Note 6 — X Ruysbroeck and Windesheim

Father Sharpe, in his recent admirable volume, Mysticism: Its True Nature and Value, writes thus of the mystic teaching, properly so called, of à Kempis’s world-famous masterpiece: “The Imitation of Christ ... probably owes much of its vast popularity to its constant recurrence to the elementary duties of religion and morality, and its insistence on the necessity of their performance as the prerequisite of the more exalted spiritual states. The ‘purgative,’ ‘illuminative,’ and ‘unitive’ ways are seen, so to speak, together, and are dealt with as aspects or constituents of the Christian life as a whole, to the completeness of which all three are necessary and, in different ways, of equal importance. The purely mystical passages are comparatively few and short; and the abundance of practical directions the book contains has sometimes caused its mystical character to be entirely overlooked. This disproportion, however, is quite sufficiently to be accounted for by the character of the work, which is that of a directory of spiritual life in general, and not a scientific treatise on any particular department of it. In such a book attempts at describing the indescribable phenomena of mysticism would obviously have been out of place, whereas the practical details of the lower and preliminary states admit of and require minute explanation. But the tone of the whole book is mystical, and the most commonplace duties and the most humiliating strivings with temptation are in a manner illuminated and glorified by the brilliancy of the result to which they tend. Thus, in point of fact, the higher and lower elements, the mystical and the non-mystical, the purgative, the illuminative and the unitive, are blended in actual human experience” (pp. 188, 189).