Both Tauler’s sermons and Seuse’s devotional works were widely transmitted in female communities, especially within the Observance.2 They are both strongly attested within the convent library of St. Katherine’s in Nürnberg, in part thanks to the labors of the librarian Kunigunde Niklas. Niklas had been a member of the convent prior to the 1428 Observant reform, and her activities on behalf of St. Katherine’s are attested from 1436 when she first becomes visible as a scribe. Niklas copied more than thirty manuscripts before her appointment as librarian in 1455.3 Among the works she copied for her convent was Seuse’s Exemplar, which she entered into her own library catalog under the signature J II.4 As librarian, Niklas was also responsible for developing the community’s cycle of table readings, edifying texts that were read aloud to the assembled sisters during a meal. Although she did not herself copy the manuscript she used, Niklas incorporated all eighty or so Tauler sermons in E V (Nürnberg, Stadtbibliothek, Cod. Cent. IV, 29) into the yearly schedule.5 Kunigunde Niklas thus single-handedly assured that Seuse’s Exemplar was available to her sisters and that they would regularly hear Tauler’s sermons.
Scholarship on the fourteenth-century vernacular writings of German Dominican friars often conceives of such literature as combatting the immediate and corporeal feminine spirituality of Dominican women by imposing a male rationality. In a statement representative of this position, Werner Williams-Krapp writes that Seuse worked to convince Dominican nuns that “wild hallucinations achieved through rigorous asceticism are not to be understood as the consummation of spiritual perfection.”6 In other words, Williams-Krapp paints a picture of rational and prudent friars working to rein in the delusional visions of women spurred by bodily excess. Although returning a measure of value to embodied female devotional practices has proven a useful corrective in certain contexts, simply turning the paradigm on its head does not correct the problem. As Ulrike Wiethaus has compellingly argued, feminist approaches that celebrate the bodiliness of female spirituality still essentialize women and their engagement with Christian tradition and practice.7 As I show in the following chapter, the visions of the sisterbooks represent carefully constructed mosaics of spiritual meaning: literary lessons which, far from being “wild hallucinations,” in fact often teach obedience and devotion to the Office. In this chapter I approach the writings of contemporary friars not as a corrective measure aimed at reining in the sisters, but as a contiguous element that lays the conceptual and practical groundwork for a broader construction of German Dominican spiritual practice and convent life, including the complex negotiation of female liturgical piety.
Treating Tauler and Seuse together reveals that, despite generic differences in their surviving works and different emphases in their patterns of thought, both friars present the Dominican forma vitae as a devotional and ascetic exercise that fosters spiritual life. Adapting the philosophy of the condemned Dominican teacher Meister Eckhart, Tauler and Seuse posit a “ground” of the soul in or through which the human mind accesses divine experience. Detaching oneself from the world in a state of Gelassenheit in order to prepare for this experience represents the ultimate goal of their spiritual programs. Nevertheless, both men reject ascetic exceptionalism and insist that spiritual perfection can only be attained through orderly practice or, better, through the practices of the order. By submitting oneself to the regulations of the Dominican order, one learns to let go of one’s own will in Gelassenheit, such that only the prayers of the Office remain as expressions of self rising from the ground of the soul. Tauler’s ideal expressions of piety prove different from Seuse’s, and Seuse’s again from those of the sisterbooks, yet these very differences reveal the spiritual productivity of life under the Dominican statutes.
The Ground and Gelassenheit
Gelassenheit and its partner concept, the ground, constitute key terms for both Tauler and Seuse, as for their Dominican predecessor Meister Eckhart, and these ideas govern their devotional and spiritual programs.8 Since their liturgical spirituality is both founded in and aims back toward the ground of the soul, I must address these concepts first, building their devotional programs from the ground up, so to speak. These terms govern how Tauler and Seuse conceive the human relationship to the divine and the effectiveness of human activity, including the Dominican forma vitae and the Office. Using the concept of the ground, Tauler and Seuse outline a schematic theological anthropology that explains in philosophical terms how and why observance of the order’s regulations brings one closer to God.
Indebted to Neo-Platonic notions of emanation, the ground represents the part of the human person that shares in the divine being as it pours itself out into creation.9 Seuse famously depicts this dependence or identity visually in a full-page illustration of the cycle of emanation and return found in the earliest manuscript witness of the Exemplar. The divine ground, represented as a dark double circle, rests at the top left of the image. From this point a red thread traces stages in Christ’s life allegorized in poetic couplets as a spiritual progression. At each stage, the thread draws through a small double disk in the center of the figure’s chest, echoing the divine ground from which the thread originates.10
Whereas Seuse uses the term grunt to designate divine mystery and avoids it when describing aspects of the human self,11 Tauler employs the term primarily with regard to the human soul.12 In Tauler’s sermons, the ground often spatially describes the location of the gemuete, which is only imprecisely translated as mind, since it designates the mind’s natural dependence upon and desire to return to God. Paul Wyser concludes that “dieses Streben ist eben doch das Gemüt selber, nicht nur eine Kraft: es ist der Menschengeist, der Seelengrund mit seiner Neigung zu sich selbst [this striving is the gemuete itself and not only a faculty: it is the human spirit, the ground of the soul with its inclination towards itself].”13 Bernard McGinn accordingly translates gemuete as “essential inclination” and defines the ground for Tauler as the “place” of God’s reflection in the human soul.14 Although McGinn’s translation is more accurate, it becomes unwieldy with frequent use. I will translate gemuete as “mind,” with acknowledgment of this term’s shortcomings.
Whether the ground represents the divine font itself or the place within the human soul where it may be sought, both Tauler and Seuse set access to the ground as the goal of contemplative practice. One may achieve this through a process of self-divestment which they both call Gelassenheit. Derived from the verb lassen, to leave or let go, Gelassenheit entails letting go of the world and worldly concerns in order to access the ground. Nevertheless, perfect contemplation neither entails nor permits quietism, but rather orients a person’s works to the will of God. As Amy Hollywood argues in her analysis of Eckhart’s sermon 86 on Mary and Martha, “the highest contemplation is compatible with, and in fact brings about, a state of heightened activity.”15 Virtuous practice is also an important component of spiritual perfection for both Tauler and Seuse, but unlike Eckhart, who offers no concrete prescriptions, the later friars promote specific devotional programs in order to foster Gelassenheit.16 As we shall see, the Dominican forma vitae represents a central component of their programs. However, since their understandings of the ground differ, their conceptions of Gelassenheit and the methods of achieving it differ, as well. Although both urge surrendering the will to God in Gelassenheit, Seuse prioritizes the path of suffering in imitation of Christ, whereas the Virgin Mary’s obedience proves more emblematic of Tauler’s approach.
Of the works included in Seuse’s Exemplar, the Vita and the Little Book of Truth contain the most extensive discussions of Gelassenheit.17 The Vita constitutes the life narrative and spiritual progression of an anonymous protagonist called simply “ein diener der ewigen wisheit [a Servant of Eternal Wisdom],”18 who nevertheless represents Seuse, if not with precise historical accuracy.19 The work is divided into two books, the first of which narrates the Servant’s own spiritual journey, while the second, beginning in chapter 33, recounts the path of his spiritual daughter, Elsbeth Stagel of the Töss convent,