A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth Century by Paul Peucker (review)

In early 1749, the charismatic founding leader of the radical Pietistic Moravian Church, Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf, was shocked to discover that some influential members had carried his innovative theology too far into territory he called “Sifting” after Luke 22:31—“Satan has desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat.” Since then, historians of the Moravian Church have almost always skirted the Sifting as irrelevant or embarrassing. At best historians have reinterpreted the Sifting according to their own sensibilities. In these retellings, religious practices of the Sifting focused on Blood-and-Wounds theology and were a brief diversion in the early history of the barely twenty-year-old Moravian Church. Paul Peucker is the first to focus squarely on the Sifting in a superbly researched, forthright study of every imaginable source, from every possible angle, especially emphasizing the perspectives of contemporaries, quite different from those of later historians.

Much of this study is about the sources. In the aftermath, Moravian leaders tried to destroy any sources documenting Sifting practices. Peucker discusses what survives in chapter 10. This reviewer read this chapter first, because destruction of sources is an important part of the story and shapes what Peucker can do. Given how much was destroyed, it is amazing how much he was able to uncover. Thankfully, it was impossible to eliminate every remnant, and through masterful detective work, Peucker is able to create a remarkably complete picture of the Sifting. He compares surviving Moravian sources with each other and with the vehement anti-Moravian publications that soon proliferated. Written either by outsiders or apostates, their credibility has generally been questioned by scholars, but Peucker’s comparative analysis proves these antagonistic writings to be accurate.

Peucker argues that practices during the Sifting were extensions of Zinzendorf’s theology, which encouraged playfulness and adoption of feminine traits to achieve childlike and womanly submission toward Christ, worship of Christ’s wounds as sources of nurture, and bridal union with Christ, whereby the believer’s feminine soul (“die Seele” in German) joined mystically with Christ as bridegroom. In Zinzendorf’s teachings, mystical marriage could be experienced between husband and wife during intercourse. Both were to feel union solely with Christ as a sacrament, rather than as lust.

Leaders of the Sifting found it natural to extend mystical bridal union to single members as well. Principally under the leadership of Christel, Zinzendorf’s charismatic son, Single Brothers began worshipping Christ’s corpse to deaden their own bodies, thus rendering themselves beyond sin. In late 1748 Christel introduced gender-changing ceremonies to enable Single Brothers to experience mystical bridal union with Christ in ritualized sex with each other. News of these new practices soon reached Zinzendorf, who reacted with stunned swiftness to try to repair the public damage they had caused. He stopped rituals of gender change and extramarital sex, but defended the mystical theology that had motivated them. Leaders after Zinzendorf’s death in 1760 attacked the theology as well, publishing carefully censored versions of Zinzendorf’s writings and a detailed compendium of Moravian beliefs that made Moravian theology virtually indistinguishable from that of Lutherans around them.

Peucker accepts Zinzendorf’s insistence that the Sifting was a time or a moment in Moravian history, not a period, but Zinzendorf’s claim can be seen as part of his attempt to distance himself from the Sifting and diminish its significance. The evidence and argument presented by Peucker suggest quite strongly that it was, in fact, a period with importance not just for the few years of the 1740s. It was the culmination of the twenty years leading to it and an upheaval whose effects long outlasted Zinzendorf’s attempts to quash it.

But this is a small quibble for such a monumental study as this...