Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  3.3 Thinking with the night about God

  “Dark texts need notes,” John Donne observed in a verse epistle to his patroness Lucy, countess of Bedford, in 1608. As creator of the English noun “nocturnal” to refer to a poem about the night, Donne joined unlettered Anabaptists, doctors of mystical theology, poets, and alchemical philosophers in using the night to think about God in new ways and with new intensity.88 Each of the conceptual/metaphorical uses of the night – ascetic, apophatic, mystic, and epistemological – epitomized in the works of John of the Cross and Jacob Böhme found new or renewed expression across European culture in first half of the seventeenth century. This “discovery of the night” went far beyond the reception of the vocabulary of its most focused exponent, John of the Cross, forming a broad but distinct cultural and “spiritual undercurrent” in the period 1550–1650.89

  Many chose poetry as the genre in which to express this new relationship with the night; John of the Cross was the forerunner in form as well as content. As Michel de Certeau observed regarding the discourse of mysticism in the period from Teresa of Avila to Angelus Silesius: “For a while, this science was sustained only by the poem (or its equivalents: the dream, the rapture, etc.). The poem was the substitute for its scientific object.”90 Much of the “discovery of the night” explicitly evoked “mystic darkness,” and these “dark texts” reveal Europeans using the night to think about God in an unprecedented variety of ways. By 1640, when the Jesuit theologian Maximilian Sandaeus published an alphabetical guide to the key terms of mystic theology, the night was firmly established in the vocabulary of mysticism.91 Under the entry for “Nox” Sandaeus presents each of the senses of the night elucidated by John of the Cross, beginning with a reference to the significance of the term: “Night. Numerous metaphors of the night can be found among the mystics; they are used most frequently by John of the Cross, distinguished mystic of our time, from whom are the books on the ascent of Mount Carmel.” Sandaeus’s guide also has entries for “dusk,” “midnight,” and “lantern,” but no entry for “day.”92

  The new role of the night in devotion and theology was celebrated in verse by Richard Crashaw in the “Hymn in the Glorious Epiphanie” of his Steps to the Temple (1648). This English Catholic, writing in exile in Paris, brought English metaphysical poetry together with early modern Catholic mysticism.93 He proclaimed “a most wise and well-abused Night” which he identified as the via negativa of John of the Cross, “the frugal negative Light.” This “more close way” to the Divine is taught by the newborn “Child of light,” whom Crashaw thanks for a night that allows us “To read more legible thine original Ray, / And make our darkness serve thy day.” The poem is spoken by the three magi:

  (1.) Thus shall that reverend Child of light,

  (2.) By being Scholar first of that new night,

  Come forth Great Master of the mistick day;

  (3.) And teach obscure Mankind a more close way

  By the frugal negative Light

  Of a most wise and well-abused Night,

  To read more legible thine original Ray,

  (Chorus) And make our darkness serve thy day;

  Maintaining ’twixt thy World and ours

  A commerce of contrary pow’rs,

  A mutual Trade

  ’Twixt Sun and Shade,

  By confederate Black and White

  Borrowing Day and lending Night.

  In this section we will follow the undercurrent of “that new night” identified by Sandaeus and Crashaw across Europe, with a focus on its breadth in the first half of the seventeenth century, the critical period in this discovery of the night as path to the Divine.

  3.3.1 The ascetic night

  The “night to all the desires and senses” had a venerable place in the Christian tradition. An ascetic life of nocturnal prayer remains a fundamental aspect of Benedictine and other monastic observance. Waking in darkness for the office of nocturns held practical and eschatological significance but was foremost a physical act of self-denial.94 This ascetic darkness is deployed by Ignatius of Loyola in the Spiritual Exercises (1548): in the first week of the Exercises, the author proposes “to deprive myself of all light … shutting the doors and windows while I stay, except when I am to read or eat.”95 In contrast with earlier observance, however, Loyola imagines the solitary use of ascetic darkness, marking the key common feature of early modern nocturnal paths to the Divine. From Loyola it is a short step to the ascetic night, in which darkness serves as a metaphor for self-denial. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle (1577–80) presents its first three sections or “mansions” as a descent into darkness (“the light which comes from the palace occupied by the King hardly reaches these first mansions at all”), signifying the sin the soul must overcome. At the end of the description of the second mansion Teresa reviews the ascetic value of the confrontation with darkness in a famous passage: “It is absurd to think that we can enter Heaven without first entering our own souls – without getting to know ourselves, and reflecting upon the wretchedness of our nature.”96 In darkness, self-denial leads to self-knowledge. This insight can carry a penitential tone, as in the poetry of Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell (c. 1561–95), whose “The Prodigal Chylde’s Soule Wracke” (c. 1595) proclaimed:

  I, plungèd in this heavye plyght,

  Founde in my faltes just Cause of feare;

  By darkness taught to knowe my light,

  The loss thereof enforcèd teares.

  The ascetic night echoes across the sacred writings of John Donne. In his “Hymn to Christ, at the Author’s last going into Germany” (1619) Donne takes his approaching travel as the moment to rededicate himself to God, shunning the distractions of daylight in favor of the darkness and night, which allow a clearer vision of the Divine.97

  Seal then this bill of my divorce to all,

  On whom those fainter beams of love did fall;

  Marry those loves, which in youth scatter’d be

  On fame, wit, hopes – false mistresses – to Thee.

  Churches are best for prayer, that have least light;

  To see God only, I go out of sight:

  And to ’scape stormy days, I choose

  An everlasting night.

  This night is intensely introspective, but Donne also considered the power of the ascetic night from his perspective as a preacher. In a 1629 sermon given “In the Evening” Donne addressed “atheists” and asked his listeners to look ahead to midnight:

  I respite thee but a few hours, but six hours, but till midnight. Wake then; and then dark and alone, Hear God ask thee then, remember that I asked thee now, Is there a God? and if thou darest, say No.98

  Stripped of the distractions of the daylight, alone at midnight, the “atheist” or libertine would recognize the God he scorned during the day. Donne’s reference to the tolling of a “passing bell” in another sermon also evokes the shock of midnight: “A man wakes at midnight full of unclean thoughts, and hears a passing bell; this is an occasional mercy.”99 The popular English emblem book of the poet Francis Quarles (1635; many editions through the nineteenth century) took a gentler approach to the same kind of night:

  My soule, cheare up: What if night be long?

  Heav’n finds an eare, when sinners find a tongue:

  Thy teares are Morning show’rs: Heaven bids me say,

  When Peter’s Cock begins to crow, ’tis Day.100

  The Lutheran pastor, poet, and hymnist Paul Gerhardt (1607–76) looked toward an ascetic night in his “Evensong” (“Abendlied,” 1667):

  Rest now all forests,

  Beasts, men, cities and fields,

  The whole world sleeps

  But you, my thoughts,

  Up, up you must begin

  What pleases your creator most.101

  In each stanza Gerhard presents a different theme of nocturnal meditation including Jesus as “another sun” and the stars, the body, and the bed as memento mori.102

  There is no bette
r way to visualize this ascetic night than in the devotional candlelight scenes of Georges de La Tour, especially the Repentance of Mary Magdalene – a popular theme, judging from the many versions and copies painted from the 1630s on.103 La Tour’s penitent Magdalene (Figure 3.5) captures the solitary nature of the ascetic night: there is no space or place in the scene into which another figure could intrude, and no light enters from outside the scene.104 The devotional context of the night scenes produced by artists active in the duchy of Lorraine such as Jacques Bellange, Jean Le Clerc, Jacques Callot, and Georges de La Tour has been examined closely by Paulette Choné.105 Arguing for a more careful approach to connections between painting and literature, she has identified the works of John of the Cross (which circulated in manuscript among the Discalced Carmelites of the region before their publication in 1618) and the Franciscans André de L’Auge (who preached at the ducal court of Lorraine) and Juan de Los Angeles as specific channels that brought the verbal imagery of the sacred night, ascetic and apophatic, into the visual arts of the Lorraine region.

  Figure 3.5 Georges de La Tour (1593–1652), The Magdalene with the Smoking Flame, c. 1638–40. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

  Of course, the specific Lorraine context does not preclude a broader set of connections. Among the manuscripts of the English Benedictine Sisters in Cambrai (Flanders), we find an anonymous devotional poem of the seventeenth century that seems to gloss the solitary, ascetic night of La Tour’s Magdalene:

  Alone retired within my native cell,

  At home within myself, all noyse shut out

  In silent mourning I resolve to dwell,

  With thoughts of death Ile hang my walls about;

  All windows close, Faith shall my taper be,

  At whose dim flame Ile Hell and Judgment see.

  …

  All windows close, Faith shall my Taper be,

  On Hope Ile rest, and sleep in Charity.106

  The abbey of Our Lady of Consolation at Cambrai was founded in 1623 by Cresacre More, great-grandson of Thomas More, and had longstanding ties to English recusant families. His daughter Dame Agnes (Grace) More (1591–1655 or 1656) and several other sisters at Cambrai were cousins of John Donne.107 The literary works of the sisters of Cambrai use themes familiar from English metaphysical poetry, such as the contrast and reciprocity of light and darkness, “the four seasons of mankind,” and the microcosm/macrocosm parallel. The sisters also drew on Spanish and French mysticism; as “Sister M.S.” noted in a collection of writings “for her spiritual comfort in her several necessities”: “John of the Cross. There is no better or more powerful way to increase the virtue of the mind, than … to shut fast the door of the senses, by solitude and forgetfulness of all creatures and human events.”108 She reveals a clear understanding of the “dark night of the senses” as described by John. At Cambrai, the English Benedictine sisters received and contributed to the latest currents in Western spirituality across national and confessional boundaries. The night became a key time and symbol in these currents: it could reveal sin and, by removing the temptations of the day, offer a path away from it. As Pascal observed in his Pensées (c. 1660): “If there were no obscurity, man would not feel his own corruption.”109

  3.3.2 The apophatic night

  As the midpoint of the soul’s dark night, faith “is compared to midnight,” the darkest part of the night. “The more the soul is darkened,” John explained, “the greater is the light that comes into it.”110 In his discussion of the Divine, John explained that “in order to reach Him, a soul must rather proceed by not understanding … and by blinding itself and setting itself in darkness, rather than by opening its eyes.”111 Empowered by the sense that the path to God is as dark as night to the understanding, mystic authors made darkness and the night key apophatic terms across genres and confessions in the seventeenth century. Darkness figured in many of the oxymora and paradoxes used to express the inexpressibility of the Divine, seen for example in George Herbert’s “Evensong” (c. 1620; the earlier of two poems with this title). Herbert begins with the more traditional negative view of “Night, earth’s gloomy shade, / fouling her nest, my earth invade,” but then corrects himself, noting that it is wrong to write “as if shades knew not Thee.” The night is also a divine time, as he immediately asserts in apophatic terms:

  But Thou art Light and Darkness both together:

  If that be dark we cannot see:

  The sun is darker than a tree,

  And thou more dark than either.

  Yet Thou art not so dark, since I know this,

  But that my darkness may touch thine:

  And hope, that may teach it to shine,

  Since Light thy Darkness is.112

  No one explored this theme more deeply than the French devotional poet Claude Hopil. The Parisian wrote extensively on this theme in his The Piercings of Divine Love Expressed in One Hundred Canticles Made in Honor of the Most Holy Trinity (Les divins eslancemens d’amour exprimez en cent cantiques faits en l’honneur de la très saincte Trinité) of 1629.113 Apophatic themes and expressions from Denys the Areopagite and John of the Cross are woven into one hundred canticles in praise of the Trinity:

  In the night of faith, the ray of darkness

  of the beautiful Trinity

  Suffices for salvation.114

  Paradoxes of night and darkness are Hopil’s primary theme:

  My spirit rises to the dungeon magnificent

  In the divine ray of mystic darkness

  All confused and ravished

  I saw what one cannot think, let alone write

  Thus I tell you all without being able to say anything

  Of all that I saw.115

  Hopil described clearly the apophatic voice: “If I speak here only of shadow and fog, / of silence and of horror, / of dungeons and dark clouds,” he explained, it is only so that “one sees the failure / that the Father causes in us through his wisdom.” This failure is a “learned ignorance … ravishing and beautiful,” a “sacred darkness which reveals to us a Sun / to the heart, not to the eye.”116 Revealed to the saints by “his eternal word,” the Divine is “hidden for us in the mystic night.”117 Many times Hopil refers to his own meditation “in the night not dark but mystic,” suggesting that he considered the night a time of actual prayer as well as an apophatic metaphor.118

  Despite their necessary obscurity, Hopil composed his devotional verses as canticles, meant to be sung to the tunes of popular secular chansons in the home. Scholars have noted that “individual readers were considered capable of choosing music themselves for pious chanson texts” such as those of Hopil, suggestion some circulation of his sense of the apophatic and mystic night among laypeople.119

  Oxymora and paradoxes abounded in the popular poetry of the spiritual night. The Lutheran baroque poet Andreas Gryphius (1616–64) often wrote of the bleak shadows of the Thirty Years War, but he also chose an apophatic night in his “On the Birth of Jesus” (“Uber die Geburt Jesu”):

  Night / more than bright night! Night / brighter than the day /

  Night (brighter than the sun) / in which the light was born.

  …

  O night, which can thwart all nights and days!120

  Other poets celebrated the night in broader terms not limited to the single, unique night of the birth of the Christian savior. As Henry Vaughan concluded his poem “The Night”:

  There is in God – some say –

  A deep, but dazzling darkness; as men here

  Say it is late and dusky, because they

  See not all clear.

  O for that Night! where I in Him

  Might live invisible and dim.

  Another of the Benedictine sisters at Cambrai, Dame Clementina Carey (d. 1671), wrote of flight from God in the night, reversing the terms of the paradox:

  If I say Darkness, and the Night,

  Which shut out all, shall bar Thy sight

  That Darkness, which is so to me, to Thee is
Light.121

  These baroque expressions of the inexpressible were drawn to the night as they sought to fuse the quotidian with the sublime.

  Similar insights appeared in natural philosophy, as in the alchemical treatise of Blaise de Vigenère (1523–96), A Discovery of Fire and Salt (English translation, 1649).122 Vigenère asserts that “Divinity is so wrapped in darkness, that you cannot see day through it,” citing Psalm 17, Orpheus, and Deuteronomy 4. His comments reveal the reception of the negative theology of Denys the Areopagite: “for in regard of God towards us, light and darkness, are but one thing: as is his darkness, such is his light.” He adds in apophatic terms:

  by … that which is equivalent to darkness, we may better apprehend something of the Divine Essence, but not by … that which relates to light … For the Divine light is insupportable above all to all his Creatures, even down to the most perfect, following that which the Apostle sets down in I. of Tim. 6. God dwells in the light inaccessible, that no man can see. So that it is to us instead of darkness, as the brightness of the Sun is to Moles, Owls, and other night birds.123

  The need for darkness in the ineffable human encounter with the Divine was a significant theme in the seventeenth century.124 The engravings forming the frontispiece of Daniel Cudmore’s A prayer-song; being sacred poems on the history of the birth and passion of our blessed Saviour (Figure 3.6, 1655) juxtapose the sun hidden in darkness with the soldiers at Christ’s tomb, blinded by the light of the Resurrection.125 The texts chosen place the images in an apophatic frame. On the left “Behold the man” refers to a cloud of darkness before the sun; on the right “He is not here but is risen” captions the blinding physical presence of the risen Christ. The darkness that covers the sun and the dazzling force that pushes back the soldiers both have their counterparts in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Surveying their new lot in Hell, the fallen angel Mammon reminds his fellows that darkness is not confined to the infernal depths: