The Sermons of Johannes Tauler · 48 of 124

First Sermon for the Feast of the Ascension

At length He appeared to the eleven as they were at table; and He upbraided them with their incredulity and hardness of heart, because they did not believe them who bad seen Him after He was risen again. — Mark xvi, 14.

This reproach of our dear Lord is spoken every day, and it is directed against men of all conditions who have hard and unbelieving hearts. But it is especially meant for members of approved religions orders, or others in like state of life. The message sometimes comes to them from our Lord through His appointed teachers, sometimes by the inner voice of conscience, if men would but hearken to it. All persons in this state of life well deserve to be reproached, if they are hard of heart and unready to believe, for it is a favor exceptionally great that they should be called by God to so high a spiritual vocation; it is something for which they should thank God sincerely and love Him fervently.

Our Saviour upbraids these men for their hardness of heart and incredulity, but they receive His reproof ungraciously. Would that they acknowledged their fault; then they would be open to good advice. St. James teaches: “Faith without works is dead.” (James ii, 26.) If they, in answer, quote our Lord: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved” (Mark xvi, 16), and add that they make professions of their faith with their mouth, they are silenced by St. Paul: “Know you not that all we who are baptized in Christ Jesus are baptized iu His death?” (Rom. vi, 3.) And St. Augustine teaches: “That is not true faith which stops at the mouth alone, and does not go on to God with living love and good works.” Oar lack of faith clearly appears if anything suits us better than God, or if we cannot truly say: Thou art my God, and nothing is well with me except in Thee. These men have, in fact, fallen off from a real and living faith; and this is true of them, though they have the name of spiritual men and have been under God’s influence, even supernaturally, sleeping or waking, and have been admonished by Him in their inmost soul.

It is an awful thing that when our Lord has upbraided them for hardness of heart and has called out unto them, they yet do not relish Divine things. They have no taste for their prayers and spiritual practices, whereas other things give them great pleasure. Their hearts are soft to many things, but are stony enough to God. Of such as these — if God will save them — the Lord spoke by His prophet: “And T will take away the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them a heart of flesh.” (Ezech. xi, 19.)

And let us ask what makes these men’s hearts hard? Why are they so dry and cold about all good works, or only do them by a sort of outward observance? It is because their heart cherishes something that is not God, and continues in that state in spite of our Lord’s admonition. Of this He spoke by Jeremias: “Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and ye gates thereof be very desolate, saith the Lord. For My people have done two evils. They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water, and have digged to themselves cisterns — broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” ( Jer. ii, 12-13.) What comes into the cistern of their heart is foul and dirty rain water. They have nothing of God in their hearts, and that is the great evil that God, through the prophet, laments in the sight of Heaven and earth.

And of what people does he complain? Alas, it is of His own people, men in spiritual states of life. These are the ones who have forsaken the fountain of living water that God is. In their interior they have little left of light and life. They remain in their external observances and methods, clinging to the outward part and not at all penetrating to the inner meaning, from which alone all good must spring forth. And even their external conformity slips away from them as soon as it ceases to please. At best, all their spirituality consists in their observances, and these they have undertaken according to their own way of thinking. They never turn to the interior life; for that they have no thirst, and in their souls its waters do not spring up. If they go through their outward routine, they are content and all is well with them, in their

As to their neighbor, they have no love nor any kindly feelings for him, and they speak injurious words, uttering them against him regardless of circumstances of time and place. Many of them would, indeed, help their neighbor, but it is with rash zeal; like one who, in striving to put out the fire in his neighbor’s house, sets fire to and burns his own — he has enough of destructive zeal in him to burn two or three houses if he had the opportunity. If some poor, afflicted soul comes to them, they call him a bad man or a silly creature. Ah, you are good cisterns, indeed! If your desert waste of hearts flowed with living waters, you would make no distinction of persons. There would be no belittling of others, nor harsh judgments, nor oppressive treatment, if Qod’s love were in your souls. And in all these cisterns the muddy waters are ever growing more foul.

It sometimes happens that these cisterns are men of cultivated minds, speaking high things, having fine intelligence. As those just treated of are self-satisfied with their outward appearanee of good works, so are these proud of their noble words and their elevated thoughts. What, think you, will be their fate when the storm of wrath overtakes them and sweeps them away, them and all their vain conceits— these miserable plagues of humanity? Then will be heard such lamentation as is almost incredible; and it will come from men who made a parade of external holiness in works and words, and within were void of all living virtue, cisterns into which all filth had been cast. One blow from Satan’s axe and the ruin is complete; all is scattered abroad, not a drop of good is found within, and the outward show is broken to pieces.

Children, you will one day remember what I have said to yon, though it be only in the other world. I know perfectly well that this false show of virtue is common enough among all those men who, though in devout states of life, cling to external virtue only, blindly practicing the outward good without the inward Bpirit. And I know that many Christians living in the world in the state of matrimony, as well as many widows, far surpass in virtue such pretended spiritual men. May God in His mercy convert them in their last hours. And if He does, then doubtless they will suffer an incredibly severe and prolonged purgatory, far removed from the joy of God’s presence. I beseech you for the love of God, children, to examine your soul’s interior motives with every possible vigilance. Be kind and gentle, be subject to God and to every creature, for of you does God complain to earth and Heaven and all His creation. To Heaven — that means all good and heavenly hearts; for every good man is God’s paradise. The wicked come close to Heaven and never enter in. The greatest torment of the damned, is the certainty that they shall never enter Heaven.

Our Lord says to the soul through His prophet: “Thou hast prostituted thyself to many lovers; nevertheless return to Me, saith the Lord, and I will receive thee.” (Jer. iii, 1.) This means: Come to Me, O soul, and I will pour into thee the living waters of holy sorrow — if thou wilt only come to Me in whole-hearted sincerity. Adore the boundless and unspeakable mercy of God. See how gladly He helps us, if we are but willing to be helped, how affectionately He receives us, if we will but return to Him. But the Lord has said to those who will not return: “Therefore will I yet contend in judgment with you” (Jer. ii, 9) . Is not that to be a fearful contention; and do we not know who will get the upper hand? Take care lest He does not at the last say to thee that thou art not of His sheep. For His sheep hear His voice, and the voice of strangers they hear not nor go after them.

And what is the “prostitution with many lovers” of which the Lord speaks? Taken in a spiritual sense, it means — if it be no worse — delivering one’s soul up to a sort of devotional sensuality, being quite seduced by the sweetness in the external forms and figures of religion. For the sake of all this does the soul depart from that chaste service of God, which alone is sincere because it is interior.

But return to Me, He says, and I will give you living water. This He tells of in two places in the gospel: “If any man thirst, let him come to Me, and drink. He that believeth in Me, as the scripture saith: Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John vii, 37, 38) ; and again to the woman at the well: “He that shall drink of the water that I shall give him, shall not thirst forever;” He had previously said to her: “If thou didst know the gift of God, and who He is that saith to

He would have given thee living water” (John iv, 10, and 13, 14) . And now when the woman asked Him for this water, He refused her. And He showed her why, by revealing to her His knowledge of her living in unlawful union with a certain man. As if to say: Before I give thee the waters of Divine grace, cleanse the cistern of thy soul from sin, study thy wickedness, and come to Me and confess thy sin humbly and completely — only then shall the waters of life be thine. When He told her that she had lived unlawfully with five men, it was as if He spoke of the five senses, which the sinful soul uses for forbidden purposes. This makes it unworthy of the living springs of God’s love. As thus: Be converted from thy disorderly life, return to Me, and I will receive thee.

The Lord spoke thus by the prophet: “My Beloved had a vineyard on a hill in a fruitful place. And he fenced it in, and picked the stones out of it, and planted it with the choicest vines, and built a tower in the midst thereof, and set up a wine-press therein; and He looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes” (Isaias v, 1, 2). God addressed this to the people of Israel, but it applies to all people to the end of the world. To every unfaithful soul He says: Thou hast become bitter to Me; I planted thee a vineyard of choicest vines, and from them only sour wine has come forth — bad deeds are the result of all my care for thee. And therefore I will contend in judgment with thee — unless thou art converted to Me and ask for the living waters of My love.

Bichard of St. Victor, a great master of spiritual doctrine, speaks of this living water as being four degrees of love. The first degree is wounded love. God wounds the soul with a stroke if true love, and it is thus He grants it the living waters of grace. And then the soul in turn wounds God with its stroke of love. For the Lord thus speaks to the bride in the Canticles: “Thou hast wounded My heart, My sister, My spouse, thou hast wounded My heart with one of thy eyes, and with one hair of thy neck” (Cant iv, 9) . Here the word eye means an eager glance of the intelligence, resting on God and on Him alone; and the word hair means pure and unalloyed love. And it is thus that God may be said to be wounded.

The second degree is captive love, as it is described by the prophet: “I will draw them by the cords of Adam” (Osee xi, 4).

The third is a fainting love, described by the words of the bride in the Canticles: “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my

To illustrate wounded love, I ask you to consider a merchant sailing about in a ship, his heart all wounded with desire of profit; here and there and everywhere he gathers his cargo till his ship is filled. Thus acts the soul: it gathers into itself all imaginations of its beloved, and is filled with thoughts of Him, is absorbed in devout practices in honor of the beloved one. And thus laden, the ship of the soul starts homeward— a strong ship and able to withstand the storm. The wind that wafts the ship is love, driving it home into the Godhead, all prosperously and according to its longing desires. The rudder is deep down in the ocean that is God.

But the wound in the soul is ever aching — the more God is granted to the soul the more the soul longs for Him. What seems perfect love turns out not so; it creates new powers of loving and receiving and enjoying God, new emptiness to be filled; new wounds of love are ever opening. And now the second degree of love begins. The Lord cuts in twain the cable by which He drew the ship onward. That is to say, he casts the soul adrift and leaves it to the mercy of the storm, breaking the rudder and the oani and all that could steady it — leaving, in a word, a man imprisoned helplessly in love, yet abandoned seemingly by God, wholly unable to guide or help himself. And this is captive love. In the first degree He is like a knight sorely wounded in battle, and yet able to escape. But if he is too helpless to escape, then he is made a prisoner and is no longer his own master. And thus it is with love’s captive in the second degree. He has no control over either thought or action: all this he must perforce yield up to the control of the beloved with no other law but love. May God grant us true love. May He enable us to give up all our own cisterns, so that into our souls the waters of true love may be generously poured. Amen.

3U?r &ouI’h JTtttr (Bapituttira captivity of good men by self-love, self-interested motives and selfindulgence — The third affects bright minds, dazzled and often perverted by intellectual self-conceit — The going astray after the sweetness of devotion is another and a pitiful enslavement — The fifth is the delusion that increase in holiness is due to one’s own exertions, not attributing both our activity and our power of suffering to Ood’s grace alone.