The Kingdom of the Lovers of God
Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381) spent some twenty-six years as a chaplain at the collegiate church of St. Gudula in Brussels before withdrawing in 1343 to the forest of Soignes at Groenendaal, where the men who gathered around him eventually became a house of canons regular. This treatise, written in Middle Dutch as "Dat rijcke der ghelieven," is traditionally identified as the earliest of his works, composed during the Brussels years. It also has the distinction of being the one book he wished had never left his hands. Brother Gerard of Herne, who compiled the earliest collection of Ruusbroec's writings and prefaced it with a prologue drawn from conversation with him, records that the manuscript was copied and circulated without the author's knowledge and that Ruusbroec was displeased enough to say he would rather have destroyed it. The complaint was about form, not doctrine: the book is crowded, schematic, and unrelentingly ambitious.
Its governing image is a kingdom. Taking up the scriptural declaration that the Lord is righteous and has loved righteousness, Ruusbroec treats the soul as a realm to be rightly ordered under God, and then builds an elaborate architecture for that ordering out of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, each gift opening a further degree of interior life. The ascent moves from the moral and sacramental grounding of the Christian life, through the interior exercises of desire, longing, and virtue, into contemplative fruition where images fall away and the soul rests in the divine unity. Underneath the scaffolding lies the doctrine that would organize everything Ruusbroec later wrote: that the soul possesses an eternal image in God, that grace draws it back along the way it came, and that the highest union is genuinely union without ever dissolving the distinction between Creator and creature. He is already guarding that last point carefully, against those who read mystical rest as license or as absorption.
The treatise matters chiefly as the workshop in which Ruusbroec's mature theology was assembled. Read alongside The Spiritual Espousals, it shows what he kept, what he simplified, and how much interpretive apparatus he learned to leave out. It also carries the interest of any first book by a major writer: the ambition is unguarded and the sources of his thought sit closer to the surface. Through Laurentius Surius's sixteenth-century Latin translation, Ruusbroec's teaching reached readers across Catholic Europe and shaped currents of spiritual writing well beyond the Low Countries.
Who should read this: readers already acquainted with Ruusbroec who want to see his system in its first form, and students of medieval mystical theology tracing the vernacular achievement of the fourteenth century. It is not the place to begin with him — newcomers should start with The Spiritual Espousals or The Sparkling Stone — and readers seeking devotional simplicity will find the sevenfold scaffolding more taxing than nourishing.