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."[6]
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 Neoplatonism,
which governed all Meister Eckhart's speculations upon the Divine Nature.
There is, says Ruysbroeck in one of his most Eckhartian passages, "a
distinction and 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."[7]
In differentiating the three great aspects of the Divine Life, as known
by the love and thought of man, Ruysbroeck keeps close to formal
theology; though investing its academic language with new and deep
significance, and constantly reminding us that such language, even at its
best, can never get beyond the region of image and similitude or provide
more than an imperfect reflection of the One who is 'neither This nor
That.' On his lips, credal definitions are perpetually passing over from
the arid region of theological argument to the fruitful one of spiritual
experience. There they become songs, as 'new' as the song heard by the
Apocalyptist; real channels of light, which show the mind things that it
never 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."[8] 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
veritable character of the Holy Spirit; the Incomprehensible Love and
Generosity of the Divine Nature, which emanates in an eternal procession
from the mutual contemplation of Father and Son, "for these two Persons
are always hungry for love." The Holy Spirit is the source of the Divine
vitality immanent in the 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."[9]
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 Dionysius the Areopagite. But beyond and above this plane of
Divine differentiation is the superessential world, transcending all
conditions, inaccessible to thought--"the measureless solitude of the
Godhead, where God possesses Himself in joy." This is the ultimate world
of the mystic, discerned by intuition and love "in a simple seeing,
beyond reason and without consideration." There, within the 'Eternal
Now,' without either before or after, released from the storm of
succession, things happen indeed, 'yet in no wise,' There, "we can speak
no more of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, nor of any creature; but only of
one Being, which is the very substance of the Divine Persons. There were
we all one before our creation; for this is our _superessence_.... There
the Godhead is, in simple essence, without activity; Eternal Rest,
Unconditioned Dark, the Nameless Being, the Superessence of all created
things, and the simple and infinite Bliss of God and of all Saints."[10]
Ruysbroeck here 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
envelopes and irradiates _both_ the natural tendency of our ground
[_i.e._ its dynamic movement to God--the River] and the fruitive
adherence of God and all those who are united with Him in this Light
[_i.e._ Eternal Being--the Rose]. And this is the union of God and the
souls that love Him."[11]