Piety and Family in Early Modern Europe

Essays in Honour of Steven Ozment

Marc R. Forster, Benjamin J. Kaplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351911177
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

At first sight, the subjects of piety and family life may appear to have little in common. Yet, as the essays in this volume make clear, there are in fact a number of shared features and points of contact that make the study of these issues a particularly fertile area for scholars of the Reformation period. Whether it be the concept of an individual's relationship with God - so often articulated in familial terms, the place of domestic devotions, or the difficulties that faced families split by rival confessional beliefs and mixed marriages, this book demonstrates how piety and family life were interwoven in the social and theological landscape of early modern Europe. Inspired by the works of Steven Ozment, the volume is divided into two sections, each of which deals with a particular concern of his writings. The first four chapters address issues of Reformation theology and the medieval heritage, whilst the remaining seven examine the spiritual life of families. Together they underline how modern scholarship by broadening its conceptual outlook and bringing together seemingly unrelated subjects, can provide a more sophisticated understanding of the past.

PART I

Reformation Theology and the Medieval Heritage

CHAPTER ONE
Tauler the Mystic’s Lutheran Admirers

Eric Lund

Martin Luther enthusiastically recommended the writings of Johannes Tauler in various letters he wrote throughout his life. On the basis of these comments and Luther’s references to Tauler in his early theological writings, Reformation historians have long recognized the possibility of some influence of this fourteenth-century mystic on the development of his thought. In more recent years, a few historical theologians, sometimes motivated by ecumenical concerns or interests in spirituality, have ventured to call Luther a mystic. Other scholars who have directed renewed attention to continuities between Luther’s thought and some late medieval theological themes have spoken more cautiously about an enduring mystical element in his outlook.¹ Critics of such views have been more inclined to see Luther’s attraction to Tauler as only an early phase in the development of his thought or have argued that the affinity Luther felt with Tauler was based on a creative misunderstanding of the mystic’s writings.²

Luther’s ambivalence about Tauler

Steven Ozment’s first book, published in 1969, was an important contribution to the debate about Luther’s relation to medieval mystical theology.³ In Homo Spiritualis, Ozment focused on the neglected issue of theological anthropology and concluded from a study of Luther’s marginal notations on Tauler’s sermons that, already in 1515, Luther was well on his way toward a break with the basic ontological presuppositions of the Catholic mystics. Ozment argued that Tauler understood the Seelengrund to be an uncorrupted higher part of the soul that allowed a person, when divine indwelling took place, to become by grace what God substantively is by nature. He noted that, when passages in Tauler’s sermons seemed to depict the ‘ground of the soul’ as a soteriologically significant resource for spiritual development, Luther substituted the assertion that the truly spiritual man is one who lives by faith.⁴ This shift in emphasis, according to Ozment, reveals a clash between two profoundly different understandings of salvation. While Tauler and the other mystics held to the widespread medieval notion that likeness to God is a precondition for the soul’s union with God, Luther’s new perspective asserted that, because of Christ, union with God could take place even though a person was still utterly dissimilar from God.⁵

To explain how Luther could praise Tauler so highly despite opposition to some of his central teachings, Ozment has argued that it is important to differentiate between the mystical and non-mystical aspects of Tauler’s writings. Luther appreciated Tauler’s psychological treatment of the religious life and, in particular, his statements about the need for self-denial and passivity in the development of a relationship with God. Luther was less interested in what the mystic had to say about a culminating experience of union with God. Ozment has concluded that Luther’s attraction to the German mystics was quite consciously selective and not based on a misunderstanding of their thought.⁶

There continue to be disagreements about the way to interpret specific passages in the writings of Tauler and Luther, but Ozment’s research has convinced most historians that Luther’s attitude toward Tauler can best be described as ‘ambivalent’.⁷ Luther’s misgivings about mysticism increased in the 1520s, when his reform movement struggled with Spiritualists who were also influenced by Tauler, but his last explicit comments about Tauler, written in the 1530s, continued to be complimentary.⁸

Interest in Tauler among later Lutherans

Interest in Tauler continued among Lutherans long after Luther’s death and sporadically intensified. Many writers of devotional literature cited Tauler frequently in their books, anthologies of excerpts from Tauler’s sermons were circulated for Protestant use, and eventually even full editions of Tauler’s writings were prepared and published by Lutherans. This longstanding interest in Tauler provoked mixed evaluations throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some Lutheran theologians charged those who made use of Tauler’s writings with heresy, prompting the admirers of Tauler to mount extensive defenses of their actions. This debate has continued among modern evaluators of Lutheran theology, some of whom have viewed the increased appropriation of mystical resources as a departure from Luther’s outlook and as an alien influence infiltrating post-Reformation Lutheranism, while others have argued that a form of mysticism emerged among Tauler’s Lutheran admirers that was quite compatible with the central affirmations of their theological tradition.⁹

Some important general assessments of the ‘renaissance of mysticism’ in post-Reformation Lutheranism have been published in recent years, and a number of detailed studies of the influence of medieval mystics on individual Lutheran authors have been undertaken.¹⁰ However more work could be done to clarify why Tauler, in particular, attracted such interest. This chapter will examine the specific efforts of Lutherans to keep the writings of Tauler in circulation during the century and a half after Luther’s death and what those who perpetuated this process explicitly said to justify these efforts. Analysis of this group of writings should shed some more light on the way later Lutherans interpreted Tauler and on the extent to which they would have agreed with Luther’s ultimately ambivalent assessment of the writings of this medieval mystic.

Influential recommendations

There are a couple of factors that seem especially to have enhanced the reputation of Tauler among post-Reformation Lutherans. First of all, they felt justified in continuing to read his writings because Luther and several of his associates had explicitly recommended that Christians do so. There are at least 26 places in Luther’s published writings where he mentioned Tauler. ¹¹ In the middle of the sixteenth century, several of these passages were being cited whenever the merits and demerits of Tauler were under discussion. In a letter written in 1516 to Georg Spalatin, Luther stated that he had found ‘no purer and more wholesome theology in Latin or German’ than what Tauler wrote in his sermons. In a second letter, Luther specifically urged Spalatin to buy Tauler’s sermons because he thought all the teachings of their own times seemed like iron or earth when compared to them.¹²

A frequently cited quotation from Philipp Melanchthon offered proof of Tauler’s basic orthodoxy by noting his gravestone in Strasbourg, which portrayed him pointing his finger towards Christ, the Lamb of God, to indicate that his teachings were Christ centric. Melanchthon also claimed that Tauler’s fellow monks viewed him as a fool, a report that only contributed further to the perception that Tauler stood on the side of the Protestants in the continuing battle against Catholicism, even though he lived and died as a Dominican friar.¹³

The evidence of the gravemarker was subjected to a more elaborate interpretation in an additional favorite quotation from Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520–75). This prominent Gnesio-Lutheran wrote a book in 1562 entitled Catalogue of True Witnesses, in which he attempted to defend Lutheranism against the charge of doctrinal innovation by presenting short descriptions of over 400 individuals who constituted a remnant of true Christianity throughout the dark centuries before the occurrence of the Lutheran Reformation.¹⁴ Bernard of Clairvaux and Johannes Tauler are the only medieval mystics among his ‘witnesses’. Flacius honored Tauler for rightly teaching justification by grace and described him as a bitter enemy of superstition. Citing various passages from the sermons, Flacius claimed that Tauler fervently dismissed the value of human merits and preached dependence on faith alone. Flacius noted sermons in which Tauler criticized conspicuous displays of external sanctity and claimed that Tauler condemned prayers addressed to the saints.

The list of supportive quotations expanded with the passage of time, and an additional one that frequently appeared came from Jerome Weller (1499–1572), a church superintendent in Freyburg, near Naumburg, who authored many commentaries on the Psalms. Luther had valued Tauler’s understanding of the role of suffering in the Christian life, and Weller, in his comments on the 119th Psalm, suggested that Tauler wrote well on this topic because he had personal experience of humiliation and Anfechtung}5 Weller based this claim on the story that for two years Tauler was afflicted with such weakness that he could not bring himself to preach or go out among people. This was interpreted as an act of God to keep him from becoming too proud of his natural abilities. After humbling Tauler, God supposedly restored his gifts and empowered him to teach effectively once again. This story can be traced back to the Meisterbuch, an account of Tauler’s life and spiritual conversion, which came to be, in addition to the existence of testimonials from respected Lutheran theologians, a second major factor causing many Lutherans to feel that Tauler’s life and work was especially worthy of respect.

The influence of the Meisterbuch

The Meisterbuch, which first appeared in 1361, described the interactions of its author, a layman who called himself ‘the Friend of God of the Oberland’, with ‘the Master’, a great preacher in Strasbourg.¹⁵ This was later assumed to be Johannes Tauler, although such an identification only appeared for the first time in a manuscript of the work dating from 1486. Modern analysis of this text has conclusively proved that the account is legendary and offers no reliable information about Tauler’s life, yet for several centuries it was seen as an authentic explanation of the way Tauler came to his enlightened spiritual perspective.¹⁶ According to the story, the author was told by God in a dream to go to Strasbourg to hear the preaching...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Reformation Theology and the Medieval Heritage
• Part II The Spiritual Life of Families
• Index