Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (125 page)

Pietists liked to emphasize the novelty of what they were doing, and certainly they were impatient with conservative ('Orthodox') Lutheran civil authorities and clergy who obstructed them, but there was little in their activities that was actually new or without precedent in Lutheran life. What they initially sought was an enriched use of the existing parish system, pulling parish life out of a mass of surviving pre-Reformation habits of worship to a more heartfelt expression of Christian faith, which would be more robust in the face of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Many deplored the divisions within Protestantism, which could plausibly be considered as contributing to the disasters of the seventeenth century. Lutherans ashamed of such schism paid more attention to their Reformed neighbours in the Netherlands and Germany, and they were impressed by the intense and personal piety they encountered, itself owing much to the preaching and writing of English Puritans who had become dissatisfied with or had been ejected from the Church of England. In many areas of Germany, particularly large cities, Lutherans were also confronted with an influx of French Huguenot refugees whose plight was directly the result of their steadfastness in Reformed religion back home.

From its earliest days, Pietism was intimately bound up with education. Thoughtful scholars and students - backbone of the parish clergy - were frustrated with the collection of northern universities which served the Protestant Churches. Protestantism in both its Lutheran and its Reformed identities had rather quickly channelled its early bursts of energy into forms which could be taught to prospective ministers in the theology faculties of existing universities. Often these universities shaped their curriculum using the medieval scholastic methods which Martin Luther himself had come to scorn, and Pietists scorned them too. They did their best to recapture the initial excitement and urgency of the Reformation, the sense of personal and public conflict which had so galvanized popular Protestant enthusiasm in the 1520s and again in the 1560s. Yet these were orderly folk: they found themselves trying to cope with the strains of a Protestant European society which was in the middle of rapid change, and they sought ways of channelling and disciplining the enthusiasm which they themselves were inciting. It was a difficult balancing act, which bequeathed enduring tensions.

Crucial to Pietist formation were two Lutheran pastors, Philipp Jakob Spener and his younger contemporary August Hermann Francke. Spener, who left his native Alsace before its takeover by Louis XIV, and became successively pastor in Frankfurt am Main and the Hohenzollern capital Berlin, was alarmed by the rapid growth of such population centres and the strains that this placed on the parish clergy. His solution was to seek out the most energetic and serious layfolk in the parishes and treat them as partners in ministry, gathering people outside service-time to meet for Bible-reading, prayer and hymn-singing in what he called
collegia pietatis
. Under his influence, in 1694 the Hohenzollern Elector Friedrich of Brandenburg founded a new university for his territories in the city of Halle, which was to prove a major source for disseminating a new spirit in Lutheranism. Spener's genius, and that of the other leaders of the movement, was for detailed organization, plus strategic alliances with sympathetic rulers and nobility, and although Spener met opposition which eventually crushed his spirit, Francke consolidated his work in spectacular fashion. Pietism, with its varied Protestant roots and openness to crossing the Lutheran-Reformed divide, was always going to get a sympathetic hearing from the monarchs of the house of Hohenzollern, whose leading representatives in Brandenburg were Reformed princes stranded uncomfortably in a landscape of Lutherans.

From 1695, Francke created at Halle an extraordinary complex of orphanage, medical clinic, schools for both poor children and young noblemen and a teacher-training college, complete with printing press, library and even a museum to demonstrate to the pupils the wonders of God's creation. The work was paid for by an enterprise useful in itself: the first commercial production in Europe of standardized medical remedies, complete with multilingual advertising brochures.
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All this was eventually housed in monumental buildings which have survived the twentieth-century disasters of Germany remarkably intact and available for their original functions. Franke's principle was that everyone, whatever their position in life, should come out of childhood education able to read the Bible and to take pride in at least one special skill. This was to link the profession of Christianity to personal self-confidence and practical achievement, in a fashion which had no exact precedent, and which has become characteristic of modern Evangelicalism.

Halle set patterns in the Protestant world for institutions created by private initiative, as Jesuits had done for Catholics a century and more before. The work of Halle extended throughout northern Europe and deep into Russia, as Francke sent out his pupils into government service or clerical ministry, printed innumerable devotional tracts and kept up a correspondence with a vast diaspora of the like-minded - around five thousand of them.
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In 1690-91, he wrote an autobiography which, although looking back to patterns set by Augustine and Luther as they described their conversion experiences, laid out the whole first thirty years of his life in terms of progressive and not instantaneous conversion: a continuous spiritual struggle marked by dramatic high points. It was hugely influential. Countless Evangelicals thereafter tried to shape their lives in the same way, and many of them turned their efforts into books.
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All this busy activity had an urgent purpose: it was a preparation for the End Times, which would be heralded by the conversion of the Jews. Like Spener before him, Francke was very aware of the decades of excited speculation about the return of the Messiah which had agitated contemporary Judaism, along with the appearance of several Jewish candidates for the post. That was one of the reasons that Francke's eyes turned so much towards eastern Europe, with its vast spread of Jewish communities. Despite the enthusiasm which he inspired in others for the cause of conversion, leading to the foundation in Halle of the first Protestant institution for Jewish mission, this effort proved one of the real failures of the Pietist movement (apart from the non-appearance of the Last Days).
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Ringing through these varied institutions, sounding through the little groups of layfolk and the churches where Pietist pastors managed to overcome the disapproval of more conventional Lutherans, was a new burst of hymnody. Here was the solvent of the tensions within the movement caused by its challenge to Lutheran tradition and its adventurous reaching out to the Reformed; here was cheer for the anxious faithful, mindful of the fragility of the war-damaged society round them. It was a warm renewal of a tradition which had distinguished precedents in the hymns of Luther and his successors in the Lutheran tradition. One of those best known in the English-speaking world as well as in Germany, thanks to its translation by Frances Cox, a Victorian enthusiast for German hymnody, was written in 1675 by Johann Jakob Schutz, a young lawyer who was an eager associate of Spener in the activities of his
collegia pietatis
in Frankfurt, but whose search for a religion of the heart led him on further to plan colonizing schemes in William Penn's Pennsylvania, and propelled him into an excitement about the Last Days exceptional even among Pietists. Schutz begins his hymn with an evocation of the power of God which is classically Lutheran but has its own intensity. Since Pietism was so much the voice of eighteenth-century Germany in anguish and in joy, it is worth viewing Schutz's German text along with Miss Cox's English. The words 'God' and 'Good' ring through the original like a mantra, although the English turns them all into 'God':

Sei Lob und Ehr' dem hochsten Gut,
Dem Vater aller Gute,
Dem Gott, der alle Wunder tut,
Dem Gott, der mein Gemute
Mit seinem reichen Trost erfullt,
Dem Gott, der allen Jammer stillt.
Gebt unserm Gott die Ehre!

Sing praise to God who reigns above,
the God of all creation,
the God of power, the God of love,
the God of our salvation;
with healing balm my soul he fills,
and every faithless murmur stills:
to God all praise and glory.

As the hymn progresses, its mood changes to speak of trouble and sorrow, but then Schutz brings back his same God as intimate, even maternal, a personal, private comfort to those crowding in from the streets of the city:

Der Herr ist noch und nimmer nicht
Von seinem Volk geschieden,
Er bleibet ihre Zuversicht,
Ihr Segen, Heil und Frieden.
Mit Mutterhanden leitet er
Die Seinen stetig hin und her.
Gebt unserm Gott die Ehre!

The Lord is never far away,
but through all grief distressing,
an ever present help and stay,
our peace and joy and blessing.
As with a mother's tender hand,
God gently leads the chosen band:
To God all praise and glory.

And all ends again in praise: '
Gebt unserm Gott die Ehre!
' - 'Give our God the honour!'

Pietists who loved such hymns were generally not sympathetic to the continuing splendour and musical elaboration of well-financed Lutheran liturgy. Their preference for informality and the extrovert expression of emotion in worship contributed to a gradual abandoning of the continuing use of Latin in the Lutheran Mass and the jettisoning of much traditional ceremony in German and Scandinavian Lutheran worship. It was predictable, therefore, that Lutheranism's greatest musician, Johann Sebastian Bach, experienced a complicated relationship with the Pietist movement which spanned his career. Undoubtedly influenced in his own passionate Christian commitment by Pietist themes and by Pietist books in his own extensive library, Bach was a man whose strenuous temperament was certainly conducive to spiritual struggle. Yet he eventually felt compelled to leave his post directing church music in the city of Muhlhausen, uneasy with the restrictions that its Pietist pastor placed on him (although also with an eye on a better-paid job at a ducal court).
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Later, based at the richly endowed parish church of St Thomas in Leipzig for the last quarter-century of his life, Bach found a conservative Latin-based liturgy which he was very ready not to supplant but to enhance, with an innovative outpouring of musical composition for organ, choir and orchestra. His cantatas - orchestral and choral commentaries in German on the preaching and liturgical themes set for the day, incorporating some of the great German hymns of the Reformation - are one of Lutheranism's greatest creative contributions to the Western cultural tradition. It is questionable whether many contemporary Pietists would have been enthusiastic for them.

Bach was never an easy man to employ or to live with, and the St Thomas congregation did not altogether appreciate what they were being offered in his barrage of musical composition - which in the end included five complete yearly cycles of cantatas (see Plate 36). When his
St Matthew Passion
was performed for the first time, influential members of the congregation became steadily more bewildered by the way that the music branched out from the chorales that they knew, and one elderly widow cried, 'God help us! 'tis surely an opera-comedy!'
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In one sense, she was right: Bach had poured his choral creativity into his cantatas and, mysteriously, was the only major composer of his time never to write an opera. In later years he concentrated more and more of his talent on solo works for keyboard and other instruments, which had little to do with his official church duties, and that may reflect his growing impatience at the quarrels in which he had become involved at St Thomas's. His monumental late work, the Latin Mass in B minor, escapes beyond the requirements of Lutheran liturgy, for which its first components, written in 1733 for the Elector of Saxony, had still been appropriate. Taking its cue from the Elector's own conversion to Catholicism in defiance of his affronted subjects in the heartland of the Reformation, the Mass transcends the battles of the previous two centuries, to reunite the divided Western Latin Church in music. No Protestant had previously written anything like it.
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While Lutheranism was largely able to contain the Pietist movement, the Pietists engendered one distinctive offshoot which, although never very large-scale, had a rapid and significant effect on Protestantism worldwide. This was the Moravian Church, a radical restructuring of some of the last remnants from the pre-Reformation movement of dissent in the kingdom of Bohemia, the
Unitas Fratrum
(see p. 573). From 1722, a handful of these refugees from Moravia in Bohemia, victims of the inexorable Habsburg recatholicization of central Europe, were given shelter to the north of the Habsburg frontiers by a Lutheran nobleman, a Pietist with the strongest credentials as a former student of Francke at Halle and a godson of Spener. Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf used his estate in the hills of southernmost Saxony to build a showcase village for a growing collection of proteges. He named it Herrnhut, a place for craftwork and farming, the first of a network of communities which eventually spread as far as Russia, Great Britain and across the Atlantic.

Zinzendorf was a charismatic and passionate man. Proudly conscious of his family's Lutheran heritage stretching back to the Reformation, he found that the only way he could remould the Lutheran Church was by leaving it; he arranged for bishops of the
Unitas Fratrum
to consecrate him as bishop for his Herrnhut community. There was a certain convenience for Zinzendorf in the fact that very few of the people who gathered at Herrnhut were genuinely from Moravia. That meant that he could forge a unifying myth out of the Moravian past, to create an identity for a new community which was in reality a very disparate group, drawn from radically different and contending Churches - Lutherans, Reformed, Anabaptists. Most were Pietists who had found their own religious environments increasingly difficult and had now made the momentous choice to start a new life, uprooting themselves from a familiar homeland. It was not surprising that their emotions ran high in those pioneering decades.