Angelus Silesius

Johann Scheffler was born in 1624 in Breslau, in Silesia, to a Lutheran family. He studied medicine at Strasbourg, Leiden and Padua, and became physician to the Duke of Oels. In Silesia he came under the influence of Abraham von Franckenberg, a follower of Jacob Boehme, who introduced him to the German mystical tradition, including Eckhart and Tauler.

In 1653 he became a Catholic, taking the name Angelus Silesius, “the Silesian messenger”, and in 1661 he was ordained a priest. He spent his later years in Breslau, writing hymns and many polemical tracts in support of the Counter-Reformation, and died there in 1677.

His fame rests on the collection of epigrams first published in 1657 and later titled The Cherubinic Wanderer: some sixteen hundred short rhymed couplets, many of them startling paradoxes of the soul’s union with God, God’s need of the soul, and the birth of God in it. Some were later set as hymns; others drew the admiration of Leibniz, Schopenhauer and Heidegger.

His couplets are written in the alexandrine metre, each a self-contained paradox meant to be read slowly and returned to. The work draws on Eckhart, Tauler, Ruusbroec and Boehme, but compresses their teaching into a form of its own.