Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (13 page)

In the years between his silencing in 1613 and the resumption of his writing in 1619 Böhme reflected deeply on confessional strife and war. He returned to writing with a manuscript titled
The Three Principles
(
Beschreibung der Drey Principien Göttliches Wesens
); like all his writings after 1612, it is entirely critical of the established churches and their clergy. In the theosopher’s view, the world was “under the sway of a fratricidal Church of Cain.”
⁸³
Böhme now saw the revelations he received as specific to the confessional age in which he lived. All around he saw that “contention and strife in faith is arisen, that men talk much of faith, one pulling this way, another that way, making a multitude of opinions, which are altogether worse than the heathen views.”
⁸⁴
Confessional conflict, doctrinal rigidity, and religious persecution had emptied Christendom of true understanding of God and nature: “today titulary Christendom is full of such magi who have no natural understanding of God or nature, but only empty babbling.” By reneging on his agreement to cease writing on matters of theology and faith, Böhme drew censure from the Lutheran clergy of his city. His ongoing conflict with the Lutheran churchmen of Görlitz echoes in his conclusion that through such clergy “the world is thus made stone-blind.”
⁸⁵

The revelations vouchsafed to Böhme and the theosophical program he expounded were intended to illuminate a world blinded by ecclesiastical authorities and confessional strife. He placed his age in contrast with early Christianity in relation to “natural magia,” i.e. the direct and allegorical understanding of the natural world: “as it was highly necessary and good that the natural magia was discontinued amongst the Christians, where the faith of Christ was manifest: so now at present it is much more necessary that the natural magia be again revealed.” For Böhme “natural magia” meant a turn to the observed phenomena of the natural world, including (as described above) a new appreciation of the complementarity of darkness and light. He echoed other programs of spiritual and natural renewal circulating at this time, such as the Rosicrucian and utopian writings of Johann Valentin Andreä. The return to “natural magia” would have immense consequences:

the self-fashioned idols of titulary Christendom will be revealed and made known through nature, so that man might recognize in nature the articulated and formed Word of God, as well as the new rebirth, and the fall and perdition.
⁸⁶

Alchemy, physical and spiritual, might serve as midwife to this rebirth, which would embrace darkness as complementary to light, and night alongside day. As Böhme exhorted in his
Signatura Rerum
of 1622, here in the English translation of 1651: “Now wilt thou be a
Magus
? then thou must understand how to change the Night again into the Day,” emphasizing that “the Day and Night lie in each other as one Essence.”
⁸⁷
Böhme saw his own age as ready to accept a new relationship between light and darkness, day and night. He would be a prophet of this nocturnalization.

The stories of the Anabaptists, John of the Cross, and Jacob Böhme alert us to a broader set of experiences across Europe in the confessional era. In each of these cases confessional conflict and ongoing persecution – from within one’s own confession or across confessional lines – led to a new relationship with the night in daily life and in spiritual expression. The encounters with darkness and the night examined here show an increasing integration of the night into spiritual life
and thought. The Anabaptists sought scriptural validation of their nocturnal position outside the established churches of the princes. In the midst of the brutal struggle to reform the Carmelite order, John of the Cross developed a profound theology of the night by nocturnalizing the three stages of the classic mystic sequence of purgation, illumination, and union. For Jacob Böhme, the balance between light and darkness became the basis of the cosmos: his abstract understanding of the meaning and reality of darkness and the night seeks its equal in the early modern era. Referring directly to the confessional strife around him, Böhme also presented a theory of history in which his era would see a return to “natural magia” in order to truly understand God’s creation, light and dark. Böhme’s writings (1612; 1619–24) take us into a period of intense occupation with the night as a path to God in Western Christendom. To chart this phenomenon in the next section, we will draw on the examples of John of the Cross and Jacob Böhme to focus on the search for God in the night in ascetic, apophatic, mystic, and epistemological terms.

“Dark texts need notes,” John Donne observed in a verse epistle to his patroness Lucy, countess of Bedford, in 1608. As creator of the English noun “nocturnal” to refer to a poem about the night, Donne joined unlettered Anabaptists, doctors of mystical theology, poets, and alchemical philosophers in using the night to think about God in new ways and with new intensity.
⁸⁸
Each of the conceptual/metaphorical uses of the night – ascetic, apophatic, mystic, and epistemological – epitomized in the works of John of the Cross and Jacob Böhme found new or renewed expression across European culture in first half of the seventeenth century. This “discovery of the night” went far beyond the reception of the vocabulary of its most focused exponent, John of the Cross, forming a broad but distinct cultural and “spiritual undercurrent” in the period 1550–1650.
⁸⁹

Many chose poetry as the genre in which to express this new relationship with the night; John of the Cross was the forerunner in form as well as content. As Michel de Certeau observed regarding the
discourse of mysticism in the period from Teresa of Avila to Angelus Silesius: “For a while, this science was sustained only by the poem (or its equivalents: the dream, the rapture, etc.). The poem was the substitute for its scientific object.”
⁹⁰
Much of the “discovery of the night” explicitly evoked “mystic darkness,” and these “dark texts” reveal Europeans using the night to think about God in an unprecedented variety of ways. By 1640, when the Jesuit theologian Maximilian Sandaeus published an alphabetical guide to the key terms of mystic theology, the night was firmly established in the vocabulary of mysticism.
⁹¹
Under the entry for “Nox” Sandaeus presents each of the senses of the night elucidated by John of the Cross, beginning with a reference to the significance of the term: “Night. Numerous metaphors of the night can be found among the mystics; they are used most frequently by John of the Cross, distinguished mystic of our time, from whom are the books on the ascent of Mount Carmel.” Sandaeus’s guide also has entries for “dusk,” “midnight,” and “lantern,” but no entry for “day.”
⁹²

The new role of the night in devotion and theology was celebrated in verse by Richard Crashaw in the “Hymn in the Glorious Epiphanie” of his
Steps to the Temple
(1648). This English Catholic, writing in exile in Paris, brought English metaphysical poetry together with early modern Catholic mysticism.
⁹³
He proclaimed “a most wise and well-abused Night” which he identified as the via negativa of John of the Cross, “the frugal negative Light.” This “more close way” to the Divine is taught by the newborn “Child of light,” whom Crashaw thanks for a night that allows us “To read more legible thine original Ray, / And make our darkness serve thy day.” The poem is spoken by the three magi:

(1.) Thus shall that reverend Child of light,

(2.) By being Scholar first of that new night,

Come forth Great Master of the mistick day;

(3.) And teach obscure Mankind a more close way

By the frugal negative Light

Of a most wise and well-abused Night,

To read more legible thine original Ray,

(Chorus) And make our darkness serve thy day;

Maintaining ’twixt thy World and ours

A commerce of contrary pow’rs,

A mutual Trade

’Twixt Sun and Shade,

By confederate Black and White

Borrowing Day and lending Night.

In this section we will follow the undercurrent of “that new night” identified by Sandaeus and Crashaw across Europe, with a focus on its breadth in the first half of the seventeenth century, the critical period in this discovery of the night as path to the Divine.

The “night to all the desires and senses” had a venerable place in the Christian tradition. An ascetic life of nocturnal prayer remains a fundamental aspect of Benedictine and other monastic observance. Waking in darkness for the office of nocturns held practical and eschatological significance but was foremost a physical act of self-denial.
⁹⁴
This ascetic darkness is deployed by Ignatius of Loyola in the
Spiritual Exercises
(1548): in the first week of the
Exercises
, the author proposes “to deprive myself of all light … shutting the doors and windows while I stay, except when I am to read or eat.”
⁹⁵
In contrast with earlier observance, however, Loyola imagines the
solitary
use of ascetic darkness, marking the key common feature of early modern nocturnal paths to the Divine. From Loyola it is a short step to the ascetic night, in which darkness serves as a metaphor for self-denial. Teresa of Avila’s
Interior Castle
(1577–80) presents its first three sections or “mansions” as a descent into darkness (“the light which comes from the palace occupied by the King hardly reaches these first mansions at all”), signifying the sin the soul must overcome. At the end of the description of the second mansion Teresa reviews the ascetic value of the confrontation with darkness in a famous passage: “It is absurd to think that we can enter Heaven without first entering our own souls – without getting to know ourselves, and reflecting upon the wretchedness of our nature.”
⁹⁶
In darkness, self-denial leads to self-knowledge. This insight can carry a penitential tone, as in the poetry of Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell
(
c
. 1561–95), whose “The Prodigal Chylde’s Soule Wracke” (
c
. 1595) proclaimed:

I, plungèd in this heavye plyght,

Founde in my faltes just Cause of feare;

By darkness taught to knowe my light,

The loss thereof enforcèd teares.

The ascetic night echoes across the sacred writings of John Donne. In his “Hymn to Christ, at the Author’s last going into Germany” (1619) Donne takes his approaching travel as the moment to rededicate himself to God, shunning the distractions of daylight in favor of the darkness and night, which allow a clearer vision of the Divine.
⁹⁷

Seal then this bill of my divorce to all,

On whom those fainter beams of love did fall;

Marry those loves, which in youth scatter’d be

On fame, wit, hopes – false mistresses – to Thee.

Churches are best for prayer, that have least light;

To see God only, I go out of sight:

And to ’scape stormy days, I choose

An everlasting night.

This night is intensely introspective, but Donne also considered the power of the ascetic night from his perspective as a preacher. In a 1629 sermon given “In the Evening” Donne addressed “atheists” and asked his listeners to look ahead to midnight:

I respite thee but a few hours, but six hours, but till midnight. Wake then; and then dark and alone, Hear God ask thee then, remember that I asked thee now, Is there a God? and if thou darest, say No.
⁹⁸

Stripped of the distractions of the daylight, alone at midnight, the “atheist” or libertine would recognize the God he scorned during the day. Donne’s reference to the tolling of a “passing bell” in another sermon also evokes the shock of midnight: “A man wakes at midnight full of unclean thoughts, and hears a passing bell; this is an occasional mercy.”
⁹⁹
The popular English emblem book of the poet Francis Quarles (
1635
; many editions through the nineteenth century) took a gentler approach to the same kind of night:

My soule, cheare up: What if night be long?

Heav’n finds an eare, when sinners find a tongue:

Thy teares are Morning show’rs: Heaven bids me say,

When Peter’s Cock begins to crow, ’tis Day.
¹⁰⁰

The Lutheran pastor, poet, and hymnist Paul Gerhardt (1607–76) looked toward an ascetic night in his “Evensong” (“Abendlied,” 1667):

Rest now all forests,

Beasts, men, cities and fields,

The whole world sleeps

But you, my thoughts,

Up, up you must begin

What pleases your creator most.
¹⁰¹

In each stanza Gerhard presents a different theme of nocturnal meditation including Jesus as “another sun” and the stars, the body, and the bed as
memento mori
.
¹⁰²

There is no better way to visualize this ascetic night than in the devotional candlelight scenes of Georges de La Tour, especially the
Repentance of Mary Magdalene
– a popular theme, judging from the many versions and copies painted from the 1630s on.
¹⁰³
La Tour’s penitent Magdalene (
Figure 3.5
) captures the solitary nature of the ascetic night: there is no space or place in the scene into which another figure could intrude, and no light enters from outside the scene.
¹⁰⁴
The devotional context of the night scenes produced by artists active in the duchy of Lorraine such as Jacques Bellange, Jean Le Clerc, Jacques Callot, and Georges de La Tour has been examined closely by Paulette Choné.
¹⁰⁵
Arguing for a more careful approach to connections between painting and literature, she has identified the works of John of the Cross (which circulated in manuscript among the Discalced Carmelites of the region before their publication in 1618) and the Franciscans André de L’Auge (who preached at the ducal court of Lorraine) and Juan de Los Angeles as specific channels that brought the verbal imagery of the sacred night, ascetic and apophatic, into the visual arts of the Lorraine region.