Angelus Silesius

Johann Scheffler, known as Angelus Silesius, was born in Breslau, today Wrocław, in December 1624, and died in the same city on 9 July 1677. He was one of the most significant poetic voices in German Baroque literature and, after his conversion to Catholicism, a prominent defender of the Counter-Reformation.

His education was broad. He studied at the Elisabeth Gymnasium in Breslau and then at the universities of Strasbourg, Leiden and Padua, where he took his doctorates in medicine and philosophy in 1648. He returned to his native city and, between 1649 and 1652, served as personal physician to the Duke of Oels. A confrontation with the Protestant censor led him to renounce Lutheranism and convert to Catholicism on 12 June 1653, when he adopted the name Angelus Silesius. From then on he defended his decision in writing and became a prolific and combative polemicist. He was ordained a priest in 1661 and, in his later years, when his poetic inspiration had waned, devoted himself chiefly to religious activity and controversy.

His best-known work, Die Geistreiche Sinn- und Schlussreime, later republished as Der cherubinische Wandersmann, brings together some two thousand epigrams, most of them written in rhyming couplets of alexandrines. His mystical longing for union with God is expressed through paradox, hyperbole and contradictory assertions, devices that lend rational shape to an experience that is at heart ineffable. Twentieth-century composers, among them Arnold Mendelssohn, Willy Burkhard, Conrad Beck, Hugo Distler and Fritz Lubrich, set texts from this collection to music.

In Heilige Seelenlust, by contrast, he employed a simple lyrical style and popular strophic forms, and made use of the contrafactum to give religious content to secular songs. In this way he sought to offer the Counter-Reformation hymns that could rival Protestant hymns in popularity. His songs endured in the hymnals of both confessions, although never with their original melodies, and the Pietists adopted them with enthusiasm, as shown by the inclusion of thirty of them in the Geistreiches Gesangbuch of 1704.