Johannes Tauler c. 1300 – 1361

Johannes Tauler was a German Dominican preacher and mystic and one of the principal figures of the Rhineland mystical tradition along with Meister Eckhart and Henry Suso. After years of study at Strasbourg under Eckhart, he became one of the most influential vernacular preachers of his age, addressing congregations of nuns and lay believers across the upper Rhine in plain German. His sermons, gathered after his death, carry the central themes of Eckhartian mysticism into a more pastoral and accessible form, stressing the ground of the soul, abandonment to God, and the spiritual fruitfulness of suffering. He shaped Luther and the wider Devotio Moderna.

Johannes Tauler was born around 1300 at Strasbourg, the son of a wealthy bourgeois family, and entered the Dominican Order in his native city around the age of fifteen. He studied at the Strasbourg studium and very probably heard Meister Eckhart at Cologne in the 1320s; he formed an enduring friendship with Henry Suso, with whom he is one of the three great Rhineland mystics. During the long interdict of Strasbourg in the conflict between pope and emperor he lived from around 1339 to 1343 at Basel, where he was a leading figure among the Friends of God around Rulman Merswin and Margaret Ebner.

Unlike Eckhart he wrote no Latin treatise; his work survives in some eighty Middle High German sermons preached to Dominican nuns and to lay audiences and circulated widely in late-medieval manuscripts. The first printed edition appeared at Leipzig in 1498, and Luther praised the sermons warmly enough to publish in 1518 the anonymous Theologia Deutsch he attributed to Tauler's school.

Tauler's central teaching is the descent into the Seelengrund, the silent ground of the soul where God speaks his eternal Word, reached only by the abandonment of self and the active imitation of Christ's suffering. His vernacular preaching transmitted Eckhart's metaphysics in a more pastoral form to a wide late-medieval audience and decisively influenced the Devotio Moderna and the early Reformers. He died at Strasbourg in June 1361.