In 1934, shortly after the Nazi ascension to power in Germany, American historian Koppel S. Pinson published Pietism as a National Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism, in which he argued that Pietism provided eighteenth-century Germany with the emotional elements that would support its subsequent nationalism.Footnote 1 Pinson, it seems, detected an irrational element embedded within German nationalism from its very beginnings. A generation later, in Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland (1961), German historian Gerhard Kaiser examined the ways that the eighteenth-century heirs of German Pietism invested traditional political images with patriotic meanings, thus linking Pietism and early German nationalism. For him, the Pietist-patriotic merger forged a tradition by which, during the national age, loyalty to national institutions was bound to religious rules.Footnote 2 In 1982, Pinson and Kaiser, both of whom signaled the irrational nature of German nationalism, were taken severely to task by Hartmut Lehmann, a prominent historian of German Pietism. Lehman harshly criticized the methodological approach of his precursors, claiming that they ignored the changing religious and intellectual climate that obtained between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. He proposed his own model of the Pietistic-national correlation, which was materialized especially in the context of the 1848/1849 Revolution and mainly in two rather marginal groups: those Pietists led to Palestine in the late 1860s by Christoph Hoffmann and the Inner Mission guided by Johann Heinrich Wichern.Footnote 3 Pinson, Kaiser, and Lehmann were among the very few that directly addressed the German Pietist-national correlation, and all set aside the close relation of Pietism and nationalism in the nineteenth century. The first two ended their analysis in the late eighteenth century, and the third, who did consider the following century, was primarily interested in the Inner Mission. Moreover, recent research on renewed German Pietism, namely neo-Pietism, makes hardly any reference to national themes.Footnote 4 Such scant attention to the Pietistic origin of a particular kind of nationalism is doubly striking. First, the central role played by religion in the formation of German national identity is well known;Footnote 5 and second, Pietist circles in the nineteenth century did not avoid engagement with nationalism but rather endeavored to demonstrate the national meaning and relevancy of certain Pietistic characteristics. It is worthwhile, then, to elaborate on this topic, raised for the first time more than eighty years ago but in practice left rather neglected by scholarship.
In this article, I aim to investigate the neo-Pietist Awakening of the first half of the nineteenth century in Prussia and other German states, particularly among theologians and noble estate owners who were associated with political conservatism. While the zealous Christianity of the German aristocrats and theological experts has won due academic discussion and has helped to explain conversionary policies toward the Jews, the religious-national fusion among this group has been given strikingly short shrift.Footnote 6 This neglect can be accounted for by the popular notion that German conservatism denied modern nationalism and accommodated national identity only after the foundation of the German Reich in 1871.Footnote 7
To support my claim concerning the tight ties between neo-Pietism, conservatism, and German nationalism, I shall discuss some features within earlier Pietistic discourse—that of the seventeenth and eighteenth century—which could have served as a basis for the Christian Pietist-national synthesis. Next, I will characterize early nineteenth century German Pietism; in the following parts of the article, I will analyze the specific conservative-Pietist and national merger among theologians and noble estate owners. In constructing this trajectory, I have borne in mind Lehman's helpful warning to avoid the pitfall of considering Pietism as a “uniform tradition.”
I. Pietist Origins of Collective Identity
Although some scholars identify the origins of Pietism as a challenge to established Protestantism before the Thirty Years War—the “pre-Pietism”—in works of mystical spiritualists like Jacob Böhme (1575–1624) and Johann Arndt (1586–1654),Footnote 8 then Pietism emerged in late seventeenth-century Protestant Europe in the context of attempts to reform German Protestant churches. A movement of religious renewal or awakening, it spread from Frankfurt through the work of Philipp Jakob Spener, and especially with the publication of his Pia Desideria in 1675. Eighteenth-century Pietism saw keen adherents, among them August Hermann Francke, and the establishment of its center in the city of Halle. Yet Pietistic tendencies can be discerned in many contemporary religious revival movements that swept across Europe and over the Atlantic. It penetrated the communities of Methodists and Puritans in England, the Philadelphians in North America, and its traces can even be detected in Catholic movements, such as Jansenism. Pietism stressed the desire for an authentic experience of God's spirit, unlimited love for God and man, social concern, and confessed confidence in God's revelation in Christ. These elements were intended to invigorate emotional closeness to God and to militate against the theological teaching of Protestant Orthodoxy. Pietism was a Herzens-Religion (religion of the heart).Footnote 9 This heart-centeredness made the movement especially appealing in Prussia, as it served to decrease tensions created by contesting dogmas. Indeed, it provided a common platform for greater integration between Reformed and Lutheran Protestantism that hindered the formation of supreme episcopacy in the monarchy.Footnote 10
As mentioned, I will focus on the neo-Pietism of the first half of the nineteenth century, which developed within the context of the Prussian monarchy and other German states prior to the 1848 Revolution. Yet, in order to grasp the origins of its concept of national identity and the tradition that inspired its perception of nationhood, we must first consider the aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German Pietism that provided the contours for the later manifestation of nationalism. Certainly, not all streams of German Pietism carried such aspects, and therefore I will try to differentiate between them and their characteristics.
Early German Pietism was not a national religious movement: nationalism as a concept of popular sovereignty was irrelevant prior to the French Revolution. Nonetheless, certain ideas of patriotism and nascent nationalism had emerged already in the second half of the eighteenth century in the wake of the Seven Years War. The challenge posed to the imperial authority motivated certain jurists, among them the Pietist Carl Friedrich von Moser (1723–1798), to rethink the consolidation of a legal system for the Holy Roman Empire as representing the “the fatherland as a whole” and to encourage the “national spirit.”Footnote 11 But the vocabulary and concepts that would later serve as a source for the articulation of national elements originated even before Moser, especially among Pietists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. As noted earlier, already by 1934 Pinson had elaborated on the notion of a Pietist-national amalgam. He endeavored, however, to demonstrate that Pietism “provided the emotional basis for subsequent nationalism . . . ”Footnote 12 While I do not wish to challenge Pinson's thesis about the importance of the emotional factor, I shall point to some early Pietistic ideas, including some that preceded Spener and Francke, which became part of the later neo-Pietist national tradition. In doing so I do not mean to chart a direct course for the advance of national notions from an earlier to a later form of Pietism. Rather, I wish to explore the persistence of some basic ideas about collective identities and how they were transformed within the Pietistic tradition as a result of changing circumstances.
As a religious movement, Pietism was motivated by emotional incentives, but also by social and political ones. The widespread discontent in seventeenth-century German lands concerning the misconduct of the political authorities prompted the pursuance of a different authority, one that prioritized justice and social relief. This alternative, stated eighteenth-century Swabian Pietist Johann Friedrich Flattich, is Christianity. And, he continued, one who seeks comfort in Christianity is a Pietist. According to Flattich, however, such a religious inwardness must be actively forged, maintained and defended against encroachments and demands from without.Footnote 13 In this view, alliances between the monarch and clerical institutions were to be avoided. Pietists perceived such alliances as a threat to the independence of Christianity, and this criticism became an argument against the state itself. Moreover, Pietists condemned the materialism of absolutist royal courts, counterposing it to the more modest standards held by the rest of society.Footnote 14 This emphasis on modesty extended to the social makeup of Pietist circles. Some groups, such as those found in Stuttgart and Frankfurt, for example, conducted their religious practices among wives and husbands only. Others formed exclusive associations of kinship and similar social status, as in the case of the separatist Saalhof, led by Maria Juliana Bauer von Eyseneck (1641–1684) on the banks of the Main.Footnote 15 But there were Pietists, like Philipp Matthäus Hahn of Tübingen and August Hermann Francke of Halle, who advocated social integration of peasants, craftsmen, and women in religious practices as well as in daily life. The latter established a special Pietist patronage, aimed at incorporating the poor into an organic social body, thus challenging the sociopolitical order. Francke's efforts developed into a system of schools, orphanages and medical care, and housing. These different shades within Pietism help us to understand how certain segments within a movement that envisaged a popular and direct devotion also produced ideals of a more harmonious community based on solidarity among its members.Footnote 16
Pietist activities spread into various German territories, some with a considerable percentage of Catholic population, like Bavaria and Württemberg. There, local Pietists such as Bengel, Oetinger, and Flattich established their own centers, the one at the University of Tübingen being a prime example.Footnote 17 This regional distribution and the fact that German states were divided along confessional lines, even among Protestants, further motivated Pietists to address the relationship between the confessions. Halle Pietists, to take one example, resisted the Unionspolitik of Frederick William I, which meant to unite the Lutheran and Calvinist confessions, because the latter was seen as threat. Pietists such as Gottfried Arnold, Spener, and Francke were explicit in their criticism of the Catholic Church. Yet these and other Pietists also thought about Catholicism and Catholics in positive terms, envisioning a future union of the two main rival confessions, thus giving rise to some clear ecumenical notions. Philipp Jacob Spener, for instance, asserted in his Aufrichtige Übereinstimmung (1696) that there is only one church, and that is the church of God. Ecclesiastical differences and church authorities were of no interest to him, and he held that the Church itself should recede before God.Footnote 18 This idea of confessional alliance won the support of the bishop of the Moravian Church, Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760).
A descendant of an aristocratic Saxon family, young Zinzendorf studied at the Halle Paedagogium, was acquainted with several languages, and travelled through Europe and across the Atlantic. While he rejected Lutheran Orthodoxy, Zinzendorf did not refrain from rational criticism. In 1722, he began his sponsorship of the Moravian Brethren community that settled in the village of Herrnhut. He valued the brotherly love of the Philadelphian society, and he saw the Philadelphian-ordered principality of Ebersdorf as a social-religious model community. Later in life, Zinzendorf was denounced by Orthodox Lutherans and Pietists alike for, among other issues, his support of separatist groups and his alleged correspondence with the Pope. It is clear, however, that Zinzendorf, together with Spener and Francke “were nevertheless central in the development of classical Pietism.”Footnote 19
In a lecture he delivered during a visit to London in 1746, Zinzendorf contended that the ecumenical apostolate aimed at making the Invisible Church of Christ evident in all its splendor by uniting the scattered children of God in the ark of holy Christendom. Such unity does not result from mere contemplation, cult, or creed but is rather a matter of the heart. He further explained that although different Christian denominations dispute the meaning of God, Catholics and Lutherans sing the same hymns praising the Creator as Savior.Footnote 20 Such a vision aligned with that of the Philadelphian Church, which sought to supersede confessional differences.Footnote 21 While Zinzendorf never discussed a German nation, like other German revivalists, he drew attention to the shared features of a people who lived within a divisive political, legal, and religious landscape. Pietists approached the Germans as a community of Christians. Their message of unity had universal appeal, but its applicability was of practical relevance to the community to which it was initially addressed, namely German Catholics and Protestants, in whose tongue these messages were delivered and who shared a specific cultural background.Footnote 22
Pietist visions of a united church were also eschatological and universal in nature. Spener's “hope for better times for the Church” stemmed from a belief that the chiliastic passage in the Book of Revelation implied a period in history in which God would renew the church. Then, Christ will work through the community for the sake of preparing the world for the final coming of the Lord. But “the hope for better times,” as recently argued by Roger Olson and Christian Collins Winn, was the eschatological correlate of a central motif of Pietism: Wiedergeburt, new birth. This notion reflected a belief that God will bring about a profound transformation in the believer,Footnote 23 recreating the individual and inspiring the subsequent course of his life.Footnote 24 Moreover, the Wiedergeburt of the individual, as argued by Gottfried Arnold in 1700, was also part of that of a collective. As a member of a community, everyone must prove his “true new birth.”Footnote 25 This nexus between the eschatological idea of “better times” and the rebirth of the individual as part of the community advanced the synthesis of the common and the particular; the universal and the national.
Pietism, however, presented another component that later proved crucial in defining national identity—that of language. The German language was not immediately leveraged for its national meaning. However, in advocating an extended use of the German language, Pietists hoped to draw supporters for their cause, which they continued to quarrel about in a literary manner.Footnote 26
Pietists also advanced the use of the vernacular in an effort to improve contact between the believer, the community, and God. Such a notion prompted Martin Luther to translate the Bible into German, but the religious reformers that followed his teaching still preferred the Latin as the lingua franca. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, French was widely spoken, especially among the aristocracy. Paralleling this drift towards universal languages, Pietists who wished to popularize religion and its emotional aspects promoted the use of German as both a vernacular and a scholarly language. Heinrich Julius Elers, one of Francke's assistants, was charged with publishing projects, which by 1717 counted about three hundred different German titles. These German texts included hymns, testimonies of individuals who experienced Pietist rebirth, and statements of piety by unlearned men and women. German was also used as the language of instruction in the Halle school system. The German language helped to counter orthodox clericalism, fortifying a linguistic culture in terms of content but also in terms of creating a sense of belonging to a wider literary community. Some of the religious texts were translated into Polish, Czech, and Ukrainian, but these were meant to support Francke's missionary objectives in East Europe, which later had a profound impact on the development of national literatures in these languages.Footnote 27
Among those campaigning for the use of the German language was the seventeenth-century “shoemaker from Görlitz,” Jacob Böhme. A mystic of the post-Reformation period, Böhme penned works on the “rebirth” of Christianity and influenced August Hermann Francke. In Mysterium Magnum, published in 1623, Böhme argued that verbally expressed that words gain substance from the interplay between the rule of the senses and the speaker himself. Only if the appropriate word emerges from one's own free will can language emerge in this natural way. In this sense, Böhme differentiated between “sensual” and “formed” languages.Footnote 28 For him, real comprehension is possible only through deliberation in one's natural sensual language, which in this case is possible to call a mother tongue.
Spener discusses the importance of the natural/mother tongue in more personal texts. For instance, in a letter to an anonymous colleague from March 1688, he writes that it is useful to speak about spiritual themes in one's mother tongue: to preach in German rather than Latin. Spener acknowledges that it can be difficult to explain something in German instead of Latin, which is more common in schools. Yet he recalls how his instructor, Dannhauer, urged that discussions, even in the university setting, ought to be held in German. This is not only so that those who do not know Latin will be able to participate, but also because the students will be able to speak about spiritual material more comfortably.Footnote 29
The priority of the vernacular over Latin won additional support from Saxon Pietist Gottfried Arnold. In his Ketezer-Historie (1700), Arnold wrote that the truth should be spoken only in “good German.” One who listens to a sermon delivered in German will become an illuminated and pious man, miraculously gifted.Footnote 30 In 1705, Francke used even more nationally oriented argumentation while discussing the translation of Pastor Johann Arndt's work, True Christianity. He notes that Germany was among the nations that were fortunate to gain an acquaintance with the book. Proposing a close correlation between religious hope, that is salvation, and ethnic-national identity, namely German, Francke attributes the special place of Germany in the “Providential Mercies” to its relationship with the World of God “in our native Language.”Footnote 31
Böhme, Arnold, and Francke are only a few among many Pietists—including Spener, Flattich, and Zinzendorf—who lauded the German language. They spurred a Sprachpatriotismus that eventually was highly instrumental in consolidating German nationalism.Footnote 32 Their linguistic mission fostered the link between religion, a particular people (Volk), and language, thus forging a nascent perception of collective identity and paving the way for an explicit synthesis between these factors and German national identity.
The close of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth witnessed the emergence of a more secular version of Pietism. While still imbued with Christian idealism, it was much more attentive to the emerging ideas of nationalism, modernism, and rationalism. The enthusiasm that characterized the early generations of Pietists was directed now toward the community, reflecting more national kinship than the earlier Gemeinschaft, which strove for social justice. “Enlightened Pietists” sought shared attributes of the community in cultural, religious, linguistic, and political terms.Footnote 33 Thus, for Pietists like Hamman, Moser, Novalis, and Schleiermacher, religious fervor was part of communal identity. Through the romantic idealization of everything authentic, adherence to God, language, and community became additional manifestations of the particular social unit.Footnote 34
Philosopher Johann George Hamann (1730–1788), associated with the literary movement Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress), was an important link in the chain of Pietism. Despite his religious enthusiasm, Hamann was not a younger model of early Pietism. Along with Böhme, he was keenly interested in the origins and inspiration of language. Unlike the elder Pietist scholars, however, Hamann combined religious zeal with a sensuality that went beyond the sphere of confession. He held that God bestowed upon each people a particular path of articulation, with the language of each people reflecting its history and the manifestations of its unique spirit. Hamann went one step further than his Pietist predecessors by declaring that this idea is equal in importance to a people's religion, morals, customs, and laws.Footnote 35
Hamann was among the prominent exponents of late-eighteenth-century Pietism, which by now accommodated more explicit national rhetoric and claimed its belonging to a certain historic and cultural community. In the next decades, the national-religious synthesis continued to capture the attention of German scholars and nationalists such as Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Ernst Moritz Arndt, Ludwig Heeren, and Fichte. This synthesis, however, was essentially devoid of Pietistic elements. It tried to introduce an enlightened nationalism that drew on the cultural—rather than theological—nature of religion, while looking toward the establishment of a future nation-state characterized by a constitutional system and modernized politics.Footnote 36 For the persisting religious-Pietistic element within the growing national awareness, we shall turn now to the conservative spectrum of Prussian, or rather German, politics.
II. The Emergence of Neo-Pietism
The new wave of Pietism that emerged in Prussia and other German lands in the early nineteenth century shared some features with the earlier phases of religious awakening. As in the first surge of the seventeenth century, the later Pietism was also prompted by violent hostility that emerged against a religious background. The earlier Pietist movement followed the Thirty Years War, after which, adherence to rigid dogmas seemed to inspire confessional belligerence. Pietism, conversely, offered some common confessional ground, shifting attention from theological argumentation to “religion of the heart.” Post-1815 German Pietism also developed in response to the generation-long wars of the French Revolution, although these were not conducted along confessional lines but were considered instead wars between Christian Germans and godless French.Footnote 37 Moreover, as against the religious divide that prevailed in the works of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Pietists, like Klopstock and Schleiermacher, earlier Pietists, such as Zinzendorf, and later ones, such as Gerlach, held to the hope of a confessional union of Reformed, Lutheran, and Catholic Christians.Footnote 38 Notably, the awakening of the early nineteenth century was not a renewed version of old Pietism. The psychological impact of defeat and the changes made under French occupation endowed the rising religious movement with a commitment to reconstruction that had a transcendental sense. Neo-Pietism engaged with the salvation of Christian souls, but it also did battle against the destructive, godless rationalism that spread in the wake of the French Revolution. It represented the persistent fight of Christianity against Enlightenment and secular subversive trends. And, while seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Pietism was spearheaded by theologians, neo-Pietism found its main impetus among noble estate owners. Both movements, however, saw members of the educated class, craftsmen, peasants, and also women taking part in religious practices.
In their struggle against Lutheran Orthodoxy, Pietists sometimes cooperated with ruling regimes. As mentioned, Pietists challenged the lavish life of princely courts and the alliance of monarchs with clerical institutions. At the same time, however, Spener, Francke, and others also joined the Hohenzollern, especially during the 1690s, and later (Francke) under Frederick William I. They helped to institutionalize the bureaucratic apparatus, but they also endeavored to improve the moral and material conditions of other societal classes, developing a school system with new Christian pedagogy as well as founding orphanages.Footnote 39 Some different elements were discernible in later Pietism, especially in Prussia. In the first decade of their activities, neo-Pietists were intensively engaged in public politics, at times acting as opposition to state administration and clergy. They confronted the police (for example, Gustav, Karl, and Heinrich von Below), organized conferences of Pietist laymen and clergy (for example, Adolf von Thadden), and threatened Orthodox clergymen with violence. Beginning in the early 1840s, under the reign of Frederick William IV, close cooperation was established between the monarch and the Pietist aristocracy.Footnote 40
Different Pietistic streams found common ground on the issue of the consolidation of a collective identity that merged religious and cultural features. This does not mean that Pietists, like Spener, Francke, Arnold, or Zinzendorf, thought about a German nation-state or held national views in terms of the political sovereignty of a particular people—even if some of them perceived the Holy Roman Empire as constituting a single political unit. Yet, since the first half of the nineteenth century, Pietism provided concepts of collective identity that promoted the evolution of a conservative Pietistic and national view. These included their conceptualization of religious belief and practices, the relationship they envisaged between God, the individual, and the community, and a certain degree of tolerance toward other Christian confessions, together with their anticipation of one German Church. Thus, Pietism propagated a religious belief that was associated with a specific people, conceiving of this people as having a special connection to God, ordained by Him to accomplish a universal mission. Moreover, as we shall see below, in this period, German conservatives further reinforced this understanding of the relationship between religious faith, cultural, and national characteristics.
The 1806, Prussian defeat to Napoleon at Jena and Auerstedt triggered intense concern among Prussian aristocrats. Some of these banded together and formed an exclusive society in Berlin, which they called the Christlich-Deutsche Tischgesellschaft (Christian-German Table Society). Society meetings involved the singing of patriotic poems and songs, declarations of Christian piety, and the expression of patriotic sentiments such as fidelity to king and fatherland. The society fell apart after several years, but in 1816 its members renewed their meetings. Romantic-conservative in outlook, the reconstructed club was christened the Maikäferei (May Chafers) after the inn that hosted its meetings. As the religious adherence of the club's members increased, they began to hold weekly meetings in private homes, concerning themselves more and more with questions of sin and salvation. Prominent Maikäferei members included noble estate owners, such as Clemens von Brentano, the brothers Leopold, Ludwig and Wilhelm von Gerlach, Count Cajus von Stolberg, Friedrich Karl von Bülow, Count Albrecht von Alvensleben-Erxleben, and Carl von Voss-Buch. These Pietists were keen to foster opposition to the ideas of the French Revolution and to its ideological implications. Although the group was established in the capital of Prussia, not all of its members were Protestants. The founder of the club, Brentano, was a Catholic, as was Carl Ludwig von Haller, a Swiss theorist who served as the group's inspiration. The Catholic priest Johannes Gossner and his followers cultivated the new awakening in southern Germany. Indeed, when the club members visited this region, they would refer to their southern brethren as “Apostles of Christ.”Footnote 41
The Maikäferei disbanded in 1819, and a more zealous, neo-Pietist Christianity took hold among Prussian aristocracy. Here, too, regional dispersion resulted in different traditions. Committed to Christian values, these nobles—among them Bülow, Voss-Buch, the Gerlach brothers, Adolf von Thadden, and Hans Hugo von Kleist-Retzow—enacted Pietism through the performance of particular religious and social practices, preserving their close connections until the 1850s. But the group also had more practical interests. Beyond strict religious observance, Prussian nobles had to confront a series of reforms initiated by the state that challenged their privileged status. Cooperation between the crown and the bureaucratic apparatus threatened to reduce the power of the aristocracy in the provinces. A centralized monarchy could reinforce the absolutist authority that many aristocrats feared. Joint opposition by the estate owners, the Prussian Junkers, could thus forestall a further reduction of their power.Footnote 42
Practical interests were only partly socio-political in nature. Religious reform also contributed to the consolidation of the neo-Pietist group. In October 1817, the three hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg, the inter-Protestant division between the Reformed Christian Unions and the Lutherans came to an end by a decree of King Frederick William III. In 1821, the ecclesiastical union was further bolstered by the crafting of a new liturgy by none other than the king himself. This merger helped to bridge the intra-confessional divide and produce pan-German Protestantism, which later facilitated the formation of national identity. Prussian Pietists—among them prominent individuals like Ludwig von Gerlach and August Wilhelm Goetze, who were joined by artisans, salt-makers, and wage laborers from the cities of Sulza and Naumburg—sought to secede from the state church. The monarchial act of union seemed to further signal the crown's centralization goals, and it spurred the neo-Pietists to oppose that church. Thus, the period from the early 1820s onward saw an exacerbation of the conflict between the state church and the neo-Pietists. Christopher Clark has demonstrated convincingly that these Pietist landowners confronted state centralization by advocating a renewed version of Pietism.Footnote 43 As in the earlier stage of the Pietist brethren community which settled in the village of Herrnhut under Zinzendorf's sponsorship—whose origins can be traced back to the rejection of the state church idea by the nascent Pietist movement of the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren, the Unitas Fratrum Footnote 44—his belief constituted a challenge to the clerical institution.Footnote 45 Suspicious of the state bureaucratic apparatus and the crown's wish to reinstate a kind of absolutist regime, the aristocracy developed its own concept of the state and of people's identity. Aiming for an alternative state foundation than that which was envisioned by the state administration, this trajectory drew heavily on the Pietist tradition.
III. Neo-Pietist Theology
The new Pietist theological theory found a home among academic theologians that allied with Awakened aristocrats. Baron Hans Ernst von Kottwitz, a prominent member of the Pietist circle in Berlin, together with Ludwig Nicolovius, an associate of eminent Prussian aristocrats, encouraged Awakened theology professors such as Heinrich Leonhard Heubner, August Tholuck, Ferdinand Guericke, and August Hahn to join the movement. The goal was to provide alternative academic elites to the rational ones who staffed many of the theology faculties. Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, for his part, a Pietist leader in Berlin and editor of the Evangelische Kirchen Zeitung (EKZ), sought changes at the University of Halle that reflected the spirit of the founder of the Halle Pietist movement, August Hermann Francke.Footnote 46
These nineteenth-century Pietists shared values and concepts with late eighteenth-century theologians and philosophers, although their origins can be tracked back to the views of earlier Pietists such as Johanna Eleonora Petersen (1644–1724) Balthasar Köpke (1646–1711), Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf (1655–1712), later ones, such as Spener and Francke, and ultimately Zinzendorf. Like the latter, the newly awakened theologians held that the Germans had a common ground upon which they could unite as a people, namely the Christian religion. In this view, a German church would serve the interests of Protestants and Catholics alike. The discussion thus shifted from the theological-philosophical sphere to theological-cultural and national issues. Transcending the notion of universal Christian truth, the discourse engaged a theme that was highly German in essence; that is, the confessional divide.Footnote 47
Among the leading Pietist-theologians of the Vormärz who elaborated on this theme was Heinrich Leonhard Heubner (1780–1853), founder of the neo-Pietist seminary in Wittenberg. Backed by the aristocrats of the circle, Heubner invigorated the dissemination of mysticism and emotional Christianity, reflecting thus the ideas he drew from Zinznendorf, whom he held showed the “right recognition in the limits of our knowledge” in contrast to devotion of the heart.Footnote 48 In a sermon delivered in 1830, Heubner expounded that all Christians were obliged to agree on matters of belief and to revere the old religion. In this respect, he emphasized the common core of Christianity, rejecting the notion of a different Christianity for every age. Jesus is the one and the same Christ of yesterday, today, and forever, he opined. Like his Pietist predecessors, Heubner did not ignore the fact of multiple confessions within Christianity but proposed that such a fact ought not to prevent common faith: some Christians’ beliefs stem from three hundred years ago and some Christians cling to the Apostolic Church. All Christians, however, should realize that only in Christ they can find the salvation of mankind, and therefore all should keep their loyalty to the Augsburg Confession—the 1530 declaration of faith that was presented at the Diet of Augsburg and meant to restore religious unity between the Roman and Lutheran German churches. In an effort to underscore the constitutional importance of this Confession, Heubner states that dismissing it is tantamount to a rejection of the gospel (Evangelium).Footnote 49
Heubner's theology, as well as his training project of anti-rationalist clergymen at the Wittenberg seminary, was conservative in nature in the sense that it reasserted the traditional Christian understanding of society and politics. But he did challenge some of the more established conventions in German society, especially in Prussia. The confessional divide among Catholics and Protestants was an established split that for centuries had characterized the Prussian state, and more so with the annexation of greater Catholic regions to the kingdom after 1815. And while the ecclesiastical union between the Reformed and the Lutheran churches was well established through the monarchial acts of 1817 and 1821, Protestant-Catholic tensions persisted. Moreover, beginning at the start of the century, a national discourse emerged, mainly as a result of the Napoleonic occupation. This, coupled with the gradual consolidation of the national movement from the early 1830s onward and spearheaded by liberal intellectuals and politicians, prompted a reassertion of the religious split, as the latter movement emphasized the association between German national identity and Protestant Christianity. On the background of this intensifying confessional tension, Heubner and his Pietistic contemporaries seemed to contest the prevailing trends in the national movement and discourse. Such endorsement of ecumenical Christianity could easily have been interpreted as a strategic conservative Christian alliance against the revolutionary nature of modern nationalism and liberalism. Yet this might be only a partial observation. Heubner, while not a supporter of the national movement, signaled a continuous trend of confessional appeasement that can be traced back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Pietism. As he conceived it, true religion was trans-confessional and beyond rational justification. As such, dogmatic and theological differences were ancillary. Furthermore, if this stance was not explicitly national at this stage, it acquired additional national attributes in the coming years.
Expectations for a Catholic-Protestant merger were further articulated a few years after Heubner's sermon was published. This time it came from Ferdinand Guericke (1803–1878), a former student of theology who had experienced conversion to Awakened Christianity and become a member of the new Pietist circle. Cooperating with the Hengstenberg faction, he shortly became an adversary of his earlier tutors.Footnote 50 In an essay written in 1833, Handbuch der allgemeinen Kirchengeschichte, Guericke paid tribute to the early founders of the Pietist movement. Spener and Francke, he wrote, earned salvation for the poor by granting theology practical meaning,Footnote 51 and he awarded Zinzendorf the title “the hero of Christian feelings.”Footnote 52 In the spirit of the latter, Guericke elaborated on the appropriate manner of a union between the Catholic and Protestant churches. Success would be achieved if people refrained from insisting upon the peculiarities of both churches. Instead, the very features that thwart unification ought to be relinquished. As a Pietist, Guericke did not insist on theoretical “truth” but revealed a genuine will for compromise in order to reach ecclesiastical merger. True union, in his view, does not fuse right and wrong, but rather subordinates the latter to the former.Footnote 53
Unlike Heubner, who thought in terms of a formalistic common ground for Catholics and Protestants, namely the Augsburg Confession, Guericke wrote in terms of a merger of the two Christian creeds. Like many Pietists of the Vormärz, however, both held German ecumenical Christianity much more than an abstract idea. Rather, it was an attainable confessional union that first of all might unite the Germans, without necessarily leading to a united Germany. And, while Heubner and Guerke were supported by the monarch alongside other Pietist theologians, they were much more interested in the German people than in a future German state. In this regard, the ecumenical ideas of these Pietist theologians differed from those who used the ecumenist notion as a kind of nostalgic memory. As recently demonstrated by Stan Landry, in the early nineteenth century, Christian ecumenism constituted an alternative path to German nationalism. Indeed, many ecumenicists believed that closing the confessional gap would serve the cause of national unity.Footnote 54
This functional aspect of ecumenism is hard to challenge, and certainly for some preachers, intellectuals, and politicians, it was a most desirable national platform. However, while examining the background of the ecumenical idea, its broader Pietist context, and the cultural and political tradition it has established, it appears that its national function emerged almost organically from the religious concept. Indeed, the early ecumenical ideas were more universal than German in nature. In the spirit of reform, they sought to create a union of Christians that would dedicate themselves to bringing about the salvation of the world.Footnote 55 Yet, within the specific German religious divide and fragmented political landscape, ecumenist notions acquired a much more practical potential. While uniting all Christians seemed a wishful fancy, unifying Catholic and Protestant Germans appeared less as an abstract aspiration. In other words, since the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth century, the importance of ecumenism and its appeal as a national feature lies in its historical and traditional role as an integrating idea within German society. More than a memory, it was also a current concept that aimed to encourage solidarity among Germans. As such, it could appeal to humanist Pietists of the Enlightenment, such as Johann Jacob Moser, Novalis, and Schleiermacher, who sought a harmonious and tolerant society free of religious dogma, as well as to conservative scholars and politicians who were disturbed by the growing secularization and socio-political disintegration of the nineteenth century, like Ludwig von Gerlach and Heinrich Leo. Together with the linguistic, patriotic, and social factors that had been present in German Pietism from its inception, ecumenism became a significant national feature of nineteenth-century religious and political conservatism.
The Pietist Awakening and ecumenical ideas, however, were far from an exclusive Protestant or Prussian domain, and certainly not all Pietists supported the merger of the two confessions. Catholicism, similarly to Protestantism, experienced transformation through revival. Attempting to counter rationalism, Catholics embraced religious devotion through emotions, mystery, and revelation. As mentioned, some members of the Pietist Maikäferei circle were Catholic Christians, but there were also not a few Catholic theologians and priests from southern Germany for whom this sort of emotional Christianity held an attraction, among them Franz von Baader (1765–1841), Johannnes Gossner (1773–1858), and Martin Boos (1762–1825).Footnote 56 Especially the latter's ideas about a union of various confessions seem of relevance to our discussion here. A Roman Catholic theologian, Boos argued against institutional integration of the churches but at the same time expressed his hope for a union of Christians. He neither desired nor hoped for Kirchenvereinigung (unification of churches), sure that such a union, if enforced from without, would spark dissension. Instead, he set his sights on one church that would serve all confessions in all their different external structures, all united in their love of Christ. Catholics, Lutherans, Reformed, Mennonites, Quakers—all will be one herd and God would be the one shepherd. Boos, it should be noted, does not write specifically about the German nation, and does not invoke national concepts. Yet his discussion and message are not merely universal. He writes in a certain German context, mentioning the Christians' love of God and His providence in terms of different people, and referring to “us Germans.” Boos actually envisions a union of the German people through inter-confessional Christianity that is applicable to this specific people.Footnote 57
Among southern Catholics who welcomed the renewal of piety and supported ecumenical Christianity was Iganz Lindl (1774–1846), a priest from Gundremmingen in Bavaria. In a sermon from 1819, while lamenting the plummeting belief in Christ on the heels of the French Revolution, Lindl called upon his listeners, Catholics, and Protestants alike to unite in these “days of anxiety.” Since in peaceful days such a confessional union is impossible, he exhorted, then at present it is necessary to strive for a “union of the spirit and love among the people.” The various forms of religious confessions arising together from their ruins will produce a better, more general and everlasting “religion-form” that will be guided by the one Shepherd.Footnote 58
Clearly, these Catholic Pietists—in contrast to Ultramontanes, who favored subordination to Rome—like many of their Protestant counterparts, sought to circumvent the authority of the state church. They were less concerned about institutional aspects of the ecumenical ideas than about human ones, namely, a union of German Christian believers. This tendency appears in line with the essence of Pietism on the one hand and its political meanings on the other. From the early days of the movement, its human, emotional, and popular character was one of its most salient features. Across the spectrum, Pietists from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century were engaged with Christians and to a much lesser extent with churches. Their endeavors and religious practices, as well as sermons, were first and foremost meant to consolidate a community. This fact, I contend, attests to two distinct tendencies. The first of these is that Pietism, in not a few respects, appeared to be an anti-institutional movement, one that countered the established, rational and governmental state church. The second tendency pertains specifically to the emerging concept of nation. Indeed, most Pietist theologians of the Vormärz, unlike the romantics of the late eighteenth century (like Hamann and Schleiermacher), did not refer specifically to the notion of nation. Yet the increasing number of references made by these theologians to believers, to the German people, and to German history, suggests that the link between certain people and specific kind of religion was on the rise.
IV. Political Pietism
The neo-Pietist theologians of the Vormärz were allied with members of old Prussian aristocratic families, who, as mentioned before, founded the Maikäferei group. Their Pietistic devotion and adherence to the religion of the heart did not mean that they relinquished politics or the opportunity to exercise influence on king and government. The emergence of the aristocrats’ awakening in 1815/1816 paralleled the development of German political conservatism. The rejection of rationalism and abstract theories as guiding schemes manifested itself in the advance these noblemen made against rational theology and the state bureaucratic apparatus, both reflecting anti-traditional and sterile attitudes and both undermining customary and long-established religious, social, and political practices. To a certain extent, this conservative neo-Pietism shared features with Protestant orthodoxy in the sense that both confessions conceived of themselves as truly Evangelical—they were devoted to the spirit of early reformers and the primacy they ascribed to the supernatural messages of the gospel, instead of the rationalist reading of it. Yet,orthodox Protestants were distrustful of the emotional and subjective conceptualization of the Pietists’ confession, regarding them as mystics. Following David J. Ellis, the awakened Christians of the early nineteenth century differed from the orthodox in their “fierce interiorization of orthodox beliefs” complemented by subjectivity and a re-ordering of beliefs in the spirit of earlier Pietists.Footnote 59
Early German conservative theories appeared sporadically already in the last third of the eighteenth century, but these were essentially intellectual anti-Enlightenment ideas.Footnote 60 However, from the early nineteenth century onward, and particularly in the wake of the reforms implemented in many German states consequent to the Napoleonic occupation, more coherent sociopolitical conservative theories began to emerge. The fear of the spreading consequences of revolution and reforms that dramatically threatened the traditional order prompted some of its representatives and supporters to provide ideological answers or take a defensive stance. Yet, the post-1815 religious Awakening and subsequent political-ideological consolidation was not the mere tactic of a menaced class. These aristocrats, especially Prussian Junkers, were undoubtedly determined to defend their status and privileges. Their piety, however, need not be considered suspect. This merger of religious and ideological renewal gradually turned into a political movement that enlisted the support of certain theologians and clergymen, thus garnering political momentum against further liberal reforms.Footnote 61
On the heels of the Prussian defeat in October 1806 and the first wave of reforms, attempts were made to draw up a conservative sociopolitical theory. Defenders of traditional concepts of state and society such as Ludwig von der Marwitz and Adam Müller argued mainly against the initiation of reforms that were perceived as encouraging capitalism and accelerating the disintegration of social order. They feared the collapse of the local Stände (estates), the private jurisdiction of noble estate owners, as well as the growing power of the state and the extension of public law. Yet these and other conservative-minded intelligentsias were writing in a period of great uncertainty, and they could not provide a reliable program for the future.Footnote 62
After 1815, with the emergence of the new Pietist movement, especially among Pomeranian nobility, its members sought to buttress the paternalistic system which suffered a severe disintegration in the wake of reforms. The ideas of Carl Ludwig von Haller (1768–1854) were well-suited their project of combining religious revival with political ideology. In his theories, they found a renewed legitimation of the preservation of hierarchical social order and consequently for their own rule over their subordinated peasants.
Haller was born to an aristocratic family from Bern. He had close connections with members of the Maikäferei, which he kept up even after its dissolution. In 1816, he began to publish his six-volume Restoration of State Science, a text which became the focus of club discussions. In Haller's view, people are not born equal, and there will always be those who depend on others, who in turn will be committed to supporting them.Footnote 63 This idea was particularly relevant for the Pietists, because it accorded with another feature of Pietism, that of charity and paternal responsibility aiming at social justice. Certainly not all noble landowners kept these commitments while enjoying privileged rights. Yet there were some, like Thadden, who were disturbed by the fact that their class members did not fulfill appropriately the Christian duties ordained by God. These social relations were manifested in religious practices as well. Since these Pietists, like their predecessors, deemed the services of the state church as sterile and overly rationalistic, some, like the brothers von Bülow, organized their own religious services. They encouraged their noble associates to abandon the official church and organized the conventicles instead. These were religious services and prayers conducted by the landowners with the participation of their day laborers and peasants. Alongside other Pietist aristocratic families like Senfft, the Belows, and the Thaddens celebrated sacraments like the Eucharist (and sometimes baptism) in their own houses. These sacraments were supposed to be administrated by the church alone. They also endeavored to generate conversion experiences among their acquaintances and tried to reach members of the lower classes. In addition, the Awakened established various societies that strove to disseminate their special confession among Jews and non-Prussians.Footnote 64
The social nature of these Pietist practices was backed by Haller's reactionary theories. Nonetheless, these theories gradually lost their pride of place. As the Pietist trend among aristocrats deepened, Haller's ideas seemed less and less capable of serving as theological justification for the political system.Footnote 65
From the late 1820s on, the Gerlachs and some of their friends forged a close alliance with the hard-liner Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg. As a group, they established the EKZ, which won the endorsement of many theologians, including those mentioned above. But this cooperation resulted in a hardening of the Pietists’ views. Hengstenberg spearheaded a closer collaboration between Pietism and orthodoxy. While trying to attract the interest of individual believers, he also worked to secure control over the church by waging war against theological opposition in the spirit of traditional Pietism, thus becoming one of the “fighters for the cause of God” among Pietists. Moreover, the fact that the state succeeded in fusing the Reformed and Lutheran churches into one church with a common liturgy lent additional support to the Pietist circles. By the late 1830s and early 1840s, with the backing of awakened theologians and Rittergütter (noble estate owners) Hengstenberg and associates such as Thadden, the Gerlachs, Stahl, Heubener and others formed a more religious-conservative wing in the Prussian, and rather German, political spectrum, determined to fight political liberalism as well as liberal theologians.Footnote 66 These Pietist leaders, especially the Rittergütter who were patrons of local communities, enjoyed a privileged status that enabled them to exercise paternal influence that reinforced the traditional order and consolidated the defense against liberalism.
While the religious-aristocratic formation seemed to regain special position and influence, the conservative nobility was caught between two rival powers. On the one hand, the state administration did not renounce its aim for central control and further constraints on local and privileged aristocratic authorities. On the other hand, the growing liberal movement and the increasing discussion of rationalism, nationalism and alternative political legitimacy undermined the basic conservative worldview. It was mostly these two factors that motivated conservatives to rethink their ideology and seek their own ways to adjust to historical changes.Footnote 67 From the mid-1840s on, Stahl's ideas seemed to suit their ideological needs.
Born as Julius Jolson in 1802 into a Jewish family in Würzburg, Stahl converted to Protestantism in 1819 and changed his name to Friedrich Julius Stahl. He continued his law studies at the University of Würzburg and became a professor of Roman law. In 1840, under the reign and support of Prussian King Frederick William IV, Stahl was offered the chair at the University of Berlin that previously was held by Hegel. From the early 1830s until the mid-1840s, Stahl's theories, markedly conservative in nature, were viewed with suspicion by Prussian noble landowners. The publication of The Monarchial Principle in 1845, however, alerted conservatives to the importance of his ideological scheme, and by the 1848 Revolution he had become the leading theoretician of German conservatism. In 1849, Stahl was awarded a lifetime appointment in the Prussian upper house.Footnote 68
Stahl's thought was suffused with Pietistic ideals. While studying in Munich he was attracted to the lectures of Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, who embraced the anti-rationalism of Böhme and Hamann.Footnote 69 During the 1830s, Stahl espoused this strand of Pietism, which harshly critiqued the philosophy of Hegel. Yet Stahl's political theory incorporated philosophical concepts as well as Pietistic ideals.Footnote 70
In his first and most important work, Philosophie des Rechts, the first volume of which was published in 1830, Stahl revealed his basic philosophical stance. Although he also exercised rational methods, Stahl's assumptions are fundamentally religious in nature. He argued that society and state are organic entities that reveal the essence of God. The entire organic world-designation is inexplicable by the laws of logic and can be grasped only through the apprehension of God's personality (Persönlichkeit Gottes), which resists rational explanation. Thus, if the state is an organism that reflects divine disposition, it must function accordingly. Like Ludwig von Gerlach, Stahl held that the state exists to fulfil God's commandments. But while Gerlach thought that the fall necessitated the creation of the state as means to control sinful man,Footnote 71 for Stahl the state operated according to a certain system of laws, which constituted the “temporal Kingdom of God.”Footnote 72 These laws are not created arbitrarily but correspond to certain moral relations that exist within the family, the state, and the church. The purpose of law is therefore to preserve the wholeness of the body politic in accordance with morals determined by God and the Christian religion.Footnote 73 In a later essay, Stahl explains the impossibility of a given state not following religious instructions, since religion itself defines the morality by which society operates. Religion not only orders right and wrong within society, it designates the entire “public life,” as it is the source of the state idea and the conduct of political authority.Footnote 74
Here Stahl clearly invokes religion as the ultimate foundation of the state and of political authority. But it also signifies another element in his thought, as well as that of Pietists and early German romantics. The central place occupied by religion means that relations between people and political authority, as well as within the society itself, is based above all on religious belief, devotion to God, and moral connections between individuals, and not merely on obedience to a legal authority. The state, following this rationale, does not win power through consent of its citizens, but because it is first of all a religious entity. Positive laws, in Stahl's view, are necessary in the modern state, as it became “public institution,” but fundamentally they are based on values of emotion and faith.Footnote 75 In other words, religion is the source of all positive laws, which implies that obedience to them is a matter of confessional devotion rather than mere legal instruction.
Theoretical concepts of this kind were disseminated to the public through the press. In 1831, the Pietist group surrounding the Gerlach brothers established the weekly Berliner Politisches Wochenblatt (BPW), which was published for a decade, and, together with the EKZ of Hengstenberg, it became one of the two most influential conservative journals in Prussia. The journal received its real momentum from two Catholics, Joseph Maria von Radowitz, a close friend of Crown Prince Frederick William IV, and Carl Ernst Jarcke, a professor of law at Berlin University, who became the first editor. Beyond professional considerations, it seems quite clear that Protestant-Catholic cooperation fueled the formation of the journal, which in the spirit of its Pietist founders aimed at introducing the German Christian perspective.Footnote 76 In 1839, the BPW declared unequivocally that “the only true foundation of the state is religion, and in this regard it is Christianity.” All other aspects of life, such as education, freedom, and wellbeing, have to concur with it.Footnote 77 And while the journal did not deny the importance of philosophy—its logic and esthetic—it argued that philosophy can be tolerated only if its final result is the primacy of Christianity. Following the Pietist tradition, according to the BPW, it was simply obvious that Christianity constitutes the deepest need of man, the very air he breathes.Footnote 78 This was a “Christian State, a real divine institution meant for the welfare of man.”Footnote 79
Such a political-religious synthesis lay at the heart of the conservative concept of the Christian State. Though not entirely original, the Christian State ideal was in many respects an alternative to the rationally oriented liberal notion of the state. The term “Christian State” had been used in the title of various texts since the 1830s, many of them elaborating on the “Jewish Question.”Footnote 80 This concept, however, had clear Pietist origins. As Christopher Clark has written, since the early nineteenth century, Awakened Christians in Prussia as well as in Britain considered a religious Awakening and genuine Christian devotion vital for national regeneration, an appropriate response to the revolutionary threat. While the Prussian absolutist state of the late eighteenth century, however, regarded religious affairs as a matter of private conscience, the romanticism of the early nineteenth century conceived of more intimate relations between the public and private spheres, defining the state in terms of a spiritual unity of the people.Footnote 81
Religion played a manifestly crucial role in the construction of the legal relationship between the Prussian state, its citizens, and the Jews. Yet there was another, overlooked aspect of such a construction that also corresponds with the German Pietist tradition. The Christian State envisioned by nineteenth-century conservative Pietists was not an abstraction, nor a universal Christian political organization. Rather, it was a state founded on a certain understanding and practice of religion, as developed within a particular people throughout history.
Arguing for the Christian essence of the state, Stahl sees beyond its universal aspect. While applying a historicist approach, he contends that each body politic is characterized by its own particular nature. The people, as a natural force, is invested with legal meaning through the state. Yet, the specific historical development of the people's life is actually a manifestation of its specific understanding of the universal substance of existence. Every Volk advances through history in its own way, with its own aptitudes and skillset. Each people is entrusted with a certain task. Consequently, the establishment of a state coincides with the distinctiveness of the Volk.Footnote 82
The criteria for the singularity of each Christian state were acknowledged by Ludwig von Gerlach. He held that the formation of national identity rests on the recognition of the centrality of religion in the life of a state. Following his reasoning, the German nation differed from the French or the English ones in the sense that only the German is a Weltbürger (a citizen of the world) and a Genosse des Reiches Gottes (a member of God's Kingdom)—his actual homeland. It is a feature granted to him by God, distinguishing him throughout history and bestowing upon him a special duty.Footnote 83 Similarly, the BPW declared in 1841 that the Germans stand at the heart of Europe and carry the inner truth of Christianity, thus fulfilling a divine promise for the human race. In 1846, the EKZ tried to link the peculiarities of the Germans before and after Christianity. The character of the old heathen Germans was “strong, solid and faithful.” They were united in body and soul. These people found in Christianity tranquility, consciousness and security. The German character came to perfection through Christianity, the author states, and it was found in Christ's Church itself.Footnote 84 Later on, during the 1848 Revolution, the EKZ argued that in order to help the German people recover its greatness it should be brought back to Christianity after the elevation of atheism by the revolution. No other people had adhered to Christianity since its early days as the German. Drawing on Tacitus, the writer reminds its readers that even this Roman historian deemed the Germans most apt to emblematize “a people of God.”Footnote 85
This understanding of the identity of the German people, which draws on its historical development and religious devotion, was quintessentially national. Nonetheless, it differed from the modern liberal concept of national identity. While modern nationalism perceives the nation in political terms and argues for a people's right for sovereignty, the Pietist-conservative idea of the nation took another course. This group upheld no direct correlation between the particularity of a people and its right to sovereign power. Instead, they regarded such particularity as the foundation of the nation. Such particularity designated a people's identity, but it did not imply political authority, which remained universal and legitimated by God's grace.
The Pietist-conservative discussion of the national-Christian identity of the German people, however, had to deal with the fundamental question of the religious divide. Like the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Pietists, they could not overlook the confessional separation that marked their vision of a German people with an identity peculiar to it. Moreover, following in the footsteps of their predecessors, they sought interconfessional features that could provide common ground for German Protestants and Catholics.
The acts of union of the Prussian church in 1817 and 1821 served to ease tensions between Lutheran and Reformed denominations. Protestant-Catholic frictions, however, endured, reaching a point of escalation in the 1830s with the disputes over mixed marriage. As such, neo-Pietists of the Vormärz attempted to craft a certain association between the two confessions. Like Spener and Zinzendorf, and later Heubner and Guericke, the neo-Pietist conservatives of the 1830s and 1840s drew on the joint elements in both confessions and the importance of emotional devotion. As mentioned, in 1831, the establishment of the BPW by the Pietist circle around the Gerlach brothers showed close cooperation between Protestants and Catholics. The group affirmed the differences between the two confessions but viewed them as part of the current phase that precedes a future age of inter-confessional reconciliation. Bonds between the confessions would create evangelische[n] Katholizität.Footnote 86
In 1839, the BPW published an article about the relationship between politics and religion. While not outright admitting tension between Catholics and Protestants, the author discusses conflict between believers and non-believers; between those who trust politics and the church and those who do not; between good and evil.Footnote 87 Such a sense of confessional solidarity was also manifested in Stahl's view. In a letter to his friend G. F. Pfeiffer, he shared his idea that the truth is scattered between the old and the new churches; none of them can make a claim for the whole, exclusive truth.Footnote 88 Later, in an essay from 1847, he wrote that division within the Christian Church is harmful for the state, for it revokes its moral foundation. In fact, he averred, the similarities shared by Catholics and Protestants are more important than the differences among them. The state, he concludes, ought not to interfere directly in provisions concerning dogmas.Footnote 89 An even more compromising path was followed later by Ludwig von Gerlach. He upheld a common ground for both churches: their members should adhere together to the Apostle's Creed and to the twenty-one articles of the Augsburg Confession,Footnote 90 which was proposed by Heubner already in 1830 as the most appropriate platform for bringing together the two Christian confessions. During the tumult of the 1848 Revolution, Gerlach argued that a union of the churches was still a relevant theme. A diary entry from 13 April of that year records that he met Thiersch and Tholuck in Bindewald's house, where they discussed unification of the churches. He informed his friends that the authority of one church of all (German) states would be a nexus of unity, and its authority would be that of the “infallible Church.”Footnote 91 The conservatives' apparatus, the Kruezzeitung, also conceived of confessional reconciliation in terms of political unification. An editorial opined that in view of the current situation, German powers, among them Protestant and Catholic, should cooperate in order to overcome the ecclesiastical division in Germany.Footnote 92
The ecumenical feature of neo-Pietism appears as a resonance of such an attitude among seventeenth and eighteenth century Pietists, like Spener and Zinzendorf, and later ones, such as Heubener and Guericke. Numbering some Catholics among the many Lutherans, all of them seemed to reject Luther's animosity toward the Catholic Church. These old and new Pietists sought common emotional, cultural and practical ground for Catholics and Protestants. Early and neo-Pietists saw ecumenical Christianity as integral to German-Christian identity. Ecumenism was therefore a factor in the formation of collective German distinctiveness. It was also constituted of common territory, culture, language and certain future destination. Yet there was also a difference. As mentioned, for Spener, Zinzendorf, and some of their associates, the hoped-for alliance between the two confessions was part of a more universal eschatological vision, but at the same time it was intended as a step towards a community of German-Christians believers. Hence, it was not merely an association of devoted Christians that was desired but rather a Christian community of kinship. This also held true for the neo-Pietists of the nineteenth century. In this later period, however, this community was invested with an explicit national element and drew on the political meaning of the ecumenical Christian community. Their ideal of a Christian State was not merely confessional. The neo-Pietist concept of the state was at once religious and national. It politicized the earlier Pietist religious-cultural construction, and forged a religious, national and political synthesis.
This interpretation of the early ecumenical ideas, which featured a national Christian state, was combined with an additional Pietist factor: language. Pietists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries favored the use of German over Latin, as part of the Lutheran tradition and as a means to help address the Christian-German community of believers. The use of the vernacular language in the exercise of religion, they held, would not just facilitate a direct link between man and God, but would also help to consolidate this community of devotees. Here again, a cultural characteristic, namely language, merged with religious adherence and practices, generating a bond between confession and people of a certain cultural affinity. For nineteenth-century neo-Pietists, this confessional-linguistic amalgam introduced another national feature of the Pietist tradition, which was now politicized.
In his Philosophy of Law (1837), Stahl discusses what he considers the fundamental incoherence of the “North American State.” In this state, he writes, every religion enjoys the same protection and validity. Yet such a state lacks national unity, which is created by a single language and religion. The state that possesses national unity by dint of language and religion, Stahl stresses, is not detached from religious principle. Rather, having a particular definition of state religion implies that the adherents of any religion that recognizes God are accorded identical rights.Footnote 93 This argument reflects the indispensable bond between a certain religion, state and language, and the idea that these constitute the essential elements of a nation. This concept seems less accommodating than the earlier Pietist one. It bears, nonetheless, the main features of the Pietist concept, namely, that confession and language of a people eventually define its national identity.
A closer association between the Germans, their language and religious devotion appears in one of August Gottreu Tholuck's ceremony from 1843. A professor of theology at the University of Halle, Tholuck was one of Kottiwitz's protégés and admitted that his religious ‘rebirth’ was a result of the latter's influence. As an Awakened Christian who sought patronage, he became one of those neo-Pietists whose religious zeal and association with Awakened nobility also provided them a distinguished office. Trying to shift Christianity away from rationalism and associate it with emotional adherence, Tholuck saw the German language as especially apt for Pietist devotion. The cross, he explains, is a word that also “our German language knows” in terms of “misery and scrutiny” (Not und Prüfung). It came to our language right from the Bible, and in “our common language” (Umgangsparche) it became a memorial for he “who died on the cross for us.” Since now this word of “our common language” is used regularly, he continues, it delineates this religious meaning of the word. Actually, in every expression of this word the Lord appears with the sorrow before our eyes.Footnote 94 Explaining this linguistic and religious connection, Tholuck introduces German, “our language,” as that which mediates the religious meaning of certain words. For him, it seems that only in the spoken language can one truly absorb the real religious denotation of what is expressed.
This confessional-linguistic synthesis was rehearsed by the Pietist-conservative organ of the BPW. Elaborating on the topic in 1838, an editor wrote that God's providence is present in the language as a means of communication as well as in the feelings and thoughts of a certain community.Footnote 95 At another time, an author wondered if there exists any Volk whose language and history were so in parallel as those of the German people.Footnote 96 For the BPW, religion and language were so integral to identity formation that it pondered if people who forsake their highest assets, namely their religion, nationality, and language could still have any moral value.Footnote 97
The engagement of neo-Pietists with the religion-language fusion seems to be closely connected to this similar merger that first appeared among the Pietistic followers of Luther. However, there is no direct link between them. Francke, Böhme, Arnold, and others presented German as the preferred language for religious performance primarily in order to replace Latin as the main language of Christianity, which was associated with the clerical establishment so challenged by Pietists. German became a tongue of the “religion of the heart,” while Latin was that of scholastic deliberation. Early Pietists did not conceive of German as a national language but rather as one that better facilitates worship of God among a certain community of believers, and consequently consolidated the connection between them. For neo-Pietists, the German-Latin tension was irrelevant. By the nineteenth century, the status of that lingua franca had long lost primacy in favor of the national languages. For conservatives like Stahl, Gerlach, and the Pietist members of the BPW, language was an explicit national feature which, together with the Christian devotion of that specific historical people, constituted the essence of the German nation. Nevertheless, we find a clear line between early and later Pietists in this matter. Both understood religion and language as emblematic of the particular identity of a collective. Early Pietists formulated this meaning of joint identity; neo-Pietists nationalized and politicized it. The former had proposed features of distinctive confessional association that allowed the latter to introduce an alternative concept of nationality based on an apparent tradition of a particular religious exercise. In this way, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German Pietists forged certain concepts of collective identity that were developed and transformed, serving as a source of national inspiration for their nineteenth-century Pietistic counterparts.
V. Conclusions
Early German Pietists were not Christians with a nascent national awareness. They did not introduce a single concept that associated a certain group of cultural kinship with political affiliation or authority. Pietistic ideas certainly had a degree of universal appeal, and they seem to have been relevant for different Christians in different locales. German Pietists, however, directed themselves primarily to a specific people while trying to address particular pressing problems. For the most part, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German Pietism was the product of specific confessional, social, and cultural circumstances in the German lands. These touched upon the social tensions between people and ruling elites, the confessional divide that marked most German regions, and the importance of disseminating conciliatory knowledge and messages through a common language. In the course of their ongoing work, Pietists invoked awareness of collective features that characterized certain communities of Christian believers. Profound historical changes in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century German territories encouraged a renewal of the Pietist movement among segments of German, and especially Prussian, society. These found in religious revival answers to new political, social and confessional realities. Pietism was fused with a newly constructed conservative ideology that now had to contest the emerging modern concepts of nationalism and nation-state. Drawing on the Pietist tradition of the seventeenth century, neo-Pietist conservatives crafted their own model of national identity and its meaning, thus introducing an alternative to the liberal one. This alternative did not materialize as originally envisioned, but it did produce an additional facet of German nationalism that thus far has eluded scholarly attention.
