The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love

One of the shorter treatises of Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381), the Brabantine mystic who spent some twenty-five years as a chaplain at the collegiate church of St. Gudula in Brussels before withdrawing in 1343 to the forest of Groenendaal, where he became prior of a community of Augustinian canons. Its date of composition is not established. Like everything Ruusbroec wrote, it is in Dutch rather than Latin, composed for readers under vows and for devout laypeople who could not read the schools' language but were being told, by preachers of the Free Spirit and by their own inclinations, that the soul arrived at God might leave virtue, obedience, and self-denial behind. The ladder image is Ruusbroec's answer to that: a height reached by rungs, none of which can be kicked away once climbed.

The seven steps run from a will wholly conformed to God's, through voluntary poverty, purity of body and spirit, and humility, into a burning desire for God's glory, then into a contemplative clarity in which the soul sees by divine light rather than its own reasoning. The seventh Ruusbroec declines to name. It is the fruition of God beyond image, mode, and understanding, and he says plainly that no tongue can teach it and that its full possession belongs to eternal life. The structure carries the argument. Ascent for Ruusbroec is not escape from the lower rungs but their deepening; the contemplative who has been drawn into the divine unity is more obedient, not less, more free of possessions, more chaste, more emptied of self-regard. Where a spiritualist reading would treat interior union as the abolition of moral form, Ruusbroec treats moral form as what union looks like from outside. He is equally firm that the highest state is received, not achieved, and that anyone who claims to have arrived at rest without love's labor has mistaken idleness for God.

The treatise has lasted because it is Ruusbroec at his most compact and most teachable. His larger works, above all The Spiritual Espousals, drew suspicion of pantheism in the fifteenth century from Jean Gerson; the ladder form here makes visible the ascetic and ecclesial scaffolding that his critics missed. It also served as a bridge text into the Devotio Moderna and, through later translation, into the wider European contemplative tradition.

Who should read this: anyone wanting a short, disciplined entry into Ruusbroec before attempting the Espousals, and anyone tempted to treat contemplative experience as a graduation from ordinary obedience. Spiritual directors will find it useful for diagnosis. It is not for readers seeking narrative, biography, or psychological interpretation of mystical states, and not for those who will not tolerate a frank medieval insistence on poverty, chastity, and self-abnegation as the ladder's lower rungs.