Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (14 page)

Figure 3.5
Georges de La Tour (1593–1652),
The Magdalene with the Smoking Flame
,
c
. 1638–40. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Of course, the specific Lorraine context does not preclude a broader set of connections. Among the manuscripts of the English Benedictine Sisters in Cambrai (Flanders), we find an anonymous devotional poem of the seventeenth century that seems to gloss the solitary, ascetic night of La Tour’s Magdalene:

Alone retired within my native cell,

At home within myself, all noyse shut out

In silent mourning I resolve to dwell,

With thoughts of death Ile hang my walls about;

All windows close, Faith shall my taper be,

At whose dim flame Ile Hell and Judgment see.

…

All windows close, Faith shall my Taper be,

On Hope Ile rest, and sleep in Charity.
¹⁰⁶

The abbey of Our Lady of Consolation at Cambrai was founded in 1623 by Cresacre More, great-grandson of Thomas More, and had longstanding ties to English recusant families. His daughter Dame Agnes (Grace) More (1591–1655 or 1656) and several other sisters at Cambrai were cousins of John Donne.
¹⁰⁷
The literary works of the sisters of Cambrai use themes familiar from English metaphysical poetry, such as the contrast and reciprocity of light and darkness, “the four seasons of mankind,” and the microcosm/macrocosm parallel. The sisters also drew on Spanish and French mysticism; as “Sister M.S.” noted in a collection of writings “for her spiritual comfort in her several necessities”: “John of the Cross. There is no better or more powerful way to increase the virtue of the mind, than … to shut fast the door of the senses, by solitude and forgetfulness of all creatures and human events.”
¹⁰⁸
She reveals a clear understanding of the “dark night of the senses” as described by John. At Cambrai, the English Benedictine sisters received and contributed to the latest currents in Western spirituality across national and confessional boundaries. The night became
a
key time and symbol in these currents: it could reveal sin and, by removing the temptations of the day, offer a path away from it. As Pascal observed in his
Pensées
(
c
. 1660): “If there were no obscurity, man would not feel his own corruption.”
¹⁰⁹

As the midpoint of the soul’s dark night, faith “is compared to midnight,” the darkest part of the night. “The more the soul is darkened,” John explained, “the greater is the light that comes into it.”
¹¹⁰
In his discussion of the Divine, John explained that “in order to reach Him, a soul must rather proceed by not understanding … and by blinding itself and setting itself in darkness, rather than by opening its eyes.”
¹¹¹
Empowered by the sense that the path to God is as dark as night to the understanding, mystic authors made darkness and the night key apophatic terms across genres and confessions in the seventeenth century. Darkness figured in many of the oxymora and paradoxes used to express the inexpressibility of the Divine, seen for example in George Herbert’s “Evensong” (
c
. 1620; the earlier of two poems with this title). Herbert begins with the more traditional negative view of “Night, earth’s gloomy shade, / fouling her nest, my earth invade,” but then corrects himself, noting that it is wrong to write “as if shades knew not Thee.” The night is also a divine time, as he immediately asserts in apophatic terms:

But Thou art Light and Darkness both together:

If that be dark we cannot see:

The sun is darker than a tree,

And thou more dark than either.

Yet Thou art not so dark, since I know this,

But that my darkness may touch thine:

And hope, that may teach it to shine,

Since Light thy Darkness is.
¹¹²

No one explored this theme more deeply than the French devotional poet Claude Hopil. The Parisian wrote extensively on this theme in his
The Piercings of Divine Love Expressed in One Hundred Canticles Made in Honor of the Most Holy Trinity
(
Les divins eslancemens d’amour exprimez en cent cantiques faits en l’honneur de la très saincte Trinité
) of 1629.
¹¹³
Apophatic themes and expressions from Denys the Areopagite and John of the Cross are woven into one hundred canticles in praise of the Trinity:

In the night of faith, the ray of darkness

of the beautiful Trinity

Suffices for salvation.
¹¹⁴

Paradoxes of night and darkness are Hopil’s primary theme:

My spirit rises to the dungeon magnificent

In the divine ray of mystic darkness

All confused and ravished

I saw what one cannot think, let alone write

Thus I tell you all without being able to say anything

Of all that I saw.
¹¹⁵

Hopil described clearly the apophatic voice: “If I speak here only of shadow and fog, / of silence and of horror, / of dungeons and dark clouds,” he explained, it is only so that “one sees the failure / that the Father causes in us through his wisdom.” This failure is a “learned ignorance … ravishing and beautiful,” a “sacred darkness which reveals to us a Sun / to the heart, not to the eye.”
¹¹⁶
Revealed to the saints by “his eternal word,” the Divine is “hidden for us in the mystic night.”
¹¹⁷
Many times Hopil refers to his own meditation “in the night not dark but mystic,” suggesting that he considered the night a time of actual prayer as well as an apophatic metaphor.
¹¹⁸

Despite their necessary obscurity, Hopil composed his devotional verses as canticles, meant to be sung to the tunes of popular secular chansons in the home. Scholars have noted that “individual readers were considered capable of choosing music themselves for pious chanson texts” such as those of Hopil, suggestion some circulation of his sense of the apophatic and mystic night among laypeople.
¹¹⁹

Oxymora and paradoxes abounded in the popular poetry of the spiritual night. The Lutheran baroque poet Andreas Gryphius (1616–64) often wrote of the bleak shadows of the Thirty Years War, but he also chose an apophatic night in his “On the Birth of Jesus” (“Uber die Geburt Jesu”):

Night / more than bright night! Night / brighter than the day /

Night (brighter than the sun) / in which the light was born.

…

O night, which can thwart all nights and days!
¹²⁰

Other poets celebrated the night in broader terms not limited to the single, unique night of the birth of the Christian savior. As Henry Vaughan concluded his poem “The Night”:

There is in God – some say –

A deep, but dazzling darkness; as men here

Say it is late and dusky, because they

See not all clear.

O for that Night! where I in Him

Might live invisible and dim.

Another of the Benedictine sisters at Cambrai, Dame Clementina Carey (d. 1671), wrote of flight from God in the night, reversing the terms of the paradox:

If I say Darkness, and the Night,

Which shut out all, shall bar Thy sight

That Darkness, which is so to me, to Thee is Light.
¹²¹

These baroque expressions of the inexpressible were drawn to the night as they sought to fuse the quotidian with the sublime.

Similar insights appeared in natural philosophy, as in the alchemical treatise of Blaise de Vigenère (1523–96),
A Discovery of Fire and Salt
(English translation, 1649).
¹²²
Vigenère asserts that “Divinity is so wrapped in darkness, that you cannot see day through it,” citing Psalm 17, Orpheus, and Deuteronomy 4. His comments reveal the reception of the negative theology of Denys the Areopagite: “for in regard of God towards us, light and darkness, are but one thing: as is his darkness, such is his light.” He adds in apophatic terms:

by … that which is equivalent to darkness, we may better apprehend something of the Divine Essence, but not by … that which relates to light … For the Divine light is insupportable above all to all his Creatures, even down to the most perfect, following that which the Apostle sets down in
I
. of Tim. 6.
God dwells in the light inaccessible, that no man can see
. So that it is to us instead of darkness, as the brightness of the Sun is to Moles, Owls, and other night birds.
¹²³

The need for darkness in the ineffable human encounter with the Divine was a significant theme in the seventeenth century.
¹²⁴
The engravings forming the frontispiece of Daniel Cudmore’s
A prayer-song; being sacred poems on the history of the birth and passion of our blessed Saviour
(
Figure 3.6
, 1655) juxtapose the sun hidden in darkness with the soldiers at Christ’s tomb, blinded by the light of the Resurrection.
¹²⁵
The texts chosen place the images in an apophatic frame. On the left “Behold the man” refers to a cloud of darkness before the sun; on the right “He is not here but is risen” captions the blinding physical presence of the risen Christ. The darkness that
covers the sun and the dazzling force that pushes back the soldiers both have their counterparts in Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. Surveying their new lot in Hell, the fallen angel Mammon reminds his fellows that darkness is not confined to the infernal depths:

Figure 3.6
Detail, frontispiece of Daniel Cudmore,
A prayer-song; being sacred poems on the history of the birth and passion of our blessed Saviour
(London, 1655). University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.

This deep world

Of darkness do we dread? How oft amidst

Thick clouds and dark doth Heaven’s all-ruling sire

Choose to reside, his glory unobscured,

And with the majesty of darkness round

Covers his throne, from whence deep thunders roar

Mustering their rage, and Heaven resembles hell?
¹²⁶

Mammon fundamentally misunderstands the origins and meaning of divine darkness, of course, describing it as a material obstacle rather than as a reflection of unconditional divine majesty.
¹²⁷
Milton evokes the apophatic through Mammon’s failure to understand it. Raphael’s description of God is more perceptive, with its apophatic flourish:

Fountain of light, thyself invisible

Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit’st

Thron’d inaccessible, but when thou shad’st

The full blaze of thy beams, and through a cloud

Drawn round thee like a radiant shrine

Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear.
¹²⁸

As we will see below in
chapter 4
, the image of light blazing through a cloud was deployed by Milton’s royalist contemporaries to praise earthly sovereigns as well.

“Although this happy night brings darkness to the spirit, it does so only to give it light in everything.”
¹²⁹
With these words John of the Cross opened the most advanced section of his extended nocturnal metaphor to describe the mystic union of the soul with God as night in the second book of
Dark Night of the Soul
. “On this night God … [has] put to sleep … all the faculties, passions, affections and desires which live in the soul, both sensually and spiritually.” John presents the liberation of the soul through night: