Groenendaal Priory

Groenendaal Priory was a rural community of hermits where John of Ruusbroec spent the final thirty-eight years of his life as prior. Its importance lay both in its withdrawal from the distractions of the city and in the community it made possible: a shared religious life that protected time for solitude, spiritual practice, and writing without making the hermitage a model everyone was expected to follow.

From City Ministry to Rural Community

John of Ruusbroec was born in 1293 in a village south of Brussels. Sent to the city at eleven to be educated by an uncle who was a priest, he was ordained at twenty-four and served for twenty-six years as an assistant pastor at the church of St. Gudula, where his uncle was a canon. In 1343, he left Brussels with his uncle and another canon for an old hermitage at Groenendaal. The three began a community there that adopted the Rule of St. Augustine, and Ruusbroec became its prior.

The move answered a problem of place as well as vocation. The men considered the city too infused with materialistic values; continuing construction at St. Gudula’s brought noise and distraction, and Ruusbroec had found it difficult to develop a deep spiritual life in that environment. Groenendaal offered a different arrangement: the men lived together, but sought as much solitude as their shared community allowed. Ruusbroec could withdraw into the surrounding woods to meditate and write, then return to the community at the end of the day.

A Retreat in an Unsettled Age

The move to the countryside took place amid wider religious and social uncertainty. The papacy had moved from Rome to Avignon, and disputes and movements including the Franciscan Spirituals, the Beghards, and reborn Waldensians were part of the unsettled church landscape. War and plague added to the sense of instability. Against this background, the hermitage provided a more favorable setting for a deep spiritual life than the busy city could offer.

Groenendaal did not remain an isolated refuge for a small circle. Others joined the community, and the site became a place of pilgrimage. A biography written by Henry Pomerius about forty years after Ruusbroec’s death records visitors arriving from across Europe to consult him. Among them was Geert Groote, founder of the Brothers of the Common Life, a movement associated with the widely read medieval book The Imitation of Christ, usually attributed to Thomas à Kempis. The priory’s withdrawal from urban life thus also drew people toward it: solitude and consultation existed side by side.

Work, Writing, and Religious Disputes

Ruusbroec’s life at Groenendaal joined contemplative retreat to sustained literary work. Among the tasks he undertook there was writing on how a new community of Poor Clares, a women’s Franciscan order, should live in a convent. He worked on a wax tablet with a stylus, taking his writing into the woods when he wanted to be alone. The setting was not simply a backdrop; its alternation between withdrawal and return reflected the community’s practical balance between solitude and common life.

Ruusbroec wrote eleven books during his life, five of them while he was a priest in Brussels. At Groenendaal he completed The Spiritual Tabernacle and wrote The Seven Enclosures for Margaret of Meerbeke of the Poor Clares. His major work, The Spiritual Espousals, develops his mystical theology through the scriptural image of the bridegroom’s arrival. The Sparkling Stone offers a more concise and accessible account of his thought. Other works addressed the Eucharist, Christian teaching, and the spiritual life; The Mirror of Eternal Blessedness also criticized the Brothers of the Free Spirit, whose claims of perfect union with God were used to reject ordinary moral norms. Written in Flemish, Ruusbroec’s books were soon translated into German, carrying ideas formed in the priory beyond its walls.

A Place, Not a Universal Prescription

The community’s history gives physical form to a tension in Ruusbroec’s teaching: he had tried to cultivate an inner life while serving in a city, then withdrew with colleagues when its crowds, noise, and distractions became too much. Yet he did not argue that everyone should become a hermit. Whatever a person’s state in life, he taught, a deep inner life could begin with the practice of virtue. The meeting of a person and God belonged to love and to an inward transformation that could not be reduced to outward withdrawal.

Groenendaal Priory therefore mattered both as a particular refuge and as a setting for a broader invitation. Its wooded solitude enabled Ruusbroec to meditate and write, while its communal life and stream of visitors kept that solitude in relation to others. The site’s significance rests in this combination: retreat from the city’s distractions, disciplined life among fellow hermits, and work that urged readers beyond the priory to seek a deeper interior life wherever they lived.