Not long after midnight on February 13, 1619, Dr. Johannes Christoph Oelhafen,Footnote 2 a celebrated jurist and legal advisor to the Nuremberg city council, held his wife, Anna Maria,Footnote 3 in his arms as she passed from this life to the next. The couple had been married for almost eighteen years and had eight surviving children.Footnote 4 According to Johannes Christoph and later Oelhafen sources, the two had enjoyed an exceptionally rich life together and therefore he was especially aggrieved by the death of Anna Maria.Footnote 5 In order to help himself and his children cope with their collective grief, the forty-four-year-old Oelhafen immediately began composing prayers, hymns, confessions, and other devotional reflections that expressed both his great sadness and his resolve to find comfort for himself and his children in their Christian faith. At some point Oelhafen gathered these musings together and had the vellum pages gilded and bound as a book in red leather; he titled the work Pious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement.Footnote 6 The work is not listed in any of the summaries of Oelhafen's life, whether early modern or modern; his few writings on jurisprudence appear in these summaries, but not his Pious Meditations, which was never published.Footnote 7 The work was also not included in Oelhafen's personal library, which made its way to the University of Altdorf library after his death.Footnote 8 He obviously intended the Pious Meditations for the private use of a very close circle of friends and family members, and then for subsequent generations of Oelhafens. It therefore wound up in the Oelhafen family archive, which is currently housed at the German National Museum in Nuremberg.Footnote 9 The work has never received scholarly attention of any kind.
Oelhafen's Pious Meditations provides a remarkably eloquent and moving example of a theme in early modern Lutheran devotion that, unlike the work itself, has received scholarly attention: the duty of self-consolation. Johann Anselm Steiger, a leading scholar of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Lutheran theology and piety, has maintained that one of the hallmarks of the evangelical care of souls in this period was an emphasis on the obligation of laypeople to prepare themselves for difficult times through sustained meditation on scripture. The clergy sought to teach the laity to become their own pastors by providing them with the “spiritual weapons” (geistliche Waffen) they would need for their inevitable duels with adversity.Footnote 10 Thus, a number of the period's most popular works of devotion invoke the image of the spiritual knight in their titles and texts. To mention but two, there is Caspar Huberinus's Concerning the Christian Knight (1545; Nuremberg, 1570)Footnote 11 and Johann Spangenberg's On the Christian Knight (1541; Nuremberg, 1598). The latter work was frequently published with another treatise by Spangenberg, The Booklet of Comfort for the Sick (1542), in which the Lutheran pastor and superintendent discusses the importance of arming oneself spiritually for death and suffering before they arrive: “You should impress (einbilden) some comforting passages from Scripture and the gospel on your memory, passages to use against all temptations. Collect them as provisions [for the journey] and always carry them with you in your heart, just as a soldier carries his arrows in the quiver and has them ready to use whenever he needs them.”Footnote 12 An edition of this work appeared in Nuremberg in 1598 along with On the Christian Knight.Footnote 13 This emphasis on spiritual self-preparation may also be seen in Lutheran funeral sermons, including those that appeared in and around Nuremberg during Oelhafen's lifetime. The sermons are full of references to how the deceased memorized or copied down consoling sayings from the Bible or devotional works to provide themselves with solace as they suffered and faced their end; the sermons urge survivors to do the same.Footnote 14
Steiger links this emphasis on spiritual self-care with the stress on physical self-care in the medical literature of the period; doctors of souls and doctors of bodies both urged their patients to become their own (and each other's) physicians.Footnote 15 Of course, both the image of the spiritual knight and the emphasis on lay spiritual self-care were not unique to Protestant pastoral care and piety; one has only to think of Erasmus's famous Handbook of the Christian Knight (1503) and the late medieval ars moriendi tradition, which similarly assumed an important role for laity in ministering to the sick and the suffering, and also emphasized the importance of spiritual self-care.Footnote 16 But the obligation to provide spiritual care for oneself and one's friends and loved ones clearly received new impetus from the Protestant movement through doctrines like the priesthood of all believers, which held that all the baptized were authorized to minister the Word to each other. The rejection of the cult of the saints placed a similar emphasis on this traditional obligation: this-worldly saints had to take over some of the functions attributed to heavenly saints in Catholicism, which included the consolation of the suffering. One also sees this new stress on spiritual self-care in the Lutheran treatment of private confession: evangelical laypeople were regularly instructed to become their own (and each other's) confessors, even as they were exhorted to seek clerical absolution whenever they required it.Footnote 17
Oelhafen's Pious Meditations provides new evidence for how creative and resourceful Lutheran burghers could be as they sought to console themselves and their loved ones in times of great suffering. This work also shows how the distinctively Lutheran emphasis on consolation could shape the emotional lives of Lutheran burghers in profound ways. In her important recent book, The Reformation of Feeling, Susan Karant-Nunn argues that Trost (consolation) was the tell-tale characteristic of Lutheran pastoral care and piety in the early modern period, an emphasis she finds sorely lacking in Reformed Protestant sources, which she says place a stronger emphasis on discipline and suppression of emotion.Footnote 18 Karant-Nunn focuses primarily on the place of consolation in Lutheran Passion sermons and prescriptions for death-bed ministry, seeking to show how these sources provided an “emotional script” that the laity was expected to learn. Her study examines the creation and dissemination of early modern emotional scripts and thus naturally deals with clerical sources for the most part. She does not examine in detail the lay reception of these scripts, that is, she does not deal with so-called “ego-documents,” or lay autobiographical sourcesFootnote 19 Oelhafen's Pious Meditations shows how the Lutheran reformation of feeling could extend to laypeople. His work may be seen as a self-conscious attempt on the part of an elite burgher to allow Lutheran-style consolation to shape, heal, and inform his own emotional life, along with that of his children and their descendents. The Pious Meditations is thus an ideal example of how the confessionalizing impulse of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Lutheranism could achieve its goal of forming lay identities around the defining convictions and concerns of the Lutheran gospel, especially in the face of suffering and death.Footnote 20 But Oelhafen's work is more than an interesting artifact of early modern Lutheran confessional culture. The Pious Meditations is an artful, poignant, and even inspiring account of how one rather remarkable human being sought to contend with some of the basic realities of human existence: mortality, loss, despair, the obligations of parenthood, and the frequently mysterious workings of providence. Before we examine the contents of the Pious Meditations, a brief introduction to Johannes Christoph Oelhafen is in order.
I. Johannes Christoph Oelhafen (1574–1631)
Johannes Christoph Oelhafen was born in 1574 in the imperial city of Nuremberg to Johannes (Hans) Oelhafen (1520–1580) and Susanna Harsdörffer (1549–1621). Both the Oelhafens and the Harsdörffer were patrician families,Footnote 21 although for a long time only the latter were considered ratsfähig, that is, worthy of serving on Nuremberg's Smaller Council (der kleinere Rat), the real locus of political power in the imperial city. The Oelhafens did not receive this honor until 1729,Footnote 22 most likely because they did not settle in Nuremberg until the late fifteenth century (1499). (The Oelhafens were from Nördlingen, having moved there in the fourteenth century from Zurich by way of Lauingen.)Footnote 23 Still, the Oelhafens were highly respected in the imperial city, owing especially to the efforts of Sixtus I (1466–1539),Footnote 24 the paternal grandfather of our Johannes Christoph. Sixtus worked as Chief Secretary (oberster Sekretär/Secretarius) and legal advisor (Hof Rath) at the imperial courts of Frederick III, Maximilian I, and Charles V. He was also a member (Genannte) of Nuremberg's Great Council (der Grosse Rat), which was occasionally convened by the Smaller Council to approve new taxes, declare war, and discuss matters relating to the city's safety.Footnote 25 It was Emperor Frederick III who raised the Oelhafens to the imperial nobility (1489) and presented Sixtus and his brother with an official coat of arms.Footnote 26 Sixtus also had the opportunity to meet Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms (1521) and was favorably impressed by his person and teaching, although he was circumspect (at least initially) in his support of the reformer, likely for fear of imperial reprisal.Footnote 27 Sixtus married twice, in both cases proving himself worthy of a wife from a ratsfähig family, the Pfinzings and Rieters, respectively.Footnote 28 The father of our Johannes Christoph was born to Sixtus and his second wife, Barbara Rieter.
Hans Oelhafen left Nuremberg at the age of fourteen to study at the University of Wittenberg, where he was a table companion of Luther and Melanchthon.Footnote 29 (Sixtus had apparently overcome his initial hesitation about declaring his support for Luther publicly.) From there Hans went to Tübingen to study law, and after traveling for a while,Footnote 30 he eventually became a judge in Nuremberg (1548).Footnote 31 Like his father, Hans married twice: his first wife was Sybilla Paumgartner (d. 1566),Footnote 32 with whom he had seven children; his second wife, whom he wed one year after Sybilla's death, was Susanna Harsdörffer, the mother of Johannes Christoph: the couple had six children altogether.Footnote 33 Hans died when Johannes Christoph was just five years old; Susanna never remarried.
Johannes Christoph began his education in a Latin school in Nuremberg and then, because of an outbreak of plague,Footnote 34 in 1586 he transferred to the academy in the town of Altdorf,Footnote 35 which is located twenty-five kilometers to the east of the Franconian city. He did extremely well at the academy, winning first prize in Latin and Greek. After spending five years in Altdorf, Oelhafen, following in his father's footsteps, went on to study law and also traveled extensively. His legal pursuits and Wanderlust took him to the Netherlands, Belgium, England, Italy,Footnote 36 Switzerland, Spain, and France. It was in France (Anjou) that he received the juristical licentiate degree.Footnote 37 It was also in France (Montpelier) that he had a close brush with death.Footnote 38 In May of 1599 a barber surgeon accidentally cut a major blood vessel and nerve in Oelhafen's arm while bleeding him. Oelhafen, who was twenty-four at the time, was convinced he was going to die and even prepared his own epitaph, instructing his traveling companion to make arrangements for his burial.Footnote 39 However, after six weeks of extreme pain and great expense, the appointed cures worked and he recovered sufficiently to return to Nuremberg. The experience made a lasting impression on him; he records in the Pious Meditations that he was still fearful of bloodletting some twenty years later.Footnote 40
In August of 1599 Oelhafen was nominated to be legal counsel (Rechtskonsulent/ Consilarius) for the imperial city.Footnote 41 After further study at the imperial chamber court in Speyer and the successful defense of his dissertation in Basel, he earned the doctoral degree and then returned to Nuremberg to take up his post in the municipal and marriage courts. Not long thereafter, on May 25, 1601, he married Anna Maria (1582–1619), who, like his mother, was a Harsdörffer. (Johannes Christoph and Anna Mara were second cousins.)Footnote 42 Despite the demands of Oelhafen's new career, which required frequent travel to princely courts and assemblies far beyond the walls of Nuremberg, it seems that Johannes Christoph and Anne Maria enjoyed a loving marriage, along with the blessings and woes of parenthood—they saw five of their thirteen children die in infancy.
According to one source, Oelhafen was an especially pious and theologically well-informed man who began and ended each day by reading scripture.Footnote 43 His impressive personal library contained a diverse array of theological works by authors such as John Cassian, Thomas Aquinas, Johannes Tauler, Desiderius Erasmus, Johannes Eck, Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, Ulrich Zwingli, Urbanus Rhegius, Johannes Oecolampadius, John Calvin, Sebastian Castellio, Aegidius Hunnius, Robert Bellarmine, and Martin Becanus; the library also included the Formula of Concord and works on the Council of Trent.Footnote 44 While he nowhere states his position on the doctrinal debates of his day, there are important clues to suggest where Oelhafen's basic theological loyalties likely lay. Oelhafen was certainly a Protestant. As we have seen, his family had become enamored with Luther early on in the Reformation and it even had ties with the leading reformers in Wittenberg.Footnote 45 We also know that Oelhafen urged the Nuremberg city council to support the Protestant cause in the early stages of the Thirty Years, War, albeit unsuccessfully.Footnote 46 There is no indication that Oelhafen shared the Bohemians' Calvinist leanings, although there were certainly those in the imperial city who did.Footnote 47 In the late sixteenth century the civic and religious leaders of Nuremberg promoted a moderate form of Lutheranism that looked to Melanchthon as its guide; Altdorf, where Oelhafen studied, was similarly Philippist in theological orientation,Footnote 48 and we know that Johannes Christoph had heard lectures on Melanchthon's theology during his early years of study in Nuremberg.Footnote 49 The theological climate of Nuremberg and Altdorf began to change in the early seventeenth century when a more conservative version of Lutheranism emerged, owing in large part to the efforts of Johannes Saubert (1592–1646), who sought to purge Philippism (and Socinianism) from this region of Franconia—Saubert clearly had an influence on Oelhafen.Footnote 50
Saubert was born in Altdorf and had studied at its academy, having been especially influenced by the Orthodox theologian Jakob Schopper who taught there. He came into contact with other Orthodox theologians at Tübingen (Lucas Osiander, Matthias Hafenreffer, Johann Valentin Andreae), eventually making his way to Jena, where he studied with Johann Gerhard (1582–1637). The two developed a close relationship in which Gerhard shared with Saubert his deep admiration for the devotional writings of Johann Arndt (1555–1621).Footnote 51 Arndt was a Protestant mystic of sorts who stressed the importance of repentance in the Christian life along with the reality of the believer's union with Christ through faith and baptism; one sees these distinctive emphases especially in the enormously popular Four Book of True Christianity (1610).Footnote 52 Saubert was a devotee of both Orthodox Lutheranism and Arndtian-style spiritual renewal, and he sought to spread them in Nuremberg and its surrounding environs.Footnote 53 He ministered first as a preacher and theologian in Altdorf, and then moved to Nuremberg in 1622, eventually becoming one of the most influential clergymen in the imperial city. Oelhafen knew Saubert and must have had a fairly close relationship with him: Johannes Christoph showed his Pious Meditations to the Altdorf preacher, who was deeply impressed by its contents. Affixed to the first page of Oelhafen's work is a slip of paper with a hand-written Latin inscription praising the deep faith that Oelhafen displays in the Pious Meditations; the slip of paper is signed by Saubert.Footnote 54 We thus have good reason to believe that Oelhafen was sympathetic to Saubert's version of Lutheran Christianity when he composed the Pious Meditations, although we cannot know if he agreed with Saubert on every point.Footnote 55
Oelhafen was a bibliophile;Footnote 56 by the end of his life his personal library contained some 1,900 works. (After his death the majority of these works made their way to the library of the University of Altdorf—the academy was raised to the level of university in 1622—and later to the library of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where they are still housed.) These volumes dealt not only with theology and jurisprudence, but also with history, politics, philosophy, and natural science, among other topics.Footnote 57 Oelhafen owned works by Cicero, Plutarch, Petrarch, Marsilius of Padua, Boccaccio, Bruni, Machiavelli, Lipsius, and Galileo, to name but a few. His book collection contained little in the way of consolation literature, although it is quite clear from the Pious Meditations that Oelhafen was familiar with this literature and its long history.Footnote 58
The Pious Meditations shares many of the assumptions and deploys many of the rhetorical devices that were common in the consolation literature of early modern Lutheran Germany,Footnote 59 including the literature written by the bereaved for themselves and others—Oelhafen was by no means alone in this endeavor.Footnote 60 Oelhafen understands the consoling effects of writing, an insight that goes back to Seneca.Footnote 61 He especially understands the solace one can gain from the writing (and singing) of poetry and hymns.Footnote 62 According to one source, Oelhafen was in the regular habit of composing his own hymns and prayers,Footnote 63 and so it was only natural that he would employ these talents as he sought to contend with his grief—he adapts standard Lutheran hymns to his own consolatory purposes in the Pious Meditations and records that he would sing these hymns with his children.Footnote 64 Oelhafen makes use of apostrophe (a speech directed to an absent being), prosopopoeia (the introduction of speech from a deceased or divine being), and also dialogismus (dialogue between two or more beings that constitutes a miniature drama).Footnote 65 In fact, Oelhafen combines these rhetorical figures when he constructs a fictitious dialogue between himself and his deceased wife in the Pious Meditations.Footnote 66 He also employs acrostics.Footnote 67 All of this was typical in the consolation literature produced by the educated classes in early modern Lutheran Germany; in fact, it was typical of burgher family life, although we should not assume that every burgher possessed Oelhafen's skill as a consoler, nor even his remarkable faith. Still, early modern families were quite adept at consolation; parents like Oelhafen were in the regular habit of teaching their children how to face death and how to grieve.Footnote 68 As Anna Carrdus explains, “the traditional consolatory forms and remedies were an integral part of an Early Modern family's day-to-day emotional and spiritual life . . . they helped both parents and children to contain their fear and grief at times of almost unbearable crisis.”Footnote 69 Carrdus emphasizes the role of the arts in helping families exercise this vital ministry of mutual consolation.Footnote 70
Oelhafen shares another important characteristic with much of the early modern Lutheran consolation literature, especially the literature dealing with grief: he gives rather full rein to his feelings of loss and despair in the Pious Meditations; he does not seek to suppress or control them through natural reason as neo-Stoics like Lipsius recommended.Footnote 71 To be sure, Oelhafen heeds the Apostle Paul's warning that Christians must not mourn as those who have no hope (1 Thess. 4:13), but this concern does not prevent him from expressing his deep grief, even as he seeks to hold onto his faith in the Resurrection. Oelhafen would have fully agreed with the judgment made by the Lutheran pastor Georg Walther in his Consolation Booklet (1559; Nuremberg, 1600) regarding those who disallowed grief for Christians: they are bestial (viehisch).Footnote 72 Candor about spiritual and emotional suffering was a hallmark of Lutheran consolation literature in the early modern period, something that can be traced back to Luther himself, who was certainly forthright about his own inner turmoil.Footnote 73
What separates the Pious Meditations from much of the other consolation literature of the period is that it was not intended for publication. We have helpful studies of early modern Lutheran funerary material,Footnote 74 along with works dealing more generally with the Lutheran ars moriendi tradition,Footnote 75 and with consolation literature that was not immediately associated with death and dying,Footnote 76 all of which provides important context for Oelhafen's work. But these sources were all printed and were therefore produced—in some cases by the most talented preachers and poets of the day—with a fairly large audience in mind. Scholars have uncovered manuscript works of consolation, which, like the Pious Meditations, were intended for a limited audience and were then passed down within families. Jill Bepler discusses how noblewomen would create their own prayer books that were filled with quotations from scripture and contemporary works of devotion.Footnote 77 Oelhafen's work is similar to these private prayer books in terms of its form and intended audience, but it differs from them in that it was not produced by a member of the landed aristocracy, and it is not simply a compilation of consoling sayings found in other sources that includes some of the author's own commentary—the prayers, poems, hymns (though not the tunes), and devotional reflections that comprise the Pious Meditations are the work of Oelhafen alone.Footnote 78 To my knowledge, there is nothing quite like Oelhafen's book in the extant early modern consolation literature.
II. Pious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement
The Pious Meditations contains seventy-five vernacular entries followed by three Latin entries; most entries are a couple of pages long. Oelhafen dated each entry and also numbered the German ones: the vernacular entries run from February 13, 1619 to December 31, 1619, while the first two Latin entries are dated January 1 and 6, 1620, and the third, June 8, 1628. It is not clear when Oelhafen produced the Pious Meditations in its final form, although it is quite obvious that he took great care in its creation and hoped that it would survive for generations to come. As we have seen, its pages are gilded vellum and it is bound in red leather. In addition to the inscription by Saubert, which appears on the first page, early on there is also a color portrait of Oelhafen by the well-known Nuremberg artist Lorenz Strauch (1554–1630).Footnote 79 (Unfortunately, there is no portrait of Anna Maria). This is followed by an ink drawing of Oelhafen's projected epitaph—Johannes Christoph and Anna Maria are depicted in a posture of prayer flanked by their thirteen children; those who have died appear with a cross over their heads. Later on the book includes an image of “Lady Patience.” Both this image and the epitaph bear the date 1619, but it seems unlikely that Oelhafen completed his Pious Meditations in the year of Anna Maria's death. The dates of the first two Latin entries militate against this possibility—the third is almost certainly a later addition—as does the fact that Oelhafen had given Saubert time to read the Pious Meditations in full. It is more likely that Oelhafen completed his work on the book—minus the final Latin entry—shortly after the first two Latin entries, that is, some time in late January or early February 1620, probably before the one-year anniversary of Anna Maria's death on February 13.Footnote 80 The entries are for the most part highly polished, although now and again there are signs of small revisions and mistakes. Oelhafen may have first composed and reworked the entries elsewhere before copying them down on vellum pages, or he may have simply written them directly on the costly material. The entries appear to be authentic, that is, there is every reason to believe that Oelhafen composed them throughout the course of the year following Anna Maria's death, rather than creating them some time afterward and belatedly assigning dates and events to them. (He refers throughout to feast and fast days in the Christian calendar and also to events in his own life and that of Nuremberg and the German lands.) The Pious Meditations was Oelhafen's attempt to assuage his grief and to find consolation through writing, artistic composition, and prayer in the period of darkness following Anna Maria's death; he needed such solace every day.
Johannes Christoph does not tell us the cause of Anna Maria's death in the Pious Meditations. However, in a diary that he began keeping a couple of years after her passing he reveals that it was a stroke that finally claimed her in the thirty-sixth year of her life.Footnote 81 Oelhafen records that on February 10 Anna Maria had thrown up bile through the whole night. This continued over the next two days. Then, around midnight on February 13, after more vomiting, her pulse gradually faded, as did her strength. She began to grow cold and to slip away. Still, she was able to speak to her husband one last time: “Oh darling, help me just once more out of this torment!” (Ach schatz, hilf mir noch Einmal, auß dieser qual!) Thirty minutes later she suffered a stroke. Oelhafen records that Anna Maria died peacefully in his arms at 12:45 AM.Footnote 82 We do not know what caused the violent sickness that Oelhafen describes in his diary. It may have had something to do with the cumulative effects of Anna Maria having born thirteen children in eighteen years of marriage, the last of which came just months before her death. We simply know that Oelhafen was devastated by the loss of his AMICO—this was his pet name for Anna Maria, a neologism composed of an acrostic of their joint initials intended to convey the deep union that he believed existed between them: Anne Maria Iohannes Christoph Oelhafen.Footnote 83 He records in his diary that immediately after her death he began to compose a prayer of consolation.Footnote 84
This prayer, which is the first in the Pious Meditations, clearly expresses Oelhafen's deep sense of loss, along with his desire for consolation and reunion with his beloved:
O living God and Consoler of all the sad-hearted, I have lost my dearest treasure on earth, for you have torn away a piece of my heart. You gave her to me and let me have her for eighteen years; now you have taken her again to yourself out of this miserable existence as your dear child, because she knew your Son and called to Him from her heart as her Bridegroom in the middle of death's despair. Console me, a sad and miserable widower, and help me to bear my suffering and to rear up my small children. According to your divine will, send a blessed final hour so that I and those who belong to me may come together with her and be near her before your face in new joy and eternal love. May you, who can bring eternal joy and pleasure out of suffering, be highly praised in all eternity. Amen.Footnote 85
In addition to Oelhafen's grief, we also see in this initial entry his great concern for his children. In the second entry, dated February 14, he prays that God will grant him good health and length of days so that he can parent his children well and thus satisfy (genug thun möge) Anna Maria's hopes and wishes, which she no doubt expressed to him before her death. (Oelhafen records at the end of this prayer that his AMICO was placed in a coffin on this day.)Footnote 86
It is also quite clear from the first entry that Oelhafen thought that God had taken Anna Maria from him; God was sovereign over this and all other events in his life. As Johannes Christoph asserts in a later entry, “Affliction cannot exist in this life without the will and counsel of God” (Creutz kan nicht sein auf Erden, ohn Gottes will vnd Rhat).Footnote 87 Why had God deprived him of his “most beloved treasure on earth,” why had the Almighty so afflicted him? Oelhafen thought it was because of his sin (although this was not his only explanation).Footnote 88 In his prayer from February 14, Oelhafen beseeches God to remove His “great rod of wrath” (große Zorn Ruthe) from him and his family.Footnote 89 A number of entries reveal the same desire for cessation of divine wrath and take the form of confessions of sin. Oelhafen believed that through repentance God would cease to be a “strict Judge” to him and instead be a “loving Father of mercy.”Footnote 90 In the entry for February 28, Oelhafen confesses to God, “you are certainly justified in everything that you have brought upon me; you have acted justly, because I have been godless and have not lived according to your law nor given heed to your commandment and testimony.”Footnote 91 Elsewhere he refers to himself as an unworthy servant who owes God 10,000 pounds (cf. Luke 19:12–27, Luther Bible) and who deserves God's punishment 10,000 times over.Footnote 92 Oelhafen does not reveal any specific sin that might have moved God to chastise him so severely, not even in the entries that he composed during Lent in preparation for private confession;Footnote 93 he focuses not on his sins but on his general sinfulness. He also stresses that only God can provide the needed forgiveness and consolation, something he similarly asserts in his initial entry.
And so Oelhafen turned to God and God alone for solace.Footnote 94 Four days after Anna Maria's death, as a wagon carried her coffin to the cemetery, Johannes Christoph composed a poem that expressed this absolute dependence upon God.
The mention of faith in the merit of Christ in the final lines of this poem reveals the vital connection that Oelhafen saw between the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith and his ability to face suffering with hope and confidence. Johannes Christoph believed that as long as he could be certain of forgiveness through divine grace, he could contend with tribulation, no matter how severe, for such knowledge would provide him with the assurance that he thought he most needed, namely, that God was still good and merciful, especially toward him and his family.Footnote 96 Again and again Oelhafen prays that God will have mercy on him and his family and cover them with Christ's righteousness, especially at the Last Judgment.Footnote 97
The merit that Christ won for humanity not only provided Oelhafen with hope in the face of divine chastisement, it also relieved him of the need (and the opportunity) of seeing his suffering as in some way salvific. As he observed in a later entry, the only merit he could offer to God was the merit of the cross, Christ's cross,Footnote 98 not his own. Oelhafen never sees his suffering as meritorious in the Pious Meditations, an important difference with the Roman Catholic tradition of Oelhafen's day, which taught that suffering could help to atone for the penalty of sin.Footnote 99 Johannes Christoph believed that he had to bear his suffering patiently, but not because it would atone for his sins. The only way he could “satisfy” God was through faith.Footnote 100
It is clear from the Pious Meditations that faith did not always come easily to the grieving Oelhafen. In another entry he compares himself to doubting Thomas and confesses his lack of faith.Footnote 101 In such instances Oelhafen turns to biblical promises of divine goodness and mercy for solace. He consoles himself with the promise that God will not discard the broken reed, that is, the weak in faith (Is. 42:3, Mt. 12: 20).Footnote 102 In one entry he states that although he feels utterly abandoned and his children are now motherless, God's unique work is to have mercy.Footnote 103 In another entry he asserts that God is like a mother hen who protects and does not forget her chicks.Footnote 104 In still another he insists that God only sends affliction for good ends.Footnote 105 As we have seen, such assertions of divine goodness were essential to Oelhafen's sense of consolation, and one can see him seeking to persuade himself and his children of their veracity again and again in the midst of their collective despair.
The hymns that Oelhafen revises and composes in the Pious Meditations especially convey the depth of both his grief and his resolve to look to God alone for consolation.Footnote 106 For example, in Oelhafen's version of All Mankind Fell in Adam's Fall (Durch Adams fall ist gantz verderbt), he conveys the sola-Christus nature of his piety:
It is the “alones” that are so striking in this verse. Christ alone is Oelhafen's source of consolation as he bears his cross. The substance of this Christo-centric consolation was the conviction that Christ had died for sinners, who through faith were delivered from hell, forgiven their sins, and made heirs of eternal life. As we have seen, Oelhafen thought that the way to deal with suffering and grief was to remind himself continually of the mercy God had shown to humanity in Christ and then to draw solace from this knowledge, ever thanking God for His grace.Footnote 108 Oelhafen thought that Germans had received a special measure of divine grace and were therefore uniquely privileged in the divine economy of salvation; they were God's special people, his “Evangelisch volk,” whom God had bought with a heavy price, Christ Himself. Oelhafen asks God several times in the Pious Meditations to protect His Chosen Ones in the battles with Catholic forces that were taking place in 1619, the early stages of the Thirty Years War.Footnote 109
In another hymn, written in early May, Oelhafen observes that the coming of spring has brought only suffering instead of the usual joy and refreshment.Footnote 110 In an interesting move for someone with Oelhafen's humanist training, he insists that time, the great boon to grief-stricken souls in classical consolation literature, cannot remove his cross, which only seems to grow heavier as the weeks and months pass. Seneca had referred to time as the “Great Healer,”Footnote 111 but Oelhafen, who likely knew the Consolation to Marcia (even though he did not own it), disagreed. This conviction, along with Oelhafen's intended audience—in the first place, his children—helps to explain why there are no references to works of consolation from classical antiquity, whether Christian or pagan. There is one brief quotation from Boethius, who drew heavily on such works, but that is it.Footnote 112 The primary and nearly exclusive source for Oelhafen's work is scripture, which he quotes frequently, in many cases providing book and chapter references in the margins. There are no non-biblical references in the margins, a rather striking commentary on Oelhafen's piety and the sources to which he felt he could turn and trust in his hour of greatest need.Footnote 113 As a Lutheran spiritual knight, Oelhafen outfitted himself first and foremost (and nearly exclusively) with scripture, which, as Steiger has shown, is exactly what Lutheran pastors wanted.
Perhaps the most moving entry in Oelhafen's Pious Meditations is the 10-stanza poem he composed on the occasion of his wedding anniversary, May 25.Footnote 114 The poem takes the form of a dialogue between Oelhafen and his deceased wife in which he has her consoling him with assurances of her blessed existence in heaven. As we have seen, this rhetorical form was common in Lutheran consolation literature. Oelhafen begins by calling out to Anna Maria, asking her to relieve his grief, which clearly has not subsided:
Anna Maria “responds” that she is now in God's “hall of joy” (frewden Saal) where there is no pain, and therefore Johannes Christoph should let go his concern for her. He cannot do so: he “replies” that he still bears his suffering all the time and that his heart aches for her every hour. He also wishes that she could still be with their children, though healthy and not sick. Anna Maria again “counsels” him not to despair but to give himself over to God's will and in so doing to find peace for his troubled heart. She also “urges” him to take comfort in the fact that she died in his arms, as she had wished. Now he must let go of her, body and soul, for this is the divine will.Footnote 116 Oelhafen finally resolves to do so, or at least to make a beginning in doing so, and wishes her much joy, even as he eagerly anticipates the day when she will be reunited with him and their children in heaven. In the final line of this ten-stanza poem, Oelhafen reveals that he has sung the preceding nine stanzas in the presence of his children, who shared his tears for his departed AMICO.Footnote 117
It would take some time for Oelhafen fully to commend Anna Maria into the hands of God. He confesses in the very next entry (on the very next day, May 26) that he simply cannot bear this cross of grief unless God helps him. He asks God to hold him “secure in faith and constant in hope” (fest im glauben, unndt bestendig in hoffnung). He thanks God for sending him “visible angels” (sichtbare Engel), that is, his good friends, who have offered their own consolation.Footnote 118 Oelhafen was not completely alone, it seems; he, too, received comfort from this-worldly saints, and elsewhere in the Pious Meditations expresses gratitude for the consolation he has received through the Lord's Supper and private confession. Oelhafen goes on to pray that God will help him to regard his affliction not as a sign of God's “disfavor” (ungnaden), but of His “fatherly affection” (väterlichen liebs naigung) that only seeks his “edification” (besserung). He asks for help in remaining faithful in his calling, adding “so that your fatherly heart's affection (which is frequently hidden under the Cross) may correspond to my immature faith, and equipped with your strength, power, and might as a Christian knight, may [it] stand firm.”Footnote 119 It also seems that Oelhafen was familiar with the Theology of the Cross—or at least with some of its defining concerns—and here applies it directly to his own suffering. This cruciform theology, which was clearly present in the consolation literature of the day,Footnote 120 allowed him to view his suffering not simply as a punishment for sin, but also, and perhaps primarily, as a divine summons to spiritual growth, especially the strengthening of his faith—the connection between suffering and spiritual edification receives ever stronger emphasis as the Pious Meditations progresses. By positing multiple explanations for his suffering, Oelhafen was participating in an ancient custom; the practice of offering numerous causae for suffering had a long history in the Christian consolation tradition.Footnote 121 Lutherans drew on this tradition appreciatively and, in keeping with the distinctive elements of their theology, placed a new emphasis on suffering as a test of faith.Footnote 122
The entries from June to August are taken up with meditations on the cross and the general misery of the human condition, especially in the light of the gathering storm of religious and political warfare that Oelhafen was witnessing in 1619. He still has Anna Maria in mind and earnestly desires to be with her,Footnote 123 but he mentions her less frequently. Again and again he prays for faith and patience in the midst of adversity and continues to assert that God uses suffering to produce spiritual improvement in His people,Footnote 124 especially by slaying the “old Adam.”Footnote 125 Patience emerges as the supreme virtue in these pages and Oelhafen devotes an entire entry to its praise, complete with an image of “Lady Patience.” Returning to the nuptial imagery of his earlier entries, Oelhafen writes that “Patience eagerly awaits her Bridegroom's will” (gedult erwart ihrs breutigams will).Footnote 126 Perhaps the main reason she does so is that she believes that the crosses of life will not separate her from Christ, the Bridegroom, something Oelhafen emphasizes with seeming new confidence in a song he composed on August 24 to the tune of Luther's From Depths of Woe I Cry to Thee (auß Tiefer Noth schrei ich zu dir). In the fourth verse he declares,
Christ was Oelhafen's sole source of consolation not only because of His sacrificial death on the Cross but also because of the Savior's sustaining presence in his life.
In the later entries of the Pious Meditations Oelhafen again makes it clear that this seemingly constant faith in Christ's fidelity actually wavers quite a bit. On December 21 Johannes Christoph again beseeches God to forgive his small faith and to grant him deeper trust in the future. He wants to be able to hold to God firmly in faith and love regardless of whether he sees or feels God.Footnote 128 One is tempted to conclude that Oelhafen did not expect or even desire such experiences of the divine, that the consolation he sought consisted exclusively of a Word-inspired faith in the goodness of God that believed against considerable evidence to the contrary, including the state of one's own affective life. There certainly is support for this interpretation in the Pious Meditations—after all, he asks God for nothing more than a small finger (Ein fingerlein) of helpFootnote 129–but there is also reason to qualify and augment this reading.
On October 28 Oelhafen composed a prayer to the “sweet Jesus Christ” (Ach du süßer Jhesus christe) in which he asks, “let me always feel your friendly sweetness in my heart” (laß mich deine freundliche süßigkeit in meinem hertzen allwegen Empfinden). Here Oelhafen wishes to experience in his own inner emotional life the consolation promised in the Lutheran gospel, he wants to feel the “inexpressible grace” (unaußsprechliche gnadte) that Christ shows to His adopted friends.Footnote 130 These references to divine sweetness immediately put one in mind of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the mellifluous doctor, and also of Johannes von Staupitz (ca. 1468–1524), both of whom had a great deal to say about spiritual sweetness in their devotional works.Footnote 131 Closer to Oelhafen's lifetime, Lutheran devotional writers such as Martin Moller (1547–1606) and Philipp Nicolai (1556–1608) employed the Bernardine image of the divine kiss to convey the deeply emotive aspect of Lutheran consolation.Footnote 132 Oelhafen's library contains no works by such authors, but it does seem that Johannes Christoph was familiar with some of the important themes in their devotional writings, especially those that attest to a desire for an experience of Christ and His gospel that touches the heart in a profound way.
Oelhafen's use of bridal imagery in the Pious Meditations also suggests a desire for such an experience of Christ and His grace. In The Freedom of the Christian (1520) Luther used bridal imagery (drawn from medieval mysticism) to speak of the “wonderful exchange” between Christ and the Christian; the Wittenberg reformer stressed that Christ was truly present in the believer's heart through faith.Footnote 133 Johann Arndt also made use of bridal imagery in his devotional works and placed great emphasis on the deeply emotive aspect of the union between Christ and the Christian soul.Footnote 134 We do not know if Oelhafen had read Arndt, but it does seem that he had certain sympathies with his brand of piety; we know that Oelhafen's associate, Johannes Saubert, who had such high praise for Johannes Christoph's faith, certainly knew Arndt's works. It would seem that the tradition of affective piety that reaches from Bernard of Clairvaux to Staupitz, and through Staupitz to Luther and figures such as Moller, Nicolai, and Arndt, had a certain appeal to Oelhafen; at the very least he was acquainted with the vocabulary of this piety and found it deeply meaningful in his time of great suffering.
The Pious Meditations ends on a confident if somber note. Oelhafen says that he is certain of Anna Maria's resurrection on the Last Day, and he eagerly awaits their reunion in the next life. In the meantime he says that he will seek to be patient until God calls him home. He mentions the many tears he has shed over the past year and concludes by saying that the “sweet memory” of Anna Maria will never leave his heart.Footnote 135
III. Conclusion
Johannes Christoph Oelhafen suffered a terrible loss when his AMICO died in 1619. He was deprived not only of his beloved wife but also of his very self; when she died Oelhafen says that a part of his heart was ripped out of his chest. Furthermore, he lost a mother for his children. Early on in the Pious Meditations Oelhafen expressed his loss this way:
Oh, if only I had enough water in my head and if only the sources of my tears were such that I could weep over the loneliness of my life day and night. Death has broken into my life and has strangled my dearly beloved [wife], and because of this my household has been destroyed and my honor has been ruined.Footnote 136
As we have seen, Oelhafen's means of coping with these shattering losses was to employ numerous well-known rhetorical and consolatory strategies as he sought to find Trost for himself and his children in their Christian faith. This faith contained many traditional elements: the belief in God's sovereignty over suffering; the positing of numerous explanations for suffering; and the consistent resolve to submit to the seemingly harsh dispensations of divine providence—Oelhafen never protests God's decision to take Anna Maria from him, even though he freely expresses to God and his circle of intimates the pain this decision has caused him. There is also much in Oelhafen's faith that is distinctively Protestant and uniquely Lutheran: there is no mention of saints or purgatory, no reference to private masses or indulgences or other forms of traditional piety, and there is no suggestion that suffering is salvific; furthermore, there is evidence of familiarity with the Theology of the Cross, participation in the Lord's Supper and private confession—other Protestants abolished this practice—and there is the rich affectivity and emphasis on self-consolation that Steiger has identified as hallmarks of early modern Lutheran consolation literature.
What we have then in Oelhafen's Pious Meditations is a piece of private Lutheran devotional literature that demonstrates rather clearly both the deep commitment to spiritual self-care that early modern evangelical burghers possessed along with their remarkable skill and resourcefulness in carrying this ministry out. In this work Oelhafen pastors himself; he applies the defining remedies of the Lutheran consolation literature to his own situation, and seemingly to good effect. Like Jacob, he wrestles with his evangelical God in these pages, now gaining the upper hand, now holding on for dear life, and he finally emerges from his long night's struggle with both a wound and blessing. Oelhafen also pastors his children; this is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the book from the modern perspective. Johannes Christoph taught his children how to grieve; he welcomed them into his own grieving process at a very intimate level and showed them through song, prayer, confession, and verse how a good (Lutheran) Christian was to supposed to cope with loss, something he also wished to convey to his and their posterity through his book. Whether this ego-document allows the historian to encounter the real Johannes Christoph Oelhafen or not—I am inclined to think that it does, although surely only in a mediated and partial sense—Footnote 137 the Pious Meditations certainly provides eloquent testimony to the great skill and care early modern parents could take in seeking to form the emotional lives of their children around the Christian gospel, especially in times of great suffering.
IV. Epilogue
Oelhafen remarried several weeks after the penultimate Latin entry in the Pious Meditations and just two days after the one-year anniversary of Anna Maria's death. (The date of this second wedding was February 21, 1620; it is likely that Oelhafen completed the work before embarking on his new marriage.)Footnote 138 There was nothing unusual about this in early modern Germany and should not be seen as evidence of lack of love for his first wife. Oelhafen's father and grandfather had done the same. Oelhafen needed help raising his eight children and facing the vicissitudes of early modern existence with a companion made better sense than seeking to face them alone. His new wife, Katharine Pfinzing (1585–1637), had already been twice widowed and so was likely no stranger to the grief that certainly continued to grip Oelhafen's soul:Footnote 139 their marriage undoubtedly provided ample opportunity for mutual consolation. Unfortunately, we know nothing about their life together other than that they had one child, a son, who survived both of them.Footnote 140 Johannes Christoph continued in his position as legal counsel for Nuremberg and served in a similar capacity for other imperial cities and princes. Already during Anna Maria's lifetime he was awarded the comitatus palatinus (Count Palatine) by Emperor Matthias (1557–1619, r. 1612–1619), which gave him the authority to dispense certain “graces” that belonged by right to the emperor (for example, the conferral of honorary degrees or titles, the creation of notaries and poet laureates, and the ability to declare illegitimate children legitimate).Footnote 141 After Anna Maria's death he was appointed to the Imperial Court Council by Emperor Ferdinand II (1578–1637, r. 1619–1637). In 1623 Oelhafen was chosen to give a formal scholarly speech on behalf of the city council at a ceremony in which he also presented imperial privileges to the Altdorf Academy, thus recognizing its status as a university. (These privileges included a golden scepter and new seal.)Footnote 142 In 1626 he was appointed Pro-Chancellor (Prokanzler) of the University of Altdorf,Footnote 143 and two years later he became the Elder (Senior) of his family line, an honor he enjoyed for only three years. In April of 1631 while at an imperial diet in Regensburg he was stricken with an unknown illness that claimed his life a month later.Footnote 144 Shortly before he passed away a person at his side asked him if he was dying with sure faith in the merit of Jesus Christ. Oelhafen replied, “Well of course, how else!” (Ei freilich, wie anders).Footnote 145 One cannot help but wonder if this confidence in the face of death did not also stem from a desire to be reunited his beloved AMICO, whose memory he had said would never depart from his heart.
