responses of consciousness to the special action of the Three Persons of
the Blessed Trinity. These three stages in the soul’s apprehension of
God, are: the Emotional, the Intellectual, the Intuitive. I think that
most of the subtly distinguished interior experiences of the mystic, the
‘comings’ of the Divine Presence, the ‘stirrings’ and contacts which he
describes in his various books, can be ranged under one or other of them.
1. First comes that loving contemplation of the ‘uplifted heart’ which is
the work of the Holy Spirit, the consuming fire of Divine Love. This
ardent love, invading the self, and satisfying it in that intimate
experience of personal communion so often described in the writings of
the mystics, represents the self’s first call to contemplation and first
natural response; made with “so great a joy and delight of soul and body,
in his uplifted heart, that the man knoweth not what hath befallen him,
nor how he may endure it.” For Ruysbroeck this purely emotional reaction
to Reality, this burning flame of devotion—which seemed to Richard Rolle
the essence of the contemplative life—is but its initial phase. It
corresponds with—and indeed generally accompanies—those fever-heats,
those ‘tempests’ of impatient love endured by the soul at the height of
the Illuminative Way. Love, it is true, shall be from first to last the
inspiring force of the contemplative’s ascents: his education is from one
point of view simply an education in love. But this love is a passion of
many degrees; and the ‘urgency felt in the heart,’ the restlessness and
hunger of this spiritual feeling-state, is only its lowest form. The love
which burns like white fire on the apex of the soul, longs for sacrifice,
inspires heroic action, and goes forward without fear, ‘holy, strong and
free,’ to brave the terrors of the Divine Dark, is of another temper than
this joyful sentiment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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