Part 5

“And you may thus understand that the attracting unity of God is nothing else save boundless love, which lovingly draws inwards, in eternal enjoyment, the Father, the Son, and all who live in love. And we desire to burn and be consumed in that love everlastingly, for in it the blessedness of all spirits is found. And so we ought all to found our lives on a fathomless abyss; we shall thus be able to descend evermore in love, and to plunge ourselves beyond ourselves into its unsounded depths; and by the same love we shall rise and go beyond ourselves into its inconceivable height, and we shall wander in that measureless love, and it will lead us away into the boundless expanse of the love of God. And there will be a flow and outflow beyond ourselves, in the unknown pleasure of the divine goodness and riches. There will be an eternal fusion and transfusion, absorption and perabsorption of ourselves in the glory of God. See how, in each of these comparisons, I have shown to the contemplative mind its essence and its inward exercises. But no other can understand me, for no man can teach contemplation to his fellow. But when the eternal truth is revealed to the spirit, it is instructed in all that is needful.”

I ought in fairness to translate also the many strange things in chapters vi., vii., and viii., which deal with “The difference between the hirelings and the faithful servants of God,” “The difference between the faithful servants and the secret friends of God,” and “The difference between the secret friends and the hidden sons of God.” Here it does really seem as if the anchorite of the Green Valley had dipped into things beyond this world. But having run to such lengths already, I can hardly attempt it I must, however, be permitted to give the following fragment, which shall be the last from this book. It is strangely beautiful:--

“Understand, now, that this is the mode of progress: in our going towards God, we ought to carry our being and all our works before us, as an eternal offering to God; and in presence of God we shall surrender ourselves and all our works, and, dying in love, we shall pass beyond all creation into the super-essential kingdom of God. There we shall possess God in an eternal death to ourselves. And this is why the Spirit of God says in the book of the Apocalypse, ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.’ Rightly indeed does He call them the blessed dead, for they remain continually dead to themselves and immersed beyond their own nature in the gladdening unity of God. And they die ever newly in love, by the attracting refreshment of that same unity. Furthermore, the divine Spirit saith, ‘They shall rest from their labours, and their works shall follow them.’ In this finite existence, where we are born of God into a spiritual and virtuous life, we carry our works before us as an offering to God; but in that unconditioned life, where we die anew in God, into a life of everlasting blessedness, our good works follow us, for they are one life with us. In our walk towards God, God dwells within us; but in our death to ourselves and to all things besides, we dwell in God. If we have faith, hope, and love, we have received God, and He dwells in us with His mercies, and He sends us out as His faithful servants, to keep His commandments. And He calls us in as His mysterious friends, and we obey His counsels. But above all things, if we desire to enjoy God, or to experience eternal life within us, we must rise far above human reason, and enter into God through faith; and there we shall remain pure, at rest, and free from all similitudes, lifted by love into the open nakedness of thought. For when in love we die to all things, when in ignorance and obscurity we die to all the notice of the world, we are wrought and reformed by the eternal Word, who is an image of the Father. And in the repose of our spirit we receive the incomprehensible splendour which envelops and penetrates us, just as the air is penetrated by the brightness of the sun. And this splendour is merely a boundless vision and a boundless beholding. What we are, that we behold; and what we behold, that we are; for our thought, our life, and our essence are closely united with that truth which is God, and are raised along with it. And that is why in this pure vision we are one life and one spirit with God; and this is what I call a contemplative life. By connecting ourselves closely to God through love, we choose the better part; but when we thus behold God in super-essence, we possess Him altogether. This contemplation is united with an untrammelled inward devotion, that is to say, with a life in which earthly things are destroyed; for when we go outside ourselves into darkness and into unlimited freedom, the pure ray of the brightness of God shines perpetually on us; we are fixed in the ray, and it draws us out of ourselves into our super-essence till we are overwhelmed in love. And this overwhelming in love is always accompanied and followed by the free inward exercise of love. For love cannot be idle; it longs by knowledge and taste to enter into the immense riches which dwell in its inmost heart; and its hunger is inappeasable. To be always receiving in this powerlessness is to swim against the stream. We can neither leave nor take, do without nor receive, speak nor be silent, for it is above reason and intelligence, and higher than all created beings. And so we can neither attain nor pursue it; but we shall look within, and there we shall feel that the Spirit of God is leading us and drawing us on in this impatience of love. We shall look above, and there we shall feel that the Spirit of God is drawing us out of ourselves, and that we are lost in Him--that is, in the super-essential love with which we are one, and which we possess more deeply and more widely than all other things.

“This possession is a pure and profound enjoyment of all good and of eternal life; and we are swallowed up in this enjoyment, above reason and without reason, in the deep calm of Godhead, which shall nevermore be stirred. It is by experience only that we can know that this is true. For how this is, or who, or in what place, or what, neither reason nor inward exercise can tell us, and it is for this reason that our inward exercise which follows must remain without mode or limit. For we can neither conceive nor understand the unfathomable good which we possess and enjoy; neither by our inward exercises can we go out of ourselves to enter into it. And so we are poor in ourselves, but rich in God; hungry and thirsty in ourselves, satiated and full of wine in God; laborious in ourselves, in God enjoying perfect rest. And thus we shall remain throughout eternity. For without the exercises of love we can never possess God, and he who feels or thinks otherwise is deceived. And thus we live wholly in God, by possessing our beatitude, and we live wholly in ourselves by exercising our souls in love towards God; and although we live wholly in God and wholly in ourselves, yet it is but one life, which has two-fold and contrary sensations. For riches and poverty, hunger and satiety, work and idleness, these things are absolutely contrary to one another. Nevertheless, in this consists the nobility of our nature, now and everlastingly, for it is impossible that we should become God, or lose our created essence. But if we remain wholly in ourselves, separated from God, we shall be miserable and unsaved; and so we ought to feel ourselves living wholly in God and wholly in ourselves, and between these two sensations we shall find nothing but the grace of God and the exercises of our love. For from the height of our highest sensation, the splendour of God shines upon us, and it teaches us truth and impels us towards all virtues into the eternal love of God. Without interruption we follow this splendour on to the source from which it flows, and there we feel that our spirits are stripped of all things and bathed beyond thought of rising in the pure and infinite ocean of love. If we remained there continually, with a pure vision, we should never lose this experience, for our immersion in the enjoyment of God would be without interruption, if we had gone out of ourselves and were swallowed up in love, so possessing God. For if, overwhelmed in love, and lost to ourselves, we are the possessors of God, God is ours and we are His, and we plunge far beyond our depth, eternally and irrevocably having God as our own. This immersion in love becomes the habit of our being, and so it takes place while we sleep and while we wake, whether we know it or whether we know it not. And in this way it deserves no other praise; but it maintains us in possession of God and of all the good which we have received from His hands. It is like unto streams, which, without pause and without returning, flow continually into the sea, since that is the place to which they belong. And so, if we possess God alone, the immersion of our being through habitual love is always, and without return, flowing into an unfathomable emotion, which we possess, and which belongs to us. If we were always pure, and if we always beheld with the same directness of vision, we should have such a feeling as this. Now, this immersion in love is above all virtues, and above all the practices of love. For it is simply an eternal going forth out of ourselves, by a clear prevision, into a changed state, towards which we lean out of ourselves, as if towards our beatitude. For we feel ourselves eternally drawn outside ourselves and towards another. And this is the most secret and the most hidden distinction which we can experience between God and ourselves, and above it there is no more any difference. Nevertheless, our reason remains with its eyes open in the darkness--that is to say, in infinite ignorance--and in that darkness the boundless splendour remains secret and hidden from us, for the presence of its immensity blinds our reason. But it wraps us round with its purity and transforms us by its essence, and so we are wrought out of our personality and transformed until, overwhelmed in love, we possess our beatitude, and are one with God.”

Let us next look at The Book of the Seven Steps of the Ladder of Love (called by Surius De Septem Gradibus amoris, libellus optimus) in which the prior of Grönendal studies seven virtues which lead from introversion to the confines of absorption. This seems to me one of the most beautiful works of a saint, whose works are all strange and beautiful I ought to translate from it some rather singular passages; among others, that in which he discusses the four melodies of heaven; but space fails us, and this introduction is already too long. I shall content myself with giving the following page:--

“The Holy Spirit cries in us with a loud voice and without words, ‘Love the love which loves you everlastingly.’ His crying is an inward contact with our spirit. This voice is more terrifying than the storm. The flashes which it darts forth open the sky to us and show us the light of eternal truth. The heat of its contact and of its love is so great that it well-nigh consumes us altogether. In its contact with our spirit it cries without interruption, ‘Pay your debt; love the love which has loved you from all eternity.’ Hence there arises a great inward impatience and also an unlimited resignation. For the more we love, the more we desire to love; and the more we pay of that which love demands, the greater becomes our debt to love. Love is not silent, but cries continually, ‘Love thou love.’ This conflict is unknown to alien senses. To love and to enjoy, that is to labour and to suffer. God lives in us by His grace. He teaches us, He counsels us, He commands us to love. We live in Him above all grace and above our own works, by suffering and enjoying. In us dwell love, knowledge, contemplation, and possession, and, above them, enjoyment. Our work is to love God; our enjoyment is to receive the embrace of love.

“Between love and enjoyment there is a distinction, even as between God and His grace. We are spirits when we hold fast by love, but when He robs us of our spirit, and re-makes us by His own spirit, then we are enjoyment. The Spirit of God breathes us out towards love and good works, and it breathes us in to rest and enjoyment; and that is eternal life, just as we breathe out the air which is in us and breathe in fresh air; and in that consists our mortal life and nature. And although our spirit should be ravished and its powers fail in enjoyment and in blessedness, it is always renewed in grace, in charity, and in virtues. And so what I love is to enter into a restful enjoyment, to go forth in good works, and to remain always united to the Spirit of God. Just as we open the eyes of the body, see, and shut them again, so quickly that we hardly notice what we have done, even so we die in God, we live out of God, and we remain always one with Him.”

Next we have The Book of the Seven Castles, called by Laurentius Surius De Septem Custodiis, Opusculum longe piissimum. It is not without resemblance to the Castle of the Soul, by Saint Teresa of Avila, which has also seven dwellings, of which prayer is the door. The hermit of the forest of Soignes sends this work, with the Mirror of Eternal Salvation, “To the holy Clare, Margaret van Meerbeke, of the convent of Brussels,” and so the counsels on which he touches in the prologue have a slight note of pitying sadness. For instance, he teaches her in what way she shall go to the window of the convent parlour, shutting out from her eyes the face of man; and speaks of the joy of pain and the care of the sick, with pale counsels for the sick-ward. Then there rise the seven spiritual castles of St. Clara, the doors of which are closed by divine grace, and must no more be opened to look into the streets of the heart. Let us hear what follows, still on the subject of love:--

“And the loving soul cannot give itself wholly to God, nor perfectly receive God, for all that it receives is but a little thing as compared with that which it lacks, and counts as nothing in its eager emotion. And so it is disturbed, and falls into impatience, and into the strong passion of love; for it can neither do without God nor have Him, reach His depth nor His height, follow nor forsake Him. And this is the storm and the spiritual plague of which I have spoken; for no tongue can describe the many storms and agitations which arise from the two sides of love. For love makes a man now hot, now cold; now bold, now timid; now joyous, now sorrowful; it brings him fear, hope, despair, tears, complaints, songs, praises, and such things without number. Such are the sufferings of those who live in the passion of love; and yet this is the most spiritual and the most useful life which man can live, each according to his own capacity. But where man’s method fails and can reach no higher, then God’s method begins; where man, by his sufferings, his love, and his unsatisfied desires, entwines himself with God and cannot be united to Him, then the Spirit of our Lord comes like a fierce fire which burns and consumes and swallows up all things in itself, so that the man forgets his inward exercises, and forgets himself and feels just as if he were one spirit and one love with God. Here our senses and all our powers are silent, and they are calmed and satisfied, for the fountain of divine goodness and wealth has flowed over everything, and each has received more than he can desire.

“Next comes the third method, which we attribute to our heavenly Father--that in which He empties the memory of forms and images, and lifts up our naked thought to the ultimate source, which is Himself. There man is fixed firmly at his beginning, which is God, and is united to Him. And there is given to him strength and freedom to work inwardly and outwardly by means of all the virtues. And he receives knowledge and understanding in all exercises which are according to reason. And he learns how to receive the inward working of God and the transformation of the divine methods, which are above reason, even as we have already said. And above all divine limits, he will understand by the same boundless intuition, the boundless essence of God, whose being is without limitation. For one cannot express it by words, nor by works, nor by methods, nor signs, nor similitudes, but it manifests itself spontaneously to the simple intuition of pure and naked thought.

“But we may place on the road signs and similitudes which prepare man for the sight of the Kingdom of God, and you shall imagine this essence like the glow of a boundless fire, in which everything is silently consumed--a red and motionless conflagration. And so it is with the calm of essential love, which is the enjoyment of God and of all the saints, above all limitations, and above all the works and all the practices of virtue. This love is a wave, boundless and calmed, of riches and joys, in which all the saints are swallowed up with God in an unlimited enjoyment. And this joy is wild and lonely like a wandering, for it has neither limit, nor road, nor path, nor rest, nor measure, nor end, nor beginning, nor anything which one can show or express by words. And this is the pure blessedness of all of us, this divine essence, and our super-essence, above reason and without reason. If we desire to experience it, our spirit must go forth into it, above our created essence, towards that eternal centre in which all our lines begin and end. And in this centre these lines lose their name and all distinction, and are united to this centre, and become that same unity which the centre itself is; and nevertheless in themselves they always remain as converging lines.

“See, then, how we shall thus always remain what we are in our created essence, and yet by the ascent of our spirit we shall continually pass into our super-essence. In it we shall be above ourselves, below ourselves, beyond our breadth, beyond our length, in an eternal wandering which has no return.”

I shall say little of the small work entitled Four Temptations, which deals with the very subtle dangers which threaten the contemplative mind, the most formidable of them all being quietism. With the exception of certain discoveries in the unknown psychology of prayer, this work, which, as I have said, is very short, does not present any very exceptionally lofty summit to our souls.

The other little work, which is about the same length--that is to say, about twenty pages--is called The Book of Supreme Truth, or, according to Surius, Samuel. He adds:--“Qui alias de alta contemplatione dicitur, verius autem apologice quorumdam sancti hujus viri dictorum sublimium inscribi possit.” But this book is so marvellous that one would need to translate the whole. At present I shall make no extract from it, since we can no more divide it than we can divide that essence whose perpetual effusion is displayed in its unique and awful mirror.

I come, therefore, to The Book of the Kingdom of Lovers, the strangest and most abstract work of the sage of the Green Valley, in the midst of which the soul stretches itself, and is filled with terror in a spiritual void which is doubtless normal, and which for the mind that does not follow it is like some dark glass bell, in which there is neither air, nor image, nor anything that can be exactly conceived, except uninterrupted stars in the eternal spaces.

The work is founded on that verse in Wisdom, “Justum deduxit per vias rectas et ostendit illi regnum Dei,” and includes the three virtues of theology and the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost I proceed at once to translate, and more fully than ever.

Let us look first at this passage on the deserts of being:--

“The soul of man being made of nothing, which God took from nowhere, man has followed this nothingness, which is nowhere, and he has gone out of his ego into wanderings, by immersion in the simple essence of God, as in his own ultimate source; and he has died in God. To die in God is to be blessed; and, for each one according to his own merits, it involves a great difference both in grace and glory. This blessedness is to understand God and to be understood by God, in the joyful unity of the divine persons, and to have flowed by this unity into the super-essence of God. Now this unity brings joy when we look inward, and bears fruit in our outward life, and so the fountain of unity flows; that is to say, the Father begets the Son, the eternal truth, who is the image of the Father, in which He sees Himself and all things. This image is the life and cause of all creatures, for in this image is everything, according to the divine mode of being; and by this image all things are perfectly made, and all things are wisely ruled upon that model; and according to this image everything is set apart for its own end, so far as it is possible for God to do so; for every creature has received the means of attaining blessedness. But the reasonable creature is not the image of the Father, according to the effluence of his created mode of being, for that effluence flows forth in as far as it is a creature, and that is why it enjoys and loves with measure in the light of grace or of glory. For no one possesses the divine nature actively according to the divine mode, except the divine persons themselves, since no creature can work according to an infinite mode, for if it worked thus it would be God and not a creature.

“By His own image God has made His creatures like unto Himself in their nature, and in those who have turned to Him, He has made the likeness even greater--higher than nature in the light of grace or of glory, each one according to the capacity which he has by the state of his soul or by his merits. Now all those who feel this inward contact, who have an enlightened reason and the eagerness of love, and to whom love’s infinite freedom has been revealed, enter into joyful contemplation in the super-essence of God. Moreover, God is united to His essence in a joyful manner, and contemplates that very essence which He enjoys. According to the mode of the enjoyment, the divine light constantly fails in the infinite essence; but in contemplation and in a fixed and steady gaze the vision cannot be darkened, for we shall forever behold that which we enjoy. Those for whom the light constantly fails are those who rest in enjoyments, in the midst of those wild solitudes where God possesses Himself in perpetual joy; there the light grows dim in rest and in the infinitude of the sublime essence. There God is His own throne, and all those who possess God in grace and in glory in this degree are the thrones and the tabernacles of God, and they have died in God in an eternal rest.

“From this death there arises a super-essential life--that is to say, a life of contemplation--and here the gift of intelligence begins. For God, who without ceasing contemplates the very essence which He enjoys, and who grants the impatience of love to those whom He makes like unto Himself, gives also rest and enjoyment to those who are united with Him. But where there is union of being and complete immersion, there is no more giving or receiving. And because He grants an enlightened reason to those whom He makes like unto Himself, He also gives a boundless splendour to those who are united to Him. That boundless splendour is the image of the Father. We are created in this image, and we are capable of being united to it in a grandeur more lofty than thrones, if we only contemplate, above our own human weakness, the glorious face of the Father--in other words, the sublime nature of deity. Now this unfathomed splendour is a common gift to all spirits who rejoice in grace and in glory. It thus streams forth for all like the splendour of the sun, and yet those who receive it are not all equally enlightened. The sun shines more clearly through glass than through stone, more clearly through crystal than through glass, and each precious stone shines and shows its beauty and its power and its colour in the light of the sun. Even so is each man enlightened both in grace and in glory, according as he is capable of receiving so sublime a gift; but he who is most enlightened in grace yet has less than he who is least enlightened in glory. Nevertheless the light of glory is not an intermediary between the soul and this unlimited splendour, but our spiritual condition, our earthly state, and our inconstancy disturb us, and so we have to gain merits, which those who dwell in glory have no need to gain.

“This sublime splendour is the simple contemplation of the Father, and of all those who behold and rejoice, and look fixedly in one direction by means of an incomprehensible light, each one according as the light is bestowed upon him. For that measureless light shines ceaselessly into all our thoughts; but the man who lives here, in this earthly state, is often overwhelmed with images, so that he does not always actively and steadily behold the super-essence of God by means of this light. But in receiving this gift he virtually possesses it, and he can contemplate whenever he wills. Since the light by which we contemplate is unlimited, and that which we contemplate of an unfathomed depth, the one can never reach the other; but this fixed gaze of our contemplation remains eternally turned towards the infinite, in the joyful presence of the sublime Majesty, where the Father, by His eternal wisdom, gazes fixedly into the depths of His own infinite being.”

A great part of this book on The Kingdom of Lovers is written in singular verses. The three-lined and breathlessly monotonous rhythm is rather like that of the Stabat Mater, only that the third line of every strophe reproduces the same rhyme throughout the entire work, and rests on an abstract idea from which the two preceding lines rise, like twin flowers of obscurity and restlessness. We can imagine this hollow music floating through the spiritual dreams of the maids of Memlinck, while their secret senses, their faces, and their little hands all unite in ecstasy; but unhappily a translation cannot reproduce its taste of darkness and of bread soaked in the night, nor catch the image of the tear-brightened gloom, of ice mingled with fire, of oppression without hope, which we feel throughout the work. I shall therefore translate only one of these dark poems, the subject of which is the “Gift of Intelligence.”

“He who seeks that gift to light him Must rise beyond his nature, To the highest height of being. Brightness without measure There shall he perceive it In primal purity. Through his soul will flow The light of heavenly truth, And he in it shall vanish. That universal radiance Enlightens the pure-hearted According to their merits. Then can they behold With gaze that knows no limit The very face of joy. For ever shall we gaze on That which we there enjoy And lose ourselves in vision. Far off has gone the Lover; We turn our eyes for ever Towards the blessed vision. Yet has he reached the goal And the lover has the loved one In the lonely realm of union. So shall we thus remain And ever strive to follow To that wondrous depth divine.”

I should have liked to translate many other passages from this remarkable volume; but I shall close with a translation of the chapter entitled “Of the gift of sweet-savoured wisdom”:--

“The seventh divine gift is that of sweet-savoured wisdom. It is granted on the highest peak of introversion, and it penetrates the intelligence and the will according as they are turned towards the absolute. This savour is without source and without measure, and it flows from within outwards, and drinks in the body and the soul (in proportion to their respective capacity for its reception) even to the inmost sense--that is to say, even to a physical sensation. The other senses, like sight and hearing, take their pleasure outside, in the marvels which God has created for His own glory and for the needs of men. This incomprehensible savour, above the mind and in the vast breadth of the soul, is without measure, and it is the Holy Spirit, the incomprehensible love of God. In lower regions than the spirit, sensation is limited. But as its powers are inherent, they overwhelm everything. Now, the eternal Father has adorned the contemplative spirit with joy in unity, and with active and passive comprehension in which the self is lost, and the spirit thus becomes the throne and the rest of God; and the Son, the eternal Truth, has adorned the contemplative intelligence with His own brightness, so that it may behold the face of joy. And now the Holy Spirit desires to adorn the contemplative will, and the inherent unity of its powers, so that the soul may taste, know, and feel how great God is. This savour is so vast that the soul imagines that heaven, earth, and all that is in them must dissolve and sink in nothingness before its unbounded sweetness. These delights are above and beneath, within and without, and have entirely enveloped and saturated the kingdom of the soul. Then the intellect beholds the pure source from which all these delights flow forth. This awakes the attention of the enlightened reason. It knows well, however, that it is incapable of knowing these unimaginable delights, for it observes by means of a created light, while this joy is entirely without measure. Therefore the reason fails in its attention; but the intellect, which is transformed by this illimitable splendour, beholds without ceasing the incomprehensible joy of beatitude.”

It remains now to say a word about the different translations of Ruysbroeck’s work. Twenty years ago, Ernest Hello, who, with Villiers de l’Isle Adam and Stéphane Mallarmé, is the greatest French mystic of our time, published a brief volume in which he collected under headings, chosen mostly as his fancy dictated, various passages of our author, translated from a Latin translation written in the sixteenth century by Laurentius Surius, a Carthusian monk of Cologne. This translation of Surius, noble and subtle in its Latinity, gives with strict and admirable care the sense of the original; but with its over-anxiety, its prolixity, and its weakness, it resembles, when we contrast with it the crude colours of the original Flemish, some distant image seen through sullied panes. When his author uses one word, Surius generally employs two or three, and even then, still dissatisfied, he very often paraphrases once more that which he has already translated in full. The hermit utters cries of love so passionate that they are sometimes almost like blasphemies; Surius is frightened as he reads them and sets down something different. There are times when the old hermit looks outside himself, and in speaking of God searches for images drawn from the garden, the kitchen, or from the stars. Surius does not always venture to follow these flights, and he tries to weaken the meaning or flatters himself that he is ennobling it.

“He escapes me like a truant,”

says one of the Flemish Beguines in speaking of Jesus, and others add:--