A Teacher
Johannes Tauler
The ground of the soul, where God is eternally born, reached by turning within
The transmission
Johannes Tauler (c.1300-1361) was a German Dominican friar, preacher, and mystic of Strasbourg, one of the three great voices of the Rhineland school alongside Meister Eckhart and Henry Suso.
Entering the Dominican order as a youth, he studied at Strasbourg and Cologne, where he came under Eckhart’s influence, and during years at Basel he became a leader among the Friends of God (Gottesfreunde), a network of clergy and laity seeking a deeper interior life.
Only his sermons survive as authentic work, and they were long counted among the noblest in the German language: intensely practical, pastoral, and concerned above all with the moral and spiritual life of ordinary people rather than with speculative flights.
Tauler’s central teaching is the Seelengrund, the hidden “ground” or abyss of the soul, untouched by time and space, where God is always essentially present and where the divine birth takes place. He taught that a person reaches this ground not through external works but through Gelassenheit, a releasement or letting-go of self-will, so that the soul turns inward and back to its eternal source.
Where Eckhart soared into daring speculation, Tauler pulled the same insight down into lived vocation, insisting that union with God is worked out in humble everyday duty; this practical, ethically grounded mysticism made him widely read for centuries and shaped later devotional currents.
What they gave
The ground of the soul (Seelengrund): the hidden, timeless abyss within where God is essentially present and the divine birth occurs.
- Turning within through Gelassenheit: releasement and letting-go of self-will as the way inward, not outward observance.
- Mysticism made practical: union with God pursued through humble, ordinary vocation and moral life rather than speculation.
- The Friends of God: a leading voice in the Gottesfreunde movement of lay and clerical seekers of the interior life.
In their words
In the most intimate, hidden and innermost ground of the soul, God is always essentially, actively, and substantially present.
The soul has a hidden abyss, untouched by time and space.
So you must be silent. Then God will be born in you, utter his word in you, and you shall hear it.
It is certain that if God is to be born in the soul it must turn back to eternity.
In temptation we are made aware of the ground of our own soul.
The line they stand in
Tauler stood in the direct wake of Meister Eckhart, whom he heard and studied under at Strasbourg and Cologne, and worked alongside his fellow Dominican Henry Suso; together they form the Rhineland mystical school.
He tempered Eckhart’s bold speculation into a pastoral, grace-centred key. Only his sermons are genuine: popular works long ascribed to him, such as the Book of Spiritual Poverty (Von der geistlichen Armut) and the Imitation of the Poor Life of Christ, are now judged spurious.
His sermons fed later German devotion and were prized by Martin Luther, who ranked him among the reformers before the Reformation, though modern scholarship reads Tauler as thoroughly medieval and Catholic.
Essential Works
- Sermons (Predigten)1350
- The Inner Way (Sermons for the Festivals of the Church Year)1350