Ruysbroeck and the Mystics: with selections from Ruysbroeck

by Maurice Maeterlinck

I

Many works are more correctly beautiful than this book of Ruysbroeck L’Admirable. Many mystics—Swedenborg and Novalis among others—are more potent in their influence, and more timely. It is very probable that his writings may but rarely meet the needs of to-day. Looking at him from another point of view, I know few more clumsy authors. He wanders off now and then into strange puerilities, and the first twenty chapters of The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, although they are perhaps a necessary preparation for what follows, contain little more than mild and pious commonplaces. Outwardly, at least, he has no order, no logic of the schools. He is full of repetitions, and sometimes seems to contradict himself. He shows the ignorance of a child along with the wisdom of one who might have returned from the dead. Over his involved syntax I have toiled more than once in the sweat of my brow. He introduces an image, and forgets it. There are some of his images which the mind cannot realise, and this phenomenon, so unusual in an honest work, can only be explained by his awkwardness or his extraordinary haste. He knows few of the tricks of language, and can speak only of the unspeakable. He is almost entirely ignorant of the habits, skilled methods, and resources of philosophic thought, and he is constrained to think only of the unthinkable. When he speaks of his little monastic garden, he can hardly tell us enough about what goes on there; on that subject he writes like a child. He undertakes to teach us what transpires in the nature of God, and writes pages which Plato could not have written. Everywhere we find a grotesque disproportion between his knowledge and ignorance, his capacity and desire. You must not expect a literary work; you will see only the convulsive flight of an eagle, dizzy, blind, and wounded, over snowy peaks. I will add one word more by way of friendly warning. It has been my lot to read books generally considered most abstruse: The Disciples at Saïs, and the Fragments of Novalis, for instance; the Biographia Literaria and the Friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the Timaeus of Plato; the Enneads of Plotinus; the Divine Names of St. Denys the Areopagite; the Aurora of the great German mystic, Jacob Böhme, with whom our author has more than one point of analogy. I do not venture to say that the works of Ruysbroeck are more abstruse than these works; but their abstruseness is less readily pardoned, because we have here to do with an unknown writer in whom we have no previous confidence. I thought it necessary to give an honest warning to idlers on the threshold of this temple without architecture; for this translation was undertaken only to please a few Platonists. I believe that those who have not lived in close fellowship with Plato and with the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria will not proceed far in reading it. They will think they are entering the void; they will feel as if they were falling steadily into a bottomless abyss, between black and slippery rocks. In this book there is no common light or air; as a spiritual abode it will be insupportable to those who come unprepared. Do not enter here from literary curiosity; there are hardly any dainty nick-nacks, and the botanist in search of fine images will find as few flowers here as on the polar ice-banks. I tell them that this is a boundless desert, where they will die of thirst. They will find here very few phrases which one may handle and admire after the way of literary critics; nothing but jets of flame or blocks of ice. Do not seek for roses in Iceland. Some flower may still linger between two icebergs—and indeed there are strange outbursts, unknown expressions, unheard-of analogies, but they will not repay you for the time lost in coming so far to pluck them. Before entering here one must be in a philosophic state as different from our ordinary condition as the state of waking is from that of slumber. Porphyry, in his Principles of the Theory of Intelligibles, seems to me to have written a warning which might fitly stand at the beginning of this book—“By our intelligence we say many things of the principle which is higher than the intelligence. But these things are divined much better by an absence of thought than by thought. It is the same with this idea as with that of sleep, of which we speak up to a certain point in our waking state, but the knowledge and perception of which we can gain only by sleeping. Like is known only by like, and the condition of all knowledge is that the subject should become like to the object.”

It is most difficult, I repeat, to understand such things without preparation; and I believe that, in spite of our preparatory studies, a great deal of this mysticism will seem to us purely theoretic, and that the most of these experiences of supernatural psychology will be accessible to us only in the character of spectators. The philosophical imagination is a faculty which is educated very slowly. We are here, all at once, on the confines of human thought, and far within the polar circle of the mind. It is strangely cold here; it is strangely dark; and yet all around there is light and flame. But to those who come without having trained their mind to these new perceptions, this light and these flames are as dark and cold as painted images. We are dealing here with the most exact of sciences. We have to explore the most rugged and least habitable promontories of the divine “Know Thyself”; and the midnight sun hangs over the tempestuous sea, where the psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God. We have constantly to keep in mind that we are dealing here with a very profound science, and not with a dream. Dreams are not unanimous; dreams have no roots; while the glowing flower of divine metaphysic, which is here full blown, has its mysterious roots in Persia and in India, in Egypt and in Greece. And yet it seems unconscious as a flower, and knows nothing of its roots. Unhappily it is almost impossible for us to put ourselves in the position of the soul which, without effort, conceived this science; we cannot perceive it ab intra and reproduce it in ourselves. We lack that which Emerson would call the same “central spontaneity”; we can no longer transform these ideas into our own substance; the utmost we can do is to take count, from the outside, of the tremendous experiences which are within the reach of only a very few souls during the whole existence of a planetary system. “It is not lawful,” says Plotinus, “to inquire into the origin of this intuitive science as if it were a thing dependent on place and movement; for it does not approach from here, nor set out from there, in order to go elsewhere, but it appears or does not appear. So that we must not pursue it in order to discover its secret sources, but wait in silence until it suddenly shines out upon us, preparing ourselves for the sacred sight, as the eye waits patiently for the rising of the sun.” And elsewhere he adds: “It is not by imagination nor by reason, which is itself obliged to draw its principles from elsewhere, that we represent to ourselves intelligible things (that is to say, the highest of all), but rather it is by our faculty for beholding them, the faculty which enables us to speak of them here below. We see them therefore by awaking in ourselves, here on earth, the same powers which we shall have to awake when we are in the world of pure intelligence. We are like a man who, on reaching the summit of a rock, perceives with his eyes objects which are invisible to those who have not made the ascent along with him.”

But although all beings, from the stone and the plant up to man, are contemplations, they are unconscious contemplations; and it is very difficult to rediscover in ourselves some memory of the previous activity of the dead faculty. In this respect we resemble the eye in the Neo-Platonic image. “It turns away from the light to see the darkness, and by the very action it ceases to see; for it cannot see the darkness with the light, and yet without it, it sees not at all; and so, by not seeing, it sees the darkness as far as it is capable of seeing it.”

I know the judgment which most men will pronounce on this book. They will think it the work of a deluded monk, of a pale solitary, a hermit, dizzy with fasting and worn with fever. They will take it for a wild, dark dream, crossed with vivid lightning flashes,—nothing more. This is the common idea which people form of the mystics; and they forget too often that they alone are the possessors of certainty. If it be true, as has been said, that every man is a Shakespeare in his dreams, we might well ask whether every man is not in this life an inarticulate mystic, a thousand times more transcendental than those who have confined themselves within the bonds of words. Is not the eye of the lover or of the mother, for instance, a thousand times more abstruse, more impenetrable, and more mystical than this book, which is poor and easily explained, after all, like all books, for these are but dead mysteries, whose horizon will never be rekindled? If we do not understand this, perhaps the reason is that we no longer understand anything. But, to return to our author, a few will recognise without difficulty that, far from being half-maddened by hunger, solitude, and fever, this monk possessed, on the contrary, one of the wisest, most exact, and most subtle philosophic brains which have ever existed. He lived, they tell us, in his hut at Grönendal, in the midst of the forest of Soignes. It was at the beginning of one of the wildest centuries of the middle ages,—the fourteenth. He knew no Greek, and perhaps no Latin. He was alone and poor; and yet, in the depths of this obscure forest of Brabant, his mind, ignorant and simple as it was, receives, all unconsciously, dazzling sunbeams from all the lonely, mysterious peaks of human thought He knows, though he is unaware of it, the Platonism of Greece, the Sufism of Persia, the Brahmanism of India, and the Buddhism of Tibet; and his marvellous ignorance rediscovers the wisdom of buried centuries, and foresees the knowledge of centuries yet unborn. I could quote whole pages of Plato, of Plotinus, of Porphyry, of the Zendic books, of the Gnostics, and of the Kabbala, the all but inspired substance of which is to be found intact in the writings of this humble Flemish priest.[1] We find strange coincidences and disturbing agreements. We find more, for he seems, at times, to have presupposed with exactitude the work of most of his unknown predecessors. Just as Plotinus begins his stern journey at the crossroad where Plato, fearing, paused and knelt down, so we might say that Ruysbroeck awakened from a slumber of several centuries; not, indeed, the same kind of thought (for that kind of thought never sleeps), but the same kind of language as that which had fallen asleep on the mountains where Plotinus forsook it, dazzled by that blaze of light, and with his hands before his eyes, as if in presence of an immense conflagration.

But the organic method of their thought differs strangely. Plato and Plotinus are before all things princes in the sphere of dialectic. They reach mysticism by the science of reasoning. They use the discursive faculties of their mind, and seem to distrust their intuitive or contemplative faculties. Reasoning beholds itself in the mirror of reasoning, and endeavours to remain indifferent to every other reflection. It continues its course like a river of fresh water in the midst of the sea, with the presentiment of a speedy absorption. In our author we find, on the contrary, the habits of Asiatic thought; the intuitive faculty reigns alone above the discursive purification of ideas by means of words. The fetters of the dream have fallen off. Is it for this reason less sure? None can tell. The mirror of the human intellect is entirely unknown in this book, but there is another mirror, darker and more profound, which we hide in the inmost depths of our being; no detail can be seen distinctly, and words will not remain on its surface; the intellect would break it if it could for a moment cast thereon the reflection of its merely secular light; but something else is seen there from time to time. Is it the soul? is it God Himself? is it both at once? We shall never know; yet these all but invisible appearances are the only real rulers of the life of the most unbelieving among us. Here you will perceive nothing but the dark reflections on the mirror, and, as its treasure is inexhaustible, these reflections are not like anything we have experienced in ourselves, but, in spite of all, they have an amazing certainty. And this is why I know nothing more terrifying than this honest book. There is no psychological idea, no metaphysical experience, no mystical intuition, however abstruse, profound, and surprising they may be, which it would be impossible to reproduce if necessary, and to cause to live for a moment in ourselves, that we might be assured of their human identity; but here on earth we are like a blind father who can no longer recall the faces of his children. None of these thoughts has the childlike or brotherly look of a thought of this earth; we seem to have lost our experience of God, and yet everything assures us that we are not entered into the house of dreams. Must we exclaim with Novalis that the time has passed away when the Spirit of God was comprehensible, and that the divine sense of the world is forever lost? That of old all things were manifestations of the Spirit, but that now we see only lifeless reflections which we do not understand, and live entirely on the fruits of better times?

I believe we must humbly confess that the key of this book is not to be found on the common pathways of the human mind. That key is not meant to open earthly doors, and we must deserve it by withdrawing ourselves as far as possible from the earth. One guide, indeed, we may still meet at these lonely cross-roads, who can point out the last way-marks towards these mysterious isles of fire, these Icelands of abstraction and of love. That guide is Plotinus, who attempted to analyse, by means of the human intellect, the divine faculty which here holds sway. He experienced the same ecstasies (as we say in a word which explains nothing) which are in their essence only the beginning of the complete discovery of our being; and in the midst of their trouble and their darkness, he never for one moment closed the questioning eye of the psychologist who seeks to explain to himself the most abnormal phenomena of his soul. He is thus like the last outwork of the pier, from which we may understand something of the waves and the horizon of that dim sea. He tries to extend the paths of the ordinary intellect into the very heart of these desolations, and this is why we must constantly revert to him, for he is the one analytical mystic. For the sake of those who may be tempted to undertake this tremendous journey, I give here one of the pages in which he has attempted to explain the organism of that divine faculty of introspection:—

“In the intuition of the intellect,” he says, “intelligible objects are perceived by the intellect by means of the light which the First One spreads over them, and in seeing these objects, it sees really the intelligible light. But, as it gives its attention to the objects on which the light falls, it does not perceive with any exactness the principle which enlightens them, while if, on the contrary, it forgets the objects which it sees so as to contemplate only the brightness which makes them visible, it sees the light itself and the principle of the light. But it is never outside of itself that the intellect can contemplate the intelligible light. It then resembles the eye which, without contemplating an exterior or alien light, and indeed before it has even perceived it, is suddenly struck by a brightness which belongs to itself, or by a ray which darts from itself, and appears to it in the midst of darkness: it is just the same when the eye, so as to see no other objects, closes its lids and draws its light from itself, or when, pressed by the hand, it perceives the light which it has in itself. Then, although seeing no outside thing, it still sees; it sees even more than at any other time, for it sees the light. The other objects which it saw before, although they were luminous, were not the light itself. So, when the intellect closes its eye in some degree to other objects, and concentrates it on itself, then, seeing nothing, it yet sees, not an alien light which shines in alien forms, but its own light, which all at once shines inwardly with a pure radiance.”

Again he says: “The soul which studies God must form an idea of Him whom it seeks to know; being aware, moreover, to what greatness it desires to unite itself, and persuaded that it will find blessedness in that union, it must plunge into the depths of divinity, until, instead of contemplating itself, or the intelligible world, it becomes itself an object of contemplation, and shines with the brightness of conceptions which have their source above.”

We have here almost all that human wisdom can tell us; almost all that the prince of transcendental metaphysicians could express; as for other explanations, we must find them in ourselves, in the depths where all explanation disappears in its expression. For it is not only in heaven and earth, but above all in ourselves, that there are more things than all philosophies can contain; and as soon as we are no longer obliged to formulate the mysteries within us, we are more profound than all that has been written, and greater than all that exists.