1. The historical
coordinates
We give the name
“pietism” to a phenomenon in church life
which certainly has a particular historical
and “confessional” starting point, but also
has much wider ramifications in the
spiritual life of all the Christian
Churches.
Pietism made its
appearance as a distinct historical movement
within Protestantism, at the end of the
seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth
centuries, around 1690-1730.
1
Its aim was to stress “practical piety,” as
distinct from the polemical dogmatic
theology to which the Reformation had
initially given a certain priority.2
Against the intellectualist and abstract
understanding of God and of dogmatic truth,
pietism set a practical, active piety (praxis
pietatis): good works, daily
self-examination for progress in virtues
according to objective criteria, daily study
of the Bible and practical application of
its moral teaching, intense emotionalism in
prayer, a clear break with the “world” and
worldly practices (dancing, the theatre,
non-religious reading); and tendencies
towards separatism, with the movement
holding private meetings and distinguishing
itself from the “official” Church.3
For pietism, knowledge
of God presupposes the “rebirth” of man, and
this rebirth is understood as living up to
the moral law of the Gospel and as an
emotional experience of authoritative
truths.4
Pietism presents itself as a mystical piety,
and ultimately as a form of opposition to
knowledge; as “adogmatism,” in the sense
that it ignores or belittles theological
truth, or even as pure agnosticism cloaked
in morality.5
Under different forms
and in various “movements,” it has not
ceased to influence Protestantism, and
indeed also the spiritual life of other
churches, to this day. In combination with
humanism, the Enlightenment and the
“practical” spirit of the modern era — the
spirit of “productivity” and “efficiency” —
pietism has cultivated throughout Europe a
largely “social” understanding of the
Church, involving practical activities of
public benefit, and it has presented the
message of salvation primarily as a
necessity for individual and collective
morality.
2. The theological
coordinates
Pietism undermines the
ontological truth of Church unity and
personal communion, if it does not deny it
completely; it approaches man’s salvation in
Christ as an individual event, an individual
possibility of life. It is individual piety
and the subjective process of “appropriating
salvation” made absolute and autonomous, and
it transfers the possibility of man’s
salvation to the realm of individual moral
endeavour.6
For pietism, salvation
is not primarily the fact of the
Church, the theanthropic “new creation” of
the body of Christ, the mode of existence of
its Trinitarian prototype and the unity of
the communion of persons. It is not man’s
dynamic, personal participation in the body
of the Church’s communion which saves him
despite his individual unworthiness,
restoring him safe and whole
to the existential possibility of personal
universality, and transforming even his sin,
through repentance, into the possibility of
receiving God’s grace and love. Rather it is
primarily man’s individual attainments, the
way he as an individual lives up to
religious duties and moral commandments and
imitates the “virtues” of Christ, that
ensure him a justification which can be
objectively verified. For pietism, the
Church is a phenomenon dependent upon
individual justification; it is the assembly
of morally “reborn” individuals, a gathering
of the “pure,” a complement and an aid to
individual religious feeling.7
By this route pietism
reached a result opposite to its original
intent. Seeking to reject the one extreme of
intellectual religion, it ended up at the
other extreme, separating practical piety
from the truth and revelation of the Church.
Thus piety loses its ontological content and
ceases to be an existential event — the
realization and manifestation of man’s
existential truth, of the “image” of God in
man. It turns into an individual achievement
which certainly improves character and
behaviour and perhaps social mores as well,
but which cannot possibly transfigure our
mode of existence and change corruption into
incorruption, and death into life and
resurrection.
Piety loses its
ontological content; and, in addition, the
truth and faith of the Church is divorced
from life and action, and left as a set of
“principles” and “axioms” which one accepts
like any other ideology. The distinction
between contemplation and action, between
truth and life or between dogma and
morality, turns into a schizophrenic
severence. The life of the Church is
confined to moral obedience, religious
duties and the serving of social ends. One
might venture to express the situation with
the paradox that, in the case of pietism,
ethics corrupts the Church: it turns the
criteria of the Church into worldly and
conventional criteria, distorting the “great
mystery of godliness” into a rationalistic
social necessity. Pietistic ethics distort
the liturgical and eucharistic reality of
the Church, the unity in life and communion
of the penitent and the perfect, sinners and
saints, the first and the last; they turn
the Church into an inevitably conventional,
institutional corporation of people who are
individually religious.
A host of people
today, perhaps the majority in western
societies, evaluate the Church’s work by the
yardstick of its social usefulness as
compared with the social work of education,
penitentiary systems or even the police. The
natural result is that the Church is
preserved as an institution essential for
morals and organized like a worldly
establishment in an increasingly
bureaucratic fashion. The most obvious form
of secularization in the Church is the
pietistic falsification of her mind and
experience, the adulteration of her own
criteria with moralistic considerations.
Once the Church denies her ontological
identity — what she really, essentially is
as an existential event whereby individual
survival is changed into a personal life of
love and communion — then from that very
moment she is reduced to a conventional form
under which individuals are grouped together
into an institution; she becomes an
expression of man’s fall, albeit a religious
one. She begins to serve the “religious
needs” of the people, the individualistic
emotional and psychological needs of fallen
man.
The utilitarian
institutional mentality, a typical product
of pietism, has led many churches and
Christian confessions to a fever of anxiety
lest they should be proved out-dated and
useless in the modern technocratic,
rationalistically organized society, and
should appear to lag behind in keeping up to
date with the world. Frequently they try to
offer contemporary man a message as
convenient and well-fitted as possible to
his utilitarian demands for prosperity.
“Humanistic” ethics — the principle of
keeping up appearances — takes precedence
over truth, over the salvation of existence
from the anonymity of death. The miracle of
repentance, the transfiguration of sin into
loving desire for personal communion with
God, the way mortality is swallowed up by
life-these are truths incomprehensible to
the pietistic spirit of our age. The Gospel
message is “made void,” emptied of its
ontological content; the Church’s faith in
the resurrection of man is made to appear
vacuous.
3. The moral
alienation of salvation
When the piety of the
Church is transferred to the plane of
individual ethics and separated from her
truth, this inevitably results in a blurring
of the difference between the truth of
salvation and -the illusion of salvation,
between the Church and heresy. The idea of
heresy or schism loses all real content, and
is confined to abstract, theoretical
differences understood only by “experts” who
discuss them at meetings and conferences,
exchanging the thrust and parry of
confessional articles and formulations which
fail to correspond in any way to the life of
human beings.
Increasingly pietism
equates the spirituality and piety of the
various churches and confessions, taking
them on the level of individual, or socially
useful and efficacious, ethics, while
disregarding even fundamental dogmatic
differences. The piety of a Roman Catholic,
a Protestant and frequently even an
“enlightened” Orthodox, do not present
substantial differences; practical piety no
longer reveals whether the truth one lives
is real or distorted. Dogma does not appear
as a “definition,” laying down the limits
within which the Church’s experience is to
be expressed and safeguarded. Christian
piety appears unrelated to the way we
experience the truth of God in Trinity, the
incarnation of the Word, and the energies of
the Holy Spirit which give substance to the
life of the members of the Church.
The model of Christian
piety in the different churches and
confessions is increasingly equated with
that of a more “perfect” utilitarian ethic,
with an individual morality which takes
precedence over the fact of the Church. The
only distinctions in piety are variations in
religious customs and religious “duties.”
Even the liturgical act is incidental to
individual piety, a complement, aid or
fruit; it is thought of as an opportunity
for “edification” or a religious duty. The
eucharist, the original embodiment of the
fact of salvation, is distorted by the
pietistic spirit; it is construed as a
narrowly “religious” obligation, a duty to
pray together and perhaps to listen to a
sermon which usually confines itself to
prescribing how the individual should
behave. The Eucharist is not the event which
constitutes and manifests the Church, the
changing of our mode of existence and the
realization of the ethos of the “new man.”
Ultimately, even
participation in the sacraments takes on a
conventional, ethical character. Confession
turns into a psychological means of setting
individual guilt-feelings at rest, and
participation in holy communion becomes a
moral reward for good behaviour - when it is
not a scarcely conscious individual or
family custom bordering on magic. Baptism
becomes a self-evident social obligation,
and marriage a legitimization of sexual
relations without regard to any ascetic
transfiguration of the conjugal union into
an ecclesial event of personal
intercourse or communion.
4. The moral
assimilation of heresies
A typical and entirely
consistent extension of all this blurring
and alienation of the ontological character
of the Church’s truth is the modern movement
towards the so-called “union” of the
churches, and the much-vaunted priority of
the “love” which unites the churches over
the “dogma” which divides them. One could
say that this movement was historically
justified, since it often looks as if union
has been accomplished on the level of, a
common, non-dogmatic piety — on the level of
pietism. What, used to divide the Church
from heresy was not abstract differences in
academic formulations; it was the radical
break and the distance between the
universality of life and illusions of life,
between realizing the true life of our
Trinitarian prototype and subjugating this
truth to fallen man’s fragmentary mode of
existence. Dogma “defined,” or showed the
limits, while the Church’s asceticism
secured participation in that truth of life
which defeats corruption and death and
realizes the image of God in the human
being.
When piety ceases to
be an ecclesial event and turns
into an individual moral attainment, then a
heretic or even a non-Christian can be just
as virtuous as a “Christian.” Piety loses
its connection with truth and its
ontological content; it ceases to be related
to man’s full, bodily participation in the
life of God — to the resurrection of the
body, the change of matter into “word,” and
the transfiguration of time and space into
the immediacy of communion. Piety is
transformed into an entirely uniform manner
of being religious which inevitably makes
differences of “confession” or tradition
relative, or even assimilates the different
traditions, since they all end in the same
result — the moral “improvement” of human
life.
Thus the differences
which separate heresy from truth remain
empty verbal formulations irrelevant to the
reality of life and death, irrelevant even
to piety. They are preserved simply as
variations in religious customs and
traditional beliefs, with a purely
historical interest. It is therefore natural
for the distinct Christian confessions to
seek formal union — respecting, of course,
the pluralism in religious customs and
theoretical formulations — since they are
already substantially assimilated in the
sphere of “practical life.” This is the
obvious basis for the unity movement in our
times — when, of course, it is not guided by
much more stark socio-political
considerations.
Socio-political
considerations, however, have influenced
church life in every age; they are the sins
of our human nature which has been taken
into the Church. And they are not a real
danger so long as we are aware that they are
sins; they do not succeed in distorting the
truth and the f act of the Church. The
danger of real distortion lies in heresy:
when we take for truth and salvation some
“improved” version of the fragmented mode of
existence of fallen man. And the great
heresy of our age is pietism. Pietism is a
heresy in the realm of ecclesiology: it
undermines or actually denies the very truth
of the Church, transferring the event of
salvation from the ecclesial to the
individual ethos, to piety divorced from the
Trinitarian mode of existence, from Christ’s
way of obedience. Pietism denies the
ontological fact of salvation the Church,
life as personal co-inherence and communion
in love, and the transfiguration of mortal
individuality into a hypostasis of eternal
life.
Pietism undermines the
ontological truth of the Church or totally
rejects it, but without questioning the
formulations of that truth. It simply
disregards them, taking them as intellectual
forms unrelated to man’s salvation, and
abandons them to the jurisdiction of an
autonomous academic theology. Pietism
preserves a formal faithfulness to the
letter of dogmatic formulation, but this is
a dead letter, irrelevant to life and
existential experience.
In that particular,
this real denial of the truth of salvation
differs from previous heresies. It does not
reject the “definitions,” the limits of the
Church’s truth; it simply disconnects this
truth from the life and salvation of man.
And this disconnection covers a vast range
of distinctions and nuances, so that it is
exceptionally difficult to “excommunicate”
pietism, to place it beyond the bounds
within which the Church’s truth and unity
are experienced. But this is precisely why
it is perhaps the most dangerous assault on
this truth and unity.
5. The
individualistic “culture” of pietism
Pietism is definitely
not an autonomous phenomenon, independent of
the historical and cultural conditions which
have shaped western civilization over the
last three centuries. The spirit of
individualism, rationalism and
utilitarianism, the priority given to
rationalization, the myth of “objectivity”
and the “values” it imposes, the connection
of truth with usefulness and of knowledge
with turning things to “practical” account —
all these are factors which have influenced
and shaped the phenomenon of pietism, and
have equally been influenced and shaped by
it. Corresponding currents and tendencies,
like the Enlightenment, humanism,
romanticism or positivism, are part of the
web of interdependence formed by these same
factors which ultimately make up the
mentality and the standards of our modern
culture, setting an imperceptible yet
decisive seal on people’s character and
temperament.
This assertion poses
an exceptionally difficult problem for
Christian theology. If the way of life in
western civilization, the only civilization
which can really claim to be called
worldwide, presupposes and imposes the cult
of the individual, what place remains for
the experience and realization of
ecclesial truth and life? If the
technocratic consumer society throughout the
world presupposes and develops the primacy
of intellectual ability in the subject, the
autonomy of his will, the rationalistic
regulation of individual rights and duties,
“objective” backing for individual choices
and for the economic safeguards assured for
the individual by trade unions, and a
rationalistic linkage of the individual with
the group then the individualistic religion
of pietism is the inevitable consequence.
Indeed, it is the only possibility for
religious expression in western culture —
the necessary and sufficient condition for
religious life. There seems little or no
scope for experience and historical
realization of the Church’s truth, the
trinitarian mode of existence: no room to
live our salvation through a practical
subjection of the individual to the
experience of communion which belongs to the
Church as a body, and to realize the ethos
or morality of the Gospel through
self-transcendence on the part of the
individual and through the freedom and
distinctiveness of persons within the
communion of saints.8
It is no accident that
the first pioneers of pietist ideals
consciously envisaged an ecumenical movement
which was to restore “genuine Christianity”
throughout the world.9
Pietism spread with exceptional speed over a
remarkably wide area. From Germany it passed
at once to England, where the ground had
been prepared by Puritanism, and to the
Netherlands and Scandinavia; it spread
eastwards as far as Russia, and took hold in
America with the first generations of
settlers, as also in the missionary churches
of Africa and Asia. But the factual details
of how pietism spread so rapidly and the
ecumenical ambitions of its founders are
only a part of its far more general and
organic identification with the tendency
towards expansionism and universality innate
in western civilization.
It is certain that
pietism holds a central place in the web of
mutual influence between the factors which
have shaped the peculiar character of
western culture. However much this might
seem both a generalization and a paradox, it
could be maintained that pietism has played
one of the most significant roles in the
historical development of “western type”
societies. This assertion becomes more
comprehensible if we accept the view of
scholars who attribute to pietism the birth
and development of the system of the
autonomous economy, or capitalism10
— a system which today is decisive in
determining the economic, political and
social lives of people all over the world.
The initial historical
link between pietism and capitalism is well
known. The linchpin of the capitalist
ideology may be identified with the
pietistic demand for direct, quantifiable
and judicially recompensed results from
individual piety and morality — in this
case, from hard work, honesty, thrift,
rationalistic exploitation of “talents,”
etc. Work acquires an autonomy: it is
divorced from actual needs and becomes a
religious obligation, finding its visible
justification and “just deserts” in the
accumulation of wealth. The management of
wealth similarly becomes autonomous: it is
divorced from social need and becomes part
of the individual’s relationship with God, a
relationship of quantitative deserts and
rewards.11
Confirmation of the
conclusions thus formulated could be based
not only on the inevitably relative
agreement among students of the phenomenon
of capitalism, but also on reference to
direct historical examples. Perhaps the most
representative example is that of the birth
and development of the United States of
America. This superpower of our times, which
is also the most powerful and important
factor in the operation of the world
capitalist system, has its roots in the
principles and the spirit of pietism. The
successive waves of Anglo-Saxon Puritans and
pietists who first emigrated to America with
the millenarian vision12
of a Puritan “promised land”13
identified trust in God with the power of
money,14
and religious feeling with the economic
efficiency of work (work ethics) and
ultimately hallowed as ethics whatever
ensured individual security and social
prosperity.15
By the very fact of their existence, the two
hundred and fifty or so different Christian
confessions in that country make the truth
of the Church body take second place; in
defining the quality of a Christian,
priority is given to the peculiarly American
idea of individual ethics (civil religion).
Going by the example
of America and the pietistic basis of the
“gospel of wealth” which took shape there,16
one might venture to make a further
assertion. The whole of mankind lives today
in the trap of a lethal threat created by
the polarization of two provenly immoral
moralistic systems, and the constant
expectation of a confrontation between them
in war, perhaps nuclear war. On the one side
is the pietistic individualism of the
capitalist camp, and on the other the
moralistic collectivism of the Marxist
dreams of “universal happiness.” At least
the latter refuses to cloak its aims under
the forged title of Christian, while the
name of Christianity continues to be
blackened in the sloganizing of even the
foulest dictatorships which support the
workings of the capitalist system, upholding
the pietistic ideal of individual merit.”
If the witness of an
ecumenical council of the Church were to
have any meaning in our day, its chief
purpose would be to denounce this torture of
man, this imprisonment in an adulterated and
falsified idea of Christian piety: the
corrosion and destruction of the truth of
salvation and the reality of the Church by
generalized pietism.
Additional Note
Footnotes
1.
There is a rich bibliography on pietism,
chiefly in the form of monographs dealing
with the numerous local pietistic movements
and the personalities of their leaders.
Although not very systematic, the fullest
study of the phenomenon as a whole is still
A. Ritschl’s three-volume work
Geschichte des Pietismus (Bonn,
1880-1886). A recent work, exceptionally
informative and well-documented, is Martin
Schmidt’s Pietismus (1972). The
Roman Catholic approach, with a concise,
objective and reasonably full description of
the phenomenon and history of pietism, may
be found in Louis Bouyer, Orthodox
Spirituality and Protestant and Anglican
Spirituality (History of Christian
Spirituality 111, London, 1969), p. 169ff.
As for the rest of the bibliography, we note
here some basic aids: W. Mahrholz, Der
deutsche Pietismus (Berlin, 1921); H.
Bornkamm, Mystik, Spiritualismus und die
Anfange des Pietismus im Luthertum
(Giessen, 1926); M. Beyer-Frohlich,
Pietismus und Rationalismus (Leipzig,
1933); K. Reinhardt, Mystik und
Pietismus (Berlin, 1925); 0. Sohngen,
ed., Die bleibende Bedeutung des
Pietismus (Berlin, 1960) ; E. Sachsse,
Ursprung und Wesen des Pietismus
(1884) ; F. E. Stoeffler, The Rise of
Evangelical Pietism (Studies in the
History of Religions IX, 1965), pp. 180-246.
2.
“The picture one gets from the relevant
bibliography would justify the view that the
historical roots of pietism are spread
throughout the religious and theological
tradition of western Christianity, both
Roman Catholic and Protestant. There is,
nevertheless, a particularly direct
historical link between this phenomenon and
certain Dutch offshoots of Protestantism,
English Puritanism and above all Roman
Catholic mysticism. Jansenism in seventeenth
century France, the Port-Royal movement,
Quietism, Thomas Kempis’ Imitation of
Christ, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross,
Francis of Sales and F6n6lon are considered
by most scholars to be immediate forerunners
of Protestant pietism. It is typical that
Lutheran “orthodoxy” always condemned
pietism as pro-Catholic. See M. Schmidt,
Pietismus, p. 26; L. Bouyer,
Orthodox Spirituality…, pp. 169-170 and
193.
3.
See Karl Heussi and Eric Peter, Precis
d’Histoire de l’Eglise (Neuchatel,
1967), § 106; M. Schmidt, Pietismus,
p. 140. The first of the founders of the
pietist movement, Philip-Jacob Spener
(1635-1705), a Lutheran pastor from Alsace,
created the blueprint for this moralistic
campaign by organizing the zealous faithful
into Bible study circles (Bibelkreise)
independent of the Church’s gatherings for
worship. Study of Scripture was meant to
lead to practical moral conclusions
affecting the individual lives of the
members of the movement. Any of the faithful
could be in charge of such a “circle.”
Spener and the other pioneers of the pietist
movement (A. H. Francke, 16631727, G.
Arnold, 1666-1714, N. L. Graf von
Zinzendorf, 1700-1760, J. A. Bengel,
1697-1752, F. C. Oetinger, 1702-1782) laid
particular emphasis on the universal
priesthood of the laity, and were sharply
critical of the clergy of their time and the
“institutional Church, compromised with the
world.” See L. Bouyer, Orthodox
Spirituality…, pp. 170-17 1; M.
Schmidt, Pietismus, pp. 12-42;
Nouvelle Histoire de l’Eglise vol. 4
(Paris, 1966), pp. 35-36.
4.
See L. Bouyer, Orthodox Spirituality
p. 174: “…the dissolution of all defined
dogmatic faith and its substitution by
unverifiable sentiment…”
5.
“‘[Pietism] considers the practice of piety
as the essential element of religion… but is
accompanied more often by a growing
indifference with regard to dogma”:
Nouvelle Histoire de I’Eglise, p. 35.
“Whenever the Church started dogmatizing, so
he held, it fell into decadence, and the
only way out lay in the fact that each
generation produced simple-minded men whose
instinctive reaction (bullied by authority)
constituted a prophetic reaffirmation of the
one pure Christianity, primitive and free
from all ratiocination”: L. Bouyer,
Orthodox Spirituality, p. 175.
6.
“At the center stands the individual person:
the early Christian image of ‘building up’
is transformed in an individualistic
direction (building up of the inner
person)”: M. Schmidt, “Pietismus,” in
Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart,
vol. 5, Col. 370. Idem, Pietismus,
pp. 90 and 123.
7.
“‘The new type of community… is the
formation of groups of reborn individuals,
not the community of those called by word
and sacrament. The initiative lies with the
subject… Individualism and subjectivism
undermine the sacramental perspective”: M.
Schmidt, “Pietismus,” Col. 371. “In the
confusion between faith and sense experience
and the tendency to replace the objective
data of faith and the sacraments by an
emotional subjective event, he discerns at
least latent indifference regarding all
established doctrine, and, in a more general
way, loss of sight of the Church and its
ministry as institutions”: L. Bouyer,
Orthodox Spirituality, p. 174.
8.
‘Precisely because the Church is not a
religious ideology but the continuous
assumption of the flesh of the world and the
transformation of it into the theanthropic
flesh of Christ, it is impossible for the
ontological truth of the Church’s unity and
communion to “coexist” passively with a
culture centered on the individual, a
culture of objectification. The Church lives
and functions only so long as she is
continuously and dynamically assuming
individualistic, objectified existences in
order to transfigure them into unity of
life, into personal relationship and
communion. But this means that on the
historical and social level, the life and
unity of the Church operates as a radical
and direct rejection or subversion of the
cultural “system” of individualism and
objectification. Otherwise, the rck would be
subject to the way of life imposed by the
“system,” so that she herself would be
alienated both as a reality of truth and
salvation, and as an institutional
expression of this reality.
9.
“Pietism originally was an ecumenical,
world-wide phenomenon… Above all it
understood itself to be of ecumenical scope,
the representation of true Christendom over
all the earth”: M. Schmidt, Pietismus,
p. 11.
10.
See R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise
of Capitalism (Penguin Books, 197511)-
Max Weber, Die Protestantische Ethik und
der Geist des Kapitalismus, in Die
protesiantische Ethik, I (Hamburg,
19733) ; E. Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren
der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen
(Tubingen, 1965); H. Hauser, Les debuts
du Capitalisme (Paris, 1927); A.
Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism and
Capitalism (London, 1935); H. M.
Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of
Economic Individualism (Cambridge,
1933).
11.
“Convinced that character is all and
circumstances nothing [the morally
self-sufficient] see in the poverty of those
who fall by the way, not a misfortune to be
pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to
be condemned, and in riches not an object of
suspicion-though like other gifts they may
be abused-but the blessing which rewards the
triumph of energy and will”: Tawney,
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism,
pp. 229-230.
12.
“Millenarist tendencies and expectation of
the Messiah are characteristic of pietism,
“… a sort of renewed ‘chiliasm,’ that is to
say the immediate expectation of a kingdom
of God on earth which it would be within our
power to produce”: L. Bouyer, Orthodox
Spirituality, p. 174. See also M.
Schmidt, Pietismus, pp. 130-132 and
160; and Charles L. Sanford, The Quest
of Paradise: Europe and the American Moral
Imagination (Urbana, Ill., 1961).
13.
See Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant —
American Civil Religion in Time of Trial
(New York, 1975), especially pp. 7-8 and the
chapter “America as a Chosen People” (P.
36ff.); Conrad Cherry, God’s New Israel:
Religious Interpretations of American
Destiny (Prentice-Hall, 1971); H.
Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in
America (New York, 1937).
14.
“In God we trust” is the inscription on
every coin and dollar note. See also Moses
Rischin, ed., The American Gospel of
Success (Quadrangle Books, 1965);
Howard Mumford Jones, The Pursuit of
Happiness (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966).
15.
See Robert Handy, A Christian America
(New York and Oxford, 197″ especially the
chapter: “Components of the New Christian
Civilization: Religion, Morality,
Education,” especially pp. 33-40; William
McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the
American Pietistic Tradition (Boston,
1967); Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-made
Man in America (Free Press, 1966).
16.
See Andrew Carnegie’s famous essay “The
Gospel of Wealth,” reprinted from The
American Review 148 (1889), pp. 653-664, in
Gail Kennedy, ed., Democracy and the
Gospel of Wealth (Boston, 1949).
Some specific products
of pietism are the Halle movement (founded
by August-Hermann Francke), the Moravian
Brethren (Herrnhuter BrUidergemeine-founded
by N. L. von Zinzendorf), the Methodists
(founded by John Wesley, 1703-1791), the
Quakers (founded by George Fox, 1624-1691),
and in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries a host of “Free Churches,”
missionary societies, schools of preaching,
“inner mission” movements, Protestant
monastic brotherhoods, etc. See M. Schmidt,
Pietismus, pp. 243-60.
In Roman Catholicism
we rarely bear of autonomous groups or
movements of pietists, perhaps because
pietistic tendencies and initiatives were
Officially adopted by the Roman Catholic
Church in the form of orders, societies,
sacred confraternities, etc. In Roman
Catholic mysticism, certainly, Pietism has
always found the conditions for its natural
generation. The individual approach to
virtue, anthropocentric sentimentality and
the transference of religious feeling to the
“interior” of the individual are all hall.
marks of Roman Catholic mystics, whether as
individuals or in organized and officially
recognized groups. The link with the body of
the Church is of secondary importance and
sometimes of purely legal and formal significance. “Bei ihnen kam alles auf die
inneren Menschen, nichts auf die aussere
Form der Kirchlichkeit an”: M. Schmidt,
Pietismms, p. 26.
Of the Orthodox
churches, the Russian Church was the first
to be invaded by the spirit of pietism.
Early in the eighteenth century, Bishop
Feofan Prokopovich (1681-1736), professor
and later rector of the Theological Academy
in Kiev, represented in Russia the pietistic
Halle movement (see Schmidt, “Pietismus,”
article in Die Religion in Geschichte
and Gegenwart, vol. 5, col. 372; R.
Stupperich, “Protestantismus in Russland,”
in the same volume, col. 1248).
Prokopovich’s influence was very widespread
and left a distinct mark on the Church and
spiritual life of Russia, from the moment
when Peter the Great (1672-1725) took him on
as a close collaborator, after promoting him
to the archbishopric of Novgorod, and let
him fundamentally shape his religious
reform. (See Igor Smolitsch, Geschichte
der russiscben Kirche, 1700-1917 [Leiden,
19641, p. 94ff; and Reinhard Wittram,
Peter I — Czar and Kaisar, vol. 2 (Gottingen,
1964], p. 189ff.) The religious reform of
Peter the Great had as its aim the
systematic westernization of the Russian
Church both in structure and in spiritual
life. And under the influence of Feofan
Prokopovich, many areas of Russian church
and spiritual life were shaped precisely in
accordance with the spirit and the criteria
of Protestant pietism. At the same time, his
theological “system” and his writings
imposed on the academic study of theology in
Russia what Florovsky calls “the domination
of Latino-protestant scholasticism” (Puti
russhogo bogosloviia [Paris, 19371, P.
104; the reference is from 1. Smolitsch,
Geschichte der russischen Kirche, p.
577. See also H. Koch, Die russische
Orthodoxie im Petrinischen Zeitalter
(Breslau, 19291; Cyprien Kern, "L'enseignement
theologique superieur dans la Russie du XlXe
siecle," Istina, 1960; Igor
Smolitsch, Russische Monchtum,
988-1917 [Wiirzburg, 1953]. p. 383ff.) The
influence of Feofan Prokopovich’s theology
reached even as far as Greece, at least
through Theoklitos Farmakidis, “the first to
teach dogmatic theology at the Ionian
Academy on Kerkyra in 1824, following the
text of the Russian Feofan Prokopovich”:
Manuel Gedeon, The Cultural Progress of
the Nation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries [in Greek — Athens, 1976), p.
206.
Actual pietistic
movements in Russia were probably very few;
the best known is the Moravian Brethren,
from 1740 in Sarepta on the Volga (R.
Stupperich, "Protestantismus in Russland,"
col. 1250). What is more striking is the way
in which the Church's mentality as a whole
was undermined. In combination with the
stress on sentiment introduced into Russia
by the religious romanticism of the
nineteenth century, and the corresponding
prevalence of baroque in church art which
distorted basic theological presuppositions
in Russian Orthodox worship, a general
climate of pietism often shapes the
atmosphere and complexion of Russian church
life.
Pietistic influence is
apparent even in the figures most
representative of Russian spiritual life.
The most important spiritual figure in
eighteenth century Russia, St Tikhon
Zadonsky (1724-1783), is also a typical
representative of pietistic and Roman
Catholic influences. "He was strongly
influenced by contemporary western piety,
both Counter-Reformation Catholic piety and
Protestant piety with an emphasis on
pietism... We find in [his works] a direct
echo of St Augustine and the Imitation
of Christ, as of Lutheran works such as
Arndt’s True Christianity… and Anglican ones
such as the Meditatiunculae subitaneae
by the Puritan Bishop Hall”: L. Bouyer,
Orthodox Spirituality, pp. 37-38.
In the form of an
organized movement, pietism appeared in the
Romanian Orthodox Church just on the eve of
World War II, under the name of “the Army of
the Lord” and with the priest Joseph Trifa
at its head. There, however, the Church
reacted swiftly; she excommunicated the
founders and excised from her body this
danger which threatened to alienate her
tradition and her life.
In Greece, pietism
made its appearance as a symptom of a more
general “europeanization” of the country.
Quite early, around the eighteenth century,
Humanism and the principles of the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment exerted an
obvious influence on Greek scholars and
church writers who turned to the West for
their higher education. Rationalism and
moralism, as direct results of European
thinking and theology, reached the Orthodox
Greek East through the writing and teaching
of the “enlightened Teachers of the Nation,”
learned preachers and writers from the
period of Turkish domination. At least in
the works of Vikentios Damodos (16791752),
Elias Miniatis (1669-1714), Evgenios
Voulgaris (1716-1806), Nikeforos Theotokis
(1730-1800), Theoklitos Farmakidis
(1754-1860) and Neofytos Vamvas (1770-1855),
there is manifest influence from western
theological positions of their day: moral
eudaemonism, the “religion of sentiment”
(Schleiermacher), the connection of Church
and 11 culture” (Kulturchristentum),
the identification of spiritual regeneration
with moral regeneration, the juridical
understanding of morality (see Ch. Yannaras,
Orthodoxy and the West — Theology in
Greece Today [in Greek-Athens, 19721,
especially pp. 57-95, with bibliography).
With the establishment
of the independent Greek state and the
imposition of German and Protestant models
on the organization of the Church of Greece
(which became “autocephalous” in 1833) and
of theological education, western influences
prevailed in Greek academic theology and in
“official” church life — though not without
exceptions and reactions. The phenomenon
could perhaps have been contained there,
since popular spirituality and piety
remained untainted by western alienation.
But from the very first decades of our own
century, pietism made its appearance in
Greece in the form of a specific movement
whose intention was to bring in the broad
masses of the people. Initially it seemed
that the aim of the “movement” was the
renewal of church life, with the systematic
organization of sermons, catechism classes,
religious publications and confession. But
it very soon separated itself and its
activity from the life of the Church, the
life of the parishes and the jurisdiction of
the local bishops. It was organized as an
independent effort, with a system of
administration and organization independent
of the church hierarchy, and with its own
spiritual and theological direction.
It is quite
extraordinary how closely the modern Greek
pietist movement copied its German and
Anglo-Saxon prototypes. Preaching and
teaching were based on exactly the same
premises: the theological truth of dogmas
was ignored or passed over in silence and
replaced with the teaching of ethics, a
rationalist apologetic, utilitarian
rationalism and moral eudaemonism, and
stress on individual virtue and the cultural
necessity of religion. Following Spener’s
method to the letter, the “movement”
organized a vast number of Bible study
circles meeting in houses all over Greece.
This led to the formation of a kind of
private worship outside church — in
imitation of the Protestant “service of the
word” (Wortgottesdienst) — with the
lay element alone. It consisted of reading
from the Bible, always with a moral
conclusion, ex tempore prayers and
sentimental songs, usually from Protestant
collections of hymns. The Greek pietist
movement, exactly like the Protestant ones,
came to be dominated by a strongly military
discipline: its members were forbidden to go
to public spectacles or recreation centers,
to smoke, or to read books or other material
of their own choosing. They have developed
more or less a common style of dress, and
cultivate a militant missionary spirit to
gain followers.
To the general public,
the pietistic movement in Greece is known as
the Zoe movement, after the first
“Brotherhood of Theologians” which began its
organized efforts in 1911. Later, however,
there emerged offshoots of this same
organization (the Fellowship of Academics
“Aktines,” the Student Christian Union, the
Christian Union of Working Youth, the
Women’s Fellowship “Evseveia,” the
Fellowship of Nursing Sisters “Evniki,” the
Christian schools “Elliniki Pedeia,” etc.).
There were also parallel movements which
copied the Zoe model in principles and
structure (the Brotherhood of Theologians “O
Sotir,” the organizations of Metropolitan
Avgoustinos Kandiotis of Florina, etc.).
Making their
moralistic criteria into absolutes, these
movements in Greece turned into complete
religious units, divorced from the life of
the Church, and society. They developed into
closed, autonomous religious groups, entry
to which could be secured only by
objectively recognized “suitability and moral
rectitude. Divorced from the life of the
parishes and from local bishops, these
pietistic groups consolidated their
independence by taking the form of secular
“associations” with recognition from the
state. They were thus able to control the
numbers and the morals of their members, and
organize a kind of “para-ecclesial” life in
open opposition to the official Church. They
acquired buildings of their own for
catechism meetings and, where possible,
their own churches. They have their own
clergy who are formally attached to the
local bishop but are in reality directed,
down to the last detail by the
administration of the organizations. They
thus have their own confessors and separate
confession, in the buildings belonging to
the organizations rather than in the
churches — own separate liturgies, where
entry is controlled and only organizations
are allowed in.
It may perhaps be
useful to add some mention of the position
taken up by the pietistic organizations in
Greece on the question of ecumenism, a
position which contradicts their principles.
The organizations came out in fanatical
opposition to the idea of church unity,
although the idea of union had to a great
extent been embodied by these same pietistic
movements. It was they who had been
exclusively responsible for transferring to
Greek Orthodox territory both the practice
of western piety and also, on many points,
such western dogmatic teaching as was
essential for their moralism. Such points of
doctrine include the legalistic theory of
the satisfaction of divine justice through
Christ’s death on the Cross, denial of
distinction between God’s essence and
energies, rejection of hesychasm and the
neptic tradition, an apologetic devised with
utilitarian ends, the general priesthood of
the laity as an autonomous absolute, a legal
understanding of the transmission of
original sin, etc. We are bound to conclude
that their stance against church unity is
simply the result of a tragic confusion in
spiritual criteria, and shows the movements’
lack of theological self-awareness, or else
is nothing but a conventional attempt to
outdo everyone else in conservatism. Either
way, it cannot be a matter of deliberately
upholding Orthodox spirituality and the
Orthodox tradition, since the organizations
could be said to ignore these quite
provocatively and to distort them
systematically.
It would require a
separate study to analyze the various forms
these distortions take: the abolition of the
holy icons, which are replaced with
Renaissance art (both in their catechetical
work and in the buildings belonging to the
organizations), the almost exclusive use of
Roman Catholic and Protestant manuals and
religious literature for the spiritual
nourishment of the faithful, the polemics
against monasticism and the Holy Mountain,
the institution of “lay brotherhoods” (like
the western “orders”), neglect and erosion
of the authority of the episcopate, etc. See
further Christoph Maczewski, Die
Zoi-Bewegung Griechenlands (Gottingen,
1970); V. Yioultsis, “A Sociological View of
the Religious Brotherhoods” (in Greek), in
Sociological questions in Orthodoxy,
ed. Prof. G. Mantzaridis (Thessaloniki,
1975), pp. 169-203; A. Alexandridis, “A
Phenomenon of Modern Greek Religious Life:
The Christian Organizations” (in Greek), in
Synoro 39 (1966), pp. 193-204; Ch.
Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the
West-Theology in Greece Today (in
Greek), p. 95ff.; idem, The Privilege of
Despair (in Greek-Athens, 1973), pp.
80-92; idem, Chapters on Political
Theology (in Greek-Athens, 1976), p.
114ff.; idem, Honest to Orthodoxy
(in GreekAthens, 1968), pp. 68-73.
Nevertheless, the most
positive sign in the history of Orthodoxy in
Greece over the last century must surely be
the progressive weakening and ultimate
disintegration of the pietistic movements.
It is extremely encouraging how the Orthodox
consciousness has reacted to this foreign
intervention in its living body. Over
approximately the last two decades, the
pietistic movements have undergone a
relentless series of internal problems; they
have suffered splits and lost their
followers, and have really ceased to be a
substantial presence in the spiritual life
of the country. At the same time, there has
been an awakening of theological
consciousness in the Church in Greece, and
the initial fascination which pietism
exerted over a majority of lay theologians
and clergy has been significantly curtailed.
This awakening is
summed up and expressed in a truly unique
manner, and in organic continuity with the
Orthodox patristic tradition, in a text
which is among the most important products
of modern Greek theology and spirituality.
This is the declaration of the “Holy
Community” of the Holy Mountain on the
academic approach to theology independent of
the Church’s experience, and the pietism of
the religious organizations which
corresponds to it. This memorable Athonite
text was published in the Periodical
Athonitikoi Dialogoi (1975, pp. 20-27)
a propos of Prof. P. N. Trembelas’ work
Mysticism — Apophatism — Cataphatic Theology,
vols. 1-2 (Athens, 1974):
The help of the logic
and language of Western theologians and the
spiritual opinions that spring from the
experience of a closed, Pietistic mentality,
are both things that leave no place for the
mystery of the mystagogic coinherence of
Orthodox theology and living experience…
The tragic state of
our times does not allow us to concern
ourselves with pietism and the obsolete
theology of the workshops of scholasticism,
that characteristic curse of the West which
is effectively nourished by the Western
tradition and which suffers from its
divisions and passes on its sickness…
Especially today, when young people all over
the world, in their barren journey through
the desert wilderness of modern so-called
civilization remain dissatisfied with a dry
scientific approach, with the paltry
productions of an insipid pietism…
The theology of the
universities and the various Christian
movements needs to be rebaptized into the
mystery of our living church tradition; this
will give them new strength and new methods
of work and evangelism…
A scholastic and
spiritually jejune theology is useless for
the salvation of man. And a dogmatically
spineless pietism which thinks that
deification is an improvement in character
should by its very nature be rejected. Such
a theology is at its last breath; and such a
way of life is powerless to withstand the
general crisis of our era. The two together,
theology and pietism, form one of the causes
and the consequences of the spiritual
decadence of our times.
If the theology of the
Church were like this, it would create not
fathers and confessors who spoke the words
of God, but cold academic researchers and
disputants of the present age. And if the
spirituality of our tradition were like
this, it would not create the neptic fathers
as “gods by grace” and “lamps of
discernment,” but morbid sentimentalists who
were prey to psychic hallucinations.
Why should we wander
pointlessly in sterile concern with a
cerebral and superfluous theology and an
unreal, insipid pietistic way of life? Both
of these are unknown to our holy tradition,
alien to the wishes and needs of man and
unworthy of them.
Our pietistic ideas
about sanctity as "improvement in character”
are shocked and rendered powerless when set
side-by-side with the holy experience of our
saints, who received Christ in their hearts
.. as light, in a real and substantial way;
seen invisibly and comprehended
incomprehensibly, with formless form and
appearance beyond appearance.”
We feel as Orthodox
that we do not simply belong to the East
geographically, nor do we fight the West in
a geographical sense. We belong to the
Church of the uncreated divine Light that
knows no evening, which saves both East and
West.
From henceforth, then,
“let no profane hand touch” the mystery of
Orthodox theology, but “let the lips of the
faithful” sing without ceasing in praise of
the Church, the Mother of God which brings
forth gods according to grace; for only in
her and through her saints are we led
unfailingly to life and knowledge.