Hölderlin's poetry is permeated by references to the divine, yet his conception of divinity does not correspond to a transcendent or dogmatic notion of God. Rather, the divine appears in fleeting moments of intensity that emerge within the relationship between humans, landscapes and natural phenomena. This paper proposes to read Hölderlin's poetry through an ecocritical perspective, arguing that his work articulates an early form of ecological thinking about the sacred (Rigby 2004; Zapf 2017).
In texts such as Hyperion, Der Archipelagus and several late hymns, the divine manifests itself in specific natural configurations: in the sea breeze, in mountain landscapes, in the changing rhythms of seasons or in moments of heightened perception. The gods do not inhabit a separate metaphysical sphere but appear intermittently within the world, revealing what Hölderlin describes as "das Unendliche im Endlichen". Such epiphanic moments establish a relational ontology in which nature, human perception and poetic language interact. In this perspective, Hölderlin's poetry can also be understood as a form of contemplative ecopoetics (Rigby 2020), inviting a non-instrumental mode of attention to the natural world and opening a space in which the divine may become perceptible within the atmospheric relations between humans and their environment (Tobias 2020).
Against the backdrop of modernity, which increasingly reduces nature to an object of explanation and exploitation, Hölderlin's poetry reactivates a form of attentiveness to the sacred dimension of the natural world. By interpreting these poetic epiphanies as ecological events, the paper argues that Hölderlin's reflections offer valuable resources for contemporary debates on the relationship between humanity, nature and the experience of the divine (Garrard 2012; Morton 2007).