Intuitive or infused contemplation is the form of communion with the Transcendent proper to those who have grown up to the state of Union; and feel and know the presence of God within the soul, as a love, a life, an ‘indrawing attraction,’ calling and enticing all things to the still unachieved consummation of the Divine Unity. He who has reached this pitch of introversion, and is able, in his spiritual exercises, to withdraw himself thus to the most secret part of his spirit, feels—within the Eternal Light which fills his mirror and is ‘united with it,’—this perpetual demand of the Divine Unity, entreating and urging him towards a total self-loss. In the fact that he knows this demand and impulsion as other than himself, we find the mark which separates this, the highest contemplation proper to the Life of Union, from that ‘fruitive contemplation’ of the spirit which has died into God which belongs to the Life of Unity.[65] When the work of transmutation is finished and he has received the ‘Sparkling Stone of Divine Humanity,’ this subject-object distinction—though really an eternal one, as Ruysbroeck continually reminds us—will no longer be possible to his consciousness. Then he will live at those levels to which he now makes impassioned ascents in his hours of unitive prayer: will be immersed in the Beatific Vision on which he now looks, and ‘lose himself in the Imageless Nudity.’
This is the clue to the puzzling distinction made by Ruysbroeck between the contemplation which is ‘without conditions,’ and that which is ‘beyond and above conditions’ and belongs to the Superessential Life alone. In Intuitive Contemplation the seeing self apprehends the Unconditioned World, Onwise, and makes ‘loving ascents thereto.’ It ‘finds within itself the unwalled’; yet is still anchored to the conditioned sphere. In Superessential Contemplation, it dies into that ‘world which is in no wise.’ In the great chapter of The Sparkling Stone[66] where he struggles to make this distinction clear, Ruysbroeck says that the Friends of God (i.e. the Interior Men) “cannot with themselves and all their works penetrate to that Imageless Nudity.” Although they feel united with God, yet they feel in that union an otherness and difference between themselves and God; and therefore “the ascent into the Nought is unknown to them.” They feel themselves carried up towards God in the tide of His all-subduing Fire of Love; but they retain their selfhood, and may not be consumed and burned to nothing in the Unity of Love. They do not yet desire to die into God, that they may receive a deiform life from Him; but they are in the way which leads to this fulfilment of their destiny, and are “following back the light to its Origin.”
This following-back is one continuous process, in which we, for convenience of description, have made artificial breaks. It is the thrust of consciousness deeper and deeper into the heart of Reality. As in the stream of physical duration, so in this ceaseless movement of the spirit, there is a persistence of the past in the present, a carrying through and merging of one state in the next. Thus the contemplation which is ‘wayless,’ the self’s intuitive communion with the Infinite Life and Light, growing in depth and richness, bridges the gap which separates the Interior and the Superessential Life.
We find in Ruysbroeck’s works indications of a transitional state, in which the soul “is guided and lost, wanders and returns, ebbs and flows,” within the ‘limitless Nudity,’ to which it has not yet wholly surrendered itself. “And its seeing is in no wise, being without manner, and it is neither thus nor thus, neither here nor there; for that which is in no wise hath enveloped all, and the vision is made high and wide. It knows not itself where That is which it sees; and it cannot come thereto, for its seeing is in no wise, and passes on, beyond, for ever, and without return. That which it apprehends it cannot realise in full, nor wholly attain, for its apprehension is wayless, and without manner, and therefore it is apprehended of God in a higher way than it can apprehend Him. Behold! such a following of the Way that is Wayless, is intermediary between contemplation in images and similitudes of the intellect, and unveiled contemplation beyond all images in the Light of God.”[67]
CHAPTER VIII
THE SUPERESSENTIAL LIFE
If, therefore, thou art become the throne of God and the Heavenly Charioteer hath seated Himself within thee, and thy soul is wholly become a spiritual eye and is wholly made into light; if, too, thou art nourished with the heavenly food of that Spirit and hast drunk of the Living Water and put on the secret vesture of light—if thine inward man has experienced all these things and is established in abundant faith, lo! thou livest indeed the Eternal Life and thy soul rests even in this present time with the Lord.
St. Macarius of Egypt.
We have seen that Ruysbroeck, in common with a few other supreme mystics, declares to us as veritably known and experienced by him, a universe of three orders—Becoming, Being, God—and further, three ways of life whereby the self can correspond to these three orders, and which he calls the life of nature, the life of grace, the life of glory. ‘Glory,’ which has been degraded by the usage of popular piety into a vague superlative, and finally left in the hands of hymn-writers and religious revivalists, is one of the most ancient technical terms of Christian mysticism. Of Scriptural origin, from the fourth century to the fifteenth it was used to denote a definite kind of enhanced life, a final achievement of Reality—the unmediated radiance of God—which the gift of ‘divine sonship’ made possible to the soul. In the life of grace, that soul transcends conditions in virtue of a Divine vitality poured in from the Absolute Sphere, and actualises its true being, (Wesen); in the life of glory, it becomes a denizen of that sphere, and achieves an existence that is ‘more than being’ (Overwesen). The note of the first state is contemplation, awareness; the note of the second is fruition, possession.
That power of making ‘swift and loving ascents’ to the plane of Onwise to which man attained at the end of the Interior Life, that conscious harmony with the Divine Will which then became the controlling factor of his active career, cannot be the end of the process of transcendence. The soul now hungers and thirsts for a more intense Reality, a closer contact with ‘Him who is measureless’; a deeper and deeper penetration into the burning heart of the universe. Though contemplation seems to have reached its term, love goes on, to ‘lose itself upon the heights.’ Beyond both the conditioned and unconditioned world, beyond the Trinity Itself, that love discerns its ultimate objective—the very Godhead, the Divine Unity, “where all lines find their end”; where “we are satisfied and overflowing, and with Him beyond ourselves eternally fulfilled.”[68] The abiding life which is there discoverable, is not only ‘without manner’ but ‘above manner’—the ‘deified life,’ indescribable save by the oblique methods of music or poetry, wherein, in Maeterlinck’s great phrase, “the psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God.” All Ruysbroeck’s most wonderful passages are concerned with the desperate attempt to tell us of this ‘life,’ this utter fruition of Reality: which seems at one time to involve for the contemplative consciousness a self-mergence in Deity, so complete as to give colour to that charge of pantheism which is inevitably flung at all mystics who try to tell what they have known; at others, to represent rather the perfect consummation of that ‘union in separateness’ which is characteristic of all true love.
This is but one instance of that perpetual and inevitable resort to paradox which torments all who try to follow him along this ‘track without shadow of trace’; for the goal towards which he is now enticing us is one in which all the completing opposites of our fragmentary experience find their bourne. Hence the rapid alternation of spatial and personal symbols which confuses our industrious intellects, is the one means whereby he can suggest its actuality to our hungry hearts.
As we observed in Ruysbroeck’s earlier teaching on contemplation three distinct forms, in which the special work that theology attributes to the three Divine Persons seemed to him to be reflected; now, in this Superessential Contemplation, or Fruition, we find the work of the Absolute Godhead Itself, energising upon a plane of intensity which so utterly transcends our power of apprehension, that it seems to the surface consciousness—as Dionysius the Areopagite had named it—a negation of all things, a Divine Dark.