The Sermons of Johannes Tauler · 38 of 124

Sermon for Easter Sunday: First Part

I In them, and Thou in Me; that they may be made perfect in one. — John xvil, 21-23.

To this union St. Paul had attained, for he says: “And I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me.” (Gal. ii, 20.) Let us ask how we, too, may be made one with God. Not otherwise than by losing ourselves and forgetting ourselves, and then by being made over again in God by God’s spirit. For as long as a man is self-conscious, even though he have God and is even conscious of Him, just so long is He not one, but two — he has not become one with God: this is multiplicity and not perfect unity. In unity a man loses multiplicity. True unity is the state in which a man finds himself solely in One, the One that is called and is God. In this state a man has, as it were, lost his selfhood in God; so that he has no joy in self, no thought of self, no outward life of self. Nor does it seem to him that it is his own self that knows and loves either God or creatures- —all seems done by God. Self is absorbed as it were in God.

All creatures seek after this unity; all multiplicity struggles toward It — the universal aim of all life is always this unity. Every creature comes forth from this unity by an immediate creative act, and each one lends again to be absorbed in its entire existence into indivisible unity, according to each one’s capability. All activity of mind and body, and all love, as well as all unrest, has an end and purpose; it all tends toward entire rest; and this rest is to be found nowhere but in the one, indivisible unity that is God. All that flows outward is to flow backward into its source — God. And when this has happened, and not before, do we find rest and tranquillity. When all that goes to make up a man’s being has become lovingly one with God, then all the soul’s cries are hushed, and the unrest of longing and of acting has ceased. Nature itself universally craves this unity, and consumes everything, even its own life, in its strivings to attain to it; but to true unity can nature never come except in God, the only being wholly one. And O how anxious, how uncertain is the soul of man whilst deprived of this union! How can he abide out of it a single instant! How can he find in himself aught worth knowing or loving as long as he is out of God!

What is the best way to enter into God and to be made one with Him? Certainly there is but one way: To die to self; to totally give up all self-seeking, all multiplicity. If thou wilt be made white, thou must wash off the black; the less black, the more white. The less thou art multiplied, the more shalt thou be single-minded and single-hearted. God does not work in thee rightly and by Himself alone, as long as thou art multiplied; His living work in thee must be one. The more the soul’s powers are detached from outward things and gathered into one in the interior life, all the stronger grows God’s action inwardly, and all the diviner and more perfect. This state no man can achieve except by dying to himself. The sooner and the more truly and the more perfectly he dies to himself, the sooner, the more truly and the more perfectly will he find his life made one with God’s. Therefore, Christ died a physical death that He might show us the way to die a spiritual death. That He might rise from the dead into immortality, He must die to mortality. If we would reach a condition of unity, we must die to multiplicity; we must die to all mortality, to all self-ownership, to all divisibility. Unity has no division; division is lost and so is multiplicity— all made one in unity. Of Christ we read that, ‘‘Rising again from the dead, He dieth now no more; death shall no more have dominion over Him.” (Rom. vi, 9.) Out of death comes life that dies no more. There is no true and undying life in us except the life that comes forth from death. If water is to become hot, then cold must die out of it. If wood is to be made fire, then the nature of wood must die. The life we seek cannot be in us, it cannot become our very selves, we cannot be itself, unless we gain it by first ceasing to be what we are; we acquire this life through death.

In very truth there is, rightly speaking, but one death and one life. However many deaths there may seem to be, they all are but one, namely, the death a man dies to his own will, to his sense of proprietorship, to division and multiplicity and activity — in so far as this is possible to a creature. And there is one life, and only one, namely, the one ineffable, incomprehensible, uncreated, essential, divine life. Toward this life all other life hurries on, is driven forward, streams along, being irresistibly drawn to possess it. The nearer our life comes to this essential life, and the more it is likened to it, the more truly do we live, for in this and from this life is all life, and not otherwise. Any life that lives apart from this, to it may be said these words: “Thou hast the name of being alive, and thou art dead.” ( Apoc. iii, 1.)

Whosoever will have this Divine life living within him, made most essentially and most truly his own, such a one must most essentially and most truly die to himself. Whosoever fails to die will fail to live. And whosoever totally dies to self, such a one is wholly made alive in God and without any separation. And this death has many degrees, just as life has. A man, for example, may die a thousand deaths in a single day, and each is instantly followed by a joyous life in God — death is no longer death. This happens perforce, because God cannot refuse the offering of death nor resist its plea for life. And the stronger death is and the more complete, so is the life that responds to it all the stronger and more integral; just as death is, so shall life be. And as life succeeds to death, so does life prepare a man to die a more perfect death to himself.

And it is thus that a man dies to himself: if he meekly accepts an insult for God’s sake, if he curbs his inclination for inner or outward joy for the same Divine motive; if in any way whatsoever, in pleasure or in pain, he bridles his wayward will for God’s sake in words or deeds, in labor or rest, in seeing or tasting; if he bears unjust reproof in silence and in all patience; if in any of his unmortifled tendencies he dies to self, he begins to live to God. At first he yields to this holy death of selfhood reluctantly and with much pain; later on he grows used to it, and to die to self and to live to God grows into a holy habit. No matter how small the death an earnest man dies to himself, it wins him a great life, and this great life heartens him to die another and a yet greater death. And soon it comes to pass that the most joyous thing* in life is to die to oneself, far more joyous than any life that is lived for self’s sake. For life is now found only in death, and light shineth only in darkness. In outward things a man may so constantly die to self, that in course of time there is nothing left in him of any inclination tothem that is not dead. Then, indeed, he hath fought a good fight; and yet in his interior life there is much that must die.

When one is truly mortified or dead to his selfhood, then all things are his and he can use them moderately without danger. Indeed, no man has real and reasonable joy in created things, until he has first gone forth out of all joy in them for the love of God — until he has died to them and they have died to him. Only after that canst thou turn again to their use, without feeling anxiety lest thou misuse them. No man truly loves his father and mother, his sisters and brothers and all his other friends, with the love that is in God, until he has first given them up and wholly died to them out of love for God; until that happens they are rather enemies to his spiritual welfare than friends. Therefore, our Lord teaches: “For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s enemies shall be they of his own household.” (Matt, x, 35-36.)

But it is only a lesser death when one has died to outward things; for when a man has sincerely renounced the world and all its superfluities, and entered upon an interior and divine life, it is an easy matter to be quite dead to external enjoyments. To him the death he has yet to die is hidden. What bitterness can he suffer who is full of the sweetness of a devout life? What battle can he have to fight who has escaped from the clutches of his enemy, and is journeying safely along the way of peace? If a man be truly converted to lead a perfect life inwardly, no matter what outward things cross his path, they do not touch his interior life. Mary was turned to Christ in all her inner faculties, and hence she sat at His feet unconcerned about the many things that troubled Martha, who complained about her. Mary thought not at all of justifying herself — quite other things absorbed her thoughts and her feelings and her love. So does it happen with any soul that is turned inward to God and away from all transitory things — turned to God, revealed within him, and by no intermediary, but. directly. Whether such a soul wills it or not, it must forget everything but God. All images of things created are gone; such a man has within him that which is the original of all things. He is liberated from creatures; he has no room in his soul for figures and types, and strange happenings and contradictions make no impression on him.

Such men as these St. Paul may have had in view when he said: “For you are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” (Col. iii, 3.)

But now it is to be remarked, that they may progress to a yet closer union; for they are hid with Christ, and are therefore two and not one with Him. On the other hand, our Lord prayed to His Father thai “they may be one, as Thou, Father, in Me, and I in Thee.” As if it were not in what made Father and Son different persons, but rather in what made them one essence, one life, one Divine operation — as if He prayed that this union might be granted us and perfected in us, as far as we are capable of it. Is it not true to say that to bring about this unity with God’s being, His life and operation, a thousand times more perfect death to self and to creatures must be experienced? If God is to go into the soul, nature must go out totally, even to the last atom; fire and water cannot dwell together in one. He whose life is to be made God’s life, must quickly and entirely die to any other life. If a man be already averse to the things of this earthly existence, then he more easily dies to himself; but whether or not this be so, the man who will have God to live within him and be his only support and only comfort, must be dead to all transitory things and they dead to him, absolutely stripped of their support and void of their comfort. Life has its hiding place* in death; consolation has its hiding place in desolation. When the outward man is hushed still, then the inward man begins to live; then does he begin truly to speak his happy words, according to the prophet: “My soul refused to be comforted; I remembered God and was delighted and was exercised, and my spirit swooned away.” (Ps. lxxvi, 3-4.) The outward craves the outward life in everything. It is true that the outward life longs for God’s help in some exterior form, as the Psalmist says: “It is good for me to adhere [that is to say, exteriorly] to my God.” (Ps. lxvii, 28.) But even this comfort has a savor of selfseeking, and it, too, must die out of the soul.

The death of self and the union with God that we have been considering, affects all the powers of the soul, even the most interior ones. The will must efface its symbols and images and rest motionless; the understanding, including knowledge and memory, and, indeed, all mental powers, must set aside, as far as possible, the objects of their activity. Listen to our Lord’s words: “He that flndeth his life, shall lose it; and he that shall lose his life for Me, shall find it.” (Matt, x, 39.) It is a hard death to the soul, when all natural lights in it and all its faculties go out in darkness; and a yet harder death when even the bright rays of light shed by God’s own gifts, must be quenched in darkness; for these are not God, and God alone must finally content the soul. All these are, as it were, but a part of God and not God one and indivisible.

But in truth it is only when all that lives within a man, and all that gives him light has died out and gone from him — it is then, and only then, that he finds his real soul — never otherwise. Does he not find it? Can you say that in such a state he rather has utterly lost it? No, by no means; for freedom of the will yet remains, and responsibility for choosing to act or not to act. Does he not now stand in control of his spiritual powers to will and to act, and how to choose? See how our Saviour and our model acted in His agony: “Father * * * not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” (Matt, xxvi, 39.) As if to say: I have no will; but Thou, Father, shalt have My will, for I am stripped of My will and dead to it, and now in Thy will I am absorbed and restored to life.

Union with God is not action, in the human meaning of the term, nor knowing, nor loving with diversity; for in God all is one and all is rest and peace. Knowing and loving, bringing forth and being brought forth, and all manner of simply human activity, is the product of diversity. In God, in this One, is all action ended and unified, and we are made one in God through Christ. Amen.