Rhineland Mysticism

The movement grew from the women’s religious movement of the thirteenth century. Beguines such as Mechthild of Magdeburg and Hadewijch wrote of union with God in German and Dutch; Marguerite Porete, author of The Mirror of Simple Souls, was burned in Paris in 1310. The Dominican order was charged with the pastoral care of many women’s communities, and its preachers addressed them in their own language.

Eckhart was tried for heresy at Cologne in 1326 and appealed to the pope; he died around 1328, and in 1329 a papal bull condemned propositions drawn from his works. Tauler and Suso defended and adapted his teaching. Circles of the “Friends of God”, lay and clerical, spread it through the Rhine valley. In Brabant, Ruusbroec withdrew in 1343 to Groenendaal, where his community was visited by Geert Grote, the founder of the Modern Devotion. The anonymous Theologia Germanica, written in the late fourteenth century, was published by Martin Luther in 1516 and 1518.

Luther admired Tauler, and the Rhineland mystics influenced Protestant Pietism and Catholic spirituality alike. In the nineteenth century Franz Pfeiffer’s edition of Eckhart’s German works (1857) began a revival of interest; Schopenhauer compared Eckhart with the Buddha, and Heidegger took up the word Gelassenheit. Rudolf Otto set Eckhart beside Śaṅkara in his study of mysticism East and West.