“neither quiescent nor lifeless but, on the contrary, lifted up into an exceptional state of sensitiveness in which he sees and feels things with peculiar vividness and power. I know of nothing in this material world to which the skjald may more fittingly be likened than a tuned harp with the wind playing upon it.”
A skjald in Grundtvig’s conception was thus a man endowed with the gift of receiving direct impressions of life and things, of perceiving especially the deeper and more fundamental truths of existence intuitively instead of
intellectually. Such perceptions, he admitted, might lack the apparent clarity of reasoned conclusions, but would approach nearer to the truth. For life must be understood from within, must be spiritually discerned. It could never be comprehended by mere intellect or catalogued by supposed science.
He knew, however, that his work was frequently criticized for its ambiguity and
lack of consistency. But he claimed that these defects were unavoidable consequences of his way of writing. He had to write what he saw and could not
be expected to express that clearly which he himself saw only dimly. “I naturally desire to please my readers,” he wrote to Ingemann, “but when I write as my intuition dictates, it works well; ideas and images come to me without effort, and I fly lightly as the gazelle from crag to crag, whereas if I warn myself that there must be a limit to everything and that I must restrain myself and write sensibly, I am stopped right there. And I have thus to choose between writing as the spirit
moves me, or not writing at all.”
This statement, although it casts a revealing light both upon his genius and its evident limitations, is no doubt extreme. However much Grundtvig may have depended on his momentary inspiration for the poetical development of his
ideas, his fundamental views on life were exceptionally clear and comprehensive. He knew what he believed regarding the essential verities of existence, of God and man, of good and evil, of life and death. And all other conceptions of his intuitive and far-reaching spirit were consistently correlated to these basic beliefs.
Bishop H. Martensen, the celebrated theologian, relates an illuminating
conversation between Grundtvig and the German theologian, P. K. Marheincke,
during a visit which the Bishop had arranged between the two men. Dr.
Marheincke commenced a lengthy discourse on the great opposites in life, as for
instance between thinking and being, and Grundtvig replied, “My opposites are
life and death” (Mein Gegensatz ist Leben und Tod).
“The professor accepted my statement somewhat dubiously,” Grundtvig said later, “and admitted that that was indeed a great contrast, but—” The difference between the two men no doubt lay in the fact that Prof. Marheincke, the speculative theologian, was principally interested in the first part of the assumed contrast—thinking, whereas Grundtvig’s main concern was with the last—being,
existence, life. In real life there could be no more fundamental, no farther reaching contrast than the continuous and irreconcilable difference between life and death. The thought of this contrast lies at the root of all his thinking and colors all his views. From the day of his conversion until the hour of his death, his one consuming interest was to illuminate the contrast between the two irreconcilable enemies and to encourage anything that would strengthen the one
and defeat the other.
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. He could see nothing but deception in the attempts of certain philosophical or theological phrasemakers to minimize or explain away the eternal malignity of death, man’s most relentless foe. A human being could
fall no lower than to accept death as a friend. Thus in a poem:
Yea, hear it, ye heavens, with loathing and grief;
The sons of the Highest now look for relief
In the ways of damnation
And find consolation
In hopes of eternal death.
But death is not present only at the hour of our demise. It is present everywhere; it is active in all things. 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.
I recognize now clearly;
Death is the wage of sin,
It is the fruitage merely
Of evil’s growth within.
And its danger is so actual because it is active in every individual in himself as well as in others:
When I view the true condition
Of my troubled, restless heart,
Naught but sin can I envision
Even to its inmost part.
Such then is his fundamental view of the condition of man, a being in the destructive grip of a relentless foe, a creature whose greatest need is “a hero who can break the bonds of death”. And there is but one who can do that, the Son of
God.
Grundtvig’s hymns abound in terms of adoration for the Savior of Man. He names Him the “Joy of Heaven”, “The Fortune of Earth”, “The Fount of Light”,
