The Christian Faith

The Christian Faith (Van den kerstenen ghelove) is a short treatise by Jan van Ruusbroec, the fourteenth-century Brabantine priest who served for decades as a chaplain at St. Gudula in Brussels before withdrawing with two companions to the forest of Soignes, where the community at Groenendaal took up the Augustinian rule and Ruusbroec became its prior. He wrote everything in Middle Dutch rather than Latin, a decision that put his teaching within reach of readers outside the schools. Most of his eleven works address souls already well advanced in the interior life. This one does not. It is an exposition of the Apostles' Creed, the plainest and most elementary thing he wrote, and its date is unknown.

Ruusbroec proceeds through the articles of the Creed in order, following the traditional division that assigns them to the twelve apostles, and organizes them around the three divine Persons. He explains what each article asserts and what it requires of the one who confesses it. The tone is instructional rather than rapturous; there is little here of the vocabulary of union, the wayless abyss, or the common life that makes his major treatises both famous and difficult. What the work does establish is the conviction that runs beneath all of his writing: that faith is not a beginner's stage to be transcended by experience, but the permanent ground on which the whole ascent stands. The contemplative does not eventually see something other than what the Creed confesses. He sees, without mediation, exactly what he had believed. This makes the treatise a corrective aimed inward at his own tradition — Ruusbroec spent considerable energy elsewhere attacking those who claimed a freedom of spirit above doctrine and above the sacraments, and this small catechetical work quietly denies them their premise by refusing to separate the articles of belief from the goal of the interior life.

It has continued to matter for two reasons. It is the shortest available door into one of the most demanding mystical writers in the Western tradition, and it demonstrates that his mysticism was doctrinally furnished rather than free-floating — a point that has been argued about Ruusbroec since the fifteenth century, when Jean Gerson raised suspicions about his orthodoxy.

Who should read this: anyone approaching Ruusbroec for the first time, and anyone who suspects that contemplative writing and creedal instruction belong to separate compartments. It is not the place to find his mature teaching on union with God — for that, go to The Spiritual Espousals — and readers already fluent in the Creed may find little here they did not know.