Johannes Tauler

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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. He composed no treatises. Apart from a single letter, the whole of his authentic corpus — some eighty-four German sermons in the modern critical count — exists because other people, mostly the religious women he preached to, wrote down what they heard.

This is the first fact to hold steady about him, because it sets the key for everything else. Tauler did not publish a system; he was overheard. The voice in the sermons is a voice caught in the act of addressing a room, circling a single matter from a dozen angles on a dozen feast days, never tidied into a doctrine. He was born into a prosperous Strasbourg family — his father probably the city councillor Nikolaus Tauler of Finkweiler — and entered the Dominican convent of the city as a youth, around 1315, passing through the order’s long course of philosophical and theological formation. Eckhart was active in Strasbourg and at the Cologne studium generale through the 1310s and 1320s, and it is all but certain, though nowhere documented, that the young Tauler heard him preach and met him at Cologne. From that encounter he took the whole of his vocabulary; what he did with it was something Eckhart had not quite done.

The ground of the soul

Where Eckhart was condemned for the daring of his formulations — twenty-eight propositions censured by the bull In agro dominico in 1329, the year before Eckhart’s death — Tauler carried the same concerns in a steadier, more pastoral key. His sermons return again and again to the Grund, the Seelengrund: the ground of the soul, an innermost point, also called the spark, the hidden abyss, the abditum mentis, where God is present and where the soul may be united with him. Into that point nothing created can enter. It is where, in the image Tauler drew from the Forty-second Psalm, abyss calls to abyss — the ungrounded depth of the soul answering the ungrounded depth of God, like to like.

Here he made a quiet but decisive adjustment to his master. Eckhart had spoken of an uncreated something in the soul, a ground identical with the divine ground. Tauler held that the ground is God’s gift by grace, not a possession the creature owns by nature — a hedge against the antinomian reading that had helped sink Eckhart, and a distancing from the heresy of the Free Spirit, whose adherents he opposed. He also drew back from the Augustinian and Thomist habit of locating the image of God in the three faculties of memory, understanding, and will, placing the true image of the Trinity in the ground itself, beneath and prior to the faculties. His anthropology is triadic — the sensual or animal person, the rational person, the supreme God-formed person — and alongside intellect, sense, and will he set the Gemüt, the orienting disposition or deep inclination of the heart, whose turning toward or away from the ground decides whether union is possible at all.

The way to that ground he described in terms of Gelassenheit: a letting-go, a releasement, a detachment that abandons self-will and clinging to created things and yields wholly to the will of God, so that the divine birth — the eternal Word born in the soul, the figure he inherited intact from Eckhart — 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 gave suffering more room than Eckhart had. He treated it as a school, a discipline that empties the person of the props he leans on, and some readers have heard in this an anticipation of the later language of the dark night. And he democratized the matter without softening it: a plowman in true Gelassenheit, he said, may stand nearer to God than a religious without it. The mystical life was not the property of the cloister.

The master of living

If Eckhart was the Lehrmeister, the master of doctrine, Tauler became the Lebemeister, the master of living — the formula that fixed the relation between them in later memory. The vocabulary is Eckhart’s, softened: the ground, the birth, the detachment that empties the soul for God. What Tauler added was not a new theory but a temperature. He preached to be used — to nuns under vows, to married burghers, to people who would have to go back to a household or a choir and do something with what they had heard — and his pastoral instinct steadily pulled Eckhart’s vertiginous formulations back toward something a soul could live inside. He gave more weight to grace and the Holy Spirit, more to the long ordinary work of detachment, less to the single audacious sentence.

His sources were the standard Dominican-Neoplatonic furniture, transposed into vivid Middle High German: the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, the Neoplatonism of Proclus that reached the German Dominicans through William of Moerbeke’s Latin, and the Albertine and Thomist learning of the order — though on the seat of the divine image he set himself gently against Thomas Aquinas. The architecture is recognizably that of the wider Rhineland mystical current, the school of speculative apophatic thought that ran along the river in the fourteenth century, and beyond it the larger world of medieval Christian mysticism. But Tauler’s distinctive note is the plainness with which he describes the difficulty of the emptying. He does not promise the union; he describes the stripping that might make room for it.

The Friends of God

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, Alsace, and the Swiss and Upper-German lands who pursued an inward, experiential piety. The name was taken from the Gospel of John, where Christ tells the disciples he no longer calls them servants but friends. It was not an order, a sect, or an organization — no rule, no vows, no membership — but a web of spiritual friendship and correspondence, cohering between roughly 1339 and 1343 amid the crises of the century, and centered on Strasbourg, Basel, and Cologne. Modern scholarship is wary of the romantic image of an organized secret brotherhood or a proto-Reformation underground; the network was more diffuse than that, more a pattern of one-to-one spiritual mentoring than a movement with a program.

Tauler entered these circles in the hard middle of his life. In the long quarrel between the emperor Louis of Bavaria and the Avignon papacy of John XXII, Strasbourg sided with the emperor and was placed under interdict; the Dominicans, obedient to the pope, were expelled, and Tauler left, probably in 1338. He passed his exile, roughly 1339 to 1343, at Basel, in the orbit of devout clergy and laity and of the connector Henry of Nördlingen, whose correspondence with the visionary nun Margaretha Ebner is among the oldest surviving exchanges of letters in German. The Friends of God stream is inseparable from the Dominican women’s mysticism of the convents and the sister-books that recorded it — a current that touches the beguine communities, the wider field of medieval women’s mysticism, and the visionary writing gathered at houses like Helfta. Tauler returned to Strasbourg around 1343, to a city that would shortly suffer earthquake and fire and then the Black Death of 1347 to 1349. He preached also at Cologne. He died on 16 June 1361 in the garden house of the convent of St. Nikolaus in undis at Strasbourg; his incised gravestone survives, now in the Temple Neuf.

A later legend made him the pupil of a mysterious lay “Master from the Highlands” — the Friend of God from the Oberland — who is said to have arrived, rebuked the famous preacher for teaching from the head rather than the surrendered heart, and converted him to a deeper life, after which Tauler fell silent for years and then preached transformed. The story is vivid and was long taken as biography; it underlies the conversion-narrative that the Victorian translator Susanna Winkworth rendered into English in 1857. Scholarship since Heinrich Denifle’s Taulers Bekehrung of 1879 treats it as a pious fiction, a didactic legend most likely generated within the Strasbourg circle of the layman Rulman Merswin, not as a record of anything that happened — its internal contradictions include a death-date for “the Master” later than Tauler’s own. What can be established is narrower, and it is the part worth keeping: a body of sermons, a place, a manner of teaching.

Afterlife

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. He owned and annotated an Augsburg edition of the sermons around 1515 and 1516, prizing in Tauler the insistence on human helplessness and the absolute need of grace — a stress he heard as confirmation of his own developing theology. In the same years Luther printed an anonymous fourteenth-century treatise from the same Rhineland milieu, the one he gave to the world as the Theologia Deutsch — a partial edition in 1516, a fuller text in 1518 under the title Eyn deutsch Theologia — and at first he thought it Tauler’s work. It is not; its anonymous author was a Frankfurt priest of the Teutonic Order, and how much it owes to Tauler directly is uncertain. But the misattribution did its work. Through Luther’s endorsement Tauler passed into Protestant as well as Catholic devotion, and the Theologia Deutsch went on to a vast career — some two hundred editions over four centuries, an inspiration to spiritualists and radicals and pietists, and, by reaction, a place on the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books in 1612.

Later readers drew Tauler into the longer story of German mystical thought: into the lineage that runs through Nicholas of Cusa and on to the paradoxical couplets of Angelus Silesius in the seventeenth century, and into the modern comparative study of mysticism that set the Rhineland masters beside the contemplatives of other traditions in the work of comparative mysticism. A confessional image of a “proto-Protestant Tauler,” a reformer before the Reformation, took hold in the nineteenth century and has since been set aside: the historical Tauler was a loyal, orthodox medieval Dominican who fought the heresies of his own age. The connection that mattered historically was not one he made but one Luther and his readers made for him.

Texts and scholarship

Because Tauler wrote almost nothing himself, his textual history is a history of other people’s copying, and a long history of confusion. The early printed corpus mixed his sermons with those of Eckhart, of Eckhart’s circle, and of others: the Leipzig editio princeps of 1498 already carried sermons not his, the Cologne edition of 1543 added some two dozen more of uncertain authorship, and Laurentius Surius’s influential Latin version of 1548 carried the inflation into the Latin-reading world. The genuine corpus was not critically sorted until Ferdinand Vetter’s Die Predigten Taulers of 1910, the foundational scholarly edition on which the modern count of eighty-four authentic sermons rests; it is freely available in the digitized holdings of the Düsseldorf University and State Library. A. L. Corin later refined the work. Several once-canonical attributions have fallen away with the sorting: the Theologia Deutsch is not his, the treatise on spiritual poverty was shown spurious by Denifle, and even the beloved Advent hymn Es kommt ein Schiff, geladen is his only by tradition.

The pre-critical English translations rest on the inflated text and must be read with that in mind. Susanna Winkworth’s History and Life of the Reverend Doctor John Tauler (1857), with a preface by Charles Kingsley, translates the legendary conversion-narrative as though it were biography and includes sermons now known to be by other hands; it remains in print through the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, which catalogs it — mistakenly — under the name of Winkworth’s younger sister Catherine, the hymn translator. Arthur Hutton’s The Inner Way (1901; second edition 1909) gathers thirty-six festal sermons and is hosted in full by Documenta Catholica Omnia; Walter Elliott’s Sermons and Conferences of 1910 was the first nominally complete English Tauler. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article, available through Wikisource, preserves a useful early-modern summary of the state of the question. The authoritative modern synthesis of the whole post-Eckhart German current, Tauler within it, is Bernard McGinn’s The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (2005); the standard modern English selection is the volume edited by Maria Shrady and Josef Schmidt for the Classics of Western Spirituality (1985). Behind all of it stands Denifle’s nineteenth-century demolition of the legendary biography, which cleared the ground on which the critical Tauler could be built.

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 · Meister Eckhart · Rhineland Mysticism · Christian Mysticism · Mysticism · Apophatic Theology · Martin Luther · Nicholas Of Cusa · Angelus Silesius · Comparative Mysticism · Beguine Mysticism · Medieval Women S Mysticism · Protestant Mysticism · Helfta Convent Mysticism · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Thomas Aquinas