Monday, November 15, 2010

Athens and Jerusalem Redux


"I don't want to hear it," said R.  "It's of no account."
“But it’s always been taken by the cognoscenti as a key,” replied K.  “Even by the moderns.  How can we now leave it be?”
“Yes, two hundred plus years of that quest,” R said with a knowing smile, betraying just a touch of condescension.  “And to what end?”
“You expect me to say, a making-clear what is not, nicht wahr?" K spit back.  "But it's patience, not clarity, you will need at the gate.”

*******************
Compare Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, Riverhead, 1994, 9, quoting literary critic Kevin Hart.  'Western culture takes its lexicon of intelligibility from Greek philosophy, and all our talk of life and death, of form and design, is marked by relations with that tradition.'

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Rainer Maria Rilke and Martin Buber: Sages of the Lord





Rilke and Buber combine a skepticism about the conventions of their religions (i.e. Christianity and Judaism, respectively) with a reverence for God.

It is worth noting that Rilke and Buber both recoil at the idea that God is merely a human projection.

In his Preface to Reden ueber das Judentum (Speeches on Judaism, 1923) Buber underlines the sincerity of his theological position with uncharacteristic wit:

if there were no religious reality, if God were only a fiction, it would be mankind's duty to demolish it; for I can hardly imagine anything more insipid and indecent than the sanctioned feigning that God exists, and whoever (in contrast to the honest atheist) programmatically proceeds as if God existed well deserves that God proceed as if he, the feigner, did not exist.

Arguably, Rilke dramatizes his own repugnance at atheistic theology--talk of God by people who see God-talk as a human fabrication--in his Geschichten vom lieben Gott (Stories of the Good Lord, 1900), a cycle of thirteen tales of God's immanent presence in ordinary life.  In one of the most captivating of these, "Wie der Fingerhut dazu kam, der liebe Gott zu sein" ("How the Thimble Came to be the Good Lord"), seven children conspire to "carry the Good Lord for a day; that way," they scheme, "we'll always know where he is at any given moment."

"...for the sake of beauty [a thimble] became the Good Lord...A single glance was enough to tell who happened to have the Good Lord on that particular day.  Because the child in question walked around a bit more erect and more solemnly, and put on a Sunday face."

The Lord, then, is in the eye of the beholder, a childish attitude, a behavioral effect?  Indeed not for Rilke, as I have said.  Rilke dangles such wholly modernist interpretations before the reader, only to decisively withdraw them.  When, on the seventh day, "little Marie was asked to produce the Good Lord (for it was her turn to carry the thimble and she had received it that morning), she emptied her pockets but it was nowhere to be found.  

After the other children went home, Little Marie remained behind, searching tall grass for the thimble. 

The story continues, in part, as follows:

"'You'd do better to go home; you know, a new [thimble] can be bought.'

Then another man arrived.  He stooped over the child:
'What are you looking for?'

Now Marie replied, bravely and defiantly, though she was close to tears.
'The Good Lord.'

The stranger smiled and simply took her by the hand; she allowed herself to be led as if everything had now been settled.  

As they walked, the stranger said: 'Just look here at this pretty thimble I found today.'"

[I thank my friend, Leslie Belay, for suggesting this interpretation]