Pantheists, he says in The Book of Truth, are “a fruit of hell, the more dangerous because they counterfeit the true fruit of the Spirit of God.” Far from possessing that deep humility which is the soul’s inevitable reaction to the revelation of the Infinite, they are full of pride and self-satisfaction. They claim that their imaginary identity with the Essence of God emancipates them from all need of effort, all practice of virtue, and leaves them free to indulge those inclinations of the flesh which the ‘Spirit’ suggests. They “believe themselves sunk in inward peace; but as a matter of fact they are deep-drowned in error.”[2]
Against all this the stern, virile, ardent spirituality of Ruysbroeck opposed itself with its whole power. Especially did he hate and condemn the laziness and egotism of the quietistic doctrine of contemplation: the ideal of spiritual immobility which it set up. That ‘love cannot be lazy’ is a cardinal truth for all real mystics. Again and again it appears in their works. Even that profound repose in which they have fruition of God, is but the accompaniment or preliminary of work of the most strenuous kind, and keeps at full stretch the soul which truly tastes it; and this supernatural state is as far above that self-induced quietude of ‘natural repose’—“consisting in nothing but an idleness and interior vacancy, to which they are inclined by nature and habit”—in which the quietists love to immerse themselves, as God is above His creatures.
Here is the distinction, always needed and constantly ignored, between that veritable fruition of Eternal Life which results from the interaction of will and grace, and demands of the soul the highest intensity and most active love, and that colourable imitation of it which is produced by a psychic trick, and is independent alike of the human effort and the divine gift. Ruysbroeck in fighting the ‘Free Spirit’ was fighting the battle of true mysticism against its most dangerous and persistent enemy,—mysticality.
His attack upon Bloemardinne is the one outstanding incident in the long Brussels period which has been preserved to us. The next great outward movement in his steadily evolving life did not happen until the year 1343, when he was fifty years of age. It was then that the three companions decided to leave Brussels, and live together in some remote country place. They had long felt a growing distaste for the noisy and distracting life of the city; a growing dissatisfaction with the spiritual apathy and low level of religious observance at the Cathedral of St. Gudule; the need of surroundings in which they might devote themselves with total concentration to the contemplative life. Hinckaert and Coudenberg were now old men; Ruysbroeck was advanced in middle age. The rhythm of existence, which had driven him as a child from country to town, and harnessed him during long years to the service of his fellow-men, now drew him back again to the quiet spaces where he might be alone with God. He was approaching those heights of experience from which his greatest mystical works proceed; and it was in obedience to a true instinct that he went away to the silent places of the forest—as Anthony to the solitude of the desert, Francis to the ‘holy mountain’ of La Verna—that, undistracted by the many whom he had served so faithfully, he might open his whole consciousness to the inflow of the One, and receive in its perfection the message which it was his duty to transmit to the world, He went, says Pomerius, “not that he might hide his light; but that he might tend it better and make it shine more brightly.”
By the influence of Coudenberg, John III., Duke of Brabant, gave to the three friends the old hermitage of Groenendael, or the Green Valley, in the forest of Soignes, near Brussels. They entered into possession on the Wednesday of Easter week, 1343; and for five years lived there, as they had lived in the little house in Brussels, with no other rule save their own passion for perfection. But perpetual invasions from the outer world, not only of penitents and would-be disciples—for their reputation for sanctity grew quickly—but of huntsmen in the forest and pleasure parties from the town, who demanded and expected hospitality, soon forced them to adopt some definite attitude towards the question of enclosure. It is said that Ruysbroeck begged for an entire seclusion; but Coudenberg insisted that this was contrary to the law of charity, and that some at least of those who sought them must be received. In addition to these practical difficulties, the Prior of the Abbey of St. Victor at Paris had addressed to them strong remonstrances, on account of the absence of rule in their life and the fact that they had not even adopted a religious habit; a proceeding which in his opinion savoured rather of the ill-regulated doings of the heretical sects, than of the decorum proper to good Catholics. As a result of these various considerations, the simple and informal existence of the little family was re-modelled in conformity with the rule of the Augustinian Canons, and the Priory of Groenendael was formally created. Coudenberg became its provost, and Ruysbroeck, who had refused the higher office, was made prior; but Hinckaert, now a very old man in feeble health, refused to burden the young community with a member who might be a drag upon it and could not keep the full rigour of the rule. In a spirit of renunciation which surely touches the heroic, he severed himself from his lifelong friend and his adopted son, and went away to a little cell in the forest, where he lived alone until his death.
The story of the foundation and growth of the Priory of Groenendael, the saintly personalities which it nourished, is not for this place; except in so far as it affects our main interest, the story of Ruysbroeck’s soul. Under the influences of the forest, of the silent and regular life, those supreme contemplative powers which belong to the ‘Superessential Life’ of Unity now developed in him with great rapidity. It is possible, as we shall see, that some at least of his mystical writings may date from his Brussels period; and we know that at the close of this period his reputation as an ‘illuminated man’ was already made. Nevertheless it seems safe to say that the bulk of his works, as we now possess them, represent him as he was during the last thirty years of his life, rather than during his earlier and more active career; and that the intense certitude, the wide deep vision of the Infinite which distinguishes them, are the fruits of those long hours of profound absorption in God for which his new life found place. In the silence of the woods he was able to discern each subtle accent of that Voice which “is heard without utterance, and without the sound of words speaks all truth.”
Like so many of the greatest mystics, Ruysbroeck, drawing nearer to Divine Reality, drew nearer to nature too; conforming to his own ideal of the contemplative, who, having been raised to the simple vision of God Transcendent, returns to find His image reflected by all life. Many passages in his writings show the closeness and sympathy of his observation of natural things: the vivid description in The Spiritual Marriage of the spring, summer and autumn of the fruitful soul, the constant insistence on the phenomena of growth, the lessons drawn from the habits of ants and bees, the comparison of the surrendered soul to the sunflower, ‘one of nature’s most wonderful works’; the three types of Christians, compared with birds who can fly but prefer hopping about the earth, birds who swim far on the waters of grace, and birds who love only to soar high in the heavens. For the free, exultant life of birds he felt indeed a special sympathy and love; and ‘many-feathered’ is the best name that he can find for the soul of the contemplative ascending to the glad vision of God.
It is probably a true tradition which represents him as having written his greatest and most inspired pages sitting under a favourite tree in the depths of the woods. When the ‘Spirit’ came on him, as it often did with a startling suddenness, he would go away into the forest carrying his tablet and stylus. There, given over to an ecstasy of composition—which seems often to have approached the limits of automatic writing, as in St. Teresa, Boehme, Blake and other mystics—he would write that which was given to him, without addition or omission; breaking off even in the middle of a sentence when the ‘Spirit’ abruptly departed, and resuming at the same point, though sometimes after an interval which lasted several weeks, when it returned. In his last years, when eyesight failed him, he would allow a younger brother to go with him into the woods, and there to take down from dictation the fruits of those meditations in which he ‘saw without sight’; as the illiterate Catherine of Siena dictated in ecstasy the text of her Divine Dialogue.
Two witnesses have preserved Ruysbroeck’s solemn affirmation, given first to his disciple Gerard Groot ‘in great gentleness and humility,’ and repeated again upon his death-bed in the presence of the whole community, that every word of his writings was thus composed under the immediate domination of an inspiring power; that ‘secondary personality of a superior type,’ in touch with levels of reality beyond the span of the surface consciousness, which governs the activities of the great mystics in their last phases of development. These books are not the fruit of conscious thought, but ‘God-sent truths,’ poured out from a heart immersed in that Divine Abyss of which he tries to tell.
That a saint must needs be a visionary, is a conviction deeply implanted in the mind of the mediæval hagiographer; who always ascribes to these incidents an importance which the saints themselves are the first to deny. Pomerius thus attributes to Ruysbroeck not only those profound and direct experiences of Divine Reality to which his works bear witness; but also numerous visions of a conventional and anthropomorphic type, in which he spoke with Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, ecstasies which fell upon him when saying Mass—and the passionate devotion to the Eucharist which his writings express makes these at least probable—a certain faculty of clairvoyance, and a prophetic knowledge of his own death. Further, it is said that once, being missed from the priory, he was found after long search by one of the brothers he loved best, sitting under his favourite tree, rapt in ecstasy and surrounded by an aura of radiant light; as the discerning eyes of those who loved them have seen St. Francis, St. Teresa, and other contemplatives transfigured and made shining by the intensity of their spiritual life. I need not point out that the fact that these things are common form in the lives of the mystics, does not necessarily discredit them; though in any case their interest is less of a mystical than of a psychological kind.