The life of Jean von Ruysbroeck, like that of most of the great
thinkers of this world, is entirely an inner life. He said himself, “I
have no concerns outside.” Nearly all his biographers, Surius among
others, wrote nearly two centuries after his death, and their work
seems much intermixed with legend. They show us a holy hermit, silent,
ignorant, amazingly humble, amazingly good, who was in the habit of
working miracles unawares. The trees beneath which he prayed were
illumined by an aureole; the bells of a Dutch convent tolled without
hands on the day of his death. His body, when exhumed five years after
his soul had quitted it, was found in a state of perfect preservation,
and from it rose wonderful perfumes, which cured the sick who were
brought from neighbouring villages. A few lines will suffice to give
the facts which are undoubtedly authentic. He was born in the year
1274 at Ruysbroeck, a little village between Hal and Brussels. He was
first a priest in the church of Sainte-Gudule; then, by the advice of
the hermit Lambert, he left the Brabant town and retired to Grönendal
(Green Valley) in the forest of Soignes, in the neighbourhood of
Brussels. Holy companions soon joined him there, and with them he
founded the abbey of Grönendal, the ruins of which may be seen to
this day. Attracted by the strange renown of his theosophy and his
supernatural visions, pilgrims from Germany and Holland, among them the
Dominican Jean Tauler and Gerhard Groot, came to this retreat to visit
the humble old man, and went away filled with an admiration of which
the memory still lingers in their writings. He died, according to the
_Necrologium Monasterii Viridis Vallis_, on the 2nd of December 1381,
and his contemporaries gave him the title of “_L’Admirable_.”
It was the century of the mystics and the period of the gloomy wars
in Brabant and Flanders, of stormy nights of blood and prayers under
the wild reigns of the three Johns, of battles extending into the
very forest where the saints were kneeling. St. Bonaventura and St.
Thomas Aquinas had just died, and Thomas à Kempis was about to study
God in that mirror of the absolute which the inspired Fleming had left
in the depths of the Green Valley; while, first Jehan de Bruges, and
afterwards the Van Eycks, Roger van der Weyden, Hugues van der Goes,
Thierry Bouts, and Hans Memlinck were to people with images the lonely
_Word_ of the hermit.
Here is a list of the writings of Ruysbroeck, the sum-total of which is
very large. _The Book of the Twelve Beguines_; _The Mirror of Eternal
Salvation_; _The Book of the Spiritual Tabernacle_; _The Sparkling
Stone_; _The Book of Supreme Truth_; _The Book of the Seven Steps of
Spiritual Love_; _The Book of the Seven Castles_; _The Book of the
Kingdom of the Beloved_; _The Book of the Four Temptations_; _The
Book of the Twelve Virtues_; _The Book of Christian Faith_, and _The
Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage_. There are besides seven letters,
two hymns, and a prayer, to which Surius gave these titles, _Epistolae
septem utiles_, _Cantiones duæ admodum spirituales_, and _Oratio
perbrevis sed pia valde_, the original texts of which I have not been
able to discover in any of the Flemish manuscripts.
Some years ago the greater number of these writings were edited with
the utmost care by a society of Flemish bibliophiles--_De Maetschappij
der Vlaemsche Bibliophilen_--and most of this translation has been made
from the excellent text of that edition.
I shall not undertake to give here an analysis of these different
works; such an analysis would be difficult, monotonous, and useless.
All the books of our author treat exclusively of the same science: a
theosophy peculiar to Ruysbroeck, the minute study of the introversion
and introspection of the soul, the contemplation of God above all
similitudes and likenesses, and the drama of the divine love on the
uninhabitable peaks of the spirit. I shall therefore content myself
with giving some characteristic extracts from each of these writings.
_The Book of the Twelve Beguines_, in the Latin translation of Surius,
is entitled _De vera contemplatione, opus præclarum, variis divinis
institutionibus, eo quo Spiritus Sanctus suggessit ordine descriptis,
exuberans_. This title explains more exactly the nature of the work,
but is not to be found in any of the early manuscripts. The truth is
that Ruysbroeck, following the custom of his age, seldom gave a title
to his writings, and the titles by which they are now known, as well as
the marginal rubrics of the chapters, have apparently been interpolated
by the copyists. In the edition of the _Maetschappij der Vlaemsche
Bibliophilen_ we find collected under the title, _Dat boec van den
twaelf beghinen_, first of all that treatise on the contemplative life
mentioned by Surius, next a kind of manual of symbolical astrology,
and lastly some thoughts on the passion and death of our Lord Jesus
Christ. The three works are marked off from each other with more or
less distinctness, and Ruysbroeck evidently fixes the place where he
forsakes the inner universe and descends to the visible firmament,
when he says at the end of chapter xxxi., “And after this I leave the
contemplative life, which is God Himself, and which He grants to those
who have renounced self and have followed His Spirit to where, in
eternal glory, He rejoices in Himself and in His chosen.”
The first eight chapters of this book are written in singular and very
beautiful verses, and across their images, on the dark background of
essential love, as across the windows of a burning convent, there
flicker continually bright spiritual flames, and also frozen sadnesses,
not unlike those of Villon or of Verlaine.