Hymne I, D 659

Hymn I

(Poet's title: Hymne)

All translations into English that appear on this website, unless otherwise stated, are by Malcolm Wren. You are free to use them on condition that you acknowledge Malcolm Wren as the translator and schubertsong.uk as the source. Unless otherwise stated, the comments and essays that appear after the texts and translations are by Malcolm Wren and are © Copyright.

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Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, "Take, eat; this is my body." And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, "Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. . . " 

(Matthew 26: 26 - 28, Revised Standard Version)

At this moment of the institution of the celebration of the Eucharist began a tradition of trying to fathom ‘the divine significance of the Last Supper’, as Novalis puts it. He is surely right that few people (either in his own time or any other) will have seen it as an encapsulation of sexual passion. This ‘Hymn’ (the poet’s own title) about the nature of Love manages to fuse the sacred and the secular in such a way, and it builds up to such an orgasmic climax, that very few readers will be left without a sense of surprise or even shock.

One of the select few who would not have felt such shock was the reformer Martin Luther (1483 – 1546), whose theological approach was basic to Novalis’s world view (the young Hardenberg was a brought up in the Lutheran Pietist tradition). Luther wrote extensively about the Last Supper (which he simply called ‘Abendmahl’ – evening meal – in his German writings), and he repeatedly insisted that the key to it was its earthiness, its rootedness in the physical world. He took particular exception to the Roman Catholic idea that the bread eaten by the believers was ‘trans-substantiated’ in the course of the celebration, that it lost its essential ‘breadness’ and was somehow ‘turned into’ the body of Christ. In one of his most important texts, De Captivitate Babylonica Ecclesiae praeludium (1520), he argued at length that the Scholastic dogma of transubstantiation was a harmful misinterpretation of the crucial belief that Christ is truly present in the bread and wine of the Last Supper. Thomas Aquinas had been wrong to argue that the bread offered to the believer in the Eucharist only retained the external ‘accidents’ (appearance, taste, smell etc.) of bread and that its ‘essence’ had been transformed into the body of Christ. Rather, Christ is truly present in the bread itself since he is truly present throughout all of creation. The incarnate Christ was ‘Emmanuel’ (= God with us). The whole point of the Incarnation of God in Christ was that God had thereby entered and redeemed the world, in all of its physicality. We do not need to escape from our physical, carnal natures to attain a different spiritual realm since that divine reality is now diffused everywhere.

This was one of the reasons why Luther objected to the idea of clerical celibacy, which was often defended in his day on the grounds that it was inappropriate for a priest to touch the Eucharistic bread with hands that had just fondled a woman’s breasts. To Luther, such thinking was based on a perverted dualistic view of the world, which wanted to separate the earthly and the spiritual, instead of accepting the consequences of the incarnation and realising that the divine was within (not detached from) human experience, with all of its down-to-earthness, its appetites and sexuality.

When in the later 1520’s some Protestants wanted to push further away from Catholic interpretations of the Last Supper by insisting that Christ was not ‘really’ present in the bread and wine, but only ‘symbolically’ present, Luther reacted with fury. Christ’s words of institution were clear, he said. “This is my body” can only mean the bread IS the body of Christ. Of course it is. After the resurrection Christ ascended ‘to the right hand of God’. Since God is everywhere, Christ’s body is therefore everywhere (could anybody be so petty as to think that ‘the right hand of God’ was a physical chair next to an old man with a beard ‘up there’ in the sky? he asked). Christ was pointing to the bread he had just broken when he said ‘This is my body’, but he could equally well have been pointing to the midden outside in the courtyard (or any other pile of shit) and said ‘This is my body’, since Christ’s body is equally present in sewage (but we can be thankful that he did not command us to eat that every time we celebrate the Eucharist, noted Luther). Thus, the ‘divine significance of the Last Supper’ is inextricable from every aspect of life.

Novalis develops this thought by concentrating on hunger and thirst, both as physical human urges and a metaphor for erotic and spiritual desire and love. Eating the body involves lips and tongues. Drinking the blood involves allowing our own blood to become so heated that we swim in an ocean of passion. Those who have been sober are invited to come to the Lord’s table, the communion table, which is now seen as ‘the table of longing’. We are moving towards the day not when we escape the body, but when everything becomes body; our hearts need to melt in trembling waves of desire so that the world ocean will turn red with all the surging blood of passionate lovers. We are dealing with the sort of appetite that can never be sated, a thirst that can never be quenched, the sort of love that stimulates ever more desire (‘As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on’ Shakespeare, Hamlet I:2). Lovers can never be close enough to each other, never belong to each other sufficiently to allow them to feel satisfied. The endless abundance of this nourishment only stimulates their sense of lack and desire. This is indeed a riddle.

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Original Spelling and note on the text

Hymne

Wenige wissen 
Das Geheimniß der Liebe, 
Fühlen Unersättlichkeit 
Und ewigen Durst. 
Des Abendmahls 
Göttliche Bedeutung 
Ist den irdischen Sinnen Räthsel; 
Aber wer jemals 
Von heißen, geliebten Lippen 
Athem des Lebens sog, 
Wem heilige Glut 
In zitternde Wellen das Herz schmolz, 
Wem das Auge aufging, 
Daß er des Himmels 
Unergründliche Tiefe maß, 
Wird essen von seinem Leibe 
Und trinken von seinem Blute  
Ewig1, ewiglich. 
Wer hat des irdischen Leibes 
Hohen Sinn errathen? 
Wer kann sagen, 
Daß er das Blut versteht? 
Einst ist alles Leib, 
E i n  Leib, 
In himmlischem Blute 
Schwimmt das selige Paar. -  

O! daß das Weltmeer 
Schon erröthete, 
Und in duftiges Fleisch  
Aufquölle der Fels! 
Nie endet das süße Mahl, 
Nie sättigt die Liebe sich. 
Nicht innig, nicht eigen genug 
Kann sie haben den Geliebten. 
Von immer zärteren Lippen 
Verwandelt wird das Genossene 
Inniglicher und näher. 
Heißere Wollust 
Durchbebt die Seele, 
Durstiger und hungriger 
Wird das Herz: 
Und so währet der Liebe Genuß 
Von Ewigkeit zu Ewigkeit. 
Hätten die Nüchternen 
Einmal gekostet, 
Alles verließen sie, 
Und setzten sich zu uns 
An den Tisch der Sehnsucht, 
Der nie leer wird. 
Sie erkennten der Liebe 
Unendliche Fülle, 
Und priesen die Nahrung 
Von Leib und Blut.


1  Schubert appears to have added this extra 'Ewig' (eternally)

Confirmed by Peter Rastl with Schubert’s source, Novalis Schriften. Herausgegeben von Ludwig Tieck und Fr. Schlegel. Dritte Auflage. Zweiter Theil. Berlin, 1815. In der Realschulbuchhandlung, pages 29-31; with Novalis Schriften. Herausgegeben von Friedrich Schlegel und Ludwig Tieck. Zweiter Theil. Berlin, 1802. In der Buchhandlung der Realschule, pages 138-140; with Novalis Schriften. Herausgegeben von Ludwig Tieck und Fr. Schlegel. Dritte Auflage. Zweiter Theil. Berlin, 1815. In der Realschulbuchhandlung, pages 29-31; and with Novalis Schriften. Kritische Neuausgabe auf Grund des handschriftlichen Nachlasses von Ernst Heilborn. Erster Theil. 1901. Druck und Verlag von Georg Reimer Berlin, pages 342-343.

First published in Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1802. Herausgegeben von A. W. Schlegel und L. Tieck. Tübingen, in der Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1802, pages 202-204.

To see an early edition of the text, go to page 29  [39 von 308] here: http://digital.onb.ac.at/OnbViewer/viewer.faces?doc=ABO_%2BZ176643708