Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
Ruusbroec's Active Life
To build the moral foundation of the inner life: through honest self-knowledge, to convert pride into humility and disordered passions into ordered virtue, growing all of it from a first movement of ‘goodwill’ and conformity to Christ.
Ruusbroec’s active life in 5 lines: Begin from goodwill — a glad “yes” to the good, not gritted willpower. See yourself honestly: name your real besetting faults without contempt. Convert each into its virtue — pride into humility, anger into gentleness, grasping into patience. Take Christ (or your chosen pattern of love) as the model, and prove it in real works toward others. Examine daily; stay humble, neither proud nor despairing. This is the floor the inner life stands on.
What it is
Before any contemplation, Ruusbroec insists on a foundation: the active life, which he calls the “union with an intermediary” — the ordinary, virtuous, honest life lived in conformity to Christ and the moral law.
This is not a lesser consolation prize; for Ruusbroec it is the indispensable floor without which the inward and contemplative lives collapse into self-deception or quietist illusion. The work of the active life is twofold: honest self-knowledge (seeing your own pride, passions, and faults truthfully) and the ordering of the virtues (deliberately converting those disordered movements into humility, gentleness, patience, purity, and love).
Underhill describes the progression as starting “from the first impulse of ‘goodwill,’ of glad acquiescence,” and growing through disciplined virtue — taming pride into humility, insurgent passions into gentleness. It is character-work, grown not from grim willpower but from a warm initial “yes.”
The Method
From Book I of the Espousals, reconstructed as a daily practice:
- Begin from “goodwill” — a glad yes, not a clenched effort. Ruusbroec roots the whole active life in an initial movement of goodwill (goede wille): a free, glad acquiescence to the good, prompted by grace. Start each day by re-consenting to this — not “I must force myself to be good,” but “I gladly turn toward the good.” The warmth of the consent is the engine; willpower alone is not.
- Practise honest self-knowledge. Look truthfully at yourself. Ruusbroec (and the whole tradition after him) makes self-knowledge the gate: you cannot order what you will not see. Name your actual besetting movements — pride, anger, envy, sensuality, sloth — without flinching and without exaggerating. This is clear seeing, not self-flagellation.
- Convert each disordered movement into its ordered virtue. Ruusbroec teaches the active life as the active taming of the passions into virtues — “pride into humility, insurgent passions into gentleness.” Take what you saw in step 2 and deliberately practise its opposite: meet a flash of pride with a chosen act of humility; meet anger with gentleness; meet grasping with patience. The virtues he names as central are humility, obedience, patience, love, and purity. 4. Conform to Christ as the living pattern. Rather than abstract self-improvement, Ruusbroec sets a concrete model: shape the affections and actions in conformity to Christ — his humility, his service, his love. Ask, in a given situation, what that pattern would do, and lean the will that way.
- Engage outward works of love — don’t withdraw. Ruusbroec is emphatic that the active life means real charitable works and service to neighbour, plus participation in the ordinary means of grace (for him, Church and sacrament). The virtues are proved and grown in actual relationship and action, not in private resolve.
- Examine daily; keep the creature–Creator distinction. Close the day with honest review: where did goodwill hold, where did a disordered movement win, what to practise tomorrow. Ruusbroec carefully preserves the distinction between creature and Creator — you are ordering yourself toward the good, by grace, not collapsing into a claim of already-arrived perfection. This humility guards against both pride and despair. (Sourcing note: “union with an intermediary,” the centrality of self-knowledge and the named virtues (humility, obedience, patience, love, purity), the “goodwill / glad acquiescence” starting point, and “pride into humility, insurgent passions into gentleness” are documented from Ruusbroec/Underhill, attributed. Step structure is faithful reconstruction; the grace/Christ-conformity elements are his theology, reported as his.)
Source & Lineage
The active life opens The Spiritual Espousals as the first of three lives. Ruusbroec’s insistence that contemplation must rest on a moral floor is, in part, his polemic against the “Free Spirit” antinomians who claimed exalted union while abandoning virtue. → (Ruusbroec).
The pattern — self-knowledge → uprooting vice → cultivating virtue → conformity to Christ — runs through the Devotio Moderna (esp. à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ), the Ignatian Examen, and the broader ascetical tradition.
The Traditions' versions
Ignatian Examen — the daily structured review of consolation/desolation and faults; a direct descendant.
- à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ — conformity to Christ through self-knowledge and humility; same lineage.
- Stoic evening review (Seneca, Epictetus) — nightly self-examination of conduct and the deliberate practice of virtue.
- Buddhist śīla + the brahmavihāras — ethical foundation plus the cultivation of opposite wholesome states (e.g., loving-kindness against ill-will).
- CBT / values clarification + character-strengths work — naming maladaptive patterns and deliberately practising chosen alternative behaviours; gratitude/examination journaling.
Common refinements
Turning self-knowledge into self-attack. The single biggest risk. Ruusbroec roots it in goodwill and grace, not punishment; clear seeing without contempt. Harsh self-criticism backfires.
- Skipping straight to “contemplation.” The whole point is that the active life is the foundation; bypassing it produces the self-deceived “high” states Ruusbroec warned against.
- Resolve without works. Private virtue that never touches actual relationships and service is incomplete; the virtues are grown in action toward neighbour.
- Willpower without warmth. Forcing virtue by gritted will is brittle; restart from the glad “yes” (goodwill) each time.
- Perfectionism / scrupulosity. The creature–Creator distinction is the guard: you are ordering toward the good, not required to have already arrived. Examine, adjust, continue — don’t spiral.