Synnøve Sakura Heggem:
To read/sing hymns with a postmodern imagination of God
”Between the dogmatic tendency to view God as ”wholly other”
and the pietistic tendency to see God in human experience
there is a third way, the imaginal way…”
David L Miller, “Three faces of God”, s 31
In this presentation I want to
a) make visible parts of the unending imaginative cosmos of the poet Grundtvig;
b) compare it with a presentation and criticism of present philosophical thinking about the concept of
God (as other, self, it, gift, circumstances etc), and
c) give some examples from Grundtvig’s texts to show how and perhaps why they refect a fexible
and imaginative view on “God and human being in the world”,
and then sum up some thoughts about what it can mean to sing or read hymns as mirrors of
existential possibilities today.
Hymns are regarded as ritualistic, pronominalistic and traditionalistic texts; often as expressions of
this or that kind of religion, confession or spirituality. The Nordic hymn tradition is often looked upon
as a typical Lutheran spirituality with the word in local mother-tongue as one of the main signs.
In my dissertation, I claim for new ways (gendered, for example) of reading (or singing!) hymns –
with – you could say – a postmodern imagination of God, world and human being; deeply inspired by
a both pre- and postmodern thinker. The Danish theologian, philosopher, historian, educationist and
writer Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783–1872), is my case. With his 15–1600 hymns he created
an unending variety and richness of biblical, historical, present and eschatological imagery with a
profound focus on life and death; where especially body, language, gender, aesthetics, relations, continuity,
progress and transformation are central elements. My underlying question coping with these texts is:
What is a hymn? My method is phenomenological with emphasis on existential matters.
1. Grundtvig’s hymnological cosmos
Let me give you an impression of Grundtvig’s cosmos:
In his philosophy of history, as expressed, for example, in Christenhedens Syvstjerne (1860) [The seven
stars, or Pleiades of Christendom] and Sang-Værk til den Danske Folke-Kirke (1836–37) [Song-Work or
carillon for the Danish Church], we fnd in coded form those historical-cultural voices out of which he
constructs his narratives concerning the past. And through the past; the present and future. He speaks
of a cultural and religious community of tongues in interactive entities (“song-schools”), which
between them chart the historical progress of Christianity.
They proceed like a chorus of historical and cultural voices: the Hebrew “song-school”, the Greek, the
Roman, the Anglo-Saxon, the German, the Nordic and – the seventh and last – the future, or the
“unknown”, which Grundtvig may have expected to be the Indian voice from Asia. A chief warranty
of each of these voices is that they articulate themselves in the true language of the heart, the local
mother-tongue.
This overview with its global, local pattern of different voices is the same as in his Song-Work.
He translated and renewed old hymns from each of these “song-schools”, and added his own poems
as a huge gift to stimulate children, adults, old people, women and men to add their own voices and
rejoice and complain together. The purpose was always to fulfl life as beautiful, true and good, and
thereby to protect and comfort against death; life’s dark and dramatic parts.
This is the linear structure in his cosmos. The cyclic and repetitive structure is for example obvious
from the different hymns for celebration of the Christian feasts as Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and not
to forget the important New Year...
Both in Denmark and Norway the different sermons in church still are unthinkable without these
songs. “Bright and glorious is the sky”/“Deilig er den himmel blå”, “The Christmas chimes, so bold
and blest”/“Det kimer nå til julefest”, “Take away the signs of mourning”/”Tag det sorte kors fra
graven, plant en lilje hvor det stod”, “The sun now shines in all its splendour”/“I all sin glans nu
stråler solen”, ”Welcome here, New Year of grace, O be welcome today”, “How sweetly beckons the
path ahead For two whose wish is to live together”/”Det er så deilig at følges ad”, “The last farewell
to life on earth, Its beauty and created worth, Oft to despair has driven”/”At sige verden ret farvel”,
are just some examples.
Grundtvig’s concept of love gathers his thinking into one domain. He perceived love as the centre of
life that is lived; its wellspring, way, meaning and goal. In the hymns he interpreted and renewed the
Nordic-European, worldwide and even cosmic hymn-rhetoric in order to mediate his existential-
nuanced philosophy of love.
In this connection I will focus upon the gendered, relational discourse in his rhetoric; which mirrors
his complex view on the relation between human being and God. It includes:
– Human being in relation to other human beings.
– Human being as a microcosm.
– Human being as she and he, as child and grown up and old.
– Human being always situated in the world, nature, culture, time and space.
– Human being in the world as a loving and loved microcosm.
As I mentioned; language, gender, body, continuity, process and transformation – all have a central
place in the hymn rhetoric, in which he gave fresh currency also to the spiritualized erotic and to erotic
spirituality without ignoring the hazard of sexism.
The body is often imagined as a residence (or living place), a tool and a mirror...
And not to forget: what is said about human being is always the true mirror when imagining God and
other divine matters. And vice versa. When imagining the holy persons, places and things – one talks
about the concrete world and human beings – in one or another way.
2. Contemporary imagination of God among philosophers as E Levinas, J Derrida and J-L Marion
Let us take a small step away from this Grundtvigian environment to a work done by the Swedish
theologian Jayne Svenungsson. In her work, The Return of God. A study of the concept of God in
postmodern philosophy, 2004, we fnd her way of analyzing thinkers as Emmanuel Levinas, Jaques
Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, to show how the concept of God has return in philosophy; not at least
as a late answer to Nietzsche’s philosophy of the death of God.
One of the results of her investigation, is that there is – in spite of the radical and distinctive
deconstructive desires among these philosophers – a striking tendency in their discourse to use a far
more traditional and Eurocentric (or better: catholic!?) concept of God than one could have expected.
God as the other, self, between, as the given or as gift; is a fatherly other and gift more than anything else.
There are no, or very few considerations with regard to a gendered god-talk, or other forms of
relational variety of the concept of God.
Let me just give you some examples of how recent researchers have worked with the task of
deconstructing and re-constructing different imaginations of God and human being in the world:
Sallie Mc Fague, Metaphorical theology. Models of God in Religious Language (1982)
David L.Miller, Three Faces of God. Traces of the Trinity in Literature and Life (2005),
Elizabeth Johnston, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (1992).
Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep. A Theology of becoming.(2003?)
3. Was Grundtvig more postmodern than contemporary, European philosophers?
a. The different perspectives of a hymn
If we go back to Grundtvig’s hymns, it is possible to claim that he was– with his relational
fexible discourse – more than hundred years before Levinas, Derrida and Marion – more
postmodern than these postmodern thinkers with regard to his imagination of God and
human being in the world.
How, then, is each of Grundtvig’s hymns built up, since they are able to express a simple,
complex and fexible world?
In my work on Grundtvig’s hymns; I distinguish between different perspectives or dimensions
in these texts. You can fnd a musical, a poetic, a relational, a spiritual, a time and space
dimension, a situated dimension, and a profound dimension of love.
All these dimensions are important when asking for what kind of imagination of God and
human being we can fnd in the texts. It is especially in the relational dimension that we can
come closer to the gendered and fexible discourse on the concept of God, which is lacking in
current philosophical thoughts, if Jane Svenungsson is right in her view (and I think she is!).
b. Different relational models
In Grundtvig’s liturgy-shaping hymn texts with a gendered language on human being as a
divine experiment (his own concept), he envisages the related human being in three main
models of a dialogue modulated by the heart:
the relationship between parent and child,
between friends,
and between lovers/couples.
This entails construing the Trinity (or: Three Faces of God) in different ways, to mirror human
life as truly and fexible as possible; characterized not only by multiple relational models, but
also by nature, culture etc. His ideal for gendered talk is a kind of androgynous balance and
with reciprocity as a profound and divine ideal.
c. One example: how to mirror everything…
There are several hymns showing these thoughts. Poetic texts are often very diffcult to
translate. In a late hymn-text, called “Looking up to sun and moon”, he sums up in verse 15
(my words):
“If it was so that there was no natural connection between body and soul, between human
being and divine reality etc – then God was a total stranger to us as we towards God (warning
against God as wholly other)”:
“never, then, we found in Heaven,
Father, Mother, Son and Friend…”.
The imagination of life – both as profane and divine – says Grundtvig, as possibility, as desire,
as fulfllment, as complaining, disaster etc, must be metaphorically imagined by images from
nature, culture similar to our experience. Otherwise, it is impossible to create human
condition as places for change, transformation, happiness, joy, and comfort.
If one reads or sings this hymn as a claim of truth – regarded as a religious, fxed dogmatic
truth on one side (dogmatic, orthodox model), or fxed religious experience (the pietistic
model), with no metaphorical distance and closeness on the other side; the poetic language
will function as pure signs of a certain acclamation of the sect or group`s worldview, which
keep something and somebody inside the group, and something and somebody outside.
Grundtvig used his whole life making texts with the hope of freeing Christianity from both
these exaggerations with his third alternative.
d. Another example of this gift rhetoric
With a creative principle as a primary theory, Grundtvig re-created and renewed the Nordic-
European hymn tradition in a comprehensive gift-rhetoric. The individual – praising God in
psalmody – is, in Grundtvig’s linguistic-philosophical and intertextual hymn rhetoric, a
representative microcosm that mirrors macrocosm primary as residences/living places for the
Good, the Beautiful and the Truth, secondary as places for death and misuses of all kinds.
In this kind of thinking it is understandable and quite natural that we also meet
representations of “The Daughter of God”, equivalent to “The Son of God”(remember
Svenungson!) within his experimental concept of the relation between human beings in the
World as mirroring the whole divine reality (or the Trinity/Three Faces of God). Therefore he
tries to expand (after deconstructing) Trinity into something new. Or perhaps better; to make
visible the forgotten or unknown, female parts of God inside Christianity.
The only begotten Daughter of The Father,
Love so beautiful and cherish,
The Smile and Laughter of Eternity,
She is the proper Bride of the Son,
Bridegroom Heaven, Bride the Earth,
Always shining by the Lords Table.
[SV V 338, Jord og himmel at forbinde]
e. Further examples
In a sermon from 1870 he argued – in his evolved classical, gendered rhetoric of “the heart” –
for women priests. A crucial point in his argument is that the absence of thoughts and
feelings, germane to women and springing from the heart, harms the church at the core of its
own heart.
Let me remind you, with regard to this thoughts and feelings, not only feelings, which would be
the most common rhetoric of his time, of one of his defnitions of what it means to be a
cultured person:
”A cultured person is he,
who is able to think what he feels,
tell what he thinks,
and know what his mouth is saying…”
Some of these thoughts are not uncommon in the actual period of romantic discourse.
However, his arguing for a public position of women, and even a sacred position, is radical and
rather original. It was in the private positions women were praised and seen as impossible to
replace. Grundtvig says that the core of the Church (its heart) is threatened if not women are
allowed to take part in the offcial religious organization.
f. Who am I, you, they, we, she, it…?
Hymn texts are typical examples of a I, you, we, it-rhetoric (pronominal texts). In almost every
hymn there is quite a lot of actors and actresses. However; which I? which you? which we and
it…? Which relation between I and you and it, I and God? Which God as you, as gift and
given, which Mary? Which child and children of God? etc.
Let me say something about the I…:
The I in Grundtvig’s hymns is a populated I. It is an I which mirrors a macrocosm, like a
microcosm – with many fulflled and possible identities. The religious concepts of
transformation… the famous metanoia (the old and new human being), impress these different
I-rhetorics.
The hymn is a metaphorical mirror which has the poetic power of mediating the singing or
reading self to be aware of the fulflled identities, the different possible identities; and to
initiate the right, small (or bigger!) steps forward…
g. Recognition. Hymns as mirrors
Since every earthly phenomenon in Grundtvig’s universe have one or another unknown
dimension, the invisible world is of huge imaginatory power. We must always have in mind
that what he says about human being, – as about culture, nature etc – has a correspondence to
religious rhetoric. God is therefore both father, mother, aunt, cousin, daughter, son, child,
parent, sun, moon, fower, star etc. And at the same time, due to the metaphorical distance, not
father, mother, sun or fower. Or better: is and is not at the same time.
The principle of recognition is crucial in these poetic and ritual texts. Human beings need the
hymns to recognize her or himself as good, beautiful and true; needs the imaginative mirror to
orientate her or himself again and again in a world of changing and confusing circumstances.
Not at least, he or she needs it to be able to realize her or his own weak or evil points. Always
in this manner: frst recognize and identify the good, the beautiful and true parts of the
person, then the weak and sinful parts. Otherwise, human beings will not grow, or succeed
with their necessary changes, says Grundtvig.
He sharply accessed Christianity for having failed and misused its power (in history and
presence) to humiliate human beings and fail to leave human being enough honor in different
ways.
He was convinced that in the joy and struggle of fnding out what life is about (including
death), how life and death are connected; human being can not use a fxed universe, but a
powerful imaginative and metaphorical universe.
4. Concluding tunes
I gave myself the task of answering the question of how to read/sing hymns with a postmodern
imagination of God and human being in the world. If I should conclude with some help from one of
several great theorists who have helped me in fnding clear and hidden wisdom in Grundtvig’s
hymns, I will give voice to Paul Ricour where he says:
“To read is similar to the praxis of playing a musical partiture…”
What Grundtvig did, was to give a huge gift to the Danish people, 15-1600 partitures of religious
poetry; saying: play on these words in your own way, with your own voice and words, and see what
happens, inside you, between you in your situation…from time to time, in different situations.
Play carefully – in every meaning of the word to play – that you may recognize, express and share
your own feelings and thoughts through some fellow texts. And for God`s sake: make new texts, so
that you may understand and continue the most important task in the world; to fulfll the divine
experiment of being a human being (in past, present and future) – as a child, as parent, as friend, as
lovers, as male and female, in progress…until everything meets everything in the eternal image of
love; the goal of cosmos, nature, culture, every human being.
Personally, I think we have a lot to learn from Grundtvig’s way of reading and singing hymns with his
more postmodern imagination of God than most present philosophers that I know.
How can I eventually dare to claim this? Because he thought thoroughly through the highly gendered
phenomenon we call “God and human being in world”, both as other, self, gift, the given and
circumstance, with a strong, lifelong desire. He made it real through a marvelous metaphorical balance in
his hymns, a balance between exaggerated dogmatic solutions on the one hand, and exaggerated
existential and private solutions on the other.
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