Rhineland Mysticism

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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. The label is a modern grouping — no fourteenth-century friar called himself a Rhineland mystic — but it marks something real: a shared idiom, a shared lineage of reading, and a shared decision to say the highest things about God in the spoken German of nuns and townspeople rather than the Latin of the schools.

The setting matters. The middle Rhine in this century was among the most densely settled religious landscapes in Europe: the great Dominican studia at Cologne and Strasbourg, scores of women’s convents and unenclosed Beguine communities, and a literate urban laity hungry for interior guidance. The Dominicans had been given pastoral charge of many of these women’s houses — the cura monialium, the care of nuns — and that charge is the engine of the whole current. Sermons preached to choirs of Dominican sisters were taken down by their hearers, copied, and circulated; the surviving Eckhart and Tauler corpora are, to a large degree, transcripts made and preserved by religious women. The speculative German vocabulary of the movement was forged in that exchange, not in the lecture hall.

Where the current located God

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. Eckhart’s German names for this innermost point multiply — the grunt (ground), the little spark or vünkelîn, the bürgelîn or small castle — and they converge on a single claim: that beneath the faculties of memory, intellect, and will there is a place in the soul that creation never touched, where the divine and the human are not joined together but were never apart.

From this follow the movement’s two signature doctrines. The first is the birth of God in the soul (Gottesgeburt): the eternal generation of the Word from the Father, the inner-Trinitarian act, is held to take place not only once, in eternity, but again in the ground of every soul detached enough to receive it. The second is detachment — abegescheidenheit in Eckhart’s coinage, Gelassenheit in the term the whole school made its watchword. Gelassenheit, releasement or letting-go, names a detachment so complete that the soul wants nothing, not even the consolations of devotion; it lets go of created things, of its own willing, and finally of any image or representation of God, so as to make room for what no effort can produce. Eckhart pressed the point to its sharpest edge in a phrase his hearers never forgot — that one should live and act ohne warum, without a why, doing the good not for reward, fearing God not for punishment, loving as the rose blooms, because it blooms.

This is not a private mood but a metaphysics. Detachment is the condition under which the ground can be what it already is; the breakthrough (durchbruch) of the soul into the Godhead beyond God is, in Eckhart’s most daring sermons, a return of the soul to the groundless source from which it flowed — a source he distinguishes, with technical care, from the three Persons: the silent, nameless Gottheit (Godhead) behind the named and active God. The architecture is demanding; it is also, in the preachers’ insistence, available to a peasant in true Gelassenheit sooner than to a learned religious without it.

The lineage

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 Thomas Aquinas and the Neoplatonist strand in Christian thought. The Dionysian corpus, anonymous late-fifth- or early-sixth-century Syrian work that reached the Latin West through Eriugena’s ninth-century translation, supplied the governing grammar: that every name affirmed of God must in turn be denied, and the denial itself transcended, so as not to make an idol of any concept. Eckhart inherited it twice over — through Aquinas, who cited Dionysius in roughly seventeen hundred places, and through his own Dominican line back to Albert the Great at Cologne, who had lectured on the Areopagite. Behind both stands the Neoplatonic metaphysics of emanation and return, of all things flowing from and back toward the One; Eckhart read Proclus and the Liber de causis, and Tauler after him drew on Proclus in Moerbeke’s Latin. This is the lineage that joins Rhineland mysticism to the longer history of apophatic theology and to the broad field of Christian mysticism within which it is one intense, identifiable chapter.

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. Eckhart was the boldest. A master in sacred theology with two regencies at Paris — the rare honor that earned him the title Meister — and a successful administrator of his order, he nonetheless said things from the pulpit that, lifted from their context, read as identifications of the soul’s ground with God. The reaction came at Cologne. From 1326 the archbishop Heinrich II von Virneburg opened an inquisitorial proceeding; Eckhart defended his orthodoxy in a public declaration in February 1327, denied that he had ever held the heretical sense imputed to his words, and appealed to the papal court at Avignon. He died, probably in early 1328, before the verdict.

Avignon, 1329

On 27 March 1329 Pope John XXII issued the bull In agro dominico. It condemned a list of articles drawn from Eckhart’s preaching and writing: fifteen of them as heretical and a further two as likewise to be condemned, with eleven more judged ill-sounding, rash, and suspect of heresy. The bull recorded, pointedly, that Eckhart had recanted before death anything that could be understood in an erroneous sense — so that the man himself was never personally condemned, only certain extracted propositions, and the bull was to be promulgated only within the province of Cologne.

The scholarly distinction worth holding is between what the sermons say and the heresy his judges heard in them. The condemnation worked by excerpt: propositions were lifted from the rhythm of preaching, where Eckhart routinely overstated to break a hearer’s settled idea and then qualified, and read as flat doctrinal theses. Whether the bare propositions are heretical and whether Eckhart taught heresy are different questions; his orthodoxy is not settled here, and modern scholarship — Catholic and Protestant alike — has largely declined to read him as the pantheist his prosecutors constructed. What the condemnation did accomplish was practical: it made his name dangerous to invoke. The current did not die, but it changed key.

Tauler and Suso, both Dominicans who had been in the Cologne orbit and absorbed the doctrine of the Seelengrund, carried the substance forward more safely. Tauler — the Lebemeister, master of living, to Eckhart’s Lehrmeister, master of teaching — became a sober pastoral preacher who reframed the daring ground-language for the cure of souls, insisting the ground is God’s gift of grace rather than a natural possession, and giving more room to the Holy Spirit and to suffering as a school of the soul. His eighty-odd surviving German sermons, again recorded by the nuns who heard them, made the teaching durable. Suso — Heinrich Seuse, who styled himself the Servant of Eternal Wisdom — took the affective road: he wrote the Little Book of Truth in part to defend Eckhart’s orthodoxy after 1329, and recast the speculative ground in the register of bridal love and chivalric devotion. His Little Book of Eternal Wisdom became one of the most copied vernacular works of the age, and his Latin Horologium Sapientiae circulated across Europe second in popularity among devotional books only to the Imitation of Christ.

Around these two ran the loose Friends of God (Gottesfreunde), a transregional web of clergy, nuns, and laity bound by spiritual friendship and correspondence — centered on Strasbourg, Basel, and Cologne, cohering amid the shocks of the age: the papacy at Avignon, the conflict between Louis the Bavarian and the pope that placed cities under interdict, and the Black Death of 1347–49. It was a network, not an order — no rule, no vows, no membership — and the romantic later image of an organized secret brotherhood overstates it. Rulman Merswin’s Strasbourg circle produced a body of texts ascribed to a mysterious lay “Friend of God from the Oberland,” a figure most scholarship since Heinrich Denifle reads as a literary construct rather than a historical convert. The same milieu is continuous with the great Dominican women’s mysticism of the convents — the visionary writing of Margaretha and Christina Ebner, the sister-books of Engelthal and Töss, and the older Saxon foundation of Helfta, whose Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, and Mechthild of Hackeborn belong to the broader story of medieval women’s mysticism and, with the Brabantine Beguine Hadewijch, to the minne-mysticism of the Low Countries. Henry of Nördlingen, the network’s great connector, translated Mechthild’s Flowing Light of the Godhead into Upper German and circulated it among the Friends.

The reach of the current

The reach of the current is the reason it is still read. The anonymous Theologia Germanica — its manuscript title Der Franckforter, “the Frankfurter,” its author known only as a priest and warden in Frankfurt — teaches the annihilation of self-will and the replacement of human willing by God’s, in an idiom continuous with the Tauler milieu. It might have remained a minor devotional text but for Martin Luther, who printed a partial edition in 1516 and a fuller text in 1518 under the title Eyn deutsch Theologia, at first taking it for Tauler’s, and who said in his preface that after the Bible and Augustine no book had taught him more of God, Christ, and man. He found his own theology of human helplessness and the priority of grace prefigured in it, and read Tauler’s sermons with the same recognition. Through Luther the German mystical stream poured into the Reformation: the Theologia Germanica ran to some two hundred editions, fed the radical-spiritualist and Pietist currents through Sebastian Franck, Valentin Weigel, Johann Arndt, and Philipp Jakob Spener, and was answered by Calvin’s condemnation and by its placement on the Catholic Index in 1612. It is a principal channel by which Rhineland mysticism becomes a tributary of Protestant mysticism and of the later German theosophy that runs through Jacob Böhme into Christian theosophy.

The downstream reach runs in several directions at once. The Friends-of-God temper — interior, Christocentric, lay-accessible — flows into the Devotio moderna of Geert Groote and the Brethren of the Common Life, and so into Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, for whom Suso’s Horologium was a staple text. Nicholas of Cusa, schooled by the Brethren at Deventer, kept some of the best manuscripts of Eckhart’s Latin works in his library at Bernkastel-Kues and defended Eckhart by name against the charge of pantheism — carrying the docta ignorantia, the learned ignorance by which God is reached in the coincidence of opposites, forward as a Renaissance restatement of the apophatic ground. The word Gelassenheit itself outlived its origin: it passed through Pietist devotion into modern German, where the twentieth century would lift it for philosophical use. The current that began in transcripts of sermons preached to Dominican nuns thus became one of the load-bearing channels of later Western spirituality — and a perennial resource for the comparative study of mysticism, where Eckhart’s groundless Godhead is the standard Western term set beside the Vedānta of Śaṅkara and the emptiness of the Buddhist traditions.

Texts, editions, and the scholarship

Reading the current honestly means knowing what survives and in what state. The foundational nineteenth-century German edition is Franz Pfeiffer’s Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, Band 2: Meister Eckhart (Leipzig, 1857), which gathered sermons, treatises, and sayings before any critical sifting existed — and so freely mixed authentic Eckhart with material now assigned to Tauler, Suso, anonymous Dominicans of the school, or the Free-Spirit author of the Schwester Katrei treatise. Heinrich Denifle’s recovery of Eckhart’s lost Latin works, published in the Archiv für Litteratur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters in 1886, first anchored the authentic corpus and printed the trial documents. The critical edition that supersedes Pfeiffer — Josef Quint and Josef Koch’s Kohlhammer Deutsche Werke and Lateinische Werke, begun in 1936 and completed only in 2015 — remains in copyright, as does the standard English of Maurice O’C. Walshe revised by Bernard McGinn (The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, Crossroad, 2009). The one substantial public-domain English Eckhart is C. de B. Evans’s 1924 translation of Pfeiffer, which carries Pfeiffer’s authenticity problems forward unmodified and must be read with that caveat in view. The genuine Tauler corpus was critically sorted only by Ferdinand Vetter (Die Predigten Taulers, 1910); Suso’s German works by Karl Bihlmeyer (Heinrich Seuse: Deutsche Schriften, 1907).

For the Avignon proceeding, the indispensable scholarly orientation is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Meister Eckhart, which lays out the bull In agro dominico of 27 March 1329 and the distinction between the condemned propositions and the man. The standard modern synthesis of the whole current is Bernard McGinn’s The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500) (Crossroad, 2005), the fourth volume of his history of Western Christian mysticism, reviewed in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History; Frank Tobin’s Meister Eckhart: Thought and Language (1986) remains the standard study of the German mystical vocabulary — grunt, abegescheidenheit, durchbruch, ohne warum. Among public-domain primary texts, Susanna Winkworth’s nineteenth-century English of the Theologia Germanica (first edition 1854, from the fuller Würzburg manuscript) is freely available, as is her History and Life of the Reverend Doctor John Tauler (1857, with Charles Kingsley’s preface) and Thomas Francis Knox’s Life of Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself (1865) — each requiring a critical headnote, since Winkworth’s Tauler Life translates the legendary Meisterbuch rather than a contemporary biography, and Suso’s Vita is stylized hagiography co-produced with the Töss nun Elsbeth Stagel. The Dionysian root is best approached through the Parker translation of the Areopagite’s works and the apophatic grammar it transmits.

Modern scholarship treats “Rhineland mysticism” as a useful grouping rather than an organized 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. The scholasticism Eckhart was trained in and engaged is the academic theology against which his vernacular preaching is often read, though he was himself a master of it; the perennialist and theosophical readings that later made him a bearer of a secret universal doctrine are reception, not the texts’ own meaning. What the preachers 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 · Meister Eckhart · Johannes Tauler · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Apophatic Theology · Thomas Aquinas · Christian Mysticism · Protestant Mysticism · Martin Luther · Beguine Mysticism · Medieval Women S Mysticism · Minne Mysticism Middle Dutch · Helfta Convent Mysticism · Nicholas Of Cusa · Scholasticism · Pietism · Lutheran Paracelsian Reform · Christian Theosophy Boehmean