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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 huma… - Johannes Tauler
" "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.
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About Johannes Tauler
Johannes Tauler (c.1300 – 1361), also known as John Tauler, was a priest and German mystic of the Catholic Church, born in Strasbourg. He belonged to the Dominican order and was a prolific preacher. Along with his friend and contemporary Henry Suso he was one of a triumvirate of thinkers belonging to the Rhineland school, also called The Rheno-Flemish school, of which Meister Eckhart was the founder and supreme proponent. Blessed John Ruysbroeck is also sometimes held to be a mystical teacher of this school and Tauler once travelled to Groenendaal for a meeting with Ruysbroeck.
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Johann Tauler
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Additional quotes by Johannes Tauler
Now we intend to talk about the three stages that a person can be at - the lowest, the middle, or the highest. The first stage of an interior virtuous life that leads one directly to close proximity to God happens when a person turns to the marvelous works and signs of inexpressible gifts and effusions of the hidden goodness of God. Out of this is born a state of soul called jubilatio. The second stage is poverty of spirit and a strange abandonment by God that leaves the spirit tortured and naked. The third stage is the transformation to a divine-like existence, into a unity of the created spirit with the very being of the spirit of God. This one can call a conversion to an essentially higher plane. And one cannot imagine that those who right reach this stage could ever fall away from God.
How can reason possibly grasp that immensity beyond all being where the precious food of the Eucharist is, in some marvellous way, made one with us, drawing us wholly to itself and changing us into itself? It is a union more intimate than any that the human mind can conceive, totally unlike any other change, a union more compatible than a tiny drop of water losing itself in the wine-vat and becoming one with the wine, or that of the rays of the sun made one with the sun's splendour; or the soul with the body, the two together making one person, one being. In this union the soul is lifted above the infirmity of its natural state, its own insufficiency, and there it is purified, transfigured and raised above its own powers, its human operations, its very self. Both being and activities are penetrated through and through by God, formed and transformed in a divine manner, the soul's new birth is accomplished in truth, and the spirit, losing all its native incompatibility, flows into divine union.
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This food of love draws the soul above distinction or difference, beyond resemblance to divine unity. This is what happens to the transfigured spirit. When the divine heat of love has drawn out all the moisture, heaviness, unfitness, then this holy food plunges such a one into the life of God. As Our Lord himself said to St Augustine, "I am the food of the strong: believe and feast on me. You will not change me into yourself; rather you will be changed into me".
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