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The Quest Series
Edited by G. R. S. Mead

RUYSBROECK

THE QUEST SERIES

Edited by G. R. S. MEAD,

EDITOR OF ' THE QUEST.'

Crown Svo. 2s. 6d. net each,

FIRST LIST OF VOLUMES.

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH AND SURVIVAL. By
James H. Hyslop, Ph.D., LL.D., Secretary of the
Psychical Research Society of America.

THE QUEST OF THE HOLY GRAIL. By Jessie
L. Weston, Author of ' The Legend of Sir
Perceval.'

JEWISH MYSTICISM. By J. Abelson, M.A.,
D. Lit. , Principal of Aria College, Portsmouth,

THE MYSTICS OF ISLAM. By Reynold A.
Nicholson, M.A., Litt.D., LL.D., Lecturer on
Persian, Cambridge University.

BUDDHIST PSYCHOLOGY. By C. A. F. Rhys
Davids, M.A., Lecturer on Indian Philosophy,
Manchester University.

RUYSBROECK. By Evelyn Underhill, Author of
' Mysticism,' ' The Mystic Way,' etc.

THE SIDEREAL RELIGION OF THE ANCIENTS.
By Robert Eisler, Ph.D., Author of 'Welten-
mantel und Himmelsrelt.' [/» the Press.

London: G. BELL AND SONS LTD.

RUYSBROECK

BY

EVELYN UNDERHILL

AUTHOR OF
'MYSTICISM,' 'the MYSTIC WAV,' ETC., ETC.

LONDON

G. BELL AND SONS LTD.

1915

/\.Z'M%Z^

FOR

JESSIE

TO WHOM IT OWES SO MUCH
THIS LITTLE TRIBUTE TO A MUTUAL FEIENI>

EDITOR'S NOTE

A GLANCE at the excellent Bibliographical
Note at the end of the volume will reveal
the surprising paucity of literature on
Ruysbroeck in this country. A single ver-
sion from the original of one short treatise,
published in the present year, is all that
we possess of direct translation ; even in
versions from translation there is only one
treatise represented ; add to this one or
two selections of the same nature, and
the full tale is told. We are equally poorly
off for studies of the life and doctrine of
the great Flemish contemplative of the
fourteenth century. And yet Jan van
Ruusbroec is thought, by no few com-
petent judges, to be the greatest of all the
mediaeval Catholic mystics ; and, indeed, it
is difficult to point to his superior. Miss
Evelyn Underbill is, therefore, doing lovers

viii EDITOR'S NOTE

not only of Catholic mysticism, but also of
mysticism in general, a very real service by
her monograph, which deals more satis-
factorily than any existing work in English
with the life and teachings of one of the most
spiritual minds in Christendom. Her book
is not simply a painstaking summary of
the more patent generalities of the subject,
but rather a deeply sympathetic entering
into the mind of Ruysbroeck, and that,
too, with no common insight.

PREFATORY NOTE

I OWE to the great kindness of my friend,
Mrs. Theodore Beck, the translation of
several passages from Ruysbroeck's Spark-
ling Stone given in the present work ; and
in quoting from The Twelve Beguines have
often, though not always, availed myself of
the recently published version by Mr. John
Francis. For all other renderings I alone
am responsible.

E. U.

CONTENTS

CHAP.

I. RUYSBROECK THE MaN

II, His Works

III. His Doctrine of God

IV. His Doctrine of Man

V. The Active Life

VI. The Interior Life : Illumination and
Destitution

VII. The Interior Life : Union and Con
templation

VIII. The Superessential Life

Bibliographical Note

PAGE
1

36
52
66
94>

115

136
164,

187

Luce divina sopra me s' appunta,
penetrando per questa ond' io m invenlro ;
La Old virtu, col mio veder conguinta,

mi leva sopra me tanto, ch' io veggio
la somma essenza della quale e munla,
Quinci vien V allegrezsa, mid' io Jiammeggio ;
perche alia vista mia, quanf ella e chiara,
la chiaritd della Jlamma pareg^o.

Par. xxi. 83.

[Divine Light doth focus itself upon me,
piercing through that wherein I am en-
closed ; the power of which, united with my
sight, so greatly lifts me up above myself
that I see the Supreme Essence where from
it is drawn. Thence comes the joy where-
with I flame ; for to my vision, even as it is
clear, I make the clearness of the flame
respond.]

RUYSBROECK

CHAPTER I

RUYSBROECK THE MAN

The tree Igtlrasil, which has its head in heaven and
its roots in hell (the lower parts of the earth), is the image
of the true man. ... In proportion to the divine heights
to which it ascends must be the obscure depths in which
the tree is rooted, and from which it draws the mystic sap
of its spiritual life.

Coventry Patmore.

In the history of the spiritual adventures of
man, we find at intervals certain great
mystics, who appear to gather up and fuse
together in the crucible of the heart the
diverse tendencies of those who have pre-
ceded them, and, adding to these elements
the tincture of their own rich experience,
give to us an intensely personal, yet uni-
versal, vision of God and man. These are
constructive spirits, whose creations in the
spiritual sphere sum up and represent the
best achievement of a whole epoch; as in
other spheres the great artist, musician, or

2 RUYSBROECK

poet — ^always the child of tradition as well
as oi inspiration — ^may do.

John Ruysbroeck is such a mystic as
this. His career, which covers the greater
part of the fourteenth century — ^that golden
age of Christian mysticism — seems to ex-
hibit within the circle of a single personality,
and carry up to a higher term than ever
before, all the best attainments of the Middle
Ages in the realm of Eternal Life. Rooted
firmly in history, faithful to the teachings
of the great Catholic mystics of the primitive
and mediaeval times, Ruysbroeck does not
merely transmit, but transfigures, their
principles : making from the salt, sulphur,
and mercury of their vision, reason, and love,
a new and living jewel — or, in his own words,
a ' sparkling stone ' — which reflects the actual
radiance of the Uncreated Light. Absorb-
ing from the rich soil of the Middle Ages all
the intellectual nourishment which he needs,
dependent too, as all real greatness is, on the
human environment in which he grows —
that mysterious interaction and inter-pene-
tration of personalities without which human
consciousness can never develop its full
powers — ^he towers up from the social and
intellectual circumstances that conditioned
him : a living, growing, unique and creative
individual, yet truly a part of the earth
from which he springs.

To speak of Ruysbroeck, as some enthusi-

THE MAN 3

astic biographers have done, as an isolated
spiritual phenomenon totally unrelated to
the life of his time, an ' ignorant monk '
whose profound knowledge of reality is
entirely the result of personal inspiration
and independent of human history, is to
misunderstand his greatness. The ' ignorant
monk ' was bound by close links to the
religious life of his day. He was no
spiritual individualist; but the humble,
obedient child of an institution, the loyal
member of a Society. He tells us again
and again that his spiritual powers were
nourished by the sacramental life of the
Catholic Church. From the theologians
of that Church came the intellectual frame-
work in which his sublime intuitions were
expressed. All that he does — ^though he
does this to a degree perhaps unique in
Christian history — ^is to carry out into action,
completely actualise in his own experience,
the high vision of the soul's relation to
Divine Reality by which that Church is
possessed. The central Christian doctrine
of Divine Fatherhood, and of the soul's
' power to become the son of God ' : it is
this, raised to the nth degree of intensity,
experienced in all its depth and fullness,
and demonstrated with the exactitude of a
mathematician and the passion of a poet,
which Ruysbroeck gives us. Thus tradition
and authority, no less than the abundant

4 RUYSBROECK

inspiration, the direct ecstatic knowledge
of God to which his writings bear witness,
have their part in his achievement. His
theological culture was wide and deep. Not
only the Scriptures and the Liturgy, but
St. Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite,
Richard of St. Victor, St. Bernard, St.
Bona Ventura, St. Thomas Aquinas, and many
others have stimulated and controlled his
thought; interpreting to him his ineffable
adventures, and providing him with vessels
in which the fruit of those adventures could
be communicated to other men.

Nor is Catholic tradition the only medium
through which human life has exercised a for-
mative influence upon Ruysbroeck's genius.
His worldly circumstances, his place within
and reaction to the temporal order, the temper
of those souls amongst which he grew — ^these
too are of vital importance in relation to his
mystical achievements. To study the in-
terior adventures and formal teachings of
a mystic without reference to the general
trend and special accidents of his outer life,
is to neglect our best chance of understanding
the nature and sources of his vision of truth.
The angle from which that vision is per-
ceived, the content of the mind which comes
to it, above all the concrete activities which
it induces in the growing, moving, supple
self : these are primary data which we should
never ignore. Action is of the very essence

THE MAN S

of human reality. "V^Tiere the inner life
is genuine and strong the outer life will
reflect, however faintly, the curve on which
it moves ; for human consciousness is a
unit, capable of reacting to and synthesising
two orders, not an unresolved dualism —
as it were, an angel and an animal — con-
demned to lifelong battle within a narrow
cage.

Therefore we begin our study of Ruys-
broeck the mystic by the study of Ruys-
broeck the man : the circumstances of his
life and environment, so far as we can find
them out. For the facts of this life our
chief authority will be the Augustinian
Canon Pomerius, who was Prior and chroni-
cler of Ruysbroeck's own community of
Groenendael. Born in 1382, a year after
Ruysbroeck's death, and entering Groenen-
dael early in the fifteenth century, he knew
and talked with at least two of the great
mystic's disciples, John of Hoelaere and John
of Scoonhoven. His life of Ruysbroeck
and history of the foundation of the monas-
tery was finished before 1420 ; that is to
say, within the lifetime of the generation
which succeeded the first founders of the
house.^ It represents the careful gathering
up, sifting, and arranging of all that was
remembered and believed by the community

' The Viia of Pomerius is printed in the Analecta Bolland-
iana, vol. iv. pp. 257 ff.

6 RUYSBROECK

— still retaining several members who had
known him in the flesh — of the facts of
Ruysbroeck's character and career.

Pomerius was no wild romancer, but a
reasonably careful as well as a genuinely
enthusiastic monastic chronicler. Modera-
tion is hardly the outstanding virtue of such
home-made lives of monastic founders.
They are inevitably composed in surround-
ings where any criticism of their subject or
scepticism as to his supernatural peculiari-
ties is looked upon as a crime ; where every
incident has been fitted with a halo, and the
unexplained is indistinguishable from the
miraculous. Nevertheless the picture drawn
by Pomerius — exaggerated though it be in
certain respects — ^is a human picture ; pos-
sessed of distinct characteristics, some natural
and- charming, some deeply impressive.
It is completed by a second documentary
source : the little sketch by Ruysbroeck's
intimate friend, Gerard Naghel, Prior of the
Carthusian monastery of Herines near
Groenendael, which forms the prologue to
our most complete MS. collection of his
writings.

Ruysbroeck's life, as it is shown to us by
Pomerius and Gerard, falls into three main
divisions, three stages of ascent : the natural
active life of boyhood ; the contemplative,
disciplined career of his middle period ; the
superessential life of supreme union which

THE MAN 7

governed his existence at Groenendael.
This course, which he trod in the tem-
poral order, seems like the rough sketch of
that other course trodden by the advancing
soul within the eternal order — ^the Three-
fold Life of man which he describes to us in
The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage
and other of his works.

Now the details of that career are these :
John Ruysbroeck was born in 1293 at the
little village of Ruysbroeck or Ruusbroec,
between Brussels and Hal, from which he
takes his name. We know nothing of his
father; but his mother is described as a
good and pious woman, devoted to the up-
bringing of her son — a hard task, and one
that was soon proved to be beyond her. The
child Ruysbroeck was strong-willed, adventur-
ous, insubordinate ; already showing signs of
that abounding vitality, that strange restless-
ness and need of expansion which children
of genius so often exhibit. At eleven years
of age he ran away from home, and found
his way to Brussels ; where his uncle, John
Hinckaert, was a Canon of the Cathedral
of St. Gudule. Pomerius assures us that
this escapade, which would have seemed a
mere naughtiness in normal little boys, was
in fact a proof of coming sanctity ; that it
was not the attraction of the city but a
precocious instinct for the religious life —
the first crude stirrings of the love of God —

8 RUYSBROECK

which set this child upon the road. Such a
claim is natural to the hagiographer ; yet
there lies behind it a certain truth. The
little John may or may not have dreamed
of being a priest ; he did already dream of
a greater, more enticing life beyond the
barriers of use and wont. Though he knew
it not, the vision of a spiritual city called
him. Already the primal need of his nature
was asserting itself — ^the demand, felt long
before it was understood, for something
beyond the comfortable world of appear-
ance — ^and this demand crystallised into a
concrete act. In the sturdy courage which
faced the unknown, the practical temper
which translated dream into action, we see
already the germ of those qualities which
afterwards gave to the great contemplative
power to climb up to the ' supreme summits
of the inner life ' and face the awful realities
of God.

Such adventures are not rare in the
childhood of the mystics. Always of a
romantic temperament, endowed too with
an abounding vitality, the craving for some
dimly-guessed and wonderful experience
often shows itself early in them ; as the
passion for music, colour or poetry is some-
times seen in embryo in artists of another
type. The impact of Reality seems to be
felt by such spirits in earliest childhood.
Born susceptible in a special degree to the

THE MAN 9

messages which pour in on man from the
Transcendent, they move from the first
in a different universe from that of other
boys and girls ; subject to experiences which
they do not understand, full of dreams
which they are unable to explain, and often
impelled to strange actions, extremely dis-
concerting to the ordinary guardians of
youth. Thus the little Catherine of Siena,
six years old, already lived in a world which
was peopled with saints and angels ; and
ruled her small life by the visions which
she had seen. Thus the baby Teresa,
mysteriously attracted by sacrifice, as other
children are attracted by games and toys,
set out to look for 'the Moors and martyr-
dom.' So too the instinct for travel, for
the remote and unknown, often shows itself
early in these wayfarers of the spirit ; whose
destiny it is to achieve a more extended life
in the interests of the race, to find and feel
that Infinite Reality which alone can satisfy
the heart of man. Thus, in their early
years Francis, Ignatius and many others
were restless, turbulent, eager for adventure
and change.

This first adventure brought the boy Ruys-
broeck to a home so perfectly fitted to his
needs, that it might seem as though some
secret instinct, some overshadowing love, had
indeed guided his steps. His uncle, John
Hinckaert, at this time about forty years of

10 ntrVSBROECK

age, had lately been converted — it is said
by a powerful sermon — from the comfort-
able and easy-going life of a prosperous
ecclesiastic to the austere quest of spiritual
perfection. He had distributed his wealth,
given up all self-indulgence, and now, with
another and younger Canon of the Cathedral
named Francis van Coudenberg, lived in
simplest, poorest style a dedicated life of
self-denial, charity and prayer. He re-
ceived his runaway nephew willingly. Per-
haps he saw in this strange and eager child,
suddenly flung upon his charity, an oppor-
tunity for repairing some at least amongst
the omissions of his past — ^that terrible
wreck of wasted years which torments the
memory of those who are converted in middle
life. His love and remorse might spend
themselves on this boy. He might make of
him perhaps all that he now longed to be,
but could never wholly achieve : a perfect
servant of the Eternal Goodness, young,
vigorous, ardent, completely responsive to
the touch of God.

Ruysbroeck, then, found a home soaked
in love, governed by faith, renunciation,
humility; a forcing-house of the spiritual
life. In the persons of these two grown
men, who had given up all outward things
for the sake of spiritual realities, he was
brought face to face — and this in his most
impressionable years — with the hard facts,

THE MAN 11

the concrete sacrifices, the heroic life of
dehberate mortification, which underlay the
lovely haunting vision, the revelation of the
Divine beauty and love that had possessed
him. No lesson is of higher value to the
natural mystic than this. The lovers of
Ruysbroeck should not forget how much they
owe to the men who received, loved, in-
fluenced, educated the brilliant wayward and
impressionable child. His attainment is
theirs. His mysticism is rooted in their
asceticism ; a flower directly dependent
for its perfection on that favouring soil.
Though his achievement, like that of all
men of genius, is individual, and transcends
the circumstances and personalities which
surround it ; still, from those circumstances
and personalities it takes its colour. It
represents far more than a personal and
solitary experience. Behind it lies the little
house in Brussels, the supernatural atmo-
sphere which filled it, and the fostering
care of the two men whose life of external
and deliberate poverty only made more
plain the richness of the spirits who could
choose, and remain constant to, this career
of detachment and love.

The personal influence of Hinckaert and
Coudenberg, the moral disciplines and per-
petual self-denials of the life which he shared
with them, formed the heart of Ruysbroeck's
education ; helping to build up that manly

n RUYSBROECK

and sturdy character which gave its special
temper to his mystical outlook. Like so
many children destined to greatness, he was
hard to educate in the ordinary sense ; un-
interested in general knowledge, impatient
of scholastic drudgery. Nothing which did
not minister to his innate passion for ulti-
mates had any attraction for him. He was
taught grammar with difficulty ; but on
the other hand his astonishing aptitude for
religious ideas, even of the most subtle
kind, his passionate clear vision of spiritual
things, was already so highly developed as to
attract general attention ; and his writings
are sufficient witness to the width and depth
of his theological reading. With such tastes
and powers as these, and brought up in
such a household, governed by religious
enthusiasms and under the very shadow of
the Cathedral walls, it was natural that he
should wish to become a priest ; and in 1317
he was ordained and given, through the
influence of his uncle, a prebend in St.
Gudule.

Now a great mystic is the product not
merely of an untamed genius for the Tran-
scendent, but of a moral discipline, an in-
terior education, of the most strenuous kind.
All the varied powers and tendencies of a
nature which is necessarily strong and
passionate, must be harnessed, made sub-
servient to this one central interest. The

THE MAN 13

instinctive egotism of the natural man —
never more insidious than when set upon
spiritual things — ^must be eradicated. So,
behind these few outward events of Ruys-
broeck's adolescence, we must discern an-
other growth; a perpetual interior travail,
a perpetual slow character -building always
going forward in him, as his whole personality
is moulded into that conformity to the vision
seen which prepares the way of union, and
marks off the mystical saint from the mere
adept of transcendental things. We know
from his writings how large a part such
moral purifications, such interior adjustments,
played in his concept of the spiritual life;
and the intimacy with which he describes
each phase in the battle of love, each step
of the spiritual ladder, the long process of
preparation in which the soul adorns herself
for the ' spiritual marriage,' guarantees to
us that he has himself trodden the path which
he maps out. That path goes the whole
way from the first impulse of ' goodwill,'
of glad acquiescence in the universal pur-
pose, through the taming of the proud will
to humility and suppleness, and of the in-
surgent heart to gentleness, kindness, and
peace, to that last state of perfect charity
in which the whole spirit of man is one will
and one love with God.

Though his biographers have left us little
material for a reconstruction of his inner

14 RUYSBROECK

development, we may surely infer something
of the course which it followed from the
vividly realistic descriptions in The King-
dom of Lovers and The Spiritual Marriage.
Personal experience underlies the wonderful
account of the ascent of the Spiritual Sun in
the heavens of consciousness ; the rapture,
wildness and joy, the ' fever of love ' which
fulfils the man who feels its light and heat.
Experience, too, dictates these profound
passages which deal with the terrible spiritual
reaction when the Sun declines in the
heavens, and man feels cold, dead, and
abandoned of God. Through these phases,
at least, Ruysbroeck had surely passed before
his great books came to be written.

One or two small indications there are
which show us his progress on the mystic
way, the development in him of those
secondary psychic characters peculiar to
the mystical type. It seems that by the
time of his ordination that tendency to
vision which often appears in the earliest
youth of natural mystics, was already estab-
lished in him. Deeply impressed by the
sacramental side of Catholicism, and finding in
it throughout his life a true means of contact
with the Unseen, the priesthood was con-
ceived by him as bringing with it a veritable
access of grace; fresh power poured in
on him from the Transcendent, an increase
of strength wherewith to help the souls of

THE MAN 15

other men. This belief took, in his medita-
tions, a concrete and positive form. Again
and again he saw in dramatic vision the
soul specially dear to him, specially depen-
dent on him — ^that of his mother, who had
lately died in the Brussels Beguinage —
demanding how long she must wait till
her son's ordination made his prayers
effectual for her release from Purgatory.
At the moment in which he finished saying
his first Mass, this vision returned to him ;
and he saw his mother's spirit, delivered
from Purgatory by the power of the sacri-
fice which he had offered, entering into
Heaven — an experience originating in, and
giving sharp dramatic expression to, that
sense of new and sacred powers now con-
ferred on him, which may well at such a
moment have flooded the consciousness of
the young priest. This story was repeated
to Pomerius by those who had heard it
from Ruysbroeck himself ; for " he often
told it to the brothers."

For twenty-six years — that is to say, until
he was fifty years of age — Ruysbroeck lived
in Brussels the industrious and inconspicuous
life of a secular priest. It was not the soli-
tude of the forest, but the normal, active
existence of a cathedral chaplain in a busy
capital city which controlled his develop-
ment during that long period, stretching
from the very beginnings of manhood to

16 RUYSBROECK

the end of middle age ; and it was in fact
during these years, and in the midst of
incessant distractions, that he passed through
the great oscillations of consciousness which
mark the mystic way. It is probable that
when at last he left Brussels for the forest,
these oscillations were over, equilibrium was
achieved ; he had climbed ' to the summits of
the mount of contemplation.' It was on
those summits that he loved to dwell,
absorbed in loving communion with Divine
Reality ; but his career fulfilled that ideal
of a synthesis of work and contemplation,
an acceptance and remaking of the whole
of life, which he perpetually puts before us
as the essential characteristic of a true
spirituality. No mystic has ever been more
free from the vice of other-worldliness,
or has practised more thoroughly and more
unselfishly the primary duty of active
charity towards men which is laid upon the
God-possessed.

The simple and devoted life of the little
family of three went on year by year un-
disturbed ; though one at least was passing
through those profound interior changes and
adventures which he has described to us as
governing the evolution of the soul, from the
state of the ' faithful servant ' to the trans-
figured existence of the ' God-seeing man.'
Ruysbroeck grew up to be a simple, dreamy,
very silent and totally unimpressive person.

THE MAN It

who, 'going about the streets of Brussels
with his mind hfted up into God,' seemed a
nobody to those who did not know him.
Yet not only a spiritual life of unequalled
richness, intimacy and splendour, but a pene-
trating intellect, a fearless heart, deep know-
ledge of human nature, remarkable powers
of expression, lay behind that meek and un-
attractive exterior. As Paul's twelve years
of quiet and subordinate work in Antioch
prepared the way of his missionary career ;
so during this long period of service, the
silent growth of character, the steady
development of his mystical powers, had
gone forward in Ruysbroeck, When cir-
cumstances called them into play he was
found to be possessed of an unsuspected
passion, strength and courage, a power of
dealing with outward circumstances, which
was directly dependent on his inner life of
contemplation and prayer.

The event into which the tendencies of
this stage of his development crystallised,
is one which seems perhaps inconsistent
with the common idea of the mystical
temperament, with its supposed concentration
on the Eternal, its indifference to temporal
affairs. As his childhood was marked by
an exhibition of adventurous love, so his
manhood was marked by an exhibition of
militant love ; of that strength and sternness,
that passion for the true, which — ^no less

18 RUYSBROECK

than humility, gentleness, peace — ^is an
integral part of that paradoxical thing, the
Christian character.

The fourteenth century, like all great
spiritual periods, was a century fruitful
in mystical heresies as well as in mystical
saints. In particular, the extravagant pan-
theism preached by the Brethren of the
Free Spirit had become widely diffused in
Flanders, and was responsible for much bad
morality as well as bad theology; those
on whom the ' Spirit ' had descended be-
lieving themselves to be already divine,
and emancipated from obedience to all
human codes of conduct. Soon after Ruys-
broeck came as a boy to Brussels, a woman
named Bloemardinne placed herself at the
head of this sect, and gradually gained
extraordinary influence. She claimed super-
natural and prophetic powers, was said to
be accompanied by two Seraphim whenever
she went to the altar to receive Holy Com-
munion, and preached a degraded eroticism
under the title of ' Seraphic love,' together
with a quietism of the most exaggerated
and soul-destroying type. All the dangers
and follies of a false mysticism, dissociated
from the controlling influence of tradition
and the essential virtue of humility, were
exhibited in her. Against this powerful
woman, then at the height of her fame,
Ruysbroeck declared war ; and prosecuted

THE MAN 19

his campaign with a violence and courage
which must have been startUng to those
who had regarded him only as a shy, pious,
rather negligible young man. The pamph-
lets which he wrote against her are lost ;
but the passionate denvmciations of pan-
theism and quietism scattered through his
later works no doubt have their origin in
this controversy, and represent the angle
from which his attacks were made.

Pantheists, he says in The Book of Truth,
are " a fruit of hell, the more dangerous
because they counterfeit the true fruit of
the Spirit of God." Far from possessing
that deep humility which is the soul's
inevitable reaction to the revelation of the
Infinite, they are full of pride and self-
satisfaction. They claim that their imagin-
ary identity with the Essence of God emanci-
pates them from all need of effort, all practice
of virtue, and leaves them free to indulge
those inclinations of the flesh which the
' Spirit ' suggests. They " believe them-
selves sunk in inward peace ; but as a matter
of fact they are deep-drowned in error." ^

Against all this the stern, virile, ardent
spirituality of Ruysbroeck opposed itself
with its whole power. Especially did he
hate and condemn the laziness and egotism
of the quietistic doctrine of contemplation :
the ideal of spiritual immobility which it

1 The Book of Supreme Truth, cap. iv.

20 RUYSBROECK

set up. That ' love cannot be lazy ' is a
cardinal truth for all real mystics. Again
and again it appears in their works. Even
that profound repose in which they have
fruition of God, is but the accompaniment
or preliminary of work of the most strenuous
kind, and keeps at full stretch the soul
which truly tastes it ; and this supernatural
state is as far above that self-induced
quietude of ' natural repose ' — " consisting in
nothing but an idleness and interior vacancy,
to which they are incUned by nature and
habit " — ^in which the quietists love to im-
merse themselves, as God is above His
creatures.

Here is the distinction, always needed and
constantly ignored, between that veritable
fruition of Eternal Life which results from the
interaction of will and grace, and demands
of the soul the highest intensity and most
active love, and that colourable imitation
of it which is produced by a psychic trick,
and is independent alike of the human
effort and the divine gift. Ruysbroeck in
fighting the ' Free Spirit ' was fighting the
battle of true mysticism against its most
dangerous and persistent enemy, — mystic-
ahty.

His attack upon Bloemardinne is the one
outstanding incident in the long Brussels
period which has been preserved to us. The
next great outward movement in his steadily

THE MAN 21

evolving life did not happen until the year
1343, when he was fifty years of age. It was
then that the three companions decided to
leave Brussels, and live together in some
remote country place. They had long felt
a growing distaste for the noisy and dis-
tracting life of the city ; a growing dis-
satisfaction with the spiritual apathy and
low level of religious observance at the
Cathedral of St. Gudule ; the need of surround-
ings in which they might devote themselves
with total concentration to the contemplative
life. Hinckaert and Coudenberg were now
old men ; Ruysbroeck was advanced in
middle age. The rhythm of existence, which
had driven him as a child from country to
town, and harnessed him during long years
to the service of his fellow-men, now drew
him back again to the quiet spaces where
he might be alone with God. He was
approaching those heights of experience
from which his greatest mystical works
proceed ; and it was in obedience to a true
instinct that he went away to the silent
places of the forest — ^as Anthony to the
solitude of the desert, Francis to the ' holy
mountain ' of La Verna — that, undistracted
by the many whom he had served so faith-
fully, he might open his whole consciousness
to the inflow of the One, and receive in its
perfection the message which it was his duty
to transmit to the world. He went, says

22 RUYSBROECK

Pomerius, "not that he might hide his
light ; but that he might tend it better and
make it shine more brightly."

By the influence of Coudenberg, John III.,
Duke of Brabant, gave to the three
friends the old hermitage of Groenendael,
or the Green Valley, in the forest of
Soignes, near Brussels. They entered into
possession on the Wednesday of Easter
week, 1343 ; and for five years lived there,
as they had lived in the little house in
Brussels, with no other rule save their own
passion for perfection. But perpetual in-
vasions from the outer world, not only of
penitents and would-be disciples — ^for their
reputation for sanctity grew quickly — ^but
of huntsmen in the forest and pleasure
parties from the town, who demanded and
expected hospitality, soon forced them to
adopt some definite attitude towards the
question of enclosure. It is said that Ruys-
broeck begged for an entire seclusion ; but
Coudenberg insisted that this was con-
trary to the law of charity, and that some
at least of those who sought them must be
received. In addition to these practical
difficulties, the Prior of the Abbey of St.
Victor at Paris had addressed to them strong
remonstrances, on account of the absence of
rule in their life and the fact that they had
not even adopted a religious habit ; a pro-
ceeding which in his opinion savoured rather

THE MAN 23

of the ill-regulated doings of the heretical
sects, than of the decorum proper to good
Catholics. As a result of these various
considerations, the simple and informal ex-
istence of the little family was re-modelled
in conformity with the rule of the Augustinian
Canons, and the Priory of Groenendael
was formally created. Coudenberg became
its provost, and Ruysbroeck, who had refused
the higher office, was made prior ; but
Hinckaert, now a very old man in feeble
health, refused to burden the young com-
munity with a member who might be a drag
upon it and could not keep the full rigour
of the rule. In a spirit of renunciation
which surely touches the heroic, he severed
himself from his lifelong friend and his
adopted son, and went away to a little
cell in the forest, where he lived alone until
his death.

The story of the foundation and growth of
the Priory of Groenendael, the saintly per-
sonalities which it nourished, is not for this
place ; except in so far as it affects our
main interest, the story of Ruysbroeck's
soul. Under the influences of the forest,
of the silent and regular life, those supreme
contemplative powers which belong to the
' Superessential Life ' of Unity now developed
in him with great rapidity. It is possible,
as we shall see, that some at least of his
mystical writings may date from his Brussels

24 RUYSBROECK

period; and we know that at the close of
this period his reputation as an ' illuminated
man' was already made. Nevertheless it
seems safe to say that the bulk of his works,
as we now possess them, represent him as he
was during the last thirty years of his life,
rather than during his earlier and more
active career ; and that the intense certitude,
the wide deep vision of the Infinite which
distinguishes them, are the fruits of those
long hours of profound absorption in God
for which his new life found place. In
the silence of the woods he was able to discern
each subtle accent of that Voice which " is
heard without utterance, and without the
sound of words speaks all truth."

Like so many of the greatest mystics,
Ruysbroeck, drawing nearer to Divine Reality,
drew nearer to nature too ; conforming
to his own ideal of the contemplative, who,
having been raised to the simple vision of
God IVanscendent, returns to find His image
reflected by all life. Many passages in his
writings show the closeness and sympathy
of his observation of natural things : the
vivid description in The Spiritual Marriage
of the spring, summer and autumn of the
fruitful soul, the constant insistence on the
phenomena of growth, the lessons drawn
from the habits of ants and bees, the com-
parison of the surrendered soul to the sun-
flower, 'one of nature's most wonderful

THE MAN 25

works ' ; the three types of Christians, com-
pared with birds who canfly but prefer hopping
about the earth, birds who swim far on the
waters of grace, and birds who love only to soar
high in the heavens. For the free, exultant
life of birds he felt indeed a special sympathy
and love ; and ' many -feathered ' is the best
name that he can find for the soul of the
contemplative ascending to the glad vision
of God.

It is probably a true tradition which repre-
sents him as having written his greatest
and most inspired pages sitting under a
favourite tree in the depths of the woods.
When the ' Spirit ' came on him, as it
often did with a startling suddenness, he
would go away into the forest carrying his
tablet and stylus. There, given over to an
ecstasy of composition — ^which seems often
to have approached the limits of automatic
writing, as in St. Teresa, Boehme, Blake and
other mystics — ^he would write that which
was given to him, without addition or
omission ; breaking off even in the middle
of a sentence when the ' Spirit ' abruptly
departed, and resuming at the same point,
though sometimes after an interval which
lasted several weeks, when it returned. In
his last years, when eyesight failed him, he
would allow a younger brother to go with
him into the woods, and there to take down
lyom dictation the fruits of those meditations

26 RUYSBROECK

in which he ' saw without sight ' ; as the
iUiterate Catherine of Siena dictated in
ecstasy the text of her Divine Dialogue.

Two witnesses have preserved Ruysbroeck's
solemn affirmation, given first to his disciple
Gerard Groot ' in great gentleness and
humility,' and repeated again upon his
death-bed in the presence of the whole com-
munity, that every word of his writings
was thus composed under the immediate
domination of an inspiring power ; that
' secondary personality of a superior type,'
in touch with levels of reality beyond the
span of the surface consciousness, which
governs the activities of the great mystics
in their last phases of development. These
books are not the fruit of conscious thought,
but ' God-sent truths,' poured out from a
heart immersed in that Divine Abyss of
which he tries to tell.

That a saint must needs be a visionary, is
a conviction deeply implanted in the mind
of the mediaeval hagiographer ; who always
ascribes to these incidents an importance
which the saints themselves are the first
to deny. Pomerius thus attributes to Ruys-
broeck not only those profound and direct
experiences of Divine Reality to which his
works bear witness ; but also numerous
visions of a conventional and anthropo-
morphic type, in which he spoke with Christ,
the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, ecstasies

THE MAN 27

which fell upon him when saying Mass —
and the passionate devotion to the Eucharist
which his writings express makes these at
least probable — a certain faculty of clair-
voyance, and a prophetic knowledge of his
own death. Further, it is said that once,
being missed from the priory, he was found
after long search by one of the brothers he
loved best, sitting under his favourite
tree, rapt in ecstasy and surrounded by an
aura of radiant light ; as the discerning
eyes of those who loved them have seen St.
Francis, St. Teresa, and other contemplatives
transfigured and made shining by the in-
tensity of their spiritual life. I need not
point out that the fact that these things are
common form in the lives of the mystics,
does not necessarily discredit them ; though
in any case their interest is less of a mystical
than of a psychological kind.

Not less significant, and to us perhaps
more winning, is that side of Ruysbroeck's
personality which was turned towards the
world of men. In his own person he ful-
filled that twofold duty of the deified soul
which he has described to us : the in-
breathing of the Love of God, the out-breath-
ing of that same radiant charity towards the
race. " To give and receive, both at once,
is the essence of union," he says; and his
whole career is an illustration of these
words. He took his life from the Tran-

28 RUYSBROECK

scendent ; he was a focus of distribution,
which gave out that joyous hfe again to other
souls. His retreat at Groenendael, his ec-
stasies of composition, never kept him from
those who wanted his help and advice.
In his highest ascents towards Divine Love,
the rich complexities of human love went
with him. Other men always meant much
to Ruysbroeck. He had a genius for friend-
ship, and gave himself without stint to his
friends ; and those who knew him said
that none ever went to him for consolation
without returning with gladness in their
hearts. There are many tales in the Vita
of his power over and intuitive under-
standing of other minds ; of conversions
effected, motives unveiled and clouds dis-
pelled. His great friend, Gerard Naghel,
the Carthusian prior — ^at whose desire he
wrote one of the most beautiful of his
shorter works. The Book of Supreme Truth —
has left a vivid little account of the im-
pression which his personality created : " his
peaceful and joyful countenance, his humble
good-humoured speech." Ruysbroeck spent
three days in Gerard's monastery, in order
to explain some difficult passages in his
writings, " and these days were too short,
for no one could speak to him or see him
without being the better for it."

By this we may put the description of
PomeriuSj founded upon the reminiscences

THE MAN 29

of Ruysbroeck's surviving friends. " The
grace of God shone in his face ; and also
in his modest speech, his kindly deeds, his
humble manners, and in the way that every
action of his life exhibited uprightness and
radiant purity. He lived soberly, neglected
his dress, and was patient in all things and
with all people."

Plainly the great contemplative who had
seemed in Brussels a ' negligible man,' kept
to the end a great simplicity of aspect ;
closely approximating to his own ideal of the
' really humble man, without any pose or pre-
tence,' as described in The Spiritual Marriage.
That profound self-immersion in God which
was the source of his power, manifested itself
in daily life under the least impressive forms ;
ever seeking embodiment in little concrete
acts of love and service, " ministering, in
the world without, to all who need, in love
and mercy." ^ We see him in his Franciscan
love of living things, his deep sense of kin-
ship with all the little children of God, ' going
to the help of the animals in all their needs ' ;
thrown into a torment of distress by the
brothers who suggested to him that during
a hard winter the little birds of the forest
might die, and at once making generous
and successful arrangements for their enter-
tainment. We see him ' giving Mary and
Martha rendez - vous in his heart ' ;

» The Twelve Biguines, cap. vii.

30 RUYSBROECK

working in the garden of the community,
trying hard to be useful, wheeling barrow-
loads of manure, and emerging from pro-
found meditation on the Infinite to pull up
young vegetables under the impression that
they were weeds. He made, in fact, valiant
efforts to achieve that perfect synthesis of
action and contemplation ' ever abiding in
the simplicity of the Spirit, and perpetually
flowing forth in abundant acts of love to-
wards heaven and earth,' which he regarded
as the proper goal of human growth —
efforts constantly thwarted by his own grow-
ing concentration on the Transcendent, the
ease and frequency with which his con-
sciousness now withdrew from the world of
the senses to immerse itself in Spiritual
Reality. In theory there was for him no
cleavage between the two : Being and Be-
coming, the Temporal and the Eternal,
were but two moods within the mind of God,
and in the superessential life of perfect
union these completing opposites should
merge in one.

A life which shall find place for the
activities of the lover, the servant, and the
apostle, is the goal towards which the great
mystics seem to move. We have seen how
the homely life of the priory gave to Ruys-
broeck the opportunity of service, how the
silence of the forest fostered and supported
his secret life of love. As the years passed,

THE MAN 31

the third side of his nature, the apostohc
passion which had found during his long
Brussels period ample scope for its activities,
once more came into prominence. He was
sought out by numbers of would-be disciples,
not only from Belgium itself, but from
Holland, Germany and France ; and became a
f ountainhead of new life, the father of many
spiritual children. The tradition which
places among these disciples the great
Dominican mystic Tauler is probably false ;
though many passages in Tauler's later ser-
mons suggest that he was strongly influenced
by Ruysbroeck's works, which had already
attained a wide circulation. But Gerard
Groot, afterwards the founder of the Brothers
of the Common Life, and spiritual ancestor
of Thomas a Kempis, went to Groenendael
shortly after his conversion in 1374, that he
might there learn the rudiments of a sane
and robust spirituality. Ruysbroeck received
him with a special joy, recognising in him at
first sight a peculiar aptitude for the things
of the Spirit. A deep friendship grew up
between the old mystic and the young and
vigorous convert. Gerard stayed often at
the priory, and corresponded regularly with
Ruysbroeck ; whose influence it was which
conditioned his subsequent career as a
preacher, and as founder of a congrega-
tion as simple and unconventional in
its first beginnings, as fruitful in its

32 RUYSBROECK

later developments, as that of Groenen-
dael itself.

The penetrating remarks upon human
character scattered through his works, and
the anecdotes of his dealings with disciples
and penitents preserved by Pomerius, sug-
gest that Ruysbroeck, though he might not
always recognise the distinction between the
weeds and vegetables of the garden, was
seldom at fault in his judgment of men. An
instinctive knowledge of the human heart,
an unerring eye for insincerity, egotism,
self-deception, is a power which nearly all
the great contemplatives possess, and often
employed with disconcerting effect. I need
refer only to the caustic analysis of the
' false contemplative ' contained in The Cloud
of Unknowing, and the amusing sketches of
spiritual self-importance in St. . Teresa's
letters and life. The little tale, so often
repeated, of the somewhat self-conscious
priests who came from Paris to consult
Ruysbroeck on the state of their souls, and
received from him only the blunt observa-
tion — apparently so careless, yet really
plumbing human nature to its deeps — " You
are as holy as you wish to be," shows him
possessed of this same power of stripping off
the husks of unreality and penetrating at
once to the fundamental facts of the soul's
life : the purity and direction of its will and
love.

THE MAN 33

The life-giving life of union, once man has
grown up to it, clarifies, illuminates, raises
to a higher term, all aspects of the self :
intelligence, no less than love and will.
That self is now harmonised about its true
centre, and finding * God in all creatures
and all creatures in God ' finds them in their
reality. So it is that Ruysbroeck's long
life of growth, his long education in love,
bringing him to that which he calls the ' God-
seeing' stage, brings him to a point in which he
finds everywhere Reality : in those rhythmic
seasonal changes of the forest life which
have inspired his wonderful doctrine of the
perpetual rebirth and re-budding of the soul ;
in the hearts of men — ^though often there
deep buried — ^above all, in the mysteries of
the Christian faith. Speaking with an un-
equalled authority and intimacy of those
supersensuous regions, those mysterious con-
tacts of love which lie beyond and above
all thought, he is yet firmly rooted in the
concrete ; for he has reconciled in his own
experience the paradox of a Transcendent
yet Immanent God. There is no break in
the life-process which begins with the little
country boy running away from home in
quest of some vaguely felt object of desire,
some ' better land,' and which ends with the
triumphant passing over of the soul of the
great contemplative to the perfect fruition
of Eternal Love.

34 RUYSBROECK

Ruysbroeck died at Groenendael on
December 2, 1381. He was eighty-eight
years old; feeble in body, nearly blind,
yet keeping to the last his clear spiritual
vision, his vigour and eagerness of soul.
His death, says Pomerius, speaking on the
authority of those who had seen it, was full
of peaceful joy, of gaiety of heart ; not the
falling asleep of the tired servant, but the
leap to more abundant life of the vigorous
child of the Infinite, at last set free. With an
immense gladness he went out from that time-
world which, in his own image, is ' the shadow
of God,' to " those high mountains of the
land of promise where no shadow is, but
only the Sun." One of the greatest of
Christian seers, one of the most manly and
human of the mystics, it is yet as a lover,
in the noblest and most vital sense of the
word, that his personality lives for us.
From first to last, under all its external
accidents, we may trace in his life the
activity — first instinctive, and only gradually
understood — of that ' unconquerable love,'
ardent, industrious, at last utterly surren-
dered, which he describes in the wonderful
tenth chapter of The Sparkling Stone, as the
unique power which effects the soul's union
with God. " For no man understandeth
what love is in itself, but such are its work-
ings : which giveth more than one can take,
and asketh more than one can pay." That

THE MAN 35

love it was which came out from the In-
finite, as a tendency, an instinct endowed
with Uberty and life, and passed across the
stage of history, manifested under hum.blest
inconspicuous forms, but ever growing in
passion and power ; till at last, achieving
the full stature of the children of God, it
returned to its Source and Origin again.
When we speak of the mysticism of Ruys-
broeck, it is of this that we should think :
of this growing spirit, this ardent, uncon-
querable, creative thing. A veritable part
of our own order, therein it was transmuted
from unreal to real existence ; putting on
Divine Humanity, and attaining the goal of
all life in the interests of the race.

CHAPTER II

HIS WORKS

In all that I have understood, felt, or written, I submit
myself to the judgment of the saints and of Holy Church,
for I would live and die Christ's servant in Christian Faith.
The Book of Supreme Truth.

Before discussing Ruysbroeck's view of
the spiritual world, his doctrine of the soul's
development, perhaps it will be well to
consider the traditional names, general
character, and contents of his admittedly
authentic works. Only a few of these works
can be dated with precision ; for recent
criticism has shown that the so-called
chronological list given by Pomerius ^ cannot
be accepted. As to several of them, we
cannot tell whether they were composed
at Brussels or at Groenendael, at the be-
ginning, middle or end of his mystical life.
All were written inthe Flemish vernacular
of his own day — or, strictly speaking, in the
dialect of Brabant — ^for they were practical
books composed for a practical object, not

' Vita, cap. xv.

HIS WORKS 37

academic treatises on mystical theology.
Founded on experience, they deal with and
incite to experience; and were addressed
to all who felt within themselves the stirrings
of a special grace, the call of a superhuman
love, irrespective of education or position —
to hermits, priests, nuns, and ardent souls
still in the world who were trying to live
the one real life — ^not merely to learned
professors trying to elucidate the doctrines
of that life, Ruysbroeck therefore belongs
to that considerable group of mystical writers
whose gift to the history of literature is
only less important than their gift to
the history of the spiritual world; since
they have helped to break down the barrier
between the written and the spoken word.

At the moment in which poetry first for-
sakes the ' literary ' language and uses the
people's speech, we nearly always find a
mystic thus trying to tell his message to the
race. His enthusiasm it is which is equal
to the task of subduing a new medium to the
purposes of art. Thus at the very begin-
ning of Italian poetry we find St. Francis
of Assisi singing in the popular tongue
his great Canticle of the Sun, and soon
after him come the sublime lyrics of Jaco-
pone da Todi. Thus German literature
owes much to Mechthild of Magdeburg, and
English to Richard RoUe — ^both forsaking
Latin for the common speech of their day.

38 RUYSBROECK

Thus in India the poet Kabir, obedient to
the same impulse, sings in Hindi rather than
in Sanscrit his beautiful songs of Divine
Love.

In Ruysbroeck, as in these others, a strong
poetic inspiration mingled with and some-
times controlled the purely mystical side of
his genius. Often his love and enthusiasm
break out and express themselves, sometimes
in rough, irregular verse, sometimes in
rhymed and rhythmic prose : a kind of wild
spontaneous chant, which may be related to
the ' ghostly song ' that ' boiled up ' within
the heart of Richard RoUe. It is well-
known that automatic composition — ^and we
have seen that the evidence of those who
knew him suggests the presence of an auto-
matic element in Ruysbroeck's creative
methods — ^tends to assume a rhythmic char-
acter ; being indeed closely related to that
strange chanted speech in which religious
excitement frequently expresses itself.. Re-
leased from the control of the surface-in-
tellect, the deeper mind which is involved
in these mysterious processes tends to
present its intuitions and concepts in
measured waves of words; which some-
times, as in RoUe's ' ghostly song ' and
perhaps too in Ruysbroeck's ' Song of Joy,'
are actually given a musical form. In such
rhythm the mystic seems to catch some-
thing of the cadences of that far-off music

HIS WORKS 39

of which he is writing, and to receive and
transmit a message which exceeds the pos-
sibihties of speech. Ruysbroeck was no
expert poet. Often his verse is bad; halt-
ing in cadence, violent and uncouth in
imagery, like the stammering utterance of
one possessed. But its presence and quality,
its mingled simplicity and violence, assure
us of the strong excitement that fulfilled
him, and tend to corroborate the account
of his mental processes which we have
deduced from the statements in Pomerius'
Life.

Eleven admittedly authentic books and
tracts survive in numerous MS. collections,^
and from these come all that we know
of his vision and teaching. The Twelve
Virtues, and the two Canticles often attri-
buted to him, are probably spurious ; and
the tracts against the Brethren of the Free
Spirit, which are known to have been written
during his Brussels period, have all dis-
appeared. I give here a short account
of the authentic works, their names and
general contents; putting first in order
those of unknown date, some of which may
possibly have been composed before the
foundation of Groenendael. In each case
the first title is a translation of that used
in the best Flemish texts ; the second,

1 De Vreese has identified i6o Flemish and 46 Latin
MSS. of Ruysbroeck.

40 RUYSBROECK

that employed in the great Latin version of
Surius. Ruysbroeck himself never gave any
titles to his writings.

1. The Spiritual Tabernacle (called
by Surius In Tahernaculum Mosis). — The
longest, most fantastic, and, in spite of some
fine passages, the least interesting of Ruys-
broeck's works. Probably founded upon
the De Area Mystica of Hugh of St. Victor,
this is an elaborate allegory, thoroughly
mediaeval in type, in which the Tabernacle
of the Israelites becomes a figure of the
spiritual life; the details of its construc-
tion, furniture and ritual being given a
symbolic significance, in accordance with
the methods of interpretation popular at
the time. In this book, and perhaps in the
astronomical treatise appended to The Twelve
Beguines (No. 11), I believe that we have the
only surviving works of Ruysbroeck's first
period ; when he had not yet ' transcended
images,' but was at that point in his mystical
development in which the young contem-
plative loves to discern symbolic meanings
in all visible things.

2. The Twelve Points of True
Faith {De Fide et Judicio). — This little
tract is in form a gloss upon the Nicene
Creed ; in fact, a characteristically Ruys-
broeckian confession of faith. Without ever
over-passing the boundaries of Catholic doc-
trine, Ruysbroeck is here able to turn all

HIS WORKS 41

its imagery to the purposes of his own vision
of truth.

3, The Book of the Four Temptations
{De Quatuor Tentationihus). — The Four
Temptations are four manifestations of the
higher egotism specially dangerous to souls
entering on the contemplative life : first,
the love of ease and comfort, as much in
things spiritual as in things material;
secondly, the tendency to pose as the
possessor of special illumination, with other
and like forms of spiritual pretence ; thirdly,
intellectual pride, which seeks to understand
unfathomable mysteries and attain to the
vision of God by the reason alone ; fourthly,
— most dangerous of all — ^that false ' liberty
of spirit ' which was the mark of the he-
retical mystic sects. This book too may
well have been written before the retreat
to Groenendael.

4. The Book of the Kingdom of God's
Lovers {Begnum Deum Amantium). — This
and the following work. The Adornment
of the Spiritual Marriage, contain Ruys-
broeck's fullest and most orderly descrip-
tions of the mystical life-process. The
' Kingdom ' which God's lovers may inherit
is the actual life of God, infused into the
soul and deifying it. This essential life
reveals itself under five modes : in the sense
world, in the soul's nature, in the witness of
Scripture, in the life of grace or 'glory,'

4>^ RUYSBROECK

and in the Superessential Kingdom of the
Divine Unity. By the threefold way of
the Active, Contemplative, and Superessen-
tial Life, here described as the steady and
orderly appropriation of the Seven Gifts
of the Holy Spirit, the spirit of man may
enter into its inheritance and attain at last
to the perfect fruition of God. To the Active
Life belong the gifts of Holy Fear, Godliness,
and Knowledge ; to the Contemplative those
of Strength and Counsel ; to the Super-
essential those of Intelligence and Wisdom.
The Kingdom of God's Lovers was tradi-
tionally regarded as Ruysbroeck's earliest
work. It was more probably written during
the early years at Groenendael. Much of
it, like The Twelve Beguines, is in poetical
form. This was the book which, falling into
the hands of Gerard Naghel, made him seek
Ruysbroeck's acquaintance, in order that
he might ask for an explanation of several
profound and difficult passages.
„ -5. The Adornment of the Spiritual
Marriage {De Ornatu Spiritalium Nup-
tiarum). — This is the best known and most
methodical of Ruysbroeck's works. In form
a threefold commentary upon the text,
" Behold, the bridegroom cometh ; go ye
out to meet him," it is divided into three
books, tracing out in great detail, and with
marvellous psychological insight, those three
stages of Active, Contemplative and Super-

HIS WORKS 4g

essential Life, which appear again and again
in his writings. Paying due attention to the
aberrations of the quietists, he^ exhibits—
with an intimacy which surely reflects his
own personal experience of the Way — ^the
conditions under which selves in each stage
of development may see, encounter, and at
last unite with, the Divine Bridegroom of
the soul. A German translation of several
of its chapters, preserved in MS. at Munich,
states that Ruysbroeck sent this book to
the Friends of God in 1350. In this case
it belongs to the years immediately pre-
ceding or succeeding his retreat.

We now come to the works which were
certainly composed at Groenendael, though
probably some of those already enumerated
also belong to the last thirty years of Ruys-
broeck's life. First come the three treatises
apparently written for Margaret van Meer-
beke, a choir nun of the Convent of Poor
Clares at Brussels ; who seems to have been
to him what St. Clare was to St. Francis,
Elizabeth Stagel to Suso, Margaret Kirkby
to Richard RoUe — first a spiritual daughter,
then a valued and sympathetic friend.

6. The Mierob of Eternal Salvation
or Book of the Blessed Sacrament
{Speculum Mternce Salutis). — This, the first
of the three, was written in 1359. It is
addressed to one who is evidently a beginner
in the spiritual life, as she is yet a novice in

44 RUYSBROECK

her religious community; but whom Ruys-
broeek looks upon as specially ' called, elect
and loved.' In simplest language, often of
extreme beauty, he puts before her the
magnitude of the vocation she has accepted,
the dangers she will encounter, and the
great source from which she must draw her
strength : the sacramental dispensation of
the Church. In a series of magnificent
chapters, he celebrates the mystical doctrine
of the Eucharist, the feeding of the ever-
growing soul on the substance of God ;
following this by a digression, full of shrewd
observation, on the different types of be-
lievers who come to communion. We see
them through his eyes : the religious senti-
mentalists, ' who are generally women and
only very seldom men ' ; the sturdy normal
Christian, who does his best to struggle
against sin ; the humble and devout lover
of God ; the churchy hypocrite, who be-
haves with great reverence at Mass and then
goes home and scolds the servants ; the
heretical mystic full of spiritual pride; the
easy-going worldling, who sins and repents
with equal facility. The book ends with
a superb description of the goal towards
which the young contemplative is set : the
' life-giving life ' of perfect union with God
in which that ' higher life ' latent in every
soul at last attains to maturity.

7. The Seven Cloisters {De Septem

HIS WORKS 45

Custodiis). — This was written before 1363,
and preserves its address to ' The Holy
Nun, Dame Margaret van Meerbeke, Cantor
of the Monastery of St. Clare at Brussels.'
The novice of the ' Mirror ' is now a professed
religious ; and her director instructs her
upon the attitude of mind which she should
bring to the routine duties of a nun's day,
the opportunity they offer for the enriching
and perfecting of love and humility. He
describes the education of the human spirit
up to that high point of consciousness where
it knows itself established 'between Eter-
nity and Time ' : one of the fundamental
thoughts of Flemish and German mysticism.
This education admits her successively into
the seven cloisters which kept St. Clare,
Foundress of the Order, unspotted from the
world. The first is the physical enclosure
of the convent walls ; the next the moral
and volitional limitation of self-control. The
third is ' the open door of the love of Christ,'
which crowns man's affective powers, and
leads to the fourth — total dedication of the
will. The fifth and sixth represent the two
great forms of the Contemplative Life as
conceived by Ruysbroeck: the ecstatic and
the deiform. The seventh admits to Abyss
of Being itself : that ' dim silence ' at the
heart of which, as in the Seventh Habita-
tion of St. Teresa's ' Interior Castle,' he
will find himself alone with God. There

46 RUYSBROECK

the mystic union is consummated, and the
Divine activity takes the place of the separate
activity of man, in "a simple beatitude
which transcends all sanctity and the prac-
tice of virtue, an Eternal Fruition which
satisfies all hunger and thirst, all love and all
craving, for God." Finally, he returns to
the Active Life; and ends with a practical
chapter on clothes, and a charming instruc-
tion, full of deep poetry, on the evening
meditation which should close the day.

8. The Seven Degrees of the Ladder
OF Love {De Septem Gradibus Amoris). —
This book, which was written before 1372,
is believed by the Benedictines of Wisques,
the latest and most learned of Ruysbroeck's
editors, to complete the trilogy of works
addressed to Dame Margaret van Meerbeke.
It traces the soul's ascent to the height of
Divine love by way of the characteristic
virtues of asceticism, under the well-known
mediaeval image of the ' ladder of perfec-
tion ' or ' stairway of love ' — a. metaphor,
originating in Jacob's Dream, which had
already served St. Benedict, Richard of St.
Victor, St. Bonaventura and many others
as a useful diagram of the mystic way.
Originality of form, however, is the last
thing we should look for in Ruysbroeck's
works. He pours his strange wine into any
vessel that comes to hand. As often his
most sublime or amazing utterances origin-

HIS WORKS 47

ate in commentaries upon some familiar text,
or the deepest truths are hidden under the
most grotesque similitudes; so this well-
worn metaphor gives him the opportunity
for some of his finest descriptions of the soul's
movement to that transmutation in which all
ardent spirits ' become as live coals in the
fire of Infinite Love.' This book, in which
the influence of St. Bernard is strongly
marked, contains some beautiful passages
on the mystic life considered as a ' heavenly
song ' of faithfulness and love, which " Christ
our Cantor and our Choragus has sung
from the beginning of things," and which
every Christian soul must learn.

9, The Book of the Sparkling Stone
(De Calculo, sive de Perfectione Filiorum
Dei). — This priceless work is said to have been
written by Ruysbroeck at the request of a
hermit, who wished for further light on the
high matters of which it treats. It contains
the finest flower of his thought, and shows
perhaps more clearly than any other of his
writings the mark of direct inspiration.
Here again the scaffolding on which he
builds is almost as old as Christian mysti-
cism itself : that three-fold division of men
into the ' faithful servants, secret friends,
and hidden sons ' of God, which descended
through the centuries from Clement of Alex-
andria. But the tower which he raises with
its help ascends to heights unreached by

48 RUYSBROECK

any other writer : to the point at which
man is given the supreme gift of the Spark-
ling Stone, or Nature of Christ, the goal of
human transcendence. I regard the ninth
and tenth chapters of The Sparkling Stone —
' How we may become Hidden Sons of God
and live the Contemplative Life,' and 'How
we, though one with God, must eternally
remain other than Him ' — as the high-
water mark of mystical literature. No-
where else do we find such a marvellous
combination of wide and soaring vision
with the most delicate and intimate psycho-
logical analysis. The old mystic, sitting
under his friendly tree, seems here to be
gazing at and reporting to us the final
secrets of that eternal world, where " the
Incomprehensible Light enfolds and pene-
trates us, as the air is penetrated by the
light of the sun." There he tastes and ap-
prehends, in ' an unfathomable seeing and
beholding,' the inbreathing and the out-
breathing of the Love of God — ^that double
movement which controls the universe ;
yet knows, along with this great cosmic
vision, that intimate and searching com-
munion in which " the Beloved and the
Lover are immersed wholly in love, and each
is all to the other in possession and in rest."

10. The Book of Supreme Truth (called
in some collections The Book of Retractations,
and by Surius, Samuel.) — This is the tract

HIS WORKS 49

written by Ruysbroeck, at the request of
Gerard Naghel, to explain certain obscure
passages in The Book of the Kingdom of God's
Lovers. In it he is specially concerned to
make clear the vital distinction between his
doctrine of the soul's union with God — a
union in which the primal distinction between
Creator and created is never overpassed —
and the pantheistic doctrine of complete
absorption in Him, with cessation of all
effort and striving, preached by the heretical
sects whose initiates claim to ' be God.'
By the time that this book was written,
careless readers had already charged Ruys-
broeck with these pantheist tendencies which
he abhorred and condemned ; and here he
sets out his defence. He discusses also the
three degrees of union with God which
correspond to the ' three lives ' of the grow-
ing soul : union by means of sacraments
and good deeds ; union achieved in con-
templative prayer ' without means,' where
the soul learns its double vocation of action
and fruition ; and the highest union of all,
where the spirit which has swung pendulum-
like between the temporal and eternal worlds,
achieves its equilibrium and dwells wholly
in God, ' drunk with love, and sunk in the
Dark Light.'

11. The Twelve Biiguines {De Vera Con-
templatione). — ^This is a long, composite book
of eighty-four chapters, which apparently

60 RtTYSBROECK

consists of at least three distinct treatises
of different dates. The first, The Twelve
Beguines, which ends with chapter xvi.,
contains the longest consecutive example of
Ruysbroeck's poetic method; its first eight
chapters being written in irregular rhymed
verse. It is believed to be one of his last
compositions. Its doctrine differs little from
that already set forth in his earlier works ;
though nowhere, perhaps, is the develop-
ment of the spiritual consciousness de-
scribed with greater subtlety. The soul's
communion with and feeding on the Divine
Nature in the Eucharist and in contem-
plative prayer ; its acquirement of the art
of introversion ; the Way of Contemplation
with its four modes, paralleled by the Way of
Love with its four modes ; these lead up
to the perfect union of the spirit with God
" in one love and one fruition with Him,
fulfilled in everlasting bliss." The seven-
teenth chapter begins a new treatise, with a
description of the Active Life on Ruys-
broeck's usual lines ; and at the thirtieth
there is again a complete change of subject,
introducing a mystical and symbolic inter-
pretation of the science of astronomy. This
section, so unlike his later writings, some-
what resembles The Spiritual Tabernacle,
and may perhaps be a work of the same
period. A collection of Meditations upon
the Passion of Christ, arranged according

HIS WORKS 51

to the Seven Hours of the Roman Breviary
(capp. Ixxiii. to end), completes the book;
and also the tale of Ruysbroeck's authentic
works. A critical list of the reprints and
translations in which these may best be
studied will be found in the Bibliographical
Note.

CHAPTER III

HIS DOCTRINE OF GOD

My words are strange ; but those who love will under-
stand. The Mirror of Eternal Salvation.

Mystical writers are of two kinds. One
kind, of which St. Teresa is perhaps the
supreme type, deals almost wholly with the
personal and interior experiences of the soul
in the states of contemplation, and the
psychological rules governing those states ;
above all, with the emotional reactions of
the self to the impact of the Divine. This
kind of mystic — whom William James
accused, with some reason, of turning the
soul's relation with God into a ' duet ' — ^makes
little attempt to describe the ultimate Object
of the self's love and desire, the great
movements of the spiritual world ; for such
description, the formulae of existing theology
are felt to be enough. Visions of Christ,
experiences of the Blessed Trinity — ^these are
sufficient names for the personal and im-
personal aspects of that Reality with which
the contemplative seeks to unite. But the

HIS DOCTRINE OF GOD 53

other kind of mystic — ^though possibly and
indeed usually as orthodox in his beliefs,
as ardent in his love — cannot, on the one
hand, remain within the circle of these sub-
jective and personal conceptions, and, on the
other, content himself with the label which
tradition has affixed to the Thing that he
has known. He may not reject the label,
but neither does he confuse it with the
Thing. He has the wide vision, the meta-
physical passion of the philosopher and the
poet ; and in his work he is ever pressing
towards more exact description, more sug-
gestive and evocative speech. The symbols
which come most naturally to him are
usually derived from the ideas of space
and of wonder; not from those of human
intimacy and love. In him the intellect is
active as well as the heart ; sometimes, more
active. Plotinus is an extreme example of
mysticism of this type.

The greatest mystics, however, whether
in the East or in the West, are possessed
of a vision and experience of God so deep
and rich that it embraces at once the in-
finite and the intimate aspects of Reality ;
illuminating those religious concepts which
are, as it were, an artistic reconstruction
of the Transcendent, and at the same time
having contact with that vast region above
and beyond reason whence come the frag-
mentary intimations of Reality crystallised

54 RUYSBROECK

in the formulae of faith. For them, as for
St. Augustine, God is both near and far ;
and the paradox of transcendent-immanent
Reahty is a self-evident if an inexpressible
truth. They swing between hushed adora-
tion and closest communion, between the
divine ignorance of the intellect lifted up
into God and the divine certitude of the
heart in which He dwells; and give us by
turns a subjective and psychological, an
objective and metaphysical, reading of
spiritual experience. Ruysbroeck is a mystic
of this type. The span of his universe
can include — indeed demand — both the
concept of that Abyss of Pure Being where
all distinctions are transcended, and the
soul is immersed in the ' dark light ' of the
One, and the distinctively Christian and in-
carnational experience of loving communion
with and through the Person of Christ. For
him the ladder of contemplation is firmly
planted in the bed-rock of human character
— ^goes the whole way from the heart of man
to the Essence of God — ^and every stage of it
has importance for the eager and ascending
soul. Hence, when he seems to rush out to
the farthest limits of the cosmos, he still
remains within the circle of Catholic ideas ;
and is at once ethical and metaphysical,
intensely sacramental and intensely tran-
scendental too.
Nor is this result obtained — ^as it sometimes

HIS DOCTRINE OF GOD 55

seems to be, for instance, in such a visionary
as Angela of Foligno — ^by a mere heaping
up of the various and inconsistent emotional
reactions of the self. There is a funda-
mental orderliness in the Ruysbroeckian
universe which, though it may be difficult
to understand, and often impossible for him
to express without resort to paradox, yet
reveals itself to careful analysis. He tries
hard to describe, or at least suggest, it to us,
because he is a mystic of an apostolic type.
Even where he is dealing with the soul's
most ineffable experiences and seems to
hover over that Abyss which is ' beyond
Reason,' stammering and breaking into wild
poetry in the desperate attempt to seize
the unseizable truth, he is ever intent on
telling us how these things may be actualised,
this attitude attained by other men. The
note is never, as with many subjective
visionaries, " I have seen," but always " We
shall or may see."

Now such an objective mystic as this,
who is not content with retailing his
private experiences and ecstasies, but
accepts the great vocation of revealer of
Reahty, is called upon to do certain things.
He must give us, not merely a static picture
of Eternity, but also a dynamic ' reading of
life ' ; and of a life more extended than that
which the moralist, or even the philosopher,
offers to interpret. He must not only tell

56 RUYSBROECK

us what he thinks about the universe, and
in particular that ultimate Spiritual Reality
which all mysticism discerns within or
beyond the flux. He must also tell us what
he thinks of man, that living, moving, fluid
spirit-thing : his reactions to this universe
and this Reality, the satisfaction which it
offers to his thought, will and love, the
obligations laid upon him in respect of it.
We, on our part, must try to understand what
he tells us of these things ; for he is, as it
were, an organ developed by the race for
this purpose — a tentacle pushed out to-
wards the Infinite, to make, in our name and
in our interest, fresh contacts with Reality.
He performs for us some of the functions
of the artist extending our universe, the
pioneer cutting our path, the hunter winning
food for our souls.

The clue to the universe of such a mystic
will always be the vision or idea which he
has of the Nature of God ; and there we
must begin, if we would find our way through
the tangle of his thought. From this
Centre all else branches out, and to this
all else must conform, if it is to have for him
realness and life; for truth, as Aquinas
teaches, is simply the reality of things as
they are in God. We begin, then, our ex-
ploration of Ruysbroeck's doctrine by trying
to discover the character of his vision of the
Divine Nature^ and man's relation with it,

HIS DOCTRINE OF GOD 57

That vision is so wide, deep and search-
ing, that only by resort to the language
of opposites, by perpetual alternations of
spatial and personal, metaphysical and
passionate speech, is he able to communi-
cate it to us. His fortunate and profound
acquaintance with the science of theology —
his contact through it with the formulae
of Christian Platonism — has given him the
framework on which he stretches out his
wonderful and living picture of the Infinite.
This picture is personal to himself, the fruit
of a direct and vivid inspiration ; not so the
terms by which it is communicated. These
for the most part are the common property
of Christian theology ; though here used with
a consummate skill, often with an apparent
originality. Especially from St. Augustine,
Dionysius the Areopagite, Richard of St.
Victor, St. Bernard and the more orthodox
utterances of his own immediate predecessor,
Meister Eckhart — ^sometimes too from his
contemporaries, Suso and Tauler — ^has he
taken the intellectual concepts, the highly-
charged poetic metaphors, in which his
perceptions are enshrined. So close does
he keep to these masters, so frequent are his
borrowings, that almost every page of his
writings might be glossed from their works.
It is one of the most astonishing features of
the celebrated and astonishing essay of
M, Maeterlinck that, bent on vindicating

58 RUYSBROECK

the inspiration of his ' simple and ignorant
monk,' he entirely fails to observe the
traditional character of the formulae which
express it. No student of the mystics will
deny the abundant inspiration by which
Ruysbroeck was possessed ; but this in-
spiration is spiritual, not intellectual. The
truth was told to him in the tongue of
angels, and he did his best to translate it
into the tongue of the Church ; perpetually
reminding us, as he did so, how great was the
difference between vision and description,
how clumsy and inadequate those concepts
and images wherewith the artist-seer tried
to tell his love.

This distinction, which the reader of
Ruysbroeck should never forget, is of primary
importance in connection with his treatment
of the Nature of God ; where the disparity
between the thing known and the thing
said is inevitably at a maximum. The
high nature of the Godhead, he says, in a
string of suggestive and paradoxical images,
to which St. Paul, Dionysius and Eckhart
have all contributed, is, in itself, " Simplicity
and One-foldness ; inaccessible height and
fathomless deep ; incomprehensible breadth
and eternal length ; a dim silence, and a
wild desert" — oblique, suggestive, musical
language which enchants rather than in-
forms the soul ; opens the door to experi-
ence, but do^s not convey any accurate

HIS DOCTRINE OF GOD 59

knowledge of the Imageless Truth. " Now
we may experience many wonders in that
fathomless Godhead ; but although, because
of the coarseness of the human intellect,
when we would describe such things out-
wardly, we must use images, in truth that
which is inwardly perceived and beheld is
nought else but a Fathomless and Uncondi-
tioned Good." '

Yet this primal Reality, this ultimately
indivisible One, has for human consciousness
a two-fold character ; and though for the
intuition of the mystic its fruition is a syn-
thetic experience, it must in thought be
analysed if it is ever to be grasped. God,
as known by man, exhibits in its perfection
the dual property of Love ; on the one hand
active, generative, creative ; on the other
hand a still and ineffable possession or
Fruition — one of the master- words of Ruys-
broeck's thought. He is, then, the Absolute
One, in whom the antithesis of Eternity
and Time, of Being and Becoming, is re-
solved ; both static and dynamic, tran-
scendent and immanent, impersonal and
personal, undifferentiated and differentiated ;
Eternal Rest and Eternal Work, the Un-
moved Mover, yet Movement itself. "Al-
though in our way of seeing we give
God many names. His nature is One."

He transcends the storm of succession, yet

* The Spiritual Marriage, lib. ii. cap. xxxvii,

60 RUYSBROECK

is the inspiring spirit of the flux. According
to His fruitful nature, " He works without
ceasing, for He is Pure Act " — a reminiscence
of Aristotle which seems strange upon the
lips of the ' ignorant monk.' He is the
omnipotent and ever-active Creator of all
things ; ' an immeasurable Flame of Love '
perpetually breathing forth His energetic
Life in new births of being and new floods
of grace, and drawing in again all creatures
to Himself. Yet this statement defines, not
His being, but one manifestation of His
being. When the soul pierces beyond this
' fruitftd ' nature to His simple essence —
and ' simple ' is here and throughout to be
understood in its primal meaning of ' syn-
thetic ' — ^He is that absolute and abiding
Reality which seems to man Eternal
Rest, the ' Deep Quiet of the Godhead,' the
' Abyss,' the ' Dim Silence ' ; and which we
can taste indeed but never know. There, ' all
lovers lose themselves ' in the consummation
of that experience at which our fragmentary
intuitions hint.

The active and fertile aspect of the Divine
Nature is manifested in differentiation : for
Ruysbroeck the Catholic, in the Trinity of
Persons, as defined by Christian theology.
The static and absolute aspect is the ' calm
and glorious Unity of the Godhead ' which
he finds beyond and within the Trinity, "the
fathomless Abyss that is the Being of God,"

HIS DOCTRINE OP GOD 61

— an idea, familiar to Indian mysticism and
implicit in Christian Neoplatonism, which
governed all Meister Eckhart's speculations
upon the Divine Nature. There is, says
Ruysbroeck in one of his most Eckhartian
passages, " a distinction and differentia-
tion, according to our reason, between God
and the Godhead, between action and rest.
The fruitful nature of the Persons, of whom
is the Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity,
ever worketh in a living differentiation.
But the Simple Being of God, according to
the nature thereof, is an Eternal Rest of
God and of all created things." ^

In differentiating the three great aspects
of the Divine Life, as known by the love
and thought of man, Ruysbroeck keeps
close to formal theology ; though investing
its academic language with new and deep
significance, and constantly reminding us
that such language, even at its best, can
never get beyond the region of image and
similitude or provide more than an imperfect
reflection of the One who is ' neither This
nor That.' On his lips, credal definitions
are perpetually passing over from the arid
region of theological argument to the fruitful
one of spiritual experience. There they
become songs, as ' new ' as the song heard
by the Apocalyptist ; real channels of light,
which show the mind things that it never

* The Twelve Biguines, cap. xiv.

62 RUYSBROECK

guessed before. For the ' re-born ' man
they have a fresh and immortal meaning;
because that ' river of grace,' of which he
perpetually speaks as pouring into the heart
opened towards the Infinite, transfigures
and irradiates them. Thus the illuminated
mind knows in the Father, not a confusingly
anthropomorphic metaphor, but the uniquely
vital Source and unconditioned Origin of
all things " in Avhom our life and being is
begun," He is the " Strength and Power,
Creator, Mover, Keeper, Beginning and End,
Cause and Existence of all creatures." ^
Further, the intuition of the mystic discerns
in the Son the Eternal Word and fathom-
less Wisdom and Truth perpetually generated
of the Father, shining forth in the world of
conditions : the Pattern or Archetype of
creation and of life, the image of God which
the universe reflects back before the face
of the Absolute, the Eternal Rule incarnate
in Christ. And this same ' light wherein
we see God ' also shows to the enlightened
mind the veritable character of the Holy
Spirit ; the Incomprehensible Love and
Generosity of the Divine Nature, which
emanates in an eternal procession from the
mutual contemplation of Father and Son,
" for these two Persons are always hungry
for love." The Holy Spirit is the source
of the Divine vitality immanent in the uni-

1 The Spiritual Marriage, lib. ii. cap. xxxvii.

HIS DOCTRINE OF GOU 63

verse. It is an outflowing torrent of Good
which streams through all heavenly spirits ;
it is a Flame of Fire that consumes all in
the One ; it is also the Spark of tran-
scendence latent in man's soul. The Spirit
is the personal, Grace the impersonal, side
of that energetic Love which enfolds and
penetrates all life ; and " all this may be
perceived and beheld, inseparable and
without division, in the Simple Nature of
the Godhead." '

The relations which form the character
of these Three Persons exist in an eternal
distinction for that world of conditions
wherein the human soul is immersed, and
where things happen " in some wise.' There,
from the embrace of the Father and Son
and the outflowing of the Spirit in ' waves
of endless love,' all created things are born ;
and God, by His grace and His death, re-
creates them, and adorns them with love
and goodness, and draws them back to
their source. This is the circling course of
the Divine life-process ' from goodness,
through goodness, to goodness,' described by
Dionysius the Areopagite. But beyond and
above this plane of Divine differentiation
is the superessential world, transcending all
conditions, inaccessible to thought — "the
measureless solitude of the Godhead, where
God possesses Himself in joy." This is the

^Op. cit, ibid.

64 RUYSBROECK

ultimate world of the mystic, discerned by
intuition and love "in a simple seeing,
beyond reason and without consideration."
There, within the ' Eternal Now,' without
either before or after, released from the
storm of succession, things happen indeed,
' yet in no wise.' There, " we can speak
no more of Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
nor of any creature ; but only of one Being,
which is the very substance of the Divine
Persons. There were we all one before our
creation ; for this is our super essence. . . .
There the Godhead is, in simple essence,
without activity ; Eternal Rest, Uncon-
ditioned Dark, the Nameless Being, the
Superessence of all created things, and the
simple and infinite Bliss of God and of all
Saints." ^

Ruysbroeck here brings us to the position
of Dante in the last canto of the Paradiso,
when, transcending those partial apprehen-
sions of Reality which are figured bj^^ the
River of Becoming and the Rose of Beati-
tude, he penetrated to the swift vision of
" that Eternal Light which only in Itself
abideth " — discerned best by man under
the image of the three circles, yet in its
' profound and clear substance ' indivisibly
One.

" The simple light of this Being is limit-
less in its immensity, and transcending

' The Seven Degrees of Love, cap. xiv.

HIS DOCTRINE OF GOD 65

form, includes and embraces the unity of
the Divine Persons and the soul with all
its faculties ; and this to such a point that
it envelopes and irradiates both the natural
tendency of our ground [i.e. its dynamic
movement to God — ^the River] and the
fruitive adherence of God and all those who
are united with Him in this Light [i.e
Eternal Being — ^the Rose]. And this is the
union of God and the souls that love Him." ^

1 The Kingdom of God's Lovers, cap. xxix.

CHAPTER IV

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN

That which was begun by Grace, is accomplished by
Grace and Free-will ; so that they work mixedly not
separately, simultaneously not successively, in each and
all of their processes. St. Bernard.

The concept of the Nature of God which
we have traced through its three phases —
out from the unchanging One to the active
Persons and back to the One again — ogives
us a clue to Ruysbroeck's idea of the nature
and destiny of man. In man, both aspects
of Divine Reality, active and fruitive, are
or should be reflected; for God is the
* Living Pattern of Creation ' who has
impressed His image on each soul, and in
every adult spirit the character of that
image must be brought from the hiddenness
and realised. Destined to be wholly real,
though yet in the making, there is in man
a latent Divine likeness, a ' spark ' of the
primal fire. Created for union with God,
already in Eternity that union is a fact.
" The creature is in Brahma and Brahma

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 67

is in the creature ; they are ever distinct yet
ever united," says the Indian mystic. Were
it translated into Christian language, it is
probable that this thought — ^which does not
involve pantheism — ^would have been found
acceptable by Ruysbroeck ; for the inter-
penetration yet eternal distinction of the
human and Divine spirits is the central fact
of his universe. Man, he thinks, is already
related in a threefold manner to his Infinite
Source ; for " we have our being in Him as
the Father, we contemplate Him as does
the Son, we ceaselessly tend to return to Him
as does the Spirit."

" The first property of the soul is a naked
being, devoid of all image. Thereby do we
resemble, and are united to, the Father and
His nature Divine." This is the 'ground of
the soul ' perpetually referred to by mystics
of the Eckhartian School ; the bare, still
place to which consciousness retreats in
introversion, image of the static and absolute
aspect of Reality. " The second property
might be called the higher understand-
ing of the soul. It is a mirror of light,
wherein we receive the Son of God, the
Eternal Truth. By this light we are like
unto Him ; but in the act of receiving, we
are one with Him." This is the power of
knowing Divine things by intuitive com-
prehension : man's fragmentary share in the
character of the Logos, or Wisdom of

68 RUYSBROECK

God. " The third property we call the
spark of the soul. It is the inward and
natural tendency of the soul towards its
Source ; and here do we receive the Holy
Spirit, the Charity of God. By this inward
tendency we are like the Holy Spirit ; but
in the act of receiving, we become one spirit
and one love with God." ^ Here the Divine
image shows itself in its immanent and
dynamic aspect, as the ' internal push ' which
drives Creation back to the Father's heart.

The soul then is, as Julian of Norwich
said, " made Trinity, like to the unmade
Blessed Trinity." Reciprocally, there is in
the Eternal World the uncreated Pattern
or Archetype of man — his ' Platonic idea.'
Now man must bring from its hiddenness the
latent likeness, the germ of Divine humanity
that is in him, and develop it until it realises
the ' Platonic idea ' ; achieving thus the
implicit truth of his own nature as it exists
in the mind of God. This, according to
Ruysbroeck, is the whole art and object of
the spiritual life ; this actualisation of the
eternal side of human nature, atrophied in
the majority of men — ^the innate Christli-
ness in virtue of which we have power to
become * Sons ' of God.

" Lo I thus are we all one with God in
our Eternal Archetype, which is His Wisdom
who hath put on the nature of us all. And

* The Mirror of Eternal Salvation, cap. viii.

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 69

although we are already one with Him
therein by that putting on of our nature,
we must also be like God in grace and virtue,
if we would find ourselves one with Him in
our Eternal Archetype, which is Himself." ^

Under the stimulus of Divine Love per-
petually beating in on him, feeding per-
petually on the substance of God, per-
petually renewed and ' reborn ' on to ever
higher levels through the vivifying contact
of reality, man must grow up into the
' superessential life ' of complete unity with
the Transcendent. There, not only the
triune aspect but the dual character of God
is reproduced in him, reconciled in a syn-
thesis beyond the span of thought ; and
he becomes ' deiform ' — ^both active and
fruitive, ' ever at work and ever at rest ' —
at once a denizen of Eternity and of Time.
Every aspect of his being — ^love, intellect and
will — is to be invaded and enhanced by the
new life-giving life ; it shall condition and
enrich his correspondences with the sense-
world as well as with the world of soul.

Man is not here invited to leave the active
life for the contemplative, but to make
the active life perfect within the contempla-
tive; carrying up these apparent opposites
to a point at which they become one. It is
one of Ruysbroeck's characteristics that he,
as few others, followed mysticism out to

' The Twelve Biguines, cap. ix.

70 RUYSBROECK

this, its last stage; where it issues in a
balanced, divine-human life. The energetic
Love of God, which flows perpetually forth
from the Abyss of Being to the farthest
limits of the universe, enlightening and
quickening where it goes, and ' turns again
home ' as a strong tide drawing all things
to their Origin, here attains equilibrium ;
the effort of creation achieves its aim.

Now this aim, this goal, is already realised
within God's nature, for there all perfection
eternally Is. But to man it is super-nature ;
to achieve it he must transcend the world
of conditions in which he lives according to
the flesh, and grow up to fresh levels of
life. Under the various images of sonship,
marriage, and transmutation, this is the
view of human destiny which Ruysbroeck
states again and again : the creative evolu-
tion of the soul. His insistence on the
completeness of the Divine Union to which
the soul attains in this final phase, his
perpetual resort to the dangerous language of
deification in the effort towards describing
it, seems at first sight to expose him to the
charge of pantheism ; and, as a matter of
fact, has done so in the past. Yet he is
most careful to guard himself at every point
against this misinterpretation of his vision
of life. In his view, by its growth towards
God, personality is not lost, but raised to
an ever higher plane. Even in that ecstatic

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 71

fruition of Eternal Life in which the spirit
passes above the state of Union to the state
of Unity, and beyond the Persons to the
One, the ' eternal otherness ' of Creator and
created is not overpassed ; but, as in the
perfect fulfilment of love, utter fusion and
clear differentiation mysteriously co-exist.
It is, he says, not a mergence but a ' mutual
inhabitation.' In his attempts towards the
description of this state, he borrows the
language of St. Bernard, most orthodox of
the mystics ; language which goes back to
primitive Christian times. The Divine light,
love and being, he tells us, penetrates and
drenches the surrendered, naked, receptive
soul, ' as fire does the iron, as sunlight does
the air ' ; and even as the sunshine and
the air, the iron and the fire, so are these
two terms distinct yet united. " The iron
doth not become fire nor the fire iron ; but
each retaineth its substance and its nature.
So likewise the spirit of man doth not
become God, but is God-formed, and knoweth
itself breadth and length and height and
depth." ^ Again, " this union is in God,
through grace and our homeward-tending
love. Yet even here does the creature feel
a distinction and otherness between itself
and God in its inward ground " ^ The
dualistic relation of lover and beloved,

' The Twelve Beguines, cap. xiv.
2 The Book of Truth, cap. xi.

72 RUYSBROECK

though raised to another power and glory,
is an eternal one.

I have spoken of Ruysbroeck's concept of
God, his closely related concept of man's
soul ; the threefold diagram of Reality
within which these terms are placed, the
doctrine of transcendence he deduced there-
from. But such a diagram cannot express
to us the rich content, the deeply personal
character of his experience and his know-
ledge. It is no more than a map of the
living land he has explored, a formal picture
of the Living One whom he has seen without
sight. For him the landscape lived and
flowered in endless variety of majesty and
sweetness ; the Person drew near in mysteri-
ous communion, and gave to him as food
His very life.

All that this meant, and must mean, for
our deeper knowledge of Reality and of
man's intuitive contacts with the Divine
Life, we must find if we can in his doctrine of
Love. Love is the ' very self -hood ' of God,
says Ruysbroeck in strict Johannine lan-
guage. His theology is above all the theo-
logy of the Holy Spirit, the immanent
Divine Energy and Love. It is Love which
breaks down the barrier between finite and
infinite life. But Love, as he understands
it, has little in common with the feeling-
state to which many of the female mystics
have given that august name. For him, it

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 73

is hardly an emotional word at all, and
never a sentimental one ; rather the title
of a mighty force, a holy energy that fills
the universe — ^the essential activity of God.
Sometimes he describes it under the antique
imagery of Light ; imagery which is more
than a metaphor, and is connected with that
veritable consciousness of enhanced radiance,
as well in the outer as in the inner world,
experienced by the ' illuminated ' mystic.
Again it is the ' life-giving Life,' hidden in
God and the substance of our souls, which
the self finds and appropriates ; the whole
Johannine trilogy brought into play, to
express its meaning for heart, intellect and
will. This Love, in fact, is the dynamic
power which St. Augustine compared with
gravitation, ' drawing all things to their
own place,' and which Dante saw binding
the multiplicity of the universe into one.
All Ruysbroeck's images for it turn on the
idea of force. It is a raging fire, a storm, a
flood. He speaks of it in one great passage
as ' playing like lightning ' between God and
the soul.

Whoever will look at William Blake's
great picture of the Creation of Adam, may
gain some idea of the terrific yet infinitely
compassionate character inherent in this
concept of Divine Love : the agony, passion,
beauty, sternness, and pity of the primal
generating force. This love is eternally

74 RUYSBROECK

giving and taking — ^it is its very property,
says Ruysbroeek, ' ever to give and ever
to receive ' — ^pouring its dower of energy into
the soul, and drawing out from that soul
new vitality, new love, new surrender.
'Hungry love,' 'generous love,' 'stormy
love, ' he calls it again and again. Streaming
out from the heart of Reality, the impersonal
aspect of the very Spirit of God, its creative
touch evokes in man, once he becomes con-
scious of it, an answering storm of love.
The whole of our human growth within the
spiritual order is conditioned by the quality
of this response ; by the will, the industry,
the courage, with which man accepts his
part in the Divine give-and-take.

" That measureless Love which is God
Himself, dwells in the pure deeps of our
spirit, like a burning brazier of coal. And
it throws forth brilliant and fiery sparks
which stir and enkindle heart and senses,
will and desire, and all the powers of the
soul, with a fire of love ; in a storm, a rage,
a measureless fury of love. These be the
weapons with which we fight against the
terrible and immense Love of God, who
would consume all loving spirits and swallow
them in Himself. Love arms us with its
own gifts, and clarifies our reason, and
commands, counsels and advises us to oppose
Him, to fight against Him, and to maintain
against Him our right to love, so long as we

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 75

may." ^ In the spiritual realm, giving and
receiving are one act, for God is an
' ocean that ebbs and flows' ; and it is only
by opposing love to love, by self-donation to
His mysterious movements, that the soul
appropriates new force, invigorating and
fertilising it afresh. Thus, and thus alone,
it lays hold on eternal life ; sometimes
sacramentally, under external images and
accidents ; sometimes mystically, in the com-
munion of deep prayer. " Every time we
think with love of the Well-beloved, He is
anew our meat and drink " — more, we too
are His, for the love between God and man
is a mutual love and desire. As we lay hold
upon the Divine Life, devour and assimilate
it, so in that very act the Divine Life
devours us, and knits us up into the mystical
Body of Reality. " Thou shalt not change
Me into thine own substance, as thou dost
change the food of thy flesh, but thou shalt
be changed into Mine," said the Spirit of
God to St. Augustine ; and his Flemish
descendant announces this same mysterious
principle of life with greater richness and
beauty.

"It is the nature of love ever to give and
to take, to love and to be loved, and these
two things meet in whomsoever loves. Thus
the love of Christ is both avid and generous
... as He devours us, so He would feed us.

' The Mirror of Eternal Salvation, cap. xvii.

76 RUYSBROECK

If He absorbs us utterly into Himself, in
return He gives us His very self again." ^

This is but another aspect of that great
' inbreathing and outbreathing ' of the Divine
nature which governs the relation between the
Creator and the flux of life ; for Ruysbroeck's
Christological language always carries with
it the idea of the Logos, the Truth and
Wisdom of Deity, as revealed in the world
of conditions, — ^not only in the historical
Jesus, but also in the eternal generation of
the Son. St. Francis of Assisi had said that
Divine Love perpetually swings between
and reconciles two mighty opposites : " What
is God ? and, WTiat am I ? " For Ruys-
broeck, too, that Love is a unifying power,
manifested in motion itself, " an outgoing
attraction, which drags us out of ourselves
and calls us to be melted and naughted in
the Unity " ; ^ and all his deepest thoughts
of it are expressed in terms of movement.

The relation between the soul and the
Absolute, then, is a love relation — as in
fact all the mystics have declared it to be.
Man, that imperfectly real thing, has an
inherent tendency towards God, the Only
Reality. Already possessed of a life within
the world of conditions, his unquiet heart
reaches out towards a world that transcends
conditions. How shall he achieve that world ?

' op. cit., cap. vii.

" The Sparkling Stone, cap. x.

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 77

In the same way, says Ruysbroeck, as the
child achieves the world of manhood : by
the double method of growth and educa-
tion, the balanced action of the organism
and its environment. In its development
and its needs, spirit conforms to the great
laws of natural life. Taught by the voices
of the forest and that inward Presence who
' spoke without utterance ' in his soul, he
is quick to recognise the close parallels
between nature and grace. His story of
the mystical life is the story of birth, growth,
adolescence, maturity : a steady progress, de-
pendent on food and nurture, on the ' brooks
of grace ' which flow from the Living
Fountain and bring perpetual renovation
to help the wise disciplines and voluntary
choices that brace and purge our expanding
will and love.

Ruysbroeck's universe, like that of Kabir
and certain other great mystics, has three
orders : Becoming, Being, God. Parallel
with this, he distinguishes three great stages
in the soul's achievement of complete re-
ality : the Active, the Interior, and the
Superessential Life, sometimes symbolised
by the conditions of Servant, Friend, and
Son of God. These, however, must be re-
garded rather as divisions made for con-
venience of description, answering to those
divisions which thought has made in the
indivisible fact of the universe, than as

78 RUYSBROECK

distinctions inherent in the reahty of things.
The spiritual hfe has the true character of
duration ; it is one indivisible tendency
and movement towards our source and
home, in which the past is never left behind,
but incorporated in the larger present.

In the Active Life, the primary interest
is ethical. Man here purifies his normal
human correspondences with the world of
sense, approximates his will to the Will of
God. Here, his contacts with the Divine
take place within that world of sense, and
' by means.' In the Interior Life, the
interest embraces the intellect, upon which
is now conferred the vision of Reality. As
the Active Life corresponded to the world of
Becoming, this Life corresponds with the
supersensual world of Being, where the
self's contacts with the Divine take place
' without means.' In the Superessential Life,
the self has transcended the intellectual
plane and entered into the very heart of
Reality; where she does not behold, but
has fruition of, God in one life and one love.
The obvious parallel between these three
stages and the traditional ' threefold way '
of Purgation, Illumination and Union is,
however, not so exact as it appears. Many
of the characters ■ of the Unitive Way are
present in Ruysbroeck's ' second life ' ; and
his ' third life ' takes the soul to heights
of fruition which few amongst j- even ^the

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 79

greatest unitive mystics have attained or
described.

(A) When man first feels upon his soul
the touch of the Divine Light, at once,
and in a moment of time, his will is changed ;
turned in the direction of Reality and
away from unreal objects of desire. He
is, in fact, ' converted ' in the highest and
most accurate sense of that ill-used word.
Seeing the Divine, he wants the Divine,
though he may not yet understand his
own craving; for the scrap of Divine Life
within him has emerged into the field of con-
sciousness, and recognises its home. Then,
as it were, God and the soul rush together,
and of their encounter springs love. This
is the New Birth ; the ' bringing forth of the
Son in the ground of the soul,' its baptism
in the fountain of the Life-giving Life.

The new force and tendency received
into the self begins to act on the periphery,
and thence works towards the centre of
existence. First, then, it attacks the ordin-
ary temporal life in all its departments.
It pours in fresh waves of energy which
confer new knowledge and hatred of sin,
purify character, bring fresh virtues into
being. It rearranges the consciousness about
new and higher centres, gathering up all
the faculties into one simple state of ' atten-
tion to God.' Thence results the highest life
which is attainable by ' nature.' In it, '^ man

80 RUYSBROECK

is united with God 'through means,' acts in
obedience to the dictates of Divine Love
and in accordance with the tendency of
the Divine Will, and becomes the ' Faith-
ful Servant ' of the Transcendent Order.
Plainly, the Active Life, thus considered,
has much in common with the ' Purgative
Way ' of ascetic science.

(B) When this growth has reached its
term, when " Free-will wears the crown of
Charity, and rules as a King over the soul,"
the awakened and enhanced consciousness
begins to crave a closer contact with the
spiritual : that unmediated and direct
contact which is the essence of the Con-
templative or Interior Life, and is achieved
in the deep state of recollection called
' unitive prayer.' Here voluntary and pur-
posive education takes its place by the
side of organic development. The way
called by most ascetic writers ' Illumina-
tion ' — ^the state of ' proficient ' in monastic
parlance — ^includes the training of the self
in the contemplative art as well as its
growth in will and love. This training
braces and purifies intellect, as the dis-
ciplines of the active life purified will and
sense. It teaches introversion, or the turn-
ing inward of the attention from the dis-
tractions of the sense- world ; the cleansing
of the mirror of thought, thronged with
confusing images ; the production of that

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 81

silence in which the music of the Infinite
can be heard. Nor is the Active Life here
left behind ; it is carried up to, and in-
cluded in, the new, deepened activities of the
self, which are no longer ruled by the laws,
but by the ' quickening counsels ' of God.

Of this new life, interior courage is a first
necessity. It is no easy appropriation of
supersensual graces, but a deeper entering
into the mystery of life, a richer, more
profound, participation in pain, effort, as
well as joy. There must be no settling
down into a comfortable sense of the Divine
Presence, no reliance on the ' One Act ' ;
but an incessant process of change, re-
newal, re-emergence. Sometimes Ruysbroeck
appears to see this central stage in the
spiritual life-process in terms of upward
growth toward transcendent levels ; some-
times in terms of recollection, the steadfast
pressing inwards of consciousness towards
that bare ground of the soul where it unites
with immanent Reality, and finds the
Divine Life surging up like a ' living fountain '
from the deeps. This double way of con-
ceiving one process is puzzling for us ; but
a proof that for Ruysbroeck no one concept
could suggest the whole truth, and a useful
reminder of the symbolic character of all
these maps and itineraries of the spiritual
life.

As the sun grows in power with the passing
6

8S RUYSBROECK

seasons, so the soul now experiences a steady
increase in the power and splendour of the
Divine Light, as it ascends in the heavens
of consciousness and pours its heat and
radiance into all the faculties of man. The
in-beating of this energy and light brings
the self into the tempestuous heats of high
summer, or full illumination — ^the ' fury of
love,' most fertile and dangerous epoch of
the spiritual year. Thence, obedient to
those laws of movement, that 'double rhythm
of renunciation and love ' which Kabir de-
tected at the heart of the universal melody,
it enters on a negative period of psychic
fatigue and spiritual destitution ; the ' dark
night of the soul.' The sun descends in the
heavens, the ardours of love grow cold.
When this stage is fully established, says
Ruysbroeck, the ' September of the soul ' is
come ; the harvest and vintage — raw
material of the life-giving Eucharist — is
ripe. The flowering-time of spiritual joy and
beauty is as nothing in its value for life com-
pared with this still autumnal period of true
fecundity, in which man is at last ' affirmed '
in the spiritual life.

This, then, is the curve of the self's growth.
Side by side with it runs the other curve
of deliberate training: the education by
which our wandering attention, our diffused
undisciplined consciousness, is sharpened and
f ocussed upon Reality. This training is needed

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 83

by intellect and feeling ; but most of all by
the will, which Ruysbroeck, like the great
English mystics, regards as the gathering-
point of personality, the ' spiritual heart.'
On every page of his writings the reference
to that which the spiritual Light and Love
do for man, is balanced by an insistence on
that which man himself must do : the choices
to be made, the ' exercises ' to be performed,
the tension and effort which must charac-
terise the mystic way until its last phase
is reached. Morally, these exercises consist
in progressive renunciations on the one hand
and acceptances on the other ' for Love's
sake ' ; intellectually, in introversion, that
turning inwards and concentration of con-
sciousness, the stripping off of all images
and emptying of the mind, which is the psy-
chological method whereby human conscious-
ness transcends the conditioned universe
to which it has become adapted, and enters
the contemplative world. Man's attention to
life is to change its character as he ascends
the ladder of being. Therefore the old attach-
ments must be cut before the new attachments
can be formed. This is, of course, a common-
place of asceticism ; and much of Ruys-
broeck's teaching on detachment, self-naught-
ing and contemplation, is indeed simply the
standard doctrine of Christian asceticism seen
through a temperament.

When the self has grown up from the

84 RUYSBROECK

' active ' to the ' contemplative ' state of con-
sciousness, it is plain that his whole relation
to his environment has changed. His world is
grouped about a new centre. It now becomes
the supreme business of intellect to ' gaze upon
God,' the supreme business of love to stretch
out towards Him. When these twin powers,
under the regnancy of the enhanced and
trained will, are set towards Reality, then the
human creature has done his part in the setting
up of the relation of the soul to its Source, and
made it possible for the music of the Infinite
to sound in him. " For this intellectual
gazing and this stretching forth of love are
two heavenly pipes, sounding without the need
of tune or of notes ; they ever go forward
in that Eternal Life, neither straying aside
nor returning backward again ; and ever
keeping harmony and concord with the Holy
Church, for the Holy Spirit gives the wind
that sings in them." ^ Observe, that tension
is here a condition of the right employment
of both faculties, and ensures that the
Divine music shall sound true ; one of the
many implicit contradictions of the quietist
doctrine of spiritual limpness, which we find
throughput Ruysbroeck's works.

(C) V^Tien the twofold process of growth
and education has brought the self to this
perfection of attitude as regards the Spiritual
Order — an attitude of true union, says Ruys-

^ The Twelve Biguines, cap. xiv.

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 85

broeck, but not yet of the unthinkable unity
which is our goal — ^man has done all that he
can do of himself. His ' Interior Life ' is com-
plete, and his being is united through grace
with the Being of God, in a relation which
is the faint image of the mutual relations of
the Divine Persons ; a conscious sonship,
finding expression in the mutual interchange
of the spirit of will and love. This existence
is rooted in ' grace,' the unconditioned life-
force, ' intermediary between ourselves and
God,' as the active stage was rooted in
' nature.' Yet there is something beyond
this. As beyond the Divine Persons there
is the Superessential Unity of the Godhead,
so beyond the plane of Being (Wesen) Ruys-
broeck apprehends a reality which is ' more
than Being ' (Overwesen). Man's spirit, having
relations with every grade of reality, has
also in its ' fathomless ground ' a potential
relation with this superessential sphere ; and
until this be actualised he is not wholly
real, nor wholly deiform. Ruysbroeck's
most original contribution to the history of
mysticism is his description of this supreme
state; in which the human soul becomes
truly free, and is made the ' hidden child '
of God. Then only do we discern the glory
of our full-grown human nature ; when,
participating fully in the mysterious double
life of God, the twofold action of true love,
we have perfect fruition of Him as Eternal

86 RUYSBROECK

Rest, and perfect sharing in that outgoing
love which is His eternal Work : " God with
God, one love and one life, in His eternal
manifestation." ^

The consummation of the mystic way,
then, represents not merely a state of
ecstatic contemplation, escape from the
stream of succession, the death of self-hood,
joyous self -immersion in the Abyss ; not
merely the enormously enhanced state of
creative activity and energetic love which the
mystics call ' divine fecundity ' ; but both —
the flux and reflux of supreme Reality. It
is the synthesis of contemplation and action,
of Being and Becoming : the discovery at
last of a clue — ^inexpressible indeed, but
really held and experienced — ^to the mystery
which most deeply torments us, the link
between our life of duration and the Eternal
Life of God. This is the Seventh Degree of
Love, " noblest and highest that can be
realised in the life of time or of eternity."

That process of enhancement whereby the
self, in its upward progress, carries with it
all that has been attained before, here finds
its completion. The active life of Becoming,
and the essential life of Being, are not all.
" From beyond the Infinite the Infinite
comes," said the Indian ; and his Christian
brother, in parallel terms, declares that
beyond the Essence is the Superessence of

> The Twelve BSguines, cap. xiii,

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 87

God, His ' simple ' or synthetic unity. It
is for fruition of this that man is destined ;
yet he does not leave this world for that
world, but knows them as one. Totally
surrendered to the double current of the
universe, the inbreathing and outbreathing
of the Spirit of God, " his love and fruition
live between labour and rest." He goes up
and down the mountain of vision, a living
willing tool wherewith God works. " Hence,
to enter into restful fruition and come forth
again in good works, and to remain ever
one with God — ^this is the thing that I would
say. Even as we open our fleshly eyes to
see, and shut them again so quickly that we
do not even feel it, thus we die into God, we
live of God, and remain ever one with God.
Therefore we must come forth in the activi-
ties of the sense-life, and again re-enter in
love and cling to God ; in order that we may
ever remain one with Him without change." ^
All perfect lives, says Ruysbroeck, conform
to this pattern, follow this curve ; though
such perfect lives are rare amongst men.
They are the fruit, not of volition, but of
vocation ; of the mysterious operations of
the Divine Light which — ^perpetually crying
through the universe the "unique and fathom-
less word ' Behold ! behold ! ' " and " there-
with giving utterance to itself and all other
things " — ^yet evokes only in some men an

1 The Seven Decrees of Love, cap. xiv,

88 RUYSBROECK

answering movement of consciousness, the
deliberate surrender which conditions the
new power of response and of growth.
" To this divine vision but few men can
attain, because of their own unfitness and
because of the darkness of that Light whereby
we see: and therefore no one shall thor-
oughly understand this perception by means
of any scholarship, or by their own acuteness
of comprehension. For all words, and all
that men may learn and understand in a
creaturely fashion, is foreign to this and far
below the truth that I mean. To under-
stand and lay hold of God as He is in Himself
above all images — ^this is to he God with God,
without intermediary or any difference that
might become an intermediary or an obstacle.
And therefore I beg each one, who can
neither understand this, nor feel it by the
way of spiritual union, that he be not
grieved thereby, and let it be as it is." ^

I end this chapter by a reference to certain
key-words frequent in Ruysbroeck's works,
which are sometimes a source of difficulty to
his readers. These words are nearly always
his names for inward experiences. He uses
them in a poetic and artistic manner,
evocative rather than exact ; and we, in
trying to discover their meaning, must never
forget the coloured fringe of suggestion
which they carry for the mystic and the

* The Spiritual Marriage, lib, iii. cap. i.

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 89

poet, and which is a true part of the message
he intends them to convey.

The first of these words is Fruition.
Fruition, a concept which Eucken's philo-
sophy has brought back into current thought,
represents a total attainment, complete and
permanent participation and possession. It
is an absolute state, transcending all succes-
sion, and it is applied by Ruysbroeck to the
absolute character of the spirit's life in God ;
which, though it seem to the surface con-
sciousness a perpetually renewed encounter
of love, is in its ground ' fruitive and un-
conditioned,' a timeless self -immersion in the
Dark, the ' glorious and essential Oneness.'
Thus he speaks of ' fruitive love,' ' fruitive
possession ' ; as opposed to striving, dynamic
love, partial, progressive and conditioned
possession. Perfect contemplation and lov-
ing dependence are the ' eternal fruition of
God ' : the Beatific Vision of theology.
" Where we are one with God, without inter-
mediary, beyond all separation ; there is God
our fruition and His own in an eternal and
fathomless bliss." ^

Next perhaps in the power of provoking
misunderstanding is the weight attached by
Ruysbroeck to the adjective Simple. This
word, which constantly recurs in his de-
scriptions of spiritual states, always conveys
the sense of wholeness, completeness, syn-

' The Twelve Biguines, cap. xvi.

90 RUYSBROECK

thesis ; not of poverty, thinness, subtraction.
It is the white hght in which all the colours
of the spectrum are included and fused.
' Simple Union,' ' Simple Contemplation,'
' Simple Light ' — ^all these mean the total un-
differentiated 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 un-
familiar with the mystics is the constant
reference to Baeeness or Nudity, 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 prob-
ably taken by Ruysbroeck from Dionysius
the Areopagite. It represents, first, the
bewildering emptiness and nakedness of con-
sciousness when introduced into a universe
that transcends our ordinary conceptual
world ; secondly, the necessity of such tran-
scendence, of emptying the field of conscious-
ness 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 have

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 91

already 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 vernacular Wise and Onwise, 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 collo-
quial ' somehow ' and ' nohow ' would be yet
more exactly expressive. Now this pair of
opposites is psychological rather than meta-
physical, and has to do with the character-
istic phenomena of contemplation. It indi-
cates 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 attach-
ments within his conceptual world, is medi-
ated 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 furniture

92 RUYSBROECK

that 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 all is, 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." ^ 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 ' way less,' 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."

Thus cries the great Sufi poet, Jalalu'ddin ;
and the suggestion which his words convey
is perhaps as close as speech can come to
what Ruysbroeck meant by Onwise. The
change of consciousness which initiates man
into this inner yet unbounded world — the
world that is ' un walled,' to use his own

1 The Twelve Biguines, cap. xii.

HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN 93

favourite metaphor — is the essence of con-
templation ; 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 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." *

' The Twelve Biguines, cap. viii.

CHAPTER V

THE ACTIVE LIFE

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 per-
petually 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 move-
ment 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.

THE ACTIVE LIFE 95

and which describe the active crescent life
of Christian virtue, the laborious adjustment
of character to the Vision of God, Ruys-
broeck always puts first the virtue, or rather
the attitude, which he calls good-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, is everything
and does everything ; it is the primal motive-
power. Ruysbroeck, too, finds in desire
txirned towards the best the beginning of
human transcendence, and regards willing
and loving as the essence of life. Basing
his psychology on the common mediaeval
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 difficult

96 RUYSBROECK

approximation of our own thoughts and
desires to the thoughts and desires of Divine
Reahty. " 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." ^
In The 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 the
will to 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 the
will turned 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 I ' for the essence
of love is generous, outflowing, expansive,

• The Seven Degrees of Love, cap. i.

THE ACTIVE LIFE 97

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 ; ex-
pressing itself within the world of action
in a new ardour for perfection — the natural
result of the 'loving vision of the Bride-
groom,' 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 tran-
scendent interests.

Whilst in the volitional life drastic re-
adjustments, stern character-building, and
eager work are the expression of good-
will, 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 out-
ward things it rules as a mistress over his
external good deeds." ^

We have here, then, a disposition of heart
and mind which both receives and responds

1 The Mirror of Eternal Salvation, cap. xvi,
7

98 RUYSBROECK

to the messages of Reality ; making it pos-
sible 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 con-
sciousness 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 be-
ginning of spiritual growth, the act which
makes man free ; translating him, in Ruys-
broeck'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 man

THE ACTIVE LIFE 99

trust and hope ; and so he becomes a true
servant, and means and loves God in all
that he does." ^

So man, emerging from the shell of self-
hood, 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 the wholeness of all healthy
human life : the mutual support and inter-
penetration 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 Him-
self."

In the practical counsels given to the
young novice to whom The Mirror of Salva-
tion is 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 greater

1 The Sparkling Stone, cap. vi.

100 RUYSBROECK

detail in The Adornment of the Spiritual
Marriage and The Kingdom of God's Lovers.
Total self-donation, he tells her, is her first
need — ' choosing God, for love's sake ' with-
out 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 per-
sonal 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 re-
arrangement 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 experi-
enced 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 reahsation of Perfection involved
a vivid consciousness of the imperfections,
disharmonies, perversities, implicit in the

THE ACTIVE LIFE 101

human 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 mediaeval ascetics. His attitude
towards character was affirmative and ro-
bust ; 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,
cpldness of heart, or spiritual self-seeking,
but always implying a central wrongness
of attitude, resulting in a wrong employ-
ment of power. Self-denials and bodily
mortifications he regarded partly as exer-
cises 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 advo-
cate 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, or

102 RUYSBROECK

perversion by which it could be checked.
Thus, throughout his works, the accent
always falls upon power rather than weak-
ness : 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 person-
ality, 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, pro-
duce 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 from

THE ACTIVE LIFE 103

spiritual muscles exercised and controlled —
was one of the favourite qualities of that
wise trainer of character, St. Francois de
Sales ; and the many small and irritating
mortifications with which he was accus-
tomed 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 com-
munion with Reality, not with that direct-
ness proper to the true contemplative, but
obliquely, by * means,' symbols and images ;
especially by the sacramental dispensation
of the Church, a subject to which Ruys-
broeck devotes great attention. As always
in his system, growth from within is inti-
mately 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 of The
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 that

104 RUYSBROECK

we 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." ^

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 which

' The Mirror of Eternal Salvation, cap. vii.

THE ACTIVE LIFE 105

her 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 he is, he should
verily be meek." This clear acknowledg-
ment of facts, this finding of one's own
place, Ruysbroeck calls ' the solid founda-
tion of the Kingdom of the Soul.' In thus
discerning love and humility as the govern-
ing 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 corre-
spondences with the ' Kingdom.' This de-
velopment follows an orderly course, as
subject to law as the unfolding of the leaves
and flowers upon the growing plant ; and

106 RUYSBROECK

though Ruysbroeck in his various works
uses different diagrams wherewith to ex-
plain it, the psychological changes which
these diagrams demonstrate are substanti-
ally 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 in The Seven Degrees of Love, since
he is there addressing a cloistered nun,
he accommodates his system to that three-
fold 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 actual-
ised in the soul, and dominates all her re-
actions 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.'

In The Spiritual Marriage a more elabor-
ate analysis is possible ; based upon that
division of man's moral perversities into
the ' seven mortal sins ' or seven funda-
mental 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 towards

THE ACTIVE LIFE 107

God, 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 posi-
tive 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 for-
ward as the first condition of communion
with God. This produces in the emotional
life an attitude of loving adoration ; in the
volitional life, obedience. By obedience,
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 prohibi-
tions 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." ^

This movement of renunciation brings —
next phase in the unselfing of the self — a com-

* The Spiritual Marriage, lib. i. cap, xiv.

108 RUYSBROECK

pensating outward swing of love ; expressed
under the beautiful forms of patience, 'the
tranquil tolerance of all that can happen,'
and hence the antithesis of Anger ; gentle-
ness, which " with peace and calm bears
vexatious words and deeds " ; kindness,
which deals with the quarrelsome and irrit-
able by means of "a friendly countenance,
affectionate persuasion and compassionate
acts " ; and sympathy, "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 four-
fold increase in disinterested love is summed
up in the condition which Ruysbroeck calls
supernatural generosity ; that largeness of
heart which flows out towards the gener-
osity 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 produces diligence and zeal: an
' inward and impatient eagerness ' for every
kind of work, and for the hard prac-
tice of every kind of virtue, which makes
impossible that slackness and dulness of

THE ACTIVE LIFE 109

soul 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.^
He has done all he can do of himself towards
the conforming of his life to Supreme Per-
fection ; has opposed, one after another,
each of those exhibitions of the self's ten-
dency 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."

1 The Spiritual Marriage, lib. i. capp. xii.-xxiv.

110 RUYSBROECK

The first three gifts of the Holy Spirit
are possessed by the soul which has reached
this point, says Ruysbroeck in The 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 dis-
cernment 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. " Here-
by 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 gener-
osity. Finally, the Reasonable with know-
ledge and discernment, and that prudence
which regulates all things." ^ The ideal of
character held out and described under

1 The Kingdom of God's Lovers, cap. xviii.

THE ACTIVE LIFE 111

varying metaphors in Ruysbroeck's different
works, is thus seen to be a perfectly con-
sistent 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 en-
counter 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 Sim-
plicity of the Real. Longing to ' know
the nature of the Beloved,' he must act
as Zacchseus did when he wished to see
Christ :

112 RUYSBROECK

" 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 know-
ledge of God which man can acquire in the
Active Life : thus to recognise by the light of
faith that God is inconceivable and unknow-
able. 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.

THE ACTIVE LIFE 113

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 in-
conceivable. 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. Accord-
ing to this manner Christ may be encoun-
tered upon the summit of the Active
Life."^

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 riches

* The Spiritual Marriage, lib. i. cap. xxvi.
8

114 RUYSBROECK

but poverty ; above all, an eager and in-
dustrious 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." ^

' The Twelve BSguines, cap, vii.

CHAPTER VI

THE INTERIOR LIFE : ILLUMINATION
AND DESTITUTION

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.

RicHAHD OF St. Victor.

It is plain that the Active Life in Ruys-
broeck's system answers more or less to
the Purgative Way, considered upon its
affirmative and constructive side, as a build-
ing 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,

116 RUYSBROECK

state of the soul. The first life has, as it
were, unfolded to the sunhght 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 Christian

THE INTERIOR LIFE 117

virtue. Again we must remind ourselves
that Ruysbroeck's theory of transcendence
involves, not the passage from one life to
another, but the adding of one life to another :
the perpetual deepening, widening, heighten-
ing and enriching of human experience.
As the author of The Cloud of Unknowing
insists that none can be truly contemxplative
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 v/ho
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." ^

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 of

» The Sparkling Stone, cap, vii.

118 RUYSBROECK

his 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 en-
larging 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 im-
personal 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 under-
standing, 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 trstnscends
nature, and is the clear-shining intermediary
between ourselves and God. Our thoughts,
bare and stripped of images, are themselves

THE INTERIOR LIFE 119

the 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." ^

In this strongly Victorine passage, the
whole process of the Second Life is epito-
mised ; but in The 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 experi-
enced, 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 con-
stantly departs from the formulae 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 ;

* The Twelve B^guines, cap. ix.

120 RUYSBROECK

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 some-
thing 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 purga-
tion, has become drowsy and tired. Then,
suddenly, " a spiritual cry echoes through
the soul," announcing a new encounter
with Reality, and demanding a new re-
sponse ; or, to put it in another way,
consciousness on its ascending spiral has
pushed through to another level of exist-
ence, 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 Illu-
minative Way. It is introversive rather
than out-going in type. Changing the char-
acter 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.

THE INTERIOR LIFE 121

pressing towards the Unity of God, the
synthetic experience of love ; for perpetual
movement towards that unity — not achieve-
ment 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 us
see. 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." ^

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 grow-
ing self. But the liberty here spoken of has

I The Spiritual Marriage, lib. ii. cap. iv.

122 RUYSBROECK

a moral as well as a mental aspect. It is a
freeing of the whole man from the fetters
of illusion, and involves that perfect de-
tachment 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 Contem-
plative 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 time

THE INTEBIOR LIFE 123

of 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 sweet-
ness ' 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 un-
governable, 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 meet-
ing of this inward and outward spiritual
force — ^the Divine Light without, the grow-
ing Divine Spark within — ^there is great

IM RUYSBROECK

joy. Ecstasy, and that state of musical
rapture, exceeding the possibilities of speech,
which Ruysbroeck like Richard RoUe calls
'ghostly song,' are the natural self-ex-
pressions of the soul in this moment of its
career.^

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 phen-
omena which are well-known accompani-
ments of religious emotion in selves of a
certain temperament. This spiritual de-
lirium, 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 excitement

1 Cf. The Twelve B^guines, cap. x.

THE INTERIOR LIFE 125

of 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 him-
self." 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.' ^ 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 emo-
tion, amenable to reason, which is the re-
action 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 supreme

' The Spiritual Marriage, lib. ii. cap. xix. ; The Book of
Truth, cap. ix.

126 RUYSBROECK

summits, 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, im-
passioned ascents towards the Spirit that
cries without ceasing to our spirit : " Pay
your debt ! Love the Love that has loved
you from Eternity." ^

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 Illumin-
ated Life." 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 in-

1 The Seven Degrees of Love, cap. xiv.
' The Kingdom of God's Lovers, cap. xx.

THE INTERIOR LIFE 127

exorable caress, 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." ^

The sensible heat of love is felt with a
greater violence now than at any other period

1 The Spiritual Marriage, lib. ii. cap. xxiii.

128 RUYSBROECK

of 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.' A,s
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 perma-
nent harm ; a kind of wise steadfastness
will support them throughout this turbu-
lent period. " Following through all storms
the path of love, they will advance towards
that place whither love leadeth them." ^

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 in-
tuitions 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 monoideism of the ecstatic,

^ op. cit, lib. ii. cap. xxvii.

THE INTERIOR LIFE 129

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 mes-
sages 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 light-
ning 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 shines in them ; and this God works
9

130 RUYSBROECK

by means. In this light, the heart and the
desirous powers are uphfted 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 called jvJbilus or jubilation ;
and it is a joy that cannot be expressed in
words." ^

Here the parallel with Richard RoUe's
* ghostly song, with great voice outbreak-
ing ' will strike every reader of that most
musical of the mystics ; and it is prob-
able that in both cases the prominence
given to this rather uncommon form of
spiritual rapture points back to personal
experience. " Methinketh," says RoUe,
" that contemplation is this heavenly song
of the Love of God, which is called jubilus,
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." "

This exultant and lyrical mood then, this
adoring rapture, which only the rhythm
of music can express, is the emotional re-
action which indicates the high summer of
the soul. It will be seen that each phase

1 The Spiritual Marriage, lib. ii. cap. xxiv.
' Richard Rolle, The Mending of Life, cap. xii. (Har-
ford's edition, p. 82).

THE INTERIOR LIFE 131

of 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 in-
dustry 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 intelli-
gence 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.^ 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.

• The Kingdom of God's Lovers, cap. xxv.

132 RUYSBROECK

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 Giv^r.
" Though he who dedicates himself to love
ever experiences great joy, he must never
seek this joy." All those tendencies grouped
by St. Jolan of the Cross under the dis-
agreeable 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 illumi-
nated state make themselves felt as a con-
dition 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 con-
temporaries, the Friends of God, called
' the upper school of perfect self-abandon-
ment.'

THE INTERIOR LIFE 133

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 that

134 RUYSBROECK

ardent 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 ? " ^
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 happi-
ness that went before. It is not necessary,
says Ruysbroeck, that all should know the
ecstasies of illumination; but by this dark

1 The Spiritual Marriage, lib. ii. cap. xxviii.

THE INTERIOR LIFE 135

stairway 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 out-
ward virtues, which man has practised
with delight in the fire of love, these, now
that he knows them and is able to accom-
plish 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 him-
self 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." ^

1 The Spiritual Marriage, lib. ii. cap. xxix.

CHAPTER VII

THE INTERIOR LIFE : UNION AND
CONTEMPLATION

Lume e lassu, eke visibile face
lo Creatore a quella creatura
che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace.

Par, XXX. loo.

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 Beguines.

The soul which has endured with courage
and humiUty the anguish of the Dark Night,
actualising within its own experience the
double rhythm of love and renunciation,
now enters upon a condition of equili-
brium ; 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,
136

THE INTERIOR LIFE 137

his mind must be detached from its
natural indination 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 Areo-
pagite. Secondly, by means of his spiritual
exercises, his progressive efforts to corre-
spond 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.^ This consciousness of union, which
we must carefully distinguish from the
Unity that 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 repre-
sents the full achievement of the Interior
Life.

In many of his works, under various
images, Ruysbroeck tries to tell us what he

^ The Sparkling Stone, cap. ii.

138 RUYSBROECK

means 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 con-
centration 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 ; ^ and here the Divine Unity dwells and
calls him to the One. Here Eternity and
Time are intertwined. Here springs the

1 Cp. The Spiritual Marriage, lib. ii. cap. Ivii.

THE INTERIOR LIFE 139

fountain of ' Living Water ' — grace, tran-
scendent vitality — ^upon which the mystic
life of man depends.

Now the self, because it is at last con-
formed 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 im-
mersed 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, how-
ever, 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 in
The Spiritual Marriage. Faithful to the

140 RUYSBROECK

mediaeval division of personality into
Memory or Mind, Intelligence or Under-
standing, 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 im-
mediate 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 truly is — delivers us from that slavery
to the multiplicity of things, which splits
the attention and makes concentration upon
Reality impossible to the soul. The achieve-
ment 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.

THE INTERIOR LIFE 141

penetrated and affirmed in the unity of his
mind or thought. And thereby he is up-
lifted and established in a new condition;
and he turns inward upon himself, and
stays his mind upon the Nudity, above all
the pressure of sensual images, above all
multiplicity." ^

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 per-
ception 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, and

* The Spiritual Marriage, lib. ii. cap. xxxvi.

142 RUYSBROECK

a 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." ^

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 a
Simple 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 a Spreading 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 an Infused 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-

1 The Spiritual Marriage, lib. ii. cap. xxxviii.

THE INTERIOR LIFE J 43

flowing into that same ground from whence
the flood has come." ^

So the Interior Life, now firmly estab-
lished, 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 establish-
ment 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, this
is a spiritual life." ^

Now the self which has achieved this
degree of transcendence has achieved, too,
considerable experience in that art of con-

• The Spiritual Marriage, lib. ii. cap. xxxix.
' The Sparkling Stone, cap. ii.

14.4 RUYSBROECK

templation or introversion which is the
mode of its communion with God. Through-
out, training and development have gone
hand in hand ; and the fact that Ruys-
broeck seldom troubles to distinguish be-
tween them, but accepts them as two
aspects of one thing — ^the gradual deifica-
tion 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 super-
sensuous 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 appre-
hensions 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 dis-
cern that Circle whose centre is every-
where, as both exterior and interior to the
self. In Ruysbroeck's own works we find
a violent efiort to express this ineffable

THE INTERIOR LIFE 145

fact of omnipresence, of a truly Trans-
cendent 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 dwells in God, 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 f ar ! " 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 pos-
sessed 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,

146 RUYSBROECK

St. Basil, St. Macarius — and also in Richard
RoUe and a few other mediaeval types.
These would agree with Dionysius the Areo-
pagite that " we must contemplate things
divine by our whole selves standing out of
our whole selves." For the other class,
the first necessity is a retreat of conscious-
ness 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 in-
turning 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 contem-
plation. 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 alone

THE INTERIOR LIFE 147

can bear to gaze on it, lies in the deeps
of human personality. The will, usually
harnessed to the surface-consciousness, de-
voted to the interests of temporal life ; the
love, so freely spent on unreal and im-
perfect 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 con-
sciousness from multiplicity to unity. His
progress in contemplation will be a progress
towards that complete mono - ideism in
which the Vision of God — and here vision
is 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 the

148 RUYSBROECK

world 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,' ' stir-
rings,' 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.)
in The Seven Cloisters, where he distinguishes
three stages of contemplation ; finding in
them the responses of consciousness to the

THE INTERIOR LIFE 149

special 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 contempla-
tion 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 RoUe 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 last

150 RUYSBROECK

the 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 Ruys-
broeck, 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 develop-
ment 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 to feel the Transcendent ; now the
understanding, stripped of sense - images,
purged of intellectual arrogance, clarified
by grace, is lifted up to apprehend it. This
degree has two phases. First, that enlarge-
ment of the understanding to an increased
comprehension of truth, the finding of deeper
and diviner meanings in things already

THE INTERIOR LIFE 151

known, which Richard of St. Victor called
mentis 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
Called mentis sublevatio. Ruysbroeck, how-
ever, 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 Contempla-
tion, 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 con-
templative's career. The veil parts, and
he sees a " light and vision, which give to
the contemplating spirit a conscious certi-
tude that she sees God, so far as man may
see Him in mortal life." ^ That strange
mystical light of which all contemplatives
speak, and which Ruysbroeck describes in
a passage of great subtlety as ' the inter-
mediary between the seeing thought and
God,' now floods his consciousness. In it
" the Spirit of the Father speaks in the up-
lifted thought which is bare and stripped of

* The Twelve B^^uines, cap. 3d,

152 RUYSBROECK

images, 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." ^

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 Ruys-
broeck's works, will show what he means by
this phase of contemplation ; and the char-
acters which distinguish it from that in-
fused or unitive communion with God which
alone he calls Contemplatio. In the seventh
book of his Confessions, 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
visipn 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." ^ It was

' Loc. cit.

' St. Augustine, Confessions, lib. vii. cap. x,

THE INTERIOR LIFE 153

by "the withdrawal of thought from ex-
perience, its abstraction from the contra-
dictory throng of sensuous images," that he
attained to this transitory apprehension ;
which he describes elsewhere as "the vision
of the Land of Peace, but not the road
thereto." 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.^

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 contem-
plative, 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." *
The intellectual vision is dazzled and dis-
tressed, like a man who can bear the diffused

^ St. Augustine, Confessions, lib. vii. capp. xvii. and xx.
" The Twelve B^gmnes, cap. xii,

164 RUYSBROECK

radiance 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. Be-
cause 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,' contem-
plates God and Creation as He and it are
reflected in the clear mirror of her in-
tellectual powers, under ' images and simili-
tudes ' — ^the Mysteries of Faith, the Attri-
butes 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 simili-

THE INTERIOR LIFE 155

tudes, and in the degree in which the illu-
minated 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 Incom-
parable Light." ^

In The Kingdom of God's Lovers Ruys-
broeck pours forth a marvellous list of the
attributes under which the illuminated in-
telligence 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 ab-
stracts those images and attributes with
which it can deal, as the lower reason ab-
stracts 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 medita-
tion is in fact the way in which the in-
tellectual faculties can best contemplate
Reality. But " because all things, when they
are considered in their inwardness, have their
beginning and their ending in the Infinite

* Loc, cit.

156 RUYSBROECK

Being as in an Abyss," here again the con-
templative 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 con-
templation 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 sim-
plicity of the Light, that thereby its avid
desire of infinite fruition may be satisfied
and fulfilled " ; ^ 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, how-
ever, to suppose from this that emotion has
been left behind. As the virtues and energies
of the Active Life continue in the Contem-
plative 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 develop-
ment of the spiritual consciousness. Never-
theless Ruysbroeck, though he cannot be

* The Kingdom of God's Lovers, cap. xxxiv.

THE INTERIOR LIFE 157

accused of intellectualism, is led by his
admiration for Victorine ideas to lay great
stress upon the mental side of contempla-
tion, 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 the whole man to
Eternal levels : and the clarifying of the
intelligence, the enhancement of the under-
standing, 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 expres-
sion, sharp definition, plain speech. Some-
times 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 Contempla-
tion lifts the whole consciousness to a plane
of perception which transcends the cate-
gories of the intellect : where it deals no
longer with the label but with the Thing.

158 RUYSBROECK

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 Apprehen-
sion [i.e. intuition] into its Origin, that is
Himself." ^ It is effected by concentra-
tion 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 appre-
hends Him, not under conditions, 'in some
wise,' but as a whole, without the discrete
analysis of His properties which was the
special character of intellectual contempla-
tion; a synthetic experience which is 'in
no wise,' This is for Ruysbroeck the con-
templative act par excellence. It is ' an
intimacy which is ignorance,' a ' simple
seeing,' he says again and again; "and
the name thereof is Contemplatio ; that is,
the seeing of God in simplicity." ^

" Here the reason no less than all sepa-
rate acts must give way, for our powers
become simple in Love ; they are silent

' The Seven Cloisters, cap. xix.
• The Twelve B^guines, cap. xii.

THE INTERIOR LIFE 159

and 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, ob-
servation 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, the simple eye
is 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 the simple eye is a
living mirror, which God has made for His
image, and whereon He has impressed it." ^
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,

* The Mirror of Eternal Salvation, cap. xvii.

160 RUYSBROECK

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.^ When the work of trans-
mutation is finished and he has received
the ' Sparkling Stone of Divine Humanity,'
this subject - object distinction — though
really an eternal one, as Ruysbroeck con-
tinually reminds us — will no longer be pos-
sible 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 con-
templation which is ' without conditions,'
and that which is 'beyond and above con-
ditions ' and belongs to the Superessential
Life alone. In Intuitive Contemplation the

* The Sparkling Stone, cap. iii.

THE INTERIOR LIFE 161

seeing self apprehends the Unconditioned
World, Onwise, and makes ' loving ascents
thereto.' It ' finds within itself the un-
walled ' ; yet is still anchored to the con-
ditioned sphere. In Superessential Con-
templation, it dies into that ' world which
is in no wise.' In the great chapter of
The Sparkling Stone ^ 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 other-
ness 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.

* Cap. viii. : ' Of the Difference between the Secret
Friends and the Hidden Sons of God.'
II

162 RUYSBROECK

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 com-
munion 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 indica-
tions of a transitional state, in which the
soul " is guided and lost, wanders and
returns, ebbs and flows," within the ' limit-
less 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 there-
to, 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 appre-
hension 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 that

THE INTERIOR LIFE 163

is Wayless, is intermediary between con-
templation in images and similitudes of
the intellect, and unveiled contemplation
beyond all images in the Light of God." ^

1 The Twelve B^guines, cap. xii.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SUPERESSENTIAL LIFE

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 — Be-
coming, Being, God — and further, three
ways of life whereby the self can correspond
to these three orders, and which he calls
the life of natvire, 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 ancient

164

THE SUPERESSENTIAL LIFE 165

technical 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 achieve-
ment 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 of Onwise to 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.' Be-
yond both the conditioned and unconditioned
world, beyond the Trinity Itself, that love

166 RUYSBROECK

discerns its ultimate objectiver— 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." ^ 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 Ruys-
broeck's most wonderful passages are con-
cerned 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 character-
istic 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 their

'■ The Twelve B^guines, cap. xvi.

THE SUPERESSENTIAL LIFE 167

bourne. 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 Contempla-
tion, or Fruition, we find the work of the
Absolute Godhead Itself, energising upon
a plane of intensity which so utterly tran-
scends 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, and

168 RUYSBROECK

that very One which the Point is, yet
nevertheless ever remain in themselves
nought else but lines that come to an end." ^

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 Testa-
ment saints, can find no other language
for this last crisis of the spirit — its move-
ment from the state of Wesen to that of
Overwesen — than the language of death.
The ever-moving line, though its vital char-
acter 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 the

* The Seven Cloisters, cap. xix.

THE SUPERESSENTIAL LIFE 169

ebb 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 resurrec-
tion-life. " None is sure of Eternal Life
unless he has died with all his own attri-
butes wholly into God " ^ — ^all else falls
short of the demands of supreme generosity.

It is The Book of the Sparkling Stone
which contains Ruysbroeck's most wonder-
ful 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,

* The Sparkling Stone, cap. viii.

170 RUYSBROECK

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 per-
petual 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 would taste God, 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 intelli-
gence. For when we go out from ourselves
in love, and die to all observances in ignor-
ance and darkness, then we are made com-
plete, and transfigured by the Eternal Word,
Image of the Father. Aiid 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 we

THE SUPERESSENTIAL LIFE 171

gaze 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 the seeing
life." ^

Such a passage as this lies beyond our poor
attempts at analysis. Those only will under-
stand it who yield themselves to it ; enter-
ing 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,' as felt
in 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 experi-
ences 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 super-
ficially inconsistent descriptions of this en-
hanced life — which must harmonise and
fulfil all the needs of our complex person-
ality, providing inexhaustible objectives

• The Sparkling Stone, cap. ix.

m aUYSBROECK

for love, intelligence and will — can we form
any true idea concerning it.

When we do this, we discover that the
side of it which seems a static beatitude,
still Fruition, perfect Rest, is always
balanced by the other side ; which seems
a perpetual and progressive attainment,
a seeking and finding, a hungering and
feeding, a giving and taking. These co-
exist ; 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 achieve-
ment 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 line

THE SUPERESSENTIAL LIFE 173

into 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 ^ —
is able to taste and apprehend the sweetness
of Infinite Reality. But at the other end,
where he still participates in the time-pro-
cess, 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 king-
dom that lives in her ground ; and this
hunger shall never be stilled." ^

The soul, whenever it attends to itself —
withdraws^ itself,3 so to speak, from the

* The Kingdom of God's Lovers, cap. xxxiii.
2 The Sparkling Stone, cap. ix. ; cp. also The Twelve
Bdguines, cap. xvi.

174 RUYSBROECK

Divine 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." ^ But when it dwells beyond
itself, and in the supreme moments of
ecstasy merges its consciousness in the
Universal Consciousness, it transcends suc-
cession 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." ^

Such experiences however, such perfect
fruition, in which the self dies into the
overwhelming revelation of the Trans-
cendent, and its rhythm is merged in the
Divine Rhythm, cannot be continuous for

• The Twelve B^guines, cap. xvi.

" The Sparkling Stone, cap. ix. ; cp. also The Book of
Truth, cap. xii.

THE SUPERESSENTIAL LIFE 175

those 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 when-
soever he will, he can wholly absorb himself
in this manner of contemplation, in so far
as it is possible in this life." ^

The superessential man, in fact, is, as
Francis Thompson said of the soul, a

"... swinging-wicket set
Between
The Unseen and Seen."

He is to move easily and at will between
these two orders, both actual, both God-
inhabited, the complementary expressions of
One Love ; participating both in the active,
industrious, creative outflow in differentia-
tion, and the still indrawing attraction
which issues in the supreme experience of
Unity. For these two movements the
Active and Interior Lives have educated
him. The truly characteristic experience of
the Third Life is the fruition of that Unity

' The Kingdom of God's Lovers, cap. xxxi.

176 RUYSBROECK

or Simplicity in which they are harmonised,
beyond the balanced consciousness of the
indrawing and outdrawing tides.^

Ruysbroeck discerns three moments in
this achievement. First, a negative move-
ment, the introversive sinking-down of our
created life into God's absolute life, which
is the consummation of self-naughting and
surrender and the essence of dark con-
templation. Next, the positive ecstatic
stretching forth above reason into our
' highest life,' where we undergo complete
transmutation in God and feel ourselves
wholly enfolded in Him, Thirdly, from
these ' completing opposites ' of surrender
and love springs the perfect fruition of
Unity, so far as we may know it here ; when
" we feel ourselves to be one with God, and
find ourselves transformed of God, and
immersed in the fathomless Abyss of our
Eternal, Blessedness, where we can find no
further > separation between ourselves and
God. So long as we are lifted up and
stretched forth into this height of feeling,
all our powers remain idle, in an essential
fruition ; for where our powers are utterly
naughted, there we lose our activity. And
so long as we remain idle, without observa-
tion, with outstretched spirit and open eyes,
so long can we see and have fruition. But
in that same moment in which we would

1 The Book of Truth, cap. xii.

THE SUPERESSENTIAL LIFE ITT

test and comprehend What that may be
which we feel, we fall back upon reason ;
and there we find distinction and otherness
between God and ourselves, and find God
as an Incomprehensible One exterior to us." ^
It is clear from this passage that such
' utterness ' of fruition is a fleeting experi-
ence ; though it is one to which the unitive
mystic can return again and again, since
it exists as a permanent state in his essential
ground, ever discoverable by him when
attention is focussed upon it. Further, it
appears that the ' absence of difference '
between God and the soul, which the mystic
in these moments of ecstasy feels and enjoys,
is a psychological experience, not an abso-
lute truth. It is the only way in which
his surface-mind is able to realise on the
one side the overwhelming apprehension of
God's Love, that ' Yes ' in which all other
syllables are merged ; on the other the
completeness of his being's self-abandon-
ment to the Divine embrace — " that Super-
essential Love with which we are one, and
which we possess more deeply and widely
than any other thing." ^ It was for this
experience that Thomas a Kempis prayed in
one of his most Ruysbroeckian passages :
" ^^Tien shall I at full gather myself in
Thee, that for Thy love I feel not myself,

1 The Sparkling Stone, cap. x.
' Op. cit. cap. ix.

178 RUYSBROECK

but Thee only, above all feeling and all
manner, in a manner not known to all ?
It is to this same paradoxical victory-in-
surrender — ^this apparent losing which is
the only real finding— that Francis Thomp-
son invites the soul :

" To feel thyself and be
His dear nonentity —

Caught
Beyond human thought

In the thunder-spout of Him,
Until thy being dim,

And be
Dead deathlessly.''

Now here it is, in these stammered tidings
of an adventure ' far outside and beyond
our spirit,' in ' the darkness at which reason
gazes with wide eyes,' * that we must look
for the solution of that problem which all
high mystic states involve for analytic
thought : how can the human soul become
one with God ' without intermediary, be-
yond all separation," yet remain eternally
distinct from Him ? How can the ' deifica-
tion,' the ' union with God without differ-
entiation ' on which the great mystics insist,
be accepted, and pantheism be denied ?

First, we notice that in all descriptions

» The Imitation of Christ, lib. iii. cap. xxiii.
* The Twelve B^guines, cap. xiv., and The Sparkling
Stone, cap. ix.

' The Twelve B^guines, cap. xvi.

THE SUPERESSENTIAL LIFE 179

of Unity given us by the mystics, there is
a strong subjective element. Their first
concern is always with the experience of
the heart and will, not with the deductions
made by the intelligence. It is at our own
peril that we attach ontological meaning
to their convinced and vivid psychological
statements. Ruysbroeck in particular
makes this quite clear to us ; says again
and again that he has '^ felt unity without
difference and distinction,' yet that he
knows that ' otherness ' has always re-
mained, and " that this is true we can only
know by feeling it, and in no other way." ^
In certain great moments, he says, the
purified and illuminated soul which has
died into God does achieve an Essential
Stillness ; which seems to human thought
a static condition, for it is that Eternal
Now of the Godhead which embraces in
its span the whole process of Time. Here
we find nothing but God : the naked and
ultimate Fact or Superessential Being
' whence all Being has come forth,' stripped
of academic trimmings and experienced in
its white-hot intensity. Here, far beyond
the range of thought, unity and otherness,
like hunger and fulfilment, activity and
rest, can co-exist in love. The ultimate
union is a love-union, says Ruysbroeck.

1 The Sparkling Stone, cap. ix. ; cp. The Booh of Truth,
cap. xi.

180 RUYSBROECK

" The Love of God is a consuming Fire,
which draws us out of ourselves and swallows
us up in unity with God, where we are
satisfied and overflowing, and with Him,
beyond ourselves, eternally fulfilled."^

This hungry and desirous love, at once
a personal passion and a cosmic force,
drenches, transfigures and unites with the
soul, as sunlight does the air, as fire does
the iron flung into the furnace ; so that
the molten metal ' changed into another
glory ' is both iron and fire ' ever distinct
yet ever united ' — an antique image of
the Divine Union which he takes direct from
a celebrated passage in St. Bernard's works.
" As much as is iron, so much is fire ; and
as much as is fire, so much is iron ; yet the
iron doth not become fire, nor the fire iron,
but each retains its substance and nature.
So likewise the spirit of man doth not
become God, but is deified, and knows
itself breadth, length, height and depth :
and as far as God is God, so far the loving
spirit is made one with Him in love." *
The iron, the air, represent our created
essence ; the fire, the sunlight, God's Essence,
which is added to our own — our super-
essence. The two are held in a union

* The Twelve Bdguines, cap. xvi.

» Ibid. cap. xiv. ; cp. St. Bernard, De Diligendo Deo
cap. X. The same image is found in St. Macarius and
many other writers.

THE SUPERESSENTIAL LIFE 181

which, when we try to see it under the
symboUsm of space, appears a mingling,
a self-mergence ; but, when we feel it under
the symbolism of personality, is a marriage
in which the lover and beloved are ' distinct
yet united.' " Then are we one being, one
love, and one beatitude with God . . .
a joy so great and special that we cannot
even think of any other joy. For then one
is one's self a Fruition of Love, and can and
should want nothing beyond one's own." ^

It follows from all this that when the soul,
coming to the Fourth State of Fruitive
Love, enters into the Equilibrium which
supports and penetrates the flux, it does
and must reconcile the opposites which
have governed the earlier stages of its
career. The communion reached is with
a Wholeness ; the life which flows from it
must be a wholeness too. Full surrender,
harmonised with full actualisation of all
our desires and faculties ; not some thin,
abstract, vertical relation alone, but an
all-round expansion, a full, deep, rich giving
and taking, a complete correspondence
with the infinitely rich, all-demanding and
all-generous God whose " love is measure-
less for it is Himself." Thus Ruysbroeck
teaches that love static and love dynamic
must coexist for us as for Him ; that the
' eternal hunger and thirst ' of the God-

1 The Sparkling Stone, cap. xii.

182 RUYSBROECK

demanding soul continues within its ecstatic
satisfaction; because, however deeply it
may love and understand, the Divine Excess
will always baffle it. It is destined ' ever
to go forward within the Essence of God,'
to grow without ceasing deeper and deeper
into this life, in "the eternal longing to
follow after and attain Him Who is measure-
less." " And we learn this truth from
His sight : that all we taste, in comparison
with that which remains out of our reach,
is no more than a single drop of water
compared with the whole sea. . . . We
hunger for God's Infinity, which we cannot
devour, and we aspire to His Eternity,
which we cannot attain. ... In this storm
of love, our activity is above reason and
is in no wise. Love desires that which is
impossible to her ; and reason teaches that
love is within her rights, but can neither
counsel nor persuade her." ^

Hence an eternal desire and an eternal
satisfaction are preserved within the circle
of the deified life. The full-grown self
feels, in its most intense degree, the double
movement of the Divine Love and Light,
the flux and reflux ; and in its perfect and
ever-renewed responses to the ' indrawing
and outflowing attraction ' of that Tide,
the complete possession of the Superessential
Life consists.

* The Sparkling Stone, cap. x.

THE SUPERESSENTIAL LIFE 183

" The indrawing attraction drags us out
of ourselves, and calls us to be melted away
and naughted in the Unity. And in this
indrawing attraction we feel that God wills
that we should be His, and for this we must
abnegate ourselves and let our beatitude
be accomplished in Him. But when He
attracts us by flowing out towards us. He
gives us over to ourselves and makes us
free, and sets us in Time." ^

Thus is accomplished that parodoxical
synthesis of ' Eternal Rest and Eternal
Work ' which Ruysbroeck regards as the
essential character of God, and towards
which the whole of his system has been
educating the human soul. The deified or
' God-formed ' soul is for him the spirit in
which this twofold ideal is actualised:
this is the Pattern, the Likeness of God,
declared in Christ our Archetype, towards
which the Indwelling Spirit presses the
race. Though there are moments in which,
carried away as it seems by his almost in-
tolerable ecstasy, he pushes out towards
'that unwalled Fruition of God,' where all
fruition begins and ends, where ' one is all
and all is one,' and Man is himself a ' fruition
of love ' ; ^ yet he never forgets to remind
us that, as love is not love unless it looks
forward towards the creation of new life,

' The Sparkling Stone, cap. x,
* Op. cit. cap. xii.

184. RUYSBROECK

so here, " when love falls in love with love,
and each is all to the other in possession and
in rest," the object of this ecstasy is not a
permanent self-loss in the Divine Darkness,
a ' slumbering in God,' but a "new life of
virtue, such as love and its impulses de-
mand." ^ " To be a living, willing Tool of
God, wherewith God works what He will
and how He will," is the goal of transcend-
ence described in the last chapter of The
Sparkling Stone. " Then is our life a whole,
when contemplation and work dwell in us
side by side, and we are perfectly in both of
them at once " ; ^ for then the separate
spirit is immersed in, and part of, the per-
petual creative act of the Godhead — the
flowing forth and the drawing back, which
have at their base the Eternal Equilibrium,
the unbroken peace, wherein " God con-
templates Himself and all things in an
Eternal Now that has neither beginning nor
end." ^ On that Unbroken Peace the
spirit hangs; and swings like a pendulum,
in wide arcs of love and service, between
the Unconditioned and the Conditioned
Worlds.

So the Superessential Life is the simple,
the synthetic life, in which man actualises at
last all the resources of his complex being.

» op. cit. cap. xiii. ; cp. also The Seven Degrees, cap. xiv.

^ The Sparkling Stone, cap. xiv.

' The Spiritual Marriage, Jib. iii. cap. v.

THE SUPERESSENTIAL LIFE 185

The active life of response to the Temporal
Order, the contemplative life of response
to the Transcendent Order are united,
firmly held together, by that ' eternal fixa-
tion of the spirit ' ; the perpetual willed
dwelling of the being of man within the
Incomprehensible Abyss of the Being of God,
qui est per omnia saecula henedictus.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

I. Flemish Text

Werken van Jan van Ruusbroec. Ed. J. David.
6 vols. (Maetschappy der Vlaemsche Biblio-
philen). (Gent, 1858-68.)

This edition, based on the MSS. preserved at
Brussels and Ghent, and the foundation of all the
best translations, is now rare. It may be con-
sulted at the British Museum.

A re-issue of the Flemish text is nov/ in pro-
gress ; the first volume being Jan van Ruysbroeck,
Van den VII. Trappen (i.e. The Seven Degrees of
Love) met Geert Groote's latijnsche Vertaling. Ed.
Dom. Ph. MtJTLLER (Brussels, 1911).

II, Translations
A. Latin

The chief works of Ruysbroeck were early
translated into Latin, some during their author's
lifetime, and widely circulated in this form.
Three of these early translations were printed in
the sixteenth century : the De Ornatu Spiritualium
Nuptiarum of Jordaens, at Paris, in 1512 ; and the

De Septem Scalce Divini Amoris Gradibtis of Gerard

187

188 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Groot, together with the De Perfectione Filiorum
Dei (i.e. The Sparkling Stone), at Bologna, in 1538.

The standard Latin translation, however — in-
dispensable to all students of Ruysbroeck — is the
great work of the Carthusian monk, Laurentius
SuRius : D. Joannis Rusbrochii Opera Omnia
(Cologne, 1552).

This was reprinted in 1609 (the best edition),
and again in 1692. It contains all Ruysbroeck's
authentic works, and some that are doubtful;
in a translation singularly faithful to the sense of
the original, though it fails to reproduce the rugged
sublimity, the sudden lapses into crude and homely
metaphor, so characteristic of his style.

B. English

The Book of the Twelve BSguines (the first sixteen
chapters only). Translated from the Flemish,
by John Francis (London, 1913).
A useful translation of one of Ruysbroeck's

most difficult treatises.

C. French

CEuvres de Ruysbroeck r Admirable. Traduction du
Flamand par les Ben^dictins de Saint Paul
DE Wisques.

Vol. I. : Le Miroir du Salut Eternel ;

Les Sept Cldtures ; Les Sept Degres

de V^chelle d'Amour Spirituel

(Brussels, 1912, in progress).

This edition, when completed, will form the

standard text of Ruysbroeck for those unable

to read Flemish. The translation is admirably

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 189

lucid, and a short but adequate introduction
is prefixed to each work.

L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles. Traduit du
Flamandpar Maurice Maeterlinck (Brussels,
1900).
This celebrated book, still more its beautiful
though unreliable introduction, is chiefly re-
sponsible for the modern interest in Ruysbroeck.
The translation, exquisite as French prose, over-
emphasises the esoteric element in his teaching.
Those unable to read Flemish should check it by
Lambert's German text (see below).

Vie de Rusbroch suivie de son Traitd des Sept

Degr6s de V Amour. Traduction litierale du

Texte Flamand-Latin, par R. Chamonal

(Paris, 1909). Traitd du Royaume des Amants

de Dieu. Traduit par R. Chamonal (Paris,

1911). De la Vraie Contemplation (i.e. The

Twelve Biguines). Traduit par R. Chamonal.

3 vols. (Paris, 1912).

These are the first volumes of a proposed complete

translation; which is, however, far from literal,

and replaces the rough vigour of the original by

the insipid language of conventional French piety.

Livre des XII. Biguines ou de la Vraie Contempla-
tion (first sixteen chapters only). Traduit
du Flamand, avec Introduction, par L'Abbe
P. CuYLiTS (Brussels, 1909).
This also contains a French version of the Vita
of Pomerius. The translator is specially successful
in rendering the peculiar quality of Ruysbroeck's
verse ; but the statements in his introduction must
be accepted with reserve.

190 BIBLIOGKAPHICAL NOTE

D. German

Drei Schrifien des Mystikers Johann van Ruys-
broeck, aus dem Vl&mischen Uhersetzt von
Franz A. Lambert (Leipzig, 1902).

A vigorous and accurate translation of The
Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, The Sparkling
Stone and The Book of Supreme Truth.

Ruysbroeck translates better into German than
into any other language ; and this volume is
strongly recommended to all who can read that
tongue.

III. Selections

Rusbrock V Admirable: CEuvres Choisies. Traduit
par E. Hello (Paris, 1902).
A series of short passages, paraphrased {not
translated) from the Latin of Surius. There are
two English versions of this unsatisfactory book,
the second being the best :

Reflections from the Mirror of a Mystic.
Translated by Earle Baillie (London,
1905).
Flowers of a Mystic Garden. Translated by
C. E. S. (London, 1912).

Life, Light, and Love : Selections from the German
Mystics. By the Very Rev. W. R. Inge,
D.D., Dean of St. Paul's (London, 1905).
Contains an abridged version of The Adornment

of the Spiritual Marriage.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 191

Biography and Criticism
{A Selection)

Auger, A. — De Doctrina et Mentis Joannis van
Ruysbroeck (Louvain, 1892).

Engelhaedt, J. G. VON. — Richard von St. Victor
und J. Ruysbroeck (Erlangen, 1838).
Useful for tracing the correspondences between
the Victorines and Ruysbroeck.

Maeterlinck, Maurice.- — Ruysbroeck and the
Mystics. Translated by Jane Stoddart
(London, 1908).
An English version of the Introduction to
L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, above-men-
tioned; with many fine passages translated from
Ruysbroeck's other works.

Pomerius, H. — De Origine Monasterii Viridisvallis
una cum Vitis Joannis Rusbrochii.
Printed in Analecta Bollandiana, vol. iv.
(Brussels, 1885). The chief authority for all
biographical facts.

Scully, Dom Vincent. — A Mediceval Mystic
(London, 1910).
A biographical account, founded on Pomerius,
with a short analysis of Ruysbroeck's works.
Popular and uncritical.

Vreese, Dr. W. L. de. — Jean de Ruysbroeck
(Biographie Nationale de Belgique, vol. xx.)
(Brussels, 1907).
An important and authoritative article with

192 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

analysis of all Ruysbroeck's works and full biblio-
graphy.

Bijdragen tot de Kennis van het Leven en de

Werken van Jan van Ruusbroec (Gent, 1896).
Contains Gerard Naghel's sketch of Ruysbroeck's
life, with other useful material.

De Handschriften van Jan van Ruushroec's

Werken. 2 vols. (Gent, 1900).
An important and scholarly study of the manu-
script sources by the greatest living authority.

Notices of Ruysbroeck will be found in the

following works : —

Auger, A. — Etude sur les Mystiques des Pays Bas
an Moyen Age (Acadimie Royale de Belgique,
vol. xlvi., 1892).

Fleming, W. K. — Mysticism in Christianity
(London, 1913).

Inge, Very Rev. W. R., D.D., Dean of St. Paul's.—
Christian Mysticism (London, 1899).

Jones, Dr. Rufus M. — Studies in Mystical Re-
ligion (London, 1909).

Applications of his doctrine to the spiritual life

in : —

Baker, Venerable Augustin. — Holy Wisdom ;
or Directions for the Prayer of Contemplation
(London, 1908).

Blosius, F. V. — Book of Spiritual Instruction
(London, 1900); A Mirror for Monks
(London, 1901); Comfort for the Faint-
hearted (London, 1903); Sanctuary of the
Faithful Soul (London, 1905).

Denis the Carthusian. — Opera Omnia (Monstrolii,
1896), in progress.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 193

Petersen, Gerlac. — The Fiery Soliloquy with

God (London, 1872).
PouLAiN, Aug., S.J. — The Graces of Interior

Prayer (London, 1910).
Underhill,E. — Mysticism, 5th ed. (London, 1914).

Influences

Much light is thrown on Ruysbroeck's doctrine
by a study of the authors who influenced him ;
especially :
St. Augustine ; Migne, P.L., xxvii.-xlvii. ; Eng.

Trans., edited by M. Dods (Edinburgh, 1876).
DiONYSius THE Areopagite ; MiGNE, P.G., iii., iv. ;

Eng. Trans., by Parker (Oxford, 1897).
Hugh and Richard of St. Victor ; Migne,

P.L., clxxv.-clxxvii. and cxcvi.
St, Bernard ; Migne, P.L., clxxxii.-clxxxv. ;

Eng. Trans., by Eales (London, 1889-96).
St. Thomas Aquinas ; Opera (Romse, 1882-1906);

Eng. Trans., by the Dominican Fathers (in

progress).
St. Bona VENTURA ; Opera (Paris, 1864-71).
Meister Eckhart ; Schriflen und Predigten

(Leipzig, 1903).
Suso ; Schriften, ed. Denifle (Munich, 1876).

Eng. Trans., Life, ed. by W. R. Inge (London,

1913); Book of Eternal Wisdom (London,

1910).
Tauler, Predigten (Prague, 1872) ; Eng. Trans.,

Twenty-five Sermons, trans, by Winkworth

(London, 1906); The Inner Way, edited by

A. W. Hutton (London, 1909).

13

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The Way of the Spirit in Ancient China.

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Spiritual Reality in Progressive Buddhism.

The Ideal Life in Progressive Buddhism.

Some Features of Buddhist Psychology.

The Doctrine of Reincarnation Ethically Con-
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Some Mystical Experiments on the Frontiers of
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The Meaning of Gnosis in the Higher Forms of
Hellenistic Religion.

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The Rising Psychic Tide.

Vaihinger's Philosophy of the 'As If.'

Bergson's Intuitionism.

Euckkn's Activism.

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