This is but one instance of that perpetual and inevitable resort to paradox which torments all who try to follow him along this ‘track without shadow of trace’; for the goal towards which he is now enticing us is one in which all the completing opposites of our fragmentary experience find their bourne. Hence the rapid alternation of spatial and personal symbols which confuses our industrious intellects, is the one means whereby he can suggest its actuality to our hungry hearts. As we observed in Ruysbroeck’s earlier teaching on contemplation three distinct forms, in which the special work that theology attributes to the three Divine Persons seemed to him to be reflected; now, in this Superessential Contemplation, or Fruition, we find the work of the Absolute Godhead Itself, energising upon a plane of intensity which so utterly transcends our power of apprehension, that it seems to the surface consciousness—as Dionysius the Areopagite had named it—a negation of all things, a Divine Dark. This Fruition, says Ruysbroeck, “is wild and desolate as a desert, and therein is to be found no way, no road, no track, no retreat, no measure, no beginning, no end, nor any other thing that can be told in words. And this is for all of us Simple Blessedness, the Essence of God and our superessence, above reason and beyond reason. To know it we must be in it, beyond the mind and above our created being; in that Eternal Point where all our lines begin and end, that Point where they lose their name and all distinction, and become one with the Point itself, and that very One which the Point is, yet nevertheless ever remain in themselves nought else but lines that come to an end.”[69] What, then, is the way by which the soul moves from that life of intense contemplation in which the ‘spreading light’ of the Spirit shows her the universe fulfilled with God, to this new transfigured state of joy and terror? It is a way for which her previous adventures might have prepared us. As each new ascent, new inflow of grace, was prepared by a time of destitution and stress—as the compensating beats of love and renunciation have governed the evolving melody of the inner life—so here a last death of selfhood, a surrender more absolute than all that has gone before, must be the means of her achievement of absolute life.