So the Interior Life, now firmly established, is found to conform to
those great laws which have guided the growing spirit from the first.
Again, the dual property of love, possession and action, satisfaction and
fecundity, is to be manifested upon new levels. The pendulum motion of
life, swinging between the experience of union with God to which ‘the
Divine Unity ever calls us,’ and its expression in active charity to
which the multiplicity of His creatures and their needs ever entreat us,
still goes on. The more richly and strongly the life-giving Life wells up
within the self, the greater are the demands made upon that self’s
industry and love. In the establishment of this balance, in this
continual healthy act of alternation, this double movement into God and
out to men, is the proof that the soul has really centred itself upon the
spiritual world—is, as Ruysbroeck puts it, confirmed in love. “Thus do
work and union perpetually renew themselves; and this renewal in work and
in union, _this_ is a spiritual life.”[54]
Now the self which has achieved this degree of transcendence has
achieved, too, considerable experience in that art of contemplation or
introversion which is the mode of its communion with God. Throughout,
training and development have gone hand in hand; and the fact that
Ruysbroeck seldom troubles to distinguish between them, but accepts them
as two aspects of one thing—the gradual deification of the
soul—constitutes one of the great obstacles to an understanding of his
works. Often he describes the whole spiritual life as consisting in
introversion, an entering of consciousness into the supersensuous regions
beyond thought; in defiance of his own principle of active charity,
movement, work, as the essential reaction to the universe which
distinguishes a ‘deified’ man. The truth is that the two processes run
side by side; and now one, now the other, is in the foreground of his
thought. Therefore all that I shall now say of the contemplative art must
be understood as describing acts and apprehensions taking place
throughout the whole course of the Interior Life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account