1690s Scandal in the Danzig Flemish Church: A Mennonite Artist

A very public congregational dispute between artist Enoch Seemann and Flemish Elder Georg Hansen in Danzig in the 1690s set new limits for Mennonite cultural participation and cemented the central role of the elder.

Renowned Canadian novelist Rudy Wiebe has put the story into a beautiful historical narrative in Sweeter than all the World, based largely on Harry Loewen’s historical tale of Seemann in Cities of Refuge. More recently we have a full text reconstruction of the key lost pamphlet and replies, by Hans Rudolf Lavater. Here is the gist of the story.

Seemann was born in the Hansa city of Elbing (Poland) to a Mennonite minister and artist—a reminder of the sophisticated urban culture that some refugees brought east. Seemann travelled abroad and apprenticed in Holland, then settled in Danzig where he also married. As an accomplished portrait painter, he was disciplined by Elder Hansen and the congregation in 1697 for painting “graven images” and was barred from communion, footwashing, and membership meetings (note 1).

This was an odd case, for Menno Simons too sat for portraits, Seemann argues, and all Mennonites were familiar with the gripping human scenes in the Martyrs Mirror, as well as the elaborate ceiling art in the Red Chamber of Danzig City Hall and paintings in its Treasury created by Flemish Mennonite artist Isaac von den Blocke.

Yet in obedience to the church, Seemann cut up two of his portraits before three congregational representatives and was then accepted back into the congregation. When minister shop-owners however did not destroy their painted signboards, Seemann felt free to return to his art which the congregation saw as deceit. An additional conflict arose when Hansen said the congregation could not permit Seemann to look at human figures, especially “exposed females” which he did “without shame” (note 2).

Hansen’s teaching on the “new creation” or the Christian life sought to warn against the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—all rooted in the power of sin (note 3). Seemann’s portraits were consistent with the best of seventeenth-century Dutch portraiture painting (Mennonite congregations in Holland were well represented in the “Dutch Golden Age” of painting; note 4). But unlike von den Blocke’s work, Seemann’s art was without an obvious moralistic narrative, e.g., of choosing between the “narrow and broad way” (note 5).

At a second church “brotherhood meeting” Seemann was placed under the ban and no longer referred to as “brother” by church members, but only “friend;” even his wife was not to share table or bed with him. In defiance, Seemann published a “well-intended brotherly admonition and faithful warning made public for all by a lover of the truth” with the title: “The Revelation and Punishment of Georg Hansen’s Folly” (note 6). This is likely the first Mennonite pamphlet (1697) published in Danzig and Poland, and in it Seemann attempted to “admonish” believers and also to expose the Flemish elder’s ignorance and maze of deceit, as well as to shame him into reconsideration. Hansen’s charge of making “graven images” was not only a poor reading of scripture, but superstitious and inconsistent, guided neither by divine nor worldly justice, according to Seemann. He argued that the elder reigned over others by his affects alone, even breaking up marriages—a civil matter—with the ban, which Seemann leveraged to bring before city council (note 7).

Hansen, while a cobbler, was the most theologically literate and eloquent Mennonite apologist in Danzig since Dirk Philips. Hansen judged the art of portraiture painting as “impudent,” “frivolous,” and vain (note 8), but what he really could not tolerate was Seemann’s free-spirited eccentricity as an artist and lack of respect and honour towards the congregation and its leaders.

This very public conflict gives profile to the struggles of the Flemish church in Danzig and Poland with early modernity. Are God-created human beings primarily “individuals” responsible to fulfill their unique spiritual and intellectual potentiality, or called primarily to obey God and to test and live this out in mutual submission to the Christian community? What are the limits to the authority of leaders in a believers’ church? Hansen often spoke of these “last evil times” when “many live as enemies of the cross of Christ, and their destiny is damnation (Philippians 3:17f.; note 9). That so few have not “defiled themselves” (note 10) is sign for the faithful that they are living in “the last days” (note 11). The Seemann case offers a vivid account of the excesses of congregational discipline that had burdened Mennonites now for a century in an attempt to preserve a pure and spotless church.

                       –Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Cf. the Second Commandment: Exodus 20:4, with Deut. 4: 16-19 and other texts. Cf. Rudy Wiebe, Sweeter than all the World (Toronto: Jackpine House, 2001), 111–136. Harry Loewen, Cities of Refuge: Stories from Anabaptist-Mennonite History and Life (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2010), 79-85. The key document is Rudolf Lavater exhaustive reconstruction of documents and the story: “Der Danziger Maler Enoch I Seemann, die Danziger Mennoniten und die Kunst,” Mennonitica Helvetica 36 (2013): 11–97.

Note 2: Lavater, “Danziger Maler Enoch I Seemann,” 27, 31, 42f., 46, 91f., 111.

Note 3: Cf. summary of Hansen’s Spiegel des Levens in Harvey Plett, “Georg Hansen and the Danzig Flemish Mennonite Church: A Study in Continuity” (PhD dissertation, University of Manitoba, 1991), 318f., https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/xmlui/handle/1993/7218. Hansen’s Confession oder Kurtze und einfältige Glaubens-Bekänetenüsse derer Mennonisten in Preußen, so man nennet die Clarichen (1678; http://pbc.gda.pl/dlibra/docmetadata?from=rss&id=35959) and appended examination is in line with Peter Twisck’s confession (in von Braght, Martyrs Mirror, 373–410); Twisck speaks of humanity after the fall as “corrupted” and “inclined to sin,” but affirms freedom of the will by God’s grace after the Fall. This larger message is arguably present in von Blocke’s works in Danzig City Hall; cf. Rainer Kobe, “Isaac von den Blocke, Painter and Mennonite at Gdańsk,” in European Mennonites and the Challenge of Modernity over Five Centuries. Contributors, Detractors, and Adaptors, edited by Mark Jantzen et al. (North Newton, KS: Bethel College, 2016).

Note 4: Cf. for example Robert W. Regier, “The Anabaptists and Art: The Dutch Golden Age of Painting,” Mennonite Life 23, no. 1 (January 1968) 16–21, https://mla.bethelks.edu/mennonitelife/pre2000/1968jan.pdf; Hendrick Meihuizen, “Dutch Painters in the Time of Vondel and Rembrandt,” in A Legacy of Faith: The Heritage of Menno Simons, edited by Cornelius J. Dyck, 119–135 (Newton, KS: Faith and Life, 1962), https://archive.org/details/legacyoffaithher00unse. See “The Dutch Golden Age: Mennonite to the Core” by Lauren Friesen, lecture at Kauffman Museum at Bethel College, October 2021, https://youtu.be/a38xkoTYZng.

Note 5: The name of von Blocke’s painting in the Protestant St. Catherine Church in Danzig.

Note 6: Lavater, “Danziger Maler Enoch I Seemann,” esp. 80, 89, 91, 92, 93.

Note 7: Lavater, “Danziger Maler Enoch I Seemann,” 43, 45, 94. For a contemporary English perspective on life in Danzig—including its forms of civil punishment, feasting, food, entertainment, recreation and church life—cf. Travels, Travels of Peter Mundy, vol. 4: Travels in Europe, 1639–1647, edited by Richard C. Temple (London: Hakluyt Society, 1925), 167–193, https://archive.org/details/travelspetermun00mundgoog/page/n8/mode/2up. 

Note 8: Lavater, “Danziger Maler Enoch I Seemann,” 32, 37, 71, 145. Hansen uses Luther’s translation of Acts 19:19, in which those who practiced “fürwitzige” (frivolous) arts brought their scrolls to be publicly burnt. The Greek original refers to magical arts, as found in most translations.

Note 9: Hansen, Glaubens-Bericht, 73.

Note 10: Hansen, Glaubens-Bericht, 74.

Note 11: Hansen, Glaubens-Bericht, 78.