Faith & Spirit Quote by Johannes Tauler

Tauler’s line is a piece of spiritual dynamite wrapped in calm, technical phrasing. He isn’t offering comfort from afar; he’s collapsing distance. God is not a visitor who drops by when the soul behaves, but a presence “essentially, actively, and substantially” rooted in the self’s deepest interior. The accumulation of adverbs matters: it’s meant to shut down the usual evasions (God as metaphor, God as mood, God as occasional help) and insist on something closer to ontological fact.

The specific intent is pastoral and corrective. Tauler, a 14th-century Dominican shaped by the Rhineland mystics, is speaking into a religious culture thick with external observance, clerical mediation, and anxiety about worthiness. His move is to relocate the decisive theater of faith from public performance to interior ground. That “hidden and innermost” space isn’t escapism; it’s a rebuke to a spirituality that confuses God with institutional proximity.

The subtext is even bolder: the soul “possesses everything by grace which God possesses by nature.” That’s not equality with God, but it flirts with the edge of it, then safeguards the claim with two crucial terms. “By grace” keeps the gift unearned and derivative; “by nature” preserves God’s unborrowed fullness. Tauler is threading a needle between ecstatic union and doctrinal guardrails.

It works rhetorically because it makes transcendence feel immediate without making it cheap. The promise is radical intimacy; the demand is just as radical: if God is already present at the core, then spiritual life becomes less about acquiring God and more about consenting to what’s already there.