composite book of eighty-four chapters, which apparently consists of

composite book of eighty-four chapters, which apparently consists of

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 Ruysbroeck 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 growing soul: union by means of sacraments and good deeds; union achieved in contemplative 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 Béguines ( De Vera Contemplatione ). - This is a long, composite book of eighty-four chapters, which apparently consists of at least three distinct treatises of different dates. The first, The Twelve Béguines, 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 development of the spiritual consciousness described with greater subtlety. The soul's communion with and feeding on the Divine Nature in the Eucharist and in contemplative 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 seventeenth chapter begins a new treatise, with a description of the Active Life on Ruysbroeck's usual lines; and at the thirtieth there is again a complete change of subject, introducing a mystical and symbolic interpretation of the science of astronomy. This section, so unlike his later writings, somewhat 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 to the Seven Hours of the Roman Breviary (capp. lxxiii. to end), completes the book.

CHAPTER III; HIS DOCTRINE OF GOD "My words are strange; but those who love will understand." 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 formulæ of existing theology are felt to be enough. Visions of Christ, experiences of the Blessed Trinity - these are sufficient names for the personal and impersonal aspects of that Reality with which the contemplative seeks to unite. But the 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 subjective 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 metaphysical passion of the philosopher and the poet; and in his work he is ever pressing towards more exact description, more suggestive 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 infinite 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 fragmentary intimations of Reality crystallised in the formulæ of faith. For them, as for St. Augustine, God is both near and far; and the

paradox of transcendent-immanent Reality is a self-evident if an inexpressible truth. They swing between hushed adoration 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 incarnational 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 transcendental too. Nor is this result obtained - as it sometimes 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 fundamental 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 Reality, 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 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 towards 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 exploration of Ruysbroeck's doctrine by trying to discover the character of his vision of the Divine Nature, and man's relation with it. That vision is so wide, deep and searching, that only by resort to the language of opposites, by perpetual alternations of spatial and personal, metaphysical and passionate speech, is he able to communicate it to us. His fortunate and profound acquaintance with the science of theology - his contact through it with the formulæ 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 the inspiration of his 'simple and ignorant monk,' he entirely fails to observe the traditional character of the formulæ which express it. No student of the mystics will deny the abundant inspiration by which Ruysbroeck was possessed; but this inspiration 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 informs the soul; opens the door to experience, but does not convey any accurate 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 outwardly, we must use images, in truth that which is inwardly perceived and beheld is nought else but a Fathomless and Unconditioned 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 synthetic 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 Ruysbroeck's thought. He is, then, the Absolute One, in whom the antithesis of Eternity and Time, of Being and Becoming, is resolved; both static and dynamic, transcendent and immanent, impersonal and personal, undifferentiated and differentiated; Eternal Rest and Eternal Work, the Unmoved Mover, yet Movement itself. "Although in our way of seeing we give God many names, His nature is One." He transcends the storm of succession, yet 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 'fruitful' nature to His simple essence - and 'simple' is here and throughout to be understood in its primal meaning of 'synthetic' - 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," - an idea, familiar to Indian mysticism and implicit in Christian Neo-platonism, 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 differentiation, 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 aridity of theological argument to the fruitfulness 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 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 whom 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 fathomless 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 true character of the Holy Spirit; the Incomprehensible Love and Generosity of the Divine Nature, which emanates in 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 universe. 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 transcendence 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, recreates 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 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 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, 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, Unconditioned Dark, the Nameless Being, the Super-essence of all created things, and the simple and infinite Bliss of God and of all Saints." Here he brings us to the position of Dante in the last canto of the Paradiso, when, transcending those partial apprehensions of Reality which are figured by the River of Becoming and the Rose of Beatitude, 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 limitless in its immensity, and transcending 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 envelops and irradiates both the natural tendency of our ground (its dynamic movement to God - the River) and the fruitive adherence of God and all those who are united with Him in this Light (Eternal Being - the Rose). And this is the union of God and the souls that love Him."

CHAPTER IV; HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN "That which was begun by Grace, is accomplished by Grace and Freewill; 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 - gives 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 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 interpenetration 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 understanding 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 comprehension: man's fragmentary share in the character of the Logos, or Wisdom of 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 Christliness in virtue of which we have power to become 'Sons' of God. "Lo! 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 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 perpetually beating in on him, feeding perpetually on the substance of God, perpetually 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 synthesis 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 contemplative; 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 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 evolution 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 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 homewardtending 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, 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 therefrom. But such a diagram cannot express to us the rich content, the deeply personal character of his experience and his knowledge. 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 mysterious 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 language. His theology is above all the theology 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 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 giving and taking - it is its very property, says Ruysbroeck, '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 conscious 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 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 selfdonation 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 communion of deep prayer. "Every time we think with love of the Wellbeloved, 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. "You will not change Me into your own substance, as you change the food of your flesh, but you will 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. 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, What am I?" For Ruysbroeck, 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? In the same way, says Ruysbroeck, as the child achieves the world of manhood: by the double method of growth and education, 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, dependent 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 reality: the Active, the Interior, and the Superessential Life, sometimes symbolised by the conditions of Servant, Friend, and Son of God. These, however, must be regarded rather as divisions made for convenience of description, answering to those divisions which thought has made in the indivisible fact of the universe, than as distinctions inherent in the reality of things. The spiritual life 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 even the 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 consciousness, 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 ordinary 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 'attention to God.' Thence results the highest life which is attainable by 'nature.' In it, man 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 'Faithful 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 Contemplative or Interior Life, and is achieved in the deep state of recollection called 'unitive prayer.' Here voluntary and purposive education takes its place by the side of organic development. The way called by most ascetic writers 'Illumination' - 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 disciplines of the active life purified will and sense. It teaches introversion, or the turning inward of the attention from the distractions of the sense-world; the cleansing of the mirror of thought, thronged with confusing images; the production of that 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 included 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, renewal, re-emergence. Sometimes Ruysbroeck appears to see this central stage in the spiritual lifeprocess in terms of upward growth toward transcendent levels; sometimes 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 conceiving 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 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 detected 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 compared 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 focussed upon Reality. This training is needed by intellect and feeling; but most of all by the will, which Ruysbroeck, like the great English mystics, regards as the gatheringpoint 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 characterise 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 consciousness, the stripping off of all images and emptying of the mind, which is the psychological method whereby human consciousness 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 attachments must be cut before the new attachments can be formed. This is, of course, a commonplace of asceticism; and much of Ruysbroeck's teaching on detachment, selfnaughting and contemplation, is indeed simply the standard doctrine of Christian asceticism seen through a temperament. When the self has grown up from the 'active' to the 'contemplative' state of consciousness, 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 throughout Ruysbroeck's works. (C) When 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 Ruysbroeck, 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 complete, 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) Ruysbroeck 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 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 selfhood, 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 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 activities of the sense-life, and again reenter 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 fathomless word 'Behold! behold!'" and "therewith giving utterance to itself and all other things" - yet evokes only in some men an 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 thoroughly 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 understand and lay hold of God as He is in Himself above all images - this is to be 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 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 philosophy has brought back into current thought, represents a total attainment, complete and permanent participation and possession. It is an absolute state, transcending all succession, and it is applied by Ruysbroeck to the absolute character of the spirit's life in God; which, though it seem to the surface consciousness a perpetually renewed encounter of love, is in its ground 'fruitive and unconditioned,' 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 loving dependence are the eternal fruition of God': the Beatific Vision of theology. "Where we are one with God, without intermediary, 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 descriptions of spiritual states, always conveys the sense of wholeness, completeness, synthesis; not of poverty, thinness, subtraction. It is the white light in which all the

colours of the spectrum are included and fused. 'Simple Union,' 'Simple Contemplation,' 'Simple Light' - all these mean the total undifferentiated act or perception from which our analytic minds subtract aspects. "In simplicity will I unite with the Simple One," said Kabir. So Ruysbroeck: "We behold His face in a simple seeing, beyond reason and without consideration." Another cause of difficulty to those unfamiliar with the mystics is the constant reference to Bareness 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 probably taken by Ruysbroeck from Dionysius the Areopagite. It represents, first, the bewildering emptiness and nakedness of consciousness when introduced into a universe that transcends our ordinary conceptual world; secondly, the necessity of such transcendence, of emptying the field of consciousness of 'every vain imagining,' if the self is to have contact with the Reality which these veil. With the distinction between Essence (Wesen) and Superessence (Overwesen) I have 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 colloquial 'somehow' and 'nohow' would be yet more exactly expressive. Now this pair of opposites is psychological rather than metaphysical, and has to do with the characteristic phenomena of contemplation. It indicates the difference between the universe of the normal man, living as the servant or friend of God within the temporal order, and the universe of the true contemplative, the 'hidden child.' The knowledge and love of the first is a conditioned knowledge and love. Everything which happens to him happens 'in some wise'; it has

attachments within his conceptual world, is mediated to him by symbols and images which intellect can grasp. "The simple ascent into the Nude and the Unconditioned is unknown and unloved of him"; it is through and amongst his ordinary mental furniture 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 'wayless,' yet far more valid than anything that can be fitted into the framework of our conditioned world. "In a place beyond uttermost place, in a track without shadow of trace, Soul and body transcending, I live in the soul of my Loved One anew." 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 'unwalled,' to use his own favourite metaphor - is the essence of contemplation; which consists, not in looking at strange mysteries, but in a movement to fresh levels, shut to the analytic intellect, open to adventurous love. There, without any amazement, the self can 'know in no wise' that which it can never understand.

"Contemplation is a knowing that is in no wise, For ever dwelling above the Reason. Never can it sink down into the Reason, And above it can the Reason never climb. The shining forth of That which is in no wise is as a fair mirror. Wherein shines the Eternal Light of God.

It has no attributes, And here all the works of Reason fail. It is not God, But it is the Light whereby we see Him. Those who walk in the Divine Light of 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."

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 perpetually beats in upon the soul. When man consents to receive it, opens the sluices of the heart to that living water, surrenders to it; then he opens his heart and will to the impact of Reality, his eyes to the Divine Light, and in this energetic movement of acceptance begins for the first time to live indeed. Hence it is that, in the varied ethical systems which we find in his books, and which describe the active crescent life of Christian virtue, the laborious adjustment of character to the Vision of God, Ruysbroeck always puts first the virtue, or rather the attitude, which he 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 turned towards the best the beginning of human transcendence, and regards willing and loving as the essence of life. Basing his psychology on the common mediæval scheme of Memory, Intelligence and Will, he speaks of this last as the king of the soul; dominating both the other powers, and able to gather them in its clutch, force them to attend to the invitations and messages of the eternal world. Thus in his system the demand upon man's industry and courage is made from the very first. The great mystical necessity of self-surrender is shown to involve, not a limp acquiescence, but a deliberate and heroic choice;

the difficult approximation of our own thoughts and desires to the thoughts and desires of Divine Reality. "When we have but one thought and one will with God, we are on the first step of the ladder of love and of sanctity; for good-will is the foundation of all virtue." 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 comes; go 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 out!' for the essence of love is generous, outflowing, expansive, an "upward and outward tendency towards the Kingdom of God, which is God Himself." This outgoing, this concrete act of response, will at once change and condition our correspondences with and attitude towards God, ourselves and our neighbours; expressing itself within the world of action in a new ardour for perfection - the natural result of the 'loving vision of the Bridegroom,' the self's first glimpse of Perfect Goodness and Truth. We observe the continued insistence on effort, act, as the very heart of all true self-giving to transcendent interests. Whilst in the volitional life drastic readjustments, stern characterbuilding, and eager work are the expression of goodwill, in the emotional life it is felt as a profound impulse to self-surrender: a loving yielding up of the whole personality to the inflow and purging activities of the Absolute Life. "This goodwill is nought else but the infused Love of God, which causes him to apply himself to Divine things and all virtues; when it turns towards God, it crowns the spirit with Eternal Love, and when it returns to outward things it rules as a

mistress over his external good deeds." We have here, then, a disposition of heart and mind which both receives and responds to the messages of Reality; making it possible for the self to begin to grow in the right direction, to enter into possession of its twofold heritage. That completely human life of activity and contemplation which moves freely up and down the ladder of love between the temporal and eternal worlds, and reproduces in little the ideal of Divine Humanity declared in Christ, is the ideal towards which it is set; and already, even in this lowest phase, the double movement of the awakened consciousness begins to show itself. Our love and will, firmly fastened in the Eternal World, are to swing like a pendulum between the seen and the unseen spheres; in great ascending arcs of balanced adoration and service, which shall bring all the noblest elements of human character into play. Therefore the pivoting of life upon Divine Reality, which is the result of good-will - the setting up of a right relation with the universe - is inevitably the first condition of virtue, the 'root of sanctity,' the beginning of spiritual growth, the act which makes man free; translating him, in Ruysbroeck's image, from the state of the slave to that of the conscious and willing servant of Eternal Truth. "From the hour in which, with God's help, he transcends his self-hood ... he feels true love, which overcomes doubt and fear and makes man 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 selfhood, makes - of his own free choice, by his own effort - his first timid upward beat to God; and, following swiftly upon it, the compensating outward beat of charity towards his fellow-men. We observe how tight a hold has this most transcendental of the mystics on the wholeness of all healthy human life: the mutual support and interpenetration of the active and contemplative powers. 'Other-worldliness' is decisively contradicted from the first. It is the appearance of this eager active charity - this imitation in little of the energetic Love of God - which assures us that the first stage of the self's growth is rightly accomplished; completing its first outward push in that new direction to which its good-will is turned. "For charity ever presses towards the heights, towards the Kingdom of God, the which is God Himself."

In the practical counsels given to the young novice to whom The Mirror of Salvation is addressed, we may see Ruysbroeck's ideal of that active life of selfdiscipline and service which the soul has now set in hand; and which he describes in greater 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' without hesitations or reserves; and this dedication to the interests of Reality must be untainted by any spiritual selfishness, any hint of that insidious desire for personal beatitude which 'fades the flower of true love.' This done, selfconquest and self-control become the novice's primary duties: the gradual subduing and rearrangement of character about its new centre, the elimination of all tendencies inimical to the demands of Eternal Life; the firm establishment upon its throne of that true freewill which desires only God's will. This self-conquest, the essence of the 'Way of Purgation,' as described and experienced by so many ascetics and mystics, includes not only the eradication of sins, but the training of the attention, the adaptation of consciousness to its new environment; the killing-out of inclinations which, harmless in themselves, compete with the one transcendent interest of life. Like all great mystics, Ruysbroeck had a strong 'sense of sin.' This is merely a theological way of stating the fact that his intense realisation of Perfection involved a vivid consciousness of the imperfections, disharmonies, perversities, implicit in the 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 mediæval ascetics. His attitude towards character was affirmative and robust; emphasising the possibilities rather than the disabilities of man. Sin, for him, was egotism; showing itself in the manifold forms of pride, laziness, selfindulgence, coldness of heart, or spiritual self-seeking, but always implying a central wrongness of attitude, resulting in a wrong employment of power. Selfdenials and bodily mortifications he regarded partly as exercises in self-control - spiritual athletics - useful because educative of the will; partly as expressions of love. At best they are but the means of sanctity, and never to be confused with

its end; for the man who deliberately passed the greater part of his life in the bustle of the town was no advocate of a cloistered virtue or a narrow perfectionism. Morbid piety is often the product of physical as well as spiritual stuffiness; and Ruysbroeck wrote his great books out of doors, with light and air all round him, and the rhythmic life of trees to remind him how much stronger was the quiet law of growth than any atavism, accident, or perversion by which it could be checked. Thus, throughout his works, the accent always falls upon power rather than weakness: upon the spiritual energy pouring in like sunshine; the incessant growth which love sets going; the perpetual rebirths to ever higher levels, as the young sapling stretches upward every spring. What he asks of the novice is contrition without anxiety, selfdiscipline without fuss; the steady, allround development of her personality, stretching and growing towards God. She is to be the mistress of her soul, never permitting it to be drawn hither and thither by the distractions and duties of external life. Keeping always in the atmosphere of Reality, she shall bring therefrom truth and frankness to all her words and deeds; and perform her duties with that right and healthy detachment which springs, not from a contempt of the Many, but from the secure and loving possession of the One. The disciplines to which she must subject herself in the effort towards attainment of this poise, will, like a wise gymnastic, produce in her a suppleness of soul; making the constant and inevitable transition from interior communion to outward work, which charity and good sense demand, easy and natural, and causing the spirit to be plastic in the hand of God. Such suppleness - the lightness and lissomeness which comes from spiritual muscles exercised and controlled - was one of the favourite qualities of that wise trainer of character, St. François de Sales; and the many small and irritating mortifications with which he was accustomed to torment his disciples had no other aim than to produce it. In the stage of development to which the Active Life belongs, the soul enjoys communion with Reality, not with that directness proper to the true contemplative, but obliquely, by 'means,' symbols and images; especially by the sacramental dispensation of the Church, a subject to

which Ruysbroeck devotes great attention. As always in his system, growth from within is intimately connected with the reception of food and power from without. The movement of the self into God, the movement of God into the self, though separable in thought, are one in fact: will and grace are two aspects of one truth. Only this paradox can express the relation between that Divine Love which is 'both avid and generous,' and the self that is destined both to devour and be devoured by Reality. In the beautiful chapters on the Eucharist which form the special feature 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 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 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 "whoever might truly see and feel

himself as he is, he should truly be meek." This clear acknowledgement of facts, this finding of one's own place, Ruysbroeck calls 'the solid foundation of the Kingdom of the Soul.' In thus discerning love and humility as the governing characteristics of the soul's reaction to Reality, he is of course keeping close to the great tradition of Christian mysticism; especially to the teaching of Richard of St. Victor, which we find constantly repeated in the ascetic literature of the Middle Ages. From these two virtues, then, of humble self-knowledge and Godcentred love, are gradually developed all those graces of character which 'adorn the soul for the spiritual marriage,' mark her ascent of the first degrees of the 'ladder of love,' and make possible the perfecting of her correspondences with the 'Kingdom.' This development follows an orderly course, as subject to law as the unfolding of the leaves and flowers upon the growing plant; and though Ruysbroeck in his various works uses different diagrams wherewith to explain it, the psychological changes which these diagrams demonstrate are substantially the same. In each case we watch the opening of man's manypetalled 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 threefold monastic vow of voluntary poverty or perfect renunciation, chastity or singleness of heart, and obedience or true humility in action, by which she is bound. When the reality which these vows express is actualised in the soul, and dominates all her reactions to the world, she wears the 'crown of virtue'; and lives that 'noble life' ruled by the purified and enhanced will, purged of all selfish desires and distractions, which - seeking in all things the interests of the spiritual world - is 'full of love and charity, and industrious in good works.' In The Spiritual Marriage a more elaborate analysis is possible; based upon that division of man's moral perversities into the 'seven mortal sins' or seven fundamental forms of selfishness, which governed, and governs yet, the Catholic view of human character. After a preliminary passage in which the triple attitude of love as towards 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 positive qualities which oppose the seven great abuses of human freedom. As Pride is first and worst of mortal sins and follies, so its antithesis Humility is again put forward as the first condition of communion with God. This produces in the emotional life an attitude of loving adoration; in the volitional life, obedience. 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 prohibitions of moral and spiritual law, the interior push of conscience. This attitude, at first deliberately assumed, gradually controls all the self's reactions, and ends by subduing it entirely to the Divine purpose. "Of this obedience there grows the abdication of one's own will and one's own opinion; ... by this abdication of the will in all that one does, or does not do, or endures, the substance and occasion of pride are wholly driven out, and the highest humility is perfected." This movement of renunciation brings - next phase in the unselfing of the self - a compensating 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; gentleness , which "with peace and calm bears vexatious words and deeds"; kindness , which deals with the quarrelsome and irritable by means of "a friendly countenance, affectionate persuasion and compassionate acts"; 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 fourfold increase in disinterested love is summed up in the condition which Ruysbroeck calls supernatural generosity ; that largeness of heart which flows out towards the generosity of God, which is swayed by pity and love, which embraces all men in its sweep. By this energetic love which seeks not its own, "all virtues are increased, and all the powers of the spirit are adorned"; and Avarice, the fourth great mortal sin, is opposed. Generosity is no mere mood; it is a motive-force, demanding expression in action. From the emotions, it invades the will, and produces diligence and zeal : an 'inward and impatient eagerness' for every kind of work, and for the hard practice of every kind of virtue,

which makes impossible that slackness and dullness of 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 Perfection; has opposed, one after another, each of those exhibitions of the self's tendency to curl inwards, to fence itself in and demand, absorb, enjoy as a separate entity, which lie at the root of sin. The constructive side of the Purgative Way has consisted in the replacement of this egoistic, indrawing energy by these outflowing energies of self-surrender, kindness, diligence and the rest; summed up in that perfection of humility and love, which "in all its works, and always, stretches out towards God." The first three gifts of the Holy Spirit are possessed by the soul which has reached this point, says Ruysbroeck 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 discernment of right and prudent conduct which checks the disastrous tendency to moral fussiness, helps man to conform his life to supreme Perfection, and gives the calmness and balance which are essential to a sane and manly spirituality. Thus the new life-force has invaded and affected will, feeling and intellect; raised the whole man to fresh levels of existence, and made possible fresh correspondences with Reality. "Hereby are the three lower powers of the soul adorned with Divine virtues. The Irascible (i.e. volitional and dynamic) is adorned with loving and filial fear, humility, obedience and renunciation. The

Desirous is adorned with kindness, pity, compassion and generosity. Finally, the Reasonable with knowledge and discernment, and that prudence which regulates all things." The ideal of character held out and described under varying metaphors in Ruysbroeck's different works, is thus seen to be a perfectly consistent one. Now when the growing self has actualised this ideal, and lives the Active Life of the faithful servant of Reality, it begins to feel an ardent desire for some more direct encounter with That which it loves. Since it has now acquired the 'ornaments of the virtues' - cleansed its mirror, ordered its disordered loves - this encounter may and does in a certain sense take place; for every Godward movement of the human is met by a compensating movement of the Divine. Man now begins to find God in all things: in nature, in the soul, in works of charity. But in the turmoil and bustle of the Active Life such an encounter is at best indirect; a sidelong glimpse of the 'first and only Fair.' That vision can only be apprehended in its wholeness by a concentration of all the powers of the self. If we would look the Absolute in the eyes, we must look at nothing else; the complete opening of the eye of Eternity entails the closing of the eye of Time. Man, then, must abstract himself from multiplicity, if only for a moment, if he would catch sight of the unspeakable Simplicity of the Real. Longing to 'know the nature of the Beloved,' he must act as Zacchæus did when he wished to see Christ: "He must run before the crowd, that is to say the multiplicity of created things; for these make us so little and low that we cannot perceive God. And he must climb up on the Tree of Faith, which grows from above downwards, for its root is in the Godhead. This tree has twelve branches, which are the twelve articles of the Creed. The lower branches speak of the Humanity of God; ... the upper branches, however, speak of the Godhead: of the Trinity of Persons and the Unity of the Divine Nature. Man must cling to the Unity which is at the top of the tree, for it is here that Jesus will pass by with all His gifts. And now Jesus comes, and He sees man, and shows him in the light of faith that He is, according to His Divinity, unmeasured and incomprehensible, inaccessible and fathomless, and that He overpasses all created light and all finite comprehension. This is the highest knowledge of God which man can acquire in the Active Life: thus to recognise by the light

of faith that God is inconceivable and unknowable. In this light God says to the desire of man: "Come down quickly, for I would dwell in your house to-day." And this quick descent, to which God invites him, is nought else but a descent, by love and desire, into the Abyss of the Godhead, to which no intellect can attain by its created light. But here, where intellect must rest without, love and desire may enter in. When the soul thus leans upon God by intention and love, above all that she understands, then she rests and dwells in God, and God in her. When the soul mounts up by desire, above the multiplicity of things, above the activities of the senses and above the light of external nature, then she encounters Christ by the light of faith, and is illuminated; and she recognises that God is unknowable and inconceivable. Finally, stretching by desire towards this incomprehensible God, she meets Christ and is fulfilled with His gifts. And loving and resting above all gifts, above herself and above all things, she dwells in God and God in her. According to this manner Christ may be encountered upon the summit of the Active Life." 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 selfsurrendered 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 but poverty; above all, an eager and industrious love. "A fiery flame of devotion leaping and ascending into the very goodness of God Himself, A loving longing of the soul to be with God in His Eternity, A turning from all things of self into the freedom of the Will of God; With all the forces of the soul gathered into the unity of the spirit."

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. " (Richard of St. Victor. ) It is plain that the Active Life in Ruysbroeck's system answers more or less to the Purgative Way, considered upon its affirmative and constructive side, as a building up of the heroic Christian character. So, too, the life which he calls Interior or Contemplative, and which initiates man into the friendship of God, corresponds in the main with the Illuminative Way of orthodox mysticism; though it includes in its later stages much that is usually held to belong to the third, or Unitive, state of the soul. The first life has, as it were, unfolded to the sunlight the outer petals of the mystic rose; exhibiting in their full beauty, adjusting to their true use, the normally-apparent constituents of man's personality. All his relations with the given world of sense, the sphere of Becoming, have been purified and adjusted. Now the expansive and educative influence of the Divine Light is able to penetrate nearer to the heart of his personality; is brought to bear upon those interior qualities which he hardly knows himself to possess, and which govern his relation with the spiritual world of Being. The flower is to open more widely; the inner ring of petals must uncurl. As the primary interest of the Active Life was ethical purification, so the primary interest of this Second Life is intellectual purification. Intellect, however, is here to be understood in its highest sense; as including not only the analytic reason which deals with the problems of our normal universe, but that higher intelligence, that contemplative mind, which - once it is awakened to consciousness - can gather news of the transcendental world. The development and clarification of this power is only possible to those who have achieved, and continue to live at full stretch, the high, arduous and unselfish life of Christian 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, heightening and enriching of human experience. As the author of The Cloud of Unknowing insists that none can be truly contemplative who is not also active, so Ruysbroeck says that no man ever rises above the ordinary obligations of Christian kindness and active good works. "We find nowadays many silly men who would be so interior and so detached, that they will not be active or helpful in any way of which their neighbours are in need. Know, such men are neither hidden friends nor yet true servants of God, but are wholly false and disloyal; for none can follow His counsels but those who obey His laws." 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 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 enlarging of man's universe, together with the further and more drastic discarding of illusions and unrealities, is the business of the Second Life, considered on its impersonal side. "If you desire to unfold in yourself the Contemplative Life, you must enter within, beyond the sense-life; and, on that apex of your being, adorned with all the virtues of which I have spoken, looking to God with gratitude and love and continual reverence, you must keep your thoughts bare, and stripped of every sensible image, your understanding open and lifted up to the Eternal Truth, and your spirit spread out in the sight of God as a living mirror to receive His everlasting likeness. Behold, therein appears a light of the understanding, which neither sense, reason, nature, nor the clearest logic can apprehend, but which gives us freedom and confidence towards God. It is nobler and higher than all that God has created in

nature; for it is the perfection of nature, and transcends nature, and is the clear-shining intermediary between ourselves and God. Our thoughts, bare and stripped of images, are themselves 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 epitomised; 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 experienced, by Ruysbroeck, can be divided into three great phases. We might call these Action, Reaction and Equilibrium. Broadly speaking, they answer to the Illumination, Dark Night and Simple Union of orthodox mystical science. Yet since in his vivid description of these linked states he constantly departs from the formulæ of his predecessors, and as constantly illustrates their statements by intimate and homely touches only possible to one who has endured the adventures of which he tells, we are justified in claiming the description as the fruit of experience rather than of tradition; and as evidence of the course taken by his own development. It is surely upon his own memory that he is relying, when he tells us that the beginning of this new life possesses something of the abrupt character of a second conversion. It happens, he says, when we least expect it; when the self, after the long tension and struggle of moral purgation, has become drowsy and tired. Then, suddenly, "a spiritual cry echoes through the soul," announcing a new encounter with Reality, and demanding a new response; or, to put it in another way, consciousness on its ascending spiral has pushed through to another level of existence, where it can hear voices and discern visions to which it was deaf and blind before. This sudden clarity of mind, this new vivid apprehension of Divine Love, is the first indication of man's entrance on the Illuminative Way. It is introversive rather than out-going in type. Changing the character

of our attention to life, we discern within us something which we have always possessed and always ignored: a secret Divine energy, which is now to emerge from the subconscious deeps into the area of consciousness. There it stimulates the will, evicts all lesser images and interests from the heart, and concentrates all the faculties into a single and intense state, pressing towards the Unity of God, the synthetic experience of love; for perpetual movement towards that unity - not achievement of it - is the mark of this Second Life, in which the separation of God and the soul remains intact. In Victorine language, it is the period of spiritual betrothal, not of spiritual marriage; of a vision which, though wide, rich and wonderful, is mirrored rather than direct. The new God-inspired movement, then, begins within, like a spring bubbling from the deeps; and thrusts up and out to the consciousness which it is destined to clarify and enhance. "The stream of Divine grace swiftly stirs and moves a man inwardly, and from within outwards; and this swift stirring is the first thing that makes 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 growing self. But the liberty here spoken of has 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 detachment of heart, that self-naughting, which makes him equally willing to have joy or pain, gain or loss, esteem or contempt, peace or fear, as the Divine Will may ordain. Thus is perfected that suppleness of soul which he began to acquire in the Active Life: a gradual process, which needs for its accomplishment the negative rhythm of renunciation, testing the manliness and courage of the self, as well as the positive movement of love. Hence the Contemplative Life, as Ruysbroeck knows and describes it, has, and must have, its state of pain as well as its state of joy. With him, however, as with nearly all the mystics, the state of joy

comes first: the glad and eager reaction to those new levels of spiritual reality disclosed to consciousness when the struggles and readjustments of the Active Life have done their work. This is the phase in the self's progress which mystical writers properly mean by Illumination: a condition of great happiness, and of an intuition of Reality so vivid and joyous, that the soul often supposes that she has here reached the goal of her quest. It is in the spiritual year, says Ruysbroeck, that which the month of May is in the seasons of the earth: a wholesome and necessary time 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 sweetness' blossoms in new and lovely graces. Illumination is an unstable period. The sun is rising swiftly in the heaven of man's consciousness; and as it increases in power, so it calls forth on the soul's part greater ardours, more intense emotional reactions. Once more the flux of God is demanding its reflux. The soul, like the growing boy suddenly made aware of the beauty, romance and wonder - the intense and irresistible appeal - of a world that had seemed ordinary before, flows out towards this new universe with all the enthusiasm and eagerness of its young fresh powers. Those powers are so new to it, that it cannot yet control or understand them. Vigorous and ungovernable, they invade by turns the heart, the will, the mind, as do the fevers and joys of physical adolescence; inciting to acts and satisfactions for which the whole self is hardly ready yet. "Then is thrown wide," says Ruysbroeck, "the heaven which was shut, and from the face of Divine Love there blazes down a sudden light, as it were a lightning flash." In the meeting of this inward and outward spiritual force - the Divine Light without, the growing Divine Spark within - there is great joy. Ecstasy, and that state of musical rapture, exceeding the possibilities of speech, which Ruysbroeck like Richard Rolle calls 'ghostly song,' are the natural self-expressions of the soul in this moment of its career. In more than one book we find references to this ecstatic period: a period so strongly marked in his own case, that it became for him - though he was under no illusions as to its permanent value - one of the landmarks in man's journey to his home. Looking back on it in

later life, he sees in it two great phases, of which the earlier and lower at any rate is dangerous and easily misunderstood; and is concerned to warn those who come after him of its transitory and imperfect character. The first phase is that of 'spiritual inebriation,' in which the fever, excitement and unrest of this period of growth and change - affecting as they do every aspect of personality - show themselves in the psycho-physical phenomena which are well-known accompaniments of religious emotion in selves of a certain temperament. This spiritual delirium, which appears to have been a common phase in the mystical revivals of the fourteenth century, is viewed by Ruysbroeck with considerable distrust; and rightly attributed by him to an excitement 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 himself." He sings, shouts, laughs and cries both at once, runs and leaps in the air, claps his hands, and indulges in absurdly exaggerated gestures 'with many other disagreeable exhibitions.' These he may not be able to help; but is advised to control them as soon as he can, passing from the merely sensuous emotion which results when the light of Eternal Love invades the 'inferior powers' of the soul, to the spiritual emotion, amenable to reason, which is the reaction of the 'higher powers' of the self to that same overwhelming influx of grace. That inpouring grace grows swiftly in power, as the strength of the sun grows with the passing of the year. The Presence of God now stands over the soul's supreme 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, impassioned 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 Illuminated 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 inexorable 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 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.' As all nature languishes under their stifling heat, so too long an exposure to their violence may mean ruin to the physical health of the growing self. Yet those who behave with prudence need not take permanent harm; a kind of wise steadfastness will support them throughout this turbulent period. "Following through all storms the path of love, they will advance towards that place whither love leads 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 intuitions of the Transcendent by which it is possessed; the abrupt suspension of the surface-consciousness in rapture and ecstasy, when that overwhelming intuition develops into the complete mono-ideism of the ecstatic, and cuts off all contacts with the world of sense. Of these phenomena Ruysbroeck speaks with intimacy, and also with much common sense. He distinguishes visions into those pictures or material images which are 'seen in the imagination,' and those so-called 'intellectual visions,' - of which the works of Angela of Foligno and St. Teresa provide so rich a series of examples, - which are really direct and imageless messages from the Transcendent; received in those supersensuous regions where man has contact with the Incomprehensible Good and "seeing and hearing are one thing." To this conventional classification he adds a passage which must surely be descriptive of his own experiences in this kind: "Sometimes God gives to such men swift spiritual glimpses, like to the flash of lightning in the sky. It comes like a sudden flash of strange light, streaming forth from the Simple Nudity. By this is the spirit uplifted for an instant above itself; and at once the light passes, and the man again comes to himself. This is God's own work, and it is something most august; for often those who experience it afterwards become illuminated men. And those who live in the violence and fervour of love have now and then another manner, whereby a certain light shines in them; and this God works by means. In this light, the heart and the desirous powers are uplifted toward the Light; and in this encounter the joy and satisfaction are such that the heart cannot

contain itself, but breaks out in loud cries of joy. And this is called jubilus or jubilation; and it is a joy that cannot be expressed in words." Here the parallel with Richard Rolle's 'ghostly song, with great voice outbreaking' will strike every reader of that most musical of the mystics; and it is probable that in both cases the prominence given to this rather uncommon form of spiritual rapture points back to personal experience. "I think," says Rolle, "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 breaks out in a ghostly voice wellsounding." This exultant and lyrical mood then, this adoring rapture, which only the rhythm of music can express, is the emotional reaction which indicates the high summer of the soul. It will be seen that each phase 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 industry is never done away. The gift of Strength, by which the self presses forward, has now been reinforced by the gift of Counsel, i.e. by the growth and deepening of that intuition which is its medium of contact with the spiritual world. The Counsel of the Spirit, says Ruysbroeck, is like a stirring or inspiration, deep within the soul. This stirring, this fresh uprush of energy, is really a 'new birth' of the Son, the Divine Wisdom; lighting up the intelligence so that it perceives its destiny, and perceives too that the communion it now enjoys is but an image of the Divine Union which awaits it. 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. Now this way of love and ecstasy and summer heats has been attended throughout by grave dangers for the adolescent spirit; above all by the primary danger which besets the mystical life, of mistaking

spiritual joy for spiritual reality, desiring 'consolations' and 'illuminations' for their own sake, and resting in the gift instead of the Giver. "Though he who dedicates himself to love ever experiences great joy, he must never seek this joy." All those tendencies grouped by St. John of the Cross under the disagreeable name of 'spiritual gluttony,' those further temptations to self-indulgent quietism which are but an insidious form of sloth, are waiting to entrap the self on the Illuminative Way. But there is a way beyond this, another 'Coming of the Bridegroom,' which Ruysbroeck describes as 'eternally safe and sure.' This is the way of pain and deprivation; when the Presence of God seems to be withdrawn, and the fatigue and reaction consequent on the violent passions and energies of the illuminated state make themselves felt as a condition of misery, aridity and impotence, - all, in fact, that the Christian mystics mean by the 'Spiritual Death' or 'Dark Night of the Soul,' and which Ruysbroeck's contemporaries, the Friends of God, called 'the upper school of perfect self-abandonment.' The mirror is now to be cleansed of all false reflections, all beautiful prismatic light; the thoughts stripped bare of the consolations they have enjoyed. Summer is over, and autumn begins; when the flowers indeed die down, but the fruits which they heralded are ripe. Now is the time when man can prove the stuff of which he is made; and the religious amorist, the false mystic, is distinguished from the heroic and long-suffering servant of God. "In this season is perfected and completed all the work that the sun has accomplished during the year. In the same manner, when Christ the glorious Sun has risen to His zenith in the heart of man and then begins to descend, and to hide the radiance of His Divine light, and to abandon the man; then the impatience and ardour of love grow less. And this concealment of Christ, and this withdrawal of His light and heat, are the first working and the new coming of this degree. And now Christ says spiritually within the man: 'Go forth, in the way which I now teach you.' And the man goes forth, and finds himself poor, wretched and abandoned. And here the tempest, the ardour, the impatience of love grows cold; and the hot summer becomes autumn, and its riches turn to great poverty. Then man begins to lament in his distress - where now has gone that 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 alldemanding 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 selfdonation 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 Your will and my will according to spirit be done." The darkness, sorrow and abandonment through which this is accomplished are far more essential to his development than the sunshine and happiness that went before. It is not necessary, says Ruysbroeck, that all should know the ecstasies of illumination; but by this dark 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 outward virtues, which man has practised with delight in the fire of love, these, now that he knows them and is able to accomplish them, he shall practise diligently and dutifully and offer them to God. And never were they so precious in His sight: never so noble and so fair. And all those consolations which God gave him before, he will gladly give up, and will empty himself for the glory of God. This is the harvest of the wheat and the many ripe fruits which make us rich in God, and give to us Eternal Life. Thus are the virtues perfected; and the absence of consolation is turned to an eternal wine."

CHAPTER VII; THE INTERIOR LIFE: UNION AND CONTEMPLATION "And the Light flows forth in similitude, and indraws Itself in unity; which we perceive, beyond the reason, in that high point of our understanding which is bare and turned within." The Twelve Béguines. The soul which has endured with courage and humility the anguish of the Dark Night, actualising within its own experience the double rhythm of love and renunciation, now enters upon a condition of equilibrium; in which it perceives that all its previous adventures and apprehensions were but episodes of growth, phases in the long preparation of character for those new levels of life on which it is now to dwell. Three points, says Ruysbroeck, must characterise the truly interior man. First, his mind must be detached from its natural inclination to rest in images and appearances, however lovely; and must depend altogether upon that naked Absence of Images, which is God. This is the 'ascent to the Nought' preached by the Areopagite. Secondly, by means of his spiritual exercises, his progressive efforts to correspond with that Divine Life ever experienced by him with greater intensity, he must have freed himself from all taint of selfhood, all personal desire; so that in true inward liberty he can lift himself up unhindered towards God, in a spirit of selfless devotion. Plainly, the desolations of the Dark Night are exactly adapted to the production within the self of these two characters; which we might call purity of intelligence and purity of will. Directly resulting from their actualisation, springs the third point: the consciousness of inward union with God. 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 represents the full achievement of the Interior Life. In many of his works, under various images, Ruysbroeck tries to tell us what he 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 concentration of the will, which the disciplines of the Active Life and Dark Night have effected, this supreme point of the spirit is brought at last within the conscious field. Then man feels and knows the presence there of an intense and creative vitality, an Eternal Essence, from which all that is worth having in his selfhood flows. This is the Life-giving Life ( Levende Leven ), where the created and Uncreated meet and are one: a phrase, apparently taken by Ruysbroeck from St. Bernard, which aptly expresses an idea familiar to all the great contemplatives. It is the point at which man's separate spirit, as it were, emerges from the Divine Spirit: the point through which he must at last return to his Source. Here the Father has impressed His image, the Son is perpetually born, the Spirit wells up; and here the Divine Unity dwells and calls him to the One. Here Eternity and Time are intertwined. Here springs the fountain of 'Living Water' - grace, transcendent vitality - upon which the mystic life of man depends. Now the self, because it is at last conformed to the demands of the spiritual world, feels new powers from this life-giving source streaming into all departments of its being. The last barriers of selfwill are broken; and the result is an inrush of fresh energy and light. Whereas in the 'First Life' God fed and communed with him by 'means,' and was revealed under images appropriate to a consciousness still immersed in the world of appearance; now man receives these gifts and messages, makes his contacts with Reality, 'without means,' or 'by grace' - i.e. in a spiritual and interior manner. Those 'lightning flashes from the face of Divine Love,' those abrupt and vivid intuitions which he enjoyed during illumination, have given way before the steady shining of the Uncreated Light. Though lightimagery is never long absent from Ruysbroeck's pages, it is, however, the spring of Living Water ever welling up, the rills or brooks which flow from it, and take its substance to the farthest recesses of the thirsty land, which seems to him the best image of this new inpouring of life. He uses it in all his chief works, perhaps most successfully in The Spiritual Marriage. Faithful to the mediæval division of

personality into Memory or Mind, Intelligence or Understanding, and Will, - influenced too by his deep conviction that all Divine activity is threefold in type, - he describes the Well-spring as breaking into three Brooks of Grace, which pour their waters into each department of the self. The duct through which these waters come, 'living and foaming' from the deeps of the Divine Riches, is the Eternal Christ; who 'comes anew' to the purified soul, and is the immediate source of its power and happiness. The first of the brooks which flow from Him is called 'Pure Simplicity.' It is a 'simple light,' says Ruysbroeck in another place; the white radiance of Eternity which, streaming into the mind, penetrates consciousness from top to bottom, and unifies the powers of the self about the new and higher centre now established. This simple light, in which we see things as they are - and therefore see that only one thing 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 achievement of such mental simplicity, escaping the prismatic illusion of the world, is the first condition of contemplation. "Thanks to this simple light which fills him, the man finds himself to be unified, established, penetrated and affirmed in the unity of his mind or thought. And thereby he is uplifted and established in 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 perception of

"the unmeasured loyalty of God to His creation" - one of his deepest and most beautiful utterances - "and therefrom springs a deep inward joy of the spirit, and 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 knowing 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 fountainhead 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 backflowing into that same ground from whence the flood has come." So the Interior Life, now firmly established, is found to conform to those great laws which have guided the growing spirit from the first. Again, the dual property of love, possession and action, satisfaction and fecundity, is to be manifested upon new levels. The pendulum motion of life, swinging between the experience of union with God to which 'the Divine Unity ever calls us,' and its expression in active charity to which the multiplicity of His creatures and their needs ever entreat us, still goes on. The more richly and strongly the lifegiving Life wells up within the self, the greater are the demands made upon that self's industry and love. In the establishment of this balance, in this continual healthy act of alternation, this double movement into God and out to men, is the proof that the soul has really centred itself upon the spiritual world - is, as Ruysbroeck puts it, confirmed in love.

"Thus do work and union perpetually renew themselves; and this renewal in work and in union, this is a spiritual life." Now the self which has achieved this degree of transcendence has achieved, too, considerable experience in that art of contemplation or introversion which is the mode of its communion with God. Throughout, training and development have gone hand in hand; and the fact that Ruysbroeck seldom troubles to distinguish between them, but accepts them as two aspects of one thing - the gradual deification of the soul - constitutes one of the great obstacles to an understanding of his works. Often he describes the whole spiritual life as consisting in introversion, an entering of consciousness into the supersensuous regions beyond thought; in defiance of his own principle of active charity, movement, work, as the essential reaction to the universe which distinguishes a 'deified' man. The truth is that the two processes run side by side; and now one, now the other, is in the foreground of his thought. Therefore all that I shall now say of the contemplative art must be understood as describing acts and apprehensions taking place throughout the whole course of the Interior Life. What, then, is introversion? It is one of the two great modes under which the spiritual consciousness works. Plainly, any living sense of God's presence must discern that Circle whose centre is everywhere, as both exterior and interior to the self. In Ruysbroeck's own works we find a violent effort to express this ineffable fact of omnipresence, of a truly Transcendent yet truly Immanent Reality; an effort often involving a collision of imagery. God, he says, may be discovered at the soul's apex, where He 'eternally lives and reigns'; and the soul itself 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 far!" exclaims St. Augustine. "You are the sky, and You are the nest as well!" says the great mystic poet of our own day. Whilst nearly all the mystics have possessed clear consciousness of this twofold revelation of the Divine Nature, and some have

experienced by turns the 'outward and upward' rush and the inward retreat, temperamentally they usually lean towards one or other form of communion with God, - ecstasy or introversion. For one class, contact with Him seems primarily to involve an outgoing flight towards Transcendent Reality; an attitude of mind strongly marked in all contemplatives who are near to the Neoplatonic tradition - Plotinus, St. Basil, St. Macarius - and also in Richard Rolle and a few other mediæval types. These would agree with Dionysius the Areopagite that "we must contemplate things divine by our whole selves standing out of our whole selves." For the other class, the first necessity is a retreat of consciousness from the periphery, where it touches the world of appearance, to the centre, the Unity of Spirit or 'Ground of the Soul,' where human personality buds forth from the Essential World. True, this inturning of attention is but a preliminary to the self's entrance upon that same Transcendent Region which the ecstatic claims that he touches in his upward flights. The introversive mystic, too, is destined to 'sail the wild billows of the Sea Divine'; but here, in the deeps of his nature, he finds the door through which he must pass. Only by thus discovering the unity of his own nature can he give himself to that 'tide of light' which draws all things back to the One. Such is Ruysbroeck's view of contemplation. This being so, introversion is for him an essential part of man's spiritual development. As the Son knows the Father, so it is the destiny of all spirits created in that Pattern to know Him; and the mirror which is able to reflect that Divine Light, the Simple Eye which alone can bear to gaze on it, lies in the deeps of human personality. The will, usually harnessed to the surface-consciousness, devoted to the interests of temporal life; the love, so freely spent on unreal and imperfect objects of desire; the thought which busies itself on the ceaseless analysis and arrangement of passing things - all these are to be swept inwards to that gathering-point of personality, that Unity of the Spirit, of which he so often speaks; and there fused into a single state of enormously enhanced consciousness, which, withdrawn from all attention to the changeful world of 'similitudes,' is exposed to the direct action of the Eternal World of spiritual realities. The pull of Divine Love - the light

that ever flows back into the One - is to withdraw the contemplative's consciousness from multiplicity to unity. His progress in contemplation will be a progress towards that complete mono-ideism in which the Vision of God - and 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 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,' 'stirrings,' and 'gifts,' in which Ruysbroeck's sublime teachings on contemplation are buried, makes the choice of some one formula imperative for us; though none will reduce his doctrines to a logical series, for he is perpetually passing over from the dialectic to the lyrical mood, and forgets to be orderly as soon as he begins to be subjective. I choose, then, to base my classification on that great chapter (19) in The Seven Cloisters, where he distinguishes three stages of contemplation; finding in them the responses of consciousness to the 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.

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