Paul Gerhardt

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Paul Gerhardt (March 12, 1607 – May 27, 1676), was a German hymn writer. He is commemorated as a hymnwriter in the Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church on October 26 with Philipp Nicolai and Johann Heermann.

Gerhardt was born into a middle-class family at Gräfenhainichen, a small town between Halle and Wittenberg. His education was held back by the troubles of the period; the Thirty Years' War began when he was about eleven. After completing his studies in Berlin as tutor in the family of an advocate named Berthold, whose daughter he subsequently married, he received his first ecclesiastical appointment at Mittenwalde (a small town near Berlin) in 1651. In 1657 he accepted an invitation as "diaconus" to the Nicolaikirche of Berlin, but owing to his uncompromising Lutheranism in refusing to accept the Elector Frederick William's "syncretistic" edict of 1664, he was removed in 1666.

Though absolved from submission and restored to office early in the following year, on the petition of the citizens, his conscience did not allow him to retain a post which, it appeared to him, could only be held on condition of at least a tacit repudiation of the Formula of Concord, one of the Lutheran Confessions as contained in the Book of Concord and for over a year he lived in Berlin without fixed employment. In 1668 he was appointed archdeacon of Lübben in the duchy of Saxe-Merseburg, where, after a ministry of eight years, he died.

Gerhardt is considered Germany's greatest hymn writer. Many of his best-known hymns were originally published in various church hymn-books, as for example in that for Brandenburg, which appeared in 1658; others first saw the light in Johann Crüger's Geistliche Kirchenmelodien (1649) and Praxis pietatis melica (1656). The first complete collection is the Geistliche Andachten, published in 1666-1667 by Ebeling, music director in Berlin. No hymn by Gerhardt of a later date than 1667 is known to exist.

The life of Gerhardt has been written by Roth (1829), by Langbecker (1841), by Schultz (1842), by Wildenhahn (1845) and by Bachmann (1863); also by Kraft in Ersch's und Gruber's Allg. Encyc (1855). The best modern edition of the hymns, published by Wackernagel in 1843, has often been reprinted. There is an English translation by Kelly (Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs, 1867).

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.