"Never believe that true prayer consists in mere babbling, reciting so many psalms and vigils, saying your beads while you allow your thoughts to roam"
About this Quote
Tauler is taking a blade to religion-as-performance, and he does it with the impatience of someone who has watched piety turn into a nervous tic. “Mere babbling” is not just a critique of bad technique; it’s a moral diagnosis. The problem isn’t that psalms, vigils, and beads are worthless. It’s that they can become a spiritual loophole: a way to feel devout without the inconvenience of attention.
The line works because it targets the most seductive form of self-deception: external precision as a substitute for inner consent. The subtext is almost psychological in its clarity. If your thoughts “roam,” prayer becomes background noise, a religious podcast you play to reassure yourself you’re still the kind of person who prays. Tauler is warning against a split self: lips doing one thing, mind doing another. That split is where hypocrisy grows, not always loudly, often politely.
Context matters. Tauler, a 14th-century Dominican tied to the Rhineland mystics, lived in a world thick with liturgical practice and public displays of penitence, also rocked by crisis (plague, social upheaval, church tensions). In that atmosphere, repetition could harden into a coping mechanism: more counting, more saying, less confronting. His insistence on inwardness isn’t anti-Church; it’s reformist pressure from the inside, pushing believers toward a prayer that actually changes the person praying.
It’s also quietly democratic. You don’t need eloquence or quantity. You need presence. Tauler’s real target is not ritual, but spiritual multitasking.
The line works because it targets the most seductive form of self-deception: external precision as a substitute for inner consent. The subtext is almost psychological in its clarity. If your thoughts “roam,” prayer becomes background noise, a religious podcast you play to reassure yourself you’re still the kind of person who prays. Tauler is warning against a split self: lips doing one thing, mind doing another. That split is where hypocrisy grows, not always loudly, often politely.
Context matters. Tauler, a 14th-century Dominican tied to the Rhineland mystics, lived in a world thick with liturgical practice and public displays of penitence, also rocked by crisis (plague, social upheaval, church tensions). In that atmosphere, repetition could harden into a coping mechanism: more counting, more saying, less confronting. His insistence on inwardness isn’t anti-Church; it’s reformist pressure from the inside, pushing believers toward a prayer that actually changes the person praying.
It’s also quietly democratic. You don’t need eloquence or quantity. You need presence. Tauler’s real target is not ritual, but spiritual multitasking.
Quote Details
| Topic | Prayer |
|---|
More Quotes by Johannes
Add to List
