The Principles of Nature and Grace

The Hamburg poet and thinker Barthold Heinrich Brockes wrote perhaps the most extensive poetic work in German literature, the nine-volume Earthly Pleasures in God (1721-1748), in which he created one of the key bridges between the German Baroque and Enlightenment, and between the concepts of Enlightenment philosophical-religious thought and beautiful literature. It represents a spiritual and social movement in Hamburg which, through the infiltration of Western European trends, formed the 'avant-garde' of the Enlightenment modernisation of German culture. After the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement, however, Brockes's work fell into obscurity and suffers from neglect or interpretive distortions to this day. The present book interprets it against the backdrop of 18th-century German and specifically Hamburg spiritual history and shows its modern features, which earned Brockes extraordinary popularity in his time.