Few hymns bring as much comfort as those of Paul Gerhardt, and few hymn writers paid so high a price to write them. A German Lutheran pastor, he lived through the worst war in European history and buried his wife and four children, yet he never stopped singing of God’s faithfulness.
Born on 12 March 1607 in Gräfenhainichen, Saxony, Gerhardt was orphaned of his father at 12 and of his mother at 14. He studied at the school in Grimma and later theology at the University of Wittenberg, graduating around 1642, in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War.
With no parish available amid the conflict, he spent years as a tutor in Berlin, in the household of the lawyer Andreas Barthold. There he met the musician Johann Crüger, who set dozens of his hymns to music, and courted Anna Maria, the family’s daughter, whom he would marry in 1655.
Only in 1651, at age 44, did he become pastor in Mittenwalde, near Berlin. It was there that he wrote many of his most beloved hymns, among them Befiehl du deine Wege, inspired by Psalm 37, and the German version of the medieval hymn that would become O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden.
In 1657 he became a preacher at St. Nicholas Church in Berlin, but in 1666 he was removed from office for refusing to sign an edict of the prince-elector that silenced doctrinal disputes between Lutherans and Reformed Christians. The city asked him to return, but he would not yield, and he went more than a year without steady income.
Of the couple’s five children, four died in infancy, and in 1668 his wife Anna Maria died after a long illness. Gerhardt moved with his only surviving son, Paul Friedrich, to Lübben, where he took up the last parish of his life.
It was in the midst of this succession of losses, not despite them, that verses such as Nun ruhen alle Wälder and Geh aus, mein Herz were born, hymns of comfort that a Germany devastated by war sang for generations. Bach would use his stanzas in the Passions and in the Christmas Oratorio.
Gerhardt died in Lübben on 27 May 1676. He left more than 130 hymns that still cross confessional lines today, a reminder that the Christian faith can sing hope precisely in the midst of pain, without denying it.
