Conclusa et Proposita non Vota (Decisions and Intentions, not Vows)
In nomine Domini. Haec sunt proposita et conclusa...
Our renderingIn the name of the Lord. These are the intentions and decisions...
What it is
Groote's personal document of interior reform, composed after his conversion and his time at the Carthusian monastery of Monnikhuizen near Arnhem. Not a monastic rule but a personal propositum — a structured list of resolutions and intentions by which he organized his entire life around God, renouncing temporal pursuits and dedicating himself to preaching and communal life. The text opens with the words 'In nomine Domini — haec sunt proposita et conclusa,' establishing the non-vow character of the commitments with deliberate canonical care. This document and Groote's eighty surviving letters form the foundational documentary core of the Devotio Moderna movement, and the propositum method it embodies was adopted as a standard formation practice in all subsequent Brethren houses.
Why it still matters
Writing one's own propositum — a personal set of spiritual intentions rather than canonical vows — was the Devotio Moderna's most powerful and most portable practical tool; any Christian can practice this discipline today as a concrete and accountable form of interior formation.
Kept alongside
De Spiritualibus Ascensionibus (On the Spiritual Ascents)
Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen (1367–1398), librarian of the Deventer house of the Brethren of the Common Life, wrote this 70-chapter handbook of interior reform describing the soul's ascent from sin back toward paradisical innocence through methodical self-examination, affective meditation, and progressive virtue. Organized around the scriptural motto from Psalm 83:6 — 'He has set ascents in his heart' — it was the most widely circulated devotional work from Devotio Moderna scriptoria and was probably present in nearly every house of the movement. First printed by R. Pafraet in Deventer c. 1483–85 and reprinted into the sixteenth century, its method of structured imaginative meditation on Scripture anticipates the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises by more than a century.
Tractatus de Quatuor Generibus Meditationum (On Four Kinds of Meditation)
Groote's foundational methodological essay on the four objects of Christian meditation — one's own sins and their consequences, the Passion of Christ, the Last Judgment, and the joys of eternal life — most likely written in the final years of his life before his death in 1384. The treatise established the contemplative programme that all Devotio Moderna houses followed and was the seed from which Zerbolt's longer manuals and ultimately the Imitation of Christ's approach to self-examination grew. It prescribes methodical use of mental imagery and regular engagement with Scripture as the basis of a lay devotional life. The standard critical edition is Albert Hyma's 1924 text in the Archief voor de Geschiedenis van het Aartsbisdom Utrecht.
De Reformatione Virium Animae (On the Reform of the Soul's Powers)
Zerbolt's companion treatise to the Spiritual Ascents structures the soul's reform around the theological anthropology of the three powers — memory, understanding (intelligentia), and will (voluntas) — which must be healed and reoriented after the Fall. Its organizing parable is drawn from Luke 10:30: the man who fell among thieves going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, making interior reform a literal ascent back to Jerusalem. Printed in incunabula editions from 1492–93 onward, it circulated alongside the Spiritual Ascents as the paired formation manual of the Devotio Moderna, though it reached a narrower readership due to its more explicitly philosophical theological framework.