Allergies to Individualism

In the bookstore of the Ephrata Cloister in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, I found a slim volume called A Short, Easy, and Comprehensive Method of Prayer, by Johannes Kelpius—a botanist, astronomer, hymn-writer and Pietist mystic. The book describes a quiet, contemplative form of prayer that would have been familiar to the medieval Greek Hesychasts, the Desert Ancestors, and modern contemplatives. Surprisingly, I found that Kelpius spent roughly the first third of his book defending the prayer method he was about to describe. Why, I wondered, was he so much on the defensive?  

Pietism, a movement within Lutheranism, grafts its own concerns with individual piety and Christian living onto the emphasis on doctrine and dogma promoted by the institutional church. And institutional churches have always been allergic to individualism. From the very early days of the Jesus movement, it has been taught that individual revelations and vocations must be affirmed by the community (“God willing and the people consenting” is the Anglican formula). If “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light,” (2 Corinthians 11:14) an individual believer could be led astray in the throes of mystical ecstasy.

Notwithstanding the revolutionary individualism of Luther’s famous “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise,” by Kelpius’ time the Lutheran movement had ossified into a church. The great flowering of speculative, possibly heterodox thought that followed the introduction of moveable type printing, with its ability to disseminate ideas widely through cheaply produced books, had exposed many sects and movements to persecution. 

The Pietists and German Baptists, the English Quakers, and the Rosicrucians, among others, were unwilling to submit their thought—often formed among people with little or no formal education—to an institutional hierarchy that had usurped the place and function of true community, seeming only to exist to quench the Spirit wherever it moved outside the halls of ecclesiastical power. By the time Kelpius wrote in the late 17^th century, suspicious church authorities were already repressing the emphasis of Pietistic and related groups on union and transformation in God through contemplative mysticism—hence the lengthy apologia with which Kelpius prefaced his book on prayer.

But Pietism didn’t appear out of nowhere. 

Establishment theologians like Johann Arndt (1555 – 1621), a German Lutheran whom we commemorate today, wrote influential books on Christian devotion that kept well within the bounds of Lutheran Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, he is considered a harbinger of Pietism. His best-known work, “True Christianity“, has been a model for many devotional books, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. Like the Pietists after him, Arndt emphasized the mystical union between the individual believer and Christ.

Kelpius (1667 – 1708), who predicted the world would end in 1694, established a community of mystics in the caves near the Wissahickon Creek in what is now Philadelphia. Inspired by the story in Revelation 12 about the “woman clothed with the sun” whom God spirited away to the wilderness keeping her safe from the red dragon waiting to devour her child as soon as she gave birth, he named his community the “Society of the Woman in the Wilderness.” Kelpius believed the forests of Pennsylvania comprised the wilderness where God hid this expectant mother, and devoted himself to awaiting her return. The “Monks of the Wissahickon”, as they were popularly known, built a tower to keep watch day and night, possibly under the influence of psychotropic herbs from Kelpius’s garden. The monks erected a hall where they offered worship services, schooling, and medicinal herbs to their neighboring settlers.Kelpius also believed the Lenapé people, who were native to the area, to be the lost tribes of Israel

In his 1872 poem Pennsylvania Pilgrim, John Greenleaf Whittier referred Kelpius:

…Or painful Kelpius from his hermit den
By Wissahickon, maddest of good men…

Deep in the woods, where the small river slid
Snake-like in shade, the Helmstadt Mystic hid,
Weird as a wizard, over arts forbid,

Reading the books of Daniel and of John,
And Behmen’s Morning-Redness, through the Stone
Of Wisdom, vouchsafed to his eyes alone…

The apocalyptic books of Daniel and John were of special interest to Kelpius, while “Behmen’s Morning-Redness” refers to the most influential—and scandalous—book of his mentor, Jakob Böhme’s Aurora.

Jakob Böhme (1575 – 1624), philosopher, mystic, and Lutheran Protestant theologian also commemorated today, was admired as an original thinker by many of his contemporaries. At fourteen-years-old, while apprenticed with a shoemaker, he devoted himself to prayer and regular reading of scripture. And, though he had no formal education, read the works of mystics and visionaries such as Paracelsus and Schwenckfeld. 

In a vision in 1600, Böhme became entranced with the beauty of a beam of sunlight reflected in a pewter dish. Believing this vision had revealed to him the spiritual structure of the world, as well as the relationship between God and human, good and evil, he chose not to speak of this experience openly, preferring instead to continue making shoes and raising his family. In 1610 Böhme had another visionary experience which he believed showed him the unity of the cosmos.

Two years later, Böhme began his first book, Die Morgenroete im Aufgang (The rising of Dawn). Never intending the work for public consumption, Böhme did not complete it. However, manuscript copies began circulating throughout German-speaking Europe. In 1619 Böhme began writing “On the Three Principles of Divine Being” followed by other treatises that were copied by hand and circulated only among friends. In 1622 he wrote several short works which were later included in his first published book on New Year’s Day 1624, under the title Weg zu Christo (The Way to Christ). One of these shorter works, “The Signature of All Things,” expounded the idea that God had left his “signature” on all created things. This “doctrine of signatures” is the basis for the “sympathetic magic” employed by traditional healers, including the Pennsylvania Germans.

Though the visionary source of his thought was met with official hostility, much of Böhme’s writing falls well within the bounds of Lutheran orthodoxy with a few key differences. Notably, his rejection of Luther’s doctrine of salvation by faith alone. 

In 1720, Johann Conrad Beissel (March 1, 1691 – July 6, 1768), a baker by trade, emigrated to Pennsylvania for the purpose of joining Kelpius on the Wissahickon. After learning too late that Kelpius died in 1708, Beissel founded a German Baptist community called the Camp of the Solitary, with a convent (the Sister House) and a monastery (the Brother House) at Ephrata. Eventually, the entire community relocated to Ephrata, and became famous for its publishing enterprise, which included Beissel’s own sacred music composed for the community, a uniquely German-American script called Fraktur, and several editions of The Martyr’s Mirror, a Mennonite martyrology known for its graphic and gruesome illustrations. 

Author’s Note: Read more about Kelpius, Böhme, and Beissel in my book, Wissahickon: Poems.