Anna Katharina Emmerich and the Impacts of Catholic Romanticism in 19th-Century Germany

Abstract

As a result of a close relationship established between Romanticism and Catholicism in the struggle against modernity in the early 19th century, a significant number of mystical phenomena, especially involving visionary women, spread throughout Europe during the 19th century. The works of Anna Katharina Emmerick stand as one of the earliest and primary influencers in this regard. Her mystical visions were transcribed and published by a romantic intellectual who had converted to Catholicism in that same context: Clemens Brentano. However, despite inspiring various mystical phenomena in the Catholic milieu, Emmerich’s visions raised suspicion within the Catholic Church due to the presence of supposed pagan and superstitious elements from Brentano’s Romanticism in her descriptions. This suspicion has resulted in ongoing difficulty in advancing her canonization process. In light of this debate, this article discusses the impacts of the union between Romanticism and Catholicism in early 19th-century Germany. It focuses on the case of Anna Katharina Emmerich and Clemens Brentano.

1. Introduction

In the realm of historiography, the European 19th century remains a treasure trove of underexplored themes. Often overshadowed by the traditional political and social history of revolutions, imperialism, and wars, themes such as Romanticism and the religiosity it spawned have received scant attention. They have found more resonance in literature, arts, and religious sciences publications than in historical approaches, making this intersection a fertile ground for further exploration.

Although the relationship between Romanticism and religion is evident when approaching authors such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and his Discourses on Religion, the fact is that, when one tries to relate Romanticism with a specific type of institutionalized, dogmatized, and ritualized religion, such as Catholicism, this relationship appears to be, at the very least, unlikely. However, as paradoxical as this narrowing may seem, the fact is that, in the first decades of the 19th century, romantic and Catholic Romanticism became possible and produced their way of being romantic and Catholic. The outcome of this unlikely but real relationship still needs to be assessed. However, the phenomenon of Catholic mysticism, particularly the stigmata and those involving women, was one of the natural consequences of this relationship.

From a specifically Catholic point of view, its close relationship with Romanticism (mainly German) occurred through at least two distinct but complementary routes. On the one hand, a relationship of “elective affinity” (in the Weberian sense) seems to have been established between the two, to the extent that Romanticism found in Catholicism the anti-modern and anti-enlightenment religious support par excellence, and Catholicism perceived in Romanticism a path to an anti-rationalist and nostalgic religious “revival” of a lost Christendom. The result of this relationship, on the other hand, generated both the conversion of essential names in German Romanticism to Catholicism (such as the Schlegel couple, Clemens Brentano, and Zacarias Werner) and the explosion of cases of mystical phenomena involving, in particular, supposedly stigmatist women.

The research object I analyze in this article finds itself in this context. Anna Katharina Emmerick, without a doubt, was not an exceptional case of female mysticism in the history of the Catholic Church. However, the historical conditions in which her mystical trajectory took place and the fundamental role of a romantic poet in exploring her supposed visions and popularizing her image demonstrate well how the relationship between Catholicism and Romanticism in the fight against the triumphant modernity of the 19th-century can and should still be explored by historiography.

In light of this debate, this article aims to analyze the impacts of German Romanticism on the development of Catholic female mysticism in the 19th century, taking as its object of analysis the case of Anna Katharina Emmerick and her visions, as transcribed by the romantic poet Clemens Brentano. To this end, I begin with a debate about the relationship between German Romanticism and Catholicism in the struggle with modernity and how this impacted the overflow of mystical phenomena involving supposedly stigmatized women. Next, I turn my attention to the case of Anna Katharina Emmerick and her relationship with Clemens Brentano, focusing on how the Catholicism experienced there and posthumously published by Brentano was filled with magical elements typical of this fusion between Catholicism and Romanticism at the beginning of the 19th century.

2. Romanticism and Modernity

Romanticism is a concept that is extremely hard to define. It has already been abandoned,1 whether due to its vast internal diversity (with elements that are often contradictory to each other) or the sociocultural, political, and artistic breadth that the movement gained in its different phases and places. Therefore, it seems reasonable to me to agree with Isaiah Berlin:

“Indeed, the literature on romanticism is larger than romanticism itself, and the literature defining what it is that the literature on romanticism is concerned with is quite large in its turn. There is a kind of inverted pyramid. It is a dangerous and confused subject in which many have lost, I will not say, their senses, but at any rate, their sense of direction. It is like that dark cave described by Virgil, where all the footsteps lead in one direction; or the cave of Polyphemus—those who enter it never seem to emerge again”.

(Berlin 1999, p. 1)

These conceptual difficulties and dangers are not just apparent. Instead, they are a set of ideas so complex and in such diverse forms that any attempt at conceptual apprehension seems to be too limited and limiting of the historical reality that the word “romanticism” tries to indicate. This is because Romanticism presented itself as something “at the same time (or alternately) revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, individualist and communitarian, cosmopolitan and nationalist, realistic and fantastic, retrograde and utopian, rebellious and melancholic, democratic and aristocratic, activist and contemplative, republican and monarchist, red and white, mystical and sensual” (Löwy and Sayre 2017, p. 20).

Such a broad, diverse, and contradictory set of characteristics attributed to the same phenomenon led to trends that abandoned the possibility of a historical concept for Romanticism and the historicity of the movement.2 These perspectives, in addition to undermining, as it seems, what Romanticism itself valued most, that is, the human and its historical character, amplify further a concept that, historically and sociologically, is already difficult to delimit.

Therefore, it is salutary to start this article from the following point of view: Romanticism was, above all, a historical phenomenon; that is, it occurred at a given time and in certain places. Even though its borders, characteristics, and delimitations are too fluid, its historicity must not be removed. Instead, it seems correct to me to state that it is precisely in its historical aspect that the possibility of delimiting what the Romantic movement was and what it was not resides. It is in its temporal dimension (and, from there, its cultural, sociological, psychological, anthropological dimensions, etc.) that we can see “what is the concept, the Begriff (in the Hegelian-Marxist sense of the term) of romanticism, capable of to explain its countless forms of appearance, its diverse empirical traits, its multiple and tumultuous colors” (Löwy and Sayre 2017, p. 25).

That said, we need to understand that, as a historical fact, Romanticism was and is, without a doubt, one of the most important artistic and intellectual movements in the history of mentalities, especially in the West. Even though the debate about its definition undergoes constant revisions, questions, and discussions, the fact is that, between the 18th and 19th centuries, “a great turning towards emotionalism, that there was a sudden interest in the primitive and the remote—the remote in time, and the remote in place—that there was an outbreak of craving for the infinite” (Berlin 1999, p. 14). More than that, Romanticism must be considered as, according to Isaiah Berlin (1999, p. xiii):

“the deepest and most lasting of all changes in the life of the West, no less far-reaching than the three great revolutions whose impact is not questioned—the industrial in England, the political in France, and the social and economic in Russia—with which, indeed, the movement with which I am concerned is connected at every level”.

(Berlin 1999, p. xiii)

Despite this, outside of the arts, letters, and literature, etc., the weight and impact of Romanticism have often been neglected. We need to notice, for example, in the fields of History and Sociology, the deficient number of articles and academic works that give it importance in these areas, “a true forgotten continent, which escapes the usual systems of interpretation of the human sciences” (Löwy and Sayre 2017, p. 54). The reason for this, according to Michel Löwy and Robert Sayre, is because “it does not correspond to the usual categories—in philosophy, rationalism, empiricism, idealism; in history and politics, left-right, conservative-liberal, progressive-reactionary—[romanticism] pass through their meshes and often remains invisible to analysis” (Löwy and Sayre 2017, p. 54).

That said, when we analyze Romanticism as a reaction to modernity, it is necessary to understand that, within the immensity of diverse and contradictory characteristics commonly attributed to Romanticism, its opposition to Enlightenment and modernity seems to be one of the few constants, even if there are exceptions. One of the most relevant authors defending this thesis is Michel Löwy. In his joint work with Robert Sayre, Löwy argues not only that Romanticism is the “first self-criticism of modernity”, but, above all, that it is a movement in opposition to capitalism (Löwy and Sayre 2017, pp. 38–41).

In general terms, in their work “Revolta e Melancolia: O Romantismo na Contracorrente da Modernidade” (2017), Löwy and Sayre argue that Romanticism cannot be summarized as merely a reactionary tendency. This is not only due to its revolutionary character, but also, and mainly, because of its opposition to capitalism. They see capitalism as a socioeconomic process that undermined community foundations and transformed the bucolic countryside into industrialized cities. This argument is quite interesting; however, as I would like to contend, it stems from a conception that does not distinguish between “modernity” and “capitalism”. Consequently, for them, if “romanticism is, in essence, a reaction against the way of life in capitalist society”, it would be correct to assert that this view is coextensive with capitalism (Löwy and Sayre 2017, p. 40).

This conclusion reached by Löwy and Sayre seems problematic to me due to at least two factors:

(1) the statement that Romanticism would be co-extensive with capitalism, in my opinion, denies, on the one hand, the condition of capitalism as an economic and social system in constant transformation, with that of the 18th and 19th centuries being indisputably different from that experienced in the 20 and 21, and, on the other, it also denies the historicity of Romanticism as a historical phenomenon, located in time and space.

Although traces of what Benedito Nunes called the “psychological category of Romanticism” (Nunes 2019, p. 52) or of Romanticism as “Weltanschauung” are indisputably present in the 20th and 21st centuries, from art to philosophy, from Pentecostal religion to New Age, the extension of Romanticism as a movement and historical phenomenon beyond the 19th century promotes it to a condition of the temporal structure as complex as modernity itself, against which it was created. This would result in something very close to the conception of Herbert Read and Kenneth Clark, which we mentioned earlier. It understands Romanticism as a state of mind found in any place or moment in history, completely emptying the concept of its historical dimension and context.

(2) Even though both are fruits of modernity, neither capitalism nor Romanticism can be confused with it. One of the main reasons for criticism by Marxist authors against the arguments surrounding “post-modernity” in the 20th and 21st centuries is precisely the visceral correlation they establish between capitalism and modernity, resulting in the position that, without overcoming one, there would be no completion of the other. Now, even though capitalism, as one of the main fruits of modernity, is inseparable from it, conditioning the cultural, social, artistic, and religious transformations, etc., of modernity to its material transformations seems to force, on the one hand, a homogeneity of this modernity, which is not accurate, and, on the other, that all transformations, in all areas of life and human society, are determined by the economy. Suppose that we overcome this kind of economic determinism in understanding modernity. In that case, Romanticism returns to what, from my point of view, it seems to be: a historical phenomenon located in time and space, which, like so many others, remains with latent roots in the world that followed its expression as a historical event.

So, if modernity is not the same as capitalism, what is it, at last? The concept of modernity is complex and would require much more than a few pages in a section like this to exhaust it. However, it is necessary to indicate my starting point. Without entering into the swampy philosophical and sociological debate about its concept, I understand modernity as a period of history marked by a temporal distension between the past and future, in the sense thought and described by Reinhart Koselleck (1985). For the German historian, therefore, there is no way to talk about modernity without thinking about the everyday experience of imagining a future endowed with the “radically new”, that is, an adequate distance between what has been experienced (cultural, socially, and politically until then) and what was expected of a future utterly open to new possibilities. This distancing had a strong accentuation from the second half of the 18th century. It developed more effectively throughout the 19th century onwards, based on three main factors: (1) the progressive decline of the Christian notion of the future as an apocalypse; (2) the set of transformations that occurred in the most diverse areas of the economy, society, culture, and politics, whether from the bourgeois revolutions from the second half of the 18th century to the first of the 19th or through the bias of imperative philosophical rationalism from the Enlightenment; and (3) technical innovations (especially in transport and communication) and the advancement of industrialization following the Industrial Revolutions. This set of transformations that occurred in the most diverse areas of the economy, society, culture, and politics, when combined with the technical innovations that completely transformed the notions of time and space in nineteenth-century Europe (and, from there, spreading throughout the world), provided the modern historical time of a characteristic hitherto little experienced: temporal acceleration and the notion of the present as “transition”.

From these assumptions, especially temporal ones, I understand modernity and Romanticism. This, as a result of the former, is, in fact, a reaction to the bourgeois society of its time, to philosophical and scientific rationalism, and to the social transformations caused by the Industrial Revolution, but also to the sensation of temporal instability caused by the feeling of time acceleration and fluidity of values. In other words, the romantics expressed through art, philosophy, and literature, etc., the anguish of an uncertain future, as it became increasingly distant and distinct from the past, in contrast to the optimism of progress hailed by the Enlightenment.

Once again, I do not believe it is reasonable to deny the inseparability between modernity and capitalism, nor Romanticism as a sociocultural and artistic expression against the rising capitalist and bourgeois society in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, both modernity and Romanticism and, mainly, the relationship between the two, start from an assumption that understands modernity from a prism of temporal experience (without denying its many and diverse other aspects) and Romanticism as a phenomenon above all historical, and, therefore, located in time and space, which is the result of a set of transformations characteristic of

“a period of transition, which lies between the Ancien Régime and Liberalism, between the way of life of pre-industrial society and the developing ethos of urban civilization under the market economy, between the moment of the renewing libertarian aspirations of intellectual minorities, on the eve of the grand ébranlement of 1789, and the moment of ideological conversion of the ideal of freedom that these minorities defended, into the principle of absolute dominance of the new ruling majorities, established with the Napoleonic Empire and after the Restoration”.

(Nunes 2019, p. 53)

Therefore, Romanticism can also be understood as a response to a tendency towards the general rationalization of society in all its spheres. However, as an essentially intellectual movement, it was against the Enlightenment philosophy that concentrated much of Romanticism’s efforts. According Löwy and Sayre (2017, p. 60):

In this same context, it is necessary to interpret the romantic fascination with the night as a place of sorcery, mystery, and magic, which writers and poets contrast with light, a classic emblem of rationalism. In Hymns to the Night, Novalis makes this strange and paradoxical complaint: “Why must the morning always return? Will the despotism of the day never end? Profane activity consumes the angelic visitation of the night”.

In this sense, even though the Romantic movement emerged as a form of opposition to Enlightenment modernity, its equal opposition to the growing secularization and “disenchantment” of society is an essential aspect of its philosophical–religious proposal.3 The many religious revivals of the 19th century, from Catholics, Protestants, and spiritualists to the proliferation of sects, secret societies, and interest in Occultism in general, have a profoundly romantic root, the importance of which has also been little explored by historiography and the social sciences in general. The fact, for example, that the foremost founding exponent of the Romantic movement in Germany, Friedrich Schlegel, became, from 1806 onwards, a fervent Catholic, has a profound significance in this still little-explored relationship between Romanticism, Catholicism, and the consolidation of modernity in the 19th century.

3. Romanticism and Religion

In general, the relationship between Romanticism and religion has often been highlighted by any author who ventures to analyze the movement deeply. This is because Romanticism has a solid and expressive conjunction between the human feeling of melancholy/nostalgia and the mystical religious experience. In other words, the essential basis of Romanticism, not only as an artistic and intellectual movement, but above all, as an expression of the cultural, economic, and social contradictions of its own time, is directly related to how human beings connect with what they consider sacred through their religious experiences, especially in the midst of a crisis of meaning and bordering situations between different ways of conceiving the world, reality, and society.

However, this manifestation of religious feelings and experiences in the form of art, literature, poetry, philosophy, or politics did not occur, in general, as a properly proselytizing discourse, as part of belonging to a set of beliefs or specific dogmas to which we are accustomed call “religion”. On the contrary, the religious expressions of Romanticism occurred in a very diffuse way, being able to be perceived in elements dissolved in the most diverse themes and approaches, something so diluted in the very praxis of the romantic being that it can hardly be distinguished from its bases, its core, and in short, its essence. In general, these religious aspects are found in expressions such as “vital force”, “universal sympathy”, “soul of the world”, and “divine principle”, etc., coming from various authors from previous centuries, be they philosophers, theologians condemned as heretics, alchemists, or astrologers. In short, as Georges Lefèbvre well expressed, the romantic is “the artist of genius who, only through intuition or even through dreams and magic, comes into contact with true reality and, in him, this mysterious experience is transformed into works of art. The poet is a priest, and this philosophy refers to miracles” (Lefèbvre 1951, pp. 614–15).

Löwy and Sayre (2017, p. 57), although they recognize that Romanticism “at its deepest and most intense, is essentially a religious experience”, argue that “there is a non-religious (Hoffmann) or even anti-religious (Proudhon, Nietzsche, Oskar Panizza) Romanticists” (Löwy and Sayre 2017, p. 58). I do not think it is possible to separate philosophy and politics, etc., from the second half of the 19th century (something like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Proudhon, among others) from the straightforward fruits of Romanticism at the beginning of the century. However, it seems necessary, on the one hand, to distinguish the first phase of Romanticism (Frühromantik) from other periods of the movement or from its booties, since even its founders, such as Friedrich Schlegel, at the beginning of the 19th century, broke with many ideals that were fundamental to the Romantic conception exported from Jena to the world. This does not mean that we should constrain romanticism only to Jena’s group. However, suppose that we try to understand what resulted from it. In that case, it seems necessary to analyze its conceptions in isolation, and only then can we know what is derived from it, whether as a complementation/continuity or as a total divergence.

In summary, here is my proposal for this point: the first phase of Romanticism (Frühromantik), from the end of the 18th century, expressed mainly by the members of the Jena Circle (such as Schleiermacher, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis and Tieck), has original and singular characteristics in the way it relates to religion, based primarily on a philosophical and anti-institutional vein of spirituality, centered on art, sentimentalism, and mystical experience with a transcendental “absolute” or “universe” and without denominational identification. In the first years of the following century, however, there was a discontinuity in this trend, expressed especially by the conversion of the Schlegel couple to Catholicism and by more notable performances by poets and literati in the German Catholic milieu, such as Zakarias Werner and Clemens Brentano (whom I will discuss later to analyze Emmerick’s case). What followed in the rest of the century and other countries was somewhat diffuse and requires individualized analyses. However, we can say that it was something essentially different from what was seen in Jena at the end of the 18th century.

In this sense, we must understand the religious essence of Frühromantik as something very distinct from “religion” as a set of institutionalized beliefs, dogmas, and rites, or at least systematized around given groups and hierarchies. There, Romantic spirituality was much closer to diffuse religiosities, although very much based on concrete historical religious experiences, such as mysticism, especially the Christian one, which was part of the field of experiences of these subjects, as well as the nostalgic imagination of Christianity lost in some pre-modern moment, often identified with the Middle Ages, or even with pre-Christian paganism. Jena group’s initial rejection of the Novalis’ text Christendom, or Europe (1799), demonstrates this initial refusal of the denominational link of the first phase of Romanticism (see: Justo 2006). On the other hand, mystical Christian roots, such as Protestant Pietism, left profound marks on how the Romantic religious experience was constructed in its first phase.

On Pietism, Isaiah Berlin highlights that “Spener, Francke, Zinzendorf, Arnold—all these founders of the Pietist movement managed to bring comfort and salvation to a large collection of socially crushed and politically miserable human beings” (Berlin 1999, pp. 36–37). More than that,

“The result was an intense inner life, a great deal of very moving and very interesting but highly personal and violently emotional literature, hatred of the intellect, and above all, of course, violent hatred of France, of wigs, of silk stockings, of salons, of corruption, of generals, of emperors, of all the great and magnificent figures of this world, who are simply incarnations of wealth, wickedness and the devil. This is a natural reaction on the part of a pious and humiliated population and has happened since their day in other places as well. It is a particular form of anti-culture, anti-intellectualism, and xenophobia—to which the Germans were, at that particular moment, especially prone. This is the provincialism which some German thinkers cherished and adored in the eighteenth century, and against which Goethe and Schiller fought all their lives”.

(Berlin 1999, pp. 37–38)

Therefore, it was from this social context of opposition between pietistic sentimentality/religious experience and French intellectual arrogance (strongly represented by Enlightenment rationalism) that Frühromantik flourished. Hence, it is neither a pure and straightforward opposition to philosophy and academia, nor a superficial artistic–philosophical branch of pietism. On the contrary, German Romanticism was born from the effervescence of all these elements together, thus creating a very original cultural broth with a deeply spiritualist root in its philosophical and world conceptions, although not strictly religious. Consequently, as a form of intellectual and artistic religiosity, for Frühromantik, “religious experience is an incipient reflection of consciousness on itself and its origins” (Mariña 2020, p. 96).

In this sense, on the one hand, the most profound religious elements of Romanticism were found dispersed in ideas, philosophies, literature, and art. On the other hand, it is undeniable that, contradictorily (as is typical of romantic paradoxical freedom), “religion” itself was on the order of the day for Romanticism since its first phase.4 Thus, there were certain attempts to think of a kind of “romantic religion”, sometimes utterly alien to any ready-made and institutionalized/dogmatized religion (something very typical of the pietist influence), sometimes perceptibly derived from the Christian mysticism idealized in the Middle Ages. Thus, as Rüdiger Safranski rightly pointed out, “if religion was ‘the order of the day’ among the romantics, this religion was not properly Christian. It was a fantasy religion or a religion of fantasy. Revealed religion is not useful for entering into the game of imagination. It was supposed to be a religion that developed from this game”. (Safranski 2012, p. 122). This “game” to which Safranski refers developed mainly in the fields of art and philosophy, and three prominent names of Frühromantik were responsible for this project of the “aestheticization” of religion: Schleiermacher, Novalis, and F. Schlegel.

According to Hermann Timm, “In the case of the first romantic triumvirate [Schleiermacher, Novalis, and Schlegel], there are good enough reasons to name the spatiotemporal proximity and declared communion of their programmatic concept of religion” (Timm 1978, p. 15), that is, even if it seems that Frühromantik’s religious proposal would only be great anarchy between art and spirituality (Schleiermacher, for example, delights in “divine abundance”, Schlegel invokes “spiritual bacchanalia”, and Novalis glorifies “true anarchy” as the procreative element of the sacred), there is a systematized proposal for religion, or at least an understanding of religion and spirituality thought there. Still, according to Timm, in the religious proposal of Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Novalis,

“The reciprocal balancing of dichotomies aims to create a sphere of equivalences of plural perspectives, a means of combinatorial diversification to make various commitments, perspectives, and facts transparent. The ideal is an osmotic wandering spirituality that decides nothing in principle and resolves nothing definitively; it knows nothing final, and no goodbyes but instead provides the carrier frequency of a loose and flexible synopsis, stimulating and inspiring—the present whole. The goal is to achieve the most significant possible amplitude and depth of resonance. The soul’s resilience must be expanded, its horizon unlimited, and the degree of complexity increased without establishing a priori limits to capacity. The completeness criterion takes first place. Revising the purist form of rationality promises to bring a more extraordinary richness of experience. The proportional weakness of the contours of thought is blithely accepted. It is a religion that thrives on youthful emphasis, written by authors who have not been subjected to any faculty or departmental discipline”.

(Timm 1978, p. 15)

At the close of the 18th century, particularly in 1799, a pivotal moment emerged with the publication of three seminal works that encapsulated early Romanticism’s engagement with religious themes. As Helmut Schanze astutely noted, “Schleiermacher’s Discourses on Religion, Schlegel’s Ideas, and Novalis’s Christendom or Europe—all published in the same year of 1799—represent the juncture at which the initial break from Enlightenment ideals converged […] with religious contemplation” (Schanze 1976, p. 15). Subsequently, Schleiermacher returned to Berlin to immerse himself in the study of hermeneutics, Novalis tragically passed away while pursuing his beloved Sophie, and Schlegel and his wife underwent conversion to Catholicism. This marked the conclusion of the early phase of Romanticism, paving the way for new developments, including the emergence of Catholic Romanticism as a distinct strand.

4. Romanticism and Catholicism

This religious conception of the world outlined by Romanticism, which I commented on a moment ago, even though it intersects with the way Catholicism also conceives existence (that is, religiously), was fundamentally different from an institutional, dogmatic, and clericalized religion such as Catholicism.

The context in which Romanticism emerged, however, as a reaction to the modern world that was being established, generated at least three points of more direct and dynamic contact that would later allow for a “relationship of reciprocal attraction and influence, mutual choice, active convergence, and mutual reinforcement” (therefore, of elective affinity—Wahlverwandtschaft—in the Weberian sense of the term) between Romanticism and specific sectors of Catholicism: (1) conservatism; (2) opposition to liberal, industrial, and enlightenment modernity; and (3) the perception of Protestantism as the religious form most suited to liberal, industrial, and Enlightenment modernity. The result of this elective affinity meant that Romanticism and part of Catholicism (especially that closest to ultramontane and baroque religiosity) generated a kind of “cultural symbiosis”, giving rise to a Romantic Catholicism (expressed in specific works and intellectuals, such as Eichendorf and Görres), regarding Catholic Romanticism, primarily via the conversion of romantic intellectuals, such as Schlegel, Werner, and Brentano.

Of these three points of contact, however, what is more specifically attractive for the proposal outlined here is the opposition to Protestantism shared by both Romanticism and Catholicism, since we are dealing with an exceptional context of a traditionally Catholic region of the Holy Empire, which, from 1815 onwards, belonged to the Prussian empire, with a Protestant majority and government.

According to Alfred von Martin, Protestantism (especially Lutheran and Calvinist) was regarded by Romanticism and Catholicism alike as a significant adversary worthy of protest. For the German historian, such protests, coming precisely from a Germany that was a daughter of the Reformation, occurred due

“to a psychological reaction that now claims the rights of those natural human inclinations that have been disregarded by Protestant culture: the rights of the poetic being. Or, to quote a letter from Tieck to Solger, the rights of the (subjective) “joy for the deep, the mystical and all that is strange” alongside the—and this is the genuinely characteristic—romantic soul […]”.

(von Martin 2019, pp. 133–34)

When Alfred von Martin refers to these “rights to be poetic”, there is an explicit reference here, which especially a German accustomed to Lutheranism can recognize, to Protestant religious rationalism, which, in one way or another, led to a kind of “disenchantment of the world”, something that Max Weber masterfully addressed.

According to Antônio Flávio Pierucci (2003), on the concept of “disenchantment of the world” in Max Weber, we are facing a complex concept that he developed throughout practically all of his works about the process of rationalization in the West, primarily through religions. In any case, for Pierucci, in Weber, the “disenchantment of the world” has at least two meanings: (1) religious disenchantment [Deszauberung] through Judeo-Christian ethics, especially in Protestantism; and (2) the emptying of meanings into the world through modern science. For what I intend to develop here as an argument, however, we will focus on the first meaning.

More directly and punctually, Max Weber defines, in his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904/1905), that the disenchantment of the world refers to the elimination of magic as a means of salvation. However, following his argument, Weber emphasizes that this elimination

“was not carried out in Catholic piety with the same consequences as in Puritan (and, before that, only in Jewish) religiosity. The Catholic had at his disposal the sacramental grace of his Church to compensate for his insufficiency: the priest was a magician who performed the miracle of transubstantiation and in whose hands the power of the keys was deposited. One could turn to him in repentance and penance; he ministered atonement, the hope of grace, the certainty of forgiveness and, in this way, gave rise to the release of that enormous tension in which it was the inescapable and implacable destiny of the Calvinist to live”.

(Schluchter 2016, p. 61)

Therefore, in Max Weber’s argument, contrary to what happened with Protestantism, Catholicism did not suffer an intense process of disenchantment, since several magical practices and religious enchantments (Verzauberungen) survived within Catholicism, so they allowed the sacred to remain present in the world. However, as a direct descendant of Judaism, Christian Catholicism inherited a significant process of disenchantment, since, as Peter Berger rightly stated in his famous The Sacred Canopy, “the ‘disenchantment of the world’ begins in the Old Testament” (Berger 2011, p. 86). As Berger argues, also based on Max Weber, Israeli religious culture was defined based on its opposition to the “cosmological” cultures surrounding it, notably Egypt and Mesopotamia. For Berger,

“One point that should be strongly emphasized is that this sort of [cosmogonic] universe is one of great security for the individual. Put negatively, it is a universe furnishing highly effective barriers against anomy. This does not mean at all that nothing terrible could happen to the individual or that he is guaranteed perennial happiness. It does mean that whatever happens, however terrible, makes sense to him by being related to the ultimate meaning of things. […] It is profoundly significant that the traditions later incorporated in the canon of the Old Testament interpreted the origins of Israel as a double exodus—the patriarchs’ exodus from Mesopotamia and the great exodus from Egypt under Moses. This prototypical Israelite exodus was not just a geographical or political movement. Rather, it constituted a break with an entire universe. At the heart of the religion of ancient Israel lies the vehement repudiation of both the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian versions of cosmic order, a repudiation that was, of course, extended to the pre-Israelite indigenous culture of Syria-Palestine. […] This great denial of Israelite religion may be analyzed in terms of three pervasive motifs—transcendentalization, historization, and the rationalization of ethics”.

(Berger 2011, pp. 87–88)

In this regard, Berger argues that the first step in the process of the disenchantment of the world occurred within the Judeo-Israelite religion, as it underwent a process of transcendentization (a radical separation of the sacred, belonging to the transcendent from the immanent world), historicization (transforming the typical cyclical cosmological history into linear prophetic history), and rationalization of ethics (whereby their God is placed outside the cosmos, and, therefore, immune to it and its processes of magical manipulation), effectively sterilizing the world of the presence of the sacred in its entirety.

However, we must remember that Catholicism, forged in the crisis of the Roman Empire, was not the result of Judaism alone. On the contrary, throughout its centuries of expansion and consolidation, Catholic Christianity took over the most diverse pagan elements of typically cosmological religions. Even though the character of historical time has been primarily maintained (the cyclical time of the liturgy, feasts, and even the sacramental mimesis of the mass are typically opposed to this), the fact is that Catholicism developed, over the entire medieval age, a progressive process of adapting a disenchanted religion into a normally enchanted world. This factor explains the number of beliefs in relics, miracles, intersections, sacraments, and earthly demons, etc., that populate the world of the sacred. In the words of Peter Berger:

“Perhaps it is not surprising that the central Christian notion of incarnation brought in its wake a multiplicity of other modifications of transcendence, the whole host of angels and saints with which Catholicism populated religious reality, culminating in the glorification of Mary as mediator and co-redeemer. In the measure that the divine transcendence was modified, the world was “re-enchanted” (or, if one wishes, “re-mythologized”). We would contend, indeed, that Catholicism succeeded in re-establishing a new version of cosmic order in a gigantic synthesis of Biblical religion with extra-Biblical cosmological conceptions. […] It is precisely in this sense that the Catholic universe is a secure one for its “inhabitants”—and for this reason of intense attractiveness to this day. It is in the same sense that Catholicism may be understood as the continuing presence in the modern world of some of the most ancient religious aspirations of man”.

(Berger 2011, p. 93)

This process, however, should be understood as something beyond the mere development of religiosity devoid of rational reflection. From philosophical and theological perspectives, for instance, the entire belief system encompassing relics, saints, the Trinity, and other elements of the Christian faith was the subject of intense debate, especially during the early medieval age. These debates resulted, on the one hand, in vibrant theology and philosophy, and, on the other hand, in the delineation of heterodox views. The most notable cases of these philosophically and theologically rationalized debates occurred particularly in the East, where the rich Greek philosophical tradition fostered a dynamic environment for disputing the rational comprehension of the mysteries of faith, as seen in the disputes over Arianism, Monophysitism, and Nestorianism.

In the West, despite a historiographical interpretation that attributes a more magical character to Christian religiosity as opposed to a properly philosophical and theological one (Giordano 1983), recent historians have highlighted essential aspects of theology and philosophy within fundamental elements of the Western Christian faith. This includes the veneration of saints (Brown 1981) and the worship of relics (Salonia 2018).

From this process described here, we finally arrive at the Protestant Reformations of the 16th century. Through them, Lutheranism and especially Calvinism once again extirpated the transcendental presence in the immanent world from their religious conception of the world, i.e.,

“If compared with the “fullness” of the Catholic universe, Protestantism appears as a radical truncation, a reduction to “essentials” at the expense of a vast wealth of religious contents. This is especially true of the Calvinist version of Protestantism, but to a considerable degree, the same may be said of the Lutheran and even the Anglican Reformations. […] At the risk of some simplification, it can be said that Protestantism divested itself as much as possible from the three most ancient and most powerful concomitants of the sacred—mystery, miracle, and magic. This process has been aptly caught in the phrase “disenchantment of the world”.

(Berger 2011, p. 85)

This is the point of the argument defended here: unlike Catholicism, whose evident presence of magic, miracle, mystery, and enchantment, in short, conditioned Christians to a world permeated by the marvelous, Protestantism reproduced disenchantment in the Jewish style, making human existence a mere historical presence in a world devoid of any significant trace of the sacred. Thus, Protestantism “broke the continuity, cut the umbilical cord between heaven and earth, and thereby threw man back upon himself in a historically unprecedented manner” (Berger 2011, pp. 85–86). Establishing a connection between the enchanted realm of Catholicism and Romanticism is not challenging. It is also evident that both Catholicism and Romanticism viewed Protestantism as the quintessential embodiment of the rational, modern Enlightenment world, which they sought to reject.

Furthermore, Protestantism, disenchanted and disenchanting the world, could not give conditions to the poetic, the bucolic, and the nostalgic, for which the romantic soul yearned so much. Pietism does not align with this framework, given its mystical origins from which the religious forms of Romanticism originated, as previously mentioned. Conversely, Lutheran–Calvinist Protestantism epitomized the rational, modern, and enlightened ideals. Therefore, the aversion to these ideals constitutes a pivotal point of the convergence that facilitated the elective affinity between Catholicism and Romanticism. As Alfred von Martin argued,

“Both—the romantic (tending towards Catholicism) and the Catholic (with a romantic inclination)—consider Protestantism as the quintessence of the non-poetic and the anti-poetic; however, the foundations of these judgments are, in both cases, completely antithetical. Genuinely romantic judgment is, by nature, aesthetic and dominant, while Eichendorff [a representative of 19th-century Romantic Catholicism], on the other hand, judges primarily in a religious way and only secondarily in an aesthetic way—by perceiving the consequences of specific religious stance for imaginative activity and, therefore, for the mastery of art and poetry. Thus, he deeply regrets that Protestantism has excluded so many poetic elements—that is, so many aspects that belong to the joyful realm of sensory appearance and affect the imagination—from religion (such as Marian worship, veneration of saints, belief in angelic hierarchies, appreciation by external ornamentation), which relegated the Church to a mere edifying and practical institution, which educated moralists rather than mystics, and which, finally, through it, religion dissolved into the philosophy of religion and “idealistic” worship of the subject. However, the destruction of “poetry” is only one (albeit necessary) consequence for him. “Protestantism”—which, incidentally, for this perspective, far from any confessional narrowness, is much older than the Reformation (including its “precursors”, commonly so-called)—is, for him, primarily understood as a revolutionary religious subjectivism, like the arrogance of the will to self-redemption”.

(von Martin 2019, pp. 143–44)

In this sense, the argument that I aim to develop in this article, based on the reflections presented so far, is that the association between Romanticism and Catholicism at the early 19th century stemmed from a historical context of anti-modernity, where Prussian Protestantism (both Lutheran and Calvinist) was perceived as a shared adversary. This association made possible at least two phenomena that represent this “cultural symbiosis” quite well, in which both parts, although remaining distinct, are organically associated” (Löwy 2011, p. 140): on the one hand, Catholic Romanticism, represented by romantic intellectuals who voluntarily converted to Catholicism; on the other, a Romantic Catholicism, who saw in Romanticism a form of expression that was not only artistic, but also religious. This unlikely association, however, was only possible due to the essential elements of contact that made their elective affinities possible: internally, conservatism tried to unite both, who had in common the reaction to modern temporality, believing that the past still pulsated in the present as its most essential element; on the other, externally, the aversion to Protestantism modulated the rejection of the process of the disenchantment of the world, perceived politically in liberalism, philosophically in the Enlightenment, and religiously in the main enemy of the Catholic Church since the Reforms of the 16th century. This symbiosis resulted in the effervescence of a mystical religious experience of Catholicism, especially among women, which the figure of Anna Katharina Emmerick represents quite well.

5. Romanticism and Female Mysticism in the 19th Century

Although mysticism as a Christian religious phenomenon has its roots in the medieval period, it can be argued that its establishment and consolidation within the Christian institution occurred primarily between the 16th and 17th centuries, especially after the consolidation of a form of “mystical literature” accepted as orthodox by the Catholic Church, where the names Tereza de Ávila and João da Cruz gain greater prominence. However, the attempt to control such phenomena through canonization generated, on the other hand, the necessary persecution of mystics who went beyond what was permitted and accepted by the Church, leading to many cases of inquisitorial persecution in the modern period.

In the 18th century, mysticism became one of the most notable targets of rationalism and enlightenment. Even within the Catholic Church, movements such as the “Catholic Enlightenment” fought directly against popular religiosity and mysticism in its most diverse spheres, classifying them all as “superstition”.5 The most significant consequence of this struggle occurred primarily in the 19th century, when “the rise of positivism, especially the introduction of psychiatry, pathologized mystical experiences; Theology, in turn, perhaps due to such pressure, became increasingly rationalist and, for this very reason, reinforced its condemnation of mysticism” (Losso 2016, p. 11).

Nevertheless, this narrative sequence regarding mysticism in the modern world—its rise and consolidation in the 16th and 17th centuries, followed by condemnation, persecution, and decline in the 18th and 19th centuries—obscures a fundamental paradox in the history of Christian mysticism in modernity. At the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, individual Christian mystical phenomena gained greater prominence and numerical significance, particularly concerning female mysticism and visionary experiences leading to stigmatization. For example, when examining data from the Biographical Dictionary of Stigmatics compiled by Van Osselaer et al. (2021), it becomes evident that, between 1775 and 1900, at least 130 cases of mystical stigmatics were documented in Western Europe alone. Extending this timeframe to 1957, it reveals 221 cases (see Figure 1), of which 212 (96%) were women (see Figure 2). The statistics on beatifications and canonizations are even more striking. According to Cassandra Painter, from 1789 to 1945, the Catholic Church beatified or canonized 704 individuals, including 18 Germans/Austrians, 19 Dutch, 167 English, 195 Italians, and 305 French (see Figure 3). This number of cases, particularly in countries associated with the first significant revolution stemming from Enlightenment ideals and those undergoing liberal unification, is not coincidental.

Therefore, it is possible to assert that, on the one hand, the 19th century witnessed the proliferation of supposedly mystical figures, both within Christianity and in the realm of so-called “occultism”, to an unprecedented extent. On the other hand, the Catholic Church itself (the promoter of more than seven hundred beatification processes between the French Revolution and the Second World War) denied the authenticity of most of the mystical phenomena (with emphasis on stigmatism) of this timeframe.6 Indeed, it is notable that, among the 18 Germans/Austrians canonized by the Catholic Church during the mentioned period, none hailed from the modern era, and only 4 were women.7 On the other hand, only 3 were men among the 44 German/Austrian mystic stigmatics within the same timeframe, therefore not canonized by the Church (see Figure 4 and Figure 5).8

This arises, as I argue, from two fundamental factors. Firstly, it is necessary to remember that “mystics are found on the margins of religion and society, embodying a subversive ‘otherness’ that challenges the establishment” (Graus 2018, p. 22). The condition of the mystic arises from the fact that, in terms of accessing the sacred/divine, these individuals do so without relying on institutional or sacramental mediation, challenging the Church’s institutional monopoly on access to the divine. During the 19th century, as discourses of national identity, rationalism, scientism, and various forms of liberalism gained prominence, the coexistence with forces openly opposed to these typical modern characteristics of civilization became increasingly challenging. In this context,

“Criminal courts in Europe were not alone in bringing mystics before the law. Sometimes, the initiative to arrest a mystic came from the Catholic Church itself. Ecclesiastical authorities often saw the enthusiasm surrounding an alleged mystic as a sign of fanaticism. By intervening, they aimed to restrain popular enthusiasm. An ecclesiastical inquiry often preceded and sometimes triggered a judicial investigation. On several occasions, incredulous clergymen refused to examine the supposed mystic”.

(Graus 2018, p. 27)

In this sense, even though the Catholic Church has extensively used mystics throughout its resistance to modernity, the independence and charisma of a predominantly female mystical leadership have made this relationship and analyzed context even more complex. Moreover, in the face of the rise of liberal secularism and many other political, social, and cultural aspects arising from the process of the consolidation of modernity, the Catholic Church promoted throughout Europe between the end of the 18th century and the 19th century a true spiritual and ecclesiastical revival based on the Romantic vision of a past lost in the medieval era.9

A second but no less important factor that explains the contradictory and complex Catholic stance towards mysticism in the 19th century concerns the substantial rise of the feminine in 19th-century cases of mysticism.

Concomitantly, but not coincidentally, in the same period of the revival of German clerical Catholicism, other important movements shook German and European civil society in general, including the feminist movement.10 On the other hand, in the decades following the turmoil of 1848, the Catholic Church took advantage of a context particularly favorable to female demands to direct its efforts towards women in two directions. Firstly, there was a significant reinforcement of the figure of the “mother” and “housewife” as fundamental aspects of the holiness of the lay mother. Analyzing the case of the Italian Blessed Isabella Canori Mora, Andrea Graus concluded that:

“In the mid-nineteenth century, Canori Mora became an exemplar housewife. Subsequently, in 1928 she was declared Venerable and in 1994 she was beatified by Pope John Paul II. For more than a century, the Catholic idealization of domestic motherhood had been on the rise, and the profiles of saints-to-be often mirrored the ideals that the Church wanted to promote. However, Canori Mora’s history is more complex than the mere promotion of a Catholic mother to a saintly level. As we will see, saintly mothers are rare. In Canori Mora’s case, emphasizing her motherhood and married state seems to have occurred in parallel with minimizing her mystical profile as prophetess and stigmatic (that is, someone who bore wounds of Christ)”.

(Graus et al. 2017, pp. 169–70)

In this sense, it is necessary to pay attention to the double discursive movement of the Catholic Church in the case of (not a few) mystical women in the 19th century. As Graus makes clear, the valorization and subsequent beatification of Canori Mora reinforced not her mystical and stigmata aspect, but, above all, her role as an exemplary mother and housewife. Canori’s case was no exception. On the contrary, this canonization can be considered an outlier since, according to Andrea Graus,

“Stigmatics were not as rare as one might think. Hundreds of cases were reported throughout Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The majority of these were women. In contrast to preceding ages, in modernity, many were laywomen rather than cloistered nuns. In other words, modern stigmatics lived an ‘ordinary’ life, albeit one riddled with mystical episodes”.

(Graus et al. 2017, p. 170)

By acting this way, the Catholic Church reinforced the role of women as mothers, significantly increasing Marian devotion (the most obvious example of the woman’s model projected by Catholicism). As a consequence (and simultaneously a driving force), the number of reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the leading countries of Europe increased exponentially in the 19th century, with this period alone witnessing a significantly higher number of appearances than that in previous centuries, and the frequency more than tripling again in the following century (See Figure 6).11

Thus, while the Catholic Church reinforced the role of mother and housewife for women throughout the 19th century, its call to populate the monasteries and convents of religious orders and congregations also gained strong appeal during this period. On the one hand, this was due to the historical incompatibility, via Catholic discourse, between holiness and ordinary women’s lives. By way of illustration, according to Andrea Graus,

“Of the women who were stigmatics, mothers are a minority. Of the approximately 270 cases traced in five European countries (Italy, Spain, France Germany and Belgium), only 18 had children. What is more several of them would have preferred not to have been married at all. Edith Challan, better known as Madame Royer (1841–1924), Domenica Nunziata Paiano (1924–1980) and Natuzza Evolo (1924–2009) were all forced to marry, although they would have preferred a life of chastity. Even more telling is the case of the Italian, Anna Rosa Gattorno (1841–1900), who swore a now of chastity after the death of her husband and founded a religious institution. Choosing a religious life meant no longer taking care of her own children, but she made this Abrahamic sacrifice after the Pope told her that God would take care of her children”.

(Graus et al. 2017, p. 171)

In quantitative terms, this substantial investment by the Catholic Church in the feminine yielded significant returns. According to data collected by Michel Gross, in Prussia alone in 1869, there were 6 female monastic orders, with a total of 41 seclusion convents, in addition to 690 female religious congregations with 4497 nuns and 867 novices and lay sisters dedicated to teaching girls and women and caring for the poor, orphans, and sick (Gross 2011, p. 133).12

This evident reinforcement of Marian devotion and women as a way for Catholic survival in the modern world led historiography to argue that there was a kind of feminization in the Catholic Church in the 19th century. According to Cassandra Painter:

“The idea of the feminization of modern Catholicism, in Germany and more generally, is a well-established one. Historians such as David Blackbourn, Ruth Harris, and Michael Gross, for example, have noted the growing centrality of Marian devotion during this period. The conjunction of a series of high-profile Marian apparitions at Lourdes, Marpingen, and La Salette, new popular devotions such as the Miraculous Medal, and the Vatican’s 1854 promulgation of the doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception have led some to describe the period ca. 1850–1950 as the “Marian century”. […] Above all, historians have pointed to the “feminization” of modern Catholic congregations, offering up a wide variety of statistical indicators. […] Some have also seen a “feminization” of piety more generally at this time, in which religion became increasingly associated with sentimentality, domesticity, and strong emotions”.

(Painter 2018, pp. 39–40)

This supposed feminization of European Catholicism in the 19th century, therefore, would have supposedly occurred on two substantial fronts: (1) on the one hand, the alleged positive and deliberate reinforcement of the Church concerning the figure of women, whether through the campaign in favor of increasing of nuns in female religious orders and congregations or whether through the Virgin Mary. In this regard, Michel B. Gross goes so far as to state that “but the Mother of Jesus also offered an image of feminine power, grace, and authority” (Gross 2011, p. 217); and (2) on the other hand, this feminization of Catholicism would have been the result of an essential reinforcement of the emotional and sentimental aspects of popular religiosity.

Concerning this initial aspect, it is crucial to emphasize that the notion of the purportedly positive reinforcement of the role of women by nineteenth-century Catholicism contradicts the actual representations of women during that period. Historians such as Thomas Buerman, Patrick Pasture, Olaf Blaschke, Manuel Borutta, and others (see: Buerman et al. 2012) argue that the notion of a significant advancement of the feminine agenda by the Catholic Church at that time may be somewhat exaggerated. Conventual or monastic life could give women a certain autonomy regarding male tutelage (from the father or husband), starting to occupy internal management positions, or even working externally as nurses and teachers. However, in addition to the priestly male tutelage of such convents and monasteries, it is essential to realize that the price paid by such women was precisely their defeminization, whether through the aesthetic disfigurement of their feminine aspects or the renunciation of their sexual activity. Thus, as Cassandra Painter reinforces,

“What is lost in this picture, however, is the undeniable fact that the Catholic Church remained (and remains) a thoroughly patriarchal institution. German nuns’ relative “independence” and broadened career options came at the price of their own sexuality, even their individuality, as they surrendered their rights to love, marriage, and motherhood, to their own names, possessions, and control over their own appearance. […] By embracing the opportunities offered by these “acceptable” religious roles, women were participating in a gender discourse which defined them as inferior”.

(Painter 2018, p. 42)

Concerning the second aspect mentioned previously—that the purported “feminization of Catholicism” resulted from a strengthening of the emotional and sentimental dimensions within popular religiosity—it is crucial to underscore the significant role of Romanticism in this process.

On one hand, Romanticism led Catholicism, particularly the ultramontane one, to embrace increasingly less rationalized forms of religious devotion, diverging from the principles advocated by the Catholic Enlightenment of the 18th century and promoting what historiography refers to as “Baroque Catholicism”.13 In practical terms, Romanticism exerted an essential influence on German Catholicism in the first decades of the 19th century in the return of mysticism with a significant “emphasis on the irrational, the mystical and the magical” (Weiss 1983, p. 81), making possible—and, to a certain extent, habitual—proximity to mystical secret societies, such as the Rosicrucian and groups linked to Kabbalah, or even—from a scientific–philosophical point of view—with mesmerism.14

In Bavaria in particular, the most influential name in Catholic Romanticism was the theologian and respected university professor Johann Michael Sailer. With a Jesuit background, the son of a shoemaker born in the small town of Aresing in 1751, Johann Michael Sailer can be considered as one of the most influential religious figures in Bavaria in the first half of the 19th century. With fluid interactions among the prominent politicians of the era and an advocate of an irenic political–religious stance, Sailer adeptly engaged with the Catholic Enlightenment during its golden age and with Romanticism in the early decades of the 19th century (see: Vonderach 1958). Sailer had an essential dialogue with the Protestant religious revival movements derived from the Allgäu in the mysticism and popular religiosity field.15 This dialogue influenced him significantly among the other Christian confessions of the time and substantially impacted political diplomacy with the Bavarian government.

Sailer’s irenist stance, as well as his political and religious influence in Bavaria, resulted in him forming an actual “school” of followers, among whom King Louis I stands out (who greatly attributed to him his characteristic knowledge of Romanticism), as do other essential and controversial names in Catholic theology and Bavarian politics in the following decades, such as the president of the government of Lower Bavaria Johann Baptist von Zenetti, the theologian Joseph Franz von Allioli, the priest and later founding pastor of the Allgäu Protestant revival Martin Boos, and the Bavarian theologian and historian, founder of the Altkatholik, Ignaz von Döllinger.

The so-called “Sailer School” [Sailerschule], or Sailer Circle [Sailerkreis], consequently became the most significant influence on the spiritual revival of the Catholic clergy in Bavaria before 1848. It formed an entire generation of priests between the 1820s and 1840s, thus becoming a new model in the country’s clerical training.

Regarding the connection between Romanticism and the ‘feminization’ of nineteenth-century Catholicism, it is crucial to emphasize the significant prominence of the feminine since the Romantic movement’s inception in Jena. To exemplify this, the main work of Friedrich Schlegel (founder of the Romantic movement and later converted to Roman Catholicism), still in Jena, was Lucinde (1799), a work widely disapproved of by public opinion at the time, whether for its innovative style or the way it valued female power and freedom. On the other hand, also within Catholic Romanticism, the poet Clemens Brentano had an aspect of true obsession with the feminine. Starting with his mother, who, after losing her at the age of fifteen, according to Orlando Fedeli, “the excessive feeling he had for her, as well as his dreamy mentality, led him to identify her with the Virgin Mary herself” (Fedeli 2019, p. 87). More than that, Brentano nurtured strong passions for many women,16 increasingly leading him to divinize the feminine. This culminated in his close relationship with Anna Katharina Emmerick, whom he met through Sailer.

Thus, the perceived association between the ‘Catholic revival’—characterized as more sentimental, emotional, and domestic—and femininity is closely linked to the descriptions and understanding of women in 19th-century Europe. In that context, on the one hand, the male was constantly described as rational, pragmatic, and enlightened, and, on the other, the woman was a symbol of irrationalism, sentimentalism, and impractical emotionality (all in line with Romanticism itself). According to David Blackbourn, “Women in orders constituted for liberals the perfect symbol of backwardness and irrationality”. (Blackbourn 1988, p. 62) In the same direction, Catholicism, represented as irrational, dependent, and untrustworthy, was compared in the liberal imagination with women. The argument was that “just as all human beings were by nature either male or female, it followed that the state and church were two different sexes” (Gross 2011, p. 200). In this sense, with the State being male and the Church being female, the Catholic institution began to be represented, in the German liberal imagination, as a seductive woman who, using her feminine tricks, deceived the State to acquire advantages for herself. According to the liberal and Protestant pastor Johann Bluntschli, in 1872,

“If the state is a man, then the church is like a woman, or more precisely a vamp, who gives the appearance of innocence yet knows full well how to sway a man now one way with her charms […]. She may no longer have enough power to launch a holy crusade as she did in the Middle Ages, but she has become “a very fashionable lady” who can still whip up confusion within the state”.

(Bluntschli 1872 as quoted by Gross 2011, p. 201)

If, on the one hand, the imaginary representation of the Church compared it to an old but still seductive woman, as opposed to a young and masculine liberal State, in practice, on the other hand, the central argument fell on the accusation that the Catholic Church used his dominance over women to undermine the German State in favor of the Pope. According to the newspaper’s editor Grenzboten, in an edition published in 1875, the woman would be “the woman is the barricade behind which the priest takes cover if he cannot reach the husband directly” (Grenzboten, as quoted by Gross 2011, p. 203). For AC Stachelstock, author of Licht und Finsterniss, women would have been recruited by the Church to be “spies within the family” (Stachelstock, as quoted by Gross 2011, p. 204). Taking advantage of political conflicts with France, as early as the late 1860s, liberal intellectuals such as the Rhenish jurist Johann Friedrich von Schulte conjectured that French abbesses often controlled women’s convents and congregations in Germany (see: von Schulte 1872).

In short, the historical and cultural scenario of the 19th century in Europe, especially in Germany, made a form of Catholic religiosity strongly influenced by the Romantic movement fruitful. On the one side, the joint struggle against Enlightenment modernity, both on the part of the Catholic Church and Romanticism, generated essential points of contact (what Max Weber would call “elective affinities”) that allowed for the emergence of a kind of “Catholic romanticism”. On the other hand, reinforcing a more emotional and mystical religiosity, having the elevation of femininity as a significant carrier of this spiritual expression led to a notable increase in cases of female mysticism, particularly stigmata. A prominent example of this phenomenon is Anna Katharina Emmerick, who lived during the early 19th century at the peak of German Romanticism.

6. Clemens Brentano and Anna Katharina Emmerick

It is precisely in this context of the revival of a less rationalized Catholic religiosity and, therefore, one more prone to ideas and beliefs in miracles, healing, and the visible hierophany of the sacred in the world, that a singular case of female mysticism was awakened in northwest Germany, which, in the following decades, would become a kind of model and inspiration for dozens of others. This is Anna Katharina Emmerick: a case that could typically be described as that of another Catholic saint arising from mystical experiences within a monastery, but which, due to the context described above, as well as singularities that I intend to analyze next, ended up becoming an emblematic case “at the moment of its supposed transition from Enlightenment austerity to post-Revolutionary [Catholic] fervor” (Painter 2018, p. 8).

Born on September 8, 1774, in Flamske, a village near Coesfeld, in German Westphalia, Anna Katharina Emmerick grew up as a poor and illiterate peasant in the countryside, where there was a strong presence of Catholicism. During her childhood, especially in rural areas, Emmerick supposedly had every type of contact with the divine, whether through visions or supposed appearances of saints, angels, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ himself. During her adolescence, the young woman worked as a maid in a relative’s house, Gerhard Emmerick, between 1786 and 1789. From the beginning of the French Revolution until 1794, Emmerick lived in the house of Elisabeth Krabbe, where she learned the seamstress trade. Even during this period, according to her biographers, Anna Katharina wanted to become a nun. However, according to Orlando Fedeli,

“Because she was penniless and sick, she had difficulty being welcomed into convents. She was rejected by the Augustinians of Borken, the Trappists of Darfeld, and the Poor Clares of Münster. She then thought about learning to play the organ, which would more easily open the doors to a religious house. To do this, she worked as a maid in the home of the organist Söntgen in Coesfeld. She became friends with the organist’s daughter, Klara Söntgen, who also wanted to go to the convent. According to Wesener, she did not learn to play the organ in this house but learned to read and write”.

(Fedeli 2019, p. 165)

According to her revelations, which were posthumously published by Clemens Brentano and the Redemptorist Carl Schmöger, Anna Katharina Emmerick supposedly received her first stigmata—wounds on her forehead from Christ’s crown of thorns—during the period she spent in the Söntgen’s house. However, it was only years later, after she had entered the convent, that these stigmata became visible through bleeding on her head.

On 13 November 1802, at 28, Emmerick was accepted into the Augustinian convent of Agnetenberg in Dülmen, Westphalia. During this period, according to Fedeli, “Katharina Emmerick had a difficult life, being constantly ill. […] In addition to these nervous illnesses, she suffered an accident in which she injured her pelvis. Furthermore, morally, she suffered when she realized that she did not observe the conventual rule” (Fedeli 2019, p. 166).

Her actual stay at the convent was, however, brief. Following Napoleon’s victories over Prussia and his conquest of the Rhine region, a decree from the French emperor on 3 December 1811 secularized monasteries and convents, expelling the nuns and forcing them into secular life. From then on, already bedridden, Katharina Emmerick stayed in a room in Münster, where she received care and visits from friends, onlookers, doctors, inspectors, and priest confessors.

From March 1813 onwards, however, the alleged stigmata of Christ (on the hands, feet, sides, and head) that the nun from Dülmen claimed to bear became publicly known. From then on, her fame spread so much that she:

“[…] would live out the rest of her days in the public eye. Before her death, she was already fodder for newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, a topic of debate in Austrian medical journals, the subject of books in France and the Netherlands, and a focal point of discussion in many German-language books, articles, and pamphlets. Even her death, at age fifty, in 1824 brought no respite. Following Emmerick’s burial, disturbing rumors spread through Dülmen that a Dutch businessman had stolen her body, intending to display it for the paying public. Concerned friends secretly opened her grave, six weeks after her death, to make certain her remains were still there. Days later, the mayor of Dülmen and a few city councilmen did the same, unaware that the previous exhumation had occurred. To date, she has been disinterred five times. On the next-to-last occasion, in 1974, her bones were displayed for photographers before being returned to their unquiet grave”.

(Painter 2018, pp. 1–2)

The success of this German nun, far beyond her lifetime, was due not only to her supposed stigmas. The publications of her supposed visions about the life of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and several other characters and places from Christian mythology made her most famous after her death. The main work, and the first to be published based on her visions, in 1833, was Das bittere Leiden unseres Herrn Jesu Christi (Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ). Remarkably, over a century after its first publication, the book had been translated into an impressive array of languages, including Czech, Dutch, English, French, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, and Spanish. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies all over the world. In 2004, the work inspired one of the greatest hits of Catholic cinema of all time: “The Passion of the Christ”, directed by Mel Gibson, which grossed more than USD 600 million and, to date, occupies the position of the most successful box office in United States history.17

This work, however, was not directly written by Anna Katharina Emmerick. Although allegedly a kind of reliable transcription of her visions, its composition was by an essential poet of German Romanticism, Clemens Brentano, the reason why the Catholic Church took more than a century to agree to move forward with her canonization process. According to Orlando Fedeli

“When reaching the stage of the process that requires the examination of the writings of the “Servant of God” (the title given to those in the process of canonization), a serious obstacle was encountered: the ideas expressed in Brentano’s writings prevented the seer’s canonization. […] In 1917, the three censors in charge of examining the writings attributed to the nun from Dülmen unanimously reached the same conclusion: the texts were the sole responsibility of Brentano. […] Given these conclusions, accepted by the congregation of Cardinals that judged the case, the Sacred Congregation of Rites issued, on 18 May 1927, a decree expressly declaring that “the writings attributed to the Servant of God were the work of Brentano, and, consequently, nothing prevented the proceeding ad ulteriora”. […] The process, however, did not go ahead due to a veto by the Holy Office on 30 November 1928, considering a continuation impossible, as an eventual canonization of Katharina Emmerick would give great authority to the writings attributed to her. In 1973, Paul VI ordered the continuation of the process, and the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith lifted the 1928 veto, which provoked a new study of the issue […]”.

(Fedeli 2019, pp. 159–61)

Emmerick was beatified (but not yet canonized) by the Catholic Church only in 2004, at the hands of Pope John Paul II. However, many controversies remain about the legitimacy or otherwise of her “sanctity”. Her alleged visions, nonetheless, remain embedded within a robust Catholic imaginary, making it practically impossible for there to be, outside theological or academic circles, a separation between the blessed one and the works published by Brentano. But ultimately, why did the poet’s interference strongly impact Emmerick’s recognition as a saint by the Catholic Church?

First, a brief explanation of the mentioned Romantic poet is necessary to understand this issue. Clemens Wenzeslaus Brentano de La Roche was born in Ehrenbreitstein, near Koblenz, in 1778 into a wealthy merchant family descended from Italians from Lombardy. His childhood was marked by the premature separation, at the age of six, from his mother to be raised, together with his sister Sophie, by an aunt, Luise Moehn. In terms of studies, Brentano first attended the University of Bonn (1794), then Halle (1797), Jena (1798), and Göttingen (1801). It was precisely during his stay in Jena, at the height of the Romantic inception, that Brentano came into contact with the great names of the idealist and romantic intellectuality of the time, such as Fichte, Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Schleiermacher. As a writer, Brentano’s first success was Godwi (originally published in 1801), through which he gained notoriety while causing a scandal, since (in a certain autobiographical way) Brentano defended in his work a true freedom of customs, attacking the bourgeois morality and Christian marriage, as well as defending free sexual union.

Between 1803 and 1806, Brentano went through traumatic experiences. He married Sophie Méreau (whom he met in romantic circles in Jena) in 1803, against his family’s wishes, as the woman had already been married, was older than Brentano, and was expecting a child from him. The child, however, died shortly after birth. The couple moved to Heidelberg, where they lost two more children, and Sophie also died when giving birth to her last stillborn in 1806.18 From these tragedies, Brentano met Father Johann Michael Sailer (whom I commented on in the previous section) and became closer to the Catholic Romantic circle. Still in Heidelberg, Brentano edited a newspaper called Zeitung für Einsiedler, with which essential names in Romanticism at the time collaborated, such as Joseph Görres, Uhland, Kerner, Tieck, Werner, Hölderlin, the Brothers Grimm, and F. Müller, among others. Between 1809 and 1811, Clemens Brentano moved to Berlin, where he came into contact with other names in German Romanticism, such as Arnim, Savigny, Eichendorf, and Adam Müller. Between 1811 and 1813, Brentano lived in Prague, looking after a family estate. Between 1813 and 1814, he moved to Vienna, where he joined the Catholic Romantic circle around Father Clemens Maria Hofbauer, which included the couple Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel (already converted to Catholicism), the Eichendorff brothers, Adam Müller, and Franz Von Baader, among others. Finally, between 1814 and 1818, Brentano returned to Berlin, where, according to Orlando Fedeli,

“He began to suffer a profound crisis. He corresponded with Wilhelm Grimm, Sailer, and Ringseis, as well as with Fouqué and E. T. A. Hoffman. He read Swedenborg and Saint-Martin and became friends with Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, a neo-Pietist. At the beginning of 1816, Brentano participated in the “Maikäferei”, a group of patriotic, romantic, and Christian tendencies”.

(Fedeli 2019, p. 90)

In this second period in Berlin, Clemens Brentano, already deeply marked by both Romanticism and Catholicism from the circles he participated in, began to grow equally close to Protestant pietism, turning once again to the Irenicism of Michael Sailer. In this context, Brentano met Luise Hensel, a pietist Protestant pastor’s daughter, with whom he fell in love and through whom he returned to Roman Catholicism. After Hensel’s conversion to Catholicism, the young woman demanded that Brentano make a confession and return to the Catholic Church, which occurred on 27 February 1817. After that, Luise presented a case of Catholic female mysticism that gained fame in Dülmen to Brentano.

This brief retrospective through the many journeys, versions, and conversions of Clemens Brentano is essential to understanding the man who arrived in Dülmen to meet Anna Katharina Emmerick. According to Érica Tunner,

“Brentano found in Katharina Emmerick three essential elements for him: the mediating woman, with whom he had always dreamed; the innocent woman, who “sleeps in his arms, like a child”; the maternal woman, who understands and protects him, who guides him on the paths of perfection, promising him peace, calm and consolation”.

(Tunner 1977, p. 824)

He is, therefore, a romantic poet and writer, Catholic, but deeply impacted by pietistic mysticism, occultism, cabalistic mysticism, alchemy, and esotericism.19 Furthermore, Brentano was already marked by a deep and traumatic experience with passion, aversion, and the worship of several women. In his perception of the world and reality, expressed mainly in his works and poetry, Brentano tended towards unrealism, confusing poetry and reality. This leads the poet,

“to a notion of romanticizing the world, of poetic existence, in which, through a “qualitative potentiality”, life becomes poetry and Romance. The means for a poetic existence is the beloved woman: “I long to have a poetic connection with a romantic and loving woman and to initiate, in real and prosaic life, a poetic and fantastic way of life”.

(Fedeli 2019, p. 118)

Despite being a converted Catholic, Clemens Brentano’s intellectual world did not have solid and exclusive roots in Catholic theology or dogmatics. On the contrary, for him, the real and the poetic are (con)fused, and, ultimately, the religious experience was nothing more than a poetic experience, with the Christian God being dissolved in a form of pantheism very typical of the Frühromantik of Jena. As noted by J. Adams,

“Indeed, the “divine”, which Brentano seeks in love and poetry, still brings pantheistic characteristics. This God is not personal; he is an immanent universe, not a transcendent Christian. But this impersonal divine takes more determined forms and is concentrated in a certain way in one place in the universe: in the love of two poetic beings. The “eternal”, the “poetic or religious reality”, which this belief has as its object, and the “poetic” and the “religious” are next to each other as synonyms and equivalents, are the two lovers, in which case love rises to blessedness (glory), to salvation. Firm, engulfed in each other, we form the essence (core) of our total conception of the world. The “poetic soul” discovers the “glory and pinnacle of life at its innermost core”; In the innermost of their invisible world lies the “source of their freest life”, and there, in mutual penetration and intimacy, they celebrate both the “mystery of their love” and the “mysteries of poetic life”.

(Adams 1956, p. 31)

The result of this meeting between Anna Katharina Emmerick and Clemens Brentano represents quite well, therefore, the meeting between a baroque Catholicism (insurgent against modernity, not through an ultramontane papist ecclesiology, but by the rescue of the enchanted world, the magical, the miracle, and the marvelous) and a post-Jena Romanticism, which ended up finding precisely in baroque Catholicism the nostalgic support for the struggle against triumphant modernity.

7. The Emmerick Issue and German Romantic Catholicism of Brentano

The meeting between Clemens Brentano and Anna Katharina Emmerick on 24 September 1818 symbolizes a much broader and deeper encounter between Catholicism cornered by modernity and Romanticism needing magical–religious revitalization. The mediation of the meeting itself involves fascinating characters from this context, such as a pietist converted to Catholicism, Luise Hensel, one of the essential names in Catholic Irenism and the Allgäu Protestant revival (Allgäuer Erweckungsbewegung), Father Michael Sailer, as well as members of religious and esoteric circles of the time, such as Christian Stolberg, Ludwig von Gerlach, and his brother Christian Brentano. Clemens Brentano’s brother was a doctor and had been interested in Emmerick’s case since July 1817, especially for magnetism tests, which he had studied for a long time.

Magnetism was a type of pseudoscience developed at the end of the 18th century (today understood as parapsychology), which used mediumistic experiences and supposed telepathic phenomena to obtain revelations of an extrasensitive world from a person in a trance. One of the main disseminators of this therapy was Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), through whom the so-called “mesmerism” was founded, based on the supposed existence of a type of “animal magnetism”. Mesmer developed his therapeutic theories from the influence of names in occultism and alchemy from previous centuries, such as Paracelsus, Rudolf Goclenius, Athanasius Kircher, Friedrich Oetinger, Procop Divisch, and Emanuel Swedenborg.20

In the specific case discussed here, the arrival of Christian Brentano in Dülmen in 1817 for evaluations and therapies with Anna Katharina Emmerick, under the authorization of the Vicar General of Münster, Clement Auguste Von Droste-Vischering, continued a series of tests and magnetism activities with the nun, beginning with her confessor, Father Limberg. According to the notes of another essential doctor in the case, Franz Wesener (1782–1832), on 16 April of that year:

“Father Limberg put her to sleep by placing the palm of his hand over the place of her heart and tilted his head towards her head. Her pulse was threadlike and spaced, and she breathed short and weakly. The patient was frail. The day before, Mr. Limberg and I, through an instructive conversation with Dr. Brentano, had become more confident with the essence and visions produced by magnetism and came to understand that magnetism is nothing more than an overflow of the fullness of health and life that, through religion and its central pillar, will ignite love towards God, towards the Redeemer, and others. Thus, Father Limberg, full of confidence, directed his mouth against the patient’s open mouth, blowing his living breath into it. After three or four repetitions of this act, the patient breathed more deeply and more profoundly and finally woke up with such a strengthening feeling of well-being that she was shocked. Even the unpleasant feeling of weakness and emptiness in the stomach area had disappeared entirely, and the patient did not understand where this rapid improvement had come from. It is necessary to briefly express myself here about the manipulation through which the patient is led to a peaceful sleep. Only now is this phenomenon explainable to me by the conception of magnetism, which I have just received. For a long time now, and frequently, Father Limberg has had the power to make the patient sleep; therefore, through the maneuver as mentioned earlier, without being able to explain this phenomenon, he places his hand on her precordium and tilts her head towards his own. This worked every time, so much so that the Father wanted to bet the patient that he would put her to sleep in two or three minutes”.

(Wesener 1973, p. 156)

As the quoted source shows, these magnetism experiments were not just attempts at medical therapies in a period of construction and consolidation of a specific science for human health. On the contrary, in a particular context of tension between modernity (rational, enlightenment, capitalist, and secular) and religious resistance to this nascent modern world, mesmerism ended up representing one of the many attempts at religious incursion into science, or the use of science for the proof of spiritual experiences; something typical of the 19th century, as the example of Kardecist spiritism shows (see: Graus 2019). In the specific case of Emmerick, this (con)fusion becomes even more evident in another test/therapy carried out by Father Limberg with the nun. According to the same diary of Wegener’s notes:

“We did the following experiment more frequently: Father Limberg moved the two consecrated fingers [used for the Eucharistic celebration] to about two inches from her lips. Soon, her rigid body, like iron attracted by a magnet, curved towards his fingers. And when she reached his fingers with her lips, she kissed them and sucked his index finger. Father Limberg immediately encouraged her to bite off a piece of her finger, but she said she couldn’t do that, and when Mr. Limberg asked her why she sucked his finger, she said: Because it’s so sweet! After that, by order of Father Limberg, I put my finger in her mouth, but she remained in her swoon and no longer moved. All this happened while she was stiff and faint, with her eyes tightly closed. Amid this fainting, Father Limberg bowed his head very slowly towards her. When it was about three inches from her face, the dead body rose towards Father Limberg’s skull, and she placed her mouth against his head. When Father Limberg placed her back on the pillow, her whole body was as hard as a piece of wood, so much so that if I had held her by the head, perhaps I could straighten her entire body. Father Limberg closed the bed curtain, Frenchman Lambert placed a double woolen blanket, and then Father Limberg went to the middle of the room and made a cross with his hand, saying very quietly: God bless you, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Immediately, the mortally weak hand slowly moved under the sheet and made the sign of the cross”.

(Wesener 1973, pp. 3–4)

The experiences above demonstrate at least one essential aspect of the case we analyze in this article. Emmerick attracted not only religious devotees, often depicted as rustic peasants enamored with miracles and the marvelous without critical discernment, but also a distinct intellectual elite. This elite included clergies, like Sailer, and lay individuals, such as doctors Brentano and Wesener, who sought to engage with her. This illustrates a liminal space during the transition from the non-modern to the modern world, where belief in the magical and extraordinary had not yet been fully separated from scientific rationalization. This liminality21 was made possible by the resistance of Romantic Catholicism to the rationalization and disenchantment of the world brought about by Enlightenment ideals, liberalism, and, ultimately, Lutheran–Calvinist Protestantism. Furthermore, these experiences highlight how this liminal space facilitated the desacralization of a significant aspect cherished by Catholicism: the body of the saint.

The inviolability of the saint’s body understood as sacred and, therefore, only manageable by properly purified hands, has been integral to developing Christian mentality. This aspect persisted throughout the Middle Ages, rooted in the belief in sacred relics, and continues today in the concept of the sanctity of the Eucharist (see: Vauchez 1995). However, when we examine Emmerick’s case, despite the belief in the sanctity of consecrated priestly fingers or the stigmatized body of the nun, the mere possibility of conducting profane ‘tests’ on her body suggests a certain desacralization of the once inviolable sanctifying value of the saint. The transition to a more secular and rationalized approach to investigating Emmerick’s case is evident in official inquiries into her situation.

After the situations previously discussed, at least two significant formal investigations occurred into Anna Katharina Emmerick: one by the Catholic Church and the other by the Prussian State. Regarding the first, on 28 March 1813, the vicar general of Münster, Clemens August von Droste zu Vischering, accompanied by his personal doctor, Dr. Druffel, arrived in Dülmen. They subjected Anna Katharina Emmerick to a rigorous physical and oral examination, and from then on, Dean Father Bernhard Heinrich Overberg was appointed to monitor the case. The main concerns over which the nun was investigated for fraud were her supposed stigmata and, secondly, her uninterrupted fasting, whereby the young woman would feed exclusively on consecrated Eucharistic bread. According to her first biographer, Father Carl Schmöger, Overberg cultivated disbelief in Emmerick, suspecting that the nun was feeding in secret and that her stigmata were the product of fraud (Schmöger 1870, p. 373). Consequently,

“It was decided that she would be watched continuously for ten days by twenty persons from Dülmen and that, during this period, Father Lambert, on whom the accusations of fraud had fallen, would remain away from the nun. During these ten days, the seer only drank water, and no one touched her wounds, with bleeding from the stigmata being observed on the 16th (Wednesday—the crosses), 18th, and 19th (Friday and Saturday—the stigmata)”.

(Fedeli 2019, p. 172)

Later, when the case had already reached frighteningly popular proportions, on 3 February 1819, it was the turn of the Prussian government to establish an investigation commission under the leadership of the sub-mayor of Münster, Clemens Maria von Bönninghausen. To conduct this, Emmerick was taken to the house of one of the counselors so that the exams could be carried out in a place far from what the nun was used to. Her main companions (Father Limberg, doctor Franz Wesener, and Clemens Brentano) were prevented from accompanying her. Alone, Anna Katharina Emmerick was subjected to intense interrogations and constantly monitored for more than 20 days. The narrative of this situation can be found in Franz Wesener’s notes:

“On Saturday, 7 August, the patient was taken by force, accompanied by soldiers, to Mr. Counselor Mersmann’s house, where she arrived unconscious but alive. As I didn’t know if I could visit her in prison, I sent the attached request to the president of the Investigative Committee. The visit was allowed to me. Then, I took the patient out of bed and held her on my knee for about an hour. She was frail but happy… I thank God, she said, who gave me patience today. She hopes to enjoy the so-called grace for longer. After I had been with her for about three-quarters of an hour, the Government Medical Advisor entered the room, a sickly man reportedly suffering from a venereal disease. It was dark, and the patient did not notice his presence. But when he took a seat two steps away, she snuggled up to me and said she was terrified. I asked her out loud, “You feel scared, but what scares you?” She replied: “I don’t know, but it scares me. I noticed nothing but an unpleasant odor of camphor”. Then, Dr. Bush, from the Investigative Committee, in charge of surveillance, informed me that my visits could no longer occur. Therefore, I went that same night to the supreme president, Von Vincke, to whom I presented and repeated the warnings contained in the letter addressed to Mr. Counselor, stating that manual work, for the relief of the patient, could not be done conveniently by a woman, etc. to which I have attached the letter, which I received from Mr. President, on the 10th. I must close my diary here until it pleases the Lord Jesus, who is praised in eternity, to allow me to continue it”.

(Wesener 1973, p. 194)

The accounts detailing these weeks of investigation underscore a fundamental conflict unfolding in Catholic Prussia during that period.22 The investigators, predominantly Protestants, harbored no belief in the miraculous, magical, or marvelous aspects associated with Emmerick’s case. Nevertheless, the widespread public interest in the nun compelled authorities to engage. Whereas Wesener and Lemberg’s “magnetic tests” revealed a liminal space between belief and rationality, the Prussian commission exemplified a staunchly rational stance that verged on contempt for the young mystic. Carl Schmöger described that “in their savage brutality, they could not even bear that the shy virgin, consecrated to God, covered her chest: every time she covered herself, trembling, they brutally opened the cloths, and responding to her pleas with cynical jests” (Schmöger 1870, p. 73). The investigation concluded on 28 August 1819, without significant repercussions for the nun from Dülmen. Instead, her fame endured beyond her death, enhancing the significance of Romantic Catholicism, particularly after the posthumous publication of her purported visions documented by Brentano.

The probing conducted by the Prussian (Protestant) Commission on Emmerick, previously described, unveils a crucial point for the argument presented in this article. The confrontation that unfolded placed Catholicism, aligned with Romanticism (Father Limberg and Clemens Brentano were barred from accompanying her), and medical science still intertwined with the magical Catholicism of the region (embodied by doctors Franz Wesener and Christian Brentano), on one side. On the other side stood the Prussian government—perceived as a political intruder and religious adversary symbolizing the modernity to be resisted—aligned with liberalism and Protestantism. Consequently, the clash between the magical–religious notion of inviolable sanctity and enlightened rationalism advocating thorough examination ultimately marginalized an essential element that became a casualty on both sides: the woman.

Anna Katharina Emmerick, a product of this context of conflict and religious mystical revival resisting European modernization, was outraged as a woman, as a nun, and as a saint. This occurred not only at the hands of the Prussian commission that violated her body and privacy, but also through her own religious experience, ultimately silenced by the subsequent canonization process and writings attributed to her. Despite gaining immense fame through the works attributed to her, in the end, as previously highlighted, the Catholic Church’s conclusion was that, although pious and blessed, Emmerick’s mystical visions were “solely the responsibility of Brentano” (Fedeli 2019, p. 159). In other words, all the mystical content, her entire unique religious experience, was sidelined as the mystical woman was silenced by an alleged fraudulent project of the man accompanying her, ignoring, as Cassandra Painter rightly highlights, that:

“she also had a powerful personality, a storyteller’s gift, and a formidable sense of mission. There is ample evidence that supports a recasting of Emmerick as a willing and active collaborator in Brentano’s literary project to record her visions—even while acknowledging the extent of Brentano’s later elaborations as he brought those visions to the printed page”.

(Painter 2018, pp. 15–16)

Even the Catholic Church, which initially supported Anna Katharina Emmerick against Protestant and modern critiques, later tarnished her memory by halting her canonization. The Church cited arguments that challenge the thesis of Catholicism’s feminization, as discussed earlier in this article. These arguments included questioning Emmerick’s chastity due to her alleged erotic relationship with her confessor’s consecrated fingers, as well as her close association with Wesener and Brentano during her mystical ecstasies in the initial phase of her canonization process between 1892 and 1894 (Fedeli 2019, p. 175).

In light of this, it is imperative to assert that Emmerick, along with many Catholic mystical women of the 19th century, was propelled to prominence due to the effervescence of Catholic Romanticism, which legitimately facilitated their rise as significant personalities. However, as triumphant modernity prevailed, they were relegated to what a part of Christianity never relinquished: control over the body and the female gender. On this topic, while some argue that Christianity maintained control over the body and female gender, others, such as Alice Von Hildebrand (2002), offer a different perspective, highlighting the respect and dignity afforded to women within the Christian tradition. This debate is highly relevant, but necessitates another article with dedicated space for the required depth and analysis.

8. Conclusions

The case of Anna Katharina Emmerick was exceptional within Germany and Europe during this period. Various contextual factors discussed in this article, including the Napoleonic and Prussian political influence in the Westphalia region (alongside rationalist, secularist, and anti-clerical Enlightenment ideals), as well as the significant rise of Romanticism as the prevailing ideology in German literary culture, contributed to a notable surge in mystics, miraculous apparitions, and supernatural phenomena across the Catholic world in that region. According to Cassandra Painter, between the Napoleonic Era and the Restoration period, the most diverse cases were reported, such as:

“The French laborer Thomas Martin, for instance, claimed to be receiving messages for Louis XVIII from the archangel Raphael. In Italy, an alleged apparition of the Virgin Mary at Arezzo, and dozens of weeping, talking, or luminescent Marian images, helped inspire native resistance movements against the French occupiers. Meanwhile, Northern Switzerland and Austria, particularly the Tirolian region, saw a rash of stigmatics—at least seven—in the 1810s through the 1830s. Even if one restricts one’s gaze to Westphalia and the Rhineland, there is no shortage of examples. In Birgden, another Westphalian village, French occupiers tried and failed to suppress veneration of a supposedly miraculous wayside cross where the Virgin Mary had appeared to praying schoolchildren. Another rumored stigmatic emerged in Aachen, and a third at Brüggen near Cologne. At Stromberg in Rhineland-Palatinate, God supposedly manifested his displeasure with the invasion with a plague of caterpillars”.

(Painter 2018, pp. 4–5)

It is clear, therefore, that Emmerick’s case cannot be read as an exception. Instead, it indicates a much broader context of Catholic resistance to modernity imposed by a new (industrial) economy, a new (liberal) politics, and a new (secular) culture. However, the case of the nun from Dülmen, in addition to being one of the first in this context, addresses at least three essential elements that outline the central argument of this article: (1) the “Catholic revival”, although it cannot be considered as the “rebirth of a lost spirituality”, was, indeed, a significant religious movement of resistance to modern values consolidating in Europe, the result of which was the proliferation of mystical, magical and miraculous events that, above all, refused the rationality imposed by modernity; (2) German Romanticism played a fundamental role in this “Catholic revival”, which the case of Emmerick and Brentano expresses well. In this context, the elective affinity established between baroque Catholicism and post-Jena Romanticism, through nostalgia for a lost past, as well as the aversion to the liberal and Protestant modernity, made possible the fusion of magical–pagan Christian elements (specific to this baroque Catholicism) with a pantheistic and irrationalist vision of nascent Romanticism; and (3) female mysticism was fundamental in this process, exposing both the religious dependence of Catholicism on female support and the attempt at reinforced ecclesiastical control over women through canonization and the discourse of sanctity, which, on the one hand, denies the thesis of the “feminization of nineteenth-century Catholicism”, but, on the other hand, reinforces the importance of the women in the anti-modern and Romantic resistance of Catholicism in the 19th century. The result was the weakening of the female gender itself, seen by triumphant modern liberalism as irrational, emotional, and Catholic and by the Church as having little genuine affection for the sanctity canonized by the institution.