"Judge yourself; if you do that you will not be judged by God, as St. Paul says. But it must be a real sense of your own sinfulness, not an artificial humility"
About this Quote
Tauler is weaponizing introspection as a kind of spiritual preemption: indict yourself before the universe does. The line borrows St. Paul not as decorative authority but as a legal logic of salvation: self-judgment interrupts the courtroom drama of divine judgment. In a medieval Christian world saturated with external measures of holiness - penances, reputations, public piety - he drags the action inward, where the verdict can no longer be performed for an audience.
The knife twist is his allergy to "artificial humility". Tauler knows how quickly self-critique can become another status symbol: the polished confession that earns admiration, the carefully staged unworthiness that quietly demands reassurance. He is not asking for self-loathing; he is demanding accuracy. "Real sense of your own sinfulness" means a diagnosis that costs you something: the loss of excuses, the collapse of the flattering narrative, the surrender of control over how you are perceived.
Context matters. Tauler is a 14th-century Dominican mystic shaped by a Christianity anxious about hypocrisy and hungry for interior transformation, not just correct doctrine. His target is the spiritual actor who uses humility the way a courtier uses etiquette. The subtext is bracingly modern: if you don't tell the truth about yourself, you'll tell a lie with religious vocabulary - and call it virtue. His insight lands because it treats humility not as a mood but as a discipline of seeing, where the point isn't to look smaller, but to stop editing the self.
The knife twist is his allergy to "artificial humility". Tauler knows how quickly self-critique can become another status symbol: the polished confession that earns admiration, the carefully staged unworthiness that quietly demands reassurance. He is not asking for self-loathing; he is demanding accuracy. "Real sense of your own sinfulness" means a diagnosis that costs you something: the loss of excuses, the collapse of the flattering narrative, the surrender of control over how you are perceived.
Context matters. Tauler is a 14th-century Dominican mystic shaped by a Christianity anxious about hypocrisy and hungry for interior transformation, not just correct doctrine. His target is the spiritual actor who uses humility the way a courtier uses etiquette. The subtext is bracingly modern: if you don't tell the truth about yourself, you'll tell a lie with religious vocabulary - and call it virtue. His insight lands because it treats humility not as a mood but as a discipline of seeing, where the point isn't to look smaller, but to stop editing the self.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
|---|
More Quotes by Johannes
Add to List
