Rhineland Mysticism

← Encyclopedia

Rhineland mysticism is the name given to a current of speculative mystical thought that flourished in the German-speaking lands along the Rhine in the fourteenth century, carried chiefly by Dominican friars and preachers. Its landmark figures are Meister Eckhart, who taught at Cologne and Paris, and two of his hearers and successors, Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Suso. The anonymous treatise later called the Theologia Germanica belongs to the same world, as does, more loosely, the women’s devotional and visionary writing of the region.

What set the current apart was where it located God. These preachers spoke not mainly of acts and merits but of a hidden depth in the human person — Eckhart’s Seelengrund, the “ground of the soul” — held to be the point at which the soul and God are not two. There, in their teaching, something is “uncreated and uncreatable,” untouched by time and image; and the whole work of the spiritual life is to be emptied enough for God to be born in that ground. The German word for the emptying, Gelassenheit, releasement or letting-go, became one of the movement’s signatures: a detachment so complete that the soul wants nothing, not even the consolations of devotion, and so makes room for what it cannot produce by effort.

Much of this descended from older sources. The negative theology of Dionysius the Areopagite — God known best by unknowing, named best by no name — runs plainly through Eckhart, who read it alongside Aquinas and the Neoplatonist strand in Christian thought. The novelty was less the metaphysics than the language: these men preached it, in the vernacular, to nuns and lay listeners, and pressed the union of soul and God in formulations sharp enough to alarm the authorities. A list of Eckhart’s propositions was condemned at Avignon in 1329, shortly after his death; Tauler and Suso, more pastoral in temper, carried the substance forward in a safer key.

The reach of the current is the reason it is still read. The Theologia Germanica was edited and championed by Luther, who found his own theology prefigured in it; the Devotio moderna and later Protestant and Pietist spirituality drew on the same well. Modern scholarship treats “Rhineland mysticism” as a useful grouping rather than an organised school, and reads Eckhart with care — distinguishing what the sermons say from the heresy his judges heard in them, and from the philosophical system later interpreters have built around him. What practitioners sought was plainer than any of that: a God found not at the end of the soul’s striving but beneath it, in a stillness the striving had to fall away to reach.

→ In the library: Steiner on Eckhart, Tauler & others (1910 essay) · The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899)

→ Related: Comparative Mysticism · Neoplatonism · Gnosis · The One