Tauler

Johannes Tauler

Johannes Tauler took the daring, speculative mysticism of his master Meister Eckhart, which the Church had condemned, and made it a living and practical path for ordinary souls. A Dominican preacher of the Rhineland, he taught not a system but a way: the turning inward to the silent ground of the soul where God is born, the detachment that empties the self to make room for God, and the strange, transforming power of suffering. His sermons became one of the deepest streams of Christian inwardness, feeding the Friends of God, and later Luther, Böhme, and the Pietists.

The corpus and how the chat cites it. Tauler wrote no treatise; his whole legacy is his German sermons, preached and taken down by his hearers. This room reads them in the 1910 English collection, The Sermons and Conferences of John Tauler, public domain by way of the Internet Archive. Each sermon was preached for a particular feast or Sunday, and the chat cites them so. Expect citations to Tauler's Sermons by their occasion.

Life. Tauler was born around 1300 in Strasbourg and entered the Dominican order as a youth, studying very likely at Cologne, where Eckhart had taught. He became a renowned preacher in Strasbourg and Basel, above all to the Dominican nuns and to the lay devotional movement known as the Friends of God, and he lived through the upheavals of a terrible century, the plague years and the long interdict laid on Strasbourg, ministering to frightened and suffering people throughout. He was, before all else, a pastor of souls who happened to carry within him the highest reaches of medieval contemplation.

Where to begin. The sermons are the work. Read them as Tauler preached them, and the great themes return again and again: the hidden ground of the soul, the detachment that prepares it, the birth of God within, and the way that leads through suffering into union.

Heir of Eckhart, but practical. The key to Tauler's place is that he was Eckhart's pupil and shared his deepest vision, the ground of the soul, the birth of God within, the call to total detachment, yet turned that mysticism toward practice and care. Where Eckhart's bold and paradoxical sayings led to condemnation, Tauler became less the metaphysician of the godhead than the physician of souls, taking the heights of his master's speculation and showing ordinary Christians, the nuns and laypeople and Friends of God before him, how actually to walk the inward road in humility, suffering, and love. He made the loftiest mysticism into something a person could live.

The ground of the soul. At the center of his teaching, inherited from Eckhart, is the ground of the soul. In the depths of the soul, beneath all its faculties and all its busy activity, there lies a hidden ground, an inner sanctuary that, like God himself, has no name that rightly tells of it, and there God dwells, nearer to the soul than the soul is to itself. Whosoever can behold how God dwells in the soul's deepest depths, Tauler preaches, is made blessed by the sight. The whole of the spiritual life is the long turning inward, away from the scattered surface of the self, to find and rest in that ground where God already is.

Detachment and releasement. The road to the ground is detachment, the releasement and letting-go that the Rhineland called Gelassenheit: a surrender of self-will, of attachments, of images, and even of one's own spiritual consolations. The soul must grow empty, still, and receptive, must sink out of itself, so that God may work in it unhindered. Tauler presses this to its furthest point: the most perfect detachment, he says, is to be detached even from one's own detachment, to want nothing for oneself at all, not even the felt experience of God, but simply to let God be God within. The emptier the soul, the more room there is for the divine.

The birth of God and the way of suffering. Into the prepared and emptied ground God is born, the eternal Word brought to birth in the soul, and this is the goal of the whole path. But the road to it runs through suffering. Tauler is unflinching about trials, desolation, and the bitter sense of God's absence: the stripping away of all consolation, the feeling of being forsaken, the patient bearing of affliction in conformity with Christ are not obstacles to union but its very means, the furnace in which the self is burned away and the ground laid bare. To follow Christ inwardly, for Tauler, is to follow him through the Cross.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Tauler's sermons carried the Rhineland mysticism out of the schools and into the spiritual life of ordinary Christians, and their influence has been vast and largely hidden. The Friends of God treasured him; Martin Luther read Tauler and the kindred Theologia Germanica with delight and found in them a piety of grace and inwardness that helped shape his own; later German mystics and the Pietists drew on him; and through that tradition his Gelassenheit reached even into the vocabulary of modern philosophy. Read now, Tauler is the great practical mystic of the ground of the soul, the preacher who made the highest contemplation a path for everyone. He was the disciple of Meister Eckhart, whose speculative mysticism he rescued by living it; he drew the apophatic depth of the nameless ground from Pseudo-Dionysius, the same source that fed the luminous darkness of Gregory of Nyssa; Nicholas of Cusa gathered and prized the Rhineland mystics; and his teaching of detachment and the inner birth flowed on into Jakob Böhme and the whole later tradition of Christian inwardness. The God who dwells, he insists, in the soul's deepest depths waits there still for whoever will turn within.