Om Guds datter i folkehøjskolen

Resumé

About God’s Daughter in the Folk High School

Midt i Højskolen (In the Middle of the Folk High School). An anthology published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Association of Folk High Schools. Edited by Else Marie Boyhus. Gyldendal\ 1991. 269 pp.

By William Michelsen

This beautiful book, introduced by the chairman of the Association, Ove Korsgaard, with a description of the development undergone by the folk high school movement since 1961, when the book »The Folk High School under Debate« was published, ends with an article by Ejvind Larsen, »The mysticism of popular democracy«, which has occasioned the present review of the book. Grundtvig’s ideas saturate the book, and it is illustrated with drawings from this century that all represent Grundtvig himself, combining to give a strong impression of the highly different ways in which this man has been perceived since his lifetime.

The same is true of the many articles contained in the book, for example one by Henrik Yde about Martin Andersen Nexø and the Germany of the Weimar Republic. - There is hardly any doubt that among Grundtvig’s ideas the concept of the folk high school has been the most important in this century.

However, Ejvind Larsen’s article does not deal so much with the cooperative movement or the folk high school as with those poems from Grundtvig’s late years where he speaks about .God’s daughter., and, in the final poems, about the wedding between God’s daughter and God’s Son. In a speech that he gave on his birthday in 1868 (and which is only known in the summary version that was published after that .Meeting of Friends.), he spoke about the »the Heavenly Father’s Daughter« who was to be raised in the North, »in another small holy land« - »as He raised His Son in the regions of Galilee«. Ejvind Larsen poses the question whether what Grundtvig had in mind may have been a »Wisdom«, corresponding to the »Sophia« that plays such an important role in the mysticism of the Byzantine Church, and after whom the main church in Constantinople was called. He confines himself to posing the question, and that is as it should be. For Grundtvig does not use the word or the name »Sophia« in any of the passages that he quotes from Grundtvig’s texts.

According to Ejvind Larsen, Grundtvig, in his late work, comes closest to this Christian mysticism in the poem Dansk Ravnegalder (1860), which Grundtvig never had printed himself. It has been published by Holger Begtrup in Selected Works by Grundtvig, vol. X, pp. 363-484, without a commentary. Ejvind Larsen quotes some lines from it which say that metaphorically »Danish popular enlightenment« is a sister of »He who is the Light Himself«, and that it must have been created by God.

The point of departure in Ejvind Larsen’s article is an emendation made by Grundtvig in 1861 in the second edition of »Scenes from Heroic Life in the North« in which the Christian Odinkar attempts unsuccessfully to convert the heathen Vagn Aagesen to Christianity. Vagn Aagesen refuses to believe that Jesus really did crush the head of the Evil One. Odinkar answers that by virtue of His victory the Christians are now able to vanquish the Subtil One »with Wisdom«. Ejvind Larsen theorizes that this »Wisdom« may be the Sophia of the Byzantine Church. The word »wisdom« does not occur in the original version from 1811. There is no doubt that Grundtvig emended the text so that it would agree with the stage in his view of Christianity that he had reached in 1861. But this does not necessarily mean that the word .wisdom. is identical with the Sophia of the Byzantine Church.

It is a peculiar characteristic of Ejvind Larsen’s article that he does not emphasize the ecclesiastical side of Grundtvig’s Christian view of man, but rather the importance it has acquired for the concept of the folk high school and thus for popular democracy, in particular through Grundtvig’s idea of man as a »divine experiment« (Norse Mythology, 1832).