Chapter M: Maeterlinck’s Introduction to His Translation of “the Adornment of (1)

THE SPIRITUAL MARRIAGE.”

I

Many works are more correctly beautiful than this book of Ruysbroeck L’Admirable. Many mystics--Swedenborg and Novalis among others--are more potent in their influence, and more timely. It is very probable that his writings may but rarely meet the needs of to-day. Looking at him from another point of view, I know few more clumsy authors. He wanders off now and then into strange puerilities, and the first twenty chapters of _The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage_, although they are perhaps a necessary preparation for what follows, contain little more than mild and pious commonplaces. Outwardly, at least, he has no order, no logic of the schools. He is full of repetitions, and sometimes seems to contradict himself. He shows the ignorance of a child along with the wisdom of one who might have returned from the dead. Over his involved syntax I have toiled more than once in the sweat of my brow. He introduces an image, and forgets it. There are some of his images which the mind cannot realise, and this phenomenon, so unusual in an honest work, can only be explained by his awkwardness or his extraordinary haste. He knows few of the tricks of language, and can speak only of the unspeakable. He is almost entirely ignorant of the habits, skilled methods, and resources of philosophic thought, and he is constrained to think only of the unthinkable. When he speaks of his little monastic garden, he can hardly tell us enough about what goes on there; on that subject he writes like a child. He undertakes to teach us what transpires in the nature of God, and writes pages which Plato could not have written. Everywhere we find a grotesque disproportion between his knowledge and ignorance, his capacity and desire. You must not expect a literary work; you will see only the convulsive flight of an eagle, dizzy, blind, and wounded, over snowy peaks. I will add one word more by way of friendly warning. It has been my lot to read books generally considered most abstruse: _The Disciples at Saïs_, and the _Fragments_ of Novalis, for instance; the _Biographia Literaria_ and the _Friend_ of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the _Timaeus_ of Plato; the _Enneads_ of Plotinus; the _Divine Names_ of St. Denys the Areopagite; the _Aurora_ of the great German mystic, Jacob Böhme, with whom our author has more than one point of analogy. I do not venture to say that the works of Ruysbroeck are more abstruse than these works; but their abstruseness is less readily pardoned, because we have here to do with an unknown writer in whom we have no previous confidence. I thought it necessary to give an honest warning to idlers on the threshold of this temple without architecture; for this translation was undertaken only to please a few Platonists. I believe that those who have not lived in close fellowship with Plato and with the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria will not proceed far in reading it. They will think they are entering the void; they will feel as if they were falling steadily into a bottomless abyss, between black and slippery rocks. In this book there is no common light or air; as a spiritual abode it will be insupportable to those who come unprepared. Do not enter here from literary curiosity; there are hardly any dainty nick-nacks, and the botanist in search of fine images will find as few flowers here as on the polar ice-banks. I tell them that this is a boundless desert, where they will die of thirst. They will find here very few phrases which one may handle and admire after the way of literary critics; nothing but jets of flame or blocks of ice. Do not seek for roses in Iceland. Some flower may still linger between two icebergs--and indeed there are strange outbursts, unknown expressions, unheard-of analogies, but they will not repay you for the time lost in coming so far to pluck them. Before entering here one must be in a philosophic state as different from our ordinary condition as the state of waking is from that of slumber. Porphyry, in his _Principles of the Theory of Intelligibles_, seems to me to have written a warning which might fitly stand at the beginning of this book--“By our intelligence we say many things of the principle which is higher than the intelligence. But these things are divined much better by an absence of thought than by thought. It is the same with this idea as with that of sleep, of which we speak up to a certain point in our waking state, but the knowledge and perception of which we can gain only by sleeping. Like is known only by like, and the condition of all knowledge is that the subject should become like to the object.”

It is most difficult, I repeat, to understand such things without preparation; and I believe that, in spite of our preparatory studies, a great deal of this mysticism will seem to us purely theoretic, and that the most of these experiences of supernatural psychology will be accessible to us only in the character of spectators. The philosophical imagination is a faculty which is educated very slowly. We are here, all at once, on the confines of human thought, and far within the polar circle of the mind. It is strangely cold here; it is strangely dark; and yet all around there is light and flame. But to those who come without having trained their mind to these new perceptions, this light and these flames are as dark and cold as painted images. We are dealing here with the most exact of sciences. We have to explore the most rugged and least habitable promontories of the divine “Know Thyself”; and the midnight sun hangs over the tempestuous sea, where the psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God. We have constantly to keep in mind that we are dealing here with a very profound science, and not with a dream. Dreams are not unanimous; dreams have no roots; while the glowing flower of divine metaphysic, which is here full blown, has its mysterious roots in Persia and in India, in Egypt and in Greece. And yet it seems unconscious as a flower, and knows nothing of its roots. Unhappily it is almost impossible for us to put ourselves in the position of the soul which, without effort, conceived this science; we cannot perceive it _ab intra_ and reproduce it in ourselves. We lack that which Emerson would call the same “central spontaneity”; we can no longer transform these ideas into our own substance; the utmost we can do is to take count, from the outside, of the tremendous experiences which are within the reach of only a very few souls during the whole existence of a planetary system. “It is not lawful,” says Plotinus, “to inquire into the origin of this intuitive science as if it were a thing dependent on place and movement; for it does not approach from here, nor set out from there, in order to go elsewhere, but it appears or does not appear. So that we must not pursue it in order to discover its secret sources, but wait in silence until it suddenly shines out upon us, preparing ourselves for the sacred sight, as the eye waits patiently for the rising of the sun.” And elsewhere he adds: “It is not by imagination nor by reason, which is itself obliged to draw its principles from elsewhere, that we represent to ourselves intelligible things (that is to say, the highest of all), but rather it is by our faculty for beholding them, the faculty which enables us to speak of them here below. We see them therefore by awaking in ourselves, here on earth, the same powers which we shall have to awake when we are in the world of pure intelligence. We are like a man who, on reaching the summit of a rock, perceives with his eyes objects which are invisible to those who have not made the ascent along with him.”

But although all beings, from the stone and the plant up to man, are contemplations, they are unconscious contemplations; and it is very difficult to rediscover in ourselves some memory of the previous activity of the dead faculty. In this respect we resemble the eye in the Neo-Platonic image. “It turns away from the light to see the darkness, and by the very action it ceases to see; for it cannot see the darkness with the light, and yet without it, it sees not at all; and so, by not seeing, it sees the darkness as far as it is capable of seeing it.”

I know the judgment which most men will pronounce on this book. They will think it the work of a deluded monk, of a pale solitary, a hermit, dizzy with fasting and worn with fever. They will take it for a wild, dark dream, crossed with vivid lightning flashes,--nothing more. This is the common idea which people form of the mystics; and they forget too often that they alone are the possessors of certainty. If it be true, as has been said, that every man is a Shakespeare in his dreams, we might well ask whether every man is not in this life an inarticulate mystic, a thousand times more transcendental than those who have confined themselves within the bonds of words. Is not the eye of the lover or of the mother, for instance, a thousand times more abstruse, more impenetrable, and more mystical than this book, which is poor and easily explained, after all, like all books, for these are but dead mysteries, whose horizon will never be rekindled? If we do not understand this, perhaps the reason is that we no longer understand anything. But, to return to our author, a few will recognise without difficulty that, far from being half-maddened by hunger, solitude, and fever, this monk possessed, on the contrary, one of the wisest, most exact, and most subtle philosophic brains which have ever existed. He lived, they tell us, in his hut at Grönendal, in the midst of the forest of Soignes. It was at the beginning of one of the wildest centuries of the middle ages,--the fourteenth. He knew no Greek, and perhaps no Latin. He was alone and poor; and yet, in the depths of this obscure forest of Brabant, his mind, ignorant and simple as it was, receives, all unconsciously, dazzling sunbeams from all the lonely, mysterious peaks of human thought He knows, though he is unaware of it, the Platonism of Greece, the Sufism of Persia, the Brahmanism of India, and the Buddhism of Tibet; and his marvellous ignorance rediscovers the wisdom of buried centuries, and foresees the knowledge of centuries yet unborn. I could quote whole pages of Plato, of Plotinus, of Porphyry, of the Zendic books, of the Gnostics, and of the Kabbala, the all but inspired substance of which is to be found intact in the writings of this humble Flemish priest.[1] We find strange coincidences and disturbing agreements. We find more, for he seems, at times, to have presupposed with exactitude the work of most of his unknown predecessors. Just as Plotinus begins his stern journey at the crossroad where Plato, fearing, paused and knelt down, so we might say that Ruysbroeck awakened from a slumber of several centuries; not, indeed, the same kind of thought (for that kind of thought never sleeps), but the same kind of language as that which had fallen asleep on the mountains where Plotinus forsook it, dazzled by that blaze of light, and with his hands before his eyes, as if in presence of an immense conflagration.

But the organic method of their thought differs strangely. Plato and Plotinus are before all things princes in the sphere of dialectic. They reach mysticism by the science of reasoning. They use the discursive faculties of their mind, and seem to distrust their intuitive or contemplative faculties. Reasoning beholds itself in the mirror of reasoning, and endeavours to remain indifferent to every other reflection. It continues its course like a river of fresh water in the midst of the sea, with the presentiment of a speedy absorption. In our author we find, on the contrary, the habits of Asiatic thought; the intuitive faculty reigns alone above the discursive purification of ideas by means of words. The fetters of the dream have fallen off. Is it for this reason less sure? None can tell. The mirror of the human intellect is entirely unknown in this book, but there is another mirror, darker and more profound, which we hide in the inmost depths of our being; no detail can be seen distinctly, and words will not remain on its surface; the intellect would break it if it could for a moment cast thereon the reflection of its merely secular light; but something else is seen there from time to time. Is it the soul? is it God Himself? is it both at once? We shall never know; yet these all but invisible appearances are the only real rulers of the life of the most unbelieving among us. Here you will perceive nothing but the dark reflections on the mirror, and, as its treasure is inexhaustible, these reflections are not like anything we have experienced in ourselves, but, in spite of all, they have an amazing certainty. And this is why I know nothing more terrifying than this honest book. There is no psychological idea, no metaphysical experience, no mystical intuition, however abstruse, profound, and surprising they may be, which it would be impossible to reproduce if necessary, and to cause to live for a moment in ourselves, that we might be assured of their human identity; but here on earth we are like a blind father who can no longer recall the faces of his children. None of these thoughts has the childlike or brotherly look of a thought of this earth; we seem to have lost our experience of God, and yet everything assures us that we are not entered into the house of dreams. Must we exclaim with Novalis that the time has passed away when the Spirit of God was comprehensible, and that the divine sense of the world is forever lost? That of old all things were manifestations of the Spirit, but that now we see only lifeless reflections which we do not understand, and live entirely on the fruits of better times?

I believe we must humbly confess that the key of this book is not to be found on the common pathways of the human mind. That key is not meant to open earthly doors, and we must deserve it by withdrawing ourselves as far as possible from the earth. One guide, indeed, we may still meet at these lonely cross-roads, who can point out the last way-marks towards these mysterious isles of fire, these Icelands of abstraction and of love. That guide is Plotinus, who attempted to analyse, by means of the human intellect, the divine faculty which here holds sway. He experienced the same ecstasies (as we say in a word which explains nothing) which are in their essence only the beginning of the complete discovery of our being; and in the midst of their trouble and their darkness, he never for one moment closed the questioning eye of the psychologist who seeks to explain to himself the most abnormal phenomena of his soul. He is thus like the last outwork of the pier, from which we may understand something of the waves and the horizon of that dim sea. He tries to extend the paths of the ordinary intellect into the very heart of these desolations, and this is why we must constantly revert to him, for he is the one analytical mystic. For the sake of those who may be tempted to undertake this tremendous journey, I give here one of the pages in which he has attempted to explain the organism of that divine faculty of introspection:--

“In the intuition of the intellect,” he says, “intelligible objects are perceived by the intellect by means of the light which the First One spreads over them, and in seeing these objects, it sees really the intelligible light. But, as it gives its attention to the objects on which the light falls, it does not perceive with any exactness the principle which enlightens them, while if, on the contrary, it forgets the objects which it sees so as to contemplate only the brightness which makes them visible, it sees the light itself and the principle of the light. But it is never outside of itself that the intellect can contemplate the intelligible light. It then resembles the eye which, without contemplating an exterior or alien light, and indeed before it has even perceived it, is suddenly struck by a brightness which belongs to itself, or by a ray which darts from itself, and appears to it in the midst of darkness: it is just the same when the eye, so as to see no other objects, closes its lids and draws its light from itself, or when, pressed by the hand, it perceives the light which it has in itself. Then, although seeing no outside thing, it still sees; it sees even more than at any other time, for it sees the light. The other objects which it saw before, although they were luminous, were not the light itself. So, when the intellect closes its eye in some degree to other objects, and concentrates it on itself, then, seeing nothing, it yet sees, not an alien light which shines in alien forms, but its own light, which all at once shines inwardly with a pure radiance.”

Again he says: “The soul which studies God must form an idea of Him whom it seeks to know; being aware, moreover, to what greatness it desires to unite itself, and persuaded that it will find blessedness in that union, it must plunge into the depths of divinity, until, instead of contemplating itself, or the intelligible world, it becomes itself an object of contemplation, and shines with the brightness of conceptions which have their source above.”

We have here almost all that human wisdom can tell us; almost all that the prince of transcendental metaphysicians could express; as for other explanations, we must find them in ourselves, in the depths where all explanation disappears in its expression. For it is not only in heaven and earth, but above all in ourselves, that there are more things than all philosophies can contain; and as soon as we are no longer obliged to formulate the mysteries within us, we are more profound than all that has been written, and greater than all that exists.

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:--

“On these four curtains of divers colours the Lord ordered Bezaleel and Aholiab to weave and to embroider with the needle many ornaments. So likewise our obedient will and our intelligence will place upon these four colours divers ornaments of virtues. On the white colour of innocence we shall place red roses, by evermore resisting all that is evil. Thus we maintain purity and crucify our own nature, and these red roses with their sweet perfume are very lovely on the white colour. Again, upon innocence we shall embroider sunflowers, by which we mean obedience; for when the sun rises in the east, the sunflower opens towards its rays, and turns ever eagerly towards the sun, even until its setting in the west; and at night it closes and hides its colours and awaits the return of the sun. Even so will we open our hearts by obedience towards the illumination of the grace of God, and humbly and eagerly will we follow that grace so long as we feel the warmth of love. And when the light of grace ceases to awaken fresh emotions, and we feel the warmth of love but little, or feel it not at all, then it is night, when we shall close our heart to all that may tempt it; and so shall we shut up within ourselves the golden colour of love, awaiting a new dawn, with its new brightness and its fresh emotions; and thus shall we preserve innocence always in its pristine splendour. On the blue colour, which is like the firmament, we shall embroider birds with varied plumage; in other words, we shall keep before our minds, with clear observation, the lives and the works of the saints, which are manifold. These works are their varied plumage, so gracious and so beautiful, and with this they adorned themselves and soared to heaven. They are birds which we must observe with attention; if we are like them in their plumage, we shall follow them to their eternal rest. On the purple colour (that is, violet or blood-red, meaning generosity) we shall place water-lilies, and these symbolise the free possession of all the treasures of God. For we notice four things in the water-lily. It keeps itself always above the water, and has four green leaves between the air and the water; and it is rooted in the earth, and above it is opened out to the sun; and it is a remedy for those who are fevered. So also may we, by generosity and freedom of spirit, possess the waves of all the riches of God. And between this free possession by our spirit and the waves of the lavish gifts of God, we shall have green leaves--that is to say, an earnest consideration of the way in which the eternal liberality of God flows forth, with ever new gifts to men, and we shall consider also how the gifts are bestowed with discrimination, according to the nature of the beloved ones who receive them, and how the final cause of all the gifts is the generous outflow of divine love; and the more immediate cause the wisdom and generosity in human creatures, which makes them resemble God. For none can know the wealth of the gifts of God except the wise and generous man, who, out of the treasures of God, can give wisely and generously to all creatures. So shall we adorn generosity, and then we shall be rooted in the soil of all the gifts--that is to say, in the Holy Spirit, as the water-lily is rooted deep down under the water. And we shall open our hearts in the air above, towards truth and towards the sun of righteousness. And thus we are a remedy for all the world; for the generous heart which possesses the treasures of God, ought to fill, console, refresh, and cool all those who are afflicted. And it is thus that the purple colour is adorned with the red colour--that is to say, with burning love. On it we shall place bright stars, by which I mean pious and devout prayer for the good of our neighbour, and reverent and secret communion between God and ourselves. These are the stars which illuminate with their brightness the kingdoms of heaven and of earth, and they make us inwardly light-giving and fruit-bearing, and fix us in the firmament of eternal life.”

I shall next translate the whole of the “chapter on fishes,” with its amazing analogies:--

“This is why the symbolic law ordered the Jews to eat clean fish, which had scales and fins; and all other fish were unclean and were forbidden by the law. By this we understand that our inner life ought to have a clothing of virtues, and our inward devotions ought to be covered with the application of our reason, just as the fish is clothed and adorned with its scales. And our loving power should move in four different ways:--in triumphing over our own will, in loving God, in desiring to resist our own nature, and in seeking to acquire virtues. These are four fins between which our inward life should swim, as fish do, in the water of divine grace. The fish has besides, in the middle of its body, a straight fin, which remains motionless in all its movements. So our inward feelings, firmly centred, should be empty of everything and without personal preference; in other words, we should allow God to act in us and in all things, both in heaven and earth. The fourth scale balances us in the mercy of God and in true divine peace. And so our devotion has fins and scales and becomes for us a pure nourishment which pleases God. But the scales which clothe and adorn our inward exercises should be of four colours, for some fish have gray scales, others red scales, others green scales, and others again white scales. The gray scales teach us that the images with which we clothe our devotions must be humble; in other words, we must think of our sins, of our want of virtue, of the humility of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of His mother, and of all things which may abase and humble us, and we shall love poverty and contempt and to be unknown and despised by everybody. This is the gray colour, which is very beautiful in the eyes of God.

“Further, we shall clothe our devotions with red scales--that is to say, we shall remember that the Son of God laid down His life for love of us, and we shall keep His passion in our memory, like a glorious mirror before our inward eyes, so that we may remember His love and console ourselves in all our sorrows. And we shall also think of the many torments of the martyrs, who by their sufferings followed our Lord into eternal life. These are red scales, set well in order, and they are a delightful clothing for our inward emotions.

“Then, again, we shall adorn our secret thoughts with green scales. I mean that we shall earnestly meditate upon the noble lives of confessors and saints, remembering how they despised the world, and by what wonderful work and in what divers ways they honoured and served God. Green is the colour which attracts and rejoices loving hearts and willing eyes. Let us stir our fins, then, and follow the saints by imitating their good works to the utmost of our power.

“Again, we shall clothe our inward exercise with white scales; in other words, we shall glass ourselves in the purity of virgins, and shall observe how they fought and how they conquered flesh and blood, by which is meant the inclination of nature. This is why they wear the crown of gold and follow the Lamb, who is Christ, with new songs, which none shall sing save those who have preserved chastity in soul and body. But if we have lost purity, we may still acquire innocence and clothe ourselves with other virtues, and so we may reach the day of judgment shining brighter than the sun, and possess the glory of God through an unending eternity. In this way, then, we shall cover our inward devotion with four kinds of scales, and each kind shall have the active fins of good-will; that is, we must desire to carry out in good works that which we understand by our intelligence. So shall our spiritual nourishment be clean; for knowledge and wisdom without a virtuous life are like scales without fins; and practical virtues without reflection are fins without scales; and so we must know, love, and practise virtues, in order that our life may be pure; and then we shall be nourished with clean fish which have scales and fins.”

I give next the following passage:--

“Further, each lamp had a vase of gold, full of water, in which was extinguished the fire taken away from the wicks. By this we learn that every gift demands from our mind a desire towards every cardinal virtue--a desire so simple that we can feel in ourselves the yearning of love after union with God. We observe this in Jesus Christ, who is our mirror in all things; for in every virtue which He practised, He excelled so lovingly that He sought ardently after union with His Father. And we shall unite all our yearnings in that loving yearning which He felt towards His Father in all cardinal virtues. For our loving yearnings are our golden vases, full of water--that is, of truth and righteousness--we shall plunge into them our burning wicks, the acts, that is, of all the virtues which we have practised; we shall plunge them in and extinguish them, by commending ourselves to His righteousness, and by uniting ourselves to His adorable merits; without this the wick of all our virtues would smoke and would have an evil savour before God and before all His saints.”

Elsewhere, he examines the twelve jewels of the Breastplate, and sees in them reflections of eternal symbols, as well as unsuspected, precise, and suggestive analogies. Let us see whether it is not so.

“In the rays of the sun, the topaz surpasses in splendour all precious stones; and even so does the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ excel in glory and in majesty all the saints and all the angels because of His union with the eternal Father. And in this union the reflection of the Divine Sun is so clear and glorious that it attracts and reflects in its clearness all the eyes of saints and angels in immediate vision, and those also of just men to whom its splendour is revealed. So likewise does the topaz attract and reflect in itself the eyes of those who behold it, because of its great clearness. But if you were to cut the topaz it would darken, while if you leave it in its natural state it will remain clear. And so, too, if you examine and try to penetrate the splendour of the eternal Word, that splendour will darken and you will lose it. But leave it as it is, and follow it with earnest gaze, and with self-abnegation, and it will give you light.”