SEBASTIAN FRANCK: AN APOSTLE OF INWARD RELIGION
Sebastian Franck is one of the most interesting figures in the group of
German Reformers, a man of heroic spirit and a path-breaking genius,
though for many reasons his influence upon his epoch was in no degree
comparable with that of many of his great contemporaries. No person,
however great a genius he may be, can get wholly free from the
intellectual climate and the social ideals of his period, but
occasionally a man appears who has the skill and vision to hit upon
nascent aspirations and tendencies which are big with futurity, and who
thereby seems to be far ahead of his age and not explicable by any
lineage or pedigree. Sebastian Franck was a man of this sort. He was
extraordinarily unfettered by medieval inheritance, and he would be able
to adjust himself with perfect ease to the spirit and ideas of the modern
world if he could be dropped forward into it.
He is especially interesting and important as an exponent and interpreter
of a religion based on inward authority because he unites, in an unusual
manner, the intellectual ideals of the Humanist with the experience and
attitude of the Mystic. In him we have a Christian thinker who is able
to detach himself from the theological formulations of his own and of
earlier times, and who could draw, with breadth of mind and depth of
insight, from the wells of the great original thinkers of all ages, and
who, besides, in his own deep and serious soul could feel the inner flow
of central realities. He was no doubt {47} too much detached to be a
successful Reformer of the historical Church, and he was too little
interested in external organisations to be the leader of a new sect; but
he was, what he aspired to be, a sincere and unselfish contributor to the
spread of the Kingdom of God, and a significant apostle of the invisible
Church.[1]
Sebastian Franck was born in 1499 at Donauwuerth in Schwabia. He began
his higher education in the University of Ingolstadt, which he entered
March 26, 1515. He went from Ingolstadt to Heidelberg, where he
continued his studies in the Dominican College which was incorporated
with the University. Here he was associated in the friendly fellowship
of student life with two of his later opponents, Martin Frecht and Martin
Bucer, and here he came under the influence of Humanism which in the
scholarly circles in Heidelberg was beginning to take a place along with
the current Scholasticism of the period. While a student in Heidelberg
he first heard Martin Luther speak on the insufficiency of works and on
faith as the way of salvation, and though he must have felt the power of
this great personality and the freshness of the message, he was not yet
ripe for a radical change of front.[2] He seems to have felt through
these student years that a new age was in process of birth, but though he
was following the great events he remained to the end of his University
period an adherent of the ancient Church and was ordained a priest about
the year 1524; but very soon after he went over to the party of Reform,
and was settled as a reforming preacher in the little church at
Gustenfelden near Nuremberg. During this period he came into close and
intimate relation with the powerful humanistic spirit of that important
city. Hans Sachs was already a person of fame and influence in
Nuremberg, and here he became acquainted with the writings of the most
famous humanists of the day--Erasmus, Hutten, Reuchlin, Pirkheimer, {48}
Althamer and others. In 1528 he married Ottilie Behaim, a woman of rare
gifts, whose brothers were pupils of Albrecht Duerer, and who were
themselves in sympathy with the freer tendencies of the time as expressed
by the Anabaptists. Franck, however, though sympathizing with the
aspirations of the Anabaptists for a new age, did not feel confidence in
their views or their methods. His first literary work was a translation
into German of Althamer's _Diallage_, which contained an attack from the
Lutheran point of view upon the various Enthusiasts of the period,
especially the Anabaptists. In his original preface to this work Franck,
though still in most respects a Lutheran, already reveals unmistakable
signs of variation from the Wittenberg type, and he is plainly moving in
the direction of a religion of the spiritual and mystical type freed from
the limitations of sect and party. Even in this formative stage he
insists that the Spirit, and not commentaries, is the true guide for the
interpretation of Scripture; he already contrasts Spirit and letter,
outer man and inner man, and he here lays down the radical principle,
which he himself soon put into practice, that a minister of the Gospel
should resign his charge as soon as he discovers that his preaching is
not bearing spiritual fruit in the transformation of the lives of his
congregation.[3]
Sometime before 1530 Franck had come into intimate connection with Denck,
Buenderlin, Schwenckfeld, and other contemporary leaders of the
"Spiritual" movement, and their influence upon him was profound and
lasting, because their message fitted the aspirations which, though not
yet well defined, were surging subconsciously in him.[4] There are
throughout his writings very clear marks of Schwenckfeld's influence upon
him, but Buenderlin especially spoke to his condition and helped him
discover the road which his feet were seeking. In an important letter
which Franck wrote to Johann Campanus in 1531, he calls Buenderlin a
scholar, a {49} wonderfully reverent man, dead to the world, powerful in
the Scriptures, and mightily gifted with an enlightened reason; and this
letter shows that he himself has been moving rapidly in the direction in
which Buenderlin and Denck were travelling, though neither now nor at any
time was Franck a mere copier of other men's ideas.[5] "We must
unlearn," he writes, "all that we have learned from our youth up from the
papists, and we must change everything we have got from the Pope or from
Luther and Zwingli." He predicts that the external Church will never be
set up again, "for the inward enlightenment by the Spirit of God is
sufficient."
In his _Tuerkenchronik_, or "Chronicle and Description of Turkey,"
published in 1530, he had already declared his dissatisfaction with
ceremonies and outward forms of any sort, his refusal to be identified
with any existing, empirical Church, his solemn dedication to the
invisible Church, and his determination to be an apostle of the Spirit.
"There already are in our times," he writes, "three distinct Faiths,
which have a large following, the Lutheran, Zwinglian and Anabaptist; and
a _fourth_ is well on the way to birth, which will dispense with external
preaching, ceremonies, sacraments, bann and office as unnecessary, and
which seeks solely to gather among all peoples an invisible, spiritual
Church in the unity of the Spirit and of faith, to be governed wholly by
the eternal, invisible Word of God, without external means, as the
apostolic Church was governed before its apostasy, which occurred after
the death of the apostles."[6]
The year that dates his autobiographical letter to Campanus saw the
publication in Strasbourg of Franck's best-known literary work:
_Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel_ ("A Universal Chronicle of the
World's History from the Earliest Times to the Present").[7] It has {50}
often been pointed out that much of the material of this great Chronicle
is taken over from earlier Chroniclers, especially from the Nuremberger
Schedel, and it is furthermore true that Franck's _Book of the Ages_
contains large tracts of unhistorical narrative, set forth after the
manner of Chroniclers without much critical insight, but the book,
nevertheless, has a unique value. It abounds in Franck's peculiar irony
and paradox, and it unfolds his conception of the spiritual history of
the race, under the tuition of the Divine Word. At the beginning are
patriarchs living in the dawn of the world under the guidance of inward
vision, and at the end are saints and heretics, whom Franck finds among
all races, bravely following the same inward Light, now after the ages
grown clearer and more luminous, and sufficient for those who will
patiently and faithfully heed it, while the real "heretics" for him are
"heretics of the letter." "We ought to act carefully before God"--this
is Franck's constant testimony--"hold to God alone and look upon Him as
the cause of all things, and we ought always in all matters to notice
what God says in us, to pay attention to the witness of our hearts, and
never to think, or act, against our conscience. For everything does not
hang upon the bare letter of Scripture; everything hangs, rather, on the
spirit of Scripture and on a spiritual understanding of the inner meaning
of what God has said. If we weigh every matter carefully we shall find
its true meaning in the depth of our spiritual understanding and by the
mind of Christ. Otherwise, the dead letter of Scripture would make us
all heretics and fools, for everything can be bedecked and defended with
texts, therefore let nobody confound himself and confuse himself with
Scripture, but let every one weigh and test Scripture to see how it fits
his own heart. If it is against his conscience and the Word within his
own soul, then be sure he has not reached the right meaning, according to
the mind of the Spirit, for the Scriptures must give witness to the
Spirit, never against it."[8]
{51}
The _Chronica_ naturally aroused a storm of opposition against this bold
advocate of the inner Way. Even Erasmus, who had been canonized in
Franck's list of heretics, joined in the outcry against the chronicler of
the world's spiritual development. His book was confiscated, he was
temporarily imprisoned, and for the years immediately following he was
never secure in any city where he endeavoured to pursue his labours. He
supported himself and his family, now by the humble occupation of a
soap-boiler, now by working in a printing-house, sometimes in Strasbourg,
sometimes in Esslingen, and sometimes in Ulm, only asking that he "might
not be forced to bury the talent which God had given him, but might be
allowed to use it for the good of the people of God."
In 1534 his _Weltbuch_ appeared from a press in Tuebingen, and the same
year he published his famous _Paradoxa_, which contains the most clear
and consistent exposition of his mystical and spiritual religion. Other
significant books from his pen are his translation of Erasmus' _Moriae
Encomion_ ("Praise of Folly"), with very important additions; _Von der
Eitelkeit aller menschlichen Kunst und Weisheit_ ("The Vanity of Arts and
Sciences"), following the treatise by Agrippa von Nettesheim; _Von dem
Baum des Wissens Gutes und Boeses ("Of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
and Evil");[9] the _Germaniae Chronicon_ ("Chronicle of Germany"), 1538;
_Die guldin Arch_ ("Golden Arch"), 1538; and _Das verbuetschiert mit 7
Siegeln verschlossene Buch ("The Seven-sealed Book"), 1539.
The closing years of his life were passed in Basle, where he peacefully
worked at his books and at type-setting, while the theologians fired
their paper guns against him, and here in Basle he "went forth with God"
on his last journey to find a safe and quiet "city with foundations,"
probably about the end of the year 1542. Three years before his {52}
death he had written in his "Seven-sealed Book" of the soul's journey
toward God in these words: "The longer one travels toward the city he
seeks the nearer and nearer he comes to the goal of his journey; exactly
so is it with the soul that is seeking God. If he will travel away from
himself and away from the world and seek only God as the precious pearl
of his soul, he will come steadily nearer to God, until he becomes one
spirit with God the Spirit; but let him not be afraid of mountains and
valleys on the way, and let him not give up because he is tired and
weary, _for he who seeks finds_."[10] "The Sealed Book" contains an
"apology" by Franck which is one of the most touching and one of the most
noble documents from any opponent of the course which the German
Reformation was taking. "I want my writings accepted," he declares,
"only in so far as they fit the spirit of Scripture, the teaching of the
prophets, and only so far as the anointing of the Word of God, Christ the
inward Life and Light of men, gives witness to them. . . . Nobody is the
master of my faith, and I desire to be the master of the faith of no one.
I love any man whom I can help, and I call him brother whether he be Jew
or Samaritan. . . . I cannot belong to any separate sect, but I believe
in a holy, Christlike Church, a fellowship of saints, and I hold as my
brother, my neighbour, my flesh and blood, all men who belong to Christ
among all sects, faiths, and peoples scattered throughout the whole
world--only I allow nobody to have dominion over the one place which I am
pledged to the Lord to keep as pure virgin, namely my heart and my
conscience. If you try to bind my conscience, to rule over my faith, or
to be master of my heart, then I must leave you. Except _that_,
everything I am or have is thine, whoever thou art or whatever thou
mayest believe."[11]
It was Franck's primary idea--the principle to which he was dedicated and
for which he was content to suffer, {53} in the faith that men in future
times would come to see as he did[12]--that man's soul possesses a native
capacity to hear the inward Word of God. He often calls Plato and
Plotinus and "Hermes Trismegistus" his teachers, who "had spoken to him
more clearly than Moses did"[13] and, like these Greek teachers of the
nature of the soul's furnishings, he insisted that we come "not in entire
forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness," but that there is a divine
element, an innermost essence in us, in the very structure of the soul,
which is the starting-point of all spiritual progress, the mark of man's
dignity, the real source of all religious experience, and the eternal
basis of the soul's salvation and joy. He names this inward endowment by
many names. It is the Word of God ("Wort Gottes"), the Power of God
("Kraft Gottes"), Spirit ("Geist"), Mind of Christ ("Sinn Christi"),
Divine Activity ("goettliche Wirkung"), Divine Origin ("goettlicher
Ursprung"), the inward Light ("das innere Licht"), the true Light ("das
wahre Licht"), the Lamp of the soul ("das innere Ampellicht"). "The
inward Light," Franck says in the _Paradoxa_, "is nothing else than the
Word of God, God Himself, by whom all things were made and by whom all
men are enlightened." It is, in Franck's thought, not a capricious,
subjective impulse or vision, and it is not to be discovered in sudden
ecstatic experiences; nor, on the other hand, is the divine Word, for
Franck, something purely objective and transcendent. It is rather a
common ground and essence for God and man. It is God in His
self-revealing activity; God in His self-giving grace; God as the
immanent ground of all that is permanently real, and at the same time
this divine endowment forms the fundamental nature of man's soul--"Gottes
Wort ist in der menschlichen Natur angelegt"[14]--and is the original
substance of our being. Consciousness of God and consciousness of self
have one fundamental source in this deep where God and man are
unsundered. "No man can see or know himself unless he sees and knows, by
the Light and Life that is {54} in him. God the eternally true Light and
Life; wherefore nobody can ever know God outside of himself, outside that
region where he knows himself in the ground of himself. . . . Man must
seek, find, and know God through an interrelation--he must find God in
himself and himself in God."[15] This deep ground of inner reality is in
every person, so far as he is a person; it shines forth as a steady
illumination in the soul, and, while everything else is transitory, this
Word is eternal and has been the moral and spiritual guide of all peoples
in all ages.
Franck thus differs in a vital point from Schwenckfeld. The latter
starts with man as utterly lost and devoid of any inherent goodness. By
a sudden, supernatural event, at a temporal moment, divine forces break
into the soul from without and supply it with a revitalizing energy.
Man--lost, fallen, sin-blasted and utterly helpless--is by a divine and
heavenly creative movement _made_ a new Adam. For Franck, the soul has
never lost the divine Image, the pearl of supreme price, the original
element which is God Himself in the soul. We are all, in the deepest
centre of our being, like Adam, possessed of a substantial essence, not
of earth, not of time and space, not of the shadow but of the eternal,
spiritual, and heavenly type. It may become overlaid with the rubbish of
earth, it may long lie buried in the field of the human heart, it may
remain concealed, like the grain of radium in a mass of dark pitchblende,
and be forgotten, but we have only to return home within ourselves to
find the God who has never been sundered from us and who could not leave
us without leaving Himself. We do not need to cross the sea to find Him,
we do not need to climb the heavens to reach Him--the Word is nigh thee,
the Image is in thy heart, turn home and thou shalt find Him.[16]
The bottomless and abysmal nature of the human soul comes first into
clear revelation in the Person of Christ, who is, Franck declares, truly
and essentially both God and Man. In Christ the invisible, eternal, {55}
self-existent God has clothed Himself with flesh and become Man, has made
Himself visible and vocal to our spiritual eyes and ears, and in Christ
God has given us an adequate goal and norm of life, a perfect pattern
("Muster") to walk by and to live by. Here we can see both the character
of God and the measure of His expectation for us. But we must not stop
with the Christ after the flesh, the Christ without. He first becomes
our life and salvation when He is born within us and is revealed in our
hearts, and has become the Life of our lives. We must eat His body,
drink His blood until our nature is one with His nature and our spirit
one in will and purpose with His spirit.[17]
Franck belongs in many respects among the mystics, but with peculiar
variations of his own from the prevailing historical type of mysticism.
He is without question saturated with the spirit of the great mystics; he
approves their inner way to God and he has learned from them to view this
world of time and space as shadow and not as reality. No mystic,
further, could say harsher things than he does of "Reason."[18] Human
reason--or more properly "reasoning"--has for him, as for them, a very
limited area for its demesne. It is a good guide in the realm of earthly
affairs. It can deal wisely with matters that affect our bodily comfort
and our social welfare, but it is "barren" in the sphere of eternal
issues. It has no eye for realities beyond the world of three
dimensions. It goes blind as soon as it tries to speculate about God.
He looks for no final results in spiritual matters from intellectual
dialectics, whether they be of the old scholastic type, or of the new
type of speculations, formulations and subtleties of the Protestant
theologians.
Franck always comes back to _experience_ as his basis of religion, as his
way to truth and to divine things. "Many," he says, "know and teach only
what they have picked up and gathered in, without having experienced it
{56} in the deeps of themselves."[19] "He who wishes to know what is in
the Temple must not stand outside, merely hearing people read and talk
about God. _That_ is all a dead thing. He must go inside and have the
experience for himself ("selbst erfahren"). Then first everything
springs into life."[20] But "experience" with him does not mean
enthusiastic visions and raptures. He puts as little value on ecstasies
and emotional vapourings as he does on dialectic. Ecstasies lead men as
often on false trails as on right tracks. They supply no criterion of
certitude; they furnish no concrete ideas or ideals to live by; but still
further, they do not bring all the deep-lying powers of the soul into
play as any true source of religion must do. _He_ is striving to find a
foundation-principle for the spiritual life which shall not be capricious
or sporadic, and which shall not be confined to one aspect of the inner
self, but which shall burn on as a steady illumination in the soul and be
the basis of all moral activity and all spiritual development. He finds
this principle, as we have seen, in the Word of God, which is a divine
reality, an eternal and self-existent activity, opening upward into all
the resources of God, and at the same time forming the fundamental nature
and ground-structure of the soul. A person may live--many persons do--in
the outer region of the self, using the natural instincts with which he
is supplied, pursuing the goals of life which appeal to common sense and
steering the earthly course by custom and by reason, but it is always
possible to have a wider range of experience, to live in deeper currents,
and to draw upon a _profounder source of insight_. This deeper
experience--which is the basis of Franck's mysticism and, for him, the
very heart of any genuine religion--consists of a personal discovery of
this eternal Word of God within and an irradiation of the whole being
through the co-operation of the will with it. The will is king in
man,[21] and can open or shut the gate which leads to life. It can make
its world good or it {57} can make it evil; just as out of one and the
same flower the bee gets honey and the spider poison.[22] It can swing
over its allegiance to God the Spirit of truth, or to the god of the
world who is anti-Christ.
This experience of the Word of God which is thus brought about by the
will of man--by an innermost personal choice--affects, Franck insists,
all the faculties of the inner life. Reason now becomes illumined with a
Light which it never had until the gate into its deeper region was
opened. Now, through co-operation with the Spirit of God, reason becomes
capable of higher processes, and can deal with divine things because it
has actual _data_ to work upon. The emotions, too, are no longer blind
and instinctive, they no longer carry the will whither it would not.
They are now the overflow of an inner experience which is too rich and
full for expression,[23] which transcends the intellectual apprehension
of it, but they are spiritualized and controlled from within. The moral
life is especially heightened, and this is for Franck one of the main
evidences that a divine source has been tapped. The discovery of the
Word of God creates and constructs an autonomous "kingdom of the
conscience" ("Reich des Gewissens"), gives us "a thousand-fold witness of
God," and becomes to us the tree of life and the tree of knowledge.[24]
In his little book on "the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil"--a
book which was destined to have a far-reaching influence--he declares
that the Garden-of-Eden story is a mighty parable of the human soul. All
that is told in the Genesis account is told of what goes on in the
mysterious realm within us. It is told as though it were an external
happening, it is in reality an internal affair. The Paradise and the
Fall, the Voice of God and the tempting voice of the serpent, the Tree of
Life and the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, are all in our own
hearts as they were in the heart of Adam. Heaven and Hell are there.
The one stands fully revealed in the triumphant Adam, who is Christ; the
other is {58} exhibited in its awfulness in the disobedient Adam of the
Fall.
As fast as the life comes under the sway of the "kingdom of conscience"
and a solid moral character is formed, the inner guidance of the Word of
God becomes more certain and more reliable. Only the good person has a
sure and unerring perception of the truth, just as only the scientist
sees the laws of the world, and as only the musician perceives the
harmony of sounds. Not only must all spiritual experience be subject to
the moral test, it must further be tested by the Light of God in other
men and in history, and by the _spirit of Scripture_, which is the
noblest permanent fruit of the Eternal Word. Every person must _prove_
the authority of his religion. He must have his heart conquered and his
mind taken captive and his will directed by his truth so that he would be
ready to face a thousand deaths for it,[25] and he must, through his
truth and insight, come into spiritual unity and co-operation with all
who form the invisible Church.
The invisible Church forms the central loyalty of Franck's fervent soul.
"The true Church," he writes, "is not a separate mass of people, not a
particular sect to be pointed out with the finger, not confined to one
time or one place; it is rather a spiritual and invisible body of all the
members of Christ, born of God, of one mind, spirit, and faith, but not
gathered in any one external city or place. It is a Fellowship, seen
with the spiritual eye and by the inner man. It is the assembly and
communion of all truly God-fearing, good-hearted, new-born persons in all
the world, bound together by the Holy Spirit in the peace of God and the
bonds of love--a Communion outside of which there is no salvation, no
Christ, no God, no comprehension of Scripture, no Holy Spirit, and no
Gospel. I belong to this Fellowship. I believe in the Communion of
saints, and I am in this Church, let me be where I may; and therefore I
no {59} longer look for Christ in lo heres or lo theres."[26] This
Church, which the Spirit is building through the ages and in all lands,
is, once more, like the experience of the individual Christian, entirely
an inward affair. "Love is the one mark and badge of Fellowship in
it."[27] No outward forms of any sort seem to him necessary for
membership in this true Church. "External gifts and offices make no
Christian, and just as little does the standing of the person, or
locality, or time, or dress, or food, or anything external. The kingdom
of God is neither prince nor peasant, food nor drink, hat nor coat, here
nor there, yesterday nor to-morrow, baptism nor circumcision, nor
anything whatever that is external, but peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,
unalloyed love out of a pure heart and good conscience, and an unfeigned
faith."[28]
In his Apology he says that he has withdrawn "from all theological
disputations, from all sectarian statements of creed, from baptism and
all ceremonies," and "I stand now," he adds, "only for what is
fundamental and essential for salvation"--that is, vital participation in
the Life of God revealed in the soul.[29] "I am looking," he writes in
the opening of the _Paradoxa_, "for no new and separate Church, no new
commission, no new baptism, no new dispensation. The Church has already
been founded on Christ the Rock, and since the outward keys and
sacraments have been misused and have gone by, He now administers the
sacraments inwardly in spirit and in truth. He baptizes His own, even in
the midst of Babylon, and feeds them with His own body, and will do so
unto the end of the world."[30]
In a letter to Campanus he says, "I am fully convinced [by a study of the
early Church Fathers] that, after the death of the apostles, the external
Church of Christ, with its gifts and sacraments, vanished from the earth
and withdrew into heaven, and is now hidden in spirit and in truth, and
for these past fourteen hundred years {60} there has existed no true
external Church and no efficacious sacraments."[31]
His valuation of Scripture fits perfectly into this religion of the
inward life and the invisible Church. The true and essential Word of God
is the divine revelation in the soul of man. It is the _prius_ of all
Scripture and it is the key to the spiritual meaning of all Scripture.
To substitute Scripture for the self-revealing Spirit is to put the dead
letter in the place of the living Word, the outer Ark in place of the
inner sanctuary, the sheath in place of the sword, the horn-pane Lantern
in place of the Light.[32] This letter killed Christ in Judea; it is
killing Him now. It has split the Church into fragments and sects and is
splitting it now.[33] It always makes a "Babel" instead of a Church. It
kept the Pharisees from seeing Moses face to face; it keeps men now from
seeing the Lord face to face.[34] Franck insists that, from its inherent
nature, a written Scripture cannot be the final authority in religion:
(_a_) It is outward, external, while the seat of religion is in the soul
of man. (_b_) It is transitory and shifting, for language is always in
process of change, and written words have different meanings to different
ages and in different countries, while for a permanent religion there
must be a living, eternal Word that fits all ages, lands, and conditions.
(_c_) Scripture is full of mystery, contradiction, and paradox which only
"The key of David"--the inner experience of the heart--can unlock.
Scripture is the Manger, but, unless the Holy Spirit comes as the day
star in the heart, the Wise man will not find the Christ.[35] (_d_)
Scripture at best brings only knowledge. It lacks the power to deliver
from the sin which it describes. It cannot create the faith, the desire,
the love, the will purpose which are necessary to win that which the
Scriptures portray. No book--no amount of "ink, paper, and letters"--can
make a man good, since religion is not knowledge, but a way of living, a
{61} transformed life, and _that_ involves an inward life-process, a
resident creative power. "In Pentecost all books are transcended."[36]
As Franck pushes back through "the ink, paper, and letters of Scripture"
to the Spirit and Truth which these great writings reveal, when they are
read and apprehended in the light of an inward spiritual experience, so,
too, he is always seeking, _through_ the historical Christ, to find the
Eternal Christ--the ever-living, ever-present, personal Self-Revelation
of God. He says, in his "Seven-Sealed Book," "I esteem Christ the Word
of God above all else, for without Him there is no salvation, and without
Him no one can enjoy God."[37] "Christ," he says in the _Paradoxa_, "has
been called the Image, the Character, the Expression of God, yes, the
Glory and Effulgence of His Splendour, the very Impression of His
Substance, so that in Him God Himself is seen and heard and known. For
it is God Himself whom we see and hear and perceive in Christ. In Him
God becomes visible and His nature is revealed. Everything that God is,
or knows, or wills, or possesses, or can do, is incarnated in Christ and
put before our eyes. Everything that can be said of God can as truly be
said of Christ."[38]
But this Christ, who is the very Nature and Character of God made visible
and vocal, is, as we have seen, not limited to the historical Person who
lived in Galilee and Judea. He is an eternal Logos, a living Word,
coming to expression, in some degree, in all times and lands, revealing
His Light through the dim lantern of many human lives--a Christ reborn in
many souls, raised again in many victorious lives, and endlessly
spreading His Kingdom through the ever-widening membership of the
invisible Church.[39] Without this eternal revelation of Himself in a
spiritual Fellowship of many members, God would not be God, as a Vine
would not be a Vine without branches; and contrariwise there could be no
spiritual humanity without the inward immanent {62} presence of this
Self-Revealing God in Christ.[40] As in Palestine, so everywhere,
Christ--not only Christ after the flesh, but after the Spirit--is a
crucified Christ. Only those can open the Sealed Book--can penetrate the
divine Revelation--who bear the mark of the Cross on their forehead, who
have eaten the flesh and drunk the blood of the suffering and crucified
Christ, who have discovered that the Word of God is eternally a Word of
the Cross.[41] God is nearest to us when He seems farthest away. He was
nearest to Christ when He was crying: "My God, why hast Thou forsaken
me?" So, too, now he who is nearest to the cross is nearest to God, and
where the flesh is being crucified and the end of all outward things is
reached, _there God is found_.[42]
Sin means, for Franck as for all mystics of his type, the _free choice_
of something for one's private and particular self in place of life-aims
that fulfil the good of the whole and realize the universal Will of God.
To live for the flesh instead of for the spirit, to pursue the aims of a
narrow private self where they conflict with the spirit of universal
love, to turn from the Word of God in the soul to follow the idle voices
of the moment--that is the very essence of sin. It is not inherited, it
is self-chosen, and yet there is something in our disposition which sets
itself in array against the divine revelation within us. The Adam-story
is a genuine life-picture. It is a chapter out of the book of the ages,
the life of humanity. We do not sin and fall because he did; we sin and
fall because we are human and finite, as he was, and choose the darkness
instead of the Light, prefer Satan to God, pursue the way of death
instead of the way of Life, as he did.[43]
This will be sufficient to show the essential character of the religion
of this lonely man and to present the main tendencies of his bold and
independent thought. He had no desire to be the head of a party; he was
too remote {63} from the currents of evangelical Christianity to impress
the common people whom he loved, and he was too radical a thinker to lead
even the scholars who had become liberated from tradition by their
humanistic studies and by historical insight. He was a kind of
sixteenth-century Heraclitus, seeing the flow and flux of all things
temporal, finding paradox and contradiction everywhere, discovering life
to be a clash of opposites, with its "way up" and its "way down," on the
surface a pessimist, but at the heart of himself an optimist; and
finally, beneath all the folly of history and all the sin and stupidity
of human life, seeing with the eye of his spirit One Eternal Logos who
steers all things toward purpose, who suffers as a Lamb slain for the
flock, who reveals His Truth and Life in the sanctuary of the soul, and
who through the ages is building an invisible Church, a divine Kingdom of
many members, in whom He lives as the Life of their lives.
[1] Troeltsch calls him a "literarischer Prophet der alleinigen
Erloesungskraft des Geistes und des inneren Wortes," _Die Soziallehren_,
p. 886.
[2] See article by M. Cunitz in _Nouvelle Revue de Theologie_, vol. v. p.
361.
[3] See Alfred Hegler's _Geist und Schrift bei Sebastian Franck_
(Freiburg), 1892, pp. 28-48.
[4] See next chapter for an account of Caspar Schwenckfeld.
[5] This Letter to Campanus, written originally in Latin, is extant in a
Dutch translation, "Eyn Brieff van Sebastiaen Franck van Weirdt,
geschreven over etlicken jaren in Latijn, tho synen vriendt Johan
Campaen." See Hegler, _op. cit._ pp. 50-53.
[6] _Chronica und Beschreibung der Tuerkey_ (Nurnberg, 1530), K. 3 b.
[7] My copy is the first edition, printed in Strasbourg by Balthasser
Beck, 1531.
[8] _Chronica_, p. 452 b.
[9] These three books were included in a volume entitled _Die vier
kronbuechlein_ (1534).
[10] _Das verbuetschterte Buch_, p. 5.
[11] Pp. 5-8 of the Apologia to _Das verbuetschierte Buch_.
[12] See _Apologia_, p. 2.
[13] _Ibid._ p. 3.
[14] Hegler, _op. cit._ p. 98.
[15] _Die guldin Arch_, Preface 3b-4a.
[16] _Paradoxa_, sec. 101.
[17] _Paradoxa_, sec. 99 and 138.
[18] Franck translated both Erasmus' _Praise of Folly_ and Agrippa's
_Vanity of Arts and Sciences_.
[19] _Moriae Encomion_, p. 149.
[20] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 13.
[21] _Moriae Enc._ p. 97b.
[22] _Paradoxa_, sec. 29.
[23] _Moriae Enc._ p. 93a.
[24] _Paradoxa_, sec. 63.
[25] _Moriae Enc._ p. 110. For the testing of the Word, see Hegler, _op.
cit._ pp. 117-119.
[26] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 8.
[27] _Paradoxa_, sec. 9.
[28] _Ibid._ sec. 45.
[29] _Das verbuetschierte Buch_, Apology, p. 11.
[30] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 8.
[31] This Letter is preserved in J. G. Schellhorn's _Amoenitates
literariae_ (1729), xi. pp. 59-61.
[32] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 4.
[33] _Ibid._ sec. 6.
[34] _Ibid._ sec. 2.
[35] See _Das verbuetschierte Buch_, passim.
[36] Quoted from Hegler, _op. cit._ p. 104.
[37] _Das verbuetschierte Buch_, p. 3.
[38] _Paradoxa_, sec. 101.
[39] _Ibid._ sec. 101.
[40] _Paradoxa_, sec. 8.
[41] _Das verbuetschierte Buch_, pp. 6-9, and _Paradoxa_, sec. 41.
[42] _Paradoxa_, sec. 41 and 42.
[43] _Moriae Enc._ p. 111. _Paradoxa_, passim, especially sec. 28-32.
See also Hegler _op. cit._ pp. 127-136.
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