Ruusbroec: Literature and Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century (review)

Geert Warnar’s monograph attempts to yoke together the methodologies of literary and religious history, two disciplines he sees as having drifted increasingly apart since the religious turn in medieval literary studies. In more precise terms, he aims to reclaim a central figure of Dutch-language vernacular theology for the canon of Dutch literature—“in the firm conviction that this is the only way to do justice to a great name in the literature of the Low Countries” (9). With a subject as resolutely mystical as Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381, beatified 1908), however, Warnar has set himself a rather Herculean—if not quite Sisyphean—task. Nonetheless, the study succeeds admirably in examining Ruusbroec’s cultural and literary as well as theological influences; its translation (from Ruusbroec. Literatuur en mystiek in de veertiende eeuw, published in Amsterdam in 2003) into an elegant and highly readable English by Diane Webb is to be celebrated.

Ruusbroec’s oeuvre has been appreciated since Evelyn Underhill as a cornerstone of the medieval mystical tradition; in his own lifetime his reputation extended far enough south that Johannes Tauler traveled from Basel to visit him in his priory of Groenendaal, just outside Brussels (after which his texts became quite popular among the Upper Rhine Gottesfreunde). In the years following Ruusbroec’s death, his most influential text, The Spiritual Espousals (Die geestelike brulocht), was denounced by the chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson—a move that, like John XXII’s 1329 condemnation of Meister Eckhart, did relatively little to stanch his growing popularity in the Low Countries and beyond.

At around the same time—the close of the fourteenth century—sections of The Spiritual Espousals were translated into English, via a Latin intermediary, as part of The Chastising of God’s Children (a compilation surviving in twelve manuscripts and subsequently published by Wynkyn de Worde around 1493). A unique English translation of On the Sparkling Stone (Vanden blinkenden steen) survives as The Treatise of the Perfection of the Sons of God immediately following the only extant copy of Julian of Norwich’s Short Text in the astonishingly rich devotional compilation known as the Amherst Manuscript (MS Add 37790, on which see Marleen Cré’s Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse; for modern English translations of both Dutch texts, see the Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality volume on Ruusbroec). As a Continental influence on late medieval English devotion, he is surpassed only by Henry Suso.

Warnar begins in Brussels, where Ruusbroec was educated in the chapter school of the Collegiate Church, St. Gudula, a formation markedly different from the Dominican upbringing of the great Rhineland mystics of the same period: Eckhart, Suso, and Tauler (although it remains possible that Ruusbroec received some education from the Brussels Franciscan convent). The second chapter examines Ruusbroec’s sources in the composition of The Spiritual Espousals, generally considered his capolavoro—especially fine is Warnar’s discussion of Ruusbroec’s debt to Hadewijch and his relationship to beguine spirituality (72–77).

Chapter 3 explores Ruusbroec’s identity as an auctor. Between Marguerite Porete’s 1310 execution in Paris and Meister Eckhart’s 1329 condemnation, Ruusbroec had every reason to be cautious about his vernacular authorship: like his near-contemporary Henry Suso, he took pains to create “authorized” manuscripts of his work and discourage its premature circulation and prohibited the copying of what he might have considered his juvenilia. Careful about his own orthodoxy, he was equally swift to point out possible heterodoxy in his contemporaries: in On the Spiritual Tabernacle, for instance, “he interpreted the characteristics of twenty species of birds in terms of heretical phenomena” (149).

Finally, in chapter 4, we reach Groenendaal, the wooded retreat just outside Brussels that Ruusbroec founded in 1345, where he would spend the rest of his life (the primary source for biographical information about Ruusbroec, the De origine of Pomerius, relates that this in part resulted from the loud, out-of-tune singing of...