Johannes Tauler Quotes
Your meditations may be as profound, as exalted, as devout as you like; you may practise every pious exercise you can manage, but all this is as nothing in comparison with the Blessed Sacrament. What we do may be godly, but this sacrament is God Himself!
Tauler, Johannes. The Sermons and Conferences of John Tauler, of the Order of Preachers. Translated by Walter Elliott, Apostolic Mission House, 1910.
when he ingests the wafer at holy communion He was referring to the Roman Catholic communion where the bread wafer is believed to be the body of Christ. This really offended many Protestants who saw it as blasphemous and to many justified their intolerance. And yet, as Locke herein observed, there was really no injury that a Roman Catholic taking communion inflicted on a Protestant who had nothing to do with the Catholic service. Of course, the same logic did not then apply to the Roman Catholic intolerance of Jewish and Muslim religious customs in which they were not involved.
Johannes Tauler OP was a German mystic, a Roman Catholic priest and a theologian. A disciple of Meister Eckhart, he belonged to the Dominican order. Tauler was known as one of the most important Rhineland mystics. He promoted a certain neo-platonist dimension in the Dominican spirituality of his time.
