Rouge Cloître

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It was Ruysbroek's custom to write as he walked in the forest, and one day having prolonged his ramble beyond his wont, the monks grew alarmed and dispatched one of their number to search for him, and presently this man discovered the Prior of Groenendael. He was seated beneath a linden tree with his tablets in his hand, and he was surrounded with rays of light. Perhaps the sun had suddenly pierced through a dark cloud, but the picture is none the less a pleasing one, and it shows in what estimation Jan Ruysbroek was held by his spiritual sons. Nor was it only in his own cloister or in his native land that Ruysbroek was regarded as a saint. In Germany, in Flanders, in Holland, wherever his books were read, his name was held in veneration, and Groenendael was constantly besieged by pilgrims, many of them from distant lands, who had come there for no other reason than to hold converse with its prior. Nor was his head turned by so much adulation. To the end of his days he remained the humble, gentle, unassuming priest he had been in the days when he was an unknown Brussels curate, and it was ever his delight to perform the most menial offices in his priory.

He died on the night of the 2nd of December 1381, in the eighty-ninth year of his age, and 'on that night,' note the chroniclers of Groenendael, 'the bells of the Church of Deventer, where dwelt his friend Geert Groote, were solemnly tolled for him by invisible hands, and another friend and disciple, the Dean of Saint Sulpice at Diest, dreamed that his soul had passed from this world, and after remaining in purgatory half an hour, was carried by angels to heaven'; and they also tell us that fifty years after his death, his body having been disinterred, was found to be still incorrupt, and that it was exposed in the cloister of Groenendael for three days and seen by thousands of people. Strange stories these, typical of the age in which they were first told.

The literary and religious revival which Jan Ruysbroek had inaugurated did not die with him. The brethren of Groenendael and of the neighbouring monasteries at Rouge Cloître and Sept Fontaines continued to busy themselves with spiritual writings, which were largely read by the people, and amongst which may be found the flower of Flemish literature of the end of the Middle Age; and Geert Groote, the most famous of Ruysbroek's immediate disciples, in founding shortly before Ruysbroek's death the congregation of the Brethren of the Common Life, had placed at the disposal of fourteenth-century mysticism an organisation no less active than the Béguinage had been two hundred years before. Groote, who belonged to a rich burgher family, was born in the year 1340 at Deventer in Holland. Having read at Cologne, at Paris, at Prague, he took orders and soon obtained preferment. But his relations with the Gottesfreunde of Cologne and, too, the books of Ruysbroek—it was not till later on that he became personally acquainted with their author—gradually inclined him to mysticism, and on his recovery from a dangerous illness in 1373 he resigned his rich livings, bestowed the greater portion of his patrimony on the Carthusians of Arnheim, and bade farewell to the world. For a time he lived in strict seclusion, devoting himself wholly to meditation and to books, and it seems to have been during this period that he made the acquaintance of Ruysbroek. But for a man of Geert's exuberant energy a hermit's life was impossible: he had found a pearl of great price and he yearned to make it known. Moreover, he was consumed with indignation at the worldliness of the Church, and presently he was wandering from village to village and town to town calling men to repentance, proclaiming the beauty of Divine love, and bewailing wherever he went the decadence of ecclesiastical discipline and the degradation of the clergy. The effect of his preaching was marvellous; thousands hung on his lips; the towns, says Moll, were filled with devotees; you might know them by their silence, their ecstasies during Mass, their mean clothes, their brilliant eyes full of sweetness. From amongst these a little band attached themselves to Groote, and became his fellow-workers—they were the first 'Brethren of the Common Life.' Of course the reformer was opposed by the clerks whose evil lives he denounced, but the cry of heresy was vainly raised against a man no less zealous for purity of faith than he was for purity of morals, and whose success in combating error had gained for him the surname of Malleus Hereticorum. The best of the secular clergy, to escape the contagion of the prevalent disorders, sought refuge within the ranks of his society, which in due course was approved by the Holy See. Geert Groote, however, did not live long enough to perfect the work he had begun. He died in 1384, and his mantle fell on the shoulders of his henchman, Florence Radewyes. This man founded two years later the famous Augustinian monastery of Windesheim, which henceforth became the centre of Geert Groote's association, and to which later on Ruysbroek's houses were also affiliated.

The confraternity of the Common Life resembled in several respects the Béguinage and the Brotherhoods of Penance, now decadent. The members took no vows, neither asked nor received alms, and earned their daily bread; but their houses were more closely knit together, and brothers and sisters alike busied themselves exclusively with educational work and literature, and in the case of priests by preaching.

When Groote began his campaign learning was at a low ebb. The fame of the schools of Liége had long since become but a memory; save for a few clerks here and there who had read at Paris or Cologne, there were no scholars in the Netherlands; even amongst the higher clergy there were some who knew nothing of Latin, and the burgher was quite content if, when his children left school, they were able to read and write. Groote and his friends determined to change all this; their efforts were crowned with success, and success came quickly; the schools which the Brethren of the Common Life founded all over the land became so many ardent centres of spiritual and intellectual life. Amongst the famous men whom they educated, or who served in their ranks, note Thomas à Kempis, Gabriel Biel, and the Dutch Pope, Adrian VI.; in a word, a widespread literary and religious revival was the outcome of their endeavour, and it had not yet begun to wane in the days of Philippe l'Asseuré.

Such was the moral complexion of the Low Country when her art reached the acme of its magnificence, and what a marvellous conglomeration of anomalies and contradictions that moral complexion must have been—an inconsequent medley of coarseness and refinement, of luxury and restraint, of avarice and generosity, of cruelty and compassion, of heroic virtue and crying vice, and with it all a rampant spirit of vulgar commercialism, which somehow or other was not incompatible with the culture of literature and music and art, nor, stranger still, with a firm conviction of the reality of spiritual things.

The God whom the men of Brabant worshipped was no vague personification of nature or natural forces, no hazy abstract conception of righteousness, order, law, but a personal God, a living, loving, life-giving God, who was the founder and father and friend of the human race, the creator and master of heaven and earth, and of all things therein contained—almighty, eternal, immense, incomprehensible, infinite in intelligence, in will, and in all perfections. The saints whom they adored were no vague, shadowy heroes who lived only in the memory of the great things they had accomplished when they were on earth. They had passed through the valley of the shadow of death, but death had no dominion over them: their hand was not thereby shortened, they were still mighty to save. Nay, the virtue in them was now greater than it had been in the days of their sojourning: if by their charity and their sweetness they had then been able to soothe the sick and console the afflicted, they could now bestow health and joy. If they had then reclaimed the desert and taught the husbandman how to tend his flock and to handle his plough, they could now ward off pest and murrain and assure him a bountiful harvest. So great was their love for the children of earth that no request was too trifling to claim their attention, and such was the efficacy of their intercession that no boon was beyond their power to confer. They held the first place in the heavenly court, they were the ministers and the intimate friends of the Most High, and He delighted to manifest His glory in them. Even their bones, and the clothes that they had worn, and the things that they had touched, were believed to be endowed with miraculous powers. They were always close at hand, and sometimes when the days were evil and the people needed heartening, they appeared to them in visible form all glorious in shimmering raiment and attended by cohorts of angels.