§ 146. Mysticism and Pantheism.Besides the true evangelical mysticism within the church, which Luther throughout his whole life esteemed very highly as a deepening of the Christian religious life, and which the Lutheran church had never ruled out of its pale, an unevangelical as well as thoroughly anti-ecclesiastical mysticism broke out at a very early period in quite a multitude of different forms. In the case of Schwenkfeld this tendency, though characterized by very decided hostility to the church, occupied an advantageous position, as well by the attitude which it assumed to theology as from the quiet and sober manner in which it conducted its propaganda. Agrippa and Paracelsus are representatives of a mysticism with a basis in natural philosophy, which was wrought out into fantastic forms by Valentine Weigel in his theosophy. Sebastian Franck drew his mysticism from the fountains of Eckhart’s and Tauler’s writings; and Giordano Bruno, by his wild, almost delirious mysticism, culminating in the boldest pantheism, won for himself the fiery stake. The FrenchLibertins spirituelsembraced a sublime antinomian pantheism, while the Familists, who appeared at a later period in England, were banded together in the service of an apotheosis of love like the members of one family.
Besides the true evangelical mysticism within the church, which Luther throughout his whole life esteemed very highly as a deepening of the Christian religious life, and which the Lutheran church had never ruled out of its pale, an unevangelical as well as thoroughly anti-ecclesiastical mysticism broke out at a very early period in quite a multitude of different forms. In the case of Schwenkfeld this tendency, though characterized by very decided hostility to the church, occupied an advantageous position, as well by the attitude which it assumed to theology as from the quiet and sober manner in which it conducted its propaganda. Agrippa and Paracelsus are representatives of a mysticism with a basis in natural philosophy, which was wrought out into fantastic forms by Valentine Weigel in his theosophy. Sebastian Franck drew his mysticism from the fountains of Eckhart’s and Tauler’s writings; and Giordano Bruno, by his wild, almost delirious mysticism, culminating in the boldest pantheism, won for himself the fiery stake. The FrenchLibertins spirituelsembraced a sublime antinomian pantheism, while the Familists, who appeared at a later period in England, were banded together in the service of an apotheosis of love like the members of one family.
§ 146.1.Schwenkfeld and his Followers.—Among the mystics of the Reformation period hostile to the church, Caspar Schwenkfeld, a Silesian nobleman of an old family, of the line of Ossingk, holds a prominent and honourable place as a man of deep and genuine piety. At first he attached himself with enthusiasm to the Wittenberg Reformation; but as it advanced his heart, which was exclusively set upon an inward, mystical Christianity, became dissatisfied. InA.D.1525 he met personally with Luther at Wittenberg. The friendly relations that were maintained there, notwithstanding all the divergences that became apparent on fundamental matters and in the way of looking at things, soon gave place on Schwenkfeld’s side to open antagonism. He expressed himself strongly in reference to his dissatisfaction with the Wittenberg reformers, saying that he would rather join the papists than the Lutherans. Even inA.D.1528 he had been expelled from his native land, and now began operations at Strassburg, where Bucer opposed him; and then, inA.D.1534, in Swabia, where he encountered the vigorous opposition of Jac. Andreä. In every place he set himself in direct antagonism, not only to the German, but also to the Swiss reformers, and engaged in incessant controversies with the theologians, working steadily in the interests of a reformation in accordance with his own peculiar views. He died inA.D.1561 at Ulm, and left behind him in Swabia and Silesia a handful of followers, who, inA.D.1563, issued a complete edition of the “Christian Orthodox Books and Writings of the Noble and Faithful Man, Caspar Schwenkfeld,” in four folio volumes. Expelled from Silesia inA.D.1728, many of them fled into the neighbouring state of Lausitz, others to Pennsylvania in North America, where they found some small communities. What Schwenkfeld so keenly objected to in the Lutheran Reformation was nothing else than its firm biblico-ecclesiastical objectivity. Luther’s adherence to the unconditional authority of the word of God he declared to be a worship of the letter. He himself gave to the inner word of God’s Spirit in men a place superior to the outward word of God in Scripture. All external institutions of the church met with his most uncompromising opposition. In a manner similar to that of Osiander (§141, 2), he identified justification and sanctification, and explained it as an incarnation of Christ in the believer. Rejecting the doctrine of thecommunicatio idiomatum, he taught a thorough “deifying of the flesh of Christ,” having its foundation in the birth by the Virgin Mary, regenerated in faith and completed by suffering, death, and resurrection; so that in His state of exaltation His Divine and human natures are perfectly combined into one. Infant baptism he condemned, and affirmed that a regenerate person can live without sin. In the Lord’s Supper according to him everything depended upon the inward operation of the Spirit. The bread in the sacrament is only a symbol of the spiritual truth that Christ is the true bread for the soul.He laid special emphasis on John vi. 51, and regarded the τοῦτο of the words of institution not as the subject but as the predicate: “My body is this;”i.e.is bread unto eternal life.416§ 146.2.Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Weigel.—Agrippa von Nettesheim, who died inA.D.1535, a man of extensive and varied scholarship, who boasted of his knowledge of secret things, led an exceedingly changeful and adventurous career as a statesman and soldier, taught medicine, theology, and jurisprudence, lashed the monks with his biting satires, so that they had him persecuted as a heretic, contended against the belief in witchcraft, exposed mercilessly in his treatiseDe incertitudine et vanitate scientiarumthe weak points of the dominant scholasticism, and in opposition to it wrought out in his bookDe occulta philosophiahis own system of cabbalistic mystical philosophy.—A man of a quite similar type was the learned Swiss physician Philip Aureolus Theophrastus BombastusParacelsusof Hohenheim, who died inA.D.1541; a man of genius and a profound thinker, but with an ill-regulated imagination and an over-luxuriant fancy, which led him to profess that he had found the solution of all the mysteries of the Divine nature, as well as of terrestrial and super-terrestrial nature, and that he had discovered the philosopher’s stone. These two continued to retain their position within the limits of the Catholic church.—Valentine Weigel, on the contrary, who died inA.D.1588, was a Lutheran pastor at Schopau in Saxony, universally respected for his consistent, godly character and his earnest, devoted labours. His mystico-theosophical tendency, influenced by Tauler and Paracelsus, came to be fully understood only long after his death by the publication of his practical works, “Church and House Postils on the Gospels,” “A Book on Prayer,” “A Directory for Attaining the Knowledge of all things without Error,” etc.; and down to the nineteenth century he had many followers among the quiet and contemplative throughout the land. While utterly depreciating as well the theology of the church as all sorts of external forms in worship, he placed all the more weight upon the inner light and the anointing with the Spirit of God, without which all teaching and prayer will be vain. In man he sees a microcosmus of the universe, and man’s growth in holiness he regarded as a continuation of the incarnation of God in him. He still allowed a place to the doctrine of the church as an allegorical shell for the knowledge of the soul to God and the world, and from this it may be explained how he was able unhesitatingly to subscribe the Formula of Concord. Bened. Biedermann, who was for a long time his deacon, and then his successor in the pastoral office, sympathised with his master’s views, and subsequently made vigorous attempts to disseminate them in his writings.On this account he was deposed inA.D.1660.417§ 146.3.Franck, Thamer, and Bruno.—Sebastian Franckof Donauwört, in Swabia, a learned printer and voluminous writer in German and Latin, for some time also a soap-boiler, had attached himself enthusiastically to the Reformation, which for several years he served as an evangelical pastor. Subsequently, however, he broke off from it, condemned and abused with sharp criticism and biting satire all the theological movements of his age, demanded unrestricted religious liberty, defended the Anabaptists against the intolerance of the theologians, and sought satisfaction for himself in a mysticism tending toward pantheism constructed out of Erigena, Eckhart, and Tauler. Among his theologico-philosophical writings, the most important are the “Golden Ark, or Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,” and especially the 280 spirited “Paradoxa,i.e.Wonderful Words out of Holy Scripture.” Against what he regarded as the idolatrous worship of the letter in Luther’s theology he directed “The Book sealed with Seven Seals.” In unreconciled contradictions collected in this tract out of Scripture he thinks to be able to prove that God Himself wished to warn us against the deifying of the letter. The letter is the devil’s seat, the sword of antichrist; he has the letter on his side, the spirit against him. With the letter the old Pharisees slew Christ, and their modern representatives are doing the same to-day. The letter killeth, the spirit alone giveth life. He also attached very little importance to the sacrament and external ordinances. He makes no distinction, or at most only one of degree, between God and nature. God, God’s Word, God’s Son, the Holy Spirit, and nature are with him only various aspects or manifestations of the same power, which is all in all; and his theory of evil inclines strongly to dualism. On the other side, he deserves the heartiest recognition as a German prose writer in respect of the purity, copiousness, and refinement of his style, and as the author of the first text books of history and geography in the German language. After a changeful and eventful life in several cities of South Germany, having been expelled successively from Nuremberg, Strassburg, and Ulm, he died at Basel inA.D.1542.—A career in every point resembling his was that ofTheobald Thamer, of Alsace. After having sat at the feet of Luther in Wittenberg as an enthusiastic disciple, he took up an attitude of opposition to the Reformation by giving absolute determining authority to the subjective principle of conscience, and by the rejection of the Lutheran doctrine of justification. He went over ultimately to the Roman Catholic church inA.D.1557, to seek there the peace of soul that he had lost, and died as professor of theology at Freiburg, inA.D.1569.—A far more powerful thinker than either of these two was the Italian Dominican monk,Giordano Brunoof Nola. His violent and abusive invectives against monkery, transubstantiation, and the immaculate conception obliged him, inA.D.1580, to flee to Geneva. From thence he betook himself to Paris, where he delivered lectures on thears magnaof Lullus (§103, 7); afterwards spent several years in London engaged in literary work, fromA.D.1586 toA.D.1588 taught at Wittenberg, and on leaving that place delivered an impassioned eulogy on Luther. After a further continued life of adventure during some years in Germany, he returned to Italy, and was burnt in Rome inA.D.1600 as a heretic. A complete edition of his numerous writings in the Italian language does not exist. These are partly allegorico-satirical, partly metaphysical, on the idea of the Divine unity and universality, in which the poetical and philosophical are blended together. He adopted the doctrine of God set forth by Nicholas of Cusa (§113, 6), representing the deity as at once the maximum and the minimum, and carried out this idea to its logical conclusion in pantheism.Bruno deserves special recognition as a consistent protester against the geocentric theories of ecclesiastical scholastic science, and for this merits a place among the first apologists of the Copernican system.418§ 146.4.The Pantheistic Libertine Sects of the Spiritualsin France, reminding us in theory and practice of the mediæval Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit (§116, 5), had their origin in the Walloon provinces of the Netherlands. As early asA.D.1529 a certain Coppin preached their gospel in his native city of Lille or Ryssel. Quintin and Pocquet, both from the province of Hennegau, transplanted it to France inA.D.1530. At the court of the liberal-minded and talented Queen Margaret of Navarre (§120, 8), they found at first a hearty welcome, and from this centre carried on secretly a successful propaganda, until Calvin’s influence over the queen, as well as his energetic polemic, “Against the Fantastic and Mad Sect of the Libertines, who call themselves Spirituals,A.D.1545,” put a stop to their further progress. The contemporaryLibertines of Geneva(§138, 3,4), who rose up against the rigoristic church discipline of Calvin, are not to be confounded with these Netherland-French Libertines, although their apostle Pocquet also lived and laboured for a long time in Geneva. The impudent immorality of the Genevan Libertines was quite different from the moral levity of theSpirituels, which had always a spiritualistic-pantheistic significance, their characteristics consisting rather in a broad denial of and contempt for Christian doctrines and the facts of gospel history.§ 146.5. Under the name ofFamilists,Familia charitatis, Henry Nicolai or Nicholas of Münster, who had previously been closely related to David Joris (§148, 1), founded a new mystical sect in England during the reign of Elizabeth. They were distinguished from the Anabaptists by treating with indifference the question of infant baptism. Nicholas appeared as the apostle of love in and through which the mystical deification of man is accomplished. Although uneducated, he composed several works, and in one of these designated himself as “endowed with God in the spirit of His love.”His followers have been charged with immoral practices, and the doctrine has been ascribed to them that Christ is nothing more than a Divine condition communicating itself to all the saints.419
§ 146.1.Schwenkfeld and his Followers.—Among the mystics of the Reformation period hostile to the church, Caspar Schwenkfeld, a Silesian nobleman of an old family, of the line of Ossingk, holds a prominent and honourable place as a man of deep and genuine piety. At first he attached himself with enthusiasm to the Wittenberg Reformation; but as it advanced his heart, which was exclusively set upon an inward, mystical Christianity, became dissatisfied. InA.D.1525 he met personally with Luther at Wittenberg. The friendly relations that were maintained there, notwithstanding all the divergences that became apparent on fundamental matters and in the way of looking at things, soon gave place on Schwenkfeld’s side to open antagonism. He expressed himself strongly in reference to his dissatisfaction with the Wittenberg reformers, saying that he would rather join the papists than the Lutherans. Even inA.D.1528 he had been expelled from his native land, and now began operations at Strassburg, where Bucer opposed him; and then, inA.D.1534, in Swabia, where he encountered the vigorous opposition of Jac. Andreä. In every place he set himself in direct antagonism, not only to the German, but also to the Swiss reformers, and engaged in incessant controversies with the theologians, working steadily in the interests of a reformation in accordance with his own peculiar views. He died inA.D.1561 at Ulm, and left behind him in Swabia and Silesia a handful of followers, who, inA.D.1563, issued a complete edition of the “Christian Orthodox Books and Writings of the Noble and Faithful Man, Caspar Schwenkfeld,” in four folio volumes. Expelled from Silesia inA.D.1728, many of them fled into the neighbouring state of Lausitz, others to Pennsylvania in North America, where they found some small communities. What Schwenkfeld so keenly objected to in the Lutheran Reformation was nothing else than its firm biblico-ecclesiastical objectivity. Luther’s adherence to the unconditional authority of the word of God he declared to be a worship of the letter. He himself gave to the inner word of God’s Spirit in men a place superior to the outward word of God in Scripture. All external institutions of the church met with his most uncompromising opposition. In a manner similar to that of Osiander (§141, 2), he identified justification and sanctification, and explained it as an incarnation of Christ in the believer. Rejecting the doctrine of thecommunicatio idiomatum, he taught a thorough “deifying of the flesh of Christ,” having its foundation in the birth by the Virgin Mary, regenerated in faith and completed by suffering, death, and resurrection; so that in His state of exaltation His Divine and human natures are perfectly combined into one. Infant baptism he condemned, and affirmed that a regenerate person can live without sin. In the Lord’s Supper according to him everything depended upon the inward operation of the Spirit. The bread in the sacrament is only a symbol of the spiritual truth that Christ is the true bread for the soul.He laid special emphasis on John vi. 51, and regarded the τοῦτο of the words of institution not as the subject but as the predicate: “My body is this;”i.e.is bread unto eternal life.416
§ 146.2.Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Weigel.—Agrippa von Nettesheim, who died inA.D.1535, a man of extensive and varied scholarship, who boasted of his knowledge of secret things, led an exceedingly changeful and adventurous career as a statesman and soldier, taught medicine, theology, and jurisprudence, lashed the monks with his biting satires, so that they had him persecuted as a heretic, contended against the belief in witchcraft, exposed mercilessly in his treatiseDe incertitudine et vanitate scientiarumthe weak points of the dominant scholasticism, and in opposition to it wrought out in his bookDe occulta philosophiahis own system of cabbalistic mystical philosophy.—A man of a quite similar type was the learned Swiss physician Philip Aureolus Theophrastus BombastusParacelsusof Hohenheim, who died inA.D.1541; a man of genius and a profound thinker, but with an ill-regulated imagination and an over-luxuriant fancy, which led him to profess that he had found the solution of all the mysteries of the Divine nature, as well as of terrestrial and super-terrestrial nature, and that he had discovered the philosopher’s stone. These two continued to retain their position within the limits of the Catholic church.—Valentine Weigel, on the contrary, who died inA.D.1588, was a Lutheran pastor at Schopau in Saxony, universally respected for his consistent, godly character and his earnest, devoted labours. His mystico-theosophical tendency, influenced by Tauler and Paracelsus, came to be fully understood only long after his death by the publication of his practical works, “Church and House Postils on the Gospels,” “A Book on Prayer,” “A Directory for Attaining the Knowledge of all things without Error,” etc.; and down to the nineteenth century he had many followers among the quiet and contemplative throughout the land. While utterly depreciating as well the theology of the church as all sorts of external forms in worship, he placed all the more weight upon the inner light and the anointing with the Spirit of God, without which all teaching and prayer will be vain. In man he sees a microcosmus of the universe, and man’s growth in holiness he regarded as a continuation of the incarnation of God in him. He still allowed a place to the doctrine of the church as an allegorical shell for the knowledge of the soul to God and the world, and from this it may be explained how he was able unhesitatingly to subscribe the Formula of Concord. Bened. Biedermann, who was for a long time his deacon, and then his successor in the pastoral office, sympathised with his master’s views, and subsequently made vigorous attempts to disseminate them in his writings.On this account he was deposed inA.D.1660.417
§ 146.3.Franck, Thamer, and Bruno.—Sebastian Franckof Donauwört, in Swabia, a learned printer and voluminous writer in German and Latin, for some time also a soap-boiler, had attached himself enthusiastically to the Reformation, which for several years he served as an evangelical pastor. Subsequently, however, he broke off from it, condemned and abused with sharp criticism and biting satire all the theological movements of his age, demanded unrestricted religious liberty, defended the Anabaptists against the intolerance of the theologians, and sought satisfaction for himself in a mysticism tending toward pantheism constructed out of Erigena, Eckhart, and Tauler. Among his theologico-philosophical writings, the most important are the “Golden Ark, or Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,” and especially the 280 spirited “Paradoxa,i.e.Wonderful Words out of Holy Scripture.” Against what he regarded as the idolatrous worship of the letter in Luther’s theology he directed “The Book sealed with Seven Seals.” In unreconciled contradictions collected in this tract out of Scripture he thinks to be able to prove that God Himself wished to warn us against the deifying of the letter. The letter is the devil’s seat, the sword of antichrist; he has the letter on his side, the spirit against him. With the letter the old Pharisees slew Christ, and their modern representatives are doing the same to-day. The letter killeth, the spirit alone giveth life. He also attached very little importance to the sacrament and external ordinances. He makes no distinction, or at most only one of degree, between God and nature. God, God’s Word, God’s Son, the Holy Spirit, and nature are with him only various aspects or manifestations of the same power, which is all in all; and his theory of evil inclines strongly to dualism. On the other side, he deserves the heartiest recognition as a German prose writer in respect of the purity, copiousness, and refinement of his style, and as the author of the first text books of history and geography in the German language. After a changeful and eventful life in several cities of South Germany, having been expelled successively from Nuremberg, Strassburg, and Ulm, he died at Basel inA.D.1542.—A career in every point resembling his was that ofTheobald Thamer, of Alsace. After having sat at the feet of Luther in Wittenberg as an enthusiastic disciple, he took up an attitude of opposition to the Reformation by giving absolute determining authority to the subjective principle of conscience, and by the rejection of the Lutheran doctrine of justification. He went over ultimately to the Roman Catholic church inA.D.1557, to seek there the peace of soul that he had lost, and died as professor of theology at Freiburg, inA.D.1569.—A far more powerful thinker than either of these two was the Italian Dominican monk,Giordano Brunoof Nola. His violent and abusive invectives against monkery, transubstantiation, and the immaculate conception obliged him, inA.D.1580, to flee to Geneva. From thence he betook himself to Paris, where he delivered lectures on thears magnaof Lullus (§103, 7); afterwards spent several years in London engaged in literary work, fromA.D.1586 toA.D.1588 taught at Wittenberg, and on leaving that place delivered an impassioned eulogy on Luther. After a further continued life of adventure during some years in Germany, he returned to Italy, and was burnt in Rome inA.D.1600 as a heretic. A complete edition of his numerous writings in the Italian language does not exist. These are partly allegorico-satirical, partly metaphysical, on the idea of the Divine unity and universality, in which the poetical and philosophical are blended together. He adopted the doctrine of God set forth by Nicholas of Cusa (§113, 6), representing the deity as at once the maximum and the minimum, and carried out this idea to its logical conclusion in pantheism.Bruno deserves special recognition as a consistent protester against the geocentric theories of ecclesiastical scholastic science, and for this merits a place among the first apologists of the Copernican system.418
§ 146.4.The Pantheistic Libertine Sects of the Spiritualsin France, reminding us in theory and practice of the mediæval Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit (§116, 5), had their origin in the Walloon provinces of the Netherlands. As early asA.D.1529 a certain Coppin preached their gospel in his native city of Lille or Ryssel. Quintin and Pocquet, both from the province of Hennegau, transplanted it to France inA.D.1530. At the court of the liberal-minded and talented Queen Margaret of Navarre (§120, 8), they found at first a hearty welcome, and from this centre carried on secretly a successful propaganda, until Calvin’s influence over the queen, as well as his energetic polemic, “Against the Fantastic and Mad Sect of the Libertines, who call themselves Spirituals,A.D.1545,” put a stop to their further progress. The contemporaryLibertines of Geneva(§138, 3,4), who rose up against the rigoristic church discipline of Calvin, are not to be confounded with these Netherland-French Libertines, although their apostle Pocquet also lived and laboured for a long time in Geneva. The impudent immorality of the Genevan Libertines was quite different from the moral levity of theSpirituels, which had always a spiritualistic-pantheistic significance, their characteristics consisting rather in a broad denial of and contempt for Christian doctrines and the facts of gospel history.
§ 146.5. Under the name ofFamilists,Familia charitatis, Henry Nicolai or Nicholas of Münster, who had previously been closely related to David Joris (§148, 1), founded a new mystical sect in England during the reign of Elizabeth. They were distinguished from the Anabaptists by treating with indifference the question of infant baptism. Nicholas appeared as the apostle of love in and through which the mystical deification of man is accomplished. Although uneducated, he composed several works, and in one of these designated himself as “endowed with God in the spirit of His love.”His followers have been charged with immoral practices, and the doctrine has been ascribed to them that Christ is nothing more than a Divine condition communicating itself to all the saints.419