His experience with the night led him to argue that “therefore, we confess that we must practice and promote the Word of the Lord at night as well as in the daytime, to the praise of the Lord.” Acknowledging Anabaptist/Mennonite practice, he continued “And so we assemble … in the fear of God, without hindrance or harm to any man, the Lord knows, at night as well as in the daytime, in a Christian manner, to teach the Word of the Lord and to admonish and reprove in all godliness; also to pray and administer the sacraments as the word of the Lord teaches us.”32 Simons’s collection of authoritative biblical accounts of gathering, teaching, and worship at night is especially significant when contrasted with the uncompromising “darkness-vs.-light” imagery of earlier Anabaptist writings.33 In the second half of the sixteenth century, we see further evidence of a much more nuanced Anabaptist view of the night and its darkness.
A Hessian account of 1578 provides an especially clear example of Anabaptist identification with Nicodemus and the night. The Lutheran pastor Tilemann Nolte (a former priest from Fulda) accepted an invitation from a peasant named Hen Klint to go and hear the Anabaptists preach.34 Nolte attended a gathering of about 300 people on the night of May 19, 1578 (Pentecost Monday) in a forest near the village of Schwarz. Two leaders of the group approached him and asked for his help in avoiding the authorities. They explained to Nolte that
they were poor people and they, like Nicodemus, had sought the Lord at night. Although they would well like to teach and preach openly, the authorities would not permit it.35
This reference to Nicodemus is especially significant. Through their deep biblicism, these Anabaptists found a scriptural reference point for lives spent “underground” avoiding persecution. Menno Simons cited John 3:1–3 in his defense of clandestine worship at night, and these Anabaptists chose to identify with Nicodemus because they “had sought the Lord at night.”
The authorities did not intervene at the Hessian meeting described above, but a similar gathering in a forest outside Zurich on September 5, 1574 was encircled and broken up by the Zurich city guard: the two missionaries from Moravia who led the service were arrested. A Zurich report of the incident included a hand-colored drawing of the Moravians preaching by candlelight at a table in the forest (Figure 3.3).36 The image of reading or preaching by candlelight in the forest recurs in other accounts.
Figure 3.3 Contemporary chronicle illustration of Moravian missionaries preaching by candlelight in the forest outside Zurich, 1574. Zentralbibliothek Zurich, ms F 23, s 393v/394r.
The Hutterites of Moravia lived in relative safety and worshipped only during the day. But the Moravian Anabaptist communities sent out hundreds of missionaries in the sixteenth century, and these men moved by night, met and preached by night, and risked imprisonment, torture, and death. The authors of the Hutterite Chronicle described them as “hunted and driven from place to place and from land to land. They had to be like owls and night ravens, not daring to appear by day, hiding … in the wild woods.”37 Setting out from their havens, the Hutterite settlements in Moravia, these missionaries anticipated a nocturnal life. When the missionaries Hans Arbeiter and Heinrich Schister were captured at Hainbach in the bishopric of Speyer in 1568, Arbeiter sent an account of their captivity and interrogation to his brethren in Moravia. He noted that “when we got to Kirrweiler Castle … I, with many threats and insults, was shut into a dark dungeon deprived of all daylight, an experience familiar to many believers.”38 Describing the captivity and martyrdom of Hans Mändel in Tirol in 1560–61, the Hutterian chronicle related that while he was imprisoned in the Vellenburg, “the spirits whom God sends to terrify the ungodly at night were now sent to serve and help him,” explaining that “the Lord forewarned him through such a spirit when the noblemen were coming to question him. It called him by name and told him to prepare himself and to be ready to suffer.”39 We have seen in the previous chapter the ubiquitous fear of “the spirits whom God sends to terrify the ungodly at night”; here the Moravian Chronicle records triumph over these nocturnal spirits and a sense that, with God’s grace, the night and its spirits instead serve the persecuted Brethren.
The earliest writings of the Anabaptist communities, such as the Schleitheim Confession of 1527, resound with the light–darkness opposition typical of Reformation polemics: “For truly all creatures are in but two classes, good and bad … darkness and light.” These early texts encouraged Anabaptists to stand firm, “so we shall not walk in darkness.”40 The transformation of the associations of darkness and the night among Anabaptists in the second half of the sixteenth century anticipates and reflects a broader appreciation of darkness across Western Europe by the start of the seventeenth century.41 Persecution forced small groups within each confession to worship at night; for Anabaptists outside of the Dutch Republic and Moravia, this experience transformed their appreciation of darkness and the night.
3.2.2 John of the Cross
As Anabaptist communities from Flanders to the Austrian Alps gathered together at night, Juan de Yepes y Alvarez lay in a dark prison cell in Toledo. His daring escape, illuminated by a full moon during the night of August 15–16, 1578 symbolized a new kind of night, a night that liberated the soul to seek the Divine.42 Following his escape John of the Cross (1542–91), as he has been known since he became a reformed Carmelite friar 1568, produced the deepest and most complex engagement with the “dark night of contemplation” in the early modern centuries.43 His writings on darkness and the night “transformed the night into the central principle of mystic theology,” crystallizing the nocturnalization of faith and piety under discussion here.44 The works of John of the Cross epitomize the use of the night to approach and understand the Divine in the seventeenth century.
Scholars agree that the actual experience of the physical night shaped profoundly the development and expression of John’s mystic theology.45 In fact two very different aspects of John’s relationship to the night emerge in his biography. Reports of his appreciation of serene nocturnal devotion (both in church before the tabernacle and outside, under the stars) contrast with the darkness of his abduction, captivity, and escape from a prison cell in the monastery of his brother Carmelites in Toledo. John’s references to “the tranquil night, / at the time of the rising of the dawn, / the silent music and sounding solitude” reflect the many accounts of his excursions outside in the middle of the night with his companions to pray and observe the beauty of the heavens, as well as many nights spent in solitary prayer.46 In violent contrast, his abduction on the night of December 2, 1577 began nine months of imprisonment in a nearly lightless cell in the fortress-like Carmelite monastery in Toledo. The period of hope and despair ended with John’s daring escape on an August night in 1578. John processed the Toledo experience in several ways, writing of the sense of being kidnapped and led away in the dark, of the dark nights of imprisonment with their attendant spiritual sorrows and joys, and of the liberation of the night of August 15–16. We can examine each in turn.
By the late 1570s the movement to reform the Carmelite order led by Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross met with increasing hostility from the unreformed (“Calced”) friars. The seizure of John by Calced fathers and armed men in Avila on the night of December 2, 1577 was not the first such abduction: in early 1576 John and another reformed Carmelite friar were taken from Avila to Medina del Campo by force at the instigation of the prior of the Calced friars in Avila. The two men were released after a short time – perhaps a few days. This first abduction may be reflected in one of his earliest poems, “I entered in – I knew not where,” dated prior to his imprisonment in Toledo. This work speaks of a “cloud of unknowing” with the power to illuminate: “however darksome was its shroud / It illuminated all the gloomy night.”47 John might have encountered this sense of “the darkness that illuminates” in a range of authors from Denys the Areopagite to Francisco de Osuna, as discussed above in chapter 1.48
The abduction in December 1577 led to a much longer impri
sonment. All accounts of John’s cell in the Calced Carmelite monastery in Toledo stress its darkness, lit by one narrow window high above. Physical darkness, combined with the psychological pressures exerted by the unreformed Carmelites who were his jailors, informed the works John composed there and shortly after his escape. His prison works include the poems “For I Know Well the Spring” (with its refrain “Although it is the night”), the first thirty-one stanzas of The Spiritual Canticle, and the Romances. The poem “Dark Night” was written just after his nocturnal escape.49 In eight stanzas “Dark Night” presents an account of John’s escape through the words of a secular love poem. These verses also served to describe, as John explained, “the method followed by the soul in its journey upon the spiritual road to the attainment of the perfect union with God, to the extent that it is possible in this life.”50 The first five stanzas narrate a nocturnal flight that unites beloved and lover:
On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings …
I went forth without being discovered, My house being now at rest.
In darkness and secure, By the secret ladder, disguised …
In darkness and in concealment, My house being now at rest.
In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld anything, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.
This light guided me – More surely than the light of noonday …
Oh, night that guided me, Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!
These and other poems from the Toledo period were revised and expanded in the following years, then glossed by John in extensive prose commentaries for the benefit of reformed Carmelite nuns and monks. In these commentaries John became the theologian of his own experience of the night. His encounter with darkness, real and spiritual, led to a deep engagement with the night, expressed in this series of devotional writings and practices. John built his theology upon a set of terms, especially the “dark night of the soul” and the “dark night of the spirit,” which resonate with the ascetic, apophatic, and mystic metaphors of the night articulated across early modern Europe in this period.
This engagement emerges in the two separate commentaries on the poem “Dark Night” written by John: The Ascent of Mount Carmel (1579–85) and Dark Night of the Soul (1582–85). In these complementary treatises John consolidated and refined his new use of the night as Ursymbol for the mystic path to union with God. The Spanish Carmelite introduced Ascent of Mount Carmel by outlining its use of the metaphor of night: “We may say that there are three reasons for which this journey made by the soul to union with God is called night.” First, John notes that “denial and deprivation are, as it were, night to all the desires and senses of man.” Second, faith, “the road along which the soul must travel to this union” is called “as dark as night to the understanding.” Third, the destination of the soul’s journey is “God, who, equally, is dark night to the soul in this life.”51 John’s works consistently outline a threefold night: an ascetic night of purgation, an inexpressible or apophatic night, and a mystic union with God likened to the night. John elaborated this tripartite metaphor by aligning it with the lived experience of the actual night:
These three parts of the night are all one night; but, after the manner of night, it has three parts. For the first part, which is that of sense, is comparable to the beginning of the night, the point at which things begin to fade from sight. And the second part, which is faith, is comparable to midnight, which is total darkness. And the third part is like the close of night, which is God, the part which is now near to the light of day.52
In this metaphor the first part of the night, the “dark night of the soul” or “dark night of the senses,” purges the soul of its connection to the worldly aspects of devotion. In John’s experience, this could be devastating.53 The second part of the night metaphor, the dark night of the spirit, is described by John as even more profound and disturbing than the night of the senses. That dark night of the spirit, “total darkness,” serves to separate the soul from its own memory, reason, and desire so that it can be united with God.54 The third part of this night is the mystic union of the soul and the Divine. To apply the night metaphor to the mystic path, John brought together the devotional, metaphorical, and mystical uses of the night in the Christian tradition. He retained the traditional mystic sequence (purgatio, illuminatio, unio) in the commentaries Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul by describing a twofold purging of the human soul (i.e., sensual nature) and spirit, moving through an ascetic night and an apophatic night to reach a mystic night of union. John’s innovation is simple and powerful: the night becomes the element common to each step of the mystic’s path.55 In this way the night becomes, as Jean Baruzi has noted, the fundamental element of John’s theology.56
Supplementing each of these metaphors of night – ascetic, apophatic, and mystic – is a deeper principle articulated by John not in direct reference to the structure and language of his work, but frequently and allusively, as for example in chapter 13 of book 1 of Dark Night of the Soul. Discussing the relationship between self-knowledge and knowledge of God in the night, John noted that, “As the philosophers say, one extreme can be well known by the other.” With these words John cited a principle central to the philosophical, pedagogical, and rhetorical culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: contrariety, which has been so richly described by Stuart Clark in his work on the intellectual history of witchcraft.57 The general concept of opposition in Western thought, reflected in “polarity, duality, antithesis, and contrariety” served innumerable purposes in thought and expression. Clark examines the deeply rooted “language of contraries” in early modern discourses on physics, natural magic, and medicine. Because, as Clark observes, “contrariety was thought to characterize the logic of the Creator’s own thinking,” it was used to understand and discuss “all natural, intellectual, and social phenomena” from cosmology and ethics to literature, rhetoric, and religion. John of the Cross’s use of the todo–nada theme in the Ascent of Mount Carmel is one of countless examples.58 In the “discovery of night” John of the Cross and his seventeenth-century successors relied on an epistemological night which illuminated through contrariety. As we will see below, Jacob Böhme elevated this device – primarily through its implications for the relationship between light and darkness – to the guiding principle of his cosmology.
Studies of John’s predecessors underscore the new role the night plays in his mystic theology.59 Although John refers to the thought of John Baconthorpe, John Tauler, and Jan van Ruysbroeck throughout his works, John’s use of darkness and the night differs from these late medieval mystics.60 Georges Tavard argues that terms similar to John’s vocabulary of the night appear in the Cloud of Unknowing and in Walter Hilton (vernacular English writers whom John could not have known) and among the Rhenish mystics (translated into Latin by Lorenzo Surius in the mid sixteenth century), but that their conception of night “seems to diverge notably from his.”61 The key comparison is with Nicolas of Cusa, who placed the complementarity and inseparability of darkness and light near the center of his thought. The logical or conceptual value of darkness in Cusa contrasts with the place of the night, experiential and concrete, at the center of John’s theology, in which it is more than merely a symbol or concept. In similar terms, Cusa’s fundamental understanding of God as the “coincidentia oppositorum” in which all contradictions, including darkness and light, become one, contrasts with the irreducibility of todo and nada for John. This irreducible night seems as existential and fundamental as John’s experiences of it.62 And this night – profound and irreducible, taken without any reference to the dawn – informs a dynamic range of early modern thought and expression in the generations after John’s death.
This reading of several of the major works of John of the Cross alerts us to four kinds of night – the ascet
ic, apophatic, mystic, and epistemological – evoked in early modern culture. The Carmelite’s theology of the night allows us to understand the uses of the night in early modern culture in terms more precise and revealing than a simple contrast between positive and negative views of the night. As we will see, each of these four ways of thinking with the night resonated widely across European culture in the seventeenth century as never before. This resonance goes far beyond any question of influence by the relatively unknown Spanish Carmelite author, whose works were not published until 1618.
3.2.3 Jacob Böhme: contrariety as cosmos
“Nothing can be revealed to itself except through contrariety [Wiederwärtigkeit].” So proclaimed Jacob Böhme in his “On the Vision of the Divine” (“Von Göttlicher Beschaulichkeit”) in book 6 of the Christosophia (1624), one of his last writings.63 Contrariety was fundamental to early modern thought and expression, but the German philosopher-mystic elevated this principle to the essence of divine and created nature. In his expansive theosophy, developed in a flood of prose between 1619 and 1624, Böhme envisioned contrariety as a dynamic force that shaped God, the process of creation, and all aspects of human existence. No contrariety was more important to Böhme’s thought than the pair light–darkness, and a systematic, detailed cosmology of light and darkness permeates his work. In his last major work, the Mysterium magnum of 1623, a commentary on Genesis that elucidated “the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace,” Böhme emphasized the power of contrariety to create and reveal:
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