Sebastian Franck
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Sebastian Franck (20 January 1499 Donauwörth, Swabia – c. 1543 Basel, Switzerland) was a 16th-century German freethinker, humanist, and radical reformer.
Biography
Franck was born in 1499 in Donauwörth, Swabia. Because of this he styled himself Franck von Wörd. He entered the University of Ingolstadt on 26 March 1515, and afterwards went to Bethlehem College, incorporated with the university, as an institution of the Dominicans at Heidelberg. Here he met Martin Bucer and Martin Frecht, with whom he might have attended Luther's Heidelberg disputation in October 1518.
Originally ordained as a priest, in 1525 Franck went over to the
Advance in his religious ideas led him to seek the freer atmosphere of
His Weltbuch, a supplement to his Chronica, was printed at Tübingen in 1534. His publication, in the same year, of the Paradoxa brought him into trouble with the authorities. An order for his banishment was withdrawn on his promise to submit future works for censure. Not interpreting this as applying to works printed outside Ulm, he published in 1538 at Augsburg his Guldin Arch and at Frankfort his Germaniae chronicon, with the result that he had to leave Ulm in January 1539. He seems to have had no settled abode from that time. At Basel he found work as a printer, and it was probably there that he died in the winter of 1542–1543. He had published in 1539 his Kriegbuchlein des Friedens, his Schrifftliche und ganz grundliche Auslegung des 64 Psalms, and his Das verbutschierte mit sieben Siegein verschlossene Buch (a biblical index, exhibiting the dissonance of Scripture). In 1541 he published his Spruchwörter (a collection of proverbs). In 1542 he issued a new edition of his Paradoxa and some smaller works.
Franck combined the humanist's passion for freedom with the mystic's devotion to the religion of the spirit. Luther contemptuously dismissed him as a mouthpiece of the devil. Martin Frecht of Nuremberg pursued him with bitter zeal. But his courage did not fail him, and in his last year, in a public Latin letter, he exhorted his friend Johann Campanus to maintain freedom of thought in face of the charge of heresy.
Franck came to believe that God communicates with individuals through a portion of the divine remaining in each human being. He came to dismiss the human institution of the church, and believed that theology could not properly claim to give expression to this inner word of God in the heart of the believer. For example, Franck wrote, "To substitute Scripture for the self-revealing Spirit is to put the dead letter in the place of the living Word..."[1][verification needed]
Franck’s comment “God is an unutterable sigh, lying in the depths of the heart,” quoted by Julius Wilhelm Zincgref[2] was described by Ludwig Feuerbach as “the most remarkable, the profoundest, truest expression of Christian Mysticism”[3]
Writings
- Autobiographical Letter to Johann Campanus (1531)
- Weltbuch (1534)
- Chronicle of Germany (1538)
- Golden Arch (1538)
- A Universal Chronicle of the World's History from the Earliest Times to the Present
- Book of the Ages
- Chronicle and Description of Turkey
- Paradoxa (1534)
- Preface and Translation into German of Althamer's Diallage
- Seven Sealed Book (1539)
- Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
- Translation with Additions of Erasmus' Praise of Folly
- The Vanity of Arts and Sciences
Notes
This article includes a improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (May 2013) ) |
- ISBN 978-1-59752-293-9. Retrieved 2 July 2017.
- ^ Zincgref, Julius Wilhelm (1835). Scharfsinnige Sprüche der Teutschen Apophthegmata genannt.
- ^ Feuerbach, Ludwig (1841). The essence of Christianity.
References
- 280 Paradoxes or Wondrous Sayings, by Sebastian Franck ISBN 0-88946-814-1
- Sebastian Franck (1499–1542), ISBN 3-447-03454-8
- Attribution
- public domain: Alexander Gordon (1911). "Franck, Sebastian". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. This work in turn cites:
- Hauck's Realencyklopädie (1899)
- C. A. Hase, Sebastian Franck von Wörd (1869)
- J. F. Smith, in Theological Review (April 1874)
- E. Tausch, Sebastian Franck von Donauwörth und seine Lehrer (1893)
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
External links
- Chronika (digital facsimile)
- Sebastian Franck in Strasbourg — by Geoffrey Dipple
- "Franck Sebastian (1499 1543)". Entry in The Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia.
- Encyclopedia Americana. 1920. .