Between Utopia and New Jerusalem: Eschatological Projectors and Lutheran Confessional Culture in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

Contributing to discussions concerning the influence of eschatological ideas on trajectories of natural philosophy in the early modern period, the present article analyses several distinct projects which emerged from the intellectual and religious traditions of Lutheran confessional culture, which imagined a future earthly golden age that existed in a discursive space between communistic utopia and heavenly Jerusalem. A consideration of this impulse among figures who emerged from Lutheran culture – like Wolfgang Ratke, Wilhelm Eo Neuheuser, Johann Valentin Andreae, Johann Permeier, and even Samuel Hartlib – sheds a unique light on broader issues of epistemology, eschatology and reforming activism of the period, and the varying cultures – natural philosophical, political and religious – which could be harmonized within the ambit of an encompassing eschatological vision.