How should we retell the cultural history of the Nordic countries when taking into consideration the cultural dominance that Protestant Churches, beliefs and religious practices have had for the last five hundred years in these countries? This is the foundational question of this anthology. The authors have undertaken an ambitious and important project; they are demonstrating how religion is integrated in the cultural weave. ‘The religious aspects of a culture's aesthetic ideas are not limited to works of art that are embedded in a religious context … but concern the aesthetic production as a whole, especially when it has been determined by a hegemonic denomination for many centuries, as is the case with Protestantism in Scandinavia’ (p. 12). The project is welcome, in particular in my Swedish context where religion tends to be overlooked in historical studies. The authors of this book come from various scholarly fields, with the majority from literary and/or cultural history. They propose a thesis of five Scandinavian aesthetic principles derived from Protestant culture: simplicity, logocentrism, ethics, relatedness to the world and tension between pronounced individualism and collectivism.
The focus on cultural history and aestheticism also suggests a timeline of three phases of Protestant aesthetics, which give a loose structure to the book: 1520–1750, Reformation to Pietist revival; 1750–1920, the end of WWI and the advent of the welfare state; and 1920–2020, described by the editors as a period with an often ‘anti-religious modernist discourse’.
In the introduction the editors give a more in-depth definition of the aesthetics of Protestantism. They claim that Protestantism did not create an aesthetics of its own, but rather that the philosophy of the religion defined what was desirable and proper.
Then follow thirteen chapters divided into the three phases. In the first chapter Jürg Glauser looks at the links between translations to the vernacular and the importance put on the aesthetics of book printing in Denmark. He concludes that the reformers created both a specific ideal and rhetoric which he describes as a ‘multi-media event’. Next Margrét Eggertsdóttir writes about Islandic poetry in the vernacular and demonstrates the importance of the old Islandic poetic tradition in the creation of new Protestant texts in the vernacular, in particular the rules of alliteration. The third chapter, by Ueli Zahnd, is titled: ‘Which Protestants? Calvinism, Crypto-Calvinism, and the Scandinavian Reformation.’ Zahnd draws a link between the Reformed image-less ideals and the modern minimalistic aesthetic ideals. However, since a more image-based Lutheran confession prevailed in the Nordic countries, he debates on the origin of the minimalistic aesthetics. His conclusion is that Pietism, at a later stage, might have had a bigger impact on Scandinavian cultural aesthetics than the Reformation. Lena Rohrbach writes about the Faroese Protestant tradition in the fourth chapter. With the Reformation, instead of following the Protestant principle of the vernacular, Danish replaced Latin on the Faroe Islands as the language of God and Church. Rohrbach demonstrates the negative consequences this has had for the Faroese language in religious life and culture.
With Arne Bugge Amundsen's chapter the book moves to the second phase: 1750–1920. Amundsen describes the many styles of church architecture that developed in Norway in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The diversification follows the development of a various Christian denominations, but the writer also links it to a new-found national identity and national aesthetic. The sixth chapter, by Bernd Roling, concerns Pomeranian Gothicism and Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten. Kosegarten's writings combine a Gothic ideal of natural mysticism with an almost ascetic belief in rationality and individualism, and strong anti-Catholic tendencies. Anna Bohlin aims to show, in the seventh chapter on anti-Catholicism in Bremer and Topelius, how the understanding of one's faith had consequences on aesthetics and interpretations. Here too, individualism and reason are highlighted as Protestant ideals. In the next chapter, Joachim Grage discusses journal-writing as a particular Protestant practice with a study of Kirkegaard's journals. In chapter ix, Claudia Lindén uses texts by Swedish writers Lagerlöf and Molin and the concepts of homo sacer and ursus sacer, for a discussion on Protestant ethics and the complexity of the question ‘who is one's neighbour?’
The remaining four chapters pertain to the modernist period 1920–2020. Sophie Wennerscheid's chapter deals with the image of Antichrist in Danish culture, which she describes as a dichotomy between Catholic imagery of sin and seduction and Protestant ideals of reason and rationality.
The eleventh chapter explores Pietist nostalgia, which Thomas Mohnike defines as elements of Protestant revival found in twentieth-century Scandinavian literature. He describes it as an aesthetic utopia of a bygone era. In the twelfth chapter, Giuliano D'Amico focuses on the poet Håkan Sandell and his Christian palimpsests. The poems explore a dualism of spirit and matter. Though hinting of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Gnostic themes, D'Amico argues the poems are grounded in the Protestant aesthetics of ‘relatedness to the world’. In the last chapter, Joachim Schiedermair explores secularisation as disenchantment, and how literary texts have shaped the term. Through the medium of comic books, he takes the discussion further to analyse the concept of ‘disenchantment of disenchantment’.
This book delivers valuable insights, but it also grapples with a problem. The difficulty lies in attempting to treat a vast span of time and geography as part of a single theory of a particular Scandinavian Protestant aesthetics. Not only did the Lutheran Churches of Denmark and Sweden develop differently to the Churches in the German states, but there was a clear divide between Western and Eastern Nordic Lutheranism. The anthology Reformation i två riken: Reformationens historia och historiegeografi i Sverige och Danmark [Reformation in two kingdoms: the history of the Reformation and history of geography in Sweden and Denmark] (Goteborg–Stockholm 2019) deals with the various strands of Reformation in the region. With some few exceptions this Nordic Lutheranism had little in common with the image-less ideals of the Reformed churches in the south. Even though Denmark had a period of Nichtbild from 1575 to 1625, the Reformation was hardly one of drastic iconoclasm. In Sweden, the sacred space continued to be image-rich well into the eighteenth century. New murals were created in the seventeenth century, and Counter-Reformation artwork from central Europe was installed in the churches without debate (E. T. B. A. Derlen, ‘A most Lutheran nation? On popular religion and eucharistic belief in post-Reformation Sweden’, unpublished PhD diss. London 2019).
There is also a problem of generalisation. Concepts such as ‘Protestant’ and ‘Lutheran’ tend to be used synonymously, and the Reformation is described as ‘an iconoclastic movement, subjecting arts and literature to the dictum of artistic economy’ (p. 10). To their credit, the editors do discuss the problem of defining Protestant aesthetic for the Nordic churches as ‘simplicity’ before the advent of the Pietist movement in the eighteenth century.
Thus, even though the chapters on the phase from 1520 to 1750 highlight areas of the Reformation often overlooked, such as the Faroe Islands, they also seem somewhat separate from the general thesis of the aesthetic simplicity of Protestantism in Northern Europe. In the chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the book comes into its own, and the main argument is supported by the material. Considering that both the editors and several of the writers (Zahnd, Bohlin, Mohnike) mention the importance of the Pietist movement for changed aesthetic Protestant ideals, it could have been a strategic choice to limit the time scope from 1750 to the present day.
That said, this anthology is a valuable contribution on lived theology that offers insights into parts of Nordic beliefs, practices and cultures that might otherwise be overlooked. The book also highlights the scholarly gains that can be achieved with inter-disciplinary projects, and it was a joy to read.
