Pomerius was no wild romancer, but a reasonably careful as well as a genuinely enthusiastic monastic chronicler. Moderation is hardly the outstanding virtue of such home-made lives of monastic founders. They are inevitably composed in surroundings where any criticism of their subject or scepticism as to his supernatural peculiarities is looked upon as a crime; where every incident has been fitted with a halo, and the unexplained is indistinguishable from the miraculous. Nevertheless the picture drawn by Pomerius—exaggerated though it be in certain respects—is a human picture; possessed of distinct characteristics, some natural and charming, some deeply impressive. It is completed by a second documentary source: the little sketch by Ruysbroeck’s intimate friend, Gerard Naghel, Prior of the Carthusian monastery of Hérines near Groenendael, which forms the prologue to our most complete MS. collection of his writings. Ruysbroeck’s life, as it is shown to us by Pomerius and Gerard, falls into three main divisions, three stages of ascent: the natural active life of boyhood; the contemplative, disciplined career of his middle period; the superessential life of supreme union which governed his existence at Groenendael. This course, which he trod in the temporal order, seems like the rough sketch of that other course trodden by the advancing soul within the eternal order—the Threefold Life of man which he describes to us in _The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage_ and other of his works.