O Noble Heart - O Edel Herz: Fraktur and Spirituality in Pennsylvania German Folk Art

Detail, Historic Monument, Elizabeth Reiff, here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kisses 

 O Edel Herz (95) thinks fraktur would be more attractive with "Reformation themes of Christ as king" (O Noble Heart, 59) instead of all the blood. Don Yoder calls it a "cult of wounds and blood" (Picture-Bible, 57).  Frederick Weiser called it a "preoccupation with death and religious themes" (Fraktur, I, xxvii). Examples given by Stoudt (Pennsylvania German Folk Art, 22) include the hymn by Paul Gerhardt,

 So lass dein Blut mein Purpur seyn,

Ich will mich darein kleiden.

So let Thy Blood be my purple cloak;

I would clothe myself therein.

Unfortunately for Reformation themes,  Christ's Blood and Righteousness was a New Testament certainty, "through faith in his blood" (Romans 2.25), as the early English 16th century poet John Skelton wrote, “Where the sank royall is, Crystes blode so rede, (Poetical Works of Skelton and Donne, see note). "Christi Blut un Gerechtigkeit," is prominent in medieval and pietistic Europe and in the seventeenth century poet John Donne and after (See Louis Martz, The Meditative Tradition), fraktur viewed with European Catholic icons is one with English metaphysical poets. Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Traherne and later Smart plead the personal heart of Jesus identical to Pennsylvanians. Consider Henry Vaughan's, "Dedication," Some drops of Thy all-quick'ning blood / Fell on my heart," and the astonishing lines of Crashaw,

They have left thee naked, Lord, O that they had!

This garment too I wish they had deny'd.

Thee with thy self they have too richly clad;

Opening the purple wardrobe in thy side.

O never could there be garment too good

For thee to wear, but this of thine own Blood. 

  (see Note below)

When these people addressed their love letters to Jesus (Bird 87) it became the scandal of Pietism. In the "sweet personal Christ of the Pietists" and their "tender endearments" Jesus was "mein Freund,"  "unashamedly casual" (86). This same "freund," who was translated both as beloved and friend [see the fraktur of 1770 by Daniel Schuhmacher (Stoudt, Sunbonnets and Shoofly Pies, 151, copied from Song of Songs 2.10-12), famously invoked for these freund  folk the first line of Song (Canticles), to be "kissed with the kisses of his mouth." No wonder their hearts flowed. In sensing him more judge than friend Bird shows how far they flee from him who sometime did them seek. (from Thomas Wyatt, contemporary of Skelton). As the Cambridge Modern History (V) says: 

"They tried to rekindle the fire of holy emotion and by the spirit of self-sacrifice and austere self-immolation to restore the mystical union of the soul with God... adopting the language of the Canticles in describing the union of the soul with the Divine Bridegroom...they express a sensuous delight in dwelling on Christ's sufferings and the agonies of the Cross. This "...irreverent tone of familiarity with the Deity which so frequently characterizes pietistic poetry..." is a comment on the "spiritual exhaustion" of spiritual life in Germany at its lowest ebb.

In context the phrase "through the merits of my Lord" had been a rallying cry of George Whitefield when he made his trip through Philadelphia in 1739. Distinguishing between the outward and inward fruits of faith was also a point of contention for Quakers. Whitefield had exhorted a Quaker meeting "that they would talk of an outward as well as an inward Christ; for otherwise, we make our own holiness, and not the righteousness of Jesus Christ the cause of our being accepted by God." (Journals, 338). This self-righteousness had been the crux of the Newborn's rejection of church and scripture. Following the theme further, Muhlenberg said, "…first one must wrap one's self in the wounds, then Christian living must follow." As we have elsewhere noted from the Weiss' dialogues, (41) the outward, the living part was superfluous because "he has all the inner fruits, but he declares he can see no use for such outward things" (Sachse, 159).

Whitefield revisits this when he returned to Philadelphia later that year, Sunday, November 25:

". . .after I had done preaching a young gentleman, once a minister of the Church of England, but secretary to Mr. Penn, stood up with a loud voice, and warned the people against the doctrine I had been delivering, urging, 'that there was no such term as imputed righteousness in Holy Scripture; that such a doctrine put a stop to all goodness; that we were to be judged for our good works and obedience, and were commanded to do and live.' When he had ended, I denied his first proposition, and brought a text to prove that "imputed righteousness" was a scriptural expression…I discoursed in the afternoon, and shewed how the Lord Jesus was to be our whole righteousness . . .the church was thronged within and without; all were wonderfully attentive; and many, as I was informed, were convinced that the Lord Christ was our Righteousness" (Journals, 352,353).

No Kisses

Bird puns upon the Blood in the illustration for the cover of his book, using an analog from the bestiary  of Physiologus, a pelican feeding its young with its own blood. The precious blood there is from an anonymous drawing (91), but there is no transmission of the wounds and the blood from Count Zinzendorf (95) or Conrad Beissel's appreciating the "cult of wounds and blood" (Bird observes the Count visited Ephrata, but he did not see Beissel).  Don Yoder calls it the cult of wounds and blood. Zinzendorf's Moravians were a center of "blood and wounds theology," beginning about 1740, but  Beissel learning it from the Count is as unlikely as his becoming a spiritual virgin after hearing of Zinzendorf's tantrism. That's a joke. Anyway the two never met. Bird does not know about The Count's tantric ways, even if he did initiate Swedenborg into such proceedings. But he did not do so to Beissel, nor did Swedenborg to Blake. How affected is fraktur and Pennsylvania German spirituality with the Rosicrucian occult? Critics take an either/or view. Either that's all they speak of or they hardly mention it. Zinzendorf's egomania to unify all the Pennsylvania religions, "harmonize the various Pennsylvania religious groups" (19), did not fool contemporaries Muhlenberg and  John Phillip Boehm who saw it for what it was, a power play of buying and selling the Spirit. 

Epiphany


But O Nobel Heart - O Edel Herz appeals even with its scholarly apparatus. The enameled paper longs to be touched. Fraktur, the celebrated nonverbal form of illuminated German writing, weaves words with flowers. Catalog holdings of nineteenth century Pennsylvania Schwenkfelder, Mennonite, Free Library fraktur illustrate the wider art comparisons of leftist Pennsylvania and the blood of Jesus. It implicates all Pennsylvania life. A pelican shedding its blood on the cover of Nobel Heart emphasizes this as much as the word woven flowers. Our scholars cannot staunch the flow.

But fraktur isn't about religion any more than Paradise Lost, Steps to the Temple, Silex Scintillans or the statue of David. Neither is Blake about Zinzendorf. Religion hinders art applied back upon it as much as wu-wei hinders Chuang Tzu. Art is about art in the same manner as Bird's citation of the Florentine renaissance. While John Joseph Stoudt (Pennsylvania German Folk Art) welcomed the ideas of Catholic mystics among the Pennsylvania Dutch, Bird says of their coexistence, "the sensibility of German Protestantism was far removed from...the Catholic world..." (9). Bird, a religion professor searches Catholic origins of iconography in  his Ontario Fraktur: "I was at somewhat of a loss as to how to reconcile this peculiarly Protestant art form with my own Roman Catholic sensibilities. How would it be possible to bridge the supposed gap between the directness of an image-tradition which came to an aesthetic zenith in the Florentine Renaissance and the austerity of a word-tradition in which the visual arts were forced, so to speak, to go underground" (11)?

To view fraktur from a Catholic background is easy if it recommends an epiphany of Christ, a symbolic representation in inner space of the Lord as the lily/tulip heart. Each culture shapes the Lily to itself, witness the mein freund of the oppressed who would oppose the English domination of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Witness that suffering is not solely a Catholic vision of Jesus in Dante or Michelangelo in the Pietà and the Dying Slave. The liberation theology of Ignacio Ellacuría says the oppressed and needy are saviors and liberators because "as the majority of humankind owes its situation of crucifixion to the way society is organized and maintained [so:] a minority exercises its dominion" (Mysterium Liberationis, 590). This "life-giving death goes by way of the oppressed [to become:] part of humankind," but more. What does this have to do with the PA Dutch? Blood, suffering and death, each culture embodies the Vision of Christ. If critics scourge him from these clothes he was never anyway a friend of religions or professors, but he got obeisance from the flower and the poor. Bird invites Mircea Eliade to explain how "the aesthetic experience is always close to religious experience," but not just art, all life transcends: sport, hiking, love.  Bird, the younger, says that "the doing of this [fraktur] art constitutes some manner of spiritual assent, an indirect affirmation of the divine power which undergirds the world" (11)! 
  

The Power


But religion and philosophy don't trust art any more than scholars trust the folk. Folk artifacts do not compare with the repute of the elite. From his notions of Catholic background Bird argues that a plebeian "labor-oriented life-style" suggests maybe "these texts and images were [not:] reflected upon by their makers and recipients." There that stereotyped brute appears again, "Let no one ask me for merriment tonight, Mean is my company...I and my Frank round our cauldron."   "Opportunities for reverential gaze and reflection were surely uncommon," as if the soul were not always gazing at the eternal, for "it is clear that fraktur images most certainly did not occupy the central place held by Byzantine icons at home or in places of worship." Reductionism! No, not the images, but the whole interior! To them gave he the power to become the sons of God. The Pennsylvania Dutch home was a study of interiors, finding the greater in the less. This thing about "reverential gaze and reflection" begs the question, confined merely to fraktur. The whole point of its folk art is that the images surrounding Pennsylvanians in stove-plate, dish, linen needlework, quilt, kitchen and barn pictured their secretive beliefs and kept the mind in a constant walking meditation. Folk nature includes intelligence and consciousness of a higher order not  harnessed to the academic, obvious from Boehme and Beissel to Rittenhouse, Muhlenberg and my own people of passion, insight and action. This pietism, which Bird observes become universal in the 19th century, is discredited among professional scholars as too emotional so one might wonder if the scholar has felt the power. 

Spiritual Exhaustion 

Sometimes it sounds like he has, other times not, as with baptism and defending the Taufschein: "Baptism of the individual by the church is regarded as of such saving importance that the sacrament is administered as shortly as possible after birth. To delay baptism would be to place in jeopardy the eternal life of the newborn child" (26). No Protestant believes that but it is a Catholic belief. A previous generalization resembles this one, that "pietism threatened to undercut denominational and theological distinctions"(20). Actually it unified them as pietism became more or less universal in these religions early and unified them later when supplanted with evangelicalism. 

Spiritual exhaustion came full circle when  scholars sought again the formalism of the past in their scholarship, found the Canticles irreverent and irrelevant to a dymythologized belief.  But while people of mein freund take passionate love of Jesus for granted their betters do not. Richard E. Wentz, another religion professor, founder of the ASU School of Religion, disbelieves his own folk icons, lending credence to Stoudt's claim that liberalism killed the flower. Wentz's Pennsylvania Dutch: Folk Spirituality describes an introversion of the flowering heart: "at least among scholars and intellectuals, heaven is an obsolescent metaphor (I speak for myself). It is hardly a way to face the darkness" (Der Reggeboge, 2007, 33). It must be hard to face the darkness from the tower. He says, "I have no intention of trying to convince any of you as twenty-first century Dutchmen to reach beyond your grasp and hitch your hopes on heaven" (41).

Reprise

Bird reprises fraktur as Christian representations of major events from  Fall to Crucifixion (78). He suggests that the Temptation on baptismal certificates to correspond with birth and baptism in the Fall and Salvation (67), the Tree of Knowledge on a pedestal (69) with Golgotha, Kreb's Prodigal with Giotto (74). He explains major events in this reprise, for example the Prodigal, so readers foreign to the Bible may understand. As to the art, Bird observes  few depictions of the Last Supper in fraktur, but much of the Nativity, Temptation, Adam and Eve and Crucifixion (63). Comparing Durer (64) and Giotto he gives fraktur as the "assembled fragments of unevenly mixed textual backgrounds combined within single fraktur compositions." (89) This ranges the whole of Pennsylvania German culture to demonstrate a unity of beliefs, at least in fraktur, in both sect and church.

Philosophical/religious concepts, art history, explanations of biblical backgrounds, the layout of the book and its wide selection of illustration make it a primer. Get past the scholarly patina, compound words and absurd professional concepts and meditate these impressions. 

Some Obvious Works
Cory Amsler. Bucks County Fraktur. 2001.
Michael S. Bird. O Noble Heart - O Edel Herz: Fraktur and Spirituality in Pennsylvania German Folk Art. Lancaster: The Heritage Museus of Lancaster County. 2002.

                         Ontario Fraktur. A Pennsylvania-German Folk Tradition in Early Canada. 1977.
Henry S. Borneman. Pennsylvania German Illuminated Manuscripts. 1937, 1973.
Mary Jane Lederach Hershey. This Teaching I Present. Fraktur from the Skippack and Salford Mennonite Meetinghouse Schools, 1747-1836. 2003.
Dennis K. Moyer. Fraktur Writings and Folk Art Drawings of the Schwenkfelder Library Collection. 
1997.
Candace Kintzer Perry. The Samuel W. Pennypacker Fraktur Collection at the Schwenkfelder Library.
Der Reggeboge. Journal of the Pennsylvania German Society, 2013.
Frederick S. Weiser; Howell J. Heaney. The Pennsylvania German Fraktur of The Free Library of Philadelphia. An Illustrated Catalogue. 2 Vols. 1976
Fraktur Web 
Free Library of Philadelphia Fraktur Sources

Note: The lament of these scholars against what they think is the gullibility of people is laid bare by such extraordinary expressions as Richard Crashaw, "On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord," "Upon the Body of Our Blessed Lord, Naked and Bloody." Thomas Traherne, The First Century. Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, Fragment C. This list goes on and on, Donne eight times in La Corona and Holy Sonnets, notably in "At the round earth's imagined corners, blow." Faith remains.