Beware man of thyself,
Self burden thou wilt rue.
It will impair thee more,
Than thousand devils do.

Three enemies has man:
Himself, Satan, the world;
The first will be the last
That to the ground is hurled.

Angelus Silesius ‘The Cherubinic Wanderer’

Man loveth even without knowing
One only Thing I love and know not what it is:
Because I know it not, therefore I’ve chosen this.

Angelus Silesius, Franciscan Third Order, medical physician to the courts, poet.

“MYSTICISM is, as it were, a short cut of sentiment to reach a truth otherwise inaccessible under given conditions…I have devoted more time to a renewed perusal of one of the most prominent and interesting mystics of Germany, Johannes Schener, or as he is better known by his adopted name, Angelus Silesius, who was born in 1624 at Breslau, and died in 1677. While mystics of the type of Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg present their views in long essays of a philosophical nature which read like the dreams (or you prefer, the vagaries) of a prophet, Angelus Silesius condenses his views in short apothegms, written in a somewhat archaic style, mostly in simple verse, and often with crude rhymes….

Johannes Scheffler was born of Protestant parents at Breslau, the capital of Silesia, in 1624, and was baptized in the same year on Christmas day. Having passed through the usual course of education at a he went to the Universities of Strassburg, Leyden and Padua where he studied medicine and philosophy. At the last mentioned place he took his doctor’s degree in 1647. For three years, 1649-1652, he served as Court Physician to Duke Sylvius Nimrod of Oels, who was a pious but decidedly onesided Protestant.

Scheffler’s mystic inclinations had long before alienated him from the dogmatic and anti-artistic spirit of the religion of his birth which during the middle of the seventeenth century was more severe and bigoted than ever before or afterwards. At the same time there was a religious revival in the Roman Catholic world which proved attractive to him, and so it was but natural that finally in 1653 he severed his old affiliations, and joined the Church that by the mystical glamor of its historical traditions was most’ sympathetic to him. The zeal with which Scheffler embraced Roman Catholicism made him unjust toward the Protestant persuasion and implicated him in very unpleasant controversies. Introduction to ‘Cherubinic Wanderer’ by Angelus Silesius

More words by doctor of man Angelus Silesius

God is my final end;
Does He from me evolve,
Then He grows out of me,
While I in Him dissolve.

When, therefore, the soul reflects that God is the principal agent in this matter, and the guide of its blind self, who will lead it by the hand and lead it where it could not of itself go (namely to the supernatural which neither its understanding, nor its will, nor its memory, could know as they are), then its chief care will be to see that its set no obstacle in the way of the guide, who is the Holy Spirit, upon the road by which God is leading it, and which is ordained according to the law of God and faith… –St John of the Cross “Living Flame of Love’

A singer soothing in abundant listening Astrud Gilberto fascinates. A song for cheer and reflection from the sixties.