Om Grundtvigs menneskesyn

Abstract

On Grundtvig's View of Man

By William Michelsen

In this paper, read to the Annual Conference of the Grundtvig Society in January 1988, an answer is offered to the question: Did Grundtvig’s view of man remain unchanged from 1817 to his death? The answer is in the affirmative. The line of argument of the paper issues from Grundtvig’s essay “On Man in the World”, printed in the magazine “Danne-Virke” II, 1817, abstracting from it nine tenets, about which Grundtvig’s view remained the same, even after 1832, when he changed his attitude to the prevailing philosophy and theory of knowledge of the age, as far as he drew a distinction between faith and knowledge. As early as 1817 man is viewed both from a Christian and a non-Christian point of view. By virtue of his sensory organs man stands in a direct relationship with animals, and his historical development is a continuation of his separation from the animal kingdom. Nonetheless, man is created in God’s image, which means, that he is intended to develop towards increasing likeness with his Maker. And the archetypal likeness to God remains in man in spite of the Fall, which is confirmed both by the life of the individual and by history. As God is Truth, the Fall means a deviation from Truth provoked by Untruth, through which man is undone. Truth and Untruth are seen as spiritual verities to be found behind the physical reality of immediate perception and consequently behind life and death.

What does Grundtvig mean by the word “spirit”? The essay offers two different answers to the question that are not in disagreement. In one place he says that the spirit consists of “mixed ideas perceived by the senses, but with a spiritual character,” that is they are exclusively manifest in the form of images. Elsewhere he holds that the Spirit is a living, forceful and active idea, which is solely perceived by consciousness, and consciousness is a product of man’s external and internal senses: feeling, vision and hearing. With the external senses we perceive the physical world and the physical part of ourselves. With the internal senses we become aware of the spiritual side to ourselves, our fellow-men and the world, in which we live.

That man and the world were created, is to Grundtvig no matter of belief, but quite simply a question of recognition of reality: No man did create himself and even less the world in which we live. This epistemological realism is Grundtvig’s main proposition, which became clear to him in 1813 (as evidenced by the lecture ms. “On the Human Condition”). - Conversely the Fall presupposes the belief that man was created to become like God, and is consequently not his own master but under his Maker. That man should be able to work his own salvation when he has deviated from his divine purpose, is to Grundtvig quite plainly an impossibility.

The only way in which man may be saved from complete annihilation is to Grundtvig by faith in the only human being who did not stray from his destiny to become like God. To choose this faith is to choose Truth rather than Untruth as one’s ideal, in one’s actions as well as in one’s external and internal perception of the world and oneself. But the heart of the matter is that man sees himself as an imperfect image of his Maker, a creature still far from having been fully developed.

According to Grundtvig this view of man is only to be attained and developed through historical scholarship. There is no short-cut to this goal as for instance by way of a mystical experience, or what his contemporaries called a pure vision of Nature or an intellectual vision, even though this may be experienced in a fleeting moment. In this case one is deluded by illusions (“brilliant shades”). To make reason a starting-point for a view of man is also an error, since both the historical development and the development of the individual begin with feeling and ideation or imagination. The road to knowledge and understanding of man must, according to Grundtvig, be entirely different from the one followed sofar. It is understandable that Grundtvig holding such views was debarred from a university post, as they differed so much from contemporary thought. The definitive formulation of his view of man is, indeed, not to be found in the Danne-Virke of 1817, but in his introduction to “Mythology of the North” from 1832 where it is presented as the opposite of what his own day and posterity imagined a Christian view of man to be: “a divine experiment” with the aim of demonstrating how it was feasible for spirit and flesh to interpenetrate, in the process being clarified in a mutual consciousness, which Grundtvig called “divine”, because it is the superhuman Maker who intends to make an image of himself, but that “will require a thousand generations yet. ” According to Grundtvig, the main error of the view of man was that it made our descendants true copies of ourselves, consequently bringing evolution to a standstill.