| Notes on Tauler's Life | ||||
He was born at Strasburg, about the year 1300, of a respectable citizen family, dwelling in a house "near the Miller's Bridge." At an early age (Preger says at fifteen) he entered the Dominican convent at Strasburg as a novice; and he was through life a brother of that "Order of Preachers," known in England as the "Black Friars." He passed the two years of his novitiate and the eight years of his preliminary study in his native city; and then, as a brother of much promise, he was sent to the studium Generale at Cologne for a further period of four years. | ||||
During those early years at Strasburg, the nave of the Cathedral, as we now see it, was fresh and white from the mason's chisel, while the great western facade was in process of erection. There he would have heard the sermons of his master, Eckhart, usually reckoned the most intellectual of the German mystics and the founder of German philosophy. He would have heard him again at Cologne, where Eckhart had the misfortune to be accused of Pantheism, but was acquitted after trial by the Inquisition. At Strasburg Tauler would also have known the mystic, John of Sternengassen, and the theologian, John of Dambach; and he would have studied the authors he most frequently quotes, Augustine, Gregory, Bernard, Hugo and Richard of St Victor, Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. Logic, Scripture, and the Sentences of Peter Lombard formed part of the regular curriculum of his preliminary training; and it is supposed that, when he proceeded to Cologne at the age of twenty-five, he had already been ordained priest, and had definitely adopted that mystical standpoint in religion by which he will always be distinguished. | ||||
At this date the Dominican order occupied a position similar to that of the Jesuits two or three centuries later. It was the nursery of great preachers and theologians, and royal confessors were usually chosen from it. At Cologne Tauler would come to know several of the more learned men of his order; and it was there that his training was probably completed. From a passage in one of his sermons: it has been inferred that he proceeded to Paris; but there is no certain trace of him in the Acta of that University; and it is more likely that he returned direct from Cologne to Strasburg. Neither is there any evidence that at Cologne he took the degree of "Master in holy Scripture," (a degree equivalent to that of "Doctor in Theology ); and this he could only have done either at Paris or Cologne. In all the MSS. previous to the fifteenth century he is described simply as "Brother John Tauler"; and this is evidence against his being the anonymous "Master of Holy Scripture" whom the lay "Friend of God" converted. Only in virtue of that indification has he been described as "Dr. John Tauler." | ||||
He would have returned to Strasburg about the year 1329, when the city was laid under an interdict by John XXII. The validity of the interdict was disputed among the city clergy, great pressure being put upon them by the municipal authorities not to observe it. Even among the regulars (Dominicans and Franciscans) there was a party that contended for its non-observance. The General Chapter of the Dominicans admitted its validity; but, according to Preger, not all the German houses there were about 100 accepted the decision. The Strasburg convent, he maintains, did not submit to it until 1339; and the friars were thereupon expelled for three years by the City Council. But before this date Tauler appears to have been sent to Basle, where, though the city was imperialist, the clergy were not called upon by the civil authorities to defy the interdict, and where, moreover, the Pope relaxed its observance from time to time. Here Tauler made a considerable stay, and presumably delivered some, at least, of those sermons which were included in the Basle edition of 1521. Here, too, he met Henry of Nordingen, a secular priest who had come to Basle from Constance for the same reason that Tauler had come there from Strasburg. He was a man of much piety and influence, and he numbered many regulars among his spiritual children, one of them being Margaret Ebner, a Dominican nun and an ecstatica, with whom Tauler had later some correspondence, now lost. | ||||
He returned to Strasburg not much later than 1346; and it was in the years following that his sermons there attracted general attention and admiration. In 1357 he again visited Cologne, and addressed a series of discourses to the nuns at St Gertrude's in that city. Some of these were presumably the originals of the sermons added to the Cologne edition of 1543. Four years later he died in Strasburg (the date on his tomb is June 16, 1361), and was buried in the convent of his order. He had died, however, outside the convent, in the guest-house of an adjoining nunnery, over which his sister presided. A manuscript at Colmar, giving an account of Tauler by one who had known him personally, describes him as "a gifted and holy Friend of God"; but adds that he was detained six years in purgatory for sundry faults, one of these being that on his death-bed he allowed himself to receive too much attention from his sister, "in whose guest-house he died." Other faults ascribed to him are that he was irritable, that he was wanting in submission to his superiors, and that he extolled too highly the "Friends of God," while towards others he was harsh. According to the legend already referred to, the lay "Friend of God," to whom he had owed his conversion, was with him again at his death-bed, and received from "the Master" the notes of his conversion, to be published after his death, describing him as "the Master," without any other name. | ||||