A provocation for modern society

Astrid Albert on the mystic Anna Katharina Emmerick, who challenged the state and church with her visions in the 19th century

An ailing woman of the 19th century still fascinates millions of people worldwide with her visions. Known through films, exhibitions and beatification, Anna Katharina Emmerick from Dülmen kept government officials and churchmen busy during her lifetime. Wuppertal historian Astrid Albert has analysed the life and suffering of the former nun and her social significance.

Anna Katharina Emmerick

It is difficult to say who Anna Katharina Emmerick really was, the historian begins, saying: "What we do know for sure is that she was born into a small farming family in Coesfeld in Westphalia in 1774. She then lived in Agnetenberg Convent in Dülmen for several years before the convent was secularised by the French in 1812. From 1813 - she was now 38 years old - she lived as a housekeeper for a clergyman in Dülmen. The first rumours that she had been stigmatised (marked with the wounds of Jesus Christ, editor's note) date back to this time." It was said that she had the five stigmata of Christ, fed only on the host and had visions of the life and death of Christ. Emmerick herself left behind no sources, explains Albert, most probably she could not even read. But her story attracted a great deal of public attention between 1813 and 1824. "This is the first important piece of information about Anna Katharina Emmerick," emphasises the researcher, "we don't see the historical person, but we see how she was perceived by her environment." Emmerick was a phenomenon of her time and, due to her wounds, an object of contemporary discussion.

Contemporary discussion about the interpretation of the stigmata

Astrid Albert has written a book about the former nun in which she explores the debate surrounding the interpretation of the stigmata at the time. The Emmerick case caused a great stir in society. "The case was everywhere," the researcher states unequivocally and explains, "on the one hand, there were the many people who travelled to Dülmen to see Anna Katharina Emmerick with their own eyes. Afterwards, many wrote letters to their acquaintances about what they had seen in Dülmen, and word of mouth, which of course only left indirect traces in the sources, was also massive: people talked about the case from the village pub to Catholic romantic circles, such as the circle in Münster around Princess Amalie von Gallitzin." On the other hand, there was a broad journalistic debate about the wounds in the press right up to medical circles and specialist journals, with different interpretations and explanations. "On the one hand, there were those who assumed that the wounds were actually stigmata and that God was manifesting himself here in the life of a very devout woman. On the other hand, there were those who assumed a natural origin: Either the woman was a fraud who wanted to profit from the self-made wounds, or the woman was a sick person whose hysterical imagination was imprinted on her body."

The Prussian state intervenes

"These discussions about the origin of the wounds ultimately travelled from Amsterdam to Leipzig, and we can trace in the sources that it was this supra-regional journalistic debate in particular that ultimately led to the Prussian state taking action." When the case was discussed at the Leipzig Book Fair in 1817, the Berlin government took this as an opportunity to call on the Westphalian provincial administration under Chief President Ludwig von Vincke to take action. This meant that he should have a possible fraud officially investigated because public order was considered to be under threat. The press in turn happily took this as an opportunity to continue reporting on the case.

Church or state - who was responsible?

"The case surrounding the wounds came at a time of uncertainty and transition in Westphalia," explains Albert. "When Emmerick was born in 1774, Dülmen was still part of the Catholic confessional state of the Prince-Bishop of Münster. He in turn came mostly from the European aristocracy and was not only the spiritual head of his diocese, but also the secular lord of his subjects. All matters of life, whether baptism or school attendance for children, taxes to be paid, legal disputes with neighbours, military service for men or the burial of the dead, were regulated and administered by the bishopric in Münster. Secular and spiritual rule lay in one hand." But when the former nun died in 1824, the situation had changed. "Triggered by the Napoleonic Wars, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was dissolved in 1806. Not only did the empire cease to exist, but the imperial church, the so-called Germania Sacra, also ceased to exist." Dülmen and the subjects of the Catholic prince-bishop of Münster became subjects of the Prussian king. Although the diocese remained responsible for Catholic life in Münster as a spiritual institution, the boundaries between spiritual and state/secular life had not been clarified.
"Anna Katharina Emmerick's wounds came during this period of massive upheaval. And even with the wounds, it was not clear who should have jurisdiction over the case," Albert continues. So it was specifically a question of who had the right to examine a woman who was also a former nun. Both the diocese and the Prussian state claimed sovereignty over the case. "However, they not only negotiated the respective sovereignty of interpretation over the woman and her wounds, but also argued about where the new boundaries to be drawn between state and church should run. This meant that the discussions about the wounds not only took place at a time of upheaval, they were themselves an expression of this very change."

Clemens Brentano and the visions of Anna Katharina Emmerick

The writer Clemens Brentano heard about the Dülmen woman's wounds in 1818. "At that time, the young Romantic was himself in a crisis of meaning and was looking for new material, new content that he could process in literature," says Albert. "The ambiguity of these wounds lent itself to questions of the time, such as the nature of the world, man and God. Brentano was looking for a supposedly good old time in which Catholicism and a patriarchal society still determined people's lives." In Dülmen, he found a new meaningful task for himself in the case of Emmerick and from then on sat at her sickbed for six years to write down her visions. However, he did not do this purely as a recorder. Albert explains: "From Brentano's point of view, the statements and life of Anna Katharina Emmerick merely provided the quarry, as he saw the poet's task as extracting and moulding what was revealed from the raw material of the visions." In his self-image, the author saw himself not only as an authorised secretary of the visions, but rather as a translator of the divine message and drew on other literary, biblical and Christian-iconographic sources to create a new whole. "Brentano wanted to create a seven-volume world epic, with three volumes dedicated to the life and death of Jesus and four to the life of Anna Katharina Emmerick. Brentano worked on this epic from 1824 until his death in 1842." Only the first volume was published during his lifetime, with further volumes completed posthumously by other authors. Although Brentano's writings give today's readers an impression of the Catholic-romantic, social and political programme of the time, they are not suitable as a source on the historical person Anna Katharina Emmerick, as they distort the actual statements.

A face-saving solution that was not realised

Prussian commissioners investigated Emmerick for three weeks and finally agreed that she was a fraud. "In their final report, they wrote that they had found sufficient evidence of fraud The woman was eating solid food again, her wounds had healed and the commission had been unable to detect any visions," confirms Albert, but the commission failed to provide any evidence and the buck was passed back to the Berlin Ministry of the Interior, which was to decide what to do with the woman. "The Westphalian Chief President Ludwig von Vincke therefore suggested a solution that would allow all parties involved to save face. He advised the Ministry of the Interior to place Emmerick in the care of the Sisters of Mercy of the Blessed Virgin and Sorrowful Mother Mary in Münster. This move would have removed her from the public eye, restored public order, which the Berlin government felt was threatened by the events, and at the same time treated the wounds in question as a medical problem. Neither his ecclesiastical antagonist Clemens August Droste zu Vischering, who was the founder of the order, nor Anna Katharina Emmerick could have seriously objected to this arrangement. But the Berlin government remained inactive." The state investigation concluded without any tangible result.

Secularisation efforts in medicine

In the 19th and 20th centuries, there were hundreds of reports of people who permanently or temporarily bore the stigmata of Christ on their bodies - on their hands, feet, chest and head. These were often young women such as Anna Katharina Emmerick, the Bavarian visionary Therese Neumann von Konnersreuth (1898-1962) or the French mystic Marthe Robin (1902-1981). Doctors also came to different judgements about their stigmata, which did not make things any easier. "The 19th cent. "The 19th century is a time in which we can increasingly observe the phenomenon of conspicuous religiosity," explains the scientist, "On the one hand, the phenomena took place on the stage of a publicised public, which means that the cases attracted a great deal of attention, On the other hand, we can also observe efforts to professionalise a scientific discipline here, as doctors used such cases of conspicuous religiosity to discuss the scope of action of theology and medicine and to mark such cases as clearly pathological in order to secure the interpretative sovereignty over such phenomena for medicine." This was also intended to exclude the traditional decision-makers in such cases, namely churchmen. Competing interpretations were now available. According to Albert: "For example, somatic explanations such as a vicarious menstruation, in which the menstrual flow was found to originate in the hands and feet, but also psychosomatic explanations such as hysteria, excessive identification with Christ or excessive imagination that led to the wounds. What all these explanations have in common is that they exclude divine intervention and examine the phenomena in terms of their materiality, thereby secularising them." However, all these efforts at secularisation by the medical profession provided no medical evidence for their theories of the cause of wounds, so that such wounds continue to be referred to as stigmata and can continue to be examined and negotiated by clerics.

Beatification 2004

In 2004, Anna Katharina Emmerick was beatified by the Catholic Church. However, the Catholic Church expressly distanced itself from Brentano's writings in its justification. "In fact, the first beatification process at the beginning of the 20th century failed precisely because of these Brentano writings, because in a canonisation process it is necessary to clarify whether the person can be considered holy, i.e. among other things, whether their statements correspond to Catholic orthodoxy and whether they led a holy life. To this end, Anna Katharina Emmerick's statements were also scrutinised, with Brentano's Emmerick writings being the most important source. These by no means corresponded to Catholic orthodoxy and some statements contradicted the official teachings of the Catholic Church. For this reason, the beatification process had to be put on hold for the time being - because there were hardly any other sources about Anna Katharina Emmerick available." The Congregation of Rites had the Brentano writings analysed for their authorship and came to the conclusion that the writings were not authentic Emmerick writings in which the former nun had her say. They were a literary adaptation of a sometimes political programme of the Romantic poet, who also wanted to create a monument to himself. Brentano's writings, in which his most important concern was to make Anna Katharina Emmerick known as a mystic and saint, thus became the biggest stumbling block. "The Augustinian Winfried Hümpfner then collected as many sources as possible from Anna Katharina Emmerick's circle and edited them for the canonisation. Now that enough sources had been collected, Anna Katharina Emmerick could be canonised." Another miracle is currently needed for another canonisation.

From Dülmen to Hollywood

The fascination with the life and visions of this woman have even led to a Hollywood film. "In 2004, the film The Passion of the Christ was released in cinemas. Producer and director Mel Gibson used The Bitter Passion, Brentano's only completed Emmerick work, as the basis for producing the story for the big screen. Gibson also used paintings by Caravaggio and an Italian film adaptation of St Matthew's Gospel by Pasolini from 1964 to add a familiar, traditional visual language to Brentano's writing, which helped to translate the literary work to the big screen." In contrast to Brentano's writings, however, the film shows depictions of violence that do not exist in the book. "Here, pain is embedded in a context of guilt and atonement. The individual torture is seen as atonement for a previous guilt that is atoned for through suffering. The body is a place of metamorphosis where sin is transformed into atonement through physical suffering, thus atoning for the fall of mankind, creating satisfaction for the sins of mankind and emphasising the importance of Christ for humanity. The film uses this as a basis and then stages it with the explicit torture scenes." The film has provoked a very divided response and thus follows a tradition when it comes to Brentano's Emmerick writings and Anna Katharina Emmerick's original wounds.

A provocation for modern society

On the 250th anniversary of her birth on 9 September 2024, Bishop Felix Genn said at a church service in Coesfeld that Emmerick was "a provocation for modern society". The bishop was alluding to a postulated dichotomy (two-way split) between faith and modernity, says Albert. "Those who are modern, for example, cannot believe in miracles. Faith is considered unfashionable because faith contradicts the modern principles of rationality, progress and reason, and Anna Katharina Emmerick seems to undermine these at first glance." The case raises the question of what can be considered modern, rational and reasonable and is therefore not a rearguard action by a conservative church and its logics, but the battle of a vanguard for further discussions about reason, rationality, faith and Catholicism as well as the relationship between state and church in the 19th century. "New men, new experts and new Catholics emerged in Dülmen, who used the case to strengthen their own position and test arguments, strategies and means in new public spheres." This is ultimately also the exciting, current and lasting aspect of the case in Dülmen, Albert concludes. It is highly ambiguous, it remains unsolved, and so it is up to each and every individual to find their own answer to the crucial question posed by the case. "The case of Anna Katharina Emmerick is both an expression and a factor of modernisation processes in the state and the church. The belief in miracles is no more irrational than the belief in medical evidence. But they are mutually exclusive."

Book tip: Astrid Albert: Wem gehören diese Wunden, Die Deutung Anna Katharina Emmericks im Spannungsfeld von Bistumsleitung, preußischer Provinzialregierung, Medizin und Romantik (1813-1852), Aschendorf-Verlag 2022

Uwe Blass

Dr Astrid Albert is a research assistant at the Department of History at the University of Wuppertal. She studied History and English/American Studies at the University of Wuppertal and the University of Stirling (Scotland).