THE INTERIOR LIFE: ILLUMINATION AND DESTITUTION
Let whoso thirsts to see his God cleanse his mirror, purge his spirit;
and when thus he has cleansed his mirror, and long and diligently gazed
in it, a certain brightness of divine light begins to shine through
upon him, and a certain immense ray of unwonted vision to appear before
his eyes.... From the beholding of this light, which it sees within
itself with amazement, the mind is mightily set on fire, and lifted up
to behold that Light which is above itself.
Richard of St. Victor.
It is plain that the Active Life in Ruysbroeck's system answers more or
less to the Purgative Way, considered upon its affirmative and
constructive side, as a building up of the heroic Christian character.
So, too, the life which he calls Interior or Contemplative, and which
initiates man into the friendship of God, corresponds in the main with
the Illuminative Way of orthodox mysticism; though it includes in its
later stages much that is usually held to belong to the third, or
Unitive, state of the soul. The first life has, as it were, unfolded to
the sunlight the outer petals of the mystic rose; exhibiting in their
full beauty, adjusting to their true use, the normally-apparent
constituents of man's personality. All his relations with the given world
of sense, the sphere of Becoming, have been purified and adjusted. Now
the expansive and educative influence of the Divine Light is able to
penetrate nearer to the heart of his personality; is brought to bear upon
those interior qualities which he hardly knows himself to possess, and
which govern his relation with the spiritual world of Being. The flower
is to open more widely; the inner ring of petals must uncurl.
As the primary interest of the Active Life was ethical purification, so
the primary interest of this Second Life is intellectual purification.
Intellect, however, is here to be understood in its highest sense; as
including not only the analytic reason which deals with the problems of
our normal universe, but that higher intelligence, that contemplative
mind, which--once it is awakened to consciousness--can gather news of the
transcendental world. The development and clarification of this power is
only possible to those who have achieved, and continue to live at full
stretch, the high, arduous and unselfish life of Christian virtue. Again
we must remind ourselves that Ruysbroeck's theory of transcendence
involves, not the passage from one life to another, but the _adding_ of
one life to another: the perpetual deepening, widening, heightening and
enriching of human experience. As the author of _The Cloud of Unknowing_
insists that none can be truly contemplative who is not also active, so
Ruysbroeck says that no man ever rises above the ordinary obligations of
Christian kindness and active good works.
"We find nowadays many silly men who would be so interior and so
detached, that they will not be active or helpful in any way of which
their neighbours are in need. Know, such men are neither hidden friends
nor yet true servants of God, but are wholly false and disloyal; for none
can follow His counsels but those who obey His laws."[35]
Nevertheless it would be generally true to say that, whilst the aim of
the Active Life is right conduct, the aim of the Interior Life is right
vision and thought. As, in that first life, all the perversions of man's
ordinary powers and passions were rectified, all that was superfluous and
unreal done away, and his nature set right with God; now--still holding
and living in its fulness this purified active life--he is to press
deeper and deeper into the resources of his being, finding there other
powers and cravings which must be brought within the field of
consciousness, and set up those relations with the Transcendent of which
they are capable. This deepening and enlarging of man's universe,
together with the further and more drastic discarding of illusions and
unrealities, is the business of the Second Life, considered on its
impersonal side.
"If thou dost desire to unfold in thyself the Contemplative Life, thou
must enter within, beyond the sense-life; and, on that apex of thy being,
adorned with all the virtues of which I have spoken, looking unto God
with gratitude and love and continual reverence, thou must keep thy
thoughts bare, and stripped of every sensible image, thine understanding
open and lifted up to the Eternal Truth, and thy spirit spread out in the
sight of God as a living mirror to receive His everlasting likeness.
Behold, therein appears a light of the understanding, which neither
sense, reason, nature, nor the clearest logic can apprehend, but which
gives us freedom and confidence towards God. It is nobler and higher than
all that God has created in nature; for it is the perfection of nature,
and transcends nature, and is the clear-shining intermediary between
ourselves and God. Our thoughts, bare and stripped of images, are
themselves the living mirror in which this light shines: and the light
requires of us that we should be like to and one with God, in this living
mirror of our bare thoughts."[36]
In this strongly Victorine passage, the whole process of the Second Life
is epitomised; but in _The Spiritual Marriage_, where its description
occupies the seventy-three chapters of the second book, we see how long
is the way which stretches from that first 'entering in beyond the sense
life' to the point at which the soul's mirror is able to receive in its
fullness that Light wherein alone it can apprehend Reality.
Considered upon its organic side, as a growth and movement of the soul,
this Way, as conceived, and probably experienced, by Ruysbroeck, can be
divided into three great phases. We might call these Action, Reaction and
Equilibrium. Broadly speaking, they answer to the Illumination, Dark
Night and Simple Union of orthodox mystical science. Yet since in his
vivid description of these linked states he constantly departs from the
formulæ of his predecessors, and as constantly illustrates their
statements by intimate and homely touches only possible to one who has
endured the adventures of which he tells, we are justified in claiming
the description as the fruit of experience rather than of tradition; and
as evidence of the course taken by his own development.
It is surely upon his own memory that he is relying, when he tells us
that the beginning of this new life possesses something of the abrupt
character of a second conversion. It happens, he says, when we least
expect it; when the self, after the long tension and struggle of moral
purgation, has become drowsy and tired. Then, suddenly, "a spiritual cry
echoes through the soul," announcing a new encounter with Reality, and
demanding a new response; or, to put it in another way, consciousness on
its ascending spiral has pushed through to another level of existence,
where it can hear voices and discern visions to which it was deaf and
blind before. This sudden clarity of mind, this new vivid apprehension of
Divine Love, is the first indication of man's entrance on the
Illuminative Way. It is introversive rather than out-going in type.
Changing the character of our attention to life, we discern within us
something which we have always possessed and always ignored: a secret
Divine energy, which is now to emerge from the subconscious deeps into
the area of consciousness. There it stimulates the will, evicts all
lesser images and interests from the heart, and concentrates all the
faculties into a single and intense state, pressing towards the Unity of
God, the synthetic experience of love; for perpetual movement towards
that unity--not achievement of it--is the mark of this Second Life, in
which the separation of God and the soul remains intact. In Victorine
language, it is the period of spiritual betrothal, not of spiritual
marriage; of a vision which, though wide, rich and wonderful, is mirrored
rather than direct.
The new God-inspired movement, then, begins within, like a spring
bubbling from the deeps; and thrusts up and out to the consciousness
which it is destined to clarify and enhance. "The stream of Divine grace
swiftly stirs and moves a man inwardly, and from within outwards; and
this swift stirring is the first thing that makes us _see_. Of this swift
stirring is born from the side of man the second point: that is, a
gathering together of all the inward and outward powers in spiritual
unity and in the bonds of love. The third is that liberty which enables
man to retreat into himself, without images or obstacles, whensoever he
wills and thinks of his God."[37]
So we may say that an enhancement of the conative powers, a greater
control over the attention, are the chief marks of the Illuminative Way
as perceived by the growing self. But the liberty here spoken of has a
moral as well as a mental aspect. It is a freeing of the whole man from
the fetters of illusion, and involves that perfect detachment of heart,
that self-naughting, which makes him equally willing to have joy or pain,
gain or loss, esteem or contempt, peace or fear, as the Divine Will may
ordain. Thus is perfected that suppleness of soul which he began to
acquire in the Active Life: a gradual process, which needs for its
accomplishment the negative rhythm of renunciation, testing the manliness
and courage of the self, as well as the positive movement of love. Hence
the Contemplative Life, as Ruysbroeck knows and describes it, has, and
must have, its state of pain as well as its state of joy. With him,
however, as with nearly all the mystics, the state of joy comes first:
the glad and eager reaction to those new levels of spiritual reality
disclosed to consciousness when the struggles and readjustments of the
Active Life have done their work. This is the phase in the self's
progress which mystical writers properly mean by Illumination: a
condition of great happiness, and of an intuition of Reality so vivid and
joyous, that the soul often supposes that she has here reached the goal
of her quest. It is in the spiritual year, says Ruysbroeck, that which
the month of May is in the seasons of the earth: a wholesome and
necessary time of sunshine, swift growth and abundant flowers, when the
soul, under the influence of 'the soft rain of inward consolations and
the heavenly dew of the Divine sweetness' blossoms in new and lovely
graces.
Illumination is an unstable period. The sun is rising swiftly in the
heaven of man's consciousness; and as it increases in power, so it calls
forth on the soul's part greater ardours, more intense emotional
reactions. Once more the flux of God is demanding its reflux. The soul,
like the growing boy suddenly made aware of the beauty, romance and
wonder--the intense and irresistible appeal--of a world that had seemed
ordinary before, flows out towards this new universe with all the
enthusiasm and eagerness of its young fresh powers. Those powers are so
new to it, that it cannot yet control or understand them. Vigorous and
ungovernable, they invade by turns the heart, the will, the mind, as do
the fevers and joys of physical adolescence; inciting to acts and
satisfactions for which the whole self is hardly ready yet. "Then is
thrown wide," says Ruysbroeck, "the heaven which was shut, and from the
face of Divine Love there blazes down a sudden light, as it were a
lightning flash." In the meeting of this inward and outward spiritual
force--the Divine Light without, the growing Divine Spark within--there
is great joy. Ecstasy, and that state of musical rapture, exceeding the
possibilities of speech, which Ruysbroeck like Richard Rolle calls
'ghostly song,' are the natural self-expressions of the soul in this
moment of its career.[38]
In more than one book we find references to this ecstatic period: a
period so strongly marked in his own case, that it became for him--though
he was under no illusions as to its permanent value--one of the landmarks
in man's journey to his home. Looking back on it in later life, he sees
in it two great phases, of which the earlier and lower at any rate is
dangerous and easily misunderstood; and is concerned to warn those who
come after him of its transitory and imperfect character. The first phase
is that of 'spiritual inebriation,' in which the fever, excitement and
unrest of this period of growth and change--affecting as they do every
aspect of personality--show themselves in the psycho-physical phenomena
which are well-known accompaniments of religious emotion in selves of a
certain temperament. This spiritual delirium, which appears to have been
a common phase in the mystical revivals of the fourteenth century, is
viewed by Ruysbroeck with considerable distrust; and rightly attributed
by him to an excitement of the senses rather than of the soul. At best it
is but 'children's food,' given to those who cannot yet digest 'the
strong food of temptation and the loss of God.' Its manifestations, as he
describes them, overpass the limits not merely of common sense but also
of sanity; and are clearly related to the frenzies of revivalists and the
wild outbreaks of songs, dance and ecstatic speech observed in nearly all
non-Christian religions of an enthusiastic type. In this state of
rapture, "a man seems like a drunkard, no longer master of himself." He
sings, shouts, laughs and cries both at once, runs and leaps in the air,
claps his hands, and indulges in absurdly exaggerated gestures 'with many
other disagreeable exhibitions.'[39] These he may not be able to help;
but is advised to control them as soon as he can, passing from the merely
sensuous emotion which results when the light of Eternal Love invades the
'inferior powers' of the soul, to the spiritual emotion, amenable to
reason, which is the reaction of the 'higher powers' of the self to that
same overwhelming influx of grace.
That inpouring grace grows swiftly in power, as the strength of the sun
grows with the passing of the year. The Presence of God now stands over
the soul's supreme summits, in the zenith: the transcendent fact of the
illuminated consciousness. His power and love shine perpetually upon the
heart, 'giving more than we can take, demanding more than we can pay';
and inducing in the soul upon which this mighty energy is playing, a
strange unrest, part anguish and part joy. This is the second phase of
the ecstatic period, and gives rise to that which Ruysbroeck, and after
him Tauler, have called the 'storm of love': a wild longing for union
which stretches to the utmost the self's powers of response, and
expresses itself in violent efforts, impassioned ascents towards the
Spirit that cries without ceasing to our spirit: "Pay your debt! Love the
Love that has loved you from Eternity."[40]
Now the vigorous soul begins to find within itself the gift of Spiritual
Strength; that enthusiastic energy which is one of the characters of all
true love. This is the third of the 'Seven Gifts of the Spirit,' and the
first to be actualised in the Illuminated Life.[41] From this strong and
ardent passion for the Transcendent, adoration and prayer stream forth;
and these again react upon the self, forming the fuel of the fire of
love. The interior invitation of God, His attractive power, His delicate
yet inexorable caress, is to the loving heart the most pure delight that
it has ever known. It responds by passionate movements of adoration and
gratitude, opening its petals wide to the beams of the Eternal Sun.
This is the joy; and close behind it comes the anguish, 'sweetest and
heaviest of all pains.' It is the sense of unsatisfied desire--the pain
of love--which comes from the enduring consciousness of a gulf fixed
between the self and That with which it desires to unite. "Of this inward
demand and compulsion, which makes the creature to rise up and prepare
itself to the utmost of its power, without yet being able to reach or
attain the Unity--of this, there springs a spiritual pain. When the
heart's core, the very source of life, is wounded by love, and man cannot
attain that thing which he desires above else; when he must stay ever
where he desires no more to be, of these feelings comes this pain....
When man cannot achieve God, and yet neither can nor will do without Him;
in such men there arises a furious agitation and impatience, both within
and without. And whilst man is in this tumult, no creature in heaven or
earth can help him or give him rest."[42]
The sensible heat of love is felt with a greater violence now than at any
other period of life; the rays of the Spiritual Sun strike the soul with
terrific force, ripening the fruits of the virtues, yet bringing danger
to the health, both mental and physical, of those who are not properly
prepared, and who faint under the exhaustion of this 'intense fury of
Divine Love,' this onslaught which 'eats up the heart.' These are 'the
dog-days of the spiritual year.' As all nature languishes under their
stifling heat, so too long an exposure to their violence may mean ruin to
the physical health of the growing self. Yet those who behave with
prudence need not take permanent harm; a kind of wise steadfastness will
support them throughout this turbulent period. "Following through all
storms the path of love, they will advance towards that place whither
love leadeth them."[43]
To this period of vivid illumination and emotional unrest belongs the
development of those 'secondary automatisms' familiar to all students of
mysticism: the desperate efforts of the mind to work up into some
intelligible shape--some pictured vision or some spoken word--the
overwhelming intuitions of the Transcendent by which it is possessed; the
abrupt suspension of the surface-consciousness in rapture and ecstasy,
when that overwhelming intuition develops into the complete mono-ideism
of the ecstatic, and cuts off all contacts with the world of sense. Of
these phenomena Ruysbroeck speaks with intimacy, and also with much
common sense. He distinguishes visions into those pictures or material
images which are 'seen in the imagination,' and those so-called
'intellectual visions,'--of which the works of Angela of Foligno and St.
Teresa provide so rich a series of examples,--which are really direct and
imageless messages from the Transcendent; received in those supersensuous
regions where man has contact with the Incomprehensible Good and "seeing
and hearing are one thing." To this conventional classification he adds a
passage which must surely be descriptive of his own experiences in this
kind:
"Sometimes God gives to such men swift spiritual glimpses, like to the
flash of lightning in the sky. It comes like a sudden flash of strange
light, streaming forth from the Simple Nudity. By this is the spirit
uplifted for an instant above itself; and at once the light passes, and
the man again comes to himself. This is God's own work, and it is
something most august; for often those who experience it afterwards
become illuminated men. And those who live in the violence and fervour of
love have now and then another manner, whereby a certain light shines
_in_ them; and this God works by means. In this light, the heart and the
desirous powers are uplifted toward the Light; and in this encounter the
joy and satisfaction are such that the heart cannot contain itself, but
breaks out in loud cries of joy. And this is called _jubilus_ or
jubilation; and it is a joy that cannot be expressed in words."[44]
Here the parallel with Richard Rolle's 'ghostly song, with great voice
outbreaking' will strike every reader of that most musical of the
mystics; and it is probable that in both cases the prominence given to
this rather uncommon form of spiritual rapture points back to personal
experience. "Methinketh," says Rolle, "that contemplation is this
heavenly song of the Love of God, which is called _jubilus_, taken of the
sweetness of a soul by praising of God. This song is the end of perfect
prayer, and of the highest devotion that may be here. This gladness of
soul is had of God, and it breaketh out in a ghostly voice
well-sounding."[45]
This exultant and lyrical mood then, this adoring rapture, which only the
rhythm of music can express, is the emotional reaction which indicates
the high summer of the soul. It will be seen that each phase of its
seasonal progress has been marked by a fresh inflow of grace and gifts, a
fresh demand upon its power of response. The tension never slackens; the
need for industry is never done away. The gift of Strength, by which the
self presses forward, has now been reinforced by the gift of Counsel,
_i.e._ by the growth and deepening of that intuition which is its medium
of contact with the spiritual world. The Counsel of the Spirit, says
Ruysbroeck, is like a stirring or inspiration, deep within the soul. This
stirring, this fresh uprush of energy, is really a 'new birth' of the
Son, the Divine Wisdom; lighting up the intelligence so that it perceives
its destiny, and perceives too that the communion it now enjoys is but an
image of the Divine Union which awaits it.[46] God is counselling the
soul with an inward secret insistence to rush out towards Him,
stimulating her hunger for Reality; or, to put it otherwise, the Divine
Spark is growing swiftly, and pressing hard against the walls of its
home. Therefore the culmination of this gift, and the culmination too of
the illuminated consciousness, brings to the soul a certitude that she
must still press on and out; that nothing less than God Himself can
suffice her, or match the mysterious Thing which dwells in her deeps.
Now this way of love and ecstasy and summer heats has been attended
throughout by grave dangers for the adolescent spirit; above all by the
primary danger which besets the mystical life, of mistaking spiritual joy
for spiritual reality, desiring 'consolations' and 'illuminations' for
their own sake, and resting in the gift instead of the Giver. "Though he
who dedicates himself to love ever experiences great joy, he must never
seek this joy." All those tendencies grouped by St. John of the Cross
under the disagreeable name of 'spiritual gluttony,' those further
temptations to self-indulgent quietism which are but an insidious form of
sloth, are waiting to entrap the self on the Illuminative Way. But there
is a way beyond this, another 'Coming of the Bridegroom,' which
Ruysbroeck describes as 'eternally safe and sure.' This is the way of
pain and deprivation; when the Presence of God seems to be withdrawn, and
the fatigue and reaction consequent on the violent passions and energies
of the illuminated state make themselves felt as a condition of misery,
aridity and impotence,--all, in fact, that the Christian mystics mean by
the 'Spiritual Death' or 'Dark Night of the Soul,' and which Ruysbroeck's
contemporaries, the Friends of God, called 'the upper school of perfect
self-abandonment.'
The mirror is now to be cleansed of all false reflections, all beautiful
prismatic light; the thoughts stripped bare of the consolations they have
enjoyed. Summer is over, and autumn begins; when the flowers indeed die
down, but the fruits which they heralded are ripe. Now is the time when
man can prove the stuff of which he is made; and the religious amorist,
the false mystic, is distinguished from the heroic and long-suffering
servant of God. "In this season is perfected and completed all the work
that the sun has accomplished during the year. In the same manner, when
Christ the glorious Sun has risen to His zenith in the heart of man and
then begins to descend, and to hide the radiance of His Divine light, and
to abandon the man; then the impatience and ardour of love grow less. And
this concealment of Christ, and this withdrawal of His light and heat,
are the first working and the new coming of this degree. And now Christ
says spiritually within the man: 'Go forth, in the way which I now teach
you.' And the man goes forth, and finds himself poor, wretched and
abandoned. And here the tempest, the ardour, the impatience of love grows
cold; and the hot summer becomes autumn, and its riches turn to great
poverty. Then man begins to lament in his distress--where now has gone
that ardent love, that intimacy, that gratitude, that all-sufficing
adoration? And that interior consolation, that intimate joy, that
sensible savour, how has he lost all this?"[47]
The veil that had seemed so transparent now thickens again; the
certitudes that made life lovely all depart. Small wonder if the tortured
spirit of the mystic fails to recognise this awful destitution as a
renewed caress from the all-demanding Lover of the Soul; an education in
courage, humility and selflessness; a last purification of the will. The
state to which that self is being led is a renewed self-donation on new
and higher levels: one more of those mystical deaths which are really
mystical births; a giving-up, not merely of those natural tastes and
desires which were disciplined in the Active Life, but of the higher
passions and satisfactions of the spirit too. He is to be led to a state
of such complete surrender to the Divine purposes that he is able to say:
"Lord, not my will according to nature, but Thy will and my will
according to spirit be done." The darkness, sorrow and abandonment
through which this is accomplished are far more essential to his
development than the sunshine and happiness that went before. It is not
necessary, says Ruysbroeck, that all should know the ecstasies of
illumination; but by this dark stairway every man who would attain to God
must go.
When man has achieved this perfect resignation and all tendency to
spiritual self-seeking is dead, the September of the soul is come. The
sun has entered the sign of the Balance, when days and nights are equal;
for now the surrendered self has achieved equilibrium, and endures in
peace and steadfastness the alternations of the Divine Dark and Divine
Light. Now the harvest and the vintage are ripe: "That is to say, all
those inward and outward virtues, which man has practised with delight in
the fire of love, these, now that he knows them and is able to accomplish
them, he shall practise diligently and dutifully and offer them to God.
And never were they so precious in His sight: never so noble and so fair.
And all those consolations which God gave him before, he will gladly give
up, and will empty himself for the glory of God. This is the harvest of
the wheat and the many ripe fruits which make us rich in God, and give to
us Eternal Life. Thus are the virtues perfected; and the absence of
consolation is turned to an eternal wine."[48]