works’; the three types of Christians, compared with birds who can fly but prefer hopping about the earth, birds who swim far on the waters of grace, and birds who love only to soar high in the heavens. For the free, exultant life of birds he felt indeed a special sympathy and love; and ‘many-feathered’ is the best name that he can find for the soul of the contemplative ascending to the glad vision of God.

It is probably a true tradition which represents him as having written his greatest and most inspired pages sitting under a favourite tree in the depths of the woods. When the ‘Spirit’ came on him, as it often did with a startling suddenness, he would go away into the forest carrying his tablet and stylus. There, given over to an ecstasy of composition—which seems often to have approached the limits of automatic writing, as in St. Teresa, Boehme, Blake and other mystics—he would write that which was given to him, without addition or omission; breaking off even in the middle of a sentence when the ‘Spirit’ abruptly departed, and resuming at the same point, though sometimes after an interval which lasted several weeks, when it returned. In his last years, when eyesight failed him, he would allow a younger brother to go with him into the woods, and there to take down from dictation the fruits of those meditations in which he ‘saw without sight’; as the illiterate Catherine of Siena dictated in ecstasy the text of her Divine Dialogue.

Two witnesses have preserved Ruysbroeck’s solemn affirmation, given first to his disciple Gerard Groot ‘in great gentleness and humility,’ and repeated again upon his death-bed in the presence of the whole community, that every word of his writings was thus composed under the immediate domination of an inspiring power; that ‘secondary personality of a superior type,’ in touch with levels of reality beyond the span of the surface consciousness, which governs the activities of the great mystics in their last phases of development. These books are not the fruit of conscious thought, but ‘God-sent truths,’ poured out from a heart immersed in that Divine Abyss of which he tries to tell.

That a saint must needs be a visionary, is a conviction deeply implanted in the mind of the mediæval hagiographer; who always ascribes to these incidents an importance which the saints themselves are the first to deny. Pomerius thus attributes to Ruysbroeck not only those profound and direct experiences of Divine Reality to which his works bear witness; but also numerous visions of a conventional and anthropomorphic type, in which he spoke with Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, ecstasies which fell upon him when saying Mass—and the passionate devotion to the Eucharist which his writings express makes these at least probable—a certain faculty of clairvoyance, and a prophetic knowledge of his own death. Further, it is said that once, being missed from the priory, he was found after long search by one of the brothers he loved best, sitting under his favourite tree, rapt in ecstasy and surrounded by an aura of radiant light; as the discerning eyes of those who loved them have seen St. Francis, St. Teresa, and other contemplatives transfigured and made shining by the intensity of their spiritual life. I need not point out that the fact that these things are common form in the lives of the mystics, does not necessarily discredit them; though in any case their interest is less of a mystical than of a psychological kind.

Not less significant, and to us perhaps more winning, is that side of Ruysbroeck’s personality which was turned towards the world of men. In his own person he fulfilled that twofold duty of the deified soul which he has described to us: the in-breathing of the Love of God, the out-breathing of that same radiant charity towards the race. “To give and receive, both at once, is the essence of union,” he says; and his whole career is an illustration of these words. He took his life from the Transcendent; he was a focus of distribution, which gave out that joyous life again to other souls. His retreat at Groenendael, his ecstasies of composition, never kept him from those who wanted his help and advice. In his highest ascents towards Divine Love, the rich complexities of human love went with him. Other men always meant much to Ruysbroeck. He had a genius for friendship, and gave himself without stint to his friends; and those who knew him said that none ever went to him for consolation without returning with gladness in their hearts. There are many tales in the Vita of his power over and intuitive understanding of other minds; of conversions effected, motives unveiled and clouds dispelled. His great friend, Gerard Naghel, the Carthusian prior—at whose desire he wrote one of the most beautiful of his shorter works, The Book of Supreme Truth—has left a vivid little account of the impression which his personality created: “his peaceful and joyful countenance, his humble good-humoured speech.” Ruysbroeck spent three days in Gerard’s monastery, in order to explain some difficult passages in his writings, “and these days were too short, for no one could speak to him or see him without being the better for it.”

By this we may put the description of Pomerius, founded upon the reminiscences of Ruysbroeck’s surviving friends. “The grace of God shone in his face; and also in his modest speech, his kindly deeds, his humble manners, and in the way that every action of his life exhibited uprightness and radiant purity. He lived soberly, neglected his dress, and was patient in all things and with all people.”

Plainly the great contemplative who had seemed in Brussels a ‘negligible man,’ kept to the end a great simplicity of aspect; closely approximating to his own ideal of the ‘really humble man, without any pose or pretence,’ as described in The Spiritual Marriage. That profound self-immersion in God which was the source of his power, manifested itself in daily life under the least impressive forms; ever seeking embodiment in little concrete acts of love and service, “ministering, in the world without, to all who need, in love and mercy.”[3] We see him in his Franciscan love of living things, his deep sense of kinship with all the little children of God, ‘going to the help of the animals in all their needs’; thrown into a torment of distress by the brothers who suggested to him that during a hard winter the little birds of the forest might die, and at once making generous and successful arrangements for their entertainment. We see him ‘giving Mary and Martha rendez-vous in his heart’; working in the garden of the community, trying hard to be useful, wheeling barrow-loads of manure, and emerging from profound meditation on the Infinite to pull up young vegetables under the impression that they were weeds. He made, in fact, valiant efforts to achieve that perfect synthesis of action and contemplation ‘ever abiding in the simplicity of the Spirit, and perpetually flowing forth in abundant acts of love towards heaven and earth,’ which he regarded as the proper goal of human growth—efforts constantly thwarted by his own growing concentration on the Transcendent, the ease and frequency with which his consciousness now withdrew from the world of the senses to immerse itself in Spiritual Reality. In theory there was for him no cleavage between the two: Being and Becoming, the Temporal and the Eternal, were but two moods within the mind of God, and in the superessential life of perfect union these completing opposites should