TAULER, JOHANNES. - Dominican preacher and mystic, b. at Strasbourg around the year 1300 (Auer) or 1304 (Théry), d. there on 16 June 1361. His tombstone is in the Neuen Kirche. He entered the Dominicans between the ages of 15 and 18, while his sister became a Dominican nun at St. Nicholas in Undis.
Although frail, T. began in Strasbourg with ardor a religious and studious life which he perfected at Cologne in the «Studium generale» under Master Eckhart (v.), of whom T. was one of the most devoted disciples. Having returned to Strasbourg, he distinguished himself as a preacher and in the care of souls. Out of respect for the interdict of John XXII, T. moved with his confreres to Basel (1339-43), where he became a central figure among the «Friends of God», showing great charity toward Henry of Nördlingen, who had also taken refuge there. From Basel he went on to Cologne (June-autumn 1339), visited Medingen (1346), and returned to Strasbourg in 1346-47, where he directed a group of «Friends of God» and was confessor to Rulman Merswin. Between 1350 and 1360 he went one last time to Cologne and perhaps visited Ruysbroeck at Groenendaal. Nineteenth-century criticism pruned away the spurious additions to T.'s memory, especially in the account of the Meisterbuch. H. S. Denifle likewise rejected as not corresponding to the truth the claim of the chronicler Daniel Specklin (d. 1589) concerning two anti-papal writings attributed to T.
Held in high esteem by contemporaries and posterity, T. is for the chronicler John Meyer (d. 1485) «homo Dei, predicator egregius, litterarum scientia clarus». When Luther took strength from some notion of T. (not even well understood) about the lesser importance of exterior works, the polemicist John Eck too lightly cast upon T. the suspicion of heresy. But St. Peter Canisius, L. Surius and L. Blosius vindicated his doctrinal purity; followed in this by H. Spondanus, by Sixtus of Siena, St. Robert Bellarmine and Bossuet, who defined him as one of the most solid orthodox mystics. In 1550 the Institutiones, moreover falsely attributed to T., were placed on the Spanish Index; the Jesuits (1578) and the Capuchins (1597) pronounced against the Taulerian writings under the pretext of quietism; but T. was in fact rehabilitated in the doctrine of St. John of the Cross, of John of the Angels and of Michael de la Fuente. St. John of the Cross too depends in substantial concepts on T. Noteworthy, moreover, was T.'s influence on the «French school» of the seventeenth century and then on St. Paul of the Cross.
The doctrine of T., sometimes called «doctor illuminatus», built on the basis of the Gospel and tested in pastoral experience, is composed of Neoplatonic-Augustinian, Pseudo-Dionysian, Thomist and Eckhartian elements, amalgamated with great cohesion and originality; it is supremely spiritual and foreshadows the teaching of St. John of the Cross, especially on the purifications of the senses and of the spirit. T.'s preaching leads souls to union with God, to be attained through the renunciation of all that is sensible and of one's own will by means of mortification and the stripping away of all attachments, images and created ideas so that God may be reflected in the human mind. Man in his total nature embraces three strata: the sensible-animal, the rational, and the spiritual which manifests itself in two functions; the ground of the soul is a passivity open to the action of God, the mind (Gemüt) gives the faculties their power toward the infinite. The path of ascent is one, but it traverses three stages: the purgative, illuminative and unitive life, in which souls receive general and special invitations. The means for attaining union are silence, prayer and oration, the imitation of Christ, sufferings, crosses, the exercise of virtue, submission and abandonment to the holy and sovereign will of God, the use of the Sacraments, attention to inspirations, correspondence to the gifts through which the will experiences transformation in the ground; the effect must be of longer duration than this fruition itself. T. puts souls on guard against the misunderstood contemplative life and demands incessant application to good works.
T. left no writings of his own; he preached and also improvised. A most upright and zealous preacher, a most original and powerful intellect, T. fought the «Brethren of the Free Spirit» in their arbitrariness and also several times - to the displeasure of certain hierarchical circles - took up the defense of Eckhart. Practical and ethical, T. recommends sincerity, docility, measure; he is intransigent against every kind of Pharisaism, against any form of sin, of seduction and of enjoyment of creatures.
Of T. there survive the Sermons (about 83), some letters (at least the one to the friends of God, Elizabeth Scheppach, prioress, and the nun Margaret Ebner in Medingen, of 1346) and three instructions (G. Hugueny, H. Théry, A.-L. Corin [v. bibl.], I, pp. 97-59; E. W. Wentzloff-Eggebert [v. bibl.], pp. 307-308). Criticism denies to T. Das Buch der geistlichen Armut, the Divinae institutiones and the Exercitia super vitam et passionem Iesu Christi.
Bibliography17 works
Angelo Walz