Louis Claude de Saint-Martin
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Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (January 18, 1743 – 1803) was a French philosopher, known as le philosophe inconnu, the name under which his works were published.
Life
He was born, at Amboise, into a poor but noble family.
As his father wished, he tried first law and then the army as a profession. While in the garrison at Bordeaux, he came under the influence of Martinez de Pasquales, usually called a Portuguese Jew (although later research has revealed the probability that he was a Spanish Catholic), who taught a species of mysticism drawn from cabbalistic sources, and endeavoured to found thereon a secret cult with magical or theurgical rites.
In 1771, Saint-Martin left the army to become a preacher of mysticism. His conversational powers made him welcome in Parisian salons; but his zeal led him to England, where he made the acquaintance of William Law, the English mystic, and to Italy and Switzerland, as well as to the chief towns of France. At Strasbourg, in 1788, he met Charlotte de Boecklin, who introduced him to the writings of Jacob Boehme, to which he developed a semi-romantic attachment.
A nobleman, he was interned and his property was confiscated during the French Revolution, He was later freed by local officials who wanted him to become a school teacher. He was brought up a strict Catholic, and always remained attached to the Church, although his first work, Of Errors and Truth, was placed upon the Index. He died at Aunay, near Paris, on October 23, 1803.
Works
He was the first to translate the writings of Jacob Boehme from German into French. His later years were devoted almost entirely to the composition of his chief works and to the translation of Boehme. His published letters show that he was interested in spiritualism, magnetic treatments, magical evocation and the works of Emanuel Swedenborg.
His chief works are Lettre à un ami, ou Considérations philosophiques et religieuses sur la révolution française (Letter to a Friend, or Philosophical and Religious Considerations on the French Revolution), Eclair sur l'Association humaine, L'Esprit des choses ou Coup d'œil philosophique sur la nature des êtres et sur l'objet de leur existence, and Le Ministère de l'Homme-Esprit. Other treatises appeared in his Œuvres posthumes (1807). Saint-Martin regarded the French Revolution as a sermon in action, if not indeed a miniature of the last judgment. His ideal society was a natural and spiritual theocracy, in which God would raise up men of mark and endowment, who would regard themselves strictly as divine commissioners to guide the people. All ecclesiastical organization was to disappear, giving place to a purely spiritual Christianity, based on the assertion of a faculty superior to the reason moral sense, from which we derive knowledge of God. God exists as an eternal personality, and the creation is an overflowing of the divine love, which was unable to contain itself. The human soul, the human intellect or spirit, the spirit of the universe, and the elements or matter, are the four stages of this divine emanation, man being the immediate reflection of God, and nature in turn a reflection of man. Man, however, has fallen from his high estate, and matter is one of the consequences of his fall. But divine love, united to humanity in Christ, will work the final regeneration.
Influence
Admirers of his works formed groups of Friends of St Martin which later became known as Martinists. They were influential on the formation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
