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 vacancy.[259]

Henry Suso, whose autobiography is a document of unique importance for the psychology of Mysticism, was born in 1295[260].  Intellectually he is a disciple of Eckhart, whom he understands better than Ruysbroek; but his life and character are more like those of the Spanish mystics, especially St. Juan of the Cross.  The text which is most often in his mouth is, “Where I am, there shall also My servant be”; which he interprets to mean that only those who have embraced to the full the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, can hope to be united to Him in glory.  “No cross, no crown,” is the law of life which Suso