Hence an eternal desire and an eternal satisfaction are preserved within the circle of the deified life. The full-grown self feels, in its most intense degree, the double movement of the Divine Love and Light, the flux and reflux; and in its perfect and ever-renewed responses to the ‘indrawing and outflowing attraction’ of that Tide, the complete possession of the Superessential Life consists.
“The indrawing attraction drags us out of ourselves, and calls us to be melted away and naughted in the Unity. And in this indrawing attraction we feel that God wills that we should be His, and for this we must abnegate ourselves and let our beatitude be accomplished in Him. But when He attracts us by flowing out towards us, He gives us over to ourselves and makes us free, and sets us in Time.”[88]
Thus is accomplished that paradoxical synthesis of ‘Eternal Rest and Eternal Work’ which Ruysbroeck regards as the essential character of God, and towards which the whole of his system has been educating the human soul. The deified or ‘God-formed’ soul is for him the spirit in which this twofold ideal is actualised: this is the Pattern, the Likeness of God, declared in Christ our Archetype, towards which the Indwelling Spirit presses the race. Though there are moments in which, carried away as it seems by his almost intolerable ecstasy, he pushes out towards ‘that unwalled Fruition of God,’ where all fruition begins and ends, where ‘one is all and all is one,’ and Man is himself a ‘fruition of love’;[89] yet he never forgets to remind us that, as love is not love unless it looks forward towards the creation of new life, so here, “when love falls in love with love, and each is all to the other in possession and in rest,” the object of this ecstasy is not a permanent self-loss in the Divine Darkness, a ‘slumbering in God,’ but a “new life of virtue, such as love and its impulses demand.”[90] “To be a living, willing Tool of God, wherewith God works what He will and how He will,” is the goal of transcendence described in the last chapter of The Sparkling Stone. “Then is our life a whole, when contemplation and work dwell in us side by side, and we are perfectly in both of them at once”;[91] for then the separate spirit is immersed in, and part of, the perpetual creative act of the Godhead—the flowing forth and the drawing back, which have at their base the Eternal Equilibrium, the unbroken peace, wherein “God contemplates Himself and all things in an Eternal Now that has neither beginning nor end.”[92] On that Unbroken Peace the spirit hangs; and swings like a pendulum, in wide arcs of love and service, between the Unconditioned and the Conditioned Worlds.
So the Superessential Life is the simple, the synthetic life, in which man actualises at last all the resources of his complex being. The active life of response to the Temporal Order, the contemplative life of response to the Transcendent Order are united, firmly held together, by that ‘eternal fixation of the spirit’; the perpetual willed dwelling of the being of man within the Incomprehensible Abyss of the Being of God, qui est per omnia saecula benedictus.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
I. Flemish Text
Werken van Jan van Ruusbroec. Ed. J. David. 6 vols. (Maetschappy der Vlaemsche Bibliophilen). (Gent, 1858-68.)
This edition, based on the MSS. preserved at Brussels and Ghent, and the foundation of all the best translations, is now rare. It may be consulted at the British Museum.
A re-issue of the Flemish text is now in progress; the first volume being Jan van Ruysbroeck, Van den VII. Trappen (i.e. The Seven Degrees of Love) met Geert Groote’s latijnsche Vertaling. Ed. Dom. Ph. Müller (Brussels, 1911).