The Way Into The Flowering Heart

 Raising Hands with the Mind

Pennsylvania German art embodies a spirit of  Inwendigkeit, interior, innerness that decides everything material and immaterial by the mind. Marriage is an imagination, dress an imagination, praising God is an imagination, raising hands with the mind and with the arms. All things are first and last imagined, whether household effects such as chests, linen, plates, or  fraktur art, all celebrate an “uncontaminated good within natural reality” (Stoudt, Pennsylvania German Folk Art, 101).

The lily is the centerpiece of this imagination and transfers its redemption to nature, which it can do because it is not only a lily, but symbolizes Christ. Perhaps the likeness is more than symbolic so that among architectures of furnished rooms and philosophies of hymns, gardens and kitchens, the praise of Christ extends to nature a sacrament that covers an outward care of earth.

These implicit and explicit  devotional attitudes flowered in Johann Arndt's Paradies Gartlein, the book that would not burn (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 245, and Gerhard Tersteegen's Spiritual Flower Garden of the Inner Soul (Geistliches Blumen-Gärtlein inniger Seelen, 1729, Germantown 1747), which was also sung. Stoudt says “Pennsylvania German folk art is basically spiritual in concept and the motifs and designs used are non-representational expressions of traditional Christian imagery” (vii). Citing Stoudt in defense of the lily is a little like taking Wallace Stevens as he is, a Pennsylvania Dutchman. Stoudt says that when the underlying faith of this people was lost, so was the art. Then Wallace Stevens also changed from a Berks County farmer to a poetry sophisticate.

Detail, silver napkin ring Berks County c. 1880

Blossoming the Lily

Could they believe such things when the good within nature was affected with flesh? Its primary philosopher, Jacob Boehme, was vexed with the soil of this flowering The lily was of the earth. "A fair flower grows out of the rough earth which is not like the earth, but declares by its beauty the power of the earth, and how it is mixed of good and evil; so also is every man, who, out of the animal, wild, earthly nature and quality, is born again so as to become the right image of God."  This flower was to the soil what the human was to the animal, however that man was also a plant. The image of God in the earth emerged from the animal man as if from a plant: "For those who are a growth of such a kind, and are shooting forth into the fair lily in the kingdom of God and are in process of birth, have we written this book” (Jacob Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 4). So "he will blossom like a lily" (Hosea 14.5) making a paradise where none was before.

A flowering heart would connote a flowering mind much as the mystical heart diagrams of Paul Kaym, Helleleuchtender Hertzens-Spiegel (1680) give as a series of heart-head images engraved by Nicolaus Häublin, who illustrated the works of Boehme. The lily as image of nature's redemption, is not however drawn strictly as a botanical lily. This Lily is unknown, a stylized “use of natural events and objects to describe spiritual conditions." Stoudt said that such collective images underlay the life of the Pennsylvania Dutch in hymns, flowers, pottery and linens and “produced an American decorative art which, with few minor exceptions, is the only indigenous art of its kind in our land” (3).

If you're of this folk you will be feeling better about yourself even more when you see that the lily in the hymns and gardens is an image from the Song of Songs before its elaboration in the writing of Boehme and in  Pennsylvania's Ephrata Cloister. This inner garden flourished also in the larger medieval setting of the terrestrial paradise, German Minnesong and baroque German religious poets (Stoudt, 56). Bernard of Clairvaux and even more obscure Dionysian Neoplatonists contemplated the lily as did the English metaphysical poets Transferred to hymnists, these “escaped to illuminated writings, to the decorated chest, and to pottery” (Stoudt, 92). So a four fold progression accounts the Bible, Boehme, hymns and folk art.

The last thing Pennsylvania Germans  would want is to seem  spiritual, which partly explains the discredit Stoudt suffered even if the spiritual intellectuals, Conrad Beissel (1691-1768), baker, founder of Ephrata and Boehme, a shoemaker, were peasants. Boehme influenced Milton, Newton and Emerson, they say, and was early translated to English (1647-1661). At the other end of the centuries Wallace Stevens, baptized at his death, reaffirmed his early life in this tradition of luminous indicia of imagination in his The Necessary Angel, a reflowering from his mother's Bible. The hymnals sang of die unfgehende lilie, the opening lily, the lilen-Zweig, the lily twig and wohlriechenden lilen, the fragrant ones (Stoudt, 85, 89, 95). This inescapable Dutch “tulip,” as Stoudt has it, was an “inarticulate belief in [all] the artist’s heart.” (Pennsylvania German Folk Art, 15).