Alexander Volck’s Anti-Moravian Polemics as Enlightenment Anxieties

Abstract

Alexander Volck’s Das entdeckte Geheimnis der Bosheit der Herrnhutischen Secte (The Revealed Secret of the Malice of the Herrnhuter Sect, 1748-1751) associates the Moravians with developments in philosophy and religion, such as Spinozism and historical Bible criticism, that had been emerging in Europe since the seventeenth century. As a result, Volck’s attacks on the Moravians reveal his anxieties about the challenges to traditional sources of secular and religious authority that the Enlightenment presented.