181. ‘Angela de Foligni.’ See Beatæ Angelæ Fulginio Visionum et Instructionum Liber; (recens. J. H. Lammertz; Cologne, 1851.)—The account of the wonderful star is given by Arnold in his Prologue, p. 12. At one time it is promised by the Lord that the ‘whole Trinity shall enter into her,’ (capit. xx.); at another, she is transported into the midst of the Trinity.—(Capit. xxxii.) In chapter after chapter of monotonous inflation, she wearies and disappoints the curious reader by declaring her ‘abysses of delectation and illumination’ altogether unutterable,—such as language profanes rather than expresses—‘inenarrabiles,’ ‘indicibiles,’ &c. So the miraculous taste of the host to her favoured palate was not like bread or flesh, but a ‘sapor sapidissimus,’—like nothing that can be named.—Capit. xl.
The following act of saintship we give in the original, lest in English it should act on delicate readers as an emetic. She speaks of herself and a sister ascetic:—‘Lavimus pedes feminarum ibi existentium pauperum, et manus hominum, et maxime cujusdam leprosi, qui habebat manus valde fœtidas et marcidas et præpeditas et corruptas; et bibimus de illâ loturâ. Tantam autem dulcedinem sensimus in illo potu, quod per totam viam venimus in magnâ suavitate, et videbatur mihi per omnia quod ego gustassem mirabilem dulcedinem, quantum ad suavitatem quam ibi inveni. Et quia quædam squamula illarum plagarum erat interposita in gutture meo, conata sum ad diglutiendum eam, sicut si communicassem, donec deglutivi eam. Unde tantam suavitatem inveni in hoc, quod eam non possum exprimere.’—Capit. l. p. 176.
In her ‘Instructions,’ she lays it down as a rule that none can ever be deceived in the visions and manifestations vouchsafed them who are truly poor in spirit,—who have rendered themselves as ‘dead and putrid’ into the hands of God. (Capp. liv. lv.) She says that when God manifests Himself to the soul, ‘it sees Him, without bodily form, indeed, but more distinctly than one man can see another man, for the eyes of the soul behold a spiritual plenitude, not a corporeal, whereof I can say nothing, since both words and imagination fail here.’ (Capit. lii. p. 192.) Angela died in 1309.
182. ‘Catharine of Siena.’ Görres gives a short account of her in his Introduction to Diepenbrock’s edition of Suso, p. 96.
183. The theology of this remarkable little book is substantially the same with that already familiar to us in the sermons of Tauler. Luther, writing to Spalatin, and praising Tauler’s theology, sends with his letter what he calls an epitome thereof,—cujus totius velut epitomen ecce hic tibi mitto. (Epp. De Wette, No. xxv.) He refers, there can be little doubt, to his edition of the Deutsche Theologie, which came out that year.
184. See, especially, the twelfth chapter of the second book, On the Necessity of bearing the Cross. Compare Michelet’s somewhat overdrawn picture of the effects of the Imitation in his History of France.
The Ignitum cum Deo Soliloquium of Gerlacus Petrus is a contemporary treatise belonging to the same school. (Comp. capp. xxxix. and xxvi.; ed. Strange, 1849.) It is less popular, less impassioned than the Imitation, and more thoroughly impregnated with the spirit of mysticism. Gerlach would seem to have studied Suso: in one place he imitates his language. The cast of his imagery, as well as the prominence given to mystical phraseology, more peculiar to the Germans, shows that he addresses himself to an advanced and comparatively esoteric circle.—Comp. capp. xxii, xxiv, p. 78.
185. ‘Gerson.‘—See an article by Liebner (Gerson’s Mystische Theologie) in the Theologische Studien und Kritiken; 1835, ii.
186. Malcolm’s Persia, vol. ii., p. 383.
187. See Schrader’s Angelus Silesius und seine Mystik; Halle, 1853. This author shows, that the supposition identifying Scheffler with Angelus (copied too readily by one writer from another) may be traced up to a source of very slight authority. Scheffler repudiated mysticism after entering the Romish communion. Furious polemical treatises by Scheffler, and sentimental religious poems by Angelus appeared contemporaneously during a considerable interval. Had Scheffler published anything mystical during his controversy, his Protestant antagonists would not have failed to charge him with it. With Scheffler the Church is everything. In the Wanderer of Angelus the word scarcely occurs. The former lives in externalisms; the latter covets escape from them. The one is an angry bigot; the other, for a Romanist, serenely latitudinarian. Characteristics so opposite, urges Dr. Schrader, could not exist in the same man at the same time.
The epithet ‘Cherubic’ indicates the more speculative character of the book; as contrasted, in the language of the mystics, with the devotion of feeling and passion—seraphic love.
188. Cherubinischer Wandersmann, i. 100, 9, 18; Schrader, p. 28.
189. And if thy heart know nought of this—‘Die that thou mayest be born;’ then walkest thou the darksome earth a sojourner forlorn.
190. Tholuck, Ssufismus, sive Theosophia Persarum pantheistica (Berlin, 1822), pp. 51-54.
191. Tholuck, Ssufismus, p. 63. Cherub. Wand., ii. 18.
192. Tholuck, Blüthensammlung aus der Morgenländischen Mystik (Berlin, 1825), p. 114.
193. Cherub. Wand., i. 274; v. 81.
194. Blüthen., p. 61. Cherub. Wand., iv. 23.
195. Blüthen., pp. 64, 71, 113, 156.
196. Blüthen., p. 167. Emerson’s Essays (1848), p. 35.
197. Blüthen., pp. 204-206. Cherub. Wand., i. 24, 92, 140.
198. Blüthen., pp. 180, 181. Cherub. Wand., v. 367; ii. 92; i. 91, 39; ii. 152, 59. Emerson, pp. 37, 42.
199. Blüthen., pp. 85, 116. Emerson, pp. 141, 143. Cherub. Wand., i. 12. Compare Richard of St. Victor, cited above, vol. i., p. 172, Note to p. 163.
200. Blüthen., pp. 82, 84.—The truth, of which the licentious doctrine alluded to is the abuse, is well put by Angelus,—
201. Blüthen., pp. 266, 260.—Never does this soaring idealism become so definite and apprehensible as when it speaks with the ‘large utterance’ of the Sufis. Angelus has here and there somewhat similar imagery for the same thought. What is with him a dry skeleton acquires flesh and blood among the Orientals.
202. Emerson, pp. 154, 156, 196. Cherub. Wand., i. 10, 8, 204.—Angelus has various modes of expressing the way in which God realizes his nature in the salvation of men.
203. Works, vol. iv., On the Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindoos.
204. Blüthen., p. 218.
205. A reference to Raumer’s History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries will satisfy the reader that this dream ‘was not all a dream.’ Most minute details are given in a letter from the MSS. of Dupuy.
207. See the account in Ranke’s History of the Reformation.
208. See Carriere, Die philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationzeit (1847), pp. 196-203.
209. Horst’s Zauberbibliothek, vol. iii. p. 21.
210. Agrippa’s Vanity of Arts and Sciences, chap. 47.
211. See M. B. Lessing, Paracelsus, sein Leben und Denken, p. 60.
212. The third and fourth volumes of Horst’s Zauberbibliothek contain a very full account of all these vincula. The vincula of the Intellectual World are principally formulas of invocation; secret names of God, of celestial principalities and spirits; Hebrew, Arabic, and barbarous words; magical figures, signs, diagrams, and circles. Those of the Elementary World consist in the sympathetic influence of certain animals and plants, such as the mole, the white otter, the white dove, the mandrake; of stones and metals, ointments and suffumigations. Those of the Astral or Celestial World depend on the aspects and dispositions of the heavenly bodies, which, under the sway of planetary spirits, infuse their influences into terrestrial objects. This is the astrological department of theurgy. Meinhold’s Sidonia contains a truthful exhibition of this form of theurgic mysticism, as it obtained in Protestant Germany. See Paracelsus, De Spiritibus Planetarum, passim. (Ed. Dorn., 1584.)
213. See Carriere (pp. 89-114), to whom I am indebted as regards the character of this and the preceding work, having had access to neither.
214. This distressing outbreak on the part of Gower will scarcely seem extravagant to those who remember how intensely poetical were many of the theosophic hypotheses. Analogies which would only occur to imaginative men in their hours of reverie were solidified into principles and enrolled in the code of nature. Nothing could be more opposite to the sifting process of modern investigation than the fanciful combination and impersonation of those days,—more akin, by far, to mythology than to science. Conceits such as the following are those of the poet,—and of the poet as far gone in madness as Plato could wish him.
The waters of this world are mad; it is in their raving that they rush so violently to and fro along the great channels of the earth.
Fire would not have burned, darkness had not been, but for Adam’s fall. There is a hot fire and a cold. Death is a cold fire.—Behmen.
All things—even metals, stones, and meteors—have sense and imagination, and a certain ‘fiducial’ knowledge of God in them.
The arctic pole draws water by its axle-tree, and these waters break forth again at the axle-tree of the antarctic pole.
Earthquakes and thunder are the work of dæmons or angels.
The lightnings without thunder are, as it were, the falling flowers of the ‘æstival’ (or summer) stars.—Paracelsus.
Hail and snow are the fruits of the stars, proceeding from them as flowers and blossoms from herb or tree.—Paracelsus.
Night is, in reality, brought on by the influence of dark stars, which ray out darkness, as the others light.—Paracelsus.
The final fires will transform the earth into crystal. (A summary expression for one of Behmen’s doctrines.)
The moon, planets, and stars are of the same quality with the lustrous precious stones of our earth, and of such a nature, that wandering spirits of the air see in them things to come, as in a magic mirror; and hence their gift of prophecy.
In addition to the terrestrial, man has a sidereal body, which stands in connexion with the stars. When, as in sleep, this sidereal body is more free than usual from the elements, it holds converse with the stars, and may acquire a knowledge of future events.—Paracelsus. See Henry More’s Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, § 44.
215. See Lessing’s Paracelsus, p. 18.
216. Lessing’s Paracelsus, § 26.
217. Language to this effect is cited among the copious extracts given by Godfrey Arnold, Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie, Th. ii. p. 309.
218. De Occulta Philosophia, Prologus, p. 30, and p. 58. This is one of the three treatises edited by Gerard Dorn, and published together in a small volume, Basle, 1584. Comp. also Arnold, Th. iv. p. 145.
219. Dorn’s Dictionarium Paracelsi (Frankfort, 1583), Art. Microcosmus. Also the Secretum Magicum of Paracelsus, entire in Arnold, p. 150. The implanted image of the Trinity, and the innate tendency in man toward his Divine Origin, are familiar to us as favourite doctrines with the mystics of the fourteenth century.
220. De Occ. Phil. cap. iv. p. 45, and cap. xi. p. 78. Also, Dict. Paracels. Art. Magia. Talis influentiarum cœlestium conjunctio vel impressio qua operantur in inferiora corpora cœlestes vires, Gamahea Magis, vel matrimonium virium et proprietatum cœlestium cum elementaribus corporibus, dicta fuit olim.—Paracelsi Aurora Philosophorum, cap. iv. p. 24 (ed. Dorn).
221. Aurora Phil. loc. cit.; De Occ. Phil. i. ii.; and xi. p. 79.
222. See De Occ. Phil. cap. v. Magical powers are ascribed to images, p. 85. A collection of talismanic figures is appended to the treatise. In the Thesaurus Philosophorum is to be found (p. 145) the arcanum of the Homunculus and the Universal Tincture. The Homunculus is said to be a mannikin, constructed by magic, receiving his life and substance from an artificial principle, and able to communicate to his fabricator all manner of secrets and mysteries of science.
223. The three continents—Europe, Asia, and Africa—were said to represent these three constituent principles respectively; the stars contain them, as in so many vials; the Penates (a race of sapient but mortal spirits) employ them for the manufacture of thunder.
224. Lessing’s Paracelsus, § 58. This fanciful kind of physiognomy displaces theurgy, among these inquirers. It led, at least, to much accurate observation. It was a sign of health when the chafing-dish and conjuring-book were forsaken for the woods and fields. Cardan, who repudiates the charge of having ever employed incantations or sought intercourse with dæmons, endeavours to establish chiromancy on what were then called astronomical principles. Thus, Mars rules the thumb, wherein lies strength; Jupiter, the forefinger, whence come auguries of fame and honour, &c.
225. See Lives of the Alchemistical Philosophers. This book contains a collection of the most celebrated treatises on the theory and practice of the Hermetic Art. The passage from Bernard is in The Book of Eirenæus Philalethes, p. 166.
226. Thus, Cardan declared that the law of Moses was from Saturn; that of Christ, from Jupiter and Mercury. Over that of Mahomet presided, in conjunction, Sol and Mars; while Mars and the Moon ruled idolatry. It was thought no impiety—only a legitimate explanation, to attribute the supernatural wisdom and works of our Lord to the divinely-ordained influences of the planetary system.
227. This passage is from the Annotations of Weidenfeld on the Green Lion of Paracelsus; Lives of the Alchem. Phil. p. 201. The Thesaurus Thesaurorum contains another choice specimen of the same sort, p. 124.
228. The personal appearance of Behmen is thus described by his friend and biographer, Abraham von Franckenberg, in the biography prefixed to his Works, § 27.
230. Lebens-lauff, § 4.
231. See his own account of his mental conflict and melancholy, issuing in the rapturous intuition which solved all his doubts, Aurora, cap. xix. §§ 1-13. He acknowledges having read many astrological books. Aurora, cap. xxv. § 43: Ja, lieber, Leser, ich verstehe der Astrologorum Meinung auch wol, ich habe auch ein paar zeilen in ihren Schrifften gelesen, und weiss wol wie sie den Lauf der Sonnen und Sternen schreiben, ich verachte es auch nicht, sondern halte es meisten Theil für gut und recht. Compare also cap. x. § 27: Ich habe viel hoher Meister Schrifften gelesen, in Hoffnung den Grund und die rechte Tieffe darinnen zu finden, aber ich habe nichts funden als einen halb-todten Geist, &c. In a letter to Caspar Lindern he mentions sundry mystical writers concerning whom his correspondent appears to have desired his opinion,—admits that several of them were men of high spiritual gifts, not to be despised, though in many respects capable of amendment,—says that they were of good service in their time, and would probably express themselves otherwise did they write now,—shows where he thinks Schwenkfeld wrong in affirming Christ’s manhood to be no creature, and speaks of Weigel as erring in like manner by denying the Saviour’s true humanity.—Theosoph. Sendbr. §§ 52-60.
232. Theosoph. Sendbr. xii. §§ 8-20.
233. A full account of the persecution raised by Gregory Richter against Behmen, was drawn up by Cornelius Weissner, a doctor of medicine, and is appended by Franckenberg to his biography. A young man, who had married a relative of Behmen’s, had been so terrified by the threatenings of divine wrath launched at him by Richter, about some trifling money matter, that he fell into a profound melancholy. Behmen comforted the distressed baker, and ventured to remonstrate with the enraged primarius, becoming ever after a marked man. For seven years after the affair of the Aurora, in 1612, Behmen refrained from writing. Everything he published subsequently was produced between the years 1619 and 1624, inclusive.
234. Thus he thanks Christian Bernard for a small remittance of money.—Theos. Sendbr. ix. Sept. 12, 1620.
235. Apologia wider den Primarium zu Görlitz Gregorium Richter, written in 1624.
236. Vide Corn. Weissner’s Wahrhafte Relation, &c., and Franckenberg’s account of his last hours, § 29.
237. While regarding as infallibly certain the main features of the doctrine communicated to him, Behmen is quite ready to admit the imperfect character both of his knowledge and his setting forth thereof. Light was communicated to him, he said, by degrees, at uncertain intervals, and never un-mingled with obscurity.—Aurora, cap. vii. § 11; cap. x. § 26, and often elsewhere.
238. Aurora, x. §§ 44, 45.
239. See Aurora, cap. xix. §§ 26-45; cap. xxiii. § 86.
After speaking of the revolt of Lucifer as the cause of the present imperfection and admixture of natural evil in the world, by corrupting the influence of the Fountain-Spirits throughout our department of the universe, and of the blind and endangered condition of man consequent thereon, he adds,—‘But thou must not suppose that on this account the heavenly light in the Fountain-Spirits of God is utterly extinct. No; it is but a darkness which we, with our corrupt eyesight, cannot apprehend. But when God removes the darkness which thus broods above the light, and thine eyes are opened, then thou seest even on the spot where thou sittest, standest, or dost lie in thy room, the lovely face of God, and all the gates that open upon heaven. Thou needest not first lift thine eyes upwards to heaven, for it is written, ‘The word is near thee, even on thy lips and in thine heart;’ Deut. xxx. 14; Rom. x. 8. So near thee, indeed, is God, that the birth of the Holy Trinity takes place in thine heart also, and there all three persons are born,—Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’—Aurora, cap. x. §§ 57, 58.
240. ‘The spirit of man,’ says Behmen, ‘contains a spark from the power and light of God.’ The Holy Ghost is ‘creaturely’ within it when renewed, and it can therefore search into the depths of God and nature, as a child in its father’s house. In God, past, present, and future; breadth, depth, and height; far and near, are apprehended as one, and the holy soul of man sees them in like manner, although (in the present imperfect state) but partially. For the devil sometimes succeeds in smothering the seed of inward light.—Aurora, Vorrede, §§ 96-105.
According to Behmen, Stephen, when he saw the heavens opened, and Christ at the right hand of God, was not spiritually translated into any distant upper region,—‘he had penetrated into the inmost birth—into the heaven which is everywhere.’—Aurora, cap. xix. § 48. Similarly, he declares that he had not ascended into heaven, and seen with the eye of the flesh the creative processes he describes, but that his knowledge comes from the opening within him of the gate to the inner heavenly world, so that the divine sun arose and shone within his heart, giving him infallible inward certainty concerning everything he announces. If an angel from heaven had told him such things, he must have doubted. It might have been Satan in a garb of light: it would have been an external testimony: it would have been beyond his comprehension; but this light and impulse from within precludes all doubt. The holy Soul is one spirit with God, though still a creature; sees as the angels see, and far more, since they discern only heavenly things, but man has experience both of heaven and hell, standing as he does midway between the two.—Aurora, cap. xi. §§ 68-72 and cap. xii. § 117. Comp. also cap. xxv. §§ 46-48.
241. The initiate mind saith this and saith that, as it circles around the unspeakable Depth. Thou art the bringer-forth, thou too the offspring; thou the illuminer, thou the illuminate; thou art the manifest, thou art the hidden one,—hid by thy glories. One, and yet all things, one in thyself alone, yet throughout all things!
242. Von den drei Principien des Göttlichen Wesens, cap. vii. §§ 22, &c., cap. ix. 30, et passim. Aurora, cap. ii. § 41; cap. xxiii. 61-82. Compare Aurora, cap. xx. §§ 49, &c. Drei Princip. cap. vii. 25. Aurora, cap. x. § 58. Also cap. iii. throughout. There he describes the way in which every natural object—wood, stone, or plant, contains three principles,—the image, or impress of the divine Trinity; first, the Power (Krafft) whereby it possesses a body proper to itself; secondly, the sap (Safft) or heart; thirdly, the peculiar virtue, smell, or taste proceeding from it; this is its spirit (§ 47). So, in the soul of man, do Power, and Light, and a Spirit of Understanding—the offspring of both—correspond to the three persons of the Trinity (§ 42).
245. Here I am much indebted to the masterly discussion of the theory in question, contained in Müller’s Lehre von der Sünde, Buch ii. cap. 4.
246. Aurora, cap. ix. § 42; cap. xviii. § 10-15; cap. xxiii. §§ 92, &c. The remarks in the text, concerning Behmen’s position as between theism and pantheism, are only true if the word theism be there understood as equivalent to deism. For theism, understanding by it belief in a personal deity, does not remove God from the universe. Theism ought to represent the true mean between the deism which relegates a divine Mechanician far from the work of his hands, and the pantheism which submerges him beneath it.
247. Aurora, cap. iv. §§ 10, 11. Comp. § 15, and also cap. xxi. § 37.
248. Aurora, cap. v. § 4; cap. xvii. § 16.
249. Aurora., § 27; cap. xiv. § 104; cap. x. §§ 42, 65; xix. § 50.
250. For example, in the Drei Principien, cap. xxvi. §§ 13-34, and in the Aurora, cap. xii. § 65.
253. Behmen supposed the latter day not far distant (Aurora, iv. 2), but his remarks on the vanity of eschatological speculations generally might be read with advantage by some of our modern interpreters of prophecy. See the letters to Paul Kaym, Theos. Send. viii. and xi.
256. See, concerning the history of this book, and its author, Valentine Andreä, J. G. Buhle, Ueber den Ursprung und die Vornehmsten Schiksale der Orden der Rosenkreuzer und Freymaurer (Göttingen, 1804), chapp. iii. and iv. Arnold gives a full account of the controversy, and extracts, which appear to indicate very fairly the character of the Fama Fraternitatis, Kirchen-und-Ketzergeschichte, Th. ii. Buch xvii. cap. 18.
The derivation of the name Rosicrucian from ros and crux, rather than rosa and crux, to which Brucker alludes (Hist. Phil. Per. III. Pars i. lib. 3, cap. 3), is untenable. By rights, the word, if from rosa, should no doubt be Rosacrucian; but such a malformation, by no means uncommon, cannot outweigh the reasons adduced on behalf of the generally-received etymology. See Buhle, pp. 174, &c.
257. Le Comte de Gabalis, ou Entretiens sur les Sciences Secrètes (Metz, an cinq. républicain), pp. 53-56.
The following passage is a sample of those high-sounding promises with which the pretenders to the Rosicrucian science allured the neophyte:—
‘You are about to learn (says the Count to the author) how to command all nature: God alone will be your master; the philosophers alone your equals. The highest intelligences will be ambitious to obey your desire; the demons will not dare to approach the place where you are; your voice will make them tremble in the depths of the abyss, and all the invisible populace of the four elements will deem themselves happy to minister to your pleasures.... Have you the courage and the ambition to serve God alone, and to be lord over all that is not God? Have you understood what it is to be a man? Are you not weary of serving as a slave,—you, who were born for dominion?‘—(p. 27.)
258. Comte de Gabalis, p. 185. See the story of Noah’s calamity, and the salamander Oromasis, p. 140.
259. See Colin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, Art. Cabale. Horst furnishes a number of such words, Zauberbibliothek, vol. III. xvi. 2.
260. Horst inserts in his Zauberbibliothek the whole of a once famous cabbalistic treatise, entitled Semiphoras et Shemhamphoras Salomonis Regis, a medley of astrological and theurgic doctrine and prescription. The word Shemhamphorash is not the real word of power, but an expression or conventional representative of it. The Rabbis dispute whether the genuine word consisted of twelve, two-and-forty, or two-and seventy-letters. Their Gematria or cabbalistic arithmetic, endeavours partially to reconstruct it. They are agreed that the prayers of Israel avail now so little because this word is lost, and they know not ‘the name of the Lord.’ But a couple of its real letters, inscribed by a potent cabbalist on a tablet, and thrown into the sea, raised the storm which destroyed the fleet of Charles V. in 1542. Write it on the person of a prince (a ticklish business, surely), and you are sure of his abiding favour. Eisenmenger gives a full account of all the legends connected therewith, Entdecktes Judenthum, vol. i. pp. 157, 424, 581, &c. (Ed. 1711).
The rationale of its virtue, if we may so call it, affords a characteristic illustration of the cabbalistic principle. The Divine Being was supposed to have commenced the work of creation by concentrating on certain points the primal universal Light. Within the region of these was the appointed place of our world. Out of the remaining luminous points, or foci, he constructed certain letters—a heavenly alphabet. These characters he again combined into certain creative words, whose secret potency produced the forms of the material world. The word Shemhamphorash contains the sum of these celestial letters, with all their inherent virtue, in its mightiest combination.—Horst, Zauberbibliothek, vol. iv. p. 131.
261. See Das transcendentale magie und magische Heilarten im Talmud, von Dr. G. Brecher, p. 52. Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, ii. pp. 445, &c.
The Tractat Berachoth says the devils delight to be about the Rabbis, as a wife desireth her husband, and a thirsty land longeth after water,—because their persons are so agreeable. Not so, rejoins Eisenmenger, but because both hate the gospel and love the works of darkness.—(p. 447.)
262. See Horst’s Zauberbibliothek, vol. i. pp. 314-327.
263. Alban Butler, July 31.