by Thomas Mann
But there is, if you like, a discipline in which Queen Philosophy becomes the servant, the ancillary science, academically speaking a subsidiary branch of another; and that other is theology. Where love of wisdom lifts itself to contemplation of the highest essence, the source of being, the study of God and the things of God, there, one might say, is the peak of scientific dignity, the highest and noblest sphere of knowledge, the apex of all thinking; to the inspired intellect its most exalted goal is here set. The most exalted because here the profane sciences, for instance my own, philology, as well as history and the rest, become a mere tool for the service of knowledge of the divine—and again, the goal to be pursued in the profoundest humility, because in the words of the Scriptures it is “higher than all reason” and the human spirit thereby enters into a more pious, trusting bond than that which any other of the learned professions lays upon him.
This went through my mind when Adrian told me of his decision. If he had made it out of an instinct of spiritual self-discipline, out of the wish to hedge in by a religious profession that cool and ubiquitous intellect of his, which grasped everything so easily and was so spoilt by its own superiority—then I should have agreed. It would not only have tranquillized my indefinite concern, always present, albeit silently; and moreover it would have touched me deeply, for the sacrificium intellectus, which of necessity contemplation and knowledge of the other world carries with it, must be esteemed the more highly, the more powerful the intellect that makes it. But I did not at bottom believe in my friend’s humility. I believed in his pride, of which for my part I was proud too, and could not really doubt that it was the source of his decision. Hence the mixture of joy and concern, the grounds of the shudder that went through me.
He saw my conflict and seemed to ascribe it to a third person, his music-teacher.
“You mean, of course, Kretschmar will be disappointed,” he said. “Naturally, I know he would have liked me to give myself to Polyhymnia. Strange, people always want you to follow the same path they do. One can’t please everybody. But I’ll remind him that through liturgy and her history music plays very strongly into the theological; more practically and artistically, indeed, than into the mathematical and physical, or into acoustics.”
In announcing his purpose of saying as much to Kretschmar, he was really, as I well knew, saying it to me; and when I was alone I thought of it again and again. Certainly, in relation to theology and the service of God, music—of course like all the arts, and also the secular sciences, but music in particular—took on an ancillary, auxiliary character. The thought was associated in my mind with certain discussions which we had had on the destiny of art, on the one hand very conducive, but on the other sadly hampering; we referred to her emancipation from cult, her cultural secularization. It was all quite clear to me: his choice had been influenced by his personal desire and his professional prospects, the wish to reduce music again to the position that once, in times he considered happier, she had held in the union of cults. Like the profane disciplines, so likewise music: he would see them all beneath the sphere to which he would dedicate himself as adept. And I got a strange vision, a sort of allegory of his point of view: it was like a baroque painting, an enormous altarpiece, whereon all the arts and sciences in humble and votive posture paid their devotions to theology enthroned.
Adrian laughed loudly at my vision when I told him about it. He was in high spirits at that time, much inclined to jest—and quite understandably. The moment of taking flight, when freedom dawns, when the school gate shuts behind us, the shell breaks, the chrysalis bursts, the world lies open—is it not the happiest, or the most exciting, certainly the most expectant in all our lives? Through his musical excursions with Wendell Kretschmar to the larger near-by cities, Adrian had tasted the outer world a few times; now Kaisersaschern, the place of witches and strangelings, of the instrument warehouse and the imperial tomb in the Cathedral, would finally loose its hold on him, and only on visits would he walk its streets, smiling like one aware of other spheres.
Was that true? Had Kaisersaschern ever released him? Did he not take her with him wherever he went and was he not conditioned by her whenever he thought to decide? What is freedom? Only the neutral is free. The characteristic is never free, it is stamped, determined, bound. Was it not “Kaisersaschern” that spoke in my friend’s decision to study theology? Adrian Leverkühn and Kaisersaschern: obviously the two together yielded theology. I asked myself further what else I had expected. He devoted himself later to musical composition. But if it was very bold music he wrote, was it after all “free” music, world music? That it was not. It was the music of one who never escaped; it was, into its most mysterious, inspired, bizarre convolution, in every hollow breath and echo it gave out, characteristic music, music of Kaisersaschern.
He was, I said, in high spirits at that time—and why not? Dispensed from oral examination on the basis of the maturity of his written work, he had taken leave of his teachers, with thanks for all they had done; while on their side respect for the profession he had chosen repressed the private annoyance they had always felt at his condescending facility. Even so, the worthy director of the School of the Brethren of the Common Life, a Pomeranian named Dr. Stoientin, who had been Adrian’s master in Greek, Middle High German, and Hebrew, did not fail at their private leave—taking to utter a word of warning.
“Vale,” he said, “and God be with you, Leverkühn.—The parting blessing comes from my heart, and whether you are of that opinion or not, it seems to me you may need it. You are a person richly gifted and you know it—as why should you not? You know too that He above, from whom all comes, gave you your gifts, for to Him you now offer them. You are right: natural merits are God’s merits in us, not our own. It is His foe who, fallen through pride himself, would teach us to forget. He is evil to entertain, a roaring lion who goes about seeking whom he may devour. You are among those who have reason to be on guard against his wiles. It is a compliment I am paying you, or rather to what you are from God. Be it in humility, my friend, not in defiance or with boasting; and be ever mindful that self-satisfaction is like a falling away and unthankfulness against the Giver of all mercies!”
Thus our honest schoolmaster, under whom later I served as teacher in the gymnasium. Adrian reported it smiling, on one of the many walks we took through field and forest, in that Eastertide at Buchel. For he spent several weeks of freedom there after leaving school, and his good parents invited me to bear him company. Well I remember the talks we had as we strolled, about Stoientin’s warning, especially about the expression “native merit” which he had used in his farewell. Adrian pointed out that he took it from Goethe, who enjoyed using it, and also “inborn merits,” seeking in the paradoxical combination to divorce from the word “merit” its moral character, and, conversely, to exalt the natural and inborn to a position of extra-moral, aristocratic desert. That was why he was against the claims of modesty which were always put forward by those disadvantaged by nature, and declared that “Only good-for-nothings are modest.” But Director Stoientin had used Goethe’s words more in Schiller’s sense, to whom everything had depended on freedom, and who therefore distinguished in a moral sense between talent and personal merit, sharply differentiating merit and fortune, which Goethe considered to be inextricably interwoven. The director followed Schiller, when he called nature God and native talent the merit of God in us, which we were to wear in humility.
“The Germans,” said the new undergraduate, a grass blade in his mouth, “have a two-track mind and an inexcusable habit of combination; they always want one thing and the other, they want to have it both ways. They are capable of turning out great personalities with antithetic principles of thought and life. But then they muddle them, using the coinage of the one in the sense of the other; mixing everything all up and thinking they can put freedom and aristocracy, idealism and natural childlikeness under one hat. But that probably does not do.”
“But they have bot
h in themselves,” I retorted; “otherwise they could not have exhibited both of them. A rich nation.”
“A confused nation,” he persisted, “and bewildering for the others.”
But on the whole we philosophized thus but little, in these leisurely country weeks. Generally speaking, he was more inclined to laughter and pranks than to metaphysical conversation. His sense of the comic, his fondness for it, his proneness to laughter, yes, to laughing till he cried, I have already spoken of, and I have given but a false picture of him if the reader has not seen this kind of abandon as an element in his nature. Of humour I would not speak; the word sounds for my ear too moderate, too good-natured to fit him. His love of laughter was more like an escape, a resolution, slightly orgiastic in its nature, of life’s manifold sternness; a product of extraordinary gifts, but to me never quite likable or healthy. Looking back upon the school life now ending, he gave this sense of the comic free rein, recalling droll types among pupils and teachers, or describing his last cultural expedition and some small-town opera performance, whose improvisations could not fail to be a source of mirth, though without detriment to the seriousness of the work performed. Thus a paunchy, knock-kneed King Heinrich in Lohengrin was the butt of much laughter; Adrian was like to split over the round black mouth-hole in a beard like a woolly rug, out of which there poured his thundering bass. That was but one instance, perhaps too concrete, of the occasions he found for his paroxysms. Oftener there was no occasion at all, it was the purest silliness, and I confess that I always had certain difficulties in seconding him. I do not love laughter so much, and when he abandoned himself to it I was always compelled to think of a story which I knew only from him. It was from St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei and was to the effect that Ham, son of Noah and father of Zoroaster the magian, had been the only man who laughed when he was born—which could only have happened by the help of the Devil. It came inevitably to my mind whenever the occasion arose; but probably it was only an accompaniment to other inhibitions I had; for instance, I realize that the look that I inwardly directed upon him was too serious, not free enough from anxious suspense, for me to follow him whole-heartedly in his abandon. And perhaps my own nature has a certain stiffness and dryness that makes me inapt.
Later he found in Rüdiger Schildknapp, a writer and Anglophile whose acquaintance he made in Leipzig, a far better partner in such moods—wherefore I have always been a little jealous of the man.
CHAPTER XI
At Halle theological and philological educational traditions are interwoven in many ways; and first of all in the historical figure of August Hermann Francke, patron saint of the town, so to speak: that pietistic pedagogue who at the end of the seventeenth century—in other words, soon after the foundation of the university—formed in Halle the famous Francke Foundation of schools and orphanages, and in his own person and by its influence united the religious interest with the humanistic and linguistic. And then the Castein Bible Institute, first authority for the revision of Luther’s language work, it too establishes a link between religion and textual criticism. Also there was active in Halle at that time an outstanding Latinist, Heinrich Osiander, at whose feet I ardently desired to sit; and more than that, as I heard from Adrian, the course in Church history given by Professor Hans Kegel, D. D., included an extraordinary amount of material for a student of profane history, which I wished to avail myself of, as I intended to elect history as my subsidiary course.
Thus there was good intellectual justification when, after studying for two semesters in Jena and Giessen, I decided to draw my further nourishment from the breast of Alma Mater Hallensis. And my imagination saw an advantage in the fact that it was identical with the University of Wittenberg, the two having been united when they were reopened after the Napoleonic Wars. Leverkühn had matriculated there a half-year before I joined him, and of course I do not deny that his presence had played a weighty, yes, a decisive part in my choice. Shortly after his arrival, and obviously out of some feeling of loneliness and forsakenness, he had even proposed to me to join him; and though some months would have to pass before I answered his call, I was at once ready, yes, probably would not have needed the invitation. My own wish to be near him, to see how he went on, what progress he made and how his talents unfolded in the air of academic freedom, this wish to live in daily intercourse with him, to watch over him, to have an eye on him from near by, would very likely have been enough of itself to take me to him. And there were besides, as I said, sufficing intellectual grounds.
Of course in these pages I can only picture in a foreshortened form, just as I did with his school-days, the two years of our youth that I spent at Halle with my friend; the course of them interrupted, indeed, by holidays in Kaisersaschern and at his father’s farm. Were they happy years? Yes, they were, in the sense that they were the core of a period when with my senses at their freshest I was freely seeing, searching, and gathering in. Happy too in that I spent them at the side of a childhood companion to whom I clung, yes, whose life-problem, his being and becoming, at bottom interested me more than my own. For my own was simple, I did not need to spend much thought on it, only to ensure by faithful work the postulates for its prescribed solution. His was higher and in a sense more puzzling, a problem upon which the concern about my own progress always left me much time and mental energy to dwell. If I hesitate to describe those years by the epithet “happy”—always a questionable word—it is because by association with him I was drawn much more effectively into his sphere of studies than he into mine, and the theological air did not suit me. It was not canny, it choked me; besides, it put me in an inward dilemma. The intellectual atmosphere there had been for centuries full of religious controversy, of those ecclesiastical brawls which have always been so detrimental to the humanistic impulse to culture. In Halle I felt a little like one of my scientific forebears, Crotus Rubeanus, who in 1530 was canon at Halle, and whom Luther called nothing else than “the Epicurean Crotus” or “Dr. Krote, lickspittle of the Cardinal at Mainz.” He even said “the Divel’s sow, the Pope,” and was in every way an intolerable boor, although a great man. I have always sympathized with the embarrassment that the Reformation caused to spirits like Crotus, because they saw in it an invasion of subjective arbitrariness into the objective statutes and ordinances of the Church. Crotus had the scholar’s love of peace; he gladly leaned to reasonable compromise, was not against the restitution of the Communion cup—and was indeed put after that in a painfully awkward position, through the detestable harshness with which his superior, Archbishop Albrecht, punished the enjoyment of the Communion at Halle in both kinds.
So goes it with tolerance, with love of culture and peace, between the fires of fanaticism. It was Halle that had the first Lutheran superintendent: Justus Jonas, who went thither in 1541 and was one of those who, like Melanchthon and Hutten, to the distress of Erasmus, had gone over from the humanistic camp to the reformers. But still worse in the eyes of the sage of Rotterdam was the hatred that Luther and his partisans brought down upon classical learning—Luther had personally little enough of it—as the source of the spiritual turmoil. But what went on then in the bosom of the Universal Church, the revolt of subjective wilfulness, that is, against the objective bond, was to repeat itself a hundred and some years later, inside Protestantism itself, as a revolution of pious feelings and inner heavenly joy against a petrified orthodoxy from which not even a beggar would any longer want to accept a piece of bread: as pietism, that is, which at the foundation of the University of Halle manned the whole theological faculty. It too, whose citadel the town now long remained, was, as formerly Lutheranism, a renewal of the Church, a reform and reanimation of the dying religion, already fallen into general indifference. And people like me may well ask themselves whether these recurrent rescues of a hope already declining to the grave are from a cultural point of view to be welcomed; whether the reformers are not rather to be regarded as backsliding types and bringers of evil. Beyond a doubt, endless
blood-letting and the most horrible self-laceration would have been spared the human race if Martin Luther had not restored the Church.
I should be sorry, after what I have said, to be taken for an utterly irreligious man. That I am not, for I go with Schleiermacher, another Halle theologian, who defined religion as “feeling and taste for the Infinite” and called it “a pertinent fact,” present in the human being. In other words, the science of religion has to do not with philosophical theses, but with an inward and given psychological fact. And that reminds me of the ontological evidence for the existence of God, which has always been my favourite, and which from the subjective idea of a Highest Being derives His objective existence. But Kant has shown in the most forthright words that such a thesis cannot support itself before the bar of reason. Science, however, cannot get along without reason; and to want to make a science out of a sense of the infinite and the eternal mysteries is to compel two spheres fundamentally foreign to each other to come together in a way that is in my eyes most unhappy and productive only of embarrassment. Surely a religious sense, which I protest is in no way lacking in me, is something other than positive and formally professed religion. Would it not have been better to hand over that “fact” of human feeling for the infinite to the sense of piety, the fine arts, free contemplation, yes, even to exact research, which as cosmology, astronomy, theoretical physics, can serve this feeling with entirely religious devotion to the mystery of creation—instead of singling it out as the science of the spirit and developing on it structures of dogma, whose orthodox believers will then shed blood for a copula? Pietism, by virtue of its overemotional nature, would indeed make a sharp division between piety and science, and assert that no movement, no change in the scientific picture, can have any influence on faith. But that was a delusion, for theology has at all times willy-nilly let itself be determined by the scientific currents of the epoch, has always wanted to be a child of its time, although the time (in greater or less degree) made that difficult for it and drove it into an anachronistic corner. Is there another discipline at whose mere name we feel ourselves in such a degree set back into the past, into the sixteenth, the twelfth century? There is here no possibility of adaptation, of concession to scientific critique. What these display is a hybrid half-and-half of science and belief in revelation, which lies on the way to self-surrender. Orthodoxy itself committed the blunder of letting reason into the field of religion, in that she sought to prove the positions of faith by the test of reason. Under the pressure of the Enlightenment, theology had almost nothing to do but defend herself against the intolerable contradictions which were pointed out to her: and only in order to get round them she embraced so much of the anti-revelation spirit that it amounted to an abandonment of faith. That was the time of the “reasonable worship of God,” of a generation of theologians in whose name Wolff declared at Halle: “Everything must be proved by reason, as on the philosophers’ stone”: a generation which pronounced that everything in the Bible which did not serve “moral betterment ” was out of date, and gave out that the history and teaching of the Church were in its eyes only a comedy of errors. Since this went a little too far, there arose an accommodation theology, which sought to uphold a conservative middle ground between orthodoxy and a liberalism already by virtue of its reasonableness inclined to demoralization. But the two ideas “preserving” and “abandoning” have since then conditioned the life of “the science of religion”—ideas both of which have something provisional about them, for theology therewith prolonged its life. In its conservative form, holding to revelation and the traditional exegesis, it sought to save what was to be saved of the elements of Bible religion; on the other hand it liberally accepted the historico-critical methods of the profane science of history and abandoned to scientific criticism its own most important contents: the belief in miracles, considerable portions of Christology, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and what not besides. But what sort of science is that, which stands in such a forced and precarious relation to reason, constantly threatened with destruction by the very compromises that she makes with it? In my view “liberal theology” is a contradictio in adjecto,” a contradiction in terms. A proponent of culture, ready to adapt itself to the ideals of bourgeois society, as it is, it degrades the religious to a function of the human; the ecstatic and paradoxical elements so essential to the religious genius it waters down to an ethical progressiveness. But the religious cannot be satisfied in the merely ethical, and so it comes about that scientific thought and theological thought proper part company again. The scientific superiority of liberal theology, it is now said, is indeed incontestable, but its theological position is weak, for its moralism and humanism lack insight into the daemonic character of human existence. Cultured indeed it is, but shallow; of the true understanding of human nature and the tragic nature of life the conservative tradition has at bottom preserved far more; for that very reason it has a profounder, more significant relation to culture than has progressive bourgeois ideology.