The Sermons of Johannes Tauler · 92 of 124

Sermon for the Twenty First Sunday after Trinity

For God Is my witness, how I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ And this I pray, that your charity may more and more abound in knowledge, and In all understanding: that you may approve the better things, that you may be sincere and without offense unto the day of Christ Filled with the fruit of justice through Jesus Christ unto the glory and praise of God. — Phil. 1, 8-11.

Notice with what earnestness St. Paul calls God to witness, of his deep love for his disciples. Had we a return of such love to the apostle and our benefactors generally, it would greatly stimulate us to show ourselves worthy of our friends’ affection for us, if for no higher motive than to satisfy their longing for our perfection. And when St. Paul says: “I pray that your charity may more and more abound,” he means that it should greatly increase till it overflows and passes beyond every lower motive, and becomes love in all things perfect.

What is the best lesson we can ever learn? Is it not how to possess the greatest love and the best? God demands not great intelligence, nor profound penetration of mind, nor magnificent methods of spirituality, for all good spiritual practises obtain their merit from love. But what God requires of us is only love, for, as St. Paul tells us, love “is the bond of perfection” (Col. iii, 14). As to greatness of intellect and force of character, these are common to us and pagans and Jews; splendid achievements are common to the just and the unjust. It is only the possession of love that divides the false hearts from the true. “God is charity: and he that abideth in charity, abideth in God, and God in him” (I John iv, 16). Therefore before all arts have the art

Now the working of love is both inner and outer. The outer love is given to our neighbor, and the inner is given to God direct. For this latter love a man needs knowledge, as St. Paul says: “That your charity may more and more abound in knowledge, and in all understanding.” We must not be content with good love; the apostle exhorts us to win the very best — he wishes that we may overflow with love. Knowledge is one of the gifts of the Holy Ghost, and goes before love as a handmaiden before her mistress to do her service. Now true divine love thou must have interiorly, and it shall be a mark to thee that thou hast it, if thou hast exteriorly a love for thy neighbor. For thou lovest God not, unless thou flndest that thy heart loves thy neighbor; as it is written: “He that loveth not his brother, whom he seeth, how can he love God, whom he seeth not?” (I John iv, 20).

Upon love depend all of God’s commandments and both the old and new testaments, — that thou shalt love God, and shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Thou shalt have common joy with him in his good fortune, common sorrow with him in his ill fortune, “one heart and one soul” (Acts iv, 32) with him, as was the case among the whole multitude of the faithful in the time of the apostles, when all things were in common. And if thou canst not exhibit this community of feeling outwardly from lack of means, thou must yet cherish it in thy deepest soul, very unfeignedly, not half-heartedly, very intelligently — “in all understanding” — and with a ready good will to do what lies within thy power. And when thou canst do no more for thy neighbor, thou canst at least say a kindly or a gentle word to him out of a full heart.

And thy love must extend even to a perverse neighbor. Thou must lovingly and patiently suffer his wickedness. Do not fall upon him with hard words, but mercifully bear his defects. Remember that often enough men are not bad from rooted and habitual malice, but from unwariness, or from dullness of mind; or, as St. Gregory tells us, from God’s allowing them to fall into sinfulness so that they may be deeply humiliated and thereby learn their own guilty weakness. As to those who are not habitual but only occasional sinners, these thou mayest easily and quickly lead to consider their sad state, to acknowledge their

Thus must our brotherly love “more and more abound,” and must be directed to all mankind as practically as lies in our power. And hereby shall we discover the genuineness of the love that is turned inwards towards God, the source and origin of our being. The knowledge and understanding in love mentioned by the apostle, is found in the orderly relation between these two loves, the inward and the outward: for the interior love in pregnant of the exterior love, which is continually being born of it: this is the kinship between the two.

When a man wishes to love God, he looks inward, and then he finds that he has a loveless and a graceless heart towards God. But he knows he must love God with all his heart: therefore he rises up in fierce condemnation of himself and he loudly laments his depravity. B[e in spirit sinks himself deep into hell, or at least into a terrific purgatory; and every conceivable misfortune seems to him to be due to him; and as a matter of fact, God sometimes sends much adversity upon him. Now in very truth this is all just; a man must indeed launch this condemnation against himself. But what shall we do, we poor little worms, crawling about in the dust of the earth? As soon as we feel this deep humiliation, let us say this: O merciful God, have pity on me; save me and help me; inflict such and such judgments on me, so that in spite of all the fires of purgatory, I may at last attain to the kingdom of heaven. Well, we know that without some purgatory, few saints have entered heaven, and yet if one should pray thus to be favored, I do not condemn him for it. But I say that he who has true

Love of God when it is true, causes total self-renunciation and the giving up of all self-will. Thus prepared, let a man fall at God’s feet and beg Him to sit in judgment on him in love, so that God’s holiness may be given him, and God’s will be done in him and in all creatures, according to His eternal decrees, whether it may condemn him to purgatory or not, — how soon, how long, how bitter: Lord, let all be ordered according to Thy will; be I much or little in Thy sight, near to Thee or far away, let all be done to me as Thou wiliest. Thus must thou be glad that God’s holiness shall be vindicated upon thy littleness; and if thou seest a holy man treated differently from thee, and God’s majesty is shown by this one’s virtue, rejoice in his good fortune as if it were thine own. Children, this is indeed true love.

O, if one has committed all the sins in the world, and now coming to the end of his life is granted such a conversion, and has thus given himself up to God’s will absolutely and in perfect love, he will go straight to heaven. But no man can bestow this grace in thee, for it is God’s gift alone. And as there can be no better death than one blessed with this love, so there can be no more blessed life than one spent in such a love, always more and more abounding in it, the lover finally absorbed in the Beloved.

But sins and temptations stand opposed to this love. As to temptations, these are, taken in themselves, not sinful, being only incidental to our fallen nature’s evil tendencies. We must not desire them, nor induce them. But as to the pain they bring in resisting them, that we should welcome, lovingly placing our shoulders under this heavy burden. Would God have thee fight temptations till the day of judgment? Make up thy mind to do so gladly — do it out of love of suffering, and to the praise and honor of God. Every thing that one is thus called on to suffer, let him accept it as from God. And if the merit of it be given not to thyself but rather to some poor Jew or heathen whom thou hast never seen, given him for his soul’s salvation, then shouldst thou thank God for it most sincerely, and be glad of it as if it were all bestowed on thyself.

Another enjoyment of love, is the sensible presence of the Beloved, and the sweetness of devotion overflowing the heart. But suppose a

And there are many other objects of a loving heart’s desire. One would be glad of the gift of divine peace; he would be glad of a state of life poorer than any orphan in the whole world. But I say to thee, leave on one side thy own plans and devices; let love do thy planning, and do thou simply go out of thyself and all that is thine in loving abandonment to thy Beloved, resting in humility and detachment of spirit.

One must have love abounding “more and more in knowledge, and in all understanding;” and that does not mean simply a good way or degree of loving but the very best. In knowledge indeed: for the prince of this world has everywhere planted weeds among the roses, so that the weeds often choke the roses to death, or at least greatly stunt their growth. One must get away from dangerous company; separations are inevitable, whether we speak of persons in communities or those who remain outside. And this does not mean that God’s friends should become little sects among ordinary people in the world, and separated from them. No; but they should be only separated from others by their love of God and their virtuous lives.

The love so far treated of is the lower powers of the soul, and by it nature is granted the enjoyment of many sweet spiritual morsels and many drinks of the wine of Cyprus. Such was the privilege of the disciples, whilst our Lord was personally present with them. But at last He said: “It is expedient to you that I go” (John xvi, 7). That is to say: If you would enjoy Me in the noblest manner, then you must give Me up. For be assured, children, that this love in abandonment is as much higher than the other as heaven is higher than earth. And unto this love the apostles were now introduced. O how much happier is the lot of those who are granted this love. Love like this consists only in denying, not at all in agreeing; it is not possessing God in the way the apostles had possessed Him in their Master’s presence, but possessing Him in the want of Him.

This is a kind of not knowing that is a superessential knowledge,

God’s face into the hidden corners of the soul is all forlorn and supremely disturbed. For nature is wholly unequal to this trial. To such desolation is the soul reduced, that it dare not look at itself, it seems to itself to have ceased to think, ceased to desire. Nor is the soul able to offer this agony to God — so at least it feels — and it can but cling to a state of apparently absolute unknowingness. And yet that soul loves; it renounces self for love; it dies to all objects of love that it had in those introductory steps we have already considered, assuming in this obscurity a higher love. In very truth, it is God who is now at work in the soul; it is He who loves Himself there, and is the only object of love. As to the soul, there is now nothing for it but self-renunciation, and enduring that process of new formation which is taking place in the divine obscurity, as we find it described in St. Dionysius. Poor human nature is now led in a very different way from the former one; it is the way of perfect denudation of self.

And this is not only in the interior life, but it extends to outward things also — all support, all consolation is withdrawn. Even the sacraments are often directly refused to such a soul, or they are somehow withheld, and this is done by God’s own ordering. Before this visitation I would have given such a one holy communion every day — and at present would by no means do so, for God wills otherwise. The soul must now tread another path, leading upward in deep darkness. That spirit must rest in God’s Spirit in a hidden stillness as if absorbed in God.

Light at last shines in that darkness, but it is seen only when the soul finds itself in complete single-minded resignation of self to God. And in that state, all multiplicity is unified. This is the day of Jesus Christ spoken of by St Paul. Now for the first time is Christ rightly received with all the fruits of His passion and death. It is His day bright and clear, in all purification. Not that there is to Him any increase of the fruits of His passion and death; but in us the gain is wonderfully great, because we have Him in this high and noble state of holiness in a way far above forms and images of the mind; in a hidden way, most interior and most divine.

And our Lord offers an instructive illustration of this state. Before His death He allowed himself to be touched by Mary Magdalene, His

(John zz, 17). Thus in the lower spiritual state, He allows Himself to be touched, washed, anointed by the soul He loves, to that soul’s intense joy. But in the higher spiritual degree it is not so: He is now known to the soul only as He is in the bosom of His Father — He is ascended, He has disappeared with all that He is. This is what the soul finds in Christ; true day.

This was foreshown in the generation of the Son by the Father in the divine life, and the procession of the Holy Qhost from the Father and the Son in ever fruitful love. This is indeed the true day, in which true love is born in its proper way and fitting nobility of birth, all in Jesus Christ; as St. Gregory has described it. On this state a great teacher of our order thus speaks: “The light of Jesus Christ shines in our interior soul clearer than the sun in the heavens, and His light is from the interior outward, and not from the exterior inward.” Children, there is herein experienced a wonderful increase of holiness, passing all calculation. It goes on not day by day, but every hour and every instant. But one in this state must watch himself very carefully, and he must labor diligently to stand his ground. That we shall do so, all of us who are true friends of God earnestly hope, namely, that we “may more and more abound” in holy love. May God, who is true love, help us to all this. Amen.