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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 Ruysbroeck 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 for ever; 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 light�a 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 a 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 Herines, 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 for ever
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 Beguines.
These three books, the substance of which is now accessible to
English readers,[9] contain the finest fruit of Ruysbroeck's
genius. The Twelve Beguines 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 love�sum
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]
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