Western Civilization.p

258 Chapter 14

literature. Manuals such as Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfec-
tionbecame extremely popular with lay people and
were circulated in large numbers both before and after
the invention of printing.
Though mysticism was essentially private, it in-
fluenced the development of a powerful corporate
movement known as the Devotio Moderna,or modern de-
votion. Its founder was Gerhard Groote (1340–84) who
organized a community of religious women at Deventer
in the Netherlands. These Sisters of the Common Life
were laywomen, not nuns. They pledged themselves to a
communal life informed by contemplation but directed

toward service in the world. A parallel group for men,

the Brethren of the Common Life, was founded shortly

thereafter by Groote’s disciple Florens Radewijns. These

two groups, together with the Augustinian Canons of

the Windesheim Congregation, a fully monastic order

also founded by Radewijns, formed the nucleus of a

movement that spread rapidly through the Low Coun-

tries and western Germany. Catholic, but highly critical

of the clergy, it emphasized charitable works, private de-

votion, and its own form of education. The goal of its

adherents was the imitation of Christ. A book titled The

Imitation of Christby one of the Brethren, Thomas à Kem-

pis, was a best-seller until well into the twentieth century

and did much to popularize a style of piety that was the

opposite of contractualism.

The Heretics: Wycliffe and Hus

Other religious movements were less innocent, at least

from the perspective of the church. Full-scale heresies

emerged in England and Bohemia in response to the

teachings of John Wycliffe (1330–84) and Jan Hus

(c. 1372–1415). Wycliffe was a successful teacher of

theology at Oxford who became involved with politics

during the 1370s. England was attempting to follow the

French lead in restricting papal rights of appointment

and taxation, and Wycliffe became the chief spokesman

for the anticlerical views of Edward III’s son, John of

Gaunt. At first Wycliffe restricted himself to the tradi-

tional arguments in favor of clerical poverty, but as his

views began to attract criticism and as he came to real-

ize that his personal ambitions would not be fulfilled,

he drifted further into radicalism. In his last years, he

rejected papal authority and declared that the Bible was

the sole source of religious truth. Strongly influenced

by St. Augustine and committed to an extreme form of

philosophical realism, he supported predestination and

ended by rejecting transubstantiation because it in-

volved what he saw as the annihilation of the substance

of the bread and wine. In his view, substance was by de-

finition unchangeable, and the miracle of the mass was

therefore an impossibility. This was heresy, as was his

revival of the ancient Donatist idea that the value of the

sacraments depended upon the personal virtue of the

priest who administered them.

Though John of Gaunt discretely withdrew his sup-

port, Wycliffe died before the church could bring him

to trial. By this time his ideas and the extraordinary vio-

lence of his attacks on the clergy had begun to attract

popular attention. His followers, the Lollards, produced

DOCUMENT 14.2

The Mystic Experience

In this passage Jan van Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) attempts

to capture the sense of unity with God that was at least one of

the late medieval mystic’s primary goals. In the process he

demonstrates both the late medieval desire to experience God

without intermediaries and the mystic’s postscholastic convic-

tion that reason is an obstacle to faith.

And after this, there follows the third way of feel-

ing: namely, that we feel ourselves to be one with

God; for through the transformation in God, we

feel ourselves to be swallowed up in the fathomless

abyss of our eternal blessedness, wherein we can

nevermore find any distinction between ourselves

and God. And this is our highest feeling, which we

cannot experience in any other way than in the

immersion in love. And therefore, so soon as we

are uplifted and drawn into our highest feeling, all

our powers stand idle in an essential fruition; but

our powers do not pass away into nothingness, for

then we should lose our created being. And as long

as we stand idle, with an inclined spirit, and with

open eyes, but without reflection, so long can we

contemplate and have fruition. But, at the very

moment in which we seek to prove and to compre-

hend what it is that we feel, we fall back into rea-

son, and there we find a distinction and an

otherness between ourselves and God, and find

God outside ourselves in incomprehensibility.

Ruysbroeck, Jan van. “The Sparkling Stone,” trans. C.A.

Wynschenck Dom. In E. Underhill, ed., Jan van Ruysbroeck.

London: Dent, 1916.