The Loss of German Devotional Ways

The relation of Pennsylvania Germans to decoration greater than tulips, hearts, stars and crowns, or Mennonites turning flowers into bookmarks to bring paradise indoors, or linens, furniture and pottery of communal tulips that migrate from paper to linen to wood, or even letters filled with swirls and stipples that whirl under signatures in descending spirals has as much to do with the absence of these things as with their presence, the plainness of a board, the cut of a lapel, whether cap or bonnet or hat, Christmas cookies at play and glee, but in a life capable of belief, an inner spiritual form and force from which the outward material surface of reality proceeds, the greater decoration is the less.

“Are there also men who are not conscious of possessing a higher spirit than brutes, and yet maintain, that they can keep their minds in a good state of rest in this life?” This question is in one of the books. Plain folk means black suit and dress, but what are they hiding? Is it something you can't see, invisible or covered up? To hide in a rough brown cabinet wood handled tools, embroidered linens in trunks on metal rollers, pottery in wardrobes, unknown, unsigned, eponymous paradox, hand painted china, hand made dresses.

The loss of German devotional ways goes to the heart of the loss of folkways, art, language and culture. What indeed were the picture oriented, word oriented, Bible centered devotional ways that Yoder ties to the roots of fraktur in Central Europe from the sixteenth century, expressed in fraktur in calligraphy and symbols "from the tombstone to the barn," he says, "the six-pointed star with its variations, the tulip-rose-lily, the tree of life" (272)? He supposes a disagreement between experts to preserve an objective distance. Choose among Stoudt's "brand of Christian mystical theology leading down from medieval Catholic mystics to Boehme and the Pietist hymnists of the seventeenth century" (274), a less Catholic, more Protestant church or sect, or a cast off pagan origin of hex signs. Pretend choices matter little to the survival or demise of devotional outlooks that fraktur exemplifes with all the other forms of folk art in this tradition. He admits, "the devotional life of the Pennsylvania Germans centered around Bible, hymnbook, and prayerbook, and strangely enough, fraktur" (275), which was "needed in the culture that produced it. It was a visual, moral, and religious symbol of the individual's relation to the institutions within the folk culture--the church, the school, and the family" (275). Except it was a symbol of relation to the natural world.

Origins

The outlook that informs these arts stems from the devotional classics found in that culture, which existed when fraktur was flourishing, "approximately from the 1750's to the 1850's" (274), always allowing precursors and survivals. Even if today these classics in German are scarce to find, they were commonplace, often reprinted. A typical small holding of books, not as an example of a library so much as a pretext of exploring devotional attitudes, takes us into the history of the 3151 books and almanacs printed in the German language in America between 1728 and 1830, most issued in Pennsylvania. Certain titles were continually reprinted, popular depending on the community, handed down on the basis of family association and particular esteem. These were further identified by the signatures of their owners as they passed through the generations. Samplings of Mennonite libraries of that era show that two dozen books in 1800 was a large number.

If we focus on selected contents of those books and their teachings the chief among them must be Johann Arndt’s, Wahren Christenthem (True Christianity). In mid 18th century Pennsylvania, Lutheran pastor Muhlenberg equated Arndt’s book with the Bible: “…take hold of the Holy Bible and True Christianity every day….” (Journals I, 219). But if we want to know its particular attraction, in truth it was the same motive that formed the domestic arts from fraktur to embroidery, that is, the central principle was an inner life, a thought life maintained by continuous meditation of the good. From this proceeds all those images of paradise that abound in Dutch art, but in Ardt there is a nemesis of this meditation because it is made difficult by counterfeits in the mouths of those who profess that very good, but do not present it in their lives. The chief attribute of the good begs to be called “mystical union," which the critics do call it, except wrong headedly invert its meaning. Arndt holds that wrestling with nemesis of all kinds in this is its proof, that is the production of a continual reassurance of joy. What bridges the feeling of union, which is everything, with its absence, is faith. That faith does not require feeling, is a paradox because without feeling where is the faith? So to paraphrase the process it is as if you wake up one day and have an inner life, where inner means beautiful, good, wholesome, joyful, but you don't naturally know where it comes from. Those who speak of it do so to betray it, but even poetically expressed the stages that critics offer in analysis as stages in the process, that is, purgation, illumination, and union, mean nothing because they are reversed. Arndt holds union as the eternal state of waking in a day, but the day is a decade, suddenly, as a tree turns seed to sapling to rough bark. Then you have an inner life where prayers are answered and you are weak as cloth which a tide of trust carries out to sea and back.

If this sounds a presumptuous claim as union with God, impossible to reason unless as product of effort or exercise, Arndt answers that union with God is accomplished solely through union with God, not by effort, but effortlessness, like some notion of backing a horse into the stable forwards. As explanation of such things people today are fond of calling on such authorities as the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who cites a similar paradox in the problem of language in describing the dual nature of matter and radiation: “it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time” (10-11). We are maybe more used to duality in physics than the beginning and end of unity in Arndt as a problem of language, that is, doing and not doing simultaneously. How resist the temptations of zen? By faith the believer is incorporated into Christ through the Spirit as Arndt places mystical union at the beginning of the Christian life not the end.

To jump ahead, one of the last such Dutch resorts of faith and doctrine was the popular catechism, Christliches Gemuths-Gesprach by Gerhard Roosen. The English translation, Christian Spiritual Conversation. First authorized in 1856, the takes a reasoned appeal to nature.

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

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

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

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


Cited

Werner Heisenberg. The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1930.

The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. Translated by Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein. Camden, Maine: Picton Press. Fortress Press, 1942.