The Sermons of Johannes Tauler · 103 of 124

First Sermon for the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist

John is his name. — Luke 1, 63.

This is the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, and scarcely any saint is more highly honored than he who baptized the Son of God. The name John means one who is in grace. Children, we have recently considered how one must prepare his soul for God’s grace.

There are two human miseries to be reckoned with. One is our inclination to sin. This is planted in nature itself ever since the fall of our first parents. Against this .we must always strive, turning away with all our might from whatever is opposed to God’s will. The other misery arises from the first one: it is all the sorrow and pain of our earthly existence. Now this misery we must accept willingly and bear cheerfully. It is placed as a duty upon us by God that we follow after our Lord Jesus Christ, who for our sins suffered the greatest misery His whole life long.

God often allows men to be oppressed with the first misery, that of sinful inclinations, in order that in their dire necessity they may find themselves out. This trial teaches them joyfully to enter the way of penance, and patiently to suffer all the misery that may happen to them. Children, it is a blessed privilege thus to accept suffering, for thereby one discovers his weakness and helplessness, yea even his nothingness before God. Ah, the man who should learn to walk in this path, and who should devote himself to no other practise than gazing down into his own helpless nothingness — in that same man would God’s grace truly be born. Dear children, man has nothing of his own; everything he claims as his is absolutely God’s, whether it be

And then thou must ponder thy outward conduct: words, works, manners and behaviour, clothes, companions, all must be scrutinized. Lament before God every shortcoming of thine each day thou livest, breathing sighs of sincere inward sorrow for thy faults and weaknesses. This secures thy forgiveness; but make sure that thy grief is deep within thy soul — a most profitable thing. Such were the interior sighs of the apostles towards God, not only for their own sins, but indeed for those of all men. When God grants a man the taste of eternity if only for an instant, there bursts forth from his heart’s cave a deep groan of sorrow. Nor does this feeling rest wholly within, for it works forth into the outward senses, which are thus made the public altar of the most high God, on which are sacrificed the goats and the oxen of sin atonement. Thus does one offer his outward, bodily flesh and blood as a recompense to God, for the immolation of His divine Son’s flesh and blood on Calvary.

In this deep search for his sinfulness, one must cast himself down at God’s feet in all humility. He must implore His mercy, full of hope that God will lift from him the weight of his guilt. Thus John, that is to say grace, is born unto us in the home of humility; for the lower we sink the higher we shall rise. Of this St. Bernard speaks: “All the devotional practises that one may do outwardly, are nothing in comparison with passing through the hidden valley of humiliation. In this valley meekness grows, as well as self-abandonment, quiet of soul and kindness: through it lies the straight and the true road. Whosoever treads it not goes astray, no matter how many external good works he may do. These without real humility avail nothing with God; indeed they rather arouse His wrath than gain His favor.”

Children, let us consider the gospel of this feast. Zachary was a high priest whose wife was barren, and this was a grief to them. Once as he entered the holy of holies, the people remaining without, — suddenly the angel Gabriel stood before him at the altar, and announced that his wife should bring forth a son, and that he should call his name John, which means grace is in him. But Zachary hesitated to believe this message, and therefore the angel struck him dumb, so to remain till the promise was fulfilled.

Now the name Zacharias means the remembrance of God. The God thinking man it is that shall be a priest, and shall enter the holy of holies, whereas the rest of the people shall remain outside. Mark the essential thing in this priest, and also his office. The office of Christian priests is to offer up the only begotten Son of God to His heavenly Father for the salvation of the people. Now I fear that not all priests are perfect — and that is indeed manifestly the case. They stand before the people personating the Christian religion, and yet some of them are better fitted to lead men astray than to assist them; they rather enkindle God’s wrath than placate it. But they do perform their priestly office as representing the holy Christian church, and it is done sacramentally; nor can any but members of the male sex validly do it. They consecrate and offer up the holy body of our Lord Jesus Christ, yrhich none but men i^ priests’ orders can do; for sacrifice is peculiarly a priestly office, i As to the spiritual offering of God’s Son to His Father, that can be dene in the soul’s interior shrine by women as well as by men, by night as well as by day. And it is this that we shall mean when we ask how one should enjter into the holy of holies, leaving the common kind of people without:

One must enter in alone; with a deeply recollected spirit must one enter into one’s own soul, leaving outside all sensible life. Thus minded shall one offer to the heavenly Father a welcome sacrifice, namely His beloved Son, with all His holy words, works, life and passion. This offering the soul makes for every desire of the heart, and into that offering it draws very affectionately all mankind: — all poor sinners and all good Christians in this life and all who are imprisoned in purgatory. Children, this is a mighty act of religion. Albertus Magnus thus tells of the high priests’ function: “He entered the holy of holies bearing fire and the blood of a red calf, and with the blood he sprinkled all the golden vessels there. Then he made a bundle of sweet smelling herbs, and he laid it on the burning coals, and as it burnt it filled the room with a fragrant cloud of smoke. And it was in that cloud that God came and spoke to him.”

Children, this high priest may be taken as a figure to show forth the interior man. He enters the sanctuary of his soul, bearing with him the precious and thrice glorious blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; and he bears fire with him, too; namely ardent love. And he sprinkles all the golden vessels there with that sacred blood; namely all souls of men in the state of grace, or who shall ever be in that state. And he also comforts with his offering all the poor souls in purgatory, sadly waiting for their release. Children, you cannot imagine how sweet and lovely a work this is. And meanwhile this man does not forget himself; he offers himself up to God’s fatherly heart, and enters into entire agreement with the heavenly Father’s will that He may do with him as He pleases, in time and in eternity.

Now some may object: if we turn thus inwards, it will happen that the figure of Jesus crucified will drop out of our mind. Dear children, I answer no. When you turn into the soul’s depths, you enter the place where alone grace is born in very truth; and in that grace will appear the life and passion of our Lord, all full of love, all simply seen, and as plainly known as if His passion were taking place right before your eyes. Nor is it there seen in multiplicity, but as if I saw all of you in one simple all embracing form as of a single person — so will the events of Christ’s life and death appear. One glimpse of this kind of knowledge of our Lord, is more useful to thee, than if thou shouldst spend five months in thinking about Him other ways. Now during this sort of priestly function, where a man enters alone into his soul’s holy of holies and stands with all his faculties lifted up in recollection, speaking no word — in that act of spiritual priesthood the angel of God, Gabriel, is presently seen standing beside the altar gazing upon the perfection of the soul’s offering. You may take the angel’s name to mean the power of God, for he bears to that sacrificial soul the power to do all things in our Lord.

Then this spiritual priest makes a bundle of sweet smelling herbs, and burns them with fire, and out of the vapor of that fire God speaks to him. These are the collection of his holy virtues, especially such ones as mildness and humility. For if a man has not virtues to gather up and offer to God, virtues of the highest or lowest or middling degree, such a one’s whole life is false and worthless. The fire that is enkindled in those virtues is the flame of love. From it rises the vapor and the darkness of rapture of the spirit, lasting perhaps not half an Ave Maria; and during that time God takes away thy senses and the

(Job iv, 12). To the soul this is the announcement of a birth, in which, as in John’s case, many souls shall rejoice. From Elizabeth the barren wife of Zachary shall the child be born: meaning a divine fulfillment of the promise of a miracle of love, a happy birth accomplished by the divine omnipotence.

And yet all this takes place in the lowest powers of the soul. And it happens sometimes, that men of mere natural intellectuality turn inwards to the natural depths of the reasoning powers with only reason’s native light. They can be absorbed in an inner state of thought void of^ all forms and images; but they hold this place of light with all self-/ proprietorship, and treat it as if it were God Himself: but it is mere human nature after all. Yet in this there is more joy than in all pleasures of the senses. But when such high spirits are herein self-contained, and when they hold it all with obstinate self-will, it makes them the wickedest of mankind, and the most dangerous. How can one discover this? By the following signs: they have not attained to this transcendent interior absorption by the way of practising virtue; they have not followed the pious exercises of a holy Christian life, including the mortification of irregular appetites. They make little or nothing of such things, for they trust wholly to their false disengagement and quiet of spirit. This they have not strived after with inner and outer practical charity. They have arrived at the dismissal of inner forms and images prematurely, and without due actual practise of virtue. And now the devil intervenes; he fills them with false light and deceitful sweetness. He so misleads them that often they are eternally lost. Studying their dominant natural tendencies, such as pride, avarice or lust, the evil one draws them on to ruin by such means.

Yet they will call this interior light and their sweetness of sentiment, God’s own self — it is only the work of the devil. Why cannot they perceive this? Because they are passionately attached, in all selfishness of enjoyment, to these interior emotions. This explains the unholy freedom with which they follow their natural inclinations.

Such men should be shunned more than the demon himself. Outwardly they so much resemble good men that they are not easily detected. But really right-spirited men show this difference: they have come to their interior peace by the road of common virtue. Humility, the fear of Ood, detachment from creatures, and mildness of manner: — all this marks their progress. They ever stand in holy fear; they feel that they dare not trust themselves in anything; a weight of sorrow for sin oppresses them; they incessantly turn to God for help. On the contrary, those who boast that they are free, are audacious spirits and inclined to quarrel. Whosoever associates with them, presently encounters bitterness and contention, and overbearing manners. They are too proud to endure contempt or anywise to be made little of. O what marvels of horror shall be seen in the next life, where men who now seem so good, shall be hemmed in straitly, and shall abide in everlasting burning. Beware, beware of this fate, I emplore you.

Ah, children, turn inwardly to God, where truth is born to you, and where many great joys are granted you, and through you to all of God’s Christian people. Then you shall not be racked with doubt as to whether or not you stand right with God, for you shall have this plain test, the choice of the straight or the crooked road to God. If you have trod the plain, sure road of virtuous conduct, that will be your guarantee of God’s friendship, whether your perfection be in the lowest or the highest or the middle state of spiritual proficiency. And when God’s joy is born in your soul, its sweetness will exceed the power of words to tell.

Dear children, no one can lead these souls astray without first enticing them from their interior recollectedness and throwing them into multiplicity: they should be left alone with God. The Lord says in the Canticles: “I adjure you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes and the harts of the fields, that you stir not up, nor make the beloved to awake, till she please” (Cant, ii, 7). Nor should they seek counsel from those who do not understand God’s ways in such things, for that kind of men may easily misdirect them; it is quite possible that thereby they may lose their state of interior union for many years together. They must keep their souls in strict custody, for they are like new wine in active ferment; so strong are the emotions of joy within them that they overcome nature, and sometimes to such a degree that blood bursts from nose and mouth. But this is in the life of the senses and is in the lower degree of union.

The angel Gabriel said of John: “He shall drink no wine nor strong drink” (Luke i, 15). This may be taken to mean, that in whomsoever this birth of God shall be accomplished, he may be led into higher \ degrees of holiness, and again into yet higher; for there are good and \ better and best ways with God. Those in the best way shall not drink \ aught that may make them drunk — that is to say their heads shall not be turned by the joys granted them; they shall not enjoy them with spiritual gluttony, either in contemplation or in action.

On the contrary, they shall be removed into a way that is narrow, dark and comfortless: a time comes when God seems lost and gone from them. Therein they find themselves in a state of intolerable oppression of spirit: nor can they possibly extricate themselves. Whichever way they turn, they find only deepest misery, their soul is desolate, obscure and disconsolate, for God is veiled from their gaze. To this state they must give themselves up. They must abandon themselves to the Lord, being resigned to remain upon this road as long as it shall please Him. And this they must do with as much willingness as if they felt no manner of anguish, and suffered no pain at all. It is a condition of intolerable anguish of spirit, and immense and fruitless longing for God — and yet of perfect resignation. This is in truth the perfect conversion, for which the most essentially perfect reward is reserved. Lesser degrees merit a less essential reward.

Therefore does St. Thomas teach, that great external works of religion — no matter how wonderful — never merit, taken simply in themselves and as good works, more than an accidental, that is to say a less essential reward, tut when a man’s spirit turns inward to God’s spirit, inward to the inmost depths, stripped in all things of what is accidental, seeking God purely and simply, transcending all works and ways and methods, all reason and thought, (a state called by St. Dionysius love unreasoning and unsensible) — when a man has thus placed himself before God, his state may rightly be termed an essential conversion. It must be granted an essential reward. That reward is God Himself.

There is another conversion that may be called essential, but only in an ordinary and external meaning of the term. That is any conversion that keeps God in view with all sincerity, and only God — God for His own sake, God in Himself. But the other above-mentioned one consists in an interior presence of the soul with God, who is formless as the soul is comfortless. It is a supersubstantial drawing of the own happiness. That man’s spirit is so immersed in God and saturated with the deity, that he loses all multiplicity in the divine unity. These are the chosen spirits whose every work on earth is divinized; and they are vouchsafed a foretaste of their eternal paradise. Upon them as a house upon its foundation stands holy Church; if they were not in Christendom, Christendom could not stand. The fact of their very existence among us, that they simply are, is of more honor and of greater benefit to holy Church than a whole world of action by other Christians. It is of them that the Lord speaks: “He that toucheth you, toucheth the apple of My eye” (Zach. ii, 8). Therefore, children, be careful not to meddle with them. May God grant us to attain to this holy state and even by the shortest way, if this may be to His praise and glory. Amen.

(Sod tip Cigfft of tip Soul

God — Corrupt nature loves created light — The first effect of divine light is to reveal the difference between the Creator and the oreature — The second effect is a clear perception of God’s love in Christ — Several different kinds of love generated by the light of God.