The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage · 102 of 131

The Sparkling Stone: Prologue

HERE ENDS THE BOOK OF THE ADORNMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL MARRIAGE

THE SPARKLING STONE

PROLOGUE

The man who would live in the most perfect state of Holy Church must be a good and zealous man; an inward and ghostly man; an uplifted and God-seeing man; and an outflowing man to all in common. Whenever these four things are together in a man, then his state is perfect; and through the increase of grace he shall continually grow and progress in all virtues, and in the knowledge of truth, before God and before all men.

Context

Book II of The Adornment ends here, and what follows is The Sparkling Stone (Vanden blickenden steen), a separate but closely related treatise that Ruysbroeck wrote to expound the same teaching in a different key. Editorial tradition usually presents the two as a single work because the architecture — three states (good / inward / God-seeing), three unions (with means / without means / without distinction) — runs continuously across them. Read the Sparkling Stone as a more concentrated, more systematic restatement of the same map, with sharper attention to the question of how the four levels of human spiritual life (sinner, hireling, faithful servant, secret friend, hidden son) are distinguished.On Ruysbroeck's compositional sequence and the relation of Adornment to Sparkling Stone see the introduction to the Standaard editie of his works, J. Alaerts, ed., Opera omnia (Brepols, 1981-).