The Cherubinic Wanderer by Johann Scheffler

First published:Geistreiche Sinn-und Schluss-reime, 1657 (English translation, 1909)

Edition used:The Cherubinic Wanderer, edited and translated by Maria Shrady. New York: Paulist Press, 1986

Genre(s): Poetry

Subgenre(s): Epigrams; lyric poetry; meditation and contemplation; mysticism

Core issue(s): Death; humility; love; mysticism; time; union with God

Overview

When Johannes Scheffler, under the pen name and religious name Angelus Silesius (“The Angel,” or perhaps “messenger,” of Silesia) published Geistreiche Sinn-und Schluss-reime (sage rhymes and epigrams) in 1657, his audience was undergoing a crisis in identity in both language and religion. The seventeenth century was fiercely sectarian: For the first twenty-three years of Scheffler’s life, his homeland, like the rest of northern Europe, was locked in the Thirty Years’ War, ostensibly a religious conflict between Catholic and Protestant Germany. At the same time, a handful of German poets and intellectuals were attempting to forge the German language into a medium for poetry to rival that of France and Italy.

Both the Catholic-Protestant conflict and the struggle to establish German as a literary language met in Scheffler’s 1657 masterpiece, later retitled Cherubinischer Wandersmann (the cherubinic wanderer). The sectarian struggle is central to its publication history: Scheffler had probably written such verses from his university days but was first moved to publish in 1652, when he was serving as court physician to Duke Sylvius Nimrod at Oels. His work at that time consisted of anthologies of mystical prayer, and as required, he submitted them for approval to the court chaplain, Christoph Freytag. Freytag, a Lutheran like Scheffler (and like the duke of Oels), was horrified by what he considered the “superstitious,” Roman Catholic, and, worst of all, mystical nature of the prayers, including some by the Catholic Saint Gertrude. Freytag refused permission to publish. Whether this censorship precipitated Scheffler’s conversion, or whether Freytag correctly diagnosed an already Catholic-leaning piety in Scheffler, the young poet was received into the Catholic faith the following year, changing his name to Johannes Angelus Silesius.

The Cherubinic Wanderer consists of five books totaling more than 1,400 short poems (the 1675 edition added a sixth for a total of 1,676 poems) expressing different aspects of the mystical union of God and humanity. A handful are sonnets, but the vast majority are Alexandrine couplets, the extremely concise two-line form known as the epigram. Because the form of the Alexandrine couplet is tied to the content of The Cherubinic Wanderer—how it is said is part of what it says—a brief explanation of the form is appropriate here. Although popular piety can sometimes chafe at formalism as a restriction inhibiting expression, mystical poets like Silesius often seek the most restrictive forms. In Catholic sacramental theology, the word “form” has a precise meaning and importance: It refers to the exact wording used in the ceremony. Vary the words beyond prescribed limits, and the Sacrament is invalid. In the couplets of Silesius, the formal tension between perfectly balanced half-lines highlights contradictory elements of mystical paradoxes. The following couplet, poem 80 of book 3, illustrates. “Gott der die Welt gemacht und wider kan zunichten:/ Kan nicht ohn meinen willn die Neugeburth auss richten.” (“The God who made the earth, and can destroy the earth/ Cannot, without my will, accomplish my rebirth.”) The absolute symmetry of the form is clear in this example. There is only one pair of rhymed lines. Some of the 1,676 poems in the collection are longer, but the majority are in this spare, two-line form. However, even within the line there are subdivisions. The meter is iambic hexameter, six feet of two syllables each, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed. Because the line has an even number of feet, it can divide evenly, as Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter (five feet) cannot. Instead of composing the line as a structural unity, Silesius follows the ancient Germanic poets (and the French neoclassic writers who gave the Alexandrine its name and its vogue) in building in a metrical pause, known as a caesura, in the middle of the line.

The form therefore is tailor-made for the language of paradox, because the two discordant elements that paradox brings into concord can be isolated and yet harmonized. In these two lines, the first presents an image of God’s absolute power: He created the world and can destroy it (literally, “bring it to nothing”). The final word in each half-line is half of an antithetical pair of verbs: gemacht (created) and zunichten (destroy). A second parallelism links the two lines: The root of zunichten is nicht, “not,” which is the second word in the next line. Having established that God can do anything, Silesius then goes on to say what God cannot do: He cannot go against a will he has made free.

The boldness of this seemingly impious statement—presenting God’s willing gift of free will as if it somehow limited God’s power—is typical of Silesius’s method and typical of German Baroque poetry, which deliberately attempts to shock reader’s expectations. In his preface to The Cherubinic Wanderer, Silesius took care to assure readers of his orthodoxy, however irreverent his mystical language might sound.

The poems are divided into five books (six in the 1675 edition), but there is no principle of organization within or among the books. A number of themes recur, however, and Jeffrey L. Sammons discussed the separate poems of The Cherubinic Wanderer under four themes: God, God and I, eternity, and death. The seeming contradiction (or repetition) of the first two topics, God and God and I, again suggests the paradoxical nature of the poet’s thought. Although it could be argued that virtually all the poems of The Cherubinic Wanderer fall under the topic of God and I, for every expression of the oneness of God and the self, Silesius offers an expression of God’s radical otherness. The topic of eternity offers ample opportunity for mystical expression, as humans’ minds and languages are finite: The same is true of the poems about death, which are always in the context, whether spoken or not, of eternal life.

Christian Themes

The Cherubinic Wanderer, the title by which this collection is most widely known, is the perfect, succinct expression of two major themes in Christian literature: wisdom and pilgrimage. While “cherubinic” suggests to the twenty-first century mind the chubby little angels of Christian religious art, its implication for the seventeenth century mind involved finding God through reason and thought. The cherubim were the second order of angels in the early Christian tradition; the first order was the seraphim. If the seraph represents coming to God through the heart, the cherub represents coming to God through the mind. “Cherubinic” was the ideal approach not only for seventeenth century theology, when sectarian strife forced a minute intellectual analysis of doctrine, but also for the century’s poetry, which was known (and in the following century scorned) for intellectualizing poetic feeling.

The second key word of the title, “wanderer,” suggests the fallen individual’s role in a fallen world: We are in this world only as pilgrims, on our way to an unfallen, eternal reality. The feelings of exile and alienation are not often invoked by the poems of the collection; instead, the poems suggest the German folk tradition of the “Happy Wanderer,” the vagabond who recalls the wandering minstrels of the medieval tradition, the troubadour. Because Silesius joined the Franciscan order before publishing The Cherubinic Wanderer, there may also be overtones of Saint Francis’s call for Christians to be “troubadours for Christ,” transforming secular poetic traditions to religious use. The subversion of the worldly to the divine was a stated goal of many of the German religious poets of Silesius’s day: they called the technique Kontrafaktur, and it permeates The Cherubinic Wanderer.

Sources for Further Study

Faber du Faur, Kurt von. Introduction to The Cherubinic Wanderer: Selections, by Willard R. Trask. New York: Pantheon, 1953. A leading American authority on the period places the work in its cultural context.

Flitch, J. E. Crawford. Introduction to Selections from the Cherubinic Wanderer, by Angelus Silesius. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1932. One of the first studies in English to look at Silesius’s verse as poetry rather than just mystical thought.

Sammons, Jeffrey L. Angelus Silesius. Boston: Twayne, 1967. An early entry in a standard series, this work remains the only book-length study of Silesius in English.

Sammons, Jeffrey L. “Johannes Scheffler.” In German Baroque Writers, 1580-1660, edited by James Hardin. Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 1996. Connects Silesius with his contemporaries in German Baroque poetry, particularly poets of mystical religious verse.

Schmidt, Josef. Introduction to The Cherubinic Wanderer, by Angelus Silesius, translated by Maria Shrady. New York: Paulist Press, 1986. Places Silesius’s work in the wider context of German mysticism.