The Messiah (original: Der Messias) was written by Friedrich Klopstock. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803) was a German poet. A deeply religious patriot, he sought to restore the "ancient German spirit" through his work. He influenced Goethe and the Sturm und Drang movement, and his Odes influenced German song composition for decades afterwards, but he is chiefly remembered now for one work: The Messiah, which deserves the descriptive phrase “Miltonian epic.”

The Messiah is set during the Passion Week, the seven days from Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem to his Crucifixion and Resurrection. The Passion Week becomes a metaphor for the history of existence and early Christendom, so that the span of time of The Messiah stretches from Creation to the Last Judgment. As might be expected, Klopstock was heavily influenced by Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the central figures of The Messiah are God and Satan. Klopstock spends a great deal of time describing heaven and hell and the influence of angels and devils on the lives of men.

The Messiah took Klopstock twenty-five years to write, and it shows. It is lengthy, filling fifteen volumes. The modern reader is not likely to find The Messiah of much interest. Although the poem has moments of lyrical beauty, Klopstock was not Milton’s equal for sustained epic imagination, and too much of the poem focuses on matters irrelevant to the main storylines. Klopstock also strains for affect, but the repetitive hosannas to the glory of God will not evoke religious fervor in modern readers, who are likely to find them tiresome. And for all its length The Messiah is notably short on action, containing far more descriptions than actual events. Klopstock’s focus in the poem is on the Passion and the Resurrection, and therefore he does not include the type of action sequences which enliven Paradise Lost.

However, The Messiah does have one character of interest: Abbadona. Abbadona is an angel who is unwillingly drawn into Lucifer's rebellion. Once the revolt has failed, and Satan and all of his followers have been cast into Hell, Abbadona does not gnash his teeth and curse the Divine Name, as the other fallen angels do, but instead sits apart “in gloomy solitude”¹and bewails his fall:

Abbadona eventually manages to speak and reproaches Lucifer for his blasphemy and pride. Abbadona discovers that Lucifer plans to kill Jesus, so Abbadona attempts to go to Heaven and warn God. But Abbadona is unable to deliver the message because of the angels set to guard over Lucifer and the other fallen angels:

In the prelapsarian days Abdiel was Abbadona's “chosen friend,”⁵ but after the Fall and throughout The Messiah the other angels do not acknowledge Abbadona, and Abdiel looks on him “in tones/Soften'd by sadness, yet austere and grave.”⁶

During the Crucifixion Abbadona lingers around the cross, feeling a constant woe over his fallen state: “then immortality/Became a curse; one life one endless death!”⁷ Abbadona, filled with fear, repentance, and even hope, eventually summons up the courage to address Jesus:

At the end of The Messiah, when Jesus ascends to Heaven, Abbadona has tired of his life and begs God for destruction. Angels of death circle around him, their flaming swords ready to kill him, but to the relief of both Abbadona and the reader, who by this time feels sympathy for Abbadona, God spares him:

And so Abbadona is reunited with Abdiel, rushing into his arms and then throwing himself in front of God and praying for forgiveness.

Catholic doctrine and Christian tradition state that the fallen angels can never repent and are now capable of only evil. But Klopstock is a product of the Enlightenment and tempers The Messiah with tolerance and reason. Klopstock does what Milton could not or would not do: he portrays a truly repentant fallen angel who is ultimately forgiven by God. Although The Messiah cannot be said to have a protagonist, and Abbadona (Klopstock’s creation, rather than a traditional figure of Christian myth) is only a secondary figure in the story, he is far more alive to the reader than Jesus, Lucifer, or any of the poem’s other main characters.

Klopstock was the first great conscious proponent of Sensibility (see: The Gothic), an approach to characterization which would flourish in the 1770s and 1780s but which can be traced to Klopstock’s live presentations of his poetry in the 1740s.¹⁰ Klopstock did not avoid including Sensibility in his religious poetry, so Messiah, in particular Abbadona’s character, is the personification of Sensibility, just as much as Harley, from Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1779), is. But Mackenzie meant Harley to be a warning to his readers, while Klopstock meant Sensibility seriously, producing an angel character who is equal parts hysterical sensitivity and brooding melancholy.

Interestingly, Messiah, because of its influence, played a role in the conception of life in outer space. Pluralism, the philosophy that there are numerous worlds in the universe with alien life on them, began in the time of the Greek philosopher Anaximander (circa 610-circa 546 B.C.E.) but was suppressed in the West for nearly a millennium before re-emerging in the Enlightenment in both France and Germany. “Recent publications…document that dozens of eighteenth-century German authors enthusiastically espoused ideas of extraterrestrial life.”¹¹ Klopstock was among them, but he

faced conceptual problems that had far less intensely troubled Milton when nearly a century earlier he had sought to find in Scripture the materials of epic poetry. Milton could assume acceptance of Christianity among his readers and faced few tensions with the pluralism of seventeenth-century astronomy. This was scarcely the case for Klopstock, writing when pluralism was highly popular and when, according to Albrecht Ritschl, there occurred “The Entire Disintegration of the Doctrines of Reconciliation and Justification by the German Theologians of the Illumination.” Klopstock’s responses in his Messias to this pair of problems was bold and original. Pluralism he accepted fully and enthusiastically; astronomy abounds in his poem, where it is less the hills of Jerusalem than the infinite universe that forms the stage for the epic events he recounts. What was still more daring was the degree to which he espoused a Christocentric cosmos. While others laid emphasis on Jesus as exemplary man, inspired teacher, and prophetic preacher, Klopstock centered his epic on Jesus as God-man, redeemer of sinful mankind, and…creator of the universe. Not nature and nature’s God, not God the Father, but Revelation and Christ are central in Der Messias….Klopstock reconciles pluralism with Christianity by assuming that “only the inhabitants of earth have fallen into sin and they alone need salvation through a divine mediator.”¹²

Finally, there is the matter of Abbadona’s relationship with Abdiel. The eighteenth century in Germany was a time of the “cult of friendship,” when true friends—between men or between men and women—were thought to achieve a spiritual communion, a seelenbund (“joining of souls”). But much of the century in Germany saw homosexuality avant la lettre, sexual activity between men and romantic relationships between men despite the men lacking a concept for homosexuality apart from physical activity and Classical models such as Socrates and Alcibiades.¹³ As far as is known, Klopstock himself was heterosexual and enjoyed a love match in his marriage. And Klopstock, perhaps in response to the homosexual activity and gay coding in literature and fashion, said in 1769, “Oh for a people which is masculine and chaste,”¹⁴ likely signifying his hostility to what was common enough socially among men. And the relationship between Abbadona and Abdiel lacks the gay signifiers of the eighteenth century, the Classical references and use of particular colors and so on. So it is not likely that Klopstock intended Abbadona and Abdiel to be seen as gay—rather as friends with a shared Sensibility. But as the basics of literary theory teach us, what an author intends can often be quite some distance from what the text actually says, and what an author intends can often be quite some distance from what the author actually feels. So while Klopstock likely wanted Abbadona and Abdiel to just be platonic friends, the nature of friendship in Klopstock’s own society was such that sexual activity took place between male friends at the time—and so the contemporary (and modern) interpretation of the relationship between Abbadona and Abdiel was likely the opposite of Klopstock’s.

Print: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Messiah. Attempted From the German of Mr. Klopstock. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale ECCO, Print Editions, 2018.

¹ F.T. Klopstock, The Messiah: A Poem, volume 1 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1826), 69.

² Klopstock, Messiah, volume 1, 70-71.

³ Klopstock, Messiah, volume 1, 71.

⁴ Klopstock, Messiah, volume 1, 76.

⁵ Klopstock, Messiah, volume 1, 69.

⁶ Klopstock, Messiah, volume 2, 61.

⁷ Klopstock, Messiah, volume 1, 202.

⁸ Klopstock, Messiah, volume 1, 205.

⁹ Klopstock, Messiah, volume 2, 275.

¹⁰ Barbara Becker-Cantarino, “Introduction: German Literature in the Era of Enlightenment and Sensibility,” in Barbara Becker-Cantarino, ed., German Literature of the Eighteenth Century: The Enlightenment and Sensibility (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 17.

¹¹ Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900 (Mineola, NY: Dover Press, 1999), 139.

¹² Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 144-146.

¹³ Robert Tobin’s Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) is very good on this, particularly chapters one and two.

¹⁴ Qtd. in George L. Mosse, “Friendship and Nationhood: About the Promise and Failure of German Nationalism,” Journal of Contemporary History 17, no. 2 (Apr. 1982): 358.