Now, where are you, who force your paper peerage down everyone's throat, while he [Hess] covered his noble birth, you, who pretend to have friends in the highest circles, where he just stayed away from them; you, who beg the great ones to tip you, while he disdained huge salaries, you, who gather the crumbs of the rich, while he did not wish to brush shoulders with the upper-classes. No-one else but our Hess would have been able to resist the temptations of court life, the ambushes of money and the tickles of homages, for he was inaccessible to the invitations of the wealthy, but free and open-handedly reacted to requests of anybody else.
The storm around Menippus led to a swift second edition, but Andreae hesitated to follow it up with his next work, Christian Mythologies.60 He had already lost friends over Menippus and there was his family to think about, and his future as a writer. Andreae thought it out and with the encouragement of genuine friends set to publishing his new collection. Andreae says he must speak out; not to do so would be a criminal sin. If Truth hides herself, even the stones would cry out : “We are not going, by the horror of our predecessor's faults, to sin by default where they sinned by excess”, wrote Andreae. This time he would nail his colours to the mast and put his name to the work. The theme of the book is nothing less than the Truth.
The title-page shows the gates to a temple. On either side of the gates are simple pictures showing all the creative deeds of man, precisely portrayed so that every visitor can learn a basic framework for knowledge without having to wade through an entire library: Theology; Mathematics; Grammar; Politics; History; Mechanics and Agriculture. At the base is a head with three faces. Looking to the left towards the word ‘Truth’ is the face of a youth. In the centre : middle-age; and looking to the right, where is written the ‘Good’ is an aged face. The three ages each bear an inscribed imperative : for youth, discuss it; for middle-age, pursue it; for old age : be wise.
Andreae followed Theodore Zwinger, whom he much admired, in using simple pictures as educational aids (rare at the time), an educational ideal more fully expressed in Andreae's Christianopolis which both Zwinger and Andreae's younger contemporary and correspondent Comenius both believed in. The aim was to make the entrance to the Temple of Science as straightforward a matter as possible, without pomposity and obscurantism, so prevalent and damaging a feature of the university life which he parodies so successfully. Christian Mythologies' collection of allegories and fables ‘takes on’ alchemists, astrological calendar-makers, the Rosicrucian Furore, the class-system, Scepticism, the Universities, Error and the exile of Truth. Andreae also gives an answer to Bücher's savage personal attack on him.
There are two kinds of literati I especially fear; the too-talkatives and crafty exponents of dialectic and rhetoric. Because they try to convince me of what they want and want to blame me for anything they like.
Andreae says that such people are always trying to make people believe that they live in the most learned and God-fearing time of all times, and that anyone who criticises this is guilty of treason against the Fatherland61.
If anyone dares saying that one should not let the unworthy become teachers and doctors, then he is immediately interpreted as trying to undermine the upper-classes. If a man says that the young should learn languages, then he gets the answer that you should emigrate to the Garamants of Libya. Should one criticise that the doctor and tutor title could only be had by paying large sums of money, the answer comes back that society cannot consist of tailors and cobblers alone. If one maintained the view that to address people with very long titles is barbaric, then you would be for all times proclaimed as an adherent of Karlstadt. And if one further objected that the poor people are treated like animals, this would mean refusal to accept your superiors. If a man should preach reciprocal love, he would immediately be called a Rosicrucian. If you would ask for more freedom, the people would fear that all the barriers were coming down. And more : if you don't like to swear, then you're an Anabaptist. If you dislike boozing and feasting, then you're a Papist; if you fight against prostitution, then you will be taken for a fanatic and a dreamer; if you try not to lie, then you must be a disciple of Schwenckfeld; and if lastly you dislike pictures and pomp, then you are certainly taken to be a Calvinist.
Andreae hits the nail on the head, time and time again. Regarding the Rosicrucian Furore, Andreae comes up with an extraordinary and painful inversion of the myth of the discovery of the tomb of Christian Rosenkreuz, linking it directly to his attack on corruption.
Andreae envisions a scene where a number of his contemporaries, following certain indices, discover a secret vault. In an almost sick parody of the Fama the explorers break down a wall, whereafter torches in hand they enter the darkness. Bearing their fiery torches aloft they discover a modest sarcophagus with an inscription upon it : mea tempora - ‘my times’. The men anxiously remove the lid. Inside the sarcophagus lies a cadaver, horribly mutilated, soiled and decaying, the flesh consumed. After great effort they succeed in uncovering a beautiful bronze plaque by the cadaver's rotting head :
I, THE TRUTH DAUGHTER OF GOD ASSASSINATED BY THE DUPLICITY OF SATAN BY THE CORRUPTION OF THE WORLD BY THE FEEBLENESS OF THE FLESH BY THE DESPOTISM OF TYRANNY BY THE INDOLENCE OF THE PRIESTS BY THE MALIGNITY OF POLITICS BY THE SUPERFICIALITY OF HISTORIANS BY THE FOLLY OF THE WISE BY THE STUPIDITY OF THE PEOPLE
I REST HERE WITHIN THE MUD OF THE LIE IN ONE HUNDRED YEARS THE SUN WILL SEE ME AGAIN GREETINGS O POSTERITY!
This is the tomb of Truth. In a startling image, Andreae has succeeded in condensing his entire outlook and the real substance of the Fama as well. As the ‘myth’ continues, once this crushing epitaph is published all who read it react with a mixture of sadness and joy. The past is vilified for not understanding the error. The response of one observer (Bücher?) is to exalt the present, while another erects a magnificent funerary monument to dignify the rediscovered Truth, adding the following words to those on the plaque :
If we had lived in the times of our fathers We would have been their accomplices in the assassination of the Truth
This is Andreae with the gloves off. It is a sign of the perversity of the world that while his Rosenkreuz fantasy is remembered, this devastatingly truthful work lies rotting in obscure libraries. The Truth is assassinated…
As ought to be crystal clear by now, the essential proposition of the Christian Mythologies is the resurrection and the return of the Truth. Truth is not to be found in the world but in the sacra universitas, the holy city. The door to this bastion is inscribed with the following : The Word of God. Andreae is still working for the spiritual reformation. Rejected by the masses, dishonoured by the philosophers and pseudo-savants, unwanted at court and repudiated by the Church, Truth had no choice but to exile herself. In Andreae's dialogue between Philalethes (Lover of Truth) and Alethea (Truth), the former seeks refuge in Eleutheropolis (from the Greek eleutheros=liberty) the City of Liberty, but this country of Liberty is only a Utopia62. Besides, Truth is faithful and still hopes that the darkness extending over Germany is only an eclipse, and that at some time the Light - not the ‘last light of the apocalypse’ - will shine again in all its startling glory. Social inequalities will cease as will all things that stem from the gulf between belief and practice.
With regard to the Rosicrucian Fraternity -what, that again! one can almost hear Andreae saying - the imaginary fraternity which promised so much in its conception, the whole business has gone beyond a joke:
Most indubitably I - Alethea [Truth] - hold nothing in common with this Brotherhood… seeing that at this present the theatre is filled with altercations, with a great clash of opinion, that the fight is carried on by vague hints and malicious conjectures, I have withdrawn myself utterly, that I may not be involved unwisely in so dubious and slippery a concern.
Andreae's succeeding works represent not only an elucidation of what he stood for but also, it seems to me, a kind of expiation for his share of the responsibility in setting off such a cavalcade of
bizarreries, for encouraging the “little curiosity brothers”, those who preferred, as he put it, “some artifical or strange way” to the simple, beautiful truth. And yet even in the madness was method, for it is without doubt true that the search for the fictitious Brotherhood has led - and still leads people to a real experience of the spiritual life - and if the Rosicrucian idea was truly inspired, then are we to deny that it was anything less than the spirit of love which inspired him?
Perhaps most touching in the Christian Mythologies are Johann Valentin Andreae's heartfelt words reserved for the two men who, he says, have influenced him the most : Tobias Hess and Christoph Besold. Indeed, the last of the three books is dedicated to Besold :
I owe a little to a lot of people. To very few, I owe a lot. To you, excellent man, I owe everything. Because whatever you initiated in and for me for so many years, now others who were jealous and envious of you, now shout out with trumpets, as if it were their own.
Andreae calls Time
In 1619 Andreae turned his attention for the last time to his most remembered creation, the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross. The furor was getting in the way of the truth; the Fama had ceased to be an enlightening phenomenon. While initially it had made people stop and think - and Andreae was content to watch its progress with a chuckle, now it was a “fantasy”: “the heart and scandal of occultism in our time”. “Would that the remaining chimes and little bells by which this fable was noised abroad be melted down; I mean that I wish their prolific writings would all go up in smoke!”63 It should be noted that he refers to their prolific writings : the dozens of comments on the Fama, the speculations, the claims, the hysteria. He knew what the Fama was all about, and he was content to know some few others now did as well. He did not stand in the way of Joachim Morsius when the latter visited him in Calw in 1629. Ambivalence was central to Andreae's genius.
In Turris Babel64 Andreae finally ‘called time’ on the furore. He reckoned that those who claimed to be Rosicrucians could well be Christian (the implicit but unseen fraternity of humankind) but that the manifold writings referring to his non-existent Brotherhood tended to attract the curiosi who want fancy spectacles without having tried to use their own eyes first. Andreae set his sights clearly, once and for all :
I shall cultivate the religion of Christ; I shall respect the government of Christ; I shall devote myself to Christian knowledge; I shall embrace the Christian way of life; I shall delight myself with the roses of Christianity and shall bear its cross; I shall uphold Christianity's order, and shall submit to its discipline; I shall live as a Christian and I shall die as a Christian. And then it will truly happen - to use their words that IESVS MIHI OMNIA.
Johann Valentin Andreae and History
The following statement appears in Dame Frances Yates' last book, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age65:
Many suggestions as to the origin of the name [Rosicrucian] have been made, but in moving along the historical line which we are following, the suggestion which seems most likely is that the [Francesco] Giorgi type of Christian Cabala acquired this name when it became associated with Elizabethanism, with the Tudor Rose, with [John] Dee's scientific British imperialism, with a messianic movement for uniting Europeans against the Catholic-Habsburg powers.
The Yates view of a British origin for the Rosicrucian movement, tied in directly to movements around the election of Frederick V of the Palatinate with Christian Rosenkreuz a Germanicised version of Spenser's ‘Red Cross knight’ from the Faerie Queen will simply not hold water. It is almost completely misleading. A full analysis of the life and associations of Johann Valentin Andreae removes the need for such a broad-sweep approach.
Andreae has been too often regarded as a kind of weird, strange or fringe figure, at one with the kind of literature sparked off by the publication of the Fama. Andreae was a most serious ‘player’ in the period, intellectually exiled not for strange occult opinions but because he had the courage to describe things as they were. Was then the man who wrote the Fama a ‘Rosicrucian’? In terms of what that word has come to denote, we had better say that he was not. It would be more correct to think of him as a ‘left-wing’ radical reformer of exceptional wisdom, knowledge, inspired cynicism and practical spiritual experience; he was certainly not a hot-head or automatic rebel. His writings on the social system of Germany in his day are remarkably prescient and advanced. Christian Socialists of the nineteenth century such as F.D. Maurice could claim him as a (superior) predecessor without doing violence to Andreae's real place in history (which of course utterly transcends politico-religious socialism). Furthermore, his scientific views were extremely advanced and aware. In the battle (1623-1633) between the Rosicrucianist and Paracelsian Dr Robert Fludd and the ‘mechanistic philosophy’ of the Jesuit Marin Mersenne (friend and promoter of René Descartes) stimulated by the Rosicrucian Manifestos, it is obvious to this author that Andreae would have sought a harmony between the world as experienced by the senses and the world as conceived in the spirit.
The appalling split between spirit and matter, of which Descartes has been seen as the harbinger, could easily have been avoided if truth had not been buried in sectarian squabbling. (Scientists and philosophers can be sectarians too - a mentality Andreae tried so hard to abolish). It has taken well over 300 years to establish the open-mindedness which could have been, and should have been established as a principle of learning in the seventeenth century. This split between the respective realities of mind and matter lies behind the intuitive suspicion of the modern which has driven people of feeling and intuition into near-despair as the orthodoxy of single-minded, blind and pathetically confident materialism has been thrust ever more desperately upon the world : a vain sense of security which is still held to be the ‘distinctive contribution’ of the West to world culture66.
Was Andreae an occultist? This question is anachronistic for the early seventeenth century. The idea of ‘occultism’ as a separate subject or fringe discipline is a relatively late development. What we would call ‘scientific’ and occult mentalities interwove in this period. One needs only to recall the now generally recognised fact that Sir Isaac Newton spent more time on alchemy than he did on gravitational science to realise that Nature for the men of learning had become an infinitely fascinating vista where all manner of unknown energies operated. Newton was happy simply to illuminate one area of the cosmic picture which indicated an harmonious, mathematically intelligible structure. Andreae would have been delighted to read Newton's Principia. Undoubtedly the greatest praise for mathematics as a discipline in the Renaissance and its aftermath came from highly gnosticised magi such as Pico della Mirandola and John Dee. The gripe of men like Andreae was not against the idea of Magic, (Andreae was a keen and advanced mathematician) but of its perversion in cheap, marketable form as in for example, popular astrology, and claims for all-embracing knowledge systems built on a portion of insight (such as Khunrath's Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae. 1598).
‘Magic’ for Andreae embraced all aspects of knowledge, since it is above all a natural system of thought, resting on the awareness that nature is magical : seen through the right eyes it bears a spiritual quality (“Was Solomon in all his glory arrayed as one of these?”). For Andreae, Magic does not mean Myth. It does not mean woolly-thinking and above all it does not mean escapism. While the image of the stage- ‘magician’ has unfortunately dominated the usage of the word magic in the West (when it is not seen as a ‘black art’), it is clear that the cosmos can be seen as one vast magician's topper, continually bringing forth the unknown and the marvellous. If we limit our emotional and spiritual response to the universe as scientists, it is merely to concentrate on the measuring of new phenomena. Scientists without awe and wonder do not make the best scientists. It is not surprising that our culture is experiencing a reaction to the myopic dogmatism of scientism, that is, science as a belief system. It is, I think, remarkable and regrettable how many second-rate theologians and phil
osophers have hung onto the hem of dogmatic scientism's garment in the hope of godless miracles.
Was Andreae a Gnostic? Dr. Carlos Gilly put it this way to me in 1989 :
The Rosicrucian Movement was undoubtedly a gnostic movement. However, if any of the authors of the Rosicrucian Manifestos had been asked if he considered himself a Gnostic, he'd have answered that he did not. At that time, the image that people had of Gnostics was practically handed to them by the writings of the opposing side : the one-sided writings of the Fathers of the Church who had fought Gnostics from the first centuries of Christianity. However, within the Rosicrucian Manifestos can be found many elements of traditional Gnosis so that the Manifestos can be seen as a kind of ring in the chain which goes from Valentinian Gnosis, the Gnosis of the 2nd and 3rd centuries after Christ; passing through the Cathars, passing through the alchemists of the Middle Ages, passing through the mysticism of the Middle Ages; the Neoplatonic and Renaissance movement - and, above all, passing through Paracelsus.
Furthermore the gnostic character of the Rosicrucian thought-world was recognised at the time both by their enemies and particularly by the admirers of Jacob Böhme (such as Abraham von Frankenburg and Gottfried Arnold) with whose writings the Rosicrucian works were frequently associated and often read side by side with. There are many elements of Andreae's thought - not counting his early and fecund immersion in the world of alchemy - which are clearly of Hermetic provenance : the discipline of the senses; the refining of the mind in order to receive divine guidance; the suspicion of the material/ego - (divorced from spirit) world as in the grip of Satan; the idea that life is a journey upon a perilous ocean towards a spiritual homeland; the idea of man locked in a prison67; the emphasis on spirit and love over formal beliefs and works; the recognition of the transmundane light existing in all religions; his overwhelming sense of the Dignity of Man and the sorrow at seeing such a potentially divine creature behaving as a monster and, above all, his dramatic sense of the cosmic dimensions of human problems and the realisation that Christ's Kingdom - which for Andreae is a kind of joyful, anarchic, truly free-willed and spiritually-minded collective - is not of this world.
The Golden Builders Page 21