“The simple light of this Being is limitless in its immensity, and transcending form, includes and embraces the unity of the Divine Persons and the soul with all its faculties; and this to such a point that it envelopes and irradiates both the natural tendency of our ground [i.e. its dynamic movement to God—the River] and the fruitive adherence of God and all those who are united with Him in this Light [i.e. Eternal Being—the Rose]. And this is the union of God and the souls that love Him.”[11]
CHAPTER IV
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.