This Fruition, says Ruysbroeck, “is wild and desolate as a desert, and therein is to be found no way, no road, no track, no retreat, no measure, no beginning, no end, nor any other thing that can be told in words. And this is for all of us Simple Blessedness, the Essence of God and our superessence, above reason and beyond reason. To know it we must be in it, beyond the mind and above our created being; in that Eternal Point where all our lines begin and end, that Point where they lose their name and all distinction, and become one with the Point itself, and that very One which the Point is, yet nevertheless ever remain in themselves nought else but lines that come to an end.”[69]
What, then, is the way by which the soul moves from that life of intense contemplation in which the ‘spreading light’ of the Spirit shows her the universe fulfilled with God, to this new transfigured state of joy and terror? It is a way for which her previous adventures might have prepared us. As each new ascent, new inflow of grace, was prepared by a time of destitution and stress—as the compensating beats of love and renunciation have governed the evolving melody of the inner life—so here a last death of selfhood, a surrender more absolute than all that has gone before, must be the means of her achievement of absolute life.
“Dying, and behold I live!” says Paul of his own attainment of supernal life in Christ. Ruysbroeck, who never strays far from the vital and heroic mysticism of the New Testament saints, can find no other language for this last crisis of the spirit—its movement from the state of Wesen to that of Overwesen—than the language of death. The ever-moving line, though its vital character of duration continues, now seems to itself to swoon into the Point; the separate entity which has felt the flood of grace pour into it to energise its active career, and the ebb of homeward-tending love draw it back towards the One, now feels itself pouring into the Infinite Sea. Our personal activity, he says, has done all that it can: as the separate career of Christ our Pattern closed with His voluntary death, so the death of our selfhood on that apex of personality where we have stretched up so ardently toward the Father, shall close the separate career of the human soul and open the way to its new, God-driven career, its resurrection-life. “None is sure of Eternal Life unless he has died with all his own attributes wholly into God”[70]—all else falls short of the demands of supreme generosity.
It is The Book of the Sparkling Stone which contains Ruysbroeck’s most wonderful descriptions of the consciousness peculiar to these souls who have grown up to ‘the fulness of the stature of Christ’; and since this is surely the finest and perhaps the least known of his writings, I offer no apology for transcribing a long passage from its ninth chapter: ‘How we may become the Hidden Sons of God.’
“When we soar up above ourselves, and become, in our upward striving towards God, so simple, that the naked Love in the Heights can lay hold on us, there where Love cherishes Love, above all activity and all virtue (that is to say, in our Origin, wherefrom we are spiritually born)—then we cease, and we and all that is our own die into God. And in this death we become hidden Sons of God, and find in ourselves a new life, and that is Eternal Life. And of these Sons, St. Paul says: ‘Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.’ In our approach to God we must bear with us ourselves and all that we do, as a perpetual sacrifice to God; and in the Presence of God we must leave ourselves and all our works, and, dying in love, soar up above all created things into the Superessential Kingdom of God. And of this the Spirit of God speaks in the Book of Hidden Things, saying: ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.’... If we would taste God, and feel in ourselves Eternal Life above all things, we must go forth into God with a faith that is far above our reason, and there dwell, simple, idle, without image, lifted up by love into the Unwalled Bareness of our intelligence. For when we go out from ourselves in love, and die to all observances in ignorance and darkness, then we are made complete, and transfigured by the Eternal Word, Image of the Father. And in this emptiness of spirit we receive the Incomprehensible Light, which enfolds and penetrates us as air is penetrated by the light of the sun; and this Light is nought else but a fathomless gazing and seeing. What we are, that we gaze at; and what we gaze at, that we are. For our thought, our life, our being, are lifted up in simplicity, and united with the Truth, that is God. Therefore in this simple gazing we are one life and one spirit with God—and this I call the seeing life.”[71]
Such a passage as this lies beyond our poor attempts at analysis. Those only will understand it who yield themselves to it; entering into its current, as we enter into the music that we love. It tells us all it can of this life which is ‘more than being,’ as felt in the supreme experience of love. Life and Death, Dark and Light, Idleness, Bareness—these are but images of the feeling-states that accompany it. But here, more than elsewhere in Ruysbroeck’s writings, we must remember the peril which goes with all subjective treatment of mystical truth. Each state which the unitive mystic experiences is so intense, that it monopolises for the time being his field of consciousness. Writing under the ‘pressure of the Spirit’ he writes of it—as indeed it seems to him at the moment—as ultimate and complete. Only by a comparison of different and superficially inconsistent descriptions of this enhanced life—which must harmonise and fulfil all the needs of our complex personality, providing inexhaustible objectives for love, intelligence and will—can we form any true idea concerning it.
When we do this, we discover that the side of it which seems a static beatitude, still Fruition, perfect Rest, is always balanced by the other side; which seems a perpetual and progressive attainment, a seeking and finding, a hungering and feeding, a giving and taking. These coexist; as the ever-renewed ‘coming of the Bridegroom,’ the welling-up of the Spirit, the stormy, eager, unsatisfied love of the soul do as a matter of experience coexist within that perfect and personal union wherein Love and Fruition, as Ruysbroeck puts it, ‘live between action and rest.’ The alternate consciousness of the line and the Point, the moving river and the Sea, the relative and the Absolute, persists so long as consciousness persists at all; it is no Christianised Nirvana into which he seeks to induct us, but that mysterious synthesis of Being and Becoming, ‘eternal stillness and eternal work’—a movement into God which is already a complete achievement of Him—which certain other great mystics have discerned beyond the ‘flaming ramparts’ of the common life.
The unbreakable unity with God, which constitutes the mark of the Third Life, exists in the ‘essential ground of the soul’; where the river flows into the Sea, the line into the Point; where the pendulum of self has its attachment to Reality. There, the hidden child of the Absolute is ‘one with God in restful fruition’; there, his deep intuition of Divine things—that ‘Savouring Wisdom’ which is the last supreme gift of the Spirit[72]—is able to taste and apprehend the sweetness of Infinite Reality. But at the other end, where he still participates in the time-process, where his love and will are a moving river, consciousness hungers for that total Attainment still; and attention will swing between these two extremes, now actualised within the living soul, which has put on the dual character of ‘Divine Humanity’ and is living Eternal Life, not in some far-off celestial region, but here, where Christ lived it, in the entangled world of Time. Thus active self-mergence, incessant re-birth into God, perpetual eager feeding on Him, is implicit in all spiritual life. Even for the souls of the ‘deified,’ quietism is never right. “For love cannot be lazy, but would search through and through, and taste through and through, the fathomless kingdom that lives in her ground; and this hunger shall never be stilled.”[73]
The soul, whenever it attends to itself—withdraws itself, so to speak, from the Divine Synthesis, dwells in itself, and beholds instead of being—feels again the ‘eternal unrest of love’; the whip of the Heavenly Charioteer, driving all spirits in towards the heart of God, where they are ‘one fire with Him.’ “This stirring, that mediates between ourselves and God, we can never pass beyond; and what that stirring is in its essence, and what love is in itself, we can never know.”[74] But when it dwells beyond itself, and in the supreme moments of ecstasy merges its consciousness in the Universal Consciousness, it transcends succession and centres itself in the Divine Selfhood—the ‘still, glorious, and absolute One-ness.’ Then it feels, not hunger but satisfaction, not desire but fruition; and knows itself beyond reason ‘one with the abysmal depth and breadth,’ in “a simple fathomless savouring of all good and of Eternal Life. And in this savouring we are swallowed up, above reason and beyond reason, in the deep Quiet of the Godhead which is never moved.”[75]
Such experiences however, such perfect fruition, in which the self dies into the overwhelming revelation of the Transcendent, and its rhythm is merged in the Divine Rhythm, cannot be continuous for those still living in the flesh. There is in Ruysbroeck no foolish insistence on any impossible career of ceaseless ecstasy; but a robust acceptance of the facts and limitations of life. Man cannot, he says, “perpetually contemplate with attention the superessential Being of God in the Light of God. But whosoever has attained to the gift of Intelligence [i.e. the sixth of the Seven Gifts of the Spirit] attains this power, which becomes habitual to him; and whensoever he will, he can wholly absorb himself in this manner of contemplation, in so far as it is possible in this life.”[76]