An interpretation of Hölderlin's poem Bread and Wine

Exploring the philosophical and historical dimensions in Hölderlin's poem through Heidegger and Milton.

I recently came across an interesting article about the life of Friedrich Hölderlin on Facebook, and it gave me a reason to finally try and articulate a somewhat elusive thought about his poem Bread and Wine (1801). First, as someone who encounters history primarily through the "close-up" lens and then continues digging deeper, I first encountered parts of this poem in Martin Heidegger's essay, "Why Poets?" (1946). This particular poem by Hölderlin is fascinating for several reasons. Firstly, it expresses a kind of poetic polytheism with a distinctly historical tone. It's worth contrasting how he views the gods with how another Romantic from the same era, Novalis, perceives them.

For Novalis, polytheism has an almost aesthetic allure. His polytheism is a natural extension of a kind of pantheism—worshipping nature. In some sense, the gods are "there" for us; we simply need to learn to see the world correctly, especially by re-examining nature. Novalis, in this respect, is a much more conventional Romantic. His engagement with history inspires him, but his heart remains with the aesthetic. For Hölderlin, however, the situation is entirely different. His polytheism, in some sense, is alive. He understands his historical moment as being on the brink of the darkest night of the gods' absence from history—a night that has stripped away the joy from everything human: love, hatred, success, happiness.

Because Hölderlin takes the gods much more seriously, he also takes their absence seriously. For him, their absence isn’t a metaphysical condition where we just need a guidebook to find them (as in Novalis); instead, it's an historical truth born of time. He also rethinks the very concept of time. Time isn't what the clock measures—tick, tock, one second passing after another—but rather the intervals between different events. Even more than that, the "home" of man is within the event he experiences and lives through. The defining event for Hölderlin is the disappearance of divinity from history. It's the only event that matters, and the only question to ask is when this reaches its peak and when it will "flip," allowing us to experience a new dawn, because time must always move forward.

In this poem, as Heidegger says, Hölderlin is "preparing the ground" for this reappearance of the gods—or God, or whatever it is that will happen in the future. The possibility he lives for lies entirely in the future, and it's the only thing that grants a glimmer of hope to his poetry. The absence of the gods is likened to a night where the remnants of the previous day fade away, and we can no longer live off them. In more conventional terms, Hölderlin's poem raises the same question that Heidegger later echoes: "Why are there poets in such a desperate time?" Hölderlin seems to see the role of poets as akin to priests of gods who have not yet arrived. And if he didn't fully grasp this yet, Heidegger certainly did.

What interests me most about this poem, however, is its historical dimension, not necessarily its polytheism (I’ll leave that for another time). Hölderlin reintroduces a certain way of thinking about history. A philosopher like Hegel tried to "digest" this form of thinking without completely destroying the modern, analogical conception of time—one whose pinnacle is the French Revolution. In a way, Hegel helped the Enlightenment religion accumulate some of the depth that characterizes this kind of thought. But that’s a subject for later. Nietzsche, for instance, never fully embraced this mode of thinking, with one notable exception—his Thus Spoke Zarathustra ("the coming of the Great Noon"). I find it telling that even in his aphorisms, Nietzsche couldn’t quite capture this cyclical notion of time and free himself entirely from the modern historiographic view of cataloging events in anonymous time. Maybe in his poetry, but that’s a question for another day.

Let’s focus on this form of historical thinking. I want to propose a comparison—a comparison that might be met with understandable skepticism. In On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity (1629), John Milton presents a similar mode of thought. His gods, too, abandon the world, but in his case, the event is near. They leave gradually, as Milton recounts how, by the morning of Christ’s birth, the world has been entirely renewed. He cherishes the pagan gods with great affection, yet he can look upon them with nostalgia, softened by the fact that, for him, there is something new and hopeful to live for: Christ. The spirits may have left the world, but there is now something better. Milton’s poem is an offering of thanksgiving, while Hölderlin’s poem is an elegy, a genre often melancholic or dedicated to the dead. Milton gives thanks for the past, while Hölderlin mourns it.

Milton offers a view of history that is surprisingly close to Hölderlin’s. The "morning" of Christ’s birth is not some date at the start of the first century AD; rather, it is the morning of a day in which he still lives fully. I once tried to trace the origins of this cyclical conception of time, and I found it quite difficult. It’s often assumed to be Greek in origin, but during the Homeric period, there’s no mention of it—not in the Iliad, not in the Odyssey, and not even in the Homeric Hymns. To my surprise, I couldn’t even find it in Hesiod, though I distinctly remembered reading something like it in the past (I re-read all of Hesiod to make sure). In fact, this notion of cyclical time only becomes explicit in Greece with Greek philosophy, and even then, it’s often attributed to some "generic East." On the other hand, various historical studies suggest that such ideas were much more prevalent in East Asia, and surprisingly (to me at least), there are more traces of it in the Bible than in the poets of classical Greece.

Of course, I wondered why I had thought otherwise. It turns out the idea that "Athens" is the birthplace of cyclical time, while "Jerusalem" is the origin of linear time framed by redemption, is likely a development from Christian apologetics in its debates with Roman paganism. And when you consider where these arguments are still used most frequently today, it’s not that surprising. Many religious apologetics that feel insecure in relation to philosophical thought often "adopt" these arguments as a way of engaging with philosophy "intellectually."

But back to Hölderlin and Milton. I think Heidegger was right when he suggested, in his 1929 book on Kant, that religious thinking would benefit if it could rid itself of the metaphysics that have stuck to it unwittingly (and believe me, agreeing with Heidegger takes years off my life). There’s something to the idea that today’s atheist and believer are far closer to each other than they are to polytheists or mytho-poetic figures like Milton and Hölderlin. And that’s not to the believer’s credit, nor to the atheist’s. This mode of thinking isn’t an "opinion" or a "position" on the state of the world. Hölderlin doesn’t "disagree" with Milton, even where they explicitly contradict each other. He simply lives in a different time or, more accurately, understands from within a different event.

The striking thing is that this isn't just a matter of historical interpretation.