During the seventeenth-century the margins of Europe became a stage on which significant cultural, social and religious transformations took place that had a tremendous impact on the shape of modern Europe. Silesian mysticism, a sub-current within the religious and philosophical tradition of Lower Silesia, significantly contributed to these revolutionary changes by promoting humanist culture and a newborn concept of “personality”. This challenges the common conviction that it was mostly the major players on the European scene: France, Germany, Italy, and Great Britain that constructed the foundations of European culture.

Johaness Scheffler (1624-1677), known as Angelus Silesius, gave a particular tone to Silesian mysticism, developing a form of modern spirituality known primarily from his mystical poetry. Because of its rich intellectual foundations and complex confessional origins, his mysticism became a cultural bridge of exceptional capacity. It developed (1) in a process of Silesius’ transition from Lutheranism to Catholicism, in the course of his travels from traditionalist Italy to the forward-looking Netherlands. It flourished (2) as a phenomenon joining past tradition with new tendencies, (3) against German and Polish background, and (4) counter to hierarchical social divisions. Finally, it arose (5) as an embodiment of the growing interest in books and the art of writing, in spite of the dissidents’ common objective to unshackle from “bondage to the letter” (Crawford Flitch). Thus, Silesius’ mysticism provided a vast space for transformations, challenging confessional differences, social divisions, national disputes, and the impenetrable gulf between medieval mystic tradition associated with spiritual purism and modern humanism with its interest in freedom, individual experience and art. The art captures the most conspicuous change—a liberation from the established canons of thinking about man and, therein, a transformation into man who not only defines but also creates himself.

The poetic writings of Silesius constitute the art that he employed to produce “guide books” for spiritual contemplation and transformation. It is also through his writings that he fashioned himself both as a religious fanatic and as a modern man – a teacher and a writer/author of mystic poetry. His masterpiece The Cherubinic Wanderer (1657), a collection of over sixteen hundred religious epigrams, is considered universal, eclectic and humanistic. However, his other works, directed to unsophisticated and uneducated readers, became an exemplum of Catholic orthodoxy and induced an extraordinary hypothesis that there were actually two different authors: a poet-mystic Angelus Silesius and a fanatical and apodictic polemicist, Johaness Scheffler. In my paper I will examine the ways in which Silesius’ mysticism contributed to humanist culture, and investigate different levels of self-creation as presented in Silesius’ mystic poetry, as embodied (1) in his concept of a writer, and (2) as shaped through his diverse works, in the process of transcending confessional, social and national divisions. I will refer to my research that contributes to a joint project Revisiting the Renaissance conducted by scholars from the University of Lodz and the University of Ghent under the agreement on scientific cooperation between the Polish Academy of Sciences and Belgium Research Foundation–Flanders.

Katarzyna Williams is an assistant professor at the British and Commonwealth Studies Department, International Studies Faculty, University of Lodz, Poland, and a Visiting Fellow at the ANU Centre for European Studies. Her research interests include literary and cultural theory, cross-cultural studies, utopian literature, diasporic literature and Renaissance studies. Her publications include a monograph Deforming Shakespeare: Investigations in Textuality and Digital Media (2009).

Enquiries:
Katarzyna.Williams@hotmail.com

To view the flyer for this event please see: Shaping modern Europe: Angelus Silesius and the self-creation of modern man.