Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata
by Jeff Bach
Georg Conrad Beissel (1691–1768),1 founder of the Ephrata community, wrote to a friend in Heidelberg in the mideighteenth century, "I wish in all my expressions to be understood magically and mystically."2 A German immigrant, Henry Ezechiel Sangmeister (1724–86), had arrived at Ephrata a few years earlier, in the spring of 1748. Later antagonistic to Beissel, Sangmeister recounted, "I committed myself to his [Beissel’s] prayers at all times, but he used a style of language that I could not understand."3 By 1762, Peter Miller (1710–96), heir apparent to leadership at Ephrata, wrote in a hymnal preface that there was at Ephrata "a language among the people of God" that few speak anymore, and "those who speak it are hard to understand."4
On first encountering Ephrata’s writings, readers often puzzle over the mix of erotic and religious metaphors abounding in the community’s voluminous devotional literature, letters, hymns, and poetic texts. This book investigates the eighteenth-century Sabbatarian monastic community at Ephrata through their religious language and its European sources as the primary, but not sole, avenue of interpretation. This book proposes that Conrad Beissel and others at Ephrata used familiar elements from German Radical Pietism to create a language and ritual practices to convey a mystical awareness of God. The concept of a mystical awareness of God comes from Bernard McGinn’s definition of mysticism as an anticipation and awareness of God’s immediate presence among those seeking it. Part of the purpose for what may be called Ephrata’s mystical language was to draw adherents into a linguistic labyrinth of delight mingled with penitence. Beissel’s labyrinth invited followers to "lose" earthly attachments in order to find God in what Beissel promoted as a foretaste of paradise. While not all at Ephrata shared Beissel’s views, nor did all find God or paradise at Ephrata, Beissel’s language so shaped the ways in which many conducted their lives there that his mystical language is a key to interpreting Ephrata. Many people at Ephrata sought to be united with Christ in mystical union, like the turtledoves frequently found in pairs in Ephrata’s art. The writers gave voice to Ephrata’s language for the quest of each soul to be joined to Christ, like a pair of turtledoves.
The Ephrata community, or Ephrata Cloister, was called by its own members der Lager der Einsamen, or Camp of the Solitaries. German-speaking contemporaries often called them Beisselianer (Beisselites) or Siebentäger (Sabbatarians). Their internal history, Chronicon Ephratense, published in 1786, is an important, but not always reliable, source of information about them. The Chronicon was edited by Peter Miller under the pseudonym Agrippa, and published in 1786, but was based on a manuscript chronicle reportedly kept by Jacob Gaas, or Brother Lamech, who died in 1764. An English translation by J. Max Hark, published in 1889, has made the chronicle more accessible.5 The name Ephrata first appeared in print in 1736, in a hymnal for the community.6 Beissel reportedly bestowed the name around this time. Ephrata was a Protestant Sabbatarian community of Christian mystical devotion and practice. With celibate orders for women and men and a congregation of married families, known collectively as the "householders," the community flourished from about 1730 to about 1770. The community began as Beissel became leader of a Brethren, or Dunker [Neu-Täufer] congregation in Pennsylvania in 1724, then formally separated from them by rebaptizing some of his followers in 1728. In 1732 he withdrew to the banks of Cocalico Creek. Members soon followed, and there they built up a religious community that peaked at about three to five hundred members and associates around mid-century. In addition to building large monastic houses and chapels, the community developed an important milling center and established a printing press by 1745. They created the first examples in Pennsylvania of the manuscript art known as Fraktur and printed the largest book produced in colonial America. Beissel wrote the first treatise on music composition produced in the colonies.
Because of these significant achievements in colonial America, the Ephrata community has invited various interpretations. The relatively few who have written about Ephrata have often defined the community either in light of mysticism or as a sectarian group. The portrait of Ephrata provided here, drawn from all major printed writings by its members as well as from manuscripts, music books, and architectural works, focuses on the unique religious language and ritual of this distinctive community, virtually unknown beyond the circle of regional interest.
The Problem of Ephrata
Mysticism is a compelling approach to the study of Ephrata for several reasons. Ephrata writers themselves identified their writings as "mystical," such as Beissel’s Mystische und sehr geheyme Sprueche (1730), the Mistisches und Kirchliches Zeuchnüß (1743), and Sangmeister’s Mystische Theologie (1819–20). Those who deeply influenced Conrad Beissel, such as Jacob Boehme7 and Johann Georg Gichtel,8 who published Boehme’s complete works, have been described as mystics.
A working definition of the mystical element of Christianity, offered by Bernard McGinn, is that part of its belief and practices that concerns the preparation for, the consciousness of, and the reaction to what can be described as the immediate or direct presence of God. Many writers emphasize religious experience and union with God as the defining characteristics of mysticism. Acknowledging the importance of the particular religions in which one discusses mysticism, Bernard McGinn is one scholar who has allowed the possibility of comparative studies of mystical elements among religions.9
"Mysticism" as a noun appeared in Christianity only in the seventeenth century, in French as la mystique, as Michel de Certeau has shown.10 Without defining mysticism as such, Certeau examined it through literary criticism. He called it a discipline, "mystics," in which received language was used in a new way. Certeau saw the new discipline emerging as the received tradition of perceived religious and political unity, cosmological and religious order, fractured in the early modern era.
According to Certeau, "mystics" as a discipline "had to determine its procedure and define its object" as it charted a new verbal topography and new procedures. While practitioners could counsel how to journey in the mystical way, they could not define the journey’s object: the Divine Other. Certeau believed that this impossibility doomed the discipline to die "of the question from which it was formed." The mystic discipline disappeared at the close of the seventeenth century as the Enlightenment ushered in a new assurance of knowledge emptied of God. As Certeau admits, however, the "ghost" of mystical discourse persisted in places where the Enlightenment’s triumph was delayed. Ephrata was such a place.11
The contributions that McGinn and Certeau make to defining mysticism advance the examination of Ephrata beyond two earlier efforts by John Jacoby and F. Ernest Stoeffler. The earlier work, Jacoby’s Two Mystic Communities in America, is a vague comparison of Ephrata with Oneida.12 Stoeffler’s Mysticism in the German Devotional Literature of Colonial Pennsylvania sets Ephrata in context with other religious groups and publications in colonial Pennsylvania. A pioneering effort, Stoeffler’s work defined mysticism as "the total complex of efforts which man has made and is making towards the immediate apprehension of the divine, and whatever may be the results of this experience in daily life." Stoeffler, however, applied this definition almost totally to mystical experience.13 A few samples illustrate the importance of mystical expressions as characteristic of Ephrata’s literature. Beissel wrote, "God is an incomprehensible Nothing, and I am an incomprehensible ‘I.’" Those seeking God will suffer "until all Being is dissolved into Being Nothing, and all Something is dissolved into Nothing." Beissel explained, "So we live in his [God’s] holy Being: his life is our life, and we have become in him, that we are what we are."14 A devotion written probably by Sister Bernice (Maria Heidt) counseled any seeking sister to direct herself singly and solely to Christ. "First then can complete union happen with her holy husband, Jesus, her heavenly bridegroom."15 These examples, and others to follow, show that Ephrata authors created a mystical literature, and that inquiring about mysticism at Ephrata can bear fruit in efforts to interpret the community and its literature.
While the study of mysticism offers a fitting interpretive tool for Ephrata, its members’ efforts to form a distinct community invite attention to the sociological dimension of relationships with their neighbors. Ernst Troeltsch’s typology of church, sect, and mystics, while formative for the study of small, distinct religious groups, has limitations.16 Ephrata fits many of his characteristics of a "sectarian" group. Yet their use of the vocabulary of mysticism suggests that Ephrata is a hybrid in Troeltsch’s typology. Bryan Wilson has tried to sharpen the sociological typology of sectarian groups, but Ephrata’s literature, ritual, and material culture are too complex to fit neatly within his precise categories.17
Nevertheless, Ephrata writers used the dichotomy of sect and church. They turned "sect"in its pejorative sense on its head by applying it against the Christian traditions established on the European continent. The community’s confession of faith stated: "There is a difference between the Church and a sect. A sect gives birth to itself from the will of a man and in general is conducted under the same man, and is ruled with human understanding. The Church may be compared to a woman; submission is characteristic of woman, just as ruling is characteristic of a man."18
One obvious problem with defining a "sect" is the power behind those doing the defining. Those who control the definition control the placement of dissenters. The Ephrata community clearly conceived of themselves as "Church." But their concept of "Church" differed radically from the religious bodies that upheld European Christendom. Ephrata considered the two major Protestant traditions to be sects, founded by two men, Martin Luther and John Calvin. Beissel also considered Roman Catholicism a sect dominated by male will.19 Thus Ephrata construed the meaning of "sect" in ways different from the dominant Christian traditions of Europe, even as those traditions saw groups like Ephrata as sects.
Bryan Wilson also holds that all sects presuppose varying responses to a world that is seen as evil. Here he sets the sect not against a dominant church but against the world, another common dichotomy in studies of sectarian movements. Conrad Beissel saw the world as divided between two opposing races (Geschlechte): "the children of God and the children of the course of this world [Kinder dieses Weltlaufs]."20 Attending to Ephrata’s relationship with the people around them adds a helpful comparative dimension to an interpretation of Beissel’s group. In this book, references to Ephrata as a sectarian group means a small group with a fairly specific identity, at times cohesive, at times contentious, in distinction to yet never isolated from the people surrounding them.
This work focuses on the religious language of Conrad Beissel and colonial Ephrata as one manifestation of Christian mysticism and on the European sources of Beissel’s thought. At times the tools of theology, at times insights from literary theory help to focus on the way Ephrata’s authors operated with their unique language and set of rituals in their search for the presence of God. Sociological considerations of the construction of a small group, or sect, in distinction to dominant religious bodies and the wider culture, also help here to put Ephrata in profile. The methodology of this work also draws on interdisciplinary insights from the study of gender and in limited ways from the study of architecture and folk art. No single methodology can say everything about Ephrata; neither can this book. For present purposes, this book examines colonial Ephrata as a community of mystical Christianity, whose unique language for the search for the immediate presence of God influenced choices about how its members organized their lives, their space, and their time.
Historical Overview
Georg Conrad Beissel was born March 1, 1691 in Eberbach, in the Electoral Palatinate, the tenth child of a baker, Matthias Beusel (also spelled Beisel), who died before Conrad’s birth. Matthias received the privilege of town baker for three-year terms in 1683, 1686, and 1689. In 1683 the family rented living quarters in the "town bakehouse behind the church." Matthias died September 19, 1690.21 Conrad’s mother, Anna Köbler Beusel, died May 28, 1699, when he was eight. Bedfast, five days before her death she received four gulden from church alms because "the poverty of this widow and her children is so great."22 Orphanhood and poverty are repeated themes in Beissel’s later writing.23
Upon the death of Matthias Beusel, his older brother, Johannes Beusel (1627–1710), intervened on behalf of the family. Johannes was a mayor (Schultheis) and Reformed schoolmaster in the nearby town of Strümpfelbrunn. 24 Johannes Beusel appealed to the Eberbach town council to permit his son Justus to succeed Matthias Beusel as the town baker so that Matthias’s widow and children could continue to live in their quarters. The council appointed Justus, replacing the interim town baker, and Matthias’s family apparently stayed on in their home.25 The aged uncle Johannes Beusel may have influenced Conrad’s understanding of the Reformed faith.
Eberbach, on the Neckar, was part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, comprising more than 250 provinces and territories. Southwestern Germany had not recovered from the sufferings of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which had effectively paralyzed population growth, economic development, and social mobility for decades.26 Germany lacked the stimulation that enabled many other European nations to recover from the war. Germany had no ties to territories that could provide natural resources or serve as export markets. Foreign investors shied away from Germany. Multiple coinage, customs barriers, and a lack of an effective communication network hindered Germany’s economic recovery.27
Agriculture suffered in Germany during these years of hardship. Generally grain prices fell during most of the seventeenth century into the second quarter of the eighteenth. Slow population growth in Germany tended to keep demand for agricultural products low, while the calamities of war and bad harvests reduced supplies. In the second half of the eighteenth century, population grew, keeping pace with gains made in the amount of cultivated land and yields. Thus the nutritional level of the general population remained poor and even deteriorated in the second half of the eighteenth century. When Beissel was born, the Electoral Palatinate suffered further from the depredations of the Nine Years’ War (or War of the Grand Alliance), 1688–97. The war began after Louis XIV made a dynastic claim to the Electoral Palatinate. Eventually German princes, the Dutch, the Austrian Habsburgs, and finally the English and the Spanish joined in the Grand Alliance to confine Louis. Both France and the Grand Alliance hired as many as thirty thousand Swiss soldiers, who ended up fighting each other on different sides of the war.
Louis XIV torched the Palatinate during his retreat across it in 1688. In 1693 the French burned Heidelberg and bombarded its castle. The winters of 1693–95 were particularly cold, reducing the food supply. When the Peace of Rijswijk (1697) ended the war, political boundaries were left about where they had been in 1679. Louis abandoned his claim to the Palatinate but kept an eye out for the successor to Spain’s childless Habsburg king, Charles II. When Charles II died in 1700, Louis supported the monarch’s last will, which favored Louis’s grandson Philip of Anjou as successor to the Spanish throne. Louis moved troops into the Spanish Netherlands in 1701, precipitating the War of the Spanish Succession. The Dutch, English, Austrians, and Prussians forged a new alliance against the Sun King. Once again the Palatinate straddled Louis’s warpath. In 1703, first French, then English troops afflicted the Palatinate. In 1707 the French pillaged the Palatinate, Württemberg, and Baden again. Treaties in 1713–14 ended the war.28
As war tore the Electoral Palatinate repeatedly during these years, Conrad Beissel grew into early adulthood. Although Ephrata’s internal history, the Chronicon Ephratense, suggests that Conrad "led a sorry life" after his mother’s death, Beissel himself wrote of a "godly youth" during which he strove for "utmost purity." Elsewhere, however, he described himself as a "berry fallen from the vine of Sodom."29 Even if he were interested in religion at an early age, Beissel was surely also vulnerable to the temptations of youth.
Beissel was reportedly apprenticed as a youth to a baker, and supposedly he also learned to fiddle. The Ephrata chronicle recounts time spent as a journeyman in Strasbourg and in Mannheim. Beissel reportedly worked in Mannheim for a baker named Kantebecker. When Beissel spurned the romantic advances of his master’s wife, the young man was sent away.30 The Chronicon’s suggestion that Beissel lived in Strasbourg and Mannheim after his conversion is probably out of sequence.31 Sometime before 1715, Beissel landed in Heidelberg as a journeyman for a baker named Prior. Beissel thanked him thirty-eight years later for his efforts when Beissel left the city under difficult conditions, perhaps even expulsion.32
The vast majority of Germans at this time were rural and poor, with varying social patterns according to town and territory. At the bottom of the social scale were cottagers and day workers, who subsisted from day to day. The economic hardships of the eighteenth century swelled the ranks of these poor. Just above them were the peasants, with varying amounts of land. Those who could not subsist from their land often adopted a secondary occupation, such as some kind of artisan work.33 The merchants who sold their wares often instigated this cottage work, also known as the putting-out system. 34 A whole family might share aspects of the supplemental work, which was often spinning and weaving. These rural artisans were outside guild membership and regulations. Because they were always vulnerable to market fluctuations, an economic crisis might force them to move. This combination of artisan work and some agricultural work was not uncommon in southwestern Germany in the early eighteenth century.
In the cities, guilds controlled much of the lives of artisans who attained the rank of master of a trade. These households made up the urban lower class (Kleinbürgertum). To these households also belonged journeymen and apprentices. Guilds rigidly controlled admission of new members and competed for political influence.This system maintained social stratification and economic stagnation in German cities throughout much of the eighteenth century, postponing the arrival of industrialization.35 These conditions shaped Conrad Beissel’s childhood and early adulthood.
Beissel experienced a religious conversion in a Pietist group in Heidelberg in 1715, according to his letters and the Chronicon.36 Pietism was a renewal movement within Protestantism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in its German manifestation typically credited to Philipp Jakob Spener, who introduced small-group meetings, collegia pietatis, for edification in his Frankfurt congregation in 1670. Small-group meetings had already been used in the Dutch Reformed renewal movement known as the nadere reformatie, or further (or second) reformation. The nadere reformatie, like German Pietism in general, sought a completion of the Reformation in moral improvement and devotion to match the sixteenth-century reform of doctrine. A German Reformed pastor, Theodor Undereyck, had introduced the use of small groups in Mühlheim in 1665, unbeknownst to Spener.37 To the use of small groups Spener added a renewed eschatology, "the hope of better times to come" (die Hoffnung künftigen besseren Zeiten).38 Johannes Wallmann has named the small groups and eschatology as the defining marks of Lutheran Pietism. Pietism was characterized by a strong interest in ethical behavior and reliance on the Bible. Some Pietist authors stressed an affective response to one’s awareness of justification by faith. August Hermann Francke, who established the education and charity center at Halle, popularized the idea that the struggle of repentance (Bußkampf) was necessary before one could break through to an awareness of forgiveness.39
A more mystically inclined member of Spener’s Frankfurt congregation, Johann Jakob Schütz, embraced a more radical eschatological hope and more separatist outlook. He eventually led a dissatisfied group out of Spener’s congregation; they became known as the Saalhof circle.40 This was the beginning of Radical Pietism, a strongly separatist wing of the Pietist movement.41 During the 1690s, many Radical Pietists sharpened their eschatology to the point of expecting Christ’s return in the new century. Many of these separatists doubted that any faithful church could exist, and consequently some pursued their faith outside of the churches of Christendom.42 Small Pietist groups, whether in or outside the church, met for mutual encouragement with no clergy present. Their efforts for renewal and their private meetings were sometimes perceived as a threat to the established church system, and some rulers suppressed them.
Pietism was part of a stream of religious renewal in Europe, responding to the doctrinal precision of Protestant Orthodoxy and the triumph of the Catholic reclamation in Europe, or Counter-Reformation. Ted Campbell has called this stream of religious renewal in Catholicism and Protestantism a "religion of the heart," emphasizing experiential faith and affective response to it, as well as ethical improvement and outreach in mission and charity. This renewal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries spawned Pietism in the Reformed tradition in the Netherlands and in the Lutheran faith in German lands, Denmark, and Sweden, and contributed to the Evangelical Awakening in Great Britain, with leaders such as George Whitefield and the Wesleys. In Catholicism this "religion of the heart" found expression in Jansenism, Quietism, and renewed devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.43 This religious renewal flowed through the Baroque era, with its emphasis on emotional response in art, architecture, and music.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Radical Pietism spread to the Palatinate. In June 1701 in Lambsheim, near Mannheim, a day laborer named Matthias Baumann (d. 1727) experienced religious visions over a fiveday period. Baumann believed God commissioned him to preach repentance before the impending final judgment.44 He stopped attending the Reformed Church and worshiped with local Mennonites. After arrests in 1702 and 1706, Baumann emigrated to Pennsylvania and founded a small group, the Neu-geboren (the Newborn) in the Oley Valley, in present-day Berks County. Baumann reportedly visited Conrad Beissel some years later in the Conestoga region, preaching sinless perfection. While Baumann expounded, Beissel told him to smell his own excrement and see if that pertained to perfection.
Pietist activity in the Palatinate quickly heated up as itinerant laymen came preaching repentance. The separatist Johann Georg Rosenbach preached in 1703 to about one hundred at a home in Heidelberg, and then in Mannheim.45 In 1706 the itinerant Radical Pietist Hochmann von Hochenau made a circuit in the Palatinate, probably at the invitation of Alexander Mack. The son of a wealthy miller and member of the Schriesheim town council, Mack had already sold his interest in the family mill to his brother that year. Their father died that summer.46 When a Schriesheim official broke up Hochmann’s preaching service there in August 1706, the group scattered. Eleven of Hochmann’s followers went to Zuzenhausen, near Heidelberg, where they stayed with Hans Bechtold, a Mennonite, who also claimed to be a Pietist.47 Hochmann surfaced in Mannheim in September and was arrested there. The punishment of forced labor on the city fortifications turned into open-air preaching services that aroused sympathy among Mannheim citizens. Meanwhile, Mack moved his family to Schwarzenau, a tiny village in Wittgenstein, where the ruling family, known for Pietist sympathies, welcomed religious dissenters. Hochmann had already preached the return of Christ in the spring of 1700 in Berleburg, the seat of government for Wittgenstein.
Pietist activity continued in and around Heidelberg. On May 1, 1708, a group of men were arrested in Schriesheim for holding unsupervised religious meetings. One of them was Alexander Mack’s father-in-law, Johann Valentin Kling, an elder in the Reformed parish and member of the town council.48 Another person in the group, Esbert Bender, was a wool spinner originally from Herborn, recently a resident of Heidelberg. Bender later joined the Neu- Täufer, then later moved to Ephrata.49 During questioning Kling named among the friends of his group one Johann Adam Haller, former clerk of the Reichskammer. Another friend was a baker from Frankenthal named Schatz, who with his wife and her brother had fled the Palatinate after being arrested for holding devotional meetings.50
Jacob Schatz, a native and master baker of Frankenthal, had experienced "awakening" as a result of Hochmann’s preaching in 1707. Schatz later recounted that "the pastors and guild leaders all together wanted to persecute" those awakened by Hochmann. In 1708 Schatz and three others moved to Düdelsheim, in the Marienborn region of Isenburg.51 Isenburg was also a Reformed territory, its ruling family related by marriage to the ruling family in Wittgenstein and somewhat hospitable to religious dissenters. Jacob Schatz and his wife later gave Conrad Beissel lodging.
Some of Kling’s group were arrested again in 1709, this time with two brothers, Johann Georg and Nicholaus Diehl. They named among their friends a certain Johann Adam Haller, a student, and Anna Maria Pastoir, wife of the Heidelberg professor Philipp Ludwig Pastoir, although she had not attended their meetings.52 The Chronicon later named a Haller, the brothers Diehl, and Mrs. Pastoir as members of the group in which Beissel experienced conversion in 1715. Julius Sachse claimed without documentation that Beissel’s Heidelberg Pietist circle was a Rosicrucian chapter.53 The unlikeliness of this claim will become clear in Chapter 7.
Beissel’s Heidelberg friends probably knew the thought and perhaps the writings of Jacob Boehme, the German visionary and spiritualist. The Haller in their circle may be the Haller with whom Johann Georg Gichtel corresponded; at least Ephrata’s chronicle identifies him as such. Gichtel published Boehme’s full corpus of writings in Amsterdam and popularized Boehme to Radical Pietists in Germany and to the Philadelphian Society. The Philadelphian Society grew out of a network of readers of Boehme in England, under the leadership of Jane Leade. The German branch of the Philadelphian Society similarly grew from among Boehme’s readership. Johann Wilhelm Petersen and his wife, Eleanora von Merlau Petersen, a member of the Saalhof separatists in Frankfurt, were leaders of the Philadelphian group in Germany. Publications by Leade and her associates John Pordage and Thomas Bromley were quickly translated into German and printed on the continent. The two branches carried on a lively correspondence.54 Gichtel was one of many important links between them. It is probable that Beissel’s Pietist circle in Heidelberg knew Boehme’s thought and had some correspondence with other Boehmists.
While working as a baker with Prior in Heidelberg, Beissel allegedly plunged into "mathematics,"55 which may have included the numerology important in his 1728 book, Mystyrion Anomias. Numerology figured in the works of Radical Pietists such as Johann Jacob Zimmermann (1634–94) and Christian cabbalists such as Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–89). Both men influenced Johannes Kelpius (1670–1708), who led a group of hermits to Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1694. Later Beissel claimed that he immigrated to Pennsylvania partly to join the Kelpius community. In addition, the former Reformed minister and professor Heinrich Horch sought to use numerology to interpret symbolic numbers in the Bible and predict Christ’s return.56
In Heidelberg, Beissel encountered legal trouble for his religious activity. Conflict within the bakers’ guild may have contributed to his troubles, perhaps leading to arrest. His final sermon in Geistliche Reden claimed explicitly that he was expelled from the Palatinate. His letters indicate that he must have left Heidelberg around 1718. Beissel remembered the Palatinate with both love and loathing. He referred to his departure as his "orphanhood," his loss of his fatherland compounding the bitter grief of losing his parents. Yet he also prophesied its utter destruction for rejecting him.57
Beissel fled from Heidelberg to Düdelsheim in the Marienborn area of Isenburg (Figure 1) and found refuge with Jacob Schatz, the baker originally from Frankenthal. By the time Beissel arrived, Schatz had associated with the Community of True Inspiration and hosted meetings in his home. The Inspirationists had arisen in 1714 and were formally organized in 1715 over a controversy about false versus true inspiration. Influenced by the French Prophets, the Inspirationists believed that the Holy Spirit gave them direct revelations. One of their number, the famous physician Dr. Johann Samuel Carl, reportedly treated Beissel in Marienborn during a severe illness. Beissel visited their services, but he was moved from the adult gatherings to the children’s meetings when two young women became disturbed by his presence. He withdrew from the Inspirationists and reportedly lived for a time with Georg Stieffel. Here Beissel worked as a wool spinner and received charity from a nobleman, Junkerroth.58
Some writers have mistakenly followed Julius Sachse’s claim that Beissel went to Schwarzenau and may have met Alexander Mack. This is unlikely, because the account of Mack’s meeting with Beissel in 1730 in Pennsylvania indicates that Mack did not recognize Beissel.59 They almost surely would have met had Beissel lived in Schwarzenau before Mack left there in 1719. Also, Beissel would not have met the Neu-Täufer in Marienborn. The entire Dunker group there was expelled in 1715 for baptizing adults. Beissel arrived in Düdelsheim a few years later. While he probably did not know the Neu- Täufer personally in Europe, he surely knew about them.
Beissel’s reasons for emigrating to America in 1720 are still not completely known. He may have sought simply to escape his abject poverty, or perhaps to join a group of hermits led by Johannes Kelpius, as the Chronicon reported. The same volume claimed that two of Beissel’s friends, Georg Stieffel and Jacob Stuntz, persuaded him to emigrate with them.60 The chronicle also claimed that some tried to dissuade Beissel from emigrating. Dr. Samuel Carl allegedly encouraged Beissel to stay and maintain important friendships, but Beissel persisted.
Political events in the Palatinate may have convinced him that confessional chaos was about to break out again. Prince Elector Carl Philip succeeded his childless brother, Johann Wilhelm, in 1716, continuing the Roman Catholic Pfalz-Neuburg family line. Carl Philip recalled the Heidelberg Catechism because of its condemnation of the mass. In 1719 he claimed the Holy Spirit Church of Heidelberg for his court church, despite the settlement of 1648 allowing Reformed and Catholics to share it. The prince elector ordered the removal of an interior wall dividing the worship space and sent the Reformed congregation elsewhere. Protestant rulers reacted so strongly that, as Reginald Ward has noted, for a moment in 1719 many Protestants thought they perched on the brink of another disastrous religious war.61 This situation may have contributed to Beissel’s decision to leave Europe permanently. Conrad Beissel reportedly sailed with four friends: Georg Stieffel, Jacob Stuntz, Simon König, and Hennrich von Bebern. Stuntz reportedly paid Beissel’s passage. Beissel arrived in Boston in October 1720, on the ship Elizabeth and Hannah, and then traveled to Philadelphia. The hermit community of Johannes Kelpius (1673–ca. 1708) near Germantown had disbanded, but Beissel imbibed the views of a few surviving members, such as Conrad Matthäi. Meanwhile Beissel apprenticed himself for a year to a weaver, Peter Becker (1687–1758), in Germantown. Becker was a native of Düdelsheim, where Beissel had lived with Jacob Schatz. Becker was baptized by the Neu- Täufer in 1714. Upon their expulsion in 1715, he went with many others to Krefeld. After conflicts within the congregation there, a group emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1719, with Becker as a leader.62 However, they did not resume worship together in Pennsylvania until 1723.
Beissel and his friends followed a stream of immigrants from southwest Germany and Switzerland that began in 1683 and swelled dramatically in the decades after his arrival in Pennsylvania. Aaron Fogelman has identified three phases of German immigration to the colonies, based primarily on motivation for leaving. From 1683 to 1709, primarily religious repression drove a few hundred to emigrate. Between 1709 and 1714, the British crown actively recruited German and Swiss immigrants to help produce naval stores. Poor harvests after the harsh winter of 1709 in the Palatinate heightened the lure of the new land. Religious issues remained a factor for a minority of the few thousand emigrants in this period. The third period, 1717–75, saw by far the largest outpouring of Germans and Swiss. A few still fled religious hardship, but the overwhelming majority of the some 80,000 in this third wave sought better economic conditions. Pennsylvania, with its religious toleration, drew the majority of Germanic immigrants, although a large concentration settled in New York’s Hudson Valley.63 Beissel arrived in1720, when Pennsylvania’s non-native population numbered perhaps 100,000, about a third of them of Germanic origin. By 1730, about 4,000 African slaves were held in Pennsylvania.64
While the large majority of the Germanic immigrants in Pennsylvania belonged to Lutheran or Reformed churches, a small but significant minority adhered to one of about a dozen dissenting sectarian groups. The first German settlers, a group of Mennonites turned Quakers, mostly from Krefeld, had established Germantown, just outside of Philadelphia, in 1683. The Kelpius group arrived in 1694 and set up a short-lived separatist community on Wissahickon Creek.65 More Mennonites arrived, followed by Dunkers in 1719, then Schwenckfelders in 1734 and Moravians in 1741. Other small groups were also represented, such as the Inspirationists, the New Born of Oley, and a group in Conestoga known as New-Mooners. When Beissel came to Pennsylvania, a few hundred Mennonites and maybe fewer than fifty Dunkers represented the sectarian people.66 Other separatists found in Pennsylvania freedom to abstain from joining any religious organization. A severe shortage of clergy helped the dissenters’ situation: only four ministers were available to serve twenty-six German Reformed congregations and three Lutheran clergymen for twenty-seven congregations in 1740.67
Beissel’s decision to leave Germany reflected the mixture of motives that drove many people to emigrate after 1717. Some had experienced difficulties over religion. Many had chafed under the limitations of economic stagnation and social rigidity in Germany. Some immigrants, including many at Ephrata, had been displaced at least once before they moved to Pennsylvania. Beissel, like some Radical Pietists, was a poor artisan who probably had to apprentice himself for survival upon his arrival. In place of the uncertainties of both Europe and the frontier, the Ephrata community eventually offered to newly arriving immigrants food, assistance with shelter, and social fellowship in a language of the old country. The motifs of homelessness, orphanhood, and pilgrimage permeate Ephrata’s spirituality. Beissel often called himself one "who possesses nothing" and "on pilgrimage to silent eternity." These phrases reflect the social conditions that he and some followers experienced.68 After one year with Becker, Beissel moved to Conestoga. This region, drained by Conestoga Creek, was sparsely settled by Swiss and German Mennonites and other Protestants.69 Beissel lived somewhat as a hermit, at first sharing a household on Mill Creek (Mühlbach) with Jacob Stuntz.70 Later Stieffel joined them, as did a young man from Holland, Isaac von Bebern, probably related to the Hennrich von Bebern who emigrated with Beissel, Stuntz, and Stieffel.
In Conestoga, Beissel encountered small religious groups, some familiar, some perhaps new. Bebern, related to a Mennonite-Quaker family among the first settlers in Germantown, took Beissel in 1722 to Bohemia Manor, the fading remnant of a community of followers of Jean de Labadie in northern Maryland. Bebern had relatives there.71 Upon their return, Michael Wohlfahrt (1687–1741), a wandering Radical Pietist originally from Memel, on the Baltic (now Klaipeda, Lithuania), visited them. Thus began a relationship that later would bring Wohlfahrt back as a leader in Beissel’s congregation. The household on Mill Creek broke up in 1723 after Michael Wohlfahrt left for the Carolinas. Stuntz sold the cabin to recoup Conrad’s transatlantic fare. Alone again, Beissel moved about a mile away to a place known as Swede’s Spring. Soon Wohlfahrt rejoined him. Years later, in a letter to a friend in Mannheim, Beissel remembered thinking that in this period of relative solitude he had triumphed "in the quiet of the spirit, separate from all men, to serve my God in his holy temple."72
In the autumns of 1722 and 1723 the Neu-Täufer, or Dunkers, renewed their fellowship through visitations led by Peter Becker. The Chronicon credited Beissel for this "awakening."73 On Christmas Day, 1723, Peter Becker baptized eight people in Wissahickon Creek in Germantown and led a love feast that evening. Evangelizing and worship continued in 1724 in the backcountry. In November they organized what became the Coventry congregation near present- day Pottstown. On November 12, 1724, Becker preached in Conestoga. Five persons requested baptism. A sixth came forward as Becker administered the rite, and Beissel stepped up as the seventh and last candidate.74
Thus at the age of thirty-three Conrad Beissel received baptism among the Neu-Täufer. He brought with him the Radical Pietist longing for spiritual love among believers. He had drunk from springs of Boehmist thought in Heidelberg, mingled with Inspirationists, the loosely knit Philadelphians, the Dunker preacher Becker, adherents of Kelpius, the fading Labadists, and the Mennonites. Yet he also held the separatist distrust in organized religious groups. Many groups influenced Beissel, but he never embraced any fully. This unresolved tension ran through Beissel’s career and the Ephrata community.
The new little congregation at Conestoga chose him as their leader. Apparently Beissel already enjoyed positive regard in the area. Even a detractor such as Ezechiel Sangmeister reported years later that Conrad Beissel was greatly loved and admired among the sectarian people in Conestoga between 1721 and 1724.75 Beissel’s reputation was in part that of a prayerful, loving man. The congregation’s choice of Beissel was not unlikely.
Soon after his baptism, Beissel began to honor Saturday, the seventh day, as a personal observance of the Sabbath. He also taught that celibacy is superior to marriage. He did not require the congregation to observe the seventh day, and continued to lead worship on Sunday. The seventh-day Sabbath and celibacy, plus probably his charismatic personality, brought him into conflict with the rest of the Dunkers. Beissel’s supporters closed ranks around him. In 1725 he moved into a cabin built for him on the farm of Rudolf Nägele, formerly the Mennonite pastor in the Conestoga region, whom Beissel baptized. Other congregation members followed suit, and a nascent community began. In December 1728 Beissel led six members to reenact the baptism he had received from the Brethren four years earlier, in order to "give it back" to them. Jan Meyle, whom Becker had immersed at the first Brethren baptism in 1723, assisted Beissel. The rebaptisms in 1728 formally marked the rupture that had begun in 1725.76 Beissel evangelized and the congregation grew. Apparently a couple named Permersdorff created some internal dissent around 1728–30.77
Beissel published a booklet on the Sabbath in 1728 and another against marriage two years later. In 1730 he also published a collection of maxims and poetry and a small hymnal of mostly original texts, thus launching a career as a prolific poet. In 1732 he abruptly surrendered leadership of the congregation and moved again to solitude, this time on the banks of Cocalico Creek, a few miles away. He actually joined Emmanuel Eckerlin, who with his brothers had joined Beissel’s congregation earlier. Emmanuel had built a squatter’s cabin on the Cocalico. Soon members followed Beissel and a settlement grew. They earned fame for their charity. Celibates lived in hermit cabins, and married couples with children, or householders, settled among them. A boom of communal building began in 1735, when members built the first monastic house, called Kedar. At this time he organized the sisters into the Order of Spiritual Virgins. The celibate men were organized into the Zionitic Brotherhood around 1738, when their house, Zion, was built. They raised dormitories and chapels at the rate of almost one a year from 1735 until 1746, when Bethania and its chapel were completed. In 1740 Beissel ordered celibates still in hermit cabins to enter monastic houses;78 not all complied.
In 1735 Beissel and Wohlfahrt evangelized in the Tulpehocken region. They won the Reformed minister, Peter Miller, who had been educated at Heidelberg, and Conrad Weiser, the Indian interpreter, among others. Beissel won converts from the Germantown Dunkers in 1738, including two sons of Alexander Mack.79 He also gathered members among Welsh and English Sabbatarians. Members settled around Ephrata, creating outposts named Zoar, Massah, Hebron, and Kadesh. Zoar is today’s Reamstown (Figure 2). Beissel chose Israel Eckerlin (Brother Onesimus) as prior when Wohlfahrt (Brother Agonius) died in 1741. Probably with the help of his older brother, Samuel Eckerlin (Brother Jephune), Israel led an economic expansion by buying and building mills on the creek. They developed a lively trade with Philadelphia, and Ephrata became an important milling center on the Pennsylvania frontier.80
Around 1740, the celibate brothers requested that Beissel be called "Father" along with his self-chosen spiritual name, Friedsam Gottrecht, meaning "Peaceable, Right with God." The title of "Father" would replace the title of "Brother," used by all the celibate men. Some members, such as Johannes Hildebrand, resisted calling Beissel "Father."81
The years between 1740 and 1745 brought other conflicts. A householder, Ludwig Blum, and the sisters introduced choral singing and composition around 1740. Beissel took over the choir, however, and Blum left. In 1742 Beissel scuttled the community’s participation in the ecumenical synods led by Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. Tensions with Israel Eckerlin over leadership and the expanding economy led Beissel to expel him in 1745. Beissel’s Ephrata peaked between 1745 and 1755 with perhaps three hundred or more residents, including celibates and families. The communal economy crested just before Beissel expelled Israel Eckerlin. His expulsion may have preserved the unique religious life for the short term. Beissel reorganized the celibate orders in 1745, naming the sisters the Roses of Saron and the men the Brotherhood of Bethania. Ephrata’s unique material culture reached its zenith during these years. The scribes created some of their best manuscript art after 1745. The composition of hymn texts and tunes flourished, as did Beissel’s devotional writing. The community established its printing press in 1745, second only to Christopher Saur’s for German printing in colonial Pennsylvania.
Some turns of events presaged future decline. New converts arrived from Gimbsheim between 1749 and 1751, including several Beissel relatives. However, many of them moved on to York County, where a congregation formed on the Bermudian. A youth revival in 1748 fizzled. Several sisters died young in 1747–48.82 The Seven Years’ War (1756–63) put Ephrata in harm’s way and helped to slow immigration.
During and after the war, Beissel wrote and cycled in and out of illness. He was reportedly severely ill around 1741 and was ill again in 1762.83 Yet on three occasions around 1764 he traveled the hundred miles to the Antietam Valley, near present-day Waynesboro, to visit a new congregation, eventually Snow Hill. Ephrata residents scattered as far away as South Carolina (Figure 3), although their settlements were not intentional extensions of the community. Beissel fought his last battles with familiars. In 1764 a small party of disgruntled former residents returned from Virginia, led by Ezechiel Sangmeister and Samuel Eckerlin. Because Samuel was the last living signatory who still acknowledged his part in a joint deed to community land, his party was entitled to live on the property. A protracted legal battle finally reached the Pennsylvania Assembly, despite supposed scruples against using courts of law. At the same time, the prioress, Mother Maria Eicher, reportedly attempted to separate the sisters completely from their affiliation with the celibate brothers. Beissel deposed her around 1764, although she remained as a sister in Saron.84 Beissel failed to secure a dismissal of Eckerlin’s land claim, and he could not bring Sangmeister’s faction into conformity with community life.85 Finally, after Beissel’s death in 1768, all parties reached an agreement in 1770, allowing vowed celibates to retain the property and allowing Eckerlin and Sangmeister’s faction lodging and some food.
Sangmeister’s autobiography portrayed Beissel’s last years as rancorous and indulgent in food, drink, and sexual affairs.86 Beissel may have drunk liquor, perhaps even to inebriation, for the pain in his aging body. If Beissel was sexually involved with any women, it had to be well before his final years. Remembered as a "living skeleton til his death,"87 Beissel could hardly have had the stamina in his seventies for the lasciviousness that Sangmeister portrayed. Beissel died an old man on July 6, 1768, attended by the aging celibates.
Although Peter Miller led the declining band of celibates and Georg Adam Martin held forth at Antietam, Beissel’s death greatly dimmed the already declining fires of piety at Ephrata.88 Certainly a product of the Old World, Conrad Beissel and his associates formed a community shaped by religious views that were rooted in that world yet were impossible to realize there. Threaded through a complex network of religious connections, their religious world was strung taut by difficult social conditions that spanned Europe, England, and North America. Beissel and the Ephrata settlers could make concrete this religious vision, with its flaws, only in the toleration and economic opportunities of William Penn’s colony.
Conrad Beissel preached God’s impending destruction of European Christendom, calling believers to prepare in lives of self-denial for the coming paradise of eternity. He embodied both fiery and prayerful charisma that rarely became routine to his listeners. Beissel promised and lived a rigorous training of body and soul in anticipation of eternity. Ephrata delivered a somewhat better here-and-now by sharing economic resources and labor, providing housing, and removing celibate women from the dangers of childbirth. Those who fled to Beissel at the supposed evening of the cosmos prepared for God’s unmediated presence in what they hoped was the dawn of the eternal Sabbath.
Few, if any, could know that the hardships of the Old World would yield in Pennsylvania not to an angelic paradise but to a new colony of prosperity and toleration. Precisely that toleration allowed them to give visible form and expression to their Christian faith and practices, originally honed on the margins of Protestant dissent in Europe. They embodied this faith in one of the most singular constructions of gender identity in the American colonies.
© 2003 The Penn State University