Faith & Spirit Quote by Johannes Tauler

Tauler’s line doesn’t ask for belief so much as a tactical retreat. “Give yourself entirely to God” is totalizing language, but its real force comes in the second clause: “enter and hide in the hidden ground of your soul.” The destination isn’t a church, a doctrine, or even an emotion. It’s an interior terrain, sealed off from performance and public piety. Tauler is directing the reader away from religious life as spectacle and toward religion as concealment: a spirituality that happens where no one can clap for it.

The phrase “hidden ground” carries the medieval mystic’s favorite paradox: the deepest part of the self is both most intimate and least possessable. You can “enter” it, but you can’t manage it; you can “hide” there, but it’s not escapism. The subtext is a critique of the ego disguised as devotion. To “give yourself entirely” is to stop curating yourself entirely. God, in this framing, isn’t an external authority so much as the name for what breaks the self’s habit of self-importance.

Context matters. Tauler preached in the 14th-century Rhineland, a world of plague, institutional anxiety, and intense lay religious movements. Mysticism offered a kind of disciplined intimacy when the church could feel distant and the world unstable. His counsel also resonates with the apophatic tradition: God is found not by accumulating concepts but by descending beneath them. It’s spirituality as subtraction - a call to disappear, not from responsibility, but from the incessant project of being someone.