Jan van Ruysbroeck 
The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage 

’The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage’ was written some time around 1350, not long after Flemish mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck moved to a small hermitage out in the country, where he wandered the woods and wrote as the Holy Ghost inspired him.



’The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage’ contains three of Jan van Ruysbroeck’s best works:
The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage,
The Sparkling Stone, and
The Book of Truth. These works are remarkable for their combination of lofty spiritual philosophy and robust common sense. As we read them, we feel that we are in touch with a man who, in his ecstatic ascents to God, never loses hold of the actualities of human life. In the
Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, he traces the gradual development of the soul through the active life of Christian virtue, the interior life of contemplation, and the super essential life of union with God.
The Sparkling Stone further elaborates on some of the more difficult passages in
The Adornment, and
The Book of Truth was written as a refutation of the accusation that van Ruysbroeck’s work supported a pantheistic and heretical view of the union of the soul with God.