Hölderlin’s poem describes the transformation of man in twelve stanzas.
The Work of the Sun
The sun is fire and light, in the physical as well as in the spiritual. Beings of the earth like us cannot live on the sun. But evolution is not yet at an end. It is guided by impulses from the sun. That which strives forward is oriented towards the sun. Its rays once awakened our eyes. With them we perceive the physical. But the impulses of the sun sow further seeds. In some, they have germinated and grown early. The pharaoh Akhenaten (14th century BC) possessed not only physical eyes but also spiritual ones. And s, he worshipped Aten, the spiritual sun. John the Seer experienced the essence of the sun in a unique way: ‘And I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; and in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man […] His eyes […] were as a flame of fire […] and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.’ (Rev. 1, 12 ff.).
Some poets lead the way, intuiting and dreaming. ‘In the lonely hours of the spirit, it is beautiful to walk in the sun. Along the yellow walls of summer,’ are the words of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887-1914; in: Helian), which are like a song. The lonely intuit what is coming. We are looked at, from the spiritual. Eyes are to arise that can look back. In her painting of ‘the highest and most fiery power Charitas’ (13th century AD), Hildegard von Bingen depicted the two future pairs of eyes of the human being.
Transformation through Light and Fire
But growth requires time and measure. Precious fruits ripen slowly. The spiritual knows what is possible for us. ‘For, always knowing the measure, / Only for a moment does a God gently touch the dwellings of men…’ The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) puts into words what is to come. They appear dark, like the coagulated outer layer, the shell of a precious fruit that needs to be uncovered. His epic Celebration of Peace tells of the transformation of man through light and fire. Hölderlin was marked by fire. The power of the sun is the ‘giver’: ‘Would that the giver did not spare, / long ago the blessing of the hearth / would have ignited / both summit and soil.’
The original germ of our existence is fire, a spark of the Spirit. It wants to break out. ‘Put on the new man who is created according to God,’ says Paul (Eph. 4:24). Everything is ‘revealed by fire’ (1 Cor. 13). ‘Mortality must put on immortality’ (1 Cor. 15:53). What the Logos creates should become its own kind. This was already expressed by Plato (in the dialogue Timaeus, no. 2.2.1). The god realizes itself in the human being, and the realization of the god becomes the realization of the human being.
The Cleansed Inner Space
It begins in the inner space of the soul. The exalted, expectant soul is the ‘womb’. It must be cleansed, ‘aired’. The vortices of thoughts, feelings, desires, and ideas must be driven out. Then the celebration can begin, the celebration of transformation, the celebration of the God of Wine. The ‘water’ of the earthly soul turns into ‘wine’. Hölderlin sees poets as priests of the wine god. Once they travelled ‘from land to land in holy night’ (In: Bread and Wine).
‘The holy, familiar hall, built long ago, / is aired, and filled with heavenly, / soft echoing, quietly modulating music.’ These are the first words of the Celebration of Peace. The ‘upper room’, the highest sphere of the human soul, was buried for consciousness, was closed, as it were. Now it opens. The powers of the heart’s longing have brought this about. Beyond the head, they extend far into the cosmos. They invite ‘loving guests’ ‘coming from far’.
The Prince of the Festival enters
‘And with half-shut eye I think I can see / the prince of the festival himself, / smiling from the day’s earnest work.’ The poet senses him and begins to recognise him, for the ‘prince of the festival’, takes on the ‘appearance of an acquaintance’. The universal, the all-consciousness, makes itself individual, ‘lowers’ its eye, appears ‘lightly shadowed’, denies its ‘foreign origin’: the Spirit dampens its firepower. Nevertheless, ‘your superiority / alone almost forces one to his knees’. All the wisdom that has been important on the way so far is undone: ‘… where / a god appears, / there is different clarity.’
The poet had boldly turned to the All, to the ‘Open’, to find in it ‘something of his own, however wide it may be’ (in: Bread and Wine). He had ‘feared neither flood nor flame’ – the high forces and fields of the universal – and now, ‘all is quiet’. The old forces in his soul lose their hold, ‘the sounds of peace’ resound, ‘days of innocence’ dawn, the God permeates the soul space, the festival of union begins. A new being shall be born: the new man, the heavenly man. God and man ‘die’ into him. For both of them, the fertilization and the pregnancy resemble a crucifixion.
Opposing Forces are Coming
‘A deadly doom’, however, overshadows the event, “terribly decisive”. The light that was so joyfully received disappears again. ‘Thus everything / from heaven passes quickly, but not in vain.’ Earthly forces, desires, wishes… are flooding again the space of the soul. ‘… something boisterous may appear, / and wildness may come to the holy place from afar’. But the place where the sacred once was has received its traces.
The poet takes stock, processes what has taken place, insights arise, like traces of light. He sums up: ‘We’ve received much from the gods. / Fire was handed to us, and the ocean’s / flood and shore.’ For a few brief moments, the divine had revealed itself to man. A ‘sea flood’ of soul power, the world soul, had entrusted itself to him. ‘Shores’ showed him the extent of his possibilities; the flame of the Spirit had entered his consciousness.
The Hour of Man
Now a new way of thinking arises in the poet, which leads to an inner experience. After the god has withdrawn, the hour of man has come. Recognition flares up: ‘The star that is before your eyes teaches you’. A ‘star’ has formed over the ‘birth grotto’, the guiding star for the poet. The God who is individualizing himself reflects in his aura, appears before his eyes, looks at him. He wants to awaken in the poet the spiritual eyes that recognise him. The divine self approaches him as a being of light, as a ‘son’. ‘Yet of the all-living ones – from whom / issue much pleasure and song, / one is a calmly powerful son. / Knowing his father, we recognise him …’
A New Impulse of the Divine
The steps of transformation take place as the light impulses are further processed. As soon as a new balance has been achieved in the ever-changing mixture of spiritual and earthly forces, the eternal takes the next initiative. ‘But a god / may once choose mundane life also, / like mortals, and share their fate. / One law of fate requires that people / should know each other, so that when / silence returns, there will also be one language.’ The divine and the human experience themselves with the help of the other. For each human, this happens differently. The fullness of earthly existence is brought into the sphere of the Spirit in the most diverse ways. And there all earthly words and contradictions merge into ‘one language’.
‘Where the Spirit is at work, we are present too, / arguing about what is best. So it seems best to me now, / when his image is complete and the master is finished / and from his workshop he steps out transfigured’. The poet senses the transfiguration, the new form that is emerging in and around him, the radiant figure. He so desires that this work be completed soon, that the newborn, the ‘silent God of Time’, in whom eternity and transience are united, may step out of his ‘workshop’. The workshop is our physical and spiritual space. When the transfigured human being steps out of it, when he, no longer earthbound, steps into the cosmic and becomes a representative of humanity, the ‘law of love, the beautifully balancing one, extends from here to heaven’.
The Union
The poet dedicates the ninth stanza of his epic, which consists of twelve stanzas, to the culmination of the union between man and God. Twelve, the number of the whole, nine, the number of the perfected human being. ‘Now they are met together as guests, / a holy number, holy in every way, / and present in choruses of song, / and their most beloved, / to whom they are attached, is here.’ The most beloved is their partner, the earthly human, of whom the poet says in the eighth verse: ‘Soon we’ll be song.’ The human being invites the immortal, the ‘Youth’, ‘to the banquet now prepared’, ‘to the evening of time’. And he reaches an ecstatic vision and proclaims: ‘And our race will not go to sleep, / until you promised ones, / all you immortals, / are here in our halls / to speak of your heaven.’
The Future of Being Human
Hölderlin tunes humanity to a future for which the seeds have been sown. ‘Lightly breathing airs / already proclaim your arrival.’ We have to look beyond ourselves, grow into the spheres of the spiritual and soul. We cannot judge the results of our lives and should not do so. Because ‘all labors, / the seasoning of life, / are prepared and completed above’, ‘the hardships are carried out’ into the divine plane of existence. ‘Each person’s work will be tested by the fire’ (1 Cor. 3:13). There in the fire, the new garment awaits the person, his garment of light. All his efforts, the fruit of his existences, are woven into it.
This robe of light has existed before. The human being had already received it in the childhood stage of his existence, but at that time without any merit of his own, without any effort of his own: ‘The golden fruit, / has fallen from ancient tree / after terrible storms, / but then is guarded, like a treasured possession, / by holy fate with gentle weapons: it is the shape of the heavenly ones’. This is how the eleventh verse of the Celebration of Peace ends.
Patience
There is still a twelfth. The poet falls back from the heavenly sphere into earthly reality. He experiences the suffering of our ‘mother’, the earthly nature. She has the task of drawing her children ‘to the light’. But she has bitter experiences in doing so. ‘Because that which you brought / to light too soon, all-powerful one, / now hates you. / But this too you recognise and accept.’ People need time to mature, need the fullness of experience, gained in ‘fearfully bustling’ activity, as we know all too well. ‘For gladly, unfeeling, it rests, / until it matures, fearfully bustling down there.’
Unearthly Beauty
The sounds of the epic echo, they want to be understood, they want to awaken sentient thinking and seeing. This takes effort. If you take it upon yourself, the lines of the poem reveal unearthly beauty. The epic resembles man himself. It entices him to fathom his secret. Every human being is faced with the question of whether he can find the courage and develop the persistence to venture into the unrecognized, into the openness of his inner self.
Those who dare to take this step into the ‘abyss’ will experience how the light becomes a new foundation for them. They will encounter the ‘First one who resurrected’ (1 Cor. 15:23), who offers them His ‘robe’, the body of light, the body of resurrection.
Origenes, one of the early church fathers, whose vision was later condemned by councils, recognized the body of light as the ‘most delicate, purest and most luminous body’ [1]. In relation to it, beauty becomes a process of recognition and growth. The words of the Holy Scriptures and also the words of an epic like the Celebration of Peace release light and become spiritual nourishment. ‘I am the light that is above all’ (Gospel of Thomas, Log. 77). ‘He who drinks from my mouth will be like me. And I myself will become him, and the secrets will be revealed to him’ (Log. 108).
The consequence is a celebration, an ever-repeating Celebration of Peace.
[1] Cit. in: Enno Edzard Popkes, Platonisches Christentum, 2019, p. 69
The Poem: Celebration of peace last access: 15.01.20269
