In 1534 his Weltbuch appeared from a press in Tübingen, and the same year he published his famous Paradoxa, which contains the most clear and consistent exposition of his mystical and spiritual religion. Other significant books from his pen are his translation of Erasmus' Moriae Encomion ("Praise of Folly"), with very important additions; Von der Eitelkeit aller menschlichen Kunst und Weisheit ("The Vanity of Arts and Sciences"), following the treatise by Agrippa von Nettesheim; _Von dem Baum des Wissens Gutes und Böses ("Of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil");[9] the Germaniae Chronicon ("Chronicle of Germany"), 1538; Die guldin Arch ("Golden Arch"), 1538; and _Das verbütschiert mit 7 Siegeln verschlossene Buch ("The Seven-sealed Book"), 1539.
The closing years of his life were passed in Basle, where he peacefully worked at his books and at type-setting, while the theologians fired their paper guns against him, and here in Basle he "went forth with God" on his last journey to find a safe and quiet "city with foundations," probably about the end of the year 1542. Three years before his {52} death he had written in his "Seven-sealed Book" of the soul's journey toward God in these words: "The longer one travels toward the city he seeks the nearer and nearer he comes to the goal of his journey; exactly so is it with the soul that is seeking God. If he will travel away from himself and away from the world and seek only God as the precious pearl of his soul, he will come steadily nearer to God, until he becomes one spirit with God the Spirit; but let him not be afraid of mountains and valleys on the way, and let him not give up because he is tired and weary, for he who seeks finds."[10] "The Sealed Book" contains an "apology" by Franck which is one of the most touching and one of the most noble documents from any opponent of the course which the German Reformation was taking. "I want my writings accepted," he declares, "only in so far as they fit the spirit of Scripture, the teaching of the prophets, and only so far as the anointing of the Word of God, Christ the inward Life and Light of men, gives witness to them. . . . Nobody is the master of my faith, and I desire to be the master of the faith of no one. I love any man whom I can help, and I call him brother whether he be Jew or Samaritan. . . . I cannot belong to any separate sect, but I believe in a holy, Christlike Church, a fellowship of saints, and I hold as my brother, my neighbour, my flesh and blood, all men who belong to Christ among all sects, faiths, and peoples scattered throughout the whole world—only I allow nobody to have dominion over the one place which I am pledged to the Lord to keep as pure virgin, namely my heart and my conscience. If you try to bind my conscience, to rule over my faith, or to be master of my heart, then I must leave you. Except that, everything I am or have is thine, whoever thou art or whatever thou mayest believe."[11]
It was Franck's primary idea—the principle to which he was dedicated and for which he was content to suffer, {53} in the faith that men in future times would come to see as he did[12]—that man's soul possesses a native capacity to hear the inward Word of God. He often calls Plato and Plotinus and "Hermes Trismegistus" his teachers, who "had spoken to him more clearly than Moses did"[13] and, like these Greek teachers of the nature of the soul's furnishings, he insisted that we come "not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness," but that there is a divine element, an innermost essence in us, in the very structure of the soul, which is the starting-point of all spiritual progress, the mark of man's dignity, the real source of all religious experience, and the eternal basis of the soul's salvation and joy. He names this inward endowment by many names. It is the Word of God ("Wort Gottes"), the Power of God ("Kraft Gottes"), Spirit ("Geist"), Mind of Christ ("Sinn Christi"), Divine Activity ("göttliche Wirkung"), Divine Origin ("göttlicher Ursprung"), the inward Light ("das innere Licht"), the true Light ("das wahre Licht"), the Lamp of the soul ("das innere Ampellicht"). "The inward Light," Franck says in the Paradoxa, "is nothing else than the Word of God, God Himself, by whom all things were made and by whom all men are enlightened." It is, in Franck's thought, not a capricious, subjective impulse or vision, and it is not to be discovered in sudden ecstatic experiences; nor, on the other hand, is the divine Word, for Franck, something purely objective and transcendent. It is rather a common ground and essence for God and man. It is God in His self-revealing activity; God in His self-giving grace; God as the immanent ground of all that is permanently real, and at the same time this divine endowment forms the fundamental nature of man's soul—"Gottes Wort ist in der menschlichen Natur angelegt"[14]—and is the original substance of our being. Consciousness of God and consciousness of self have one fundamental source in this deep where God and man are unsundered. "No man can see or know himself unless he sees and knows, by the Light and Life that is {54} in him. God the eternally true Light and Life; wherefore nobody can ever know God outside of himself, outside that region where he knows himself in the ground of himself. . . . Man must seek, find, and know God through an interrelation—he must find God in himself and himself in God."[15] This deep ground of inner reality is in every person, so far as he is a person; it shines forth as a steady illumination in the soul, and, while everything else is transitory, this Word is eternal and has been the moral and spiritual guide of all peoples in all ages.
Franck thus differs in a vital point from Schwenckfeld. The latter starts with man as utterly lost and devoid of any inherent goodness. By a sudden, supernatural event, at a temporal moment, divine forces break into the soul from without and supply it with a revitalizing energy. Man—lost, fallen, sin-blasted and utterly helpless—is by a divine and heavenly creative movement made a new Adam. For Franck, the soul has never lost the divine Image, the pearl of supreme price, the original element which is God Himself in the soul. We are all, in the deepest centre of our being, like Adam, possessed of a substantial essence, not of earth, not of time and space, not of the shadow but of the eternal, spiritual, and heavenly type. It may become overlaid with the rubbish of earth, it may long lie buried in the field of the human heart, it may remain concealed, like the grain of radium in a mass of dark pitchblende, and be forgotten, but we have only to return home within ourselves to find the God who has never been sundered from us and who could not leave us without leaving Himself. We do not need to cross the sea to find Him, we do not need to climb the heavens to reach Him—the Word is nigh thee, the Image is in thy heart, turn home and thou shalt find Him.[16]
The bottomless and abysmal nature of the human soul comes first into clear revelation in the Person of Christ, who is, Franck declares, truly and essentially both God and Man. In Christ the invisible, eternal, {55} self-existent God has clothed Himself with flesh and become Man, has made Himself visible and vocal to our spiritual eyes and ears, and in Christ God has given us an adequate goal and norm of life, a perfect pattern ("Muster") to walk by and to live by. Here we can see both the character of God and the measure of His expectation for us. But we must not stop with the Christ after the flesh, the Christ without. He first becomes our life and salvation when He is born within us and is revealed in our hearts, and has become the Life of our lives. We must eat His body, drink His blood until our nature is one with His nature and our spirit one in will and purpose with His spirit.[17]
Franck belongs in many respects among the mystics, but with peculiar variations of his own from the prevailing historical type of mysticism. He is without question saturated with the spirit of the great mystics; he approves their inner way to God and he has learned from them to view this world of time and space as shadow and not as reality. No mystic, further, could say harsher things than he does of "Reason."[18] Human reason—or more properly "reasoning"—has for him, as for them, a very limited area for its demesne. It is a good guide in the realm of earthly affairs. It can deal wisely with matters that affect our bodily comfort and our social welfare, but it is "barren" in the sphere of eternal issues. It has no eye for realities beyond the world of three dimensions. It goes blind as soon as it tries to speculate about God. He looks for no final results in spiritual matters from intellectual dialectics, whether they be of the old scholastic type, or of the new type of speculations, formulations and subtleties of the Protestant theologians.
Franck always comes back to experience as his basis of religion, as his way to truth and to divine things. "Many," he says, "know and teach only what they have picked up and gathered in, without having experienced it {56} in the deeps of themselves."[19] "He who wishes to know what is in the Temple must not stand outside, merely hearing people read and talk about God. That is all a dead thing. He must go inside and have the experience for himself ("selbst erfahren"). Then first everything springs into life."[20] But "experience" with him does not mean enthusiastic visions and raptures. He puts as little value on ecstasies and emotional vapourings as he does on dialectic. Ecstasies lead men as often on false trails as on right tracks. They supply no criterion of certitude; they furnish no concrete ideas or ideals to live by; but still further, they do not bring all the deep-lying powers of the soul into play as any true source of religion must do. He is striving to find a foundation-principle for the spiritual life which shall not be capricious or sporadic, and which shall not be confined to one aspect of the inner self, but which shall burn on as a steady illumination in the soul and be the basis of all moral activity and all spiritual development. He finds this principle, as we have seen, in the Word of God, which is a divine reality, an eternal and self-existent activity, opening upward into all the resources of God, and at the same time forming the fundamental nature and ground-structure of the soul. A person may live—many persons do—in the outer region of the self, using the natural instincts with which he is supplied, pursuing the goals of life which appeal to common sense and steering the earthly course by custom and by reason, but it is always possible to have a wider range of experience, to live in deeper currents, and to draw upon a profounder source of insight. This deeper experience—which is the basis of Franck's mysticism and, for him, the very heart of any genuine religion—consists of a personal discovery of this eternal Word of God within and an irradiation of the whole being through the co-operation of the will with it. The will is king in man,[21] and can open or shut the gate which leads to life. It can make its world good or it {57} can make it evil; just as out of one and the same flower the bee gets honey and the spider poison.[22] It can swing over its allegiance to God the Spirit of truth, or to the god of the world who is anti-Christ.
This experience of the Word of God which is thus brought about by the will of man—by an innermost personal choice—affects, Franck insists, all the faculties of the inner life. Reason now becomes illumined with a Light which it never had until the gate into its deeper region was opened. Now, through co-operation with the Spirit of God, reason becomes capable of higher processes, and can deal with divine things because it has actual data to work upon. The emotions, too, are no longer blind and instinctive, they no longer carry the will whither it would not. They are now the overflow of an inner experience which is too rich and full for expression,[23] which transcends the intellectual apprehension of it, but they are spiritualized and controlled from within. The moral life is especially heightened, and this is for Franck one of the main evidences that a divine source has been tapped. The discovery of the Word of God creates and constructs an autonomous "kingdom of the conscience" ("Reich des Gewissens"), gives us "a thousand-fold witness of God," and becomes to us the tree of life and the tree of knowledge.[24]
In his little book on "the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil"—a book which was destined to have a far-reaching influence—he declares that the Garden-of-Eden story is a mighty parable of the human soul. All that is told in the Genesis account is told of what goes on in the mysterious realm within us. It is told as though it were an external happening, it is in reality an internal affair. The Paradise and the Fall, the Voice of God and the tempting voice of the serpent, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, are all in our own hearts as they were in the heart of Adam. Heaven and Hell are there. The one stands fully revealed in the triumphant Adam, who is Christ; the other is {58} exhibited in its awfulness in the disobedient Adam of the Fall.
As fast as the life comes under the sway of the "kingdom of conscience" and a solid moral character is formed, the inner guidance of the Word of God becomes more certain and more reliable. Only the good person has a sure and unerring perception of the truth, just as only the scientist sees the laws of the world, and as only the musician perceives the harmony of sounds. Not only must all spiritual experience be subject to the moral test, it must further be tested by the Light of God in other men and in history, and by the spirit of Scripture, which is the noblest permanent fruit of the Eternal Word. Every person must prove the authority of his religion. He must have his heart conquered and his mind taken captive and his will directed by his truth so that he would be ready to face a thousand deaths for it,[25] and he must, through his truth and insight, come into spiritual unity and co-operation with all who form the invisible Church.