ANGELO SILESIO. — The literary name (Angelus Silesius) adopted by Johann Scheffler at his conversion to Catholicism, a German poet and controversialist, born in Breslau to a Lutheran father in December 1624, died there on 9 July 1677. At the age of nineteen he studied medicine at the University of Strasbourg, soon moving to Leiden and two years later (1647) to Padua, where on 9 July 1648 he earned his doctorate in philosophy and medicine. He served as personal physician to Duke Silvio Nimrod von Oels until 1652. Returning to Breslau, he converted to Catholicism on 12 June 1653 and, receiving confirmation shortly afterward, changed his name. His conversion was not the result of sudden enthusiasm but grew from long meditation and reading, to which he was readily devoted owing to his close friendship with Abraham von Franckenberg (d. 1652), a disciple of Jakob Böhme who had amassed a rich library of ancient and modern mystics. Scheffler did not merely study the mystics but deepened his theological knowledge, as shown by a treatise published fourteen days after his conversion in which he set forth the reasons for his return to the Catholic Church. He attained a high social position as court physician to Emperor Ferdinand III, yet lived ascetically, devoted to prayer. On 29 May 1661 he was ordained a priest and soon after held important offices in the episcopal curia of Breslau. Yet he preferred the silence of the Franciscan cloister of St. Matthias in Breslau, where he died a holy death.
Literary history has treated Angelo Silesio both as a controversialist and as a poet. From 1663 to 1675 he published fifty-five writings against Protestants (later collecting thirty-nine of them in his extensive Ecclesiologia, 1677), works whose tone differs so markedly from that revealed in his poetry that some have attributed them to another author. The harsh language of certain pamphlets is understandable when one considers the polemical conventions of the time, especially in Breslau where the struggle was fiercest. His fame rests chiefly on his collections of spiritual poetry, many of which were included in Protestant hymnals under the attribution “Giovanni Angelo” or to an anonymous author.
His Cherubinischer Wandersmann (1657), a compendium of moral, philosophical, and mystical aphorisms in Alexandrine couplets (perhaps inspired by the Sexcenta Monodisticha Sapientum [c. 1647] of Daniel Czeppio [d. 1660], whose “mystical” circle in Breslau Scheffler frequented), teaches the mystical path to union with God. In these concise and profound maxims, remarkable for their effective and often paradoxical form, some have discerned pantheistic and quietist tendencies. Yet C. Seltmann, in his Angelus Silesius und seine Mystik (Breslau 1866), offered a fully orthodox interpretation of this poetic corpus as well. “The Breslau convert’s reverence for Catholic dogma did not, as one might suppose, curb either his speculative boldness or his imaginative daring” (L. Vincenti). The collection Heilige Seelenlust (1657) consists of spiritual pastoral songs of the soul in love with Jesus and shows the influence of the Jesuit Friedrich Spee’s idyllic manner. The soul (Psyche), abandoning all earthly things, follows the Divine Spouse along the path of suffering and triumph. In his Similiche Beschreibung der vier letzten Dinge (1675) he vividly and serenely describes the Novissimi.