The Sermons of Johannes Tauler · 87 of 124

Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity

And behold a certain lawyer stood up tempting Himf and saying: Master, to Him: Thou has answered right; this do and thou shalt lire. — Luke x, 25-23.

Children, our Lord’s questioner thought not of God or of eternal life for his purpose in asking was treacherous. O how comes it that such a Pharisaical spirit prevails among men, that in word and work they regard outward things exclusively; as long as an outward show of piety is observed, they go on with all liberty in their greed for money and honors and pleasures of all sorts. Now everything that men do for the sake of show, all that they would have held for great and wonderful, such works God makes no account of, no matter how high they may seem. Who caused this or that work to be done? That question decides whose the work is.

The inward pharisaism is this: No matter what a Pharisee does he always has himself in view. Some spiritual men are thus infected, even though they are not aware of it; for thinking that they do things for God’s honor, yet — if only you could read their hearts — they do them out of self love; and this includes even their prayers. This fundamental fault is deeper in some than in others; but once made habitual, it is seldom entirely overcome. Men ostentatiously do great things; they endeavor to gain indulgences, they beat their breasts, they pray before pious pictures, here they kneel and there they run in their showy devotions; and throughout it all they do not consider

God; for their love and their purpose is not given to God but is bent downward to creatures. Created things minister to them; these are their joy, a joy wilfully and knowingly received. Their own inward and outward comfort and profit is the end they have in view. This is not according to this gospel: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and therefore God makes no account of it.

Then we find other men who are a little better; they are cured of this delusion, and they have turned away from earthly things as much as they can. But their pious methods smack too much of the life of the senses, and their souls are absorbed too much in gross mental pictures of Christ’s holy humanity, the scenes of His birth, the events of His life, sufferings and death. All this is in their soul in a manner far too material. These feelings journey through the soul as a ship upon the waters of the Rhine. This is called by preachers a fleshly love of God, but I would prefer to call it a sensible love — a love dominantly of the senses, thinking only of our Lord as known by the senses, and viewing Him thus from head to foot. These men draw from their devotions a pleasurable love rather than a divine love, and it must be reckoned as savoring of the Pharisaical. Such men’s souls dwell more intently on the things they do than on the end for which they should do them. Spiritual contentment — that instead of God, is what they strive after. It is not the essential but the accidental, not the goal but the way to it, not the inner meaning but the outer act, that engages their mind: and God has the least possible to do with their religious existence. Natural love and divine love seem so much alike, that we cannot easily distinguish one from the other. It were better for such a man to have no devotional sweetness, if he could but manage to do all his pious actions without it. In this way he would learn to read his own heart far more truly. And yet, although the way of sensible devotion is thus by no means the most perfect, nevertheless would to God that wre had more men willing to follow even that low method.

Children, St. Bernard, speaking of the love that is commanded us, says that it is threefold: a sweet love, a wise love, and a strong love; which I can explain by a comparison. The first is a wooden statue gilded all over, the second a silver statue gilded all over, and the third is a statue of solid gold: the wooden one is sweet love, the silver one is wise love, the gold one is strong love.

Now if the wooden statue is well made and finely gilded, every particle of it being well hidden with gold leaf, we prize it highly; but hardly give twelve pennies for it. So it is with out devotional sweetness in good works and prayer; it is the fine appearing gold leaf; peel it off, and our religious life is of small value to us, however much it may once have delighted our natural sensibility. But by means of sensible devotion God leads and entices a man onward to a better love, which is gradually developed in the soul amid these sweet sentiments, until at last He extinguishes the natural enjoyments which have mingled with pure love. Let us not cast away sensible devotion; let ud receive it with all reverence and humility. But we should ascribe to our pettiness and meanness that the Lord must thus allure us onward from the religion of imagination to that which is so far above it, through outward to inward things, even unto His own divine self in the depths of our souls, where He would establish His Kingdom of everlasting truth. We meet with many who have much sensible joy in their devotion, and whose interior hearts are shut in as tight as a mountain of iron — nothing can come forth from them. This is due to want of proper spiritual training. Their souls rest upon the forms and maps of the mind; they are unconscious of that light of eternal truth that shines in their inmost souls: — they never penetrate those holy depths. But no man can serve two masters, namely, his senses and his spirit.

Then we must consider St. Bernard’s second kind of love, which he calls wise love. This is seated in the reason; and it is wonderfully elevated above the first kind. We have likened it to the silver gilt statue, which is intrinsically very precious, and if it were a large statue might be the chief adornment of a church. So is this wise love, seated as it is in the understanding, a precious thing and exceedingly lovely. Now mark how thou mayst attain to it. Thou must turn thy spirit to eternal things. As thou hast been wont to dwell on sensible images in the mind, as, for example, mental pictures of our Lord’s life, consider now the eternal meaning of each and all of the events of His life. Think on the eternal birth of the infinite Word of God in the bosom of the Father; how He was born to us and yet remained with the Father; consider how the Holy Ghost proceeded in unspeakable love from the Father and the Son; and consider the divine life of the blessed Trinity, one only God in three distinct persons. Draw into that divine sanctuary thy own nothingness, and thy manifold distracted life; look deep into the hidden recesses of the Eternal God head; think that to Him there is no past and no future, but only an everlasting present, possessing in an infinite way all things whatsoever, embracing them in the divine unchangeableness. Place all this in contrast with thy own variableness in this life of fleeting time, with thy changeable and fluctuating spirit. Thus it will happen that thy sensible love will be elevated above its forms and images in a state of self-renunciation and will approach to a wise love of the understanding, thereby using these lower forms as helps to pass through and beyond into a higher state of holiness.

Children, this wise love leads a man’s spirit so far beyond these alien figures of outward things, that he presently is in a state of forgetfulness of them. In his first state, it was a laborious task to turn away from worldly things, and now they drop out of his mind of their own weight. He despises them and feels a downright aversion for them and for all that is not rightly ordered in his affections. This grace raises the mind above all transitory things far more effectually than strenuous external observances: one is now more entirely regenerated. His soul gazes into the divine obscurity; for God the infinitely incomprehensible, is dark to the created understanding, just as the noon day sun, if looked at directly, dazzles and blinds the human eye by its very brightness.

Dionysius says: “God is above every name, or existence, or figure that man can attribute to Him: He is superessentially above all things.” As soon, then, as a man is granted to know something of what God essentially is, the knowledge sinks him downwards: it melts and dissolves him into his own nothingness. And the clearer, the more nakedly, God’s infinitude beams upon him, the better he understands his own littleness, his very nothingness. It follows that the reality of this inner divine illumination cannot be known in any mental forms and figures, nor by any action of the mental faculties; it can only be verified in the inmost essence of the spirit, and in the sinking of the spirit downward into the sense of its own utter nothingness.

This is against the error of those overbold spirits, who are led astray by false inner illumination. They imagine that they have found the infinite truth, and they are puffed up with self-complacency. Their heads are turned with their false mortification; they dishonor our Lord by their evil treatment of other men, whom they deny to have reached a state of prayer which is beyond that of the figures of the himself below all things, and deems that he has attained to no perfection. It is men of a different spirit, men of a proud spirit, who come to you with their heads in the air, and who, if they hear some wild sermon that has neither dovout method nor living truth in it, proclaim it the highest doctrine ever taught. As to the living truth of God, all plain and simple, for that they have no taste whatever. As a matter of fact these souls are stagnated; they bask in their own natural light, parading idly about. They have never broken through their weakness, being regardless of the lessons of our Lord’s adorable life. They have never subdued nature by the practise of virtue: the true way of love is unknown to them. They trust to a false inward recollection which flatters their natural pride, and which blinds them to the deep rooted defects of their spirit, inducing a counterfeit state of repose. This evil is very obstinate, and we may well pray a merciful God to pity it and reform it.

In these, our evil days, I would be loath to make men miserable by my complaints, for it is well nigh a hopeless task to wean them from their almost universal self love. But this I will affirm: If any one our Lord Jesus Christ. Such a man falls into no false state of recollection, nor is he infected with a false spirit of liberty — he cares nothing at all for himself. And that is the reason why he is very dear to God.

We are now to consider the third degree, namely, the strong love, as St. Bernard calls it. We have compared this essential love to a statue of pure and solid gold. Now some of this pure love all must have: if any man feels his soul totally devoid of it, his state is a perilous one, and he may well weep day and night. This gold is so brightly polished that it dazzles the eye: — one can hardly gaze straight at it, for it is the brightness of God shining upon the soul: He is present there. The spirit is too weak to endure this brightness, which threatens to melt it away into its original helplessness. And the presence in the mouth of his cave. The soul wraps its mantle of helplessness about its eyes in an ecstacy; all mental activity seems still. God appears to assume every act and thought and affection. In this strong love the spirit is immersed in its Beloved, as a litle drop of water in the deep sea. The spirit is made one with God almost as the air with the sunlight at midday. But how all this is, can be better known by experience than told by words.

And what afterwards remains in the spirit? Only a sense of utter self-annihilation, total giving up of all proprietorship in will and in mind and in life. The soul sinks to the bottom: and if it could sink yet lower into actual nothingness, this it would (if such a thought were lawful or possible) be overjoyed to do out of love and out of humility. This self-annihilation comes into existence as if newly born within the soul. Such a man deems himself unworthy to be a man, to enter a church, to look at a crucifix: he is persuaded that he is worse than the evil one. But never before were our Saviour’s sufferings so well loved, never did that man love His Lord’s blessed humanity so devotedly. It seems to him that now for the first time in his life he has begun to love. And, indeed, he seems only to be beginning to practise virtue, and rightly to go through spiritual exercises. All such things from least to greatest, he now performs in a spirit essentially sincere. Indeed, as God is present to Him in everything, so the simplest and the highest acts of piety are now all alike. The highest heavens — as the soul now plainly understands — work with the lowest earth in God’s undivided unity of purpose; the highest works at its best when it fructifies the lowest. So the soul perceives clearly, that God’s mightiest influence is displayed in sanctifying man’s deepest lowliness of humility.

As the sun absorbs unto itself the moist vapors of the deep hidden valleys, so God seems to absorb this soul into Himself. It is drawn into God and thinks and feels as if it were now even as God; and presently it sinks down back again into itself, and thinks and feels as if it were even less than man. The soul is like an iron vessel half full of water set over a hot fire: it boils up and down and sometimes boils over the sides: taken off the fire, the water sinks down silently to the bottom. Thus does the fire of this strong love affect the spirit, lifting it up into

God, the overflowing point, as if it were about to be thrown out of itself into divine oblivion; and then it drops back into the consciusness of its own nothingness.

This strong, free love has three qualities. The first is that it forcibly lifts the spirit up and casts it into union with Him who is its beloved, far above the working of its faculties of knowing and remembering, and beyond the reach of understanding and the action of the senses. The second is that it sinks the soul down into a fathomless sense of its own nothingness, in a state of humiliation wholly incomprehensible, so that it seems to have lost its place and name in all existence. The third quality is, that this strong love marvellously changes a man’s soul into a most peaceful state of contentment; he is entirely restful no matter what happens; he stirs about only very little, remaining tranquil in his place, awaiting the Lord’s will to lead him hither or thither. He has become like a servant standing beside his master sitting at table, looking quietly for a signal, ready to do or not to do, just as he is bidden.

Yet after all this great progress, it is quite possible that the evil one will assail him, and even with the most violent temptations. But in vain: these but offer him occasion for an immeasurable increase of love. He stands as firm as a rock, he yields not a single step. When all this is gone through with, the spirit stands like a newly ordained priest before the altar: all that he is, all that he has, all that he does is holy. In his daily conduct he has, as it were, the blessed body or the Lord in his keeping, to lift it up and to set it down where he will. And yet his humility ever abides with him. He dare not say a Pater Noster, without humbly prefacing it with the words holy Church bids her priests utter in the mass: “Admonished by Thy saving precepts, and following Thy divine institution, we make bold to say: Pater Noster.” The soul’s littleness is ever before its eyes in contrast with the Father’s sovereign holiness, which it contemplates and petitions with fear and trembling. Indeed, children, every one of us should thus acknowledge that it is a marvellous thing that his weakness and misery should dare to address God and call Him Father.

And now what is yet wanting to this man thus transformed in God?, This condition is wanting, namely, a soul full of God, a body full of pain. And when that state comes upon him, God looks often into him, casting a lightning flash of love into the inmost depths. Then all pain seems too little to that soul. And another effect of these quick unites our spirit to His own for our renewal — Times and other circumstances which favor the process of this union — Outward good works, how related to this inward process — The relation of outward suffering to it.