Brief biographies of the eleven European Mystics presented by Rudolf Steiner. The mystics include: Meister Eckhart Johannes Tauler Heinrich Suso Jan van Ruysbroeck Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa Agrippa of Nettesheim Theophrastus Paracelsus Valentin Weigel Jacob Boehme Giordano Bruno and Angelus Silesius

1. RUDOLF STEINER
Eleven European Mystics:
Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age
CLARITY GRAPHIC ©

2. 2. Johannes Tauler
7. Paracelsus
5. Nicholas of Cusa6. Cornelius Agrippa
4. Jan van Ruysbroeck
8. Valentin Weigel 3. Heinrich Suso
9. Jacob Boehme
11 European Mystics by Rudolf Steiner
1. Meister Eckhart
10. Giordano Bruno
11. Angelus Silesius

3. Meister Eckhart
(1260 – 1328)
Meister Eckhart (1260 - 1328) was a Catholic German
theologian, philosopher, and mystic.
Eckhart came into prominence during the Avignon
Papacy, at a time of increased tensions between the
Franciscan Order and Eckhart's Dominican Order of
Preachers.
He once stated that, “Theologians may quarrel, but the
mystics of the world speak the same language.”
In later life, Eckhart was accused of heresy, brought up
before the local Franciscan-led Inquisition, and tried as
a heretic by Pope John XXII.
“If the only prayer you ever say in
your entire life is thank you,
it will be enough.”
-Meister Eckhart

4. Johannes Tauler OP was a German mystic, a
Catholic preacher and a theologian.
A disciple of Meister Eckhart, he belonged to
the Dominican order.
Tauler was known as one of the most
important Rhineland Mystics.
Johannes Tauler
(1300 – 1361)
God does not lead all His servants by one road,
nor in one way, nor at one time;
for God is in all things;
and that man is not serving God aright,
who can only serve Him in his own self-chosen way.
- Johannes Tauler

5. Suso recounts how, after five years in the monastery (he was about
18 years old), he experienced a conversion to a deeper form
of religious life through the intervention of Divine Wisdom. He made
himself "the Servant of Eternal Wisdom", which he identified with
divine Eternal Wisdom made woman in Christ.
This burning love for Eternal Wisdom culminated in a mystical
marriage to Christ through Eternal Wisdom..
He defended Meister Eckhart's legacy after Eckhart was
posthumously condemned for heresy in 1329.
He was beatified by the Catholic Church in 1831.
Henry Suso
(1295 – 1366)
“None can come to the sublime heights of the divinity”, said the Eternal Wisdom, "or taste its ineffable
sweetness, if first they have not experienced the bitterness and lowliness of my humanity. The higher they climb
without passing by my humanity, the lower afterward shall be their fall. My humanity is the road which all must
tread who would come to that which you seek: my sufferings are the door by which all must come in.”
– Henry Suso

6. John of Ruysbroeck
(c. 1293 – 1381)
When love has carried us above all things ... we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us and
penetrating us. What is this Light, if it be not a contemplation of the Infinite, and an intuition of Eternity? We
behold that which we are, and we are that which we behold; because our being, without losing anything of its
own personality, is united with the Divine Truth. – John of Ruysbroeck
Ruysbroeck insisted that the soul finds God in its own depths and noted
three stages of progress in what he called the spiritual ladder of Christian
attainment: (1) the active life, (2) the inward life, (3) the contemplative
life.
He did not teach the fusion of the self in God, but held that at the summit
of the ascent the soul still preserves its identity In relation to the
contemplative life, he held that three attributes should be acquired:
The first is spiritual freedom from worldly desires ("as empty of every
outward work as if he did not work at all,"); the second is a mind
unencumbered with images ("inward silence"); and the third is a feeling
of inward union with God ("even as a burning and glowing fire which can
never more be quenched.")

7. Nicholas of Cusa
(1401 – 1464)
In humility alone lies true greatness,
and knowledge and wisdom are profitable
only in so far as our lives are governed by them..
– Nicholas of Cusa
Nicholas of Cusa was a German philosopher, theologian, jurist,
and astronomer.
One of the first German proponents of Renaissance humanism,
he made spiritual and political contributions in European history.
A notable example of this is his mystical or spiritual writings on
"learned ignorance," as well as his participation in power
struggles between Rome and the German states of the Holy
Roman Empire.

8. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
(1486 – 1535)
It is us he inhabits, not the underworld, nor the stars in the sky.
The spirit who lives in us makes those.
– Cornelius Agrippa
Agrippa von Nettesheim was a German polymath, physician, legal
scholar, soldier, theologian and an occult writer.
The paradox with which Agrippa challenges his readers lies precisely in
the simultaneous presence of two speculative concerns, which are
scattered in different texts, but which express, in spite of their apparent
inconsistency, a complex cultural and religious project.
• De vanitate performs the epistemological function of the pars
destruens, identifying the causes and the historical responsibilities for
the general spiritual wreckage of Christian society, and introducing
the proposal contained in the pars construens.
• De occulta philosophia, recovering “true magic” in the framework of
Neoplatonic metaphysics and Hermetic theology, offers humankind a
wonder-working knowledge, one which is able to restore human
cognitive and practical capacities.

9. Paracelsus
(1493 - 1541)
The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician.
Therefore the physician must start from nature, with an open mind.
– Paracelsus
Paracelsus was a Swiss physician, alchemist and astrologer of
the German Renaissance.
He was a pioneer in several aspects of the "medical revolution"
of the Renaissance, emphasizing the value of observation in
combination with received wisdom. He is credited as the
"father of toxicology".
He also had a substantial impact as a prophet or diviner, his
"Prognostications" being studied by Rosicrucians in the late
16th and 17th centuries. Paracelsianism is the early modern
medical movement inspired by the study of his works.

10. Valentin Weigel
(1533- 1588)
Weigel the founder of the Spiritualist movement during the Protestant
Reformation.
He was a German teacher and theologian who articulated a variant of the
Protestant Reformation known as Spiritualism. Spiritualism refers to a form
of dissent emphasizing spiritual or inner dependence from rules,
ceremonies, and the visible or organized church.
He championed tolerance and individual conscience in an age of
confessional hatred and religious war. Weigel's writings embody Spiritualist
theory at its most accurate. His life completes a missing chapter in the
history of mystical literature.
"The man who has the Christ-Life in him does not quarrel; he does not go to law for temporal goods;
he does not kill...but now [Christ] is tender, kind, loving. He kills no one. The Lamb kills no wolf...
Where the Life of Christ is, there is no war made with corporeal weapons...
The world wars but Christ doth not so. His warfare is spiritual...
We walk no longer under Moses but under Christ.“
– Valentin Weigel

11. Jacob Böhme
(1575- 1624)
When thou art quiet and silent, then art thou as God was before nature and creature;
thou art that which God then wants;
thou art that whereof he made thy nature and creature:
Then thou hearest and seest even with that wherewith God himself saw and heard in thee,
before even thine own willing or thine own seeing began.
―Jacob Boehme
The chief concern of Böhme's writing was the nature
of sin, evil and redemption.
Consistent with Lutheran theology, Böhme preached that humanity had
fallen from a state of divine grace to a state of sin and suffering, that the
forces of evil included fallen angels who had rebelled against God, and
that God's goal was to restore the world to a state of grace.

12. Giordano Bruno
(1548- 1600)
Beginning in 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on
charges including denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal
damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary,
and transubstantiation. Bruno's pantheism was also a matter of grave concern, as
was his teaching of the transmigration of the soul (reincarnation). The Inquisition
found him guilty, and he was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori in
1600.
After his death, he gained considerable fame, being particularly celebrated by
19th- and early 20th-century commentators who regarded him as a martyr for
science, although historians have debated the extent to which his heresy trial was
a response to his astronomical views or to other aspects of his philosophy and
theology. Bruno's case is still considered a landmark in the history of free
thought and the emerging sciences.
There was in me, whatever I was able to do, that which no future century will deny to be mine, that
which a victor could have for his own: Not to have feared to die, not to have yielded to any equal in
firmness of nature, and to have preferred a courageous death to a noncombatant life.
– Giordano Bruno

13. Angelus Silesius
(1624- 1677)
If Christ were born in Bethlehem a thousand times
and not in thee thyself;
then art thou lost eternally.
- Angelus Silesius
Angelus Silesius was born into a Polish Lutheran family. As a young man he was
influenced by the teachings of the German mystic Jacob Boehme. Angelus later
left his Lutheran faith to become a Catholic Monk (in 1661). He was drawn to
the monastic life because of his inner mystic yearnings.
His two best known books of poetry include ‘ The Soul’s Spiritual Delight’ and
The Cherubic Pilgrim.
Angelus was often embroiled in controversy with various Protestant sects that
he wrote criticisms of. However despite this his poetry reveals Angelus had a
deep spirituality and strong conviction that God could be accessed through
love. Angelus also said that God could love nothing inferior to himself and
therefore in essence he concluded that God and man are essentially one.

14. JOHN D. HIPSLEY
JHIPSLEY@IGC.ORG