It would be difficult to describe my thoughts and emotions as I went
home. The soul cannot at once translate itself perfectly in words, and
there are "thoughts without words," which in every man are the prelude
of supreme joy and suffering. It was neither joy nor pain, only an
indescribable bewilderment which I felt; thoughts flew through my
innermost being like meteors, which shoot from heaven towards earth but
are extinguished before they reach the goal. As we sometimes say in a
dream, "I am dreaming," so I said to myself "thou livest"--"it is she."
I tried again to reflect and calm myself, and said, "She is a lovely
vision--a very wonderful spirit." At another time, I pictured the
delightful evenings I should pass during the holidays. But no, no,
this cannot be. She is everything I sought, thought, hoped and
believed. Here was at last a human soul, as clear and fresh as a
spring morning. I had seen at the first glance what she was and how
she felt, and we had greeted and recognized one another. And my good
angel in me, she answered me no more. She was gone and I felt there
was no place on earth where I should find her again.
Now began a beautiful life, for I was with her every evening. We soon
realized that we were in truth old acquaintances and that we could only
call each other Thou. It seemed also as if we had lived near and with
one another always, for she manifested not an emotion that did not find
its counterpart in my soul, and there was no, thought which I uttered
to which she did not nod friendly assent, as much as to say: "I thought
so too." I had previously heard the greatest master of our time and
his sister extemporize on the piano, and scarcely comprehended how two
persons could understand and feel themselves so perfectly and yet
never, not even in a single note, disturb the harmony of their playing.
Now it became intelligible to me. Yes, now I understood for the first
time that my soul was not so poor and empty as it had seemed to me, and
that it had been only the sun that was lacking to open all its germs,
and buds to the light. And yet what a sad and brief spring-time it was
that our souls experienced! We forget in May that roses so soon
wither, but here every evening reminded us that one leaf after another
was falling to the ground. She felt it before I did, and alluded to it
apparently without pain, and our interviews grew more earnest and
solemn daily.
One evening, as I was about to leave, she said: "I did not think I
should grow so old. When I gave you the ring on my confirmation day I
thought I should have to take my departure from you all, very soon.
And yet I have lived so many years, and enjoyed so much beauty--and
suffered so very much! But one forgets that! Now, while I feel that
my departure is near, every hour, every minute, grows precious to me.
Good night! Do not come too late to-morrow."
One day as I went into her room, I met an Italian painter with her.
She spoke Italian with him, and although he was evidently more artisan
than artist, she addressed him with such amiability and modesty, with
such respect even, one could not avoid recognizing that nobility of
soul which is the true nobility of birth. When the painter had taken
his leave, she said to me: "I wish to show you a picture which will
please you. The original is in the gallery at Paris. I read a
description of it, and have had it copied by the Italian." She showed
me the painting, and waited my opinion. It was a picture of a man of
middle age, in the old German costume. The expression was dreamy and
resigned, and so characteristic that no one could doubt this man once
lived. The whole tone of the picture in the foreground was dark and
brownish; but in the background was a landscape, and on the horizon the
first gleams of daybreak appeared. I could discover nothing special in
the picture, and yet it produced a feeling of such satisfaction that
one might have tarried to look at it for hours at a time. "There is
nothing like a genuine human face," said I; "Raphael himself could not
have imagined a face like this."
"No," said she. "But now I will tell you why I wished to have the
picture. I read that no one knew the artist, nor whom the picture
represents. But it is very clearly a philosopher of the Middle Ages.
Just such a picture I wanted for my gallery, for you are aware that no
one knows the author of the 'German Theology,' and moreover, that we
have no picture of him. I wished to try whether the picture of an
Unknown by an Unknown would answer for our German theologian, and if
you have no objections we will hang it here between the 'Albigenses'
and the 'Diet of Worms,' and call it the 'German Theologian.'"
"Good," said I; "but it is somewhat too vigorous and manly for the
Frankforter."
"That may be," replied she. "But for a suffering and dying life like
mine, much consolation and strength may be derived from his book. I
thank him much, for it disclosed to me for the first time the true
secret of Christian doctrine in all its simplicity. I felt that I was
free to believe or disbelieve the old teacher, whoever he may have
been, for his doctrines had no external constraint upon me; at last it
seized upon me with such power that it seemed to me I knew for the
first time what revelation was. It is precisely this fact that bars so
many out from true Christianity, namely: that its doctrines confront us
as revelation before revelation takes place in ourselves. This has
often given me much anxiety; not that I had ever doubted the truth and
divinity of our religion, but I felt I had no right to a belief which
others had given me, and that what I, had learned and received when a
child, without comprehending, did not belong to me. One can believe
for us as little as one can live and die for us."
"Certainly," said I; "therein lies the cause of many hot and bitter
struggles; that the teachings of Christ, instead of winning our hearts
gradually and irresistibly, as they won the hearts of the apostles and
early Christians, confront us from the earliest childhood as the
infallible law of a mighty church, and demand of us an unconditional
submission, which they call faith. Doubts arise sooner or later in the
breast of every one who has the power of thinking and reverence for the
truth; and then even when we are on the right road, to overcome our
faith, the terrors of doubt and unbelief arise and disturb the tranquil
development of the new life."
"I read recently in an English work," she interrupted, "that truth
makes revelation, and not revelation truth. This perfectly expressed
what I found in reading the 'German Theology.' I read the book, and I
felt the power of its truths so overwhelmingly that I was compelled to
submit to it. The truth was revealed to me; or rather, I was revealed
to myself, and I felt for the first time what belief meant. The truth
which had long slumbered in my soul belonged to me, but it was the word
of the unknown teacher which filled me with light, illuminated my inner
vision, and brought out my indistinct presentiments in fuller clearness
before my soul. When I had thus experienced for the first time how the
human soul can believe, I read the Gospels as if they, too, had been
written by an Unknown man, and banished the thought as well as I could
that they were an inspiration from the Holy Ghost to the apostles, in
some wonderful manner; that they had been endorsed by the councils and
proclaimed by the church as the supreme authority of the alone-saving
belief. Then, for the first time, I understood what Christian faith
and revelation were."
"It is wonderful," said I, "that the theologians have not broken down
all religion, and they will succeed yet, if the believers do not
seriously confront them and say: 'Thus far but no farther.' Every
church must have its servants, but there has been as yet no religion
which the Priests, the Brahmins, the Schamins, the Bonzes, the Lamas,
the Pharisees, or the Scribes have not corrupted and perverted. They
wrangle and dispute in a language unintelligible to nine-tenths of
their congregations, and instead of permitting themselves to be
inspired by the apostles, and of inspiring others with their
inspiration, they construct long arguments to show that the Gospels
must be true, because they were written by inspired men. But this is
only a makeshift for their own unbelief. How can they know that these
men were inspired in a wonderful manner, without ascribing to
themselves a still more wonderful inspiration? Therefore they extend
the gift of inspiration to the fathers of the church; they attribute to
them those very things which the majority have incorporated in the
canons of the councils; and there again, when the question arises how
we know that of fifty bishops twenty-six were inspired and twenty-four
were not, they finally take the last desperate step, and say that
infallibility and inspiration are inherent in the heads of the church
down to the present day, through the laying on of hands, so that
infallibility, majority and inspiration make all our convictions, all
resignation, all devout intuitions, superfluous. And yet,
notwithstanding all these connecting links, the first question returns
in all its simplicity: How can B know that A is inspired, if B is not
equally, or even more, inspired than A? For it is of more consequence
to know that A was inspired than for one's self to be inspired."
"I have never comprehended this so clearly myself," said she. "But I
have often felt how difficult it must be to know whether one loves who
shows not a sign of love that could not be imitated. And, again, I
have thought that no one could know it unless he knew love himself, and
that he could only believe in the love of another so far as he believed
in his own love. As with the gift of love so is it with the gift of
the Holy Spirit. They upon whom it descended heard a rushing from
heaven as of a mighty wind, and there appeared to them cloven tongues
like as of fire. But the rest were either amazed and perplexed, or
they made sport of them and said: 'They are full of sweet wine.'
"Still, as I said to you, it is the 'German Theology' to which I am
indebted for learning to believe in my belief, and what will seem a
weakness to many, strengthened me the most; namely, that the old master
never stops to demonstrate his propositions rigidly, but scatters them
like a sower, in the hope that some grains will fall upon good soil and
bear fruit a thousand fold. So our Divine Master never attempted to
prove his doctrines, for the perfect conviction of truth disdains the
form of a demonstration."
"Yes," I interrupted her, for I could not help thinking of the
wonderful chain of proof in Spinoza's 'Ethics,' the straining after
demonstration by Spinoza gives me the impression that this acute
thinker could not have believed in his own doctrines with his whole
heart, and that he therefore felt the necessity of fastening every mesh
of his net with the utmost care. "Still," I continued, "I must
acknowledge I do not share this great admiration for the 'German
Theology,' although I owe the book many a doubt. To me there is a lack
of the human and the poetical in it, and of warm feeling and reverence
for reality altogether. The entire mysticism of the fourteenth century
is wholesome as a preparative, but it first reaches solution in the
divinely holy and divinely courageous return to real life, as was
exemplified by Luther. Man must at some time in his life recognize his
nothingness. He must feel that he is nothing of himself, that his
existence, his beginning, his everlasting life are rooted in the
superearthly and incomprehensible. That is the returning to God which
in reality is never concluded on earth but yet leaves behind in the
soul a divine home sickness, which never again ceases. But man cannot
ignore the creation as the Mystics would. Although created out of
nothing, that is, through and out of God, he cannot of his own power
resolve himself back into this nothingness. The self-annihilation of
which Tauler so often speaks is scarcely better than the sinking away
of the human soul in Nirvana, as the Buddhists have it. Thus Tauler
says: 'That if he by greater reverence and love could reach the highest
existence in non-existence, he would willingly sink from his height
into the deepest abyss.' But this annihilation of the creature was not
the purpose of the Creator since he made it. 'God is transformed in
man,' says Augustine, 'not man in God.' Thus mysticism should be only
a fire-trial which steels the soul but does not evaporate it like
boiling water in a kettle. He who has recognized the nothingness of
self ought to recognize this self as a reflection of the actual divine.
The 'German Theology' says:
["Was nu us geflossen ist, das ist nicht war wesen, und hat kein wesen
anders dan in dem volkomen, sunder es ist ein zufal oder ein glast und
ein schin, der nicht wesen ist oder nicht wesen hat anders, dan in dem
sewer, da der glast us flusset, als in der sunnen oder in einem
liechte."]
"What has flown out is not real substance and has no other reality
except in the perfect; but it is an incident or a glare or a shimmer,
which is no substance, and has no other reality, except in the fire
from which a glare proceeds, as in the sun or a light."
"What is emitted from the divine, though it be only like the reflection
from the fire, still has the divine reality in itself, and one might
almost ask what were the fire without glow, the sun without light, or
the Creator without the creature? These are questions of which it is
said very truthfully:
["Welch mensche und welche creatur begert zu erfaren und zu wissen den
heimlichen rat und willen gottes, der begert nicht anders denne als
Adam tet und der boese geist."]
"What man or creature desires to learn and to know the secret counsel
and will of God--desires nothing else but what Adam did and the evil
spirit.
"For this reason, it should be enough for us to feel and to appear that
we are a reflection of the divine until we are divine. No one should
place under a bushel or extinguish the divine light which illuminates
us, but let it beam out, that it may brighten and warm all about it.
Then one feels a living fire in his veins, and a higher consecration
for the struggle of life. The most trivial duties remind us of God.
The earthly becomes divine, the temporal eternal, and our entire life a
life in God. God is not eternal repose. He is everlasting life, which
Angelus Silesius forgets when he says: 'God is without will.'
"'We pray: 'Thy will my Lord and God be done,'
And lo, He has no will! He is an eternal silence.'"
She listened to me quietly, and, after a moment's reflection, said:
"Health and strength belong to your faith; but there are life-weary
souls, who long for rest and sleep, and feel so lonely that when they
fall asleep in God, they miss the world as little as the world misses
them. It is a foretaste of divine rest to them when they can wrap
themselves in the divine; and this they can do, since no tie binds them
fast to earth, and no wish troubles their hearts except the wish for
rest.
"'Rest is the highest good, and were God not rest,
Then would I avert my gaze even from Him.'
"You do the German theologian an injustice. It is true he teaches the
nothingness of the external life, but he does not wish to see it
annihilated. Read me the twenty-eighth chapter."