The first German edition of Thieleman Janszoon van Braght (29 January 1625 – 7 October 1664), the Anabaptist author of the Martyrs Mirror or The Bloody Theater, first published in Holland in 1660 in Dutch. was translated and published in 1748-49 in the cloister at Ephrata, Pennsylvania, in an edition of 1,300 copies, 1,512 pages. The prior of the cloister, the learned Peter Miller of Alsenborn near Kaiserslautern, was the translator; in addition to 14 other cloister brethren were also engaged in this work: 8 in the print shop and 6 in the paper mill.
In a review of the literature, the force of the seed. the force of the loins of Jacob Reiff (1698-1782) from his father and mother, and in his brothers and sister that has been so determinate in subsequent generations must be remembered to be part of a community of these like souls before and after they lived in Montgomery County. Jacob personally was tempered by being the youngest son among 4 brothers, with only one sister younger than he, growing up in the pristine forests of Montgomery Country and roaming with abandon those pioneer hills and valleys, further tempered by the kindred spirits of his neighbors, all people of high principle and force, among whom he worked and studied, for by 1717, the first record of his fathers’ boundaries, he was already at 19 a full seasoned and well educated man, completely outside the universities. James Heckler, History of Lower Salford Township (26-35) says “he was the most prominent man in the early history of Salford’ (26) so much so that we have the urge to take him down a peg or two, which is unnecessary, since conflict sought him out, but still he persevered. Knowing English, German, Dutch fluently, he was already delegated among these people in an ex officio capacity, which would later become official, so that he is called one of the four most educated—[today he has his own website] which no doubt traces to his mother and father, his mother being thought to be the daughter of a Dutch Reformed official given all advantage in her education, and his father, a blacksmith, was a man of poised and equable spirit, early and late a man of distinction, so no wonder this Jacob was given his father’s blacksmith tools, no wonder he was an executor and intermediary among these high spirited people and, thanks be to our Creator, no wonder he was also a polemicist of high order and fought for what he deemed right, with all that will bring in any and every such man, whose spirit unquenched and his faith much tested, was a patriarch to later generations.
Theocratic Identity of Place of Early Philadelphia, Germantown, Skpppack, Oley. Some names and places in the settling of the beliefs.
Eagle Gathering.
Eagles close up make a mess. Their lives are as fantastic in journal and letter as eagles who mate in midair. If the first histories of Pennsylvania came in flights, as Mittelberger claimed they attacked in 1756, the thoughts, journals and letters of individuals like Gottlieb Mittelberger (1714 – 1758), Henry Muhlenberg (1711-1787), John Phillip Boehm (1683–1749), Matthias Baumann (1675-1727), Francis Daniel Pastorius (September 26, 1651—c. 1720), construct an analogy of freedom is that you have to think more or less like eagles. Native transcendentalists gathered in Philadelphia a hundred years before Transcendentalism landed in New England. So while in single or in small groups, in flights the folk also transcend. This is the cultural way of that Heart.
Gottlieb Mittelberger claimed in his Journey to Pennsylvania that Conrad Reiff was attacked in his field by a whole flight of golden eagles. Wilhelm Schimmel (1817–1890) carved these eagles in the 19th century, but in the 18th, in Germantown and further out in Perkiomen, Salford, Skippack, Worcester, New Providence, Hereford, Oley, there was no wagon top. In winter, children hid in the back with baskets of food. Domestic issues crowded the street. The feel of the farmhouse was the main event with battles in the church, the market and the countryside that made the time.
The introspective life of that age knew itself when recorded from missteps on the trail. The better scandalized and forgotten the better remembered. Sued, advertised, with newspaper ads, "better not ask. He deserved what he got." Be sure of one thing, a life dredged from complaint and self defense calls for a discerning eye, the words of enemies will not deny themselves. Cases illumine the whole ethnic, religious and political conflict of the old orders. Philadelphia had no wall around. You could just disappear in the trees. Atavists, obstructionists, elitists who thought the common man unworthy of free speech hid there minding the liberty-happy flaw.
We grew up in the iron age and thought it gold, but back in the days of yesteryear two centers of habitation compare, Boston and Philadelphia. Boston was strict. If you did not agree you went to Rhode Island, but you were still strict. Solely English immigrants aside from some Swedes and Dutch in New York, predominated. Philadelphia was opposite. It harbored every religious sect under the sun. The list is never complete until another is found. Its charter made it such. These two first golden ages in Boston and Philadelphia contrast religious dogma and treatment of indigenous. Quakers and Pietist Palatinians were mild in comparison to Boston in their treatment of Indians and the land, to which they brought a scent of care, not domination and control. Their works did not especially fear the forest or the Indian. The important outcome was that the English fear of the alien and the wilderness made New England aggressive, which climate rebounded and made them treat themselves the way they did the natural and indigenous world, that is, they got Hawthorne. The Bounce Back psychologist says you will always internalize your outer world in the inner, or vice versa. Fear was part of the English national character, but Philadelphia had a different demographic. What is golden in one is tarnished silver in another and it can go to bronze, fall to iron, which rusts. This is the identity of place
The first English settlement in Philadelphia occurred about 1642, when 50 Puritan families from the New Haven Colony in Connecticut led by George Lamberton, tried to establish a theocracy at the mouth of the Schuylkill River. Theocracies among the Pennsylvania folk area were of two kinds, one farcical, profane, humorous, idolatrous, like the Neuborgen farmer who praised his manure pile and held Sunday court in the tavern with other libertine philosophers, Balaamistic, or Baalistic. This facetious theocracy is still celebrated as hexes and hexical signs on barns, with sex magic of abstention and orgy (Count Zinzendorf), spiritual virgins (Conrad Beissel) and tantric sex.
The other theocracy is high minded, seeks peace, struggles against war and is persecuted as an agonist of contradiction. This is called the way into the flowering heart, which claims Moses or David or Adam for that matter against the principalities and powers of the fallen bene Elohim, sons of God. The Pennsylvania Dutch angels and artists of the profane practice many ludicrous lawless perversions of their brother’s faith, mocking it while both practice and deny it. All of it entertains the minds left in what wilderness remains. So the history of the settlement of Pennsylvania is full of absurdity and sincerity from 1683 to 1760 thereabouts, which can be further delimited from 1709 about 50 years, but extends beyond the Civil War in influence. Its understanding requires identifying names and biographies of a list of names that appear in the findings, but arbitrary and never complete, hence we imagine volumes 2 and 3.
There is a rabbinical and a cabbalistic side to these religions among the attempts at true understanding of the scriptures and a perversion of them into Baal. On any given day we might have pages open from Second Temple understandings of Psalm 8 along with Ovid’s metamorphoses, or the slender archives of old Mennonites of the Skippack and Franconia Conferences of the 18th cent with the electronic text corpus of Inanna and Enki and multiplicity of German sects, such as Moravians, Mennonites and Dunkards,
German American origins in PA are least subject to internet search. Much is still in German, or not digitally available. Any search of a figure like Peter Miller or Christopher Saur omits more than it reveals so the sketches available hit high spots of the figures actions.
Official depositories of documents were almost unknown among the Mennonites of America until the first half of the 20th century. The descendants of Mennonite immigrants 1683-1873 from Switzerland, South Germany and France kept few if any records in their aftermath. Even membership lists could be considered evidence of pride. Written minutes of conference meetings were not kept until about 1905. Few records or correspondence letters before 1870 were preserved. One early exception is the Alms books of the Skippack (1738- ) congregation of Montgomery County, PA. The important records of the first Mennonite congregation in North America, the Germantown congregation (1708 ff.), still extant in 1835, have since disappeared (Harold Bender).
Among Mennonite and anabaptists, When I first realized existence of this community and the relations of its families the identity of names places and biographies following included. Among the general highlights, Kelpius’ Journal (1697), Heinrich Funk’s A Mirror Baptism (1744), Saur’s letters and broadsides, Zinzendorf’s Sermons (1742), which of course we read together with no less pious A Tale of A Tub (1704) of Jonathan Swift. The Mennonite pastor Michael Ziegler, the newborn reborn Hans Reiff, Peter Miller, the polyglot translator and editor of Ephrata, his intervention with Geo Wash for Michael Widman, Conrad Beissel, Dissertation on Harmony as it appears in the preface of the Turtel Taube of 1747 and Wunderschrift (1745), the English version being, " A Dissertation on Man's Fall,"
1765.--Among the Baptist and Lutheran the accounts rendered of in Christopher Sower’s journey (20 September 1721, Gottlieb Mitteberger, Journey to Pennsylvania (1756), Heinrich Muhlenberg’s etters and journals from 1742 stand out.
--Among the Newborn: Matthius Baumann, Oley, A Call to the Unregenerate, Philip Kulhwein, his second in command. Conrad Reiff, who inherited the whole mess.
--Among the Reformed: The letters of John Philip Boehm, the court cases of Jacob Reiff. The Rev. George Michael Weiss (1697-1762), titular head of a colony that arrived en masse in 1727 and began that upset, whose real powers were the Hillegasses, and Captain John Diemer, who led a British colonial expedition into Quebec against New France in 1746 to 1747. Immediately on landing Weiss deposed John Philip Boehm from his pastorates because he was “unliscensd”, but whose desire for advancement made him embark in 1730 on a fundraising tour to Holland etc. on a year and half trip, chaperoned by Jacob Reiff, then unattached, who with a history of public ventures behind was roped in. That trip compromised both. Weiss abandoned the effort, returned to PA but refused to carry the funds with him and disappeared to New York, not to return for many years. He was author of the second publication in the colony in 1729, Der In der Americanischen Wildnusz (Bradford) on the New born (Tr in see Penn Germania I, 338-361)and of a work, both lost and Account of the Indians (1743) on the Indians, both first of their kind, an example of the intellectual acumen common among many of these immigrants.
Frederick Hillegas, Skippack
Peter and Michael Hillegas, Phila
Dr. Jacob Diemer
Rev. Michael Schlatter
William j. Hinke. THE EARLY HISTORY OF WENTZ'S REFORMED CHURCH, MONTGOMERY CO., PA
Zinzendorf,
Strassburger
Betlemen
Skippack
New providence, Trappe
Salford
Ephrata
Oley
Henry S. Dotterer, James Heckler, Alderfer-librarian,
Methacton, Strassburger (Ralph Beaver Strassburger, The Strassburger Family,
John Joseph Stoudt
Christopher Saur (Sower, Sauer) 1693-1758 In 1738 Sauer began to publish almanacs, calendars, books and newspapers in 1739 using a type face that his German readers could more easily read. In 1743, Sauer published the first German-language Bible to be printed in North America (Trinity Lutheran Church now stands on the site of Christopher Sower's printing establishment. 5300 Germantown Avenue).
It is unusual that a family not Mennonite should be mentioned in its earliest documents of 1700-1750 as is the case of Hans George Reiff (1659-1726) and his wife Anna, daughter of a Dutch Church minion. First they were associated by proximity with Mennonites. Reiff’s land bordered his Mennonite cousin, Hans Reiff, from Wadenzwil, Most Mennonite Reiffs came from this canton outside Zurich, but Hans George was German Reformed in faith. His land is used as a legal boundary to establish Michael Ziegler’s property in 1717, which proximity but more his good character are the likely cause that Mennonite Pastor Ziegler asked Hans George to sign as a witness of the Mennonite Trust of 1725, where his name appears.
This family was known and respected by their Mennonite neighbors even while they were embroiled in difficulties with the religionists of the German Reformed church whose first building was on their land and whose elders sent the Reiff son, Jacob, to Holland on a fund raising tour along with their pastor Weiss. this voyage of a year and a half ended badly when Weiss abandoned the mission and refused to take the collected funds with him on his return. As soon as he returned to Philadelphia he a little suspiciously moved to New York, suspicious because he started all this mess in the first place when he landed as the religious head of a colony of Reformed in 1727 and deposed the religion that was practiced there then. Then he went abroad for more money, then abandoned Jacob Reiff with the whole business.
their sons and daughter’s names occur variously in lawsuits, as with Jacob (1698-1782) , a disputed scion of the German Reformed Reiff Church, first such in that area, of 1732 and 33, and Conrad (1696-1777) of the Newborn of Oley in Mittelberger’s Journey to Pennsylvania, who in the end returns to a faith more less in the Moravian fashion, but also both mother, sons and daughter appear in Muhlenberg’s episode of Anna’s funeral and burial in the Mennonite cemetery at Salford (1753) which funeral is also celebrated by Mittleberger’s Journey (1756) for its own sake and because he was employed by Pastor Muhlenberg as organist at that time, and this is not all for the first German Reformed church.
* Apologies to Wilhelm Schimmel (1817 to 1890) who made carved eagles of wood in mid and late 19th century which later became more valuable than a new car. He however drove a mule.
Reiff Church
The Reiff Church still functioned in 1736 when Jacob Reiff with Gerhard In den Hoffen (1687-1746), a previous fellow member of that entity who rented his mill to Felix Good, sought a road from Harleysville to Good's mill, which they claimed would benefit people going to the Skippack Reformed Church. This petition to the Quarter Sessions Court of Philadelphia on September 6, 1736 was denied because "the owners and distances in some cases had not been correctly given" (Heckler, History of Skippack, 7) and because the road would only distantly approach the church, possibly an "inaccuracy of early eighteenth century surveying" that bothered Detweiler (v) in his reconstruction of the map of Bebber's Township.
Six pastors served in that church, counting Boehme, unofficially, the last being John William Straub from 1739-1741. It may indicate the church building was removed after that if we consider that in 1743, Indenhofen applied for a license to keep a "public house" and also let the house be used as the Skippack Reformed Church for Sunday meeting. Boehme roughly from 1720, first as Reader, then about 1725 as pastor, then George Michael Weiss, 1727-30, Peter Miller, 1730-31, John Bartholomew Rieger, 1731-34, John Henry Goetschy, 1735-39, John William Straub, 1739-41 (Life of Boehm, 60)
There was a natural divide between the Philadelphia and Skippack Reformed churches. Philadelphia was led by Weiss who arrived with a colony in 1727 while Skippack was led by Boehme and was comprised of indigenous people who had already lived there for some generations. Weiss was ordained at Heidelberg, was formal and insisted on preeminence as did his shipmates, all alphas themselves who played a large role in later political events. Boehme was merely a Reader but Skippack was also comprised of alpha, public spirited people.
Two Eighteenth Century Sources for The Funeral of Anna Reiff, January 8, 1753
Astonishing details about a funeral in Skippack, 1753:
the wake of Anna Reiff's funeral from Mittelberger's Journey to Pennsylvania,
the epicede of that funeral from Henry Melchior Muhlenberg's Journals.
Further details of Anna Reiff are considered at Anna Reiff's "Neat Hand."
I. The Wake
The Funeral
The name of his wife Anna appears on the first page of the Skippack Alms Book in 1738. Few or no membership lists, letters or minutes of meetings were kept by Mennonites before 1870, so the Skippack Alms Book is among the first of such. Anna’s (1662-1753) name appears in 1738 for a gift of ten shillings, which it seems likely to have been given for a new building and cemetery for the Salford Mennonite congregation which had become separate from the Skippack Church by then. A deed of trust was issued to trustees of the Salford and Franconia congregations 25 Jan 1738 (Wenger, 16 and James Y. Heckler in the History of Lower Salford Township (1888) p 105. Heckler says that the deed given by Henry Ruth for ten acres of land was made by lease and release, October the 4th and 5th 1738 for a meetinghouse and also to be used as “a burial place for the burying of all such persons they shall allow.” Anna Marie Reiff’s gift was prophetic since she was herself interred in that cemetery in 1753.
This funeral has become a magnet for several different atrocities and in different ways, for it was the most widely celebrated event, involving a funeral oration and extensive notes by the Lutheran pastor Henry Muhlenberg, a profane epicede by the unhappy organist of Muhlenbergs’ church, Gottlieb Mittelberger, who wrote afterward of the proceedings in his disgruntled Journey to Pennsylvania, and of Mennonite historian John Ruth’s use of it as a pretext of the modern reconciliation of Lutheran and Mennonite.
Henry Muhlenberg arrived in New Providence or Trappe in 1742, about 8 miles in his reckoning from Salford. His belief in the all sufficiency of faith enabled other positive aspects of his character, which were many. He was able both to befriend beliefs while at the same time discriminate his own, hence he preached in churches among the English and the Germans, Baptists, Mennonites, Reformed. Muhlenberg’s Journals, extant and translated, kept assiduously, describe many of difficulties he encounters in his relations with people and other faiths in that lawless environ.
The 350 pages of these Journals, with the Correspondence from Jan 1742 when he begins to Jan 1753 when he writes of this funeral are first primary sources of those years. Sometimes what they omit is as important as what they develop. For instance he at no time mentions the organist who worked at his Augustus Lutheran Church in Trappe for 3 years, Gottlieb Mittelberger, the same who published after returning to Europe the Journey to Pennsylvania (1756) who seems to describe the details of this funeral. In those years Muhlenberg gives much account of Zinzendorf’s Herrhutters, Baumann’s Newborns, Mennonites, Baptists, Lawless and not. He writes with integrity and authenticity of himself and others who of course being a pastor he sees often in extremity.
In the rough decade before this funeral of 1753 of which we speak he had conducted a great many Since he singlehandedly built the Lutheran presence in that area
Music in New Jersey, 1655-1860: A Study of Musical Activity and Musicians in ...By Charles H. Kaufman, 32 takes Mittelbeger at face value and believes he delivered organs when he did not , but is puzzled that Muhlenberg never mentions him at all! It is likely he is omitted out of courtesy since he is such a bore.
"The most prestigious social event of 1753 occurred in Providence and
Salford at the January funeral of Anna Reiff, Conrad Reiff's mother. Rev.
Muhlenberg, Mittelberger's employer, who later writes of it, officiated. Mittelberger
would surely have played the organ had the Mennonite church where it was held
possessed one, but in his fancy as a connoisseur of "the American
funeral" (44) he seems to describe the event. "I should like to
describe the funeral customs in greater detail," he says. "It is
possible to count up to four hundred or five hundred persons on horseback"
(43). Muhlenberg later wrote that there was a "large and distinguished assembly"
at Anna Reiff's funeral (Journals, I, 353), her other son Jacob being a leading citizen of Salford.
Some would ride "up to ten hours" says Mittelberger (43), but as a
local he would have been there already, for "while these people are
assembling, those present are handed pieces of good cake on a large tin platter.
Aside from that everyone gets a goblet of well-warmed West Indian rum"
(44). Such niceties sound indeed like a winter occasion and probably this particular
funeral, though he does not [specifically] say. He certainly knew all the
parties in attendance, especially his subject, Conrad Reiff, whose misbehavior
he later reports, but which however had not yet occurred, for it would have
been summer when he was [putatively] attacked by [a flight of golden] eagles in
his fields.
And since it would be three full years before the Journey was issued in
Frankfurt to catalog these events (1756) we can without hindrance imagine the
organ lovers, for Conrad Reiff owned one,and Mittelberger, chatting at the
funeral about how it was "still pretty difficult to hear good music"
except at private English "spinet or harpsichord concerts"(Journey,
87). Mittelberger would have said, "I brought the first organ into the country"
(87) and boasted about the "fine and good instruments" people came
"up to thirty hours' journey [to him] to hear. He would have confided
that he could even make better organ pipes out of cedar trees, "a
purer tone than those made of tin" (56), and that all the organs
"came into the country during the four years of my stay" (88)...Mingling
in that crowd after the funeral at the reception, Mittelberger might have
gotten stuck beside the Planter again, for "after this the guests are also
offered warmed sweet cider." Musical tales exhausted he could tell of the
"clumsy hangman" (73), the young wife and the wold wife (71-2), the
turtles at the market (50), the fireflies (61) or a dozen other tales, but
though the funeral was in Salford they wouldn't talk of Oley, home of those
"Newborn" who so aroused this air: "such outrageous coarseness
and rudeness result from the excessive freedom in that country' (48).
(AE Reiff, "Journey to Pennsylvania." Berks County Historical Review, Summer 2009, 133)
II. The Funeral and the Life
"In the same month of January I was called upon to bury a ninety-year-old
pious widow who fell asleep in the Lord. She lived eight miles from New
Providence and was buried in the so-called Mennonite cemetery. She
lived in this land for a long time. She had several married sons who are well
thought of, and some of these profess the Reformed religion [George,
Jacob] while others believe in nothing but the transitory riches of this earth.
[Conrad, Peter] She also had a daughter who is attached to the Evangelical
(Lutheran) Church. The last years of her life the widow lived with her best and
most reasonable son who cared for her as was right and proper. During my first
years here [1742 and following] she was living with her daughter
[in Germantown] and she heard the Word of God regularly, proved herself to be a
true widow, lived in solitude, put her hope in the living God, and was instant
in prayer day and night. She lived thus notwithstanding the fact that she was
obliged to listen to many a blasphemous utterance and witness many an
offense [HD on the part of her son-in-law, [Conrad Gehr] who was
Reformed by birth, but in this country not only forsook the Word of God and the
other meas of grace, but also despised and ridiculed them. [He was a Newborn,
as was his uncle, Conrad Reiff of Oley] This might be illustrated by citing
just two examples.
The said man maintained a public house and it occurred to him that he might
institute a so-called assembly of worship in his house on Sundays. For
this purpose he associated himself with a half-educated but totally perverted
Christian who was to deliver a sermon or address on physic or
natural science at every meeting. The auditors were obligated to pay three
pence apiece each time, and this money was to be consumed in drink after the
speech. The lasted for a while until the wind intervened and dispersed the chaff.
Moreover, a trustworthy man named Georg Stoltz came to me and related the
following incident. One evening he and a Swiss gentleman were obliged to stop
at the blasphemer's house and put up for the night. He went out of way to annoy
his two guests with sinful talk. Among other things he said that the context of
nature is God, that the world came into existence by an accident in eternity, that
the universe maintained itself, etc. What the parsons say about God, about a revealed
religion, about a Saviour, and about heaven and hell, they have to say to make
a living and in order to lead the masses by the nose. Such were the trite fables
with which he regaled his guests. They tried to refute him on the basis of
God's Word and experience, but he spurned everything. After the two men had
gone to bed with heavy hearts and after they had spent about an hour discussing
the sad conditions in this land and the ingratitude of men who forget God, the
next door neighbor's house was suddenly set on fire and the blasphemer's house
was brilliantly illuminated by the flames. The two men sprang out of bed. They
observed that the blasphemer in an adjoining room was suddenly roused from his
sleep and that he believed that it was his own house that was burning, for he cried
out, "O my God, O almighty God, O dear God, help me!" The Swiss
gentleman said to the blasphemer, "You big fool! Last evening you denied
and blasphemed God, and now you expect Him to help you because you are in
trouble," etc. The men were comforted and cheered recalling what is
written in Psalm 14 and Jeremiah 17, "The fool hath said in his heart,
There is no God." Whence cometh this? "They are corrupt , they have
done abominable works," etc. The heart of natural man is deceitful about
all things and desperately wicked: who can know it? Some of the poor, sinful
worms start out in this free land with hot heads and boldness; then they develop
quickly in their corruption; and finally they fall into the pit of their own
making just so much the more quickly. That is what happened to this poor
blasphemer. He became entangles in a money-making scheme, was caught and was
thrown into prison. There, unbidden, he took up the Bible again.
For the sake of her daughter the distressed old widow stayed at the former's home.
The paid no attention to the world of God]] and to prayer until she was
able to move to her son's. There she spent her remaining days in relative
quiet, [relative because Jacob's life was very active!] preparing herself for a
blessed end. At her son's request I visited her in this last home of hers and
ministered to her with the Word of God and the Holy Communion. At her funeral
her son, who can discern good as well as evil in others, testified with tears
that she had been a pious widow, a domestic preacher, an intercessor, and a
model of godliness. In this testimony other impartial friends concurred, adding
only that she had been too little esteemed and too often distressed in this
wicked world. [[HD: as it is expressed in the evangelical hymn,
Blessed are the tears of those
Who, in godly bale,
Others' sins bewail,
Owning, too, their own grave woes]]
In consideration of the circumstances, I selected Ecclesiastes 9: 13-16 as my
text, "This wisdom have I seen also under the sun, and it seemed great unto
me: there was a little city, and few men within it," etc. The elders of
the Mennonite meeting permitted and urged us in neighborly love to deliver the
funeral address in their meeting-house, which I did in the presence of a large
and distinguished assembly. The wailing of the surviving relatives was so loud
that I was almost compelled to interrupt my address. The God of blessing let an
enduring blessing rest upon His Word!"
Note. Muhlenberg's Journal comes in different states indicated
here by HD, a variant filled in by other records, as explained in the
Introduction. In offering this long quotation I mean to stimulate readers to
obtain their own copies of the three volumes of the Journals, for
nowhere else is there a more cogent, factual and engaging contemporary account.
It makes for the best reading.
Introduction to the Commission, Complaint and Answer of Jacob Reiff
Freedom of association, congregationalism, religious freedom, not
authority, created the independent congregations who engaged preachers
"for the year, like cowherds in Germany" (Gottlieb Mittelberger,
Journey to Pennsylvania, 47): "When any one fails to please his congregation,
he is given notice." Mittelberger did not see the silver lining,
"liberty in Pennsylvania does more harm than good to many people"
(48). "Excessive freedom," he calls it famously, "heaven for
farmers, paradise for artisans and hell for officials and preachers" (48).
This freedom was an extension of Penn's vision for Pennsylvania, and a desire
for it underlies the Jacob Reiff controversy.
The unofficial history of the German Reformed Church claims "their concerns
were pragmatic. They did not bring pastors with them." But this means they
were unpragmatic, since according to their laws they could not baptize
infants or celebrate communion without ordained leaders. Teachers, or readers
without ordination had to serve this need: "because these men called
Readers were not ordained ministers, the settlers could not have their children
baptized nor partake of Holy Communion" (History of Bethany United Church
of Christ, Ephrata, Pennsylvania, 1730-1976).
The modern revision continues: "they realized that they were sheep
without a shepherd. Having come to Pennsylvania for religious freedom but
finding no place to worship God, they would gather in houses, barns or groves
and select a man who could read well to read sermons and
prayers." But the Reformed did not emigrate for religious
freedom, as Frederick S. Weiser observes: "Reformed and Lutheran, along
with the Roman Catholics, were the only legally recognized churches in Germanic
lands. Mennonites and other Anabaptists existed in hiding and defiance of the
law. But it is important to note regarding the Pennsylvania migration that
whereas almost all the Anabaptists left Europe, the Lutheran and Reformed
emigration was not undertaken for religious reasons or because of
persecution...but for opportunity" (Pennsylvania German Fraktur,
xx).
In Bern, Zurich and the Palatinate the Reformed followed the state church. They
were the state church. Mennonites in Pennsylvania had been oppressed for two
centuries by those Reformed in Germany, Holland, Switzerland. The Reformed
establishment was a Mennonite oppressor. If you held "pernicious views in
regard to the sacraments" you could be drowned in a bag (Bloody Theatre,
485). "King Ferdinand declared drowning (called the third baptism)
"the best antidote to Anabaptism". Such persecutions followed
Anabaptists to Holland and the Low Countries, where many Mennonites migrated to
the Ukraine, children of whom in the 1800's emigrated to the Midwest to
be visited in Nebraska by Bishop Mack.
The United Church today is that Reformed church of old continued, but shorn of
outright opinion. Nobody wants to take credit for doctrines of blood. If the
Reformed were fleeing the so-called Palatinate "oppression and
poverty" they were fleeing themselves. Thousands of people were executed for
being rebaptised. Baptize your baby or die. Hierarchy vs. democracy were so
embarrassing that later denominations hid their complicity in crimes of blood. It
was the Anabaptists who wanted freedom and escaped to find it.
The Reformed clergy that settled in Philadelphia thought itself superior to the
ignorant lay pastors of the Mennonites. Mennonite leaders were
"uneducated," as is charged against Jacob Reiff, but the Reformed top
down hierarchy contradicted the essence of emerging democratic Pennsylvania.
Mennonites ordained nominees by lot, not seminary. Lacking pastors, early
Reformed generations had to create leadership, so "Readers," unordained
in the case of the Skippack church and others, were drafted. John Philip Boehm
preached and performed the sacraments from 1725 until September 1727 when that
colony of Reformed brought the first legitimate church official, Rev.
George Michael Weiss. Before Weiss' arrival the only means of grace had been
for the congregation to call its own pastor, that is, school teacher and
Reader John Philip Boehm, who ministered with accord at Skippack until the day
Weiss landed. Weiss then systemically routed Boehm from every church.
Weiss was the instrumental cause, not the efficient cause of the failure of
leadership to provide. As opposed to Zwingli, church order, Heidelberg
Catechism and Reformed governance, Pennsylvania was famous for its enthusiasms.
Conrad Weiser and Beissel burned the Heidelberg Catechism whose doctrines had
been the sometime agency of death. Judges of those duly constituted old world
councils made clear to Mennonites how free they were to disagree. Believe or
die. Shadows of this are everywhere in Weiss' contentiousness. So the modern
progenies of these ideas have a problem when they afterward take upon themselves
the qualities and traits they first assailed, as though they had recognized
themselves and couldn't stand it. The German Reformed Church in Pennsylvania
derived its ideas c. 1725 from Zwingli and Calvin two centuries before. It
eventually became the Evangelical and Reformed Church, merged with the
Congregational Christian Churches, then merged again and became the United
Church in 1957.
Conrad Reiff in the Journey to Pennsylvania (1696 -1777, )
This is an alternate draft of the article that appeared in the Berks County Historical Review. The second half of this article continues here.
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The natives in Gottlieb
Mittelberger's Journey to
Pennsylvania (1756) may be the first in all travel accounts to talk
back. Moralizers like author of that Journey are not like the scientific
Elizabethan Thomas Harriot, A briefe and
true report of the new found land of Virginia who went with Raleigh to
Virginia in 1585 or the poet Francis Daniel Pastorius who founded Germantown in
1683, Description of Pennsylvania (1700).
Organ master Mittelberger (1714-1758) is a gossip and part time immigrant who only
sticks it out a few years. This charms us in a way. He arrived in Pennsylvania
in 1750 and was so offended with the "lawlessness," especially of one
Conrad Reiff, that he returned to Germany to expose the many "unfortunate
circumstances of most of the Germans who have moved to that country or are
about to do so" (Journey, 1). " Someone told me" all
this, he says, "and I partly found out for myself" (8).
Yahoos of Oley
His translators Handlin and Clive call this gossip "direct
observations" when they concern the unfortunate German travelers who sold
their future as indentured servants to get passage. But other than Capt. John
Deimer and a preacher or two, Mittelberger names only two others who he judges
to be examples of “the wicked life some people lead in this free country” (84).
Overcome with the unfortunate circumstances “on my voyage to and fro” (9) he
brings “divine retribution” on these Yahoos
of Oley, to borrow from Gulliver. Yahoo there signifies a filthy crude
brute, a prejudice that overtook both native and immigrant. When a more recent
traveler, William Least Heat Moon, searched his “shelves
[for] accounts of exploration and travel in America, [he] 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). He learns 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 did die
unshriven!" (93).
Both Moon and Mittelberger are wrong, but take the organist first, who was a
patron of organs long before he became a journalist. Long time resident Conrad
Reiff had an organ too so they must have met early since they 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 [Muhlenberg's church]” (7). Taken at face value for
centuries, his farcical tales, embellished arguments and “uproarious laughter”
suffer from an abuse of the adverbs “often” and “frequent,” so even his style
seems to question his assertions.
Doubt About the Organs
First, his organ bringing is in doubt. Lutheran pastor Peter Brunnholz, who
assisted Henry Melchior Muhlenberg at Philadelphia and Germantown from 1745 to
1757, reported to Halle (the Institution that persuaded Muhlenberg to accept
the call to North America) 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 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). But Brunnholz's reliability may
also be in doubt. He was that he was a suffering and terminally ill alcoholic,
apparent since 1754, mentioned in Muhlenberg's letter of 18 March 1757, the
year of his death, as a "burden and an outrage." (Muhlenberg
Correspondence, Vol 4, 29-30). But there is reason to question Mittelberger
beyond the his organs. Even if "reliable” witnesses may have “told him” of
the scoffers’ actions he would have known himself the details of 1753 he
reports, since he did not return to Germany for another year. his zeal to put
offenders in their place claims Conrad Reiff died of an act of “divine retribution”
when in fact he lived two decades more.
It’s not that Mittelberger didn’t know the malefactors well. Huffnagel
and Conrad 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 would have gotten around to see them 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.
Mittelberger's employer, Pastor Muhlenberg had been asked to officiate.
Mittelberger would have played the organ if it had not been held at a Mennonite
church which had none. As a journalist he loved all "large and
distinguished assembly" as Muhlenberg says this was in his Journals
(I, 353). Was this where Mittelberger learned of Conrad Reiff's follies, for
the January funeral was certainly before the putative eagles felled Reiff in
his field in summer. The funeral, the eagle attack, Mittelberger's departure
from Muhlenberg all occurred in 1753 three years before the Journey was
published in 1756, but we imagine Mittelberger at the funeral chatting about
how it was "still pretty difficult to hear good music" (Journey,
87) and complimenting private English "spinet or harpsichord
concerts." There of course he 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 hear [him] play.
"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). What a
love of music won't do! He even played "the organ for a savage
family" (63).
At the wedding reception he
would 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).
Mittelberger knew Reiff as one of those who mocked the "preachers"
and made "the German and English newspapers of Philadelphia" (45)
laugh with their crudities. But that is what you expect when "totally
unlearned men [preached] in the open fields" (44). "Most preachers are
engaged... like cowherds in Germany" (47).
Mittelberger's naive translators say he is accurate in
"direct observations" (xvi) of the Redemptioners who enticed poor
German immigrants into selling themselves for passage so that "later
scholars who have reviewed the evidence have been well impressed by the
accuracy of the book" (xvi). But it was not a direct observation when
"a flight of golden eagles" attacked Reiff in his field because of
his "wicked life," and tried "to kill him." This symbolic justice
eagle also came came to tear out little Stephen
Dedalus' eyes. "Apologize apologize," they threatened poor
Stephen, "the eagle will come and pull out your eyes!" Such fear was
struck in Conrad 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 bit a crock, none of which
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)."
"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." Conrad got
the better part. He took Huffnagel's place in heaven for his own in hell, says
Mittelberger: That is, in a stroke of poetic justice he bargained for hell and
died in the basement! Let that be a lesson! Scholar Pendleton thinks this is
too apocryphal (108) at least by half, but 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). Only one further correction is
necessary, Conrad Reiff did not live unshriven as the reprobate Least Heat
Moon hopes to justify his own sins, any more than he was a "victim to
[Mittelberger's] wasting disease...unrepentant." Our Conrad died "in
hopes of a joyful resurrection," as we will see. So be careful what you
wish for and what you trust.
After the funeral of Conrad Reiff's mother Anna above, where we recall the
offender and righteous met over bowls, Pastor 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 riches 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, and
are roughly equivalent to the Conrad Reiff estate of 1750. This is success in
"transitory riches."
Huffnagel and Reiff were however as Mittelberger claimed, "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 which
will show some mitigation to these reports, but in the same language
Mittelberger the Newborn Muhlenberg applies to Reiff's errant nephew, innkeeper
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."
Communicants there 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 before 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 news by 1753, but you need
an audience for anti-worship, of which the "meeting" in Gehr's tavern
is a good example.
History reads better as fiction. Since we have disposed Huffnagel in the
basement and Mittelberger has left the state, fast forward to Reiff ten years
later, 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" (Glatfelter,
41).
This tour did better, raised 15 pounds, 9 shillings. They went to New Jersey,
through Goshenhoppen "and then up towards Oley" (44). There were 400
contributions, illustrious 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, and its references to "pious exercises,"
"the Nurture of the Lord " and "the Praise of His Holy
Name?" What happened to "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 demonstrates 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
Thus 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 in 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).
But Conrad Reiff's confession of faith in his will is most explicit. If we compare it with his father's, Hans George (1726), and his brother George (1759), neither 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 differs from his father's and brother's as much as it does 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, for example, by the secretary of Mr. Penn, through "our good works and obedience," cited below.
This last will and testament must have been made for his progeny and the public alike. 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. . ." (Journals, I, 123). To a Newborn such language would be 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 such of the 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 had exhorted a Quaker meeting "that they would talk of an outward as well as an inward Christ; for otherwise, we make our own holiness, and not the righteousness of Jesus Christ the cause of our being accepted by God." (Journals, 338). This self-righteousness had been the crux of the Newborn's rejection of church and scripture. Following the theme further, Muhlenberg said, "…first one must wrap one's self in the wounds, then Christian living must follow." As we have noted from the Weiss' dialogues, (41) the outward, the living part was superfluous because "he has all the inner fruits, but he declares he can see no use for such outward things" (Sachse, 159). 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 demonstrates 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.
The Correspondence of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg, Volume 4, 1757-1762.
Translated and Edited by Wolfgang Splitter and Timothy J. Wengert. Rockland ME:
Picton Press, 2010.
Journals of Henry Melchior Mühlenberg. 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.
Pennsylvania Lawless Ch. 1
Outbreaks
on the Pennsylvania Frontier says
tolerance of lawless behavior stemmed from fear.
Philadelphia had greater extremes of philosophy than
other frontiers.
Violence and intimidation were an important background of religious
and irreligious success. In Ephrata about 1734 "these newcomers... devoid
of all fear of God... once they, without warning, set fire to the forest, in
the hope of burning down the Settlement; but the fire turned, and laid in ashes
the barn of a householder with all its contents; (Chronicon 66). Adam Hains
attempted one night to burn down the house of Muhlenberg's son-in-law, justice
of the peace Conrad Weiser, with his family in it (Wallace, 208). No
better instance sums these Outbreaks than Muhlenberg declaring how intruders at
a wedding "scoff at churches and preachers," (Journals I,
136). Fire was a preferred means of extermination in the timber.
As Muhlenberg says, "If the head of a house should give offense to
some insolent Irishman or brutal German, he may very likely find that some harm
has been done to his cattle or crops during the night, since everything stands
out in the open, exposed to the revenge and spite of such callous people…
before he is able to summon the aid of a neighbor or the justice of the peace,
the enemy may already have perpetrated the utmost damage and fled several miles
away into the forest" (Muhlenberg Journals, op. cit.).
The paradox of Pennsylvania liberty cultivated a philosophy of lawlessness,
irreligiousness, but the religious explained that in the new world immigrants
lost their faith. Tautology and nihilism were only the tip of the branch
of liberty and license. "Even the most exemplary preachers, especially in
rural districts, are often reviled, laughed at and mocked by young and old,
like Jews... such outrageous coarseness and rudeness result from the excessive
freedom in that country, and from the blind zeal of the many sects"
(Mittelberger, 48). How then distinguish the newborns from the unborns so to
speak, when one seems to speak all, for the Newborns, a religious cult, were
the most religious irreligious of all. But the much-quoted phrase that
"Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans, and hell for
officials and preachers" makes a case for broad membership to
include every anticlerical spirit focused by the more spectacular sects.
Mittelberger laments:
"In Pennsylvania there exist so many
varieties of doctrines and sects that it is impossible to name them all. Many
people do not reveal their own particular beliefs to anyone. Furthermore there
are many hundreds of adults who not only are unbaptized but who do not even
want baptism. Many others pay no attention to the Sacraments and to the Holy
Bible, or even to God and his Word. Some do not even believe in the existence
of a true God or Devil, Heaven or Hell, Salvation or Damnation, the
Resurrection of the Dead, the Last Judgment and Eternal Life, but think that
everything visible is of merely natural origin. For in Pennsylvania not only is
everyone allowed to believe what he wishes; he is also at liberty to express these
beliefs publicly and freely" (22).
Before 1750 Muhlenberg says that the many makeshift preachers among them did
"not know the fundamental truths of religion, but they affect only the
outward forms and dispute about such matters as altar and table, the bread and
the host, the preacher's robe and vestments, about whether to say Vater
Unser or Unser Vater. This gives rise to heated religious disputes
and disgraceful word battles among the common people—between husbands and wives,
among neighbors, parents, children, relatives, and friends" ( I, 152).
Mittelberger illustrates these heated disputes, "I knew an old German
neighbor of mine very well. He had been a Lutheran. Then he rebaptized himself
in running water. Some time later he circumcised himself and thereafter
believed only in the Old Testament. Finally, just before he died, he baptized
himself again by sprinkling water over his head" (Journals I, 84).
This religious confusion is nothing compared with the many baptisms of
Conrad Beissel whose ritualistic mentality and isolation were so
extreme that he attempted to baptize
himselfto baptize himself, "this questionable act, however, failed
to convince him...yet he considered his old master...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). Beissel got
over his impediment by comparing himself with Jesus, in the revival on the
Pequea (1724), remembered "that even Christ had humbled himself to be
baptized by so lowly a person as John" (Sachse, 103). He had himself
immersed by Peter Becker face forward three times.These exaggerations match his
pride, for that cleansing from all taint lasted only until it had to be redone,
that is, as Sachse, himself a Rosicrucian like Beissel, relates, Beissel in
November 1724 plunged "beneath the flood, and through it again enter[ed]
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). Of course all this must be done
"apostolicwise," Sachse says. "Apostles" appeared in
Pennsylvania as much and as often as they did in later Scottsdale. Aposticity
dictates the autocracy of Beissel going "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 as if he had been baptized in muddy water and had later to rewash, four
years later Beissel renounced this baptism to avoid any taint on his
authority in having been baptized by a group from whom he now severed (Becker's
baptists). It puts a whole new meaning on Anabaptist when Beissel was rebaptized
again again, went 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 mysteries of
fours and sevens that only Sachse comprehends. Then, after being unbaptized, he
flipped over on his face and went down forwards. Backwards means face up in
renunciation and frontwards means face down in restoration. By 1738 Beissel was
enacting baptisms for the dead, (Chronicon, 122). The son of the
founder of the Baptists, Alexander Mack, was baptized in his father's stead in
order to qualify him for the Celestial Virginity. These incongruent baptisms
were common knowledge. In his polemic
against Beissel Christopher Sauer alludes to it when 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. Anabaptists took again and again to the water. They rebaptised
as a rededication, a repentence and a show of solidarity until in 1745 repeated
baptisms were 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" (Chronicon, 192) This
occurred after the trying period when the Eckerlins had left, accused of
"church-robbery" (190)
The difference between the irreligious fanatic Newborn and this Baptist
lawlessness was narrow. Beissel, founder of the Ephrata Cloister, and Newborn founder,
Baumann, leader of the Newborn, insisted absolutely upon their authority in
every matter. Likewise, the Reformed founder, Boehm had to have his way, and
his usurper Weiss, his. Each arrogated a law of their own. They said they were
following God in overthrowing men. In this they were joined by Zinzendorf, the
Moravian founder who had the sweetest tongue to speak of redemption, but the
most autocratic command of the redeemed. He says, "'Benedict, I am giving
your daughter to Eschenbach; you and your wife I am taking with me to Germany,
and your estate belongs to the Saviour'" (Muhlenberg, I, 150). Thus the
sects ruled the minds of their followers. Conrad Weiser went from being a
Lutheran, to being celibate with Beissel, to Zinzendorf' and then back to being
Lutheran through the good offices of his father-in-law, Muhlenberg whose
daughter he married. When the much reconverted Indian scout left Beissel the Moravians it was because he was
"compelled to protest for a considerable time against the domination of
conscience, the suppression of innocent minds, against the prevailing pomp and
luxury…" (Weiser, 128). When he left Zinzendorf that cult it prayed for his death! So the choices were
either to subscribe to the old world church, the newer Pietists, the religious
no-religion of the Newborns, or the No- religion, called the Pennsylvania
religion: "It had become proverbial, respecting any one who cared not for
god and his word, that 'he was of the Pennsylvanian religion'" (Spangenberg's
Life of Zinzendorf, in Wallace 246).
A Pennsylvania Dada Cult Der Neugeborene
The apparent secular irreligiousness, of say a "Spinoza, Collins, Spenzer,
Bayl," (Muhlenberg, I, 139) is turned into a religion by the Newborn. In
May 1747 Muhlenberg observed a woman in "Oley, where practically all the inhabitants
are scoffers and blasphemers. It is a place like Sodom and Gomorrah and I have
preached there several times for the sake of a Lot or two who live there, but
the wanton sinners only scoffed and jeered at me" (I, 146). In June 1747,
"we stopped in at the home of an old man, one of the sect called
Newborn…he will listen to no advice, accepts neither reason nor a higher
revelation in all its parts…when he came to this country, he joined the turbulent
sect" ( I, 149). Presiding at the funeral of an ex-Newborn member in 1753,
Muhlenberg relates that he had "lived in a region inhabited by people who
hold all kinds of curious opinions, despise preachers, churches, and sacraments
without discrimination, and pride themselves in their own righteousness"
(I, 357). During the service, "an old man, who called himself Newborn,
stood outside, before the door, and began to preach to several people of his
persuasion with noisy blustering which was intended to disturb me."
Monopolizing the term Newborn to denote a sociopath was a mockery of those
pietistic people who wanted to get some emotion and integrity into their religion
but instead got autocracy. This mockery was purposeful and not ironic. New born
of course signifies spiritual birth, a regeneration leading to a changed life,
an unworldly life, much as evangelicals say today. The Newborn hijacked
the term and made it virtually opposite and antagonistic to any sane
belief. The Neugeborene however founded no later denomination.
Among the host of visionaries, arriving about 1714, their founder, Baumann,
began to travel from Oley into Philadelphia for dialectics against Quakers and
others on the courthouse steps, promising them he would walk on the
Delaware river. He did not say whether this would be in winter, on ice. His
comeuppance from Beissel was nasty. When Baumann visited Ephrata
(c.1722). Beissel was so offended at Baumann's (rhetorical) freedom from sin
that he offered his own stink as a remedy and repudiation of Baumann's sinlessness.
Such was the power of his demons that Beissel seduced other men's wives
with promises of spiritual intercourse.
Derision was heaped on the Newborns however to evade the issue of the other
sects malfeasance. Muhlenberg, one of the few voices of integrity (June 10,
1747), gave a contemporary explanation of Newborn theology: "this sect
claims the new birth which they receive suddenly through immediate inspiration
and heavenly visions through dreams and the like. When they receive the new
birth in this way, then they are God and Christ Himself, can no longer sin, and
are infallible. They therefore use nothing from God's Word except those passages,
which taken out of context, appear to favor their false tenets. The holy sacraments
are to them ridiculous and their expressions concerning them are extremely
offensive" (I, 149). Heavenly visions and inner light preoccupied what
Muhlenberg learned of the old man who disturbed Philip Bayer's funeral:
"this was the basis of his authority: one night, many years ago, he saw a
light in his room. He claimed that this light revealed to him, that he was a
child of God, that the magistracy, the ministry, the Bible, sacraments, churches,
schools, etc. are of the devil, that all men must be like him, etc" (I,
357-358). This all smacks of the erosion of sanity in ergot poisoning, not that
it was, it being merely a societal disease like the Anabaptists eating each other
in the attempt to found a theocracy in the Münster
rebellion (1534-1535).
Pennsylvania Dadaist
A response to the virulent Newborn came from George Michael Weiss, the Reformed
pastor who supplanted and defrocked Boehm. He issued Der In Der Americani
Schen Wildnusz in 1729 in the form of a visit to the farm of a Newborn. The
argument goes: "I have worked hard and that is the result, but I do not
see any reason why I should thank God" (summarized by Hinke in Sachse,
157-59). "I do not need all that, for I am a New Born. I am perfectly
without sin. God is in me and I am in God," (presumably quoting John 14:20),
"I am in my Father, you are me and I am in you." When the narrator
enumerates four ways God could be in him "the New Born then claims without
hesitation that He is in him in the most perfect way, because He is perfectly
sinless." There being no greater authority than himself he "answers
by denying the authority of the Bible," that is, he is his own Scripture. Trumping
the objective universe, in answer to the query, "How do you know that you
are new born?" he answers, 'I feel it within me by a peculiar illumination
of God's Spirit.'" Who can not say this at any time, from Lem's spaceman
Kelvin in Solaris to every incidence on a picket line, to greater and lesser
degree? Cautioned about the danger of self-deception, "the New Born
answers that he has all the inner fruits, but he declares he can see no use for
such outward things as have been mentioned. Especially does he object to divine
worship in a church and to ministers." Finally, QED, "it is all the
same whether you talk or don't talk."
This sounds so Zen we have to ask whether it is, even if the groundswell
of beliefs supporting the Newborns were a patina to justify lawless acts.
Dreams, visions and inspirations give a greater context for 18th century
Pennsylvania setting out to "confound men." But in the religious
customs of his day Baumann and the Newborns were more Pennsylvania Dadaists
than Zen Buddhists. The Dada Manifesto of the early 20th century writes large
Baumann's thinking. But while Tristan Tarza proclaimed that Dadaism
"expresses the knowledge of supreme egoism, in which laws wither
away" (Motherwell, 78-79), both Beissel and Zinzendorf could say, "me
too" (but of course there can be only one me). It is perfect
solipsism: "everything one looks at is false...everyone dances to his own
boom-boom." Tarza's aphorisms, the "abolition of
logic…memory...unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product
of spontaneity" (78-9) are very suitable for a zealot. To substitute "religion"
for "art" in the Neu-merz manifesto of Victor Zygouov (1997) we would
have a Neugeborene: "In art, Dadaism is the concept of anti-art
[anti-religion]. All art that one sees is just a product of the society that
created it. Because Dadaism is in opposition to all society, it is in
opposition to the art which society produced as well."
The Newborn in opposition to society is in opposition to the religion society
produced. The only truth being inward illumination, it is that religious
conundrum of kergyma vs. truth, me vs. thee, rhema vs. logos. TThe word fragment "merz" in
Neu-merzwas was discovered by Dadaist Kurt Schwitters in a Hanover trash can.
Pennsylvania prophets resemble Dadaists in that they "express the
knowledge of supreme egoism, in which laws wither away." This withering of
law is a common denominator, among Labadists, Rosicrusians, various Pietists,
Dunkers, German Baptists, Moravians, Ephratatites, Baumann, Beissel, Zinzendorf.
Oley
Oley was the home territory of this mockery: "Many agitators appeared among
the backwoods, among them Matthias Baumann from Oley who came in 1719 (sic.) to
conduct revivals among the godless settlers. A visionary, he taught that his
disciples were free from sin and had no need for Scripture, sacraments or
marriage. Many converts flocked to even Quakers, Reformed and Lutheran"
(Earnst, 48). Mittelberger, three times references Oley and the newborn.
(Philip E. Pendleton. Oley Valley Heritage. The Colonial Years: 1700-1775).
"One of our
churchmen approached a rich scoffer in Oly Township and desired to borrow some
money.
The rich man said to the poor man, "Do you know who my God is?"
The poor man replied, "No."
The rich man pointed to his manure pile outside the door and said, 'there is my
God; he gives me wheat and everything I need" (I, 138).
Wheat, of course, was the region's cash crop. Another,
admonished to give thought to his death, laughed "that he had long since
thought of his death and decided, as far as his soul was concerned, to enter
into a swine, since he was fond of pork anyhow" (Muhlenberg, I, 138).
Mittelberger's homily against Conrad Reiff and Arnold Huffnagel for their
contempt and mockery of the clergy is the most detailed report of Oley (Journey
to Pennsylvania, 84). In it we understand the fundamental mission of the
Newborn to mock the clergy.
There Mittelberger made an example of such an "objectionable
preacher," giving a Newborn parody:
"Alas, among the preachers there are also several quite irritating ones
who offend many people, besides causing much annoyance to our ministers. At a
gathering of young farmers from the township of Oley with whom he
ministers. I will cite one example of such an objectionable preacher. His name
was Alexander. At a gathering of young farmers from the township of Oley with
whom he had been carousing he announced that with his sermon he would so move
the people standing in front of him that all of them would begin to cry, but at
the very same time all of those standing behind him would start laughing. He wagered
these same young farmers a considerable sum that he would be able to do this.
And on a certain agreed day he appeared at a church meeting, stationed himself
in the midst of the assemblage, and began to preach with a great deal of power
and emotion. When he saw that his listeners had become so moved that they began
to cry, he put his hands behind him, pulled his coat-tails apart, and revealed
through a pair of badly torn breeches his bare behind, which he scratched with
one hand during this demonstration. At this those who were standing behind him could
not help roaring with laughter; and so he won his bet. An account of this
disgusting incident appeared both in the German and English newspapers of
Philadelphia" (Journey, 45).
Following the riches theme, Muhlenberg says that life in Oley was "lucrative
and lascivious." A third time, June 10, 1747, he visits eight miles from
New Hanover. "We stopped in at the home of an old man, one of the sect
called Newborn. . .he separated from the (Reformed) Church and the Lord's
Supper and refused to give the oath of loyalty to the then ruling elector, for
which he was examined by the consistory and imprisoned. According to his opinion
he had been persecuted and expelled for the sake of Christ and the truth, but
as a matter of fact he was only confirmed in his stubbornness. He will listen
to no advice, accepts neither reason nor a higher revelation in all its parts,
since he is weak in understanding, headstrong, and hot-tempered; and
unfortunately he abuses the freedom of Pennsylvania. When he came to this
country, he joined the turbulent sect of people who call themselves
Newborn."
Confounding Men
With apologies to Ovid and Kafka, Matthius Baumann had his own metamorphosis
during a sudden illness in 1701. In a tract written in Oley in 1723 intended
for distribution in Pennsylvania he published, Ein Ruf an die
Unwiedergebohrene Welt (A Call to the Unregenerate). Parts of this are
preserved in the Chronicon Ephretense (1786). Baumann says hewas
"translated to heaven and given the power of prophecy" (Sachse, 73).
He had trances for 14 days, saw the end of the world, had an interview with the
divine. "All church and sect life as it was known - clergy, sacrament,
ritual, catechism, scripture, prayer, communal worship-was an abomination
before God and a waste of time. The only way to salvation was through a
traumatic experience of spiritual death and rebirth, which incorporated an actual
interview with the heavenly Being. Those who underwent this wrenching
transformation emerged saved and, from then on, forever free of and incapable
of sin" (Pendleton, 106).
The Newborn believed this "perfection" was a massive internal
revelation from which the "babe" could not fall. Whether the faith
was Lutheran, Reformed, Moravian or anything else those faiths were sin. More
traditional communities thought that "New Born beliefs more dangerous to
people's souls and to the social order than those of any other sect in
Pennsylvania" (Pendleton, 106). The ridicule and blasphemy the Newborn urged
was first cited in the Chronicon (17). As a result of their desire to
"confound men," to disrupt their religious services and rhetoric, Oley
and the Newborn were joined at the hip. Oley, derived from the Lenape name,
meaning "hole" or "kettle," a hollow ringed with mountains,
was a caldron of prophetic thornapple.
But it continued a little. In 1753 (although the account is published in 1756),
Mittelberger, three times references Oley and the newborn in his Journey.
Mittelberger gives the Newborn current status, while others say they have died
out by that time, including them equally in his heterogeneous catalog of
"Lutherans, members of the Reformed Church, Catholics, Quakers, Mennonites
or Anabaptists, Herrenhuter or Moravian Brothers, Pietists, Seventh-Day
Adventists, Dunkers, Presbyterians, New-born, Freemasons, Separatists,
Freethinkers, Jews, Mohammedans, Pagans, Negroes, and Indians" (Journey,
41).
Silencing the newborn
John Philip Boehm wrote of Oley in 1740 that "the worst were those who
called themselves 'The New Born.' Without hesitation they declared themselves
to be equal to God and greater than our Saviour; they pretended to be free
(from sin)…however, after God had removed such shameless blasphemers of His
name, the true Christians met and desired to establish, by the help of God, a
congregation according to our true Reformed doctrine" (Life and Letters,
1740, 278-79). This refers to the founding of the Oley Reformed Church in 1736.
Boehm said he had been aware of the Newborn since he was first in the country,
eighteen years before, in 1722. He mentions them first in his letter of 1728
among "all sorts of errorists, as Independents, Puritans, Anabaptists,
Newborn, Saturday-folks" (Life and Letters, 1728, 161).
The multiple references of Muhlenberg and Mittelberger to the later Newborn presence
would seem to modify Boehm's statement that they had been silenced, as does the
Old Moravian record of the Oley church in 1736 that "there were at that
time all kinds of spirits in Oley, of which the Newborn were the dominant party"
(cited by Hinke in Life and Letters, 110). The Moravian version of the
silencing is that it came about as a direct result of Moravian efforts, namely
Spangenberg's, who in 1737 "…came to Oley and there he gave such testimony
regarding the meritorious death of Christ, (this language, also that of
Conrad Reiff's will, suggests Conrad after became a Moravian) with such a
demonstration of the Spirit, that the power of darkness received a severe blow.
His first sermon was delivered in the house of Jonathan Herbein and the second
in the house of Abraham Bertholet. He attacked the newborn in his discourse
from the words of I John 1:7,8,9. Through this address the spirit of the
Newborn was so broken that it could not gain strength again and is daily
becoming weaker" (Hinke, Life and Letters, 111).
Everybody wanted a piece of the Newborn's demise. The Ephrata hermits claimed
it was earlier "that from this time on [after Baumann's audience with
Beissel] they lost all power to spread their seductions any farther, which finally
died out with their originators" (Chronicon, 17). Thus Boehm must
share Baumann with the Moravians and the Moravians with The Ephrataites.
Newborn notoriety was much greater than actual numbers, as Boehm said, some
partially agreed with them, swelling their ranks. We discern true believers,
partial believers and in the pond that supports the lily pad, a great swell of
anti-clericalism and unbelief that the Newborn focused and gave expression to.
Outlaw Outtakes on Conrad Reiff
Some of Conrad Reiff's biography in The Historical Review fell to
the cutting floor. These cuttings can amplify Outbreaks of the Lawless. Reiff
and Gottlieb Mittelberger were probably at one time friends of a sort. Before
he left Pennsylvania in 1753 for Germany Mittelberger would have attended the
funeral service of Anna Reiff.
Everyone else was there. Conrad Reiff, was. We develop the likelihood of their
contact in the article. At the funeral of their mother various other contacts
among the frontier brothers occurred, and also at the reading of the will of
their brother George in 1759. The
conflicted Balthaser Gehr, son of Anna Reiff II and Conrad Gehr, probably
attended. He had been given fiduciary and legal care of his cousin Philip
Reiff, Conrad’s son, from 1786 to his death in 1815. Balthaser Gehr (cf.
Pendleton, 137, 147) married the daughter of that equally wealthy neighbor of
Conrad Reiff, Antony Jaeger. In 1767 Jaeger's "sons Daniel and
Henry, and his son-in-law Balthaser Gehr were tried for assault and battery on
the Jaegers' lifelong neighbor, miller Heinrich Kerst. A neighbor, Jacob
Silvious, also stood trial for coming to Kerst's defense" (Pendleton,
147). Balthaser exercised a power of attorney for his infirm cousin, Philip
Reiff, second son of Conrad, in 1786 (Pendleton, 137). Meanwhile, in more
lawless outbreaks, Baltes went Oley.
The disposition of another son of Gehr, Philip, is unknown. He appears in the
ledger of the Old Salford Store (c. 1766-1774) reported as, "Gehr, Philip;
Conrad Gehr's son of Germantown" (John R. Tallis, The Perkiomen Region,
II, 33).] Near the bottom of the will of Hans George Reiff (d. 1726), a
different handwriting than the will reads, "Cunrad Gehr married Anna,"
(Riffe, 20) suggesting this was written after probate. Gehr was issued a patent
by the land office for 34 acres in the Salfords in 1735, the same year as
Garrett Clemens, Christopher Dock, Peter Wentz and Hans Reiff among others (H.
W. Kriebel in The Perkiomen Region, V, 11), but Heckler speculates he
possibly there was confused with Conrad Custer (Heckler, Lower Salford,
I, 13). Gehr had at least two sons. Baltazar, or Baltes Gehr served in
the Pennsylvania legislature. He was mentioned in his uncle's will, (George
Reiff) in 1759, "my will is after my sister's son Baltes should set up his
trade, my wife shall give him twenty pounds to buy tools for it" (Riffe,
28). It should be noted that Anna was not called Anna Maria as her full name is
suggested to be, but merely Anna, like her mother, who signed Anna in the
Landes will and on the board in the attic.
Conrad Gehr's Peccadilloes
Oley affected Conrad Reiff, brothers Peter and George and Jacob's daughter
Catherine who all either lived there or owned land. Spiritually the effects of
Oley were more serious upon Conrad's mother and sister (Anna and Anna Maria)
through the aforesaid sister's husband Conrad Gehr. Gehr's experience of the Newborn
is as important as brother-in-law Conrad's because they together flesh out the
satirical Newborn beliefs and show the influence in the family. Genealogist
Harry Reiff says the "family knew about Conrad's (Gehr) peccadilloes, as
indicated in the will of Hans George's son, George (d.1759), who died leaving a
legacy to nephew Baltazar with an admonition not to permit his father, Conrad Gehr,
to have any of the legacy" (Letter of 2/13/2002). Gehr's peccadilloes were
1) that he operated a tavern in Germantown (before 1753) where Newborn
blasphemy was commonplace and 2) that he had been imprisoned for fraud (Muhlenberg,
I, 353). Gehr figures prominently in Muhlenberg's writing after the funeral of
Conrad's mother, Anna. The daughter, Anna Maria, had been "attached to the
Evangelical (Lutheran) Church," which means Muhlenberg must have heard
firsthand the distress Gehr put his wife through by his behaviour. This
distress doubled because at that time the mother lived with her daughter.
Muhlenberg says,
"During my first years here [1742 and
following] she was living with her daughter in Germantown…for the sake of her daughter
the distressed old widow stayed at the former's home…she was obliged to listen
to many a blasphemous utterance and witness many an offense on the part of her
son-in-law, who was Reformed by birth, but in this country not only forsook the
Word of God and the other means of grace, but also despised and ridiculed
them" (I, 352).
Muhlenberg stipulates that the "offenses" included, that "the said man maintained a public house and it occurred to him that he might institute a so-called assembly of worship in his house on Sundays. For this purpose he associated himself with a half-educated but totally perverted Christian who was to deliver a sermon or address on physic or natural science at every meeting. The auditors were obligated to pay three pence apiece each time, and this money was to be consumed in drink after the speech" (I, 353).
New Born ideas gave a metaphysic to tavern talk, even if it sounds like Paine's
Age of Reason (1795) or other enlightenment doctrines, such
attitudes were early 18th century and German, the specific form that
Mittelberger saw affecting Conrad Reiff. But it was not isolated from all the
other revisions of order in PA from Wohlfarth and Beissel standing on the court
house steps to argue which day of the week was the sabbath (Sachse, German
Sectarians, I, 154) to Gehr's substitution of tavern for church, science
for scripture and the price of a drink for the offering. These suggest that the
1701 Blue Law of the General Court of Germantown was not being enforced, which
said: "no inn-keepers on the first day called Sunday in God's service,
shall hold gatherings of guests. . .on pain of whatever penalty the court of
record shall inflict" (Pennypacker, Germantown, 283). Gehr was the
brunt of gossip. Muhlenberg had heard further: "a trustworthy man named Georg
Stoltz came to me and related the following incident. One evening he and a
Swiss gentlemen were obliged to stop at the blasphemer's house and put up for
the night. He went out of his way to annoy his two guests with sinful talk. Among
other things he said that the context of nature is God, that the world came
into existence by an accident in eternity, that the universe maintained itself,
etc. What the parsons say about God, about a revealed religion, about a
Saviour, and about heaven and hell, they have to say to make a living and in
order to lead the masses by the nose."
Although Muhlenberg does not make the connection, such views easily mask themselves as naturalism.Gehr's satire is very much in the Newborn manner, like Conrad and those others to whom the sacraments were "ridiculous and their expressions concerning them are extremely offensive" (Muhlenberg), who uttered "such blasphemous words against our Saviour" (Boehm), who theatrically mocked preachers in parody (Mittelberger), who "despise preachers, churches and sacraments without discrimination" (Muhlenberg), who scoff that manure is life and pig the destiny of the soul. The Newborn catechism was as active in the tavern of Gehr as in the township of Oley except that Gehr went his brother-in-law one better and mixed scoff with drink.
Such tavern philosophy is reported in practically every contemporary account of the Newborn. Gehr's metaphysic implicates both brother and brother-in-law in the Newborn practice. While Boehm's summary of the sects names Puritans, Baptists and Pietists it is really the Newborn of Gehr's metaphysic that he exposes:
"Independents, Puritans, Anabaptists, Newborn, Saturday-folks, yea even the most horrible heretics, Socinians, Pietists, etc., among whom dreadful errors prevail; indeed heinous blasphemies against our great God and Savior and their own exaltation over His Majesty; for they claim that they have essential divinity in themselves; that they cannot sin…they believe there is no other heaven or hell than what is here on earth; they even deny Divine Providence, and assert that nothing needs God's blessing, but that all products of the ground and all offspring of animals and of the human race, come simply from nature, without any care on the part of God, and that prayer also is useless. (Life and Letters, (1728) 161."
Prodigal Son
While Conrad became a prodigal in joining the Newborn at midlife, he later seems
to repudiate them in word and deed, which suggests that he came home. for that
story you have to get the Review.
He was not a recent immigrant to Philadelphia, had lived in Skippack with his family
from at least 1717, the first mention of his father's land. His brother Jacob
was named in 1723 as an agent for the government. Though Reformed, his father,
Hans George, was a signatory witness of the trust agreement for the Salford
Mennonite Meeting House in 1725. There has been some suggestion that Conrad's
mother, Anna Maria, was the educated daughter of a Dutch Reformed church minion.
His first explicit mention occurs in his father's will of 1726 where the estate
was equally divided between himself and his siblings. His name next appears
with his brothers, Peter and George, in their petition to Governor Gordon of
April 29, 1728 where 74 "Back Inhabitors," residents along Skippack
Creek, sought protection against the Indians. He was an executor (with Henry
Funk and Christian Allebach) of the will of Claus Upleger, drawn up August 3,
1730: "Guardians or Executors over my wife, children and all the goods
which I left behind" (Heckler, History of Franconia Township,
10-11).
About this time he began to prepare to leave Skippack for Oley, where he bought
300 acres in 1730. Remaining yet a while, he again petitioned the Assembly with
his neighbors in 1731 to be "permitted to enjoy the rights and privileges
of English subjects" (Riffe, 26). He is doubtless included with his brothers
in the recriminations of the rival Reformed shepherds, George Michael Weiss and
John Philip Boehm which preoccupied the founding of the Reformed Church in
Skippack. These disputes began with Weiss's arrival in September 1727. Boehm
includes them all in the phrase, "Jacob Reiff and his brothers"
(Letter of 1730 in Life and Letters, 217). In these years, 1727 – 1731, Conrad
probably took care of his brother Jacob's farm while Jacob was abroad, that is,
from the end of 1727, with one six month respite, until September 1731 when he returned
from his second voyage.
Conrad may have bought the land in Oley in anticipation of his marriage of
1733. Maybe he was tired of being of the "party of Reiff" that Boehm
so incessantly argued his brother Jacob ran in Skippack, sort of an out of the
frying pan into the fire thing. Maybe it was the expression of a pioneering
spirit. If however he was seeking peace and quiet from religious disputes he
could not have gone in a worse direction. He was one of those worldly sons that
Muhlenberg disapproved. Ruminating over the matriarch Anna's obsequies in 1753
he says, "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" (Muhlenberg, I, 352).
Conrad moved to Oley in 1733 and married Anna Margaretha Kuhlwein, Mary, daughter
of Philip Kuhlwein, brother-in-law of Matthias Baumann, founder of the Newborn.
Kuhlwein had pioneered that area as an advance for Baumann in 1709. When
Kuhlwein chose the Oley Valley as the site for the perfectionist Neugeborene
colony he and Jean LeDee were the first German-speaking settlers (Pendleton,
106). Since Baumann came to Oley at Kuhlwein's advise, it is no surprise that
Kuhlwein took over leadership of the colony after Baumann's death in 1727.
We should probably assume Conrad Reiff's acceptance of Newborn beliefs,
although they were pretty different from those in which he was raised. In
marrying the scion's daughter, a family with no sons, he would have to inherit
extensive land holdings. Marriage transported him into the bosom of the Newborn
community. Thus, he immediately is identified with the twenty or so families
that originally settled the north Oley valley starting about 1712 (Pendleton,
27): Baumann, Bertolet, Levan, DeTurk, Joder (Yoder), Kuhlwein, Huffnagel,
Schenkel, Keim, Schneider, Hoch, Ballie, Peter, Herbein, Weber, Kersten,
Aschmann, Ritter, and Kauffmann (Pendleton, 18). No one benefited more from the
Newborn than he, who gained a wife, a homestead, two sons and inherited Philip
Kuhlwein's estate in less than four years, ranking him among the largest
landholders and candidate for richest man of Oley, far surpassing his brother
Jacob down in Skippack. He had a little success in the "transitory
riches."
Not only did Conrad Reiff inherit Kuhlwein's estate upon his death in 1736 (Pendleton,
108), he seems to have inherited Baumann's as well. Comparing Pendleton's maps
of the Oley Zone of 1725 with 1750, the configurations of the Baumann and Kuhlwein
estates of 1725, which adjoin on a southwest axis, are roughly equivalent to
the Conrad Reiff estate of 1750. In the 1750 map which indicates Conrad Reiff's
holdings (the estate of Philip Kuhlwein), the two tracts seem to join, as if
Baumann's estate were inherited by Kuhlwein and then that augmented section
inherited by Conrad Reiff. When Baumann died in 1727 did he deed it to his
brother-in-law? The two estates that became one were then inherited by Reiff in
1737. Why wouldn't he remain stanch when after Baumann's death the Yoders, John
Lesher, Casper Griesemer, Gabriel Boyer, (c. 1736) founded the Oley Reformed
Church ( Hinke, Life and Letters, 34)? Conrad must have seemed in 1733 a
good prospect to his father-in-law for all that he, even then, intended to
trust him with.
Conrad's Religion
Whatever the outcome, the reputation of Conrad Reiff was materially damaged,
for the Journey was "widely read and quoted" at the time of its
publication in Frankfurt in 1756. "Writers in the latter half of the eighteenth
century borrowed freely from it" and "the book remained well known in
the nineteenth century" (Mittleberger, Handlin and Clive, xvii). Folks
back home and in subsequent generations must have wondered what happened to Conrad
Reiff. But folks closer to Skippack and Germantown also wondered what happened
to him, as if the geography of Oley had spiritual connotations.
The Collection
That Conrad Reiff didn't die
until more than 20 years after the report of his death suggests there may be
more truth to the eagles than we can literally recognize. How dramatic did it have
to be? His change of heart is evidenced in a collection taken in September 1764
for the building of the Wentz Church, successor to the previously established Reiff
Church.
"The Evangelic Reformed Congregation in Skippack found themselves
necessitated for building of a House of Worship by Reason of the Great Distance
they have to church or meeting, which is Six miles or more." Their
intention, "their indispensable Duty" was so that "their Youth
might be the better brought up in the Nurture of the Lord and to the Praise of
His Holy Name." The fundraising efforts however had fallen short,
"they find 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 according to their good Will and Abilities-Knowing that
the Lord will richly reward all Such Charitable Gifts or Alms, Which are given
with a Simplicit Heart" (The Perkiomen Region, I, 38). Since the first
collecting tour raised only 12 pounds, 4 shillings a second effort was made
outside the immediate congregation. 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" (4l). This tour raised 15 pounds, 9
shillings.
Three collections in all were made, the first in New Jersey, the second throughout
Goshenhoppen and the third "through Frederick township to Falckner's Swamp
and then up towards Oley" (44). Over 400 names are listed with the amount
of their contributions. For example, from Goshenhoppen, Philip Boehm gave l
shilling, Peter Miller gave l shilling, Friedrich Hilligass gave 5. In Oley,
Casper Griesemer gave 7 shillings and so did Abraham Lewan, a comparatively
generous gift. This tour raised 14 pounds, 7 shillings.
The two largest gifts of 10 shillings each were given by Georg Welker and
Conrad Reiff (39-44). Considering the language of the subscribing petition, its
references to "pious exercises," "the Nurture of the Lord "
and "the Praise of His Holy Name," it is obvious that Conrad Reiff is
no longer sympathetic to Newborn practices which "called 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). Not only does his acceptance of such pious
language witness a change, but we also discern in the gift a reaffirmation of
his Reformed roots, supporting the attempt to restart the Skippack Reformed
Church in a permanent structure again: "When George Alsentz first reported
this congregation to the coetus in 1763, he called it Skippack, a name which
was often used during its early years to identify it" (Gladfelter I, 384).
The Newborn were never politic in their beliefs but "harsh and
uncharitable" as Philip Bayer had been before his reconciliation (Muhlenberg
I, 357).
To demonstrate how short funds were when the first church was dedicated in
November 1763, the "costs of this undertaking were greater than
anticipated. Moreover, they were 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).
To speculate, Conrad may have taken up with the Moravians since the language of his will is like the way they spoke. He appears in the Moravian archive Nov. 1, 1763 (Our Savage Neighbors, Silver, 2009, 343), "as if the Bethlehem [European] People had likewise a Hand in it" (dep. of Conrad Reiff, Nov. 1, 1763, Morav. Recs).
Notes
[Speaking of those pastors of the first Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, Boehm
and Weiss, Sachse observes that it is "a strange coincidence that both
Boehm and Baumann came to Pennsylvania about the same time from Lambsheim, in
the Palatinate" (The German Sectarians, I, 157). Five years separated
them. Hinke has Baumann arriving in Philadelphia in 1718, Sachse in 1719, but
Pendleton (176) cites land office records that show Baumann already residing in
the Oley Valley in 1714. Since Baumann had left Lambsheim in 1714 and Boehm did
not resign his position as schoolmaster in Worms until November 22, 1715 (Hinke,
15) their paths did not cross in Lambsheim and at least his one indignity can
be spared Mr. Boehm.]
If it is wondered why this sect rejected the Bible and its teachings, the text
recorded above by Spangenberg (6) should be noted, that is, I John 1.8: "if
we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us."
We don't really need to prove Conrad was a Newborn from his reputation or his speech.
Interesting as it might be, it is a much bigger topic. We know he was a Newborn
from his marriage and we know the Newborn mockeries of religions from
testimonies from nearly every contemporary source.
when the Yoders, John Lesher, Casper Griesemer, Gabriel Boyer, (c. 1736)
founded the Oley Reformed Church (Hinke, Life and Letters, 34). By 1736
however, with both leaders gone, the Newborn were on their way out.
A broader case for Newborn membership includes every spirit of anticlericalism
and unbelief. As with Boehm's catalogue of sects, this seems to be focused by
the more spectacular Newborns. Mittelberger laments: "In Pennsylvania
there exist so many varieties of doctrines and sects that it is impossible to
name them all. Many people do not reveal their own particular beliefs to anyone.
Furthermore there are many hundreds of adults who not only are unbaptized but
who do not even want baptism. Many others pay no attention to the Sacraments
and to the Holy Bible, or even to God and his Word. Some do not even believe in
the existence of a true God or Devil, Heaven or Hell, Salvation or Damnation,
the Resurrection of the Dead, the Last Judgment and Eternal Life, but think
that everything visible is of merely natural origin. For in Pennsylvania not
only is everyone allowed to believe what he wishes; he is also at liberty to
express these beliefs publicly and freely" (Journey, 22).
The reason the Newborn speak so fully for all such ideas is that they are a
genera. Thus the farmer says his situation good is because "I have worked
hard" and none other. "I am perfectly without sin" is the
metaphysical justification. Being without sin had been the contention of
Newborn founder Matthias Bauman, taught in his pamplet of ..... As the
Chronicon says, "there arose about that time [1720] a people in the neighborhood
of Oley" (16). Through a series of propositions Bauman ends with the
notion that "with the body one cannot sin before God" (Chronicon,
17) which to the Calvinists was of course impossible. Worse that these
"dangerous conclusions" (17) was their technique, "...to
confound men, a work they also diligently carried on during ten years, so that
their disputations at market times in Philadelphia were often heard with
astonishment" (17).
All the Church folk, Lutheran, Reformed, non church
sectarians say "Ishmaelites,
Laodiceans, Naturalists... Atheists, of whom the country was full... had
forsaken their mother-church" Pennsylvania (Chronicon Ephratense.
Translated by J. Max Hark. Lancaster: S. H. Zahm & Co. 1889, 71).
How exactly Mittelberger knew of the attack he doesn't say. Embellishment may
swell the breast. A provocateur of all that had gone wrong in his eyes with the
freedoms and frail order of Pennsylvania, Mittelberger would not himself know
what he would write when he began the following year. Presumably he was taking
notes. The funeral occurred about a year and a half before he left to return to
Germany.
Conrad Reiff's change of faith occured when he moved to Oley and married Anna
Margaretha Kuhlwein c. 1733, Mary, daughter of Kuhlwein pioneered the area for
Baumann in 1709, chose the Oley Valley as the site for the perfectionist Neugeborene
colony. Kuhlwein and Jean LeDee were the first German-speaking settlers
(Pendleton, 106). Baumann came to Oley at Kuhlwein's advise but didn't last
long; it is no surprise Kuhlwein took over leadership of the colony after
Baumann died in 1727. In marrying the scion's daughter, a family with no sons,
Conrad Reiff became a rich planter. He was the richest man in the area.
(Raymond J. Brunner. "That Ingenious Business" Pennsylvania German Organ Builders. Birdsboro, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1990.
Chronicon. Abstract of the diary of the Brotherhood,
which had been kept by Brother
Lamech, and continued and edited by Brother Jaebez (Agrippa) i.e. JohanPeter
Miller. Brother Lamech has been identified as Jacob Gass bySeidensticker (First
Century of German Printing in America, p. 117). Evans19558: "This
biography of Johann Conrad Beissel, the founder of the EphrataCommunity, is the
principal source of information regarding that remarkable institution. Brother
Agrippa is Johann Peter Miller; and Brother Lamech's secular name is said to be
Jacob Gass
ouˈgoost gôtˈlēp shpängˈənbĕrk, 1704–92, a bishop of the Moravian Church and a
founder of that church in America, b. Prussia. While at the Univ. of Jena, he
met Graf von Zinzendorf, and in 1730 he paid a visit to the Moravian colony,
Herrnhut. In 1732, Spangenberg joined the theological faculty of the Univ. of
Halle, but disagreement with the views of his superiors led to his dismissal.
He became assistant to Zinzendorf and was sent by him on a mission to America
in 1735. There, for a large portion of his life, Spangenberg was active in
establishing settlements, churches, and schools in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North
Carolina. In 1744 he was made bishop. Zinzendorf died in 1760; two years later
Spangenberg returned to Herrnhut, where he held a place of leadership among the
Brethren. His Idea Fidei Fratrum (1779, tr. 1784) was adopted as the
declaration of faith of the Moravian Church. Among his other writings is a
biography of Zinzendorf. If you read around the Blake entry in Flowering Heart
you will find this Zinzendorf was a freak of tantric sex.
On Baumann, by Stoudt, xvii,
Further, “Herbein was hardly alone in suspecting that the real intent of the
missionary effort was make everyone into good Moravians” Pendleton, 114
“One of the authors forebears was banished from Germany because he refused to
accede to the magistrate’s domination of his conscience. On 3 January 1702 he
told the Court at Grankfurt-am-Main that magistrates are established merely to
punish evil and encourage good. In matters of faith they have no authority.
This is an American principle, for Matthias Baumann became an American….
The lives of the Reiff
brothers, especially Conrad (c. 1696-1777) are a target for social equalizers. Conrad
was one of the richest men in Oley, but he and his younger brother Jacob
(1698-1782) of Skippack so ran afoul of contemporary piety that they are both
immediately likable to the modern mind. In matters of religion the Reiff brothers, Conrad (c.1696-1777) and Jacob
(1698-1782) ran afoul of contemporary piety, but they are likeable to the
modern mind. Their biographies document as much about Pennsylvania
religion as about either of them. This stream of events concerning battling
shepherds, religion founders and feuding families was pretty much concluded between the death of their father in 1727 and
their mother in 1753. The mutual offenses of religious practices was enough for
several lifetimes. Of the four sons, George was a Reformed elder and Jacob could
"discern good as well as evil" (I, 353), but Conrad and Peter lived
in the Oley of ill repute. That tears it. Also, the husband of the only
daughter of that family, Conrad Gehr,gets significant mention, for he too had
"despised and ridiculed," according to Muhlenberg, the "means of
grace." When we compare Muhlenberg's description of Gehr with
Mittelberger's of Reiff a pattern emerges. There are odd facts that seem to run
counter to patterns, much as in real life. For instance how was Conrad Reiff
executor of Claus Upleger of Franconia, when he then lived in Lower Salford,
and that his co-executor was Henry Funk, the Mennonite Bishop. Common sense
suggests that this was some other Conrad, except there was no other. Was he
acting as a translator like his brother? Obviously the relations of the
community were more wide than narrow. What did Reiff and Funk have in common that
Upleger chose them, unless there was some Mennonite influence on Conrad,
unlikely as this seems. In any case the question makes us take more seriously
than we otherwise would the note in the Sunday Eagle Magazine (January 12,
1969) of Reading, PA, that Conrad was a "Mennonite preacher."
Peter Reiff had already taken a patent on 100 acres in Oley (November 1735) when
Jacob Reiff deeded 193 acres on the Little Branch to him in August of 1737. Conrad
sold Peter 300 more acres in 1742, certainly the same 300 he had initially
acquired in 1730. On April 17, 1745 Peter and his wife Margaret sold the 193
acre Skippack property to John Ulrich Stauffer and went to Oley. Brother George
lived in Germantown, but his transactions mimic Peter's. In 1734 he owned 100
acres in Skippack and Jacob deeded him157 acres in 1740. He acquired an
adjoining 84 acres from neighbor Casper Ulstar making 241, kept this tract
about a year and sold it in 1741 to Jacob Shoemaker. There is no precise record
of George's owning land in Oley, but he appears on the tax list of Rockland
Township (Oley) in 1757 and 1759. He went a little Oley. According to James
Heckler, Jacob the Elder's daughter Catharine, was a widow living in Oley "at
the time of her father's death," that is, in 1782. Holy Oley!
Religious history in early Pennsylvania is dominated by feuding shepherds right
out of Edmund Spenser's Colin Clout. They feud for the same reasons as their
shepherd analogies, fame, boredom, spite, glory. Alliance-shifting friends are
enemies and back again. It would be comical to invest their passions with our
own. Quarreling is opposite golden age singing where shepherds keep their
putative flocks. They escaped the old world but found plenty of labor and
freedom without discord.
Religious fratricides of early Pennsylvania are further supercharged by
later partisans. Contemporaries who perversely held the law of grace to
assassinate character are upheld by historians of the institutions they found.
Religion in Pennsylvania resembles a pathology. The more they claim to be
right the more wrong they are. On the other hand a pool of anti-clericalism
masked much personal vengeance, which suggests a positive and a negative
expression of Pietism, positive since so many sects sought spiritually an
emotional base, but negative when these emotions enflamed neighbors.
II. Some Sources for the Reiff brothers of Schuippach.
There were plenty of Reiffs in trouble in 18th century Philadelphia, especially the four sons of Hans George (c.1659-172 6) and Anna Reiff (1662-1753). The greatest attention attaches to Jacob Reiff, called the Elder, brother of Peter, George, and Conrad, and Anna, but we do not feel sympathy for his plight until we realize his underdog status.
1) His lengthy defense in the Answer (September 1733) to a court complaint against him the previous year is his only extant writing, for he seems to represent himself. He however is quoted frequently in the letters of Boehm.
2) The Wills of Hans George, Conrad and George are extant, with numerous deeds, records of transactions and agreements, formal petitions, newspaper notices and accounts, church records, and tax lists.
3) The Journals of Henry Melichor Muhlenberg
is an important primary source for the funeral of Anna Reiff in 1753 and of
events in general in Perkiomen (1742-87). Muhlenberg lived in New Providence or
Trappe, 8 miles from Skippack where the four Reiff brothers grew up. He
traveled extensively in that region and beyond in his service as a pastor,
frequently wrote of the common people he met, of their problems, births,
baptisms and deaths with names and details. His Journal was kept mainly as a record
for himself, but he writes with veracity. Muhlenberg sounds a keynote in remarks
in his Journal after the funeral address he gave to a "large and
distinguished assembly" on the occasion of the Reiff matriarch's death, January
8, 1753 (I, 353). These reflections are an excellent jumping off point into the
labyrinth of civil and religious fratricides of that day.
Anna Reiff, widow of her husband, Hans George, who died in 1726, was one of
three women at whose death Muhlenberg presided in the month of January 1753. The journal gives his private thoughts on the
course and significance of her life, things he would not have said out loud.
These are not the official remarks, except for the biblical text. His thoughts
sum up the Reiff brothers' reputations:
"In the same month of
January I was called upon to bury a ninety-year-old pious widow who fell asleep
in the Lord. She lived eight miles
from New Providence and was buried in the so-called Mennonite cemetery. She lived in this land for a long time.” Muhlenberg calls Jacob Reiff, his father's
executor of years before, "her best and most reasonable son who cared
for her as was right and proper."
"At her son's request I visited her in this last home of hers and
ministered to her with the Word of God and the Holy Communion."
4) John Phillip Boehm before 1742 in his Letters (1728-1748)
gives a wealth of particulars concerning Jacob Reiff, notably his calling the Philadelphia
elders “church robbers.”
Continuing the meditation Muhlenberg says, "at her funeral her son, who
can discern good as well as evil in others, testified with tears that she had
been a pious widow, a domestic preacher, an intercessor, and a model of
godliness (I, 353)." If Muhlenberg says
Jacob Reiff can discern "good as well as evil" long after the many
vicious allegations had passed, we take his judgment after the fact as evidence
of exoneration of the many charges against his character.
5) Gottlieb Mittelberger's disgruntled record of his Journey to Pennsylvania (1756) where he had gone in 1752 to become the organist in Muhlenberg's church famously details Conrad Reiff.
George Reiff (1692-1759). The Innocent, we might christen him in contrast with his brothers, was among the elders and the early founders of the Reformed Congregation of Skippack, the first Reformed church in Pennsylvania. This itself is evidence of his concern for a more unworldly way of way of life. With other elders he signed the authorization for his brother Jacob to go Holland with Pastor Weiss to collect the ill-fated funds donated to the Reformed congregations. (Life and Letters of the Rev. John Philip Boehm, 209. He is sometimes confused with his father of the same name. Referring to Dotterer's report of the tradition that Hans Georg Reiff, arrived in Pennsylvania 'before Penn set up his government' " Boehm’s editor, Hinke, mistakes the father for the son, unless we consider the son a junior, saying in the next sentence that "in 1730 Hans Georg Reiff (d. 1726) was a member of the Reformed Church at Skippack" (21). That George had no progeny and seems at all accounts to have been a faithful and steady member of the community should not be held against him. He did sign the two petitions of 1728 and 1731 mentioned below. In 1757, two years before his death, he is taxed for owning land in Oley about eleven miles south of Reading, near Peter and Conrad. It would seem George was allied with Jacob in Muhlenberg's mind as one of the sons well thought of.
Peter Reiff (c.1694-c.1782) was a smith like his father (who however left his smith's tools to Jacob), but although he was the son of Hans George Reiff he managed to confound a generation of genealogists by founding a strain of Riffes in West Virginia. The antecedents of Daniel Boone also lived in Oley (Riffe, 29) and that association according to Riffe was the primary cause of Peter's childrens' southward descent. He did not leave a will but lived in Skippack from youth to sometime after 1745 when, having accumulated 400 acres or so in Oley near his brother Conrad, he moved there.
All three brothers, Conrad, Peter and George, appear on the tax rolls of Oley in 1757, the first year of the organization of that township (Rockland Township). Peter may have lived there some years prior, as perhaps had George. Before moving to Oley Peter was much involved in the area of his father's settlement in Skippack. His first son, Peter Jr. was born there (c. 1728). Peter Sr., with George, Conrad and 74 other inhabitants along Skippack Creek, calling themselves "Back Inhabitors," petitioned then Governor Gordon in April 29, 1728 for protection against the Indians (Riffe, 26). Likewise with George and Conrad, Peter petitioned the Assembly in 1731 to be "permitted to enjoy the rights and privileges of English subjects" (Riffe, 26). Brother Jacob did not sign any of these petitions because he took two trips to Holland etc. in those years. Three of Peter’s children were born in Rockland Township after his relocation, Jacob (1755), Henry (1756) and Daniel (1759) He started a school (c. 1750) and employed a teacher and was as well known to witness wills.
Conrad Reiff
Conrad (1696-c.1777) had two sons, Daniel and Philip, with the rank of Captain and Lieutenant respectively, who maybe fought in revolutionary battles of 1777. Conrad operated a large farm, some 970 acres by 1775, with its own sawmill and gristmill. Based on the 1767 tax assessment Pendleton says he was one of only three men "who did not have to work with their hands" (44). This tax assessment lists 20 acres of grain, a gristmill, sawmill and several tenant farms. He had taken on several indentured servants in 1745 and following. He sued the equally wealthy ironmaster Johannes Lesher in 1766.
He began the move to Oley, buying land there in 1730 and moving in 1733. His two sons Daniel (b.1736) and Philip (b.1739) are registered as being born in Philadelphia County, but at this time Philadelphia County demarked the region. He deeded 300 acres to Peter in 1742 and the two were associated after that date. When the taxes for the new township were assessed in 1759 Conrad paid more than anybody, for he had some 925 acres. There is a spiritual odyssey denoted in his beliefs. At the outset he was Reformed, lived in Skippack, signed the petition of 1728 (and 1731?) and no doubt was included in Boehm's (1730) passionate denunciation of "Jacob Reiff and his brothers" (Letters, 217).
How rich is rich?
Conrad's Organ connects the two protagonists. Reiff willed it to his son
Daniel in 1777. At that time "the organ can be considered to have been
somewhat of a rarity as a home instrument. Those individuals who did own an
organ were often wealthy persons of the community" (Brunner, 10). Conrad
Reiff may have inherited the organ from his father-in-law Philip Kuhlwein in
1737, he certainly inherited all of his land. The organ mentioned in the
will of Matthias Zimmerman in Philadelphia is of 1734. Conrad Weiser had one
prior to 1760 in Tulpehocken (10). A schoolmaster and organist of Old
Goschenhoppen c.1779 was paid five pounds a year. A schoolmaster-organist at
Trappe, 11 pounds in 1760. Compensation could include other items such as use
of the schoolhouse as living quarters, free use of church land, donations of firewood,
food and clothing. An average for the middle of the eighteenth century,
including playing the organ, free rent, singing at funerals and conducting the
singing school was approximately 20 to 25 pounds a year. (Ingenious Bus, 44).
Mittleberger got 10 pounds in his last year (43).
Be sure your sins will find you out applies to
every PA figure who needs the expulpation given Hart Crane's biographers by his
tale builders. More excuses were never given for a fallen, erring, suicidal
poet, but he was infected with the approved muse. Of the many perquisites to
exculpation even more can be forgiven if he will also die young in the throes
of the if and only if at the age of 33, although Keats was more tragic at 25
years and out, and Rimbaud at 36 can be halved since it completed his poetic
suicide at 21.
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.
T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1943.
Ernest, James E. Ephrata A history. Allentown: Schlechter's, 1963.
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.
Motherwell, Robert, tr. The Dada Manifesto, in Dada Painters and Poets, NY:
1951.
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.
Wallace, Paul. Conrad Weiser: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945.
Weiser, C. Z. The Life of (John) Conrad Weiser. Reading, PA: Daniel Miller,
1899.
George Whitefield's Journals (1737-1741). Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles
& Reprints, 1969.
Pennsylvania Spiritual Lawlessness Ch. 2
Baptisms
The brightest star in this stellium of mystic artists pretending to the prophetic
was Conrad Beissel. The illuminations of books and prints of the utopian
society at Ephrata were a century
before Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance (1852) or Brook Farm (1841-47). New England got all
the press but the real transcendentalists were in Pennsylvania. Beissel was
just hitting his stride in 1741, but, as will happen with the individual and the
prophetic, the isolation of his mentality and individuality was extreme. At one
time he attempted to baptize himselfto
baptize himself which is as hard as marrying yourself, which he also
tried to do. Anointing yourself is more common and just as prideful. Of the
baptism, "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). In the
revival on the Pequea (1724) he compared himself with Jesus, "even
Christ had humbled himself to be baptized by so lowly a person as John"
(103). Then he was immersed face forward three times. When one changed religions
there was a giving of "a bill of divorce to their former spiritual wife"
(51). "There were few under the leading of the Superintendent who were not
rebaptized at least three times, according as their zeal for God demanded (51).
The social relationships in these communities were as difficult as New
England's. Hawthorne quit Brook farm over its nastiness in 1841.
Julius Friedrich Sachse (1842-1919),
Beissel's biographer, another Rosicrucian, empathizes with Beissel in November
1724 as he "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). Submission is the opposite of
lawlessness but pride isn't.These exaggerations were a style of writing of the
18th century (compare Sterne or Defoe) and they match the pride of the
celebrant himself, for that cleansing from all taint, if it had any effect at
all (and if it did we should all instantly baptize the world) it lasted only so
long as it had to be redone, and redone, so was no cleansing at all. Before
this their adversaries had taunted the Baptists who needed a second baptism
with a third, drowning, but that is
another course entirely. All must be done to further imitation
"apostolicwise," Sachse says. "Apostles" appeared in
Pennsylvania as much as they did in latter day Scottsdale pyramid schemes, what they call affinity frauds. Aposticity went with autocracy
down to the Pequea where 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" (The
German Sectarians of Pennsylvania I, 104).
But not so fast. Four years later Beissel renounced this baptism lest there
seem to be any taint on his authority from having been immersed by a group he
now severed (Becker's baptists). It puts a whole new meaning on Anabaptist.
Beissel rebaptized again, went back down to the river and got re-baptized
twice. By any proper count we are now at four, not counting those congregants
baptized in muddy water who had to rewash. First he was unbaptised backwards to
wash off the former (at the hands of Becker). He went back under three times
backwards. This was done to an accompaniment of Rosicrucian fours and sevens that
Sachse comprehends, that the underground
cities of the future will practice in thirds. Then Beissel, being
unbaptized on his back, flipped over on his face and went down forward thrice.
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) wherein the son of Alexander Mack was baptized in his father's stead to
qualify him for Celestial Virginity. These incongruities were common.
They just could not leave baptism alone. In his polemic against Beissel Christopher Sauer says, "I have,
without baptizing myself and letting myself be baptized four times (like him)
(Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 344). Anabaptists again and again took
the waters. They rebaptised as rededication, as repentance and as 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 another,
all performed by Beissel, who "purposed it be a yearly custom" (Chronicon,
192). This occurred after the trying period when the Eckerlins had left,
accused of "church-robbery" (190).
Ephrata Cloister: The Prophecies of Conrad Beissel in Chronicon Ephratense (1786) Take I
The English translation of this
work of 1786, published in 1889, is a history of the community of Seventh Day
Baptists at Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, primary resource on Ephrata.
Written by two orignal members of the community, it includes a biography of the
spiritual order's founder Conrad Beissel, whose spiritual name in the Ephrata
Cloister was Friedsam Gottrecht.
To read the Chronicon is easier
than reading about the Order. Snobberies and shibboleths of mysticism,
emaciated hermits said to be singing to Rosicrucian alchemists. The critical
verbiage is even worse from the spiritualized knowledge that mystics say
they have, through tantric and siddhi power, to adulation. The modern texts
have none of the power of the original, its faith and experience also having
been vaporized.
Chronicon navigates these paths of irrelevancies and
asides with good humor. Rising in night at 3 AM to read Wallace Stevens
and Dylan Thomas, I picked up the Chronicon one night. 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 pretty fluidly modern,
the autocratic charismatic experience is and is not, depending. Prophets rule
like Neptune and declare all naturalism void. Beissel is a prophet, failing
naturalism there is no defense from the prophetic curses that sweep the
country with railings, self-exaltation and boasting.
Before fully appreciating the language of this American "paradise,"
that is, the Novus Ordo Seclorum, called
the Invisible Empire in its global reach, I had read it as a fantasy, a contradiction
and fulfillment of sexual repression. After all, were America in any way this
kingdom it would have inscribed upon its Capitol Dome and currency not the
slogans of Egyptian Illuminati that are there, with E Pluribus Unum, but
"Gather Together In One All Things In
The Messiah, both in heaven and on earth in Him."
America has seen dozens, hundreds of schemes groping to a millennial end, but
instead of invoking Psalm 2 which says, Kiss the Son whose kingdom is
set upon the holy hill, the Masonic American symbols invoke Hosea 13.2, images
the work of craftsmen where the sacrificers of men kiss the calves. The
sacrifice of men is pursued in The War on
Neptune. Beissel's pagan visions are not completely gone!
Pewter Miller
My choice for supposed editor and writer of the Chronicon
is Peter Miller, elected after Beissel's passing to head the order.There
are clues to Peter Miller's life. He is called Pastor Miller in an
excerpt because he was first a pastor of the German Reformed Church. In his
second or third pastoral term he led the Reiff Church in Salford, first served
by John Phillip Boehm until taken down by the usurping Weiss in 1727.
(There is little likeness of Boehm to Jacob Boehme the mystic, even with the
near spelling.) This Pewter Miller turned gold in his loyalty to Conrad Beissel,
if only from the fantasy that Beissel thinks he will survive the Fall!
With the stellium of artists around Beissel sing a new world whose lyrics
restore Adam before division. Prophecies of heavenly virginity and 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).
|
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|
The Making of Conrad Beissel |
This
version, a man of raw clay, contrasts with his fired state at 2350 degrees
meant to show what Beissel thought could happen if the spirit were properly
restored to Adam in this "prevision of the new world." The versions
below show the work this clay sustained in its making.
No greater slight was ever given Conrad Beissel than when the German printer,
Christopher Sauer, called him an amateur poet (below). He was a major dreamer.
To reinhabit the unfallen Adam after the Fall meant acquiring a glorified body before death, finding
"again an entrance unto the tree of life" (135)! Today this would be
taken as a trans-human foresight,to be
done by sacrificing the body. One cannot be immortal while eating strudel. It
was a political vision as well, foreseeing a millennial kingdom in
America before the Mormon vision of the same, sharing with the Puritan somewhat
The Paradiesisches Wunderspiel [Beissel's 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" (135, 167).
The virgin would be intact in his dream. Rediscover your virginity would be a principle of Tantrism where during meditation the initiate incorporates numerous gods and goddesses, visualizes and internalizes them, a process likened to sexual courtship and consummation. Beissel shared this doctrine as it was unbelievably promulgated with the alchemical quirks of Count Zinzendorf, one of Beissel's adversaries. The central idea was that prevention of orgasm propagates long life. Some call it Taoist alchemy and cite it today on the authority of some Tibetan they say has lived, but they themselves die before they reach the average age of our Mennonite ancestors. This notion did not bring Beissel and Zinzendorf together. For all his biblicism and seeking to be a spiritual virgin Beissel never however took up the phrase that he should be made a "eunuch for the kingdom of heaven," though Miller at one point suggests that the Brotherhood was a kind of slavery implied in an oriental court. One can see that spiritual virginity and being a eunuch have something in common. A colony of eunuchs however would have made the neighbors less nervous, for Beissel had a way of (spiritually) seducing their wives! Beissel offered to his followers to either spiritual virginity or married servitude, the latter much inferior. Even if every aspect of physical existence was tainted for those people by the flesh, the sacrifices of a eunuch and a virgin are not the same Tainted is the crux. Loathing of the body denied its redemption at the cross and sanctification in all life as much in order to attain it in the cloister. This substitution was a denial of redemption. Not that Beissel had less scorn for the body than that advertised in commercials to sell perspiration products. Crucifixion includes Incarnation and hallows physical existence. Physical existence is such an easy target, witness all the prohibitions against it, all the while of course avoiding the real problem that lust or virtue is of the mind.
Quest for the Immortal / Denial of the Natural
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, editor of the Chronicon, 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. "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? How does one become two? Have you seen the missing self? Where is the Garden?
Climbing up from the lower state Beissel tangled this unity of existence with negation. Punitive rules, regulations produced that rebellion inherent in the nature where good is imposed from without. But while prophesy reechos in the Ephrata Community it is not only of personal fame or infamy at first, such as Zinzendorf's prophesy to Prior Eckerlin that he would succeed the Superintendent in office (149), except he died twenty years too soon. During Eckerlin's rebellion and removal from the community there was much banter on all sides which produced blessing and cursing, including Beissel's prophesy that "the Brotherhood in Zion would yet have a great fall" (173). This was superimposed upon other speaking when "the language of the spirit, which requires no words, was still spoken in the Settlement" (180).
Against the Natural
Since there had been no guardian over Adam to prevent his Fall Superintendent
Beissel served instead. He 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 force he called
"man-power" (130), the "selfish possession" of the good. It
got punitive. Women practiced "head-shearing" (126), cut a bald spot
on the crowns of their heads in yearly tonsures. Along with the oaths of Perpetual
Chasity the hair of the Sisters' heads was laid on the table (126) even as the
puling Alexander Mack Jr. baptized himself for the salvation of his illustrious
and godly father (122) Alexander Mack (1670-1735), founder of the Church of the
Brethren. Something like the latter Mormon custom. This is like Isaac getting
baptized for Abraham. The"falling and rising again of man" (205)
preoccupied them, which means that rites of rebaptism were yearly enforced with
off-again on- again marriages, letters of divorce and removal of all worldly
entrapments. The trades and bells installed by Eckerlin were done away with as
well as chopping down an "orchard of 1000 trees...to lay open the inner
man" (193).
The social psychological pathology of these actions and motives was ironically
called a "divine comedy...that you must learn to be both high and low,
rich and poor, etc. without a change of mind" (196). Among these changes
of mind the mill stood for the natural. So "many Brethren turned
towards the mill whenever they wished to escape the disciplines of the Holy
Spirit" (209). The mill was lost when they came to rely on it, that is
they had fallen "into unbelief and bought the mill" for their
livelihood, instead of seeking "support mostly from offerings" (209).
So as they traveled 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 around roused to join in "home worship."
The period of the bell under Eckerlin ironically coincided with its golden age
of prophecy.
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). Beissel in the company of Elijah (I
Kings 17) and the two witnesses in Revelations (11.6) prevented the
rain for a similar amount of time. Mighty man or what? The offense was that the
community had used an abundant wheat harvest to fatten hogs and distill drink
instead of distributing to the poor.
Imagine if that happened on Wall Street, what excesses would instill. 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 but "the judgment was not revoked by
it...therefore he warned against finding fault with God on account of benefits
he had bestowed" (223), not taking the other clue that this
self-arrogation was as deluded as the white explorer in Africa claiming
supernatural powers during a lunar eclipse. Beissel's infatuation with judgment
was 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),
shoring up the event on both sides. It should be obvious how such appeals were
aimed at social control.
Denying the Literal
Emphasis of the prophetic against the natural summoned adroit interpretation. 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,"hence was married. 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). His rejection of the literal text is like the rejection of the body that bode such ill for the Sabbatical church. Take the first floor of the building's interpretation, the base, and there is no top but fabrication. Reject the text, reject the body. Explaining away "rejoice in the wife of your youth...may her breasts satisfy you always" (Proverbs 5.18f) as another such quasi-rabbinical, medievalism overhung Beissel's core belief that marriage was "a house of correction for carnal minded persons" (147). His views of marriage and justification are both tied 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). Peter Miller makes it worse. On celibacy he 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).
After all, who madethese people immortal but their own efforts? A more modern prophet, D. H. Lawrence, also argues the unification of the male and female principles, but in intercourse (Fantasia of the Unconscious, 1921).
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 on this by arguing that both sexes lacked fulfillment of the other, but there was a preponderance of negative stereotype of the feminine in the Order. Never a notion of the false husband to complement the displaced Sophia. 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). The woman seen as "Wife of the world," temptress, implicitly makes the man a victim, but ialso must cast him as her inferior. That psychology explains much of their fear of the body. The body, the woman and the world must be overcome. It never occurred to Beissel how counter this was to the incarnation. In 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 the daughter of Eve Beissel himself would have been unable to obtain a birth. This obvious natural effect invalidates 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 or himself, divorce from the literal 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 conditions of privation. Miller seems to say with approval 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 righteousness 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 rich.
This austere theology was Englished by Miller in his translation of Beissel's work called Dissertation on Man's Fall (1765). It shows another intense period in the cloister, but not always clearly. Miller compares Eckerlin 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 a baldly 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 was beset with continual plots. Miller calls them variously attacks, disagreements, difficulties, fissures, conscience smiting, gossiping, quarreling, spiritual tyrannies and vexations (133-135), for the spirit of self denial is full of recrimination. The attempt of the Order to name Beissel as Father 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, but Miller spiritualized the factions to the disagreements of the tribes of Judah and Ephraim (115). Not only are political parties, but their geography is Old Testament, namely Ephrata's Zion. Naming, 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 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. 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. He says of Yuchly that "the judgment overtook him."
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 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 compare to death bed agonies. Again and again Miller speaks of
agonized leave takings at death as in the obituary of Michael Wolfort, 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 interactions of the natural and spiritual afflicted much of
conscience among them. To be sure it was all a setup for Beissel to come and
anoint Wolfort for his relief.
The Quarrel
Constant jockeying and quarreling within and without 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.
One Order representative on site, Miller, suggested to Sauer that this 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
communication 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 corrects 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. In defense,
Peter Miller had 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. Miller 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 have been much comforted
to later read that Beissel had also compounded 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 confused 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 Sauer's 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.
Whatever holiness was involved in these affairs was 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 what 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 Edith Sitwell who says, "in
the plain of the world's dust where the lion and honeybee held with the dust a
colloquy, all things must end, the hump on the dwarf, the mountain on the
plain, all loss all gain, yet will the world remain." If the world
will remain in spite of 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 must appear.
It may be enjoyable to compare the foibles of Beissel with the psychology of
poet Robert Bly, similar cult figures, whose take
on anger, that it is from shame, and what to do about it, has a similar
appeal as Beissel's invitation to celibacy. That is, it is the language and
thought of sanctity, or as they will all say of severity, "iron sharpens
iron." The mechanisms 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.
Among people who need this outer discipline, since they lack the inner compulsion
of the prophet, Beissel's order fulfills the 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.
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.
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
[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 if it all comes down to how can I make myself immortal, not how can I give
up my life, the immortality quest freezes
Ted Williams, but is not as well thought out as Swift's Struldbruggs. Austerities
constrict the blood vessels. I have met some who would make this happen by the
way they think, or the way they eat, or the way they pray. 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 divisiveness
and 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 of the first delusion. 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? So what if you take those drugs with all those 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 the
storm when the mind stops thinking, is elusive. Disorder the mind and the
brain will follow is their motto. Making yourself immortal by Science is like
making yourself wise by dope.
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)
Conrad Beissel's Virgin Heart (1786)
If a virgin is pure of heart, free of lusts, but maybe not of hopes and dreams, it is hard to call Conrad Beissel one. He was full of threatenings, pomposities, fears, conflicts, collisions and pride, not qualities of virginity. So we beg to view the Ephrata Cloister in a more modern context of the body as hermeneutical category:
"For many centuries the importance of the body,
of matter, has been devalued. Importance
has always been given to the human "soul" or, in another generalizing
view, a person's place in the socio-political structure and the economy. But
history shows that the body has always been the main locus of the oppression
and appropriation of women, as it has also been with other oppressed groups (for
example indigenous and black peoples): this has been done through rape,
aggression, denial, abuse, manipulation, idealization.
For this very reason, the body cannot be considered as a mere side-issue in any
reading of the Bible which asks questions about gender relations. Life and
death manifest themselves through the body. Restoring the physical body to its
rightful place is a fundamental part of our affirmation of a real and sensual
life." (Pereira, Nancy Cardoso,
from The body as hermeneutical category).
Denying the Literal
Emphasis of the prophetic against the natural often summoned adroit interpretation. When the Moravians visited Ephrata to argue for marriage justification, one said that "Enoch walked with God for 300 years and begot sons and daughters" and that therefore Enoch was married. Enoch of course would be the patron saint of the celestial virgin since he did not die. Peter Miller, writing the Chronicon, 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 only airy fabrication. Reject the text, reject the body, explain how your wife's breasts are meant only for an infant's nourishment despite the literal text that you should "rejoice in the wife of your youth...may her breasts satisfy you always" (Proverbs 5.18f). Such quasi-rabbinical medievalisms filled Beissel's core belief that marriage was "a house of correction for carnal minded persons" (147). His views of marriage and justification by faith both tie to the carnal, for "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, Paul means forgiveness became a license to sin. Peter Miller makes denial of the literal even more extreme, since his way of pronouncing his allegiance to Beissel was to *publicly burn the Heidelberg Catechism (an historical pastime). On celibacy Miller expands the literal 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 cloistered Brothers in all this therefore intended to make themselves "immortal" by their efforts. A more modern prophet, D. H. Lawrence, argues that the unification of the male and female principles in intercourse is the way to be immortal. (Fantasia of the Unconscious, 1921).
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, as in 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 doctrine of the
false woman, the displaced Sophia or feminine principle. Miller argue
Eckerlin deluded from his inherent contradiction of priesthood in 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). The woman is seen as "Wife of the world," a temptress
who makes the man a victim and casts him as her inferior, as one renamed
Berenice who "denied herself her carnal bridal-couch here below"
(69). Such denigration of the bride explains much of the
Cloister's fear of the body. John Donne's love sonnets and O my America,
and among the Puritans, the body of forests and landscapes, extended by
later settlers to clearcut and plow the prairie, which in the modern day blows
tops off of mountains in West Virginia to mine coal, while power plants belch
hydrocarbons, oil spills, nuclear waste, all according to the power of dominion
over the body, the woman and the world, all set the stage of the ultimate
victimization of woman and earth by the nephilim of Genesis 6 and their modern
trans-human cohorts.
The virgin goes intact to his dream, or wants to. Maybe he will revirginize,
but Beissel always uses the feminine; he 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 as a "virgin" he had a way of (spiritually) seducing the
neighbor wives! Christopher Sauer's wife left her husband in a snowstorm in
order to walk to Beissel and be a spiritual virgin. As Sister Marcella she
believed that "marriage tarnishes the clear crystal of the soul's
purity." Every aspect of physical existence was tainted for Beissel 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. It never occurred to Beissel to see how opposed this denial
of the body 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). Adam however is given a
pass. Beissel himself would never have attained birth had not a
daughter of Eve been his mother. Isn't it obvious that natural effects invalidate
this 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, Beissel advised Matthias Baumann to "smell of his own stink", but did not do so 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, he argued, they would all have 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." 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). 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, also 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 and shearing. Chapter XXI of the Chronicon on these prophecies is poignant in this, but so is XXIV of the later singing schools.
Since the spirit of self denial is full of recrimination the Ephrata order suffered continual plots. 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. 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. 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 over their tithes generally "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 edying like flies from their failure at tithes and offerings, Count Zinzendorf was condemning others to death among the Pennsylvania spiritually lawless. 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.
No greater slight was ever given Conrad Beissel 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), which is the essence of
transhumanism occult, except by the Tree of Knowledge, more clearly seen today
than ever before in the various stratagems
so offered. This was to be done by sacrificing the body, called the
appetites of the flesh. One cannot be immortal while eating strudal. Beissel's Paradiesisches
Wunderspiel [Paradisiacal Wonder Music] (1754) or in other words, "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.
Pewter Miller
That all these American
agrarian Utopian schemes prepare for the acceptance of the new world order is
not a conclusion anyone wants to accept. An important byproduct of the Chronicon
is the clue it gives to its editor Peter Miller as a prophetic character.
He is called Pastor Miller who 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, a story in itself. This Pewter
Miller turned silver as it were, and then gold in his loyalty to Conrad Beissel.
But since Beissel, with the stellium of artists around him, thinks he will
survive the Fall, a new world order whose lyrics restore Adam before division,
these prophecies of heavenly virginity in the priesthood of
Melchizedek (Chronicon, 165) are "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 [and songs] 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 gnostic 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). Climbing up the ladder from low
physical state, Beissel tangled his 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 that occured when "the language
of the spirit, which requires no words, was still spoken in the
Settlement" (180).
Church of Adam
Denial of the body and the natural is a older 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 expression of this madness, contrasted with the notable example of
the peacemaker Bishop Andrew Mack. Newer
vagaries of madmen and their denials occur with the psychology of poet Robert
Bly, who founded his own community in his garage and around campfires, where
the take on anger is from shame, a
similar appeal as Beissel's invitation to celibacy. These are all the language
and thought of severity not mercy, as they will all say of severity, "iron
sharpens iron." All systems of such discipline are control, judgment and
submission to the 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. The Ephrata Order 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. The 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. Differing
versions proclaim the sacredness of their particular Ark where the condemned
must die for their disregard of the holy. Such talk is commonplace in the
counsels of severity.
Since there had been no guardian over Adam to prevent his Fall
Superintendent Beissel served instead. He 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 Adam 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 an "orchard of 1000 trees...to lay open the inner
man" (193). The social psychology 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 it had to be destroyed. 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. 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 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.
Was this unity confined only to male/female division? Have you seen the missing self? Where is the Garden? Directly conflicts of severity and mercy, the true spiritual path.
This golden age came, went, and came again 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 was that the community had used an abundant wheat harvest to fatten hogs and distill drink instead of distributing to the poor. This 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 the sahib in Africa claiming supernatural powers for the moon's disappearance during a lunar eclipse. The outer worlds practice the inner. 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.
The Sauer Quarrel, Theosophic
Monstrosity
Constant jockeying and quarreling within and without the the
Order occurred with printer Christopher Sauer who had a press before Ephrata did.
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. In the same way that printers
corrected Elizabethan puritans and dramatists, sometimes refusing to print
their works, he wrote to Beissel and protested verse 37 of a hymn for its
pretentiousness, being 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).
Beissel's hyperbole in reply exceeds Sauer's. The modern historian Alderfer argues that Beissel is above
criticism because "it is presumptuous 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...[from] 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 favorable view of the Father,
whatever his amateur poetry, Miller admits that the writing of Dissertation
on Man's Fall, which he translated in 1765, "is somewhat unclear in
its expressions" (135). So goes the magical complex. The printer
Sauer contended that Beissel represented himself as Christ, but Peter Miller's
defense of Beissel further antagonized. He told Sauer that people thought
Beissel "a great wizard" and gave an example where Beissel was made "invisible" (103), claiming siddic
powers to refute claims of divinity. In this theosophic monstrosity, perhaps
Miller 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 depicts
Beissel as Christ and as the Holy Spirit 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). Whatever the sources of Beissel's elevation, Chronicon
says he 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). Printer Sauer would not have been
comforted to read later that Beissel compounded the gifts of 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). 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 without Lithium.
We compare Zinzendorf's cultivation of tantric powers against Beissel's spiritual
celibacy. How else become immortal except by either 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.Whatever holiness was involved in these affairs was a species
of Severity
*Zinzendorf taught the tantric to Swedenborg who taught it to Blake, they say.
Peter Miller
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 handing. Arrived August 1730. Ordained by Presbyterians about Sept 1730. Served about a year as pastor of Skippack, Germantown and Philadelphia, then c. Nov 1731 goes to Goshenhoppen. “In course of time Miller extended his activity. In 1733 we find him ministering to the Reformed people in the Conestoga valley, Lancaster County, and in the Tulpehocken valley, Berks County.” 79
As quoted by Boehm in his letter to the Classis Nov 12 1730:
" There is such a glorious liberty in this country that the people themselves are free to elect, accept and also dismiss their preachers. It is not right to attempt to deprive them of this liberty and to subject them to a Classis, which can then force upon them such ministers as she desires. Christians have liberty and are in this world under no head, Christ alone is their head in heaven." 75 Hinke. A History of the Goshenhoppen Reformed Charge
Boehm replies, “I furthermore reminded him, that I also regarded Christ as the head of his church, yet I believed that Christ ruled his church on earth through agents, wherefore I would rather be under supervisors divinely appointed, in order to preserve good order in the Church of Christ, than stand up on my own freedom." On this point he did not agree with me.”
Hinke comments: “Miller, easy-going, chafing under restraint, glad to be free from the restrictions of the old world, caring little for traditions and customs, or even for the visible Church. To his sanguine temperament the ideal and spiritual alone appeals. He thinks of the liberty of the children of God and the glory of the invisible Church.”
“The same unwillingness which the people of Skippack manifested to submit themselves to the supervision of the Classis of Amsterdam, appeared also in Philadelphia, under the inspiration of Weiss and Miller, for Boehm writes again:80
With respect to the Reformed people of Philadelphia, I have been compelled to hear repeatedly, with a sad heart, from several of them the reply, (when I recommended the good work to them): " We are here in a free country, and the Classis of Holland has no right to give us any orders." This statement, however, has been prompted, as I believe, by the persuasion of Mr. Weis alone, which is now continued by Mr. Miller. “ 76
“A well known letter of Rev. Jedidiah Andrews, from 1698 to 1747 pastor of the old Buttonwood Presbyterian Church, supplies the omission partially. It was written on October 14, 1730, to his friend, the Rev. Thomas Prince, pastor of the Old South Church of Boston. In it he writes :82
There is lately come over a Palatine candidate of the ministry, who having applied to us at the Synod, for Ordin'n, 't is left to 3 ministers to do it. He is an extraordinary person for sense and learning. We gave him a question to discuss about Justification, and he has answered it, in a whole sheet of paper, in a very notable manner. His name is John Peter Miller, and speaks Latin as readily as we do our vernacular tongue, and so does the other, Mr. Weis.” 77
Ephrata Cloister and the Prophecies of Conrad Beissel in Chronicon Ephratense (1786)
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)
Quest for the Immortal / Denial of the Natural
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.
Pewter Miller
There are clues in Chronicon to Peter Miller's life, the supposed editor. Pastor Miller, he is called in an excerpt, was first a pastor of the Reformed. His second or third post was as pastor of the Reiff Church in Salford, founded by Boehme and taken down by the usurping Weiss. This Pewter Miller turned silver, found some gold in his loyalty to Conrad Beissel.
But Conrad 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. His prophecies of heavenly virginity and the priesthood of
Melchizedek (Chronicon, 165) were "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).A some point Miller
says the country areound Conestoga was like a "new Switzerland" (41)
No greater slight was ever given this man than when German printer, Christopher Sauer, called him an amateur poet (below). He was a major dreamer. To reinhabit the unfallen Adam after the Fall meant acquiring a glorified body before death, finding "again an entrance unto the tree of life" (135)! This was to be done by sacrificing the body. One cannot be immortal while eating strudal. The 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" (135) embody this absurd contradiction.
This version of the man of raw clay, contrasted with his firing at 2400 degrees above, is meant to show what Beissel thought could happen if the spirit were properly restored to Adam in his "prevision of the new world.""
Rediscover your virginity! 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," even though Miller at one point suggests that the Brotherhood was a kind of slavery. If he had it would have made the neighbors less nervous. Beissel had a way of (spiritually) seducing their wives! The choices for Beissel were to be a spiritual virgin or a married prisoner, not to be a spiritual eunuch. The sacrifices of a eunuch and a virgin are not the same. 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? Not that Beissel had less scorn for the body than that advertised in commercials to sell products, perspiration, the crucifixion includes the incarnation which hallowed physical existence. Physical existence is an easy target, hence all the prohibitions marketed against it, all the while of course avoiding the real problems associated with the mind.
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, editor of the Chronicon, 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. "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? How does one become two? Have you seen the missing self? Where is the Garden?
Climbing up from the lower state Beissel tangled this unity of existence with negation. Punitive rules, regulations produced that rebellion inherent in the nature where good is imposed from without. But while prophesy reechos in the Ephrata Community it is not only of personal fame or infamy at first, such as Zinzendorf's prophesy to Prior Eckerlin that he would succeed the Superintendent in office (149), except he died twenty years too soon. During Eckerlin's rebellion and removal from the community there was much banter on all sides which produced blessing and cursing, including Beissel's prophesy that "the Brotherhood in Zion would yet have a great fall" (173). This was superimposed upon other speaking when "the language of the spirit, which requires no words, was still spoken in the Settlement" (180).
Against the Natural
Since there had been no guardian over Adam to prevent his Fall Superintendent Beissel served instead. He 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 force he called "man-power" (130), the "selfish possession" of the good. It got punitive. Women practiced "head-shearing" (126), cut a bald spot on the crowns of their heads in yearly tonsures. With the oaths of perpetual Chasity the hair of the Sisters' heads was laid on the table (126) even as the puling Alexander Mack Jr. baptized himself for the salvation of his illustrious and godly father (122) Alexander Mack (1670-1735), founder of the Church of the Brethren. This is like Isaac getting baptized for Abraham. The"falling and rising again of man" (205) preoccupied them, which meant rites of rebaptism yearly enforced with off-again on- again marriages, letters of divorce and removal of all worldly entrapments. The trades and bells installed by Eckerlin were done away with as well as chopping down an "orchard of 1000 trees...to lay open the inner man" (193). The social psychological history of these actions and motives was ironically called a "divine comedy...that you must learn to be both high and low, rich and poor, etc. without a change of mind" (196). Among these changes of mind the mill stood for the natural. So "many Brethren turned towards the mill whenever they wished to escape the disciplines of the Holy Spirit" (209). The mill was lost when they came to rely on it, that is they had fallen "into unbelief and bought the mill" for their livelihood, instead of seeking "support mostly from offerings" (209). So as they traveled 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 around roused to join in "home worship." The period of the bell under Eckerlin ironically coincided with its golden age of prophecy.
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). Beissel in the company of Elijah (I Kings 17) and the two witnesses in Revelations (11.6) prevented the rain for a similar amount of time. Mighty man or what? The offense was that the community had used an abundant wheat harvest to fatten hogs and distill drink instead of distributing to the poor. Imagine if that happened on Wall Street, what excesses would instill. 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 but "the judgment was not revoked by it...therefore he warned against finding fault with God on account of benefits he had bestowed" (223), not taking the other clue that this self-arrogation was as deluded as the white explorer in Africa claiming supernatural powers during a lunar eclipse. Beissel's infatuation with judgment was 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), shoring up the event on both sides. It should be obvious how such appeals were aimed at social control.
Denying the Literal
Emphasis of the prophetic against the natural summoned adroit interpretation. 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,"hence was married. 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). His rejection of the literal text is like the rejection of the body that bode such ill for the Sabbatical church. Take the first floor of the building's interpretation, the base, and there is no top but fabrication. Reject the text, reject the body. Explaining away "rejoice in the wife of your youth...may her breasts satisfy you always" (Proverbs 5.18f) as another such quasi-rabbinical, medievalism overhung Beissel's core belief that marriage was "a house of correction for carnal minded persons" (147). His views of marriage and justification are both tied 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). Peter Miller makes it worse. On celibacy he 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).
After all, who madethese people immortal but their own efforts? A more modern prophet, D. H. Lawrence, also argues the unification of the male and female principles, but in intercourse (Fantasia of the Unconscious, 1921).
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 on this by arguing that both sexes lacked fulfillment of the other, but there was a preponderance of negative stereotype of the feminine in the Order. Never a notion of the false husband to complement the displaced Sophia. 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). The woman seen as "Wife of the world," temptress, implicitly makes the man a victim, but ialso must cast him as her inferior. That psychology explains much of their fear of the body. The body, the woman and the world must be overcome. It never occurred to Beissel how counter this was to the incarnation. In 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 the daughter of Eve Beissel himself would have been unable to obtain a birth. This obvious natural effect invalidates 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 or himself, divorce from the literal 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 conditions of privation. Miller seems to say with approval 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 righteousness 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 rich.
This austere theology was Englished by Miller in his translation of Beissel's work called Dissertation on Man's Fall (1765). It shows another intense period in the cloister, but not always clearly. Miller compares Eckerlin 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 a baldly 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 was beset with continual plots. Miller calls them variously attacks, disagreements, difficulties, fissures, conscience smiting, gossiping, quarreling, spiritual tyrannies and vexations (133-135), for the spirit of self denial is full of recrimination. The attempt of the Order to name Beissel as Father 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, but Miller spiritualized the factions to the disagreements of the tribes of Judah and Ephraim (115). Not only are political parties, but their geography is Old Testament, namely Ephrata's Zion. Naming, 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 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. 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. He says of Yuchly that "the judgment overtook him." 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 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 compare to death bed agonies. Again and again Miller speaks of agonized leave takings at death as in the obituary of Michael Wolfort, 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 interactions of the natural and spiritual afflicted much of conscience among them. To be sure it was all a setup for Beissel to come and anoint Wolfort for his relief.
The 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.
One Order representative on site, Miller, suggested to Sauer that this 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
communication 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 corrects 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. In defense, Peter Miller
had 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. Miller 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 have been much comforted to later read that Beissel had
also compounded 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 confused 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.
Whatever holiness was involved in these affairs was 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 what 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 Edith Sitwell who says, "in the plain of the world's
dust where the lion and honeybee held with the dust a colloquy, all things must
end, the hump on the dwarf, the mountain on the plain, all loss all gain, yet will
the world remain." If the world will remain in spite of 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 must appear.
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 afer 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. 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.
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
[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.
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.
|
This version of the man of raw
clay, |
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 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.
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.
Ephrata Cloister and the Prophecies of
Conrad Beissel: Quest for the Immortal / Denial of the Natural.(1786)
Sabbath Celibacy
Many extremities were summoned to defend Beissel's 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, and rest means
turmoil. So the preface to the reader of Mystery of the Lawless invests
in Beissel's own word an 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 was 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," was always a favorite topic of the
Sanctifieds, except that the whole of Pennsylvania art celebrated the world its
religion forswore, if you count the thousand domestic details of their Jerusalem in Eden fraktur and furniture.
It's almost as if "the Whore together with the Antichrist" was the
facetious Beissel himself.
Baptism and the Sabbath were crucial 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 of 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 Ben Franklin, his
printer, the Mason, and had begun to coin 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, and
first with Franklin (c. 1729), 32 pages, of which the 99 maxims
printed were, as Sachse unhelpfully explains, "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 (1768), part 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 a work 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. 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 before 1738 to Beissel and Wohlfarth
(2) , 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 pretended to a large family, but under the surface it
was 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, dying generations, entropy, life is never sufficient.
Celibacy, tantraism, magic rituals, incantations, death, rebirth are drugs that
oppose existence of itself. This negativity was so strong it cast
itself as positive and maligned the negative as the positive. This negativity
unleashed 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 the negative joined to its opposite is still negative, so
if St. Paul had an agapetae, meaning a live-in snuggle bunny, the
real version of which might be David's girl who warmed him on his deathbed, but
there will be some priest who will give him a bastard, and some
critic to write about it. The root of negativity is to usurp 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 for seducing one of the Reformed wives, presumably seeking 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 Hegelian
choice in their minds. Of the immediate temptations in this holy melancholy we have
only Buñuel to spank, and he wasn't there. To borrow from conspiracy theory,
the processes of 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.
"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)
said "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 in this god-awakened
soul that word awakened, being the favorite of them all, 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).
The entrance to the doorway of the Ephrata chapel was so low as 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 someone as to
lengthen their 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 infancy, so bring a bottle
to their meeting. 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 some time later 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; then you
deed him your home and your estate. They will give you a reading. I am not going.
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 will tell you. So medieval was this high
calling and self esteem that 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 who were so totally dominated by inner vision, but 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?
Zinzendorf
Denial of sexuality in Beissel and promotion of sexuality in Zinzendorf
had opposite programs as kinds of perversion. Enforcing their own anti-laws,
their supercharged terms for sexual denial and promotion were similar if
opposite. The productivity of their efforts is measured by their autocracy
and amazing released energy, which should not necessarily seem a product of
sublimation. 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 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 founder of the Baptists (after his
death!). Conrad Weiser (1696-1760) bounced from Lutheran to Beissel to
Zinzendorf and back to Muhlenberg 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 most extensive use of drawing Lots in the Pietist tradition may
have been Count von Zinzendorf
and the Moravian
Brethren of Herrnhut who
drew lots for many purposes, including selection of church sites, approval of missionaries,
the election of bishops and many others. This practice was greatly curtailed
after the General Synod of the worldwide Moravian Unity in 1818 and finally
discontinued in the 1880s." Cleromancy
The words of Beissel and Zinzendorf had a bite. They could not mutually humble
themselves enough even to meet in the flesh. Beissel, who "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).
If it is a mystery how Blake yokes such disparates in his visionary poems,
speaking at the same time primitive biblical devotional language over an
allegorical remake of the nature of man, describing his Fall in mysterious
quaternaries, he is just another lovable case of 18th century mind whom
renaissance cabala remarried to a pietistic lifestyle. Were there such extremes
in England that turned up in Penn's Woods with the renaissance pictographs of the
spiritual bride? Blake got it from Swedenborg. Swedenborg got it from
Zinzendorf. In the greater context it is urged that
"In l743 the names "Mr. and Mrs. Blake" appeared on the register of the Fetter Lane Society, at a time when seventy-two members formed "The Congregation of the Lamb. The Blake couple were perhaps Willam's grandparents, for James Blake (his father) married a widow, Catherine Armit
age, in l752 [9]. Catherine's maiden name was Wright, anda Mr. Wright (her father?) was included among the married men in the l743 register. According to the early Blake facsimilist William Muir they "attended the Moravian Chapel in Fetter Lane." [10]...Of greatest relevance of Blake's radical sexual beliefs is the fact that his family was allegedly associated with the Moravians during the turbulent "Sifting Period"a series of experiments in social egalitarianism, magical practices, and
sexual antinomianism. Count Nicolas Ludwig Zinzendorf, the chief of the "United Brotherhood," was determined to act out the Kabbalistic theories of earthly and heavenly copulation that he had learned...." Schuchard, Why Mrs. Blake
Whatever the practices urged on these Pennsylvanians and Blake get taken as a
whole they lead to madness, which you could conceive from the prevention of
climax to provoke greater consciousness. They call them antinomian spiritual
practices of the mystical marriage of the mind, visualizing Hebrew letters with
the breath, orgasmic trance, heavenly sex, " brain corticals, lung
rhythms, abdominal muscles, and seminal ducts" all this while controlling
evil thoughts and manipulating the cremaster muscle such as it was for
Swedenborg who had mistresses throughout Europe.
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 were not confined to particular time and place.
Percival Lowell stationed himself in Occult Japan so that he could
take a space jump when he underwent possession in his Shinto ritual.
Whether to be possessed by food or the gods, or a girl? Or 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. There was foot first baptism,
reserved for sects whose final planting at burial was 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, two, 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.
One of the first publications in Pennsylvania was Conrad Beissel's The
Mystery of Lawlessness (Andrew Bradford, 1729), translated by Michael
Wohlfarth. It's easy to exaggerate lawless effects 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 statistics.
To combine the mystic and the outlaw, Pennsylvania may have as many mystical
hard cases as libertines. They make a work of roaring contradiction.
Early Pennsylvania was a frontier contrary to the reputation
of peaceful Quakers, a haven of religious plurality and a contest among public
relations teams of the majorities. Spiritual lawlessness turned into law
attracted dueling personalities who contended over the sabbath, sex and separation
from the world. Whether it wife with husband or sensuous goose of the table,
"luxurious indulgence" was an offense to them. Buñuel's Simon of
the Desert gets the spirit of this monasticism when it exchanges death
threats one against each other. Contemporary establishment charismatics Paul
Crouch, Benny Hinn, et al. continue death
threats (xvii) against Hanegraaff and his children. Prophetic
authority, tithing, healing were all turned lawlessness along with
baptism, chastity, Sabbaths and communal living. Should it be called spiritual
inconsistency? Convinced they were headed east they called it west.
One Pennsylvania prophet who opposed them all was 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 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, not confined to practice only. Baumann's direct speech calls into
question the plague of gnostic transferences from Eve to the body and to women.
Extremes of Liberty and Lawlessness. Newborn Matthias Baumann / Ch. 3
|
In Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 209 |
Newborns in the Cradle of
Liberty, Oley 1720—Revised /Dec 2011
The Philadelphia Snort
“Philadelphians snort that a building in Boston—Faneuil Hall, should be
called “the cradle of liberty” just because James Otis gave a fiery
anti-British speech there in 1761. How can you compare that to a city where
the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States were
drafted, debated, revised, and signed—both in a brief period of eleven years?”
Gary B. Nash
The Newborn of Oley are as much about politics and liberty as religion. The bitter sweet ideas of founder Matthias Baumann, Newborn founder from Lambsheim, charmed and antagonized. His followers practiced such gracelessness and rancor they underwrote the formation of liberty. Newborns squalled all the way from Oley and Berks County into Philadelphia stating Baumann's “principle [in 1705] that magistrates had no authority in matters of conscience, an early instance of separation of church and state” (Stoudt. Sunbonnets 51). Die Neu-geboren focused on “confounding men.” These guaranteed extremes of speech transferred to the constitution prepared such guarantees for all citizens.
While the toleration of this virulence contributed mightily to the notion of liberty in Jefferson's language, a second contribution of the Newborn Baumann was his confrontation of violence against women, especially those Gnostics who opposed the body, which they identified with woman. Thirdly, his “hallucinatory perfectionism” was influential in the later revivals of Charles Finny, and the rise of evangelicalism, all of which marks out a territory of the Newborn in influence far beyond their number.
1. Freedom of Speech
Call dates itself by twice referring to 22 years since Baumann had a mind numbing overwhelming experience in 1701. Ad hominium attacks against him then and since pass over in silence that he had carried his dream before magistrates and into the new world, defending it charismatically before all comers, writing a defense that attracted strong minded intelligent men whose families grew large and prosperous in America, Kuhlwein, Joder, DeTurk, Schenkel, Yoder, Reiff, LeDee and others who acted in a public manner.
The Newborn habits of American revivalism inculcated liberty by their theatrics.
Religious primitivism and charismatic behavior mark all frontiers, and the
newborn were at the forefront of mystical nihilism, radical pietism and
religious primitivism. So strongly individualistic in the overthrow of formula
the peace loving spirit of all the groups of Philadelphia that made liberty
possibleThat said, it was the deep abiding and the Newborn the best occasion of
their testing.
The later freedoms of the Declaration and Constitution were nurtured most among
the most outrageous sects and religions of early Philadelphia.
This article was written at the request of an editor, but not published, but it seems from the evidence that the Newborn Baumannites might be credited for contributing to American thought much outside their usual due.
Freedom of conscience went unnoticed in Pennsylvania except among the participants. Early Pennsylvania was a lawless place, but whether as a haven of extreme liberty or religious plurality in a golden age the victor gets to declare.
Any window on 1720-1730 pre-revolutionary Philadelphia is worth seeing through. It cannot help but focus what became significant later. Issues of religion were a whole lot more than religion, encompassed politics, science, art. There are not that many of these windows. The longer you look through them the more you see, not that a list is forthcoming, but the themes are undeniable, liberty being foremost. So something that first appears small can enlarge our understanding. (from Jacob Reiff)
2. The Rights of Women
not so unlike that manuscript included at the end
of he Music of the Ephrata Cloister where
the writer takes up the first tract in
support of animal rights attributed to Ludwig Hocker Brother Obed of the
Ephrata Cloister, 95f. He does so also for the rights of women, but this had
been a cause of Cornelius Agrippa in Nobilitate & Præœcellentia
Fœminei of 1529, The Nobility
of Woman.
In addition to provoking liberty from their scurrilous speech, Baumann’s
idea of the sinless body implicitly supported the rights of women against the
unworldly pietistic sects. Baumann incensed his opponents with the statement
that “with the body one cannot sin before God.” The pietists’ fear of the body
had extended to women in a kind of Gnostic
transference which symbolized a fear of the flesh. Women were blamed for
male sexuality. Such prejudice extended to marriage, which Conrad Beissel
of Ephrata called a refuge of the carnal minded. Baumann’s vindication of woman
must be seen against the idea of woman symbolizing the unfaithful in the
Gnostic world, a temptation to man to sin in the flesh. Baumann turns this view
on its head when he says the body is not capable of sin.
The body enabled sin for Beissel who believed every aspect of existence tainted with the flesh, so that the "good [that] sought to possess them" (Chronicon Ephratense 129) must be protected from "too much of the good [falling] into their natural life." He urged spiritual and physical virginity upon his followers. This natural life Beissel called "man-power" (Chronicon 130) or the "selfish possession" of the good. Such medievalism overhung his core belief that marriage was "a house of correction for carnal minded persons" (Chronicon 147). The eminent editor of Chronicon, Peter Miller, expanded this notion 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). Baumann’s notion of no longer sinning with the body struck at the heart of those theologies that posited sin as a cause for instruction and strong leadership. If sinless there was little reason for such outer rituals toward redemption. A person could just live as they saw fit, which they did anyway, but with guilt.
Pennsylvania pietists believed the new birth was a regeneration leading to changed life, unworldly. Baumann however said that “Christ’s congregation is invisible” (138) and “everything is of the spirit” (138). The Newborn hijacked the new birth and made it antagonistic to those beliefs. Baumann's "perfection" of sinlessness constituted a massive internal revelation from which the "babe" could not fall. But when Baumann disputed with Quakers and all comers on the courthouse steps of Philadelphia, he did it with humor, promising he would walk on the Delaware river. He did not say if this would be in winter, on ice. When Baumann visited Beissel’s “solitary residence” at Conestoga (c. 1721) that most famous comeuppance given him was as much a revelation of Beissel as it was correction of Baumann. Beissel said of Baumann's idea of freedom from sin, that “Adam did not do evil with his body” (Chronicon 137), was contradicted by his own stink (literally) and repudiated Baumann's sinlessness. Beissel’s demons would later allow him to seduce other men's wives with promises of spiritual intercourse, so physical sinlessness would of course much offend him (Chronicon 17).
3. Perfectionism and Humanitarianism
The cults of Perfectionism begat John Rogers in Newport about 1674. The Rogerenes were "the last of the English revolutionary sects and the first of the indigenous American perfectionist sects" (John L. Brooke. The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844, 48)
Nature is freedom and law restriction, but liberty tries to reconcile nature and law, the personal with the social. Or put another way law is a form of enforced Perfectionism which opposes humanitarianism, which allows for imperfection. Philadelphia Quakers sought purity (law) in their shunning of the world (nature), which compromised the Quakers’ humanity, says Daniel Joseph Boorstin, “To avoid taking oaths, Quakers sacrificed the humanity of criminal laws.”(Daniel Boorstin 11).
But many Pennsylvania groups shared Quaker and Gnostic suspicions on the body and were willing to sacrifice humanity for the perfect pursuit of purity. Count Zinzendorf (1799-1760) was both an autocrat and a sensualist. John Phillip Boehm (1683-1749) was a fanatic in all his personal polemics. He terrorized every reformed pastor, from Weiss and Peter Miller, who was pastor of a Reformed church in 1730, to pastors Rieger, Lispsky and Goetschy. Printer Christopher Sauer (1695-1758) was wildly partisan, blaming Beissel for heresy and overturning the English language movement. It is no surprise Baumann’s followers were fanatics who carried their own hypocrisies to an extreme. Sinlessly they met in taverns on Sunday and mocked the believers in their churches. Sinlessly they made creeds and beliefs a bedrock of their anti-hypocrisy, and instituted their own anti-Calvinisms as abominable, as though they were latter day prophets: “filthy!” they proclaimed like Isaiah, “they are all gone out the way!”
On any occasion of assembly, outside churches, during sermons and at funerals, the newborn in their cups mocked and satirized the public beliefs of every fellow cultist, sectarian and religious. There is no record of newborn piety anywhere else but in this public mockery or in taverns taking beer as communion. Separated from all semblance of tolerance it was a lifestyle that grew thin quick. In New England they’d have been stoned. If the Newborn were tolerated in this barbarism anyone could be, but the long lasting social effects of the Newborn in the birth of liberty also influenced later American religion: “Matthias Baumann’s hallucinatory perfectionism had important consequences: it helped inspire the many ‘holiness revivals’ of the nineteenth century in both Europe and America and left traces in modern American evangelicalism” (Bernard Bailyn 157).
As a result of their extreme beliefs the Newborn also dramatically confronted the overt occultism of the sects who yoked primitive biblical devotional language with an allegorical remake of the nature of man. The Newborn put to flight those renaissance pictographs of the spiritual bride. There is no new moon braying among them or disciple anointing talk, just rancor and parody, satire and rigor. These were applied across the board against all religiousity, including the Rosicrucianism of the mystic Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) and the mystics of the Wissahickon. The Newborn rejected outright every form of sectarian and denominational worship. So when those “extraordinary physical manifestations occurred—some quacked like ducks, some brayed like jackasses,” (Sunbonnets, 51), and descriptions of the Fall occurred in mysterious quaternaries, they heaped them with scorn.
The denominations were as much offended with Baumann’s sinlessness as the sects. The spiritual stink for them of such talk was Baumann’s arrogating spirituality to himself, but it is pointless to debate the Newborn theology of lawlessness in Oley.
4.
--Acceptance of the body, liberty of speech, perfectionism were all wrapped up
together in Newborn life.
Die Neu-geboren was an anti church. They “boasted they
had only been sent by God to confound men” (Chronicon Ephratense 17).
Matthias Baumann’s call to examine the spirit as the cause of sin
instead of the flesh confronts the first Gnostic delusion that fell into
the material realm, and confirms Dante climbing out, entering Paradise, in “this
glorious and holy flesh (Paradiso, XIV, 45). The spirit made the choice,
said Baumann. The body is incapable of sin without the spirit the way a car
does not sin when the operator fails to brake. The Newborn took spiritual sin
as the motive of their Call to confound and confront men even if St.
Paul confronts both in his filthiness of the flesh and spirit (II Cor
7.1). What indeed is a doctrine of the flesh?
The Newborn held baptism in contempt with communion and church attendance
because “Christ’s congregation is invisible” (Stoudt, Baumann 138). “Everything
is of the spirit,” said Baumann (138), but when he said he could not sin in the
body, his opponents said he claimed he could not sin at all. What he actually
said was that sin was of the spirit. Of course his tract in its
plain speaking has as many inconsistencies as those of other battling shepherds,
John Philip Boehm, George Michael Weiss and Conrad Beissel. The light and shadow of Call
are part of Baumann's confounding the world. In the light that emerges from his
coruscations extremes define the question; if this then that! Newborn beliefs
were so big they could not contain Newborn ideas and became disbeliefs.
Standing against visibility Baumann’s followers enacted shadow services
outside conventional churches at worship, and in taverns, mocking and mimicking
the evangelism of the time with scatological preaching that would not pass the
censors of Saturday Night Live. The excesses reported by Mittelberger
are parody (see Journey to Pennsylvania 45, 83-86). Henry Muhlenberg
accounts the more sober side of facetious Newborn rhetoric (Journals,
I, 138-139) with their evangelistic picketing (I, 146, 357) and mock services
held in taverns on Sunday mornings (I, 352). The first licensed Reformed
preacher in Philadelphia, Rev. George Michael Weiss, found farmers not pastors
performing their doctrines in The Preacher traveling about in the American
Wilderness (1729). Matthias Baumann, founder of the Newborns left one
work, A Call to the Unregenerate (Berleberg, 1731). The marks of infamy
were their fame.
The Newborn were champions at holding their neighbors in contempt. Believing they were free from sin they could hardly mistake, which is how they underwrote free thought, because they presented to society the dilemma to either forcibly suppress them or tolerate them. Liberty cannot exist without this tolerance, so it is also a mark of the generosity of Pennsylvania culture that they were tolerated. If the newborn could mock all sacred beliefs of their neighbors and be tolerated then their liberty was great indeed. To show how noxious this can be, compare the birthers of today who challenge the president’s nativity or the people who show up at funerals to protest government wars (Westboro Baptist Church, of Topeka, Kansas has picketed at the funerals of 500 soldiers nationwide since June 1991.). The newborn practiced even greater offenses, which freedom of speech was ultimately licensed into the constitution.
God Falls Into My Mind
All parties derided the Newborn, in part to evade their own malfeasance, but it is too easy to discredit Matthias Baumann as a bipolar menace in his so-called ravings. Called an hallucinatory perfectionism because of the way its founder came to his beliefs, he fell into a coma for some days, or weeks. His wife thought him dead and he had no memory of the event except to say that he had been transported to heaven, caught up like St. Paul, who also says little of the experience (II Corinthians 12. 1-4). He returned to earth changed. Whether this happened once or twice, in five or fourteen days, and whether he was arrested in 1702 and 1705 or 1706, in 1709, when a handful of Baumann relatives and friends emigrated to Pennsylvania and settled in Oley, Pennsylvania, Baumann followed in 1714.
He says himself “I entered the sickness an old man. I arose a new one.” (translated by John Joseph Stoudt in the Historical Review of Berks County, Fall, 1978). Baumann repeats that before this he could not concentrate on saying the Lord’s Prayer long enough to avoid being interrupted by errant thought four times over, but after God fell into his mind, as he puts it (Stoudt, 137) he could not be distracted. He would have been hospitalized, drugged and shocked in later times. There are plenty of analogues besides psychosis in the religious ecstasy of the saints, the visions of Blake and in the supernatural ramblings and astrologies of them all. But unlike Jacob Boehme the shoemaker, acclaimed for alchemy and psychology, translated not to heaven but to English (by William Law, 1764). Baumann put no structure on his visions. He lacked a system, merely conceptualized that the inner world trumps the outer, that sin is of the spirit not the flesh, that beliefs, realities are internal, that outer practices of devotion contravene the truth of the inner. How he knows this of course questions the sincerity of his own motive since he judges piety, but “Christianity is not something as you think which can be taught” (Stoudt, 142).
Christians Without Christ
A majority of Newborn practices after Bauman’s death in 1727 read right out of his plan of action for these “Christians without Christ,” Christians in quotes, or the unregenerate in A Call to the Unregenerate World (Ein Ruf an die Unwiedergebohrene Welt, written 1723). The faux evangelist in the back of a manure wagon mocking Oley farmers (Mittelberger 45) is following Baumann’s seven points, holding that “all denominations are sinful’ (Stoudt 138), and “all that Christ and his Apostles commanded has become vast idolatry” (Stoudt 144). Baumann ridiculed the hypocrisy of outer worship held sacred by churches and sects. His Call reads like an invective against the Pharisees who think that “if you only live devoutly you will go to heaven” (Stoudt 144). He calls this “self-centered piety” with the paradox that “God dwells in a Christian, therefore he can sin no more.” And “he who is born of God cannot sin” (Stoudt 137), which seems to say that because he cannot sin that being devout is a sign that he is sinning.
So all signs of devotion to him were sin. He numbers seven axioms of these disbeliefs and says that “is the doctrine that Christ brought into the world.” Self centered piety is a proof of sin because “when God comes into a person…he does nothing but praise and honor God. Rather, he does not do it but God’s Spirit does it in him.” (Stoudt 137) If this equivocates the doer from the deed that is the paradox, to call it so, because all that is seen is the deed, the motive of the doer is unknown, whether acting out of God or selfishness. Thus with baptism, communion, church attendance, prayer, devout living, alms giving and fasting, the doing of the deed, he said, betrayed the outer act against the inner. Hence “all that Christ and His Apostles commanded has become vast idolatry…the best has become the vilest” (Stoudt 144). The societal malignancies of these people, who seem so out of sorts, were easy targets for their antagonists to discredit.
Muhlenberg, the most balanced voice of the time, gave a contemporary explanation of Newborn theology: "this sect claims the new birth which they receive suddenly through immediate inspiration and heavenly visions through dreams and the like. When they receive the new birth in this way, then they are God and Christ Himself, can no longer sin, and are infallible. They therefore use nothing from God's Word except those passages, which taken out of context, appear to favor their false tenets. The holy sacraments are to them ridiculous and their expressions concerning them are extremely offensive" (Journals I, 149, June 10, 1747).
Heavenly visions and inner light preoccupy what Muhlenberg learns of the old man who disturbed Philip Bayer's funeral: "this was the basis of his authority: one night, many years ago, he saw a light in his room. He claimed that this light revealed to him that he was a child of God, that the magistracy, the ministry, the Bible, sacraments, churches, schools, etc. are of the devil, that all men must be like him, etc" (Journals, I, 357-358). This smacks as much of ergot poisoning as illumination. The conflict of the inner and outer raised deep psychological issues for a Pietism that rejected formalism on one hand for a reviving of the spirit on the other. This pendulum came full swing in Baumann’s seven laws rejecting outer form, but he opposed all the theology of the time in saying the body was not the cause of sin,
5. Dada
Resisted in the new world as he had been in the old, Baumann provoked the second extant printed book in Pennsylvania, The Preacher, / traveling about in the American Wilderness/ by George Michael Weiss (1729) [Der IN DER AMERICAN SCHEN WILDNUSZ]. As is often the case the back story of these affairs rivals the main tale, for Weiss not only wrote this title, but also the first book about the Indians in the wilderness (1741). Weiss was not alone in resisting the Neu-geboren since nearly every other religious figure of the time did so, from Beissel and Boehme of the 1720’s to Muhlenberg and Zinzendorf in the 1740’s. The Newborn, never more than a few hundred, overtook more powerful groups in influence out of all proportion to membership. Reformed apostle Boehm compares it with much larger groups, “all sorts of errorists, as Independents, Puritans, Anabaptists, Newborn, Saturday-folks, yea even the most horrible heretics, Socinians, Pietists, etc. (Letter of 1728, Life and Letters 161). Mittelberger does the same in 1756, “Lutherans, Reformed, Catholics, Quakers…Dunkers, Presbyterians, Newborn…” (Journey 54).
It is hard to judge them fairly from the words of their enemies, almost the only other source being a letter of May 14, 1718 written by his follower Maria De Turk where she says, “I cannot sin any more.” This is the crux of the affair, the cause of newborn mockery of other beliefs and the revulsion against them in turn. Sure, Baumann was no longer a force after his death, as his critics say in every breath, along with mentioning that he was a day laborer, or that maybe if there had just been a good asylum none of this would have happened, but it needs to be said that Baumann’s visitation at the birth of Liberty in America prefigured the whole Dada movement of the 1920’s in Paris, to hold up to scorn the everyday affairs of men thus to provoke them into consciousness, which became by the 21 century public philsophy in the dissolution of all boundries whether religous, social, geographical. All values dissolved into a melting pot merged identities, the opposite of Dada intent. So it goes.
Notes:
Bernard Bailyn. British Academy, 2007. The Search for Perfection: Atlantic Dimensions. http://www.proc.britac.ac.uk/tfiles//151p135.pdf
Daniel Joseph Boorstin. The Americans, the colonial experience. New York: Random House, 1958. “To avoid taking oaths, Quakers sacrificed the humanity of criminal laws.”(Daniel Boorstin, 11).
Chronicon Ephratense. Ephrata, 1786. Translated by J. Max Hark, Lancaster, 1889.
Mittelberger, Gottlieb. Journey To Pennsylvania. Edited and Translated by Oscar Handlin and John Clive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.
Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. 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.
Motherwell, Robert. tr. The Dada Manifesto, in Dada Painters and Poets,
NY: 1951.
Gary B. Nash http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/cradle-of-liberty/
Pendleton, Philip E. Oley Valley Heritage, The Colonial Years: 1700-1775.
Birdsboro, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1994. [The general details of
the Newborn are well stated here. Pendleton also gives Maria DeTurk’s letter of
1718 in full]
John Joseph Stoudt. “Matthias Baumann.” Historical Review of Berks County. Fall, 1978. [a translation of Baumann’s Call to the Unregenerate]
John Joseph Stoudt. Sunbonnets and Shoofly Pies. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1973
Conrad Gehr's Peccadilloes Ch. 4
A
second Newborn afficinado of Oley PA about who much is known. was the nephew of
Conrad Reiff, Conrad Gehr.
Conrad Gehr's peccadilloes were 1) that
he operated a tavern in Germantown (before 1753). 2) He hosted a mock religious
service on Sunday of Newborn blasphemy there and 3) that he had been imprisoned
for fraud. In an account in Muhlenberg's Journals (I, 352-3) Conrad
Gehr is called the "blasphemer" who "became entangled in a
money-making scheme, was caught, and was thrown into prison. There, unbidden,
he took up the Bible again."
Conrad Gehr figures prominently in Muhlenberg's writing after the funeral of
his wife's mother, Anna Reiff. Gehr's wife, Anna Maria, named for her mother,
had been "attached to the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church," which means
Muhlenberg perhaps heard firsthand the distress Gehr put his wife through by
his behavior. This distress doubled because at that time Anna Maria's
mother lived with her daughter and was also subject to these shenanigans. After
that she moved and lived to end of her life with her son Jacob. Muhlenberg
says:
"During my first years here [1742 and following] she was living with her
daughter in Germantown…for the sake of her daughter the distressed old widow
stayed at the former's home…she was obliged to listen to many a blasphemous
utterance and witness many an offense on the part of her son-in-law, who was
Reformed by birth, but in this country not only forsook the Word of God and the
other means of grace, but also despised and ridiculed them" (I, 352).
Muhlenberg had three informants on Gehr, Gehr's wife Anna (née Reiff, Hans George's daughter), her mother, Anna,
who lived with her, whose funeral Muhlenberg
conducted, and George Stoltz, who told of the incident of a fire in the
adjoining house.
Muhlenberg stipulates that the "offenses" included, that "the
said man maintained a public house and it occurred to him that he might
institute a so-called assembly of worship in his house on Sundays. For this
purpose he associated himself with a half-educated but totally perverted
Christian who was to deliver a sermon or address on physic or natural science
at every meeting. The auditors were obligated to pay three pence apiece each
time, and this money was to be consumed in drink after the speech" (I,
353). Gehr was the brunt of gossip Muhlenberg had heard: "a trustworthy
man named Georg Stoltz came to me and related the following incident. One
evening he and a Swiss gentlemen were obliged to stop at the blasphemer's house
and put up for the night. He went out of his way to annoy his two guests with
sinful talk. Among other things he said that the context of nature is God, that
the world came into existence by an accident in eternity, that the universe
maintained itself, etc. What the parsons say about God, about a revealed
religion, about a Saviour, and about heaven and hell, they have to say to make
a living and in order to lead the masses by the nose."
New Born ideas were a metaphysic to this tavern milk, even if it sounds like
Paine's Age of Reason (1795) or other enlightenment doctrines. Such
attitudes were early 18th century and German, the specific form that
Mittelberger, in his Journey to
Pennsylvania (1756) singled out against Conrad Reiff. But these were
not isolated from other reversals of order in PA, from Wohlfarth and Beissel [of
Epherta] standing on the court house steps to argue which day of the week was the
sabbath (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 154) to Gehr's substitution of tavern
for church, science for scripture and the price of a drink for the offering.
These suggest that the 1701 Blue Law of the General Court of Germantown was not
being enforced which said: "no inn-keepers on the first day called Sunday
in God's service, shall hold gatherings of guests. . .on pain of whatever
penalty the court of record shall inflict" (Pennypacker, Germantown,
283).
Although Muhlenberg does not name it thus, such views easily mask themselves as
naturalism. Gehr's satire is very much in the Newborn manner, like Conrad Reiff
and those others to whom the sacraments were "ridiculous and their
expressions concerning them are extremely offensive" (Muhlenberg), who
uttered "such blasphemous words against our Saviour" (Boehm), who
theatrically mocked preachers in parody (Mittelberger), who "despise
preachers, churches and sacraments without discrimination" (Muhlenberg),
who scoff that manure is life and pig the destiny of the soul. The Newborn
catechism was as active in the tavern of Gehr as in the township of Oley except
that Gehr went his brother-in-law one better and mixed the scoff with drink.
Tavern philosophy is reported in practically every contemporary account of the
Newborn. Gehr's metaphysic implicates both brother and brother-in-law in the
Newborn practice. While Boehm's summary of the sects names Puritans, Baptists
and Pietists it is really the Newborn of Gehr's metaphysic that he exposes:
"Independents, Puritans, Anabaptists, Newborn, Saturday-folks, yea even
the most horrible heretics, Socinians, Pietists, etc., among whom dreadful
errors prevail; indeed heinous blasphemies against our great God and Savior and
their own exaltation over His Majesty; for they claim that they have essential
divinity in themselves; that they cannot sin…they believe there is no other
heaven or hell than what is here on earth; they even deny Divine Providence,
and assert that nothing needs God's blessing, but that all products of the ground
and all offspring of animals and of the human race, come simply from nature,
without any care on the part of God, and that prayer also is useless. (Life
and Letters, (1728) 161."
Oley and the Newborn influenced Conrad Reiff, brothers Peter and George and
Jacob's daughter Catherine, all who either lived there or owned land there.
Spiritually the effects of Oley were more serious upon Conrad Reiff's mother
and sister (Anna Maria and Anna) through the aforesaid sister's husband Conrad
Gehr. The connection between Gehr and Conrad Reiff involves Gehr's experience
of the Newborn, which is as important as Conrad's because they flesh out the
satirical Newborn beliefs and show the influence in the family. Genealogist
Harry Reiff says the "family knew about Conrad's (Gehr) peccadilloes, as
indicated in the will of Hans George's son, George (d.1759), who died leaving a
legacy to nephew Baltazar with an admonition not to permit his father,
Conrad Gehr, to have any of the legacy" (Letter of 2/13/2002).
The conflicted Balthaser Gehr, son of Anna Reiff II and Conrad Gehr, (mentioned in PA supreme court
case, (see genealogy here) also probably
attended these views, but he had fiduciary and legal care of his cousin Philip
Reiff, Conrad’s son, from 1786 to his death in 1815. Sort of like the son of
the innkeeper in the Fellowship of the Ring, Balthaser Gehr (cf. Pendleton,
137, 147) married the daughter of that equally wealthy neighbor of Conrad
Reiff, Antony Jaeger. In 1767 Jaeger's "sons Daniel and Henry, and his
son-in-law Balthaser Gehr were tried for assault and battery on the Jaegers'
lifelong neighbor, miller Heinrich Kerst. A neighbor, Jacob Silvious, also
stood trial for coming to Kerst's defense" (Pendleton, 147). As said,
Balthaser exercised a power of attorney for his infirm cousin, Philip Reiff,
second son of Conrad, in 1786 (Pendleton, 137). But in more outbreaks of the
lawless, Baltes too went Oley.
The disposition of another son of Gehr, Philip, is unknown, who appears in the
ledger of the Old Salford Store (c. 1766-1774), reported as, "Gehr,
Philip; Conrad Gehr's son of Germantown" (John R. Tallis, The Perkiomen
Region, II, 33). Conrad Gehr is also mentioned near the bottom of the will
of Hans George Reiff (d. 1726), in a different handwriting than the will reads:
"Cunrad Gehr married Anna," (Riffe, 20), suggesting this was written
after probate. Gehr had been issued a patent by the land office for 34 acres in
the Salfords in 1735, the same year as Garrett Clemens, Christopher Dock, Peter
Wentz and Hans Reiff, among others (H. W. Kriebel in The Perkiomen Region,
V, 11), but Heckler speculates he possibly was there confused with Conrad
Custer (Heckler, Lower Salford, I, 13). Gehr had at least two sons.
Baltazar, or Baltes Gehr served in the Pennsylvania legislature. He is
mentioned in his uncle's will, (George Reiff) in 1759, "my will is after
my sister's son Baltes should set up his trade, my wife shall give him twenty
pounds to buy tools for it" (Riffe, 28). It should be noted that Anna was
not called Anna Maria as her full name is suggested to be, but merely Anna,
like her mother, who signed Anna in the Landes will and on the board in the
attic.
There was also a Peter Gehr, d. 12 May 1764
at Ephrata Cloister mentioned in Chronicon (131).
5) O Noble Heart - O Edel Herz: Fraktur and Spirituality in Pennsylvania German Folk Art
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Kisses
O Edel Herz (95) thinks fraktur would
be more attractive with "Reformation themes of Christ as king" (O
Noble Heart, 59) instead of all the blood. Don Yoder calls it a
"cult of wounds and blood" (Picture-Bible, 57).
Frederick Weiser called it a "preoccupation with death and religious
themes" (Fraktur, I, xxvii). Examples given by Stoudt (Pennsylvania
German Folk Art, 22) include the hymn by Paul Gerhardt,
So lass dein Blut mein Purpur seyn,
Ich will mich darein kleiden.
So let Thy Blood be my purple cloak;
I would clothe myself therein.
Unfortunately for Reformation themes, Christ's Blood and Righteousness was a New Testament certainty, "through faith in his blood" (Romans 2.25), as the early English 16th century poet John Skelton wrote, “Where the sank royall is, Crystes blode so rede, (Poetical Works of Skelton and Donne, see note). "Christi Blut un Gerechtigkeit," is prominent in medieval and pietistic Europe and in the seventeenth century poet John Donne and after (See Louis Martz, The Meditative Tradition), fraktur viewed with European Catholic icons is one with English metaphysical poets. Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Traherne and later Smart plead the personal heart of Jesus identical to Pennsylvanians. Consider Henry Vaughan's, "Dedication," Some drops of Thy all-quick'ning blood / Fell on my heart," and the astonishing lines of Crashaw,
They have left thee naked, Lord, O that they had!
This garment too I wish they had deny'd.
Thee with thy self they have too richly clad;
Opening the purple wardrobe in thy side.
O never could there be garment too good
For thee to wear, but this of thine own Blood.
(see Note below)
When these people addressed their love letters to Jesus (Bird 87) it became the scandal of Pietism. In the "sweet personal Christ of the Pietists" and their "tender endearments" Jesus was "mein Freund," "unashamedly casual" (86). This same "freund," who was translated both as beloved and friend [see the fraktur of 1770 by Daniel Schuhmacher (Stoudt, Sunbonnets and Shoofly Pies, 151, copied from Song of Songs 2.10-12), famously invoked for these freund folk the first line of Song (Canticles), to be "kissed with the kisses of his mouth." No wonder their hearts flowed. In sensing him more judge than friend Bird shows how far they flee from him who sometime did them seek. (from Thomas Wyatt, contemporary of Skelton). As the Cambridge Modern History (V) says:
"They tried to rekindle the fire
of holy emotion and by the spirit of self-sacrifice and austere self-immolation
to restore the mystical union of the soul with God... adopting the language of
the Canticles in describing the union of the soul with the Divine Bridegroom...they
express a sensuous delight in dwelling on Christ's sufferings and the agonies
of the Cross. This "...irreverent tone of familiarity with the Deity which so frequently
characterizes pietistic poetry..." is a comment on the "spiritual
exhaustion" of spiritual life in Germany at its lowest ebb.
In context the phrase "through the merits of my Lord" had been a rallying cry of George Whitefield when he made his trip through Philadelphia in 1739. Distinguishing between the outward and inward fruits of faith was also a point of contention for Quakers. Whitefield had exhorted a Quaker meeting "that they would talk of an outward as well as an inward Christ; for otherwise, we make our own holiness, and not the righteousness of Jesus Christ the cause of our being accepted by God." (Journals, 338). This self-righteousness had been the crux of the Newborn's rejection of church and scripture. Following the theme further, Muhlenberg said, "…first one must wrap one's self in the wounds, then Christian living must follow." As we have elsewhere noted from the Weiss' dialogues, (41) the outward, the living part was superfluous because "he has all the inner fruits, but he declares he can see no use for such outward things" (Sachse, 159).
Whitefield revisits this when he returned to Philadelphia later that year, Sunday, November 25:
". . .after I had done preaching a young gentleman, once a minister of the Church of England, but secretary to Mr. Penn, stood up with a loud voice, and warned the people against the doctrine I had been delivering, urging, 'that there was no such term as imputed righteousness in Holy Scripture; that such a doctrine put a stop to all goodness; that we were to be judged for our good works and obedience, and were commanded to do and live.' When he had ended, I denied his first proposition, and brought a text to prove that "imputed righteousness" was a scriptural expression…I discoursed in the afternoon, and shewed how the Lord Jesus was to be our whole righteousness . . .the church was thronged within and without; all were wonderfully attentive; and many, as I was informed, were convinced that the Lord Christ was our Righteousness" (Journals, 352,353).
No Kisses
Bird puns upon the Blood in the illustration for the cover of his book, using an analog from the bestiary of Physiologus, a pelican feeding its young with its own blood. The precious blood there is from an anonymous drawing (91), but there is no transmission of the wounds and the blood from Count Zinzendorf (95) or Conrad Beissel's appreciating the "cult of wounds and blood" (Bird observes the Count visited Ephrata, but he did not see Beissel). Don Yoder calls it the cult of wounds and blood. Zinzendorf's Moravians were a center of "blood and wounds theology," beginning about 1740, but Beissel learning it from the Count is as unlikely as his becoming a spiritual virgin after hearing of Zinzendorf's tantrism. That's a joke. Anyway the two never met. Bird does not know about The Count's tantric ways, even if he did initiate Swedenborg into such proceedings. But he did not do so to Beissel, nor did Swedenborg to Blake. How affected is fraktur and Pennsylvania German spirituality with the Rosicrucian occult? Critics take an either/or view. Either that's all they speak of or they hardly mention it. Zinzendorf's egomania to unify all the Pennsylvania religions, "harmonize the various Pennsylvania religious groups" (19), did not fool contemporaries Muhlenberg and John Phillip Boehm who saw it for what it was, a power play of buying and selling the Spirit.
Epiphany
But O Nobel Heart - O
Edel Herz appeals even with its scholarly apparatus. The enameled
paper longs to be touched. Fraktur, the celebrated nonverbal form of
illuminated German writing, weaves words
with flowers. Catalog holdings of nineteenth century Pennsylvania
Schwenkfelder, Mennonite, Free Library fraktur illustrate the wider
art comparisons of leftist Pennsylvania and the blood of Jesus. It implicates
all Pennsylvania life. A pelican shedding its blood on the cover of Nobel
Heart emphasizes this as much as the word woven flowers. Our scholars
cannot staunch the flow.
But fraktur isn't
about religion any more than Paradise Lost, Steps to the Temple, Silex
Scintillans or the statue of David. Neither is Blake about Zinzendorf.
Religion hinders art applied back upon it as much as wu-wei hinders Chuang Tzu. Art is about art
in the same manner as Bird's citation of the Florentine renaissance. While John
Joseph Stoudt (Pennsylvania German Folk Art) welcomed the ideas of
Catholic mystics among the Pennsylvania Dutch, Bird says of their coexistence,
"the sensibility of German Protestantism was far removed from...the
Catholic world..." (9). Bird, a religion professor searches Catholic
origins of iconography in his Ontario Fraktur: "I was at
somewhat of a loss as to how to reconcile this peculiarly Protestant art form
with my own Roman Catholic sensibilities. How would it be possible to bridge
the supposed gap between the directness of an image-tradition which came to an
aesthetic zenith in the Florentine Renaissance and the austerity of a word-tradition
in which the visual arts were forced, so to speak, to go underground"
(11)?
To view fraktur from a Catholic background is easy if it recommends an epiphany
of Christ, a symbolic representation in inner space of the Lord as the lily/tulip
heart. Each culture shapes the Lily to itself, witness the mein
freund of the oppressed who would oppose the English domination of the
Pennsylvania Dutch. Witness that suffering is not solely a Catholic vision of
Jesus in Dante or Michelangelo in the Pietà and the Dying Slave. The liberation
theology of Ignacio Ellacuría says the oppressed and needy are saviors and
liberators because "as the majority of humankind owes its situation of
crucifixion to the way society is organized and maintained [so:] a minority exercises
its dominion" (Mysterium Liberationis, 590). This
"life-giving death goes by way of the oppressed [to become:] part of
humankind," but more. What does this have to do with the PA Dutch?
Blood, suffering and death, each culture embodies the Vision of Christ. If
critics scourge him from these clothes he was never anyway a friend of
religions or professors, but he got obeisance from the flower and the poor.
Bird invites Mircea Eliade to explain how "the aesthetic experience is
always close to religious experience," but not just art, all life
transcends: sport, hiking, love. Bird, the younger, says that "the
doing of this [fraktur] art constitutes some manner of spiritual assent, an
indirect affirmation of the divine power which undergirds the world" (11)!
The Power
But religion and philosophy don't trust art any more than scholars trust the
folk. Folk artifacts do not compare with the repute of the elite. From his
notions of Catholic background Bird argues that a plebeian "labor-oriented
life-style" suggests maybe "these texts and images were [not:]
reflected upon by their makers and recipients." There that stereotyped
brute appears again, "Let no one ask me for merriment tonight, Mean is my
company...I and my Frank round
our cauldron." "Opportunities for reverential gaze and
reflection were surely uncommon," as if the soul were not always gazing at
the eternal, for "it is clear that fraktur images most certainly did not
occupy the central place held by Byzantine icons at home or in places of
worship." Reductionism! No, not the images, but the whole interior! To
them gave he the power to become the sons of God. The Pennsylvania Dutch
home was a study of interiors,
finding the greater in the less. This thing about "reverential gaze
and reflection" begs the question, confined merely to fraktur. The whole
point of its folk art is that the images surrounding Pennsylvanians in stove-plate,
dish, linen needlework, quilt, kitchen and barn pictured their secretive
beliefs and kept the mind in a constant walking
meditation. Folk nature includes intelligence and consciousness of a higher
order not harnessed to the academic, obvious from Boehme and Beissel to
Rittenhouse, Muhlenberg and my own people of passion, insight and action. This
pietism, which Bird observes become universal in the 19th century, is
discredited among professional scholars as too emotional so one might wonder if
the scholar has felt the power.
Spiritual Exhaustion
Sometimes it sounds like he has, other times not, as with baptism and defending
the Taufschein: "Baptism of the individual by the church is regarded as of
such saving importance that the sacrament is administered as shortly as possible
after birth. To delay baptism would be to place in jeopardy the eternal life of
the newborn child" (26). No Protestant believes that but it is a Catholic
belief. A previous generalization resembles this one, that "pietism
threatened to undercut denominational and theological distinctions"(20).
Actually it unified them as pietism became more or less universal in these
religions early and unified them later when supplanted with evangelicalism.
Spiritual exhaustion came full circle when scholars sought again the
formalism of the past in their scholarship, found the Canticles irreverent and
irrelevant to a dymythologized belief. But while people of mein freund
take passionate love of Jesus for granted their betters do not. Richard E.
Wentz, another religion professor, founder of the ASU School of Religion,
disbelieves his own folk icons, lending credence to Stoudt's claim that
liberalism killed the flower. Wentz's Pennsylvania Dutch: Folk Spirituality
describes an introversion of the flowering heart: "at least among scholars
and intellectuals, heaven is an obsolescent metaphor (I speak for myself). It
is hardly a way to face the darkness" (Der Reggeboge, 2007, 33). It
must be hard to face the darkness from the tower. He says, "I have no
intention of trying to convince any of you as twenty-first century Dutchmen to
reach beyond your grasp and hitch your hopes on heaven" (41).
Reprise
Bird
reprises fraktur as Christian representations of major events from Fall
to Crucifixion (78). He suggests that the Temptation on baptismal certificates
to correspond with birth and baptism in the Fall and Salvation (67), the Tree
of Knowledge on a pedestal (69) with Golgotha, Kreb's Prodigal with Giotto
(74). He explains major events in this reprise, for example the Prodigal, so
readers foreign to the Bible may understand. As to the art, Bird observes
few depictions of the Last Supper in fraktur, but much of the Nativity,
Temptation, Adam and Eve and Crucifixion (63). Comparing Durer (64) and Giotto
he gives fraktur as the "assembled fragments of unevenly mixed textual
backgrounds combined within single fraktur compositions." (89) This ranges
the whole of Pennsylvania German culture to demonstrate a unity of beliefs, at
least in fraktur, in both sect and church.
Philosophical/religious concepts, art history, explanations of biblical
backgrounds, the layout of the book and its wide selection of illustration make
it a primer. Get past the scholarly patina, compound words and absurd professional
concepts and meditate these impressions.
Some Obvious Works
Cory Amsler. Bucks County Fraktur.
2001.
Michael S. Bird. O Noble Heart - O
Edel Herz: Fraktur and Spirituality in Pennsylvania German Folk Art.
Lancaster: The Heritage Museus of Lancaster County. 2002.
Ontario Fraktur. A Pennsylvania-German Folk Tradition in Early Canada.
1977.
Henry S. Borneman. Pennsylvania
German Illuminated Manuscripts. 1937, 1973.
Mary Jane Lederach Hershey. This
Teaching I Present. Fraktur from the Skippack and Salford Mennonite
Meetinghouse Schools, 1747-1836. 2003.
Dennis K. Moyer. Fraktur Writings
and Folk Art Drawings of the Schwenkfelder Library Collection.
1997.
Candace Kintzer Perry. The Samuel
W. Pennypacker Fraktur Collection at the Schwenkfelder Library.
Der Reggeboge. Journal of the Pennsylvania German Society,
2013.
Frederick S. Weiser; Howell J.
Heaney. The Pennsylvania German Fraktur of The Free Library of Philadelphia.
An Illustrated Catalogue. 2 Vols. 1976
Fraktur
Web
Free
Library of Philadelphia Fraktur Sources
Note: The lament of these scholars against what they think is the
gullibility of people is laid bare by such extraordinary expressions as Richard
Crashaw, "On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord," "Upon the Body
of Our Blessed Lord, Naked and Bloody." Thomas Traherne, The First Century. Christopher Smart, Jubilate
Agno, Fragment C. This list goes on
and on, Donne eight times in La Corona and
Holy Sonnets, notably in "At the round earth's imagined corners,
blow." Faith remains.
The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians (Ephrata, 1749.)Drowning, the Third Baptism
One understands Christmas, Messiah, Four Quartets, stables and
cattle, but how understand the world of affliction that 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 present day Mennonites take the
thousand pages of their martyrdoms day by day, for granted, but without the
blood. That was the threat that was. Something happened those nights to
Mennonites. Take Christmas Eve. They couldn't get to the theater, I mean our
equivalent of theirs, were up by the fire roasting, quilting, repairing tools.
In the first Mennonite theater, 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, wearing wooden knives, a foolishness of
action in rhetoric, but to them God had made foolish the wisdom of the world.
As a metaphor this theater
shamed Aristotle's tragedy 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 can
be countermanded when peasants overcome, so European states began more
subtleties in their subversion. They discovered pride, whose insistence does
not arouse the noble. Seduction works, we all know that, and if not we learn it
from Mennonites old and new. That was the pride that 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 was
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 one cannot know, failing opportunity, so they
could not 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” was 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). This 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 should all run from our seats.
It is masquerade worthy of
renaissance shrines and anti-shrines, the House of Fame, The Bower of Bliss. In
the play the leading lady, this world's mistress, with “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 Yahshua "should
be the first that should rise from the dead" (Acts 26.23) and 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 all 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 life.
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 would 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?
[Part of this oath was, "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."] This non
conformity was always an old world view, an anti-intellectualism run amok.
Hostage to the 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 did 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 he thought 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 all ask who is our
enemy and never know who is in the mirror as our friend.
Two important issues raised by Ruth's Funk's Mennonite oaths are:
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? (John L. Ruth. Maintaining the Right Fellowship.
Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1984, 153-55)
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 failed to defend the status quo? SURELY! Mennonites
continually raise and illustrate social debate. 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 still alive in 1933. The
Rules of the Franconia Conference of Mennonites were still making fun of
the sensitive and 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
has hardly been talk of anything else in the evangelical Church but the
millennium. The millennium! The tribulation! An old Mennonite turned Baptist once
asked, "do you still at least believe in the tribulation?" The answer
must be, "I'm bleeding aren't I!" The difference about the tribulation
for the Mennonites was they had been and sought to be in it while the rest hid
out to escape. 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 such a proposition is against thought control, mind control to control
masses, the "powers of the air," what blue states convinced
themselves of. That it includes electrosmog
and micro hearing effects, but it goes deeper. Mennonites 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? Don't go to the mall.
With Mary we behold it, the Virgin Mother kind.
But what about the further 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."
Not clothe your dead in black throws the whole school of death in a hat.
It upsets the notion that “He's just gone to a better place! We wish him well!
" Say no nasty Black about the afterlife, even if preachers wear it here
it is to renounce the world. Just one thing though, stop pretending the guy
didn't die in his sin. Flowers aren't going to change it. None but the Rose the
Mennonite sings. The flowers are there to convince cousins in the pew that they
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 down 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 sharpish venture of Mr. Wm. Blake
into the post-modern psyche suggests he clearly saw how the "mind-forged
manacles," protocols of black, bind the present while those of the
primitive past are 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: Consume! Consume! Consumption democracy in
the name of conforming individuals. They got the "plain people," over
there in trouble with snaps and zippers and buttons and bows.
The unvarnished Mennonite was not much on style. Fashion, so 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). Dress up "with good deeds" (I Tim. 2.10). A deacon is
not measured by his banking prowess but how he will "manage his children
and household" (I Tim. 3.12). Mennonites sound like and dress like
Orthodox 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 symbolized the literal
exaltation of the Name and the Word of Yahweh 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 now
wear t shirts of Metallica.
Vestito en carne humana!
"Maybe it's not the Mennonite we should blame for dramatizing this, but
the Bible." World Empire is much against the Bible, substitutes for it 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. There is no one right way."
This argument still says, "well if this country wasn't free, then where
would Mennonites be?” The answer is, back in the old country dead, no doubt.
But when they wheel you out to disciple yourself to this edge, there is
more to it 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, founding the fourth world empire. Free yourself
from the world.
Don’t affiliate with chorales says Franconia. The horror! Or theater recitals
(a little disingenuous) . 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 school codes for children: "Please
don't OD in public.
"Please don't commit
suicide at home. Please don't blow up your high school or take ecstasy and
drive, but you may prolong your adolescence into your 50's. We did!"
Mennonites think skeletal resistance, life as art, for Mennonite theater is 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 of children 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 it is superseded by the transhuman, 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 as failures at the Gates of the
Commandment, the higher you climb the farther you fall, but a long fall urges
sympathy for the underdog, so then you're back up. Fall from a standard of
worldliness and your children won't hold you in contempt. What are 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 all the suckers for the high
ideal hold you fail as you succeed. If you simply want to please the world you
cannot be said to fail. In the religion of social position one size fits
all. But faith falls on pebbles and hard rocks.
Oh flower!
Maybe the small "c" in contradiction proves Mennonites are not
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." Free yourself from the world. There is a cloven
dimple on the chin of doubt. 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 the would, language that 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. This unsubtle moral came 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 practiced that on Saturday
night. Public morals are protective covering. Right again. Right is wrong!
That's why they say the devil has twisted rhetorical triumphs. Arguments with
this devil go on forever. It always is what if?
Consider thy do-gooders where all men are created equal in the blurb. Speak to
immigrants when they cut your lawn, says Colin Powell, but flame against
offenses in newspaper codes. Could Jesus talk to them? Blake? Socrates? Put to
death nonconformists with the Mennonite. Well, Blake escaped.
Moralists of England, moralists of France,
how you disrobe your hierophants.
Leaving only those who kill for peace, lie for truth, and
stand up for the fundamentalist liberals of earth.
But 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 a 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). He shall see what great things he must
suffer for my name.
The Mennonites were blamed for corrupting the State Church like early
Christians were of corrupting Saul’s synagogue. Keep reading that sentence. On
the other hand the keepers of the state strike you with the 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 pious of protective covering. These must always be the greatest
offenders, like Saul, Dimmsdale.
The second principle of subversion is 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 asked to kneel at Caesar's hand and call him good. They were
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 its quest? Into symbolic speech
and beyond!
There is danger however when different members sacrifice in varying degrees and
if 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 dominant force without your death? When it
becomes dominant, will your group do what was done to them? Some Mennonites
symbolically shunned offenders. Some sent a death certificate to the parents
of a member who gave the local elder some offense.
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. He was
executed 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. But 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, the life within? They don’t say. Commonplace in small
deeds, unnoticed acts, choices, hard stands in 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," a liberal asks 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 of their racist thoughts
and crucifixion of their depressing lives without faith in the sacrifice of
their children. Sacrifice to Moloch, 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 is 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 caused by suppressed anger. “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
Christian falls 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 also be a theology for oppressing others. If you don’t measure up how
could they? Little is said of that reading of the Gospel that absorbs mind and
body in one new man, 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 repeated in the 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.
The breathing time included before its end these dictims of secondary and
tertiary response to separation from the world:
"All our lives we had lived in a constant struggle over issues involving the use of chain
saws, neck ties, oil stoves, drains in bathtubs, the number of pleats in women's
veilings, chrome cupboard-door handles, lawn chairs, white figure skates, flush
toilets, unpainted barns and painted implement sheds, roofs on silos, hydraulic
cylinders, motors on grain binders, contact lenses. . . .Peter Hoover III, Mennonite
In broader context however the martyrs of all denominations and names played a
formative role in the freedoms of civilization breaking the yoke 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 that Mennonites disdain have raised a question
as to whether Mennonites harbor a death wish by making people murder them. The
world is so filled with loathing psychiatrists will help you they persecute
yourself. 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 is this rule except tyranny? Only by the rule of onformity. On
similar grounds I. F. Stone charges Socrates for what he 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 had 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. Pacifism 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 Revolution 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 then 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 believes 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 in
public adiscourtesy 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 rejoice in 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 are 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, does not need to hide the ill, indeed confesses
aplenty, to urge “no more be grieved at that which thou hast done.” No more
be grieved that is the sum.
Water Torture
In Switzerland, some who carried wooden knives in their belts to show their
contempt of murder, were dragged behind the boats of Lake Geneva. Much in
the way of torture and oppression was practiced against them, especially as
noted in the Mirror where Mennonites and Anabaptists were tortured for
their views on communion. It was like the theatre of Rome informed the martyrs’
trials.One of the favorite traditions of torture in Zurich and Geneva was
drowning in a bag. This precursor of the American water boarding of its terror
suspects has never seemed to receive its due, especially since it was the
widespread and central technique used in the Spanish Inquisition. Why did
opponents of this in the Bush years not trumpet the Inquisition connection? Of
course nowadays drowning has been give up for drones. To a Protestant people that
should have sealed its condemnation. "In the toca, or water
torture, the accused was tied down on a rack, his mouth forced open, and a toca,
or linen cloth, pushed down his throat. Water was then dripped onto the cloth
to simulate the sensation of drowning" (Robert Hughes, Goya, 59).
In their “kindness” the authorities of that time coaxed a general confession
first, conducted in the leniency of their compassion to surrender 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 too. Off with her head! She failed the exam of
Papal ordinance general.
A second audience was 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.
"All our lives we had lived in a constant struggle over issues involving the use of chain
saws, neck ties, oil stoves, drains in bathtubs, the number of pleats in women's
veilings, chrome cupboard-door handles, lawn chairs, white figure skates, flush
toilets, unpainted barns and painted implement sheds, roofs on silos, hydraulic
cylinders, motors on grain binders, contact lenses. . . ." PeterHoover III, Mennonite
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.
Reife nach Pennsylvanien
(Stuttgart,1756) is the title in German of Mittelberger's work, Journey to Pennsylvania. The word for
journey in German is reise, which becomes Reife from the
convention of the long s. Also called a
ligature, the long s has no bar through it, which at first seems to substitute
f for s. In type setting there is also a greater need for s. It however
appears immediately to the eye as Reife so that in its original the title is
almost Reiff nach Pennsylvanien.
Muhlenberg spells Reiff as Reiss and Reif. He gives Reif in
the name of "George Reif, Jacob Reif's son" (Journals III,
344, c. 1780). Reiss however denotes the widowed Anna Reiff and her son
Jacob where the Church Record says, 'Widow Reiss, mother of Jacob Reiss,
was buried January 8, 1753" (Journals I, 352). Conrad Reiff was of course
the target of several pages of fulminations in Mittelberger's Journey
(see 110f) that makes this confusion interesting. That any of this seems
peculiar can be perused at will online here.
It's one thing to seek such matters out, it's another for them to summon you,
as this. Take for instance the restraint of the world so utterly present in
these Mennonite and pietistic writings, whatever that comes to mean. If Reiff
is a Reise, a journey, a Reife upon his Journey, as Mitteberger's title,
the Hebrew word for Hebrew, both man and language, is also journey, to
cross over, or pass through, "a passer-through...one
who takes into account that which is outside of himself, and so "does
not the world made visible run the risk...of becoming an idol?"
(Marc-Alain Ouaknin, The Burnt Book, 73).
What is the visible and the invisible world? The highest authorities are best.
Take Emmanuel Levinas who says, invisibility "is a way of signifying quite
different from that which connects exposition to sight...it is the very
transcending characteristic of this beyond that is signification." (Otherwise,
100). In a word, what is the invisible before "showing itself in the
said," in the present "always already in the past behind which the
present delay is," "straiting with its furrows the clarity of the
ostensible?" What is the invisible? It is "a responsibility with regard
to men we do not even know," it is a responsibility for my neighbor (100).
" This incommensurability with consciousness, which becomes a trace of the
who knows where, is not the inoffensive relationship of knowing in which
everything is equalized, nor the indifference of spatial contiguity; it is an
assignation of me by another, a responsibility with regard to men we do not
even know."
This journey speaks also to the valley of passengers of Ezekiel 39 who hold
their noses as they pass through. This journeyist immigrant to many lands and
internal landscapes reife nach Pennsylvanien, who evokes new worlds, gold
agues, the ages of Jerusalem, is also the subject of inquiries, appearing as Forward Blue Superposition I, Colonia, and more or less everything that
appeared at Gobbet.
