Education Quote by Johannes Tauler

A line like this is a theological gut-punch disguised as piety: if God rewards only His own works, then the spiritual scorecard most people secretly keep is worthless. Tauler, a 14th-century Dominican mystic preaching in the volatile air of late medieval Europe, aims straight at the era's anxious economy of merit: pilgrimages, alms, fasting, vows, the tacit belief that holiness can be tallied. His sentence doesn’t politely critique that system; it detonates it.

The intent is pastoral and surgical. Tauler isn’t telling listeners to stop doing good, but to stop treating goodness as a personal asset. The subtext is an attack on spiritual self-ownership. If any act is genuinely good, it’s because God is already acting in and through the person. Reward, then, isn’t wages for effort; it’s the divine recognition of divine life. Human pride is the real target: the subtle urge to present God with a resume.

This also functions as a safeguard against religious performance. Tauler’s mystical tradition (shaped by Meister Eckhart’s orbit and the Devotio Moderna mood) pushes inward: surrender, detachment, the emptying of the will. The quote’s brilliance is its paradoxical humility. It grants God total agency while still demanding a radical human response: consent. You’re not earning heaven by your works; you’re trying to become the kind of person through whom God can work without obstruction. That’s less comforting than transactional religion, and more freeing.