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Three Christians in Literature: Browning, Kierkegaard, Heine

The three writers considered in this essay were contemporaries: the English crusader for Christianity lived longest (1812โ€“1889); the Dane who fathered existentialism had the shortest span (1813โ€“1855); and the German lyricist, born sixteen years before Kierkegaard, outlived the latter by one year (1797โ€“1856). Kierkegaard and Heine were baptized as Lutherans; Browning received his youthful Christian training in the London chapel attended by his devout Scotch-German mother. All of them became recognized as Christians with deep biblical roots.

The voice of each of these protesters against the spirit of the age was raised with vehemence for the โ€œold-time religion,โ€ and raised with power and beauty. William Lyon Phelps called Robert Browning the greatest secular ally of Christianity in modern times. Heinrich Heine was to write some of his finest poetry in the Romanzero (1851) composed in his faith period, during the dark decade of almost unbearable pain on his โ€œmattress-graveโ€ (Matratzengruft) in Paris. But through his reading of the Bible and above all his โ€œconversationsโ€ with God during the long night-watches, his spirit had come to a glorious reawakening. His own testimony reads of a conversion as dramatic as that of Augustine and as sure: โ€œThe reawakening of my religious feelings I owe to that Holy Book [the Bible], and it became for me both a source of salvation and an object of the most pious admiration.โ€ Romano Guardini in telling of St. Augustineโ€™s conversion stresses the โ€œnew attitude befitting the new station,โ€ which is that of humility. Heine expressed that new attitude in the following words:

Strange! After I had jumped about all my life on all the dancing-floors of philosophy, had given myself over to all the orgies of the spirit, and had wooed all possible systems without being satisfied โ€ฆ now I find myself on the same foundation on which Uncle Tom stands, that of the Bible. And I kneel down beside the black praying brother in the same devotion.

Hegelโ€™s former disciple was to prove the genuineness of his conversion by burning a work he had been long in preparing explaining the Hegelian philosophy; and he also wrote a long preface to a new edition of an earlier book wholly recanting parts in such words as these, โ€œI confess without reserve that everything here which has reference to the great question of God is just as false as indiscreet.โ€ But his about-face regarding Christianity has been played down. To the German mind of the period, his denunciation of the specific doctrines of Hegel as having been put into a few words by the serpent of Eden (โ€œWhen you have eaten of the tree of knowledge, you will be as godsโ€) was quite unthinkable.

Lone Knights Of Faith

Both Browning and his Danish twin, Sรถren Kierkegaard, were profound religious psychologists. From the start, each acted as a โ€œlone knight of faith,โ€ to use Kierkegaardโ€™s term. Moved alike by a strong sense of sure Christian mission, each writer brought the Christian message to his readers by way of a series of dramatic monologues. Here the characters speak for themselves; and they speak most eloquently as they exemplify lifeโ€™s business as the โ€œterrible choiceโ€ between good and evil. For they make that choice (as well as excuses to themselves for it) over and over in their everyday lives. Indeed the high purpose of the English poet and the Danish seer was to make clear to an age they saw treating Christ more and more cavalierly that, as St. John says in Browningโ€™s A Death in the Desert,

The acknowledgement of God in Christ โ€ฆ solves for thee

All questions in the earth and out of it.

Thus in open defiance of the German philosophers, notably Hegel, whose doctrine manifestly exalted philosophy over religion, the Briton and the Dane conducted their lone literary crusades for Christianity. As heirs of Luther, these two highly gifted menโ€”both of whom were endowed with minds, like Lutherโ€™s own, among the sharpest the world has knownโ€”did not so much play down manโ€™s reason (as they were accused of doing) as refuse to enthrone it above manโ€™s faith. What actuated Browning and Kierkegaard was the spirit of Christian living as set over against the letter of formalismโ€”the same cry, in fact, as that of their spiritual ancestor for sincerity toward God. We find Kierkegaard in his own rebellion against the Danish state church in 1854, the year before his death, appealing to that sincerity in these desperate words:

Whoever thou art, whatever thy life may be, my friendโ€”by ceasing to take part (if in fact thou dost) in the public performance of divine worship as it now is, thou has one guilt the less, and a great one, that thou dost not take part in holding God to be a fool, and in calling that the Christianity of the New Testament which is not the Christianity of the New Testament.

For on such Luther-like terms Kierkegaard stressed the need for โ€œreine Innerlichkeitโ€ (absolute inwardness).

Certainly when Kierkegaard launched his psychological faith-campaign in 1843 with the famous Either / Or, basing it, on the one hand, on a flat denial of manโ€™s reason to arrive at the true knowledge and, on the other hand, on the acceptance of the Christian revelation, he was following directly in Lutherโ€™s footsteps. So far from faithโ€™s being the outgrowth of knowledge, the opposite is true: knowledge is the fruit of faith. The German rationalism that developed in the centuries following Luther is as false to his teaching as the Sartrian type of existentialism is false to Kierkegaardโ€™s. As the seventeenth-century mystic Isaac Penington declared of the rationalism he saw developing rapidly in Europe, such trust in the autonomy of manโ€™s reason is a harking back to the sin of Eden, the taking over by what the Quaker philosopher called โ€œthe darkness within.โ€

When Penington wrote, the movement was just beginning; at the time of Kierkegaard and Browning, both of whom saw it for what it was, the tide of rationalism was at its height. Both England and Denmark became fertile soil for Hegelianism, as it swept from Germany throughout Europe. It is interesting to note that Heine, who had studied with Hegel as a young man, in the epochal thorough-going repudiation of his philosophy, referred, as had Penington two centuries before, to the diabolism of the reason doctrine. The German poet even had a statement in his will to the effect that for four years he had abdicated all philosophic prideโ€”and this will had been written five years before his death in 1856. In the writings of his last decade, Heine tells further of the way he had been entrapped by the gray spider webs of Hegelian dialectic which he declared were traceable to the Evil One, whom he called โ€œthe bluestocking without feetโ€ in the Garden of Eden. In another figure, the poet wrote (in the epilogue to his Romanzero, 1851): โ€œYes, I have returned to God like the prodigal son after I had herded the swine for a long time with the Hegelians.โ€

Sincerity In Question

Some German critics doubted Heineโ€™s sincerity in that greatest act of his life, his profession of faithโ€”for the mockery of the gifted ironist had become so ineradicable a hallmark that a number of persons questioned, alas, his good faith here, even in the face of his agonizing, constant physical suffering at the period of his recantation of rationalism. Yet the noted Harvard Germanist, Kuno Francke, did not doubt the sincerity of Heineโ€™s conversion but rather made it the basis of an attack upon the poet. In his History of German Literature, a volume going through a number of editions at the turn of the century, the German scholar at Harvard wrote that โ€œof all the writers of his time Heine is the saddest example of the intellectual degeneration wrought by the political principles of the Restoration.โ€ Calling him โ€œan unworthy disciple of Goethe,โ€ Francke refers to Heineโ€™s theism of his last years (a theism so heartfelt that he incorporated in the will mentioned above an appeal to โ€œthe one God, single and eternal, creator of the worldโ€ to have mercy on his immortal soul) as โ€œblasphemous godliness.โ€ Here the adjective โ€œblasphemousโ€ is evidently intended for Heineโ€™s desertion of what Francke called โ€œthe modern ideal of humanityโ€ as represented in Goethe, Hegel, and others. The German historian thus dismisses him as โ€œfrom the beginningโ€”religiously, politically, and even artistically a renegade.โ€

But the Francke indictment of Heine, precisely like the scorn both Browning and Kierkegaard met in their own circles because of their forthright defense of Christianity, is the price paid by the knight of faith in an unbelieving age. It is only the later ages who see the worth of those Kierkegaard called โ€œthe sacrificed onesโ€ in the cause of truth. The point, however, to be made here is that the type of reason inveighed against by the Christian writer is what Isaac Penington, referred to earlier, called โ€œthe corrupted reason.โ€ It was this type of reason that Luther, trained in Occamโ€™s school, fought; and it was also this corrupt form of rationalizing that Browning, Kierkegaard, and Heine came to see in its proper perspective.

And earlier than any and all of these Christian seers we have St. Augustineโ€™s own coming to โ€œthe Truth of man as by God first spoken,โ€ and coming to this Truth via the one only Way, that which Christ Jesus offers us. For the โ€œparadox of faithโ€ is paradoxical only on the surface; but in the war on humanist rationalism, where it is necessary to fight it on its own terms, only the truly faith-filled can see below that surface. In Godโ€™s light only do we see light. โ€œHe who knows the truth knows that Light,โ€ said Augustine, โ€œand he who knows the Light knows eternity.โ€ And, he adds, โ€œCharity knows it.โ€ As Romano Guardini wrote in his exegesis on St. Augustineโ€™s Confessions, titled The Conversion of Augustine (Newman, 1960):

Such knowledge of the spirit cannot be acquired abstractly; it must be personally experienced, and in such a way that the person experiencing it is drawn into a living relationship with it: I was created by Him โ€œupโ€ there, or rather, by Thee up there; Thou art He-who-tums-to-me, He-who-creates-me. And still the depths of the soul are unplumbed; still this does not suggest the existentiality that Augustine means. Only love can do that because it is the only fitting response to Godโ€™s creative act, its reflection of the Creator in the creature. The motion with which love places itself within the I-thou, with which it unfolds, takes fire, ventures, flings itself across and surrenders, thereby finding itselfโ€”this is what first renders one capable of seeing that which should be seen: โ€œCharity knows itโ€โ€”namely, the Light which to know is to become an entity [p. 220].

Here is spelled out unequivocally the true philosophy of faith in all eras.

For, as Guardini has made very clear in the above work on Augustine, universal truths are what exist, not, as rationalism falsely holds, as autonomous knowledge, but as a gift. They appear, that is, โ€œin their proper place, namely, behind the banners of grace, as revelation.โ€ What Guardini has to say in the matter is well worth hearing:

The realities of the spiritual God, of creation, of good and evil and of the soul now assume their true form with all the authority of sacred truth. With this the knower too finds his place: from one who has recognized mere philosophically grounded truth, he becomes one who has heard the word of God and gained a new attitude befitting his new station: that of humility.

Paul Brockelman, writing on Kierkegaardโ€™s โ€œPhilosophy of Existenceโ€ (Koinonia, December, 1962), makes this point about this โ€œChristian philosopherโ€: โ€œHis concept of existence and his notion of Christian faith mutually define one another.โ€ The same thing may be said with equal justice and succinctness of Browning and Heine. Not only so, but it may also be said of every articulate seer from the dawn of Christianity down to our own day: โ€œHe who knows the Light knows eternity.โ€

Two Hands

I saw two hands

In nowhere

Before sometime and somewhere that

Clapped

And a blacksmithโ€™s shower of stars

Bespangled

Everywhere.

I saw two hands

In sometime

Roll up the clouds and

Wring

A thirsty riverโ€™s rain from them

While lightnings leap from snapping fingers

And Milky Wayโ€™s walls reverberate.

I saw two hands

In somewhere

By a muddied riverโ€™s bank that

Pinched

A piece of clay and

A man stepped forth

Who had two fateful hands.

I saw two hands

One time

In ancient Egyptโ€™s land

Cleave

The carmine sea and

Push a wall of water on either side

To set a people free.

I saw two hands

In fullness of time

On a mystery-laden night

Begrace

An oxโ€™s strawy crib

While a wistful mother wondered

At what rustic sheepmen see.

I saw two hands

At that time when

Time held its breath

Clutching

At the spikes in the tree

On a place of a skull.

โ€˜Come unto me.โ€ฆโ€

ROBERT J. REAM

M. Whitcomb Hess, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a graduate of the University of Kansas (A.B.) and of Ohio University (A.M.), has written more than 100 essays on philosophical and literary themes, and also many poems. Among the publications in which her work has appeared is the London โ€œContemporary Review.โ€

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