Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (10 page)

Members of these other religious communities were sometimes forced to meet in darkness, but the Anabaptists faced a much broader exile into the night. For the persecuted Anabaptist communities of the sixteenth century, the confrontation with darkness and the night was literal. From the 1530s on, Anabaptist and Mennonite communities began to meet regularly at night, seeking in the darkness the freedom to assemble and preach denied to them during the day. They found toleration only in Moravia in the mid sixteenth century, and in the Dutch Republic from the late sixteenth century.

In the sixteenth century and for scholars today “Anabaptist” refers to Protestant radicals marked by their insistence on believer’s baptism, their denial of infant baptism, their pacifism, and their understanding of their sect as the separate, “true” church.
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From their origins in the Zurich Reformation, four Anabaptist groups
emerged by the middle of the sixteenth century: the Swiss Brethren (direct successors of the first Anabaptists of Zurich), South German groups, the Hutterian or Moravian communities, and the Mennonites of northern Germany and the Low Countries. These groups sought to live a biblicist theology as a tiny minority suffering sporadic but violent persecution. The Hutterian or Moravian communities found refuge at the far eastern edge of the Holy Roman Empire in territories still controlled by the local nobility. They enjoyed a golden age in the second half of the sixteenth century before the Habsburg imposition of the Catholic Reformation forced them eastward into Hungary and Russia.
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The earliest reports of Anabaptist worship mention early morning services and meetings, but by the 1530s these had become too dangerous in most regions.
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Sources from Flanders, the Rhineland, Alsace, Switzerland, Württemberg, Hesse, and Tirol document dozens of nocturnal gatherings of Anabaptists and Mennonites, including those planned around visits by Moravian/Hutterian missionaries.
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The Strasbourg city archives, for example, describe specific gatherings at night outside the city in 1545, 1557, and 1576 and refer to at least thirty-four other nocturnal meetings in the Strasbourg area in the period before 1601.
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The accounts came from town officials, pastors, and the simply curious who found their way into nocturnal gatherings of Anabaptists.
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Reports of hundreds of participants are not uncommon. For example, the Lutheran pastor Elias Schad reported to the Strasbourg city council about a gathering he had infiltrated in 1576. Judging from the accents he heard, Schad thought those assembled came from across the Empire – from “Switzerland, Breisgau, Westerich [?], Württemberg, Upper and Lower Alsace, perhaps even from Moravia.”
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The intrepid Lutheran pastor described a system of passwords and sentries used to protect the gathering, evidence of practical experience built up over decades of meeting at night.
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After Schad revealed himself to the group and initiated a lengthy theological debate over baptism and the nature of the church, he was escorted out by the Anabaptists, without whose help, he notes, he would never have found his way out of the forest at night.

Living in a state of confessional siege, the Anabaptists and Mennonites gained a new appreciation of the night in both practical and spiritual terms. A 1538 apology for Anabaptism in Hesse written by Georg Schnabel explains that their “secret gatherings in the woods, in the wilderness, or in houses” followed biblical precedents, citing among other passages “Acts 20 [verse 9], where Paul preached in the night.”
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Evidence of the re-evaluation of the night appears in one of the earliest accounts of a nocturnal gathering. As Anabaptists met outside Strasbourg on the night of July 24–25, 1545, two youths, the Lutheran pastor’s son Jeremias Steinle and his friend Murwolf, snuck into the gathering “for fun” (“aus fürwitz”) and described it to the city council shortly afterward. The young men reported hearing a sermon on the liberation of the children of Israel from their bondage in Egypt, and another sermon on Revelation 11.
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The Anabaptist preaching, which lasted from about 10 p.m. until 1 a.m., contrasted the false “church of stone” established by the authorities with the true church of the spirit.
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The assembled were told to shun their parish church and meet with their fellow believers whenever they could. The leaders of the service then explained that “one cannot find God
except in the wilderness and in the darkness
.”
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For those who gathered regularly in the night, the point was clear.
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By the middle of the sixteenth century, Anabaptists and their persecutors alike associated the movement with secret meetings at night.
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The imperial warrant issued for the arrest of Menno Simons in December 1542 accused him of “deceiving the simple people with his false teaching during secret, nocturnal meetings.”
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Simons himself took up this accusation in his “A Humble and Christian Apology and Reply concerning the Bitter, Vicious Lies and False Accusations” of 1552. “In the seventh place,” he explained, “they slander us and say that we are vagabonds, sneak-thieves, seducers … an ungodly sect and conspiracy.” Simons used the charge to address the association of Anabaptist and Mennonite communities with the night:

As to the ugly and vicious slander of being s
neak-thieves
: sneak-thieves are thieves and murderers who secretly enter houses for the purpose of taking the property or lives of others, also adulterers and seducers who are intent upon defiling the houses of their neighbors. Such wait for the darkness, says Job, and say “No eye shall see me.” In the dark they break into houses.
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“But we are not of that kind,” Simons explained. Because in these troubled times “one cannot publicly let out a peep about the word of the Lord,” the faithful must gather in secret at night. Simons justifies this with biblical authorities:

Moreover we learn from the Scriptures that Moses and all Israel ate the Passover at night [Ex. 12]; that Jesus admonished Nicodemus at night [John 3:2]; that the church assembled at night to pray [Acts 12:12]; that Paul taught the Word of the Lord all night [Acts 20]; and that the first church assembled at night to break the bread of the Lord, as the historians report.

His experience with the night led him to argue that “therefore, we confess that we must practice and promote the Word of the Lord at night as well as in the daytime, to the praise of the Lord.” Acknowledging Anabaptist/Mennonite practice, he continued “And so we assemble … in the fear of God, without hindrance or harm to any man, the Lord knows, at night as well as in the daytime, in a Christian manner, to teach the Word of the Lord and to admonish and reprove in all godliness; also to pray and administer the sacraments as the word of the Lord teaches us.”
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Simons’s collection of authoritative biblical accounts of gathering, teaching, and worship at night is especially significant when contrasted with the uncompromising “darkness-vs.-light” imagery of earlier Anabaptist writings.
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In the second half of the sixteenth century, we see further evidence of a much more nuanced Anabaptist view of the night and its darkness.

A Hessian account of 1578 provides an especially clear example of Anabaptist identification with Nicodemus and the night. The Lutheran pastor Tilemann Nolte (a former priest from Fulda) accepted an invitation from a peasant named Hen Klint to go and hear the Anabaptists preach.
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Nolte attended a gathering of about 300 people on the night of May 19, 1578 (Pentecost Monday) in a forest near the village of Schwarz. Two leaders of the group approached him and asked for his help in avoiding the authorities. They explained to Nolte that

they were poor people and they, like Nicodemus, had sought the Lord at night. Although they would well like to teach and preach openly, the authorities would not permit it.
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This reference to Nicodemus is especially significant. Through their deep biblicism, these Anabaptists found a scriptural reference point
for lives spent “underground” avoiding persecution. Menno Simons cited John 3:1–3 in his defense of clandestine worship at night, and these Anabaptists chose to identify with Nicodemus because they “had sought the Lord at night.”

The authorities did not intervene at the Hessian meeting described above, but a similar gathering in a forest outside Zurich on September 5, 1574 was encircled and broken up by the Zurich city guard: the two missionaries from Moravia who led the service were arrested. A Zurich report of the incident included a hand-colored drawing of the Moravians preaching by candlelight at a table in the forest (
Figure 3
.3).
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The image of reading or preaching by candlelight in the forest recurs in other accounts.

Figure 3.3
Contemporary chronicle illustration of Moravian missionaries preaching by candlelight in the forest outside Zurich, 1574. Zentralbibliothek Zurich, ms F 23, s 393v/394r.

The Hutterites of Moravia lived in relative safety and worshipped only during the day. But the Moravian Anabaptist communities sent out hundreds of missionaries in the sixteenth century, and these men moved by night, met and preached by night, and risked imprisonment, torture, and death. The authors of the
Hutterite Chronicle
described them as “hunted and driven from place to place and from land to land. They had to be like owls and night ravens, not daring to appear by day, hiding … in the wild woods.”
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Setting out from their havens, the Hutterite settlements in Moravia, these missionaries anticipated a nocturnal life. When the missionaries Hans Arbeiter and Heinrich Schister were captured at Hainbach in the bishopric of Speyer in 1568, Arbeiter sent an account of their captivity and interrogation to his brethren in Moravia. He noted that “when we got to Kirrweiler Castle … I, with many threats and insults, was shut into a dark dungeon deprived of all daylight, an experience familiar to many believers.”
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Describing the captivity and martyrdom of Hans Mändel in Tirol in 1560–61, the Hutterian chronicle related that while he was imprisoned in the Vellenburg, “the spirits whom God sends to terrify the ungodly at night were now sent to serve and help him,” explaining that “the Lord forewarned him through such a spirit when the noblemen were coming to question him. It called him by name and told him to prepare himself and to be ready to suffer.”
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We have seen in the previous chapter the ubiquitous fear of “the spirits
whom God sends to terrify the ungodly at night”; here the Moravian
Chronicle
records triumph over these nocturnal spirits and a sense that, with God’s grace, the night and its spirits instead serve the persecuted Brethren.

The earliest writings of the Anabaptist communities, such as the Schleitheim Confession of 1527, resound with the light–darkness opposition typical of Reformation polemics: “For truly all creatures are in but two classes, good and bad … darkness and light.” These early texts encouraged Anabaptists to stand firm, “so we shall not walk in darkness.”
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The transformation of the associations of darkness and the night among Anabaptists in the second half of the sixteenth century anticipates and reflects a broader appreciation of darkness across Western Europe by the start of the seventeenth century.
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Persecution forced small groups within each confession to worship at night; for Anabaptists outside of the Dutch Republic and Moravia, this experience transformed their appreciation of darkness and the night.

As Anabaptist communities from Flanders to the Austrian Alps gathered together at night, Juan de Yepes y Alvarez lay in a dark prison cell in Toledo. His daring escape, illuminated by a full moon during the night of August 15–16, 1578 symbolized a new kind of night, a night that liberated the soul to seek the Divine.
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Following his escape John of the Cross (1542–91), as he has been known since he became a reformed Carmelite friar 1568, produced the deepest and most complex engagement with the “dark night of contemplation” in the early modern centuries.
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His writings on darkness and the night “transformed the night into the central principle of mystic theology,” crystallizing the nocturnalization of faith and piety under discussion here.
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The works of John of the Cross epitomize the use of the night to approach and understand the Divine in the seventeenth century.