Living in “these times of persecution and trial” during the Puritan Commonwealth, the royalist and Anglican poet Henry Vaughan (1622–95) turned to identify with Nicodemus in his 1655 poem “The Night”:
Wise Nicodemus saw such light
As made him know his God by night.
Most blest believer he!
Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes
Thy long-expected healing wings could see
When Thou didst rise!
And, what can never more be done,
Did at midnight speak with the Sun!144
Why did spiritual writers such as John of the Cross, Jacob Böhme, or John Donne see the night as a path to the Divine or insist on the complementarity of darkness and light? What happened to the clear “light overcoming darkness” imagery of the Reformation, epitomized by the “Wittenberg Nightingale” of Hans Sachs? Answering this question satisfactorily is not easy. The first step is to document the development, as I have done here, and show that it is distinct. The late medieval mystic appreciation of night in no way approaches the elevation of darkness we see in the period from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century.
My sense is that the valorization of darkness in Christian imagery arose from an ongoing sense of conflict and confusion in the confessional era. Times of apocalyptic struggle, such as the years of the early Reformation, offer a clear view of good and evil. Even if the forces of darkness threatened to triumph, at least the sides were clear. The struggle against the Antichrist was unambiguous, and it would all be settled soon. By the end of the sixteenth century, the dividing line between God’s flock and the wickedness of the world was much less clear in practice. John of the Cross and Jacob Böhme faced suspicion and persecution from within their own churches; they, and all Christians after the Reformation, had to accept the existence of numerous confessions heretical to one another across a divided Christendom.
When we survey all those who sought the Lord by night in the pages above, does any pattern emerge? The humble Anabaptists discussed above shared little with the erudite Henry Vaughan save the bitter experience of religious persecution – and an appreciation for the night, literal and metaphorical. By the second half of the sixteenth century the clear calls to overcome the darkness surrounding God’s word gave way to an appreciation of the darkness without which, as Böhme stated, the light could not be revealed, reflecting a new sense that darkness was “inseparable from light as an iconic and psychological factor of essential importance.”145 In the confessional age Christians of all churches identified themselves with Nicodemus, hoping to come to the Lord even in dark times of secrecy and persecution. Worship at night helped expand the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night, fostering the nocturnalization of spirituality in the confessional age.
Did living in the darkness of unresolved confessional strife mean seeing darkness as a part of God’s plan? In the period from the mid sixteenth through the late seventeenth century, Europeans could draw on a wide range of images and discourses to think about the Divine – the night was only one of these, and many of the contemporaries of John of the Cross, Jacob Böhme, or Henry Vaughan chose other paths to similar destinations. Darkness remains, however, an especially dynamic image and the night an especially dynamic time in this period. The new emphases on the night surveyed here (primarily, though not exclusively, in devotional texts) anticipated new forms of political expression and new uses of the night – in very material terms – in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Europeans of the seventeenth century apprehended the night and its darkness as a positive presence, a tangible reality that could be manipulated to a variety of ends. Building upon the chiaroscuro of the Renaissance, artists as diverse as Caravaggio, La Tour, and Rembrandt all used darkness (which in simple extent came to dominate many of their canvasses) to create physical and emotional depth, emphasize natural and divine light, and define space. As I have shown this was true in theological, mystical, and devotional literature as well.146 It is clear that the appreciation of darkness and the night unfolded across the Christian West, and one of the few experiences that John of the Cross, the Anabaptists, Jacob Böhme, John Donne, Georges de La Tour, and Henry Vaughan, for example, shared was the awareness of inter- and intraconfessional division and persecution. Darkness and light had become intermixed and inseparable, and so the night became more sacred. By 1600 the straightforward “light versus darkness” imagery of the Reformation had created a confessionally fractured world in which the night took on new sacred values and, as we will see in the next chapters, secular values. The night was becoming more useful, more meaningful, and more manipulable than in the days of the “Wittenberg Nightingale.” It is to these new uses of the night at court and in the city that we now turn.