HIS DOCTRINE OF MAN
That which was begun by Grace, is accomplished by Grace and Free-will;
so that they work mixedly not separately, simultaneously not
successively, in each and all of their processes.
St. Bernard.
The concept of the Nature of God which we have traced through its three
phases--out from the unchanging One to the active Persons and back to the
One again--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."[12]
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."[13]
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."[14] Again, "this union
is _in_ God, through grace and our homeward-tending love. Yet even here
does the creature feel a distinction and otherness between itself and God
in its inward ground."[15] 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."[16] In the spiritual realm, giving and
receiving are one act, for God is an 'ocean that ebbs and flows'; and it
is only by opposing love to love, by self-donation to His mysterious
movements, that the soul appropriates new force, invigorating and
fertilising it afresh. Thus, and thus alone, it lays hold on eternal
life; sometimes sacramentally, under external images and accidents;
sometimes mystically, in the communion of deep prayer. "Every time we
think with love of the Well-beloved, He is anew our meat and
drink"--more, we too are His, for the love between God and man is a
mutual love and desire. As we lay hold upon the Divine Life, devour and
assimilate it, so in that very act the Divine Life devours us, and knits
us up into the mystical Body of Reality. "Thou shalt not change Me into
thine own substance, as thou dost change the food of thy flesh, but thou
shalt be changed into Mine," said the Spirit of God to St. Augustine; and
his Flemish descendant announces this same mysterious principle of life
with greater richness and beauty.
"It is the nature of love ever to give and to take, to love and to be
loved, and these two things meet in whomsoever loves. Thus the love of
Christ is both avid and generous ... as He devours us, so He would feed
us. If He absorbs us utterly into Himself, in return He gives us His very
self again."[17]
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";[18] 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 life-process 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 gathering-point of personality, the
'spiritual heart.' On every page of his writings the reference to that
which the spiritual Light and Love do for man, is balanced by an
insistence on that which man himself must do: the choices to be made, the
'exercises' to be performed, the tension and effort which must
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, self-naughting 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."[19] 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."[20]
The consummation of the mystic way, then, represents not merely a state
of ecstatic contemplation, escape from the stream of succession, the
death of self-hood, joyous self-immersion in the Abyss; not merely the
enormously enhanced state of creative activity and energetic love which
the mystics call 'divine fecundity'; but _both_--the flux and reflux of
supreme Reality. It is the synthesis of contemplation and action, of
Being and Becoming: the discovery at last of a clue--inexpressible
indeed, but really held and experienced--to the mystery which most deeply
torments us, the link between our life of duration and the Eternal Life
of God. This is the Seventh Degree of Love, "noblest and highest that can
be realised in the life of time or of eternity."
That process of enhancement whereby the self, in its upward progress,
carries with it all that has been attained before, here finds its
completion. The active life of Becoming, and the essential life of Being,
are not all. "From beyond the Infinite the Infinite comes," said the
Indian; and his Christian brother, in parallel terms, declares that
beyond the Essence is the Superessence of 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 re-enter in
love and cling to God; in order that we may ever remain one with Him
without change."[21]
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."[22]
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."[23]
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."[24] This is the direct,
unmediated world of spiritual intuition; where the self touches a Reality
that has not been passed through the filters of sense and thought. There
man achieves a love, a vision, an activity which are 'wayless,' yet far
more valid than anything that can be fitted into the framework of our
conditioned world.
"In a place beyond uttermost place, in a track without shadow of trace,
Soul and body transcending, I live in the soul of my Loved One anew."
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."[25]