Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (24 page)

Yet there are signs that the peculiar confessional geography of his lands did gradually propel the Elector towards a more principled commitment to tolerance. He repeatedly renounced any intention of compelling the consciences of his subjects and enjoined his successor in the Political Testament of 1667 to love all his subjects equally, regardless of their religion. He supported the admission into Ducal Prussia of nonconformist Protestant sectaries fleeing from persecution in neighbouring Catholic Poland and was prepared to tolerate the private practice of their religion. He even, in later years, encouraged the immigration of Jews. There was a small Jewish community in the territories of Kleve and Mark, but the Jews were prohibited from settling in Brandenburg or Prussia. In 1671, when Emperor Leopold expelled the Jews from most of the Habsburg lands, Frederick William offered the fifty wealthiest families a domicile in Brandenburg. Over the following years, he supported them against the bitter complaints of the Estates and other local interests.

This policy was of course motivated by economic calculation, but the Elector’s justification for it also reveals a striking absence of prejudice. ‘It is known that cheating in trade takes place among Christians as well as Jews and with more impunity,’ he told a group of delegates from the district of Havelland who had demanded that the Jews be expelled.
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In 1669, when a Christian mob destroyed the synagogue in Halberstadt, he admonished the local Estates and ordered his officials to pay for its reconstruction.
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It is difficult to know precisely why the Elector adopted these untypical views, but plausible to suppose that they may date back to his upbringing in the Dutch Republic, home to a flourishing and respected Jewish community. A letter he had drafted by his secretary in 1686 suggests that he may also in his own mind have connected the
imperative of tolerance with the remembered strife of the Thirty Years War. ‘Differences between religious communities certainly produce violent hatreds,’ he wrote. ‘But older and holier is the law of nature, which obliges men to support, tolerate and help one another.’
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On 21 March 1691, Philipp Jakob Spener, the Lutheran Head Chaplain to the Saxon court in Dresden, took up a senior church post in Berlin. It was a provocative appointment, to say the least: Spener was already well known as one of the leading lights in a highly controversial movement for religious reform. In 1675, he had achieved instant notoriety with the publication of a short tract called
Pious Hopes
that decried various deficiencies in contemporary Lutheran religious life. The orthodox ecclesiastical establishment, he argued, had become so absorbed in the defence of doctrinal correctness that it was neglecting the pastoral needs of ordinary Christians. The religious life of the Lutheran parish had become desiccated and stale. In a pithy and accessible German, Spener proposed various remedies. Christians might try revitalizing the spiritual life of their communities by founding groups for pious discussion – Spener called them ‘colleges of piety’ (
collegia pietatis
). The spiritual intensity of these intimate circles, he suggested, would transform nominal believers into reborn Christians with a powerful sense of God’s agency in their lives. The idea proved enormously appealing and colleges of piety began to pop up across the parishes of the Lutheran states. The Lutheran establishment responded with alarm to what they saw as a subversive campaign to dilute the spiritual authority of the ordained pastorate.

By 1690, the Spenerite reformers – dubbed ‘Pietists’ by their detractors – were under attack from the orthodox authorities at the Lutheran universities. August Hermann Francke, a graduate student in theology at the University of Leipzig and a follower of Spener, caused a huge stir in 1689 when he encouraged the formation of colleges of piety under student supervision, and denounced the traditional Lutheran theological curriculum, prompting some students to burn their textbooks and lecture
notes.
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The academic authorities soon found themselves faced with a formidable student movement, and the Saxon government intervened in March 1690 to prohibit all ‘conventicles’ (a term widely used by contemporaries for non-official religious gatherings) and to stipulate that ‘Pietist’ students – it was in the course of this conflict that the term entered general usage – be excluded from admission to clerical office. Francke himself was hounded out of the university and subsequently took up a minor clerical post in Erfurt. Wherever recognizable Pietist groups emerged there were bitter – sometimes violent – conflicts with the Lutherans.
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Pietism was controversial because it represented a critical counterculture within German Lutheranism. It was one of that broad palette of seventeenth-century European religious movements that challenged the authority of ecclesiastical establishments by calling for a more intense, committed and practical form of Christian observance than was usual within the formal church structures. Pietism was about living to the full Luther’s ‘priesthood of all believers’; Pietists cherished the
experience
of faith; they developed a refined vocabulary to describe the extreme psychic states that attended the transition from a merely nominal to a truly heartfelt belief in redemption through reconciliation with God. Perhaps because it was driven by such explosive emotions, Pietism was also dynamic and unstable. Once elements of the movement began to distance themselves from the established Lutheran churches, it proved difficult to arrest the process of disintegration. In many places, newly formed conventicles spiralled out of control, falling under the influence of radicals who ultimately severed themselves entirely from the established churches.
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Spener himself had never intended the conventicles to function as vehicles for separatism.
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He was a devout Lutheran who respected the institutional structures of the official church; he insisted that religious meetings take place under clerical supervision and be disbanded with good grace if they incurred the disapproval of the church authorities.
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The movement developed a momentum of its own. In Dresden, where Spener had occupied the position of Senior Court Chaplain since 1686, the escalating conflict with the Orthodox Lutherans – exacerbated by the reformer’s stern rantings against the moral laxity of the Saxon court – soured relations with his employer, Elector John George. In March 1691, the Elector, whose own sexual morality was rather relaxed, ran
out of patience and asked his privy councillors to ‘have Spener quit his post without further ado, since we do not want to see nor hear this man any more’.
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In the following year, the Lutheran theological faculty at the University of Wittenberg officially confirmed Spener’s heterodoxy, identifying no fewer than 284 doctrinal ‘errors’ in his writings.
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Help was at hand. Just as Spener wore out his welcome in Dresden, Frederick III of Brandenburg offered him a senior ecclesiastical and pastoral post in Berlin. Frederick also allowed him to recruit numerous beleaguered Pietist activists to clerical and academic offices in Brandenburg-Prussia. One of these was August Hermann Francke, who, having left Leipzig, had been forced only one year later to leave his post as deacon in Erfurt. In 1692, Francke was appointed to a vicarage in Glaucha, a satellite town of Halle, and professor of Oriental languages at the new University of Halle. The theologian Joachim Justus Breithaupt, who had fallen from favour in Erfurt for defending Francke against the Orthodox, became the University’s first professor of theology in 1691. A further veteran of the Leipzig quarrels, Paul Anton, was also appointed to a professorship. At the same time, Spener gathered and instructed a new generation of Pietist leaders in a college of piety that met twice weekly in Berlin.
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This deliberate state sponsorship of the movement was at variance with the policies adopted in most other territories and it represented an important point of departure, both in the history of the Pietist movement and in the cultural history of the Brandenburg-Prussian polity.

The reason for Brandenburg’s co-option of Pietism lay in the peculiar confessional predicament of the Calvinist ruling house. Repeated efforts to stifle Lutheran polemic had failed utterly and the prospect of a voluntary union of the two confessions remained as remote as ever. Spener’s outspoken condemnations of inter-confessional squabbling were therefore music to the ears of the Elector and his family. The fourth of the six proposals in
Pious Hopes
was that theological polemics should be curtailed: it was ‘the holy love of God’ rather than disputation, Spener argued, that anchored the truth in each individual; exchanges with those whose beliefs differed from one’s own should therefore be undertaken in a pastoral, not a polemical, spirit.
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Throughout Spener’s theological and pastoral writing dogmatic issues were marginalized by an overwhelming concern for the practical, experiential dimension of faith and observance. Christians were urged to practise ‘spiritual priesthood’ in
their own lives by tending actively to the well-being of their fellows, observing, edifying and ‘converting’ them.
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‘If we awaken in our Christians an ardent love, for each other in the first instance and thereafter for all mankind [… ] then we have achieved virtually everything we desire.’
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Spener always remained respectful of the established Protestant churches and their liturgical and doctrinal traditions, and he was never a supporter of unionist projects.
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Nevertheless, it was possible to see in his writings – as in the individualized, experience-oriented devotional culture of the Pietist movement as a whole – the outlines of a confessionally impartial Christianity that transcended the boundaries between Calvinist and Lutheran Protestantism. By playing down the significance of dogma and the sacraments, and by emphasizing the indivisibility of the apostolic true church, pietism promised to cement the ‘inner basis’ for the Prussian monarchy’s claim to supreme episcopacy over the two Protestant confessions.
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There were also good reasons why the Elector should have chosen Halle as the place in which to furnish the Pietist movement with a provincial stronghold. Halle was one of the largest cities in the Duchy of Magdeburg. Brandenburg had acquired the inheritance rights to Magdeburg as part of the peace settlement of 1648, but the territory changed hands only in 1680. Magdeburg was a bastion of Lutheran orthodoxy, where the Lutheran Estates had traditionally ruled without hindrance from the nominal sovereign, the archbishop of Magdeburg. Until 1680, Calvinists were forbidden to own land in the duchy and possessed no civil rights. The takeover was followed by a period of tense confrontation between the government in Berlin and the local Estates. Against the wishes of the Lutherans, a Calvinist chancellor was installed to administer the duchy.

In this context, the significance of state support for the local Pietist movement becomes clear. The Pietists were to function as a kind of fifth column, whose task was to assist in the cultural integration of an ultra-Lutheran province. Throughout the 1690s, the Electoral government intervened to protect the Pietists against attacks and obstruction from the local Lutherans – municipal authorities, guildsmen and local landowners.
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The keystone of the government’s cultural policy in the region was the foundation of the University of Halle in 1691 as the leading university of the Hohenzollern lands. With Pietists and
distinguished secular thinkers in key administrative and academic positions, the University of Halle would mellow the combative Lutheranism of the province. As a training institute for future pastors and church officials, it would offer a congenial alternative to the combative and anti-Calvinist theological faculties of neighbouring Saxony, where much of the Lutheran pastorate of Brandenburg had hitherto been educated.

The Pietists also became involved in the provision of social services. Spener had long believed that poverty and its concomitant evils, idleness, beggary and crime could and should be eliminated from Christian society by judicious reforms involving the forced or voluntary participation of the indigent in work programmes.
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In this respect, as in his conciliatory confessional outlook, he found himself in tune with the aspirations and policies of the Brandenburg state. At the Elector’s request, Spener submitted a memorandum recommending the suppression and policing of beggary in Berlin and the centralization of charitable provision for persons requiring temporary or permanent care. The necessary funds, he argued, could be raised through a combination of church poor-boxes, donations and state subsidies. The consequence was a general prohibition of beggary, the creation of a permanent Poor Commission and the establishment in Berlin of the Friedrich-Hospital for the Sick, the Elderly and Orphans (1702).
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In Halle, too, the local Pietists battled poverty and indigence. Around the charismatic figure of August Hermann Francke there was an extraordinary flowering of Christian voluntarism. In 1695, Francke opened a poor-school financed by pious donations. Such was the scale of public generosity that he was soon able to expand the school into an ‘orphanage’ offering accommodation and maintenance as well as free elementary tuition. The daily routine within this institution was structured around practical and useful tasks, and the ‘orphans’ (many of whom were in fact the children of local poor families) were regularly taken to visit the workshops of artisans, so that they might form a clear idea of their prospective professions. In the early years, Francke experimented with plans to finance the orphanage through the sale of items produced using child labour, but even after this idea had been abandoned as impracticable, skilled manual crafts remained a crucial component of the orphanage’s pedagogical programme.
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It was above all this striking combination of education, socialization through labour and charitable
provision that aroused the interest and admiration of contemporaries in Brandenburg-Prussia and beyond.