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

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