Chapter Two
Early modern Europeans thought about the night directly and indirectly under a vast range of topics. More importantly for our discussion, early modern Europeans thought with the night, using its lived experience and traditional associations to articulate an extraordinary range of values and concepts. Paradoxically, their deepest engagement with the night and its darkness came in their discourses on witchcraft and the Devil, and in their understanding of “the dark night of the soul” as a path to God. Some of the most intense, transcendent, and threatening expressions of the diabolical and the Divine were understood in and through the night in this turbulent age.1
The early modern authors discussed here inherited an ambiguous image of the night — sharply negative except within the rarified world of mystic expression. In this chapter I examine the associations of the night with evil across European Christian culture from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, focusing on the night as a site of diabolical temptation. In the following chapter, I turn to those who took up and developed the “divine darkness” of Denys the Areopagite by seeing the night, literal and figurative, as a pathway to the Divine. In darkness, whether divine or diabolical, the night create, evoke, and represent human isolation in solitary, individual encounters with God and with the Devil.
The image of the “Wittenberg Nightingale” crafted by the Nuremberg cobbler-poet Hans Sachs (1494—1576) in 1523 was a resounding success: the pamphlet went through six printings in that year alone. The first section of the poem describes the desolate state of Christendom through an extended allegory. As a lost flock of sheep, God’s people are in the wrong place (misled from the pasture into a dark wilderness) at the wrong time (in the dark of night). The song of the nightingale can set things right by heralding the light of day:
All through the long night
we are all finally awakened
as the nightingale so clearly sings
and the light of day breaks in.2
Sachs immediately identifies the subject of his poem:
Who is this dear nightingale
who calls us to the light of day?
It is Doctor Martin Luther
Augustinian of Wittenberg
Who wakes us from the night.3
At the end of the allegory Sachs clarifies in the margin “What the night is” (“Was die nacht sey”). For Sachs the church of Rome
Never made clear to us the faith
Which in Christ makes us holy
This failure is signified by the night
In which we all have been lost.4
The dawn heralded by Martin Luther dispels the night of error and confusion.
Three years earlier, the papal bull Exsurge Domine (“Arise, O Lord”) had condemned Luther by using the same contrast between darkness and daylight, proclaiming him “blinded in mind by the father of lies.” The bull explained that had Luther come to Rome personally to make his case, “we would have shown him clearer than the light of day” that the moral lapses and doctrinal errors he alleged did not exist.5 In the reform conflicts of the 1520s all sides used this straightforward imagery of daylight and darkness as good and evil in their writing and preaching. Zwingli refers often to “clarity and light” in his On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God (Von Klarheit und Gewißheit des Wortes Gottes, 1522), and Luther’s response to Erasmus in The Bondage of the Will(De servo arbitrio, 1525) abounds in references to the light and clarity of Scripture. He asked: “for who would say that the public fountain is not in the light, because those who are in some dark narrow lane do not see it, when all those who are in the open market place can see it plainly?”6 For Luther darkness is the result of human failure to believe what is clearly revealed.
The first decades of the Reformation echo with this language. In his first controversial work, the 1529 Dyaloge … touching the pestylent sect of Luther and Tyndale (in modern editions The Dialogue concerning Tyndale) Thomas More attested to the derisive association of the night with spiritual blindness by the “heretics” of the 1520s: I … marvel at the madness of these heretics that bark against the old ancient customs of Christ’s church, mocking the setting up of candles and with foolish facetiousness and blasphemous mockery demand whether God and his saints lack light or whether it be night with them that they cannot see without candle.7 “Whether it be night with them?” One can easily imagine the “heretical” response. As Hans Sachs explained, through the false practices arising from the cult of the saints, all Christendom stands benighted, “the holy word of God … obscured by human teaching.”8
Later in this same dialogue More identified the night with the heretics themselves, who gather under cover of darkness. More described a carpenter of Essex whom he had personally interrogated sometime around 1521. The man “had long held diverse heresies” and confessed to frequenting “a place which he named us in London, where, he said, that such heretics were wont to resort to their readings in a chamber at midnight.” The carpenter named “diverse” others who “were wont to haunt those midnight lectures,” among them Richard Hunne (d. 1514) a well-known London merchant suspected of Lollardy who had died in prison while awaiting trial. In his account More underscored the heretical associations of the night: “thus there learned we … that Hunne had haunted heretics’ lectures by night long before.”9 Leaving aside the veracity of More’s tale of regular nocturnal gatherings, which resemble accounts of the witches’ sabbath (see below, section 2.3) and descriptions of persecuted congregations gathering at night (seechapter 3), his use of the night as a sign of evil in Reformation polemic is clear.
In 1523, Erasmus wrote a short commentary on a hymn to the birth of Jesus by the fourth-century poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, evoking a similar sense of spiritual darkness. The hymn itself refers briefly to the winter solstice; Erasmus introduces his commentary with an extended discussion of a “world [that] lay beneath the darkness of ignorance and the shadow of sins.” He refers to the era of the Nativity, describing the error, idolatry, and depravity of the pagan world. But Erasmus himself was living in dark times: accused of responsibility for the unrest in the church, challenged for his work on the New Testament, and under suspicion of heresy.10 When he described “our darkness” in the era preceding Jesus’ birth and exclaimed that “This was surely the depths of the night!” was his own age far from his thoughts? “Ignorance of the truth is night,” he adds, letting this exposition of night and spiritual darkness “suffice as a kind of preface, even if it is not entirely relevant.”11
The radicals of the early Reformation also drew on the identification of the night with evil. Given the insistence on separation from the world in Anabaptism, it is no surprise that some of the most intense uses of the darkness—light metaphor issued from the first writings of that tradition. The earliest creed of the Anabaptist movement, the Swiss-German Schleitheim Confession of 1527, proclaimed that “all those who have fellowship with the dead works of darkness have no part in the light.” In the discussion of separation, the Confession explained that “there is nothing else in the world and in all creation than good and evil, believing and unbelieving, darkness and light, the world and those who are [come] out of the world, God’s temple and idols, Christ and Belial, and none will have part with the other.”12 The Anabaptist congregation of Kempen (lower Rhine) described the “worldly preachers,” traditional and Protestant, as “servants of the belly [Romans 16:18] … overcome with eternal darkness” [2 Peter 2:17] in a 1545 confession submitted to the authorities of Electoral Cologne.13 The topical biblical concordance printed in Worms c. 1540, a significant early Anabaptist text, presents a dozen Scripture passages under the topic of “light,” including Romans 13 [12—14]: “The night is past, and the day is drawing near. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness.” Identifying with the light in the struggle against worldly darkness is the focus of the entry.14
In all of these conflicts, reformers and defenders of tradition understood their age as an immense struggle between light and darkness. Their easy reliance on the contrast between daylight and night introduces to us both the continuity and the transformation of Europeans’ understanding of the night in the early modern period. The continuity is clear: as I discuss below, Christians had long associated darkness and the night with Satan, death, sin, and heresy, and continued to do so throughout the early modern period. But, as I will show in the following chapter, by the beginning of the seventeenth century mystics, poets, and theologians of all confessions expressed a renewed sense of the value of darkness and the night in ascetic, apophatic, mystical, and epistemological terms.