Jan van Ruusbroec was born in the village of Ruisbroek south of Brussels and raised by his uncle Jan Hinckaert, a canon at the collegiate church of Sint-Goedele (St. Gudula) in Brussels. He was ordained priest in 1317 and lived in Brussels as a parish curate for twenty-six years, devoting his evenings to the composition of the first of his mystical works, the great Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage (Die geestelike brulocht).
In 1343, at the age of fifty, he and his uncle and a fellow priest left Brussels for the solitude of the Soignes forest at Groenendaal, where the three founded an Augustinian Canons' priory and Ruysbroeck served as prior until his death thirty-eight years later. The priory became the heart of the Flemish mystical tradition; visitors included Gerard Groote (founder of the Brethren of the Common Life and the Devotio Moderna) and Geert van Calcar (who carried Ruysbroeck's teaching into the Rhineland).
His writings — the Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, the Mirror of Eternal Salvation, the Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, and the Little Book of Clarification — present the great Flemish mystical synthesis: a three-fold progression through active life, interior life, and contemplative life, culminating in the union of love that is also the eternal communion of the Trinity. He was the principal influence on the Devotio Moderna, on Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ, and (more indirectly) on John of the Cross. Pius X beatified him in 1908.