The Late Medieval Era · c. 1300-1400 · Rhineland, Switzerland
Rhineland Mysticism & the Friends of God
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About This Movement
Along the Rhine a generation of Dominican preachers — Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Henry Suso — began preaching in German to convents of nuns and to devout lay people, and in doing so had to invent a vocabulary for the inner life that the language did not yet have. Eckhart pushed furthest, speaking of the ground of the soul and of a birth of God within it in terms that got him put on trial for heresy. He died before the case closed, and in 1329 a papal bull condemned twenty-eight propositions drawn from his work, which is how his memory reached everyone who came after. Around Strasbourg and Basel a mixed circle of clergy and laypeople who called themselves Gottesfreunde, the Friends of God, carried the same piety outside the cloister, and out of that milieu came the anonymous Theologia Deutsch. Much of what survives survives because women preserved it. Nuns took sermons down as they were delivered, convents compiled sister-books recording their own communities' lives, and Elsbeth Stagel worked with Suso on the book of his own life.
Sources
- Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense (trans. Colledge & McGinn, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1981) (primary) — Latin and German works, with his trial Defense. The papal bull In agro dominico (1329) condemned 28 of his propositions, taken out of context, after his death - an institutional condemnation that has shaped how his legacy has been read ever since.
- Johannes Tauler, Sermons (trans. Shrady, CWS, 1985) and Henry Suso, The Exemplar (trans. Tobin, CWS, 1989) (primary) — Tauler preaching to Dominican nuns; Suso's Life of the Servant, co-produced with Elsbeth Stagel - a man's interior life reaching us through a woman's editorial hand. These sermons survive as listeners' transcripts and convent copies, not the preacher's own manuscript.
- The Dominican convent Sister-Books (Schwesternbuecher: Toess, Unterlinden, Engelthal, St Katharinental and kin); study-with-translations: Gertrude Jaron Lewis, By Women, for Women, about Women (PIMS, 1996) (primary) — Nuns writing their own communities' graces, austerities, and deaths - collective women's memory in its own genre. English translations exist only piecemeal.
- Theologia Deutsch (trans. Bengt Hoffman, The Theologia Germanica of Martin Luther, CWS, 1980) (primary) — The anonymous Frankfurt priest's treatise from the Friends of God milieu. The standard English translation is made from Luther's own 1518 edition, so the Luther connection is built into how the text reaches English readers at all. Rulman Merswin's Friends-of-God literature stands behind it.
- Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (Presence of God vol. 4, 2005) (secondary) — Current standard on exactly this ecosystem, Eckhart through the Sister-Books.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 19 'Mysticism and transcendence' (Hollywood) (reference)