Part 2

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

II

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

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

Here is a list of the writings of Ruysbroeck, the sum-total of which is very large. _The Book of the Twelve Beguines_; _The Mirror of Eternal Salvation_; _The Book of the Spiritual Tabernacle_; _The Sparkling Stone_; _The Book of Supreme Truth_; _The Book of the Seven Steps of Spiritual Love_; _The Book of the Seven Castles_; _The Book of the Kingdom of the Beloved_; _The Book of the Four Temptations_; _The Book of the Twelve Virtues_; _The Book of Christian Faith_, and _The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage_. There are besides seven letters, two hymns, and a prayer, to which Surius gave these titles, _Epistolae septem utiles_, _Cantiones duæ admodum spirituales_, and _Oratio perbrevis sed pia valde_, the original texts of which I have not been able to discover in any of the Flemish manuscripts.

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

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

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

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

Here are some of these verses:--

“Contemplation is a science without mode, Above human reason remaining evermore; Unto our reason can it not come down, Neither above it can reason ever rise. Its enlightened freedom is a noble mirror, Wherein the eternal splendour of God doth shine. This modeless freedom hath no manner of its own, And before it all the works of reason pale; This modeless freedom is not God Himself, But it is the light by which we see Him. Those who move in this freedom unrestrained In the light of God, See vast prospects stretching out within them. This modeless freedom is more high than reason, Yet not without reason; All things beholdeth it without surprise-- Surprise is far beneath it The life of contemplation is without surprise: It sees, but knows not what is seen, Above all things is it, and neither this nor that.”

Afterwards, the poet, perceiving that his verses are becoming too obscure, standing as he is on the threshold of eternal knowledge, says suddenly and very simply--

“Now must I cease from versing And speak of contemplation clearly.”

From this point he makes use of a strange prose, dark as the fearful void into which he is gazing, resembling that fierce cold which reigns above all our images, with blue lights flashing over the black frosts of abstraction. And when he descends for a moment into the regions of similitudes, he touches only the most distant, the most subtle, and the most unknown; he loves, too, such things as mirrors, reflections, crystal, fountains, burning glasses, water-plants, precious stones, glowing iron, hunger, thirst, fire, fish, the stars, and everything that helps him to endow his ideas with visible forms--forms laid prostrate in the presence of love on these clear summits of the soul--and to give distinctness to those unheard-of truths which he calmly reveals. It is needless to say more, for you shall presently reach the threshold of that spiritual marriage, and from there behold the still tempest of joy, reaching as far as to the eternal heart of God. In one word, this man of all others went near to beholding thought as it will be after death, and showed a faint shadow of its rich growths of the future, in the midst of the incomprehensible effluence of the Holy Trinity. I believe that this is a work which we shall perhaps remember elsewhere and always. You shall see, too, that the most amazing outbursts of St. Teresa are hardly to be distinguished from the top of those unlighted, colourless, and airless glaciers to which we climb with him “beyond surprise and emotion, above reason and the virtues,” in the dark symphony of contemplation.

I give a passage from the book: _De altero veræ contemplationis modo_:--

“After this comes another mode of contemplation.

“Those who have raised themselves into the absolute purity of their spirits by the love and reverence which they have for God, stand in His presence, with open and unveiled faces. And from the splendour of the Father a direct light shines on those spirits in which the thought is naked and free from similitudes, raised above the senses, above similitudes, above reason and without reason, in the lofty purity of the spirit.

“This light is not God, but is a mediator between the seeing thought and God. It is a light-ray from God or from the Spirit of the Father. In it God shows Himself immediately, not according to the distinction and the mode of His persons, but in the simplicity of His nature and His substance; and in it also the Spirit of the Father speaks in thought, lofty, naked, and without similitude, ‘Behold me as I behold you.’ At the same time the keenness of the pure eyes is revealed, when the direct brightness of the Father falls upon them, and they behold the splendour of the Father--that is to say, the substance or the nature of God in an immediate vision, above reason and without distinction.

“This brightness and this manifestation of God give to the contemplative spirit a real knowledge of the vision of God, as far as it can be enjoyed in this mortal state. In order that you may understand me clearly, I will give you an image from the senses. When you stand in the dazzling radiance of the sun, and turn away your eyes from all colour, from attending to and distinguishing all the various things which the sun illuminates, if then you simply follow with your eyes the brightness of the rays which flow from the sun, you shall be led into the sun’s very essence; and so likewise, if you follow with a direct vision the dazzling rays which stream from the splendour of God, they will lead you to the source of your creation, and there you will find nothing else but God alone.”

I come now to the second of the works enumerated above. _The Mirror of Eternal Salvation_ (_Die Spieghel der Ewigher Salicheit_) is, like all the writings of the mystic, a study of the joys of introversion, or of the return of man into himself, until he comes into touch with God. It was sent by the admirable doctor and eminent contemplator of the Green Valley “To the dear Sister Margaret van Meerbeke, of the convent of the Clares at Brussels, in the year of our Lord 1359.” In some manuscripts the work is entitled “Book of the Sacraments,” and it is indeed the poem of eucharistic love, above all distinctions and in the midst of the blinding effluence of God, where the soul seems to shake the pollen from its essence and to have an eternal foreknowledge. Here, as elsewhere, we would need, in order to realise even slightly these terrors of love, a language which has the intrinsic omnipotence of tongues which are almost immemorial. The Flemish dialect possesses this omnipotence, and it is possible that several of its words still contain images dating from the glacial epochs. Our author then had at his disposal one of the very oldest modes of speech, in which words are really lamps behind ideas, while with us ideas must give light to words. I am also disposed to believe that every language thinks always more than the man, even the man of genius, who employs it, and who is only its heart for the time being, and that this is the reason why an ignorant monk like this mysterious Ruysbroeck, was able, by gathering up his scanty forces in prayers so many centuries ago, to write works which hardly correspond to our senses in the present day. I translate from this book the following fragment:--

“See now, here must our reason and all definite actions give way; for our powers become simple in love, and are silent and bend low before the manifestation of the Father; for the manifestation of the Father raises the soul above reason, into nakedness without similitudes. There the soul is simple, pure, and emptied of everything, and in that pure emptiness the Father shows His divine brightness. Into that brightness there can enter neither reason nor the senses, observation nor distinction. All these things must remain underneath it, for that measureless brightness dazzles the eyes of the spirit, so that their lids must close under its inconceivable radiance. But the naked eye, above reason, and in the inmost depths of intelligence, is always open, and beholds and contemplates with naked vision that light by that light itself. There we have eye to eye, glass to glass, image to image. By these three things we are like unto God, and are united to Him. For this vision which strikes upon our naked eye is a living mirror which God has made in His image. His image is His divine brightness, and with it He has filled to overflowing the mirror of our soul, so that no other brightness and no other image can enter there. But this brightness is not an intermediary between God and us; for it is the thing which we see, and also the light by which we see, but not our eye which sees. For although the image of God is without intermediary in the mirror of our soul, and is united to Him, still the image is not the mirror, for God does not become the creature. But the union of the image with the mirror is so great and so noble that the soul is called the mirror of God.

“Further, that very image of God which we have received and which we carry in our souls is the Son of God, the eternal mirror of divine wisdom, in which we all dwell, and are continually reflected. Yet we are not the wisdom of God, otherwise we should have created ourselves, which is impossible and a suggestion savouring of heresy. For whatever we are and whatever we have, we have received all from God and not from ourselves. And although this sublimity is so great a thought for our soul, yet is it hidden from the sinner and from many righteous persons. And all that we can know by the light of nature is incomplete and savourless and without emotion, for we cannot contemplate God or find Him reigning in our souls without His aid and grace, and without diligently exercising ourselves in His love.”

_The Book of the Spiritual Tabernacle_ (_Dat boec van den Gheesteleken Tabernacule_). _In Tabernaculum Mosis et ad id pertinentia commentaria, ubi multa etiam Exodi, Levitici, Numerorum mysteria, divino spiritu explicantur_, as Surius describes it, is the longest work of the hermit, and contains a strange, naïve, and arbitrary interpretation of the symbols of the ark of the covenant, and of the sacrifices of the ancient law. I shall give somewhat copious extracts from this work, for it shows an interesting and brotherly aspect of his Flemish soul; and the artistic subtlety with which he labours to elucidate his emblems, as well as his amusing and childlike delight in certain effects of colour and of figures, reminds us now and then of his marvellous contemporaries of the Cologne school, the old dreamy painters, Meister Wilhelm and Lochner, and of the splendid succession of nameless dreamers, who, in lands far off from his, gave a fixed form to the almost supernatural reflections of the spiritual joys of that and the following century, which passed away so near to God and so far from earth.

Here is what he says with regard to the offering of the poor as commanded in the Jewish law:--

“And they (the doves) shall keep near streams and beside clear waters, so that if any bird flies downwards to seize them or to do them any injury, they may recognise him by his reflection in the water and beware of him. The clear water is Holy Scripture, the lives of saints, and the mercy of God. We shall reflect ourselves therein when we are tempted, and so none shall be able to hurt us. These doves have a loving nature, and young doves are often born of them, for whenever, to the glory of God and for our own felicity, we think of sin with scorn and hatred, and of virtue with love, we give birth to young doves--that is to say, to new virtues.”

In the following passages he pictures, with the help of these same doves, the offering of Saint Paul:--

“And our Lord replied that His grace should be sufficient for him, for virtue is perfected in the weakness of temptations. When he understood this he offered these two doves into the hands of our Lord. For he renounced self, and willingly became poor, and bent the necks of his doves (that is, his desires) under the hands of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the Holy Church. And Christ broke the necks and the wings of the doves, and then he became incapable of desiring or of flying towards any desire except that which was God’s will. And then Christ placed the head (that is to say, the will, which was dead and powerless) under the broken wings, and then the doves were ready to be consumed; and so the holy apostle says: ‘Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in my weakness, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.’”

Let us consider further the extraordinary interpretation of the spiritual flowers embroidered on the hangings of the tabernacle:--