A Letter to the Brothers in Herne
This is a short letter of spiritual counsel from Jan van Ruusbroec, prior of the Augustinian community at Groenendaal in the Sonian Forest outside Brussels, to the Carthusian monks of Herne (Hérinnes) in Brabant. It belongs to the small surviving group of Ruusbroec's letters, none of them treatises, all of them written into specific relationships. The Herne charterhouse was among the most important of those relationships: its monks copied and circulated his Dutch writings, and it was their questions about his language of union with God "without difference" in The Spiritual Espousals that brought Ruusbroec to Herne in person and eventually produced his Little Book of Clarification. Brother Gerard of Saintes, a monk of the house, wrote the prologue that remains the earliest account of Ruusbroec's life. The letter is thus a fragment of a sustained friendship between a canon and a community of hermits who took his work seriously enough to press him on it.
What the letter does is compress the whole of Ruusbroec's teaching into exhortation. Because he is writing to men already bound by a rule, he does not prescribe practices; he addresses the interior temper a life of enclosure requires. The counsel turns on his characteristic insistence that the ascent to God is not a ladder one climbs and then possesses. Grace flows out from God and the creature must flow back in love, and the flowing back is never finished. Detachment from one's own will, humility that does not measure its own progress, charity toward the brother in the next cell — these are not preliminaries to contemplation but its substance. The letter carries the same warning that runs through his major works against a false rest, an interior emptiness cultivated for its own sweetness, which mistakes the quiet of nature for the presence of God. Union is a gift, and it does not dissolve the one who receives it.
Ruusbroec's longer works are demanding, architecturally intricate, and easy to lose one's way in. The letters show the same mind working at pastoral scale, and they demonstrate that the boldest speculative mystic of the Low Countries understood himself first as a director of souls. For readers of the Rhineland and Flemish tradition, the letter is also evidence of how mystical writing actually traveled in the fourteenth century — hand to hand, through monastic scriptoria, under the scrutiny of careful readers.
Who should read this: anyone approaching Ruusbroec for the first time who wants his voice before his system, and readers interested in how contemplative teaching was transmitted between medieval religious houses. Not for those seeking biography, historical narrative, or a systematic account of Ruusbroec's trinitarian mysticism — for that, go to The Spiritual Espousals and the Little Book of Clarification.