The greatest mystics, however, whether in the East or in the West, are possessed of a vision and experience of God so deep and rich that it embraces at once the infinite and the intimate aspects of Reality; illuminating those religious concepts which are, as it were, an artistic reconstruction of the Transcendent, and at the same time having contact with that vast region above and beyond reason whence come the fragmentary intimations of Reality crystallised in the formulæ of faith. For them, as for St. Augustine, God is both near and far; and the paradox of transcendent-immanent Reality is a self-evident if an inexpressible truth. They swing between hushed adoration and closest communion, between the divine ignorance of the intellect lifted up into God and the divine certitude of the heart in which He dwells; and give us by turns a subjective and psychological, an objective and metaphysical, reading of spiritual experience. Ruysbroeck is a mystic of this type. The span of his universe can include—indeed demand—both the concept of that Abyss of Pure Being where all distinctions are transcended, and the soul is immersed in the ‘dark light’ of the One, and the distinctively Christian and incarnational experience of loving communion with and through the Person of Christ. For him the ladder of contemplation is firmly planted in the bed-rock of human character—goes the whole way from the heart of man to the Essence of God—and every stage of it has importance for the eager and ascending soul. Hence, when he seems to rush out to the farthest limits of the cosmos, he still remains within the circle of Catholic ideas; and is at once ethical and metaphysical, intensely sacramental and intensely transcendental too. Nor is this result obtained—as it sometimes seems to be, for instance, in such a visionary as Angela of Foligno—by a mere heaping up of the various and inconsistent emotional reactions of the self. There is a fundamental orderliness in the Ruysbroeckian universe which, though it may be difficult to understand, and often impossible for him to express without resort to paradox, yet reveals itself to careful analysis. He tries hard to describe, or at least suggest, it to us, because he is a mystic of an apostolic type. Even where he is dealing with the soul’s most ineffable experiences and seems to hover over that Abyss which is ‘beyond Reason,’ stammering and breaking into wild poetry in the desperate attempt to seize the unseizable truth he is ever intent on telling us how these things may be actualised, this attitude attained by other men. The note is never, as with many subjective visionaries, “_I_ have seen,” but always “_We_ shall or may see.”