Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (15 page)

It is not to be supposed that, because in this night and darkness it has passed through so many tempests of afflictions, doubts, fears, and horrors, as has been said, it has for that reason run any risk of being lost. On the contrary …
in the darkness of this night it has gained itself
.
¹³⁰

For John and his successors, this mystic night built upon the ascetic nights of despair and purgation, and could be expressed only in the apophatic terms outlined above. As Jeanne de Cambry, an Augustinian canoness, wrote in her mystic
Ruin of Self-Love and Building of Divine Love
(1623): “But indeed they cannot be explicated by any human tongue! Nevertheless, serving myself of a similitude, I will describe this as best I can.” Later in the treatise she describes a soul in mystic union: “For she will be, as it were, wrapped up in a wonderful kind of interior darkness.”
¹³¹
By the early seventeenth century, more spiritual authors used similitudes of darkness and the night to describe the encounter with God.
¹³²
Writing in 1610, the Lutheran theologian and devotional author Johann Arndt (1555–1621) described a dark night of mystical union in terms remarkably similar to those of John of the Cross:

When the heart is still, when all senses are turned inward, in peace, and recollected in God; when no earthly light appears in the understanding, and the wisdom of the flesh is swallowed up in a night or divine darkness, then the divine light rises and gives a flash, a ray of itself, and shines in the darkness. That is the darkness in which the Lord dwells, and the night in which the will
sleeps and is in union with God. In this [state] one’s memory has forgotten the world and time.
¹³³

The theme of darkening the self to admit the divine light is not common in Arndt’s writings, but it is unmistakable. Again, it is significant that Arndt developed this metaphor of darkness without access to the works of John of the Cross, which were first printed in Spanish in 1618 and in French in 1622–23.

The writings of John of the Cross
did
clearly influence Claude Hopil’s
Divins eslancemens d’amour
of
1629
. Hopil described the divine union in shadowy terms: “One night in the midst of the cloud / in a superabundance of spirit / my soul was alienated of its senses.” He continued: “No, I have neither heart, nor mind, nor memory / since the happy night in which I glimpsed the glory / of the King of love / a night in front of which my days are but a vain shadow / night clearer than a day.”
¹³⁴
In Hopil’s case there is little discussion of purgation before the mystic union. As he wrote: “I like only nights and mystic clouds / To sing in silence to my God my canticles.” Hopil imagines finding God “In the ray of shadow where the Essence hides, / In the
clair-obscur
where silence resides.”
¹³⁵
Hopil’s use of phrases such as “claire obscurité” underscores the links with “clair-obscur” as key concept emerging in painting in the first half of the seventeenth century.
¹³⁶

Images of divine union in the dark night traveled across confessions. The Lutheran convert to Roman Catholicism Johannes Scheffler (1624–77), who after conversion wrote devotional poetry under the name Angelus Silesius, united the powerful sense of immanence from the heterodox spiritualist and Behemist traditions with the Catholic baroque. In his “The Blessed Silence of the Night” (1657), Scheffler provided a concise and eloquent description of the mystic night:

Note, in the silent night, God as a man is born

To compensate thereby for what Adam had done

If your soul can be still as night to the created

God becomes man in you, retrieves what’s violated.
¹³⁷

Nativity, Original Sin, and mystic redemption all coincide in Scheffler’s blessed night.

In all of these evocations of an ascetic “dark night of the senses” and a mystic “happy night in which I glimpsed the glory / of the King of love,” the night is a solitary time in which an individual can be utterly subjected to God – but also to the Devil. The isolated figure at night, such as La Tour’s Magdalene, is fundamental to contemporary narratives of diabolical temptation on stage or in witch trials. Thousands of accused witches, almost all women, inculpated themselves by describing, under torture or its threat, how they encountered the Devil alone at night and surrendered themselves to him, body and soul, in a diabolical parody of mystic union. The early modern night opened up greater heights
and
lower depths for the Christian soul, epitomizing the formation of the early modern Christian subject.
¹³⁸

The fundamental reliance on contrariety in rhetoric and literature, in religious discourse, in sacred history, and in philosophy created an epistemological night in which “the contrary makes known the contrary, as … the daylight by the darkness.” This general understanding of contraries could shift into a sense of the value of darkness and the night, as when an author notes that “the obscurity of darkness commends the clearness of light.”
¹³⁹
Joshua Sylvester added this insight when he translated the
Semaines
of Huguenot poet Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas:

Swans seem whiter if swart crowes be by

(For Contraries each other best discry)

Th’All’s-Architect, alternately decreed

That Night the Day, the Day should Night succeed.
¹⁴⁰

Two German Catholic opponents of witchcraft persecutions, Michael Stapirius (Stappert) and Hermann Löher, produced an extraordinary print to illustrate the need to see by night and by day, i.e., to consider both guilt and innocence, in witchcraft trials (
Figure 3.7
). The “Brillen-Marter-Traktat” of Stappert, written around 1630 and first published with the eyeglass image by Löher in 1676, explained that judges must see with both lenses “to be able to distinguish and separate
the false from the true and the true from the false” (“quo Falsum a Vero et Verum a Falso disjungi et Separari posses”). Note that the night lens allows the “Bonis Liberationem Honorem et Virtutem” while the day lens is associated with the “imprisonment, torture, and death” of the witch (“Veneficis”).
¹⁴¹

Figure 3.7
Illustrating the need to see both sides in witchcraft trials: Hermann
Löher
,
Hochnötige Unterthanige Wemütige Klage der Frommen Unschültigen
(Amsterdam, 1676). Jesuitenbibliothek of the St. Michael-Gymnasium, Bad Münstereifel, Germany.

The French Protestant theologian Lambert Daneau, author of a widely cited witchcraft treatise, placed day and night among the “contrary virtues and natures” in his
Physica Christiana
of 1576, translated as
The Wonderfull Workmanship of the World
(1578). This Calvinist treatise recognized the value of all the contraries in creation:

For God made not all things at the first of one quality, colour, and greatness, neither of one kind and nature. But he made some high some low, some moist some dry, some warm some cold, the day to be one thing and the night another. Yet God made nothing that was evil.

This mode of creation served several purposes:

The power and wisdom of God is thereby more apparent: and also the things themselves by this repugnancy of contrary virtues and natures … For what manner [?] state of things would there have bin, if all things had bin hot? what numbness, if all things had bin cold? what misery, if all ways there had bin darkness; what wearisomness, if it had always bin day? And therefore when God had created the natures of this world, and of the things contained therein, he thought it convenient to refresh and ease them with change and course.
¹⁴²

This pattern of contrariety also structured the relations between God and humankind. In his hymn on the Epiphany, Crashaw proclaimed “a most wise and well-abused Night” that will teach “obscure Mankind … To read more legible thine original Ray / And make our darkness serve thy day.” The Lutheran poet Daniel Czepko (1605–60) captured this sense in an epigram:

Each through the other:

Eternity through time; life through death.

Through the night to light, and through men I see God.
¹⁴³

By using the night to express contrariety, self-denial, and their ineffable encounters with the Divine, these seventeenth-century authors and artists profoundly enriched the scope of representation of their age, while presenting and fostering new attitudes toward the night.

Living in “these times of persecution and trial” during the Puritan Commonwealth, the royalist and Anglican poet Henry Vaughan (1622–95) turned to identify with Nicodemus in his 1655 poem “The Night”:

Wise Nicodemus saw such light

As made him know his God by night.

Most blest believer he!

Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes

Thy long-expected healing wings could see

When Thou didst rise!

And, what can never more be done,

Did at midnight speak with the Sun!
¹⁴⁴

Why did spiritual writers such as John of the Cross, Jacob Böhme, or John Donne see the night as a path to the Divine or insist on the complementarity of darkness and light? What happened to the clear “light overcoming darkness” imagery of the Reformation, epitomized by the “Wittenberg Nightingale” of Hans Sachs? Answering this question satisfactorily is not easy. The first step is to document the development, as I have done here, and show that it is distinct. The late medieval mystic appreciation of night in no way approaches the elevation of darkness we see in the period from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century.

My sense is that the valorization of darkness in Christian imagery arose from an
ongoing
sense of conflict and confusion in the confessional era. Times of apocalyptic struggle, such as the years of the early Reformation, offer a clear view of good and evil. Even if the forces of darkness threatened to triumph, at least the sides were clear. The struggle against the Antichrist was unambiguous, and it would all be settled soon. By the end of the sixteenth century, the dividing line between God’s flock and the wickedness of the world was much less clear in practice. John of the Cross and Jacob Böhme faced suspicion and persecution from
within
their own churches; they, and all Christians after the Reformation, had to accept the existence of numerous confessions heretical to one another across a divided Christendom.

When we survey all those who sought the Lord by night in the pages above, does any pattern emerge? The humble Anabaptists discussed above shared little with the erudite Henry Vaughan save the bitter experience of religious persecution – and an appreciation for the night, literal and metaphorical. By the second half of the sixteenth century the clear calls to overcome the darkness surrounding God’s word gave way to an appreciation of the darkness without which, as Böhme stated, the light could not be revealed, reflecting a new sense that darkness was “inseparable from light as an iconic and psychological factor of essential importance.”
¹⁴⁵
In the confessional age Christians of all churches identified themselves with Nicodemus,
hoping to come to the Lord even in dark times of secrecy and persecution. Worship at night helped expand the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night, fostering the nocturnalization of spirituality in the confessional age.

Did living in the darkness of unresolved confessional strife mean seeing darkness as a part of God’s plan? In the period from the mid sixteenth through the late seventeenth century, Europeans could draw on a wide range of images and discourses to think about the Divine – the night was only one of these, and many of the contemporaries of John of the Cross, Jacob Böhme, or Henry Vaughan chose other paths to similar destinations. Darkness remains, however, an especially dynamic image and the night an especially dynamic time in this period. The new emphases on the night surveyed here (primarily, though not exclusively, in devotional texts) anticipated new forms of political expression and new uses of the night – in very material terms – in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Europeans of the seventeenth century apprehended the night and its darkness as a positive presence, a tangible reality that could be manipulated to a variety of ends. Building upon the chiaroscuro of the Renaissance, artists as diverse as Caravaggio, La Tour, and Rembrandt all used darkness (which in simple extent came to dominate many of their canvasses) to create physical and emotional depth, emphasize natural and divine light, and define space. As I have shown this was true in theological, mystical, and devotional literature as well.
¹⁴⁶
It is clear that the appreciation of darkness and the night unfolded across the Christian West, and one of the few experiences that John of the Cross, the Anabaptists, Jacob Böhme, John Donne, Georges de La Tour, and Henry Vaughan, for example, shared was the awareness of inter- and intraconfessional division and persecution. Darkness and light had become intermixed and inseparable, and so the night became more sacred. By 1600 the straightforward “light versus darkness” imagery of the Reformation had created a confessionally fractured world in which the night took on new sacred values and, as we will see in the next chapters, secular values. The night was becoming more useful, more meaningful, and more manipulable than in the days of the “Wittenberg Nightingale.” It is to these new uses of the night at court and in the city that we now turn.