Johann Valentin Andreae was born of distinguished Lutheran parents in Herrenberg in 1586. His grandfather, Jacob Andreae had been a staunch and brave pioneer of the Reformation cause. The dreamy and imaginative young Johann was expected to advance the family tradition. The young Andreae seems to have been more interested in theatre, alchemy and mysticism than politics. He had great intuitive powers and an unerring nose for hypocrisy, like many dramatists. In youth he dramatised his own life and early struggles in works published when he was thirty, such as Turbo and the Chymische Hochzeit, both of which employ alchemical themes - a practice engaged in by the family - while the latter work introduced the character of Christian Rosenkreuz who, doubtless reflecting the family crest of a S. Andrew's cross with four roses, dons a blood-red ribbon bound crossways over his shoulder, and puts four red roses in his hat “that I might the sooner by this token be taken notice of amongst the throng.” The boy was clearly a genius, a quality which few either recognise or understand. It means that he was more intelligent than his own explicit thoughts, a condition necessitating irony and a sense of detachment. He found his equilibrium in the embrace of the purest Christianity he could conceive of : that of Christ Himself. It was perhaps this quality which drew him towards friendship with the older man Tobias Hess, the man who was prepared to stand for truth wherever he found it, no matter what sectarian interests it might offend.
Andreae entered Tübingen University in 1601 at the age of fifteen, at which time Hess is reported to have been in a black prophetic mood, deep into his studies of Brocardo and Studion. Had Andreae met Hess at this time the younger man might have found Hess to be rather old-fashioned. Andreae attended to his studies : classical languages, poetry, Renaissance literature, physics, mechanics and chemistry. He realised that in spite of his vast knowledge, he would never know all. This realisation may have brought the gnosis out in him : the sense that orbis non sufficit : the world is not enough.
His first acquaintance with Hess' name may date from 1603 when Studion sent a letter to Hess, asking for a copyist with good Latin to help prepare the final draft of Naometria. Hess may have suggested Andreae's brother Ludwig to execute the task. But it was to be another five years before the two masterminds of the Rosicrucian Manifestos actually met : in 1608, the year in which John Dee died in poverty in Mortlake, ignored and perhaps feared by Britain's King James I. By this time, Hess was beginning to look beyond the end of the world, and had taken a very deep interest in Theology, as well as in the iatrochemical medicine of Paracelsus. It is significant that healing was the basis for Andreae's and Hess's first encounter. It is said in the Confessio that the philosophy of the Rose-Cross Brothers “containeth much of Theology and medicine, but little of the wisdom of the law..” Hess had already healed Ludwig Andreae of an oedemitus knee, when Hess brought his skills to bear on a serious fever from which Johann Valentin was suffering. Hess brought Paracelsus and Apocalyptic to Andreae, and thus to the Fama. It was Andreae's genius tactfully to subsume these elements into an overall mystery-story which prevented the manifestos from coming out as yet another mystico-political pamphlet. The Fama is especially well-written, full of the dignity of language which one might expect from an illuminated being. Andreae clearly loved Hess, as can be seen from his Immortalitas, written on Hess's death, and published in 1619. “Hess listens to God and no-one else.” wrote Andreae of his friend. He was struck by Hess's attempts to live his Christianity, not to get bogged down in theological conflicts over doctrines and dogmas. He took the path of the Imitatio Christi, attributed to the medieval mystic Thomas à Kempis which Andreae would have found in his friend Besold's huge library, if he had not read it already.
Hess, originally an able lawyer and after that an even better doctor, eventually developed into an outstanding theologian, who (please take note) however knew about the older and the more recent scholarly opinions (he devoured their works in large quantities) and he also knew enough about various conflicts and heresies, but he was rather concentrated on the imitation of the life of Christ than on the defence of its teachings, more concentrated on its practise than on its purely scientific approach. (IMMORTALITAS. 1619)
We shall need to hear more from this beautiful work in memory of Hess, for nothing else shows as clearly what it was that the two men stood for and what the true intention of the Rosicrucian Manifestos consisted of, for there can be little doubt that the character and life of Hess informed Andreae's conception of Christian Rosenkreuz : the true Christian disciple on his way to the chemical wedding of his soul with God :
The world showed all its enticements and tried to win his noble talent with the promise of great glory. No doubt, there he would have reached important summits, should he have agreed to the laws of this world and said goodbye to his conscience. Melodious conceptions like ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’ have always attracted our man who was himself a just man.
..with ardour he tried to grasp the idea of the greatness of God's book compared to the insignificance of the specialist's works. His house underwent a complete change. Bartolus and Baldus were thrown out, Hippocrates and Galen were welcomed. He let them in, being a free man himself. With no obligations and under condition that they were not allowed to affect the higher aspect of his mind, nor would they try to get hold of it. Since the purple clad teachers were too delicate, he added Paracelsus to their number, a man who would not give up so easily and who rightly shows suspicion where nature is not fully involved, but full of patience where hard work and experiments are involved and who, at last, has the courage to concentrate on research after the composition of things.
In the mean time, as a result of his wife's fertility, his house became rather crowded. With such a large number of children - by that time more than twelve - I doubt whether anyone else could easily have managed to run the household along the lines of fair and sacred standards. Anyway, to Hess it turned out to be something like the twelve labours of Hercules, not so much for the faults of that period he had to deal with, and with the problems young people usually bring along, but because some Pandora seemed to have thought up and let loose her proverbial flood of disasters.
Hess was “a friend of God, a servant of Christ, a brother to his fellow-creature, a herald of truth, an executor of goodness, a jewel of literature, a shining star in Tübingen, a treasurer of nature and also a stumbling-block for the world and an enemy of Satan.” While the Immortality of Hess stands as the greatest obituary and apologia a man could possibly wish for - and it was certainly earned - Andreae felt it necessary to address the issue of Hess's reputation, in particular with regard to Hess's interest in Simon Studion and, by implication, his involvement with the genesis of the Rosicrucian movement:
Hess was said to be superstitious, a man who followed his own lines, an eccentric, a phantast and, as a result of the multiplication of lies - a king of Utopia, an interpreter of dreams and a predictor. Whoever belonged to his closer friends and who he called his brother, was said to be a member of a gang of fanatics, of a group of conspirators and a gathering of obscurantists.
In this period of time, when he was a most devoted priest to his own body, all kinds of people turned up - apparently times were ready for it-who introduced the end of the earth and the arrival of the Antichrist, things which are always pushed when the Church is slowing down. Since these people found a rich source in the bible to defend their case, Hess did not feel so much like rejecting them, moreover, while they did not touch the basic principles of faith. And little by little - for curiosity is part of the human kind - he also took to the teachings of holy numbers, in order to find out whether they could reveal anything about similarities between periods of time and between the old and the new Babylonia. In the beginning it was a matter of comparitive innocence (most of the true theologians joined in), but soon Hess came into trouble caused by lack of thought of some young adepts : for they not only expected Hess to give such doubtful drafts of repeating patterns in history, but they wanted him to come up and defend an idea which had never been fully his own. Thus, warned by his friends, he stood up for his point of view that he did not wish to recommend all his ideas to as many people as possible, but at least show the pure and very much to our faith related meaning supporting them, and that he furthermore wished to move away from the irresponsible explanations those supporters attached to his words. This however, was the very moment slander sprang to life. Growing with pride she exclaimed that now she had got hold of Hess on whom she had vainly tried her teeth when he had studied chemistry-and she called him a naometrist, a chiliast and a day-dreamer. It is amazing to see how her foul talk could smudge so pure a man. And since people are liberal in nothing else so much as in lies, she affected people who were actually not prejudiced at all, but who rather could be called a little bit unattentive towards the noble name he enjoyed in all his innocence.
I am sorry to say that even I was influenced to prefer such a kind of paradox in Hess's mind and some imaginary golden age to the possibility of some playful calculations of the brain.
If Andreae had toyed with Hess's apocalyptic ideas, it could not have been for very long. Andreae tended to lump together those who were obsessed with purely alchemical and magical solutions to the human condition along with those who racked their brains trying to extract complex numerological significance from apocalyptic writings. He called them the “little curiosity brothers” who obscure, rather than illuminate the spiritual life. He found their writings odd, strange, (insolite) often arrogant and fundamentally unhelpful. In his book Turris Babel (1619), Andreae devotes the fifth dialogue between Astrologus & Calculator and Conjectans (the interpreter of dreams) to an attack on the Naometria and kindred works :
I would deny nothing to heaven, but I am enraged at you who read lies into the heavens; I respect sacred numbers, but I suspect that they have nothing to do with these tortured interpretations.
In the Immortalitas he says that when Tobias Hess “was admonished in a friendly way, he moderated the defence of his opinion” and “finally withdrew himself from these exceedingly rash speculations.”
Andreae was deeply suspicious of what he saw as misguided attempts to suugest that if one wanted to know God, then one should needs have access to occult, alchemical or specialist mystical knowledge. The exclusivity of much alchemical literature, seen as a single or reserved path to the truth appalled him. The mysterious Fraternity of value for Andreae was simply the Fraternity of Christ, best expressed in love for one's neighbour and an open hearted and open-minded response to new knowledge. So while in a sense the spiritually regenerated imitator of Christ has indeed become a member of a Brotherhood - which has (note the metaphor) become invisible to the (blind) eyes of the world and exists as it were, underground, Andreae cleverly (perhaps too-cleverly) attracts attention to it by playing dramatically with the mythology of secret gnostic adepts. Speaking of Brocardo, Studion and, by implication, astrologers like Paul Nagel and alchemists like Heinrich Khunrath, Andreae complained of their inability to talk to ordinary people in their own language, preferring an idiom Andreae calls : “Persian, Chaldean, Brahmanic, Druidic, of Fez or of Damcar.” The ambivalence of the Fama in attempting to get responsible science and scientists into positive and non-sectarian shape by using the imagery of mystical and magical secrecy, while at the same time clearly approving of men of learning such as Paracelsus, practically ensured that ‘in the wrong hands’ the Fama would attract attention very much at odds with what Andreae originally had in mind.
Happily for us, Andreae's precise views on ‘natural magic’, or what we would call simply ‘science’ are laid out in a very amusing dialogue between a ‘Christianus’ and a ‘Curiosus’, in a playlet called Institutio Magica pro Curiosis (The institution of magic for the curious), which appeared in Andreae's brilliant polemical work Menippus in 1617.
Taking place in the book-filled study of Christianus, the dialogue is a masterpiece of terse, intellectual comedy. Curiosus drops in for a chat, to find out how much magical power the famous Christianus really has. Curiosus is portrayed as a man who is desperate to find an occult explanation for everything; a man looking for the easy way out, and a fool obsessed with illusory powers. Here are some relevant extracts. The stage-directions are mine :
CU: It is said, Christianus, that you have knowledge of all things, both serious and diverting…And - this is the most important point - that you have achieved all this within the space of two or three years.
CH: And of course, as well as that, I'm able to produce gold and nourish the eternal flame!
CU: All agree on one point, that you are a magician.
CH: ‘Magician’ is an ambitious name, don't you think? Perhaps you mean necromancer?
CU: I am not quite sure of the distinction but I mean the person who through intimacy with and servitude to the spirits achieves great and wonderful things.
CH: I would rather prefer another definition of ‘necromancy’. But please tell me, do you really believe I am able to do the things you just mentioned? [Curiosus squints, nods his head & then wonders. Christianus decides to play with Curiosus on his own level. He looks significantly at the curtains. Curiosus gets the point, rises and closes them, crossing himself as he does so.] Well then, Curiosus, as it is now of prime importance to become a magician - or a wise man, we must incessantly invoke God's help.
CU: [rubbing his hands] Excellent.
CH: So [handing paper and pen to Curiosus], please write here, on the first line of your piece of paper : ‘Invocation of God’.
CU: That's done.
CH: Now please, examine yourself, whether you have been born with an earthy, a watery, an airy or a fiery character.
CU: [looks up] This is all new to me.
CH: You force me to consider opening up for you, a thing as yet known to nobody, not even to my brethren.
CU: [earnestly] Please do.
CH: But would I dare to entrust you with my secrets, lest they reach the common people?
CU: Here, I give you my right hand in promise.
CH: Please Curiosus [looks deeply into Curiosus' eyes], please consider and consider again where you lead me : for necromancy is a very serious business.
CU: Please trust me, and if I fail you, so may the supreme God have me-
CH: Please do not swear - I cannot stand it! I will believe you without any oaths. But tell me, are you really longing for this magic of mine?
CU: Very much indeed, if only [he coughs] it can be exercised with a clear conscience.
CH: Why, as surely as if you were studying the Bible itself. [Christianus gestures for Curiosus to close his eyes, very tightly. He tip-toes to the curtains and opens them. He touches Curiosus' shoulder, who opens his eyes to see his mentor pointing at the Bible, opened at Genesis 1.1., over which he immediately places a Mercator map of the known world and then the works of the Polymathia.]
CU: [both astonished & disappointed] So…your magic is nothing more than this?
CH: By the Holy Trinity…there is no other magic but the persistent study of the different sciences.
CU: But if I follow your advice, I might as well throw my studies overboard and start work with a - with a craftsman or a sailor.
CH: What you say there is not bad, but it's what you're thinking when you're saying it.
CU: Would you make a farmer or a mining expert out of me?
CH: No, Curiosus, all I want to do is to make a philosopher out of you so that you may become a citizen of the world - and not the alien wanderer.
CU: - And that special Art whereby you can learn all sorts of things in no time at all?
CH: Have I not told you that this Art is called hard work and perseverence? …The foremost stars of learning and the princes of the arts were always highly versed in many branches of science - this is testified by their books, densely filled with every kind of knowledge.
CU: Perhaps they too were magicians!
CH: O Curiosus - you always sing the same old song - everything that is inelegant, unlearned and vulgar is God's intention. But if it be spiritual, rare and admirable, then it is taken as the devil's work. But it was God who gave man a mind so aristocratic that when we refine our mind and abstain from worldly matters, then we can work wonders.
CU : [a sudden afterthought] Do you have anything to say on medicine?
CH : By all means. As there has taken place such a great accession of new land, that the world is now known to be twice as big as before -and as all this has been meticulously described, do you have any doubts that medicine too will make some progress? Is it such an absurd idea to try to reconcile, at least in part, Galenus and Paracelsus, as both ways round it appears that the one's remedies are not always happily applied and the other's not always unhappily - and as we cannot be sure whether Galenus, had he lived today, would not have borrowed a few things from chemistry? We know that this was done by, amongst others, Josephus Querceteanus, a thing greatly enhancing his reputation, but even more beneficial to his patients! In the meantime the other members of the medical profession are perpetually poised in battle array - as if they were to fight for their altars or their hearths - with such bitterness that many a patient has already succumbed to his pains amidst such sighing and suffering, as from neither side no helping hand was offered.
I take the same line as to mathematicians. From them I only demand one thing, that they should show me the celestial phenomena regardless of whether the earth moves within them and the sun is fixed, or the sun moves and the earth is at rest, or the earth moves in one place and turns around its own axis - and so on and so on. All these things are beyond proof to us. For not because we think one way or another will the sun move rather than be fixed. Let it suffice for us to measure time exactly and to get a clue to the harmony God has equipped all things with.
CU : Goodbye Christianus, carry on ridiculing man's folly!
CH : That I will do. But for now, Curiosus, goodbye.
This dialogue squarely places Johann Valentin Andreae in the centre of the European scientific avant garde of his day, albeit as a very well informed theologian and ideological activist. It also makes much more sense of the story of Christian Rosenkreuz as outlined in the Fama. We can now see that the journey of Father C.R.C. is a pure allegory for the transition of knowledge from the East to the West via Spain19. That transition of course included a great deal of knowledge of gnostic provenance. The underground (when not sky-high) nature of the Rose Cross Brotherhood, for 120 years, can also be seen as the burying of Renaissance and medieval Christianised science and cosmosophy during the ravages of the Reformation. Andreae is picking up the torch of the Renaissance and, as we have seen, calling out for a second spiritual and scientific reformation to encompass all men of goodwill in the true Christian spirit of love and brotherhood.
In order to get an idea of how advanced Andreae was, one only has to recall the famous lines of Isaac Newton on the limitations of science. Newton - who took an interest in the Rosicrucian movement while being aware that its precise origin was an “imposture” - was not born until 23 years after the publication of Andreae's Menippus. (Newton was born in 1642). They make a stunning comparison with Andreae's words printed above, that mathematics can at best only offer a clue to the harmony of the cosmos:
To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‘Tis much better to do a little with certainty, and leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things. …I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Newton was the kind of man with whom Andreae hoped his Fama would put him in contact. Andreae - alas - was ahead of his time.
According to the archives of the senate of the university of Tübingen, there occurred in 1620 the trial of the Tübingen librarian Eberhard Wild, accused by the Theological Faculty of having sold books by the radical reformers Caspar Schwenckfeld, Valentin Weigel and Sebastian Franck, and of being friendly to the Austrian gentleman Michael Zeller, a ‘notorious’ Schwenckfeldian. Wild had edited the Imago20and Dextera porrecta21 of Andreae. The trial further revealed that the condemned books had been printed by Andreae's ‘secret friend’ Abraham Hölzl, even though no printer or author was mentioned on the title pages. Andreae, as a Lutheran deacon in the parish of Calw (near Stuttgart) was thus put in a delicate position. Hölzl had printed a catechism by Andreae and was known to be a visitor to Andreae's house. It was further suspected that Andreae and Hölzl exchanged heretical and occult books. After examination however, the theologians could establish nothing particularly reprehensible in Andreae's conduct. What was so terribly wrong with these radical reformers that Andreae should have had to defend himself from being associated with their works?
I cannot be one in faith with either the Pope or Luther, because they condemn me and my faith, that is, they hate my Christ in me. To have the real Christ according to the spirit is very important. Christ does not condemn Himself. He does not persecute Himself. (Caspar Schwenckfeld*)
Schwenckfeld was a prince of Leignitz in Ossig, Lower Silesia. He was an aristocratic evangelist and a knight of the Teutonic Order, the exponent of an eirenic and evangelical spiritual Christianity with Gnostic resonances. Schwenckfeld was a spiritual hero. In 1518 Schwenckfeld converted to Lutheranism, but with reservations. He believed that the Spirit should be free of all institutions. He followed the “royal road”, tending neither to the right nor to the left - a road trodden by a few : “To my mind, I am one with all churches in that I pray for them, in that I despise none, because I know that Christ the Lord has his own everywhere, be they ever so few.”
In 1524 Schwenckfeld wrote An Admonition to all the brethren in Silesia urging the adoption of the inward eucharist. Taking as his cue John VI.35 : I am the bread of life : he that cometh to me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst, Schwenckfeld posited a mystical flesh upon which only those who perceived Christ spiritually might feed. Christ was “killed in the flesh and made alive in the Spirit” declared Schwenckfeld. He recommended his followers cease taking the external eucharist of bread and urged instead an inner, meditative feeding on Christ's true nature. He later regarded the correct institution of the Lord's Supper as impossible to reconstruct, its true nature lying in the “sealed book of the Apocalypse”. It may well be a Schwenckfeldian eucharist that Andreae has Christian Rosenkreuz celebrate in the first paragraph of his Chymical Wedding :
On an evening before Easter day, I sat at a table, and having (as my custom was) in my humble prayer sufficiently conversed with my Creator, and considered many great mysteries (whereof the Father of Lights his Majesty had shewn me not a few) and being now ready to prepare in my heart, together with my dear Paschal lamb, a small, unleavened, undefiled cake…
The spiritual inner eucharist was part of a process of deification : a distinctively gnostic understanding of human potential. This process of deification - becoming divine (a process which was thought even to affect the nature of the flesh) - was predicated on a special understanding of Christ's and of human-nature :
The bodily food is transferred into our nature, but the spiritual food changes us into itself, that is, the divine nature, so that we become partakers of it. (Schwenckfeld)
Schwenckfeld developed his views through engaging his beliefs with those of the radical reformer Melchior Hoffmann, a man who had thoroughly imbued the ‘celestial flesh heresy’ of the Bogomils and Cathars. For Hoffmann, Jesus Christ is the “heavenly manna which shall give us eternal life” - that is, Christ's body, which in the words of the Eucharistic institution, “I give unto you”, must have been of a wholly spiritual nature. The second Adam (Christ) has a wholly heavenly origin, and is symbolised as heavenly manna, or heavenly dew, tangible only insofar as say water becomes ice through the blowing of the cold north wind. For Hoffmann, the ‘wind’ or ‘breath’ of the Holy Spirit made Christ's body tangible. (This conception has a highly alchemical ring to it). The teaching of the Catholic Church on the other hand was, and is, that Christ was emphatically the “Word made flesh”, in order thoroughly to redeem humanity in its full terrestrial identity; He was both God and man. Schwenckfeld held to this latter view, but with a difference. Schwenckfeld believed that human nature was, to an extent, already spiritualised. His flesh, when progressively spiritualised, is not as other flesh. (Attentive readers will note the parallel here with the “whole and unconsumed” corpse of Christian Rosenkreuz, discovered, according to the Confessio Fraternitatis, in 1604). Schwenckfeld describes human nature as “uncreaturely”, scarcely distinguishable from the divine nature in Christ. In this sense Schwenckfeld understood humankind to be the sons of God (LukeXX. 34-36).
In principle, according to Schwenckfeld, God can bring pure visible flesh from a virgin. Through the persistent feeding on the inward flesh/bread of Christ, man can become progressively deified through the spiritual processes of transfiguration, resurrection, and ascension. This view is echoed in the gnostic alchemy prevalent at the time, and from whose imagery Andreae and others borrowed freely to describe the transformation of leaden, blackened man into spiritual gold : the theme of Andreae's Chymical Wedding. Schwenckfeld's view of man is very close to William Blake's “Divine Humanity” and is ultimately derived from the Heavenly Man (Anthropos) of the gnostic Hermetica.
Schwenckfeld wrote that “Justification [before God] derives from the knowledge [Erkenntnis] of Christ through faith.” Participation in the bread of heaven (which according to John's Gospel feeds the kosmos) made Schwenckfeld a free man : a member of the true church behind the visible church - the spiritual fraternity, and the central concept implicit in Andreae's Fraternity of the Rose-Cross, which meets in a building called the House of the Holy Spirit. Schwenckfeld was ‘freed-up’ to act as Adam did before the Fall. He became the “new regenerated man” who was able, because he was spiritually free, to keep the commandments of God, since he was truly in love with God.
In 1526, Schwenckfeld was rebutted by Martin Luther on the eucharistic issue, and his teachings were condemned as heretical. Two years later, the Catholic Ferdinand of Bohemia and Hungary annulled the evangelical reforms which had taken place in Silesia, and Schwenckfeld went into exile to Strasbourg in 1527. While in Strasbourg, he disputed with Anabaptists - the most anarchistic and physically courageous of the radicals - but who Schwenckfeld thought lacked the true knowledge of Christ. He considered the Anabaptists to be too preoccupied with the end of the world and the ‘second coming’, and begged them rather to consider how things are in the presence of God. Schwenckfeld was not an apocalyptic millenarian.
Nor can we wait here on earth for a golden age. We hope to attain to the perfect knowledge of Christ yonder in the Fatherland. Here we know only in part.
The Anabaptists might well have sought an end to time. In 1522 the Holy Roman Emperor, the Habsburg Charles V, had introduced the Inquisition into the Netherlands, and it is claimed that during his reign 30,000 of these revolutionaries met grisly deaths in the seventeen provinces under his control. The Anabaptists, abandoned by Luther along with the peasants, were to be tortured, drowned, burned, and roasted over slow fires. For Andreae, the Anabaptists were the boni, the good people, whose word was ignored and whose martyrdom was exemplary. In Andreae's eyes, it was better to be a Waldensian22 or an idiot whose life and preaching harmonised than to show off many learned books of orthodoxy, while neglecting Christian practice and the love of one's fellows. Andreae did not need to be in agreement with their entire outlook (which in the case of the Anabaptists was egalitarian and socially revolutionary - and not infrequently quite hysterical) to feel scandalised by the treatment meted out to radical reformers. Andreae also regarded the burning of witches as a stain on mankind.
While in Strasbourg, Schwenckfeld became close to the radical reformer Sebastian Franck, who was also in temporary sojourn in that ‘free’ city. Franck, an itinerant printer and effective radical, had been hounded out of more cities, free or otherwise, than he could properly recall.
A key belief of Franck's was that of the celestial assumption of the apostolic church. According to this picture the primitive Christian Church had in distant times become corrupt, and the true church had become a spiritual body. The visible church was, according to Franck, a mere husk that the Devil had perverted. The spiritual church would remain scattered and hidden among the heathen and the nominal Christians until the second advent, when Christ would gather his own and bring them home. This vision of an invisible fraternity would impact itself in the conception of the invisible Rosicrucian Brotherhood, as well as providing a source for much later neo-gnostic and neo-Rosicrucian beliefs regarding a hidden sanctuary of adepts or invisible cabal of ‘Secret Chiefs’. Indeed, when you add this image to that of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Gral castle (Munsalvaesche) in Parzifal, you have the fundamental itinerary of a good deal of contemporary neo-gnostic and theosophist mythology23.
It is noteworthy that Franck translated Agrippa's de vanitate scientiarum, (very much in tune with Franck's notable ‘learned are perverted’ theme as we shall see). Agrippa was of course steeped in Neoplatonic-occult lore. Franck was also acquainted with Paracelsus when both these giants resided in Basle, and in Franck's book Die Gulden arcke24 he says of Hermes that “he hath all that in him which a Christian must needs know.” In the same book, (written in 1538), Franck gives an extensive paraphrase from the Poimandres of Corpus Hermeticum I, a translation of which provided Holland with her first printed acquaintance with the Corpus Hermeticum. Sebastian Franck stood for the Ecclesia Spiritualis, the spiritual church which, as with the Cathars, required neither wood nor stone but subsisted in the hearts of the faithful. Franck wrote that:
The unitary spirit alone baptizes with fire and Spirit all the faithful, and all who are obedient to the inner Word in whatever part of the world they may be. For God is no respecter of persons but instead is the same to the Greeks as to the Barbarian and the Turk, to the lord as to the servant, so long as they retain the Light which has shone upon them and the joy in their heart.
In 1531, Sebastian Franck was accused of being a revolutionary and kicked out of Strasbourg. Schwenckfeld received the same treatment two years later.
Anyone who doubts the influence of the radical reformation on Andreae need only consult his brilliant Menippus (1617), described by Wilhelm Kühlmann as “a satire which cannot be more highly regarded as the summing-up of the conflicts of an entire epoch.” The theme of the 86th Discourse, Paradoxa, is taken completely from the Paradoxa of Sebastian Franck : quo doctorium, eo perversiorem or more bluntly, the learned are perverted. Andreae was heartily sickened at the arrogant conceit of academics who thought they knew everything, did nothing, and stood by while good men and women went to the stake for the very thing with which they ought to have been most concerned : the truth. Andreae says he would rather have been a witness of the truth than a doctor; those thought by the world to be impious (such as the radical reformers) are the truly holy; the truth is always revolutionary. Theology is an experience, not a science; belief is not an art. The will and the thoughts are free and no judgement can restrict them. In short, the learned are perverted. In fact, the very same theme had been used by Andreae nine years earlier in the Fama: “the pride and covetousness of the learned is so great, it will not suffer them to agree together”.
The 23rd Dialogue of the Menippus tells of how pious people have to starve because they give themselves freely and without ceremony. The 24th Dialogue says that too many books prevent the ordinary man from finding God and gaining understanding, while the teachers and priests call anyone an Anabaptist and a heretic who is simply going his own holy way. The 25th talks of the downfall of the universities, calling them schools where empty meaning, vanity, wastefulness, manure, intolerance of dissenters, hypocrisy, flattery, idle talk and lying dominate, and where talkers armed with “scholastic guns” are aimed against Christ and his foolish disciples, while the whole travesty rules over the poor people25.
By the time Andreae was born, in 1586, the political effectiveness of the radical spirituals had been suppressed. In 1535, the wild Anabaptist ‘kingdom’ of Münster fell with the death of every inhabitant, while spiritual prophets tried to recruit disappointed Anabaptists into sects of ‘invisible churches’. Five years later, Franck and Schwenckfeld were condemned by Lutherans and Calvinists at Smalkald. The ‘inner word’ of the radicals was denied. The Holy Spirit, said the Judges - speaking on its behalf - works exclusively through the exterior Word, written and preached. As George Williams expressed the consequences in his brilliant book, The Radical Reformation (1962) :
The ruthless suppression of the radical Reformation by the Catholic and Protestant princes alike led to the permanent disfigurement of the social and constitutional structure of central Europe, culminating in the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück with their sanction of the complete disintegration of the great medieval ideal of a universal Christian society. …they [the radical reformers] were covenanters of the ongoing Israel of faith, died confident in their election to live obediently at the suffering centre of redemptive history, in imitation of Him who taketh away the sins of the world.
There was another link which bound the genesis of the Rosicrucian Manifestos to the radical reformers. That link subsists in the development of German Pietism from out of the streams of radical reform, mysticism and theosophy (direct investigation of the life of God in the soul, expressed in terms of philosophical and alchemical dynamics).
A key author in this development was Valentin Weigel, who was born in Dresden in 1533 and who died in 1588 - the year of the Spanish Armada. Weigel published only one book in his lifetime, On the Life of Christ (1578), but after his death his works gained considerable underground currency. Some even crossed the Channel to England. Astrology Theologized was published in London in 1649 under the gnostic rubric Sapiens dominabitur Astris. Pirate copies emerged from all kinds of places, including, Carlos Gilly surmises, Augustus von Anhalt's secret printing-press at Plötzkau, (Augustus being, according to Gilly, the first known recipient of the Fama Fraternitatis). Weigel was certainly influenced by Caspar Schwenckfeld while his Life of Christ displays much erudition influenced by Paracelsus. The microcosm-macrocosm theory, so central to the thought-world of the ‘Rosicrucian’ is quite explicit in Weigel's work on the superiority of the light of grace to the natural cosmic dominants expressed in the images of the stars in Astrology Theologized :
Everything which is without is as that which is within, but the internal always excels the external in essence, virtue and operation, so we bear God within us, and God bears us in Himself. God hath us with Himself, and is nearer to us, than we are to ourselves. We have God everywhere with us, whether we know it, or know it not.
Weigel, a Protestant minister, came to consider his own professional calling vain, and the ordained ministry in general as the work of the Antichrist. He was against the Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577) with its emphasis on formal dogma and the straight-jacketing of the inner spiritual movement. His view of the cosmos was that of the Neoplatonic Theurgist : the Three Worlds, (as detailed in Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1533) : the material world, (a world of darkness in itself), the invisible celestial (angelic) world, and the supercelestial domain of God. God for Weigel is the summum bonum, reception of Whom is blessedness. When a person accepts salvation, he or she becomes a god. He followed Schwenckfeld's view on the supercelestial nature of Christ's flesh and the general Schwenckfeldian scheme of progressive deification.
Weigel's theosophic vision represents a Neoplatonic, gnostic reworking of orthodox Christian theology. He saw the magical power inherent in the theology but unexpressed by the orthodox Lutherans. Due to the synthetic and harmonising nature of Weigel's thought, he found approval among Andreae's circle and among all those who believed that true Christian spirituality was, in a very special sense, magical. Weigel's works had a practical, helpful and above all spiritual character. He was a great influence on Jacob Böhme (1575-1624) whose profound theosophic system was compared by his follower Abraham von Frankenburg to the Valentinian Gnostics in the manuscript Theophrastia Valentiniana (1627), as well as upon Andreae's friend and spiritual mentor Joannes Arndt of Anhalt (1555-1621). Arndt reworked Weigel's writings, and in so doing became the father of German Pietism, a movement which persists in influence to this day. Arndt wrote that “Christ has many servants but few followers.”
In 1618, while Böhme was busy writing his spiritual masterpieces in Görlitz, Johann Valentin Andreae founded his Christian Society, the Societas Christianae, whose twenty-six members included Tobias Adami, Christoph Besold and Joannes Arndt. (Andreae included the name of the late Tobias Hess on the list as well). Arndt was particuarly close to Andreae's friend Christoph Besold, the last link in our chain of association. Besold called Arndt “the most meritricious man in Christ's Church” and shared with him and with Andreae an extraordinarily deep and well-informed knowledge of medieval mysticism.
Born at Esslingen in 1577, Besold was nine years older than Andreae, gaining a chair in Jurisprudence at Tübingen in 1610, three years after Andreae had been sent down from the university for writing a lude poem about a tutor's wife. Andreae learnt a great deal from the older man's encyclopaedic knowledge. Besold knew nine languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, was familiar with the Qabalah and occult sciences, was brilliant at Theology, at home with the Patristics, the scholastics and, above all, the Platonist mystics and cosmologists from the thirteenth century to his own : Ramon Lull (c.1232-1316); Cusanus (who used the Hermetic Asclepius, 1401-1464); Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494); Giordano Bruno (1548-1600); Eckhart (c.1260-1328); Heinrich Suso (c.1295-1366); Ruysbroek (1293-1381); Joannes Tauler (c.1300-1361) and the author of the Imitatio Christi (called Thomas à Kempis) : all vital links in the chain of the intellectual presentation of a spiritual gnosis, and who together represent a veritable catalogue of some of that movement's greatest literary moments. Andreae had unrestricted access to Besold's library (now housed at the Universitatsbibliothek in Salzburg).
Besold was also politically aware. He was passionate about Campanella's utopian Civitas solis (The City of the Sun, which became a model for Andreae's Reipublicae Christianopolitinae or Christianopolis of 1619, dedicated to Joannes Arndt), and was an enthusiast for the Italian anti-Habsburg liberal satirist Trajano Boccalini whose Ragguagli di Parnaso (News from Parnassus 1612-1613 - an extract from which was published with the 1614 Fama) was probably translated by Besold.
Besold's philosophical outlook, as revealed in his Signa temporum (Signs of the Times, 1614) and Axiomata Philosophico-Theologica (1616) was exeedingly profound and made a great impact on Johann Valentin Andreae, to whom it was dedicated. Like Andreae, Besold was fully aware that the hoped-for spiritual reformation had been hi-jacked by the ruling classes and soured by the theologians and ecclesiastical authorities. He set about trying to establish a basis for the true and authentic spiritual Christianity. In spite of the huge scope of this endeavour, and his vast knowledge, Besold himself was sincerely humble, favouring the doctrine of ‘learned ignorance’ detailed by Cusanus in the latter's famous work of this name. Besold realised that no theory or external knowledge-system could ever constitute absolute and everlasting knowledge. Following the mystics, Besold saw that God Himself can mostly only usefully be described in terms of what He is NOT. Ultimately, the highest wisdom is to know NOTHING26 .
Besold preferred act to theory and disputation. He saw the Church as an embattled ship calling on Christ to save it. The world to Besold was a sect : separated from God. The good man passes through the world as a voyager : “he must not be in the world as if it were his native land; he passes by as a traveller” said Besold in an utterance highly reminiscent of views expressed in the Nag Hammadi Library such as the imperative to “Become passers-by” so as to remind Gnostics of the relative character of this world. According to Besold, the pretended sages of the world in their blindness, regard people who behave as Christians as mad, and insofar as they claim to be Christians themselves do the name a dishonour. Besold shares with Hess, Andreae and Comenius the theme of the folly of the world - to be in right relation to it must mean appearing foolish to the worldly.
Besold regarded erudition as an obstacle to true devotion. Besold cites the melancholy voice of Ecclesiastes : With much knowledge cometh great sorrow. Even the most assiduous researches reveal the full profundity of neither nature nor the human-being in spite of vaunted claims to the contrary. The false sage is like a caged bird : always turning around on himself. Pious philosophy on the other hand does not make for multiple theories, but it does make us better. The demon of the savants (the learned-perverted) is curiosity, offering much work for poisoned fruit. This theme will have a great influence on Andreae, and arm him with a useful category to describe many of the absurd responses to the Fama.
For Besold, curiosity obstructs the revelation of God in man. The “curious” are like Martha who obstructs calm and confidence with her incessant worries about domestic necessities. Rather, Besold advises, man should strive for the “most simple simplicity”*. Humility is the true foundation of all Christian life. It is the trunk of the Cross, the other arms being according to Besold, obedience, poverty, and chastity. The Cross is the only intimate knowledge of the Word of God. The ‘real thing’ is interior; the Reformation had failed to reform the heart. Those who were closest to genuine spiritual regeneration were attacked from all sides. While before the reform of Luther the Church had been dominated by Pharisees, now it had been taken over by the scribes. Whereas religion is firstly communicated through acts of love, the religion of the letter kills. Christianity, according to Besold, is not a system or theory but a practice through which we advance by Grace. Luther's ‘justification by faith alone’ is insufficient if not followed up and accompanied by good works, acts of love, remembering that it is not the earthy ‘I’ (ego) that does these good things but God within, without Whom we are helpless, though we may consider ourselves powerful and impervious to circumstance. The Godless are obsessed with insurance; death will cure us of the illusion. We are not saved by our own efforts, externally generated, but by the sole merits of Christ dead and raised within us. We must die and be resurrected with Him : an inner alchemy. Without Christ-the-Stone we are lead, truly dead. (As the “living Jesus” of the Nag Hammadi Library says : “The dead are not alive and the living will not die”).
Penitence is “the best of all medicines”. We must lose confidence in ourselves, and in the world. Once the flesh is mortified, that is governed by the Spirit, the Spirit of God lives in us. Wisdom destroys man to renovate him; she humiliates him to exalt him. She darkens him to make in him a new light. This is accomplished by the alchemy of regeneration. The more frequently the metal ‘dies’, the more it is transmuted into noble metal, the more it abandons its old ‘body’. The better the metal, the more it must die, to reveal the gold. If you are especially gifted, expect to suffer. The more often he dies, the more death illuminates him by the resurrection of Christ in himself. The imitation of Christ is the real alchemy, culminating in the real New Man.
Besold uses the image of the Christian knight and of ‘the sleeping fiancé’, brought in time to the rose-garden. Few are called there, and few are chosen. The chosen are the elect : nothing to be proud of. The elect are not a sect, which is always a human invention and therefore ultimately sterile. Besold quotes Augustine : “I was searching for you outside of myself, and did not find the God in my heart.” God is at the centre of the soul.
Regarding the path of the mystics and the seeing-of-visions, Besold says that visions are dangerous for those not thoroughly schooled in humility, (as occult and mainstream history makes abundantly clear). The divine garden is always there, but no-one can force entry. The door is always ajar, but not everyone can enter. We make our own barriers. Besold regrets the blindness of man who cannot see the signs sent to awaken him. Paraphrasing the gospel (Matthew XIV. 22-27), Besold writes how Christ returned at the fourth watch of the night to the boat of the disciples (meaning the time of Luther), but was unrecognised and taken for a ghost. The Church-boat is still rocking with the winds of doctrinal conflict and will continue to do so until the moment comes when Christ will re-enter the boat and the ocean will become calm.
But the ocean will not be calm. The already wild surface is about to receive a colossal splash whose waves will billow for a generation.
Christoph Besold
“I was searching for you outside of myself, and did not find the God in my heart”
*Quotations from Schwenckfeld (pp. 116 - 118) appear in Williams, George, The Radical Reformation (Westminster, US, 1962, pp. 106 - 112, 257f., 466ff.).
*Quoted by Roland Edighoffer in his analysis of Christoph Besold in his excellent and invaluable study of the Rosicrucian phenomenon, Rose-Croix et Société Ideale (2 vols. Paris, 1982).