There are, again, in his Universe, as in the other occult systems, three elemental worlds—the spiritual or intellectual world, the astral world or universal Soul, and the terrestrial world; and all three worlds are man's "mothers." Man is a quintessence of all the elements, visible and invisible. He has a spiritual essence within him which is an emanation of God; he has an astral-soul essence, from the Soul of the world; and he partakes, too, of the material and earthly world. His supreme aim in life should be to establish, or rather re-establish, a harmony between his own little world and the great Universe, so that all the worlds have their right proportions in him, and so that through his highest essence he can win the secrets of the lower worlds—the astral and the material. To accomplish that is to be spiritual, to become like Adam, {139} a paradisaical Man, or like Christ the new Adam. Even the lowest world is penetrated with the spiritual "seed" or "element." The very basic substances of which it is composed—sulphur, mercury, and salt—are in essence spiritual principles, elemental forces, rather than crude matter, and the lower world is written over, like a palimpsest, with "signatures" of the divine world to which it belongs. All doors into all the worlds of God open to faith and prayer, and he who subordinates lower elements in himself to higher has power and potency in all realms.
But far more important for the development of spiritual religion, and far more important as a living link between Reformers like Denck, Schwenckfeld, and Franck of the sixteenth century, and Jacob Boehme and the spiritual interpreters of the English Commonwealth, was Valentine Weigel, Pastor of Zschopau. Like so many of the men who figure in these chapters, he is little known, seldom read, not a quick and powerful name in the world, but he is worth knowing, and he was the bearer of a burning and kindling torch of truth. He was born at Naundorf, a suburb of Grossenhain, District of Meissen, in 1533. He received the Bachelor's and Master's degree of the University of Leipzig, and he pursued his studies still further in the University of Wittenberg, his study-period having continued until 1567. In the autumn of that year he was ordained and called to be Pastor of Zschopau, where he passed as a minister his entire public life, which came to a peaceful end in 1588. He was an ideal pastor and true shepherd of his flock—loving them and being beloved by them. His ministry was fresh and vital, and made his hearers feel the presence and the power of the Spirit of God.
There was, so far as I can discover the facts, only one blemish on his really beautiful character. He lacked that robust, unswerving conscience which compels a man who sees a new vision of the truth to proclaim it, to champion it, and to suffer and even die for it when it comes into collision with views which his own soul has outgrown. {140} Weigel was resolved not to have his heart's deepest faith, his mind's most certain truth, known, at least during his lifetime, by the persons who were the guardians of orthodoxy. He signed the "Confessions" of his time as though they expressed his own convictions; he counted it a duty of the first importance to guard his pastoral flock from the distractions and assaults of heresy-hunters, and he left his matured and deeply meditated views for posterity to discover. How far he was personally timid cannot now be determined. It would seem, however, from his own words,[6] that he was especially concerned for the safety and welfare of his own flock, who would suffer if he were cried down as an enthusiast or a spiritual prophet. But even so, it is very doubtful if any man can rightly permit anything on earth to take precedence to his own loyalty to the vision of truth which his soul sees. As a result, however, of the course he took, he died in good odour of sanctity, and the epigones of that day had no suspicion of the ideas that were swarming in the mind of the quiet Pastor of Zschopau, or of the mass of manuscripts proclaiming his faith in the inner Word which he was leaving behind him, to fly over the world like the loose leaves of the Sibyl.
His writings were not printed until 1609 and onwards, and as his disciples went on producing writings, somewhat in the style and spirit of the master who inspired them, the list of books in Weigel's name is considerably larger than the actual number of manuscripts extant at his death in 1588. It is not always easy to distinguish the pseudo-writings from the genuine ones, but there is a vividness and pregnancy of style, a spiritual depth and power in the earlier writings which are lacking in the later group, and there is an emphasis on the magical and occult in the secondary writings that is largely absent in the primary ones.[7] The most important of his books will be referred to and quoted from as I present his type of religion and his message, but I shall draw especially upon his little {141} book, Von dem Leben Christi, das ist, vom wahren Glauben ("On the Life of Christ, or True Faith"), as it is the one of Weigel's writings which, in English translation, most deeply influenced kindred spirits in the English Commonwealth.[8]
His spiritual conception of Christianity was formed and fed by the sermons of Tauler, and by that little book which was "the hidden Manna" for all the spiritual leaders of these two centuries—the German Theology. Weigel edited it with an introduction. He calls it "a precious little book," "a noble book"; but he tells his readers that they can understand it and find it fruitful only if they read it "with a pure eye" and with "the key of David," i.e. with a personal experience. But while he loved the golden book of mysticism and the sermons of the great Strasbourg preacher, and was led by the hand of these guides, he drew also from many other sources and finally arrived at a type of religion, still interior and personal, but less negative and abstract than that of the fourteenth-century mystics, and more penetrated and informed with the presence of the Christ of the Gospels. He insists always that in the last analysis it is Christ in us that saves us, but it was Christ in the flesh, the Christ of Galilee and Golgotha, that revealed to men the way to apprehend the inward and eternal Christ of God. "The indwelling Christ," he wrote, "is all in all. He saves thee. He is thy peace and thy comfort. The outward Christ, the Christ in the flesh, and according to the flesh, cannot save thee in an external way. He must be in thee and thou must abide in Him. Why then did He become man and suffer on the Cross? There are many reasons why, but it was especially that God by the death and suffering of Christ might take the wrath and hostility out of our hearts, on account of which we falsely conceive of God as a wrathful enemy to us. He had to deal that way with poor blind men like us and so reconcile us with Himself. {142} There was no need of it on His part. He was always Love and He always loved us, even when we were enemies to Him, but we should never have known it if God had not condescended to show Himself to us in His Son and had not suffered for us."[9]
Weigel everywhere maintains Christ's double identity—an identity with God, so that in Christ we see God; and an equal identity with man, so that Christ is man revealed in his fulfilled possibilities. In Him God and man are one. In this deep-lying and fundamental idea of his entire Christianity he was undoubtedly influenced, profoundly influenced, by Schwenckfeld. He presents in chapter i. of his Life of Christ the Schwenckfeldian view that Christ is God and Man in one. But He is Man not in the crass, crude and earthly form: He is not composed of mortal and earthly substance as our "Adamical bodies" are. He is wholly and absolutely composed of heavenly, spiritual, divine substance. His flesh and blood are as divine and spiritual in origin as is His spirit, so that His resurrection and ascension are the normal outcome of His nature. It was as natural for Him to rise into life and to ascend into glory as it is for heavy things to fall. But that divine, spiritual, heavenly nature, which appeared in Him, is the true, original, consummate nature of Man. Man, as we know him, is cloudy, or even muddy, with a vesture of decay, but that is not a feature of his real nature—either in its original or its potential form—and all who "put on Christ," all who have "Christ in them," become one flesh with Him and gain an indestructible and permanent inward substance like His.
Consistently with this view, Weigel declares that here lies the significance of Christ's saying, "I am Bread"; "I am Meat and Drink." The only adequate Supper of the Lord, he says, is real feeding upon His spiritual, life-giving flesh and blood, so that Salvation is not tied to external sacraments, but stands only in the faith that Christ feeds us with Himself.[10] There are, he proceeds to show, two radically diverse natures, the traits and {143} characteristics of which he arranges in opposing pairs, in two parallel columns as follows:
A. The Nature of Christ and B. The nature of Adam and
of those who live in Him those who live by him,
and by Him. i.e. those who live the
natural, earthly life.
1. This Nature turns from 1. This nature turns from God
creatures to God. to creatures.
2. This Nature hates itself and 2. This nature loves itself
loves others. more than it loves God or
others.