Priscilla Hayden-Roy, _”A Foretaste of Heaven”: Friedrich Hölderlin in the Context of Würtemberg Pietism_

THIS MADE FOR a happy antidote to the all the Heidegger-on-Hölderlin I have been reading in recent months. Heidegger is only a little interested in Hölderlin’s biography and seemingly not at all interested in his cultural and intellectual context in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Indeed, a recurring note in his analyses is that we are only now (that is, circa 1934-44) in a position to really understand Hölderlin, since only with Hellingrath’s edition did we have the necessary materials; the unstated assumption, I think, is that only once Heidegger had dispelled metaphysical error were we really able to see Hölderlin plain.

Hayden-Roy, however, is all about the biographical, historical, and intellectual context. Hölderlin as a young man entered seminary (where he met Hegel and Schelling—what a seminary that must have been); his relationship to faith and the church evolved so rapidly that he did not complete his studies and became a tutor instead, but his exposure to the theological thinking of the time, including pietism, was thorough, and it made a difference.

“Pietism” considered from a distance seems a distinctly outlined and unified phenomenon, but looked at up close, as Hayden-Roy does, it gets awfully craggy and multiple. Still, the case that its emphasis on personal experience of the divine, its unwillingness to do much policing of the bounds of orthodoxy, and its indifference to the church’s role in being a prop to secular authority profoundly affected Hölderlin makes sense, given how carefully Hayden-Roy distinguishes between points at which Hölderlin shared ground with the pietists and where he parted company from them.. (The supporting quotations from Höldelin’s poetry and correspondence are untranslated from the original German, so I could not judge how airtight the argument was, but still, from what I could gather, I’d say it made sense).

I’d like to see some work on the English Romantic poets along these lines. Frank McConnell’s ˆThe Confessional Imagination, which put Wordsworth’s Prelude in the context of Methodist and Quaker thinking, comes to mind. But compared to recent scholarly attention to the Romantics’ interest in the French Revolution, the ways they may have been influenced by theological developments seems an under-explored topic.

Hayden-Roy does second Heidegger in one way, though: Hölderlin’s sense that his era was on the brink of a breakthrough, that everything was about to be transformed. The French Revolution, the re-connection with ancient Greece, the new theological thinking—it all meant that some “measureless consummation” (Yeats’s phrase) was a-dawning. Heidegger obviously saw this, too—I guess he just thought Hölderlin was talking about the 1930s.