To the Reader.

thrown himself about with carnal eloquence original: "fleischlicher Beredsamkeit"; refers to a prideful, intellectual style of preaching based on human rhetoric rather than divine inspiration, so he now taught from his own experience the way which he himself had walked. Yes, he showed the Way of the Cross original: "Creutzstrasse"; the spiritual path defined by suffering and the imitation of Christ's passion on which GOD had led him; he pointed his listeners toward the honey, whose sweetness he had tasted for himself. And it would have been impossible for him to have expressed such high mysteries Deep spiritual truths that are hidden from the unlearned or the unspiritual with such simple, spirit-filled words, if the Spirit of GOD had not truly taught them to him in such a school; and there is none among all the Fathers, in the Greek as well as the Latin churches, who has reached such a height of mysteries, or even such enlightenment, as this very Tauler.

For this reason, the holy Luther Martin Luther (1483–1546), the Protestant Reformer, who was deeply influenced by Tauler’s mysticism—whose testimony no honest Protestant theologian Evangelischer Theologus: a scholar of the Lutheran or Reformed tradition will think lightly of—writes of him not without cause: That there has not been a teacher like him since the time of the Apostles. That the late Luther also read this man's writings so diligently, and turned them into his essence and lifeblood original: "succum und sanguinem"; literally "juice and blood," a Latin idiom meaning to fully internalize or digest the substance of a text, as it were, into his own flesh and blood—that is, applying them to his own benefit—is shown by his