essence are
simply lifted up and united to the very truth, which is God. Wherefore
in this simple and intent contemplation we are one life and one spirit
with God. And this I call the contemplative life. In this highest
stage the soul is united to God without means; it sinks into the vast
darkness of the Godhead." In this abyss, he says, following his
authorities, "the Persons of the Trinity transcend themselves";
"_there_ is only the eternal essence, which is the substance of the
Divine Persons, where we are all one and uncreated, according to our
prototypes." Here, "so far as distinction of persons goes, there is no
more God nor creature"; "we have lost ourselves and been melted away
into the unknown darkness." And yet we remain eternally distinct from
God. The creature remains a creature, and loses not its
creatureliness. We must be conscious of ourselves in God, and
conscious of ourselves in ourselves. For eternal life consists in the
knowledge of God, and there can be no knowledge without
self-consciousness. If we could be blessed without knowing it, a
stone, which has no consciousness, might be blessed.

Ruysbroek, it is plain, had no qualms in using the old mystical
language without qualification. This is the more remarkable, because
he was fully aware of the disastrous consequences which follow from
the method of negation and self-deification. For Ruysbroek was an
earnest reformer of abuses. He spares no one--popes, bishops, monks,
and the laity are lashed in vigorous language for their secularity,
covetousness, and other faults; but perhaps his sharpest castigation
is reserved for the false mystics. There are some, he says, who
mistake mere laziness for holy abstraction; others give the rein to
"spiritual self-indulgence"; others neglect all religious exercises;
others fall into antinomianism, and "think that nothing is forbidden
to them"--"they will gratify any appetite which interrupts their
contemplation": these are "by far the worst of all." "There is another
error," he proceeds, "of those who like to call themselves
'theopaths.' They take every impulse to be Divine, and repudiate all
responsibility. Most of them live in inert sloth." As a corrective to
these errors, he very rightly says, "Christ must be the rule and
pattern of all our lives"; but he does not see that there is a deep
inconsistency between the imitation of Christ as the living way to the
Father, and the "negative road" which leads to vacanc