Full or partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline http://latviansonline.com/forum/ + Forum Home + Open Forum – The 4th Awakening. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/, http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/, http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ or http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.

The 4^th Awakening

5 Awakening Inside a Trojan Horse (1)

Another way to look at Herrnhuter success in a society suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is to see it not only as its Savior, but as an aggressor. The aggressor appeared the moment the Saved had learned to stand up and push up against the doors of the heirs of the Teutonic Order, albeit be it as people dying on their feat. This distressed the German barons, because foreign labor workers were not then known.

Shortly before events turned the Saved into the collapsed and, thus, a threat to the barons, Livonians were moving in a direction that was already discernible as one not what the German Herrnhuters had in mind. The Common Man of Liuonia, supported by the teachings of the Bible (1694, transl. by the German Lutheran Pastor Ernst Gluck) was beginning to have ideas about imitating the lords of the manor. After all, man is mime and mime is man. Whether by hook or crook, he who is envied most gets copied most.

Fortunately for the barons, the Russians attacked the Swedes and threw the evolution of self-consciousness among the Latuous off track. The movement toward a new identity in Livonia was inhibited by the Great Northern War (1700-1721), which was won by Russia. Early in the war (1702), Ernst Gluck—whom the Germans may have believed to be against their interests—was removed to Moscow. The German barons were permitted to stay. The Lutheran pastors, subservient to the interests of the barons, did not encourage the pa-Yans to read the Bible or anything else.

That is why thirty-five years after distributing Gluck’s Bible to the churches, 1730 arrived with only few of Latuous pa-Yans having an idea of how to read, let alone write.

The post-Great Norther War period is the time when even some of the German barons bega to be alarmed over the consequences of the  repression and degeneration that its work force had suffered. This is why General Hallert and Mrs. Hallert from Wolmar, Liuonia issued a cry for help. Mrs. Hallert, a good friend of a Mrs. Zinzendorf, exchanged letters with her friend and they visited together in Dresden. This is how Graf Zinzendorf became involved in the matter. In 1729, eight years after the treaty of Nystad, he sent one Christian David to Wolmar to check on how things stood there in person.

Ludwig Zinzendorf understood the importance of hands-on training and made a notable innovation: his missionaries were not to be ordained ministers, but artisans: carpenters, smiths, mast makers, innkeepers, and the like. He also had them learn the local language. These were rebellious ideas and a move against the status quo desired by the authorities, the Lutheran church among them. In 1736 the church expelled Zinzendorf from Saxony. This is how he came to Riga, Wolmar, and Tartu-Tallin  (before going on to America).

For the next hundred years the Herrnhuters worked with great success. Their emphasis on piety was as if tailor-made for the Latuous pa-Yans whose very language--with its ability to endear every noun (object) and even verb (action)--was pietistic in nature.

But there were difficulties. The barons and the Lutheran church were not happy over Zinzendorf’s activities. This is why about a hundred years later the same thing that had happened to Zinzendorf happened to the Herrnhuters: in 1843, the Russian government put down such strict conditions for continued Herrnhuter existence that their congregations ceased to exist.

All of which suggests that if the Livonian Herrnhuters had been let evolve as a community free from interference by orthodox Christianity, the character of the Latvian people would have evolved differently. With no religious censor sitting on their shoulders and watching their thoughts, the Latuous would have settled into a pious daily routine all their own. They would probably have let their Johns become their priests-ministers [on Johns Day every head of the Latvian household (saime) was and sometimes still is called Father Johns and Mother Johns]. It is possible that the endearing word, which has such a distinct and elevated presence in the Latvian language, would have led the newborn people toward a re-acquaintance of their arch-Christian ways.

Of course, no such thing happened. Something died. Nevertheless, while one hears that what did not happen does not matter and is lost for ever, maybe not quite so.

If the repression of the Herrnhuters interrupted the inner awakening of the Latuous, it could also perhaps turn it into an inner conflict, which may lead to a schizophrenic personality. Just what such a personality looks like none of us knows, because if it exists among us, it is always too close to us to be acknowledged or recognized. However, one characteristic of it is for the people who are suffering from it to experience continued discomfort with the way things have turned out to be. I comes with a sense of being lost.

If the Latvian Herrnhuters had prevailed, Latvians today would probably not be as ethnically oriented as they are. If the Second (~1900 to ~1918) and Third Awakening (~1980s~1991) were Herrnhuter led, the lead would have been provided by the meme of a subjectivism (piety) that is part of the Latvian language. It is unlikely to have chosen ethnicity as its flag bearer. The Moravian Brotherhood, dressed in the mantle of Herrnhut, was revolutionarily universalistic rather than ethnicically nationalist in its outlook.

For all the kudos that I give the Herrnhuters, the Herrnhuter movement unfortunately also encouraged iconoclastic activities in their Latvian communities. Many such activities were directed against the arch-Christian Children of Johns.

It was not only the holy trees which were cut down. It was also a time when “Johnny, Son of the Sun” became “Johnny, Son of God”, and when the folk songs which referred to Johnny (the Preaching Man) were collected from wherever they were to be found, where after it was decreed that they be sung on Midsummer’s Eve only. This left the rest of the days of the year free to sing hymns to the figure of Jesus removed to heaven. Fifteen sixteen decades later, we are beginning to understand that the decapitation of John in the “Good News New Bible” makes possible the removal of Jesus to Heaven—because there is no one left among the spiritual authorities on Earth to object.

The Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which the tearing apart of spirit and flesh engendered among the pa-Yans, became manifest in the mind’s eye of the Latvian Herrnhuters as a stream of blood flowing from the wounds of Jesus. Finding no way to reunite them, the Latuous became iconoclasts of their own culture. We see traces of this not only in the famed proto-Latvian traitor Kaupo, but also in such Latvians as Pumpurs, Stuchka, Rainis, and many more of the builders of “new” Latvia. First John was replaced by Lachplesis (Destroyer of Bears), then came Ulmanis (an attempted reincarnation of John and Bear Destroyer in one person), and last, came John as Jesus in Heaven again, but both impotent beyond cure.

Iconoclastic activity acted also against the interests of the Latvian language itself. As mentioned above, the endearing word and the John who came to be called Johnny, were quite literally showed the door by the Latvian communications media. In the name of objectivity, the formerly “dear tree” had to be called tree. Even Dear Dictator, with its implicitly profound irony, has to be called Dictator now.

With the iconoclastic activity at last come to an end, the question is: with all subjective language gone by the wind and effectively dead, why not exchange Latvian for English?

Asterisks & Links of Interest
Posted by Jaņdžs at 2:57 AM 0 comments