“Prophetic, Dreaming on the Mounds of Heaven”: Schelling and Hölderlin and the Madness of Prophetic Time

Abstract

Hölderlin, it must be said, was always ahead of his time! His was an experience of Heracleitean time, as the later hymns would conceive it, one in which the liveliness within poetry is transfigured into the ever-living fire of prophetic time and logos. What does it mean to speak of the prophetic? What does this strange word, wrenched from the comforts of institutional religion as usual—Nietzsche’s “monotonotheism”— give us to hear? In a time of diminishing returns for the traditional regimes of religion, how does the promise of the prophetic still speak to us?