Tauler was Eckhart’s spiritual heir. A Dominican friar based primarily in Strasbourg, he heard Eckhart preach in his youth, absorbed the teaching of the soul’s ground, and spent the next forty years translating it into pastoral German vernacular sermons that could be heard, lived, and practised by ordinary lay Christians.
His genius was integration. Where Eckhart pushed metaphysics to its outer limit and was condemned for it, Tauler kept the same essential teaching but wrapped it in the language of Christian discipleship: humility, suffering, surrender, the work of the cross. The same nondual ground is there. The same pointing to what is already true. But the form is one a parish priest could deliver without inviting heresy charges.
He preached often to the Beguines and the Dominican women’s houses of the Upper Rhine, to the Friends of God movement, and to the lay communities devastated by the Black Death of 1348-50, the years he became their teacher in plague time. His sermons return again and again to the inner ground, the Seelengrund, and to what he called the gemüt, the deep orientation of the soul prior to thought.
Luther read Tauler closely and called him the spiritual master who had shaped him most. The Theologia Germanica, an anonymous Rhineland tract closely associated with Tauler’s circle, would become the first book Luther personally edited and published. Through this lineage Tauler shaped not only the contemplative current but the Protestant Reformation itself.
