burg, 1983), Richard Faber, Eveline Goodman-Thau, and
Thomas Macho’s collection Abendländische Eschatologie: Ad
Jacob Taubes (Würzburg, 2001), and also the monograph by
Elettra Stimilli, Jacob Taubes: Sovranità e tempo messianico
(Brescia, Italy, 2004).
ELETTRA STIMILLI (2005)TAULER, JOHANNES (c. 1300–1361), German Do-
minican and mystic. Born at Strasbourg, Tauler entered the
convent of the Strasbourg Dominicans as a young man and
was probably a student, and certainly a disciple, of Meister
Eckhart. Living at a time of political upheaval, aggravated by
the social excesses that came in the wake of the Black Death,
Tauler was distinguished by a remarkable sobriety of lan-
guage and thought, a refusal of extremism, and a profound
understanding of human nature, which did not keep him
from being a demanding spiritual guide. His surviving ser-
mons, all in German, were preached to Dominican nuns,
written down, copied, and sent to other convents eager for
spiritual nourishment, then often in scarce supply.
Primarily a pedagogue and a “master of life,” Tauler
takes as his starting point a carefully defined conception of
“man as being really like three men (Menschen), though re-
maining one”: the sensible man, with sensations, percep-
tions, imagination, action, and sensible will; the rational or
intellectual man, capable of abstract thought, conceptualiza-
tion, and deduction; and the higher, or interior and essential
man, the “depth” (Grund) from which the spark emerges and
in which the birth of God takes place.
The spiritual life starts with sensible devotion (images
of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ) and a love that
is felt strongly at the time of the first “conversion” of the
heart, often with a degree of exaltation that approaches in-
toxication. But such devotion and love, though useful, re-
main “in nature,” and there follows a lengthy period in
which the person advances with difficulty, under the guid-
ance of reason as it exercises discernment, often amid obscu-
rity and aridity when reduced to its own powers and sus-
tained by naked faith. If the person perseveres, this period
brings a detachment that will do away with all obstacles to
the unmediated encounter with God. In this process an expe-
rienced teacher is needed. If God wills it, the person will at-
tain supernatural contemplation, a pure gift that cannot be
merited.
In addition to Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Saint-
Thierry, and Meister Eckhart, Tauler drew on Christian (Di-
onysius the Areopagite) and non-Christian (Proclus) Neo-
platonism. Tauler exercised an extensive influence in the
Germanic countries (as a young man, Luther read and reread
him) and also—through Latin translations and complex
channels—on Spanish and French spiritual writers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An exhaustive bibliography of works published before 1961 is in
Johannes Tauler: Ein Deutscher Mystiker, edited by Ephrem
Filthaut (Essen, 1961), pp. 436–479. A bibliography of
works from 1961 until 1969 is in Bibliographisches Handbuch
der Deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 1, edited by Clemens
Köttelwesch (Frankfurt, 1973). For 1969 through 1973
there is Bibliographie der Deutschen Sprach- und Literatur-
wissenschaft, edited by Hildegard Huttermann, Clemens
Köttelwesch, and Heinz-Georg Halbe (Frankfurt, 1973).
The original texts of Tauler’s sermons are published as Ser-
mons de Tauler, 2 vols., edited by A. L. Corin (Liège, 1924–
1929). A critical edition was produced by Ferdinand Vetter
as Die Predigten Taulers, “Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters,”
vol. 11 (Berlin, 1910). A. L. Corin has translated the sermons
into French in three volumes, Sermons de Tauler (Paris,
1927–1935), and Georg Hofmann has produced a German
edition in two volumes, Sämtliche Predigten (Freiburg,
1983). An English translation by Maria Shrady is available
as Johannes Tauler: Sermons (New York, 1985). Selections
from Tauler have been translated and edited by Eric Col-
ledge and Sister M. Jane, O.P., as Spiritual Conferences (Saint
Louis, 1961). A brief secondary source on Tauler is James M.
Clark’s The Great German Mystics (Oxford, 1949),
pp. 36–54, with bibliography, pp. 114–117.CLAIRE CHAMPOLLION (1987)
Translated from French by Matthew J. O’ConnellTAEZIYAH, more fully known as taEziyah-khva ̄n ̄ı or
shab ̄ıh-khva ̄n ̄ı, is the Sh ̄ıE ̄ı passion play, performed mainly
in Iran. The word itself is derived from the Arabic Eaza ̄D,
“mourning,” and the taEziyah performance marks the death
of H:usayn, the grandson of the prophet Muh:ammad and the
third imam of the Sh ̄ıEah, who was brutally murdered, along
with the male members of his family and a group of follow-
ers, while he was contesting his hereditary right to the caliph-
ate. The horrors of this hot and bloody scene, which took
place on the plain of Karbala near the Euphrates on EA ̄shu ̄ra ̄D,
the tenth day of the Muslim month of Muh:arram, in AH 61/
680 CE, became the prototype of Sh ̄ıE ̄ı martyrdom.Beginning in the middle of the tenth century, annual
parades held in Baghdad during the month of Muh:arram
vividly portrayed the fate of the martyrs, loudly lamented by
attending crowds. When the Safavid monarch made Shiism
the state religion of Iran in the sixteenth century, these dem-
onstrations became highly elaborate, featuring men, on ca-
parisoned horses and camels, acting the role of martyrs with
bloody wounds and gruesome injuries. Floats were also con-
structed to depict the various events at Karbala, and the en-
tire parade was accompanied by funerary music while by-
standers wailed and beat their breasts. Contemporaneously,
the lives, deeds, and sufferings of H:usayn and other Sh ̄ıE ̄ı
martyrs were also treated in a book entitled Rawd:at
al-shuhada ̄D (The Garden of the Martyrs), which in turn gave
rise to readings called rawz
̈ah-khva ̄n ̄ıs, or “garden recita-
tions” in Persian. It was from a combination of the
Muh:arram parades and the rawz
̈ah-khva ̄n ̄ı that the taEziyah
drama emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century.9022 TAULER, JOHANNES