Brethren of the Common Life

Without taking up irrevocable vows, the Brethren[1] banded together in communities, giving up their worldly goods to live chaste and strictly regulated lives in common houses, devoting every waking hour to attending divine service, reading and preaching of sermons, labouring productively, and taking meals in common that were accompanied by the reading aloud of Scripture: "judged from the ascetic discipline and intention of this life, it had few features which distinguished it from life in a monastery", observes Hans Baron.

[3] The four cornerstones of the Brethren were The Confraternity of the Common Life were in many ways similar to the Beghard and Beguine communities which had flourished two centuries earlier but were by then declining.

[4] The Brethren's confraternity is the best known fruits of the "Devotio Moderna", (the Modern Devotion), a lifestyle and undogmatic form of piety which some historians have argued helped to pave the road for the Protestant Reformation.

His relations with the German Gottesfreunde and the writings of John of Ruusbroec, who later became his friend, gradually inclined him to mysticism, and on recovering from an illness in 1373, he resigned his prebends, bestowed his goods on the Carthusians of Arnhem and lived in solitude for seven years.

[7] A small band of followers attached themselves to Groote and became his fellow workers, thus becoming the first "Brethren of the Common Life" (Dutch: Broeders des gemeenen levens).

He died in 1384 and was succeeded by Florens Radewyns, who two years later refounded the famous monastery of Augustinian canons at Windesheim, near Zwolle, which was now the centre of the new association.

[5] Books and the library were central to the communities of Brethren, whose scrupulous copies of works of piety supported their houses and put the texts in which they found spiritual sustenance in many hands.

When Groote began, education in the Netherlands was still rare, unlike in Italy and the southern parts of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation; the University of Leme of the schools of Liège was only a vague memory.

[9] The Brethren spared no pains to obtain good masters, if necessary from foreign countries, for their schools, which became centres of spiritual and intellectual life of the Catholic Church; amongst those whom they trained or who were associated with them were men like Thomas à Kempis, Dierick Maertens, Gabriel Biel, the physician Vesalius, Jan Standonck (1454–1504), priest and reformer, Master of the Collège de Montaigu in Paris, and the Dutch Pope Adrian VI.

Before the fifteenth century closed, the Brethren of the Common Life had placed in all Germany and the Netherlands schools in which teaching was offered "for the love of God alone."

Others languished until the French Revolution, while the rise of universities, the creation of diocesan seminaries, and the competition of new teaching orders gradually extinguished the schools that regarded Deventer and Windesheim as their parent establishments.