Jan van Ruysbroeck – ‘THE BOOK OF SUPREME TRUTH’ – Chapter IV; OF THE MEN WHO PRACTISE A FALSE …
[BLESSED JAN VAN RUYSBROEK – XIII-XIV Century AD; Ruisbroek, Holy Roman Empire/ Groenendael, Holy Roman Empire; Mystic, Spiritual Writer, Doctor Divinus Ecstaticus]
Chapter IV - OF THE MEN WHO PRACTISE A FALSE VACANCY
“BEHOLD, such folk, by means of a onefold simplification and a natural tendency, are turned in upon the bareness of their own being; and therefore they think eternal life is and shall be nought else but an enduring state of beatitude, without distinction in order in holiness or in reward. Yea, all such are so deep in error that they say that the Persons shall pass away into the Godhead, and that nought else shall remain in eternity than the essential substance of the Godhead; and that all blessed spirits shall be so simply absorbed with God in the Essential Blessedness that nothing shall remain beside it, neither willing nor working, nor the discerning knowledge of any creature whatsoever. Behold, these men have gone astray into the vacant and blind simplicity of their …More
"Lo! this is a fruit of hell, which grows from their unbelief; and therewith shall unbelief be nourished even in death. For, when the time has come and their nature is weighed down with bitter woe and the sorrow of death, then they are filled with images and unrest and inward fear; and they lose their vacant introversion in quietude, and fall into such despair that none can console them, and they die like mad dogs."
"They practise the liberty of the flesh, for they give to the body whatsoever it lusts after; and this they take to be natural freedom. They have unified themselves in a blind and dark vacancy of their own being; and there, they think, they are one with God, and they take this for the Eternal Blessedness."