Generally, Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705) is considered the founder of German Pietism.1 Trained as a Lutheran theologian, Spener was a senior minister in the predominantly Protestant city of Frankfurt am Main when in 1667 he published a translation of La Pratique de l’oraison et méditation chrétienne (The practice of Christian prayer and meditation) by Jean de Labadie (1610–1674). In 1675 he published Pia Desideria oder Herzliches Verlangen nach gottgefälliger Besserung der wahren evangelischen Kirchen samt einigen dahin einfältig abzweckenden christlichen Vorschlägen (Pia Desideria or the Heartfelt Desire for a God-pleasing Betterment of the True Evangelical Church Together with Some Simple Proposals Aiming Thereto) as the preface to a new edition of Arndt’s True Christianity. In order to counter possible objections from the side of Protestant orthodoxy, Spener justified his great interest in the tradition of mysticism and the literature of edification by drawing on Luther’s model of religious belief as an active and divine work that transforms the individual from within. His concerns were an attempt to rejuvenate a Protestant church that after the Thirty Years’ War was worn out by internal theological fights over orthodoxy. Dry theological debate was to be replaced by religion as lived experience. Spener turned to mystical writers and invoked the authority of the historical ideal of an early Christian community. The role of the minister was to change. Instead of being primarily a learned authority in the interpretation of the Bible, he now was to become a living example of the faith. To accomplish these goals, the education of ministers had to be reformed. In contrast to the radical religiosity of the Puritans in England, for instance, German Pietism, as it found its programmatic articulation by Spener, needs to be understood as an attempt to avoid separatist tendencies by integrating a mystical tradition into official church culture. Yet the potential for separatism was extremely high even within mainstream Pietism, as it sprang directly from the Pietist critique of the “external,” institutionalized aspects of the Christian Church.
In 1670 a group of men around Spener began to gather regularly in his study. The aim of these meetings was to form a small group of friends who would support each other in their spiritual growth apart from worldly vanity and gossip. Soon these meetings were called collegia pietatis and exercitia pietatis. Until then the Protestant church had not supported any organized events apart from church services. Although initially the meetings included primarily Spener’s male colleagues, soon they were opened up to people of all social ranks and ages, students of theology, lawyers, doctors, merchants, craftsmen, and married as well as unmarried people. Even women could attend but not participate in the discussion, which was framed by a prayer at the beginning and end and focused on a biblical passage or a book of religious edification. These regular Bible study groups are still one of the prominent features of German Pietism. It was in Darmstadt and Frankfurt around 1677 that the term Pietists was first used to refer to those particularly religious church members who partook in the collegia pietatis. Very quickly, what started out as a derisive term was appropriated by the Pietists themselves.2
The concern with Bible study and pious praxis could ultimately be achieved only through increased literacy. Spener had articulated some social reforms concerning poverty, but the lasting institutional impact of Pietist reforms was left to his student, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), who invented an entire educational system. It provided schooling ranging from literacy programs for the poor up to a Pädagogium regium to educate Prussian officers, high-ranking bureaucrats, and teachers.3 Another important aspect of Pietist literacy and its relationship to print culture was the intensive cultivation of biographical and autobiographical writing (from conversion and deathbed narratives to the confession, memoir, and diary) and its epistolary culture.
Spener’s Pia Desideria was addressed primarily to his fellow ministers and leaders of the church. In the introduction Spener pointed out that whereas in former times church reforms were initiated and organized by a council, he hoped that now the publication of his ideas (which he had already circulated and discussed with many of his colleagues) would take over the function of a council and lead to a productive exchange between responsible theologians and ministers. In his hope that wide discussion and a collective mode of decision-making could rely primarily on the print medium, we glimpse a model of the public sphere that was to be fully fleshed out in Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment” (1784). Spener’s manifesto for the reform of the Protestant church relies on the basic distinction between doxa and life. If he joins the widely voiced criticisms of the wrongs of the church, he nevertheless also distinguishes his own position by dissociating the teaching of the Protestant church from the lifestyles and religiosity of its pastors and members. The issue in the public debate is to be the reform of the praxis, not the nature of the teaching. Furthermore, he shifts the basis by which religious doctrine is to be measured from scholarly debate to individual belief. The true faith shows itself not by way of argument but through practice. This emphasis on religious praxis, on the actuality of a pious life rather than sophisticated doctrinal points, together with the emphasis on the urgency and the actual possibility of a better church, constitutes the core of the Pia Desideria.
The distinction between the truth claims of the official religious doctrine, which if tinkered with would lead only to pointless argument and unresolvable conflict, and the truth of an individual’s spiritual experience as something that cannot be argued with but has to be respected and accepted on its own, introduces powerful arguments in favor of religious freedom and tolerance. It threatens the role and position of Bible and church by handing over the principal authority to the individual believer. The union of all true Christians, wherever they might be found, became a natural task for the Pietists. The unifying force did not have to come from membership in one particular church with one particular credo; rather it was derived from the experience of conversion, spiritual rebirth, and the pious life that ensued. This widened the horizon of German Protestantism to the treatises, prayers, songs, and in particular the autobiographical documents by Roman Catholic nuns, monks, and laypeople. The integration of these texts into a Protestant tradition meant a severe departure from orthodox tradition. Among its advocates were Johann Arndt, Johann Heinrich Reitz (1655–1720), and Gottfried Arnold (1666–1715).
Following up on Spener’s remarks from the Pia Desideria, Gottfried Arnold studied the early Christian community’s liturgy and government. His publications range from religious poetry and songs, to a systematic description of mysticism and its tradition, to the very controversial Unparteiische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie (Impartial History of the Church and of Heresy) (1699/1700). Arnold uses the term impartial in the title to denote a position for the historian that is not congruent with any particular religious confession. Both heretics and church followers are subjected to the same critical eye that seeks to evaluate their adherence to Christianity by considering their lived religiosity rather than their doctrinal position. The lives of individuals, often their spiritual autobiographies, are reprinted in Arnold’s history and serve as manifestations of the general historical development. Arnold argues, against Luther, that the history of Christianity, presented as a “decline and fall,” should not be blamed on the power of the papacy alone. All kinds of alliances between church and state, an established class of priests, dogma, a rigidly codified credo, and this-worldliness are equally responsible. True Christians are those who live an ascetic otherworldly life. Arnold’s church history became a very widely read and influential book throughout the eighteenth century. It expressed in many ways the attitude toward religion that was to become dominant in the German-speaking Enlightenment, in that it held on to Christianity but rejected its institutionalized aspects.
In a narrower sense, however, Arnold’s position was extremely limited by the chiliastic hopes that characterized the expectations of most radical Pietists at the turn of the century.4 Their rejection of any this-worldly arrangement or mediation could not be sustained over time. Arnold’s emphasis on the so-called heretics of the church and his attempts at their rehabilitation in light of the authenticity of their piety needs to be understood in conjunction with his condemnation of any form of sectarianism. Although one must not judge and condemn an individual believer for her or his departure from or critique of the official doctrine, any attempt at formalizing one’s own belief and of gathering followers amounts to a sinful sectarianism, or, in biblical terms, to an attempt to steal the bride from her rightful bridegroom.5
Arnold’s Impartial History gives a prominent place to the insights and lives of religious women of the later seventeenth century. He reprints at length Jane Lead’s discussion of the nature of visions, as he also reprints the visions and biographies of Antoinette Bourignon and Anna Vetter.6 He does not depict these women as spiritual leaders—although this title could certainly be claimed for both Bourignon and Lead—but merely as divinely inspired visionaries and exemplary figures of a pious life that did not shun exile and persecution.7 The overall picture that emerges from the individual examples in Arnold’s Impartial History is one of an increasingly atomistic individualism that does not know any secular concept of community, either as an actual organization that would exist apart from the church or as a more general humanist or universalist ideal. In the following section I shall show the extreme limitations of this kind of radical Pietist version of the self as it is artfully developed in Johanna Eleonora Petersen’s autobiography. In preparation for this discussion, however, I shall first take another glance at the Pietist use of autobiographical and biographical material as it became increasingly popular in the first part of the eighteenth century.
Beginning in 1699/1700, Johann Henrich Reitz, another radical Pietist who had lost his position as a Protestant minister, started to publish, in ever expanding editions, the title Historie der Wiedergebohrnen (History of the Born-Again), a collection of conversion narratives, biographical and autobiographical narratives of spiritual rebirth.8 Reitz’s collection was an enormous success on the book market. Ten thousand copies had been sold by mid-century.9 The first of the three volumes of the first edition contains thirty-seven relatively brief narratives about the religious rebirths primarily of Puritan women from England. Reitz had selected and translated them from a collection by the nonconformist missionary Vavosar Powell (1617–1670) entitled Spiritual Experiences, of Sundry Beleevers. Held forth by them at severall solemne meetings (1653).10 The narratives of the first volume are uniform in composition: all contain some briefly described external or internal circumstances (the feeling of a great sadness, the experience of an illness or of the death of a beloved person) that lead to a spiritual crisis, the experience of a religious rebirth, and a conclusion that comprises several biblical citations or a confession of faith. Reitz, quite aware of the uniformity of the conversion narratives of the first volume, in the preface to the first edition alerts his readers to the second and third volumes, which contain a far greater variety of biographical material: tales of men and women of high and low rank from diverse countries. As opposed to the mere writing about “spiritual rebirth, temptation, divine sadness, faith, consolation peace and joy,” which often misses the truth when it lacks authenticating experiential depth and hence amounts to sheer hypocrisy, Reitz advertises his collection as both grounded in experience and appealing to the reader’s own experience.11
A single spiritual autobiography, according to Reitz, could not accomplish his goal. Because of the highly specific and individual nature of true faith, it is important to provide a wide spectrum of conversion narratives to represent the multiplicity of God’s “process with the souls of his children.” “Then any reader can see and perceive in this history, as a living mirror, his own image and gestalt, the conformity and difference, what is lacking or how far he is still removed form the realm of God” (“Vorrede”). Thus Reitz encourages his readers to engage in an ongoing process of self-examination, differentiation, and individualization that works by making detailed comparison with the different templates for spiritual rebirth.
Reitz frames these confessional narratives with all their “anxiety, and labor, sighs and tears, hope, doubt and fear” (“Vorrede”) as an inner drama. Furthermore, he comments on the specifically literary nature, the aesthetic qualities and truth values of these narratives, which are not just a portrait of the human heart in general, but which provide immediate access to the drama of God’s work of redemption and revelation: “One can see from that how the entire heaven with all its secrets, indeed, how the entirety of Scripture is within us: Hell, Heaven, Adam, Christ, Cain, Abel, Sin, Justice, Judgment, Death, Life, Darkness and Light” (“Vorrede”). By elevating the individual confessional narratives into examples of God’s active intervention and by attributing to them the textual status of fractals of Scripture, he furthermore opposes the literary and scholarly standards by which they could be misjudged. They might not be learned, nor rhetorically sophisticated, but in their clumsy and simple language they can far surpass the Ancients, they can express true learning, the insight into the “essence of things” not in “art and order” but in “words full of spirit and life” (“Vorrede”).
In the concluding pages of his preface, Reitz posits his collection as the essence of Pietist practice. He begins this argument with an appeal to the reader’s own experiential knowledge that the effective acquisition of an art of skill does not result from bookish learning, nor from lectures or theory, but from actual practical involvement:
Whoever tries to become an experienced soldier by trying to get his war exercises merely from lessons, books and narratives will never succeed. Equally, that person will always remain a bad merchant who always runs to the stock exchange and merely listens, but never undertakes anything, nor consults with those people who could teach him that science. One should not reject public general meetings [öffentliche allgemeine Versammlungen]. That is why one cannot shed enough tears about the fact that in many places the only kind of special meetings that are known and tolerated are held in the gambling- shooting- drinking- whoring- comedy- tobacco- dancing- coffee- newspaper- and vain assembly houses that are mostly the market places, stock-exchanges and guild chambers of unholy people.
(“Vorrede”)
Reitz goes on to offer his collection to his readers as a new and badly needed kind of public forum that would provide a better alternative to the worldly and lewd kind of public gathering. The activity of reading in his collection is thus made into an analogy of Spener’s collegia pietatis, a form of authentic, pious exchange of experience, an imaginary dialogue and participation in a Christian life, opposed to abstract, external doctrine as well as lewd worldly entertainment. Instead of the mere lip service of current Christianity, of hypocritical involvement with religious rituals and formulas, the readers will find an opportunity to learn by participating in the lived experience expressed in this collection. Long before the culture of sensibility arose, with its extensive private novel reading culminating in hallucinatory engagement and identification on the part of the reader, we find here a model for the cultivation of an interiority and authenticity. Reitz’s presentation of his collection of texts situates this book in opposition to dry theory and abstract learning on the side of experience, practice, and immediate involvement. For, according to Reitz, readers should be immediately and experientially touched by these writings because “what comes from the heart goes to the heart” (“Vorrede”).
Both Arnold’s Impartial History and Reitz’s Historie situate confessional discourse at the heart of Pietism. In Arnold’s case the individual heretics’ visions, dreams, and religious insights, supported by narratives about their lives, become an occasion for studying the worldly corruption, intrigue, and rigidity of the official church and its officials, who slandered and persecuted those authentic believers. In Reitz’s case the emphasis is placed exclusively on the testimonial status of individual confessions with regard to the providential order. Especially in Reitz’s preface, we see a model in which the autobiographical material of the believer posits the individual as distinct from other believers, fleshing out the specifics of concrete experiential, practical data and inviting readers into a process of self-examination by way of a contrastive comparison with the details of their own lives. When Reitz draws attention to the actual articulation, to the textual features of the conversion narratives, he does so primarily in terms of a modern, anticlassical, primitivist aesthetic that values the non-studied, artless immediacy of expression in order to prove the authenticity and spontaneity of the individual account. He would, of course, not go so far as to seek an ideal of originality in those departures from rhetorical or stylistic standards. Nor would he present the individual narrators as authors who have claims to make or ideas to represent that could be considered on their own, apart from the biographical persona. Reitz’s appeal to the imagined community of believers as a quasi-public oral exchange is most instructive in this respect, because this model highlights how he prevents the dissociation of the narratives from the imaginary presence of their speaker as someone who must demonstrate everything she or he is saying through actual practice and experience. Along the same lines, it is important to note that Reitz only included lives of reborn believers after their death to make sure they could not lapse afterward.12
Thus one is led to a rather strange conclusion: the writers of the conversion narratives that are being collected, cited, and published do not really attain the status of authors. Their inclusion in the collection actually prevents them from assuming a public function that would extend beyond what they have to say about their lives and religious experience. After all, these believers have merely distinguished themselves in terms of their piety, their authentic belief, their intensely felt insight into the necessity and truth of Scripture. They are not at all of interest as senders of a message, merely as receivers. The most salient example can be found in the second edition of Reitz’s Historie, in the spiritual biography of Gottfried Arnold. Reitz summarizes, in a third-person narrative, Arnold’s vita, his education and activity as a scholar and professor of history. He even mentions a few of Arnold’s publications by title and praises their value for spiritual edification. Nevertheless, he quotes at length and verbatim only from Arnold’s explanation for his resignation from his position as a history professor at the university, which was published in 1699. In it Arnold describes at length first his temptations then his growing “disgust for the arrogant, vainglorious rationality of academic life.”13 Thus even the well-known scholar is radically isolated from the learned community of scholars as well as from the discourse of that community. Instead he is integrated into the virtual community of the pious who do not debate doctrinal points or generalize from their experiential knowledge but merely testify to the manifold ways God has of calling his children. Hence we can also witness a distinct anti-intellectualism in this model of authenticity, experience, and practice. For the reader of Reitz’s collection to participate in this virtual community of believers, he or she has to engage in a minute process of comparison and self-reflection, but by no means in an empathic identification with those templates of conversion.
The autobiography of Johanna Eleonora Petersen (1644–1724) was not integrated into a collection, as part of the confessional chorus of many individual narratives by multiple believers. Clearly, it doesn’t fit into Reitz’s model in that she constructs for herself a position of authorial authority. However, in contrast to the autobiographies of the “patriarchs” of the Pietist movement, who frequently borrowed from the older secular autobiographical genre of the scholar’s vita, a partial model for the public presentation of the self to which they then would add a conversion narrative as they moved toward their conclusion, Petersen’s biography adheres to the Pietist rejection of all external worldly attachments in the most radical fashion.14 Historians of Pietism have tended to contrast her with her husband Johann Wilhelm Petersen (1649–1726) and praise her autobiography as opposed to his for what they perceived as its genuine religiosity and emotional depth.15 In what follows I shall not pursue these kinds of speculations about her actual character. Instead, I shall pay particular attention to the construction of a self that allows her to publish radical theological insights.16
Johanna Eleonora Petersen believed that God has many ways of drawing men to him: “Insofar as it concerns me, I have experienced the drive [Trieb] of his good spirit from early childhood on, but out of ignorance I have often resisted this very same good spirit. I put up great obstacles by way of various identifications with the world, which was encouraged by the worldly outlook and values of the nobility, until finally understanding intervened when the wholesome word worked in me its powerful conviction.”17 In this phrase Petersen highlights the features that guide the organization of her autobiography: 1.) a childhood distinguished by a not yet entirely conscious religiosity, 2.) a phase of youthful error encouraged by the worldliness of the courtly lifestyle of the nobility, and 3.) the recognition of her spiritual calling in conjunction with the development of an inspired reading practice during her adult life.
Petersen recounts her childhood in a chronologically ordered sequence of six episodes. Her criteria for the selection of these individual events are not immediately obvious. Void of broader references to family, tradition, history, or culture, these episodes are told both rather matter-of-factly, without any sentimentality or ponderous digressions, and, in spite of their brevity and relative triviality, with much attention to seemingly mundane details. Eleonora von und zu Merlau emerges as a child who was born into the impoverished gentry, who grew up without a formal education, a loving family, community, or comfortable home, who was exposed to betrayal, the unrest of war, poverty, neglect, abuse, and hunger. Yet—what might be most strange to a twentieth-century reader—none of these episodes focuses on the experience of loss or mourning. The reader of Petersen’s string of childhood memories is led to wonder about the significance of these seemingly isolated events, about potential connections and common themes. Probably the most persistent feature of these six individual childhood memories is that they all end in what I would call a disidentification with the world and disassociation from people around her. Petersen expresses this movement in her rejection of what she calls the identification with the world (Gleichstellung der Welt).
The first episode, after the war in 1648, when Eleonora was only four years old, takes place when her family has moved to their country estate. One day the servants told Eleonora’s mother that a troop of soldiers was approaching on horseback. Thereupon Eleonora’s mother carried her infant daughter and guided her two older daughters through the summer fields toward Frankfurt. When they could hear the approaching troops a pistol-shot away, their mother admonished the girls to pray. As soon as they had reached safe shelter she told them to thank the Lord. But the older sister did not obey: “‘Why should we thank God, now that they can’t reach us anymore? ’ Then I had in my heart an actual sensation about this speech that truly hurt me, that she did not want to thank God or thought it was no longer necessary. I punished her for it with an ardent love of God whom I thanked with all my heart” (Mahrholz 205). The first childhood experience that Petersen mentions motivates her religious devotion in the feeling of pain at her older sister’s flippant instrumentalization of God. Her ardent love of God neither springs directly from her own gratitude over being saved, nor is it merely the result of her obedience to her mother, no, it draws its affective energy from the righteous, punitive rejection of her sister’s calculus.
With this simple childhood episode, Petersen introduces a relevant theological distinction: Eleonora is not just obedient and grateful, in contrast to her sister who is ungrateful and refuses to heed her mother’s words. Eleonora’s gratitude is part of her ardent love of God, her childish love of Jesus Christ of whom she has heard from her godmother. In that sense it is also a love of God that is different from her mother’s gratitude, which appears to be motivated by rescue from a concrete threat to their physical safety. Thus Eleonora’s religious sentiment at the age of four is already marked as otherworldly, and it draws its energy first from the active rejection of her sister’s position, from a disidentification with all of her female family members that leaves her alone with God.
The second event from her childhood continues the theme of disidentification with the world. When she was six years old, and her mother had just given birth to another child, Eleonora noticed that her mother was crying a lot. Her nine-year-old sister told her that this was because
a well known maiden of noble birth had become a whore. Although I did not know at that time what a whore was, I nevertheless thought that it must be something very evil, because my late mother cried so much. Thus I isolated myself, fell on my knees and prayed in tears to God that he should protect me from becoming a whore. The faithful God has mercifully heard this simple-minded prayer of a child. He has not only protected me from the opportunity to become one but he has also given me such a heart that I had an abhorrence of all language and gesture that was not chaste and that I did not remain in any society that was not chaste and honorable.
(Mahrholz 206)
This event is concluded with a parenthetical explanation in which Petersen departs from her usual chronological order. She mentions that, in spite of her strictly chaste comportment, the devil of slander later accused her of having an illegitimate child when she was taking care of her sister’s second daughter, the legitimate child her sister had with her husband von Praunheim. As in the first childhood memory, this second event also features the very young Eleonora distancing herself from the women around her. Her mother’s distress and recent experience of giving birth provides the negative affective charge to the sister’s obscure phrase, which yokes a young woman of their own class background with a morally reprehensible sexuality. Eleonora’s prayer is not concerned with others, but exclusively with asking God’s protection from the same fate.
In view of the entire biography, this second episode furthermore introduces the theme of the potentially corrupting influence of society. For ultimately Petersen’s decision to live a religious life means both breaking away from the aristocratic society at court and forming a mésalliance with the learned theologian Petersen, who has neither wealth nor title. Both these decisions, as she narrates at some length in the middle part of her autobiography, gave rise to much slander, of which the speculation that her niece was actually her own illegitimate child was only a small part. Thus this childhood memory lays the groundwork for the later elaboration of her spiritual authority as her disidentification with carnal femininity and her family’s social standing. Her decision “not to become a noble whore” encompasses not just the fear of betraying the worldly code of her class by giving birth to an illegitimate child but also the fear of being corrupted by that very code. In that sense, it not only means the decision to remain chaste, as would be expected of any young noble woman, but it also means not to become a whore to the nobility, not to be defined exclusively by its worldly values.
At the age of nine, Eleonora became a motherless orphan. Her father lived at court and left the children behind on their estate in the care of a schoolmaster’s widow, who gave to her own children in the village what she owed to her charges. At night she would leave the children alone, prey to being terrorized by cunning villagers. Some of the villagers, in complicity with the schoolmaster’s widow, would smear honey and sprinkle flour on their faces, put on white shirts, and appear in this ghostly disguise at night at the estate. Bearing lanterns, they would break open chests and boxes and steal whatever pleased them. Because Eleonora’s father treated them harshly, the children did not dare to tell him about these frightening apparitions. Thus it was not until the young von Praunheim, who later married Eleonora’s sister, came for a visit that the children dared speak up. Von Praunheim stayed with them and put an end to the appearance of the thievish ghosts by surprising them in flagrante.
The incident with the ghosts seems to fall out of the overall series of childhood memories: There is no connection to a religious experience. But, once more, there is the theme of fear and abandonment of the motherless orphans. Instead of dwelling on the loss of her biological mother, Petersen tells this episode about paternal neglect. Not only does her father choose a dishonest and uncaring caretaker for his children, but furthermore he has intimidated them to such a degree that they can not tell him about their troubles, “but were only glad when he had left again” (Mahrholz 207). In contrast to her heavenly father, in whom she can confide and who listens to her, her earthly father is mostly absent, and when he happens to be present he is too forbidding to be addressed. The ghost story allows Petersen to depict her father’s harshness without having to present his actual behavior in any negative detail. Furthermore, by keeping the story entirely within a natural and rational universe, this episode allows her to portray herself as someone who has learned from an early childhood experience about the crude and criminal abuses of such superstitions as a belief in ghosts. Especially for a religious figure whose later insights draw on visions and dreams, this story about exposing the false ghosts increases her spiritual authority. She knows how to distinguish between superstition and divine revelation.
After the ghost story, Petersen tells of another event that builds on the theme of the orphan left in the care of an evil woman and bereft of the support of her biological father. After the father dismissed the neglectful schoolmaster’s widow, he employed the wife of a captain who had been recommended to him as a good housekeeper. This woman turned out to be a thief, an “un-christian woman, who had not yet forgotten her tricks of the soldiers” (Mahrholz 207). One day she spotted a flock of chickens, grabbed the best, and drove away the others. When she needed dry firewood to prepare her stolen roast, she sent Eleonora to climb up to the attic of a five-story tower to fetch some loose boards from a pigeon roost. After Eleonora had thrown down a few boards, pulling on another one, she slipped and fell down two flights of stairs. She lost consciousness and lay there for about half an hour. Feeling very weak when she regained consciousness, she climbed down the stairs and lay down to sleep in a bed in a chamber of the tower where her father used to sleep during his brief stays at the house. After a few hours she woke up refreshed and healthy. For the entire time after her fall, nobody had inquired after her. When she told about her accident, she was scolded for having not paid better attention. Eleonora isolated herself and refused to eat of the stolen roast, but did not dare to speak up about it.
To the extent that this childhood memory further unfolds the theme of the orphan exposed to the evils of the world, it is closely related to the previous ghost story. Again, wickedness and neglect appear in the guise of a female caretaker, again Petersen’s actual father is absent, and again this episode is devoid of explicit religious concerns, in contrast with the first two or last two episodes. Yet the narrative program of being saved from becoming the accomplice of a crime by a fall, a story about a fall with a happy outcome, suggests a number of religious interpretations reflecting providential order. The narrative does not pause to acknowledge her being saved from physical harm in a fall that could have ended much worse. She merely mentions that she could have tumbled down two more stories and that nobody seems to have cared about her potential injury. Oddly, she adds the detail of her perfect recovery in her absent father’s empty bed. She seems to suggest that in this place, as in the lap of a protective and caring father, she received the health and strength to withstand the scolding and to set herself apart from the consumption of the illegally obtained meal. The concluding phrase parallels the spatial movement she had used to describe her reaction to her sister’s comment about the noble whore. Then she went alone to the side—“und ging allein beiseits” (Mahrholz 206)—in order to pray; here she “went to the side and did not want to eat anything of the stolen roast” (Mahrholz 208). Whereas the first two episodes conclude with Eleonora assuming a position apart from the earthly fates of the women of her family and social standing, the second pair of episodes that begin with her as one among several orphans also conclude with an isolating move that sets her apart from her company, with her refusal to partake in the community of a shared meal. This fourth episode emphasizes the almost miraculous acquisition of a strength that allows her to value spiritual well-being over creature comforts.
The final two childhood memories return to the explicit religious thematic. The fifth episode directly connects to the conclusion of the previous one. Petersen tells about her precocious desire to participate in the communion service. When she was ten years old, her older sister started her preparation for her first communion: “Then I had such a drive [Da bekam ich solchen Trieb] and wanted to join her” (Mahrholz 208). First her father refused, but Eleonora persisted until he agreed to let her go if the minister should judge her to be ready. The pastor tested not only whether she knew the “words” but also whether she had the appropriate “understanding.” God’s grace permitted her to respond to the questions, and the minister was pleased to give her permission to participate in the preparatory class.
Eleonora’s precocious desire to participate in the communion is clearly distinguished from a younger sibling’s mimetic desire vis-à-vis an older sibling. Petersen repeats the term Trieb for her religious stirrings, which she used in the introductory description of her vita. Her religious talent is not only articulated in the precocious wish but also authenticated in her ability to interpret the words in the spirit, a gift on which she is to build her later spiritual authority as a divinely inspired interpreter of the biblical word. As in the concluding passage to the first two episodes, Petersen again uses a particular kind of slander to demarcate her own position. A girl from her communion class, a close relative of hers, accused her of having said that when she obtained the chalice she would “heartily” [tapfer] drink from it. With this phrase her relative insinuated that Eleonora was expressing a love of wine, a slanderous attribution that pained the young girl tremendously. When the pastor first got word of it, he blamed the statement on her young age. But when he learned of Eleonora’s melancholy over the accusation and realized the girl’s true devotion to the “blessed chalice (which is the community of Christ)” he recognized Eleonora’s innocence and chastized the liar (Mahrholz 208–9).
The final childhood memory is not based on any specific incident. Instead, it describes her overall psychic disposition, her management of her father’s household, and her unjust treatment by her impatient and punitive father, which nevertheless did not affect her general cheerfulness and quietist submission to her fate. Petersen emphasizes that her sunny disposition, which persisted in spite of the servile fear and terror of any voice that vaguely resembled her father’s, had nothing to do with lascivious enjoyments. She had a genuine disgust for whatever was unchaste and did not want to have anything to do with childish games that involved such things as marriage and baptism.
Eleonora’s last childhood memory provides the transition to the middle part of her autobiography, a much longer part that describes her youth and apprenticeship with the nobility, first as a companion and guardian to the mad Countess von Solms-Redelheim, who then was a lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Holstein. Again, the narrative is written entirely in view of Petersen’s later position as an isolated eminent Pietist and divinely inspired interpreter of the Bible whose authority hinges on her commitment to an uncompromising rejection of all worldly ties and emotions. In contrast to Petersen’s brief collection of childhood episodes, where each individual episode sets the young Eleonora apart from her family, peers, and worldly comforts, the middle of her autobiography is a more sustained narrative about her life at court, which culminates in her decision to ask for her dismissal from the duchess’s services. The reason for this grave step, a step that surely would sever her permanently from the entire tradition of her family and class, from all prospects for the worldly success she could hope for as a young woman of an old though impoverished noble family, is her decision to live out her belief, to become a practitioner of true Christianity instead of being content with being a mere “listener.” Her Pietist radicalism, which entailed the rejection of any compromise with the world, and which ultimately led to her position outside any form of institutionalized religion, is prepared for obliquely. She does not, like some of her contemporaries, rant against the corruptions of the church and its members. The church and its function as a mediating institution, regulating the spiritual lives of its members while they are part of this world, is simply absent as a positive force; if present, the church is part of the compromising identifications with the world.
How then does Petersen depict her break with her life at court? First, she is careful not to portray her break as a rebellion or a critique of her surroundings. Rather than ascribing an active role to herself, she primarily portrays herself as the beneficiary of the workings of divine wisdom. Thus, at the point when her life at court is at its happiest—certainly happier and easier than her harsh childhood or her initial life with the mad countess who mistook her for her dog, beat her, and tried to drown her—just at that moment God intervenes. For when she enjoyed the lovely clothes, the dances, and the praise of both secular and religious people she was closest to taking the wrong path. She points out that people considered her a pious maiden because she liked to read, to pray, and to go to church and because she could remember sermons in great detail, whereas in actuality she “led a life that was conducted in a loving and pleasurable identification with the world, a life that had not yet taken on the true imitation of Christ” (Mahrholz 213).
Ironically, Petersen’s separation from courtly life is initiated by a marriage proposal from a not-very-pious army officer, Bretewitz. What at first sight might look like the perfect completion of her worldly trajectory becomes the occasion for her severance from the world. It reintroduces her critical distance from a worldly position, that moment of being set aside from the world that continued to mark her religious talent throughout her youth. The fact that her father accepts the proposal protects her from other suitors, puts her out of circulation. The fact that her fiancé still has to advance himself in his career buys time and provides her with an opportunity to reflect on the values and obstacles by which life in the world is staked out. She is upset and unhappy to learn that her fiancé does not lead a religious life in the army. This grief translates into her losing the taste for her own worldly achievements. She can no longer enjoy being held up as an example by noble mothers for their daughters. Her distance from her fiancé thus establishes a break between her outward behavior, its recognition, and her inner disposition. Furthermore, she is distressed by the fickleness of her fiancé, who keeps changing his mind. In this state she seeks comfort in God. As if to emphasize the divine and beneficial nature of this breaking away from courtly life, she provides a miniature narrative to illustrate the particular relationship with God. She mentions for the first time that God gave her much strength through reading the Bible and through dreams that made her talk aloud in biblical language while she was asleep. A young companion of hers who had a pious heart was distressed that she did not experience the same kind of divine attention. Eleonora consoled her companion by telling her she should look upon her as a child that is cajoled by her father with sugar; she, however had already proven herself and did not need this kind of enticement. “For I could very well see that the world was attracted to me because of my cheerful spirit. My God, however, attracted me to him through joyfulness and love, and he disclosed the word to me that my body and soul took pleasure and strength from it” (Mahrholz 214). In brief, God intervenes with special attractions, with treats that make her reject worldly temptations. The special treat, the way God spoils his child, however, is also exactly what lays the ground for her later spiritual career, her identity and authority as an inspired reader of the Bible.
Petersen describes the end of her engagement with Bretewitz as the result of the increasing conflict between her religious fervor and his efforts to find a wealthier bride, some intrigue, and a fair amount of slander. Her own position is again entirely passive, perfectly trusting in God’s providential order. The rumor and scandal over the broken engagement she portrays as God’s “wholesome examination of her soul” (Mahrholz 217). She marks the end of the engagement as a decisive step in her disengagement from the world. She does not see in it just a rejected marriage option, rather she takes it as the final irreversible disidentification with her own social class: “Thus I was freed of that burden and strengthened in the meantime, so that I no longer considered the option of marriage. I have always been aware that among the nobility there was so much abuse that was thoroughly against Christianity. First, because they have more opportunity and force in drinking. Second, that they cannot stand any kind of insult and are willing to risk their body and soul for any kind of injustice or bad word” (Mahrholz 216). She hastens to add that her principled objection to the loose lifestyle and code of honor of that particular class made her reject the idea of marriage altogether. For, although she knew some very fine people of that class, the offspring of a noble marriage “would be exposed to such danger.”
After she has decided not to marry, she is free to realize her true calling and to act on the insight that a genuine religious life would require her to leave the life at court behind. Her decision finds the support of the two famous Pietists Spener and Schütz, whom she had encountered on a journey by boat. Her departure from court, however, is narrated as a prolonged and painful phase in which she requested her dismissal and the duke and duchess tried everything to keep her. Finally, because her father is in need of her, she manages to leave.
About the six years that she spends in Frankfurt with the pious widow Maria Juliane Baur von Eyseneck, she does not provide any narrative detail. Although she mentions that she had a very cordial relationship with this woman, she does not describe her, nor does she discuss the pedagogical, instructional work with young girls that she undertook in the widow’s house.18 Likewise, about her meeting Johann Wilhelm Petersen, his proposal, and her reaction, we learn scarcely anything except the bare facts. She left the decision entirely to her father, who against her expectations actually agreed to this mésalliance with a commoner. But, the resulting slander she narrates at length. Finally, about the nature of her married life, about her husband’s dismissal from his pastoral office after the couple’s controversial cultivation of their young houseguest, the visionary Rosamunde Juliane von der Asseburg, we do not learn anything at all.19 In fact, everything Petersen chooses to narrate is related to her own stylized position as a prophet, patriarch, church father, and spiritual mother. She associates and compares herself to Moses, Abraham, Sarah, Paul, Luther, and Augustine, even to the Holy Ghost, who in Hebrew, she points out, is of feminine gender.
What emerges from this analysis of Petersen’s autobiography in its radical disidentification with the world is a model of a public persona that presents an individual interiority. Unlike some of her male counterparts, Petersen does not give us a painstaking anatomy of her inner struggles and ailments but a depiction of an increasingly isolated and autonomous self that seeks to anchor its authority and freedom in its independence from worldly comforts, attachments, and opinions exclusively in direct contact with God. The often-mentioned emotionality and sensibility of Johanna Eleonora Petersen is absent, hence we cannot project any direct trajectory to the later culture of sensibility.20 The tremendous public recognition that she nevertheless claims through her alignment with authorities from the Bible and great leaders of Christianity draws on Petersen’s reliance on a model of honor and fame that is opposed to its secular counterpart: Instead of success in mundane business, she builds her reputation on her humiliation from all the slander she had to endure. Indeed, she opens her autobiography by listing the many wrongful accusations made against her (of being mad, unchaste, a heretic, a failure at court, etc.) not in order to defend herself and clear her worldly reputation but rather in order to seek in this humiliation a kind of martyrdom that confirms her pious life as imitatio Christi. Thus all the slander functions like negative publicity as it becomes an important means by which she is transformed from an obscure impoverished young girl into a public figure. Along with seeing secular talk and slander as a badge of honor and a sign of divine distinction, pious circles then cultivated the distinction of a “nobility of virtue” (Tugendadel) as opposed to nobility by birth (Geburtsadel). Petersen’s rejection of an aristocratic marriage and lifestyle tapped into this discourse, which also leaves its traces in occasional remarks by Reitz.21 In this context, however, it is important to remember that in spite of this at times quite strident critique of the nobility, early Pietist culture relied heavily on support, protection, and sponsorship by born-again nobles and princes.
Finally, I would like to return to a point I made earlier with regard to the atomistic individualism of radical Pietism with its ideal of a supraconfessional impartiality that leaves little room for any kind of collectivity or solidarity that would go beyond the “virtual community” of the intimate experiential exchange between pious souls. In Reitz we found a model of a public forum that was situated in the privacy of reading in the collection of conversion narratives. Reitz envisaged the reader’s isolated self-examination in her or his attention to the various voices of the distinctly different believers. In Petersen’s autobiography, apart from her reference to the conversation with the two eminent Pietists who confirmed her decision to break with her life at court, there is only one other episode that deals with an experience of community. It is the narrative of her husband and herself having the same experience of divine inspiration. She recounts that it was in the historically charged year of 1685, the year of Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which led to the massive persecution of the Huguenots, that she gained her first significant access to an understanding of the apocalypse. For a long time she had avoided reading this difficult book, until accidentally her eyes fell on the Revelation of John 1:3: “Blessed is he who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written therein; for the time is near.” She took this verse as encouragement, prayed ardently to God for his assistance, and when she then read the book she felt as if her heart was penetrated by the light of God and she understood everything she had read. She was also able to connect what she was reading with many other relevant biblical passages. In order not to forget these she wrote them down. Then she went to her husband and told him:
“Look what our dear God has revealed to me in the holy Revelation.” He took the sheet into his hand in order to read and was startled by it and handed to me the sheet of paper he had written on, and on it still wet, written in the same hour, I could find all the foundations that also stood on my sheet of paper, and he said to me: “The Lord has truly revealed to you what he has revealed to me, go on, after some time we shall show to each other what the Lord will reveal to us.” And this is what happened. When I showed something to him that the Lord had revealed to me, he demonstrated how the same had been revealed to him; equally, when he would bring something to me I would have already received the same.
(Mahrholz 237)
This episode summarizes some of the salient points about Petersen’s construction of her public persona as an inspired visionary and traditional prophet. She is careful to remove her visions from their potential association with a subjective experience, to present herself as a pure medium who has a particular relationship to reading and writing. Her visions are generally not just based on supernatural sights; rather they are in most cases dreams that provide her with keys for an interpretation of a biblical passage by which she resolves a difficult theological problem related to eschatological questions. In the passage quoted here, she provides a narrative that offers a quasi-scientific empirical model for her prophetic observer position and demonstrates that she and her husband are both tuned into the same station from which they receive the same messages. This model emphasizes the externality and objectivity of the source of her divine inspiration. The fact that husband and wife are receiving these messages simultaneously but separately distinguishes their source from a joint hallucination, a folie à deux. Like the scientist who conducts an experiment that must be repeatable by another subject, her experience of divine inspiration is repeatable by her husband. The identity of their results proves the objectivity and validity of their divinely inspired notes. She and her husband serve as each other’s control groups.
And yet, obviously, as closely as this model of herself as a medium and visionary fuses the position of the traditional prophet with the model of the Enlightened modern scientific observer, there is, on the other hand, an entire spectrum of both mystical traditions and modern scientific traditions that is excluded from this experimental model: the rich and complex nature of perception and sensation as well as her own embodiedness is strangely elided in the entire autobiography. The fact that Petersen does not portray her marriage as the meeting of true soulmates, and that she chooses to depict their joint reception of divine inspirations as isolated, separate dictations, again highlights the distance of this phase of Pietist culture from the later culture of sensibility, with its attention to forms of identification with another human being as a similarly embodied, feeling, sensate creature and with its celebration of empathy and pity as the guiding values for any form of solidarity and community. Nevertheless, this portrait is unbalanced in its emphasis on what is lacking. In the Pietist avoidance of what some Pietists would have called a “sinful sentimentality,” there is not only the absence of the writer’s sympathy with others but there is also the avoidance of self-stylization as a victim. To put it more positively, Pietist confessional discourse of the early Enlightenment develops the option of a radical individualism that is devoid of an emphatic subjectivity, but that supports the Pietist model of the authenticity of faith as an individualized experience. It thereby gains an impartiality and tolerance toward others who cannot be judged by external forms and doctrine insofar as it also refuses sectarian camps.
With this overview over the nature of Pietist confessional discourse and this discussion of some of the salient features of Johanna Petersen’s spiritual autobiography I hope to have made a case both for the importance of Pietism for Enlightenment culture as well as for the differences between the confessional discourse of Pietism and the later eighteenth-century development of autobiography as an author’s biography. On the one hand, we could see how the valorization of individual religious experience as the prime motivation for a spiritual reawakening and the uncontestable source of the individual’s belief provided the grounds for a certain indifference toward official doctrine, which could encourage both tolerance toward other believers, even other religions, as well as distrust of the institutionalized aspects of religion and its authorities. On the other hand, however, we could also see how the widely popular confessional narratives refrained from self-stylization but rather were presented as witness accounts to the workings of Providence as well as invitations for self-scrutiny and self-observation. The fact of their publication was not an issue of making their conversion narrative available to a larger audience as an individual, subjective message, but merely as one of many testimonies and cases against which individual readers would be able to hold their own subjective experience. They neither called for sympathy nor admiration but imitation. The examination of Johanna Petersen’s spiritual autobiography showed both the potential and the limits for the transformation of confessional discourse into an author’s biography. Clearly, Petersen goes beyond the confessional discourse of her contemporaries and uses her spiritual autobiography to motivate her position as an especially devout religious practitioner who has an exceptional connection with the workings of divine grace as well as a special access to understanding and interpreting Scripture. To the extent that she uses the account of her personal experiences to legitimate her authority as a religious author she quite consciously goes back to Augustine’s Confessions. However, in distinction to Augustine, she never presents her autobiographical account as a prayer, addressed to God, but rather chooses the form of the defense of her reputation, of demonstrating through her personal narrative and authentic account her exclusive devotion to a religious life through her utter disregard of worldly norms and expectations. In this regard, Rousseau’s Confessions, as a secular autobiography and author’s biography, can be seen to build on this attention to the disregard for worldly norms and audience expectations. For Rousseau, too, promotes his authorial autonomy by proving his independence from social norms by narrating in great detail—in that sense like Johanna Petersen—the tale of his disidentification with the world, his independence from what others thought of him. But, before turning to Rousseau’s Confessions and its vexed relationship to various kinds of audiences, I shall first turn to “The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar,” in Rousseau’s Émile. I will discuss this text in view of its specific form, the intimate dialogue between two friends, and its content, the discourse about an individual’s relationship toward religious belief that is grounded in the subjective experience of an individual as well as careful rational reflection and its generic signpost provided by the title, namely the claim that the text will provide the equivalent of a “credo.” In other words, before turning to Rousseau’s Confessions, I shall analyze how, within the context of his semifictionalized pedagogical treatise Émile, Rousseau “stages” his position toward religion and official doctrine.