In the stage of development to which the Active Life belongs, the soul enjoys communion with Reality, not with that directness proper to the true contemplative, but obliquely, by ‘means,’ symbols and images; especially by the sacramental dispensation of the Church, a subject to which Ruysbroeck devotes great attention. As always in his system, growth from within is intimately connected with the reception of food and power from without. The movement of the self into God, the movement of God into the self, though separable in thought, are one in fact: will and grace are two aspects of one truth. Only this paradox can express the relation between that Divine Love which is ‘both avid and generous,’ and the self that is destined both to devour and be devoured by Reality.
In the beautiful chapters on the Eucharist which form the special feature of The Mirror of Eternal Salvation, Ruysbroeck develops this idea. “If He gives us all that He has and all that He is, in return He takes from us all that we have and all that we are, and demands of us more than we are capable of giving.... Even in devouring us, He desires to feed us. If He absorbs us utterly into Himself, He gives Himself in return. He causes to be born in us the hunger and thirst of the spirit, which shall make us savour Him in an eternal fruition; and to this spiritual hunger, as well as to the love of our heart, He gives His own Body as food.... Thus does He give us His life full of wisdom, truth and knowledge, in order that we may imitate Him in all virtues; and then He lives in us and we in Him. Then do we grow, and raise ourselves up above the reason into a Divine Love which causes us to take and consume that Food in a spiritual manner, and stretch out in pure love towards the Divinity. There takes place that encounter of the spirit, that is to say of measureless love, which consumes and transforms our spirit with all its works; drawing us with itself towards the Unity, where we taste beatitude and rest. Herein therefore is our eternal life: ever to devour and be devoured, to ascend and descend with love.”[29]
The soul, then, turned in the direction of the Infinite, ‘having God for aim,’ and with her door opened to the inflowing Divine Life, begins to grow. Her growth is up and out; from that temporal world to which her nature is adapted, and where she seems full of power and efficiency, to that eternal world to which the ‘spark’ within her belongs, but where she is as yet no more than a weak and helpless child. Hence the first state of mind and heart produced in her, if the ‘new birth’ has indeed taken place, will be that humility which results from all real self-knowledge; since “whoso might verily see and feel himself as he is, he should verily be meek.” This clear acknowledgment of facts, this finding of one’s own place, Ruysbroeck calls ‘the solid foundation of the Kingdom of the Soul.’ In thus discerning love and humility as the governing characteristics of the soul’s reaction to Reality, he is of course keeping close to the great tradition of Christian mysticism; especially to the teaching of Richard of St. Victor, which we find constantly repeated in the ascetic literature of the Middle Ages.
From these two virtues, then, of humble self-knowledge and God-centred love, are gradually developed all those graces of character which ‘adorn the soul for the spiritual marriage,’ mark her ascent of the first degrees of the ‘ladder of love,’ and make possible the perfecting of her correspondences with the ‘Kingdom.’ This development follows an orderly course, as subject to law as the unfolding of the leaves and flowers upon the growing plant; and though Ruysbroeck in his various works uses different diagrams wherewith to explain it, the psychological changes which these diagrams demonstrate are substantially the same. In each case we watch the opening of man’s many-petalled heart under the rays of the Divine Light, till it blossoms at last into the rose of Perfect Charity.
Thus in The Seven Degrees of Love, since he is there addressing a cloistered nun, he accommodates his system to that threefold monastic vow of voluntary poverty or perfect renunciation, chastity or singleness of heart, and obedience or true humility in action, by which she is bound. When the reality which these vows express is actualised in the soul, and dominates all her reactions to the world, she wears the ‘crown of virtue’; and lives that ‘noble life’ ruled by the purified and enhanced will, purged of all selfish desires and distractions, which—seeking in all things the interests of the spiritual world—is ‘full of love and charity, and industrious in good works.’
In The Spiritual Marriage a more elaborate analysis is possible; based upon that division of man’s moral perversities into the ‘seven mortal sins’ or seven fundamental forms of selfishness, which governed, and governs yet, the Catholic view of human character. After a preliminary passage in which the triple attitude of love as towards God, humility as towards self, justice as towards other men, is extolled as the only secure basis of the spiritual life, Ruysbroeck proceeds to exhibit the seven real and positive qualities which oppose the seven great abuses of human freedom. As Pride is first and worst of mortal sins and follies, so its antithesis Humility is again put forward as the first condition of communion with God. This produces in the emotional life an attitude of loving adoration; in the volitional life, obedience. By obedience, Ruysbroeck means that self-submission, that wise suppleness of spirit, which is swayed and guided not by its own tastes and interests but by the Will of God; as expressed in the commands and prohibitions of moral and spiritual law, the interior push of conscience. This attitude, at first deliberately assumed, gradually controls all the self’s reactions, and ends by subduing it entirely to the Divine purpose. “Of this obedience there grows the abdication of one’s own will and one’s own opinion; ... by this abdication of the will in all that one does, or does not do, or endures, the substance and occasion of pride are wholly driven out, and the highest humility is perfected.”[30]
This movement of renunciation brings—next phase in the unselfing of the self—a compensating outward swing of love; expressed under the beautiful forms of patience, ‘the tranquil tolerance of all that can happen,’ and hence the antithesis of Anger; gentleness, which “with peace and calm bears vexatious words and deeds”; kindness, which deals with the quarrelsome and irritable by means of “a friendly countenance, affectionate persuasion and compassionate acts”; and sympathy, “that inward movement of the heart which compassionates the bodily and spiritual griefs of all men,” and kills the evil spirit of Envy and hate. This fourfold increase in disinterested love is summed up in the condition which Ruysbroeck calls supernatural generosity; that largeness of heart which flows out towards the generosity of God, which is swayed by pity and love, which embraces all men in its sweep. By this energetic love which seeks not its own, “all virtues are increased, and all the powers of the spirit are adorned”; and Avarice, the fourth great mortal sin, is opposed.
Generosity is no mere mood; it is a motive-force, demanding expression in action. From the emotions, it invades the will, and produces diligence and zeal: an ‘inward and impatient eagerness’ for every kind of work, and for the hard practice of every kind of virtue, which makes impossible that slackness and dulness of soul which is characteristic of the sin of Sloth. It is dynamic love; and the spirit which is fired by its ardours, has reached a degree of self-conquest in which the two remaining evil tendencies—that to every kind of immoderate enjoyment, spiritual, intellectual or physical, which is the essence of Gluttony, and that to the impure desire of created things which is Lust—can be met and vanquished. The purged and strengthened will, crowned by unselfish love, is now established on its throne; man has become captain of his soul, and rules all the elements of his character and that character’s expression in life—not as an absolute monarch, but in the name of Divine Love.[31] He has done all he can do of himself towards the conforming of his life to Supreme Perfection; has opposed, one after another, each of those exhibitions of the self’s tendency to curl inwards, to fence itself in and demand, absorb, enjoy as a separate entity, which lie at the root of sin. The constructive side of the Purgative Way has consisted in the replacement of this egoistic, indrawing energy by these outflowing energies of self-surrender, kindness, diligence and the rest; summed up in that perfection of humility and love, which “in all its works, and always, stretches out towards God.”
The first three gifts of the Holy Spirit are possessed by the soul which has reached this point, says Ruysbroeck in The Kingdom of God’s Lovers: that loving Fear, which includes true humility with all its ancillary characteristics; that general attitude of charity which makes man gentle, patient and docile, ready to serve and pity every one, and is called Godliness, because there first emerges in it his potential likeness to God; and finally that Knowledge or discernment of right and prudent conduct which checks the disastrous tendency to moral fussiness, helps man to conform his life to supreme Perfection, and gives the calmness and balance which are essential to a sane and manly spirituality. Thus the new life-force has invaded and affected will, feeling and intellect; raised the whole man to fresh levels of existence, and made possible fresh correspondences with Reality. “Hereby are the three lower powers of the soul adorned with Divine virtues. The Irascible [i.e. volitional and dynamic] is adorned with loving and filial fear, humility, obedience and renunciation. The Desirous is adorned with kindness, pity, compassion and generosity. Finally, the Reasonable with knowledge and discernment, and that prudence which regulates all things.”[32] The ideal of character held out and described under varying metaphors in Ruysbroeck’s different works, is thus seen to be a perfectly consistent one.
Now when the growing self has actualised this ideal, and lives the Active Life of the faithful servant of Reality, it begins to feel an ardent desire for some more direct encounter with That which it loves. Since it has now acquired the ‘ornaments of the virtues’—cleansed its mirror, ordered its disordered loves—this encounter may and does in a certain sense take place; for every Godward movement of the human is met by a compensating movement of the Divine. Man now begins to find God in all things: in nature, in the soul, in works of charity. But in the turmoil and bustle of the Active Life such an encounter is at best indirect; a sidelong glimpse of the ‘first and only Fair.’ That vision can only be apprehended in its wholeness by a concentration of all the powers of the self. If we would look the Absolute in the eyes, we must look at nothing else; the complete opening of the eye of Eternity entails the closing of the eye of Time. Man, then, must abstract himself from multiplicity, if only for a moment, if he would catch sight of the unspeakable Simplicity of the Real. Longing to ‘know the nature of the Beloved,’ he must act as Zacchæus did when he wished to see Christ: