Love Quote by Johannes Tauler

Tauler’s God doesn’t just tolerate human flourishing; He permits it, like a monarch granting a license to become fully alive. That verb does heavy theological work. In the Rhine mystic world Tauler inhabited - 14th-century Germany, bruised by plague, political fracture, and ecclesial scandal - the promise of “green and bloom” is a counter-image to a culture steeped in decay and anxiety. The spiritual life is framed less as moral bookkeeping and more as organic growth: something slow, seasonal, and uncontrollable once the conditions are right.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to spiritual self-assertion. Tauler’s “spirit” is not the modern self polishing its brand; it’s the interior life surrendered to grace. God “permits” the blooming, which implies the creature cannot manufacture it. Even the most “marvelous fruit” is not a trophy but an overflow - virtue, compassion, and insight as consequences of a deeper rooting, not as goals you can hustle toward.

The line’s rhetorical engine is its deliberate collapse of language. “Surpassing anything a tongue can express and a heart conceive” takes the reader to the edge of speech, a classic move in apophatic theology: naming the point where religious experience outstrips description. It’s persuasive because it flatters neither intellect nor emotion; it relativizes both. Tauler isn’t offering a neat takeaway. He’s trying to induce a posture: expectancy without control, awe without spectacle, a spirituality that measures its truth by fruit rather than by fluency.