The Theologia Germanica survives in a few late fourteenth-century manuscripts attributed only to a Friend of God in Frankfurt. The text was largely unknown until 1516, when a young Augustinian friar named Martin Luther came across a partial copy and published it under the title Eyn deutsch Theologia. Three years later, with a complete manuscript in hand, he issued a fuller edition. It became the second book Luther personally edited and published, after his edition of the Penitential Psalms, and shaped his theology more than any other medieval source.
Whoever wrote the Theologia Germanica was working inside the same Rhineland current as Eckhart and Tauler. The vocabulary is theirs: the soul’s ground, the indwelling Word, the false self of self-will and the true self that has let go of self. The book’s distinctive contribution is compactness. Eckhart’s sermons can be dazzling but range widely. Tauler’s are pastoral and patient. The Theologia Germanica is short, intense, and concentrated on a single move: the abandonment of self-will and the soul’s emptying into the divine.
The text was suspect to Catholic authorities for centuries because Luther had championed it. It was placed on the Index in 1612. Yet many of the great Counter-Reformation contemplatives, including the seventeenth-century Quietists and the German Pietists, kept reading it. It has remained in print for nearly five hundred years.
Chapter one — That which is perfect and that which is in part
1.1
Saint Paul saith: When that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. Now mark, what is that which is perfect, and what is that which is in part? That which is perfect is a Being, who hath comprehended and included all things in himself and his own substance, and without whom and beside whom there is no true substance, and in whom all things have their substance.
1.4
For the creature, as creature, cannot of himself come to perfection. But to that which is perfect a creature may come, when he forsaketh himself. To forsake himself is the only way to perfection.
[ A representative passage. Fifty-three further short chapters continue the same teaching, each compressed to a single point. The complete Winkworth translation is at the source linked above. ]