Embodiment · “Being Precedes Having”
Ruusbroec's Common Life
To let all outward action flow out of an abiding inner stillness and return to it — being ‘ever at work and ever at rest,’ so contemplation and active love become one rhythm rather than competing demands.
Ruusbroec’s common life in 5 lines: Establish an inward rest (the unity of the heart) and act from it, not over it. Let love and work flow OUT abundantly; keep one quiet foot inward while engaged. Flow back IN — re-center, briefly and often, all day. Refuse both empty busyness and withdrawn quietism. The test: does it serve God and neighbour without self-focus? Be ever at work and ever at rest.
What it is
After mapping the active and inward lives, Ruusbroec describes a third, integrating mode he calls the common life (ghemeyne leven) — the life of the “common man” (ghemeyne mensche), his highest ideal.
This person is “both active and fruitive, ever at work and ever at rest”: outwardly flowing into love and service, inwardly resting in union with God, with no fracture between the two. Underhill summarizes the vision as “ever abiding in the simplicity of the Spirit, and perpetually flowing forth in abundant acts of love.” Crucially, this is not action and then rest, alternating — it is acting from rest and resting in action, a single continuous rhythm of flowing out (into works) and flowing in (into stillness), patterned, in Ruusbroec’s theology, on the eternal out-going and returning of the divine Persons.
The Method
Ruusbroec presents this less as a sitting and more as a way of carrying yourself through the day. Drawn from Book III of the Espousals and The Sparkling Stone:
- Establish the inward rest first. The common life presupposes the inward gathering: you must have a recollected centre to act from. Begin the day, and return through it, to that unity of the heart.
- Let action flow OUT of the rest, not over it. When you turn to work, relationships, or service, let the doing arise from the inner stillness rather than pulling you out of it. Ruusbroec’s image: the contemplative “flows forth on the waters to all the boundaries of the earth. on compassion, pity and mercy” — abundant outward love that is fed from the inward spring, not a substitute for it.
- Keep one foot inward while acting (recollected-in-engagement). The practical heart of the method: remain inwardly recollected even while outwardly engaged. You are not to retreat from the world (he condemned that as half a life) nor to be swallowed by it. You hold a quiet inner attention to God/the unity of the heart underneath the activity.
- Flow back IN — re-center, repeatedly. Just as you flow out into works, deliberately flow back into stillness — pausing to return attention to the inward rest. Ruusbroec describes the soul that “will go out and in and find nourishment both within and without” and “with God they will ebb and flow, and always be in repose.” In practice: brief, frequent re-centering through the day, not one long retreat.
- Test the fruit: does it serve God and neighbour without self-focus? The mark of the genuine common life is that the works are fruitful love serving “both God and neighbour without fragmentation or self-focus.” Self-seeking action, or “rest” that makes you neglect others, both fail the test. Use this as a daily examination.
- Refuse both extremes — busy fragmentation and quietist withdrawal. Ruusbroec is pointed: pure outward busyness loses the rest; pure inward repose that abandons works is the heresy of the quietists. The common life is the deliberate refusal of both. (Sourcing note: “ever at work and ever at rest,” the “common man,” “flows forth on the waters,” and the ebb-and-flow/“go out and in” phrasings are documented translations of Ruusbroec, attributed. The day-structuring steps are faithful reconstruction; the Trinitarian rationale is his own theology, reported as such.)
Source & Lineage
The common life is the capstone of Ruusbroec’s Spiritual Espousals and the ideal he tried to realize in his own community at Groenendael. It is his deliberate corrective to two errors of his day: empty external religiosity and the antinomian “Free Spirit” quietists who claimed union exempted them from works and morality. → (Ruusbroec).
The ideal of contemplata aliis tradere (handing on the fruits of contemplation) links him to the Dominican tradition (Eckhart, Tauler) and forward to the Devotio Moderna and Ignatian “contemplative in action.”
The Traditions' versions
Ignatian “contemplative in action” (Jesuit) — finding God in all things while fully engaged in the world; near-identical aim.
- Karma yoga (Bhagavad Gita) — acting fully while remaining inwardly unattached to outcomes; the same out-from-rest structure.
- Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God — maintaining inner communion through ordinary labour.
- Zen “chop wood, carry water” — enlightenment expressed in, not apart from, ordinary action.
- Informal mindfulness / values-based action (ACT) — acting from a centered, values-anchored awareness and returning to presence throughout the day.
Common refinements
Spiritual bypass. Using “inner rest” to avoid hard feelings or duck responsibility is the exact error Ruusbroec attacks. Genuine rest increases engaged love, not detachment from people.
- All flow-out, no flow-in. Endless service with no return to stillness burns out and drifts into reactive busyness. Schedule the re-centering.
- All flow-in, no flow-out. Resting without works is, for Ruusbroec, a half-life and a temptation. Insist on the overflow.
- Treating it as alternation rather than integration. The point is acting from rest, not work-then-rest-then-work. The rest is the ground, not a reward.
- Skipping the prerequisite. Without the inward gathering, there is no rest to act from; build that first.