Restoring the human community

Abstract

In Patmos, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) the German Romanticist poet and philosopher, reflects on the Jesus story, focusing on his absence, the disciples scattering, and the awaiting for his return as experienced by those who knew him in flesh and blood. In the ninth stanza of the poem, Hölderlin evokes the Emmaus story as well as Jesus’s promise in today’s Gospel: “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Amid grief, confusion, and the scattering of people, “the divine spirit was twice recognised, in unity”, writes Hölderlin. Scholars note that one thing which possibly perplexed Hölderlin throughout his life was “the irrevocable divide that occurred at the dawn of the ancient world and deprived humanity of the proximity it enjoyed with the gods”. In Hölderlin, this perplexity was an extended sense of grief haunting him since infancy: a twice orphaned boy, he was pressured to pursue a Lutheran ecclesiastical career. He attributes to Christianity this irrevocable divide. Indeed, belief in the Incarnation brought down the separation between the sacred and the profane.