Grundtvig og mystikken

Resumé

Grundtvig and mysticism

By Hellmut Toftdahl

The article appraises Grundtvig in relation to the Eros-agape tradition in Christianity. Common to mysticism and gnosticism is the idea that through Eros-love an can attain union with God and thereby grasp truth, together with the fact that the important thing is self-redemption through achievement. Both are hostile to institutions and are a threat to the Church, for institutional fellowship and the outward actions of the Church are unimportant. Worship, dogmatics and the institution give place to subjective experience or higher cognition. The distance between God as the Creator and man as the creature is obliterated and Christ is conceived as an incorporeal link between God and man.

Eros-love is often expressed in Grundtvig’s poetry, especially in his early poetry, where he has a tendency to overestimate his own importance as the spiritual leader of the Danish people, and to place himself on a par with the prophets of the Old Testament, i. e. a man whose personal visions represented truth and guidance for a whole people. A controversy between Grundtvig and H. C. Ørsted in 1815 makes Grundtvig admit the necessity of being on his guard against his own visions. False as well as true visions exist, and because of man’s condition as a creature in time and space it is not possible for him to distinguish clearly between true and false prophets. After 1815 Grundtvig no longer sees himself as a prophet but as a poet. To him a poet is a visionary, a seer of divine truths or diabolical hallucinations. Grundtvig’s attitude to his visions is based on ethical considerations of their truth value and he consciously eliminates any visions that reflect self-willedness or acute depression. He places his poetry at the disposal of the community in baptism, Holy Communion and hymn singing. His work is the result of an uncommon individual steering an even course between a universe based on personal struggles and the striving of the Eros-love to go beyond this universe. For Grundtvig the criterion for an even course is solidarity with his own social context, and not, as in the case of the mystic, development into an ecstatic vision of the boundlessness of the Ego. Grundtvig’s congregation exists in time and grows with time. The mystic is sufficient to himself in ecstacy and his experience is beyond time and space. The mystic seeks eternity in the present and the world around fades as inspiration grows. Grundtvig acts within time. His poetic universe is a cosmos in which chaos is always present as a possibility that he will not accept. Grundtvig’s Eros-love attains fullness through preaching, the confession of faith, and praise within the limits of this cosmos; in the community which the congregation creates through this activity there is the possibility that the Eros-love will be met by agape, but only if God so wishes and only if the individual has prepared himself for agape through fruitful, collective activity.