Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670-1789

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Early Evangelicalism

Evangelicalism contributed to major changes of ideas in the modern world. This book represents a pioneering attempt to trace the discussions within the evangelical movements from Central Europe to the American colonies about what constituted evangelical identity, and what the basis was for the felt fraternity among leaders of strikingly different backgrounds. Through a global study of the major figures and movements in the early evangelical world, W. R. Ward aims to show that down through the eighteenth century, the evangelical elite had coherent answers to the general intellectual problems of their day, and that piety, as well as Enlightenment, was a motor of intellectual change. However, as the century wore on, the evangelicals lost the ability to state a general intellectual setting for their case, and when they entered on their period of greatest social influence in the nineteenth century their former cohesion disintegrated into acute partisan wrangling. .  .    is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Durham. His recent publications include The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (1992) and Christianity under the Ancien Régime, 1648–1789 (1999).

Early Evangelicalism A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789 W. R. Ward

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521864046 © W. R. Ward 2006 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2006 isbn-13 isbn-10

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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction 1 The thought-world of early evangelicalism

page vi 1 6

2 Spener and the origins of church pietism

24

3 The mystic way or the mystic ways?

40

4 The development of pietism in the Reformed churches

70

5 The Reformed tradition in Britain and America

85

6 Zinzendorf

99

7 John Wesley

119

8 Jonathan Edwards

140

9 The disintegration of the old evangelicalism

156

Conclusion

184

Select and user-friendly bibliography Index

194 214

v

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the Cambridge University Press for undertaking the publication of this volume, and for the engaged attention given by their readers to the original typescript. I am also grateful for the tolerance of various evangelical friends to my utterances over the years, and hope for their continued indulgence. My wife has nobly borne the demands of (doubtless far too many) books for more than half a century. She is unlikely to stretch her patience to the extent of reading any of them, but this does not impair my gratitude for what she has done.

vi

Introduction

The great spate of historical inquiry into evangelicalism in the last generation has been curiously uninformative in three respects. It has not dated the beginnings of the evangelical movement (in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word) early enough; what are called early evangelicals here are those who originated in the first century of the movement from c.1670. The new work has also said little about the evangelical identity that was so apparent to the early evangelicals. And it has been overwhelmingly devoted to the Anglo-American aspects of the movement to the neglect of its global reference. For this reason there has never been an account of the internal discussions in the movement about the nature of evangelical identity. Jonathan Edwards thought that the millennial bliss was being anticipated in this present age by labour-saving ingenuity which provided more time for ‘contemplation and spiritual employments’; indeed ‘the invention of the mariner’s compass is a thing discovered by God to that end’.1 The objects of this book are to supply some Edwardsian compass-bearings to the wider evangelical enterprise, and to present, not a rounded discussion of its leading exponents, but an account of where they stood in relation to the pool of common ideas to which they contributed and from which they drew, or (to paraphrase Jonathan Edwards) to mitigate the tedium of the voyage to the other hemisphere. It aims to offer not a potted account of Wesley, Edwards and the others of the sort that has been well provided in recent editions of the theological encyclopedias, but an approach to what they thought about evangelical identity. This will show at the least that evangelicalism contributed to major changes of ideas in the modern world, even though it did not set out to be a primarily intellectual movement. The non-intellectual or anti-intellectual aspects of evangelicalism are not the business of the discussion here.

1

Jonathan Edwards, The Millennium, in The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards from His Private Notebooks, ed. H. G. Townsend (Westport, Conn., 1955), pp. 207–8.

1

2


The ways in which Spener2 and Jonathan Edwards parted company with popular evangelicalism have evoked some exciting narratives elsewhere; the subject here is that of top-drawer evangelicalism, which in this period always responded coherently to the world of thought as its adherents perceived it. Incidentally the narrative will suggest ways in which the history of piety casts light on the general movement of ideas. The defeat of the Ancients by the Moderns was not the work of the Enlightenment alone. Confessionalisation and Orthodoxy Chapter 1 discusses rather narrowly the thought-world of early evangelicalism. What must be borne in mind is the background, only partly intellectual, against which Pietism developed and reacted, which is often referred to in short-hand terms such as confessionalisation and Orthodoxy. In the Lutheran world these movements developed in the second and third quarters of the sixteenth century, and were born of the need to delimit Lutheranism against the articulation of Roman Catholic doctrine by the Council of Trent on the one side and against the challenge of Calvinism on the other. In Germany especially this process was generally linked with the development of the territorial system and the increase in the powers of princes over the churches and other forms of organisation in their states. Princely power did not change one of the important legacies of Luther himself – the high prestige of academic theology – though it led to the foundation of more universities. Here the standing of theology, the number of theological students and the output of scholarly work remained unchallenged far down the seventeenth century. The intellectual outcome of these processes was Lutheran Orthodoxy, and the Orthodox became the dominant party in the Lutheran churches. It is a calumny to maintain, as critics (including some Pietist critics), ancient and modern, have maintained, that the Lutheran Orthodox were interested in theological system-making and not interested in personal holiness; but it became clear that the ordinary faithful needed something simpler and more devotional than the great theological systems. It also became clear that, while the rise of princely power removed some functions from the churches, it did not often subordinate church discipline to the other forms of social discipline it introduced. All these were questions to which the Pietist leaders, themselves of Orthodox stock, gave 2

How Spener and Francke parted company with popular Pietism has recently been charted in detail in Ryoko Mori, Begeisterung und Ernüchterung in christlicher Vollkommenheit (Tubingen, ¨ 2004).

Introduction

3

their minds. One of the consequences of their efforts was an outcome that hardly anyone wanted at the beginning, viz. that doctrinal pluralism became the normal condition of the churches. It is a paradoxical measure of the success of the (usually) minority movements discussed here in producing this pluralism that the nineteenth-century successors of the Orthodox parties, the confessional theologians, were less plausible than their predecessors. Kliefoth insisting in 1854 that ‘the church consists only of teachers and listeners’3 , or American Lutherans maintaining that there were no open questions in theology, but that the answers could only be satisfactorily expounded in German, are examples of the sillinesses to which the more open ways of the early evangelicals had driven the conservatives. Reformed Orthodoxy Because the process in the Reformed world was different and more complicated, it is given fuller treatment in chapter 4 below; but the final upshot was similar. Aristotelian logic was applied with precision to both doctrine and ethics, especially in universities and academies; a series of Reformed confessions was produced, of which one of the highest and most familiar to English readers was the Confession of Westminster; and an Orthodox party took power in some (though far from all) Reformed churches. Reformed Orthodoxy left its mark on English Puritanism, but the nearest English counterpart to the Orthodox parties on the continent was the High Church. Evangelicals of Reformed stock were concerned to bridge the gap between their own tradition and that of the Lutherans, and, within the English fold, between themselves and other parties. On the continent they had the sympathy of the house of Hohenzollern, the Reformed rulers of an overwhelmingly Lutheran people; but even in early nineteenth-century England the gap between the Calvinists and the rest was the hardest to bridge. Eastern Orthodoxy is not treated in this book. By the early eighteenth century a recognisable evangelicalism had emerged from different confessional starting points. Its most universal characteristic was a violent, even venomous, anti-Aristotelianism, embodied in a tremendous hostility to systematic theology, what Wesley was to dismiss as ‘opinions’. The Orthodox parties had been at pains to achieve these systems, believing them to be the proper response to the intellectual demand of the world of knowledge as then organised. Particularly in the Lutheran world, but also elsewhere, this anti-Aristotelian stance 3

Walter H. Conser Jnr., Church and Confession (Macon, Ga., 1984), p. 95.

4


increased the attractiveness of one particular strand of scientific investigation that was connected with the name of Paracelsus. It was no accident that an attempt to understand the world of nature in terms of ‘life’ was adopted by Arndt, who reprocessed it with a great body of medieval mysticism for Lutheran consumption. Paracelsian ‘life’, Arndtian mysticism and affection for what was (not always very accurately) believed to be the Jewish Cabbala became the defining characteristics of Lutheran evangelicals and were widely found elsewhere. To this mixture Spener added two further ingredients of his own, a (temporary) belief in what might be achieved by small-group religion, and ‘the hope of better times’, the idea that the Last Things would not come till all God’s promises to the church had been fulfilled; this implied a rejection of the recent obsession of many Orthodox with the imminence of the end-time, and its postponement to the middle distance. This displacement carried important pastoral consequences and had also ethical implications. Unlike the Lutherans, the Reformed had been used to employing small groups for a variety of purposes, but had equally severe difficulties to overcome with the Last Things; for many of them had been committed to an elaborate historical scheme through the federal theology of Coccejus. They had, however, plenty of experience in encouraging what became famous as the ‘practice of piety’, and, especially in Puritan circles, a considerable stock of experimental investigation into the understanding of conversion. The Lutheran Pietists too were soon provided with a normative model of conversion of another kind by August Hermann Francke. It was not immediately clear that his experience differed widely from that of Luther, but it was a powerful tool for leaders of class meetings down the eighteenth century. These themes – the close association with mysticism, the small-group religion, the deferred eschatology, the experimental approach to conversion, anti-Aristotelianism and hostility to theological system, and the attempt to reinforce religious vitality by setting it in the context of a vitalist understanding of nature or, as in the case of Jonathan Edwards, supporting it by a typological reading of the natural world – formed a sort of evangelical hexagon lasting until the original evangelical cohesion began to fail. All these themes and the names associated with them will be explained further below. Intellectual history should ideally have a denser texture than the narrative that follows. Scotland, Ireland and Hungary, for example, are omitted in the interests of lucidity; but, given the total absence of a narrative of this kind in the current scholarship, a set of compass-bearings has seemed the most practicable and useful objective. What even the brief treatment attempted here is able to show is that the early evangelicals were not successful in replacing the general framework of the belief of their earliest

Introduction

5

predecessors, and this in the end contributed to the fragmentation of their common corpus of doctrine. In their turn, nineteenth-century evangelicals accomplished much, but their exaggerated notions of what was within their grasp were, at least in part, related to the fact that they devoted themselves zealously to fragments of the original evangelical stock, and would hardly have been recognised by the original pioneers.

1

The thought-world of early evangelicalism

Evangelicals, in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, seem generally to have found it easier to recognise each other than others have found it to categorise them. Indeed Ernst Benz found this to be true even of evangelical visions; these were strong in the discovery that God has his own in every confession, and that the true church was built from true, i.e., regenerate, Christians who were to be found in every denomination.1 Divided by language and theological tradition (Lutheran, Reformed or Anglican), separated by the Atlantic Ocean or (in the case of the Swedish prisoners-of-war) by the huge land mass of Siberia, confronting different problems (survival under the hammer of the Counter-Reformation, reviving a decayed Protestant establishment, or creating religious society from the ground up in America), evangelical friendship in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was as much an evidence of the persisting cohesion of a much riven Protestant world as it was of a desire to change it. The unlikely admiration in New England of Cotton Mather and his son for August Hermann Francke and his son spoke of an understanding on the fringes of the Protestant world for the problems of the centre,2 of some regrouping of sentiment, of a willingness to try new contractual methods of action. And although evangelicals liked to think of themselves as conservative in doctrine, they were looking to change, and put together a platform of forces for change extending beyond the narrowly theological region, so that their origins form a significant chapter in the history of European thought. And because the great body-blow to the survival of Protestantism had been delivered in Germany, that is where their story begins. On the whole things had gone the way of the Protestant powers for a century after the Reformation, as they were to go the way of the Catholics 1 2

6

Ernst Benz, Die Vision. Erfahrungsformen und Bilderwelt (Stuttgart, 1969), p. 609. On the ways in which this understanding was created and maintained, see my Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 1–15. Cotton Mather was an admiring correspondent of Francke; Samuel Mather wrote a Vita B. Augusti Hermanni Franckei (Boston, 1733) addressed in Latin to all at Harvard.


7

for a century from the beginning of the Thirty Years War in 1618. But, even before the Protestant world had been narrowed by loss of territory to the confessional enemy and a sorry trail of Protestant princes in the Holy Roman Empire had been converted to Rome, there was a recognition that much was wrong in Zion, that there was indeed a ‘crisis of piety’.3 This fit of the blues, this period of anxious introspection, was one of two asymmetric levels on which the origins of Pietism, known in Britain as evangelicalism, are to be sought. Had Catholic hopes of military success in the Thirty Years War not been frustrated by French and Swedish intervention, it would not quite have been the case that there would have been no Protestantism left to renew; the position more generally would have been that which actually faced Protestant minorities within the Habsburg system. They had the choice between putting their faith in apocalyptic pipedreams or pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps in revivalism. They did both, and in both they retained a relation to what became Pietism, but were clearly not the same thing. It is also true that what became the Pietist party of the later years of Spener and the early years of Francke was the battered remnant left by ferocious Orthodox assaults, notwithstanding its own Orthodox origins. The Pietism which created its New Jerusalem out of unpromising materials at Halle was not the heir to all the ages, but the religion it offered bore the marks of the anxieties of the crisis of piety a century earlier. The resources on which it drew were freely available to others who used them in other ways. Thus the history of Pietism as part of what Wallmann has called ‘the movement for piety’,4 and the history of Pietism as a church party defined by relations of antagonism to other church parties, are to be sought on two quite different levels. Johann Arndt Of no writer is this more clear than of Arndt (1585–1621). Arndt’s Four (later Six) Books of True Christianity, first published in 1605, went through ninety-five editions up to 1740, including six in Latin, five in English, four in Dutch, three each in Danish, Swedish and French, two in Czech, and one each in Russian and Icelandic. Clearly Arndt was read and prized well outside the German and Lutheran area, and oddly 3

4

This phrase was given much currency by the late Winfried Zeller, especially in his two essays ‘Protestantische Frommigkeit ¨ im 17. Jahrhundert’ and ‘Die “alternende Welt” und die “Morgenrote im Aufgang” – Zum Begriff der “Frommigkeitskrise” ¨ in der Kirchengeschichte’, in Theologie und Frömmigkeit. Gesammelte Aufsätze, 2 vols. (Marburg, 1971, 1978). Johannes Wallmann, Der Pietismus, 2nd edn (Gottingen, ¨ 2005), p. 26.

8


enough he achieved his maximum rate of republication in it during the decade 1730–40, the decade in which Anglo-Saxon revivalism began its continuous history.5 All the Pietist leaders except Francke wrote introductions to the True Christianity and other works of Arndt (Spener indeed wrote his principal programmatic work, the Pia Desideria, as a preface to Arndt’s lectionary sermons), and in Francke’s parish of Glaucha, outside the walls of Halle, Arndt was regularly read and preached on.6 In Wurttemberg, ¨ where Pietism penetrated more deeply than anywhere else, Arndt was highly prized, and it was reported that at Neckargroningen ¨ in 1735 there were more Arndts than Bibles.7 Even in the middle of the seventeenth century Dannhauer had warned his congregation from the pulpit of Strasbourg Minster not to forget Bible-reading for the delights of Arndt.8 What was it that made Arndt important? The answer to this question must be that it varied from reader to reader among the host who took him up. Wallmann points out that even those who regarded themselves as Arndt’s pupils were extraordinarily different. Andreae9 and Comenius10 were not greatly interested in the diffusion of medieval piety. Spener, the founder of Lutheran Pietism, adopted a quite different eschatology. Francke’s plans for social reform owed nothing to Arndt, no more than did Zinzendorf’s communitarian ideas.11 What impressed them all was Arndt’s resolute turning away from doctrinal polemic towards improvement of life. Arndt’s own generation had lost touch with the hard-won insights of the first generation of Reformers, and was finding that the apparently water-tight guarantees of the Formula of Concord did not fill the void. That Arndt and others who wrote in similar strain at the time had uncovered a huge vein of people whose problem was not that of apprehending Christianity, but of appropriating it – of, as Spener wrote later, ‘grasping it in the heart’12 – was made clear by his publishing history. Moreover, to a Protestant public for whom sufficient 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Hartmut Lehmann, Das Zeitalter des Absolutismus (Stuttgart, 1980), p. 116; Wilhelm Koepp, Johann Arndt. Eine Untersuchung u¨ ber die Mystik im Luthertum (Berlin, 1912), p. 151. Vier Briefe August Hermann Franckes, ed. G. Kramer (Halle, 1863), pp. 73–6. F. Fritz, ‘Die evangelische Kirche Wurttembergs ¨ im Zeitalter des Pietismus’, Blätter für Württembergische Kirchengeschichte 55 (1955), p. 73; 57 (1957), p. 48. Johannes Wallmann, Theologie und Frömmigkeit im Zeitalter des Barock (Tubingen, ¨ 1995), p. 4. See below, n. 39. Johann Amos Comenius (1592–1670), educationalist, theologian, pansophist and devotional writer. The last directing bishop of the old Unity of the (Bohemian) Brethren. Wallmann, Theologie und Frömmigkeit, pp. 5–6. Philipp Jakob Spener. Briefe aus der Frankfurter Zeit (cited below as Spener, Briefe), ed. J. Wallmann et al. (Tubingen, ¨ 1992– ), III, p. 112.


9

devotional literature had never been provided, Arndt reopened the door to the mystical literature of the past. He re-edited the Theologia Deutsch (c.1430) several times and translated the Imitation of Christ (1418). The True Christianity became the standard work of Lutheran spirituality, and provided a Lutheran editing for a rich vein of medieval mysticism. The Theologia Deutsch was of course there; so were Angela da Foligno, Valentin Weigel, the Jesus-mysticism of Bernard of Clairvaux (though he appears more fully in Arndt’s sermons), Meister Eckart, and Tauler on a big scale. The power of these sources was reinforced by Arndt’s own reputation for sanctity – his face in prayer was said to be bathed in brilliant light like that of Moses and the saints – and by his other best-seller, the Little Paradise Garden (1612), in which he sought to establish a school of prayer.13 Arndt was by no means the only writer of this kind, but he was the most important, and the market that he revealed drew in resources from elsewhere, including that great flood of Puritan practical divinity memorably described by Hans Leube as ‘the victory march of English devotional literature in the Lutheran church’.14 And long before Bunyan’s pilgrim progressed triumphally through north Germany and Scandinavia, the medieval mysticism mediated by Arndt and the Puritan tracts had become an essential part of the early evangelical makeup. Arndt’s notion of devotional reading was a good deal broader than would be favoured by spiritual writers today. Arndt’s first three books of True Christianity correspond to the classical stages of the mystical way, the via purgativa, the via illuminativa, and the via unitiva. Book Four, however, was entirely different. Arndt commences: Moses, the Prince of prophets, in his book of Genesis, produces two very strong proofs of the Being of a God. The first is taken from the Macrocosm, or great world. The second from the Microcosm, or lesser world, which is man. And because by these the Maker and Preserver of all things is manifested, and in lively characters engraved upon our hearts; therefore the Holy Scriptures do frequently appeal to them both. I also intend in this book to follow the same method, and by various reflections upon both the greater and the lesser world, endeavour to show, that the creatures are as it were the Hands and Messengers of God, in a sound and Christian sense, leading us to the knowledge of God and Christ.15 13

14 15

Walter Nigg, Heimliche Weisheit. Mystisches Leben in der evangelischen Christenheit (Zurich, 1959), pp. 127, 138; Zeller, Theologie und Frömmigkeit, II, pp. 45–7; Wallmann, ‘Johann Arndt und die protestantische Frommigkeit’, ¨ in his Theologie und Frömmigkeit im Zeitalter des Barock, pp. 1–19. H. Leube, Die Reformideen in der deutschen lutherischen Kirche zur Zeit der Orthodoxie (Leipzig, 1924), p. 169. Johann Arndt, Of True Christianity, 2nd edn (London, 1720), vol. II, para.1. This translation is of peculiar interest for the theme of this book, as it was prepared by the

10


Arndt then confesses himself to the doctrines of Paracelsus, perceives that the light which is in every man signifies the art of magic, and considers the Cabbala, the Jewish medieval mysticism,16 to be a great effort to recover the hidden mysteries under the letter of Scripture. ‘Where magic ceases, the Cabbala begins, and where the Cabbala ceases, there true theology and the prophetic spirit begins.’ In the end the two-fold service of man and the creatures yields a wonderful union between the visible world, man and God from which can be derived the obligations of man. On all these subjects explanation is required. Arndt had revealed his commitment to a Hermetic kind of hierarchy of symbols, and revealed also why the whole of nature and history was germane to his purpose, long before Book Four. The science of symbols was based on the correspondence between different orders of reality, the natural and the supernatural, the natural being perceived as the exterior form of the supernatural. The golden rule of symbols was that reality of a certain order may be represented by reality of a lower order, but the reverse is impossible since the symbol must always be more readily comprehensible than the thing it symbolises.17 Thus in Book Two, chapter 37 Arndt maintained that ‘God himself is the essential life and the life of all living things. Man’s life is nobler than that of any creature; the angel’s life is nobler, Christ’s life is the noblest. God’s goodness shines forth from all creatures as from the book of nature,’ though his grace is revealed in Scripture. And in Book Two, chapter 58: The misuse of astrology is to be opposed but the heavenly bodies do have influence on our life. God works through nature and Christ pointed to the signs of the heavens. The great stars often bring great changes. Sicknesses come about for the most part through the stars. It would be foolish to reject the workings of the heavenly bodies on man for the whole firmament is in man. Nevertheless all the activities of the stars are brought under the rule of faith and prayer.18

16

17 18

Hallensian A. W. Boehm, chaplain to Prince George of Denmark, consort of Queen Anne, for presentation to the Queen herself in 1712. The Cabbala was the most important school of Jewish mysticism. It had its origin in Provence in the 13th century, and spread widely in Spain where its most famous book, Zohar (The Book of Splendour), was written in the last quarter of the thirteenth century. The central idea of the cabbalistic systems was that of the ten Sefirot or emanations of God which make up his fullness. The mystical knowledge of creation through these emanations assisted the adept to fellowship with God by stepping back from the multiplicity of creation to its original unity. Luc Benoist, The Esoteric Path. An Introduction to the Hermetic Tradition (Wellingborough, 1988), p. 22. Johann Arndt, True Christianity, ed. and tr. Peter Erb (London, 1979), pp. 213, 217.


11

Paracelsus Arndt had at one time studied medicine at Basel, and there was nothing singular in his view of the close connexion between theology and medicine. So Orthodox a theologian as Johann Gerhard19 had emphasised the close relationship between salvation (Heil) and healing (Heilung); in their objects both were practical sciences. Arndt’s own view of the ‘crisis of piety’ was that it flowed from the severance of polemical theology and practical piety.20 Theophrastus von Hohenheim, professionally known as Paracelsus (1493 or 1494–1541), was a doctor, born at Einsiedeln in Switzerland and trained at Ferrara.21 After years as a wandering scholar, and taking to writing on cosmological subjects, Paracelsus went through an inner crisis; he never left the Catholic Church, but devoted himself to the intractable subject of the arcane cures. Starting from the concepts of macrocosm and microcosm, the unity of the universe and its reflection in the small world, man, Paracelsus went back to the earliest Greek philosophy, to Pythagoras and even Egypt. The correspondences between the great and the small worlds were to be found in Neoplatonism and in all the cabbalistic and Hermetic traditions. There was a basic life-force which was related to the ‘idea’ of Plato. It was the basic life-bearer in plants, animals and men, but extended also to the elements of matter. The arcanum or secret was the improver of all virtue in things; it was incorporeal and immortal; it had the power to renew and restore. There were four kinds of arcane cures: (1) prima materia; (2) lapis philosophorum; (3) mercurius vitae; (4) tincture. Paracelsus’s originality came in the discovery of a fifth, the quinta essentia, which is in all growth and life, and separates them from impurity and mortality. The vitalism that characterised the whole alchemical tradition was a clear attraction to men like Arndt and the Pietists of a later generation who were seeking to recover religious vitality, but it had other virtues as well. It seemed, as it seemed much later to Newton, to be an answer to the perceived weaknesses of a mechanical or materialist philosophy. Atoms in constant motion might influence each other like billiard balls, but could hardly cohere, or combine to produce the immense variety of 19

20 21

Johann Gerhard (1582–1637), one of the most devout of Lutheran Orthodox theologians, studied first medicine and then theology at Wittenberg, continuing in theology at Jena and Marburg. As a young man he had enjoyed pastoral support from Arndt. Zeller, Theologie und Frömmigkeit, II, p. 8. Johannes Hemleben, Paracelsus. Revolutionär, Arzt und Christ (Frauenfeld, 1973). On the location of Paracelsianism in general thought about nature see Antoine Faivre, Philosophie de la Nature. Physique sacrée et Théosophie, XVIIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1996).

12


living forms of the real world, or the apparently spontaneous processes of fermentation, putrefaction, generation and so forth. Moreover, the light that was God’s creative agent in the beginning could be identified with the active alchemical agent.22 A typological exegesis of what the stones became in Psalm 118:22, Isaiah 8:13–14, Acts 4:11 and 1 Peter 2:4–8 might identify this agent with Christ and clinch the whole matter. Magic on this view was not witchcraft, but a harnessing of the divine forces in nature. Luther himself had seen in alchemy a metaphor of the resurrection. The mutual reinforcement apparently provided by Scripture, by ancient mythology, by the desire for a universal science, and by the longing for the millennium gave this frame of mind remarkable durability. August Hermann Francke, the founder of the great Halle institutions, possessed copies of old and rare Paracelsus MSS, strove valiantly to secure the help of a laboratory chemist from London who understood the manufacture of English secret medicaments, and, in successive editions of the Blessed Footsteps, his fund-raising tract, trumpeted the miraculous cures worked by the secret tincture, the essentia dulcis, the formula of which was known only to the Orphan House dispensary.23 Lay Pietism was introduced into Sweden at the end of the seventeenth century by Urban Hjärne, who became president of the Collegium Medicum, vice-president of the ministry of mines and physician to Charles XI, and who was one of the first Swedes to become a fellow of the Royal Society. It was said at the time that ‘almost the whole Hjärne family was devoted to the mystical theology and to alchemy, and to research into the arcana of the kingdoms of grace and of nature’.24 Indeed, in publishing terms Arndt did not reach the peak of his Swedish influence until the decade 1850–60 when he was upheld by the revival movements. Power seemed to come through this compendium to the last.25 22

23 24

25

On this theme see Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, ‘Alchemical Death and Resurrection: The significance of alchemy in the age of Newton’, in Stephen A. McKnight (ed.), Science, Pseudo-Science and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought (Columbia, Miss., 1992), pp. 55–87. Erich Beyreuther, August Hermann Francke, 1663–1727. Zeuge des lebendigen Gottes (Marburg an der Lahn, 1956), p. 169. Harry Lenhammar, ‘Paracelsus, Dippel und die Familie Hjärne – zur Frage der Rezeption pietistischer Gedanken’, in J. Wallmann and P. Laasonen (eds.), Der Pietismus in seiner europäischen und aussereuropäischen Ausstrahlung (Helsinki, 1992), pp. 40–1. Anders Jarlert, ‘Johann Arndt, die Erweckungsbewegungen und das schwedische Frommigkeitsleben’, ¨ in A. Jarlert (ed.), Johann Arndt – Rezeption und Reaktion im Nordisch-Baltischen Raum (Lund, 1999), pp. 100–1.


13

Anti-Aristotelianism If there was one more thing needed to complete the attractions of this style of thought for Pietists and proto-Pietists, it was that it was Neoplatonic and very hostile to the influence of Aristotle. Indeed, what they (and especially the radical Pietists) tended to say was that there were two kinds of theology: the first, scholastic theology, orientated to Aristotle, moved the understanding only and had no power to move the heart; the second, which had its seat in the will implanted by God, is all experience, reality and practice: it is mystical theology. It is wisdom, not science; it casts light on Scripture everywhere, and, independently of the latter, can be experienced through the illumination of God himself.26 Philipp Jakob Spener, the leader of North German Pietism, cautious on many things, maintained that he could not look back on Aristotle without a shudder.27 A radical like Christian Hoburg could find no middle way between the way of power (Kraftweg) of the mystical theology and the scholastic way (Schulweg) of Orthodoxy and Aristotle.28 If a clinching argument were needed it was provided by E. D. Colberg, a professor at Greifswald, who rolled all the modern mystical heresies into one ball in a celebrated treatise, Platonic-hermetic Christianity, comprising the historical narrative of the origin and numerous sects of modern Fanatics, Rosicrucians, Quakers, Behmenists, Anabaptists, Bourignonists, Labadists, and Quietists.29 If this was what the conservative reaction in the universities led to,30 then Spener’s call for a religious appeal which did not have to wait on the cooperation of public authorities became all the more urgent. Radical mysticism The heritage of Arndt and the crisis of piety could, of course, be appropriated by very different parties, and a more radical form of mystical criticism 26 27 28

29

30

Erich Seeberg, Menschwerdung und Geschichte (Stuttgart, 1938), p. 107. Paul Grunberg, ¨ Philipp Jakob Spener (Gottingen, ¨ 1893–1906), II, p. 14; Spener, Briefe, II, pp. 86, 206; III, pp. 217, 221. Martin Schmidt, ‘Christian Hoburgs Begriff der “mystischen Theologie”’, in FS Ernst Benz, Glaube, Geist, Geschichte, ed. G. Muller ¨ and Winfried Zeller (Leiden, 1967), pp. 314–15. Das Platonisch-hermetisches Christenthum, Begreiffend die Historische Erzehlung vom Ursprung und vielerlei Secten der heutigen Fanatischen, Rosencreutzer, Quäker, Böhmisten, Wiedertäuffer, Bourignisten, Labadisten und Quietisten (Leipzig, 1690–1). Colberg admitted that there were dangers from the Aristotelian side which encouraged the rash to pit reason against Scripture. R. B. Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis. Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford, 1988), p. 247.

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developed sustained by a really major figure, Jakob Bohme ¨ (1575–1624). Spener’s ambivalent attitude towards him is reminiscent of that of Wesley towards the mystical tradition as a whole, always alert for new sources of religious vitality, but aware of the potential hazards, and especially those of separatism. Spener felt able neither to condemn Bohme ¨ nor to recommend that he be read, since he himself was unable to understand a word.31 The radical critique was nevertheless of importance since it was built into a general view of the history not only of the church, but of the mystical theology; and, since the modern word ‘mysticism’ was introduced by the French only in the seventeenth century, this was of consequence, and this was what Colberg had firmly grasped. Protestants always had to have some answer to the vexatious question of Catholic polemicists as to where Protestantism had been before the Reformation. The radicals, who had no interest in the defence of Protestant scholasticism, had an answer. This conveniently circumvented the need for written evidence by postulating an oral tradition, while at the same time maintaining that a mystical understanding of Scripture provided written evidence of the extreme antiquity of the mystical theology. And this orally transmitted theology is the mystical theology which is written by the hand of many holy souls through the impulse of God in many books. That this mystical theology is the common way of God to lead souls to union with him, and to perfect them in it, is made as clear as daylight by the fact that the great and holy fathers of the Old and the New Testament were led by this way; since it is impossible to understand according to the truth and the deep sense of the spirit of God the book of Job, the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, the lamentations of Jeremiah, the epistle of St Paul to the Romans, and the figures of the Revelation of St John, indeed most of the sermons and parables of Jesus Christ, without a mystical exposition and without experience in this way, this mystical experience being imparted by the Spirit of God to hungry souls.32

Modern Roman Catholic scholarship has approached this view of the matter with mixed sympathies. On the one hand it discounts much of the modern German criticism of the radical position, which is based on a forced distinction between mysticism and the mystical theology, a distinction which could not be made before the term la mystique obtained ´ currency in the seventeenth century.33 St Theresa of Avila had described 31 33

32 Geistliche Fama no. 27 (1741). Spener, Briefe, III, p. 287. See, e.g., Erich Seeberg’s criticism of Bohme ¨ and Arnold as theorists rather than practitioners of mysticism (Menschwerdung und Geschichte, pp. 102, 106; Gottfried Arnold. Die Wissenschaft und die Mystik seiner Zeit, 2nd edn (Darmstadt, 1964), pp. 379–83); and Wallmann’s criticism of Arndt on similar grounds, Theologie und Frömmigkeit, p. 19. Cf. Ferdinand van Ingen, ‘Die Wiederaufnahme der Devotio Moderna bei Johann Arndt und Philipp von Zesen’, in Dieter Breuer (ed.), Religion und Religiosität im Zeitalter des Barock (Wiesbaden, 1995), II, p. 471.


15

her own experience as ‘a consciousness of the presence of God of such a kind that I could not possibly doubt that he was within me or that I was wholly engulfed in him. This was in no sense a vision: I believe that it is called mystical theology.’34 On the other hand the history of mysticism is quite largely the history of texts and their transmission; and McGinn finds that a theory of explicit mysticism was first fully laid out in the Christian tradition by Origen in the third century and institutionally embodied in the new phenomenon of monasticism in the fourth century. It is at this point that the series of Platonic and Neoplatonic texts – Dionysius the Areopagite and others – begins, to which Christian mystics appealed for a millennium and a half or more. The radical mystics of the seventeenth century were in one sense premature in finding scriptural warrant for their views, but it was true that, before a Christian body of mystical literature existed, the Hebrew Scriptures in both their Jewish form and as the Christian Old Testament were treated as mystical books by many readers. Great figures, such as Abraham, Jacob and especially Moses, were regarded as archetypal mystics whose experience and life-histories became the models through which others sought to achieve contact with God. Favoured texts, especially the Psalms and the Song of Songs, were thought to contain an account of the soul’s journey to God. The same was true of the New Testament. Paul and John were read selectively for this purpose, Paul’s account of his rapture into heaven (2 Cor. 12:2–4) being an important warrant for visionary experiences of this type. And the exegesis of the Johannine writings on the union of Christ and the believer had been central to Christian mysticism from almost the beginning.35 Thus some of what the radicals believed was more true than they could have known. They also knew, for this was part of the common stock of European knowledge in this area, of the transmission of many of these ideas through Plato (often believed to have picked up his best ideas from Moses) and the Neoplatonists, Philo, Plotinus and Proclus. Apocalyptic There were, finally, two other matters with which the mystical theology was connected from a very early date: the first was apocalyptic and the second (which gives some credence to those modern German critics who 34 35

The Life of Teresa of Jesus: The Autobiography of St Teresa of Avila, tr. E. Allison Peers (New York, 1960), p. 119. Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (London, 1992– ), I, pp. 3–4.

16


seek to reduce the mystical theology to a form of reflection rather than the practice of the presence of God) was a kind of speculation known as theosophy. The first is something of a surprise since it might be thought that mystical access to God, even union with him, involved a quite different frame of mind from preoccupation with the Last Things. But the Jewish apocalypses had been ways of making God accessible to the world as much as the mystical interpretation of Scripture, and it is now recognised that the apocalyptic frame of mind was in the immediate background to the ministry of Jesus, who was a preacher not a writer. The presence of God, which Jewish apocalypticists and early mystics realised in their ascent to the divine realm and which the Platonists sought through a flight to the contemplation of ultimate reality, Christians maintained could only be attained through their Risen Lord. This indeed involved an ascent to the heavenly realm, to be effected through Christ and the community that formed his body. Access to all this was to be had through baptism and the eucharist, and might entail martyrdom. Jewish apocalypticism differed from the view of history to be found in the old Hebrew prophetic tradition and also from that present in the Wisdom traditions. It took a deterministic view of God’s control over history, offering the conviction that present events, usually trials or difficulties of various sorts, formed the beginning of a three-fold drama of the last time, conceived according to a pattern of present crisis, imminent divine judgement, and the subsequent reward of the just. The divine plan for universal history, hidden from the ages, was believed to have been revealed by God through angelic intermediaries to the seers of old, and recorded by them in the apocalypses. But once again there was a hidden meaning in the text, as the Greeks had found hidden meanings in their own mythic and poetic texts, and by the end of the second century  Christian exegetes would be referring to such deeper meanings of the Old Testament as ‘mystical’, the earliest usage of the term in Christian literature.36 The association between mysticism and apocalyptic might not have been expected to last, since mysticism had come to chart a path to God which was independent of what happened to the historical process as a whole. In fact, the late medieval German mystics like Eckhart and Seuse had a powerful sense that the world was old and hastening to its end, and in the sixteenth century a spiritualist writer like Sebastian Franck (c.1499–1542) also had the conviction that inevitably even spirit-filled lives turned into dead forms.37 36

Ibid., I, pp. 11–12.

37

Zeller, Theologie und Frömmigkeit, II, pp. 1–3.


17

Theosophy Certainly the Lutheran Reformation was accompanied by a great flood of magical, mystical and eschatological writing which was fully illustrated in Arndt. The Reformed world escaped much more lightly. And there was another twist to this tradition, which arose partly from a desire to recover some wholeness of vision behind the conflict, and this was theosophy. Apocalyptic and magic had in common the assumption of an underlying universal purpose. Zeller quotes a MS verse from the beginning of the seventeenth century which sounds this note: O du wahre 3-falt hilf aus allem 2-spalt zu der wahren 1-falt

O thou true Trinity help us out of our division into two to the true unity.38

As those who studied history and astrology sought to reveal the works and purposes of God, so also the pansophist sought to reveal and glorify the general wisdom of God. If he was a magician, demonic magic was not his metier. The great object, in the words of the title of Jakob Bohme, ¨ was to get to the bottom of the Mysterium Magnum, the secret of the creation of the universe, and complete the work of the God-fearing alchemists. When this was done, since this movement also was reforming and anti-Aristotelian, it would be possible for an Andreae39 in his Rosicrucian writings to thrash out plans for universal reform in politics and education. How important this was to be for the German frame of mind and for the pietist movement may be illustrated from the fact that in the eighteenth century Pietism was to produce a theosophist of the first importance in Oetinger,40 and that at the beginning of the nineteenth century Jung-Stilling could declare that ‘the national spirit was up to that time mystical-behmenist and occasionally Paracelsian’. Before then, however, pansophism had to create a vast pedigree of its own. There was something in common between the frame of mind and the choice of texts in the ‘mystical theology’ and theosophy. The latter, like the former, was a relatively recent intellectual fashion that claimed authority on the basis of the hidden wisdom of ancient texts. It was not only Colberg who saw it as a complex of modern heresies, the Encyclopédie did the same. The story began in 1462 when Cosimo de’ Medici provided Ficino with MSS containing all Plato’s surviving works and ordered him to translate 38 39

40

Ibid., I, p. 97. Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), the most important Wurttemberger ¨ theologian of the seventeenth century. In satirical and paedagogical writings he advocated reform in church and society based on the practice of piety. On whom see below in ch. 9.

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them into Latin. Ficino41 actually began with the Corpus Hermeticum, which was believed to be Plato’s main source.42 The Hermeticum was not the only treatise of importance to be restored to circulation at this time; there were also, for example, the Orphica, the Sibylline Prophecies, and the Pythagorean Carmina Aurea. All these pagan texts dated from the first four centuries of the Christian era and were held to contain vestiges of monotheism, the doctrine of the Trinity, creatio ex nihil and so forth. It was usual to suppose that this theology derived from Moses (which preserved a useful Egyptian connexion). But sometimes it was held to go back to Noah and his two good sons, Shem and Japhet, or to antediluvian patriarchs, such as Enoch or even Adam. This body of literature was regarded as the source of the religious truths to be found in Plato, and provided a field-day for anxious scholars seeking to bridge the gap between their faith and what they knew of the universe. What was problematic about the attempt was that, perceived or not, the Hermetic doctrines were very different from what had been understood as Christian orthodoxy. On the latter view the world was indeed created by God, and declared his handiwork, but was not God himself; worse than that, it was a fallen world, at best groaning after redemption. On the view attributed to Hermes Trismegistus – and here the vitalism that went into the mystical theology reappears – ‘the world is a living creature, endowed with a body which men can see and a mind which men cannot see’. Creation did not declare the glory of God, it was an emanation of God. The core of Hermeticism was that the world emanated from the divine intelligence, and was a whole in which each part was an essential component member; stated nakedly this was radically different from the hierarchical views of the universe which had hitherto prevailed. It was not easy to see through the haze, though what the Hermeticum offered was a magical religion dominated by the stars, offering its initiates the possibility of being transformed into powerful Magi. Indeed, by the time of Giordano Bruno the magic religion of the ancient Egyptians had swallowed up the younger Christian faith; Christ was only one of several 41 42

Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), Italian philosopher, doctor and humanist. The three great authorities for the following are the treatises by Will-Erich Peuckert, Pansophie. Geschichte der weissen und schwarzen Magie, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1956); Das Rosenkreuz, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1973); Gabalia. Ein Versuch zur Geschichte der Magia naturalis im 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1967). Useful and more accessible are: D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958); D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the 15th to the 18th Century (London, 1972); Antoine Faivre, Philosophie de la Nature. Physique sacrée et Théosophie, XVIIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1996); Ernest Lee Tuveson, The Avatars of Thrice Great Hermes (Lewisburg, 1987).


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preaching, wonder-working Magi in the Hermetic tradition and Bruno was another. In 1614 Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), the great Huguenot classical scholar, destroyed the ancient dating of the Hermetic MSS accepted by the adepts; and the direst enemies of theosophy were always Erasmian Catholics and Calvinist Protestants who were trying to get the magic out of Christianity. But their arguments counted for little with those who suspected that these procedures offered a better science than materialism, a liberating alternative later on to an Aristotelianised Protestant Orthodoxy, or even assistance to Jesuits facing unfamiliar missionary problems in the Far East. For had not St Paul at Athens quoted from the pagan Stoic poet Aratus, ‘For in him we live and move and have our being; as certain also of your poets have said, “For we are also his offspring”’ (Acts 17:28)? To use pagan literature for apologetic purposes seemed to have the highest authority. Indeed, Christian magic was really wisdom, and before the end of the sixteenth century it was known in Germany that the true wisdom of Moses was to be found in the Cabbala. The Cabbala The history of the Cabbala is one of the more extraordinary features of the whole extraordinary story. The Cabbala, literally the ‘tradition’, was the sum of Jewish mysticism, and as such eventually lost contact with both the Jewish and the Christian traditions.43 In the Middle Ages, however, a great body of mystical inquiry was built up by Jews seeking a deeper understanding of their own traditional forms. The chief literary work of this movement, the Zohar or ‘Book of Splendour’, was widely revered as a sacred text of unquestionable value. This status it managed to maintain among remote and isolated communities of Jews down to the present time, despite the recurrent opposition of Jewish Orthodoxy. But when in Western Europe in the late eighteenth century Jews began to assimilate to European culture, this part of their tradition, with its intricate symbolism, was lost. Meanwhile several attempts had been made to put it to Christian use. In the fifteenth century Jewish converts in Sicily produced a Latin version of the Cabbala, still preserved in the Vatican archives. This proved still-born 43

On the following see Gershom Scholem, Alchemie und Kabbala. Ein Kapitel aus der Geschichte der Mystik, n. pl. or d. [Berlin, 1927]; Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbala and its Symbolism, tr. Ralph Mannheim (London, 1965; orig. German edn Zurich, 1960); Ernst Benz, Die Christliche Kabbala. Ein Stiefkind der Theologie (Zurich, 1958); Otto Betz, ‘“Kabbala Baptizata”. Die judisch-christliche ¨ Kabbala und der Pietismus in Wurttemberg’, ¨ Pietismus und Neuzeit 24 (1998), 130–59.

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in terms of influence, but Faradsch, who made it, was the fountain-head of much more than he knew, because he was the tutor in Hebrew and Chaldean to the celebrated humanist Pico della Mirandola (1463–94). In 1486 Pico published 900 theses on a Christian syncretism of all religions and sciences; in these the Cabbala played a considerable part, and the assumption of the whole was that, contrary to the teaching of the orthodox on either side, the core of the Jewish religion showed an essential affinity with the Christian gospel. Pico made the fortunes of the Christian Cabbala. Paracelsus claimed to have learned alchemy from it; Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) in Germany was the founder of a special Swabian branch of the Christian Cabbala which can be followed through the famous doctrinal tablet (Lehrtafel) of the Princess Antonia 44 of Wurttemberg ¨ to Oetinger in the eighteenth century. The attraction to men like Reuchlin was that the doctrine of the Trinity seemed to harmonise with the cabbalistic doctrine of the Sephirot or emanations from the Godhead; and the emanations were familiar from the Hermetic doctrines. The Cabbala, indeed, made a decisive contribution to the development of pietism in Wurttemberg, ¨ one of the areas where it struck deepest root. At the heart of it all there was a strange paradox. A large part of the huge cabbalistic literature consisted in mystical commentaries on books of the Bible, especially the Pentateuch, the Five Scrolls, the Psalms, the book of Ruth and Ecclesiastes. In the effort to penetrate the divine emanations in which God’s creative power unfolds, and to develop a symbolism for processes not accessible to the direct perception of the human mind, the cabbalists made the Torah a symbol of cosmic law and made the history of the Jewish people a symbol of the cosmic process. This symbolism was lost to the Jews during their long period of coming to terms with the culture of the West, and was only recovered when that period ended in fresh persecution.45 The Christian cabbalism, by contrast, was part of a process of coming to terms with a strange culture derived from Neoplatonism and the Hermetic traditions. The result of so much labour has been to earn the derision of modern Jewish scholarship. As Scholem puts it, cabbalism became a sort of flag under which, since there was no fear of control by real Cabbala scholars, almost everything could be offered to the public, from weak judaising meditations of deep Christian mystics up to the latest annual market-products of geomancy and soothsaying with cards. 44 45

On the Princess Antonia and her tablet see further below, ch. 2, pp. 37–8. Scholem, Alchemie und Kabbala, pp. 1–2; On the Kabbala, pp. 1–9.


21

Even the natural sciences of the day, so far as they were in any sense occult, like astrology, alchemy and nature-magic, became ‘Cabbala’. Paracelsus was believed when he claimed to have learned alchemy from cabbalistic sources, though in Jewish cabbalistic circles alchemy was never practised, and in Hebrew cabbalistic books and MSS there are no instructions for it. Nevertheless the advocates of the Christian Cabbala believed that they had found in it an esoteric philosophy and a basis for Christian dogmatics. Their cause was given a fresh impetus in the seventeenth century by the Rosicrucian movement, they themselves became very numerous throughout Protestant Europe, and one of their slogans, the New Birth, that perfection of the soul which might permit the discovery of the philosopher’s gold, became the most pervasive cliché of the evangelical movement. Jakob Bohme ¨ One of the characteristics of all the protests against systematic orthodoxy was eclecticism, and in Jakob Bohme ¨ (1575–1624) both the protest and the eclecticism were embodied in such power as to echo violently down to the nineteenth century. He entered into the Cabbala, though his sources are not known; he rejected alchemy. What Bo¨ hme stood for, like Zinzendorf a century later, was the independence of Upper Lusatia. This independence was threatened by the leading orthodoxies of the day: the Counter-Reformation as understood by the Habsburgs, Reformed Orthodoxy as represented by the Elector Palatine and the Reformed nobility of Bohemia, and the Lutheran Orthodoxy embodied in the church of Electoral Saxony. Eventually the independence of Upper Lusatia fell in 1621 to Saxony, and Bohme ¨ died shortly afterwards. The political downfall of Upper Lusatia reproduced itself in Bo¨ hme in a violent religious upheaval of a mystical kind, his account of which led to his being silenced for a number of years by the Go¨ rlitz clergy. But the Oberpfarrer of Gorlitz ¨ (in the Lusatian manner) was a very offbeat kind of Melanchthonian Orthodox, and there seems no support for the story that at the end of his life Bohme ¨ was tried at Dresden against the Lutheran confessional documents.46 The Bohme ¨ who was so cordially loathed by the later Lutheran Orthodox, and who in fact became a rallying point for all kinds of separatist tendencies, died a Lutheran. There was indeed something very Luther-like about him. It is impossible to describe Bohme ¨ as anything but a mystic, but his mysticism was not 46

H. Obst, ‘Zum “Verhor” ¨ Jakob Bohmes ¨ in Dresden’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 1 (1974), 25–31; Wallmann, Theologie und Frömmigkeit, pp. 51–2.

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a ladder to a unitive experience. The world as he observed it was administered through two competing principles, God’s love and his wrath, both forms of God’s action. The life of nature was also the outcome of this conflict. The opposed forces unfold in seven ‘nature-spirits’ taken from the cabbalistic tradition. In God these form a play of harmonious forces, but now, through Lucifer’s fall, they have entered into the inner strife of the world and meet it in enmity. A first Trinity forms: the bitterness (also equated with one of the three Paracelsian original materials, salt), the sharp and prickly mobility (i.e., quicksilver), and the torment or Angst in which the first two forces destroy one another in restless movement (i.e., the inflammatory sulphur). To them is opposed a second Trinity: the light and fiery desire of love, the clear sound in which the cosmic love rings out, and the putting together of all seven in the eternal kingdom of heaven, the paradisal archetype of nature. When these two trinities clash a fire like lightning is kindled, the middlemost spirit of Nature which stands between the trinities. Of course these Behmenist nature-spirits will never surrender their secret to analytical observation; but Bohme’s ¨ tortured style is very apt to generate a feeling for the cosmic struggle of love and wrath.47 This dualism, this sense of conflict and movement, was in a measure smoothed out by the English Behmenists at the end of the seventeenth century, but was of course what attracted Hegel and the pioneers of dialectical philosophy in the nineteenth. What is very remarkable about the influence of Bohme ¨ is that though his work had mostly to be published after his death, and for reasons of censorship had to be published in the Netherlands and brought in surreptitiously, he was speedily translated into other languages and became the most important German literary figure before Leibniz. It has been argued that Catholics and Protestants divided the heritage of the Renaissance between them.48 Each, looking for a knock-down argument in support of their general claim to authority, had appropriated its inheritance, the Catholics taking miracles, the Protestants the notion of predictability and vindication by the future. Neither of these very readily broken reeds 47

48

On the above see Heinrich Bornkamm, ‘Jakob Bohme, ¨ Leben und Wirkung’, in his Das Jahrhundert der Reformation. Gestalten und Kräfte (Gottingen, ¨ 1961), pp. 291–307. The literature on Bohme ¨ is endless and bemusing. The following are useful: W.-E. Peuckert, Das Leben J. Böhmes (Jena, 1924); A. Koyré, La Philosophie de J. Böhme (Paris, 1929); J. J. Stoudt, Sunrise to Eternity. A Study in J. Boehme’s Life and Thought (Philadelphia, 1957); Erich Seeberg, ‘Zur Frage der Mystik’, in Menschwerdung und Geschichte, pp. 98–137. See also Eberhard H. Pältz, ‘Jakob Boehmes Gedanken uber ¨ die Erneuerung des wahren Christenthums’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 4 (1977–8), 83–118. R. J. W. Evans. The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 394–5.


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would bear the weight put upon it. But in spite of the reluctance of the Protestant pundits to acknowledge chiliastic movements, Luther’s own belief that Christ could not long delay rescuing his flock from the Papal Antichrist and the Turks spread widely, especially among the persecuted. Of this view, from which in the end even the Lutheran Orthodox were unable to escape, Bohme ¨ also was a spokesman. There was no necessary connexion between Renaissance science and mysticism, though the veneration of both for ancient texts brought them together. But, as Bohme ¨ showed very clearly, apocalypticism clamped them both together by creating the ultimate need for a unitary view of God, man, the universe and history. Johannes Kelpius’s venture into the wilderness of Pennsylvania in readiness for the millennium forecast for 1694, a venture equipped with a telescope to put on the roof to observe the signs of the times,49 is eloquent of a frame of mind shared by Bohme ¨ himself. Meanwhile, although Bohme ¨ had died in the church, and had believed that it was possible to build the temple of God within what he denounced so vehemently as the Mauerkirche – the church of bricks and mortar – his denunciations had provided a shelter for all those who, for whatever reason, persecution or disillusionment – spiritualists, separatists, antiwar prophets – found themselves outside of the church. By this time they had acquired another powerful spokesman in Gottfried Arnold,50 and were known as radical Pietists. All were attempting to draw upon various aspects of the movement for piety, as indeed was another movement intruding upon Germany: the Quakers, who came in quest of souls and of settlers for real-estate improvement in their new colony of Pennsylvania. This meant that Spener, an establishment man if ever there was one, who stands at the head of the evangelical movement in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, had, once the great clash with Orthodoxy began, to campaign on two fronts. He too was indebted to the movement for piety, and did not want to lose touch with whatever sources of spiritual vitality might be disclosed by the radical pietists; but apart from the fact that his faith in the church never failed, he had to be clear that his origin was in Lutheran Orthodoxy. And the Orthodox continued to thunder that the whole trouble with modern enthusiasm arose from an improper mixing of philosophy and theology. Platonists tried to be clever beyond what Scripture revealed; Aristotelians tried to be clever against Scripture and flirted with becoming Hobbesians.51 How would Spener relate to these various options? 49 50 51

Elizabeth W. Fisher, ‘“Prophecies and Revelations”: German cabbalists in early Pennsylvania’, Pennsylvania Magazine for History and Biography 109 (1985), 299–333. On Arnold see below, ch. 3. Colberg, Das Platonisch-hermetisches Christenthum, Preface.

2

Spener and the origins of church pietism

Arndt offered his own version of what the English Puritan Lewis Bayley called the ‘practice of piety’ as a solution to the ills of the church; but many who subsequently called on his name were sure that there was no solution to the ills of the Babel that masqueraded as an ecclesiastical establishment. There were Behmenists of various degrees of radicalism, anti-war prophets, and spiritualists like Christian Hoburg who sought in mysticism an alternative to the ‘school-way’ of confessional Word- and Wind-theology with its Aristotelian methods and its passion for polemic.1 Mingled with these rather vociferous advocates of peace were assorted mystics, Paracelsists, alchemists, cabbalists, and enthusiastic prophets of judgement drawing in various proportions from the wells described in the last chapter. Their history was recorded by Gottfried Arnold in his Kirchen und Ketzerhistorie but has never as a whole been scientifically written. They were nevertheless continually in the background to the work of Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), himself the offspring of the impeccably Orthodox university of Strasbourg. He it was who distilled the piety of Arndt and the theology of Orthodoxy into a policy of church reform. And he was never able to lose touch with such sources of spiritual vitality as the radical underworld possessed or to escape the reproaches of the unyielding Orthodox that what he proposed must lead to schism. It is indeed now clear that the driving force behind the formation of the collegium pietatis was Johann Jakob Schutz, ¨ converted from atheism through the reading of Tauler, and hand-in-glove with the hotbed of Christian cabbalism at the court of Sulzbach. He never shared the establishmentarian ideals of Spener and finally led a separation from him.2

1 2

M. Brecht (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus (Gottingen, ¨ 1993), I, p. 226. This process is magnificently described in Andreas Deppermann, Johann Jakob Schütz und die Anfänge des Pietismus (Tubingen, ¨ 2002); cf. E. W. Fisher, ‘“Prophecies and Revelations”. German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania’, Pennsylvania Magazine for History and Biography 109 (1985), 306–7.

24


25

The rise of Spener Spener’s active life fell into three periods. In 1666 when he was apparently preparing himself for an academic career he received an unexpected call as Senior of Frankfurt. This was one of the most important Imperial cities, with a complicated confessional makeup. Its Lutheran town council strenuously kept a Reformed minority outside the walls, but was required under Imperial law to leave the cathedral in the hands of the Roman Catholics, this being where the Emperor himself was crowned. Frankfurt was also home to the largest Jewish ghetto in Germany. There was in short no German town less likely to solve its religious problems by the standard prescription enforced by the peace settlements of Westphalia, viz. by a monopolistic religious establishment chosen by public authority from among the three permitted religions, Catholic, Evangelical (or Lutheran) and Reformed. It was here that Spener became famous for a plan of reform or renewal which did not require waiting for the action of public authorities. In 1686 he received his reward in a call to be Senior Court Chaplain to the Elector of Saxony. This was in effect an invitation to be the informal Primate of Lutheran Germany, for the Elector was perpetual head of the Corpus Evangelicorum, the Protestant caucus in the Imperial Diet, while the Saxon church regarded itself as the especial guardian of Luther’s personal heritage. Here things began to go badly wrong. Spener did not get on well with the Elector; the Orthodox attack upon his policies and friends gathered force. In 1695 the Wittenberg faculty accused him of 284 errors, 263 of which were offences against the Confession of Augsburg. By this time, however, Spener had concluded that he had no standing ground in Saxony, and had accepted an invitation in 1691 from the Elector of Brandenburg to be Provost of the Nikolaikirche in Berlin. This was not only an apparent demotion; it was for an Orthodox theologian an ambiguous vocation to the service of a dynasty which, as the Reformed rulers of an overwhelmingly Lutheran people, were full of devices for getting round the legal division of the Protestant flock in Germany. Under the tolerant Hohenzollern aegis, nevertheless, Spener reached the peak of his achievement. He completed his enormous literary output;3 defended what became the Pietist party against ferocious attacks and much legal discrimination; watched over the creation of permanent bases for it in the university and charitable institutions of Halle; and planted out its 3

The bibliography ascribed to Spener by his biographer, Paul Grunberg, ¨ Philipp Jakob Spener (Gottingen, ¨ 1893–1906), III, pp. 205–388 runs to 323 items and is not complete.

26


alumni in the churches of Brandenburg and Prussia, the army and the civil service, and in court chaplaincies all over Germany.4 What was it about the Orthodox son of an Orthodox university that the Orthodox party became so ruthlessly determined to root out? Spener’s master’s thesis was in the field of ethics and included one of the first German attempts at a controversy with Thomas Hobbes,5 an achievement which could certainly do him no harm with the Orthodox; his doctoral thesis was written in the theological faculty under the ferociously Orthodox Dannhauer. In view of what came later it is interesting that this was on eschatology, more precisely on Revelation 9:13–21, the passage in which the sixth angel blew the trumpet to release four avenging angels with an army from the east who killed a third of the human race. The traditional Orthodox construction of this passage had been to relate it to the Turkish menace, and this Spener adopted. In the course of his work he became acquainted with Reformed chiliasm – in fact he produced a table of no fewer than 38 expositions of the Apocalypse6 – but adopted no personal or unorthodox position. Just before his death Spener confessed that he had never deviated from the doctrinal position he had held under Johann Konrad Dannhauer (1631–75), a professor of theology at Strasbourg and one of Spener’s teachers, except in one point, that of eschatology. Clearly that deviation had not yet begun. Spener’s Frankfurt years Even in Frankfurt, where Spener produced his most famous programmatic writing, trouble was relatively slow to brew. What made the difference was a year’s study of Luther from his own writings with a view to producing a Life, further studies on the Apocalypse, and above all the practical experience of pastoral difficulties in the wake of the Thirty Years War. The Luther biography was never produced, but on the way to it Spener acquired a knowledge of the Luther corpus which was unusual in his day. Pastoral experience led him to doubt both the current policy of the Orthodox party and the view of history that underlay its eschatology. Orthodox policy was perfectly well known to Spener from his time in Strasbourg, for the Strasbourg theologians had been called out by Duke Ernst the Pious of Saxe-Gotha to carry through a reform in his territory. Here reformation, initiated and carried through by princely authority, 4 5 6

For the biography of Spener, Grunberg ¨ is still useful; there is also an up-to-date short life by Martin Brecht in his Geschichte des Pietismus, I, pp. 281–389. Johannes Wallmann, ‘Philipp Jakob Spener’, in M. Greschat (ed.), Gestalten der Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart, 1982), VII, p. 206. Brecht, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, p. 284.


27

had sought to tighten up religious observance and discipline, and to reinforce the operation of church, state and law by education. Reformation concerned the whole social body. This was the style in which Spener began. Along with the rest of the Frankfurt ministry he called on the magistrates to enforce Sunday rest more rigorously, and to proceed more strictly against the Jews. The whole operation could be gingered up by preaching, and Spener turned to the text which down the generations has been a standing temptation to zealots desirous of annoying their congregations, Matthew 5:20 – ‘For I say unto you, That unless your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ (Predictably Wesley was also unable to resist it).7 The attempt to stir the lethargy (or overcome the prudence) of the magistrates, and to prick the self-assurance of church-going by habit, proved equally ineffective. The magistrates, doubtless aware that attempts to enforce uniformity of observance in a city as religiously divided as Frankfurt were doomed to failure, did very little; the congregation, conscious that it was conforming according to its lights, divided. A minority were open to Spener’s exhortation, the majority felt they were being robbed of evangelical comfort by a sort of Popery. Certainly Spener had strengthened rather than overcome the leaven of the Pharisees. This double set-back left Spener with little option but to see what could be done with the dévots of his congregation. The change from bullying backsliders to encouraging the spiritual elite marked an important shift from the pastoral strategy of the Orthodox, and it was slow to come. The Lutheran churches lacked the experience which the Reformed had built up in using small groups within the parish; in fact devotional exercises outside the church and not under clerical leadership were forbidden. So Spener’s original proposal, made from the pulpit in the autumn of 1669, bore little resemblance to what the class meetings or collegia pietatis were to become. It was implied that after the Sunday service friends might (convivially) sanctify the Lord’s Day by giving up card-playing and wine-drinking, in favour of reading devotional literature or discussing the sermon they had heard. This was not very different from the student groups that Spener had known in his days at Strasbourg, nor from the hymn-singing fellowships that were common elsewhere. These housegroups came into existence, and by the following summer began to ask for something much more radical than Spener had proposed. 7

Works of John Wesley. Bicentennial edn. I Sermons, ed. A. C. Outler (Nashville, 1984), p. 550.

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The proposal now,8 from people who professed weariness with the ‘clubbiness’ that was coming in with the decay of corporately organised society, was to form a society for devotional discussion, more intense fellowship and works of charity. The people behind this request were patricians and academics, and it was not lost on Spener that the degree of separation from the world now proposed contained the political and ecclesiastical risks of separation from the church. These risks, to much Orthodox hand-rubbing, were ultimately realised, and raise the question whether from the beginning there was not in Spener’s milieu an element of mystic spiritualism. For the moment he secured an acceptable compromise and the support of his clerical colleagues by the stipulation that he should always take part, that meetings should be held in his study, and that the aspiration to intense fellowship should be surrendered to the cause of open membership. From August 1670 the meetings took place twice a week, Spener introducing the discussion with a prayer and a devotional or theological reading. The principal figure throughout was the lawyer Johann Jakob Schutz ¨ (1640–1709). What perhaps nobody expected was that these meetings attracted people of quite humble status, some dozens of them, including eventually women, who were allowed to sit in an adjacent room and listen but not speak. The difference in scale was itself sufficient to change the character of the meeting, and after four years a change of substantial principle was made, the business being now confined to the reading and exposition of Scripture, a function restricted in the Lutheran order to the ministry. A year later the more radical step was ventured of claiming that the collegium pietatis was a revival of the early Christian custom of congregational meetings described in 1 Corinthians 14.9 This call for meetings in which anyone could speak, whether in tongues or in prophecy, was quite alien to the Lutheran tradition, though it had taken various forms among the Reformed. What was ominous at the moment was that its most recent advocate was Jean de Labadie, in his L’exercice prophétique (1669). In his student years Spener had encountered Labadie (1610–74)10 in Geneva, and he translated Labadie’s La Pratique de l’Oraison et Méditation 8 9 10

The story which follows has been traced in detail in Deppermann, Johann Jakob Schütz. This is the passage in which Paul stresses the limitations of speaking in tongues, and commends the superior usefulness of prophecy. On Labadie see T. J. Saxby, The Quest for the New Jerusalem. Jean de Labadie and the Labadists, 1610–1744 (Dordrecht, 1987). Perhaps a bastard of Henry IV of France, Labadie was raised by a Calvinist family on the make, and groomed for stardom by the Jesuits; he broke with the Jesuits to join the Reformed church, was hunted from both France and Orange by Louis XIV, and, after an uneasy pastorate in Geneva, answered a call to Middelburg, where he never got going. Soon afterwards he left the Reformed church with a select body of disciples, the most famous of whom was Anna van Schurman. Expelled from the Netherlands, they were disappointed in their belief


29

Chrétienne into German in 1667. He also published some of Labadie’s poems. But though Labadie enjoyed great prestige for sanctity and mystical insight, he was clearly an ecclesiastical misfit, and precisely the sort of man the Lutheran Orthodox loved to hate. The rediscovery in recent years of correspondence between Anna van Schurman, the Labadist, and Johann Jakob Schutz, ¨ the king-pin of the Frankfurt group, has shown that contact between leading members of each group was close and not merely literary. Eleonore von Merlau (1644–1724)11 was another of the Frankfurt group in correspondence with the schismatic Labadists, and among the presents from the latter was L’exercice prophétique. Moreover, Labadie’s problem was very like that of Spener. Labadie had failed in an attempt at general church reform in the Netherlands, and had responded by secession and the attempt to gather the ‘true church’ and to live by community of goods. The press was agog, and Spener, the most loyal of friends to the established church, had from the beginning of the collegium pietatis to be on his guard against charges that he was going the same way as Labadie. He made it clear that his ecclesiola, unlike Labadie’s ‘true church’, was an ecclesiola in ecclesia; unfortunately some of the Frankfurt flock, led by Schutz, ¨ insisted on behaving exactly as the Orthodox said they would. Radical circles began to form not only among the Frankfurt Pietists but elsewhere; anti-pietist legislation began in Hesse-Darmstadt; Spener’s own brother-in-law, Johann Heinrich Horb, was expelled by the Strasbourg Orthodox. Spener himself was attacked by the deacon Dilfeld from Nordhausen, but managed to find support from Luther and almost every significant evangelical theologian since for his view that the understanding of Holy Scripture required a special illumination by the Holy Spirit, and emerged triumphant. But Christian Fende and Schutz ¨ had been talking of the Lutheran church as Babel, accusing it of false doctrine, and urging separation. In 1682 Spener expelled them and drew the line between church pietism and pietism of the radical-separatist brand. Nor was Orthodox criticism all he had to bear. Quaker missions had been coming into Germany, and everywhere they made for little groups of religious virtuosi. Penn himself arrived in 1678 and held devotions with Spener’s group of Pietists. The threat here was not just that of an alternative religious appeal. Penn was seeking to extract value from his new real estate, the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, by recruiting colonists,

11

that they were inaugurating the millennial kingdom, and, after founding a number of settlements, soon died out. On whom see Markus Mathias, Johann Wilhelm und Johanna Eleonora Petersen (Gottingen, ¨ 1993); Ruth Albrecht, Johanna Eleonora Petersen. Theologische Schriftstellerin des frühen Pietismus (Gottingen, ¨ 2005).

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and his chief recruiting agent, Franz Daniel Pretorius, was a member of Spener’s collegium pietatis. In 1683 he emigrated to found the famous German settlement at Germantown near Philadelphia. Others had preceded him, though Schutz ¨ stayed at home and in 1690 was refused burial by the Frankfurt ministers. Christian Fende died only at the age of ninety-five in 1746, having become an eloquent defender of the rights of meetings like the Frankfurt collegium and of chiliasm. In fact he was the means by which the millennium calculations of Bengel reached a broad public. Having acquired the chiliastic hopes of Schutz, ¨ Eleonore von Merlau left Frankfurt, married Johann Wilhelm Petersen (Spener officiating),12 and joined him in the energetic propagation of chiliastic doctrines. Spener in Dresden These calamities put paid to Spener’s original hopes for his class meeting. In 1682 he moved the meeting out of his house into the Barfusserkirche, ¨ and from that time on few spoke apart from himself and theology students. In the later phases of his life in Dresden and Berlin he bothered no more with class meetings. He never gave up the theory of class meetings as he expounded it in the Pia Desideria, and supported meetings that continued elsewhere; but the wounds inflicted by the separations in Frankfurt never healed. Worse was to come. During Spener’s Dresden years the Orthodox launched two violent assaults on the Pietists in Leipzig and Hamburg which concerned Spener only indirectly; but they involved him in continuous defensive writing, and transformed Pietism from an aspect of the Arndtian movement for piety into an organised party established in Orthodox territory. Spener’s rival for the Dresden appointment had been a Leipzig theologian of formidable polemical violence, Johann Benedict Carpzov. The latter had actually encouraged two students, August Hermann Francke and Paul Anton, when they created a Collegium Philobiblicum in the university to practise exegesis. But, when the movement spread into the town and in the university began to turn students against philosophy (i.e., Aristotle), Carpzov turned angrily against them and got up a campaign throughout Germany against them as enemies of the truth who substituted piety for faith. Certainly the class meetings that Spener had devised as a means of church reform had in Leipzig got into the hands of determined young men bent on using them as a means to Christian perfection.13 In Hamburg Spener’s brother-in-law, Horb, was again in 12 13

On Petersen (1649–1727) see Mathias, Petersen. Ryoko Mori, Begeisterung und Ernüchterung in christlicher Vollkommenheit (Tubingen, ¨ 2004), pp. 22–4.


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trouble as the ministry attempted to impose a new religious oath, a move, according to Spener, to sacrifice the freedom of believers to a revived papal tyranny. The Pia Desideria Fortunately Spener’s great policy document, the Pia Desideria or Heartfelt Longings, was written well before these disappointments, and equally fortunately he never turned his back upon it. In 1675 a Frankfurt publisher persuaded Spener to produce a new edition of Arndt’s gospel lectionary sermons. The following year he brought out the book with a programmatic preface of proposals for the ‘improvement of the true evangelical church’. Spener took care to get the work approved by the Frankfurt ministers in advance and sent offprints to numerous important theologians for discussion.14 He received nearly a hundred replies, most of them favourable.15 A Latin edition and a separate publication as a pamphlet under the famous title, Pia Desideria, served the same purpose. No order of society escaped Spener’s lash. Princes were not the nursing mothers of the church, they were Caesaropapists who used the church for their own purposes. The clergy lacked a living faith, the root of their disorder being their training in scholastic rather than biblical theology. Indeed the key to the whole matter was to spread the word of God more richly among men. Various devices were suggested by which lay people were to be encouraged to study the Bible, including sessions where the Bible was read to those who were not able to read it for themselves. But the great thing was to dissuade lay people from the delusion that simple attendance on the preaching and sacraments of the church was what was required of them. They needed to take a degree of responsibility for each other, to encourage, warn and convert each other. The ideal forum for this was the collegium pietatis. Interior religion, the great prescription of Arndt, would take root and turn the church into a society of living stones. And here at least Spener diverged radically from the kind of prescriptions familiar among the reforming Orthodox. The energetic exercise of the spiritual priesthood of believers would transform the whole situation; to this idea, sketched out by Luther and neglected ever since, Spener devoted a treatise in 1677. 14

15

On this whole subject see Hyeong-Eun Chi, Philipp Jakob Spener und seine Pia Desideria (Frankfurt, 1997) and the comprehensive bibliography it contains; also Martin Brecht, ‘Philipp Jakob Spener und das Wahre Christentum’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 4 (1977/8), 119–54, repr. in his Ausgewählte Aufsätze, II, pp. 177–214. J. Wallmann, ‘Pietismus und Spiritualismus: Ludwig Brunnquells radikalpietistische Kritik an Speners Pia Desideria’, in FS Reinhard Schwarz, Von Wittenberg nach Memphis, ed. W. Homolka and O. Ziegelmeier (Gottingen, ¨ 1989), p. 230.

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But was the church capable of improvement? Were the Last Days (as the Orthodox had come round to thinking)16 so imminent that there was no time left for long-term reform? And if the clergy were to be disabled from threatening the flock that if they did not repent today tomorrow might be too late, what leverage upon conscience would they have left? At the stage of his doctoral work, as we have seen, Spener was still in this matter in the Orthodox mould, but just before the publication of the Pia Desideria he made a move. He became convinced that what the Bible envisaged was that the end would not come until all God’s promises to the church were fulfilled, and that one of the signs of this latter-day prosperity would be the conversion of the Jews. Like most Lutherans Spener thought this was promised in Romans 11. (Some of the Orthodox considered that this was already past, others that it was still to come.) He further thought that the reason why the conversion of the Jews still tarried was that the decayed condition of the church offered them very little inducement to come over. If therefore the prescriptions for the renewal of the church that he was putting forward in the Pia Desideria could be made to work, the great obstacle to the conversion of the Jews would be removed and the glories of the end-time would be within reach. Spener did not think that this period was very far away,17 and lifelong he followed politics so as not to miss the hand of God;18 but he began the process of putting off the Last Days into the middle distance which became characteristic of evangelical Christianity on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the eighteenth century. And in so doing he had provided himself with a lever upon conscience to replace that of the Orthodox. For in one sense not merely the renewal of the church, but the completion of the historical process, was now in the grasp of the faithful. It was worth while to labour for the renewal of the church because the ‘hope of better times’ was promised and real improvement, perhaps much more, was the reward. One of the ways in which Spener sought lifelong to labour was in catechising. He claimed to have learned from experience that the inner man was more often reached by catechising than by the most challenging

16

17 18

On this process see J. Wallmann, ‘Zwischen Reformation und Pietismus. Reich Gottes und Chiliasmus in der lutherischen Orthodoxie’, in E. Jungel, ¨ J. Wallmann and W. Werbeck (eds.), Verificationen. FS für Gerhard Ebeling zum 70. Geburtstag (Tubingen, ¨ 1982), repr. in Wallmann, Theologie und Frömmigkeit im Zeitalter des Barock (Tubingen, ¨ 1995), pp. 104–23. Cf. Martin Brecht, ‘Chiliasmus in Wurttemberg ¨ im 17. Jahrhundert’, in his Ausgewählte Aufsätze, II, pp. 131–3. He thought highly of the English apocalyptic interpreter Joseph Mede (1586–1638). Spener, Briefe, III, p. 324; II, p. 162. Hartmut Lehmann, ‘Pietismus im alten Reich’, Historische Zeitschrift 214 (1972), 73.


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sermons,19 and he knew that much good preaching was robbed of its effect by ignorance in the pew. He did not share the popular equation between ignorance and simple faith. He sought to steer his instruction between the New Testament on the one hand, and the inner response of the catechumen on the other, avoiding the mechanical repetition of answers. He was not free from a certain schoolmasterly pursuit of nostrums which tended to frustrate his objects; the alchemist and theosophist Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (1618–99) attended one of Spener’s catechetical examinations in Frankfurt in 1677, and summed up his impressions in the question, ‘but how do we bring the head into the heart?’20 That at least was the object of a lifetime of writing, preaching and practice devoted by Spener to the field of catechesis. Modern critics have also found him insufficiently attentive to the need to link catechism with confirmation. Spener’s theology In his general theology Spener remained loyally Orthodox, but in his pursuit of inwardness there were occasional changes in emphasis. The Orthodox relied heavily on the law of God to induce conviction of sin and repentance. Spener could not possibly turn against this view, but preferred to reach the heart of men from the standpoint of the gospel; mercy was a more appealing concept than judgement. Here he had taken a step which the theology of the Enlightenment was to take further. He likewise sought to unite the notion of justification by faith with the practice of an active Christianity. The living faith needed for this purpose was not the dead consent to theological propositions, it was the personal trust which led indeed to knowledge through divine illumination. Living faith was inseparable from real appreciation of the work of Christ. Thus faith was related in one mode to justification and in a second mode to sanctification. He managed not merely to unite faith and activity, but to reintroduce the notion of Christian perfection into theology; the evidence of the needful living faith is the praxis pietatis in the active sense.21 Writing and speaking in this vein, Spener could not delimit himself from the mystics with absolute clarity, a clarity further muddied by a strong infusion of native caution.22 In addition, like Wesley later, he retained a lively interest in whatever looked like sources of religious vitality, and was loath to write them off. His judgements turned on the fact 19 21 22

20 Grunberg, Spener, Briefe, III, p. 608. ¨ Spener, II, p. 65. Emanuel Hirsch, Geschichte der neueren evangelischen Theologie, 5th edn (Gutersloh, ¨ 1975), II, pp. 142–50. Christoph Kolb, ‘Die Anfänge des Pietismus und Separatismus in Wurttemberg’, ¨ Württembergische Vierteljahresheft für Landesgeschichte 9 (1900), 63.

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that, despite his criticisms of the status quo, Spener was not only an ingrained Lutheran but also a stout establishment man as well. Thus he would have no truck with avowed separatists such as Quakers,23 let alone the native radical spiritualists for whom the establishment was Babel or worse. Although much is obscured in this area by the censorship, it appears that Spener had no contact with men of this kind before the appearance of the Pia Desideria in 1675. Even then it is hard to find evidence of replies from this quarter to his proposals. But in Spener’s Theologische Bedencken24 there is an elaborate answer to something of this sort from Ludwig Brunnquell, who was in trouble with the church in Wurttemberg ¨ for chiliasm and for propagating the views of Jakob 25 Bohme. ¨ Of Bohme ¨ Spener has not much to say: he read little and understood very little of what he did read, so why read more?26 Bohme’s ¨ erroneous method of writing about the Holy Spirit in Scripture was bound to make him suspect.27 He came round to advising inquirers not to read him.28 For Spener the norm of truth was not Bohme ¨ but Scripture, and, in a recourse to the historical elements in Christianity, of which much more was to be heard in the evangelical tradition, he would stick to preaching the crucified and risen Christ and his grace in which men were born again.29 Nor had Spener much use for the immediate revelations that became only too common in the later seventeenth century. He did not wish to limit what God might possibly do, but did not think that current revelations could be a principle of faith or necessary to salvation.30 He was cautious, even sceptical, about visions, and held no fellowship with visionaries.31 Even a century later Jung-Stilling still looked for guidance to the section in the first volume of the Last Theological Reflections in which Spener offered his thoughts on visions. The crucial passage raises caution to an art-form. The great thing is ‘not to be too hasty in forming a judgement’ so that the subject may not resist God’s message, if that is indeed what the vision is; if on the other hand the vision is ‘the work of Satan desirous of playing his tricks under such a disguise, he must not give way to his will

23 24 25 26

27 29 30

Spener, Briefe, III, pp. 256–7. Theologische Bedencken (Halle, 1700–2), III, pp. 176–90; Spener, Briefe, III, pp. 1086–96. Wallmann, ‘Pietismus und Spiritualismus’, pp. 229–43. See n. 10 above. Spener, Briefe, III, p. 287. On the whole subject see Helmut Obst, ‘Jakob Bohme ¨ im Urteil Philipp Jakob Speners’, Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 23 (1971), 22–39. 28 Ibid., III, p. 902. Spener, Briefe, III, p. 461. Ibid., III, pp. 785–6. Cf. II, pp. 402–3. 31 Ibid., III, pp. 903, 834. Ibid., II, p. 462.


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in the least, but cleave firmly to the Word of God alone’.32 Here Spener was so safe as to be unhelpful to visionaries. With mystics he had more sympathy. The mystical theology had come to much less harm in the Middle Ages than had scholasticism, and the authority of Luther could be used in favour of pre-Reformation mystics like Tauler.33 But in the end these texts were of limited use in theological education.34 Spener and the mystics Spener lived long enough to be required to give opinions on at least one of the Quietists who exercised so strong an attraction upon the early Protestant evangelicals. As we shall see later, their fortunes among Protestants (and those of many Counter-Reformation mystics) were made by Pierre Poiret. He began as a Reformed minister in the Rhineland, and became a disciple of Antoinette Bourignon (1616–69), a mystic from the Spanish Netherlands, published her works and then turned to collecting and publishing those of other mystics dead and alive.35 It did not help Bourignon’s cause with Spener that he did not care much for Poiret; that universal salesman of modern mysticism recommended the Huguenots to sacrifice Protestant shibboleths in favour of the best compromise they could make with the rampant government of Louis XIV.36 But the general curve of his 37 development bore a good deal of resemblance to his views on Bohme; ¨ he began with caution and the expression of doubts about his ability to judge, and became steadily more hostile. What especially irked Spener about Bourignon was her claim to be a prophet and the way she undermined the whole Lutheran doctrinal structure by insisting that only those who had attained Christian perfection could be sure of salvation. Spener thought that the tenor of Scripture prophecy was that any new prophets were likely to be false ones, and was too firmly wedded to the doctrine of 32 33 35

36

37

J. H. Jung-Stilling, Theory of Pneumatology, Eng. tr. (London, 1834), p. 250. 34 Ibid., II, p. 118. Spener, Briefe, II, pp. 205–6, 103; I, pp. 549–50. On him see W. R. Ward, ‘Mysticism and Revival. The Case of Gerhard Tersteegen’, in FS John Walsh, Revival and Religion since 1700, ed. Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew (London, 1993), pp. 45–6; F. J. R. Knetsch, ‘Pierre Poiret und sein Streit mit Pierre Jurieu uber ¨ das Verhalten der Opfer der Zwangsbekehrungen nach der Aufhebung des Edikts von Nantes’, in J. van den Berg and J. P. van Dooren (eds.), Pietismus und Reveil (Leiden, 1978), pp. 182–91. Cf. P. J. Spener, Letzte Theologische Bedencken (Halle, 1711), I, pp. 93–100. Whom Spener likened to Nebukadnezar, irresistible because appointed by God to carry out his judgements (Nahum 3:11). Spener, Briefe, III, p. 541. On Spener’s objections to Poiret see also Grunberg, ¨ Spener, I, p. 509. The subject is usefully treated by Klaus vom Orde, ‘Antoinette Bourignon in der Beurteilung Philipp Jakob Speners und ihre Rezeption in der pietistischen Tradition’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 26 (2000), 50–80. Spener gave Bourignon full-dress treatment in Letzte Theologische Bedencken, I, pp. 25–74.

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justification in which the sinner could be justus ac peccator to be tempted by perfectionism.38 Spener had a kind of esoteric theology of his own. Grunberg ¨ believed that some of the mistrust that he encountered was again due to his caution in, for example, excluding certain things from his catechism on the ground that they were not suitable for catechetical purposes. This was partly a question of achieving simplicity but partly a question of propagating only what was useful to the church. To Grunberg ¨ all this constituted Spener one of the people who undermined the ‘na¨ıve’ equating of church doctrine and personal religious conviction.39 Yet Spener pointed the way to Enlightenment in his openly confessed alienation from Book Four of the True Christianity in which Arndt had set forth his Paracelsian vision,40 and could be enthusiastically appraised in the relatively clear air of early nineteenth-century England along with the Halle fathers; they commendably discarded the metaphysical mode of tuition and the jargon of the schools, where Aristotle’s subtleties had been more often studied than the Bible; and a rage for controversies of no real import to improve the understanding, or to affect the heart, occupied the time and exalted the conceit of the captious disputants . . . [as compared with] the visionaries, such as Petersen or the Theosophists, revived by Jacob Boehmen and others, who, though for a time they glared as a meteor in the sky, and attracted the eyes of gazing curiosity, suggested nothing tending to the revival of general religion and piety; and . . . the tribe of prophets and prophetesses, who alarmed the fears of the credulous, had their day, and were forgotten.41

Spener and the Cabbala The case of Spener’s approach to the Cabbala is not quite so simple, not least because the Cabbala itself changed markedly in Spener’s lifetime. The medieval Cabbala had been an esoteric doctrine for scholars of historical bent, given to speculation about the origin of the world and the image of man in God. The disaster of 1492 when the Spanish and Portuguese Jews were expelled gave rise to a New Cabbala in which the Jewish catastrophe could only be made bearable by being interpreted as the birthpangs of the messianic era. Just when the pain that underlay 38 39 40

41

For examples of his views, see Briefe, III, pp. 288–9, 778. Grunberg, ¨ Spener, I, pp. 398–400; Spener, Briefe, III, pp. 47, 310–11. ¨ Oscar Sohngen, ¨ ‘Uberlegungen zu den theologie- und geistesgeschichtlichen Voraussetzungen des lutherischen Pietismus’, in FS Erich Beyreuther, Pietismus – Herrnhütertum – Erweckungsbewegung, ed. Dietrich Meyer (Cologne and Bonn, 1982), p. 3. Thomas Haweis, An Impartial and Succinct History of the Rise, Declension and Revival of the Church of Christ from the birth of our Saviour to the Present Time (London, 1800), III, pp. 64–6, 75.


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the messianic expectation might have been expected to dull, there were pogroms in Poland in 1648 in which more than 200,000 Jews lost their lives, and the hope of the coming of the Messiah flared up again. In 1665–6 the imminent expectation of the end was further fanned by the movement of the Rabbi Sabbatai Zwi. A crisis of a different kind broke out when in 1666 Sabbatai Zwi converted to Islam. Many Jewish congregations, bereft of their hope, now entered upon a course of secularisation that paved the way for the Jewish Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Others turned in on themselves and clung to their inherited rabbinic faith and their eschatological ideas.42 Clearly Spener could not afford to fight off pressure from Christian sources which urged the imminence of the end-time, only to succumb to similar pressure from the Jewish side. On the other hand, if one of the signs of the fulfilment of God’s promises to the church was to be the conversion of the Jews; if that conversion was likely to wait on the evidence of reform in Christendom; and if further, as Spener’s whole milieu believed, the common ground between Christianity and Judaism was the key to reform, then the Cabbala was a major pointer to the hope of better times. Even here, however, the internal dynamics of the Frankfurt collegium pietatis in a measure tied Spener’s hands. For Johann Jakob Schutz ¨ and he were both great admirers of the Kabbala Denudata, a Christian Cabbala produced by Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–89), a prominent Lutheran minister in Bavaria. Schutz, ¨ indeed, was close to Rosenroth, as he was also cousin to Andreae, the famous reformer in Wurttemberg ¨ during the Thirty Years War. Schutz ¨ was also the leading figure and disturbing spirit in the Frankfurt collegium, and wanted to use the meetings to propagate cabbalistic ideas. He it was who led the refractory group in the meeting which Spener could not control, and finally damaged the whole reputation of the institution by separating. Thus, like the visions of servant girls, cabbalism was one of Spener’s problems. He himself had been part of the cabbalistic circle at the court of the Princess Antonia of Wurttemberg ¨ in the early 1660s. It is characteristic of Spener’s methods of apologetic that he claimed not to have been deeply involved out of sheer inability to understand the system.43 It is hard, 42

43

On all this see G. Scholem, Sabbat Sevi. The Mystical Messiah (London, 1973); E. G. E. Van der Wall, ‘“A Precursor of Christ or a Jewish Impostor?” Petrus Serrarius and Jean de Labadie and the Jewish movement around Sabbatai Sevi’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 14 (1988), 109–24; Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen, ‘Einfuhrung ¨ [zur judischen ¨ Existenz]’, in Hartmut Lehmann and A.-C. Trepp (eds.), Im Zeichen der Krise (Gottingen, ¨ 1999), p. 203. It is impossible to mistake the parallelism between the movements in the Jewish and Christian worlds; more work is needed to elucidate it. Wallmann, Philipp Jakob Spener und die Anfänge des Pietismus (Tubingen, ¨ 1970), pp. 148–52.

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however, to believe that he was not in some way influenced by the celebrated Lehrtafel or pictorial display (with notes) of the Princess Antonia which the group erected in the Trinity church at Teinach.44 Wurttemberg ¨ had its own access to the Christian Cabbala through Johannes Reuchlin who had known Pico personally. His publications led the circle of the princess to read classic works of the Cabbala and perhaps also inspired the pictorial representation of the system. Spener had a powerful personal influence on the origins of Pietism in Wurttemberg, ¨ but so did the strikingly Christianised doctrines embodied in the Lehrtafel. Those who contrived it succeeded in combining the Lutheran doctrine of the cross with the cabbalistic doctrine of the ten emanations of God in such a way as to give an invitation to contemplative piety. The Cabbala also offered a great inducement to the reading of the Old Testament in Hebrew, and suggested ways in which the messianic prophecies in the law and the prophets could be given a symbolic and speculative interpretation and taken further. Thus from the very first word of the Bible there were indications of the heavenly Adam and the Son of God. Christ was in the Old Testament from the beginning. Johannes Laurentius Schmidlin (1626–92), one of the experts who designed the tablet, claimed that it was a ‘commentary on the secrets of both testaments’ and a ‘summary of sacred philosophy and history’. The theme which united both testaments was that of promise and fulfilment. The concentration of Pietism on the Christ-event and the discipleship of Jesus often led to a narrow neglect of the theology of creation and a denial of thankful joy in nature. The Cabbala, however, persuaded the Swabian fathers that the Book of Nature was a second source of revelation alongside the Scripture. The emanations of God (Sephirot) in the Cabbala showed the continuous creativity of God in nature and in the basic components of creation, the four elements of water, fire, air and earth. All this was to bear remarkable fruit in the duchy in the next century. Christ was equated with the pre-existent wisdom of God which according to rabbinic and cabbalistic doctrine was the tool of creation. And Antonia was by this means enabled to emphasise the restoration of the original harmony and glory of the fallen world. The female form of the second Sephirah with a water jug and cup stood for the sacraments of baptism and communion. The Cabbala also inculcated the ‘piety of the heart’, and it is impossible to miss the fact that Spener’s famous title, the Pia 44

On this see Otto Betz, ‘Kabbala Baptizata. Die judisch-christliche Kabbala und der Pietismus in Wurttemberg’, ¨ Pietismus und Neuzeit 24 (1998), 130–59, which includes a representation of the tablet at pp. 145–6. It is not suggested that Spener became as professional a student of the Cabbala as the princess herself, or as Oetinger became later.


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Desideria, is taken from Psalm 37:4, ‘the desires of the heart’, in quite the cabbalistic style. In short, much of what entered into Wurttemberger ¨ pietism through the Christian Cabbala also entered into Spener, whatever his disclaimers of ignorance of the technicalities. Spener had thus made his own selections from the thought-world of early evangelicalism, and in doing so anticipated much of what was to come. He drew from the heritage of Arndt a concern for the internalisation of the faith which could neither be separated from the mystical tradition, nor yet unequivocally committed to it. He sought to activate the dormant spiritual priesthood of believers, but, perhaps not surprisingly, failed to solve all the problems either of catechising or of the class meeting. Nevertheless he had written the virtues of small-group and lay religion into the history of a church that had no tradition of them in such a way that all the evangelical movements that followed found them indispensable. He resumed the process of postponing expectations of the Last Things (while keeping the expectations alive) which was to characterise all the evangelical movements of the next century. He had also begun the severance of the evangelical movements from the theosophical and Paracelsian traditions, notwithstanding the powerful temptations they offered of reinforcing the drive against Aristotelianism. Spener had also been forced into caution towards the Christian Cabbala, notwithstanding the backing it could be made to offer to the biblical basis of his position. Whether in practice his biblical basis or his ethical activism could be combined in the long run with his residual mysticism, or whether his evangelicalism could achieve a rounded shape without the theosophy, were all questions that remained to be tested. These questions in turn implied that it was still uncertain whether an evangelical identity could be achieved.

3

The mystic way or the mystic ways?

If Spener was frequently caught between prudence and the desire to tap sources of religious vitality on the one hand, and what could in practice be kept within the bounds of the Protestant establishments on the other, the problem was even more acute for his protégé and disciple, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727).1 For at an early stage an ecclesiastical career was closed to Francke, partly because he was more open to radical and spiritualistic influences; and although, unlike the radical separatists, Francke wanted the ‘true’ church of the faithful to retain its connexion with the establishment, he was more concerned with the pursuit of Christian perfection than with church reform. Much of his life’s work was devoted to the support of Protestants in Moscow and Siberia, Silesia and Bohemia, who had no established church system to cling to. Moreover, the great institutions at Halle which came to provide a badge of evangelical orthodoxy as far away as Newcastle-upon-Tyne, South Wales and Georgia were not institutions of church or state, but an application, at the time unique, of the principle of contract to the work of the kingdom of God. So long as Francke was able to retain the sympathy of the Hohenzollern monarchy, as his son and successor, Gotthilf August Francke, was not, he had in a sense a little more elbow-room than was ever available to Spener. Yet the outcome of Francke’s conversion was to narrow the options available to him, and to all who were spellbound by his analysis of what conversion was. August Hermann Francke Francke was the son of Johannes Francke, a Lubeck ¨ jurist who spent his last years in the service of Duke Ernst the Pious in Saxe-Gotha. He thus began life in the most exalted circles of Lutheran Reform Orthodoxy. A 1

The biography of Francke by Erich Beyreuther, August Hermann Francke, 1663–1727. Zeuge des lebendigen Gottes (Marburg-an-der-Lahn, 1956), is still useful. See also Martin Brecht’s contribution to Geschichte des Pietismus (Gottingen, ¨ 1993), I, pp. 440–539.

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studious young man, he gave early evidence of a vocation to be a theologian, and in the Collegium Philobiblicum, an academic Bible-study circle which he joined as a student in Leipzig, it became clear that he would become a biblical theologian. Various other patterns in Francke’s life now took shape. The Collegium had been created by Johann Benedict Carpzov, an Orthodox theologian of formidable violence, who, as we have seen, turned against his creation when he perceived its anti-Aristotelian bias and its popularity in the town. The resulting furore made it unrealistic for Francke to contemplate a church career. Francke’s reading had hitherto been of a mainly Orthodox or Reform Orthodox kind; but he had been raised also on Arndt, and the English Puritan devotional literature, and had obtained some insight into the mystical traditions on which they built. His first-hand acquaintance with this field came in 1687 when a disputation was scheduled in Leipzig ‘De Religione Quietistarum’. At that date Quietism was understood primarily to mean the doctrines of the Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos (1628– 96), now resident in Italy, with a large following in Naples, and facing the inveterate hostility of the Jesuits. His ‘true Christianity’ (as we shall see later) consisted in mystical devotion to God, Christ and Mary, and in radical Gelassenheit or tranquillity. What irked Francke was that this academic exercise was to take place not on the basis of anything Molinos had written (no texts being available) but on secondary works that included only excerpts from the originals. With Spener’s encouragement Francke (who in addition to the biblical and theological languages had acquired English and Italian as well) translated Molinos’s Spiritual Guide and Daily Communion from the Italian into Latin to make them available for academic purposes. In his own account of his conversion2 he strenuously denied calumnies that he had become a Molinist; but the fact is that Molinos intensified some of the contrasts that Francke had already encountered in Arndt. Arndt emphasised that every man had two birth-lines in himself, one from Adam and one from Christ, and contrasted them violently. God’s image was destroyed in Adam and renewed only in Christ, our model. Similarly, Arndt sharply contrasted knowledge and faith; the kingdom of God consisted not in knowledge but in power. There was nevertheless a human contribution to salvation. Everything must lose its old form if it is to obtain a new one. Nature abhors a void, and when the heart of man is empty God must fill the empty place with his love, wisdom and 2

August Hermann Franckes Lebenslauf [1690–1], in August Hermann Francke. Werke in Auswahl, ed. E. Peschke (East Berlin, 1969), here pp. 21–3. See also the recent edn by Markus Mathias, Lebensläufe August Hermann Franckes (Leipzig, 1999), pp. 5–32.

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knowledge. The human part comes in true penitence which consists in turning from the world, self-denial, mortification and death to worldly desires. Of course temptations persist, for God withdraws comfort until we are purified, and true repentance is brought nearer. These contrasts were only intensified in Molinos. He opposed thought and faith even more sharply, and was savage in his criticism of scholasticism. The way to God for anyone who was not a beginner was by pure faith and contemplation, and God would lead the believer beyond the knowledge of the senses. Yet the element of synergism is greater in Molinos than in Arndt. Man’s cooperation is essential to the whole process; particular ascetic exercises are not required, but the humble acceptance of outward tribulation is indispensable. Temptations, dryness, darkness, the sense of abandonment, are God’s way of teaching men to shed hindrances in his presence; Gelassenheit, humble acceptance, is the short route to perfection.3 Francke’s conversion That Francke’s conversion has much in common with all this is apparent from his own account. Scholasticism never had much attraction for him; his devotion in exegesis to philology had made him the target of a vicious polemical campaign. However, in the autumn of 1687 he received a scholarship to further his exegetical studies in Luneburg ¨ with the Superintendent, Kaspar Hermann Sandhagen. Francke now believed that his trouble from the beginning had been (in the phrase which had dogged Spener’s catechetical exercises) that he found it hard to get his theological studies out of his head and into his heart;4 now (in the best Arndtian or Molinist manner) God took away all security from the Scriptures themselves. ‘Who knows whether the Holy Scripture is the Word of God, the Turks insist their Koran is, and the Jews their Talmud, and who will say who is right?’5 If the Scriptures went, God went; Francke prayed desperately to a God he did not know. Quite suddenly (again in the Molinist way) what Francke was to call ‘the breakthrough’ came. Having fallen to his knees in great affliction and doubt, he rose ‘with unspeakable joy and great certainty’, and could not sleep for his new-found happiness.6 The 3

4

On all this see E. Peschke, ‘Die Bedeutung der Mystik fur ¨ die Bekehrung August Hermann Franckes’, Theologische Literaturzeitung 91 (1966), 881–92, repr. in his Bekehrung und Reform: Ansatz und Wurzeln der Theologie August Hermann Franckes (Bielefeld, 1977), pp. 13–40. See also the discussions in Brecht, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, pp. 442–5 and Horst Weigelt, Pietismus Studien (Stuttgart, 1965), I, pp. 60–2, who speaks of Francke’s ‘productive misunderstanding’ of Molinos. 5 Ibid., p. 26. 6 Ibid., p. 28. Peschke, Werke in Auswahl, p. 13.


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change came in a trice, but it was to last lifelong; it led to a major reconstruction of personality, and issued in an unexampled power of work. In Francke’s reflection upon his conversion there are a number of unLutheran things. It was not just that his problem was not Luther’s moral problem of how the unrighteous man could stand before God, how he could be justus ac peccator. He had a sharp eye for things not in the Lutheran tradition, the psychological stages of his conversion, and especially the total contrast between life before conversion and life afterwards; everything before conversion had been a turning from God to the world, even the Bible had been a means to worldly honour and a dead shell of dead knowledge. The knowledge he had gained at the feet of Gamaliel was dross compared with the overflowing knowledge of the living Christ. Indeed he caps the whole account by quoting from the Luther Bible Psalm 36:9:7 ‘They will be drunk with the rich goods of thy house, and thou wilt give them to drink with delight as with a river.’ The doctrine of spiritual drunkenness had a long history in the mystical literature, going back at least to Catherine of Genoa, who recognised it as the second stage of the spiritual experiences of love granted by God; and to Molinos also it signified the second step on the spiritual ladder.8 But Francke’s efforts to square all this with the doctrine of Luther’s Preface to the Romans, which became the classical text for evangelical conversion, are not quite acceptable. What he was going back to was the mystic-spiritualist contrast between Adam and Christ. His attempt to establish visible signs distinguishing a child of God from a child of the world9 was very un-Lutheran, and, while his analysis of the stages of salvation did yeoman service in the hands of class-leaders down the eighteenth century, its implication that turning away from worldly things was a presupposition for the work of God was also very un-Lutheran. Francke and the mystical theology By 1704 Francke had come back to the subject in a Lectio Paraenetica, or warning lecture, given in connection with a course on the Epistle to the Romans. The claims made for the mystical theology were now enormous; it was no less than the interior practice of Christianity, without which all 7 8

9

My translation. The AV differs from Luther at this point both in the translation and in including the reference in verse 8. Friedrich de Boor, ‘“Geistliche Trunkenheit” und “gottliche ¨ Wollust”. August Hermann Franckes Beitrag zur Auslegungsgeschichte von Psalm 36, 8–10’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 28 (2002), 118–46. Looking ahead in evangelical history one recalls the unhappy attempt of Jabez Bunting to establish that this distinction was made clear by the operation of church discipline.

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else is dead.10 On the other hand the treatment is narrow and rather slight. It is done by a brief exposition of Arndt. The claim is that the third book is a compendium of the whole mystical theology, and especially Tauler, with the object of renewing man increasingly in the image of God and enabling him to obtain a true and closer union and fellowship with God. Even the fourth (Paracelsian) book, which had been too much for Spener, is commended as showing man, now united with God, the way into God’s garden, the created world, so that he may praise him rightly in all things and apply the creation to proper use.11 But the key to the whole matter was a proper understanding of repentance and faith; this was why Arndt had devoted so much of his first book to human need, and why so many mystical books (unspecified) ‘put the cart before the horse’.12 This limited treatment was evoked by what Francke regarded as an unhealthy circulation of mystical writings among his students. His own piety was much more strongly influenced by the substance of the mystical tradition than this lecture suggests. He believed that the whole idea of mystical theology had arisen in the dark centuries before the Reformation as a middle way between ceremonies ex opera operato and polemical theology. Tauler, Ruysbroeck, even Bonaventura and Aquinas, ‘Theologi Scholastici und Mystici’, were in the succession. Luther himself had ‘drawn more strength and sap from them than from all the writings of the scholastics’. It had taken Arndt to rescue them from another crisis of piety. There were limits to how far Francke would go with the mysticspiritualists; and the Bible was the chief. Not for him the contrast between the dead letter of Scripture and the living mystical meaning behind the word. Those who scorned God’s Word and applied themselves only to mystical books were merely fashion-mongers, who ‘fluttered about like mosquitoes till they flew into the light and were burned up’. If the mystical theology began with repentance and faith, speculative mystical spiritualism, the mother of delusions of all sorts, was one of the evidences of the Fall. Nevertheless Francke departed substantially from Luther because he began with Arndt and Spener. The church was based, not on baptism, but on the renewal of the baptismal covenant in conversion, on the personal appropriation of salvation and the priesthood of all believers. And Francke was full of mystical words and ideas: Gelassenheit (tranquillity), discipleship under the cross, the indwelling of Christ, the stages of salvation, temptations and the withdrawal of grace. He shunned the ecstatic, but the decisive transaction took place in the heart rather than the head.13 10 13

11 Ibid., p. 206. 12 Ibid., pp. 207, 209. Peschke, Werke in Auswahl, p. 203. E. Peschke, Studien zur Theologie August Hermann Franckes (East Berlin, 1964–6), I, pp. 113–15, 133–5, 150–1.


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There were two drawbacks to Francke’s enduring love affair with mysticism. The first was that the very sharp contrast which he absorbed from Arndt and Molinos between Adam and Christ, the world and grace, knowledge and faith, underlay the coarse hostility later in the eighteenth century between the Halle men and the Enlightenment; and even in Francke himself this may well have been prefigured by his early turn from philosophy to philology. For lesser men than himself this could be a welcome excuse for intellectual idleness, and it was a temptation from which the evangelical movement never managed completely to free itself.14 Anna Magdalena Francke The second ill consequence was of a more personal and paradoxical nature. Relief from intellectual uncertainty had taken the brakes off Francke’s entirely exceptional power of work, and enabled him to develop into one of the greatest organisers of the whole of Christian history. The personal dedication required to organise the theological teaching at Halle, the famous charitable institutions, the politics of Protestant rescue in the Baltic, Russia, Silesia and America, not to mention conceiving a Christian Utopia for universal regeneration, could only come at a cost; and predictably that cost was partly borne by his wife. In 1694 Francke married Anna Magdalena von Wurm, writing to Spener that ‘he who has the universe in his hands has powerfully guided my heart to look about for a helpmate who may share with me the burden and the blessing’.15 This she did up to a point; but the romantic hopes with which the marriage began were hardly fulfilled. There was always a streak of mysticism in Anna Magdalena, and Francke himself put her in touch with radicals in Quedlinburg and elsewhere; she took Greek lessons from none other than Gottfried Arnold. After her marriage she began a sustained correspondence with the radical spiritualist (and editor of Jakob Bohme) ¨ Johann Georg Gichtel, much of whose life’s work consisted in devotional correspondences of this kind. One of the great topics of this correspondence was the relation of the new-born to the heavenly Sophia, a relationship, according to Gichtel, only to be enjoyed at the price of renouncing normal marriage relations. Even without this, to a person of Anna Magdalena’s views, her husband’s 14

15

Peschke, ‘Die Bedeutung der Mystik’, p. 891, repr. in Bekehrung und Reform, p. 40; F. de Boor, ‘Erfahrung gegen Vernunft. Das Bekehrungserlebnis A. H. Franckes als Grundlage fur ¨ den Kampf des Hallischen Pietismus gegen die Aufklärung’, in FS Martin Schmidt, Der Pietismus in Gestalten und Wirkungen, ed. H. Bornkamm, F. Heyer and A. Schindler (Bielefeld, 1975), pp. 120–38. Beyreuther, August Hermann Francke, p. 137.

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intense absorption in institutional management and politics could not but appear a gross sacrifice of interior Christianity to outward churchmanship. The Francke partners kept most of their disagreements to themselves, but in 1715 differences became open. Anna refused to move with her husband into the manse of the Ulrichskirche; she also refused to agree to the marriage of her daughter (perhaps significantly called Sophia) to Johann Anastasius Freylinghausen, and took no part in the wedding. Nor could the new son-in-law reconcile his wife’s parents. This whole contretemps showed not only how the innermost circles of church pietism were always liable to infection by radical spiritualist views, but how hard it was to keep extreme activism and interior religion together. Francke did more than exemplify this to his evangelical successors at home and abroad; as their unrivalled hero-figure he foisted the problem upon them.16 This side of the matter was admirably put in a successful pamphlet by one of Francke’s youthful Pietist colleagues in Leipzig, What do I still lack?. ‘Knowledge is good. Action is still better . . . One thing you still lack, Action.’17 As minister of the parish of Glaucha, Halle, Francke drove his parishioners mercilessly, using exclusion from confession and communion on a great scale to get his way. Action was his watchword.18 Erhard Peschke, the most learned modern student of Francke, insists outright that despite the importance of mysticism in Francke’s conversion, and despite his own insistence on the significance of conversion as a presupposition of theological study, he was no mystic.19 And unhappily for Francke family relations the radical pietists recognised the fact and substantially parted company with him round about 1700. It was also about this time that the affairs of the greatest scholar and spokesman the radicals ever had, Gottfried Arnold, were reaching a crisis; and to him we must turn. Gottfried Arnold Arnold’s career, like the marital relations of the Francke family, illustrates the way in which the activities of opposing wings of the Pietist movement 16

17 18 19

On all this see Gertraud Zaepernick, ‘Johann Georg Gichtels und seiner Nachfolger Briefwechsel mit den Hallischer Pietisten, besonders A. H. Francke’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 8 (1983), 74–118; and Brecht, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, pp. 460–1. Johann Caspar Schade, Was fehlet mir noch? (Leipzig, 1690–1). Veronika Albrecht-Birkner, Francke in Glaucha. Kehrseiten eines Klischees (Tubingen, ¨ 2004). E. Peschke, ‘A. H. Franckes Reform des theologischen Studiums’, in Festreden und Kolloquium u¨ ber den Bildungs- und Erziehungsgedanken bei A. H. Francke . . . 1963 (Halle, 1964), p. 114.


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were constantly interwoven. It is particularly important to bear this in mind in relation to Arnold’s sudden changes of front. These seemed to him less abrupt than they have generally seemed to commentators because they took place within a fluid context. Arnold (1666–1714) was the son of a grammar-school teacher, and educated in the fortress of late-orthodoxy at Wittenberg. But his first appointment as a house tutor at Dresden was obtained for him by Spener, who had lately become the senior court chaplain there. Spener’s writings interested Arnold in Pietism, and a correspondence between the two began in 1688 which led to a close and lifelong acquaintance. Under Spener’s influence Arnold became a Pietist and, when Arnold was again out of employment in 1693, Spener once more found him a job in Quedlinburg.20 At this point, the beginning of the second phase of his career, it became clear that Arnold was not going to become a second Francke. He fell under the influence of mystic-spiritualism, became a radical critic of the church, and rejected both the pastoral office and marriage. He also revealed the historical learning that was the one positive thing he had brought away from Wittenberg, reinforced now by patristic studies under the influence of the Anglican, William Cave. But while Cave embodied the Anglican quirk that the early church (or any other ecclesiastical exemplar) bore a curious resemblance to the Church of England, Arnold derived from the apostolic age the ideal of a Christian community without clerical hierarchy, prescriptive doctrine or liturgy, without church buildings. It was the time of the first love, the priesthood of all believers, the time almost obliterated by the alliance with the state in the time of Constantine which seemed so splendid to Cave. The reputation of Arnold’s historical writings at this time secured him an invitation to a chair at the pietistic university of Giessen, and led rapidly to his most famous work, the massive Impartial History of Churches and Heretics (1699–1700). This, perhaps the most influential work of church history ever written, was not so much impartial as undenominational; its object was succinctly described in the title of a later work, the History and Description of the Mystical Theology or Secret Divinity, and of the Ancient and Modern Mystics (1703), a book he himself described as ‘more an introduction to the true knowledge and love of the invisible God than to mere historical scholarship’.21 The venture to Giessen, however, had begun dubiously with an inaugural ‘De corrupto historiarum studio’, and ended 20 21

On the peculiarities of Quedlinburg see J. B. Neveux, Vie Spirituelle et Vie Sociale entre Rhin et Baltique au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1967), p. 12. Gottfried Arnold, Historie und Beschreibung der mystischen Theologie oder geheimen Gottesgelehrtheit wie auch alten and neuen Mysticorum (Frankfurt, 1703), Preface, n.p.

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six months later with Arnold’s resignation and return to Quedlinburg. The Abomination of Desolation (Dan. 9:27; Mark 13:14) had risen to such a point that flight from Babel was the only option; moreover, the love of God and the denial of self which were the essence of the mystic way required him to sell his books and forsake any pretence to literary reputation. Nevertheless he went on writing in much the same vein; he married in 1701 (the radical Gichtel affirming sagely that ‘Eve and Sophia could not stand on the same ground’),22 and he took church office as royal Prussian Inspector of Perleburg. Yet Arnold was hardly a renegade; like so many of the mystics he had doubts about his guidance, and as a mystic he was prepared to sacrifice to God even his separatist and individualist piety. The ultimate freedom of the children of God was to bear institutional churchmanship as a cross for the sake of weaker brethren, though not of course to live by it. In its highly individual way Arnold’s course had mirrored that of the Central European radicals as a whole. Radical mysticism Contemporaries insisted that there had always been a difference between the church Pietists and the separatists and coined a variety of terms of abuse to define it. On the one hand there were the moderate or ‘subtle’ Pietists; on the other the ‘hyper’ Pietists, enthusiasts or fanatics. Nor was this emotive but hazy distinction improved on by the second distinction between Pietists orthodox and Pietists heterodox. But the radicals, who included remnants of the old anti-war protesters, Behmenists and critics who despaired of the possibility of improvement in the church, tended to come much more into the open with the rise of Spener in the Lutheran and of Undereyck23 in the Reformed churches. Radical propaganda came in not only from the United Provinces, but from the tiny principality of Offenbach, which afforded a safe haven for radicals like Johann Heinrich Reitz (1655–1720) and Heinrich Horche (1652–1729), and where a radical German press was established under a printer of Huguenot descent.24 Both the temper and the doctrine of the radicals began to change. Behmenism became much more important than before. Gichtel produced the first Bohme ¨ edition in Amsterdam in 1682 and the works of the English Behmenists, Jane Leade, Pordage and Bromley, so much 22 23 24

Erich Seeberg, Gottfried Arnold. Die Wissenschaft und die Mystik seiner Zeit. Studien zur Historiographie und zur Mystik, 2nd edn (Darmstadt, 1964), p. 6. On whom see further below in ch. 4. On the radical press see Hans-Jurgen ¨ Schrader, Literaturproduktion und Büchermarkt des radikalen Pietismus (Gottingen, ¨ 1989).


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more comprehensible than Bohme ¨ himself, exercised enormous influence. There is no question but that to the radical mind the late 1690s appeared to be an era of terrible break-up. Bohme ¨ might be obscure but he spoke to just such a time, and offered it a deep speculative understanding. The other conventional response to such a time was apocalyptic; this had played a small part in Bohme ¨ himself, but was very prominent in the English Behmenists. Radical Pietism was strong among the social groups that suffered in the later seventeenth century, and the apocalyptic readings of the Thirty Years War were given a new twist by the widely circulated writings of Bohemian and Moravian exiles, especially Drabik and Comenius. The two great apocalyptic bogeys since the Reformation had been the Turks and the Papacy. The Turks now appeared before Vienna, and the Pope’s ally Louis XIV, not content with wreaking havoc among the Huguenots and among the apocalyptically inspired rebels in the Cévennes, was wielding the mailed fist in the west of the Empire with scant regard to the guarantees to Protestants given in the Westphalia settlements. The radical Pietists Horche and Reitz had had their fill of these trials in the Palatinate. The Great Northern War with its threat to the old saviour of German Protestantism, the Swedish monarchy, was also bound to evoke apocalyptic speculation. Add to all this that the church pietists were not delivering much of their programme of reform, that they were subject to violent attacks by the Orthodox, that in 1697 Reitz, Philipp Jakob Dilthey and Horche were all dismissed from office, and it is not surprising that Spener’s postponement of the apocalypse lost its charm, or that Arnold could see no future in the church. Both before and after the Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie Arnold was setting forth not merely the historical pedigree of the mystical theology, but the mystical theology itself; indeed, his History of Mystical Theology was bound up with a Defence of the Mystical Theology. The reason for the constant persecution of true believers was the fall of the church which was complete by the time of Constantine. At both ends his study witnessed to his special point of view. He was learned in patristic studies, but was bound to see things going wrong at an early date, because the great word mysticus or mysteriosus signified something arcane, secret and concealed. In the precise sense the mystical theology concerned the vision of God, or the most inward and essential union of the soul with God in which it sees and enjoys God beyond all sensual perception and imagination. More generally the word ‘mystical’ applied to the spiritual interior life (i.e., in the real sense to active Christianity) as contrasted with spiritually outward and sensual things. It meant especially the exposition of the veiled spiritual sense of Scripture as distinct from its literal and historical sense.

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The decline of the early church meant eventually that the Scripture was further veiled by a great admixture of Aristotelian and Platonic doctrine in the scholastic theology. At the other end, Parts II, III and IV of the Unpartheyische Historie are very heavily weighted in favour of the persecuted and disadvantaged of the seventeenth century, Anabaptists, Socinians, Jansenists, Jews, atheists. Spiritualists, Quakers, Behmenists, Quietists (and Poiret), not to mention medical exponents of Paracelsianism, and many women, especially visionaries. With the perspective of the modern end of the story so heavily weighted in this direction Luther gets relatively short shrift. Finally the story is brought to an end in 1688, presumably because Arnold expected the historical process to be wound up at any time thereafter. For Arnold did not have any sense of history as development – he divided his narrative by centuries – and put all the weight on individual psychology. In this respect he was an innovator; he was also unusual in that he was, in addition to his other gifts, a lyric poet of merit; and he anticipated what became a well-established pattern among the remaining radical Pietists later in the eighteenth century, in that his principal monument was a literary achievement.25 Pierre Poiret Arnold’s return, however unreconstructed, to institutional Christianity was prophetic of the sudden collapse of radical Pietism, and so was the place allotted in his pedigree of the true believers to the Carmelites and the Quietists. It was not so much Arnold who brought them back into Protestant circulation as another true believer whom he admired, Pierre Poiret (1646–1719). Poiret was born and educated in Metz and, after a brief period as a language teacher in Alsace, studied theology at Basel from 1664 to 1667, and in 1672 became pastor of a French Reformed congregation at Annweiler in the Palatinate. Poiret, however, soon changed course. He early attempted a defence of Christianity on Cartesian lines, 25

This account is based on Arnold’s Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie (Frankfurt, 1699–1700); his Das Leben der Gläubigen (Halle, 1701); the edns of his Historie und Beschreibung der mystischen Theologie (Frankfurt 1703 and Leipzig 1738); Seeberg, Gottfried Arnold; Jurgen ¨ Buchsel, ¨ Gottfried Arnold: sein Verständnis von Kirche und Wiedergeburt (Witten, 1970); Hans Schneider in Brecht, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, pp. 410– 16. On the location of the Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie in ecclesiastical historiography, see Klaus Wetzel, Theologische Kirchengeschichtsschreibung im deutschen Protestantismus, 1660–1760 (Giessen, 1983), pp. 175–209. For Arnold’s correspondence see Jurgen ¨ Buchsel ¨ and Dietrich Blaufuss, ‘Gottfried Arnolds Briefwechsel: erste Bestandaufnahme’, in FS E. Beyreuther, Pietismus – Herrnhütertum – Erweckungsbewegung, ed. D. Meyer (Cologne and Bonn, 1982), pp. 71–107.


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but almost from the beginning gave up this style of reasoning as hopeless. And having taken refuge in the United Provinces, he became involved in controversy with a Huguenot, Pierre Jurieu, on the problem of conscience faced by the Huguenots, and perpetually threatening all adherents of the Reformed churches in the way of Louis XIV’s brutal drives to the north-east. Jurieu himself was not too distantly related to the Pietist outlook, being the author of a successful Traité de la Dévotion (1675) and an advocate of the praxis pietatis; but he was also an unyielding defender of the Huguenot cause. The more desperate that cause became, the more Jurieu, a former professor at the Protestant academy at Sedan, turned to apocalyptic for encouragement. He looked to the collapse of the French church and the conversion of Louis XIV himself to Protestantism within three years; after Jurieu’s death his widow joined the French Prophets in England.26 Poiret’s ‘charitable advice’ to Huguenots exposed to compulsory conversion was, on the other hand, to adapt to Catholic worship.27 Confessional hostility was not the will of God; the essence of the faith was love of God and denial of self; enough had already been sacrificed on the altar of Reformed shibboleths. This argument (quite apart from the fact that Poiret was in touch with J. J. Schutz, ¨ the leader of the secession in the Frankfurt collegium pietatis) was sufficient to turn Spener against him; and it showed the turn in Poiret’s thought which brought him close to Gottfried Arnold. As much as Jurieu, Poiret believed that the Last Judgement was imminent, but the conclusion he drew was that Christians should strip down their religious practice to the bare essentials, the love of God and the denial of self, the ‘true Christianity’ which was independent of ecclesiastical pretensions and conflicts. Nevertheless Poiret’s chief work, the Divine Oeconomy, is anything but a lean and pared-down intellectual creation.28 It offers a complete sketch of Heilsgeschichte from the creation of the world to the Second Coming with appropriate philosophical and theological reflections. The date of the great event Poiret thought was incalculable, for (in the quaint language of his English translator) ‘God 26

27

28

On this controversy see F. R. J. Knetsch, ‘Pierre Poiret und sein Streit mit Pierre Jurieu uber ¨ das Verhalten der Opfer der Zwangsbekehrungen in Frankreich nach der Aufhebung des Edikts von Nantes’, in J. van den Berg and J. P. van Dooren (eds.), Pietismus und Reveil (Leiden, 1978), pp. 182–91. P. Poiret, Avis charitable pour soulanger la conscience de ceux qui sont obligez de se conformer au culte de l’église Catholique-Romaine . . . (1686), repr. in his La Paix de bonnes aˆ mes dans tous les Parties du Christianisme sur les Matières de religion . . . (Amsterdam, 1687). P. Poiret, L’Oeconomie divine ou système universel et démontré des oeuvres et des dessins de Dieu envers les hommes, 7 vols. (Amsterdam, 1687); Eng. tr. Divine Oeconomy, 6 vols. (London, 1713).

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purposely hid it from men, to keep ’em continually upon the Watch, and from falling into security.’29 But the devil found means to make these truths pass for ridiculous stories, and for Errours, and those that hold them for Hereticks, and thus they are presently called Chiliasts or Millenaries, an odd whimsical sort of people, and he has besotted most men to such a degree that they foolishly go about to measure the greatness and magnificence of God’s works by their own shallow apprehensions, and the silly and pedantick notions of the schools.30

Like Arnold, Poiret believed that ‘true Christianity’ had not survived in the church after primitive times, and that the total fall of the church system had been completed under Constantine. The true practice had survived among those who had left the fleshpots for the wilderness, the hermits, Makarius the Egyptian and the like. Poiret and Arnold between them put Makarius in the forefront of the Protestant discovery of the mystics, and from the radicals of the Wetterau to Wesley and Law he had his effect.31 Poiret’s Divine Oeconomy also left its mark in another direction. The key assumption in the theosophies of the previous century had been that there were correspondences between the microcosm, man, and the macrocosm, the universe at large. What Poiret here achieved was a synthesis between this kind of German theosophy and mostly Latin mysticism, a bond between the individual seeking perfection within and the cosmos without. This aspiration persisted; Oetinger and Baader32 were its most celebrated exponents in Germany, but there were also SaintMartin33 and various romantics in France. More immediately Poiret was of service to others like Thomasius,34 the celebrated humanist of Halle, who were trying to get round the religious conflicts of the period from their own points of view.35 Poiret’s turn to the Latin mystics was brought about by his connexion with Schutz ¨ and the schismatic members of Spener’s collegium pietatis, known from their meeting-place as the Saalhof Pietists, who were also connected with the Labadists. (Penn preached to them in the course 29 31

32 33 34 35

30 Ibid, IV, pp. 252–3. Divine Oeconomy, IV, pp. 248–9. Ernst Benz, Die Protestantische Thebais. Zur Nachwirkung Makarius des Aegypters im Protestantismus des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1963). For Poiret’s direct influence on the English and Scottish mystics see Stephen Hobhouse, ‘Fides et Ratio. The Book Which Introduced Boehme to William Law’, Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1936) 350–68, esp. 352–4. B. F. X. von Baader (1765–1841), philosopher, Roman Catholic lay theologian and scientist. Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803), called ‘the unknown philosopher’. Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), jurist and exponent of natural law doctrine. Antoine Faivre, Mystiques, Théosophes et Illuminés au Siècle des Lumières (Hildesheim, 1976), pp. 192–3, 229–30.


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of recruiting for his American colony.) From this quarter in December 1675 Poiret received a present of Antoinette Bourignon’s book The Tomb of False Theology. Poiret could hardly have made contact with a more resolute group of aspirants to sanctity, and the contact changed the direction of his life. He became convinced that the church was a Babel beyond redemption, resolved to resign his clerical office, and, in the interests of personal salvation, went off to Amsterdam to meet the prophetess Bourignon herself. She persuaded him to give up philosophy and secular scholarship and follow her teaching alone. Poiret was in a mood to prefer experience to doctrine, but was in practice not able to forswear the intellectual categories in which his mind had been shaped.36 His contact with her was brief for in 1680 she died. It then became Poiret’s life-mission to publish her works in nineteen volumes, including biographical and apologetic material of his own on a very large scale. Antoinette Bourignon Antoinette Bourignon (1616–80) was as sad a case as Mme Guyon later, and attracted the derision of Pierre Bayle. There is no consensus about her among the modern commentators. They have seen her variously as a sorry remnant of a dying race of wandering visionaries, a prophet of a rationalistic approach to the Bible, the pathetic result of allowing an untutored woman to interpret doctrine, or even as a prophetic motherfigure.37 What remains mysterious is the capacity of a woman whose doctrine was inconsistent and whose personal relations were unpredictable to acquire devoted followers who included some sensible people, not least Poiret himself. That she said some things that some people wanted to hear, such as that the church was a Babel and that family life could be an oppressive fraud, does not go far towards revealing the secret of her appeal. Born in Lille, then a flourishing town with a vigorous local mysticism, Bourignon was the daughter of a well-to-do merchant of Italian descent and a mother of Flemish extraction. She was born disfigured with black hair down to her eyes, and with her upper lip attached to her nose. The latter defect was put right by surgery, but her mother rejected her (as 36 37

On this see Gustav A. Krieg, Der mystische Kreis. Wesen und Werden der Theologie Pierre Poirets (Gottingen, ¨ 1976), p. 223. The fullest modern treatment is in Marthe van der Does, Antoinette Bourignon 1616– 1680: La vie et l’oeuvre d’une Mystique chrétienne (Amsterdam, 1974). An interpretation based on it is Phyllis Mack, ‘Die Prophetin als Mutter: Antoinette Bourignon’, in Hartmut Lehmann and Anne-Charlott Trepp (eds.), Im Zeichen der Krise. Im Europa des 17. Jahrhunderts (Gottingen, ¨ 1999), pp. 79–100.

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she also rejected a later sister). She made a congenial milieu for herself by immersing herself in the lives of the saints and the history of early Christianity. This escape was continually barred by the family and church authority. They opposed her wish to enter a Carmelite convent; she had visions that she should seek God in the wilderness, and in 1636 did in fact light out ahead of a marriage arranged for her by her father. This time she was sent home by the authority of the Bishop of Cambrai. In the 1640s she took to writing hymns, two of which fetched up in Wesley’s collection (and survived in successive English Methodist hymnbooks until recent times). On the death of her father in 1646 she came into a considerable fortune, which enabled her in 1648 to found a home for young girls under her own direction. After a few years, however, reports that the girls were all demon-possessed brought in the police, and at the trial in 1662 there was evidence against her of physical and mental abuse; all the minors in her care were set free. She herself had to flee. For a few years she actually became a wandering prophetess, and an attempt to gather a community of aspirants to Christian perfection on the island of Nordstrand did not last long. She died in 1680, according to Poiret, ‘the purest soul since Jesus was on earth’. Odd though Bourignon’s personality was, her doctrine was still odder. Though generally classified among the Quietists, she still had an animus against organised religion which was not usual among them; the church, she held, was the Babylonian whore, nor were other institutions much better, for the end of all things was imminent. She had a view of the Trinity peculiar to herself; Christ was the first man who brought forth Adam and was born a second time through Mary. Sacraments were of no value to the regenerate. Contemporaries were as divided as the modern critics. She was suspect to Roman Catholics and condemned by the Church of Scotland in 1710. Her writings were condemned by Quakers and Pietists, sympathetically received by Philadelphians and Swedenborgians. Wesley included her Traité de la Solide Vertu in his Christian Library. More immediately, she set Poiret on his life’s course, beginning with the publication of her works. Poiret as a publisher of mystical texts It may be, as Ernst Schering suggests, that Poiret’s hitherto chequered course had been an effort to find peace of soul through the pursuit of knowledge: that when his pastorate failed, he tried Cartesianism, and when that failed he turned to the mystic way. He himself never had the experience of melting into God. He certainly wanted a union of


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knowledge and experience, but it was to be a union with God’s true being and will. What he was seeking was the knowledge that corresponded inwardly to the mystical experience. It should be possible to distil the psychology of mysticism into theological propositions. At any rate Poiret’s unique contribution to Protestant spirituality was to make the firsthand literature of Catholic mysticism available again on an unparalleled scale.38 One of Poiret’s early ventures in this direction was to publish the life of Armelle Nicolas written by the Ursuline Johanna. Armelle was an illiterate peasant girl who, precisely because of her educational handicaps, knew nothing of religious conflicts or theological speculations, and thus became in Poiret’s view ‘a pattern of informative instruction’. As his introductions to mystical writers of mostly romance origins multiplied, it became plain that Poiret had become a Quietist himself, having grasped the core principle that this kind of mysticism was altogether voluntarist. He held that there were two chief forces in the soul, the understanding and the will. The former might permit a few elect souls to achieve union with God through visions, raptures or ecstasy – at, of course, the unacceptable risk of untold diabolical illusions. What he now saw as the ‘true mystical theology’ was ‘voluntarist and consists in purifying the heart from pride and love of created things and self, and being imbued completely with the will of God’. This union with God achieved by a union of wills was not capable of rational demonstration, but could be experienced in a pure heart, a heart bent on following Jesus. Poiret had thus arrived at the Quietist prescription of the emptying and crucifixion of the self; this was at once a presupposition of valid religious experience and a recognisable fruit of faith.39 The curiosity of this somewhat bleak doctrine in Poiret’s case was that it was so often stated in defence of persecuted women as to achieve a somewhat liberationist effect. Since the veneration of saints had died out in Protestantism, male punditry had reigned unchecked in matters of doctrine; now, in an almost Arnoldian way, the pattern of ‘true Christianity’40 was discovered in harassed females. 38

39 40

Ernst Schering, ‘Pietismus und die Renaissance der Mystik. Pierre Poiret als Interpret und Wegbereiter der romanischen Mystik in Deutschland’, in Meyer, PietismusHerrnhutertum-Erweckungsbewegung, p. 51. P. Poiret, La Théologie de l’Amour ou la vie et les oeuvres de Sainte Cathérine de Gênes (Cologne, 1691), Preface. For the title of his translation of the Theologie Deutsch (1700) Poiret adopted Real Theology. His edition of the life of Wesley’s hero, the Marquis de Renty, was entitled The True Christian (1701).

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In Poiret’s later years no religious woman was more harassed, and harassed in the full glare of Protestant publicity, than the celebrated Mme Guyon whose story will engage us later. Suffice it now to say that Poiret constituted himself a virtual counsel for the defence and ended by producing a complete edition of her works as he had for Antoinette Bourignon. This campaign elicited a warm expression of approval from Mme Guyon herself,41 and brought Poiret into contact with her patron Fénelon, the Chevalier Ramsay,42 and the group of Episcopalians from north-east Scotland who gathered round her.43 The whole association provided a touchstone as to how far Quietism might fulfil Arnoldian criteria of ‘impartiality’.44 In fact, having brought about the conversion to Rome of Ramsay, Mme Guyon’s secretary and his own disciple and future biographer, Fénelon paid Poiret the compliment of assuming that he was a far bigger fish in the Protestant pond than Ramsay, and attempting to convert him too.45 In this exchange Fénelon attempted to persuade Poiret that many of the mystical writers whom he loved were officially commended by Roman Catholic authority, and (with scant foresight of his own fate)46 that those who were condemned suffered for good reason; Poiret, still convinced that the fall of Rome must come, softened only to the extent of suggesting that judgement was providentially delayed in order to permit mystics like Mme Guyon to complete their work. The intervention of church authority in this case either prevented all parties 41 42 43

44

45

46

Mme J. B. de la Mothe Guyon, Lettres chrétiennes et spirituelles (London, 1767–8), IV, p. 577. On whom see G. D. Henderson, Chevalier Ramsay (Edinburgh, 1952). On whom see G. D. Henderson (ed.), Mystics of the North-East (Aberdeen, 1934); W. R. Ward, ‘Anglicanism and Assimilation; or Mysticism and Mayhem in the 18th Century’, in W. M. Jacobs and Nigel Yates (eds.), Crown and Mitre (Woodbridge, 1993), pp. 81–91. There were times when the dévote Mme Guyon could sound very Arnoldian indeed: ‘The establishment of all these ends [the conversion of sinners, etc.] which [Christ] proposed in coming into the world, is effected by the apparent overthrow in that very structure which in reality he would erect: for by means which seem to destroy his church, he establishes it.’ The Exemplary Life of the pious Lady Guion, translated from . . . the original French . . . (Dublin, 1775), p. 27. For this affair and the surviving part of the correspondence see Jean Orcibal, ‘Une ´ controverse sur l’Eglise d’après une correspondance inédite entre Fénelon et Pierre Poiret’, XVIIe Siècle 29 (1955), 396–430. Fran¸cois de la Motte Fénelon (1631–1715), French theologian, was called by Louis XIV to court in 1689 as tutor to the heir to the throne. Appointed Archbishop of Cambrai in 1695, he seemed on the threshold of a brilliant career, but his connexion with Mme Guyon was attacked by Bossuet and, despite his defence that views like hers had often found acceptance in the church in the past, he was put down and silenced. The official case against Quietism was and remains that the consequence of their self-abandonment to God’s hands was the neglect of ordinary religious duties and an apologia for inaction. J. Delumeau, Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire: A new view of the CounterReformation (London, 1977), p. 54.


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from yielding to their gentler feelings or brought to the surface the hard rock of confessional differences. Gerhard Tersteegen If the defence of Bourignon and Guyon, the development of an interest in Jakob Bohme ¨ and the publication of innumerable lives of the mystics were not one life’s work enough, Poiret made two massive contributions to the infrastructure of his theme: the collection of a great library of mystical works, and the compilation of an index of mystical works almost as complete as could be made at the time.47 The library passed to one of Poiret’s disciples, Gerhard Tersteegen (1687–1769), who used it not merely to continue the work of publication, but to sustain an independent literary productivity, and to shape a mystical life so winsome as still to attract disciples of his own. Tersteegen was born at Moers in the north-west of the Empire while it was still an Orange principality (it passed to Prussia in 1712). He grew up with fluent Dutch and in later life regularly visited circles of his followers there.48 Moers was a Reformed territory, and one of Tersteegen’s brothers entered the ministry of the Reformed church; but it was surrounded by Catholic lands belonging to the see of Cologne, and was always liable to French invasion. Nearby the dependent lordship of Krefeld offered an entirely opposed model of religious life. The town was active in the history of both emigration and religious revival, partly because its Mennonite congregation, protected by both the Orange and the Hohenzollern families, attracted Quakers, Baptists, Labadists, revivalists, visionaries and sectaries of every kind. They formed a permanent opposition to the official order in church and state, and one capable of exciting all the towns in the Ruhr area. Their industries were said to recruit labour of a higher intellectual calibre than the neighbouring countryside, and hence to be susceptible to alternative religious appeals. And for a generation the whole area had been worked over by revivalists like Hochmann von Hochenau49 and Wilhelm Hoffmann. But there was in any case a long tradition of artisan mysticism in this area, and already it possessed a degree of organisation; for the area was full of class meetings. Some of these were 47 48 49

Printed in Max Wieser, Peter Poiret. Der Vater der romanischen Mystik in Deutschland (Munich, 1932), pp. 226–38. His Dutch correspondence is edited by Cornelis Pieter van Andel, Briefe in niederländischer Sprache (Gottingen, ¨ 1982). On whom see Heinz Renkewitz, Hochmann von Hochenau (1670–1721) (Witten, 1969). Hochmann had given Francke trouble by holding ecstatic meetings in a private house in Glaucha. Ryoko Mori, Begeisterung und Ernüchterung in christlicher Vollkommenheit (Tubingen, ¨ 2004), pp. 225–39 passim.

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part of the apparatus of the old Reformed church; some had been got up in opposition to it by the Labadists, and some by the Reformed ministry in competition with the Labadists. These meetings formed a constituency when Tersteegen began to give himself to pastoral work, and eventually drew him like a magnet into revivalism.50 From all this it is clear that Tersteegen fitted none of the standard categories of the day or of our narrative so far. He was deeply indebted to Poiret for inspiration and for the bequest of literary materials which enabled him to put together his three huge volumes of Select Lives of Holy Souls (Frankfurt/Leipzig, 1733–54; 3rd edn Essen, 1784–6), thirtyfour lives, all of them Catholic and divided almost equally between pre- and post-Reformation saints. This was an enormous contribution towards continuing Poiret’s work of making the mystical literature available to the German and Protestant worlds; it neatly complemented one of the standard Pietist compendia of mass biography, Reitz’s History of the Regenerate.51 Yet confessional hostility even in the Rhineland made it the most unsuccessful of Tersteegen’s major projects, even though he was not a separatist in the sense that both Poiret and Reitz were. He abstained from the sacraments, and appealed to a public that wanted more than conformity. But his view was clear enough that ‘a separatist can be or become a mystic, although a real mystic will not so easily become a separatist: he has more important things to do. Mystical theology is what we are accustomed to call among ourselves the interior life or godliness of heart.’52 Those who argued in effect for open communion were apt to plead that Judas himself had received communion at the hands of the Lord. Tersteegen’s reply, based on the words of institution and John 13, was that Judas was admitted not to communion but to the Passover. But his whole mission was devoted not to Babel-storming, but to encouraging the practice of the presence of God. He did not hold his house-meetings during the hours of church services, and in the long run enormously enriched those services by his verse. For like Arnold, but unlike Poiret, Tersteegen was a considerable poet and a prolific one. He took over the Big Neander hymnbook, trebled 50

51 52

For Tersteegen see Max Goebel, Geschichte des christlichen Lebens in der rheinischwestphälischen evangelischen Kirche (Coblenz, 1849–52), III, pp. 289–438; Cornelis Pieter van Andel, Gerhard Tersteegen. Leben und Werk – sein Platz in der Kirchengeschichte, German edn (Dusseldorf, ¨ 1973); Brecht, Geschichte des Pietismus, II, pp. 390–410. There are brief introductions by myself in FS John Walsh, Revival and Religion Since 1700, ed. Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew (London, 1993), pp. 41–58; Christianity under the Ancien Régime, 1648–1789 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 25–6, 128–30; The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 232–7. Johann Heinrich Reitz, Historie der Wiedergebohrnen . . . 5th edn (Berleburg, 1724). Goebel, Geschichte des christlichen Lebens, III, p. 289.


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its size (with, among others, 100 hymns of his own) and became one of the most numerously represented hymn-writers in the books of the Lutheran churches with which he never had any connexion. How quickly Tersteegen’s influence began to spread beyond his constrained immediate circumstances is illustrated by the case of John Wesley. On his way to Georgia in 1735 Wesley had to teach himself German from the only available text-book, the Moravian hymnbook. The fruit of his labour was in part realised in translations of thirty-three German hymns of varied provenance;53 two of these were by Tersteegen, including the most popular hymn he ever wrote, Gott ist gegenwärtig; in Wesley’s version, Lo, God is here! Let us adore, And own how dreadful is this place!

This hymn has not only stood its ground against all the subsequent changes of fashion, but perfectly encapsulates Tersteegen’s reply to both the early Enlightenment which seemed to be exiling God from his universe, and the physico-theologians who could only bring Him back at the end of a long argument. Besides endless spiritual biography, Tersteegen also produced spiritual verse, his Blumengärtlein, or Little Spiritual Flower Garden of Interior Souls going through seven editions in his lifetime (and getting bigger all the while) and at least thirty in all. The list of his work published posthumously occupies a page and a half of print,54 including two major categories that were major tools of his pastoral and evangelistic work, his correspondence and his Spiritual Addresses,55 which show him to have been perhaps the best Bible expositor for a class meeting or revival there has ever been. In this last achievement there is an element of paradox. Tersteegen’s outlook was based throughout on the contrast between interior and exterior. The interior world was the world in which the relationship with God was forged and hopefully consummated. Adam’s sin had been that he had forfeited his relationship with God for the sake of exterior things. Tersteegen was not optimistic about the external world, which might at any time fall victim to the French if not to concupiscence from within. Suffering was to be expected, indeed welcomed, for it was one of the means which a Suffering Lord used to purify his followers; the redemptive possibilities of suffering were one of the things that drew Tersteegen 53 54

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John L. Nuelson, John Wesley and the German Hymn (Calverley, 1972). In Hansgunter ¨ Ludewig, Gebet und Gotteserfahrung bei Gerhard Tersteegen (Gottingen, ¨ 1986), pp. 325–36. The book itself offers a useful if rather mechanical treatment of its main theme. Geistliche Reden, I, ed. A. Loschhorn ¨ and W. Zeller (Gottingen, ¨ 1979).

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to Mme Guyon. The essence of the Christian faith for Tersteegen as for Poiret was the love of God (the interior value) and the denial of self (the exterior value), and in Tersteegen’s case this formula was not as self-centred as it sounds; for part of the object in accepting an extremely straitened life-style was to ensure that there would always be food and medical assistance for the needy who queued at his door. He knew that the poor would always be with us; the sufferings he shared with them would not cure an insoluble social problem, but could redeem the denial of self to the greater love of God. When the inner man had been radically purified by this treatment, when there was nothing left within but the vision of God, actual union with God could take place. Because of the supreme importance of this inner transaction institutional religion was really an irrelevance; Tersteegen did not try to provide an alternative to a decayed church by organising a pure sect. Yet in the end Tersteegen admitted that there were external helps to enable frail men to tread their thorny path. The chief of these (and here his Reformed heritage appears) were the Scriptures which he expounded with such effect; but even the church might be regarded as a prop to the weak. Without being anti-clerical (though he did not care for the Papacy) Tersteegen shared Arnold’s view that church history was primarily a story of the saints. And certainly the Christian should not lightly break with the fellowship in which he was born and brought up. In God’s eyes there were only two parties, the children of this world and the children of God in whose hearts the love of God was poured out through the Holy Spirit. Mercifully some of the latter were to be found in every communion. Tersteegen had, however, put two question-marks against the early parameters of the evangelical movement. Spener and his followers had put off the Last Days until the middle distance. Tersteegen would occasionally threaten the unconverted with the unscheduled Second Coming, in almost the old Orthodox manner. But in his general theology, even in what he had to say about death, eschatology played almost no role.56 How could it while the interior life was the scene of the crucial drama? And as for mysticism, he blurted out what had been implicit in his work and that of Poiret from the beginning: ‘I must openly say, that the works of love, mortification, self-denial, and, in a word, discipleship of Christ, are more strenuously pursued among the mystics of the Roman churches, than among us Protestants.’57 The attempt to propagate meditation, even 56 57

Van Andel, Gerhard Tersteegen, p. 147. Ibid., p. 163. Cf. Mme Guyon: ‘Someone asked Mme Guyon why so few saints were found among Protestants, while there was so large a number among Catholics. She replied, “It is because Protestants lack any focus of subordination, and everyone behaves according to his own frame of mind.”’ J. F. von Fleischbein, quoted in Marie-Louise Gondal, Madame Guyon (1648–1717). Un nouveau visage (Paris, 1989), p. 65.


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mysticism, in a Protestant milieu had not been without its effect; but it had never achieved the critical impetus which would enable it to make its way independently of what happened to the mysticism of the Catholic world that he and Poiret had done so much to open up. What happened to Catholic mysticism is our next inquiry, and it went far to justify Tersteegen’s suspicions of the Papacy. Molinism For, quite largely under French pressure, a series of Popes in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries made successive condemnations of Jansenism and Quietism which confirmed the worst suspicions of Protestants. Not that there was any great resemblance between the two currents of opinion, nor very great consistency between what either stood for over periods of time. The Jansenists had a programme for church reform, and underpinned it by a strenuous spiritual programme in which they reopened, in their own Catholic way, many of the questions which had been taken up by the early Protestant reformers. Their Augustinianism led them to stress the great gap between the righteous God and sinful mankind, and to pore over the mystery of grace. The Quietists were Augustinians too, but envisaged a different Augustine; whereas the Jansenists looked to grace to bridge the dualism between God and men, the Quietist ideal was to restore the lost unity between man and his Creator. Where the Jansenists were full of Christology, the Quietists talked about creation; if Jesus appeared it was as the great model of childlike abandonment to the will of the Father which formed the core of their spirituality. And whereas Augustine or Thomas, or even the Jansenists, could look to the transformation of the creature by grace, to Fénelon or Mme Guyon whatever in a man or woman was not ‘pure will’, ‘pure love’, must be annihilated, must be replaced by the ultimate reality, the will of God, obedience to which was the beginning and end of all spiritual life.58 Whatever their differences, however, Jansenist and Quietist were equally anti-Jesuit, and each came under the hammer clearly because they challenged the dominant character imparted to the Counter-Reformation by the Jesuit order. The early evangelicals were much more interested in the Quietists than the Jansenists, but could not fail to be affected by the general Protestant reaction to the condemnations of both. 58

Henk Hillenaar, ‘L’Augustinisme de Fénelon face a` l’Augustinisme des Jansénistes’, in Jansenismus, Quietismus, Pietismus, ed. H. Lehmann, Heinz Schilling, H.-J. Schrader (Gottingen, ¨ 2002), pp. 40–53, here 41.

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The tone was set at the beginning by the commentary of Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, on the imprisonment of Miguel de Molinos (1628–1717) even before his condemnation.59 The new method of Molino’s doth so much prevail in Naples, that it is believed he hath above twenty thousand followers in this City; and since this hath made some noise in the world . . . I will give you some account of him: He is a Spanish priest that seems to be but an ordinary divine, and is certainly a very ill reasoner when he undertakes to prove his opinions: He hath writ a book, which is intituled, Il Guida Spirituale, which is a short abstract of the mystical divinity; the substance of the whole is reduced to this, that in our prayers and other devotions, the best methods are to retire the mind from all gross images, and so form an act of faith, and thereby to present ourselves before God; and then sink into a silence and cessation of new acts, and to let God act upon us, and so to follow his conduct. This way he prefers to the multiplication of many new acts, and different forms of devotion and he makes small account of corporal austerities, and reduces all the exercises of religion to this simplicity of mind: He thinks this is not only to be proposed to such as lie in religious houses, but even to secular persons, and by this he hath proposed a great reformation of men’s minds and manners: He hath many priests in Italy, but chiefly in Naples, that dispose those who confess themselves to them, to follow his methods: The Jesuits have set themselves much against this conduct, as foreseeing that it may much weaken the empire that superstition hath over the minds of the people, that it may make religion become a more plain and simple thing, and may also open a door to enthusiasms: they also pretend that his conduct is factious and seditious that this may breed a schism in the Church . . . [and because he says that the mind may in some devotions rise to God immediately] without contemplating the humanity of Christ, they have accused him as intending to lay aside the doctrine of Christ’s humanity, tho it is plain that he speaks only of the purity of some single acts . . . Yet he was much supported in the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily; he hath also many friends and followers at Rome. So the Jesuits, as a provincial of the Order assured me, finding that they could not ruin him by their own force, got a great King [Louis XIV] that is extreamly in the interests of their Order to interpose, and to represent to the Pope the danger of such innovations. It seems certain the Pope understands the matter very little, and that he is possessed with a great opinion of Molino’s sanctity, yet upon the complaints of some cardinals that seconded the zeal of the King, he and some of his followers were clapt in the Inquisition, where they have now been for some months . . .

In 1687 sixty-eight propositions from his works were condemned, and Molinos remained in prison for the rest of his life. 59

G. Burnet, Some letters containing an account of what seemed most remarkable in Switzerland, Italy &c. (Amsterdam, 1686), pp. 197–9. This account was updated for English readers in M. Molinos, The Spiritual Guide, which Disentangles the Soul, and brings it by the inward Way to the getting of perfect Contemplation, and the rich Treasure of internal Peace. Also the substance of several letters sent from Italy concerning the Quietists (n.pl., 1699), pp. 167–80.


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The condemnation of Molinos was immediately coupled with the first episcopal condemnations of Mme Guyon, and an even greater stir was created by the contests in which her patron and defender, Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, became involved. His high-profile conflict with Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, supported by all the forces of the French court, ended in 1699 with Innocent XII’s brief Cum alias condemning twenty-three propositions drawn from Fénelon’s Explication des maximes des saints (1697). The politics of this contest were clear at the time, and have been laboriously elucidated by subsequent scholarship.60 Bossuet was an avowed Aristotelian and Hobbesian on the make; Fénelon, a genteel anti-Jansenist, ought to have been safe, but felt dedicated to speak against the corruption that had got in French political life and was unwilling to abandon Mme Guyon to a witch-hunt. Moreover in the Protestant world it was believed that more than politics was at stake. Many believed Fénelon’s defence that he held no views which had not been held by approved church sources in the past. And in any case the intellectual issues raised by the questions of pure love and annihilation of self had been widely aired in the controversies to which Antoinette Bourignon had given rise, and rehashed in scholarly reviews such as the Acta Eruditorum.61 All the more shocking therefore when the brief Cum alias condemned the idea of pure love devoid of all self-interest, hope of reward and fear of punishment, and with it the idea of a habitual state of sublime contemplation, innocent of the exercise of virtue. It was small wonder that Gottfried Arnold at this point gave up his chair at Giessen to retire to Quedlinburg to cultivate Quietistic mysticism away from the world, to put the Quietist works into German (along with the classics of Theresa ´ of Avila and John of the Cross) and to venerate Molinos as the type of persecuted witness to the truth.62 But while Protestant and especially protoevangelical writers wrote excitedly about the Quietist questions, Fénelon submitted at once. One of the consequences of his condemnation was that Catholic theologians were not able to take up the question of pure love again.

60 61

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Especially by Raymond Schmittlein, L’Aspect Politique du Différend Bossuet-Fénelon (Bade, 1954). On this see Jacques Le Brun, ‘Echos en pays germaniques de la querelle du pur amour’, in Lehmann et al., Jansenismus, Quietismus, Pietismus, pp. 76–91; see also H. Heppe, Geschichte der quietistischen Mystik in der katholischen Kirche (Berlin, 1975; repr. Hildesheim, 1978), pp. 490–506. His Molinos edition was very successful, being printed at least three times in his lifetime, and twice more afterwards.

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Mme Guyon There remained Mme Guyon (1648–1717), persevering in a life of almost unrelieved tragedy. Born Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Mothe to well-to-do parents, both of whom were in their second marriage, she was married at fifteen to a man of thirty-seven, and at twenty-eight was left a widow with three children. They, however, were the least of her troubles. M. Guyon had, not surprisingly, been perplexed by a wife who in 1672 contracted a spiritual marriage with the child Jesus, and endeavoured within marriage to live the religious life in the technical sense; and after his death his family did not take to the idea that the disinterested love of God justified her abandonment of her children. If she took refuge in the reconstructed diocese of Geneva, where the bishop was trying to convert Huguenots and educate ‘new Catholics’, she found him unwilling to add a nest of Quietists to his burdens. If she migrated to Paris there was more trouble, violent attacks from Bossuet, and prison sentences (including a spell in the Bastille); appeals to the king’s consort, Mme de Maintenon, who was in the thick of the Quietist witchhunt, of course did not help. But the big game in this contest was Fénelon; and in 1701, three years after his condemnation, the French hierarchy decided there was no point in imprisoning Mme Guyon further, and she soon settled in pious retreat near Blois until her death in 1717. Here she regarded herself as a model Catholic, communicating every three days, but execrated by conservative Catholic opinion down to recent times.63 All the more remarkable that she was immortalised (or embalmed) in a monster edition of her works in thirty-nine volumes by Peter Poiret; that Tersteegen was her most distinguished adept (though he never got round to including her among his Select Lives); that one of the curious images of the early eighteenth century is of the elderly Mme Guyon holding court to Protestant episcopalian Jacobites from the north-east of Scotland;64 that her letters, including secret correspondence with Fénelon, should be published in England in five volumes as late as 1767–8;65 that an English version of her Life should appear at Dublin in 1775, complete with her most Arnoldian and antiinstitutional view of the church66 – ‘The establishment of all those ends [the conversion of sinners &c.] which [Christ] proposed in coming into 63

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A recent Carmelite writer has pointed out that only her Short and very easy method of prayer (1685) suffered serious condemnation. Giovanna della Croce, Gerhard Tersteegen. Neubelebung der Mystik als Ansatz einer kommenden Spiritualität (Bern, 1979), p. 124. G. D. Henderson, Mystics of the North-East (Aberdeen, 1934). Mme J. M. B. de la Mothe Guion, Lettres Chrétiennes et spirituelles sur divers sujets qui regardent la vie intérieure ou l’esprit du vrai Christianisme (London, 1767–8). The Exemplary Life of the pious Lady Guion . . . For the quotation see above, n. 44.


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the world, is effected by the apparent overthrow in that very structure which in reality he would erect: for by means which seem to destroy his church, he establishes it’ – and was bowdlerised by Wesley himself in the following year.67 Clearly much of Mme Guyon’s appeal rested on her role as a persecuted witness of the truth, for the influential portion of her literary corpus was quite small – The short and very easy method of prayer (1685), Spiritual Torrents (1688), and her posthumously published Life – and not particularly distinctive. God enjoyed perfect rest in himself and rejoiced in the contemplation of his own beauty and glory. It was to share this joy that he had created man for himself. The great grace of creation was not that it was created out of nothing, but that man, being created in the image of God’s son, must, like him, be the object of God’s perfect love, and framed to enter God’s perfect rest. The highest stage of the life of prayer was the wordless prayer of the heart, the pure effect of the spirit of God within. There was no single route to this state of grace, but Spiritual Torrents envisaged three general stages of the spiritual pilgrimage. The first was not specially passive: it embraced the active pursuit of religious truths, strictness of life, and the exercise of works of mercy. The end-product would be a religious life based on rule and method, not unlike that of the young Wesleys. But some would penetrate by passive contemplation to the second stage, where they would be joined by those who from the beginning had had the spirit of God in their hearts, without recognising what the object of their love was. For the distinction between divine and human love was that the latter was directed to external things, while the former could be found within in the recognition of the grace upon grace, the gift upon gift, which God had granted. In the third stage, reached by some elect souls, God himself revealed within the believer the distance separating him from the object of his desire; and God finally ended the confusion and anxiety caused by this discovery by revealing that the treasure sought by the believer was indeed within him and not far away where he had sought it. Ecstatic astonishment followed. A judgement against Mme Guyon in 1694 found her guilty of four grave errors in asserting that human perfection was attained by a continual act of contemplation and prayer; that in this state resorting to acts of charity was of no avail; that the state of total indifference to all that is not God was legitimate; and that perfection consisted in extraordinary prayer, at which every Christian should aim. Mme Guyon in short had given offence 67

John Wesley, An Extract of the Life of Madam Guion (London, 1776).

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by breaking away too far from tried and trusted channels. According to a bon mot of Innocent XII, Fénelon ‘perhaps sinned by excess of the love of God’;68 perhaps Mme Guyon did so too. Scots Episcopalians smarting against the high Westminster Orthodoxy of the Kirk, and protoevangelicals everywhere chafing against their own Orthodoxies, loved her for it. The Bull Unigenitus The dramatic condemnation of Quesnel in 1713 seemed to be an altogether simpler matter (though this time Fénelon was among the persecutors). In 1671 Pasquier Quesnel, a Jansenist companion of Antoine Arnauld in exile, had begun a collection of Moral Reflections on the New Testament which had been warmly approved by Noailles, who was now a cardinal and Archbishop of Paris.69 At this late date Quesnel was found to be a moral and political danger, and in 1713 the Pope issued the notorious Bull Unigenitus which condemned 101 propositions from Quesnel’s hoary work, not least his doctrines of irresistible efficacious grace and irreversible predestination. The Jansenists were not alone in objecting to a document which had condemned a book without the author being allowed to appear in its defence, by a Roman congregation, only one member of which understood the language in which it was written. The attack on Quesnel seems to have been launched by Jesuits hoping to discredit Noailles; but the outcome was that Louis XIV compromised the sacral character of the French monarchy by securing a condemnation as part of an implied bargain to put down Gallicanism in the French church. Protestants everywhere regarded the Bull as an attempt to make people affirm what they knew was not true, or repudiate what they knew was true. The alliance of Pope and monarchy was now public, and Jansenism subtly changed with it, becoming a rallying-point for those opposed to papal and royal power, for parlementary Gallicans defending royal power against the Pope and his royal ally, and of lower clergy resisting the bishops. It is only of late years that the seriousness of this cantankerous issue has been recognised. Half a century later the alliance of the Jansenists and the Paris Parlement still formed the hard core of the opposition to the Jesuits, and, contrary to every probability, was able to plot and preside over the destruction of the Jesuit order in France. 68 69

Schmittlein, Différend Bossuet-Fénelon, p. 4. He also has a tangential association with evangelical history as godfather of two of Zinzendorf’s daughters.


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Still worse, the Jansenist issue undermined the whole order of the Ancien Régime in France.70 Nor was the matter simply one of high confessional politics. On 1 May 1727 a Jansenist deacon of saintly reputation named Fran¸cois de Pâris died in Paris, and at once crowds began to flock to his grave in the cemetery of Saint-Médard. There were reports of miraculous cures of illnesses of all kinds; the crowds became an unmanageable flood, and the cure became supplemented by frenzied convulsions of people claiming to be inspired by the Holy Spirit through the intercessions of M. Pâris. Again the government applied brute force to suppress an unauthorised cult, closed the cemetery, and contained the wave of religious enthusiasm that spread across the capital.71 What they could not do was to repair the damage done to the reputation of the monarchy and its relations with the Papacy, sometimes bullying, sometimes cooperative. Wesley’s reaction, having read one of Montgeron’s Jansenist accounts of Saint-Médard a generation later, was characteristic. One side of him wished to condemn the hysterics as superstitious; but there were two inhibitions to doing so. One was that the miracles of Scripture and the early church had played a major role in the apologetic of both Catholic and Protestant, and were now beginning to fit awkwardly into a wellordered Newtonian universe; it would not do to rubbish the miracles of Saint-Médard too hastily. More to the point, ‘if these miracles were real, they strike at the root of the whole papal authority, as having been wrought in direct opposition to the famous Bull Unigenitus’, or (as he put it when first reading Montgeron) ‘in opposition to the grossest errors of popery and in particular to that diabolical Bull Unigenitus, which destroys the very foundations of Christianity’.72 The Jansenist issue, was not the same as the Quietist issue, which concerned the early evangelicals very much more; indeed Mme Guyon’s influence in Germany and Switzerland was much greater than it ever was in France.73 And the persecution of Jansenists could hardly lower the repute of the French monarchy among Central European pietists who 70

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This argument is developed in the works of Dale Van Kley, especially in The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, 1996). Force against the cult was accompanied by renewed propaganda against the Quietists. [J. Phélipeaux] Relation de l’Origine, du Progrès et de la Condemnation du Quiétisme répandu en France (n.pl., 1732). John Wesley, A Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Gloucester [Warburton] (1763), ed. Gerald R. Cragg in Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley, XI, p. 479; Journals and Diaries, ed. R. P. Heitzenrater and W. R. Ward, in ibid., XX 3, p. 318. On the events in Saint-Médard see B. Robert Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, 1978). Hans-Jurgen ¨ Schrader, ‘Madame Guyon, Pietismus und deutschsprachige Literatur’, in Lehmann et al., Jansenismus, Quietismus, Pietismus, p. 191.

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detested both its continual aggressions in the Empire and the lavish court mores which it exported to relatively impecunious German princelings. But it was a serious matter for Protestant evangelicals that the damage which Louis XIV’s Jansenist policy did to French institutions of church and state was repeated on an even bigger scale by his Quietist policy in the world of Catholic spirituality at large. It was notable that the word mystique disappeared from the titles of works that ventured upon this field, to be replaced by the more general notion of oraison. After the Seven Years War, when admittedly all the religious establishments, Catholic and Protestant, went badly down the hill, the quantity of this sort of spiritual literature diminished greatly. This decline is the more striking as the word mysticisme (as distinct from théologie mystique) had only been coined in seventeenth-century France, and it marked the first return northward of mystical speculation on the back of the dévot movement after a couple of centuries’ migration south. Mysticism, more general religious revival, French power, doubtless for different reasons, were all on an ascending curve together. Yet it is no accident that a modern scholar, sympathetic to the official line, can call the period that began with the condemnation of Molinos the Twilight of the Mystics,74 and speak of passive prayer falling into discredit for two centuries.75 What began in seventeenth-century France with an extraordinary circulation of Dionysius the Areopagite continued with a new attempt to envisage the spiritual life outside the traditional framework of general treatises of theology. Most of what went into Mme Guyon and Fénelon was already present in the early seventeenth century, and although for defensive purposes Fénelon sought to draw support from the Fathers and sixteenth-century Spanish writers, he viewed them through the spectacles of more recent literature, and became interested in Mme Guyon because he saw a continuity between her spirituality and what had grown up in early seventeenth-century France. This movement, however, always had its critics. There were those who did not like its propaganda; the new mystics were surrounded by the veneration of the faithful who seemed generally to find a benevolent secretary (as Fénelon found the Chevalier Ramsay) to take notes of their ecstasies and revelations. Nor was the atmosphere of the marvellous in which they lived above reproach. There were sorcery trials, and even the achievement 74 75

L. Cognet, Crépuscule des Mystiques (Tournai, 1958). Ibid., p. 6. It is noteworthy that the Second Vatican Council in the article Lumen Gentium affirmed the call of all Christians to sanctity without reference to the mystical life, identifying sanctity with the perfection of charity.


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of heroic virtue which Wesley so admired in M. de Renty76 (and which influenced Mme Guyon) might be regarded as not altogether healthy. And there were doctrinal difficulties. What these mystics wanted was direct, immediate and total union with God which required complete annihilation of the will of the self. But was not the condition of the absorption of the will of man into the will of God, viz. annihilation, a kind of depersonalisation? Was not the demand for immediate union with God a denial of the work of Christ? And although 2 Peter 1:4 undoubtedly referred to believers as ‘partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust’, was not the claim that the final absorption into God created a stable deiformity, a practical impossibility of sin, to hang a desperate weight upon a single text? Whatever the motives of Louis XIV and Mme de Maintenon in turning the biggest of big guns against the Quietists, they could rely on the support of many reasonable men. Moreover there were things within the Carmelite tradition from which so much recent mysticism stemmed that did not augur well for the future once the tide turned. In the second half of the seventeenth century chairs of mystical theology were created in Carmelite and other colleges. There were endless ‘vocabularies’ of mystical theology that aimed to clear up difficulties and inconsistencies in the terminology of the great mystical writers.77 The attraction of the spiritual autobiographies produced by Poiret and Tersteegen was that they gave first-hand accounts of religious experience for readers who were weary of system and the polemical conflicts to which it led. To offer mysticism in systematic text-books was to kill it stone-dead. And threatened from without and suffocated from within, the mystical tradition died a slow death. From this the expenditure of enormous scholarly labour in the twentieth century has not enabled it to recover. By the same token one of the main pillars of the new evangelical identity was beginning to crumble, and it was no wonder that the evangelical pioneers were to become increasingly ambivalent towards it. 76

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On whom see Maurice Souriau, La Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement de l’Autel. Deux Mystiques normands au XVIIe Siècle, M. de Renty et Jean de Bernières (Paris, 1913). Little is added in the same author’s later work, Le Mysticisme en Normandie au XVIIe Siècle (Paris, 1923). Renty very early came into the English tradition through J. B. Saint-Jure, The Holy Life of M. De Renty, a late nobleman of France, tr. E. S. Gent (London, 1657). Wesley’s abridgement (London, 1741) went through 9 editions before 1830. A swashbuckling compendium of information on all these matters is to be found in the article ‘Mystique’ in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité (Paris, 1932–95), X/2, Cols. 1889– 984.

4

The development of pietism in the Reformed churches

The formation of Reformed confessions The pre-history of Pietism in the Reformed churches has been charted much less satisfactorily than in the Lutheran world, principally because it is much more difficult to chart. This was partly because the great Reformed expansion of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was halted by the Thirty Years War, leaving major reserves in Switzerland, France, the United Provinces and Hungary with a great diaspora across Germany and in Poland, and with the Church of England at one stage reckoned part of the Reformed world. Each of these communities felt the pressure to form its own confession, but the practical problems of each were different, and there was no constitutional mechanism to keep them in line doctrinally. Even the Synod of Dort did not produce a homogenised Reformed confession. Moreover, this situation had in practice existed from the beginning. Calvin, himself a humanist as well as a theologian, had not created the kind of highly articulated Orthodoxy which came later; colleagues had worked in their own way at a variety of themes, and it is not useful to treat his successors as betraying his heritage because they continued to do the same. They wished to be regarded as Reformed theologians working in his tradition, even though their local problems varied enormously. Thus the Elector Frederick III commissioned the writing of the Heidelberg catechism and pushed its adoption, in the explicit hope of reducing tensions between Lutheran and Reformed. In this he was not immediately successful, but the catechism’s view of relations between God and man from the human end was in the long run to have an importance in the history of Pietism. In the same way the French Reformed showed an uncommon propensity to continuous reformation and to softening the edges of the doctrine of predestination, until their very survival was put at hazard by Louis XIV.1 1

On these points see the essays by Brian G. Armstrong, John Hesselink and Robert Letham in W. Fred Graham (ed.), Later Calvinism. International Perspectives (Kirksville, Miss., 1994).

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Pietism in the Reformed churches

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On one particular matter which we have seen to be of importance in the Lutheran world, the Last Things, Calvin left the door unusually wide open. Primarily a biblical theologian, he left no commentary on the book of Revelation, and even asserted that if the apostle Paul had known by a special revelation the date of the Last Day he would have had to deny his knowledge to his flock to save them from a false sense of security.2 Too alarmed by the apocalyptic fanaticism of his time to suggest that the end was near, his view was that the Second Coming of Christ was to be characterised by Christ’s visible presence as distinct from His exalted and risen omnipresence in the present age.3 Both instant millennialism and caution were to mark different sections of the subsequent Reformed movements at different times. There were, however, general pressures, political and intellectual, that drove the Reformed everywhere to attempt a greater precision of doctrinal statement than Calvin himself had achieved. In 1580 the French Reformed theologian Antoine de Chandieu made the first urgent call for the adoption of a ‘scholastic method’ in Reformed theology. In making this call Chandieu was assuming that theology was a science in the Aristotelian sense – that is, it had indemonstrable principles, drawn from Scripture – and that by treating these using syllogism and analysis according to the methods of Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics the theologian could reason his way by logical demonstration to conclusions of great certainty. The attraction of this to a movement engaged in continuous controversy to right and left is obvious; indeed, if Chandieu was right that the only alternative was a rhetorical treatment of theology, i.e., a treatment of theology according to the methods of persuasion appropriate to the pulpit, the Reformed had no option but to take the scholastic route,4 and in so doing they remained loyal to the Reformers’ tradition of teaching through at least some of the academic methods of the day. At any rate this was the route taken by Reformed theologians generally in the age in which the Reformed confessions were produced. To no church was the siren call more welcome than that of Bern. Confessional fighting in the full military sense went on in Switzerland longer than anywhere else, right into the eighteenth century, affording an ideal opening for major powers to fish in the troubled waters. And, within a generation of the Protestant cantons establishing their supremacy in the Confederation 2 3 4

On Poiret’s appropriation of these views see pp. 51–2 above. Heinrich Quistorp, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Last Things (London, 1955), p. 110. Donald Sinnema, ‘Antoine de Chandieu’s Call for a Scholastic Reformed Theology (1580)’, in Graham, Later Calvinism, pp. 159–90. Richard A. Muller, After Calvin (Oxford, 2003), makes a spirited plea that historians recognise both the continuity between Reformation and Reformed Orthodoxy and the care of both for practical piety.

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on the back of the Toggenburg wars, confessional warfare threatened to break out on a much more serious scale; the great Catholic rivals on the international stage, Habsburg and Bourbon, buried the hatchet of their mutual animosity, and with it the main protection of Protestant Switzerland. It is not surprising therefore that Bern felt the need for a guaranteed platform on the international front. At the same time the Bern patriciate suffered perhaps exaggerated anxieties at the double internal threat to their position. They seemed always to believe that the Swiss Anabaptists, who had withdrawn to an a-political stance and were not more than stationary, were a prospective menace; and while their French Reformed co-religionists who came flooding in, particularly after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, with their frills, furbelows, and fancy notions about predestination, might be a necessary claim on charity, they remained a menace to all things sacred. Thus the tone in Bern rose steadily, and in 1675 the city authorities began the effort to enforce acceptance of the very high Formula Consensus as the sole Swiss Protestant confession; 1675, be it noted, being the year in which Spener’s Pia Desideria had issued its clarion call to Protestants to reduce their reliance on the political arm of flesh. Rational Orthodoxy This proved to be a more Sisyphaean labour than Bern had calculated. They stamped it hard on the ministry and academy of Lausanne, and expelled more Pietists than any other canton. But Ostervald kept it out of Basel, Neuchâtel abandoned subscription when it passed to Prussia in 1709, Geneva bade farewell to subscriptions in 1725, and the general dismay of the Protestant powers at the divisive effect of the Formula Consensus ensured that Bern Orthodoxy would get no support from abroad. Still more alarming was the speed with which the Formula seemed to lose credibility in Switzerland. One of the great pillars of Reformed Orthodoxy in Geneva had been Fran¸cois Turretini (1623–87), but already his nephew and colleague, Bénédict Pictet (1655–1724), began the move to what became known as Rational Orthodoxy. The object now was to foster a return to the biblical text unencumbered by the controversial language of Reformed scholasticism and to promote a practical form of theology acceptable in the parishes. If this helped to recover the vitality of Calvin’s thought as well, so much the better. Pictet5 was professor of theology at the academy in Geneva from 1687 to 1724 and served two spells as rector. 5

Martin I. Klauber, ‘Reformed Orthodoxy in Transition: Bénédict Pictet and Enlightened Orthodoxy in Post-Reformation Geneva’, in Graham, Later Calvinism, pp. 93–113.


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One of his great policies was the promotion of Protestant union, and this was characteristic of his colleague Jean-Alphonse Turretini (1671– 1737), the son of Fran¸cois. He and the other pioneers of Rational Orthodoxy, Jean-Frédéric Ostervald of Basel (1663–1747) and Samuel Werenfels of Neuchâtel (1657–1740), were all international men sustaining great correspondences (with, among others, Archbishop Wake of Canterbury).6 They could not stop Bern’s forays in the interest of the Formula Consensus, but they vividly illuminated her self-chosen isolation, and, as it proved, saved their own cantons from any serious trouble with Pietism. Conservative as they all were, they had provided sufficient lee-way for change. Bern, on the other hand, had to cope with a very pertinacious Pietism which continually spilled over into revivalism.7 In one sense her efforts on behalf of Orthodoxy had been misconceived, for in spite of the severity of the Bern censorship, Swiss publishers were alert to bring out translations of the English Puritan classics, Perkins, Bayley, Hall and Baxter, so for those who wished there was direct access to a piety characterised by conversion, sanctification and self-observation; and these left their mark on the locally produced literature of prayer and devotion. And no matter how Bern tried to pull down the shutters on the outside world, it was not possible to keep its subjects in.

Swiss Pietism The pioneers of Pietism in Bern, Samuel Guldin, ¨ Christoph Lutz, Samuel Schumacher and Samuel Dick, were all graduates of the Bern Hohe Schule, who met in 1689 in Geneva on the first stage of their academic travels.8 They formed a devotional group for prayer, the study of the Bible and spiritual literature, apparently in innocence of the word ‘pietism’. But the rest of their travels, singly or together, were directed to the great names in the Pietism of that day – to Schutz ¨ in Frankfurt, the Labadist community in Wieuwerd, Undereyck and his pupil de Hase in Bremen,9 Horb, Spener’s brother-in-law, in Hamburg, Spener himself in Berlin, and followers of Francke in Leipzig. They came back to take service in

6 7 8

9

N. Sykes, William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1657–1737 (Cambridge, 1957), II, pp. 27–8. For a brief account of this story see my Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992). For this story see Rudolf Dellsperger, Die Anfänge des Pietismus in Bern (Gottingen, ¨ 1984) and ‘Der Pietismus in der Schweiz’, in M. Brecht and K. Deppermann (eds.), Geschichte des Pietismus (Gottingen, ¨ 1995), II, pp. 588–616. On Undereyck and de Hase see below, pp. 78ff.

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the church of Bern enamoured of the world-wide movement of the Spirit which they had perceived among the Lutherans, tarred with the mystical brush, and with a mystical openness to possibilities of biblical interpretation which went beyond Calvin and Zwingli. Nevertheless when they reported back at length to Francke, one of the things they asked for was a New Testament lexicon which should supply them with the precise meanings of the basic words, and keep them au fait with philological exegesis as then understood. Of course this attempt to link Bern with the outside world from below was vigorously contested by the city authorities, and Tauler, Thomas a` Kempis, Antoinette Bourignon and Pierre Poiret were added to the censorship list. And in spite of movements springing up in many places, especially in Bern’s restive French-speaking territories, Pietism was vigorously suppressed. Guldin ¨ fetched up in America, and Samuel Konig ¨ (1670– 1750), the most broadly educated of them all, with the radical Pietists in Germany, a chiliast in the wake of Jane Leade and the Petersens. One consequence of the hammering which the early Bern Pietists received was that subsequently Pietism took on a revivalist character, and became a magnet for the Inspired and the Moravians from Germany; but the immediate effect was that Pietism as an inner-church reform movement of the Spenerite kind was defeated. Forcibly put down, there was little alternative for them but to turn in the first quarter of the eighteenth century to separatism. It was only in the second quarter of the century that integration began, notably in the ministry of Samuel Lutz (1674–1750). Defying endless professional setbacks he finally became a notable revivalist and pastor in the Bernese Oberland, winning back for the church many who had previously separated. When Hieronymus Annoni (1697–1770) made a great journey out from his pastorate in Basel to visit the pious in Switzerland in 1730–1, he found that attempts to secure uniformity had largely been given up. Indeed, in the next generation Pietism and Orthodoxy alike were threatened by the spread of Enlightenment, and numerous Pietists were seeking to deal with it by a large admixture of theosophy. Meanwhile there was an abiding Pietist legacy of private meetings, devotional publishing (including translations of floods of English literature), hymn-writing, and good works which were eventually to issue in foreign missions.10 As was to happen later in England, the Swiss Pietists brought a Reformed community closer to what was happening in the Lutheran world, and their principal departure from their own Orthodox tradition was a considerable 10

P. Wernle, Schweizerischer Protestantismus im 18. Jahrhundert (Tubingen, ¨ 1923), I, pp. 326–41, 441–68.


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addiction to millennialism;11 and, for reasons which we shall see, this was to become a feature of Reformed Pietism elsewhere. Dutch scholasticism The position of the Reformed churches in the United Provinces, their second great reserve, was fundamentally different from that in Switzerland. In Switzerland Protestant establishments had been created out of Catholic ones with appropriate changes in doctrine and church structure, and in some cases with a fight, but with not much change in social structure. In Bern especially patrician government and the defence of Reformed Orthodoxy went hand in hand, much as they would have done had Bern retained allegiance to the Counter-Reformation. In the Netherlands the Beggars had introduced Protestantism by violence from the outside, and although the establishment of Reformed doctrine had attracted support over the generations, it had not enabled the Reformed churches to undermine a very large Catholic minority, a third of the whole population, nor to make an impact upon that substantial Dutch underworld which existed for fairs and riotous living. Dutch governments, in short, were, in policy terms, like modern governments confronted with hard liquor and hard drugs; never in a position of control, they experienced the drawbacks of both hard and soft measures, and were bound to be more attracted to persuasion than the Swiss. Like the latter they afforded generous hospitality to French refugees, and, like the German Reformed, did not want anything more radical from that quarter than they got in Bayle.12 One solution to their problem was Nadere Reformatie, Further Reformation. This name has a Puritan sound to it, and indeed Willem Teellinck (1579–1629), who stood at the fountainhead of that tradition, was influenced by Puritan as well as mystical traditions. But the Nadere Reformatie aimed to unite pietas, the subjective religion of the heart, with praecisitas, a conduct strictly in accordance with the biblical commandments, or, put in another way, to unite the reformation in doctrine and church structure already achieved with the inner reformation of the believer. If this union of piety and strict conduct could be undergirded by the certainty apparently provided by Aristotelian scholasticism it would certainly find followers in this quarter; and this was what was offered by Gisbertius Voetius (1589–1676). 11 12

K. Guggisberg, Bernische Kirchengeschichte (Bern, 1958), pp. 398–9. Sandra Pott, Reformierte Morallehren und deutsche Literatur von Jean Barbeyrac bis Christoph Martin Wieland (Tubingen, ¨ 2002), p. 141.

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Voetius embodied much of the affective side of English Puritanism which was often recalled when the age of religious revivals began, and the Voetians formed one of the main channels of English Puritan influence in the United Provinces. Voetius began his career as a pastor, and though he took a hard line against the Remonstrants at the Synod of Dort, and was appointed to a chair at Utrecht in 1634, pastoral concerns remained dominant throughout his career. Pietas remained a major object, and in the Aristotelian manner he pursued it in every detail. Two of the five volumes of his magnum opus, the Selectae disputationes theologicae (1648–69), were devoted to practical theology including ethics; and ethics extended to details like dancing, comedy, food and drink, luxury, hair-styles, jewellery and ostentation. But the faith that was to underlie the conduct, prayer, meditation, church-going, Bible-reading and so forth was treated in a handbook of religious practice that developed from student disputations. The formation of church life was treated in another four volumes, the De Politica Ecclesiastica (1663–76), always with a view to promoting a lively, personal, if pugnacious, piety. John Quick, an English Puritan, quotes a Dutch pastor as saying that ‘before the Belgick churches were pester’d with the Dogmes of Cocceius, the ministry of the Word was exceedingly successful, many hearers would weep at sermons, proud sinners would quake and tremble at the word preached, multitudes were converted & reformed, religious worship was strictly and reverently celebrated in congregations and families’ under pastors of the Puritan stamp.13 Voetius, in short, was both an outstanding example of Reformed scholasticism and a protorevivalist. Coccejus The ‘Dogmes of Cocceius’ would, alas! not go away, nor would the political and social divisions round which Voetianism and Coccejanism crystallised. Voetians affected the ‘language of Canaan’ and plain dress; the Coccejans were modish and their ministers wore wigs. The Voetians were strong in the lower middle class, went more directly for a result among their more modestly circumstanced flock, and in politics were devotees of the Orange family and strong central government; the Coccejans were more notable in the world of wealth and scholarship, and stood for Patriot opposition to Orange power. The Coccejans held that the Sabbath was a ritual obligation now outdated, and Heppe reports how ladies of the Coccejan party would sit in the window knitting on the Sabbath with a 13

G. F. Nuttall, ‘English Dissenters in the Netherlands, 1640–1689’, Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiednis, LIX, 37–8.


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view to annoying their Voetian neighbours, and that in village congregations side by side, the Voetian congregation would preserve the silence of the grave on the Lord’s Day, while the Coccejan congregation might be a riot.14 Already at the end of Voetius’s life15 events suggested that the issue between him and Coccejus might be inconclusive; in 1672 the Orange Stadtholdership was re-established, a great political advantage; on the other hand the Labadist schism carried a powerful suggestion that the Dutch Protestant establishment was no place for zealots for sanctity. Johannes Coccejus (1603–69) was, however, much more important than a man who provided badges for people who could not stand Voetianism; indeed, he has been reckoned the most important Reformed theologian of his century. Born in Bremen, a free Hanse town and the one great Reformed city of the Holy Roman Empire, he was the son of the Town Clerk (he Latinized his name from Coch), and, on his mother’s side, the descendant of a respected artisan family, and grandson of an alderman. His brother Gerhard followed the law line, and became not only a professor of law but a diplomat in the service of Bremen, East Frisia and the Empire. Thus the social differences that irked the Voetians were prominent from the beginning; but Coccejus and Voetius were alike in two respects: both were Orthodox, and both were men of genuine piety, who accepted that the promotion of piety was one of the ends of theological labour. Coccejus, however, by the intense scholarship in biblical philology which attracted students to him from all over Reformed Europe,16 and which in recent times has caught the interest of critics of the calibre of the Erlangen school, von Rad and Karl Barth, sought to present from Scripture a comprehensive overview of the saving intention of God in Christ throughout history. Before the Fall God had established his relationship with men in a covenant of works. If men fulfilled their side of this covenant, salvation was theirs. God, however, foresaw from eternity that events would not issue thus happily. Even before the Fall, God had announced his will in the so-called protogospel to lead man to a higher stage of perfection in a covenant of grace.17 In the covenant of grace the consequences of the Fall were overcome step by step. In the Old Testament God concluded a covenant with his Chosen People through 14 15

16 17

H. Heppe, Geschichte des Pietismus und der Mystik in der Reformierten Kirche (Leiden, 1879), pp. 234–6. On Voetius see Aart de Groot, ‘Gisbertius Voetius’, in M. Greschat (ed.), Gestalten der Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart, 1982), VII, pp. 149–62; Aart de Groot, ‘Pietas im Vorpietismus (Gisb. Voetius)’, in J. van den Berg and J. P. van Dooren (eds.), Pietismus und Reveil (Leiden, 1978), pp. 118–29. Muller, After Calvin, pp. 110–16. He received chairs in Bremen in 1630, Franeker in 1636, and Leiden in 1650. Genesis 1:26.

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Moses; following the commandments would again bring the sinner under God’s grace. In the New Testament Christ overcame the power of death by taking all the consequences of the Fall upon himself, and opening the way for everyone into God’s covenant of grace. Five covenants culminated in the general resurrection, but meanwhile the true believer could see where he was in God’s great plan, and be led by grace infallibly to his salvation in God’s presence. Coccejus still employed the syllogistic method characteristic of the Protestant Orthodoxy of his period; but his biblical scholarship was admired by Spener, and he anticipated favourite themes of the Pietists, rejecting calculations of the imminent end of this present age, talking much of conversion and the New Birth and the way the Christian knows himself to be included in the covenant. The federal (or covenant) theology showed how in an apocalyptically minded age the faithful could infer security from the Heilsgeschichte itself, and for this reason it was violently assailed as a novelty if not a heresy by the Orthodox Voetians.18 Yet there was clearly a good deal in common between these two Reformed schools. Both insisted on the connexion of piety and theology. Voetius’s recommendation of reading in the mystics was widely accepted, and he was esteemed as a renewer of catechetical exercises. Both men promoted class meetings as a step to practical piety, and had kept them free from the separatism of the Labadists. One of the most powerful things separating them had been their differences respecting the political ambitions of the Orange family, and these were of no immediate significance to members of the great Reformed diaspora stretching from Bremen and East Frisia round to the Lower Rhine area. It was here that the two outlooks were first united to form a Reformed Pietism that in turn laid the foundations of a Reformed revivalism. This became clear in the ministry of Theodor Undereyck (1635–93). German Reformed Pietism Undereyck was a merchant’s son, born in Duisburg in 1635. He began his education in philosophy and Greek at the new university of Duisburg and then went on to Utrecht to work with Voetius and his colleagues. 18

On Coccejus see G. Schrenk, Gottesreich und Bund im a¨ lteren Protestantismus, vernehmlich bei J. Coccejus (Gutersloh, ¨ 1923); H. Faulenbach, Weg und Ziel der Erkenntnis Christi. Eine Untersuchung zur Theologie des J. Coccejus (Neukirchen, 1973), and his papers ‘Johannes Coccejus’ in M. Greschat, Gestalten der Kirchengeschichte, VII, pp. 163–76, and ‘Die christliche Personlichkeit ¨ bei Johannes Coccejus’ in van den Berg and van Dooren, Pietismus und Reveil pp. 130–40; W. J. van Asselt, Federal Theology of J. Cocceius (Leiden, 2001).


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Here he acquired his master’s Orthodoxy and precisianism. He also sat at the feet of Jodocus van Lodenstein, a preacher prized in retrospect as one of the heralds of Pietism. He continued his education in Duisburg, Frankfurt and Leiden, and on a tour to France, Switzerland and England. Undereyck, in short, was like the protopietists of Switzerland in being an international man and in touch with international movements of grace. The English Puritans were heavily quoted in his works,19 but the influential figures were Voetius and Coccejus, and he determined to take the best of each. In his first parish at Mulheim ¨ on the Ruhr he preached in the Voetian manner, beating the drum about the gulf between the kingdom of Christ and that of the world, rejecting every compromise, and looking to turn every family into a house-church with a father exercising discipline. Preaching of this kind suited those tempted by Labadism and sanctification; it also produced converts who responded to his stress on the personal appropriation of salvation. He corresponded with Reitz who was compiling his great History of the Regenerate, and drove some sinners to suicide. After a brief court chaplaincy in Kassel he went on to a generation’s work in the Coccejan town of Bremen. Already his pupils, friends and converts were spreading his work all over Reformed Germany; and of these the most important were the hymn-writer Joachim Neander, whom he encountered at school in Bremen, and Friedrich Adolf Lampe (1683–1729). In Lampe Reformed Pietism came to full flower, and the transition to another stage, that of revivalism, was also fulfilled. Lampe was brought up in Detmold by his grandfather, Generalsuperintendent Johann Jacob Zeller, a zealous Voetian who had been taken hostage by the French in 1672. After the latter’s death in 1691, Lampe went on to Bremen where he was educated at the Pädagogium and the Lycaeum, the Bremen theological faculty. From here he migrated to Franeker and Utrecht to study under a series of Coccejan professors who united the philological expertise of Coccejus with currents of living piety that Lampe had known from his youth up. Here he underwent a decisive conversion which he celebrated in a hymn of praise in thirty-six stanzas. Lampe was soon in Germany again in pastoral appointments near Cleves and then in Duisburg. It here became apparent that the German Reformed had to face some of the same problems that had already confronted their brethren in the United Provinces. John de Labadie (1610– 74), born to an ex-Calvinist family in France, now on the make, had entered the Jesuit order at the age of fifteen.20 Leaving the Jesuits in 1639, 19 20

Heiner Faulenbach, ‘Die Anfänge des Pietismus bei den Reformierten in Deutschland’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 4 (1977–8), 219. On Labadie see ch. 4, n. 10 above.

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he worked in France as a secular priest, drawing closer to the Jansenists the whole time. In 1650 he fulfilled the next stage in his pilgrimage, being converted to the Reformed church, and serving congregations in Geneva and elsewhere until he was called to Middelburg in 1666 by the reform movement of which Voetius was the centre. While he was in Geneva one of his devotional writings had attracted the attention of Spener. His Middelburg appointment did not last long; he fell foul of the Dutch authorities for his chiliastic tendencies and his biblical exegesis. Expelled in 1669, he took refuge with a house-church he had collected at the opulent convent of Herford under the protection of the Abbess, Elizabeth of the Palatinate. This refuge lasted only a couple of years until an expulsion order arrived from the Imperial courts. But even though Labadie’s expectations that they would all be joined by the elect were farfetched, his movement showed the perils of an attempt rapidly to jack up the level of devotion in a Reformed establishment, and how the fall-out from the attempt might directly affect other Reformed areas. Lampe had had direct experience of the repercussions of the Labadie affair in the three years he served as a pastor in Duisburg before being called back to Bremen in 1709. The Reformed congregation had been badly divided, those who hungered and thirsted after righteousness becoming separatists after the style of Labadie, leaving behind a very secularised rump. Lampe did much to save the day by preaching in a style to satisfy the one, and by energetic house-to-house visiting to keep an eye on the other. This experience left its mark on him when he got to Bremen. He now admitted at the outset that the church could not consist entirely of the elect; it was bound to contain some of the lost for whom Christ had not died. He therefore introduced another custom from the Lower Rhine area. He addressed the conclusion of the sermon to the elect who were required to stand and receive the word directed to them. This was ‘discriminating’ preaching indeed and an example of the way in which the revivalists were to contrive the application of moral pressure on their congregations. On the other hand, he followed his teacher at Franeker, Campegius Vitringa the Elder, in putting off the apocalypse.21 He was an active hymn-writer, and his theological and pastoral works included the first Reformed theological journal for Germany. He is credited with originating, at any rate in that part of the world, ‘the language of Canaan’, that bowdlerised form of biblical address that was taken up for theological reasons by Zinzendorf and had a long run in English Methodism.22 In 21 22

J. F. G. Goeters in Brecht and Deppermann, Geschichte des Pietismus, II, p. 376. Part of the field is covered by Mason I. Lowance, Jnr., The Language of Canaan (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).


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1720 Lampe was called back to a chair at Utrecht where he stayed until his final call to Bremen in 1727 not long before he died. The union in his own ministry of much of what had been divided between the Voetian and the Coccejan parties now bore fruit in a wide-ranging literary output for the service of the whole Reformed cause: a history of the Reformed church in Hungary and Transylvania, very successful catechisms that achieved a wide circulation, and of course the evidence that the necessities of the churches were driving part of the Reformed ministry towards revivalism.23 Rhineland Reformed churches I have shown elsewhere that this development of attitude was compacted in the case of Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (1692–1747), a village pastor near Emden, who was tempted in 1719 by the Amsterdam classis to accept an appointment in New Jersey, and there became a notable revivalist, acting in concert with the Tennent family, the celebrated revivalists of the Middle Colonies.24 It is noteworthy, however, that the Reformed communities of the Lower Rhine area had shown themselves capable of developing in two other ways. They accepted Labadism as a genuine challenge, and, while resisting the attempts of some conventicles to appoint their own teachers or get in the way of church services, knew that they had too long a history in the Dutch Reformed church to be got rid of. The Synod of Mark in 1676, and the Synod of Cleves and the General Synod of the following year, resolved that every member of the synod was bound not merely to orthodoxia, i.e., the Heidelberg confession and other official standards, but also to the studium pietatis. A series of synodical resolutions in subsequent years made it clear that the Lower Rhine churches were to pursue sanctification and inwardness of spiritual life with a quite new determination. What had been offered by Labadism was to be cultivated within the church. Here they remained true to the anthropological orientation of the Heidelberg catechism. Thus in 1687 the town council of Wesel published a resolution that ‘Almighty God is to be served not only publicly in the congregations of the church, but also privatim’, i.e., in class meetings or conventicles. Free prayer emerged from the private gatherings to supplement the liturgy in church; congregations were helped to internalise the Coccejan doctrine of the covenant of grace 23

24

On Lampe: Heppe, Geschichte des Pietismus, pp. 236–40; A. Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus (Bonn, 1880–6), I, pp. 427–54; G. Mai, Die niederdeutsche Reformbewegung (Bremen, 1979), pp. 252–301; Gerrit Snijders, F. A. Lampe (Bremen, 1961); Walter Hollweg, Die Geschichte des a¨ lteren Pietismus in Ostfriesland (Aurich, 1938), pp. 152–3. Ward, Protestant Evangelical Awakening, p. 229.

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in Christ, the work of the new race of preachers was underpinned, and the movement for piety in its Reformed shape was kept under clerical control.25 Two things, however, were not under control. The Huguenot intelligentsia in Germany were in one sense restrained, fighting their own battles in their own way against Reformed Orthodoxy on the one hand and scepticism (which meant anything to the left of Bayle) on the other, but almost inevitably drifting away from confessionalism into the pursuit of a simple Protestantism resting on sola scriptura and sola fide. Commonweal, freedom of conscience and toleration became their watchwords. This programme was convenient for the Hohenzollerns to whom they owed so much, and it seemed the only way to provide an ideological platform for a Grand Alliance against Louis XIV and accomplish anything for the Protestants abandoned to his tender mercies in France. A scholastic Orthodoxy that got in the way of this would have no sympathy in that quarter.26 So the Huguenot diaspora played its part not so much in the origins of Pietism, as in weakening the Protestant enemies they had to contend with. Tersteegen It was also fortunate for the church leaders that the most important Reformed separatist (as we have seen) was an unaggressive character little given to ecclesiastical or anti-ecclesiastical scruples. Gerhard Tersteegen pressed upon a Protestant readership the spiritual odyssey not merely of Catholic, but of Counter-Reformation, saints. This record might seem to confirm Ritschl’s belief that, in the German Reformed Church, Pietism (in his view a basically un-Protestant deviation) drew separatism after it, even if in the Rhineland the two tendencies did something to keep each other in check.27 It is remarkable, however, that despite attempts by Carmelites28 and Benedictines29 to claim Tersteegen for themselves, 25

26 27 28 29

Dr. Rothert, ‘Die Minden-Ravensbergische Kirchengeschichte’, Jahrbuch des Vereins für Westphälische Kirchengeschichte 28/9 (1928), 134; H. Heppe, Geschichte der evangelischen Kirche von Cleve-Mark und . . . Westphalen (Iserlohn, 1867), p. 243; J. Tanis, ‘The Heidelberg Catechism in the Hands of the Calvinistic Pietists’, Reformed Review 24 (1971), 156–7; W. Gobell, ¨ Die evangelische Lutherische Kirche in der Grafschaft Mark (Bethel, 1961); M. Goebel, Geschichte des christlichen Lebens in der rheinisch-westphälischen evangelischen Kirche, 3 vols. (Koblenz, 1849–52), vol. II. Pott, Reformierte Morallehren, pp. 19, 43. A. Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, p. 482. Giovanna della Croce, Gerhard Tersteegen. Neubelebung der Mystik als Ansatz einer kommenden Spiritualität (Bern, 1979). Emmanuel Jungclaussen, ‘Gerhard Tersteegens kurzer Bericht von der Mystik’, Una Sancta 1 (1988), 18–23.


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he continues to appear not merely very Protestant but very Reformed. Tersteegen went well beyond the claim that Protestants had generally been willing to admit, that examples of the true seed could be found in the Roman Catholic fold; justification by faith alone, or, as he epitomised the gospel, ‘complete denial of the world, dying to oneself, . . . God’s leadings over his elect, to purify them of their peculiarities’,30 was by no means confined to the Reformed world. If there was one thing that caused Tersteegen to lash out, it was the spectacle of that spiritual pride that put its trust in ‘peculiarities’ whether confessional or spiritual. Given his situation, it was Protestants who felt the brunt of this. ‘With what may awakened souls in these days sustain themselves after they have made a little progress on the first paths of repentance? [It is not] with immature pursuit of conversion, with powerful Babel-storming, with singular opinions of all kinds, or higher speculations . . . [still less with mounting] the golden hermetic hills.’31 Having thus smartly dispatched the distinctive clan-badges of Halle, Zinzendorf, the Inspired, the Behmenists and the Protestant Cabbalists, Tersteegen was in no mood to bow before the shibboleths of the mystics. Mystics form no particular sect, they have no principles differing from those of other Christian parties . . . Visions, revelations, remonstrances, prophecies and many other extraordinary things, a mystic may encounter without seeking them, but they do not belong to the essentials of mysticism, indeed all experienced mystics provide very important memorials in respect to such extraordinary phenomena. Mystics are not gossips of superior spirituality . . . They say little, they do and suffer much, they deny [themselves] everything, they pray without ceasing . . . Theosophy and Mysticism are quite different.32

Thus a ‘Separatist can be or become a mystic, although a true mystic finds it harder to become a Separatist: he has more important things to do’. Although not personally conforming, Tersteegen was not a Babelstormer. He spoke little of mysticism, and (in Protestant style) he spoke even less of the unio mystica. He wanted an experiential theology, but believed that even first-hand religious experience must be tested by Scripture. He was an example of what the piety of the Heidelberg catechism might turn into.33 And, though ultimately a revivalist, in his feeling 30 31 33

G. Tersteegen, Auserlesene Lebensbeschreibungen heiliger Seelen, 3rd edn (Essen, 1784–5), I, p. xiii. 32 Jungclaussen, ‘Gerhard Tersteegens kurzer Bericht’, pp. 20–1. Ibid., I, p. i. For reflections upon this theme see the essays by Dietrich Meyer, ‘Cognitio Dei Experimentalis oder “Erfahrungstheologie” bei Gottfried Arnold, Gerhard Tersteegen und Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf ’ and Hansgunter ¨ Ludewig, ‘Gerhard Tersteegen als evangelischer Mystiker’, in Dietrich Meyer and Udo Sträter (eds.), Zur Rezeption mystischer Traditionen im Protestantismus des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts (Cologne 2002), pp. 223– 40, 241–82.

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that there was not much to be done about the world in general until God set about the conversion of the Jews in earnest, there was more than a little of the Orthodox or Coccejan about him.34 Thus the experience of the great Reformed reserves on the continent was that the strictest of the Reformed Confessions, the Formula Consensus, was also the most ephemeral. In the Netherlands the decrees of the Synod of Dort retained their hold and there was a marked lack of adventurousness among the Dutch theologians in the eighteenth century. But just as in Switzerland the hard edge of the Formula Consensus was softened by the emergence of Rational Orthodoxy, so in the Netherlands the stiff opposition of the Voetians to the Coccejans diminished as the political differences between them disappeared; the concessions made by both to piety were capable of being fanned into revival by the experience of Reformed communities in New England and Scotland, and the general change in the intellectual atmosphere, which made it more difficult not to take an optimistic view of unfettered rational inquiry or to oppose toleration, opened the way to evangelical as well as other views.35 34 35

Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, p. 493. J. van den Berg, Religious Currents and Cross-Currents. Essays in Early Modern Protestantism and the Protestant Enlightenment (Leiden, 1999), pp. 256ff., 267.

5

The Reformed tradition in Britain and America

The Reformed tradition in Britain was singular without being insular. At the end of the sixteenth century the Church of England was commonly reckoned among the Reformed churches of Europe, though the party in it wishing for further reformation on the lines of the best Reformed churches in Europe was never in control. These Puritans were for the most part establishment men. Thus the confessedly Reformed party in the Church of England, whose literature was always influential abroad, was not in the position of either of the main groups of Reformed churches on the continent; it was neither setting the tone in a church establishment, nor was it a persecuted minority.1 Under Scottish armed force the very high Reformed Westminster Confession was adopted in 1643, but from the beginning its supremacy was challenged by the power of the New Model Army in which Independents and sectaries were strong, and the hopes of the Presbyterians who contributed powerfully to the return of Charles II in 1660 were badly frustrated by the duplicity of the King and a sort of White Terror launched under the aegis of the Cavalier Parliament. The famous 2000 clergy expelled from the Church for refusing to accept the Restoration Prayer Book formed the nucleus of a new kind of nonconformity; and both they and the congregations they gathered were subject to a good deal of persecution over the next generation. The Puritan tracts continued to make their way in Europe but were passé at home; and German commentators, who had been too ready to accept the Church of England as a Reformed Church, concluded (also prematurely) that the true English character had had to take refuge in the New England colonies. If, however, the Reformed establishments in New England had a more natural and unimpeded development than the Puritan minority in England they were, down to 1688, still affected by the general religious policies of British governments, by the wider policies of the Church of 1

There were of course periods when the Reformed churches in Scotland and Ireland were subject to acute persecution.

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England, and by their own persisting unwillingness to forfeit their heritage in the English establishment. The curiously ‘half-way’ situation of English Puritanism in the early seventeenth century intensified one of its special characteristics and strengthened its connexion with its lost sons in America. Safe but not in control, early Stuart Puritanism became politically quiescent and spiritually introspective. It was now that the devotional literature that had an enduring impact in Europe, the ‘practical divinity’, poured forth; and it was backed up by supplementing the official diet of the church by lectures and exercises, by sabbatarianism and efforts to achieve precision of conduct and the internalisation of the covenant theology. Puritanism as a devotional movement of the literate generated not only Bibles with appropriate notes, but a great stock of devotional manuals; these were taken to America by the emigrants, imported continually thereafter and subsequently republished in Cambridge and Boston. Hambrick-Stowe insists that these manuals are a fair index of Puritan piety in America; the diary references to private devotion show them in use, and the battered condition of the surviving copies bespeak their continued employment.2 The Puritans did for the Reformed tradition much of what Arndt did for the Lutherans. They made good use of Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas a` Kempis, and, like Arndt, were a vehicle of them to a wider public. Also like Arndt they were eminent protagonists of the current vogue of renewing Christianity by establishing meditation in the home and heart; indeed ‘closet religion’ became one of their characteristics. For this purpose the Puritans showed a curious fondness for the devotional literature of the Counter-Reformation. The Reformed tradition had tended to argue for a political and social policy as well as a reform of the church; but, when all these were out of reach, and when in the later seventeenth century the world of business was increasingly abandoned by the state to laisser-faire, it was very important for the descendants of the Puritans that the world of closet religion was left to them. Nor were they modest about what could be achieved there. They claimed mystical union with God in a way that would have horrified many Lutherans, not least Jakob Bohme. ¨ We are implanted into Christ by a lovely fruitful faith, says Robert Bolton, ‘and blessedly knit into Him by His Spirit, as fast as the sinews of His Precious Body are knit into his bones His Flesh to His sinews and His Skin to His Flesh’.3 Not only was Jesus called the Christ, so were all the true members of his congregation. 2 3

Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety (Chapel Hill, 1982), p. vii. Quoted in G. S. Wakefield, Puritan Devotion. Its Place in the Development of Christian Piety (London, 1957), p. 33.


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There is a certain irony in the fact that when the Quakers began to preach Christian perfection, Presbyterians reverted to Protestant type, and (as George Fox found) to ‘roare up for sinne in their pulpits. Itt was all their workes to plead for it.’4 (Equally ironical was the fact that the spiritualising tendency of the Quakers greatly increased the appeal of Jakob Bohme.) ¨ Nevertheless there was a distinctive stamp to the Reformed treatment of the mystical tradition of the past. As Francke analysed the steps in Pietist conversion, so the Puritans analysed the stages in the mystical life. The traditional periodisation had been that of purgatio, illuminatio, and unio; the Puritans scored an advantage over the Catholics by moving mystical union, conversion, into the first stage of their doctrinally framed scheme of justification, sanctification and glorification. Mystical union, in the Catholic schemes the ultimate reward of a spiritual elite, was now available to all the faithful, and available where it was most needed, at the beginning of the saint’s pilgrimage, as encouragement for everything ahead. For pilgrimage was emphatically the Puritan view of the Christian life, and the pilgrim was the Puritan hero-type as much as the son of toil, horny-handed but right with God, was that of the later Primitive Methodists. It did not need Bunyan to teach the Puritan that his pilgrimage was likely to be a long and testing experience, that final perseverance was as rare a quality in its way as that which enabled Catholic mystics to mount the seven rungs on the ladder to God. Possessed of the need to penetrate the allegories that he would encounter on the way, the Puritan knew that he must realise within himself the pilgrimage of the people of God in the Bible. Their journey through the wilderness was a type of the death and resurrection of Christ, and the Puritan must prayerfully identify himself with the whole story. Indeed for many Christians glorification was so distant from justification that they would be bound to wonder at some times whether the journey they were on was actually the journey to the heavenly kingdom, whether the faith they had was really the justifying faith which they had claimed at the beginning. It was indeed one of the characteristics of English Puritans that the doctrine of predestination seemed not to convey the assurance that it brought to most of the Reformed world. Bunyan was not alone in stressing ‘what I felt, what I did smartingly feel’;5 more than most, the English Puritan needed to feel his election sure, as well as to acknowledge the biblical promises and to recognise the signs in himself. Despite Foxe’s Book of Martyrs England did not rival the great compendiums of godly lives produced on the continent like Reitz’s 4 5

G. F. Nuttall, The Welsh Saints (Cardiff, 1957), pp. 59, 68. Grace Abounding, para. 276.

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History of the Regenerate, nor the attempt to produce a pedigree for the radical Protestant mystic like Gottfried Arnold’s History of Churches and Heretics, but a large part of exemplary Puritan reading was in fact constituted by the lives of godly men, often attached to their funeral sermons, and the sheer quantity of autobiographical writing, never intended for publication and only seeing the light of day in recent times, is a testimony to the self-examination that went on.6 It was not only the failure of political hopes that aggravated the desire for reassurance. The changes in English church life introduced by Charles I and Laud marginalised the Calvinist mainstream into a position at once unorthodox and subversive. This ‘hijacking’7 was so unpalatable to the political nation that a united front formed against the king and rendered him powerless. Inevitably a zealous minority among the Puritans saw the opportunity to make the gains in church and state that had eluded them for so long; equally inevitably, they divided the united front. The outbreak of civil war marked an increase in the royal strength, and the check to that increase by the New Model Army and the execution of the king himself were all results unwelcome to the Presbyterians. This was more than a political setback. The Puritans had shared the apocalyptic language current in the England of their day; an England in which since Thomas Brightman (1562–1607) apocalyptic study had become a field of sophisticated investigation, and had been absorbed into the national tradition. In the early 1640s the Clavis apocalyptica of Joseph Mede (Milton’s tutor at Cambridge) attained European fame by its synchronisation of apparently disparate events in the book of Revelation;8 indeed part of the spur to perseverance had been the happy vision of Christ’s return, and the beatific prospect of completing reform in church and state. What had actually occurred was the emergence of sects, many with much more radical apocalyptic views; when it could be maintained that the execution of Charles I was necessary because he was the tenth and final horn of the fourth beast of the book of Daniel, and that, Babylon having now fallen, the way was open for the monarchy of Christ himself, it was plain to the Presbyterians that the end-time afforded more possibilities than they had reckoned on. The end of Puritan rule nevertheless seemed to afford the opportunity to realise the opportunity for a reformed national church under a king restored under Presbyterian auspices. 6 7 8

For a survey of all this literature see my introduction to the Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley, XVIII: Journal & Diaries I, pp. 1–36, 105–18. John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 11. Katherine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1654 (Oxford, 1979), p. 179.


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Alas! This opportunity disappeared even quicker than the last; to their consternation the Presbyterians found themselves not only nonconformists but persecuted nonconformists like the rest of the hated sects. The tortured conscience of an expelled minister like Philip Henry, who could not bring himself to gather congregations against the national church, tells its own story. So does that of his son, the famous Bible commentator Matthew Henry, for whom rural evangelism was life and breath, and who preached a course of sermons on the Four Last Things – death, judgement, hell and heaven – apparently without raising the question of when Christ would appear in glory.9 With a Catholic on the throne and with a public tendency to panic at fears of sectarian uprising enduring for many years after the Restoration, both Puritan and non-Puritan inquirers into the Last Things (like Newton) tended to keep quiet about their convictions. It appears, however, that Richard Baxter had reached settled convictions on this matter before the imprisonment in 1685 that enabled him to give his whole mind to the subject. During the previous twenty years Baxter had sought repeatedly to secure an accommodation with the church establishment with no success at all, and not unnaturally he became disillusioned at the prospect. In the end, however, he came to the conclusion, abhorrent to the Puritan tradition as a whole, that the Papacy was not Antichrist, that there was to be no millennial rule of Christ, that God ruled through Christian Emperors and national churches, that the date, 1697, pressed on him by Thomas Beverley for the end of the world was blasphemous, perhaps even that William III might bring off the coup which had eluded the Westminster Assembly, Oliver Cromwell, Richard Cromwell and General Monk and establish the Christian Empire for which he now yearned.10 Under the guise of expounding what the scriptural prophecies actually said, this was to put off the apocalypse not, as in the contemporaneous case of Spener, into the middle distance, but into oblivion. Bunyan and for that matter Baxter were still capable of a ravishing vision of the heavenly city, the pilgrim’s ultimate goal,11 but it is hard not to feel that the grand panorama that had been held by so many with such certainty in mid-century, of God’s blow at Antichrist at the Reformation now being within sight of completion, and there being no clear limits to what might be achieved by the pouring out of His Spirit in these latter days, was losing its urgency and imminence. It fared rather better 9 10

11

The Works of Matthew Henry, ed. W. Tong (London, 1726), p. 42. On all this see W. M. Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium (London, 1979); N. H. Keeble and G. F. Nuttall (eds.), Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (Oxford, 1991), no. 1158. G. F. Nuttall, Studies in English Dissent (Weston Rhyn, 2002), p. 76.

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in America, partly because the laudable desire to rebut the Orthodox calumny, that America was the outer darkness where the lost were cast with weeping and gnashing of teeth, had favoured the exegesis that she might well be the privileged site of the Second Coming; indeed there was no reason why America should not host that great missing sign-post to the end, the conversion of the Jews. For had not Thorowgood satisfied himself that the native Indians were in fact Jews, and ‘the English nation in shewing kindness to the aboriginal natives of America may possibly [have been showing] kindness to Israelites unawares’. And given the glorious abundance of God’s grace at the end-time, was it not actually America’s turn? Asia, Africa and Europe have, each of them, had a glorious gospel-day; none therefore will be grieved at anyone’s pleading that America may be made a coparcener with her sisters in the free and sovereign grace of God . . . And when the Messiah shall have gathered his sheep belonging to this his American fold; his churches [sic] musick being then compleat in harmony, the whole universe shall ring again with seraphical acclamations ONE FLOCK! ONE SHEPHERD!12

Sewall was even prepared to draw ammunition from the e´ migré Huguenot apocalyptist in the United Provinces, Pierre Jurieu; he had correctly located the slaying of the witnesses, another sign of the end, in the sufferings of his own people in the Cévennes. Surely then a Second Advent in New England could not be far behind.13 Samuel Willard, the great systematician of New England, was less optimistic. It was clear to him in 1700 that the general calling of the Jews had not yet taken place, and that there would be no dramatic developments until it had: ‘It is night at present, and the terrors of it are apt to affright us; but the day will break, and let us refresh ourselves with that consideration . . . It will not be long before these days commence.’14 But when he came to produce his Compleat Body of Divinity in two hundred and fifty lectures15 he preserved a deafening silence about the Last Things. Similarly Thomas Shepard could preach on the themes that ‘true believers do with hope expect the Second Coming of Christ’, on ‘the certainty of Christ’s Coming’ and that ‘Christ will not tarry once his time is come’ without attempting to ascribe a date to the drama. 12 13 14 15

Samuel Sewall, Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica ad Aspectum Novi Orbis configurata (Boston, Mass., 2nd edn, 1727 [1st edn 1697]), Dedication. Samuel Sewall, Proposals Touching the Accomplishment of Prophecies (Boston, Mass., 1713), p. 10. Samuel Willard, The Fountain Opened; or the admirable Blessings plentifully to be dispensed at the National Conversion of the Jews (n.pl., 3rd edn, 1727), pp. 2, 11. Boston, Mass., 1726.


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The most important weather-gauge, however, was constituted by those indefatigable propagandists, Increase and Cotton Mather. Both were full of policy prescriptions and had inevitably to prescribe for New England as well as for the churches. Increase (1639–1723) did not care too much for New England, and seems to have outlived any conviction that his prescriptions could possibly work. It is the more interesting therefore that he represented a New England Reformed version of the Lutheran Orthodox. Armed with the federal theology which the Puritans took to America, he was a master of the jeremiad in its great days, interpreting the troubles of New England as God’s judgements upon its sins, and prescribing accordingly. The civil authorities should do what they could by enforcing wholesome laws for moral behaviour and church attendance. The churches should cooperate by getting the people to ‘own’ or renew the local covenant with God. And the ministry should put the screw upon the people by seeking to restore regeneration as the test for church membership. Increase Mather’s first prescription was to be undergirded by private enterprise in the modish English manner. He had a copy of Josiah Woodward’s Account of the Rise and Progress of the Religious Societies in the City of London (1699) and both he and his son Cotton (1663–1728), who in 1683 became his ministerial colleague, pushed societies of all kinds both spiritual and law-enforcing. ‘Owning the covenant’ became one of the characteristics of the New England scene, but it was a graft upon the covenant theology they brought with them. To the original theology was added the requirement that to qualify for church membership candidates must give an acceptable testimony to a work of grace within, to what like Bunyan they might ‘smartingly feel’. This requirement, appropriate when saints were to be gathered out of the parish, created problems in America. It put a barrier to church membership to the children of regenerate communicants who arrived already baptised, and put a stop to the baptism of children of non-communicant adherents. Thus the small pool of church members in New England had to be replenished from the very small pool of candidates baptised in infancy. When in 1662 a Massachusetts synod insisted that church membership be confined to ‘confederate visible believers . . . and their infant seed’, they at the same time created a class of half-way members, subject to church discipline, and capable of transmitting baptism, but excluded from the Lord’s Supper and from voting in church affairs. No testimony of regeneration was required from half-way members, simply the act of ‘owning’ the baptismal covenant made for them by their parents. By this device the churches enlarged their formal constituency, the ministry obtained a homiletic lever to use on future occasions, and half-way members could secure baptism for their

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children. The procedures for owning the covenant varied from parish to parish, and on occasion evoked a community response reminiscent of a revival.16 The war years of the 1670s brought a flurry of covenant renewals, and in 1677 Increase Mather began a campaign to persuade all the churches in Massachusetts to renew their covenants. Thus in the hour of trial New England was taken back to its roots. It was also taken on to a long-running controversy led by one of Cotton Mather’s sharpest critics. Mather’s massive two-decker Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) had been intended to establish the providential status of New England against the denigration of the European Orthodox. From a Puritan point of view, however, he got off on the wrong foot from the start. The hand of God in the creation of New England he descried in the simultaneity of the discovery of America, the Reformation and ‘the resurrection of literature’ or Renaissance. The invention of printing had denied the devil any possibility of excluding the new settlers from ‘the two benefits, Literature and Religion’. Desperate to put American culture on the map, he sought a foothold in the most energetic spiritual movement of his middle years, that of Halle Pietism. He took up with Arndt, corresponded strenuously with ‘the incomparable Dr Franckius’, advocated his institutions, and asked A. W. Bohme, ¨ the Pietist chaplain to Queen Anne’s consort, Prince George of Denmark, to get a copy of the Magnalia to ‘our [Hallesian] friends in the Lower Saxony’, for it would ‘be a little serviceable to their glorious intentions’, ‘the American Puritanism [being] . . . much of a piece with the Frederician Pietism’.17 Mather’s selfconscious Europeanism is hardly surprising; his father, Increase, who did as much as anyone to shape the legend of New England as Immanuel’s land, spent his life trying to get back to old England;18 his uncle Nathaniel and his brother Samuel actually got back; while his son Samuel not only continued the correspondence with Francke’s son, but published a life of the great August Hermann, theologus incomparabilis,19 including material by the pro-rector of Halle, and an account of religious events in the Lutheran world down to the revival in Livonia, all addressed to the college at Harvard. It is not easy to imagine the hand of friendship being extended to Lutheran Pietism from the top drawer of any of the European Reformed systems at that date, but Mather’s doctrine, the starting point of so much 16

17 18 19

J. M. Bunsted, The Great Awakening and the Beginnings of Evangelical Pietism (Waltham, Miss., 1970), pp. 24–7. Cf. T. Prince, Christian History (Boston, Mass., 1743–5), pp. 108–12. Selected Letters of Cotton Mather, ed. K. Silverman (Baton Rouge, La., 1971), pp. xvi, 89, 215. M. G. Hall, The Last American Puritan (Middletown, Conn., 1988), pp. 61–2, 65, 76, 269, 272–3, 280–2. S. Mather, Vita B. Augusti Hermanni Franckii (Boston, Mass. [1733]), p. 1.


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later evangelical propaganda as to convince unwary critics that the whole notion of the Great Awakening was a literary fiction, had a practical as well as an ideological end. Massachusetts needed a better charter after the ravages of James II, and it needed some shield against the constant external pressure from France. This shield was the more necessary to Mather as he thought that the religious societies had done their work before the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. Even the pure church, it seemed, would not save New England. It now appeared to Mather that the pure church would not usher in the millennium; the millennium would have to usher in the pure church. Halle, with its plans for universal regeneration, its efforts to convert the Jews, its missions, was less significant as empirical evidence of the way the kingdom of God might be realised than it was as a sign of the end-time. In the years after the peace of Utrecht, when in England Archbishop Wake was seeking to dam the international tide of Popery by negotiating Protestant Union, Mather in New England was pursuing Christian union on the basis of the simple ‘MAXIMS OF PIETY’ (always in upper case) as a certain sign that the millennium was near. This transformation in Mather was accompanied by a steady heightening of the emotional temper. For all the Mathers’ championship of a pure and narrow church, and of owning the covenant, it is not surprising that the Oxford English Dictionary attributes to him the first use of the word ‘revival’ in the technical religious sense. Mather did not live to see it on any great scale, and those who practised it on a small scale were his chief critics. First among them was Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729). Stoddard, minister of Northampton, Mass., from 1669, was a man of abounding strength and vitality. Succeeding the first minister of the town, he married his predecessor’s widow, added twelve children to her three, and reinforced his spiritual influence by a great network of family connexions in the Connecticut valley. He got the town meeting to build a good road to Boston, and came down it annually until he was eighty to preach at the Harvard commencement when most of the ministers were present; and when war broke out in 1675, he, almost singlehandedly, forced the magistrates to drop their intention of abandoning the defence of Northampton. He thus acquired a singular resonance both southwards down the Connecticut valley, and eastwards towards Boston, the stronghold of the Mathers. He was also an innovator, and began to use the half-way covenant when it was still a relative novelty. A standard statement was prepared in which the individual acknowledged the teaching and government of the church in return for instruction. In three months 105 people, virtually all the eligible children of the parish, had owned the covenant; but over the next five years Stoddard admitted only nineteen

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new communicants. As a preparatory stage towards church membership the half-way covenant was a failure, and in 1677 Stoddard discarded it and church covenants as well.20 Stoddard’s new broom did not stop there. He was not interested in the millennial question, and was here sharply distinguished not only from the Mathers but from his celebrated grandson, Jonathan Edwards. In consequence Stoddard gave new prominence to another doctrine from the Puritan treasury, that of ‘preparation’. From the beginning the Reformed tradition, not least in New England, had found ways of softening the edges of the doctrine of the sovereignty of God. The date of the final consummation of all things was of course in the hands of God alone; but Cotton Mather was not the only policy-maker fertile in suggestions for inducing God to bring it about more quickly. Stoddard at least offered relief from all this by giving his mind to the practical question of how to undo the ruinous effects of what amounted to a Protestant Jansenism, which narrowed the basis of the church at the very moment when it was on trial. It was the same story with that other favourite topic of British Puritan converse, conversion. Conversion, the ultimate spiritual prize, was also the work of God alone, and the founding fathers had required candidates for church membership to testify to this work of grace. But not only had the Reformers thought of ways in which the heart might be prepared to be grasped by grace, the Scripture itself had testified that the Law was a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ. This raised a host of other questions. How effective a schoolmaster was the Law? How long and imperceptible was the progress from conviction under the Law to the assurance of saving grace? And practical religion had its counterpart to the issue in moral philosophy, whether ethics was primarily a matter of the will or the understanding: if the study of the passions was part of ethics, how far did regeneration involve the affective side of human nature?21 Puritan thinkers had worked out their own morphology of the Christian life in which a man’s pilgrimage from sin to salvation corresponded, hopefully, with the three stages of God’s relation with man, viz. vocation, justification and sanctification. Stoddard could not have repudiated this frame of mind and got a hearing; when he came out in favour of permitting all but the scandalous to partake of the sacraments, Stoddard was in effect pushing sacramental observance forward from the period of assurance into the period of preparation. 20 21

J. W. Jones, The Shattered Synthesis (New Haven, 1973), p. 106; R. G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant (Princeton, 1969), pp. 251–3. N. Pettit, The Heart Prepared (New Haven, 1966), pp. 45–7; W. Walker, History of the Congregational Churches in the U.S. (New York, 1894), pp. 252–3.


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Stoddard, moreover, latched on to another discussion which was not new, and which was to be revived in a strange context by Wesley: whether the Lord’s Supper could be regarded as a converting ordinance. Proclaiming that ‘all men of competent knowledge’ may partake of the sacrament, ‘though they know themselves to be in a natural condition’, he held that ‘this ordinance had a proper tendency of its own nature to convert men’. Preparation might take a long time but conversion (and here Stoddard almost anticipated the objections which the Moravians would make to the Puritan as well as the Franckean scheme) was wrought in the twinkling of an eye. For this reason, if for no other, to subject candidates for church membership to an inquisition about the work of grace within could not yield a useful result.22 In all these ways Stoddard was easing his path by reducing the burdens that the New England Way had placed on the flock, but in the Reformed manner he introduced some more by the back door: ‘the use of this discourse [he concluded a vast sermon on the Nature of Saving Conversion (1719)] is of EXHORTATION to labor to be converted’. A further implication was unmistakable. If salvation was prepared by the ordinances of the church, and if it was important to get as many people prepared as possible, the rational ideal was that of a national church and not the gathered community of visible saints. The ‘light of nature’ suggested to Stoddard that the ideal polity was that of the Church of Scotland. All this might be poison to the Mathers, and one of the objects of writing the Magnalia Christi Americana was to show that Congregationalism was the true New England tradition; but it became an orthodoxy in the Connecticut valley, and, as Jonathan Edwards related in a famous passage in 1736, by beating the drum of the Law, Voetian-style, Stoddard produced results:23 he had five harvests, as he called them. The first was about 57 years ago; the second about 53; the third about 40; the fourth about 24; the fifth and last about 18 years ago . . . Those about 53, and 40, and 24 years ago, were much greater than either the first or the last: but in each of them, I have heard my grandfather say, the greater part of the young people in the town seemed to be mainly concerned for their eternal salvation.

Moreover, as he grew older Stoddard championed a charismatic ministry of a style that was becoming fashionable in the Church of Scotland, even more than he championed the sacraments, and almost brought the Mathers to terms. When he produced his Guide to Christ (1714), Cotton 22 23

Pettit, Heart Prepared, pp. 201–4. Jonathan Edwards, Works, ed. S. E. Dwight and E. Hickman, 2 vols. (London, 1834; repr. Edinburgh, 1974), I, p. 346.

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Mather wrote a preface asserting that the two were in complete agreement except on the matter of the use of communion. In 1716 Mather even urged revivals right across the province on a European pattern designed to secure the triumph of Protestantism over its Roman Catholic enemies. And as preaching began to compress the familiar progress from sin to assurance into the crucial phase of the New Birth, the revivals began, most notably at Windham, Conn., in 1721.24 The most famous of Stoddard’s harvests, because it was described in the most famous tract of the whole revival, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God . . . in Northampton by his grandson and successor in the parish, Jonathan Edwards (1737), occurred after his death. This tract gave a classic account of the diffusion of revival by contagion, and has often been regarded as the beginning of the Great Awakening. This it was not. Stoddard had been no more able than the Mathers to generate a great awakening as distinct from quite local revivals, and the outcome of Edwards’s preaching in ‘Northampton and the neighbouring towns and villages’ differed little in scale from that of his grandfather. Moreover the tract was first published in England with a commendation by the eminent Congregationalists Isaac Watts and John Guyse; this showed, as Steinmetz’s German edition showed still more clearly, that the significance of the pamphlet lay less in the importance of what it reported, than in the way it corresponded to hopes and fears much more widely held. Neither the impact on America of the constant reporting of developments in European Protestantism, nor the emigration there of men like Frelinghuysen, had been sufficient to generate a really great awakening. The heavy hand of the Reformed ministry needed to be loosened before a dramatic result could be achieved. This happened with two surprise arrivals from the Middle Colonies, George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent. Nevertheless, on the brink of the Revival the Reformed ministry in New England had argued itself through Puritan presuppositions to a position characteristic of later evangelical attitudes that had not been evident in those presuppositions, viz. that if the Christian life did not begin with conversion it would probably not begin at all. They had also managed to slough off a great heritage of the occult beliefs and practices that still clung round the Lutheran world.25 This was not altogether their own achievement, for by about 1720 imports of occult literature from England had more or less dried up; with the partial exception of 24

25

C. Mather, Menachem (1716), pp. 39–42; W. F. Willingham, ‘Religious Conversion . . . in Windham, Conn., 1723–24’, Societas 6 (1976), 109–19; Prince, Christian History, pp. 129–34. Jon Butler, ‘Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600–1760’, American Historical Review 84 (1979), 317–46.


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almanacs, the English publishers were ceasing to find a market for this kind of thing. To what had been happening there we must now turn. Inside the English establishment many of the things that had accompanied the development of Pietism in the Lutheran world made a brief but spectacular entry in quarters that were to leave no mark on the development of evangelicalism. Newton continued to play with Paracelsianism, without committing himself to it, notwithstanding that there was now little magic left in alchemy.26 The character that made Newton the butt of Keynes’s description as ‘the last magician’ nevertheless provided him with a link to his friends the Cambridge Platonists, and sustained his role as ‘the last of the interpreters of God’s will in action, living on the eve of the fulfilment of times’, at the moment when Paracelsianism received a fresh impulse from van Helmont.27 Paracelsus had believed that the Day of Judgement was fast approaching, and among Newton’s contemporaries there was a prevailing sense that the revolution of knowledge and the unsealing of the prophetic books were two aspects of God’s plan for the restoration of the world. The full Renaissance programme of Hermeticism and magic was at this time kept up in England by the curious group of Cambridge Platonists gathered around Ralph Cudworth, Master of Christ’s, and one of his fellows, Henry More. In 1670 More met the younger van Helmont when he came to England, bringing as always the Cabbala with him. More persuaded him to visit the young Anne, Viscountess Conway, who suffered debilitating headaches. Van Helmont’s alchemy did no good at all, but he persuaded Lady Conway to see her own suffering in cabbalistic terms as part of the divine redemptive process leading to universal salvation. Henry More was dismayed at this, but the cabbalistic treatise she eventually wrote, a refutation of Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza, was the kind of thing the Cambridge Platonists stood for, and the kind of science that Newton was anxious to rebut. More followed Joseph Mede in his interpretation of the Last Things, which meant that he too expected the end before long. Not surprisingly, ‘his temper was Sanguine; yet with a due quantity of Noble Melancholy that was mix’d with it: As it was Aristotle’s Observation, “That all persons eminent, whether in Philosophy, Politicks, or any other Arts, do partake pretty much of the Melancholick Constitution”.’28 26 27 28

F. E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 168–74. Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 8, 11. Richard Ward, The Life of the Learned and Pious Dr. Henry More [1710], ed. M. F. Howard (London, 1911), pp. 184, 230; Aharon Lichtenstein, Henry More. The Rational Theology of a Cambridge Platonist (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. viii, 106–7; Allison P. Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah Century. The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont, 1614–1698 (Leiden, 1999), pp. xv–xvi.

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Yet brightly as shone the light of the Cambridge Platonists, their efforts to simplify the religious understanding of the world were soon forgotten in favour of other methods. In the same way, Newton’s expectation of the approaching Last Things found fewer hearers, and though his disciple and successor in the chair of mathematics at Cambridge, William Whiston, tried to keep up the notion of a fairly prompt end to all things,29 even this fell victim to a change of atmosphere and of scholarly fashion. In 1650 men had defined themselves by reference to the Scriptures, but in the Augustan age the patterns were taken from Roman history and politics. Satirists evoked not Jeremiah but Juvenal, legislators not Moses but the Roman senate, moralists not Hebraic righteousness but Roman virtue, not the end of all things but that epitome of short-termism, the balance-sheet.30 And right on cue came the learned Anglican Dr Whitby to explain that this change of perspective was what the Bible had all along intended. The second volume of his Paraphrase and Commentary on the New Testament (1703) contained31 ‘A Treatise of the true Millennium: showing that it is not a reign of persons raised from the dead, but of the Church flourishing gloriously for a thousand years after the conversion of the Jews and the Flowing in of all nations to them thus converted to the Christian Faith’. Daniel Whitby, in short, was the inventor of the post-millennial scheme. The ordinary operations of divine grace would on this view be enough, given the thousand years or so, to convert the nations, destroy the Papacy, and get everything ready for the Second Advent. The balance-sheet was perhaps a more attractive prospect than this enervating perspective. As the doughty old hyper John Gill was to complain in 1776, the millennial age was supposed to include the binding of Satan, and of this there was no sign whatever. What was obvious was ‘the decline in the reformed churches both as to doctrine, discipline, and conversation’.32 The anxieties generated by this decline were to initiate a major change of tack and of inspiration, and to bring about the emergence of evangelicalism in the West. 29

30

31 32

William Whiston, An Essay on the Revelation of Saint John, so far as concerns the Past and Present Times (Cambridge, 1706). In the edn of 1744, p. 298, Whiston reckoned that the battering which the Papacy suffered in 1736 at the hands of the kings of Spain, France and the Two Sicilies was one of the worst years it had had since the Reformation, another encouraging sign of the imminence of the end. Stephen N. Zwicker, ‘England, Israel and the Triumph of Roman Virtue’, in Richard H. Popkin (ed.), Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, 1650– 1800 (Leiden, 1988), pp. 37–64. II, pp. 247–78. John Gill, An exposition of the Revelation of St John the Divine (London, 1776), p. 229.

6

Zinzendorf

Hostility to Zinzendorf If the eccentric Lusatian Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700– 60) was not an evangelical it would be hard to know how to classify him; but he tested the boundaries of evangelical accommodation to the limit, and the torrent of abuse that he encountered in the press, which amounted to a major literary industry, was by no means all from predestined opponents on the side of Lutheran Orthodoxy. And all this notwithstanding that the Renewed Unity of the Brethren which he launched from his estate at Herrnhut acquired an honourable place in the history of Protestant missions, and generated some of the most dramatic of all religious revivals in the former Swedish territories east of the Baltic.1 For this there were two main reasons. The first was that the great puzzle for the count’s biographers was his extraordinary capacity to combine a great ability to make a good first impression with an even greater inability to keep the loyalty of men of independent mind. Even two of the men who did come through this stringent test, Spangenberg, who at the end of Zinzendorf’s life took control of the community and rescued something from the spiritual and financial morass into which Zinzendorf got it, and the Baron von Schrautenbach, one of his eighteenth-century biographers and admirers, bore witness to the toll it took. Spangenberg admitted candidly that ‘I cannot deny that to me his addresses often appeared paradoxical and his methods of business extraordinary. I must also admit that I was often reluctant towards them, and on this account not seldom let myself out in my free way.’2 Schrautenbach was even more candid, comparing

1 2

For an account of these events see my Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 144–55. A. G. Spangenberg, Declaration u¨ ber die Zeither gegen uns ausgegangen Beschuldigungen (Leipzig and Gorlitz, ¨ 1751), p. 18. Repr. in Olms edn of the works of Zinzendorf (Hildesheim, 1962– ) (cited below as Zinzendorf Werke), here Ergänzungsband V.

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Zinzendorf with Cromwell not just as a hero but as a hypocrite and manipulator.3 As a target of friendly fire on this scale, the count might be thought to need no enemies, but the long-running feud between him and his old friends at Halle was probably the worst outbreak of bad blood in the evangelical ranks in the eighteenth century. Hitherto this feud has seemed sufficiently accounted for by Zinzendorf ’s rebellion against the scheme of conversion advocated by Francke, the centrepiece of which was the Busskampf or penitential struggle, in favour of rapid or e` ven instantaneous conversion, and by the hostilities generated by Spangenberg during the brief period in which he enjoyed a half-appointment at Halle, 1731–3. But it now appears that the young count had been something of a nuisance when he had been a schoolboy at Halle, trading on his social standing to report some misdemeanour by Gotthilf August Francke to his father, the great Professor August Hermann Francke.4 It did not help that after the death of the latter in 1727 the former became head of the Halle institutions, and much preoccupied with the defence of his father’s heritage. It has also become apparent that while still a boy Zinzendorf aspired not merely to reconcile Halle and Wittenberg, but to play a leading role in the active negotiations for church union that went on after the War of the Spanish Succession, again a presumptuous intervention in policy which was not well received by the elder Francke.5 An esoteric theology? Thus the personal misjudgements which marked Zinzendorf ’s whole career began early; but they were not the only cause for suspicion. He was widely accused of teaching a secret or esoteric doctrine, or at least of practising a disciplina arcani among the Brethren.6 It was a particularly sore point with Bengel that he would not have preaching about the millennium,7 and certainly (as we shall see) did not want it in the Litany of the Wounds. If the count had his secrets there was no saying 3

4 5

6 7

Ludwig Carl Freiherr von Schrautenbach, Der Graf von Zinzendorf und die Brüdergemeine seiner Zeit (Gnadau, 1851); Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2, Bd. IX, p. 176. For the full story see Hans Schneider, ‘Die “zurnenden ¨ Mutterkinder”. Der Konflikt zwischen Halle und Herrnhut’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 19 (2003), 37–66. This theme is explored by Thilo Daniel, Nikolaus von Zinzendorfs Beteiligung an den InnerProtestantischen Einigungsbestrebungen des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts. Biographie und Theologie, 1716–1723 (Marburg, 2000). Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband III, pp. 328–9. Johann Albrecht Bengel, Abriss der sogenannten Brüdergemeine in Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2, Bd. X, p. 266.

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what might be going on behind closed doors in the Brudergemeine. ¨ And certainly the count kept secret the documents explaining why he could not be appointed Abbot of St George in Wurttemberg, ¨ and, yet more suspicious, held to the view that reading the whole Bible was dangerous for some people, that the Bible as a whole should not be printed but circulated from hand to hand amongst the elect in manuscript, while anthologies of important passages were published for the hoi polloi.8 Of course there were denials of the existence of any disciplina arcani, and explanations why some things were better kept within the flock;9 but a French scholar has written a huge treatise on Zinzendorf ’s esoteric doctrine10 without at the end quite clarifying what it was. His claim is that this esoterism was not an institutionalised affair with initiating practices like freemasonry, but an anti-institutional spiritual conception, with a long Christian tradition behind it.11 He maintained that Spangenberg approved his master’s refusal to cast all his pearls before swine, but that, when in the 1750s he began to push the Moravian community back towards Lutheran Orthodoxy, he opted for the count’s theologia publica which was more susceptible of general acceptance; he did not deny or admit the arcane teaching preserved in the hearts of the elect to whom alone and between whom alone it could be communicated.12 And it is certainly true that the great nineteenth-century expositors of Herrnhut like Plitt13 and Becker14 mention the existence of an arcane theology without making anything of it. Like Francke, Zinzendorf made an absolute distinction between the unregenerate but baptised conformist and the regenerate Christian who had received the spirit of God. This afforded grounds for treating the two classes differently; yet Zinzendorf knew three things: (1) that the original defensive reasons for a measure of secrecy in the early church no longer applied; (2) that his own belief that the end of time was not too far off might well be held to justify a change of policy; and (3) that Gottfried Arnold had argued that with the invention of printing nothing was secret any more, a fact peculiarly difficult for the original sense of the mystical theology as access to hidden truths. Yet a whole section of his London Sermons15 is devoted to esoteric theology. 8 9 10 11 13 14 15

Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband III, pp. 529, 470. Daniel, Nikolaus von Zinzendorfs Beteiligung, p. 177. ´ erique de Zinzendorf (1700–1760) (Paris, 1969). Pierre Deghaye, La Doctrine Esot´ 12 Ibid., pp. 8–9. Ibid., Avant-propos. H. Plitt, Zinzendorfs Theologie (Gotha, 1869–74), I, p. 127; III, pp. 194–5. Bernhard Becker, Zinzendorf im Verhältnis zu Philosophie und Kirchentum seiner Zeit (Leipzig, 1886), pp. 398, 369. Zinzendorf Werke, Hauptschriften V, pp. 256–76.

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All this is true; it helps to explain the suspicion to which he was subject; and it was no doubt an expression in Zinzendorf of a more general Pietist desire to achieve a separation between the children of God and the children of this world. This, however, hardly justifies the wider attempt of Deghaye to argue that Zinzendorf ’s habitual inconsistencies, the natural fruit of an autodidact who scorned to speak precisely,16 form an overarching totality of antithetical propositions which cannot be separated.17 It may be, as Deghaye thinks, that in this matter Zinzendorf, like earlier evangelicals, was influenced by the Cabbala, the emanatist principles of which bore a resemblance to the Gnosis, starting from Nothingness and multiplying itself in hypostases, each of which represents the whole, which in the end would be glorified when manifested in the Saviour. It can be shown that the count’s grandmother, under whom he was brought up, collected cabbalistic works and that he knew them; that on his Grand Tour he sought out Jacques Basnage (1683–1752), a refugee Huguenot in the Netherlands, whose celebrated History of the Jews gave a lengthy (unfriendly) commentary on the Cabbala; that the minuscule court at Ebersdorf, from which he took his wife and which certainly influenced him permanently, was in touch with the Christian cabbalists;18 that Oetinger, who (as will transpire later)19 was the leading cabbalist of his day, flirted briefly with the count in the early 1730s; and that Zinzendorf ’s singular views of the parousia or Second Coming may well have been influenced by the cabbalistic construction of the Matthean text that where two or three are gathered together studying the words of the Torah, the Chekhina or divine presence is with them: i.e., in his view the parousia is in the hearts of the elect. But at the end Deghaye had to admit that Zinzendorf was no true cabbalist.20 What he has actually shown is that like all the other early evangelicals Zinzendorf was eclectic. There are in fact simpler approaches to what he became. Zinzendorf and Mysticism Zinzendorf was not only a godson of Spener, and the grandson of one of Spener’s favourite women, he retained much of Spener’s frame of mind throughout his life: his hope of better times, his emphasis on fellowship, his approach to the Jews, his belief that Christ was the subject of the Old Testament. The Halle party hoped that he would become one of the quintessential ‘pious counts’ who did so much for the support of the 16 18 20

17 Deghaye La Doctrine Esot´ ´ erique, pp. 671–2. Zinzendorf Werke, Hauptschriften I, p. ix. 19 In chapter 9 below. Daniel, Nikolaus von Zinzendorfs Beteiligung, p. 242. ´ erique, pp. 161–3, 168, 182, 184–6, 673. Deghaye, La Doctrine Esot´

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Halle institutions. Their hopes were disappointed for other reasons. He shared with them all that emphasis upon experience, interior appropriation, which drew them all close to the mystics and kept them within reach of the exponents of experimental science. The odd feature of all this is that at any rate Bernardine mysticism had been largely appropriated by Lutheran Orthodoxy (which in this respect cannot be rightly accused of teaching ‘dead’ theology); whereas radical criticism of the church was a characteristic of what the Germans call the ‘spiritualist’ or sharply anti-institutional tradition. The main tradition of what was known as ‘the mystical theology’ tended towards what Gottfried Arnold called the ‘impartial’ or undenominational view. By virtue of being impartial or undenominational this view was also critical of the church in its measure, though more for its denominational pretensions than for its institutional existence. But all of them rebelled against the dominance of Aristotle and of system in the Orthodox understanding of the faith, and put their trust in ‘experience’. This was emphatically Zinzendorf ’s character from an early age, and during his adolescent obsession with church union he tried to base everything on experience.21 The problem with experience, as he found, was not just that his own experience differed from that of others in the field, but that it did not always seem quite trustworthy even to himself. One of Zinzendorf ’s unquestionable merits was that he was certainly a cheerful Christian, and nothing in his experience corresponded to the painful struggles of the Busskampf which (in the light of his own experience) Francke had built into the prescriptive Hallesian understanding of conversion. The open breach between the two parties that came about in 1733 led to a good deal of abuse on this issue by both sides. Zinzendorf did not mind admitting that on Hallesian principles he was an unconverted person; the Halle reproach came back that his method of conversion was so quick that it even preceded the acknowledgement of sins to be forgiven. In no way nonplussed, Zinzendorf claimed that ‘a Pietist is a man who cannot be converted in the cavalier way that we are, but needs more circumstance, has to have his affairs in better order, and his books in credit’; ‘we ride and the Pietists go on foot’.22 While conceding that ‘Pietism is not an error, simply another method’, Zinzendorf did in fact feel that a great principle was at stake. If, as he believed, Christ had suffered the Busskampf representatively for all mankind, then to call for men to go through the struggle again did them a double disservice: it 21 22

Daniel, Nikolaus von Zinzendorfs Beteiligung, p. 17. Hans-Walther Erbe, Zinzendorf und der fromme hohe Adel seiner Zeit (Leipzig, 1928), repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2, Bd. XII, pp. 489–90.

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not only piled misery unnecessarily upon them, but delayed conversion by focussing their minds upon internal thresholds, when they should be looking outwards upon the wounds of Christ. There was a good deal in common between Zinzendorf and the great Protestant mystic Tersteegen, but the count’s attempt to recruit him in 1741 broke down at precisely this point. The former maintained that one could be freed lifelong from all self-righteousness in a quarter of an hour; Tersteegen, who knew that Zinzendorf was much too much of an activist ever to be a contemplative, and much preferred the Countess who had been left quietly at home, would not have it.23 The sad thing about this meeting, which ended courteously but unproductively, is that each party believed the other was betraying a basic Protestant principle by advocating a form of salvation by works, the Count by grabbing instant salvation, the mystic by advocating some form of the mystical ladder to God. It made no difference that each pleaded explicitly for experiential religion, nor that Zinzendorf on another occasion came close to claiming that the Beatitudes were the rungs on an even longer ladder to God.24 What was common to the two was that, because experience mattered, the biographies of those who had it also mattered. Tersteegen inherited from Pierre Poiret his unrivalled collection of Catholic lives of the saints, and put them into the Protestant tradition in three huge volumes; while the Herrnhut archive accumulated the testimonies of deceased Moravians by the scores of thousands. But the fact that throughout his life Zinzendorf distrusted scholarship in favour of experience, apparently supposing that all scholarship was Aristotelianism and that abstract thought would lead the faithful away from contemplating the wounds, exposed him to slashing attacks from men like Lessing25 and Bengel. Bengel indeed maintained in plain terms that when the count accepted doctrine without a scriptural basis he was a fanatic, and in any case did not have the capacity for the job he had undertaken.26 Zinzendorf nevertheless continued to stand on experience against all else, except in one curious instance. He once brought about the healing of a sick English brother called Worthington by faith and the laying on of hands. He did not, however, conclude that he had a gift of 23

24 25 26

The only record of this encounter is a letter by Tersteegen, printed by Dietrich Meyer in ‘Cognitio Dei experimentalis oder “Erfahrungstheologie” bei Gottfried Arnold, Gerhard Tersteegen und Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf ’, in Dietrich Meyer and Udo Sträter (eds.), Zur Rezeption mystischer Traditionen im Protestantismus des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts (Cologne, 2002), pp. 235–6. Otto Uttendorfer, ¨ Zinzendorf und die Mystik (East Berlin, 1950), pp. 117–18. Hans-Christoph Hahn and Hellmut Reichel (eds.), Zinzendorf und die Herrnhuter Brüder (Hamburg, 1977), pp. 479, 487–90. Bengel, Abriss der sogenannten Brüdergemeine, pp. 37, 286.

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healing and the experiment was never repeated.27 This caution contrasts curiously with his unconditional faith in the use of the lot. Zinzendorf and the mystics The tussle with Halle permanently soured Zinzendorf ’s attitude to mysticism, to which he thought his opponents especially committed. It is important therefore to try to sort this out, especially as it affects the way one assesses his role in the Sichtungszeit, the ‘time of sifting’, in the later 1740s when, especially in the community at Herrenhaag, baroque devotions with fireworks and feasting broke out unrestrained. This took the whole community towards bankruptcy, financial and, in the view of many critics, spiritual as well. This sorting-out is not made easier by the way Moravian historiography has responded to ecclesiastical circumstances. The upshot of Spangenberg’s rescue policies after the financial collapse of the early 1750s was to push the community back towards Lutheran Orthodoxy (at the expense of whatever ‘esoteric’ doctrine there was); and this, combined with later developments, was to leave the Moravians formally independent but in considerable practical dependence upon the Protestant establishments, much as English Methodism has become tied to the coat-tails of the Church of England to the profit of neither. The result was that, when Hermann Plitt, Bernhard Becker and other good scholars were opening up the Herrnhut archive in the nineteenth century, they felt in duty bound to accommodate what they found to the long reign of Ritschl and his pupils in the German theological schools. Ritschl did enormous service to Pietist studies with his Geschichte des Pietismus (1881–6), but to his hard mind Pietism was ultimately the re-emergence of medieval wet rot, and no rot could be wetter than the exuberant baroque enthusiasm of the ‘time of sifting’. This period therefore became a prime embarrassment to the Moravian historians, who seized upon Zinzendorf ’s repudiation of the use of sentimental diminutives and other signs of retreat in the 1750s, and failed to account for the fact that in the 1740s he reached the peak of his creativity in liturgy, preaching and writing, or else regarded it as some kind of alien intrusion. Clearly, however, mysticism formed an important part of the Lutheranism in which Zinzendorf grew up, especially in its hymnbooks and devotional aids. The mystical eroticism of the hymns appealed especially to the young count;28 the hymnbook that he published for his own parish at Berthelsdorf in 1725 was based on the Freylinghausen 27 28

Schrautenbach, Zinzendorf und die Brüdergemeine, p. 84. E. Beyreuther, Studien zur Theologie Zinzendorfs (Neukirchen, 1962), pp. 10–11.

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(Hallesian) book and liberally featured mystical hymns by Gottfried Arnold, the Petersens and Richter;29 and when on his Grand Tour he made friendly contact with the Jansenist Archbishop of Paris, the Cardinal de Noailles, it was perfectly natural for him to have Arndt’s True Christianity translated as a present for him.30 By this date, however, Arndt was not at the forefront of the count’s mind. His disappointment at his early failures to secure the union of the theological schools at Halle and Wittenberg, or that of the Protestant churches of the Empire, moved him powerfully in a spiritualist direction; the influence of the court at Ebersdorf, which had separated itself from its parish and pursued a philadelphian and revivalist spiritualism, was a still more powerful influence in the same direction. This influence remained dominant until the early or mid-1730s.31 For long enough it seemed compatible with Zinzendorf ’s simple trust in experience; even in 1728 physica experimentalis was still his model for theology. Zinzendorf ’s friendship with Noailles, however, had opened the door to the works of Mme Guyon and Fénelon, and in 1731 he began regularly to concern himself with Guyon’s discourses in his addresses to the community. This was not just from the fascination with the victims of ecclesiastical and political oppression which attracted so much evangelical attention, but because his very favourite Moravian, Anna Nitschmann, had become a fiery enthusiast for Mme Guyon and looked likely to become a Moravian Bourignon as well. Not surprisingly Zinzendorf dealt gently with Guyon, admitting the usefulness of her transcendental concepts;32 and saved the day with Anna Nitchsmann. Soon afterwards, in trying to ward off accusations that the Moravians were mystics who did not make the Bible the basis of their faith, he had to admit that there were scholars in Herrnhut who were followers of Poiret, that Reformed and universal salesman of mysticism, medieval and modern.33 And by the time of the great breach with Halle in 1733–4 he had already begun to rehearse the arguments that would support his breach with mysticism in general. In a claim that paid scant respect to any notion of evangelical solidarity, he stressed the Brethren’s differences 29 30 31

32 33

Uttendorfer, ¨ Zinzendorf und die Mystik, pp. 55, 57. Schrautenbach, Zinzendorf und die Brüdergemeine, p. 121. The following discussion is based on Leiv Aalen, Die Theologie des jungen Zinzendorfs (Berlin, 1966); Leiv Aalen, ‘Die Theologie des Grafen von Zinzendorf ’, repr. in M. Greschat (ed.), Zur neueren Pietismusforschung (Darmstadt, 1977), pp. 319–53; D. Meyer, ‘“Erfahrungstheologie”’; and the great mass of the Zinzendorf Werke, and the MS resources of the Moravian archives at Herrnhut and Muswell Hill, London. Uttendorfer, ¨ Zinzendorf und die Mystik, gives numerous excerpts from these addresses, pp. 116–18. Ibid., p. 129.

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from Pietists, Methodists, Jansenists and Quietists, whom he lumped together as ‘mystics’: [T]hey press for the alteration of conduct or of personality or both, or for liturgical reform or for getting rid of everything outward. We preach nothing but the crucified Christ for the heart, and think that whoever grasps this sheds everything which is not good, and acquires all good things including the living and abiding impression of the man of heart, whose name is the Lamb of God.

What now irked Zinzendorf was the idea that mysticism consisted in the abominable fancy of setting up a ladder to God; the idea that ‘everything must grow, mount to the heights, become clearer, more purified, cleaner, more noble; for this in our view is pure moonshine [Träume]’. Mysticism in short was the ultimate abomination of the deification of the creature; it was worse than the Busskampf. Although, exactly like Tersteegen, Zinzendorf called for humility against this demonstration of pride, he made something radically different from it. For Tersteegen the humble heart was the beginning of a long course of sanctification; when on Maundy Thursday 1724 he signed his covenant with his Saviour in his own blood, he concluded: ‘May thy death struggle support me. Amen.’ The support for which he called was for a life of self-denial and prayer, the strenuous course which might, with perseverance, yield the experiential theology that he, like Zinzendorf, required. For Zinzendorf Christ on the cross had not only performed the Busskampf for all mankind, he had done all that was necessary to connect men with God. Sin was vanquished, grace was triumphant, there was joy in contemplating the wounds. The Moravian commentators tend to describe this new position as Zinzendorf ’s ‘turn to Luther’. Whether this theologia crucis was really a turn to Luther is questionable, but the count certainly believed that it was, and saw in the doctrine of justification by grace through faith, in the status of the believer as justus ac peccator, relief from the burdens, from the apparent self-centredness, of both the Busskampf and the mystic way. At any rate by 1734 his mind was made up and from then on he battled sturdily against what he took mysticism to be.34 Zinzendorf and theosophy During this same period of the early 1730s Zinzendorf also closed the door against another possibility, that of theosophy, or, in practical terms, Jakob Bohme. ¨ The count claimed never to have read him,35 but in 34 35

See sources quoted in n. 31 above, especially Meyer, ‘“Erfahrungstheolog`ıe”’, pp. 233–9. August Gottlieb Spangenberg, Apologetische Schluss-Schrift (Leipzig, 1752); repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband III, p. 192.

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1730 and 1733–4 a young Wurttemberger ¨ minister, Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, had a lengthy stay in Herrnhut and theosophy was among the things in which he tried to interest Zinzendorf. As we shall see, Oetinger36 obtained considerable repute in his own right, but he never had much luck with Zinzendorf. Thus whether the count read Bohme ¨ or not he certainly knew of him, particularly after the efforts of Oetinger. With Oetinger as with Tersteegen, Zinzendorf shared some presuppositions but could not accept the way they were developed. What Oetinger sought to do (as in his own way the count did too) was to overcome the dualistic severance of the modern outlook, ‘the falling apart of nature and spirit, physics and ethics, matter and mind [Verstand]’. To these discomforts Oetinger opposed a pansophic viewpoint derived from Bohme. ¨ God was the fount of all life and from his love there streamed the groundless sea of all the forces on which nature and mental life fed. The Fall had created a great rift through this creation bringing with it inward and outward death. However, the Bible, with a wonderful inner unity, countered this disaster with a great central view of the creation, the Fall and the re-establishment of the unity that had its origin in God. And because spirit and nature were the two sides of the one reality which came from God, ‘physicality [Leiblichkeit] is the end of God’s ways’.37 For Oetinger the devil was an idealist who did not believe in matter. Zinzendorf had his own grievances against Enlightenment and materialism, and the cult of the wounds was among other things a prophylactic against both; but the ‘great central view’ was system under another name. ‘You love opinion [i.e., system], I hate it. You honour knowledge, I despise it. You seek to lead souls into speculation, reading, learning, and I seek to hunt all souls out of it with war-cries.’ He believed indeed in the unity of the Scriptures, but, following Spener, he found that unity in Christ not in the theosophical panorama. Indeed ‘not Plato nor Socrates, not Grotius nor Leibniz nor Newton, if they put together all their wisdom, could bring it into a rational connexion with the love and righteousness of God’.38 Thus by the mid-1730s Zinzendorf had turned his back upon systematic theology, theosophy and mysticism as represented by ‘the mystical theology’. That his position was not quite simple is shown by his publication in 1735 of an article in his Freywillige Nachlese entitled ‘Brief Propositions on Mystical Theology’.39 This was a thoroughly Guyon-ish, even 36 37 38 39

In chapter 9 below. E. Beyreuther, Zinzendorf und die Christenheit (Marburg-an-der-Lahn, 1961), p. 59. Hahn and Reichel, Zinzendorf und die Herrnhuter Brüder, p. 192. Repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband XII, pp. 809–61. For a commentary see Uttendorfer, ¨ Zinzendorf und die Mystik, pp. 131–4.

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Arnoldian, piece, and it was quite certainly not written by Zinzendorf himself, but by Jeremias Josephi who died in 1729 as superintendent of Sorau (Niederlausitz), written indeed before he attained that dignity.40 To cap all it was speedily followed in the same journal by another piece, supposed to have originated from Paul Anton in Halle, entitled ‘Theological Circular on the Crimes of the Mystics’, which sharply contrasted Luther and the mystics, whom it treated as forming a characteristically Catholic movement of piety.41 What is to be made of all this? Zinzendorf presumably edited and approved the inclusion of these articles; they could not be consistent with each other, nor with what is known of his views at the time; perhaps he was responding to the fact, already noted, that there was a variety of views on mysticism within the community at the time. Zinzendorf and St Bernard Yet for all Zinzendorf ’s ranting against mysticism and the mystical theology so beloved by the radicals, it is impossible to overlook his indebtedness to the Bernardine bride- and passion-mysticism with which he had grown up and which had come to him out of the devotional traditions of Lutheran Orthodoxy. No one emphasised more than he the experiencing and feeling, the enjoying and tasting of the work and the body of Christ, and if he now chose to regard this as biblical and Lutheran and nothing at all to do with mysticism, it is difficult to see how his attitude can be squared with the ordinary use of words; it simply exemplifies what different uses the early evangelicals made of the same texts and traditions. The specially personal element in all this is what Dietrich Meyer has called Zinzendorf ’s ‘na¨ıve Biblicism’;42 i.e., the belief that Christ’s unseen presence in the world was a prolongation of his apparently bodily presence in the forty days after the first Easter. Without this the cult of the wounds could not have had the realism that Zinzendorf believed it had. Moreover he had begun to ‘locate’ the place where this transaction went on in ‘feeling’. Here it is impossible not to notice how in an unsophisticated way he anticipated that later ex-Moravian, Schleiermacher,43 and anticipated also the workings of his own imagination in the 1740s in ‘locating’ the dramatic events of the apocalypse. At any rate it is clear enough that if by the mid-1730s Zinzendorf had abandoned one kind of mysticism he was deeply engaged in another, and clear too that the ‘time of sifting’ in the 1740s was not an aberration or the intrusion of some alien influence, but 40 41 42 43

For this argument see Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband XI, pp. L–LII. Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband XII, pp. 891–938. Meyer, ‘“Erfahrungstheologie”’, p. 239. Cf. Aalen, ‘Die Theologie des Grafen von Zinzendorf’, p. 339.

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the logical conclusion of what went before, and a fitting time for him to reach the peak of his liturgical and literary creativity. The ‘time of sifting’ The Sichtungszeit was that rather ill-defined period in the 1740s when the overflow of Zinzendorf ’s baroque enthusiasms seemed to burst all bounds, and was spectacularly exemplified in the feasting and fireworks in the settlement at Herrnhaag. These contributed first to the expulsion of the Brethren from Herrnhaag in 1750, then to the financial collapse of the whole Moravian enterprise, to Spangenberg’s assumption of control and to the count’s abandonment of some of the characteristic mannerisms of the previous period. Zinzendorf ’s productivity, published and unpublished, in this period was immense. Pride of place perhaps goes to the Litany of the Wounds of 1744 and the 32 Homilies on the texts contained in it which he gave in 1747. It is a measure of how far Zinzendorf ’s piety had penetrated the community that he did not himself write the Litany, which was the work of a number of other Brethren; though of course he revised, corrected and authorised it, and, according to Uttendorfer, ¨ stamped it with ‘his inimitable crass and yet genial paradoxes’.44 The Litany begins with a solemn invocation of the Lamb of God, his side-wound and the holy Trinity. Then follow petitions for God to protect against all self-righteousness, all dryness of discipline, all grace and beauty apart from the blood of Christ. There follow meditations on the life of Christ and his physical manifestation, all designed, in a litany to be performed weekly, to encourage a particular form of humility, a particular kind of child-likeness towards the friend of children; ‘your astonishing simplicity makes reason hateful to us’. The quasi-physical contact between the Saviour and the faithful is further emphasised in the addresses: ‘pale lips kiss us upon the heart’. If in the Old Testament to see God was to die, now to feel the kiss of the pale (or dying) lips was healing to the soul. Endlessly encouraged, this yearning for a real, ‘tangible’ experience of the Saviour gave rise to an intense chiliasm, a thing of which Zinzendorf otherwise said little.45 This vivid sense of constant feeling and enjoyment of the wounds betrayed the count into saying some very un-Lutheran things about faith; the absolute sense of their living in Christ and he in them made the general promises attached to faith seem rather passé; ‘the essential character of a child of God is to live, move, be in love, in the Saviour on the cross’.46 For all his controversy with Mme Guyon, 44 45

Uttendorfer, ¨ Zinzendorf und die Mystik, p. 217. 46 Ibid., p. 222. Ibid., p. 221.

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Zinzendorf was now using the language of ‘pure love’ and treating faith as simply a means of temporarily overcoming the imperfections of inward vision. And the immediacy (in both senses) that had attached to conversion now attached to the vision of the Saviour: ‘if anyone is a Christian, the Saviour becomes personally present to him in a moment’.47 This view of course involved Zinzendorf in the exegesis of the passage in which the Saviour himself declared those blessed who had not seen and yet believed; but by expanding on the difference between seeing and not seeing, he believed he had got round the difficulty. In any case he could always resume the usual evangelical rant against ‘system’, assured that the dear God had planted no theoretical system in the Bible, and that to look for one was really rather provincial. When in this mood, Zinzendorf oscillated between the acute and the obtuse. He could counter approaches to the Scriptures of the fundamentalist kind by the observation that the apostles could not have been fundamentalists or they would not as a matter of habit have quoted the Old Testament from the Septuagint, its Greek translation. On the other hand he almost gloried in the reproach of Richard Rothe, the parish minister at Berthelsdorf, that the Brethren had a new theology every year. If he found a word that pleased a hundred Sisters it was right to speak of nothing else for a while, without pretence that this was the whole truth of the matter. If they said that faith was so-and-so, it did not mean that they implied it was nothing else.48 It was no wonder that Zinzendorf’s critics found him slippery. But he went on as before, maintaining even of ‘those Revelation- and Prophesying-Whimsies which are in some countries & particularly at this time so catching, from which nothing can keep one but an attachment to our Saviour’s person & ye side’s dear hole’ that the one prescription would cure all.49 And when in the 1750s Spangenberg was getting a grip on the community, the count adapted in manner and vocabulary rather than in substance. Just as baroque enthusiasm led Zinzendorf, not to complete fantasy in the way he used the Scriptures, but to a rather hit-and-miss practice, so his devotion to the wounds did not betray him into a general susceptibility towards the supernatural or even the extraordinary. He would give no heed to alchemy or the schemes for making gold. His wealth was in Jesus alone. Yet the Paracelsian background to early evangelicalism persisted among some of the Moravians as it did among a few Methodists. The young Goethe’s Moravian friend Suzanne von Klettenberg was an adept 47 49

48 Ibid., pp. 229, 233. Ibid., p. 225. The quaint English is that of the translation made for the English Moravian community: Moravian Church House, Muswell Hill. MS Gemeinhaus Diarium, 31 May 1747.

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of nature-magic, and he himself long afterwards kept up a form of it.50 Nor did Zinzendorf care for the trances of Rock and the Inspired, though the piety of Rock impressed him. But he should stick to Scripture and the wounds of Jesus. Prophecy which Rock claimed to utter when in Inspiration was another problem; divination (Weissagen) was not the same as prophecy, and meant the immediate impression of the Holy Spirit going beyond usual understanding but yet being consonant with Scripture. This was known among the Brethren, but made little of by them, and was subject to examination and, in appropriate cases, to condemnation by them. The possibility of visions was admitted on the authority of the Saviour, but if a Brother claimed to have had a vision he was subject to a careful examination, to find whether he had fallen under the influence of some fanaticism or other. Here again the count’s influence was thrown on to the side of caution. In the congregation itself apostolic graces, miracles and powers of insight were to be expected and accepted in a child-like spirit, but basically they were to be regarded as occasional gifts. As we have seen, healing by faith and the laying on of hands happened, but was not attempted as part of the spiritual armoury of the congregation. On the other hand, doctors in the congregation needed prophetic gifts. Zinzendorf ’s caution in all these matters was strengthened by his belief that one of the mistakes of the Hallesian party was that they had confused a belief in miracles with the saving faith, and he was not loath to tell in detail how Francke’s belief in miracles had exposed him to the coarsest deception.51 He also had views on telepathy and second sight, that curious gift which persisted among the Inspired for a century or more, and which they took with them successfully to America. Telepathy, illustrated by the knowledge that someone fifty miles away is dying, was not a prophetic gift, it was an unusual natural gift the connexions of which are not known. Second sight was more important than telepathy, but was also often not prophetic but intuitive. He regarded it as a necessary quality, and did once wish that the Sisters of the congregation would cultivate their interior feelings more. He also wished for responsible leaders of the community to have the gifts of genius they needed, and often went further than this, wishing for them to have particular charismata. Thus servants of the Saviour, who had to care for the organisation at a particular time, must have a revelation of their plan and proceedings or they would fail in their object. They required indeed prophetic personalities; they must have an insight into the whole affair, know that they stood in a simple connexion with 50 51

The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ed. K. J. Weintraub (Chicago, 1974), I, p. 370. On the above see Uttendorfer, ¨ Zinzendorf und die Mystik, pp. 383–4.

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God, and know also from one day to the next what was the Lord’s mind for his people. The seer must know and say what that mind was, but he must not know how he attained the knowledge. The burdens of office were real, but it was Zinzendorf’s belief that every period in the history of the kingdom of God had a prophet or two to see it through, perhaps not more, for there were not many with whom the Saviour could come to an understanding on these things. Indeed it was beyond ordinary human capacity to know when to speak and when to be silent about revelations of this kind. But the Saviour equips those he chooses and makes sure they retain their humility. Only God can bear the burden of both omniscience and omnipotence, so foreknowledge is kept within bounds. The prophet must obey the voice of God and keep his revelations to himself. At the end of his life the count professed that the community would never have got anywhere had it not had very precise prophecies from the Saviour. He himself had frequently had advance knowledge of dates to travel, of the trustworthiness of individuals, and the success or failure of particular enterprises. But the lot remained a continuous miracle, by which his revelations could be checked.52 One more oddity is worth a mention because it links Zinzendorf to an intellectual fashion which came later and which contributed to the disintegration of the original evangelical mix. That is magnetism. The count recognised in Christ magnetic and magical properties. Those qualities were magnetic which resembled the ability of a stone to attract iron; those were magical which revealed a supernatural power in certain things and circumstances. The scriptural test case was that of the woman who touched the hem of Christ’s garment; although she denied it, he had felt virtue go out of him.53 This signified to Zinzendorf a polemical blow to the stiff Wittenberg insistence that Christ acted through the Word alone; the episode showed clearly that there were forces in the soul and body of the Saviour which acted sympathetically upon the soul and body of another, without his even thinking about it. This implied in turn that whoever came near him became wundenhaftig, attached to the wounds; whoever approached his deceased body became jesushaft, one with Jesus. Thus to Zinzendorf the Christian was a soul who ceaselessly represented himself to his divine friend, and in his glance reliably studied the physiognomy in which all good things were contained. He gave thanks that this was actually attained in the community. ‘Among the first blessings which he has given us is this, that we know him. This is the text which was a dogma at least two thousand years ago, and is praxis with us at this moment. We know him and are known by him.’ Moravians became copies of the blessed original. 52

Ibid., pp. 385–7.

53

Ibid., p. 388.

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Zinzendorf and the Last Things Little has been said so far of Zinzendorf ’s understanding of the Last Things, and it is a matter of some consequence that he said little on this subject, and that most of what he did say was during the enthusiastic period of the ‘time of sifting’.54 But Zinzendorf had been reared on Spener’s ‘hope of better times’ and clung on to this hope throughout his life, distinguishing it clearly from the millennium;55 indeed in 1751 he claimed that ‘if there are still brethren besides us who have Spener’s ideas, namely a hope of better times and so forth at heart, and they would only compare how much H[errn]hut has for these thirty years past contributed towards that matter, then they should have occasion to rejoice with shame and humiliation’.56 This hope had been modified during the formative period he spent at Ebersdorf, especially under the tutelage of Benigna, his future sister-inlaw.57 The Ebersdorf court, convinced that it was living in the evening of time, had separated itself from the parish and established its own philadelphia, an undenominational foreshadowing of the church of the last age. This too stayed with Zinzendorf to the end, complicated only by his need to establish a case for toleration under the law of the Empire by professing undying loyalty to the Augsburg Confession. During the ‘time of sifting’ he began to wonder whether the end might be longer postponed than he hoped – ‘the flax must go through a great deal before it can be spun’58 – but he continued to depend heavily on texts that had, or could be given, an eschatological slant: Luke 14:7, ‘Come for all is prepared’; Revelation 19:8, ‘Happy are those invited to the wedding of the Lamb’; 1 John 2:18, ‘It is the last hour.’ This indeed was the reason for a missionary apostolate, and for avoiding the Lutheran Pietist mistake of preaching ‘within the temple of religions’, the religious establishments;59 they were already under the sign of the fall of Babel. In 1733 (as we will see) Oetinger arranged for Zinzendorf to meet Bengel in Wurttemberg, ¨ in the hope of promoting an understanding between the two men. This enterprise was foredoomed to failure. Zinzendorf was not much disposed to listen to a then little-known Swabian schoolmaster, though he was prepared to help his efforts to establish a better text of the New Testament. But Bengel had expended immense labour in working out the salvation history implied in the book 54 55 56 57 58 59

Plitt, Zinzendorfs Theologie, II, p. 541. Spangenberg, Apologetische Schluss-Schrift, p. 168. Moravian Church House. MS Gemeinhaus Diarium 1751, 11 February 1751. Daniel, Nikolaus von Zinzendorfs Beteiligung, pp. 86–7. Moravian Church House. MS Gemeinhaus Diarium 1747, 12 November 1747. ´ erique, pp. 69–73. Deghaye, La Doctrine Esot´

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of Revelation, ending with a demonstration that the Last Age would open in 1836. Zinzendorf was too consumed by venomous hostility to ‘system’ and too much under the influence of Pierre Bayle to give heed to any such thing. He nevertheless, under the influence of Spener, philadelphianism, and the practical experience of his community, continued to feel his way towards an eschatology that was unlike any of those on offer among his contemporaries.60 The essence of the chiliasm which Zinzendorf developed to the full in the 1740s was constituted by his intense conviction of the real and inseparable contact between his community and the crucified Saviour. Christ was the Eldest of the community; an empty chair was kept for him for when his physical presence returned; meanwhile the lot declared his will. The Brudergemeine ¨ was only the model of the house of God of the latter days, but it was the ultimate model, and once it ceased to exist the congregation of glory would be revealed. Thus much of what the churches looked to in the Second Coming was already present among the Brethren. Given the fact that Zinzendorf was able to envisage a presence of the Lord in the style of his resurrection appearances before the Ascension, he found no difficulty in conceiving a return visible only to the elect; so far from being the triumphal return anticipated by the Protestant Orthodox, this would be a return to the flock in silence and tears. This imagery owed much to Matthew 25 which was full of stories of those who served the Saviour, or did not serve him, without knowing of his presence. Nevertheless the Second Coming would begin in the congregation which had already anticipated the chiliasm by handing over the leadership to Christ in 1741. Zinzendorf had of course to take care not to offend against the eighteenth article of the Augsburg Confession which rejected chiliasm in the flesh. So the spiritual presence, visible to the saints, would initiate a millennium of comfort to them. Once Zinzendorf embarked on the geography of the millennium his imagination had free rein. Sometimes he thought the Saviour would create a hidden kingdom, like that of the Incas. There he would create a great island like England, inaccessible with rocks and sandbanks, and like Cura¸cao with no harbour penetrable by alien ships. In this base there would be toleration and the influence of the gospel would radiate abroad. But the publicly visible return of Christ in the clouds to judgement (which the churches were expecting) would take place at the end of the thousand years, when the great contest with Satan would be fought out, the Jews would be converted, and the apokatastasis, or the restoration of all things in the universe corrupted by Adam’s sin, 60

Useful material on this theme is to be found in Plitt, Zinzendorfs Theologie, esp. I, pp. 591–6; II, pp. 541–60; Samuel Eberhard, Kreuzes-Theologie. Die reformierten Anliegen in Zinzendorfs Verkündigung (Munich, 1937), esp. pp. 205–26; Gosta ¨ Hok, ¨ Zinzendorfs Begriff der Religion (Uppsala, 1948), pp. 206–9.

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would be achieved. Thus this second parousia was conceived with Zinzendorf professing complete certainty about Christ’s resurrection body, and complete uncertainty about the resurrection bodies of the saints. Zinzendorf’s apocalyptic could not do without the conventional stageproperty of the conversion of the Jews; but it is worth noting that his record of dealing with Jews, which went back to Spener, was not at all conventional.61 For the immediately foreseeable future the Jews would maintain their separate existence among the nations because under God’s plan of salvation they still had work to do there. Jews were already being grafted on to the Christian stock like wild olives, and in the period of active mission before the Last Judgement Israel itself would proselytise actively, and those Jews who did not reject this happy work would be reconciled to Christ, who was actually the son of the God of Moses come to earth. Indeed Zinzendorf’s ‘method with the Jews’ was ‘always to presuppose that Moses and the prophets knew of no other God than he who became man, and whom their fathers hanged on the tree: Hear, O Israel, you have no other God than Jehovah, your God. Where is a people whose God has gone down to become Jesus?’62 Zinzendorf had the wit to appreciate that no appeal to the Jews was likely to succeed as long as Christian powers treated them as shabbily as they normally did. His early education at Halle had put him in touch with all the work being done there upon the languages of the ancient Middle East, and the significance they might have for Jewish missions.63 On his Grand Tour he visited the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, and gradually built up an apologetic strategy for dealing with Jews, based on respect for Israel. The United Provinces proved crucial for him. There he created settlements and there he raised money cheaply for his projects and those of the Saxon government. And it was there and in the Wetterau that his collaborator Samuel Lieberkuhn ¨ sought relations with the Jews. His missions extended to the Baltic, Zinzendorf ’s to America where he thought the Indians were Jews. Their fruits were scanty and Zinzendorf came to disagree with Lieberkuhn ¨ as to the way that missions should be conducted. Lieberkuhn ¨ found that there was no way that Jews could be brought to listen to the doctrine of the Trinity, which they found in conflict with their monotheism. He believed that Jews won for Christianity must maintain the full validity of the Law, and he shared the Jews’ hope for their national 61

62 63

The most useful single collection of material on this theme is Erich Beyreuther, ‘Zinzendorf und das Judentum’, repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2, Bd. XII, pp. 679–732. See also Hans Schneider, ‘Ein “Schreiben an die Juden”. Hochmann, Zinzendorf und Israel’, Unitas Fratrum 17 (1985), 68–77. Plitt, Theologie Zinzendorfs, I, p. 644. On Halle and the Jewish mission see Christoph Rymatzki, Hallischer Pietismus und Judenmission (Tubingen, ¨ 2004).

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future. He might differ from the count, but the pair continued to maintain charitable relations with the Jewish community. Their mission to the Jews was interrupted by the bankruptcy of the Moravian community in the early 1750s; Zinzendorf was putting the best face on a bad job when he concluded that his time was the time for the first fruits of the mission, not the harvest. Zinzendorf and Bengel The differences between Zinzendorf and Bengel are worth a brief mention in connexion with the eschatology of the former, partly because of the rift they caused among evangelicals, but also because they illustrate very clearly their different approaches to the Bible.64 Bengel was a remarkable scholar,65 both broad and narrow. He became a philologist as part of his equipment as a schoolmaster, and his German grammar appeared in innumerable editions in Germany down to 1960, and in several English editions published in Edinburgh and the United States in the course of the nineteenth century. But he wrote it in Latin for a scholarly public. This skill underlay Bengel’s massive contribution to almost every branch of theological studies as then understood, philological, exegetical, eschatological, polemical. His salvation history was based on the idea of an oeconomia divina, God’s housekeeping, which was constituted by a firm plan for the world, worked out chronologically from the beginning to the end. This scheme was deduced from the Bible which also taught profane history and the arts of nature. But the Bible was the key source and its evidence must be preferred to that of nature and history. The great merit of this evidence was that it conferred an understanding of the dealings of God with men not only in the past; it revealed the future, not to gratify idle curiosity, but to enable men better to walk in God’s ways. The details of Bengel’s arithmetic do not concern us; but in 1724 he calculated that the 666 years of the beast ran from 1143 to 1809; in other words the final dénouement was in sight. Making the necessary adjustments he worked out that the end of the world and the Last Judgement were due in the calendar year 3836, but that the millennial age would begin 2000 years before that, in fact in 1836.66 Before that again the ‘harvest’ and the 64

65

66

This question is well studied in two works by Gottfried Mälzer, Bengel und Zinzendorf. Zur Biographie und Theologie Johann Albrecht Bengels (Witten, 1968); and Johann Albrecht Bengel. Leben und Werk (Stuttgart, 1970). To Martin Brecht, Bengel was ‘the great exegete of Pietism’. ‘Johann Albrecht Bengel und der schwäbische Biblizismus’, in Kurt Aland (ed.), Pietismus und Bibel (Witten, 1970), p. 193. Proper emphasis on the bimillennial nature of Bengel’s millennium has been recently given in two essays by Martin H. Jung in his Nachfolger, Visionärinnen, Kirchenkritiker (Leipzig, 2003), pp. 75–116.

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‘autumn’ when many good and wicked men would be taken away would happen between 1734 and 1834. If the essence of Bengel’s message to the Wurttemberger ¨ church was that there was no need to panic and secede at the implications of a Catholic succession to the duchy, to the church as a whole the message was that the evening of time was far gone, and men must prepare to face the apocalyptic music. When Oetinger arranged for Zinzendorf to meet Bengel in 1733, the count’s views on the general question did not differ greatly from Bengel’s. What he could not stand was, first, the imposition of a system, in this case a chronological system, upon the Scripture, and, second, Bengel’s use of the Scripture data. For although Bengel is commonly classed as a Pietist, his use of Scripture was Orthodox in its method. Bengel assumed that the biblical data were guaranteed valid by divine inspiration and could therefore be worked on by a proper scientific method to produce farreaching and valid conclusions. He knew that Zinzendorf not only did not have such a scientific method, but did not want one; he could not know in 1733 that the count’s extraordinary religious imagination could secure some good hits against Orthodox exegesis, and some misses. The results of the failed conference of 1733 were striking. The two never met again, but Bengel in his academic way read all the count’s output, and stalked him relentlessly in the press. According to Bengel Zinzendorf was not up to his undertakings, and could not bear the word millennium in ordinary preaching.67 His influence helped to kill the hopes of Moravianism in Wurttemberg ¨ until the nineteenth century, and he was so completely adopted by local Pietists as one of their own that the book of Revelation became their most read book for more than half a century. What none of them could have foreseen was that his views on the book of Revelation would make a distant convert in Wesley. Is then (with hindsight) Zinzendorf to be regarded as an evangelical? It seems to me that he is. He was like them all, violently anti-system and antiAristotle; he thought the end was near but not imminent; he would have nothing to do with the Paracelsian aura of Lutheran Pietism, and sooner or later they all had to do without it, mostly without finding a substitute. His Passion-mysticism led him into some odd views of the Bible and of faith, but he was in his own way a man of faith and a strenuous Bible expositor, at any rate to the elect. And if both his philadelphianism and his personal relations were prickly he was not the only hedgehog in the evangelical world. 67

Bengel, Abriss der sogenannten Brüdergemeine, p. 266.

7

John Wesley

Piety and government in the age of the young Wesley Wesley was born into a family of the narrowest of Little England sympathies. Both his parents had deserted a dissenting heritage for the Church of England, and the political instinct of both was to prefer loyalty to an English Catholic monarch in the person of James II to obedience to a foreign Protestant saviour in the shape of William III. Samuel Wesley made his peace with the powers in possession earlier than his wife Susanna. But according to John (much later) his father wrote one of the speeches for the defence in the impeachment of Henry Sacheverell,1 that wild Tory agitator on behalf of all those who damned foreign powers, and with them the Whig generals and their foreign victories on behalf of foreign powers. There is no doubt that this upbringing marked Wesley lifelong. Born into a Jacobite milieu, the younger brother of a (non-Methodist) collaborator of Bishop Atterbury,2 Wesley did not adopt the world as his parish; indeed his one substantial trip abroad was to a nest of Jacobites in Georgia, headed by General Oglethorpe, who had been christened James Edward for the Old (Jacobite) Pretender. And Oglethorpe as much as Wesley illustrated how difficult it was in a generation born to the titanic struggle against Louis XIV actually to be Little Englanders; for his service to Georgia was conditioned by the fact that he had served under Prince Eugene, and knew all about Habsburg policies of frontier settlement. Equally, although it was still possible in Queen Anne’s reign to get up mobs powerfully vociferating that the church was in danger, and that dissenters were covert Cromwellians, the thoughtful, like German Pietists, were bound to react against the violence of Louis XIV’s religious policies 1 2

John Wesley, A Concise History of England (London, 1776), IV, p. 75. Francis Atterbury (1662–1732), Bishop of Rochester 1713–23. A royal chaplain to William III and Mary, Atterbury became famous early in the eighteenth century for his championship of the powers of Convocation. Failing to make his way under George I, he became involved in Jacobite conspiracy. He was imprisoned in the Tower in 1722, impeached, deprived of his offices and banished in 1723.

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and to sympathise with many of their victims. French Protestants were in England in force, vexing all who had to deal with them. Wesley was convinced lifelong that the Bull Unigenitus required Catholics to affirm what they knew to be untrue and deny what they believed to be true,3 and the conviction that an unholy alliance between Rome and Versailles had dealt roughly with the Quietists created an English market for them and their publications. There was indeed one group whose relations with the London government and the Scottish church that it supported were not unlike those of the Quietists across the Channel: the mystics among the Scottish Episcopalians.4 Following the cue given in the seventeenth century by Robert Leighton (1611–84), a former Presbyterian who became Archbishop of Glasgow and took up with Port-Royal and the Jansenists, a group of Episcopalians in north-east Scotland became devotees of the Quietists and, as we have seen, gathered round the deathbed of Mme Guyon at the end. James Garden (1647–1726), who was deprived of his divinity professorship at Aberdeen for refusing to sign the Westminster Confession, published a great attack on Reformed Scholasticism in Theologia Comparativa. On the true and solid grounds of pure and peaceable theology in 1699, a treatise given a European circulation by Pierre Poiret. George Garden (1649–1733), the minister of St Nicholas, Aberdeen, who was deposed in 1701 but continued to officiate, published and distributed most of the works of Antoinette Bourignon. Finally deterred by some of her eccentricities he turned to Mme Guyon in 1710, published her works, was imprisoned as a Jacobite after the rebellion of 1715, and was among the Scottish throng at Blois when she died. In their intense reaction against the Westminster documents they went back to older traditions: St Bernard, St Francis de Sales, Pascal, and that hero both of old Samuel Wesley and young John, M. de Renty.5 They also championed the work of another former Aberdeen divinity professor, Henry Scougal (1650–78), whose Life of God in the Soul of Man (1677) became a classic dear to the young Wesley. English non-jurors added their tithe to what the Scots had begun, as did the enormously corpulent George Cheyne, an adherent of the Aberdeen circle, who confirmed his medical authority with John Wesley by reducing his own weight from thirty stones to manageable proportions, and made mysticism a matter of coffee-house chat among his Bath clientele. He linked up with 3 4 5

Wesley Works. Bicentennial Edition (cited below as Wesley Works), XX: Journals III, p. 318. For the literature on this group see above, ch. 3, n. 43. L. Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. Samuel Wesley (London, 1866), p. 227.

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the Manchester Jacobite John Byrom, who was a sales agent for Poiret. Another non-juror, Francis Lee, son-law of Jane Leade, the philadelphian who did much to make Jakob Bohme ¨ palatable to Germans, joined the philadelphians and translated Fénelon. Gradually German mysticism appeared in English dress. William Law, another non-juror, discovered a preference for Tauler and the Theologia Germanica, and by 1737 he had become a devotee of Bohme. ¨ So to the Quaker irreconcilables of the pre-Revolution regime were added numerous irreconcilables to the post-Revolution regime, in studying, translating and circulating works of modern mysticism, especially French and Quietist. John Wesley’s milieu was predisposed in this direction, and it was not long before he went with the tide. This tide had been augmented by parental influence. That old curmudgeon Samuel Wesley, whose reputation has suffered by his devotion to a sort of scholarship in which no one has ever been interested, nevertheless knew his Thomas a` Kempis, Pascal and de Renty. His parting advice to his son, that ‘the strongest proof of Christianity’ was the inward witness, was well in the mystical tradition. Unfortunately for young John, parental influences did not all operate in the same direction. Both Samuel and Susanna preserved in themselves more of their Puritan heritage than they knew; and when in 1725 John was confronted by the prospect of ordination, and beguiled by the kindly attentions of Sally Kirkham, he took the sudden turn to seriousness in religion which some commentators have regarded as his real conversion, and began meticulously to measure out his hours and days. What he became, in short, was an example of Puritan precisianism. Precisianism, as we have seen, was the ethical counterpart of Reformed Orthodoxy in theology: that is, the application of a sort of scientific method to biblical data, presumed to be inerrant, with a view to establishing far-reaching (or minute) conclusions of great certainty. It was at this point that even the old beacon of Thomas a` Kempis seemed to flicker:6 I was lately advised to read Thomas a` Kempis over, which I had frequently seen, but never much looked into before. I think he must have been a person of great piety and devotion, but it is my misfortune to differ from him in some of his main points. I can’t think that when God sent us into the world he had irreversibly decreed that we should be perpetually miserable in it. If it be so the very endeavour after happiness in this life is a sin, as it is acting in direct contradiction to the very design of our creation.

6

Wesley Works, XXV: Correspondence I, pp. 162–3.

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Wesley and the mystics I If it is one paradox that this was a repudiation of the Kempis of whom the mature Wesley was to publish editions and extracts almost without number, it is another that the course of life on which he now embarked, pursued with the strenuousness with which he did everything, was singularly unsuccessful in producing happiness. Within a few months he pronounced to his mother in his worst Oxford tutorial manner that ‘faith is a species of belief, and belief is defined7 [as] an assent to a proposition upon rational grounds. Without rational grounds there is therefore no belief and consequently no faith.’8 Within a few weeks he had argued himself out of that definition. It was possible, however, that the precisian was not yet precise enough. Wesley took up with Jeremy Taylor’s Rules for Holy Living and with a` Kempis (again). Taylor was not in any great degree a mystical writer, and, though The Imitation of Christ is a mystical work, what appealed at this moment was that it sought to harmonise the will of man and the will of God not through the methods of the Quietists (who also were all voluntarists) but by devices of mortification based on the example of Jesus. Mortification was one of old Samuel Wesley’s prescriptions, and doubtless no more palatable to John for that. But the self-examination for which it called opened at least potentially the door to inward religion. More importantly, however, he was deeply influenced by two works of William Law, his Treatise on Christian Perfection (1726) and Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728). Law9 was another non-juror, a polemicist, not yet a mystic, but on his way. Given the present cast of Wesley’s mind the insistence of these works that God must be the sole object of human striving was bound to be attractive. Still more important was Law’s friendship and the introduction that he gave Wesley to the German mystics, Tauler and the Theologia Germanica. Law was by this time well versed in Fénelon and Mme Guyon whose doctrines of ‘pure love’ he approved, but he found more philosophical rigour in the Germans, and for this reason he became from 1737 increasingly devoted to Jakob Bohme. ¨ Just as capable as Wesley of sudden changes of front, 7 8 9

By Richard Fiddes (1671–1725), whose Body of Divinity earned him an Oxford DD. Wesley Works, XXV: Correspondence I, p. 175. Besides the modern literature referred to below, the student of Law is unable to avoid Christopher Walton, Notes and Materials for an Adequate Biography of . . . William Law (London, 1854). This, perhaps the most disorderly book ever published, does indeed contain ‘notes and materials’ for almost everything to do with William Law, not to mention ‘an indication of the true means for the induction of the intellectual “heathen”, Jewish and Mahomedan natives into the Christian faith’.

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he now turned against the Francophone mystics, including Antoinette Bourignon of the Netherlands and Hector de Marsay, the Welsch-Swiss. But the floodgates opened for Wesley. He not only took a shorthand system from John Byrom, the Manchester poet and Jacobite, but also the entrée to the mystical works edited by Pierre Poiret. Once embarked on the French, Wesley turned to the Jansenist writers who lay behind his old favourites Jeremy Taylor, Henry Scougal and Law. French writers multiplied: Pascal; Quesnel’s Reflections on the New Testament, which had encountered so much trouble in the church and was now available in an English version by the non-juror R. Russell. He worked on the Introduction a` la vie dévote in Nichols’s version. He was also in regular touch with John Heylin, ‘the mystic doctor’, a well-known Behmenist10 and a favourite preacher of the members of the London religious societies, whose church Wesley attended frequently till 1741. With him he collaborated to produce a new edition of the Imitation. The Georgia interlude Caught up in the general Protestant rescue operation on behalf of the Salzburgers Wesley arrived in Georgia in February 1736. Georgia proved to be no context for a Desert Father (though Wesley had taken Makarius the Egyptian and Ephraem Syrus with him), but it offered an education of another kind. Intensive concern with Bourignon, Scougal, Tauler, Fleury and a` Kempis was backed up by discussions on mysticism with Spangenberg. Makarius and Ephraem came to offer especial hope. Yet in the end the outcome was disappointment once more. The flock whose expectations were doubtless conditioned by an inherited Kulturprotestantismus did not respond to Wesley’s new-fangled notions as he hoped; the putative Indian mission never began; and his own innate genius for making a mess of his relations with the fair sex led to his having to beat a discreditable retreat back to England to avoid legal proceedings. And when he got home he found that the last big policy-maker of the Church of England, Edmund Gibson, had fallen out with the government and had been passed over for the succession to the see of Canterbury. Not all the Georgia experience had been negative; Wesley had been informed first-hand of the great feud between Halle and Herrnhut that was dividing continental evangelicalism, and he had greatly improved his stock of modern languages; but a general reappraisal was now called for. What would the new adept of the mystics make of this particular heritage? 10

Désirée Hirst, Hidden Riches. Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake (London, 1964), p. 183.

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An ominous sign had been a letter written by John from Savannah to his elder brother Samuel on 23 November 1736. I think the rock on which I had nearest made shipwreck of the faith was in the writings of the mystics, under which term I comprehend all, and only those, who slight any of the means of grace. I have drawn up a short scheme of their doctrines, partly from conversations I have had, and letters, and partly from their most approved writers, such as Tauler, Molinos and the author of Theologia Germanica.11

This reappraisal ‘may be of consequence not only to this province but to nations of Christians yet unborn’. This rather eccentric definition of a mystic was followed by a considerable diatribe which revealed how strong the rock of churchmanship in Wesley was. Aimed mainly at Quietism, Wesley’s notes deplored the mystic’s superiority to those aids to faith sustained by religious institutions, public prayer, the sacraments, the Scripture and so forth. The arrogance of the mystic came out in his claim to have achieved union with God. ‘Having thus attained the end, the means must cease. Hope is swallowed up in love. Sight, or something more than sight, takes [the] place of faith.’ Faith, somewhat differently expounded, was to be a key concept in Wesley’s ultimate exit strategy from the impasse in which he found himself. But his first manoeuvre on return from Georgia was to pick a quarrel with William Law, who had led him into the quandary.12 His first letter on 14 May 1738 begins rather bitterly by ascribing the outpouring to the call of God, and proceeds to ascribe his vexation of soul to Law’s doing: For two years (more especially) [I] have been preaching after the model of your two practical treatises. And all that have heard have allowed that this law is great, wonderful and holy. But no sooner did they attempt to follow it than they found it was too high for man, and that by doing the works of this law should no flesh living be justified.

Both parties had sought to overcome the impossibility by trying harder, but ‘under this heavy yoke I might have groaned till death’, had not ‘an holy man’ [Peter Bohler, ¨ the Moravian] advised him ‘to believe in the Lord Jesus with all thy heart, and nothing shall be impossible to thee’. 11

12

Wesley Works, XXV: Correspondence I, pp. 487–9. Wesley chose his correspondent carefully, as his brother Samuel had already written in verse against the ‘whims of Molinos, lost in rapture’s mist’. Wesley Works, XVIII: Journals I, p. 135. This conflict is treated at length in J. Brazier Green, John Wesley and William Law (London, 1945); Eric W. Baker, A Herald of the Evangelical Revival (London, 1948); and briefly by Robert Tuttle, Mysticism in the Wesleyan Tradition (Grand Rapids, 1989), pp. 113–19. The correspondence between Wesley and Law is given in Wesley Works, XXV: Correspondence I, pp. 540–50.

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Then the reproaches poured out in a torrent. Why had Law not told him all this before? ‘Why did I scarce ever hear you name the name of Christ? Never, so as to ground anything upon faith in his blood? . . . I beseech you, sir, by the mercies of God, to consider deeply and impartially whether the true reason of your never pressing this upon me was not this, that you had it not yourself?’ Indeed was this not the reason for his ‘extreme roughness, I might say, sourness of behaviour’ to Charles Wesley and others? This totally unconfessional style of out-pouring did not encourage Law to accept any responsibility for Wesley’s mishaps. He could have derived all Law taught him from a` Kempis whom Wesley had lately edited. He refrained from adding that Wesley’s tirade was beside the point, since he, Law, had also gone in fresh pursuit of spiritual power, and was finding it in Jakob Bohme. ¨ Wesley and the Moravians What Bohler ¨ had spotted, and I think all Wesley’s biographers have missed, is that the latter had reached the precise stage in his development which Zinzendorf had reached with his so-called ‘turn to Luther’, and that the full Zinzendorfian treatment applied. The prescription was entirely to separate religion from philosophy, and to ease the burden of guilt and failure by stressing that the sinner justified in the sight of God was both justus ac peccator, and that this gift of grace required only acceptance by faith in the blood of Christ. While Law had turned to the theosophy of Bohme, ¨ which impressively brought together redemption and creation in one great panorama though (in the best Lutheran manner) it did not offer a unitive experience of God, Wesley was turned back towards his Reformation heritage by the arguments of Peter Bohler, ¨ backed up by the testimony of Moravian witnesses. It came down to this; if Bohler ¨ was right, and true faith carried with it ‘dominion over sin, and a constant peace from a sense of forgiveness’ Wesley did not have that faith; and if all he had to shelter behind was the bogus High-Church history that the Scripture testimony to that faith could be disregarded as ‘Presbyterian’,13 his condition was dire indeed. Wesley, for want of all else, was on the brink of intellectual conviction, but, like Zinzendorf, he needed to feel the force of this modernised Lutheranism, emotionally to know the ‘constant peace’. According to Wesley’s own famous account this actually happened on 24 May 1738 at the Moravian meeting in Aldersgate Street. It happened right on cue ‘where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the 13

Wesley Works, XVIII: Journals I, p. 248.

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Romans’, which by this time was also the familiar preface to evangelical conversion over much of Protestant Europe. ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.’14 The clear intention of the narrative is to claim that Wesley’s emotional convictions, the ‘feeling’ and in this sense the ‘knowing’, were now mobilised behind a rational conviction of a sort of Lutheran doctrine of justification. Had not Zinzendorf disposed of both the burden of sin and the burden of the Hallesian Busskampf in short order, claiming that conversion could be achieved in a quarter of an hour? On this time-scale Wesley was a laggard, but a conversion period of about three months was speedy going by most standards. What is the historian to make of it? Wesley’s best biographer, Henry Rack,15 offers an acute summary of what has become a classical Tom Tiddler’s ground for historians, theologians and propagandists of every hue. There can be no agreement as to whether Wesley’s conversion experience was a conversion or not as long as there is no agreement about what constitutes conversion. But historians have to assess what the practical effect of the experience was. To give a slightly polemical edge to Rack’s argument (which he is careful to avoid) Wesley’s conversion was a failed attempt to become a Moravian.16 For this view there is much to be said. It is usual in Methodism to put a sentimental construction on ‘the heart strangely warmed’; but this is to miss the point. If Wesley is compared with his contemporaries among the Inspired in the Rhineland, who understood Paul’s injunction to be fervent in prayer quite literally to be boiling hot, or even with the wilder shores of enthusiasm at Herrnhaag on which the Moravians were shortly to fetch up, his confession of a warmed heart is that of a rather cold fish whose pulse-rate (whether in religion or love) could not be got up to the point of letting himself go. (To do him justice he did in the literal sense let his hair down.) Indeed a fortnight after Aldersgate Street he confessed ‘my weak mind could not bear to be thus sawn asunder’.17 This is the crucial 14 15 16

17

Ibid., I, p. 250. Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast. John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism, 3rd edn (Peterborough, 2002), ch. 4. It is worth comparing this blunt assessment with that of the editor of Wesley’s diaries, R. P. Heitzenrater: ‘The irony of Aldersgate . . . is that its theological significance rests in Wesley’s eventual modification of nearly every aspect of his perception and explanation of the event at the time.’ This essay, ‘Great Expectations: Aldersgate and the Evidences of Genuine Christianity’, in Randy L. Maddox (ed.), Aldersgate Reconsidered (Nashville, 1990), ably gathers all the literary evidence together in a volume generally devoted to American blues about a historical fiction called ‘Aldersgate spirituality’: ‘Aldersgate spirituality has hurt us’ (ibid., p. 22). Wesley Works, XIX: Journals I, p. 254.

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explanation why, just as Wesley carried much of his early precisianism into his peak period of mysticism in the mid-1730s, he carried a great deal of mysticism with him to the far side of an evangelical conversion. To this we must shortly turn. Meanwhile Wesley divided the Fetter Lane Society, behaved quite abominably to friends in London who genuinely loved and cared for him,18 and showed little evidence of the fruits of the Spirit promised by Bohler. ¨ In the August following his ‘conversion’ Wesley, along with so many others who wished to see whether Primitive Christianity had been reborn in Herrnhut, made his pilgrimage there, and, on the return journey, was denied communion on the grounds, uncharitable but sharply observed, that he was a man of disturbed mind.19 This was to set the official seal on the fact that his failure to become a High-Church Pharisee, and his failure to become a successful working mystic and Indian missionary, had been followed by a failure to undergo a Moravian conversion. In the event this was no great loss, since it is impossible to imagine Wesley and Zinzendorf cooperating in the same religious community for long.20 Wesley’s real conversion The final outcome could not have been foreseen by the most prophetic formulation of religious policy. On 4 January 1739 Wesley wrote a rather savage personal appraisal in his Journal: ‘A Christian is one who has the fruits of the Spirit of Christ, which (to mention no more) are love, peace, joy. But these I have not. I have not any love of God. I do not love either the Father or the Son.’21 This was to be the last time he wrote in this strain. On 3 March Whitefield, who had been pursuing open-air evangelism in Bristol but now wanted to go on to South Wales preaching and raising funds for his projected orphan house in America, wrote about the ‘glorious door opened among the colliers. You must come and water what God has enabled me to plant’; on the 22nd he wrote much more insistently. Neither Wesley nor his circle knew what to do. They tried the sortes biblicae; they tried the lot; they got different answers.22 18 19 20 21 22

Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast, p. 184: Herrnhut MSS R13 A.7 fo.25, James Hutton to Zinzendorf, 14 March 1739. D. Benham, Memoirs of James Hutton (London, 1856), p. 40. As was appreciated from the beginning by James Hutton. See MS ref. in n. 18 above. Wesley Works, XIX: Journals II, p. 30. Ibid., II, p. 37. For Whitefield’s correspondence see Luke Tyerman, Life of Revd. George Whitefield (London, 1890), I, pp. 193–4. See also Wesley Works, XXV: Correspondence I, pp. 611–12.

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Wesley finally answered Whitefield’s summons with the utmost reluctance, apparently believing that he was going to his death. On his way to Oxford in October 1738 someone had given him a copy of Jonathan Edwards’s famous tract, the Surprising Work of God . . . in Northampton, and the tract made a sufficient impression for him to send an extract to a friend.23 When Wesley was put down, against all his inclinations of propriety and prudence, in a religious revival initiated by someone else, Bohler’s ¨ advice to preach faith till he had it was no longer relevant to his problem. What he found was that if he preached in the style of Edwards other people found faith, and then he not only had faith but kept it. ‘Experience’ reasserted itself. He had not only found a stable faith, but a new profession, that of revivalist. This was not the first time that evangelicalism and revivalism had appeared together. The Pietism of Spener or Francke or Wurttemberg ¨ had aspired to renew a decayed establishment; revivalism had been the work of oppressed minorities in the Habsburg lands who had no church structure to renew, and must pull themselves up by their own bootlaces or go under. The Protestant establishments in the Empire managed to make the kind of thing Wesley now undertook almost impossible; the Habsburgs brutally succeeded in confining it to particular areas. Of course Wesley had it all to learn. Some kind of administrative mechanism must be created to support the newly awakened faith of the flock, for which the Church of England offered no more promising patterns than the Lutheran churches afforded Spener. Ebenezer Erskine of the Associate Presbytery in Scotland offered (not altogether helpful) coaching in how to deal with abnormal religious phenomena. The Anglo-Saxon revival world, which, Wesley apart, was almost entirely Reformed, was prepared to accept him as part of a putative Great Awakening. Still more striking, Wesley, the stiff Oxford tutor, managed to establish sufficient rapport with a variety of popular milieux to keep the supply of converts going. More again, though no one really knows the rate of turnover among Wesley’s assistants, it is plain that he managed to attract and keep the loyal service of a great number of lay preachers, without whom the work could not have continued steadily, more or less free of the convulsive ups and downs of the revival in America. Wesley could not avoid the Edwardsian effort to distinguish between true and false religious experience, and he struggled with only limited success to create a homespun sociology of religion; this might have explained why congregations which at one time were full of life went dead at other times, or why social groupings such as coal-miners, with whom he was often 23

Wesley Works, XIX: Journals II, p. 16.

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very successful, were in some parts of the country unresponsive to his appeal.24 The evidence is that Wesley kept thinking about what he did, and if he could not see to the bottom of some very difficult issues, he did not rant about being misled by others as he had against Law. The sum of all these changes is certainly enough to be described as a conversion and the crucial changes were wrought quickly in the spring of 1739. Wesley and the mystics II What in the longer term happened to Wesley the mystic? The immediate consequence of Wesley’s breach with both mysticism and Moravianism was that the former became one of his charges against the latter. ‘You receive not the ancients but the modern mystics as the best interpreters of Scripture . . . You greatly refine the plain religion taught by the letter of Holy Writ, and philosophize on almost every part of it to accommodate it to the mystic theory,’ to which Zinzendorf returned the lie direct: We concern ourselves not either with the ancient or modern mystics. That people may mix nature with grace, . . . that nature may attempt to mimic grace in a thousand ways . . . – all this we do not learn from the mystics, but sound reason and daily experience can teach us, and if there was no other space in the Scriptures but that . . .25 we should be warned enough.26

Wesley’s own comments continued in much the same vein. By 1749 he had managed (just) to find a gracious word for William Law, but apparently only at the price of total rejection: ‘I read Mr. Law on the Spirit of Prayer. There are many masterly strokes therein, and the whole is lively and entertaining; but it is another gospel. For if God was never angry (as this tract asserts) he could never be reconciled. And consequently the whole Christian doctrine of reconciliation by Christ falls to the ground at once.’27 Once again (as in Zinzendorf) mystical union had foundered on the hard rock of justification by faith, and this in a Wesley who had lately dealt roughly with a Newcastle society which he diagnosed as subject to ‘the spawn of mystic divinity’ and required ‘all who desired to remain with us to justify themselves whenever they were blamed unjustly, and not to swallow up both peace and love in their voluntary humility’.28 It could therefore hardly be a surprise, though there was no discernible occasion, when on 6 January 1756 Wesley published a savage open 24 25 27

Many of these questions are discussed in my introduction to Wesley Works, XVIII: Journals I, pp. 47–61. 26 Wesley Works, XXVI: Correspondence II, pp. 29, 40. Blank space in text. 28 Ibid., III: p. 167. Wesley Works, XX: Journals III, pp. 292–3.

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letter to Law,29 attempting to pick holes in Law’s whole system partly on the ground that Law had been tempted by Jakob Bohme ¨ to speculate far beyond the letter of Scripture, and partly on the now well-established basis that mysticism, by offering a ladder to God, undercut the doctrine of justification by faith. Friends such as John Byrom attempted to mediate, but it was no use, and Law suffered a smouldering resentment for the rest of his days. What makes this latter episode hard to understand is not the circumstance that Wesley was never attracted to theosophy and could never either stand or understand Jakob Bohme. ¨ Nor that Law was Bohme’s ¨ English spokesman, though perhaps not a very good one. The puzzle is that after such an outburst Wesley published in 1768 an abridgement of The Spirit of Prayer, in which he had found some merit in 1749, in a two-volume Extract of the Rev. Mr Law’s Later Works (1768), which he also included in the 1772 edition of his own works. The abridgement was also reprinted as a tract for free distribution by Wesley and Coke in 1782. Moreover, in spite of turning his back on mysticism and Moravianism as the embodiment of the mystical spirit, Wesley had continued to dabble in the mystical literature. Poiret was read and material from him was prescribed for use at Kingswood School. And when in the 1750s Wesley began to bring out his multi-volume Christian Library, the mystics were there in force – Ignatius, Makarius, Arndt, Pascal, Bourignon (two of whose hymns survived in Methodist hymnbooks till quite recent times), John of Avila, Miguel de Molinos – though not in quite such force as the Puritans. This instability on questions of mysticism remained with Wesley throughout his life. He was disappointed in the Life of Hector de Marsay,30 but himself published a Life of Mme Guyon (1776). He is said to have been reintroduced to the mystics by Fletcher of Madeley (1729–85), whose funeral sermon he preached on the text ‘Mark the perfect man’ (Psalm 37:37). But he could still say that ‘the reading of those poisonous writers the Mystics confounded the intellect of both my brother and Mr Fletcher’,31 and one of the curious images of the eighteenth century is the spectacle of the aged Wesley purging ‘mysticism’ from his brother’s hymns.32 29 30 31

32

John Telford (ed.), Letters of John Wesley (London, 1931), III, pp. 332–70. Wesley Works, XXII: Journals V, p. 458. Telford, Letters, VIII, p. 93. John William Fletcher, Swiss-born but an Anglican divine interested in Methodism, became vicar of Madeley in 1770. He assisted Wesley in the work of replying to Calvinist polemic, and was nominated by him as his successor at the head of the Methodist movement. However, he predeceased Wesley. Ibid., XVIII, p. 122. He missed at least one, ‘Happy the man that finds the grace’, clearly a hymn to the Divine Sophia, still in the current hymnbook, Hymns and Psalms, no. 674.

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To the end of his life he was recommending the Quietist writers, especially to ladies, and especially in modest doses.33 Mysticism, it appeared, was pardonable provided the subject did not inhale. Robert Tuttle34 has argued that the mature Wesley was engaged in sifting the mystical gold from the mystical dross. There is force in this argument, since, as we have seen, the evangelicals were all engaged in drawing from and contributing to a common pool of ideas; but Wesley’s reactions, pro-mystic or anti-mystic, seem too arbitrary for this hypothesis to be very attractive. There were, however, apart from the grand stumbling block of justification by faith, two practical factors at work. Jonathan Edwards came to insist that holiness ‘consists not only in contemplation, and a mere passive enjoyment, but very much in action’;35 and so did all the evangelicals. If there were two mystics to whom Wesley remained steadily faithful they were the two activists M. de Renty and Gregory Lopez. It became apparent to the evangelicals that professional mysticism was a product of the leisure industry, and that a post-conversion diet of endless ‘dark nights of the soul’ did no one any good. Yet the tradition died hard that in the mystical literature, and, especially perhaps in the Quietists, who in their own withdrawn way had stood up to the combined tyranny of Pope and Louis XIV, there was red meat and nutriment. So a Wesley whose ‘only relaxation was a change of employment’36 could speak (with an abandon unequalled even by Zinzendorf) of the Sermon on the Mount that ‘the Son of God . . . is here showing us the way to heaven . . . the Beatitudes are the successive steps on the ladder of ascent to God’,37 an ascent he never completed to the level of assurance he craved. And while he longed for the spiritual sustenance which the mystical tradition seemed to give when he was a young man, he lived long enough to know that that tradition had been largely crushed between the upper millstone of political despotism and the lower millstone of internal textbook-isation and routinisation. Despite the old appeals, Wesley must have known in later life that they were not going to be answered. Some of his accusations, that mysticism made Christianity a solitary instead of a corporate profession, that it made men miserable instead of cheerful, that it made men hide the graces God had given under a bushel, might be 33

34 35 36 37

Telford, Letters, VII, pp. 66, 126–7; V, p. 313; VI, pp. 39, 43–4, 115. The tenor of his advice is very similar to that on novels (also given to a lady): ‘I would recommend very few novels to young persons for fear they should be too desirous of more’ (ibid., VII, p. 228). Mysticism in the Wesleyan Tradition, e.g., pp. 184–5. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. S. E. Dwight and E. Hickman, repr. (Edinburgh, 1974), II, p. 3. John Whitehead, Life of Rev. John Wesley (London, 1796), II, p. 467. Tuttle, Mysticism in the Wesleyan Tradition, p. 151, n. 54.

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crude, but they embodied a rough-hewn perception that not much more spiritual vitality would come by that route. Wesley and other evangelical keynotes Of two other familiar keynotes of evangelicalism, the willingness to practise small-group religion, and anti-Aristotelianism, there is, for different reasons, little in Wesley’s case to be said. Wesley’s Methodism was in origin a religious society emerging from a context of religious societies. The class meeting was built in as the unit of membership, and so remained until Methodist ecclesiastical pretensions became embarrassed at the fact that baptism was not the doorway to church membership. On the antiAristotelian front the case is a little more complicated. Wesley fully shared the venom of all the evangelicals against ‘system’ in theology,38 but the alternative context of religious thought favoured by so many evangelicals, Paracelsianism, was not influential in the Britain of Wesley’s day. As a young fellow of Lincoln College, he had once borrowed the translation of a French satirical attack upon it from the college library,39 and he later needed the psychology of Locke to say what he wanted to say. His Zinzendorfian separation of religion and philosophy intensified his animosity against men like Bohme ¨ and Oetinger who provided theosophical tools for evangelicals who wanted them. He spoke with favour of Bridget Bostock, the celebrated white witch of Sandbach who exercised a notable healing ministry by the practice of nature-magic.40 In a letter of 175341 he declared he had ‘always approved of the German method of practising physic far beyond the English’, a preference (possibly) patient of a Paracelsian interpretation, and certainly, just as Zinzendorf against his will had the occasional follower who was an adept of nature-magic, Wesley’s preacher Adam Clarke had an intimate friend in East Cornwall as late as 1784 who was ‘deep in the study of alchemy’.42 But while Wesley fully shared the concerns of the Central Europeans that modern materialism might blot God out of the universe, and was prepared to advertise his belief in witches to prove it, sophisticated literature supporting this kind of spiritual view of the universe disappeared from 38

39 40 42

‘The points we chiefly insisted upon [at the beginning of the revival] were . . . first, that of orthodoxy or right opinions, is, at best, a very slender part of religion, if it can be allowed to be any part of it at all.’ A Plain Account of the People called Methodists in a letter to the Rev. Mr Perronet (1748). John Wesley, Works (London, 1872), VIII, p. 249. The Count of Gablis, or the extravagant mysteries of the Cablists, tr. P. Ayres (London, 1680). 41 Ibid., II, p. 529. Wesley Works, XXVI: Correspondence II, p. 329. J. W. Etheridge, Life of the Rev Adam Clarke, 2nd edn (London, 1858), p. 81.

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English publishers’ lists in the eighteenth century even faster than mysticism disappeared in France.43 Thus for various reasons Wesley exemplified what came to be a characteristic of Western evangelicalism, an inability to place the drama of redemption within a larger framework of thought.44 What Methodists were to call ‘our doctrines’, i.e., doctrines which Methodists did not invent, but which went well in the preaching, were all about salvation and not creation. This tended to be left to Unitarians and deists. Wesley and the Last Things The other characteristic of early evangelicalism was the displacement of the Last Things into the middle distance, that Spenerite ‘hope of better things’ of which the aged Zinzendorf had spoken as if he were the last representative. Here Wesley wrote and spoke in a recognisably evangelical mould, but over a long life manoeuvred almost as tortuously as he did with mysticism. To the undisguised astonishment of his nineteenth-century biographer, Wesley’s father, the elder Samuel, was a millenarian, and advocated millenarian views in his own journal, the Athenian Oracle, in the 1690s before Wesley was born.45 The saints [he wrote] shall reign with Christ on earth a thousand years; . . . this reign shall be immediately before the general resurrection, and after the calling of Jews, the fullness of the Gentiles, and the destruction of Antichrist, whom our Saviour shall destroy by the brightness of his coming, and appearance in heaven; that at the beginning of this thousand years shall be the first resurrection, wherein martyrs and holy men shall rise and reign here in spiritual delights in the New Jerusalem, in a new heaven and a new earth, foretold by the holy prophets.

These views were of course common to the High-Church Protestant parties all over Europe; Tyerman does not let his readers into the crucial secret of when these events were scheduled to take place, but to judge by Samuel’s detailed certainties about the resurrection bodies ‘made of the purest aether . . . [so that] every individual person in heaven or hell shall see and hear all that passes in either state; these to a more extensive aggravation of their tortures, by the loss of what the others enjoy; and 43

44

45

Despite the strength of the Behmenist cause at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Antoine Faivre, Philosophie de la Nature. Physique sacrée et Théosophie XVIIIe –XIXe siècle (Paris, 1996), p. 13. Though in Wurttemberg ¨ doctrines of animal protection were early developed and advocated. Martin H. Jung, ‘Die Anfänge der Tierschutzbewegung ¨ im 19. Jahrhundert’, in his Nachfolger, Visionärinnen, Kirchenkritiker (Leipzig, 2003), pp. 171–216. Tyerman, Samuel Wesley, pp. 146–7.

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those to a greater increase of their bliss, in escaping what the others suffer’, the time could not have been distant. This was the point from which Wesley began. As early as 1742, when he preached a sermon before the University of Oxford notorious for its rebukes to the congregation, he had worked out a three-stage eschatology. In the first stage the Kingdom of God was established by the apostles in Palestine; in the second stage this kingdom developed into Christendom, in which the enormous geographical spread in Christian influence was offset in part by the flourishing of the tares amid the wheat, ‘the still increasing corruptions of succeeding generations’. Having thus made his bow to radical Pietism, Wesley affirmed that the third age was dawning in which ‘Christianity will prevail over all, and cover the earth’.46 At this point Wesley seems to have advanced little beyond his Orthodox predecessors, since the burden of his message was that the members of the university showed little sign of awareness of the time in which they lived, and should give more evidence of the fruits of the Spirit before it was too late. In one sense Wesley did not move from this position, though, when he came to refer to this sermon late in life, his mood was not to hector his congregation but to move them to enthusiastic gratitude at what the Spirit had accomplished in his lifetime. In Sermon 63, preached in 1783, he referred to the little band of original Methodists fifty years before who testified ‘to those grand truths which were then little attended to’ but which had now spread not only across the United Kingdom but to the whole of Protestant Europe and North America.47 This really was the dawn of the latter-day glory. And in quite the old style (but rather briefly), ‘all Israel too shall be saved’.48 By 1787 there seemed no doubt that ‘the latter-day glory’, meaning the time wherein God would gloriously display his power and love in the fulfilment of his gracious promise, ‘“that the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth, as the waters cover the sea”’, was at hand.49 Of course the hearts of the Jews seemed to be as hard as ever,50 but the providential route to conversion had been discovered. It was not to be the work of the godly prince, ‘a hero like Charles [X] of Sweden or Frederick [II] of Prussia to carry fire and sword and Christianity through whole nations at once’,51 not even of the Frederick II whom Charles Wesley had three times hymned during the Seven Years War as God’s 46 47 48 50

Wesley Works, I: Sermons I, pp. 159–80. Wesley reprinted this sermon at least 15 times. Sermons on Several Occasions by the Rev. John Wesley (London, 1872), II, pp. 319–22. 49 Ibid., II, p. 349 (Sermon 66 on the ‘Signs of the Times’). Ibid., II, pp. 325–6. 51 Ibid., II, p. 353. Ibid., II, p. 352.

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champion;52 the key was for the household of faith to ‘proclaim the glad tidings of salvation ready to be revealed, not only to those of your own household, not only to your relations, friends and acquaintance, but to all whom God providentially delivers into your hands’.53 And in almost Spenerite language, ‘at that time [i.e., soon] will be accomplished all those glorious promises made to the Christian church, which will not then be confined to this or that nation, but will include all the inhabitants of the earth’.54 This cheerful eventide glow had been foreshadowed for some years. In 1781 Wesley had topped off the fourth volume of his abridgment of Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History with a totally unconnected Short History of the People Called Methodists.55 This tail-piece would not have been eccentric if Wesley were not leaning to the view that if Methodism was not actually the latter-day glory, then it was probably a ‘trailer’ to it. How cheerful the bent of his mind now was came out in December 1788. On the same page of his Journal he denounced first the ‘poisonous mysticism’ that had given ‘a gloomy cast first to his [brother’s] mind and then to many of his verses’, and then the prophets of apocalypse. ‘For near seventy years, I have observed that before any war or public calamity, England abounds with prophets who confidently foretell many terrible things. They generally believe themselves, but are carried away by a vain imagination. And they are seldom undeceived, even by the failure of their predictions, but still believe they will be fulfilled sometime or other.’56 Wesley and Bengel On the way from using the apocalypse as a scourge to finding it a source of hope and encouragement Wesley had made one major deviation, via the great prophet of Wurttemberg, ¨ Bengel. Part of the attraction of this rebarbative scholar was his surpassing learning, and part no doubt that he was Zinzendorf’s most dogged foe. At any rate, when Wesley came to prepare his Notes on the New Testament in 1754 he admitted: I once determined to write down barely what occurred to my own mind, consulting none but the inspired writers. But no sooner was I acquainted with that great light of the Christian world (lately gone to his reward) Bengelius, than I entirely changed my design, being thoroughly convinced it might be of more service to 52 53 55 56

The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, ed. George Osborn (London, 1868–72), VI, pp. 120–3. 54 Ibid., II, p. 326. Sermons, II, p. 355. A Concise Ecclesiastical History, from the Birth of Christ to the beginning of the Present Century (London, 1781). Wesley Works, XXIV: Journals VII, p. 117.

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the cause of religion were I barely to translate his Gnomon Novi Testamenti than to write many volumes upon it.

And when it came to the crucial text of Revelation, he explained again that: [I]t is scarce possible for any that either love or fear God not to feel their hearts extremely affected in seriously reading either the beginning or the latter part of the Revelation . . . but the intermediate parts I did not study at all for many years; as utterly despairing of understanding them, after the fruitless attempts of so many wise and good men: and perhaps I should have lived and died in this sentiment, had I not seen the works of the great Bengelius . . . The following notes are mostly those of that excellent man . . .

– though after his general vote of confidence, Wesley did not undertake to defend Bengel in every detail.57 Bengel, however, to the confusion of both his pupils and most of the commentators, combined great simplicity – that the final drama would begin to unfold on 18 June 1836 (a date that would come back to haunt Wesley) – with a complexity exceeding that of Zinzendorf.58 What would happen in 1836 was that a time of prosperity for the church would begin of the sort for which Spener had looked. Unfulfilled Old Testament prophecies would now be fulfilled, especially those relating to the Jews. The end of the Beast, i.e., the Papacy, would permit the gradual conversion of the Jews, their return to Palestine, the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem, and the creation of a new people of God embracing both Jew and Gentile. The fact that Satan would be bound in this period did not mean that there would be in a literal sense a Second Coming. For according to Revelation 20:4 a second millennium would then follow, introduced by the resurrection of the saints to rule with God in heaven; then, less comfortably, Satan would be unbound for a little period (111 years according to Bengel’s calculation). Only at the end of the second millennium (c.3836) would there be the Last Judgement, the return of Christ to judge, the general resurrection, the end of the world, the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, and the heavenly Jerusalem. In short, while Bengel conformed to the Pietist pattern in moving the commencement of the apocalyptic drama to the middle distance, he postponed its consummation to a period almost unimaginably remote to the devout mentalities of the early and mid-eighteenth century, biblically conditioned as they were to a very short time-scale. 57 58

John Wesley, Explanatory Notes on the New Testament (ed. London, 1958), pp. 7, 932. A good recent commentary is given by Martin H. Jung, ‘1836 – Wiederkunft Christi oder Millennium? Zur Eschatologie J. A. Bengels und seiner Schuler’, ¨ in Nachfolger, Visionärinnen, Kirchenkritiker, pp. 93–116.

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How did Wesley edit this for his British flock? He did his best to save the two successive millennia with their distinct dramas, claiming reasonably that ‘there is room enough for the fulfilling of all the prophecies’; but he undermined what he had done by saying that ‘neither the beginning of the first nor of the second thousand [years] will be known to the men upon earth, as both the imprisonment of Satan and his loosing are transacted in the invisible world’. And his carefully constructed chronology, based on Bengel, contains no date later than 1836.59 What Bengel did for Wesley was much what Spener did for the early Pietists. By getting him off the hook of an early dénouement and by bidding him work for the promised ‘better times’, he provided a potential escape from the constrictions of both time and place of the Orthodox eschatologies, and especially from their obsession with Jewish questions. Of course, for missions in a wider sense, the maritime nations did not get really free access to the outside world till after the Seven Years War;60 but, before the opportunities then created could be taken, substantial changes of mind needed to take place in the evangelical milieu. Empiricism needed to displace Paracelsian and other intellectual frameworks of evangelical belief. William Carey’s careful calculation of ends and means based on commercial experience round the world revealed a very different frame of mind from that of the old Orthodox.61 A double paradox was of course concealed by the change. The missionaries who went out in numbers from Britain at the end of the eighteenth century would never have reached the mission field but for the triumph of empiricism at home; but they would have been better equipped to understand the flock they went to meet by the Paracelsian outlook of old. And of course no change of mind, however profitable, was without its downside; and Wesley in particular was fortunate to reach the end of his long course about a decade before it was discovered that the new empiricism posed special dangers for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Meanwhile Wesley, the son of a speculative millenarian, who had begun his own career by threatening the University of Oxford with the Last Things,62 now used Bengel to ensure that his followers did not become a millenarian sect.63 There were only two Methodists of note who were 59 60 61 62 63

Notes on the New Testament, pp. 1039, 1051–2. On this see my paper on ‘Missions in Their Global Context in the Eighteenth Century’ in M. Hutchinson and O. Kalu (eds.), A Global Faith (Sydney, 1998), pp. 108–21. William Carey, An enquiry into the obligation of Christians to use means for the conversion of the heathen (Leeds, 1793). And even in the 1760s shared the pre-millennial views of Thomas Hartley. L. Tyerman Life and Times of John Wesley, 6th edn (London, 1890), II, p. 523. Kenneth G. C. Newport, Apocalypse and Millennium (Cambridge, 2000) shows that there were often millenarian oddities in and about Methodism, and that in 1754 (when

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captivated by the flood of apocalyptic speculation stimulated by the French Revolution, and they were Thomas Taylor and Joseph Benson. Wesley was immunised against a great deal of this by the conviction that for practical purposes the Papacy had fallen long since, and his counsel to Benson was application to Bengel, and a calling ‘to propagate Bible religion through the land – that is, faith working by love, holy tempers and holy lives’.64 And Bengel’s great time-scale provided release for Wesley himself. On 4 May 1788 Wesley preached to a packed congregation in Bradford parish church on words from the epistle for the day, ‘The end of all things is at hand; be ye therefore sober and watch unto prayer’ (1 Peter 4:7).65 In the course of his sermon he mentioned that Bengel had expected the millennial age to begin in 1836, and was subsequently dunned by correspondents whether that was his own belief. His replies could hardly have been more laid back. I said nothing, less or more, in Bradford Church concerning the end of the world, neither concerning my own opinion. What I said was that Bengelius had given it as his opinion, not that the world would then end, but that the Millennial reign of Christ would begin in the year 1836. I have no opinion at all upon that head. I can determine nothing about it. These calculations are far above out of my sight. I have only one thing to do, to save my own soul and those that hear me.66 What I spoke was a citation from Bengelius who thought, not that the world would end, but that the Millennium would begin about the year 1836. Not that I affirm this myself, nor ever did. I do not determine any of these things: they are too high for me. I only desire to creep in the vale of humble love.67

No wonder that Luke Tyerman was astonished to find that the elder Samuel Wesley, John’s father, was a speculative millenarian! Thus Wesley stands at an important turning-point in the history of evangelical identity. At the practical level his work gave rise to a number of religious communions which together, and for a time, made up the largest religious group of evangelical origin. Moreover American Methodism came to offer a natural, though not always easy,68 home for German evangelical sects in America, as their German character suffered assimilation into American life. All the more striking then was the

64 66 68

John Wesley was in low spirits) Charles professed a full-blown pre-millennialism with an imminent Second Coming; this will hardly explain why Methodism went against the torrent of apocalyptic speculation at the end of the eighteenth century. 65 Wesley Works, XXIV: Journals VII, pp. 80–1. Telford, Letters, VI, p. 291. 67 Telford, Letters, VII, p. 67. Telford, Letters, VIII, p. 63. Some indications of how it felt in the case of the Evangelical United Brethren are given in the Epilogue to J. Steven O’Malley, ‘On the Journey Home’. The History of Mission of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, 1946–68 (New York, 2003), pp. 187–9.

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Methodist contribution to the disintegration of the original evangelical mix in their virtually total repudiation of any interest in the millennium. As late as 1814 the Methodist Magazine could complacently declare that the old dissenters had ‘little but the form of godliness’ while affirming their own solidarity with the new evangelical dissent, where ‘the holy flame is burning . . . [and] increasing in strength and clearness. Holy Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists (one in Christ) unite to teach to warn all they can . . . Watched over by zealous and affectionate pastors, they are instructed in relative duties with great minuteness.’69 This affection for precisionism and ministerial authority was a prelude to the Wesleyan attempt to break up the undenominational enterprise,70 and to subject ministerial training for a century to a systematic theology of their own (Richard Watson’s Theological Institutes, 1823–9, repr. in 4 vols. 1877). This marked ‘a change of focus from Wesley’s “distinctive mark of practical theology” to a more deductive, systematic and propositional approach underpinned by an emphasis on the authority of scripture’,71 the very thing from which the early evangelicals had sought to escape. At the same time the residual Wesleyan connexion with the mystical tradition was steadily eroded.72 69 70 71 72

Methodist Magazine 37 (1814), 376. Following the example of the Church of England; the story is told in my Religion and Society in England 1790–1850 (London, 1972). Martin Wellings in the Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals (Leicester, 2003), p. 706. Gordon S. Wakefield, an admirable man whose piety sometimes outweighed his historical judgement, made the best of the residuum in Methodist Devotion (London, 1966).

8

Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) is a prime example of many things, not least of the still persisting sense of evangelical fellowship; for no one could have disliked his Calvinism more than the arch-Arminian John Wesley, yet it was Wesley who went to considerable trouble to make versions of Edwards’s works available to his own flock, and this at a time when his own relations with the great representative of English evangelical Calvinism, George Whitefield, were fractious. To the same sense of fellowship testified the publishing history of his most famous tract, the Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God . . . in Northampton . . . First published in England in 1737, with a commendatory preface by the Congregationalist ministers John Guyse and Isaac Watts arguing that Edwardsian revival was the old Baxterian middle way, it was almost never out of print for the next century. If ever revival seemed to flag, someone somewhere would reprint the Faithful Narrative as a classic analysis, description, and exhortation to return not to seventeenth-century Puritanism but to the fires of revival.

Edwards and ministerial authority In this there was an element of paradox, for Edwards fought desperately to preserve a sort of Reformed Orthodoxy, at a time when it was losing its grip in his own country. And he retained an encyclopedic or systematic mind familiar in the old Reformed tradition. Even in his own parish of Northampton, Edwards found that young church members whom he had admitted during the revival turned against him, and forced him out of his living and away to the Indian mission at Stocksbridge. In other ways, however, Edwards benefited by being born into the third generation of the evangelical succession. New England followed European traditions at its own distance, and by the time Edwards was in his prime the battle against 140

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Aristotle had been won.1 If his dependence upon Locke now seems to be much less than was once thought, Edwards felt the need to thunder against system2 or ‘opinions in religion’ much less than the young Wesley. It is also true that although Edwards’s loss of his parish showed what the lay interest could accomplish in the Reformed system, he wrote and acted for the most part in the character of the heavy hand of clerical leadership which marked the whole history of revival in the Reformed world. It is indeed very extraordinary how the concessions which the Reformed churches made to small-group religion and to the lay interest seem to have delivered them into clerical control more thoroughly than even the Lutheran and Anglican systems. Nevertheless if Edwards needed a testimony on this front it was provided by the way he prepared the revival in Northampton by persuading the town to organise itself into smaller private meetings,3 and by the Concert of Prayer. In 1744 a group of ministers in Scotland, including Edwards’s ministerial friends there, commenced the Concert of Prayer, a regular meeting to pray for an outpouring of God’s Spirit on the church. Edwards became a leading advocate of the Concert in New England. There was an obvious eschatological component to this scheme, and one which made it particularly appropriate to the New England scene. For the British colonies there were immediately exposed to the threat of French military power, and that at a time when New England opinion had been bitterly divided by the outbreak of revival. If New England could not pray itself into a harmonious frame of mind the judgement might well be severe. The Concert of Prayer was begun by ministers, and, although Edwards was in a mood of exalted clericalism at the time, it was apparent to him that if this union in prayer was to fulfil William Ames’s requirement of ‘a devout presentation of our will before God so that he may be, as it were, affected by it’,4 or even to stop the disputatious rot at home, it would be necessary ‘to engage, as far as we are able, all persons of distinction and influence to unite with us in this work of reformation; e.g. justices, school-masters, candidates for the ministry; and especially to assist us by their example’.5 It was indeed the willingness of so many to cooperate 1 2

3 4 5

On this theme see Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard. A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill, 1981). Though as a young man ‘he had already discovered that much of what he found in systems and commentaries was a mere mass of rubbish’. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. S. E. Dwight and E. Hickman, 1834 (repr. Edinburgh, 1974), I, p. xxxvii. G. M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards. A Life (New Haven, 2003), p. 156. Quoted in Jonathan Edwards, Apocalyptic Writings, Yale edn, V (New Haven, 1977), p. 34. Edwards, Works, I, pp. xci, cviii.

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in ‘prayer for the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, and the coming of the Redeemer’s kingdom, [which showed that the Concert was] from the Lord’, and an earnest of greater things soon to come.6 There was here nothing of the timidity of the Lutheran Orthodox at realising the spiritual power of the laity. Edwards and mysticism What then of Jonathan Edwards the mystic? Here the waters have been unusually muddied, partly because of the lack of agreement as to what mysticism is, and partly because of the desire of commentators to box him into the corner of their own specialisms. Thus, for example, Delattre, one of the most sensitive of Edwards students, exalts his own perspective on his hero’s aesthetics by contrasting it with his mysticism.7 This will hardly do. Edwards was distinguished from most theologians in the Reformed tradition by a clear relationship to the English Neoplatonists and to one of the major strands of European mysticism, and by his willingness to use the language about divine emanations that had so often been associated with enthusiasm for the Cabbala; but his own description of his religious experience could sound like the Catholic descriptions of the mystical ladder to God. The saints, he found, may reach a feeling of ‘ecstasy, wherein they have been carried beyond themselves, and had their minds transported into a train of strong and pleasing imaginations, and kind of visions, as though they were wrapped [sic] up even to heaven, and there saw glorious sights’.8 Had Edwards not enjoyed a religious experience of this kind first-hand he could not have failed to notice that his wife, Sarah, had it frequently, sometimes triggered by reading a hymn. Mr Buell then read a melting hymn of Dr Watts’s concerning the loveliness of Christ, the enjoyments and employments of heaven, and the Christian’s earnest desire of heavenly things; and the truth and the reality of the things mentioned in the hymn, made so strong an impression on my mind, and my soul was drawn so powerfully towards Christ and heaven, that I leaped unconsciously from my chair. I seemed to be drawn upwards, soul and body, from the earth towards heaven; and it appeared to me that I must naturally and necessarily ascend thither. These feelings continued while the hymn was reading, and during the prayer of Mr Christophers which followed. After the prayer Mr Buell read two other hymns, 6 7

8

Ibid., I, p. cvi. R. A. Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1968), p. vii. Marsden judges better that ‘Edwards’ experiences were not simply those of a born mystic’, Jonathan Edwards, p. 45. The Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God (1741), in The Great Awakening, ed. C. Goen, Yale edn, IV, p. 237.

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on the glories of heaven, which moved me so exceedingly, and drew me so strongly heavenward, that it seemed as it were to draw my body upwards, and I felt as if I must necessarily ascend thither. At length my strength failed me, and I sunk down; when they took me up and laid me on the bed, where I lay for a considerable time, faint with joy, while contemplating the glories of the heavenly world.9

Here, apparently freed entirely from the hang-ups about justification by faith that had plagued Zinzendorf and even Wesley, is an account of immediate union with God, which corresponds to many of the Catholic characteristics of mystical experience generally. For example: 1◦ The mystical experience is above all an experience of radical passivity: it is the transcendant, the mystery which invades human existence . . . This passivity distinguishes mysticism from magic, the latter trying to dominate the Other or to manipulate the mystery. The passivity of the mystic is not inertia nor the absence of activity. The depth of man does not remain inactive; it is more active than before; but now there is a distinct subject which dominates and guides this activity . . . 3o Knowledge in mystical experience is not that of philosophy and is not related to any form of ordinary knowledge . . . This new knowledge includes a true type of certitude; it is both experimental and savoureuse [in the language of Edwards, ‘sweet’].10

Edwards and beauty It was the particular genius of Edwards to perceive experience of this kind in such a way as to provide a new construct of Reformed Orthodoxy without separating himself from any but the wilder forms of evangelicalism, a construct that circumvented some commonly felt difficulties in the Reformed tradition. It was doubtless a calumny that coarse critics of the Reformed tradition tended to maintain that the Reformed worshipped an arbitrary God, electing and rejecting whom he would, and that what the catechism enjoined about enjoying him for ever was simply a comfortable feeling of being on the right side of the electing decrees. Edwards cut through all this in a way that was not characteristic of Reformed theologians.11 Beauty ‘is what we are more concerned with more than anything else whatsoever; yea we are concerned with nothing else’.12 This followed inescapably from the perception that beauty is that ‘wherein the truest idea of divinity does consist’. The God of the Reformed was not only, not even primarily, power and justice, but beauty. Whoever shared Edwards’s 9 10 11 12

Edwards, Works, I, pp. lxii–lxviii, here lxiv. Dictionnaire de Spiritualité (Paris, 1932–95), X, pt. 2. Art. ‘Mystique’, cols. 1895–7. Though much later Karl Barth was to dabble in the idea in his Church Dogmatics. Mind, quoted in Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility, p. vii. Cf. Edwards, Works, I, p. ccxvi.

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vision of the ravishing beauty of God could not possibly remain unaffected by it, could not but be grasped by its sweetness. The saints were not the recipients of an arbitrary divine favour: [T]hey do not first see that God loves them, and then see that he is lovely; but they first see that God is lovely, and that Christ is excellent and glorious; their hearts are first captivated with this view, and the exercises of their love are wont, from time to time, to begin here, and to arise primarily from these views; and then, consequentially, they see God’s love, and great favour to them. The saints’ affections begin with God; and self-love has a hand in these affections consequentially and secondarily only.13

Here Edwards sidestepped both the laborious demand of the Quietists for ‘disinterested love’ and the preoccupation with justice that underlay the Lutheran insistence on justification. Moreover the transforming effect of the vision of divine beauty created the special sense, the ‘sense of the heart’, which would be required if the process which he was analysing were to be understood in terms of the psychology of John Locke. More than this, while Edwards admitted that it was ultimately impossible clearly to distinguish true from false religious affections, he had laid the basis for a very fine-drawn analysis which would take the believer substantially along the road. The essence of it was not primarily that truly gracious affections promoted love, forgiveness and mercy (what Wesley might have called ‘holy tempers’), but that, partaking of the divine character, they have ‘beautiful symmetry and proportion’.14 And should anyone demand an example of this from contemporary life, it was to be found in David Brainerd, the missionary to the Indians, whose well-proportioned zeal ran off neither into pharisaism on the one hand nor antinomianism on the other. The correlate of the divine beauty in man was sensibility, and so there was room for imagination, even for visions, though in the conventional Reformed way Edwards did not go in for ikons. It was indeed impossible in the ultimate sense to be miserable for God’s sake.15 The great aesthetic criteria of harmony, regularity, and proportion would also do at a pinch to confute the atheist. If the atheist will not acknowledge any great order and regularity in the corporeal world he must acknowledge that there is in spirits, in minds, which will be as much an argument for a contriver as if the contrivance was in bodies. He must acknowledge that reason, wisdom, and contrivance are regular actions. But they are the actions of spirits. Many of the works of men are wonderfully regular, but certainly no more regular than the contrivance that was the author of them . . . Hence we see that all man’s works and human inventions and artifices are arguments of the 13 15

14 Ibid., I, pp. 303, 309. Ibid., I, p. 276. Harvey G. Townsend (ed.), The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards (Westport, 1955), p. 204.

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existence of God, as well as those that are more immediately the works of God, for they are only the regular actings of God’s works.16

Typology Edwards’s perception of the divine beauty and his efforts to find it a long-overdue central place in Christian theology obviated some of the conventional flaws in Reformed theology; but not all. Once embarked on the quest for evidences of the divine beauty his enthusiasm knew no bounds. In a certain sense the situation he inherited in his own theological tradition invited this excess. As is well known, biblical exegesis before the Reformation had commonly sought four levels of interpretation: the basic literal or historical level, the allegorical (which commonly meant Christological) level, the tropological (or figurative and moral) level, and the anagogical, which meant interpreting the text in an ultimate or spiritual sense. Luther himself found the whole Bible to be the cradle of Christ, but the first reformers were distinguished less by exegesis of this kind than by a powerful call for the literal or historical interpretation only. That call was loyally maintained by their successors. They, however, began to find exegetical literalism problematic in the case of Scriptures like the Canticles, certain Psalms, the apocalypses. Everyone believed that the birth of Christ had been foretold in the Old Testament, and, particularly in Switzerland, a major intellectual industry developed in which Old Testament passages could be understood as ‘types’ fulfilled in their ‘antitype’ which was Christ. And whenever men were tempted to see their contemporary struggles foreshadowed, even illuminated, by the apocalyptic writings, the same process began again. Edwards leapt to take the whole process much further, with a view to enlarging the evidences for the divine beauty. It was not now that types of Christ were to be found in the Old Testament; it was that [T]here is that wondrous universal harmony and consent and concurrence in the Scriptures; such an universal appearance of a wonderful glorious design; such stamps everywhere of exalted and divine wisdom, majesty and holiness in matter, manner, contexture, and aim – that the evidence is the same that the Scriptures are the word and work of a divine mind to one that is thoroughly acquainted with them, as ’tis that the words and actions of an understanding man are from a rational mind to one that has, of a long time, been his familiar acquaintance.17 16 17

Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 80. The modern reader is reminded forcefully of Quentin Skinner’s warning against ‘the mythology of coherence’.

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It was no longer that the Old Testament contained types of New Testament anti-types, it was that the whole Scripture embodied a coherence that bespoke the beauty of its divine author. Embarked on this route Edwards was prepared to use New Testament passages and events in the life of the church to extract the information apparently contained about the future in the apocalyptic passages. Even this was not enough. He found types in the natural world as well, and discovered that there were patterns of redemption in nature as well as history. Of course this Christocentric interweaving of space and time was only apparent to the man transformed as well as enlightened by the divine beauty. By this stage this was another way of saying that it had become so completely severed from the literal sense so dear to the Reformers as to be completely arbitrary. Take for example his exegesis of the texts Matthew 13:33 and Luke 13:21. ‘The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened.’ By ‘three measures’ it meant the whole world, the progeny of the three sons of Noah, who settled the three parts of the world: Shem, Asia; and Ham, Africa; and Japheth, Europe. To a later generation raised on critical and historical studies such exegesis could hardly be more arbitrary.18 The Scripture passages that apparently envisaged an imminent end to the historical process were bound to present difficulties to Edwards as to every other commentator; special difficulties in his case, as the tension between an Orthodox desire to have the end early and an evangelical impulse to put it off into the middle distance was aggravated by the new evidence brought to bear by the Great Awakening. The effort to resolve this question took as much of Edwards’s time and intellectual energy as the struggle to distinguish between true and false religious affections, and the posthumously published torso of his inquiries proved to be the most influential part of his literary legacy in America. Edwards and eschatology Edwards could not be unaffected by the lively tradition of apocalyptic speculation in New England. He was familiar with the work of Joseph Mede which appeared to so many in Europe to put the whole question 18

This theme is discussed in several volumes of the Yale edn of Edwards’s works: Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, ed. J. F. Wilson, Yale edn, IX (New Haven, 1989), pp. 44–50; Jonathan Edwards, Typological Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson et al., Yale edn, XI (New Haven, 1993), p. 3; Jonathan Edwards, Notes on Scripture, ed. S. J. Stein, Yale edn, XV (New Haven, 1998), p. 2 (Intr.), p. 49 (text); S. J. Stein (ed.), Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation (Bloomington, 1996), pp. 61–2.

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on a scientific basis, and with the efforts of Newton and William Whiston to bring it up to date. He was also deeply versed in the eighteenth-century work of Daniel Whitby (1638–1726), the Anglican scholar who argued that the millennium was not an actual reign of resurrected saints, but a picture of a period in which the church would prosper in advance of Christ’s return to earth; he was thus, in the technical jargon of the day, a post-millennialist. In this matter Charles Daubuz (1673–1717), a Huguenot exile, and Moses Lowman (1680–1752), an English dissenter, whose Paraphrase and Notes on the Revelation of St John (1737) was meat and drink to Edwards, followed him. Apocalyptic speculation had received two new impulses among the serious-minded from the manifest failures of the radical interpretations during the civil wars and of the Huguenot prophecies of the fall of the French church after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. While the issue went largely dead during the triumph of established vested interests in the Church of England in the age of Walpole, for those with an active concern with the solution of the apocalyptic riddle it was clear that there was much to be done. Edwards was bound to be of this number. Not only was he heir to the disappointments that had followed New England’s ambitions to be an eschatological beacon on the hill, he could not evade the perennial military and diplomatic challenge to his native land. One of his bedrock convictions was that Revelation 17:18 showed without allegory that the Papacy was Antichrist. Throughout his lifetime New England appeared to be one of the most active fronts in the perennial struggle against that force of evil. During what in Europe was known as the War of the Spanish Succession, his father Timothy had been appointed chaplain to the Connecticut expedition against Canada, and a deep-rooted fear persisted that French Jesuits in combination with Indian tribes would isolate New England from the rear – perhaps even, as agents of divine wrath against a New England faithless to its mission, overthrow the entire enterprise. Antichrist was much closer to home than Rome. The best comfort that Edwards’s studies afforded was that the Papacy would fall by 1866. Nevertheless he continued to study, preach and make notes on the theme; the end-time was glorious, it consoled and nerved the courage for struggles to come. And he worked hard on the metaphysical implications of these questions, demonstrating to his own satisfaction that the absolute decrees of God were not inconsistent with liberty, and that foreseen events were necessary events.19 So far as the published word was concerned Edwards prudently held his peace, but the outbreak of revival in his parish, what he himself described 19

Edwards, Works, I, pp. 36, 39.

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as ‘the conversion of many hundred souls in Northampton and the neighbouring towns and villages’, forced the question whether this was the glorious outpouring of the Spirit, or at least the beginning of it, which the post-millennialists expected to precede Christ’s return. In the Faithful Narrative Edwards made no such claim; but in their preface to the first edition published in England Watts and Guyse ended what was otherwise a cautious assessment with the enthusiastic prayer: [W]e entreat our readers in both Englands, to join with us in our hearty addresses to the throne of grace, that this wonderful discovery of the hand of God in saving sinners, may encourage our faith and hope of the accomplishment of all his words of grace, which are written in the Old Testament and the New, concerning the large extent of this salvation in the latter days of the world. Come. Lord Jesus, come quickly, and spread thy dominion through all the ends of the earth. Amen.20

The revival problematic The cat was now out of the bag. Charles Chauncy, the Boston minister who became one of Edwards’s chief critics, appears not to have scrupled to allege that Edwards had claimed that the revival was the beginning of the latter-day glory, and that the Second Coming would take place in Northampton;21 in fact even in his (second) Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England (1740) Edwards went no further than to claim that ‘it is not unlikely that this work of God’s Spirit, so extraordinary and wonderful, is the dawning, or at least the prelude of that glorious work of God, so often foretold in Scripture, which, in the progress and issue of it, shall renew the world of mankind’, and that (on the basis of some very contrived exegesis of Scripture) ‘there are many things that make it probable that this work will begin in America’.22 The sad part of the whole affair from Edwards’s point of view was that by the mid-1740s much of the revival had become unbearable both to his exalted clericalism and to his fastidious perception of the divine beauty. He would not turn his back on Spener’s formulation, but would circumscribe it: I suppose that all are agreed as to these two things, viz. 1. That all exhorting one another by laymen is not unlawful or improper; but, on the contrary, that such 20 21

22

Ibid., I, p. 346. Edwards, Apocalyptic Writings, Yale edn, V, p. 29. Chauncy’s main thrust was that the revival represented a recrudescence of the irrationalism promoted within living memory by the French Prophets in England. [Charles Chauncy], The Wonderful Narrative, or a faithful Account of the French Prophets, their Agitations, Extasies and Inspirations . . . (Boston, Mass., 1742). Edwards, Works, I, pp. 381, 383.

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exhorting is a Christian duty. And, 2. I suppose also, all will allow that there is some kind or way of exhorting and teaching which belongs only to the office of teachers.23

The depth of Edwards’s disappointment with the revival came out in a private letter to John Erskine in Scotland in 1750:24 I suspect the follies of some of the Seceders, which you mention in both your letters . . . , arise in a considerable measure from the same cause with the follies of the Moravians, and the followers of the Wesleys, and many extravagant people in America, viz. false religion, counterfeit conversions, and the want of a genuine renovation of the spirit of their minds. I say as to many of them, not to condemn all in the gross. The spirit seems to be exactly the same with what appears in many, who apparently, by their own account have had a false conversion.

The numbers of conversions, which had once seemed ‘probably’ to herald the millennium, now seemed to be a great mistake. Barring the final disclaimer, the opinion might have come from Charles Chauncy. The Work of Redemption In the full flush of enthusiasm for the revival, however, Edwards launched into a systematic investigation of the question in a series of thirty sermons to his parish which was published posthumously in 1774 as A History of the Work of Redemption. When he was invited to become President of Princeton, he expressed hesitation on the grounds that he was contemplating ‘a great work’ of divinity on a new historical method; this was the Work of Redemption. When he died in 1758 of a failed inoculation, the work had not been completed. Whether this was due to his early unforeseen death, or to the fact that his estimate of the Awakening had changed so radically since the sermons were first preached, or because the task was impossible, cannot be established with certainty. The difficulty of assessing this his most influential book is increased by the fact that the materials he left were in a rather ragged state and underwent considerable editing at the hand of his son Jonathan Jnr. and also of John Erskine in Edinburgh. Despite all these uncertainties, it remains the best guide to Edwards’s views on eschatology. Whatever the editing, the grandiose perspective of the Work of Redemption is unmistakeably vintage Edwards. Redemption had formed the common theme of Puritan theology for generations, but it had been treated predominantly from the standpoint of pastoral theology, and 23 24

Ibid., I, p. 417. Jonathan Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings, ed. G. S. Calaghorn, Yale edn, XVI (New Haven, 1998), p. 349.

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directed to the familiar case of Puritan pastoral care, that of the person who had no difficulty in accepting the doctrine of justification by faith independent of works, but who suffered agonies of uncertainty as to whether the faith he had was the saving or justifying faith. This concern with the application of redemption to the individual had led Puritans into the study of the morphology of conversion, and of all those signs, required particularly by the Congregational churches, of visible sainthood. Edwards had already contributed substantially to this genre in the Faithful Narrative.25 In the Work of Redemption, however, he began boldly by establishing the cosmic context of his theme. The work of redemption had indeed its common limited sense of the purchase of salvation. ‘In this restrained sense the work of redemption was not so long in doing; but was begun and finished with Christ’s humiliation.’ But in a broader sense it includes ‘all that God accomplishes tending to this end; not only the purchase itself, but also all God’s works that were properly preparatory to the purchase, and accomplishing the success of it’. So that the whole dispensation, as it includes the preparation and purchase, the application and success of Christ’s redemption, is here called the work of redemption. All that Christ does in this great affair as Mediator, in any of his offices, either of prophet priest or king; either when he was in this world, in his human nature, or before or since. And it includes not only what Christ the Mediator has done, but also what the Father, or the Holy Ghost have done, as united or confederated in this design of redeeming sinful men.26

Yet more: though Edwards was prepared to pursue this gracious design from the fall of man to the end of the world, no one should consider that the fall of man was the terminus a quo. Some things were done before the world was created, yea from eternity. The persons of the Trinity were, as it were, confederated in a design, and a covenant of redemption . . . There were things done at the creation of the world, in order to that work; for the world itself seems to have been created in order to it . . . The creation of heaven was in order to the work of redemption; as a habitation for the redeemed . . . this lower world . . . was doubtless created to be a stage upon which this great and wonderful work of redemption should be transacted.

Nor would the work cease with the end of the world, for the glory and blessedness of the saints would remain with them for ever.27 Thus, while giving notice that he was confining himself to the huge tract of time between the fall of man and the end of the world, Edwards made it clear that gracious redemption was the key to the world at large, and that 25

Edwards, Works, I, pp. 350–64.

26

Ibid., I, p. 534.

27

Ibid.

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the history of redemption could not be confined to the historical process alone. But this great span of time divided itself up into three periods simply enough: I. That from the fall of man to the incarnation of Christ, God was doing those things which were preparatory to his coming, as forerunners and earnests of it. II. That the time from Christ’s incarnation to his resurrection, was spent in procuring and purchasing redemption. III. That the space of time from the resurrection of Christ to the end of the world, is all taken up in bringing about or accomplishing the great effect or success of that purpose.28

The first period was one in which the assumptions behind the general Christian view, that the Jewish Scriptures were an Old Testament to Christ, was bolstered by pressing typology to the limit, and creating the impression that there was a cohesion in God’s gracious purposes which would not have arisen from reading the Scriptures simply as historical documents or even as religious texts. From what has been said, we may strongly argue, that Jesus of Nazareth is indeed the Son of God, and the Saviour of the world; and so that the Christian religion is indeed the true religion, seeing that Christ is the very person so evidently pointed at, in all the great dispensations of Divine Providence from the very fall of man, and was so undoubtedly in so many instances foretold from age to age, and shadowed forth in a vast variety of types and figures.

The types having been so elaborately arranged to produce this result, it was easy to brush aside the objections that cunning men might have contrived the prophecies, or that the divine authority of the Old Testament was undermined by its propensity to ‘warlike histories and civil transactions’.29 Having got his readers where they expected to be, Edwards was able to analyse the work of Christ briefly. Though it lasted only between thirty and forty years it was crucial, for ‘though many things had been done in the affair of redemption, though millions of sacrifices had been offered, yet nothing was done to purchase redemption before Christ’s incarnation’.30 The Christian era The completeness of Christ’s purchase was Edwards’s balm for fearful souls, but more to his immediate purpose was to point out that after Christ’s resurrection ‘established means of success’ were created 28

Ibid., I, p. 536.

29

Ibid., I, p. 569.

30

Ibid., I, p. 572.

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by which the church was to complete the cosmic victory which he had in principle won. The Jewish dispensation was abolished, the Christian Sabbath and the gospel-ministry instituted with a world-wide missionary commission. Doctrine was developed, the Scriptures written, church councils summoned, and the familiar sacraments and agencies of the church brought into being.31 It was now up to Edwards to get his readers convincingly through the history of the Christian era, sacred and secular, to the point where they could contemplate the Last Things with understanding. The period from the destruction of Jerusalem to the time of Constantine virtually put paid to the opposition of the Jews, and ‘though the learning and power of the Roman empire were so great and both were employed to the utmost against Christianity, yet all was in vain’.32 The conversion and accession of Constantine delivered the church from persecution, but the survival of the gospel against such powerful persecution ‘plainly shows the hand of God’.33 Satan must now change his tactics and try infesting the church with heresy. This had only limited success, but given time Satan almost achieved success with the rise of Antichrist in the west and of Muslim power in the east. The true church was like the woman in the wilderness, ‘almost hid from sight and observation’. The rise of Antichrist was gradual: creeping clericalisation, increasing superstition in worship, a concentration of power in the Papacy, the engrossing of wealth in the hands of the church, the taking of the Scriptures out of the hands of the laity. It was characteristic of this period that the emergence of militant Islam on the eastern frontiers of Christendom was accompanied within the frontiers by the persecution of the Waldensians, who preserved pure worship and a testimony against Rome in their Alpine fastnesses. Otherwise the gloom was lit only by the morning stars of the Reformation, Wycliffe and Hus. Both were burnt. Edwards had now arrived at the period in which he could be sure of taking his readers with him. Luther arose to unmask Antichrist, and about half of Christendom threw off the yoke of Rome, though subsequently ‘the papists have gained ground, so that the protestants now have not so great a proportion’.34 Nevertheless the Papacy was terribly shaken by the outpouring of the vials of God’s wrath. But persecution, war and the outbreak of internal heresy took their toll of the Protestant ranks. Yet in the worst of times reformed doctrine proved its power by the propagation of the gospel in Russia, among the American Indians, and on the Malabar coast. And ‘revival’ (Edwards’s word) returned to Christendom in the 31

Ibid., I, pp. 588–9.

32

Ibid., I, p. 591.

33

Ibid., I, p. 593.

34

Ibid., I, p. 597.

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work of the Halle institutions and in the ‘remarkable pouring out of the Spirit of God . . . in this part of New England’.35 A balance sheet of the present state of affairs showed, on the debit side, that the Reformed churches had lost ground, most notably in France, that there was more licentiousness and less of the power of godliness; on the credit side, that there was less persecution, and, more ambiguously, more learning and trust in reason, as prophesied by Daniel himself. The final consummation At the end of this vast narrative Edwards drew comfort from the capacity of God’s work to survive so many trials, but had to admit that ‘we know not what particular events are to come to pass before that glorious work of God’s Spirit begins, by which Satan’s kingdom is to be overthrown’.36 What could be said with confidence was that the final dénouement would be preceded by a dark time for religion, and then accomplished by a tremendous revival and outpouring of the Spirit of God. This in turn would be bound to provoke the last violent resistance of Satan, and ‘all the forces of Antichrist, and Mahometanism, and heathenism will be united’.37 The outcome of this dreadful Armageddon was, however, not in doubt: the seventh vial would be poured out, and Christ would dash his enemies in pieces. In practical terms, ‘heresies, infidelity and superstition among those who have been brought up under the light of the gospel, will then be abolished; and particularly deism, which is now so bold and confident in infidelity, shall be driven away, and vanish to nothing’. Antichrist (in the shape of the Papacy) will be overthrown, and the work of the Reformation (in that sense) completed. ‘The Mahometan empire shall fall at the sound of the great trumpet which shall then be blown.’ ‘Jewish infidelity shall then be overthrown’; and the conversion of the Jews and the salvation of the house of Israel will follow. Heathenism, which now possessed a great part of the world, would also succumb to the enlightenment of the gospel. A time of knowledge and peace, holiness and prosperity would follow. After a thousand years of this happiness Satan would be once more loosed from his captivity, and the great apostasy would be the preface to Christ’s final return in judgement.38 The conclusion of Edwards’s argument had been implicit from the start. The work of redemption had always been incremental, its slow progress disguised by revolutions on the way. The whole history of the church under the means of grace was to prepare it for ‘the bestowment of 35

Ibid., I, p. 600.

36

Ibid., I, p. 605.

37

Ibid., I, p. 606.

38

Ibid., I, pp. 609–11.

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glory. The means of grace, and God’s grace itself is bestowed on the elect to make them meet for glory. All those glorious things which were brought to pass for the church while under the means of grace [i.e., during the historical process] are but images and shadows of this.’39 The end, as the beginning, of the whole tremendous work was the salvation, the glory, of the elect. Edwards and history Although Edwards had referred to his study as a work upon historical principles, he was under no illusion that these were the principles upon which ordinary historians worked.40 What has been said may greatly serve to show us the consistency, order and beauty of God’s works of providence. If we behold events in any other view, all will look like confusion, like the tossing of waves; things will look as though one confused revolution came to pass after another, merely by blind chance, without any regular or certain end . . . All God’s works of providence, through all the ages, meet at last, as so many lines meeting in one centre.41

It was, of course, impossible for Edwards to know the vast panorama of global human history which could not be arranged around the short thread to be inferred from the Scripture testimony, nor how high the waves tossed in the human enterprise as a whole. His vision of God’s work as consistency, order and beauty stemmed from his vision of God as consistency, order and beauty. The need for coherence had led him greatly to extend the typological interpretation of Scripture, and to push it into the interpretation of profane history and of nature as well. His achievement of coherence convinced him of the providential nature of the entire work, and continued into the middle of the next century to give numerous American evangelicals a sense of the ‘setting’ of their pilgrimage. But the loose ends remained. Was the Salzburg emigration the sign of at least the beginning of the end?42 Or were the revivals in New England to which, despite all his distaste, he remained loyal? Or did his observation of the millennia past and his championship of David Brainerd mean that the slow progress of missions

39 40 41 42

Ibid., I, p. 612. Edwards possessed many of the works by Enlightenment historians. Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History (Princeton, 2003), p. 8. Edwards, Works, I, p. 617. Edwards, Works, II, p. 294. On the Salzburg case, see my Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 93–114.

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was the only way to a relatively distant millennium?43 Edwards had not been got off the hook of this dilemma as Wesley had been got off by digesting Bengel. Or perhaps Edwards, the great hero of the English-speaking Reformed evangelicals, had succumbed to the impossibility of combining a revised cohesive Orthodoxy with the practical necessities of evangelical existence. This was a question further to be explored outside America. 43

Jonathan Edwards, The Life of David Brainerd, ed. N. Pettit, Yale edn, VII (New Haven, 1985), p. 1.

9

The disintegration of the old evangelicalism

It had been a question from the beginning whether the mutual charity and the sense of being up against a systematic Aristotelian Orthodoxy would be enough to keep the evangelical mix together and with it the sense of fraternity among evangelicals of various stripes. Zinzendorf had tested patience to the limit in one direction, and finally led his community to financial disaster. Edwards had tried to reclaim evangelicalism for Reformed Orthodoxy at the price of having to rewrite the Orthodoxy, to disclaim the religious affections of much of what passed for evangelicalism, and to sustain the whole by an artificial typology of biblical harmonisation. In his later years Wesley successfully torpedoed even moderate millennialism, but could not keep his American followers in line, and bequeathed a community more prone to internal fragmentation than was British society at large. Could anything be done? Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–82), a Wurttemberger, ¨ thought it could, and his prescription was to abandon the old evangelical hostility to ‘system’, and to create on conservative principles what no other evangelical had contemplated, a grand synthesis of Bible, history and science. The watchword of this new system was that favourite slogan of early Central European evangelicalism, ‘life’. Oetinger Oetinger was the son of the Town Clerk of Goppingen, ¨ and was given the best education available at the monastic schools of Blaubeuren and Bebenhausen, followed by university studies at Tubingen, ¨ with a view to his entering the church. It was, however, never very clear where he would fetch up. One of his teachers interested him in natural history, mystical theology and poetry. August Hermann Francke visited Blaubeuren and made a deep impression on him. Bilfinger1 put him on to mathematics 1

Georg Bernhard Bilfinger (1693–1750) won fame in chairs of mathematics and ethics at Tubingen. ¨ On him see Heinz Liebing, Zwischen Orthodoxie und Aufklärung (Tubingen, ¨ 1961).

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and philosophy, and especially Christian Wolff and Leibniz, who were becoming dominant in the German schools; but he also studied Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715), the French Oratorian who greatly influenced Edwards. Even at this early stage he made contact with the Cabbala and with Jakob Bohme, ¨ who eventually provided him with weapons against the philosophical enlightenment. He took up with patristic studies, for he perceived the problem of how Christian truth was to be mediated in different historical contexts. It appeared to him a similar question to that of how the pure inner church could mediate itself to the outer institutional church. As early as 1728 he took up the study of medicine as an insurance against the real possibility that his views might make a career in the established church of the duchy impossible for him.2 And indeed his church career was one long course of public criticism. Before this, however, Oetinger cast his bread on a variety of waters. He went to Frankfurt where a celebrated Jew, Cappel Hecht, instructed him in the Cabbala, told him that there was a better account of its implications in Jakob Bohme ¨ than in any Jewish writer, and stressed the importance of Plato. In Frankfurt he also came across a circle to which the English Behmenists, Jane Leade and the Philadelphians, were live reading. Nor, assuming that he followed the theology line, was it at all clear where his church allegiances might lie. In the winter of 1729–30 he was at Halle without either making an impression or getting what he wanted; from 1730 to 1734 he was in close touch with Zinzendorf and, as we have seen, arranged the ill-fated meeting between the count and Bengel in 1733. By the following year Oetinger had finally broken with Zinzendorf, and Bengel had become the firmest prop of his intellectual existence for the rest of his life. But he was still restless. He talked of going to France to fight in the Protestant Cévennes; of picking up esoteric wisdom in Constantinople or India; of realising the kingdom of God apart from the institutional church among the sects in Pennsylvania. None of these ambitions was fulfilled, but after more study journeys in Germany, 1735–7, he put himself at the disposal of the consistory, which required him to decide between medicine and theology, and finally in 1738 found him a living. This decision and a further decision (supported by Bengel) to marry marked Oetinger’s final breach with separatism. This in turn meant 2

Emanuel Hirsch indeed maintained that the fact that this passionate critic of the Enlightenment ultimately had a career in the state church, rising to be Prälat of Murrhardt, was a tribute to the Enlightenment itself, he holding views on the restoration of all things that had cost Spener’s friend J. W. Petersen his church office. Geschichte der neuern evangelischen Theologie, 5th edn (Gutersloh, ¨ 1975), IV, p. 167. It perhaps illustrated something else, that a Catholic dynasty which was a thorn in the side of the Protestant Wurttemberger ¨ church thought that an adept of alchemy might make something of the salt-works near Murrhardt.

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that, against continuous public criticism and the blank incomprehension of parishioners,3 Oetinger, whose devotion to Bengel committed him to as intense a devotion to Heilsgeschichte as that of Edwards, had now to realise that concept within the culture of the day and to make it his life’s work within the institutional church.4 The bedrock of Oetinger’s mature mind was provided by Bengel, but it was Bengel with a difference. He allowed himself to be portrayed, fieryeyed, with a heavy bookcase, a couple of phials and a globe, and in his hand a Bible and a crucifix. If Bengel in his apocalyptic system conceived history as the development of the kingdom of God on earth, Oetinger broke free from the Leibnizian system to bring the whole of nature into relation to that history. Not only did he deploy his medical studies, but he endeavoured to keep up with French, English and German science, laboured at Greek philosophy, the Fathers, the cabbalists and the mystics, became a devotee of Bohme, ¨ and for a while at least was influenced by Swedenborg. All the time he was studying Hippocrates, Paracelsus and the adepts, and pursuing his own alchemical and chemical studies. Of course he made contact with that other medically qualified theologian and terror of the conventional, Conrad Dippel (1673–1734), and his followers, who had fetched up among the radicals of Berleburg. Oetinger’s system Oetinger was clearly an eclectic to end all eclecticism; if he was to create his system he had no alternative. Bohme ¨ and the Cabbala would do for nature what Bengel had done for history. Both of them left their mark upon his speculation about God and his interpretation of nature. But both were held to account by the criterion of Scripture. And Oetinger took over wholesale Bengel’s exposition of the Apocalypse and his periodisation of history. To confess God’s order in salvation history meant persevering with hope; it meant not being reconciled to the age, but saying what was appropriate to the conditions of the age in the full hope of the kingdom to come. What he aimed to produce was a philosophia sacra 3 4

Notwithstanding which Oetinger’s sermons proved to be the most frequently reprinted of his works. On Oetinger see: F. C. Oetinger, Selbstbiographie, ed. J. Hamberger (Stuttgart, 1845); F. C. Oetinger, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. K. C. E. Ehmann (Stuttgart, 1852–64); C. A. Auberlen, Die Theosophie Friedrich Christoph Oetingers nach ihren Grundzügen (Tubingen, ¨ 1847); Hartmut Lehmann, Pietismus und weltliche Ordnung in Württemberg (Stuttgart, 1969); Rainer Piepmayer, ‘Friedrich Christoph Oetinger’, in M. Greschat (ed.), Gestalten der Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart, 1982), VII, pp. 373–90; Martin Brecht, ‘Der Wurttemberger ¨ Pietismus’, in M. Brecht and K. Deppermann (eds.), Geschichte des Pietismus (Gottingen, ¨ 1995), II, pp. 269–86; Ernst Benz, ‘Die Naturtheologie Friedrich Christoph Oetingers’, in A. Faivre and R. C. Zimmermann (eds.), Epochen der Naturmystik (Berlin, 1979), pp. 256–77.


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which should attain concrete shape in the explication of his concept of life. This philosophia should not only include speculative problems of theology and theoretical questions of philosophy, but should be essentially a doctrine of the common sense, of the sensus communis. This common sense Oetinger derived from the Wisdom literature of the Bible; it provided a meeting-point for biblical theology and the philosophia sacra. It provided an escape from the rational knowledge of Christian Wolff; and by seeking to develop a system out of ‘the idea of life’ in the old vitalist style Oetinger hoped to unite not only nature and history, but also theory and practice. The truth as it was revealed in Christ could not only be presented in contemporary shape; this truth should create certainty of moral action and be the basis for certainty of theory. The whole thing was made more complicated by the fact that the correlation of the book of nature with the book of Scripture was not simple to recover. In principle the book of nature was as much revelation as the events related in the book of the Bible; indeed nature was revelation before there was any Bible. But the Fall had made nature more difficult to read, and it now required the Bible to explicate. Thus the scientist Oetinger now required the theologian Oetinger to find him principles of scientific understanding from the Bible. So it was not surprising that Oetinger took up with the traditions of alchemy. The key here was that all changes in nature were to be interpreted organically. The self-unfolding of nature followed physiological laws. This appeared to Oetinger to imply that the Scriptures too were to be understood according to an organic model where one thing grew from another like plants from seed and flowers from plants. The Bible was an introduction not only to the understanding of nature and vice versa, but to the interpretation of history, as history points to the events of the Bible; there the events of past, present and future are typologically to be found, though not always very clearly. In this revival of typology Oetinger was better placed than Edwards as he could rely explicitly upon the scholarship of Bengel. The end of the argument was that Oetinger felt able to reject both the mechanical understanding of the universe then prevalent in the German schools, and what he believed was the application of the same frame of mind to the interpretation of the Scriptures. He thus arrived at a unitary science of reality, the main departments of which, nature and history, were related to the Bible, while correlatively the exposition of the Bible was directed to the interpretation of history and nature. On this view God was a creator of emblems; creation was an image that was accompanied by Scripture as an explanatory text. ‘Life’ underlay both, and was made the basis of a systematic theology; from it were developed the concepts of God, of man, the law, sin and grace, of the church and the Last Things. Christ as life was the Word of God, a Word also revealed in nature. Life

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was a union of many forces working upon each other. God was to be thought of as such an indissoluble union; and his connexion with the world was (contrary to the views of deists and materialists) also indissoluble. Drawing upon the theosophy of Bohme ¨ and of the Cabbala, and even Newton’s conception of space, Oetinger trod a fine line between Christianity and pantheism. And, at the end of an argument that could hardly be exceeded for obscurity, Oetinger was very evangelical in his conclusion; Protestant preaching, he complained, was far too intellectual. Preaching and catechetical instruction must, in the light of the concept of ‘life’, concern themselves with the whole man, and especially the heart. By the same token they must take account of the peculiarities of time and place. Oetinger ‘an outsider’? Here Oetinger exposed one of the risks he had undertaken. Viewing the philosophy of Wolff and his contemporaries as the great current threat to faith, he hazarded losing any significance at all when the contemporary mind moved on. This was his fate. When Emanuel Hirsch classified Oetinger as one of the ‘outsiders’ of the eighteenth century this was what he meant. Oetinger was part of a substantial religious movement of mysticism and illuminism which has only been recovered by scholars in the last generation, although it was still strong enough to produce an Oetinger edition in the middle of the nineteenth century. But to those theologians who thought that the only fight in town worth joining in was that between liberals and rationalists on the one side and conservative confessionalists on the other, and who monopolised the later writing of theological history, Oetinger was nowhere, flattered even by the title of ‘outsider’. And it was true that even in the popular Pietism of Wurttemberg, ¨ where the tradition of Bengel, sustained by his sons-in-law and disciples like Oetinger, remained dominant, successors could hardly be found, not even the celebrated mathematician and theologian Philipp Mathäus Hahn (1739–90), whose astronomical world-machine displayed the movements of the planets and incorporated a brake timed to operate in 1836 when Bengel’s millennial age was scheduled to begin. Moreover, whereas in the earlier part of the century Pietism had been part of a ‘country’ opposition to the duke, reviling the French court politics and mores of the ruling house, Johann Jakob Moser5 was the last of the reforming Pietists; Bengel’s 5

J. J. Moser (1701–85), a celebrated public lawyer, who in two great compendia of 52 parts (1737–54) and 24 volumes (1766–75) put the public law of the Empire on a new footing in a marvellous combination of history, law and politics. See Mack Walker, Johann Jakob Moser and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Chapel Hill, 1981).


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successors were quiescent, and by the time Oetinger died in 1782, torpor might be excused by the steady approach of the millennial year 1836, when God would begin to take things into his own hands. From the standpoint of the present theme, however, the significant thing was less the practical failure of Oetinger’s return to ‘system’ than the evidence that exponents of parts of the evangelical mix were pulling apart, going overboard on this or that item, and losing that mutual respect which had been one of the better features of the movement in its earlier days. It was therefore significant that both Oetinger and Wesley gave a warm welcome to the Swedish seer, Swedenborg, and both turned bitterly against him. Swedenborg Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) aimed to be in the front rank of the scientists of his age but ended as its leading visionary, reviled by churches, denounced by evangelicals, and never able to develop a vocabulary in which the substance of his extraordinary visions could be conveyed convincingly to any great number of readers. He is nevertheless of more than tangential importance to the story of what happened to the original mix of evangelical attitudes in the later eighteenth century.6 Never himself an evangelical, Swedenborg was always sufficiently near the evangelical tradition to illustrate its problems. His father Jesper Svedberg was a minister, and eventually a bishop, in the High-Church Orthodox tradition of the Swedish church. He was, however, distinguished from many of his colleagues by a familiarity with angelic spirits and an interest in both the piety and the activism of the pietist movements. How close the two traditions could still come together he related in one of his conversations with spirits. ‘God’s angel stood next to me and said: “What are you reading?” I answered: “I am reading the Bible, Scriver, Lutkemann, ¨ Johann Arndt, Kortholt, Grossgebau, J. Schmidt7 and others.” ’8 Emanuel’s development in the long term owed much to Arndt. He was, however, irked by his father’s strict upbringing and determined to get abroad as soon as possible to places where science and philosophy 6

7 8

The best guide to Swedenborg is that by Ernst Benz, which has had a singular history. Originally published at Munich in 1948, the book was deprived of its footnotes by order of the Allied Control Commission. In 1969, not long before Benz’s death, it was republished at Zurich by one of his pupils with a handful of footnotes. In 2002 it was republished in Eng. tr. by N`ıcholas Goodrick-Clarke from the 1969 edn as Emanuel Swedenborg. Visionary Savant in the Age of Reason (West Chester, Pa., 2002) and in this dress deserves the success it was denied by earlier circumstances. A Bible translator of the Strasbourg Orthodox reform school. Benz, Swedenborg, p. 5; cf. pp. 14, 106.

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were being studied on modern principles. He left for London in 1710 and did not return for more than five years. His intellectual arrogance in these years is more than breathtaking. He put himself forward in the highest scientific circles in England, France and the Netherlands, learning rapidly the whole time not only the science and technology, but also the frequently fraught personal relations among the Western scholars. Abrasiveness did nothing to ease relations with his father. To old Jesper the boy seemed a soul lost to Western materialism, and he saw no reason to continue to subsidise his claims to have invented a submarine or other devices of little apparent usefulness. Relations between father and son were never fully repaired, and Jesper mentioned the boy only twice in his huge autobiography. In fact neither party really understood the other. Swedenborg came home with the same arrogance with which he left, claiming that the salaries of professors in Sweden should be docked in order to produce a chair for himself; but he had learned in the West that science was advancing by applying itself to technical projects approved by courts, and especially garden design, mining and navigation. He successfully won the favour of Charles XII, and was appointed as a scientific researcher to the Board of Mines with no obligation to work at the Board. The vicepresident of the board, Hjärne, was an opponent of royal absolutism as well as of Swedenborg, and put on a great agitation against Emanuel’s whole family. Charles XII was happy to demonstrate royal absolutism by putting him down, and in Emanuel’s later visions Hjärne appeared in hell. Emanuel, however, had acquired financial support for life. He used it to pursue a two-pronged career, seeking a European reputation as a scientist and working honestly at the scientific and technical problems of the Swedish mines. He received leave from his official appointment of unexampled generosity, going abroad for months or years on the grounds of his need to study or get his books published elsewhere. Again he rewarded Crown patronage with a long series of scientific works which earned him European fame. He seemed to have grown into the scientific materialist his father had feared all along.

Andreas Rudiger ¨ This view of the matter, however, ignored two tell-tale signs. One was that on a visit to Halle in 1733 Swedenborg had become acquainted with the professor of philosophy Andreas Rudiger ¨ (1673–1731), a pupil of Christian Wolff. He was the author of a famous work entitled Divine Physics: a true way between superstition and atheism leading to the natural


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and moral blessedness of men.9 Here Rudiger ¨ fought on two fronts. The first front was against superstition which idolised the things of this world and abused them for sorcery and magic; the second was against modern atheism which sought a comprehensive explanation of the world in terms of mathematics and mechanics and left no room for God. Each had begun from a true insight but had proceeded down a wrong path to a false conclusion. The task of ‘divine physics’ was ‘to link the mechanical principles with the vital life-giving principles and thereby to understand nature’. In practical terms this meant harmonising the natural philosophy of the English theosophists such as Henry More and the disciples of Bohme ¨ with the mathematics and mechanics of England and France. The same intellectual process would enable the divine physics which Moses had still possessed to be linked to the occult sciences of Egypt and Phoenicia. Christ had restated the true physics, but then physics had passed to the Arabs before coming back into the West as false physics; this had sunk into the superstition against which modern science had arisen.10 Unfortunately, in thinkers like Descartes (1596–1655) and Gassendi (1592–1655) mathematics had presumptuously claimed to be the sole guiding principle of the universe. Against them Rudiger ¨ played off Newton and Henry More. He concluded that everything, even spirit, had a spatial extension. God was universal space, comprising all finite spaces in himself but simultaneously permeating all of them. There were no empty spaces between the stars, for God was there. The difference between mind and matter did not lie in extension but in the nature of their substantiality; spirit required extension as a basis for its development. The immortality of the soul could be proved from the fact that the subtle, fine character of its substance precluded its destruction by a natural cause. Rudiger, ¨ in short, was grappling with problems that also exercised Oetinger and even Jonathan Edwards; and he was just what the young Swedenborg needed. Swedenborg’s turn For, like so many others, he had begun with the assumption that there were two books of revelation, one in Scripture and one in nature; and he had a curious yearning for a paradise lost, an age when ‘nature showed her most friendly face’, an age before the earth had moved further from the sun, when the seasons had become more extreme; an age before the world entered its dotage, ‘in which we live with less joy, even if we 9 10

Göttliche Physik, ein rechter Weg zwischen dem Aberglauben und dem Atheismus, der zu der natürlichen und sittlichen Seligkeit des Menschen führt (1716). Benz, Swedenborg, pp.126–9.

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are ourselves still young’.11 He also had a curious obsession with the dead, the damned and the fires of hell; in later life he came to the view that hellfire was not a physical flame, but the spiritual fire of conscience that burned the damned without destroying them. He was still trying to unravel these transcendental mysteries by scientific means, but, finding this route increasingly impracticable, he would shortly see what intuition would do. By the early 1740s the influence of Rudiger ¨ was making itself felt in Swedenborg’s turn from geometrical, mathematical and physical studies to works on the animal kingdom. Here organic and vitalist thought seemed more immediately applicable. By grounding all living forms in a primal universal formative energy, he joined that long tradition of Naturphilosophie which had been so close to the early Lutheran evangelicalism, and which had been recently represented by the English Behmenists, van Helmont and Henry More, whom Swedenborg frequently quoted. An organic world-view, based on a metaphysical notion of life, thus replaced the mechanistic picture. He came to feel that his earlier career based on empirical research had reached the limits of what he felt mattered; he was now seeking a higher type of knowledge, intuition, which might still yield scientifically valid results. But after what he came to call his ‘vocation’ he ended by believing that he could dispense with empirical knowledge altogether. Swedenborg’s vocational vision, sudden and dramatic as it was in the mid-1740s, seemed after the event, like many conversion experiences, to have had a considerable pre-history, a pre-history of about a decade of dreams of reassurance, which led him eventually to keep a diary of dreams. Writing in retrospect in 1748 he recalled that ‘for several years, I had not only dreams through which I was taught about the very things I was just writing about, but I also experienced changes in my state while writing, in that an extraordinary light appeared in things I wrote. Later I had various visions with closed eyes and wonderful illuminations. I experienced influences from spirits, so clear to the senses, as if it was occurring bodily.’12 These visions and dreams assuring what he was doing became more frequent, and seemed confirmed in authority by testimonies ancient and modern. Swedenborg believed that in the primeval age of human innocence when the human mind was directly illuminated by the ray of divine truth intuitive knowledge was predominant; and latterly ‘the famous Locke’ had supposed13 that in a future life the angels and spirits of honest men 11 13

12 Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., p. 114. Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Bk 4, ch. 17, sect. 14.


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would have an understanding resembling our intuition. But visionary assurance, so different from the empirical research to which he had been bred, inevitably produced severe inner conflicts. On the one hand science began to seem a laborious impediment to the intuitive knowledge now opening to him; on the other it was a question whether he was worthy to receive flashes of divine illumination. His religious crisis came to a head in 1743–4 as a conflict between his inner vocation and an outward profession financed for other purposes by the board of mines. Not only was Swedenborg reverting to a view of the world familiar from childhood in Book Four of Arndt’s True Christianity, but the pietistic elements in his upbringing enabled him to see his current predicament as a conversion experience. His new vocation as a seer enabled him to elucidate what the Church and Bible had taught him uncomprehendingly in his youth. His late father, estranged in his lifetime, now appeared in his dreams in radiant light as a guide to the new path. This inner struggle was resolved in good evangelical style by a vision of Christ, grace personified. Swedenborg was thrown to the ground, and the words he spoke were not his words but a confession and plea for mercy put into his mouth by Christ himself. His conversion led to a decision to devote himself to the grace of Christ, and to another vision in London in the middle of 1745 in which he received a vocation to disclose the inner sense of Scripture, and the opening of his vision into the world of spirits, heaven and hell. Swedenborg the visionary So far Swedenborg’s experience followed a pattern resembling that of others in the Christian tradition, though it was not one to which institutional churches ever took kindly. In more recent terms it could be said that as far as the secrets of Scripture were concerned, he was trying to do by prophecy what Jonathan Edwards tried to do by typology; and in trying to fit scientific endeavour into a fully disclosed Christian revelation, he was trying to do what Oetinger was attempting.14 For three years of his visionary vocation he confessed to ‘a kind of dim sight’; but as the clarity of his perception improved he abandoned the idea that his revelations might need revision, and began to claim that he was the visionary of the age, elect to proclaim the whole truth of heaven. Some of what he had to reveal was in truth rather commonplace. He had a major preoccupation with the Jews, who had a privileged but 14

Swedenborg’s difficulty in finding a vocabulary recalls John Banville’s description of the young Copernicus’s ‘few notions that he had managed to put into words, gross ungainly travesties of the impossibly elegant concepts blazing in his brain’. John Banville, Doctor Copernicus (London, 1976), p. 49.

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miserable place in the spiritual world; even their tongue was not what it should have been, for although the angels affirmed that there were heavenly correspondences to the Hebrew letters or syllables, there were roughnesses in the language which had no correspondence.15 Self-important theologians were packed like sardines in hell, and he had a special hostility to Zinzendorf.16 Aristotelians were ‘much blinder and more stupid in spiritual and celestial things than the most insignificant amongst the crowd, or than any rustics’.17 These phobias were standard in the evangelical movement everywhere. Less easy to swallow was his solution to the enigma of the Second Coming. All the Orthodoxies had been in trouble over the question of what happened to the dead in the ever-extending period until Christ’s return. Swedenborg boldly abolished the distinction between angels and men, and with it the need for an eschatological cataclysm. In Heaven and Hell he confidently affirmed that ‘it is completely unknown in Christendom that heaven and hell consist of the human race’. It is still believed that the angels were created at the beginning in heaven and that the Devil or Satan was an angel of light. The angels are amazed at this. They want me to confirm that I have it from them that there is not a single angel in the whole of heaven who was created at the beginning nor a devil in hell who was created as an angel of light and was expelled, but that all in heaven and hell are of the human race.18

The evolution of the human being is not concluded with his earthly life but continues immediately following physical death in another, more spiritual, form of corporeality. The old idea of the Last Judgement, when the saints would be raised, is altogether abandoned in favour of a notion immediately relevant to life. If Spener had applied one kind of stimulus to living by displacing the end-time to the middle distance, Swedenborg applied another by spiritualising the concept. He was not, however, quite finished with the Last Judgement. Ever since the Council of Nicaea ecclesiastical dogma had been hardening, with the result that (according to his visions) the Last Judgement upon the church took place in the spirit world in 1757. This great transformation above paved the way for the earthly transformation by which the New Church should emerge from the old through its prophet and evangelist Swedenborg.19 He was not a schismatic and left the process by which the New Church should emerge from the old sufficiently obscure 15 16 19

The Spiritual Diary of Emanuel Swedenborg, tr. G. Bush and J. H. Smithson (London, 1883), I, p. 11; IV, p. 478 et passim. 17 Ibid., I, p. 284. 18 Benz, Swedenborg, p. 388. Ibid., e.g. IV, pp. 141–3. Ibid., pp. 460, 482; Spiritual Diary, p. x.


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to be a matter of conflict among his English disciples even in the early nineteenth century; the Anglicans tending to say that the time was not yet, while those of Methodist origin claimed that the New Church had already left the womb and was in independent life.20 Swedenborg and the evangelicals The later development of Swedenborg’s visions, not to mention the famous slashing attacks of a Kant just shaking free of metaphysics, are immaterial to the present theme of what was happening to evangelicalism. Had Jonathan Edwards survived into Swedenborg’s maturity his hostility would have been predictable. He had validated visions as a legitimate function of the religious imagination, but hardly contemplated a visionary almost permanently camped out in the geography of the other world, and using his knowledge of that geography to displace typology as the key for unlocking the secrets of Scripture. Wesley proved capable of mastering the scholarship of Bengel, but, having originally scented religious vitality in Swedenborg, felt that abuse, not comprehension, was the answer to him. In 1770 he reports: I sat down to read and seriously to consider some of the writings of Baron Swedenborg. I began with huge prejudice in his favour, knowing him to be a pious man, one of a strong understanding, of much learning, and one who thoroughly believed himself. But I could not hold out long. Any one of his visions puts his real character out of doubt. He is one of the most ingenious, lively, entertaining madmen that ever set pen to paper. But his waking dreams are so wild, so far remote, both from Scripture and common sense, that one might as easily swallow the stories of Tom Thumb or Jack the Giant-killer.

Wesley did not quite give up on his lost hope, but he discovered the grounds of his fall: ‘I can’t but think the fever he had twenty years ago, when he supposes he was “introduced into the society of angels” really introduced him into the society of lunatics. But still there is something noble even in his ravings.’21 The problem for Wesley was, of course, partly that he had a small amount of trouble with preachers who found that Swedenborg’s doctrine of the New Church offered them a way of rationalising their relations with the Church of England, and partly that like most evangelicals he had so recently emerged from what on the continent would have been called the Orthodox stable that he could not bend 20 21

On this subject see W. R. Ward, ‘Swedenborgianism: Heresy, Schism or Religious Protest?’, Studies in Church History 9 (1972), 303–9. Wesley Works, XXII: Journals V, pp. 216–17, 301. Eight years later Wesley was still trying and failing with Swedenborg: Works, XXIII: Journals VI, pp. 126–8.

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his mind round what the seer did to the doctrine of the Trinity. But he knew when he saw it that one element of the evangelical mix had been magnified out of all relation to the rest. Swedenborg’s fate in Germany was inevitably more complicated. Oetinger saw so much more in him than Wesley did that he set out to become his principal spokesman in that part of Europe.22 Before Oetinger became acquainted with Swedenborg he had been prepared for the encounter by a consumptive illness in his parish at Herrenberg which was expected to be terminal. He used the time, however, to immerse himself in Jakob Bohme ¨ and the Cabbala, and to give thought to the questions of death and the after-life which were also at the forefront of Swedenborg’s mind. One of the fruits of this period of reading and reflection was his book Theologia ex Idea Vitae deducta (Theology deduced from the Idea of Life), in which he sought to pursue a middle course between idealism and materialism. During his struggle for clarification as to the Last Things occasioned by his expectation of imminent death, Oetinger obtained a copy of Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia, and experienced surprise, astonishment and some scepticism. He said that the Swede had developed from ‘the greatest philosopher’ into ‘the least of the apostles’. As volume after volume of revelations appeared, Oetinger concluded that enough was enough and sharpened his original criticisms. At the heart of the matter was the fact that Oetinger adhered to Bengel’s traditions of realistic exegesis according to which everything promised in the Bible had a real existence; if, for example, the Bible said that Christ would return on the clouds in glory, that was exactly what would happen. Nevertheless Oetinger thought he could separate the exegesis from the visions, and in 1765 he produced two books setting out the seer’s doctrines and trying to present his philosophy, as he had been trying to present his own in connexion with contemporary metaphysics and science. This he conceived as a last effort to introduce Swedenborg in Germany before he himself succumbed to consumption. The story was further complicated by the fact that the Stuttgart consistory, which had never cared for Oetinger, now saw a chance to put down a man whom the Duke of Hesse had made a prelate. In other words, for Oetinger, expounding Swedenborg now became part of his own defence; indeed, exposition was part of the defence of Swedenborg also. He too was in trouble with his own church, though his social standing put him in a less exposed position. Part of Oetinger’s defence was that Swedenborg’s 22

For the following see Ernst Benz, Swedenborg in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1947); and Michael Heinrichs, Emanuel Swedenborg in Deutschland. Eine kritische Darstellung der Rezeption des schwedischen Visionärs im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1979).


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illumination of the nature of the soul and its condition after death was urgently required because the English deists and the French materialists were already beginning to deny the immortality of the soul, and new arguments were needed for the defence. Swedenborg indeed seemed likely to produce the evidence, for the Duchess of Brunswick got the Queen of Sweden to put pressure on the seer to produce a message from the duchess’s lately deceased brother and was overcome by his report. So, shortly after the outbreak of Oetinger’s conflict with the consistory he began a correspondence with Swedenborg which was courteously received and proved to be the most important of the exchanges of letters which the seer undertook.23 This contact did not, however, resolve the differences between them, Oetinger being unwilling to abandon the realistic exegesis he had learned from Bengel, and Swedenborg being unwilling to describe his revelations about the New Jerusalem as simple prophecies. Oetinger nevertheless produced a series of works expounding Swedenborg for the German market,24 in December 1767 issuing a direct challenge to him to say whether he accepted the Lutheran symbols. But the decisive breach came in 1771 when Swedenborg published his True Christian Religion, which appeared to Oetinger to be not true at all, and especially not true in the spiritualising interpretation of the book of Revelation which he had substituted for the careful calculations of Bengel. The most sympathetic interpreter of Swedenborg from inside the evangelical movement had found the Bible stood between them. Lavater This was not a problem for one of those who inquired anxiously of Swedenborg for news of a deceased friend now presumably in the spirit world, and did not get an answer. The inquirer was Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801), pastor of the Orphan House Church in Zurich 1769–78, and subsequently of St Peter’s 1778–1801. Of Reformed stock, Lavater was perhaps more of a hymn-writer and poet25 than a theologian, and more of a preacher than either. He added a dash of fire that Swiss preaching has commonly lacked, which has led to his being placed 23 24

25

The other important collections being with Thomas Hartley in England, and Gabriel Beyer in Stockholm. The German prince most strongly impressed by Swedenborg’s visions was the Landgrave Ludwig IX of Hessen-Darmstadt, who was himself prone to visionary and occult experiences. His one surviving hymn in the current British Methodist hymnbook, Hymns and Psalms no. 742, ‘O Jesus Christ, grow thou in me’, admirably summarises the evangelical side of Lavater.

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among the pioneers of what the Germans are apt to call the revival movement (Erweckungsbewegung) and Anglo-Saxon commentators generally call the Second Great Awakening. His preaching attracted hearers from as far away as England, and one of its characteristics illustrates the problem of ‘locating’ and describing him: that is his extraordinary capacity for convincing his hearers (however various) that they agreed with him. Lavater began life and ended it as a Patriot politician, first as a Patriot against patrician rule in Zurich,26 later in the much more conservative role as a Patriot against French invasion. He also began as a theologian of the moderate enlightenment and much of this never left him.27 At the beginning he believed that the object of the Bible was to teach virtue and to form men of active Christianity. But in 1768 he underwent a major reorientation. Christ became the centre of his belief and prayer. Moreover he felt that the divine powers that had been bestowed on the disciples in the New Testament were still available to those who believed. Indeed the core of Christianity was that men were raised from their natural impotence to the strength of God through faith in Christ and prayer through him. Of this the Bible was the great witness. The age of miracles was not dead; Christ had been a miracle-worker and had shown the power of love. ‘Everything which Jesus knows and has and is is accessible through the prayer of the believer.’ The intensity of Lavater’s new Christocentric faith came close to magic. In October 1767 he had conducted the wedding of his friend Felix Hess who was already very ill with tuberculosis. The following 3 March Lavater was called to his sickbed; he prayed powerfully for Hess’s recovery; but the invalid died the same day. It was of course Hess’s fate in the spirit-world of which he inquired of Swedenborg. Much leafing through the New Testament followed and the conclusion, despite the disappointment in Hess’s case, was that: ‘Jesus is a helper even in physical need, who deserves my faith and my whole trust. He wishes not only that my soul be saved to eternity through him. He is also mighty and willing to bless my faith, if in physical necessity and danger I take refuge in him.’28 There was here clearly the basis for a bond between Lavater and ‘die Stille im Lande’ who formed the bulk of his followers. His intense Biblicism, his Christocentric piety, his rough rejection of neology, of Steinbart 26 27

28

For one of the less salubrious episodes in this career, related with enormous good humour, see Jeffrey Freedman, A Poisoned Chalice (Princeton, 2002). On the following see Paul Wernle, Der schweizerische Protestantismus im 18. Jahrhundert (Tubingen, ¨ 1925), III, pp. 221–84; Horst Weigelt, Lavater und die Stille im Lande (Gottingen, ¨ 1988); Horst Weigelt, J. K. Lavater, Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Gottingen, ¨ ¨ 1991): E. Benz, ‘Swedenborg und Lavater. Uber die religiosen ¨ Grundlagen der Physiognomik’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 57, 3s. 8 (1938), 153–216. Weigelt, Lavater, p. 16.


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and Lessing, his contacts across denominational borders, all endeared him to them. But if there was one evangelical characteristic which Lavater possessed in a wildly exaggerated degree it was eclecticism. His views that ‘system is not the form of scripture’ and that ‘I hate theological language because it appears to me largely anti-biblical’29 were commonplace enough; less commonplace was his denial that ‘I have ever been under the hands of Pietists, Ascetics and Enthusiasts, how much so ever I may have been in danger to become one of them – although I was never inclined that way longer than twice twentyfour hours’.30 What he meant by this was that although in many ways he was a Pietist, he could not stand the substitutionary theory of the atonement, the view that Christ reconciled not us but God, which they commonly held; not ascetic because perhaps more than anyone at the time he believed that true Christian faith was actually good for mankind. He did not forswear his original Enlightenment New Year wish: Good God! how many inward and valuable pleasures do we chase away from our soul, by banishing from it humanity, the most precious jewel of our nature . . . I should force myself to wish you happy . . . wishing you, in the presence of the omnipresent Father, the Father of all, happy days, health, new strength for being virtuous, and everything that God himself calls blessings.31

Nor could he be an enthusiast since (as will be seen shortly) he was an inveterate pursuer of evidence: ‘Observation . . . is my whole philosophy; and non-observation but mastery of nature is the character of contemporary philosophy which is hastening to its end. I have no system; but am always ready to accept everything, provided it is correct observation.’32 It was this cheerful frame of mind which enabled Lavater to admire Zinzendorf 33 but detest the Moravians and the ‘blood and wounds theology’; to venerate Oetinger but to conclude that ‘in Scripture the content is simple; in Oetinger’s writings everything is manifold’;34 to make Bengel his daily devotional reading with his wife, but to find him ultimately too inhibited, philological and dry.35 Swedenborg remained ‘an absolute puzzle’. And one thing which Lavater’s Reformed heritage seems to have denied him altogether was the Puritan fund of labour upon the morphology of conversion and the Christian life. With whatever defects 29 30 31 32 33 34

Briefwechsel zwischen Lavater und Hasenkamp, ed. K. C. E. Ehemann (Basel, 1870), pp. 105, 68. J. C. Lavater, A Secret Journal of a Self-Observer, tr. P. Will (London, 1795), II, p. 325. Secret Journal, I, p. 11. Lavater-Hasenkamp Briefwechsel, pp. 39–40. Johann Kaspar Lavaters Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. J. K. Orelli, 3rd edn (Zurich, 1859–60), I, p. 298. 35 Ibid., pp. 7, 20, 129. Lavater-Hasenkamp Briefwechsel, p. 41.

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in practice, this body of inquiry, which had provided such a support for Jonathan Edwards, was supposed to enable the individual believer or those to whose pastoral guidance he was submitted to tell where he was in the Christian pilgrimage. Lavater’s search for evidence The evidence for which Lavater looked was not dovetailed into an explanatory framework of this kind. He began by dunning his friends, and especially Dr Obereit of Lindau, for evidence of the persistence of New Testament miraculous gifts and especially for that of Lutheran mystics and apocalypticists, Bohme ¨ and his disciples (including the English followers), the Quietists and Reformed mystics like Hector de Marsay. When this sort of task had been undertaken by Poiret and Tersteegen they had been concerned to restore first-hand accounts of mystical experience to circulation among Protestants; but Lavater was once jarred by a favourable reference to Tersteegen into insisting that despite his own high estimate of mysticism, Protestant-apostolic Christianity rested on better historical foundations than mysticism.36 The practical problem was that Lavater’s interest in man and especially the persistence of supernatural powers among men was never fully controlled by his devotion to the Bible and his Christocentrism; it was a sort of anthropocentrism which led him to try to base faith in Christ upon religious experience, especially where it was coupled with evidence of unusual powers. It was this which betrayed him in the 1780s into foolish statements about Cagliostro37 and an unbounded keenness for animal magnetism and physiognomy which he himself would earlier have regarded as enthusiasm. Indeed Goethe, with whom he had had a warm friendship, tired of his addiction to charlatans and came to regard him as a common swindler and a target for his satires. Magnetism In the mid-1780s Mesmer and Puységur were known to be conducting experiments in magnetism. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) was a Viennese physician who claimed to have successfully treated a woman suffering from a hysterical condition with complex symptoms. Mesmer gave his patient a solution containing traces of iron to drink, and then attached magnets to her legs and stomach. She began to report waves of 36 37

Wernle, Schweizerischer Protestantismus, III, p. 275. Cagliostro (1743–95) was summarily described by his biographer as ‘an adventurer’.


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energy flowing up and down her body, which eventually produced a violent recurrence of her hysterical symptoms. With continued treatment these crises diminished and finally disappeared; she was pronounced cured. Other cures followed, and Mesmer, who was both a showman and a salesman, pronounced in 1779 that ‘there is only one illness and one healing’. Meanwhile in 1775 he had achieved a great triumph over a Swiss priest, Joseph Gassner, a popular exorcist, before the German medical academy. Mesmer did not inquire into patient psychology, nor even attribute his success to magnets, with which he dispensed before long. The curative agent was said to be an invisible energy, or fluid, called animal magnetism. This was the aetheric medium through which sensations of every kind from light to electricity were able to pass from one physical object to another. What the magnets did was to restore life-giving energy to patients whose supply of animal magnetism was out of equilibrium. Needless to say such a drastic simplification of their professional mystery did not go down well with many doctors, and two governmental commissions in Paris concluded that there was no proof of the existence of animal magnetism, and therefore no need to investigate the alleged cures. Mesmer had, however, stumbled upon an aspect of human experience that seemed impatient of interpretation by the mechanistic categories popular in the Enlightenment, and he retained some following. It was Mesmer’s most capable pupil, the Marquis de Puységur (1752– 1807), who gave mesmerism a different and lasting shape. He magnetised his patients only to have them fall into sleeplike conditions, and become suddenly interesting. Some prescribed for the illnesses of others (adding a timetable for recovery); some, in deeper states, were capable of telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition. Puységur, in short, losing interest in aetheric fluids, was a hypnotist and an amateur psychiatrist who had discovered that below the level of ordinary consciousness, there was another mental realm of which men were not often aware. What would Lavater, pledged to the growth of the indwelling Christ, make of all this? In 1785 he had an invitation to travel to Geneva with a scion of an old evangelical house, Count Henry XLIII Reuss of Schleiz-Kostritz, ¨ and his wife. His brother, a doctor, commissioned him to find out what was going on in the field of magnetism, and it only needed the blessed word ‘experiment’ to set Lavater agog. A Bern doctor who was an enthusiast indoctrinated him, and gave him Puységur’s book. In Lausanne he found Tissot38 extremely sceptical. In Geneva he found many people who had had happy experiences with magnetism in Lyons, and who tried 38

Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728–97), a celebrated doctor who contrived to keep the friendship of both Rousseau and Albrecht von Haller.

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unsuccessfully to magnetise him. Clearly more experiment was required and on his return Lavater set about magnetising his ailing wife.39 Under hypnosis she produced divinations of all kinds including a cure for whooping cough in children (lactose and magnetising on the navel). This was sufficient to overwhelm Lavater’s imagination. It was really no problem that magnetism had been launched on to the world by worldly persons. From Lavater’s point of view it was a blessed gift of God to mankind in general and an example of the divine forces he had been studying for so long. Moreover (and this must have surprised the still-in-the-land), Jesus was the greatest of all magnetisers, and he taught his disciples the art. The puzzle of the New Testament miracles was solved, and a bridge established between the natural and the supernatural, the bridge between human nature in general and God incarnate, Jesus Christ. All men were created in the image of God, the perfection of which was to be seen in Christ; the Bible teaching was that the Christian was a God-man as Christ was, different not in essence but in degree. Magnetism was a way, perhaps the way, for enabling men to realise that object. The hymn-writer who had prayed that Christ might grow in him had now humanised Christ in order to divinise man. Physiognomy These views naturally brought down on Lavater the hostility of all the opponents of magnetism, and especially the Berlin Aufklärer, as well as those replying from the standpoint of Protestant Orthodoxy. It is small wonder that in later life Lavater felt a growing need for fellowship. However, the excursion into magnetism is easier to understand in the light of the principles that underlay his great enthusiasm of the 1770s, that of physiognomy.40 The principle involved here had been central to the whole theosophical tradition (with which Lavater refused to have anything to do), that of correspondence. The fact that man was made in the image of God concerned not only his spiritual but his physical makeup. After the Fall this image was desecrated but not entirely destroyed; it was capable of being restored in Christ. In short there were correspondences between the earthly and the spiritual world, between the spiritual archetype and its earthly reflection. What happened in regeneration was that the earthly 39

40

In addition to the other sources cited see Gisela Luginbuhl-Weber, ¨ ‘J. K. Lavaters physikotheologische Sicht des animalische Magnetismus’, in Helmut Holzhey and Urs Bosching (eds.), Gesundheit und Krankheit im 18. Jahrhundert (Amsterdam, 1995), pp. 205–12. For the following see Benz, ‘Swedenborg und Lavater’; J. C. Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, tr. Thomas Holcroft, 19th edn (London, n.d. [1885]).


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mask crumbled and gradually the true face of the inner man appeared – or, in the language of Swedenborg, a man was transformed into his angel. Even now the this-worldly bent of Lavater’s thought becomes apparent. The kingdom of God is a concrete reality inseparable from a particular physical form. Nevertheless even the regenerate only know their mask, which is gradually crumbling; the true face, the end-product of all their inner development, appears only in the beyond, an event which constitutes the Judgement upon them. Physiognomy, therefore, appeared to be a scientific way of sharpening everyday perceptions of character by observing body language. That, at least, was the aim of the One Hundred Physiognomical Rules which Lavater confidently produced, and which included the following valuable guidelines:41 VI General Rule Of him whose figure is oblique – Whose mouth is oblique – Whose walk is oblique Whose handwriting is oblique – that is, in an unequal irregular direction – Of him the manner of thinking, character, and conduct are oblique, inconsistent, partial, sophistic, false, sly, crafty, whimsical, contradictory, coldly-sneering, devoid of sensibility.

Small wonder that such magnates as the Grand Duke of Russia (later Tsar Paul I) and Prince Edward of England (later Duke of Kent) beat a path to his door for the new wisdom. As usual, however, the theory of correspondences was easier to state than to apply in practice. Lavater’s attempts at historical application varied from the commonplace to the silly. As we have seen, physiognomy made him shrewd about Spener, silly about Frederick the Great’s horse.42 And it is noticeable that Lavater himself seems to have derived little help during the period when he was dunning friends to send him analyses of Christ’s physiognomy, so that he might check experimentally how He was growing within. Lavater as a superficial dabbler is clearly not very interesting. But Lavater as a failed evangelical is very interesting indeed. As a member of the Enlightenment Mittwochgesellschaft he kept an openness to culture which Paracelsianism no longer provided for the pietists. He also kept up the evangelical expectation of the coming of the kingdom of God, but to give it concrete shape he had to transform it into an individual hope, realisable in whole or in part by the unlikely mechanism of magnetism. Lacking the intense Puritan application to the morphology of conversion and the Christian life, he tried to supply the need by studies 41 42

Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, pp. 461–91, here 463. Lavaters Ausgewählte Schriften, I, pp. 295, 305.

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in physiognomy which were on the whole less plausible. The extraordinary thing is that his devotion to Christ and to the Bible, coupled with a singular passionate enthusiasm, enabled him to make, through his circle of friends, a genuine contribution to the next general revival. Perhaps in this he did more than the next example of the difficulty in preserving a balance in the evangelical mix, Jung-Stilling. Jung-Stilling Johann Heinrich Jung, generally known as Jung-Stilling (1740–1817), had the most singular of careers, and it was a testimony not just to his views that the head office of the Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft in Basel reported of him to the London Missionary Society in 1799 that he was ‘an especial monument of the providence of God and one of the most candid confessors of the truth’.43 Born in a village in Siegerland where a popular Protestant mysticism was strong, and where it was natural in his circle to ascribe everything to the immediate action of God, he never lost the marks of his upbringing. Many of the most vivid and entertaining passages of both his fictional and autobiographical works describe this special milieu. ‘I knew also a number of godly men who often sat in groups together on a Sunday evening to hear [a book] read, and who seemed to be transported to the skies, by the interesting nature of its aminathemes. This book, if I mistake not, was called Spiritual Fame . . . Its author was a Dr Carl, surgeon to the court of Baden.’44 In this company Jung-Stilling underwent a conversion experience in 1762. He filled in several years with appointments to village schoolmasterships and menial jobs, and even when he left his native heath for the duchy of Berg he still ‘met with immense numbers of minor sects, from whose sources flowed all those numerous, ponderous disquisitions on metaphysical philosophy and the natural history of man’.45 Somehow he scraped together enough money to study medicine in Strasbourg, 1770–2, and this was the second turningpoint in his life.46 Here he came face to face with Enlightenment culture. 43

44

45 46

Ernst Staehelin, ‘Aus der Geschichte der Frankfurter Christentumsgesellschaft’, in FS Martin Schmidt, Der Pietismus in Gestalten und Wirkungen, ed. Heinrich Bornkamm et al. (Bielefeld, 1975), p. 438. On Dr Johann Samuel Carl, his work among the Inspired and his journal, Geistliche Fama, devoted to the history of revival and to discerning the signs of the times, see my Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992), p. 168. For the quotation, see Heinrich [Jung-]Stilling, Theobald, or the Fanatic, tr. S. Schaeffer (Philadelphia, 1846), pp. 76–7. [Jung-]Stilling, Theobald, p. 4. On Jung-Stilling generally see Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, Werke, 12 vols. (Stuttgart, 1841–60); Max Geiger, Aufklärung und Erweckung (Zurich, 1963); Ernst Staehelin, Die Christentumsgesellschaft in der Zeit der Aufklärung und der beginnenden Erweckung (Basel,


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He got to know Goethe and Herder, and through them obtained an entrée into English literature and the German philosophical Enlightenment (and especially determinism), and the emotional turmoil of the Sturm und Drang. For a man of Jung-Stilling’s upbringing, this encounter afforded a rapid expansion of outlook and a severe spiritual burden which he never finally shook off. The furniture of his mind, which had been created by Homer, mysticism and alchemy, Paracelsus and Bohme, ¨ was now upset by modern medicine, mathematics and mechanics. The alienation had set in before he got to Strasbourg with reading in Leibniz and Wolff, JungStilling’s evangelical anti-Aristotelianism now giving him a powerful push towards Enlightenment: In former centuries superstition and errors prevailed among men; the formation of the spirit rested merely on the doctrines of the scholastic hair-splitting. The powers of understanding were by this means confused rather than developed . . . until finally Leibniz arose and brought forth materials out of the deep fullness of his soul from which Wolf [sic] brought to effect his excellent great philosophical structure. The whole world now rejoiced, the whole scholastic firmament began to disappear, there was light everywhere.47

Jung-Stilling’s struggle with Enlightenment The new philosophy, however, was not all fun. Jung-Stilling’s original conversion had been a surrender to the providence of God; the Aufklärer were also spokesmen of the divine providence, but they perceived it in the predictability of the stellar universe rather than in the daily mercies which Jung-Stilling had not only been brought up to expect, but actually needed. Two of his three wives were poor managers, and despite his reasonably successful professional career his affairs were generally embarrassed. Had not Wolff scoffed at this kind of dependence as inviting God to be selfcontradictory? Hoping against hope Jung-Stilling continued to pray. But, as he recalled, it was a great burden: Stilling, through the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, fell into the harsh imprisonment of determinism – for over twenty years he had struggled with prayer and

47

1970) and Die Christentumsgesellschaft in der Zeit von der Erweckung bis zur Gegenwart (Basel, 1974); Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, Lebensgeschichte, ed. Gustav Adolf Benrath (Darmstadt, 1984); Rainer Vinke, ‘Jung-Stilling-Forschung seit 1963’ in Theologische Rundschau 48 (1983) 156–86; Rainer Vinke, ‘Jung-Stilling Forschung von 1983 bis 1990’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 17 (1991), 178–228. Portions of the autobiographical texts were tr. into English by R. O. Moon, in Jung-Stilling: His Biography, 2nd edn (London, 1898). Geiger, Aufklärung und Erweckung, p. 444.

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weeping against this giant48 without being able to overcome him. In his writings he had always maintained the freedom of the will and of human actions, and even believed it against all the objections of his reason. He had also always prayed, although that giant always whispered in his ear: your prayer does no good, for what God has decreed will happen whether you pray or not.

In this frame of mind even apparent answers to prayer were comfortless, ‘for the giant said, it was mere chance’.49 When the whispers of the giant were on top Jung-Stilling felt he must strike out against superstition. One of the early works of his successful literary career was a novel with some autobiographical content, Theobald, or the Fanatic: a true history (1785). The object was ‘to show my German Fatherland that the way to true temporal and eternal happiness lies midway between unbelief and religious delusion’. This largely boiled down to a decision whether that great progenitor of delusionists, Jakob Bohme, ¨ was one himself. The fanatic and the enthusiast were totally different things. An enthusiast was one who clothes, at least for the most part, the legitimate deductions of reason or the authorised principles of truth in the light drapery of the imagination, and taking those images for the truth itself, introduces them in the theatre of life in all the warmth of animated action. A fanatic, on the contrary, is one who takes all the glowing images of fancy for actual truth, and gives them out as evidences of divine illumination. Delusionists of this latter class are in the highest degree dangerous.50

He was not sure in which class Bohme ¨ came, though many of his followers were clearly fanatical, and he took refuge in the lack of a suitable word in the German language. Thus he obtained some relief by demythologising the tradition in which he had grown up and been converted. The rest of Jung-Stilling’s career might well be taken as an illustration of what he conceived as Providence. From 1772 to 1778 he was a (rather unsuccessful) doctor in Elberfeld, but achieved fame through another avenue. A method of operating on cataracts came into his hands from a Catholic priest, and from 1773 till a year before his death he was in demand all over Germany to perform cataract operations, which he carried out with a good measure of success. Nevertheless he conceived that Providence was calling him into the field of political economy, and from 1778 to 1803 he held chairs in that subject in Kaiserslautern, Heidelberg and Marburg. Here he did not win the confidence of his academic colleagues, who were suspicious of a man principally celebrated as a peripatetic surgeon and writer of novels and devotional literature. But 48 49

The literary reference is to Bunyan who came to be both a literary and a spiritual model for Jung-Stilling. 50 [Jung-]Stilling, Theobald, pp. 5, 11. Jung-Stilling, Lebensgeschichte, pp. 448–9.


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he retained the confidence of princes, and he was a court counsellor in the Palatinate and later adviser to Karl Friedrich of Baden for a quarter of a century from 1785. His literary output was enormous, and his reputation as a man of letters became secure. But how successful was he in solving a problem of conscience which induced a kind of schizophrenia? Could the world be made to find room for the freedom of either God or man? Jung-Stilling and Kant As usual in the case of a man like Jung-Stilling, books, friendships and events all had a part to play. In 1788 he read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; he soon ‘grasped its meaning, and all of a sudden his struggle with determinism was at an end: Kant showed there on irrefutable grounds that human reason knew nothing at all outside the limits of the world of sense – that in supernatural things always – as often as it judged and reached conclusions from its own principles – it ran up against contradictions’. In fact Kant’s Critique was ‘a commentary upon the words of Paul: “the natural man understands nothing of the things which are of the spirit of God” . . . Now was Stilling’s soul as it were winged upwards,’51 much as it had been when he first discovered the Enlightenment. The bliss of instant relief did not prove a sign of total cure; but at least he now had genuine intellectual ballast against the doubts engendered by Wolff. Then there was the example of others who had doubted. Even in Theobald Jung-Stilling had commented that ‘Zinzendorf ’s system had more plan, wisdom and practical policy than both the protestant churches united’,52 and at the time of his encounter with Kant he began to read the theology of Zinzendorf who had himself been a youthful doubter. What he drew from this was, not surprisingly, what he had clung to for so long, namely an emphasis on experience, which for him meant an emphasis on providential leading, an emphasis which it seemed Kant had made intellectually respectable again. Coming as it did in 1789 and 1790, this new encounter coincided with other shattering experiences – the death of his second wife, his marriage with Elise Coing, and the outbreak of the French Revolution – and it came when he was unusually susceptible to an appeal from the evangelical past. But it also ushered in close relations with the Moravians as a body, and these, together with his similar closeness to the conservative evangelical Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft, his new connexions with the Bible, tract and missionary societies at 51

Jung-Stilling, Lebensgeschichte, pp. 449–50.

52

[Jung-]Stilling, Theobald, p. 29.

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home and abroad, and the encouragement he drew from the revival in England, were what earned him the eventual title of ‘Patriarch of the Awakening’. Jung-Stilling and Lavater Before, however, he had returned so far down the evangelical road, there was another friendship which began in a meeting with Goethe and others and generated considerable correspondence with another contemporary who had solutions to some of his problems, namely Lavater.53 Lavater’s doctrine of the ether seemed to soften the harshness of a mechanical universe; his practice of animal magnetism seemed to open a door to the world of spirits in which they were both interested, and seemed to be independently confirmed by scientific friends of Jung-Stilling’s own; Lavater’s death in 1701 in resisting the incursions of the French revolutionary armies into Switzerland seemed to Jung-Stilling to create him a patriot-martyr, and caused him to burst into verse on The Transfiguration of Lavater. The whole subject was resumed in Jung-Stilling’s late investigations into the spirit-world. The combined effect of his reading, changes in his personal circumstances, and the outbreak of the French Revolution was to drive him back upon the old evangelical programme with which he had begun; yet with a difference. In his successful novel Heimweh (Homesickness, 1794–6) he has his crusader seeking to lead sympathetic members of Solyman’s state to Christianity, yet ‘through rational conviction, and bases the doctrine of Christ not upon unconditioned faith alone, but shows that this faith can subsist with sound reason’. Having gained this degree of confidence Jung-Stilling proceeded to apply it round the circle of central doctrines, dredging up evidence of varying kinds and applying it with greater or lesser degrees of certainty to the divine character of the biblical truths, the fall of man, Christology, reconciliation, the resurrection of Christ, the biblical miracles, the immortality of the soul and the millennial kingdom, the divine character of the apocalypse of John, and the biblical chronology.54 In all this Jung-Stilling anticipated much of the future, for at the bottom he based his faith on his own experience of divine mercy and personal leading. Yet the necessities of his years of doubt remained with him in the zeal with which he now sought to fortify the old faith with new evidences. 53 54

An example of the degree to which Jung-Stilling was prepared to unburden himself to Lavater by letter is given in an appendix to the Lebensgeschichte, pp. 659–66. Geiger, Aufklärung und Erweckung, pp. 503–4.


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Yet even his ‘old faith’ was the old faith with a difference.55 Like Wesley, but unlike the early evangelicals, Jung-Stilling had taken the evangelical animus against ‘system’ to the point of presenting a version of Christianity based on central doctrines. Though of Reformed extraction, he found no place for the doctrine of predestination, and so anxious was he to preserve human freedom against determinism that he left the door open to Pelagianism. The doctrine of the ‘restoration of all things’ which had been dear to one group of evangelicals he had rejected when young, and did not recover till much later when he found it in the English Behmenist, Jane Leade, and then only with the ‘health warning’ that it must not be coupled with moral indifference. Of the old Orthodox doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the Bible he would have nothing. Even the wrath of God was not to be understood literally. The anthropocentric ways of the Enlightenment marked him deeply. The end of man (as in Lavater) was improvement and happiness. The essence of sin was sensuality. The purpose of Christ’s redemptive mission was the ‘improvement’ or ‘ennobling’ of man. In all these ways Jung-Stilling anticipated what would happen to the mass evangelicalism of the West in the nineteenth century. Jung-Stilling and the world of spirits Moreover, he was still sufficiently insecure against the challenge of determinism of the Wolffian kind to feel bound to resume the incursions of Lavater and Swedenborg into the world of spirits in order to establish that there were spiritual realities. He found much that was admirable in both, but also claimed the support of a characteristically cagey passage on apparitions in the first volume of Spener’s Last Theological Reflections.56 Spener’s problem was not the existence of apparitions, but the faculty of distinguishing those that brought a divine message from those that were the work of Satan. He could only advise that the recipient of apparitions take time and care in assessing them, in awareness of the consensus which then existed that Satan undoubtedly mimicked the work of God. Enlightenment left Jung-Stilling in a position to say both more and less than Spener. It is a divine and irreversible law that mankind, in the present state should be guided with respect to temporal and sensible things by just and rational inferences, the result of a sound understanding; but with respect to those things which are above sense, by the Word of God, and in both together by divine providence . . . When an advanced and enlightened Christian falls into this state, 55 56

Geiger, Ibid., pp. 505–7 gives Jung-Stilling’s credo from a long private letter. P. J. Spener, Letzte Theologische Bedencken (Halle, 1711), I, pp. 209–21.

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he attaches no value to it; on the contrary he humbles himself before his God, and fervently implores wisdom and protection against the abuse of it . . . When an unconverted, worldly-minded, man develops his faculty of presentiment, he falls into the danger of idolatry and sorcery. Preachers and physicians ought therefore to instruct the ignorant upon this important point.

Real presentiments (a ministry of angels) and real prophecies could be distinguished from their merely human counterparts by the fact that they have in view substantial objects for the good of mankind as distinct from trivialities.57 Jung-Stilling and the French Revolution Still more important was Jung-Stilling’s reaction to the French Revolution. His attention had been drawn to the chronology of the apocalypse established by Bengel in the 1780s, and especially to a reworking and confirmation of it by ‘an unknown in Carlsruhe’.58 From all this it appeared not merely that the millennial age would begin in 1836, but that the Papacy would fall at a precise date in the 1790s. This was of course the decade in which the age-old Protestant prophecies of the fall of Rome came nearest to accomplishment. Jung-Stilling became hooked on Bengel. And the apocalyptic question was given a fearful actuality by the outbreak of the French Revolution. He now perceived the beginning of the decisive struggle between light and darkness, between truth and seduction, between Christ and Antichrist. The ultimate Judgements were at hand. Here once again Jung-Stilling picked up one thread of the evangelical past only to break another. Ever since the time of Louis XIV the evangelical movements of the Rhineland and Wurttemberg ¨ had hated the French as merciless aggressors, Papists who threatened the Westphalia settlements, and upholders of a model of extravagant monarchy that was only too attractive to the German princes of the West. But to move from this to denouncing the French as the embodiment of Antichrist of the latter days was to abandon the commonest platform of all the early evangelicals, their postponement of the millennial age into the middle distance. And like all prophets of imminent Judgement Jung-Stilling felt there was no alternative to preaching this obsession by every means in his power. The upshot was that the periodical instalments of his autobiography and his stories declined in general interest, and a concentration upon 57

58

J. H. Jung-Stilling, Theory of Pneumatology, in reply to the question what ought to be believed or disbelieved concerning Presentiments, Visions and Apparitions, according to Nature, Reason and Scripture. Orig. edn 1808. Eng. tr. (London, 1834), pp. 43–57, 87–94, 375–8. The Baden Hofrat Georg Friedrich Fein in a work of 1784.


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apocalyptic signs, dates, events and materials set in. Three generations later Albrecht Ritchl called it ‘dilettantism in religion’. In all this JungStilling was characteristic of the Erweckungsbewegung but out of line with the great body of the early evangelical movement. Moreover, after his meeting with Juliane von Krudener ¨ (1764–1824), the prophetess from Russia, in 1808, he was further distinguished from the evangelical past by knowing whence salvation in the apocalyptic age would come; it would come from the East, and especially from Russia. This conviction underlay notable emigration from the south-west of the Reich in the years after the Napoleonic wars, but it had not been part of the evangelical tradition. Thus it happened that while believing he was going back to his evangelical roots, Jung-Stilling, like Lavater and Swedenborg, illustrated the disintegration of the tradition to which he appealed by grossly inflating the importance of particular elements in it.

Conclusion

The difficulties of evangelical ‘system’ in the West In the Anglophone world the difficulties encountered by evangelicalism in Northern and Central Europe were repeated on a bigger scale as both the repute and the real power of established institutions were diminished by social change and by the impact of the French Revolution. Swedenborg and Oetinger in their different ways had tried to restore or remake the general setting of evangelical thought that had once been provided by Paracelsianism. The former, however, had been repudiated by evangelicals in violent terms, and had in any case turned his back on the working science on which he had made his name. Like his father Bishop Svedberg, he had concluded that science and technology did not afford the necessary key to meaning, but, by going over wholesale to a visionary activity that was out of proportion to anything known in the Protestant world, he had effectively closed the gates to any return. Would the Swedenborgian New Church descend from the heavens? Was it embodied in an English Methodism gradually asserting its independence from the established Church?1 Or was it still concealed in the womb of the Church of England? Convincing negative answers were given to each of these three questions within fifty years of Swedenborg’s death. As if this were not enough, English Swedenborgianism now became characterised by vegetarian convictions; in other words it had been moved by its adherents from a credo seeking to answer questions thrown up by European high culture into a set of beliefs purporting to enable silk-workers and other labouring men to cope with their daily problems. In the case of Oetinger, not only had he no successors to continue the gargantuan labours he had undertaken, but with every decade after his death it became increasingly clear that he had backed the wrong scientific tradition. There was still life in illuminism for Oetinger’s triad of Bible, Bohme ¨ and Bengel, but not much life for those who wanted to be working 1

See my paper ‘Swedenborgianism: Heresy, Schism or Religious Protest?’, Studies in Church History 9 (1972), 303–9.

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Conclusion

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scientists. And given the fact that Jonathan Edwards had not left behind a living tradition of broadly based systematic theology, evangelicals tended increasingly to follow the lead of Jung-Stilling and Wesley in offering a Christianity based on a circle of central doctrines – not only a Christianity without general intellectual context, but a Christianity without the further reaches aspired to by the systematicians of old. Preaching nothing but Christ and him crucified was satisfactory as long as the hearers found in this an immediacy they did not find in broader structures of the faith. Backing favourites among the persons of the Trinity would not, however, always satisfy, and particularly not when ‘the quest of the historical Jesus’ proved a great deal more complicated than anyone expected at first. The mention of Albert Schweitzer’s obsessional eschatological treatise2 serves to introduce the sad fate of the evangelical effort to displace the millennium to the middle distance. As if it were not bad enough that the Methodists, the largest of the new evangelical communities, had used Bengel virtually to dispense with the millennium altogether, a large part of the Anglophone Protestant world, upset by the French revolutionary challenge, and unhinged by the spectacle of the Papacy in the 1790s apparently on its last legs, began to clamour for an instant millennium – which would have left no time for the manifold good works that the evangelicals actually succeeded in accomplishing in the next century. Amidst the huge upsurge of apocalyptic speculation, it became apparent that even the millenarian wing of the evangelical movement was dividing, as so often in the past, between an intellectual top-drawer and a popular milieu that was sometimes not Christian at all. Southcottians,3 Richard Brothers4 and the like cannot really be considered part of the evangelical movement, but they operated in the same popular environment, catered to many of the same needs, and, if anything went wrong, could always take refuge in America. Moreover, given the curious fixation of historians 2 3

4

Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: German edn Geschichte der Leben-Jesus Forschung, 2nd edn (Tubingen, ¨ 1913); complete Eng. edn London, 2000. Joanna Southcott (1750–1814), a Devonshire farmer’s daughter, and at first a Methodist; in 1801 she began to attract notice and make converts. In 1802 she declared she was about to bring into the world a spiritual man, ‘Shiloh’; she died of a brain disease. Her final illness was widely understood to be pregnancy with Shiloh, but of this an autopsy could find no trace. Richard Brothers (1757–1824) early served in the Navy, and for years contested the terms of the payment of his pension. In 1792 he wrote to the heads of state that the time was come for the fulfilment of Daniel 7. In 1793 he regarded himself as ‘nephew of the Almighty’, and in 1794 claimed the revelation that he was prince of the Hebrews to whom King George must deliver up his crown. Placed in an asylum as a lunatic, he occupied himself writing prophetic pamphlets, and drawing plans for the New Jerusalem to which he would lead the Jews. He was buried at the opposite side of St John’s Wood cemetery from Joanna Southcott.

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of the last generation with the bizarre, their stories have dominated the historiography.5 And since the Ottoman Turk was now figuring as ‘the sick man of Europe’ it could not be denied that the old prophecies about returning the Jews to their homeland had a startling actuality. Apocalypse and system in Simeon Nor was all this the uncultivated froth of simple people. On the eve of the French Revolution there was a curious spirit of expectation that 6 looked to Bohme ¨ or to Swedenborg7 for meaning behind the surface of events; indeed, in the 1790s Swedenborg reached the peak of his influence in England. That pillar of the evangelical party in the Church of England, Charles Simeon (1759–1836), abandoned the traditional evangelical view, that the Last Things were to be located in the middle distance, for the seventeenth-century Orthodox doctrine that they were imminent. ‘The general scope of prophecy’, he proclaimed, ‘ . . . points to this very age in which we live.’ The one thousand two hundred and sixty years of Daniel are, beyond all doubt, near to their completion; and consequently the reign of Christ on earth, as its universal monarch, is near to its commencement. Besides, among both Jews and Gentiles there is a general expectation that some great change is at hand and that God will shortly interpose to bring all nations to such an unity of religious faith and practice as have never yet been seen upon earth.8

The evidence for this on the ground was the unprecedented effort that had gone into missionary enterprise and the translation of the Scriptures into many tongues. In many places there was a work of grace ‘where nothing but darkness reigned till of late’; moreover, ‘even in the Apostles’ days females had their department of labour, and laboured too with good success’ – as they were doing once more. Inevitably, a surprising amount of Simeon’s preaching (not to mention his work with the Jews’ Society) was taken up with Jewish questions, all with an empirically unjustifiable enthusiasm. ‘The future conversion of the Jews is absolutely certain’, ‘the Jews beyond all reasonable doubt will be restored to their own land’, and 5

6 7 8

See, e.g., W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists (Auckland, 1978); Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution (Baltimore, 1975); Clarke Garrett, Spirit Possession and Popular Religion (Baltimore, 1987); J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming. Popular Millenarianism 1780–1850 (London, 1979); Janet K. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People (Austin, 1982). Walton, Notes and Materials on William Law (London, 1854), pp. 575, 595–7. Clarke Garrett, ‘Swedenborg and the Mystical Enlightenment in Eighteenth-century England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984), 67–81. C. Simeon, Horae Homileticae, 21 vols. (London, 1832–3), Sermon 901, VIII, pp. 22–6. Cf. Sermon 1001, VIII, pp. 538–42.

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these great events would be the signal for an outpouring of blessings on the rest of mankind, and especially the church.9 If there was another evangelical group, the Eclectic Society, in which the Last Things played a relatively small part,10 there was certainly in the evangelical upper ranks a determination to add precision to the apocalyptic timetable which had not characterised their forbears. The Albury group were prominent in all this, but they were not alone. Premillennialists, they believed like many before them that Christ would return to lead his faithful before the millennium, and Bebbington notes that they were in fact more interested in the Second Advent than they were in the millennium.11 Their desperation to leave no text unturned was well illustrated by Joshua Brooks, whose Dictionary of Writers on the Prophecies (London, 1835) offered a catalogue of 114 double-columned pages of authors and works in this field. In these circles speculation about the Last Things was emphatically in vogue, even if the Last Things themselves, and the events expected to be their harbingers, obstinately failed to turn up. More to the point, in the early 1850s the revolutionary steam leaked out of British society, and with it the sense men had of living on the cusp of great and astonishing events. This was death to the various forms of religious and ethical heroism that had flourished in the first half of the century, and especially in the 1830s and 1840s – evangelicalism and Newmanism, teetotalism and anti-war prophecy – and virtually total death to obsession with the Last Things. Balleine reaches the comically pedestrian judgement that the millenarian issue was wound up for Anglican evangelicals by Bishop Waldegrave’s Bampton Lectures in 1853.12 Undenominationalism There was one cause with a great resonance in the evangelical past to which Simeon gave vociferous backing, and which for a generation seemed on the verge of triumph. In the 1770s the old differences between Calvinist and Arminian had been given a ferocious airing as Wesley and his friends clashed with the Calvinist evangelicals in the Church of England; to both sides loyalty to the Thirty-nine Articles seemed to be at stake. Quite suddenly these disputes seemed hardly to matter any more. The Methodists dropped one red rag in the title of the connexional journal, the Arminian Magazine, and admitted that the old Calvinist system 9 10 11 12

Ibid., VIII, pp. 628–32, 648–54; IX, pp. 214–18, 248–55, 403–6, 433–40, 448–65. J. H. Pratt, The Thought of Evangelical Leaders (repr. Edinburgh, 1978). D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 4th edn (London, 2002), p. 83. G. R. Balleine, A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England (repr. London, 1957), pp. 164–5.

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had ‘been greatly improved in the last forty years’. System was evidently the villain once again. Simeon, that luminary among the next generation of Anglican evangelicals, claimed to be ‘no friend to systematizers in theology’. . . . He has no doubt that there is a system in the Holy Scriptures (for truth cannot at the same time be inconsistent with itself); but he is persuaded that neither Calvinists nor Arminians are in exclusive possession of that system . . . the Scripture system, be it what it may, is of a broader and more comprehensive character than some very exact theologians are inclined to allow.13

And exemplifying the revived hostility to metaphysics, he supported his view by an analogy from engineering; in a machine wheels turning in opposite directions may serve a common end. ‘God has not revealed his truth in a system: the Bible has no system as such. Lay aside system and flee to the Bible . . . Be Bible Christians not system Christians.’14 Simeon was here deploying a legitimate Christian argument for latitude; but he was not quite redeemed. In his Old Testament sermon outlines he was not above using typology to create a greater appearance of system than is strictly warranted. But the contrast with Jonathan Edwards is striking. The ‘improvement’ in the Calvinist system perceived by the Methodist commentators was to be found as much in Dissent as in the Church. It was not all one-way traffic. The more progressive intellectuals seemed to reduce the barriers, the higher the conservatives piled theirs, transforming high- into hyper-Calvinism. When rationalism made inroads among the Presbyterians, the Independents stood out for orthodoxy; when the Independents yielded to the new ways, the Baptists offered a refuge, and produced great conservative stalwarts in Brine and Gill. It was therefore very significant that there was now a race of Baptists committed to evangelism at home and abroad, and that improved Calvinism, ‘moderate Calvinism’, ‘practical Calvinism’, Fullerism15 was their work; they insisted with the Bible that God had elected the faithful to life, and were content to leave the rest in its biblical obscurity. Fullerism and empiricism greatly increased the pressure for open communion among the Baptists, for theological modernism and popular appeal seemed to go hand in hand. The truth was that the shibboleths of the old Dissent had never 13 14 15

Simeon, Horae Homileticae, I, pp. xiii–xiv. A. W. Brown, Recollections of the Conversation Parties of the Rev. Charles Simeon (London, 1840), p. 269. Andrew Fuller (1754–1815), Baptist theologian and secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society. Fuller contested the resistance to missions of the hyper-Calvinists in The Gospel Worthy of all Acceptation (1785). For the nature and importance of this kind of religious appeal, see my paper ‘The Baptists and the Transformation of the Church, 1780–1830’, Baptist Quarterly 25 (1973), 167–84, repr. in my Faith and Faction (London, 1993), pp. 202–22.

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won a great popular following in England, but now that ‘the bigotry of former times seems hastening to an extinction’, and ‘religion itself is now much better understood than formerly’, the numbers were increasing by leaps and bounds. In the bumper years, when the harvest seemed limited only by the number of labourers in the field, it was hard to preserve an existential attachment to the doctrine of a limited atonement. For a generation the new anti-systematic empiricism seemed to carry all before it at the growth points of the church order.16 The general shaking of institutions, and the breach of many old loyalties, opened the way to almost miraculous growth among the evangelical denominations in the generation that followed the outbreak of the French Revolution. Methodists found that they expanded without Wesley far more rapidly than they had ever done with him, and the fact that, with whatever jars to the pretensions of the old connexion to be the guardians of Wesley’s deposit, the American Methodists crossed the Alleghenies and were moving into the interior barely behind the pioneer settlers themselves, gave rise to pipe-dreams that the old establishments might be displaced by voluntary organisations.17 Undenominational voluntaryism seemed to triumph everywhere. If it was a question of Sunday Schools, the new movement began on a largely undenominational basis; when it came to the formal organisation of overseas missionary work, the London Missionary Society appealed to, and at first received, the support of men of good will of whatever stripe; with the Bible Society and, at first, the schools, it was the same; in many parts of the country the work of missions overseas was replicated at home by village preaching societies, many of them on an undenominational basis. In all this there was a good deal of the pragmatism which the English evangelical world had derived from the Enlightenment, and a recognition that the growth of population and the commercialisation of agriculture had created problems which neither the parish system of the Church nor the gathered communities of Dissent were well fitted to solve. But much of it also derived from the great impetus given by the new social and intellectual circumstances to the old evangelical hostility to Aristotle, to Orthodoxy and to system. Anglo-German theological diplomacy The great cry of Simeon and the Fullerites had been to ‘lay aside system and flee to the Bible’, and the Bible indeed seemed to be liberation theology in literary form when it came to numbers of the elect or offers 16 17

This theme is worked out in ch. 1 of my Religion and Society in England 1790–1850 (London, 1972). The telling legend was that Methodism arrived in every frontier settlement by the time the second saloon was opened.

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of grace. But the nineteenth century was not far gone before it became apparent that the Bible was part of the problem at least as much as it was part of the solution. In the first generation of the nineteenth century the English church entered on a period of increasing isolation from the continent. To their credit the evangelicals were among the last to follow this trend, and all during the years of the Napoleonic wars they had their own means of breaking the Continental System and keeping in touch with their continental counterparts. They owed much to the itinerant labours of men like K. F. A. Steinkopf (1773–1859). He was pastor of the German Lutheran congregation in the Savoy. His circle abroad was based on the highly conservative Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft18 of Basel, of which he was secretary 1795–1801. This body spread the ideals of the London Missionary Society, the Religious Tract Society and the Bible Society abroad, establishing a cosmopolitan and unconfessional model for the men of the Erweckungsbewegung in Germany. But the English High-Church party was increasingly engaged in developing a highly precarious church construct which should be national against Rome and catholic against dissent. In their turn the evangelicals were increasingly drawn into this warfare, and it was men of liberal bent who looked to Germany for theological progress or university reform. As at the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a pro-German and an isolationist party in the English church; but the balance between them had changed fundamentally – as it had not changed in America, whence students continued to trek to German universities by their thousands.19 The evangelicals (like the High-Church), concerned to preserve the English Church against enemies within and abroad, and followed by too many evangelical dissenters, went with the isolationist tide. The Bible The result was that what is sometimes melodramatically called ‘the Victorian crisis of faith’20 was predominantly felt by a certain kind of evangelical. Both the Bible as a whole and the centrality of Jesus in it became suddenly much harder to use. Long before Darwin and the evolution controversies, geologists had come to require a much greater timescale than the English Bible commentators had been accustomed to grant. 18 19 20

On this body see Ernst Staehelin, Die Christentumsgesellschaft in der Zeit der Aufklärung und der beginnenden Erweckung (Basel, 1970). Carl Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship 1770–1870 (New Haven, 1978). Theologians declined both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the whole after 1850. For more on this see my paper ‘Faith and Fallacy: English and German Perspectives in the Nineteenth Century’ in R. J. Helmstadter and B. Lightman (eds.), Victorian Faith in Crisis (London, 1990); repr. in my Faith and Faction, pp. 49–72.

Conclusion

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Still worse, David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus21 and the long trail of successors that it provoked made it clear that fleeing to Christ, like fleeing to the Bible, was, if not hazardous, at least less simple than evangelicals had supposed. Evangelicals, once progressive in their use of Locke, were now painfully caught in Locke’s assumption that knowledge was something external to man, perceived by sense impressions.22 In the nature of the case revelation was external to man, though it was recognisable by supporting evidences, and especially by miracles and the fulfilment of prophecies. All these supporting evidences now began to seem insecure. To the battering suffered by inner-church conflict, the evangelical movement suffered further loss of confidence as a result of developments elsewhere on which it had turned its back. Isolation was dramatically exemplified all round. It took exile in Natal to save Colenso from English isolation and make a scholar of him. It happened that the curator of the museum and library in Cape Town was the son of the notable German Old Testament scholar Friedrich Bleek, and he kept Colenso supplied with good German work in the field that he would probably not have obtained in England.23 Nor were evangelical nonconformists any better. When the Congregationalists created the British Quarterly Review in the 1840s, they included valuable bibliographies of the current German output; but when Samuel Davidson, professor of biblical literature and ecclesiastical history at Lancashire Independent College, 1843–57, a friend of various German theologians of relatively conservative views, contributed to the second volume of the tenth edition of Horne’s Introduction to the Sacred Scriptures (1856), the college committee made him resign his chair. And the very last extant letter of Jabez Bunting, the so-called ‘last Wesleyan’, was to forbid the teaching of German to voluntary classes in the Didsbury College seminary; the ‘first Wesleyan’, John Wesley himself, had been a principal channel of the influence in England of Bengel, Buddeus and the Pietists, and a notable translator of German hymns. Evangelicalism in America What meanwhile had happened to the heritage of Jonathan Edwards in America? The American situation was altogether singular. In the halfcentury following Edwards’s death, independence was achieved, and 21 22

23

First German edn 1835–6; Eng. tr. from the 4th German edn 1866. For Otto Pfleiderer’s polemic against this from the German side see his Development of Theology in Germany Since Kant and Its Progress in Britain Since 1828 (London, 1890), p. 307. John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London, 1984), p. 221.

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achieved on a basis which made clear that the days of church establishment even on a state-wide basis were everywhere numbered. Moreover, as population began to pour into the interior, society had to be constructed from the ground upwards, and this implied that the wider functions of organised religion would differ greatly from those in Europe; in the areas of new settlement there was no decayed establishment in need of Pietist renewal; nor had the revivalist prescription for saving Protestantism against a hostile state immediate relevance, though, as the event proved, it was much nearer the mark than European notions of establishment. Jonathan Edwards had stood for a restatement of New England Orthodoxy in the hope of giving new life to community religious observance. Yet within a few years of his death the prospect of community observance in New England had gone for ever, and many of the New England clergy were preaching up a sort of millennial bliss as a reward for resisting British imperial reorganisation. This was hardly achievable, and was certainly not compatible with Edwards’s understanding of sin. Yet in two quite different ways, and on a very narrow basis, his heritage survived. Important parts of his work were not published in his lifetime; indeed much of it was unavailable till given a scholarly editing by the Yale factory in our own day. And the self-appointed guardians of his legacy, the New Divinity school, were a very minuscule group. Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy had studied with Edwards and became his personal friends; Jonathan Edwards Jnr, only thirteen when his father died, was a pupil of Hopkins and Bellamy and, in his own more limited way, dedicated to the preservation of his father’s work. But not only were the epigone lesser men, they divided the heritage they claimed to defend. Strong in the Connecticut Valley, they had no Arminians to oppose, so they tackled the old Calvinists in an increasingly metaphysical way, separating themselves informally from the evangelists remaining in the party. Underlying Edwards’s doctrines had been his vivid perception of the divine beauty; the penchant of the New Divinity men for system and intellectualisation helped to empty their churches even as they multiplied their number. Yet the recollection of religious awakening was there, and when the Second Great Awakening began at the end of the century, it began in New Divinity parishes.24

24

Hartmut Lehmann notes that it is difficult to know whether Claus Harms (1778–1855), the celebrated preacher and writer of Schleswig, is to be classified to the revival movement or to Neo-orthodoxy (Protestantische Weltsichten (Gottingen, ¨ 1998), p. 69). For all the differences in the American situation, the similarity with the New Divinity men is unmistakeable. The evangelicalism of each was no longer a force for liberation, and its top-drawer was no longer addressing the intellectual problems of the contemporary elite.

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By this time America was a different place from the time of Edwards. It was not just that the Baptists and Methodists were better geared up for evangelism in the back country than the apostles of New England religion; they were bitterly hostile to establishment and cared not at all for metaphysics. Within New England itself evangelical orthodoxy soon faced an outright challenge from Unitarians arguing from the premises of Enlightenment, and it divided into schools advocating dispensationalism, millenarianism, even perfectionism. The Benevolent System, that great interlocking network of societies for good works, based on a British model but overshadowing denominational organisations and thought to a degree not experienced in Britain, all showed how the evangelical heritage, with all its pragmatic vigour, had splintered into often unharmonious fragments. And if America was spared the divisive disputes about religious establishment that complicated the nineteenth-century history of British evangelicalism, it had shortly to face the even more contentious issue of slavery. To say this is to say more than that evangelicalism, like every other religious movement, had a history; it is to say that the extraordinary capacity of sections of the movement to reinvent themselves led to a future with much less cohesion and mutual respect than early evangelicalism had summoned up. It was characteristic of that future that wouldbe umbrella organisations like the Evangelical Alliance remained special interest groups. Much the same was true of those who developed a fixation on eschatology, or the canon of Scripture, or Christian perfection, and there was warfare between those who gave themselves to the Benevolent System and the denominations, not least the evangelical denominations on both sides of the Atlantic. Evangelicals retained a power to straddle denominations, but, in spite of the linkages, seemed unable to transmit an understanding of new church problems across the continents in the old style. America, loved or loathed, was no more understood in nineteenthcentury Europe than was Africa in the twentieth century. The evangelical hexagon was no more. What could not have been foreseen at the end of the eighteenth century was the energies which in the very long run could be released by this process of re-forming around fragments of the evangelical past, and which enabled evangelicalisms of various kinds (and mostly new kinds) to establish themselves globally. Their history is part of the successful rise of the lower social orders against the top-drawer which occurred in piety as well as politics. To chart their progress a different compass and a different method are required.

Select and user-friendly bibliography

Indispensable bibliographies on an international basis appear annually in the German journal Pietismus und Neuzeit 1974– (abbr. below as PuN) now published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Gottingen. ¨ A narrative of the revivalist side of the movement may be found in my Protestant Evangelical Awakening, 3rd edn, Cambridge, 2002, and the broader context is sketched in my Christianity under the Ancien Régime, Cambridge, 1999. An immense amount of information about the movement as a whole is contained in the Geschichte des Pietismus, ed. M. Brecht and others, 4 vols., Gottingen, ¨ 1993–2004. On a smaller scale, but pugnacious, see Johannes Wallmann, Der Pietismus, 2nd edn, Gottingen, ¨ 2005. Do not miss the collected essays of three great Pietismus scholars, not all the contributions in which are listed below: Martin Brecht, Ausgewählte Aufsätze Bd. II Pietismus, Stuttgart, 1997; Hartmut Lehmann, Religion und Religiosität in der Neuzeit, Gottingen, ¨ 1996; Johannes Wallmann, Theologie und Frömmigkeit im Zeitalter des Barock, Tubingen, ¨ 1995.

CHAPTER 1 Arndt, Johann, Of True Christianity. 2nd edn, London, 1720. (A modern tr. of selections by Peter Erb, Johann Arndt, True Christianity, London, 1979 is useful.) Barnes, Robin Bruce, Prophecy and Gnosis. Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation. Stanford, 1998. Basnage, Jacques, History of the Jews. London, 1708. Benoist, Luc, The Esoteric Path. An Introduction to the Hermetic Tradition. Wellingborough, 1988. Benz, Ernst, Die christliche Kabbala. Ein Stiefkind der Theologie. Zurich, 1958. Die Vision. Erfahrungsformen und Bilderwelt. Stuttgart, 1969. Betz, Otto, ‘“Kabbala Baptizata”. Die judisch-christliche ¨ Kabbala und der Pietismus in Wurttemberg’, ¨ PuN 24 (1998), 130–59. Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter, ‘Alchemical Death and Resurrection: The Significance of Alchemy in the Age of Newton’, in Stephen A. McKnight (ed.), Science, Pseudo-Science and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought. Columbia, Miss., 1992. Evans, Robert J. W., The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700. Oxford, 1979. 194

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Faivre, Antoine, Philosophie de la Nature. Physique sacrée et Théosophie, XVIIIe – XIXe siècle. Paris, 1996. Fisher, Elizabeth W., ‘“Prophecies and Revelations”: German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania’, Pennsylvania Magazine for History and Biography 109 (1985), 299–333. Fritz, F., ‘Die evangelische Kirche Wurttembergs ¨ im Zeitalter des Pietismus’, Blätter für Württembergische Kirchengeschichte 55–7 (1955–7). Gibbons, B. J., Spirituality and the Occult from the Renaissance to the Modern Age. London, 2001. Hemleben, Johannes, Paracelsus. Revolutionär, Artzt und Christ. Frauenfeld, 1973. Ingen, Ferdinand van, ‘Die Wiederaufnahme der Devotio Moderna bei Johann Arndt und Philip von Zesen’, in Dieter Breuer (ed.), Religion und Religiosität im Zeitalter des Barock. 2 vols., II, 467–76. Wiesbaden, 1995. Jarlert, Anders, ‘Johann Arndt, die Erweckungsbewegungen und das schwedische Frommigkeitsleben’, ¨ in Anders Jarlert (ed.), Johann Arndt – Rezeption und Reaction im Nordisch-Baltischen Raum. Lund, 1999. Koepp, Wilhelm, Johann Arndt. Eine Untersuchung u¨ ber die Mystik im Luthertum. Berlin, 1912. Koyré, A., La Philosophie de J. Böhme. Paris, 1929. Lehmann, Hartmut, Das Zeitalter des Absolutismus. Stuttgart, 1980. Lenhammar, Harry, ‘Paracelsus, Dippel und die Familie Hjärne – zur Frage der Rezeption pietistischer Gedanken’, in Johannes Wallmann and P. Laasonen (eds.), Der Pietismus in seiner europäischen und aussereuropäischen Ausstrahlung. Helsinki, 1992. Leube, Hans, Die Reformideen in der deutschen lutherischen Kirche zur Zeit der Orthodoxie. Leipzig, 1924. McGinn, Bernard, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (in progress). London, 1992– . Nigg, Walter, Heimliche Weisheit. Mystisches Leben in der evangelischen Christenheit. Zurich, 1959. Obst, H., ‘Zum “Verhor” ¨ Jakob Boehmes in Dresden’, PuN 1 (1974), 25–31. Pältz, Eberhard H., ‘Jakob Boehmes Gedanken uber ¨ die Erneuerung des wahren Christenthums’, PuN 4 (1977–8), 83–118. Peuckert, Will-Erich, Das Leben des J. Böhmes. Jena, 1924. Pansophie. Geschichte der weissen und schwarzen Magie. 2nd edn, Berlin, 1956. Gabalia. Ein Versuch zur Geschichte der Magia naturalis im 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert. Berlin, 1967. Das Rosenkreuz. 2nd edn, Berlin, 1973. Schmidt, Martin, ‘Christian Hoburgs Begriff der “mystischen Theologie”’, in FS Ernst Benz, Glaube, Geist, Geschichte, ed. G. Muller ¨ and W. Zeller. Leiden, 1967. Scholem, Gershom, Alchemie und Kabbala. Ein Kapitel aus der Geschichte der Mystik. [Berlin, 1927] On the Kabbala and its Symbolism, tr. Ralph Mannheim. London, 1965 (original German edn Zurich, 1960). Seeberg, Erich, Menschwerdung und Geschichte. Stuttgart, 1938.

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Sprat, Thomas, History of the Royal Society, ed. J. I. Cope and H. W. Jones. London, 1958. Stoudt, J. J., Sunrise to Eternity. A Study in J. Boehme’s Life and Thought. Philadelphia, 1957. Tuveson, Ernest Lee, The Avatars of Thrice Great Hermes. Lewisburg, 1987. Underhill, Evelyn, Mysticism. The Development of Mankind’s Spiritual Consciousness. 14th edn, London, 1995. Walker, D. P., Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella. London, 1958. The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the 15th to the 18th Century. London, 1972. Ward, W. Reginald, ‘The Making of the Evangelical Mind’, in FS Stuart Piggin, Making History for God, ed. Geoffrey R. Treloar and Robert O. Linder (eds.), Sydney, N.S.W., 2004. Yates, Frances R., The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London, 1972. Zaehner, Robert Charles, Mysticism Sacred and Profane. Oxford, 1957.

CHAPTER 2 A photographic reprint of the voluminous works of Spener, begun under the editorship of Erich Beyreuther at the Olms Press in Hildesheim in 1977, has been completed by Dietrich Blaufuss. A magnificent edition of Spener’s correspondence is being prepared by a team led by Johannes Wallmann, and published at Tubingen. ¨ Volumes to have appeared so far include Briefe aus der Frankfurter Zeit, 4 vols., 1992– , and Briefe aus der Dresdener Zeit, in progress, 2003– . Aland, Kurt, Kirchengeschichtliche Entwürfe. Gutersloh, ¨ 1960. Aland, Kurt (ed.), Pietismus und Bibel. Witten, 1970. Albrecht, Ruth, Johanna Eleonora Petersen. Theologische Schriftstellerin des frühen Pietismus. Gottingen, ¨ 2005. Berg, Jan van den, and Nuttall, Geoffrey F., Philip Doddridge (1702–1751) and the Netherlands. Leiden, 1987. Berg, J. van den, and van Dooren, J. P. (eds.), Pietismus und Reveil. Leiden, 1978. Brecht, Martin, ‘Philipp Jakob Spener und die wurttembergische ¨ Kirche’, in FS Hanns Ruckert, ¨ Geist und Geschichte der Reformation, ed. Heinz Liebing and Klaus Scholder. Berlin, 1966. ‘Philipp Jakob Spener und das Wahre Christentum’, PuN 4 (1977/8), 119–54, repr. in his Ausgewählte Aufsätze, II (see above). ‘Chiliasmus in Wurttemberg ¨ im 17. Jahrhundert’, in his Ausgewählte Aufsätze, II (see above). Chi, Hyeong-Eun, Philipp Jakob Spener und seine Pia Desideria. Frankfurt, 1997. Deppermann, Andreas, Johann Jakob Schütz und die Anfänge des Pietismus. Tubingen, ¨ 2002. Grunberg, ¨ Paul, Philipp Jakob Spener. 3 vols., Gottingen, ¨ 1893–1906. Haweis, Thomas, An Impartial and Succinct History of the Rise, Declension and Revival of the Church of Christ from the birth of our Saviour to the Present Time. 3 vols., London, 1800.

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Willingham, W. F., ‘Religious Conversion in Windham, Conn., 1723–24’, Societas 6 (1976), 109–19. Young, Bryan W., Religion and Enlightenment in 18th Century England. Oxford, 1998. Zwicker, Stephen N., ‘England, Israel and the Triumph of Roman Virtue’, in Richard H. Popkin (ed.), Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, 1650–1800. Leiden, 1988. CHAPTER 6 The student of Zinzendorf, who set out to ensure that he was the best documented of all the religious leaders of his day, is confronted with an embarras de richesses. The Olms Press of Hildesheim began to produce a reprint edition of Zinzendorf’s works in 1962 under the editorship of Erich Beyreuther and Gerhard Meyer. The original edition of the Hauptschriften (6 vols.) was followed by 13 vols., of Ergänzungsbande (1964–72) and four vast series of Materialen und Dokumente which include many scarce monographs relating to the subject. Then there are the immense resources of the archive at Herrnhut, so rich that even the cash-strapped government of the DDR thought it worthwhile to spend money on them; and the English Moravian archives at Moravian Church House, Muswell Hill, London, which contain the Count’s daily teachings translated into often quaint English in the MS Gemeinhaus Diaries. All these resources have been ably exploited by the Moravian historians, especially Plitt, Uttendorfer ¨ and Meyer. Confronted by this overwhelming amount of material the student may take cautious note of Leiv Aalen’s opinion that the Moravians seem not to have said in private anything very different from what they published in the public domain. Aalen, Leiv, ‘Die Theologie des Grafen von Zinzendorf’, in Gedenkschrift für D. Werner Elert. Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, Berlin, 1955; repr. in Martin Greschat (ed.), Zur neueren Pietismusforschung, Darmstadt, 1977. Die Theologie des jungen Zinzendorfs. Berlin, 1966. Becker, Bernhard, Zinzendorf in Verhältnis zu Philosophie und Kirchentum seiner Zeit. Leipzig, 1886. Bengel, Johann Albrecht, Abriss der sogenannten Brüdergemeine, repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2 XVI. Beyreuther, Erich, Der junge Zinzendorf. 2nd edn, Marburg-an-der-Lahn, 1957. Zinzendorf und die sich allhier beisammen finden. Marburg-an-der-Lahn, 1959. Zinzendorf und die Christenheit. Marburg-an-der-Lahn, 1961. Studien zur Theologie Zinzendorfs. Neukirchen, 1962. ‘Zinzendorf und das Judentum’, repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2 XII. Bräunung-Oktavio, Hermann, ‘Ludwig Carl von Weitalshausen, genannt Schrautenbach’, Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 13 (1963), 223–79. Brecht, Martin, ‘Johann Albrecht Bengel und der schwäbische Biblizismus’, in Kurt Aland (ed.), Pietismus und Bibel. Witten, 1970. Cranz, David, Ancient and Modern History of the Brethren, tr. Benjamin La Trobe. London, 1780.

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Daniel, Thilo, Nikolaus von Zinzendorfs Beteiligung an den Inner-Protestantischen Einigungsbestrebungen des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts. Biographie und Theologie, 1716–1723. Marburg, 2000. ´ erique de Zinzendorf (1700–1760). Paris, 1969. Deghaye, Pierre, La Doctrine Esot´ Eberhard, Samuel, Kreuzes-Theologie. Die reformierten Anliegen in Zinzendorfs Verkündigung. Munich, 1937. Erbe, Hans-Walther, Zinzendorf und der fromme hohe Adel seiner Zeit. Leipzig, 1928; repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2 XII. Geiges, R., ‘Zinzendorf und Wurttemberg’, ¨ Blätter für Württembergische Kirchengeschichte 17 (1913), 52–152. ‘Die Auseinandersetzung zwischen Oetinger und Zinzendorf’, Blätter für Württembergische Kirchengeschichte 39 (1935), 131–48; 40 (1936), 107–35. ‘Wurttemberg ¨ und Herrnhut im 18. Jahrhundert’, Blätter für Württembergische Kirchengeschichte 42 (1938), 28–88. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Autobiography, ed. K. J. Weintraub. 2 vols., Chicago, 1974. Hahn, Hans-Christophe and Reichel, H., Zinzendorf und die Herrnhuter Brüder. Hamburg, 1977. Hok, ¨ Gosta, ¨ Zinzendorfs Begriff der Religion. Uppsala, 1948. Jung, Martin H., Nachfolger, Visionärinnen, Kirchenkritiker. Leipzig, 2003. Mälzer, Gottfried, Bengel und Zinzendorf. Zur Biographie und Theologie Johann Albrecht Bengels. Witten, 1968. Johann Albrecht Bengel. Leben und Werk. Stuttgart, 1970. Meyer, Dietrich, ‘Cognitio Dei experimentalis oder “Erfahrungstheologie” bei Gottfried Arnold, Gerhard Tersteegen und Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf’, in Dietrich Meyer and Udo Sträter (eds.), Zur Rezeption mystischer Traditionen im Protestantismus des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts. Cologne, 2002. Moravian Church House, London. MS Gemeinhaus Diary 1747–51. Okeley, Francis, Memoirs of the Life, Death, Burial and Wonderful Writings of Jacob Behmen. Northampton, 1780. A Faithful Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with Hiel. . . Northampton, 1781. Philipp, F.-H., ‘Zinzendorf und die Christusmystik des fruhen ¨ 18. Jahrhunderts’, in FS Ernst Benz, Glaube, Geist, Geschichte, ed. G. Muller ¨ and W. Zeller. Leiden, 1967. Plitt, Hermann, Zinzendorfs Theologie. 3 vols., Gotha, 1869–74. Schneider, Hans, ‘Die “zurnenden ¨ Mutterkinder”. Der Konflikt zwischen Halle und Herrnhut’, PuN 19 (2003), 37–66. Schrautenbach, Ludwig Carl Freiherr von, Der Graf von Zinzendorf und die Brüdergemeine seiner Zeit. (1851); repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2 IX. Spangenberg, August Gottlieb, Declaration u¨ ber die Zeither gegen uns ausgegangen Beschuldigungen. Leipzig and Gorlitz, ¨ 1751; repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband V. Apologetische Schluss-Schrift. Leipzig, 1752; repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband III. Uttendorfer, ¨ Otto, Zinzendorf und die Mystik. East Berlin, 1950.

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CHAPTER 7 A modern edition of Wesley’s works is in progress at Nashville, Tenn., as the Bicentennial Edition, and will eventually supersede all older editions in about 35 vols. Some substantial contributions are already published, including the Sermons, ed. Albert Outler, vols. I–IV in the series, and the Journal and Diaries, ed. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater, vols. XVIII–XXIII. Meanwhile the edition of the Works in 14 vols., London, 1872 is still useful. Ayres, P. (tr.), The Count of Gablis, or the extravagant mysteries of the Cablists. London, 1680. Baker, Eric W., A Herald of the Evangelical Revival. London, 1948. Benham, Daniel, Memoirs of John Hutton. London, 1856. Carey, William, An enquiry into the obligation of Christians to use means for the conversion of the heathen. Leeds, 1793. Dreyer, Frederick, ‘Faith and Experience in the Thought of John Wesley’, American Historical Review 88 (1983), 12–30. English, John C., ‘John Wesley and his “Jewish Parishioners”. Jewish–Christian Relationships in Savannah, Georgia, 1736–7’, Methodist History 36 (1998), 220–7. Etheridge, John Wesley, Life of the Rev Adam Clarke. 2nd edn, London, 1858. Green, J. Brazier, John Wesley and William Law. London, 1845. Heitzenrater, Richard P., ‘Great Expectations: Aldersgate and the evidences of genuine Christianity’, in Randy L. Maddox (ed.), Aldersgate Reconsidered. Nashville, 1990. Herrnhut MSS. R13 A7 fo.25: James Hutton to Zinzendorf, 14 March 1739. Hirst, Désirée, Hidden Riches. Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake. London, 1964. Jung, Martin H., ‘1836 – Wiederkunft Christi oder Millennium? Zur Eschatologie J. A. Bengels und seiner Schuler’, ¨ in his Nachfolger, Visionärinnen, Kirchenkritiker. Leipzig, 2003. Larson, Timothy (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals. Leicester, 2003. Methodist Magazine 37 (1814). Newport, Kenneth G. C., Apocalypse and Millennium. Cambridge, 2000. O’Malley, J. Steven, ‘On the Journey Home’. The History of Mission of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, 1946–68. New York, 2003. Rack, Henry D., Reasonable Enthusiast. John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism. 3rd edn, Peterborough, 2002.

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Streiff, Patrick, Reluctant Saint? A Theological Biography of Fletcher of Madeley. Peterborough, 2001. Telford, John (ed.), Letters of John Wesley. 8 vols., London, 1931. Tuttle, Robert, Mysticism in the Wesleyan Tradition. Grand Rapids, 1989. Tyerman, Luke, The Life and Times of the Rev. Samuel Wesley. London, 1866. Life and Times of John Wesley. 3 vols., 6th edn, London, 1890. Life of Revd. George Whitefield. 2 vols., London, 1890. Venn, John, Life and a Selection from the Letters of the late Henry Venn, ed. H. Venn, London, 1834. Wakefield, Gordon S., Methodist Devotion. London, 1966. Walton, Christopher, Notes and Materials for an Adequate Biography of . . . William Law. London, 1854. Ward, W. Reginald, Religion and Society in England 1790–1850. London, 1972. ‘Missions in Their Global Context in the Eighteenth Century’, in Mark Hutchinson and Ogbu Kalu (eds.), A Global Faith. Sydney, 1998. ‘“Putting off the Apocalypse”. Evangelical Identity and the Origins of Missions’, Humanitas 5 (2003), 25–42. Wesley, John, A Plain Account of the People called Methodists in a letter to the Rev. Mr Perronet (1748), in Works. (1878 edn), VIII; repr. also in Telford, Letters, II, 292–311. A Concise History of England. 4 vols., London, 1776. [abr. from Mosheim], A Concise Ecclesiastical History, from the Birth of Christ to the beginning of the Present Century. London, 1781. A Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Gloucester [Warburton], ed. G. R. Cragg, in Bicentennial Edition, II. Bicentennial Edition: Correspondence, ed. Frank Baker, XXV–XXVI. Sermons on Several Occasions by the Rev. John Wesley. 3 vols., London, 1872. Explanatory Notes on the New Testament, ed. London, 1958. Wesley, John and Charles, Hymns and Sacred Poems. London, 1839. The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, ed. George Osborn. 13 vols., London, 1868–72. Whitehead, John, Life of Rev. John Wesley. 2 vols., London, 1796.

CHAPTER 8 The Works of Jonathan Edwards are being made available in their entirety for the very first time in the great Yale edn, begun a quarter of a century ago and now nearing completion in more than twenty vols. Nevertheless the old edition by Dwight and Hickman listed below is still useful not only for being in much more general circulation, but also for the original biographical materials it contains. [Chauncy, Charles], The Wonderful Narrative, or a faithful Account of the French Prophets, their Agitations, Extasies and Inspirations . . . Boston, Mass., 1742. Cherry, Conrad, Nature and the Religious Imagination from Edwards to Bushell. Philadelphia, 1980. Delattre, Roland André, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards. New Haven, 1968.

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Edwards, Jonathan, Works, ed. S. E. Dwight and E. Hickman. 2 vols., London, 1834; repr. Edinburgh, 1974. Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God . . . in Northampton. London, 1737. Apocalyptic Writings, ed. Stanley J. Stein. Yale edn, V. The Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God (1741), in, The Great Awakening, ed. C. Goen. Yale edn of Works, IV. A History of the Work of Redemption, ed. J. F. Wilson. Yale edn, IX. Typological Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson et al. Yale edn, XI. Notes on Scripture, ed. Stanley J. Stein. Yale edn, XV. Letters and Personal Writings, ed. G. S. Calaghorn. Yale edn, XVI. The Life of David Brainerd, ed. N. Pettit. Yale edn, VII. Erdt, Terrence, Jonathan Edwards. Art and the Sense of the Heart. Amherst, 1980. Fiering, Norman, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard. A Discipline in Transition. Chapel Hill, 1981. Hatch, Nathan O. and Stout, Harry S. (eds.), Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience. New York, 1988. Marsden, George M., Jonathan Edwards. A Life. New Haven, 2003. Murray, Iain H., Jonathan Edwards. A New Biography. Edinburgh, 1987. Simonson, H., Jonathan Edwards. Theologian of the Heart. Grand Rapids, 1974. Stein, Stanley J., Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation. Bloomington, 1996. Townsend, Harvey G. (ed.), The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards. Westport, 1955. Zakai, Avihu, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History. Princeton, 2003. CHAPTER 9 Auberlen, Carl August, Die Theosophie Friedrich Christoph Oetingers nach ihren Grundzügen. Tubingen, ¨ 1847. Banville, John, Doctor Copernicus. London, 1976. ¨ Benz, Ernst, ‘Swedenborg und Lavater. Uber die religiosen ¨ Grundlagen der Physiognomik’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 57, 3s. 8 (1938), 153–216. Swedenborg in Deutschland. Frankfurt, 1947. ‘Die Naturtheologie Friedrich Christoph Oetingers’, in Antoine Faivre and R. C. Zimmermann (eds.), Epochen der Naturmystik. Berlin, 1979. Emanuel Swedenborg. Visionary Savant in the Age of Reason, tr. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. West Chester, Pa., 2002. Brecht, Martin, ‘Der Wurttemberger ¨ Pietismus’, in M. Brecht and K. Deppermann (eds.), Geschichte des Pietismus, II. Darnton, Robert, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass., 1968. Deghaye, Pierre, ‘La Mystique Protestante, Oetinger’, in Yvon Belevel and Dominique Bourel (eds.), Le Siècle des Lumières et la Bible. Paris, 1986, 481– 510. Ennemoser, Joseph, History of Magic, tr. W. Howitt. London, 1854. ´ erisme chrétien et Fabry, Jacques, Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817). Esot´ prophétisme apocalyptique. Bern, 2003.

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Faivre, Antoine, Access to Western Esoterism. New York, 1994. Freedman, Jeffrey, A Poisoned Chalice. Princeton, 2002. Geiger, Max, Aufklärung und Erweckung. Zurich, 1963. Gessner, Georg, Johan Kaspar Lavaters Lebensbeschreibung. 3 vols., Winterthur, 1802–3. Grossmann, Sigrid, Friedrich Christoph Oetingers Gottesvorstellung. Gottingen, ¨ 1979. Groth, Friedhelm, Die ‘Wiederbringung aller Dinge’ im württembergischen Pietismus. Gottingen, ¨ 1984. Hahn, Otto W., Jung-Stilling zwischen Pietismus und Aufklärung. Frankfurt, 1988. Heinrichs, Michael, Emanuel Swedenborg in Deutschland. Eine kritische Darstellung der Rezeption des schwedischen Visionärs im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt, 1979. Hirsch, Emanuel, Geschichte der neuern evangelischen Theologie. 5 vols., 5th edn, Gutersloh, ¨ 1975. Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich, Theory of Pneumatology, in reply to the question what ought to be believed or disbelieved concerning Presentiments, Visions and Apparitions, according to Nature, Reason and Scripture (1808); Eng. tr. London, 1834. Werke. 12 vols. Stuttgart, 1841–60. Theobald, or the Fanatic, tr. S. Schaeffer. Philadelphia, 1846. Lebensgeschichte, ed. G. A. Benrath. Darmstadt, 1984. Kant, Immanuel, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, ed. T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson. New York, 1960. Keller, Jules, Le Théosophe alsacien Frédéric-Rodolphe Saltzmann et les milieux spirituels de son temps. Bern, 1985. Lavater, Johann Caspar, A Secret Journal of a Self-Observer, tr. P. Will. 2 vols., London, 1795. Essays in Physiognomy, tr. T. Holcroft. 19th edn, London [1855]. Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. J. K. Orelli. 3rd edn, 2 vols., Zurich, 1859–60. Briefwechsel zwischen Lavater und Hasenkamp, ed. K. C. E. Ehmann. Basel, 1870. Lehmann, Hartmut, Pietismus und weltliche Ordnung in Württemberg. Stuttgart, 1969. Liebing, Heinz, Zwischen Orthodoxie und Aufklärung. Tubingen, ¨ 1961. Liegenbuhl-Weber, Gisela, ‘J. K. Lavaters physicotheologische Sicht des animalische Magnetismus’, in Helmut Holzey and Urs Bosching (eds.), Gesundheit und Krankheit im 18. Jahrhundert. Amsterdam, 1995. Locke, John, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. A. S. PringlePattison. Oxford, 1924; repr. Hassocks, 1978. Moon, R. O., Jung-Stilling: His Biography. 2nd edn, London, 1898. Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph, Selbstbiographie, ed. J. Hamberger. Stuttgart, 1845. Sämtliche Schriften, ed. K. C. E. Ehmann. 7 vols., Stuttgart, 1852–64. Pestalozzi, Karl and Weigelt, Horst (eds.), Das Antlitz Gottes im Antlitz des Menschen. Zugänge zu Johann Kaspar Lavater. Gottingen, ¨ 1994. Piepmayer, Rainer, ‘Friedrich Christoph Oetinger’, in Martin Greschat (ed.), Gestalten der Kirchengeschichte, VII. Stuttgart, 1982.

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Rudiger, ¨ Andreas, Göttliche Physik, ein rechter Weg zwischen dem Aberglauben und dem Atheismus, der zu der natürlichen und sittlichen Seligkeit des Menschen führt. Halle, 1716. Sauer, Klaus Martin, Die Predigttätigkeit Johann Kaspar Lavaters (1741–1801). Zurich, 1988. Schwinge, Gerhard, Jung-Stilling als Erbauungsschriftsteller der Erweckung. Gottingen, ¨ 1994. ‘Jung-Stillings Lekture ¨ . . .’, PuN 28 (2002), 237–60. Spindler, Georg (ed.), Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Glaube und Erkennen. Metzingen, 2002. Staehelin, Ernst, Die Christentumsgesellschaft in der Zeit der Aufklärung und der beginnenden Erweckung. Basel, 1970. Die Christentumsgesellschaft in der Zeit von der Erweckung bis zur Gegenwart. Basel, 1974. ‘Aus der Geschichte der Frankfurter Christentumsgesellschaft’, in FS Martin Schmidt, Der Pietismus in Gestalten und Wirkungen, ed. H. Bornkamm et al. Bielefeld, 1975. Swedenborg, Emanuel, The Spiritual Diary of Emanuel Swedenborg, tr. G. Bush and J. H. Smithson. London, 1883. The Last Judgement, ed. and tr. G. F. Dole. West Chester, Pa., 1996. Trautwein, Joachim, Die Theosophie Michael Hahns und ihre Quelle. Stuttgart, 1969. Vinke, Rainer, ‘Jung-Stilling Forschung seit 1963’, Theologische Rundschau 48 (1983), 156–86. ‘Jung-Stilling Forschung von 1983 bis 1990’, PuN 17 (1991), 178–228. Walker, Mack, Johann Jakob Moser and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Chapel Hill, 1981. Ward, W. Reginald, ‘Swedenborgianism: Heresy, Schism or Religious Protest?’, Studies in Church History 9 (1972), 303–9. Wehr, Gerhard, Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Theosoph, Alchymist, Kabbalist. Freiburg im Breisgau, 1978. Weigelt, Horst, ‘Friedrich der Grosse im Urteil von Johann Kaspar Lavater’, Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 35 (1983), 335–51. Lavater und die Stille im Lande. Gottingen, ¨ 1988. J. K. Lavater. Leben, Werk und Wirkung. Gottingen, ¨ 1991. Wernle, Paul, Der schweizerische Protestantismus im 18. Jahrhundert, III. Tubingen, ¨ 1925. Weyer-Menkhoff, Martin, Christus das Heil der Natur – Entstehung und Systematik der Theologie Friedrich Christoph Oetingers. Gottingen, ¨ 1990. Zinn, Elisabeth, Die Theologie des Friedrich Christoph Oetinger. Gutersloh, ¨ 1932.

CONCLUSION Balleine, G. R., A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England. Repr. London, 1957. Bebbington, David W., Evangelicalism in Modern Britain. 4th edn, London, 2002.

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[Brooks, Joshua], A Dictionary of Writers on the Prophecies. London, 1835. Brown, A. W., Recollections of the Conversation Parties of the Rev. Charles Simeon. London, 1840. Carus, William, Memoirs of the Life of Rev. Charles Simeon. London, 1847. Diehl, Carl, Americans and German Scholarship 1770–1870. New Haven, 1978. Garrett, Clarke, Respectable Folly. Millenarians and the French Revolution. Baltimore, 1975. ‘Swedenborg and the Mystical Enlightenment in Eighteenth-century England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984), 67–81. Harrison, John Fletcher Clews, The Second Coming. Popular Millenarianism 1780– 1850. London, 1979. Hopkins, Janet K., A Woman to Deliver Her People. Austin, 1982. Lehmann, Hartmut, Protestantische Weltsichten. Gottingen, ¨ 1998. Moule, A. C., Charles Simeon. London, 1892; repr. 1959. Oliver, William Hosking, Prophets and Millennialists. Auckland, 1978. Pfleiderer, Otto, The Development of Theology in Germany Since Kant and Its Progress in Britain Since 1828. London, 1890. Pratt, John H., The Thought of Evangelical Leaders. London, 1856; repr. Edinburgh, 1978. Rogerson, John, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany. London, 1984. Schweitzer, Albert, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Complete Eng. edn, London, 2000. Simeon, Charles, Horae Homileticae. 21 vols., London, 1832–3. Strauss, David Friedrich, Life of Jesus. 1st German edn 1835–6; Eng. tr. from 4th German edn, London, 1866. Thompson, Edward Palmer, Witness Against the Beast. William Blake and the Moral Law. Cambridge, 1993. Ward, W. Reginald, Religion and Society in England 1790–1850. London, 1972. ‘The Baptists and the Transformation of the Church, 1780–1830’, Baptist Quarterly 25 (1973), 167–84; repr. in his Faith and Faction, London, 1993. ‘Faith and Fallacy: English and German Perspectives in the Nineteenth Century’, in Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman (eds.), Victorian Faith in Crisis, London, 1990; repr. in his Faith and Faction, London, 1993.

Index

Aberdeen 120 Albury group 187 alchemy 12, 17, 21, 24, 97, 132, 157, 159 America 45, 74, 90, 91, 92, 96, 112, 116, 127, 128, 134, 148, 149, 154, 185, 191, 192, 193 Ames, William 141 Amsterdam 53, 81 Anabaptists (including Baptists) 50, 57, 72, 139, 188, 193 Andreae, Johann Valentin 8, 17, 37 Anne, Queen, of England 10, 92, 119 Annoni, Hieronymus 74 Annweiler 50 Anton, Paul 30, 109 Antonia, Princess, of Wurttemberg ¨ 20, 37, 38 apocalyptic 7, 15, 16, 17, 26, 49, 51, 78, 88, 89, 109, 116, 135, 138, 145, 146, 158, 183, 186 Aquinas, St Thomas 44, 61 Aratus 19 Aristotelian logic 3, 4, 13, 19, 23, 24, 30, 36, 39, 41, 50, 63, 71, 75, 103, 104, 118, 141, 156, 166, 177, 189 Arnauld, Antoine 66 Arndt, Johann 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 24, 31, 36, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 86, 92, 106, 130, 161, 165 Arnold, Gottfried 14, 23, 24, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 58, 60, 63, 64, 88, 101, 103, 106, 109 associate presbytery 128 astrology 10 Atterbury, Bp Francis 119 Augsburg, Confession of 25, 114, 115 Augustine, St 61, 86 Baader, B. F. X. von 52 Balleine, G. R. 187 Barth, Karl 143 Basel 11, 50, 72, 73, 74, 176

214

Basnage, Jacques 102 Bavaria 37 Baxter, Richard 73, 89, 140 Bayle, Pierre 53, 75, 82, 115 Bayley, Lewis 24, 73 Bebbington, David 187 Becker, Bernhard 101, 105 Bellamy, Joseph 192 Benedictines 82 Bengel, Johann Albrecht 30, 100, 104, 114, 117, 118, 135, 136, 137, 155, 157, 158, 159, 167, 168, 169, 171, 182, 184, 191 Benson, Joseph 138 Benz, Ernst 6, 161 Berleburg 158 Berlin 30, 73 Bern 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 173 Berthelsdorf 105, 111 Beverley, Thomas 89 Beyer, Gabriel 169 Bilfinger, Georg Bernhard 156 Bleek, Friedrich 191 Boehm, Anton Wilhelm 10, 92 Bohemia 40 Bohler, ¨ Peter 124, 125, 127, 128 Bohme, ¨ Jakob (including Behmenism) 14, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 35, 36, 45, 48, 49, 50, 57, 83, 86, 107, 108, 121, 123, 125, 130, 133, 157, 158, 160, 163, 164, 168, 172, 177, 178, 184, 186 Bolton, Robert 86 Bonaventura, St J. F. 44 Bossuet, Bp Jacques-Bénigne 63, 64 Bostock, Bridget 132 Boston, Mass. 86, 148 Bourignon, Antoinette 35, 53, 54, 56, 57, 63, 74, 106, 120, 123, 130 Bradford 138 Brainerd, David 144, 154 Brandenburg, Elector of 25 Brecht, Martin 40

Index Breman 78, 79, 80, 81 Brightman, Thomas 88 Brine, John 188 Bristol 127 Bromley, Thomas 48 Brooks, Joshua 187 Brothers, Richard 185, 187 Brunnquell, Ludwig 34 Bruno, Giordano 18 Brunswick, Duchess of 169 Buddeus, Johann Franz 191 Bunting, Jabez 43, 191 Bunyan, John 9, 87, 89, 91, 178 Burnet, Bp Gilbert 62 Byrom, John 121, 123, 130 Cabbala 4, 10, 11, 19, 20, 21, 22, 36, 37, 38, 39, 83, 97, 102, 142, 157, 158, 160, 168 Cagliostro 172 Calvin, John 71, 72, 74 Calvinism 2, 3, 140 Cambridge, Mass. 86 Cambridge, UK 98 Cambridge Platonists 97, 98 Carey, William 137 Carl, Johann Samuel 176 Carmelites 50, 54, 64, 69, 82 Carpzov, Johann Benedict 30, 41 Casaubon, Isaac 19 Catherine of Genoa, St 43 Cave, William 47 Chandieu, Antoine 71 Charles I, king of England 88 Charles II, king of England 85 Charles X, king of Sweden 134 Charles XI, king of Sweden 12 Charles XII, king of Sweden 162 Chauncy, Charles 148, 149 Cheyne, George 120 Clairvaux, Bernard of 9, 86, 103, 109, 120 Clarke, Adam 132 Class meetings (including collegia pietatis) 4, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 37, 43, 52, 57, 59, 78, 132 Cleves 79, 81 Coccejus, Johannes (including Coccejans) 4, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 84 Coing, Elise 179 Colberg, E. D. 13, 14, 17 Colenso, Bp John William 191 Cologne 57 Comenius, Johann Amos 8, 49 Concert of Prayer 141, 142 Confessionalisation 2, 51, 70, 71, 82 Connecticut 93, 147

215 Conway, Anne, Viscountess 97 Copernicus 165 Cromwell, Oliver 89, 100, 119 Cromwell, Richard 89 Cudworth, Ralph 97 Dannhauer, Johann Konrad 8, 26 Daubuz, Charles 147 Davidson, Samuel 191 Deghaye, Pierre 102 Descartes, René 97 Detmold 79 Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft 176, 179, 190 Dick, Samuel 73 Dilfeld, Georg Conrad 29 Dilthey, Philipp Jakob 49 Dionysius the Areopagite 15, 68 Dippel, Conrad 158 Dort, Synod of 70, 76, 84 Drabik, Nikolaus 49 Dresden 30 Duisberg 78, 79, 80 Ebersdorf 102, 106, 114 Eckart, Meister 9, 16 Eclectic Society 187 Edward, Duke of Kent 175 Edwards, Jonathan 1, 4, 94, 95, 96, 128, 131, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 163, 165, 172, 185, 188, 191, 192, 193 Edwards, Jonathan, Jnr 149, 192 Edwards, Sarah 142 Edwards, Timothy 147 Einsiedeln 11 Elizabeth, Abbess of Herford 80 Emden 81 Encyclopédie 17 England 79, 88, 135, 148, 162, 163, 169, 170, 180 Church of 70, 85, 97, 105, 119, 123, 128, 139, 147, 167, 184, 187, 190 Ephraem Syrus 123 Ernst the Pious, Duke, of Saxe-Gotha 26, 40 Erskine, Ebenezer 128 Erskine, John 149 eschatology (including Last Things and ‘hope of better times’) 4, 8, 16, 17, 26, 32, 37, 39, 51, 54, 60, 71, 89, 90, 97, 98, 102, 114, 115, 117, 133, 134, 136, 137, 141, 146, 147, 152, 159, 166, 168, 187

216

Index

Evangelical Alliance 193 evangelicals, Reformed 3 exegesis, principles of 145, 168 Fein, Georg Friedrich 182 Fende, Christian 29, 30 Fénelon, Fran¸cois de la Mothe 56, 61, 63, 64, 66, 106, 121, 122 Ficino, Marsilio 18 Fiddes, Richard 122 Fletcher, John W., of Madeley 130 Fleury, Claude 123 Foligno, Angela da 9 Formula Consensus (1675) 72, 73 Formula of Concord 8 Fox, George 87 Foxe, John 87 France 70, 79, 80, 82, 93, 133, 153, 163, 169 Franck, Sebastian 16 Francke, Anna Magdalena 45, 46 Francke, August Hermann 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 30, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 57, 73, 74, 87, 92, 95, 100, 101, 103, 112, 128, 156 Francke, Gotthilf August 40, 100 Francke, Johannes 40 Franeker 79, 80 Frankfurt-a.-M. 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 79, 116, 157 Frederick II, king of Prussia 134, 175 Frederick III, Elector Palatine 70 French Prophets 51 Frelinghuysen, Theodorus Jacobus 81, 96 Freylinghausen, Johann Anastasius 46 Fuller, Andrew 188, 189 Garden, George 120 Garden, James 120 Gassendi, Petrus 163 Gassner, Joseph 173 Geneva 28, 72, 73, 80, 173 George, Prince, of Denmark 10, 92 George I, king of England 119 Georgia (Am.) 119, 123, 124 Gerhard, Johann 11 Germany 70, 74, 79, 157, 168, 178, 190 Gibson, Edmund 123 Gichtel, Johann Georg 45, 48 Giessen 47, 63 Gill, John 98, 188 Glaucha 8, 46, 57 glorification 87 Goethe, J. W. 111, 172, 177, 180 Gorlitz ¨ 21

Grossgebauer, Theophil 161 Grotius, Hugo 108 Grunberg, ¨ Paul 25, 36 Gulden, ¨ Samuel 73, 74 Guyon, Mme Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Mothe 53, 56, 57, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 106, 108, 110, 120, 122, 130 Guyse, John 96, 140, 148 Hahn, Philipp Mathäus 160 Hall, Joseph 73 Halle 7, 8, 12, 36, 40, 45, 52, 83, 92, 93, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 109, 112, 116, 123, 126, 153, 157, 162 Haller, Albrecht von 173 Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. 86 Hamburg 30, 73 Harms, Claus 192 Hartley, Thomas 137, 169 Hase, Cornelius de 73 Hecht, Cappel 157 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 22 Heidelberg 178 Heidelberg Confession and Catechism 70, 81, 83 Heitzenrater, Richard P. 126 Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius van 33, 97, 164 Henry XLIII, Count, Reuss von Schleiz-Kostritz ¨ 173 Henry, Matthew 89 Henry, Philip 89 Heppe, Heinrich 76 Herder, Johann Gottfried 177 Herford 80 Hermeticism (including Hermes Trismegistus) 10, 11, 13, 18, 19, 20, 97 Herrnhaag 105, 110, 126 Herrnhut 99, 101, 104, 105, 106, 108, 123, 127 Hess, Felix 170 Hesse, Duke of 168 Hesse-Darmstadt 29 hexagon, evangelical 4, 193 Heylin, John 123 Hirsch, Emanuel 157, 160 Hjärne, family 162 Hjärne, Urban 12 Hobbes, Thomas 23, 26, 63 Hoburg, Christian 13, 24 Hochenau, Hochmann von 57 Hoffmann, Wilhelm 57 Hohenzollern, house of 3, 25, 40, 57, 82 Hopkins, Samuel 192

Index Horb, Johann Heinrich 29, 30, 73 Horche, Heinrich 48, 49 Hungary 70, 81 Hutton, James 127 Independents 188 Innocent XII, Pope 63 Inspired, the 83, 112, 126 Ireland 85 Italy 41, 62 James II, king of England 93, 119 Jansenists 50, 61, 66, 67, 80, 94, 106, 107, 120, 123 Jews 25, 27, 32, 36, 37, 50, 84, 90, 93, 98, 102, 116, 122, 134, 136, 137, 152, 153, 157, 165, 186 John of Avila 130 John of the Cross, St 63 Josephi, Jeremias 109 Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich 17, 34, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185 conversion of 176, 177 Jurieu, Pierre 51, 90 justification by faith 33, 35, 87, 107, 126, 131, 144, 150 Kaiserslautern 178 Kant, Immanuel 167, 179 Karl Friedrich, Duke of Baden 179 Kassel 79 Kelpius, Johannes 23 Kempis, Thomas a` 74, 86, 121, 122, 123, 125 Keynes, J. M. 97 Kirkham, Sally 121 Klettenberg, Suzanne von 111 Kliefoth, Theodor 3 Konig, ¨ Samuel 74 Kortholt, Christian 161 Krefeld 57 Krudener, ¨ Juliane von 183 Labadie, Jean de (including Labadists) 28, 29, 52, 57, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81 Lampe, Friedrich Adolf 79, 80, 81 ‘latter-day glory’ 135, 148 Laud, Abp William 88 Lausanne 72 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 180, 181 Law, William 52, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129, 130 Leade, Jane 48, 74, 121, 157, 181 Lee, Francis 121

217 Lehmann, Hartmut 192 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 22, 108, 157, 158, 177 Leiden 79 Leighton, Robert 120 Leipzig 30, 73 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 104, 171 Leube, Hans 9 Lieberkuhn, ¨ Samuel 116 Lille 53 Livonia 92 Locke, John 132, 141, 144, 164, 191 Lodenstein, Jodocus van 79 London Missionary Society 176, 189, 190 Lopez, Gregory 131 Louis XIV, king of France 28, 35, 49, 51, 62, 66, 68, 69, 82, 119, 131, 182 Lowman, Moses 147 Loyola, Ignatius 130 Ludwig IX, Landgrave of Hessen-Darmstadt 169 Lusatia, Upper 21 Luther, Martin 2, 4, 12, 23, 25, 26, 29, 31, 35, 43, 44, 50, 107, 109, 125, 145, 152 Lutkemann, ¨ Joachim 161 Lutz, Christoph 73 Lutz, Samuel 74 magnetism (including animal magnetism) 113, 172, 173, 174, 175, 180 Maintenon, Mme de 64, 69 Makarius the Egyptian 52, 123, 130 Malebranche, Nicholas 157 Marburg 178 Mark, Synod of 81 Marsay, Hector de 123, 130, 172 Marsden, G. M. 142 Massachusetts 91, 93 Mather, Cotton 6, 7, 91, 92, 93, 95 Mather family 95, 96 Mather, Increase 91, 92 Mather, Nathaniel 92 Mather, Samuel, I 92 Mather, Samuel, II 6, 92 McGinn, Bernard 15 Mede, Joseph 32, 88, 97, 146 Medici, Cosimo de’ 17 Merlau, Eleonore von (later Petersen) 29, 30 Mesmer, Franz Anton 172, 173 Methodists 107, 111, 134, 137, 167, 184, 187, 189, 193 conversion 126, 129 doctrines 133

218

Index

Meyer, Dietrich 109 Middelburg 28, 80 millennium 12, 71, 75, 89, 93, 98, 100, 114, 115, 133, 137, 139, 147, 149, 182, 185, 192 Milton, John 88 Mirandola, Pico della 20, 38 Moers 57 Molinos, Miguel de 41, 42, 43, 45, 61, 62, 63, 68, 124 Monk, General George 89 Moravians (including Renewed Unity of the Brethren) 74, 95, 99, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 111, 112, 113, 117, 118, 124, 125, 126, 129, 130, 149, 171, 179 conversion 111 More, Henry 97, 163, 164 Moser, Johann Jakob 160 Mosheim, Johann Lorenz von 135 Mulheim ¨ 79 mystical theology, the 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 35, 43, 44, 47, 49, 55, 58, 62, 68, 69, 101, 103, 108, 109, 129 mysticism, medieval 4, 8, 9, 41, 48, 55, 57, 58, 105, 109, 120, 142 mysticism, radical 13, 14, 15, 17, 23, 34, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 74, 83, 88 Nantes, Edict of 72, 147 Neander, Joachim 79 Neckargroningen ¨ 8 Neoplatonism 11, 15, 142 Netherlands 75, 123, 162 Neuchâtel 72, 73 New England 84, 85, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 140, 147, 153, 154, 193 Newton, Sir Isaac 11, 67, 89, 97, 98, 108, 147, 160, 163 Nicolas, Armelle 55 Nitschmann, Anna 106 Noailles, Cardinal 66, 106 Northampton, Mass. 96, 140, 141, 148 Obereit, Dr Jacob Hermann 172 Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph 17, 20, 38, 52, 102, 108, 114, 118, 132, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 165, 168, 169, 171, 184 Offenbach 48 Oglethorpe, James Edward 119 Orange family 57, 76, 78 Origen 15 Orthodoxy, Eastern 3

Orthodoxy, Lutheran 2, 3, 11, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 40, 43, 91, 101, 103, 109, 115, 118, 142, 161 Ostervald, Jean-Frédéric 72, 73 Paracelsus [Theophrastus von Hohenheim] (including Paracelsianism) 4, 10, 11, 12, 17, 20, 21, 22, 24, 36, 39, 44, 50, 97, 111, 118, 132, 137, 158, 175, 177, 184 Pâris, Fran¸cois de 67 Pascal, Blaise 120, 121, 123, 130 Paul I, Tsar of Russia 175 Penn, William 29, 52 Pennsylvania 23, 29, 53, 157 Perkins, William 73 Peschke, Erhard 46 Petersen, Eleonore, see Merlau, Eleonore von Petersen, Johann Wilhelm 30, 36, 74, 106, 157 Pfleiderer, Otto 191 Philadelphians 54, 114, 115, 118, 121, 157 physico-theologians 59 physiognomy 113, 174, 176 Pia Desideria 31, 32, 34, 38, 72 Pictet, Bénédict 72 Pietism, origins of 2, 7, 11, 17 and conversion 4, 42, 43, 46, 78, 79, 87, 100, 103, 131, 149 hostility to Orthodoxy 2, 7, 25, 189 piety, crisis of 7, 11, 13 Plitt, Hermann 101, 105 Poiret, Pierre 35, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 69, 104, 106, 120, 121, 123, 130, 172 Poland 37, 70 Pordage, John 48 predestination 87, 181 Presbyterians 85, 87, 88, 120, 125, 139, 188 Pretorius, Franz Daniel 30 priesthood of all believers, spiritual 31, 39, 44, 47 Primitive Methodists 87 Prussia 26, 48, 57, 72 Puritanism 3, 4, 9, 24, 41, 73, 79, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 94, 121, 130, 140, 149, 171 Puritan conversion 87, 95, 96, 150, 175 Puritan devotional manuals 86 Puységur, Marquis de 172, 173 Pythagoras 11

Index Quakers 23, 29, 34, 50, 54, 57, 87, 121 Quedlinburg 45, 47, 48, 63 Quesnel, Pasquier 66, 123 Quick, John 76 Quietists 35, 41, 50, 54, 55, 56, 61, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 107, 120, 121, 122, 124, 131, 144, 172 Rack, Henry D. 126 Ramsay, Chevalier 56, 68 Rational Orthodoxy 72, 84 Reformed Orthodoxy 3, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, 84, 85, 91, 121, 134, 140, 146, 154, 156, 174 Reformed Pietism 70, 75, 78, 79, 152 Reitz, Johann Heinrich 49, 58, 79 Remonstrants 76 Renty, M. de 55, 69, 120, 121, 131 Reuchlin, Johannes 20 revivalism 7, 8, 57, 59, 73, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 92, 128, 152, 153, 192 Richter, Abraham E. 106 Ritschl, Albrecht 82, 105, 183 Rock, Johann Friedrich 112 Rosenroth, Knorr von 37 Rosicrucianism 17, 21 Rothe, Richard 111 Rousseau, J. J. 173 Rudiger, ¨ Andreas 162, 163, 164 Russell, R. 123 Ruysbroeck, Jan van 44 Sacheverell, Henry 119 Saint-Martin, Louis Claude de 52 Sales, St Francis de 120 Salzburgers 123, 154 Sandbach 132 Sandhagen, Kaspar Hermann 42 Saxony 25 Schering, Ernst 54 Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E. 109 Schmidlin, Johannes Laurentius 38 Scholem, Gershom 20 Schrautenbach, Baron von 99 Schumacher, Samuel 73 Schurman, Anna van 29 Schutz, ¨ Johann Jakob 24, 28, 29, 30, 37, 51, 52, 73 Schweitzer, Albert 185 Scotland 84 Church of 85, 95, 120, 141, 149 Scougal, Henry 120, 123 Scriver, Christian 161

219 Seeberg, Erich 14 Seuse, mystic 16 Sewall, Samuel 90 Shepard, Thomas 90 Siberia 40 Siegerland 176 Silesia 40, 45 Simeon, Charles 186, 187, 188, 189 Skinner, Quentin 145 Socinians 50 Sorau 109 Southcott, Joanna 185 Spangenberg, A. G. 99, 100, 101, 105, 110, 111, 123 Spener, Philipp Jakob 2, 4, 7, 8, 13, 14, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 49, 51, 60, 72, 73, 74, 78, 89, 102, 108, 114, 115, 116, 128, 133, 135, 136, 137, 148, 157, 166, 175, 181 Spinoza, B. de 97 spiritualists 50, 102, 106 Steinbart, Gottlob Samuel 170 Steinkopf, K. F. A. 190 Steinmetz, J. A. 96 Stoddard, Solomon 94, 95, 96 Strasbourg 8, 24, 26, 27, 29, 161, 176 Sulzbach 24 Sunday schools 189 Svedberg, Bp Jesper 161, 162, 184 Sweden, Queen of 169 Swedenborg, Emanuel (including Swedenborgianism) 54, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 175, 181, 183, 184, 186 conversion of 165 Swiss Pietism 73 Switzerland 70, 72, 75, 79, 84, 145 systematic theology 4, 103, 108, 111, 118, 132, 139, 140, 141, 156, 159, 161, 171, 181, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189 Tauler, Johann 9, 24, 35, 44, 74, 121, 122, 123, 124 Taylor, Jeremy 122, 123 Taylor, Thomas 138 Teellinck, Willem 75 Teinach 38 Tennent family 81 Tennent, Gilbert 96 Tersteegen, Gerhard 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 69, 82, 83, 104, 107, 108, 172 theosophy 16, 17, 19, 36, 39, 52, 74, 83, 107, 108, 130, 132, 163, 174

220

Index

´ Theresa of Avila, St 14, 63 Thomasius, Christian 3, 52 Thorowgood, pamphleteer 90 ‘time of sifting’ 110, 114 Tissot, Samuel Auguste 173 Tubingen ¨ 156 Turretini, Fran¸cois 72 Turretini, Jean-Alphonse 73 Tuttle, Robert 131 Tyerman, Luke 133, 138 typology 12, 145, 146, 151, 154, 156, 159, 165, 167, 188

visions, evangelical 6, 15, 34, 37, 50, 54, 55, 112, 144, 161, 165 mystical 83, 164, 165, 168, 184 vitalism 18 Vitringa, Campegius 80 Voetius, Gisbertius (including Voetians) 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 95

Wesley, John 1, 3, 14, 27, 33, 52, 54, 55, 59, 65, 67, 69, 95, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 148, 155, 156, 161, 167, 168, 181, 187, 189, 191 Wesley, Samuel, the elder 119, 120, 121, 122, 133, 138 Wesley, Samuel, the younger 119, 124 Wesley, Susanna 119, 121 Westminster, Confession of 3, 66, 85, 120 Wetterau 116 Whiston, William 98, 147 Whitby, Daniel 98, 147 Whitefield, George 96, 127, 140 Wieuwerd 73 Willard, Samuel 90 William III, king of England 89, 119 Windham, Conn. 96 Wittenberg 47, 100, 106, 113 Wolff, Christian 157, 159, 160, 162, 177, 181 Woodward, Josiah 91 Worthington, Br 104 Wurttemberg ¨ 8, 17, 20, 34, 37, 39, 101, 108, 114, 118, 128, 133, 135, 156, 157, 160, 182

Wake, Abp William 73, 93 Wakefield, Gordon S. 139 Waldegrave, Bp Samuel 187 Waldensians 152 Wallmann, Johannes 7, 8 Watts, Isaac 96, 140, 142, 148 Weigel, Valentin 9 Werenfels, Samuel 73 Wesel 81 Wesley, Charles 125, 134, 138

Zeller, Johann Jakob 79 Zeller, Winfried 17 Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von 8, 21, 66, 83, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 143, 156, 157, 166, 171, 179 Zurich 169 Zwi, Sabbatai 37

Undereyck, Theodor 48, 73, 78 Unigenitus, Bull 66, 67, 120 Unitarians 193 United Provinces 51, 70, 75, 76, 79, 84, 90, 116 Utrecht 76, 78, 79, 81, 93 Uttendorfer, ¨ Otto 106, 110

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