Nster, Westpha Essay, Research Paper
Charisma and History: The Case of M nster, Westphalia, 1534-1535THE VIOLENT attempt by the Melchiorite Anabaptists in 1534/35 to establish the “New Jerusalem” in the city of M nster represents one of the most bizarre events of the Reformation. The whole crisis is often construed as an extreme outworking of some latent tendencies within Reformation thought. Luther’s widespread influence had greatly diminished the role of the priest as a mediator between the layman and God, thereby increasing the importance of the Bible and personal conscience in directing the layman’s spiritual journey. The outcome of this change was that many laymen gave birth to radical interpretations of scripture — interpretations which often carried dangerous social and political implications.1 The prophetic claims of the two principal prophets at M nster, Jan Matthys and Jan Bockelszoon van Leiden, support this view. Both men drew an enormous amount of prophetic authority from scripture and wielded it with disastrous social and political consequences.I intend to investigate the means by which Matthys and Bockelszoon established their prophetic authority among the citizens of M nster. I will focus specific attention on their leadership roles during the turbulent period of 1534 and 1535. However, the narrative given here is also an attempt to redress some of the shortcomings of previous interpretations of these two prophets. There has been a tendency among scholars to employ Max Weber’s categories of “charisma” and the “routinization of charisma” in order to understand the leadership styles of Matthys and Bockelszoon. The initial leadership of Matthys so goes the argument — reflected a dominant charismatic style, while Bockelszoon only represented the routinization or bureaucratization of this charisma, which culminated in the oppressive legalism of his messianic reign.2 A closer examination of the actual events at M nster, however, reveals that such Weberian distinctions are largely unjustifiable. The classic Weberian devolution from charisma to bureaucracy does not clearly appear in the succession from Matthys to Bockelszoon. Rather, each prophet manifested extreme bureaucratic, even authoritarian, tendencies — they only perhaps worsened under Bockelszoon.3Page 49————————————————————————Attempts to over look this and retain a strict Weberian terminological framework overvalue the conceptual utility of charisma and clouds historical perception. By presenting Matthys and Bockelszoon without Weberian conceptual support, I aim to highlight the shortcomings of charisma as a conceptual category, and thus call attention to the disadvantages which such theoretical devices, when not judiciously employed, often bring to the discipline of history.BACKGROUNDAS RECENT scholarship points out, identifying the origins of Anabaptism is a notoriously complicated matter. Previous disputes have centered around whether Anabaptism began in Zurich with the initiation of believers’ baptism in January of 1525, or in 1521 and 1522 with Luther’s confrontation of the Wittenburg radicals, whom he labeled Schw rmer (enthusiasts). Recently, the disputed nature of Anabaptism’s origins has led scholars, instead of trying to establish a single moment of origin, simply to accept a plurality of possible origins and to engage the complexity of Anabaptism.4 For our purposes, I only mention the spread of Anabaptism throughout Southern Germany and into the Netherlands, a process largely traceable to the fiery apocalyptic sermons of Melchior Hoffman, who independently initiated adult baptism in Strasbourg in 1530 and later, after much traveling and preaching, won a following in the Low Countries.5 It was his strand of Anabaptist faith, characterized by eschatological fervor (once encountered by Jan Matthys and later transmitted to Jan Bockelszoon van Leiden) that laid the intellectual foundations for the events at M nster.IN 1533, Hoffman’s eschatological prophecies were perceived as a social threat by the authorities at Strasbourg (the city he originally had prophesied as the future “New Jerusalem”) and he was imprisoned despite his refusal to employ violence to achieve his ends. After his imprisonment, his ideas began to assume an aggressive life of their own in the Netherlands. Soon after hearing of Hoffman’s fate, the Haarlem baker Jan Matthys, in the presence of the Low Country Melchiorites, professed to be driven by the Spirit, and he told how God had revealed to him that he was Enoch, the second witness of the apocalypse (Hoffman had claimed to be the first witness, Elijah). This caused considerable confusion among the Melchiorite Anabaptists in the Low Countries who did not know how to respond to Matthys’s sudden claim of prophetic authority. When Matthys learned of this confusion, according to the Confession of Obbe Philips, he resorted to threats and terror; Philips writes, “he carried on with much emotion and terrifying alarm, and with great and desperate curses cast all into hell and toPage 50————————————————————————the devils to eternity . . . who would not recognize and accept him as the true Enoch.”6 Gradually, however, he won a small following of disciples, one of whom was Jan Bockelszoon van Leiden, the future king of M nster’s theocracy. Matthys immediately began sending his disciples out in pairs as emissaries for Christ. Bockelszoon and a man named Gerard Boekbinder were sent to M nster.7 They returned and reported to Matthys that they had found Bernard Rothmann, the leading preacher in M nster, openly teaching Anabaptist doctrines similar to their own. The conditions in M nster, Matthys reasoned, seemed to coincide with Hoffman’s eschatological hopes for Strasbourg. A major revision in Melchiorite apocalyptic thought took place. The New Jerusalem, Matthys reasoned, would now be M nster. The political and social climate there seemed to confirm this.8 On January 5, 1534, other emissaries from Matthys’s camp entered M nster and began to initiate adult re-baptism. As they had expected, the citizens were receptive to their message.9The initial steps toward M nster’s tragic fate had been taken.CHARISMA AND THE QUESTION OF LEGITIMATIONWITH THIS scant historico-intellectual backdrop bearing upon Matthys and Bockelszoon, we must now turn from our narrative in order to examine the nature of the sociological interpretations which these two prophets have received.As mentioned before, scholars have liberally applied the Weberian categories of “charisma” and the “routinization of charisma” to both men in order to illuminate the means by which they established their leadership positions and transmitted their religious ideas to their followers.10 The concept of charisma is of central importance in both Weber’s philosophy of history and his sociology of dominion (Herrschaftssoziologie). In his monumental fragment Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, charisma appears in his tripartite division of pure types of legitimate authority: the traditional, the rational- legal, and the charismatic. Weber defined traditional authority as order resting on “an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of the status of those exercising authority under them.” Rational or legal authority, on the other hand, he defined as “a belief in the ‘legality’ of patterns of normative rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands.”11 Unlike charismatic authority, traditional and rational forms of authority (also described as patriarchal and bureaucratic) share a significant characteristic: permanence. In this respect they are both institutions of the daily routine, providing for the recurrent and normal needs of daily life. As Weber himself put it, “The patriarch is the ‘natural leader’ of the daily routine. And in this respect, the bureaucraticPagestructure is only the counter-image of patriarchalism transposed into rationality.”12Charisma,on the other hand, represents a radically different form of authority that appears in periods of social distress. Unlike traditional and rational authority, where ultimate power resides in impersonal entities (i.e. institutions, constitutions, hereditary lines), charismatic authority appears in the leadership characteristics of specific individuals, or perhaps more accurately, in the dialectical interplay between leaders and their followers. Weber writes,Charisma shall be understood to refer to an extraordinary quality of a person, regardless of whether this quality is actual, alleged, or presumed. “Charismatic authority,” hence, shall refer to rule over men . . . to which the governed submit because of the belief in the extraordinary quality of the specific person…. Charismatic rule is not managed according to general norms, either traditional or rational, and in this sense it is “irrational.”13This passage touches on several noteworthy aspects of charisma. First, the leader-follower relationship is characterized by a complete personal devotion. Second, the devotion of the followers often leads to the formation of a charismatic community (Gemeinde) in which the followers exist in an emotionally charged environment in which each is committed to the leader. Third, and most importantly, there is the hint in this passage that authentic charisma acts as a revolutionary force, disrupting social norms. Elsewhere Weber writes,charisma, in its most potent form, disrupts rational rule as well as traditional altogether and overturns all notions of sanctity . . . [it] is indeed the specifically creative revolutionary force in history…. The bearer of charisma enjoys loyalty and authority by virtue of a mission believed to be embodied in him: his mission has not necessarily and not always been revolutionary, but in its most charismatic forms, it has inverted all value hierarchies and overthrown custom, law, and tradition.14The essence of genuine charisma is thus its revolutionary nature. Weber documented various historical manifestations of genuine charisma in such figures as Christ, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, Napoleon, and many others whose personal appeal somehow revolutionized their respective social orders.The concept of charisma especially invites application to religious figures. In fact, Weber derived the term from the church historian Rudolf Sohm, who in turn borrowed the idea from St. Paul’s epistles to the Corinthians, where it had originally meant “gift of grace.” In his Kirchenrecht, Sohm used the term toPage 52————————————————————————explain how the early church legitimated itself as a durable institution in antiquity.15 While Sohm speaks of charisma principally from a religious point of view, Weber expanded the term to apply to a multiplicity of social contexts, both religious and secular. He wanted his concept be value-neutral: to be a charismatic leader is not necessarily to be an admirable individual. Thus, one could, with good conscience, apply the term to a religious figure like Francis of Assisi as well as to a secular military leader like Napoleon without deviating from the general spirit of the conceptual framework.16 Moreover, Weber recognized that his three types of legitimate authority were “ideal types,” that is to say, that nowhere in history did he expect to find a political or religious order established purely on one means of authority alone. In perhaps all cases, legitimate order is a conglomerate of the three types of authority complexly related to one another.17Despite the frequent employment of charisma throughout his oeuvre, Weber devotes more space to its routinization than to charisma itself. Routinization refers to the means by which a charismatic movement becomes infused with everyday social institutions. It is also a process of the de-personalization and derevolutionization of genuine charisma. Since charisma depends on a period of social distress in order to flourish, its life is necessarily short-lived, because its revolutionary drive becomes mitigated by the more resilient forces of tradition and rationality.18 As Weber himself put it,As domination congeals into a permanent structure, charisma recedes as a creative force…. However, charisma remains a very important element of the social structure, even though it is much transformed . . . after its routinization its very quality as an extraordinary, supernatural, and divine force makes it a suitable source of legitimate authority for the successors of the charismatic hero.19Though charisma is superseded by stabilizing forces, it still remains within the fabric of the ascending structures of tradition and/or rationality. It serves these structures by acting as a point of reference from which they derive legitimation.UNTIL NOW, I have been discussing charisma and its routinization in a broad and theoretical manner. Though Weber largely speaks in similar terms, he also pinpoints specific historical personalities and social situations in order to demonstrate the value of his theory, including the example of a religious prophet.20 Weber believed that charismatic prophet inspires from the resources of his own personality — resources which his followers believe are somehow “in touch” with a spiritual or extra-mundane realm which confers “a unified view ofPage 53————————————————————————the world derived from a consciously integrated meaningful attitude toward life”21 upon the person who accepts the leadership of the prophet. Such a prophet leads simply because of the compelling characteristics of his nature; he is able to “win over” his followers with the apparent realism of his world view, and compel them to act accordingly.Of course, the charisma of the prophet is subject to routinization. This takes place, according to Weber, after the death of the prophet when he is succeeded by a “legislator” — one who continues the leadership role of the prophet but does so by institutionalizing or bureaucratizing the charismatic drive of the former leader. Incapable of generating the “crowd-response” like his charismatic forebear, the legislator appeals to rational and/or traditional means of authority to sustain the momentum among the followers which the prophet had inspired. The devolution in early Christianity from Christ to Paul is an oft-cited example of this process, though Weber notes many other examples. The procedure can take many forms, ranging from a simple codification of the accepted moral behavior set down by the prophet to the imposition of cruelty and force. Both forms may be seen as efforts to maintain a sense of control in the absence of the charismatic leader. Weber does not view this change in leadership styles as a radical dichotomy, but often as a fluid and inevitable transition. The death of the prophet leads to the rise of the legislator. The structure which the latter imposes represents a compensation for the loss of charisma in the former.22SINCE WEBER, the concept of charisma has witnessed a bewildering variety of applications, often of a contradictory nature. Because of the perceived abuse (or perhaps, overuse) of the concept, one must wonder whether the concept remains serviceable for sociological investigation. Weber himself is at least partly to blame for this problem, for he frequently left the term vague, in spite of many attempts to clarify himself. His original opacity is compounded by the fact that such sweeping concepts as charisma do not fit harmoniously into the multiparadigmatic character of modern sociology. Scholars who attempt to appropriate Weber’s vocabulary often end up obfuscating his intent while producing a revised conceptual framework of questionable value. In the final analysis, the opacity of Weber’s original formulation coupled with the diverse character of contemporary sociology has produced a conceptual quagmire in which, as has been repeatedly argued, terms such as charisma have become “sponge words” easily employed for multiple and often contradictory purposes. The question no longer is, What does charisma mean? but, What does it mean for whom and when applied to which circumstances? This state of conceptual anarchy has led some scholars to argue for the elimination of its use inPage 54————————————————————————sociology.23But this is an extreme position. Weber’s canonical status in modern sociology has led many scholars to endeavor to rescue charisma from the entropy which its applications have generated. A principal strategy has been to subdivide the concept into categories and then to resolve the residual ambiguities with copious qualifications. Since the literature which this enterprise has generated is too massive to take account of here, I will only touch on a few developments which charisma has undergone as it specifically relates to prophecy.Robert Tucker’s study of Lenin’s leadership style (1968) argues that “prophetic charisma” should be understood as the centerpiece of Weber’s entire work on charisma. Tucker makes a sharp distinction between prophetic charisma and routinized charisma, and argues that the latter should be given another name, since forces of routinization are completely contradictory to charisma as he defines it. In a 1977 study, Margrit Eichler calls for a limited understanding of charisma in which she concludes that the idea of charisma is not useful for the study of social movements, but rather should be confined only to understanding the legitimacy of leadership. Guenther Roth (1975), on the other hand, argues for an expansion of the conceptual boundaries of charisma to encompass the genesis and development of a wide range of social movements. He generally speaks of groups rather than individuals as charismatic, and he calls the members of these “inspired” groups “ideological virtuosi” who espouse single minded convictions about certain absolute values.24Even from this brief glance at attempts to clarify or improve upon Weber’s idea of charisma, we can see that the concept is a bit too pliable to be practical: attempts at clarification only result in further obfuscation. I contend that charisma from a macrosociological standpoint has entered a state of severe questionability. The promise of conceptual clarity which the idea seems to offer has been lost in the manifold attempts to effect this clarity.This is true in both a macrosociological and mircosociological context: the problematic nature of charisma seen in a purely theoretical context also appears when it is applied to specific historical settings. The Weberian treatments of leadership during the M nsterite kingdom is an apt example. The social turbulence at M nster coupled with the presence of self-proclaimed prophets makes for an appropriate setting to use Weberian concepts. However, as mentioned above, the Weberian reading applies only by excessively tampering with historical detail.An example of such an endeavor is Otthein Rammstedt’s 1966 Sekte und soziale Bewegung: Soziologische Analyse der Ta fer in M nster (1534/1535). Rammstedt depicts Jan Matthys as a radical charismatic leader (charismatischenPage 55————————————————————————Herrscher). The reasons for this, according to Rammstedt, are based on the fact that Matthys claimed to be directly led by God in his actions. He possessed the gift of exorcism and categorized peoples imply as saintly or ungodly. His actions were sanctioned by his pneuma and could not be controlled, criticized, or subjected to set regulations or traditions (Ordnungen oder Traditionen), but were dependent solely on his spontaneous revelations. Finally, the nature of his chiliastic expectations made it possible for his followers to identify with him.25The death of Matthys only months after the “New Jerusalem” had gotten under way led to the leadership of Jan Bockelszoon van Leiden who, according to the Weberian scheme, fits the role of a “legislator.” Rammstedt claims that Bockelszoon lacked charismatic authority and could only establish his legitimacy by authoritarian control. Unlike Matthys, whose authority radiated from charismatic appeal, Bockelszoon was forced to depend on two of M nster’s leading officials, Rothmann and Knipperdolling, to help him bolster his position of leadership. Though he did prophesy, his prophecies were unsatisfactory to the M nster congregations because they lacked the spontaneous and irrational elements characteristic of Matthys’s visions. Moreover, the spontaneity of Matthys’s leadership style was replaced by organization, as seen in Bockelszoon’s decision to end Matthys’s former spontaneous group meetings and to institute a system of organized meetings.26Rammstedt’s chief argument for the institutionalization hypothesis is based on the cruelty and terror of Bockelszoon’s reign. Violence increased when he came to power; in one case he summarily executed someone, without definite cause, simply to inspire dread in the people. In sum, to quote Rammstedt,Formerly spontaneous, extraordinary events became ordinary phenomena, became ritualized, and all that remained was fear for one’s own life. To preserve their power positions and to prevent the disintegration of the congregation, the ruling minority regulated the life of the Anabaptists completely.27Rammstedt’s argument has been criticized by Margrit Eichler, who argues that the succession of the M nsterite prophets may be apprehended in a Weberian framework only if that framework is modified. She argues that in certain contexts, a charismatic leader may be succeeded by another charismatic leader as in the case of Matthys and Bockelszoon. She divides charismatic leaders into two types: prophets and saviors, and argues that saviors (Bockelszoon) often follow prophets (Matthys). The archetypal example she gives of this process is found in the succession from John the Baptist to Christ, where the charisma originating in the former culminates in the latter. In her scheme, the classicalPage 56————————————————————————Weberian notion of the routinization of charisma does not appear and Matthys and Bockelszoon are both depicted as charismatic.28 Rammstedt and Eichler’s approaches present several problems. Granted, Rammstedt’s “charisma legislator” devolution in some respects is genuinely observable, and a certain conceptual insight may be gleaned from Eichler’s modified approach. However, the paradigmatic nature of both arguments yields insights at the expense of significant historical detail. To remedy this problem, in the narrative of Matthys and Bockelszoon presented below, I have consciously abandoned Weberian constructs in order to suggest that both prophets operated simply by employing manipulation and brute force to accomplish their goals. This process originated with Matthys, who captured and maintained the devotion of his followers not by charismatic personal authority, but by the fear and dread which he inspired. Bockelszoon’s rule by intimidation and his Old Testament monarchy therefore represents only the natural outworking of authoritarian tendencies already embodied in Matthys. Again, it is my contention that, though the Weberian approach does offer a hermeneutic for understanding this historical situation, it is not without its limitations. The paradox and price of insight is often an accompanying blindness.MxNSTER UNDER MATTHYS AND BOCKELSZOONDURING February 1534, the power of the Anabaptists in M nster increased dramatically. On February 8, Jan Bockelszoon van Leiden and the guild leader Bernard Knipperdolling, whom Bockelszoon had befriended, ran wildly through the streets, screaming that everyone must repent of their sins.29 This ignited much emotional turbulence, especially among the women Anabaptists, who, as former nuns,had recently left the convents and fallen under the influence of Rothmann’s preaching. Some began to see apocalyptic visions in the streets of such intensity that they would foam at the mouth and throw themselves upon the ground . In such a charged atmosphere, the Anabaptists made their first armed rising and took the Town Hall and market place. The Lutheran majority in the town offered little resistance, and soon the town council recognized the Anabaptists as legal citizens of M nster. Thereafter, many Lutherans fled the city and the Anabaptists grew in number and power. Messengers and manifestos were sent out urging Anabaptists in other towns to come with their families to M nster. The rest of the earth, it was announced, was to be destroyed, but M nster would be spared to become the New Jerusalem.30