Dominicus de Tauler

“ In this manner also the Father produces him in the essence of the soul, and unites himself to her." (Sermons.)
All the discourses of Tauler end by a refrain. The chorus of his song is ever divine unity. Tauler is hardly a man; he is a voice speaking in the wilderness, calling men to descend into the depths of their souls. All his doctrine may be resumed in this word, to which we must give its etymological signification: Adieu, à Dieu. [Footnote 99]
[Footnote 99: The point of these words is untranslatable. The sense is adieu to creatures; and turn to God—à Dieu!— [Translator's Note.] ”

“ Without even rightly understanding it, he at once applied the teaching of this master of mysticism to his own inward condition and his new, growing opinions; he clothed his own feelings and views in Tauler’s beautiful and inspiring words. His beloved mother-tongue, so expertly handled in Tauler’s sermons, was at the same time a new means of binding him still more firmly to the mystic. In Tauler the necessity of the complete surrender of the soul to the action of God, of indifference and self-abandonment, is strongly emphasised. To free oneself as far as possible of self ”

“ There is a line of fire separating sinners from the accursed. All Catholic doctrine, all ascetical tradition, is but the echo of Christ's mercy and Christ's anger. Tauler teaches like all the great doctors, in this respect.
He reprobates exterior practices which are devoid of charity, as the works of hell, most hateful to the Holy Spirit. The fixedness of his ideas gives a singular solemnity to his repetitions. On every page his hatred of works done without interior life shows itself. ”

“ What is true of a landscape is also true of a book or a man. But Tauler lost the balance between unity and variety, for he gave all to one and nothing to the other. Few individuals, even among the greatest saints, have been so ardent in the sentiment, love, pursuit, and conquest of unity. He seeks after it incessantly, and it haunts him. He never seems to look at the road he is travelling. He fixes his eyes solely on the goal ever present to his soul. ”

“ Tauler says: “God is moved with so vehement a love towards us, as if his divinity itself depended on us, and his only aim and design were, to discover to us the abyss of his divinity, and the fulness of his essence and nature; so that all may belong to us, even as it belongs to him.” And again, “We were created, and are called and invited to things immeasurably great, and eternal; wherefore God is exceedingly displeased with us, when we prefer the empty and trifling vanities of the world before him, who is ready, not only to bestow all things else, but even Himself upon us.” ”

“ All this was possible for the layman without sacerdotal observance. Man was answerable for himself to himself alone, and could make himself at one with God without the intervention of the priest. [404]
Great as was Tauler’s renown as the foremost preacher of his day, he bowed as a little child before the mysterious layman known as the Friend of God in the Oberland. In the full strength of mature manhood, when at least fifty years of age and when all Strassburg was hanging on his words, a stranger sought his presence and probed to the bottom his secret weaknesses. ”

“ Transcending the common view of the average Christian that religion's one end was his own salvation, Tauler taught him that the love of God was greater than this. He tells of a woman ready to be damned for the glory of God—"and if such a person were dragged into the bottom of hell, there would be the kingdom of God and eternal bliss in hell."
One of the fine flowers of German mysticism is a book written anonymously—"spoken by the Almighty, Eternal God, through a wise, understanding, truly just man, his Friend, a priest of the Teutonic Order at Frankfort." ”

“ It seems to me that the doctrine of justification by faith, is practically involved in a theology like that of Tauler, so deep in its apprehension of sin as selfishness, so thorough in renouncing all merit on the part of man. ”

“ If such an assertion be true at all, it cannot be true for Tauler only. Would Mr. Kingsley say that no man has a right to become the critic of Augustine, of Luther, of Calvin, of Wesley, of George Fox, who has not first ascertained himself a better man? Ought every biographer, who is not a mere blind eulogist, to start with the presumption that he is a better man than he of whom he writes? ”

“ The spiritual conflict and desolation which had shaken Tauler’s nature to its depths bears fruit in this profound humility. Self-abasement is the cardinal doctrine of all his sermons; his lowliness of spirit the safeguard of his theology from all dangerous error. The troubles through which he and Suso were made to pass, gave them an antidote to the poison of the current ecclesiastical doctrine. ”

“ But he who has not lived so that his errors are apparent, should, herein, if he is otherwise well disposed, be borne with; and this the more, when he has to live among so disorderly a people, as popery was then composed of, and can obtain no other liberty. Such was John Tauler, and as such we will recognize him. Our love will and shall bear his weakness. ”

“ No men animated by a love so Christ-like as was theirs, could have put an abstraction in the place of Christ.
With regard to the work of Christ, Tauler acknowledges (more readily than George Fox) that the divine element or inward light in man must remain a mere surmise or longing, apart from the historic manifestation of God in the flesh. It is Jesus of Nazareth who at once interprets to the soul, while He satisfies, its own restless heavenward desire. It is His grace alone which makes a mere capacity of God, a possession—a mere potentiality, actual. ”

“ It is quite true that Tauler said this; he also teaches that the greater the desolation by which God tries the souls of the elect, the higher the degree of mystical union to which He wishes to call them; for death is the road to life. It is quite another thing, however, whether Tauler would have approved of Luther’s application of what he wrote.
Luther also refers both to Tauler and to himself elsewhere in the “Operationes,” where he speaks of the fears of conscience regarding the judgment of God which no one can understand who had not himself experienced them ”

“ Tauler seems to desire obscurity. The remarkable effects of his preaching on his audience are less like thunder pealing in his language, than like the awful presence of the sacred cloud where the thunder is reposing.
Every man is a universe in himself. Unity and variety are the two terms of the antinomy, without which there is no life. But perfection consists in equilibrium between those terms. Such perfection is very rare. In general the antinomy of life is replaced by the contradictory, which is death. ”

“ With one voice Eckart and Tauler, Ruysbroek and Suso, exclaim—‘Arise, O man! realize the end of thy being: make room for God within thy soul, that he may bring forth his Son within thee.’
The Saviour’s obedience unto death is regarded by Tauler, rather in its exemplary, than in its propitiatory aspect. Very 1-301important, as characteristic of his theology, is the distinction he makes between our union to the humanity of Christ, and our union to his divinity. As man, He is the ideal of humanity—the exemplar of self-surrender. ”

“ It is in the Son that the Ideas exist "from all eternity." The Ideas are said to be "living," that is, they work as forms, and after the creation of matter act as universals above and in things. Tauler is careful to show that he is not a pantheist. "God is the Being of all beings," he says; "but He is none of all things." God is all, but all is not God; He far transcends the universe in which He is immanent.
We look in vain to Tauler for an explanation of the obscurest point in Eckhart's philosophy, as to the relations of the phenomenal to the real. ”

“ Tauler, says a modern historian of literature, in his German sermons, mingled many expressions invented by himself, which were the first attempt at a philosophical language, and displayed surprising eloquence for the age wherein he lived. It may be justly said of him, that he first gave to prose that direction in which Luther afterwards advanced so far. [95] Tauler died in 1361. Meantime, as has been said before, the nobility abandoned their love of verse, which the burghers took up diligently, but with little spirit or genius ”

“ He who seeks God must "rid himself of all that pertains to the creature." He that would find the absolute Good must withdraw not only beyond all his senses, but beyond all desires, into an inner "solitude where no word is spoken, where is neither creature nor image nor fancy." "Everything depends," Tauler counsels us, "upon a fathomless sinking into a fathomless nothingness. . . . God has really no place to work in but the ground where all has been annihilated. ”

“ Hence it is that Tauler, though he is always speaking of ravishments, never loses the character of force, and of that austerity which is the sign of God and the test of true contemplation.
"Where then does God act without a medium? In the depths, in the essence of the soul? I cannot explain; for the faculties cannot apprehend a being without an image. They cannot, for instance, conceive a horse under the species of a man. It is precisely because all images come from without to the soul, that the mystery is hidden from it ”

“ He thus gives a much wider application to the ideas he had met with in Tauler than was in the mind of that pious mystic. Tauler writes: “I tell you that you must not submit your inner man to anyone, but to God only. But your exterior man you must submit in a true and real humility to God and to all creatures.” [598] Luther says what on the surface seems quite similar: the Christian is free and master of all things and is subject to no one (by faith) , and yet at the same time a willing servant of all and [230] subject to all (by charity) . ”

“ How much more profound his apprehension of sin—his sense of need; how much more prominent Christ, rescuing and purifying the stricken soul. Tauler lays man in the dust, and keeps him there. Eckart suffers him to expand from Nothing to Infinity. Summarily, I would put the difference thus:—With Eckart the language of Christianity becomes the metaphorical expression for pantheism; with Tauler, phraseology approaching pantheism is the metaphorical expression of a most truly Christian conviction. ”

“ From Strassburg he went to the Dominican college of Cologne, and perhaps to St James's College, Paris, ultimately returning to Strassburg. In 1324 Strassburg with other cities was placed under a papal interdict. Legend says that Tauler nevertheless continued to perform religious services for the people, but though there may be a germ of historical truth in this story, it is probably due to the desire of the 16th-century Reformers to enroll the famous preachers of the middle ages among their forerunners. ”

“ The doctrines which Tauler advances in the very context in which his blame of the self-righteous occurs, viz. that there is no righteousness without personal acts, that even the sinner can do what is good, that he, more especially, must prepare himself for the grace of justification, pass unheeded in Luther’s exposition of the Epistle to the Romans. ”

“ John Tauler, a German divine, said, at this time, in his book of sermons: “Our prelates (he means the rulers of the Roman church) , are blind, and leaders of the blind; and it is to be feared that they both together will be condemned.”
He also spoke much of the persecution, tribulation, hardship, and suffering, a Christian must expect here; but did not say that one should inflict sufferings one upon another. ”

“ Of course, here again, what he has in mind are the well-known admonitions of Tauler, to trust in God more than in our own acts of virtue, though he takes them quite wrongly as implying the worthlessness of works for salvation. A Protestant authority here meets us at least half-way: “Tauler certainly did not hold in so accentuated a fashion as Luther the antithesis between grace and works, for he allows that ‘good works’ bring a man forward on the way of salvation.” ”

“ But we find in them an unfaltering conviction that our communion with God must be a fact of experience, and not only a philosophical theory. With the most intense earnestness they set themselves to live through the mysteries of the spiritual life, as the only way to understand and prove them. Suso and Tauler both passed through deep waters; the history of their inner lives is a record of heroic struggle and suffering. The personality of the men is part of their message, a statement which could hardly be made of Dionysius or Erigena, perhaps not of Eckhart himself. ”

“ Both Tauler and Luther believe in substitution. The substitution of Tauler is internal—God takes his place within himself. The substitution of Luther is external—when he believed in Christ, the Saviour associated him with Himself, and so brought him into sonship. So inevitable is the idea of some substitution, where the sense of sin is deep. Luther believes as profoundly as Tauler in a present, inward, living Saviour, as opposed to a remote historic personage, intellectually acknowledged. In the theology of both the old dualism is broken down, and God is brought near to man, yea, within him. ”

“ Never surely was a theory so negative combined with an action more fervently intense—a positiveness more benign.
Gower. In his life we understand him,—that is at once the explanation and vindication of what his mysticism means.
Atherton. Few, however, of his fellow-mystics rose, so far as Tauler, above the peculiar dangers of mysticism. Even the good layman, Nicholas of Basle, was a man of vision, and assumed a kind of prophecy. Tauler and the Theologia Germanica stand almost alone in rejecting the sensuous element of mysticism—its apparitions, its voices, its celestial phantasmagoria. ”