Johannes Tauler

What this work carries

Tauler's sermons transmit the late-medieval German Dominican mystical stream rooted in Neoplatonic interiority and the cultivation of Gelassenheit (soul-surrender). They preserve the experiential core of Rhineland speculative mysticism as mediated through Meister Eckhart's school. The vernacular homiletic form makes esoteric soul-knowledge accessible beyond the Latin-literate clergy.

Language frame

Written in Middle High German vernacular for lay and semi-religious audiences in Strasbourg and the Rhineland, the sermons occupy the intersection of Dominican preaching and contemplative mysticism. The form is homiletic rather than systematic, conveying interior soul-states through direct pastoral address.

Steiner’s engagement

• GA 7Steiner situates Tauler within the Friends of God network, noting his visit to Jan van Ruysbroeck at Groenendaal and his connection to the tradition continuing Meister Eckhart's work, including the figure identified with the 'Friend of God from the Oberland.'
• GA 59, 1910-02-10Steiner references Tauler as a defining figure of the German mystical movement in a lecture from the Metamorphoses of the Soul cycle.
• GA 64, 1915-01-14Steiner identifies Tauler alongside Eckhart as the leading figures of German mysticism in whom the soul-life passes directly into a form of spiritual experience characteristic of that stream.
• GA 109, 1909-02-15Steiner identifies Tauler as a German Dominican mystic and disciple of Meister Eckhart within the context of spiritual-economic transmission of impulses.
• GA 117, 1909-12-21Steiner describes the earnest character of the language used by the German mystics, singling out Tauler's work in Alsace as emblematic of that stream's affective and moral depth.
• GA 157, 1915-01-19Steiner lists Tauler among the German mystics treated in his own work Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens, directing readers there for fuller engagement.
• GA 176, 1917-06-19Steiner identifies Tauler as a German mystic and preacher in the context of a lecture on human evolution and the Christ impulse.
• GA 199, 1920-08-08Steiner places Tauler in a list of Christian mystics — alongside Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross — relevant to the discussion of inner experience and the threshold to spiritual worlds.
• GA 326, 1922-12-26Steiner describes Tauler as a Strasbourg Dominican preacher and student of Meister Eckhart whose German sermons represent a key document of the mysticism treated in Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.

Cross-tradition congruence

• Flemish Devotio Moderna (Ruysbroeck)The structural parallel between Tauler's interior soul-surrender and Ruysbroeck's doctrine of the spark of the soul (scintilla animae) reflects a shared Neoplatonic anthropology operating independently in Dominican and Flemish Augustinian contexts.
• Vedantic notion of the Atman withdrawing from outer sheathsTauler's teaching on the Grund (ground of the soul) as the site of divine union shows cross-tradition congruence with the Vedantic account of the Atman as the irreducible interior witness distinct from body, vital force, and mental activity.