Angelus Silesius

Extract

The religious development of Angelus Silesius (Johannes Scheffler is one of the most interesting chapters in the history of the religious life. Usually coupled with Meister Eckhart, he became a text-book example for the Protestant theory that the Catholic Church kills the inner life—Meister Eckhart she condemned (though, in fact, only a few of his more extreme statements), but Angelus Silesius she broke.

The time into which Johannes Scheffler was born was not unlike our own. The greater part of the continent was in a state’of material and spiritual upheaval; the Thirty Years’ War devastated Central Europe, Reformation and Counter-Reformation were fighting for the souls of men; peasants and soldiers sang that awful ballad, ‘There is a reaper called Death, Hath power from the great God’— not knowing whether they should eat and drink for to-morrow they would die, or follow the call to sackcloth and ashes of men like the great popular preacher Abraham a Santa Clara.

Outside the Catholic Church the religious life had broken up inttf two main streams : the orthodox Lutheranism (or Calvinism) of the established territorial churches on the one hand, and a number of sfnall groups and sects experimenting in a pseudo-mystic religion on the other. Two provinces of the Holy Roman Empire were especially affected by this revival : Silesia, where Scheffler was born, and Holland, where he spent part of his university years. It was, therefore, almost inevitable that the passionate young man should have made contact with these circles, ‘conventicles ‘as they were usually called, in the hope of finding in them the fulfilment of the yearnings of his deeply religious nature.