In principle, according to Schwenckfeld, God can bring pure visible flesh from a virgin. Through the persistent feeding on the inward flesh/bread of Christ, man can become progressively deified through the spiritual processes of transfiguration, resurrection, and ascension. This view is echoed in the gnostic alchemy prevalent at the time, and from whose imagery Andreae and others borrowed freely to describe the transformation of leaden, blackened man into spiritual gold : the theme of Andreae's Chymical Wedding. Schwenckfeld's view of man is very close to William Blake's “Divine Humanity” and is ultimately derived from the Heavenly Man (Anthropos) of the gnostic Hermetica.
Schwenckfeld wrote that “Justification [before God] derives from the knowledge [Erkenntnis] of Christ through faith.” Participation in the bread of heaven (which according to John's Gospel feeds the kosmos) made Schwenckfeld a free man : a member of the true church behind the visible church - the spiritual fraternity, and the central concept implicit in Andreae's Fraternity of the Rose-Cross, which meets in a building called the House of the Holy Spirit. Schwenckfeld was ‘freed-up’ to act as Adam did before the Fall. He became the “new regenerated man” who was able, because he was spiritually free, to keep the commandments of God, since he was truly in love with God.
In 1526, Schwenckfeld was rebutted by Martin Luther on the eucharistic issue, and his teachings were condemned as heretical. Two years later, the Catholic Ferdinand of Bohemia and Hungary annulled the evangelical reforms which had taken place in Silesia, and Schwenckfeld went into exile to Strasbourg in 1527. While in Strasbourg, he disputed with Anabaptists - the most anarchistic and physically courageous of the radicals - but who Schwenckfeld thought lacked the true knowledge of Christ. He considered the Anabaptists to be too preoccupied with the end of the world and the ‘second coming’, and begged them rather to consider how things are in the presence of God. Schwenckfeld was not an apocalyptic millenarian.
Nor can we wait here on earth for a golden age. We hope to attain to the perfect knowledge of Christ yonder in the Fatherland. Here we know only in part.
The Anabaptists might well have sought an end to time. In 1522 the Holy Roman Emperor, the Habsburg Charles V, had introduced the Inquisition into the Netherlands, and it is claimed that during his reign 30,000 of these revolutionaries met grisly deaths in the seventeen provinces under his control. The Anabaptists, abandoned by Luther along with the peasants, were to be tortured, drowned, burned, and roasted over slow fires. For Andreae, the Anabaptists were the boni, the good people, whose word was ignored and whose martyrdom was exemplary. In Andreae's eyes, it was better to be a Waldensian22 or an idiot whose life and preaching harmonised than to show off many learned books of orthodoxy, while neglecting Christian practice and the love of one's fellows. Andreae did not need to be in agreement with their entire outlook (which in the case of the Anabaptists was egalitarian and socially revolutionary - and not infrequently quite hysterical) to feel scandalised by the treatment meted out to radical reformers. Andreae also regarded the burning of witches as a stain on mankind.
Sebastian Franck (1499-1542)
While in Strasbourg, Schwenckfeld became close to the radical reformer Sebastian Franck, who was also in temporary sojourn in that ‘free’ city. Franck, an itinerant printer and effective radical, had been hounded out of more cities, free or otherwise, than he could properly recall.
A key belief of Franck's was that of the celestial assumption of the apostolic church. According to this picture the primitive Christian Church had in distant times become corrupt, and the true church had become a spiritual body. The visible church was, according to Franck, a mere husk that the Devil had perverted. The spiritual church would remain scattered and hidden among the heathen and the nominal Christians until the second advent, when Christ would gather his own and bring them home. This vision of an invisible fraternity would impact itself in the conception of the invisible Rosicrucian Brotherhood, as well as providing a source for much later neo-gnostic and neo-Rosicrucian beliefs regarding a hidden sanctuary of adepts or invisible cabal of ‘Secret Chiefs’. Indeed, when you add this image to that of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Gral castle (Munsalvaesche) in Parzifal, you have the fundamental itinerary of a good deal of contemporary neo-gnostic and theosophist mythology23.
It is noteworthy that Franck translated Agrippa's de vanitate scientiarum, (very much in tune with Franck's notable ‘learned are perverted’ theme as we shall see). Agrippa was of course steeped in Neoplatonic-occult lore. Franck was also acquainted with Paracelsus when both these giants resided in Basle, and in Franck's book Die Gulden arcke24 he says of Hermes that “he hath all that in him which a Christian must needs know.” In the same book, (written in 1538), Franck gives an extensive paraphrase from the Poimandres of Corpus Hermeticum I, a translation of which provided Holland with her first printed acquaintance with the Corpus Hermeticum. Sebastian Franck stood for the Ecclesia Spiritualis, the spiritual church which, as with the Cathars, required neither wood nor stone but subsisted in the hearts of the faithful. Franck wrote that:
The unitary spirit alone baptizes with fire and Spirit all the faithful, and all who are obedient to the inner Word in whatever part of the world they may be. For God is no respecter of persons but instead is the same to the Greeks as to the Barbarian and the Turk, to the lord as to the servant, so long as they retain the Light which has shone upon them and the joy in their heart.
In 1531, Sebastian Franck was accused of being a revolutionary and kicked out of Strasbourg. Schwenckfeld received the same treatment two years later.
Anyone who doubts the influence of the radical reformation on Andreae need only consult his brilliant Menippus (1617), described by Wilhelm Kühlmann as “a satire which cannot be more highly regarded as the summing-up of the conflicts of an entire epoch.” The theme of the 86th Discourse, Paradoxa, is taken completely from the Paradoxa of Sebastian Franck : quo doctorium, eo perversiorem or more bluntly, the learned are perverted. Andreae was heartily sickened at the arrogant conceit of academics who thought they knew everything, did nothing, and stood by while good men and women went to the stake for the very thing with which they ought to have been most concerned : the truth. Andreae says he would rather have been a witness of the truth than a doctor; those thought by the world to be impious (such as the radical reformers) are the truly holy; the truth is always revolutionary. Theology is an experience, not a science; belief is not an art. The will and the thoughts are free and no judgement can restrict them. In short, the learned are perverted. In fact, the very same theme had been used by Andreae nine years earlier in the Fama: “the pride and covetousness of the learned is so great, it will not suffer them to agree together”.
The 23rd Dialogue of the Menippus tells of how pious people have to starve because they give themselves freely and without ceremony. The 24th Dialogue says that too many books prevent the ordinary man from finding God and gaining understanding, while the teachers and priests call anyone an Anabaptist and a heretic who is simply going his own holy way. The 25th talks of the downfall of the universities, calling them schools where empty meaning, vanity, wastefulness, manure, intolerance of dissenters, hypocrisy, flattery, idle talk and lying dominate, and where talkers armed with “scholastic guns” are aimed against Christ and his foolish disciples, while the whole travesty rules over the poor people25.
By the time Andreae was born, in 1586, the political effectiveness of the radical spirituals had been suppressed. In 1535, the wild Anabaptist ‘kingdom’ of Münster fell with the death of every inhabitant, while spiritual prophets tried to recruit disappointed Anabaptists into sects of ‘invisible churches’. Five years later, Franck and Schwenckfeld were condemned by Lutherans and Calvinists at Smalkald. The ‘inner word’ of the radicals was denied. The Holy Spirit, said the Judges - speaking on its behalf - works exclusively through the exterior Word, written and preached. As George Williams expressed the consequences in his brilliant book, The Radical Reformation (1962) :
The ruthless suppression of the radical Reformation by the Catholic and Protestant princes alike led to the permanent disfigurement of the social and constitutional structure of central Europe, culminating in the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück with their sanction of the complete disintegration of the great medieval ideal of a universal Christian society. …they [the radical reformers] were covenanters of the ongoing Israel of faith, died confident in their election to live obediently at the suffering centre of redemptive history, in imitation of Him who taketh away the sins of the world.
Piety and Mysticism
There was another link which bound the genesis of the Rosicrucian Manifestos to the radical reformers. That link subsists in the development of German Pietism from out of the streams of radical reform, mysticism and theosophy (direct investigation of the life of God in the soul, expressed in terms of philosophical and alchemical dynamics).
A key author in this development was Valentin Weigel, who was born in Dresden in 1533 and who died in 1588 - the year of the Spanish Armada. Weigel published only one book in his lifetime, On the Life of Christ (1578), but after his death his works gained considerable underground currency. Some even crossed the Channel to England. Astrology Theologized was published in London in 1649 under the gnostic rubric Sapiens dominabitur Astris. Pirate copies emerged from all kinds of places, including, Carlos Gilly surmises, Augustus von Anhalt's secret printing-press at Plötzkau, (Augustus being, according to Gilly, the first known recipient of the Fama Fraternitatis). Weigel was certainly influenced by Caspar Schwenckfeld while his Life of Christ displays much erudition influenced by Paracelsus. The microcosm-macrocosm theory, so central to the thought-world of the ‘Rosicrucian’ is quite explicit in Weigel's work on the superiority of the light of grace to the natural cosmic dominants expressed in the images of the stars in Astrology Theologized :
Everything which is without is as that which is within, but the internal always excels the external in essence, virtue and operation, so we bear God within us, and God bears us in Himself. God hath us with Himself, and is nearer to us, than we are to ourselves. We have God everywhere with us, whether we know it, or know it not.
Weigel, a Protestant minister, came to consider his own professional calling vain, and the ordained ministry in general as the work of the Antichrist. He was against the Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577) with its emphasis on formal dogma and the straight-jacketing of the inner spiritual movement. His view of the cosmos was that of the Neoplatonic Theurgist : the Three Worlds, (as detailed in Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1533) : the material world, (a world of darkness in itself), the invisible celestial (angelic) world, and the supercelestial domain of God. God for Weigel is the summum bonum, reception of Whom is blessedness. When a person accepts salvation, he or she becomes a god. He followed Schwenckfeld's view on the supercelestial nature of Christ's flesh and the general Schwenckfeldian scheme of progressive deification.
Weigel's theosophic vision represents a Neoplatonic, gnostic reworking of orthodox Christian theology. He saw the magical power inherent in the theology but unexpressed by the orthodox Lutherans. Due to the synthetic and harmonising nature of Weigel's thought, he found approval among Andreae's circle and among all those who believed that true Christian spirituality was, in a very special sense, magical. Weigel's works had a practical, helpful and above all spiritual character. He was a great influence on Jacob Böhme (1575-1624) whose profound theosophic system was compared by his follower Abraham von Frankenburg to the Valentinian Gnostics in the manuscript Theophrastia Valentiniana (1627), as well as upon Andreae's friend and spiritual mentor Joannes Arndt of Anhalt (1555-1621). Arndt reworked Weigel's writings, and in so doing became the father of German Pietism, a movement which persists in influence to this day. Arndt wrote that “Christ has many servants but few followers.”
In 1618, while Böhme was busy writing his spiritual masterpieces in Görlitz, Johann Valentin Andreae founded his Christian Society, the Societas Christianae, whose twenty-six members included Tobias Adami, Christoph Besold and Joannes Arndt. (Andreae included the name of the late Tobias Hess on the list as well). Arndt was particuarly close to Andreae's friend Christoph Besold, the last link in our chain of association. Besold called Arndt “the most meritricious man in Christ's Church” and shared with him and with Andreae an extraordinarily deep and well-informed knowledge of medieval mysticism.
Christoph Besold (1577-1649)
Born at Esslingen in 1577, Besold was nine years older than Andreae, gaining a chair in Jurisprudence at Tübingen in 1610, three years after Andreae had been sent down from the university for writing a lude poem about a tutor's wife. Andreae learnt a great deal from the older man's encyclopaedic knowledge. Besold knew nine languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, was familiar with the Qabalah and occult sciences, was brilliant at Theology, at home with the Patristics, the scholastics and, above all, the Platonist mystics and cosmologists from the thirteenth century to his own : Ramon Lull (c.1232-1316); Cusanus (who used the Hermetic Asclepius, 1401-1464); Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494); Giordano Bruno (1548-1600); Eckhart (c.1260-1328); Heinrich Suso (c.1295-1366); Ruysbroek (1293-1381); Joannes Tauler (c.1300-1361) and the author of the Imitatio Christi (called Thomas à Kempis) : all vital links in the chain of the intellectual presentation of a spiritual gnosis, and who together represent a veritable catalogue of some of that movement's greatest literary moments. Andreae had unrestricted access to Besold's library (now housed at the Universitatsbibliothek in Salzburg).
Besold was also politically aware. He was passionate about Campanella's utopian Civitas solis (The City of the Sun, which became a model for Andreae's Reipublicae Christianopolitinae or Christianopolis of 1619, dedicated to Joannes Arndt), and was an enthusiast for the Italian anti-Habsburg liberal satirist Trajano Boccalini whose Ragguagli di Parnaso (News from Parnassus 1612-1613 - an extract from which was published with the 1614 Fama) was probably translated by Besold.
Besold's philosophical outlook, as revealed in his Signa temporum (Signs of the Times, 1614) and Axiomata Philosophico-Theologica (1616) was exeedingly profound and made a great impact on Johann Valentin Andreae, to whom it was dedicated. Like Andreae, Besold was fully aware that the hoped-for spiritual reformation had been hi-jacked by the ruling classes and soured by the theologians and ecclesiastical authorities. He set about trying to establish a basis for the true and authentic spiritual Christianity. In spite of the huge scope of this endeavour, and his vast knowledge, Besold himself was sincerely humble, favouring the doctrine of ‘learned ignorance’ detailed by Cusanus in the latter's famous work of this name. Besold realised that no theory or external knowledge-system could ever constitute absolute and everlasting knowledge. Following the mystics, Besold saw that God Himself can mostly only usefully be described in terms of what He is NOT. Ultimately, the highest wisdom is to know NOTHING26 .
Besold preferred act to theory and disputation. He saw the Church as an embattled ship calling on Christ to save it. The world to Besold was a sect : separated from God. The good man passes through the world as a voyager : “he must not be in the world as if it were his native land; he passes by as a traveller” said Besold in an utterance highly reminiscent of views expressed in the Nag Hammadi Library such as the imperative to “Become passers-by” so as to remind Gnostics of the relative character of this world. According to Besold, the pretended sages of the world in their blindness, regard people who behave as Christians as mad, and insofar as they claim to be Christians themselves do the name a dishonour. Besold shares with Hess, Andreae and Comenius the theme of the folly of the world - to be in right relation to it must mean appearing foolish to the worldly.
Besold regarded erudition as an obstacle to true devotion. Besold cites the melancholy voice of Ecclesiastes : With much knowledge cometh great sorrow. Even the most assiduous researches reveal the full profundity of neither nature nor the human-being in spite of vaunted claims to the contrary. The false sage is like a caged bird
: always turning around on himself. Pious philosophy on the other hand does not make for multiple theories, but it does make us better. The demon of the savants (the learned-perverted) is curiosity, offering much work for poisoned fruit. This theme will have a great influence on Andreae, and arm him with a useful category to describe many of the absurd responses to the Fama.
For Besold, curiosity obstructs the revelation of God in man. The “curious” are like Martha who obstructs calm and confidence with her incessant worries about domestic necessities. Rather, Besold advises, man should strive for the “most simple simplicity”*. Humility is the true foundation of all Christian life. It is the trunk of the Cross, the other arms being according to Besold, obedience, poverty, and chastity. The Cross is the only intimate knowledge of the Word of God. The ‘real thing’ is interior; the Reformation had failed to reform the heart. Those who were closest to genuine spiritual regeneration were attacked from all sides. While before the reform of Luther the Church had been dominated by Pharisees, now it had been taken over by the scribes. Whereas religion is firstly communicated through acts of love, the religion of the letter kills. Christianity, according to Besold, is not a system or theory but a practice through which we advance by Grace. Luther's ‘justification by faith alone’ is insufficient if not followed up and accompanied by good works, acts of love, remembering that it is not the earthy ‘I’ (ego) that does these good things but God within, without Whom we are helpless, though we may consider ourselves powerful and impervious to circumstance. The Godless are obsessed with insurance; death will cure us of the illusion. We are not saved by our own efforts, externally generated, but by the sole merits of Christ dead and raised within us. We must die and be resurrected with Him : an inner alchemy. Without Christ-the-Stone we are lead, truly dead. (As the “living Jesus” of the Nag Hammadi Library says : “The dead are not alive and the living will not die”).
The Golden Builders Page 17