J. C. Aaberg

“ Grundtvig found the spiritual in many things, in the myth of the North, in history, literature and, in fact, in all things through which man has to express his god-given nature. He had no patience with the Pietists who looked upon all things not directly religious [158] as evils with which a Christian could have nothing to do. Yet he believed above all in the Holy Spirit as the “Spirit of spirits,” the true agent of God in the world. The work of the Spirit was indispensable to man’s salvation, and the fruit of that work, the regenerated Christian life, the highest expression of the spiritual. ”

“ People from all walks of life, from the Queen to the common laborer, became regular attendants at the unpretentious sanctuary, and the eyes of some old people still shine when they recall the moving spirit of the services there, the venerable appearance and warm monotone voice of the pastor, and, especially, the hearty, soul-stirring singing. Many of Grundtvig’s own great hymns were introduced at Vartov. From there they spread throughout the church. And it was to a large extent the hearty, inspiring congregational singing at Vartov which made the Danish church a singing church. ”

“ If Christianity be true, tolerance toward opinions and teachings denying its truth is nothing but a craven betrayal of both God and man. It is written, ‘Judge and condemn no one’ but not ‘Judge and condemn nothing.’ For every Christian must surely both judge and condemn evil. ”

“ This underlying unity is his clear conception of the spiritual and of man as a spiritual being who can attain his fullest development only through the widest possible realization of the spiritual in all his divine and human relationships. In every part of his work Grundtvig, therefore, invariably seeks to discover the spiritual realities. The mere form of a thing, the form of religion, of knowledge, of education, of government, of all human institutions and endeavors have no intrinsic value, are only skeletons and dead bones until they become imbued and vivified by the spirit. ”

“ The world of his songs is as peaceful and idyllic as the quiet countryside around his beloved Sorø. If at times he tries to take the deeper note, his voice falters and becomes artificial. But though his hymns on such themes as sin and redemption are largely a failure, he has written imperishable hymns of idealistic faith and childlike trust in the goodness and love of God. ”

“ Grundtvig was impetuous, and volcanic, in constant ferment, always in search of spiritual reality and wholly indifferent to outward appearances. His own experience had led him to believe that a return to Evangelical Christianity could be effected only through a clean break with Rationalism, and he could not understand Mynster’s apparent attempt to temporize and bring about a gradual transition from one to the other. There should be no compromise between truth and falsehood. All believers in the Gospel should stand up and proclaim it fearlessly, no matter what the consequences. ”

“ If anyone wishes to name us after any other than Christ, we ought to tell them that we accept nothing unto salvation except what the Christian church has taught and confessed from generation to generation. ”

“ He possessed an exceptional ability to absorb the essential implications of a text and to present it with the terseness and force of an adage.
Although Grundtvig’s hymns at times attain the height of pure poetry, their poetic merit is incidental rather than sought. In the pride of his youth he had striven, as he once complained, to win the laurel wreath, but had found it to be an empty honor. His style is more often forceful than lyrical. When the mood was upon him he could play the lyre with entrancing beauty and gentleness, but he preferred the organ with all stops out. ”

“ Grundtvig held that the life of a nation, Christian as well as national, never rose above the real culture of its common people. To be real, a culture had to be national, had to be based on a people’s natural characteristics and developed in accordance with native history and traditions. The aim of all true folk-education was the awakening and enrichment of life and not a mere mental or practical training. The natural means for the attainment of this aim was a living presentation of a people’s own cultural heritage, their native tradition, history, literature and folk life. ”

“ Spiritual Song-Choir, Part II contains twenty hymns and seventeen “sighs”, thus outwardly following the arrangement of Part I. But the content is very different. The hymns are songs of penitence, repentance and faith. They show mastery of form, a wealth of imagery, a facility for concentrated expression and a range of sentiment from stark despair to the most confident trust that is, perhaps, unequalled in Danish poetry. It is an embattled soul that speaks through these hymns, a soul that has faced the abyss and clung heroically, but not always successfully, to the pinnacle of faith. ”

“ By the last of these words most people understand an attitude of superior neutrality toward the opinions of others, even when these opinions concern the highest spiritual welfare of man. Such an attitude has for its premise that good and evil, truth and falsehood are not separate and irreconcilable realities but only different phases of the same question. But every Christian, thoroughly convinced of the antagonism and irreconcilability of truth with falsehood, must inevitably hate and reject such a supposition. ”

“ It destroys nations, corrupts society, robs the child of its innocence, wipes the bloom from the cheeks of youth, frustrates the possibilities of manhood and makes pitiful the white hair of the aged. For death, as all must see, is only the wage of sin, the ripe fruit of evil. ”

“ The spiritual ferment of the Reformation had subsided into a staid and uniform Lutheran orthodoxy. Jesper Brochman, a bishop of Sjælland and the most famous theologian of that age, praised king Christian IV for “the zeal with which from the beginning of his reign he had exerted himself to make all his subjects think and talk alike about divine things”. That the foremost leader of the church thus should recommend an effort to impose uniformity upon the church by governmental action proves to what extent church life had become stagnant. ”

“ Thus, the permanent value of Kingo’s hymns rests not only on their rugged and expressive poetry but on the earnest and warm-hearted Christian spirit that breathes through them. In the perennial freshness of this spirit succeeding generations have experienced their kinship with the poet and found expression for their own hope and faith. The following ageless prayer expresses not only the spirit of the poet but that of earnest Christians everywhere and of every age. ”

“ It was an unusually cold and unfriendly world that greeted the advent of the coming poet. The winter of his birth was long remembered as one of the hardest ever experienced in Denmark. The country’s unsuccessful participation in the Thirty Year’s War had brought on a depression that threatened its very existence as a nation; and a terrible pestilence followed by new wars increased and prolonged the general misery, making the years of Kingo’s childhood and youth one of the darkest periods in Danish history. ”

“ In this rugged hymn Kingo is at his best—fiery, vital, a master of imagery and graphic expression.
His hymns on the sacraments faithfully reflect the doctrines of the Lutheran Church. Here he most clearly shows his ability to present objective truths in a devotional spirit. We meet in these a Christian who humbly and prayerfully accepts the whole mystery of God. For centuries these rugged songs have served to express the sentiments of millions as they met at the baptismal font or knelt before the altar. ”

“ Grundtvig loved life in all its highest aspects and implications, and he hated death under whatever form he saw it. “Life is from heaven, death is from hell,” he says in a characteristic poem. The one is representative of all the good the Creator intended for his creatures, the other of all the evil, frustration and destruction the great destroyer brought into the world. There can be no reconciliation or peace between the two, the one must inevitably destroy or be destroyed by the other. ”

“ A church, such as he advocates, that has no determinable form, exists only in the brains of the theologians, and must be construed from theological [118] speculations on the basis of a discredited Bible and according to the changing thoughts and opinions of man, is plainly nothing but a fantastic dream, a comic if it were not so tragic conception of a Christian congregation which claims to confess the same faith, but knows not what it is, and holds that it is instituted by God, but cannot tell for what purpose before the theologians have found it out. ”

“ Grundtvig began his translation of the sagas on a wave of high enthusiasm. But as the years multiplied, the interest of his supporters waned and he himself wearied of the task. He began, besides, to doubt his ability to resurrect the heroic dead in such a manner that they could revive the dropping spirit of the living.
In a welcome to Ingemann, on his return from a tour abroad, he expresses the hope that the poet will now devote his gifts to a reincarnation of his country’s old heroes. He himself has tried to do this. ”

“ This inconsistency in the work of a man so eminently gifted as Grundtvig is explainable only by his method of writing. He was an intuitive writer and preferred to be called a “skjald” instead of a poet. The distinction is significant but somewhat difficult to define. As Grundtvig himself understood the term, the “skjald”, besides being a poet, must also be a seer, a man able to envision and express what was still hidden to the common mortal. “The skjald is,” he says, “the chosen lookout of life who must reveal from his mountain what he sees at life’s deep fountain. ”

“ In this splendid sanctuary it must have been inspiring to listen to the known eloquence of its most famous pastor as he preached the gospel or, with his fine musical voice, chanted the liturgy before the altar. The church was always well attended when Kingo conducted the service. People soon recognized his exceptional ability and showed their appreciation of his devoted ministry. The position of a pastor was then much more prominent than it is now. He was the official head of numerous enterprises, both spiritual and civic, and the social equal of the best people in the community. ”

“ For who can dispute that every human action—irrespective of how little considered it may have been—is expressive of its doer’s attitude, of his way of feeling and thinking. But what determines a man’s way of thinking except his essential thoughts concerning the relationship between God and the world, the visible and the invisible? Every serious thinker, therefore, must recognize the importance of faith in the furtherance of science, the progress of nations and the life of the state. ”

“ Despite his attempt to laugh away the impression of the fiery speaker, Grundtvig, nevertheless, retained at least two lasting memories from the lectures—the power of the spoken word, a power that even against his will could arouse him from his cynical indifference, and the reverence with which Steffens spoke of Christ as “the center of history.” The human race, he contended, had sunk progressively lower and lower from the fall of man until the time of Nero, when the process had been reversed and man had begun the slow upward climb that was still continuing. ”

“ The strong Pietist movement at the time of Brorson, as we have seen, lost much of its momentum with the death of King Christian VI, and within a few years was overwhelmed by a wave of the intellectual and religious Rationalism then engulfing a large part of Europe. Religion, it was claimed, should be divested of its mysteries and reason made supreme. Whatever could not justify itself before the bar of the human intellect should be discarded as outworn conceptions of a less enlightened age. ”

“ But although such a warning may have been timely, then as now, it hardly expresses the real Christmas spirit. In the next hymn, however, he at once strikes the true festival note in one of the most triumphant Christmas anthems in the Danish or any other language.
This blessed Christmastide we will,
With heart and mind rejoicing,
Employ our every thought and skill,
God’s grace and honor voicing. ”

“ The holy men of old believed in the message they were called to preach, but the human spirit has now become so proud that it feels itself capable of discovering the truth without the light of the Gospel, and so faith has died. ”

“ It was not everyone who could see why a poor weaver’s son should be raised to such a high position. Kingo was accused of being greedy, vain, over-ambitious and self-seeking, all of which probably contained at least a grain of truth. We should have missed some of his greatest hymns, if he had been a saint, and not a man of flesh and blood, of passionate feelings and desires, a man who knew from his own experiences that without Christ he could do nothing. ”

“ After his conversion, he felt for a time that his new outlook was incompatible with his previous enthusiasm for the heroic life and ideals of the old North, and that he must now devote himself solely to the preaching of the Gospel. But the formerly mentioned decline of all phases of Danish life during the early part of the nineteenth century and the failure of his preaching to evoke any response from an indifferent people caused him to suspect a closer relationship between a people’s religious and national or folk-life than he had hitherto recognized. ”

“ Kingo and Birgitte, a contemporary tells us, were “inseparable as heart and soul.” She was an accomplished and highly intelligent woman, and Kingo found in her, perhaps for the first time in his life, a woman with whom he could share fully the rich treasure of his own heart and mind. He is credited with the remark that he had done what all ought to do: married an elderly woman in his young days, whom he could care for when she grew old, and a young woman in his later years, who could comfort him in his old age. ”

“ Judging Brorson’s original hymns to be far superior to his translations, some have deplored that he should have spent so [74] much of his time in transferring the work of others. And it is, no doubt, true that his original hymns are as a whole superior to his translations. But many of these are so fine that their elimination would now appear like an irreplaceable loss to Danish hymnody. The constant love with which many of them have been used for more than two hundred years should silence the claim that a translated hymn must of necessity be less valuable than an original. ”