Faith & Spirit Quote by Johannes Tauler

Tauler doesn’t dress this up as gentle spiritual self-care; he frames prayer as an all-or-nothing act of desertion. “Turn our backs” is a physical, almost defiant gesture, making interior devotion feel less like mood and more like stance. The sentence piles up exclusions - “everything temporal, everything external” - until the reader feels the squeeze. That pressure is the point: prayer, for Tauler, isn’t another activity layered onto a busy life, it’s the stripping away of the life that competes with God.

The intent is disciplinary. Tauler is writing out of the late medieval Rhineland mystic tradition, where the problem isn’t atheism but distraction: the soul clogged with status, comfort, and religious performance. “External” is a quietly barbed word here, because it doesn’t just indict worldly pleasures; it also targets a faith that stays on the surface - pious gestures, public virtue, devotions done for applause or self-soothing. True prayer, in this frame, is not speech aimed upward. It’s detachment: a reorientation so severe it can feel like loss.

The subtext is psychological as much as theological. Tauler understands that the self is addicted to the measurable - time, outcomes, recognition. He offers a remedy that sounds extreme because the disease is subtle. In an era rattled by plague, social instability, and churchly anxiety, the promise of a “not divine” world being finally refused isn’t escapism; it’s a bid for the only stable center available. Prayer becomes a kind of inner exile that claims, with austere confidence, that the real world starts where the external ends.