Karl von Eckartshausen

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A natural son raised in a Bavarian castle, melancholy from boyhood over the circumstance of his birth, grew into one of the most printed authors of his time, and then, in the last full year of his life, set down a slim sequence of letters that nearly all of those books would be forgotten to make room for. The letters described a church no one could find on a map. Two centuries later it is the only thing most readers know him by, and the one work his own biographers, by his English translator’s account, scarcely troubled to mention.

Karl von Eckartshausen was born on 28 June 1752 at the Castle of Haimhausen, north of Munich, the illegitimate child of Count Karl of Haimhausen and Marie Anne Eckart, a daughter of the overseer of the family estates. His mother died bearing him; his father, by the account preserved in A. E. Waite’s biographical notice, educated him with unusual care and affection. He read philosophy and Bavarian civil law at the colleges of Munich and Ingolstadt, took the title of Aulic Councillor through his father’s offices, and in 1780 was appointed censor of the Munich library — a post that, for all his reputed rectitude, earned him enemies, and which he held under the protection of the Elector Carl Theodor. In 1784 he was named Keeper of the Archives of the Electoral House. He published, across his life, something on the order of sixty-nine works, in registers as far apart as drama, statecraft, natural science, and the occult sciences. He died at Munich on 12 May 1803.

Karl von Eckartshausen (1752–1803), Bavarian court official, censor, and mystic. Engraved portrait. — Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From the censor’s desk to the interior life

Eckartshausen belonged, by office and temperament, to the apparatus of an Enlightenment court. A censor of books in the Bavaria of Carl Theodor was a functionary of reason and order, charged with deciding what the reading public could be trusted to see. His early popular success was of a piece with that world: a small devotional collection, Gott ist die reinste Liebe (God Is the Purest Love), a manual of Catholic prayers, meditations on the fear and love of God, and exercises for use at Mass and confession. It ran, by report, through some sixty German editions and was carried into most of the languages of Europe and into Latin. Waite, faintly puzzled, could find in it little to distinguish it from the countless lay manuals of piety the Catholic centuries had produced — though others heard in its intense devotion the voice of Fénelon, the great quietist of the French church.

That ordinary surface is worth holding onto, because the inward turn happened underneath it rather than against it. Eckartshausen never broke with the visible Catholic Church; he remained, so far as the record can be traced, in loyal communion with the body in which he had been trained. What changed was the depth at which he read it. He wrote books on magic and on the mystical properties of numbers — most notably the Aufschlüsse zur Magie (Disclosures on Magic, 1788), drawing on Kabbalah and Hermetic natural philosophy — and he was credited with some knowledge of alchemy. By the mid-1790s, on his own testimony in private correspondence, his chief light was coming from the mystical study of number, and from experiences he described with the guarded vocabulary of someone who expected never to be quoted: a consciousness of a higher presence, answers received, visions, and an advance he called the attainment of “the Law in its fullness.”

The decisive shaping pressures were two near-contemporary currents of theosophical Christianity. One was the legacy of Jacob Boehme, the Görlitz shoemaker whose visionary metaphysics of fall and regeneration had seeded a whole German tradition of inward, sophianic Christianity. The other was the living circle around Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, the French philosophe inconnu whose own initiation ran back through Martinez de Pasqually. Eckartshausen stood in epistolary contact with that circle by way of Baron Kirchberger of Bern, Saint-Martin’s Swiss correspondent. Saint-Martin, Waite reports, confessed himself more interested in Eckartshausen than he could express, and acknowledged that part of the Bavarian’s numerical system stood in astonishing agreement with what he had learned long before in his own school of initiation. Kirchberger went so far as to travel toward the Swiss frontier to receive from Eckartshausen, in person, the communication of a lost Word — a meeting frustrated only by the would-be teacher’s illness. These are the lineaments, drawn from the testimony of fellow seekers, of a court official who, in Kirchberger’s phrase, walked the narrow way of the inner life.

There was also a current he set himself against. As a young man Eckartshausen entered, briefly, the Bavarian Illuminati — the secret society founded at Ingolstadt in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, dedicated to the perfection of humanity through reason. He withdrew, on the standard account of his life, once he grasped that the order recognized enlightenment through human reason alone. The break is more than a biographical footnote. The Illuminati embodied exactly the program his mature work refuses: the conviction that the cloud over the sanctuary lifts by the unaided intellect. Against the rationalist secret society he would set the image of a hidden community whose light is not its own.

The cloud upon the sanctuary

The book that survives him is Die Wolke über dem Heiligtum, The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, written in the form of letters and published in 1802. Isabel de Steiger’s English translation first appeared in the 1890s in the magazine The Unknown World, then in volume form with an introduction by Waite; it is that translation, with Waite’s framing, that is hosted here in full. The opening letters take up a complaint against the age. Eckartshausen writes that his contemporaries live “in the times of idolatry of the intellect,” placing a common torchlight upon the altar and proclaiming the dawn — mistaking the light already in their hands for the brilliant illumination they still lack. The Enlightenment’s confidence is precisely the cloud.

The lifting of that cloud, in his teaching, is the opening of an inner organ. There is in the human being, dormant, a faculty by which the transcendental world can be perceived as objectively as the outward senses perceive the natural one. Its awakening — which he calls the mystery of the New Man, the mystery of regeneration — proceeds by three degrees: morally, by inspiration; intellectually, by illumination; spiritually, by revelation. When the highest of these unfolds, in his image, the curtain is raised all at once, the impenetrable veil torn away, the cloud before the sanctuary lifts, and the seer is carried from the phenomenal world into the regions of truth. Religion’s whole aim is this intimate union of the human heart with God, and it is possible in this world, and it is possible only by the opening of the inner sensorium.

Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), the Lusatian theosopher whose vision of regeneration stands behind the German theosophical tradition Eckartshausen inherited. — Rijksmuseum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From this anthropology the book’s central claim follows. The knowledge of these mysteries has been preserved, from the first day of creation, by a single school — a community illuminated inwardly by the Savior, the society of the Elect. Its members are scattered across the world and across the ages; they have never met as a society meets; yet they are united in one spirit, one truth, one doctor and master. Eckartshausen names this community the Invisible Celestial Church, or the interior Church, or the interior Sanctuary. It was formed, he writes, immediately after the Fall, and received at first hand the revelation of the means by which fallen humanity could be raised again. From all time it has thrown up an exterior school as its outer expression; every external Church, with its symbols, ceremonies, and sacred books, is the letter that bodies forth the spirit residing within the interior one. The truth was carried into every nation and modified symbolically according to its climate and capacity — so that the outward forms of all religions have, more or less veiled, the same inner sanctuary as their object.

This is the teaching that gives the book its place. It is a sacramental Christianity read entirely from the inside: the Mass, the rite, the creed are not discarded but understood as the outward letter of a living interior. The interior Church, on Eckartshausen’s account, is invisible and yet governs all, because to it alone force and power are confided; it is perpetuated in silence and in real activity. It is not, he is careful to insist, a secret society that meets at set times and elects its officers — even its chief does not invariably know all its members, and the ripe are joined to it at the moment and from the quarter they least expect. He calls it, in the old creedal phrase, the Communion of Saints, and ventures that it forms a theocratic republic which one day will be “the Regent-Mother of the whole world.” Its Chief is the Light of the World himself, the single mediator, royal priest after the order of Melchizedek; and so the interior Church can claim a Job among idolaters, a Melchizedek among strangers, a Moses in the land of Midian — living proofs that the community of those capable of light was always united across the visible divisions of the nations.

The structure is unmistakably Boehmean and Martinist in its bones — fall, regeneration, an inner light recovered — yet Eckartshausen’s distinctive contribution is the ecclesiology. Where Boehme gives a metaphysics of the soul’s rebirth and Saint-Martin a doctrine of reintegration, Eckartshausen names a Church: a concrete, perpetual, invisible institution standing behind every visible one, with its own school, its own chair, its own degrees of ascent. The unity of all religions, in his reading, is not a leveling of their outward forms but a single hidden sanctuary at the base of each. This is the move that later readers in the esoteric tradition would seize on, because it offered, in Christian and sacramental dress, a hidden lineage of the regenerate that any seeker might silently belong to.

A quiet book and its loud heirs

For most of the nineteenth century The Cloud upon the Sanctuary led the half-buried life Eckartshausen seemed to intend for it. It was translated into French under the patronage of the Countess of Caithness for the journal L’Aurore; it circulated, in Waite’s phrase, within a restricted circle, kept in memory by a few. Its broad afterlife begins with that English rendering and with the milieu of late-Victorian esoteric Christianity that received it.

The pivotal figure is Arthur Edward Waite. As the book’s English editor he supplied the introduction that has traveled with it ever since, reading the interior Church not as allegory but as a real claim made by a man speaking, in his words, “as one having full knowledge and ambassadorial powers, as one speaking from the centre.” Waite was careful, in that same introduction, to say what the inner Church is not: not a corporate body lodged within the visible Church and steering it from some local center, and not the collective oversoul of its most advanced members. He left the positive answer to each reader, while insisting the question was a real one and not a figure of speech. Waite’s own preoccupation — a hidden, sacramental, Christian core within the Western mystery tradition — found in Eckartshausen something close to a charter, and he set the book at the head of a small library of cognate texts on the inward Church that he commended to serious readers, ranging it alongside the anonymous Some Characteristics of the Interior Church, the dramatic poems of Zacharias Werner, and the seven-volume Berleburg discourses on the interior life. Through Waite the work passed into the orbit of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where it was held in unusually high regard, a devotional touchstone for an order otherwise occupied with ritual and the Tree of Life. The same lineage of esoteric Christianity that runs through the Golden Dawn carries forward to figures such as Dion Fortune and the wider current of twentieth-century Christian mysticism read in an initiatory key.

The most consequential transmission ran through Waite to a single young reader. In 1896, on Waite’s recommendation, Aleister Crowley took up The Cloud upon the Sanctuary as the book that would explain to him the nature of the interior Church — a reading later remembered as a hinge in his turn toward the occult. When Crowley came to construct the curriculum of his own order, the A∴A∴, and published its course of study in The Equinox, Eckartshausen’s little book of letters stood near the very head of the prescribed reading. The placement is worth pausing over for its strangeness: a Bavarian Catholic’s manual of the regenerate heart, written by a man who would not leave his church, installed as a foundational text for a system that would go on to repudiate Christianity root and branch. What survived the translation between worlds was the architecture — the invisible community of the awakened, perpetuated in silence across the ages — emptied of its creedal content and refilled. Later codifiers of the magical curriculum such as Israel Regardie, preserving and publishing the Golden Dawn material, kept the book in circulation as part of the inherited canon.

That afterlife has produced a durable double reading. To the historian of esotericism, The Cloud upon the Sanctuary is a late and lucid distillation of the Boehmean-Martinist theosophy of its century, valuable for the precision with which it states the doctrine of an invisible Church — a position with deep roots in Christian thought, from the Augustinian distinction between the visible and invisible Church to the radical spiritualists of the Reformation. To the reader inside the tradition Eckartshausen addressed, it remains what it claims to be: not a theory of a hidden community but a summons addressed to one, written by a man who held that some things can be changed from within, essentially, without altering the outward names and forms. The censor who once guarded the boundary of what could be read ended by describing a sanctuary that no censorship reaches, and an entrance to it that opens only inward.

→ In the library: The Cloud upon the Sanctuary (trans. Isabel de Steiger, intro. A. E. Waite)

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