All that this meant, and must mean, for our deeper knowledge of Reality and of man’s intuitive contacts with the Divine Life, we must find if we can in his doctrine of Love. Love is the ‘very self-hood’ of God, says Ruysbroeck in strict Johannine language. His theology is above all the theology of the Holy Spirit, the immanent Divine Energy and Love. It is Love which breaks down the barrier between finite and infinite life. But Love, as he understands it, has little in common with the feeling-state to which many of the female mystics have given that august name. For him, it is hardly an emotional word at all, and never a sentimental one; rather the title of a mighty force, a holy energy that fills the universe—the essential activity of God. Sometimes he describes it under the antique imagery of Light; imagery which is more than a metaphor, and is connected with that veritable consciousness of enhanced radiance, as well in the outer as in the inner world, experienced by the ‘illuminated’ mystic. Again it is the ‘life-giving Life,’ hidden in God and the substance of our souls, which the self finds and appropriates; the whole Johannine trilogy brought into play, to express its meaning for heart, intellect and will. This Love, in fact, is the dynamic power which St. Augustine compared with gravitation, ‘drawing all things to their own place,’ and which Dante saw binding the multiplicity of the universe into one. All Ruysbroeck’s images for it turn on the idea of force. It is a raging fire, a storm, a flood. He speaks of it in one great passage as ‘playing like lightning’ between God and the soul. Whoever will look at William Blake’s great picture of the Creation of Adam, may gain some idea of the terrific yet infinitely compassionate character inherent in this concept of Divine Love: the agony, passion, beauty, sternness, and pity of the primal generating force. This love is eternally giving and taking—it is its very property, says Ruysbroeck, ‘ever to give and ever to receive’—pouring its dower of energy into the soul, and drawing out from that soul new vitality, new love, new surrender. ‘Hungry love,’ ‘generous love,’ ‘stormy love,’ he calls it again and again. Streaming out from the heart of Reality, the impersonal aspect of the very Spirit of God, its creative touch evokes in man, once he becomes conscious of it, an answering storm of love. The whole of our human growth within the spiritual order is conditioned by the quality of this response; by the will, the industry, the courage, with which man accepts his part in the Divine give-and-take.