Free The German Genius by Peter Watson Page B

around 1670, when its strong emphasis on discipline began to attract adherents who formed the view that Martin Luther’s church had itself become infected with the very corruptions it had been founded to avoid. These early Pietists sought a return to Luther’s “pristine simplicity” by “stressing the priesthood of all believers against the hierarchy, the inner light against doctrinal authority, the religion of the heart against the religion of the head…and practical acts of charity, not scholastic dispute.” 16 It should be said that there were other reasons that made Pietism attractive, especially to the political authorities. Chief among them was the fact that, in emphasizing the “inner light,” the Reformed churches, which had emerged after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, when the Papacy had lost a great deal of its worldly power, were much less of a political threat than the older, more orthodox, and more organized churches. The change to a more “internal” faith enabled the authorities to use the confessional as a way to impose a stricter moral discipline on the laity. The aims of Pietism and Friedrich Wilhelm coincided.
    Pietism was deeply influenced by English Puritanism, notable for its “intrusive moralism,” advocating that good works in this life , right here on earth, helped to determine what happened at the day of judgment. God, argued the Puritans, actually wanted people to perform good works here on earth—this was how He revealed himself. Friedrich Wilhelm was not formally a Pietist, but had grown up with a sensibility and work ethic not too dissimilar from that of the Pietists. Between 1713 and 1740, as a result of this complementarity of outlook, the king gave the Pietists unprecedented opportunities for realizing their ambitions, and these reinforced and helped legitimate the king’s fundamental restructuring of the administrative, military, and economic life of his realm. Thomas Nipperdey thought this had another effect: Protestantism was essentially pessimistic about human nature; this made it conservative and set against modernity. Such an attitude was to have momentous consequences. 17
    The first person who had called attention to the new approach was Philipp Jacob Spener, born in Alsace in 1635, in his Pia Desideria , published in 1685. 18 But it was August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) who conceived the form of Pietism that was to transform Prussia. In the 1690s Spener induced the powers that be in Berlin to appoint Pietists to two professorships on the theological faculty of the newly established University of Halle. In the eighteenth century, the University of Halle, together with the University of Göttingen, would transform ideas about learning and scholarship in Germany (and eventually across the world). Francke, born in Lübeck, had been barred from teaching in Leipzig and joined the Halle faculty as professor of Near Eastern (then called Oriental) languages and, from 1695, this gave him the position and opportunity to rethink the state’s role in the light of Pietist aims. 19
    His own earlier crisis of faith, and a “born-again” conversion, convinced him that “the cultivation of the heart,” prayer, Bible reading, heartfelt repentance, and daily introspection were the basic ingredients for a truly religious life, rather than intellectual sophistication and doctrinal wrangling. He insisted that piety was not to be sought in isolation: to fulfill the biblical injunction to love one’s neighbor, “one should seek to improve society through practical acts of charity.” 20 It was a short step to Francke’s view that vocational labor must become the main sphere of activity through which Pietists could serve their fellow citizens. 21 Theologically, Francke’s approach was quite daring: he justified such activism by arguing that the Creation “could be improved upon,” moreover that this improvement must form the central plank in the individual’s quest for salvation.