ANGELUS SILESIUS, a German philosophical poet, was born in 1624 at Glatz, and died at Breslau in 1677. His real name was Johann Scheffler, but he is generally known under the assumed name which marks the country of his birth. Brought up a Protestant, and at first physician to the Duke of Wurtemberg, he afterwards embraced the Roman Catholic faith and took orders as a priest.
His peculiar religious faith, founded on his early study of the works of Tauler and Böhm, as expressed in his hymns (Cherubinisches Wanderbuch), is a mystical pantheism founded on sentiment. The essence of God he held to be love: God, he said, can love nothing inferior to himself; but he cannot be an object of love to himself without going out, so to speak, of himself, without manifesting his infinity in a finite form; in other words, by becoming man. God and man are therefore essentially one. The following are some specimens of his sayings:—"Nothing exists but thou (God) and I; and when we both exist not, God is no more God, and the heavens fall in." "God was not slain for the
first time on the cross, for behold he lies there in Abel already slain." "I am nothing without God, and God were nothing without me." The following lines contain sentiments less startling and paradoxical.
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The wise man never lacks an aim, an end he can fulfil,
He ever has a guiding star, to wit, God's holy will.
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The rose needs not a Way—it blooms because it can,
Considers not itself, and asks no praise from man.
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A selection of his hymns, which are very popular in Germany, was published in 1820, by Varnhagen Von Ense.