Pennsylvania Fathers

Three Problems in the Early Letters and Ministry of Bishop Andrew Mack 1836-1917

2011-12-18T10:09:00.000-08:00

The complete Andrew Mack Letters here occur in the Jacob Mensch Letter Collection. Jacob Mensch "corresponded with every...Old Mennonite community (Ruth, Maintaining, 395) and "kept records of meetings from 1880 to 1907" (Wenger, History, 52). I obtained the Mack letters (1870 to 1906) by donating to defray costs of the translator Isaac Horst, who is now deceased. Anyone interested in contributing further sums to make the completed archive of translations available online is welcome to do so: "A project is underway to have the 1603 letters of Jacob Mensch translated and typed, with the possibility of eventual publication. The first phase is estimated to require about $4000.00 for completion of copying, translation labor, and typing. You are invited to send a donation to help defray the costs of the project." [This project was in fact completed.]

Notice in the Mennonite Historian,Winnipeg, Manitoba March 1982

There is a real question as to whether the names given in these letters should even now be made public. In an age of the most sordid revelations it would seem innocuous enough. Not to reveal the names however, that are so closely related to Andrew Mack, his brother in law, an elder, the father, the mothers, the sister, all implicated in this tiny community, prevents our understanding of their lives. In order to survive the relations were pretty much for life. Is the maid of Ihst going to move away? But of course there is always the possibility we might mistake an identity try as we might otherwise. But the larger point for instruction is that fraud, sham and cover up are all too familiar, with nobody taking or giving account of their own sins, perpetuated in a sea of self infatuation where nobody’s at fault. This seems more relevant considering “spiritual wickedness in high places” scholars may cite at the machinations of King David’s court, the fortune and fog of war.

When we do get the hair shorn from the religious? Spare us the names? Do we need to think more poorly of ourselves than we do? Does our own rehabilitation override covering the sins of Lot? Good questions, except there is no answer in good taste. And further what happens to the content neutral standard of good writing if as we show the passion of a character and his empathy we trespass so far into the moral universe. In the end there is no avoiding what Ezekiel saw through a hole in the wall, the elders making pact and sacrifice. Such sins are sordid not glorious, not the “heart became proud on account of its beauty” (Ez 28.17), the second we think of Ezekiel and do well to be afraid. The Spirit lifted me up…I dug into the wall and saw a doorway…I went in and looked, and I saw portrayed all over the walls all kinds of crawling things and detestable animals… In front of them stood seventy elders of the house of Israel, and Jaazaniah son of Shapham was standing among them (Ez 8.11).

To see the sins of world portrayed in all their sickness is a crippling sight and when it concerns your own all the more so, so that we can well believe Andrew Mack saw these things with tears and we can believe it was with weakness and pain that he mediated among them. It’s not witty, it’s heartbreaking. Ezekiel writes with a sense of outrage and judgment, but his knowledge is by revelation, being caught up. Andrew Mack writes privately with a sense of sorrow, pain, unbelievable contradiction that such things come to him he has to decide. But Andrew Mack was also a farmer. He knew that when the weeds are rank in their growth the husbandman with a scythe (or a weedeater) is going get the moist blades and severed roots on his clothes. Weed puller, he was a stone puller.

The circumstances of his early life as a pastor were utterly formative in the career he was to have as a peacemaker. These took principally two forms in the problems he faced in his own church and in his dire sickness when elevated to Bishop.

The first six letters, from 1870 to 1876 are preoccupied with pastoral problems that the young minister needs to air: discord, adultery and immorality leading to disfellowship. In spite of the custom that Mennonites would generally confess their sins before the whole congregation, in much of this he is the last to learn of the problem, hearing only secondhand of the discord and adultery. The problem with digging around in the past is that we might find things that have been buried. This is the case regarding the young pastor’s afflictions.

With the first problem of discord however the young preacher does not even himself believe his advice to the parties and does not actually send the letter. He must sense that his own counsel is flawed. Are we to take it literally when he says he writes “partly in tears?” He says, “I have heard that discord has taken place” and feels that he must act, “write.” Perhaps the reason he does not believe even himself is that he assumes their guilt in such language that they might “sooner return to your first love.” What are you going to say to gossipers, “I heard that you were gossiping?” That doesn’t work. That’s gossip too. His strategy in the letter he doesn’t send is to display his feelings, “tears,” followed by his reasoning.

This is all the more strange since this letter is not cataloged with the other 49! As though it had fallen through some crack and ended up in the Mensch collection.

His reasoning he admits “is sometimes made worse by writing.” But this leads in the second part of the letter to his own self doubt as if he were seriously thinking, “I will lay down my office” rather than intervene this way. He includes himself with them in a triangle, “consider with me where we stand.” Their disagreement is emotional, fueled by false beliefs about themselves, each other and of the nature of discord, “the old Adam,” who threatens God’s kingdom in this, and gives comfort to Satan. His solution is humility, his own as he has said, but theirs too, but are they hardhearted or tender? And whose spirit is it that “will make us believe this or that, which often has no significance?”

The solution he offers is one he sought for himself in his own life with his own tears. That is “take each other’s weaknesses upon yourself,” that is, bear one anothers' burdens to the sea of forgetfulness, the “ocean of oblivion.” His argument is that they should be like Jesus “and hear Him say, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

It doesn’t sound even to him like this is going to work if they want to continue to disagree. He feels that the letter would just make it appear he is taking sides. He doesn’t send it also because he doesn’t believe his own argument. What is the flaw? Nothing except that he is still learning to feel his way in such matters. But he learns that the solution is not argument. His wife feels this too and gives the writer the best counsel of his day, stop. Later in life he will have learned how to bring the disagreeable together, but also he will know when not to speak.

With the second issue, the sin of adultery, he only learns of it at the 11th hour and there is little then to do except try to heal the injured by counseling, but he is counseling his own family, daughter, cousins, aunts. The offender in this letter is John L. Gehman who has confessed himself an adulterer “several weeks ago,” an act that transpired “several years ago, with the maid who was with Ihst.” This raises two issues with him, first that Ihst “did not wish to say anything; yet he talked about it so much it made me wonder; then he told me about it himself.” It sounds derelict of Ihst first not to have defended the maid better after “she told Ihst about it,” but further, when she had confided in him, not to have properly reported it, instead gossiping the news all over so that Mack heard it from others before ever Ihst said a word.

John L. GEHMAN

[NI19113]

12 SEP 1819 - 3 MAR 1892

BIRTH: 12 SEP 1819 [24459]

DEATH: 3 MAR 1892, Hereford, Berks Co PA [24460]

BURIAL: Old Hereford Mennonite

REFERENCE: LKG

Father: Johannes Ziegler GEHMAN
Mother: Maria M. LATSHAW

Family 1 : Susanna S. STAUFFER

MARRIAGE: 25 AUG 1844 [61708]

+Susanna S. GEHMAN

Family 2 : Elizabeth S. STAUFFER

MARRIAGE: 4 APR 1847

+Abraham S. GEHMAN

+David S. GEHMAN

+Enos S. GEHMAN

http://www.wengerdc.com/Wenger/d0000/g0000023.html#I19113

Another and more serious problem for him is that this John L. Gehman, ordained a deacon in 1858, is the son of the preacher John Z. Gehman (mentioned in Noah Mack, 4) who had grown up in the church and community. He was about 50 when taken with the escapade of the maid of Ihst. But Gehman had married Elizabeth Stauffer in 1847. Andrew S. Mack is Andrew Stauffer Mack, and indeed had both sisters and daughters named Susanna and Elizabeth, but with different birth dates than Gehman's wives, so this was either an aunt or cousin. Further Gehman had previously been married to Elizabeth’s sister, Susanna Stauffer in 1844. He had one child with the first wife, a daughter, and three sons with the second, two of whom became deacons. [see Mack 10, the number of sons and daughters is in question.] No wonder the “church is in a sad situation.”

When Mack says “you wouldn’t believe how much trouble this caused for me and also for many others, especially the family," that is because of his relation to the Stauffer family and because Gehman had married both daughters. Mack’s solace which he offers is that Gehman’s “wife thinks she can bear it with the help of God,” meaning that she can go on living anyway, “yet for the rest of life can have no more joy,” more than a sad situation.

As with the previous discord and the “old Adam,” here “the flesh still feels its weakness” and nobody can correct those who will not correct themselves: “verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.” Later he says that “Gehman also desires that all faithful ones should pray for him. He is quite depressed because of this sin,” but that is not altogether to the point since, “what is man when he flees from the Lord? He is as the prodigal son. He must arise and go to the father, but no man can come to him except the father draw him.” Nobody can correct one who will not correct himself. Mack bears the lesson himself as always and mutually exhorts Mensch, “dear brother, let us seek to accomplish our office faithfully,” always realizing that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities…the rulers of darkness of this world…”

To illustrate the extraordinary nature of these Mennonite communities and their close proximity to one another, therefore the need to be without discord and adultery, Gehman’s own daughter was married to the same (John M.) Ihst (1844-1923) with whose maid Gehman conducted his affair. Andrew Mack had visited upon him a vision of the sins of the world and it was only his weakness that enabled him to bear.

A third, even greater personal tragedy, reported in these first letters, his own brother-in-law is disfellowshiped. Compassed with the first report of his severe ensuing illness which was to last years, this makes the trial more poignant, “I write tonight as I have never written before.” Taking his lead from “the saddest part,” he writes that “brother John Gabel fell into an abominable sin and is discharged from the church.”

John L. Gable (1837-1887) had first been married to Leah High who died 23 Aug 1873 at age 34. Andrew Mack preached the sermon at her funeral. He had eight children with her. A sawmiller and merchant, he then married Elizabeth, sister of Andrew S. Mack and had four more children. Gabel had been ordained a deacon at Hereford 17 Oct 1872.

This letter comes two and a half years after the death of that first wife. That this transgression had occurred while he was, past tense, still a widower, we would say “single,” indicates perhaps that he was remarried at the time of this report. Mack writes that “this took place while he was still in the state of widowhood.” Writing as he has never written before means that “you can’t imagine how my poor heart often feels, especially at this time while I am weak and unwell.” It is as though he feels the whole enterprise is coming apart yet still he has to provide solace for the aggrieved, Gabel’s father for instance, who died at age 86 in 1885, who with his son J. L. Gabel bought the Gleason company machinery and had begun production in 1871.

Demonstrating again how everybody knew everything about everybody else in that small community, he says, “old father Gabel was here today and he wept over his son.” While he says nothing about the pain of his sister in all this, he does say “pray for J. Gabel. He is in great sorrow yet there are those who press him farther down.” Depression and some gossip, the reward for sins. He seems to bear the burden himself, “when I see the church and how I labored these 12 years that I served, my courage would often sink.”

Not To Do

Like the first account when writing could have been misconstrued so it were better left unsent, writing to his friend Mensch as relief from pressures is to be curtailed, “I could still write much of what is on my mind, but too much writing isn’t good for me either.’ This is because of the sickness he has first reported,

“I am not well…my nerves are also weakened.” Those things which had been his escape from the ministry are now denied to him: “I am not to do any heavy physical work, not preach, not indulge in deep thoughts and not read. The latter is the most difficult for me. I couldn’t keep up with reading much anyhow.”

This sickness is to vex him off and on the rest of his life. It reminds him of his vulnerability, increases his humility so that when “our pilgrimage is over, we may all enter into that heavenly home where no sickness nor sorrow may overtake us.” His solace in all this is simply what he recommends to others and himself, “I will seek to totally surrender myself to my dear Jesus and as He decides for me is right.”

It must be the case that these letters are only a sampling of the trials of these six years, although maybe they are the low spots; it is obvious he has undergone a lot. This period of his life comes to an end. Never again does he address such dire straits, either because they don’t happen, other issues are more urgent, or simply that he says nothing. His health however continues to be difficult, both from the burden of his accountability and from the physical weakness. He writes, “how serious it often appears to me when I consider what we are accountable for, if we have not been found faithful stewards.” This does not refer to finance, but to moral leadership, compassion, wisdom, judgment in administering his office. He would always feel this deeply. “I find myself so weak, physically and spiritually,” he says, probably a desirable effect in a leader since it enforces a sense of humility. “I am still not supposed to preach and cannot work much yet.” It has only been six weeks since he had released the doctor’s report in his last letter, but it shows how much he wants to continue his vocation.

Whether to Resist

He is to have plenty of opportunity to be accountable. About a year after being ordained bishop by acclamation in 1875, a dispute arises between the old and new Mennonites at Boyertown, formerly Colebrookdale. This corporate discord has its roots in the original split of 1847, the Oberholtzer controversy. He was not a minister then, but was the first ordained after it at Hereford in 1863. His jurisdiction as bishop now includes the problem, so immediately his care of the larger Mennonite community impacts both Old and New Mennonites as it was also to do later in his life when he “approved the organizing of the Mennonite General Conference, even though the majority of his conference did not” (The Mennonite Encyclopedia, III, 432).

The beginning is innocent enough. Mennonites had shared premises, I mean buildings, a long time. After their initial division between old and new in 1847 the two groups shared the Hereford meetinghouse until the new Mennonites built their own in 1851. The old group then bought out the new’s half share in the old building. There being also a building at Boyertown, then Colebrookdale, about six miles from the Hereford church, “built for the convenience of the Hereford Mennonites in and near Boyertown” (Wenger 366), but with no pastor separate from Hereford, this building had been used by both groups until 1876 when the old purposed to build anew on the original 1819 building, first tearing down the old. In the midst of the demolition the new “served an injunction against the building committee, enjoining them against the tearing down of the meetinghouse, and sued for equal rights as tenants in common” (Wenger 122).

Contrary to the stand of the old, Andrew’s son Noah says that his father “always upheld the idea that the old Mennonite Church should not have made any defense but when the sheriff came and placed an injunction on the church building the brethren just should have left and built a meeting house outside of the town” (Mack, ) A question as to why he could not overrule the building committee as bishop does not understand the conditions applied. Neither could he introduce footwashing or missions when he wanted. Pressed on his first trip to Kansas in 1881 about missions by some Prussian Mennonites at Beatrice, Nebraska, he could only reply that “he had to wait until the time when such support could be had” (5). The injunction not only resulted in a lawsuit that lasted seven years, ultimately decided by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, but it caused a scrutiny of the conditions of the original Oberholtzer controversy of 1847.

“However, he was somewhat relieved in heart when the judge of the supreme court called the old Mennonites the defendants still to the close of the litigation but from a pure non-resistant standpoint he considered the true way would have been to leave all when and flee to another city as Jesus says Matt. 10-23.” (Mack, )

Andrew Mack would of course know nothing of this when he wrote, before the fact, the letter of 27 Feb 1876:

“For some time there have been quite a few communications among us regarding the building of a meeting house in Boyertown. The new (Mennonites) wished to build with us and we did not want that. Then our members decided that we would build a house, but they [the New] would have nothing to say to the building, but after it was built they could donate to the costs voluntarily and then have meetings in the new house as before in the old house. The new (ones) wished to have meetings in the new house as before in the old house. The new (ones) wished to have a written agreement drawn up so they could show that they had their rights, but ors did not wish to commit themselves. Now this is as it stands and I haven’t heard anything more. I heard that in Matdege they built in a similar way. If you know how they did in Matdege then write to me as soon as you can. I did not intend to be concerned with the building, but I would like to tell the brethren how they did it there.”

For one who “did not intend to be concerned with the building,” his concern is prescient. The original differences between the two groups in 1847 were some parts substantive, one being the whole subject of legality, which traditionally Mennonites rejected. That is, “that litigation was a downright violation of the New Testament ethic and was contrary to the historic practice of the church” (Wenger, 353). Oberholtzer testified, “our conference was not opposed to go to law in a just cause” (cited by Wenger, 353). Outside of the Bible and the Dortrecht Confession, traditional Mennonites shunned legality, creeds, written ordinances, constitutions, even minutes of their meetings at that time.

In Boyertown the two factions fought all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. When the old group referenced in Andrew Mack’s letter decided to build anew, they offered tenancy to the new, on condition of their using no objectionable musical instruments. This demand initiated a series of conundrums that lasted six years. When demolition had already partly removed he old building, the New Mennonites sued for tenancy in common before the Berks County Court. That suit, denied in 1879, was subsequently reversed. Then, on appeal in 1883, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, reversed it back, finding for the Old, a truly contradictory procedure for people who did not believe in such legal remedies (see Wenger, 122-23 and Ruth, 366-67) and a betrayal of principles held by traditional Mennonites.

The disagreement between old and new at Boyertown was similar to one in Skippack except there the old Mennonites surrendered the meetinghouse and built anew. This was celebrated by John F. Funk as “one of the most glorious examples of self-denial and devotion to … religious principles, presented to us in modern times. The new factions claimed the old meeting-house and were determined to have it at all events. The property was one of considerable value and justly belonged to the Old Church, and any impartial judge or jury would have, without any scruples, freely accorded it to them, had they presented their claims, but instead of doing so, they chose rather to obey the scriptural injunctions 'not to resist evil, and of him that taketh away thy goods, not to ask them again,' and quietly, leaving the new factions in possession, they purchased other grounds and built themselves a new house.” (John F. Funk. The Mennonite Church and Her Accusers. Elkhart, Indiana: Mennonite Publishing Company, 1878, 128.)

Andrew Mack’s thinking on all this was reported much later by his son, Bishop Noah Mack in 1939. This eleven page biography of Andrew Mack never got much circulation since it was solicited by Noah’s own biographers and served only as background for their work.

The Last Pennsylvania Dutchman

2011-12-12T07:59:00.000-08:00

She must have heard a music of mind most wonderful those years, living alone sorting clothes on top of the dryer. Nor do I know what it was like, pretending to be a non-thinking circle member, still afflicting the Acme, yakking on the phone to this music. The amazing thing I realized this morning is she didn’t want to die any more than my black chows. Two of them now have shown the ultimate courage and gratitude for life, the most loyal of creatures with fur of \the sweet earth. She is among them, cases of insurmountable will, but really spirit you know.

For six months, a year, I expected both dogs to be gone by morning, but there they would be, hungry, ready to walk, if you could call it that. Six years apart, but otherwise the same, one time I had to carry him home in my arms. How light he was. At her last I carried her out and lay her gently on the grass. Even his last week he could jog to the gate were another dog passing, then collapse out of breath. One time he had a fit from the noise of the mower, but came back even from that.

The night before he died he lay on the bed panting with the will to life, a heating pad beneath him. About 10 PM he began to bark as he always had when he knew his family was coming home. He would bark in anticipation for minutes before his mistress’ car ever came in view. How did he know? It was his welcome bark, deep and commanding, as he barked for life that night in all the hours. We put our hands on him and he stopped, breathed and heaved for breath. Then he barked. He barked hour after hour and only then did it begin to lessen. She couldn't walk on the slippery floors so I put carpet everywhere she wanted to go and being near blind, lights near the floor like on a runway, landing lights. I would hear her coming by her breath and gently guide her outside, then wait by the door until she came back to bed. It was a warm night in April when she left. She was so comfortable I left her out by the aloe. The previous night or two she lay in the kitchen while we cooked dinner and said I love you, thank you, thank you. I learned I can never love enough.

It was Palm Sunday when he left. I stayed home while the others went to church. I didn’t know what to do. I think maybe I expected him to get up and run. But he stayed panting. His mistress came home in an hour. She has shepherded plenty of souls to the door of the afterlife, held their hands when they were alone, sung to them, somehow communicating comfort. So she sat with him, her hands on his chest and brow. I came out to check. He breathed his last. Then we wept. There was never any of the spirit of resignation in him as sick as he was, never any give.

Risk- taking laughter. Three women, if you count their mother, tolerated the one son and brother. Irritated with this sense of realism, stoicism, boasting you are terminal, zero gelassenheit, she wanted to go on. I heard accounts of her passing. Betty Miller held her hand, sat with her for hours, as did Carole Watkins, others. Just 5 days before, she was angry at an electrical short in the brain, was partly paralyzed, had to be fed. She died in her sleep though, quoted Ira Byock’s The Four Things That Matter Most, please forgive me, I forgive you, thank you and I love you. She got the last, but did not expect to die. That’s what she meant when she said she didn’t think things would turn out as they did.

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. She would like to hear that. I flew Christmas night '04 with son to Philadelphia. We spent New Year’s eve in Arkadelphia on the way back, ended with things never known to identify. Calls afterward roused with the move. I’m talking on the phone with her about pain. She takes offense, says you can’t call cancer arthritis. She laughs, mocks again the time she and her sister, maiden aunts, visited me in the hospital after the cartilage was cut from my knee the old way, says in the parking lot had a good laugh at my “pain.” She says I called her Curator of the family years ago. Every family needs a curator to survive in larger sense, but after looking into the Macks these years she never thought to mention that Lizzie and Jesse had their pictures in the old photo album in the attic. This after countless queries of old photographs.

Now that those letters exist in printed form in Tulip it seems like they have always been so, but of course that isn’t true. The pieces of the puzzle change in the light like the painting on her wall, like the desire to understand. What is permanent anyway? When Henry Mack was 90 I was 5. Don’t sell little children short, “a little child shall lead them.” I entertained the new Jacob, he’s two. He took home a stuffed white kitty cat bigger than himself. I sent a tortoise doll to Paris for Slow Club. Nick bit me in twelve places. I told him to sit. I asked Chris on my lap where the kitty was. He said, meow! Remember me! She’s getting communion at 11 AM today.

If glory is going to be revealed in us, in families, in the earth, it has to be in our deeds and the attitudes of our hearts. The hymn of the realist occurs to the Preacher. “I the teacher.” And what does he teach, “what is twisted cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted.” I have more understanding than all my teachers says Psalm 119, so there will be healings and miracles today. Odds will be surmounted. Faith is what matters.

The big problem is the preacher’s natural mind. If the Virgin Mary told her Mom she was pregnant her Mom would be supposed to say, “it takes two honey.” Natural expectation covers every degree of “normal” expectation. Thus, in the way things are, the sick must die, the rejected fail. But revelation contradicts every natural state, turns rough places plain, virgins conceive. Passing revelation through natural understanding confirms all opposites. Passing the natural through revelation reverses them, brings union, deliverance. Oh yes it does. Religion is bondage. Everybody can cite abuses and failure of revelation, but never of natural expectation because the natural never fails. A little bit of doubt reverses natural expectation. That is faith.

Revelation turns offense to blessing. You can explain this process to the natural mind endlessly as it transfers its assumptions to all it perceives. People transfer what they assume to be true about light, space, science to anything that conflicts with it and believe the referent wrong. This is done with dogma. It is another new religion.There is a dog in dogma. The issue isn’t, do I agree with revelation, but do I like salvation.

Everything can be restored. What’s the point of holding a grudge in the afterlife? Give it up. What’s the point of keeping a scorecard for real and imagined losses and transgressions in this life that reach far into the past. You can’t even the score. The techniques of human self destruction have no purpose. We can resurrect the offenders and torture them in a Dantean fugue or rehabilitate them in the halfway house, or stand up to them while they’re in the flesh. So stand up! They wanted money from Jake, but when he offended they didn’t oppose him. Afraid it would afright the mark? It stuck in the craw. Weakness created resentment. Saving the appearances to his benefit, the grandson stood up to Jake.

Here’s the problem with the Way of Jesus. When you’ve made your best case, rehearsed it again and again, brooded over it, cursed the deed and darkness, he tells you, gelassenheit. Bless those who curse you, bless and curse not. Pray for those that persecute you. This probably doesn’t break their teeth. Loose love and peace on them, blessing, the liquid presence of comfort.

By the time you grow up and age out you find the body is imperfect. Old dogs can tell you, and the neighbor across the street, a curmudgeon who worked for the Indian bureau. Hank had stacks of Playboy to the wainscot, took care of neighborhood business, got old. It was a slalom bounce from car to post to house, landing akimbo, to cross the street. Wherever his mind wanted to go, he sent his body.

But at the end of life my dog is worse, can’t see, hear, walk, but he can eat. But his mind is as alive as ever. The Dutch torturers in the Martyr’s Book thought they could kill the Anabaptist body and the mind would die. That’s backwards. You can’t kill the mind, it lives, communicates its passions when the body is gone. In the memory of neighbor Hank his desert tortoises have meaning, In one of those good news the youths who now own his house stand in the street and stare at cars going 30.

By this standard nothing can be lost, even if unmade it will out, someday be remade. In the eternal library all the lost works of merit and all works not done by people exist. They’re eternal. Have you heard of it? Want to get on Google and find it? Not the Alexandrian Library, rather like the last work of Traherene, Poems of Felicity, found in the British Museum manuscripts accidentally, published in 1910, 200 years after his death, or Tolkien’s essay on Beowulf of 1936 published in 2003 in its unrevised form of hundreds of pages.

Reputations are waiting to be made. Consider if that one copy of Jerusalem had been lost. Families have made comebacks too when they reduced to one. J. Howard was the only son of an only son, keep that up long enough it leads to extinction. But what about them that never was but were supposed to be and the lost coin, pearl, orphan? Those who never were are promises to the world that lies down with the lamb, a progeny of childless Abraham. Is that the difference between the works of man and the works of God? The first is possible the second is certain, that is, after the fact.

If they are works of man they can be done by men. If a man made it a man can fix it. Not just frakturs, diaries, records, letters. Once lost they can be found, if they exist, but if they have ceased to exist? The resurrection of the body leads to the record. The Father has kept all those letters.

That’s why they call it redemption. It brings back what is lost. Anabaptists believe it. Do you think in rejecting the body, the book, the oeuvre, they actually help it along? Such a lot of questions just to understand that nothing is lost. Say it, "nothing is lost." I know my redeemer lives.

Isaiah says, “Lord open his eyes that he may see.” Nothing is lost. Regrets are lost, but not one species, not one baby, not one attempt to put into the body, into form what all creation groans toward, the redemption of the body. Not only are the lost restored to a magnitude above all expectation but you’ve also got to get over this notion of physical existence as a curse. It was turned to a blessing by Jesus.

Her afterlife begins for me AM, April 6, four days after death when she calls me with the info that she has a “Washington Jefferson,” 1766, one of twenty. She is back in the house, looks a little younger, pulls the b/w print carefully from its envelop, the tissue paper slides off. Do you like the symbolism? She says she was never able to get a price on it. Yes it is a dream. Her skin is fair, she is in her kitchen, about forty years old. I had another dream last night. My dog is hanging out, head down, humpbacked, like in his last months, curled head to tail. But dreams are replaced with visions. It is Easter Sunday at communion. That dog is running flat out in those tight circles he loved, barking, barking and barking, carousing around the throne of God. My dead bodies shall live. You will not suffer your holy one to see corruption.

Rimbaud’s Attic

Rimbaud was called a saint for struggling with his savage nature. Up close the savage is heightened in the old survivor, they are not at all what you first thought or lived with all of life. That Rimbaud walked out on the false world of culture and civilization, that he denuded his spirit of artificial trappings or wanted was his notion of Christmas on earth.

There’s a lot of nonsense written about Rimbaud. That he was an angel, fallen or otherwise. That he had a destiny other than his own. Nobody has a destiny until the fact of earning it. Not that he hyped himself for the ages to be greater than he was, lived a grand lie in competition with all the other great liars of politics and literature. Let him rest in the grave, even if in going there he contradicted all that the free thinkers and licensees want, because in his end all he wants is peace with God. What else is there anyway?

Well in the interim there is fame, achievement, fortune. "Are these what is destined and is destiny greater than honesty? " She doesn’t answer any of this, turns her back on the lesser by default and chooses the greater, is that her thinking? A better question might be, does it matter at all?

Put fame and fortune in a scale and weigh against self sacrifice, honesty and the life of the mind to no end other than itself. The mind as an end in itself, what a notion. And add that no one would know. There’s your Rimbaud. None of these delights shared with the world.

Is it a crime, a shame, a sin? You have to answer yourself, unless you see fame as arbitrary, an obstacle to truth’s realization and beauty’s. No, fame is a heist. Does it matter at all? Fame is a con. Is not the thing an end in itself and not the means to some other? Can’t anybody shut Socrates up? Is beauty beauty if it is a means to fame? It could be the implicit argument of her life. That it doesn’t matter. What matters is truth, honesty, being. It’s not about product development. How are you going to sell that to publishers, patrons and audience? Let them get their own. It is a rigorous individuality held out, living alone, spreading her past and future out upon the dryer at 94 to see what else she can do without. In the end it is pure survival.

Daniel restored Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, remembered it for him, which he couldn’t do himself, so this Portfolio of paper and ink, images on a screen, illustrates her best and worst, herself. Denial and repression are interesting things. Push it down here, won’t it come up there? In the hands a majority truth can be counted. But you can’t annihilate talent, genius, destiny. It will out of eclipse. Sun still shines and the effects when known are wonderful.

Here on the ground, if a corn of wheat falls, what happens to the grit? It goes down like the envelope she keeps her memoir of her mother in, sent originally to her in 1982 from Bennett Publishing Company with the proof revisions of her sister’s book. Will it show up in the attorney’s inventory of the estate? No. She and my old dog are standing, but not side by side. Six mourners at the private grave. I guess you’re allowed to visit. “Died the same day as the Pope,” no other epitaph. Well, one more, “buried the same day as the Pope.”

Were they able to process her right away or did she have to wait for the crush to die down, after all, it’s not every day and it's the Pope. Anyway he died first. These and many other questions we wait to answer when satellite communications are restored. And suddenly there is a rash of deaths. Saul Bellow. Prince Rainier, so good conversation anyway. Thus the last Pennsylvania Dutchman in our family, Anna Elizabeth Reiff Young.

This blog, Animal Person, connects.
Works Cited

Three volumes on Pennsylvania Dutch origins, 2004 :

Volume I: A Red Portfolio: The Life of a Pennsylvania Dutch Radical.

Volume II: A Tulip Blooms from the Heart: Some Lives and Letters of the PA Dutch.
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Volume III: Truth and Lawlessness in the Pennsylvania Religion.

I had wanted to catalog her affairs in this manner of speaking, but was confronted with relatives' doubts and hers. Family doubters, better do nothing, what will come of something? Anything to prevent the salvation to be revealed, the body. They want to save their points of view. You can’t drive all that way. One, how can you do it? Two, the weather will prevent it. Three, she doesn’t want it done. Their doubt made me doubt them, the people on the sidelines are nuts.

Pennsylvania Spiritual Lawlessness

2011-08-04T15:21:00.001-07:00

Contrary to its reputation early Pennsylvania was a lawless place. Whether it was so or a haven of religious plurality in a golden age is only a contest among the public relations teams of the majorities

It's easy to exaggerate lawlessness, from Gottlieb Mittelberger (1756) to Jack D. Marietta and Gail Stuart Rowe's Troubled Experiment (University of Pennsylvania, 2006), which is shocked to learn that the crime rate among Germans was greater than among English, as if there were such statistics. But Pennsylvania includes as many notable lawless mystical hard cases as libertines. These made a work of love and roaring contradiction. A definition of spiritual lawlessness can be left to induction from cases interesting in themselves, but it is a little ironic that one of the first publications in Pennsylvania was Conrad Beissel's The Mystery of Lawlessness (Andrew Bradford, 1729), translated by Michael Wohlfarth.

Spiritual lawlessness turned into law attracted many peculiarities, contention over the sabbath, denial of sexuality, fervent separation from the world. Whether it be wife from husband or sensuous goose from the table, the "luxurious indulgence" of the world was an offense to them. Buñuel's Simon of the Desert gets the spirit of this monasticism. It's hard to believe they're serious when they exchange death threats to each other, but establishment charismatics Paul Crouch, Benny Hinn, et al. have continued the practice of death threats (xvii) against Hanegraaff and his children. Prophetic authority, tithing, healing were all turned to lawlessness as much as baptism, chastity, Sabbaths and communal living were. Should it be called spiritual inconsistencies? Convinced they were headed east they called it west.

One Pennsylvania prophet who opposed all this is Matthias Baumann of Oley, founder of the Newborn. He objects to baptism in all its forms. He opposes all devout practices, says that "all that Christ and his Apostles commanded have become vast idolatry," calls the sects and denominations, Christians without Christ, (Call to the Unregenerate. Tr. Stoudt. Berks County Historical Review, Fall, 1978, 144). In the context of what must be considered continuing epidemic spiritual lawlessness he says, "all people want to look at Christianity from the outside...and they know nothing about the inward ground" (138). The outer ground is here the mystic lawlessness and it is not confined to practice only. Baumann's direct speech also calls into question the plague of gnostic transferences from Eve to the body and to women.

The Baptisms of Beissel

One bright star in this stellium of radical mystic artists was Conrad Beissel who operated in the guise of the prophetic 18th century. The illuminations of books and prints in Ephrata embody a utopian society a century before Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852) or Brook Farm (1841-47). New England got all the press but it imitated the real transcendentalists of Pennsylvania. The social relationships of these communities were as difficult as New England's. Hawthorne quit Brook farm over its nastiness in 1841. Beissel was just hitting his stride in 1741, but, as will happen with the individual and the prophetic, his mentality and individuality in isolation were more extreme. At one time he attempted to baptize himselfto baptize himself which is as hard as marrying yourself, which he also tried to do. "This questionable act, however, failed to convince him...yet he considered his old master [Peter Becker]...so far beneath him... that it would be too great a humiliation for his proud spirit to receive baptism at their hands." (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 102). He compared himself with Jesus. In the revival on the Pequea (1724) Beissel remembered "that even Christ had humbled himself to be baptized by so lowly a person as John" (103). Then he was immersed face forward three times.

Sachse, himself a Rosicrucian, empathizes as Beissel in November 1724 "plunges beneath the flood, and through it again enter[s] the material world cleansed from all taint and sin...yet his pride forbade him to humble himself, as he considered, to bow to his old master [Peter Becker] and receive the rite at his hands" (103). These exaggerations match the pride of the celebrant, for that cleansing from all taint lasted only so long. It had to be redone, so was no cleansing at all. Of course all this must be done in further imitiation "apostolicwise," Sachse says. "Apostles" appeared in Pennsylvania as much as they did in later Scottsdale's pyramid schemes. Aposticity seemed to go along with autocracy when down he went "face forward, under the cold flood." Sachse says that "this baptism in the Pequea was the most noteworthy one in the history of the sect-people of Pennsylvania" (104).

But not so fast. As those baptized in muddy water had later to rewash, four years later Beissel renounced this baptism lest there seem to be any taint on his authority in having been baptized by a group from which he now severed (Becker's baptists). It puts a whole new meaning on Anabaptist when Beissel was rebaptized again, that is he back down to the river and got re-baptized twice. By any proper count we are now at four. First he was unbaptised backwards to wash off the former at the hands of Becker. He went under three times backwards. This was done to an accompaniment of Rosicrucian fours and sevens that only Sachse comprehends. Then Beissel, after being unbaptized, flipped over on his face and went down forwards. Backwards means face up in renunciation and frontwards means face down in restoration. In 1738 Beissel enacted baptisms in and for the dead, (Chronicon, 122) that the son of Alexander Mack has baptized in his father's stead in order to qualify him for the Celestial Virginity. These incongruent baptisms were apparent common knowledge. In his polemic against Beissel he says, "I have, without baptizing myself and letting myself be baptized four times (like him) (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 344). They could not leave baptism alone, took Anabaptists again and again into the water. They rebaptised as a rededication, a repentance and a show of solidarity until in 1745 repeated baptism was joined with hair cutting. The whole sisterhood was rebaptized as were ten at one time, fourteen at other, all performed by Beissel. It was "purposed it be a yearly custom" (192) This occurred after the trying period when the Eckerlins had left, accused of "church-robbery" (190)

Sabbath and Celibacy

Beissel summoned these extremities to defend his notion of the Sabbath.The long title of his Mystyrion is the "Lawless ANTICHRIST discover'd and Disclos'd, Shewing that all those do belong to that Lawless Antichrist, who willfully reject the Commandments of God, amongst which, is his holy, and by himself blessed Seventh-Day Sabbath." A law of opposites prevailed in his writing, a code where bride means whore, rest means turmoil. So the preface to the reader of Mystery of the Lawless invests Beissel's own word, the editorial "we," dozens of times in two pages. His proof of truth is that it must first be spoken before it is written, that is, by himself. That makes it apostolic, "the Whore and her Cup," "explain the Words of God after her crooked Serpentine Will." So it is necessary to "withdraw with all his Heart and whole Mind from all Vanity, and Love of Creatures, and from all Worldly and carnal or fleshly Desire." "Denying the world," is always a favorite topic of the Sanctifieds even while the whole of Pennsylvania art celebrated the world its religion forswore. You used to "the Whore together with the Antichrist" being the facetious Beissel himself.

Baptism and the Sabbath were crucial issues in 1728 and 29 when Beissel's confederate Michael Wohlfarth insisted on his own inspired authority in Philadelphia, "I have a message to you from the Lord" (Sachse, 150) and exchanged broadsides with opponents. Wohlfarth and Beissel found themselves on the court house steps of Philadelphia arguing about the days of the week (154). The odd thing in this mix of genius and idiocy is that while Beissel was proclaiming himself sultan of the left wing, introverting sexuality, baptizing again and again, he was early associated with Franklin, his printer, and coined the atonal music of his later community that fostered decorative art to the nth degree. All this is more or less simultaneous with Beissel's second theosophical work in print, the first with Franklin (c. 1729), 32 pages, of which the 99 maxims printed were, as Sachse helpfully explains, because "the figure 1 stands for the finite or man, while the 0 represents the infinite, and to make the number 100 would have been to place the finite before the infinite" (162). We can't have that.

These NINETY NINE MYSTICAL SENTENCES exist translated by Peter Miller in part (1768), issued by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1912. So Beissel in quick succession in two years published four books, the Mystery of Lawlessness, 99 Sayings, a hymnbook of 62 hymns, 31 of his own, Gottliche Liebes (Franklin, 1730) and one on Matrimony, Ehebuchlein (Franklin 1730) in addition to Wohlfarth's Seventh-Day-Sabbath (1729). These points of contention would occupy him the rest of his years: baptism, the Sabbath, wisdom, hymns and music, celibacy.

Denial and promotion of sexuality as a kind of perversion had opposite programs in Beissel and Zinzendorf, celibacy on the one and Baptism and the Sabbath were crucial issues in 1728 and 29 when Beissel's confederate Michael Wohlfarth insisted on his own inspired authority in Philadelphia, "I have a message to you from the Lord" (Sachse, 150) and exchanged broadsides with opponents. Wohlfarth and Beissel found themselves on the court house steps of Philadelphia arguing about the days of the week (154). The odd thing in this mix of genius and idiocy is that while Beissel was proclaiming himself sultan of the left wing, introverting sexuality, baptizing again and again on the other. Enforcing their own law of anti-law, their supercharged terms for sexual denial were similar if opposite. The productivity of such efforts is measured by their autocracy and amazing energy, which should not necessarily seem a product of sublimation. Beissel kept publishing prolific editions of his hymnbooks in 1730, 32, 34 (ms. edition) and 36, with Franklin, most of the hymns written by Beissel. He was a propaganda machine. The First Century of German Language Printing attributes eight of the twelve known printed works in the colony to Beissel and Wohlfarth (2) before 1738, the Mystery of Lawlessness, German and English editions of 1728, 29, the Ninety-nine Mystical Sentences of 1729-30, a book on marriage as the penitentiary of man, Ehebuchlein...Menschen of 1730 and the hymn books. His community built houses for neighbors and held theater when they marched the road.

This Ephrata community was analogous to a large family, although one feels under this surface a substitute for a real family more like a gang. How to explain celibacy's extremities? A prejudice against life? You can see it in theosophy in the cycle of death and rebirth. One life is never enough for Those dying generations at their song, as Yeats says, dying generations, entropy, life is never sufficient. Celibacy, tantrism, magic rituals, incantations, death, rebirth, drugs oppose existence in and of itself. Their negativity was so strong it cast itself as positive and maligned the positive as negative. This negativity also produced huge creativity, push a thing down here and won't it come up there? Polarized or natural? We are unable to think clearly when the poles are reversed! Commonplace phrases of esoteric teachings increase the reversal: rites, secret rituals, mystic theosophists, altars, fires, esoteric speculations, Celestial Eve, heavenly virgin, spiritual virgin, celestial virgin, virgin Sophia, mixed with the mystic, dogmas, awakening, simplicity, revival. All you need do to attract a following is tie up a sack and call it love. But he negative joined to its opposite is still negative, so if St. Paul had a agapetae, meaning a live-in snuggle bunny, the real version of which might be David's girl who warmed him on his deathbed, there will be some priest who will give him a bastard, and some critic to write about it. The root of negativity is to overturn authority to create authority. The one thing none of this bears is the thought that all human relation, every act, every thought, each moment is infused with redemption, so no matter what you have done, thought or said, there is redemption for it.

Even if Beissels's tract against marriage has no known copy there is plenty of evidence of his view. About 1735 he was awakened in his hut by intruders who whipped him presumably for seducing one of the Reformed wives to seek her virginity with him (Sectarians, 254). All opposites! Along with chastity came mortifying the flesh, full beards, pilgrim costume with the implicit violence of that garb. Whether to be a full hermit or merely a monastic seemed the choice in their minds. Of the immediate temptations in this holy melancholy we have Buñuel again to spank. To borrow from conspiracy theory, the processes of this control through sexual repression are mesmerist, patterning and depatterning, inversion techniques, hypno-illusions, etc., and even if we question the applications in politics, the techniques are seen in the Pennsylvania communes.

Zinzendorf

There were many of these mystics. The meditations of Zinzendorf riding horseback to take the gospel to the Indians may resemble the meditations of Crashaw and Donne, but Zinzendorf, like Beissel, is also a consumed megalomaniac. His mysticism is tantrism, his community autocracy. Pennsylvania is more than toy statistics in the bathtub however. Christopher Sauer's wife went one snowy night to become the spiritual bride of Conrad Beissel at Ephrata. Alexander Mack, called Brother Timotheus at Ephrata (Sectarians, 88) got baptized for his godly father (after his death!) founder of the Baptists. Conrad Weiser bounced from Lutheran to Beissel to Zinzendorf and back to Muhlenberg's daughter after burning all his prayer books. The New Mooners of Pennsylvania, played trombones at the new moon in the wilderness, holding that prayer ascended in the waxing but descended in the waning moon as did deceased souls (Sectarians, 431). The entrance to the doorway of the Ephrata chapel was so low to force the entrant to bow (404). Iron was prohibited in their building because it was unholy in the Temple, as Sachse says in reference to Nebuchadnezzar's dream, "that even in Babylon iron was known as the symbol of destruction" (402), but while iron may have been destructive it was not deceitful. When it served them to spurn Babylon they did, but when it suited them they would confirm their learning with Rosicrucian Egyptian-Babylonian ritual. Even while surrendering their so called "Babylonian names given them by their parents at baptism they substituted new spiritual names" (305) embracing Babylon at every turn, admitting Eckerling (Onesimus), Miller (Jaebez) and Weiser (Enoch) to the grandiose Order of Melchizedek (386). It was a new/old testament Babylon Talmud/Gospel.The Zionitic Brotherhood at Ephrata could in as little as 40 days so completely physically and spiritually rehabilitate as to lengthen your years to 5557 in perfect health and contentment. The initiate restored to the state of perfect innocence of Adam was reborn by fasting, chanting, and drugs, a perfect Castaneda of the 18th century (361f). The good news for historians is that these elites, living so long, must still be alive to be interviewed. Of course they are yet in their baby hood, so incompatible with rational discourse. The underlying purpose of these efforts, as reported by Sachse of Johann Frantz Reguier, was the good Pennsylvania quest that "by a strict life and bodily denial one may grow and increase in sanctification" (362). And when the self-administered treatment failed and he had after some time regained his senses, Reguier went off "on July 15, 1735…for Georgia in the hope of meeting Count Zinzendorf and through him learning the way to perfection and sanctification' (quoted by Sachse, 364). "The fortunate adept who had thus successfully completed the ordeal, with physical body as clean and pure as than of a new-born child, his spirit filled with divine light, with vision without limit, and with mental powers unbounded…should finally be able to say to himself, I AM, THAT I AM." But we know all this. What Van de Wetering says of the Zen Buddhists is said of every human spiritual master when you deed him your home and your estate. They will give you a reading.

Sachse says they aped the monastic customs of the Middle Ages in night vigils, tonsures, regalia, priesthoods (375) and mystical theology that included baptism for the dead, even more primitive than reincarnation, the most absurd instance being the creation of "immunity for deceased or absent kinfolk" (366) gained by the outer faith. It's all about the outer. Look who has entered the human plane, they tell you. So medieval that in his high calling and self esteem Beissel was forced to adopt the office of Vater instead of merely Brother, a title "too commonplace" (367). These orders, rituals and hierarchies of law and outer ceremony were just opposite of the Oley Newborn so totally dominated by inner vision and yet the impetus to egotism and domination were the same. Signs, countersigns and mystics, how embarrassed was Yeats when he practiced the rituals of the Golden Dawn?

The words of Beissel and Zinzendorf had a bite. They could not mutually humble themselves enough even to meet in the flesh. Beissel "regarded himself as of a higher rank in the theosophical fraternity, considered it against his dignity to call on Zinzendorf (Sachse, 448) who responded by letter to Beissel that he "should descend from his spiritual height that others might sit alongside of him without danger to their lives" (449).
This pearl comes from the same Zinzendorf who threatened to kill Weiser. The two are paired. Both loved secret orders, paraphernalia of medals, robes, rituals and the power to command others. The Moravians had the Order of the Mustard Seed and the Order of the Passion of Jesus (Sachse 4548f). Both were social visionaries. Zinzendorf held seven ecumenical conferences to found "one congregation of God in the Spirit" (442). Throughout these things their words about Christ and love are enticing to the extreme, but the liberty and love they spoke were completely opposite their autocratic practice of the Bethlehem and Ephrata communities (435). "The tail of a comet portended switches with which God would lash and judge them with great "calamities (417), compelling Beissel to issue Mystische Abhandlung uberdie Schopfung und vondes Menschen Fall (1745), A Dissertation on Mans Fall, Englished in 1765 (433) which Peter Miller (Agrippa) says "has gone further than even the holy Apostles in their revelations" (422). No wonder Christopher Sauer says, but not in devotion, "this one must be regarded as a God" which he calls "spiritual harlotry and idolatry" (343, 44) in regard to Beissel's hymn to himself (Hymn 400 in the collection Sauer printed for Ephrata in 1739, Zionitic Incense Hill, (Zionitischer Weyrauchs Hugel (320). But of course this is a god-awakened soul that word awakened, being the favorite of them all, as it had several meanings. Peter Miller in the Ephrata Chronicon claims that Beissel can render himself invisible, "the spirit under whose guidance he was, at times made him invisible" (332).

If it is a mystery how Blake yokes such disparates in his visionary poems, bespeaking at the same time primitive biblical devotional language with an allegorical remake of the nature of man, describing his Fall in mysterious quaternaries, he is just another lovable case of 18th century mind whose renaissance cabala remarried a pietistic lifestyle. Were there such extremes in England who turned up in Penn's Woods with the renaissance pictographs of the spiritual bride? Blake got it from Swedenborg. Swedenborg got it from Zinzendorf. Thus the teachings of "the occult philosophy of the Mystics and Cabalists of the Middle Ages [were joined] with the severely simple Sabbatarian worship and tenets set forth in their primitive Bible teachings" (German Sectarians, 31). There was always a heavy blend of Rosicrucianism in Boehme, in the mystics of the Wissahickon, in Beissel, Zinzendorf, in them all, Muhlenberg aside.

Theosophists well loved, notconfined to particular time and place station Percival Lowell in Occult Japan to make what we can only call a space jump when he undergoes possession in his Shinto ritual. Whether to be possessed by food or the gods? Or a girl? Shall we be satisfied merely to say our names in sobriety and let that be enough? Was Sauer's criticism mere sour grapes, for "all was well between the two men until Sauer's wife left her husband and family to follow…a stricter observance (313).

Mania can't hold still. Beissel is one who "journeyed towards the valley of the Pequea to bring about an awakening among the Mennonites, who had settled there, many of whom had become followers of the seductive Bauman and his noxious "Newborn" teaching.

"Many thousands of these people cared so little for religion [or so much] that it became a common saying in reference to such, who cared neither for God nor His word, that they had the Pennsylvania religion" (Spangenberg as quoted by Sachse, I, 442).

Hawthorne's Dimmesdale impregnated a naif to prove that human nature cannot be altered by ordinary means.

There was a continual flow between the Moravians at Bethlehem and Beissel at Ephrata about 1742 (Sachse, German Sectarians, 424).

Esoteric teaching, secret ritual, mystic lies

have truth meant as bait for all poor flies

who find the sweetness bitter as they dive,

but with enjoyment skim the surfaces.

Deeper dive to bitter seeming truth,

which is so sweet and satisfying beneath.

This is the way of opposites and earth.

Nothing is so unimportant as the principled/unprincipled conflict of principals.

Megalomania is incomplete without projection upon the other, that holiest of psychological mechanisms where the outer world is inflicted with the inner.

The comet must be punitive if Beissel says so.

[One is tempted to be facetious and say that elaborations upon these practices in Felker's Schwamp coined a new deep pit baptism. In this ritual celebrants had their feet tied to a rope suspended from a branch over water and were raised and lowered three times head first. You believe that? Also, Oley Judizers practiced left and right side baptism. Then there was foot first baptism, reserved for sects whose final planting at burial, made ready to be raised. so they were buried standing up.] Why douse a sick girl with buckets of water three times in the middle of the night? To be able to say at her funeral that it was just in time for her death. Sprinkle or plunge, forwards or backward, splash one or three, that's obvious Pennsylvania.

Some Sources:

On the musical compositions of Conrad Beissel. Peter Miller to Ben Franklin, President of the American Philosophical Society (1768)

"The Present, which I have added, was the Father's musical Book, wherein are contained the most part of the Musical Concerts, by himself composed. It did cost three Brethren three Quarters of a Year Work to write the same: by the Imbelllshment thereof It will appear, what a great Regard we had for our Superior, In the whole Book there Is no musical Error. And as It was written before the Mystery of Singing was fully discovered, there- for are not all the Keys therein mentioned. The Masters of that Angelic Art will be astonished to see that therein a Man, destituted of all human Instruction, came therein to the highest Pitch of Perfection, merely through his own Industry. Also, that when he did set up a School In the Camp, not only the Members of the Single Station were therewith occupied for many years : but also the Family- Brethren were also thereby enamoured, that their natural Affection, to their Family suffered a great Loss.

It Is a Wonder, how the even Notes and few half-notes can be so marvellously transposed, as to make thereby 1000 Melodies, all of 5 Tunes, and some of 6 Tunes, yea some of 7 Tunes, also that they came not one the other In the Way. In the Composition the Father had the same Way as in his Writings, viz : he suspended his considering Faculty, and putting his Spirit on the Pen, followed its Dictates strictly, also were all the Melodies flown from the Mystery of Singing, that was opened within him, there- fore have they that Simplicity, which was required, to raise Edification. It Is certain, that the Confusion of Languages, which began at Babel, never did affect Singing: and therefore is in Substance of the Matter in the Whole."

Peasant art, tramp art, folk art connects to the radical religious Anabaptist and demonstrates the integrity of its life. The extremes are interesting juxtaposed against each other but are nothing compared with old world extremes where celebration of baptism was held to be worthy of death. Switzerland vs. Pennsylvania was the greater contrast.Finally, it's very rare to find someone who writes down something and does reveal their disease in the writing.

Conrad Reiff (1696 -1777) in the Journey to Pennsylvania (1756)

2011-06-20T16:02:00.000-07:00

The natives in Journey to Pennsylvania may be the first in all travel accounts to talk back to their critics, those moralizers like Gottlieb Mittelberger, who is not exactly Herriot in Virginia or Pastorius in Germantown. The organ master is a gossip and part time immigrant, sticks it out just a few years, which charms us in its way. He arrived in Pennsylvania in 1750 and was so offended with the "lawlessness" that he returned to Germany in 1754 to publish Journey To Pennsylvania (Frankfurt, 1756). He there exposed the many "unfortunate circumstances of most of the Germans who have moved to that country or are about to do so" (1), but not so many domestic particulars." Someone told me," he says, "and I partly found out for myself" (8).

His translators Handlin and Clive call these "direct observations" when they concern the plight of those unfortunate poor Germans who sold their lives to Redemptioners as indentured servants to get passage. But other than Capt. John Deimer and a preacher or two, Mittleberger personally mentions only two others by name. These he judges such bad examples of “the wicked life some people lead in this free country” (84) that he appoints their perdition. All the license and misbehavior of Pennsylvania he summed in Conrad Reiff and Arnold Huffnagel of Oley.

Overcome with the difficulties “on my voyage to and fro” (9) with the "unfortunate circumstances," Mittelberger brings “divine retribution” to these Yahoos, a retribution that has overtaken many an immigrant over the years. Most recently William Least Heat Moon of Blue Highways searched his “shelves [for] accounts of exploration and travel in America,[and] pulled down Journey To Pennsylvania...astonished to come across an anecdote in the Journey about one of my grandfathers [Conrad Reiff] eight generations back" (River-Horse, 92). Moon learns what Mittelberger said all along. They “often met to pour ridicule and insults upon the preachers and the assembled congregation” (84), were the worst of all misguided folk who had "changed their faith" (83) and “in 1753 these two scoffers met again, according to their evil habit…” (84) and came to ruination. Moon thinks the "assertions about divine retribution are mendacious" (93), but Mittelberger says it “had a visible effect on other scoffers." Moon facetiously agreeing with the adversary, says he is proud of his ancestor, "like grandfather, like grandson," (92)… he "he did die unshriven!" (93).

But Moon is wrong; first however to Mittelberger. He was an organist and patron of organs long before he was a journalist. Conrad Reiff had an organ so the two must have met early. Organs were the purpose of Mittelberger's journey. “The organ was waiting for me,” he says, “ready to be shipped to Pennsylvania. With this organ I took the usual route down the Neckar and the Rhine…I spent nearly four years in America and, as my testimonials show, held the post of organist and schoolteacher in the German St. Augustine’s Church in Providence” (7). As such his narrative has been believed for centuries, but the tales, arguments and “uproarious laughter” he reports in farcical court cases are nearer the truth. His accounts suffer a little from an abuse of adverbs such as, “often,” “frequent,” so that his style seems to question his assertions

But the substance of his organ bringing is much questioned. Rev. Brunnholtz, a Lutheran associate of Muhlenberg, reported to Halle in 1752 about organ building and existing organs in Pennsylvania, but "Mittelberger is not mentioned at all in the letter, raising the question of just what his connection with the organ was, if any” (Brunner, 51). Mittelberger says there were six organs in Pennsylvania at that time, "all of which came into the country during the four years of my stay there," but scholar Brunner says there were "certainly more than six organs in Pennsylvania by the time he left in 1754,” and “the six he mentions did not all arrive during his stay" (53). These "exaggerations and inaccuracies," "embellishment of the facts casts doubt on his credibility" (53), and "since his claims concerning the two organs he was directly connected with as organist seem to be false, it is unlikely that he imported any organs at all" (54).

So mendacity brought Mittelberger into question and if there is doubt about his organs, so to speak, what about the rest? "Reliable” witnesses may have “told him” of the scoffers’ actions, but he would have known the details of 1753 since he did not repatriate to

Germany

for another year. In his zeal to put the offenders in their place he says that Conrad Reiff died of an act of “divine retribution” when he lived in fact two decades more. It’s not that Mittelberger didn’t know them well. Huffnagel and Reiff were long time citizens. Huffnagel owned land in Oley since 1717, (Philip E. Pendleton. Oley Valley Heritage. The Colonial Years: 1700-1775, 177) and assigned a tract to Reiff in 1743. Their lands adjoin in 1750 (198). Mittelberger got around to see them and most everyone. He was an organist in Philadelphia before taking similar employment with Lutheran pastor Henry Muhlenberg in New Providence. Based on his talent with the organ, and because he is a new journalist, we expect him at social events.

The big event in January 1753 was the funeral of Conrad Reiff's mother, Anna. Employer Muhlenberg officiated. Mittelberger would have played the organ if it had not been held at a Mennonite church which had none. The journalist loved all of the "large and distinguished assembly"(Muhlenberg, Journals I, 353) and especially his subjects, but this perhaps would be before he learned of their follies, before the eagles felled Reiff in his field [not], which would have been summer. The funeral, the eagle attack, Mittelberger's departure from Muhlenberg all occurred in 1753 three years before the account published. We imagine him at the funeral talking about how it was "still pretty difficult to hear good music" (Journey, 87), making chitchat about private English "spinet or harpsichord concerts." Mittelberger would boast, "I brought the first organ into the country" (87) and about the "fine and good instruments" people came "up to thirty hours' journey" [to him] to hear. "Here's how to make better organ pipes, out of cedar trees with "a purer tone than those made of tin" he would say (56). All the organs "came into the country during the four years of my stay" (88). Lo what a love of music will do, he even played "the organ for a savage family" (63).

At the reception would he not have told about the "clumsy hangman" (73), the young wife and the old wife (71-2), the turtles at the market (50), the fireflies (61)? But even though the funeral was in Salford they wouldn't talk of Oley. Crude Oley was home of the "New Born" monsters: "such outrageous coarseness and rudeness result from the excessive freedom in that country" (48). Mittleberger knew Reiff was one of them. They mocked the "preachers" and made "the German and English newspapers of Philadelphia" (45) laugh with their crudities. Well what do you expect, "totally unlearned men [preached] in the open fields" (44). "Most preachers are engaged for the year, like cowherds in Germany" (47).

Mittelberger's believing translators (Handlin and Clive) say he is accurate in "direct observations" (xvi) of the Redemptioners, who enticed poor German immigrants into selling years of their time for the price of passage. "Later scholars who have reviewed the evidence have been well impressed by the accuracy of the book" (xvi). But is it a direct observations that "A flight of golden eagles" attacked Reiff in his field because of his "wicked life," tried "to kill him?" This was no symbolic eagle. The eagles of justice came to tear, "apologize apologize," they threatened poor Stephen, "if not the eagle will come and pull out your eyes!" Yes, Joyce in Portrait is quoting Mittelberger. Such fear was supposedly struck in Jacob Reiff's heart, that "from that time on he would not trust himself out of his house." Mittelberger says he only survived at all by the intervention of his neighbors. But this is every whit and whistle a crock. None of it happened:

"Reif...was suddenly attacked in his field by a flight of golden eagles who sought to kill him. And this would have happened without fail had he not piteously cried for help, so that some neighbors came to his assistance. From that time on, he would not trust himself out of his house. He fell victim to a wasting disease and died in sin, unrepentant and unshriven. These two examples had a visible effect on other scoffers, similarly inclined (85)."

To continue mocking the facetious report, the good news for our Conrad that day was his bargain for the better part. He got Huffnagel's place in heaven for his own in hell says Mittelberger: "The two scoffers struck their bargain." Huffnagel "who had been so ready to get rid of his place in Heaven, wanted to go down (italics ours) to his cellar the next day [and] suddenly dropped dead." He bargained for hell and died in the basement! Let that be a lesson! Immorality here has no chance, except Pendleton thinks it apocryphal (108) at least by half, but what does he know? Huffnagel did die in 1753, suddenly, that is, intestate. So Mittelberger is shall we say one for two, for Reiff lived two decades more (d. 1777). One further correction however he did not live unshriven as the reprobate Least Heat Moon grandfather, and neither as Mittleberger's "victim to a wasting disease... unrepentant," but "in hopes of a joyful resurrection," as we will see. So be careful wh you trust.

After the funeral of Conrad Reiff's mother Anna above, where we recall the offender and righteous met over bowls, Muhlenberg wrote, "she had several married sons who are well thought of, and some of these profess the Reformed religion while others believe in nothing but the transitory riches of this earth" (Journals, I, 352). Conrad was the one with money but not the Reformed religion. He married Margaretha, daughter of New Born scion Philip Kuhlwein, brother-in-law of Matthias Baumann, founder of the Newborn. Conrad inherited Kuhlwein's land in 1736 (Pendleton, 108) and Baumann's (d. 1727) to boot! The configurations of the Baumann and Kuhlwein estates of 1725, adjoin on a southwest axis, roughly equivalent to the Conrad Reiff estate of 1750. This is success in "transitory riches."

Huffnagel and Reiff were however "archenemies of clergy," tasteless as it seems, "scoffing at them and the Divine Word." They heaped "ridicule and insults upon preachers and the assembled congregations," and laughed at, "denying Heaven and future bliss as well as damnation in Hell" (Journey, 84). We are prepared to address the theology of the Newborn in an upcoming Berks County Review which will show some mitigation to these reports, but what Mittelberger says of them Muhlenberg says of Reiff's equally errant nephew, Conrad Gehr, that he "ridiculed" the "Word of God and the other means of grace," mocked the churches by holding an "assembly of worship in his [tavern] house on Sunday" after which the enforced offering, "three pence apiece," was "consumed in drink," argued that "revealed religion," "heaven and hell," are used by preachers merely "to make a living" (I, 352-3). That Huffnagel and Reiff "often met" implies the same sort of affair nephew Gehr was running in his tavern.

What Mittelberger complained of in 1753 however had been commonplace three or four decades earlier in the disorder of the frontier. One group focused this lawlessness better than others, that being the New Born. If Mittelberger is upset about their mockery of the church, it was old hat by 1753, but you need an audience for anti-worship. The "meeting" in Gehr's tavern in a good example.

History reads better as science fiction. Since we have deposed Huffnagel and Mittelberger has left the state, now fast forward to Reiff ten years later, in September 1764, at a collection taken up for the building of the Wentz Church, successor to the previously established Reiff Church founded by his brother and father. The intent of the fund raising campaign was to build a "House of Worship...in the Nurture of the Lord and to the Praise of His Holy Name." (The Perkiomen Region, I, 38). Fundraising efforts had fallen short. The first collecting tour raised only 12 pounds, 4 shillings. A second effort outside the immediate congregation found themselves "obliged to apply to the Charitable Benevolence of all well disposed Christians to contribute their Mite towards the finishing of the said Meeting House.... George Alsentz, the Evangelical Reformed minister, urged (August 1764): "In as much as the generous contributions hitherto received from kind friends were far from sufficient to defray the expenditures of our church we are obliged to turn to other benefactors to find out their benevolent disposition toward our enterprise…May the God of all mercy send his richest blessing upon all benefactors, such is my wish, and in witness of the foregoing I hereunto set my hand" (41).

This tour did better, it raised 15 pounds, 9 shillings. They went to New Jersey, through Goshenhoppen "and then up towards Oley" (44). There were 400 contributions, illustrious names names like Philip Boehm gave l shilling, Peter Miller, Beissel's right hand at Ephrata, editor of the Chronicon Ephratense, gave a shilling, Friedrich Hilligass (father of the first Treasury Secretary) gave 5. The two largest gifts, however, 10 shillings each, were made by Georg Welker and Conrad Reiff (39-44). So where is the renegade now, considering the language of the subscribing petition, its references to "pious exercises," "the Nurture of the Lord " and "the Praise of His Holy Name?" What happened to the "the Holy Scriptures old, outworn fables, tomfoolery, and the like, and said that the parsons had to make so and so out of it in order not to lose their bread and butter"(Muhlenberg I, 139). Acceptance of the pious language of the petition must evidence a return from those who had "changed their faith" back to a reaffirmation of his Reformed roots. The Newborn were never politic in their beliefs but as "harsh and uncharitable" as Philip Bayer had been before his reconciliation (Muhlenberg I, 357).

Money was short, so again, when the first church was dedicated in November 1763, the "costs of this undertaking were greater than anticipated. "... incurred just as a depression hit the colonies following the French and Indian War" (Gladfelter I, 384). The assembly authorized a lottery to pay the debt, since "the members of the German Reformed church in the township of Worcester, in the county of Philadelphia, have erected a church and school house in the said township, the expense and costs whereof have been so great as to amount to a debt of six hundred pounds more than they are able to pay" (Gladfelter, I, 384).

The Will

The change in Conrad Reiff in old age is just plain frustrating to mockery, but so is the language of his will, which deviates substantially from convention, in the statement of faith that forms the preface. Conventional language took a generic form. For example, the will of John Pawling of 1733 is word for word identical to the will of Christopher Dock in 1762.

"That is to say, Principally and first of all I give and recommend my Soul into the hands of God that gave it, and for my body I recommend it to the Earth to be buried in a Christian like and decent manner at the discretion of my Executor, nothing doubting but at the general Resurrection I shall receive the same again by the mighty Power of God, And as touching such Worldly Estate wherewith it has pleased God to bless me in this Life I give devise and dispose of the same in the following manner and form."(The Perkiomen Region, III, 17, and II, 25).

">Slightly different phrasings, spellings, a different order of sentences and a shortened order of divine disposition mark the statement of Gabriel Shuler's will of 1776:

"First, I recommend my Soul in the hands of God my Creator, and my Body to the Earth to be buried at the Discrition of my Executors. And as for my worldly Goods & Effects, wherewith it hath pleased God to bless me in this Life, I give and dispose the same in Mannor following…"(The Perkiomen Region, II, 45).

Nicholas Wohlfart, in 1788 is content merely to say that "first of all I commend my Soul into the Hands of Almighty God that gave it" (The Perkiomen Region, I, 129). Mathias Sheiffle in 1790 says only that "first I Deliver my Soul in to the Hand of the allmighty god, and my body to the Earth to Be Buried in Christian Lick manner. . ." (The Perkiomen Region, I, 110).

Conrad Reiff's confession of faith in this is even more evident if we compare his will with his father's, Hans George (1726) and his brother George (1759), neither of whom make any such statements: "I, John George Reiff of Salford Township for County of Philadelphia and province of Pennsylvania, Smith, being weak of Body but of Perfect Mind and Memory do make and Order this my last will and Testament. . ."(Riffe, 20). Conrad's brother George, proceeds: "Will of George Reiff, Germantown, Philadelphia County Pennsylvania…" (Riffe, 28).

Conrad's will of 1777 is as different from his father's and brother's as it is from the general community, which suggests there was a point he wanted to make. "In the name of God Amen. I Conrad Reiff of Oley township in the county of Berks and province of Pennsylvania, Yeoman, being infirm and weak in body but of sound mind memory and understanding blessed be God for the same. And well knowing that all flesh must die therefore do make my last will and testament in the following manner. I recommend my infinite soul into the hands of Almighty God who gave it to me and my body to the earth whence it was taken in sure and certain hopes of a joyful resurrection through the merits of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ."

Four notable points of departure which affect the disposition of soul and body set the will apart .

1) His "infinite" soul he gives into the hands of God.

2) His body is not recommended "to the Earth to be buried in a Christian like & decent manner at the discretion of my Exects." He has neither "decent manner" nor discreet executor. He replaces the negative "nothing doubting," with his "certain hopes,"

3) not of a "general" but of a "joyful resurrection" that has his body, taken from earth once, taken once again. Finally he concludes that this all will occur

4) "through the merits of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" and not through such efforts as those offered by the secretary of Mr. Penn, through "our good works and obedience," cited below.

This statement must have been made for his progeny and the public as well. The import that he does not trust in his own merits, riches or wit, but in the "merits of my Lord" and in the "certain hopes of a joyful resurrection," is not that of a scoffer, but words that Muhlenberg would ratify.

The important conclusions that emerge from this are, first, that the words of his will are the best confirmation we can get that Mittelberger, if he had the details wrong, got the essence right. Conrad Reiff leaves just such a personal testimony in his will because he was guilty of the behavior Mittleberger charged. He goes out of his way to contradict his past. A renunciation of the Newborn sinlessness is explicit in his statement, hence, we conclude, Mittelberger's report, at least the first part, is credible.

Second, the phrase "through the merits of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" is a polar opposite of the Newborn view reported by Boehm that "they claim that they have essential divinity in themselves" (Life and Letters, 1728, 161). As to the meaning of the phrase, Muhlenberg suggests that "the merits of my Lord" means "to wrap oneself in Jesus wounds…the words mean rather the perfect payment which our Mediator made for our sins, guilt, and punishment, the perfect righteousness which He obtained for us by His life, sufferings, and death. To inwrap one's self therein means to appropriate and assume Christ's merit and righteousness in faith. . ." (I, 123). To a Newborn such language were repugnant, for the Newborn "pride themselves in their own righteousness" (Muhlenberg, I, 357). Conrad Reiff would not have been the first to come full circle, but he might have been the last. Newborn proselytes who founded the Oley Reformed Church.

In larger context the phrase "through the merits of my Lord" had been a rallying cry of George Whitfield when he made his trip through Philadelphia in 1739. Distinguishing between the outward and inward fruits of faith, so important to the Newborn who denied the need for the outward, also a point of contention for the Quakers, Whitefield 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 noted from the Weiss' dialogues, 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). These outward things Conrad Reiff now affirms by commitment to the outer Christ, the one whose external merits become the means of his hope for the "joyful resurrection."

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).

On April 24, 1740 Whitefield preached thus also at Skippack, but of course the doctrine of the Substitution cannot be thought peculiar to him or to the Moravians who assisted in the Skippack visit (Journals, 410). It is likely Conrad Reiff had several chances to adopt such a phrase in his life and in his will and it is good possibility that he did so through the Moravians. So it is a loaded phrase that he there plants to demonstrate in a word that in his end he had come back to his beginning.

Works Cited

Raymond J. Brunner. "That Ingenious Business" Pennsylvania German Organ Builders. Birdsboro, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1990

Chronicon Ephratense. Ephrata, 1786. Tr. By J. Max Hark, Lancaster, 1889.

James Y. Heckler. History of Franconia Township. 1901. Bedminster, PA: Adams Apple Press, 1993.

The History of Harleysville and Lower Salford Township. 1886. Bedminster, PA: Adams Apple Press, 1993.

Glatfelter, Charles H. Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, l7l7-l793. 2 Vols. Breinigsville, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, l980.

Mittelberger, Gottlieb. Journey To Pennsylvania. Edited and Translated by Oscar Handlin and John Clive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. The Translated by Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein. Fortress, 1958. Reprinted by Picton Press, Camden, ME.

The Life and Letters of the Rev. John Philip Boehm. Edited by the Rev. William J. Hinke. Philadelphia: Sunday School Board of the Reformed Church in the United States, 1916.

Pendleton, Philip E. Oley Valley Heritage, The Colonial Years: 1700-1775. Birdsboro, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1994.

Pennypacker, Samuel Whitaker. The Settlement of Germantown Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: William J. Campbell, 1899. Reprinted 1997 by Higginson Book Company, Salem, MA.

The Perkiomen Region. Vols. 1-5. Adams Apple Press, Bedminster, PA, 1994.

Reiff, Harry E. Reiff Families in America. Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1986.

Riffe, Fred J. Reiff to Riffe Family in America. 1995.

Sachse, Julius Friedrich. The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania, 1708-1742. 2 Vols.
Philadelphia: 1899, AMS:1971.

George Whitefield's Journals (1737-1741). Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles Reprints, 1969.

The Library of Elisabeth Bechtel

2011-04-16T17:14:00.001-07:00

"Are there also men who are not conscious of possessing a higher spirit than brutes, and yet maintain, that they can keep their minds in a good state of rest in this life?" This question is in one of the books.

The loss of German devotional ways goes to the heart of language loss, culture and art. What were the picture oriented, word oriented, Bible centered devotional ways Yoder ties to the roots of Central Europe "from the tombstone to the barn...the six-pointed star with its variations, the tulip-rose-lily, the tree of life" (272)?

Click to enlarge

A presumed objectivity supposes disagreement about origins. Stoudt's "brand of Christian mystical theology leading down from medieval Catholic mystics to Boehme and the Pietist hymnists of the seventeenth century" (Don Yoder, Discovering American Folklife, 274), is compared with less Catholic, more secular Protestant church or sect, or with cast off pagan signs. But Yoder admits that "the devotional life of the Pennsylvania Germans centered around Bible, hymnbook, and prayerbook, and strangely enough, fraktur" (275). "It was a visual, moral, and religious symbol of the individual's relation to the institutions within the folk culture--the church, the school, and the family" (275). But these devotional ways were really an understanding of their relation to the natural world. That faith failed coincident with the loss of the natural.

John B. Bechtel, scion of that family of Old Mennonite ministers of Hereford Pennsylvania, bequeathed four titles from the 1830's and before, the earliest being of 1745, to his daughter, Elisabeth Longacre Bechtel (8 February 1852 / 22 April 1885). These, along with New Testaments, Mennonite song books and catechisms of the 1870's passed to her daughter Anna Bechtel Mack (1880-1970) to be reclaimed from her attic after both Anna and her own daughter Anna Elizabeth Reiff Young (1910-2005) passed. This transmission extends well beyond a century. Elisabeth Bechtel's husband's name, Henry Mack (1854-1946), is stamped in one song book. Henry was the brother of Andrew Mack, who succeeded John B. Bechtel as minister at Hereford. Two catechisms are inscribed by Anna, while the works from the 1830's contain the names of the Elisabeth's mother, father and grandfather. Elisabeth Bechtel seems to be the common denominator of all these, but being that some are the professional books of a minister and that other members of the family were Mennonite ministers, additional books were surely owned. These were kept by or for Anna when her mother died prematurely in 1885.

This provenance in its own leads to understanding of loss of the devotional ways. John B. Bechtel and his wife had eight children, but five died before their parents, including Elisabeth. How were the books passed down? Elisabeth's mother, Mary, who lived until 1898, left them as a keepsake for her grand daughter, Anna Bechtel Mack, who on her 21st birthday also inherited several hundred dollars from this grandmother. The books kept incognito for a hundred years their past owners' lives.

The devotion of this culture existed in a narrow window in Pennsylvania from the 1750's to the 1850's (Yoder, 274), always allowing precursors and survivals. Even if today such classics in German are scarce, they were commonplace then and reprinted, some 3151 titles, books and almanacs in the German language in America between 1728 and 1830, most in Pennsylvania, handed down on the basis of family association and esteem. Two dozen books in 1800 was a large number.

The most important of these would have been the Johann Arndt, Wahren Christenthem that John B. Bechtel obtained from the estate sale of his father's library. John B. wrote on the first free end paper in English and German, "Bought at the Sale of my dec’d Father Abm. C. Bechtel Nov the 15th 1861 / John B. Bechtel /paid $1.00 / one of the administrators." On the paste down his father had written, "Subscriber /Abraham C. Bechtel / January the 26th 1833."

This inscription evidences an extensive Mennonite relation in the family. Abraham C. Bechtel (1776 -1861) is not to be confused with his father, minister Abraham Bechtel (1749-1815), trustee in 1780 for an acre of land given by Henry Stauffer (grandfather of Henry Stauffer Mack?) for the Colebrookdale meetinghouse (Wenger, 251, 121). Abraham C. 's brother, Bishop John C. (Clemens) Bechtel (1779-1843), was also a "preacher at Hereford in 1816 and bishop in 1830," (Wenger, 251) whose son, John B. Bechtel (1807-1889) was ordained at Hereford in 1848. Four generations of Bechtel Mennonite pastors existed, with John B. Bechtel's grandson, Henry G. Bechtel (b. 1878) ordained a minister at Vincent in 1914.

The Wahren Christenthem that Abraham C. subscribed was two parts bound in one, 941 and 232 pages respectively, 2 copper-engraved title pages and 63 full-page woodcut emblems. It is the most frequently used devotional book for more than two centuries among Mennonites. Three German editions appeared in Philadelphia and Germantown prior to it, Ben Franklin's (1751), Christopher Saur's (1765) and Johann Georg Ritter's, 1830.

In 1749 Lutheran pastor Muhlenberg equated Arndt's book with the Bible, "take hold of the Holy Bible and True Christianity [Wahren Christenthem] every day" (Journals, I, 219). It fostered as a central principle an inner life maintained by continuous meditation of the good. The images of paradise in Dutch art are said to come from this, but in Ardt there is a conflict between those who profess the good, but do not represent it in their lives. Children call this hypocrisy.

The chief attribute of the good might be called "mystical union," which critics do call it, but they invert the meaning. Arndt says that wrestling with hypocrisy produces continual joy. Faith bridges the feeling of union with its absence, but without feeling where is the faith? So if one were to wake up one day and have an inner life, which means beautiful, whole, joyful, but did not know where it came from, it would be a product of this union.

Critics offer stages in analysis: purgation, illumination, and union, but Arndt says it all begins with union, which sounds presumptous to claim unless as a product of exercise, but Arndt maintains union is accomplished only by union and not by effort. To effort, effortlessness sounds like backing a horse into a stable forwards. The beginning and end of unity in Arndt is doing and not doing simultaneously. By faith the believer is incorporated into Christ through the Spirit. Arndt thus places mystical union at the beginning of the Christian life not the end.

Such views were implicit in Abraham C. Bechtel's subscription of Wahren Christenthum. Mennonites might be expected to be ordained if their name were chosen out of a hat. Most of Bechtel's family and the community at large inclined to such practice.This happened to John B. Bechtel at age 41, who was also important in sustaining the continuity of Hereford Mennonites. He may be compared with George Clemens Reiff in Skippack who served a like function of preserving the Old Mennonites during the Oberholtzer schism of 1848. Christian Clemmer, who had been the pastor in Hereford, went with Oberholtzer's "New" Mennonites and Bechtel was elected his successor.

On 17 January 1852, John B. Bechtel of the Old order, paid $75.00 to the New for its one half interest in the old meetinghouse (Good, 19). Bechtel wrote that Clemmer "publicly denounces us from the pulpit as trouble makers and good-for-nothings" (Ruth, 283), but in later testimony for a Supreme Court of Pennsylvania Appeal (Samuel H. Landis et al. vs. Henry H. Borneman et al.) (1883), Bechtel conciliates that "the object of the conference is to keep the congregations[s] together and to promote unity of opinion, and if any trouble arises to consider and adjust them" (Wenger, 51-52).

The lot that fell to John B. Bechtel in 1848 at age 41 does not prove he had been yearning for the call, but his annotation of Die Wandelnde Seele in 1835 suggests interest, multiple signatures with the comment, “a very useful book.” A list of birth dates at the end suggests he used it almost as a family Bible. The title from the first English translation of 1834 is, The Wandering Soul; or, Dialogues Between the wandering Soul and Adam, Noah, and Simon Cleophas Comprising A History of the World, Sacred and Profane From the Creation Until the Destruction of Jerusalem. Two copies in German remain among those attic books, 1833 and 1834. That of 1833 is inscribed by both Bechtel and his wife Mary.

He signed it three times, first with wife, Mary L., on the front paste down in English and in German. Across from these signatures, on the first free end paper, he writes with a flourish in both languages, "Wandering Soul / a very useful book." Turning the page, he signs again in German in pencil on the verso and on the recto of the second free end paper, utterly certain to establish ownership, writes large in English, in ink with a flourish, "John B. Bechtel / February the 13th 1835."

Like Wahren Christenthum, The Wandering Soul had great popularity among Mennonites. Written in Holland in 1635 by Dutch Mennonite Jan Philips Schabaelje, translated into German, it was published in seven different editions in Pennsylvania from 1767 to 1833. It is cited today in the debate over dispensationalist theology, that is, of the last days. Wandering Soul has been reissued by Preterists, who hold that the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD fulfilled the major part of The Apocalypse of St. John. hence that the last days have already occurred. In its fictional account of world history, Wandering Soul supports aspects of preterism as opposed to the English theology of dispensationalism that only began to effect Mennonites after revivalism was adopted by Mennonites in the 20th century.

The oldest title in that attic collection is Die Ordnung des Heils nach dem Catechifmo Lutheri. (Bernigeroda, 1745), a technical commentary on Luther’s catechism, with a long preface by Samuel Lau and many contemporary notes in the margins in ink. The Order of Heaven is externally identified three different ways. It is signed on the first free endpaper “Benj. German,” presumably the first owner. There is a book plate on the rear paste down, "Bibliothek, Pastor G. R. Brobft," and it is signed in pencil “W. W. Deistler(?). The extensive notes in ink suggest it was used for instruction and that it belonged to a pastor, as indeed the bookplate states, but another bookplate of a Pastor Brobft, on the Lutherifche Kalender of 1875, identifies a bookseller in Allentown, Pa. as "Paftor G. R. Brobft & Co." (See, Almanacs in the George A. Smathers Libraries Rare Book Collection) but other such calendars exist as early as 1854: Der Lutherische Calender fuer das Jahr 1854

This book certainly could have belonged to Elizabeth Bechtel's brother in law, Peter Mack, Lutheran pastor at Hummelstown before his premature death in 1879, possibly retrieved by Henry Mack, the dates for this are right, or it too could be from the library of John B. Bechtel.

Wahren Christenthem and Die Wandelnde Seele are landmarks of German pietism much appreciated by Mennonites but not in themselves Mennonite in nature. Their mystical-evangelical outlook, the desire for a deeper, more genuine spirituality, much in the air in the 1830s, is universal among Mennonites who examine every boundary between their faith and the world.

Most of the books of Elizabeth Bechtel's time and before are in German, but she wrote English as her father seems to. Her signature occurs in German "Elizabeth S. Bechtel" and opposite, in English, "Lizzie S. Bechtel" on successive free end papers, in the German / English New Testament (1870). It seems the Bechtel family spoke both languages and her husband Henry Mack's entire ledger is in English.

There are two other testaments. One has no date or marks of any kind. Das Neue Testament. Philadelphia: Georg W. Mentz (J. Howe, stereotyper), 1831 [504pp with plates] The other has a name in German written twice on the front free endpaper and is dated, January 1836. There is a blue paper cutout marker at p. 189. The publisher and bookbinder,George Mentz, was not a printer. He used a variety of Philadelphia-based printers to print his books.

All of this collection seems kept for a purpose. Two identical copies, leather bound with clasps, of Die Kleine Geistliche Harfe der Kinder Zions (Lancaster, 1870), lay side by side. Zion’s Harfe, (Zion’s Harp) was the Franconia Mennonite Conference hymnal. It had 40 select Psalms in a first section, followed by 474 hymns in a second section under a new title, with some variation in the later editions.

These two copies belonged to Henry Mack and Elizabeth Bechtel when they were courting. Elizabeth's is signed "Lizzie L. Bechtel / Feb 11th ’72." His is stamped "Henry S. Mack."

Henry was a chorister whose obituary says that he was “active in Mennonite church work for 60 years, serving as chorister and musical director in many churches in this part of the state.” Historian Wenger calls him and his brother, Andrew Mack, choristers since 1860 (120) so obviously he loved music. He led the singing the whole of his life in several different congregations (Wenger, 120). Henry kept their songbooks together all the years after Elizabeth had died.

New testaments and hymn books were standard fare in Mennonite families, as were catechisms. One of the most popular catechisms was the Christliches Gemuths-Gesprach (1869) by Gerhard Roosen. (Lancaster: John Baer’s Sons, 1869). This has been signed on the first free end paper, "Annie B. Mack / Mar 7 1897."

The English translation, Christian Spiritual Conversation (Lancaster, Pa. John Baer’s Sons, 1892.) is also signed, "Annie B Mack. 1897" on the first front free endpaper, A couple of pages are bookmarked, p. 84, on the baptism of small children and p. 292, "On Predestination." (Cited in Funk )

Another popular devotional in the collection is a dual language German-English translation of Habermann's Prayers of 1873: MORNING AND EVENING / PRAYERS / FOR EVERYDAY OF THE WEEK / BY / /DR JOHN HABERMANN. (Philadelphia, IG. Kohler, 1873). The titles themselves tell a tale. This is initialed in pencil on the second front free endpaper, "AM," that is, Annie Mack. If we think that the use of a book tells us something of the user then we note that several pages are dog eared,. Especially notable this way is p. 103, "prayer of a child" in which we see perhaps the wrestling of the young Annie, beset with difficulty with her stepmother yet trying to subdue herself to the good:

"Give me an obedient heart that I many patiently obey, serve and show myself obliging and ready to do every thing which they desire, that is not contrary to the will of God, nor at variance with my soul’s salvation, so that I may receive their blessing and live a long and pleasant life. Protect me against sin and evil society, so that I may not provoke and grieve my parents with hatred, sadness, unfriendliness, contempt, disobedience and stubbornness, so that I may not bring upon myself here on earth both their and thy curse."

So these books are a window we see through to ask further of Elizabeth Bechtel, who lived from 1852 to 1885, whether her love was great enough to live even longer, togive a testament of herself for future centuries, she for whom otherwise all else known is that she had red hair and was one of 8 children.

John and Mary Bechtel buried five of these children, all those whose birth and death dates are known, two at Christmas, but they themselves lived into their eighties. That they had both signed their names together in the front of Die Wandelnde Seele fifty years before is sheer luck, but more than that, together the events speak of faith and love. These did not fail them, even if they seemed to. How could they have believed that even with the loss of their daughter Elizabeth in 1885 they would be honored more than a century later, that their lives would be remembered. Unbelievable, that they would be celebrated at some 150th wedding anniversary.

The tragedies in these lives are too evident, but what about the triumphs, the enthusiasms, the love? When things look bad, when Elisabeth had died, it was darkest. We learn then that that’s when you most need to find the love and faith to believe it will be all right, because it will. The promise to a thousand generations is partly fulfilled in the ten from now until someone, some family member, stands in your place and remembers you. We learn from these generations that it’s going to be all right in the midst of pain and sorrow, to believe in your children, in yourself, in God.

The Rest of the Books

Anna's family, Bechtels, Longacres, Stauffers, Macks, pastors, singers and schoolteachers, were practical intellectuals, an important glue of the infrastructure. Elizabeth Bechtel's death diminished the reading and thinking of her daughter Anna, for her mother was not there to buffer the child from the difficulties of younger brothers, farm bother and little schooling. It was in Anna to want education because it was in her family. While her literary remains were sparse, her gifts to her children were not. All finished college. She had few books growing up, although Henry's Ledger mentions a few schoolbooks, no fairy tales. Aside from the catechisms of 1897 above there is only an Appleton's Third Reader, dated Oct 28, 1889.

Anna's hunger for the life of the mind was evident in her conversation of later years and also in the books she gave her daughters that tell the story of what she missed. She could not have been more proud when she complained she lost her daughter who began to read at the age of two, nor done any more to have fostered imaginative delight in her.

Her daughters' childhood reading included:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. "Elizabeth Reiff / June 19, 1917. / From Mrs. Lenters."

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. "To Elizabeth / From Mother / Dec. 25, 1917."

Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper and other Stories. "Dec. 1915. Elizabeth Reiff."

Raggedy Ann Stories. "Florence M. Reiff."

A Child's Garden of Verses. Robert Louis Stevenson. "Florence M. Reiff / 3319 N 15th St."

Oliver Twist, inscribed "A. Elizabeth Reiff."

Little Women and Little Men, both inscribed "Elizabeth Reiff."

Longfellow’s Evangeline.

Aurand’s Collection of Pennsylvania German Stories and Poems.

Yes there is a Pilgrim's Progress, a Bible given by her grandfather Mack in 1926, but Anna's attempts to nurture imagination in Elizabeth were more thwarted by that child's love of the rational than they were for lack of reading, what she herself called "realism," giving no quarter to the fantastic or whimsical. Alice fell fallow where William Osler would have flourished. In her last years Elizabeth read Malamud's The Fixer with pleasure, liked translations of the Aeneid, Tolstoy, Dickens. Her aversion to theological exposure, reading and understanding were probably gained from her mother's milk. She hardly knew Wahren Christenthum and Die Wandelnde Seele were even in her attic let alone that they were signed by these ancestors.

Possessing a Higher Spirit

One of the last Dutch resorts of faith and doctrine was the popular catechism, Christliches Gemuths-Gesprach by Gerhard Roosen. Christian Spiritual Conversation, the first English translation (1856), takes a reasoned appeal.

Question: Are there also men who are not conscious of possessing a higher spirit than brutes, and yet maintain, that they can keep their minds in a good state of rest in this life.

Answer: whenever any of these men become of another and a better mind, and get into other reflections, (which cannot take place, however, without divine agency) and continue in them,--they will come not only to a knowledge of the nature of their condition, but also to a knowledge of themselves, and their higher spirit.

Question: “in what then, does man’s true knowledge of himself consist?

Answer: This knowledge consists in two things 1. to know that of and from himself he has no power to do or understand any thing, either in matters external or spiritual. 2. To have a knowledge of his transitory and troublesome state of life” (5-6).

Cited

Johann Arndt. Wahren Christenthem Sechs Bucher vom Wahren Christentum…Nebst DessenParadiesgartliein (Four Books Concerning True Christianity).Philadelphia: Georg W. Mentz und Sohn, 1832.
German/English New Testament. New York: American Bible Society, 1870.
Douglas L. Good. The Growth of a Congregation. A History of the Hereford Mennonite Church. 1988.
The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. Translated by Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein. Camden, Maine: Picton Press. Fortress Press, 1942.
J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. 1985.
John L. Ruth. Maintaining the Right Fellowship. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1984.
Don Yoder. Discovering American Folklife. Essays on Folk Culture & the Pennsylvania Dutch. Stackpole Books. 2001.
Bechtels of Old Mennonite Hereford, PA

Note:

Hans George Bechtel, George Bechtel a minister in the Palatinate in 1727 came to Philadelphia on the the same ship Jacob Reiff returned from his first trip on, the Mortonhouse. Bechtel preached at Hereford until his death in 1759 (Wenger, 251).

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

2010-11-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

This image here

Kisses

Edel Herz (95) thinks fraktur more attractive without all the blood and death. Thinking "reformation themes of Christ as king" (Heart, 59) supplanted by a "cult of wounds and blood" (Yoder, Picture-Bible, 57), Bird, Yoder and Weiser (Fraktur, I, xxvii) agree. Preoccupation with the Blood was a New Testament certainty and prominent in medieval and pietistic Europe, seventeenth century 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, who plead the personal heart of Jesus identical to Pennsylvania. Consider Henry Vaughan's, "Dedication," Some drops of Thy all-quick'ning blood / Fell on my heart," or the astonishingly beautiful 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)

This was the scandal of Pietism, the "sweet personal Christ of the Pietists" and their "tender endearments." This "unashamedly casual" (86) Jesus was "mein Freund," to whom love letters address, (87) the same "freund" translated both 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]. These freund folk famously invoked 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. (Thomas Wyatt). Anyway 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.

No Kisses

Bird puns upon this 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 here is from an anonymous drawing (91), but there is no transmission of the wounds and the blood from Count Zinzendorf (95) to 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! 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 does not exclude intelligence, obvious from Boehme and Beissel to Rittenhouse and Muhlenberg and my own people of passion, insight and action, not harnessed to the academic. 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.
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.

The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians (Ephrata, 1749)

2010-09-20T10:13:00.001-07:00

One understands Christmas, Messiah, Four Quartets, stables and cattle, but how understand the world of affliction when it blazes so bright one forgets to live, where flesh, ashen at a knock at the door, beds the night in straw? We live in peace and safety the same way Mennonites take the thousand pages of their martyrdoms day by day, for granted, and without the blood. They call it their Bloody Book, Theatre of Torture. That was the threat that was. Do you want to make a Mennonite sing? Respighi, [listen here, while you read] his Lauda per la Nativitὰ del Signore, reechoes: Segnor tu sei desceso de cielo en terra (Lord, you have descended from Heaven to earth), which wraps the whole: vestito en carne humana, that is, wrapped in human flesh.

Something happened those nights to Mennonites. It was Christmas Eve. They couldn't get to the theater, I mean our equivalent of theirs, were up by the fire roasting, quilting, repairing tools. The first Mennonite theater was incarnate, clad in human dress. A Mennonite was asked to separate from the world. "Free yourself from the world!" There was a rehearsal in rituals and rules of Mennonite theater that they concocted to set them apart in plain dress and wooden knives, a foolishness of action and rhetoric, but to them God had made foolish the wisdom of the world.

As a metaphor this theater shamed Aristotle's that merely wanted to rouse pity and purge fear to perpetuate the state. The Mennonite was in desperate conflict with the state that put him to death. While the populace in Athens was getting theatrically pacified and cleansed of contradiction, making society safe, in Bern the theatrical mirror saw Mennonites crucified, burned and drowned. But murder is countermanded when peasants overcome, so European states undertook more subtlety in their subversion. They discovered pride, which insistent does not rouse the noble. Seduction works, we all know that, and if not we learn it from Mennonites old and new. That was the pride the Franconia rules were intended to prevent in the wearing of hats, but it was also of shed blood with a witness against the mirror and all its good.

Lo, how a Rose e'er blooming from tender stem hath sprung.

American Mennonites escaped the fire to reproduce a book of tortures read in their centuries of peace, Bloody Theatre or Martyr’s Mirror, translated from Dutch to German, (Märtyrer Spiegel, Ephrata, 1748-9) to English. Two centuries of horror behind, ten American generations ahead, Mennonites still ask today, “could you forfeit your life.” Whether we have the courage to sacrifice ourselves we can not know, failing opportunity, neither could they know what they would do. Hostage to their martyrs, denied the peace of freedom the martyrs had died to collect, “could you forfeit your life as he did” is asked again and again.

Bloody Theater rehearsed the persecutions of previous centuries by contrasting the “gay performances” of “Grecian theaters” with martyrs’ deaths. Not cheery, not “merry," "comedies,” these entertainments, were “valleys of death where nothing will be seen…,” yet “the soul will nevertheless rejoice” (6). The tantamount of horror follows the theater motif, “O that Satan would show himself, as he really is, and that the world, too, might come forth without disguise or mask” (10). We shall all run from our seats.

It is masquerade worthy of renaissance shrines and anti-shrines, the House of Fame, The Bower of Bliss. Our leading lady, this world's mistress at court, “Satan appears to be a prince or king and the world a noble princess or queen." Free yourself from the world! A Queen whose hands can ne'er be clean, and the court's lesser figures, “servants and servant-maids, who follow them as pages and maids of honor, appear as cavaliers and ladies, reveling in joy and delight” (10). This is starkly opposite the prophecy of latter day where the least shall be as David and David shall be as the angel of the Lord. Only the bloody then are undeceived. You want to run up and ask a Mennonite how Christmas got tied up with the crucifix.

Little child of Jesse's lineage coming, as seers of old have sung?

All they had to do was conform. They refused to conform, but without bloody hands. The "nonresistant doctrine" forbade all taking of life or resisting evil at all. Jesus' commands were literal, "give to him that asks of thee," "turn the cheek," and Paul, “resist not evil but overcome with good.” Their friends had to explain in the American Revolution that they just didn’t know any better, "their present blindness to their own essential interest proceeds from an unhappy bias in their education, and not from a disaffection to the present Government" (J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 61). Mennonite-disdained violence against enemies, neighbors and the world in all its sorrows in Philadelphia was the background and context of their world.

Just Say No to Goberment

The thing about this "unhappy bias" was that it was against the worldly constant of self defense, revenge and resistance. Mennonites would swear no oath, not even go against the oaths sworn by their fathers to the British king. They could not renounce the British government in 1777, not because they loved the British, but because Jesus had said, "swear not at all," and because they feared being “forsworn.” Such literalists held their grandfathers' promise to the previous King George as binding on themselves. How can you not love such intransigency?

["We do swear or solemnly declare, that we deny all obedience to the Pope of Rome; and further swear or solemnly declare that no Prince or Person whatsoever hath any Right or Title to the Crown of Great Britain but his Majesty George the Second and his lawful Issue."] It is non conformity all ways, an old world view, an anti-intellectualism run amok. Hostage to time and fearing the torture their Bloody Book would produce, friends and neighbors had to keep repeating, "their present blindness... unhappy bias [taking Jesus literally] is not a disaffection to the present Government"(Wenger, 61). American government mostly blinked an eye.

It came, a blossom bright, amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.

If government blinked their own bishops would not, for though they were against swearing and war, and favored loyalty to the British Crown (their apriori oath of loyalty before), Mennonite Bishop Christian Funk, supported the Pennsylvania government because its constitution gave freedom of worship and promised to exempt from arms and the oath. He supported a war tax to the American government. So in 1778 Funk was deposed. We can ask all we like about who is our enemy and never know who is in the mirror.

Two important issues raised by Ruth's Funk's Mennonite oaths are (John L. Ruth. Maintaining the Right Fellowship. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1984, 153-55):

1) why did the bishops excommunicate Funk on their own authority but asked the people to reinstate him?

2) What do we make of the principle raised by Funk's dilemma that if a man is right in his vision but impolitic in its expression he is wrong?

3) What of the opposite postulate, that the man is wrong because he is wrong?

Chamberlain! Bingo! Of no. 1, is not this what they charge Socrates, but at least they don't call him by his first name! that he alienated the elders by his lack of consideration (of their feelings) and Jesus who failed to defend the status quo? SURELY! Mennonites continually raise and illustrate societal debating, should the individual in the right give over truth to merge with the group (that is wrong)? Too insistent upon the truth, the world called it.

Isaiah 'twas foretold it, the Rose I have in mind.

The Franconia Rules of 1933

The storms of this Mennonite Theatrical glee were alive as recent as 1933. In the Franconia Conference Rules Mennonites were still making fun of the sensitive, powerful majority world, poking sticks of incense at evangelicals and Sunday golfers. We do not have to dig deep to find these spiritual goads, for roses have thorns and spiritual Mennonites mud.

Consider how "this conference feels the necessity of urging the leaders of the church" to "not speculate on unfulfilled prophecy such as the doctrine of the Millennium" (Wenger 431). In the hundred years since Darby there was hardly talk of anything else in the evangelical Church. The millennium! The tribulation! An old Mennonite turned Baptist once asked, "do you still at least believe in the tribulation?" The answer must be, not while I'm bleeding! The difference about the tribulation is that Mennonites were, had been and sought to be in it while the rest hid out to escape from it. Non-conformists.

Take another Franconia discipline, "we as a conference, protest against the evils of the radio… condemn…the heretical doctrines on the air." You think the preposition was against thought control, mind control to control masses, the "powers of the air," what blue states convinced themselves of. It goes deeper. Mennonites too prophetic think violence on TV affects the rate of high school murders and that children contract vibes from peers like virus. Free yourself from the world! Just what can't you foist on a Mennonite? Vibes in the air? Yes! Don't go to the mall.

With Mary we behold it, the Virgin Mother kind.

And what about the Franconian theatric of "flowers and other decorations are to be omitted at all funerals held in our meetinghouses and members are not to clothe their dead in black."

To not clothe your dead in black throws the whole school of death in a hat. It throws out the notion that “He's gone to a better place! We wish him well! " Speak no nasty Black of the afterlife, even if preachers wear it here it is to renounce the world. Just one thing to stop pretending the guy didn't die in his sin. Flowers aren't going to change it. None but the Rose the Mennonite sing. The flowers are there to convince the cousins in the pew that they too will have a fragrant not a flagrant end. When flowers fade it pictures the conflict of the world.

To show God's love aright, she bore to us a Savior,
When half spent was the night.

Mennonites contradicted the flesh done up in the mortician's dress, flying in the face of custom: "dress him in black and paint his face so he looks good. He’s just off for a interview up the road." Franconians say, he's dead, now judged. Dress him up in white or red. White for sins forgiven, translucent in Christ's robe, or red for sins he carries to his bed.

Inner Adornment, Symbolic Dress

The venture of Mr. Wm. Blake sharpish into the post-modern psyche proves we clearly see how the "mind-forged manacles," protocols of black, bind the present that those of the primitive past set free. Mennonites want to liberate from the "foolishness," of banking, "stylish automobiles," "bankruptcy law," "voting," public office, just about every shibboleth each election makes cool: CONSUMPTION! Consumption democracy in the name of conforming individuals. These got the "plain people," over here in trouble over snaps and zippers and buttons and bows.

The unvarnished Mennonite was not much on style. Fashion rejected, took it hard. Plain dressers are bad for business, but the Mennonite is not solely to blame for boring the world. The Proverb said, sound judgment is "an ornament to grace your neck" (3.22) so dress in that, and the fisherman was guilty too, who sought beauty not of "braided hair, gold jewelry and fine clothes," but a "gentle and quiet spirit" (I Peter, 3. 3-4). Paul wants you to dress "with good deeds" (I Tim. 2.10), a deacon not measured by his banking prowess should "manage his children and household" (I Tim. 3.12). Mennonites sound and dress like Jews whose best adornment is the tefillin: "tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads" (Deut. 6.8). A sign on the hand and a symbol on the head, embodied in phylacteries, literal exaltation of the Word of God upon the person. Don't they belong together, Franconia and Torah? Symbolic dress stimulates spiritualness, ages that at one time appreciated the new Millenial London, Paris, Rome.

Vestito en carne humana!

"Maybe it's not the Mennonite we should blame for dramatizing this, but the Bible," says World Empire, Web bound cocooned desire. "It's a good thing there are so many different versions, we can be comfortable and not have to surrender to the Order of Christ," says the Internet army: "There's truth and room for all you can be."

This argument still says, "well if this country wasn't free, then where would Mennonites be?” Back in the old country dead, no doubt. But when they wheel you out to disciple yourself to this edge, there is more than heaven and earth. There is the Sovereignty of God. Ouch. There is the predestination of the Elect. No! There is Providence. Oh! Take Mennonites for what they're worth, truth in opposition to the world, and not for what they're not worth, which would be founding the fourth world empire. Free yourself from the world.

Don’t affiliate with chorales says Franconia. The horror! Or theater (disingenuous) recitals. Never! Or academies. Set an example of abstinence, not drain the dregs of the cup. Their Confession in its absurdity to the modern contrasts nicely with those current world codes for children that read: "Please don't OD in public.

"Please don't commit suicide at home. Please don't blow up your high school, take ecstasy and drive, but you may prolong your adolescence into your 50's. We did!"

Mennonites think skeletal resistance. It's life as art, Mennonite theater in the theater of the heart. The actors took off no caps. There was no stage. The audience changed. Or not. There was no show. The show went on. It was living.

Hypocrisy In The Camp

Old Mennonites doubled down when it came to the charge all children make that they are hypocrites. It isn't hypocrisy that "vitamins are valueless" until we hear about vitamin D. These are counted as sincere vs. the hypocrisies there: "Believe in evolution until we tell you not, then believe as told, if science is wrong it is just more right."

Mennonite separation from the world was so great that their field of contradiction was even greater. Viewed from failures at the Commandment Gates, the higher you climb the farther you fall, but a long fall draws sympathy for the underdog so then you're back up. Fall from a standard of worldliness and your children will hold you in contempt. What they gonna do, tell you you were worldly! Get angry, be foolish, smoke to death, go to concerts (if you must!) disagree with neighbors, show your prejudice. You don’t measure up to TV morals or the news, let alone PBS. But if you believe you should sacrifice your life and fail from that then we suckers for the high ideal hold you succeed. If you simply want to please you cannot be said to fall. In the religion of social position one size fits all. Faith falls on pebbles.

Oh flower!

Maybe the small "c" in contradiction makes Mennonites not proven Adepts. It's just that some contradiction is honorable, some not. It's hard to meet a pretentious Mennonite. Maybe that’s a sign their ideas are working. Mennonites wrote 4 books in 150 years. Not long on theology, they consider eternal security speculative, the millennium debatable, but believe in spiritual community, mutual submittedness, the small group over the large. You might call it Mennonite mythology that opposes a culture which says "do what you will is the whole of the law." This is no dimple on the chin of doubt. Free yourself from the world. Why are you doing it? The flesh, the sin nature, throw up the hands, shrug the shoulders. Are you sure you couldn't do more? Or less? Preparation for heaven laments a failure of the could, but there is no shirking of duty to the would. Such language gives psychology a holler.

In Bunyan's tale, Christian on the road to God is distracted by the world, by Vanity Fair, flesh, its weakness. That unsubtle moral made it to Puritan land. Hawthorne's preacher, Dimmsdale, preached the sin he was most guilty of. We go from that to repeating that "public moralists practice the secret sin they most condemn." William Bennett, the living moralist is addicted to gambling. Guys and prostitutes in Sunday sermons carry on all Saturday night. Public morals are protective covering. Right again, right is wrong. That's why they call it the devil with its twisted rhetorical triumphs. Arguments with this devil go on forever. It always is, what if.

Consider the do-gooders and everything they do where all men are created equal in the blurb. Speak to immigrants when they cut you lawn, says Colin Powell, but flame out against offenses in newspaper codes. Could Jesus talk to them? Blake? Socrates? Put them to death with the Mennonite. Well, Blake escaped. Their hero and ours! Moralists of England, moralists of France, how you disrobe your hierophants. Leaving only those who kill for peace, lie for truth, those stand up fundamentalist liberals of earth.

Let us go back to yesteryear, to that era long ago.

Freedom of Conscience

Part of the purpose of Mennonites as precursors of Gandhi and King was to understand the oppressor, not Christian’s favorite thought. Apostle Paul echoes the judges who put them all to death. In his own words to Agrippa, “I put many of the saints in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them [like the judges above and below]. Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished and I tried to force them to blaspheme. In my obsession against them, I even went to foreign cities to persecute them” (Acts 26.9-11). What is too good for him?

In context, the Mennonite was blamed for corrupting the State Church, like early Christians did of Saul’s synagogue. Keep reading that sentence. On the other hand the keepers of the state equivocate two principles. First, that of being pious, as related in the death of Hans Van Overdam, 1550: “we were all betrayed by a Judas...who seemed to be one of the most pious of all the brethren that were there, so successfully could he practice his deception” (Theatre, 487). Watch out for the super pious! These must always be the greatest offenders, with Saul, Dimmsdale and the esteemed mouth.

The second principle of subversion is to engage in dialectic: “...they imprudently allowed themselves to be drawn into disputations with the false prophets, though they had been sufficiently warned...for it is not given to everyone to dispute...when these poor lambs engaged in controversy, they became perplexed in their consciences.” Finally, “the poor, ruined lambs were released from prison and recanted everything...” (Theater, 487).

Mennonites were not asked to kneel at Caesar's hand and call him good. They were merely asked to conform, believe. When you start giving your life to what you are supposed to conform to, where do you stop? Will you die to wear a beard? Will you die to be sprinkled, immersed? To publicly confront authors? To speak a certain language? Where does freedom not force us in its quest? Into symbolic speech and beyond!

There is danger however when different members sacrifice in varying degrees, when all are made to feel that the greatest must obtain for the least. You could go to death as much from tyranny of your own group as from the oppressor. Cannot the group confront the dominance without your death? When dominant, will your group do what was done? Some Mennonites have symbolically shunned offenders. Some sent a death certificate to the parents of a member who gave the local governance some offense. Read again, again.

After the fact of their tortures the question for American Mennonites was whether they too would leave their “flesh on the posts” of the “strait gates” (Theatre, 6) over issues of how to worship God. The reference to the strait gate means narrow, “strait is the gate and narrow is the way.”

Moral Confidence

Oh flower!

Not only Mennonites face the quandary of courage and choice. Psychiatrist Robert Coles found a parallel in Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazis and his execution before war’s end. Asked “what would you do under such circumstances, under Hitler, if you were there, back then,” Coles replied, “by the time that question had been put to the class, not one of us was able to answer with any moral confidence.” (Coles, 198-99).

Free yourself from the world? Coles cites his teacher Niebuhr that there is only a “potential disparity” between psychiatry and religion, counseling that “stresses of social adjustment” and religions like Mennonites diametrically oppose social accommodation. There is a polar disparity between psychiatry and total committment. Counseling stresses adjustment. Normality means avoid conflict, anxiety, depression, not to continue“the essential ‘madness’… that won’t settle for the rewards of social conformity.” Social conformity, promotion, tenure, couldn’t counsel Bonhoeffer out, so he was martyred like Mennonites, who were always social heroes.

Another problem of Accommodating Ethics occurs when Coles and his physicians confront malnutrition in Mississippi to be in turn rejected by Washington bureaucrats. RFK tells them that the real problem is the anger and pride inside themselves. Yes Kennedy was a Mennonite. They think malnutrition is an object. "Why can’t the government see it? We’ve done all we can." But the problem is inside them.

It's the same with Bonhoeffer. Niebhur says. “we looked up to him as if he’d been sent to inspire us" ( 201), but they didn't go back to Germany. As Crito does with Socrates, they urge his escape. Martyr and hero find themselves in an accident of time with a fixed purpose. Fixed purpose! The Mennonite martyrs don’t give in. Why not, they could have lived? "The difficulty my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death" (Mennonite Socrates). When the audience far and wide, Niebuhr, Coles, Crito, Mennonite congregations of the new world, sees the problem outside focused by another, they are the problem.

The extracted conscience portrayed in homily and false dilemma caused Mennonites to mourn their weakness, claim they couldn't chose. What would you do? What would you do? The answer is either to die or betray and be left with the endless guilt of words. The weakest ethical offenders make the greatest moral defenders, the greatest adulterers. It is why the flesh beds the night in straw. But look, who is that beside?

O Flower, whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air
Dispels with glorious splendor the darkness everywhere.

The Life Within

How does it get there? They don’t say. Commonplace in small deeds, unnoticed acts, choices, hard stands with the attitude. I’m no hero. High flying words, advanced degrees plagued with their fears that they are not good enough. So don’t be good. Profiteer your doubt. It is always a curse to be ever observing conscience outside and not in life.

There Are No Liberal Martyrs

What makes an intellectual anyway but doubt and information? If it comes to debate about liberal righteousness the response is ad hominum. "What have you done," they ask as if heroism were PR and you cannot see in the human face all of its acts. Controversy between the inner and the outer smacks of those pietists of the soul, who do not fit the Social Adjustment Franchise@Assassinating Pietists, that is, Albrecht Ritschl (History of Pietism, 1880-86), “so overpowering and far-reaching that today, outside the small circle of specialists, pietism is still generally associated with anti-intellectualism, hyper-individualism, and holy-group separatism… (Heiko A. Oberman, preface in Johann Arndt, True Chrisitanity, NY: Paulist Press, 1979, xii). This “antagonism was continued by the Protestant dialectical theologians of this century, chief among whom was Karl Barth” (Peter Erb in Arndt, op cit, 1). In the end you can be a martyr if you just give up and surrender.

This is not to say tests don’t exist for the masses in their racist thoughts and crucifixion of their depressing lives without faith in the sacrifice of their children. Who wants to be a moral hero? Everyone. Who doubts their commitment? Everyone. You’ve got to find it in the belly not the brain.

The “defenseless” took much of their inspiration from the early church: “even the Roman bishops, in the first three hundred years, were mostly all martyred”(Theater, 357), the point being that “true Christians have never persecuted the innocent, but were always persecuted themselves” (357). For the modern era, this raised a question for Mennonites as to whether they were true Christians, not because they had attained the inner state of Arndt’s union, but because they had been persecuted enough. Outer trumps inner again. Of old they were persecuted by institutions that no longer exist, “because they did not obey the mother holy church and the decree of the Emperor” (357- 58). When church and empire were survived by free will and democracy the defenseless had a hard time coping.

Shunning

True Christians never persecuted the innocent; “the holy apostle commands no greater punishment for heretics, than to shun...Tit. 3:10” (Theatre, 359). New world Mennonites shunned their own nonconformists, either heretics of doctrine or of the flesh taken in the world. It is hard to get a list of offenses. One might do as mindset directed, punishment mediated as the group would, men treated differently from women of course, according to the sin.

Heresy was not the original edict for which shunning occurred; it was style of life. It might come from wearing the bonnet, driving a car, or sleeping with the choir director. The motive for such rigors derives from “former times, in the times of the cross, when men could assemble only under peril of their lives...” (Theatre, 361) Then, “heavenly riches were sought above all things; for earthly possessions were altogether insecure.” But in a time of peace, failing persecution, “simplicity is changed into pomp and ostentation. Possessions have increased but in the soul there is leaness” (361), which sums up a large part of Mennonite schism, that the world had overtaken Christian in his race. Without persecution to stir his ardor he was subverted by his possessions. John Herr inspired his Reformed Mennonites with calumnies of their brothers’ worldliness.

True Man, yet very God, from sin and death now save us.

Persecute Yourself

Free yourself from the world sounds a little strange. With inner and outer so opposed how could it be other? Depression is accounted for when anger is great. “For, though outward persecutions now and then cease, yet every Christian is called to sufferings and conflicts...each must live, not after the flesh, but after the Spirit; each must suffer in the flesh, that he may cease from sin.” (361).

The understanding is that when the outer world suffers, the inner is at peace, but when the outer is peaceful the inner suffers. There was one way out of this,“if you then find, that the time of freedom has given liberty and room to your lusts, persecute yourself, crucify and put yourself to death, and offer up soul and body to God.” (361).

The whole argument of Bloody Theater is that without persecution Christians fall away. But how long can you persecute yourself? Inner hair shirts and psychological flagellations call to repentance and self doubt. These applications of mind-body dualism become a theology of depression, for what better or more accessible way is there to persecute yourself than to accuse yourself that you are unworthy, guilty, weak, don’t measure up? Others beside Mennonites do this. What could be their motive?

It can be a theology for oppressing others. If you don’t measure up how could they? Of that reading of the Gospel that absorbs mind and body in one new man, little is said, that is, of the one who doesn’t persecute himself but renews the mind.

Mennonites were caught in a warp when there was no persecution by church and state in the new world. Without persecution where was the motive for “words and colloquies in edifying instructions, and awakenings toward godliness?” When the outward persecutions cease, “examine...whether...you have not lent your tongue to please frivolous, worldly men with vain and useless talk...whether you did not defame your neighbor’s good name...by lying and deceit ministered to avarice” (361-62).

This reads like the confession of every church teaching broader than the Mennonite repeated in pulpit: “Many, when they could not use the world, turned of necessity to God, as their nearest refuge; but as soon as a little breathing time set in, they again began to lean towards the world; the parents became rich, the children luxurious and wanton; the world caressed them, and in course of time they became respected and lifted up; the reproach of the cross was relinquished, and the honor of this world stepped into its place.” (Theater, 362). So 16th century religion menopaused to the present. But on the other hand, it is still looking around.

In broader context the martyrs of all denominations and names played a role in the freedoms of civilization in the breaking of Church and Empire. Some would say that all freedoms stem from this while the Anabaptists might say that modern freedoms are themselves a persecution.

Two Wrong Paths

There are then two ways to go, if you can’t be godly and prosper, or be persecuted and betray, how can you live. It’s like what Socrates tried to teach, rein in extravagances to achieve self-government or everyone's late favorite Chaung Tzu, "free yourself from the world."

The psychologists of the world the Mennonites disdain have raised a question as to whether Mennonites are harboring a death wish by making people murder them. The world is filled with loathing that they persecute themselves.

This charge could occur with every principled stand, that if only the stubborn would let go of that fixed idea we could let them live in peace. That we might let them live at all is the catch, for by what right do we rule? Only by the rule of onformity. On similar grounds I. F. Stone charges Socrates for what Stone argues is a deliberate aggravation of his judges, the jury of 500. Socrates early and late practiced theater against the world. He says, "me you have killed because you wanted to escape the accuser and not to give an account of your lives" (Jowett).

That is the point, the world will do anything to anybody to avoid facing itself. The It-Self here is the operative word. In Mennonite terms the unclean garments the It-Self wears are just opposite the garments of the Lamb. Socrates wants a man to do nothing common or mean when in danger, nor to use any cowardly way of escaping death, even in war, so he refuses escape and all the petty escapes of his sentence urged upon him.

In much the same way the old world took Mennonites to death and prison. The new world was more happy but still with consequences, for this is how the lawless think: you could steal their cow and they won't prevent it! "What do you say about going over and getting some corn?" It was thought you could do just anything to Mennonites. That's why their pacifism is unlikeable. It encourages lawlessness. Of the French and Indian War Wenger says "there is no evidence that Mennonites used self-defense in any attack made upon them" (58). For the evil-doer the only danger was their inability to calculate who among the Mennonites were truly devout (thus nonresistant). The cry of the devout, "vengeance is mine, I will repay" echoed with "because he loves me, says the Lord, I will rescue him." But human contradiction is as great a force as piety. There is danger to a thief who comes upon a lapsed Mennonite and gets a beating. You can't always tell whether it was Harvey or Philip Mack coming down the road.

What is the inward nature of the Mennonite today, the defenseless Christian in name? When Funk began his crusade to bring them into the American fold, brothers and sisters were able to abstract their desire not to kill into not to pay war tax into not swear allegiance. The heart of legalism abstracts issues from specific to general. Not to work on the Sabbath means not to heal. Not to kill or do harm means not to support those who do. Colonial Mennonites couldn’t swear the oath any more than Huckabee believe in evolution. Why should either? Pledge allegiance or pay the tax, but reservations occurred. Be at peace before communion is an example. Men apologize to the church, shed tears, confess discourtesy to their wives they haven’t yet told them about! Sham suggests doubt.

The Adverse Party as the Advocate

Pick on Mennonites? The defenseless? No. No more than Israel you idiot. I will revenge, I will repay. So let us see the higher good and the happy fall to earth that is our own. Consider righteousness with an anti-Petrarchan view, as late Elizabethans did. Beauty is not meant to magnify contradiction, but to “show the adverse party as the advocate,” as Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXXV designs. Mennonites as deep conflicted as any “clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun / And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.” The ideal cloys. The only problem with Roger Clemens' false innocence is Marion Jones'. We must turn it upon its head to see what's really true. Good humor is more tolerant than law. Maybe it is the only true love, realistic clay about which not much is said, not to hide the ill, indeed confess aplenty, and to urge “no more be grieved at that which thou hast done.” No more be grieved that is the sum. Mennonites didn’t say.

In Switzerland, some carried wooden knives in their belts to show their contempt of murder, were sometimes dragged behind the boats of Lake Geneva. Much in the way of torture and oppression was practiced against them all, especially as is noted in the Mirror where Mennonites and Anabaptists were tortured for communion and their views withal. It was like the theatre of Rome that informed the martyrs’ trials.

In their “kindness” the authorities of that time coaxed a general confession first, conducted in the leniency of their compassion in the surrendering up of one’s Mennonite fellows and parents. One example among many, a “Miss Elizabeth,” for whose sacrifice only one cure can occur, in a first arraignment was accused of being a teacher. Beadles found a Latin Testament. The horror! When asked to take an oath she replied that “we ought not to swear” quoting and liberally believing that same testament of the words of Jesus that centuries later her family believed. Nor would she identify this family or her friends. She said the phrase “holy sacrament” did not appear in the Testament. She failed the test of infant salvation through baptism. Off with her head! She failed the exam of Papal ordinance general.

Thus a second audience required to show her the severe arm. She was reexamined in a chamber: “but as she would not voluntarily confess, he applied the thumbscrews to her thumbs and forefingers, so that the blood squirted out at the nails.” This earnest catechism of confession further despised, examiners “applied the screws to her shins.” This called for her to elicit associates’ identity more than admit any particular "crime." Oh she was hard hearted. And since “they obtained not one word from her detrimental to her brethren in the Lord, or to any other person,” along came the spider and sat down beside her and she was “drowned in a bag.” Although she was held from January 15 until her execution on March 27, 1549 (Theatre, 482-83), this was her last offense.

In a world owned by bullies you want to knock down,

from militancy everywhere in the wars

to the cry of justice for the weak against the five kings Joshua found

hiding in a cave-don't stop! Pursue your enemies-

when he summoned the commanders of Israel-

put your feet on the necks of these kings,

to the cry of the blood of martyrs before the throne,

vengeance is mine, I will repay,

to Elizabeth's husband, pacifist Marvin,

who broke the head of a burglar with a door

one night in their home at age of 85, but repented!

It's easy to like Mennonites.

Works

The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians. Thieleman J. van Braght, tr. from the Dutch edition Of 1660 by Joseph F. Sohm. Scottdale, Pa.: Mennonite Publishing House, 1964. Thanks to the Paradise Valley Mennonite Church for the loan of this book.

Robert Coles. Lives of Moral Leadership. NY: Random House, 2000.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press. 1966.
I.F. Stone. The Trial of Socrates. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1988.
J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Scottdale, Pa.: Mennonite Publishing House, 1985.

Some Reading:
The physical book
Escape From the Bloody Theatre: The M. Stories. Magdalene Redekop.
Stick Up! [or, "Mennonites and Muslims] AE Reiff, elimae, April 2007.
Jacobo Timerman. Prisoner without a name, Cell without a number. 1981.

Immortality Cult

2010-07-27T06:59:00.000-07:00

The Immortal is a superstar. Uncommon ability, power, wealth, achievement. Magic and the quest for super long life manipulates the elements, long sought by those who seek to manifest. This is their power. The Immortals seek power like a sports event. Both Taoism and Christianity represent these poles, the Immortal, the Way of Powers (siddhi) vs. the Philosophical Way of Wisdom. Alan Watts says: [Hsien Taoism is] "a quest for immortality and supernormal powers through the gymnosophic and "yogic" practices which seem to have arisen among Taoists in the -2nd and -1st centuries. A hsien is an immortal--one who has purified his flesh from decay by special forms of breathing, diet, drugs, and exrcises for preserving the semen comparable to those of Tantric Yoga" (The Watercourse Way, xxv).

As opposed to this H. G. Creel says that the Huai Nan Tzu Contemplative Taoism (which became Zen), "insists repeatedly that death and life are just the same, and neither should be sought or feared. It ridicules breath control and gymnastics, which are designed to perpetuate the body but in fact confuse the mind" (xxvi). Watts says, "the indefinite enlargement of our powers and techniques seems in the end to be the pursuit of a mirage."

It is important not to miss the wit of this response which is more gentle than its condemnation by Lieh Tzŭ, who called it "not merely foolish and futile, but even immoral" (Creel, 22). Facetiously assuming the mirage, these "immortals" live in the desert of their own making. They deny themselves. Watts teases "one who is immortal and who has control of everything that happens to him strikes me as self-condemned to eternal boredom, since he lives in a world without mystery or surprise."

But people are highly vested in immortality. Russell Kirkland calls Creel's nicely reasoned What is Taoism? a "diatribe". The diatribe is the critic's.

Beyond aspersions Creel believes, as opposed to Watts, that Lao Tzu is not the work of one author, that the unity of voice however proves how good the editor is: "the editor was excellent and gives, on the whole, a remarkable appearance of homogeneity." Ancient texts differ from the modern in this. It is only fiction if I demythologize Borges, which in essence argues that he was never born, but it is called fact if I find that of Homer, Sappho, Moses, David, Plato, Moses, Beowulf. We have the odd companions of fiction that reads like journalism and criticism that reads like fantasy. Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu editors and scholars believe in themselves and the editorial class more than in authors. The qualities Creel cites, repetitions in the text, terse and aphoristic style, are primary facets of writers, along with contradiction and fine expression. To imagine these qualities from the hand of editors is a nineteenth century fantasy. A greater myth than Borges! As Watts says and Wouk agrees these "interpretatio europeica moderna" (European desk scholar) demo primary sources as their livelihood because it buys promotion and tenure. Wendell Berry calls them the luxury politics of an academic islander.This is true among the Pennsylvania Dutch as well as Taoists.

Chuang Tzu was asked whether he would rather drag up the useless tree that was spared or the unsinging goose that was not (Legge, II, 27). Some editor thought that? 'There is a man over there with a long body and short legs, round shoulders and drooping ears. He looks as though he were sorrowing over mankind. I know not who he can be.' 'It is Confucius!' 'Bid him come hither.' #26

To live long be useless is the counsel. Or get eaten. The invitation to usefulness, perfection, immortality is an invitation to consumption. The Mystic quest is tainted with the furtherment of personal ambitions and political purposes. Science and art are marketed as business. If you are a migrant you may be kidnapped, but if you are rich you might be too. Hunchbacks are not conscripted for war, the straight and strong are, therefore hunchbacks live.The straight tree is the first cut; the well of sweet water is the first exhausted (Legge, Chuang Tzu, II, 33). But if a man can empty himself of himself during his time in the world who can harm him (II, 31)? We sure see a lot of that! The close-furred fox and the elegantly-spotted leopard...it is their skins which occasion their calamity (II, 29).

Watts feels that if you do certain things to live forever, that tends toward the Confucian. Before the age of resveratrol and HA, Taoist alchemy said all you had to do was sublimate energy up the spine. Breathe right, eat right, sit right, stop the wandering mind. Who knows how old you can be? It brings into question life itself if to be immortal you have to not live at all. Cut down to perfection, life free of mistake loses the thing Taoists seek most, spontaneity.

Stopped Minds

Smoothing the ocean by hitting it with a board is stopping the mind. The mind anxious for its own anxiety feels the same with this compulsion as the body hit by the same flat board in zazen. Stopped minders can be petty. Immortality is a pinched nerve. Beauty conflicts with immortality. It wants to be exploited and used. The gnarled pine, thorn and crag, hellebore bushes up the path of weasels (Legge, II, 93) get to be immortal. Nobody wants them. Imperfection outlasts the straight and strong. Only the singing goose that is spared is the exception.

To be mortal Chuang-tzu says, "though seventy years of age, I am still making wheels," or as Andrew S. Mack found as he traveled to Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota at the age of 71 in 1908, two years after his last letter, and Amasa Clark who fathered four children after the age of 70, though he lived to 101, the chance of survival is best when there is no anxiety to survive, but there is no greater anxiety than the effort to be immortal, to "exhale and inhale, to puff out old breath and draw new, stretch and crane to live long, it is an induced tao." Do not let the thoughts keep working anxiously (James Legge, Chuang Tzu, II, 77). Van de Wetering called it Afterzen, when he saw through the sham. Do you want nose, ear, eye and mind to wander like Chaung Tzu who invented Zen? Live.

It is the difference between supermarket foods we call immortal, because enhanced, and natural foods, unimproved, or if you like, the life and death herbs. The improved "immortals" are desiccate, ragged, empty of nutrition when dried. The unimproved are full, well formed, nutritious. This analogy between two corns resembles people who cut their own lawns, do their own dishes, repair themselves by themselves, weed their gardens, do their own books, clean their house, teach their children. Those who hire maintenance so they can seek pleasure and fortune are immortal.

Unimproved roads! Narrow is the way! What are improved roads for but more traffic? Why traffic, but development? Why development, but trade? Travel as easy as you can. Thoroughfare, freeway, inflation, consumption for its own sake pave a way to the empty fritterless corn. Immortal, happily there is a cure. A cure for immortality: here

The Celestial Virgin of Conrad Beissel's Heart (1786)

2010-06-16T16:00:00.001-07:00

Ephrata Cloister and the Prophecies of Conrad Beissel: Quest for the Immortal / Denial of the Natural

No greater slight was ever given this man than when Pennsylvania German printer, Christopher Sauer, called him an amateur poet (below). He was a major dreamer to reinhabit the unfallen Adam after the Fall. This meant acquiring a glorified body before death, finding "again an entrance unto the tree of life" (Chronicon 135)! This is the essence of transhumanism with a basis in the occult, more clearly seen today than ever before in the various stratagems so offered. This was to be done by sacrificing the body. One cannot be immortal while eating strudal. Beissel's Paradiesisches Wunderspiel [Paradisiacal Wonder Music] (1754) "the mysteries...the wonders of the last times through the revelation of the heavenly Virgin-estate and of the Melchizedekian priesthood in America" (Chronicon Ephratense, 1786, 135) embody this contradiction.

The virgin goes intact to his dream. Beissel never takes up the phrase that he should be made a "eunuch for the kingdom of heaven." The choices for Beissel were to be a spiritual virgin or a married prisoner, not to be a spiritual eunuch. As a eunuch he'd have made the neighbors less nervous, for the "virgin" had a way of (spiritually) seducing their wives! Every aspect of physical existence was tainted for him with flesh. Tainted is the crux.This axiom of loathing denied the redemption of the body at the cross as much as it sought to attain it in the cloister. A denial of redemption? The crucifixion hallows the incarnation which hallows physical existence.

Pewter Miller

An important byproduct of the Chronicon is the clue it gives to its editor, Peter Miller, also a prophetic character. He is called Pastor Miller. He had first been a pastor of the Reformed. His second or third post was in the Reiff Church of Salford founded by Boehm but disestablished by the usurping Weiss, as story in itself. This Pewter Miller turned silver as it were, and gold in his loyalty to Conrad Beissel. But since Beissel thinks he will survive the Fall, with the stellium of artists around him, he sings a new world whose lyrics restore Adam before division, the prophecies of heavenly virginity in the priesthood of Melchizedek (Chronicon, 165), "a prevision of the New World, consisting of an entirely new and uncommon manner of singing, arranged in accord with the angelic and heavenly choirs" (167).

Prophecies streamed forth from the Superintendent at all the meetings... still to be found in the hymns then composed by him" [at least by 1738 and following] (90). These prophecies "satisfied ...with unceasing prayer as though they had been at a sumptuous banquet; all which Adam forfeited when he descended to earthly things" (135). The hymns of Zionitic Incense Hill, (1739), with the Paradiesisches Wunderspiel and the Chronicon make it obvious that Beissel himself and Peter Miller, especially hold these views. As editor, Miller was always shaping, amplifying and writing the text, defending the Order while transmitting his urbanity and wit, evident from tone and style, so that, unbelievably, it is a pleasure to read: "The Spirit sought to restore, even externally, that unity in all things, which was destroyed by the fall of man, and transformed into diversity" (88). Was this unity confined only to male/female division? Have you seen the missing self? Where is the Garden?

Climbing up the ladder from low estate, Beissel tangled this unity of existence with its negation. Punitive rules and regulations produced that rebellion inherent when good is imposed from without. But when prophesy reechos in the Ephrata Community it is not only of personal fame or infamy, as was Count Zinzendorf's prophesy to Prior Eckerlin that he would succeed the Superintendent in office (149), except Eckerlin died twenty years too soon. Eckerlin's rebellion and removal from the community produced much blessing and cursing, including Beissel's prophesy that "the Brotherhood in Zion would yet have a great fall" (173). This was simultaneous with that other speaking when "the language of the spirit, which requires no words, was still spoken in the Settlement" (180).

Against the Natural

This version of the man of raw clay, contrasted with his firing at 2400 degrees is meant to show what Beissel thought could happen if the spirit were properly restored to Adam in his "prevision of the new world.""

Since there had been no guardian over Adam to prevent his Fall Superintendent Beissel served instead, stipulated that the "good [that] sought to possess them" (129) must be protected from "too much of the good [falling] into their natural life." This natural life he called "man-power" (130), or the "selfish possession" of the good. Purging the natural however could get punitive. Women practiced "head-shearing" (126), cut a bald spot on the crowns of their heads in yearly tonsures. In these meetings, along with the oaths of perpetual Chasity, the hair of the Sisters' heads was laid on the table (126), while the absurdly puling Alexander Mack Jr., son of his illustrious father, [Alexander Mack (1670-1735)], like Isaac getting baptized for Abraham, was baptized for the salvation of that godly man (122), founder of the Church of the Brethren. This in no fiction. The"falling and rising again of man" (205) preoccupied them, so rites of rebaptism were yearly enforced with off-again on-again marriages, letters of divorce and removal of such worldly entrapments. The trades and bells installed by Eckerlin were done away with as well as chopping down of an "orchard of 1000 trees...to lay open the inner man" (193). The social psychological history of these actions and motives was dubbed a "divine comedy...that you must learn to be both high and low, rich and poor, etc. without a change of mind" (196). The point in all this is that among these changes of mind the mill came to stand for the natural. So "many Brethren turned towards the mill whenever they wished to escape the disciplines of the Holy Spirit" (209). They fell "into unbelief and bought the mill" for their livelihood, instead of seeking "support mostly from offerings" (209). So as the brotherhood traveled about with "their wan and pale faces...[to] hide their afflictions...under the mask of a serene countenance, that no one could read on their foreheads what transpired in their hearts" (203), even as these contradictions were prevalent, the "fires of the first love still burned" (121), Miller said. When the bell rang for prayers at midnight in the cloister, homes for four miles round were supposed to have roused to join in "home worship." The period of the bell under Eckerlin ironically coincided with its golden age of prophecy. If it is any comfort to the present reader these contradictions and oppressions seemed appropriate to everyone concerned at the time. Cult members always think so. It's no good arguing with them about it either, then or now; it is indeed a kind of brainwashing. If you doubt this, continue on your way. Do not go here and read more absurd contradictions and oppressions than you ever believed could be sold.

This golden age came, went, and came again, consumed with braggadocio. In 1752 it was a retake of Elijah preventing rain for three years (James 5.17) when Beissel prayed that an abuse of abundant harvest be met with "check... that in future the inhabitants of the land may not be able so often to enjoy Thy gifts of love" (222), he cursed the rain. Is this a mighty man or what? Beissel puts himself in the company of Elijah (I Kings 17) and the two witnesses in Revelations (11.6) who prevented rain for a similar amount of time. The offense, that the community had used an abundant wheat harvest to fatten hogs and distill drink instead of distributing to the poor, required retribution to establish control. Imagine if that happened on Wall Street. Chronicon reports "for three summers thereafter a drought followed" (222), but "...no one sought for the causes of this severe judgment" (223). The Superintendent repented his curse but the "drought" did not relent, placing Beissel in the position he may have sought all along, that "the judgment was not revoked by it...therefore he warned against finding fault with God on account of benefits he had bestowed" (223). He did not take the other possible clue that his self-arrogation was as deluded as the sahib in Africa claiming supernatural powers for the moon's disappearance during a lunar eclipse. Beissel's "judgment" was only removed when the "Brethren...refractoriness" was. Then "the Superintendent also was permitted by God to take back what three years before he had laid before him in regard to the country" [no rain]" (223). It should be obvious that such appeals were aimed at total domination and control.

Denying the Literal

Emphasis of the prophetic against the natural summoned adroit interpretations. When the Moravians visited Ephrata to dispute marriage and justification, one argued that "Enoch walked with God for 300 years and begot sons and daughters," and that hence, Enoch was married. Enoch of course would be the patron saint of the celestial virgin since he did not die. Miller responded that "the fathers before the deluge represented but figures of the future and that Enoch represents the fruitfulness of the Sabbatical church" (148). This rejection of the literal text mirrors the rejection of the body that bode such ill in the Sabbatical church. Take away the first floor of the building and there is no top but airy fabrication. Reject the text, reject the body. Explain how your wife's breasts are meant only for an infant's nourishment when it says you should "rejoice in the wife of your youth...may her breasts satisfy you always" (Proverbs 5.18f). Such quasi-rabbinical medievalisms overhung Beissel's core belief that marriage was "a house of correction for carnal minded persons" (147). His views of marriage and justification both tie to the carnal, "that in the churches the blood of atonement was permitted to become a shield in the hands of the old Adam, the consequence of which was a carnal security" (146-7) [presumably he refers to Paul saying, should we continue in sin that grace may abound], that is he means forgiveness became a license to sin. Peter Miller makes this even more extreme, but then as his way of pronouncing faith in Beissel he *publicly burned the Heidelberg Catechism (an historical pastime). On celibacy Miller expands to the effect that "who does not know that carnal intercourse stains not only the soul, but also weakens the body, and renders the voice coarse and rough; so that the senses of him must be very blunt who cannot distinguish a virgin from a married woman by her voice. Much concerning the fall of man can be explained from the voice" (161). The Brothers in all this therefore made themselves "immortal" by their own efforts. Why do I continually type, immoral? A more modern prophet, D. H. Lawrence, argues that the unification of the male and female principles in intercourse is the way to the immortal. (Fantasia of the Unconscious, 1921). Go fig. In my very first college essay, that I still have, I wrote the Greeks believed in the immorality of the gods.

Opposition to the body could not help but contaminate their view of woman. A modern gender deconstruction in Voices of the Turtledove (Jeff Bach) puts the most favorable construction possible on this by arguing that both sexes lacked fulfillment of the other, a la Plato, but there was a preponderance of negative stereotype of the feminine in the Order. A notion of the false husband or false Christ was never taught to complement the false woman, the displaced Sophia or feminine principle. Miller says of Eckerlin's "delusions" that "it is strange that men who were already divorced from the wife of the world were still thus extraordinarily tempted by the false priest-spirit; and it sees that this was harder to overcome than the attractions of a mortal wife" (187). Denigration of the bride! The woman seen as "Wife of the world," temptress, makes the man a victim, which casts him as her inferior. Pobrecito. Such psychology explains much of their fear of the body, which extended in understanding, is mocked in Donne's love sonnets, O my America, and after than much extended by the American pilgrims to the body of forests and landscapes, extended by further settlers to clearcut and plow the prairie, and in the modern day to blow tops off of mountains in West Virginia to mine coal, power plants belching hydrocarbons, oil spills, nuclear waste. It is all according to the power of dominion over the body, the woman and the world. This sets the stage for the ultimate victimization of woman by the trans-human.

It never occurred to Beissel how counter this was to the incarnation. His spiritual vs. natural woman was a constant, "strife between the Celestial Virgin and Eve's daughters for the possession of Adam's empty side" (215), but not so much the "forfeit of Adam." Lacking a daughter of Eve as his mother, Beissel himself would never have attained birth. Isn't it obvious that natural effects invalidated his spiritual rhetoric? Constantly issuing and revoking their own writs of divorce and then revoking them in turn (200, 216), marriage was a stumbling block. When such behavior came before the Pennsylvania justices they said "by God, this man can do more than God and the king" (216).

Denying the literal, whether in Enoch, himself or the world, he advised Matthias Baumann to "smell of his own stink", but did not do so for himself. Divorce from the literal was linked to emaciation and death bed agonies, "for he [Beissel] was a living skeleton until his death" (132). They starved like so many "Lachrymae Christi" out of Crane's Bridge, lean long from sable, slender boughs, unstanched and luminous. The brotherhood's "lean and pale appearance" (132) was almost a stigmata, but with implicit boasting of the superior condition of privation. Miller seems to approve that "thus the Prior brought the Brotherhood into such thralldom that the only difference between a Brother of Zion and a negro was that the latter was a black and involuntary slave, while the former was a white and voluntary one" (132). Chronicon uses these conditions to evidence the rightness of their lives, for had they not been righteous, it was argued, they would have all died: "How otherwise would it have been possible for them, amidst their severe labors, to live in such abstemiousness?" "They again ate of the Verbo Domini and so satisfied themselves" (135) at the "sumptuous banquet" of "unceasing prayer." In a later time Max Weber could argue that had they not all been righteous they would not have been made rich.

This austere theology Englished by Miller in his translation of Beissel's work called Dissertation on Man's Fall (1765) shows another intense period in the cloister, but not always clearly. Miller compares Eckerlin's opacity with Beissel, "the Prior wrote so much at this time...his witness also was confused and unclear" (136). Reading the coded language of Miller and Beissel on marriage and the feminine is not as disturbing as reading it as an exposed species of gnosticism shorn of its beauty and mystery in the service of criticism, as much as those sisters who kept their bald spots. Chapter XXI of the Chronicon on these prophecies is poignant in this, but so is XXIV of the later singing schools.

From these confusions, dictates and austerities the Ephrata order suffered continual plots, for the spirit of self denial is full of recrimination. Miller calls them variously attacks, disagreements, difficulties, fissures, conscience smiting, gossiping, quarreling, spiritual tyrannies and vexations (133-135). The attempt of the Order to name Beissel as Father illustrates it. It caused so such trouble that his title was left off the grave stone. Miller rationalizes this incompleteness, "everything in this world must be mixed with hypocrisy if it is to be acceptable" (118). John Hildebrand, who "had a deep insight into the writings of Jacob Boehme," was much opposed to the title Pater, but Miller spiritualized away the factions of the disagreements by analogy to the tribes of Judah and Ephraim (115). Not only are political parties and their geographies Old Testament, namely Ephrata's Zion, but naming and renaming, father or brother, baptizing, rebaptizing, they took new names as a matter of course when they joined (113).

It is not far from denial of the body, denial of woman and the world to the denial of property. These denials involved money and the deathbed. Beissel had to rebaptize some people that Benedict Yuchly had baptized (107), which gave rise to bitterness among "wooers of the Virgin." Yuchly had schemed to leave the Order to repossess his European estate, but without saying so. To get passage to Switzerland he pretended to sign over his wealth in case of death, but died before he ever left, so Beissel became his beneficiary. On this occasion Miller observes that "more than twenty of both sexes in the Settlement...similarly paid the penalty with their lives" (107) for false behavior. That means they died. He says of Yuchly that "the judgment overtook him." At the same time they wer dying like flies from their failure at tithes and offerings, Count Zinzendorf was condemning others to death among the Pennsylvania spiritually lawless.

They declared "property...sinful" (121), that it was to "be accursed of ownership" (121), but "anyone who should leave...should forfeit whatever he had contributed" (121). So "all private ownership was declared to be an Ananias-sin" (138). This was probably helped by their all having given up the original names in which their property was held in the first place. The list of names is allegorical, as in all orders. So, as with Peter Gehr, those who failed to be slavish followers of a "bestowal and withdrawal of confidence were loosed upon their death beds" (131). Private ownership scruples were compared to death bed agonies.

Again and again Miller speaks of agonized leave takings at death, as in the obituary of Michael Wohlfahrt, whose conscience "rose up against him severely on his death bed." With "anguish of heart" he said he had been "reckoned...with the godless and [God] hath become cruel toward me.' To show this was no unusual event, they believed as Miller says, that "the spirits of righteousness obtained the right to cut off his approach to the kingdom of grace" (142). Such bizarre interdictions of the natural by spiritual afflicted much conscience among them. To be sure it was all a setup for Beissel to come and anoint Wohlfahrt for his relief.

The Sauer Quarrel

Constant jockeying and quarreling within and without the the Order occurred with printer Christopher Sauer who had a press before Ephrata. The Order had first printed with Ben Franklin then with Sauer. But Sauer had old country scruples with his healthy dose of self esteem. Astrology made the meddling printer seek to purge Beissel's words. He wasn't correcting Elizabethan puritans and dramatists when he wrote to Beissel and protested verse 37 of a hymn for its pretentiousness, he was offended at its paganism. The Order representative on site, Peter Miller, suggested to Sauer that the verse was the foible of "amateur poets," which phrase Sauer throws at Beissel three times in his letter as "one foolish hymn after another came before me" (79). "In the 36th he says, he who has made this little hymn, ought never to be despised. In the 37th, 38th and 39th verses, Mercury springs to the front, and jumps upon the throne and cries, "Sehet, sehet," etc. And this stuff people are to sing! Surely one's hair ought to stand on end at such blasphemy if he were not stricken blind or mad" (Pennypacker, 85).

To be sure, Beissel's reply exceeds Sauer's charges in offensiveness. The hyperbole of their style of attack results in magnified name calling. Alderfer dwarfishly argues Beissel above criticism because "it is presumptious to try to dissect the magical complex of an inner spirit and psychic engine of a man like Beissel" (68), but Pennypacker correctly says that while "the text alone would hardly seem to justify the criticism of Sower...the remarkable influence wielded by Beissel ...and the intense mysticism of the doctrines...we are apt to conclude there was some foundation for the interpretation" (78). Sauer naively asks Beissel in his letter whether he had "considered what a dreadful production it is" (Pennypacker, Quarrel, 88).

Beissel's Order name was Vater Friedsam but in the trials with the Eckerlins he signed himself "FRIEDSAM, a Nonentity" (181). Although Miller gives a favorably biased view of the Father, whatever his amateur poetry, Miller admits the writing of Dissertation on Man's Fall, which he translated in 1765, "is somewhat unclear in its expressions" (135). The printer contended that Beissel represented himself as Christ. Peter Miller's defense of Beissel would have further antagonized. He told Sauer that people thought Beissel "a great wizard" and gave an example where Beissel was made "invisible" (103). How comforting siddic powers to refute claims of divinity must have been. It is the theosophic monstrosity, Miller however maybe speaks tongue in cheek, but Sauer says (Pennypacker, 87) Eckerlin (the corrector, Chronicon, 104) further troubled the printer when he asked "whether he then believed only in one Christ" (104).

Chronicon rather depicts Beissel as Christ and in terms of the Holy Spirit, as above where Beissel is likened to Elijah, in quotation of Hebrews 4.12, "the sharpness of his spirit pierced such an one through bone and marrow" (131) or of the Temptation (Matthew 4.4), "his emaciated body was nourished by the Word that proceeded out of the mouth of God" (132). Of emaciation and denial of the body, spiritual overuling the natural, they contended "it was still possible to live without animal food and without evacuation of the bowels" (135). Who doesn't welcome that news? Whatever the sources of Beissel's elevation, Chronicon says Beissel is one "who bore in his heart the seal of the redemption of the whole world" (123) and that "whoever opposed him struck at the very apple of God's eye" (126). The printer would not either have been much comforted to read later that Beissel had compounded together the same gifts as Lucifer and Adam. Continual reversion to classical sources, since nothing could be simply what it was but must be seen in the perpetual context of good and evil, made "these events have a great resemblance to the fall of the angel of envy and of the first man" (170). Beissel, to whom "much was entrusted to him by God at his awakening, namely, it was that good through which the grand-duke Lucifer was turned into the devil" (170).

None of Beissel's grandiosity makes the printer's point about the hymn. Sauer's polemic confuses his own astrology and alchemy with Beissel's planets. He calls him Mercury and unless we are willing to engage the symbolism the point is lost, but if we must, Miller observes that the offending stanza was "so flowery and ambiguous a wise that one could not know of whom he spoke" (Chronicon, 104). In retaliation Sauer published Beissel's horoscope alleging a "strange...conjunction of stars" (104) and the number of the mark of the Beast coded in his name in Latin. This was as much caused by his wife joining Beissel's order to be a "spiritual bride," as Sauer's scruples.

But the continual occasions of Beissel's "bestowal and withdrawal of confidence" more argues his manic depressive state than his divinity, "falling and rising alternated continually; he who today was exalted on spiritual heights, tomorrow was laid low" (131). Whether these are taken as methods of purged selfishness or manipulative control of his followers, it was the cult of personality refined, typical fare of manias.Lithium.

Whatever holiness was involved in these affairs was a species of Severity. A fair comparison might be Zinzendorf's cultivation of tantric powers over against Beissel's spiritual celibacy. How else become immortal except by expression or suppression of sex? How far anyway is spiritual celibacy from tantric sex? The severity of both however masks very well with sincerity. If it is important to know inner life in truth, be glad for Greek statuary (and Michelangelo), as in the Winged Victory. Even if shorn of interpretation, the lines themselves suggest the nature.

For all his philosophical curiosities and his administrations, Beissel was at root an artist and musician who invented his own notion of harmonies and antiphony, typically, as from the angels. There was a writing school and calligraphies individually designed. These things have been given much more attention than the philosophic.

Church of Adam

To say that denial of the body and the natural directly concerns the difference of severity and mercy, the true spiritual path is a modern equivalent of submitting the mind and spirit to the vagaries of madmen, entertaining as they are. The real path of peace, not that anybody found it in any community, did not run from to Brook Farm from Ephrata and then to the Golden Dawn, but more to all the surrounding Mennonite communities. From Beissel and Bishop Christian Funk to S. L. Mathers, autocracy was the most universal style, contrasted with the notable example of the much endeared Bishop Andrew Mack, of whom an account has now appeared.

Further compare the foibles of Beissel with the psychology of poet Robert Bly, whose take on anger, that it is from shame, and what to do about it, have a similar appeal as Beissel's invitation to celibacy. That is, it is the language and thought of severity, as they will all say of severity, "iron sharpens iron." All systems of such discipline are control, judgment and submission to outer order and social control. If you are a member you may attend after a year of discipleship. Beissel's intent that "mere external forms of divine worship...were never meant to be the end itself" (attributed to Stephen Koch, Chronicon, 95), that "outer forms of service...became their lord and master...the church of Adam" (96), makes this tension between submission to the outer to discipline the inner like the psychology of Bly's mythopoetic.

Beissel's order fulfills this dictate reversedly, becomes thus a displaced church of Adam, which begs the question as to the proper role of the outer resisted by the inner even while benefiting from it. Outer forms, prayer and fasting, celibacy, 40 day fasts cannot deny the inner truth of prayer without ceasing ( but not an emaciated kind), joy never ending, which sounds impossible to the imposed vigilance which actually prevents it, making joy a duty. What effect this has on Bly likens him to a more modern spiritual outlaw, hence a kind of Beissel. The first principle of organized lawlessness is to pretend law to control the thoughts and actions of those in and out of community. When the condemned must die for their disregard of the holy, differing versions proclaim the sacredness of their particular Ark. Such talk is commonplace in the counsels of severity.

Postscript

Chronicon is a product of the genius of its author, Peter Miller (1710-1796), elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1768, who put the Declaration into the seven major languages of Europe. Miller tends to be invisible in discussions about Ephrata, but he is by far the most important if unseen character. His prose makes the community visible. His skill of indirection, humor and understatement is marvelous when we know the background of the events he is sleight handing.

The Ephrata community lived in a mood of contradiction. Chronicon Ephratense, A History of the Community of Seventh Day Baptists (1786), not only shows its mystical politics but in a language, a "garb...intended to represent a spiritual man" (88). As its translator Max Hark (1889) says, it invents a vocabulary to "muffle the mortal body in a style of garment:" "involved sentences, ungrammatical constructions, local idioms, mystical expressions and ecclesiastical words and phrases" convey a meaning quite foreign to ordinary usage (iv). To preserve the "peculiar flavor," Hark says he had "to sacrifice every trace of literary elegance and grace" (v), but this is as false as those scholars who say “the aesthetic quality of these writings is often inferior” ("The Present Status of Conrad Beissel/Ephrata Research," 1976).

The Chronicon is a dark, shot with light, unlike anything written today. It combines passion, clarity, confusion and panoramas in a phrase, "two parties might get into each others wool" (123), like the extreme Elizabethan writings of the 1580's, the Martin Marprelate Tracts. Aside from the ready prejudice of Pennsylvania German scholars against their own people, their love of amulet and hex, omen and pow-wows is not the profound inner contradiction of the community leader Conrad Beissel (1691-1768). Contradiction upon contradiction can be thought of as poetry. Beissel's address, "Spiritual Whoredom and Adultery" (Chronicon, 92-94, 20 Nov 1736) rejects omens even while he is starving himself and sowing "seeds of the new manhood (Chronicon, 135). "As such whoremongers we designate all fortune-tellers, star-gazers, and interpreters of omens, who have not come over in their calling to the simplicity of Christ, but who, because the secrets of the starry magia are disclosed in them, have taken this instead of their heavenly inheritance.

[Beissel held at least a "double conversion," one under Moses to works and one under Paul where works were made desolate (147). There was at least a year trial period before admission to the order, and much trial of it, but the Moravians "said they could make a Christian in three days" (147).]
Old World and New

In the midst of these affairs repose sundry outlooks of wit, as where various immigrants passing through Ephrata are advertised as "new pietists" who in Grimsheim of the Palatinate "began to hold meetings in the fields...powers of prophecy were often felt....Roman Catholic and Reformed ministers sounded an alarm" (218). Besides prophecy the problem was that these people were "accustomed to sing and pray at their meetings, for this was forbidden under penalty" (218).

There was ample publication in book and song when Peter Miller, editor, writer of the Chronicon said the songs were the main source of the prophetic. Two varieties occurred, the first in a book issued by Christopher Sauer and the second from the singing school: "the contents of these songs were entirely prophetic (165). They were also aesthetic, "it was with him as with Solomon...to manifest the wonderful harmony of eternity" (165). Much of the fervor in doctrine and practice that comes from this period ended when "the prophetic spirit had withdrawn again into his chamber" (136).

This is to contrast Germany and America.

***
They thought to make themselves immortal by esoteric works, days, lives, but the animal got confused with the flesh to justify the spirit. Is this nuts? Whatever the truth, their work had the opposite effect.They died sooner than they might. When it comes down to how to be immortal, not how to give up life, the depreciation is not well thought out. Austerities constrict blood vessels.

The immortality quest is more than freezing Ted Williams. Some make immortal by the way they think, the way they eat, the way they pray. Poor bygone child Pythagoras thought to do it by virtue! They die whole generations before those who live long lives out of Psalm 91. None of this has a corner on weirdness, but the religious aspects, from Tibetan monks to Van de Wetering in his second and third Zen books, show especially well the divisions and pettiness of the seekers. Loss of the golden age or small minded and ungenerous? Beissel's spiritual celibacy like his tantric cousin Zinzendorf? So what if you dry a wet towel on your naked body in winter by a mountain stream. The maelstrom continues within. So what if you cook marijuana in the monstrance on the altar during mass? More publicly, so what if you take those drug letters and get tight? It's little different from starving yourself on a tower in the desert like Buñuel's monk in Simon of the Desert. Henry Miller on D. H. Lawrence celebrates his death wish, the same in Battille and those quasi linguist/biologists that say the voice of death is the voice of the animal in the human, slandering the animal to justify the spirit. How to calm the waves, that storm of thought when the mind stops thinking?

Still the heart.

Disorder the mind and the brain will follow might be their motto.

Made immortal by Science!

Made wise by dope!

Rediscover your virginity!

At no time does Conrad Beissel take up the phrase that he should be made a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven, even though Peter Miller at one point allows that the Brotherhood was a kind of slavery. The virgin goes intact to his grave without that sacrifice. The choices for Beissel were to be a spiritual virgin or a married prisoner, not a spiritual eunuch. Are the sacrifices of a eunuch and a virgin the same? Every aspect of physical existence was tainted for him with flesh. Tainted is the crux. Flesh is the crux! This axiom of loathing implicitly denied the redemption of the body at the cross as much as it sought to attain it in the cloister. Redemption is unfolded as a process, an earlier step being the incarnation which hallowed physical existence. Not that Beissel had less scorn for the body than commercials designed to exploit perspiration. Physical existence is an easy target. Prohibitions marketed against it utilize all opposite strategies from making and unmaking obesity simultaneously to avoiding the real problems associated with the mind.
***

So it all comes down to how can I make myself immortal, not how can I give up my life. This immortality quest is more than freezing Ted Williams, but not well thought out. Austerities constrict the blood vessels. I have met some who will make this happen by the way they think, or the way they eat, or the way they pray. I tell you they die whole generations before those who live long lives out of Psalm 91. None of this has a corner on wierdness. The religious aspects are appalling, from Tibetan monks on. Van de Wetering in his second Zen book catalogs especially well the divisions, the pettiness of those who seek, do you want to call it, truth? Small minded, not generous. But Beissel's control of the seminal fluid like his Taoist tantric cousin Zinzendorf has to be at the top of the deluded list. So what if you can dry a wet towel on your naked body in winter by a mountain stream. The maelstrom continues within. So what if you cook marijuana in the monstrance on the altar during mass? More publicly, so what if you take those drug letters and get high? It's no different that starving yourself on a tower in the desert like Bunuel's monk. Henry Miller on D. H. Lawrence celebrates his death wishes many ways. The same in Battille and in those quasi linguists/biologists that say the voice of death is the voice of the animal in the human.How to calm those waves, that storm of thought when the mind stops thinking, is elusive. Disorder the mind and the brain will follow might be their motto. Making yourself immortal by Science is like making yourself wise by dope.

Rediscover your virginity! To read the Chronicon about Conrad Beissel is less inhibiting than reading about the Order. Those snobberies, shibboleths and mysticisms generalize from emaciated singing hermits to Rosicrucian alchemists. The verbiage about mysticism is worse, spiritualizing knowledge that mystics say they have by tantrism and siddhi power.

Chronicon navigates these paths with irrelevancies and asides written in good humor. Rising in night to read Wallace Stevens and Dylan Thomas, one night I picked up the Chronicon. Thereafter, for about four weeks, reading a chapter or two a night, following meditatively and sequentially, I became aware of the tone, the change in narrative voice. But even if the language in the translation of 1889 is a pretty modern, its charismatic experience is not uplifting. Prophets rule like Neptune who dictate all naturalism void. Failing naturalism there is no defense from the prophetic curses that sweep with railings, self-exaltations and boasting.

A different take on the above exists at Goodreads here.

Chronicon Ephratense: A History of the Community of Seventh Day Baptists at Ephrata, Lancaster County, 1889.
Everett Gordon Alderfer. The Ephrata commune: an early American counterculture. Mostly an uncritical summary of the events. John S. Flory. Literary Activity of the German Baptist Brethren in the Eighteenth Century. 2004. Hans Schneider, Gerald T. MacDonald. German radical Pietism. 2007.Jeff Bach. Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata. 2006. Easily it seems the best of all these works. Jan Stryz. The Alchemy of the Voice at Ephrata Cloister. As biased as Gordon, but in favor of alchemy. Jade Kierbow. The Women of Ephrata: Recovering the Importance of the Feminine at Ephrata. 2007. A student paper exaggerating the role of two women. Ronald J. Gordon. Conrad Beissel and his Communal Experiment. 1996. Evaluates Beissel as a spiritual raider of the lost ark type. Gives details of judgment out of the norm but accurate. Samuel W. Pennypacker. The Quarrel between Christopher Sower, the Germantown Printer, and Conrad Beissel. Yaacov Oved. Two Hundred Years of American Communes (1993). John Bradlye. Ephrata Cloister (2000). Consider Kripal, Jeffrey John, Reality against Society: William Blake, Antinomianism, and the American Counterculture.Common Knowledge - Volume 13, Issue 1, Winter 2007, pp. 98-112 http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/common_knowledge/v013/13.1kripal.html

Arthur Versluis. The esoteric origins of the American Renaissance

Baptism is the most important doctrine in PA. See below all about Beissel's baptisms. "Evangelical Mennonites baptized by single backward immersion. The Brethren by triple forward immersion" (Hershey, MHEP Quarterly, Spring 2010

Not that Beissel had less scorn for the body than that advertised in commercials to sell perspiration deodorants,

*Sachse, German Sectarians I, 243. "To accomplish this act of temporary aberration, all the German devotional books in possession of the various families were gathered and taken to Fiedler's house, and among them were a number, if not all, from Peter Miller's little library. It appears that upon the appointed day, Peter Miller, Conrad Weiser and others assembled at this lowly cabin, and there solemnly condemned the books and ordered them to be burned upon the scheiterhaufen. These libri herettci consisted of the Heidelberg Catechism ; Luther's Catechism, both the larger and smaller ; the Psalter, and a number of time-honored devotional books which for ages had been held sacred in the Fatherland.

Wallace Stevens and The Bed of Old John Zeller

2010-03-22T04:07:00.000-07:00

Stevens' Baptism

To view the beginning from the end everything must be rewritten. How else understand Stevens' lament of the past in "The Bed of Old John Zeller," that his grandfather held beliefs he could not believe. He wanted to believe would reason allow it, but the last gasp of the poet, swallowed up in death, was baptized by a priest in a hospital.

The priest was so afraid of Stevens' legacy he hardly dared mention the event, didn't tell Holly, Stevens' daughter, or the wife. Nobody told Harriet Monroe of Poetry and those who run the Stevens' reputation, mostly women, that savage presence of the death bed lay among all the old beliefs of Dutchman dead, and living in the poetic recall of Pennsylvania (see Lombardi, Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone, 145).

Why doesn't Stevens say what he means when he wants to feel the vermilion gold of a girl? Too simple, but not too elemental. We do not talk poetry of theology or put truth plainly to the plain man Stevens thinks he's not in his harmonies of the flesh and the zeitgeist of a priestess. He convinced himself, Stevens did, but couldn't quite swallow his own supremacy at the bed of old John Zeller.

Resurrection is everywhere in Stevens' revived childhood catechism of his grandfather. Three weeks before his death in one fell swoop he contradicts all the Ideas of Order he conjured up. Like some mage who ran away from his mother's Bible and Zeller's bed to fame, the lilies of the field caught him, the cannas, the orchids, the iris said they should be glad to take water with him in the fount. Baptism is funny that way, it changes everything. It changes the mind.

The act of prophecy in John the Baptist Zeller is that the promises of God are good to a thousand generations. So Stevens comes down to the cleansing, plunging in the grace of God. What a wonder! He was baptized and buried. The waters creased his head, drops on the brow from a living hand. The room gave a sigh, transported to the other side. Not that baptism is a magical event. He was made new by the word he spoke. God capitalized on it, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. How that afrights the man who thought him comfortably stopped in logical positivism.

Stevens Decks Hemingway

Stevens knocked Hemingway to the ground in Key West, punched him in the head. Stevens, told of Hemingway's brutality to woman, exited a tavern to confront Hemingway in the street. Hemingway later died of a shotgun blast to that same head. He couldn't stand the loss of himself parceled out to the million, Life's version of the Old Man (and the Sea). Ravening readers were his gods. They read Hemingway raw, but Stevens in his bed after the fight and before his death winced at his own naivete. To think he could undo in a splash what he had meticulous built to house reason against the savage! Boxers should be poets but not novelists. What is the meaning of the sign, the outward sign?

Stevens loved his flowers. We are all botanicals that "water" puts back into the human mind again. Not simples, perennials from the root. Cataloged in his letters and poems, a materia medica of the flower came to Stevens, "I know the end, cracked the code that all creation travails for the adoption of sons." Only Stevens could hear this. In baptism our lives pass before us, the flesh, the youth, the marriage with a wife, children, to be returned to life and seek the gold skin and eyes, silk. Baptism brings life. Who buys the redeemer, baptizer, deliverer, lover, friend, back to basics of the coffin, who comes to rescue the quick and the dead?

This coat of many colors of Stevens own poems was his piety and it took critics time to decide if they would throw out the old as unworth the new, or see in it the human nurture of his mother's breast and his grandfathers' life and the lives he meant to live. "Try on this coat," they said to Stevens. His works swirled in the coat covered in the blood of the righteous. Throw it out or start afresh? "Neither," the angel said. See in his verse his resurrection, which being interpreted means that Stevens underwrote in image and thought the surrender he at last made. He pretended, but a deeper being got him yet. Those architectured subtexts flee, but he is there. Whither shall I flee from his presence? Great comfort Stevens in the hymn of being whose hair grew long. Baptism accreted his unlayering, long mysteries Stevens wrote below the surface.

Old Man Zeller's Bed

The critic Lombardi says Stevens' "contemporary world reduces God to something powerless or irrelevant" (143), that the world of belief, "Zeller's world has forsaken the world of reality, but in the contemporary world people live their lives as though God does not exist" (Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone,142). So, "Wallace refuses to capitalize the initial letter of "god" as an admission that the poet acknowledges neither the existence nor the eternal nature of a Supreme Being." But Stevens showed them all up.

If anything, the Bed of Old John Zeller says that Stevens' own disorder is as great as his heritage of the Pennsylvania past, but at least it is a "structure of ideas" as opposed to the "structure of things." Whatever he means by disorder we can see as a compound of the religious misalliances of the Pennsylvania Dutch past with all the confused doctrines it produced. If this were too general a misunderstanding then say that "structure" refers simply to the Creed of the faith in general. Stevens says, "add your own disorder to disaster," sounding like he's not much in the modern camp either.

In stoic sadness neither past nor present are true to him; the structure of things and ideas in the "old peak of night" is his heritage. How important is that? "It is easy to wish for another structure" but to get only the weak substitute of "ghostly sequences" of humanism is not enough. This is "the habit of wishing as if one's grandfather lay in one's heart." Here the underwriter speaks. Wishing is such a huge truth next to the "structures." Yet his grandfather does sleep in his heart and he knows it, so to escape he says the opposite of what he knows. Witness the baptism. "Evade" wishing, "accept" structure, both unwished for, yet wished. "Oh to be a solipsist" he might have titled this. But a critic won't get the way the poet backs a horse into the stable forwards, just exactly what Arndt said of faith.

Stevens' "Dead Ancestors"

"The future must bear within it every past, not least the parts that have become submerged in the subconscious" (Letters, 373). Lombardi makes out of this that Stevens' dead ancestors, like living progeny (aren't the two one?), explain Stevens struggle to remember his ancestral origins" (125). Critics share one trait with poets, exaggeration to prove a point. Stevens' struggle with dead ancestors comes down to corresponding with some "country pastors" and exchanging some letters with his sister about their mother. His past of the hills however, the flowers, farm and sky included with his mother's Bible, are more of his present than his past in poetry. They are always there in his concerns about life in the ancestral bed and their life in his heart. Stevens "struggle" of ancestry was a joy. It is clear his greatest ancestry is in the natural, far from Hartford and Harriet. This ancestry was in his blood. Isn't that a pun? I mean his family environment, his growing up, the farm and more the continual love of the botanical he always carried with him, visiting botanical gardens, corresponding about flowers with his wife, cultivating his garden at home. The dead ancestors are not dead. You have to get that they live in him and make him himself. That's what comes of a godly heritage. Even if you don't like it it's true. So the perennial love of the Pa Dutch for nature permeated Stevens' being and was communicated there by his mother and her family.

Lombardi says, "he and his genealogists labored to reorganize the fragments of his past into an acceptable [he should have said coherent] whole...at a time when the past seemed most elusive, Stevens sought to reconstruct it for the purposes of establishing continuity between the generations. Transport to Summer depicts the story of that reconstruction" (125). But it's not like that. Poems aren't tracts. There is an approach/avoidance in Stevens as in many Pennsylvania Dutch. The notion that he sought to form an "acceptable" past is telling. The self recriminations of the Dutch are woven into their identity. Lombardi found that the Dutch Reformed Church in Feasterville in 1751 had an early pastor, Jonathan Dubois, who was Stevens' ancestor: "the yard contains the graves John Stevens, his great grandparent, who was 76 at his death in 1811, and Sarah Stoopthoof Stevens, who was 81 at her death in 1825" (127-8). Give it any time to sink in, which happens with age, and there Stevens appears among a cloud of witnesses.

Baptism

Lombardi goes overboard talking of the baptism, as if Stevens had a wish to be a Dante or St. Augustine. "Had he arrived at his own vision of Reading and mistaken it for Jerusalem or found Jerusalem and mistaken it for Reading" (246), a pun on Oedipus, whether going or coming from Athens or Thebes. Stevens' visions are of the words themselves, not the places, they are of the flowers not the gardens. It is a *crucifiction that "commencing in 1915 Stevens, about to begin his quest for Reading-Jerusalem, devised in poetry a dialectic between the Christian world of the Pennsylvania past, represented by the Zellers and the Stevenses, and the non-Christian or post-Christian world of Stevens' present, represented by the secular vision he had cultivated in college" (246). The package of two parts is too neat. Stevens is more like the topography of a cinnamon bun. Lombardi says, "Stevens made a reality of that landscape of Pennsylvania. In short, he became Pennsylvania, a phenomenon more genuine than unique" (248). But he doesn't become Pennsylvania, it is something more than that.

Stevens' Mental Fraktur

Stevens (1879-1955) entered the flowering heart from Reading as a Pennsylvania German, his mother native to Berks County. His temperament derives from farm visits, biblical pietism and a love of nature.That this would stem from centuries of worship and inwendigeit transmitted in the gifts of his birth is as inevitable as Stevens himself, a mature voice to be compared with Henry James, but not to the boyish outcries of the (younger) poets. Why he was never even a professor; he held a real job, that sets him apart right there, and refused being the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Stevens, raised at his mother's side, was subsequently owned by the poetry establishment and New York before he returned to the well of his first life in The Necessary Angel and Transport to Summer. Those who previously owned him would not let him go so his baptism at the end was contested and ignored. The sophistication and mere naturalism of the early work did not last. In the 1940's he reinvestigated his origins and his last books, especially Auroras of Autumn revive his ancestral boyhood. As maybe the only mature American poet he is also philosophical. These poems show he had never surrendered those early beliefs. Thanks to elimae his celebration in the long line of major poets baptized in spirit takes a reading here.

Poetic Repair: My Tongue a Lute, My Heart a Lyre

Baptism is the essence of controversy for the Pennsylvania Dutch, along with being conflicted about their identity. As Germans in an English speaking land, aliens and foreigners, from Ben Franklin on they were ridiculed for their convoluted life and speech. That the most urbane poet America has produced was Dutch compromises the stereotype. Stevens was an underwriter, an insurance executive for Hartford, but laid his testament to Pennsylvania in his poems. In the last weeks of his life he was baptized, in utter contravention of his reputation.

There is more baptism of Wallace Stevens than meets the eye. It concerns an inward "well of water springing up to life," the baptism which so offended the protestant humanists of poetry and criticism, also his wife and daughter. It either springs up from within or pours down without. It wasn't that he became a Catholic any more than he wanted to deck Hemingway. From the start his poems sang of an ocean, himself not conscious. He wrote of a world he didn't believe and said of it things true, reflection of the love shed in the heart of goodness, good humor encompassing all nature and human family to the most intimate, particular detail. He must be read in the dead of night. The still voice not outwardly heard has less to do with ears, as baptism has with water. Stevens waited till 75 to prove his art, much as one first marries at 72, open to the core in Transport to Summer (1947). Everywhere he doesn't speak, yet speaks. So while critics hammer down the dandy, he camps by Lao Tzu to turn the outward in. There descend from the One, virtue, then humanity, morality and ceremony, the beginning of disrepair. Stevens' baptism immersed him in the one in which he had his being all those years.

More discussion here and here and here

Up close that night I took down Necessary Angel and sat hours denoting the glory of God in Stevens' mind-making. Stevens' baptism consecrates post hoc. Then I took Transport to Summer out, fallow from decades, and Angel from a dollar sale. Transport had Max and Edna Lerner's name in the front. It's hard to find the great writers in English unbaptized, a prophecy itself. To prefer the old duped man calls down rocks on the head. There is malleable rock in the aquifer rising up. Its dust cries with Stevens, cross the road! We bring this Pennsylvanian to mind with other baptisms Pennsylvanians know at Fathers, I mean farmers, laborers, shopkeepers, mothers, daughters, sons under the arbors of the harmless east, you know the kind. In night we take him down. And all this from his birth!

More Stevens. Put Religion back in poetry!

They used to tell me when I performed Keats, Byron and Shelley that the Romantics make poetry their religion. The point being, why? As a substitute for religion. Implies some inner need, yes? In Necessary Angel Stevens says the poet in formation and realization is parallel to the mystic. Indeed he uses religious terms in the steps of this process:

"If, then, when we speak of liberation, we mean an exodus; if when we speak of justification, we mean a kind of justice of which we had not known and on which we had not counted; if when we experience a sense of purification, we can think of the establishing of a self, it is certain that the experience of the poet is of no less a degree then the experience of the mystic and we may be certain that in the case of poets, the peers of saints, those experiences are of no less a degree than the experiences of the saints themselves" (50-51, italics mine).

If you think this something, know that Stevens has a way of grasping and letting go at the same time his questions of eternity, to call his inquiring into the poet and mystic. Also he seems to distance himself from any aspect of being a true believer, more of the poet sophisticate who knows and will tell but is the Olympiad above in his manner. But this is more defense than sincere, for underneath he is just that sincere about his Bible lessons as a child and his mother's devotion as when he translates into high sounding phrases.

The Bird That Sings

So he continues directly:
"In this state of elevation we feel perfectly adapted to the idea that moves and l'oiseau que chante (the bird that sings). The identity of the feeling is subject to discussion and, from this, it follows that its value is debatable. It may be dismissed on the one hand, as a commonplace aesthetic satisfaction; and, on the other hand, if we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and than our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free--if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved
God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished his purpose, would have seemed, whether young or old, whether in rags or cesremonial, robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation" (51).

This is either blasphemy of a kind, putting the poet as creator in place of the Creator or a praise to the creator (Sayers, The Mind of the Maker) or Tolkien, sub-creation) where the hymns of joy to the creation of the poet are sung by himself, a kind of self-worship. All of this is from his insecurity to declare himself a true believer. One feels the social pressure of his position in Poetry mightily. As if he were pretending the divine afflatus, another term he liked, were something to be had from drugs, or good conversation, or even fine music or art, instead of what it was, the pearl of great price, why not use Biblical metaphors, he does it all the time, as italics above again show. There is some sense here that he says poetry is the maker of God and poetry is a substitute for God, but another in which the poet is a mimic of God as much as that bird that sings.

Of course we have elsewhere contended that the bird that sings, as opposed to Ambigen and those who say that animal expression is the cry of pain, of dissonance, that it is the joy of creation, the joy of the Lord, to take Stevens and turn his rhetoric on its head, that is to make sacred his profane lunacy here. Take a look here at Chimeric Splicing.

Harvey Mack's Postcards from Mennonite Service with the Red Cross in France 1917-1919

2010-03-02T05:13:00.000-08:00

Harvey G. Mack (25 July 1889 - September 1984) who in WW I drove an ambulance like E. E. Cummings, stayed after the war to work as a carpenter in the French reconstruction and remained a carpenter the rest of his life. The postcards here were written during his Mennonite service with the Red Cross, 1917-1919. Because he spoke German he was also given responsibility of German POWs who he revisited later in life. See A Service of Love in Wartime: American Friends Relief Work in Europe, 1917-1919 (Appendix, 275). He worked in Dinan with Miss Kitchener, sister of the first British War Secretary, Lord Kitchener, seated next to him below. Mennonite historian J. C. Wenger says he "sailed for France in June 1918," but the first postcard of January 1918 alludes to his Christmas there the preceding year. Wenger says he "served in reconstruction work under the American Red Cross and the American Friends Service Committee, returning to the United States in March, 1920 (History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference, 75).

Click / Double Click to Enlarge

7. The Viaduct, Dinan, France

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Mothers Round the Genome

2009-08-04T08:27:00.001-07:00

Linens, show towels, embroideries, quilts of Pennsylvania mothers, dresses, hats, patches more intimate than books were made by the ones that gave birth, not by strangers at auction. Symbols of the bone and genome, their hands touched the linen a hundred, two hundred years ago. In that trunk were bracelets of hair around the bone, kidding, but only just, in quoting Donne's "Relic," for there were combings of hair belonging to Anna over a hundred years old, who had long hair all her life. Doll clothes were there that she made, another avocation to clothe dolls for the orphan, to remind her of the one doll she had as a girl, but made her daughters many. Her first communion dress in that chest with its bonnet fits a slender girl, blue grey. The quilts she knitted for her family are in that chest, but not the hat. Mennonites eschewed the hat at certain periods of their industry. Their latest hat phobia had come just when she as a young woman emancipated from all farm and ignorance, as she saw it, but then again, when she saw at ninety, the longhair grandson who taught thinking and writing, maybe she thought thinking could go too far. They looked across the ages at each other. She loved her Uncle Andrew that much, was of his blood, just as her grandson was of hers, the principled faithful kind, but when Bishop Andrew wrote her in 1906 that if she were coming home to the yearly communion at Bally she had better wear the bonnet, it confirmed the recession from the Mennonite in her mind.

All these things and more were in that trunk, the double-sided car blanket, double woven, double to guard from the chill of a car without a heater. Not a lap blanket, full size, wool, the two stitched together as one. Was that car in the trunk? Of course it was, it was a touring car for a Mennonite, for.life has more contradictions than you can fit in a hat. That car compromised between her husband and his father, who he worked for. The son could use the car if he drove the father around on Sundays too. Then Old Jake would chew his cigars, which is why there is probably never much masculine in trunks. That car was driven with all aboard by Anna's husband Howard up to the Old Mennonite root farm in Worcester on weekends. The farm is gone, the car is gone, the people are gone. The chests remain. They are full.