(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]