The Sermons of Johannes Tauler · 112 of 124

Sermon for the Feast of St. Matthew, Apostle and

And He salth to him: Follow Me. And he arose up and followed Him. —

This blessed apostle St. Matthew is a moving example to all men. He was at first a great sinner, as scripture tells us, and afterwards he became one of the greatest friends of God. Our Lord spoke to him; and as he heard the words they sank deep down into his soul; he instantly rose up, left all things, and followed Him. Everything depends on our doing like St. Matthew, following God in all truth.

But that means forsaking everything whatsoever that is not God and that has gained a foothold in one’s soul. For God is a lover of hearts; He is not content with anything else; no gift of outward things will satisfy Him. He is concerned with the interior life of a man; He would have a man cultivate an inner inclination to all that is virtuous, all that is Divine. God is in the interior life; He is more truly there in one minute of recollection than in hours of wordy prayers, or in singing loud enough to echo through the whole earth, or in any amount of fasting and vigils, if these are done with little interior spirit.

Our Lord said: “Follow me,” and to obey Him means six things, three in the lower and three in the higher faculties. In the lower, there must be humility, gentleness, and patience. The other three virtues left are high above all our powers, being supernatural: faith, hope and charity. He says: Follow. We do this, in one way, after His own example, namely, by thanksgiving and praise to His Father.

In another way we come closer to Him, transcending all methods, and yielding to a certain interior quiet. In this state our spirit is turned inward, and simply waits for God, letting Him do His will just as it may please Him. We meet men with whom all seems to go well in outward religious exercises, as prayer, fasting and vigils. But they have so absorbing a joy in these practices that God is not much reckoned with — at least directly — sometimes is quite forgotten; and then He withdraws Himself. The reason is because these men make themselves the object of their devotion, cherishing a sense of ownership of spiritual things in great self contentment. They forget that every good thing is God’s and not anything is their own.

One may inquire how he shall be able to separate a good thing from the joy there is in it. I answer by a comparison. In the old law the priest was forbidden to eat the fat of the sacrifice; that was commanded to be burnt as an offering to God. But yet the fat that was in the intestines of the victim he was allowed to eat. Now we may compare the sweetness of all external devotions and good work to the outside fat of the victim. These sensible joys we must cast into the fire of love, and burn them in God’s honor: He has appropriated them to Himself. But yet a certain sense of satisfaction inherent to these good works by the necessity of the case and by their very nature, these emotions one may enjoy in a single-hearted way, though without any self complacency.

Now let us apply to ourselves the spirit in which St. Matthew left all things and followed Jesus. The man who gives up everything, and includes himself in this renunciation, must follow the Lord in His outward life in all virtuous practices, and in universal love. As to the interior life, he must follow Jesus with sincere self abandonment, embracing a real freedom of spirit about all devotional practices, whether inner or outer. And listen to what 1 have to say about myself. From God I have received the gift of Divine grace; from holy Church I have received my holy order of St. Dominic, my habit and cowl; and from her also comes my holy priesthood; and so I am appointed to preach and to hear confessions. Now if it should happen that the pope and holy Church, from whom I have received all these privileges, should as far as possible deprive me of them, then if I were a truly detached man, I would humbly accept the deprivation nor so much as ask why it had been done. I would put on a rough gray coat — if I could get one, — and go my way. And if I could no longer live with my brothers stripped even of my priestly functions and of my power to hear confessions, and also to preach, I should say this: In God’s name I give it all up; they gave me these privileges, they have taken them away from me, as they had the power to do: I will not presume to ask them why they have done so. I do not wish, indeed, to be called a heretic, nor would I like to be excommunicated. Well, then, if I had the grace to bear my trial in that spirit, I should in truth be a detached man, resigned to God’s will. But take a different case, suppose someone not invested with lawful authority should try to rob me of these gifts, I should rather suffer death than submit to it; and yet in resisting with due moderation I should remain a man really detached and resigned to God’s will. And should holy Church deprive me of the sacrament outwardly, I must yield with all submissiveness; but to hinder me from spiritual communion, that can no one do. Whatsoever the Church has given us, she can take away, and to her rule we must bow without the least murmuring or contradiction.

So much for disengagement of spirit in outward things. But we should go yet farther in resignation of proprietorship in inward things. What have we that God has not given us? Hence all that He gave us must be yielded up to Him again in sincere detachment just as if we never had received it. Dear people, you whose souls are occupied with devout forms and figures and thoughts, whose time is employed in the ordinary methods and good works of religion — I am not now addressing you, do not apply my words to yourselves. No; I am now speaking to those led by God in special ways of interior darkness, who have been guided into that narrow path trodden by only a few. Their way is very different from that of others, both in doing and refraining from doing certain things.

One must hold his spiritual gifts in his soul’s powers without any feeling of ownership. Indeed, God’s work in such a soul is in a region above the soul’s powers. Let it rate all things as nothing except for God’s sake alone. But meanwhile all men are naturally formed to possess, to know, and to will; and this is operative in the acitvity of the powers of nature. In this you must recall the six things I already named. In the lower faculties are humility, gentleness and patience; in the higher, faith, hope or confidence in God, and charity. And when God leads thy soul to close union with Him, He sends faith to desjwil thee of thy reason, and of all knowing, and to make thee mentally

And these three high virtues pass from the superior faculties of the soul into the inferior ones, and they are projected into the virtues dwelling there, humility, mildness and patience. Humility vanishes away into a blank feeling of one’s very nothingness, losing even its name. This meek grace had already robbed the will of the pride of selfish ownership; but now all things are become alike to the soul because all are reduced to nothingness in the soul’s esteem. One no longer seems conscious of being virtuous; virtue loses its name, and its very being is lost in the one supreme virtue, love. All things are had in even minded peace. As to patience, love so rules the soul that its thirst for suffering seems but love, and patience is known no more by its own name.

Dear children, amid all this state of detachment one may commit faults. A fit of anger may seize one, and an ugly word may escape one; but this should not discourage thee. God allows this in order to sink thee yet deeper in thy own nothingness, causing thee to know how unworthy thou art of receiving even a good thought from God. Upon one thing everything depends, namely, a bottomless sense of thy own perfect nothingness. As to the spiritual exercises of persons thus placed, they are not the ordinary outward devotions, nor ordinary methods of prayer with forms and figures in the imagination. Let those who have not reached so far diligently cultivate all these, and God will forgive them their sins, and lead them through purgatory to the kingdom of heaven. You must know that it is not by self-chosen pious practices that one arrives at the more perfect state we have been considering, no, nor even to be made servants of the servants of these favored souls. If such chosen ones are only well advised, they are above measure fortunate; and yet it is as perilous a state as that of the wildest men in the world, for it places souls on a darksome road; as Job says: “ A man whose way is hidden, and God hath surrounded Him with darkness” (Job iii, 23). In that desert road all depends on a man walking in a state of entire self-abasement, detached from every thing that may possibly arise before him. To such a soul our Lord would say: Follow me — come onward through and past all things: whatsoever thou seest is not Myself — forward! follow Me, never stop.

Then the soul may ask: Lord, who art Thou, that I must follow after Thee in this dark, wild and gloomy road? And Jesus may answer: I am Man and God, and far more God than thou canst understand. And O how happy for that soul, if it can but respond to the Lord: Thou art God, and I am nothing and less than nothing. For in truth the infinite and unnamed God can have no other place or state to work His will in, than in the depths of a soul that confesses itself to be nothing.

Philosophers tell us that when a new form of existence enters a substance the old form must needs be destroyed; as when in the mother’s womb mere matter gives place to the animal form, and then in God’s due time the animal form receives the rational soul, forming the human nature — quality, quantity, shape, color, and the like, all being assimilated to the new form. So I affirm of the transformation of the soul by this superessential process: all its forms must needs, in a sense, yield place to God, such as the powers of knowing, willing, acting, feeling, self proprietorship. When St. Paul at the gate of Damascus was struck blind, he saw God. When Elias covered his head with his mantle, the Lord appeared to him.

And now all rocks shall be rent asunder: all that the spirit rested on, is shattered and torn away. And when all natural forms and conditions are gone, the very same instant the soul is transformed. Therefore must thou ever keep on and go forward. The heavenly Father says: “Thou shalt call Me Father and shalt not cease to walk after Me” (Jer. iii, 19). As if to say: On and on must thou go, deeper and deeper into the unnamed and unknown abyss, nearer and nearer to Me: far above all methods, and all figures of the mind, thy soul stripped naked, thy mental faculties lost in Me. Into this lost state of soul no ray of light ever flashes but only one; and this lights up and reveals the all sufficient being of God — one in essense, one in life, above all. A man may say of this rapture that he is so absorbed in God, that in himself he is devoid of consciousness, of love, and of spirit. But this is not to be understood to mean the effacement of one’s natural individuality, but tells of the transformation which the Spirit of God works in the created spirit out of His own free goodness; and it tells of the created spirit’s bottomless feeling of being lost in God, and its immeasurable disengagemeut from all that is not God. Of this state we may also say that in it the soul learns to know God, to love Him and enjoy Him in a transcendent manner, for now there remains to it happen that a soul thus favored, should bear itself with undue freedom and should follow after any false guidance, it would be in the most perilous condition possible in this life.

The way and method to reach this happy state, is the study and imitation of the life and passion and death of our blessed Lord. For He is the way that we must walk, He is the truth that lights up the way, He is the life that we must attain to live. He is also the door; and He tells us that whosoever enters unto God through any other door is a thief and a robber. Through this blessed door, then, all must enter, breaking down nature’s resistence in the steadfast practise of virtue, especially humility, mildness and patience. Be sure that anyone who fancies that he has come to perfection without treading this road, is under a delusion. From such persons God is far removed, and they are blind and self-blinded.

As to those who have sincerely trodden in our Lord’s footsteps and obtained this state of perfection, the authorities of holy Church from the pope down, feel no uneasiness about them, nor need they. For they obey all laws out of love. As St. Paul says: “If you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law” (Gal. v,18). Life is never weary to such souls, for tedium never oppresses them. The same cannot be said of any world-lovers, for their love palls on them. Whereas in these heavenly lovers, their very existence has in the superior powers of the soul, been lifted above time and its weary changes. And even in their inferior faculties their life is full of freedom, for they are detached from affection for all things: they have come into a land of essential peace. From God they accept instinctively all that happens to them, and in the same spirit they offer up all to Him again, and so they abide in sweet tranquility of mind. And this is true of them even while their outward man is much disturbed and sorely pained. O what happy men are these. Wherever they aye found, they should be honored by all. But I fear that such Divine seed is but thinly sowed among us. Let us beseech our Lord to grant us the grace to follow Him in this manner, and that we may acquire these high privileges. Amen.

U8 should be our guardian angels — How the different choirs of angels are engaged with different states and classes of men.