Beyond human thought
In the thunder-spout of Him,
Until thy being dim,
And be
Dead deathlessly.”
Now here it is, in these stammered tidings of an adventure ‘far outside and beyond our spirit,’ in ‘the darkness at which reason gazes with wide eyes,’[81] that we must look for the solution of that problem which all high mystic states involve for analytic thought: how can the human soul become one with God ‘without intermediary, beyond all separation,’[82] yet remain eternally distinct from Him? How can the ‘deification,’ the ‘union with God without differentiation’ on which the great mystics insist, be accepted, and pantheism be denied?
First, we notice that in all descriptions of Unity given us by the mystics, there is a strong subjective element. Their first concern is always with the experience of the heart and will, not with the deductions made by the intelligence. It is at our own peril that we attach ontological meaning to their convinced and vivid psychological statements. Ruysbroeck in particular makes this quite clear to us; says again and again that he has ‘felt unity without difference and distinction,’ yet that he knows that ‘otherness’ has always remained, and “that this is true we can only know by feeling it, and in no other way.”[83]
In certain great moments, he says, the purified and illuminated soul which has died into God does achieve an Essential Stillness; which seems to human thought a static condition, for it is that Eternal Now of the Godhead which embraces in its span the whole process of Time. Here we find nothing but God: the naked and ultimate Fact or Superessential Being ‘whence all Being has come forth,’ stripped of academic trimmings and experienced in its white-hot intensity. Here, far beyond the range of thought, unity and otherness, like hunger and fulfilment, activity and rest, can co-exist in love. The ultimate union is a love-union, says Ruysbroeck. “The Love of God is a consuming Fire, which draws us out of ourselves and swallows us up in unity with God, where we are satisfied and overflowing, and with Him, beyond ourselves, eternally fulfilled.”[84]
This hungry and desirous love, at once a personal passion and a cosmic force, drenches, transfigures and unites with the soul, as sunlight does the air, as fire does the iron flung into the furnace; so that the molten metal ‘changed into another glory’ is both iron and fire ‘ever distinct yet ever united’—an antique image of the Divine Union which he takes direct from a celebrated passage in St. Bernard’s works. “As much as is iron, so much is fire; and as much as is fire, so much is iron; yet the iron doth not become fire, nor the fire iron, but each retains its substance and nature. So likewise the spirit of man doth not become God, but is deified, and knows itself breadth, length, height and depth: and as far as God is God, so far the loving spirit is made one with Him in love.”[85] The iron, the air, represent our created essence; the fire, the sunlight, God’s Essence, which is added to our own—our superessence. The two are held in a union which, when we try to see it under the symbolism of space, appears a mingling, a self-mergence; but, when we feel it under the symbolism of personality, is a marriage in which the lover and beloved are ‘distinct yet united.’ “Then are we one being, one love, and one beatitude with God ... a joy so great and special that we cannot even think of any other joy. For then one is one’s self a Fruition of Love, and can and should want nothing beyond one’s own.”[86]
It follows from all this that when the soul, coming to the Fourth State of Fruitive Love, enters into the Equilibrium which supports and penetrates the flux, it does and must reconcile the opposites which have governed the earlier stages of its career. The communion reached is with a Wholeness; the life which flows from it must be a wholeness too. Full surrender, harmonised with full actualisation of all our desires and faculties; not some thin, abstract, vertical relation alone, but an all-round expansion, a full, deep, rich giving and taking, a complete correspondence with the infinitely rich, all-demanding and all-generous God whose “love is measureless for it is Himself.” Thus Ruysbroeck teaches that love static and love dynamic must coexist for us as for Him; that the ‘eternal hunger and thirst’ of the God-demanding soul continues within its ecstatic satisfaction; because, however deeply it may love and understand, the Divine Excess will always baffle it. It is destined ‘ever to go forward within the Essence of God,’ to grow without ceasing deeper and deeper into this life, in “the eternal longing to follow after and attain Him Who is measureless.” “And we learn this truth from His sight: that all we taste, in comparison with that which remains out of our reach, is no more than a single drop of water compared with the whole sea.... We hunger for God’s Infinity, which we cannot devour, and we aspire to His Eternity, which we cannot attain.... In this storm of love, our activity is above reason and is in no wise. Love desires that which is impossible to her; and reason teaches that love is within her rights, but can neither counsel nor persuade her.”[87]