The most lengthy this of all Ruysbroeck's works. It consists of a mystic
interpretation, a long-drawn-out allegory, in which the Tabernacle of the
Old Testament is considered as a type of the course of love. The outer
and the inner courts, the altar of sacrifice, the hangings, the pillars
and their sockets, the rings, the names of the workmen, the seven-branch
candlestick, the brazen laver, the priestly ornaments, the ephod and the
twelve stones, the holy oils and the incense, the table of the loaves of
proposition, the different sacrifices with the distinction between the
clean and the unclean animals, the holy of holies, the ark and its
appurtenances,--all are applied with a wealth of detail, which, however,
never lacks dignity, and with a wondrous skill to Ruysbroeck's usual
three divisions of the exterior moral life, the interior, and the purely
contemplative. The Tabernacle was a subject which naturally lent itself
to allegory and to mystic interpretation, and Hugh of St. Victor had
already preceded our author, as doubtless also he inspired him with his
_De Arca mystica_. Though sometimes the thread is lost in the
multiplicity of details, this treatise is most attractive and contains
some of the best pages of Blessed Ruysbroeck.