Martensen, HANS LASSEN

Martensen, HANS LASSEN, metropolitan bishop of Denmark and her most prominent theologian in the 19th century, was born at Flensburg on 19th August 1808, and studied at the university of Copenhagen. After shaking off the influence of Grundtvigianism, by which he was dominated in his student days, he stepped into the chair of Philosophy at Copenhagen, and in 1845 added to these duties those of court preacher. In 1840 he published a valuable monograph on Meister Eckhart, the German mystic, and nine years later laid the foundation of a European fame by a masterly work, from the conservative Lutheran standpoint, on Christian Dogmatics (Eng. trans. 1866). This gained him in 1854 the primacy of Denmark, and this again was the cause of a powerful satirical attack upon him by Kierkegaard, which started a controversy in which Martensen suffered severely. His great intellectual energy, however, and the force of his character soon enabled him to recover from the blow, so that, after the publication of another great work, in 3 vols., on Christian Ethics (1871-78; Eng. trans. 1881-82), his influence in the country was more dominant than ever. With a mind wonderfully acute and powerful, he was deficient in intellectual sympathy. Nevertheless he stood for many years a bulwark of defence to conservative theology. He died on 3d February 1884. See his Autobiography, in Danish (1883), London Quarterly (1883), and Brit. and Foreign Evangel. Review, vol. xxxv.