The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage

...Plato could have written. There was no order in his writings, he claimed, and all scholastic logic the formal philosophical and logical system taught in medieval European universities was missing. It was absolutely necessary to honestly warn the sluggish who were about to set foot upon the steps of this "temple without architecture." The first twenty chapters, even if perhaps necessary as an introduction, contained only overly sweet, sanctimonious platitudes... ❦ I kept the book until 1894, then I had to return it to the friend who had lent it to me, and with that, Ruysbroeck almost completely disappeared from my horizon. I did read around 1912 that the Benedictine Abbey of Wisques-Oosterhout was preparing a French edition and Dr. H. Moller a Dutch edition of the works of the Blessed original: "des Seligen"; a title for a person who has been beatified by the Church, but I did not learn that Fr. A. Lambert had already published a German translation of three of Ruysbroeck's writings, including "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage," in the year 1903. ❦ When I stayed in my fatherland the Netherlands for a few weeks in 1917, I found a beautifully produced, thick book at a clergyman's house in Delft with the inscription: Jan van Ruusbroec, the Admirable, Volume I original: "de Wonderbare"; this refers to Ruysbroeck's traditional epithet, "the Admirable". It was the first volume of the planned Dutch edition of Ruysbroeck’s works. I borrowed the book and now, after twenty-five years, read a portion of "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage" once again. This time I understood much more of it, and the feeling of strengthening and nourishment after the reading was even stronger than before. Having returned to Beuron Abbey a famous Benedictine monastery in Germany known for its scholarship and art, I spoke to a Germanist a scholar of Germanic languages and literature who loved Ruysbroeck very much about that Dutch edition. He asked me,