Now surely this is the psychological situation described by Ruysbroeck. The very images used by Augustine are found again in him. The mind of the contemplative, purified, disciplined, deliberately abstracted from images, is inundated by the divine sunshine, “the Light which is not God, but that whereby we see Him”; and in this radiance achieves a hurried but convincing vision of Supreme Reality. But “even though the eagle, king of birds, can with his powerful sight gaze steadfastly upon the brightness of the sun; yet do the weaker eyes of the bat fail and falter in the same.”[59] The intellectual vision is dazzled and distressed, like a man who can bear the diffused radiance of sunshine but is blinded if he dares to follow back its beams to the terrible beauty of their source. “Not for this are my wings fitted,” says Dante, drooping to earth after his supreme ecstatic flight. Because it cannot sustain its gaze, then, the intelligence falls back upon the second phase of intellectual contemplation: _Speculatio_, the deep still brooding in which the soul, ‘made wise by the Spirit of Truth,’ contemplates God and Creation as He and it are reflected in the clear mirror of her intellectual powers, under ‘images and similitudes’—the Mysteries of Faith, the Attributes of the Divine Nature, the forms and manners of created things. As the Father contemplates all things in the Son, ‘Mirror of Deity,’ so now does the introverted soul contemplate Him in this ‘living mirror of her intelligence’ on which His sunshine falls. Because her swift vision of That which Is has taught her to distinguish between the ineffable Reality and the Appearance which shadows it forth, she can again discover Him under those images which once veiled, but now reveal His presence. The intellect which has apprehended God Transcendent, if only for a moment, has received therefrom the power of discerning God Immanent. “He shows Himself to the soul in the living mirror of her intelligence; not as He is in His nature, but in images and similitudes, and in the degree in which the illuminated reason can grasp and understand Him. And the wise reason, enlightened of God, sees clearly and without error in images of the understanding all that she has heard of God, of faith, of truth, according to her longing. But that image which is God Himself, although it is held before her, she cannot comprehend; for the eyes of her understanding must fail before that Incomparable Light.”[60]