Exploring the Field: Exploring the Field (Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, 1) 9782503601601, 250360160X

Citation preview

Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe

Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe Series editors Joachim Grage Thomas Mohnike Lena Rohrbach Editorial Board Guiliano D’Amico Claudia Lindén Joachim Schiedermair Sophie Wennerscheid

Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe Exploring the field

Edited by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach

F

© 2022, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2022/0095/223 ISBN 978-2-503-60160-1 eISBN 978-2-503-60161-8 DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.130805 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.

Contents

Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe. Introductory Investigations Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike, Lena Rohrbach

7

The Aesthetics of Protestant Rhetoric. Early Reformation Polemic in Denmark 19 Jürg Glauser The Value and Importance of Poetry in the Vernacular Margrét Eggertsdóttir

57

Which Protestants? Calvinism, Crypto-Calvinism, and the Scandinavian Reformation 69 Ueli Zahnd Access to the Word of God. Language, Literacy, and Religious Understanding in Protestant Faroese Tradition Lena Rohrbach Church Architecture in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Norway Arne Bugge Amundsen

87 105

Rugia Gothorum. Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten and the Tradition of Gothicism 129 Bernd Roling Anti-Catholicism in Bremer and Topelius. Addressing the Historicity of Trans-historical Principles Anna Bohlin Kierkegaard’s Journals as a Protestant Practice of Writing Joachim Grage Ursus Sacer. The Bear As Man’s Neighbour in Swedish Nineteenthcentury Fiction Claudia Lindén Sin and Seduction. Antichrist in Danish Literature, Opera, and Film Sophie Wennerscheid

147 163

177 199

6

con t en t s

Pietist Nostalgia. Aesthetization of Faith and the Nordic Revival Movements in Scandinavian Post-World War II Literature Thomas Mohnike

215

‘Rather Than Buddha’s Calm, I Choose the Crucifixion’. Håkan Sandell’s Christian Palimpsests Giuliano D’Amico

233

Absence — Remnants of a Protestant Past. Greeley / Vattimo / Ask Joachim Schiedermair

247

Biographical Notes

259

Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike, Lena Rohrbach

Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe Introductory Investigations Decemberkväll -72 Här kommer jag den osynlige mannen, kanske anställd Av ett stort Minne för att leva just nu. Och jag kör förbi Den igenbommade vita kyrkan — därinne står ett helgon av trä leende, hjälplös, som om man har tagit ifrån honom hans glasögonen. Han är ensam. Allt det andra är nu, nu, nu. Tyngdlagen som pressar oss mot arbetet om dagen och mot sängen om natten. Kriget.1 [December evening -72 Here I come the invisible man, perhaps employed / by a great Memory to live right now. And I drive past // the boarded-up white church — inside, a wooden saint / stands smiling, helpless, as if his glasses have been taken from him. // He is alone. Everything else is now, now, now. The gravity that pushes us / towards work by day and towards bed by night. The war.]

A wooden statue of a helpless, almost blind saint in a white, locked church is the centrepiece of Nobel prize winner Tomas Tranströmer’s poem. A statue that is described as lonely and opposed to all that is ‘now, now, now’, that compels us to engage in the cyclical rhythms of work and sleep, the peaceful, everyday war of survival. The ‘lyrical I’, that is, the implied subject of the poem, passes by as an invisible man, as representative of Tranströmer’s contemporaries, invisible in his ordinariness, one of the anonymous mass, encompassing the reader, ‘possibly employed by a great Memory to live now’. The meaning of his life seems to be defined by work — but working for what? Who is this ‘great memory’ that he is ‘possibly’ in the service of? Is it the collective subject of humanity, of history, or of modernity for which the sense of present-day activity is to prepare the memory of tomorrow’s now? It seems that the lyrical persona of the poem is living and working in the hope of memory that could make sense without knowing if it is a hope in vain, a sense that would give direction to life, a sense that seems to have become fragile in Sweden’s modernist society of the 1970s. Modernity’s memory in progress is mirrored by the locked church that figures here as a sort of lieu de mémoire over a lost time, lost frames of meaning

1 Tomas Tranströmer, Dikter (Stockholm: MånPocket, 1984), p. 113. Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 7–18 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.132880

8

j oac h i m g r age, thomas mohn ik e, lena rohrbach

that were given by Christian faith and institutions, a memory of a time where meaning was given. The relationship to this time is not one of nostalgia, but rather of sentimentality in Schiller’s sense: the church is locked, the saint — perhaps Jesus himself, as it is a white church, probably Protestant — is wooden, artificial, not living, a symbol of a time that has been lost forever and cannot be recreated, but that nonetheless serves as a point of hope. The wooden saint is representative of the other in everyday life, the hope for long-term stability in a world of daily change, a place of transcendence in everyday life, even though the aim of this hope for transcendence is void, without God. Christianity seems to be the hidden model of contingence for a major poet of secular Scandinavian modernism. In her groundbreaking studies on the religious preconditions for the making of the Swedish women’s movement, Inger Hammar deplored that the study of the women’s movements has too often been ‘“religion blind” in the same way that feminist research termed earlier work “gender blind”’.2 This was and is, in spite of some recent attempts, still true even for cultural studies in general. All too often, the impact of religious practices and ideas on cultural phenomena that are not bound into ecclesiastical contexts (and vice versa) is all too little researched. It seems that not only the glasses of the saint in Tranströmer’s poem had been taken from him; we as scholars of cultures all too often would need glasses of religion in order to understand the societies we analyse, independently of whether religious practices are dominant in a society or seen as merely remnants of a past, as in Tranströmer’s poem. The present volume is a first result of a transnational research project that takes up this challenge and asks: how should we retell the cultural history of the Nordic countries when taking into consideration the cultural dominance that Protestant churches, beliefs, and religious practices had for the last 500 years in these countries? And more specifically: what was impact of Protestantism on what could be called the aesthetic paradigms that governed Nordic cultural productions? Assuming a connection between Protestant culture and Nordic culture is not a new idea per se. This is partly reflected in a multitude of studies on the social history of Protestant churches since the nineteenth century. The collection The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Northern Europe 1780–1920 may serve as a good introduction to the state of the art.3 Introduced in Max Weber’s work Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus (1904/05),4 the birth of a specific work ethic and the connected thesis of modernization as disenchantment have also been discussed by scholars of Nordic history. However, the influence of Protestantism on modernization and secularization processes in Scandinavia has only recently become an area of focus in research, especially in the work of scholars





2 Inger Hammar, ‘From Fredrika Bremer to Ellen Key: Calling, Gender and the Emancipation Debate in Sweden, c. 1830–1900’, in Gender and Vocation: Women, Religion, and Social Change in the Nordic Countries, 1830–1940, ed. Pirjo Markkola (Helsinki: SKS, 2000), 58; Inger Hammar, Emancipation och religion: Den svenska kvinnorörelsens pionjärer i debatt om kvinnans kallelse ca 1860–1900 (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1999), pp. 32–33. 3 Joris van Eijnatten and Nigel Yates, eds, The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Church, State and Society in Northern Europe, 1780–1920, 3 vols (Louvain: Leuven University Press, 2010). 4 Max Weber, Die protestantischen Sekten und der Geist des Kapitalismus: Schriften 1904–1920, ed. by Wolfgang Schluchter (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2016); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, with a Foreword by R. H. Tawney, trans. Talcott Parsons, 3rd edn (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950).

aesthetics of p rotesta ntism in northern europe

of nation and identity building.5 In this context, the works of Nina Witoszek can be seen as of particular relevance. She convincingly argues that the ideas of the Enlightenment were carried and disseminated in particular by the ‘proto-intelligensia of the North’, the Protestant pastors, on a congressional level leading to a specific non-revolutionary spirit of social transformation and, in European terms, a late ‘pastoral enlightenment’ focusing particularly on folkeoplysning (‘enlightenment of the people’) in Nordic countries as ‘they founded schools, disseminated literacy, created welfare institutions, improved farming methods and public health systems’, working particularly outside the greater Nordic cities, in the countryside.6 And it is in the same circles that the foundations of Nordic literature and art were laid, with their distinctive relationship to nature, and specifically to Nordic nature.7 Indeed, many of the most important modern Nordic writers were theology students or children of pastors, for example, Johannes Ewald, N. F. S. Grundtvig, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Søren Kierkegaard, Henrik Wergeland, Henrik Pontoppidan, and Ingmar Bergman. Similarly, in the context of gender studies, the collective study on women, religion, and social change showed that Nordic women’s movements originated from Christian feminist circles within the churches, redeploying central Protestant ideas in order to widen the circle of feminist activity (Fredrika Bremer was an important figure in these circles).8 Other studies have addressed frictions between modern masculinity and the feminization of religion in the nineteenth and twentieth century.9 The Oslo-based NFR-funded research project Tracing the Jerusalem Code: Christian Cultures in Scandinavia



5 For example, see Henrik Stenius, ‘The Good Life Is a Life of Conformity: The Impact of the Lutheran Tradition on Nordic Political Culture’, in The Cultural Construction of Norden, ed. by Bo Stråth and Øystein Sørensen (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997), pp. 161–71; Dag Thorkildsen, ‘Religious Identity and Nordic Identity’, in The Cultural Construction of Norden, ed. by Bo Stråth and Øystein Sørensen (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997), pp. 138–60; Aage B. Sørensen, ‘On Kings, Pietism and Rent-Seeking in Scandinavian Welfare States’, Acta Sociologica, 41, no. 4 (1998): 363–75; Ingmar Brohed, ed., Kyrka och nationalism i Norden: nationalism och skandinavism i de nordiska folkkyrkorna under 1800-talet, BV000870985 39 (Lund: Lund UnivPress, 1998); Tim Knudsen, Den nordiske protestantisme og velfærdsstaten (Aarhus: Universitetsforlag, 2000); Hanne Sanders, ‘Revivalism in the Process of Modernisation: Popular Protestant Culture in Denmark and Sweden 1820–1850’, in Politik, Religion und Gemeinschaft. Die kulturelle Konstruktion von Sinn, ed. by Bernd Henningsen, Die Kulturelle Konstruktion von Gemeinschaften im Modernisierungsprozess 10 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2005), pp. 217–24; Klaus Petersen and Jørn Henrik Petersen, ‘The Good, the Bad, or the Godless Society?: Danish “Church People” and the Modern Welfare State’, Church History, 82, no. 4 (December 2013): 904–40, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009640713001182; Anders Jarlert, ed., Piety and Modernity, The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Church, State and Society in Northern Europe, 1780–1920 3 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012); Pirjo Markkola and Ingela K. Naumann, ‘Lutheranism and the Nordic Welfare States in Comparison’, Journal of Church and State, 56, no. 1 (2014): 1–12 ; Mark Safström, Religious Origins of Democratic Pluralism: Paul Peter Waldenström and the Politics of the Swedish Awakening 1868–1917 ( James Clarke & Co Ltd, 2016) . 6 Nina Witoszek, The Origins of the ‘Regime of Goodness’: Remapping the Cultural History of Norway (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2011), p. 63; see also Nina Witoszek, ‘Fugitives from Utopia: The Scandinavian Enlightenment Reconsidered’, in The Cultural Construction of Norden, ed. by Øystein Sørensen and Bo Stråth (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997), pp. 72–90, here p. 75. 7 Witoszek, The Origins of the ‘Regime of Goodness’, pp. 50–85. 8 Pirjo Markkola, ed., Gender and Vocation: Women, Religion, and Social Change in the Nordic Countries, 1830–1940 (Helsinki: SKS, 2000). 9 Yvonne Maria Werner, Christian Masculinity: Men and Religion in Northern Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Leuven: Leuven UP, 2011).

9

10

j oac h i m g r age, thomas mohn ik e, lena rohrbach

(2015–2018) has investigated transfor­mations of Scandinavian Christianism by studying the changing idea of Jerusalem. In several articles, Joachim Schiedermair has shown that the history of modernization in Scandinavia cannot simply be described as a process of secularization, but that secularization is merely a ‘grand récit’, a frame narrative that dominates European self-understanding in spite of the fact that religious themes and motifs are still dominant in literature, media, and art and that questions of faith have had an important impact on culture in the twentieth and twenty-first century.10 In spite of these efforts, there is to our knowledge no comprehensive study on the aesthetic implications of Protes­tantism in Northern Europe. How can we define these specific aesthetics? In our preliminary discussions and reflections, it has proven helpful to structure our explorations by describing five abstract and trans-historical principles dominating modern aesthetics in Scandinavia, which arguably derive from Protestant thinking and practice: 1. Simplicity: The Reformation was an iconoclastic movement, subjecting arts and literature to the dictum of artistic economy. The aesthetics of Protestantism are rooted in the principles of auster­ity, measure, and simplicity. This tradition has endured and can be linked to minimalism and functionalism as Scandinavian trademarks, especially in the field of modern furniture design and architecture, and is also evident throughout Scandinavian art history, for example, in the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi and Carl Larsson. 2. Logocentrism: The Protestant focus on words promoted writing and talking about religious experience. It supported early literacy and the development of literary culture, also in lower social strata. As it implied a revolt against Latin as an elitist language and the democratization of religious knowledge, Lutheran Protestantism had an immense impact on the development of the Nordic languages, as vivid and rich linguistic traditions, and served as a model of rhetorics.11 The aesthetic consequences of Protestant logocentrism and its hermeneutic relation to language are obvious, especially in modern poetry, which is highly appreciated and popular in Scandinavian literature, Inger Christensen and Tomas Tranströmer being perhaps the best-known examples. 3. Tension between pronounced individualism and collectivism: By focusing on the individual experi­ence of faith and the believer’s personal relation to God, Protestantism pushes the discovery of the self. The aesthetic manifestation of this development can be seen both in the reflective ego-literature (diaries, memoirs, autobiographies), which gives a voice to individual experiences and reflections, and in the high importance of the ‘Bildungsroman’ and the coming-of-age novel, of which important modern Scandinavian novels such as Lykke-Per (1904/05) and Sult (1890) are examples. On the other hand, the individual is often seen as participating in a disciplined collec­tive;

10 Joachim Schiedermair, ‘Noras Weihnachtsbaum. Säkularisierung als Forschungsfrage an den modernen Durchbruch’, European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, 43, no. 1 (2013): 60–75; Joachim Schiedermair, ‘Erweckung Säkularisiert. Zur literarischen Anthropologie der Erweckungsbewegungen am Beispiel Skandinavischer Literatur’, in Zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne. Erweckungsbewegungen als Historiographische Herausforderung, ed. by Thomas K. Kuhn and Veronika Albrecht-Birkner (Münster: LIT, 2017), pp. 141–56. 11 See Pil Dahlerup, Litterær reformation (Copenhagen: U Press, 2016).

aesthetics of p rotesta ntism in northern europe

a suitable example is Aksel Sandemose’s En flygtning krydser sit spor (A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks) and its Jantelov, the law of Jante, modelled on the Ten Commandments. 4. Relatedness to the world: The close connection between political and religious discourse in Scan­dinavia has its roots in Protestant anthropology: the Protestant believer is an active part of the world, he is called upon to confess his faith in public, and he has to justify his or his community’s secular actions on the basis of his faith. In this way, Protestantism also urges each individual to take responsibility for the materialization of Christian virtues through praxis-orientated work obligations. This is the reason why (non-conformist) religious groups were able to become driving forces of social movements in nineteenth and twentieth century (for example, labour and women’s movements) and why Nordic literature often shows a social commitment and builds utopias of improved social orders. 5. Ethics: As a consequence of the Protestant tradition of intersecting aesthetic principles with ethically orientated usefulness, the choice of aesthetic principles becomes a question of conscience. Martin Luther’s famous words ‘Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise’, reported to have been uttered at the Diet of Worms in 1521, are perhaps the most radical model of a Protestant ethics. Expressed as the habitus of an independent intellectual, it is on display in Ibsen’s Brand and most recently per­haps with Greta Thunberg, who confesses the sins of our modern progress publicly and, in doing so, speaks up against the ‘papist’ elites of our global age. In Luther’s Der kleine Katechismus (1529, The Small Catechism), the continuous struggle of the Protestant to justify secular actions is described as a daily effort to ‘drown […] the old Adam’; pietism-inspired movements stressed the importance of conduct to pre­pare for individual salvation.12 Applied to a non-religious framework, this led to Georg Brandes’ Kier­kegaard-influenced aesthetic and ethical dictum of ‘debating problems’ as a function of literature and art, which played a huge role throughout Scandinavia, as did Ellen Key’s call for Skönhet för alla (Beauty for Everybody) as a prerequisite for a better society. The understanding of literature as political intervention, intertwining aesthetic and ethical principles, has a long tradition in North­ern Europe. When we speak of aesthetics of Protestantism in this sense, we use ‘aesthetics’ as a descriptive term, although they are bound to changing cultural norms. We do not postulate that Protestantism has developed an aesthetic of its own in the sense of a specific philosophy of art, but that it has developed the notions of what is considered within a culture to be ‘beautiful’, ‘sublime’, ‘artis­tic’, ‘tasteful’, ‘expressive’, ‘sophisticated’, etc. Recent research on an aesthetics of religions refers to aisthetis as ‘an epistemological concept that denoted sensory perception, but also referred to the larger process of how human beings make sense of their environment and of themselves through their senses’.13 Based on this, one can speak about ‘religious aesthetics’ as ‘the repertoire of practices — ways of seeing or

12 See Søren Blak Hjortshøj and Thomas Mohnike, ‘En sekulær munk’, Atlas, 2020 [accessed 10 March 2022]. 13 Alexandra Grieser and Jay Johnston, ‘What Is an Aesthetics of Religion? From the Senses to Meaning–and Back Again’, in Aesthetics of Religion: A Connective Concept, ed. by Alexandra Grieser and Jay Johnston (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2017), pp. 1–49, here p. 2.

11

12

j oac h i m g r age, thomas mohn ik e, lena rohrbach

listening, cultivating the body, implementing embodied values and imaginations — and the repertoire of products that developed in the context of religious traditions — images, architecture, texts, and dances, and the institutions that teach, traditionalize, and evaluate them’.14 The religious aspects of a culture’s aesthetic ideas are not limited to works of art that are embedded in a religious context (such as church architecture, devotional literature, religious painting) or that address religion (such as novels or films about conflicts of faith), but concern the aesthetic production as a whole, especially when it has been determined by a hegemonic denomination for many centuries, as is the case with Protestantism in Scandinavia. In this sense, the rules and regularities of art and literature, the modes of representation and perception are substantially influenced by Protestant theology, anthropology, and ethics. We are therefore also interested in determining the transfer and translation processes which take place when elements of religious aesthetic forms, contents, and worldviews are used in a secular context. We differentiate between new constellations and argue that the different ways of transferring do not imply ‘double alienation’ as Homi K. Bhabha’s term ‘act of translation’ points to — proposed by Joachim Schiedemair as a key secularization term: ‘On the one hand, what is to be translated is “overwhelmed or alienated in the act of translation”, on the other hand, however, the adoption also alienates the target context by adding something to it that blocks it — because otherwise it would not have to be “overwhelmed”’.15 We would in this context argue that this transfer process should be viewed as an integration process instead of a double alienation process: indeed, not all elements of the old context are lost in the translation. In the Nordic context, Protestant aesthetics often seem to fit very well into secular contexts, as in the films of Ingmar Bergman or the key role still played by Brorson’s and Grundtvig’s psalms in the present-day secular and widespread Højskole institution (People’s High School). When speaking of five principles of ‘religious aesthetics’ in Scandinavian Protestantism, we should stress that, historically speaking, the picture is more complicated, as there is no such thing as a homogeneous Protestant aesthetics. Even if Calvinists, Lutherans, and other Protestant communities of different origins and locations share a number of ethical assumptions that in turn influenced aesthetic predilections, such as the focus on words, music, minimalism, etc., there are a great number of differences between groups and across historical periods. For example, it might be argued that simplicity was more of an ideal in Calvinist contexts than in Lutheran ones — many churches of the Scandinavian sixteenth to eighteenth century were rather lavishly decorated in comparison to Calvinist Dutch architecture.16 Also, particularly in a Dano-Norwegian context, with the advent of pietism in the eighteenth century, colourful and sensuous ‘vulgar’ Catholic fresco paintings (for example, portraying amoral deeds of the devil and sexual scenes between men and women) were painted over. Subsequently, the churches designed and celebrated minimalistic interior aesthetic principles, favoring non-ornamented and light-filled church rooms with functionalist dark wooden congregational benches and all-white painted walls. The tradition of celebrating mini­malistic architecture and interior design was continued in the Pietist 14 Grieser and Johnston, ‘What Is an Aesthetics of Religion?’, p. 16. 15 Schiedermair, ‘Noras Weihnachtsbaum’, p. 63. 16 On this subject, see the chapters by Ueli Zahnd and Arne Bugge Amundsen in this volume.

aesthetics of p rotesta ntism in northern europe

prayer houses. The numerous Nordic Pietistic Protestant revival movements, including the influential Moravian and Halle Pietistic eighteenth century movements, all had the religious aim of re-establishing the authentic, simplistic church of ethically puritan early Christianity, as they considered the ‘unfinished’ Protestant church as morally declining, as were Catholic institutionalized structures. The tradi­tion also lived on in the design and architecture of twentieth-century Nordic churches, as in the impres­sive but aesthetically minimalistic Grundtvigs Kirke (Grundtvig’s Church) in Copenhagen. Thus, in a Nordic context, the key aesthetic principle of simplicity appears to merge with minimalism. Seen from this point of view, it will not be surprising that we propose to see the advent of Pietism as an important turning point in the cultural history of Scandinavia — and the history of Scandinavian aesthetics. Pietist-inspired revival movements were in fact important for the modernization of Nordic societies. As Bo Ståth writes, they ‘broke the unity of premodern agrarian society, created new social forms, and stood for modernity. Pietism and revivalism meant individ­ualization and dehierarchization of religion with long-term secularization impact when religion moved from the public arena to the private room’.17 Meetings of revival movements were places of collective education (dannelse / bildning) from below that served as the foundation for the popular movements, as, for example, the ‘labour move­ments took form and content from the religious ambience and were lastingly influenced by them’.18 Pietist and revival Christian influences did not follow a straightforward path from one group and into mainstream culture and literature; rather, complex interactions occurred. In fact, Pietist influences can be found even in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish state church practices and media that officially were not always open to Pietist teachings, and even less to forms of self-organized religious meetings, as the latter often appeared to threaten the religious monopoly. This likely had an impact on the aesthetics of Scandinavian literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Historically, the impact is more obvious in the Dano-Norwegian contexts where Pietist ideas were in some periods openly welcomed and made their way into widely circulated media, such as Erik Pontoppidan’s Pietist Catechism (1737), which was extensively used as a mandatory manual in school and church and was thus one of the few books to be owned by the majority of the population, especially in Norway until the end of the nineteenth century.19 Even the Swedish catechisms of the nineteenth century, such as Lindblom’s catechism, can be shown to have been influenced by Pietism — and to have influenced the state church and later free churches. These catechisms propagated an ethics of work and a love of oneself as a preparation to salvation that scholars often relate to Calvinism.20 They influenced generation after generation to live according to similarly disciplined work ethics based on values such as simplicity, modesty, patience, individual integrity, measure, and austerity; their influence cannot be overstated. The same can be argued

17 Bo Stråth, ‘Nordic Modernity: Origins, Trajectories, Perspectives’, in Nordic Paths to Modernity, ed. by Jóhann Páll Árnason and Björn Wittrock (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. 25–48, p. 33; see also Thorkildsen, ‘Religious Identity and Nordic Identity’; Stenius, ‘The Good Life Is a Life of Conformity’. 18 Stråth, ‘Nordic Modernity’, p. 33. 19 Henrik Horstbøll, ‘Pietism and the Politics of Catechisms’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 25, no. 2 (2004): 143–60. 20 Christer Hedin, Kristendomens historia i Sverige (Norstedts, 2019).

13

14

j oac h i m g r age, thomas mohn ik e, lena rohrbach

for songs and songbooks that circulated in large numbers of editions outside Moravian circles.21 Alongside the schoolbooks from compulsory school and main narratives from the Bible, these texts were the main shared models for literary narration. Additionally, revivalist publishers were very successful in disseminating their products. Influences can be located in the genre of autobiography, which was impacted by the Pietist demand to report one’s curriculum vitae as addressed to God; they can also be found in the language of emotions and bodily expressions and lastly even in nature poetry.22 Of course, many of the characteristics of what might appear as typical Protestant aesthetics or practices are not exclusively Protestant. The focus on scripture and interpretation of the divine word in a philological critical manner was shared, for example, by both Protestant and Catholic humanists in the sixteenth century. Hence, the term ‘Protestant aesthetics’ refers here to the corpus of ideals, ideas, and practices that were typical for specific religious milieus at specific moments in its historical evolution, considering the internal synchronic and diachronic heterogeneity that is typical of the Nordic countries in the period of study. However, calling these different aesthetics ‘Protestant’ was important to many actors, in that it emphasized its difference from other aesthetic paradigms. The will to distinguish oneself from others was perhaps more important than empirical difference. Based on these reflections and the discussions that we had with the authors of this volume, we propose to distinguish three major phases of in the cultural history of Protestant aesthetics in Scandinavia: the first one covers the time of Lutherian Protestantism until the advent of Pietist revival (1520–1750). The second begins with the Pietist revival as a paradigm for experiments with new forms of community and identity that in the course of the nineteenth century were dominated by a nationalist frame and end around the First World War and thus the advent of the social democratic welfare state project (1750–1920). The third follows the consequences of the mostly modernist welfare state project and its often anti-religious modernist discourse until today (1920–2020). The chapters of this volume are organized in this manner and explore central aspects of this history. Jürg Glauser opens the volume with a consideration of the material and rhetorical aesthetics of Scandinavian prints from the Reformation period. While the incunabula of the very first phase of printing during Catholic times share many of their visual features with late-medieval manuscripts, Scandinavian prints from the Reformation period developed an aesthetics of their own with close connections to contemporary German traditions and embedded in an international print culture. The evolving Protestant print aesthetics can partially be connected to the Lutheran principle of simplicity, but as Glauser shows, the rather minimal verbal and the splendid visual presentation often enter into a relationship of tension and mediate complex political and theological messages. A study of the early Danish translations of the New Testament reveals intricate inscriptions into the tradition of previous translations that exhibit a high awareness of the challenges of

21 Ann Öhrberg, ‘Imagery of God in Moravian Songs from Eighteenth-Century Sweden’, in Rhetoric and Literature in Finland and Sweden, 1600–1900, ed. by Pernille Harsting and Jon Viklund, Nordic Studies in the History of Rhetoric 2 (Copenhagen: NNRH, 2008), pp. 1–28 [accessed 10 March 2022]. 22 Thomas Bredsdorff, ‘Pious Nature’, in Erschriebene Natur. Internationale Perspektiven auf Texte des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Michael Scheffel (Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 73–87.

aesthetics of p rotesta ntism in northern europe

lucid and adequate translations of the Latin text into the vernacular. Other printed works from the Reformation period are characterized by dialogic principles and stage Protestant learning as a polemic tradition steered by the Lutheran solae that made use of the medial potentials of the printed book. The role of vernacular poetry in post-Reformation Iceland is addressed in Margrét Eggertsdóttir’s contribution. She identifies language, poetry in the vernacular, and prosody according to the literary tradition as important issues of the Icelandic Reformation movement. The importance of the vernacular for the religious poetic tradition is for the first time stressed in an Icelandic Protestant context in Guðbrandur Þorláksson’s preface to his Sálmabók (Book of Hymns) from 1589. His praise of the vernacular as poetic language can be related back to the vivid vernacular medieval poetic tradition. Guðbrandur’s translations of Lutheran hymns incorporate the Icelandic poetic conventions, first and foremost the alliteration, while he dismisses the tradition of kennings and metaphorical language as unfitting to mediate religious thinking. This application of the traditional poetic aesthetics in a lucid language was a successful model for the integration of Danish and German Lutheran texts into the Icelandic tradition. It induced a long row of Icelandic hymnal collections that make use of the same aesthetic principles, with Hallgrímur Pétursson’s Passíusálmar (printed in 1666, Hymns of the Passion) as the most influential of all Icelandic hymnal collections, with repercussions in Icelandic poetry felt up to the present day. Contributing theological expertise, Ueli Zahnd devotes his chapter to reflections on the relationship between Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines in relation to the Protestant principles identified earlier in this introduction. Several of the principles identified as typical for Scandinavian aesthetics are closer to Calvinist thinking than Lutheran, as in the case of simplicity and logocentrism, while the Calvinist church never had any noteworthy influence and was even banned in Scandinavia. One of the few Calvinist scholars in the North was the Danish theologian Niels Hemmingsen in the late sixteenth century, but his thinking as apparent in his writings cannot be linked to the identified characteristics of Scandinavian aesthetics. Rather, Zahnd argues, Scandinavian Lutheranism might have been influenced by Calvinist regions such as the Netherlands and English Pietist movements in the centuries after the Reformation in their development of a distinctive Scandinavian (religious) aesthetics. With a departure point in the Lutheran principle of sola scriptura, In her contribution, Lena Rohrbach discusses the implementation of the Lutheran plea for the vernacular as the language of the church in the context of the Danish realm. The Lutheran efforts had far-reaching effects on all aspects of learning and erudition: not only was the Bible translated into Danish shortly after the Reformation, but the liturgy, curriculum, and production of books were reformed and adapted according to this central Lutheran dogma. Danish was introduced as the ecclesiastical language of the Danish church through the Danish church ordinance in 1537/42 and completely displaced Latin with the Kirke-Ritual (Church Ritual) in 1685. In the context of the Faroe Islands, a Danish dependency since the end of the fourteenth century, this vernacularization of the language of the church however implied the introduction and establishment of a new foreign language. From the late seventeenth century onwards, Faroese as well as Danish writings on the Faroes framed and justified the choice of Danish as the language of the church by means of Protestant concerns of

15

16

j oac h i m g r age, thomas mohn ik e, lena rohrbach

accessibility and theological cognition, as Rohrbach shows, albeit with different conclusions as to the state of learning and understanding on the islands. While most of the contributions in this volume deal with the aesthetic consequences of Protestantism in media of language, Arne Bugge Amundsen turns to the question of how the denomination is reflected in the architecture of churches in Norway. Of course, even there, after the Reformation, the old churches continued to be used after their interiors were adapted to the new faith. Population growth and changing demands on church spaces then led to new buildings from the seventeenth century onward. New beliefs such as Pietism or lay movements were also reflected in the architecture of the necessary new buildings. In the prayer houses of the Haugeans, the boundaries between public church building and private meeting room became blurred. Amundsen clearly shows that the construction of new churches was also influenced by legislation (such as the permitting of religious communities). Many of the new communities of faith also marked their opposition to the Lutheran state church externally, whereupon in the nineteenth century Lutheran churches also changed their facades to show their claim to power as state churches. Norway became an arena for the development of a national, confessional aesthetic of church architecture. In his contribution, Bernd Roling shows how in individual regions quite different ideological, historical, and religious traditions converged and influenced the shaping of a Protestant aesthetic. His reference is Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten (1758–1818), Protestant pastor, scholar, and nature poet on Rügen, which had been part of the kingdom of Sweden since the Thirty Years War. Roling shows how Sweden’s national mythology of Gothicism was taken up by Pomeranian scholars in the eighteenth century and adapted for Pomerania and Rügen. Kosegarten then integrated individual elements of this mythology into his Enlightenment Protestant worldview. In his topographical descriptions, his theological writings, and in his poems, a unique, original synthesis of Lutheranism, natural piety, and Gothicism is evident. Anna Bohlin illuminates the connection between the aesthetics of Protestantism and the anti-Catholicism with which many Protestants reacted to the increasing religious freedom in the nineteenth century. Particularly in the direct confrontation with Catholicism, the players often made programmatic statements on questions of a Protestant aesthetic. Bohlin shows this with the example of two mid-nineteenth century writers, the Swedish Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865) and the Finnish Zacharias Topelius (1818–1898). Bremer’s engagement with Catholicism is evident in her book about her journey to southern Europe and Palestine. On the occasion of an audience with Pope Pius IX, she reflects on the fundamental right of all people to have immediate access to the Holy Scriptures and to be able to know the truth independently. At the same time, with her journey to the Holy Land, she revitalizes a ‘Catholic’ practice of faith that is obsolete in Protestantism, the pilgrimage, and reflects on the embodiment of faith under the auspices of Protestantism. Topelius’ engagement with a Catholic aesthetic is evident in his historical drama Regina von Emmeritz och Konung Gustaf II Adolf (Regina von Emmeritz and King Gustav II Adolf), which also deals with the reinterpretation of Catholic metaphor in the context of a Protestant allegory. Søren Kierkegaard, as one of the most important thinkers of Protestantism in nineteenth-century Scandinavia, is the focus of Joachim Grage’s contribution. Grage pursues the question of the connection between a Protestant production aesthetic and a Protestant ethic, however, not on the basis of Kierkegaard’s theoretical-theological writings, but

aesthetics of p rotesta ntism in northern europe

on the basis of his handwritten journals, on which Kierkegaard worked daily and which constituted a kind of workshop or experimental laboratory for his literary work. The journals are located in the context of a Pietistic practice of self-reflection and thus in the tradition of diary writing as a practice of faith. Using two central concepts Kierkegaard uses to refer to his literary writing, Grage examines how Kierkegaard’s daily writing practice manifests what Max Weber called Protestant ethics. Protestant ethics is also the subject of Claudia Lindén’s contribution, which focuses on anthropological self-determination in relation to the animal, not in the sense of delimitation, but with a view to common ground as God’s creatures. Lindén shows how the bear, which was on the verge of extinction in the Nordic countries at the end of the nineteenth century, became an ethical paradigm at the same time. She uses two short stories by the Swedish writers Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) and Pelle Molin (1864–1896) to examine how moral equality between humans and animals is constructed on the basis of a Protestant ethic. She transfers Agamben’s concept of homo sacer to the bear and illustrates how the bear as an ursus sacer is presented in the texts as the epitome of pure life. The bear appears not only as a neighbour of man, but as a creature with a moral agenda, a creature that lives in a more godly manner than man. Lindén highlights the political dimension of this idea, in which the boundaries between man and animal, between culture and nature, are called into question. Sophie Wennerscheid is discussing the figure of the Antichrist in Danish drama, opera, and film, all entitled Antikrist (Antichrist): the 1907 verse drama by P. E. Benzon, Rued Langgaard’s opera composed between 1920 and 1930, and Lars von Trier’s movie from 2009. The Antichrist is a rarely used motif in Danish literature and arts, as it is closely associated with Catholic aesthetics and extravagances. The figure of the Antichrist is therefore a means of challenging society’s moral and ethical standards by leaving what is supposed to be good and appropriated, mainly through the exposure of the seductive force of evil. The works thereby challenge Protestant ethics and aesthetics, subverting and renegotiating what is expected to be good and edifying. However, whereas in Benzon’s verse drama from 1907, all evil is eliminated at the end of the drama, God’s victory in Langgaards opera is already more ambivalent. Lars von Trier’s movie is the most radical version, merging the aesthetic exploration of Catholic medieval images and ideas with Protestant self-inquiry into the dark side of the enlightened mind. The conscious literary appropriation of Pietist ideas and practices in Post-World War II Scandinavian literature is the focus of Thomas Mohnike’s contribution. In studying Danish and Swedish literary works by Karen Blixen, Per Olov Enquist, Göran Tunström, and Jonas Gardell, he seeks to explore a phenomenon that he proposes to call Pietist nostalgia. According to him, Pietist nostalgia is a specific form of nostalgia, structured around four elements that relate directly to the Pietist tradition: 1) a dead, but present, father figure, 2) a lost childhood as an often precisely situated chronotope, 3) biblical intertexts that structure the narrative, and 4) a utopian aspiration to find the lost world again, not by restoring it but by transforming it into something new, most often through a staging of aesthetic transcendence. Giuliano D’Amico enquires into the Christian palimpsest in Håkon Sandell’s poetry, one of the major poets of a movement called retrogardism, a poetic approach not in opposition, but in counterbalance to avant-garde ideas and aesthetics, reconnecting,

17

18

j oac h i m g r age, thomas mohn ik e, lena rohrbach

as D’Amico formulates, ‘to a belief in the power of the poetic word as a medium to the transcendent, and a way to the divine’ through the use of metric forms and poetical ideas that are inspired, but not firmly followed by premodernist poetry. Guiliano D’Amico focuses, as mentioned, on Christian palimpsest, employing the term coined by Gérard Genette. Christian intertexts are in this way not used in order to invoke a Christian past, but to transform them into hermeneutic tools of existential and spiritual historicism and poiesis of history seeking new poetic and narrative modes of access to the present, failing in, as D’Amico writes, ‘“taking off ” from the secular ground they are anchored to’. With Joachim Schiedermair’s contribution, we encounter a popular medium not yet discussed in this volume, the graphic novel. Schiedermair discusses Lene Ask’s Hitler, Jesus, og farfar (Hitler, Jesus, and Grandfather, 2006) and especially Kjære Rikard (Dear Richard) from 2014 against the backdrop of texts by a Catholic sociologist, Andrew Greeley, and the philosopher Gianni Vattimo, which all explore that which could be specific to a Protestant aesthetics. The three contributions define Protestant aesthetics as an aesthetics of absence, as Schiedermair shows, and they are only understandable as a reaction to what can be called the narrative of secularization. In Ask’s work, the absence is especially manifest in the absence of the father, resulting in a melancholic longing for a lost world. However, the story of the father’s absence can be read in dialogue with the transcendence of God, suggesting a difference between creation and creator. Kjære Rikard can thus be read as an example of Protestant aesthetics. Most of the contributions in this volume originated in a conference in Strasbourg in November 2018, where the editors first put forward for debate their theses on the aesthetics of Protestantism. The historically wide-ranging case studies and the discussions, which were critical in the best sense of the word, contributed just as much to the further development and formulation of our concept as the contributions of Søren Blak Hjortshøj, who joined our project group as a post doc in 2019. The conference that we organized in November 2018 and the work on the present volume have been very inspiring. Our work was supported by seed money from the EUCOR universities in the Upper Rhine region and by funding from the Excellence Programme of the University of Strasbourg. This volume is the first in a new series that will continue with the results of further study of the aesthetics of Protestantism in Scandinavia. We combine this launch with the hope that others will also take up our suggestions and critically engage with our theses. Our special thanks go to Damaris Berger, Julia Jank, and Valentine Royaux, who supported us as student assistants through their research and their organization of the conference, to the participants of our joint master’s seminar in autumn 2018 at the universities of Basel, Freiburg, and Strasbourg, to Eline Elmiger, Natalie Menti, and Hanna Rothmund for proofreading the individual contributions, and especially to Philadelphia Iglehart for the thorough linguistic and formal editing of the entire volume. Last but not least, we would like to thank the publishing house Brepols and especially Alexander Sterkens for admirable cooperation.

Jürg G lauser

The Aesthetics of Protestant Rhetoric Early Reformation Polemic in Denmark The Reformation As a ‘Media Event’ It has become established practice to refer to the Reformation that began in 1517 in the German countries and was officially accepted in 1536 in Denmark as an event in which a variety of different media played a crucial role. One of the most prolific and impactful genres in this plurality of media — together with translations of biblical texts or books for the reformed liturgy such as psalm books — were polemic pamphlets. Pamphlets of this kind were produced and diffused during the early phases of the Reformation period by representatives of both the old and the new church; this was done to such an extent that the metaphor of a ‘flood’ that ‘inundated’ large parts of Europe in the sixteenth century with these writings has been used as a stereotype for a long time, or the Reformation movement was compared to a fire that spread over the country.1 It goes without saying that rhetorical devices of virtually every kind were essential in these polemics; in fact, rhetoric was the basis and the means that mediated the diverging ideas, the clashes of theological, political, and intellectual positions, the utterances of wishes and hopes, deceptions and disappointments that were so vibrant in these decades.2 Originating from the German countries and the German-speaking areas of Switzerland in the 1520s, Reformation polemic rapidly crossed the language borders and immediately



1 For example, Oluf Friis, Den danske Litteraturs Historie (Copenhagen: G. E. Gads Forlag, 1937–1945; repr. 1975), here p. 242: ‘breder Reformationen sig som en Brand’ (the Reformation spreads like a bush-fire). See for general overviews of Scandinavian church history, for example, The Scandinavian Reformation: From Evangelical Movement to Institutionalisation of Reform, ed. by Ole Peter Grell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Heinrich Holze, Die Kirchen des Nordens in der Neuzeit (16. bis 20. Jahrhundert), Kirchengeschichte in Einzeldarstellungen, III/11 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2011). For a history of the Reformation in the Danish church and culture, see Reformationen i dansk kirke og kultur, ed. by Niels Henrik Gregersen and Carsten Bach-Nielsen, University of Southern Denmark Studies in History and Social Sciences, 544, 3 vols (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2017), and Rasmus H. C. Dreyer, ‘Den lange danske reformation’, in Reformationen. 1500-tallets kulturrevolution. 2. Danmark, ed. by Ole Høiris and Per Ingesman (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2017), pp. 43–115. 2 See, for example, Achim Aurnhammer and Nicolas Detering, Deutsche Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit. Humanismus, Barock, Frühaufklärung, utb 5024 (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 2019), p. 17: ‘Das Medienereignis 1517’, pp. 76–102: ‘Reformation und Konfessionspolemik (1520–1570)’. An excellent study of the simultaneity and plurality of media in Reformation rhetoric can be found in Peter Matheson, The Rhetoric of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998). See also Meenken’s overview of central features of Reformation rhetoric, in Immo Meenken, ‘Reformation’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. by Gert Ueding, Gregor Kalivoda et al., 12 vols (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer [vols 1–9]; Berlin: De Gruyter [vols 10–12], 1992–2015), VII (2015), cols 1078–96. Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 19–55 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.131413

20

j ürg gl au ser

spread to almost all adjacent territories, including the Scandinavian countries where first especially Danish and Swedish and somewhat later Norwegian and Icelandic writers contributed to this sort of publications. The emergence of a Protestant rhetoric in the Nordic countries was thus mainly influenced by the changes the Reformation brought about in Germany. Translations of the constitutive writings of Luther, Melanchthon, and other German Protestants into Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic were made at an astonishing pace. For example, the first Danish rendering of the New Testament, ‘Christiern II’s Nye Testamente’ (Thet Nøye Testamenth), was published in Wittenberg as early as 1524, only two years after Luther’s so-called September Testament from 1522 on which it heavily depended. Just like in Germany, the political dimensions of the Reformation in the Scandinavian countries were at least as important as the theological ones, and the aspect of power in a very broad sense helped to shape the dialogic facets of the debates so specific to Protestant rhetoric in these years.3 Reformation print was designed to be read and spread aloud and contributed to the staging of an arena of orality, theatricality, vivacity — the basis of reformatory preaching and teaching. The rhetoric of these medial forms of speaking and enacting in live performances (memoria and actio) cannot be overestimated. In pietistic movements in the seventeenth and later centuries, public speech played a central role and the rhetoric of pre-modern pietism underscored the importance of affects and emotions. But there are also clear similarities between Reformation preaching, pietist emotional speech, and the ideology of the ‘Living Word’. This catchphrase, in the context of German language philosophy and theology mainly associated with Johann Gottfried Herder in the late eighteenth century (‘Das lebende Wort’) was used as an advantageous opposite pole to the ‘Dead Word’ of writing. Strongly influenced by Herder, the Danish theologian, writer, and politician N. F. S. Grundtvig coined the term ‘Det levende Ord’ (‘The Living Word’) as his ideal of sermon rhetoric and practice. Comparable features of language-orientated dialogicity and narrativity in writing as well as preaching were already characteristic in the influential works and activities of the ‘Danish Luther’, Hans Tausen.4 It was in such a field of tension between rhetorical performance and reformatory struggle that the intrinsic Protestant aesthetics found and developed its formal and medial expressions.





3 On the influence of Luther in Denmark, see Anna Vind, ‘Lutherreception i 1500- og 1600-talles Danmark’, in Reformationen. 1500-tallets kulturrevolution. 2. Danmark, ed. by Ole Høiris and Per Ingesman (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2017), pp. 117–37. The role of language is treated in Languages in the Lutheran Reformation: Textual Networks and the Spread of Ideas, ed. by Mikko Kauko, Miika Norro, Kirsi-Maria Nummila, Tanja Toropainen, and Tuomo Fonsén, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019). An interesting case study on the production and use of printed books in teaching the new faith by the Danish pastor and prolific writer Rasmus Hansen Reravius (1525/40–82) is Morten Fink-Jensen, ‘Printing and Preaching after the Reformation: A Danish Pastor and his Audiences’, in Religious Reading in the Lutheran North: Studies in Early Modern Scandinavian Book Culture, ed. by Charlotte Appel and Morten Fink-Jensen (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), pp. 15–47. 4 On pietist rhetoric see, for example, Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Reinhard Breymayer, ‘Pietismus’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, VI (2003), cols 1191–1214, esp. cols 1196, 1199, 1204–05. On Herder, see Ralf Simon, Das Gedächtnis der Interpretation. Gedächtnistheorie als Fundament für Hermeneutik, Ästhetik und Interpretation bei Johann Gottfried Herder (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998); on Herder and Grundtvig, see Ole Vind, Grundtvigs historiefilosofi (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1999), esp. pp. 99–110; on Grundtvig, see also Inga Meincke, Vox Viva. Die ‘wahre Aufklärung’ des Dänen Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000).

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

While Christianity can be called a religion of the book in general, Protestantism is certainly a religion of the printed (and translated) book. Print culture, as has long been recognized, was one of the medial bases of the new faith, although the simultaneity of handwritten and printed texts had, of course, not come to an end with Gutenberg’s invention in the middle of the fifteenth century. To a certain extent, the coexistence of the manuscript and of print can be considered to be one rather essential of the many aspects of the theological debates, and this holds true, as we shall see, for Bible translations and polemical pamphlets as well.5 In what follows, the present study will, with a focus on the Danish material, scrutinize some examples of the aesthetics of Protestant rhetoric in a few representative Scandinavian writings that were produced in the early phases of the Reformation. The centre of attention will be on the earliest editions of the Danish New Testament: 1524, 1529, 1531. The Danish Protestant Reformers and Their Print Connections The progress printing made as a cultural technique in the Scandinavian countries in the incunabula era can be roughly illustrated in the following survey which lists, chronologically, when, where, and by whom the first books, in Latin and in the vernacular, respectively, were printed in each country:6





5 For a discussion of the special situation in Iceland, see Steingrímur Jónsson, ‘The Handwritten Book in Iceland after the Invention of Printing: Why Not Printed?’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 73 (1998), 17–23. A new ongoing research project is described by Jonas Nordin, ‘Between Manuscript and Prints — Physical Expression of Handwritten and Printed Law Texts c. 1450–1650’ [accessed 10 March 2022]. 6 The standard work on the beginning of printing and early book history in Denmark is still Lauritz Nielsen, Dansk Bibliografi 1482–1550 med særligt Hensyn til dansk Bogtrykkerkunsts Historie (Copenhagen and Kristiania: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1919). ‘LN + number’ refers hereafter to this work. Some more recent contributions to Danish and Icelandic book-history in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are Paul Heinz Vogel, ‘Erstdrucke ausländischer Bibeln von deutschen Druckern des 15. und 16. Jahrhundert’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1959, 92–98 (pp. 93–97); Erik Dal, ‘500 Jahre Buchdruck in Dänemark außerhalb Kopenhagens’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 59 (1984), 211–40; Erik Dal, ‘Bücher in dänischer Sprache vor 1600’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 62 (1987), 37–46; Guðrún Kvaran, ‘Die Anfänge der Buchdruckerkunst in Island und die isländische Bibel von 1584’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 72 (1997), 140–47. The first books printed in Norway were published in 1643, the first book printed in Faroese in 1822 (Randers, Denmark); see Lena Rohrbach’s chapter in the present volume. For an excellent general study of Scandinavian print culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Wolfgang Undorf, From Gutenberg to Luther: Transnational Print Cultures in Scandinavia 1450–1525, Library of the Written Word, 37 (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2014); also available online [accessed 10 March 2022]: ‘The nature of the Scandinavian pre-Reformation print culture didn’t essentially differ from its continental or Western European siblings. In comparison, Scandinavia did evolve slower and we mustn’t disregard the effects of a position in the geographical periphery. But, at the same time, was Scandinavia firmly positioned in European ecclesiastical, academical, intellectual and book trade networks.’ Unpaginated abstract. See also Wolfgang Undorf, ‘Reformation ohne Luther? — Transnationale Druckkultur in Dänemark und Schweden in der Reformationszeit’, in Reformation und Buch. Akteure und Strategien frühreformatorischer Druckerzeugnisse, ed. by Thomas Kaufmann and Elmar Mittler, Bibliothek und Wissenschaft, 49 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016), pp. 263–80; and Otfried Czaika, ‘Buchdruck und Reformation in Schweden und Finnland. Einheimische Drucke, Transfer und Importe, Sammlungen’, in Reformation und Buch. Akteure und Strategien frühreformatorischer Druckerzeugnisse, ed. by Thomas Kaufmann and Elmar Mittler, Bibliothek und Wissenschaft, 49 (Weisbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016), pp. 281–301.

21

22

j ürg gl au ser

1482: First books printed in Denmark: Breviarium Ottoniense, Odense,7 and De obsidione et bello Rhodiano by William of Caoursin, Odense,8 both printed by Johan Snell (see Figures 1 and 2) 1483: First book printed in Sweden: Dyalogus creaturarum optime moralizatus (collection of fables and dialogues), Stockholm, printed by Johan Snell9 (see Figure 3) 1495: First book printed in Danish: Den danske Rimkrønike (The Danish Rhymed Chronicle), Copenhagen, printed by Gotfred af Ghemen10 (see Figure 4) 1495: First book printed in Swedish: Aff dyäfwlsens frästilse (Swedish translation of Jean Gerson’s Liber de tentationibus diaboli), translated by Ericus Nicolai, Stockholm, printed by Johan Fabri11 1534: First book printed in Iceland: Breviarium Holense, Hólar í Hjaltadal, printed by Jón Matthíasson12 1540: First book printed in Icelandic: Hid nya Testament (The New Testament), translated by Oddur Gottskálksson, Roskilde, printed by Hans Barth13 (see Figure 5) 1543: First book printed in Finnish: ABCkiria (ABC Book), translated by Michael Agricola, Stockholm, printed by Amund Laurentsson14 1559: First book in Icelandic printed in Iceland: [Antonius Corvinus], Passio. Það er píning vors herra Jesú Christi (Passio: That Is the Torture of Our Lord Jesus Christ), Breiðabólstaður, translated by Oddur Gottskálksson, printed by Jón Matthíasson15 (see Figure 6)

7 LN 29; facsimile of p. 260b: Nielsen, Dansk Bibliografi 1482–1550, Table II. There is no print or online edition of this book. For an online edition of the second edition, see Breviarium Ottoniense (Lübeck: Brandis, 1497) [accessed 10 March 2022]. 8 LN 39; facsimile editions: Guillaume Caoursin, Beretning om Belejringen af Rhodos. Johan Snells Udgave af 1482, Facsimile edition, (Copenhagen: Hermann-Petersens Forlag, 1910); Guillaume Caoursin, descriptio obsidionis urbis Rhodie per johannem snel in ottonia impressa anno dñi 1482, Facsimile edition, Guillaume Caoursin, Beretning om belejringen af byen Rhodos, trans. Jacob Isager (Odense: Forening for Boghaandværk. Fynsafdelingen, 1982). 9 Isak Collijn, Sveriges bibliografi intill år 1600, Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet, 10, 3 vols (Uppsala: Svenska litteratursällskapet, 1934–1938), pp. 16–29; facsimile edition: Dyalogus. 10 LN 232; facsimilie of p. 61a: Nielsen, Dansk Bibliografi 1482–1550, Table V; online edition: ‘Tekster fra Danmarks middelalder og renæssance — på dansk og latin’ [accessed 10 March 2022]. 11 Collijn, Sveriges bibliografi intill år 1600, I, pp. 144–47; facsimile of p. 2a: p. 146, Figure 34; online facsimile edition: Jean Gerson, Aff dyäffwlsens frästilse, (Stockholm: Johannes Smedh, 1495) [accessed 10 March 2022]. 12 LN 26; Halldór Hermannsson, Icelandic Books of the Sixteenth Century, Islandica, 9 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library; repr. New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1966), pp. 1–2; facsimile edition: Isak Collijn, ‘Två blad af det förlorade Breviarium Nidrosiense, Hólar 1534’, Nordisk tidskrift för bok- och biblioteksväsen, 1 (1914), 11–16, tables 1–2. 13 LN 268; Halldór Hermannsson, Icelandic Books of the Sixteenth Century, pp. 2–4; facsimile edition: Hið nya Testament 1540: Oddur Gottskálksson’s Translation of the New Testament (Roskilde, Hans Barth, 1540). Facsimile edition […] by Sigurður Nordal, Monumenta Typographica Islandica, 1 (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, Publishers, 1933). 14 Mikael Agricola, Abckiria. Kriittinen editio, ed. by Kaisa Häkkinen (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2007). 15 Halldór Hermannsson, Icelandic Books of the Sixteenth Century, pp. 14–15; facsimile edition: Passio 1559. Facsimile edition […] by Jón Helgason, Monumenta Typographica Islandica, 4 (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, Ejnar Munksgaard, 1936).

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

Figure 1. Breviarium Ottoniense (Odense: Johan Snell, 1482), p. 260b. Source: Lauritz Nielsen, Dansk Biblio­ grafi 1482–1550, 1919, table II.

23

24

j ürg gl au ser

Figure 2. Guillaume Caoursin, De obsidione et bello Rhodiano (Odense: Johan Snell, 1482), title page. Source: Caoursin, Guillaume, descriptio obsidionis urbis Rhodie […], 1982.

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

Figure 3. Dyalogus creaturarum optime moralizatus (Stockholm: Johan Snell, 1483), title page. Source: Dya­ logus creaturarum optime moralizatus, 1983.

25

26

j ürg gl au ser

Figure  4. Den danske Rimkrønike (The Danish Rhymed Chronicle) (Copenhagen: Gotfred af Ghemen, 1495), title page. Source: [accessed 10 March 2022].

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

Figure 5. Hid nya Testament (The New Testament), trans. Oddur Gottskálksson (Roskilde: Hans Barth, 1540), title page. Source: Hið nya Testament.

27

28

j ürg gl au ser

Figure 6. Antonius Corvinus, Passio. Það er píning vors herra Jesú Christi (Passio: That is the Torture of Our Lord Jesus Christ), trans. Oddur Gottskálksson (Breiðabólstaður: Jón Matthíasson, 1559), title page. Source: Corvinus, Passio 1559.

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

While Latin texts intended for the liturgy of the old church (Breviarium Ottoniense, Missale Upsaliense, Breviarium Holense) belonged to the oldest phase of the history of printing in the North, the first books that were written in the vernacular had historical or didactic / moral contents (Den danske Rimkrønike, Aff dyäfwlsens frästilse). Once the Reformation gained a foothold in Denmark and Sweden in the 1520s, Danish and Swedish were increasingly used as the languages for Protestant publications, and the decades between 1520 and 1550 witnessed an extraordinary dynamic in printing and publishing activities on behalf of the reformers. Not least the four translations of the New Testament in Danish (1524–1531) were heavily exploited in the theological power struggle and the exchanges of polemics between the representatives of the Catholic church and the reformatory movement. Some outstanding examples of Danish printed books in these formative years of Protestant book production were:16 The Nøye Testamenth (The New Testament), Wittenberg 1524, translated by Hans Mikkelsen, Christian Vinter, Henrik Smith, printed by Melchior Lotther, the first Danish translation of the Gospels17 (see Figure 7) Thet cristelighe messze embedhe paa dansche (The Christian Mass in Danish) by Claus Mortensøn, Malmø 1528, printed by Oluf Ulricksøn, the oldest Danish Psalm and Mass Manual18 En merckelig grundfest disputatz giort Paa tiltale och gienswar (A Noticeable Disputation about the Foundation of Faith, Made in Address and Response) by Jens Peerszøn, Viborg 1531, printed by Hans Vingaard, a translation of Urbanus Rhegius’ and Benedictus Gretinger’s German Ein trostliche disputation / auff frag vnt antwürt gestellet (A Consolatory Disputation, Put in Questions and Answers), 152419 (see Figure 8) Nikolaus Herman, Et ynkeligt Klagemaal (A Pathetic Complaint), Viborg 1528, printed by Hans Vingaard20 Een ny handbog med Psalmer oc aandelige lofsange (A New Manual with Psalms and Spiritual Hymns), Rostock 1529, printed by Ludwig Dietz21 (see Figure 9) Hans Tausen, Svar til Biskoppen af Odense’s Sendebrev (Answer to the Bishop of Odense’s Circular), Viborg 1529, printed by Hans Vingaard22 (see Figure 10) Det ny Testamente (The New Testament), Antwerp 1529, translated by Christiern Pedersen, printed by Willem Vorsterman23 (see Figure 11) 16 For an overview of the book production in the contexts of late medieval and early modern literature in Denmark, see, for example, ‘Tekster fra Danmarks middelalder og renæssance’; Friis, Den danske Litteraturs Historie, pp. 201–321; Bibliografisk supplement til Oluf Friis, Den danske Litteraturs Historie, ed. by Thorkil Damsgaard Olsen and others (Copenhagen: G. E. Gads Forlag, 1977), pp. 28–31; Pil Dahlerup, Litterær reformation (Copenhagen: U Press, 2016), esp. ‘Bibelen på Dansk’ (‘The Bible in Danish’), pp. 95–158, is an excellent new contribution to the theological literature in Denmark from a literary perspective with close readings of the main texts. 17 LN 270; facsimilie edition: The Nøye Testamenth. Christiern II’s Nye Testamente, Wittenberg 1524, ed. by Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Danske Bibelarbejder fra Reformationstiden, 1 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1950). 18 ‘Det kristelige Messeembede’, in Danske messebøger fra reformationstiden, ed. by Universitets-Jubilæets danske Samfund (Copenhagen: J. H. Schultz Forlag, 1959). 19 Jens Peerszøn, En merckelig grundfest disputatz, vdsatt aff Tydsch och fordanskedt [1531], ed. by Poul Andersen, Universitets-Jubilæets danske Samfund, 359 (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1952). 20 LN 154; Fem Reformationsskrifter trykt af Hans Vingaard i Viborg 1528–1530, ed. by Universitets-Jubilæets danske Samfund (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Forlag, 1987), pp. K 1–24. 21 LN 77; facsimile edition: ‘En ny håndbog med psalmer og åndelige lovsange’, in Ludwig Dietz’ Salmebog 1536, ed. by Niels Knud Ahnlund (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1972), pp. A–Riiij. 22 LN 263; Fem Reformationsskrifter, pp. S 25–82. 23 LN 271; facsimile edition: Det ny Testamente. Oversat af Christiern Pedersen, Antwerpen 1529, ed. by Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Danske Bibelarbejder fra Reformationstiden, 2 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1950).

29

30

j ürg gl au ser

Joh. Toltz, En liden Indgang i Skriften (A Little Introduction to Scripture), translated by Peder Borgsmed, Viborg 1530, printed by Hans Vingaard24 Martin Luther, Tvende Beslutninger om Ægteskab (Two Decisions on Marriage), translated by Jørgen Jensen Sadolin, Viborg 1530, printed by Hans Vingaard25 Jørgen Jensen Sadolin, Danmarks Prædikanters Gensvar (The Danish Predicants’ Answer), Viborg 1530, printed by Hans Vingaard26 Det ny Testamente (The New Testament), Antwerp 1531, translated by Christiern Pedersen, printed by Willem Vorsterman, Pedersen’s revised translation of his own edition of the Gospels 152927 Een handbog som inde holler det hellige Euangeliske Messe embede […] (A Manual Containing the Holy Evangelical Mass), Malmø 1535, printed by Oluf Ulricksøn28 Nogle nye Psalmer oc Lofsange som icke till forn ere wdgange paa Danske / medt een Correcht oc forbedering paa then store Sangbog som er trycht y Rostock wedt Ludowich Dyetz (Some New Psalms and Hymns Which Have Not Been Published before in Danish, with Corrections and Improvements of the Large Songbook Which Was Printed in Rostock by Ludwig Dietz), Rostock 1536, printed by Ludwig Dietz29 Een gantske nyttelig oc alle sogneprester oc predicanter nødtorftelig Handbog Om den rette Euangeliske Messe (A Very Useful and for All Pastors and Predicants Necessary Manual for the Right Evangelical Mass) by Frands Vormordsen, Malmø 1539, printed by Oluf Ulricksøn30 Biblia, Det er den gantske Hellige Scrifft, vdsæt paa Danske (Biblia, That Is the Complete Holy Scripture, Translated into Danish), ‘Christian 3.s bibel’, Copenhagen 1550, printed by Ludwig Dietz31 (see Figure 12) En Ny Psalmebog medt flere Psalmer oc Christelige oc Aandelige lofsang met Colecter og Bøner som icke ere tillforne Prentet i de andre Psalmebøger […] (A New Psalm Book with More Psalms and Christian and Spiritual Hymns with Offertory and Prayers Which Are Not Printed before in the Other Psalm Books), Copenhagen 1553, printed by Hans Vingaard32 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

Fem Reformationsskrifter, pp. T 83–132. LN 141; Fem Reformationsskrifter, pp. B 133–58. LN 73; Fem Reformationsskrifter, pp. G 159–216. LN 272; edition: Christiern Pedersen, ‘Det Nye Testamente (1531)’, in Danske Skrifter, ed. by C. J. Brandt and R. Th. Fenger, 5 vols (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandling, 1850–1856), III (1852). LN 76; ‘Haandbog i det hellige Messeembede’, see Nielsen, Dansk Bibliografi, 1482–1550, p. 39. LN 238; ‘Nogle nye psalmer og lovsange’, in Ludwig Dietz’ Salmebog 1536, ed. by Niels Knud Ahnlund (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1972). LN 298; ‘Haandbog om den rette evangeliske Messe’, in Danske messebøger fra reformationstiden, ed. by Universitets-Jubilæets danske Samfund (Copenhagen: J. H. Schultz Forlag, 1959). On this first complete Danish edition of the Old and the New Testament, the aim of the Reformation translation activities in Denmark, see Marita Akhøj Nielsen, ‘Om Christian 3.s danske Bibel’ [accessed 10 March 2022]; here also an electronic edition of the Danish Bible 1550. The following studies are mainly concerned with the (pre-)history of the first Danish translation of the complete Bible (1550): Bertil Molde, Källorna till Christian III:s bibel 1550. Textfilologiska studier i reformationstidens danska bibelöversättningar (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, and Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1950); Peter Skautrup, ‘Reformationsbiblens tilblivelse og forudsætninger. Forskningens problemer og resultater. En oversigt’, in Bidrag til Den danske Bibels Historie. Festskrift i Anledning af Den danske Bibels 400 års jubilæum, ed. by Aarhus Universitet (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1950), pp. 42–58. En Ny Psalmebog 1553, ed. by Universitets-Jubilæets danske Samfund and Niels Knud Ahnlund, 2 vols (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1983).

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

Figure 7. The Nøye Testamenth (The New Testament), trans. Hans Mikkelsen, Christian Vinter, Henrik Smith (Wittenberg: Melchior Lotther, 1524), title page. Source: The Nøye Testamenth. Christiern II’s Nye Testa­ mente, Wittenberg 1524.

31

32

j ürg gl au ser

Figure 8. Jens Peerszøn, En merckelig grundfest disputatz giort Paa tiltale och gienswar (A Noticeable Disputa­ tion about the Foundation of Faith, Made in Address and Response) (Viborg: Hans Vingaard, 1531), title page. Source: Jens Peerszøn, En merckelig grundfest disputatz, 1952.

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

Figure 9. Een ny handbog med Psalmer oc aandelige lofsange (A New Manual with Psalms and Spiritual Hymns) (Rostock: Ludwig Dietz 1529). Source: Ludwig Dietz’ Salmebog 1536, 1972.

33

34

j ürg gl au ser

Figure 10. Hans Tausen, Edt kort antswor til bispenss sendhæbreff aff Othense huilcket hand tilskreeff the borgh­ eræ i Wiborg oc Olborg (A Short Answer to the Letter of the Bishop of Odense, Which He Sent to the Citizens of Viborg and Aalborg) (Viborg: Hans Vingaard, 1529), title page. Source: Fem Reformationsskrifter, 1987.

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

Figure 11. Det Ny Testamente Jhesu Cristi ord oc Euangelia (The New Testament, Jesus Christ’s Words and Gospels), trans. Christiern Pedersen (Antwerpen: Willem Vorsterman, 1529), title page. Source: Det ny Testamente. Oversat af Christiern Pedersen, Antwerp 1529.

35

36

j ürg gl au ser

Figure 12. Biblia, Det er den gantske Hellige Scrifft, vdsæt paa Danske (Bible, That Is the Complete Holy Scrip­ ture, Translated to Danish), ‘Christian 3.s danske Bibel’, trans. Peder Palladius, Johannes Machabæus, Niels Henningsen, Hans Henriksen, Peder Tidemand (Copenhagen: Ludwig Dietz, 1550), title page. Source: [accessed 10 March 2022].

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

As is well known, incunabula from the very first phase of printing, in some way the ‘Catholic’ prints, shared many features of their visual aesthetics such as layout, initials, colouring, and other effects with late medieval manuscripts. The first pages of Breviarium Ottoniense and De obsidione et bello Rhodiano, for example, show this point quite nicely (see Figures 1–2). Reformation prints which represented the next phase of early printing gradually developed an aesthetics of their own. They contributed substantially to the emancipation of the printed book from its medieval contexts and became a new medial form. Over the course of this development, important books like the Danish New Testaments 1524, 1529, and 1531 were obviously influenced by the aesthetics of the German Reformation publications, especially Luther’s texts. As can be seen from some of the figures, important aspects of the emerging Protestant aesthetics were expressed both verbally and optically. A glance at a few title pages of early Danish prints shows clear influences from German books and woodcuts made by German artists, which will be discussed in more detail below (see the Danish New Testaments 1524 and 1529/31 and especially Figures 5–8 and 12–13). For example, the title page of the Danish New Testament 1524 (see Figure 7) has a rather short title, displays a simple layout, and uses plain, clear types. It thus adheres to the criterion of simplicity which is often seen as a major feature of Protestant ideology (expressed in teaching and preaching) and aesthetics (in bookmaking), when it reads: ‘Thette ere thz Nøye testamenth paa danske ret effter latinen vdsatte’ (‘This is the New Testament in Danish translated rightly after the Latin’). In this case, visual as well as verbal effects are combined to express, that is, verbalize and visualize, its message. But it would be a simplification to reduce Protestant aesthetics to pure simplicity. As the title page of the Bible 1550 shows (see Figure 12), the title as such, which is extremely minimized and matter-of-fact on the level of verbal expression, ‘Biblia, Det er den gantske Hellige Scrifft, vdsæt paa Danske’ (‘Biblia, That is the Complete Holy Scripture, Translated into Danish’), is surrounded by a rich visual narrating frame based on Ludwig Dietz’ Low German bible. So early title pages at times already show a certain tension between the two codes and make use of them in a remarkable way. The new Protestant visual aesthetics is also expressed by the importance of the many illustrations showing people (mostly the apostles) in acts of reading and / or writing books. Some books display on their title pages the important Protestant element of theological controversy and dialogue: disputation, address, answer (see, for example, Figures 8 and 10). This is a feature that structures many of the period’s writings. And the technique of the woodcut allows for yet another facet of the new aesthetics and mediality which are its political implications; Lucas Cranach’s beautifully drawn portrait of Christiern II from 1523 in the New Testament 1524 (see Figure 13) demonstrates that the king is now a worldly just as much as a spiritual leader, the head of the nation and the church. It is also noteworthy to realize that the lion’s share of the earliest Reformation prints consisted of translations of the New Testament and writings that more or less depended directly on it, while translations of books of the Old Testament were a somewhat later phenomenon.33 The division can be seen as significant. Firstly, the sheer quantity at an early 33 See, for example, Gammeltestamentlige Bøger. Oversat af Peder Tidemand, Domernes Bog 1539, Jesus Syrach 1541, Salomonis Wijshed 1541, ed. by Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Danske Bibelarbejder fra Reformationstiden, 3 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1950). On Christiern Pedersen’s role in the translation

37

38

j ürg gl au ser

stage made it difficult to translate and publish all books of the Old Testament completely in one volume. Thus, in the beginning the translation history of the Old Testament is characterized by editions of volumes that contained only a few books at a time. Secondly, while the Old Testament is written for the most part as narrations and histories, the books of the New Testament are structured to a much larger extent by teaching and preaching. Because of the presence of Jesus in many of the stories, these facets have the form of dialogues. Protestant teaching could thus rely on them both on a thematic and a performative level (see, for example, the title page of the Icelandic New Testament, 1540, with preaching scenes in the upper and lower margins, Figure 5). The culmination, the ‘summa’, so to speak, of these Protestant translation activities that started in the 1520s, was of course reached with the great Danish Reformation Bible from the year 1550, usually called ‘Christian 3.s bibel’ which included both Testaments. The selective list above shows that the centres of Reformation printing in Denmark were Viborg, Malmø, and Copenhagen, while quite a few other books were produced in Germany and the Netherlands as well. A number of different genres, complete books and small pamphlets are represented. One of the most specific features one finds in all these publications are comments on title pages or in prefaces and introductions. Noteworthy in these paratexts are, among other things, the numerous references to earlier prints, especially in Bible translations. But there is also a lucid example of such a comment in the oldest extant book in the Danish language, Gotfred af Ghemen’s first extant edition of Den danske Rimkrønike (The Danish Rhymed Chronicle), Copenhagen 1495. Just like in many late medieval manuscripts, this edition of the Rhymed Chronicle starts with an incipit consisting of one sentence only and not with a title or an extensive preface: ‘Hær begynner then danskæ Kronnickæ well offuerseet oc ræth.’ (‘Here begins the Danish Chronicle, carefully revised and corrected’) (see Figure 4). The fact that the incipit mentions that the book about the history of the country’s kings has been revised means, if it is true and not just a formula, that the present edition cannot be the oldest book printed in Danish — unless the phrase refers to a lost handwritten copy of the chronicle. It also means, which is more interesting in the present context, that books of this type place themselves within the frame of an ongoing process, and they do so with the help of such intertextual references. Corrections are explicitly mentioned, improvements are commented on. Later editions of the Rhymed Chronicle in which the first pages are extant have very much identical incipits.34 The concept that a text can and must be improved by corrections is a recurring topic in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and is very closely connected to the emergence of philology and

activities, see Allan Karker, ‘Omkring Christiern Pedersens Bibel’, Ord, Sprog oc artige Dict. Et overblik og 28 indblik 1500–1700. Festskrift til Poul Lindegård Hjorth, ed. by Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen, Maria Akhøj Nielsen, and John Kousgård Sørensen (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1997), pp. 115–26. 34 Copenhagen: Gotfred af Ghemen, 1508, LN 234: ‘Hær begynnes then danske Krønikæ wel offuerseeth och rætthelige corrigeret’ (‘Here begins the Danish chronicle carefully revised and corrected’); Copenhagen: Hans Vingaard, 1533, LN 235: ‘Her begynnes then Danske krønicke wel offuerseet och corrigeret, bedre end til forn’ (‘Here begins the Danish chronicle carefully revised and corrected, better than before’); Malmø: Johan Hoochstraten, 1534, LN 236: ‘Her begyndes den Danske Krønicke Paa Rim wel offwerseet oc bedre rettet en hun waar føre’ (‘Here begins the Danish chronicle in rhymes, carefully revised and better corrected than it was before’).

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

editorial practices in Humanist and Renaissance writings. One aspect in the discussion of correctness in these comments in both theological and other texts is language and especially its adequate use — one of the most important issues of the Protestant doctrine, on which more below. The following is mainly a short discussion of some of the early Danish translations of the New Testament and some related works (see Figures 7–12). Thet Nøye Testamenth (The New Testament), 1524

Following Luther’s ‘Vorrhede’ (‘Preface’) in his so-called September Testament, or September Bibel from 1522, the ‘Fortaale’ (‘Preface’) to the Danish New Testament 1524 starts with the remarkable statement that a preface could actually be considered to be superfluous in the case of this prominent work: ‘Thet wore wel reet oc skelligt at thenne bog vden alle foretaale eller fremmede naffn vtginge / at hun selffue sit eyget naffn oc foretaaler førde’ (‘It would be right and reasonable that this book would be issued without any preface or foreign name and that it lead its own name and preface’).35 Yet, the tradition to place a paratext in the shape of a preface had become so established by the beginning of the sixteenth century that not even a translation of the New Testament could manage to do without it. In the following decades, prefaces were to become major arenas for Protestant theological and aesthetic theorizing. Another central aspect are the ways images are used. Translating works such as the New Testament meant much more than just rendering the text in another language. It also included other elements of the prints such as the recycling of images. Architectonically constructed title-frames which were based on an aesthetics typical of the time were often used many times in different works. Georg Lemberger, for example, produced a title frame for the Catholic Missale Pragense 1522 that was re-used in the first edition of Luther’s Old Testament in 1523, as well as in the folio and the octavo editions of Luther’s New Testament, and in the Danish New Testament, all three published in 1524.36 Both texts and images, their intrinsic aesthetical approaches, and the printing processes of Danish books were thus heavily influenced by norms and practices originating in German poetical, rhetorical, and stylistic discourse. According to Volmer Rosenkilde, the Danish New Testament 1524 was the most precious Danish book from the first half of the sixteenth century (‘vores værdifuldeste danske Bog i det 16. Aarhundrede’s første Halvdel’),37 not least because it integrated the German wood-carver Georg Lemberger’s many woodcuts, which were important innovations in contemporary Bible illustrations, and Lukas Cranach the Older’s two woodcuts especially made for this edition, that is, the Danish coat of arms and a portrait of King Christiern II (who, in the autumn of 1523, lived for some time in the

35 The bibliographical, book-historical, and linguistic information in the following passages about the New Testaments 1524, 1529, and 1531 are mostly based on Volmer Rosenkilde, ‘Boghistorisk Indledning’, in Thet Nøye Testamenth. Christiern II’s Nye Testamente, Wittenberg 1524, pp. 7–34; Bertil Molde, ‘Sproghistorisk indledning’, in Thet Nøye Testamenth. Christiern II’s Nye Testamente, Wittenberg 1524, pp. 35–51; Volmer Rosenkilde, ‘Boghistorisk Indledning’, in Det ny Testamente. Oversat af Christiern Pedersen, Antwerpen 1529, pp. 7–30; Bertil Molde, ‘Sproghistorisk indledning’, in Det ny Testamente. Oversat af Christiern Pedersen, Antwerpen 1529, pp. 31–51. 36 The original printing-plate was used for the title page of Gustav Vasas Bible, printed by Georg Richolff in Uppsala in 1540–1541, see Rosenkilde, ‘Boghistorisk Indledning’, Thet Nøye Testamenth, 1524, p. 17. 37 Rosenkilde, ‘Boghistorisk Indledning’, Thet Nøye Testamenth, 1524, p. 23.

39

40

j ürg gl au ser

house of Cranach in Wittenberg) (see Figure 13). In the early phases of Bible translation and Bible edition, printers like Melchior Lotther worked on both German and Danish projects. Luther’s September Testament and his December Testament of 1522, the printing of Luther’s first octavo edition of the New Testament, and the Danish New Testament 1524 were, for example, all executed simultaneously. The early Danish reformatory writings must thus be seen in the context of an emerging international print culture that included most of the countries in the north of Europe.38 It was probably Luther who encouraged Christiern II in his exile to have the New Testament translated into Danish. The translation itself was carried out quickly in the summer of 1524 by Hans Mikkelsen, Christian Vinter, and Henrik Smith, each of whom used their own orthography. It became known as ‘Christiern II’s Nye Testamente’. The New Testament 1524 played a significant role in the Danish Reformation struggle in the years 1523–1524, when the Catholic prelates intensified their battle against Luther’s doctrine. The diffusion of his and his follower’s writings in Denmark was forbidden, and even a short-term ban on translating the Scripture was implemented. It was not least Hans Mikkelsen’s preface to the second part of the book in the form of a letter to the Danish people, ‘NAade oc frijd aff gud’ (‘Grace and peace from God’) (pp. Aaij) — ‘Screffuit vti Androp vti Brabandt aar effter Christi fødzsel twsende femhundrede paa thet fire oc tyuge aar’ (‘Written in Antwerp in Brabant in the year after the birth of Christ 1524’) (p. Aaiiij) — an addition in the Danish version and not original in Luther’s text, that many understood as heresy. In some copies of the New Testament 1524, the relevant pages (leaves Aaij–Aaiv) were taken out and distributed secretly. The colophon concluding the book after ‘Enden paa Sancti Hanssis openbaring’ (‘The End of The Revelation to John’) — ‘Trøckt oc saat vti Lybs i land til Myssen / aff Melchiar [!] Lotther / aar effter guds biurd / tusinde oc femdhundrede paa thet fierde oc tiwffue / mondagen nest fore Bartholomi dag’ (‘Printed and set in Leipzig in the country of Meissen by Melchior Lotther in the year after the birth of God 1524 on Monday before St Bartholomew’s Day’) — intentionally gives the place of printing wrongly as Leipzig in order to disguise that it was printed in the centre of the Reformation itself, Wittenberg (see Figure 14.1). Despite the criticism raised by numerous people, not at all only Catholics, against the rather poor linguistic quality of the translation, the New Testament 1524 was a pioneering work. It offered the first complete Danish translation of those parts of the Bible that to the Protestants were most important and as such was of exceptional value for the early Lutherans in Denmark. It was also used as a source for the Swedish New Testament 1524, but when Christiern Pedersen published a Danish translation of the New Testament in 1529 for the second time, he dismissed the 1524 edition altogether and translated it completely from the beginning.

38 The importance of the visual tradition for the Reformation has been examined in different ways. In his by now classic study of popular propaganda for the German Reformation, R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of the Simple Folk. Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994 [1981]), has a chapter on ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, pp. 229–50.

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

Figure 13. Lucas Cranach, portrait of the Danish King Christiern in The Nøye Testamenth, 1524, p. Bvv. Cranach’s signature, a snake with the wings of a bat, to the right of the date 1523 on the bottom line. Source: The Nøye Testamenth. Christiern II’s Nye Testamente, Wittenberg 1524.

41

42

j ürg gl au ser

Figure 14.1. Colophon of Thet Nøye Testament (The New Testament), 1524, p. ssiiijr. Source: The Nøye Testa­ menth. Christiern II’s Nye Testamente, Wittenberg 1524.

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

Figure 14.2. Colophon of Det ny Testamente (The New Testament), 1529, p. zviijr. Source: Det ny Testamente. Oversat af Christiern Pedersen, Antwerp 1529.

43

44

j ürg gl au ser

Figure 14.3. Colophon of Det Ny Testamente (The New Testament), 1531, [last page]. Source: Det ny Testa­ mente. Oversat af Christiern Pedersen, Antwerp 1529.

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

Figure 15. John devours the book. ‘S. Hansis Obenbaring’ (‘Revelation to John’), Det ny Testamente (The New Testament), 1529, p. yiijv. Source: Det ny Testamente. Oversat af Christiern Pedersen, Antwerp 1529.

45

46

j ürg gl au ser Det Ny Testamente (The New Testament), 1529, 1531

In contrast to the Danish New Testament 1524, the next editions from 1529 and 1531 were the work of one man alone, Christiern Pedersen. By the time he undertook to translate the New Testament, Pedersen was an experienced translator and editor with many publications behind him, a person who had at his disposal an excellent international network of bookmakers. His translation is completely independent of Christiern II’s New Testament, 1524. It is a distinctive mark of the first of these two editions that it attempted to disguise the printer and partly the editor by consciously giving misleading information in the colophon (see Figures 14.1–14.3). The reasons behind this cover up were of theological and political nature. In 1524, Christiern II, as seen above, wanted to avoid his intimate relationship to Luther and Wittenberg being disclosed in the book itself, so in the colophon Leipzig is wrongly given as the place of print instead of Wittenberg. In 1529, Christiern Pedersen concealed his translation activity because of the Dutch regent, Margarete’s (1480–1530), strong Catholic belief. Pedersen stayed in the Netherlands at the time, and only place and date were given in the colophon: ‘Her endis Det Ny Testamante Sat i Andorp Vaar Frwe afften dyre Aar effter Gudz byrd MDxxix’ (‘Here ends The New Testament, set in Antwerp. On the Eve of Our Dear Lady. In the year after God’s birth 1529’).39 It was not until 1531, one year after Margarete’s death, that Pedersen revealed his part in the project and openly exposed that he was the translator of both the 1529 and 1531 editions: ‘Her endis det Ny Testamente som er prentet i Andorp (oc rettet paa ny igen aff Christiern Pedersen som vaar Cannick i Lund). Aar effter Gudz byrd MDxxxi’ (‘Here ends The New Testament which was printed in Antwerp [and corrected anew by Christern Pedersen who was a canon in Lund]. In the year after God’s birth 1531’).40 Another interesting trait in the early history of Danish bible translation is that simultaneously to Christiern Pedersen, a group of Christiern II’s collaborators planned to revise the edition of The New Testament 1524. However, due to financial reasons, these plans could not be realized and no new translation or revision of Christiern II’s testament was printed. Another reason was that, while publication of the testament in 1524 had some rather important political significance, by the end of the decade Lutheranism was so widely accepted that a new edition would not have had the same importance and urgence. The background of Pedersen’s translation was mainly his ambition to submit a linguistically more acceptable text of the Gospels. To make the Gospels available in the vernacular and in printed form was one of the main Protestant projects. That Protestantism is a religion of the book is also apparent in what could be called a visual self-referentiality that occurs in so many of the texts of the sixteenth century. Both the New Testaments of 1524 and of 1529/31 display innumerable woodcuts, which stage the book as a material object, as well as a variety of writing and reading acts. Protestant writings represent religion as a cultural activity that depends on the book and presupposes literacy. In all Bible editions of the time, the text-image-relations are of primary importance.

39 Det ny Testamente, 1529, p. zviiijr. 40 See Rosenkilde, ‘Boghistorisk Indledning’, Det ny Testamente. Oversat af Christiern Pedersen, pp. 22–23; colophon on last page.

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

The New Testament 1524, for example, includes many excellent woodcuts by Lemberger, dated to 1523, which show the apostles writing the Gospels and other subjects (see pages Biiijv, Mjv, Sjr, diijv, Nnjr, etc.). Also, in the 1529 New Testament, books and scrolls containing the Gospels are the subject of many illustrations (see pages bviijv, giiijr, kiijr, svjv, Eiijv, Siiijv, Xvijv, yiiijv, etc.). In Pedersen’s edition, printed by Willem Vosterman, one of the foremost Dutch printers, the woodcuts are strongly influenced by the German tradition of Bible illustration. The most telling example here is perhaps the scene from the Book of Revelation in which the strong angel tells John to devour the book: Och ieg saa en anden sterk Engil komme aff Hiemmelen […] Och hans føder vaare lige som ild pillere / och hagde en oben bog i sin hand. Och han sette sin høgre fod paa Haffuit / oc Den venstre fod paa Jorden / oc han robede / met høy røste / lige som en løwe vraaler […] Oc ieg hørde en røst igen aff Hiemmelen tale til mig oc sagde / Gack hen och tag den obne bog aff den Engelss hand […] han sagde till mig / Tage hende hæn och slwg hende / oc hun skal vere beck i Din bwg / Men hwn skal være sød i Din mwnd lige som hwnig / […] Dw skalt en nw prophetere igen faar folked och faar hedningene och faar mange twngemaal / och faar mange Konger.41 [Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven. […] his legs were like fiery pillars. He was holding a little scroll, which lay open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land […]. Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me once more: “Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.” […] He said to me, “Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.” […] “You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, languages, and kings.”] (Book of Revelation 10.1–11) The image in Pedersen’s translation 1529 can ultimately be traced back to one of Albrecht Dürer’s images from his famous series of fifteen woodcuts Apocalipsis cum figuris (Nuremberg, 1498) (see Figure 15). The images contribute to making Reformation books emblematic units. They often apply a mise-en-abyme constellation in which the book as such, Scripture, as well as the process of translating the word of God are staged. In later editions, such as Christian 3.s bibel, structurally important frames on title pages with historized biblical narratives become, under the influence of bookmaking in Germany, recurrent elements that combine text and image in order to generate a new multimedial meaning. As mentioned above, the focus on language is one of the central points of Pedersen’s testaments from 1529 and 1531. The use of the mother tongue was an essential part of the preaching of the new creed. But not only the vernacular had to be used in the translations, equally important criteria were linguistic correctness and clarity of language. So when Pedersen in his versions of the New Testament in 1529 and 1531 again and again insists that the Gospels are now translated into correct Danish (‘de ære nw Vdsette paa reth Danske’) and that they are now again translated into correct Danish and improved (‘De ære nw vdsette igen paa ret Danske och forbedrede’), he makes a double point in his argument, one against Catholic tradition, the other one against the first Danish translation of the 41 Det ny Testamente, 1529, ‘S. Hansiss Obenbaring’, pp. yiijr–v.

47

48

j ürg gl au ser

Gospels 1524. The principle that the Bible should be translated into the vernacular was one of the major issues in Reformation and Counter-Reformation polemics. The need for a new translation of the New Testament was legitimized by the poor, sometimes even incomprehensible language of the first translation 1524. Pedersen writes among many other things about this need in his Foreword (‘Faartalen’) to the 1531 edition: Jeg haffuer nw vdset paa ny igen Dette nye Testamente paa ret danske At den menige almwe maa diss bedre faarstaa det (Thi mange kerde før ath de kwnde icke forstaa danske i de Testamente som før vaare sette i lipsk) Jeg haabis ath alle skulle vel forstaa denne danske Gud vnde dem alle naade til at forstaa ordene oc meningen ret / oc beuare dem i deris hiert Gud til loff oc ære / oc dem selffue till salighed Vil Gud vnde mig sin naade / da wil ieg vdsette det gamble Testamente paa danske i framtiden42 [I have now again translated this New Testament into correct Danish, so that the common people can better understand it. (Because many complained before that they could not understand the Danish in the Testaments which previously had been set/published in Leipzig). I hope that all will understand this Danish well. May God grant them all the grace to understand the words and the meaning correctly, and keep them in their hearts, to the praise and honour of God, and the salvation of themselves. If God will grant me his grace, I will translate the Old Testament into Danish in the future.)] The first paragraph of this foreword starts with the following address: ‘Naade och fred aff Gud vaar fader och af vaar Herre Jesu Christo vaar frelsere, Vere met alle Danske / Suenske och Norske / oc meth Alle andre som forstaa wort twngemaall.’ (‘Grace and peace of God our father and of our Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour be with all the Danes, Suedes, and Norwegians, and with all who understand our language.’)43 The author makes here, at the very beginning of the text, language, and that is the vernacular, not Latin, the central aspect of his work. And he continues to point out that now everybody is able to ‘Ath wij mwe høre / see læse / oc lære, Hans hellige / sande rene ord oc Euangelia paa vaart eget twngemaall / Lige som han dem selff lerde oc predickede her paa Jorden’ (‘hear, see, read, and learn His holy and truthful pure words and Gospels in our own language, just like he himself taught and preached here on earth’).44 The all-including medial forms of hearing, seeing, reading, and learning are mentioned prominently in the foreword, as is the insisting on the clarity of the language and its authenticity which guarantees truth. This leads him to a polemic against falsified and obscured readings of Scripture by the many wrong preachers, church fathers, and clerics of the old faith (‘Huilke Dog vaare siden i mange aar / megeth forfalskede / forwende oc formørckede aff […] mange falske predickere læresfedre / oc klercke’).45 Their ‘løgn oc bedragelse’ (‘lies and deception’) and ‘falske lerdomme som menniskene selffue optenckte’ (‘false teachings which people themselves had made up’)

42 43 44 45

Pedersen, ‘Det Nye Testamente (1531)’, p. x; more or less identical with Det ny Testamente, 1529, p. avjr. Det ny Testamente, 1529, p. aijr. Det ny Testamente, 1529, p. aijr. Det ny Testamente, 1529, p. aijr.

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

can now be falsified because ‘wij mwe høre oc læse hans ord som han selff predickede’ (‘we can hear and read his words as he himself taught’).46 In the following paragraphs of the foreword, language also plays an essential role in Pedersen’s aggressive discourse. He polemicizes against the use of Latin because everybody should be allowed to hear God’s word, while the prelates prohibit teaching His word in the common people’s language.47 Pedersen intends his new translation to be comprehensible for everybody,48 a correct and clear language being the precondition for the spreading of the word. As Molde has pointed out, Pedersen adheres to the translation principle of claritas as the main stylistic and rhetorical method.49 Pedersen discusses the general problem of translating in the preface to the letters of Paul in a way that makes this text a general essay of the problematic of languages. The New Testament 1529 and its improved edition of 1531 were the main sources of the Danish Reformation Bible 1550. They were immensely significant for the Danish Bible language in the early modern period and its pursuit for simplicity in lexicon, syntax, and more regular orthography.50 Seen from a point of view of linguistic correctness, the New Testament 1529 is usually considered to be the better translation than the New Testament 1524. Its orthographical aesthetics is clear and firm, and Pedersen’s idiom is not so heavily influenced by either Latin or German as is the case with the New Testament 1524. His clean, simple, and easily understandable language supports the understanding of the Gospels. A telling example which shows how Pedersen adapted a translation policy that served the purpose of the spreading the new faith is a kind of pious falsification in The Book of Acts (‘Apostlenis Gerninger’) 2.46, where the Danish translation by Pedersen is pointed against the Catholic interpretation of the Eucharist: ‘De vaare dagligen endrectelige i templen / och brøde brød i alle huss och gaffue fattige oc de ode till sammen meth glæde och loff uede Gud i deriss enfoldige hierte / De haffde yndest aff alt folked.’ (‘Every day they were harmoniously in the temple and broke bread in all the houses and gave to the poor and ate together with joy and praise with God in their simple-minded hearts. They enjoyed all people.’)51

Det ny Testamente, 1529, p. aijr. Det ny Testamente, 1529, p. aiiijr. Det ny Testamente, 1529, p. avjr. See Molde, ‘Sproghistorisk indledning’, in The Nøye Testamenth. Christiern II’s Nye Testamente, esp. pp. 38–39, 45–48. 50 Peter Skautrup, Det danske Sprogs Historie, 4 vols (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel — Nordisk Forlag, 1944–1968), II: Fra Unionsbrevet til Danske Lov (1947), p. 176, called Chistiern Pedersen the founding father of the standard of written Danish (‘den danske skriftnorms grundlægger’); see also Molde, ‘Sproghistorisk indledning’, in Thet Nøye Testamenth. Christiern II’s Nye Testamente, p. 43. 51 Det ny Testamente. Oversat af Christiern Pedersen, Antwerpen 1529, p. Aiijr; see also Molde, ‘Sproghistorisk indledning’, in Thet Nøye Testamenth. Christiern II’s Nye Testamente, p. 45. 46 47 48 49

49

50

j ürg gl au ser

The Dialogic Principle of Reformation and Counter-Reformation Rhetoric Another sign of the intensity with which foreign, for the most part German books were translated and published in Denmark in the 1520s and 1530s — besides the two translations of the New Testament by the staff of Christiern II and by Christiern Pedersen mentioned above — are two translations of an anonymous German Reformation text, Ein trostliche disputation / auff frag vnd antwürt gestellt (A Consolatory Disputation, Set in Question and Answer) (High German 1524, Low German 1525), made by two different translators, Jens Peerszøn and (again) Christiern Pedersen, published in the same year 1531.52 Peerszøn’s En merckelig grundfest disputatz giort Paa tiltale och gienswar (A Noticeable Disputation about the Foundation of Faith, Made in Address and Response) was published by Vingaard in Viborg, while Pedersen had his En christelig bogh Om merckelige spørsmaal och swar Om Troen och kerlighed (A Christian Book about Noticeable Questions and Answers about Faith and Love) printed in Antwerp: ‘Denne bog er vdset paa Danske aff Christiern Pedersen / som vaar Cannick i Lund […] Och hwn er prentet i Andorp Aar effter Gudz byrd MDxxxi’ (‘This book is translated into Danish by C. P., who was a canon in Lund […] And it was printed in Antwerp in the Year 1531 after the birth of God’).53 As much of the aesthetic discussion of reformed rhetoric, these two books apply the method of question and answer, a didactic approach to learning with a long tradition, but intensely favoured by the Protestants, as, for example, in the case of Luther’s Catechisms. This dialogic principle prevalent in many Protestant writings allows the authors to structure their texts along basic and clear structures, and consequently they often fall back on it in their propaganda and teaching. Both Peerszøn’s Disputatz and Pedersen’s En christelig bogh consist throughout of a number of questions about theological issues, which are answered with references to pertinent verses in the Bible. Thereby, their books take the form of long dialogues between a first speaker who is not yet firm in his faith and asks the questions and another speaker who informs him: ‘Hwad schal ieg tha troo / Taa schalt thw tencke i hierthet och tage thet inderlig i how och sind ath Christus’ (‘What shall I then believe? Then you shall think in your heart and take fully in memory and mind that Christ’),54 and ‘Huad skal ieg da tro.

52 See Poul Andersen, ‘Indledning’, Peerszøn, En merckelig grundfest disputatz, 1531, pp. 17–23. For aspects of dialogicity and polemics in Reformation and Counter-Reformation rhetoric in general, see, for example, the following entries in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. by Gert Ueding, 12 vols (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1992–2015): Hermann Stauffer, ‘Polemik’, VI (2003), cols 1403–15; Ulrich Köpf, ‘Kontroverstheologie’, IV (1998), cols 1302–11; Hanspeter Marti, ‘Controversia’, II (1994), cols 380–84; Hanspeter Marti, ‘Disputation’, II (1994), cols 866–80; François Renaud, ‘Streitgespräch’, IX (2009), cols 178–89; Kai Bremer, ‘Streitschrift’, IX (2009), cols 189–91. Friis, Den danske Litteraturs Historie, ‘Fejdeskrifter’, pp. 239–66, deals especially with polemical writings in Denmark in the first half of the sixteenth century. See also Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen, ‘Paulus Helie’, Arkiv for Dansk Litteratur [accessed 10 March 2022]; Skautrup, Det danske Sprogs Historie, II, ‘Reformationstiden (1500–1600)’, pp. 122–263; Martin Schwarz Lausten, Reformationen i Danmark, (Copenhagen: Eksistensen, 2017), pp. 59–75: ‘Den litterære polemik’. 53 Christiern Pedersen, ‘En Christelig bogh Om merckelige spørsmaall och swar […] (1531)’, in Danske Skrifter, ed. by C. J. Brandt and R. Th. Fenger, 5 vols (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandling, 1850–1856), IV (1854), pp. 335–423 (p. 423). 54 Peerszøn, En merckelig grundfest disputatz, 1531, p. Bijr.

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

Befinde och tenck i dit hierte kære ven / at Christus vor Herre’ (‘What shall I then believe? Consider and think in your heart, dear friend, that Christ our Lord’).55 Peder Palladius’s translation of Luther’s manual Enchiridion (Erfurt, 1524), Enchiridion / siue Manuale vt vocant. Een Haandbog / for Sogneprester / til Euangeliske kircke tiæniste […], M.D.xxxviij (Copenhagen, 1538), contains a short section called ‘De .x. Gudz budord / som en hwsfader sine tywnde enfoldelige vnderuise oc lære skal’. (‘The Ten Commandments of God, by which a house father shall inform and teach his people in a simple way’).56 Here the orally and vocally focused syntactical structure of dialogicity with its parallelisms and repetitions is evident, for example, in the First Commandment — ‘Du skalt icke haffue fremmede Guder. / Huad er det? Svar: Wij skulle frycte oc elske Gud offuer alle ting / oc oss al ene paa hannem forlade.’ (‘Thou shalt not have other gods before me. / What is this? Answer: We shall love and fear God above all things, and trust in him alone.’) — whose structure is repeated in the remaining text according to this pattern. The same matrix, although more eloquent and elaborated is underlying strictly polemical writings. Again, the dialogic principle is apparent in the titles, such as Paulus Helie’s Svar til Hans Mikkelsen, 1527 (Answer to Hans Mikkelsen) and Hans Tausen’s Svar til Biskoppen af Odense’s Sendebrev, 1529 (Answer to the Letter of the Bishop of Odense) (see Figure 10).57 Helie’s brilliantly written ‘answer’ is a harsh polemic against the translation of the New Testament, 1524. Helie’s counter-reformatory attacks focus mostly on the content and language of his opponent’s text, especially Mikkelsen’s introduction to Paul’s letters (pp. AAijr–AAiiijr). As most of his contemporaries, Helie loved arguing with the help of argumentum ad hominem. The full title gives a good idea of his style and rhetoric: Till thet ketterlige wchristelige och wbesindige breff, som then wbeskemmede kettere Hans Mickelsen aff Malmø, lod wdgaa met thet ny testamente, ther konnigh Christiern lod ynckelige och wtilbørlighe forwandle paa sith tijranniscke wildt, oc icke gud till loff, eet kort och tilbørligt swar.58 [To the Heretical and Thoughtless Letter, Which the Impertinent Heretic, Hans Mickelsen from Malmø, Let Go Out Together with the New Testament, Which King Christiern Had Miserably and Inappropriately Falsified in His Tyrannical Way, and Not to the Praise of God, a Short and Appropriate Answer.] Helie then quotes Mikkelsen’s address to his readers, ‘Alle christne Dansche mendt […] ønscke Hans Mickellsen den sande Helliandt, som Gudt fader formedels sijn søn Jesu Christo pleijer ath schiffthe met sijne wdwolde børn’ (‘All Christian Danish men […] H.M. wishes the true Holy Spirit which God, our father, by the medium of his son Jesus 55 Pedersen, En Christelig bogh, 1531, p. 336. 56 Peder Palladius, Danske Skrifter, ed. by Lis Jacobsen, 5 vols (Copenhagen: H. H. Thieles Bogtrykkeri, 1911–1926), I, 73–79. 57 On Tausen’s theology see Rasmus H. C. Dreyer, Hans Tausen mellem Luther og Zwingli. Studier i Hans Tausens teologi og den tidlige danske reformation (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2020), p. 313: ‘Hans Tausen was an evangelical reformer. He had a humanist background, read Luther, perhaps via Zwingli — and in this manner, he resembles other urban reformers from Switzerland to Northern Germany: A theology and an approach to the practical reformation as lead by Luther, but understood by way of Zwingli.’ 58 Paulus Helie, ‘Svar til Hans Mickelssen, 1527’, in Skrifter, ed. by Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 7 vols (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1932–1948), II (1932), 1–116, ‘Kommentar’, VII (1948), 35–50, (p. 1).

51

52

j ürg gl au ser

Christ divides with his chosen children’), and continues his pamphlet with a fierce attack on the Protestant king and his heretical follower Mikkelsen: Som tw arme mandt medt thijn herre konnigh Christiern, wæridt haffuer ij mange aar een weldig tijranne […] Saa wilde tw oc nw i thenne ketterske tidt offweer wor siæll haffwe eeth nytt rige och tijranne welde […] Tha wiltw oss nw giøre Luthers oc kettere […] [As you poor man with your lord King Christiern who has been a mighty tyrant for many years […] So will you now in these heretical times have a new kingdom and tyrannic power over our soul […] Then you will now make us Luthers and heretics […]] and in a margin, Helie adds: ‘Thet Danske Testament er Hans Mikelsen saare ligt’ (‘The Danish New Testament is very much like H. M.’).59 In his answer to Bishop Jens Andersen, written not against but in favour of the new faith, Tausen applies the same method of quoting the enemy’s text verbally and then exposing it to theological opposition and learned scrutiny: Wij Jenss Anderssen met gudz naadhæ biscop wdi Othense. / Aha her Jens Anderssen / hwor thet skal bliffwæ ether hardt ath bestaa / ath j eræ en bisp aff gudz naadhæ / A ney (thess werr) icke aff gudz naadhæ / men aff gudz stoeræ fortørnelseæ […] och besøndherlich wredhæ60 [We, J. A., by God’s grace bishop of Odense. / Aha, lord Andersen, how hard it will be for you to assert that you are a bishop by God’s grace, oh no (unfortunately), not by God’s grace, but by God’s great irritation […] and particular anger.] In the present context it is interesting to observe that typographic means, such as the size of letters, are also used to promote one’s own case (see as an example Figure 16). Besides the structural and compository features already noted, mention must here be made of a further concept that heavily characterizes the texts of the reformatory movement. On the levels of both theological content and rhetoric and aesthetics, the books of the Protestant writers regularly make use of the principles of the five so-called solae (only, alone, single). Sola scriptura (by Scripture alone) is the overarching principle for the Protestant doctrine and postulates the absolute primacy of God’s word as it is written down in the Bible; if, according to this doctrine, the written word in the vernacular is the only basis of faith, the correctness and the clarity of language become essential, both in terms of theology and aesthetics. The other solae-principles, sola fide (by faith alone), soli Deo gloria (glory to God alone), solus Christus (Christ alone), and sola gratia (grace alone), depend on the concept of sola scriptura. Of these, solus Christus — the idea that only Christ is the mediator between God and man, and that a clerical hierarchy is of evil — is especially important in the early phase of the Reformation. These principles contributed to structuring the fundamental belief system and teachings of Protestantism and making 59 Helie, ‘Svar til Hans Mickelssen’, Skrifter, pp. 3–4. 60 Hans Tausen, ‘Svar til Biskoppen af Odense’s Sendebrev, 1529’, in Fem Reformationsskrifter trykt af Hans Vingaard i Viborg 1528–1530, pp. S 25–81, (p. S 31).

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

Figure  16. Different styles used by Hans Tausen in his ‘Tausen, Hans’, ‘Svar til Biskoppen af Odense’s Sendebrev, 1529’. Source: Fem Reformationsskrifter trykt af Hans Vingaard i Viborg 1528–1530, pp. S 34–35.

them lucid and accessible. Every Protestant text discussed here, pamphlet or large book, treats one or more of them prominently. In their polemics, Helie and Tausen apply the same methods as those that are used in courtroom rhetoric (genus iudiciale). As in a speech at court, the opponent’s ideas are summarised step by step before they are subjected to criticism, ridicule, insults. As their texts show, the directness and liveliness of oral dialogues can be kept, even when orality is transferred to the written medium of the printed book. The works of the polemical genre ‘answer’ are thus very much trials written from the perspective of the prosecutor, and seen as rhetorical performances. They often achieve their aim quite convincingly so that the jury of the readers would follow their argumentation. In texts like these, dialogue as one of the basic principles of Protestantism is staged as opposite to Catholicism, which is exposed as monological. The often plain and transparent structures of the works are characterized by rhetorical clarity and lucidity, not so much by simplicity. The polemic they perform must be seen as part of the general context of heated debates. The rhetoric they apply express these clashes of diverging ideas very suitably in the form of the new medium of the printed book.

53

54

j ürg gl au ser

The Reformation As a ‘Multimedia Event’ The present study focused on a strictly limited corpus of early Danish religious prints, particularly the different versions of the New Testament, and on a few core issues of the aesthetics of Protestant rhetoric. Some of its main results may be summarized as follows. One of the most outstanding features of early Danish book production are the many translations. In the field of religious texts, the Protestant movement stood behind an amazing number of translations into the vernacular. Through these writings, now in the Danish language, the believers were given direct access to the word of God. Thus, the reformatory requirements of sola scriptura could be met, either by personal reading or hearing the text in the sermon. A part of Protestant aesthetics was the further requirement that translations of the Bible had to be linguistically as ‘clear’ and ‘pure’ as possible, which can be seen in Christiern Pedersen’s translation programme. The books analysed in the present contribution are generally characterized by dialogic principles. Speech constellations of preaching and listening, question-answer structures, oral delivery, etc., are abundant in both texts and images. Polemics and polemical discourse formed an integral part and influenced aesthetic features as well as rhetorical devices applied in the texts in question. Important aspects of Protestant aesthetics on the textual levels, as scrutinized in the different Danish translations of the New Testament, are thus its rhetoric, its intended uses of preaching in the vernacular, its dialogicity in the teaching, and its general predilection for polemics. Danish Reformation writings cannot be separated from the overall developments in contemporary northern Europe. Strong German influences can be detected in all sorts of bookmaking and other cultural expressions, not least in the use of images. Elements of visual (self-)representation included perfectly done woodcuts by such artists as Lemberger or Dürer. Many other significant aspects had to be left out in the close readings proposed above. But of course, the results must be seen against the background of a wide context of different media. Not only writings, but books and their rhetoric and aesthetics contributed to the overarching, partly new cultural, visual, and the auditive expressions the reformatory movement entailed. The space in which the new Protestant aesthetics could unfold itself especially well and was developed were — besides printed books, translated into the vernacular — the churches as material spaces and medial entities. Here, substantial new interpretations of pre-Reformation architectural elements took place, the altar and the pulpit were conferred new meanings and functions. Also of particular importance was the re-use of medieval church murals in the post-Reformation era. Activities such as preaching, listening, collective singing superseded older forms of the liturgy and necessitated, for example, new functional divisions of the church room and different applications of media.61

61 An excellent study on how religious spaces were changed and adapted in Danish village churches from the second half of the fifteenth century to around 1600 is Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen, Ritual and Art across the Danish Reformation: Changing Interiors of Village Churches, 1450–1600, Ritus et Artes, 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018); see also Louise Nyholm Kallestrup, ‘The Devil Is Awake: Pre-Reformation Church Murals in Post-Reformation Danish Churches’, in Myth, Magic, and Memory in Early Scandinavian Narrative Culture, ed. by Jürg Glauser and Pernille Hermann (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), pp. 371–87. Katelin Marit Parsons, ‘Songs for the End of

the aesthetics of protesta nt rhetoric

That fact that Scripture was available in the mother tongue and was used in hymnals and other innovative literary genres played a significant role in the modified and extended plurality of media applied in Reformation service. The specific aesthetics of Protestant rhetoric can therefore only be understood as a part of a ‘multimedia event’.

the World: The Poetry of Guðmundur Erlendsson of Fell in Sléttuhlíð’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Iceland, 2020), p. 61, characterizes an Icelandic Baroque poet’s perceptions of Protestant activities as: ‘Singing, learning and printing go hand-in-hand in Guðmundur Erlendsson’s vision of the Reformation’.

55

Margrét Egg e rtsdóttir

The Value and Importance of Poetry in the Vernacular

The Reformation in Iceland With the Reformation in 1550, a new chapter in Icelandic cultural history began.1 From abroad came new ideas and concepts for which new words had to be found or coined. The most obvious comparison is with the fundamental cultural changes that took place after the acceptance of Christianity in the year 999/1000. The Icelandic language, poetry in the vernacular, and prosody according to the Icelandic literary tradition were all important issues in the Reformation in Iceland. Guðbrandur Þorláksson (c. 1541–1627), bishop for half a century at Hólar in north Iceland, contributed most to the establishment of Lutheranism in Iceland. His preface to the hymnal Sálmabók (1589) is the earliest printed discussion of Icelandic literature. Guðbrandur studied between 1561 and 1564 at the University of Copenhagen, where he absorbed the new teachings of Martin Luther (1483–1546) and other leading Reformation figures, while also being influenced by the new humanism. In his preface to the hymnal, Guðbrandur stresses that hymns should be in the vernacular, and writes of the importance of music, the excellence of Icelandic, and the value of eloquence. This attitude towards poetry in the vernacular and ideas about the nature of the Icelandic language have deep roots in Nordic culture. These ideas, which have been persistent in Icelandic cultural history, are discussed in the present chapter. An attempt is made to connect them with the radical changes in Icelandic poetry that took place in the twentieth century, when young writers began experimenting with a more innovative type of poetry, which in form and thought differed from the existing norm and the long-standing lyric tradition characterized by alliteration, regular rhythm, and rhyme. With the Reformation, new literary genres appeared, while others, such as lives of saints (heilagra manna sögur) and Catholic devotional poems, disappeared.2 To familiarize the Icelandic population with the new faith, translated religious and moral tracts were

1 See Margrét Eggertsdóttir, ‘From Reformation to Enlightenment’, in A History of Icelandic Literature, ed. by Daisy Neijmann, Histories of Scandinavian Literature, 5 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), pp. 174–250 (pp. 174–85). 2 Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how many Catholic verses and even prose works were preserved and disseminated in manuscripts and thus never disappeared, as recent research reveals and confirms. See Katelin Parsons, ‘Text and Context: Maríukvæði in Lbs 399 4to’, in Mirrors of Virtue: Manuscript and Print in Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 57–67 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.131414

58

m a rgr ét eggertsdóttir

produced in large numbers, along with hymns and other kinds of religious poetry, and the Bible was translated and printed in Icelandic. New types of poetry were introduced, such as commemorative verse of various kinds, lyric poetry, and epic poetry with a basis in folklore, composed in Eddic metres. The writing of sagas continued, but with new forms and emphases, and learned histories of Icelandic medieval literature appeared. Some literary genres continued to flourish after the Reformation, in particular rímur (Icelandic narrative poems), and sagnadansar (narrative ballads). From the rímur the tradition of the lausavísa (pl. -vísur; ‘occasional’ verse) developed: a single stanza or epigram written in rímur metres. The lausavísa has a long history in Icelandic, and is found in the earliest manuscripts. It addresses a wide variety of subjects; there are, for instance, love poems, satirical and defamatory verses, as well as poems in praise of horses, tobacco, and other pleasures in life. In the Service of the Lutheran Church According to Martin Luther, hymns played a crucial role in religious instruction, so it should come as no surprise that they were among the first and most important literary innovations that followed in the wake of the Reformation. The first Icelandic hymnal, entitled Lítið sálmakver (A Small Hymnbook), was published in 1555. It comprised only translated hymns, some Danish but mostly German, about half of which were by Luther.3 Three years later another hymnal was published, again containing only translated material.4 These translations, particularly in the latter publication, were rather poor and extremely literal; in addition, they lacked alliteration and were thus at odds with the Icelandic poetic tradition. It was not until the publication of Bishop Guðbrandur Þorláksson’s hymnal in 1589 that Icelanders finally acquired acceptable Lutheran hymns that incorporated native poetic conventions. It is an interesting fact that all Martin Luther’s hymns had been translated into Icelandic by 1600.5 Luther’s hymns rapidly spread through all the Nordic countries, and Iceland was no exception, where a total of forty-one hymns (including liturgical songs) and a full thirty-eight Kirchenlieder have been used.6 As previously mentioned, Bishop Guðbrandur Þorláksson was a key figure in the establishment of Lutheranism in Iceland. He was the first Icelander known to have studied



3 4



5



6

Late Pre-modern Iceland, ed. by Margrét Eggertsdóttir and Matthew James Driscoll (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2017), pp. 57–86, and Kirsten Wolf and Natalie M. van Deusen, The Saints in Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). Marteinn Einarsson, Ein kristilig handbog islenskud af herra Marteine Einarsyne […] (Copenhagen: 1555). Gísli Jónsson, At Gudz lof meigi ætiid auckazt […] nockrer Psalmar vtsettir af mier Gilbert Jonsyne aa islensku med litaniu og skriptargangi (Copenhagen: Hans Vingaard, 1558). Einar Sigurbjörnsson and Guðrún Edda Gunnarsdóttir, ‘Luthers psalmer i Island’, in Martin Luthers psalmer i de nordiska folkens liv. Et projekt inom forskarnätverket Nordhymn, ed. by Sven-Åke Selander and Karl-Johan Hansson (Lund: Arcus, 2008), pp. 359–64 (p. 360); Einar Sigurbjörnsson, ‘Sálmar Lúthers í íslenskum messusöng’, in Áhrif Lúthers. Siðaskipti, samfélag og menning í 500 ár, ed. by Hjalti Hugason and others (Reykjavík: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, 2017), pp. 175–92 (p. 192). Karl-Johan Hansson, ‘Martin Luther’s Hymns in the Life of the Nordic People’, in Martin Luthers psalmer i de nordiska folkens liv. Et projekt inom forskarnätverket Nordhymn, ed. by Sven-Åke Selander and Karl-Johan Hansson (Lund: Arcus, 2008), pp. 730–40 (p. 733).

the value an d imp ortance of poetry in  the  vernacula r

at the university in Copenhagen, which was the chief intellectual and cultural centre for Icelanders from soon after the Reformation until well into the twentieth century; most of those who had the opportunity to study abroad went to Copenhagen. Bishop Guðbrandur was a man of great energy and many talents who accomplished much; he worked out Iceland’s geographical position and produced a map of Iceland which was far more accurate than previous maps. Under his auspices around ninety books were printed, including the Bible.7 Iceland had only a single printing press, which was therefore of great importance for the intellectual life of the population. The press had been brought to the country around 1530 by Iceland’s last Catholic bishop, Jón Arason (1484–1550), and later moved to Hólar by Bishop Guðbrandur. Guðbrandsbiblía (Guðbrandur’s Bible as this edition of the Bible has been called ever since) was printed in 500 copies at Hólar in 1584. With twenty-seven woodcuts and many ornamental initials, it is a fine example of early Icelandic book production. Bishop Guðbrandur did much of the translation himself, although he made use of an older translation of the New Testament by Oddur Gottskálksson (1514–1556) and translations of some of the books of the Old Testament.8 The translation of Guðbrandur’s Bible was of high quality, as witnessed by the fact that relatively few changes were made in subsequent translations. It has often been said that the publication of the Bible in Icelandic translation so soon after the Reformation, and with very little influence from other languages, was of great importance for the survival of Icelandic as a language in future centuries under Danish rule.9 Aesthetics, Policy, the Bishop’s Manifesto Bishop Guðbrandur’s hymnal, Ein ný sálmabók (A New Hymnbook, 1589), contained 300 hymns.10 Most were translated from German, Danish, or Latin, while around twenty were original Icelandic texts. The preface to the hymnal contains the first discussion of literature to be published in Icelandic, from which a number of interesting things emerge. For one thing, it is clear that the Bishop is extremely unhappy with the literary taste of his countrymen and keen to do what he can to change it: til þess að af mætti leggjast þeir ónytsamlegu kveðlingar, trölla- og fornmannarímur, mansöngvar, afmorsvísur, brunakvæði, háðs- og hugmóðs vísur og annar vondur og ljótur kveðskapur; klám, níð og kerskni, sem hér hjá alþýðufólki framar meir er elskað og iðkað

7 See Margrét Eggertsdóttir, ‘“Frómum og guðhræddum, leikum og lærðum”. Um Guðbrand biskup Þorláksson og þýðingar hans’, in Áhrif Lúthers. Siðaskipti, samfélag og menning í 500 ár, ed. by Hjalti Hugason and others (Reykjavík: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, 2017), pp. 145–74. 8 See Guðrún Kvaran, ‘Breytingar Guðbrands biskups á Nýja testamenti Odds Gottskálkssonar. Hverjar voru fyrirmyndirnar?’ in Áhrif Lúthers. Siðaskipti, samfélag og menning í 500 ár, ed. by Hjalti Hugason and others (Reykjavík: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, 2017), pp. 119–44. 9 See, for instance, Steingrímur Jónsson, ‘Prentaðar bækur’, in Íslensk þjóðmenning VI: Munnmenntir og bókmenning, ed. by Frosti F. Jóhannsson (Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfan Þjóðsaga, 1989) pp. 91–115 (p. 98). 10 Ein ny psalmabok med morgum andligum psalmum, kristelegum lofsaunguum og vijsum, skickanlega til samans sett og auken og endurbætt (Holum i Hialltadal: 1589). Hereafter Sálmabók.

59

60

m a rgr ét eggertsdóttir

[Men might be able to put away unprofitable songs of Ogres and of the Heathen of old, Rímur, naughty love-songs, amorous verses, sonnets of lust, verses of mockery and malice, and other foul and evil poesy, ribaldry, wantonness, and lampoonery and satire, such as are loved and used by the commonalty of this land.]11 But there is more of interest in the Bishop’s preface. Guðbrandur also stresses that hymns should be in the vernacular, and writes of the importance of music, the excellence of the Icelandic language, and the value of eloquence. He argues against those who claim that the outward form of poetry is unimportant, recognizing that carefully crafted poetry and good melodies are more likely to have an effect on people.12 He is also aware of the uniqueness of Icelandic, referred to by the older term norræna (Norse), which had preserved a unique poetic tradition that, with its distinct metrical forms, alliteration, and diction, deserved to be nurtured. That, he says, is the mode of poetic expression best suited to the Icelandic language.13 The Icelandic Tradition There were however other features that characterized Icelandic poetry, such as the old poetic diction — kenningar (a kenning is a figurative phrase, replacing a common noun) and heiti (name, appellation used as synonym) — based on Old Norse mythology, preserved in the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241). The adoption of Christianity around ad 1000 brought new kinds of poetry and poetics. From the mid-twelfth century onwards, entire religious poems were composed in skaldic metres. In the fourteenth century and after, there are two dominant styles of religious poetry. The drápa form (a heroic, laudatory verse form, featuring a refrain) survives, but only in hrynhent (flowing rhymed) metre, and generally avoiding such old poetic diction as kennings and heiti; and a new kind of song appears, making use of simple style and end-rhymed stanza forms, probably connected with melodies and a mode of singing imported from abroad. ‘Lilja’ (‘The Lily’), composed before the middle of the fourteenth century, was recognized as a masterpiece of religious verse and became an important influence on subsequent poetry. Here is the beginning of the poem:

11 Sálmabók, p. 11. English translation: Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell, Corpus poeticum boreale: The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue from the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883), p. 388. 12 ‘þá mega þó öll sanngjörn hjörtu játa það og meðkenna, að þegar þar kemur til samans mjúk málsnilld orðanna og fagurlegt lag og sæt hljóðagrein, þá fær sá söngur nýjan kraft og gengur djúpara til hjartans og hrærir það og uppvekur til Guðs’ Sálmabók, p. 6; English translation: ‘all reasonable hearts may agree and acknowledge that when the smooth eloquence of words, a beautiful melody and pleasing alliteration are combined, then that song takes on a new force and reaches deeper into the heart, moving and arousing it to God’; see Margrét Eggertsdóttir, Icelandic Baroque: Poetic Art and Erudition in the Works of Hallgrímur Pétursson, translated by Andrew Wawn (Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 2014), pp. 335–36. 13 In his preface, Guðbrandur Þorláksson uses the term málsnilld, i.e., eloquence, with reference to Old Icelandic poetry, claiming that ‘hinir gömlu forfeður vorir’ [our venerable forefathers] (1589, 4) had loved eloquence and employed the poetic forms best suited to the Norse language; see Margrét Eggertsdóttir, Icelandic Baroque, pp. 90–91.

the value an d imp ortance of poetry in  the  vernacula r

Almáttigr guð allra stétta, yfirbjóðandi engla og þjóða, ei þurfandi stað né stunda, stað haldandi í kyrrleiks valdi, senn verandi úti og inni, uppi og niðri og þar í miðju. Lof sé þér um aldur og ævi, eining sönn í þrennum greinum. [Almighty God of all classes, ruler of angels and peoples, independent of time and space, standing firm in the power of peace, at once inside and outside above and below and in between. Praise be to you for all ages and time, three in one and one in three.]14 A description of Iceland by an unknown author, Qualiscunque Descriptio Islandiae or Íslandslýsing, was probably written during the winter of 1588/9, around the time that the Sálmabók was published.15 Its author was an even more ardent admirer of the Icelandic language than Guðbrandur; he calls it ‘illam linguam unam esse ex omnibus linguis principalibus et reliqua idiomata, Danorum et Suecorum, ex hac esse deducta’ (‘one of the major languages, and the other national tongues, those of the Danes and Swedes, derive from it’).16 A similar claim — that Icelandic is an ancient language comparable in status to Latin — is found in Arngrímur the Learned’s Crymogæa (1609), in which Icelandic is associated with both runes and the Gothic language.17 The author of Qualiscunque claims that there is no repetitionis rhetoricæ or dictionis figura (rhetorical figure of repetition or diction) in Latin verse that has not been used in Icelandic poetry.18 This obviously relates to his intention to demonstrate that Icelandic verse is in no way inferior to foreign (especially Latin) poetry, and that the rules of Icelandic poetry are no less complex than those of classical verse. In particular, he points to the rule about correct alliteration. The author of Íslandslýsing points to this as a distinctive characteristic of Icelandic verse, an essential rule from which no deviations are allowed.

14 Martin Chase, ed., ‘Lilja’, in Poetry on Christian Subjects, ed. by Margaret Clunies Ross, 2 parts, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), part 2, pp. 544–677. 15 Fritz Burg, Qualiscunque descriptio Islandiae. Nach der Handschrift der Hamburger Staats- und Universitäts-Bibliothek (Hamburg: Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, 1928); Oddur Einarsson, Íslandslýsing, Icelandic trans. by Sveinn Pálsson, intro. by Jakob Benediktsson (Reykjavík: Menningarsjóður, 1971). 16 Burg, Qualiscunque, p. 76; see Margrét Eggertsdóttir, Icelandic Baroque, p. 91. 17 Crymogæa. Þættir úr sögu Íslands, ed., trans., and intro. by Jakob Benediktsson (Reykjavík: Sögufélag, 1985). 18 ‘ut nulla extet in Latina lingua repetitionis rhetoricæ siue dictionis figura, quæ non eleganter expressa sit uernaculis nostris’, Burg, Qualiscunque, p. 79; Margrét Eggertsdóttir, Icelandic Baroque, pp. 91–92.

61

62

m a rgr ét eggertsdóttir

The Edda In his description of Icelandic literature, the author of Qualiscunque descriptio Islandiae names two works that provide instruction in the rules and traditions of Icelandic poetry. His reference is obviously to the Prose Edda, which he divides into two parts: ‘Skálda’ and ‘Edda’. The author indicates that these works remained influential and much used in his own day, as poets learned from riddles and kenningar how to ‘maternam linguam uoluptatis gratia obscurare, ut ipsis popularibus difficilior sit intellectu quam Sibyllarum oracula uel Sphingis ænigmata nisi illis, qui diu multumque in figmentis hisce uersati sunt’ (‘cloak the mother tongue in such mystery, for the sake of entertainment, that it becomes even more difficult to interpret such popular pieces than the oracles of the sibyls and the riddles of the sphinxes, except for those very experienced in such imaginings’).19 The author seems here to be referring to kenningar, but he might also mean what in Old Icelandic poetics is called ofljóst (‘equivocal’), i.e., when a poet uses ambiguous wording in order to compose in a fólgið (‘concealed, secretive’) manner, as Snorri puts it.20 In the fourteenth century, the monk Eysteinn Ásgrímsson revealed a new mode of composition in his poem Lilja, based on the ideas of Geoffrey of Vinsauf (d. 1210) in his Poetria Nova. Eysteinn used few kennings and composed in a transparent and comprehensible manner.21 Bishop Guðbrandur Þorláksson’s preference for such ‘transparent’ writing seems apparent in his introduction to the Sálmabók (1589), when he criticizes poetry ‘með djúpum kenningum og lítt skiljandi orðum og meiningum’ (‘with obscure kennings and barely comprehensible vocabulary and meanings’).22 During the Renaissance and Baroque periods, however, such obscurity was regarded as artistic and desirable, and the author of Qualiscunque seems proud that Icelandic poets are specifically taught to compose in this way. Baroque poetry was generally based on the theories of classical rhetoric and characterized by a tendency to ornament the text, inter alia, by using circumlocution. In an article titled ‘Vom “Barock” in der deutschen Lyrik des 17. Jahrhunderts’, the German scholar Karl Otto Conrady describes Baroque poetry as the art of repeated, distinguished naming and the decoration of things.23 In his essay on poetry,24 Magnús Ólafsson (c. 1573–1636), a poet, scholar, and pastor best known for his revised version of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, known as the Laufás Edda, 19 Burg, Qualiscunque, p. 86; see also Margrét Eggertsdóttir, Icelandic Baroque, p. 93. 20 Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241). See Jakob Benediktsson, Hugtök og heiti í bókmenntafræði (Reykjavík: Bókmenntafræðistofnun Háskóla Íslands, 1983), p. 198. 21 Peter Foote, ‘Latin Rhetoric and Icelandic Poetry’, in Aurvandilstá: Norse studies, ed. by Michael Barnes, Hans Bekker-Nielsen and Gerd Wolfgang Weber (Odense: Odense University Press, 1984), pp. 249–70 (p. 259); Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Kveðskapur frá síðmiðöldum’, in Íslensk bókmenntasaga II, ed. by Böðvar Guðmundsson and others (Reykjavík: Mál og menning 1993), pp. 283–378 (pp. 286–99). 22 Sálmabók, p. 8; see Foote, ‘Latin Rhetoric and Icelandic Poetry’, p. 269. 23 ‘eine Kunst gehäuften erlesenen Benennens und Dekorierens’, Karl Otto Conrady, ‘Vom “Barock” in der deutschen Lyrik des 17. Jahrhunderts’, in Der literarische Barockbegriff, ed. by Wilfried Barner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), pp. 460–87 (p. 480). 24 The essay is printed in Ole Worm, Runer seu Danica literatura antiqvissima vulgo gothica dicta luci reddita opera (Hafniæ, 1636). Text and English translation in Anthony Faulkes, Two Versions of Snorra-Edda from the 17th Century I, Edda Magnúsar Ólafssonar, ed. by Anthony Faulkes (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi, 1979), pp. 408–15. An Icelandic version of Magnús Ólafsson’s Latin essay exists in manuscript Reykjavík AM 148 8vo, fols 34r–38v, see Þórunn Sigurðardóttir, ‘Tvær ritgerðir um skáldskap í Kvæðabók úr Vigur (AM 148 8vo)’, Gripla, 19 (2008), 193–209.

the value an d imp ortance of poetry in  the  vernacula r

starts by discussing a number of old writers. He then turns to contemporary Icelandic poets, to remind readers that although the early Norse language is no longer understood elsewhere in Scandinavia, there are still those in Iceland who honour its medieval poetic traditions while at the same time addressing the literary needs of the contemporary church. He writes: adhuc tamen in Islandia ubi lingvæ ejus usus præcipue conservatur, magno numero Poetæ extant, prompti et ingeniosi, qui non tantum res profanas, ubi Edda potissimum locum habet, sed etiam sacras historias simplici orationis vena in numeros convertunt Rhythmicos, Psalmos et cantilenas pias et graves componunt, et ecclesiæ Dei apud nos utiliter communicant [yet still in Iceland, where the use of this language is especially well preserved, there are poets in great number, fluent and skilful, who turn into poetical form not only profane subjects, which is the area to which the Edda principally applies, but also sacred stories, which they treat with a straightforward style of utterance, and compose and provide most profitably for God’s church in our land psalms and holy and serious songs;]25 The Reformation’s Greatest Hit: Hallgrímur Pétursson’s Hymns of the Passion A vast amount of religious poetry survives in Iceland from the seventeenth century, since it played an important role in society. Performing or singing morning and evening hymns was a part of daily life: there were hymns related to daily chores, travelling, fishing, celebrations, and the seasons (New Year hymns and hymns for the arrival of spring). Then there were hymns composed to suit specific situations, for example, when people faced troubles and sorrow. Hymns also had educational value, especially in teaching about the contents of the Bible and religious doctrine. In Iceland it was common to recite biblical stories in verse; in that way, people enjoyed the stories more and remembered them more easily. All the prominent poets of the period wrote hymns. These include Stefán Ólafsson (1618/19–88), who also translated hymns by renowned Danish Baroque poet Thomas Kingo (1634–1703), and Sigurður Jónsson from Presthólar (d. 1661), a respected poet in the period. He transformed the Meditationes sacrae (Religious reflections) of German theologian Johann Gerhard (1582–1637) into hymns, first printed in 1652, which enjoyed huge popularity. He also composed a hymn cycle based on another of Gerhard’s books (Exercitium pietatis quotidianum quadripartitum), called Dagleg iðkun guðrækninnar (The Daily Practice of Devotion). Also extant is an unusual religious poem by a woman, who in sources is called Sigga skálda (‘the poet’). Her full name is believed to be Sigríður Jónsdóttir (d. 1707). She is said to have been a pauper for a while, and at other times a vagrant. She is believed to have composed a religious poem, ‘Geðfró’ (‘Comfort to the Mind’) consisting of seventy-three verses, spoken by a woman. 25 Faulkes, Two Versions of Snorra-Edda from the 17th Century I, pp. 414–15; see also Margrét Eggertsdóttir, Icelandic Baroque, pp. 102–03.

63

64

m a rgr ét eggertsdóttir

The most important religious poet in Iceland is without doubt pastor/poet Hallgrímur Pétursson (1614–1674), who is now best known for his Passíusálmar (Hymns of the Passion). Over the centuries, these fifty hymns in a variety of metres and melodies, contemplating the crucifixion and death of Christ, have been sung during Lent in Iceland.26 As early as the eighteenth century, Hallgrímur Pétursson was being referred to as the national poet of Iceland, and in the opinion of many he remains Iceland’s greatest religious poet. The Hymns of the Passion were printed at Hólar in 1666, while the poet was still alive, which was quite unusual at that time. The Hymns were printed repeatedly, more than ninety times — no Icelandic book has been printed more often. Though printed, the Hymns were also owned in handwritten copies, and were preserved orally as well, as people sang them in their homes and thus gradually learned them by heart. The most recent edition was published in 2015.27 This long afterlife and the longevity of the hymns may certainly be partly ascribed to new melodies and music, such as the oratorio Hallgrímspassía (Hallgrímur’s Passion, 2010) by Sigurður Sævarsson.28 The melody to the last hymn, Passion hymn no. 50, is a good example of a musical composition which emphasizes the peaceful atmosphere of meditation and worship at the end of the dramatic story of the Passion of Christ. Stanzas 11 and 12, in Icelandic and an English translation by Michael Fell: Hvíli eg nú síðast huga minn herra Jesú við legstað þinn. Þegar ég gæti að greftran þín gleðst hugur minn, skelfing og ótti dauðans dvín. Sektir mínar og syndir barst sjálfur þegar þú píndur varst. Upp á það dóstu Drottinn kær að kvittuðust þær. Hjartað því nýjan fögnuð fær.29 [Rest I will find beside you there Lord Jesus at your sepulcher. When I think of your dying day– Glad soul sing praise– My terror over death abates.

26 See Hallgrímur Pétursson, Rise Up, My Soul: The Icelandic Way of the Cross, trans. by Michael Fell. A metrical English translation of the Passion Hymns of Hallgrímur Pétursson, with introduction and notes by Michael Fell (Montclair, NJ: IndieReader Publishing Services, 2014), pp. 1–70. 27 Hallgrímur Pétursson, Passíusálmarnir, ed. by Mörður Árnason (Reykjavík: Crymogæa, 2015); see also Hallgrímur Pétursson, Passíusálmar, ed. by Ögmundur Helgason, Skúli Björn Gunnarsson, and Eiríkur Þormóðsson (Reykjavík: Landsbókasafn Íslands — Háskólabókasafn, 1996). 28 Sigurður Sævarsson, Hallgrímspassía (cd) (Reykjavík: Aspir, 2010); see also Gracia Grindal, ‘Hallgrímur Pétursson, The Passion Poet of Iceland’, Lutheran Forum, spring (2017), 27–29. New melodies by the musician Megas (Magnús Þór Jónsson, b. 1945) have also had great influence. 29 Hymns of the Passion 50, 11 and 12, see Passíusálmarnir, ed. by Mörður Árnason, p. 608.

the value an d imp ortance of poetry in  the  vernacula r

My guilt and sin you bore for me, In your last pain and agony Dear Lord for me you died alone You did atone And there you reaped what I had sown.]30 Some Thoughts on the Present Situation To make a long story short, the rules for Icelandic poetry, described by Bishop Guðbrandur in the sixteenth century, may be said to have remained in force until around 1950, for 400 years. The history and development of religious poetry in Iceland is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it should be mentioned that the publication of a new hymnal in 1801 led to heated debate, mainly because the advocates of the Enlightenment in Iceland allowed themselves to change texts of hymns written by contemporary poets without asking for their approval, but also because it was thought to be bad poetry as the nickname ‘Leirgerður’ (‘Crap version’) clearly confirms.31 Soon after the Second World War, under direct influence from Modernism, the Icelandic poetic tradition was gradually abandoned without reservation and the road paved for a new kind of poetry, not only based on new aesthetics but also on a new world-view. Young poets declared that in a changed world, the old, traditional verse forms were no longer applicable for expressing their experience and thoughts. They began experimenting with poetry that in form and thought differed from the long-standing lyric form characterized by alliteration, regular rhythm, and rhyme.32 Since then, Icelandic poetry has become more international in form and its perspective has widened. Nevertheless, certain elements, such as alliteration, still play a part in some of the best Icelandic poetry.33 The Heritage of the Reformation in Iceland Books of poetry are published in Iceland every year. Most of them consist of free verse or modernist poetry, i.e., poems without traditional rhythm and rhyme. Many of them, nevertheless, use alliteration consciously. It has been claimed that the only characteristic

30 Hallgrímur Pétursson, Hymns of the Passion, Passíusálmar by Hallgrímur Pétursson, translated into English by Gracia Grindal (Reykjavík: Hallgrímskirkja Skálholtsútgáfan, 2019), p. 219; see also Hallgrímur Pétursson, Rise Up, My Soul, p. 315. 31 Evangelisk-kristileg Messu-saungs- og Sálma-bók ad konunglegri tilhlutun samantekin til almennilegrar brúkunar i kirkjum og heimahúsum […] (Leirárgarðar: Hið konunglega Landsuppfræðingarfélag, 1801), called by its opponents Leirgerður (‘crap-version’), referring to a myth in Snorra Edda, where the origin of bad poetry is ‘arnarleir’ (‘eagle excrement’). The name also refers to Leirárgarðar, where the hymnal was printed; see Shaun F. D. Hughes, ‘Hallgrímur Pétursson and the Icelandic Baroque: Review Essay’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 117, no. 2 (2018), 244–54. 32 Eysteinn Þorvaldsson, ‘Icelandic Poetry since 1940’, in A History of Icelandic Literature, ed. by Daisy Neijmann, A History of Scandinavian Literature, 5 vols, ed. by Sven H. Rossel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), pp. 471–502 (p. 471). 33 Eysteinn Þorvaldsson, ‘Icelandic Poetry since 1940’, p. 501.

65

66

m a rgr ét eggertsdóttir

feature of Icelandic poetry which survived the form revolution was alliteration.34 A new hymnal for the Icelandic Lutheran church is in preparation and will soon be published.35 Bishop Guðbrandur would be pleased to see that the majority of the hymns that will appear in the new hymnal are written in accordance with the old rules of Icelandic poetry, with alliteration, rhythm, and rhyme. When Guðbrandur died in 1627, Hallgrímur Pétursson was a young boy at the episcopal see at Hólar, actually quite a rebel, and the Bishop could have had no idea that he would later become the most important religious poet of Iceland. Neither of them could have dreamt of the influence the Hymns of the Passion would have in Iceland. The Hymns are the best-known work of Icelandic poetry of the seventeenth century. It is still customary to recite them in their entirety once a year, on Good Friday, in many churches in Iceland. Most people regard it as an honour to be offered the opportunity to read the hymns aloud on this occasion. The biggest issue in Iceland at the moment is, however, whether the Icelandic language will survive the radical changes now taking place in Iceland and around the world. Not only have Icelanders created literature continuously from the start of their history, they have also preserved old stories, verses, and myths that once were part of a larger, ancient European verse and storytelling tradition. This literary heritage has provided Icelandic poets with a rich source of materials, motifs, and styles over the centuries. The question now is: Will this history continue, or will it come to an end? Obviously, that depends first and foremost on whether Icelanders continue using their language, not only in their private and economic life, but also in composing literature and poetry in Icelandic. According to an article in the Reykjavík Grapevine (an English-language paper based in Reykjavík), growth in publications across the sector is staggering, with more Icelandic-language fiction this year (2019) than the year before, and fifty-one per cent more poetry.36 In an article in the same paper we learn that poetry ‘is bought and sold, read and recited, and reviewed and criticized across Iceland. The Icelandic poetry scene is no bastion of the old’.37 This is encouraging, and offers hope for the future of the Icelandic language. We can conclude that the aesthetics advocated by the first Lutheran reformers in Iceland in the sixteenth century, especially Bishop Guðbrandur Þorláksson, had a long-lasting and deep-rooted influence on Icelandic language and culture. In the middle of the twentieth

34 Óskar Halldórsson claimed in 1972 that alliteration was still very much alive: ‘Þegar alls er gætt er stuðlun lifandi þáttur íslenskrar ljóðlistar enn í dag’, in Bragur og ljóðstíll (Reykjavík: Rannsóknastofnun í bókmenntafræði við Háskóla Íslands, Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, 1972), p. 27. In 2013, on the other hand, Kristján Árnason suspected that it was disappearing: ‘Þetta bendir til þess að íslensk ljóðagerð sé sífellt að komast nær þeim áfanga að segja skilið við “stuðlanna þrískiptu grein”’, in Stíll og bragur (Reykjavík: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag 2013), p. 438. 35 See the interview with the director of church music Margrét Bóasdóttir and the Rev. Jón Helgi Þórarinsson: ‘Styttist í nýja Sálmabók’. Interviewer: Ragnar Gunnarsson, Bjarmi December 2019, pp. 11–13. 36 A. Rawlings and Andie Sophia Fontaine, ‘Wordflood: “Bókamessa” boasts a record-breaking year for fiction and poetry books’, in The Reykjavík Grapevine, 2 January 2020: [accessed 10 March 2022]. 37 Felix Robertson, ‘The Next Generation: Una Press Brings Young Icelandic Poetry to the Masses’, in The Reykjavík Grapevine, 21 June 2019: [accessed 10 March 2022].

the value an d imp ortance of poetry in  the  vernacula r

century, modernism sparked another cultural revolution when young Icelandic poets discarded the old rules of alliteration and rhyme. These rules, so important in earlier times, now seem absolutely irrelevant compared to the urgent importance of maintaining the language by writing and composing in Icelandic. The emphasis the reformers placed on the vernacular is thus still valid. One of the most influential products of the Lutheran church in Iceland is Hallgrímur Pétursson’s Hymns of the Passion. It is indeed remarkable how popular and well known they are still today. As I have tried to demonstrate, their long-lasting popularity depends not least on the music and melodies composed for them, which confirms the truth of Bishop Guðbrandur’s words about the deep impact a well-written text combined with well-composed music can have on people, literally ‘touching their hearts’. Rules of alliteration and rhyme may no longer be of importance, but old ideas about the aesthetic value and impact of poetry combined with music are still highly relevant.

67

Ueli Zahnd

Which Protestants? Calvinism, Crypto-Calvinism, and the Scandinavian Reformation The question mark in the title of this contribution is more than a rhetorical one. It stands for an intellectual historian’s perplexity in the face of the confrontation between the two main concepts of this book, Scandinavian aesthetics on the one hand, and Protestantism on the other. From a contemporary perspective, it is true, it seems reasonably natural to connect the confessional and the geographical concept and to point to a series of characteristics typical for both Protestantism and Scandinavian aesthetics, such as simplicity, logocentrism, individualism, and relatedness to the world.1 But the conjunction is less natural from a historical perspective, and from the perspective of the sixteenth century in particular, when Protestantism emerged. For, as is well known, this emergence was not a uniform process leading to a homogeneous new movement, but a complex accumulation of various initiatives with different centres that involved the most diverse players with their individual beliefs, motives, and goals. As a result, the main branches of the movement that would become known, thanks to their official political support, as the ‘magisterial Reformation’ divided into two dominant groups in 1529,2 the Lutherans on the one hand, and, on the other, the Zwinglians, who would later form with the Calvinists the ‘Reformed’ branch of the Protestant churches. In the course of the sixteenth century, both branches began to evolve into well distinguished and even bitterly divided confessions, developing their respective cultures and stressing their differences,3 so that it might be difficult to speak, with regard to this historical era, of ‘the’ Protestant aesthetics as such. But this is not where the real problem lies. While it is undeniably true that the aforementioned characteristics are somehow typical of ‘Protestantism’ in a general sense, it is apparent that, within Protestantism, they fit much better with its Reformed, Calvinist



1 See introduction to this volume, pp. 10–11. I would like to thank Christian Grosse for his useful remarks on an earlier version of this paper. 2 For a short, but very concise overview, see Kenneth G. Appold, ‘Lutheran-Reformed Relations: A Brief Historical Overview’, The Journal of Presbyterian History, 95 (2017), 52–61. On the ‘magisterial Reformation’ and the colloquy of Marburg from 1529, see Amy Nelson Burnett, Debating the Sacraments: Print and Authority in the Early Reformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 282–97. 3 See Thomas Kaufmann, Konfession und Kultur. Lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); and Birgit Emich, ‘Konfession und Kultur, Konfession als Kultur? Vorschläge für eine kulturalistische Konfessionskultur-Forschung’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 109 (2018), 375–88. Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 69–85 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.131415

70

uel i z a h nd

branch than with Lutheranism. To take the example of simplicity, it is the Reformed churches that were cleansed — sometimes in violent iconoclastic acts — of images, altars, and altarpieces; the Calvinists abandoned liturgical clothing and even banned crosses from their churches, while these furnishings remained in Lutheran buildings and liturgy.4 This becomes most apparent in buildings from the Baroque age, when Lutheran churches such as the Storkyrkan in Stockholm were equipped with the typically rich and lavish furnishings, while a Reformed temple such as the Church of the Holy Spirit in Bern had no ornaments at all, even though this Zwinglian city was one of the richest places north of the Alps in the early eighteenth century when the church was built.5 The same is true for the other characteristics mentioned above: regarding logocentrism, it was the Reformed theologians in the sixteenth century who distrusted church music and banned organs to suppress an all too emotional approach to religion;6 and if the nowadays disputed Weberian notions of Protestant individualism and a specific relatedness to the world are to be maintained at all, it should be remembered that Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was, properly speaking, a description of Calvinist ethics with its intrinsic link to the particularly Reformed doctrine of predestination.7 If these characteristics are typical for some kind of Protestant aesthetics, it seems, from a sixteenth-century perspective, that the Calvinists were much more Protestant than the Lutherans, who remained, in these regards, closer to the Catholic culture and retained a certain amount of opulence and exuberance. Unsurprisingly, the most relevant book written on ‘Protestant’ aesthetics in the sixteenth century so far, Victoria George’s Whitewash and the New Aesthetic of the Protestant Reformation, focuses almost exclusively on Zwinglians and Calvinists.8 But why is this a problem? It is a problem because Scandinavia was one of the core regions of Lutheranism, not of Calvinism: the Scandinavian churches all derived from the









4 Cf. Willem J. Van Asselt, ‘The Prohibition of Images and Protestant Identity’, in Iconoclasm and Iconoclash: Struggle for Religious Identity, ed. by Willem J. Van Asselt, Paul van Geest, Daniela Müller and Theo Salemink (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 299–311. On Calvinist simplicity, see Daniel T. Jenkins, ‘A Protestant Aesthetic? A Conversation With Donald Davie’, Journal of Literature and Theology, 2 (1988), 153–62; and also Johannes Stückelberger, ‘Das unsichtbare Bild. Prolegomena zu einer reformierten Ästhetik’, in Das unsichtbare Bild. Die Ästhetik des Bilderverbots, ed. by Matthias Krieg et al. (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2005), pp. 11–18 (p. 17). 5 For both churches, there is a rich collection of images on wikimedia, see [accessed 10 March 2022] and [accessed 10 March 2022]. 6 Randall D. Engle, ‘A Devil’s Siren or an Angel’s Throat? The Pipe Organ Controversy among the Calvinists’, in John Calvin, Myth and Reality: Images and Impact of Geneva’s Reformer, ed. by Amy Nelson Burnett (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2011), pp. 107–25; and Chiara Bertoglio, Reforming Music: Music and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017). See, however, Erin Lambert, ‘In corde iubilum’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 14 (2012), 269–87; and Christian Grosse, ‘L’esthétique du chant dans la piété calviniste aux premiers temps de la Réforme (1536–1545)’, Revue de l’histoire des religions 1 (2010), 13–31, on aesthetic aspects of chant in Calvinist liturgy. 7 This is most apparent in the quick shift between parts I.1, talking about Luther, and I.2, taking up Calvin: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 89–122. See Peter Ghosh, Max Weber and ‘the Protestant Ethic’: Twin Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 354–61. 8 Victoria Ann George, Whitewash and the New Aesthetic of the Protestant Reformation (London: Pindar Press, 2012). Luther only appears on pp. 33–34 and 199–200.

which protesta nts?

Wittenberg Reformation, and they never gave up that association.9 They even defended it to the exclusion of any other influence, to the point that it is almost impossible to find traces of an enduring reception of Calvinist thought in the first two centuries after the Reformation. After some short and almost insignificant episodes in the late sixteenth century — one of them will be treated later on in this chapter — Calvinism was definitely and, as it seems, very effectually banned, such that, in his huge Oxford History on German and Scandinavian Protestantism after 1700, the historian Nicholas Hope did not even include an entry in the index for ‘Calvin’, ‘Calvinism’, or ‘Reformed confession’.10 Hence, there is an interesting (but problematic) situation: in a region that seems to virtually lack any Calvinist roots in the Reformation era, we have nowadays a set of aesthetic tendencies that seem to conform most closely with Calvinism. Three possible rationales lend themselves to explain this situation: the first denies that there is a real link between Calvinism and the aforementioned aesthetic features; the second suggests that there was, ever since the Reformation, a hidden Calvinist influence in Scandinavia; and the third would say that Calvinist influence in Scandinavia occurred only centuries after the Reformation. In what follows, I will provide some elements to tackle the first two possible causes, and I will argue that neither of them seems sufficient to explain the situation. First, with regard to Calvinism and a specific aesthetics, I will present three models of how Christianity — at least in its Western occurrences — conceived of religious aesthetics, that is, of the perceivability of the divine. In order to do so, I will focus on the problem of religious images, which is — as will become clear — a test case for the functioning of other aesthetic experiences with a religious connotation. Second, I will discuss the most prominent example of a possible reception of Calvinist thought in Reformation Scandinavia, the case of the Danish theologian Niels Hemmingsen who, in the late sixteenth century, had to withdraw one of his major works and who lost his position at the University of Copenhagen due to an accusation of Crypto-Calvinism. Given that the first section will argue that there is, indeed, a specific Calvinist shape to the aforementioned aesthetic characteristics, and that the second section will show the limitation of Hemmingsen’s case, I will conclude that the first two rationales outlined above do not explain our problematic situation. Rather, historical arguments about the conjunction of Scandinavian aesthetics and Protestantism should be based on the third potential cause, suggesting that a Calvinist influence in Scandinavian mentality only occurred centuries after the Reformation, most possibly through mediation of English puritanism.

9 See Torkild Lyby and Ole Peter Grell, ‘The Consolidation of Lutheranism in Denmark and Norway’, in The Scandinavian Reformation: From Evangelical Movement to Institutionalization and Reform, ed. by Ole Peter Grell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 114–43; Ingun Montgomery, ‘The Institutionalization of Lutheranism in Sweden and Finland’, in The Scandinavian Reformation: From Evangelical Movement to Institutionalization and Reform, ed. by Ole Peter Grell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 144–78; and Otfried Czaika, ‘Luther, Melanchthon und Chytræus und ihre Bedeutung für die Theologenausbildung im Schwedischen Reich’, in Konfession, Migration und Elitenbildung. Studien zur Theologenausbildung des 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Herman Selderhuis and Markus Wriedt (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 53–83 (pp. 79–83). 10 Nicholas Hope, German and Scandinavian Protestantism, 1700–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

71

72

uel i z a h nd

Theological Aesthetics and the Question of Religious Images First, then, let us see whether there was such a thing as confessional aesthetics. In a religious context such as the one of ‘Protestantism’, aesthetic theories are forged by their attempts to explain the perceivability of the divine.11 A historical investigation of models of religious aesthetics will thus ask how the adherents of a religious tradition thought themselves to be capable of having such an aesthetic experience: how did they imagine it was possible that the realm of the divine was perceivably present, and thus representable in the world?12 In this sense, the problem of religious aesthetics oscillates between the two poles of the divine and the mundane as it becomes most apparent in the question of religious objects and their veneration, since theories about the presence of the divine in a religious image have to ask about the relation between these two poles. In a Christian setting, however, a third factor is taken into consideration, namely, the figure precisely of Christ as a specific incarnation of the godly sphere: he is thought to conjoin in his one person a divine and a human nature, and to function thus as a unique mediator between God and the world.13 One could say, thus, that Christian religious aesthetics and, more particularly, its thinking about the presence and the perceivability of the divine in material representations is inscribed within the triangle of God, Christ, and the world. From a historical perspective, the three corners of this triangle had particular functions with regard to the question of religious images. With its Jewish roots, Christianity was long informed by a strong anti-iconic approach, as it was condensed in the Ten Commandments with their strict prohibition of any images of God. The means of this material, created world did not seem appropriate to represent the divine that was believed to be fundamentally different, radically other than anything present and hence representable in this world.14 11 See, most basically, Richard Viladesau, ‘Aesthetics and Religion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts, ed. by Frank B. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 25–43; for a critical survey, see Linda Stratford, ‘Methodological Issues from the Fields of Art History, Visual Culture, and Theology’, in ReVisioning: Critical Methods of Seeing Christianity in the History of Art, ed. by James Romaine and Linda Stratford (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2014), pp. 27–41. 12 See Anton Houtepen, ‘The Dialectics of the Icon: a Reference to God?’ in Iconoclasm and Iconoclash, ed. by Willem van Asselt et al., Jewish and Christian Perspective Series, 14 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 49–73 (pp. 51–52); on the fundamental character of this question for the study of religion, see Jürgen Mohn, ‘Von der Religionsphänomenologie zur Religionsästhetik: Neue Wege systematischer Religionswissenschaft’, Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift, 55 (2004), 300–09. 13 Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 64–71; Erin Henriksen, Milton and the Reformation Aesthetics of the Passion (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 23–24. According to traditional Catholic (and, to a lesser extent, Lutheran) theology, this representing mediation was regularly repeated in the Eucharist; see Thomas Lentes, ‘Auf der Suche nach dem Ort des Gedächtnisses. Thesen zur Umwertung der symbolischen Formen in Abendmahlslehre, Bildtheorie und Bildandacht des 14.–16. Jahrhunderts’, in Imagination und Wirklichkeit. Zum Verhältnis von mentalen und realen Bildern in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Klaus Krüger and Alessandro Nova (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2001), pp. 21–46; and William A. Dyrness, The Origins of Protestant Aesthetics in Early Modern Europe: Calvin’s Reformation Poetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 55–57. 14 See Shulamit Laderman, ‘Biblical Controversy: A Clash Between Two Divinely Inspired Messages?’ in Iconoclasm and Iconoclash, ed. by Willem van Asselt et al., Jewish and Christian Perspective Series, 14 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 141–56; Houtepen, ‘The Dialectics of the Icon’, p. 51; Matthias Zeindler, ‘Warten auf Gottes Kommen. Zur Theologie des Bilderverbots’, in Das unsichtbare Bild. Die Ästhetik des Bilderverbots, ed. by Matthias Krieg et al. (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2005), pp. 20–23; and the articles collected in Reinhard Hoeps, ed., Handbuch der Bildtheologie I: Bild-Konflikte (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007).

which protesta nts?

From a worldly perspective, there seemed to be no means to directly relate the two realms of the divine and the earthly. On the other hand, there was Christ who, in his person, had bridged the gap between the creator and his creation, between the material and the spiritual, and who — given that he was said to have walked on this earth in human flesh — had become visible, perceptible, tangible, and thus representable. In this regard, Christ was the point of attack (or the detour) Christians thought was needed to comprehend God.15 Although in and of itself the divine was believed to be unrepresentable, in the figure of Christ God was thought to have proven that he could become present in the material world. Christian tradition thus incorporates both image-friendly and iconoclastic tendencies, depending on the corner of the triangle from which one chose to approach the question. Accordingly, western Christianity knew of three models to conceive of religious images. The first model was the common medieval one, and it is well known that medieval theology was generally in favour of religious images (although not exclusively, as will become apparent later on).16 A good example of a typically medieval, image-friendly approach is Bonaventure, a scholastic theologian of the mid-thirteenth century, since he tackled the question about the representability of the divine in a very significant way. In his main scholastic work, a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard,17 he did not start the discussion by asking about representations of God, but with a discussion concerning the status of the body of Jesus while he lived on earth: given that he was not only a human being, but also God, were the people living then obliged to worship him?18 Bonaventure answered this question with an obvious yes, arguing as follows: Quia est una persona in Christo, cui debetur reverentia summa, una adoratione adoranda est […] quantum ad utramque naturam, sicut eadem adoratione adoratur in uno homine caput et pes […]. Et quoniam caro Christi nunquam est separata a Verbo, ideo semper consideranda est ut coniuncta et semper adoranda est latria.19 [Since there is one person in Christ, to whom the greatest reverence is due, [his body] has to be worshipped according to both natures with one adoration, such as in one human being the head and the foot are revered with one and the same reverence. For, given that the flesh of Christ is never separated from the Word [i.e.,

15 For a nuanced collection of theories about this ‘detour’, see Jean Wirth, ‘Soll man Bilder anbeten? Theorien zum Bilderkult bis zum Konzil von Trient’, in Bildersturm. Wahnsinn oder Gottes Wille?, ed. by Cécile Dupeux et al. (Zürich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2000), pp. 28–37. 16 On medieval iconoclasms, see Guy P. Marchal, ‘Das vieldeutige Heiligenbild. Bildersturm im Mittelalter’, in Macht und Ohnmacht der Bilder. Reformatorischer Bildersturm im Kontext der europäischen Geschichte, ed. by Peter Blickle et al. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2002), pp. 307–32. 17 On Bonaventure’s aesthetics in general, see Oleg Bychkov, Aesthetic Revelation: Reading Ancient and Medieval Texts After Hans Urs von Balthasar (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), pp. 268–78; for his aesthetics as presented in his more mystical texts, see Dyrness, The Origins of Protestant Aesthetics, pp. 11–14. 18 Bonaventure, Commentaria in quatuor libros Sententiarum III. 9. 1. 1, in Doctoris seraphici S. Bonaventurae Opera Omnia III, ed. by the Collegium at S. Bonaventura (Quaracchi: Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1887), p. 199: utrum cultus latriae sit exhibendus humanitati sive carni Christi. 19 Bonaventure, Commentaria III. 9. 1. 1, p. 201a.

73

74

uel i z a h nd

from his divine nature], therefore it always has to be considered as conjoined to it and thus it always has to be worshipped with adoration.]20 There are at least three points worth noting in this passage. First, by opening the discussion from a Christological angle, Bonaventure stated from the outset that there are things belonging to the realm of the creation — namely Jesus’ body with its flesh and blood — that are worth of being worshipped. Hence, worship and adoration were not exclusively reserved to the realm of the divine, but there was a possible setting in which matter rightfully could be the object of veneration since it was linked to the divine. Any further discussion thus occurred in light of this basic fact that there obviously were intersections between the creator and the creation filling the aforementioned gap. The second point to note here is that, in his argument, Bonaventure introduced an epistemological dimension. The reason contemporaries of Jesus should have worshipped his historical body lies in the fact that, for Bonaventure, it should always have to be ‘considered’ as conjoined with Christ’s divine nature. Contemporaries of Jesus did not perceive with their senses this divine nature (given its divinity), but faithful observers would have known it was there, and by considering this fact they would have realized that they had to adore Christ’s divine nature.21 This is an important point, for if what asks for an adoration is the reflective act of thinking the presence of the divine in a physical body — that is, if an intellectual representation is needed — then it follows that other physical objects capable of eliciting such an intellectual representation might also be worthy of worship. Unsurprisingly, Bonaventure claimed, in the following, that a whole arsenal of religious objects was in need of certain forms of worship, from images of Christ and crosses to the Virgin Mary, the saints and their relics.22 With the mental presence of the divine being the decisive factor, the sphere of possible media to represent and experience the divine grew dramatically, and so Bonaventure defended this typically late-medieval (and later Catholic) veneration of all kinds of material representations of the divine. It goes without saying that this was a religious approach that was also amenable to numerous other aesthetic ways of experiencing God.23 The third point to note is that, on a theological level, it seems that this openness was possible precisely because the gap between God and the world was not thought to be completely unbridgeable. In the text cited, Bonaventure compares the relation of the divine and the human nature of Christ with a body’s head and foot, which are two parts of different value and honour, of course, but belong to the same realm of one human body.24 Later in 20 All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 21 If Christ’s human nature would have been considered alone, it would not have to be adored, as Bonaventure puts it in similarly epistemological terms: ‘prout in se nuda consideratione consideratur’ (Bonaventure, Commentaria III. 9. 1. 1, 201b). 22 Bonaventure, Commentaria III. 9. 1. 2–5, pp. 202–11, and 203a in particular: ‘Eandem reverentiam exhibemus et exhibere debemus imagini beatae Virginis quam ipsi Virgini, et sic de aliis Sanctis.’ 23 See above, n. 19; Oleg V. Bychkov, ‘The Place of Aesthetics and the Arts in Medieval Franciscan Theology’, in Beyond the Text: Franciscan Art and the Construction of Religion, ed. by Xavier Seubert and Oleg Bychkov (St Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2013), pp. 196–209; and John W. O’Malley, ‘Trent, Sacred Images, and Catholics’ Senses of the Sensuous’, in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, ed. by Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 28–48. 24 See also Bonaventure, Commentaria III. 9. 1. 1, ad 1, p. 201a: ‘Sicut enim, cum dicitur: solus Petrus est hic intus, non excluditur manus vel pes eius; sic, cum dicitur: solus Deus est adorandus latria, non excluditur humanitas, quia humana natura et divina in unam concurrunt personam.’

which protesta nts?

his commentary, when discussing images of Christ, Bonaventure described a similar idea in semiotic terms and wrote: ‘Res parvi valoris rem nobilem significare potest. Cum ergo adoratur imago, non adoratur ratione nobilitatis, quam habet in se, sed ratione nobilitatis significatae in se.’ (‘A thing of small value can refer to a noble thing. If we worship an image, we do not worship it for the sake of the nobility it has in itself, but for the sake of the nobility that is signified in it.’)25 Distinguishing clearly between different levels of nobility, Bonaventure implied that the divine and the world differed only gradually and shared a common scale. With this common scale that measured both the lowness of this world and the excellence of the divine, he assumed that there was no insurmountable gap between the spheres. Hence, taking Christ with his two natures as the starting point, Bonaventure ended up with an aesthetic reconciliation, so to say, of the creator and the creation.26 A second model for conceiving of religious images started precisely as a critique of this common, shared scale between the creator and the creation. Thinking about God, and not so much about Christ, it was John Duns Scotus in particular who, in the early fourteenth century, opened up a new perspective.27 Given that God belonged to an eternal, unlimited sphere, while everything corporeal and material was finite and limited, he reinforced the idea of a gap between the two spheres, stating that, from a metaphysical point of view, this gap necessarily had to exist. At the beginning of his Sentences commentary, he famously stated: ‘Ens prius dividitur in infinitum et finitum, quam in decem genera: quia alterum istorum, scilicet ens finitum est commune ad decem genera.’ (‘What is is divided into infinite and finite, prior than into the ten categories, for the latter of these, i.e., the finite being, is common [only] to the ten categories.’)28 The point of this division was to stress the huge metaphysical difference between being as it is known, perceived and experienced, and infinite being. Although Scotus still retained the view that both the divine and the worldly realms could be considered as entities, sharing thus a common notion of being,29 it became unthinkable for him to bridge the gap between God and the world by means of categorical, material entities such as human beings knew them from their finite experience. Interestingly, Scotus never dealt with the question of religious images.30 Later theologians in his tradition, however, elaborated on this metaphysical model, coming to conclusions that differed greatly from Bonaventure’s position. One of these Scotists was a certain Stephen Brulefer, a Franciscan from the late fifteenth century who even published 25 Bonaventure, Commentaria III. 9. 1. 2, p. 204a. 26 On the concept of ‘aesthetic reconciliation’, brought up by Schiller in the nineteenth century, see Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 54–61. 27 See Wolfgang Kluxen, ‘Die Originalität der skotischen Metaphysik: Eine typologische Betrachtung’, in Aspekte und Stationen der mittelalterlichen Philosophie, ed. by Ludger Honnefelder and Hannes Möhle (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012), pp. 233–44. 28 John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio I. 8. 1. 3, n. 113, Doctoris subtilis et mariani B. Ioannis Duns Scoti opera omnia, ed. by Karl Balić et al., 15 vols (Citta del Vaticano: Vatican Press, 1950–2017), IX (2006), p. 205. 29 There is abundant literature on this doctrine of the ‘univocity of being’; see, most helpfully, Tobias Hoffmann, ‘The Quaestiones de anima and the Genesis of Duns Scotus’ Doctrine of Univocity of Being’, in Medieval Perspectives on Aristotle’s De Anima, ed. by Russell L. Friedman and Jean-Michel Counet (Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters, 2013), pp. 101–20. 30 At the places where this usually was done (the ninth distinction of book III of the Sentences), Scotus focused in all versions of his commentary on the sole question of the veneration of Christ’s human nature. For a reconstruction of his doctrine of mental images of God, see Andrew T. Lazella, ‘Remainders and reminders of the divine. Duns Scotus’s critique of images of God’, Anuario filosófico, 49/3 (2016), 517–37.

75

76

uel i z a h nd

a short treatise on the question of knowing if and to what extent the divine persons were representable in colour and wood by images and statues.31 Unsurprisingly, assuming the theocentric metaphysical perspective of Scotus, Brulefer denied almost every type of representations that prevailed in his immediate religious context. In his discussion of images of God-Father as a bearded old man, he acted precisely on the lack of a common scale between the creator and the created world: Nulla est habitudo seu similitudo paternitatis increatae ad paternitatem creatam. […] Nulla imago aut sculptura seu pictura erronee et false sui imaginati repraesentativa et ad haeresim penitus ductiva est fienda ab aliquo vere catholico. […] Simpliciter haereticum est asserere patrem in divinis esse talem qualis per eam repraesentat, ad quod tamen credendum firmiter inducuntur potissime simplices et rudes per talem imaginationem.32 [There is no proportion or similarity between uncreated paternity and created paternity. Now, no image or sculpture or drawing that represents its content in a wrong and erroneous way or that leads straight into heresy is to be made by a real Catholic. Yet, it simply is heretical to assert that the divine father is such as he is represented by this kind of image, what the simple and unlearned in particular are induced to firmly believe by such an image.] The problem, for Brulefer, lay in the fact that any representation of God by worldly, material means necessarily led to mistaken images of God, for there was no common ground between corporeal imaginations and the divine, metaphysically other. It was thus an act of pastoral duty, in Brulefer’s eyes, to protect the simple believers from religious images, since these images could only incite these believers to heresy. In a later work — an exposition, by the way, of Bonaventure’s Sentences commentary — Brulefer even appealed for the destruction and abolition of religious images, thus asking for the contrary of what Bonaventure had claimed.33 Brulefer’s position is interesting in two regards. First, this is a late medieval, scholastic text that was published more or less two generations before the Reformation and its iconoclastic turn. It thus documents the existence of an essentially critical stance against images still within medieval theology.34 Second, and this is more interesting with regard

31 The treatise appeared as part of a posthumous edition of Brulefer’s works: Stephanus Brulefer, Positio decem propositionum descindens an persone in divinis sint ut usus habet depingende, et que personarum sit depingibilis, in Opuscula (Paris: Jean Petit, 1500), fol. 18v–23v. On the treatise, see Ueli Zahnd, ‘Bildkritik am Vorabend der Reformation. Stephan Brulefers Thesen zur Darstellung der trinitarischen Personen’, in Reformation und Bildnis. Bildpropaganda im Zeitalter der Glaubensstreitigkeiten, ed. by Günther Frank and Maria Lucia Weigel (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2018), pp. 217–26. 32 Brulefer, Positio decem propositionum, fol. 19r. 33 Stephanus Brulefer, Reportata clarissima in quatuor Sancti Bonaventure doctoris seraphici sententiarum libros (Basel: Jakob von Pfortzheim, 1507), fol. 294rb–va: ‘Imagines facte ad representadnum Patrem in divinis vel Spiritum Sanctum quo ad deitatem nullo honore sunt venerande nec adorande adoratione latrie; sed potius sunt destruende, quia quicquid est impium debet destrui in ecclesia. […] Quicquid est signum falsum et erronee figuratum debet repelli et destrui in lege veritatis. […] Omne quod est provocativum ad idolatriam est destruendum et abolendum.’ 34 In this regard, it challenges the idea of an ‘epistemological shift’ that only occurred with the Reformation, see Robert W. Scribner, Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1600), ed. by Lindal Roper (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 98–99.

which protesta nts?

to ‘Protestant’ aesthetics, this Stephen Brulefer had an avid reader, namely, a young priest from Glarus in central Switzerland by the name of Huldrych Zwingli. The copy of Brulefer Zwingli owned still exists with a whole set of notes in Zwingli’s hand,35 and even if the later Reformer of Zurich did not borrow his own criticism of religious images directly from Brulefer, it is obvious that he found in this late medieval Scotist approach a model for his own position on the irrepresentability of God.36 A similar case could probably be made for John Calvin37 who, in his Institutio Christianae religionis, also argued against religious images and leaned, in order to do so, on the Scotist division between the eternal and thus unrepresentable creator and the limited corporeal world, which lacks any own means to approach this fundamentally other God.38 Calvin wrote that it amounted to an indecora et absurda fictione foedari Dei maiestatem, dum incorporeus materia corporea, invisibilis visibili simulacro, spiritus re inanimata, immensus exigui ligni, lapidis, vel auri frusto assimilatur.39 [absurd and indecorous fiction, when [the majesty of God] who is incorporeal is assimilated to corporeal matter; he who is invisible to a visible image; he who is a spirit to an inanimate object; and he who exceeds all measure to a bit of paltry wood, or stone, or gold.]40 Approaching the question of religious images from the angle of God, this Scotist line that would become the Reformed and Calvinist one thus rejected any chance of using religious images. But the rejection was further reaching, of course, and affected other dimensions of the material world, leading to the notorious (but sometimes exaggerated) austerity in Reformed culture.41 Given the otherness of God, the abolition of images, the relative confinement of the use of music, the prohibition of dancing and other worldly elements was a question of pastorally protecting the flock from being distracted, or, even worse, from being misled to adopt heretical notions of God. Yet, in claiming the incorporeal otherness of God, this Scotist-Calvinist line still made claims about God, about what he was and what he was not. This is where the third model 35 See Martin Sallmann, Zwischen Gott und Mensch. Huldrych Zwinglis theologischer Denkweg im De vera et falsa religione commentarius (1525) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), pp. 183–97; the annotations are edited in Daniel Bolliger, Infiniti Contemplatio. Grundzüge der Scotus- und Scotismusrezeption im Werk Huldrych Zwinglis. Mit Ausführlicher Edition bisher unpublizierter Annotationen Zwinglis (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 36 For Zwingli’s theology of images, see Zahnd, ‘Bildkritik am Vorabend der Reformation’, pp. 218–21, with further literature; Andreas Rüfenacht, ‘Bildersturm im Berner Münster. Berns Umgang mit sakralen Bildern in der Reformation — Symptom der städtischen Herrschaft’, Zwingliana, 44 (2017), 1–155 (pp. 5–9). For Zwingli’s aesthetics see George, Whitewash, pp. 283–340. 37 There is an ongoing debate about Calvin’s potential dependencies on Scotus, but there is an undeniable set of doctrinal parallels; see Heiko A. Oberman, Initia Calvini: The Matrix of Calvin’s Reformation (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1991), pp. 24–25. 38 On Calvin and images, see most recently Dyrness, The Origins of Protestant Aesthetics, pp. 57–59; and William A. Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 76–79. 39 Calvin, Institutio Christianae religionis I. 11. 2, col. 75. 40 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. by Ford Lewis Battles (London: S.C.M Press, 1961), p. 48. 41 Susan Hardman Moore, ‘Calvinism and the Arts’, Theology in Scotland, 16 (2009), 75–92; Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture, p. 81; see also Kai Hammermeister, Kleine Systematik der Kunstfeindlichkeit. Zur Geschichte und Theorie der Ästhetik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007), pp. 77–78.

77

78

uel i z a h nd

comes in. For, back in the early fourteenth century, Scotus had a famous critic in William of Ockham who reviewed Scotus by radicalizing his approach.42 If one takes it for granted that there is no common measure between the divine and the world — that there is no common scale in the sense of Bonaventure — then the two realms, as Ockham suggested, have to be conceived as incommensurable: the sphere of the divine is so radically other that there is no means anymore to say from a worldly perspective what God is and what he is not, for even notions such as ‘other’, ‘infinite’, or ‘being’ do not apply to God as they are shaped by a worldly understanding.43 Considering the subject from the angle of the world, Ockham — just as Scotus — did not, however, discuss the possibility of religious images. Yet, just as with Scotism, there was a theologian in the early sixteenth century who would claim during his lifetime to have been a student in the tradition of Ockham and who would speak out on the problem: Martin Luther who had studied in the Ockhamist via moderna at Erfurt.44 It is well known how much Luther was struck by the human impossibility of approaching God by one’s own means, or to think and do anything that would matter in the realm of the divine. Rather, for Luther, God in his absolute, incommensurable otherness was unreachable.45 With regard to the question of images this meant that, on the one hand, Luther was manifestly against representations of the divine, and even more so if they incited adoration.46 On the other hand, he was irritated by those who destroyed images, for, from his perspective, they only promoted the abolition of images because by destroying them they thought to do something good. This, however, opposed Luther’s idea of the humans’ incapacity before God, for according to him, there was no means for human beings to accomplish a good work. And so, in a sermon from 1525, he warned of false prophets, and said: Ich hab es offt gesagt und sage es widderumb: Ihr werdet finden, das sie ja allezeyt eyn wercklin auff werffen, nicht damit yhr den leuten hie dienet, sondern damit man verdienen soll: wer das helt und thut, der wird selig, etc. Also reyssen sie dich auff die werck, wie denn unsere schwermgeyster den pöfel auch an sich gerissen haben mit den bilder stürmen: wer eyn bilde zu bricht odder eyn taffel eyn reyst, der thut eyn gut werck, der beweyset sich, das er eyn Christ sey.47 42 See Bolliger, Infiniti contemplatio, 166–82; and Alan Perreiah, ‘Knowing Unknowing and The Cloud of Unknowing’, Medieval Perspectives, 25 (2012), 79–87. 43 Anne A. Davenport, Measure of a Different Greatness: The Intensive Infinity, 1250–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 365–72; and Jenny Pelletier, ‘Chatton and Ockham: A Fourteenth Century Discussion on Philosophical and Theological Concepts of God’, Franciscan Studies, 73 (2015), 147–68. 44 On Luther’s involvement in the late medieval theological traditions, see most recently Pekka Kärkkäinen, ‘Nominalism and the Via Moderna in Luther’s Theological Work’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther, ed. by Derek R. Nelson and Paul R. Hinlicky, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), II, pp. 696–708; and Eric L. Saak, Luther and the Reformation of the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 45 On this incommensurability in Luther, see Ueli Zahnd, ‘Protestantische Debatten um die Einheit der Wahrheit. Luther, Melanchthon und Zwingli’, Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie, 64 (2017), 58–71 (p. 64). 46 Marc Lienhard, ‘Luther et les images’, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses, 97 (2017), 349–60; Jan N. Bremmer, ‘Iconoclast, Iconoclastic, and Iconoclasm: Notes Towards a Genealogy’, Church History and Religious Culture, 88 (2008), 1–18 (pp. 17–18.); see also Joseph L. Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), pp. 27–28. 47 Martin Luther, Predigt am Sonntag nach Jacobi (1525), in Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe XVII/1 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1907), pp. 354–72 (p. 366).

which protesta nts?

[I often said and repeat it, that you will find them always requiring some good little deed, not thereby to serve the people, but in order to merit salvation, that whoever does and keeps this shall be saved, but he who does not observe and do this, shall be damned. Thus, they force you to trust in works, as the fanatics drove the mob to break up images by saying: Whoever breaks an image or tears down a painting does a good work, and proves himself a Christian.]48 Thus, Luther concluded that the question of images belongs to the so-called adiaphora, that is, doctrinal questions that simply do not matter.49 This is not to say that Luther explicitly allowed or even recommended religious images, but he did not prohibit them either. Considering the topic from a worldly angle, images were neither good nor bad.50 These are thus the three models of dealing with the question of images: a Christocentric promoting one, a theocentric prohibitive one, and an anthropocentric permissive one. In the early modern period, these models would become distinctive for the three main confessions of Catholics, Calvinists, and Lutherans — even if they all had their roots in the late Middle Ages51 — and they would provide the theoretical framework for the different aesthetic approaches. It is noteworthy, however, that, other than from a chronological perspective, the two Protestant models are difficult to classify. From a phenomenological perspective, the Calvinist model is, of course, the more radical one since it simply does away with images and many other forms of aesthetic media of the divine. The Lutherans, in turn, seem to stand somewhere in between the Calvinists and the Catholics. From a theological perspective, however, Luther is more radical, since he minimizes more radically the conceivability of the divine in worldly terms. There is thus, so to speak, a minimalist culture among Calvinists, and a minimalizing theology among Lutherans. Yet, given that only the former seems to have had an immediate effect in aesthetic terms in the sixteenth century,52 it appears, with regard to the main question of this chapter, that there actually is a link between Calvinism and a specific aesthetics, so that the first potential solution to the initial ‘problematic situation’ does not seem to work. What about the second one, then, suggesting that this Calvinism had, ever since the Reformation, a certain — even though hidden — impact in Scandinavia?

48 The Precious and Sacred Writings of Martin Luther IV, trans. by John N. Lenker (Minneapolis: Lutheran in All Lands, 1904), pp. 257–8. 49 Thomas Lentes, ‘Zwischen Adiaphora und Artefakt. Bildbestreitung in der Reformation’, in Handbuch der Bildtheologie, (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007) pp. 213–40. 50 See Luther, Predigt am Sonntag nach Jacobi, 368: ‘Item das andere klöster und bilder ynn eynander brechen, was ist dem nehisten damit geholffen? Dis hat alleyn eynen scheyn und ist an zusehen, als sey es etwas, es ist aber keyn nutz darynne’. See Günther Wartenberg, ‘Bilder in den Kirchen der Wittenberger Reformation’, in Die bewahrende Kraft des Luthertums: mittelalterliche Kunstwerke in evangelischen Kirchen, ed. by Johann M. Fritz (Regensburg: Schnelle & Steiner, 1997), pp. 19–33. 51 On this late medieval ‘fermenting tank’ for the early modern confessional situation, see Zahnd, ‘Einheit der Wahrheit’, 70–71.; see also Dyrness, The Origins of Protestant Aesthetics, pp. 1–18. 52 On the aesthetic changes, and more so, continuities in the Lutheran milieu, see also Wartenberg, ‘Bilder in den Kirchen’; Insa Christiane Hennen, ‘The So-Called “Reformation Altarpiece” by the Cranach Workshop and the Restyling of the Wittenberg Town Church Between 1500 and 1600’, in Arts, Portraits and Representation in the Reformation Era: Proceedings of the Fourth Reformation Research Consortium Conference, ed. by Patrizio Foresta and Federica Meloni (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019), pp. 123–30.

79

80

uel i z a h nd

The Case of Niels Hemmingsen As already mentioned, it is difficult to find traces of Calvinism in early modern Scandinavian theology. In the late sixteenth century, when, in the German Empire, the supposedly Calvinistic Philippists and the insistently orthodox Gnesio Lutherans began their quarrels, these quarrels spilled over into Scandinavia, so that there were rumours about CryptoCalvinists in the region.53 Duke Karl in particular, the later king of Sweden, was suspected of sympathizing with Calvinist doctrines — but this seems to have been first and foremost a politically driven backlash in the strife between Karl and his brother Johan III, the latter of whom openly sympathized with the Catholicism of his Polish wife.54 For, after Johan’s death in 1592, it was Karl who forced Johan’s Catholic son Sigismund to accept the resolutions of the Uppsala Synod from 1593, a synod that exclusively enforced the Augsburg Confession, forbade Catholicism and Calvinism, and thus consolidated the Lutheran confession in the entire region. In contrast to any earlier allegation of Crypto-Calvinism, Karl became the champion of Scandinavian Lutheranism.55 At least, these political moves and the debate in the German Empire led some Scandinavian theologians to take note of the existence and to write against the henceforth prohibited Calvinists. It is very telling to observe, however, how they did this. A good example is the Finnish theologian Marcus Henrici who flourished in Helsinki at the turn of the seventeenth century.56 In 1602, Henrici published an ‘Elenchus or succinct refutation of the Calvinists’ theses’;57 however, he drew the theses not from a personal confrontation with Calvinist theologians nor from reading their works, but from a translation a Swedish Lutheran had made58 of a collection of articles a German Lutheran had composed59 in the 1560s when Frederik III of the Palatine had switched from the Lutheran to the Reformed 53 See Ole Peter Grell, ‘Introduction’, in The Scandinavian Reformation: From Evangelical Movement to Institutionalization and Reform, ed. by Ole Peter Grell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1–11 (pp. 5–6); and Montgomery, ‘Lutheranism in Sweden and Finland’, pp. 162–67. Earlier in the century, Dutch refugees had caused similar debates in Denmark; see Lyby and Grell, ‘Lutheranism in Denmark and Norway’, pp. 118–9; and E. I. Kouri, ‘The Reformation in Sweden and Finland’, in The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, ed. by E. I. Kouri and Jens E. Olesen, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), II, pp. 60–88 (p. 72). More generally on the reception of Philipp Melanchthon in Scandinavia, see Czaika, ‘Luther, Melanchthon und Chytræus’, pp. 62–64. 54 Lyby and Grell, ‘Lutheranism in Denmark and Norway’, p. 121. 55 See Otfried Czaika, ‘Konfession und Politik in Mecklenburg und Schweden in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts’, in Verknüpfungen des neuen Glaubens. Die Rostocker Reformationsgeschichte in ihren translokalen Bezügen, ed. by Heinrich Holze and Kristin Skottki (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020) pp. 345–68 (pp. 359–62). 56 On Henrici, see Simo Heininen and Markku Heikkilä, Kirchengeschichte Finnlands, trans. by Matthias Quaschning-Kirsch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), pp. 80–81. 57 Marcus Henrici Helsingius, Elenchus seu refutatio succinta thesium calviniarum ex ordinantia ecclesiastica ecclesiarum Heidelbergensium decerptarum (Rostock: Christofer Reusner, 1603). See Tuija Laine, ‘Die Bedeutung Rostocks für das lutherische kirchliche Leben in Finnland von der Reformation bis zur frühen Orthodoxie’, in Verknüpfungen des neuen Glaubens (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), pp. 283–99 (p. 294). 58 Petrus Johannis Gothus, Puncta aff them Heydelbergiska pfaltziska caluiniska kyrkeordning, som år nu nyliga vprettat (Rostock: Christofer Reusner, 1602). On Petrus Johannis Gothus, see Kajsa Brilkman, ‘Petrus Johannis Gothus und der Konfessionskonflikt im Schwedischen Reich. Kompilation, Übersetzung und Paratext in De Christiano milite (1592)’, in Verknüpfungen des neuen Glaubens (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), pp. 391–404. 59 The anonymous German pamphlet with the title ‘Ettliche Artickell so die Zwinglianer in der Pfalz in irem Synodo berathschlagt und agerichtet haben’ was published in winter 1562/63 and has been edited by Albrecht Wolters, ‘Zur Urgeschichte des Heidelberger Katechismus’, Theologische Studien und Kritiken, 40 (1867), 7–51 (pp. 15–18).

which protesta nts?

confession. It is thus only through three Lutheran lenses that readers of Henrici’s work could connect with Calvinist thought. The most famous Scandinavian theologian who seems to have engaged with Calvinist thought is the aforementioned Niels Hemmingsen. Vice-chancellor of the University of Copenhagen, Hemmingsen was one of the leading Danish theologians in the second half of the sixteenth century, but, charged with defending Calvinist positions, he had to retract one of his works and finally leave his positions.60 In Hemmingsen’s case, the reasons also seem to have been political rather than theological, even if the affair took its starting point in a theological debate about the Eucharist. For the aforementioned reason of a minimalist theology, Luther had tried to exclude metaphysics from theology. But as early as his split with Zwingli in 1529, he had to introduce several metaphysical notions to explain his position in the Eucharist, one of them being the doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ’s body, a doctrine needed to defend Christ’s real presence in the Eucharistic bread and wine.61 Although Hemmingsen did not reject the Lutheran doctrine of real presence as such, he was not willing to accept the theory of ubiquity that became a metaphysical standard among Lutherans,62 and he confessed this openly in his main theological work, the Syntagma institutionum Christianorum published in 1574.63 In Denmark, the publication did not cause any problems at first, but when the Gnesio-Lutherans in Saxony noticed what had been published in Copenhagen they got the ball rolling, and they immediately interfered on a political level: since August of Saxony was the brother-in-law of Frederik II of Denmark, the former urged the latter to take measures.64 On this political level, it has to be said that, given the then raging religious wars in countries with a considerable Calvinist influence such as France and the Netherlands, it seemed politically mandatory to keep clear of this dangerous doctrine of Calvinism and to suppress debate. Frederik had no interest in the theological details of the Eucharist; rather, he feared that too much discussion would stir up the controversy, so he forbade to give it any room, and he even silenced a persuaded Lutheran theologian who was willing to refute Hemmingsen’s

60 On Hemmingsen, see Mattias S. Sommer, Envisioning the Christian Society. Niels Hemmingsen (1513–1600) and the Ordering of Sixteenth-Century Denmark (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2020); Rasmus H. C. Dreyer, ‘The Changing Face of Lutheranism in Post-Reformation Denmark’, in Medicine, Natural Philosophy and Religion in Post-Reformation Scandinavia, ed. by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 38–58 (pp. 46–51); Ole Peter Grell, ‘The Reformation in Denmark, Norway and Iceland’, in The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, II, pp. 44–59 (pp. 54–55); Ole Peter Grell, ‘Intellectual Currents’, in The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, II, pp. 89–100; and Mattias S. Sommer, ‘Hemmingsen, Niels’, Encyclopedia of Martin Luther and the Reformation, ed. by Mark A. Lamport, 2 vols (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), II, pp. 323–25. 61 For a careful analysis of the concept of ubiquity in Luther, see Allen G. Jorgenson, ‘Luther on Ubiquity and a Theology of the Public’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 6 (2004), 351–68 (pp. 362–65). 62 Sommer, ‘Hemmingsen, Niels’, pp. 324–5; see also Paul D. Lockhart, Frederik II and the Protestant Cause: Denmark’s Role in the Wars of Religion, 1559–1596 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 159. For further material on Hemmingsen’s Eucharist theology, see Kurt Jakob Rüetschi, ‘Heinrich Bullinger und Dänemark. Die Widmung von “De gratia dei iustificante” an König Christian III. im Jahre 1554’, Zwingliana, 15/3 (1980), 215–37 (p. 231). 63 Niels Hemmingsen, Syntagma institutionum Christianarum, perspicuis assertionibus ex doctrina Prophetica et Apostolica congestis (plerisque propositis et disputatis in Academia Hafniensi) comprehensum (Copenhagen: Balthasar Kaus, 1574); on the kind of ‘presence’ Hemmingsen supported see pp. 509–10. 64 Lyby and Grell, ‘Lutheranism in Denmark and Norway’, p. 121; Paul D. Lockhart, Denmark, 1513–1660: The Rise and Decline of a Renaissance Monarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 69–71.

81

82

uel i z a h nd

Syntagma for Frederik’s cause.65 For August of Saxony, however, this was not enough, and notwithstanding an expert advise of the Lutheran University of Rostock that confirmed that Hemmingsen was an orthodox Lutheran,66 Frederik eventually forced Hemmingsen to resign and to quit teaching. The whole affair was so clearly political that Hemmingsen’s reputation as a theologian was not really harmed. He remained an important voice and his works continued to be published.67 The interesting point for the present purpose is, however, that the whole debate — where it had a theological dimension at all — concerned a detail within the setting of the Lutheran doctrine of real presence and did not question Lutheran doctrine as such.68 Moreover, if ever this could be seen as a Calvinist slant in Hemmingsen’s theology, it remained focused on this doctrine of the Eucharist and had nothing to do with the theology of images and religious aesthetics. The Syntagma, however, do have a chapter on religious images, and it is worth looking at it to check whether it was there that Hemmingsen — unnoticed by the Saxon Lutherans — adopted a Calvinist position. Hemmingsen treats the question of religious images as part of an exposition of the Ten Commandments.69 Like other chapters of the Syntagma, the section consists of a collection of theses that had been discussed several years before the publication of the Syntagma in a university disputation and had been printed before, but they were now incorporated into the Syntagma without any substantial changes.70 In both cases, these ‘theses on the prohibition of images and idols’ commented on the second of the Ten Commandments, which is revealing, since the Calvinists numbered the Ten Commandments differently than the Lutherans — and as a matter of fact, Hemmingsen used the Calvinist numbering.71 In the exposition itself, he also adopted terminology that seems familiar from a Calvinist perspective: Tria hac Lege prohibentur. Primum, ne Deum ulla effigie exprimere tentemus. Effigies enim Dei manu hominis expressa, cedit in contumeliam divinae maiestatis. Nam cum Deus sit expers corporis, invisibilis et infinitus, et effigies omnis ex materia corporea sit, visibilis, et terminis clausa, fieri non potest sine contumelia Dei, effigiem Dei manu exprimere.72 [This Commandment prohibits three things. First, that we do not try to express God through any figure. Because any figure of God expressed by human hand is an

65 This Lutheran was Henrik von Bruchofen; see Lockhart, Frederik II and the Protestant Cause, p. 160. 66 Lockhart, Frederik II and the Protestant Cause, p. 162. 67 Sommer, ‘Hemmingsen, Niels’, p. 325. Hemmingsen’s Syntagma, however, were not republished in Danish lands. On the contrary, the first re-edition of the Syntagma in 1578 in Calvinist Geneva (by Eustache Vignon) may have tipped the scales for Hemmingsen’s dismissal (see Lyby and Grell, ‘Lutheranism in Denmark and Norway’, p. 121), and two further editions were printed in 1581 and 1585 by Aegidius Radaeus in Antwerp. 68 Within Lutheranism, Hemmingsen followed the ‘Philippist’ (Melanchthonian) tradition. On the aftermath of this tradition in Denmark, see Dreyer, ‘Changing Face of Lutheranism’, pp. 51–52. 69 Hemmingsen, Syntagma institutionum Christianarum, II. 4, pp. 706–14. The work consists of two main parts, an exposition of theological loci, and this explanation of the Ten Commandments. 70 Niels Hemmingsen, Assertiones de prohibitione imaginum et idolorum (Copenhagen: Laurentius Benedictus, 1568). 71 In the Lutheran and Catholic traditions, the prohibition of images belongs to the First Commandment, while the Reformed, Anglican and Orthodox traditions consider it as a commandment on its own. 72 Hemmingsen, Syntagma institutionum Christianarum, II. 4, § 2, p. 706.

which protesta nts?

insult to the divine majesty. For, given that God is incorporeal, invisible and infinite, and given that every figure is of corporeal matter, visible and finite, it cannot be without an insult to God that a figure of God is expressed by hand.] These are the typical metaphysical statements about what God is that have been presented above as model two: God as an infinite being cannot be represented, but the statement that he is infinite seems possible. Yet, in what followed, Hemmingsen made clear that even so, there were reasons not to be against images as such. After having explained that the devil had introduced images and their veneration into Christianity,73 he went on and explained: Porro, ne quis artem pingendi et sculpendi, prohibitione imaginum et idolorum damnari existimet, conferat Legem prohibitionis cum alijs praeceptis et exemplis Scripturae, quibus aliquae imagines et simulachra approbantur.74 [Yet, in order that one does not think that the prohibition of images and idols condemns the art of painting and sculpting [as such], he should compare the law of prohibition with other laws and examples of Scriptures, some of which approve of images and statues.] In contrast to the first exposition, this seems a rather permissive claim, and in order to substantiate it, Hemmingsen gave the example of the Cherubim in the First Temple according to 1 Kings 6, arguing thus on a purely biblical basis for the legitimate existence of images within religious buildings.75 All of a sudden, therefore, he seemed to be much more in line with the Lutheran approach. This same tension is present in a second part of the disputation where Hemmingsen explains what uses images can have. He distinguishes three uses, a superstitious one of the worshippers of idols, a typological and a political one.76 With regard to the typological use, Hemmingsen said: ‘Typicus usus in veteri Testamento fuit, ut rem aliquam divinam, sub imagine rei incurrentis in oculos, adumbraret.’ (‘The typological use existed in the Old Testament in order to adumbrate something divine in the image of a thing that catches one’s eyes.’)77 The strict reservation concerning the possibility of material things to ‘adumbrate something divine’ that would have been typical for model two is abandoned. Yet, again, Hemmingsen finds an example in the Bible to confirm his case, namely the story of the bronze serpent according to Numbers 21 that the New Testament itself presented as a type of Christ, and thus as a material type of something divine. However, also according to the Bible, this serpent was later destroyed by King Hezekia since it was

73 Hemmingsen, Syntagma institutionum Christianarum, II. 4, §§ 6–16, pp. 707–10. 74 Hemmingsen, Syntagma institutionum Christianarum, II. 4, § 17. 75 Hemmingsen, Syntagma institutionum Christianarum, II. 4, § 18; on the role of the Cherubim in debates on religious images, see Laderman, ‘Biblical Controversy’, pp. 152–3.; and Houtepen, ‘The Dialectics of the Icon’, pp. 55–56. 76 Hemmingsen, Syntagma institutionum Christianarum, II. 4, § 23, p. 712: ‘Triplex est in universum imaginum et simulachrorum usus, videlicet, Superstitiosus, typicus, et politicus.’ 77 Hemmingsen, Syntagma institutionum Christianarum, II. 4, § 25.

83

84

uel i z a h nd

abused for worship;78 and while the typological reading seems to stress that Hemmingsen rather adopted the Lutheran model, the Danish theologian used this destruction as an appeal to his contemporary rulers: Hezekias ‘relinquens omnibus Regibus et principibus exemplum, ut et ipsi tollant instrumenta idolatriae, ne impediatur verus Dei cultus, et caveant, ne posteris instrumenta relinquant impietatis’ (‘He [i.e., Hezekias] left for all kings and princes an example, that they also abolish the instruments of idolatry, so that the true worship of God is not encumbered, and that they take care so that they do not leave instruments of impiety to posterity’).79 Even if this was not an explicit appeal to destroy religious images as such (but only the ‘instruments of idolatry’), in the context of the present chapter of the Syntagma it obviously could be read as a strong iconoclastic tendency such as prevailed, in these years, in the Calvinist Netherlands.80 With the vocabulary of the infinite, invisible God, and with this appeal to the destruction of ‘instruments of impiety’, there seem to have been traits in Hemmingsen’s approach that reveal a Calvinist shape; however, just as with his doctrine of the Eucharist, they do not lead to a fundamental questioning of religious images that would have broken with the common Lutheran tolerance of them. When presenting the last use of images, the so-called ‘political’ one, Hemmingsen rather stressed that images could be used as ornament, in a symbolic, or in a historical way, the latter serving for the comprehension and remembrance of things.81 The argument is close to medieval legitimization of wall paintings in churches,82 so that one thing becomes clear: if this is the intrusion of Calvinism into Scandinavian Protestantism, then there is not much reason to link the minimalist Scandinavian aesthetics with its Protestant roots. Conclusion It is time for a short conclusion. The present chapter started with the observation that the typical features of ‘Protestant’ aesthetics belong to the Calvinist branch of Protestantism rather than to the Lutheran one that prevails in Scandinavia. Three scenarios have been proposed to solve this problem: the first denies that a typically Calvinist aesthetics exists at all; the second suggests that there must have been a Calvinist impact in Scandinavia in the sixteenth century itself; and the third suggests that Calvinist influence only took 78 Hemmingsen, Syntagma institutionum Christianarum, II. 4, § 25: ‘Veluti aeneus Serpens suspensus in deserto, adumbrabat Christum, Iohan. 3 [14]. Hic usus tantisper fuit licitus, donec populus Aegyptio more eum adorare caepit’ (see 2 Kings 18.4). On this ‘locus classicus of the image debate’, see van Asselt, ‘The Prohibition of Images’, p. 303. 79 Hemmingsen, Syntagma institutionum Christianarum, II. 4, § 25, p. 712. 80 On the Dutch wave of iconoclasm, see Peter Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); on its effects on aesthetics, see Angela Vanhaelen, The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). 81 Hemmingsen, Syntagma institutionum Christianarum, II. 4, § 28, p. 713: ‘Historicus usus est, qui Historiis servit, hoc est, qui ad intelligendas rectius rerum descriptiones, et ad memoriam rerum conservandam facit. Hic usus et in libris et alibi licitus est.’ 82 For the so-called biblia pauperum according to Gregory the Great, see Houtepen, ‘The Dialectics of the Icon’, p. 52; Hammermeister, Kleine Systematik der Kunstfeindlichkeit, p. 76; and Lentes, ‘Auf der Suche nach dem Ort des Gedächtnisses’, pp. 25–26.

which protesta nts?

place at a later point in Scandinavian history. This chapter has focused on the first two scenarios, arguing that neither explains the situation: on the one hand, there absolutely is a typically Calvinist approach to images in a religious context — and thus to a certain kind of religious aesthetics — so that there is no need to abandon the idea of a ‘Protestant’ (or rather Calvinist) aesthetics. On the other, it has become clear that this Calvinism did not have a lasting effect on Scandinavian theology in the sixteenth century, the case of even Niels Hemmingsen being too feeble to be considered as a Calvinist incursion. This opens the door, then, to the third scenario. While this is not the place to approach it in detail (and while it would exceed the competences of a Reformation historian), the history of Scandinavian Protestantism after the Reformation era does not exclude that modern Scandinavian aesthetics has a Calvinist dimension. Even though since the late sixteenth century — and even more so since the end of the Thirty Years War — the Lutheran confession was exclusively in force on an official level,83 there are several possibilities where, in the following centuries, this Scandinavian Lutheranism may have adopted influences from Calvinist regions. It is noteworthy in this regard that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Scandinavian students frequented Franeker Academy and the University of Leiden, the academic hot spots of the Calvinist Netherlands;84 one might think of the more irenic inter-confessional exchanges in Pietist milieus;85 and, most importantly, there was an undeniable influence of Puritan literature in Scandinavia.86 These possible paths of influence would not concern the official, institutionalized theology much, as they might become apparent in literature, arts, and architecture. It is thus in a domain other than Reformation history that this ‘problematic situation’ will have to be explained.

83 Dreyer, ‘Changing Face of Lutheranism’, pp. 54–57; see Grell, ‘Introduction’, pp. 9–10 for exceptions on a less official level. 84 Hope, German and Scandinavian Protestantism, pp. 84–85. 85 In general, see Todd Green, ‘Swedish Pietism (1700–1727) as Resistance and Popular Religion’, Lutheran Quarterly, 21 (2007), 59–77; Seppo Salminen, ‘Religious and Intellectual Currents’, in The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, II, pp. 545–86. On the effects of Pietism, see David M. Gustafson, ‘Swedish Pietism and American Revivalism: Kindred Spirits in the Evangelical Free Tradition’ in The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, ed. by Christian T. Collins Winn et al. (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2012) pp. 199–214; and Aage B. Sørensen, ‘On Kings, Pietism and Rent-Seeking in Scandinavian Welfare States’, Acta Sociologica, 41 (1998), 363–75 (p. 358). 86 Tuija Laine, ‘English Puritan Literature in the Swedish Realm in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries — Translation Phases’, Journal for the History of Reformed Pietism, 1 (2015), 35–55; Hope, German and Scandinavian Protestantism, pp. 34–40. See also Hardman Moore, ‘Calvinism and the Arts’, pp. 81–85; and Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture, pp. 181–85.

85

Lena Roh rbach

Access to the Word of God Language, Literacy, and Religious Understanding in Protestant Faroese Tradition O han leâd up Munn suin, lardi tair, o seje Og han oplod sin Mund, lærte dem, og sagde Matthew 5.2 Evangelium Sankta Matteusar (1823)1

Sola Scriptura, Cognition, and the Language Question in Lutheran Thinking One of the solæ, the fundamental principles of Lutheran theology from the beginning, was sola scriptura. Christian theology should no longer be governed by church traditions and readings of the church fathers and other theologians; rather, the word of the Bible itself was to be the ultimate reference point and interpreted through itself.2 As a consequence of this principle, one central cornerstone of the reformatory project of Martin Luther was his translation of the Bible into German in order to make it accessible and understandable for the common people.3 Accordingly, the geographical extension of the Reformation and introduction of Lutheran Protestantism in new regions was accompanied by early endeavours to make the word of God accessible — and thereby the principle of sola scriptura viable — by means of translations of the Bible to the vernacular. This also holds true generally for the introduction of Lutheranism in the Nordic countries. The Bible or parts of it were translated into Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic in the wake of the Reformation, with first printed translations of the New Testament only shortly after Luther’s German translation, in 1524 in Denmark and in 1526 in Sweden, and translations of the complete text as early

1 Evangelium Sankta Matteusar. Prentaða týðing Schrøters 1823 og óprentaðu viðmerkingarnar, ed. by Christian Matras (Tórshavn: Emil Thomsen, 1973), I, p. 15. 2 On the central dogma of unicum principium cognoscendi in early Lutheran thinking, see Jan Bauke-Ruegg, Die Allmacht Gottes. Systematisch-theologische Erwägungen zwischen Metaphysik, Postmoderne und Poesie (Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, 1998), pp. 300−01. 3 See Lars Wollin, ‘Luther, Erasmus und die Vulgata in den Bibelübersetzungen der nordischen Reformation’, in Hochdeutsch in Skandinavien. 2. Internationales Symposium, Oslo 19.-20. Mai 2000, ed. by John Ole Askedal and Hans-Peter Naumann, Osloer Beiträge zur Germanistik, 31 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 9−26 (p. 9). Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 87–103 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.131416

88

l en a roh r b ac h

as 1541 (the Swedish Gustav Vasa Bible), 1550 (the Danish Bible of Christian III), and 1584 (the Icelandic Bible of Guðbrandur Þorláksson).4 But it was not only the word of God that was meant to be made accessible by means of translations into the vernacular. The Lutheran efforts concerned liturgy and the production and distribution of books, as well as the curriculum of schools, and had far-reaching effects on all aspects of learning and erudition. Accessibility to theological knowledge was at the heart of Lutheran reform.5 One particularly interesting case for a study of the rationales and effects of the implementation of this central Lutheran dogma is the development of Faroese literacy in the wake of the Reformation up to the nineteenth century. The history of literate culture in the Faroe Islands is intrinsically intertwined with the advent of Protestantism, the establishment of Lutheran church structures, and the colonial situation of the islands. The history of the Faroes throughout the premodern period is characterized by their dependency on political and ecclesiastical structures across the sea. In Catholic times, the islands were a suffragan bishopric of the archdiocese at Nidaros, today’s Trondheim, accompanied by and intertwined with their political dependency within the realm of Norway since the thirteenth century. Since the end of the fourteenth century, Norway had become part of the Kalmar Union with Denmark as the hegemonic power and centre of the realm, and Danish soon became the official language of the realm and all its dependencies, both in public administration and in the church.6 Until the Reformation, the islands were thus situated in a sphere of power between the political centre in Copenhagen and the ecclesiastical centre in Trondheim. While Latin had been the language of the church in Catholic times throughout the Danish realm, Danish had been established as the official language in royal administrative contexts from the end of the fourteenth century onwards. This complex entanglement of political and linguistic hegemonies also had its effects on the implementation of the Lutheran reqiurement for accessibility to the word of God. Following the Reformation of the church in the Danish mother country in 1536, the Danish King decreed that all Danish







4 For a detailed discussion of early Scandinavian biblical translations, see Lillemor Santesson, ‘Nordic Language History and Religion / Ecclesiastical History III: Luther’s Reformation’, in The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages, ed. by Oskar Bandle et al., Handbücher zur Sprachund Kommunikationswissenschaft, 22.2 (Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, 2005), I, pp. 412−24 (pp. 414−18); Wollin, ‘Luther, Erasmus und die Vulgata’, pp. 10−17, and Jürg Glauser’s contribution in this volume. On the theological and aesthetic paradigms of early Danish Bible translations, see Pil Dahlerup, ‘Bibelen på dansk’, in Litterær reformation (Copenhagen: U Press, 2016), pp. 95−157. 5 See Christoph Gellner, ‘Protestantismus’, in Handbuch Literatur und Religion, ed. by Daniel Weidner (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016), pp. 84−91 (p. 84). As to Luther’s critical engagement with philosophical concepts of cognition and perception, see Theodor Dieter, Der junge Luther und Aristoteles (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001), in particular pp. 257−75; Olli-Pekka Vainio, ‘Martin Luther on Perception and Theological Knowledge’, Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 1/57 (2015), 87−109. 6 For profound expositions of the state of the Danish language in the Danish realm from the Reformation to 1800, see Hanne Ruus, ‘The Development of Danish from the Mid-16th Century to 1800’, in The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages, ed. by Oskar Bandle et al., Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 22.2 (Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, 2005), II, pp. 1282−91; Oddvar Nes, ‘The Development of Norwegian Local Dialects and Dano-Norwegian from the Mid-16th Century to 1800’, in The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages, ed. by Oskar Bandle et al., Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 22.2 (Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, 2005), II, pp. 1291−1301.

access to the word of g od

dependencies were to follow the new Lutheran faith. The church became a dominion of the Danish king.7 Just as in Lutheran Germany, the vernacular was gradually institutionalized as the new language of the church, but in most parts of the realm this vernacular was Danish, the vernacular of the central power.8 At the time of the Reformation, after the recent breakup of the Kalmar Union, the Danish realm comprised the Danish mainland and Norway as well as Iceland and the Faroe Islands.9 Only Iceland, with its long-lasting vernacular literate culture, developed their own vernacular Protestant religious textual tradition through the above-mentioned early translations of the Bible and a vivid local vernacular hymn tradition, as well as early Icelandic translations of German and Danish hymns from the mid-sixteenth century onwards.10 Similar to the situation in the German-speaking countries and the Danish mainland, the Reformation ultimately promoted the vernacular in Iceland, whereas in the other regions of the realm beyond Denmark proper — in Norway and the Faroe Islands — the local vernacular was effectively supplanted in written as well as oral contexts by the vernacular of the realm, Danish. Whereas the impacts of the Reformation on Norwegian culture are well-studied, the Faroese situation is most often only briefly alluded to or left out completely in the vast corpus of studies on the Scandinavian Reformation, not least blossoming in recent years on the occasion of the 500-year anniversary of Lutheran Reformation.11 Taking its

7 This was legally institutionalized in the Kongeloven of 1665 and the Danske Lov of 1683: ‘Skall og Kongen eene haffve høyeste Magt offver all Clericiet fra den høyeste till den Laweste, at beskicke og anordne all kircke og Gudstieniste; Møder, Sammenkomste og forsamblinger om Religions Sager, naar hand det raadeligt eragter, biude, forbiude; og i allmindelighed, korteligen at sige, skall Kongen eene haffve Magt at bruge alle Regalier og Iur. Majestatis, huad naffn de og haffve kunde.’ (‘The King alone shall have the highest power over the whole clergy from the highest to the lowest, to arrange and dispose the whole church and church service; to call or forbid gatherings and conventions on religious matters, if he deems it advisable; and in general, in brief, shall the King alone have power and use all regalian and majestical rights, whatever name they might have.’) (Kongeloven 1665, art. 6. Kongeloven og dens Forhistorie. Aktstykker udgivne af de under Kirke- og Undervisningsministeriet samlede Arkiver, ed. by Adolf Ditlev Jørgensen (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1886), pp. 38−67 (p. 45). All translations in this chapter are mine, unless stated otherwise [LR]. 8 On the implications of the Lutheran Reformation for the development of the Danish language, see Marita Akhøj Nielsen, ‘Reformationens betydning for det danske sprog’, Teologisk Tidsskrift, 4/7 (2018), 278−90. DOI: 10.18261/issn.1893-0271-2018-04-05 (last accessed 19 July 2021). 9 Greenland was territorially also part of the Danish realm, but only ‘rediscovered’ by Danish missionary Hans Egede in 1721. 10 On the vernacular Icelandic hymnal tradition, see Margrét Eggertsdóttir in this volume. On the persistence of the Icelandic vernacular after the Reformation, see Magnús Pétursson, ‘The Development of Icelandic from the Mid-16th Century to 1800’, in The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages, ed. by Oskar Bandle et al., Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 22.2 (Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, 2005), II, pp. 1258−69 (pp. 1258−59). 11 To mention but a few recent publications on the Norwegian situation, see Religiøs tro og praksis i den dansk-norske helstat fra reformasjonen til opplysningstid ca. 1500−1814, ed. by Arne Bugge Amundsen and Henning Laugerud (Bergen: Institutt for lingvistiske, litterære og estetiske studier, 2010); Øystein Rian, ‘Den paradoksale reformasjonen. Ensrettingen som uniformerte Danmark og Norge, men likevel gjorde de to landene mer ulike’. Teologisk Tidsskrift, 3/7 (2018), 177−87. Notably, in an article on the influence of Lutheran doctrines on the development of language and literature in the Nordic countries, Lars Wollin only discusses Denmark, Sweden, and Iceland with a reference to the long-lasting dominance of Danish in Norwegian biblical exegesis and no mention of the Faroese tradition at all (see Wollin, ‘Luther, Erasmus und die Vulgata’, p. 10). Wollin also ponders whether the development of the modern Icelandic language might have evolved differently if the Bible had not been translated into Icelandic in the aftermath of the Reformation (Wollin, ‘Luther, Erasmus

89

90

l en a roh r b ac h

departure point in the legal-dogmatic foundations of Danish Lutheranism as expressed in the Danish Church Ordinance of 1537 and the Danish-Norwegian Church Ritual of 1685, this chapter will discuss repercussions of the implementation of these doctrines in the Faroe Islands up to the nineteenth century. As will become apparent, the clear preponderance of Danish and the long-standing neglect of Faroese with its massive effects on the development of Faroese literate culture were consistently framed and justified by concerns of accessibility. It will be argued that the reasoning of the literate elite, mostly clerical by training, ultimately installed the imperial Danish tongue by means of drawing on Protestant paradigms related to the possibility of theological cognition, whereas the local Faroese vernacular is associated with emotional and aesthetic perception. ‘Paa Danske’: Liturgy, Language, and Learning in Den rette ordinants (1537/1542) The fundamental legal-doctrinal document for the implementation of the Reformation in the Danish realm was the Ordinatio ecclesiastica regnorum Daniae et Norvegiae et ducatuum Slesvicensi Holtsatiae, devised under the auspices of Luther’s confidant Johannes Bugenhagen. It was declared and accepted by the council of the Danish Realm (Rigsraad) in 1537, authorized by Martin Luther himself and subsequently translated into Danish by Peder Palladius in 1539, and finally published in 1542 after renewed approval by the council of the realm.12 Sola scriptura and questions related to the mediation of the Scripture are treated throughout the ordinance. The primacy of the Scripture is prominently acknowledged in the disposition of the ordinance in the introductory letter of King Christian III, accompanied by considerations regarding the importance of education for the promotion of theological knowledge: Effterdi her tracteres dog inted andet end det rette oc klare Euangelium/ Desligeste Sacramenterne effter Christi egen indskickelse/Sang oc hellige Lectier/om en erlig samquem til Predicken / oc det hellige Sacramentes tildelelse/huorledis vngdommen maa optuctis i Bogen og gode Konster / til Guds hellige Ord oc den hellige Scrifft […] At Børnelærdommen maa være vdi alle huss/at ocsaa Bønderbørn mue nu her effter

und die Vulgata’, pp. 14−15). However, these considerations neglect the fundamentally different situation in the two regions, with a long-living vernacular Icelandic literate tradition and no noteworthy local literate Faroese tradition whatsoever. 12 Ordinatio ecclesiastica regnorum Daniae et Norvegiae et ducatuum Slesvicensi Holtsatiae, (Copenhagen, 1537). Danish translation: Den rette ordinants som paa herre dagen i Ottense bleff offuerseet oc beseglet huorledis kircketienisten skal holdis vdi Danmarckis oc Norgis riger oc de hertugdomme Slesuig Holsten: her bag i bogen findis ocsaa de sex oc tiue artickle some bleffue samtyckte oc beseglede i Ribe, (Copenhagen, 1542). On the pre-history of this ordinance and a detailed analysis of the provisions in relation to Luther’s Deutsche Messe and contemporary Danish complements, see Kristoffer Garne, Den danske gudstjeneste. Historie, teori og praksis (Copenhagen: Fønix, 2020), pp. 70−105. Again, this ordinance was translated into Icelandic in an abridged version by Bishop Gissur Einarsson as early as 1541. The translation is transmitted in an autograph in NKS 1924 4to. The complete text was translated in 1600; none of the two versions were printed before 1900 (see Torfi K. Stefánsson Hjaltalín, Íslenzk kirkjusaga (Reykjavík: Flateyjarútgáfan, 2012), pp. 126−27). See E. H. Dunkley, The Reformation in Denmark (London: S.P.C.K., 1948), pp. 81−86.

access to the word of g od

vide det som ey alenicke Bønder/ men ocsaa Eddele mend/Ja vel Konger oc Førster haffue icke selffue her til dags vist.13 [As there is nothing treated here but the true and clear gospel as well as the sacraments according to Christ’s own disposal, song and holy lectures, the honest congregation for the sermon and the reception of the holy sacraments, how the youth has to be instructed in the Book and good virtues in relation to the holy word of God and the Holy Scripture […] and that the instruction of children has to take place in every house, and also children of farmers may now hereafter know what not only farmers, but also aristocrats, indeed kings and princes have not known up to this day.] This general commitment to education for the purpose of cognition is elaborately explicated throughout the ordinance. In the first section on erudition (lærdom), the instructional function of the small catechism is elucidated as ‘en enfolding forklaring paa Børnelærdom/i huilcken der klarlige vises vdi huad maade mand skal rette oc bedre sig’14 (‘a simple explanation of the syllabus for children, in which it is clearly shown how one shall correct and improve oneself ’). Cognition is also a leading principle for the reform of the mass. The ordinance makes clear that the purpose of the mass is to give account of theological knowledge. Accordingly, the service has to be understandable for everybody. This is repeatedly explicitly set in relation to the choice of the vernacular: ‘Her skal mand acte at Pater noster, oc Ordene som liude paa Nadueren / bliffue læsde paa Danske / Saa vel i Domkircker som vdi andre/ effter som det bliffuer dem forscreffuet.’15 (‘Here one has to ensure that Pater noster [the Lord’s Prayer] and the words leading to the Eucharist are read in Danish, in the cathedral as well as in other churches, as it is prescribed.’) The liturgy includes Latin as well as Danish elements, and the importance of Danish elements in the liturgy is underlined time and again, in particular for rural areas.16 The heart of the Lutheran mass was to be the sermon, which again was to take place in Danish, if necessary with recourse to Danish postils.17 The Danish ordinance thus closely followed Luther’s 13 Den rette ordinants, folio 3r/v. 14 Den rette ordinants, folio 11v. Børnelærdom, literally erudition or education of children, is in the period up to 1750 also used as a designation for Luther’s small catechim; see Ordbog over det danske sprog [accessed 10 March 2022]. 15 Den rette ordinants, folio 18r. See Garne, Den danske gudstjeneste, p. 73. 16 For example, ‘Først skal siungis eller læsis Indgongen/som kaldes Introitus […] tagen udaff Psalteren / eller vdi den sted nogre Danske Psalmer / oc synderlige paa Landsbyerne.’ (Den rette ordinants, folio 18v) (‘First, the Introduction, that is called Introitus is to be sung or read […] taken out of the Book of Psalms or else some Danish hymns, in particular in the hamlets.’); ‘Siden i den sted som man pleyede at siunge Gralen/maa siunges en Dansk sang/tagen vdaff Scrifften/eller oc en Grale aleniske met tho Vers.’ (Den rette ordinants, folio 19r). (‘Thereupon, where the Graduale used to be sung, a Danish song shall be sung, taken out of the Scripture, or also a Graduale with only two verses.’) Only on the high holy days, Latin is to be the language used in church service, see Den rette ordinants, folio 21v). See Garne, Den danske gudstjeneste, p. 100. Significantly, the passages in the ordinance that refer to the Danish language are translated in the Icelandic translation of Gissur Einarsson as ‘í móðurmáli’ (in the mother-tongue) (see Siðaskiptin á Íslandi 1541−1542 og fyrstu ár siðbótar. Kirkjuskipan Kristjáns III. Danakonungs, Gissur Einarsson biskup og Skálholtsstaður, ed. by Torfi K. Stefánsson Hjaltalín (Reykjavík: Flateyjaútgáfan, 2017), pp. 41−43). 17 ‘Paa Landsbyerne skal oc lige sammeledis altid om Søndagen Prædickes det vonlige Euangelium en halff time /oc den anden halff time skal brugis til at forklare Børnelærdom vdi. Oc der som nogre aff de nu ere Sogneprester paa Landet/kunde icke ret Predicke det som Gud tilhører/da mue de aff Danske Postiller læse

91

92

l en a roh r b ac h

reformatory programme in placing the sermon and congregational singing at the centre of a liturgy that was predominantly to be carried out in the vernacular.18 In contrast, in continuation of the medieval institution, the school curriculum is disposed in an erudite tradition with a syllabus in the spirit of humanist ideals with Cato, Donat, Aesop, Cicero, Terence, Virgil, Ovid, but also Erasmus of Rotterdam.19 The ordinance prescribes that there is to be one, and only one school in every town and that the language of instruction is to be Latin: ‘Icke skal der helder andet læres i dem end Latine. Fordi Latine Scholer forderffuis gierne aff de Danske og Tydske Scholer.’20 (‘And nothing else is to be taught there but Latin. Because Latin schools are often corrupted by Danish and German schools.’) The ordinance however acknowledges that some children are not capable of learning Latin. For these children, writing schools (scriffuere scholer) were to be kept in order to instruct them in piety in recourse to the small catechism: ‘Dog skulle forstanderne til same Scholer see til met/at sand Gudfryctighed maa same Børn saa effter haanden indgydes/oc indgrundes aff Børnelærdommen.’21 (‘The headmasters of these schools, however, shall procure that these children with true piety are gradually instilled and grounded by the small catechism.’) There is also a short section on books that a parish pastor should own. Apart from the Bible, the list contains five central works of Lutheran doctrine, namely Luther’s Postils and small catechism and Philipp Melanchton’s Apologia Confessionis Augustanae, Loci communes and Instructio visitationies Saxonicæ.22 The ordinance also introduced rigid religious censorship: new books — whether in Danish, Latin, or German — were not to be printed unless authorized by the superintendent.23 This enactment of censorship

ord fra ord faar sine Folck/ baade Euangelij vdlegninge/oc Børnelærdoms forklaringe/ Dog saa at de met tiden venne sig til at Predicke oc tale selff.’ (Den rette ordinants, folio 24r/v) (’Likewise, in the hamlets the ordinary gospel shall be preached every Sunday for half an hour, and the other half an hour shall be used to explain the small catechism. And as some of the parish pastors in the rural areas cannot properly preach seemly for God, they may read from Danish postils word by word for their people, both the interpretation of the gospel and the explanation of the catechism. They shall however over time get used to preaching and speaking themselves.’) Gissur Einarsson’s Icelandic translation deviates considerably from the Danish ordinance, again with a reference to the vernacular (móðurmál) rather than Danish, and with a concrete reference to Corvinus postilla, the first devotional book to be translated into Icelandic in 1546 (see Siðaskiptin á Íslandi, p. 45; Skúli S. Ólafsson ‘Hljóðbækur á lærdómsöld. Misjafnar vinsældir húslestrarbóka Gísla Þorlákssonar og Jóns Vídalíns’, Vefnir, 1/11 (2019), pp. 1−22 (p. 3). 18 See also Martin Schwarz Lausten, Danmarks kirkehistorie (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1987), p. 158. 19 With the Reformation, the king not only became head of the church but also took on the main responsibility for the education system. See Lausten, Danmarks kirkehistorie, p. 130; Dunkley, The Reformation in Denmark, p. 84; Ingrid Markussen, ‘The Role of Schools and Education from the 16th to the End of the 18th Century’, in The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages, ed. by Oskar Bandle et al., Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 22.2 (Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, 2005), II, pp. 1369−79 (pp. 1370−72). The complete section on schools is omitted in Gissur Einarsson’s translation, probably because Gissur deemed it irrelevant due to the nonexistence of children’s schools in Iceland, cf. Siðaskiptin á Íslandi, p. 63. 20 Den rette ordinants, folio 53r and 54r. 21 Den rette ordinants, folio 56r. See Dunkley, The Reformation in Denmark, p. 92. 22 Den rette ordinants, folio 83v−84v. The Instructio visitationies Saxonicæ is a Latin translation of Melanchthon’s doctrine Unterricht der Visitatoren by Johannes Bugenhagen for Danish pastors; see Siðaskiptin á Íslandi, p. 66. 23 See Den rette ordinants, folio 84v−85r. See Dunkley, The Reformation in Denmark, p. 86. In particular, the ordinance prohibits the printing of Danish translations of hymns by Thomas Müntzer. On Thomas Müntzer as the spectre of Danish Lutheranism, see Jens Lyster’, Marderhunde im dänischen Kirchengesangbuch’, Jahrbuch für

access to the word of g od

ultimately led to a concentration of printing presses at the episcopal sees in Denmark proper, which had sustainable effects on the consolidation of Danish as the hegemonic language of the realm.24 The liturgy of the ordinance of 1537/1542 was replaced by the enactment of Danmarks og Norgis Kirke-Ritual (‘the Danish-Norwegian Church Ritual’) under Christian V in 1685, which in turn was in effect until 1912.25 The authorial spirit behind the church ritual was Thomas Kingo, at that time bishop of Odense, who contemporaneously also prepared a new hymn-book for the Danish kingdom which came to be known as Kingos salmebog (Kingo’s Hymnal). This hymnal that was popular and widely used throughout the realm, not least in the Faroe Islands, was closely aligned with the new Kirke-Ritual and presented Danish hymns for the whole church year.26 Accordingly, the church ritual itself contains detailed liturgies for church services of different purpose including prayers and incipits of hymns and psalms, all of which are in Danish. Regarding the sermon, the ritual stipulates that Præsterne skulle blive ved Texten i deris Prædikener / den samme efter Guds Ord og den sande Kirkis Lærdom forklare saaledis retteligen/ at de Eenfoldige vel kand forstaa dennem/ og deraf uddrage Lærdom/Undervisning/Trøst/Formaning/Straf og Refselse27 [The pastors shall keep to the text [of the Bible] in their sermons and thereupon explain the same according to the word of God and the true doctrine of the church so that the simple-minded can understand them and extract erudition, instruction, solace, admonition, punishment, and rebuke] Following the principle of sola scriptura, again, emphasis is laid on accessibility to knowledge of the Scripture for the community, but the question of language is no longer taken up, 150 years after the Reformation.28 Only the liturgies for the consecration of new bishops and pastors contain prayers and hymns in Latin, while the readings from the Scripture are also

24

25 26 27 28

Liturgik und Hymnologie, 53 (2014), 200−07 (pp. 200−01) [accessed 10 March 2022]. On the reasons and effects of the immediate introduction of rigid religious censorship in early reformed Denmark, see Thorkild Lyby and Ole Peter Grell, ‘The Consolidation of Lutheranism in Denmark and Norway’, in The Scandinavian Reformation: From Evangelical Movement to Institutionalisation of Reform, ed. by Ole Peter Grell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 114−43 (p. 118); Øystein Rian, ‘Reformasjonen i Danmark-Norge 1500−1700. Maktpolitikk og sensur’, in Reformasjonstidens religiøse bokkultur cirka 1400−1700. Tekst, visualitet og materialitet, ed. by Bente Lavold and John Ødemark (Oslo: Nasjonalbiblioteket, 2017), pp. 19−43 (pp. 26−27). For the effects of this concentration on the decline of Norwegian as written language, see Rian, ‘Reformasjonen i Danmark’, p. 29. Again, Iceland developed differently, with its own printing press established at the Northern episcopal see of Hólar as early as c. 1530, and a vivid religious vernacular printing culture; see Margrét Eggertsdóttir, ‘Script and Print in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Iceland: The case of Hólar í Hjaltadal’, in Mirrors of Virtue: Manuscript and Print in Late Pre-modern Iceland, ed. by Margrét Eggertsdóttir and Matthew Driscoll, Opuscula, 15 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2017), pp. 127−65. Danmarks og Norgis Kirke-Ritual (Copenhagen: Joachim Schmedtgen, 1685). Danmarks og Norges Kirkers Forordnede Psalme-Bog. Vinter-Parten was published in 1689, followed by the revised Dend Forordnede Ny Kirke-Psalme-Bog in 1699. See Garne, Den danske gudstjeneste, pp. 105−06. Danmarks og Norgis Kirke-Ritual, p. 21. See Garne, Den danske gudstjeneste, p. 105. Even on the three high holidays, the liturgy is completely laid out in the vernacular. See Danmarks og Norgis Kirke-Ritual, p. 20.

93

94

l en a roh r b ac h

on this occasion in Danish.29 The ideological groundwork for these changes had already been laid by Jesper Brochmand (1585−1652), bishop of Odense and rector of the University of Copenhagen, who was one of the foremost protagonists against the continuation of Catholic traditions. Brochmand not only published the fundamental orthodox dogmatic work Universæ Theologiæ Systema (1633), but he also authored a Huus-Postill (1635−38) that came to be the most widely read devotional book in the Danish realm and saw to the abolition of Latin songs during church service.30 By the end of the seventeenth century, following these orthodox endeavours, Danish thus reigned supreme as the language of the church in virtually all contexts.31 Postils and Hymnals: Learning and Book Culture in the Faroe Islands Whilst Iceland followed an individual path and, in the wake of the Reformation, firmly endorsed the position of its local vernacular in ecclesiastical contexts and beyond, in the Faroe Islands the ordinance and other directives of the mother country were in immediate effect and thus employed without adjustments to the local situation.32 The church organization of the Faroes was far less independent from Denmark than in Iceland: in 1540, King Christian III had appointed a superintendent for the Faroe Islands, Jens Gregersen Riber, who only stayed on the islands until approximately 1556.33 After that, the Faroes were a priory (próstadømi) of changing dioceses in the Danish realm until it became finally independent in 2007. The Latin school in Tórshavn, mentioned first right after the Reformation and the only school on the islands until well into the nineteenth century,34 was a perpetual cadre factory for the small Faroese elite: six out of nine rectors were sons of pastors, five out of nine were Faroese. All of them had studied theology at the university of Copenhagen and thus brought (back) with them Protestant Danish theology and taught the Danish curriculum as enacted in the church ordinance to the next generation.35 In line with this

29 Danmarks og Norgis Kirke-Ritual, pp. 341−74. 30 See Lausten, Danmarks kirkehistorie, pp. 160−61, 165; Bjørn Kornerup and H. A. Hens, ‘Jesper Brochmand — biskop’, in Dansk Biografisk Leksikon på lex.dk. https://biografiskleksikon.lex.dk/Jesper_Brochmand_-_biskop (last accessed 19 July 2021). Brochmand’s dogmatic writings had influence far beyond the Danish context, see Markus Matthias and Oliver Fatio, ‘Orthodoxie’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie Online (Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, 2010). [accessed 10 March 2022]. 31 Accordingly, the Kirke-Ritual ultimately implied the establishment of Icelandic as the sole ecclesiastic language in Iceland (see Torfi K. Stefánsson Hjaltalín, Íslenzk kirkjusaga, p. 171). 32 This holds also true for Norway; see Rian, ‘Reformasjonen i Danmark’, pp. 22−24. 33 See Thomas Tarnovius, Ferøers beskrifvelser, Færoensia, 2, ed. by Håkon Hamre (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1950), p. 50; Hans Jacob Debes, Føroya saga (Tórshavn: Føroya Skúlabókagrunnur, 1995), II, p. 139. 34 Malan Marnersdóttir and Turið Sigurðardóttir, Føroysk bókmenntasøga (Tórshavn: Nám, 2011), I, p. 85; Hans Jacob Debes, Hin lærdi skúlin í Havn (Tórshavn: Sprotin, 2000), pp. 34−35. 35 See Christen Djurhuus, Catalogus over de færøiske Præster, Rectores og Landeprovster siden den lutherske Religions velsignede Begyndelse paa Færøerne anno 1538 indtil vor allernaadigste Kong Frederici Geburtstag den 31 Martii 1759. Efter mundtlige Relationer, Protocoller, Opskrifter og egen Kyndighed, korteligen optegnet that is edited in Povl Skårup, ‘Christen Djurhuus’ færøske præstetal (1759)’, Fróðskaparrit 56 (2008), pp. 5−62. See also Hans

access to the word of g od

institutional situation, the oldest printed books known to have existed in the Faroes all belong to the corpus of accredited Danish Lutheran texts in accordance with the church ordinance. Hymnals and devotional books are mentioned from shortly after the Reformation, although not by name. The most prominent books according to contemporaneous book lists were Kingo’s Salmebog and Jesper Brochmand’s Huus-Postill.36 Erudition and theological propagation in the firm hands of an elite trained in Copenhagen and paired with the absence of established literate traditions on the islands, let alone of a printing press, facilitated the consolidation of the imperial language of Danish as the language of learning, reading, and preaching in the Faroe Islands.37 ‘Meest alle Mands Personer hafve deris Psalmebog med sig’: Exploring the Word of God in the (Foreign) Vernacular The uncontested hegemony of the Danish Lutheran canon accompanied by a rapid consolidation of the imperial vernacular resounds in Faroese writings, or rather writings on Faroese matters, up to the nineteenth century, again with recourse to the Lutheran ideals of learning and cognition, along the lines of the orthodox Danish doctrine. There are only few works handed down before 1800.38 The first book on the islands was Lucas Debes’ Færoæ et Færoa Reserata, first printed in 1673 in Copenhagen.39 Debes (1623−75), born in

Jacob Debes, Hin lærdi skúlin í Havn, p. 81; Hans Jacob Debes, Føroya saga, p. 157. 36 The oldest devotional book mentioned is Niels Hemmingsen’s Huspostill (Latin 1561, Danish 1576). Devotional books are mentioned among others from Viðareiði 1709/10 (Brockmands postil) and Kvívík 1729 (Müllers postil). Heinrich Müller (1631−1675) was a German theologian, professor at the University of Rostock. Church registers from the nineteenth century show that virtually every church in the Faroe Islands owned an exemplar of Brochmand’s postil; see Petur Martin Rasmussen, Tættir úr Føroya kirkjusøgu (Tórshavn: Føroya Skúlabókagrunnur, 1978), pp. 44 and 58−59; Malan Marnersdóttir and Turið Sigurðardóttir, Føroysk bókmenntasøga, p. 91. Throughout the eighteenth century, Kingo’s Salmebog and Brochmand’s Huus-Postil were probably the most popular books throughout the whole realm, also in Norway. See also Ruus, ‘The Development of Danish’, p. 1285. For insightful studies in early modern religious book culture in the Lutheran North, which, however, do not include the Faroes, see Religious Reading in the Lutheran North. Studies in Early Modern Scandinavian Book Culture, ed. by Charlotte Appel and Morten Fink-Jensen (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). Different from the Faroe Islands, Norwegian book collections also held books beyond the Danish canon, in particular of German origin. For discussions of (religious) book culture in early modern Norway, see Gina Dahl, ‘Geistliges bokkultur 1650−1750. Mangfold eller restriksjon?’, in Reformasjonstidens religiøse bokkultur cirka 1400−1700. Tekst, visualitet og materialitet, ed. by Bente Lavold and John Ødemark (Oslo: Nasjonalbiblioteket, 2017), pp. 44−68; Gina Dahl, Books in Early Modern Norway, Library of the Written Word, 17 (Leiden / Boston: Brill, 2011), in particular pp. 41−89. 37 See Hans Jacob Debes, Føroya saga, p. 161. 38 Jón Helgason points out some short pieces on Faroese matters written in Latin by Faroese students of theology in Copenhagen. He provides a detailed list of matriculated Faroese students in Copenhagen in the eighteenth century and the transmitted dissertations and declamations of these students, most of which related to biblical topics, while two texts are handed down that treat Faroese matters; see Jón Helgason, ‘Tvey gomul føroysk skrift’, Varðin, 11 (1931), pp. 65−84. 39 Lucas Debes, Færoæ & Færoa Reserata. Det er: Færøernis oc Færøeske Indbyggeris Beskrifvelse, udi hvilcken føris til liuset adskillige naturens hemeligheder, oc nogle antiqviteter, som her til dags udi mørcket hafve været indelugt, oc nu her opladis / alle curieuse til velbehagelighed, sammenskrefven oc forklaret aff Lucas Jacobsøn Debes (Copenhagen: Matthias Jørgensøn, 1673). Modern reprint: Tórshavn: Einars Prent og Forlag, 1963. The book was written in Danish, but soon translated to English (1676, London) and later to German (1757, Copenhagen and Leipzig); see Malan Marnersdóttir and Turið Sigurðardóttir, Føroysk bókmenntasøga, pp. 89 and 100.

95

96

l en a roh r b ac h

Stubbekøbing / Falster in Denmark, was a graduate from the Latin school in Slagelse. He became a pastor in the Faroe Islands in 1652 and later head of the Latin school in Tórshavn and provost of the Faroe Islands. Debes’ book, traditionally characterized as a topographical-ethnographical work, is religious at its core, as Debes was preoccupied with the religious and spiritual state of his parishioners.40 The structure of the book follows conventions of contemporary topographic and ethnographic works, with chapters on the land, the water, air, settlement, activities and characteristics of the inhabitants, and politics.41 The last and by far longest part of his book is, however, devoted to the religious state of the Faroe Islands, with one chapter on religion and one chapter on superstition and heresy.42 The chapter on religion is for the most part a survey of the Christianization and church history of the Faroes, as well as the ecclesiastical structures in Debes’ times, including the organization of the Latin school in Tórshavn. Debes expresses the importance of postils and hymns in the remote and widespread parishes.43 According to Debes, these books allow the parishioners to study the word of God on their own, and Debes praises the effects of this industrious reading: Effterat Gud hafver antændt et større Lius for disse Indbyggere, ved Evangelii rette Forklaring, da hafve de saaledis tiltaget udi den sande Guds, og deris Saligheds Kundskab, at det kand i Sandhed skrifvis, at deris lige iblant den Gemene-Mand udi Religionens Kundskab findis icke udi Danmarck. Thi effterat de faa siælden Guds Ord at høre lydeligen aff deris Lærere, da øfve Tilhørerne sig selff udi Læsning, haffve deris Danske Postiller, hvoraff de for deris Folck udi Præstens Fraværelse oplæse Evangelii Forklaring, haffve derhos andre aandelige Skrifter, saa velsom den hellige Skriftis Bøger, hvilcke de flitteligen læse: Hvorudover de saaledis er grundede udi Guds Ord, at de vide med god Fynd at conferere med deris Lærere udi deris Forsamlinger, om Religionens atskillige Artickler, saa oc andet merckeligt, der kand falde udi Guds Ord: oc efftersom alt Huus-Folcket sidde den største Tid hiemme udi deris Huuse om Vinteren, øfve de sig idelig udi Psalmer at siunge; hvorudofver fast alle ere saaledis grundede, oc øfvede udi Psalmer at siunge, at de kunne siunge flere Psalmer, end her troligt kand skrifvis. Naar derfor Menigheden forsamlis med Præsten udi Kircken til Guds Tienistis Forrettelse, da hafve de icke Degn fornøden til at tage vare paa Sangen; men Præsten begynder, siden siunge Tilhørerne selff, i hvor vanskelig Sangen kand 40 In their literary history, Malan Marnersdóttir und Turið Sigurðardóttir point out that the appreciation of God’s presence in every piece of nature is at the heart of the work: see Malan Marnersdóttir and Turið Sigurðardóttir, Føroysk bókmenntasøga, p. 100. 41 Lucas Debes’ work was highly indebted to early modern learned historians in the Norwegian and Danish tradition, first and foremost Norriges Oc Omliggende Øers sandfærdige Bescriffuelse (Copenhagen 1632) and Norske Kongers Chronica (Copenhagen 1633) by Peder Claussøn Friis. 42 In particular in the part on superstition and heresy (Om Spøgelse og Satans Anfecktelse udi Færøe), there are ubiquitous references to the Bible and Luther’s writings. 43 ‘Oc enddog de icke som paa andre Stæder, kunne besøge ideligen deris vitløftige Menigheder; saa holde de dog hver Søndag og Bede-Dag Guds Tieniste hiemme udi Hofvet-Sognet. Imidlertid tilholde de deres Tilhørere, at holde deris Forsamlinger udi Husene, der om hellige Tider at læse aff en postil, oc siunge Aandelige Psalmer til Guds Ære.’ (And even though, unlike in other places, they cannot regularly visit their widespread parishes, they hold a church service in the main parish every Sunday and prayer day. In the meantime, they urge their audience to congregate in their houses and to read from a postil or sing spiritual hymns on holy days for the glory of God.) (Lucas Debes, Færoæ & Færoa Reserata, p. 304).

access to the word of g od

være: Thi de icke allene kunne siunge uden ad, men meest alle Mands Personer hafve deris Psalmebog med sig.44 [Since God has ignited a bigger light for these inhabitants, by help of the right explanation of the gospel, they have grasped the knowledge of the true God and their way to redemption, so that it can truly be written that their equal is not to be found among the commoners in Denmark when it comes to religious knowledge. Because the audience itself practices reading — since they so seldom hear the word of God read aloud from their teachers — they have their Danish postils, from which they read the explanation of the gospel for their people in the absence of the pastor, accompanied by other religious writings, as well as the books of the Holy Scripture, which they read industriously: moreover they are so well grounded in the word of God that they can confer profoundly with their teachers in their congregations, about the different articles of religion and anything else remarkable related to the word of God: and since all residents of a house had to stay home during wintertime, they practice themselves in the singing of hymns; moreover nearly everybody is so well grounded and practised in the singing of hymns that they can sing more hymns than truly can be noted down here. When therefore the parish congregates with the pastor in the church for the church service, they do not need a dean to look after the singing; the pastor begins, and then the audience sings, not matter how difficult the song is. And not only can they sing it by heart, but nearly every man brings his own hymn book.] Debes is also full of praise for the state of erudition of the youth: Hvor udofver de unge mange, som icke ere ofver deris ti eller tolf Aar gamle, kunne uden ad paa deris Fingre, icke alleniste Lutheri Catechismum med sin enfoldige Forklaring, men endoc S. Doctor Jesper Brockmands Sententzer aff den H. Skrift sammendragne ofver Religionens Artickler. Hvorfor dette fattige Folck er rigeligen opfylt med allehaande Vißdom og Forstand udi Gud.45 [Moreover, the many young people, who are not older than ten or twelve years old, by using their fingers have memorized not only Luther’s catechism with its simple explanation, but also doctor Jesper Brochmand’s sentences of the holy Scripture on the articles of religion. Thus, the poor are abundantly filled with sundry wisdom and knowledge of God.] Debes’ considerations and observations endorse the prominence of the Danish Lutheran canon in the Faroes at the end of the seventeenth century. A first domestic devotional book was written by the Faroese-born Johan Hendrik Weyhe (1706−70). After years as student in Sorø and at the University of Copenhagen, he wrote Nogle vigtige Troens Articler i Vort Danske, forestillede udi sytten Prædikener/ Som paa Maaneds Bede-Dage kunde læses/ Guds allerhelligste Navn til Ære/ og alle Mennesker til

44 Lucas Debes, Færoæ & Færoa Reserata, pp. 308–10. 45 Lucas Debes, Færoæ & Færoa Reserata, p. 310.

97

98

l en a roh r b ac h

Opbyggelse (1733) and returned as a pastor to the Faroes one year later.46 Weyhe’s sermons were written in Danish, in full compliance with the Danish Kirke-ritual. But he seems to have held an interest in the Faroese vernacular, as he is said to have written a Faroese grammar that vanished in the great fire of Copenhagen in 1728.47 Weyhe’s postil does not seem to have been received enthusiastically in the Faroese parishes; it is only mentioned in one church register in the Faroes, the church of Sandur.48 It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that a written tradition in the Faroese language began to appear for good. Jens Christian Svabo (1746−1824), born the son of a pastor in Miðvágar, was a student at the Latin school in Tórshavn and at the University of Copenhagen, and is associated with three major works, of which only one made its way into print during his lifetime, the geographical-ethnographical account Indberetninger fra en Reise i Færøe 1781 og 1782 (Accounts of a Journey to the Faroes 1781 and 1782) that he wrote — in Danish — at the behest of King Christian VII.49 His two other major accomplishments can duly be called the first materially traceable preoccupations with Faroese language and literary traditions: collections of Faroese ballads, written down in Faroese by means of using Danish orthography to reproduce Faroese phonology, and a trilingual Latin-Danish-Faroese dictionary.50 An autograph of the first redaction of his dictionary from 1773, NKS 1952 4to, features at the beginning a treatise on the history of Faroese language, in which Svabo repeatedly compares the desolate state of Faroese to the continued prosperity of Icelandic. As one of the major catalysts of the linguistic demise, Svabo identifies the Reformation: Reformationen synes at have gjort en mærkelig Forandring i Sproget men ikke just til det beste, uagtet den Lutherske Religion kunde være meere beqvem dertil end den Catholske. Landet har i det mindste siden været besat med danske Præster; disse har vel i førstningen ligesaalidt forstaaet Indbyggerne som de hine, en af Parterne maatte da lære, og det blev Indbyggerne. Det Danske blev indført i Kirkerne og Rætterne. Bonden maatte da lære saameget, at han forstod hvad Præsten sagde, han skulle tro, end meere, Bonden har saa, ligesaavelsom andensteds havt da ligessaavelsom nu en besynderlig Kiærlighed og Fortrolighed til sin Præst, gierne talt og raadført sig med ham i vigtige Begivenheder, og for ikke i saa Fald at paalegge Præsten den Nødvendighed 46 He was a pastor on Suðuroy from 1734−1745 and then moved to Tórshavn, where he was in office until 1763, see Rasmussen, Tættir úr Føroya kirkjusøgu, p. 61. 47 Weyhe’s grammar is mentioned in Christopher Müller’s dissertation De quærendo in et ex insulis Feröensibus meliori proventur observationes (1761), the first known thesis to discuss the Faroe Islands; see Jón Helgason, ‘Tvey gomul føroysk skrift’, p. 82. 48 Rasmussen, Tættir úr Føroya kirkjusøgu, p. 62. 49 For a detailed discussion of Svabo’s œuvre, see Christian Matras, ‘Indledning’, in Svabos færøske visehaandskrifter, ed. by Christian Matras, Samfund til udgivelse af gammel nordisk litteratur, 59 (Copenhagen: Bianco Lunos bogtrykkeri, 1937), I, pp. v−lxxxv (pp. xlii−lxxvii). 50 Svabo in fact made two different collections of ballads, a minor collection in the 1770s (NKS 344 8vo) and a major collection in the 1780s (GKS 2894 a−c 4to), both of which were handed down in his autograph. For an edition of both collections, see Svabos færøske visehaandskrifter, ed. by Christian Matras, Samfund til udgivelse af gammel nordisk litteratur, 59 (Copenhagen: Bianco Lunos bogtrykkeri, 1937−39). His dictionary is transmitted in three different redactions in manuscripts, most of them autographs, from the 1770s to c. 1800 (redaction 1, in the manuscripts called ‘Forsøg til en Ordbog eller Ordsamling i det færøeske Sprog’ in NKS 1952b 4to, Additamenta 312 4to, NKS 1952 4to, Uldall 475 4to, UB Jena Gl. X. q. 11 H.Z.; Nicolai Mohr’s copy of a second redaction in NKS 1287 fol.; redaction 3 in AM 971 4to). For a critical edition, see Jens Christian Svabo, Dictionarium Færoense. Færøsk-dansk-latinsk ordbog, ed. by Christian Matras, 2 vols (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966−1970).

access to the word of g od

at lære deres Sprog, har de nok, saagot de kunde, stammet det danske efter for at giøre sig forstaaet. Sproget er saaledes efterhaanden bleven meere dansk end det var før.51 [The Reformation seems to have induced a significant change in the language, but not quite for the best, although the Lutheran religion should have been more apt to that than the Catholic. The country, at least since then, has been occupied by Danish pastors; initially, these pastors probably understood the population as little as the other way around, and one party had to learn, and that was the population. Danish was introduced in the churches and courts. The farmer had to learn so much that he understood what the pastor told him to believe, and more than that, the farmer has, as much as in other places, had a special affection and confidentiality for his pastor, talked to him and conferred with him about important incidents, and in order to not burden the pastor the necessity of learning their language, they have, as best as they could, stammered Danish to make themselves understood. In that way, the language has over time become more Danish than it used to be.] Svabo’s evaluation of the situation in the Faroes differs fundamentally from Debes’ mellifluous appraisal of the Faroese industriously striving after pious (Danish) book learning. Svabo makes no pretence of his criticism of the linguistic oppression of the Faroese in the name of the Reformation and implicitly calls for the Lutheran advocacy of the vernacular.52 This critical evaluation did not remain uncontested. Jørgen Landt (1751−1804), a Danish priest in Norðurstreymoy and married to a Faroese woman, Anneke Djurhuus, published in 1800, after his return to Denmark, Forsøg til en Beskrivelse over Færøerne. In line with his fellow Danish precursor Debes and probably in direct engagement with his writings,

51 Dictionarium Færoense. Færøsk-dansk-latinsk ordbog, II, p. xiv. See also Svend Grundtvig, Dansken paa Færøerne. Sidestykke til Tysken i Slesvig (1845), ed. by Hans Bekker-Nielsen (Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1978), p. 19. 52 Towards the end of his treatise, Svabo nonetheless praises the use of Danish from a patriotic viewpoint, but the placement of these considerations directly before his plea for the need of a Faroese dictionary disclose the rhetorical obedience of this statement: ‘Jeg kan desuden ikke andet end forestille mig det som en langt større Fuldkommenhed, at Kolonien, saalænge den med Dannemark tilbeder en Gud, knæler for en Konge, ogsaa talte med samme Tunge som det. Man regner det til en Fuldkommenhed i blant Fremmede, at Danmark, fremfor andre Riger har det samme Maal i alle sine Provintzer; skulde det ikke være ligesaastor en, at Borgeren, ihvor han end kom hen, altid kunde tale med sine Medborgere, og at det Sprog som taltes i Hiertet af Hoved-Staten, blev med samme Strenghed talt i alle Afkroge og de yderste Grændser af Riget. Paa denne Maade kunde man da ansee Færøers Sprog for fuldkomnere end Islandsk, uagtet det, betragtet fra en anden Sigtspunkt har større Fuldkomenhed og Nytte. Saaledes kunne Sprogets Fordærvelse selv, synes mig, give Patrioten Anledning til at giøre det fuldkomnere.’ (‘Furthermore, I cannot see it otherwise than a far greater perfection that the colony, as long as it together with Denmark prays to the same God, kneels for one king, also speaks the same language. It is regarded as perfection among foreigners that Denmark, ahead of other realms, has the same language in all its provinces; should it not be an equally great perfection, that a citizen, wherever he comes from, always could speak with his fellow citizens, and that the language that was spoken in the heart of the main state was spoken with the same sincerity in most regions and the outermost borderlands of the realm. In that respect, one could regard the language of the Faroese as more perfect than Icelandic, notwithstanding that the latter, viewed from another perspective, has greater perfection and utility. In that way, the demise of the language itself could, I think, motivate the patriot to ameliorate it.’) (Dictionarium Færoense. Færøsk-dansk-latinsk ordbog, II, 1970, p. xv). Nearly contemporaneously, Christopher Müller describes the decline of the Faroese language as a result of the complete hegemony of Danish along similar lines, see Jón Helgason, ‘Tvey gomul føroysk skrift’, p. 82.

99

10 0

l en a roh r b ac h

Landt reflects on the state of language and literacy in the islands, and also emphasizes the diligent pious reading of the islanders: I et Land, som Færø, hvor der ikke er een eneste Landsbye-Skole eller Skoleholder, skulde man vel ikke formode Andet, end at der maae herske et grueligt Barbarie og Vankundighed især i Religionen; og dog kan jeg med Sandhed forsikre at det i Færøe ikke forholder sig saa. Naar jeg aleene undtager meget faa med dette Sekulum næsten jævnaldrende, hvilke ikke kunne eller have kunnet læse i Bog, er Færøboerne ret vel oplyste i deres Kristendom og have ofte ret god Bibel-Kundskab […] Indbyggerne have og megen Læse-Lyst, hvilken giver Præsterne en herlig Anledning til ved Udlaan af gode Almuesbøger at udbrede almeennyttige Kundskaber iblandt deres Meenigheder.53 [In a country like the Faroe Islands, where there is not a single school or headmaster in the hamlets, one would probably not expect other than cruel barbarity and ignorance especially in religious matters; and yet I can assure truly that this is not the case in the Faroe Islands. If I exclude very few people nearly the same age as our century who cannot read a book, the inhabitants of the Faroes are quite enlightened in their Christendom and often have quite good knowledge of the Scripture […] The inhabitants are also very eager to read, which gives the pastors a wonderful occasion to spread general knowledge in their parishes by lending out chap-books.] ‘Om de aandelige Ting hører vi helst paa Dansk’: A Faroese Bible Translation 1823 Despite the scattered criticism and first attempts to revive and reinstall a written Faroese language, Danish continued to remain the language of Lutheran piety and religion in the Faroe Islands. In 1823, one year after the first-ever printed book in Faroese was published,54 a bilingual Faroese-Danish translation of parts of the Gospel of Matthew in Danish and Faroese was published by Det danske bibelselskab, translated by J. H. Schrøter, a Faroese born pastor of Suðuroy. The directorate of the Bible society explains the motivation for the bilingual edition in the prologue to the translation: Hensigten dermed kan ingenlunde være, at ville fortrænge paa hine Øer den Danske Bibel, som der har været brugt i halvtrediehundrede Aar, og som fremdeles bør bruges. Selskabet ønsker netop ved denne nye Oversættelse at sætte Færøboerne istand til bedre at forstaae saavel den Danske Bibel, som den øvrige Religionsundervisning, der gives i det Danske Sprog, til hvilken Ende man ogsaa har ladet den Danske Oversættelse aftrykke ved Siden af den Færøiske.55 53 Jørgen Landt, Forsøg til en Beskrivelse over Færøerne (Copenhagen, 1800), pp. 440−41 [accessed 10 March 2022]. 54 The first book printed in Faroese was Hans Christian Lyngbye’s Færøiske Qvæder om Sigurd Fofnersbane og hans Æt in 1822 (Randers, Denmark), thus roughly three hundred years later than the first printed books in Danish (Den danske Rimkrønike, 1495), Swedish (Aff dyäfwlsens frästilse, 1495), and Icelandic (Hid nya Testament, 1540). For a short survey of the history of printing in the Scandinavian countries, see Jürg Glauser’s chapter in this volume. 55 Evangelium Sankta Matteusar, I, unpaginated.

access to the word of g od

[The purpose of the translation cannot in any way be to displace on these islands the Danish Bible, which has been used there for 250 years and still ought to be used. With this new translation, the society wishes precisely to enable the Faroese to better understand both the Danish Bible, and religious teaching in general given in the Danish language, and for that purpose the Danish translation has been printed next to the Faroese.] A first letter of Schrøter to the bibelselskab in 1815 pronounces even more distinctly that the obtaining of religious knowledge in the Faroe Islands is hindered by the use of the Danish language: Uagtet dette Sprog igiennem saa mange Aarhundrede hverken er brugt ved Prædiken eller i Skrifter, har det dog bevaret sig som det almindelige Almuesprog paa disse Øer. Vel nægter jeg ei, at Almuen forstaaer, naar de ere komne til mandlige Alder, temmelig vel det danske Sprog især ved Gudstjenesten, men Børn, som hverken høre eller tale et dansk Ord hjemme, have som oftest stor Besværlighed med at forstaae de befalede Lærebøger, da Forældre eller Naboer, som undervise dem, ei selv ere istand til at udtrykke sig i det danske Sprog, og ved Undervisningen har jeg erfaret, at de unge vel kunne forstaae Spørgsmaalet, men maa møisommelig lede efter Ord og skamfulde over at tro sig uforstaaelige, ei tør fremsige deres Tanker. Dette gjelder især om det bibelske Sprog, naar Beviis for Sætningen deraf skal udledes.56 [Despite the fact this language has neither been used for preaching nor in the Scriptures, it has been kept as common language of the population on these islands. I do not deny that the common people, when they have reached adulthood, understand the Danish language quite well, especially during church service, but children, who neither hear nor speak a Danish word at home, have often great difficulties in understanding the prescribed textbooks, because parents or neighbours who teach them are themselves unable to express themselves in the Danish language, and I have experienced during instruction that the youth can understand the question, but have to struggle laboriously for words and do not dare to say their thoughts, embarrassed, as they think they would be unintelligible. This in particular holds true for the biblical language, when evidence for a sentence has to be deduced from it.] Schrøter’s fellow contemporaries do not seem to have shared his views. The translation, distributed in 1200 exemplars to every Faroese household, was received with criticism by its domestic audience, according to contemporaneous reactions, as apparent in, for example, a letter by Søren Sørensen, the pastor of Norðuroy, to the bibelselskab in the year 1824: De Fleste hørte på Oplæsningen som paa noget Selsomt, og Enkelte sagde til mig, naar et Ord forekom, som skurrede i deres Øren: “Velsignet være du (et almindeligt Høflighedsudtryk), Ordet er ikke helligt (høitideligt) nok til at betegne saa hellige Ting. Vort Maal (Sprog) kan være godt nok i daglig Tale, men om de aandelige Ting

56 Evangelium Sankta Matteusar, II, p. 8. On the prehistory, concept, and reception of the translation, see also Christian Matras, ‘Tá ið Schøter ætlaði at týða Nýggja Testamenti’, Varðin, 16 (1936), 181−87; Reidar Djupedal, ‘Kring J. H. Schröters omsetjing av Matteus-Evangeliet’, Fróðskaparrit, 13 (1964), 235−62.

1 01

102

l en a roh r b ac h

høre vi helst paa Dansk, for hvis Udtryk i Religionssager vi have baaret Ærbødighed fra vi vare Smaae.”57 [Most listened to the reading as something strange, and some said to me, when a word occurred that squeaked in their ears: “Be blessed (a common polite phrase), this word is not holy (solemn) enough to denote matters as holy as these. Our language may be good enough for daily affairs, but we prefer to hear about spiritual matters in Danish, and we have revered its notions in religious matters since we were children.”] Sørensen nonetheless concedes that the translation might be of help ‘især for Gamle og Enfoldige, der ikke fyldest kunne benytte den danske Undervisning’58 (‘in particular for the old and simple-minded who cannot fully make use of the Danish instruction’). More devastating is the critique of the German Carl Julian Graba who in his travel-book on his journey to the Faroe Islands in 1828 notes: Die dänische Bibelgesellschaft übernahm die Herausgabe mit grossen Kosten und liess die Schrift vertheilen; allein kein Färinger kann sie verstehen, und sie lesen nur in dem Buche, wenn sie Lust haben, sich über das wunderbare Schreiben ihrer Worte zu belustigen.59 [The Danish bible society took over the task of the edition with great costs and had the print distributed, but no Faroese can understand it, and they only read in the book when they are in the mood for amusing themselves over the strange spelling of their words.] ‘Huller og Spring, som findes i Meningen’: Language, Enlightenment, and Aesthetics By 1800, the Faroese language had thus turned into a language that was perceived as detached from the word of God. Due to the nonexistence of a tradition of written Faroese, the reading of the Scripture in Faroese led to amusement rather than enlightenment. That religious texts in the vernacular were appreciated and transmitted more for aesthetic than for spiritual reasons is also confirmed by the transmission of the poem ‘Ljómurnar’ (‘Rays of Light’) that both Lucas Debes and Jens Christian Svabo mention in their writings and that Svabo also renders as the first poem in his major collection of ballads.60 Both Debes and Svabo bemoan the fragmentary transmission of the poem, and Svabo introduces his edition of the poem with the following words:

57 58 59 60

Evangelium Sankta Matteusar, II, p. 13. Evangelium Sankta Matteusar, II, p. 13. Evangelium Sankta Matteusar, II, p. 14. See Lucas Debes, Færoæ & Færoa Reserata, pp. 144−45. Svabo renders the poem in the beginning of GKS 2894 a 4to as well as in a separate manuscript, NKS 1955 4to. See Føroya kvæði. Corpus Carminum færoensium a Sv. Grundtvig et J. Bloch comparatum, ed. by Michael Chestnutt and Kaj Larsen (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1996), VII History, manuscripts, indexes, p. 101.

access to the word of g od

Denne er en meget gammel Sang, som uden al Tvivl er digtet i Island eller af en Islænder. Den igjennemgaaer Religionens Hoved-Artikle og Saliggjørelsens Orden, og synes at have været brugt i de catholske Tider som en art af Cathechismus, og det saameget rimeligere, som man i ældre Tider gjerne affattede de Begivenheder i Riim, som man vilde have bevaret i Hukommelsen. Nu er denne Sang (hvorom Lucas Debes mælder) saa meget ufuldkommen, at man kun kan anse den for en Levning af hvad den før har været, hvilket, foruden de i Afskriften satte Stjerner (der ikke gjerne i Bøger bebude noget behageligt) kan sees af de Huller og Spring, som findes i Meningen. Ingen Under at den er ufuldkommen, og det langt mere end i benævnte Provst Debes’s Tid; thi ej allene har den bestandig været overladt til Hukommelsen, og aldrig, saa vidt jeg veed, været optegnet; men denne Overtroe, i det mindste hos Nogle, har tillige befordret dens Ufuldstændighed: at naar en skulle lære den fra sig, måtte han tilbageholde et Vers, ifald hann ikke skulde sjeulaatast ɔ: omkomme på Søen.61 [This is a very old song which without doubt was composed in Iceland or by an Icelander. It goes through the main articles of the religion and the way to redemption, as it seems to have been used in Catholic times as a kind of catechism, and this seems all the more reasonable as one used to compose those events in verse in older times that one wanted to remember. This song (which is also mentioned by Lucas Debes) is so defective that one can only regard it as a remnant of what it used to be, which, apart from the asterisks in the transcript (that seldom indicate something pleasant in books), can be seen from the lacunae and the holes in the meaning. No wonder it is defective, and much more so now than during provost Debes’ time; because not only has it constantly been left to memory, and never, as far as I know, been written down; but a superstitious belief, at least for some, has also contributed to the defective state, namely, that if one taught the song to somebody else, one should at least keep one verse to oneself, if one did not wish to die on the sea.] The old Icelandic poem that once was composed as a means of education thus had turned into a remnant of bygone religious and linguistic traditions that was handed down with little regard to the preservation of its contents. Due to the intellectual and institutional hegemony of the Danish church and crown, the Faroese vernacular was a language detached from contexts of learning, erudition, and religious understanding. After 300 years of Danish Protestant rule on the islands, the Danish church had successfully replaced Latin as the religious language. Diverging from the Lutheran plea for the vernacular, the learned foreign language Latin did not give way to the local vernacular, but, due to the institutional hegemony of the Danish mother church and its officials, was replaced with another foreign language. The Protestant principle of accessibility was overridden by political-institutional circumstances and led to a suppression of the local vernacular as a medium of cognition and understanding. Over the course of the centuries, imperial Danish was consolidated in contributions from the Danish-Faroese learned elite as the appropriate language to convey religious matters and as a direct pathway to the word of God.

61 Svabos færøske visehaandskrifter, I, p. 7.

1 03

Arne Bugge Amundsen

Church Architecture in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Norway

Scandinavia had much in common in the nineteenth century, including history, religion, politics, and material culture. The three countries went through important political changes in this period, with Denmark and Norway separated as an absolutist twin monarchy in 1814 and Sweden and Norway as two separate states under one king between 1814 and 1905. The period saw political and cultural dreams of a united Scandinavia, but also the rise of independent national awakenings searching for cultural, historical, aesthetic, and religious identities in the three countries. This was also a period where church architecture and religious aesthetics developed according to the radical shifts in cultural preferences and confessional conflicts. From a rather mono-confessional situation, nineteenth-century Scandinavia experienced cultural and religious opposition and conflicts: the Lutheran state church hegemony was challenged both from new religious confessions and from liberal politicians. All three countries were dominated by national Lutheran churches controlled by the state. The Danish-Norwegian church had the king as its head, and with — in principle — equal bishops serving the king. Norway continued this structure with its 1814 constitution stating that the king was head of the church, but with a parliament with legislative power also in church affairs. In practice, church rule was exercised through the Norwegian government and the Ministry of Church Affairs. Questions concerning religious freedom had a huge impact from both a short-term and a long-term perspective. New ideologies and political interests — not least inspired by the American and French Revolutions — provided a space for discussions regarding the influence of the state on the individuals. These discussions immediately became influential within the sphere of religious practices: liberal ideologists argued that a modern state should include and tolerate a number of religious convictions, only expecting its citizens to stay loyal to the constitution. In Norway, solutions were found during the 1840s, with new legislation allowing both Pietist groups freedom of speech and new Christian confessions the liberty (or freedom) to be established in the country. These changes had deep influence on theology, culture, and strategy both within the Lutheran majority churches, and in the new religious groups and churches that established themselves in Scandinavia. Taking the historical background into consideration, these changes were expressed in conflicts over and competitions concerning the religious landscape, the religious territory, and partly concerning aesthetics. The Lutheran churches had territorial monopoly with full control over the religious landscapes through church buildings and Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 105–127 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.131417

10 6

a r n e b ugge amun dsen

church organization based on territorial borders. Religion was practiced within a territory, the local congregation with its church and its minister. The new legislation on religious liberty established a new principle — civil and religious territories were different. That paved the way for proponents of new confessions and churches to regard the Scandinavian countries as missionary fields with opportunities for establishing their own territories, congregations, and buildings. These overarching changes in the religious landscape will be the focus of this chapter, in an attempt to follow these changes through the diversification of religious and architectural practice during nineteenth-century Norway. The Early Lutheran Situation With the introduction of Christianity in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, churches and monasteries were built, parishes were established, and the Roman church organization became decisive in the construction of landscape and society. After the introduction of the Lutheran religion to Denmark-Norway in 1536–1537, the main project of the kings was to consolidate the new religious and political situation. This consolidation had several elements: monasteries were torn down, monastic churches were in some cases changed into parish churches, private churches were abolished, and in general, the number of churches was reduced, especially in the cities. Since very few new churches were built, the majority of parishes were left with churches — both wooden and stone churches — that had been built, decorated, and furnished in the Roman Catholic period. A well-known example is the large number of stave churches that survived the Middle Ages (Figure 1). Of course, these churches were transformed into what was regarded as acceptable by the authorities of the new religion, but this transformation had different phases.1 The changes to the churches in the decades after the Reformation had three important dimensions: ideology, economy, and demography. The ideology is seemingly the clearest dimension. It was an urgent issue to the reformers to remove anything that could prevent the smooth transition from one religion to another. In practice, however, the changes that the reformers regarded as urgent and necessary were made during long processes. Side altars and sculptures of saints were removed, but much of the Roman Catholic interior that was unobtrusive and not the object of superstition, or could be assimilated into the new religion, seems to have been kept. Examples of iconoclastic actions can be found in the sixteenth century, but they were few, local, and organized by the authorities, not by the congregations. Economy was also substantial. The Lutheran Reformation represented a dramatic economic change. In Denmark-Norway, the crown confiscated all property of monasteries and bishops. Left untouched was the economy of the local churches and the parishes. New laws regulated this part of church economy, which partly was dependent on contributions from the congregations. This meant that negotiations between the authorities and the congregations were necessary

1 Arne Bugge Amundsen, ‘Reformed Church Interiors in Southern Norway, 1537–1700’, in The Protracted Reformation in Northern Norway: Introductory Studies, ed. by Lars Ivar Hansen, Rognald Heiseldal Bergesen, and Ingebjørg Hage (Stamsund: Orkana Akademisk, 2014), pp. 73–93.

c h urc h a rc hitectur e in eighteen th- a nd  nineteenth- century norway

Figure  1. The stave church of Borgund, built c.  1200. (Photo: Wikipedia) [accessed 10 March 2022].

when changes should take place. The question of how to reward and pay the Lutheran ministers became an almost explosive issue during the centuries. Demography is the third important dimension. The majority of the population lived in rural areas, and in most cases, the borders between the congregations were left unchanged. In these parts of the country, traditional relationships between clergy and congregations were supported. In the cities, however, there were not enough people to sustain the many churches, and a substantial number of churches were demolished. This was to change in the following centuries with urban expansion and general increased population, not least in the nineteenth century: Norway had c. 440,000 inhabitants in the 1660s, 883,000 in 1801, and 2,240,000 in 1900. In 1801, 8 per cent of the population was living in urban areas, in 1900, 36 per cent.2 One of the consequences of this demographic development was that the development of religion in Norway increasingly became influenced by urban culture: class conflicts, individualism, liberalism, and a general desire for change. In the seventeenth century, a substantial number of new churches were built, and important changes in the furnishing of existing churches took place. This was the century when Lutheran versions of the Baroque style were introduced. Most of the churches



2 ‘Hjemmehørende folkemengde’, in Statistisk sentralbyrå: [accessed 10 March 2022].

1 07

10 8

a r n e b ugge amun dsen

received private donations, making it possible to install new pulpits, altarpieces, pews, baptismal fonts, and religious art according to the preferences of the day.3 The religious ideologies of the eighteenth century were more complex. In the first half of the century, Danish-Norwegian kings Fredrik IV (1671–1730) and Christian VI (1699–1746) were deeply influenced by Pietism, and a number of state reforms took place within school and religious education systems. What was expected of the Lutheran clergy was taken to a higher level, with emphasis on deeper commitment to their mission, internalization of religious ideals, performance of house inspections, and other forms of religious control, everything under the auspices and control of the sovereign. Important contributors to the dissemination of this new ideology and control over it were Pietist bishops and church administrators.4 At the same time, organized assemblies of Pietists and other non-conformist groups were prohibited by the Conventicle Act (Konventikkelplakaten) in 1741, since the Pietist authorities regarded them as threats to the public order. Technically, no arenas other than the churches were permitted for religious activities outside the household. The principle of the Lutheran territorial state church was kept and defended by the authorities. The non-conformists among the Pietists did not accept the authority of the Lutheran clergy, while those who stayed loyal to the state church system accepted — at least to a certain degree — the primacy of the established structures, traditions, and rituals.5 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, churches were still dominated by the Baroque style, emphasizing the order and regulations of the old, Lutheran orthodoxy. However, the two dominating theologies in the last half of the century were Enlightenment and Pietist, both loyal to the State Church. Both theologies had in common that less weight was put on the sacraments, and more attention was paid to the effects of the Divine Word — in a wide sense. The Pietist clergy wished to emphasize the importance of the religious individual with the word of God at its heart, and to encourage repentance and new moral life. The Enlightenment clergy saw themselves as state propagators of modern religion, rationality, education, and national economic growth. According to both standards, new churches were intended to be local arenas for public instruction and improvement under the auspices of the Christian king. A major accomplishment was the building of so-called central churches with pulpit altars, where altar, pulpit, and eventually an organ were placed on top of each other at the eastern wall of the church. In most cases, churches with such constructions also had galleries — often over many floors — to house as many groups of churchgoers as possible. This architecture was favoured by the Pietist church regime in the middle of the eighteenth century, and used in places as varied as the mining city Kongsberg in Norway (Figure 2)





3 Øystein Ekroll, ‘State Church and Church State, Churches and their Interiors in Post-Reformation Norway, 1537–1705’, in Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Andrew Spicer (Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 277–309; see Birgitte Bøggild Johannsen and Hugo Johannsen, ‘Re-forming the Confessional Space: Early Lutheran Churches in Denmark, c. 1536–1660’, in Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Andrew Spicer (Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 241–76. 4 Arne Bugge Amundsen, ‘Mellom inderlighet og fornuft’, in Norges religionshistorie, ed. by Arne Bugge Amundsen (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2005), pp. 253−255. 5 Arne Bugge Amundsen, ‘Oppvekkelsens steder. En lesning av Erik Pontoppidans Sandhed til Gudfrygtighed (1737)’, in Vekkelsens møtesteder, ed. by Arne Bugge Amundsen, Bibliotheca Historico-Ecclesiastica Lundensis, 57 (Lund: Lunds Universitet / Kyrkohistoriska Arkivet, 2014), pp. 53–76.

c h urc h a rc hitectur e in eighteen th- a nd  nineteenth- century norway

Figure 2. The Rococo church of the city of Kongsberg was built in 1740−61 based on drawings by Joachim Andreas von Stukenbrock (1699−1756) and Michael Heltzen (1712−70). (Photo: Wikimedia) [accessed 10 March 2022].

and a number of ordinary parish churches in Telemark and Hedmarken, also in Norway. The ideal was to construct churches as auditoria where the congregation was able to hear, observe, and respond to sermons and rituals. This ideal was shared by both Pietists and representatives of the Enlightenment.6 Moravianism Despite attempts to maintain a religious monopoly by the Lutheran state churches, the eighteenth century was also marked by the growing influence of Moravianism, which, under its leader Count Nicolas Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760), rapidly spread to Scandinavia in the 1730s. The Moravian movement advocated a modern piety with emphasis on personal choice, new social patterns, emotional involvement, and global pretentions. Moravianism was much more radical than the Lutheran Pietists, and it inspired both deviant behaviour and ambitious missions in many parts of the world — as well as modern economic strategies.7

6 Oddbjørn Sørmoen, 1700-tallet. Skjønnhetens århundre, Kirker i Norge II (Oslo: Arfo, 2001), pp. 14, 26−28, 33−35. 7 Recent discussions are presented in Per von Wachenfelt and Christer Ahlberger, eds, Herrnhutismen i Västsverige (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma bokförlag, 2019).

1 09

110

a r n e b ugge amun dsen

Moravianism became popular among craftsmen, servants, and theological students, even if the influences are difficult to trace in detail. Interest on behalf of parts of the aristocracy can also be observed. Regardless of the process, the result was that in a number of cities, small groups of Moravians met in private homes or in minor assembly halls, in most cases under the auspices of local clergy or well-off tradesmen. The Conventicle Act from 1741 forbade public meetings, but as long as the Moravians kept to themselves, they were tolerated. In 1773, the Moravian settlement Christiansfeld was established in southern Jutland with permission and support from the Danish-Norwegian king, Christian VII (1749–1808).8 For the very first time in Scandinavia, it was possible for a dissenting religious group to establish its own public arena and with support from the highest authorities. After a long period of meetings in private homes supported by ministers in the capital, the Moravians also established a church in Copenhagen in 1783.9 The Moravian example shows that the monopoly of Lutheran church buildings in the last part of the eighteenth century had been challenged. The Moravian churches were built with the church in Herrnhut as a model: a central church with the pulpit as the main furnishing, a simple interior with benches and galleries separating the different choirs of men and women, married and unmarried persons. These churches were lecture halls oriented towards preaching and singing. This was primarily an urban phenomenon. In rural districts, Moravians assembled more discretely in private homes, kept together by visiting Moravian missionaries and written information from Herrnhut.10 Inner Opposition and Competition In the last part of the eighteenth century, the Moravians had represented a silent but quite visible challenge to the monopoly of the Lutheran church buildings, primarily in some of the important cities, but also in rural districts. A further and even more influential challenge to this monopoly were the activities and strategies of different Pietist awakenings and lay movements in the nineteenth century. These groups and movements developed a self-conscious political conviction when it came to religious liberty. A major aim in their political strategies was to have the Conventicle Act abolished. Finally, Haugean and liberal representatives in Parliament were successful in their campaign, and in 1842, the act was abolished.11 In most parts of Norway, the Pietist lay preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771–1824) had sympathizers and followers opposing clergy and church authorities. His followers chose

8 Anders Pontoppidan Thyssen, Herrnhuter-Samfundet i Christiansfeld I–II (Aabenraa: Historisk Samfund for Sønderjylland, 1964). 9 Ludvig Schrøder, Om Brødremenighedens Betydning for Kirkelivet i Danmark (Copenhagen: Lehmann & Stage, 1902), p. 25. 10 See Göran Lindahl, Högkyrkligt, lågkyrkligt, frikyrkligt i svensk arkitektur 1800–1950 (Stockholm: Diakonistyrelsens bokförlag, 1955), pp. 28−30. 11 Arne Bugge Amundsen, ‘Haugeanism between Liberalism and Traditionalism in Norway 1796–1845’, in Pietism and Community in Europe and North America, 1650–1850, ed. by Jonathan Strom, Brill’s Series in Church History, 45 / Religious History and Culture Series, 4 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 291–306.

c h urc h a rc hitectur e in eighteen th- a nd  nineteenth- century norway

Figure 3. The prayer house Effata in Eidsvoll, built around 1880 as a simple, timbered construction with elements of ‘Carpenter Gothic’. (Photo: flickr) [accessed 10 March 2022].

to stay members of the state church, but they also confronted the 1741 act by arranging their own meetings and gatherings in private homes and by having migrant lay preachers competing with the Lutheran clergy. In 1821, Hauge explicitly admonished his followers to stay loyal to the formal church organization, but also to continue their independent religious activities. In practice, this meant that the Haugeans arranged their own meetings in private homes, thus establishing alternative religious arenas in local communities all over Norway.12 The first generations of Hauge followers stayed loyal to the 1821 admonitions of their founder — they did not oppose the formal authority of the clerics and they continued to gather in private homes. However, from the 1840s onwards, local groups of Pietists started to build their own meetinghouses, in Norwegian called bedehus (‘prayer houses’).13 These small timbered houses were built and paid for by the members; they were modest and discrete in expression and architecture (Figure 3).

12 Arne Bugge Amundsen, ‘The Devotion of the Simple and Pure: Devotional Culture in the Haugean Movement in Norway, 1796–1840’, in Devotional Cultures of European Christianity, 1790–1960, ed. by Henning Laugerud and Salvador Ryan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012), pp. 13–33. Svein Ivar Langhelle, ‘Haugianske møteplasser og samlingsformer med eksempel fra det sørvestre Norge’, in Vekkelsens møtesteder, ed. by Arne Bugge Amundsen, Bibliotheca historico-ecclesiastica lundensis, 57 (Lund: Lunds Universitets Kyrkohistoriska arkiv, 2014), pp. 77–88. 13 The first houses of this kind seem to have been built in Rogaland in southeastern Norway. Grete Swensen, Moderne, men avleggs? Foreningers byggevirksomhet 1870–1940 i formativt perspektiv (Oslo: Det historisk-filosofiske fakultet, 1997), pp. 68−69.

111

112

a r n e b ugge amun dsen

The very name — prayer houses — indicated that they did not compete openly with the local churches, but were extensions of the private homes where the believers gathered to read religious texts, sing, and pray according to their Pietist standards. At the same time, they challenged the territorial church organization by building houses dedicated to religious practice open to anyone and visited by wandering preachers whom they appointed themselves.14 The building of prayer houses expanded considerably from the 1870s, especially in urban areas,15 where some of the houses were built with red bricks and with neo-Gothic, church-inspired design.16 The prayer houses were given biblical place names like Bethel, Bethesda, Bethlehem, Sion, Zoar, Ebenezer, Effata, Pella, and Sarepta — a tradition that might have come from the Moravian culture.17 Eventually, these Pietist groups increased in number and became more expanding and critical towards the Lutheran church and the clergy. One example will show this development: the layman Erik Tønnesen (1816–1880), originally based in a radical, quite subversive religious group, established himself as a Pietist preacher in southeastern Norway around 1850. He was critical of local ministers and argued — against Hans Nielsen Hauge — that missionary work within the Lutheran state church needed organization and structure. He travelled from parish to parish and established a network of supporters who eventually took the initiative to establish a formal inner mission society for the region where Tønnesen was preaching. In the town of Sarpsborg, a formal prayer house was erected for his purpose in 1855.18 Outside the town of Fredrikstad, he used a house built in 1857 for the Teetotalists. This house — called Samfundshuset (‘The Community House’) — was also an arena for other activities like charity and public lectures addressing the working class population.19 Tønnesen himself was not a Teetotalist, and in general, the Teetotalist movement did not appeal to the Pietists, who chose to stay within the Norwegian state church organization. The two wooden houses clearly signalled that they were meant for assemblies, but they were definitely not meant to be churches. Exterior and interior was very simple, with large windows, rostrum, lectern, and benches. In this way, they were clearly differentiated from the churches. The buildings were made by local carpenters. An important dimension is the fact that these prayer houses had their own boards. That meant that they opened their

14 See Swensen, Moderne, men avleggs, pp. 29, 126−27, 200−201. 15 Swensen, Moderne, men avleggs, pp. 68−69. There have been discussions about the architectural influences behind the prayer houses. Some have suggested inspiration from local school houses, others from the Moravian assembly halls or the Bethlehem Church in Stockholm (see below); Swensen, Moderne, men avleggs?, pp. 152−153. Hild Sørby, ‘Religiøse forsamlingshus I Stavanger — arkitektur og utsmykning’, in Kunst og pietisme. Noen trekk ved den religiøse kulturen i Rogaland, ed. by Pål Repstad et al. (Stavanger: Rogalandsforskning, 1977), pp. 52−54. 16 For example, Missionshuset (‘The Mission House’) in Fredrikshald or the prayer house in Moss, both built in 1890, or Alvim prayer house outside Sarpsborg, built in 1900. Kai Ørebech, Bedehus i Østfold (Oslo: Lunde forlag, 2006), pp. 146, 184, 231. 17 Ørebech, Bedehus i Østfold, p. 28. Kurt E. Larsen, ‘De 1073 danske missionshuse, deres internationale baggrund og særpreg’, in Vekkelsens møtesteder, ed. by Arne Bugge Amundsen, Bibliotheca historico-ecclesiastica lundensis, 57 (Lund: Lunds Universitets Kyrkohistoriska arkiv, 2014), pp. 106−107. 18 Ørebech, Bedehus i Østfold, p. 283. Arne Bugge Amundsen, ‘“Naar Stormen kommer, tager Fuglen afsted”. Erik Tønnesen og indremisjonen i Fredrikstad-distriktet 1850−1880’, in MindreAlv V (Fredrikstad: Fredrikstad Museum, 1992–1993), pp. 51–74. 19 Martin Dehli, Fredrikstad bys historie II (Fredrikstad: Fredrikstad kommune, 1964), pp. 470−71. Ørebech, Bedehus i Østfold, pp. 88−89.

c h urc h a rc hitectur e in eighteen th- a nd  nineteenth- century norway

building to Erik Tønnesen’s activities, but they were not bound to him. That became very important when so-called neo-Evangelical preachers and influences reached the FredrikstadSarpsborg area in the 1870s. Tønnesen very much opposed this new interpretation of the Pietist message and tried to prevent it from spreading, but his campaign failed, and he left the local Inner Mission Society. Some groups stayed loyal to Tønnesen and his conservative message, but since the two prayer houses in principle were independent of him, the boards permitted the new Inner Mission Society to have meetings there. The neo-Evangelical trends of the 1870s created a new generation of migrant preachers, with much more expansive and ambitious strategies. Again, the city of Fredrikstad might be used as an example. In 1874, when Erik Tønnesen’s activities were marginalized, a new local society for inner mission was established — the new Inner Mission Society. Their meetings started in Samfundshuset as a contrast to Tønnesen’s previous activities there, and they also started a school, an orphanage, and a charity. In 1887, this new Inner Mission Society built its own prayer house, called Bethel. Their meetings and activities were also arranged in schools owned by the many industrial sawmills in the area. In the period between 1883 and 1908, the Inner Mission Society built up an impressive regional consortium of new prayer houses, to which they could send their preachers.20 This development is quite typical for Norway in the late nineteenth century. There are local variations, of course, and an important factor has been the independence of the prayer house. Some of them remained independent and local, others — mostly from the 1870s onwards — were linked to regional or national organizations for inner mission, among which Den norske Lutherstiftelse (‘The Norwegian Luther Foundation’), established in 1868, was the most important.21 Denominational Competitions on the Religious Landscape From the last part of the nineteenth century, the Scandinavian countries allowed their citizens to join non-Lutheran churches. In Norway, the Dissenter Act (Dissenterloven) of 1845 paved the way for non-Lutheran churches to establish themselves in Norway. Their position was very different from the Pietist revival groups, since they actively sought to demonstrate their opposition and subversive attitude to the Lutheran state church. By 1843, two years before the Dissenter Act, Roman Catholics were allowed to perform rituals in a provisory chapel in the capital, Christiania,22 and in 1856 they built their own church in the city, St Olav’s Church. The church had as its main relic what was regarded as an arm of the most important Norwegian medieval saint, St Olav (d. 1030), through which the Roman Catholics wanted to appropriate a legitimate historical connection to the historical period so significant for the construction of a national identity in Norway. The first Roman Catholic church in Trondhjem,23 consecrated in 1902, was also dedicated to St Olav.

20 Ørebech, Bedehus i Østfold, pp. 57−59. 21 In 1891, named Det norske lutherske Indremissionsselskab (’The Norwegian Lutheran Society for Inner Mission’). 22 From 1877, the official spelling of the name of the city was Kristiania, and in 1924 its name was changed to Oslo. 23 From 1930, the official name of the city has been Trondheim.

113

114

a r n e b ugge amun dsen

Figure 4. St Bridget’s Roman Catholic Church, Fredrikstad, built in 1899, deconsecrated in 1990. Photographed c. 1920−30. (Photo: Wikimedia — Anton Olsen) [accessed 10 March 2022].

In many other parts of Norway, the Catholics established their activities and built churches. In Fredrikshald (Halden), St Peter’s Church, designed by the Dutch architect Pierre Cuypers (1827–1921), was built in neo-Gothic style in 1877.24 In Alta in Finnmark, a mission was established in 1855, and in 1878 a church was consecrated, but replaced by a new one as early as 1885. In Alta and elsewhere, the Roman Catholic religious activities were closely accompanied by charity and medical care by nuns, often of the Order of St Joseph (CSJ). That was the case in Kristiansand, Bergen (St Paul’s 1876), and Fredrikstad, where the first church was built in 1882, replaced in 1899 by St Bridget’s Church designed in a national dragon style by the architect Ole Sverre (1865–1952) (Figure 4).25 A similar design based on drawings by the same architect was given to Catholic churches in Stavanger (St Swithun’s) in 189826 and Drammen in 1899.27 Even more striking was the Roman Catholic church in Porsgrunn (The Church of Our Lady), replacing a chapel from 1890. The new church in

24 Geir Tandberg Steigan, ‘Fra Fredrikshalds murarkitektur: St Peters kirke, Kristian V plass 1’, in Artemisia, 2003: [accessed 10 March 2022]. 25 Lars Ole Klavestad, Arkitekturen i Fredrikstad. Arkitektur- og byplanhistorien 1567–2017 (Fredrikstad: Gyldenstierne forlag, 2014), p. 135. Geir Tandberg Steigan, ‘Fredrikstad: Metodistkirken, Ridehusgaten 7’, in Artemisia, 2001: [accessed 10 March 2022]. 26 Hundre år i St Svithuns by 1898–1998. Jubileumsskrift for den katolske menighet i Stavanger (Stavanger: St Svithuns katolske menighet, 1999), pp. 11−13. 27 St Laurentius. Drammen katolske menighet 1899−1999 (Drammen: Drammen katolske menighet, 2000).

c h urc h a rc hitectur e in eighteen th- a nd  nineteenth- century norway

Figure 5. The Methodist church in Skien, built in 1887. (Foto: Norske kirker) [accessed 10 March 2022].

Porsgrunn was consecrated in 1899, designed by the Norwegian architect Haldor Larsen Børve (1857–1933) in the style of a Norwegian stave church from the Middle Ages.28 An important factor behind the establishment of Roman Catholic congregations and churches in Norway was the royal benefactors. The two first Bonaparte monarchs of Sweden and Norway (Carl III/XIV Johan, 1763−1844, and Oscar I, 1799–1859) had queens who remained Roman Catholics for their entire life — Desideria (1777–1860) and Josephine (1807–1876), and they both used political networks and national and foreign economic resources to support this church. In the nineteenth century, most Norwegian Catholics were of foreign origin, and the dominant opinion in Norway was fervently anti-Catholic, so the actual number of conversions was small. Another dissenting Christian denomination was the Methodist church, introduced around 1850 by Norwegian sailors and rapidly expanding in urban and industrialized societies in southern Norway. The first congregations were established in the 1850s (Fredrikshald 1856, Sarpsborg 1856, Porsgrunn 1858, Mysen 1860), followed later in Fredrikstad in 1863 (1861),29 Christiania in 1865, Skien in 1873, Kjølberg in 1878, Bergen in 1879, Trondhjem in 1881, Tromsø in 1888, and Lisleby and Hamar in 1889. In all these places, the Methodists

28 Carl Lund, Porsgrund 1807–1907. Et Hundreaars Minde (Porsgrunn: Br. Dybings Bogtrykkeri, 1907), p. 36. 29 Dehli, Fredrikstad bys historie II, p. 469. Martin Dehli, Fredrikstad bys historie III (Fredrikstad: Fredrikstad kommune, 1973), p. 126. Geir Tandberg Steigan, ‘Fredrikstad: Metodistkirken, Ridehusgaten 7’, in Artemisia, 2001: [accessed 10 March 2022].

115

116

a r n e b ugge amun dsen

began their activities in buildings not constructed for religious purposes, but formal churches were built a few years after the establishment of congregations. The Methodist churches were rather conservative in design, mostly with neo-Gothic windows and doors, eventually also church towers — but not belfries. Fredrikshald30 Methodist church was built in 1857. It even had a churchyard of its own until 1919,31 but that was extraordinary. The Methodist church in Skien, inaugurated in 1887 after a devastating fire in the town, was designed by its own pastor, Johannes Arbo Wiel (1856–1942) (Figure 5).32 The first Methodist congregation in Christiania was organized in 1865, and their church — with no tower — was built 1874 in a neo-Roman style. The ambitions for the church were high, with room for one thousand persons.33 There are many similarities between the Norwegian Methodist churches and the Lutheran Free church, established in the 1870s as a protest against the legal and theological ties between the Lutheran church of Norway and the Norwegian State. In the early churches built by theses dissenters, neo-Gothic or neo-Roman style was preferred, often including symbolic church towers. One example was the Lutheran Free church in the eastern part of Christiania. The congregation was established in 1878 and its neo-Roman church built in 1885.34 A similar example is found in Kristiansand, where a Lutheran Free church was established in 1877 and a church inaugurated the same year. The churches indicated strong cultural links with the religious culture of the prayer houses.35 Similarly discrete were the Norwegian Baptist churches, established in many parts of the country since the 1860s, as offsprings of dissenting religious groups who left the Norwegian Lutheran church one decade earlier, and whose leader was the former Lutheran vicar Gustav Adolf Lammers (1802–1878). In most cases, these local congregations built or rented small houses or rooms and refurbished them for their own purposes, especially the baptism of adult believers. When formal churches were built, they resembled assembly halls more than Protestant churches, for instance, in Tromsø, where a Baptist church was built in 1872.36 Norway also saw the construction of more free and open buildings for Christian missionary work in urban areas, often designed and planned by groups supporting one specific, charismatic preacher free of territorial state church organization. One example is the impressive Calmeyergatens Missionshus (‘The Mission House of Calmeyer Street’) in Christiania, built in neo-Gothic style in 1891 based on drawings by the architect Henrik Nissen (1848–1915) (Figure 6). The initiative was taken by the non-confessional preacher 30 From 1928, the name of the city has been Halden. 31 Jan-Tore Egge, ‘Halden metodistkirke’, in Norske Kirker: [accessed 10 March 2022]. 32 Jan-Tore Egge, ‘Skien metodistkirke’, in Norske Kirker: [accessed 10 March 2022], and Geir Tandberg Steigan, ‘Fra Skiens murarkitektur: Metodistkirken, Telemarksgaten 3’, in Artemisia, 2003: [accessed 10 March 2022]. 33 Trygve Hammelbo, ed., Oslo første metodistmenighet 1865–1945 (Oslo: Typografia Boktrykkeri, 1945). 34 Geir Tandberg Steigan, ‘Arkitektur og historie i Oslo: Østre frikirke, Lakkegaten 47’, in Artemisia, 2004: [accessed 10 March 2022]. 35 Tor Tønnessen, ‘Kristiansand frikirke’, in Agderkultur, 2006: [accessed 10 March 2022]. 36 Peder Stiansen, Baptistkirkens historie i Norge. Første del inntil 1880 (Oslo: Norsk litteraturselskap, 1935).

c h urc h a rc hitectur e in eighteen th- a nd  nineteenth- century norway

Figure 6. The mission house in Calmeyer Street, Christiania, built in 1891, photographed in 1957, and demolished 1974. (Photo: Digitalt museum) [accessed 10 March 2022].

Otto Treider (1856–1928), and the house — partly paid by Treider himself — was exceedingly ambitious with room for five thousand persons, which made it the largest religious building in Scandinavia at the time. Responses from the National Lutheran Church As can be understood from the previous overview, the Lutheran state churches in Scandinavia were confronted with a number of challenges during the nineteenth century: liberal politicians arguing the differentiation between civil rights and religious practice, new religious societies within the Lutheran churches challenging the ideological monopoly of the clergy, aggressive competition from new Christian denominations on the territorial monopoly of religion, and growing indifference concerning religion in general among all classes of society. The eighteenth-century solutions to these challenges had been Pietism and theological Enlightenment; the main nineteenth-century Lutheran solutions were confessionalization, aesthetization, and modernization. The considerable growth of new Christian congregations and churches changed the religious landscape of most Scandinavian cities. Roman Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Lutheran Free churches, and Pietist groups within the Lutheran state churches built their own prayer houses and churches. This development called for action and new strategies from the state churches, which tried to dispel the new competition with debates, control — and new and impressive

117

118

a r n e b ugge amun dsen

churches placed in new demographic centres. And there are indications that justify calling these actions and strategies reactions — the representatives of the Scandinavian state churches were not prepared for or supportive of the changes, but as spokesmen of the majority culture they had to respond and react to make the changes as small as possible and to stay in control. Confessionalization had several elements: one was the new interest in the Lutheran confessional legacy; another was a new focus on the national dimensions of Lutheranism. Since the three Scandinavian countries developed a clearer distinction between citizenship and church membership during the nineteenth century, competition over the national religious landscapes increased significantly in importance. To claim historical and cultural legitimacy within national and local borders and structures was a rational and emergent response from representatives of the Lutheran churches. In Norway, the new self-consciousness of the Lutheran state church as a separate institution with its own history and identity initiated the new concept of Den norske Kirke (‘The Norwegian church’). Aesthetization was also part of the Lutheran state church strategy. The question raised by many decision-makers was how new aesthetic principles might contribute to secure the continuous success of the Lutheran church in a new, competitive situation. Another question raised concerned confessionally specific elements of a Lutheran aesthetics. Modernization was the third part of the Lutheran state church strategy in Scandinavia. As in the century after the Reformation, demography, ideology, and economy were important factors. The population was growing, an increasing part of the populations settled in cities and urban areas, and it was in these areas that the new dissenting religious movements and churches were most successful. In such a situation, the question of how the Lutheran church buildings could house, convince, and appeal to believers and non-believers became urgent. These processes and ideas did not develop in an isolated Scandinavian church culture. New influences and ways of thinking in the field of confessional reorienting and church architecture found their way to the three countries in the north, especially from Lutheran Germany. From the last part of the eighteenth century, neoclassicism, with its references to ancient Greek and Roman aesthetics, dominated. The Baroque expressions were regarded as old-fashioned and unsuitable to express modern religious feelings and theological ideals. Simplicity, light colours, and motifs with direct appeal to both Pietist and enlightened piety replaced old ideas. The model of the pulpit-altar-organ construction of church interiors was often preferred in new churches, characteristically used in octagon churches to ensure optimal acoustics and visibility for the congregation.37 The religious experience should not be disturbed by complex iconography — instead of the Baroque altarpieces, a simple, golden cross or an easy-to-read meditative motif was recommended. In Denmark and Norway, the new Church of Our Lady in Copenhagen (consecrated 1829) was an important model: on the altar was placed the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen’s (1770–1844) monumental figure of Christ, in white marble and with open, inviting arms and a warm and friendly gaze. In Norway, this model found a counterpart in the neoclassical Immanuel Church in Fredrikshald, designed by Christian Heinrich Grosch (1801–1865) and built in

37 Sørmoen, 1700-tallet, pp. 33−35; Lindahl, Högkyrkligt, pp. 23−25.

c h urc h a rc hitectur e in eighteen th- a nd  nineteenth- century norway

Figure 7. The Immanuel Church in Fredrikshald, designed by Christian Heinrich Grosch and built in 1828−33. (Photo: Wikipedia) [accessed 10 March 2022].

the years 1828–1833 (Figure 7).38 A similar copy was also placed on the altar in the cathedral of Trondhjem, as a personal gift from the sculptor himself.39 However, aesthetic ideals were one thing, practical realities — for instance, lack of money or local affinition to older furnishings — were another. An interesting example is Langestrand Church in Norway, built in 1818 and designed by a local architect, Hans Christian Lind (1753–1820), who had studied at the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen. The light-coloured church replaced an older, Baroque church, and had a simple and clear-cut pulpit-altar construction. However, some of the old furnishing was transferred to the new church — e.g., the baptismal font and a number of old-fashioned paintings. The original plans put a simple cross on top of the altar, but it is unclear if that part of the design plan was conducted.40 Another example is Hadsel Church in northern Norway, an octagon church built in 1824, replacing an older church. Hadsel Church has many similarities with Langestrand Church, but an altarpiece from c. 1520 was put on the altar, and a late-fifteenth-century sculpture of St Olaf was placed between the altar and the pulpit. In addition, a large number of seventeenth-century paintings, both portraits of vicars and their families and devotional paintings, were transferred to the new church.41 38 Eldal, Med historiske forbilder, p. 33. 39 Trygve Lysaker, Høyalteret i Nidarosdomen, Småskrifter nr. 11 (Trondheim: Nidaros domkirkes restaureringsarbeiders forlag, 1996), p. 13. 40 Arne Bugge Amundsen, Enighet og uenighet i 400 år. Kirkene på Langestrand, Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning, Serie B, Skrifter CLXXI (Oslo: Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning, 2018), pp. 125−27; Jens Christian Eldal, Med historiske forbilder. 1800-tallet. Kirker i Norge III (Oslo: Arfo, 2002), p. 24. 41 Ane Solvik Grydeland, Hadsel kirke 1824−1999 (Stokmarknes: Hadsel kirkes venner, 1999).

119

12 0

a r n e b ugge amun dsen

In post-1814 Norway, the new Ministry of Church and Education played an active role in church building and church architecture. Unlike the situation in Sweden, this political control over church building plans was a novelty in Norway.42 Norway’s few architects were educated in Denmark. Of great importance were the aforementioned Christian Heinrich Grosch43 and Hans Ditlev Frants von Linstow (1787–1851). Grosch designed around eighty churches, of which ten had an octagon shape. Von Linstow was hired to design the new Royal Palace in Christiania and he was also occupied with theatre architecture. In his writings, there are few theological reflections, but there was a concern about the effects on people’s minds and the economy of the local congregation. In 1829, von Linstow published models for new rural church design in Norway, models that were widely used — around eighty churches, among them many octagon churches — were built according to von Linstow’s neoclassic models.44 Neoclassicism was, however, profoundly challenged around the mid-nineteenth century. From Lutheran, Anglican, and Roman Catholic leading theologians and architects, the Christian Middle Ages and especially the Gothic aesthetics came to be regarded as the most genuine expression of Christian culture and piety. Confronted with modernism and secularism, the neo-Gothic style was described as the Christian architectural style, while the ideals of neoclassicism were regarded as secular, theatrical, and heathen.45 Von Linstow did not follow up on this new development, but Grosch did — as did von Linstow’s assistant from 1838, the German architect Heinrich Ernst Schirmer (1814–1887), and Wilhelm von Hanno (1826–1882), another German architect who settled in Christiania. Grosch, Schirmer, and von Hanno designed a large number of Norwegian churches in the neo-Gothic style, some of them with very simple interiors and just a golden cross as altar decoration — as was the case with Balsfjord Church from 1856, designed by Grosch (Figure 8). The last part of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented number of new churches built in Norway. The background was a law passed by the Parliament in 1851 stating that all privately owned churches46 were to be sold to the local congregations / municipalities and that all churches should have room for at least 30 per cent of the members of the congregation. The proposed law had been through many political debates, mostly concerning the legal rights of the private church owners.47 However, the new law had many other important elements: the ownership of the churches was linked to the territorial church structure, the congregation, the churches should be well kept in order to appeal to the new religious ideals, and they should be able

42 Eldal, Med historiske forbilder, pp. 12−13. 43 Elisabeth Seip, ed., Chr. H. Grosch — arkitekten som ga form til det nye Norge (Oslo: P. Hammers forlag, 2001). 44 Hans Ditlev Frants Linstow, Udkast til Kirkebygninger paa Landet i Norge (Christiania: G. L. Fehr, 1829); see Eldal, Med historiske forbilder, pp. 25−27. 45 Henrik von Achen, ‘Fighting the Disenchantment of the World: The Instrument of Medieval Revivalism in Nineteenth-Century Art and Architecture’, in Devotional Cultures of European Christianity, 1790–1960, ed. by Henning Laugerud and Salvador Ryan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012), pp. 131–54. Eldal, Med historiske forbilder, pp. 36−38. 46 Most Norwegian rural churches were sold by the crown in the 1720s as a solution to cover the enormous state debt created by the long-standing war with Sweden. 47 Eldal, Med historiske forbilder, pp. 13−14.

c h urc h a rc hitectur e in eighteen th- a nd  nineteenth- century norway

Figure 8. Balsfjord Church, designed by Christian Heinrich Grosch and built in 1856. The altarpiece with the golden cross was a votive gift from the local vicar in 1897. (Photo: Arne Bugge Amundsen).

to house a substantial number of congregation members. This was confessionalization, aestheticization, and modernization in one! And the result was astonishing. Between 1850 and 1910 no less than 720 new churches were built.48 A large number of medieval stone and stave churches were torn down and replaced by modern neo-Gothic churches designed according to the new ideals. The contestation from the revivalist groups and the dissenting churches was met with new ideals of church buildings and liturgical space. The old churches, with references to the former static and paternalistic society, with Baroque, Renaissance, or pre-Reformation furnishing, were replaced by churches referring to the medieval Gothic aesthetics, but with no links to the immediate past. The neo-Gothic churches were functional, with much light, were easy to keep clean, and were warm, and with furnishings that both referred to and also competed with the prayer houses or the mission halls. The altar pieces were simple, Bible orientated, easy-to-read paintings depicting central Jesus motifs — e.g., the Resurrection or the meetings between Jesus and his disciples, or in some cases just a golden cross. Not even existing churches were left untouched by the new ideals. Trøgstad Church in southeastern Norway, a stone church from the Middle Ages, caused a bitter, local conflict over church economy, religious ideals, and historical legacy. The 1851 law demanded changes,

48 Eldal, Med historiske forbilder, pp. 11−12.

1 21

12 2

a r n e b ugge amun dsen

Figure 9. The church of Western Fredrikstad, built 1880. The interior is simple, with a painting by Wilhelm Peters (1851−1935) as altarpiece — with the motive ‘Jesus curing a blind man’. The stained-glass windows by Emanuel Vigeland (1875−1948) were donated to the church in 1917. (Photo: Digitalt museum) [accessed 10 March 2022].

but the local wish to protect the result of past generations’ investment and piety resulted in a compromise. The medieval church was extended with the aim of keeping its ‘medieval’ identity, while the interior was totally refurbished in 1904 in a strange combination of neo-Gothic elements, historicism, and prayer house ideology.49 The new aesthetic orientation among State Church representatives competed with a new, revivalist-oriented piety. Again, Fredrikstad in southeastern Norway will serve as an example: in the last part of the nineteenth century, the city was structurally changed by industrialization and mass immigration, with substantial conflicts as a consequence. The old social and cultural structures collapsed, and the inner mission activities and the dissenting religious opposition against tradition and authority was quite dominant. The city church was located in a marginalized part of the religious landscape, and the surrounding rural municipality tried to compensate for this by building a new — neo-Gothic — church in 1853. However, contemporary commentators argued that this new church with room for 600 persons could not meet the needs of a population of 10,000! But state church changes took time. In the meantime, the Methodists had built their church in the new part of the city, and other dissenting churches were proudly and self-consciously expanding — Baptists, Roman Catholics, and other ‘free’ groups opposing the historical territories of the Lutheran state church. Finally, in 1880, a new, impressive Lutheran church was built in the middle of the new city centre, with its own congregational borders and served by a vicar and a

49 Arne Bugge Amundsen, ‘En demokratisering av kirkerommet? Norske kirker på 1800-tallet’, Fortidsminneforeningen. Årbok 2013 (2013), pp. 91−110.

c h urc h a rc hitectur e in eighteen th- a nd  nineteenth- century norway

chaplain. The architect was Waldemar Ferdinand Lühr (b. 1848) and the new church had room for 1200 persons (Figure 9). The tower overshadowed any other building in the city.50 In other churches, the medieval or early post-Reformation wall paintings or other interior elements were covered with white paint, and the old order of church benches was replaced with open structures disconnected from the social order of the local society.51 What About ‘The Old’? With the Scandinavian Lutheran state churches sticking to the strategies of confessionalization, aestheticization, and modernization — what about the problem of ‘the old’, the old churches with references to church history and older aesthetic preferences? In the national awakenings of the nineteenth century, the material heritage was addressed, not least the medieval parts of it, while post-Reformation churches were not afforded much honour or attention. The investigation and revitalization of the medieval past, on the other hand, was left with private organizations, museums, architects, politicians, and academic research. The revival movements did not address questions of material cultural heritage, and there was — with a few exceptions — little room for such questions in the debates within the state churches.52 In Norway, the mortal blow to many of the old churches was the law of 1851, starting an impressive modernization process of local churches. This process, however, called for action from concerned citizens on a national level. In 1844, Foreningen for norske Fortidsmindesmærkers Bevaring (‘The National Trust of Norway’) was established, supported by artists, civil servants, and academics. This organization took part in public debates arguing the cultural value of preserving the nation’s material culture, not least the stave churches. The Trust eventually managed to buy some significant medieval churches, thus preserving them for the future. This happened, for example, with the stave church in Borgund in 1877. The church had been in regular use until 1868, when a new church, designed by architect Christian Christie (1832–1906) was built a few hundred meters from the stave church. Christie designed a church with clear references to the old stave church structure, but he omitted any elements referring to the Roman Catholic past (Figure 10). This preservation and conservation strategy generally was not rooted in a concern for the future of the Lutheran church of Norway, but focused on the medieval heritage of the young Norwegian nation. The most important Norwegian example of this process is the cathedral of Trondhjem. For centuries, this church had been regarded by historians as the most important symbol of the heroic national past of a country that had only regained its cultural and intellectual independence in 1814. In the constitution of 1814, Trondhjem Cathedral was appointed the future venue for royal crowning ceremonies. Accordingly, political debate ended by declaring the cathedral a national monument that was in urgent

50 Dehli, Fredrikstad bys historie III, pp. 127−29; Klavestad, Arkitekturen i Fredrikstad, pp. 125−27. 51 Sørmoen, 1700-tallet, pp. 42−44. 52 See Arne Bugge Amundsen, ‘Pastoralt kulturminnevern: Gerhard Schøning, Jacob Neumann og Magnus Brostrup Landstad’, Fortidsminneforeningen. Årbok 2019 (2019), pp. 9−26.

1 23

12 4

a r n e b ugge amun dsen

Figure 10. The Borgund stave church from c. 1200 and the Borgund church from 1868, designed by Christian Christie. (Photo: Axel Lindahl, 1892). [accessed 10 March 2022]

Figure 11. The cathedral in Trondhjem before extensive restoration: photograph of the western part of the church, unknown date. (Photo: Wikimedia) [accessed 10 March 2022].

c h urc h a rc hitectur e in eighteen th- a nd  nineteenth- century norway

Figure 12. The cathedral in Trond­ hjem after extensive restoration: photograph of the western part of the church, unknown date. (Photo: Wikimedia) [accessed 10 March 2022].

need of reconstruction in 1869 (Figure 11). In the following decades, the cathedral was rebuilt and reconstructed, all elements of post-Reformation church furnishing were removed, and the search for the tombs of St Olav and other medieval Norwegian kings started (Figure 12).53 With Norway and the Trondhjem cathedral project as perhaps the most striking Scandinavian example, a last development of the religious material culture can be identified. The Middle Ages and the material symbols of the glorious religious past were nationalized and made part of new national narratives of self-conscious Scandinavian nations. This strategy was not part of the Pietist or confessional debates over piety, church organization, or religious territorial control. On the contrary, the debate over national heritage presupposed a de-confessionalization of history and of medieval churches: they were not remnants of a Roman Catholic past, but of past national glory.

53 Øystein Ekroll, ed., Katedralbyggerne. Nidarosdomens gjenreisning 1869−2019 (Trondheim: Museumsforlaget, 2019).

1 25

126

a r n e b ugge amun dsen

Norwegian Religious Aesthetics of the Nineteenth Century — Some Concluding Remarks Nineteenth-century Norway — as in fact all of Scandinavia — was a vibrant laboratory for new religious expressions and aesthetics, uses of history, and competitions over territorial landscapes. The Lutheran state churches attempted to sustain their social and cultural control based on the old territorial system of religious belonging and devotion. To demonstrate their historical and aesthetical superiority, the state churches developed strategies for building dominant, impressive churches according to new aesthetic preferences. This strategy was, however, not convincingly successful if the aim was to prevent further religious diversity. The religious Pietist awakenings and the intrusion of new, dissenting religious groups and churches nurtured new ideals of religious community, social interaction, and non-territorial belonging. The new material religious landscapes were shaped by believers following a preacher, searching for their equals. Their culture was expressed through houses built at their own cost, controlled by themselves, and furbished according to their aesthetic preferences. Their main occupation was the success of the Divine Word preached and interpreted by authorities appointed by them and supported by a local group. Especially in rural districts, the new religious landscape framed closed communities different from the territorial communality of pre-modern society. The aesthetics of these communities was expressed through the simple, wooden prayer house built and controlled by themselves, often as an architectural extension of the Christian household. It was an architecture with freedom and simplicity as its ideological references — no external authority could interfere or decide its use and interpretation, and there was little room for the use of professional architects and artists. In the new urban religious landscapes of the nineteenth century, the competition between the different churches and groups was more explicit and the boundaries between the closed communities of believers rather fluent. Free preachers, non-Lutheran denominations, and inner mission societies formally loyal to the Lutheran state churches built new buildings and constructed new symbolic territories. This competition had different levels and dimensions. To some of the most radical groups, like the Baptists or the more successful free preachers, the references to traditional Lutheran churches were of no relevance. Instead, their models were taken from Anglo-American ‘tabernacles’ and assembly halls with the charismatic religious leader as the main person. That demonstrated the otherness and the radical critique of the existing religious material culture. Others, e.g., the Methodists, more discretely copied the neo-Gothic style, thus referring both to the new churches of the Lutherans and to English Methodist chapels — with one, important difference: the Methodist churches did not have belfries. Even the Roman Catholic churches came to influence some of the larger cities. These churches had belfries, thus also competed across the urban soundscapes, they dedicated their churches to old national saints, and they actively connected their churches to medieval church architecture. Among the nineteenth-century dissenters, the Roman Catholics were the most conscious of tradition and history. The Roman Catholic architecture and aesthetics of the nineteenth century appropriated the national medieval legacy, with its references to stave churches and saints. Without doubt, this can be interpreted as a territorial reclaiming of Norway.

c h urc h a rc hitectur e in eighteen th- a nd  nineteenth- century norway

During the nineteenth century, the physical and symbolic structure of the material religious landscapes in Norway was profoundly changed. Church geography in 1900 was radically different from church geography in the year 1800.54 Many dimensions of change have been important here. Demography changed radically, with an increasing proportion of the population living in cities. The urban population included important groups of immigrants and of people bringing with them religious influences from other parts of the world. This meant that religious aesthetics became more international: the Methodist churches had references to both English chapels and neo-Gothic Lutheran churches. The Baptist churches consciously resented the Lutheran neo-Gothic aesthetics. And the Roman Catholic churches tried to surpass the neo-Gothic modernism by imitating medieval national aesthetics. During the nineteenth century, the role of architects to develop the new Lutheran church aesthetics is impressive. A small number of architects with an international educational background found Norway an interesting arena for exploring and developing national, confessional aesthetics. Norway, with growing self-consciousness and increasing economic strength, gave them opportunities to adjust new ideals to national identity building. With new influences, also in the Lutheran state churches, ideology changed, and the quest both for confessional identities and new aesthetic expressions of these identities was begun. During these changes, the important question was of the balance between historical legacy and urgent change, a question that is always connected to a historical religion like Christianity. In nineteenth-century Norway, the differences between urban and rural religious landscapes became more explicit, but in general the century was dominated by an increasing competition about modernization, aesthetics, visibility, and cultural capital.

54 See Carola Nordbäck, ‘Trons mötesplatser. Ett kyrko- och väckelsehistoriskt perspektivt’, in Vekkelsens møtesteder, ed. by Arne Bugge Amundsen, Bibliotheca historico-ecclesiastica lundensis, 57 (Lund: Lunds Universitets Kyrkohistoriska arkiv, 2014), pp. 9−52.

1 27

Bernd Roling

Rugia Gothorum Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten and the Tradition of Gothicism

Introduction When Sweden still possessed an empire whose rule reached from Karelia to Jämtland, from Lappland to Wildeshausen near Oldenburg in Germany, the claim to be the natural ruling power of the Baltic region demanded a historical justification.1 The response to these desires for legitimation, as is well known, was the ideology of Gothicism, the foundations of which had been laid by the first apologists of the Swedish nation in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.2 The Getae, the Goths, so it was believed, had once been known throughout the whole ancient world, they had arisen from the Scythians, who had been descendants of Japheth. It was therefore possible to draw a direct line from the first settlers of Sweden, who had arrived in the North straight after the Deluge, back to Noah’s Ark. Sweden had been the mother culture of ancient Europe. The temple of Uppsala described by Adam of Bremen, with its cult of Odin, Thor, and Freya, was thus also the starting point for all the cults and religions of the ancient world.3 Here, as could be read again and again throughout the Swedish domains, a primordial revelation had been presented that had preserved the memory of the Old Testament belief in the Creation, passed down by Noah and the Scythians, and had exported it to Sweden, where it was still present as an echo even in the Edda and other key texts of the Old Norse tradition.



1 I owe special thanks to Orla Mulholland for the translation and Ivo Asmus (Greifswald) and Dorothee Huff (Tübingen) for discussions. 2 On the Swedish national ideology of Gothicism, see Johan Svennung, Zur Geschichte des Goticismus (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1967), pp. 1–33; Inken Schmidt-Voges, De antiqua claritate. Gotizismus als Identitätsmodell im frühneuzeitlichen Schweden (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 38–43; see also Ulrike-Christine Sander, ‘I göticismens “järngrepp”: Patriotische Selbstkonstruktion in Schweden von Nicolaus Ragvaldi bis Esaisas Tegnér’, in Abgrenzung — Eingrenzung. Komparatistische Studien zur Dialektik kultureller Identitätsbildung, ed. by Frank Lauterbach, Fritz Paul, and Ulrike-Christine Sander (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2004), pp. 401–64; Tania Preste, ‘I goticismo. Un mito per la costruzione dell’identità svedese (1611–1682)’, Studi Storici, 49 (2008), 473–521; Sten G. Lindberg, ‘“Den ädle vilden”. Om skyterna i svensk historieskrivning’, Fenix. Tidskrift för humanism, 12 (1996), 28–60 (esp. pp. 29–47). 3 Adam of Bremen, Bischofsgeschichte der Hamburger Kirche, in Quellen des 9. und 11. Jahrhunderts zur Geschichte der Hamburgischen Kirche und des Reiches, ed. by Werner Trillmich and Rudolf Buchner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978), Liber IV, §§ 26–27, Latin and German, pp. 470–73. Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 129–146 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.131418

130

b er n d rolin g

With the advancing political success of Sweden, this today rather counterintuitive model had been built up in the seventeenth and eighteenth century into an ever more expansive historical architecture, until finally, with Olaus Rudbeck and his followers, in the Atlantica an almost universalist validity was claimed for it.4 Perhaps also because in this historical architecture both ambition and utopian dreams were combined, it was able to survive as an ideology even after the collapse of the Caroline empire in the Great Northern War; despite all the criticisms made of it in the following period, its echo can be traced long into the nineteenth century.5 Western Pomerania — Vorpommern in German — and its western half of Rügen and Wismar had been part of the area of Swedish rule since the end of the Thirty Years’ War. From the second half of the eighteenth century at the latest, as has been shown above all by Anders Önnerförs, here the members of the academic elite — professors, pastors, civil servants, school teachers at Gymnasia — had reached a very favourable accommodation with the Swedish regime, and in their rhetoric they had made Sweden’s national mythology of Gothicism their own.6 In this chapter I will offer an example of the long-lasting effect of this ideology, which enabled many transformations, namely, the pastor, poet, and professor Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, who is today rightly best known as the idealizing bard of his homeland Rügen. Kosegarten’s extensive work long suffered from lack of interest, but in recent years it has once again been attracting attention. There is a biography of Kosegarten by Lewis Holmes,7 enriched by study on his reception,8 and in the outstanding essay collection of Wilhelm Kühlmann and Horst Langer on the early modern intellectual world of Pomerania he merits a number of studies.9 Kosegarten’s special relationship with Rügen has been stressed once again in an outstanding contribution by





4 Olaus Rudbeck, Atland eller Manheim, dedan Japhetz afkomne, de förnemste Keyserlige och Kungelige Slecht. Atlantica sive Manheim, vera Japheti posterorum sedes ac patria, 4 vols (Uppsala: Curio, 1679–1702). On the ‘Atlantica’ of Olaus Rudbeck, see, e.g., David King, Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World (New York: Three River Press, 2005), pp. 7–254; Gunnar Eriksson, Rudbeck 1630–1702. Liv, lärdom, dröm i barockens Sverige (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2002), pp. 17–190; Jesper Svenbro, ‘L’ideologie “gothisante” et l’Atlantica d’Olof Rudbeck. Le mythe platonicien de l’Atlantide au service de l’Empire suédois du XVIIe siècle’, in Quaderni di storia, 6 (1980), pp. 121–56; see also Kenneth J. Knoespel, ‘Reshaping the Earth: Olof Rudbeck and the Transformation of Sweden’, in Cultural Exchange between European Nations during the Renaissance, ed. by Gunnar Sorelius and Michael Srigley (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1994), pp. 193–212. 5 On the role of Gothicism in Sweden after the collapse, see esp. Jonas Nordin, Ett fattigt men fritt folk. Nationell och politisk självbild i Sverige från sen stormaktstid till slutet av frihetstiden (Stockholm: Ösling, 2000), pp. 328–428. 6 Andreas Önnerfors, Svenska Pommern. Kulturmöten och identifikation 1720–1815 (Lund: University of Lund, 2003), pp. 39–484; see also Andreas Önnerfors, ‘Svenska språkets ställning i den tyska Östersjöprovinsen Pommern 1648–1815’, in Svenska språkets historia i östersjöområdet, ed. by Svante Lagman, Stig Örjan Ohlsson, and Viivika Voodla (Tartu: University of Tartu, 2002), pp. 81–97. 7 Lewis M. Holmes, Kosegarten: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Northern German Poet (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 129–64; see also Dirk Alvermann, ‘Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten (1758–1818). Thematische Annäherungen’, in Mecklenburgische Jahrbücher, 124 (2009), pp. 169–212, and on his poetry pp. 172–79. 8 Lewis M. Holmes, Kosegarten’s Cultural Legacy: Aesthetics, Religion, Literature, Art, and Music (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), esp. pp. 57–69. 9 Klaus Manger, ‘Melancholie und Harmonie in Ludwig Gotthard Kosegartens Lyrik’, in Pommern in der Frühen Neuzeit. Literatur und Kultur in Stadt und Region, ed. by Wilhelm Kühlmann and Horst Langer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), pp. 501–20, or, for example, Gerd-Helge Vogel, ‘Die Bedeutung Ludwig Gotthard Kosegartens für die Herausbildung des frühromantischen Weltbildes bei Caspar David Friedrich’, in Pommern in der Frühen Neuzeit. Literatur und Kultur in Stadt und Region, ed. by Wilhelm Kühlmann and Horst Langer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), pp. 549–62.

rug ia g othorum

Dirk Alvermann.10 I will trace how Kosegarten borrowed elements of Gothicism, while at the same time integrating these borrowed elements into his Enlightenment-Protestant worldview. To this end, I will first consider the role that Pomeranian Gothicists and spokesmen for the Swedish empire had accorded to Pomerania and Rügen in the eighteenth century. I will then give examples of how Kosegarten dealt with these mythologemes, taken first from his topographical descriptions and theological works, then also in his poems, which perhaps became the most emphatic mouthpiece for these inherited motifs. In the process it will become clear that Kosegarten was able to unite Lutheranism, nature-piety, and Gothicism into an original synthesis. Sweden and a Fictional Gothic Rügen The cult of the primordial Gothic sages and belief in a primordial Scytho-Gothic history were in fact amazingly popular in Swedish Western Pomerania. The Pomeranian historian Nicolaus von Klemptzen had made two key claims in his Chronicle of Pomerania, though since his work was not printed, they long remained without influence. The cities of Vineta and Wollin described by Adam of Bremen, so the humanist from Wolgast Klemptzen had insisted, were the oldest cities of the ancient land of Pomerania; at the same time, according to von Klemptzen, it had been the Swedish Goths under their legendary leader King Erik who had been the first to take control of this region, shortly after the birth of Christ.11 In the eighteenth century, these speculations would be picked up again and set within the national myths being aired in Sweden. By 1693, Benjamin Potzerne, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Greifswald, had called upon his contemporaries to write a history of the scholars of Pomerania. For Potzerne, there was no question about who should be placed at the beginning of this history: Anarchasis the Scythian, with whom the history of Gothic learning had begun, so Potzerne believed.12 And Gabriel Lütkemann, who as a theologian in Swedish service climbed as high as governor of Gotland, defended, along with his Swedish respondents, the exceptional position of the skalds with well-worn arguments and guarded the runes against any attempt to interpret them in ways other

10 On Kosegarten’s relationship with Rügen, see Dirk Alvermann, ‘Kosegarten, Rügen und die Liebe’, in Insel im pommrischen Meer. Beiträge zur Geschichte Rügens, ed. by Irmfried Garbe and Nils Jörn (Greifswald: Sardellus Verlag, 2011), pp. 187–216; Dirk Alvermann, ‘Arndt und Kosegarten — zwei rügische Dichter zwischen Gott, Napoleon und Nation’, in Ernst Moritz Arndt (1760–1860). Deutscher Nationalismus — Europa — Transatlantische Perspektiven, ed. by Walter Erhart and Arne Koch (Tübingen: Niemeyer 2007), pp. 77–95, (pp. 83–89); see also Christian von Zimmermann, Ästhetische Meerfahrt. Erkundungen zur Beziehung von Literatur und Natur in der Neuzeit (Hildesheim: Olms, 2015), pp. 144–52. 11 Nicolaus von Klemptzen, Vom Pommer-Landes und dessen Fürsten, Geschlecht-Beschreibung in IV Büchern nach einer alten Handschrift, ed. by Johann Carl Dähnert (Stralsund: Struck, 1771), First Book, pp. 3–5, Second Book, pp. 43–44. The original manuscript, Nicolaus Klemzen, Chronica Pomeranica (Stadtarchiv Stralsund, MS HS 0275) is stored today as part of the former papers of Gottlieb Mohnicke in Stralsund. Copies of the manuscript were widespread throughout the Baltic Sea area. 12 Benjamin Potzerne, Autoschediasma epistolicum ad Germaniae gloriosae Patres conscriptos et cives maxime suos hodie claros quo scribendae B. C. D. Pomerianiae litteratae institutum atque consilium aperit (Greifswald: Weidner, 1693), pp. 13–14; see also Ludolph Ludwig Poetter, Oratio de expeditione Rugiensi (Frankfurt an der Oder: Steppinus 1716), fol. Av–A2r.

1 31

132

b er n d rolin g

than that of the Swedish Gothicists.13 His colleague in Greifswald, Albert Georg Schwartz, assiduously researched the antiquities of ancient Pomerania and made the Swedish myth of the skalds fertile ground for Pomeranian local history.14 The Germans of his homeland, too, were direct descendants of the Scythians; their eloquence had been praised as early as Herodotus and Diodorus, as Schwartz stressed, and their heroes Zalmoxis, Abaris, and Anacharsis had exported their wisdom to Greece.15 Even though the Wends would later force the original ur-Swedish settlers out of Pomerania, it had been these erudite Scythian skalds who, according to Schwartz, had established Gymnasia in the earliest cities of the region, the famous Vineta and Jomsburg.16 The mysterious Jomsburg described by Adam of Bremen, the great Old Norse trading city, which the Greifswald professor placed in Kötzlin, where even in his own times there was a village called Jamen, had been able to become, according to Schwartz, a ‘schola atque officina militaris per omnem septentrionem nobilissima’ (a very noble school and knights’ smithy in the Northern area).17 If one were to believe these professors, the primeval Gothic history of Pomerania was thus the same as a cultural and educational history in no way inferior to Graeco-Roman antiquity.18 Schwartz was not alone in his belief in an original Scythian history of the region: many other authorities might be mentioned. In 1730, Ernst Heinrich Wackenroder had composed another of the great histories of the island of Rügen, his Altes und Neues Rügen (Old and New Rügen). Wackenroder began the history of his island with the Scythians and the Goths, the first settlers of the island. Their druids in their groves, their belief in Valhalla, and their cult of Mercury and Hercules had then been superseded by the Slavonic Wends, who had worshipped Rhadagast and Svantevit.19 A similar approach, though with rather more reserve towards the Swedish Gothicists themselves, was taken by Johann David Jäncke from Cöslin in his Gelehrtes Pommern (Learned Pomerania), produced in 1734: druids and Goths, bearers of culture and first settlers of Rügen, had formed a single

13 Gabriel Timotheus Lütkemann, Olaus Fagerroth (respondens), and Jacob Arnold Düvall (respondens), Dissertatio historica de varia litterarum humaniorum in Suecia fortuna (Greifswald: Struck, 1743–1744), Pars I, §§ 1–4, pp. 5–15. 14 Schwartz had already prepared the key ideas in manuscripts; on Odin, Thor, and Frigg, see Albert Georg Schwartz, Observationes ad Historiam ecclesiasticam gentilem Pomeraniae pertinentes (Universitätsbibliothek Greifswald MS 389, 4°), fol. 12v, fol. 14r–15v; on the Gothic migration and on Odin, see Albert Georg Schwartz, Commentatio academica historico-critica de Pomerania Rugiaque veteri Suecica (Universitätsbibliothek Greifswald MS 35, 2°), Sectio III, §§ 1–9, fol. 3r–4v, and on the immigration in Pommern, see esp. §§ 17–23, fol. 4r–6r. 15 Albert Georg Schwartz and Johannes Wilde (respondens), Commentatio academica de eloquentia purpurata cum veteris orbis tum Pomeraniae atque Rugiae dum gentiles fuerint (Greifswald: Struck, 1740), c. 1, § 9, pp. 13–18. 16 Schwartz and Wilde, De eloquentia purpurata, c. 2, §§ 1–3, pp. 25–28. On Vineta as center of erudition that hosted a school of druydae, see in Greifswald also Georg Christoph Gebhardi, Duae Dissertationes de Wineta et Arcona, nobilissimis quodnam urbibus in Vandalia, iam destructis (Greifswald: Starck, 1691), Dissertatio I, pp. 23–27. 17 Schwartz and Wilde, De eloquentia purpurata, c. 2, § 4, pp. 28–29; see also Albert Georg Schwartz, Commentatio critico-historica de Joms-Burgo Pomeraniae Vandalo-Slavicae inclyto oppido (Greifswald: Struck, 1735), c. 2, pp. 17–26. 18 On the early settlings in Pomerania, see Gustav Heinrich Schwallenberg, Historia Pomeraniae Pragmatica (Szczecin, Archiwum Państwowe, MS RiS 451), pp. 1–5, the first capitals pp. 6–8. 19 Ernst Heinrich Wackenroder, Altes und Neues Rügen, das ist Kurtzgefaßte und umständliche Nachricht von demjenigen, was so wohl in Civilibus, als vornehmlich in Ecclesiasticis mit dem Fürstenthum Rügen von Anfang an bis auf gegenwärtige Zeit sich zugetragen (Greifswald: Löffler, 1730), 1. Theil, 1. Buch, c. 1–3, pp. 1–3, and 1. Theil. 2. Buch, c. 1–5, pp. 11–18.

rug ia g othorum

unity, which must have conferred enormous glamour upon the earliest days of the Swedish province of Pomerania.20 Likewise, the great historian of Greifswald, Thomas Heinrich Gadebusch, had had no problem accepting the primeval Gothic history of Pomerania and Rügen in his early writings; however, at least in his works produced towards the end of the eighteenth century, he had begun cautiously distancing himself from it.21 Thus, over a period of almost a hundred years among German scholars writing on Rügen and the earliest history of their own land, one could speak of a consensus view that was massively favoured by their belonging to the Swedish empire.22 But there is at least one other figure from these years who ought to be mentioned, even though by Kosegarten’s time he no longer commanded a reputation worth having. Remembered as a forger of documents, the pastor Samuel Gottlieb Pristaff was responsible for a whole series of topographical descriptions, which, for the most part, he illustrated lovingly, and he also exerted himself in the study of the medieval remains in the region.23 Pristaff developed a decidedly ingenious iconography around the gods, temples, and heroes of Rügen and Pomerania, depicting both Goths and Wends in equally imaginative ways.24 But he went a step further. Around 1730, under the name Adam Gerschovius, Pastor Pristaff fabricated an extensive Historische und geographische Beschreibung aller zerstörten Städte (Historical and Geographical Description of All Ruined Cities) of the land of Pomerania, which he backdated by sixty years, equipped with his well-practised drawings of the ancient gods, and then had it published in, of all places, Danzig, stronghold of the Sarmatists. In this work, too, Pristaff once again retold with fervour the tale of the Svantevit temple at Arkona,25 described the cult of the god Rügevit as it had been conducted in the fortress of Karenz, and mentioned the god Radegast, worshipped by the Luticians.26 The primeval Nordic city of Vineta was to be located on the island of Usedom,27 so Pristaff reports,

20 Johann David Jäncke, Vorbericht von seiner Abhandlung des Gelehrten Pommer-Landes, bestehend Theils in historischen Beweißthümern, daß die Gelehrsamkeit in Pommern durch die drey merckwürdige Periodos, das es von denen alten Deutschen, Wenden, und darauf von denen Sachsen bewohnet worden, den Zeiten gemäß im Schwange gewesen (Stargard: Tiller, 1732), I. Abtheilung, §§ 2–4, pp. 8–16. 21 Thomas Heinrich Gadebusch, Einleitung in die Geschichte von Pommern unter den eingebohrnen Erbfürsten (Greifswald: Weitbrecht, 1759), Älteste Zeiten, p. 9; also, more sceptically, Thomas Heinrich Gadebusch, Grundriß der Pommerschen Geschichte (Stralsund: Struck, 1778), Erster Abschnitt, §§ 15–16, pp. 11–12. 22 As a remarkable, but unprinted, example regarding the Hertha-temple in Rügen, see Andreas Westphal, Einleitung in die Geschichte von Pommern (Szczecin, Archiwum Państwowe, MS RiS 452), c. 1, § 5, pp. 50–52, and Praefatio §§ 27–30, pp. 38–40, with a long list of authorities on Pomeranian paganism. 23 As an example, see Gottlieb Samuel Pristaff, Nachricht von den meisten Pfarren des alten platten Landes in Schwedisch-Pommern und auf der Insel Rügen (Stadtarchiv Stralsund, MS HS 0704), later owned by Gottlieb Mohnicke, for example, ‘Prospect der Stubbenkammer’ (‘A View of the Stubbenkammer’) fol. 56r, or ‘Eine Rugianische Baurin’ (‘A Rugian Farmerwoman’), fol. 57r. 24 Gottlieb Samuel Pristaff, Abhandlung von den Alt-Pommerisch-Rugianischen Götzen (Universitätsbibliothek Greifswald, MS 49, 2°), fol. 19–28r; and Gottlieb Samuel Pristaff, Abhandlung von den Alt-Pommerischen Göttern (Universitätsbibliothek Greifswald MS 40, 2°), fol. 1r–5r. 25 Adam Gerschovius, Historische und geographische Beschreibung aller zerstörten Städte, Schlösser, Flecken, Dörffer, und anderer Merckwürdiger Orte, ingleichen derer Felder, Clöster des gantzen Pommerlandes aus den alten glaubwürdigen Uhrkunden, Chronicken und Schriften, mit großen Fleiße verfaßet, auch mit aus der Antiquität herfürgesuchten Abrissen zu mehrer Beleuchtung zusammengetragen, Danzig 1670 (Stadtarchiv Stralsund, MS HS 0405), and on Arkona pp. 3–27. 26 Gerschovius, Historische und geographische Beschreibung, pp. 55–62, 161–63. 27 Gerschovius, Historische und geographische Beschreibung, pp. 246–49.

133

134

b er n d rolin g

and another cult image was to be found on the island of Wollin.28 Yet it was not the Slavs who had been the first on Rügen, Pristaff hints. Not far from the Stubbenkammer cliffs on Jasmund had risen the impressive cult image of the Nordic mother goddess Hertha, which Gerschovius’ key authority, a Cistercian monk and chronicler of that order on Rügen, Bernhard of Hiddensee, had still been able to admire and draw in the original in the thirteenth century, as was also the case with the statue of the goddess Rügevit.29 Bernhard’s manuscript on Rügen had reached Oliva, so Pristaff claimed, where Gerschovius had been able to consult it. Despite this double brazenness of furnishing his pseudonym with a corpus of invented sources, Pristaff ’s Gerschovius text was so successful that several copies were made and circulated.30 Kosegarten’s Protestant Aesthetics: A Gothic Mysticism of Nature Pristaff ’s inventions were bound to be found out at some point,31 especially when he tried to support his view of Rügen further by forging runestones and offering them to the Greifswald professor Albert Georg Schwartz, who had initially still accepted his good faith.32 Yet, by the time it all came out, the Protestant pastor’s theses had already gained wide popularity. What we should be clear about is that Kosegarten was familiar with the various versions of Gothicism that circulated around Swedish Pomerania and Rügen and that these imaginative speculations had not lost any of their attractiveness in his day. We should also keep in mind that early nineteenth-century Sweden saw a revival of Gothicism through the ideas of the ‘Götiska Förbundet’, whose most famous protagonists, Jacob Adlerbeth or Eric Gustaf Geijer, remained strongly indebted to their baroque Swedish predecessors.33 In his early historiographical writings, the young Geijer developed a synthesis between

28 Gerschovius, Historische und geographische Beschreibung, pp. 150–55. 29 Gerschovius, Historische und geographische Beschreibung, pp. 226–31. Pristaff also seems to be responsible for a comparable text, namely, A. F., Historische und geographische Beschreibung der Insulen Rügen, Üsedom und Wollin, in welcher alle Merckwürdigkeiten aus alten Uhrkunden entworfen und darbey verzeichnet sind, mit gehörigen Abrissen gestellet (Anno 1662) (Universitätsbibliothek Greifswald, MS 37, 2°), which includes a detailed description of the Hertha-temple, and the cult of this Isis and Magna mater of the Northern people, fol. 185r–218v. 30 As examples, see Adam Gerschow, Historische und Geographische Beschreibung aller Städte, Schlösser, Stecken, Dörffer und anderer merckwürdiger Orte des alten Pommerlandes, Danzig 1670 (Universitätsbibliothek Greifswald, MS 40, 2°), and Adam Gerschow, Historische und geographische Beschreibung aller zerstörten Städte, Schlösser, Flecken, Dörfer und anderen merkwürdigen Örter, imgleichen der Feldklöster des ganzen Pommernlandes, aus alten glaubwürdigen Urkunden, Chroniken und Schriften mit großem Fleiß verfasset und zusammengetragen, Danzig 1670 (Szczecin, Archiwum Państwowe, MS RiS 1381). 31 Pristaff was finally unmasked systematically by Johann Carl Conrad Oelrichs, Historisch-Diplomatische Beyträge zur litterarischen Geschichte fürnehmlich des Herzogthums Pommern (Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung der Realschule, 1790), with a biography and a list of his writings, including extracts of his ‘diplomas’, Appendix 7, § 2, pp. 94–124. 32 Schwartz himself reports the case, see Albert Georg Schwartz, Versuch einer Pommersch- und Rugianischen Lehn-Historie, erhaltend die zum Lehn-Wesen dieser Lande gehörige Geschichte und Merckwürdigkeiten, von den ältesten bis auf die heutigen Zeiten, 2 vols (Greifswald: Struck, 1740), II, p. 1079. 33 On the programme of the ‘Götiska förbundet’, see Rudolf Hjärne, Götiska förbundet och dess hufvudmän. I. Götiska förbundet. Erik Gustaf Geijer (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1878), pp. 7–93; Bo Grandien, Rönndruvans glöd. Nygöticistiskt i tanke, konst och miljö under 1800-talet (Stockholm: Nordiska Museet, 1987), esp. pp. 44–62; see also Anna Wallette, ‘Från göter till germaner. Erik Gustaf Geijers och Viktor Rydbergs tankar om svensk

rug ia g othorum

Indological motifs, the idea of a primordial history, including Odin as central figure, and an almost illuminated approach to pagan religion and its core ideas, with a result that had many similarities with Kosegarten. The majority of Geijer’s important and influential writings nevertheless arose after Kosegarten had died.34 Kosegarten was of course not a Gothicist in the spirit of Swedish nationalist Gothicism, even though as a young man he had delivered enthusiastic speeches to King Gustav III as he made a triumphal progress through the province of Pomerania, and even shortly before his death he still found warm words for the young Karl XV.35 The first speech was part of a wave of panegyrics that captured all Pomerania for the new ruler, and a second ode that Kosegarten devoted in 1813 to Bernadotte as Swedish crown prince was part of his professorial duties.36 But two years later, Swedish rule in Pomerania had finally become history. The old Kosegarten respectfully welcomed Prussian rule in speeches and poems, but was criticized heavily by German nationalists who blamed him for his lack of patriotism. In his History of His 50th Year (Geschichte seines fünfzigsten Lebensjahres), Kosegarten replied that he was accused in vain not to have venerated den dummen Götzen Teutschthum (‘the stupid idol Germany’), because, in his eyes, as Kosegarten emphasized, ‘weil das Menschenthum mir höher steht als das Volkstum, und der Gattung gemeinsames Vaterland höher, als des Einzelnen Heimath’ (‘the idea of mankind was of higher value than the idea of a single nation and the mother country of the human species more precious than the home of single people’).37 As is well known, other representative intellectuals of former Swedish Pomerania, like the Greifswald scholar Friedrich Rühs, quickly moved towards German nationalism and, with much more public opportunism, abandoned any good memories of the former Swedish rulers and their cultural achievements.38 Gothicism, which for a century had been firmly embedded in the learned world of Pomerania, had different connotations for Kosegarten, and his readiness to draw on the pool of images of Swedish national mythology surely will not have been entirely without irony. Gothicism offered Kosegarten a way to link fundamental motifs of his thought — an almost pantheistic nature-mysticism and a basic Protestant outlook sustained by a strong belief in reason — with the distinctive spirit of his homeland Rügen and, as it were, to give this link a historical basis. Belief in a primeval tradition as had been posited by the supporters of the Swedish national mythology formed a bridge across the Middle Ages and

34 35 36 37 38

identitet’, in Det norrøne og det nationale. Studier i brugen af Islands gamle litteratur i nationale sammenhænge i Norge, Sverige, Island, Storbritannien, Tyskland og Danmark, ed. by Annette Lassen (Reykjavík: Stofnun Vigdísar Finnbogadóttur, 2008), pp. 221–38 (pp. 223–29). As an example, see esp. Eric Gustaf Geijer, Svea Rikes Häfder, 2 vols (Uppsala: Palmblad, 1826); in German as Eric Gustaf Geijer, Schwedische Urgeschichte (Sulzbach: Siedel, 1826). Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, Die wahre Grösse der Fürsten. Eine Rede und Hymne an Gustafs von Schweden Einundreissigstem Geburtstage (Stralsund: Struck, 1777). Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, Ode, presentée à son altesse royale Charles Jean Prince Royale de Suède le jour de son entrée joyeuse dans sa ville loyale de Greifswald (Greifswald: Eckhardt, 1813). Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, Geschichte seines fünfzigsten Lebensjahres (Leipzig: Weygand, 1816), pp. 181–84, quotations pp. 181, 183. Friedrich Rühs, Die Vereinigung Pommerns mit der preußischen Monarchie. Schreiben an einen Kaufmann im ehemaligen schwedischen Pommern (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1815), passim; see also Ludwig Biewer, ‘Der Berliner Historiker Christian Friedrich Rühs aus Greifswald und der Anfall Schwedisch-Vorpommerns an Preußen’, in Vom Löwen zum Adler. Der Übergang Schwedisch-Pommerns an Preußen 1815, ed. by Nils Jörn and Dirk Schleinert (Wien: Böhlau, 2019), pp. 107–24, (pp. 119­–24).

135

136

b er n d rolin g

the Reformation, linking the earliest days of religion in the North with Kosegarten’s own ideal of a rational Christianity based on nature-piety, lack of dogma, and selfless devotion. For Kosegarten, prehistoric Nordic Rügen, while it did not offer a natural religion as ideal model for his religious ideas, could nonetheless be turned into a pre-rational prototype upon which he could build. It was at the same time a primeval vision that was able to transfigure the island of Rügen in an almost magical way and so allowed it to profit from the symbolic capital accumulated by Kosegarten’s predecessors in and around Greifswald. Antidogmatic immediacy and belief in the primordial, as they had been taught in these circles in Greifswald, could be interlinked. That this alliance of Lutheranism with Swedish national mythology offers just one possible perspective on Kosegarten is self-evident. It occurs together with other, all-too-familiar motifs, such as the ubiquitous Ossian, the great cypher for poetic authenticity and purity of feeling until the end of the eighteenth century,39 and the spirit of Rousseau, also revered by Kosegarten.40 In addition, there was the cult of the Protestant rectory, the ‘Pfarrhaus’, established by poets such as Johann Heinrich Voss and pursued with all the resources of pastoral, the rectory that Kosegarten, too, chose to celebrate, with the expected sentimentality, both as a source of interiority and pious retreat, and of timeless values of education. But, on the other hand, just how well Kosegarten knew the source materials of the genuine Nordic tradition is revealed by the adaptations of Old Norse subject matter that he had undertaken at an early stage. In the Rhapsodieen (Rhapsodies), we encounter a reworking of the ‘Vegtamsquiða’, Odins Höllenfahrt, (‘Odin’s Voyage to Hell’) and Regner Lodbrogs Sterbelied (‘Elegies of Ragnar Lodbrog’), themes that had been repeatedly treated since the generation of Thomas Percy and which may be counted as classics of their genre.41 In addition to these works produced in the wake of Ossian, there were also versions of Swedish and Danish folk legends that Kosegarten published in his poetry collection Blumen (Flowers) in 1803, here together with new Ossianic variations.42 But, if he had left it at that, Kosegarten could hardly have developed the influence, in relation to Rügen, that he later achieved. That only became possible by making a connection to a Nordic tradition that could be articulated directly in Rügen itself. For Kosegarten, this connection had several components: it had a theological-philosophical component and a historical-genealogical one, but above all it had a poetic dimension in which both history and theology could meet. 39 Recently, Ossian had been translated into Swedish in Kosegarten’s environment; see Ossian, Skaldestycken (3 parts) (Uppsala: Edmans, 1794–1801). On the influence of Ossian in Scandinavia, seethe short summaries of Joseph Bysveen, ‘The Influence of James MacPherson’s Ossian on Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s Kung Fjalar: Some Notes’, in Aberdeen and the Enlightment, ed. by Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), pp. 350–56, and Sanna Nyqvist and Outi Oja, Kirjalliset väärennökset. Huijauksia, plagiaatteja ja luovia lainauksia (Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2018), pp. 141–49; on his influence in Germany in general, see the monumental study of Wolf Gerhard Schmidt, ‘Homer des Nordens’ und ‘Mutter der Romantik’. James MacPhersons Ossian und seine Rezeption in der deutschsprachigen Literatur, 4 vols (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003–2004), passim. 40 For a good summary of the influence of Rousseau at Swedish universities, see Elena Dahlberg, ‘Från förakt till aktning: Rousseau i svenska dissertationer från 1750 till 1815’, in Kritik och beundran. Jean-Jacques Rousseau och Sverige 1750–1850, ed. by Jennie Nell and Alfred Sjödin (Lund: Ellerström, 2017), pp. 97–124. 41 Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, Rhapsodieen, 3 vols (Leipzig: Gräff, 1790–1801), III: ‘Odins Höllenfahrt’, pp. 108–12; Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, ‘Regner Lodbrogs Sterbelied’, in Pommersches Archiv der Wissenschaften und des Geschmacks 3/3 (1784), pp. 137–40. 42 Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, Blumen (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1801), pp. 96–136.

rug ia g othorum Stranded Man’s Letters

In 1790, hidden in the second volume of Rhapsodieen, Kosegarten’s ‘Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen’ (‘Stranded Man’s Letters’) appeared,43 which read like the foundation document of his Rügen myth. The opening circumstances of this account of Rügen match the epistolary novels that were common at the end of the eighteenth century. Two friends, Volker and Hartmut, on a sea voyage from England, (‘Ossian’s Albion’, as it is called), had been driven onto the coast of Rügen. Volker’s letters home paint a panorama of a site of bucolic yearning in which a simple life, an overwhelming and elemental landscape, and the inescapable nature-piety formed a perfect unity. Layer by layer, Volker’s letters penetrate down to the origins and primordial history of the island, which explain Rügen’s distinctive aura. Clichés from pastorals come to the shipwrecked man’s mind almost continuously; Volker realizes that Rügen recalls Petrarch’s Vaucluse, but at the same time he thinks he sees the nymphs of classical antiquity, Horace’s Blandusia, or Theocritus’ Arethusa, but also Gottfried Bürger’s Negenborn, the fountain of youth of this German contemporary, and Rousseau’s Isle of Poplars, where the Genevan philosopher had found his final resting place.44 At other points, Volker feels connected to the Apostle John and his island of Patmos, when under a blue sky and in the sea breeze he eats his buttered bread and coffee on the shore. He himself had been able to escape from the ship with only two books, Aeschylus and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and so in this way he is linking the world with wishes for the future.45 It soon becomes clear that the true heart of the island is the ancient Arkona, seat of the old temple of the gods, the destruction of which had been described by Saxo Grammaticus in his History of the Danes. Here Bishop Absalon of Lund had put an end to the old religion and had the greatest pagan cult site of the Baltic region razed to the ground; here too was where the two friends’ ship had been driven ashore.46 As he hikes through northern Rügen, Kosegarten’s Volker everywhere comes across evidence of the past, which marks out the island for him as a site of archaic religiosity. Was it mere chance that the name of the coastal ravines on Rügen — ‘Liethen’ — was matched in the gorges of the Pyrenees, or was this not rather an indication of a primordial language?47 Behind ‘Arkona’ lay, so Kosegarten believed, not just the word ark, the ‘mountain’, but also kon, the ‘peak’. It was a Mongolian word, as had been shown by the great Swedish explorer of Siberia from Stralsund, Philipp von Strahlenberg, and was thus, so Kosegarten believed, an indication of the origin of the first inhabitants of the island, the Gothic Scythians.48 While Volker admires the Jaromarsburg below Arkona and climbs over Jasmund’s ‘blue 43 Kosegarten, Rhapsodieen, II, pp. 55–134. I will follow the new edition, namely, Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen, ed. by Katharina Coblenz (Bremen: Temmen, 2010). 44 Kosegarten, Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen, pp. 33–34, 87–88. 45 Kosegarten, Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen, p. 40. 46 Kosegarten, Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen, pp. 67–68. 47 Kosegarten, Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen, p. 33. 48 Kosegarten, Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen, p. 69; for Kosegarten, see Philipp Johann Tabbert von Strahlenberg, Das Nord- und Ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia (Stockholm: Krüger, 1730) (Reprint: Szeged, University of Szeged, Studia Uralo-Altaica 8, 1975), Introduction, pp. 125–26; Albert Georg Schwartz, Diplomatische Geschichte der Pommersch-Rügischen Städte Schwedischer Hoheit nach ihrem Ursprung und erster Verfassung (Greifswald: Struck, 1755), Arkona, § 1, pp. 615–16. Schwartz’ description of the temple of Arkona, §§ 7–8, pp. 628–31, was heavily influenced by Pristaff.

137

138

b er n d rolin g

shores’, in his phrase, he thinks himself back into the past and, as if in a dream vision, he runs through the chain of peoples who one after another had taken possession of Rügen. It had all begun with the Scythian Teutons, who had also built the temple of Arkona, then the Suevo-Vandals and Rugians had entered the scene, who would sack Rome in the Age of Migrations, and finally the Wends, whom Kosegarten knew as a peaceful people who had then reconsecrated the temple of Arkona to their god Svantevit. They had left their traces in many place names in the region.49 That Rügen could lay claim to an original Scytho-Gothic population was beyond doubt for Kosegarten. Not far from Arkona, as Volker wanders along the Stubbitz and Stubbenkammer cliffs, he stumbles upon the remains of the temple of Hertha that Pristaff had described still in its original form. Could there be a more vivid witness to the presence of the ancient Scythian Teutons than this temple of Nerthus, at a site where Tacitus had placed the cult of the great Mother Goddess?50 Many other relics of the legendary prehistory of Rügen were to be found, including urn shards and sacrificial knives,51 and finally also the amber that had been described by the ancients and which the fisher-people still gathered at the coast of Hiddensee.52 Also striking for Volker, Kosegarten’s mouthpiece, was how many of the inhabitants possessed spiritual clairvoyance and had the ‘second sight’. When his ship ran aground, one of the ship’s boys, who had been born in the ‘Rauhnächte’, the Twelve Days of Christmas, had foreseen the disaster.53 On the coast, so Volker learned, the same wreck had been foretold by omens, the Wafeln, or phantom appearance, of the ship.54 The connecting link between the old and the new faith was made, finally, by an episode that above all in its form mediates between old and new worlds. After long descriptions of the landscape, the fields, pastures, and rock formations, the letter makes a transition to the pastor of Altenkirchen, in which it is not hard to recognize a self-portrait of Kosegarten himself. This man of God, Finster (‘gloomy’) by name, preaches to the fisher-folk on the shore, in the ‘temple of nature’, as it is called, and has a daughter, to whom Kosegarten gives the traits of his own young daughter Alwina. With the two of them Volker visits the church of Altenkirchen and gazes with awe upon the stone of the god Svantevit, with the sacrificial horn in his hands, which is even now preserved in the masonry. In the fields, the pastor’s daughter asks who made the sun; there follows a short catechism that introduces the child to the belief in a Creator God who fills the world with his love.55

49 Kosegarten, Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen, pp. 44–45, 69–71. 50 Kosegarten, Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen, pp. 87–90; on the same ‘temple’ later on, see Johann Carl Friedrich Rellstab, Ausflucht nach der Insel Rügen durch Meklenburg und Pommern (Berlin: Rellstab, 1797), pp. 81–82; and with a rich discussion Johann Friedrich Zöllner, Reise durch Pommern nach der Insel Rügen und einem Theile des Herzogthums Mecklenburg, im Jahre 1795 (Berlin: Maurer, 1797), Dreizehnter Brief, pp. 246–62; Karl Nernst, Wanderungen durch Rügen, ed. by Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten (Düsseldorf: Denzer, 1800), pp. 246–81; Treumund Welp (Eduard Pelz), Wanderungen im Norden. Bemerkungen auf einer Reise durch Esthland, Finnland, Schweden, Dänemark und die Insel Rügen nach Schlesien, 3 vols (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1844), II, c. 23, pp. 262–66. 51 Kosegarten, Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen, p. 92. 52 Kosegarten, Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen, pp. 110–11. 53 Kosegarten, Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen, p. 22. 54 Kosegarten, Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen, p. 43. 55 Kosegarten, Briefe eines Schiffbrüchigen, pp. 55–62. On the same stone later, see Johann Jacob Grümbke, Streifzüge durch das Rügenland in Briefen (Altona: J. F. Hammerich, 1805), Anhang, p. 306.

rug ia g othorum A Preacher of Nature

If the ‘Stranded Man’s Letters’ were, despite all the autobiographical allusions, still a literary document, the first sermons that Kosegarten published from his time as pastor in Altenkirchen were not; here the theologian was able to gain an audience with works in tractate form. In 1793, Kosegarten published in a single volume the inaugural sermon that he had delivered on Rügen after leaving Wolgast, as well as the first so-called ‘Uferpredigt’ (‘Sermon at the Shore’) delivered on the cliffs at Arkona and the sermon celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation in Sweden.56 The latter two are characterized by a triad of elements, namely: the potential of nature on Rügen to overwhelm, which must make a belief in the divine power of creation directly plausible; an undogmatic Protestantism; and the lingering historical resonance of ancient Rügen, which was able to back up this undogmatic, nature-inspired Protestantism with the authority of the past. It was self-evident that the sermons delivered to a large audience would necessarily set the main priorities within Lutheranism. But as early as in his inaugural lecture, in which Kosegarten presented ‘the mature men of the people’ (‘reifen Männer dieses Volkes’), in his words, as brothers, he conjures up the spirit of the island. In the coming to be and passing away of the natural order and the alternation of the seasons, God revealed himself everywhere on Rügen, and Kosegarten wants to proclaim him on the spot. The island on which he stood should become a ‘Lustgarten der Tugend’ (‘pleasure garden of the virtues’) and a ‘Pflanzschule der Gottesfurcht’ (‘seminary of fear of God’).57 The ‘Sermon at the Shore’, the first of a whole series, was delivered by Kosegarten in sight of the temple of Arkona; it chooses this site as its addressee throughout and integrates its history into its reflections. The true temple of God, so Kosegarten begins once again, was nature. No vault enclosed Him, no stone cult-site could encompass Him. Moses had seen the Creator in the fields, Christ had sought Him in the ‘shady grove’ (‘vertraulichem Tal’), according to Kosegarten, the first Apostles in the forest and in the ravines of the cliffs; sun, seas, and snowstorms proclaimed Him. Who had erected the shimmering blue Jasmund and heaped up its dunes, if not He?58 As lesson, Kosegarten had chosen the address to the unknown god at Athens by Paul in the Acts of the Apostles; this brought Arkona and its history directly into view: ‘O Wittow, Wittow, Du bist mitnichten die verächtlichste in der Myrias!’ (‘O Wittow, Wittow, you were not the least of the cities in the crowd!’)59 It would have remained merely enthusiasm for nature if Kosegarten had not also followed this up with a belief in a tradition that was pre-Christian but which also articulated the truth, a tradition that must include ancient Rügen. God revealed Himself in nature, but He also gave Himself a voice in men, in, as Kosegarten formulates it, the ‘natures that are brethren to Him’ (‘der Schrei verbrüderter Naturen’). The pagans too ‘had had their 56 Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, Drey Gelegenheits-Predigten. 1. Antritts-Predigt zu Altenkirchen auf der Halbinsel Wittow. 2. Erste Ufer-Predigt auf dem Vorgebürge Arkona. 3. Jubel-Predigt. Gehalten am hundertjährigen Gedächnißtage des im Jahr 1593 in Schweden gesezlich eingeführten Lutherthums (Leipzig: Gräffsche Buchhandlung, 1792–1793). 57 Kosegarten, Drey Gelegenheits-Predigten, First Sermon, pp. 15–44, on the ‘Lustgarten der Tugend’ esp. pp. 18, 21–22, and on the ‘Pflanzschule der Gottesfurcht’ pp. 38–39. 58 Kosegarten, Drey Gelegenheits-Predigten, Second Sermon, pp. 47–50. 59 Kosegarten, Drey Gelegenheits-Predigten, Second Sermon, pp. 50–58, with quotation at p. 58.

1 39

14 0

b er n d rolin g

righteous’ — Persians, Medes, Egyptians, Arabs, Tartars, Chinese, and Indians, ‘noble and fully capable men’, according to Kosegarten, who had ‘insight into nature and truth’ (‘vortreffliche Menschen, ausgerüstet mit reinem Wahrheitssinn, mit tiefer Einsicht in die Natur’). Zerdusht, Confucius, the authors of the Rig-Veda, and the priests of Eleusis were to be found in this series, as were Pythagoras, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and Manco Capac, the first king of the Incas. Their wisdom had also been the wisdom of Moses, David, and Isaiah, until Christ had revealed the Father who could be worshipped without ceremonies or burnt offerings, but just through the power of virtue. The premonition of the true religion that was vouchsafed even to the heathens and which had found its echo in the cult at Arkona was interlinked with the imposing experience of the landscape at Jasmund. The Rugians in their Scythian temple of Arkona, so one might conclude, had always had a primeval image of the Creator God before their eyes.60 If we take a look at the disputations that Kosegarten would supervise as professor in Greifswald a few years later, it soon becomes clear that Veda and Avesta were not just empty words to him, but that he would later treat them, as well as the Orphic Hymns and Pythagoras, both with his Swedish respondents and in his own works.61 The third sermon, too, which was delivered in 1793 on the anniversary of the establishment of the Reformation by the Synod of Uppsala, also links nature, Lutheran Christianity, and ancient Rügen, but now, as would be expected, with Lutheranism at its centre, the civilizatory-rational but also liberatory achievement of which Kosegarten wishes to emphasize. Despite the Protestant background, Kosegarten is still remarkably free-thinking about this. With Christ, all the truth that had been distinctive to all previous religions became united in one single religion. God the Father had created the world and took care of every creature; He did not need to be venerated through rites and sacrifices, but rather through childlike devotion and active collaboration in the perfection of the world.62 The following generations, however, had overlaid this simple belief with ‘enthusiasm and follies’ (‘einseitige Vorstellungsarten’) and filled it out with the ‘fool’s gold of scholastic learning’ (‘Rauschgolde ihrer Schulgelehrsamkeit’), until it turned into the anti-Christianity of the medieval papists. When this Christianity of Corpus Christi processions and the cult of the saints, which now provided only a perversion of the true doctrine, had arrived with the missionaries to Rügen, the pagan inhabitants had intuitively understood how false it was and had rejected it for more than 300 years, staying true to their old beliefs. They continued to worship their Rugewit in Garz and Svantevit in Arkona. Were those gods really worse than the pagan belief that was being forced on the Rugians?63 Only with the Reformation had the true faith and, with it, true freedom come to the island. Kosegarten recalls the eventful life of Luther, along with the decision of Gustav Wasa, Karl IX, and 60 Kosegarten, Drey Gelegenheits-Predigten, Second Sermon, pp. 58–62, with quotation at p. 59. 61 As academic disputations held in Greifswald, see Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten and Andreas Skårman (respondens), Doctrinae Dualismi a Zoroastre Medo-Bactrico instaurati delineatio (Greifswald: Eckhardt, 1811); Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten and Elias Rhodin (respondens), De gloriosissimi ac pervetusti regis Dshemschid Achaemenidarum Atavi claris natalibus, facinoribus egregiis, exituque, quem ferunt, fatali (Greifswald: Eckhardt, 1811); Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten and Johannes Petrus Knös (respondens), Orphei hymnus in tellurem, notis illustratus, rhythmis auctus, Latialibus, Germanicis, atque Suecanis (Greifswald: Eckhardt, 1814). 62 Kosegarten, Drey Gelegenheits-Predigten, Third Sermon (separated pagination), pp. 6–9. 63 Kosegarten, Drey Gelegenheits-Predigten, Third Sermon, pp. 9–17, quotation p. 10.

rug ia g othorum

the parliament of Uppsala. The sum of the Lutheran faith appears in Kosegarten as if it had been formulated by Kant. To be a Lutheran meant to use one’s reason freely and independently and to be subject to no authority. No one was obliged to subject himself to a doctrine that he himself had not tested and found satisfactory for himself. Everything had to stand up to the conscience.64 A Poetic Vision of Paganism

In Kosegarten’s sermons, he portrays the Reformation, which had returned to the immediacy of belief and the independent responsibility of the individual, almost like the completion of the old nature-faith that the pagan Rugians had already followed, even though he does not draw a direct link and guards against filiations. A sermon on the anniversary of the Reformation would not have been the appropriate occasion. What had to remain unstated in genuine theology, however, could be formulated more openly in the medium of poetry.65 Two great cycles of eclogues are set in Rügen by Kosegarten. Both of them, Iucunde written in 1803 and Die Inselfahrt oder Aloysius und Agnes (‘Island Journey, or Aloysius and Agnes’) published in 1805, revel in pastoral enthusiasm for Rügen and celebrate the rectory as the nucleus of god-fearing education and of pious and pure-hearted love. Both works are enriched by lively beach scenes, the foaming sea, and the glow of the evening sun, which is shown sinking significantly to the horizon of the Land of Amber. In both works the youthful couple, predictably and unsurprisingly, come together in the end. Likewise, in both bucolic cycles the central part of the work is taken up by a sermon on the shore which passionately honours the Creator and Father of All through the beauty of nature and has the ravines of the coastal escarpment of Jasmund sing psalms to praise God. Before Iucunde, the heroine of the first eclogue, is able to realize that her friend’s brother, the noble Amalrich, is in fact the unknown knight who once saved her from a snake and to whom she has ever since been devoted in silent love, in Kosegarten’s setting she can first enthusiastically read Plato. The goal here is to penetrate to the fountainhead of classical antiquity, as the girls in the rectory learn, and to recognize the sacred love, manic and frenzied but at the same time rising up in its soul-chariot to the Highest.66 Before Thekla is allowed by the author to reveal her friend’s Iucunde’s love, which has been philosophically founded in this way, to the future father-in-law, thus also making her a spokeswoman for it, the pastor once again tells of Arkona, Svantevit, and the ancient sacrifices. Once again, the pious, post-dogmatic simplicity of Iucunde and the paganism of ancient Rügen seem to be interlinked, even if this is only hinted at.67 The historical substrate of pagan Rügen appears more clearly under the surface of the second eclogue cycle, the Island Journey, which comes across as less fussily didactic than its predecessor. It tells of the love of the young aristocrat Aloysius and Agnes von Rosen, 64 Kosegarten, Drey Gelegenheits-Predigten, Third Sermon, pp. 17–43, including a biography of Luther. 65 Kosengarten’s poems, entitled ‘Sagen der Vorwelt’ are partly located on Rügen; Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, Dichtungen, 8 vols (Greifswald: Eckhardt, 1812–1813), IV, pp. 7–144, esp. ‘Rithogar und Wanda’, pp. 105–07, on the temple of Hertha. 66 Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, Jucunde. Eine ländliche Dichtung in fünf Eklogen (Berlin: Johann Friedrich Unger, 1803), Zweite Ekloge, pp. 81–94. 67 Kosegarten, Jucunde, Fünfte Ekloge, pp. 178–81.

1 41

14 2

b er n d rolin g

whose association with each other is again orchestrated by a bevy of sisters and female friends. Here a metaphorical ensemble is formed by the sea as a site of yearning, which appears like the ‘old world sleeping in the deep’ (‘aus der Tiefe die schlafende Vorwelt’) with which sensitive souls wish to unite; archaic paganism; and of course the perfection of the Creator God, the pure Platonic Good, final goal of all religious desire. Rügen’s landscape is of bucolic simplicity and a true Arcadia; to it corresponds the divine voice of nature that is heard in the mazy motion of the bees and the song of the larks, so we are told, just as it is heard also in the ‘sizzling of acids’ (‘die Säuren brausen’) and the force of magnets.68 The island-like Creation is surrounded by the sea of infinitude, which receives humans as does the Creator himself. As a synonym for the Island Journey’s Gothicist-tinted primeval world we find the ‘Northland’ (‘Nordland’): to set off for it and return is a particular wish especially of the enthusiast and dreamer Aloysius. In Kosegarten, this term seems to be able to stand equally for northern Rügen, Arkona, or ancient Sweden. The ‘Northland’ had not been so richly blessed by Flora or Pomona, but was the ‘Lustgarten des Vogelgesangs’ (‘pleasure garden of birds’ chant’) and the place where the temple had once been torn to pieces.69 The young nobleman is drawn through the mountainous ravines to the shore and at the same time into the infinite, driven, we are told, by the force of destiny in order to receive from this infinity the affirmation of his own yearning; at that point he encounters the sleeping Agnes and her friends, who have followed him. ‘Deine güldene Au’n, o paradiesisches Wittow!’ (‘O paradise of Wittow, O golden meadow’).70 Together they look to the North and sink into the dune grass as the sun goes down. When Godiva, Agnes’ friend, discovers amber on the shore, Aloysius feels called upon to explain once again the origin of the stone. He begins with the Ovidian myth, the fall of Phaethon and the grief of his sisters, the Heliades, who had turned into trees. The amber was their golden tears. That electron, the amber which, so it was said, adorned the (‘Lilienhals holdseliger Jungfrau’n’) (‘necklace of the Virgin’), was to be found near the Baltic Sea; hence, the Eridanus of the ancient world and the Baltic, with its resinous pine forests, must be identical, as all the Gothicists of the eighteenth century had unanimously insisted.71 But what else, Godiva wants to know, is there to tell of the Land of Amber? Aloysius goes into more detail of the Swedish national myth. The Land of Amber, including Rügen with its temples, had been Atlantis, the homeland of the Hyperboreans, noble men and free, who ‘ohne Ruder und Pflugschar’ (‘without plough and rudder’), righteous and holy, had lived on the shores of the Baltic, until death overcame them as if in sleep. Here on Rügen had been the old Saturnian land, Aloysius insists. These lines could not be declaimed entirely without irony, and Aloysius’ sister Godiva interjects that, in that case, if you look closely, is that 68 Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, Die Inselfahrt oder Aloysius und Agnes: Eine ländliche Dichtung in sechs Eklogen (Berlin: Voss, 1804), Erste Ekloge, pp. 17–30, Zweite Ekloge, pp. 66–79, quotation p. 19 and p. 69. 69 Kosegarten, Die Inselfahrt, Dritte Ekloge, pp. 85–91, quotation p. 90. 70 Kosegarten, Die Inselfahrt, Dritte Ekloge, pp. 97–111, quotation p. 111. 71 As an example, see Anders Prysz and Johannes Franseen (respondens), Expositio transformationis lacrymarum Heliadum in electrum exercitatione academica adumbrata (Turku: Johan Wall, 1708), and as a summary in the days of Kosegarten, see Friedrich Samuel Bock, Versuch einer kurzen Naturgeschichte des preußischen Bernsteins und einer neuen wahrscheinlichen Erklärung seines Ursprunges (Königsberg: Zeisens Witwe und J. H. Hartungs Erben, 1767), c. 2, pp. 16–44.

rug ia g othorum

not the spears of the Arimaspes twinkling there on the horizon?72 The fourth and fifth eclogue then bring the high-minded couple together, after they have studied legends of the saints together.73 Once again Aloysius is drawn by night to the foaming Baltic, the starry sky is revealed to him as an all-encompassing infinity, and he sinks, as Kosegarten formulates it, into ‘den erhabenen Weltgeist’ (‘the sublime world-spirit’); now there is no obstacle to love, ‘den unfaßlichen Urgrund es Seyns’ (‘the incomprehensible fundament of being’).74 After a final small shipwreck, which is brought about as they depart in a canoe, the ‘paradiesisches Wittow’ (‘paradise of Wittow’) takes them in.75 Two poems that Kosegarten included in his Poems (Poesieen), which had appeared complete in three volumes in 1803, share the poetic synthesis of these motifs.76 In both poems, the beholder of a pagan cult-site on Rügen becomes a witness to a primordial religiosity, a witness who can draw a line from the most remote Nordic-Scythian past into the future, leading to an almost mystical experience that takes as starting point the experience of nature. In the rather patriotic poem ‘Stubnitz and Stubbenkammer’, the poet enters the grove of Hertha and the remains of the temple, of which we have already often spoken.77 The primeval world, night, and archaic religiosity yet again come together: Sey mir gegrüßt, geweihter Hayn! Mit heilger Scheu, mit leisem Grauen Beschreit ich deine Nacht.78 [May I be greeted, consecrated grove! With holy dread, with quiet terror, I step into your night.] The place still has a force that is felt almost ineluctably by the visitor:79 Es öffnet sich des Walles Ring, Den rings die Väter schütteten Zum Schirm des Heiligtums. Des Tempels Thore thun sich auf. Das Allerheiligste empfängt Den bangen Wanderer.80 [The ring of the rampart opens up That the fathers heaped around 72 Kosegarten, Die Inselfahrt, Dritte Ekloge, pp. 118–38, quotation p. 129 and p. 132. 73 Kosegarten, Die Inselfahrt, Vierte Ekloge, pp. 145–200. Kosegarten himself had written Saints’ Legends, see Kosegarten, Dichtungen, vol. 3, passim On Kosegarten’s use of Saints’ Lives, see forthcoming Andreas Keller, ‘Heiligenlegenden: Aufklären mit den Mitteln des Aberglaubens oder Rettung des Christentums im Rückgriff auf dessen erzählerische Vorformen?’, in Akten der IZEA Jahrestagung 2015, ed. by Frauke Berndt and Daniel Fulda (in print). 74 Kosegarten, Die Inselfahrt, Fünfte Ekloge, pp. 205–09, 212–13, quotation p. 212. 75 Kosegarten, Die Inselfahrt, Sechste Ekloge, pp. 253–55, quotation p. 255. 76 Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, Poesieen, 3 vols (Leipzig; Gräff, 1798). 77 Kosegarten, Poesieen, vol. 1, pp. 180–83. 78 Kosegarten, Poesieen, vol. 1, p. 181, ll. 7–9. 79 All translations are by Orla Mulholland. 80 Kosegarten, Poesieen, vol. 1, p. 181, ll. 19−24.

1 43

14 4

b er n d rolin g

As a shield for the sanctuary. The temple’s doors fall agape. The holy of holies receives The frightened wanderer.] The poet recalls the human sacrifices that were conducted in the ‘black pool’ and he turns with horror towards the murky blue sea, when he sees the cliff of Königsstuhl: Ha Babelufer! Schwindel faßt Den Staunenden, und löst sein Knie, Und wirft ihn betend hin! Dich, Obelisk der Ewigkeit, Dich thürmete dem Ewigen Die dankende Natur.81 [Ha, shore of Babel! Dizziness grips The amazed starer, loosening his knees, And throws him praying down! You, obelisk of eternity, You were towered up to the Eternal By grateful nature.] The old ritual sites, when linked together with their grand surroundings, can still be a school for monotheism. The second poem, a work about Arkona with almost 170 lines, goes further.82 At sunset and by a calm sea, the poet walks to Cape Arkona. As before his eyes ‘der Väter Stolz, der alten Rugia / Gepries’nes Kapitol, Arkona’ (‘pride of the fathers, ancient Rugia’s / Exalted capitol, Arkona’) rises impressively before him, the beholder’s gaze turns in the direction of infinitude.83 The expanse of the ether opens up to the wanderer immediately: Ein magisch Licht umschwamm die schimmernde Musive Der Landschaft, sanft verschmolz in blauer Perspective Die Ferne, rings umfloss ein heilig Dunkelklar Arkonens Hochaltar.84 [A magic light surrounded the shimmering mosaic Of the landscape, softly in blue perspective faded The distance, a holy chiaroscuro flowed around The high altar of Arkona.] Then the whole history of pagan religion that still smouldered in the ground below the sanctuary seems to create an echo chamber: the primordial Scythian tradition of Rügen, the chain of truth, which had been spoken of in the Sermon at the Shore. At the sight of the

81 Kosegarten, Poesieen, vol. 1, p. 181, ll. 43−48. 82 Kosegarten, Poesieen, vol. 1, pp. 285–95. 83 Kosegarten, Poesieen, vol. 1, p. 286, ll. 11−12. 84 Kosegarten, Poesieen, vol. 1, p. 287, ll. 37−40.

rug ia g othorum

sea, a feeling of sublimity arises in the wanderer, an immediate and supernatural presence of the divine, which at the same time plays with the motifs of the Mosaic metaphysics of Exodus: Noch stand ich aufgelöst in ahnungstrunknes Staunen, Da hört ich‘s mir ins Ohr, wie Geistgeflüster raunen: ‚Knie nieder und bet‘an!‘Ich kniet‘ins falbe Moos, Und also rang es sich aus meinem Innern los: ‚O du — wie nenn‘ich Dich, dem alle Busen wallen, Und alle Herzen glühn, und alle Zungen lallen — Zeus, Tien, Manitu, Allfader, Brama, Foh, Eloah, Allah, O! Sey, wer du seyst, du bist! Ja, Wesen aller Wesen, Ich glaube, dass Du bist! Ich glaub‘und bin genesen!85 [Still I stood, drunk on intuition, lost in amazement, When I heard in my ear ghost-whispers murmur: “Kneel down and pray”. I knelt in the yellow moss, And at once burst out from within me: “O you — what shall I call you, for whom all breasts heave, And all hearts glow, and all tongues babble — Zeus, Tien, Manitu, Allfader, Brama, Foh, Eloah, Allah, O! Be who you be, you are! Yes, essence of all essences, I believe that you are! I believe and am healed!”] Kosegarten elevates this into a hymn which, as in the sermons, senses the echo of the divine in all the phenomena of the sea, the shoreline, plants, and geological formations; at the same time, so we are told, he feels liberated from all the demands of the old law of duty. The poet follows this with a massive storm of biblical fury, which sets before his eyes both divine power and his own finitude; then the speaker, filled with awe, falls to the ground once again: Von seinem Drachenschweif umschlungen und zerquetschet, Von Larven angegrinst, von Furien angefletschet, Mit ausgeschöpfter Kraft und ausgelöschtem Sinn Sank ich aufs Antlitz hin.86 [Entwined and crushed by its dragon’s-tail, Sneered at by ghouls, snarled at by furies, Strength exhausted and sense extinguished, I sank down, face to the ground.]

85 Kosegarten, Poesieen, vol. 1, p. 288, ll. 41−50. 86 Kosegarten, Poesieen, vol. 1, p. 292, ll. 117−20.

1 45

146

b er n d rolin g

Once again, the concern is to acknowledge the greatness of God in his awe-inspiring works, and then, as if in reconciliation, the starry sky opens up in all its beauty, and the Old Testament scenario that had blurred Jasmund with Carmel and Sinai comes to an end. The quality of the poem shall not be discussed here.87 Of course, early romanticism enjoyed playing with such analogies, and images like these had been widespread in Protestant poetry since Klopstock. But in the case of Kosegarten, we should take note that they would be hard to explain without their foundation in the imagery of Gothicism. Arkona was a temple of Odin the Allfather, but at the same time also a relic of a quasi-biblical monotheism which the first, Scythian inhabitants of Rügen, the Atlanteans and Hyperboreans, had preserved in memory. Kosegarten may no longer have taken these theories entirely seriously, but he knew them, as did his readers in Western Pomerania, and so they formed a poetic reservoir upon which he could draw. As a final point, Kosegarten offers a special and maybe unique combination of ideas. He connects the aesthetical values of natural mysticism and an ascetic and almost Kantian Protestant belief in rationality. The experience of nature and the refusal of all — Catholic — rituals are key motifs of his theology; the same faith in the homiletic power of nature and the superiority of preaching was the foundation of his special veneration of the Rügen landscape. In Kosegarten’s case, the ideology of Gothicism was able to legitimize both, the Protestant anti-Catholicism, with its lack of any dogma, and the worship of nature that, according to Kosegarten, was able to support the key ideas of the Swedish Reformation.

87 Further comparable poems, situated near the Baltic sea, interpreted in the tradition of Gothicism, are written in German, for example, by Karl Lappe, Gedichte. Zweyte Auswahl (Stralsund: Löffler, 1811), no. 19, ‘Der Meth’, pp. 51–53, or no. 31, ‘Wineta’, pp. 101–07, or by Wilhelm Müller, ‘Vineta’, as part of the collection ‘Muscheln von der Insel Rügen’, in ‘Lyrische Wanderungen’ (first 1827), in Wilhelm Müller, Gedichte in zwei Theilen, ed. by Friedrich Max Müller, 2 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1868), I, p. 102.

Ann a Bohlin

Anti-Catholicism in Bremer and Topelius Addressing the Historicity of Trans-historical Principles The aesthetics of Protestantism has always been understood in opposition to the aesthetics of Catholicism.1 The Reformation entailed a thorough transformation of religious aesthetics in the literal sense of the word aisthesis: ‘sense-perception, sensation’. A sacramental principle — to channel grace through materiality and physical action, placing corporeality, touch, smell, and sight, at the centre — was replaced by a concentration on the Word, featuring hearing as the essential sensory organ of faith.2 The historical conditions for this opposition changed in Scandinavia from the sixteenth-century violent process of Reformation within the Nordic countries, through the Wars of Religion of the seventeenth century, into the late eighteenth century, when Pietism in Denmark and Enlightenment ideas in Sweden strongly affected Christian doctrines and theological training. Anti-Catholicism in Northern Europe even increased when the perception of religious faith as a private matter gained influence in the nineteenth century, and retained its function for identity formation in Protestant nations well into the twentieth century.3 Thus, in the nineteenth century, anti-Catholicism was deeply rooted in Scandinavia, sanctioned by legislation, and at the heart of the aesthetics of Protestantism. Five ‘trans-historical principles’ — simplicity, logocentrism, individualism, relatedness to the world, and a certain ethics — have been identified as engendering an aesthetics of Protestantism.4 In the Scandinavian nineteenth century, they were used to corroborate the new ideas of modern nationalism in general, and the idea of vocational nationalism in





1 This chapter is part of the research project ‘Enchanting Nations: Commodity Market, Folklore and Nationalism in Scandinavian Literature 1830–1850’, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond 2016–2018. 2 For a discussion on the Reformation process in Sweden and the ‘de-materialization of faith’, see Anders Piltz, ‘Örat tar över. Trons avmaterialisering på 1500-talet’, in Doften av rykande vekar. Reformationen ur folkets perspektiv, ed. by Fredrik Heiding and Magnus Nyman (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma bokförlag, 2016), pp. 45–92, especially pp. 47–48. See also Tracing the Jerusalem Code, II: The Chosen People: Christian Cultures in Early Modern Scandinavia (1536–ca. 1750), ed. by Eivor A. Oftestad and Joar Haga (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2021). On hearing as the essential Protestant sensory organ, see, for example, Ola Sigurdson, Himmelska kroppar. Inkarnation, blick, kroppslighet (Göteborg: Glänta, 2006), p. 17. 3 Yvonne Maria Werner and Jonas Harvard, ‘European Anti-Catholicism in a Comparative and Transnational Perspective: The Role of a Unifying Other: an Introduction’, in European Anti-Catholicism in a Comparative and Transnational Perspective, ed. by Yvonne Maria Werner and Jonas Harvard, European Studies, 31 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013) pp. 13–22; Yvonne Maria Werner, ‘“Den katolska faran”. Antikatolicismen och den svenska nationella identiteten i ett nordiskt perspektiv’, Scandia. Tidskrift för historisk forskning, 81.1 (2015), pp. 40–61; Frode Ulvund, Nasjonens antiborgere. Forestillinger om religiøse minoriteter som samfunnsfiender i Norge, ca. 1814–1964 (Oslo: Cappelen Damm, 2017). 4 See introduction to this volume, p. 10-11. Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 147–162 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.131419

148

a n n a b ohlin

particular. Nationalist writers featured simplicity and individualism as core characteristics of different Scandinavian peoples, whereas logocentrism and relatedness to the world were celebrated as the chief benefits of the Protestant faith to be fiercely defended by the Scandinavian nations.5 Since national history was construed as pre-determined to lead to Protestantism, a prominent position was awarded to the Swedish seventeenth-century king Gustaf II Adolf, the champion of a Lutheran superpower at the time. The king thus plays a predominant role, for instance, in the Finnish national author Zacharias Topelius’ cycle of historical novels The Surgeon’s Stories (Fältskärns berättelser, 5 vols, 1853–1867) and in the play Regina von Emmeritz (premiered in 1853), promoting simplicity, logocentrism, individualism, relatedness to the world, and an ensuing ethics. Unsurprisingly, the conceptions of these principles in Topelius’ literary works differ considerably from the seventeenth-century ideas he claims to portray. They were indeed self-consciously employed to create a specifically Protestant aesthetics as part of the nineteenth-century national self-understanding. In studying the trans-historical principles of the aesthetics of Protestantism, we need to address their historicity. The principles may be conceived of as governing an aesthetic and epistemological regime, structuring cultural production, or as self-consciously used for promoting exactly that idea, by creating cultural expressions claimed to be distinct from cultural expressions of other religious denominations. This question ultimately pertains to a more general question



5 For example, C. J. L. Almqvist’s influential idea of poverty, that is, the ability to cope with scarcity, as the most important characteristic quality of the Swedish people inspired J. L. Runeberg to claim poverty as the characteristic quality of the Finnish people. C. J. L. Almqvist, ‘Svenska Fattigdomens betydelse’, Samlade Verk 8, ed. by Bertil Romberg (Stockholm: Svenska Vitterhetssamfundet, 2006); Johan Wrede, Världen enligt Runeberg. En biografisk och idéhistorisk studie (Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, and Stockholm: Atlantis, 2005), pp. 218, 237–44. See also Anna Bohlin, ‘Fattigdom som svensk estetik — från Almqvist till Ikea’, in Nation som kvalitet. Smak, offentligheter och folk i 1800-talets Norden, ed. by Anna Bohlin and Elin Stengrundet (Bergen: Alvheim & Eide akademisk forlag, 2021), pp. 43–64. Like many nationalists across Europe, nationalists in the Nordic countries envisioned their respective peoples to be chosen by God. It was by no means a new idea to the nineteenth century (see Bernd Roling’s chapter in this volume), but it was reinforced and reinterpreted within the framework of modern nationalism. Scandinavian nationalists of calling typically claimed the God-appointed national task of providing a wall of defence against Russian Orthodoxy in the East and Catholicism in the South. Even though the peak for vocational nationalism would occur at the turn of the century 1900 and the beginning of the twentieth century — when, for example, the slogan ‘The Swedish people — a people of God’ was coined — these ideas were prominent among mid-nineteenth-century writers. Matti Klinge, Idyll och hot. Zacharias Topelius — hans politik och idéer, trans. by Nils Erik Forsgård (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, and Helsinki: Söderström & Co., 2000), pp. 28, 256; Wrede, Världen enligt Runeberg, p. 190; Alf Tergel, ‘Ungkyrkorörelsen och nationalismen’, in Kyrka och nationalism i Norden. Nationalism och skandinavism i de nordiska folkkyrkorna under 1800-talet, ed. by Ingemar Brohed (Lund: Lund University Press, 1998), pp. 343–55; Urban Claesson, ‘Folkhemmets kyrka. Harald Hallén och folkkyrkans genombrott. En studie av socialdemokrati, kyrka och nationsbygge med särskild hänsyn till perioden 1905–1933’, doctoral thesis, Uppsala University, 2004, pp. 105–06; Anthony D. Smith, ‘Biblical Beliefs in the Shaping of Modern Nations’, Nations and Nationalism, 21.3 (2015), 403–22; Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Jes Fabricius Møller, ‘Grundtvig, Danmark og Norden’, in Skandinavismen. Vision og virkning, ed. by Ruth Hemstad, Jes Fabricius Møller, and Dag Thorkildsen (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2018), pp. 99–120; Dag Thorkildsen, ‘“For Norge, kjempers fødeland” — norsk nasjonalisme, skandinavisme og demokrati i det 19. århundre’, in Kyrka och nationalism i Norden. Nationalism och Skandinavism i de nordiska folkkyrkorna under 1800-talet, ed. by Ingemar Brohed (Lund: Lund University Press, 1989), pp. 129–55; Pertti Anttonen, ‘Oral Traditions and the Making of the Finnish Nation’, in Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. by Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), pp. 325–50.

an ti-c atholicism in bremer a nd topelius

concerning the relation between ideology and aesthetics. My aim in this chapter, however, is merely to show how the conception of the aesthetics of Protestantism is complicated by contradictions within the literary text — contradictions that are informed by the historical circumstances of the defining opposition to Catholicism. In the following, I will examine anti-Catholicism as a defining aspect of the aesthetics of Protestantism in two mid-nineteenth century writers, the Swedish Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865) and the Finnish Zacharias Topelius (1818–1898). The first part of the chapter historicizes Protestant aesthetics within a broader cultural context. First, the opposition between Protestantism and Catholicism within the framework of modern nationalism needs attention. Second, transformations in theological interpretations and religious practices had significant consequences for aesthetics. In the nineteenth century, Protestant pilgrimage was a new religious practice with profound aesthetic implications. Critical-historicist theology gave rise to the idea that walking in the footsteps of the historical Jesus would ensure a better understanding of his teachings; the landscape became the ‘Fifth Gospel’. An increasing number of British, American, and Scandinavian Protestants visited the Holy Land, and very consciously elaborated a specifically Protestant pilgrimage in order to distinguish themselves from the religious practices of other Christian denominations.6 These aspects will be highlighted by Bremer’s anti-Catholic arguments in her travel narrative, Life in the Old World (Lifvet i gamla verlden, 1860–1862),7 covering her journey to southern Europe and Palestine. Bremer stayed in Italy for several months and sought out representatives of the Roman Catholic faith to increase her knowledge and sharpen her arguments against them. She continued her journey to the Holy Land, which prompted a reflection on why she, as a Protestant, went on a pilgrimage. Turning to fiction in the second part of the chapter, I will analyse the play Regina von Emmeritz by Zacharias Topelius, set in Germany during the Wars of Religion and featuring a Catholic as the protagonist. Three levels of analysis will be addressed: the author’s comments on the Protestant aesthetics of his own work, the conflict between Lutheranism and Catholicism as the topic of the play — which is how the conflict is portrayed in the dramatic plot — and finally, how a Protestant idea of truth structures the allegedly universal truth conveyed by the drama. Anti-Catholicism defines the Protestant aesthetics in contradictory ways, which ultimately undermines the distinction Topelius is trying to uphold. Before turning to the analysis, the differences in the histories of the Nordic national churches should be noted. The progress of religious freedom in the Nordic countries





6 Anna Bohlin, ‘Att kyssa olivträd. Fredrika Bremer som ambivalent pilgrim till det Heliga Landet’, in Fiktion och verklighet. Mångvetenskapliga möten, ed. by Anna Bohlin and Lena Gemzöe (Göteborg and Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2016), pp. 147–69; Tracing the Jerusalem Code, III: The Promised Land: Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–ca. 1920), ed. by Ragnhild J. Zorgati and Anna Bohlin (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021); Ruth Hummel and Thomas Hummel, Patterns of the Sacred: English Protestant and Russian Orthodox Pilgrims of the Nineteenth Century (London: Scorpion Cavendish, 1995); Charles Lock, ‘Bowing Down to Wood and Stone: One Way To Be a Pilgrim’, in Pilgrim Voices: Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage, ed. by Simon Coleman and John Elsner (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. 110–32. 7 Of the three volume Life in the Old World (Lifvet i gamla verlden, 1860–1862), only the second part on Palestine was published in English in a translation by Mary Howitt under the title Travels in the Holy Land I–II (1862). Since I will refer to the entire work, I will use the literal translation of the Swedish title throughout.

1 49

15 0

a n n a b ohlin

took uneven courses, also regarding Catholicism. In Sweden, foreign believers of different religious denominations were allowed to worship from the late eighteenth century, but until the dissenter laws were passed in 1860 and 1873, Swedish citizens were forbidden to leave the national Lutheran church.8 The lifting of the ban on converts in 1860 had been preceded by a prolonged parliamentary debate since the 1840s; the reform was delayed due to strong anti-Catholic sentiments, regarding Catholicism as a threat to national integrity as well as to personal freedom.9 As the analysis will show, these arguments were echoed in the literature of that time. Equal civil rights for converts were not obtained in Sweden until a new law on religious freedom was passed in 1951. In Denmark, on the other hand, freedom of religion was granted in the Constitution of 1849, whereas in Norway the Constitution of 1814 included a medieval paragraph prohibiting Jews, monks, and Jesuits access to the realm. The prohibition on Jews was lifted in 1851, and religious orders were allowed in 1897, whereas the ban on Jesuits was not lifted until 1956.10 I will return to the Jesuits. The Finnish national church is a special case, as the head of state, from 1809, was the Orthodox Russian Tsar. That did not prevent nationalist leaders, such as Topelius, from claiming Protestantism as a national characteristic — quite the opposite. Bremer’s Evangelical Democracy Fredrika Bremer was, together with the singer Jenny Lind, the most internationally renowned Swedish person of her time; her novels were translated into several different languages.11 By the time she embarked on what was to become a more than five-year-long journey to southern Europe and Palestine in 1856, she was already an experienced traveller. Her journey to America in 1849–1851 had resulted in the travel book The Homes of the New World (Hemmen i Nya Verlden, 1853–1854), published in Swedish and in English simultaneously. One of the most important incentives for her journeys was to study other religious denominations: doctrines, religious practices, organization, and above all, the position of women. She left Sweden in 1856 initially in order to examine the reformed, Free church of Switzerland. Her aim was to work out an ecclesiological model that would clarify how different denominations would contribute to a future universal, Christian church (including Socrates and Buddha!) with different sections for different religious practices 8 Hanne Sanders, Bondevækkelse og sekularisering. En protestantisk folkelig kultur i Danmark og Sverige 1820–1850 (Stockholm: Historiska institutionen, Stockholms universitet, 1995). 9 Werner, ‘“Den katolska faran”’, p. 46; Yvonne Maria Werner, ‘“The Catholic Danger”: The Changing Patterns of Swedish Anti-Catholicism 1850–1965’, in European Anti-Catholicism in a Comparative and Transnational Perspective, ed. by Yvonne Maria Werner and Jonas Harvard, European Studies, 31 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013) pp. 135–48. 10 Ulvund, Nasjonens antiborgere. 11 Carina Burman, Mamsellen och förläggarna. Fredrika Bremers förlagskontakter 1828–1865 (Uppsala: Avdelningen för litteratursociologi Uppsala universitet, 1995); Åsa Arping, ‘“The Miss Austen of Sweden”: Fredrika Bremer’s Transatlantic Triumph in the Age of Reprint’, in Swedish Women’s Writing on Export: Tracing Transnational Reception in the Nineteenth Century, LIR.skrifter.10, ed. by Yvonne Leffler, Åsa Arping, Jenny Bergenmar, Gunilla Hermansson, and Birgitta Johansson Lindh (Göteborg: Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, 2019), pp. 97–153; see also Yvonne Leffler, Swedish Nineteenth-Century Novels as World Literature: Transnational Success and Literary History, LIR.skrifter.11 (Göteborg: Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, 2020).

an ti-c atholicism in bremer a nd topelius

and needs — an ecumenical thought well ahead of her own time.12 Still, Bremer obviously measured the contributions of other religious denominations against a Protestant standard. Bremer’s novels inspired the women’s movement in Sweden. Her travel narrative was written in the form of a diary, directly addressing a reader, who is invited to experience Bremer’s individual search for God’s truth and witness a coming into being of a Lutheran subject. Twenty-five years earlier, she had written the first Swedish realistic novel, featuring a housekeeper as the main character, implying simplicity and relatedness to the world as part of the job description. We may relate these facts to Protestant aesthetics, but the question is to what extent Protestantism would explain these matters. If we argue that it all comes down to her Lutheran faith, Bremer herself would agree a bit too eagerly. That was indeed her intention: she styled herself as a Protestant author, based on a historically specific interpretation of Luther and defined in relation to an equally historically specific view of Catholicism. It is no coincidence that the Virgin Mary turns up in both Bremer’s and Topelius’ anti-Catholic arguments; Mary was a hotly debated topic in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1854, Pope Pius IX proclaimed the Immaculata Conceptio an official dogma of the Roman Catholic church: the old idea that the Virgin Mary was free from original sin had now been raised to a dogma. Historian Yvonne Maria Werner identifies the Mariological dogmas together with the worship of saints, the doctrines of deeds, and the transnational character of the Roman Catholic church, as the key issues delaying legislative reform in the Swedish parliamentary debate of the mid-nineteenth century.13 Mary was, however, no less prominent in a Lutheran context; she was frequently evoked as a role model for women by conservative and liberal writers alike, though for different reasons. Conservatives stressed her obedience, whereas liberals stressed her vocation, or in Bremer’s words: Mary was the servant of the Lord — not the lords.14 The interpretation of the mother of God separated not only Christians of different denominations, but also different traditions within the Lutheran churches. When Fredrika Bremer arrived in Rome, she visited the catacombs under the city, where the early Christians hid from pagan persecution, and she was very pleased to inform the reader that there were no signs of worship of Mary as the queen of heavens on the walls. The Christian teachings in these early days, she wrote, ‘bibehöll [ännu] hela sin renhet’ (‘were still entirely pure’).15 Worship of the saints, or idolatry as

12 Torsten Bohlin, ‘Fredrika Bremer och kyrkoläran’, in Årsbok för kristen humanism (Uppsala: Förbundet för kristen humanism och samhällssyn, 1966), pp. 70–85; Sven-Erik Brodd, ‘“Jag är mer katolsk än så”. Ett bidrag till frågan om Fredrika Bremers kyrkouppfattning’, in Den kommunikativa kyrkan. Festskrift till Bernice Sundkvist på 60-årsdagen, ed. by Birgitta Sarelin and Mikael Lindfelt (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma bokförlag, 2016), pp. 197–228. 13 Werner, ‘“Den katolska faran”’, p. 46. 14 Fredrika Bremer, ‘Om Qvinnans stilla kallelse. Tvänne genmälen till Erikebiskop J-O Wallin’, in Tvenne efterlämnade skrifter jämte några bref af Fredrika Bremer, ed. by Anna Hierta-Retzius (Stockholm: Fritze, 1902), pp. 47–62. See also the first Danish emancipation novel by Mathilde Fibiger, making a similar use of Mary in stressing her calling as a model for female individualism. Mathilde Fibiger, Clara Raphael: Tolv Breve (Copenhagen: C. M. Reitzel, 1851). 15 The full text reads: ‘Men — den fanns icke här, och kunde ej finnas på en tid då christna läran ännu bibehöll hela sin renhet.’ Fredrika Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden. Dagboks-anteckningar under resor i Söder- och Österland vol. 1, part 2 (Stockholm and Uppsala: Adolf Bonnier, 1860), p. 144. Since there is no English translation of the first part of Bremer’s travel narrative, the translations from that part are my own.

1 51

15 2

a n n a b ohlin

the Lutherans would have it, was one of the main stumbling-blocks for Bremer, and for her — as for her contemporaries debating legislative reform in the Swedish Parliament — it was connected to the authority of the Pope, the power of the Roman Catholic priesthood over people’s minds, and ultimately to democracy. To get to the bottom of things, Bremer even obtained an audience with Pope Pius IX. In the travel narrative, the event is presented in the form of a thrilling dialogue: me — the Pope — me — the Pope. Before the audience, she had undermined the Pope’s authority by portraying him as a good-natured, chubby man, showing all the signs of a good worldly life, but very few of a spiritual life. Bremer’s mission was to ask the Pope if she, as a Protestant, was acknowledged as a member of Christ’s church, which a number of representatives of the Catholic church had previously denied. The Pope confirmed that she was indeed a member of Christ’s church, but that she should be so to the full extent by joining the one true church, quoting from the Scriptures on Peter being the cornerstone of the church. The obstinate Protestant immediately came up with an alternative interpretation, and in the end the Pope gave up and urged her to pray for enlightenment from the Lord, telling her that controversies only show pride and self-complacency.16 That somewhat subdued her, but not for long: on her way out, she told an astonished Cardinal that she was more a Catholic than he was — that is Catholic in the etymological sense of ‘universal’. Her final judgement of the Pope was that he did have a fine capacity for liberalism, but that the papacy has made him ‘liksom insockrad och krystalliserad, så att hans inre, ursprungliga lif blifvit förqväfdt’ (‘as if pickled in sugar and crystallized, so that his inner, original life has suffocated’).17 Actually, this was a widespread opinion of Pius IX; even Catholics were disappointed with his conservative rule.18 However, for Bremer the Catholic insertion of the Pope and the priesthood between the individual believer and God prevented the Kingdom of God on earth. To read the Bible yourself was, in Bremer’s view, imperative for the development of a democratic political system: Nej, katolicism måste återfödas, på nytt födas i Evangelii källa, om den skall kunna blifva en troslära för sjelfständiga, politiskt och borgerligt fria folk.19 [No, Catholicism must be reborn from the source of the Gospels (i.e. Evangelical truth) to become a faith for independent peoples with political and civil freedom.] Protestant thinkers like Bremer deemed Catholic countries unprepared for democracy and even for independence, as Catholics were not encouraged to read the Bible themselves; the Catholic clergy was, in the Protestants’ opinion, blocking the individual’s personal relationship with God. In Bremer’s view, the modern, liberal nation state, built on autonomous citizens, required a Protestant understanding of the Word. Only Protestant peoples

16 Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden vol. 1, part 2, pp. 197–98. 17 The full text reads: ‘Af mitt samtal med påfven medtog jag det intryck, att han är en af naturen liberalt kännande och tänkande man, som af påfvedömets konstlade anstalt och ceremoniväsen blifvit liksom insockrad och krystalliserad, så att hans inre, ursprungliga lif blifvit förqväfdt […].’ Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden vol. 1, part 2, p. 203. 18 Klinge, Idyll och hot, pp. 265–66. 19 Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden vol. 1, part 2, p. 77.

an ti-c atholicism in bremer a nd topelius

might acquire the political and civil freedoms of nationhood. For the Lutheran version of vocational modern nationalism, liberal nationalism and Lutheranism defined each other. Bremer, however, took the argument one step further and claimed that everybody had the right, not only to read, but also to interpret the Bible — a criticism directed at the Swedish national church and the literalist exegetics preventing women’s emancipation. In fact, she asked if the Protestant churches themselves had fully understood their own fundamental idea. She clarified the epistemological and ontological implications: Ty frågan gäller icke protestantismens grund allena, utan öfverhufvud grunden för all mensklig visshet, den gäller menniskans rätt, det vill säga menniskans förmåga att fatta sanningen, att sjelf något bestämma och besluta i de högsta frågor, i dem, som djupast röra hennes själ, hennes väl eller ve.20 (Bremer’s italics.) [For the question is not only a matter of the foundation of Protestantism, but of the very foundation of all human knowledge, it is a matter of the human right, that is the human ability to grasp the truth, to decide independently on the most elevated issues concerning the soul, a person’s wellbeing.] Bremer appears here as a promoter of a still ongoing Reformation of the Christian church: to her, access to the Word implied that every person must search for, and decide on, the truth. The Protestant anthropology, which equals the ‘human ability’ to ‘human right’, was a consequence of new interpretational practices. A critical-historicist study of the Scriptures had, from the late eighteenth century, challenged the literalist, inspirational interpretation, resulting in long-lasting theological debates, fuelling biblical archaeology in, and Protestant pilgrimage to, the Holy Land.21 Bremer’s Protestant Pilgrimage and Embodiment of Faith The Reformation meant a break with the tradition of pilgrimage. In Sweden, pilgrimage was even forbidden at the Riksdag in Västerås in the year 1544. Thereafter, travels to the Holy Land could only be undertaken for scientific reasons. The historicist interpretations of the Bible, however, allowed for a renewed interest in the Holy Land even for Protestants. While the Roman Catholic church had upheld its presence in Palestine over the centuries, the first Protestant bishopric was not established in Jerusalem until 1841, as a collaboration between Britain and Prussia. The Protestants were late. The holy sites had already been ‘occupied’ by shrines, built by other religious denominations, most notably the Catholics. And why would a Lutheran go on a pilgrimage in the first place, when Luther himself had declared that God cared for the Holy Sepulchre no more than for the cows of Switzerland?22 Protestant pilgrims needed to conceive of a new, specifically Protestant religious practice.

20 Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden vol. 1, part 1, p. 57. 21 Anna Bohlin and Ragnhild J. Zorgati, ‘Introduction: Jerusalem in Modern Scandinavia’, in Tracing the Jerusalem Code, III: The Promised Land: Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–ca. 1920), ed. by Ragnhild J. Zorgati and Anna Bohlin (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), pp. 12–50. 22 Fredrika Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden. Dagboks-anteckningar under resor i Söder- och Österland vol. 2, part 1 (Stockholm and Uppsala: Adolf Bonnier, 1861), p. 89.

1 53

15 4

a n n a b ohlin

Common to practically all the Protestant pilgrims of different nationalities were their constant complaints over the noisy, bodily, emotional religious practices of Christian pilgrims of other denominations, always getting in the way and disturbing the solemn contemplation the Protestants tried to obtain.23 Contemplation was also disturbed by the aesthetics of the Catholic shrines. Bremer’s distain for the church to commemorate Joseph in Nazareth, still under construction, is a case in point: Mycket osymboliskt och taktlöst […] hafva katholikerna förvandlat Josephs föregifna timmermans-verkstad till en liten budoir-lik kyrka, der altartaflan föreställer Joseph, lik en pariser-sprätt, hvilken låtsar vara timmerman.24 [The Catholics have […] very unsymbolically, and in very bad taste, converted Joseph’s supposed carpenter’s shop into a little boudoir-like church, where the altarpiece represents Joseph like a Parisian beau who pretends to be a carpenter.]25 Her critique is three-fold: the site is probably not historically correct, neither is the representation of Joseph on the altarpiece, and finally, the aesthetics of the whole church fails to fulfil the symbolic potential of the site due to its ‘very bad taste’, an extravagance with sexual overtones — ‘boudoir-like’. Aesthetic simplicity in opposition to Catholic extravagance stands in a direct relation to the ‘crystallized’ pope, blocking access to the Word. In the Holy Land, Protestant pilgrims connected the idea of hindering access to the Word with hindering access to nature. This connection is clearly spelled out in Bremer’s contempt for the oil-lamps in the Nativity Church in Bethlehem — a contempt she shared with contemporary American Protestant pilgrims.26 This time, the culprit is the Greek Orthodox church: Skada att menniskorna genom deras barnsliga glitter tillåta så litet att ses af denna betydningsfulla symbol, — symbol af den jordiska lott, som fritt utkorades af honom, som ägde “all makt i himmelen och på jorden”.27 [It is a great pity that people, by their childish tinsel and show, so almost entirely conceal that important symbol — symbol of the earthly condition which was voluntarily chosen by Him who possessed “all power in heaven and on earth”.28] The important ‘symbol’ that the ‘childish tinsel’ prevents the pilgrim from beholding is the naked rock. Luther would hardly have been enthusiastic about a grey stone, but

23 Bohlin, ‘Att kyssa olivträd’; Anna Bohlin, ‘Geography of the Soul — History of Humankind: The Jerusalem Code in Bremer and Almqvist’, in Tracing the Jerusalem Code, III: The Promised Land: Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (c. 1750–ca. 1920), ed. by Ragnhild J. Zorgati and Anna Bohlin (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), pp. 361–89; Glenn Bowman, ‘Christian Ideology and the Image of a Holy Land: The Place of Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Various Christianities’, in Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, ed. by John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow (Routledge: London and New York, 1991), pp. 98–121. 24 Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden vol. 2, part 2, p. 142. 25 Fredrika Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land II, trans. by Mary Howitt (London: Hurst and Blacket, 1862), p. 143. 26 Edward L. Queen, II, ‘Ambiguous Pilgrims: American Protestant Travelers to Ottoman Palestine, 1867–1914’, in Pilgrims & Travelers to the Holy Land, ed. by Bryan F. LeBeau and Menachem Mor (Omaha and New York: Creighton University Press, 1996), pp. 209–28. 27 Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden vol. 2, part 2, p. 87. 28 Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land II, p. 73.

an ti-c atholicism in bremer a nd topelius

Bremer was, just as she longed to kiss the olive trees in Gethsemane.29 Whereas the displacement of the corporeal, sacramental principle to logocentrism had been a theme since the Reformation, the connection to nature was a result of Romanticist ideas on the sublime. Charles Lock has drawn attention to the long descriptions of landscapes in Protestant pilgrimage narratives, and argues that they should be understood as examples of a peculiar ‘Protestant optic’, developed in the nineteenth century. Protestants preferred open views to imagine themselves walking side by side with Jesus in an empty landscape, valuing inner sight over outer experience. Lock calls this religious practice, conditioned by the Romanticist apprehension of nature, ‘aesthetic idolatry’.30 Inner sight and ‘symbolic’ interpretation of sites were valued over the Catholic sacramental principle. For instance, Bremer reflects on pilgrimage and penitence, and claims that the human need for easing pain of conscience should be taken seriously. The religious significance of bodily actions, however, should not: Det är ett heligt behof; det grundar sig på medvetandet om eviga heliga lagar. Man måste vörda detta på samma gång man måste fördömma den makt, som dristar aflösa synden och syndaren på grund af några yttre, usla penitensers utförande, stundom mera en lek, än ett straff.31 [The need is holy, based on the consciousness of eternal holy laws. You have to revere the need and simultaneously condemn the power, that dare to absolve the sin and the sinner on the grounds of some external, miserable penitence, sometimes little more than a game, rather than punishment.] Deeds do not engender salvation, Bremer stated, only the conscience and inner conversation with God do. Bremer even considered the Catholic belief in relics and pilgrimage as belonging to an earlier stage of development: ‘Att dyrka den kroppsliga hylsan, som anden afkastat, det tillhör själar ännu i larf-tillstånd […].’ (‘To worship the bodily shell, thrown off by the spirit, is a habit of souls still in a caterpillar-stage.’)32 Nevertheless, walking in the footsteps of Jesus, exposed to the same bodily and aesthetic experiences as the historical Jesus, was considered to contribute to religious knowledge by many nineteenth-century Protestant pilgrims.33 The historicist interpretation of the Bible, simultaneously emphasizing the need to interpret the inner meaning of the Gospels and interest in the historical, human Jesus, reintroduced corporeality into the aesthetics of Protestantism. The Protestant embodiment of faith in the nineteenth century relied on the aesthetic abilities of the human, the sense perception of the living body, to reveal the 29 See Bohlin, ‘Att kyssa olivträd’; Bohlin, ‘Geography of the Soul — History of Humankind: The Jerusalem Code in Bremer and Almqvist’. 30 Lock, ‘Bowing Down to Wood and Stone’. 31 Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden vol. 1, part 2, p. 128. 32 Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden vol. 1, part 2, p. 129. 33 Anna Bohlin, ‘Jerusalem in Every Soul: Temporalities of Faith in Fredrika Bremer’s and Harriet Martineau’s Travel Narratives of Palestine’, in Time and Temporalities in European Travel Writing, ed. by Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 182–209. One example of how the embodiment of faith as Christian pedagogy was deployed in literature for children is Fredrika Bremer’s story about ‘Little pilgrim’, who is invited to accompany the narrator to the Holy Land on a goose-feather. Fredrika Bremer, Liten pilgrims resa i det Heliga Landet (Stockholm: A. L. Norman, 1865).

1 55

156

a n n a b ohlin

inner truths of the Gospels and to communicate grace. This theme is further elaborated in Topelius’ portrayal of the religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the seventeenth century. Topelius’ Protestant History Bremer’s contemporary and friend Zacharias Topelius believed that the Finnish people were chosen by God to spread the light of Protestantism in the North.34 In his textbook Boken om vårt land / Maamme kirja (The Book of Our Country, 1875/76), he taught generations of Finnish schoolchildren well into the twentieth century that the Roman Catholic church led to darkness and delusion because the people were not allowed to read the Bible for themselves. He claimed that the Roman Catholic church encouraged superstition, and that the pope and the religious orders had absolute power over people’s minds, while indulging in various kinds of sins themselves.35 Initially, this was sadly the only available Christian church; the Reformation brought liberation. This is in short the narrative of the Catholic legacy in Finnish national history in Topelius’ school-book — and in school-books and public discourse in general across Scandinavia at the time. As late as 1921, exactly these accusations caused the Catholic bishop of Sweden, Albert Bitter, to complain to the authorities, demanding that the representations of the Roman Catholic church in schoolbooks be corrected. Instead, the complaint started the most comprehensive anti-Catholic campaign in Sweden in modern times.36 In Topelius’ enormously popular cycle of novels, The Surgeon’s Stories (1853–1867), he depicted Finnish history through family history from the early seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century — a history Finland shared with Sweden in a common realm, which is why these novels contributed substantially not only to Finnish nationalism but also to Swedish nationalism.37 The very first story takes place in Germany during the Wars of Religion of the seventeenth century, and Topelius also rewrote this story as a play, which focuses the 34 Nils Erik Forsgård, ‘Topelius och folket’, in Folket. Studier i olika vetenskapers syn på begreppet folk, ed. by Derek Fewster, Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 626 (Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2000), pp. 81–89; Nils Erik Forsgård, I det femte inseglets tecken. En studie i den åldrande Zacharias Topelius livs- och historiefilosofi. Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 616 (Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 1998), pp. 118–25. 35 Zacharias Topelius, Boken om vårt land. Läsebok för de lägsta läroverken i Finland. Andra kursen, 19th edn (Helsinki: Söderström, 1937), pp. 250, 268. 36 Werner, ‘“Den katolska faran”’, pp. 43–44. 37 Swedish misreadings of Finnish national history as Swedish historiography characterized the reception of both Topelius’ and J. L. Runeberg’s historical literature in Sweden. See, e.g., Klinge, Idyll och hot, pp. 238–39; Wrede, Världen enligt Runeberg, pp. 19, 337. See also Selma Lagerlöf, Zachris Topelius (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1920). On Toplius’ historical fiction in general and The Surgeon’s Stories in particular, see H. K. Riikonen, ‘Fältskärns berättelser i förhållande till 1800-talets historiska roman’, in Författaren Topelius — med historien mot strömmen, ed. by Pia Forssell and Carola Herberts (Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, and Stockholm: Appell Förlag, 2019), pp. 43–70; Pia Forssell, ‘Ramberättelser och samband i Topelius prosa’, in Författaren Topelius — med historien mot strömmen, ed. by Pia Forssell and Carola Herberts (Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, and Stockholm: Appell Förlag, 2019), pp. 149–80; Mari Hatavara, ‘Composing Finnish National History: Zacharias Topelius’ The Surgeon’s Stories’, in Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia, ed. by Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, and Ilona Pikkanen, (Helsinki: The Finnish Literature Society, 2015), pp. 79–97.

an ti-c atholicism in bremer a nd topelius

religious conflict even more sharply: Regina von Emmeritz (1853). Theatre historian Pentti Paavolainen refers Regina von Emmeritz to a group of historical kingship-plays in Topelius’ authorship, and unlike his other plays it retained its popularity in Finland and Sweden into the twentieth century.38 In 1845, when the play premiered in Stockholm, the success was immediate, according to a letter from Fredrika Bremer to Topelius.39 She was so moved when reading the play that she cried, and she particularly appreciated the main character, Regina.40 And in 1910, a silent film based on Topelius’ play, Regina von Emmeritz och Konung Gustaf II Adolf (Regina von Emmeritz and King Gustav II Adolf), was produced in Sweden.41 Regina is the daughter of a Catholic lord of a castle under attack from the Protestant king shortly after the battle of Breitenfeld in 1631. Topelius intended her as a personification. In a newspaper article, published three days after the premier, Topelius clarified the historical background for the play, stating that although Regina herself was a fictive character, she was ‘historiskt berättigad … som en inkarnation, ett förkroppsligande av sin tids religiösa och politiska fanatism.’ (‘historically justified … as an incarnation of the religious and political fanaticism of her time’).42 In the novel, Regina is shipped off to Finland and marries the novel’s main character Bertelsköld, and thus becomes the mother of one of the two families that will carry the fate of the nation through the entire cycle of novels, acknowledging Catholicism as a national heritage. The play, however, is a tragedy and she must die a martyr’s death — the question is: will she die for hatred or for love? Besides being a professor of history and a poet, Topelius was a journalist and had a prolific output on the theatre, including his own plays, as he responded to criticism and explained his ideas in his newspaper and elsewhere.43 In a note to the publication of the rewritten version of the play from 1881, on which this analysis is based, he acknowledged the overwhelming influence of a Catholic writer, namely Victor Hugo, and specifically from Hugo’s Hernani (1830). The cultural import and influence from Catholic countries during the nineteenth century was of course immense, especially for a writer like Topelius, rooted in a Romantic tradition and frequently using melodrama as a dramatic form. Paavolainen

38 Toplius’ twenty-seven plays for children would, unlike his eight or nine plays for adults, maintain their popularity in Finland and Sweden until the 1960s. Pentti Paavolainen, ‘Genre, samhälle, metateater — reflektioner over Topelius dramatik’, in Författaren Topelius — med historien mot strömmen, ed. by Pia Forssell and Carola Herberts (Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, and Stockholm: Appell Förlag, 2019), pp. 181–226. See also Anna Simberg, ‘Topelius och teatern — den nationella scenkonstens födelse’, in En nyckel till Zachris Topelius, ed. by Anna Simberg, Matilda Hellman and David Lindström (Helsinki: Svenska folkskolans vänner, Svenska Teater & Hufvudstadsbladet, 1998), pp. 24–27. 39 Fredrika Bremer’s letter to Zacharias Topelius 8 February 1855, in Fredrika Bremers Brev IV, ed. by Klara Johanson and Ellen Kleman (Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söners Förlag, 1920), pp. 566–67. 40 Fredrika Bremer’s letter to Zacharias Topelius, 30 March 1855, in Fredrika Bremers Brev, pp. 569–71. 41 The film Regina von Emmeritz och Konung Gustaf II Adolf was directed by Gustaf ‘Muck’ Linden and produced by AB Svenska Biografteatern [accessed 10 March 2022]. 42 The full text reads: ‘Reginas icke-historiska personlighet kan i så måtto anses historiskt berättigad, att hon uppträder som en inkarnation, ett förkroppsligande av sin tids religiösa och politiska fanatism.’ Zacharias Topelius, ‘Historiska noter till skådespelet “Regina von Emmeritz”’, in Helsingfors Tidningar 16 April 1853, reprinted in Zacharias Topelius, Samlade Skrifter XXV (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1921), pp. 197–203, quotation on p. 198. 43 Valfrid Vasenius, Topelius om teatern i Finland 1842–1860. Bedömanden och artiklar (Borgå: Holger Schildts förlag, 1916).

1 57

15 8

a n n a b ohlin

stresses that Regina von Emmeritz was not only performed with music, but was also the only Finnish historical drama containing crowd scenes and tableaux with singing. Thus it was the Finnish play closest to the French theatre tradition, represented by Hugo, except that unlike Hugo’s plays, Topelius’ was not politically radical.44 Representing the Wars of Religion, with the Protestant champion king in one of the main parts, in a theatre form branded as Catholic, required an explanation in the mid-nineteenth century. In acknowledging his debt to Hugo, Topelius also distanced himself from his apprehension of a Catholic aesthetics: Författaren har velat, såvidt det numera låtit sig göra, bortrensa något af den prunkande pathos, som influtit från förebilden, äfvensom vårdslösheter i språket. Expositionen är förlagd till början af stycket, i stället för andra akten, svärmeriet förmenskligadt, fanatismen lyftad och utjemnad med den nödiga motvigten af en sann fromhet.45 [The author has, as far as possible, sought to purge the drama of some of the showy pathos, originating from the model, as well as of carelessness of style. The exposition is transferred to the beginning of the piece, instead of the second act, the enthusiasm humanized, the fanaticism elevated and balanced by the necessary counterweight of true piety.] Topelius emphasizes simplicity as a corner-stone of the aesthetics of Protestantism — that is, a nineteenth-century notion of simplicity, meaning restrained emotions signalling sincerity, or ‘true piety’, as somehow more ‘human’. Apparently even Topelius’ own style was in need of purification to conform to his idea of a Protestant aesthetics, and he takes efforts to convince his audience of the play’s true Protestant qualities. Simplicity required a lot of embellished persuasion. Appropriating the ‘human’ as Protestant is an instance of the embodiment of faith, and the implications are clearly worked out in the depiction of the religious conflict. A Decorative King and a Jesuit Villain The religious conflict is the very topic of the play. Ainur Elmgren notes that Topelius helped to keep alive the ‘messianic image of the king […] in the national mythology’.46 Gustaf II Adolf is portrayed as the incarnation of compassionate love and a respect for human lives; if Regina is the personification of religious fanaticism, Gustaf Adolf is the personification of Toplius’ nineteenth-century view of Protestantism. Obviously, that view is historically incorrect, and it does not make for good drama. As the Finnish literary historian Arvid 44 Paavolainen, ‘Genre, samhälle, metateater’, p. 200. 45 Zacharias Topelius, ‘Regina von Emmeritz. Skådespel i fem akter. Musiken af J. A. Söderman’, in Dramatiska dikter I (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1881), pp. 101–205, at p. 103. The translation into English of this note to the play is my own. 46 Ainur Elmgren, ‘The Jesuit Stereotype: An Image of the Universal Enemy in Finnish Nationalism’, in European Anti-Catholicism in a Comparative and Transnational Perspective, ed. by Yvonne Maria Werner and Jonas Harvard, European Studies, 31 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), p. 197. On Topelius’ views on Gustaf II Adolf and his daughter Kristina, who abdicated and converted to Catholicism in 1650, see Forsgård, I det femte inseglets tecken, pp. 222–28.

an ti-c atholicism in bremer a nd topelius

Hultin pointed out in 1918, the King’s part is merely decorative — a critique that was already voiced by Topelius’ contemporaries.47 Still, at the middle of the nineteenth century, Topelius could rely on arousing the audience’s emotions simply by placing the great king Gustaf II Adolf on stage: ‘denna djärvhet … verkade mäktigt gripande på åskådarna’ (‘this bold move would have a powerful effect on the audience’).48 Judging from the success, it did. The problem for the dramatic plot is even worse as the villain is the Jesuit Pater Hieronymus — a fictive, and according to Paavolainen, the single most negatively portrayed character in Topelius’ entire role gallery.49 Historian Frode Ulvund has pointed out that the anti-Jesuit stereotype was established in the early seventeenth century, less than a hundred years after Societas Jesu was formed in 1534. As instrumental in the Catholic counter-Reformation and in Spanish colonialism in South America, the Jesuits quickly gained considerable power and were accused of constituting ‘a state within the state’, a reputation that would follow the Jesuits well into the twentieth century. Thus, the reasons were basically political for their exclusion from a number of Catholic states in the late eighteenth century, and for the fact that the entire order was dissolved by the pope for a period of time (1773–1814). The ban on Jesuits in the Norwegian Constitution had a long history.50 In Sweden as late as 1910, Nathan Söderblom, soon to become the archbishop of the Swedish national church, characterized the Jesuits as the most dangerous enemy of modern civilization.51 Apart from the reputation of political disloyalty, the Jesuits were accused of furthering worldly achievements by immoral means. Ulvund summarizes the anti-Jesuit stereotype dating from the days of the seventeenth-century Wars of Religion: I dette lå ikke bare en påstand om at jesuittene var aktive som politiske intrigemakere og manipulatorer — særlig i egenskap av skriftefedre for fyrster — men også at de legitimerte og praktiserte politisk vold, inkludert drap på fyrster når det var opportunt, og en påstand om at løgn var tillatelig, selv under ed, om dette fremmet ordenens sak.52 [The implication was not only a statement about the Jesuits as active instigators of political schemes and as manipulators — especially in the capacity of confessors to princes — but also that they legitimized and practiced political violence, including

47 ‘Konungens roll är väsentligen passiv, ställvis utan tvivel dekorativ.’ Arvid Hultin, ‘Fältskärns Regina i dramatisk omklädnad’, in Zacharias Topelius hundraårsminne. Festskrift den 14 januari 1918 (Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 1918), p. 173. Topelius wrote a preface to the first publication of the play in 1854, defending the drama against criticism from his friend and professor of aestethics and modern literature Fredrik Cygnæus. Gustaf Adolf might not be at the centre of the action, Topelius wrote, but ‘he does not appear as “decoration”’. (‘Ehuru Gustav Adolf icke är handlingens medelpunkt; ehuru fruktan för longörer i detta stycke, som är skrivet direkt för scenen, icke tillåtit mig utföra hans ridderliga gestalt så fullständigt som bort; så vågar jag tro, att han ej uppträder som “dekoration”.’) Zacharias Topelius, ‘Till professoren i estetik och moderna litteraturen Fredrik Cygnæus’, in Topelius, Samlade Skrifter XXV, pp. 203–11, quotation on pp. 204–05. 48 Hultin, ‘Fältskärns Regina i dramatisk omklädnad’, p. 163. 49 Paavolainen, ‘Genre, samhälle, metateater’, p. 200. 50 Ulvund, Nasjonens antiborgere, pp. 170–79. 51 Werner, ‘“Den katolska faran”’, p. 53. 52 Frode Ulvund, Nasjonens antiborgere, quotation on p. 174. On the debate on Jesuits in Sweden in the 1920s, see Werner, ‘“Den katolska faran”’. On parallels between anti-Jesuit and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories early in the nineteenth century, see Ulvund, Nasjonens antiborgere; Elmgren, ‘The Jesuit Stereotype’, p. 193.

1 59

160

a n n a b ohlin

murdering princes when opportune, and a statement about the permission to lie, even under oath, if it would further the cause of the order.] This is an accurate description of Pater Hieronymus in Topelius’ nineteenth-century play — and there would be similar characters that followed. Ainur Elmgren contends: ‘Topelius established the Jesuit plot in Finnish fiction’.53 Nevertheless, the Catholics in the play are not all evil. The Finnish historian Matti Klinge stresses that Topelius’ main problem with Catholicism was the papacy and in particular the Jesuit order.54 The play actually starts out with disagreement among the Catholic monks themselves about God’s purpose with the invasion of the heretics and how to confront it. The Franciscan monk suggests prayers, the Jesuit suggests murdering the king. With a decorative king and a stereotypical villain, all the dramatic attention centres on the main character, Regina. At the beginning, manipulated by the Jesuit, she is determined to murder the king, but she is struck with admiration, awe, and love for the magnificent Gustaf Adolf and she cannot go through with it. Her love for the king on the one hand, and her faith on the other hand, tears her soul apart. Thus, the religious war over the interpretation of the Kingdom of God takes place in her soul. In the end she dies saving the king and waving the Swedish flag, according to Topelius’ play, ‘mensklighetens fana’ (‘the banner of humankind’).55 Humanity, in this case, should not be understood merely as universal, but as a valorization of the human body. The first action on stage by the Protestants is to — accidentally — smash a statue of the Virgin Mary to pieces — a classical example of iconoclasm, which is also repeated on a rhetorical level. When first seeing the statue, the soldier Larsson remarks: ‘Afgudar utaf sten må djefvulen anamma. / Jag är en lutheran.’ (‘The devil may accept idols of stone. / I am a Lutheran.’)56 After a fencing fight, his sword breaks on the statue, which falls to pieces, and Larsson comments: ‘Der ligger stenbelätet!’ (‘There lies the idol, a piece of stone!’)57 To the Protestant, the image of the saint has no other meaning than its materiality: stone. This operation is also enacted in the figurative language; to literalize allegory, to reclaim the earthly, material matter. It is most conspicuously carried out regarding the metaphors for the Virgin Mary. Regina’s own name is the most important, relating to the religious conflict over the Catholic doctrine of Mary as the queen of the heaven, which Bremer also commented on. The Catholic worship of Mary is manifested in the play, as a prayer to Mary for liberation is performed on stage, not once but twice. Besides ‘coeli regina’ (‘the queen of heaven’), Mary is called ‘Optime flos’, ‘Flos sine spina’,

53 Elmgren, ‘The Jesuit Stereotype’, p. 199. 54 Klinge, Idyll och hot, pp. 260–66. 55 The full text reads: ‘Nej, det banér jag håller i min hand / […] är mensklighetens fana.’ Topelius, ‘Regina von Emmeritz’, p. 193. Regina von Emmeritz was translated into Finnish and Russian during the nineteenth century, and although The Surgeon’s Stories were translated into English in 1872, there is to my knowledge no English translation of the play. Yvonne Leffler, ‘Zacharias Topelius i världen — verken i översättning’, in Författaren Topelius — med historien mot strömmen, ed. by Pia Forssell and Carola Herberts (Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, and Stockholm: Appell Förlag, 2019), pp. 432–33; Paavolainen, ‘Genre, samhälle, metateater’, p. 201. All translations of the quotations are therefore my own, and for the purpose of the analysis, I have translated the alexandrines of the original into a literal, prose version. 56 Topelius, ‘Regina von Emmeritz’, p. 127. 57 Topelius, ‘Regina von Emmeritz’, p. 128.

an ti-c atholicism in bremer a nd topelius

‘Rosa Formosa’ (‘a perfect flower’, ‘a flower without thorns’, ‘a beautiful rose’) and ‘Stella jucunda’ (‘a lovely star’): Sancta Maria, / Libera nos! / Optime flos, / Flos sine spina! / Coeli regina! Ter gloriosa / Rosa Formosa! […] Stella jucunda!58 In Toplius’ play, the names for Mary, the rose and the star, are connected to Regina’s person, but reattributed to nature.59 Still, Catholic allegory does not end with Protestant, literal materiality. The ultimate meaning in Topelius’ play is still holiness, but he inserts the human body in the chain of reference between the topos of nature and the anagogical meaning. The earth, nature, the living body, flesh, and blood become the starting point for a new set of allegorical operations, redistributing holiness from stones to living bodies and to love. The competing, Protestant allegory reinterprets the metaphors as their earthly origin in nature, setting off another register of sacred meaning, which identifies Regina with the rose and the star as a part of nature — a living, loving nature that supposedly corresponds to her inner loving nature. Regina’s dramatic development in the play consists of her transformation from being compared to a marble stone by her father, to recognizing herself as his emotionally engaged daughter; she realizes that she is not, as she initially thinks, only ashes, waiting for her reward in Paradise, but a human, loving body.60 Mary is reinterpreted from the Catholic heavenly queen, demanding sacrifice, to the Protestant family ideal: the loving mother of Christ. In Topelius’ view, by embracing love and caring, Regina embraces her femininity. Bremer agreed: she regarded Regina as an ideal woman.61 Nevertheless, Regina does not convert to Protestantism; she dies a good Catholic. Still, the more loving Catholicism she embraces does have a striking resemblance to Lutheranism. At one point, Regina confesses her sins to the Franciscan monk, who absolves her sins, but there is a curious lack of penance. Her sins are washed away solely by her faith, the Franciscan father tells her, just as Luther would.62 And when Regina breaks free from the bonds keeping her tied to the manipulating Jesuit, she does so with a declaration of freeing her heart and hand to live in the world: För länge viljelös jag gått i edra band. Jag sliter dem, är fri! Mitt hjerta och min hand Jag rycker ur ert våld. Jag vill för verlden stanna Med stolt och öppen blick, med hög och furstlig panna.63 [Too long your bonds have robbed me of my will. I break them, I am free! I tear my heart and my hand out of your power. I will stay in the world with a proud and open gaze, with a raised and princely brow.] 58 59 60 61 62 63

Topelius, ‘Regina von Emmeritz’, pp. 139, 189. Topelius, ‘Regina von Emmeritz’, pp. 130, 131, 204. Topelius, ‘Regina von Emmeritz’, pp. 120, 129. Bremer letter to Topelius, 30 March 1855, in Fredrika Bremers Brev, pp. 569–71. Topelius, ‘Regina von Emmeritz’, p. 188. Topelius, ‘Regina von Emmeritz’, p. 158.

1 61

162

a n n a b ohlin

Breaking the bonds of obedience to the Jesuit is portrayed as an act of regaining God and her courage.64 Civil freedom and a freedom to act in the world thus entail a more proper and a more individualistic understanding of faith. Most importantly, religious truth is found in the Word; that is stressed throughout the play and conspicuously manifested from the beginning, when Regina has taken a vow of silence, encouraged by the Jesuit. Silence nearly drives her mad, or as Topelius puts it: Åh, jag förstår min sak. När ordet är begrafvet Djupt ned i tankens natt, som perlan djupt i hafvet, Gå hjernans spöken blindt som galna hundar ut Och bita i den hand de slickade förut.65 [Oh, I know my business. When the word is buried deep down in the night of thoughts, like the pearl at the bottom of the sea, the ghosts of the mind go blind like crazy dogs, biting the hand they used to lick.] Obviously, allegory is at play here as the buried Word refers to Christ. The Resurrection of the Word is salvation, and indeed, as soon as Regina starts to talk, her mental health recovers. Individualism and relatedness to the world are tightly connected to logocentrism in Topelius’ play — as in Bremer’s writing — in a manner peculiar to a nineteenth-century understanding of these principles. Interpreting God’s word implies speaking your own mind and demanding personal freedom as a prerequisite for engaging in worldly matters. The Word, redeeming sins and bringing life, is the religious truth according to the play. Notably, this is not explicitly depicted as Protestant, but on the contrary as Catholic. It is not part of the explicit religious conflict treated as a topic, but still conveys Lutheranism as the ultimate truth. Nevertheless, Protestantism does not amount to the ultimate aesthetic truth of the play. The portrayal of the topic of conflict must be taken into account: competing religious beliefs reflected in competing registers of allegory suggest a relativization of religious truths. A Romantic notion of nature and the critical-historicist exegetics, allowing for a specifically Protestant pilgrimage, entailed a new understanding of corporeality as an aesthetics of Protestantism: the embodiment of faith. The living body, encompassing intellectual and emotional capacities, was understood as a vessel for receiving and communicating God’s grace. The human was claimed for Protestantism, although these features closely relate to the Catholic sacramental principle. Furthermore, the Protestant aesthetic must be understood in light of the outright dismissal of a Catholic aesthetic in the commentary, prompted by a Catholic influence, determining the melodrama form, and part of a self-conscious creation of a Lutheran national culture. The aesthetics of Protestantism in these cases is defined, and undermined, by a historically specific perception of Catholic aesthetics.

64 ‘Jag återfått min Gud; jag återfått mitt mod.’ Topelius, ‘Regina von Emmeritz’, p. 159. 65 Topelius, ‘Regina von Emmeritz’, p. 122.

Joachim Grage

Kierkegaard’s Journals as a Protestant Practice of Writing1

Nulla dies sine linea ‘Nulla dies sine linea’ is a kind of motto in Søren Kierkegaard’s journal DD,2 placed before the entries for the year 1838. Translated too literally, this well-known winged word reads ‘No day without a (written) line’,3 because line (as well as the Danish linie) seems to be an appropriate translation for the related Latin word linea, although this meaning is not common for classical Latin. The origin of the quotation, namely Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, tells us what is actually meant.4 There, the famous painter Apelles (fourth century bc) is said to have made it his habit not to let a day pass without drawing a line with his brush in order to perfect his technique. Pliny also says that this then became a proverb. Incidentally, the four words of this ‘proverb’ do not appear at all in Pliny’s work, but they did during the Renaissance and in Humanism, where poets and scholars repeatedly quoted this sentence and cited Pliny as the source. In awareness of the context of origin, it should therefore be correctly translated as ‘No day without a brushstroke’, and the sentence could then at best be transferred metaphorically to the daily practice of writing: ‘No day without a penstroke’. At the same time, the phrase is a common one, especially in literary circles; it recommends not to interrupt the flow of thoughts by writing something down every day, even if it is only a few words. On the one hand, there is a psychological element to this: by working regularly on the text to be written, there is no break from which one cannot get going again; on the other hand, the text grows continuously through the constant work. Accordingly, there are many proverbs that invoke the power of the supposedly small contribution: constant dripping wears away the stone, many a little makes a mickle, and so on.





1 A German, slightly abridged version of this chapter appeared in the European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, 52.1 (2022). 2 Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks are cited with the usual abbreviation of the journal and the respective number according to Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and others, 28 vols (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2000–2011), cited hereafter as SKS, and the English edition Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and others, 11 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007–2020), cited hereafter as KJN, here DD:95, SKS XVII, p. 252 / KJN I, p. 243. 3 See also the commentary to this entry in KJN I, p. 527. 4 See Oleg Dmitrijewitsch Nikitinski, ‘Zum Ursprung des Spruches nulla dies sine linea’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 142 (1999), 430–31. According to this, the quotation in the known wording is first found in the work of the Latin poet Publio Fausto Andrelini in the early sixteenth century. Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 163–176 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.131420

164

j oac h i m g r age

I would like to assert another context for Kierkegaard, and that is a religious one, or one that grew out of a religious culture. This context concerns, on the one hand, the literary medium in which it is formulated here, namely that of the journal, notebook, or diary not intended for publication — the genre will have to be defined in more detail — and the writer’s self-reflection inherent in it. On the other hand, however, writing as an act of text production and the status of this activity as work or as a profession are also to be located in this context. In the following, I will first deal generally with Kierkegaard’s journals and notes as the result of daily writing and show that these texts offer us a glimpse into his writing workshop — an expression that cannot be taken literally enough. I will then characterize diaristic writing, in the broadest sense, as a Protestant practice of self-reflection and self-justification. Against this background, I will turn to the question of how far Kierkegaard’s daily writing can be understood as an expression of a Protestant work ethic, or how far Max Weber’s theses on the connection between Protestantism and capitalism can be illuminating for understanding Kierkegaard’s journals. I will then focus on two central terms with which Kierkegaard repeatedly self-reflexively refers to his writing and relate them to the Protestant work ethic. Finally, I will address the question of how Kierkegaard’s testamentary disposition of his literary estate is to be situated in this context and how he reflects on those who deal with his intellectual capital after his death. Kierkegaard’s Journals as a Writing Workshop First, however, to the corpus of texts to which I refer in the following. I am addressing a large part of Kierkegaard’s estate that was unpublished during his lifetime, namely, that which is available in pre-bound notebooks. They comprise consecutively entered records with likewise consecutive signatures. The first of the total of sixty-one booklets dates from 1835, the last from Kierkegaard’s year of death, 1855. Their scope varies in each case. In the new Danish Kierkegaard edition, they comprise volumes seventeen to twenty-six with a total of more than 4300 printed pages. Chronologically, they reach beyond the published work, which first begins in the late 1830s with a few articles and the review of H. C. Andersen’s novel Kun en Spillemand (Just a Fiddler) published in 1838 in book form as Af en endnu Levendes Papirer (From the Papers of One Still Living), and initially ends in 1851 before resuming in the year of his death with the church-critical journal Øjeblikket (The Moment), of which Kierkegaard was the sole author. The notes in the notebooks run parallel to the published works and also bridge breaks in writing. One of their essential features is the unbroken continuity of their creation. The publication history of the notes is confused. A first edition appeared in 1869–81 under the title Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer (ed. by H. P. Barfod and H. Gottsched), a more comprehensive one then in 1909–48 as Søren Kierkegaard’s Papirer (ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting). Only in the aforementioned new Kierkegaard Complete Edition, published in 2000–08, are they available completely and in their original arrangement and textual form. This edition also forms the basis of the first complete English translation, recently completed under Bruce H. Kirmmse as general editor.

k i er k egaar d’s jour n als as a protesta nt practice  of writing

Kierkegaard himself called this unpublished part of his literary work ‘mine Papirer’ (‘my papers’)5 and, in anticipation of his death, also ‘mine efterladte Papirer’ (‘my posthumous papers’),6 a part of these papers ‘Dagbøger’ (‘diaries’).7 He titles a whole group of notebooks ‘Notesbøger’ (‘notebooks’), numbered from one to fifteen. Then, from 1844 on, he usually calls the notebooks ‘Journaler’ (‘journals’), especially the thirty-six notebooks he fills from 1846 on, which bear the title NB plus the consecutive numbers. In his printed works, Kierkegaard uses the term ‘Journaler’ exclusively for newspapers or magazines, that is, regularly appearing publications. When he also calls his regularly produced private notes ‘Journaler’, he uses the term ‘in einem an die Buchhaltung anknüpfenden Sinn’ (‘in an accounting sense’) for ‘ein Verzeichnis der täglich anfallenden Geschäfte sowie seine eigenen Notate […], die ja nicht selten auch eine Rechenschaft über sich selbst ablegen’ (‘an index of daily business as well as his own notations […], which not infrequently also give a kind of account of themselves’),8 as the editors of the German Kierkegaard Edition write. They argue that the term ‘journal’ should also be used in Kierkegaard research because, in view of the heterogeneity of the records, it is ‘hinreichend unscharf[]’ (‘sufficiently blurred’) and was used by Kierkegaard himself and ‘weil die Bezeichnung “Tagebücher” zu sehr auf Privates und bloß biographisch Relevantes weist’ (‘because the term “diaries” refers too much to the private and merely biographically relevant’).9 The redactors of the older edition of the journals and notebooks, Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, have assigned the individual records to three groups and printed them accordingly in different sections of the edition: ‘A) Aufzeichnungen mit Tagebuchcharakter, B) Entwürfe, Studien, und Bemerkungen zu veröffentlichten Werken, C) Aufzeichnungen, die sich auf das Studium beziehen, wie etwa Buchexzerpte und Vorlesungsnotizen’ (‘A) records of a diary nature, B) drafts, studies, and remarks on published works, C) records relating to study, such as book excerpts and lecture notes’).10 This division reflects the thematic and content spectrum of the records quite well, but suggests that all entries can be clearly assigned. This is not the case. Even in diary-like notes, remarks can be made about published works, and thoughts or sketches for new works are sometimes ignited by a recorded experience. Even their own designation as ‘papers’, ‘notebooks’, or ‘journals’ does not give any indication of the respective content: Notesbog 1, for example, contains transcripts of H. N. Clausen’s lectures on Christian dogmatics, Notesbog 2 contains excerpts and notes on the literary figures Faust, Don Juan, and Ahasverus, on which Kierkegaard at times planned his own studies, Notesbog 6 is a diary on his journey to Jutland in 1840, and Notesbog 15 finally contains intimate self-reflective reflections on ‘Mit Forhold til “hende”’ (‘My relationship with “her”’), that is, with his former fiancée Regine Olsen. What is neatly divided into different notebooks here is intermingled in the other journals. Their principle of arrangement is the practice of continuous daily writing, and it is precisely for

5 6 7 8

JJ:95, SKS XVIII, p. 169 / KJN II, p. 157. NB6:75, SKS XXI, p. 57 / KJN V, p. 57. NB11:135a, XXII, p. 81 / KJN VI, p. 77. Markus Kleinert and Heiko Schulz, ‘Einleitung’, in Journale NB11–NB14, ed. by Markus Kleinert and Heiko Schulz, trans. by Henrike Fürstenberg and others, Deutsche Søren-Kierkegaard-Edition. Journale und Aufzeichnungen, 6 (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), p. xv. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated. 9 Kleinert and Schulz, ‘Einleitung’, p. xv. 10 Kleinert and Schulz, ‘Einleitung’, p. xiii.

1 65

166

j oac h i m g r age

Figure 1. Statue of Søren Kierkegaard by Louis Hasselriis in the Royal Library garden, Copenhagen. [detail, accessed 10 March 2022], public domain.

this reason that the journals, in their juxtaposition of different types of texts, allow us an insight into Kierkegaard’s writing workshop. The term writing workshop should be taken literally. For Kierkegaard, writing is first and foremost a physical activity, a craft that, in addition to the mastery of various scripts (‘Gothic’ and ‘Latin’ script as well as Greek and Hebrew in their respective alphabets), also includes the conscious spatial arrangement of the notes, which is therefore also given special attention in the new print editions, because in it ‘den karakter af værksted, af uafsluttethed, af eksperiment i både indhold og form’ (‘the workshop character, the peculiarity of both content-related and formal incompleteness and experimentation’)11 is expressed particularly well. Accordingly, Kierkegaard is remembered in cultural memory not only as a passionate walker but also as a writer, for example, with Louis Hasselriis’ bronze statue in the garden of the Royal Library (1879, see Figure 1). Georg Brandes may have laid a foundation stone for this with his biography of Kierkegaard, published two years earlier, which states: Men gik man saa en Vinteraften forbi hans Hus og faldt Blikket paa den lange Række af oplyste Vinduer, der gav det Stokværk, han beboede, et Udseende, som var det 11 Jette Knudsen and Johnny Kondrup, ‘Tekstkritiske retningslinier for Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter: Journaler, notesbøger og papirer’, in SKS XVII, pp. 301–43 (p. 307).

k i er k egaar d’s jour n als as a protesta nt practice  of writing

illumineret, da anede eller skimtede man en Række smukt møblerede, alle opvarmede Værelser, i hvilke den sære Tænker gik frem og tilbage under en Stilhed, som kun afbrødes ved Pennens Kradsen paa Papiret, naar han standsede for at nedskrive et Indfald i sit Haandskrift eller en Bemærkning i sin Dagbog; thi i alle Værelser laa Pen, Papir og Blæk. Saaledes levede han: spadserende, kørende, samtalende og fremfor Alt skrivende, altid skrivende. Han var flittig som Faa, og al hans Flid bestod i at skrive. Han talte ikke alene med sin Samtid, men med sig selv ved Hjælp af sin Pen. I faa Menneskeliv har Blækket spillet saa stor en Rolle.12 [But if one passed by his house one winter evening, and one’s gaze fell on the long row of lighted windows, which gave the floor he inhabited the appearance of being illuminated, one suspected or perceived a flight of beautifully furnished, all heated rooms, in which the strange thinker paced up and down in a silence that was only interrupted by the scribbling of the pen on the paper when he stopped to write an idea in his manuscript or a note in his diary; for there was ink, pen and paper in every room. This is how he lived: walking, driving, talking, and above all, writing, always writing. He was as diligent as few, and all his diligence consisted in writing. He spoke not only to his time, but to himself by means of his pen. In the life of few, the ink played such a great role.] Both the formulation of the self-talk with the pen and the idea of the journal as an account cited above aim at a certain idea of a special dialogical form of diary writing. This is often located in a religious context, which shall be explored in the following. Diary Writing as a Protestant Practice The history of the diary in European literature is often associated with the influence of Pietism, in that it becomes a medium of ‘Selbstbefragung und Selbstrechtfertigung vor Gott’ (‘self-questioning and self-justification before God’).13 This implies a double dialogical structure, on the one hand with one’s own self, and on the other with God, or to put it another way: the dialogue with the self is conducted in the awareness that God is a witness. It is precisely in relation to Him that unsparing openness is required. A basic dogma of Protestantism is justification by God and his grace alone (sola gratia) and not by good or pious deeds. Self-justification before God therefore presupposes the internalization of His standards by which one’s own life is evaluated, while these standards are at the same time vague. They can be derived from the Bible alone (sola scriptura). This leads to the

12 Georg Brandes, ‘Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids (1877)’, in Samlede Skrifter, II (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1899), pp. 249–418 (p. 252). 13 Sybille Schönborn, ‘Tagebuch’, in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Neubearbeitung des Reallexikons der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, ed. by Jan-Dirk Müller et al., 3 vols (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2003), III, pp. 574–77 (p. 575).

1 67

168

j oac h i m g r age

subject living in constant uncertainty and the feeling of potential insufficiency towards God, even if He is presented as a merciful God. Control by ecclesiastical authority figures is replaced by self-control, even though social control of the individual plays a major role, especially in Pietism, by calling for permanent self-reflection. In the introduction to this volume, the diary, or more generally diaristic writing, was mentioned as an example of reflective first-person literature, in which the extent to which Protestantism promoted the discovery of the self is reflected. In relation to the idea of a Protestant aesthetic, diaries and other records written down daily are also a central genre in other respects. In that the self writes about itself, its actions, and, where appropriate, also about God, the logocentrism of Protestant cultures becomes apparent — the (self-) experience must be translated into words and takes place in the medium of language. The special ‘relatedness to the world’ is also expressed in them, since self-exploration vis-à-vis God takes place against the background of daily experiences in the world, that is, in the parish or in society, and tensions arise especially in the realization of religious norms or in the following of religious models in everyday life, which is reflected in daily writing. The rootedness of diary writing in a Protestant understanding of God is particularly evident in Kierkegaard’s early journals. Journal AA from 1837, for example, states: Jeg vil vende mig fra dem, der blot staae paa Luur for at opdage, at man har forseet sig i en eller anden Henseende, — til ham, der glæder sig mere over een Synder, der omvender sig, end over de 99 Vise, der ei have Omvendelse behov. [I will turn away from those who simply lie in wait in order to find out that one has done wrong in this or that respect — to him that rejoices more over one sinner who repents than over the 99 wise men, who have no need of repentance.]14 This turning away from the judgement of other people and turning to God alone as the judge of life, formulated in the form of a maxim of life, is followed in the very next entry by the confession that the I has forgotten this resolution and turned to the world: O Gud, men hvor let glemmer man ikke sligt Forsæt! Jeg har atter været vendt tilbage til Verden for dog endnu nogen Tid, afsat i mit eget Indre at herske der. O men hvad hjalp det Msk, at han vandt den ganske Verden; men tog Skade paa sin Sjæl. [O God, but how easily one forgets such an intention! I have again returned to the world to reign there yet a while, dethroned in my own inner realm. O, but what did it profit the man that he gained the whole world but lost his own soul?]15 This self-knowledge, extrapolated into the general, is followed by a concrete, precisely dated experience that apparently forms the trigger for this record. On 8 May, the writer had once again tried to forget himself and had wandered out to Frederiksberg to meet a girl he knew when God intervened: — da Du indhentede mig, o Gud hav tak at du ikke lod mig strax blive afsindig, — jeg har aldrig været saa angst derfor, hav Tak, at Du endnu engang bøiede Dit Øre til mig.

14 AA:52, SKS XVII, p. 53 / KJN I, pp. 46–47. 15 AA:53, SKS XVII, p. 53 / KJN I, p. 47.

k i er k egaar d’s jour n als as a protesta nt practice  of writing

Figure 2. Søren Kierkegaard’s manuscript of Journal AA, entries AA:53 (above) – AA:55, with Kierkegaard’s own corrections and handwritten notations by later editors. SKS XVII, p. 55 [accessed 10 March 2022].

[— when you caught up with me, O God, I thank you for not letting me instantly lose my mind — never have I been more afraid of that, so be thanked for once more bending your ear to me.]16 Especially when, as here, God is the direct contact and the entries take on the character of a prayer, Kierkegaard’s journals are close to the depiction of experiences of challenge and revival that are typical of Pietist diaries. Thus, it is possible to postulate that his writing is rooted in this tradition, even though such entries only make up a small part of the overall work of the journals. For this reason alone, it would be misleading to understand the journals as a medium of justification before God. In fact, a look at the handwriting also makes it clear that the journals are also working papers, in that they bear traces of work on the one hand and also aim at something else: the work on language. Kierkegaard revised and rewrote much of it afterwards. He had incorporated wide margins for additions and corrections from the outset. This can also be seen in the example of the entry AA:53 just quoted and the following AA:54, in which Kierkegaard again reports on a secular temptation and addresses God directly (see Figure 2).

16 AA:53, SKS XVII, p. 53 / KJN I, p. 47.

1 69

170

j oac h i m g r age

After re-reading, he deleted single passages or, in the case of AA:54, the entire record and reformulated it in the side column. Self-reflection and confession before God are also used to find the right expression. Nulla dies sine linea — even the painter Apelles practised the perfect brushstroke every day to refine his technique. Protestant Work Ethic Kierkegaard’s incessant writing on his published work and journals can also be placed in another Protestant context, which Max Weber established at the beginning of the twentieth century with his study Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus (1904/05, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). His concept of the Protestant work ethic has been common knowledge ever since, without most people knowing it from the original source and without them knowing what exactly Weber meant by it. His attempt to derive the ‘spirit’ of capitalism (note the telling quotation marks in the German title) from a Protestant attitude of mind and practice of life has met with much criticism, partly because Weber delved deeply into theological and historical subjects (or, as his critics would state, poached from theology and historiography), partly because he refers primarily to Calvinism, which, however, cannot be generalized as ‘the’ Protestantism. However, Weber’s theses can be partially applied to the Pietist milieu that influenced Kierkegaard’s father and that also had an impact on his son’s education. In his influential study, Weber develops ‘The Practical Ethics of the Ascetic Branches of Protestantism’17 (the title of the second part). He starts from the Lutheran concept of calling as a ‘fulfilment of worldly duties’ committed to the commandment of brotherly love. This is ‘under all circumstances the only way to live acceptably to God […], and hence every legitimate calling has exactly the same worth in the sight of God’.18 Luther’s concept of profession was traditionalist: ‘work in the calling was a, or rather the task set by God’ and the calling is ‘something which man has to accept as divine ordinance, to which he must adapt himself ’.19 This concept of calling and profession became established within various Reformation movements in which worldly asceticism played an important role. Weber includes Calvinism (which is his main focus), Pietism, Methodism, and the Baptist sects, the last three of which are known to play a not insignificant role in Scandinavia. In addition to a special emphasis on social responsibility for the Christian community, they focused on the God-pleasing life of the individual: in order ‘to attain certainty of one’s own election and justification in the daily struggle of life […] intense worldly activity is recommended as the most suitable means’.20 And while ‘[t]he Lutheran faith […] left

17 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, with a foreword by R. H. Tawney, trans. by Talcott Parsons, 3rd edn (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950 [1930]), p. 93. Translated more literally, it should read: ‘the concept of profession in ascetic Protestantism’ (Die Berufsidee des asketischen Protestantismus); see Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus, ed. by Andrea Maurer (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2017). The German term Beruf, today mostly used in the sense of profession, has its root in the term Berufung (‘calling’). 18 Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 81. 19 Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 85. Emphasis here and in the following in the original. 20 Weber, The Protestant Ethic, pp. 111–12.

k i er k egaar d’s jour n als as a protesta nt practice  of writing

the spontaneous vitality of impulsive action and naïve emotion more nearly unchanged’, the ascetic movements aimed at ‘constant self-control and thus to a deliberate regulation of one’s own life’.21 Those who then achieve professional success through restless work should not spend the money they earn on luxury goods, but only on ‘necessary and practical things’.22 Weber blames this on the ‘spirit of capitalism’, which becomes effective in the spiral of capital generation, reinvestment in production goods, and thereby increased capital yield. It is only fair to ask what this has to do with Søren Kierkegaard. In fact, much of what Weber describes applies more to his father Michael, the Pietist wool merchant who, through diligence and business acumen, rose from a poor Jutland shepherd boy to a rich Copenhagen businessman and whose inheritance enabled his son to work as an author until his death. If one believes the journals, income from writing does not seem to have played a major role — time and again Kierkegaard complains that book sales do not bring in a profit in such a small country as Denmark.23 In Kierkegaard research, the myth persisted for a long time that writing cost Kierkegaard more than it brought in, partly because Kierkegaard self-published some (but by no means all) of his books and had them sold on commission in bookshops — in the hope that sales would recoup the printing costs. The research of Frithjof Brandt and Else Thorkelin has shed light on Kierkegaard’s finances, but they too come to the sobering conclusion that Kierkegaard made a surplus of around 5000 rix-dollars in the course of his seventeen years as an author. This amount would have covered his living expenses for just three years.24 So he also had to live off the money and shares bequeathed to him by his father. These were used up at the end of his life. At first glance, Weber’s aspect of asceticism does not seem to apply either, at least not with regard to the renunciation of luxury. Joakim Garff ’s biography of Kierkegaard in particular has paid special attention to the bills for books, suits, hats, café visits, wine deliveries, and cigars, and has painted a picture of a dandy rather than a monkish ascetic. As a student, he accumulated 1262 rix-dollars of debt in one year, which his father had to pay off for him.25 Indeed, Weber’s ‘ascetic Protestantism’ can hardly be related to Kierkegaard’s handling of money. Nevertheless, Weber’s concept of a Protestant ethic can be applied to Kierkegaard as the basis of a Protestant aesthetic of production, that is, with regard to his understanding of his profession as an author, which apparently began to take shape in the early 1840s, at the beginning of his pseudonymous authorship. The conscious decision for writing as a profession goes hand in hand with an equally conscious ascetic step, the breaking of his engagement with Regine Olsen and the renunciation of marriage, with the argument that there was no room for a woman in the life Kierkegaard had chosen. One might be tempted to interpret this as a quasi-Catholic decision on celibacy; however, in his many omissions against the professional pastors, Kierkegaard never makes the claim that they

21 Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 126. 22 Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 171. 23 See the compilation of relevant passages in Frithiof Brandt and Else Thorkelin, Søren Kierkegaard og pengene, 2nd updated edn (Copenhagen: Spektrum, 1993 [1935]), pp. 51–56. 24 See Brandt and Thorkelin, Søren Kierkegaard og pengene, p. 62. 25 See Joakim Garff, SAK: Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. En biografi (Copenhagen: Gad, 2000), p. 92.

1 71

172

j oac h i m g r age

should live celibate lives. Instead, he repeatedly rages against their state pensions. In his subsequent statements on his self-perception as an author and the plan underlying his publications, he makes it clear that the choice of this profession was the consequence of a calling. In retrospect, he sees all his texts located in a great movement towards a Christian existence: ‘Forfatterskabet, totalt betragtet, er religieust fra Først til Sidst’26 (‘the literary work, considered in total, is religious from beginning to end’). In Kierkegaard’s self-perception, he purposefully applied his own energies to the cause of Christianity, although this went hand in hand with a rejection of the office of pastor envisaged for him by his father and, in later years, with a struggle against the state church. Particularly in view of the restlessness of the writing, which is based on extreme self-discipline, one can see here quite well ‘the concept of profession in ascetic Protestantism’ realized in Weber’s sense. ‘Productivitet’ and ‘Virksomhed’ To what extent does this Protestant-ascetic self-understanding as a ‘religieus forfatter’ (‘religious author’)27 or as an ‘author of the religious’28 manifest itself in Kierkegaard’s journals, apart from the fact that he very often writes, both explicitly and implicitly, about religious themes and that his journals locate him in the tradition of Pietist diaries? I have already suggested that answers to this can be found in the practice of writing, in the principle of nulla dies sine linea, and in the work on the texts, that is, in running a writing workshop. The sketchy and fragmentary nature of the notes, as well as the rawness of individual contributions with their orthographic and syntactic errors, which would have been erased when a fair copy was prepared for publication, are consequences of this. However, another aspect is unmistakable, which is also related to Weber’s ‘professional idea of ascetic Protestantism’ and which does not refer to the journals alone, but to the whole of his writing, namely, the awareness of a high productivity, sometimes even a proud flirting with the record-breaking output of texts within a short time. For the most important parts of his complete works from Enten — Eller (1843, Either — Or) to the small treatise Om min Forfatter-Virksomhed (1851, On My Work as an Author), he needed less than ten years. His diligence had already caused astonishment among those contemporaries who suspected that the many pseudonymous writings were to his credit. In Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift (1846, Concluding Unscientific Postscript), Kierkegaard writes: ‘De pseudonyme Bøger henføres i Almindelighed til eet Firma’29 (‘The pseudonymous books

26 Søren Kierkegaard, Om min Forfatter-Virksomhed (1851, ‘On my work as an author’), in SKS XIII, pp. 5–27 (p. 12). See Joachim Grage, ‘Selbst-Lektüre als Selbst-Gestaltung. Strategien der Offenheit in “Über meine Wirksamkeit als Schriftsteller”’, in Kierkegaard’s Late Writings, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and others, Kierkegaard Studies, Yearbook 2010 (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 289–303. 27 NB6:69, SKS XXI, p. 51 / KJN V, p. 50. 28 ‘Schriftsteller des Religiösen’, Hermann Deuser und Richard Purkarthofer, ‘Einleitung’, in Deutsche Søren Kierkegaard Edition, I: Journale und Aufzeichnungen. Journale AA, BB, CC, DD, ed. by Hermann Deuser and Richard Purkarthofer (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2005), pp. xi–xvii (p. xi). 29 Søren Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift til de philosophiske Smuler. Mimisk-pathetisk-dialektisk Sammenskrift, existentielt Indlæg, af Johannes Climacus, SKS VII, p. 245.

k i er k egaar d’s jour n als as a protesta nt practice  of writing

are generally attributed to one and the same firm’), as if he were a commercial enterprise. In 1845, a reviewer wrote in Berlingske Tidende: Man skulde troe, at Mag. Kjerkegaard var i Besiddelse af en saadan Ønskeqvist, hvorved han i et Nu fremtryllede sine Skrifter, en saadan næsten til det Utrolige grændsende Productivitet har han de senere Aar udfoldet ved sin Skribentvirksomhed, dersom man tør troe Rygtet, der vel ikke tager Feil i at erklære ham som Forfatter til “Enten — Eller” og den Række Skrifter, der aabenbart derivere sig fra samme Haand.30 [One would think that Mag. Kjerkegaard was in possession of a divining rod, with which he conjured up his writings in an instant, such productivity bordering on the unbelievable has he unfolded in recent years through his activity as a writer, if one dares to trust the rumour, which is probably not wrong, to declare him the author of “Either — Or” and the series of writings that apparently originate from the same hand.] Two key terms are employed here, which Kierkegaard also uses again and again when referring to his work as a writer: productivitet and virksomhed — both could also be used for a craftsman or an industrial enterprise, as they bring busyness, being active, to the fore. The term virksomhed is particularly prominent in Kierkegaard’s work, not least because it appears in the title of two writings in which he looks back on his previous work, believing he recognizes in it a plan that he attributes not to himself but to God’s guidance: the small treatise Om min Forfatter-Virksomhed (On My Work as an Author) from 1851 and the more extensive work Synspunktet for min Forfatter-Virksomhed (The Point of View for My Work as an Author), the latter unpublished during his lifetime. While the term is usually rendered as ‘work’ in the common English translations of Kierkegaard,31 that is, it refers to the result of activity or working, in Danish the focus is on being active. Ordbog over det danske Sprog, the historical dictionary of Danish, provides two main meanings: on the one hand, being active or in operation (also of machines) and related to this, work, employment, and business, and on the other hand, business in the sense of an enterprise.32 In Kierkegaard’s case, it occurs very often (also in the journals) in connection with reflection on the inner context of his works (today one would perhaps say: the essence of his brand), and in doing so, the texts are always related to his own activity as a writer. He sees the works primarily as the result of his occupation, and so he also frequently refers to the two retrospectives on his oeuvre just mentioned as the ‘Skrifter om mig selv’ (‘Writings about Myself ’).33 The retrospective of what he has written acquires the status of an autobiography; work and life are fused in the sense of a Protestant concept of occupation. One cannot think of the texts independently of the author who created them in his writing workshop. Similarly, but with different nuances, the term productivitet is also about producing texts, but now in a more quantitative sense and related to the results. Whereas virksomhed can 30 Berlingske Tidende, 6 May 1845, quoted from SKS K VII, p. 241. 31 See, for example, Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, ed. and trans. with introd. and notes by Howard V. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998), containing On My Work as an Author and The Point of View for My Work as an Author. 32 See [accessed 10 March 2022]. 33 See, for example, NB16:42, SKS XXIII, p. 123 / KJP VII, p. 124.

1 73

174

j oac h i m g r age

be thought of as purely being busy, productivitet means an activity that provides constant output — the translators of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks chose creativity as an English equivalent. Thus, in a journal entry from 1849, when Kierkegaard had initially decided not to continue writing, he describes ‘en stadig Productivitets jævne Fart’ (‘the steady impetus of ongoing creativity’)34 as what had kept him going in the last years: Som jeg saa tidt har sagt om mig selv: liig hiin Prindsesse i 1001 Nat frelste jeg Livet ved at fortælle ɔ: ved at producere. At producere var mit Liv. Et uhyre Tungsind, indre Lidelser af sympathetisk Art, Alt, Alt kunde jeg magte — naar jeg fik Lov at producere. Saa stormede Verden ind paa mig, Mishandling, som vilde have gjort en Anden uproductiv — mig gjorde den kun mere productiv; og Alt, Alt var glemt, havde ingen Magt over mig, naar jeg blot fik Lov at producere. [As I’ve so often said about myself, like the princess in 1001 Nights, I saved my life by telling stories, that is, by creating. Creating was my life. I was able to conquer it all, all of it — prodigious melancholia, inner sufferings of a sympathetic kind — when I was able to produce. Then the world stormed in on me; mistreatment that would have rendered others unproductive only made me more productive; and everything, all of it, was forgotten, it had no power over me when I was able to create.]35 The comparison with Scheherazade is revealing, precisely because it is a comparison and not an identification with the Arab princess who enchants the king by telling him stories night after night, which prevents him from having her executed in the morning. Kierkegaard sees the equivalent for storytelling in producing.36 So it is not about poetic creativity, but about regularly producing and publishing texts. Here, too, work is described as the purpose of life — and beyond that: as the elixir of life that shields the writer from the negative influences of the world. The storm of the world and the mistreatment that Kierkegaard mentions are the reactions to his publishing activity. In particular, he is referring here to the press campaign of the satirical magazine Corsaren, which repeatedly ridiculed him through caricatures, whereupon people who had never read his books laughed at him in the streets of Copenhagen. These negative reactions are nonetheless results of his own journalistic activity, for it was Kierkegaard himself who had challenged the editor of Corsaren to write about him. In fact, although this campaign deeply shocked Kierkegaard, it did not limit his productivity as a writer. If one compares this with the capitalist spiral movement that Max Weber describes and whose basis he sees in ascetic Protestantism, the (negative) reactions of the public correspond to the yields of work that flow back into the working process and increase productivity. In this respect, Kierkegaard’s productivitet is also permeated by the ‘“spirit” of capitalism.’

34 NB11:142, SKS XXII, p. 84 / KJP VI, p. 80. 35 NB11:142, SKS XXII, p. 83 / KJP VI, p. 79. 36 See also NB8:36: ‘Hvor sandt er derfor ikke det Ord, jeg saa ofte har sagt om mig selv, at som Schehersade frelser Livet ved at fortælle Eventyr, saaledes frelser jeg Livet ell. holder mig i Livet ved at producere.’ SKS XXI, 160 (‘How true, then, are those words that I have so often said of myself, that as Scheherazade saved her life by telling tales, I save my life or keep myself alive by producing.’ KJP V, p. 167).

k i er k egaar d’s jour n als as a protesta nt practice  of writing

The Legacy In view of this strong perspective on writing as an activity and as the result of work, Kierkegaard’s existence as a writer can be understood as that of a one-man business and his writing workshop as virksomhed also in the sense of business, firm or enterprise, in which an active person follows his vocation. The strong emphasis on writing as a profession is also evident in the fact that in 1848 Kierkegaard was thinking of giving up writing to become a pastor, knowing that his way of writing could not be done ‘part-time’ in the leisure hours that the church office would allow him. But what remains when life has its content in productivity? For every entrepreneur, the question arises as to what happens to the firm and the capital generated by the activity after death. The question of heirs is problematic for Kierkegaard, since he has neither bodily descendants nor disciples. As far as the spiritual heirs of his virksomhed are concerned, Kierkegaard sees blackness, because he sees the theological professors seizing his work: Der siges etsteds i en Psalme om den Rige, at han samler en Skat med stor Møie og “veed ei, hvo ham arve skal”: Saaledes vil jeg efterlade mig, intellectuelt, en ikke saa lille Capital; ak, og jeg veed tillige, hvo der skal arve mig, han den Skikkelse, som er mig saa uhyre imod, han der dog hidtil har og fremdeles vil arve alt Bedre: Docenten, Professoren. [Somewhere in a hymn about the rich man it says that he painstakingly amasses a fortune and “knows not who will inherit from him”. Likewise I will leave behind me, intellectually speaking, a by no means insignificant bit of capital. And alas, I know who is going to inherit from me, that figure to whom I am so deeply opposed, he who up to now has inherited all that is best and will continue to do so — namely the docent, the professor.]37 Significantly, Kierkegaard uses the term capital here only for his spiritual heritage. This is beyond his power of disposal and cannot be regulated in a testament. For his material legacy, on the other hand, he had appointed his former fiancée Regine Olsen, now married as Regine Schlegel, as universal heir.38 After Kierkegaard’s death, however, she was only interested in the few items that concerned her personally. Thus, Kierkegaard’s literary estate, and with it the journals, first passed into the hands of his nephew Henrik S. Lund, who wanted to take care of the publication of these papers, and later into the possession of Kierkegaard’s brother Peter Christian, who finally commissioned Hans Peter Barfod to publish them. After Peter Christian Kierkegaard’s death, his brother’s unpublished works and papers came to the Royal Library in Copenhagen, where they still reside. The posthumous reader (or the one posthumous female reader) was also evidently always included in the journals. This raises the question of the openness of self-revelation in the journals. As early as 1843, Kierkegaard wrote in the journal JJ:

37 NB26:76, SKS XXV, p. 79 / KJP IX, p. 76. 38 On the history of the unpublished works, see Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and others, Skriftbilleder. Søren Kierkegaards journaler, notesbøger, hæfter, ark, lapper og strimler (Copenhagen: Gad, 1996).

1 75

176

j oac h i m g r age

Efter min Død skal Ingen i mine Papirer (det er min Trøst) finde en eneste Oplysning om hvad der egentlig har udfyldt mit Liv; finde den Skrift i mit Inderste, der forklarer Alt, og som ofte gjør hvad Verden vilde kalde Bagateller til uhyre vigtige Begivenheder for mig, og hvad jeg anseer for Ubetydelighed, naar jeg tager den hemmelige Note bort, der forklarer det. [After my death no one will find in my papers (this is my consolation) the least information about what has really filled my life, find that script in my innermost being that explains everything, and which often, for me, makes what the world would call trifles into events of immense importance, and which I too consider of no significance once I take away the secret note that explains it.]39 So this too is an essential aspect of virksomhed: to regulate it beyond death. Nothing is better suited to this than to portray oneself as a sphinx-like enigmatic being who uses a kind of magic script with which it conceals the ‘script in its innermost being’. Nevertheless, by explicitly referring to a coded subtext in his journals that can only be deciphered with a secret key, Kierkegaard puts the figures that are so repugnant to him on his trail: theologians and philologists, including some professors. In a marginal note to the entry NB26:76 quoted above, he writes about the author of this chapter in dialectical exaggeration (and so he deservedly gets the last word): Og selv naar “Professoren” fik dette at læse, det vilde dog ikke standse ham, ikke bevirke, at Samvittigheden slog ham, nei ogsaa dette vil blive doceret. Og atter denne Bemærkning, hvis Prof. fik den at læse, det vilde ikke standse ham, nei, ogsaa dette vilde blive doceret. Thi endnu længere end den Bændelorm (som man nylig, ifølge Adresseavisen, seer en Kone at være blevet befriet fra, hvorfor hendes Mand takker i Adresseavisen, med Angivende af dens Længde: 100 Alen) endnu længere er Prof; og intet Msk. kan skille et Msk, i hvem “Professoren” er, af med denne Bændelorm, det kan kun Gud, naar Msket selv vil. [And even if “the professor” chanced to read this, it would not give him pause, would not cause his conscience to smite him; no, this, too, will be something on which to hold forth. Nor, again, would this latter observation, should the prof. chance to read it, give him pause; no, this, too, would be something on which to hold forth. For longer even than the tapeworm (of which according to Adresseavisen, a woman was recently delivered, for which her husband expresses gratitude in Adresseavisen, informing us of its length: 200 feet), longer still is the prof.; and no hum. being can purge another in whom this tapeworm, “the professor”, is lodged: only God can do this, if the pers. himself is willing.]40

39 JJ:95, SKS XVIII, p. 169−70 / KJP II, p. 157. 40 NB26:76, SKS XXV, p. 79 / KJP IX, p. 76.

Claudia Lindén

Ursus Sacer The Bear As Man’s Neighbour in Swedish Nineteenth-century Fiction In the Nordic countries, the bear can, like no other wild animal, be traced in ancient folklore, folk tales, mythic imaginations of shapeshifting, place names, and linguistic expressions.1 Bears are found in a variety of heraldic weapons for nobility, and for cities and regions. The bear’s unique place in Nordic culture is also evident in its recurring presence in literature, not just cute teddy bear stories for children, but all kinds of literature from the Icelandic sagas to present-day experimental prose.2 It is one of those ironic, remarkable historical reversals of values and norms, that Christianity, which once dethroned the bear from sacred animal to monster, in the end, became its saviour. And it is based on the same reason: the bear’s resemblance to man. Once a religious and ethical connection between human and bear was made around 1900, it also resonated with the long, ancient, in some sense never-ending religious relations humans have had with the bear. In this chapter I will show how Protestant ethics allows for a moral equality between human and animal. Through a reading of two short stories from the 1890s by the Swedish authors Selma Lagerlöf and Pelle Molin, I argue that the bear is depicted as similar to man or even as man’s neighbour and a good samaritan. To paraphrase the philosopher Giorgo Agamben’s concept homo sacer, specifying in ancient Roman law a person who may be killed but not sacrificed, someone who is outside both human and divine law I also argue that the bear can be understood as ursus sacer. pointing towards the always, already crossed line between humans and non-human animals, nature and culture. According to Agamben this is the urphänomen (primary phenomenon) of politics. In my analysis of Lagerlöf ’s and Molin’s stories I show how Protestant ethics, creating a moral equality between man and bear, also points to this urphänomen of politics, where the the border between human and non-human animals is transgressed.



1 A shorter version of this text has been published as ‘The bear as Ursus Sacer in 19th century Swedish Literature’, in Squirrelling: Human–animal Studies in the Northern-European Region, ed. by Claudia Lindén, Amelie Björck, and Ann-Sofie Lönngren (Stockholm: Södertörn University, Library, 2022). 2 An example of present-day experimental literature that lets a bear take part in a story, and also connects to the old Nordic folklore idea of women’s special relationship to the bear, is the fantastic story by Linda Knausgård, ‘Vitbjörn Kung Valemon’, in The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat: and Other Stories from the North, ed. by Sjón, and Ted Hodgkinson (London: Pushkin Press, 2017), pp. 39−53. Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 177–198 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.131421

178

c l audi a lin dén

The Bear on the Verge of Extinction at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century In 1864, when the new Swedish national hunting charter was passed, the decision was taken to intensify the project to exterminate all the large predators such as bear, wolf, wolverine, and lynx. The bounty was increased tenfold, accordingly. It was a successful policy: by the end of the nineteenth century, the bear was on the verge of extinction, and the price on a Swedish bearskin had skyrocketed.3 In the winter of 1904, the nobleman and hunter Eric von Rosen proudly let himself be photographed outside his home at a fashionable address in central Stockholm, with ten dead bears he had killed (see Figure 1).4

Figure 1. Photo: Axel Malmström for Dagens Nyheter (March 1904), published 28 May 2014.5







3 At the beginning of the twentieth century, a good bearskin could cost 400 SEK (c. 20,000 SEK or 2000 € today) and a good skin quadrupled in cost, as compared to the much cheaper Russian skins. Sune Björklöf, Björnen: i markerna och i kulturen (Möklinta: Gidlund, 2010), p. 213. All the large predators in Sweden, bear, wolf, wolverine, and lynx, were more or less threatened by extinction around 1900. The wolf was extinct in Sweden for most of the twentieth century but is now back. All the large predators in Sweden are still under protection and can only be hunted under strictly controlled forms. License to hunt bear and wolf did not open up until the turn of the millennia. In order to regulate the number of predators and prevent damage to domestic animals and reindeer, protection hunting, and certain license hunting can be carried out if the conditions for the hunt are met. 4 The bears from this hunt were mostly Finnish, which is also a sign that the bear in Sweden was almost gone by 1904. One of the killed bears had a cub and von Rosen took care of it (in the picture he is holding the cub in his arms). Mischa, as it was called, grew up on von Rosen’s estate and became very domesticated, and lived there for many years. But in the end, when it attacked a farmhand who tried to stop the bear from eating a carcass, it was put down [accessed 10 March 2022]. The von Rosen family later became famous for its Nazi connections. Eric’s wife Mary was the sister of Carin, Göring’s Swedish wife. They met in 1920 at von Rosen’s estate. 5 The picture was taken for the paper Dagens Nyheter’s [The Daily News] by their young photographer Axel Malmström. Dagens Nyheter wrote about von Rosen’s hunt and the bears outside his house March 13 1904, but did not print Malmström’s picture. The picture was later published in Dagens Nyheter 28 May 2014 in an article on Malmström (1872−1945), who became one of Sweden’s most well-known press photographers.

ursus sacer

What seemed a desirable achievement in the nineteenth century would take on different connotations at the dawn of the new century. When the possibility of the bear’s extinction became a reality, a wider opinion against the state’s bounty on bears and its devasting effect emerged. By 1905, the population of bears in Sweden had diminished so radically that the Royal Academy of Science argued that the bear had to be protected since there were too few left for them to reproduce.6 In the law on national parks 1909, it was forbidden to hunt bears and other large predators on state land.7 In 1916, the king Gustav V issued a ban on the cruel tradition of bear dancing.8 When the Nordic outdoor museum Skansen, created by Arthur Hazelius in 1891, decided to house animals as well, bears were among the first animals at Skansen, as early as 1893.9 The bear went from a monster, with a bounty on its head, to a protected museum piece, in just a few years. It is noteworthy that the state was involved in both the imperative to exterminate and then half a century later to save the bear. The new regulations aimed at protecting the bear can be related to Protestant ethics and aesthetics in several ways, both in the sense where the state takes responsibility for an improved social order and as an ethic that now also includes the animals. If Protestantism urges each individual to take responsibility for the materialization of the Christian virtues through praxis, hunting large animals now becomes not only unlawful but an evil act in itself. The king’s ban on bear dancing also testifies to this new awareness of previous behaviours as cruel and disrespectful towards the animals. If the large predators previously had been perceived as an incarnation of the devil, they now become part of God’s kingdom and therefore, it is man’s duty to behave respectfully towards them. When the discussion of stopping cruelty against animals started in Victorian England in the early nineteenth century, it was firmly grounded in Quaker and Christian beliefs about man’s relation to his neighbour and kin.10 The Quakers were primarily concerned with domestic animals. When the first ‘Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ was founded in England in 1824, it was initiated in a response to the poor treatment of urban workhorses and stray dogs. Anna Sewell came from a Quaker family, and her Black Beauty (1877), one of the world’s all-time best-selling novels, became a famous representation of the welfare of horses.11 Caroline Hagood, who points out that Sewall seems to connect 6 Einar Lönnberg, Björnen i Sverige 1856−1928 (Uppsala, and Stockholm: Almqvist, and Wiksell, 1929), p. 12−13. 7 These regulations were codified again with small alterations in the hunting law of 1912, and it became forbidden to hunt bear outside your own land. Björklöf, Björnen, p. 199. 8 Pelin Tünaydin, ‘Pawing through the History of Bear Dancing’, Frühneuzeit-Info, 24 (Oct 2013), 53. 9 The idea behind Skansen, created by Hazelius as a microcosm of Sweden, is an open-air museum that collects and preserves the material memory of a nation in one place, not only buildings but also its animals and traditions. See also Claudia Lindén, and Hans Ruin, ‘A Home to Die in: Hazelius, Skansen and the Aesthetics of Historical Disappearance’, in History Unfolds: samtidskonst möter historia: Contemporary Art Meets History, ed. by Helene Larsson Pousette (Stockholm: Historiska, 2017), 136−147. 10 The Quakers were active in the anti-vivisection movement, and the Quaker Joseph Pease persuaded the Parliament to insert two clauses into the act to protect the animals in Westminster and London. Peter Hollindale, ‘Plain Speaking: Black Beauty as a Quaker text’, Children’s Literature, 28 (2000), Social Science Premium Collection, 95−111 (p. 97). 11 The novel is written from the perspective of Black Beauty, a horse that starts his life in good circumstances and then through unfortunate events goes through several owners, both poor and cruel, but in the happy ending finds his way back to a good life with kind humans. Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, The Autobiography of a Horse (1877) available at [accessed 10 March 2022] made from

1 79

180

c l audi a lin dén

animal rights to human rights, argues that in this way ‘Sewell bridges the human-animal rights gap by implying that cruelty to animals often extends to humans’.12 This connection between Christian thought and animal rights is not obvious though. Building on the legacy from St Augustine (who said the bear was the devil), the church has a long tradition of placing animals, both domestic and wild, beneath humans.13 But Christian tradition is complex, and there are plenty of examples of the opposite position that regards all creatures as God’s creatures both in the Bible and in philosophy, as Rod Preece and David Fraser have pointed out in their article on animals in Christian thought.14 When concerns of animal rights were directed at the bear, its link to Christian tradition took on a whole new meaning. There are few animals that the church has fought more fiercely than the bear, once itself an object of religious beliefs and practices. Worshipping of the bear as sacred had to be subdued by the Christian tradition, for the church to maintain its power. The (Sacred) Bear in Christian Tradition In his wonderful book of Christianity’s relation to the bear, The Bear: History of a Fallen King, the French historian Michel Pastoureau traces the millennia-long process of the church’s struggle against the bear: ‘Almost everywhere, from the Alps to the Baltic, the bear stood as a rival to Christ. The church thought it appropriate to declare war on the bear, to fight him by all means possible, and to bring him down from his throne and his altars’.15 According to Pastoreau, the Church’s struggle against the bear took several forms: demonization as well as the replacement of sacred rituals with Saint days or other Church festivities. Around the year 1000 the bear was replaced with the lion, a more Christological symbol in the eastern tradition. But the definite dethroning of the bear comes with the bestiary Roman de Renart in the mid-thirteenth century, where the bear is portrayed as coward and a glutton.16

the 1911 American edition, updated 16 March 2018. 12 Caroline Hagood, ‘Animal Rights Versus Human Rights: Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Paula Casal’s “Animal Accommodation”, and David Hume’s “Of Justice”’ in Kenyon Review, 24 April 2019 [accessed 10 March 2022]. The association between animal rights and social radicalism was more complicated in the US, where the Quaker tradition was notably important in the abolitionist movement, with Harriet Beeches Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) as the most famous example of this connection. But, as Michel Lundblad has shown, animal rights discourses could also imply racism. Around the turn of the century 1900, various discourses on animality could also be used with racist implications, when white people claimed their humanity through their care for animals, in relation to blacks who were then presented as more ‘savage’, wild, and inhuman. Michael Lundblad, The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-era U.S. Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 20. 13 St Augustine has a special disregard for the bear that he calls the devil: ‘ursus est diabolical’ (‘the bear is the devil’), quoted from Michel Pastoureau, The Bear: History of a Fallen King (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 120. 14 Rod Preece and David Fraser, ‘The Status of Animals in Biblical and Christian Thought: A Study in Colliding Values’, Society, and Animals, 8.3 (2000), 245−263 (p. 258). 15 Pastoureau, The Bear, p. 3. 16 Pastoureau, The Bear, p. 167.

ursus sacer

At the same time, the humiliating tradition of bear dancing commenced. Bear dancing, with bears in chains and muzzle, were common in the whole of Europe until the early twentieth century and can be seen as a tradition and late example of humiliating the bear. Being the only four-legged animal that, like humans, is also a plantigrade and puts its heels first when walking on hind legs, the dancing bear becomes uncannily like a human in chains when moving on two legs.17 Pastoureau points out that the church, who condemned spectacles, tolerated this practice with bears, but looked down on the bear handlers, something that in turn made the bear an even more despised animal: ‘Associating the bear with them therefore effectively helped to devalue the animal and, therefore through a kind of osmosis, to project onto him all the vices imputed to his masters and companions in misfortunes’.18 Agamben’s Concept Homo Sacer and Animal Studies At the dawn of the twentieth century, the bear had become an ursus sacer, to paraphrase Agamben’s concept homo sacer, a concept in ancient Roman law specifying a person who may be killed but not sacrificed, someone who is outside both human and divine law. Within the theoretical field of Animal Studies, Giorgio Agamben is mostly known for his concept of the anthropological machine, a cultural system that differentiates between species in order to create a negative difference, which in turn makes it possible for humans to perceive themselves as humans ‘the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human’.19 This recognition depends on animal otherness according to Agamben. In relation to the bear, with its long and complex cultural history, I find the homo sacer concept, with its political implications, to be more useful. Agamben sees the ‘sacer’ category not as a taboo — as it has often been interpreted as — but as an ‘originary political structure that is located in a zone prior to the distinction between sacred and profane, religious and juridical’.20 A person who can be killed but not sacrificed is in a sort of double exception, excluded both from human law and at the same time from divine law, but also — through this double ban — included in both categories, the human and the divine. To Agamben, this zone in between is what he calls ‘bare life’, that is, what comes before the juridical law. He regards homo sacer as the original figure of life that has been taken into the sovereign ban and therefore preserves the memory of this original exclusion, through which, according to Agamben, ‘the political dimension was first constituted’.21 The political sphere of sovereignty, Agamben continues, was thus constituted through a double exclusion, ‘as an excrescence of the profane in the religious and of the religious in the profane’.22 Agamben regards this bare life as the original activity of sovereignty with this double ban from the profane and the religious: 17 Tünaydin, ‘Pawing through the History of Bear Dancing’, p. 52. 18 Pastoureau, The Bear, pp. 172−75. 19 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 25. 20 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 48. 21 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 53. 22 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 53.

1 81

182

c l audi a lin dén

The life caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originally sacred — that is, that may be killed but not sacrificed — and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty. The sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an absolutely fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power, in fact originally expresses precisely both life’s subjection to a power over death and life’s irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment.23 The bear’s close resemblance to man, in real life (being omnivorous and a plantigrade, as well as the bear’s central position in folklore, culture, literature, in pre- or rather non-Christian belief as well as in Christian tradition, makes it a creature that could be viewed as another example of bare life in Agamben’s sense of a double exception / inclusion in the profane and the religious. As an actual animal, the bear is affected by human actions and politics but also, in turn, itself affecting cultural imagination and thereby humans. In a very interesting way for this essay, Agamben connects homo sacer with the Germanic and Scandinavian notion of fredlös, which in German is called friedlos or Friedlosigkeit: ‘founded on the concept of peace (Fried) and the corresponding exclusion from the community of the wrongdoer, who therefore became friedlos, without peace, and whom anyone was permitted to kill without committing homicide’.24 Agamben connects homo sacer to fredlöshet, Friedlosigkeit, to the Old Icelandic expression vargr í véum for someone who had committed a crime, especially in a church, or a murder: ‘In the bandit and the outlaw (wargus, vargr, the wolf and, in the religious sense, the sacred wolf, vargr y veum), Germanic and Scandinavian antiquity give us a brother of homo sacer beyond the shadow of any doubt’.25 This connection between homo sacer and the Old Nordic concept of fredlöshet, which also has a connotation of animality, of a mix between human and animal, enables us to see the bear as ursus sacer. When the bear has been made fredlös, the old resemblance between human and bear becomes similar to a weird, distorted, Dorian Grey-like mirror of the human: a mirror-image of oneself that the human eventually has to confront. Darwinism’s Influence on the Literature of the Modern Breakthrough in Relation to the Bear It is not possible though to discuss the relationship between human and non-human animals in the latter part of the nineteenth century without taking into account Darwin’s tremendous influence on thinking, with his conclusion in Descent of Man: ‘the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree

23 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 53. 24 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 63. 25 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 63. I am grateful to Olof Sundqvist for pointing out that this expression is attested in .l.fs saga Tryggvasonar by Oddr: gerir Hakon j. utlag.an oc scylldi hann heita vargr i veum. er hann haf.i brotit hit ỏzta hof i Gautlandi. A person who killed someone on a sanctified ground could be described as a “wolf” in ancient Scandinavia: ‘In Egils saga 49, Queen Gunnhildr’s brother, Eyvindr, was considered a “wolf” after killing at a sanctuary: “Because Eyvindr had committed murder at a sacred place he was declared a defiler [actually a wolf (vargr)] and had to go into outlawry at once”’, Olof Sundqvist, An arena for higher powers: ceremonial buildings and religious strategies for rulership in late Iron Age Scandinavia, (Leiden: Brill, 2016), p. 294.

ursus sacer

and not of kind’.26 Although Darwinism on one level was the most radical philosophical challenge to anthropocentrism, it did not have that effect. Instead, the notion of evolutionary development, from the primitive to the higher, could be used to create a difference between animals and humans and between peoples. Although man was an animal, he was the highest animal, and the evolutionary doctrine could again secure man’s supremacy. Carrie Rohan, an animal study researcher, believes though, that ‘What the literature of the late Victorian and modernist era reveals, however, is the lurking anxiety that this view of human privilege cannot be maintained’.27 In What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity, Philip Armstrong has pointed out that how animals are understood and treated by humans should be considered in relation to the ways we feel about them, and in doing so the study of fiction has a special role to play: ‘Literary texts testify to the shared emotions, moods and thoughts of people in specific historical moments and places, as they are influenced by — and as they influence — the surrounding sociocultural forces and systems’.28 When the bear was on the verge of extinction, it seems to have stimulated the cultural imagination in new ways. Several Swedish authors wrote stories about bears at the fin de siècle.29 The Swedish writers Selma Lagerlöf and Pelle Molin both wrote short stories about bears in the 1890s where the ethical and emotional similarities between man and bear are accentuated, thereby opening up a cultural, religious, and political space where bear and human co-exists. Lagerlöf ’s and Molin’s stories testify to more than just a ‘lurking’ anxiety that human privilege cannot be maintained. Pelle Molin’s short story ‘En ringdans medan mor väntar…’ (‘A Ring-dance While Mother is Waiting…’, 1897) makes an analogy between bear and man as parents defending their children.30 In ‘Gudsfreden’ (‘The Peace of God’, 1899), Lagerlöf explicitly does this through a reference to Pax et treuga Dei and the biblical narrative about the good Samaritan.31

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871), I, 105. Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 5. Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 4. Apart from Selma Lagerlöf and Pelle Molin, Alfhild Agrell and Helena Nyblom also wrote short stories where the bear plays a central role. 30 Pelle Molin, and Gustaf af Geijerstam, eds, Ådalens Poesi. Efterlämnade skrifter af Pelle Molin. Utgifna och försedda med en lefnadsteckning öfver författaren af Gustaf af Geijerstam (Stockholm: Wahlström, and Widstrand, 1897). I am grateful to Anders Öhman for making me aware of Molin’s bear story. Öhman is a researcher specializing in literature from the northern part of Sweden. See for example: Anders Öhman, ‘Norrland and the Question of Cultural Identity’, in Centring on the Peripheries: Studies in Scandinavian, Scottish, Gaelic and Greenlandic Literature ed. by Bjarne Thorup Thomsen (Norwich: Norvik Press, 2007), pp. 59−67; Anders Johansson, Anders Öhman, and Peter Degerman, eds, Norrlandslitteratur: ekokritiska perspektiv (Göteborg: Makadam, 2018). 31 Lagerlöf is here using the Swedish word for what in Latin is called Pax et treuga Dei, which translates as ‘The Peace and Truce of God’. This tradition from the Middle Ages was created as a reaction to the constant fighting not only among noblemen but noblemen also fighting with everyone else. Peace was permanently proclaimed in certain buildings like the church, and certain persons like monks, clerics, and women, cattle and horses, should always be protected by this peace. The Truce of God or Treuga Dei concerned only special periods and had its origin in Normandy in the city of Caen in the eleventh century. The Truce of God peace was required throughout Advent, the season of Lent, and from the beginning of the Rogation days until eight days after Pentecost, and during certain days of the week. Daniel Francis Callahan, ‘Truce-of-God’ in Britannica [accessed 10 March 2022]. Anonymous, ‘Gudsfrid’, in Nordisk familjebok 1909 [accessed 10 March 2022]. Lagerlöf includes the wild animals in the category protected by The Truce of God, which was probably an accepted interpretation. 26 27 28 29

1 83

184

c l audi a lin dén

Even though none of them mentions the emerging animal rights movement, they seem to incorporate such a perspective in their writings. In combination with the awareness of the bears’ possible extinction, which Lagerlöf mentions a few years later in her famous book The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906), it created a new perception of the bear.32 In their stories, the bear once again becomes someone who resembles the human, man’s neighbour, thereby re-connecting human and bear with their long mutual history. Pelle Molin’s ‘A Ring-dance While Mother Is Waiting…’ Pelle Molin (1864−96) was an artist and a writer from Ångermanland on the northeast coast of Sweden. He worked as a journalist and a writer of short stories and died young, at the age of thirty-two. Anders Öhman, a literary scholar specializing in the literature from the northern part of Sweden, has pointed out that Molin has been classified as the noble savage and his literature as vildmarksromantik (wilderness romance) and Molin himself viewed as a fjällman (a man coming from the mountains).33 At first, this description was positive; then it became condescending, measured against an aesthetic norm of realism.34 This has prevented people from understanding how political Molin’s stories are. According to Öhman this placing of literature in category’s has often meant that one has been blind to what took place in the northern literature ‘Det är en blindhet som, förutom att den varit förtryckande och hämmande, även lett till att mycket av den norrländska litteraturen och verkligheten lämnats obeaktad’ (‘It is a blindness that, in addition to being oppressive and inhibiting, also led to much of the northern literature and reality has been ignored’).35 All Molin’s stories are about the lives of small peasants or Sami in northern Sweden and show an unusual sensitivity to the animal’s agency and emotional life and the similarity between human and non-human animals. Even though he did not include as-clear religious undercurrent in his stories in the same way as Selma Lagerlöf, Molin’s way of accentuating the moral resemblance between human and bear in his short story ‘A Ring-dance While Mother is Waiting…’ (1897) could be read as an example of Protestant ethics, namely, linking man to the life of reciprocity that requires deeds for the sake of the neighbour. As an example of literature from the northern periphery, it could be read as showing an awareness that there is no real difference between man and bear in a way that the bear becomes both a neighbour in the Protestant sense and a representation of bare life in Agamben’s sense. Molin’s ‘A Ring-dance While Mother is Waiting…’ is a very dramatic and sad story about a man called Salmon, who is running through the woods on a light summer night on his way to fetch the midwife when he encounters a bear and gets into a life or death struggle with it. Salmon’s wife is about to give birth to their fourth child. It takes him two hours to run through the forest to the midwife and then back again. He is full of anxiety

32 Lagerlöf seems to have had an interest in animal rights. She criticized Hazelius for keeping wild animals in captivity at Skansen. In ch. 38 of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Nils liberates the eagle Gorgo, and then rides on Gorgo’s back when they escape together from Skansen. 33 Anders Öhman, ‘Sagofolket och Norrlandslitteraturen’, Tidskriften Västerbotten, 1 (2004.) 8−13, p. 9. 34 Öhman, ‘Sagofolket och Norrlandslitteraturen’, p. 10. 35 Öhman, ‘Sagofolket och Norrlandslitteraturen’, p. 13.

ursus sacer

that something will happen to the child, or even worse, to his wife and make their three children motherless. It all depends on him, how fast he can run. Then he hears a noise and understands that it is a bear. He has met and shot many bears, but he has never seen one so angry as this one. Men aldrig förr än denna lidandets och nödens och brådskans natt hade han sett maken till denna. Han kunde icke förklara detta ofattliga raseri … och denna envisa löpande kanalje, var han kanske jagad och sårad, hade man beröfvat honom ungarne? Nej, det fanns icke bloddroppe i de bruna håren.36 [But never before this night of suffering and distress and urgency had he seen the like of it. He could not explain this unimaginable rage […] and this stubborn running rascal, perhaps he was hunted and wounded, had he been robbed of his young? No, there was not a single drop of blood in the brown hairs.]37 Salmon hopes that the bear will lose interest in the hunt and leave. When this is not the case, he is aiming for a tree to hide behind. He knows that if he is fast, he can keep the pine tree between himself and the bear at all times, thus avoiding the bear’s attacks. Ett hopp i half cirkel och Nalle susade förbi, knappt en half aln ifrån. Det förfelade språnget slutade med ett tvärstopp i mossan, däri nosen plöjde en liten väg. Ett larmande ryt … mossan refs upp i tvärvändningen … den stod som en sky … och så kom han igen i blind ilska … gjorde hastig halt invid trädet, då han såg Salmon vika undan … rusade nu efter honom men kunde icke hålla cirkeln så snäf som Salmon; hans kropp var för lång … och så bar det sig igen, att han sköt fram och tillbaka i spetsiga vinklar … gjorde tvära vändningar och kast som en skrämd gris … kastade om … stötte emot … röt, så att det slamrade om det … klöste i mossan, så att den magra sandjorden tittade upp med aflånga gula ögon … men kom alltid på sidan om Salmon. Kvistar knastrade, och alla små stenar rasslade och skreko. [A jump in half circle and Nalle rushed past, barely half a yard away. The lascivious leap ended with a sudden stop in the moss, where the nose plowed a little way. A noisy roar … the moss was torn up when the bear quickly turned around it stood like a cloud … and then he came again in blind anger … hurriedly stopped by the tree, when he saw Salmon bend away … now rushed after him, but could not keep the circle as narrow as Salmon; his body was too long … and then he came back again so he shot back and forth at pointed angles … made sharp twists and turns like a frightened pig … threw about … bumped … roared so it slammed about it … scratching the moss, so that the meagre sandy ground looked up with elongated yellow eyes … but always came to the side of Salmon. Twigs crumpled, and all the small stones rattled and shrieked.]38

36 Pelle Molin, Ådalens poesi [Elektronisk resurs] efterlemnade skrifter (Stockholm: Wahlström, and Widstrand, 1897), p. 65 [accessed 10 March 2022]. 37 All translations to Pelle Molin’s text are my own. 38 Molin, Ådalens poesi, p. 64.

1 85

186

c l audi a lin dén

The fight, going on like this, with the bear attacking and Salmon moving fast around the tree so that the bear miss him every time, is the core of the story. It goes on for a long time. It is only occasionally intertwined with Salmon’s thoughts on his wife in the agonies of childbirth and the children at home: ‘Och mor, som arbetat hela aftonen med sitt — och väntade … väntade!’ [‘And mother, who worked all evening with hers − and waited … waited!’].39 The bear’s rage is incomprehensible. Why does he not just let it go? This seemingly illogical fury makes the bear more monstrous. In medieval moral theology, a distinction was made between vice and sin. Vice was rooted in the very nature of a person, and hard to repress or control. Sin, on the other hand, arose from free and voluntary conduct (sometimes inspired by the devil), and was, therefore, an offence against God.40 Given free will, one should be able to refrain from sin, correct oneself, or confess in cases where a sin was committed. In medieval bestiaries, the bear became connected to vice. Animals did not commit sins, they were imperfect creatures, more or less vicious. The bear, as Pastoureau points out, was, for the Church Fathers and theologians of the Middle Ages, the creature who inhabited most vices. When, during the thirteenth century, the vices merged into the form of the seven deadly sins, as opposed to the seven virtues, each sin and virtue was associated with a certain number of animals. Lion, eagle, and horse were associated with virtue, whereas bear, fox, monkey, pig, and dog are always negatively connected with sin.41 But worst of them all is the bear, who is associated with five out of the seven sins; lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth: ‘From the thirteenth century, he was the star of this hateful bestiary, a sad fate for a wild animal who was once the king of the beasts’.42 It is noteworthy, Pastoureau continues, that in the bestiary of the seven major sins, the two animals considered closest to humans, bear and pig, are the most devalued. Too close kinships with animals seems to be unbearable, and compensated for by devaluation, and in the case of the bear, extermination. The major monotheist religions, Pastoureau writes, ‘do not like animals that nature and culture have declared to be “cousins” or “relatives” of man. […] It has never been a good idea to resemble human beings too closely’.43 In Pelle Molin’s text, the bear’s incomprehensible and ongoing blind rage, its small glowing eyes, make it a devilish beast in a way that resembles the medieval bestiaries: Nalles små stickande ögon glödde. Ryggens hår låg tätt, slätt, bakåtlagdt. Öronen hade han dragit intill hufvudet Det låg någonting af isande beslutsamhet hos denne kamrat i skogen. Utan ett ögonblicks uppehåll jagade han efter den magre nybyggaren [Nalle’s small pungent eyes glowed. The fur of the back laid tight, flat, backward. He had drawn his ears near the head There was something of ice-cold determination in this comrade in the forest. Without a moment’s pause he chased after the skinny settler]44

39 Molin, Ådalens poesi, p. 65. 40 Pastoureau, The Bear, pp. 178−79. 41 Pastoureau, The Bear, p. 183. 42 Pastoureau, The Bear, p. 184. 43 Pastoureau, The Bear, p. 184. 44 Molin, Ådalens poesi, p. 65.

ursus sacer

The fury and the ice-cold determination make the bear monstrous, but at the same time suggest a human, and therefore moral, resemblance in this raging adversary in the forest. As Pastoureau suggests, the border between human and animal must be maintained, partly on moral grounds. A too close resemblance between human and animal would imply not only free will and the possibility of voluntary good conduct in the animal but also a moral obligation from human to animal. One cannot just hunt and kill such a creature. So, the bear had to be made into a monster to be able to be killed, both on the long-term cultural level as on the individual level in Molin’s story. When Salmon realizes that he has his knife with him, he aims at the bear and manages to inflict a wound on the bear. But that act also seals the fate of the battle. Now, one of them will die: Nu visste han, att leken icke skulle ändas förr än en af dem låg kall och stilla. Hade utsikten till en uppgörelse i godo för en stund sedan varit ringa, var den nu ingen. Det syntes tydligt, att nu skulle det gälla för Björn-Salmon, om han ännu var Björn-Salmon. Nu skulle enderas lif spillas, men knappast björnens … i sådan ojemn strid. Salmon tänkte: “det är icke jag, som blir änkling i natt; det är mor, som blir änka … mor, som väntar mig.” [Now he knew that the game would not end until one of them lay cold and still. Had the prospect of a settlement in peace been slight a little while ago, it was now null. It seemed clear that now this would be the end for Bear-Salmon if he still was Bear-Salmon. Now, one of their lives would end, but hardly the bear’s … in such uneven battle. Salmon thought, “It is not I who will become a widower this night; it’s mother who will be widowed … mother, who is waiting for me”.]45 They fight for a long time, attacking each other again and again, the bear with all its force and Salmon with his knife. In the end, he manages to kill the bear. Exhausted, Salmon falls asleep. He wakes up half an hour later because a bear cub, who had been hiding in the tree, comes falling down in his lap. The reader, and Salmon, then understand that the bear’s fury was all about protecting her child. Had Salmon chosen another tree to hide behind or looked up, just once, the whole tragedy could have been avoided. Or, had he managed to see the resemblance between himself and the bear, that the cause of agitation was the same in man as in bear, the bear had only done the same thing as Salmon did, struggling and fighting to protect its family, its child. The whole story is told from the angle of Salmon, except for this penultimate paragraph, which instead is narrated from the bear cub’s perspective. This change of the story’s focalization breaks up the anthropocentric perspective and accentuates the similarities between man and bear. The altered narrative perspective gives an agency to the animal, to the enemy’s child, now an orphan: Det är björnhonans unge. Han är oviss på betydelsen af denna djupa stillhet efter detta långa larm. Men han ser, att mor gjort fred och den andre med, och han känner längtan

45 Molin, Ådalens poesi, p. 69.

1 87

188

c l audi a lin dén

att komma härifrån. Han har icke varit litet rädd häruppe. Nu sätter han tassarne intill stammen och börjar masa sig ned. Det går långsamt till en början… Det var icke en vettig mans blick hos Salmon, då han väcktes af ett tungt bylte, som föll ned på honom. Det var hos honom, då han rusade i väg till bygden, något af ett jagadt vildbråd, en vettskrämd grå tuss med något af svansen mellan benen. Där fanns ingenting alls af nattens hjälte, af Björn-Salmon. Det var endast en svulten nybyggare, afkvistad och allena, som sprang för sitt fattiga lif. [It’s the bear’s cub. He is uncertain of the importance of this deep silence after this long alarm. But he sees that mother made peace and the other too, and he feels the desire to come from here. He has not been a little scared up here. Now he puts the paws next to the trunk and begins to slide down. It goes slowly at first… It was not a sensible man’s gaze in Salmon when he was awakened by a heavy boot which fell upon him. It was with him when he rushed to the village, reminiscent of a hunted quarry, a frightened grey tuft as if he had his tail between his legs. There was nothing left of the night’s hero, of Björn-Salmon. It was only a starving settler, like a tree without twigs and alone, who ran for his poor life.]46 When Salmon realizes what he has done, that he has killed the bear cub’s mother, and that the bear cub now is in exactly that position Salmon himself fought so hard to avoid for his own children, he is filled with shame. Salmon is overtaken, not by a ‘lurking anxiety’ as Rohman called it, but full-blown angst in his realization that there is no difference between his children and the bear’s.47 He saw a monster where there was only a mother with a child. He has failed in recognizing the bear as his neighbour. Salmon runs into the village like a scared dog or even worse, completely de-masculinized. In regarding the bear as monster, the human made himself into a monster, a shameful person. Then both he and the bear become fredlösa, that is, homo / ursus sacer. In this, both bear and human become an example of bare life where the border between human and animal are obliterated: ‘a condition in which everyone is bare life and a homo sacer for everyone else, and in which everyone is thus wargus, gerit caput lupinum’ as Agamben writes.48 In killing the bear, he has protected himself and his children, but at the cost of someone else’s life, a poor little bear cub, who now probably will die of starvation. Bear and human are alike and stand in an ethical relationship to each other. In the Icelandic sagas, encounters between man and animal are much more common than in other European literature from the Middle Ages, as Lena Rohrbach has shown in Der tierische Blick: Mensch-Tier-Relationen in der Sagaliteratur.49 When it comes to the bear, the most common sort of encounter is to hunt the bear, a hunting that makes men more masculine.50 This notion of the masculinization of especially the bear hunter is very much

46 Molin, Ådalens poesi, p. 74. 47 Rohman, Stalking the Subject, p. 5. 48 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 64. 49 Lena Rohrbach, Der tierische Blick: Mensch-Tier-Relationen in der Sagaliteratur (Erlangen-Nürnberg: Francke, 2007), also published as a dissertation (Tübingen, 2009). 50 Rohrbach, Der tierische Blick, pp. 201−02.

ursus sacer

present in both Molin’s and Lagerlöf ’s stories. But in the end, both stories implode this close connection of masculinity and killing of the bear when it turns out that men who kill or plan to kill the bear, in fact, become de-masculinized in one way or another. The famous Bear-Salmon is initially presented as a man who has killed many bears, but in the end — after killing the bear — he is described as a frightened creature who runs away with his tail between his legs. Killing a bear made him, in fact, lose his masculinity. Lagerlöf, who knew her Icelandic sagas by heart, depicts as we shall see a similar de-masculinization in relation to an attempt to kill a bear.51 Ancient Bear Cult in Scandinavia Ceremonies around bear hunting are found over large parts of the northern hemisphere.52 After the Middle Ages, the bear had in practice disappeared from the forests of southern and central Europe, even though a few single bears still lingered on in Germany and the Alps into the nineteenth century.53 In the Nordic region, on the other hand, where the bear still lived and lives on today, there is an associative link, a cultural bridge one might call it, between the pre-Christian view of the bear as sacred and the twentieth century’s endangered and protected bear. As Pastoreau has shown, the bear was an element of different cults through the whole of Europe, up until the Middle Ages. In the Nordic region, it went on much longer. In Finland, the traces of these bear ceremonies are very tangible and several songs in the Kalevala are today considered to be songs that were sung or read over the dead bear.54 Traces of these beliefs are also found in Sweden and occur into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.55 It seems as if the beliefs and ceremonies surrounding the bear could coexist with Christian faith in the Nordic region. The common denominator to these ceremonies, with its regulations for how one should approach the bear before and after it was killed, is the respect and reverence for the powerful animal. The reverence for the bear, however, did not prevent the bear also being feared, hunted, and eaten. Some of the key features of these ceremonies are the ways the hunt is performed. The bear must never be killed in its sleep during hibernation. If it is winter, the bear must be awakened and lured out of its den. According to the same depictions, one should not say ‘shoot’, but instead ‘let go’. Anna Westman Kuhmunen writes that, according to a Sami woman interviewed in the early half of the nineteenth century in Sweden, ‘The word she used expresses the idea that the killing was a gift from the bear. The hunting

51 In her biography, Anna-Karin Palm shows how intensely Lagerlöf read the Icelandic sagas in her youth. Anna-Karin Palm, ‘Jag vill sätta världen i rörelse’: en biografi över Selma Lagerlöf (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 2019), ch. 2. 52 Björklöf, Björnen, p. 251. 53 Pastoreau, The Bear, pp. 237−39. 54 Juha Pentikäinen, and Ritva Poom, Kalevala mythology, expanded edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 55 Anna Westman Kuhmunen, ‘A Female Perspective on Sami Bear Hunting Ceremonies’, Journal of Northern Studies, 9 (2015), 73−94 (p. 74).

1 89

190

c l audi a lin dén

method that was used meant that the bear gave itself to the hunter’.56 When the bear was killed, everyone had to shake the paw of the fallen bear. The eating of the bear in these ceremonies is also often an opportunity to partake of the sacred, through the sharing of the flesh and blood of the divine. The ceremonies were often called björnens gravöl (the bear’s funeral feast), or björnbröllop (the bear’s wedding) where a bride or groom (depending on the bear’s sex) is appointed during the festivities when the bear’s meat is eaten. The clean-boiled skull is then placed in a tree so that the spirit of the bear can return to its origin. The oldest complete depictions of a bear’s burial feast are from the seventeenth century, and there is an oral eyewitness account from as late as 1890 in Sweden.57 In addition to these ceremonies, there are also strong ideas about animal transformation into both wolf and bear in Swedish and Nordic folklore. It is reflected in expressions like ‘löpa björn’ (‘run bear’), ‘gå björn’ (‘go bear’), ‘gå i björnhamn’ (‘go into bear shape’), ‘vänd till björn’ (‘turn to bear’). In her book about the werewolf in Swedish folk tradition, Ella Odstedt mentions three ways in which belief in werewolves expresses itself in Sweden: belief in self-transformation, transformation through destruction, and transformation through circumstances at birth.58 There are also notions of women’s special relationship with the bear, and stories about mixed marriages between women and bears. The assumption that women can scare away a bear by lifting their skirt existed throughout the farmland in the whole middle part of Sweden.59 In Lagerlöf ’s story, the woman is not the one who scares the bear away, but the one who has a special connection with the bear; she is the one who points out that the humans have acted not only unethically, but in an unholy way, against the bear. Selma Lagerlöf’s ‘The Peace of God’ In Lagerlöf ’s short story ‘Gudsfreden’ (‘The Peace of God’, 1899), not only is the ethical relationship towards the bear, but the bear’s own moral agency, accentuated through the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10.25−37). Lagerlöf ’s story takes place at the intersection of Old Nordic belief in the holiness of the bear and a post-Darwinist insight into the similarity between animals and ourselves, in combination with an animal rights perspective with Christian roots of the bear as an endangered species. In her book on

56 Westman Kuhmunen, ‘A Female Perspective’, p. 81. 57 Björklöf, Björnen, p. 260. 58 The idea of self-transformation was most common in in the northern landscapes of Sweden ( Jämtland, Härjedalen, Dalarna, Värmland and Ångermanland). The most common figure that the self-transformed assumes was the wolf or the bear. In Dalarna and Värmland, it is only into a bear that transformation could take place. The most common causes of transformation were ravenousness, pleasure, or revenge. The notion that some people can bewitch others so they shapeshift into a predator existed all over Sweden. Ella Odstedt, Varulven i svensk folktradition, Utök. nyutg., (Täby: Malört, 2012), pp. 63−65 and 95. Lagerlöf relates to this notion of magically turned bears with the story of the bear from Gurlitta in the The Saga of Gösta Berling, which only a bullet made from the church-bells metal can kill. 59 Björklöf, Björnen, p. 287. The Swedish doctor Axel Munthe’s world-renowned book about his life and travels tells such a story. When he is walking across the mountains up north with a Sami girl as a guide, they encounter a bear, and she scares off the bear in exactly this way, by lifting her skirt. It is said in the story that it was something her mother taught her to do. Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele (London: John Murray, 1929).

ursus sacer

Lutheran undercurrents in Lagerlöf, Margareta Brandby-Cöster writes that ‘much of Selma Lagerlöf ’s writing can be interpreted within the framework of a Lutherean view of creation theology’.60 But Brandby-Cöster also points out that Lagerlöf lived in a time of great transformation regarding religion and secularization. Lagerlöf writes about her faith, in a letter to a friend, the same year she wrote ‘The Peace of God’: ‘Jag tror på Gud mer än jag någonsin gjort förr, men jag tror ej på prester. Och lägg märke till att Gud ej tycker om religioner. Ingenting blir så snart förvridet och förstört som religioner.’61 [I believe in God more than I have ever done before, but I do not believe in priests. And notice that God does not like religions. Nothing is as soon distorted and destroyed as religions] It is the commandment to love thy neighbour as yourself, as it is used in the Gospel of Luke, which constitutes the intertext of Lagerlöf ’s short story. Lagerlöf ’s stories are not openly religious but could often be read as worldly, religious, or even fantastic, depending on the reader’s interpretation. When Lagerlöf uses the Gospel of Luke, it connects the story to Protestant ethics. This Lutheran undercurrent could be interpreted in line with a Quaker-inspired view of human-animal relations that Anna Sewall promoted in Black Beauty. When Lagerlöf opens up the religious domain for the bear, she also connects to the above-mentioned, ancient belief in the bear’s holiness. ‘The Peace of God’ takes place on Christmas Eve in Ingmarsgården, the homestead of the Ingmarson family. The house is swept and cleaned to the last minute, and the sauna is heated so everyone could take a bath before Christmas. The girl whose job it is to tie birch twigs for the sauna bath cannot perform her task well because she has no thin sprigs to tie with. As everyone is busy, old Ingmar Ingmarson decides to go out himself and cut the sprigs. It blows and snows intensely and the snowy wind makes old Ingmarson dizzy, and on his way home he walks in the wrong direction: into the forest, instead of home over the fields. He thus goes astray in the woods. Then comes a surprisingly long, horrifying depiction of how the old man walks in the blizzard in the woods and gets increasingly tired while darkness descends upon him. Lagerlöf often works with magic and Gothic elements, and the depiction of how old Ingmarson is lost in the waste forest while the snow swirls and sweeps away all his tracks so that he neither knows what is forward or backward is clearly Gothic: Det var som förgjordt och förtrolladt, att han skulle löpa omkring där på skogen hela kvällen och komma för sent till badningen.62 [It was as if bewildered and bewitched that he would run around there in the forest all evening and arrive too late for the sauna].63 Nature as horror is a recurring feature of Nordic Gothic. If, at first, it is a nuisance that the storm makes him late for the bathing, the forest, and the snowstorm, quickly turn into a

60 Margareta Brandby-Cöster, Att uppfatta allt mänskligt: underströmmar av luthersk livsförståelse i Selma Lagerlöfs författarskap (dissertation, University of Karlstad, 2001), p. 39. All translations to Brandby-Cöster are my own. 61 Lagerlöf to Elise Malmroos 1899, quoted from Brandby-Cöster, Att uppfatta allt mänskligt, p. 74. 62 Selma Lagerlöf, ‘Gudsfreden’, in Drottningar i Kungahälla jämte andra berättelser (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1899), p. 252: [accessed 10 March 2022]. 63 All translations to Selma Lagerlöf ’s text are my own.

1 91

192

c l audi a lin dén

death threat. Ingmarson understands that if he falls asleep he will freeze to death. He is so tired that he considers the possibility and begins to think of all the beautiful words that the priest will say about him at the funeral, until he realizes that the fact that he got lost in the forest on Christmas Eve could be interpreted as him being drunk. This is not how he wants to be remembered. So, he continues. Finally, he gives up and crawls in under a heap of twigs. However, this turns out to be a bear den: Men då han sköt in kroppen under kvistarna, kände han, att därinne i högen låg något, som var varmt och mjukt. Här ligger visst en björn och sofver, tänkte han. Han kände hur djuret rörde sig och hörde hur det vädrade omkring sig. Han låg stilla i alla fall. Han tänkte intet annat än att björnen gärna kunde få äta upp honom. Han orkade ej gå ett steg till för att komma undan honom. Men björnen tyckte sig väl ej vilja göra något åt den, som sökte skydd under hans tak under en sådan ovädersnatt. Han flyttade sig något längre ned i sin håla liksom för att ge rum åt gästen, och strax därefter sof han med jämna, susande andetag. [But when he shot in his body under the twigs, he felt that inside the pile was something warm and soft. Here a bear lies and sleeps, he thought. He sensed how the animal was moving and heard how it was sniffing around in the air. He lay still in any case. He thought of nothing but that the bear might as well eat him if he wanted. He couldn’t move one step further to get away from him. But the bear did not seem to want to harm the one who sought protection under his roof during such a stormy night. He moved slightly further down into his hole as if to give space to the guest, and shortly afterward he slept with regular, whistling breaths.]64 Old Ingmar Ingmarson is thus saved from freezing to death by the bear, who without damaging him, lets him share his den during the night. A truly compassionate act thus. For most of the story, the beginning and the middle of the walk in the forest, up to the meeting with the bear, it is focalized from Ingmarson’s perspective. But from the moment of his meeting with the bear, the story changes the focal point, to his wife, and therefrom the story is narrated from her perspective. While old Ingmarson got lost in the woods, everyone in the homestead was sitting still at home, worrying, but no one could do anything because of the storm. To calm everyone while waiting for the weather to clear up so they would able to go out and search for her husband, Mrs Ingmarson has read from the Bible, and what she ‘efter fattig förmåga’ (‘after poor ability’) chooses to read is the story of the man who travelled from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers.65 Den gamla kvinnan läste och läste och kom till frågan: “Hvilken var nu hans nästa, som för röfvarena kommen var?” Men innan hon hunnit läsa svaret, sköts dörren upp och gamle Ingmar kom in i rummet. “Mor, far är här”, sade en af döttrarna, och det blef aldrig uppläst, att mannens nästa var den, som hade bevisat honom barmhärtighet. [The old woman read and read and came to the question: “Who was his neighbour, who came before the robbers?” But before she had time to read the answer, the 64 Lagerlöf, ‘Gudsfreden’, p. 256. 65 Lagerlöf, ‘Gudsfreden’, p. 257.

ursus sacer

door was opened and old Ingmar entered the room. “Mother, father is here”, said one of the daughters, and it was never read out loud, that the man’s neighbour was the one who had shown him mercy.]66 The question of who the man’s neighbour was is never answered. Nor is the question asked when everyone agrees that they must dash out and shoot the bear, instead of celebrating Christmas in joy now that the father is returned to them. ‘Because it is so’, it says in the text: Ty det är så, att björnen är det en mans plikt att fälla, hvar och när han råkar honom. Det går ej an att skona en björn, ty förr eller senare får han dock smak på kött, och då sparar han hvarken djur eller människa. [Because it is so that it is a man’s duty to slay the bear, where and when he comes upon him. It is not possible to spare a bear, because sooner or later he gets a taste for meat, and then he saves neither animal nor man.]67 But even though she knows this injunction well, Mrs Ingmarson is distressed and rightly so. Brandby-Cöster accentuates how important the notion of the word in Lutheran theology is to Lagerlöf. När Guds löfte mottas av människan i tro får ordet en dubbel uppgift, nämligen att knyta människan till det ömsesidighetens liv som kräver gärningar för nästans skull (lagen) och genom vissheten om rättfärdiggörelsen ge människan vilan hos Gud (evangeliet).68 [When God’s promise is received by man in faith, the word is given a double task, namely, to link man to the life of reciprocity that requires deeds for the sake of the neighbour (the law), and through the certainty of justification give man rest in God (the gospel).] In the story, no one in the Ingmarson family cares to listen to the word of the Bible of who the man’s neighbour was. Instead, they run off to kill the one who saved old Ingmarson. They all have failed in listening to the word. Mrs Ingmarson senses this, deep in her heart, and in her distress, she continues to search in the Bible: Men sedan de gått bort till jakten, hade den gamla husmodern fått en stor ängslan öfver sig och hade tagit till att läsa. Nu började hon läsa om det, som den dagen predikades i kyrkan, men hon kom ej längre än till detta, “Frid på jorden, och människorna en god vilje!” Hon blef sittande och stirrade på dessa ord med sina slocknande blickar, och allt emellanåt drog hon en tung suck. Hon läste ej vidare, men hon upprepade gång på gång med långsam och släpande röst: “frid på jorden, människorna en god vilje!” [But after they have gone to the hunt, the old Mistress of the house felt great anxiety come over herself and had taken to reading. Now she began to read about that which was preached in the church this day, but she came no further than to this, “Peace on earth, and Goodwill to all Men!” She remained sitting and stared at

66 Lagerlöf, ‘Gudsfreden’, p. 258. 67 Lagerlöf, ‘Gudsfreden’, p. 258. 68 Brandby-Cöster, Att uppfatta allt mänskligt, pp. 79.

1 93

194

c l audi a lin dén

these words with her fading eyes, and from time to time she drew a heavy sigh. She did not read any further, but she repeated again and again with a slow and dragging voice: “Peace on earth, and Goodwill to all Men!”]69 Before she even has time to formulate for herself what is amiss, the youngest son rushes in. He is very upset and can barely talk. She pats him on the cheek ‘och gjorde hvad hon ej gjort, sedan sonen varit barn’ (‘and did what she had not done since he was a child’).70 She takes him in her arms, and he breaks down and starts crying: —“Jag kan förstå, att det är något med far”, sade hon. —“Ja, men det är värre än så”, snyftade sonen. —“Är det värre än så?” Karlen grät allt häftigare, han visste ej hur han skulle få makt med sin röst. Slutligen lyfte han upp sin grofva hand med de breda fingrarna och pekade på detta, som hon nyss läst. -”Frid på jorden.” — “Är det något med detta?” frågade hon. —“Ja”, svarade han. —“Är det något med julfreden?” —“Ja.” —“Ni ville göra en ond gärning i morse.” —“Ja.” — “Och Gud har straffat oss?” —“Gud har straffat oss.” [“I can understand that there is something about father”, —“Yes, but it is worse than that”, sobbed the son. —“Is it worse than that?” The man cried increasingly fiercely, he did not know how to get power over his voice. Finally, he raised his coarse hand with his wide fingers and pointed to that, which she just had read. —“Peace on earth, and Goodwill to all Men!” — “Is there anything about this?” she asked. —“Yes”, he answered. —“Is there something about Christmas peace?” —“Yes.” —“You wanted to do an evil act this morning.” —“Yes.” —“And God has punished us?” —“God has punished us”.]71 Finally, he tells her what happened. They had found and drawn a circle around the den and charged with guns. As mentioned earlier, in the old bear ceremonies it was forbidden to kill a bear while it was asleep. It was not respectful. Now old Ingmar Ingmarson and his sons were both prepared to kill the one who saved him and break the ancient taboo about killing a sleeping bear. And this on Christmas Eve itself, when peace is supposed to rule on earth. It is, therefore, a violation on many levels. 69 Lagerlöf, ‘Gudsfreden’, p. 259. 70 Lagerlöf, ‘Gudsfreden’, p. 259. 71 Lagerlöf, ‘Gudsfreden’, p. 260.

ursus sacer

To hunt an animal at any cost that does not threaten anyone, an animal that the reader in 1899 knows is endangered and no longer exists, for example, in Värmland (the last bear was shot there in 1898), is presented as ill-considered and immoral in Lagerlöf ’s story. The bear has also literally hit back: han kom rakt emot den gamle Ingmar Ingmarson och gaf honom ett slag öfver hjässan, som fällde honom, såsom hade han träffats af blixten. [he came straight on to old Ingmar Ingmarson and gave him a blow over his head, which brought him down as if he had been hit by lightning.]72 The bear does not care about the other hunters and just runs away into the forest. This is an example of how the old idea of the bear hunter as the most masculine man is turned upside down, when old Ingmarson is punished by the bear. The Bear As Man’s Neighbour Within the context of the story, God has punished Ingmar and his sons for not showing mercy to their neighbour, the bear who saved old Ingmarson. Realizing that they are the ones who have broken the Peace of God, and therefore have been punished by God, Mrs Ingmarson insists that her husband’s funeral should be as insignificant as possible. From a different angle, yet in a similar way as in Molin’s story, the bear and the human both become homo / ursus sacer here. When Ingmarson and his son went out to kill the bear, they treated the bear as fredlös, as someone that could be killed but not sacrificed, as excluded from both profane and divine law. But, in the end, it is old Ingmarson, punished by God when the bear killed him, and bereft of a high-status funeral, thereby expelled from both the divine and profane order, who has become a homo sacer, a fredlös. Again, man and bear are interconnected, mirror each other, or change places. Men om julen har Gud satt fred mellan djur och människor, och det arma djuret höll Guds bud, men vi bröto det, och därför äro vi nu under Guds straff. [But at Christmas, God set peace between animals and humans, and the poor animal kept the commandments of God, but we broke it, and therefore we are under God’s punishment.]73 The bear becomes, in Lagerlöf ’s story, not only man’s neighbor but a creature with a moral agency. In contrast to the humans, the bear has kept God’s commandments. The bear is the one who can choose to be a merciful Samaritan, and who also has the ability to see that a neighbour can be someone who is different from himself, even someone who is usually an enemy. Animals and people have always been parts of God’s kingdom, but here they become equal moral beings in a mutual dialogue where man was the one who betrayed the agreement and therefore is now punished by God. By making bear and human equal

72 Lagerlöf, ‘Gudsfreden’, p. 260. 73 Lagerlöf, ‘Gudsfreden’, p. 262.

1 95

196

c l audi a lin dén

moral beings before God, Lagerlöf repeals the anthropocentrism that places man as centre of the universe, as an image of God. As is often with Lagerlöf, her stories can be read both religiously and secularly at the same time. Read from a cultural-historical perspective in a post-Darwinian era, Lagerlöf seems here to undermine the evolutionary logic that says that man is the crown of evolution and thus can do what he wants with more primitive beings. Lagerlöf ’s story then becomes an example of Carrie Rohan’s observation about the fin de siècle literature, that it testifies to Darwinism’s deeper challenge to anthropocentrism, which is manifested in lurking anxiety that human supremacy can no longer can maintained. From an animal rights perspective, is it possible to read the story as an argument in the contemporary debate, where it was possible to read in the Swedish newspapers of the 1890s the call ‘Låt ej björnen utrotas’ (‘Don’t let the bear be exterminated’).74 Seen in relation to an older view of the bear, where the bear was seen as omniscient, but above all with the ability to understand human speech even human thought, the bear in Lagerlöf ’s short story becomes an example of such a bear who hears and knows everything.75 Thus, the bear in Lagerlöf ’s story can be seen an echo of an older view of the bear as holy, merged with a Christian message of who is one’s neighbor and God’s peace on earth. When old Ingmarson met the bear, it was asleep, and it seemed to notice that he was there since it moved away and then continued to sleep: ‘och strax därefter sof han med jämna, susande andetag’ (‘soon afterward he slept with an even, whispering breath’).76 We must assume that the bear slept even when Ingmarson snuck out of the den in the morning. A bear in hibernation sleeps deeply, for several months. That the bear is both awake and hears how the hunters gather outside, understands what they are planning, and knows who the culprit is — it is only old Ingmarson who gets attacked by the bear — seems to testify to the notion of the bear as both omniscient and omni-hearing, and above all, that he understands human speech. As all bear-hunting ceremonies and rites testify to, man fears that the holy bear will punish them for the hunt if they do not behave respectfully towards the bear. Old Ingmarson has in all respects broken the reverence owed to the bear, regardless of whether the bear is a sacred animal or the human’s neighbour in a Christian order. Ursus Sacer In the end, both the bear and old Ingmarson share the same place in the universe, and the same condition of having become fredlös, that is, sacer in Agamben’s sense of being a hybrid between man and animal. They now belong to ‘a realm of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion: the life of the bandit

74 Quoted from Lönnberg, p. 11. As a solution, it was proposed to ban the sale of a ‘bear circle’, i.e., the ancient method of pointing out the bear in its den marking the place of the den, in order to be being able to kill the bear later. 75 Björklöf, Björnen, p. 270. Westman Kuhmunen, ‘A Female Perspective’, p. 85. 76 Lagerlöf, ‘Gudsfreden’, p. 256.

ursus sacer

is the life of the loup-garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither’.77 As mentioned before, in the northern regions magical shapeshifting occurs with bears rather than wolves, which means that in the North the werewolf is actually a werebear.78 The human who becomes fredlös is a hybrid of human and animal, a kind of shapeshifter, a werewolf, or a werebear: ‘What had to remain in the collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city — the werewolf — is, therefore, in its origin the figure of the man who has been banned from the city’, Agamben writes.79 In the connection between homo sacer, the Germanic and Scandinavian concept of fredlöshet/Friedlosigkeit and werewolf ’s, pointed out by Agamben, the bear in its complex tradition of werebears, holy bears, and bears that are fredlösa with a bounty on their heads, can be understood as ursus sacer — and thereby also as a political category. To Agamben this original ban in homo sacer, this lycanthropy, is directly connected to the law and the city. Bare life and sacred life are both always present and always presupposes sovereignty. Agamben sees this in contrast to our modern way of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts: ‘from the point of view of sovereignty only bare life is authentically political’.80 Agamben suggests another reading of Hobbe’s and Rousseau’s foundational myth of the city. To Agamben the city is not founded on the citizen’s free will. The state of nature, he writes, is in truth a state of exception. It is not something that is founded once and for all, but instead something that is continually operative in the civil state in the form of the sovereign decisions.81 The citizen’s bare life is also the life of homo sacer, Agamben claims: What is more, the latter refers immediately to the life (and not the free will) of the citizens, which thus appears as the originary political element, the Urphänomen of politics. Yet this life is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoē of the Greeks, nor bios, a qualified form of life. It is, rather, the bare life of homo sacer and the wargus, a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture.82 Not only is bare life the urphänomen of politics, but it is so in a ‘continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture’, as Agamben puts it above. If we continue to follow Agamben’s argument on homo sacer, politics, and the city, and return to the picture of von Rosen with the dead bears at the beginning of this chapter, we can see the bears, ursus sacer, as a political category. The dead bears are displayed on the street outside von Rosen’s home in Stockholm. It happens to be on a very fashionable address in Stockholm facing The Royal Palace. The heads of dead bears are pointing in the direction of the sovereign. In that instant, they are the city’s wargus, or werebears, which, according to Agamben as quoted above, is the figure of the man who has been banned from the city. Bereft of its

77 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 63. 78 Odstedt, Varulven i svensk folktradition, p. 95. 79 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 63. 80 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 64. 81 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 65. 82 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 65.

1 97

198

c l audi a lin dén

once holy status, and killed for a bounty, the dead bear facing the palace becomes the sign for the indistinguishable line between human and animal, culture and nature. Bear death as bare life. Von Rosen’s violent act of showing off the dead bears in the city in the king’s view shows who has been banned from the city and the culture. That von Rosen also holds, as it were, a baby, the bear cub of one of the dead bears, in his arms, underlines the mutual merging of human and bear. Michel Pastoureau argued that, ‘In killing the bear, his kinsman, his fellow creature, his first God, man long ago killed his own memory, and more or less symbolically killed himself’.83 Pastoureau thought it was too late to turn the clock back. But the once-endangered bear not only lives on in Sweden today, it thrives. Even though the memory of the bear as man’s neighbour, and a realization of the political implication of this, not only eco-political but political in every sense of the word, need to regain awareness, the cultural memory of the bear’s significance continues to resonate through literature. If the urphänomen of politics is always a line that has already been transgressed between human and animal, between culture and nature, then the bear is as political as the human. There is then no need to question the anthropocentric paradigm in order to find a way forward to a new environmental politics because that paradigm rests on a fundamentally contingent ground. The political realm is a priori crossed, muted, and mixed in a never-ending transition between man and beast. At a moment in Sweden’s history when the bear was on the verge of extinction, protestant ethics made it possible for Molin and Lagerlöf to create a new awareness in their stories, that bear and human stood in an ethical, and therefore also political, relation to each other. Thought of as political, ursus sacer is the reminder that in bare life there is no difference between humans and animals. We have always, and will always, share the same habitat, in nature as in the city. Our neighbour the bear reminds us of that.

83 Pastoureau, p. 239.

Sophie Wenner s cheid

Sin and Seduction Antichrist in Danish Literature, Opera, and Film

Introduction In 1999, the Danish composer Rued Langgaard’s opera Antikrist (‘Antichrist’) had its theatrical premiere at the Tiroler Landestheater in Innsbruck. The programme booklet stated that the figure of the Antichrist did not play a particularly important role in the history of the Danish church.1 Although this statement is correct, it does not mean that reflecting on the Antichrist in the context of Protestant aesthetics will not provide interesting insights. On the contrary, it is precisely because there is so little evidence of the figure of the Antichrist in Danish church history that the few examples from the realm of aesthetics are particularly interesting. They demonstrate how Catholic imagery that is received as visually powerful and affective lives on in a largely Protestant society and troubles Protestantism’s self-understanding as enlightened, sober, and reflective. The three artistic works that deal with the figure of the Antichrist in a particularly profound way, and which therefore are at the center of my study, are the verse drama Antikrist (Antichrist) by the Danish pastor and writer P. E. Benzon, published in 1907, the above-mentioned opera by Rued Langgaard, composed between 1920 and 1930, and Lars von Trier’s movie Antichrist from 2009. The main aim of my analysis is, on the one hand, to clarify the way the Antichrist is connected with the concept of sin, and, on the other, to show to what extent this understanding of sin is associated with a specific aesthetic of seduction. The thesis, on which I base my analysis, is that the figure of the Antichrist is closely associated with Catholic imagery, because Catholicism, just like the Antichrist, is perceived as so visually diverse and powerful that it cannot be grasped rationally. And because it cannot be grasped rationally, it is both seductive and frightening. Although the three examples cannot, of course, be regarded as representative, it does not seem to be a coincidence that we are dealing with a drama, an opera, and a film — in other words, media that all aim at visual implementation. In order to illustrate my thesis, I will briefly discuss an example from Danish literature that is not directly connected with the theme of the Antichrist, but which shows very



1 Rued Langgaard, Antichrist. Kirchen-Oper in 6 Bildern, Programmheft (Innsbruck: The Tiroler Landestheater, 1999), p. 11. Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 199–213 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.131422

200

s op h i e w e n n er scheid

clearly the extent to which a pictorial world perceived as Catholic is presented as both fascinating and frightening. The example is from Jens Baggesen’s travelogue Labyrinten (The Labyrinth), published in 1792–1793. In this diverse and colourful prose work, the narrator describes how overwhelmed he is when he sees Strasbourg Cathedral. On the one hand, it is the sheer size of the church he is impressed by, but on the other, it is also the Gothic west front, decorated with thousands of figures, that astounds him. The sight is impressive but also strange and frightening because one cannot fall back on learned cultural patterns. ‘Smagen jages i første Skuen paa Flugt — og man staaer der allene med sin Følelse, tilbagehvirvlet i Middelalderens Dødmørke’ (‘The first thing chased away is good taste — and you stand there, alone with your feelings, thrown back into the deathly darkness of the Middle Ages.’).2 The narrator characterizes the incomprehensible chaos of different characters from different biblical stories and legends as Catholic, which for him is synonymous with unenlightened. ‘Det heele Physiognomie er Catholicismens. Overtroen er kiendelig i enhver Udziiring’ (‘The whole physiognomy is Catholicism’s. The superstition is noticeable in every adornment’).3 But as disconcerting as the sight is, it is fascinating. The following analysis shows the extent to which this simultaneity of fascination and fright is inspired by the figure of the Antichrist. In doing so, it begins with a short overview of the Christian understanding of evil, sin and salvation, and the various representations of the Antichrist throughout history, and then elaborates on the artistic representation of the Antichrist issue in the three authors mentioned. Antichrist in Christian Discourse In Christianity, as in all monotheistic religions, evil is a crucial theological problem, rooted in the necessity to make the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God conceptually consistent with the fact of evil. Out of this mental dilemma, which is negotiated as the problem of theodicy, the figure of the Antichrist as God’s opponent emerges. Is the Antichrist an embodiment of evil independent of God, or is he an entity that can only exercise power as long as God allows it, and which finally, to testify God’s ultimate superiority, is overcome by him? The Antichrist legend has its origin in the figure of the Anti-Messiah, called Armilus, rooted in the apocalyptic traditions of Second Temple Judaism (c. 200 bce–50 ce).4 However, it first finds its full-fledged form in the second part of the first century ce, when early Christianity came to believe that the saviour they expected in the returning Christ ‘would have to encounter the epitome of human opposition to goodness in order to realize

2 Jens Baggesen, Labyrinten eller Reise giennem Tydskland, Schweitz og Frankerig, ed. by Henrik Blicher, 2 vols (Copenhagen: DSL, Gyldendal, 2018), II, pp. 185–86. All translations by the author unless stated otherwise. 3 Baggesen, Labyrinten, p. 186. 4 For the beginnings of the forming of legends and the revival in the seventh century, see Lutz Greisiger, ‘Die Geburt Armilos und die Geburt des “Sohnes des Verderbens”. Zeugnisse jüdisch-christlicher Auseinandersetzung um die Identifikation des Antichristen im 7. Jahrhundert’, in Antichrist. Konstruktionen von Feindbildern, ed. by Felicitas Schmieder and Wolfram Brandes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 15–37.

sin a nd seduction

the fullness of his reign on earth’.5 Although the figure of the Antichrist has sometimes been entwined with Satan or the devil as God’s ‘superhuman spiritual adversary’, he is considered by most sources to be a figure in his own right, ‘a human agent’.6 The first time the word ‘Antichrist’ appears in the New Testament is in the First Epistle of John, where he is characterized as the one who ‘denies the Father and the Son’.7 Other texts of the New Testament that encourage the early Christians to believe in the Antichrist are the Book of Revelation, also called the Apocalypse of John, and the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians. In neither of the two texts does the term Antichrist appear explicitly but both refer to figures likewise symbolizing the adversary of Christ. In the Epistle to the Thessalonians, Paulus refers to the ‘final foe’, ‘the son of destruction, who […] takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God’.8 In the Apocalypse, the figure is given traits of a demonic animal. It is referred to as ‘the Beast from the Abyss’9 and ‘the Beast from the Sea’.10 In the Great Whore of Babylon the figure is gendered female, featured as ‘the mother of prostitutes and of the abominations of the earth’.11 Her association to animality is emphasized by presenting her as riding the ‘scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns’.12 The plethora of flamboyant attributes the Whore of Babylon is associated with — ‘decked with gold and precious stones and pearls’, ‘having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication’13 — evinces the aesthetic fascination evoked by the sinister but luscious figure of the Antichrist. In particular, the many pictorial representations of the Antichrist and his apocalyptic time bear witness to this fascination.14 Because the early biblical texts are vague about the details of the Antichrist’s person and his reign, later authors, in particular from the era of the Church Fathers (c. 100–700) and the early Middle Ages (c. 500–1000), had sufficient opportunity to create various exegetical texts and legends to fill the lacuna. Many of these texts found their way into the Benedictine abbot Adso of Montier-en-Der’s work, De ortu et tempore Antichrist (c. 940–954), which had a large impact on all later apocalyptic thoughts and images.15 Although there has always been a strong interest in the dramatical portray of the Antichrist as an identifiable external foe, many Christian thinkers and later authors have identified the Antichrist as an internal force that resists Christ’s power over the Christian soul. The Antichrist is thus seen as a force within ourselves, which we have to guard against by exploring it. According to Bernard McGinn, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), one of the

5 Bernard J. McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 3. 6 McGinn, Antichrist, p. 2. 7 I John 2.22. 8 II Thess. 2.3–4. 9 II Thess. 11.7. 10 II Thess. 13.1. 11 Revelation 17.5. 12 II Thess. 17.3. 13 II Thess. 17.4. 14 See Suzanne Lewis, ‘Encounters with Monsters at the End of Time: Some Early Medieval Visualizations of Apocalyptic Eschatology’, in Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art, 2 (2010), pp. 1–76. 15 See Bernard McGinn, Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters of Lactantius, Adso of Montier-en-Der, Joachim of Fiore, the Franciscan Spirituals, Savonarola (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), pp. 89–96.

201

2 02

s op h i e w e n n er scheid

most important Church Fathers of the Roman Catholic church and in the view of many the ‘fountainhead’ of the theodicy-problem,16 plays an important role here. Although a man of the church and its tradition, Augustine was sceptical of apocalyptical eschatology. Instead of regarding the Antichrist as a demonic figure who will reign terribly before the Last Judgement inaugurates the Final Kingdom of God, he drew attention to the possibility of evil in every single individual. According to Augustine, evil has no substance in its own right, but is an epiphenomenon that occurs when the soul turns away from God. The basis of evil is thus the perversity of the free will, granted by God. In his Confessiones (Confessions), Augustine, in relentless openness, stresses evil’s foundation in the conscious and self-destructive exaltation of the rebellious, disobedient self: ‘foeda erat, et amavi eam; amavi perire, amavi defectum meum, non illud, ad quod deficiebam, sed defectum meum ipsum amavi, turpis anima et dissiliens a firmamento tuo in exterminium, non dedecore aliquid, sed dedecus appetens’ (‘It was foul, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself. Foul soul, falling from Thy firmament to utter destruction; not seeking aught through the shame, but the shame itself ’).17 The only way out of this fatal situation, according to Augustine, is given thanks to God’s unconditional devotion to the human being in Christ. In the love of Christ, humanity is provided with the power to overcome sin and self-destructiveness. However, to receive this love, the soul is in need of the church. John Peter Kenney, in his 2019 book On God, The Soul, Evil and the Rise of Christianity, explains: ‘The whole Christ speaks to the soul through the book of the church and sustains the soul through its communal rituals. Nesting in the church, the soul is in union with Christ its saviour. The Christian self is, therefore, an ecclesial self ’.18 This is where it becomes clear why Augustine plays such an important role both for Catholicism and Protestantism. On the one hand, he makes the salvation of the soul dependent on the embedding of the soul in the church. In so doing, he becomes the founding father of a Catholic and ecclesial thinking, as it is alien to Protestantism. On the other hand, however, by locating evil in the soul of the individual, he also lays the foundation for confessional introspection and Protestant self-inquiry. From here we can see why the Reformation of the sixteenth century, with Luther and Calvin as its most important representatives, has been regarded as ‘a revival of Augustinianism’.19 Although Luther differs fundamentally from Augustine’s view of the church’s role in the forgiveness of sins,20 he shares Augustine’s conviction of the necessity of introspection

16 John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: Palgrave McMillan, 1966; repr. 2010), p. 37. 17 Aurelius Augustinus, Confessions, a text and commentary by James J. O’Donnell, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), vol. II, book 4, section 9. 18 John Peter Kenney, On God, The Soul, Evil and the Rise of Christianity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), p. 113. 19 Hick, Evil and the God of Love, p. 115. 20 In Catholicism, penance is regarded as a sacrament and absolution as an act by which the forgiveness of sins is conferred due to the power of the priest. According to Luther there is no priestly act of forgiving sin, but only a promise of divine forgiveness. Since human beings are sinners to the core, they are completely dependent on the grace of God. Neither repentance nor human works can contribute to the salvation of the human soul. ‘Sola gratia’ and ‘sola fide’, by grace and faith alone, the sinner is granted justification.

sin a nd seduction

and passes on this Augustinian heritage. Precisely because the justification of the sinner is dependent on the belief in the grace of God, the individual is obliged to constantly keep in mind its sinfulness and its need for mercy. Because, according to Luther, the Catholic church denies this utter dependence on the grace of God and puts the pope in the place of God as the authority that forgives sins, the institution of the papacy becomes for Luther an incarnation of the Antichrist. Since the nineteenth century at the latest, the figure of the Antichrist has hardly played a role in the Protestant church. In the tradition of Augustine and Luther, however, the individual’s sin-conscious view of himself has been perpetuated. With regard to Denmark, Soren Kierkegaard’s theology plays a particularly important role here. In his 1851 book Til Selvprøvelse (For Self-Examination), Kierkegaard strongly criticizes his contemporaries for intentionally misunderstanding faith in the grace of God as a guarantee of salvation and thus of being allowed to sit back and relax. By ironically twisting Luther’s critique of the Catholic works righteousness (Werkgerechtigkeit), Kierkegaard suggests that we, independent of our good or bad deeds, can feel safe because God will love us anyway. According to Kierkegaard, however, this conclusion is a fatal fallacy. To illustrate his point, Kierkegaard imagines a Luther who insistently asks him, Kierkegaard, ‘er Du en Troende, har Du Troen?’ (‘Are you a believer? Do you have faith?’).21 This question causes a trouble for the hypothetical Kierkegaard. He tries his very best to convince Luther of being a true believer but is proven wrong. The real believer will not claim to be a believer but will experience himself as ‘et eenligt Menneske i Frygt og Bæven og megen Anfægtelse’ (‘a solitary person in fear and trembling and much spiritual trial’).22 Only when the individual constantly checks him- or herself and questions his or her faith, s/he is close to God in humble self-submission. If, on the other hand, the individual is sure of itself and no longer sees itself as a sinner in need of the grace of God, it is subject to the seductive power of self-sufficiency. Or to put it in the words of the apocalyptics, which Kierkegaard himself does not do: the self-righteous and self-exalting human being has fallen for the power of the Antichrist. It is precisely this story of the seductive power of the Antichrist that is told by the three works of art selected for closer examination. Benzon’s Antichrist: God Defeats Satan Peter Eggert Benzon (1857–1925) was a Danish pastor and writer who made his debut in the 1880s and is today mainly known for his stories that ‘er præget af en mild menneskelighed og et lyst religiøst syn’ (‘are characterized by a mild humanity and a bright religious conviction’).23 His later dramas received very little attention from the academic community. The play Antikrist, published in 1907, is a verse drama with a typical five-act structure, following 21 Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. (Copenhagen: Gads, 1997–2013), XIII: Til Selvprøvelse Samtiden anbefalet (2009), p. 46. English translation: Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978–), XXI: For Self-Examination/Judge for Yourselves (1990), p. 17. 22 Kierkegaard, Til Selvprøvelse, p. 48; Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination/Judge for Yourselves, p. 19. 23 Kenth Kjeldgård Nielsen, ‘P. E. Benzon’, in Den Store Danske, 17 July 2011 [accessed 10 March 2022].

2 03

2 04

s op h i e w e n n er scheid

the classical scheme of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement. It is set in Rome in a non-specified time. Two of the main characters, the young woman Kora and her father, the priest Martin, belong to a Protestant parish, dealing with their precarious situation in a Catholic environment. Kora is in love with a Jew, who, due to his name, Armillo, is clearly associated with the Jewish Anti-Messiah. Armillo is presented as a celebrated war hero who recently returned from a military expedition. While Kora and Martin are introduced as representatives of a Lutheran worldview, i.e., adhering to the idea of a humble and pious life, Armillo is depicted as a man of power. He despises the Protestant theology of the cross, i.e., the doctrine of repentance and renunciation. He blasphemes: ‘Bod og Bod — jeg kender Kuren: / knægt din Vilje, kvæl Naturen!’ (‘Repent, repent — I know this cure: / oppress your will, subjugate nature’).24 For Armillo there is only one sin, namely, ‘at spærre sine Drifter i Bur’ (‘to cage your natural drives’).25 Instead of exercising asceticism, he worships the fullness of life and men’s ability to create by themselves. After Armillo has broken up with Kora and her father and his heroic deeds slowly fall into oblivion, he withdraws disappointedly to a remote area and devotes himself to scientific studies. Here he is visited by a powerful representative of the Catholic church, Cardinal Massimo, who takes on the role of Satan. He stirs up Armillo’s former ambitions and suggests to him that he is destined for great deeds. By inciting his conceit and megalomania, Massimo succeeds in enthroning Armillo as a world ruler and a new God, who, however, is governed by Massimo, Satan himself. While most of the people eagerly start worshipping the false Messiah, Kora, Martin, and some other members of their parish hold firm and identify Armillo as the Antichrist and the whole situation as ‘Satans Blændværk, Brøl af Dæmoner’ (‘Satan’s deception, braying of the demons’).26 In the end, the true Christians are proved right. God defeats Satan and the Antichrist, and in an apocalyptic scenario where only God’s true disciples are saved, the world comes to an end. Benzon’s Antichrist demonstrates, in quite predictable steps, how true Christians are tempted and how they succeed in resisting the seduction and remain faithful to a humble Christian life devoted to God. The message of the text, presented in a straightforward manner, is to prove Armillo’s love of power wrong and Kora’s humbleness right. Langgaard’s Antichrist: The Aesthetics of the Evil Defeats God Rued Langgaard’s opera Antikrist (Antichrist) was first composed in the early 1920s. A second, completely revised version in the late 1920s was only staged and recorded about fifty years after his death in 1952. The opera has been described as ‘a philosophical-religious opera about the decline and (spiritual) fall of western civilization’.27 Langgaard himself characterized it as an artwork about ‘noget af det dybeste i vor Tid’ (‘some of the most profound issues

24 P. E. Benzon, Antikrist. Et dramatisk digt (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske boghandel, Nordisk forlag, 1907), p. 48. 25 Benzon, Antikrist, p. 104. 26 Benzon, Antikrist, p. 101. 27 Bendt Viinholt Nielsen, ‘Antichrist’, trans. by James Manley, in Rued Langgaard Index [accessed 10 March 2022].

sin a nd seduction

of our time’).28 By referring to ‘our time’, Langgaard alludes to the way of living in the 1920s, which he regarded as engaging in self-indulgence and materialism at the expense of a truly spiritual existence. Due to this stance, Langgaard’s opera can be understood as an aesthetic contribution to the so-called ‘worldview debate’ that took hold in Denmark at the beginning of the 1920s. In this debate, proponents of a material worldview arising from the natural sciences were criticized by people with a more religious view. They warned against the belief in technical progress and the overestimation of humans’ abilities which they regarded as being responsible for the disaster of World War I.29 In Langgaard’s opera, this critical point of view seems to be sharpened. He portrays his own time as one that is ruled by the Antichrist and thus doomed to failure. However, because of the stylistic strategies of his opera, the criticism is much more ambiguous than in Benzon’s play, whose structure Langgaard draws on in the first version of his opera.30 While Benzon’s evil figures, Armillo and Massimo, are accompanied from the beginning by their Christian counterparts, Martin and Kora, this is not the case in Langgaard’s early Antikrist. Its main character is Apollyon who sells his soul to the devil and becomes the Antichrist who brings about the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ. In the opera’s first scene, ‘Rosenoffer’ (‘Sacrifice of the Rose’), Apollyon meets Hesperia, a beautiful, heavenly woman. When a dispute arises between the two, Apollyon takes the Antichrist’s role. In the second scene, ‘Dag og Død’ (‘Day and Death’), Apollyon denies God and claims that the truth is to be found in the human himself. He is punished by God but recovers in the third act, ‘Opstandelsen’ (‘Resurrection’), in which a second, more profane woman, Helena, becomes his new lover. The fourth scene, ‘Ved Kvindens højre Haand’ (‘By the Woman’s Right Hand’), ends with an ecstatic scene full of violence and lust. In the libretto, the central part of the scene reads as follows: Apollyon (overmodigt): Til Elskovs-Vin / stampes skal Druen, vi faar / I Vinhøstens Tid, /Blod og Voldtægt er Lystens Vaar! Apollyon og Helena (afsindigt-hovmodigt): Hør! Hør! / I Dybets Svang: / de Blodstraaler ringe / Afsindigheds Sang / fløjte / brydes i Klang, / fraader / pisker Forraadnelsens Hav! Helena: Jeg! Jeg! / Jeg vil! Jeg vil! / Jeg! Jeg! Jeg! Apollyon: Pres! Pres! / Blod! Flyd! / Flyd! Syd! / Nyd! Nyd! / Byd! Yd! / Ja! Nej! Ja! Nej! / Jeg! Jeg! Jeg! Jeg! Jeg! [Apollyon (boisterous): To love-wine / shall the grapes be stamped, which we get / in the time of wine harvest, / blood and rape is the lust of spring! // Apollyon and Helena (maniac-boastful): Listen! Listen! / In the arc of

28 Unknown, ‘En ny dansk opera’, in Søndag (Tillæg til Nationaltidende, Dagens Nyheder og Dagbladet), nr. 109, 4 May 1924 quoted from Bendt Viinholt Nielsen, Den ekstatiske outsider. Rued Langgaards liv og musik (Klampenborg: Engstrøm & Sødrings Musikforlag, 2012), p. 129. 29 See Jesper Vasczy Kragh, Kampen om livsanskuelse (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2005). 30 Other Danish books that had impact on Langgaard’s opera, and which demonstrate the topic’s relevance in these years, are Ernesto Dalgas, Dommedags Bog: En Vandring gennem Eksistensens Verden, berettet af Peregrinus Peripateticus (Copenhagen: DSL, 1903; repr. 1996), and Einar Prip, Antikrist (Copenhagen: Frimodt, 1919).

205

206

s op h i e w e n n er scheid

depth: / streams of Blood are ringing / the song of madness is playing the flute, foaming, / whipping up the ocean of decay // Helena: I! I! / I want! I want! / I! I! // Apollyon: Press! Press! Blood! Flood! / Flood! Fizz! / Enjoy! Enjoy! / Exchange! Out of here! / Yes! No! / Yes! No! / I! I! I! I! I!).]31 This scene clearly demonstrates what makes the libretto interesting with regard to the seductive power of evil. Displaying sexual excesses and Dionysian rapture in the form of expressive exclamations, devoid of a deeper meaning, the scene celebrates pure lust and aggressively transgresses the borders of reason and decency. However, this does not go without punishment. In the fifth and final scene, ‘Den store Mester kommer’ (‘The Great Master Arrives’), the catastrophe culminates, and as the world is coming to an end, Apollyon is overthrown, and Christ reappears. Thus, the ending is purified in much the same way as in Benzon’s drama. Langgaard completed his opera in February 1923 and submitted it to the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. With reference to the libretto, which was considered obscure and inaccessible, the opera was rejected. Langgaard tried his very best to get it accepted several times, but without success.32 Officially, Antikrist was rejected because the aesthetic form of the libretto was perceived as too inconsistent and its message as incomprehensible. But there might also be another reason for the rejection. The libretto may have been experienced as far too engaged with the sensual experience of evil. When one reads the text, and probably even more so when one hears and sees it (although this version was never performed), one is addressed as an emotional being, affectible by the power of linguistic material without meaning, characterized by its acoustic quality instead of its semantic content. Being affected in this way, it is difficult to maintain a reflective-critical distance. This shift in attention from meaning to affective quality can be interpreted as an orientation towards a Catholic-inspired aesthetic, characterized by a strong experience of a numinous that goes beyond the rational and tangible. Such a Catholic-influenced aesthetics can also be found in Richard Wagner, with whom Langgaard has dealt extensively. This can be seen, for example, in a talk that Langgaard gave in the Roman Catholic community Academicum Catholicum in Copenhagen in 1923, only a few months after finishing the Antichrist opera. In this talk, the manuscript of which is preserved under the title ‘Fremtidens Frelser og Kunsten’ (‘The Saviour of the Future and the Art’), he presents his idea of a new form of art which he calls ‘det 20. Aarhundredes teosofiske Kunst’ (‘the theosophical art of the twentieth century’).33 That Langgaard gave his talk to a Catholic audience shows from where he hoped new impulses would come. Langgaard’s biographer, Bendt Viinholt Nielsen, supports this assumption. ‘Den protestantiske kirke var stivnet efter hans mening, så hvis der skulle ske en fornyelse måtte det være inden for den katolske kirkes rammer’ (‘In his view, the Protestant church had become fixed, so if there was to be a renewal, it had to be within the framework of the Catholic church’.).34

31 Rued Langgaard Samling RLS (Copenhagen: Det Kgl. Bibliotek, Musikafdelingen), vol. 8, p. 26. 32 Nielsen, Den ekstatiske outsider, p. 135. 33 Rued Langgaard, ‘Fremtidens Frelser og Kunsten’, in Rued Langgaard Samling RLS (Copenhagen: Det Kgl. Bibliotek, Musikafdelingen), 139a, 1, quoted from Nielsen, Den ekstatiske outsider, p. 143. 34 Nielsen, Den ekstatiske outsider, p. 143.

sin a nd seduction

With regard to the issue of a Protestant aesthetic, however, it is interesting that Langgaard nevertheless puts emphasis on the power of the word. Word, thought, and music are closely associated, he stresses. Only united will they be able to guide people on the right road. To achieve this, the opera seems to be the most suitable medium. As a good example, Langgaard names Wagner’s last and most religious opera, Parsifal. Without explaining in detail what makes Parsifal so important to him, Langgaard draws attention to the fact that personal experiences are needed to access Wagner’s complex drama. He reasons that one is only able to understand Wagner when one obtains insight into his or her own complex self. And the best way to gain insight into the depth of the human self is to deal with the figure of the Antichrist, representing the abyss of the human Ego. Langgaard explains that the Ego is ‘indbegrebet af vore sensuelle, sensitive Storhedsdrømme (Antikrist)’ (‘the epitome of our sensual, sensitive dreams of grandeur (Anti-Christ)’). And, he continues, ‘i “Jeget” er også “det onde”, lad os da i Guds Navn også lære at kende dets Væsen tilbunds “um sehend zu werden”’ (‘in “the Ego” also lies “evil”, so let us in God’s name also learn to know its nature thoroughly “um sehend zu werden”’).35 ‘Sehend zu werden’ (‘to become seeing’) is a direct quote from Wagner’s essay ‘Religion und Kunst’ (‘Religion and Art’, 1880). It means to recognize humanity’s inmost and secret dimensions in order to understand both the work of God and the Antichrist. But since this kind of understanding is not rational but emotional, music is needed. In an interview from 1926, Langgaard explains further: ‘Antikrist er den inkarnerede Lucifer. Hans Rige begynder dèr, hvor en Ting ikke kan bevises, og Musiken naar derned. Hvad er vel al Verdens Mangfoldighed og Lærdom mod et Indblik i det Rige?’ (‘The Antichrist is the incarnated Lucifer. His kingdom begins where nothing can be proven, and it is music that reaches down that deeply. What is all the world’s rich variety and knowledge in comparison with insight into that kingdom?’).36 The reference to the task of providing insight into humanity’s depths by means of music makes sense, especially as it was at this time that Langgaard started to revise his rejected opera. Between 1926 and 1929 he wrote a new score, rearranging parts from the first version, and wrote a completely new libretto. Langgaard’s new version displays a wide range of strong and fascinating scenes which seduce the audience into the sensuous, hedonistic, and flamboyant world of evil. The stage directions give us a clear idea of the fact that it is not only the music and the libretto Langgaard puts emphasis on, but also the power of images. In the German critical edition of Langgaard’s opera, edited by Bendt Viinholt Nielsen, in the prologue and the first scene, we find Langgaard’s references to Luca Signorelli’s famous fresco, Fatti dell’Antichristo, to Emile Renard’s painting Die Dämmerung and to Albrecht Dürer’s etching Melancolia I.37

35 Rued Langgaard, ‘Fremtidens Frelser og Jesu Musikalske Selskab’, in Rued Langgaard Samling RLS (Copenhagen: Det Kgl. Bibliotek, Musikafdelingen), 139a, 1, quoted from Nielsen, Den ekstatiske outsider, p. 145. 36 Interview, Berlingske Tidende, 7 March 1926, quoted from Nielsen, Den ekstatiske outsider, p. 129. 37 Rued Langgaard: Antichrist. Oper in Prolog und sechs Bildern. BVN 192. Text des Komponisten. Klavierauszug mit deutschem Text. Deutsche Übersetzung des Opernlibrettos Inger und Walter Methlagl, für die kritische Ausgabe überarbeitet von Monika Wesemann, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. by Bendt Viinholt Nielsen (Copenhagen: Edition Samfundet, 2017), p. 5.

207

208

s op h i e w e n n er scheid

The new libretto shows hardly any similarities with the first version. Langgaard not only omitted the previous plot but abandoned every form of traditional plot. Instead of presenting recurring characters interacting with each other, he created an opera consisting of eight separate scenes or tableaux. Embedded in a ‘Prolog’ (‘Prologue’), in which the Antichrist is sent into the world by God, and a ‘Slutning’ (‘Finale’), in which God is praised as lightning striking the people’s mind, the opera consists of six scenes, dominated by monologues of various allegorical figures, representing different aspects of the Antichrist, for example, ‘Gådestemningen’ (‘Spirit of Mystery’) and ‘Munden der taler store ord’ (‘The Mouth Speaking Great Things’). However, what remains to a large extent the same is the expressive gesture. The language used in the second version is a wild mixture of short sentences, interrupted by a wide range of exclamations, similar to the ones seen in the above-quoted passage from the first version of the opera. Other striking features are an inverted word order and many metaphors, symbols, or often repeated key expressions, such as Larmens Kirke-Øde. This term, which appears in the prologue and in the beginning of the second to the fifth scene, is as hard to understand as it is to translate. Øde can be translated as ‘emptiness’ or ‘desolate wasteland’. Kirke-Øde thus is ‘the emptiness of the church’ or ‘the desolate church’ and Larmens Kirke-Øde, consequently, ‘the noise of the desolate church’. In the English opera libretto, however, Larmens Kirk-Øde is translated as ‘the church ruin of noise’, presumably because it better fits the verse metre. Into this void, this roaring emptiness, the garish and noisy figurations of the Antichrist speak and unfold. A look at the opera’s fourth scene, ‘Lust’, can illustrate this point. The characters featured here are ‘Den store skøge’ (‘The Great Whore’) and ‘Dyret i skarlagen’ (‘The Scarlet Beast’) both praising a life of lust. The Scarlet Beast exclaims: Pris og tilbed denne Verdens Tone. Lovet være det levende. Det mulige. Begæret: “Den stærke lever!” Jagende nydende liv, altid attraaende, favner i lønlige Nat: myrder dansende. Gærende levende Liv, altid brusende, jubler vaander sig, vildt berusende! [Praise and adore the way of the world. Praised be that which lives. The possible. Desire: “Survival of the strongest!” Busy enjoyable life, always desirable, embracing in secret night: murderously dancing. Vital fermenting life, always bubbling, rejoicing, agonising, wildly intoxicating!]38 The ecstatic, self-exalting tone is clearly reminiscent of the tone in Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christentum (The Antichrist: Curse on Christianity), written in 1888 but first published in 1895. In the second paragraph, Nietzsche introduces his concept of will to power and appeals to strong life: ‘Was ist gut? — Alles, was das Gefühl der Macht, den Willen zur Macht, die Macht selbst im Menschen erhöht. Was ist schlecht? — Alles, was aus der Schwäche stammt’ (‘What is good? — All that heightens

38 The English terms and quotes are all taken from the booklet to the Opera which gives us the libretto in Danish, English, and German. Rued Langgaard, Antikrist (Copenhagen: Dacapo Records, 2005).

sin a nd seduction

the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? — All that proceeds from weakness’).39 However, this gospel of vitality is also negated at the end of Langgaard’s opera. In the fifth scene, we learn about ‘Alles strid mod alle’ (‘Every man’s strife with every man’), culminating in self-destruction. And in the sixth scene, ‘Fortabelsen’ (‘Perdition’), we hear ‘Guds stemme’ (‘The Voice of God’), cursing the Antichrist and fighting him with the words ‘Effata! Mod Antikrist det evige lyn!’ (‘Ephphatha! Against the Antichrist the eternal lightning!’), referring to the Gospel of Mark in which Christ heals a deaf man by exclaiming ‘Ephphatha — Be opened’. In the opera’s final scene, a celestial light appears, and a chorus affirms God’s power. Although the overall intention of the opera seems clear, namely, to warn against humans’ hubris, a significant ambiguity remains. First, the ambiguity occurs since the happy ending, announced in the ‘Finale’, is nothing more than a pious promise, a wishful thinking. And second, the whole scenery is ambivalent because the Antichrist is represented in such a fascinating and aesthetically ingenious way. The opera as a whole thus offers a picture of the evil Ego in all its facets that captivates the audience until the very end. Lars von Trier’s Antichrist produces a similar effect. Lars von Trier’s Antichrist: A Devilish Anti-Trinity With regard to the question of Protestant and Catholic influences in the aesthetic study of the figure of the Antichrist, Lars von Trier plays a particularly interesting role. On the one hand, he made the Antichrist the central figure of his 2009 eponymous film and demonstrated that the subject of sin and seduction is still relevant in the twenty-first century. On the other hand, he is interesting as a personality who converted from Protestantism to Catholicism — even if in retrospect he described this as an act of defiance. This begs the question, whether there is a connection between religious affiliation and religiously inflected film. In 2005, after the release of von Trier’s film Manderlay, the German film critic Katja Nicodemus assumed that there might be an inconsistency between the ascetic form of Manderlay and von Trier’s former interest in ‘the opulence of Catholic imagery’. In response to this, von Trier dismissed the connection between religious belonging and visual language out of hand: ‘I don’t know if I’m all that Catholic really. I’m probably not. Denmark is a very Protestant country. Perhaps I only turned Catholic to piss off a few of my countrymen’.40 In 2009, the Danish author Knud Romer brought the subject up again. In a long interview, later published in the press kit to Antichrist, Romer brings together Catholicism, Romanticism, Symbolism, and the Gothic and states: ‘For me, it’s a relief to see you return to a 100% romantic, symbolic universe with some Catholic reminiscences, the whole shebang — it’s almost pre-romantic, gothic in a lot of ways, Count Dracula’. To Romer’s persistent questions, however, of how ‘Catholicism gets into the picture’, von

39 Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christentum, in Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1988), VI, p. 170. 40 Katja Nicodemus, ‘I Am an American Woman. Interview with Lars von Trier’, in Signandsight, 17 November 2005 [accessed 10 March 2022].

209

2 10

s op h i e w e n n er scheid

Trier still refuses to answer. Instead, he again insists on being ‘a very bad Catholic’ and ‘becoming more and more of an atheist’. But Romer reminds von Trier that ‘Catholicism is the favourite religion of non-believers, because it has so many expressions: rituals, ornaments, and so on’. And von Trier, finally, agrees that Catholicism offers a big toy chest he is free to use, while Protestantism for him was always ‘the big beast’.41 Although von Trier does not elaborate on that, his comment seems to indicate that he regards Protestantism as a moral or social order to which one must submit, while Catholicism offers a reservoir of images, a disorderly imagery he feels inspired by. In the following analysis, I will try to explain to what extent von Trier’s depiction of the Antichrist draws on a Catholic-influenced imagery and undermines the Protestant self-image of being able to rationally come to terms with it. I will start with a look at the structure of the film, highlighting the motif of the three beggars, which I see as closely connected to the Antichrist theme. After this, I will discuss to what extent the film can be seen as von Trier’s own psychic introspection and thus as part of the Protestant tradition of self-exploration. Lars von Trier’s film Antichrist (2009) is a psychodrama turning into a horror movie that engages with the issues of sexuality, guilt, and evil. When it was released at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2009, it immediately engendered a fierce debate. The graphic representation of violence and female sexuality in general, and genital mutilation in particular, especially aroused strong emotions. The ecumenical jury at the Cannes Festival went as far as to give the film a special ‘anti-award’ and declared it to be ‘the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world’.42 Although the film’s title clearly alludes to the eschatological motif of the Antichrist, and although von Trier claimed that he started his film with the title,43 the motif itself has received very little scholarly attention. Shortly after Antichrist premiered, the critic Roger Eber wrote a review with the telling title ‘A Devil’s Advocate for “Antichrist”’ in which he argued that the title was the key to understanding the film. In the analysis itself, however, he did not refer to the Antichrist but only to the concept of evil in general. ‘I believe Antichrist may be an exercise in alternative theology: von Trier’s version of those passages in Genesis where Man is cast from Eden and Satan assumes a role in the world’.44 Professor of Catholic studies, Tina Beattie, comes closer to the film’s key issue when she reads Antichrist as ‘an exploration of the violent underbelly of the Christian story of sin

41 The interview, from which these quotes and information comes, and other material related to the film can be found online [accessed 10 March 2022]. 42 The quotation can be found in several newspapers, for example, in Sheila Johnston, ‘Is Antichrist Anti-women?’, in The Independent, 22 July 2009 [accessed 10 March 2022]. I could not find the original source. 43 Kaleem Aftab, ‘Lars von Trier — “It’s Good That People Boo”’, in The Independent, 29 May 2009 [accessed 10 March 2022]. 44 Roger Ebert, ‘Cannes #6: A Devil’s Advocate for “Antichrist”’, in Chicago Sun-Times, 19 May 2009 [accessed 10 March 2022].

sin a nd seduction

and redemption’.45 As part of this ‘underbelly’, Beattie draws her reader’s attention to the film’s female protagonist, whom she understands as a representation of ‘Eve, who in the Christian theological tradition has been represented as the personification of evil and bringer of death to the world’. She also points out that the Antichrist of the film’s title is ‘everywhere and nowhere — a viscous and elusive presence that seeps through nature, including human nature, and infects it with futility, death and decay’.46 A more explicit examination of the figure of the Antichrist is provided by the Danish scholar in film and literature, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, who in her thorough study Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film 1984–2014 pays special attention to the films’ style, which she claims to be a filter laid over the represented content. Drawing on Alois Riegl and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the haptic image that makes the audience ‘feel with the eyes’, Thomsen contends that von Trier’s film techniques render the medium’s materiality visible and by doing so disturb the viewer’s access to the narrated story. She further argues that it is precisely this awareness of ‘the screen as a haptic surface’ which affects the viewer’s physical sense perceptions and emotions beyond rational understanding.47 As forerunners of these kind of non-representational forms of filmic affect, Thomsen cites Carl Theodor Dreyer and Andrei Tarkovsky. When it comes to von Trier’s Antichrist, Dreyer’s Vredens Dag (‘Day of Wrath’; 1954) and Tarkovsky’s Offret (‘The Sacrifice’; 1986) are of particular importance. Both films, recounting the story of a middle-aged man and his relationship with a woman who is depicted as a witch, not only make their audience ‘feel with the eyes’ but also combine this haptic sensation with the experience of evil. Another important intertext Thomsen refers to in her analysis of von Trier’s Antichrist is Nietzsche’s treatise The Anti-Christ (1888). Stressing Nietzsche’s equating of Dionysus with the Antichrist and viewing the two as the key figures in his critique of Christian morality, Thomsen likewise reads Trier’s Antichrist-figure as a Dionysian character, closely associated with untamed natural forces on the one hand, and with the likewise untamed female on the other, celebrating a ‘Dionysian-cyclical understanding of time, which threatens chronological-linear time’.48 Thomsen’s reference to non-chronological thinking is important, since it draws attention to the subversion of logical analytical thinking. How exactly this subversion of the rational takes place in Antichrist I will examine in the following by looking more closely at how the film’s story unfolds and what role the motif of the three beggars play in this context. For this, I make use of the so-called Malleus Maleficarum, the late-medieval standard handbook on witches and witch-hunting, published in 1487 and republished many times in the early modern period.49 According to this book, male and female witches commit infanticide, cannibalism, and cast evil spells over other people. My thesis is that these three 45 Tina Beattie, ‘Antichrist: The Visual Theology of Lars Von Trier’, retrieved from: openDemocracy, unknown release date [accessed 10 March 2022]. 46 Beattie, ‘Antichrist: The Visual Theology of Lars Von Trier’. 47 Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film 1984–2014. Signal, Pixel, Diagram (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2018), p. 23. 48 Stavning Thomsen, Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film 1984–2014, p. 250. 49 Heinrich (Institoris) Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

21 1

2 12

s op h i e w e n n er scheid

atrocities are reflected in von Trier’s film by the three beggars: the deer with its stillbirth, the self-consuming fox, and the sinisterly squawking raven. Even the most scary bestiality a witch can commit, namely, to steal a man’s penis, occurs in the film. It finds its strong visualization in She’s smashing He’s genitals. Antichrist is told in four chapters, framed by a prologue and an epilogue. In the ‘Prologue’, shot in black and white and in slow motion, She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a PhD student, and He (William Defoe), a psychotherapist, have passionate sex with each other and fail to notice their little son Nic (Storm Acheche Sahlstrøm) who crawls up to a window and falls to his death. In two short shots, we see a jigsaw puzzle depicting three animals: a fox, a deer, and a crow, and three little toy figurines of the allegorical Three Beggars: Grief, Pain, and Despair. In the following part, referred to as ‘Antichrist, Chapter One: Grief ’, the first beggar materializes when He and She are on their way to their little forest cabin Eden where She spent the previous summer with Nic. While crossing the forest by foot, seen from the woman’s perspective, the woods look sinister and scary, while He feels fine in nature. A little later, however, the scenery suddenly changes. A deer, symbolizing the first beggar, Grief, appears, and He recognizes a stillborn foetus still hanging out of the hind’s genital opening. A close-up shows that He reacts with terror and repulsion. He’s horror increases in the following chapter, ‘Pain (Chaos Reigns)’. In this chapter, She tells about her experiences last summer, when she thought she heard nature crying. Later, She states that ‘Nature is Satan’s church’. Although He keeps on trying to rationalize the woman’s explanations, her statements do not remain without effect. At the end of the chapter, He encounters a fox biting off chunks of his own flesh, speaking with a human voice: ‘Chaos reigns’. The second beggar, pain, has revealed itself. In ‘Chapter Three: Despair (Gynocide)’, the references to a demonic nature consolidate. At the cabin’s attic, He unexpectedly finds the material on gynocide She had been working on last summer: pictures of tortured female bodies and drawings with quotations from female-hostile writings. He also finds an astrologer’s chart with the constellation of the Three Beggars, the names of which are written as ‘The Hind’, ‘The Fox’, and ‘The Bird’. In a strange nocturnal sex scene at the foot of a huge tree, She invokes the ‘Sisters of Ratinbon’, who then take part in the intercourse in the form of hands reaching out from the roots. She identifies herself with the evil nature of women, but He rationalizes this as pathological delusion. A little later though, her ideas have taken possession of him. He suspects her of intentionally have been mistreating Nic, whereupon She starts attacking him madly. She crushes He’s testicles, thrusts an iron rod through his leg, and attaches a grindstone to it. Although badly hurt, He succeeds in escaping and hiding in a foxhole. A raven, symbolizing the third beggar, reveals him. In ‘Chapter Four: The Three Beggars’, She brings He back to the cabin. Overwhelmed by images in which her sexuality is shown as the reason for her son’s death, she mutilates her genitals with a pair of scissors. Shortly afterwards, a hailstorm starts, and the deer and the fox appear. As She falls into a sleep of exhaustion, the two animals lying by her side, the croaking raven gives He a hint of how to free himself from the grindstone. In a final struggle, He strangles She to death and burns her like a witch at the stake. The film’s epilogue consists of an epic shot, showing He walking through the woods on crutches and peacefully picking wild berries. From the forest below, a swarm of faceless female figures emerge, which he does not seem to notice. This scene demonstrates that He, the rational

sin a nd seduction

mind, has still not recognized the world for what it is: permeated by the power of something beyond his control. As a cognitive therapist, he believes in his capacity to gain insight into She’s and his own unconscious emotions, drives, and fears. But the film’s action and its powerful and affective images prove him wrong as they show him a world which he is unable to understand rationally. The film’s title, the allusions to the original sin and the ‘fall of man’, the representation of nature as demonic, the references to witchcraft, and most of all the symbolic presence of the three beggars suggest that this unfathomable world is the world of the Antichrist. Instead of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, there is a devilish anti-trinity at work. Conclusion The French philosopher and author George Bataille states that good literature is essentially evil because it transgresses a society’s moral surface and makes visible the evil that is a part of humankind. As a consequence, reason is confronted with what it seeks to exclude in order to remain intact: aggression, affect, perversion, laughter, ecstasy, and readers are provided with a gaze into the abyss of themselves.50 In Benzon’s Antichrist, good and bad are clearly separated. The evil spirits are eliminated at the end of the drama and the audience can go home and trust that everything is as it should be. In Langgaard’s final version of his Antichrist opera, the Antichrist has an ambivalent power due to its fascinating appearance. Even if he is defeated by God in the end, this does not mean that he will not remain effective. His seductive glow, which is due to his various manifestations, will not fade away. As described by Baggesen when looking at Strasbourg Cathedral, it is impossible to sort out the diversity and abundance of the world according to a clear pattern. The scenarios von Trier makes use of in his film come from the image reservoir of the Catholic Middle Ages. At the same time, however, the film also echoes the Protestant tradition of self-enquiry. Lars von Trier refers to the tradition of the inward-looking self when, in the press kit for his film, he writes that he would like to invite his audience ‘for a tiny glimpse behind the curtain, a glimpse into the dark world of my imagination: into the nature of my fears, into the nature of Antichrist’.51 This ‘invitation’ to look at the director’s supposed fears bears a certain resemblance to his male protagonist’s professional interest in psychotherapy. But both prove to be highly ambivalent. He thinks he can cast out She’s fears and drives by working them through. However, this rational approach fails and turns out to be the opposite. Instead of curing She, He kills her. Also, his final assumption that he has restored order by killing the supposed witch proves to be a fatal mistake. He turns himself into what he wanted to destroy: the dark side of the enlightened mind. The Protestant tradition of self-exploration to which von Trier adheres is thus a tradition he turns upside down. The cinematic exploration of fears and passions does not aim to explain them, let alone atone for them. Rather, it is aimed at exploiting their aesthetic potential. Sin and seduction remain inextricably connected.

50 George Bataille, Literature and Evil, (New York: Marion Boyars, 1985). 51 Anonymous, Antichrist, ed. by Susanna Neimann, trans. by Glen Garner (Cannes: The Film Festival Cannes, 2009) [accessed 10 March 2022].

21 3

Thomas M ohnike

Pietist Nostalgia Aesthetization of Faith and the Nordic Revival Movements in Scandinavian Post-World War II Literature In 2001, the well-known Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist published the historical novel Lewis resa (Lewi’s Journey, 2001), a double biography of Pentecost leader Petrus Lewi and the writer Sven Lidman. In his novel, Enquist argues through its intriguing narration that Pietist movements such as the Moravian Brethren (Herrnhuter), and subsequent Pietist-inspired revival movements (väckelserörelser) had an enormous impact not only on the social and economic transformations of Nordic societies, but even on the language and aesthetics of Nordic art. The influence is not easily traceable, Enquist writes, as the Moravians did not seek to impose their organization, but spread their ideas, texts, songs, etc. to those it would interest without asking them to adhere to the entirety of their teachings, often with one of their centres of practice located in Christiansfeld in Southern Denmark as a main place of agency. The seemingly non-religious, modern Nordic welfare states have, he suggests, some of their most important roots in pious communities and practices, and this is palpable in its literature and art.1 If Enquist is right, this ‘second Reformation’, as Pietist often described their endeavours, has perhaps marked more significantly the aesthetics of Scandinavian literature than the Scandinavian versions of Lutheranism of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Enquist’s novel, however, is not only an inquiry into the forgotten roots of the modern Swedish welfare state, which is in its collective childhood. It is also a dialogue with the lost world of the narrator’s own childhood, a nostalgic act of revisiting an ever lost home, elaborating its strength in this tension between collective and individualist remembrance; it is an example of a bundle of narrative techniques that I propose calling Pietist nostalgia. According to this perspective, Pietist nostalgia would thus be a specific form of nostalgia, structured, as I will show in the following pages, around four elements that relate directly to the Pietist tradition. These elements are 1) a dead, but present father figure, 2) a lost childhood as an often precisely located chronotope, 3) biblical intertexts that structure the narration, and 4) a utopian longing for regaining the lost world, not by restoring it, but by transforming it into something new, most often through a staging of aesthetic transcendence.



1 Per Olov Enquist, Lewis resa: roman (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2001). Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 215–231 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.131423

2 16

t h om a s mohn ik e

Pietist nostalgia would thus be a specific form of modern consciousness of an irreconcilable distance to a bygone era, attainable only through acts of remembrance and imagination. In fact, since the neologism of ‘nostalgia’ had been forged by the Basel medical doctor Johannes Hofer at the end of the seventeenth century to describe the suffering of homesickness, the notion has moved beyond medical discourse and become an often-oscillating cross-disciplinary concept. In her historically and theoretically very useful attempt to grasp the phenomenon of nostalgia, The Futures of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym describes nostalgia in this tradition as ‘a longing for home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but also a romance with one’s own fantasy’.2 Nostalgia is thus an attempt to bridge the unbridgeable distance between the place of being of an individual person and an ideal place of dwelling by the use of fantasy. Boym insists on the observation that the experienced rupture between what is and what had or could have been is a defining and necessary condition of nostalgia. Even though nostalgia is centred in the imaginative act of the individual, she continues, nostalgia goes beyond individual psychology. At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually, it is a yearning for a different time — the time of our childhood, the slower rhythm of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.3 Nostalgia is thus not only a question of place, but even of time: returning to the place where one has grown up will never signify coming back to childhood. Even if the place might only have changed in detail (which is not likely), the difference in time makes a return impossible. The object of nostalgia is thus always a chronotope in the Bakhtinian sense, a narrative place-time, as can be exemplified by Enquist’s and the welfare state’s childhood in Lewis resa. In what follows, I will undertake a handful of close readings in order to develop the proposed model in more depth. After a much too short, but necessary discussion of the place and pace of Pietist ideas in Nordic societies in order to suggest the validity of my argument of Pietist influence, I will discuss the phenomenon of Pietist nostalgia in works by Jonas Gardell, Per Olov Enquist, and Göran Tunström. All narrative studied here reconnect their universes to the bygone world of (Pietist) Christian belief by using what I would describe as nostalgia and by transgressing this state through its transformation into an artistic epiphany, and they do this through use of tension between individual and collective memory in the of unfolding their stories. The third part will focus on Karen Blixen’s Babette’s Feast, which uses the same techniques, but in more radical way; the chapter will end with some general discussion and perspectives. We will see that the above-mentioned elements of Pietist nostalgia are closely related to what we have proposed to be the five principles of Scandinavian aesthetics.

2 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. xiii. 3 Boym, Future of Nostalgia, p. xv.

pietist nosta lg ia

A Much Too Short Introduction to Pietist Influence and History in Scandinavia Recent research in the cultural history of Northern Europe confirms the idea of a significant impact of Pietist-inspired revival and reform movements on the Nordic countries. Although these movements are sometimes in more or less pronounced conflict with each other, they share a number of ideas, characteristics, and historical contexts. Dag Thorkildsen argued convincingly, for example, that one should not understand Pietist religious revivalism as a popular response to the Enlightenment and rational approaches among the clergy, but rather as part of the modernization process of the Scandinavian states in the nineteenth and twentieth century, because Pietists introduced new forms of cooperation, education, and egalitarian thought.4 Thorkildsen names Grundtvig as an important and influential Pietist-inspired example; Henrik Horstbøll follows in a similar way the impact of Eric Pontoppidan’s Pietist Catechism on Danish and Norwegian social and ethical thought,5 and the cultural historian Nina Witoszek argues that the many Pietist-inspired movements ‘were not just reforming religion but contributing to a civic Bildung’.6 She asserts that this specific constellation led to the ‘Scandinavian Sonderweg’ of nation-building, characterized by reformation instead of revolution in the nineteenth century and by the creation of a specific ‘ecohumanist’ discourse that traces the particular character of Nordic nationalities from Nordic nature.7 Pietist-inspired religious movements, such as the Moravian brothers or the Halle-based Pietists around August Hermann Francke, thus had an impact too long overlook on the social practices, ideas, and aesthetics in the Nordic countries.8 In fact, Pietism could be the missing link that explains why the five principles of aesthetics in Scandinavia proposed in the introduction to this volume seem to resemble Calvinist ideals rather than Lutheran, as discussed in the present volume by Ueli Zahnd and Arne Bugge Amundsen. Early German Pietism, which forms the most important source of Nordic Pietists, was inspired by Calvinist ideas and, consequently, aesthetics. It is in this milieu that we can find the aesthetics and ethics that seem to be typical of Nordic aesthetics and cultural practices. These movements were, as the historian of Pietism Douglas H.



4 Dag Thorkildsen, ‘Religious Identity and Nordic Identity’, in The Cultural Construction of Norden, ed. by Bo Stråth and Øystein Sørensen (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997), pp. 138–60 (p. 144). 5 Henrik Horstbøll, ‘Pietism and the Politics of Catechisms’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 25.2 (2004), 143–60. 6 Nina Witoszek, The Origins of the ‘Regime of Goodness’: Remapping the Cultural History of Norway (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2011), p. 61. 7 Witoszek, ‘Regime of Goodness’, pp. 60–85. 8 Important contributions to the study of the impact of Pietism in Northern Europe include Anders Jarlert, Läsarfolket - från gammalläseri till nyortodoxi : förändringar i västsvensk kyrkoväckelse med särskild hänsyn till utvecklingen i Marks, Bollebygds och Kinds härader under 1800-talet, Västsvensk kultur och samhällsutveckling genom tiderna, 6 (Göteborg: Humanistiska fakulteten, 1997); Aage B. Sørensen, ‘On Kings, Pietism and Rent-Seeking in Scandinavian Welfare States’, Acta Sociologica, 41.4 (1998), 363–75; Ann Öhrberg, ‘Imagery of God in Moravian Songs from Eighteenth-Century Sweden’, in Rhetoric and Literature in Finland and Sweden, 1600–1900, ed. by Pernille Harsting and Jon Viklund, Nordic Studies in the History of Rhetoric, 2 (Copenhagen: NNRH, 2008), pp. 1–28 http://www.nnrh.dk/NSHR/nshr2/index.html [accessed 10 March 2022]; Piety and Modernity, ed. by Anders Jarlert, The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Church, State and Society in Northern Europe, 1780–1920, 3 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012); Lars Jakob, Wege in den Norden der hallische Pietismus in den skandinavischen Ländern des 18. Jahrhunderts, Kleine Schriftenreihe der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 14 (Halle: Verl. der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2014).

21 7

2 18

t h om a s mohn ik e

Shatz writes, above all conventicle movements where laymen met in each other’s homes to discuss ‘the Bible and devotional books, engaged in edifying conversation, and shared their understandings and experiences with one another.’9 These informal groups created non-formalized networks that expressively were not orientated towards status in society, but towards the grade of true belief. It was thus a new, rather flat form of organization, but not all-inclusive. On the contrary, these Pietists ‘saw themselves as more perfect and more sanctified than their neighbours, leading them to separate themselves from the ways and pleasures of “the world”’.10 This critical attitude towards ‘cultural’ Christians was paired with a ‘strong sense of individualism, with subjective claims to intimate and direct dealing with God’. This would lead ‘these Pietist to close self-examination and to interpreting their feelings as the moving and speaking of God within them’.11 All these are elements found in some works of Scandinavian literature that we will discuss below. Through the activity of the Pietist reformer August Hermann Francke, the Calvinist ethics of work entered the world of Pietists. His Halle orphanage included schools, workshops, printing studies, and pharmacies and became one of the main educational models for raising good Christians. Francke taught that commitment and success in work was one of the ‘indubitable signs’ that one is a child of God. However, ‘Francke’s Pietism differed from Dutch Calvinism and English Puritanism on one key point: his Pietist ethic was directed not so much toward encouraging capitalist activity as to encouraging education and educational activity’.12 Humanist knowledge like Latin, Greek, and even Semitic languages like Hebrew were important to the schools in the orphanage, as was practical work and the living word. As Max Weber pointed out, Francke’s idea was ‘the methodological development of [an individual’s] state of grace to a higher and higher degree of certainty and perfection’, an idea that he would describe as profane, that is non-monastic, Christian asceticism. ‘Labor in a calling was […] the ascetic activity par excellence’,13 the calling (Beruf / Berufung) being the role that God had given to the individual. Many young Protestant intellectuals from all over the Protestant world and thus also from Scandinavia spent some time in Halle in the orphanage schools and the nearby university, and its publications were widely read, quickly becoming the direct14 or indirect model for educational institutions in Scandinavia, Grundtvig’s folk high school movement without doubt being one of its important later heirs. This is a field that should be studied in more detail, however, not the immediate object of the present chapter, but rather its backdrop and premise: if Pietism had a significant impact on ethics and educational practices and ideals even outside the religious sphere in Scandinavia, as had been shown, it is here

9 Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), p. 115. 10 Shantz, Introduction to German Pietism, p. 116. 11 Shantz, Introduction to German Pietism, p. 116. 12 Shantz, Introduction to German Pietism, p. 138. 13 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 2nd edn (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976), p. 133. 14 Early examples include the schools established by the missionaries in Danish Tranquebar and the Royal orphanage in Copenhagen. See Jochen Birkenmeier, ‘Die weltweite Ausstrahlung des Halleschen Waisenhauses’, in Kinder, Krätze, Karitas: Waisenhäuser in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Claus Veltmann and Jochen Birkenmeier (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2009), pp. 101–11 (pp. 104–05).

pietist nosta lg ia

that we should look for the predecessors for Scandinavian aesthetic and ethic ideals of the twentieth and twenty-first century. In fact, the five supposed principles of simplicity, logocentrism, tension between pronounced individualism and collectivism, a specific kind of relatedness to the world, and a commitment to a Protestant ethic can be related to the sketched Pietistic ascetic Christianism. From this perspective, simplicity could be seen as an ‘indubitable sign’ of methodical commitment to the vocation of a chosen individual for his community, who is to make the world a place of God’s grace and thus of humanity’s welfare. Simplicity would even be one of the consequences of Pietist’s logocentrism, focusing on the word. Logocentrism, on the other hand, is part of a culture of self-critical intertextuality: relating one’s action and, as a writer, one’s text, to what has been already written by inspired Christians and in the Bible to reassure oneself that the way taken is the way of grace, as these models had already proven to be righteous. Intertextuality as a consequence of logocentrism would even lead to a tension between collectivism and individualism, that is, the question of how to relate one’s own biography to the sanctioned models of live stories. Finally, and consequently, there is a specific relation to the world that could be described as nostalgic: Pietists never wanted to create a new church, but just regain the original path of Christian belief. There was thus a profound element of nostalgia inherent in Pietist practice, a longing for a happy state that was lost long ago, but hoped for in a future of a coming heavenly Jerusalem. I will discuss the notion of nostalgia in more detail in the next section. Reconfiguring Childhood: Pietist Nostalgia As (Auto-)Biographical Utopia What then is Pietist nostalgia in Scandinavian literature after 1945? Let us start with a telling example. The Swedish comedian and writer Jonas Gardell introduces his successful book Om Gud (About God, 2003) with an autobiographical note where he starts with a surprising genealogy. He tells his reader that ‘[j]ag är uppfostrad av mama i Enebyberg och av Fader Vår som är i himmelen. Jag helgades i bägges namn, och båda var medvetna om den andras existens’ (‘I was brought up by my mother in Enebyberg and by Our Father who is in heaven. I have been sanctified in both their names, and they knew of each other’s existence’).15 In this simple, innocent-looking assertion, Gardell skillfully combines individual and collective biography, profane and religious genealogy, autobiography and biblical intertext, here being the Lord’s Prayer. In order to explain why he would write a book on the different figures of God that are used in the Bible, he transforms the metaphysical quest for God into a question of spiritual genealogy. God is here not primarily a matter of faith, but a question of individual origin — or rather of a childhood that is gone. As early as this first sentence, he thus uses many of the enumerated techniques and aspects that I mentioned above. The God of his childhood was, as Gardell tells us some lines later in the text, a figure of unconditional love; a figure that, however, was questioned in his adolescence:

15 Jonas Gardell, Om Gud (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2003), p. 7. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

21 9

220

t h om a s mohn ik e

jag var lycklig med Gud och Gud var nöjd med mig, hans ivrige lille lärjunge. Kristus var uppstånden, ja, han var sannerligen uppstånden. Tills jag blev äldre och förstod att Gud kanske inte var så nöjd med mig trots allt, och Kristus var måhända uppstånden, men det enkla faktumet att han var uppstånden räckte inte på långt när för att rädda mig till något evigt liv.16 [I was happy with God and God was happy with me, his eager little disciple. Christ is risen, yes, he is risen indeed. Until I got older and realized that God might not be so happy with me after all, and Christ may have been risen, but the simple fact that he was risen was not long enough to save me from eternal life.] As a child, Gardell saw himself as a disciple of Christ, believing with all his heart in the message of Easter that is quoted en passant. When becoming adult, however, some Christian people told Gardell that he was not as God wanted him to be, that he was not as he should be as a true son of God. He had perhaps become something else than he believed he had to be, although Gardell felt the entire time ‘samma närvaro av samma Gud som när jag var barn’ (‘the same presence of the same God as when I was a child’).17 The relation to his Father God thus becomes problematic in a puberty crisis. He has to leave home and his father, but not because his father rejected him, but other people, society, told him of his father being unsatisfied, creating a tension between the collective and the individual. The distance to his father is caused by intermediaries, not by the father himself. How to know then whether the intermediaries are right? He has to ask his father directly, and consequently, the quest to understand God undertaken in his book finds itself in good Protestant tradition, without intermediaries, respecting implicitly without mentioning the Lutheran principle of solo scriptura (by scripture alone), taken into its radical form of Pietist demand of self-education and self-examination guided by God’s own word. In reading the Bible critically, he wants to return to God’s protection, to become a respected and thus elected child again. And of course, he succeeds, or at least provisionally, as he finds in the last pages an explanation for the many images and representations of God that exist and are advanced by the many intermediaries, and which does not contradict for him the existence of his childhood’s God. Consequently, the book ends with an evocation of his childhood’s room with his mother praying with him to his father God. Gardell’s God thus appears to be part of a lost time, which one can only nostalgically long for, without being fully able to return to it. According to Gardell, however, this God is too important for him to abandon, as he had shared the responsibility for his upbringing with his mother. His interest in God is in part explained by his respect and love for his parents. Remarkably, his biological father is not even mentioned in a footnote. The theme of the child of a father or a mother in heaven is quite common in the literature of my corpus. In P. O. Enquist’s autobiography Ett annat liv (A Different Life, 2008), for example, the child grows up with his mother, the father having died at an early age. Like Gardell, Enquist engages in an almost lifelong dialogue with his father in heaven that he calls ‘Välgöraren’ (‘benefactor’), explicitly, because God and Jesus do not respond to his 16 Gardell, Om Gud, p. 8. 17 Gardell, Om Gud, p. 8.

pietist nosta lg ia

prayers, but his father in heaven does and is always present in need — that is, as a substitute for Jesus. In Kapten Nemos bibliotek (Captain Nemo’s Library, 1991), a similar ‘välgörare’ is identified with Captain Nemo, as neither Jesus nor the protagonist’s (uncertain, perhaps dead) father is present. In Tunström’s Juloratoriet (Christmas Oratorio, 1983), the mother dies in the first pages, but stays an ever-present wife and a dialogue partner for the father and indirectly for her son. Victor, the grandson who will stage Bach’s Christmas Oratorio as the fulfilment of his grandmother’s wish, is even more connected to Jesus, as Anita Vargas has shown, being staged as the son of (almost) a virgin, growing up with only God as his father, his earthly father being long ignored.18 The virtual presence of the physically absent father or mother figure recalls the Pietist claim of an intimate dialogue with God and his son; in the inner dialogue with the absent father, the bygone world becomes a guide for the future plans. The relationship to Pietist practice is, however, not straightforward in any of the texts: in Gardell’s text, the Gardell is prevented from taking part in the Last Supper, because he is said not to be a true Christian, as radical Pietist would say in such cases. In writing the book, Gardell shows that he in fact is a good Christian, perhaps even a better Christian than those who refused to admit him to the Last Supper. In demonstrating his profound knowledge of the Bible throughout the book, he proves even his own righteous intertextual relation to it, inscribing himself in the philological humanist Pietistic tradition which can be traced, for example, to the Halle Pietism, as mentioned above. Enquist’s autobiography Ett annat liv is a more complicated case in question, as he is not looking for God as Gardell is, but self-examining his own life and whether it was righteous or not — not in facing God, but himself and his own internalized ethics. He implicitly asks all through his novel: When did I leave the way of the righteous? Was it when I left the belief of my childhood? No, the moment is without doubt when he leaves his family for another woman and gets addicted to alcohol. It is the ‘dark life’ as an alcoholic that is the turning point of the book, and the narration is accomplished by abandoning alcohol through a retreat in a rehabilitation centre and thorough self-examination by writing a novel about his family. He has now entered, as the title of the book suggests, a different life (Ett annat liv), where he can come home at last, not to his former or present wife, bur to his mother and lost, but ever-present father, the benefactor (välgöraren). It is a work of confession that turns into a story of conversion. Through admitting to himself and to the implied, anonymous reader — who in some way here takes the place of God — that he has left the way of the righteous, the narrator undertakes the work of understanding the truth about himself. It is not the work incited by the intervention of doctors, but the result of an inner process. The inner process is enacted through a basically nostalgic longing, as it is triggered through the remembrance of the lost world of a childhood. Tunström’s Juloratoriet (Christmas Oratorio, 1983), on the other hand, never directly discusses questions of faith. Its main interest is to tell the history of three generations of a family that revolves around loss and imaginative presence of family members in the small town of Sunne, albeit also connected to destinies in the United States and New

18 Anita Vargas, ‘Myten som livstydningsmodel. Figurala kompositionsprinsiper i Göran Tunströms Juloratoriet’, Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, 31.3 (2002), 47–54 (pp. 49–50).

221

222

t h om a s mohn ik e

Zealand and, most importantly, to music, especially that of Bach. The church is merely only a building of remembrance via the surrounding graves and the location where Bach’s Christmas Oratorio will be staged. In this narrative, music has universally replaced God as a major reference of metaphysical happiness. In his search for the right way in life, the young Sidner does not look for pietistic models, but in his school essays he deals with the Bach family as the noblest example of a righteous life. Art here becomes a sphere that is connected to practices that are traditionally used in Pietist contexts, transforming the relation to art into what could be called an art religion.19 This connection between music and religion is enforced by the narrative through at least two major endings. Firstly, Sidner, looking for his lost and dead father in New Zealand, becomes church organist in a newly founded congregation; it is here where he marries his father’s second love and becomes happy in fulfilling his lost father’s dream on the other opposite side of the planet. Secondly, Victor is staging Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in the small town’s church, fulfilling the project of his grandmother. Accomplishing a lost family member’s call seems to be a guarantee for success and happiness in live. In all the books, a specific chronotope, a unit of time and place, represents the object of nostalgia. Gardell takes care to evoke his childhood not only as a moment in time, but he even locates it as the place of Enebyberg, turning the small town into a paradoxical chronotope of a utopian state beyond time and space. In Enquist’s Ett annat liv and Kapten Nemos bibliotek, the green house of childhood in Hjoggböle in northern Sweden becomes a chronotope in much a similar way — as does Sunne in Tunström’s Juloratoriet and many of his other books. In doing so, the memory of childhood-Enebyberg / Hjoggböle / Sunne is in opposition with time, creating a utopian state of stability, and it becomes stable through linking it to biblical intertexts. It is proposed that these utopian chronotopes are to be read as representations of a collective lieu de mémoire (site of memory), shared with the reader, as the narrators evoke their childhoods as paradigmatic for numerous Swedish childhoods. In fact, Gardell does not mention that he actually passed his childhood in a very specific branch of Christian Protestant, Baptism,20 that is, one of the many Nordic revival movements that accompanied the societies of Northern Europe on their way to modernity, because he wants the reader to identify with his or her own experiences. Enquist tells his reader of the very righteous and implicitly Pietist belief of his mother, but without naming the exact branch. The writers suppose — and the success of their books seem to prove them right — that their experiences are representative of many of their reader’s own stories. The narratives can be read paradigmatically as a commonly shared experience even outside the Baptist and Pietist milieus; their heavenly Father is a figure that in some way or other for many readers 19 See, for example, Heinrich Detering, ‘Was ist Kunstreligion? Systematische und historische Bemerkungen’, in Kunstreligion: ein ästhetisches Konzept der Moderne in seiner historischen Entfaltung. Band 1, der Ursprung des Konzepts um 1800, ed. by Albert Meier, Alessandro Costazza, and Gérard Laudin (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2011), pp. 11–27; Stefania Sbarra, ‘Das Erlösende in der Poesie/ Eine Parallele zwischen Zinzendorf und Goethe’, in Kunstreligion: ein ästhetisches Konzept der Moderne in seiner historischen Entfaltung. Band 1, der Ursprung des Konzepts um 1800, ed. by Albert Meier, Alessandro Costazza, and Gérard Laudin (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2011), pp. 44–58. 20 There is a small exception, though, when he remembers a line that he sung in his childhood’s ‘baptistkyrka’ (‘Baptist church’): Gardell, Om Gud, p. 274.

pietist nosta lg ia

dominated childhood formation (bildning) in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Sweden. These very individualized stories of coming home after having been forced to leave a chronotope of a lost childhood — by unhappiness as in Tunström, by puberty as in Gardell, or after being lost to alcohol as in Enquist — intentionally follow the plot of many biblical narratives, for example, the expulsion from Paradise or the parable of the prodigal son, without, however, identifying with them closely. Allusions to biblical or other Christian texts and practices seem to be an important element in the structuring of the texts and the narrative Ego. It is striking how Gardell, Enquist, and Tunström implicitly write their stories near the story of Jesus, without identifying with him fully: Gardell and Enquist are the son of God or a Jesus-like figure and an earthly mother, albeit not a virgin, and as Jesus and later Luther, they seek a way to be with their fathers directly, without an intermediary other than prayer and the main media of God, the Bible. In Tunström’s Juloratoriet, the media are letters and music, particularly the collective singing of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, the story of the birth of God’s son. It seems important to me that these intertextual allusions are merely reminiscences of elements of Protestant and Pietist faith, but not an attempt at restoring, retelling the biblical narrations in a traditional way. It is an open-minded, reflective nostalgia, interested in ‘details, not symbols’,21 as Svetlana Boym would put it in her above-mentioned study. Gardell tells his reader that his quest for God is the quest of a believing Christian, but it is not missionary nor exclusive, as we have seen. Enquist or Tunström never suggest that their protagonists are believers. Their narratives should thus rather be qualified as reflective nostalgia, according to Boym’s terminology, opposed to restorative nostalgia. The latter, restorative nostalgia, is at core of recent national and religious revivals; it knows two main plots — the return to the origins and the conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones; it loves details, not symbols. At best, reflective nostalgia can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias. This typology of nostalgia allows us to distinguish between national memory that is based on a single plot of national identity, and social memory, which consists of collective frameworks that mark but do not define the individual memory.22 Theoretically, Pietist nostalgia could be of both sorts described by Boym, restorative and reflective. However, in most of the cases that will interest me here, the nostalgic approach seems often to belong to a third category that is transformative nostalgia. This is a form of reflective nostalgia that seeks consciously to transform what has gone into something different, new, living. In fact, Pietist nostalgia, as I want to define it here, is often an attempt at transferring the lost world of Pietist community, rites, and belief into a new, aesthetic sphere, not as an act of reconstructing the old, but transforming it to something useful in modern and postmodern worlds. This is evident in Enquist’s book, as the aim of

21 Boym, Future of Nostalgia, p. xviii. 22 Boym, Future of Nostalgia, p. xviii.

223

224

t h om a s mohn ik e

narration is to provoke in his reader the experience of aesthetic epiphany as a result of a good, astonishing reconfiguration of desperate details of life. It is even more apparent in Tunström’s Juloratoriet where the performance of Bach’s Christmas Oratio is the elevated fulfilment of the thriving protagonists and thereby transforms the lost experience of God into the transcended sphere of aesthetic experience, of what Hugo Friedrich called ‘leere Transzendenz’ (‘empty transcendence’).23 The Notion of Pietist Nostalgia and Karen Blixen / Isak Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast Transformation, however, is in itself an important element of Pietist thought and practice, a transformation that is caused by the lived experience of the presence of God, causing a fundamental conversion to the real belief. At least since Francke at the turn of the seventeenth century, a Pietist should have a datable experience of the presence of God, transforming him from a learned or cultural Christian to a real Christian, living in sincerity and truth.24 We have seen some of these moments in Enquist’s, Gardell’s, and Tunström’s work, where the narrative quest for understanding ends into a provisional state of fulfilment and aesthetic access to a form of empty transcendence. The perhaps most canonical version of this narrative endeavour, however, might be found in the work of Karen Blixen, that takes its seductive force, as Aage Henriksen once write, from ‘the empty room between art and church’.25 The work of Karen Blixen, known to the English-speaking world under the penname of Isak Dinesen, is a paradigmatic example not only of reception and transformation of Pietist ideas and aesthetic practices, but also, and perhaps even more, of nostalgia. Many of her works can be described as attempts at bridging the distance between now and a lost and far-away world by the means of art. The famous opening line of her book Out of Africa is a well-known case in point. ‘I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills’, she writes, reflecting the lost world of aristocratic colonialism as a starting point for an artistic rendering of a European utopia of Africa. In other works, Pietist elements play a similar role, notably in her collection Anecdotes of Destiny (1950). The five stories of the collection treat the power of imagination, of stories, theatre, and art. Religion is a subtext in all of them; in the first three stories, it plays a dominant role: the first one exploring an oriental Islamic world, the two others Pietist Norway. All of the five stories take place in a time that had already passed at the time of narration. Perhaps the best-known story from this collection is Babette’s Feast, which in many ways explores what aesthetic Pietist nostalgia might mean at its best. Babette’s Feast tells the most improbable story of a renowned French cook working for two elder Pietist sisters who live an ascetic live and of a most luxurious dinner that

23 Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik von d. Mitte d. 19. bis zur Mitte d. 20. Jh. (Hamburg [i.e. Reinbek]: Rowohlt, 1981), pp. 20, 48-49, 61-64. 24 Shantz, Introduction to German Pietism, p. 138. 25 Aage Henriksen, ‘Der leere Raum zwischen Kunst und Kirche’, in Blixen, Christensen und andere dänische Dichterinnen, ed. by Bodil Wamberg (Münster: Kleinheinrich, 1988), pp. 53–65.

pietist nosta lg ia

she organizes for the birthday of the two women’s father, the founder of a Pietist sect that renounces all earthly pleasures in order to prepare oneself for the New Jerusalem to come. The narrated world of Babette’s Feast is, however, held at distance by the narrator in both space and time. The story takes place in Norway, in ‘a fjord — a long narrow arm of the sea between tall mountains — named Berlevaag Fjord’.26 From the outset, the setting is exotic enough to make it a world of what could be called the familiar Other: it is part of the Nordic realm of the narrator, but situated at its outermost margins in a landscape that is of no resemblance to anything one might encounter in Denmark or Sweden or in most other parts of Europe. In fact, any reader interested in maps would discover Berlevaag in one of the northernmost fjords of Norway. It is a rural world, far from urbanization, a world of peasants and fishermen, and of a noble woman from the Loewenhielm family; it is thus in some way a premodern, still feudal world, even if the noble elder lady is depicted as a pious member of the community. It takes place, however, not at the time of the reader, but ‘sixty-five years ago’,27 that is, in the middle of the 1880s in relation to the publication date. Berlevaag is thus a chronotope of a far-away world that has long disappeared, which is visited by the narrator and his ally, the reader; the narration is informed by care and benevolence towards its object, preparing a utopian aesthetic elevation as the ultimate aim of the story, turning it hence into an object of nostalgia. As mentioned above, the story develops around some moments in the life of a small ‘pious ecclesiastic party or sect, which was known and looked up to in all the country of Norway’, founded by the father of the two elderly sisters. However, their father has long been dead, and his disciples have become ‘somewhat querulous and quarrelsome, so that sad little schisms would arise in the congregation. But they still gathered together to read and interpret the Word’.28 The narrated world is hence a world that has left its idyllic status of Pietist salvation; the relation of the state of the congregation to its ideal is thus of nostalgic nature as well. The ideal spiritual world evoked is thus doubly at a timely distance from the reader: it is already only memory for the protagonists who in turn lived sixty-five years before the act of narration. At the end of the story, however, this lost world will be provisorily restored, both for the community and the reader, and it reveals its utopian element; we will come back to this later. To be the object of nostalgia, we have noted above, the chronotope has not only to be characterized as being far away, but even familiar, a representation of home. This is probably one reason why Norway is chosen — a place that is imagined as still European, as still Nordic, even if it is located at the margins. More important, however, are other, subtler strategies. The two protagonists are called Philippa and Martine ‘after Martin Luther and his friend Philip Melanchthon’,29 placing them in the tradition of Lutheran Protestantism and likening the two women to two main heroes of Protestant mythology. Additionally, like in the other examples analysed above, the absent, long-dead father is a central dialogue partner not only with his two daughters, but even with the whole congregation, becoming a surrogate for Jesus and God. Remarkably, the mother is, except for a short mention of 26 Isak Dinesen, Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (New York: Vintage books, 1993), p. 21. 27 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 21. 28 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 21. 29 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 21.

225

2 26

t h om a s mohn ik e

her ‘small working-table beneath’ the portrait of the father,30 all absent from the text. Like the reference to Jesus and the absent father figures in the case of Jonas Gardell, Per Olov Enquist, and Göran Tunström, these intertextual references are merely an allusion, not a retelling; it is detail, not symbol in the sense Boym put it, an allusion that serves to create familiarity without confining its object to a specific plot. The ‘pious party or sect’ is said to have been known all over Norway and by that becomes less exotic. When the narrator describes the main principles of the specific sect, they appear to be the same as in the vast majority of Pietist inspired revival movements: Its members renounced the pleasures of this world, for the earth and all that it held to them was but a kind of illusion, and the true reality was the New Jerusalem toward which they were longing. They swore not at all, but their communication was yea yea and nay nay, and they called one another Brother and Sister.31 By means of these different strategies, the specific story of a particular Northern Norwegian Pietist community becomes the representative of the many Pietist movements of the Nordic nineteenth and early twentieth century; it becomes familiar, near to individual and collective memory, but far away like a childhood memory. The world is as such evoked as a perfect object of nostalgia: familiar, but too far away in time and space to be reached. In the same manner, many other allusions to biblical and Christian, notably Pietist, texts and practices evoked throughout the story are used as a means of resonance, of remembrance, not of direct re-enacting. Babette’s relation to the two sisters is described as ‘dark Martha in the house of their two fair Marys’, alluding to a passage in Luke 10. 38–42. This allusion is followed by a reference to the biblical saying of the cornerstone which ‘had almost been refused [but] had become the head-stone of the corner’, to be found at numerous places in the New Testament and referring to the Old Testament’s Psalms 118. 22.32 A little later, the description of the congregation as ‘unshepherded sheep’ has to be seen as an allusion to Christ as the good shepherd, etc.33 None of these intertexts appear to connect to a deeper meaning, they serve nothing other than to create an atmosphere of remembering and associating the well-known and well-esteemed, proving that the protagonists adhere to the biblical model in the Pietist tradition of following God’s example and refer to the Bible as the guide to interpretation of one’s own life. The most obvious reference to Christian texts and practices is, however, the feast organized by Babette in memory of the Dean as a re-enactment of the Last Supper. This re-enactment is chatoyant between Jesus’s Last Supper before his arrest and crucifixion and the rite of remembrance of community with him celebrated in church, a rite that was crucial for many Pietists; admission to the Last Supper was highly discussed and often reserved only to the seemingly righteous. We have briefly met this problematic when discussing Gardell. As for the Last Supper, there are twelve disciples present at the Dean’s birthday dinner, and just as after the death of Jesus, the host is merely present through the act of remembrance. At the same time, however, the narrator connects even other biblical stories to the dinner, for 30 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 43. 31 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 21. 32 Both quotations in Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 33. 33 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 34.

pietist nosta lg ia

example, the story of the wedding of Cana as well as stories of miracles from the life of the Dean, etc., probably in order to advise against all too easy parallelisms. In the same sense, whilst biblical and Christian intertexts dominate the narration in general, references to other literary universes interfere easily, as, for example, to the Islamic world when citing ‘the black stone tone of Mecca, the Kaaba itself ’, or to classical mythology when describing Babette as ‘Phytia upon her tripod’.34 It is thus not an act of restorative, but of reflective nostalgia, of a nostalgia that takes elements to transform them into something new. It is repetition of the known to open up to the unknown, unexpected — that transforms the unexpected and extraordinary to the experience of the familiar, of home. More important, however, than the intertextual references to other texts are intratextual citations, repetitions, and allusions that structure the narration, as Stefanie von Schnurbein had remarked.35 In fact, several passages are reused two times verbatim by different protagonists or the narrator, once at the beginning and once at the end. For example, of the two sisters it is said twice that ‘for a full minute they could not speak’, first, when hearing about Babette’s lottery winning, and then, when they hear that she had spent the money on the dinner.36 When the General Loewenhielm as a young man meets the Dean, the latter tells him ‘Mercy and Truth, dear brethren, have met together’, and ‘Righteousness and Bliss have kissed one another’. Thirty years later at the dinner, the General opens his speech with the same words, just replacing ‘brethren’ with friends.37 Even more importantly, perhaps, the words that Papin writes to his lost love Philippa: ‘I feel that the grave is not the end. In Paradise I shall hear your voice again. There you will sing, without fears or scruples, as God meant you to sing. There you will be the great artist that God meant you to be. Ah! how you will enchant the angels’. Philippa will use almost the same words to praise Babette in the sentences of the story: ‘I feel, Babette, that this is not the end. In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be! Ah! […] how you will enchant the angels!’38 Each of these uses mark a before and an after of a conversion experience, it is the difference between a learned Christian and a true Christian according to the structure of Pietist thought, a difference induced by the experience of conversion, of the experience of God’s presence.39 Of course, in Blixen’s story, the experience of God’s presence is translated into something that we could call the aesthetic experience of truth and eternity. This experience of conversion is most traditionally depicted by the General who first hears some words of wisdom through the Dean and then, thirty years later, repeats them, but now not as an outer knowledge, but as an experience of truth. He is said not to have prepared any speech for the occasion, but that ‘it was as if the whole figure of General Loewenhielm, his breast covered with decorations, were but a mouthpiece for a message which meant to be brought

34 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 33. 35 See, e.g., Stefanie Von Schnurbein, Ökonomien des Hungers: Essen und Körper in der skandinavischen Literatur, Berliner Beiträge zur Skandinavistik, 23 (Berlin: Berlin Nordeuropa-Institut der Humboldt-Universität, 2018), p. 161. 36 Dinesen, Anecdotes, pp. 36, 57. 37 Dinesen, Anecdotes, pp. 23–24, 52. 38 Dinesen, Anecdotes, pp. 30, 59. 39 Horstbøll, ‘Pietism and the Politics of Catechisms’, p. 148.

227

228

t h om a s mohn ik e

forth’.40 It is a higher force that talks through him like through a medium, not like speaking in tongues, but as possessed by a higher will that expresses the truth. In the same way, the silence of the two sisters being confronted with the lottery prize is first informed by on outer understanding of its significance for Babette: they only see the possibility for her to return home; at the end, however, they understand that home for Babette is not Paris, but art. And as such, Philippa’s quoting Papin at the end is a means for her to understand fully what Papin was telling her: as a great artist, she has gained entrance to paradise, it is through their art that the happy few true artists may open the view to the eternal hope for themselves and their public. Art and true belief are not contradictions, but two ways to Paradise, that one should follow ‘without fears or scruples’. In this moment, Philippa seems to truly understand to ‘be the great artist that God meant you to be’, taking up another Pietist thought: that each individual has their own call in the world which they have to discover and to realize as God’s will. When we follow this train of thought, we can see that Babette’s dinner is structured around the verses of the Dean which are said as grace at the beginning of the dinner, describing Pietist longing for God: May my food my body maintain, may my body my soul sustain, may my soul in deed and word give thanks for all things to the Lord.41 The congregation remains first in fear, confronted with the idea of being obliged to stay in the realm of the body, but in fact, all of Babette’s art is meant to create food that is sustaining the soul: The convives grew lighter in weight and lighter of heart the more they ate and drank. They no longer needed to remind themselves of their vow. It was, they realised, when man has not only altogether forgotten but has firmly renounced all ideas of food and drink that he eats and drinks in the right spirit.42 The members of the congregation start their conversation by remembering the miracles of the Dean and God, and remember by these means their community in order to confess and forgive the sins of each other and praise at the end, first through the speech of the General, then through many expressions of the leaving congregation ‘“Bless you, bless you, bless you”, like an echo of the harmony of the spheres rang to all sides’,43 and finally through the last words of Philippa praising Babette’s art as a gift from God. The artist becomes as such the preacher, the ‘mouthpiece’ of eternity. When she performs her art, she is no longer herself, she is acting by a greater will; it is in this way we have to understand Papin’s regret that it was not him who kissed Philippa, but Don Giovanni. And this is why Babette is identified, as noted above, as the Greek ‘Phytia upon her tripod’ as a seeress of the gods’ will. 40 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 52. 41 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 48. 42 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 50. 43 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 55.

pietist nosta lg ia

However, the most profound incentive of all action, of all will, and all deed in the story is the motif of love. When the narrator sets up to explain why Babette is living in exile in Norway, he tells us that ‘the true reason for Babette’s presence in the two sisters’ house was to be found further back in time and deeper down in the domain of human hearts’.44 Nevertheless, the narrator does not begin with the story of Papin, which would be the practical reason for Babette’s coming to Berlevaag, but of the encounter of the young Loewenhielm with Martine that would inspire the two of them to eternal, heavenly love, which was never ‘touched by the flames of this world’,45 but fulfilled itself over the course of Babette’s dinner. Likewise, Papin, as an artist, has encountered love for Philippa in the sphere of art, which is thereby elevated to eternity. And finally, the dinner itself is defined as ‘a love-affair of the noble and romantic category in which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite or satiety’,46 as Loewenhielm remembers Colonel Galliffet to have declared. Furthermore, this spiritual love as the basic principle is perhaps the most significant element in the narrative universe inherited from Pietism. For example, Pontoppidan’s widely used catechism declared that the first of the Ten Commandments talks about the ‘love to God’, and this love to God should express itself as a love to oneself and ‘to our fellow man’, because this love ‘is a desire implanted in Man by God to make possible his true welfare and salvation’.47 In Blixen’s Babette’s Feast, many elements of Pietist practice and belief are thus reused and put forward in a utopian manner, celebrating the possibility of an aesthetic epiphany as a means of an (unstable) experience of fulfillment. Just as in the other texts discussed above, this reconfiguration is done in a way that creates something new, detached from religious belief in a narrow sense. It is nostalgic in the same manner, as all of the texts studied start with a world, a chronotope, that has lost its ideal state through the death of father figures (and one mother), a state that is longed for and that is regained in a productive, aesthetically transformed manner at the end of the narrations. Inter- and intratextuality in a strict sense, that is, the conscious reuse of words, has been noted as an important narrative means, being an expression of logocentrism as a significant part of aesthetics. This reuse of texts refers here and often to attempts at following renowned role models, as when the general quotes the Dean, or Sidner in Tunström’s Juloratoriet re-enacts his dead father’s journey and Gardell and Enquist mirror themselves in Jesus as the son of God. Profane aesthetic moments of epiphany have been noted throughout and can be described as variants of the datable conversion experience of Pietists. None of the authors studied wants to regain the state of belief of childhood (with perhaps the uncertain exception of Gardell), but all of them seek a utopia of liberation in the act of narrative art itself.

44 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 22. 45 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 23. 46 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 51. 47 Horstbøll, ‘Pietism and the Politics of Catechisms’, p. 150.

229

2 30

t h om a s mohn ik e

Perspectives In another Anecdote of Destiny, ‘The Tempest’, the protagonists are caught in a similar way in the structuring force of intertextual references, or rather, text passages of role models to follow. A theatre group wants to stage Shakespeare’s Tempest in several towns in Norway, but on their way to Kristiansand in southern Norway, they find themselves caught in a violent storm. In this situation of stress and struggle for life, the female actor playing Ariel falls into the role of the Shakespearean Ariel and, through the courage of the figure, saves the ship and crew. When they land, she is celebrated as a hero by the city and the rich shipowner and his wife, a Pietist merchant and his wife, ‘godfearing folk, their house was the most decorous in the town and the most charitable to the poor’.48 However, her act is understood rather in the context of Christian role models of self-sacrifice. She accepts the veneration with surprise, but struggles with the interpretation. In the end, she leaves the rich pious family and her love, the shipowner’s son, because the Bible seems to tell her that her heroic deed which defined her new place in society was done as a work of art, but not as a true act of her conviction, as a re-enactment of a theatre play and not of God’s own word. Also, she grows up with an absent, but through stories ever-present father, and in this way, we can find many of the structuring elements, seen in the foregoing analysis, even in this story. However, the narration does not resolve into a utopian state of an aesthetic epiphany and can thus be read as a counter-piece to the hope transmitted via Babette’s Feast. On the contrary, art and truth appear not to meet. However, this is not the fault of the eventual Pietist parents-in-law, but of a practice of reading the Bible too literally. The young actress did not yet understand that truth and art are interconnected, that art is the door to truth. Above, I defined Pietist nostalgia as the use of motifs, ideas, and narrative elements that can be traced to or are identified by the texts as belonging to the Protestant revival movements of the nineteenth and twentieth century as a means of evoking a chronotope of a bygone world as an aesthetic utopia. Intertextual relations to biblical and Christian texts and practices are thus a central element of this type of nostalgia, as the texts do not seek to re-establish the bygone world per se, but to reuse some of its elements. It would be simple to add works of major, canonized authors that could be analysed in this way. To quote but some names, we can think of Pär Lagerkvist’s later work (Ahasverus död, Pilgrim på havet, Det heliga landet (1960–1964)), Kerstin Ekman’s Kvinnor och Staden (1974–1983), Torgny Lindgren’s works such as Ormens väg på hälleberget (1982), Legender (1986) or Gustav Dorés bible (2005), Edvard Hoem’s Mors og fars histoire (2005) and Slåttekar i himmelen (2014), and Jon Fosse’s trilogy Andvake, Olavs draumar, Kveldsvævd (2014). This list is far from exhaustive. Much of Scandinavian literature seems to be informed by some kind of Pietist nostalgia, reflecting it in their work through an exciting confrontation in which models of faith are aestheticized in order to make them compatible with (post-)modernist discourse, a discourse that was often governed by the frame narrative of secularization and anti-religious impetus.

48 Dinesen, Anecdotes, p. 87.

pietist nosta lg ia

Nevertheless, the question remains: what are the limits of such a definition? How explicit should the reference to the corpus of Pietist and Christian texts be in order to qualify as Pietist nostalgia? Karen Blixen and Enquist were rather explicit when it came to Pietism; Tunström and Gardell rather implicitly quoted this universe, and even less explicit are texts like Ekman’s Kvinnor och staden. The problem lies in the definition of Pietism itself: its different currents did not define themselves as something new, but as movements of renewal, which ideally should influence all members, parts, and aspects of human societies, and indeed, it did in many aspects of Scandinavian culture, as briefly discussed in the introduction. However, such questions have to be resolved if we want to understand how the relationship to Pietism and Protestantism changes over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first century — will the implicit reference to these universes decrease and be replaced by an aesthetic nostalgia that takes other elements, for example, nationalistic ones? Or will Pietist nostalgia transform in itself? In order to ask these questions, we should redefine and contextualize the reflections of the present chapter in a study of nostalgia in Scandinavian post-World-War-II literature in general. These are studies still to be made.

2 31

Giuliano D’Amico

‘Rather Than Buddha’s Calm, I Choose the Crucifixion’ Håkan Sandell’s Christian Palimpsests1 It was late, and Oslo was cold, icy, treacherous underfoot. Håkan Sandell was showing me around his adopted city, and we had just visited some of the more illustrious graves in Vår Frelsers Gravlund (Our Savior’s Cemetery), Ibsen’s and Munch’s among them. Small votive candles had been placed in front of a number of the graves. […] The cemetery was pitch-black aside from the candles at scattered graves, the moonlight, and the reflection of the moonlight off ice. During our tour we passed the cemetery chapel where the Russian Orthodox church in Oslo holds its services. Sandell had occasionally attended liturgy at the chapel, and I had become Orthodox the year before, back home in Boston. He had thought about converting too, he said. His problem was with one question posed in the ceremony: “Do you renounce Satan, and all his works, and all his worship, and all his angels, and all his pomp?” To which the expected, and obligatory, response is, “I do renounce him.” “Do I really”, Sandell asked plaintively, but with a smile in the corner of his mouth and a (what else to call it?) devilish twinkle in his eye, “have to renounce all his works and pomp? Couldn’t I just renounce the vast majority of them?”2 With these words the translator Bill Coyle opens the anthology Dog Star Notations, the first English-language collection of Swedish contemporary poet Håkan Sandell’s poems. In more ways than one, these lines are appropriate to introduce the theme of this chapter, which will focus on the Christian palimpsests present in Sandell’s poetry. Coyle’s anecdote tells a story about a spiritual kind of poetry, one that takes into account the contradictions of human nature, its tension with the divine and its dependence on the realm of matter. In addition, it tells the story of a failed conversion, i.e., of a spiritual worldview that, while hinting at other variants of Christian faith, remains Protestant at its core. This material and these considerations spur the following research questions: which kind of religious, and more specifically biblical, references are present in Sandell’s poems? Which poetic and/or spiritual role do they play? And how do these references relate to Sandell’s ‘retrogardist’ poetics?





1 Parts of this chapter have appeared earlier in Giuliano D’Amico, ‘Retrogardism and Occulture in Håkan Sandell’s Poetry’, in The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature and Cinema, ed. by Henrik Johnsson and Tessel Bauduin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 215–34 and Tilbake til fremtiden. Håkan Sandell og den nordiske retrogardismen (Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press, 2020). They are reproduced here by permission. 2 Bill Coyle, ‘Introduction’, in Håkan Sandell, Dog Star Notations: Selected Poems 1999–2016 (Manchester: Carcanet, 2016), p. 8. Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 233–245 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.131424

2 34

gi ul i a n o d’amico

In order to answer these questions, I will apply a theoretical-methodological approach that rests upon Dana Gioia’s idea of ‘poetry as enchantment’, i.e., of a modern, lyrical expression that allows for contact with the divine. More specifically, I will also show how Frederic Jameson’s ‘existential historicism’ and Keala Jewell’s concept of poiesis of history mould this religious and literary material into a conceptualization of the past in poetry, which comes to the surface in the form of palimpsests. I will soon expand on these aspects in the theoretical part of the chapter; in the following sections I will give a brief introduction to Sandell’s authorship and aesthetics. Born in Malmö in 1962, Sandell published his first collections of poetry in the early 1980s in the context of the so-called Malmöliga, or ‘Malmö gang’, a group of young poets inspired by punk culture and by the geographically and thematically related poetry developed in Copenhagen by Michael Strunge and Søren Ulrik Thomsen. Their ambition was to create a popular poetry from the street, in open opposition to the established culture of the capital, Stockholm, which they deemed too academic and bookish.3 Some ten years later, in 1995, having terminated the Malmöliga experience, Sandell published, together with his colleague Clemens Altgård, the pamphlet Om retrogardism (On retrogardism), which marked the start of his ‘retrogardist’ poetics. In the pamphlet, Altgård states: ‘Konsten har nått det stadium där det åter blir nödvändigt att, utan att ge upp modernismens viktiga landvinningar, och utan att kunna gå förbi postmodernismens kritiska insikter, försöka återvinna en förlorad autenticitet, återupprätta konsten och poesin, omskapa den marginaliserade poetrollen’ (‘the stage art has reached makes it necessary, without renouncing modernism’s important achievements, and without denying postmodernism’s critical stances, to try to reclaim a lost authenticity, revitalize art and poetry, reshape the marginalized role of the poet’).4 Sandell’s phrasing is more polemical: ‘Modernismen och dess sentida förtunningar har i mitt tycke uppträtt med en närmast kolonial attityd till världslitteratur och litteraturhistoria, med sin självrättfärdighet, sin hegemoni och sina blindperspektiv’ (‘Modernism and its later outputs have to my mind acted with an almost colonial attitude to world literature and literary history, with self-consciousness, hegemony and blindness’).5 With an evident pun on the term avant-garde and the prefix retro, the starting point of retrogardism is a criticism of modernism, especially that of the Nordic countries, although — as Altgård’s moderation proves — the aim was not to deny its role in literary history. The point was rather to focus on the aspects of literature and poetry that had suffered by the advent of modernism and resist its ‘later outputs’, for instance, the growing language poetry movement, or språkmaterialism, as it was called in Sweden. Retrogardism’s artistic programme aimed at going back in time and recovering forms of poetry and art that had been set aside as a consequence of modernism’s establishment as canon.



3 Peter Luthersson, ‘Malmöligan. En introduktion’, in Malmöligan. En originalantologi, ed. by Clemens Altgård et al. (Lund: Ellerströms, 1992), pp. 141–82. 4 Clemens Altgård, ‘Tillbaka till framtiden’, in Om retrogardism, ed. by Clemens Altgård and Håkan Sandell (Lund: Ellerströms, 1995), p. 9. My translation. 5 Håkan Sandell, ‘Vid den blåa blixten, vid den gröna lind’, in Om retrogardism, ed. by Clemens Altgård and Håkan Sandell (Lund: Ellerströms, 1995), p. 46. Italics in the original. My translation.

‘ r ather than b uddha’s ca lm, i  choose the  crucifixion’

Retrogardism brought Sandell into contact with a group of Norwegian figurative painters, who were also working in opposition to the contemporary non-figurative art scene and were inspired by the great masters of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, with Caravaggio, Titian, and Rembrandt as main points of reference. This meeting occurred when Sandell moved to Oslo in 1997, an event that was followed by the foundation of the Senter for frie kunster (Centre for Liberal Arts) in 2002, a commune of poets and artists based in an old neo-Gothic building in central St Olavs gate, where most of them still live. Simplifying to the extreme, the poems mentioned in this chapter can be interpreted in the context of a poetry that, although it does not reproduce directly styles and forms from the past, is still firmly anchored to a regular rhythm (especially Nordic knittel, blank verse and alexandrine), sometimes to rhyme, to a clear centrality of the lyrical I, and, especially, to a belief in the power of the poetic word as a medium to the transcendent, and a way to the divine. On this last aspect, it is interesting to look at what the American critic and poet Dana Gioia has written in an article published in 2015, ‘Poetry as Enchantment’.6 In this article, Gioia argues for the recognition of a topic (namely, ‘enchantment’) ‘so remote from contemporary literary studies that there is no respectable critical term for it’.7 He points out that poetry, as the oldest form of literature and a universal human art, is intrinsically linked to a form of vocal music. This has fostered an idea or representation of the poet as a sacred or tribal singer, which originated in premodern societies and continued to be invoked throughout Western literature. As Gioia argues, ‘poetry recognizes the mysterious relationship between dream and reality. In tribal societies, the shaman navigates the paths between the worlds of sleep and waking, and modern poetry still claims some power to connect the conscious and the unconscious minds’.8 The key to this enchantment is rhythm, a fact that, as he says, has been ‘confirmed by cognitive science about the impact of shamanistic chanting on the human mind and body’.9 Sandell seems to be on a similar line as Gioia when he, in Om retrogardism, writes on bardic poetry, on the role of the past within this tradition, and on the importance of rhythm for the development of inspiration, a quality he finds lacking in most modernist poetry: Man gav den gången upp den bundna versen, man gav snart också upp vad som under en period kallades “den fria versen”, och förlorade så småningom kontakten med det skaparprivilegium som alltid tillräcks en av rytmen; de med puls och andning förbundna versrytmer som kan åsidosätta diktarens vardagsjag och skänka tillgång till kraftkällor som väntande finns kvar […].10 [They gave up the fixed verse, soon they also gave up what they, for a period, called “free verse”, and suddenly they lost contact with that creative privilege which rhythm always bears within: those metrical forms linked to pulse and breathing that can

6 Dana Gioia, ‘Poetry as Enchantment’, The Dark Horse, 34 (2015) [accessed 10 March 2022]. 7 Gioia, ‘Poetry as Enchantment’. 8 Gioia, ‘Poetry as Enchantment’. 9 Gioia, ‘Poetry as Enchantment’. 10 Sandell, ‘Vid den blåa blixten’, p. 45. Italics in the original.

23 5

2 36

gi ul i a n o d’amico

put aside the everyday experience of the poet and give access to sources that are still waiting for us’. [My translation] If this would take us very far into the investigation of Sandell’s shamanic and esoteric poetry — a theme I have explored elsewhere11 — in this chapter I would like to focus on one of these sources, namely, Christianity and the way it is represented in Sandell’s poetry. From this point of view, Sandell reminds us closely of what Michael D. Hurley describes in his book Faith in Poetry, in which he investigates a form of lyrical expression that is “religious” not merely for what it illustrates, but for what it is. The pressing challenge for all poets is one of commensurability: to find or found a style adequate to their subjects. But at its height, religious poetry asks more of itself than that its form might find continuity with its content; it aims not simply to delineate theological niceties, but to become itself an efficacious mode of theology.12 Generally speaking, Sandell’s poetry on religious matters develops among binary oppositions (and the possibility of reconciling them): good/evil, material/immaterial, spirit/ flesh, West/East, orthodox/heterodox, esoteric/exoteric. As Coyle again puts it in this longer quotation: The problem, or rather problems, of evil (they are legion) are of perpetual interest to Sandell. His work is often spiritual, sometimes explicitly so, though it is more often Gnostic — in the good old heretical sense of the word — than Christian in an orthodox sense. […] The struggle between two visions of the material world — on the one hand, as in Neoplatonism and other theosophies, a symbol of a higher, spiritual reality, on the other a prison of the spirit — is present throughout the work. […] These are not just big issues, but weighty ones, as we say, and in Sandell’s poetry they have real physical heft, occupy a real space.13 I will soon comment on a few poems, but it is necessary to first highlight a specific issue. Although Coyle has a point in assessing the Gnostic duality present in Sandell’s poems, and although Sandell, as we will see later, may seem to partly concede a Catholic worldview in some of them, I would maintain that this duality still remains in a very Protestant context, i.e., the one in which his poetic (as well as real) persona has grown up. This may also be traced in Sandell’s problems with Orthodox Christendom, mentioned in this and in the opening quotation, and with Eastern philosophy, as will become clear later on. Before proceeding to the analysis of the poems, I will devote some space to the technique Sandell uses to develop religious themes, which in the title of this chapter I have called palimpsests. The reference, of course, is to Gerard Genette’s famous definition of texts that bring about meaning, themes, and/or forms from earlier texts.14 More specifically, these palimpsests are a function of what James Longenbach called ‘existential historicism’, originally referring to Tomas Stearns Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s poetry:

11 12 13 14

D’Amico, ‘Retrogardism and Occulture in Håkan Sandell’s Poetry’. Michael D. Hurley, Faith in Poetry: Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 3–4. Coyle, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982).

‘ r ather than b uddha’s ca lm, i  choose the  crucifixion’

For both these poets the present is nothing more than the sum of the entire past — a palimpsest, a complex tissue of historical remnants. […] Pound and Eliot participated in the crisis of historicism that wrenched nearly every discipline of human thought during their lifetimes. And like many of the historians and philosophers of history who were their contemporaries, they felt that a healthy relationship with the past is essential for the highest quality of life and literature in the present.15 Therefore, Sandell’s palimpsests allow for this ‘complex tissue of historical remnants’, including their religious narratives. In so doing, they also realize what Keala Jewell has called ‘poiesis of history’ referring to the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Such poiesis, which is also based on palimpsests, works with a process of contaminatio, or ‘a plurality of superimposed styles’ that makes the ‘incorporations of past poetic styles provocatively conspicuous’.16 As far as Sandell’s poetry is concerned, such poiesis of history happens both at a stylistic level (with the use of past verse forms) and at a thematic level, with the frequent use of palimpsests related to the Bible or the Christian tradition in general. His poetry offers a complex blend of biblical references, spiritual reflections, and generally a sacral atmosphere. Based on these Christian palimpsests, his existential historicism and poiesis of history enable access to such narratives as a hermeneutic tool to the present, as I will show in the following sections. It is particularly in his collection from 2003, Oslo-Passionen (The Oslo Passion), and his later one from 2013, Ode till demiurgen (Ode to the Demiurge), that Christian palimpsests are present. A good example to start with is ‘Överfallet’ (‘The Assault’), a poem that describes a fight between two gangs of young criminals. The poem opens with the epigraph ‘Wer hat dich so geschlagen…’ (‘Who has beaten you in this way…’, my translation), which is originally a verse from a hymn by the German psalmist Paul Gerhardt, later also used in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Johannes-Passion. This is the first palimpsest that tells us that the framing is a Christian one, and especially that of the Passion. One of the gangs has sent a young boy to the pit: De har skickat fram nybörjarkillen, följd av granskarblickarna hos koret som väntar solot, framför halvringen.17 [Dispatched, the new initiate advances, the chorus watching him as they await his solo there before their semi-circle.]18 The situation looks scary for the boy, who is losing the fight: Nu känner han, liksom på baksidan av världen, obönhörlig närhet, 15 James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 11. 16 Keala Jewell, The Poiesis of History: Experimenting with Genre in Postwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 17 Sandell, Oslo-Passionen (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2003), p. 10. 18 Sandell, Dog Star Notations, p. 28. All translations in this collection are Bill Coyle’s.

23 7

2 38

gi ul i a n o d’amico

värmen sippra ner i hans Adidas, urin och blod […]19 [Now he feels, as though he had gone behind the world, implacable nearness, his Adidas warm with the blood and urine pooling inside them drop by drop’.]20 His figure turns increasingly Christ-like, something that makes the lyrical I — who is the boy’s opponent — feel the following: […] mest av allt en lust att stryka honom över kinden: Jag svär vid Samsons blindhet, vid lampan Psyke synade den nakna vingen, Getsemane med Petrus svärd, och Brutus kniv, att jag önskade mig ett annat skeende och utan ens en droppe raseri fördelade det uppföljande tunga slaget.21 [I realise that most of all I’d like to stroke his cheek, not strike him down. I swear by Samson’s blindness, by the lamp that Psyche glimpsed the naked wing by, Gethsemane with Peter’s sword and Brutus’s knife, I wish that things had turned out otherwise, and it was without a drop of fury that I delivered the next — the final — heavy blow.]22 The I knows well that ‘det finns inget annat sätt att lära’ (‘Experience is the only thing that teaches’),23 but still the boy awakens new feelings in him. The complex palimpsest, based on the Bible, Greek mythology, and Roman history at one and the same time, describes the moment in which the last drop causes the overflow, when a murderer delivers the final blow, the moment that separates a before and after: it is the case of the Philistines who carve Samson’s eyes out; the oil lamp that makes Psyche see Eros and which decides her fate; the sword of Peter that wounds one of the soldiers who keep Jesus, and which makes him predict Peter’s death; Brutus’ knife that kills Caesar and changes the course of history. The lyrical I seems to partially leave the body of the opponent — can a gang boy have so much knowledge of history and the Bible? — and takes more unclear and spiritual traits: […] Men lammets liv är det inte hellre inkarnerat i

19 Sandell, Oslo-Passionen, p. 10. 20 Sandell, Dog Star Notations, p. 28. 21 Sandell, Oslo-Passionen, p. 11. 22 Sandell, Dog Star Notations, p. 29. 23 Sandell, Oslo-Passionen, p. 10 and Dog Star Notations, p. 28.

‘ r ather than b uddha’s ca lm, i  choose the  crucifixion’

den pojkkropp som här rystit till, ett nedlagt vilddjur med droppande saliv från de vita jämna tänderna?24 [[…] But isn’t, finally, the lamb’s life incarnate more sublimely in the boy’s body that lies twitching here a felled wild animal with the saliva dripping off of his white, even teeth?]25 The palimpsest has turned the episode into a retelling of the Passion of Christ, and the reference contained in the epigraph finds an echo in the doubt of the assaulter. He knows that he cannot free himself from the rule of the trade: Kan jag falla ner och lossa skobanden, eller — Mästare! — kyssa de skrapade händerna, utan att näste man, mittöver min panna sätter ett skoavtrycks solkiga stjärna?26 [To fall down — Master! — and untie his laces or kiss his scraped hands would just guarantee that the next man with his own track shoe places a dirt star on my forehead, dead-centre.]27 Even though he knows that he hardly would turn himself to the Master (the identification boy-Christ is now complete) in the situation he is in, it is nevertheless with a doubt that he ends his reflection. He is no longer just the member of a gang, but a metonymy of humanity, who addresses both the rest of humanity and the divine: Är det meningen, att det höga skallbenet och den mjuka fyllningen i hjärnan som med sköra trådar vävde identitet ska spricka som en såpbubbla i intet?28 [What does it mean? Was this what was intended, that the high skull and the brain’s tender contents that with brittle threads wove an identity should burst like a soap bubble in the end?]29 ‘The Assault’ is a good example of how Sandell’s palimpsests work as hermeneutic gateways to our time, and of how they can tie together different experiences and portions of reality. In addition, the poem shows a number of elements that suggest that Sandell’s Christian

24 Sandell, Oslo-Passionen, p. 11. 25 Sandell, Dog Star Notations, p. 29. 26 Sandell, Oslo-Passionen, pp. 11–12. 27 Sandell, Dog Star Notations, p. 29. 28 Sandell, Oslo-Passionen, p. 12. 29 Sandell, Dog Star Notations, p. 29.

239

240

gi ul i a n o d’amico

spirituality is still anchored to a specific Protestant context — if we take into account the general characteristics that are outlined in the introduction to this anthology — although he also seems to acknowledge elements that point at a Catholic worldview.30 To begin with the epigraph, we see that it not only introduces the main biblical palimpsest, i.e., the retelling of the Passion of Christ, but also points to one of the most iconic pieces of sacred music in the Protestant context, i.e., Bach’s Johannes-Passion. In addition, the tension and dialogue between the ‘past’ event of the Passion and the ‘present’ event of the fight emphasize a form of concreteness and relatedness to the world that is typical of a Protestant aesthetics: the religious experience of the poem is always related to a concrete human event — the fight and its gruesome consequences — and the humanity of this experience is emphasized by the compassion expressed by the winner of the duel. At the same time, however, the tension between the past and the present seems to recall a ‘long view of things’ that make the Catholic, according to Dana Gioia, ‘look back to the time of Christ and the Caesars while also gazing forward toward eternity’.31 Finally, the marked presence of a lyrical I allows the poem to elaborate on the tension between individualism and collectivism that is present in the Protestant worldview: the spiritual experience described in the poem is strictly personal, while at the same time pointing to a shared human condition — suffering — represented by the bleeding, beaten boy. In a way, the theme of the poem does relate to a typical Catholic ‘redemption through suffering’, but the sense of community it expresses never relates to a form of ecclesia that would perhaps be recurrent in a Catholic context;32 on the contrary, it refers to a concrete human condition, an aspect that Sandell also explores in his many poems dedicated to the working classes.33 Such aspects are also strictly related to another important, spiritual element that is present in many of Sandell’s poems. In fact, many of his biblical palimpsests have love as a common denominator, both understood as eros, i.e., physical love, and as agape, or spiritual love. The palimpsests in the poems function as a binding between these two elements, which melt in an experience that concerns earthly feelings as much as religious ecstasy. Such mix of spiritual and earthly love is perhaps best realized in ‘Trappan’ (‘The Stairs’), a poem from Sandell’s 2013 collection Ode till demiurgen (Ode to the Demiurge). The poem is about a dinner that the I is organizing for his girlfriend, and on the efforts to prepare it, since he is sick with a fever and pneumonia. The poem opens with another epigraph, Psalt. 23.5, which points to David’s psalm ‘The lord is my shepherd’. The verse that is mentioned is the following one, in King James’ Version: ‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over’. The reader is therefore warned that the dinner will feature some kind of spiritual traits. The reference to the Lord that prepares the table and pours oil complicates the palimpsest — which of the two characters is the Lord? Is it the I, who is going to offer a dinner to the woman he has expected so long that ‘datumet står inpräntat med rött i

30 Of course, such categories are general and slippery. I will here refer to the reflections on Catholic literature contained in Dana Gioia, The Catholic Writer Today and Other Essays (Belmont: Wiseblood Books, 2019). 31 Gioia, The Catholic Writer Today, p. 20. 32 Gioia, The Catholic Writer Today, p. 20. 33 D’Amico, Tilbake til fremtiden, pp. 206–20.

‘ r ather than b uddha’s ca lm, i  choose the  crucifixion’

hjärtform’ (‘the day’s imprinted in red, in a heart shape’)?34 Or is it the guest, who will offer him so much love that the cup will run over? We are getting closer to an answer if we consider that the I has chosen fish for dinner and is observing the dead angler fish’s ‘svarta blicks / förstelning blank som min egen av hög feber’ and ‘de döda ögonen speglande mig själv’ (’black gaze stiff / and glassy as my own thanks to my high fever’ and ‘its dead eyes giving back my mirror image’).35 Therefore, a clear identification with the fish, traditionally a symbol of Jesus, is established, and this builds an atmosphere of biblical Passion of which the I becomes the protagonist. Both the I and the fish will be sacrificed to the Lord, the beloved guest. After a while, the I notices that his fever ‘har kokat upp i kökets atmosfär / av het frityrolja’ (‘boils up in the kitchen’s fragrant cloud / of hot frying oil’),36 and he starts having hallucinations and to identify himself with the dinner: the fish course becomes ‘Min egen välsmakande ondskapsfulla natur / på offerbordet, istället för syster marulk’ (‘My own delicious, wicked nature lying there / on offer, say, in place of Sister Angler Fish’).37 The meal becomes a sort of cleansing ritual, though with a quite carnal trait: the I is looking forward to the meeting ‘vid nymåne, för det att ingen menstruation / skall ödelägga festen för min så sluga kärlek’ (‘At the new moon, so no menstruation will postpone / my sly love’s full communion, ruining the feast’).38 The detail is less blasphemous than an attempt to balance materiality and immateriality, an expression of his unconditional love for the earthly aspect of this world and the beauty it contains. The turning point takes place when the guest arrives: Jag kastar mig på trapporna, fördubblad puls av fyrtio graders feber, tills jag går ner på knä till slut av ansträngning och segnar framstupa vid tröskeln, ja, jag ligger ner, jag är färdig.39 [I hurl myself down the stairs, pulse rate doubled due to my 104-degrees fever, fall to my knees at last, collapse from sheer exhaustion, sprawling prone there at the threshold, yes, I lie down, I am done].40 Even though the I cannot raise himself and meets his woman who ‘smilar lite osäkert’ (‘smiling, albeit a bit doubtfully’),41 it is with a hymn that the poem ends: ‘Åh, lovad vare Du, framdukade skapelse / i vilken jag nog inte skall klara att ta del’ (‘Oh praise be unto you, munificent creation, so plainly beyond my power to participate in’).42 The banquet has turned, in a metonymic way, into the whole Creation, that the I is too feeble to participate in, but can admire from a distance. For ‘denna milda junikväll’ (‘this mild June evening’) is still a ‘välsignelse’ (‘blessing’) for the I, who can observe, lying on the ground, the roses 34 Sandell, Ode till demiurgen (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2013), p. 111 and Dog Star Notations, p. 82. 35 Sandell, Ode till demiurgen, p. 111 and Dog Star Notations, p. 83. 36 Sandell, Ode till demiurgen, p. 112 and Dog Star Notations, p. 83. 37 Sandell, Ode till demiurgen, p. 112 and Dog Star Notations, p. 84. 38 Sandell, Ode till demiurgen, p. 112 and Dog Star Notations, p. 84. 39 Sandell, Ode till demiurgen, p. 112. 40 Sandell, Dog Star Notations, p. 84. 41 Sandell, Ode till demiurgen, p. 112 and Dog Star Notations, p. 84. 42 Sandell, Ode till demiurgen, p. 113 and Dog Star Notations, p. 84.

2 41

242

gi ul i a n o d’amico

in the backyard ‘som reser sig / ur gödseln på de höga rankorna för Din skull’ (‘rising out of fertiliser / to climb the high vines, purely for the sake of you, along the gables’). ‘En fuktdroppe från gräset’ that ‘bukta[r] sig från remmen av din blanka festsko’ (‘A drop of moisture from the grass / that trembles on the shining black strap of your shoe’) is the last thing the I can see ‘före mörkret’ (‘before darkness falls’), i.e., probably before he faints (or dies?).43 With this picture, the union of religion and love is complete, and this lifts the apparently common love poem to other spheres of meaning. ‘The Stairs’ looks like a hymn to the divine and the human at one and the same time. Well rooted in Christian tradition, the poem realizes the potential that Christianity represents for Sandell: a gateway into the present, as in the case of ‘The Assault’, a reflection on love, as in ‘The Stairs’. In addition, looking at these two poems together allows us to grasp another element that suggests Sandell’s relatedness to a Lutheran aesthetics, i.e., the centrality of the word — be it written or pronounced by the object of erotic love (as in the last poem), inter-human love (as in the first) or spiritual love (i.e., God, who is present in both). As it is known, the Lutheran tradition developed a form of logocentrism in which the word uttered by God and transmitted by writing played a central role in the development of both its doctrine and its aesthetics. In these two poems, we sense a tension on the part of the lyrical I towards the divine other (represented by the beaten boy turned into a lamb, and by the female guest turned into the Lord), who is begged, directly or indirectly, to utter a word of salvation. Such tension towards the divine word is a function of a more general characteristic of retrogardism, which I mentioned earlier: the firm conviction that the poetic word is still a medium of expression of and communication with the divine. However, one can also notice that Sandell somewhat blurs the picture: the figurative, heavily metaphoric language contained in ‘The Stairs’ seems rather to evoke a rich, Catholic iconography than a minimalistic, Lutheran one. The Protestant point of departure is therefore not realized one-sidedly, similarly to the previous poem. Sandell’s spiritual poetry depicts another important aspect, one that is related to a reflection on the relationship between the East and the West. This is the case in ‘To a Female Friend Travelling in Thailand’, another poem from The Oslo Passion, which is a prayer from the I to the beloved one, who is on holiday in Thailand, to come back to him: Snart, när din fot på nytt rör europeisk jord och det fem veckors eländighet sedan du for, så går det underjordiskt genom vår union elektriska stötar helt upp till förvisningens Oslo, där jord och hjärtan skakar till för eruptionen som bryter upp skorpan och smälter likt blod allt motstånd mot de ringvis spridda blommor som höjer sig från marken upp kring fågelbon fruktträden väntande hållit tomma av trohet trofast som bara det gamla hopplösa Europa.44

43 Sandell, Ode till demiurgen, p. 113 and Dog Star Notations, p. 84. 44 Sandell, Oslo-Passionen, p. 39. Italics in the original.

‘ r ather than b uddha’s ca lm, i  choose the  crucifixion’

[Soon, when your foot treads European soil once more, and this five weeks since your departure, weeks of sheer torture, then subterranean electric shocks will go throughout our Union, on up to my exile’s Oslo, where heart and soil will shake with a volcanic explosion that breaks the crust and melts like blood all that opposes the scattered flowers that resurrect themselves and grow up suddenly among the birds’ nests, fruit trees holding their branches empty from sheer faithfulness, devoted as no place can be save our hopeless old Europa].45 Looking at the Swedish original and comparing it to the English translation, one notices that the translator has tried to recreate the O-assonance placed at the end of the verses. Such repetition creates a litany that works, in the first place, as a hymn to the beloved, who almost gains metaphysical traits through her power to send ‘electric shocks’ to the earth when she is back in Europe. In addition, the poem turns into an invocation: the I wishes for something very concrete, i.e., her return. The repetition of the vowel O builds an atmosphere of suffering by the awaiting lyrical I. ‘To a Female Friend…’ creates a picture of the Passion that is well in keeping with the title of the collection, The Oslo Passion, and the general themes of love and suffering that permeate many of the poems. And here is when the biblical palimpsest comes into play. The I is wondering whether the beloved has found ‘själens djupa ro / […] i ett land som hyllar koncentration och jämnmod’ (‘the deep peace of the soul / […] in that country that extols / the qualities of concentration and composure’), but there is no doubt about what the lyrical I prefers: ‘Långt framför Buddhas lugn väljer jag korsfästelsen’ (‘Rather than Buddha’s calm, I choose the Crucifixion’).46 This remark closes the circle of the opposition East-West, started with ‘my exile’s Oslo’, ‘hopeless old Europa’ and ‘Crucifixion’. This is less a Eurocentric position-taking than a dialogue with Eastern philosophy, which is centered on the dualism between the material and the spiritual world that Sandell inherits from Gnosticism, and about which he is critical. For the lyrical voice in ‘To a Female Friend…’, and in several other poems, the materiality of the body is a function of the spirit, in contrast to hardcore Gnosticism or Eastern ascetism. Therefore, the East is criticized for having taken the beloved away from him — in both a geographical and affective sense. Such hymns to a sacralized, material world and its consequences for spiritual questions come to their conclusion in ‘Till Justyna vid avresan till retreaten i Tushita’ (‘Words to Justyna on Her Departure for a Retreat in Tushita’), from Sandell’s later collection Musiken av aldrig och ingenting (Music of Never and Nothing, 2019). On the occasion of the departure of the beloved to a meditation retreat in India, the poetic I expresses his view on the duality of spirit and matter: Den värld du ser, Justyna, är fullt verklig. En sten är en sten, tanken under din tinning

45 Sandell, Dog Star Notations, p. 25. 46 Sandell, Oslo-Passionen, pp. 39–40 and Dog Star Notations, pp. 25–26.

243

244

gi ul i a n o d’amico

om än fragil och slöjlikt genomskinlig är inte en dröm och inte en vattenspegling.47 [This world that you see, Justyna, really exists. A stone’s a stone, even the thought behind your temporal bone, while of a veil-like thinness, is not a dream or watery mirror image.]48 As the I continues, ‘I kroppen har själen tagit inkarnation’ (‘It’s in the body the soul’s become incarnate’),49 and when it comes to the body of the beloved, Trots de uppenbara fel som jag besitter så kan jag inte desto mindre vittna om att allt är rent hos dig, din rosiga fysik, din svett är ren för mig, ja, ditt kiss, i varje välfungerande funktion som intagits av din personlighet, där varje handling i denna världen är en skiss till evigt liv och inte någon skenbild.50 [In spite of all my faults, which are conspicuous enough, I am prepared to here bear witness that you are entirely pure, your rosy limbs, your sweat is clean to me, even your pee is, each smoothly executed function annexed by your personality, where every action performed in this world is a sketch that hints at life eternal, and not some thin illusion].51 In this poem, Eastern philosophy and meditation are again criticized for their focus on an immaterial dimension that excludes matter. In contrast to this, love becomes once more the key to an appropriation of the material world. The body is the repository of the divine, in a way that echoes both the Gnostic idea of the divine spark in man and the above-mentioned longing for materiality. In ‘Words to Justyna…’, love allows the poetic I to assert that the body of the beloved, even in its utterly physical form (urine), is ‘entirely pure’. The consequence for the poetic I’s worldview is that ‘every action performed in this world’ is not some ‘thin illusion’ of the Demiurge, but ‘a sketch that hints at life eternal’. In this way, the poem achieves a synthesis of the realms of spirit and matter and resolves the Gnostic impasse. In this way, the last two poems mentioned explain why Sandell’s poetry, although permeated by Gnostic themes, never leaves the world of matter and that sort of concreteness with which Protestant aesthetics are concerned. As the religious experiences described in the poems never reach that level of ecumenism that would make 47 Sandell, Musiken av aldrig och ingenting (Lund: Ellerströms, 2019), p. 39. 48 Sandell, Dog Star Notations, p. 94. 49 Sandell, Musiken av aldrig och ingenting, p. 44 and Dog Star Notations, p. 97. 50 Sandell, Musiken av aldrig och ingenting, p. 44. 51 Sandell, Dog Star Notations, p. 98.

‘ r ather than b uddha’s ca lm, i  choose the  crucifixion’

them embrace Catholicism (to which, however, Sandell often hints) or Orthodoxy (to which, as mentioned at the beginning, Sandell was attracted to for a period, but eventually dropped), they also fail in ‘taking off ’ from the secular ground they are anchored to, making the lyrical I levitate towards the pleroma of the Gnostic. The physical world of matter, flesh, and blood is instead cherished as the focal point of the human and spiritual experience, echoing that ‘relatedness to the world’ typical of a Protestant aesthetics. In conclusion, we notice that in the very last poem the Christian palimpsests, present in all the other ones, have disappeared. In this case, the spiritual, existential historicism, and poiesis of history are suggested more generally and not shown directly via a palimpsest. Nevertheless, this poem, as the rest of Sandell’s poetry, has metaphysical and sacred qualities; a token that his Christian worldview, though perhaps heterodox, is a fundamental element, visible and invisible, of the poetic world he builds.

245

Joachim Schiedermair

Absence — Remnants of a Protestant Past Greeley / Vattimo / Ask

Preliminary Remark: Secularization as a Narrative Structure Throughout the twentieth century, the concept of secularization was adopted with an almost incontestable plausibility with regard to the self-interpretation of European societies.1 However, this implicitness has dwindled over the last fifteen years in both academic and public debate. The following chapter intends to make use of the subject area of aesthetics of Protestantism in order to address the question of how the term secularization has been moulded by literary texts. Secularization turns into an object of literary study the moment it is no longer regarded as an inevitable historical process, but as a specific narrative structure, involving a specific period of historical validity. In agreement with Albrecht Koschorke,2 I refer to the term narrative structure for describing a culturally established, abstract conceptual model of narration, which can be regenerated in countless individual stories. Furthermore, I believe that this narrative structure was not simply invented by the sociological classics, that is, Durkheim, Tönnies, Weber, or Simmel. Instead, I argue that their theoretical work was preceded by a period in which this narrative structure was established. Thus, the thing that is now generally referred to as secularization was shaped, honed, and put to the test by numerous stories (literary and non-literary), told during the second half of the nineteenth century. Accordingly, I assume that the current crisis is best analyzed using individual stories, which once again, and under altered conditions, negotiate the narrative structure’s plausibility, that is, contribute to its reconstruction or even its disintegration. In this chapter, I will refer to three very different texts: an essay by the Catholic sociologist Andrew Greeley, a treatise by the philosopher Gianni Vattimo, and a graphic novel by the Norwegian artist Lene Ask. All three outline a Protestant aesthetics. The goal of the argumentation will be to show how any of those conceptions depend on the way secularization is being narrated. The comic will illuminate the theories by Greeley and



1 Manuel Borrutta, ‘Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie. Zur Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 36 (2010), 347–76. 2 Albrecht Koschorke, ‘Säkularisierung und Wiederkehr der Religion. Zu zwei Narrativen der europäischen Moderne’, in Moderne und Religion. Kontroversen um Modernität und Säkularisierung, ed. by Ulrich Willems and others (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013), pp. 237–60. Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, ed. by Joachim Grage, Thomas Mohnike and Lena Rohrbach, APNE, 1 (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 247–257 © FHG DOI 10.1484/M.APNE-EB.5.131425

2 48

j oac h i m s chieder mair

Vattimo, but it also presents an approach to aesthetics and secularization of its own. Lene Ask’s Kjære Rikard (Dear Rikard) from 2014 tells the story of a longing through letters — letters that were sent between the missionary, David Olaus Jakobsen, in Madagascar, and his seven-year-old son, Rikard, in a children’s home in Norway. Lene Ask found these historic letters from the 1890s in the Mission Archives in Stavanger and combined some of them with her own pencil sketches, forming a most touching story of love and longing. All three — Greeley, Vattimo, and Ask — define secularization in a new and unexpected way. And all three conceptualize Protestant aesthetics as an aesthetics of absence. Catholic Aesthetics: Greeley 1 Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. As Catholics, we find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace.3 This quote comprises the first sentences of the essay The Catholic Imagination, published by the American-Irish sociologist of religion, Andrew Greeley, in 2000. According to Greeley, the core of this Catholic imagination consists of the conviction that God shows Himself in His creation, meaning that He is always present in some way or another. For Catholics, holiness is lurking everywhere in God’s creation due to the mere fact that it is a creation and therefore resembles its creator in some way. Every bodily, physical, and material reality entails God. In a way, the only requirement for reading this kind of writing is knowing the right code. Not only places and points in time (such as churches and feast days), but also erotic desire, motherly love, natural phenomena, or even a simple, yet lovingly prepared sandwich can be interpreted as a place in which God is present — just like bread and wine during communion. Two aspects make it possible for Greeley’s concept of imagination to pass as an aesthetics. Firstly, the idea of a resemblance between creator and creation can be best described as a metaphor: ‘The Catholic imagination in all its many manifestations […] tends to emphasize the metaphorical nature of creation’.4 Moreover, this resemblance is so fundamental that everything found in the world — even pagan gods and rites — could be described as a metaphor of God. Consequently, Greeley concedes a contiguity between the Catholic imagination and animism, which defines each earthly object as having a soul, thus, not only being a place of the divine, but actually a part of it. Secondly, Greeley emphasizes that Catholicism must not only be defined by dogmas or theology. Instead, he insists on defining religions as structures designed by narratives. They begin their existence in stories and are then used to generate a productive imagination which adapts those early stories for other narratives and images, as well as for constructing

3 Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkely/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), p. 1. 4 Greeley, The Catholic Imagination, p. 6.

ab sen ce — remna nts of a protesta nt pa st

spaces, daily and annual routines and rituals — even before those ideas are condensed to dogmas or are theorized as theological discourse. Therefore, religion and Catholicism, in particular, are aesthetic phenomena. Protestantism or/and Disenchantment: Greeley 2 When Greeley asserts in the first sentence of his essay that ‘Catholics live in an enchanted world’ (my italicization),5 he uses the attribute enchanted to refer to Max Weber’s famous words in his lecture “Science as a Vocation”, in which Weber describes the process of modernization as disenchantment. Since then, disenchantment has become one of the most powerful metaphors for the process of secularization. Thus, the way Catholicism’s enchanted world has been worded itself suggests that the term secular imagination is its own opposite. Yet, this is not the case. Greeley does not describe Catholic imagination as being the opposite of secular, but rather the opposite of Protestant imagination:6 [T]he classic works of Catholic theologians and artists tend to emphasize the presence of God in the world, while the classic works of Protestant theologians tend to emphasize the absence of God from the world. The […] Protestants emphasize the risk of superstition and idolatry, the Catholics the danger of a creation in which God is only marginally present. Or, to put the matter in different terms, Catholics tend to accentuate the immanence of God, Protestants the transcendence of God.7 Based on these few indications, it is possible to deduce a Protestant aesthetics which is characterized by its opposition to Catholic aesthetics. So, what would constitute the opposite of the metaphorical aesthetic of presence? Obviously, it would not be an aesthetic that highlights other resemblances, because it is exactly the notion of any similarity that would prove to be an obstacle for a position that stresses the differences between creation and its creator. Instead, such an approach would be forced to constantly denounce any positive statement about God as being inadequate, as it would restrict an infinite God to the boundaries of a finite creation. Thus, Greeley’s outline of the Protestant imagination would constitute something like a negative theology.8 Protestantism’s distrust of the Catholic aesthetics’ metaphorically produced resemblance would imply that Protestant aesthetics could never be regarded as positive (meaning representative and descriptive), and would instead result in a strategy of criticism and deconstruction of metaphors. By asserting the Catholic imagination’s dangerous propensity 5 Greeley, The Catholic Imagination, p. 1. 6 The quotation is Greely’s summary of a thesis of theologian David Tracy: David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroads, 1982). 7 Greeley, The Catholic Imagination, p. 5. 8 The fact that negative theology is much older than the Protestant and even the Catholic church, is an obstacle that shows that Greeley’s essay contains a number of inconsistencies. Being a devoted Catholic, Greeley wants to draw a clear demarcation line between Catholicism and Protestantism, not so much in terms of theology but in terms of forms of imagination. He describes the imagination by turning to artworks of famous Catholic artists. But I am not sure whether this is a method that produces valid results. The approach assumes that every Catholic individual has a Catholic imagination. But no individual imagination originates from a single source.

2 49

250

j oac h i m s chieder mair

to animism, which defines the divine as an incorporated element of the world, Greeley basically proposes — and this is how his train of thought must be continued — that Protestant imagination could be mistaken for atheism: God cannot be found anywhere in the world, and the metaphors used to address Him tend to disclose something about the speakers rather than about their subject matter. And that is in fact the point at which the de-metaphorization of the Protestant aesthetics and the disenchantment of the secularization process merge. The enchanted world of Catholicism faces the disenchanted world of Protestantism. Greeley’s hypothesis regarding Catholic imagination thus implies a continuum that leads from animism to Catholicism, and subsequently to a form of Protestantism in which God has vanished completely from the world, before resulting in secularism as a last consequence. Ultimately, Greeley is telling a narrative of secularization. In contrast to Weber’s narrative, disenchantment does not mean the end of Christianity for Greeley, but rather an option that has developed within Christianity. And, the remarkable thing is that he is narrating it as a change of imagination and aesthetics. Christianity as Secularization: Vattimo Greeley’s essay has many weaknesses and logical inconsistencies. But a very similar new version of the secularization story — only of higher intellectual quality — is told by the Italian postmodern philosopher Gianni Vattimo. In a whole series of essays, lectures, and books, of which Credere di credere, published in 1996, is probably the best known, he argues that ‘secularization is the essence of the [Christian] history of salvation’.9 One could hardly formulate it more boldly.10 Secularization as a “positive” fact signifying the dissolution of the sacral structures of Christian society […] should be understood not as the failure of or departure from Christianity, but as a fuller realization of its truth, which is, as we recall, the kenosis, the abasement of God, which undermines the “natural” features of divinity.11 With the Greek expression kenosis (‘the act of emptying’), Vattimo takes up the central idea of Christianity as outlined by Paul in his letter to the Philippians (Book of Philippians 2. 6–7). I quote from the New Revised Standard Version: Jesus Christ, ‘though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness’ (my emphasis). Kenosis thus means that God Himself leaves the sphere of the divine, renounces His overview, omnipotence, omniscience, and instead reduces His radius of action to the boundaries of a vulnerable and always needy body, restricts His cognitive options to the range of the imagination of a man who lived in a peripheral Roman province in the first century of our era. However, Vattimo understands kenosis not only in the sense of

9 Gianni Vattimo, Belief (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 53. 10 One of similar poignancy is Jean-Luc Nancy, La Déclosion, Déconstruction du christianisme I (Paris: Galilée, 2005). 11 Vattimo, Belief, p. 47.

ab sen ce — remna nts of a protesta nt pa st

incarnation, but also as the quintessence of religious history. For this, he takes up René Girard’s cultural anthropology, which traces back the origin of religion to the process of channeling society’s potential for violence.12 The violence in the struggle for survival, which can be witnessed in the war of all against all, is not being abolished by natural religion. Instead, it is just being contained (and thus also compacted) and socialized: the violence accumulated within society is regularly taken out on a scapegoat. After the collaborative killing of a scapegoat, society experiences the relief of the loss of momentum, but also the bond created by a common guilty conscience. Thus, the group experiences how its crisis is overcome by joint murder. The person killed actually appears to restore the foundation of coexistence. Therefore, he or she is endowed with attributes of holiness. Ultimately, this results in the defiance of violence. According to Girard and Vattimo, this kind of natural religion includes the idea of a vengeful, punishing God, who represents violence through His omnipotence and His function as judge of the world. This idea was also passed on by Christianity in the process of interpreting the violence which crucified Jesus, as God’s punishment for the sins of mankind. Yet — according to Vattimo — the New Testament also contains the seed for rebellion against this form of natural religion. This is exactly what kenosis means — the removal of all attributes ascribed to natural religion from God, and the annihilation of religion’s claim to violence. Through this, secularization — meaning the narrative of the weakening of the aspects of ‘natural’ religion in Christianity — delivers on Jesus’s promise which he makes to his disciples in John 15. 15: ‘I do not call you servants any longer […]; but I have called you friends’. I repeat Vattimo’s hypothesis in his own words: If the natural sacred is the violent mechanism that Jesus came to unveil and undermine, it is possible that secularization — which also constitutes the Church’s loss of temporal authority and human reason’s increasing autonomy from its dependence upon an absolute god, a fearful Judge who so transcends our ideas about good and evil as to appear as a capricious or bizarre sovereign — is precisely a positive effect of Jesus’ teaching, and not a way of moving away from it. It may be that Voltaire himself is a positive effect of the Christianization of mankind, and not a blasphemous enemy of Christ.13 So, if secularization is an ‘authentic religious experience’,14 then this can only make sense because the classic narrative of secularization — according to which religion represents only remainders of pre-modern thinking and consequently is about to disappear — is untenable. And indeed, Vattimo states ‘that disenchantment has also produced a radical disenchantment with the idea of disenchantment itself; or, in other words, that de-mythification has finally turned against itself, recognizing that even the ideal of the elimination of myth is a myth.’15 It is precisely those two steps, firstly, Christianity’s disempowerment by an atheism that sees itself as the winning side in the course of history, and, secondly, the de-mythologization

12 Vattimo intensively refers to René Girard’s famous genealogy of violence as he develops it in La violence et le sacré, Paris, 1972. — Vattimo, Belief, pp. 36–38. 13 Vattimo, Belief, p. 41. 14 Vattimo, Belief, p. 21. 15 Vattimo, Belief, p. 29.

251

252

j oac h i m s chieder mair

of this development that in turn leads to an acknowledgement of Christian imagination, which are being narrated in Lene Ask’s comic books. And she does this by using exactly those aesthetics of absence which — according to Greeley — one would have to define as Protestant aesthetics and — according to Vattimo — as an aesthetics of weakening. The Secularization of the Father: Ask 1 Lene Ask made her debut in 2006 with the autobiographical comic book Hitler, Jesus og farfar (Hitler, Jesus and Grandfather), which was extraordinarily successful by Norwegian standards: 50,000 copies were printed after the first 3000 books sold out immediately. In her comic book, Ask uses naïve drawings to recount how she is gradually detaching herself from the Free church milieu of her childhood and how she — in the confrontation with art, sexuality, and her own family history — is losing her faith. This very much personal narrative of secularization is linked to the absence of a father figure, as she lost her father when she was twelve, after he died of a heart attack. This experience of fatherlessness is intensified by the fact that the grandfather, farfar, was also absent from his son’s, that is, Lene’s father’s life: as a German soldier during World War II, he absconded after the troops were withdrawn from Norway and thus disappeared from family history. The comic book begins with the first-person narrator’s (Lene’s) departure to Berlin in order to search for the missing farfar. I therefore suggest the Norwegian word farfar should be regarded not only as a term for the father of the father but rather, in a manner of speaking, as an accumulation of fathers, which implies the succession of fathers or even the father figure per se. So, Lene is trying to find an imaginary father by searching for her grandfather. And, in fact, on the flight back to Norway, she finds a father — it is not her own, but the future father of her child. But the story has another tragic twist: the child is stillborn — in this case meaning that there is a father, but no child — which leads to her final renunciation of faith: ‘Maybe I’ll finally have to put this behind me. And close that door for good’.16 At the same time, this last turn of events represents a shift with regard to the object of her search — the search for a father turns into a search for a mother, as suggested by the graphic novel’s last images (see Figure 1). Here, Lene meets a confused elderly lady, who is looking for her mother. And Lene joins her. After having become the mother of a dead child herself, it seems that she can no longer solve the question of her identity by searching for a father figure, but rather by searching for what a mother is supposed to be. In narrating a story of secularization in Hitler, Jesus og farfar, which ends up as a rejection of the father, Lene Ask uses a common pattern: in his book Vaterlosigkeit (‘Fatherlessness’), the philosopher Dieter Thomä traces the transition from the pre-modern era to modern age back to — amongst other things — a deconstruction of a patriarchal regime. He characterizes pre-modern Europe as follows: ‘Geordnet war die patriarchale Welt gemäß einer Hierarchie, die in drei Größen gestaffelt auftrat. Der göttliche Vater autorisierte den Monarchen, beide hielten ihre Hand über den Familienvater’ (‘The patriarchal world

16 Lene Ask, Hitler, Jesus og farfar (Oslo: Jippi, 2006), p. 47.

ab sen ce — remna nts of a protesta nt pa st

Figure 1. Lene Ask, Hitler, Jesus of farfar, p. 47

was structured according to a hierarchy, which was shown in three layers of fathers. The Heavenly Father gave authority to the monarch, both held their hand over the father, who was head of the family’).17 When the political father figure is beheaded during the French Revolution, the status of both the divine and the biological father also become precarious. Thomä shows that the classic narrative of secularization can be told as the disappearance of the imaginary father function. And, it is exactly this well-established pattern that is being narrated once again in Hitler, Jesus og farfar — in an astute and surprising fashion. Letters between Absentees: Ask 2 Against this background, one thing is evident: when the artist Lene Ask, eight years after the publication of Hitler, Jesus og farfar, again takes up the theme of a child’s longing for its absent father, one must regard this narration — Kjære Rikard (Dear Rikard)18 — as a sequel to the narration of secularization which began in Hitler, Jesus og farfar. As mentioned at the beginning, in this new comic book, Lene Ask quotes historical text material, that is, the letters of David Jakobsen to his son, Rikard, and Rikard’s answers. She also incorporates historical pictures from the Missions Archives: for example, a portrait photograph of seven-year-old Rikard, which is also the title image; group photos of the children’s home in Stavanger; a class in the mission school in Madagascar, etc. The comic book tells the melancholy story of the father’s longing for his beloved son and the son’s longing for his beloved father. One could imagine that a comic book might use this material to denounce a faith that forces parents to leave their children behind in the name of converting heathens. But, in this comic book Lene Ask’s intention is not to 17 Dieter Thomä, ‘Statt einer Einleitung: Stationen einer Geschichte der Vaterlosigkeit von 1700 bis heute’, in Vaterlosigkeit. Geschichte und Gegenwart einer fixen Idee, ed. by Dieter Thomä (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), pp. 11–64, (p. 12). 18 Lene Ask, Kjære Rikard (Oslo: No Comprendo Press, 2014).

253

254

j oac h i m s chieder mair

Figure 2. Lene Ask, Kjære Rikard, without page numbers.

criticize religion — proselytism does not play a role at all. Instead, she is analysing the dual, paradoxical nature of longing. By combining two codes (images and texts), she shows the two antagonistic desires of longing: the fight against the pain of the absence of a beloved person, but at the same time, also the fight to keep this pain alive, for it is the medium of love. And it would be the greatest loss to lose this beloved pain. By looking at only two images, I want to show how Ask uses her historical sources from around 1900 to put a new spin on the secularization narrative that she began in Hitler, Jesus og farfar. The two details I want to focus on are shown by two mass-produced devotional images of the nineteenth century, which Lene Ask transfers into the comic book. There is one print showing a small child sitting on Jesus’s lap and trustingly leaning against his breast. The picture hangs above Rikard’s bed in Solbakken Children’s Home in Norway (see Figure 2). The second print hangs in the house of the missionary in Madagascar (see Figure 3). It shows Jesus looking up towards a light shining upon him from above. This obviously represents the son’s contact to his divine father. Both images cannot deny their origins in the religious practices of the nineteenth century. By importing these two historical prints into her comic, Lene Ask also takes on a number of meanings that the material had in its social contexts. And these meanings are diverse: 1) most prominently, of course, is the practice of consolation. The picture in the children’s home is an expression of the devout hope that God may provide the children with everything that they would have to sacrifice for God’s kingdom. 2) Placed above the lonely child’s bed, it is also an instruction for religious communication and devotion; it is meant to shape the attitude and expectation of the praying child. 3) The print also exhibits the aesthetics of revivalism, which is trapped in the tension between iconoclasm, historicism, and kitsch. 4) The picture also imports the topic of globalization,

ab sen ce — remna nts of a protesta nt pa st

Figure  3. Lene Ask, Kjære Rikard, without page numbers.

as the same type of image is found in Norway as well as in Madagascar; because they signify European practices of piety and European aesthetics, they are also a vehicle of maintaining colonial power. This historical potential of the images could be explored successfully throughout the whole comic book. But one should not stop at identifying the imported discourses. ‘[W]orks of art are not neutral relay stations in the circulation of cultural materials. Something happens to objects, beliefs, and practices when they are represented, reimagined, and performed in literary texts, something often unpredictable and disturbing’,19 as Stephen Greenblatt puts it. In the case of the picture of Jesus as a friend to children (figure 2), the line of argument could be as follows: Jesus is meant to fill the lack in the child’s emotional economy. The divine son therefore stands in place of the absent father, be it the heavenly or the earthly one. In devotional practice, Rikard adopts the role of the child in the image; his father David, on the other hand, adopts the position of the godly father not seen in the image. They gain access to each other only via an intermediary; just like in Protestant tradition, the Father is mediated through the Son, Jesus. ‘No one comes to the Father but by me’. In the communication between David and Rikard, Jesus takes on the role of the medium of letters (see Table 1). In the comic book, media theory is combined with theological dogma. Jesus represents the letters. But the lines from the letters that are quoted in the comic book are rather meagre. They only tell trivialities of everyday life, but they fail to communicate inner life. I am tempted to see this as an analogy to the Protestant aesthetic as conceptualized by Andrew Greeley: Just as God is absent in creation, the signs of language fail to communicate the 19 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Culture’, in Critical Terms for Literature Study, ed. by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 225–32, (pp. 230–31).

255

2 56

j oac h i m s chieder mair

Picture in Solbakken

Dogma

Figure Constellation

child Jesus absent earthly father

the believer Jesus invisible heavenly father

Rikard, the son medium letter David, the father

Table 1

Picture in Madagascar

Figure Constellation

sender of the prayer: the son of God recipient of the prayer: God, the Father

sender of the letter: David, the father recipient of the letter: Rikard, the son

Table 2

presence of the letter’s writer. Using the concepts of Charles Sanders Pierce, the letters fail to symbolize emotions, attitudes, hopes, beliefs. They are not symbolic but rather indexical signs, like traces in the snow that signify the existence of the other by showing his absence. Transferred to the analogy of the comic book: the father, in both of his forms (the earthly and the heavenly), remains absent. But that absence does not kill the longing. Let us move on to the image of Christ praying (figure 3). Lene Ask pairs the more or less unambiguous image with a line from one of David’s letters. This combination completely confuses the positions of father and child. Here, David writes to his three children in Norway: ‘Jeg har bedet Eder skrive to Gange i Maaneden til os’ (‘I asked you to write to us twice a month’).20 And the letter continues as follows: ‘Jeg vil gjerne at I skal gjöre det. Det er saa tungt for mig naar der kan gaa saa mange Post Dage og jeg ikke faar höre noget fra Eder’ (‘I wish you would do so. It is so hard for me when so many mail days pass and I have not heard from you’).21 In the expression, ‘I asked you to write to us twice a month’, Lene Ask uses the Norwegian word har bedet, which means ‘to ask for’ or ‘to beg for’, but also ‘to pray’. We see the picture of the praying Jesus and we read the lines written by David as he prays to his children that they might show themselves. In this plea to his children, David takes on the position of the praying Christ in the picture, who is praying to the divine Father. The addressee of the prayer remains absent. Rikard does not write (or only very rarely), despite David’s plea, which in this analogy means that the heavenly Father does not show himself despite his son’s prayer. Therefore, text and image build a chiasm. The father becomes the son, the son the father (see Table 2). Even if these small hints do not constitute in-depth analyses, they might suggest that the comic book portrays a world that is ultimately without powerful fathers; Lene Ask’s use of iconography of nineteenth-century devotional images transforms the semantic impact:

20 Lene Ask, Kjære Rikard (Oslo: No Comprendo Press, 2014), without page numbers. All translations from the comic book are my own. 21 Ask, Kjære Rikard, without page numbers.

ab sen ce — remna nts of a protesta nt pa st

the once mighty fathers turn into needy sons. This is very reminiscent of the way Vattimo interprets kenosis: the self-abasement of God. It also reminds me of the crucial narrative of European modernity that Dieter Thomä reconstructed: the sons’ emancipation from the paternal authorities represented by God the Father, feudalism’s political father figure, and the individual father of a family. In Kjære Rikard, the alliance of fathers seems to have finally been destroyed when the son Rikard is able to adopt the position of the heavenly Father, through which the earthly father, in the powerlessness of his love, becomes his son’s son. If we consider that Lene Ask’s breakthrough in 2006 was an autobiographical comic book, in which she describes, among other things, her dissociation from the Free church milieu in Norway, and therefore tells her life as a story of secularization, then the moving story Kjære Rikard, told eight years later, is a testimony of a secular society which grieves the death of the heavenly Father as a loss. Using Vattimo, we can interpret this grief as ‘a radical disenchantment with the idea of disenchantment itself ’.22 But, just as the letters between Rikard and David have the function of keeping the longing alive, as it is the most precious thing they have, the comic book Kjære Rikard also seems to serve the melancholic maintenance of this longing. Maybe it would seem to be too harsh to interpret this notion as atheistic; maybe the absence of the father in Kjære Rikard is not a sign of his non-existence; maybe the story of the father’s absence must be read as Ask’s insisting on the transcendence of God, on the difference of creation and creator. If this is how it is, then we could perhaps call Kjære Rikard an example of Protestant aesthetics.

22 Vattimo, Belief, p. 29.

257

Biographical Notes

Giuliano D’Amico is associate professor of Scandinavian Literature at the University of Oslo’s Centre for Ibsen Studies. His research interests include nineteenth and twentieth Century Scandinavian Literature and especially its reception, as well as translation studies and the history of the book. More recently, he has focused his research on Scandinavian retrogardism and has published the first scholarly monograph on the Swedish contemporary poet Håkan Sandell. Arne Bugge Amundsen is professor of cultural history at the University of Oslo. Among his research interests are Nordic popular culture, church history, museum studies and regional history with emphasis on the period 1500–1850. He is the editor-in-chief of ARV. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore and is chairing The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture, Oslo. Anna Bohlin is associate professor of Nordic Literature at the University of Bergen. Her main area of research is nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Scandinavian literature, and her recent research focusses on nineteenth-century nationalisms, religious beliefs, and feminism in literature. Jürg Glauser is professor emeritus of Scandinavian Studies at the Universities of Basel and Zurich. His main research areas are phenomena of textuality, media, and memory in Old Norse-Icelandic literary culture, Scandinavian literatures of the early modern period, and pre-modern Icelandic, Danish, and Swedish book history. Joachim Grage is professor of Scandinavian Literature and Culture at the Albert-LudwigsUniversity of Freiburg. His current areas of research include the aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, the history of Scandinavian Studies in Europe, the cultural transfer between the Nordic and German-speaking countries, the intermediality of literature and music as well as performativity and literary practise. He is co-editor of the German edition of Søren Kierkegaard’s works. Claudia Lindén is professor in comparative literature at Södertörn university in Stockholm, Sweden. Her research interests include nineteenth-century Scandinavian literature, British and Scandinavian Gothic literature, gender studies, queer theory, theory of history and animal studies. Lindén is currently working on the project ‘Bear traces: A study of the bear in national romantic literature around the Baltic Sea’.

26 0

b i og r a p h i c al n otes

Margrét Eggertsdóttir is Research Professor at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic studies in Reykjavík. She is one of the editors of a complete edition of the works of Hallgrímur Pétursson. She has authored and edited numerous scholarly publications on the literature of late pre-modern Iceland. Currently she is leading a research project entitled ‘The sacred and the profane. Comparative studies in the reception and transmission of popular and religious literature in late pre-modern Iceland.’ Thomas Mohnike is professor in Scandinavian Studies at the Université de Strasbourg. His research interests include the aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, geographies of scholarly work on Northern Europe since the Renaissance, computational approaches to the analysis and circulation of mythemes of narrative knowledge and imaginative geographies of the North. Lena Rohrbach is professor of Scandinavian Studies at the Universities of Basel and Zurich. Her research focuses on premodern Scandinavian textual and literary history up to the eighteenth century. She is interested in questions related to the materiality of literature, the impact of medial constellations, generic hybridity, memory culture, and the interplay of discursive fields in the premodern North. Bernd Roling is professor for Latin and Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests include the history of early modern science and philosophy in general, Jesuits, philosophy of language, national romanticism and the history of universities. Joachim Schiedermair is professor of Scandinavian Literature at the Institut für Nordische Philologie at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. His research interests include, among others, the relationship between text and image, Scandinavian Romantic and Realist literature, literary studies as cultural studies, secularisation as narrative. Sophie Wennerscheid is associate professor of Scandinavian literature at the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. She has published books and articles on Scandinavian literature and film, amongst others on Søren Kierkegaard, Karen Blixen and Carl Th. Dreyer. Other research interests include gender and sexuality studies, intermedial studies and speculative fiction. Her current research project is on ‘The crisis of modernity in contemporary Nordic eco-fiction and critique’. Ueli Zahnd is professor of intellectual history of protestant traditions at the Institut d’histoire de la Réformation, University of Geneva. His research focuses on the transition period of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries with a particular interest in questions of continuity and discontinuity between the medieval and early modern period.