A reading of Karl Gjellerup’s novella Pastor Mors in the light of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy

Abstract

The article argues that the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer constitutes the ideological foundation of Karl Gjellerup’s novella Pastor Mors (1894). This premise also establishes how the now obscure publication is an exemplary expression of the pessimistic tendency in Danish literature, which was particularly prominent in the final decades of the 19^th century. Further, the close reading intends to show that the pessimistic anthropology conveyed by Gjellerup in Pastor Mors is an expression of a desire to revitalize the religious aspect. In the novel, Christian anthropology – and what Gjellerup sees as a phantasmagoria of existential illusions in the religious individual inspired by Christian ontology – is substituted with Euro-Buddhism to establish the Eastern philosophy of life as the real truth of life.