E: Sermons etc.
It is a well-known fact that the formidable storyteller from Lützelflüh, Jeremias Gotthelf, was a priest by trade. Born in 1797 in Murten as the son of the priest Sigmund Friedrich Bitzius, who was selected to take his clerical post in Utzensdorf in 1804. Then there was his uncle Samuel Studer, who hosted the 15-year-old Albert in Bern, while the youngster underwent additional schooling. Said uncle was a theologian who lectured on the Art of the Sermon (Homiletics) at the Bernese Academia, the very institute where Albert Bitzius was studying from 1814 to 1820. It is fair to assume that Albert Bitzius’ rhetoric education derived from this extended study period under his father – a practitioner of the spiritual word – and his uncle – a theoretical expert on the sermon.
Priestly figures, church visits and church goers are themes that feature centrally in the literary oeuvre of Gotthelf, as do, not seldom, fragments of his sermons, indeed entire sermons, and there are even traceable hidden hints suggestive of a Homiletic on his part.
One initial sermon from the year 1818 can be traced to his study period; and in the summer of 1820 Bitzius conducted hisinitial sermon rehearsal. He was accepted into the Bernese Ministry, upon which he proceeded to join his father in Utzensdorf to assume the role of a priest vicar, and where he would remain until 1824, the very year his father passed on. It was as yet too early for him to be considered for the actual post of a priest, and so he went on to Herzogenbuchsee, again as a vicar; in 1829 to the Heiliggeistkirche in Bern; and eventually, in 1831, to Lützelflüh, where in April 1832 he was summoned as a priest and where he would remain active in this position until the end of his li
A total of some 350 sermons are handed down from Gotthelf’s collective time as a vicar. He painstakingly noted down most of them in great detail, then he added the frontispieces to the sermon texts, dated them, and finally he incorporated them into the archives. It was only later on when he stopped collecting his written sermons. In the novels the preacher and priest blends with the polemic satirist and they culminate with and into the narrator Jeremias Gotthelf; a combination that from time to time leaned more toward the side of satire, to then again favoured a pastoral narrative, but it was not rare either that the two modes followed one another in very quick succession, due to the very characteristic impulsive narration style of his. It is in the sermons of his time as a vicar that we can reconstruct the very trail from sermon to narrative, and we can now safely lay aside the earlier assumption as invalid which claimed that his sermons were merely »simple testimonies of the daily work of Gotthelf«.
For the first time the entire volume of manuscripts with handed down sermons is to be edited, as are a notebook of his containing the sermon themes of later years, as well as all materials that are contributed to these subjects.
It goes without saying that a complete edition of the sermons must be presented in a way that allows contextual access to the texts for the modern reader. To this end a comprehensive introduction accompanies the critical edition. A focal point therein is to highlight Gotthelf’s homiletic education, his preaching practice within the scope of regional historical context as well as ethical and anthropological topics of his sermons. Numerous names of preachers of his time used to be much more popular than Gotthelf, and yet are familiar nowadays only to some experts.
The edition of sermons by Albert Bitzius is very significant toward comprehending the works by Jeremias Gotthelf. But even beyond that alone may the reappraisal of those texts contribute toward understanding the church history of the Canton of Bern, toward the history of priestly activity and toward preaching activity of a rural cleric of the 19th century. Further to that, the sermons are also a testimony to the search of a contemporary method of transmitting the Christian message, a way that would lead to the calendar entries, the publications and to the well-known narrated stories of his.