Outstanding medieval mystic

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	• John Ruusbroec: The Spiritual Espousals, The Sparkling Stones, and Other Works (Classics of Western ... Paulist Press, 1986 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Outstanding medieval mystic

Ruusbroec is a great Christian mystic who lived a very sensible, grounded life as a Catholic priest in what is now Holland. Ruusbroec lived a very rich contemplative life, and wrote many outstanding works on Christian contemplative spirituality. In terms of depth, beauty and greatness, his mysticism stands equal to that of Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics, his contemporaries, and influenced many later spiritual schools in Europe.

The greatest of Ruusbroec's works is the Spiritual Espousals, which outline a pathway by which the human soul is united with God. The process of union follows the classical pattern of Christian spirituality, purification, illumination, and divinisation, whereby the soul is cleansed of sin through baptism and the sacraments and by living the good moral life and is then lead to a deep and intimate communion with God by letting go of one's will and egoistic desires, rising above all creatures in the world, and by turning inwards in a state of inner unity, calm, and silent contemplation. As a master of the Christian spiritual life Ruusbroec gives many stern warnings about spiritual deception and egoism and false forms of Christian spirituality, including those which proclaim freedom to do as one wishes and total union with God's essence.

Ruusbroec's mysticism is strongly focused on love, God's ineffability, and on the Trinitarian nature of God's inner life. Of all the great mystics, Ruusbroec seems to be the one who most strongly saw God's triune side, as opposed to other mystics who tended to see more God's unity and oneness (Eckhart and John of the Cross). This makes the inner nature of God's love, both for himself and for his creatures, an essential part of Ruusbroec's mysticism, an important and biblical truth often forgotten by some mystics and contemplative writers down the ages. Evelyn Underhill rightly praised Ruusbroec as perhaps the greatest of the medieval mystics, because of his awareness of God's triune nature and the infinite love that flows from that ineffable nature.

This work will be a joy to read for any Christian with an interest in spirituality and the contemplative life, and since Ruusbroec was also a fairly sensible and sober fellow, doesn't depart fundamentally from any teaching of either Christianity or the Catholic Church. In this sense then he is a 'safe' mystic, though like many mystics at times his language can lack rigor and coherence and can at times seem to approach more dubious theological notions.

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The fourteenth century in Europe has been called "the age of adversity." It was a time when medieval society was racked by the Hundred Years' War, the Black Death, and peasant turmoil of the age, saw the decline of its mendicant orders, the "Babylonian Captivity" of the papacy in Avignon, and the rise of wide-ranging heretical movements such as the Free Spirit heresy that disparaged the Church and its sacraments in favor of an immediate experience of God.

In this context John Ruusbroec (1293-1381) lived as a monk in the duchy of Brabant and produced a corpus of works on the spiritual life that has made him the most important Flemish mystic in an age of such greats as John Tauler, Julian of Norwich, and Birgitta of Sweden.

For the first time in English, four of Ruusbroec's most influential writings have been collected in one volume: The Spiritual Espousals, A Mirror of Eternal Blessedness, The Little Book of Clarification, and The Sparkling Stone. This new translation by James Wiseman offers a fresh, contemporary rendering of Ruusbroec's brilliant discourses that caused Abbot Cuthbert Butler to comment that "in all probability?there has been no greater contemplative; and certainly there has been no greater mystical writer."

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