The Golden Builders by Tobias Churton

Author:Tobias Churton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609251772
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser Conari

Piety and Mysticism

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

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