Johannes Tauler

← Encyclopedia

Johannes Tauler (c. 1300–1361) was a Dominican friar and preacher of the Rhineland, remembered as one of the leading figures of fourteenth-century German mysticism and as a younger contemporary and follower of Meister Eckhart. He spent most of his life at Strasbourg, where his work was preaching rather than writing: the texts that survive under his name are sermons, taken down in the vernacular and copied for circulation, addressed to nuns and lay listeners as much as to the learned.

Where Eckhart was condemned for the daring of his formulations, Tauler carried the same concerns in a steadier, more pastoral key. His sermons return again and again to the Grund — the ground of the soul, an innermost point where, he taught, God is present and where the soul may be united with him. The way to that ground he described in terms of Gelassenheit, a letting-go or detachment: the stripping away of self-will and attachment so that the divine birth might take place within. This was not, in his telling, an achievement of the intellect but a yielding, reached through suffering and the abandonment of one’s own striving.

Tauler is usually placed within the loose devotional network known as the Friends of God (Gottesfreunde), informal circles of clergy and laity in the Rhineland and Switzerland who pursued an inward, experiential piety. A later legend made him the pupil of a mysterious “Master from the Highlands” who converted him to a deeper life; scholarship treats this story as a pious fiction attached to his name rather than biography. What can be established is narrower: a body of sermons, a place, and a manner of teaching.

His afterlife was large. The sermons were read steadily through the late Middle Ages and into the Reformation, and Martin Luther counted himself among their admirers, finding in Tauler — and in the anonymous treatise he published as the Theologia Deutsch — a German Christianity that spoke of grace and the surrender of the self in terms he recognized as his own. Through that endorsement Tauler passed into Protestant as well as Catholic devotion, and later readers drew him into the longer story of German mystical thought. How much of the Theologia Deutsch itself owes to him directly is uncertain; the connection that mattered historically was the one Luther and his readers made.

What Tauler offered was less a system than a direction. The vocabulary is Eckhart’s, softened: the ground, the birth, the detachment that empties the soul for God. The lasting interest lies in how plainly he addressed the difficulty of that emptying — that, on his telling, it is reached not by ascent but by being undone, and the one who arrives has nothing left to claim.

→ In the library: Steiner — Mystics of the Renaissance (1910), incl. a chapter on Tauler

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Middle Ages