In the fallen world around them, did the men and women of this era see darkness and the night everywhere? When Marlowe’s Faustus asks Mephistopheles “How comes it then, that thou art out of hell?” the spirit answers “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it,” asking in return:
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?95
For early modern Europeans, the night could indeed represent hell on earth. The night and its darkness expressed fundamental truths about witchcraft, spirits, Hell, and the Devil. In chapter 8 I examine the illumination of these dark features of the European mental landscape by new quotidian and metaphorical uses of the night, darkness, and light in the second half of the seventeenth century. The new truths of the resulting Enlightenment would redefine “night’s black agents” for the modern world.
Chapter Three Seeking the Lord in the night, 1530–1650
3.1 Discovering the night
In the fiery exchanges of the first decades of the Reformation all sides cast their struggle as one of light against darkness, Christ against Antichrist. This was the world of the witch persecutions as well. Loud accusations of spiritual darkness or benighted ignorance drowned out the quieter tones that occasionally described darkness and the night as a path to the Divine. Yet by the end of the sixteenth century, a very different sense of darkness and the night emerged in Christian visual culture, spirituality, and literature. The art historian Maria Rzepinska was one of the first to call attention to the “‘discovery of darkness’ or the ‘discovery of night’” in European Christian culture at the very end of the sixteenth century. She examined the use of “active darkness” to create shafts of artificial, condensed light in baroque painting, especially in the works of the late Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Ribera, Honthorst, and Georges de La Tour.1 The use of this intense chiaroscuro suggested to Rzepinska “a powerful European trend which introduced darkness, inseparable from light, as an iconic and psychological factor of essential significance.”2 In similar terms, Chris Fitter has documented the rise of the poetic nocturne in the English Renaissance, whose “poetry, masques and painting, in revaluing the night as a time of beauty and profundity, overturn … the construction predominant in classical and medieval traditions.”3 Fitter also dates the earliest evidence of this “nocturnal revolution” to the end of the sixteenth century. The work of Rzepinska and Fitter on this “discovery of night” sought to contextualize the development in relation to European painting and English literature respectively, but their studies lead us to a broader question: how did early modern Europeans use the night to think about God in the turbulent period between the Reformation and the Enlightenment?
In this chapter I explore evidence of changing attitudes toward the night in the piety and practices of the Anabaptist movement, in the mystic theology of John of the Cross (1542–91) and Carmelite reform, and in the theosophy of Jacob Böhme (1575–1624). I then show how a wide range of writers across confessions, including John Donne (1572–1631), Johann Arndt (1555–1621), and Claude Hopil (c. 1580–after 1630) used the night in ascetic, apophatic, mystic, and epistemological terms as a powerful metaphor in the first half of the seventeenth century. This approach allows us to understand the uses of the night in early modern culture in terms more precise and revealing than those of previous scholarship and go beyond the general contrast between a positive night and a negative night.
3.2 Seeking the Lord in the night
Across Christian confessions, the confrontation with lasting division, uncertainty, and persecution in the wake of the Reformation was a painful reality. Yet in this period the few and circumscribed positive associations of the night described in chapter 1 gave way to much broader and more complex associations of darkness and the night with the Divine as Christians used the night to think about God in unprecedented and powerful ways. In this section I argue that the night became more sacred and more meaningful as an unintended consequence of the persecution and clandestine worship attendant to confessional formation. The connection between confessional division, persecution, and a new appreciation of the night is especially apparent in the new relationship with darkness and the night seen among sixteenth-century Anabaptists and Mennonites, in the mystic theology of John of the Cross, and in the complex and all-encompassing theosophy of Jacob Böhme. Their experiences and writings reveal a central set of metaphorical uses of the night that will allow us to survey the hidden terrain of darkness and devotion in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
As territorial churches established themselves in the sixteenth century, each prohibited and persecuted the others. Turbulent dynastic politics hurled kingdoms from one confession to another, and Christians of all confessions found themselves estranged from the established church of their ruler. Some chose to gather and worship in secret. For those driven “underground” by confessional conflict, the night was indispensable. Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Reformed Christians all worshiped secretly at night at some point in the century after the Reformation. More importantly, members of each confessional retold and published stories of meeting at night as part of their narratives of persecution and steadfastness, faith and martyrdom. By the early seventeenth century, scattered accounts of “underground” worship at night had entered the literature of every church, subtly shifting the associations of secret services at night. As the Anglican preacher (later bishop of Norwich) Edward Reynolds (1599–1676) explained in 1632, even “in the worst times … wherein the Church was most oppressed … God found out in the wilderness a place of refuge, defence, and feeding for his Church.” The faithful “did defend his truth, and … preserve his Church, though they were driven into solitary places, and forced to avoid the assemblies of Heretical and Antichristian Teachers.” For Reynolds the lesson of persecution was clear: “We learn likewise not to censure persons, places or times … Nicodemus came to Christ by night, and yet even then Christ did not reject him.”4 The experience of persecution and reports of it taught this age that the persons, places, and times established by the authorities for worship might be false, and that the faithful might have to accept “persons, places or times” far from the traditional in order to worship as God intended.
Reynolds supported his point by reference to Nicodemus in the Gospel of John (3:1–3), “a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God.” Twice more identified with the night (John 7:50–51; 19:39), tradition explained that Nicodemus, like Joseph of Arimathea, came by night “secretly, for fear of the Jews” (John 19:38). In the sixteenth century this obscure figure became the exemplar for Christians forced to seek the Lord at night.
Writing in the mid 1520s, the poet Euricius Cordus was one of the first of this era to describe himself as a seeker in the night. A supporter of Luther, he felt himself “among people who persecute with … hate every Nicodemus who seeks Christ in this night.” Supporters of church reform in Hildesheim were described in 1528 as “finding their way secretly to Christ according to the example of Nicodemus.” And in the town of Veere in the Netherlands in 1530 we hear of a Protestant “school” or conventicle held nightly in a home. One evening an itinerant Dutchman preached there on “how Nicodemus came at night to our Lord to be taught,” combining the nocturnal meeting time with a discussion of its apostolic precedent.5 From Catholic Albertine Saxony the redoubtable Georg Witzel, writing in 1538, compared his fellow Catholics in the surrounding Lutheran territories to Nicodemus: “they attend church at night, they sing at night, they come into their own at night; in the light of day they hide, speak under their breath, and dissimulate.” In the same years Luther preached on John 3, praising Nicodemus for coming to the Lord at night.6
In the 1540s Calvin coined the term “Nicodemite” to rebuke Protestants in
France who still attended Mass and failed to profess their faith openly.7 He used the term figuratively, with no reference to any actual nocturnal gatherings.8 The writings of Calvin, Farel, and Viret succeeded in giving Nicodemus a bad name, and in the second half of the sixteenth century fewer individuals identified themselves with him directly (though Calvin himself moderated his tone, later referring to Nicodemus as a true disciple).
Despite the pejorative use of “Nicodemite,” the biblical scene in which Nicodemus comes to Christ by night appears in the devotional imagery of all confessions, growing in popularity well into the seventeenth century.9 Figures 3.1 and 3.2 suggest the wide resonance of this night scene, from its use on a ceiling panel in the Carmelite convent of Himmelspforten, Würzburg (1613, Figure 3.1) to numerous prints, including one in Matthaeus Merian’s engravings of biblical scenes in 1627 (Figure 3.2).
Figure 3.1 “Von Nicodemo dem Obersten. JO[hannes] 3,” ceiling panel in the Carmelite convent of Himmelspforten, Würzburg, 1613, showing Nicodemus by candlelight.
Figure 3.2 Matthaeus Merian, “Meeting of Christ and Nicodemus by Night,” engraving in Noui Testamenti D.N. Iesu Christi … Des Newen Testaments vnsers Herren Jesu Christi fürnembste Historien vnd Offenbarungen in fleissigen und geschichtmesigen Figuren abgebildet, aufs Kupffer gebracht … Durch Mattheum Merian von Basel (Frankfurt, 1627). Photograph courtesy of the Newberry Library.
Accounts of Christians of all confessions meeting at night to avoid persecution abound in the second half of the sixteenth century. In England during the reign of Mary, Protestant congregations met in secret. Looking back from the third year of Elizabeth’s reign, William Ramsey of Devon wrote to the Protestant congregation he served during the time of Marian persecution, reminding them that he ministered “Early and late, privately and openly, as cause required and occasion served.”10 A London congregation led by Thomas Rose held a Protestant service on New Year’s night, 1555, and in the remote Lancashire village of Shakerly a layman named Jeffrey Hurst organized regular gatherings at his home “by night … bringing with him some preacher or other, who used to preach unto them so long as the time would serve, and so departed by night again … every time they came thither they were about 20 or 24 sometimes, but 16 at least, who had there also sometimes a Communion [service].”11 In his Ecclesiastical History Theodore Beza described a Reformed congregation meeting at night in Tours in 1560:
[O]n the last day of September of the said year, the Holy Supper was celebrated by night with such a multitude of people that not being able to find a room large enough, they had to make do with an old temple of St. Lawrence that was not used for anything any longer … Since then, the exhortations continued in this temple, by night, until about the twelfth of October, [when] the Church was entirely dispersed.12
After the accession of Elizabeth, English Catholics tended to continue to attend services in their parish church; Catholic noblemen conformed as an act of political obedience. The papal bull of 1570 deposing Elizabeth sharpened the line between English Catholics and Anglicans, and Catholic recusants began to avoid the established church and hear Mass in private or in secret, as in the county of Denbigh in Wales in 1578, where a Lady Throgmorton and others heard Mass in the house of John Edwards. Later, “upon St. Winifrid’s day, Mrs. Edwards went to Halliwell by night, and there heard Mass in the night season.” The recusants “carried thither with them by night, in mails and cloak-bags, all things pertaining to the saying of Mass. And … these Mass-sayers used their audience to receive holy water, and come to confession.”13 In the same years the so-called Godly or Puritans were accused of setting up “night conventicles.”14 For Christians of all confessions, persecution or word of it showed that the true church might be driven into the night. Was it reassuring to note that “this Son of God did instruct his timorous Disciple Nicodemus, who came to him by night, more fully, than he did such as were his daily followers”?15
3.2.1 Anabaptists
Members of these other religious communities were sometimes forced to meet in darkness, but the Anabaptists faced a much broader exile into the night. For the persecuted Anabaptist communities of the sixteenth century, the confrontation with darkness and the night was literal. From the 1530s on, Anabaptist and Mennonite communities began to meet regularly at night, seeking in the darkness the freedom to assemble and preach denied to them during the day. They found toleration only in Moravia in the mid sixteenth century, and in the Dutch Republic from the late sixteenth century.
In the sixteenth century and for scholars today “Anabaptist” refers to Protestant radicals marked by their insistence on believer’s baptism, their denial of infant baptism, their pacifism, and their understanding of their sect as the separate, “true” church.16 From their origins in the Zurich Reformation, four Anabaptist groups emerged by the middle of the sixteenth century: the Swiss Brethren (direct successors of the first Anabaptists of Zurich), South German groups, the Hutterian or Moravian communities, and the Mennonites of northern Germany and the Low Countries. These groups sought to live a biblicist theology as a tiny minority suffering sporadic but violent persecution. The Hutterian or Moravian communities found refuge at the far eastern edge of the Holy Roman Empire in territories still controlled by the local nobility. They enjoyed a golden age in the second half of the sixteenth century before the Habsburg imposition of the Catholic Reformation forced them eastward into Hungary and Russia.17
The earliest reports of Anabaptist worship mention early morning services and meetings, but by the 1530s these had become too dangerous in most regions.18 Sources from Flanders, the Rhineland, Alsace, Switzerland, Württemberg, Hesse, and Tirol document dozens of nocturnal gatherings of Anabaptists and Mennonites, including those planned around visits by Moravian/Hutterian missionaries.19 The Strasbourg city archives, for example, describe specific gatherings at night outside the city in 1545, 1557, and 1576 and refer to at least thirty-four other nocturnal meetings in the Strasbourg area in the period before 1601.20 The accounts came from town officials, pastors, and the simply curious who found their way into nocturnal gatherings of Anabaptists.21 Reports of hundreds of participants are not uncommon. For example, the Lutheran pastor Elias Schad reported to the Strasbourg city council about a gathering he had infiltrated in 1576. Judging from the accents he heard, Schad thought those assembled came from across the Empire – from “Switzerland, Breisgau, Westerich [?], Württemberg, Upper and Lower Alsace, perhaps even from Moravia.”22 The intrepid Lutheran pastor described a system of passwords and sentries used to protect the gathering, evidence of practical experience built up over decades of meeting at night.23 After Schad revealed himself to the group and initiated a lengthy theological debate over baptism and the nature of the church, he was escorted out by the Anabaptists, without whose help, he notes, he would never have found his way out of the forest at night.
Living in a state of confessional siege, the Anabaptists and Mennonites gained a new appreciation of the night in both practical and spiritual terms. A 1538 apology for Anabaptism in Hesse written by Georg Schnabel explains that their “secret gatherings in the woods, in the wilderness, or in houses” followed biblical precedents, citing among other passages “Acts 20 [verse 9], where Paul preached in the night.”24 Evidence of the re-evaluation of the night appears in one of the earliest accounts of a nocturnal gathering. As Anabaptists met outside Strasbourg on the night of July 24–25, 1545, two youths, the Lutheran pastor’s son Jeremias Steinle and his friend Murwolf, snuck into the gathering “for fun” (“aus fürwitz”) and described it to the city council shortly afterward. The young men reported hearing a sermon on the liberation of the children of Israel from their bondage in Egypt, and another sermon on Revelation 11.25 The Anabaptist preaching, which lasted from about 10 p.m. until 1 a.m., contrasted the false “church of stone” established by the authorities with the true church of the spirit.26 The assembled were told to shun their parish church and meet with their fellow believers whenever they could. The leaders
of the service then explained that “one cannot find God except in the wilderness and in the darkness.”27 For those who gathered regularly in the night, the point was clear.28
By the middle of the sixteenth century, Anabaptists and their persecutors alike associated the movement with secret meetings at night.29 The imperial warrant issued for the arrest of Menno Simons in December 1542 accused him of “deceiving the simple people with his false teaching during secret, nocturnal meetings.”30 Simons himself took up this accusation in his “A Humble and Christian Apology and Reply concerning the Bitter, Vicious Lies and False Accusations” of 1552. “In the seventh place,” he explained, “they slander us and say that we are vagabonds, sneak-thieves, seducers … an ungodly sect and conspiracy.” Simons used the charge to address the association of Anabaptist and Mennonite communities with the night:
As to the ugly and vicious slander of being sneak-thieves: sneak-thieves are thieves and murderers who secretly enter houses for the purpose of taking the property or lives of others, also adulterers and seducers who are intent upon defiling the houses of their neighbors. Such wait for the darkness, says Job, and say “No eye shall see me.” In the dark they break into houses.31
“But we are not of that kind,” Simons explained. Because in these troubled times “one cannot publicly let out a peep about the word of the Lord,” the faithful must gather in secret at night. Simons justifies this with biblical authorities:
Moreover we learn from the Scriptures that Moses and all Israel ate the Passover at night [Ex. 12]; that Jesus admonished Nicodemus at night [John 3:2]; that the church assembled at night to pray [Acts 12:12]; that Paul taught the Word of the Lord all night [Acts 20]; and that the first church assembled at night to break the bread of the Lord, as the historians report.
Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) Page 7