Faith & Spirit Quote by Johannes Tauler

Tauler doesn’t offer self-help; he offers a spiritual strip search. The line turns inwardness into a battlefield, insisting that the distance between “you” and “God” isn’t closed by louder belief or better doctrine but by a ruthless inventory of what resists surrender. “Weaknesses and faults” here aren’t minor habits to optimize away. In Tauler’s mystic vocabulary, they’re the seams where ego still insists on being the main character.

The phrase “inward ground” does heavy lifting. For the Rhineland mystics, the “ground” isn’t a mood or a private diary voice; it’s the deepest stratum of the self, where the soul’s attachments and evasions are most expertly disguised. Tauler’s intent is diagnostic: if you want to “discern” what separates you from God, you must go past public piety and into the subterranean motives beneath it. That’s why “confront yourself” lands like a dare. The enemy isn’t atheism. It’s spiritual performance, self-deception, the comforting story that your problems are external.

Context matters: Tauler is a 14th-century Dominican writing in an era of plague, institutional anxiety, and intense devotional experimentation. His audience isn’t secular skeptics; it’s serious Christians hungry for a more immediate God than ritual alone can deliver. The subtext is bracingly anti-escapist: holiness is not ascent into purity but descent into truth. You don’t meet God by fleeing your mess; you meet God by letting your mess be seen, named, and finally relinquished.