Traditions / Christian Mysticism / Sermons
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Christian Mysticism · classical text

Sermons

Tauler's Strasbourg sermons on the indwelling ground of the soul

Translator: Susanna Winkworth (1820–1884), 1857.

Source: Internet Archive

Licence: Public Domain. Winkworth's translation, with a long biographical introduction. Strict PD.

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Tauler's vernacular German sermons carry Eckhart's nondual mysticism into pastoral form, accessible to lay Christians and shaped by the experience of preaching to communities living through the Black Death of 1348-50.

From the text

Tauler’s surviving body of work is almost entirely sermons, around eighty of them, preached over the last twenty years of his life primarily in Strasbourg, Cologne, and Basel. They were transcribed by listeners, mostly nuns and Beguines, and circulated widely in fourteenth-century manuscripts. The Winkworth translation gathers a substantial selection in idiomatic Victorian English.

Tauler’s voice is quieter than Eckhart’s. The vocabulary of Seelengrund and the indwelling Word is the same, but where Eckhart could startle with metaphysical formulations, Tauler patiently translates the same recognition into the language of Christian discipleship. He emphasises the work of gelassenheit, releasement, the steady letting go of every attachment, every consolation, every spiritual experience that the soul might cling to. The path, in Tauler, is one of long humble surrender rather than sudden insight.

What gives the sermons their particular weight is that many were preached in the years following the Black Death of 1348-50. Tauler was preaching to communities ravaged by mass death, to individuals who had lost everyone, in a Europe that had buried perhaps a third of its population. The contemplative path he describes is not abstract. It is forged in actual loss.

Sermon — On the indwelling of God in the ground of the soul

Opening

Children, in this hour our Lord takes his abode in the ground of the soul. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear what the silent God speaketh in his most inward part. There is no need to seek him afar. He is closer to thee than thou art to thyself. The work is to turn thither, and to wait.

Continuation

We must learn to be still, in the depths of the soul, where the Word is uttered. As long as the senses are scattered abroad, and the heart is divided among many things, the speaking cannot be heard. But when a man hath gathered himself wholly into his ground, and is silent there, then the Word is spoken, and he heareth it.

[ One of Tauler’s surviving sermons. The collection includes many further texts, each a working-through of a single scriptural verse into the language of the soul’s ground. The complete Susanna Winkworth nineteenth-century English edition is at the source linked above. ]