“This soul,” says Love, “can no more speak of God; for she is noughted to all outward desires, and of all the affections of the spirit. So that what this soul does, she does it by usage of good custom, and by commandment of Holy Church, without any desire: for will is dead, that gave her desire.... Who that asks these free souls, sure and peaceful, if they would be in purgatory, they say nay. If they would living be certified of their salvation, they say nay. Eh, what would they? They have nothing of will, this for to will; and if they willed, they should descend from Love: for He it is that hath their will.... Thus departs the soul from her will and the will departs from this soul, so she again puts it and gives and yields it in God where it was first.” Such a doctrine easily slides into the complete passivity or “holy indifference” which was the ideal of the seventeenth century Quietists: and the Mirror certainly does contain passages which, if taken alone, would convict their author of a fondness for this heresy. “I certify thee that these souls that fine love leads, they have as lief shame as worship, and worship as shame; and poverty as riches and riches as poverty; and torments of God and of His creatures as comforts of God and of His creatures; and to be hated as loved, and loved as hated; and hell as paradise and paradise as hell ... the free soul has no will to will or unwill, but only to will the will of God and suffer in peace His divine ordinance.”
Nevertheless, other passages make it clear that active surrender, not mere passivity is the aim, and that the “noughting” of the self within the All is a loving sacrifice, consistent with its achievement of completest happiness. “True love has but only one intent; and that is, that she might alway love truly, for of the love of her Lover has she no doubt, that He does what best is. And she follows this: that she does that that she ought to do. And she wills nought but one thing; and that is, that the Will of God be alway in her done.... This soul,” says Love, “swims in the sea of joy, that is, in the sea of delights, streaming of divine influences. She feels no joy, for she herself is joy. She swims and drenches in joy, for she lives in joy without feeling any joy. So is joy in her, that she herself is joy, by the virtue of joy that has merged her in Him. And so is the will of the Loved and the will of this soul turned into one as fire and flame.”
The teaching of the writer seems to be, that so long as the will is consciously active and desirous—however good its actions or desires—its owner cannot be liberated from the illusions and anxieties of the personal life. What he needs, if he did but know it, is reunion with that fontal life from which he came, to which he is perpetually drawn by love. Here his separate will finds its meaning, and is not annihilated but absorbed. “The understanding, that gives light, shows to the soul the thing that she loves. And the soul that receives by light of understanding the nighing and the knitting by accord of union in plenteous love, sees the Being, where that she holds to have her seat; receiving gladly the light of knowing that brings her tidings of love. And then she would become so, that she had but one will and love; and that is, the only will of Him that she loves.”
The detached soul who is thus “noughted in God” enjoys a freedom from stress, an immunity from disappointment incredible to those who still live the individual life. “Now shall I say to you what they be that sit in the mountain above the wind and the rain? These be they that have in earth neither shame nor worship, nor dread of anything that befalls.” She has, moreover, passed beyond that moral conflict which arises from the discord between conscience and desire, and is the essential character of the active life; for she has within her “the Master of Virtues, that is called Divine Love, that has her merged in them all and to Him united.” Thus she is able to say, “Virtues, I take leave of you for evermore. Now shall my heart be more free and more in peace than it has been. Forsooth, I wot well your service is too travaillous. Sometime I laid my heart in you without any dissevering: ye wot well this. I was in all thing to you obedient. O, I was then your servant: but now I am delivered out of your thralldom.”
M.N. is quick to gloss this dangerous declaration: “I am stirred here to say more to the matter ... when a soul gives her to perfection, she labours busily day and night to get virtues by counsel of reason, and strives with vices at every point, at every word and deed ... thus the virtues be mistresses and every virtue makes her to war with her contrary.... But so long one may bite on the bitter bark of the nut that at last he shall come to the sweet kernel. Right so, ghostly to understand, it fares with these souls that be come to peacefulness. They have so long striven with vices and wrought by virtues that they be come to the nut’s kernel, that is to say, to the love of God, which is sweetness. And when the soul has deeply tasted this love ... then is she mistress and lady over the virtues, for she has them all within herself ... and then this soul takes leave of virtues, as of thralldom and painful travail ... and now she is lady and sovereign and they be subjects.”
In the technical language of mysticism she has passed from the active to the contemplative life, the crucial phase in the evolution of man’s transcendental consciousness. This evolution is described for us with great psychological exactness in the Mirror, under the traditional formula of the “States” of the soul’s ascent. Since few mystics have escaped the mania for significant numbers, one is not surprised to find seven steps on this “steep stairway of love.” “I am called,” says this soul, “of the touchings of Love, something to say of the Seven Estates that we call beings: for so it is. And these be the degrees by which man climbs from the valley, to the top of the mountain that is so several [apart] that it sees but God.”
“The First Estate is, That a soul is touched of God by grace and dissevered from sin: and, as to her power, in intention to keep the commandments of God.” This is, of course, equivalent to the conversion or change of heart which begins the spiritual life.
“The Second is, that a soul hold what God counsels to His special lovers, passing that what he commands. And he is no good lover that demenes him not to fulfill all that the which he wist might best please to his Beloved.
“The Third is, that a soul holds the affection of love of works of perfection, by which her spirit is ripened by desires: taking the love of these works to multiply in her. And what does the subtlety of her thought, but makes it seem to the understanding of her humble affection, that she cannot make offering to her Love that might comfort her, but of thing that He loves: for other gift is not prized in love.
“The Fourth is that a soul is drawn by highness of love into delight of thought by meditation, and relinquishes all labours outward, and obedience to others, by highness of love in contemplation. Then the soul is dangerous, noble and delicious: in which she may not suffer that anything her touch but the touchings of pure delight of love, in the which she is singularly gladsome and jolly. What marvel is it if this soul be upheld and updrawed thus graciously? Love makes her all drunken, that suffers her not to attend but to Him.” These four stages have brought the self to the complete practice of the contemplative life, and prepared the way for that second great phase in the achievement of reality which consists in the surrender of the separate will.