ANGELUS SILESIUS. - Literary name (Angelus Silesius) adopted upon his conversion to Catholicism by Johann Scheffler, German poet and controversialist, b. at Breslau of a Lutheran father in Dec. 1624, d. there on 9 July 1677. At the age of 19 he was studying medicine at the University of Strasbourg, which he exchanged almost immediately for that of Leiden and two years later (1647) for that of Padua, where on 9 July 1648 he obtained his doctorate in philosophy and medicine. He was personal physician to Duke Silvius Nimrod von Oels until 1652. Having returned to Breslau, he converted to Catholicism on 12 June 1653 and, receiving confirmation at once, changed his name. His conversion did not come about through sudden enthusiasm, but was the result of long meditations and readings, to which he could easily devote himself given his close friendship with Abraham von Franckenberg (d. 1652), a disciple of Jakob Böhme, who had gathered a rich library of ancient and modern mystics. Scheffler did not limit himself to studying the mystics, but deepened his theological knowledge, as is shown by the writing published 14 days after his conversion, in which he sets out the reasons for his return to the Catholic Church. He attained a high social position with his appointment as court physician to Emperor Ferdinand III; but he lived ascetically, devoted to prayer. On 29 May 1661 he was ordained a priest; shortly afterwards he held important offices in the episcopal curia of Breslau. But A. preferred the silence of the Franciscan cloister of St. Matthias in Breslau, where he died a holy death.
Literary history has dealt with A. as a controversialist and as a poet. From 1663 to 1675 he published 55 writings against the Protestants (he later collected 39 of them in his extensive Ecclesiologia, 1677), in which he displays a character so different from that revealed by his poetry as to induce some to attribute them to another author. The violence of language of certain pamphlets is understandable if one takes into account the polemical customs of the time, especially in Breslau where the struggle was fiercest. A.'s fame is linked to his collections of spiritual poems, several of which were also received in the books of sacred songs of the Protestants with the attribution to a «Johann Angelus» or to an uncertain author.
His Cherubinischer Wandersmann (1657), a sum of moral, philosophical and mystical aphorisms in alexandrine distichs (perhaps inspired in him by the Seccenta Monodistica Sapientum [ca. 1647] of Daniel Czeplo [d. 1660], whose «mystical» circle in Breslau A. frequented), teaches the mystical path to reach union with God; in these concise and profound maxims, of most effective and often paradoxical form, some have discerned pantheistic and quietist tendencies. But C. Seltmann, in his Angelus Silesius und seine Mystik (Breslau 1896), has given even to this part of A.'s poetic work a completely orthodox interpretation. «To the convert of Breslau, adherence to Catholic dogma certainly did not restrain, as was claimed, either speculative boldness or imaginative daring» (L. Vincenti). The collection Heilige Seelenlust (1657) consists of spiritual pastoral songs of the soul in love with Jesus, and in it one notes the influence of the idyllic manner of the Jesuit Friedrich Spee. The soul (Psyche), abandoning all earthly things, follows the Divine Bridegroom along the path of sorrow and triumph. In the Sinnliche Beschreibung der vier letzten Dinge (1675) he describes the Last Things with vividness and serenity.
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