Panel: HÖLDERLIN AND THE QUESTION OF GOD: POETRY, PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY IN DIALOGUE



961.6 - CHRIST AND THE GODS: SACRED MEDIATION IN HÖLDERLIN

AUTHORS:
Myers B. (Alphacrucis University College ~ Sydney ~ Australia)
Text:
This paper argues that Hölderlin places Christ and the Greek gods within a shared horizon of historical survival, where divinity reaches the modern world through mediated forms of transmission and reception. In Hölderlin's late poetry, the gods endure through signs, cultic residues, landscape, and song. Christ also endures after withdrawal, yet in a distinctly Christian mode shaped by scriptural transmission and communal reception. He enters a poetic field already marked by the persistence of absent divinities, and his singularity appears as an intensified form of mediated nearness. What remains after divine departure is a charged interval in which inherited forms continue to bear traces of presence. The reading of Hölderlin's poetry offered in this paper will suggest that his treatment of Christ and the gods yields a poetics of sacred mediation that redefines the relation between antiquity and Christianity, bringing Christ and the gods into uneven proximity rather than synthesis or simple opposition.