Grace, which dwells like a living fountain at the heart
of our personality — tlie " unity of the spirit " — thence
pours forth into each faculty in three streams of
radiance : claerheit, a word expressive at once of
pervading brightness and limpid clearness, which
occurs on almost every page of his writings. The
sense of this supernal clarity, veritably experienced
— a viva luce, a quickening light, of which we become
aware when we open the soul's eyes — is found in
nearlj' every mystical writer from the time of St
John, and probably originates in that consciousness
of enhanced lucidity whicli frequently accompanies
spiritual exaltation. It was crystallised by the school-
men in the doctrine of the lumen gloriae — ^the Divine
light which transfigures the soul and makes it Hke to
God' — and much of Ruysbroeck's work is really a
poetic elaboration of this idea. As a "simple hght"
this Radiance now frees the mind from the teasing com-
plexity of distracting iiiiages : as a " spreading light "
it illuminates the understanding : as a burning flame,
it enkindles the will. The self thus becomes capable
of the first form of contemplation, adherence to God
by means of the purified reason and will : responding
to the " loving drawing-nigh " of God — dai mmlike
neyghen Gods — with an ardent outstretching of him-
self towards that seeking and compelling power.
The powers of the soul, then, in the second stage of
illumination, become inundated by the divine claer-
' CI. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, i., q. 12, a. 5.
