258 Chapter 14literature. 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, producedDOCUMENT 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.