The veil that had seemed so transparent now thickens again; the certitudes that made life lovely all depart. Small wonder if the tortured spirit of the mystic fails to recognise this awful destitution as a renewed caress from the all-demanding Lover of the Soul; an education in courage, humility and selflessness; a last purification of the will. The state to which that self is being led is a renewed self-donation on new and higher levels: one more of those mystical deaths which are really mystical births; a giving-up, not merely of those natural tastes and desires which were disciplined in the Active Life, but of the higher passions and satisfactions of the spirit too. He is to be led to a state of such complete surrender to the Divine purposes that he is able to say: “Lord, not my will according to nature, but Thy will and my will according to spirit be done.” The darkness, sorrow and abandonment through which this is accomplished are far more essential to his development than the sunshine and happiness that went before. It is not necessary, says Ruysbroeck, that all should know the ecstasies of illumination; but by this dark stairway every man who would attain to God must go.
When man has achieved this perfect resignation and all tendency to spiritual self-seeking is dead, the September of the soul is come. The sun has entered the sign of the Balance, when days and nights are equal; for now the surrendered self has achieved equilibrium, and endures in peace and steadfastness the alternations of the Divine Dark and Divine Light. Now the harvest and the vintage are ripe: “That is to say, all those inward and outward virtues, which man has practised with delight in the fire of love, these, now that he knows them and is able to accomplish them, he shall practise diligently and dutifully and offer them to God. And never were they so precious in His sight: never so noble and so fair. And all those consolations which God gave him before, he will gladly give up, and will empty himself for the glory of God. This is the harvest of the wheat and the many ripe fruits which make us rich in God, and give to us Eternal Life. Thus are the virtues perfected; and the absence of consolation is turned to an eternal wine.”[48]
CHAPTER VII
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.