VALENTINE WEIGEL AND NATURE MYSTICISM
Project Gutenberg EPUB edition
Jones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
This chapter cannot come to a proper close without some consideration of a Weigelean book which was translated into English in 1649, under the title, "Astrologie Theologized: That the Inward man by the Light of Grace, through possession and practice of a holy life, is to be acknowledged and live in us: which is the only means to keep the true Sabbath in inward holinesse." {149} The anonymous translator ascribes the book to Weigel. It is, in fact. Part Two of [Greek] Gnothi Seauton, but it is uncertain whether it was written by Weigel himself. But whether written by Weigel or later by one of his school, it is a good illustration of the way in which mystically inclined Christians of that period endeavoured to make spiritual conquest of the prevailing Astrology and, through its help, to discover the nature of the inner, hidden universe. Astrology, this little book declares, is "conversant with the secrets of God which are hidden in the natural things of creation." It is the science of reading the unseen through the seen, for, according to the teaching of this book, everything visible is an unveiling of something invisible. Man—who is a centre of the whole universe, who has in himself elements of all the worlds, inner and outer—"is created to be a visible Paradise, Garden, Tabernacle, Mansion, House, Temple and Jerusalem of God." All the wisdom, power, virtue, and glory of God are hidden and are slumbering in man.
There is nothing so near to man as God is—"He is nearer to us than we are to ourselves"[31]—and the only reason we do not find Him and know Him and open out our life interiorly, so that the true Sabbath comes to the soul, is due to our "vagabond and unquiet ways of keeping busy with our own will, outside our internal country." If I could desist from the things with which I vex and worry myself, and study to be at rest in my God who dwells with me; if I could accustom my mind to spiritual tranquillity and cease to wander in a maze of thoughts, cares, and affections; if I could be at leisure from the external things and creatures of this world, and chiefly from myself; if, in short, I might "come into a plenary dereliction of myself," I should at once "begin to see and know of the most present habitation of God in me and so I should eat of the Tree of Life in the midst of the Paradise, which Paradise I myself am, and be a Guest of God."[32] Adam, who was "the Protoplast" and begetter of all men, and who, like everything else in the universe, was "double," {150} allowed himself to live toward the outward instead of toward the inward, permitted the seed of the serpent to grow in him instead of the divine seed, and so came under the dominance of the natural, elemental world, with its "lesser light" of knowledge and with its "tree of death." But the Paradise, with its greater Light of Wisdom and with its Tree of Life, is always near to man and can be repossessed and regained by him. The outer elements, and the astral world with its visible stars, rule no one, determine no one.
Each man's "star" is in his own breast. It lies in his own power to "theologize his astrologie," to turn his universe into spiritual forces. By "a new nativity," initiated by obedient response to the inward Light—the spiritual Star, not of earth and not of the astral universe, but of God the indwelling Spirit—he may put on the new man, created after the likeness of God, and become the recipient of heavenly Wisdom springing up within him from the Life of the Spirit.[33]
There can be no question in the mind of any one who is familiar with the literature and religious thought of seventeenth-century England, that the ideas set forth in this chapter exerted a wide and profound influence, and were a part of the psychological climate of the middle decades of that century. The channel here indicated was only one of the ways through which these ideas came in. In due time we shall discover other channels of this spiritual message.
[1] Ficino is dealt with at greater length in Chapter XIII.
[2] The Cabala was, as I have tried to make clear, only one of the influences which produced this new intellectual climate. The rediscovered "Hermes Trismegistus," the mystically coloured Platonism, as it came from Italy, the awakened interest in Nature and in man, and the powerful message of the German Mystics all played an important part toward the formation of the new Weltanschauung.
[3] Three Books of Occult Philosophy, translated by J. F. (London, 1651).
[4] Stoddart's Life of Paracelsus (London, 1911), p. 76.
[5] Browning, Paracelsus, B. i. This passage fairly represents Paracelsus' general position. "There is," he says in his Philosophia sagax, "a Light in the spirit of man which illuminates everything. . . . The quality of each thing created by God, whether it be visible or invisible to the senses, may be perceived and known. If man knows the essence of things, their attributes, their attractions, and the elements of which they consist, he will be a Master of nature, of the elements, and of the spirits."
[6] Christliches Gespraech, chap. iii.
[7] There is an excellent critical study of Weigel's writings by A. Israel, entitled, Weigels Leben und Schriften nach den Quellen dargestellt (Zschopau, 1888).
[8] "Of the Life of Christ, That is, Of True Faith which is the Rule, Square, Levell or Measuring Line of the Holy City of God and of the Inhabitants thereof here on Earth. Written in the German Language by Valentine Weigelus." (London, Giles Calvert, 1648.)
[9] Quoted from Israel, op. cit. p. 107.
[10] On the Life of Christ, part i. chap. ii.
[11] On the Life of Christ, part i. chap. iii.
[12] Ibid. part i. chap. viii.
[13] On the Life of Christ, part i. chap. ix.
[14] Ibid. part ii. chap. ix.; part i. chap. x.; part ii. chap. x.; and part. i. chap. xiv.
[15] Ibid. part ii. chaps. iii. and iv.
[16] This is the view set forth in his [Greek] Gnothi Seauton [Know Thyself].
[17] On the Life of Christ, part ii. chaps. v. and vii.
[18] Ibid. part i. chap. viii.
[19] Vom himmlischen Jerusalem in uns, chap. viii.
[20] Weigel enjoins his readers to read Franck's book on "the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." See On the Life of Christ, part ii. p. 57.
[21] "Faith," he says, "cannot be forced into any person by gallows or pillory." On the Life of Christ, part i. chap. xv.
[22] Ibid. part ii. chap. xiv. This is built on a passage in Franck's Apologia.
[23] On the Life of Christ, part i. chaps. iv. and v.
[24] Ibid. part i. chap. vi.
[25] Ibid. part i. chaps. xii. and xiii.
[26] Quoted from Tauler by Weigel, ibid. chap. vii. See also part iii. chap. i.
[27] Ibid. part ii. chap. ii.
[28] Op. cit. chap. xx.
[29] Christ. Gespraech, chap. ii.
[30] In his Der gueldene Griff, he tells of a personal spiritual "opening" which is very similar to the one which occurred later in the life of Boehme. He found himself astray in "a wilderness of darkness" and he cried to God for Light to enlighten his soul. "Suddenly," he says, "the Light came and my eyes were opened so that I saw more clearly than all the teachers in all the world with all their books could teach me." Chap. xxiv.
[31] Astrologie Theologized, p. 8.
[32] Ibid. pp. 16-17.
[33] This little book refers with much appreciation to Theophrastus Paracelsus. It uses his theory of "first matter" and his doctrine of "the seven governours of the world," which we shall meet in a new form in Boehme. Another book which carried astrological ideas into religious thought in a much cruder way was Andreas Tentzel's De ratione naturali arboris vitae et scientiae boni et mali, etc., which was Pars Secunda of his Medicinii diastatica (Jena, 1629). It was translated into English in 1657 by N. Turner with the title: "The Mumial Treatise of Tentzelius, being a natural account of the Tree of Life and of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, with a mystical interpretation of that great Secret, to wit, the Cabalistical Concordance of the Tree of Life and Death, of Christ and Adam." Tentzel was a famous doctor and disciple of Paracelsus and "flourished" in Germany during the first half of the seventeenth century.
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