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THE QUEST SERIES
Edited by G. R. S. MEAD,
EDITOR OF 'THE QUEST.'
_Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net each._
FIRST LIST OF VOLUMES.
PSYCHICAL RESEARCH AND SURVIVAL. By James H. Hyslop, Ph.D., LL.D.,
Secretary of Psychical Research Society of America.
THE QUEST OF THE HOLY GRAIL. By Jessie L. Weston, Author of 'The Legend
of Sir Perceval.'
JEWISH MYSTICISM. By J. Abelson, M.A., D.Lit, Principal of Aria College,
Portsmouth.
THE MYSTICS OF ISLAM. By Reynold A. Nicholson, M.A., Litt.D, LL.D.,
Lecturer on Persian, Cambridge University.
BUDDHIST PSYCHOLOGY. By C. A. F. Rhys Davids, M.A., Lecturer on Indian
Philosophy, Manchester University.
RUYSBROECK. By Evelyn Underhill, Author of 'Mysticism,' 'The Mystic Way,'
etc.
THE SIDEREAL RELIGION OF THE ANCIENTS. By Robert Eisler, Ph.D., Author of
Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt.' [_In the Press._
London: G. BELL AND SONS LTD.
RUYSBROECK
BY
EVELYN UNDERHILL
AUTHOR OF
'MYSTICISM,' 'THE MYSTIC WAY,' ETC., ETC.
LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS LTD.
1915
FOR
JESSIE
TO WHOM IT OWES SO MUCH
THIS LITTLE TRIBUTE TO A MUTUAL FRIEND
EDITOR'S NOTE
A glance at the excellent Bibliographical Note at the end of the volume
will reveal the surprising paucity of literature on Ruysbroeck in this
country. A single version from the original of one short treatise,
published in the present year, is all that we possess of direct
translation; even in versions from translation there is only one treatise
represented; add to this one or two selections of the same nature, and
the full tale is told. We are equally poorly off for studies of the life
and doctrine of the great Flemish contemplative of the fourteenth
century. And yet Jan van Ruusbroec is thought, by no few competent
judges, to be the greatest of all the mediæval Catholic mystics; and,
indeed, it is difficult to point to his superior. Miss Evelyn Underhill
is, therefore, doing lovers not only of Catholic mysticism, but also of
mysticism in general, a very real service by her monograph, which deals
more satisfactorily than any existing work in English with the life and
teachings of one of the most spiritual minds in Christendom. Her book is
not simply a painstaking summary of the more patent generalities of the
subject, but rather a deeply sympathetic entering into the mind of
Ruysbroeck, and that, too, with no common insight.
PREFATORY NOTE
I owe to the great kindness of my friend, Mrs. Theodore Beck, the
translation of several passages from Ruysbroeck's _Sparkling Stone_ given
in the present work; and in quoting from _The Twelve Béguines_ have
often, though not always, availed myself of the recently published
version by Mr. John Francis. For all other renderings I alone am
responsible.
E. U.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. Ruysbroeck the Man 1
II. His Works 36
III. His Doctrine of God 52
IV. His Doctrine of Man 66
V. The Active Life 94
VI. The Interior Life: Illumination and Destitution 115
VII. The Interior Life: Union and Contemplation 136
VIII. The Superessential Life 164
Bibliographical Note 187
Luce divina sopra me s' appunta,
penetrando per questa ond' io m' inventro;
La cui virtù, col mio veder conguinta,
mi leva sopra me tanto, ch' io veggio
la somma essenza della quale è munta.
Quinci vien l' allegrezza, ond' io fiammeggio;
perchè alla vista mia, quant' ella è chiara,
la chiarità della fiamma pareggio.
Par. xxi. 83.
[Divine Light doth focus itself upon me, piercing through that wherein
I am enclosed; the power of which, united with my sight, so greatly
lifts me up above myself that I see the Supreme Essence where from it
is drawn. Thence comes the joy wherewith I flame; for to my vision,
even as it is clear, I make the clearness of the flame respond.]
RUYSBROECK
CHAPTER I
RUYSBROECK THE MAN
The tree Igdrasil, which has its head in heaven and its roots in hell
(the lower parts of the earth), is the image of the true man.... In
proportion to the divine heights to which it ascends must be the
obscure depths in which the tree is rooted, and from which it draws the
mystic sap of its spiritual life.
Coventry Patmore.
In the history of the spiritual adventures of man, we find at intervals
certain great mystics, who appear to gather up and fuse together in the
crucible of the heart the diverse tendencies of those who have preceded
them, and, adding to these elements the tincture of their own rich
experience, give to us an intensely personal, yet universal, vision of
God and man. These are constructive spirits, whose creations in the
spiritual sphere sum up and represent the best achievement of a whole
epoch; as in other spheres the great artist, musician, or poet--always
the child of tradition as well as of inspiration--may do.
John Ruysbroeck is such a mystic as this. His career, which covers the
greater part of the fourteenth century--that golden age of Christian
mysticism--seems to exhibit within the circle of a single personality,
and carry up to a higher term than ever before, all the best attainments
of the Middle Ages in the realm of Eternal Life. Rooted firmly in
history, faithful to the teachings of the great Catholic mystics of the
primitive and mediæval times, Ruysbroeck does not merely transmit, but
transfigures, their principles: making from the salt, sulphur, and
mercury of their vision, reason, and love, a new and living jewel--or, in
his own words, a 'sparkling stone'--which reflects the actual radiance of
the Uncreated Light. Absorbing from the rich soil of the Middle Ages all
the intellectual nourishment which he needs, dependent too, as all real
greatness is, on the human environment in which he grows--that mysterious
interaction and inter-penetration of personalities without which human
consciousness can never develop its full powers--he towers up from the
social and intellectual circumstances that conditioned him: a living,
growing, unique and creative individual, yet truly a part of the earth
from which he springs.
To speak of Ruysbroeck, as some enthusiastic biographers have done, as an
isolated spiritual phenomenon totally unrelated to the life of his time,
an 'ignorant monk' whose profound knowledge of reality is entirely the
result of personal inspiration and independent of human history, is to
misunderstand his greatness. The 'ignorant monk' was bound by close links
to the religious life of his day. He was no spiritual individualist; but
the humble, obedient child of an institution, the loyal member of a
Society. He tells us again and again that his spiritual powers were
nourished by the sacramental life of the Catholic Church. From the
theologians of that Church came the intellectual framework in which his
sublime intuitions were expressed. All that he does--though he does this
to a degree perhaps unique in Christian history--is to carry out into
action, completely actualise in his own experience, the high vision of
the soul's relation to Divine Reality by which that Church is possessed.
The central Christian doctrine of Divine Fatherhood, and of the soul's
'power to become the son of God': it is this, raised to the _n_th degree
of intensity, experienced in all its depth and fullness, and demonstrated
with the exactitude of a mathematician and the passion of a poet, which
Ruysbroeck gives us. Thus tradition and authority, no less than the
abundant inspiration, the direct ecstatic knowledge of God to which his
writings bear witness, have their part in his achievement. His
theological culture was wide and deep. Not only the Scriptures and the
Liturgy, but St. Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, Richard of St.
Victor, St. Bernard, St. Bonaventura, St. Thomas Aquinas, and many others
have stimulated and controlled his thought; interpreting to him his
ineffable adventures, and providing him with vessels in which the fruit
of those adventures could be communicated to other men.
Nor is Catholic tradition the only medium through which human life has
exercised a formative influence upon Ruysbroeck's genius. His worldly
circumstances, his place within and reaction to the temporal order, the
temper of those souls amongst which he grew--these too are of vital
importance in relation to his mystical achievements. To study the
interior adventures and formal teachings of a mystic without reference to
the general trend and special accidents of his outer life, is to neglect
our best chance of understanding the nature and sources of his vision of
truth. The angle from which that vision is perceived, the content of the
mind which comes to it, above all the concrete activities which it
induces in the growing, moving, supple self: these are primary _data_
which we should never ignore. Action is of the very essence of human
reality. Where the inner life is genuine and strong the outer life will
reflect, however faintly, the curve on which it moves; for human
consciousness is a unit, capable of reacting to and synthesising two
orders, not an unresolved dualism--as it were, an angel and an
animal--condemned to lifelong battle within a narrow cage.
Therefore we begin our study of Ruysbroeck the mystic by the study of
Ruysbroeck the man: the circumstances of his life and environment, so far
as we can find them out. For the facts of this life our chief authority
will be the Augustinian Canon Pomerius, who was Prior and chronicler of
Ruysbroeck's own community of Groenendael. Born in 1382, a year after
Ruysbroeck's death, and entering Groenendael early in the fifteenth
century, he knew and talked with at least two of the great mystic's
disciples, John of Hoelaere and John of Scoonhoven. His life of
Ruysbroeck and history of the foundation of the monastery was finished
before 1420; that is to say, within the lifetime of the generation which
succeeded the first founders of the house.[1] It represents the careful
gathering up, sifting, and arranging of all that was remembered and
believed by the community--still retaining several members who had known
him in the flesh--of the facts of Ruysbroeck's character and career.
Pomerius was no wild romancer, but a reasonably careful as well as a
genuinely enthusiastic monastic chronicler. Moderation is hardly the
outstanding virtue of such home-made lives of monastic founders. They are
inevitably composed in surroundings where any criticism of their subject
or scepticism as to his supernatural peculiarities is looked upon as a
crime; where every incident has been fitted with a halo, and the
unexplained is indistinguishable from the miraculous. Nevertheless the
picture drawn by Pomerius--exaggerated though it be in certain
respects--is a human picture; possessed of distinct characteristics, some
natural and charming, some deeply impressive. It is completed by a second
documentary source: the little sketch by Ruysbroeck's intimate friend,
Gerard Naghel, Prior of the Carthusian monastery of Hérines near
Groenendael, which forms the prologue to our most complete MS. collection
of his writings.
Ruysbroeck's life, as it is shown to us by Pomerius and Gerard, falls
into three main divisions, three stages of ascent: the natural active
life of boyhood; the contemplative, disciplined career of his middle
period; the superessential life of supreme union which governed his
existence at Groenendael. This course, which he trod in the temporal
order, seems like the rough sketch of that other course trodden by the
advancing soul within the eternal order--the Threefold Life of man which
he describes to us in _The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage_ and other
of his works.
Now the details of that career are these: John Ruysbroeck was born in
1293 at the little village of Ruysbroeck or Ruusbroec, between Brussels
and Hal, from which he takes his name. We know nothing of his father; but
his mother is described as a good and pious woman, devoted to the
upbringing of her son--a hard task, and one that was soon proved to be
beyond her. The child Ruysbroeck was strong-willed, adventurous,
insubordinate; already showing signs of that abounding vitality, that
strange restlessness and need of expansion which children of genius so
often exhibit. At eleven years of age he ran away from home, and found
his way to Brussels; where his uncle, John Hinckaert, was a Canon of the
Cathedral of St. Gudule. Pomerius assures us that this escapade, which
would have seemed a mere naughtiness in normal little boys, was in fact a
proof of coming sanctity; that it was not the attraction of the city but
a precocious instinct for the religious life--the first crude stirrings
of the love of God--which set this child upon the road. Such a claim is
natural to the hagiographer; yet there lies behind it a certain truth.
The little John may or may not have dreamed of being a priest; he did
already dream of a greater, more enticing life beyond the barriers of use
and wont. Though he knew it not, the vision of a spiritual city called
him. Already the primal need of his nature was asserting itself--the
demand, felt long before it was understood, for something beyond the
comfortable world of appearance--and this demand crystallised into a
concrete act. In the sturdy courage which faced the unknown, the
practical temper which translated dream into action, we see already the
germ of those qualities which afterwards gave to the great contemplative
power to climb up to the 'supreme summits of the inner life' and face the
awful realities of God.
Such adventures are not rare in the childhood of the mystics. Always of a
romantic temperament, endowed too with an abounding vitality, the craving
for some dimly-guessed and wonderful experience often shows itself early
in them; as the passion for music, colour or poetry is sometimes seen in
embryo in artists of another type. The impact of Reality seems to be felt
by such spirits in earliest childhood. Born susceptible in a special
degree to the messages which pour in on man from the Transcendent, they
move from the first in a different universe from that of other boys and
girls; subject to experiences which they do not understand, full of
dreams which they are unable to explain, and often impelled to strange
actions, extremely disconcerting to the ordinary guardians of youth. Thus
the little Catherine of Siena, six years old, already lived in a world
which was peopled with saints and angels; and ruled her small life by the
visions which she had seen. Thus the baby Teresa, mysteriously attracted
by sacrifice, as other children are attracted by games and toys, set out
to look for 'the Moors and martyrdom.' So too the instinct for travel,
for the remote and unknown, often shows itself early in these wayfarers
of the spirit; whose destiny it is to achieve a more extended life in the
interests of the race, to find and feel that Infinite Reality which alone
can satisfy the heart of man. Thus in their early years Francis, Ignatius
and many others were restless, turbulent, eager for adventure and change.
This first adventure brought the boy Ruysbroeck to a home so perfectly
fitted to his needs, that it might seem as though some secret instinct,
some overshadowing love, had indeed guided his steps. His uncle, John
Hinckaert, at this time about forty years of age, had lately been
converted--it is said by a powerful sermon--from the comfortable and
easy-going life of a prosperous ecclesiastic to the austere quest of
spiritual perfection. He had distributed his wealth, given up all
self-indulgence, and now, with another and younger Canon of the Cathedral
named Francis van Coudenberg, lived in simplest, poorest style a
dedicated life of self-denial, charity and prayer. He received his
runaway nephew willingly. Perhaps he saw in this strange and eager child,
suddenly flung upon his charity, an opportunity for repairing some at
least amongst the omissions of his past--that terrible wreck of wasted
years which torments the memory of those who are converted in middle
life. His love and remorse might spend themselves on this boy. He might
make of him perhaps all that he now longed to be, but could never wholly
achieve: a perfect servant of the Eternal Goodness, young, vigorous,
ardent, completely responsive to the touch of God.
Ruysbroeck, then, found a home soaked in love, governed by faith,
renunciation, humility; a forcing-house of the spiritual life. In the
persons of these two grown men, who had given up all outward things for
the sake of spiritual realities, he was brought face to face--and this in
his most impressionable years--with the hard facts, the concrete
sacrifices, the heroic life of deliberate mortification, which underlay
the lovely haunting vision, the revelation of the Divine beauty and love
that had possessed him. No lesson is of higher value to the natural
mystic than this. The lovers of Ruysbroeck should not forget how much
they owe to the men who received, loved, influenced, educated the
brilliant wayward and impressionable child. His attainment is theirs. His
mysticism is rooted in their asceticism; a flower directly dependent for
its perfection on that favouring soil. Though his achievement, like that
of all men of genius, is individual, and transcends the circumstances and
personalities which surround it; still, from those circumstances and
personalities it takes its colour. It represents far more than a personal
and solitary experience. Behind it lies the little house in Brussels, the
supernatural atmosphere which filled it, and the fostering care of the
two men whose life of external and deliberate poverty only made more
plain the richness of the spirits who could choose, and remain constant
to, this career of detachment and love.
The personal influence of Hinckaert and Coudenberg, the moral disciplines
and perpetual self-denials of the life which he shared with them, formed
the heart of Ruysbroeck's education; helping to build up that manly and
sturdy character which gave its special temper to his mystical outlook.
Like so many children destined to greatness, he was hard to educate in
the ordinary sense; uninterested in general knowledge, impatient of
scholastic drudgery. Nothing which did not minister to his innate passion
for ultimates had any attraction for him. He was taught grammar with
difficulty; but on the other hand his astonishing aptitude for religious
ideas, even of the most subtle kind, his passionate clear vision of
spiritual things, was already so highly developed as to attract general
attention; and his writings are sufficient witness to the width and depth
of his theological reading. With such tastes and powers as these, and
brought up in such a household, governed by religious enthusiasms and
under the very shadow of the Cathedral walls, it was natural that he
should wish to become a priest; and in 1317 he was ordained and given,
through the influence of his uncle, a prebend in St. Gudule.
Now a great mystic is the product not merely of an untamed genius for the
Transcendent, but of a moral discipline, an interior education, of the
most strenuous kind. All the varied powers and tendencies of a nature
which is necessarily strong and passionate, must be harnessed, made
subservient to this one central interest. The instinctive egotism of the
natural man--never more insidious than when set upon spiritual
things--must be eradicated. So, behind these few outward events of
Ruysbroeck's adolescence, we must discern another growth; a perpetual
interior travail, a perpetual slow character-building always going
forward in him, as his whole personality is moulded into that conformity
to the vision seen which prepares the way of union, and marks off the
mystical saint from the mere adept of transcendental things. We know from
his writings how large a part such moral purifications, such interior
adjustments, played in his concept of the spiritual life; and the
intimacy with which he describes each phase in the battle of love, each
step of the spiritual ladder, the long process of preparation in which
the soul adorns herself for the 'spiritual marriage,' guarantees to us
that he has himself trodden the path which he maps out. That path goes
the whole way from the first impulse of 'goodwill,' of glad acquiescence
in the universal purpose, through the taming of the proud will to
humility and suppleness, and of the insurgent heart to gentleness,
kindness, and peace, to that last state of perfect charity in which the
whole spirit of man is one will and one love with God.
Though his biographers have left us little material for a reconstruction
of his inner development, we may surely infer something of the course
which it followed from the vividly realistic descriptions in _The Kingdom
of Lovers_ and _The Spiritual Marriage_. Personal experience underlies
the wonderful account of the ascent of the Spiritual Sun in the heavens
of consciousness; the rapture, wildness and joy, the 'fever of love'
which fulfils the man who feels its light and heat. Experience, too,
dictates these profound passages which deal with the terrible spiritual
reaction when the Sun declines in the heavens, and man feels cold, dead,
and abandoned of God. Through these phases, at least, Ruysbroeck had
surely passed before his great books came to be written.
One or two small indications there are which show us his progress on the
mystic way, the development in him of those secondary psychic characters
peculiar to the mystical type. It seems that by the time of his
ordination that tendency to vision which often appears in the earliest
youth of natural mystics, was already established in him. Deeply
impressed by the sacramental side of Catholicism, and finding in it
throughout his life a true means of contact with the Unseen, the
priesthood was conceived by him as bringing with it a veritable access of
grace; fresh power poured in on him from the Transcendent, an increase of
strength wherewith to help the souls of other men. This belief took, in
his meditations, a concrete and positive form. Again and again he saw in
dramatic vision the soul specially dear to him, specially dependent on
him--that of his mother, who had lately died in the Brussels
Béguinage--demanding how long she must wait till her son's ordination
made his prayers effectual for her release from Purgatory. At the moment
in which he finished saying his first Mass, this vision returned to him;
and he saw his mother's spirit, delivered from Purgatory by the power of
the sacrifice which he had offered, entering into Heaven--an experience
originating in, and giving sharp dramatic expression to, that sense of
new and sacred powers now conferred on him, which may well at such a
moment have flooded the consciousness of the young priest. This story was
repeated to Pomerius by those who had heard it from Ruysbroeck himself;
for "he often told it to the brothers."
For twenty-six years--that is to say, until he was fifty years of
age--Ruysbroeck lived in Brussels the industrious and inconspicuous life
of a secular priest. It was not the solitude of the forest, but the
normal, active existence of a cathedral chaplain in a busy capital city
which controlled his development during that long period, stretching from
the very beginnings of manhood to the end of middle age; and it was in
fact during these years, and in the midst of incessant distractions, that
he passed through the great oscillations of consciousness which mark the
mystic way. It is probable that when at last he left Brussels for the
forest, these oscillations were over, equilibrium was achieved; he had
climbed 'to the summits of the mount of contemplation.' It was on those
summits that he loved to dwell, absorbed in loving communion with Divine
Reality; but his career fulfilled that ideal of a synthesis of work and
contemplation, an acceptance and remaking of the whole of life, which he
perpetually puts before us as the essential characteristic of a true
spirituality. No mystic has ever been more free from the vice of
other-worldliness, or has practised more thoroughly and more unselfishly
the primary duty of active charity towards men which is laid upon the
God-possessed.
The simple and devoted life of the little family of three went on year by
year undisturbed; though one at least was passing through those profound
interior changes and adventures which he has described to us as governing
the evolution of the soul, from the state of the 'faithful servant' to
the transfigured existence of the 'God-seeing man.' Ruysbroeck grew up to
be a simple, dreamy, very silent and totally unimpressive person, who,
'going about the streets of Brussels with his mind lifted up into God,'
seemed a nobody to those who did not know him. Yet not only a spiritual
life of unequalled richness, intimacy and splendour, but a penetrating
intellect, a fearless heart, deep knowledge of human nature, remarkable
powers of expression, lay behind that meek and unattractive exterior. As
Paul's twelve years of quiet and subordinate work in Antioch prepared the
way of his missionary career; so during this long period of service, the
silent growth of character, the steady development of his mystical
powers, had gone forward in Ruysbroeck. When circumstances called them
into play he was found to be possessed of an unsuspected passion,
strength and courage, a power of dealing with outward circumstances,
which was directly dependent on his inner life of contemplation and
prayer.
The event into which the tendencies of this stage of his development
crystallised, is one which seems perhaps inconsistent with the common
idea of the mystical temperament, with its supposed concentration on the
Eternal, its indifference to temporal affairs. As his childhood was
marked by an exhibition of adventurous love, so his manhood was marked by
an exhibition of militant love; of that strength and sternness, that
passion for the true, which--no less than humility, gentleness, peace--is
an integral part of that paradoxical thing, the Christian character.
The fourteenth century, like all great spiritual periods, was a century
fruitful in mystical heresies as well as in mystical saints. In
particular, the extravagant pantheism preached by the Brethren of the
Free Spirit had become widely diffused in Flanders, and was responsible
for much bad morality as well as bad theology; those on whom the 'Spirit'
had descended believing themselves to be already divine, and emancipated
from obedience to all human codes of conduct. Soon after Ruysbroeck came
as a boy to Brussels, a woman named Bloemardinne placed herself at the
head of this sect, and gradually gained extraordinary influence. She
claimed supernatural and prophetic powers, was said to be accompanied by
two Seraphim whenever she went to the altar to receive Holy Communion,
and preached a degraded eroticism under the title of 'Seraphic love,'
together with a quietism of the most exaggerated and soul-destroying
type. All the dangers and follies of a false mysticism, dissociated from
the controlling influence of tradition and the essential virtue of
humility, were exhibited in her. Against this powerful woman, then at the
height of her fame, Ruysbroeck declared war; and prosecuted his campaign
with a violence and courage which must have been startling to those who
had regarded him only as a shy, pious, rather negligible young man. The
pamphlets which he wrote against her are lost; but the passionate
denunciations of pantheism and quietism scattered through his later works
no doubt have their origin in this controversy, and represent the angle
from which his attacks were made.
Pantheists, he says in _The Book of Truth_, are "a fruit of hell, the
more dangerous because they counterfeit the true fruit of the Spirit of
God." Far from possessing that deep humility which is the soul's
inevitable reaction to the revelation of the Infinite, they are full of
pride and self-satisfaction. They claim that their imaginary identity
with the Essence of God emancipates them from all need of effort, all
practice of virtue, and leaves them free to indulge those inclinations of
the flesh which the 'Spirit' suggests. They "believe themselves sunk in
inward peace; but as a matter of fact they are deep-drowned in error."[2]
Against all this the stern, virile, ardent spirituality of Ruysbroeck
opposed itself with its whole power. Especially did he hate and condemn
the laziness and egotism of the quietistic doctrine of contemplation: the
ideal of spiritual immobility which it set up. That 'love cannot be lazy'
is a cardinal truth for all real mystics. Again and again it appears in
their works. Even that profound repose in which they have fruition of
God, is but the accompaniment or preliminary of work of the most
strenuous kind, and keeps at full stretch the soul which truly tastes it;
and this supernatural state is as far above that self-induced quietude of
'natural repose'--"consisting in nothing but an idleness and interior
vacancy, to which they are inclined by nature and habit"--in which the
quietists love to immerse themselves, as God is above His creatures.
Here is the distinction, always needed and constantly ignored, between
that veritable fruition of Eternal Life which results from the
interaction of will and grace, and demands of the soul the highest
intensity and most active love, and that colourable imitation of it which
is produced by a psychic trick, and is independent alike of the human
effort and the divine gift. Ruysbroeck in fighting the 'Free Spirit' was
fighting the battle of true mysticism against its most dangerous and
persistent enemy,--mysticality.
His attack upon Bloemardinne is the one outstanding incident in the long
Brussels period which has been preserved to us. The next great outward
movement in his steadily evolving life did not happen until the year
1343, when he was fifty years of age. It was then that the three
companions decided to leave Brussels, and live together in some remote
country place. They had long felt a growing distaste for the noisy and
distracting life of the city; a growing dissatisfaction with the
spiritual apathy and low level of religious observance at the Cathedral
of St. Gudule; the need of surroundings in which they might devote
themselves with total concentration to the contemplative life. Hinckaert
and Coudenberg were now old men; Ruysbroeck was advanced in middle age.
The rhythm of existence, which had driven him as a child from country to
town, and harnessed him during long years to the service of his
fellow-men, now drew him back again to the quiet spaces where he might be
alone with God. He was approaching those heights of experience from which
his greatest mystical works proceed; and it was in obedience to a true
instinct that he went away to the silent places of the forest--as Anthony
to the solitude of the desert, Francis to the 'holy mountain' of La
Verna--that, undistracted by the many whom he had served so faithfully,
he might open his whole consciousness to the inflow of the One, and
receive in its perfection the message which it was his duty to transmit
to the world, He went, says Pomerius, "not that he might hide his light;
but that he might tend it better and make it shine more brightly."
By the influence of Coudenberg, John III., Duke of Brabant, gave to the
three friends the old hermitage of Groenendael, or the Green Valley, in
the forest of Soignes, near Brussels. They entered into possession on the
Wednesday of Easter week, 1343; and for five years lived there, as they
had lived in the little house in Brussels, with no other rule save their
own passion for perfection. But perpetual invasions from the outer world,
not only of penitents and would-be disciples--for their reputation for
sanctity grew quickly--but of huntsmen in the forest and pleasure parties
from the town, who demanded and expected hospitality, soon forced them to
adopt some definite attitude towards the question of enclosure. It is
said that Ruysbroeck begged for an entire seclusion; but Coudenberg
insisted that this was contrary to the law of charity, and that some at
least of those who sought them must be received. In addition to these
practical difficulties, the Prior of the Abbey of St. Victor at Paris had
addressed to them strong remonstrances, on account of the absence of rule
in their life and the fact that they had not even adopted a religious
habit; a proceeding which in his opinion savoured rather of the
ill-regulated doings of the heretical sects, than of the decorum proper
to good Catholics. As a result of these various considerations, the
simple and informal existence of the little family was re-modelled in
conformity with the rule of the Augustinian Canons, and the Priory of
Groenendael was formally created. Coudenberg became its provost, and
Ruysbroeck, who had refused the higher office, was made prior; but
Hinckaert, now a very old man in feeble health, refused to burden the
young community with a member who might be a drag upon it and could not
keep the full rigour of the rule. In a spirit of renunciation which
surely touches the heroic, he severed himself from his lifelong friend
and his adopted son, and went away to a little cell in the forest, where
he lived alone until his death.
The story of the foundation and growth of the Priory of Groenendael, the
saintly personalities which it nourished, is not for this place; except
in so far as it affects our main interest, the story of Ruysbroeck's
soul. Under the influences of the forest, of the silent and regular life,
those supreme contemplative powers which belong to the 'Superessential
Life' of Unity now developed in him with great rapidity. It is possible,
as we shall see, that some at least of his mystical writings may date
from his Brussels period; and we know that at the close of this period
his reputation as an 'illuminated man' was already made. Nevertheless it
seems safe to say that the bulk of his works, as we now possess them,
represent him as he was during the last thirty years of his life, rather
than during his earlier and more active career; and that the intense
certitude, the wide deep vision of the Infinite which distinguishes them,
are the fruits of those long hours of profound absorption in God for
which his new life found place. In the silence of the woods he was able
to discern each subtle accent of that Voice which "is heard without
utterance, and without the sound of words speaks all truth."
Like so many of the greatest mystics, Ruysbroeck, drawing nearer to
Divine Reality, drew nearer to nature too; conforming to his own ideal of
the contemplative, who, having been raised to the simple vision of God
Transcendent, returns to find His image reflected by all life. Many
passages in his writings show the closeness and sympathy of his
observation of natural things: the vivid description in _The Spiritual
Marriage_ of the spring, summer and autumn of the fruitful soul, the
constant insistence on the phenomena of growth, the lessons drawn from
the habits of ants and bees, the comparison of the surrendered soul to
the sunflower, 'one of nature's most wonderful works'; the three types of
Christians, compared with birds who can fly but prefer hopping about the
earth, birds who swim far on the waters of grace, and birds who love only
to soar high in the heavens. For the free, exultant life of birds he felt
indeed a special sympathy and love; and 'many-feathered' is the best name
that he can find for the soul of the contemplative ascending to the glad
vision of God.
It is probably a true tradition which represents him as having written
his greatest and most inspired pages sitting under a favourite tree in
the depths of the woods. When the 'Spirit' came on him, as it often did
with a startling suddenness, he would go away into the forest carrying
his tablet and stylus. There, given over to an ecstasy of
composition--which seems often to have approached the limits of automatic
writing, as in St. Teresa, Boehme, Blake and other mystics--he would
write that which was given to him, without addition or omission; breaking
off even in the middle of a sentence when the 'Spirit' abruptly departed,
and resuming at the same point, though sometimes after an interval which
lasted several weeks, when it returned. In his last years, when eyesight
failed him, he would allow a younger brother to go with him into the
woods, and there to take down from dictation the fruits of those
meditations in which he 'saw without sight'; as the illiterate Catherine
of Siena dictated in ecstasy the text of her Divine Dialogue.
Two witnesses have preserved Ruysbroeck's solemn affirmation, given first
to his disciple Gerard Groot 'in great gentleness and humility,' and
repeated again upon his death-bed in the presence of the whole community,
that every word of his writings was thus composed under the immediate
domination of an inspiring power; that 'secondary personality of a
superior type,' in touch with levels of reality beyond the span of the
surface consciousness, which governs the activities of the great mystics
in their last phases of development. These books are not the fruit of
conscious thought, but 'God-sent truths,' poured out from a heart
immersed in that Divine Abyss of which he tries to tell.
That a saint must needs be a visionary, is a conviction deeply implanted
in the mind of the mediæval hagiographer; who always ascribes to these
incidents an importance which the saints themselves are the first to
deny. Pomerius thus attributes to Ruysbroeck not only those profound and
direct experiences of Divine Reality to which his works bear witness; but
also numerous visions of a conventional and anthropomorphic type, in
which he spoke with Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, ecstasies
which fell upon him when saying Mass--and the passionate devotion to the
Eucharist which his writings express makes these at least probable--a
certain faculty of clairvoyance, and a prophetic knowledge of his own
death. Further, it is said that once, being missed from the priory, he
was found after long search by one of the brothers he loved best, sitting
under his favourite tree, rapt in ecstasy and surrounded by an _aura_ of
radiant light; as the discerning eyes of those who loved them have seen
St. Francis, St. Teresa, and other contemplatives transfigured and made
shining by the intensity of their spiritual life. I need not point out
that the fact that these things are common form in the lives of the
mystics, does not necessarily discredit them; though in any case their
interest is less of a mystical than of a psychological kind.
Not less significant, and to us perhaps more winning, is that side of
Ruysbroeck's personality which was turned towards the world of men. In
his own person he fulfilled that twofold duty of the deified soul which
he has described to us: the in-breathing of the Love of God, the
out-breathing of that same radiant charity towards the race. "To give and
receive, both at once, is the essence of union," he says; and his whole
career is an illustration of these words. He took his life from the
Transcendent; he was a focus of distribution, which gave out that joyous
life again to other souls. His retreat at Groenendael, his ecstasies of
composition, never kept him from those who wanted his help and advice. In
his highest ascents towards Divine Love, the rich complexities of human
love went with him. Other men always meant much to Ruysbroeck. He had a
genius for friendship, and gave himself without stint to his friends; and
those who knew him said that none ever went to him for consolation
without returning with gladness in their hearts. There are many tales in
the _Vita_ of his power over and intuitive understanding of other minds;
of conversions effected, motives unveiled and clouds dispelled. His great
friend, Gerard Naghel, the Carthusian prior--at whose desire he wrote one
of the most beautiful of his shorter works, _The Book of Supreme
Truth_--has left a vivid little account of the impression which his
personality created: "his peaceful and joyful countenance, his humble
good-humoured speech." Ruysbroeck spent three days in Gerard's monastery,
in order to explain some difficult passages in his writings, "and these
days were too short, for no one could speak to him or see him without
being the better for it."
By this we may put the description of Pomerius, founded upon the
reminiscences of Ruysbroeck's surviving friends. "The grace of God shone
in his face; and also in his modest speech, his kindly deeds, his humble
manners, and in the way that every action of his life exhibited
uprightness and radiant purity. He lived soberly, neglected his dress,
and was patient in all things and with all people."
Plainly the great contemplative who had seemed in Brussels a 'negligible
man,' kept to the end a great simplicity of aspect; closely approximating
to his own ideal of the 'really humble man, without any pose or
pretence,' as described in _The Spiritual Marriage_. That profound
self-immersion in God which was the source of his power, manifested
itself in daily life under the least impressive forms; ever seeking
embodiment in little concrete acts of love and service, "ministering, in
the world without, to all who need, in love and mercy."[3] We see him in
his Franciscan love of living things, his deep sense of kinship with all
the little children of God, 'going to the help of the animals in all
their needs'; thrown into a torment of distress by the brothers who
suggested to him that during a hard winter the little birds of the forest
might die, and at once making generous and successful arrangements for
their entertainment. We see him 'giving Mary and Martha _rendez-vous_ in
his heart'; working in the garden of the community, trying hard to be
useful, wheeling barrow-loads of manure, and emerging from profound
meditation on the Infinite to pull up young vegetables under the
impression that they were weeds. He made, in fact, valiant efforts to
achieve that perfect synthesis of action and contemplation 'ever abiding
in the simplicity of the Spirit, and perpetually flowing forth in
abundant acts of love towards heaven and earth,' which he regarded as the
proper goal of human growth--efforts constantly thwarted by his own
growing concentration on the Transcendent, the ease and frequency with
which his consciousness now withdrew from the world of the senses to
immerse itself in Spiritual Reality. In theory there was for him no
cleavage between the two: Being and Becoming, the Temporal and the
Eternal, were but two moods within the mind of God, and in the
superessential life of perfect union these completing opposites should
merge in one.
A life which shall find place for the activities of the lover, the
servant, and the apostle, is the goal towards which the great mystics
seem to move. We have seen how the homely life of the priory gave to
Ruysbroeck the opportunity of service, how the silence of the forest
fostered and supported his secret life of love. As the years passed, the
third side of his nature, the apostolic passion which had found during
his long Brussels period ample scope for its activities, once more came
into prominence. He was sought out by numbers of would-be disciples, not
only from Belgium itself, but from Holland, Germany and France; and
became a fountainhead of new life, the father of many spiritual children.
The tradition which places among these disciples the great Dominican
mystic Tauler is probably false; though many passages in Tauler's later
sermons suggest that he was strongly influenced by Ruysbroeck's works,
which had already attained a wide circulation. But Gerard Groot,
afterwards the founder of the Brothers of the Common Life, and spiritual
ancestor of Thomas à Kempis, went to Groenendael shortly after his
conversion in 1374, that he might there learn the rudiments of a sane and
robust spirituality. Ruysbroeck received him with a special joy,
recognising in him at first sight a peculiar aptitude for the things of
the Spirit. A deep friendship grew up between the old mystic and the
young and vigorous convert. Gerard stayed often at the priory, and
corresponded regularly with Ruysbroeck; whose influence it was which
conditioned his subsequent career as a preacher, and as founder of a
congregation as simple and unconventional in its first beginnings, as
fruitful in its later developments, as that of Groenendael itself.
The penetrating remarks upon human character scattered through his works,
and the anecdotes of his dealings with disciples and penitents preserved
by Pomerius, suggest that Ruysbroeck, though he might not always
recognise the distinction between the weeds and vegetables of the garden,
was seldom at fault in his judgment of men. An instinctive knowledge of
the human heart, an unerring eye for insincerity, egotism,
self-deception, is a power which nearly all the great contemplatives
possess, and often employed with disconcerting effect. I need refer only
to the caustic analysis of the 'false contemplative' contained in _The
Cloud of Unknowing_, and the amusing sketches of spiritual
self-importance in St. Teresa's letters and life. The little tale, so
often repeated, of the somewhat self-conscious priests who came from
Paris to consult Ruysbroeck on the state of their souls, and received
from him only the blunt observation--apparently so careless, yet really
plumbing human nature to its deeps--"You are as holy as you wish to be,"
shows him possessed of this same power of stripping off the husks of
unreality and penetrating at once to the fundamental facts of the soul's
life: the purity and direction of its will and love.
The life-giving life of union, once man has grown up to it, clarifies,
illuminates, raises to a higher term, all aspects of the self:
intelligence, no less than love and will. That self is now harmonised
about its true centre, and finding 'God in all creatures and all
creatures in God' finds them in their reality. So it is that Ruysbroeck's
long life of growth, his long education in love, bringing him to that
which he calls the 'God-seeing' stage, brings him to a point in which he
finds everywhere Reality: in those rhythmic seasonal changes of the
forest life which have inspired his wonderful doctrine of the perpetual
rebirth and re-budding of the soul; in the hearts of men--though often
there deep buried--above all, in the mysteries of the Christian faith.
Speaking with an unequalled authority and intimacy of those supersensuous
regions, those mysterious contacts of love which lie beyond and above all
thought, he is yet firmly rooted in the concrete; for he has reconciled
in his own experience the paradox of a Transcendent yet Immanent God.
There is no break in the life-process which begins with the little
country boy running away from home in quest of some vaguely felt object
of desire, some 'better land,' and which ends with the triumphant passing
over of the soul of the great contemplative to the perfect fruition of
Eternal Love.
Ruysbroeck died at Groenendael on December 2, 1381. He was eighty-eight
years old; feeble in body, nearly blind, yet keeping to the last his
clear spiritual vision, his vigour and eagerness of soul. His death, says
Pomerius, speaking on the authority of those who had seen it, was full of
peaceful joy, of gaiety of heart; not the falling asleep of the tired
servant, but the leap to more abundant life of the vigorous child of the
Infinite, at last set free. With an immense gladness he went out from
that time-world which, in his own image, is 'the shadow of God,' to
"those high mountains of the land of promise where no shadow is, but only
the Sun." One of the greatest of Christian seers, one of the most manly
and human of the mystics, it is yet as a lover, in the noblest and most
vital sense of the word, that his personality lives for us. From first to
last, under all its external accidents, we may trace in his life the
activity--first instinctive, and only gradually understood--of that
'unconquerable love,' ardent, industrious, at last utterly surrendered,
which he describes in the wonderful tenth chapter of _The Sparkling
Stone_, as the unique power which effects the soul's union with God. "For
no man understandeth what love is in itself, but such are its workings:
which giveth more than one can take, and asketh more than one can pay."
That love it was which came out from the Infinite, as a tendency, an
instinct endowed with liberty and life, and passed across the stage of
history, manifested under humblest inconspicuous forms, but ever growing
in passion and power; till at last, achieving the full stature of the
children of God, it returned to its Source and Origin again. When we
speak of the mysticism of Ruysbroeck, it is of this that we should think:
of this growing spirit, this ardent, unconquerable, creative thing. A
veritable part of our own order, therein it was transmuted from unreal to
real existence; putting on Divine Humanity, and attaining the goal of all
life in the interests of the race.