No book appeared in England before 1648—the date of the translation of Weigel's Life of Christ—which more closely approached the Quaker position. That religion must have an inward seat and origin; that divine things must be learned of God, are taken as axiomatic truths throughout this book. If a man is to see, he must have eyes of his own; if he is to teach, he must have the Word of God within him. People say that "there can be no true Faith without outward preaching ministry." That is not so, Weigel declares. The way to heaven is open to hungry penitent souls everywhere, although, as is the case with infants, they may hear no sermons at all: "Faith comes by inward hearing. Good books, outward verbal ministry have their place, they testify to the real Treasure, they are witnesses to the inner Word within us, but Faith is not tied to books; it is a new nativity which {147} cannot be found in a book. He who hath the inward Schoolmaster loseth nothing of his Salvation although all preachers should be dead and all books burned."[23] Many take great pains to be baptized, and "to hear sermons of their hired priests," and to use the Lord's Supper, and to read theological books, who, nevertheless, show no "spiritual profit" therefrom. The reason is that "Truth runs into no one by a pipe!"[24] "In the Church of men—the man-made Church—the measuring-line," or standard, he says, is the written Scripture, according to one's own interpretation, or according to books, or according to University men; but in the true Church the measuring-reed is the inward Word, the Spirit of Christ, within the believer. Those who are in the Universities and Churches of men have Christ in their mouths, and they have a measuring-reed by their side—the inhabitants of God's Church on the other hand have the Life of Christ and the testing-standard within themselves.[25] Those who are "nominal professors" hang salvation on a literal knowledge of the merit secured by Christ's death; the true believer knows that salvation is never a purchase, is never outwardly effected, but is a new self, a new spirit, a new relation to God: "Man must cease to be what he is before he can come to be another kind of person."[26] Outward baptism and external supper may, if one wishes, be used as symbols of the soul's supreme events, but they cannot rightly be thought of as effecting any change of themselves in the real nature of the man; only Christ the Life-bringer, only the resident work of God within the soul, can produce the transformation from old self to new self. "Salvation is not tyed to sacraments."[27]
It is a well-settled view of Weigel's that Heaven and Hell are primarily in the soul of man. He says, in Know Thyself, that both the Trees of Paradise are in us; and in his Ort der Welt he declares that "the Eternal Hell of the lost will be their own Hell."[28] And in his Christliches {148} Gespräch he insists that the holy Spirit, the present Christ, does not need to come down from Heaven to meet with us, for when He is in our hearts there then is Heaven.[29] No person can ever be in Heaven until Heaven is in him.
In Der güldene Griff and elsewhere Weigel works out a very interesting theory of knowledge, which fits well with the inwardness of his religious views. He holds that in sense perception the percipient brings forth his real knowledge from within. The external "object," or the outward stimulus, is the soliciting occasion, or suggestion, or the sign for the experience, but what we see is determined from within rather than from without. All real knowledge is in the knower. Both external world and written scriptures are in themselves shadows until the inward spirit interprets them, and through them comes to the Word of God which they suggest and symbolize.
Weigel plainly arrived at his ground ideas under the formative influence of Schwenckfeld and Franck, but he also reveals, especially in his conception of the deeper inner world and of the microcosmic character of man, the influence of Paracelsus and of the nature mystics of his time. He was himself, in turn, a most important influence in the development of the religious ideas of Jacob Boehme, and he is historically one of the most significant men of the entire spiritual group before the great Silesian mystic.[30]
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] Gnôthi 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.