Between alchemy and Pietism: Wilhelm Christoph Kriegsmann's philological quest for ancient wisdom

A minor figure undeservedly forgotten, Wilhelm Christoph Kriegsmann (1633–1679) has received only limited attention from historians of alchemy and church historians. He is known chiefly either for his idiosyncratic Phoenician reconstruction of the Tabula Smaragdina, a foundational text of alchemy attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, or alternatively for writing one of the earliest sustained defenses of Pietist conventicles to appear in print. In an attempt to bridge this unsatisfactory segregation, this paper argues that the notion of ancient wisdom (prisca sapientia) provided a crucial link between these seemingly disparate areas. First, Kriegsmann’s largely philological works on alchemy published between 1657and 1669 are discussed, with particular emphasis on how they framed the relationship between alchemy and religious piety. As Kriegsmann joined the cause of the first Pietists in the early 1670s, he was inspired to announce a whole range of books, some of which were never published. In the year 1676, he made the transition from an occult reading group to a Pietist conventicle. In its explicit combination of complete knowledge and practical piety, Kriegsmann’s call to restore the Bible wisdom (bibliosophia) of the ancient Jews is considered and placed in the context of other spiritualist and Pietist appropriations of ancient wisdom

The Priesthood of All Believers and the Theology of Pietism

Pietism and pietistic emphases are becoming popular again because during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century the Pietists sought to revitalize Christianity in ways familiar to twentieth century Christians seeking to do the same. Pietism sought to foster a more vigorous personal and public piety among the people. They sought to improve the education of ministers in practical piety so that they might better guide and edify their people. They sought to encourage the reading of the Bible, Christian education of the youthful and the mature, demonstrated social concern and resposibility in their philanthropic enterprises, and embarked upon ambitious programs of domestic and foreign missions. In a state-church environment where erastianism had led to spiritual smugness or apathy, the Pietists sought to reform the life of the church by reasserting the rights and responsibilities of the priesthood of all believers emphasized by Luther but neglected in seventeenth century German Lutheranism. They felt that this revitalization of the laity would lead to a reform of church and society. They believed, moreover, that his would require the improvement also in the education of clerics. In this the Pietists seemed to have achieved initial success in that the movement spread rapidly and widely. Yet, over the longer term, Pietism\u27s attempt to reform the life and practice of the church did not effect truly permanent changes in society. It is the purpose of this study to demonstrate that one major cause for this was that Pietism, in its practices and emphases, transformed itself into a theological movement and promulgated a theology not totally consistent with classical Lutheranism

Mystical theology, ecumenism and church-state relations: Francesco Bellisomi (1663–1741) at the limits of confessionalism in early eighteenth-century Europe

This article reconstructs the biography of a little-known Italian priest, Francesco Bellisomi (1663–1741), in order to trace the intellectual and political dimensions of religious reformism in early eighteenth-century Europe. Its primary objective is to demonstrate the causal relationships between three trends: firstly, pietistic spiritual reform influenced by mystical theology; secondly, ecumenical dialogue among Protestants and between Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox Christians; and thirdly, the political articulation of the non-confessional state. By following a persecuted Bellisomi from Pavia to Rome, and then on to Venice, Vienna, Halle, Berlin and London, it depicts the strands connecting the political, intellectual and religious environment on the Italian Peninsula, within the Holy Roman Empire and in the British Isles. From the latter seventeenth century, the equation of confessionalism – the alliance of a confessionalising church and a centralising state – was being undermined across Europe. One factor in this process was enthusiasm for a supra-confessional ecclesia universalis, the nature of which was highly contested. Bellisomi’s life offers a unique window onto this networked and inter-confessional intellectual culture

IN SEARCH OF ADEQUATE FAITH: RELIGIOUS SKEPTICISM IN GERMAN LETTERS (1750-1800)

The following dissertation, “In Search of Adequate Faith: Religious Skepticism in German Letters (1750–1800),” is an interdisciplinary study exploring the religious writings of Klopstock, Lessing, and Novalis. During the mid- to late-eighteenth century the struggle to articulate a distinctly modern faith becomes audible across the literary and aesthetic works of writers who were committed to making the biblical tradition more appealing to an increasingly skeptical age. Rather than driving a wedge between sacred and secular cultures, these writers promised greater spiritual cohesion. Instead of simply yielding to the authority of tradition and scripture, their works strove to articulate more adequate means of forging religious bonds. This study investigates how a number of writers turned the spirit of religion into a weapon, which precipitated a second reformation in the latter half of the eighteenth century. How did literature and aesthetics challenge the authority of the five Lutheran Solae? How might they offer more effective strategies for reconciling faith and reason than philosophy and theology? What role did material and visual culture play in mediating religious experience at this time? To answer these questions, I analyze a constellation of documents associated with each writer. My first chapter interrogates the poetic methodology of Klopstock’s Der Messias by exploring his extensive amplification of the New Testament figure Doubting Thomas. In my analysis, Klopstock's poetics inadvertently reproduce Thomas’ tragic “mistake” by doubting the efficacy of unaided scripture to communicate religious truth; a doubt that he attempts to resolve by intensifying the reader’s affective experience of the gospel narratives. My second chapter argues that Lessing develops a more powerful defense against religious skepticism than Klopstock by appealing to the spirit of religion rather than to the authority of its letter. By reorienting faith around the spirit of religion, Lessing sparks a Copernican turn in religious consciousness that helped emancipate modern believers from theological regimes that had become increasingly normative in their approach to the letter of scripture. My final chapter considers how Novalis confronts the ways in which Lessing and the Protestant tradition deminishes the value of sensible forms of religious mediation by “spiritualizing” modern faith. Unlike Lessing, Novalis insists that revealed knowledge demands material mediation like images and symbols in order to (re)shape and (re)generate religious experience

Through the eye of a needle : The Role of Pietistic and Mystical Thought among the Anglican Elite in the Eighteenth Century Lowcountry South

This dissertation examines the transmission and eventual manifestation of Christian pietistic and mystical thought into the Colonial and Revolutionary lowcountry South. The facilitators of this transmission include the Continental Pietists, who were themselves heavily influenced by the mystics, and British Evangelicals such as John Wesley and George Whitefield, who, even in their public denials of mysticism, nevertheless demonstrated its strong influence in their ministries. Mystical and pietistic expressions impacted the religious, social, and political life of the lowcountry more than has been previously recognized. Evangelical Pietism\u27s mid-eighteenth century infusion prompted some to correctly recognize its subjective (i.e. inwardly focused and feelings oriented) roots in medieval Catholic mysticism. Such association led them to wrongly conclude, however, that Evangelicals were secret emissaries of Rome sent to disrupt social and religious stability in the region. Enthusiastic religion did not play the disruptive role that many feared it would. Granted, misguided notions led to early concerns in the lowcountry, but in the end, Evangelical Pietism\u27s transcendent and flexible qualities contributed to the formation of political and social consensus, provided a new means to obtain significance in the larger British world, helped transform the image of slavery into a uniquely Christian institution, and supplied impulse for unified action during the Revolutionary Era

The Emergence of Radical Christianity: The Mystical Dunkers, its Antecedence, Hermetical Founding, Germanic Diaspora, and its Apogee on the Frontier of Colonial America

The Dunker Sect, a radical Christian fellowship founded by Alexander Mack and Ernst Christoph Hochmann von Hochenau, grew from the endless conflict and radicalization of Christianity that emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in what is now Germany and Switzerland. These men were guided by Christian leaders such as Jakob Spener, August Hermann Franke, and other radicals in Eastern Germany. Both Hochmann and Mack were separatists, in that they wanted nothing to do with what they considered the corrupted Church of the Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed denominations. The term “separatist” however, only describes their removal from the established church rather than their “liberation” from the established church. In their eyes they saw a new beginning for Christianity, a path that would lead their followers to a new spiritual freedom. This spiritual freedom culminated in the New World where their freedoms were taken to limits beyond their own dreams and aspirations. Hochmann never saw the New World; however, Mack and his followers, some of which would split off into their own fringe groups, others would float back and forth from one to another, such as the Inspirationists, the Mennonites, the Quakers, and the Moravians, arrived in the New World in clusters. Most of Mack’s followers would settle first in Germantown, Pennsylvania, then migrated into the frontier or fringe of British North America to seek both solitude and peaceful co-existence with nature and with their fellow man. They sought what Rufus M. Jones called the “perfect flower of religion [the] crowning achievement of the soul in its search of God.” This Christian Mysticism, not to be confused with the occult, was an attempt “to realize, in thought and feeling, the imminence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal,” and further, that the relationship between “temporal and the eternal, are bound together.” The German community created a vibrant and mystical relationship with the New World that remains, albeit diminished today, one of the most unique of in both colonial America as well as the early United States history. The Dunkers, while bearing a small but unique and impactful part of this history, created printed material, a unification of frontier ambitions and opportunities, and also established churches and other sects that remain vibrant and alive today. As one of the smaller groups that triggered the Radical Pietism movement in Pennsylvania and beyond after 1770, the movement created multiple splinter religious communities which emphasized a “religion of the heart” rather than of the mind. Many, such as the River Brethren, Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish, Bruderhof, and Schwarzenau Brethren (Dunkers) as well as Apostolic Christians, became reenergized and created denominations rather than merely following one leader or another. Prior to 1770, the Anabaptist movement, along with the Radical Pietism movement, created separatist groups, mentioned above, that still got along, but remained separate. However, between the failure of Zinzendorf to create one denomination under the Moravian flag, and the schisms over theology and dogma, the various denominations emerged over the next century and a half. The Old Order Anabaptist groups emerged from the division of mainstream Anabaptist groups between 1850 and 1900. The frontier in America was a daunting mass of land, completely wild and untamed. Very few places in America today are reminiscent of what the settlers of the mid-eighteenth century witnessed when they crossed the Blue Ridge and beyond. America’s collective memory of the frontier, romanticized by John Wayne, Dean Martin, Roy Rogers, and others on the Silver Screen, do little justice to the hardships, sacrifices and depravity that our forefathers endured settling this rugged expanse. While religion played an important part in the spiritual lives of most settlers who crossed the Susquehanna River, the Potomac River, the Shenandoah River, south along the Great Wagon Road that grew out of the toil and adversity the flora and fauna that must have seemed disconcerting, religion itself was secondary to the survival and success of the homesteads and settlements that were to be created. A frontier, which stretched from New England to Georgia, occupied by men, women, and children, who had to survive. Many historians call these trailblazers hardy, rough, strong, however, they were practically no different than their descendants today. What made them different was their willingness to live in a land which offered so much for someone who governed themselves, harvested a hardy crop, cultivated fertile land, celebrated victories, and mourned defeats. Although this frontier was settled by hundreds of dissenters who created communities of believers or communities of language, it was the necessity of survival that generated peace between religious distinctions. It was not until after the Revolutionary War, and into the nineteenth century that the various groups, primarily Moravian, Mennonite, Dunker, and Quaker, began to quarrel on principles of theology and dogma. Ironically, the Dunkers familiar association with these other “Plain People” sects in both Pennsylvania and the frontier, prompted all four to adopt various features that were characteristic of these distinctive groups, which has caused the reader to misidentify key individuals as Moravian, Mennonite, Dunker, or Quaker during the colonial frontier period. All these sects, plus tens of other German, English, and other Northwestern European group all came to America to be free of persecution because of their faith, and Pennsylvania offered that. However, as more migrants landed in Philadelphia and other ports, the land value grew to be more expensive, unavailable, or crowded. What many thousands began to do was migrate further west as the land became available. First to what is now Dauphin, Lancaster, Lebanon, and York Counties, then to Adams and Cumberland Counties in Pennsylvania, Washington, and Frederick Counties in Maryland, and finally into the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and south into North and South Carolina. The further west and south these migrants went, the further from their organized religion they became. In Europe, this was not the case, land, religious activity, the frontier, were all populated, fortified, galvanized, and legalized by the various factions, principalities and other religious or government entities. In the frontier in America, no populations existed, no religious or governmental body ruled over the estates, no large landowners existed, fertile, cheap land was available to settle. The catch, it was untamed, wild, unregulated land, far from the civilized east of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania; and far from their religious leadership which had provided spiritual comfort and a firm theological standing. It was not until after the French and Indian War that the municipal courts and other local governments began modernizing the Great Wagon Road that ran from Philadelphia, west then south through the Shenandoah Valley eventually ending in Georgia. The road was surrounded by endless farms, forts, taverns, villages, and meeting houses which afforded the sectarians a means to gather for worship, trade, and commune with neighbors. Not only did the road offer goods and services to the frontier, but also mail and publication services, which began to provoke the associated sects (Mennonite and Dunker particularly) against each other due to religious writings. However, the road did not produce this on its own, life began to get easier, families who survived the first few years on the frontier in a single room single story homestead were now building new homes, many survive today as “two up, two down” stone houses. The Schwarzenau Brethren, Dunkers, Long Beards, are unique in colonial American history, such that examining the history of how the Anabaptists and Radical Pietism transformed a community which settled Pennsylvania and its frontier is difficult. This is not an exhaustive examination of the Dunkers themselves, rather this is an history of Radical Christianity during the Reformation and the collision of Pietism and Anabaptism which created the Dunker sect, highlights of their movements, trails, tribulations as well as their victories. Additionally, what happened to the Dunker members between the French and Indian War and the Treaty of Paris at the end of the Revolutionary War is important. Finally, examining the Dunker migrations within the context of the frontier, why they migrated into the wilderness, and what they accomplished is another fascinating note. The frontier presented the Dunkers with both formidable obstacles and unique opportunities to these religious outcasts. The “Old West” gave the individual a life that was less communal than their eastern counterparts. The infrastructure was yet to be established, the facilities were not yet built, and the environment remained wild. What the Dunkers faced in the east was schism, divisiveness, and power struggles, what they faced in the west was individualism, religious freedom, and the ability to seek out the Holy Spirit for themselves. They allied themselves with likeminded individuals which they incorporated, collaborated, and intermarried with to develop yet another unique Anabaptist and Pietist movement that became more fluid in the frontier than it did in the east

The Legacy of Luther: National Identity and State-Building in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany

Historians have posited a number of theories about nationalism. Using Anthony D. Smith\u27s historic ethno-symbolic theory, this thesis examines the development of German national identity in the decades following the French Revolution up to the 1848 revolutions and the National Assembly that met in Frankfurt to write a constitution for the German Nation. Martin Luther was an important figure to Germans in the nineteenth century and a number of influential intellectuals drew on his contributions to define themselves as a distinctive people, even though Germans as yet, had no nation-state. The particular contributions of Luther examined in this thesis are language, music and concepts of freedom and unity