Volume 7 — Translated From The "Revue Du Monde Catholique." John Tauler. By Ernest Hello.

History has an astonishing memory. She records the day and hour of battles with exact fidelity. She knows a thousand things. She has recently discovered, if I do not mistake, the name of Julian the Apostate's cook. She remembers everything of little importance. The names of celebrated mistresses who have amused or poisoned renowned personages, are transmitted from age to age. Erudition has been making strides during the last hundred years, as if she had seven-leagued boots. To deserve the admiration and gratitude of mankind, however, she should not have degraded herself, but taken a higher sphere in her progress. Her memory indicates greatness of genius; but she is like calumny, she increases in size as she advances through the centuries. In her labors, researches, and exploits, she has been mostly busied with soldiers, and frequently forgotten God and man. She could not think of everything at once; the hidden history of humanity is yet to be written; the greatest events of the world are secret to this very day; and those who reflect on them are men of a special caste.

If there were question of the battle of Marathon, or of Antony and Cleopatra, our contemporaries would be found well instructed; but do they know John Tauler, the German Tauler, of the Dominican or preaching order?

Master Tauler was a great preacher—powerful and popular. One day he gave a learned discourse, in which he taught the way of perfection, with all his characteristic assurance. To become perfect, he enumerated twenty-four conditions, which he developed before an attentive and brilliant audience. After the sermon, a layman, one of the poorest and most ignorant of his hearers, came to him. History, by one of those distractions so usual for her to have, when there is question of God, has forgotten the name of this individual. This simple layman said to Tauler:

"Master, the letter kills, and the spirit gives life; but you are a Pharisee."

Doctor Tauler: "My son, I am now old, and no one has ever spoken to me in this manner."

The Layman: "You think I speak too bluntly to you; but it is your own fault; and I can prove that what I say to you is true."

Doctor Tauler: "You will do me a favor, for I have never loved the Pharisees."

Then the layman, probing into the doctor's mental condition, showed him that he was held captive by the mere letter of the evangelical law, and devoid of its spirit.

"You are a Pharisee," proceeded the layman, "but not a hypocritical Pharisee. You are not on the road to hell, but on that which leads to purgatory."

Doctor Tauler embraced the man, and said to him: "I feel at this moment as the Samaritan woman must have felt at the well; you have revealed to me all my faults, my son; you have told all that was most secret in my soul. Who, then, has told you? It is God; I am convinced it must be so. I entreat you, my son, by the death of our Lord, to be my spiritual father, and I, a poor sinner, will become your son."

The Layman: "Dear master, if you speak thus contrary to order and reason, I shall not remain with you any longer, but straightway return to my own house."

Doctor Tauler: "Oh! no. I beg you, in the name of God, to stay with me, and I promise not to speak thus again."

The docility of Tauler is sublime and touching. His great good will, which broke the pride of science, led him into the paths of spiritual contemplation.

"Tell me, I conjure you, in the name of God," said Tauler, "how you have succeeded in arriving at the contemplative state?"

The Layman: "You ask me a very odd question. I confess to you frankly that, if I should recount or write all the wonderful things which God has been doing to me, a poor sinner, for twelve years, there would be no book large enough to contain them."

The layman then recounted how he had been deceived in his spiritual life; how, influenced by Satan, he had practised imprudent austerities, which would have injured both his body and soul; and how, warned by God, he had returned to the paths of wisdom.

Both Tauler and the layman were then lifted up to the regions of contemplation. The unknown monitor then said: "If the God whom we worship could be comprehended by reason, he would not be worthy of our service."

But before his great illumination, Tauler suffered during two years frightful temptations. Abandoned, poor, suffering, that man of iron was shaken like a reed. The layman comes to his assistance, and sustains in his time of misery him whom he had crushed in his period of pride.

"For the first time," said the layman, "God has touched your superior faculties."

At the end of two years, the doctor again ascended the pulpit. The crowd which came to hear him was large. Tauler cast his eyes over the expectant multitude, then drew his cowl over his eyes and prayed.

The crowd awaited him; but he spoke not a word. Tears filled his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. Tauler wept bitterly.

What a scene! The audience become impatient. Some one asks Tauler if he will preach. Tauler continues weeping. He wept and wept; and the multitude, anxious to hear his inferior oratory, and incapable of appreciating the higher eloquence of tears, could not comprehend the doctor's conduct. At last Tauler dismissed the assembly; for his sobs choked his utterance. He asked pardon of the people for having kept them uselessly waiting; and they went home. "Now," said some of them, "we see that he has become a fool."

But after five days' silence, Tauler preached before the friars of the convent, and he was sublime. One of the friars went to the pulpit and addressed the congregation as follows: "I am requested to make known to you that Doctor Tauler will preach here to-morrow; but if he acts as he did last time, remember not to blame me." "How will he succeed?" said one to another. "I do not know," was the answer; "God knows."

This time Tauler could control his voice, and silence was his theme. He had built his eyrie in silence, as an eagle on the summit of a cliff. His language, worked out in silence, seemed to long after it; to return to its home, and die away in the high sombre clouds of complete solitude. Silence is the doctrine of Tauler; his secret, his food, his substance and his slumber. Absolutely free from all oratorical finery, his sermons go right to the mark, without respect for conventionality or the cant of ordinary discourses. He utters what he wishes to express; praises solitude, and returns into it. This is the reason why his external word takes nothing away from his interior recollection. His words do not betray his soul. Silence is the guardian angel of strength.

It was doubtless this profound doctrine of silence which gave to the eloquence of Tauler an extraordinary virtue. This man, who seemed to come out of a tomb, appeared with a thunderbolt in his hand. Fifty men, after the sermon, remained in the church as if transfixed by an invisible hand. Thirty-eight of them were able to move during the half-hour which followed; but the twelve others could not stir. Tauler said to the unknown layman, his adviser: "What shall we do with these people, my son?" The layman went from one to the other and touched them, but they were as immovable as rocks.

Tauler was frightened at the paralysis which he had caused. "Are they dead or alive?" said he to his friend. "What do you think?" "If they are dead," replied the layman, "it is your fault, and that of the Spouse of souls."

This fact, which is historical, seems like a legend.

This picture would be magnificent, if an artist should sketch it. The place where Tauler had just preached was a cemetery, and the twelve men who were lying on the ground in ecstasy resembled those who slumbered in death beneath. The orator, walking with his friend through the audience, who had become almost his victims; feeling the pulse and the face of his hearers, to detect in them after the sermon, as after a battle, some sign of life; passing through the ranks of the vanquished and healing the wounded, must have seemed something superhuman. At last the friend of Tauler found that the thunderstruck hearers breathed still, "Master," said he, "those men still live. Request the nuns of the convent to take them away from here; for this cold floor will injure them." One of the nuns, who was a listener to the fearful discourse, had to be carried to her bed, where she lay motionless.

The biography of John Tauler, which serves as prologue to his sermons, says nothing of his exterior life; but dwells specially on his unhistorical and legendary character. Those who wrote about him have not deigned even to inquire in what century he lived. This strange man has dispensed history from its ordinary inquiries, as if eternity had been the sole theatre of his terrestrial existence.

His friends are as strange as himself. The astonishing layman, who tells his name to nobody, and gives us no means of discovering it, was not the doctor's only teacher. Another of his instructors was a beggar, just as extraordinary.

Tauler, according to Surius, petitioned God during eight years for a master capable of teaching him the truth. One day when his desire was more than usually strong, he heard a voice saying to him, "Go to the door of the church. Thou wilt find there the man whom thou seekest." He obeyed, and met at the appointed spot a beggar, whose feet were soiled with mud, and whose rags were not worth three half-pence. They began a dialogue, of which the following is a portion:

Doctor Tauler. "Good day, my friend."

The Beggar. "I do not remember ever to have had a bad day in my life."

Tauler. "May God grant thee prosperity."

The Beggar. "I know not what adversity is."

Tauler. "Well, may God make thee happy!"

The Beggar. "I have never been unhappy."

Urged for an explanation, the mendicant affirms that, "by means of silence, he had arrived at perfect union with God; never being able to find pleasure in anything less than God."

Tauler. "Whence comest thou?"

The Beggar. "From God."

Tauler. "Where hast thou found God?"

The Beggar. "Where I have left all creatures."

Tauler. "Where is God?"

The Beggar. "In men of good will."

Tauler. "Who art thou?"

The Beggar. "I am a king."

Tauler. "Where is thy kingdom?"

The Beggar. "In my soul."

We need often recall to our minds, in reading Tauler's life, that he was really a man of flesh and bone, an historical personage. Surius, Fathers Echard and Touron, have written his real life circumstantially. He was born in 1294. He was an Alsatian. He lived at Cologne, and died probably at Strasburg. We cannot fix the date of his death. It happened May 17th, 1361, says Father Alexander. Father Echard places it in the year 1379. Another historian, M. Sponde, puts it in 1355.

Let us now speak of his doctrine.

II.

The doctrine of Doctor Tauler is the practice of divine union. This union, transcending human thoughts and hopes, is the secret of his life and the leading principle of his work. His sermons are full of instruction regarding this union.

His Institutions also teach it. Some writers hostile to Tauler pretend to have found in his writings the foreshadowing of quietism. This mistake can be refuted in three ways: by the works of Tauler, which always affirm human activity to the most contemplative soul, thus clearly separating the doctrine of the quietists from that of the German thinker. Secondly, Bossuet, whom no one will suspect of any leaning toward quietism, says of Tauler: "He is one of the most solid and exact of the mystical theologians." Thirdly, Tauler himself predicted quietism in a remarkable monograph, blaming strongly all that Molinos, Madame de Guyon, and Fenelon afterward asserted.

A close study of the Alsatian doctor shows that he always gives to both internal and external activity all the reality and all the rights which they possess.

"If any one," says he, "ascends to such a height of contemplation as Saints Peter and Paul reached; and he perceives that a sick beggar needs his help to warm his soup, or for any other service, it would be much better for him to leave the repose of contemplation, and aid the poor man, instead of remaining in the sweetness of contemplative life." (Institutions, p. 195.)

Here is the plain truth and no illusion. And elsewhere he writes: "Men should not pay so much attention to what they do, as to what they are in themselves; for if the core of their heart be good, their acts will be so also without difficulty; and if their conscience be just and right, their works cannot be otherwise. Many make sanctity [to] consist in action; but action is not the chief element in it. Holiness must be judged in its principle as well as in its acts. In other words, we must be interiorly saints before we can perform exterior holy actions. No matter how good may be our works, they do not sanctify us as works. It is we, on the contrary, who make them meritorious, in virtue of inner sanctity which is their producing principle. It is in the bottom of the soul that we find the essence of a just man." (Institutions, p. 156.)

Here is the truth again. Collate those two passages, after having studied them separately, and you will find that they throw complete light on the nature and value of human acts.

The almost continual ecstatic state in which Tauler lived, never made him forget his smallest duties.

It has been often remarked that grace adapts itself to the natural qualities of the individual whom it sanctifies. This is as true of nations as of individuals. In Italy, asceticism has the color of the sun. Italian ascetics shout, burn with ardor, and seem full of exaggerated transports to the nations of cooler blood. The landscape of Italian asceticism presents you a burning sky, an ocean of fire, and a scorching earth. Sadness is generally wanting. In Spain, the hue is more sombre. The same ardor is there; but ardor tempered with jealousy. There is interior disquietude in Spanish mysticism, and even adoration in it examines itself as if suspicious of its truth. In Germany, profound gravity and stern austerity lead the soul into a horrible place. In Italy, images come crowding together, and divine love, instead of rejecting them, embraces them. The soul of the Italian saint holds garlands of flowers in his hands, offering them joyously to the blessed sacrament. Familiarity and adoration unite, like the two species of electricity before the thunder-clap. Familiarity, wedded to adoration, appeared in St. Francis of Assisi. The greatness of that strange man, who saw brothers and sisters in everything, and conversed with water, fire, the birds, and his monks, in the same tone and spirit, is not immediately manifest to superficial minds. Plain good nature veils his wonderful character. In Germany, those images which poetry presents to love are accepted with great precaution. Adoration is sober in thought and expression; and aspires to something sublime, whose form and name are intangible. German adoration is philosophical, meditative, broad, comprehensive, austere, silent, wrapped up in herself, and self-sufficing. She borrows only what is strictly necessary from persons and things. The world is a servant which she employs only with regret. She holds aloof from all creatures, and her words sound like concession. She says to no one, "My brother," or "My sister." If she had a brother. he would be silence. Her sister would be the mist which surrounds God.

Tauler is one of the most majestic representatives of Teutonic asceticism.

A disciple of St. Dionysius the Areopagite and of that layman of whom we have written, in the wake of those two great characters he follows, with eye and wing of eagle, into the region of translucent darkness. He does not flutter there, he soars; or, if he flies, his motion is so high and rapid, that it seems like the active repose of a sublime and fruitful immobility.

Tauler seems to desire obscurity. The remarkable effects of his preaching on his audience are less like thunder pealing in his language, than like the awful presence of the sacred cloud where the thunder is reposing.

Every man is a universe in himself. Unity and variety are the two terms of the antinomy, without which there is no life. But perfection consists in equilibrium between those terms. Such perfection is very rare. In general the antinomy of life is replaced by the contradictory, which is death. Man is divided between good and evil, always attempting an impossible reconciliation between them. Contradiction is a dead force which tries to serve two masters. An antinomy is a living force which, having chosen a master, and obeying but him, desires to serve him in a thousand different ways always useful. Nothing better displays the unity of a landscape than the variety of colors which it presents to the eye at the same time. The lights and shades, the undulations of the soil, and the accidents of sun, clouds, villages, forests, and spires, all are harmonized in the eye of the spectator; and the more numerous, varied, and unexpected are the details, the more does he experience delight and a certain dilation of mind and heart in the contemplation of their unity. If he takes away some of the circumstances, he mars the effect of the whole; for he cannot even destroy a shadow without diminishing the sunshine. What is true of a landscape is also true of a book or a man. But Tauler lost the balance between unity and variety, for he gave all to one and nothing to the other. Few individuals, even among the greatest saints, have been so ardent in the sentiment, love, pursuit, and conquest of unity. He seeks after it incessantly, and it haunts him. He never seems to look at the road he is travelling. He fixes his eyes solely on the goal ever present to his soul. He turns neither to the right nor the left. He knows not whether there be flowers or thorns on the borders of his pathway. Do not ask him to imitate St. Antony of Padua, and preach to the fishes of the streams. He minds neither fishes nor birds. He seems to regard creation as a stranger, of whom he had heard tell long ago, but whose remembrance is now but faintly glimmering in his mind.

His love of unity, his call to unity, his transports for it, always take the same shape, the same key and accent; and produce in the end a certain monotony, which is not a question of doctrine, but an affair of nature and temperament.

Tauler somewhere relates the history of a hermit, from whom a troublesome visitor begged something that was lying in the cell. The hermit went in to find the required object, but forgot at the threshold what was wanted, for the image of external things could not remain in his head. He went out, therefore, and asked the visitor what he sought. The visitor repeated his petition. The hermit re-entered his cell, but again forgot the request; and was at last obliged to say to his guest: "Enter and find yourself what you seek, for I cannot keep the image of what you ask for sufficiently long stamped on my brain to do what you desire."

Tauler, in narrating this story, unintentionally describes his own character. In every one of his sermons, he chooses a text and a subject. This was required by circumstances and by his audience. But the moment he enters the cell of his contemplation, he forgets text and everything else, and mounts into the realms of sublimity where he loses himself in that supreme unity after which his heart is always aspiring. The moment he begins to fly, he forgets the course he must take. With one stroke of her wings, his intellect finds her love, and then soars in her natural element, with plumes unruffled. Far above modes and forms of earth, she stretches out her broad wings in the cerulean vault of her beloved repose. If any should then ask him about some ordinary detail, he would certainly answer like the recluse above mentioned: "Enter yourself, and find what you are inquiring after. I cannot keep the image of material or minor things long enough in my mind to fulfil your request."

Tauler is continually citing Saint Dionysius the Areopagite. In fact, these two great men are at home in the same latitudes. The sermons of Tauler are to the works of the Areopagite what a treatise of applied mathematics is to one on theoretical mathematics. Tauler, like St. Dionysius, dwells in the interior of the soul, that secret and deep abode, the name of which he is ever seeking without finding, and which he ends by calling ineffable as God himself.

"It is in this recess of the soul," he preaches, "that the divine word speaks. This is why it is written, 'In the midst of silence, a secret word was spoken to me.' Concentrate then, if thou canst, all thy powers; forget all those images with which thou hast filled thy soul. The more thou forgettest creatures, the more thou wilt become fit and ready to receive that mysterious word. Oh! if thou couldst of a sudden become ignorant of all things, even of thy own life, like St. Paul, when he said, 'Was I in the body or out of the body? I know not, God knows it.'" ... "Natural animation was suspended in him, and for this reason his body lost none of its powers during the three days which he passed without eating or drinking. The same happened to Moses when he fasted forty days on the mountain, without suffering from such long abstinence, finding himself as strong at the end as at the beginning."

The desire of Tauler that his hearers should become Christian children, ignorant or forgetful of everything in sublime ecstasy, shows plainly the nature of his charity. He wished for them absolute perfection, contemplative and active, transfiguration, transport, exactness, total accomplishment of truth, and the plenitude of all heavenly things. The atmosphere in which he lived favored his hopes and helped the efficacy of his teaching. He declares that in the monastery when a soul is suddenly called to some interior consideration, it can leave the choir in the midst of the exercises, and plunge itself unseen into the abyss of meditation to which God draws it. He also affirms that when friars pass several days in ecstasy, they have no reason to be disturbed at any irregularity of theirs which may result from such an accident, provided they obey the rule again, when they become masters of themselves. Thus the prodigious transports of true asceticism are ever strengthening; while those of false mysticism enervate the soul. Hence it is that Tauler, though he is always speaking of ravishments, never loses the character of force, and of that austerity which is the sign of God and the test of true contemplation.

"Where then does God act without a medium? In the depths, in the essence of the soul? I cannot explain; for the faculties cannot apprehend a being without an image. They cannot, for instance, conceive a horse under the species of a man. It is precisely because all images come from without to the soul, that the mystery is hidden from it; and this is a great blessing. Ignorance plunges the soul into admiration. She seeks to comprehend what is taking place in her; she feels that there is something; but she knows not what it is. The moment we know the cause of anything, it has no longer any charm for us. We leave it to run after some other object; always thirsting for knowledge, and never finding the rest which we seek. This knowledge, full of ignorance and obscurity, fixes our attention on the divine operations within us. 'The mysterious and hidden word' of which Solomon writes, is working in our minds." (Sermons.)

Many men of genius, from the beginning of the world, have studied the human soul, and many are illustrious for the profundity of their psychological researches. Yet compared to the great mystical writers, those philosophers are mere children. Merely human psychology skims over the surface of the soul, only analyzing its relations to the interior world. They are ignorant of the phenomena which take place in the secret recesses of the mind. The great light, the incarnate Word, alone can throw its rays into those abysses. It is remarkable that those who study the soul for curiosity, merely to find out, and consecrate their life to such investigations, discover very little. While those who care nothing for simple science, but who act virtuously, obey and glorify the Lord, see all things properly. Instead of aiding vision to peer into the soul's penetralia, curiosity dims the light. Simplicity is the best torch in those catacombs. Simplicity, commissioned by God, penetrates into the abysses of the soul, with the audacity of a child sent by its father.

The interior and extraordinary efforts by which Tauler rose to the height of contemplation, gave him, though he knew it not, an astounding knowledge of the resistance which man makes to man and to God; of our combats, defeats, and victories; and of those artifices by which we veil from ourselves our true situation during the battle. The rounds by which the soul ascends are counted, and yet the ladder of perfection has no summit.

The gospel, so merciful to sinners, vents all its wrath on the Scribes and Pharisees. All its charity is for external enemies; all its severity for interior enemies. Jesus Christ used the whip once in his life to show men in what direction his indignation was turned. We have Magdalen and the woman taken in adultery on the one hand; the money-changers of the Temple, the Scribes and Pharisees on the other. There is a line of fire separating sinners from the accursed. All Catholic doctrine, all ascetical tradition, is but the echo of Christ's mercy and Christ's anger. Tauler teaches like all the great doctors, in this respect.

He reprobates exterior practices which are devoid of charity, as the works of hell, most hateful to the Holy Spirit. The fixedness of his ideas gives a singular solemnity to his repetitions. On every page his hatred of works done without interior life shows itself. Such works are his abomination. In all his meditations, prayers, experiences, and contemplations, he condemns them. "This doctrine," says he, "ought to be attentively meditated by those who torment and mortify their poor flesh, plucking out the bad roots which lie hidden around the core of man's heart. My brother, what has thy body done that thou shouldst scourge it in that fashion? Those men are fools who act as if they wanted to beat their heads against the wall. Extirpate thy vices and thy bad habits, instead of tormenting thyself as thou dost." ... "There are men in the cloister and in solitude whose soul and heart are always distracted by a multiplicity of external things. There are men, on the contrary, who in public places, in the midst of a market, and surrounded by countless distractions, know so well how to keep their heart and senses recollected, that nothing can trouble their interior peace or injure their soul. These deserve the name of religious far more than the former." (Sermons.)

Tauler goes farther. When those men who place God in external acts remain apparently virtuous, "the Lord," says he, "turns away from them. But when, in his mercy, he allows them to fall into grievous exterior faults, then he returns to them and offers them forgiveness." Tauler is always in the sky. He never stays long on earth. "God," says he, "can unite himself to the soul simply, immediately, and without image. He acts in the soul by an immediate operation; he operates in the depths of the mind where no image ever penetrates, and which are accessible only to him. But no creature can do this. God, the Father, begets his Son in the soul, not by means of an image, but by a process similar to the eternal generation. Do you want to know how divine generation takes place? God the Father knows himself, and comprehends himself perfectly. He sees down to the very source of his being; and contemplates himself, not by aid of an image, but in his own essence. Thus he engenders his Son in the unity of divine nature. In this manner also the Father produces him in the essence of the soul, and unites himself to her." (Sermons.)

All the discourses of Tauler end by a refrain. The chorus of his song is ever divine unity. Tauler is hardly a man; he is a voice speaking in the wilderness, calling men to descend into the depths of their souls. All his doctrine may be resumed in this word, to which we must give its etymological signification: Adieu, à Dieu. [Footnote 99]