»Helt kun i mand og kvinde«. Grundtvigs tanker om den fruktbare dobbelthet

Resumé

»Whole Only in Man and Woman«. Grundtvig’s thoughts about the fruitful doubleness

By Kirsti Aasen

Grundtvig lived in the Age of Enlightenment, a time worshipping reason, which he was strongly opposed to. His conviction after a long life was that real and true reason has its source in emotion. As against reason, thinking and the intellect, which Grundtvig calls male values, he sees sympathy, susceptibility, and compassion as female characteristics. It was because of her openness and susceptibility that the Virgin Mary could embrace Jesus and give birth to him.  And by virtue of her sympathy Mary Magdalene was the first one to hear the news of the resurrection and to pass it on.

The sensitivity of a woman rarely qualifies her as a communicator. At a time when the very idea was unthinkable, Grundtvig goes so far as to claim the necessity of female deans. On the whole, he encourages the woman to use her intellectual abilities, i.e., the male qualities, which are also part of her. But even more, he calls on the man to recognize the emotional and female part of himself. For .the Heart is always a Woman., he says in one of his hymns. Thus he manages to say that the basic human feature in both woman and man is emotion, residing in the heart.

When Grundtvig emphasizes the female values so strongly, it is because he recognizes that they have been suppressed, not in order to disparage the male values. He is convinced that the male and female features together constitute what is truly human - a conviction he finds substantiated in the Bible (in Paul’s 1 Corinthians, 11,11-12).

Hence, Grundtvig concludes that God must be both woman and man, and so is every human being, created in his image. And the relationship between Creator and creation is above all a relationship of the heart.

The man-woman theme remains with Grundtvig through his whole life. But undoubtedly it is strengthened through impressions he received from East European culture. The indirect openness to the Greek is probably due to his interest in the Church Father, Irenaeus, who, in the struggle with the Gnostics, became a defender of natural human life. But more directly, we know that the Greek church service manual »Leiturgikón«, which Grundtvig borrowed from the Royal Library in January 1837, fascinated him so as to leave traces in his sermons and hymns. In an article (p. 225 in .Vision and Song - Poetry and Theology in Grundtvig., Gad 1989), Christian Thodberg points out how the Greek church makes more of the women in the New Testament than does the Western European church, something that deepens his preoccupation with the natural and the emotional. And Kaj Thaning claims (p. 214 in .Man First - Grundtvig’s Struggle with Himself., Gyldendal, Copenhagen 1963) that it was a woman whom Grundtvig met during his visit to England as early as 1830 who came to have a decisive importance in this context. Thaning maintains that it was this Greek-oriented woman who really opened Grundtvig’s eyes, enabling him to understand the doubleness in human life, so that a reconciliation became possible for him between spirit and heart, thought and emotion. As Grundtvig had to borrow a foreign culture and a woman’s eye to discover the fruitful doubleness in life - and hence its wholeness, so our contact with Eastern Europe today may open our eyes to a rediscovery of ideas which we have so long overlooked in our worship of reason and our materialism.