There are many Jacob's and many troubles. they sum supernatural and natural. They confront gods and men. Jacob has a blessing and a name change too, and Jacob names a nation and a succession of peoples who conform more or less to the onset when Jacob emerged from the womb ahold of his twin brother's heel. Hartman calls Jacob was a heel, a low class way of saying he was a trickster, but he was a doublerin his ways and so continued. The troubles of Jacob get to the east coast of America, imported to Philadelphia in the Mennonite and Reformed Palatinate refugee colonists recruited by Wm Penn to settle Pennsylvania, which people began to settle in and around Germantown from the 1680s. Since the dominant English ran Pennsylvania and feared the arrival of so many foreign tongues they took lists of names and identity when they landed. These are the ship lists. To extrapolate foreigners further, they brought the supernatural with them in many religious enthusiasms that prevailed in that early territory. There was already supernatural in New England, but restrained, and controled. These extreme outbursts of energy and artistic endeavor fueled combat. There is always a sense of the battling shepherds of renaissance epic writers like Spenser's Colin Clout in the whole of the U.S.
These Palatinates can be generally called Pietists, which has its own definition in literature one can access, but it means more Jacob, living out the Bible, Jacob's Ladder and Jacob's Dream and of course Jacob's Trouble. So these people took the Bible to heart that said "there were shepherds abiding in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night, and the angel of the Lord appeared with acclamation and announcement of the birth of the one who would save the world." They took themselves as the sheep, looked over by shepherd angels. Because of this the diversity and intensity of practices in what the New England colony north in Boston called wilderness, was not taken by them not as fearful but as blessing. A first arrival, John Kelpius found three wildernesses, Barren wilderness, Fruitful wilderness, and the Wilderness of the Elect of God (Letter to Hester Palmer, 86f) of Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist, Jesus the Messiah, David, and Paul—all of the Wilderness—that “God has always prepared his most eminent instruments in the wilderness, ”The valley of Achor."Kelpius this in the "restitution of all things," (Diarium 81), as "the birth of eternities." Childhood and manhood may both consist of the second state, called Ecstasies, Revelations, Inspirations, Illuminations, Inspeakings, Prophesies, Apparitions, Changing of Minds, Transfigurations, Paradisaical Representations by voices, Melodies and Sensations by the perception" by Kelpius
Georg Conrad Beissel emigrated from Germany in early years of the 18 th century, intending to join Johannes Kelpius and his utopian community at their settlement alongside Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia. Beissel was unaware that Kelpius had died some years prior, but he stayed on for a time, associating with surviving members of the Kelpius community before moving on to establish Ephrata Cloister on the Cocalico Creek in Lancaster County. The two communities –Ephrata Cloister and The Chapter of Perfection – are spiritually interrelated, with Ephrata also the repository for the compositions and hymns written by Kelpius and his followers, along with related archival materials.
As has been said the modeled it and forged it on the forge and turned it into a garden in their thoughts and lives, rather opposite New England and not due primarily to the climate and the soil as to the predisposition they brought to it in the pietism in the classic translated from the Dutch from 1741 that they read in German like Die wandlende Seel or The Wandering Soul, and wahren Christentum (1605) True Christianity, often compared with Jakob Boehme as "an experiential sanctification of life, a certain holiness mysticism" (Gameo) handed down in the families from 18th century Pennsylvania to the 21st when this is written. These inspired much adherence and pleasure. Later translated to English they were also read, but not as intently. Original copies held by these Jacobs and the children inscribed with their names, sometimes by known figures in the ancient history of Mennonite PA should be acknowledged for the principled stands against slavery and violence, the earliest founding of schools orphanage and graveyards, the care of the poor that these first Mennonites of the frontier founded, an ethical sense that stands apart from the domination of rest of the world. They kept to themselves mostly and pursued peace. At the first it was called the new world, which suited the religious frenzy of the supernatural to the heavenly thought in the earthly way. Jacob in conflict with the world and practically everyone in the world from his precarious ways has a literature all to himself that tends to creative extremes in such works as have been put into the minds of new Israel in its founding, so can be explored in Memoir of Angels (2022) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982342152?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860
With this small introduction we proceed to the Jacobs of our subject in Pennsylvania, that is to the Jacobs and the Conrads who seem to recapitulate over and over in succeeding generations of repeated pietists and secularists, Bishops and liberitarians. In the end we will see light in their faces.
The Jacob and Conrad here are brothers in a family of the five children born to Hans George Reiff and Anna Maria Landes. All of these are significant in themselves and bear mention along the way, but the main topic here are these two brothers who have the distinct mention as founders and destroyers of two different religions, Jacob of the Reformed, Conrad of the New Born.
No comments:
Post a Comment