Memories, Dreams, Reflections

In the course of my life it has often happened to me that I suddenly knew something which I really could not know at all. The knowledge came to me as though it were my own idea. It was the same with my mother. She did not know what she was saying; it was like a voice wielding absolute authority, which said exactly what fitted the situation.

My mother usually assumed that I was mentally far beyond my age, and she would talk to me as to a grown-up. It was plain that she was telling me everything she could not say to my father, for she early made me her confidant and confided her troubles to me. Thus, I was about eleven years old when she informed me of a matter that concerned my father and alarmed me greatly. I racked my brains, and at last came to the conclusion that I must consult a certain friend of my father’s whom I knew by hearsay to be an influential person. Without saying a word to my mother, I went into town one afternoon after school and called at this man’s house. The maid who opened the door told me that he was out. Depressed and disappointed, I returned home. But it was by the mercy of providence that he was not there. Soon afterwards my mother again referred to this matter, and this time gave me a very different and far milder picture of the situation, so that the whole thing went up in smoke. That struck me to the quick, and I thought: “What an ass you were to believe it, and you nearly caused a disaster with your stupid seriousness.” From then on I decided to divide everything my mother said by two. My confidence in her was strictly limited, and that was what prevented me from ever telling her about my deeper preoccupations.

But then came the moments when her second personality burst forth, and what she said on those occasions was so true and to the point that I trembled before it. If my mother could then have been pinned down, I would have had a wonderful interlocutor.

With my father it was quite different. I would have liked to lay my religious difficulties before him and ask him for advice, but I did not do so because it seemed to me that I knew in advance what he would be obliged to reply out of respect for his office. How right I was in this assumption was demonstrated to me soon afterwards. My father personally gave me my instruction for confirmation. It bored me to death. One day I was leafing through the catechism, hoping to find something besides the sentimental-sounding and usually incomprehensible as well as uninteresting expatiations on Lord Jesus. I came across the paragraph on the Trinity. Here was something that challenged my interest: a oneness which was simultaneously a threeness. This was a problem that fascinated me because of its inner contradiction. I waited longingly for the moment when we would reach this question. But when we got that far, my father said, “We now come to the Trinity, but we’ll skip that, for I really understand nothing of it myself.” I admired my father’s honesty, but on the other hand I was profoundly disappointed and said to myself, “There we have it; they know nothing about it and don’t give it a thought. Then how can I talk about my secret?”

I made vain, tentative attempts with certain of my schoolfellows who struck me as reflective. I awakened no response, but, on the contrary, a stupefaction that warned me off.

In spite of the boredom, I made every effort to believe without understanding — an attitude which seemed to correspond with my father’s — and prepared myself for Communion, on which I had set my last hopes. This was, I thought, merely a memorial meal, a kind of anniversary celebration for Lord Jesus who had died 1890–30=1860 years ago. But still, he had let fall certain hints such as, “Take, eat, this is my body,” meaning that we should eat the Communion bread as if it were his body, which after all had originally been flesh. Likewise we were to drink the wine which had originally been blood. It was clear to me that in this fashion we were to incorporate him into ourselves. This seemed to me so preposterous an impossibility that I was sure some great mystery must lie behind it, and that I would participate in this mystery in the course of Communion, on which my father seemed to place so high a value.

As was customary, a member of the church committee stood godfather to me. He was a nice, taciturn old man, a wheelwright in whose workshop I had often stood, watching his skill with lathe and adze. Now he came, solemnly transformed by frock coat and top hat, and took me to church, where my father in his familiar robes stood behind the altar and read prayers from the liturgy. On the white cloth covering the altar lay large trays filled with small pieces of bread. I could see that the bread came from our baker, whose baked goods were generally poor and flat in taste. From a pewter jug, wine was poured into a pewter cup. My father ate a piece of the bread, took a swallow of the wine — I knew the tavern from which it had come — and passed the cup to one of the old men. All were stiff, solemn, and, it seemed to me, uninterested. I looked on in suspense, but could not see or guess whether anything unusual was going on inside the old men. The atmosphere was the same as that of all other performances in church — baptisms, funerals, and so on. I had the impression that something was being performed here in the traditionally correct manner. My father, too, seemed to be chiefly concerned with going through it all according to rule, and it was part of this rule that the appropriate words were read or spoken with emphasis. There was no mention of the fact that it was now 1860 years since Jesus had died, whereas in all other memorial services the date was stressed. I saw no sadness and no joy, and felt that the feast was meagre in every respect, considering the extraordinary importance of the person whose memory was being celebrated. It did not compare at all with secular festivals.

Suddenly my turn came. I ate the bread; it tasted flat, as I had expected. The wine, of which I took only the smallest sip, was thin and rather sour, plainly not of the best. Then came the final prayer, and the people went out, neither depressed nor illuminated with joy, but with faces that said, “So that’s that.”

I walked home with my father, intensely conscious that I was wearing a new black felt hat and a new black suit which was already beginning to turn into a frock coat. It was a kind of lengthened jacket that spread out into two little wings over the seat, and between these was a slit with a pocket into which I could tuck a handkerchief — which seemed to me a grown-up, manly gesture. I felt socially elevated and by implication accepted into the society of men. That day, too, Sunday dinner was an unusually good one. I would be able to stroll about in my new suit all day. But otherwise I was empty and did not know what I was feeling.

Only gradually, in the course of the following days, did it dawn on me that nothing had happened. I had reached the pinnacle of religious initiation, had expected something — I knew not what — to happen, and nothing at all had happened. I knew that God could do stupendous things to me, things of fire and unearthly light; but this ceremony contained no trace of God — not for me, at any rate. To be sure, there had been talk about Him, but it had all amounted to no more than words. Among the others I had noticed nothing of the vast despair, the overpowering elation and outpouring of grace which for me constituted the essence of God. I had observed no sign of “communion,” of “union, becoming one with …” With whom? With Jesus? Yet he was only a man who had died 1860 years ago. Why should a person become one with him? He was called the “Son of God” — a demigod, therefore, like the Greek heroes: how then could an ordinary person become one with him? This was called the “Christian religion,” but none of it had anything to do with God as I had experienced Him. On the other hand it was quite clear that Jesus, the man, did have to do with God; he had despaired in Gethsemane and on the cross, after having taught that God was a kind and loving father. He too, then, must have seen the fearfulness of God. That I could understand, but what was the purpose of this wretched memorial service with the flat bread and the sour wine? Slowly I came to understand that this communion had been a fatal experience for me. It had proved hollow; more than that, it had proved to be a total loss. I knew that I would never again be able to participate in this ceremony. “Why, that is not religion at all,” I thought. “It is an absence of God; the church is a place I should not go to. It is not life which is there, but death.”

I was seized with the most vehement pity for my father. All at once I understood the tragedy of his profession and his life. He was struggling with a death whose existence he could not admit. An abyss had opened between him and me, and I saw no possibility of ever bridging it, for it was infinite in extent. I could not plunge my dear and generous father, who in so many matters left me to myself and had never tyrannised over me, into that despair and sacrilege which were necessary for an experience of divine grace. Only God could do that. I had no right to; it would be inhuman. God is not human, I thought; that is His greatness, that nothing human impinges on Him. He is kind and terrible — both at once — and is therefore a great peril from which everyone naturally tries to save himself. People cling one-sidedly to His love and goodness, for fear they will fall victim to the tempter and destroyer. Jesus, too, had noticed that, and had therefore taught: “Lead us not into temptation.”

My sense of union with the church and with the human world, so far as I knew it, was shattered. I had, so it seemed to me, suffered the greatest defeat of my life. The religious outlook which I imagined constituted my sole meaningful relation with the universe had disintegrated; I could no longer participate in the general faith, but found myself involved in something inexpressible, in my secret, which I could share with no one. It was terrible and — this was the worst of it — vulgar and ridiculous also, a diabolical mockery.

I began to ponder: What must one think of God? I had not invented that thought about God and the cathedral, still less the dream that had befallen me at the age of three. A stronger will than mine had imposed both on me. Had nature been responsible? But nature was nothing other than the will of the Creator. Nor did it help to accuse the devil, for he too was a creature of God. God alone was real — annihilating fire and an indescribable grace.

What about the failure of the Communion to affect me? Was that my own failure? I had prepared for it in all earnestness, had hoped for an experience of grace and illumination, and nothing had happened. God had been absent. For God’s sake I now found myself cut off from the Church and from my father’s and everybody else’s faith. In so far as they all represented the Christian religion, I was an outsider. This knowledge filled me with a sadness which was to overshadow all the years until the time I entered the university.

I began looking in my father’s relatively modest library — which in those days seemed impressive to me — for books that would tell me what was known about God. At first I found only the traditional conceptions, but not what I was seeking — a writer who thought independently. At last I hit upon Biedermann’s Christliche Dogmatik, published in 1869. Here, apparently, was a man who thought for himself, who worked out his own views. I learned from him that religion was “a spiritual act consisting in man’s establishing his own relationship to God.” I disagreed with that, for I understood religion as something that God did to me; it was an act on His part, to which I must simply yield, for He was the stronger. My “religion” recognised no human relationship to God, for how could anyone relate to something so little known as God? I must know more about God in order to establish a relationship to him. In Biedermann’s chapter on “The Nature of God” I found that God showed Himself to be a “personality to be conceived after the analogy of the human ego: the unique, utterly supramundane ego who embraces the entire cosmos.”

As far as I knew the Bible, this definition seemed to fit. God has a personality and is the ego of the universe, just as I myself am the ego of my psychic and physical being. But here I encountered a formidable obstacle. Personality, after all, surely signifies character. Now, character is one thing and not another; that is to say, it involves certain specific attributes. But if God is everything, how can He still possess a distinguishable character? On the other hand, if He does have a character, He can only be the ego of a subjective, limited world. Moreover, what kind of character or what kind of personality does He have? Everything depends on that, for unless one knows the answer one cannot establish a relationship to Him.

I felt the strongest resistance to imagining God by analogy with my own ego. That seemed to me boundlessly arrogant, if not downright blasphemous. My ego was, in any case, difficult enough for me to grasp. In the first place, I was aware that it consisted of two contradictory aspects: No. 1 and No. 2. Second, in both its aspects my ego was extremely limited, subject to all possible self-deceptions and errors, moods, emotions, passions, and sins. It suffered far more defeats than triumphs, was childish, vain, self-seeking, defiant, in need of love, covetous, unjust, sensitive, lazy, irresponsible, and so on. To my sorrow it lacked many of the virtues and talents I admired and envied in others. How could this be the analogy according to which we were to imagine the nature of God?

Eagerly I looked up the other characteristics of God, and found them all listed in the way familiar to me from my instruction for confirmation. I found that according to Article 172 “the most immediate expression of the supramundane nature of God is (1) negative; His invisibility to men,” etc., “and (2) positive; His dwelling in Heaven,” etc. This was disastrous, for at once there rushed to my mind that blasphemous vision which God directly or indirectly (i.e., via the devil) had imposed on my will.

Article 183 informed me that “God’s supramundane nature with regard to the moral world” consists in His “justice,” which is not merely “judicial” but is also “an expression of His holy being.” I had hoped that this paragraph would say something about God’s dark aspects which were giving me so much trouble: His vindictiveness, His dangerous wrathfulness, His incomprehensible conduct towards the creatures His omnipotence had made, whose inadequacies He must know by virtue of that same omnipotence, and whom, moreover, it pleased Him to lead astray, or at least to test, even though He knew in advance the outcome of His experiments. What, indeed, was God’s character? What would we say of a human personality who behaved in this manner? I did not dare to think this question out to its conclusion. And then I read that God, “although sufficient unto Himself and needing nothing outside Himself,” had created the world “out of His satisfaction,” and “as a natural world has filled it with His goodness and as a moral world desires to fill it with His love.”

At first I pondered over the perplexing word “satisfaction.” Satisfaction with what or with whom? Obviously with the world, for He had looked upon His work and called it good. But it was just that I had never understood. Certainly the world is immeasurably beautiful, but it is quite as horrible. In a small village in the country, where there are few people and nothing happens, “old age, disease, and death” are experienced more intensely, in greater detail and more nakedly than elsewhere. Although I was not yet sixteen years old I had seen a great deal of the reality of the life of man and beast, and in church and school I had heard enough of the sufferings and corruption of the world. God could at most have felt “satisfaction” with paradise, but then He Himself had taken good care that the glory of paradise should not last too long by planting in it that poisonous serpent, the devil. Had He taken satisfaction in that too? I felt certain that Biedermann did not mean this, but was simply babbling on in that mindless way that characterised religious instruction, not even aware that he was writing nonsense. As I saw it, it was not at all unreasonable to suppose that God, for all that He probably did not feel any such cruel satisfaction in the unmerited sufferings of man and beast, had nevertheless intended to create a world of contradictions in which one creature devoured another and life meant simply being born to die. The “wonderful harmonies” of natural law looked to me more like a chaos tamed by fearful effort, and the “eternal” starry firmament with its predetermined orbits seemed plainly an accumulation of random bodies without order or meaning. For no one could really see the constellations people spoke about. They were mere arbitrary configurations.

I either did not see or gravely doubted that God filled the natural world with His goodness. This, apparently, was another of those points which must not be reasoned about but must be believed. In fact, if God is the highest good, why is the world, His creation, so imperfect, so corrupt, so pitiable? “Obviously it has been infected and thrown into confusion by the devil,” I thought. But the devil, too, was a creature of God. I had to read up on the devil. He seemed to be highly important after all. I again opened Biedermann’s book on Christian dogmatics and looked for the answer to this burning question. What were the reasons for suffering, imperfection, and evil? I could find nothing.

That finished it for me. This weighty tome on dogmatics was nothing but fancy drivel; worse still, it was a fraud or a specimen of uncommon stupidity whose sole aim was to obscure the truth. I was disillusioned and even indignant, and once more seized with pity for my father, who had fallen victim to this mumbo-jumbo.

But somewhere and at some time there must have been people who sought the truth as I was doing, who thought rationally and did not wish to deceive themselves and others and deny the sorrowful reality of the world. It was about this time that my mother, or rather, her No. 2 personality, suddenly and without preamble said, “You must read Goethe’s Faust one of these days.” We had a handsome edition of Goethe, and I picked out Faust. It poured into my soul like a miraculous balm. “Here at last,” I thought, “is someone who takes the devil seriously and even concludes a blood pact with him — with the adversary who has the power to frustrate God’s plan to make a perfect world.” I regretted Faust’s behaviour, for to my mind he should not have been so one-sided and so easily tricked. He should have been cleverer and also more moral. How childish he was to gamble away his soul so frivolously! Faust was plainly a bit of a windbag. I had the impression that the weight of the drama and its significance lay chiefly on the side of Mephistopheles. It would not have grieved me if Faust’s soul had gone to hell. He deserved it. I did not like the idea of the “cheated devil” at the end, for after all Mephistopheles had been anything but a stupid devil, and it was contrary to logic for him to be tricked by silly little angels. Mephistopheles seemed to me cheated in quite a different sense: he had not received his promised rights because Faust, that somewhat characterless fellow, had carried his swindle through right into the Hereafter. There, admittedly, his puerility came to light, but, as I saw it, he did not deserve the initiation into the great mysteries. I would have given him a taste of purgatorial fires. The real problem, it seemed to me, lay with Mephistopheles, whose whole figure made the deepest impression on me, and who, I vaguely sensed, had a relationship to the mystery of the Mothers.5 At any rate Mephistopheles and the great initiation at the end remained for me a wonderful and mysterious experience on the fringes of my conscious world.

At last I had found confirmation that there were or had been people who saw evil and its universal power, and — more important — the mysterious role it played in delivering man from darkness and suffering. To that extent Goethe became, in my eyes, a prophet. But I could not forgive him for having dismissed Mephistopheles by a mere trick, by a bit of jiggery-pokery. For me that was too theological, too frivolous and irresponsible, and I was deeply sorry that Geothe too had fallen for those cunning devices by which evil is rendered innocuous.

In reading the drama I had discovered that Faust had been a philosopher of sorts, and although he turned away from philosophy, he had obviously learned from it a certain receptivity to the truth. Hitherto I had heard virtually nothing of philosophy, and now a new hope dawned. Perhaps, I thought, there were philosophers who had grappled with these questions and could shed light on them for me.

Since there were no philosophers in my father’s library — they were suspect because they thought — I had to content myself with Krug’s General Dictionary of the Philosophical Sciences, second edition, 1832. I plunged forthwith into the article on God. To my discontent it began with the etymology of the word “God,” which, it said, “incontestably” derived from “good” and signified the ens summum or perfectissimum. The existence of God could not be proved, it continued, nor the innateness of the idea of God. The latter, however, could exist a priori in man, if not in actuality at any rate potentially. In any case our “intellectual powers” must “already be developed to a certain degree before they are capable of engendering so sublime an idea.”

This explanation astounded me beyond measure. What is wrong with these “philosophers”? I wondered. Evidently they know of God only by hearsay. The theologians are different in this respect, at any rate; at least they are sure that God exists, even though they make contradictory statements about Him. This lexicographer Krug expresses himself in so involved a manner that it is easy to see he would like to assert that he is already sufficiently convinced of God’s existence. Then why doesn’t he say so outright? Why does he pretend — as if he really thought that we “engender” the idea of God, and to do so must first have reached a certain level of development? So far as I knew, even the savages wandering naked in their jungles had such ideas. And they were certainly not “philosophers” who sat down to “engender an idea of God.” I never engendered any idea of God, either. Of course God cannot be proved, for how could, say, a clothes moth that eats Australian wool prove to other moths that Australia exists? God’s existence does not depend on our proofs. How had I arrived at my certainty about God? I was told all sorts of things about Him, yet I could believe nothing. None of it convinced me. That was not where my idea came from. In fact, it was not an idea at all — that is, not something thought out. It was not like imagining something and thinking it out and afterwards believing it. For example, all that about Lord Jesus was always suspect to me and I never really believed it, although it was impressed upon me far more than God, who was usually only hinted at in the background. Why have I come to take God for granted? Why do these philosophers pretend that God is an idea, a kind of arbitrary assumption which they can engender or not, when it is perfectly plain that He exists, as plain as a brick that falls on your head?

Suddenly I understood that God was, for me at least, one of the most certain and immediate of experiences. After all, I didn’t invent that horrible image about the cathedral. On the contrary, it was forced on me and I was compelled, with the utmost cruelty, to think it, and afterwards that inexpressible feeling of grace came to me. I had no control over these things. I came to the conclusion that there must be something the matter with these philosophers, for they had the curious notion that God was a kind of hypothesis that could be discussed. I also found it extremely unsatisfying that the philosophers offered no opinions or explanations about the dark deeds of God. These, it seemed to me, merited special attention and consideration from philosophy, since they constituted a problem which, I gathered, was rather a hard one for the theologians. All the greater was my disappointment to discover that the philosophers had apparently never even heard of it.