The adornment of the spiritual marriage E-Book

JAN VAN RUYSBROECK

• Herausgeber: GIANLUCA
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Jan van Ruysbroeck - three of whose most important works are here for the first time presented to English readers - is the greatest of the Flemish mystics, and must take high rank in any list of Christian contemplatives and saints. He led a life of asuterity, eventually founding a congregation in Groenendaal. His writings were widely circulated in his lifetime and he influenced an entire generation of Christian mystics. He was beatified on December 1st, 1908, by Pope St. Pius X. The writings here include The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, The Sparkling Stone, and, The Book of Supreme Truth.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

FIRST BOOK - PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1. OF THE ACTIVE LIFE

CHAPTER 2. SHOWING HOW WE SHALL CONSIDER THE COMING OF CHRIST IN THREE WAYS

CHAPTER 3. OF HUMILITY

CHAPTER 4. OF CHARITY

CHAPTER 5. OF PATIENT ENDURANCE

CHAPTER 6. OF THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST

CHAPTER 7. OF THE BLESSED SACRAMENTS

CHAPTER 8. OF THE THIRD COMING OF CHRIST

CHAPTER 9. SHOWING WHAT CHRIST WILL DO IN THE DAY OF DOOM

CHAPTER 10. OF THE FIVE KINDS OF MEN WHO SHALL APPEAR AT THE JUDGMENT

CHAPTER 11. OF A SPIRITUAL GOING OUT WITH ALL VIRTUES

CHAPTER 12. HOW HUMILITY IS THE FOUNDATION OF ALL OTHER VIRTUES

CHAPTER 13. OF OBEDIENCE

CHAPTER 14. OF THE RENUNCIATION OF SELF WILL

CHAPTER 15. OF PATIENCE

CHAPTER 16. OF MEEKNESS

CHAPTER 17. OF KINDLINESS

CHAPTER 18. OF COMPASSION

CHAPTER 19. OF GENEROSITY

CHAPTER 20. OF ZEAL AND DILIGENCE

CHAPTER 21. OF TEMPERANCE AND SOBRIETY

CHAPTER 22. OF PURITY

CHAPTER 23. OF THREE ENEMIES TO BE OVERCOME BY RIGHTEOUSNESS

CHAPTER 24. OF THE KINGDOM OF THE SOUL

CHAPTER 25. OF A SPIRITUAL MEETING OF GOD AND OURSELVES

CHAPTER 26. OF THE DESIRE TO KNOW THE BRIDEGROOM IN HIS NATURE

SECOND BOOK - PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1. HOW WE ACHIEVE SUPERNATURAL SIGHT IN OUR INWARD WORKINGS

CHAPTER 2. OF A THREE-FOLD UNITY WHICH IS IN US BY NATURE

CHAPTER 3. OF THE INFLOW OF THE GRACE OF GOD INTO OUR SPIRIT

CHAPTER 4. SHOWING HOW WE SHOULD FOUND OUR INWARD LIFE ON A FREEDOM FROM IMAGES

CHAPTER 5. OF A THREE-FOLD COMING OF OUR LORD IN THE INWARD MAN

CHAPTER 6. OF THE SECOND COMING OF OUR LORD IN THE INWARD MAN

CHAPTER 7. OF THE THIRD COMING OF OUR LORD

CHAPTER 8. HOW THE FIRST COMING HAS FOUR DEGREES

CHAPTER 9. OF UNITY OF HEART

CHAPTER 10. OF INWARDNESS

CHAPTER 11. OF SENSIBLE LOVE

CHAPTER 12. OF DEVOTION

CHAPTER 13. OF GRATITUDE

CHAPTER 14. OF TWO GRIEFS WHICH ARISE FROM INWARD GRATITUDE

CHAPTER 15. A SIMILITUDE HOW WE SHOULD PERFORM THE FIRST DEGREE OF OUR INWARD EXERCISE

CHAPTER 16. ANOTHER SIMILITUDE CONCERNING THE SAME EXERCISE

CHAPTER 17. OF THE SECOND DEGREE OF OUR INWARD EXERCISE, WHICH INCREASES INWARDNESS BY HUMILITY

CHAPTER 18. OF THE PURE DELIGHT OF THE HEART AND THE SENSIBLE POWERS

CHAPTER 19. OF SPIRITUAL INEBRIATION

CHAPTER 20. WHAT MAY HINDER A MAN IN THIS INEBRIATION

CHAPTER 21. A SIMILITUDE HOW A MAN SHOULD ACT AND BEAR HIMSELF IN THIS CASE

CHAPTER 22. OF THE THIRD DEGREE OF THE SPIRITUAL COMING OF CHRIST

CHAPTER 23. OF THE PAIN AND RESTLESSNESS OF LOVE

CHAPTER 24. OF ECSTACIES AND DIVINE REVELATIONS

CHAPTER 25. AN EXAMPLE SHOWING HOW ONE IS HINDERED IN THIS EXERCISE

CHAPTER 26. ANOTHER EXAMPLE

CHAPTER 27. A PARABLE OF THE ANT

CHAPTER 28. OF THE FOURTH DEGREE OF THE COMING OF CHRIST

CHAPTER 29. SHOWING WHAT THE FORSAKEN MAN SHOULD DO

CHAPTER 30. A PARABLE: HOW ONE MAY BE HINDERED IN THIS FOURTH DEGREE

CHAPTER 31. OF ANOTHER HINDRANCE

CHAPTER 32. OF FOUR KINDS OF FEVER WHEREWITH A MAN MAY BE TORMENTED

CHAPTER 33. SHOWING HOW THESE FOUR DEGREES IN THEIR PERFECTION ARE FOUND IN CHRIST

CHAPTER 34. SHOWING HOW A MAN SHOULD LIVE IF HE WOULD BE ENLIGHTENED

CHAPTER 35. OF THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST, OR, THE FOUNTAIN WITH THREE RILLS

CHAPTER 36. THE FIRST RILL ADORNS THE MEMORY*

CHAPTER 37. THE SECOND RILL ENLIGHTENS THE UNDERSTANDING

CHAPTER 38. THE THIRD RILL ESTABLISHES THE WILL TO EVERY PERFECTION

CHAPTER 39. SHOWING HOW THE ESTABLISHED MAN SHALL GO OUT IN FOUR WAYS

CHAPTER 40. HE SHALL GO OUT TOWARDS GOD AND TOWARDS ALL SAINTS

CHAPTER 41. HE SHALL GO OUT TOWARDS ALL SINNERS

CHAPTER 42. HE SHALL GO OUT TOWARDS HIS FRIENDS IN PURGATORY

CHAPTER 43. HE SHALL GO OUT TOWARDS HIMSELF AND TOWARDS ALL GOOD MEN

CHAPTER 44. SHOWING HOW WE MAY RECOGNISE THOSE MEN WHO FAIL IN CHARITY TO ALL

CHAPTER 45. HOW CHRIST WAS, IS, AND EVER WILL BE THE LOVER OF ALL

CHAPTER 46. REPROVING ALL THOSE WHO LIVE ON SPIRITUAL GOODS IN AN INORDINATE MANNER

CHAPTER 47. SHOWING HOW CHRIST HAS GIVEN HIMSELF TO ALL IN COMMON IN THE SACRAMENT OF THE ALTAR

CHAPTER 48. OF THE UNITY OF THE DIVINE NATURE IN THE TRINITY OF THE PERSONS

CHAPTER 49. SHOWING HOW GOD POSSESSES AND MOVES THE SOUL BOTH IN A NATURAL AND A SUPERNATURAL WAY

CHAPTER 50. SHOWING HOW A MAN SHOULD BE ADORNED IF HE IS TO RECEIVE THE MOST INWARD EXERCISE

CHAPTER 51. OF THE THIRD COMING OF CHRIST

CHAPTER 52. SHOWING HOW THE SPIRIT GOES OUT THROUGH THE DIVINE STIRRING

CHAPTER 53. OF AN ETERNAL HUNGER FOR GOD

CHAPTER 54. OF A LOVING STRIFE BETWEEN THE SPIRIT OF GOD AND OUR SPIRIT

CHAPTER 55. OF THE FRUITFUL WORKS OF THE SPIRIT, THE WHICH ARE ETERNAL

CHAPTER 56. SHOWING THE WAY IN WHICH WE SHALL MEET GOD IN A GHOSTLY MANNER BOTH WITH AND WITHOUT MEANS*

CHAPTER 57. OF THE ESSENTIAL MEETING WITH GOD WITHOUT MEANS IN THE NAKEDNESS OF OUR NATURE

CHAPTER 58. SHOWING HOW ONE IS LIKE UNTO GOD THROUGH GRACE AND UNLIKE UNTO GOD THROUGH MORTAL SIN

CHAPTER 59. SHOWING HOW ONE POSSESSES GOD IN UNION AND REST, ABOVE ALL LIKENESS THROUGH GRACE

CHAPTER 60. SHOWING HOW WE HAVE NEED OF THE GRACE OF GOD, WHICH MAKES US LIKE UNTO GOD AND LEADS US TO GOD WITHOUT MEANS

CHAPTER 61. OF HOW GOD AND OUR SPIRIT VISIT EACH OTHER IN THE UNITY AND IN THE LIKENESS

CHAPTER 62. SHOWING HOW WE SHOULD GO OUT TO MEET GOD

CHAPTER 63. OF THE ORDERING OF ALL THE VIRTUES THROUGH THE SEVEN GIFTS OF THE HOLY GHOST

CHAPTER 64. OF THE HIGHEST DEGREE OF THE MOST INTERIOR LIFE

CHAPTER 65. OF THREE KINDS OF MOST INWARD PRACTICES

CHAPTER 66. SHOWING HOW SOME MEN LIVE CONTRARY TO THESE EXERCISES

CHAPTER 67. OF ANOTHER KIND OF PERVERTED MEN

THIRD BOOK - CHAPTER 1. SHOWING THE THREE WAYS BY WHICH ONE ENTERS INTO THE GOD-SEEING LIFE

CHAPTER 2. HOW THE ETERNAL BIRTH OF GOD IS RENEWED WITHOUT INTERRUPTION IN THE NOBILITY OF THE SPIRIT

CHAPTER 3. HOW OUR SPIRIT IS CALLED TO GO OUT IN CONTEMPLATION AND FRUITION

CHAPTER 4. OF A DIVINE MEETING WHICH TAKES PLACE IN THE HIDDENNESS OF OUR SPIRIT

THE SPARKLING STONE - PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1. THROUGH THREE THINGS A MAN BECOMES GOOD

CHAPTER 2. THROUGH THREE THINGS A MAN BECOMES INWARD

CHAPTER 3. THROUGH THREE THINGS A MAN BECOMES GOD-SEEING

CHAPTER 4. OF THE SPARKLING STONE, AND OF THE NEW NAME WRITTEN IN THE BOOK OF THE SECRETS OF GOD

CHAPTER 5. OF THE WORKS WHICH GOD WORKS IN ALL IN COMMON AND OF FIVE KINDS OF SINNERS

CHAPTER 6. OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE HIRELINGS AND THE FAITHFUL SERVANTS OF GOD

CHAPTER 7. OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE FAITHFUL SERVANTS AND THE SECRET FRIENDS OF GOD

CHAPTER 8. OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE SECRET FRIENDS AND THE HIDDEN SONS OF GOD

CHAPTER 9. HOW WE MAY BECOME HIDDEN SONS OF GOD, AND ATTAIN TO THE GOD-SEEING LIFE

CHAPTER 10. HOW WE, THOUGH ONE WITH GOD, MUST ETERNALLY REMAIN OTHER THAN GOD

CHAPTER 11. OF THE GREAT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE BRIGHTNESS OF THE SAINTS AND THE HIGHEST BRIGHTNESS TO WHICH WE CAN ATTAIN IN THIS LIFE

CHAPTER 12. OF THE TRANSFIGURATION OF CHRIST ON MOUNT THABOR

CHAPTER 13. HOW WE OUGHT TO HAVE FRUITION OF GOD

CHAPTER 14. OF THAT COMMON LIFE WHICH COMES FROM THE CONTEMPLATION AND FRUITION OF GOD

THE BOOK OF SUPREME TRUTH - PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1. WHEREFORE THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN

CHAPTER 2. A SHORT REPETITION OF ALL THE HIGHEST TEACHINGS WRITTEN BY THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER 3. OF THE UNION THROUGH MEANS

CHAPTER 4. OF THE MEN WHO PRACTISE A FALSE VACANCY

CHAPTER 5. OF THE UNION WITHOUT MEANS

CHAPTER 6. OF HEAVENLY WEAL AND HELLISH WOE

CHAPTER 7. SHOWING WHEREFORE ALL GOOD MEN DO NOT ATTAIN TO THE UNMEDIATED UNION WITH GOD

CHAPTER 8. SHOWING HOW THE INWARD MAN SHOULD EXERCISE HIMSELF, THAT HE MAY BE UNITED WITH GOD WITHOUT MEANS

CHAPTER 9. OF THE INWARD WORKING OF GOD’S GRACE

CHAPTER 10. OF THE MUTUAL CONTENTMENT OF THE DIVINE PERSONS, AND THE MUTUAL CONTENTMENT BETWEEN GOD AND GOOD MEN

CHAPTER 11. HOW GOOD MEN IN THEIR CONTEMPLATION HAVE THE LOVE OF GOD BEFORE THEM, AND HOW THEY ARE LIFTED UP INTO GOD

CHAPTER 12. OF THE HIGHEST UNION, WITHOUT DIFFERENCE OR DISTINCTION

CHAPTER 13. OF THE THREEFOLD PRAYER OF CHRIST, THAT WE MIGHT BE ONE WITH GOD

CHAPTER 14. HERE THE AUTHOR DECLARES THAT HE SUBMITS ALL THAT HE HAS WRITTEN TO THE JUDGMENT OF HOLY CHURCH

THE ADORNMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL MARRIAGE

THE SPARKLING STONE

THE BOOK OF SUPREME TRUTH

by

JAN VAN RUYSBROECK

First digital edition 2019 by Gianluca Ruffini

INTRODUCTION

I

Jan van Ruysbroeck - three of whose most important works are here for the first time presented to English readers - is the greatest of the Flemish mystics, and must take high rank in any list of Christian contemplatives and saints. He was born in 1273, at the little village of Ruysbroeck or Ruusbroeck between Brussels and Hal, from which he takes his name; and spent his whole life within his native province of Brabant. At eleven years old, he is said to have run away from home and found his way to Brussels; where he was received by his uncle Jan Hinckaert, a canon of the Cathedral of St Gudule. Hinckaert, who was a man of great piety, lived with another devout priest named Francis van Coudenberg in the most austere fashion; entirely devoted to prayer and good works. The two ecclesiastics brought the boy up, and gave him a religious education, which evidently included considerable training in theology and philosophy: subjects for which he is said to have shown, even in boyhood, an astonishing aptitude. In 1317 he took orders, and obtained through his uncle’s influence a prebend’s stall in St Gudule; a position which he occupied for twenty-six years.

During youth and early middle-age, then, Ruysbroeck lived in Brussels, fulfilling the ordinary duties of a cathedral chaplain: and here some of his earlier works may have been written. Here no doubt he developed that shrewd insight into human character to which his books bear witness; and here gained his experience of those “false mystics” and self-sufficient quietists so vividly described and sternly condemned in the second book of The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, in The Book of Truth, and other places. In the early fourteenth century, a number of heretical sects, of which the Brethren of the Free Spirit were typical, flourished in the Low Countries. Basing their doctrine on a pantheistic and non-Christian conception of the Godhead, they proclaimed the “divinity of man,” and preached a quietism of the most soul-destroying kind, together with an emancipation from the fetters of law and custom which often resulted in actual immorality. (1) As Ruysbroeck grew in knowledge of the true contemplative life, the dangers attending on its perversion became ever more clear to him: and he entered upon that vigorous campaign against the heretical quietists which was the chief outward event of his Brussels period.

As to his spiritual development during these years, we can have no certain knowledge: since none of his works are exactly dated, and the order in which they should be arranged is a matter of inference. But it is inherently probable that he was experiencing the early stages of that mysterious growth of the soul which he describes so exactly in the first two books of The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage: the hard self-discipline, the enlightenment, raptures, and derelictions, of the “active” and “interior” life. At this period, he had made little impression on his contemporaries. The Augustinian canon Pomerius, who had known in their old age some of Ruysbroeck’s friends and followers, and who wrote his Life (2) in the year 1420, describes him as a simple, quiet, rather shabby-looking person, who “went about the streets of Brussels with his mind lifted up into God.” Yet it is certain that great force of character, much shrewd common sense, and remarkable intellectual qualities lay behind this meek appearance. We know how greatly he disliked “singular conduct” in those who had given themselves to the spiritual life. They should be, he thought, like “other good men”; (3) and this ideal found expression in his own life. A devout and orthodox Catholic, well read in scholastic theology and philosophy, on the mental and social side at least, he was a thorough man of his time; apparently accepting without criticism its institutions and ideas. Many passages in his works indicate this: for instance, his constant and unquestioning use of the categories of mediaeval psychology, or his quiet assumption (4) that “putting to the torture” is part of the business of a righteous judge. But on the spiritual side his period influenced him little. There, his concern was with truths which lie, as he says, “outside Time” in the Eternal Now; and when he is trying to interpret these to us the Middle Ages and their limitations fall away. Then we catch fragments which Plato or Plotinus on one hand, Hegel on the other, might recognise as the reports of one who had known and experienced the Reality for which they sought. “My words,” said Ruysbroeck, “are strange, but those who love will understand”: and this indeed is true, for he possessed in an extraordinary degree the power, which so many great mystics have lacked of giving verbal and artistic expression to his soaring intuitions of Eternity.

In 1343, when he was fifty years old, the growing sense of contrast between those intuitions and the religious formalism and unreality of the cathedral life, the distracting bustle of the town, reached a point at which it seems to have become unendurable to him. Together with Hinckaert and Coudenberg - both now old men - he left Brussels forever; all three intending to settle in some lonely country place, where they could devote themselves to the life of prayer and contemplation. They were given the old hermitage of Groenendael, or the Green Valley, in the forest of Soignes outside Brussels. There they were presently joined by disciples, and formed a small community, which was eventually placed under the rule of the Augustinian canons. Coudenberg became the provost and Ruysbroeck the prior; and under their government the priory of Groenendael soon became known as the home of a special holiness.

We shall probably be right if we identify his thirty-eight years, sojourn in the forest with the “God-seeing” stage of Ruysbroeck’s mystical life. (5) Here without doubt all his greatest works were written. The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage must have been composed soon after his retreat from Brussels, for we know that in 1350 he sent a copy of it to the group of Rhenish mystics who called themselves the Friends of God. The Sparkling Stone and The Book of Truth - both written at the request of friends, to explain difficult points in his earlier books - belong to a later date. We need not feel surprised that the full flowering of his genius should coincide with his abandonment of the world. In one form or another such abandonment has been found imperative by all the great explorers of Eternity; whose inward quest of the One nearly always entails some withdrawal from the multiplicity of things. But beyond this, there was in Ruysbroeck’s mysticism, at once so intimate in its feeling so vast in its reach, a deeply poetic strain. The silence and growing beauty of the forest ministered to this: and many passages in his books show how easily he discovered intimations of divinity through the loving contemplation of natural things. A beautiful tradition tells us that he would go out alone into the woods when he felt that the inspiration of God was upon him; and there, sitting under his favourite tree, would write as the Holy Ghost dictated. The brethren used to declare that once, having been absent many hours from the priory, he was at last found in this place, rapt in ecstacy and surrounded by a brilliant aura of divine lighta legend which closely resembles many similar stories in the lives of the saints.

Such ecstatic absorption in God, however, formed only one side of Ruysbroeck’s religious life. True to his own doctrine of the “balanced career” of action and contemplation as the ideal of the Christian soul (6) his rapturous ascents towards Divine Reality were compensated by the eager and loving interest with which he turned towards the world of men. In the daily life of the priory he sought perpetually for opportunities of service, especially those of the most menial kind. As time passed, and his great mystical gifts became known, many disciples came to him: amongst them Gerard Groot, afterwards the founder of the Brothers of the Common Life and hence spiritual ancestor of Thomas Kempis. To all these he gave patient help and robust advice; initiating them, so far as it was possible, into the secrets of the true spiritual life, and ruthlessly exposing the pious pretensions of those who sought only a reputation for sanctity. It is clear even from his writings that he possessed to a remarkable degree the “gift of the discernment of spirits” in other words, that his shrewd judgment of humanity seldom failed him. All know the story of the two priests, who came from Paris to ask his opinion of their spiritual state: merely to receive the truthful but disconcerting reply, “You are as holy as you wish to be!”

The thirty-eight years which Ruysbroeck passed at Groenendael were, from the point of view of the earthly biographer, almost devoid of incident. True, he formed many friendships with the most spiritual men of his time, and seems occasionally to have left his priory in order to visit them. We possess a charming account of one such visit; that to Gerard Naghel, the Prior of Hérines, at whose suggestion The Book of Truth was written. “His peaceful and joyful countenance, his humble good-humoured speech,” says Gerard, made him loved by all with whom he came into contact: a sentence which brings to mind Ruysbroeck’s own picture of those happy men who walk in the way of love.

“Those who follow the way of love Are the richest of all men living: They are bold, frank, and fearless, They have neither travail nor care, For the Holy Ghost bears all their burdens. They seek no outward seeming, They desire nought that is esteemed of men, They affect not singular conduct, They would be like other good men.” (7)

Further, he saw during these years the rapid growth of the community - now swiftly becoming one of the chief centres of spiritual life in the Low Countries - and the wide dissemination of his own works. He even lived to see certain passages in those works criticised, as supporting a pantheistic and heretical view of the union of the soul with God. The Book of Truth was written to refute this accusation. But the true events of these years took place for him in that supernal world of high contemplation which it was his special province to disclose to his fellow-men. There his real life was fixed. There his loving ardour was forever young. Thither he drew those treasures of mystical knowledge which he is said to have poured forth to his brethren in long ecstatic discourses when the Spirit impelled him to speak: for he never taught or spoke unless he felt himself inspired thereto by God. When old age came upon him, though his ghostly vision never lost its keenness his earthly eyes grew dim: and his later works were dictated, when the Spirit moved him, to one of the younger brothers of the house. At eighty-eight years of age his strength failed: and after a short illness, which never clouded the radiance of his spirit, he died upon December 2nd, 1381.

II

Ruysbroeck wrote all his works in the dialect of his native province of Brabant: which stands in much the same relation to modern Flemish as Chaucer’s English stands to our own speech. Eleven of these works have come down to us in various MS. collections; and all of them, with one or two others of doubtful authenticity, are included in the great standard Latin translation made in the sixteenth century by the Carthusian monk Laurentius Surius. (8)

The authentic writings are these:

- 1. The Spiritual Tabernacle: a long symbolic treatise on the tabernacle of the Israelites, considered as a type of the spiritual life.

- 2. The Twelve Points of True Faith: a short mystical interpretation of the Creed.

- 3. The Book of the Four Temptations: an oblique attack on false mystics.

These are probably early works.

- 4. The Kingdom of God’s Lovers.

- 5. The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage.

Two elaborate and orderly treatises on the threefold life and development of the soul, which probably belong to the first years at Groenendael.

- 6. The Mirror of Eternal Salvation: written before 1359.

- 7. The Seven Cloisters: written before 1363.

- 8. The Seven Degrees of Love: written before 1372.

This group of works, forming a graduated instruction on the ascetic and mystical life, seems to have been written for Dame Margaret Van Meerbeke, a nun in the Convent of Poor Clares at Brussels.

- 9. The Book of the Sparkling Stone.

- 10. The Book of Supreme Truth.

- 11. The Twelve Béguines.

These three books, the substance of which is now accessible to English readers, (9) contain the finest fruit of Ruysbroeck’s genius. The Twelve Béguines is partly written in the rough rhymed verse which he uses in many parts of The Kingdom of God’s Lovers and other places; as if at times his ecstatic apprehensions presented themselves to the surface mind in a rhythmic form and “prayer into song was turned.” There is a short example of this in The Book of Truth. Such verse, however, though its uncouth strangeness gives to it an impressive quality, is a far less successful medium for the expression of his subtle mystical perceptions than the vigorous prose style of his best passages; for instance, the wonderful ninth chapter of The Sparkling Stone. (10)

When we come to examine the character of these mystical perceptions, we find that Ruysbroeck was one of the few mystics who have known how to make full use of a strong and disciplined intellect, without ever permitting it to encroach on the proper domain of spiritual intuition. An orderly and reasoned view of the universe is the ground plan upon which the results of those intuitions are set out: yet we are never allowed to forget the merely provisional character of the best intellectual concepts where we are dealing with ultimate truth. Ultimate truth, he says, is not accessible to the human reason: “the What-ness of God” we can never know. (11) Yet this need not discourage us from exploring, and describing as well as we can, those rich regions of approximate truth and life-giving experience which await us beyond the ramparts of the sensual world. The intellectual ideas and symbols which he uses most often are taken to a large extent from the Bible and the Liturgy, and the works of his great predecessors and contemporaries; and conform to the main lines of the Christian mystical tradition. St Paul and St Augustine, in particular, have influenced his thought. The notion popularised by M. Maeterlinck, that Ruysbroeck was an “ignorant monk” who became in his ecstacies a profound philosopher, is contradicted by the reminiscences of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, the many quotations from Dionysius the Areopagite, St Augustine, Richard of St Victor, St Bernard, and other mystical authors, which we find in his works. Indeed, only those familiar with these great seers and thinkers are in a position to recognise the sources and unravel the meaning of his more difficult passages. He was in fact almost as well equipped on the intellectual as on the contemplative side: and hence was enabled to interpret to others, in language with which all educated Christians in his day were more or less familiar, something at least of the adventures of his spirit in the fathomless Ocean of God.

Those intellectual concepts, however, of which he availed himself, are constantly used by him in an original way: and always as a means of expressing the results of direct personal inspiration and experience. Particularly characteristic is the living quality with which he invests theological formulae that for us have become fixed and sterile. As Dante, without deviating from the narrow path of scholastic philosophy, brings us at last into the presence of “that Eternal Light which loves and smiles,” (12) so Ruysbroeck leads us back by way of the most orthodox Trinitarian doctrine to the very heart of Reality: the eternal and abysmal Fountain of life-giving life.

In the three books which are now translated we shall find all his most characteristic ideas, though here it is only possible to touch upon a few of them. (13) For Ruysbroeck, as for St Augustine, Reality is both Being and Becoming: one-fold and changeless in essence, active and diverse in expression, a dualism aptly represented by the theological dogma of the Trinity in Unity. So too man, the image of God, is a unity who manifests himself in diversity; “made trinity, like to the unmade Blessed Trinity,” as our own mystic Julian of Norwich has it. (14) The ultimate truth is the Godhead: the Divine Unity of religion, the Absolute of philosophy. It is Simple, not with the simplicity of negation but with the simplicity of complete affirmation: gathering up into its unity all the rich complexities of power, wisdom, and love. In its essence, it is “dark,” “naked,” “wayless”; inaccessible to all the processes of thought. Yet it is alive through and through; the eternal “lifegiving ground” from which all comes. The ideas of “Fatherhood”, and “Sonhood” represent its quickening fruitfulness; (15) the Holy Ghost is the name of the Divine energy and love which pours forth into the created world, and thence, like a strong ebb-tide, draws all things back into their Origin. (16) Though the soul plunged in God, “sunk in His unity,” seems to itself to experience a profound rest and stillness, yet it is really surrendered to the movement of this mighty power: for “God is an ocean that ebbs and flows.”

The ideas, then, of movement, effort, and growth are central for Ruysbroeck’s thought. Again, and again we are impressed by his almost modern sense of life and action as the substance of the real: his freedom from merely static conceptions. Therefore, we find that the theme of all his more important books is the growth and development of the soul: the forms in which God’s energy plays upon it, the forms which should be taken by its response. The goal of this development is the unified state of “pure simplicity” in which it is able to “lose itself in the Fathomless Love” and enter into the complete and beatific enjoyment, possession, or use of God, for all these meanings are included in the word ghebruken, usually translated “fruition,” which is his favourite term for the consummation of the mystical life. (17)

In “The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage” this growth is divided into the three stages of the Active, Interior, and Superessential Life: called in The Sparkling Stone by the old names of the state of Servant, Friend, and Son. Man, we know, has a natural, active life; the only one that he usually recognises. This he may “adorn with the virtues” and make well-pleasing to God (Book I.). But beyond this he has a spiritual or “interior” life, which is susceptible of grace, the Divine energy and love; and by this can be remodelled in accordance with its true pattern or archetype, the Spirit of Christ (Book II.). Beyond this, again, he has a superessential or “God-seeing life,” in virtue of the spark of Divine life implanted in him. By the union of his powers of reason will and feeling with this spark a welding of the several elements of his being into unity he may enter into his highest life; the dual and God-like existence of fruition in God and work for God, alternate action and rest (Book III.). The correspondences of the active life are with that moral order which we recognise as binding on all men of good will. Those of the interior life are with the experiences which we usually recognise as religious and spiritual. But the correspondences of the superessential life are with a plane of being which lies beyond thought, and has, so far as our intellectual perceptions go, no condition. It is a wayless state, “above reason, not without reason”; (18) dark with excess of light. This state is the Being of God; but for us it is “beyond being.”

The First Book, then, is almost wholly concerned with the development of the Christian character: the only solid and enduring foundation of the mystical life. It treats of the virtues which adorn our human nature and make it ready for the coming of the Spirit of Christ; and of the primary importance of intention, the stretching out of the loving will toward God, “having Him in mind” in all things. “Mean only God,” said the old English mystics. So, for Ruysbroeck meyninghe en minnen will and lovesum up the obligations of the soul at this stage of its growth, and prepare it for the greater experiences of the interior life. Though he never uses the traditional formula of the Mystic Way, we may regard this active life as more or less equivalent to the Way of Purgation. The same stage is treated in the 1st and 6th chapters of The Sparkling Stone and the 3rd chapter of The Book of Truth.

The Second Book goes on from moral training to spiritual training, and includes all that ascetic writers mean by the “Illuminative Way.” It deals with those “ghostly exercises,” the deliberate responses of the soul to the invitation of God, which form the first degrees of our interior life, and with the dawning of the true mystical consciousness. It falls into three chief divisions, treating of three ways in which the Spirit of God comes into our inner man (caps. 5, 6, and 7).

In the first division (caps. 8-32) Ruysbroeck treats of the action of grace on the “lower powers,” or sense life. In the allegory of the Seasons, he describes the normal development of the illuminated life in its emotional aspect: its joys and ardours, reactions and despairs. The Holy Ghost “hunting the spirit of man” (cap. 3) has seized and transfigured those “desirous, affective and irascible” powers of the soul which, according to the doctrine of medieval psychology, make up natural life of normal men. (19)

In the second division (caps. 35-38) this process is extended to the “higher powers” of the soul: the memory or mind, the understanding, and the will. The experience of God is, for these higher powers, an experience of fresh enlightenment and fresh ardour; in Ruysbroeck’s favourite imagery, of light and fire. Grace, which dwells like a living fountain at the heart of our personality the “unity of the spirit”, thence pours forth into each faculty in three streams of radiance: claerheit, a word expressive at once of pervading brightness and limpid clearness, which occurs on almost every page of his writings. The sense of this supernal clarity, veritably experienced a viva luce, a quickening light, of which we become aware when we open the soul’s eyes is found in nearly every mystical writer from the time of St John, and probably originates in that consciousness of enhanced lucidity which frequently accompanies spiritual exaltation. It was crystallised by the schoolmen in the doctrine of the lumen gloriae, the Divine light which transfigures the soul and makes it like to God (20) and much of Ruysbroeck’s work is really a poetic elaboration of this idea. As a “simple light” this Radiance now frees the mind from the teasing complexity of distracting images: as a “spreading light” it illuminates the understanding: as a burning flame, it enkindles the will. The self thus becomes capable of the first form of contemplation, adherence to God by means of the purified reason and will: responding to the “loving drawing-nigh” of God dat minlike neyghen Godswith an ardent outstretching of himself towards that seeking and compelling power.

The powers of the soul, then, in the second stage of illumination, become inundated by the divine claerheit. It “drenches them”; and the result of this is seen in the state of perfect charity to which the self now attains: the condition of equable outflowing love to God and all manner of men (caps. 39-43). In the third and highest stage (caps. 49-65), we pass beyond the enhancement and enlightenment of the separate powers of our nature to the “essential being” of the self: that unity of the spirit of which Ruysbroeck is always speaking, and wherefrom the powers proceed, as the Divine Persons proceed from the Unity of God. (21) Whether our mental and emotional powers as such participate in the spiritual life, is for him a secondary consideration. They may do so, if they be wholly surrendered to God. But our true union with Him takes place in the abysmal deeps of our being, our “ground”and ever abides there: for here our life, as it were, buds out from the Divine life, and here God dwells eternally “according to His essence.” If we learn to enter within, passing beyond the powers to the unity of the spirit, we become conscious of this. (22) There we experience His mysterious touch and stirrings; feel and respond to the thrust and invitation of His love, as He drives each created spirit forth to work His will, and draws it home again towards His heart. There, outside Time, the Eternal Birth takes place (caps. 57-61).

As a result of this practice in introversion, this simplification of consciousness, the self now first becomes capable of the second form of contemplation, described in The Twelve Béguines as

“A knowing which is in no wise; Forever abiding above the reason.” (23)

and enters upon that profound yet simple communion with God which Ruysbroeck calls the most inward of all exercises. For this his favourite image is that of feeding: the soul tastes God (cap. 65), eats, devours, assimilates Him, and in her turn, is eaten and consumed (24) language which probably reflects his great personal devotion to the Eucharist. With this mystical savouring and feeding upon Reality, the self reaches the term of the interior life, and the full stature of that “secret friend of God” described with such marvellous subtlety in the 8th chapter of The Sparkling Stone.

It is at this point that the dangers of a false mysticism make themselves felt. Here, then, Ruysbroeck enters upon a vigorous and acute criticism of Quietism (caps. 66-67): especially valuable to us at the present day, when so many irresponsible apostles of “new mysticism” are recommending voluntary passivity of this type as a substitute for the stern discipline and perpetual willed effort involved in the Christian science of prayer. Ruysbroeck describes the interior blankness and silence of the quietist as a psychic trick: a deliberate sinking down into the subconscious the subsoil of human nature where it is true that the Divine Life dwells and supports our created life, but where we are below instead of above the levels of normal consciousness. Here, indeed, the soul experiences a sensation of rest and peace: but it is merely resting in its own emptiness, a false repose which demands no exercise of virtue, no tension of the will, and is a caricature of the active and loving surrender taught by the Christian saints. The true emptiness and idleness of which Ruysbroeck speaks as an essential preparation of the contemplative state, is a condition of meek and passive attentiveness to God, which excludes consciousness of the ordinary objects of perception and thought; sweeps and garnishes the interior castle. Here the virtue is not in the emptiness and idleness, but in the humble and eager yielding of ourselves. Although man cannot by his own effort reach God, yet without such deliberate loving effort we shall never possess Him. (25)

Beyond even the highest point of this interior life, in which the contemplative feels himself to be living “in God,” (26) is that transfigured or deified life, as the Platonic mystics named it, which Ruysbroeck calls overwesens uper essential the life of the “God-seeing man” (Book III). Whereas in the interior life we may be said to re-discover the lost inheritance of our spirit, in this life there is a genuine transcendence, a passing beyond that spirit’s created being: for the Being of God, in which this consummation is found, is “more than being” to us. It abides beyond all the concepts of reason, beyond anything that we can name or describe, outside Time, in the bosom of Divine Reality: that deep Quiet of the Godhead which cannot be moved. Those who ascend thereto have passed from the state of “secret friends” to that of the “hidden sons” of God, and completed the soul’s journey to its home. (27) Then they find themselves, so far as their separate consciousness persists, in a place that is placeless and a way that is wayless: in the abysmal Onwise of God, a word for which we have no exact equivalent, but which embodies one of Ruysbroeck’s most important conceptions, and is the occasion of some of his most mysterious utterances. It represents that world of spiritual reality which is beyond all attributes and conditions; which is neither This nor That, which is “in no wise”—the Absolute wherein all ways and modes of being, all wise, are swallowed up, and all our finite perceptions die into ignorance and darkness (cap. 4). (28)

“The splendour of That which is in no wise is as a fair mirror Wherein shines the everlasting light of God: It has no attributes, And in it all the activities of reason fail. It is not God But it is the light whereby we see Him: Those who walk in the divine light thereof Discover in themselves the Unwalled.” (29)

Seen from the synthetic and spiritual point of view, this supernal world of experience is the Essential Unity, wherein the richness of Eternal Life consists, and where the surrendered soul enjoys the peaceful fruition of God. But seen from the analytic and intellectual point of view it is the Essential Nudity, the “nought” or “divine dark” of Dionysius the Areopagite: for it has been stripped of every character of which we can think. (30) Here the mystic feels himself, as regards his essential being, to be poured out into God, melted and merged in Him as a river in the sea: and, as regards his own separate consciousness, apprehends Him in one simple act of absorbed attention “seeing and staring” with wide-open eyes. It is in this one act, sometimes felt by us as a passing beyond ourselves, sometimes as a fixed ecstatic vision, “beholding that which we are, and becoming that which we behold” that the self at last knows itself to be one life and one spirit with God. (31)

The mystic has now entered into union with the three wise, the three modes or ways, under which Divine Love imparts itself in the spirit of man: characteristically distinguished by Ruysbroeck as three forms of movement. First this energetic love pours itself out from the Godhead into us as grace: and we, in receiving it and making it ours by our virtues and good works, are united to God “through means.” This is the function of the active life harmonising man’s work with God’s work. Then, as a compelling tide, it draws us within its own flood back towards God. This is the union “without means” ‘wherein we are wholly surrendered to His love: it is the proper condition of the interior life. But when we have reached the superessential life, and seem to our own feeling to be lost in the Darkness, burned up in the Brightness, and sunk in the Eternal Stillness of God, that “dark silence where all lovers lose themselves,” (32) then the circle is complete. We are made part of His divine fruition or “content the eternal satisfaction and eternal activity of Perfect Love; achieving thus the “union without distinction,” though not union without “otherness.” (33) Henceforward we can participate in God’s dual life of rest and work, transcendent fruition and immanent fruitfulness: abiding in restful possession of Him, yet perpetually sent down from the heights to serve the whole world. (34)

The final state of the Christian mystic, then, is not annihilation in the Absolute. It is a condition wherein we dwell wholly in God, one life and truth with Him; yet still “feel Godand ourselves,” as the lover feels his beloved, in a perfect union which depends for its joy on an invincible otherness. The soul, transfused and transfigured by the Divine Love as molten iron is by the fire, becomes, it is true, “one simple blessedness with God” (35) yet ever retains its individuality: one with God beyond itself, yet other than God within itself. (36) The “deified man” is fully human still, but spiritualised through and through; not by the destruction of his personality, but by the taking up of his manhood into God. There he finds, not a static beatitude, but a Height, a Depth, a Breadth of which he is made part, yet to which he can never attain: for the creature, even at its highest, remains finite, and is conscious that Infinity perpetually eludes its grasp and leads it on. So, heaven itself is discovered to be no mere passive fulfillment, but rather a forward-moving life: (37) an ever-new loving and tasting, new exploring and enjoying of the Infinite Fulness of God, that inexhaustible Object of our knowledge and delight. It is the eternal voyage of the adventurous soul on the vast and stormy sea of the Divine.

EVELYN UNDERHILL

Footnotes;

(1) Cf. The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, bk. ii. caps. 66-67, and The Book of Truth, cap. 4.

(2) H. Pomerius, De Origine Monasterii Viridisvallis una cum Vitis Joannis Rusbrochii(Analecta Bollandiana, vol. iv., Brussels, 1885).

(3) The Twelve Béguines, cap. 2. Vide infra, p. xvii.

(4) The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, bk. i. cap. 24.

(5) Cf. The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, bk. iii., and The Sparkling Stone, caps. 3 and 9.

(6) The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, bk. ii. caps. 62 and 63. Cf. The Sparkling Stone, cap. 14.

(7) The Twelve Béguines, cap. 2.

(8) - 1552. Surius, D. Joannis Rusbrockii Opera Omnia, Cologne, 1552.

(9) The first and finest part of The Twelve Béguines, translated from the Flemish by John Francis, was published by J. M. Watkins in 1913.

(10) This he evidently came to realise himself. Cf. the end of the 8th chapter of The Twelve Béguines, “Now I must cease from my rhyming, that I may show clearly the way of contemplation.”

(11) The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, bk. i. cap. 21. Compare The Sparkling Stone, cap. 9.

(12) Par. xxxiii. 124.

(13) The student will find a fuller analysis in my monograph Ruysbroeck (Quest Series, 1915).

(14) The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, bk. ii. cap. 2.

(15) The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, bk. iii. cap. 3; and The Book of Truth, cap. 10.

(16) The Sparkling Stone, caps. 3 and 10.

(17) Cf. The Twelve Béguines, cap. 16.

(18) The Twelve Béguines, cap. 8.

(19) Cf. The Book of Truth, cap. 9.

(20) Cf. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, i., q. 12, a. 5.

(21) The Book of Truth, cap. 11.

(22) Ibid., cap. 8.

(23) The Twelve Béguines, cap. 8.

(24) The Sparkling Stone, caps. 9, 10 and 11. Compare The Twelve Béguines, caps. 5 and 15.

(25) The Sparkling Stone, cap. 9.

(26) Ibid., cap. 10.

(27) Cf. The Sparkling Stone, caps. 8, 9, 10 and 13; and The Book of Truth, caps. 10, 11 and 12.

(28) The Sparkling Stone, cap. 13.

(29) The Twelve Béguines, cap. 8.