Juan Eusebio Nieremberg

← Encyclopedia

Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595–1658) was a Spanish Jesuit, natural philosopher, and ascetical-mystical writer whose books on the soul’s relation to eternity were among the most reprinted devotional works of seventeenth-century Catholic Europe. He was born in Madrid to parents of German and Tyrolean origin who had come to Spain in the service of the imperial court — a Tyrolese father, a Bavarian mother, a household poised between the Habsburg lands and the Habsburg crown of Spain. The mixed background he carried into a career spent almost entirely in one city; the foreignness of the name (it is German, not Castilian, and the Spanish presses spelled it as best they could) sat on a wholly Madrid life. He studied the classics at the royal court, science at Alcalá, and canon law at Salamanca before turning, against his family’s plans for him, to religion.

Title page of the Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae (Antwerp, Plantin–Moretus, 1635), Nieremberg’s chief work of natural philosophy — BEIC digital library, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A reluctant father and a chosen order

Nieremberg entered the Society of Jesus in 1614. The decision cost him: his father, who had a different future in view, obliged him to leave the novitiate at Villagarcía, and the entry into the order was, by the early biographers’ account, a thing won rather than granted. He persisted, took up Greek and Hebrew at the Jesuit college at Huete, returned to arts and theology at Alcalá, was ordained in 1623, and made his solemn profession in 1633. For the rest of his life he was a fixture of the Colegio Imperial de Madrid — the flagship Jesuit college of the capital — where he taught humanities and natural history for some sixteen years and Sacred Scripture for three. He did not travel to the missions he wrote about, did not hold high office, and left almost no record of incident. What he left instead was a shelf: some seventy-five separate works, in Latin and in Spanish, running steadily in two directions at once.

That two-track output is the distinctive shape of his mind, and it is worth holding the two tracks apart, because they answer to two different appetites that the post-Tridentine Society tried to keep in one hand. On one side stood the works of natural science and natural philosophy, written for the learned and in Latin. On the other stood a long series of ascetical and meditative treatises in Spanish, written for a wide lay and religious readership rather than for specialists — books to be read slowly, returned to, and prayed over. The same author who cataloged the unknown animals of the Indies also taught the reader to count the goods of this world as nothing against the next. To Nieremberg the two were not a contradiction but a single argument made twice: the visible world is a legible thing, and what it spells out, read rightly, is the soul’s brief errand and its endless stake.

The book of creation: Historia naturae (1635)

The chief monument of the first track is the Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae — natural history, especially of the remote and the foreign — printed in 1635, not in Spain but at Antwerp, by the Plantin Office under Balthasar Moretus, the great house that the Society favored for ambitious illustrated books. It was the first and only edition, sixteen books long, gathering rare secrets of nature, matters astronomical, and above all the unknown living kinds of the Indies: quadrupeds, birds, fish, plants, metals, stones and other minerals, the conditions of rivers and elements, each entered with its medicinal properties, and capped by books on the marvelous natures of Europe and of the Holy Land. It runs to well over three thousand entries.

Its content was, in large part, not Nieremberg’s own observation but his ordering of someone else’s. The American material rests chiefly on the great unpublished expedition of the physician-naturalist Francisco Hernández, who in the 1570s had been sent by Philip II to New Spain and had returned with a vast description of Mexican flora and fauna that languished, mostly unprinted, for decades. Nieremberg, working from manuscripts of that survey in Madrid, became one of the first to bring its findings into print and into system, so that the Historia naturae stands as an early — by some accounts the first — attempt to order the natural history of the Americas as a whole. Because he kept the indigenous names of the plants and animals he described, the book is also, by an accident of piety, a linguistic source for Nahuatl. Its woodcut illustrations carried the strange creatures of the New World into European libraries; the images traveled further and lived longer than most of the Latin around them.

A branch of the granadilla (passionflower), one of the New World plants engraved for the Historia naturae (Antwerp, 1635) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

For all that, the Historia naturae is not a secular catalog with a few devotional flourishes. Its governing idea is the older one that the creation is a second scripture — a book written by God to be read alongside the book of words, each thing a letter pointing past itself to its maker. Within that frame, the rarer and more peregrine the creature, the louder the testimony: a thing that no European had named, that fit no familiar order, was not an embarrassment to the catalog but a fresh proof of an inventiveness without limit. The wonder of the work and its theology are the same motion. To turn the page on a beast from the Indies was, in Nieremberg’s hand, to be shown again that the world is too full and too strange to be the last word about itself. This is the book of nature read by a man for whom the study of the world and devotion were one practice, the natural-historical compendium and the meditative treatise two applications of a single disciplined attention.

The book of the end: De la diferencia entre lo temporal y lo eterno (1640)

The work that carried his name furthest belongs to the second track. De la diferencia entre lo temporal y eterno, first printed at Madrid in 1640, is usually shortened in English to Of the Difference Between the Temporal and the Eternal, but its full Spanish title names its method: crisol de desengaños — a crucible of disillusionments — con la memoria de la eternidad, postrimerías humanas, y principales misterios divinos, with the memory of eternity, the human last things, and the principal divine mysteries. It is a sustained meditation on mortality, judgment, and the disproportion between the goods of this life and the stakes of the next: the kind of book meant to be read slowly and returned to.

The argument is built from named authorities held in a particular order: Scripture first; then historical example; then the ancient philosophers, Seneca and Aristotle pressed into Christian service; and then the ascetical Fathers, Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux, whose contempt for the passing world Nieremberg gathers and sharpens. The method is desengaño — the undeceiving of a mind that has overvalued what perishes — the same disabusing turn that runs through the literature of his Spanish century, here pointed past worldly vanity to the four last things: death, judgment, hell, heaven. Later editions made the point in copper: the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century printings were illustrated with engravings of the last things and the torments of the damned, so that the eye was caught and turned along with the will.

Its reach is the measure of its century’s appetite. The Spanish text ran through some fifty-four editions, and the whole — across the languages — to around sixty printings carried over more than a hundred years; it was translated into Latin, Italian, French, German, Flemish, English, and even Arabic. The English version, made by Sir Vivian Mullineaux and brought into line with the tenth Spanish edition, was printed in 1672. Most telling of all the renderings is the Guaraní one: translated by Father José Serrano and set with copper engravings cut by Guaraní craftsmen, the Diferencia was printed at the reduction of Loreto in 1705 — the first book printed in the Guaraní language, and among the earliest produced on the mission press of the Río de la Plata. The order that cataloged the Indies in his Latin chose his Spanish to set in the mission tongue. The choice was pointed: the Jesuit general Tirso González (in office 1687–1705) reached for the same book as a weapon against the Laxism and Quietism he was bent on refuting, which gives a measure of where it sat in the order’s self-understanding — orthodox, exacting, and useful. Scholarship treats this long circulation as a fair index of post-Tridentine lay piety — what an ordinary literate Catholic, across the Catholic world, kept on the shelf and read at the threshold of death.

An affective, not an apophatic, mysticism

Alongside the Diferencia he wrote a cluster of shorter treatises that fill in the same devotional program from the warm side: De la afición y amor de Jesús and De la afición y amor de María (both 1630), on the love owed to Christ and his mother; Vida divina y camino real (1633), on the way of perfection; Del aprecio y estima de la divina gracia (1638), on the worth of grace; De la hermosura de Dios y su amabilidad (1641), on the beauty and lovableness of God; and treatises on providence and on the discernment and conformity of the will to God’s. He also made a Castilian version of the Imitation of Christ — the devotional handbook of the devotio moderna, associated with Thomas à Kempis — adapting for his own readers the most widely copied lay-contemplative text of the late Middle Ages.

These books place him precisely. His piety belonged to the affective, Christ-centered current that the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola had shaped — a method that works through the disciplined imagination, the composition of a scene before the inner eye, the application of the senses to a mystery of the Passion or the last things, so that the will is moved by what the imagination has made vivid. The same instinct that made him a cataloger of visible creatures made him a teacher of inward sight: to picture eternity until it weighs more than the room one is sitting in. This is a mysticism of images and affect, not of the dark. It stands deliberately apart from the speculative, imageless ascent of the Rhineland masters — Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and the secular priest Henry of Nördlingen who carried their world in letters — for whom the soul empties itself of every image to meet a God beyond name; and apart, too, from the strict contemplative interiority of the Spanish Carmelites, Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, with their dark night and their wordless union. The later strain of God-in-the-soul paradox that runs through Nicholas of Cusa and the epigrams of Angelus Silesius is a different country again. Set against the whole reach of Christian mysticism and against the apophatic theology of the negative way, Nieremberg is better described as an ascetical and meditative writer than as a contemplative in the strict technical sense — though the older devotional literature, which counts its authors generously, counts him among its mystics, and his place in the long tradition of asceticism is secure either way.

He was, in this, a faithful editor of his own inheritance as well as an original voice. The graded inner discipline of the German Franciscan David of Augsburg, the scene-by-scene meditative life of Christ assembled by the Carthusian Ludolph of Saxony — the Vita Christi that Ignatius himself had read in convalescence — and the affective prayers and editorial labors of the Carthusian Lanspergius all fed the reservoir of imaginative, Christ-centered devotion from which the Ignatian method drew, and from which Nieremberg drank in turn. He is the post-Tridentine heir of that line, not its peer in time: where they laid the ground, he worked the flowered field of seventeenth-century print, and put the old composition-of-place into a hundred thousand lay hands.

The partisan and the chronicler

Nieremberg also wrote as a partisan of his order, and the third face of his work is institutional. He was a chronicler of the Indies missions and a biographer of the Society’s own — composing and popularizing lives of Jesuit figures, including its founder Ignatius of Loyola and the third general, Francis Borgia, and gathering the Vidas ejemplares of notable men of the Company.

Title page of the fourth volume of the Vidas ejemplares (Madrid, 1647), Nieremberg’s collection of exemplary lives of members of the Society of Jesus — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

He defended the spirituality and practices of the Society against its critics, and he edited and adapted earlier devotional literature for contemporary use. The labor of the editor and the labor of the author were, for him, continuous: to set a saint’s life before a reader, to recast an old manual, to translate a meditation into the living tongue, was the same service as writing one’s own — the keeping in motion of a tradition, so that what had moved one generation could move the next.

Scholarship and texts

Nieremberg’s bibliography was first set in order by the Jesuit bibliographers and is summarized in the standard reference of the order, the Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús (O’Neill & Domínguez, 2001). The older Catholic Encyclopedia article of 1913 remains a convenient gathering of the biographical facts — the German parentage, the reluctant father, the dates of ordination and profession, the count of works, the editions of the Diferencia — and is the source most cited for them. For the Historia naturae, the Linda Hall Library sets out the book’s structure, its Antwerp printing under the Plantin–Moretus house, and its dependence on the Hernández survey of New Spain. The first complete edition (Antwerp, 1635) survives in numerous copies and has been digitized. The principal Spanish treatise circulates in many early printings and in a modern critical introduction prepared by the Universidad Católica Argentina, while the early modern English readership can be met directly in Sir Vivian Mullineaux’s seventeenth-century translation, preserved in the Oxford Text Archive. Recent scholarship has read his ascetical treatises through the lens of the visual imagination — the way the Ignatian composition of place organizes the prose and the engravings — locating him precisely within the affective, not the apophatic, lineage of Catholic devotion.

He fell ill in his final years and died in Madrid in 1658, by tradition still at his desk. What kept his books in print long after — through the Guaraní press in Paraguay, the Arabic of the eastern missions, the English of a knight’s parlor — was less any single doctrine than a tone: grave, exact, and addressed to the ordinary reader weighing a short life against an unbounded one. He had spent the one track of his work proving the world too full to be its own last word, and the other reminding the reader that he would soon leave it. The man who measured the disproportion between the temporal and the eternal lived sixty-two years and wrote some seventy-five books against the imbalance; the books, set beside the eternity they pointed toward, were themselves a temporal thing, and he knew it, and wrote them anyway.

→ Related: Ludolph Of Saxony · Lanspergius · David Of Augsburg · Henry Of Nordlingen · Thomas A Kempis · Teresa Of Avila · Meister Eckhart · Johannes Tauler · Rhineland Mysticism · Apophatic Theology · Christian Mysticism · Asceticism · Meditation · Nicholas Of Cusa · Angelus Silesius · Augustine Of Hippo · Bernard Of Clairvaux · Aristotle