"Let God and all his creation teach you what your sins are"
About this Quote
Tauler’s line weaponizes the whole cosmos as a moral mirror. It’s not pious small talk; it’s a program of surveillance, with a twist: the watcher isn’t a priest or a rulebook but “God and all his creation.” In one stroke, the quote relocates moral knowledge from the confessional booth to the ordinary world. Your “sins” are not just the scandalous acts you can list; they’re the subtle distortions of desire and attention that become visible when everything around you is treated as instruction.
The intent is pastoral but exacting. Tauler, a 14th-century Dominican mystic shaped by the Rhine spirituality and the shockwaves of plague-era instability, distrusts purely external religiosity. So he pushes the reader toward an interiorized, experiential ethics: if you’re impatient, creation will show you what patience looks like; if you’re proud, the sheer givenness of the world will expose how little you command. Nature, neighbors, work, suffering, even your own limitations become pedagogy.
The subtext is a quiet critique of shortcuts to holiness. Don’t outsource discernment to mere doctrine, ecstatic visions, or spiritual status. Let the world press on you until the ego cracks and the truth leaks out. It’s also an invitation to humility: if “all his creation” can teach you, then every encounter carries moral information, and no one gets to pretend they’re above correction.
The rhetoric works because it collapses the distance between theology and life. Sin isn’t an abstract category; it’s what reality keeps revealing when you stop negotiating with it.
The intent is pastoral but exacting. Tauler, a 14th-century Dominican mystic shaped by the Rhine spirituality and the shockwaves of plague-era instability, distrusts purely external religiosity. So he pushes the reader toward an interiorized, experiential ethics: if you’re impatient, creation will show you what patience looks like; if you’re proud, the sheer givenness of the world will expose how little you command. Nature, neighbors, work, suffering, even your own limitations become pedagogy.
The subtext is a quiet critique of shortcuts to holiness. Don’t outsource discernment to mere doctrine, ecstatic visions, or spiritual status. Let the world press on you until the ego cracks and the truth leaks out. It’s also an invitation to humility: if “all his creation” can teach you, then every encounter carries moral information, and no one gets to pretend they’re above correction.
The rhetoric works because it collapses the distance between theology and life. Sin isn’t an abstract category; it’s what reality keeps revealing when you stop negotiating with it.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Johannes
Add to List
