Pietistic atheism and the modern breakthrough: on the narrative culture of secularity

ABSTRACT

Secularity was first substantiated as a cultural practice constitutive of modernity in late-nineteenth-century fiction. The so-called Modern Breakthrough in Danish literature, taking place between 1871 and into the 1880s, is a prime case of a cultural radical movement that translated the modern criticism of religion into a literary and political program. Today, the Danish writer J. P. Jacobsen’s novel Niels Lyhne (1880) remains a classic of the atheistic literature of the period. Its portrayal of the psychological struggles involved in the transition from a tradition of faith to a modern secular society suggest it to be a core document of atheistic identity formation. To contemporaries, however, the psychology of the protagonist Niels Lyhne seemed fundamentally implausible, and his atheism overtly dramatic. By contextualising the literary work in its wider and highly contested narrative culture, this article discusses how narrative scripts first substantiated the modern religious vs secular distinction. In documenting the changing plausibility structures by which Jacobsen’s novel could become prescriptive of the emotional norms of a secular mind, the article explores how literary works shape cultural and emotional realities.

KEYWORDS:

• Secularity
• narrative cultures
• free thought
• J. P. Jacobsen
• Georg Brandes
• modernity
• the Modern Breakthrough

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway (Project no. 334603).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All translations from Danish, Norwegian, German, and Swedish sources are by the author.

2. In a minimal definition, the term narrative simply relates to any expression of a sequence of events. Narrative requires, in other words, sequentiality and eventfulness. From a narratological perspective, as it entered historiography in the work of Hayden White, this formula already identifies two layers of analysis (Scheffel 2013). The chronological sequence of events and their implied relationship constitute the narrative’s story, but this story exists only virtually. It results from a recipient processing the limited information offered in a composed presentation: the plot. In exploring the immersive ‘virtual realities’ (Ryan 2015) of storyworlds, reader response theory and cognitive poetics have demonstrated how much remains unsaid in narrative formats. By conveying events in the form of codified scripts sequenced to suggest a coherent unit, texts invite readers to fill remaining gaps with assumptions derived from the cultural scripts available to them. However, not everything is ‘tellable’. Narrative sequencing implies causality and intentional agency, making it not only challenging to represent scientific theories such as evolution or quantum physics in a narrative format, but also, for example, emotions without giving them an agency regarding the related events. In communicating an ‘anthropocentric experience’ (Fludernik 2009, 59), the narrative format clouds historical particularities by taking human universals for granted. Against this backdrop, aspects of fictionality entering even the most reduced forms of narrative presentation almost seem a minor inconvenience.

3. On its international reception, see (Heitmann 2017).

4. See also Jacobsen’s letter to G. Brandes, February 12, 1878 (Jacobsen 1974, 38–40).

5. The connotations changed throughout Christian times from denoting the covenant in the Christian interpretation of religio as ‘bond’ rather than ‘repetition’ to contrasting the practice of religious specialists with lay practices in the medieval period and identifying legitimate denominations in the age of reformations. Superstition served as the antonym of religion throughout the Early Modern period. See (Feil 1986–2007).

6. Georg Brandes remains a polarising figure to this day. Literary historians continue to debate his relevance in the literary developments that occurred in the Nordic countries, particularly in Denmark and Norway. As Salmi shows in his contribution to this special issue, digital newspaper archives as well as large digitised corpora of, for example, correspondence between writers can change our perceptions of past developments. Regarding the question of Brandes’ role in the wider cultural debates of the 1870s and 1880s, they provide a key to appreciate the massive scale of the immediate response and the subsequent debates connected to his name.

7. The theoretical framework in Brandes’ Main Currents is one of psychological associationism, as propagated by James Mill in Analysis of the Phenomena ([1829] 1878), John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic ([1843] 1874), and especially Hippolyte Taine’s On Intelligence (1871). Brandes had met both J.S. Mill and Taine on his travels, translating Mill’s On the Subjection of Women and earning his doctorate with a dissertation on Taine’s aesthetics.

8. This would include, Brandes specified, ‘the conviction that no part of Western Asia at a certain time in ancient history was governed by completely different laws of nature and spirit than the rest of the world’ (G. Brandes 1872a, 46).

9. For biographical details (Knudsen 1985–2004), provides a conclusive account of Brandes’ life and work. For the impact of the debate on Brandes’ professorship, see (Larsen 2016) (Stangerup 1946). provides the most detailed account of the conservative public debates and political constellations that emerged in the ensuing ‘culture wars’, while the socialist response remains understudied (for a survey, see Johannsen 2023).

10. Munch, Unge Studenter.

11. e.g. Social-Demokraten, May 30, 1874, 1 and October 7, 1874, 2.

12. Knudsen (2007) has compiled a collection of 48 works of fiction featuring Brandes. Notably, many of the early references rely on knowledge of the ongoing debates for a reader to understand the plot or the character’s reactions (such as Bauditz 1876; Ewald 1876 [1873]; Elbert and Reinhard 1880; Krebs 1873). See also (Bredsdorff 1973).

13. The play, revolving around another polemically fictionalised Brandes, was (Bloch 1875).

14. Garborg [1879] 1881. Curiously, even this literary topos soon entered the real world. In 1879, a friend from Jens Peter Jacobsen’s youth was admitted to the psychiatric hospital for ‘religious crises caused by her fear of committing herself to a childhood friend […] because he was a freethinker’, quoted in Høi Jensen 2017, 29.

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Notes on contributors

Dirk Johannsen

Dirk Johannsen is Professor of Cultural History at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS), University of Oslo. His research focuses on narrative cultures, popular religion and magic in the nineteenth century, cognitive approaches, and trolls. Recent publications include the co-edited volumes Narrative Cultures and the Aesthetics of Religion (Brill 2020) and Fictional Practice: Magic, Narration, and the Power of Imagination (Brill 2021).