This study sets out to challenge the usual approach to the question of Hölderlin’s response to Christ, which focuses on no more than two or three late hymns, by tracing, through each major stage of Hölderlin’s work, a series of latent Christological debates.
These debates, in which philosophy, theology, and poetry converge, represent Hölderlin’s engagement with the urgent intellectual issues of his day.
This book, originally published in paperback in 1991 under the ISBN 978-0-947623-36-4, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
In Hölderlin’s day, a more or less stable theological context for thinking about Christ was challenged by an unstable and rapidly changing context created by new philosophical presuppositions and demands. The stable theological context had as its main points of reference the ideas of Fall, Incarnation, Redemption and Final Judgement, and the assumption that authoritative knowledge about what these ideas meant was provided by the Bible. Together they formed a scheme of salvation in which men, apart from the free-will fatally and culpably exercised by their ancestor Adam, were largely passive. God acted on man’s behalf through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son. This theological context was rendered unstable first by the rise of historical biblical criticism, which called into question the absolute authority of the Bible. A further challenge to the established theology was the claim, expressed in various ways from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, that man’s reason should be the highest arbiter in all matters of belief. This claim amounted to a progressive demand for complete autonomy of the human subject in religion.
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Chapter One: Hölderlin and Tübingen (1788–93): The Problem of Christ Defined Mark Ogden doi:10.59860/td.c8cb9b5
(I) Introduction; (II) C. F. Sartorius; (III) G. C. Storr and J. F. Flatt; (IV) The reception of Kant (1); (V) Hölderlin’s Tübingen hymns; (VI) The reception of Kant (2).
(I) Introduction. (II) Johannine christology: a. Incarnation; b. Wisdom christology; c. The Father-Son relationship; d. The release of the Spirit; e. Eighteenth-century reinterpretations of John: Lessing and Hegel. (III) The latent christology of Hyperion: a. ‘Es war da!’: Diotima as the incarnation of Beauty; b. ‘non coerceri maximo, contineri minimo, divinum est’; c. Der heilige Tausch; d. Die Theokratie des Schönen; e. The death of Diotima; f. Narration and Salvation.
(I) Introduction; (II) ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage...’; (III) ‘Brod und Wein’; (IV) ‘Der Mutter Erde’ and the naming of the earth; (V) Naming and the private world; (VI) ‘Friedensfeier’: Christ named.
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Bibliography entry:
Ogden, Mark, The Problem of Christ in the Work of Friedrich Hölderlin, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 33 (MHRA, 1991)
First footnote reference:35 Mark Ogden, The Problem of Christ in the Work of Friedrich Hölderlin, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 33 (MHRA, 1991), p. 21.
This title was first published by Modern Humanities Research Association for the Institute of Germanic Studies but rights to it are now held by Modern Humanities Research Association and the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies.
