Johannes Tauler Quotes

Children, to be truly in this stage is the deepest ground of genuine humility and annihilation. This, in truth, cannot be grasped by the senses. For here he receives the most profound insight possible into his nothingness. Here he sinks as deep as it is possible into the ground of humility; the deeper, the higher, because here high and deep are one and the same...In this state one achieves true unity of prayer spoken of in the epistle that truly brings it about that a person becomes one with God

It is impossible for us in words to describe the ineffable dignity of the soul, and we cannot in any way comprehend it. If we had here with us a human being in his primal nobility, pure as Adam in paradise in his natural state apart from grace, his simple nature unadorned — that person would be so luminous and pure, so ravishing and richly favoured by God that no one would be able to comprehend his purity nor with his reason conceive of it.

When shall we find an know this birth of God within us? Only when we concentrate all our faculties within us and direct them all towards God. Then he will be born in us and make himself our very own. He will give himself to us as our own, more completely ours than anything we have ever called our own.

So you must be silent. Then God will be born in you, utter his word in you and you shall hear it; but be very sure that if you speak the word will have to be silent. If you go out, he will most surely come in; as much as you go out for him He will come in to you; no more, no less….

Next the soul must go out. It must travel away from itself, above itself…. There must be nothing left in us but a pure intention towards God; no will to be or become or obtain anything for ourselves. We must exist only to make a place for God, the highest innermost place, where He may do His work; there, when we are no longer putting ourselves in His way, He can he born in us.

It is certain that if God is to be born in the soul it must turn back to eternity…. It must turn in toward itself with all is might, must recall itself, and concentrate all its faculties within itself, the lowest as well as the highest. All its dissipated powers must be gathered up into one, because unity is strength.

God is pure Being, a waste of calm seclusion…much nearer than anything is to itself in the depth of the heart, but He is hidden from all our senses. He is far above every outward thing and every thought, and is found only where thou hidest thyself in the secret place of thy heart, in the quiet solitude where no word is spoken, where is neither creature nor image nor fancy. This is the quiet Desert of the Godhead, the Divine Darkness—dark from His own surpassing brightness, as the shining of the sun is darkness to weak eyes, for in the presence of its brightness our eyes are like the eyes of the swallow in the bright sunlight.

When the spirit looks within, to the Spirit of God, from the ground of the heart, where man, empty and bare of all works, seeks God only, far above all thoughts, works and reason, it is truly a thorough conversion, which will ever be met with a corresponding reward, and God will be with him. Another conversion may take place in an ordinary external way, whenever man turns to God, thinking wholly and entirely of Him, and of nothing else but of God for Himself and in Himself. But the first turning is in an inner, undefined, unknown presence, in an immaterial entrance of the created spirit into the uncreated Spirit of God. If a man could only once in his life thus turn to God, it would be well for him. Those men whose God is so powerful, and Who has been so faithful to them in all their distress, will be answered by God with Himself. He draws them so mysteriously unto Himself and His own blessedness; their spirits are so lovingly attracted, while they are at the same time so filled and transfused with the Godhead, that they lose all their diversity in the Unity of the Godhead. These are they to whom God makes their work here on earth a delight; so that they have a real foretaste of that which they will enjoy forever. These are they on whom the Holy Christian Church rests; and, if they did not form part of Christianity, Christianity could no longer exist; for their mere existence, what they are, is infinitely worthier and more useful than all the doings of the world. These are they of whom our Lord has said: “He that toucheth you, toucheth the apple of Mine eye.” Therefore, take heed that ye do them no wrong. May God help us.

The mystery of our union with God affected by the Eucharist, is a union more intimate than the human mind can conceive.

In the first stage, that of jubilatio, a person becomes intensely aware of the dear signs of his love that god has marvelously given us in the heavens and on earth, how marvelously much good he has done for us and all creatures, how everything blossoms, sprouts forth, and is filled with God, and how unimaginable the generosity of God has inundated all creatures with his great gifts and how God has gone searching for him, showered him with gifts, carried him, advised him, waited for him, cared for him...and to what inexpressible nearness he has invited him, and how the most Holy God has expectantly awaited him eternally so that he might be filled with joy forever. And when a person experiences this fully through loving insight, there is born in him great genuine joy. The person who perceives these things with genuine love is so flooded with an interior joy that his frail body cannot contain this joy and erupts in its own way...And in this way our Lord showers him with great sweetness and gives him inwardly an embrace and palpable union. Thus does God lure, pull and yank a person, first of all out of himself, and then out of all dissimilarity to himself...

May God help us to prepare a dwelling place for this noble birth, so that we may all attain spiritual motherhood

When our Lord has prepared a person in this unbearable state of misery - for this prepares him much better than all the spiritual practices that all people might be able to accomplish - then our Lord comes and leads him to the third stage. In this stage the Lord removes the cloak from his eyes and reveals the truth to him. Bright sunshine appears and lifts him right out of all his misery. It seems to this person just as though the Lord had raised him from the dead. In this stage the Lord leads a person out of himself into himself. He makes him forget all his former loneliness and heals all his wounds. God draws the person out of his human mode into a divine mode, out of all misery into divine security. Here a person becomes so divinized that everything he is and does God does and is in him. And he is lifted up so far above his natural state that he becomes through Grace what God in his essence is by nature. In this state a person feels and is aware that he has lost himself and does not at all feel himself or is he aware of himself. He is aware of nothing but one simple Being.

One man can spin, another can make shoes, and all these are gifts of the Holy Spirit. I tell you, if I were not a priest, I should esteem it a great gift that I was able to make shoes, and I would try to make them so well as to be a pattern to all

The second stage is like this: When God has drawn a person so far away from all things, and he is no longer a child and he has been strengthened with the comfort of sweetness. Then indeed one gives him coarse rye bread. He has become a man and has reached maturity. Solid, strong food is what is good and useful for a grown man. He shouldn't be given milk and soft bread any longer, and such is withheld from him. He is then led on a terribly wild path, very gloomy and forsaken. And on this path God takes back from him everything that he had ever given him. Then and there the person is left so completely to himself that he loses all notion of God and gets into such a distressful state that he cannot remember whether things had ever gone right for him, so as not to know any more if he were ever on the right path, whether he has a God or not, nor does he know if God does or does not exist, or if he is alive or dead and whether he is the same person; and he suffers such incredible pain that this whole wide world is too confining for him. A very strange sorrow comes over him that makes him think that the whole world in its expanse oppresses him. He neither has any feeling for nor knowledge of God, and he has no liking for any other things and even all the rest seems repugnant to him, so that it seems that he is a prisoners between two walls. It seems to him that he is suspended between two walls with a sword in back of him and a sharp spear in front. What does he do then? He can go neither forward nor back. He can only sit down and say, "Hail, bitterer bitterness, full of grace!" If there could be hell in this life, this would seem to be more than hell - to be bereft of loving and the good thing loved. Anything that one might say to such a person would console him about as much as a stone. And he could stand even less hearing about creatures. The more the sense of and feel for God stood formerly in the foreground, the greater and more unendurable are the bitterness and misery of this abandonment.

If one would a prepare an empty place in the depths of the soul there can be no doubt that God must fill it at once. If there were a void on earth the heaven would fall to fill it….