To speak of Ruysbroeck, as some enthusiastic biographers have done, as an isolated spiritual phenomenon totally unrelated to the life of his time, an ‘ignorant monk’ whose profound knowledge of reality is entirely the result of personal inspiration and independent of human history, is to misunderstand his greatness. The ‘ignorant monk’ was bound by close links to the religious life of his day. He was no spiritual individualist; but the humble, obedient child of an institution, the loyal member of a Society. He tells us again and again that his spiritual powers were nourished by the sacramental life of the Catholic Church. From the theologians of that Church came the intellectual framework in which his sublime intuitions were expressed. All that he does—though he does this to a degree perhaps unique in Christian history—is to carry out into action, completely actualise in his own experience, the high vision of the soul’s relation to Divine Reality by which that Church is possessed. The central Christian doctrine of Divine Fatherhood, and of the soul’s ‘power to become the son of God’: it is this, raised to the _n_th degree of intensity, experienced in all its depth and fullness, and demonstrated with the exactitude of a mathematician and the passion of a poet, which Ruysbroeck gives us. Thus tradition and authority, no less than the abundant inspiration, the direct ecstatic knowledge of God to which his writings bear witness, have their part in his achievement. His theological culture was wide and deep. Not only the Scriptures and the Liturgy, but St. Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, Richard of St. Victor, St. Bernard, St. Bonaventura, St. Thomas Aquinas, and many others have stimulated and controlled his thought; interpreting to him his ineffable adventures, and providing him with vessels in which the fruit of those adventures could be communicated to other men.