuition of Reality so vivid and joyous, that the soul often supposes that she has here reached the goal of her quest. It is in the spiritual year, says Ruysbroeck, that which the month of May is in the seasons of the earth: a wholesome and necessary timeof sunshine, swift growth and abundant flowers, when the soul, under the influence of ‘the soft rain of inward consolations and the heavenly dew of the Divine sweetness’ blossoms in new and lovely graces.
Illumination is an unstable period. The sun is rising swiftly in the heaven of man’s consciousness; and as it increases in power, so it calls forth on the soul’s part greater ardours, more intense emotional reactions. Once more the flux of God is demanding its reflux. The soul, like the growing boy suddenly made aware of the beauty, romance and wonder—the intense and irresistible appeal—of a world that had seemed ordinary before, flows out towards this new universe with all the enthusiasm and eagerness of its young fresh powers. Those powers are so new to it, that it cannot yet control or understand them. Vigorous and ungovernable, they invade by turns the heart, the will, the mind, as do the fevers and joys of physical adolescence; inciting to acts and satisfactions for which the whole self is hardly ready yet. “Then is thrown wide,” says Ruysbroeck, “the heaven which was shut, and from the face of Divine Love there blazes down a sudden light, as it were a lightning flash.” In the meeting of this inward and outward spiritual force—the Divine Light without, the growing Divine Spark within—there is greatjoy. Ecstasy, and that state of musical rapture, exceeding the possibilities of speech, which Ruysbroeck like Richard Rolle calls ‘ghostly song,’ are the natural self-expressions of the soul in this moment of its career.[38]
In more than one book we find references to this ecstatic period: a period so strongly marked in his own case, that it became for him—though he was under no illusions as to its permanent value—one of the landmarks in man’s journey to his home. Looking back on it in later life, he sees in it two great phases, of which the earlier and lower at any rate is dangerous and easily misunderstood; and is concerned to warn those who come after him of its transitory and imperfect character. The first phase is that of ‘spiritual inebriation,’ in which the fever, excitement and unrest of this period of growth and change—affecting as they do every aspect of personality—show themselves in the psycho-physical phenomena which are well-known accompaniments of religious emotion in selves of a certain temperament. This spiritual delirium, which appears to have been a common phase in the mystical revivals of the fourteenth century, is viewed by Ruysbroeck with considerable distrust; and rightly attributed by him to an excitementof the senses rather than of the soul. At best it is but ‘children’s food,’ given to those who cannot yet digest ‘the strong food of temptation and the loss of God.’ Its manifestations, as he describes them, overpass the limits not merely of common sense but also of sanity; and are clearly related to the frenzies of revivalists and the wild outbreaks of songs, dance and ecstatic speech observed in nearly all non-Christian religions of an enthusiastic type. In this state of rapture, “a man seems like a drunkard, no longer master of himself.” He sings, shouts, laughs and cries both at once, runs and leaps in the air, claps his hands, and indulges in absurdly exaggerated gestures ‘with many other disagreeable exhibitions.’[39]These he may not be able to help; but is advised to control them as soon as he can, passing from the merely sensuous emotion which results when the light of Eternal Love invades the ‘inferior powers’ of the soul, to the spiritual emotion, amenable to reason, which is the reaction of the ‘higher powers’ of the self to that same overwhelming influx of grace.
That inpouring grace grows swiftly in power, as the strength of the sun grows with the passing of the year. The Presence of God now stands over the soul’s supremesummits, in the zenith: the transcendent fact of the illuminated consciousness. His power and love shine perpetually upon the heart, ‘giving more than we can take, demanding more than we can pay’; and inducing in the soul upon which this mighty energy is playing, a strange unrest, part anguish and part joy. This is the second phase of the ecstatic period, and gives rise to that which Ruysbroeck, and after him Tauler, have called the ‘storm of love’: a wild longing for union which stretches to the utmost the self’s powers of response, and expresses itself in violent efforts, impassioned ascents towards the Spirit that cries without ceasing to our spirit: “Pay your debt! Love the Love that has loved you from Eternity.”[40]
Now the vigorous soul begins to find within itself the gift of Spiritual Strength; that enthusiastic energy which is one of the characters of all true love. This is the third of the ‘Seven Gifts of the Spirit,’ and the first to be actualised in the Illuminated Life.[41]From this strong and ardent passion for the Transcendent, adoration and prayer stream forth; and these again react upon the self, forming the fuel of the fire of love. The interior invitation of God, His attractive power, His delicate yet inexorablecaress, is to the loving heart the most pure delight that it has ever known. It responds by passionate movements of adoration and gratitude, opening its petals wide to the beams of the Eternal Sun.
This is the joy; and close behind it comes the anguish, ‘sweetest and heaviest of all pains.’ It is the sense of unsatisfied desire—the pain of love—which comes from the enduring consciousness of a gulf fixed between the self and That with which it desires to unite. “Of this inward demand and compulsion, which makes the creature to rise up and prepare itself to the utmost of its power, without yet being able to reach or attain the Unity—of this, there springs a spiritual pain. When the heart’s core, the very source of life, is wounded by love, and man cannot attain that thing which he desires above else; when he must stay ever where he desires no more to be, of these feelings comes this pain.... When man cannot achieve God, and yet neither can nor will do without Him; in such men there arises a furious agitation and impatience, both within and without. And whilst man is in this tumult, no creature in heaven or earth can help him or give him rest.”[42]
The sensible heat of love is felt with a greater violence now than at any other periodof life; the rays of the Spiritual Sun strike the soul with terrific force, ripening the fruits of the virtues, yet bringing danger to the health, both mental and physical, of those who are not properly prepared, and who faint under the exhaustion of this ‘intense fury of Divine Love,’ this onslaught which ‘eats up the heart.’ These are ‘the dog-days of the spiritual year.’ As all nature languishes under their stifling heat, so too long an exposure to their violence may mean ruin to the physical health of the growing self. Yet those who behave with prudence need not take permanent harm; a kind of wise steadfastness will support them throughout this turbulent period. “Following through all storms the path of love, they will advance towards that place whither love leadeth them.”[43]
To this period of vivid illumination and emotional unrest belongs the development of those ‘secondary automatisms’ familiar to all students of mysticism: the desperate efforts of the mind to work up into some intelligible shape—some pictured vision or some spoken word—the overwhelming intuitions of the Transcendent by which it is possessed; the abrupt suspension of the surface-consciousness in rapture and ecstasy, when that overwhelming intuition develops into the complete mono-ideism of the ecstatic,and cuts off all contacts with the world of sense. Of these phenomena Ruysbroeck speaks with intimacy, and also with much common sense. He distinguishes visions into those pictures or material images which are ‘seen in the imagination,’ and those so-called ‘intellectual visions,’—of which the works of Angela of Foligno and St. Teresa provide so rich a series of examples,—which are really direct and imageless messages from the Transcendent; received in those supersensuous regions where man has contact with the Incomprehensible Good and “seeing and hearing are one thing.” To this conventional classification he adds a passage which must surely be descriptive of his own experiences in this kind:
“Sometimes God gives to such men swift spiritual glimpses, like to the flash of lightning in the sky. It comes like a sudden flash of strange light, streaming forth from the Simple Nudity. By this is the spirit uplifted for an instant above itself; and at once the light passes, and the man again comes to himself. This is God’s own work, and it is something most august; for often those who experience it afterwards become illuminated men. And those who live in the violence and fervour of love have now and then another manner, whereby a certain light shinesinthem; and this God worksby means. In this light, the heart and the desirous powers are uplifted toward the Light; and in this encounter the joy and satisfaction are such that the heart cannot contain itself, but breaks out in loud cries of joy. And this is calledjubilusor jubilation; and it is a joy that cannot be expressed in words.”[44]
Here the parallel with Richard Rolle’s ‘ghostly song, with great voice outbreaking’ will strike every reader of that most musical of the mystics; and it is probable that in both cases the prominence given to this rather uncommon form of spiritual rapture points back to personal experience. “Methinketh,” says Rolle, “that contemplation is this heavenly song of the Love of God, which is calledjubilus, taken of the sweetness of a soul by praising of God. This song is the end of perfect prayer, and of the highest devotion that may be here. This gladness of soul is had of God, and it breaketh out in a ghostly voice well-sounding.”[45]
This exultant and lyrical mood then, this adoring rapture, which only the rhythm of music can express, is the emotional reaction which indicates the high summer of the soul. It will be seen that each phaseof its seasonal progress has been marked by a fresh inflow of grace and gifts, a fresh demand upon its power of response. The tension never slackens; the need for industry is never done away. The gift of Strength, by which the self presses forward, has now been reinforced by the gift of Counsel,i.e.by the growth and deepening of that intuition which is its medium of contact with the spiritual world. The Counsel of the Spirit, says Ruysbroeck, is like a stirring or inspiration, deep within the soul. This stirring, this fresh uprush of energy, is really a ‘new birth’ of the Son, the Divine Wisdom; lighting up the intelligence so that it perceives its destiny, and perceives too that the communion it now enjoys is but an image of the Divine Union which awaits it.[46]God is counselling the soul with an inward secret insistence to rush out towards Him, stimulating her hunger for Reality; or, to put it otherwise, the Divine Spark is growing swiftly, and pressing hard against the walls of its home. Therefore the culmination of this gift, and the culmination too of the illuminated consciousness, brings to the soul a certitude that she must still press on and out; that nothing less than God Himself can suffice her, or match the mysterious Thing which dwells in her deeps.