John Ruysbroeck: Spirit

John Ruysbroeck was Flemish mystic. Explore interesting quotes on spirit.
John Ruysbroeck: 180   quotes 3   likes

“This is that Wayless Being which all fervent interior spirits have chosen above all things, that dark stillness in which all lovers lose their way.”

John Ruysbroeck

If we could prepare ourselves through virtue in the ways I have shown, we would at once strip ourselves of our bodies and flow into the wild waves of the Sea, from which no creature could ever draw us back.
The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Way , Lovers

“For all spirits thus raised up melt away and are annihilated by reason of enjoyment in God’s essence which is the superessence of all essence”

John Ruysbroeck

The Little Book of Enlightenment (c. 1364)
Context: See, here the beatitude is so simple And so without mode that therein all essential gazing, Inclination and distinction of creatures Pass away. For all spirits thus raised up melt away and are annihilated by reason of enjoyment in God’s essence which is the superessence of all essence. There they fall away from themselves and are lost in a bottomless unknowing. There all clarity is turned back to darkness, there where the three Persons give way to the essential unity and without distinction enjoy essential beatitude.

God

“See, this hidden brightness in which one contemplates everything that one desires according to the way of emptiness of spirit, this brightness is so great that the loving contemplative neither sees nor feels anything in his ground in which he rests except an incomprehensible light. And according to the simple bareness which encompasses all things, he finds and feels himself to be that very light by which he sees, and nothing else.”

John Ruysbroeck

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Love , Way , Feeling , Light

“These same interior, enlightened persons Have the love of God before them in their inward vision Whenever they want, as drawing or calling in towards unity. For they see and feel that the Father with the Son by means of the Holy Spirit stand embraced with all the elect and are brought back with eternal love into the unity of their nature. This unity is constantly drawing or calling in all that has been born out of it naturally or by grace. And therefore these enlightened people are lifted up with free mind above reason to a bare vision devoid of images (The imageless place of spirit vision). There lives the eternal invitation of God’s unity, and with imageless naked understanding they go beyond all works and all practices and all things to the summit of their spirit. There their naked understanding is penetrated with eternal clarity as the air is penetrated by the light of the sun. The bare elevated will is transformed and penetrated with fathomless love just as iron is penetrated by the fire. And the bare elevated memory finds itself caught and established In a fathomless absence of images. Thus the created image is united threefold wise above reason to its eternal image, Which is the source of its being and of its life.”

John Ruysbroeck

The Little Book of Enlightenment (c. 1364)

Love , Life , God , People

“For the divine Persons embrace mutually in eternal complacency With an infinite and active love in unity. This activity is constantly renewed in the living life of the Trinity. There is continuous new birth-giving in new knowledge, new complacency and new breathing forth of the Spirit in a new embrace with a new torrent of eternal love. All the elect, angels and men from the last to the first are embraced in this complacency. It is in this complacency that heaven and earth are suspended, existence, life activity and maintenance of all creatures.”

John Ruysbroeck

The Little Book of Enlightenment (c. 1364)

Love , Life , Men , Angels

“The Spirit of God now speaks within our own spirit in its hidden immersion: ‘Go out, into a state of eternal contemplation and blissful enjoyment after God’s own manner.’ All the richness which is in God by nature is something which we lovingly possess in God –and God in us– through the infinite love which is the Holy Spirit... There the spirit is caught up in the embrace of the Holy Trinity and eternally abides within the superessential Unity in a state of rest and blissful enjoyment. In this same Unity, considered now as regards its fruitfulness, the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father, while all creatures are in them both.”

John Ruysbroeck

James A. Wiseman, Jan Van Ruusbroec (Classics of Western spirituality, 1985), p. 148
The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Love , God , Nature

“There, the Father with the Son and all the beloved are enfolded and embraced in the bond of love, that is to say, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. It is this same unity, which is fruitful according to the bursting-out of the Persons and in the return, an eternal bond of love, which can nevermore be united. And all those who know themselves to be bound therein must remain eternally blissful. They are all rich in virtues and enlightened in contemplation and simple where they rest enjoyably, for in their turning-in, the love of God reveals itself as flowing out with all good and drawing in into unity and is superessential and without mode (method or system) in an eternal repose. And so they are united to God, by intermediary, without intermediary, and also without difference.”

John Ruysbroeck

The Little Book of Enlightenment (c. 1364)

Love , God , Drawing , Personality

“And there you In a new embrace, with a new torrent of eternal love: all the elect, angels and men, from the last to the first are embraced It is a living and fruitful unity, which is the source and the fount of all life All creatures are there without themselves as in their eternal origin, One essence and one life with God These enlightened people are lifted up with free mind above reason…To the summit of their spirit Their naked understanding is penetrated with eternal clarity as the air is penetrated by the light of the sun. The bare elevated will is transformed and penetrated with fathomless love, just as iron is penetrated by the fire [God] gives Himself in the soul’s essence…Where the soul’s powers are unified…And undergo God’s transformation in simplicity. In this place all is full and overflowing, for the spirit feels itself as one truth and one richness. And one unity with God All spirits thus raised up Melt away and are annihilated by reason of enjoyment in God’s essence They fall away from themselves and are lost in a bottomless unknowingWith God they will ebb and flow, and will always be in repose…They are drunk with love and have passed away into God in a dark luminosity must accept that the Persons yield and lose themselves whirling in essential love, that is, in enjoyable unity; nevertheless, they always remain according to their personal properties In the working of the Trinity. You may thus understand that the divine nature is eternally at rest and without mode according to the simplicity of its essence. It is why all that God has chosen and enfolded with eternal personal love, he has possessed essentially, enjoyably in unity, with essential love.”

John Ruysbroeck

The Little Book of Enlightenment (c. 1364)

Love , Life , Men , God

“When we soar up above ourselves, And become, in our upward striving towards God, So simple, that the naked Love in the Heights can lay hold on us, There where Love cherishes Love, above all activity and all virtue (That is to say, in our Origin, wherefrom we are spiritually born)— Then we cease, and we and all that is our own die into God. And in this death we become hidden Sons of God, and find in ourselves a new life, And that is Eternal Life. And of these Sons, St. Paul says: ‘Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.’ In our approach to God we must bear with us ourselves and all that we do, As a perpetual sacrifice to God; And in the Presence of God we must leave ourselves and all our works, And, dying in love, soar up above all created things into the Superessential Kingdom of God.
And of this the Spirit of God speaks in the Book of Hidden Things, saying: ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.”

John Ruysbroeck

From Evelyn Underhill Ruysbroeck (1915), p171
The Sparkling Stone (c. 1340)

Love , Life , Death , God

“AND thus the Fourth Mode is a state of emptiness,
made one with God in bare love and in Divine Light,
free and empty of all the observances of love,
above actions, and enduring a pure and simple love,
which consumes and annihilates in itself the spirit of a man,
so that he forgets himself, and knows neither himself nor God,
nor any creature, nor aught else but Love alone,
which he tastes and feels and possesses in simple emptiness.
He feels himself one Breadth with Love, Which is measureless, comprehending all things,
and Itself for ever remaining incomprehensible.
He sees himself made one with the eternal Length,
which is immovable, without beginning or ending,
going before and following after all created things”

John Ruysbroeck

The Twelve Beguines

Love , God , Feeling , Light

“Next follows the seventh step, the noblest and most elevated that it is possible to realize in the life of time or eternity. It is attained when, above all knowledge and science, we find within us a limitless ignorance; when, passing beyond every name given to God or creatures we expire and pass to an eternal Unnamable where we are lost; when, further than any practice of Virtue, we contemplate and discover within us everlasting Repose, or immeasurable Beatitude where none can act; when we contemplate above all blessed Spirits an essential Beatitude where all are one, melted, lost, in their Superessence in the bosom of a darkness defying all determination or knowledge.”

John Ruysbroeck

Source: The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, p. 151-2

Life , God , Knowledge , Science

“See, the bliss and the joy which this Bridegroom brings in His coming are fathomless and incommensurable, for He Himself is that bliss and joy. And therefore, the eyes with which the spirit contemplates and gazes upon its Bridegroom are so widely dilated that they will never again be closed. For the gazing and contemplation of the spirit remain eternally fixed on the hidden revelation of God, and the comprehension of the spirit is so widely dilated for the coming of the Bridegroom that the spirit itself has become the wideness which it apprehends. And so God is apprehended and seen with God; in this all our blessedness resides.”

John Ruysbroeck

Wim van den Dungen, The Spiritual Espousals, Book 3, The Third Life: the contemplative life (2013)
The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

God , Joy

“This possession is a simple and abysmal tasting of all good and of eternal life; and in this tasting we are swallowed up above reason and without reason, in the deep Quiet of the Godhead, which is never moved…And therefrom follows the last point that can be put into words, that is, when the spirit beholds a Darkness into which it cannot enter with the reason. And there it feels itself dead and lost to itself, and one with God without difference and without distinction.”

John Ruysbroeck

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Life , God , Feeling , Dead

“To comprehend and to understand God above all similitudes, as He is in Himself, is to be God with God, without intermediary, and without any otherness that can become a hindrance or an intermediary. Whosoever wishes to understand this must have died to himself, and must live in God, and must turn his gaze to the eternal light in the ground of his spirit, where the Hidden Truth reveals Itself without means.”

John Ruysbroeck

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

God , Truth , Understanding , Light

“And this divine light is granted in the simple being of the spirit, where the spirit receives the brightness –which is God Himself- above all gifts and above all creaturely activity, in the empty void of the spirit in which it has lost itself through enjoyable love and receives the brightness of God without intermediary. And without cease, it becomes the very brightness which it receives.”

John Ruysbroeck

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Love , God , Light

“But yet another thing is necessary, Purity of spirit; for an intelligence in repose without images, an intuition in the light of God, and a spirit elevated in Purity to the Face of God, these three qualities united constitute the true contemplative life, where none can err; for the pure spirit expands ceaselessly and follows rapidly in purified love, the enlightened intelligence towards its Cause.”

John Ruysbroeck

Source: The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, p. 150

Love , Life , God , Intelligence

“The Will of God, which is free - indeed freedom When in the inmost Being the Soul follows the Divine drawing and gives itself up freely to the Spirit of God, it tastes infinite happiness impossible to comprehend, in which the whole being dissolves itself - takes from us the spirit of fear and makes us free, disengaged from and emptied of self, and of every fear that might oppress us in time or eternity.”

John Ruysbroeck

Source: The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, p. 72

God , Fear , Soul , Freedom

“Thirdly, he must have lost himself in a waylessness and in a darkness in which all contemplatives wander around in enjoyment and can no longer find themselves in a creaturely way. In the abyss of this darkness in which the loving spirit has died to itself, there begin the revelation of God and eternal life. For in this darkness there shines and is born an incomprehensible light which is the Son of God, in whom one contemplates eternal life. And in this light one becomes seeing.”

John Ruysbroeck

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Love , Life , God , Way

“This contemplation establishes us in purity and in limpidity above all our understanding, for it is a special enrichment and a heavenly crown, and in addition, an eternal reward for all virtues and for all lives. And no one can arrive at this by means of science or subtlety, nor by any practice, but only he whom God wishes to unite with His Spirit and to illumine with Himself may contemplate God, and nobody else. The hidden divine nature is eternally active, contemplating and loving with respect to each person, and always enjoying the embrace with each person, in unity of essence.”

John Ruysbroeck

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Love , God , Understanding , Nature

“And this is without time, that is to say, without before or after in an eternal present, for in the embrace in unity all things have been consummated. And in the out-flowing of love all things are being achieved. And in the living fruitful nature all things have the potentiality to occur, for in the living fruitful nature the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son, and the Holy Spirit in them both. For it is a living and fruitful unity which is the source And the fount of all life.”

John Ruysbroeck

The Little Book of Enlightenment (c. 1364)

Love , Life , Nature , Time