This is the apogee of the interior life, the meeting, the union of the soul with God. It may be brought about in three different ways: (1) Man, struck by a light coming forth from God, forsakes all images; he is plunged into the union of fruitive love; he meets God without any medium, a spirit like unto Him; it is the state of absolute repose in God, utter emptiness and leisure. (2) At other times man adores God and consumes himself in continual love, which ceaselessly feeds on the presence of God; it is the mediate stage, the state of affective love, needful for the attainment of the preceding. (3) Finally, it is possible to unite enjoyment with activity: man enjoys a most profound peace and produces all the acts of love; he receives God; and His gifts in the superior faculties, images and sensations in the lower powers; it is the most perfect state, the state of combined activity and repose.
Even so, it is not the most sublime state. Above the interior life there is the superessential contemplative life; above the faithful friends there are the Intimate Sons of God. This third stage of perfection can never be acquired by any act of the intelligence or will; and so sublime is it that he only who has experienced it can attempt its description, and then in terms the most halting and imperfect. This contemplation consists in an absolute purity and simplicity of the understanding; it is a knowledge and possession of God, without modes, without limits, without medium, without any consciousness of the difference of His qualities. Nevertheless, it is not God, it is the light by which He is seen. It is the death and destruction of self to behold only the Being eternal and absolute. Its essence is union with God, the still contemplation of God, abandonment to God, so that He alone acts, and not the soul. This repose of the spirit engenders a supernatural contemplation of the Trinity without any medium, a feeling of bliss unspeakable, a sublime ignorance; the last consciousness of the difference between God and the creature—being and nothingness—disappears.
This is the honeymoon of Christ with the soul, to which the preceding stages are only a preparation. The spirit is led from brightness to brightness; and since no medium comes between it and the divine splendour, since the brightness by which it sees is the light itself which it sees, in a certain sense itself becomes this brightness; it attains a consciousness of its own superessential being, of the unity of its essence in God.
XIII
Some Appreciations
Arrived thus at the summit of mystic speculation, Ruysbroeck finds himself on the confines of pantheism. However, he constantly insists, as we have already remarked, on the essential difference between the created spirit and the Spirit Eternal. Man, he says, must become deiform as far as that is possible for the creature; in the union with God it is not the difference of personality which is destroyed, it is only the difference of will and of thought, the desire to be anything apart in oneself which must disappear. He declares: “There where I assert that we are one in God, I must be understood in this sense that we are one in love, not in essence or in nature.” His own strenuous opposition to the pantheists of his day proves his orthodoxy in this matter; yet it must be confessed again that from the very nature of his sublime discourse, his expressions are at times exceedingly bold and seemingly unorthodox. The truth is that the resources of human language prove inadequate to describe even the foretaste on earth of that “which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive.”
In B. John’s own lifetime Gerard Groote was alarmed, and wrote once to the Canons of Groenendael of a Doctor in Theology, and of one Henry of Hesse, who had declared that the Spiritual Espousals contained errors. Twenty years after Ruysbroeck’s death, John Gerson, the famous Chancellor of Paris, in a letter to one Bartholomew, a Carthusian, who had given him a copy of this treatise, praises the first two books, but declares that the third teaches a kind of pantheism. This charge brought forth a lengthy and spirited defence from a Canon Regular of Groenendael, named John Scoenhoven; and then in a second letter Gerson maintained his objections, but acquitted the holy author of all intentional error. A similar stand was taken later by Bossuet, who excuses Ruysbroeck but condemns his manner of expression. It must be remembered that these two were engaged in confuting false mystics, and naturally they would discredit the writings of even a holy man, however orthodox, which would appear to favour the erroneous tenets of their opponents. Once more, we remark that not only was Ruysbroeck manifestly free from all culpable error, but throughout in his own mind he never lost sight of the essential distinctions, though at times his language must necessarily sound exaggerated to unaccustomed ears.
On the other hand, to outweigh the unfavourable opinion of these two French critics, we have a host of writers of Ruysbroeck’s own and subsequent days who not only defend the orthodoxy of his writings, but who also speak of them in terms of the deepest admiration, and regard their author almost as inspired.
We have already seen the esteem in which the holy Prior of Groenendael and his writings were held by Tauler, Gerard Groote, and the Venerable Thomas à Kempis, and the vigour with which his memory was vindicated by John of Scoenhoven, But his advocates were by no means confined to the limits of his own Order, period, or country.
Henry van Herp, a Franciscan, compiled a Mirror of Perfection, taken almost exclusively from the Spiritual Espousals; and by his means the teachings of Blessed Ruysbroeck were propagated among the followers of St. Francis, particularly of the Third Order.
Denys the Carthusian is unstinted in his praises. He calls him the Divine Doctor. “I name him the Divine Doctor,” he writes, “because his only master was the Holy Ghost. Of this the abundance of wisdom wherewith he was gifted is a sure guarantee.... Ignorant man as I am, I confess that nowhere have I found such sublimity and such knowledge, save in the works of Denys the Areopagyte. But in his writings the difficulty arises especially from the style, whereas it is not so with the Prior of Groenendael.... As they say of Hugh of St. Victor that he is another St. Augustin, so I will say of Ruysbroeck that he is another Denys the Areopagyte.”