At Calw, the pastor saw a woman gnawing the raw flesh off a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens were also feeding...In Rhineland [the city magistrates] watched the graveyards against marauders who sold the flesh of the newly buried for food ....Acorns, goats' skins, grass, were all cooked in Alsace; cats, dogs, and rats were sold in the market at Worms....Cicely Veronica Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War is loaded with passages equally repugnant. She found it difficult, I'm sure, to describe the scene without documenting the bloody horrors all around.
Between 1618 and 1648, political and religious hatred teamed up to create a war in which the Austrians and Swedes and just about anyone else looking for power on the continent took turns thrashing the very life out of the German people and countryside.
To those who lived through it, the steel wheels of that war must have seemed to grind on endlessly. So many thousands deserted farms and homes for protection in the old walled-in cities that, soon enough, there was no room.
At Strassburg, Ms. Wedgwood says, the living shut their windows to death groans just outside. In winter, people stepped over the dead bodies all over the streets. Finally, when the city knew it could do no more, the magistrates threw out 35,000 refugees to terror and death outside the walls.
Spring came in long days of warm rains that kept the earth moist and rich for disease that flourished in the hot summer sun that followed. Plagues swarmed through the streets in gusts of warm wind. Outside the gates, law and order crumbled into dystopian chaos as men formed marauding, outlaw gangs who murdered each other for food.
Sometime during the final years of that war, Martin Rinkert, a preacher in his hometown of Ellenberg, Saxony, found himself, not by choice I’m sure, in the heart of all that horror, thick in the swamp of life-draining disease. Rinkert, the only clergyman left in Ellenberg, held funerals for up to fifty people per day. One day, that number came to include his own wife.
But sometime during those years—during the groaning persistence of the Thirty Years War’s evil, Martin Rinkert sat down and wrote a hymn that a thousand churches in a hundred different countries will sing sometime before Thanksgiving, a stately, magnificent tribute to the God he loved and worshiped, even though the world around him had seemingly descended into madness.
Thanksgiving—imagine that. Thanksgiving in the middle of all of that death.
“Now thank we all our God,” Rinkert wrote, his own nostrils full of the stench all around. In spite of the horror, the man was still counting his blessings and offering thanks.
To those who lived through it, the steel wheels of that war must have seemed to grind on endlessly. So many thousands deserted farms and homes for protection in the old walled-in cities that, soon enough, there was no room.
At Strassburg, Ms. Wedgwood says, the living shut their windows to death groans just outside. In winter, people stepped over the dead bodies all over the streets. Finally, when the city knew it could do no more, the magistrates threw out 35,000 refugees to terror and death outside the walls.
Spring came in long days of warm rains that kept the earth moist and rich for disease that flourished in the hot summer sun that followed. Plagues swarmed through the streets in gusts of warm wind. Outside the gates, law and order crumbled into dystopian chaos as men formed marauding, outlaw gangs who murdered each other for food.
Sometime during the final years of that war, Martin Rinkert, a preacher in his hometown of Ellenberg, Saxony, found himself, not by choice I’m sure, in the heart of all that horror, thick in the swamp of life-draining disease. Rinkert, the only clergyman left in Ellenberg, held funerals for up to fifty people per day. One day, that number came to include his own wife.
But sometime during those years—during the groaning persistence of the Thirty Years War’s evil, Martin Rinkert sat down and wrote a hymn that a thousand churches in a hundred different countries will sing sometime before Thanksgiving, a stately, magnificent tribute to the God he loved and worshiped, even though the world around him had seemingly descended into madness.
Thanksgiving—imagine that. Thanksgiving in the middle of all of that death.
“Now thank we all our God,” Rinkert wrote, his own nostrils full of the stench all around. In spite of the horror, the man was still counting his blessings and offering thanks.
Some stories have to be told and retold and retold again. Then again, some simply have to be sung.
Professor, a hard reminding read. The real "Great War", the Thirty Year War, WWI cited the great war, well anyway made me think maybe after all these wars, just gave up on God. Have traveled Europe extensively. The great cathedrals, do not see many attending, just some black robed nuns coming in to pray. Faith. How that pastor could compose that hymn?
ReplyDeleteThanks for that report.
I read somewhere that J.S. Bach began to work on every compositions he wrote with the silent prayer "Jesus help me."
ReplyDeleteFor Bach and Martin Rinkert there must have been some divine intervention.
It harder to find at Strassburg during the Thirty Years War or Dresden on February 13, 1945.
I will take the liberty of some of Revilo's ideas.
The first Earl of Shaftesbury has the reputation of having been the most adroit politician of the Seventeenth Century, at least in England. He certainly was, throughout most of his career, the most adroit in discovering that his religious faith always conformed to the dogmas of whatever church would advance his own interests. After one mutation of his faith, a lady of rank asked him what he actually believed. “Madame,” he said urbanely, “all men of sense are really of but one religion.” So the lady asked, “Pray, my Lord, what religion is that in which men of sense agree?” And the Earl made answer, “Madame, men of sense never tell.”
Benjamin Franklin is said to have quoted the Earl’s exemplary prudence with approval. And Benjamin D’Israeli appropriated Shaftesbury’s sagacity and put it in the mouth of a character in one of his novels. One suspects, however, that most of the contending theologians and ambitious princes of the church, in all centuries since the outbreak of Christianity in the decadent Roman Empire, would have been in complete agreement with Shaftesbury and each other, had they had his whim to be candid for a moment.
thanks,
Jerry