“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.