“Or, parme, fo fallanza,
non se’ quel che credea,
tenendo non avea
vertá senza errore.”
Thus Ruysbroeck attributes to the contemplative life, “the inward and upward-going ways by which one may pass into the Presence of God,” but distinguishes these from that super-essential life wherein “we are swallowed up, beyond reason and above reason, in the deep quiet of the Godhead which is never moved.”
All the personal raptures of devotional mysticism, all the nature-mystic’s joyous consciousness of God in creation, Blake’s “world of imagination and vision,” the “coloured land” of Æ., the Sūfi’s “tavern on the way,” where he is refreshed by a draught of supersensual wine, belong to the way of illumination. For the Christian mystic the world into which it inducts him is, pre-eminently, the sphere of the divine Logos-Christ, fount of creation and source of all beauty; the hidden Steersman who guides and upholds the phenomenal world:
“Splendor che dona a tutto ’l mondo luce,
amor, Iesú, de li angeli belleza,
cielo e terra per te si conduce
e splende in tutte cose tua fattezza.”