While preparing himself for ordination, Andreae lived at the famous Tübinger Stift, whose roster of famous stipendiarii over the centuries has included Kepler, Schelling, and Hegel. The Stift must have reinforced for Andreae the orthodox Lutheranism of his University years, for the theological tone had been set by Jakob Andreae, Heerbrand, Hafenreffer, Stephan Gerlach, J. Heilbrunner, Polycarp Leyser, and Aegidius Hunnius. Probably the social-service nature of the Stift influenced Andreae's later concern for the well-being and support of students; certainly for him the Stift experience was a positive one, for he was instrumental in its survival through the black period of the Thirty Years' War. At the Stift he formed friendships with David Hafenreffer, Matthias' son; and with Johann Jakob Heinlin and Wilhelm Schickhardt, both of them students of theology and mathematics who in future years maintained contact with him by correspondence. Through Besold he entered into friendship with Wilhelm Wense, who would shortly become acquainted with Campanella in Italy, and who would later be named by Andreae as a prime stimulant to Andreae's "Societas Christiana"; and Wense put Andreae in touch with Tobias Adami, who as early as 1613 began to introduce Campanella's ideas into German circles, and who also became a supporter of the "Societas Christiana." Some writers, by misusing these facts and misapplying Andreae's genuine appreciation for certain aspects of Campanella's work, have claimed that Andreae's Christianopolis is but a pale reflection of Campanella's Civitas solis, or that Campanella, via Andreae, lies at the root of Rosicrucianism—claims that simply will not stand up under careful historical and literary scrutiny.

Andreae, then, made new friends at the Stift; also, he profited from his stay there by taking part in a "Collegium mathematicum," which led to the writing of one of his first published works, the Collectaneorum mathematicorum decades XI [1614], that well displays his wide scientific interests and the harmony of science and faith characteristic of his Chymische Hochzeit. At this time he prepared his Doctrinae christianae summa: ex Hafenrefferi Locis communibus contracta [1614], which shows beyond all doubt that he had drunk deeply at the founts of Hafenreffer's orthodox Lutheranism. He spent much time in the reading of theological classics; he concentrated especially, he tells us, on the "consummatissima theologia" of Luther himself, and on the "solid food" of the fathers—Jerome and Augustine. Significantly, these theological works he read had been part of his father's library: through the years of education and travel, when a new world of learning had opened for Andreae, the "old, old Story" of Christian truth never lost its central place in his life.

On February 25, 1614, Johann Valentin Andreae was ordained to the holy ministry, having received his first ecclesiastical call—to the position of "deacon" (in present-day terminology roughly equivalent to "assistant pastor") of the church in Vaihingen/Enz, a little town fourteen miles northwest of Stuttgart. The remainder of his life would be spent in the active pastorate. It is impossible to present here a full account of those years of Christian service … but an attempt will be made to point up the highlights of his career and to show its essential unity with his early years—over against the questionable efforts on the part of some (both "occultists" on the left and "orthodoxists" on the right) to drive a wedge between Andreae's allegedly "radical" youth and "conservative" manhood. In contrast to such a dichotomy, we shall find in the pastorate the same Andreae as we found at Tübingen, Strasbourg, Geneva, Rome, and Augsburg: a believing Christian of strong Lutheran persuasion, compelled by inner necessity to make the Gospel relevant both to the intellectual and to the social challenges of his day.

In the last year of his life, Andreae epigrammatically outlined his pastoral career in a letter to Duke Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg:

Let us briefly consider in turn each of these phases of Andreae's ministerial life.

Vaihingen: the "Laboratorium"

One would think that the picturesque town of Vaihingen, situated between the Black Forest and Heidelberg's romantic Neckar river, should have provided Andreae with a peaceful respite after his hectic but exciting period of wanderings. However, he rightly refers to his six year Vaihingen pastorate as a "workroom." From April 2, 1614, when he made his first entry in the ecclesiastical "Toten-Register," to February 18, 1620, when he performed this duty at Vaihingen for the last time, his days were filled with labor and with accomplishment—and also with love. Only a few months after his arrival at Vaihingen we find him writing to his friend of student days, Johann Bernhard Unfrid, candidatus juris of Tübingen, about "the girl who is going to unite herself to me in the everlasting bonds of love." He invites Unfrid to the forthcoming August wedding which is to take place at Poppenweiler, and (as if the hurried script did not already indicate it), he signs himself "occupatus." August 2 was the wedding day, and the bonds of love did indeed become perpetual: Agnes Elisabeth, née Grüninger, would remain his companion for life; she survived her husband by five years.

In Andreae's "Breviarium Vitae" the entry following that for his wedding reads: "Hinc prognati Liberi ac Libri." This same coupling together of physical and literary progeny occurs in Andreae's Indiculus librorum [1642?], so the juxtaposition can hardly have been merely a conceit: for Andreae, scholarly productivity as well as the joy of parenthood was bound up with a loving and stable marriage. Many have wondered why Andreae published the Chymische Hochzeit when he did (in 1616)—so many years after he had originally drafted it (1605); could his early months of marriage, when he experienced personally the closest human analogy to the union of Christ and His Church have moved him to give to the world his striking allegory of the ineffable marriage of heaven and earth that centers in the Person and Work of Jesus Christ? There is every reason to think so.

Three of Andreae's nine children were born in Vaihingen: Maria (1616-1681), who eventually married a citizen of Calw when her father had his pastorate there; Concordia, who was born June 29, 1617 and died a month later, on July 28; and Agnes Elisabeth, who died at birth on September 19, 1618. That Andreae was still maintaining close contact with his friends of Tübingen days is evident from the fact that Besold, Hoelzel, and Wense served as respective god-parents of these three children. In the matter of "libri," the Vaihingen period was the most intensively productive in Andreae's life: an examination of the chronological Bibliography of his printed works will show that over twenty separate writings came from his pen during that time, and that they represent a remarkable breadth of subject matter, including theology, political philosophy, social criticism and satire, and belles-lettres. These works reflect Andreae's spiritual outlook at the time he offered his Chymische Hochzeit to the general public, and thus the more prominent of them deserve at least cursory mention here—particularly when we remember that the Chymical Wedding may have undergone revision between the time of original composition and that of publication.

Andreae never wrote a non-theological work, for his faith illumined every subject he took in hand. Yet some of his writings are more strictly theological than others. During the Vaihingen period three such works stand out with special prominence; one is of an editorial nature, the other two are original compositions. In 1615, Andreae published a summary of Johann Arndt's famous devotional work, True Christianity. Andreae's high opinion of Arndt is evident from the fact that in 1621 he published still another anthology of True Christianity, and in 1644 he included both of these digests in his Summa doctrinae christianae trigemina along with his editions of Hafenreffer and Schaefer. In the letter of dedication to Duke Augustus which he prepared in conjunction with his autobiography, Andreae includes Arndt among six "blessed athletes and faithful shepherds of God's flock" (the others: Luther, Brenz, Jakob Andreae, Hafenreffer, and Johann Gerhard); these are clearly the theologians whom he regards most highly. It is not difficult to see why Arndt appealed to Andreae—and why his name later appears first in Andreae's list of the supporters of his "Societas Christiana" of 1618-1619: Arndt was firmly committed to orthodox Lutheranism (he had studied under Pappus at Strasbourg and had given his allegiance to the Formula of Concord); he had a definite interest in the interpretation of alchemy from a Reformation standpoint (he wrote a short commentary on Khunrath's Amphitheatrum); and his entire career was spent in an effort to make the truths of Lutheran theology live in the personal experience of believers. This passion to "existentialize" the Christian message, over against the tendencies toward "dead orthodoxy" in his time (comparison with Søren Kierkegaard in nineteenth century Denmark is irresistible) touched Andreae deeply, for Arndt's concern for a living, "true" Christianity was Andreae's own concern as well. "L'insistance qu'il [Arndt] mettait sur l'union mystique" would certainly have appealed to the author of the Chymical Wedding; and when, in 1619, Andreae dedicates his Christianopolis to Arndt, he is saying that in his opinion, Arndt's vital Christianity holds the key to an ideal Christian society.

In 1616—a year after the publication of Andreae's anthology of Arndt and the same year the Chymical Wedding was given to the public—there appeared Andreae's Theca gladii spiritus. This small volume was issued anonymously by the publishing house of Lazarus Zetzner in Strasbourg, and, in common with the first printing of the Chymische Hochzeit by that firm, the book carries the Zetzner mark on the title page and Conrad Scher's printer's device as a colophon. Because the book contains prefatory remarks about and some memorial verses for Andreae's friend Tobias Hess, who had died two years before, it has frequently been attributed to Hess; however, as Andreae expressly states in his autobiography, he himself wrote the work and had it published in common format with Besold's Axiomata philosophico-theologica (1616), which Besold dedicated to him. The outward similarity of these companion volumes (each contains numbered aphorisms—847 in Besold's book, 800 in Andreae's) has seemed to support the contention of Kienast that during the period when Andreae wrote and published the Chymical Wedding he had fully absorbed Besold's occult-mystical approach to life. But in reality, the similarity between the two books ends with their external format and structure. The titles of the works reveal their essential difference: Besold writes first as a philosopher, and only secondarily as a theologue; Andreae, however, humbly prepares a sheath for "the sword of the Spirit": an allusion to Eph. 6:17, where the Apostle identifies that sword as nothing less than the Word of God—meaning, as axiom 771 puts it: "divina dicta sumite." An examination of the respective contents of the two books confirms this fundamental distinction: Besold, though he presents many Biblical references and allusions, prefers to display his wide learning through citations to secular authors; Andreae, however, mentions non-Biblical writers only once in his eight hundred axioms (no. 372: Abbots Joachim of Flora and Tritheim). Besold, while he makes quite clear in his axioms that he is a Christian believer (and feels it necessary to add a postscript stating that the book really presupposes his orthodoxy!) continually strives to find philosophico-mystical depths and extensions of Christian faith; Andreae, quite to the contrary, totally subordinates man to God-in-Christ, as his axioms 759 and 760 well show:

Philosophus ratione, conscientiâ, amicitiâ, coronâ, sceptro, sigillo, rex mortalitatis est.

Nemo in hoc magno universo magnus, felix, bonus, sapiens, dives, dominans, liber, nisi Christianus; Christi sui, filius, frater, amicus, divinae possessionis cohaeres, angelorum nunc cura, aliquandò judex, Sacrosanctae Trinitatis delitium.

True, between axioms 777 and 778, Andreae inserts a Zodiac table—but it is a "Zodiac of the Christian who is a Pilgrim in this World" ("Zodicus Christiani Cosmoxeni"), in which each of the twelve signs is made to convey an aspect of Christian doctrine or practice; just as Andreae in the Chymical Wedding employs alchemy as a pointer to evangelical truth, so here he brings astrological motifs into captivity to Christ. No better illustration of the totally dissimilar thrusts of Besold's Axiomata and Andreae's Theca exists than the final aphorism in each book. Besold's obscure and mystical axiom reads:

Cabbalisticum est: Angelus omnia secum habet; Angelico ac spirituali modo. Imò totam mundi machinam in se complicat, & est quasi omnia inferiora.

Andreae, however, concludes with the simple yet profound assertions:

Scientia inflat: Charitas aliis prodest.
Nil Christo triste recepto.

The year 1618 saw the appearance of another independent theological work by Andreae—but a work which, both by its title and by its content, shows Arndt's influence on him. The Veri Christianismi solidaeque philosophiae libertas, which contains a moving "encomium to Jesus Christ," sets forth, in a manner reminiscent of Luther's Christian Liberty, the freedom which comes from a personal, living union with Jesus Christ. Here, as in his comments on his Geneva experience, one sees that for Andreae "freedom" is never "from" but always "for"—freedom to live the kind of morally upright life that is capable of producing an ethically transformed society.

As a bridge between theology and belles-lettres during the Vaihingen period, we encounter Andreae's Herculis christiani luctae XXIV of 1615, and his Christian poetry. The Hercules, written in memory of Andreae's close friend Tobias Hess who had died the previous year, allegorically employs and freely develops the struggles of the most popular classical Hero to point up the temptations of the Christian life and the means of overcoming them. To take but one example from this exceedingly clever work: the Christian Hercules' twelfth labor requires him to overcome the giant Antaeus, whom Andreae takes to represent human wisdom. The classical Hero, on observing that every time Antaeus fell on the earth he gained new strength, killed him by holding him aloft in the air. Likewise the only way for a Christian to deal with human wisdom, says Andreae, is to hold it up to the "liberum Divinae lucis aërem," for all so-called human remedies only add to the monster's strength. Thus throughout his book Andreae witnesses to eternal truth through the motifs of classical literature.

Andreae's poetry likewise employs literary technique to illumine the Christian message. His earliest published verses appeared in 1615 in his Vom Besten und Edelsten Beruff. Des wahren Diensts Gottes, which included five "geistliche Lieder." The allegorical-epic poem Christenburg was probably composed in 1619, though it may date back as far as the year 1615; it was not published until 1836. Two of its most striking sections are the "Summarische Bekandtnuss unnd Glaub Eines Christen" (setting forth, in obvious reliance upon the Catechisms of Luther and Brenz, Baptism, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Eucharist, the Law, and the Office of the Keys) and the sanctificatory verses under the rubric, "Von dem Wahren Creutz der Christen." In 1619, Andreae published his Geistliche Kurtzweil, a collection containing both original poetry and poems in translation. Perhaps the most interesting original selection in the Kurtzweil is Andreae's "Das Gute Leben eines recht-schaffenen Dieners Gottes," which so moved Herder that he included it in one of his own works, and which modern editors have not inappropriately titled "Alte Reime von der praktischen Theologie" and "Eine Pastoraltheologie in Versen." In some 640 lines it discusses the pastor's calling:

Da müsst ihr glauben, wissen, tun,
Leiden lassen, fürchten und hon …

As the Chymische Hochzeit shows how Andreae put alchemical science into the service of the Gospel, so his poetry shows how he brought the Muse into its service also. And the absence in Andreae's thinking of the baleful separation of the "two cultures" of art and science is illustrated by the several poetical interludes in the Hochzeit itself.

During the Vaihingen years Andreae wrote a number of belletristic works of timeless value, though they have, in general, been forgotten in modern times. Four of these are social satires, and on the basis of them Andreae has been called "the Christian Lucian." A closer parallel is with Erasmus' Praise of Folly, and certainly Andreae's satires reach the literary level of Erasmus' work—and, in their powerful theological dynamism, they may be said to surpass the Praise of Folly, with its tendencies toward dilettantism. Andreae's Turbo [1616] is a comedy which—while displaying an extraordinary erudition that moves effortlessly from Hesiod to Rabelais and from Slovanic to Spanish—lampoons the pretentions of the pseudo-intellectuals of the day and the educational institutions they create in their own image; the large cast of characters includes, inter alios, a rhetorician, a mathematician, a political scientist, a historian, a linguist, a traveller, musicians, students, an alchemist, and numerous personified virtues. The hero, "Turbo"—who on one level represents the playwright himself—encounters all varieties of intellectual presumption, and though in consequence "suam dolet vitam, à Sapientia ad quietem tandem ducitur." By leading Turbo to a personal knowledge of God, Sapientia brings him in the last scene to pray:

Creator Deus, Benefactor Christe, Illuminator Spiritus, quas tibi grates referam, qui, quae abscondita hactenus, & abstrusissima credidi bona, in Cor hoc meum seminâsti, & jam aperire se, excrescere, & fructum ferre voluisti. Accipe hoc ipsum cor, quod tibi humiliter offero.

This play has rightly been regarded as a forerunner of Goethe's Faust, but it should be clearly noted that whereas Faust, whose author had moved beyond confessional Christianity, centers attention on man (either as a Prometheus in Part One or as one who achieves personal enlightenment in Part Two), the Turbo, written by a convinced Lutheran believer, offers an uncompromisingly theocentric answer to the human dilemma. The Turbo deserves theatrical production and would have real impact in our own time—when anthropocentric erudition is so often mistaken for theocentric wisdom, and when so many suffer from the Angst which the comedy's leading character typifies.

Andreae's Menippus, the first edition of which appeared in 1617 and the second the following year, consists of one hundred short satires and several satirical appendixes; it is subtitled, "inanitatum nostratium speculum," and it deals with all manner of folly—secular and religious. The literary technique employed is Andreae's favorite one, the dialogue (which—let it be noted—aligns him closely with the theological atmosphere of our day). Herder's translation of selections from the Menippus is but one indication of the timeless quality of the book. The closing affirmation of the one hundredth satire is both Andreae's answer to the follies he has so mercilessly exposed, and perhaps the most succinct statement of the heart of his world-view to be found anywhere in his writings:

At nos, mi frater, quibus & haec displicent, & imposturae multae patent, vitam studiaque ita instituamus, ut religio nobis nulla sit nisi pietas Jesu, leges nullae quàm charitas Jesu, medicina nulla praeter abstinentiam Jesu, eruditio nulla post simplicitatem Jesu, mores nulli ubi non humilitas Jesu, exercitium nullum ultra Crecem Jesu, Societas nulla extra Fraternitatem Jesu, finis nullus praeterquam aeterna cohabitatio Jesu: ita Jesus nobis omnia erit in omnibus, quo in uno acquiescemus.

Along much the same line is Andreae's Peregrini in Patria errores [1618], with a title-page quotation from the last verse of Psalm 119: "I have gone astray like a lost sheep." Here Andreae describes the "lostness" which man, apart from Christ, always experiences in the world. The remedy is set forth in the Civis christianus of the next year, whose theme is clearly indicated by its title-page motto—the concluding verse of Jesus' parable of the lost sheep who is sought and found by its shepherd: "I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance" (Luke 15:7).

Sixteen-nineteen also saw the publication of Andreae's Mythologiae christianae sive virtutum & vitiorum vitae humanae imaginum libri tres, where he employs the mythical technique of the Chymische Hochzeit to produce numerous vignettes of human folly and the divinely revealed correctives for it. Here Andreae reveals himself as the very opposite of the Bultmannian "demythologizer" of the twentieth century; for Andreae, myth is not an obstruction to faith, but one of the best vehicles for conveying it! In the Mythologia Andreae shows acquaintance with an impressive number of Italian writers: Petrarch, Machiavelli, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Scipione Gentili, Girolamo Cardano, Bernardino Ochino, Boccalini, and Campanella. Like his contemporary, the great Lutheran baroque musician Michael Praetorius, who has left a permanent legacy in his work on organ construction and in his magnificent chorale preludes, Andreae apparently believed that "Germany and Lutheranism needed the relaxing influence of the Italians." So impressed was Herder by the Mythologia that in the late eighteenth century he prefaced a free translation of selections from it [Dichtongen, 1786] with the comment: "Valentin Andreä gehört so eigentlich für unsre Zeit, dass ich in Vielem, Vielem ihr jetzt einen Andreä wünschte."

Andreae's most famous writing likewise appeared in 1619: his utopia, the Christianopolis, appropriately dedicated to Johann Arndt. It would be impossible here to do the work justice; nor is a general analysis necessary, since the Christianopolis is the one work of Andreae already provided with a modern English translation, accompanied by an exceedingly valuable critical introduction. The pity is that this preeminent Christian conception of an ideal society remains less well known than the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, which is inferior to it in many ways. The Christianopolis beautifully sets forth the social ideal of Protestantism at its best: a wedding of learning and social justice centering on, and receiving its dynamic from, the free grace of God in Jesus Christ. As for the other major works of the Vaihingen period—the Invitatio fraternitatis Christi, the Turris Babel, and the De curiositatis pernicie syntagma—these are intimately connected with the Rosicrucian question and with Andreae's plan for a "Societas Christiana"….

Andreae's literary accomplishments during the six years of Vaihingen pastorate might give the impression that he sorely neglected his ministerial role in relation to his immediate flock. Nothing could be further from the truth. In actuality, he made such a spiritual and civic impact upon the community that he is still remembered as one of its foremost citizens: legends have grown up about him and in the 1950's a stained-glass window to his memory was placed in the Vaihingen Rathaus. His posthumous fame in the town is based chiefly upon the fact that he was instrumental in the rebuilding of the community after two devastating conflagrations to which the town was subjected during the Thirty Years' War. He himself prepared and published careful accounts of these destructions of November 1, 1617 and October 9, 1618, and later incorporated the substance of them into his autobiography [Vita, 1849]. The accounts contain digests of the sermons he preached to a populace sick with shock after these dual calamities within a year of each other. He beautifully combines Law and Gospel (did not Luther define the true "doctor of theology" as one who could do so?) by underscoring God's judgment on sin and His grace to those who rely on him for mercy. A persistent tradition in Vaihingen says that the first sermon, following a conflagration that destroyed most of the town but missed the parsonage, was a discourse on just punishment for the excessive consumption of alcohol by the citizenry; and that the sermon which followed hard on a second burning that did destroy Andreae's home and valuable personal library had as its theme a warning against becoming too attached to one's own possessions! Though the story requires some modification from a strictly historical standpoint, it accomplishes the feat of the true legend by capturing in epitomal form the essence of a man's character: Andreae was indeed a person who consistently strove to bring men to actualize the Christian faith in their ethical conduct—and at the same time he was concerned, as a physician of souls, that "having preached to others," he might not himself become "a castaway." Andreae's appreciation for the "true" Christianity of Arndt—which shows itself in literary terms at the beginning of his Vaihingen experience—is manifested in the warmth and suppleness of his heart during the practical trials and agonies of that wartime pastorate.