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the bread came from our baker, whose baked goods were
general y 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
swal ow of the wine--I knew the tavern from which it had come--and
passed the cup to one of the old men. Al 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 al other
performances in church--baptisms, funerals, and so on. I had the
impression that something was being performed here, in the
traditional y correct manner. My father, too, seemed to be chiefly
concerned with going through it al 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 al other memorial services
the date was stressed. I saw no sadness and no joy, and felt that
the feast was meager in every respect, considering the
extraordinary importance of the person whose memory was being
celebrated. It did not compare at al 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 smal est sip, was thin
and rather sour plainly not of the best. Then came the final prayer,
and the people went out, neither depressed nor il umined 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 social y elevated and by implication
accepted into the society of men. That day, too, Sunday dinner was
an unusual y good one. I would be able to strol about in my new suit
al day. But otherwise I was empty and did not know what I was
feeling.
Only gradual y, in the course of the fol owing 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 al 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 al 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 cal ed the
"Son of God"--a demigod, therefore, like the Greek heroes: how
then could an ordinary person become one with him? This was
cal ed 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 hol ow; 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 al ," 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. Al 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 tyrannized over me, to 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 natural y tries to save
himself. People cling one-sidedly to His love and goodness, for fear
they wil fal 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, stil less the dream that
had befal en me at the age of three. A stronger wil than mine had
imposed both on me. Had nature been responsible? But nature
was nothing other than the wil of the Creator. Nor did it help to
accuse the devil, for he too was a creature of God. God alone was
real--an annihilating fire and an indescribable grace.
What about the failure of Communion to affect me? Was that my
own failure? I had prepared for it in al earnestness, had hoped for
an experience of grace and il umination, 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. Insofar as they al represented the Christian religion, I
was an outsider. This knowledge fil ed me with a sadness which
was to overshadow al 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 tel 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
Dogmotik, 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" recognized 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 al , 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 stil 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 resistances 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 al 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 al 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 dwel ing
in Heaven," etc. This was disastrous, for at once there rushed to my
mind the blasphemous vision which God directly or indirectly (i.e.,
via the devil) had imposed on my wil .
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 toward
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 fil ed it with His goodness and as a moral world desires to fil 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 cal ed it good. But it was just this
that I had never understood. Certainly the world is immeasurably
beautiful, but it is quite as horrible. In a smal vil age in the country,
where there are few people and nothing much 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 characterized religious
instruction, not even aware that he was writing nonsense. As I saw
it, it was not at al unreasonable to suppose that God, for al 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 real y see the constel ations people
spoke about. They were mere arbitrary configurations.
I either did not see or gravely doubted that God fil ed 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 al . 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 stil , it was a fraud or a specimen of
uncommon stupidity whose sole aim was to obscure the truth. I was
disil usioned and even indignant, and once more seized with pity for
my father, who had fal en 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 rational y 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 behavior, 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 hel . He deserved it. I
did not like the idea of the "cheated devil" at the end, for after al
Mephistopheles had been anything but a stupid devil, and it was
contrary to logic for him to be tricked by sil y little angels.
Mephistopheles seemed to me cheated in quite a different sense:
he had not received his promised rights because Faust, that
somewhat characterless fel ow, 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. 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.
* "Faust, Part Two, trans. by Philip Wayne (Harmondsworth, England,
Penguin Books Ltd, 1959), pp. 76ff. 60
For me that was too theological, too frivolous and irresponsible,
and I was deeply sorry that Goethe too had fal en 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 virtual y
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
potential y. In any case our "intel ectual 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 real y 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 al 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 al --that is, not something
thought out. It was not like imagining something and thinking it out
and afterward believing it. For example, al that about Lord Jesus
was always suspect to me and I never real y believed it, although it
was impressed upon me far more than God, who was usual y 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 fal s on your
head?
Suddenly I understood that God was, for me at least, one of the
most certain and immediate of experiences. After al , I didn't invent
that horrible image about the cathedral. On the contrary, it was
forced on me and I was compel ed, with the utmost cruelty, to think
it, and afterward 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. Al the greater was my disappointment to discover that
the philosophers had apparently never even heard of it.
I therefore passed on to the next topic that interested me, the article
on the devil. If I read, we conceived of the devil as original y evil, we
would become entangled in patent contradictions, that is to say we
would fal into dualism. Therefore we would do better to assume that
the devil was original y created a good being but had been
corrupted by his pride. However; as the author of the article pointed
out--and I was glad to see this point made--this hypothesis
presupposed the evil it was attempting to explain--namely, pride.
For the rest, he continued, the origin of evil was "unexplained and
inexplicable"--which meant to me: Like the theologians, he does not
want to think about it. The article on evil and its origin proved
equal y unil uminating.
The account I have given here summarizes trains of thought and
developments of ideas which, broken by long. intervals, extended
over several years. They went on exclusively in my No. 2
personality, and were strictly private. I used my father's library for
these researches, secretly and without asking his permission. In the
intervals, personality No. 1 openly read al the novels of Gerstacker,
and German translations of the classic English novels. I also began
reading German literature, concentrating on those classics which
school, with its needlessly laborious explanations of the obvious,
had not spoiled for me. I read vastly and planlessly, drama, poetry,
history, and later natural science. Reading was not only interesting
but provided a welcome and beneficial distraction from the
preoccupations of personality No. 2., which in increasing measure
were leading me to depressions. For everywhere in the realm of
religious questions I encountered only locked doors, and if ever one
door should chance to open I was disappointed by what lay behind
it. Other people al seemed to have total y different concerns. I felt
completely alone with my certainties. More than ever I wanted
someone to talk with, but nowhere did I find a point of contact; on
the contrary, I sensed in others an estrangement, a distrust, an
apprehension which robbed me of speech. That, too, depressed
me. I did not know what to make of it. Why has no one had
experiences similar to mine? I wondered. Why is there nothing
about it in scholarly books? Am I the only one who has had such
experiences? Why should I be the only one? It never occurred to me
that I might be crazy, for the light and darkness of God seemed to
me facts that could be understood even though they o