The dissolution

of Germanic racial care by medieval Christianity (2)

by Hans F. K. Günther

 
In many areas of Sweden and Norway the racial barrier between free and unfree fell much later than in southern Germania, because Christianity penetrated there much later. In Sweden there were many unfree servants who had been imported from Finland, from areas of predominantly non-Nordic race. Sweden seems to have had the largest number of unfree people around 1200, although by then many people had already been freed under southern Christian influence. But there were still many unfree people in Sweden up until the 14th century, most of them probably in Uppland, the region opposite the Finnish coast, where the need for servants was greater due to the seat of the kingdom and the estates of the powerful large farmers. In some areas of Uppland there are today relatively many short-headed people with broad faces, pronounced cheekbones and features of the Baltic race, which are more common in Finland. When the serfs in Sweden became free around 1200 and later, these people moved to the undeveloped and inhospitable areas, as there was still enough cultivated land. In many cases, the names of settlements and villages indicate that such places were cleared and founded by freedmen. But in these areas, the people are mostly darker in skin, hair and eyes than other Swedes, and at the same time more shy, simple, distrustful and religious in their souls, and not as open and frank as other Swedes. Thus, according to research by Rihtén, despite some later mixing of the populations, there is still a racial difference between the descendants of former freemen and those of former serfs.

Another abolition of the idea of ancestry and ethnic origin was brought about by the idea of redemption – this idea itself was such a characteristic idea of the Near Eastern racial soul that Claus combined the spiritual traits of the people of the Near Eastern race to form the image of the ‘redemptive man’. The redemption taught by the church should, however – and this is the essential difference compared to the traditional racial cultivation of Germanic culture – at the same time bring about a liberation and rejection of species, tribe, language and people, which here appeared as something restrictive and degrading. The ‘Revelation of John’ (5:9) taught that God had redeemed people through his blood from every tribe, every language and every people (ex omni tribu et lingua et populo et natione).

A Jew of the Hellenistic-Roman era could, under certain circumstances, see his nationality as something repulsive and something to be discarded. There were many at that time who detested the Jewish people; there were also some Jews who saw their people as inferior to the Hellenes and Romans. Josephus, for example, the Jewish historian on the side of the Romans besieging Jerusalem, felt this way as a citizen of the world with a Hellenistic education. But now the Germanic peoples were supposed to see their tribe, their language and their way of life as something from which they had to be redeemed. Through priestly instruction, the spirit of the East now influenced the West.

In my work Piety of a Nordic Kind (1934) I tried to show why the idea of redemption in all its interpretations and effects must have seemed completely alien to Germanic culture at first: redemption from what evil and to what other life? Midgard, the world of sensible order, the cultivated homeland, was his evil, was in fact something divine, and Utgard, the power of the anti-divine, was to be fought on the side of the god. There could not be a better life than the combative life on this earth and in friendship with God. It was precisely as a pious person that the Germanic people possessed the security described above and, as a nobleman and descendant of select aristocratic peasant families, the certainty of good nature. Now Midgard was to become for him a scene of original sin and frailty in need of redemption, his very nature bound to the disgusting ‘flesh’ that leads to sin, something sinful from which a soul separated from the body must strive for an afterlife. All human nature was corrupted in its infancy, ‘evil from birth’ (Genesis 8:2) and created from ‘sinful seed’ (Pyalm 51:7). According to this doctrine, it was no longer possible, as it seemed to the Indo-Europeans, that something divine could manifest itself in human races; rather, everything human was inherited, unworthy before God and therefore dependent on redemption, redemption through a blood-stained head.

For the reasons stated above, no evidence has survived of the effect such teachings had on the Germanic mind. This mind probably opposed them with a similar resistance to that felt by Goethe, who rebelled against the doctrine of original sin and wanted to see certain phenomena recognized as an ‘inherited virtue.’ We also know of Goethe’s indignation at Kant’s idea of ’radical evil’ in man – Goethe was certainly too good a connoisseur of reality to overlook the fact that the majority of his contemporaries could probably provide examples of something ‘radical evil.’ but he refused, out of what one might call an Indo-European feeling, to understand this ‘sad evil’ as something necessary and essential to the human species and to all types of people, and believed that Kant had introduced this view into his teachings in order to attract Christians to his philosophy as well, as he wrote in his letter to Herder on June 7, 1793.

The Germanic peoples may have felt something like this in relation to the medieval church teachings. An idea such as that expressed by Luther in his baptismal book (1526), that the child before baptism is possessed by the devil and a child of the devil; further an idea such as that expressed by the Augsburg Confession (Confessio Augustana) and the Formula of Concordia (Formula Concordiae), the obligatory foundations of the Germanic Church, that a person conceived and born of the devil cannot have a true faith in God by nature; that there is nothing found and uncorrupted in the body and soul of man and that he is therefore not only unwilling but completely incapable of doing good and that his whole nature, person and being is completely corrupted by original sin. Such ideas, in contrast to Germanic-Indo-Germanic thinking, can only have entered the minds of the descendants of converted Germanic peoples after centuries of appropriate interpretation. Individual Germanic tribes have certainly tried to interpret the church teachings in a native sense; one such attempt, which may have seemed strange enough to most Germanic tribes of the time, is represented by the Old Saxon Geltand-Bichtung of the 9th century. The sober-minded among the Germanic noble farmers – and sober thinking was always widespread among the farmers of predominantly Nordic origins – may have initially perceived the church teachings somewhat in the same way as Frederick the Great did according to his living will of 1768.