“Christianity is an epidemic”: on Hölderlin and the plague

Throughout literary history the event of a plague has been an interpretation event typically split into two mutually exclusive stances. On one side, the plague is interpreted as the manifestation of divine punishment (for example, Homer’s Iliad) or, more ambiguously, as a test of faith. On the other side, it is understood in terms of its material causes in the absence of God (for example, Lucretius’ De rerum natura). However, there is an important liminal space in which the plague is understood neither as evidence of divine presence nor as evidence of divine absence but as a sign of discord between the human and the divine and discord in the divine. In this space, both humanity and God are infected by a finitude and contingency that the plague, perhaps more than any other phenomenon, renders palpable and unavoidable. It is in and of this temporal space that Friedrich Hölderlin wrote. This article begins with an explication of Jacques Lacan and Jean-Claude Milner’s understanding of the plague as an affront to the belief in the existence of an exception to finitude and contingency (the immortal Absolute in the form of God or the soul) and then combines this with David Farrell Krell’s elucidation of the effect on German idealism’s poets and philosophers of an awareness of this ailing or “tragic Absolute..” It then turns to Hölderlin’s translation of Oedipus Rex and later poems and fragments where the plague is obliquely referenced in order to show how what Wilhelm Scherer diagnosed as Hölderlin’s “spiritual epidemic”—his struggle, to the point of madness, with a universe in which the divine exception is a presentified absence—is the result of a recognition that, in Lacan’s provocative terms, “Christianity is an epidemic.”