Faith & Spirit Quote by Johannes Tauler

Tauler’s line treats failure less like a moral scandal and more like weather: frequent, expected, and survivable. The shock is in the math. “Seventy times a day” is not a realistic tally; it’s spiritual hyperbole meant to break the fantasy that holiness is a clean upward climb. By exaggerating the frequency of collapse, Tauler normalizes the messiness of conversion and makes perseverance the real metric of devotion.

The command to “rise” isn’t self-help grit dressed up in piety. In Tauler’s mystical-theological world (shaped by late medieval pastoral anxiety, scrupulosity, and the interior turn of Rhineland spirituality), the danger isn’t simply sin; it’s the secondary spiral of shame, self-obsession, and despair that keeps a person turned inward. “Return to God” functions as a reorientation of attention: away from the ego’s scoreboard and back to the relationship that sustains repentance.

The kicker is the final clause: “so that you will not fall too often.” It sounds almost pragmatic, even behavioral, as if closeness to God reduces relapse the way good habits reduce bad ones. Subtext: grace isn’t only forgiveness after the fact; it’s preventative medicine. The more quickly you return, the less time your failure gets to metastasize into a pattern. Tauler is quietly arguing that the spiritual life is iterative: fall, turn, repeat - not because sin is trivial, but because God is not a fragile presence that disappears the moment you break.