Ruysbroeck and the Mystics: with selections from Ruysbroeck

by Maurice Maeterlinck

I have translated this book, then, solely because I believe that the writings of the mystics are the purest diamonds in the vast treasure of humanity. A translation may indeed very easily be useless, for experience seems to prove that it matters little whether the mystery of the incarnation of a thought takes place in darkness or in light; it is enough that it has taken place. But, however this may be, the truths of mysticism have a strange privilege over ordinary truths; they can neither grow old nor die. There is no truth which did not, one morning, come down upon this world, lovely in strength and in youth, and covered with the fresh and wondrous dew which lies on things yet unspoken: to-day you may pass through the infirmaries of the human soul, where all thoughts come day by day to die, and you will not find there a single mystic thought. They have the immunity of the angels of Swedenborg, who progress continually towards the spring of their youth, so that the oldest angels appear the youngest; and whether they come from India, from Greece, or from the North, they have neither country nor date, and wherever we meet them, they are calm and real as God Himself. A work grows old in exact proportion to its anti-mysticism; and that is why this book bears no date. I know that it is unusually obscure, but I believe that a sincere and honest author is never obscure in the eternal sense of the word, because he always understands himself, and in a way which is infinitely beyond anything that he says. It is only artificial ideas which spring up in real darkness, and flourish solely in literary epochs and in the insincerity of self-conscious ages, when the thought of the writer is poorer than his expression. In the former case, we have the rich shade of a forest; in the latter, the gloom of a cavern, in which only dismal parasites can grow. We must take into account that unknown world which our author’s phrases were meant to enlighten through the poor double horn-panes of words and thoughts. Words, as it has been said, were invented for the ordinary uses of life, and they are unhappy, restless, and as bewildered as beggars round a throne, when, from time to time, some royal soul leads them elsewhere. And, from another point of view, is the thought ever the exact image of that unknown thing which gave it birth? Do we not always behold in it the shadow of a conflict like that of Jacob with the angel, confused in proportion to the stature of the soul and of the angel? “Woe to us,” says Carlyle, “if we have nothing in us except that which we can express and show to others.” I know that on these pages there lies the shadow cast from objects which we have no recollection of having seen. The monk does not stop to explain their use to us, and we shall recognise them only when we behold the objects themselves on the other side of this life; but meanwhile, he has made us look into the distance, and that is much. I know, besides, that many of his phrases float almost like transparent icicles on the colourless sea of silence, but still they exist; they have been separated from the waters, and that is sufficient. I am aware, finally, that the strange plants which he cultivated on the high peaks of the spirit are surrounded by clouds of their own, but these clouds annoy only gazers from below. Those who have the courage to climb see that they are the very atmosphere of these plants, the only atmosphere in which they can blossom in the shade of non-existence. For this is a vegetation so subtle that it can scarcely be distinguished from the silence from which it has drawn its juices and into which it seems ready to dissolve. This whole work, moreover, is like a magnifying glass turned upon darkness and silence; and sometimes we do not immediately discern the outline of the ideas which are still steeped therein. It is invisible things which appear from time to time, and some attention is obviously needed for their recognition. This book is not too far off from us; probably it is in the very centre of our humanity; it is we, on the contrary, who are too far from the book; and if it seems to us discouraging as the desert, if the desolation of divine love in it appears terrible, and the thirst on its summits unendurable, it is not that the book is too ancient, but that we ourselves are perhaps old and sad and lacking in courage, like gray-haired men in presence of a child. Plotinus, the great pagan mystic, is probably right when he says to those who complain that they see nothing on the heights of introspection: “We must first make the organ of vision analogous and similar to the object which it is to contemplate. The eye would never have perceived the sun, if it had not first taken the form of the sun; so likewise the soul could never see beauty if it did not first become beautiful itself; and all men should begin by making themselves beautiful and divine, in order that they may obtain the sight of the beautiful and of divinity.”

II

The life of Jean von Ruysbroeck, like that of most of the great thinkers of this world, is entirely an inner life. He said himself, “I have no concerns outside.” Nearly all his biographers, Surius among others, wrote nearly two centuries after his death, and their work seems much intermixed with legend. They show us a holy hermit, silent, ignorant, amazingly humble, amazingly good, who was in the habit of working miracles unawares. The trees beneath which he prayed were illumined by an aureole; the bells of a Dutch convent tolled without hands on the day of his death. His body, when exhumed five years after his soul had quitted it, was found in a state of perfect preservation, and from it rose wonderful perfumes, which cured the sick who were brought from neighbouring villages. A few lines will suffice to give the facts which are undoubtedly authentic. He was born in the year 1274 at Ruysbroeck, a little village between Hal and Brussels. He was first a priest in the church of Sainte-Gudule; then, by the advice of the hermit Lambert, he left the Brabant town and retired to Grönendal (Green Valley) in the forest of Soignes, in the neighbourhood of Brussels. Holy companions soon joined him there, and with them he founded the abbey of Grönendal, the ruins of which may be seen to this day. Attracted by the strange renown of his theosophy and his supernatural visions, pilgrims from Germany and Holland, among them the Dominican Jean Tauler and Gerhard Groot, came to this retreat to visit the humble old man, and went away filled with an admiration of which the memory still lingers in their writings. He died, according to the Necrologium Monasterii Viridis Vallis, on the 2nd of December 1381, and his contemporaries gave him the title of “L’Admirable.”

It was the century of the mystics and the period of the gloomy wars in Brabant and Flanders, of stormy nights of blood and prayers under the wild reigns of the three Johns, of battles extending into the very forest where the saints were kneeling. St. Bonaventura and St. Thomas Aquinas had just died, and Thomas à Kempis was about to study God in that mirror of the absolute which the inspired Fleming had left in the depths of the Green Valley; while, first Jehan de Bruges, and afterwards the Van Eycks, Roger van der Weyden, Hugues van der Goes, Thierry Bouts, and Hans Memlinck were to people with images the lonely Word of the hermit.

Here is a list of the writings of Ruysbroeck, the sum-total of which is very large. The Book of the Twelve Beguines; The Mirror of Eternal Salvation; The Book of the Spiritual Tabernacle; The Sparkling Stone; The Book of Supreme Truth; The Book of the Seven Steps of Spiritual Love; The Book of the Seven Castles; The Book of the Kingdom of the Beloved; The Book of the Four Temptations; The Book of the Twelve Virtues; The Book of Christian Faith, and The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage. There are besides seven letters, two hymns, and a prayer, to which Surius gave these titles, Epistolae septem utiles, Cantiones duæ admodum spirituales, and Oratio perbrevis sed pia valde, the original texts of which I have not been able to discover in any of the Flemish manuscripts.

Some years ago the greater number of these writings were edited with the utmost care by a society of Flemish bibliophiles—De Maetschappij der Vlaemsche Bibliophilen—and most of this translation has been made from the excellent text of that edition.

I shall not undertake to give here an analysis of these different works; such an analysis would be difficult, monotonous, and useless. All the books of our author treat exclusively of the same science: a theosophy peculiar to Ruysbroeck, the minute study of the introversion and introspection of the soul, the contemplation of God above all similitudes and likenesses, and the drama of the divine love on the uninhabitable peaks of the spirit. I shall therefore content myself with giving some characteristic extracts from each of these writings.

The Book of the Twelve Beguines, in the Latin translation of Surius, is entitled De vera contemplatione, opus præclarum, variis divinis institutionibus, eo quo Spiritus Sanctus suggessit ordine descriptis, exuberans. This title explains more exactly the nature of the work, but is not to be found in any of the early manuscripts. The truth is that Ruysbroeck, following the custom of his age, seldom gave a title to his writings, and the titles by which they are now known, as well as the marginal rubrics of the chapters, have apparently been interpolated by the copyists. In the edition of the Maetschappij der Vlaemsche Bibliophilen we find collected under the title, Dat boec van den twaelf beghinen, first of all that treatise on the contemplative life mentioned by Surius, next a kind of manual of symbolical astrology, and lastly some thoughts on the passion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. The three works are marked off from each other with more or less distinctness, and Ruysbroeck evidently fixes the place where he forsakes the inner universe and descends to the visible firmament, when he says at the end of chapter xxxi., “And after this I leave the contemplative life, which is God Himself, and which He grants to those who have renounced self and have followed His Spirit to where, in eternal glory, He rejoices in Himself and in His chosen.”

The first eight chapters of this book are written in singular and very beautiful verses, and across their images, on the dark background of essential love, as across the windows of a burning convent, there flicker continually bright spiritual flames, and also frozen sadnesses, not unlike those of Villon or of Verlaine.

Here are some of these verses:—