What Is The Spiritual Flower Garden? Tersteegen's Devotional Masterpiece, in English at Last

By Jarred Fenlason · Encounter Press · 16-minute read

In 1729, a frail ribbon-weaver from Mülheim an der Ruhr sent a manuscript to the printer with an apology attached. He could promise the reader "nothing great from my little work," he wrote, since the verses had been composed "amid persistent headaches and bodily weakness," jotted down as they came to him, "without thinking much of art or ornament." He had never intended to publish them at all; friends who had seen a few pages talked him into it.

The little book he was apologizing for became one of the most beloved devotional works in the German language.

He called it the Geistliches Blumengärtlein inniger Seelen — the "little spiritual flower garden for inward souls." It went through seven editions in his lifetime and countless more after his death. Its hymns entered the German hymnal and are sung there still, nearly three centuries later. John Wesley carried its verses into English Methodism. Generations of German-speaking believers learned to pray from its pages, drew its aphorisms by lot for daily guidance, and sang its songs over cradles and gravesides.

And for two hundred and ninety-six years, no English reader could walk through the whole garden. Fragments crossed the language barrier — a hymn here, an anthology selection there — but the complete work, all four sections and more than 1,300 individual pieces, arranged exactly as its author planted it, remained locked in eighteenth-century German.

This article tells the story of that book: what it is, who made it, what grows in it, and how — at last — the gate has been opened for English readers.

What Is The Spiritual Flower Garden?

The Spiritual Flower Garden (Geistliches Blumengärtlein inniger Seelen) is a collection of devotional poetry, hymns, Scripture meditations, and spiritual aphorisms by Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1769), the German Reformed Pietist mystic, hymn writer, and spiritual guide. First published in 1729 and expanded across multiple editions during his lifetime, it is widely regarded as one of the most influential devotional texts in the German-speaking Protestant tradition.

The work contains over 1,300 individual pieces organized into four major sections. Book I gathers 605 short and edifying verses — compressed couplets and brief poems Tersteegen called Schlußreime, "closing verses." Book II presents 120 devotional meditations on the Prophets, followed by sixteen pieces on Christ's Ascension and forty-four poems translated from the French mystic Madame Guyon. Book III contains 122 hymns and devotional songs, including some of the most enduring hymns in Christian history. The work closes with The Devout Man's Lottery — 412 aphorisms originally designed to be drawn at random for daily spiritual guidance.

Despite its enormous influence, the complete work had never appeared in English — until now. The Spiritual Flower Garden, translated by Jarred Fenlason, D.Min., and published by Encounter Press, is the first complete English translation in the book's history, freshly rendered from the original 1729 German.

The Gardener: The Man Who Tried to Disappear

To understand the garden, it helps to know the gardener — a man whose life reads like a parable he might have written himself.

Gerhard Tersteegen was born in 1697 in Moers, a small town on the Lower Rhine, one of eight children in a prosperous merchant family. A brilliant classical student marked out for the ministry, he was instead apprenticed at fifteen to his brother-in-law's shop in Mülheim — but commerce never took. What took instead was Mülheim's living tradition of Pietist devotion: prayer meetings humming through the town, and a generation of seekers pursuing what they called inwardness — a faith felt in the soul's depths, not merely professed from the pulpit. Tersteegen resolved to give himself wholly to God, quit the shop, and settled into the quiet trade of ribbon-weaving in a small cottage on the edge of town, a vocation that left ample room for prayer.

What followed was not the peaceful idyll he imagined. From 1719 to 1724, Tersteegen descended into five years of spiritual darkness — a prolonged crisis of the soul during which he ate once a day, was shunned by embarrassed relatives, and lay ill for weeks with no one to bring him water.

Then, on Maundy Thursday 1724, something broke open. Tersteegen emerged from the long tunnel with an assurance of Christ's reconciling grace — not earned by his striving, but given. To seal the moment, he did something extraordinary: he wrote out a solemn covenant with God and signed it in his own blood, a document he renewed every Easter for the rest of his life. It was not morbid theater; it was a tradesman's contract, drawn up with the materials at hand, sealing what words alone could not contain.

The poetry began immediately. Where five dark years had produced silence, the years that followed produced a torrent — hymns, meditations, verses of compressed spiritual wisdom. Five years after the covenant, the first edition of the Blumengärtlein went to press.

The rest of the story is the great irony of Tersteegen's life: he wanted to remain invisible, and failed spectacularly. He refused ordination, declined an invitation to visit Frederick the Great, and never founded a sect, insisting, "I am a universal Christian." Yet his cottage became a destination. Pilgrims came from the Rhineland, from Holland, from Scandinavia; when he spoke, six hundred souls filled the lower rooms of his house while latecomers propped ladders against the windows to catch a few words. He became a lay physician, treating the poor without charge. He died on April 3, 1769, worn out by a service he had never sought. His house in Mülheim still stands, now a museum. The blood-signed covenant resides there.

Through all of it, the Blumengärtlein was his voice traveling where he would not — the quiet man's words crossing borders while he stayed home and wove ribbons. His full story is told in our biographical article and, at length, in Hidden in God.

The Shape of the Garden

Tersteegen arranged his garden deliberately, in three books and a closing collection, each with its own character. Walking through them in order is the best way to see what makes the work unlike any other devotional of its age.

Book I, "Short and Edifying Verses," is the largest section: 605 short poems, plus a supplementary "Gleanings" section — some only two lines, most under eight. Tersteegen called them Schlußreime, "closing verses": compressed seeds of spiritual truth, pithy and direct, often startling in their simplicity. They cover the full landscape of the interior life — the soul's longing for God, the danger of self-will, the blessedness of hiddenness, the necessity of suffering, the sweetness of divine love, the quiet joy of walking with God in simplicity. Their tone is that of a friend rather than a preacher; each verse has the quality of a proverb, meant to be plucked like a flower and pondered slowly rather than read quickly.

Book II, "Devotional Meditations and Spiritual Verses," shifts from couplets to sustained engagement with Scripture. Its core is 120 meditations on the four Major Prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel — each pairing a biblical text with Tersteegen's reflection, drawing out the inward dimensions of the prophetic writings and applying them to the soul's journey. His method, laid out in a remarkable prefatory notice, is disarmingly simple: however long you turn a passage of Scripture, you must at last "interpret it in reference to my own person" — otherwise it profits you nothing. Following the prophetic meditations come sixteen pieces on Christ's Ascension, and then something unexpected: forty-four poems translated from the French Catholic mystic Madame Guyon, whose emphasis on pure love and total abandonment to God resonated deeply with Tersteegen's own spirituality. By including her, the Protestant ribbon-weaver quietly built a bridge between French Catholic mysticism and German Pietism — a bridge readers still cross in this volume today.

Book III contains the hymns — and they deserve a section of their own.

The garden closes with The Devout Man's Lottery (Die Frommen Lotterie): 412 brief spiritual maxims originally designed to be drawn at random, by lot, offering a word of guidance for the day — a devotional practice common in Pietist circles. The aphorisms distill Tersteegen's whole teaching into miniature: yieldedness to God's will, the danger of self-seeking, the value of suffering, the call to inward prayer, the blessedness of living hidden with God. Many carry the gentle but firm tone of a spiritual director who knows the soul's evasions intimately. A supplementary gleaning adds thirty-one maxims drawn from the Spanish mystic Anna Garcías, with meditations on the Cross and the virtues. Here, for the first time, the complete Lottery appears in English.

The Hymns That Crossed the Ocean

If any part of the Blumengärtlein escaped its language barrier over the centuries, it was Book III. The 122 hymns and devotional songs gathered there secured Tersteegen's lasting fame — and a handful of them became some of the most widely traveled hymns in Christian history.

The most famous is "Lo, God Is Here" (Gott ist gegenwärtig), which remains to this day one of the most widely sung hymns in German-language worship — a hymn of adoration so saturated in the sense of God's presence that singing it is itself an act of recollection. Generations of English congregations have known it too, in various renderings, without ever knowing the ribbon-weaver behind it.

Then there is "Thou Hidden Love of God" (Verborgne Gottesliebe du), which entered the English hymnal tradition through John Wesley himself, who translated several of Tersteegen's hymns; through Methodism they spread across the English-speaking world. It is a striking thought: at the very moment the evangelical revival was stirring in England, its founder was carrying water from Tersteegen's well. "God Calling Yet" (Gott rufet noch) followed a similar path, appearing in hymnals across denominations for centuries.

But here is what most English readers have never been able to see: those famous hymns are three flowers out of a hundred and twenty-two. The rest of Book III — hymns of morning and evening devotion, of the soul's journey through suffering and consolation, of the hidden life with God and the longing for union with Christ — never crossed the ocean. Tersteegen composed many of them for the prayer meetings he led in Mülheim; others were written for private devotion, extended prayers meant to be read as much as sung. They range from brief stanzas to lengthy poems of ten or more verses, and all of them reflect his conviction that the soul's deepest truths are best carried by song.

A taste of that voice, from Hymn 67, "Solitary Summer Delight":

To dwell alone with Thee, Beloved, / Is blessedness on earth; / What the mad world offereth / Can give me naught but trouble. / To dwell alone with Thee, Beloved, / Is blessedness on earth, / When we cleave to Thee alone / Beyond sense, and place, and time.

This edition presents all 122 hymns complete, many in English for the first time. For readers who have loved "Lo, God Is Here" for years, it is the difference between knowing a single melody and finally hearing the whole songbook. The translation aims at readable hymn poetry — preserving Tersteegen's original stanza structures, keeping the lines recognizably metrical, and allowing rhyme to relax rather than padding the theology to force a chime.

What Does the Garden Teach?

Tersteegen stands at the intersection of Reformed Protestantism, German Pietism, and the Rhenish mystical tradition of Eckhart and Tauler, enriched by Thomas à Kempis and the French Quietists. The Blumengärtlein is where that whole inheritance is distilled into its most concentrated devotional form, and a few great themes return on nearly every page.

The central virtue is Gelassenheit — yieldedness: the willing release of self-will into God's will. It is active openness, not passivity; surrender, not collapse. Its great enemy is Eigenwille, self-will — for Tersteegen the very root of sin — along with Eigenheit, the false self-asserting identity that must be surrendered for the soul to be united with God.

The soul's destination is what Tersteegen, following the mystics before him, calls the Seelengrund — the Ground of the soul: the deepest interior point, untouched by creatureliness, where the soul meets God. "Sink into the Ground" is his constant exhortation, and his own preface to the work ends with the invitation to "enter into our spirit and into the Ground of our soul, and there find God, who is Spirit; and thus behold Him, love Him, and enjoy His peace, which is higher than all reason."

Around these gather the rest of his vocabulary: Stille, stillness — not mere silence but a quietness of will, the precondition for perceiving God's inward presence; Verborgenheit, hiddenness — the mystery of God's veiled presence and the believer's call to live "hidden in God," unknown to the world; and Einfalt, simplicity — the unified, undivided heart that looks to God alone.

What keeps all this from floating off into abstraction is Tersteegen's remarkable honesty. In his preface he warns the reader that when he writes of the highest states of the soul, he speaks "not of myself, as though I actually possessed it." He compares himself to a sick man who loves health and gladly speaks of it though he does not yet enjoy it — writing of deep spiritual truths not from attainment but from longing. There is no posture in the garden. Its maker walks beside the reader as a fellow pilgrim, and that is much of why souls have trusted him for three hundred years.

Why Did It Take Nearly Three Centuries to Reach English?

The question is fair. If the book mattered this much, why was it never fully translated?

Partly, sheer scope: more than 1,300 individual pieces spanning four distinct genres — aphoristic couplets, prose-and-verse Scripture meditation, formal hymnody, and devotional maxims. A complete translation is an enormous undertaking, and no one ever attempted it. Partly, vocabulary: Tersteegen's theological language draws on the Rhenish mystical tradition and uses technical German terms — Gelassenheit, Seelengrund, Gemüt, Einkehr — that resist easy English equivalents. Rendered carelessly or inconsistently, his conceptual world simply dissolves.

So the English-speaking world received the garden only in cuttings. Wesley translated a few hymns. Nineteenth-century editors anthologized selections. In the twentieth century, Emily Chisholm's The Quiet Way offered a slim and lovely sampling. Every one of these was a genuine gift — and every one left the essential thing undone. The Blumengärtlein was not designed as a quarry for excerpts; it was designed as a garden, arranged by its maker, meant to be walked. For 296 years, English readers stood at the fence.

The First Complete English Translation

The Spiritual Flower Garden, published by Encounter Press, opens the gate. Translated and edited by Jarred Fenlason, D.Min., it is the first complete English translation of the Geistliches Blumengärtlein — every section, every piece, in Tersteegen's original arrangement: all 605 short verses, the 120 prophetic meditations, the sixteen Ascension pieces, the forty-four Guyon poems, all 122 hymns, and the complete 412-lot Devout Man's Lottery with its gleanings.

The translation was made fresh from the 1729 German original — not modernized from old English versions — with the 1729 print edition serving as the canonical reference throughout. The approach, which Fenlason calls a "Moderate Pietist Style," preserves Tersteegen's inward tone and theological precision without the heavy archaism that distances modern readers: devotional clarity without flattening the spiritual intensity of the original. Key terms from the German mystical vocabulary are rendered consistently across the entire work by means of a translation concordance, so that words like Gelassenheit ("yieldedness") and Seelengrund ("Ground of the soul") keep their full force from the first poem to the last aphorism, and a glossary at the back of each volume opens up the theological world behind them.

The translator is also transparent about his method: the translation was produced with the assistance of advanced computational language tools, which served the way lexicons, concordances, and interlinear texts served scholars of earlier generations — handling the mechanical labor of vocabulary and syntax while every final rendering reflects deliberate human judgment, theological, poetical, and devotional. As Fenlason writes in the introduction: "The technology has changed; the translator's task has not. The tools proposed; I decided."

The complete work is published in two print volumes — Volume One containing Books I and II, Volume Two containing Book III and The Devout Man's Lottery — and as a complete single-volume ebook. All editions are available in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle. Readers who want the story behind the poetry will find its companion volume in Hidden in God: The Life and Writings of Gerhard Tersteegen, which gathers his biography, letters, treatises, and sermons; the two books share no overlapping material and together form the most complete English library of Tersteegen available anywhere. His letters — a third door into Tersteegen — are being published in full and free at gerhardtersteegen.com.

How to Read a Flower Garden

This is not a book to be read quickly. Its strength lies in its stillness and its invitation to linger — and it was built, from the beginning, for slow use. Tersteegen himself asked his readers to take the pages "with quiet deliberation and attention," and offered gentle counsel for the passages that resist: practice the little you do understand, and in due time the rest will become clear.

The garden welcomes many kinds of walking. Some readers will begin at Book I and take one short verse a day, letting a two-line couplet do a full day's work. Some will go straight to the hymns of Book III, especially if "Lo, God Is Here" or "Thou Hidden Love of God" is already dear to them. And many will discover what Pietist communities knew centuries ago: that The Devout Man's Lottery makes an uncanny daily devotional — open anywhere, receive one of 412 brief words for the day, and carry it with you.

However you enter, the invitation over the gate is the one Tersteegen wrote to his own readers, which remains his promise to you: "May God lure you more and more out of yourself and all created things. May He lead you into the sweet wilderness of inner solitude, and there speak to your soul like a friend."

He closed the garden with a blessing on everyone who would ever walk in it, and there is no better way to close its story: "The little flowers stand here, planted upon the paper. May God Himself paint them, water them, and shine upon them; may the heart be their soil, and may each little flower become truth, power, and substance in all who read them."

Frequently Asked Questions

What is The Spiritual Flower Garden?
It is the first complete English translation of Gerhard Tersteegen's Geistliches Blumengärtlein inniger Seelen (1729), one of the most beloved devotional works in the German language — more than 1,300 poems, hymns, Scripture meditations, and spiritual aphorisms that shaped German-speaking piety for nearly three centuries. This Encounter Press edition makes the complete text available to English readers for the first time.

Who was Gerhard Tersteegen?
Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1769) was a German Reformed Pietist mystic, hymn writer, and lay spiritual guide from Mülheim an der Ruhr, who supported himself as a ribbon-weaver while becoming one of the most sought-after spiritual counselors of eighteenth-century Europe. The Blumengärtlein, first published in 1729, is his devotional masterpiece. Read his full story →

What does the book contain?
Four sections: Book I holds 605 short and edifying verses (Schlußreime) — compressed poems, most under eight lines. Book II offers 120 meditations on the Prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel — followed by sixteen pieces on Christ's Ascension and forty-four poems translated from Madame Guyon. Book III gathers all 122 of Tersteegen's hymns and devotional songs. The work closes with The Devout Man's Lottery, 412 aphorisms designed to be drawn at random for daily guidance.

Which famous hymns are in it?
Book III includes "Lo, God Is Here" (Gott ist gegenwärtig), still one of the most widely sung hymns in German-language worship; "Thou Hidden Love of God," which John Wesley translated into English; and "God Calling Yet," which has appeared in hymnals across denominations for centuries. This edition presents all 122 hymns in complete form, many in English for the first time.

Why was the complete work never translated before?
The scope — over 1,300 pieces across four genres — made a full translation an enormous undertaking, and Tersteegen's technical mystical vocabulary resists easy English equivalents. Individual hymns crossed over through Wesley and others, and selections appeared in anthologies such as Emily Chisholm's The Quiet Way, but no translator had previously attempted the entire Blumengärtlein.

How is the book published?
In two print volumes and a complete ebook. Volume One contains Books I and II; Volume Two contains Book III and The Devout Man's Lottery. All are available in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.

How does it differ from Hidden in God?
They are companion volumes with no overlapping material. Hidden in God collects Tersteegen's prose — biography, letters, treatises, and sermons — modernized from Samuel Jackson's nineteenth-century translations. The Spiritual Flower Garden is his poetry, freshly translated from the 1729 German. Together they form the most complete English library of Tersteegen's writings available today.

Is this book only for scholars?
Not at all. Tersteegen was a ribbon-weaver, not an academic, and he wrote for ordinary believers gathering in homes and barns. The book works beautifully as a daily devotional — one poem, hymn, or aphorism at a time — and readers of Thomas à Kempis, Brother Lawrence, Madame Guyon, or The Cloud of Unknowing will recognize a kindred voice.