Johannes Jørgensen
| Johannes Jørgensen | |
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| Born | 6 November 1866  Svendborg
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| Died | 29 May 1956 (aged 89) Svendborg
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| Nationality | Danish |
| Alma mater | University of Copenhagen |
| Works | St. Francis of Assisi |
Jens Johannes Jørgensen (6 November 1866 in Svendborg – 29 May 1956) was a Danish writer, best known for his biographies of Catholic saints. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.
Johannes Jørgensen was born in 1866 in Svendborg, Denmark. In 1884, he travelled to Copenhagen to start his studies, but he quit his studies in 1888. In Copenhagen he began to develop radical social views, which soon led him into a circle of cultural and radical artists.
He was fascinated by the Russian nihilists and by Georg Brandes who boasted of dispelling "the darkness of Christianity." He led a life of pleasure and married, but his happiness did not last. New voices announcing spiritual values were then being heard in Denmark. Jørgensen read Joris-Karl Huysmans, Maurice Maeterlinck and others. He broke with Georg Brandes and his school, which would later cause his ruin.
From his earliest years, he had shown a strong love of poetry through which he could express his dreams and observations. For rest of his life, poetry remained as one of his prominent modes of expression.
But with his innate melancholy temperament, he found no permanent place in cultural radicalism and materialism, where Eros and connoisseur, summarized in pantheism's worship of nature was prevalent. Therefore, he began a quest for more spiritually motivated sources of inspiration together with like-minded people. As an editor of the magazine The Tower (Taarnet in Danish) in the years 1893-94, he had an outlet for his expressing his ideas about symbolism, and his opposition to naturalism.
Symbolists quickly came across the prevailing literary circles, in particular, the brothers Georg and Edvard Brandes, who did not spare the young rebels.
Johannes Jørgensen then met a young Jewish silversmith, Mogens Ballin, who had converted to Catholicism. He had not reached the spiritual depth he had sought. From his childhood home he had inherited an entrenched base of Christianity, and even at his most radical period this base never quite left him. It now returned in the form of mysticism. It took a long time with many internal battles before he found the port of spiritual comfort, though many internal and external factors constantly tore at him.
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