Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/229

Rh Ruysbroeck, have made a very plastic use of this striking image.

Master Eckhart spoke of “the abyss without mode and without form of the silent and waste divinity.” The fruition of bliss, says Ruysbroeck, “is so immense that God Himself is as swallowed up with all the blessed ... in an absence of modes, which is a not-knowing, and in an eternal loss of self.” And elsewhere: “The seventh degree, which follows next ... is attained when, beyond all knowledge and all knowing, we discover in ourselves a bottomless not-knowing; when beyond all names given to God and to creatures, we come to expire and pass over in eternal namelessness, where we lose ourselves ... and when we contemplate all these blessed spirits which are essentially sunken away, merged and lost in their super-essence, in an unknown darkness without mode.”

Always the hopeless attempt to dispense with images and to attain “the state of void, that is mere absence of images,” which only God can give. “He deprives us of all images and brings us back to the initial state where we find only wild and waste absoluteness, void of all form or image, for ever corresponding with eternity.”

The contemplation of God, says Denis the Carthusian, is more adequately rendered by negations than by affirmations. “For, when I say: God is goodness, essence, life, I seem to indicate what God is, as if what He is had anything in common with, or any resemblance to, a creature, whereas it is certain, that He is incomprehensible and unknown, inscrutable and ineffable, and separated from all He [sic] works by an immeasurable and wholly incomparable difference and excellence.” It is for this reason that the “uniting wisdom” was called by the Areopagite: unreasonable, insane and foolish.

But whether Denis or Ruysbroeck speak of light changed into darkness (a motif inspired by the Old Testament and which the pseudo-Areopagite had developed), or again of ignorance, forlornness or of death, they never get beyond images.

Without metaphors it is impossible to express a single thought. All effort to rise above images is doomed to fail. To speak of our most ardent aspirations only in negative terms does not satisfy the cravings of the heart, and where philosophy