Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (5 page)

Early modern Europeans thought about the night directly and indirectly under a vast range of topics. More importantly for our discussion, early modern Europeans thought
with
the night, using its lived experience and traditional associations to articulate an extraordinary range of values and concepts. Paradoxically, their deepest engagement with the night and its darkness came in their discourses on witchcraft and the Devil, and in their understanding of “the dark night of the soul” as a path to God. Some of the most intense, transcendent, and threatening expressions of the diabolical and the Divine were understood
in
and
through
the night in this turbulent age.
¹

The early modern authors discussed here inherited an ambiguous image of the night – sharply negative except within the rarified world of mystic expression. In this chapter I examine the associations of the night with evil across European Christian culture from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, focusing on the night as a site of diabolical temptation. In the following chapter, I turn to those who took up and developed the “divine darkness” of Denys the Areopagite by seeing the night, literal and figurative, as a pathway to the Divine. In darkness, whether divine or diabolical, the night create, evoke, and represent human isolation in solitary, individual encounters with God and with the Devil.

The image of the “Wittenberg Nightingale” crafted by the Nuremberg cobbler-poet Hans Sachs (1494–1576) in 1523 was a resounding success: the pamphlet went through six printings in that year alone. The
first section of the poem describes the desolate state of Christendom through an extended allegory. As a lost flock of sheep, God’s people are in the wrong place (misled from the pasture into a dark wilderness) at the wrong time (in the dark of night). The song of the nightingale can set things right by heralding the light of day:

All through the long night

we are all finally awakened

as the nightingale so clearly sings

and the light of day breaks in.
²

Sachs immediately identifies the subject of his poem:

Who is this dear nightingale

who calls us to the light of day?

It is Doctor Martin Luther

Augustinian of Wittenberg

Who wakes us from the night.
³

At the end of the allegory Sachs clarifies in the margin “What the night is” (“Was die nacht sey”). For Sachs the church of Rome

Never made clear to us the faith

Which in Christ makes us holy

This failure is signified by the night

In which we all have been lost.
⁴

The dawn heralded by Martin Luther dispels the night of error and confusion.

Three years earlier, the papal bull
Exsurge Domine
(“Arise, O Lord”) had condemned Luther by using the same contrast between darkness and daylight, proclaiming him “blinded in mind by the father of lies.” The bull explained that had Luther come to Rome personally to make his case, “we would have shown him clearer than the light of day” that the moral lapses and doctrinal errors he alleged did not exist.
⁵
In the reform conflicts of the 1520s all sides used this straightforward imagery of daylight and darkness as good and evil in their writing and preaching. Zwingli refers often to “clarity and light” in his
On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God
(
Von Klarheit und Gewißheit des Wortes Gottes
, 1522), and Luther’s
response to Erasmus in
The Bondage of the Will
(
De servo arbitrio
, 1525) abounds in references to the light and clarity of Scripture. He asked: “for who would say that the public fountain is not in the light, because those who are in some dark narrow lane do not see it, when all those who are in the open market place can see it plainly?”
⁶
For Luther darkness is the result of human failure to believe what is clearly revealed.

The first decades of the Reformation echo with this language. In his first controversial work, the 1529
Dyaloge … touching the pestylent sect of Luther and Tyndale
(in modern editions
The Dialogue concerning Tyndale
) Thomas More attested to the derisive association of the night with spiritual blindness by the “heretics” of the 1520s: I … marvel at the madness of these heretics that bark against the old ancient customs of Christ’s church, mocking the setting up of candles and with foolish facetiousness and blasphemous mockery demand whether God and his saints lack light or whether it be night with them that they cannot see without candle.
⁷
“Whether it be night with them?” One can easily imagine the “heretical” response. As Hans Sachs explained, through the false practices arising from the cult of the saints, all Christendom stands benighted, “the holy word of God … obscured by human teaching.”
⁸

Later in this same dialogue More identified the night with the heretics themselves, who gather under cover of darkness. More described a carpenter of Essex whom he had personally interrogated sometime around 1521. The man “had long held diverse heresies” and confessed to frequenting “a place which he named us in London, where, he said, that such heretics were wont to resort to their readings in a chamber at midnight.” The carpenter named “diverse” others who “were wont to haunt those midnight lectures,” among them Richard Hunne (d. 1514) a well-known London merchant suspected of Lollardy who had died in prison while awaiting trial. In his account More underscored the heretical associations of the night: “thus there learned we … that Hunne had haunted heretics’ lectures by night long before.”
⁹
Leaving aside the veracity of More’s tale of regular nocturnal gatherings, which resemble accounts of the witches’ sabbath (see below,
section 2.3
) and descriptions of
persecuted congregations gathering at night (see
chapter 3
), his use of the night as a sign of evil in Reformation polemic is clear.

In 1523, Erasmus wrote a short commentary on a hymn to the birth of Jesus by the fourth-century poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, evoking a similar sense of spiritual darkness. The hymn itself refers briefly to the winter solstice; Erasmus introduces his commentary with an extended discussion of a “world [that] lay beneath the darkness of ignorance and the shadow of sins.” He refers to the era of the Nativity, describing the error, idolatry, and depravity of the pagan world. But Erasmus himself was living in dark times: accused of responsibility for the unrest in the church, challenged for his work on the New Testament, and under suspicion of heresy.
¹⁰
When he described “our darkness” in the era preceding Jesus’ birth and exclaimed that “This was surely the depths of the night!” was his own age far from his thoughts? “Ignorance of the truth is night,” he adds, letting this exposition of night and spiritual darkness “suffice as a kind of preface, even if it is not entirely relevant.”
¹¹

The radicals of the early Reformation also drew on the identification of the night with evil. Given the insistence on separation from the world in Anabaptism, it is no surprise that some of the most intense uses of the darkness–light metaphor issued from the first writings of that tradition. The earliest creed of the Anabaptist movement, the Swiss-German Schleitheim Confession of 1527, proclaimed that “all those who have fellowship with the dead works of darkness have no part in the light.” In the discussion of separation, the Confession explained that “there is nothing else in the world and in all creation than good and evil, believing and unbelieving, darkness and light, the world and those who are [come] out of the world, God’s temple and idols, Christ and Belial, and none will have part with the other.”
¹²
The Anabaptist congregation of Kempen (lower Rhine) described the “worldly preachers,” traditional and Protestant, as “servants of the belly [Romans 16:18] … overcome with eternal darkness” [2 Peter 2:17] in a 1545 confession submitted to the authorities of Electoral Cologne.
¹³
The topical biblical concordance printed in Worms
c
. 1540, a significant early Anabaptist text, presents a dozen Scripture passages under the topic
of “light,” including Romans 13 [12–14]: “The night is past, and the day is drawing near. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness.” Identifying with the light in the struggle against worldly darkness is the focus of the entry.
¹⁴

In all of these conflicts, reformers and defenders of tradition understood their age as an immense struggle between light and darkness. Their easy reliance on the contrast between daylight and night introduces to us both the continuity and the transformation of Europeans’ understanding of the night in the early modern period. The continuity is clear: as I discuss below, Christians had long associated darkness and the night with Satan, death, sin, and heresy, and continued to do so throughout the early modern period. But, as I will show in the following chapter, by the beginning of the seventeenth century mystics, poets, and theologians of all confessions expressed a renewed sense of the value of darkness and the night in ascetic, apophatic, mystical, and epistemological terms.

Early modern Europeans associated the night with its “black agents” of human and diabolical evil.
¹⁵
The dark hours of the day framed the most intense fears: “At night, the flying phantoms / Champing ferocious jaws, / Do by their whistling terrify my soul,” as Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) pronounced.
¹⁶
Edmund Spenser (
c
. 1552–99) addressed “Night, thou foule mother of annoyaunce sad / Sister of heavie Death, and nourse of Woe” in similar terms:

Under thy mantle black there hidden lye

Light-shonning thefte, and traiterous intent,

Abhorred bloodshed, and vile felony,

Shamefull deceipt, and daunger imminent.
¹⁷

The age-old identification of night with fear and danger resonated with German poets like Simon Dach (1605–69) and Andreas Gryphius (1616–64). Writing during the Thirty Years War, they described a night of “terror, silence and dark horror”: Gryphius spoke of “the hours of sad loneliness,” when “black cold covers the land / and now sleep
all, from labor and pain exhausted.”
¹⁸
Dach expanded on the theme in the poem “Heart-Felt Lament” (“Hertzliche klage”) of 1641:

Fear I bear before the night

I keep myself awake with fright

My sleep is pain and sorrow,

I long so much

as no other

night watchman, for tomorrow.
¹⁹

This pre-modern topos has been documented by Jean Delumeau, Piero Camporesi, A. Roger Ekirch, and many others.
²⁰
Shakespeare’s contemporary, the writer Thomas Nashe, regarded this view of the night as a cliché: “When any poet would describe a horrible tragical accident,” Nashe intoned, “to add the more probability and credence unto it he dismally begins to tell how it was dark night when it was done, and cheerful daylight had quite abandoned the firmament.”
²¹
Shakespeare parodies this dismal view of the night in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(5.1) when Bottom, playing Pyramus, awkwardly declaims:

O grim-look’d night! O night with hue so black!

O night, which ever art when day is not!

O night, O night! alack, alack, alack.

Clearly, one would not want to mistake this topos for unmediated, direct evidence of the experience of the night in this period, but cliché and parody alike show its ubiquity. Can we explore this venerable identification of the night with evil, death, and despair for its distinctly early modern emphases and inflections?

Several key works reveal the developments within the continuity. Thomas Nashe described the night as a hellish time of fear and danger in his 1594 tract on
The Terrors of the Night
: “Well have poets termed night the nurse of cares, the mother of despair, the daughter of hell.”
²²
But Nashe expanded on these traditional associations of the night by evoking in personal, spiritual terms a night that terrified in part because it reflected the darkness within: “As touching the terrors of the night, they are as many as our sins.” Nashe’s night linked infernal evil, diabolical temptation, and human sin:

The devil is the special predominant planet of the night, and … Like a cunning fowler … he spreads his nets of temptation in the dark, that men might not see to avoid them.

For Nashe the “danger imminent” of the night was less physical than spiritual; less assault and more temptation. It was a time when one’s sins were reckoned, and when diabolical trials (both of temptation and of despair) were the strongest:

In the quiet silence of the night he will be sure to surprise us, when he infallibly knows we shall be unarmed to resist, and that there will be full auditory granted him to undermine or persuade what he lists.
²³

Nashe concluded his tract by asserting that “the terrors of the night [are] more than of the day, because the sins of the night surmount the sins of the day.” Nashe here represents a trend that makes nocturnal danger more personal, internal, and subjective: “we that live in his [the devil’s] nightly kingdom of darkness must needs taste some disquiet.” This interior view of the night contrasts with the traditional emphasis on the external threats, natural and supernatural, that arose at night.