Jan van Ruysbroek (or Jean, Johannes Ruysbroeck) (1293-1381) was a Flemish mystic and scholar, born at Ruysbroek , near Brussels, in 1293. He also died in Brussels. In 1317 he was ordained priest and became vicar of St. Gudule, Brussels. When sixty years of age he withdrew with a few companions to the monastery of Groenendael, near Waterloo, giving himself to meditation and mystial writing, and to a full share of the practical tasks of the society. He was known as the Ecstatic Doctor or Divine Doctor, and formed a link between the Friends of God and the Brothers of the Common Life, sects which helped to bring about the Reformation.

Ruysbroek insisted that the soul finds God in its own depths, and noted three stages of progress in what he called the spiritual ladder of Christian attainment: (1) the active life, (2) the inward life, (3) the contemplative life. He did not teach the fusion of the self in God, but held that at the summit of the ascent the soul still preserves its identity. His works, of which the, most important were De vera contemplatione and De septem gradibus amoris , were published in 1848 at Hanover; also Reflections from the Mirror of a Mystic (1906) and Die Zierde der geistlichen Hochzeit (1901).