My Hippocrates has died, my Machaon, HESS, whose abilities made him a God to the sick. Sorrow protests here : “either he should not have been born, or he should not have passed away so soon.” But reason said : “Hess was a peer to Job, unless he has born more crosses than he”. But since this worn out world treads down on virtue and rewards those without merit instead of the meritorious, God has called this man of merit and now he is a citizen of Mount Olympus and he is full of joy, he, HESS, who before has been so unhappy.
For Christoph Besold the furor merely confirmed what he had always suspected about the stupidity and waywardness of humankind : curiosity satisfies, the truth can ‘go by the board’. In 1634 he would convert to Catholicism : “A long-time wanderer got snatched away by the wind” is how Andreae described the occurrence in his Autobiography. Andreae reckoned Besold's knowledge was too vast for his move to Rome to carry much conviction. Andreae regarded the move as spiritual death. What seems most likely is that Besold's tired mind was simply sick to death of controversy. The on-going atrocities of the war must have made him see again that fighting over religious affiliation was utterly pointless. It seems his spiritual homeland was, in a sense (like the frustrated Victorian romantics who followed Cardinal Newman to Rome) in the (so-called) undivided Church of the Middle Ages. When his encyclopaedic Orbis Novis Thesaurus was published after the war he was content to use Libavius' entry to sum up the Rosicrucians : “Chiliasts, Prophets, reformers, Paracelsians, Paradise and Rose-garden dreamers…” In Besold's copy of the Fama (now in the university library of Salzburg) he wrote : “Autorum suspicor J.V.A.” There was no suspicion about it; he knew perfectly well of Andreae's contribution - but with the insanity of the war raging, it was wise to be discrete.
Besold's view of the world seems to be well embodied in the extract from Boccalini's News from Parnassus which was printed with the Fama in 1614. It is highly likely that Besold was the translator. The inclusion of the text ought to have alerted readers to the true nature of the manifesto : a ludibrium (as Andreae called it) - a dramatic joke with a serious intent. The “Reformation of the whole wide world” is presented in the Boccalini extract as universally desirable but practically impossible. In it we have the picture of Apollo holding court on Parnassus (remember Helicon juxta Parnassus as the source of Andreae's Turbo in 1616) where Pico della Mirandola is complaining that the noise of the reformers is preventing him from thinking! The news of the world heard on Parnassus is so bad - people are committing suicide rather than endure it any longer - that Apollo calls as many wise people as possible to debate how to reform the world. The big guns arrive : Socrates, Solon - all have their say. One suggests that the problem is that people lie, therefore it would be a good idea to put a window in their chests so you could see what their heart was thinking. Another objects that this would make social intercourse a matter of frustration. Another suggests that the problem is greed and money - therefore why not get rid of gold altogether and let everybody have the same? This is in turn rejected as producing social sterility, sameness, tedium and a loss of value. And so the arguments rage. Nobody can agree on the ideal solution to the ills of the world. Eventually, Apollo sighs at the terminal wisdom of the world and suggests announcing to the expectant crowds at the foot of the mountain - who are anxiously attending the court's deliberation - that the prices of vegetables are to be lowered. The result : widespread rejoicing!50 It should not be difficult to imagine how a man who saw the humour of this would regard the Rosicrucian furor.
And Andreae, what of him? In April 1614 he married the niece of Bishop Erasmus Grüninger (Besold became godfather to his three children, along with Abraham Hölzl and Wilhelm Wense51) and settled into a tireless Christian ministry in Vaihingen, not far from Tübingen. What with the death of Hess and these new assumptions of responsibility, Andreae's imaginative mind was doubtless steadied to some extent. However, that mind had already been moving towards a more serious approach to the problems of Germany before the Fama was published. He was under the eye of his father-in-law. Furthermore, Andreae was attacked by members of the university as a dreamer with dangerous views, as a friend of the Paracelsian Hess, as a social revolutionary, suspected heretic, secret magician. At some stage he would have to justify himself and make it clear to all what it was that he stood for. His first task was to clear his table of unpublished writings so that he could devote himself to his main work of presenting unambiguously his own conception of the ideal fraternity.
Andreae was twenty-eight years old when he began the editing and re-writing process, and his work had attained a new maturity. It would be easy for him to disown his older work to some extent as the peregrinations of a young mind. With regard to the Fama, that task would be even easier since the furor demonstrated the need not only for himself, but for German religious culture in general to ‘grow up’. In his Autobiography52 Andreae wrote that he had devoted the early months of 1610 to a number of writings which were later brought to the light of day by the agency of other people. It is difficult to find any candidates for these works other than the Fama Fraternitatis and a reworking of the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz. Perhaps it was Andreae or one of his associates who brought the Chymical Wedding to Jungius, Lazarus Zetzner's reader in Strasbourg. After the publication of the Confessio Fraternitatis in 1615 - the second ‘manifesto’ almost certainly conceived and directed by Tobias Hess (but not intended for publication) - it might have struck Andreae that it would be interesting for someone to consider his youthful work written (he notes in his Autobiography) in 1605. The Chymische Hochzeit would have to appear to all but the dullest dolt as a work of fiction, he doubtless thought. Thus people might get the idea that the Fama should also be regarded as a specialist type of literature. It could be that Andreae was trying to save the day before the Rosicrucian business got completely out of hand. Alas the Chymical Wedding was taken as yet another hieratic pronouncement from the mysterious Brotherhood.
The Chymical Wedding was published in 1616 along with two other works which should have had the effect of neutralising the absurd notion that the weird Brotherhood of Christian Rosenkreuz actually existed, as well as guiding enthusiasts of the Fama into the direction in which Andreae wished them to go. One gets the feeling that for the first two or three years after the publication of the Fama Andreae was more or less pleased to keep the pot boiling so long as his works might influence the outcome of the furor. Andreae's initial pleasure in the sport is revealed in a speech put in the mouth of Alethea (=Truth) in his Christian Mythologies, published in January 1618 :
When it came about, not a long time since, that some on the literary stage were arranging a play scene of certain ingenious parties, I stood aside as one who looks on, having regard to the fashion of the age which seizes with avidity on new-fangled notions. As spectator, it was not without a certain quality of zest that I beheld the battle of the books and marked subsequently an entire change of actors.
Andreae after 1617 would change his tune, and, as we shall see, it is not difficult to see why. Nevertheless, 1616 marked a good beginning for Andreae's life as a published writer. We can see him facing up to his own youthful escapist drives in Turbo.53 Turbo is a beautiful work on a Faust-like theme but with the emphasis on the search for wisdom rather than power. The play tells of how Turbo (a play on the alchemical work the Turba philosophorum) studies, then goes to France where he has a disappointing love-affair. He puts all his hopes into alchemy. The treatment of alchemy is somewhat ambiguous, since it is a scenario for charlatanism, especially where the “accursed gold-making” is concerned : a practice ridiculed in the Fama. Andreae is emphasising the spiritual alchemy which leads to the regenerated human-being. Alchemists are mocked in Turbo as devotees of ‘Beger’, an anagram of that famous Arabic alchemist known to the west as Geber. We are also introduced to Andreae's alter-ego Peregrinus, who reappears in two works, one published in 1618 and the other in 1619.54 In these succeeding works we find the signs of the new A
ndreae. After years of wandering among the errors of the world - the “land of errors”- Peregrinus arrives in Elysium. His steadfastness in the face of the world's manifold illusions (cf : Bunyan's later Vanity Fair in The Pilgrim's Progress) earns him a new life given by God, the “highest doctor”. Peregrinus changes and becomes a new man. In fact he becomes a Christian. The new attitude is clear in the dialogue between ‘Christianus’ (a kind of retired Peregrinus) and ‘Curiosus’ written for Menippus a year before Civis Christianus in 1617, and which was quoted at length earlier. Now I hope we are beginning to get a glimpse of where Andreae ‘was coming from’ and why he was to become so impatient with the Rosicrucian Furore.
Later in the year (1619) Peregrinus will appear yet again, washed up on the shore of a mysterious island while his heart is being cleaned. The island contains the object of Andreae's utopian masterpiece : the city of Christianopolis55, Andreae's ideal civic society, full of science, medicine, art, idealism, harmony, cosmic consciousness, practical charity - all running under benign angelic care. This latter work must have been in England's Sir Francis Bacon's mind when he published his ideal island civilisation in his New Atlantis (1627), another Utopian, Rosicrucian-inspired classic, and itself an inspirer of enlightened scientific advance throughout the years of the Civil War in Britain and the Thirty Years War in Germany.
Andreae's first batch of printed writings also included the Theca56. This book offers clear evidence that Andreae and Hess participated in the production of the Confessio Fraternitatis57. The Theca retains those passages of the Confessio with reference to the superiority of the Bible and associated pious observations. The words of the Confessio regarding the highest philosophy which “containeth much of Theology and medicine, but little of the wisdom of the law” reappear in the Theca. The Naometrian and chiliastic material is rejected outright, considered by Andreae to be products of the curiosi. The references to the R.C. Brothers are replaced by references to “the good”, the “humble” : those chosen by God as ‘His own’ who can interpret his signature in His Creation and in His Word. Was this work put out to defend Hess's reputation after the calumny thrown at him in his lifetime by academic ‘colleagues’ at Tübingen? The book says that it owes its authorship to Hess “in part from published works” chosen and “in part suggested by the consideration of pious thoughts.” However in 1642 a communication from Andreae to Augustus of Braunschweig contradicts this, saying that it was his own work.
There is still an enigma surrounding the Theca but happily it is of no great importance to us - suffice to say that it shows the literary involvement of Andreae and Hess in the genesis of the Rosicrucian movement, an involvement also supported by Joannes Arndt's close friend Melchior Breler who was physician to Augustus of Braunschweig (Andreae's friend and patron) and who wrote that the Fama was assuredly written by “three eminent men” in order to discover the Philosopher's Stone.
In 1617 Andreae had a shot at hitting two birds with one (philosopher's) stone. Firstly, the incessant communications begging entry into the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross and secondly, Andreae's first explicit printed attempt to define the essence of Christian spirituality. His method was gentle. He invites his readers to join the Fraternitas Christi : the Fraternity of Christ. Entry is free. No magical skills are necessary but it might require some very hard work58. How many would wish to be a candidate for membership in a spiritual Brotherhood whose only aim was sacred love? There was no furore.
In this beautiful little book Andreae contrasts the world, inspired and governed by Satan, with the little number of real Christians. Although they are few, they are yet secure on the perfidious ocean in the little barca of Christ, whose mast is the cross. (Journeying across the oceans to the mystical homeland is another favourite image of Andreae - as is that of discovering wonders in secret vaults). Christianity in its deepest and purest form (invisible to the world) is the great fraternity worth responding to because Christ's love wanted it to be so. Those who enter become “friends of God”, a designation used, incidentally, by the medieval Cathars for those who joined them. Andreae links the life of this Fraternity to the exploration of nature. Looking at the magnificent harmony which men of learning have discerned in the cosmos, what more beautiful task exists, asks Johann Valentin, than to discover the wisdom of the creator in all its creatures? Such study requires effort, disciplined, arduous, prolonged work. Renunciation is required, not lust for power. The true scientist, if he is to be true, needs be a man of God Whose Mind is discernible in all things. In the same year Andreae will personify this attitude in the figure of Christianus. Magic is neither more nor less than the diligent study of all the sciences. The method of magic : hard work and perseverence. Christianus is contrasted to Curiosus, the person who believes that magic is a short-cut to the truth. According to Andreae the search for the Truth requires self-mastery and Christian discipleship : disciple, as in discipline. The greater part of mankind are characterised as the curiosi, forever distracted by the latest new thing, unconsciously gripped by the Satan of the world; trapped among the vanities of the world, they live in chains they cannot feel. The supreme reason is not to listen to human reason but to believe in God who is omnipresent, omniscient, just and merciful and to manifest faith in reality. Only the heart inhabited by God is really aware of the authentic philosophy, the aim of whose study is to regenerate man who, on becoming regenerate, is made son, brother and heir to the wealthiest fraternity imaginable : true cosmic citizenship.
What a contrasting sight greeted Andreae's eyes in October 1617! The potential citizens of the cosmos had other things on their minds. Pamphlets flew from one end of Europe to the other. Theologians bickered, tempers flared, knives were drawn. It was the centenary year of the Reformation - 100 glorious years of ‘freedom’!
Meanwhile, news was arriving from Bohemia. Ferdinand, persecutor of the Styrian Protestants had been advanced to the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia and planned to succeed his elderly cousin Matthias as Holy Roman Emperor. Ferdinand did not give a mark for promises made to the Bohemian Protestants. He was a Counter-Reformer and believed that the sword was more powerful than the pen. Back in Tübingen, self-congratulation was the order of the day. Lutheran orthodoxy was there to stay. What a joy to be in the Truth! What a pleasure to have taken the Right Side! This is how Andreae saw through what he sincerely considered to be a vast hypocritical illusion. He put pen to paper and wrote one of the most brilliant and precise works of practical satire ever written : Menippus59.
The title-page gave its source as Cosmopolis : City of the Cosmos. The book was dedicated to the “sensible and simple” people of the Antipodes, implying that his own hemisphere was ridiculous. Andreae took on the whole German situation. He declared that the true Christian athletes for evangelical purity, Luther and his friends - men who aimed in the first instance to spiritualise and revive the Church had been betrayed by a fantasy, a joke. (The reference to Luther and the popular reformers was a necessary courtesy which, once made, slips out of the main picture. Andreae was no simple Protestant).
The author of Menippus did not pull his punches. As far as he was concerned, to serve Christianity was to serve the Truth : to tell it like it is. Andreae set about pouring some light into the dim cave in which the fools lived, congratulating one another, backbiting each other, jealous of one other, impatient with one another, judging one another, destroying one another. Johann Valentin Andreae believed the pen was mightier than the sword.
Dr Carlos Gilly (to whom we should all be indebted for having discovered and undertood the value of so much ‘new’ Rosicrucian material) has described Menippus as a work coming from the “radical left-wing of the Reformation”, and I believe him to be absolutely right. The 61st discourse, for example, calls in no uncertain terms for full religious tolerance. A person's belief should not be linked to the state he was born in. All religions contain good people. Andreae followed the Spanish radical Giacomo Aconcio in declaring all theological disputes to be u
nimportant. Heretics do not exist. They are created in the minds of theologians, who seem to have nothing better to do. It is always pious people who are branded as being “impious” or heretical. University professors should listen to the “exemplary martyrdom” of the Anabaptists who are rejected by those who consider themselves educated. Christ will recognise His own, even in the flames.
Andreae denies the right of Christians to make religious judgements. It is clear that there are Christians who surpass even the barbarians in cruelty and torture, frequently applied over matters where no definitive judgement exists, frequently applied in dark places with torture instruments, threats and fire. Those who shout loudest against the Machiavellian character of the aristocracy are themselves the most Machiavellian. Machiavellianism has always existed. All Machiavelli was doing was plainly stating the perennial wheelings and dealings of the ruling classes. If Andreae had wished ‘to make friends and influence people’ he would not have written Menippus. It brought him more hatred and envy than any other work. He was on his way to becoming an intellectual exile. Copies of Menippus were confiscated in Tübingen. Andreae had upset the status quo.
An extremely dangerous attack came in vocal and printed form from Tübingen's professor of oratory, Caspar Bücher. Bücher described Menippus as an “alchemical abortion” : the author biting the hand that had fed him, putting him in the rank of low-level ranters, haters of learning such as Karlstadt : a notorious anti-intellectual and Anapbaptist radical. In disguised form, Bücher hinted that all the world knew who this ‘Menippus’ was. (The book had been published anonymously). Everyone knew that he belonged to the circle of Tobias Hess and that they planned a quixotic ‘reformation of the whole world’. Was Andreae thinking of Bücher and his slander against his late friend Hess when he wrote the following in The Immortality of Hess?
The Golden Builders Page 20