Angelus Silesius was a 17th century Christian mystic, native to Silesia, in what is now Poland, and was known as
The Prophet of the Ineffable. He composed spiritual epigrams mostly in the form of couplets written in German, and was influenced by his reading of medieval mystics such as Meister Eckhart
and Jan van Ruysbroeck.
Most of the English translations I have seen of his epigrams are very outdated, and sometimes horribly contorted in order to make them rhyme in English.
I think Silesius wrote them as rhyming verses, but it's not always possible to translate such concise rhyming couplets into another
language successfully.
Here are some renderings I've made from them, some freer than others in adherence to the originals. They are not intended to be
accurate translations, and I didn't try to make them rhyme.
I was struck by the similarity of some of Angelus's poems to Indian mystical writing.
Search within yourself.
The Philosopher’s Stone,
the key to transformation,
cannot be found outside.
The entire Universe,
Heaven, Hell and Earth,
are all within you.
Whatever you desire,
you already have.
The world does not contain you;
you contain the world.
You are yourself the world
and you contain nothing but yourself.
God is no thing.
He is untouched
by time or matter
God is heard in silence,
and is best worshipped in silence.
The saint does not look forward
to a heaven in an afterlife;
he lives in heaven now.
You cannot enter heaven;
heaven is who you are.
Before there was a sense of a separate I,
there was only Universal Being.
And when the separateness disintegrates,
you will know you are that Universal Being.
Time is timeless;
it is only the mind that
tries
to measure what is measureless.
God is gold hidden in river sand,
and love is river water,
washing God into view.
The rose has no rationale,
it simply blooms.
Joy can only be experienced
by dissolving the sense of ‘I’ and ‘other’
in the ocean of Unity.
Love is a faster way to God than knowledge.
God pours Himself out into Creation
for Eternity,
yet He is undiminished.
Without rebirth we are like rivers
which turn back from the ocean.
Theologians form different schools
to describe God,
but the school of the Spirit within you
teaches you to know God.
When the human heart
becomes attuned to God,
the whole everlasting cosmos
becomes a bell that rings.
Those who know God’s depths
also attain His peaks.
We think a child foolish
for crying over a broken doll,
but are the things we covet
any more alive than a doll?
When you heart is pulled
neither by attraction nor aversion,
it rests in God.
The richness and vastness of God
is like an undiscovered continent.
Even if God was to be born
a thousand times to Mary,
in Bethlehem,
it would do you no good
if you do not bear Him within yourself.
The saint knows that all possessions
are nothing but himself.
The owner of the world’s greatest treasure
is poorer than a beggar
if he sees that treasure as other than himself.
God is one without an other.
To know God, the knower must know
that he is one with the known.
A loaf contains many grains,
and the sea countless drops;
so is God both one and many.
The All emerges from the One
and to the One the All returns.
If you do not become reborn in God
you do not value His birth in Bethlehem,
and if your separateness does not die,
His death at Golgotha will not save you.
God and Self are one.
If the Self ceased to exist
God would cease to exist.
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| Rose Window, Milan Cathedral |
