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]
A reader of this blog wrote me privately that perhaps we, as readers of Rilke's "How the Thimble became the good Lord," are to value the absence of the thimble as an advance beyond a materialization of God.
ReplyDeleteThis is an intriguing possibility, since it would reverse the surface meaning of the tale, namely, that the absence of a tangible sign of God needs to be remediated, and that the thimble, gone missing, neesd to be retrieved.
It is also intriguing because reminiscent of the "via negativa," of classical Jewish thought, the idea that God's incomparable difference from any world material represents the height of theological insight.
I do think, though, that, in taking this interpretive option, we are departing from the mood Rilke sets in the story, and perhaps even from his worldview more generally.
The commitment to "render visible what is spiritual," that is, to materialize and concretize what might otherwise remain an abstract idea of God or human being, is central to Rilke's art. (For the context for this Rilke quote, see *The Poet's Guide to Life The Wisdom of Rilke, ed. U. Baer, p. 174)
As I shall try to point out in future comments, this commitment is also central to Buber's writing.
I thought this was a wonderful "legend" in a wonderful book. I did wonder if we could read the search for the thimble as the search for God, the point being that the process of searching for God brings us to, or, at least closer to, God.
ReplyDeleteGood morning everyone.
ReplyDeleteI posted a comment several days ago that did not register on this site and am just checking to see whether this will go through.
In general, I disagree with the interpretation posited above. I think the thimble is a fetish onto which aspects of God are projected, not a reflection of "God's incomparable difference from any world material" or "rendering visible what is spiritual," because one statement we can make about God (in the positive) is that He is generative or (in the negative) He is not barren. The thimble is barren.
I am particularly interested in the Russian connection in Rilke and one of the Kafka stories we'll be discussing on Sunday and look forward to comments and discussion on that topic.
As Kathryn intimates, an interest and even fascination with "life in the East" (i.e. agrarian religious folk piety and oral culture; Hasidim; Russian Orthodoxy) is a significant theme running through the life and work of Rilke, Kafka and Buber. Worth exploring further!
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