THE INTERIOR LIFE: UNION AND CONTEMPLATION
_Lume è lassu, che visibile face_
_lo Creatore a quella creatura_
_che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace._
Par, xxx. 100.
And the Light floweth forth in similitude, and indraweth Itself in
unity; which we perceive, beyond the reason, in that high point of our
understanding which is bare and turned within.
The Twelve Béguines.
The soul which has endured with courage and humility the anguish of the
Dark Night, actualising within its own experience the double rhythm of
love and renunciation, now enters upon a condition of equilibrium; in
which it perceives that all its previous adventures and apprehensions
were but episodes of growth, phases in the long preparation of character
for those new levels of life on which it is now to dwell.
Three points, says Ruysbroeck, must characterise the truly interior man.
First, his mind must be detached from its natural inclination to rest in
images and appearances, however lovely; and must depend altogether upon
that naked Absence of Images, which is God. This is the 'ascent to the
Nought' preached by the Areopagite. Secondly, by means of his spiritual
exercises, his progressive efforts to correspond with that Divine Life
ever experienced by him with greater intensity, he must have freed
himself from all taint of selfhood, all personal desire; so that in true
inward liberty he can lift himself up unhindered towards God, in a spirit
of selfless devotion. Plainly, the desolations of the Dark Night are
exactly adapted to the production within the self of these two
characters; which we might call purity of intelligence and purity of
will. Directly resulting from their actualisation, springs the third
point: the consciousness of inward union with God.[49] This consciousness
of union, which we must carefully distinguish from the _Unity_ that is
Ruysbroeck's name for the last state of the transfigured soul, is the
ruling character of that state of equilibrium to which we have now come;
and represents the full achievement of the Interior Life.
In many of his works, under various images, Ruysbroeck tries to tell us
what he means by this inward union with God, this 'mutual inhabitation,'
as he calls it in one passage of great beauty, which is the goal of the
'Second Life.' He reminds us again of that remote point of the spirit,
that 'apex' of our being, where our life touches the Divine Life; where
God's image 'lives and reigns.' With the cleansing of the heart and mind,
the heightening and concentration of the will, which the disciplines of
the Active Life and Dark Night have effected, this supreme point of the
spirit is brought at last within the conscious field. Then man feels and
knows the presence there of an intense and creative vitality, an Eternal
Essence, from which all that is worth having in his selfhood flows. This
is the Life-giving Life (_Levende Leven_), where the created and
Uncreated meet and are one: a phrase, apparently taken by Ruysbroeck from
St. Bernard, which aptly expresses an idea familiar to all the great
contemplatives. It is the point at which man's separate spirit, as it
were, emerges from the Divine Spirit: the point through which he must at
last return to his Source. Here the Father has impressed His image, the
Son is perpetually born, the Spirit wells up;[50] and here the Divine
Unity dwells and calls him to the One. Here Eternity and Time are
intertwined. Here springs the fountain of 'Living Water'--grace,
transcendent vitality--upon which the mystic life of man depends.
Now the self, because it is at last conformed to the demands of the
spiritual world, feels new powers from this life-giving source streaming
into all departments of its being. The last barriers of self-will are
broken; and the result is an inrush of fresh energy and light. Whereas in
the 'First Life' God fed and communed with him by 'means,' and was
revealed under images appropriate to a consciousness still immersed in
the world of appearance; now man receives these gifts and messages, makes
his contacts with Reality, 'without means,' or 'by grace'--_i.e._ in a
spiritual and interior manner. Those 'lightning flashes from the face of
Divine Love,' those abrupt and vivid intuitions which he enjoyed during
illumination, have given way before the steady shining of the Uncreated
Light. Though light-imagery is never long absent from Ruysbroeck's pages,
it is, however, the spring of Living Water ever welling up, the rills or
brooks which flow from it, and take its substance to the farthest
recesses of the thirsty land, which seems to him the best image of this
new inpouring of life. He uses it in all his chief works, perhaps most
successfully in _The Spiritual Marriage_. Faithful to the mediæval
division of personality into Memory or Mind, Intelligence or
Understanding, and Will,--influenced too by his deep conviction that all
Divine activity is threefold in type,--he describes the Well-spring as
breaking into three Brooks of Grace, which pour their waters into each
department of the self. The duct through which these waters come, 'living
and foaming' from the deeps of the Divine Riches, is the Eternal Christ;
who 'comes anew' to the purified soul, and is the immediate source of its
power and happiness.
The first of the brooks which flow from Him is called 'Pure Simplicity.'
It is a 'simple light,' says Ruysbroeck in another place; the white
radiance of Eternity which, streaming into the mind, penetrates
consciousness from top to bottom, and unifies the powers of the self
about the new and higher centre now established. This simple light, in
which we see things as they are--and therefore see that only one thing
truly _is_--delivers us from that slavery to the multiplicity of things,
which splits the attention and makes concentration upon Reality
impossible to the soul. The achievement of such mental simplicity,
escaping the prismatic illusion of the world, is the first condition of
contemplation. "Thanks to this simple light which fills him, the man
finds himself to be unified, established, penetrated and affirmed in the
unity of his mind or thought. And thereby he is uplifted and established
in a _new condition_; and he turns inward upon himself, and stays his
mind upon the Nudity, above all the pressure of sensual images, above all
multiplicity."[51]
The second stream which pours out from that Transcendent Life is a
'Spiritual Clarity,' which illuminates the intelligence and shows it all
good. This clarity is a new and heightened form of intuition: a lucid
understanding, whereby the self achieves clear vision of its own life,
and is able to contemplate the sublime richness of the Divine Nature;
gazing upon the mystery of the Trinity, and finding everywhere the
Presence of God. Those who possess this light do not need ecstasies and
revelations--sudden uprushes towards the supernal world--for their life
and being is established in that world, above the life of sense. They
have come to that state which Eckhart calls 'finding all creatures in God
and God in all creatures.' They see things at last in their native
purity. The heart of that vision, says Ruysbroeck, is their perception of
"the unmeasured loyalty of God to His creation"--one of his deepest and
most beautiful utterances--"and therefrom springs a deep inward joy of
the spirit, and a high trust in God; and this inward joy embraces and
penetrates all the powers of the soul, and the most secret part of the
spirit."[52]
The third Brook of Grace irrigates the conative powers of the self;
strengthens the will in all perfection, and energises us anew. "Like
fire, this brook enkindles the will, and swallows up and absorbs all
things in the unity of the spirit ... and now Christ speaks inwardly in
the spirit by means of this burning brook, saying, 'Go forth, in
exercises proper to this gift and this coming.' By the first brook, which
is a _Simple Light_, the Mind is freed from the invasions of the senses,
and grounded and affirmed in spiritual unity. And by the second brook,
which is a _Spreading Light_, the Reason and Understanding are
illuminated, that they may know and distinguish all manner of virtues and
exercises, and the mysteries of Scripture. And by the third brook, which
is an _Infused Heat_, the heights of the Will are enkindled with quiet
love and adorned with great riches. And thus does man become spiritually
illuminate; for the grace of God dwells like a fountain-head in the unity
of his spirit, and the brooks cause a flowing forth of all virtues from
the powers of the soul. And the fountain-head of grace demands a
back-flowing into that same ground from whence the flood has come."[53]
So the Interior Life, now firmly established, is found to conform to
those great laws which have guided the growing spirit from the first.
Again, the dual property of love, possession and action, satisfaction and
fecundity, is to be manifested upon new levels. The pendulum motion of
life, swinging between the experience of union with God to which 'the
Divine Unity ever calls us,' and its expression in active charity to
which the multiplicity of His creatures and their needs ever entreat us,
still goes on. The more richly and strongly the life-giving Life wells up
within the self, the greater are the demands made upon that self's
industry and love. In the establishment of this balance, in this
continual healthy act of alternation, this double movement into God and
out to men, is the proof that the soul has really centred itself upon the
spiritual world--is, as Ruysbroeck puts it, confirmed in love. "Thus do
work and union perpetually renew themselves; and this renewal in work and
in union, _this_ is a spiritual life."[54]
Now the self which has achieved this degree of transcendence has
achieved, too, considerable experience in that art of contemplation or
introversion which is the mode of its communion with God. Throughout,
training and development have gone hand in hand; and the fact that
Ruysbroeck seldom troubles to distinguish between them, but accepts them
as two aspects of one thing--the gradual deification of the
soul--constitutes one of the great obstacles to an understanding of his
works. Often he describes the whole spiritual life as consisting in
introversion, an entering of consciousness into the supersensuous regions
beyond thought; in defiance of his own principle of active charity,
movement, work, as the essential reaction to the universe which
distinguishes a 'deified' man. The truth is that the two processes run
side by side; and now one, now the other, is in the foreground of his
thought. Therefore all that I shall now say of the contemplative art must
be understood as describing acts and apprehensions taking place
throughout the whole course of the Interior Life.
What, then, is introversion? It is one of the two great modes under which
the spiritual consciousness works. Plainly, any living sense of God's
presence must discern that Circle whose centre is everywhere, as both
exterior and interior to the self. In Ruysbroeck's own works we find a
violent effort to express this ineffable fact of omnipresence, of a truly
Transcendent yet truly Immanent Reality; an effort often involving a
collision of imagery. God, he says, may be discovered at the soul's apex,
where He 'eternally lives and reigns'; and the soul itself dwells _in_
God, ebbing and flowing, wandering and returning, within that Fathomless
Ground. Yet none the less He comes to that soul from without; pouring in
upon it like sunshine, inundating it with torrents of grace, seizing the
separate entity and devouring whilst He feeds it; flashing out upon it in
a tempest of love from the Empyrean Heaven, the Abyss of Being, where He
dwells. "Present, yet absent; near, yet far!" exclaims St. Augustine.
"Thou art the sky, and Thou art the nest as well!" says the great mystic
poet of our own day.
Whilst nearly all the mystics have possessed clear consciousness of this
twofold revelation of the Divine Nature, and some have experienced by
turns the 'outward and upward' rush and the inward retreat,
temperamentally they usually lean towards one or other form of communion
with God,--ecstasy or introversion. For one class, contact with Him seems
primarily to involve an outgoing flight towards Transcendent Reality; an
attitude of mind strongly marked in all contemplatives who are near to
the Neoplatonic tradition--Plotinus, St. Basil, St. Macarius--and also in
Richard Rolle and a few other mediæval types. These would agree with
Dionysius the Areopagite that "we must contemplate things divine by our
whole selves standing _out_ of our whole selves." For the other class,
the first necessity is a retreat of consciousness from the periphery,
where it touches the world of appearance, to the centre, the Unity of
Spirit or 'Ground of the Soul,' where human personality buds forth from
the Essential World. True, this inturning of attention is but a
preliminary to the self's entrance upon that same Transcendent Region
which the ecstatic claims that he touches in his upward flights. The
introversive mystic, too, is destined to 'sail the wild billows of the
Sea Divine'; but here, in the deeps of his nature, he finds the door
through which he must pass. Only by thus discovering the unity of his own
nature can he give himself to that 'tide of light' which draws all things
back to the One.
Such is Ruysbroeck's view of contemplation. This being so, introversion
is for him an essential part of man's spiritual development. As the Son
knows the Father, so it is the destiny of all spirits created in that
Pattern to know Him; and the mirror which is able to reflect that Divine
Light, the Simple Eye which alone can bear to gaze on it, lies in the
deeps of human personality. The will, usually harnessed to the
surface-consciousness, devoted to the interests of temporal life; the
love, so freely spent on unreal and imperfect objects of desire; the
thought which busies itself on the ceaseless analysis and arrangement of
passing things--all these are to be swept inwards to that gathering-point
of personality, that Unity of the Spirit, of which he so often speaks;
and there fused into a single state of enormously enhanced consciousness,
which, withdrawn from all attention to the changeful world of
'similitudes,' is exposed to the direct action of the Eternal World of
spiritual realities. The pull of Divine Love--the light that ever flows
back into the One--is to withdraw the contemplative's consciousness from
multiplicity to unity. His progress in contemplation will be a progress
towards that complete mono-ideism in which the Vision of God--and here
_vision_ is to be understood in its deepest sense as a totality of
apprehension, a 'ghostly sight'--dominates the field of consciousness to
the exclusion, for the time of contemplation, of all else.
Psychologically, Ruysbroeck's method differs little from that described
by St. Teresa. It begins in recollection, the first drawing inwards of
attention from the world of sense; passes to meditation, the centring of
attention on some intellectual formula or mystery of faith; and thence,
by way of graduated states, variously divided and described in his
different works, to contemplation proper, the apprehension of God 'beyond
and above reason.' All attempts, however, to map out this process, or
reduce it to a system, must necessarily have an arbitrary and symbolic
character. True, we are bound to adopt some system, if we describe it at
all; but the dangers and limitations of all formulas, all concrete
imagery, where we are dealing with the fluid, living, changeful world of
spirit, should never be absent from our minds. The bewildering and often
inconsistent series of images and numbers, arrangements and
rearrangements of 'degrees,' 'states,' 'stirrings,' and 'gifts,' in which
Ruysbroeck's sublime teachings on contemplation are buried, makes the
choice of some one formula imperative for us; though none will reduce his
doctrines to a logical series, for he is perpetually passing over from
the dialectic to the lyrical mood, and forgets to be orderly as soon as
he begins to be subjective. I choose, then, to base my classification on
that great chapter (xix.) in _The Seven Cloisters_, where he
distinguishes three stages of contemplation; finding in them the
responses of consciousness to the special action of the Three Persons of
the Blessed Trinity. These three stages in the soul's apprehension of
God, are: the Emotional, the Intellectual, the Intuitive. I think that
most of the subtly distinguished interior experiences of the mystic, the
'comings' of the Divine Presence, the 'stirrings' and contacts which he
describes in his various books, can be ranged under one or other of them.
1. First comes that loving contemplation of the 'uplifted heart' which is
the work of the Holy Spirit, the consuming fire of Divine Love. This
ardent love, invading the self, and satisfying it in that intimate
experience of personal communion so often described in the writings of
the mystics, represents the self's first call to contemplation and first
natural response; made with "so great a joy and delight of soul and body,
in his uplifted heart, that the man knoweth not what hath befallen him,
nor how he may endure it." For Ruysbroeck this purely emotional reaction
to Reality, this burning flame of devotion--which seemed to Richard Rolle
the essence of the contemplative life--is but its initial phase. It
corresponds with--and indeed generally accompanies--those fever-heats,
those 'tempests' of impatient love endured by the soul at the height of
the Illuminative Way. Love, it is true, shall be from first to last the
inspiring force of the contemplative's ascents: his education is from one
point of view simply an education in love. But this love is a passion of
many degrees; and the 'urgency felt in the heart,' the restlessness and
hunger of this spiritual feeling-state, is only its lowest form. The love
which burns like white fire on the apex of the soul, longs for sacrifice,
inspires heroic action, and goes forward without fear, 'holy, strong and
free,' to brave the terrors of the Divine Dark, is of another temper than
this joyful sentiment.
2. A loving stretching out into God, and an intellectual gazing upon Him,
says Ruysbroeck, in a passage which I have already quoted, are the 'two
heavenly pipes' in which the wind of the Spirit sings. So the next phase
in the contemplative's development is that enhancement of the intellect,
the power of perceiving, as against desiring and loving Reality, which is
the work of the Logos, the Divine Wisdom. As the cleansed and detached
heart had been lifted up to _feel_ the Transcendent; now the
understanding, stripped of sense-images, purged of intellectual
arrogance, clarified by grace, is lifted up to _apprehend_ it. This
degree has two phases. First, that enlargement of the understanding to an
increased comprehension of truth, the finding of deeper and diviner
meanings in things already known, which Richard of St. Victor called
_mentis dilatatio_. Next, that further uplift of the mind to a state in
which it is able to contemplate things above itself whilst retaining
clear self-consciousness, which he called _mentis sublevatio_.
Ruysbroeck, however, inverts the order given by Richard; for him the
uplift comes first, the dilation of consciousness follows from it. This
is a characteristic instance of the way in which he uses the Victorine
psychology; constantly appropriating its terms but never hesitating to
modify, enrich or misuse them as his experience or opinions may dictate.
The first phase of Intellectual Contemplation, then, is a lifting of the
mind to a swift and convincing vision of Reality: one of those sudden,
incommunicable glimpses of Truth so often experienced early in the
contemplative's career. The veil parts, and he sees a "light and vision,
which give to the contemplating spirit a conscious certitude that she
sees God, so far as man may see Him in mortal life."[55] That strange
mystical light of which all contemplatives speak, and which Ruysbroeck
describes in a passage of great subtlety as 'the intermediary between the
seeing thought and God,' now floods his consciousness. In it "the Spirit
of the Father speaks in the uplifted thought which is bare and stripped
of images, saying, 'Behold Me as I behold thee.' Then the pure and single
eyes are strengthened by the inpouring of that clear Light of the Father,
and they behold His face, in a simple vision, beyond reason, and without
reason."[56]
It might be thought that in this 'simple vision' of Supreme Reality, the
spirit of the contemplative reached its goal. It has, indeed, reached a
point at which many a mystic stops short. I think, however, that a
reference to St. Augustine, whose influence is so strongly marked in
Ruysbroeck's works, will show what he means by this phase of
contemplation; and the characters which distinguish it from that infused
or unitive communion with God which alone he calls _Contemplatio_. In the
seventh book of his _Confessions_, Augustine describes just such an
experience as this. By a study of the books of the Platonists he had
learned the art of introversion, and achieved by its aid a fleeting
'Intellectual Contemplation' of God; in his own words, a "hurried vision
of That which Is." "Being by these books," he says, "admonished to return
into myself, I entered into the secret closet of my soul, guided by Thee
... and beheld the Light that never changes, above the eye of my soul,
above the intelligence."[57] It was by "the withdrawal of thought from
experience, its abstraction from the contradictory throng of sensuous
images," that he attained to this transitory apprehension; which he
describes elsewhere as "the _vision_ of the Land of Peace, but not the
_road_ thereto." But intellect alone could not bear the direct impact of
the terrible light of Reality; his "weak sight was dazzled by its
splendour," he "could not sustain his gaze," and turned back to that
humble discovery of the Divine Substance by means of Its images and
attributes, which is proper to the intellectual power.[58]
Now surely this is the psychological situation described by Ruysbroeck.
The very images used by Augustine are found again in him. The mind of the
contemplative, purified, disciplined, deliberately abstracted from
images, is inundated by the divine sunshine, "the Light which is not God,
but that whereby we see Him"; and in this radiance achieves a hurried but
convincing vision of Supreme Reality. But "even though the eagle, king of
birds, can with his powerful sight gaze steadfastly upon the brightness
of the sun; yet do the weaker eyes of the bat fail and falter in the
same."[59] The intellectual vision is dazzled and distressed, like a man
who can bear the diffused radiance of sunshine but is blinded if he dares
to follow back its beams to the terrible beauty of their source. "Not for
this are my wings fitted," says Dante, drooping to earth after his
supreme ecstatic flight. Because it cannot sustain its gaze, then, the
intelligence falls back upon the second phase of intellectual
contemplation: _Speculatio_, the deep still brooding in which the soul,
'made wise by the Spirit of Truth,' contemplates God and Creation as He
and it are reflected in the clear mirror of her intellectual powers,
under 'images and similitudes'--the Mysteries of Faith, the Attributes of
the Divine Nature, the forms and manners of created things. As the Father
contemplates all things in the Son, 'Mirror of Deity,' so now does the
introverted soul contemplate Him in this 'living mirror of her
intelligence' on which His sunshine falls. Because her swift vision of
That which Is has taught her to distinguish between the ineffable Reality
and the Appearance which shadows it forth, she can again discover Him
under those images which once veiled, but now reveal His presence. The
intellect which has apprehended God Transcendent, if only for a moment,
has received therefrom the power of discerning God Immanent. "He shows
Himself to the soul in the living mirror of her intelligence; not as He
is in His nature, but in images and similitudes, and in the degree in
which the illuminated reason can grasp and understand Him. And the wise
reason, enlightened of God, sees clearly and without error in images of
the understanding all that she has heard of God, of faith, of truth,
according to her longing. But that image which is God Himself, although
it is held before her, she cannot comprehend; for the eyes of her
understanding must fail before that Incomparable Light."[60]
In _The Kingdom of God's Lovers_ Ruysbroeck pours forth a marvellous list
of the attributes under which the illuminated intelligence now
contemplates and worships That Which she can never comprehend; that
"Simple One in whom all multitude and all that multiplies, finds its
beginning and its end." From this simple Being of the Godhead the
illuminated reason abstracts those images and attributes with which it
can deal, as the lower reason abstracts from the temporal flux the
materials of our normal universe. Such a loving consideration of God
under His attributes is the essence of meditation: and meditation is in
fact the way in which the intellectual faculties can best contemplate
Reality. But "because all things, when they are considered in their
inwardness, have their beginning and their ending in the Infinite
Being as in an Abyss," here again the contemplative is soon led
above himself and beyond himself, to a point at which intellect and
'consideration'--_i.e._ formal thought--fail him; because "here we touch
the Simple Nature of God." When intellectual contemplation has brought
the self to this point, it has done its work; for it has "excited in the
soul an eager desire to lift itself up by contemplation into the
simplicity of the Light, that thereby its avid desire of infinite
fruition may be satisfied and fulfilled";[61] _i.e._ it has performed the
true office of meditation, induced a shifting of consciousness to higher
levels.
We observe that the emphasis, which in the First Degree of Contemplation
fell wholly on feeling, in the Second Degree falls wholly upon knowledge.
We are not, however, to suppose from this that emotion has been left
behind. As the virtues and energies of the Active Life continue in the
Contemplative Life, so the 'burning love' which distinguished the first
stage of communion with the Transcendent, is throughout the source of
that energy which presses the self on to deeper and closer
correspondences with Reality. Its presence is presupposed in all that is
said concerning the development of the spiritual consciousness.
Nevertheless Ruysbroeck, though he cannot be accused of intellectualism,
is led by his admiration for Victorine ideas to lay great stress upon the
mental side of contemplation, as against those emotional reactions to the
Transcendent which are emphasised--almost to excess--by so many of the
saints. His aim was the lifting of the _whole man_ to Eternal levels: and
the clarifying of the intelligence, the enhancement of the understanding,
seemed to him a proper part of the deification of human nature, the
bringing forth in the soul's ground of that Son who is the Wisdom of God
as well as the Pattern of Man. Though he moves amongst deep mysteries,
and in regions beyond the span of ordinary minds, there is always
apparent in him an effort towards lucidity of expression, sharp
definition, plain speech. Sometimes he is wild and ecstatic, pouring
forth his vision in a strange poetry which is at once uncouth and
sublime; but he is never woolly or confused. His prose passages owe much
of their seeming difficulty to the passion for exactitude which
distinguishes and classifies the subtlest movements of the spiritual
atmosphere, the delicately graded responses of the soul.
3. Now the Third Degree of Contemplation lifts the whole consciousness to
a plane of perception which transcends the categories of the intellect:
where it deals no longer with the label but with the Thing. It has passed
beyond image and also beyond thought; to that knowledge by contact which
is the essence of intuition, and is brought about by the higher powers of
love. Such contemplation is regarded by Ruysbroeck as the work of the
Father, "Who strips from the mind all forms and images and lifts up the
Naked Apprehension [_i.e._ intuition] into its Origin, that is
Himself."[62] It is effected by concentration of all the powers of the
self into a single state 'uplifted above all action, in a bare
understanding and love,' upon that apex of the soul where no reason can
ever attain, and where the 'simple eye' is ever open towards God. There
the loving soul apprehends Him, not under conditions, 'in some wise,' but
as a _whole_, without the discrete analysis of His properties which was
the special character of intellectual contemplation; a synthetic
experience which is 'in no wise.' This is for Ruysbroeck the
contemplative act _par excellence_. It is 'an intimacy which is
ignorance,' a 'simple seeing,' he says again and again; "and the name
thereof is _Contemplatio_; that is, the seeing of God in simplicity."[63]
"Here the reason no less than all separate acts must give way, for our
powers become simple in Love; they are silent and bowed down in the
Presence of the Father. And this revelation of the Father lifts the soul
above the reason into the Imageless Nudity. There the soul is simple,
pure, spotless, empty of all things; and it is in this state of perfect
emptiness that the Father manifests His Divine radiance. To this radiance
neither reason nor sense, observation nor distinction, can attain. All
this must stay below; for the measureless radiance blinds the eyes of the
reason, they cannot bear the Incomprehensible Light. But above the
reason, in the most secret part of the understanding, the _simple eye_ is
ever open. It contemplates and gazes at the Light with a pure sight that
is lit by the Light itself: eye to eye, mirror to mirror, image to image.
This threefold act makes us like God, and unites us to Him; for the sight
of the _simple eye_ is a living mirror, which God has made for His image,
and whereon He has impressed it."[64]
Intuitive or infused contemplation is the form of communion with the
Transcendent proper to those who have grown up to the state of Union; and
feel and know the presence of God within the soul, as a love, a life, an
'indrawing attraction,' calling and enticing all things to the still
unachieved consummation of the Divine Unity. He who has reached this
pitch of introversion, and is able, in his spiritual exercises, to
withdraw himself thus to the most secret part of his spirit,
feels--within the Eternal Light which fills his mirror and is 'united
with it,'--this perpetual demand of the Divine Unity, entreating and
urging him towards a total self-loss. In the fact that he knows this
demand and impulsion as other than himself, we find the mark which
separates this, the highest contemplation proper to the Life of Union,
from that 'fruitive contemplation' of the spirit which has died into God
which belongs to the Life of Unity.[65] When the work of transmutation is
finished and he has received the 'Sparkling Stone of Divine Humanity,'
this subject-object distinction--though really an eternal one, as
Ruysbroeck continually reminds us--will no longer be possible to his
consciousness. Then he will live at those levels to which he now makes
impassioned ascents in his hours of unitive prayer: will be immersed in
the Beatific Vision on which he now looks, and 'lose himself in the
Imageless Nudity.'
This is the clue to the puzzling distinction made by Ruysbroeck between
the contemplation which is 'without conditions,' and that which is
'beyond and above conditions' and belongs to the Superessential Life
alone. In Intuitive Contemplation the seeing self apprehends the
Unconditioned World, _Onwise_, and makes 'loving ascents thereto.' It
'finds within itself the unwalled'; yet is still anchored to the
conditioned sphere. In Superessential Contemplation, it _dies into_ that
'world which is in no wise.' In the great chapter of _The Sparkling
Stone_[66] where he struggles to make this distinction clear, Ruysbroeck
says that the Friends of God (_i.e._ the Interior Men) "cannot with
themselves and all their works penetrate to that Imageless Nudity."
Although they feel united with God, yet they feel in that union an
otherness and difference between themselves and God; and therefore "the
ascent into the Nought is unknown to them." They feel themselves carried
up towards God in the tide of His all-subduing Fire of Love; but they
retain their selfhood, and may not be consumed and burned to nothing in
the Unity of Love. They do not yet desire to die into God, that they may
receive a deiform life from Him; but they are in the way which leads to
this fulfilment of their destiny, and are "following back the light to
its Origin."
This following-back is one continuous process, in which we, for
convenience of description, have made artificial breaks. It is the thrust
of consciousness deeper and deeper into the heart of Reality. As in the
stream of physical duration, so in this ceaseless movement of the spirit,
there is a persistence of the past in the present, a carrying through and
merging of one state in the next. Thus the contemplation which is
'wayless,' the self's intuitive communion with the Infinite Life and
Light, growing in depth and richness, bridges the gap which separates the
Interior and the Superessential Life.
We find in Ruysbroeck's works indications of a transitional state, in
which the soul "is guided and lost, wanders and returns, ebbs and flows,"
within the 'limitless Nudity,' to which it has not yet wholly surrendered
itself. "And its seeing is in no wise, being without manner, and it is
neither thus nor thus, neither here nor there; for that which is in no
wise hath enveloped all, and the vision is made high and wide. It knows
not itself where That is which it sees; and it cannot come thereto, for
its seeing is in no wise, and passes on, beyond, for ever, and without
return. That which it apprehends it cannot realise in full, nor wholly
attain, for its apprehension is wayless, and without manner, and
therefore it is apprehended of God in a higher way than it can apprehend
Him. Behold! such a following of the Way that is Wayless, is intermediary
between contemplation in images and similitudes of the intellect, and
unveiled contemplation beyond all images in the Light of God."[67]