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Updated: May 17, 2025
In Ruysbroeck's phrase, we are "inwardly abiding in simplicity and stillness and utter peace"; and this is man's state of maximum receptivity. "The best and noblest way in which thou mayst come into this work and life," says Meister Eckhart, "is by keeping silence and letting God work and speak ... when we simply keep ourselves receptive we are more perfect than when at work."
They aim at God: the phrase is Ruysbroeck's, but it pervades the real literature of the Spirit. Thus it is the first principle of Hinduism that "the householder must keep touch with Brahma in all his actions." Thus the Sufi says he has but two laws to look in one direction and to live in one way.
"In the theatre," he says in the introduction to his translation of Ruysbroeck's l'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, "I wish to study ... man, not relatively to other people, not in his relations to others or to himself; but, after sketching the ordinary facts of passion, to look at his attitude in presence of eternity and mystery, to attempt to unveil the eternal nature hidden under the accidental characteristics of the lover, father, husband.... Is the thought an exact picture of that something which produced it?
Neither the Libri Teutonici, published by Ruysbroeck's followers, nor the great paintings of the brothers Van Eyck, Van der Weyden and Memling, suggest for one moment the laxity of morals prevalent at the time and revealed by the writers of the Chronicles.
If then we admit this formula, "ever seeking and finding the Eternal" which is of course another rendering of Ruysbroeck's "aiming at God" as the prime character of a spiritual life, the secret of human transcendence; what are the agents by which it is done?
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