by Thomas Mann
Here one sees clearly the infiltration of theological thinking by irrational currents of philosophy, in whose realm, indeed, the non-theoretic, the vital, the will or instinct, in short the daemonic, have long since become the chief theme of theory. At the same time one observes a revival of the study of Catholic mediaeval philosophy, a turning to Neo-Thomism and Neo-Scholasticism. On these lines theology, grown sickly with liberalism, can take on deeper and stronger, yes, more glowing hues; it can once more do justice to the ancient aesthetic conceptions which are involuntarily associated with its name. But the civilized human spirit, whether one call it bourgeois or merely leave it at civilized, cannot get rid of a feeling of the uncanny. For theology, confronted with that spirit of the philosophy of life which is irrationalism, is in danger, by its very nature, of becoming daemonology.
I say all this only in order to explain the discomfort caused in me at times by my stay in Halle and my participation in Adrian’s studies, the lectures that I followed as a guest hearer in order to hear what he heard. I found in him no understanding for my uneasiness. He liked to talk over with me the theological problems touched on in the lectures and debated in the seminar; but he avoided any discussion that would have gone to the root of the matter and have dealt with the problematic position of theology among the sciences, and thus he evaded precisely the point which to my easily aroused anxiety was more pressing than all the rest. And so it was in the lectures as well: and so it went in association with his fellow-students, the members of the Christian Students’ Union Winfried, which he had joined on external grounds and whose guest I sometimes was. Of that perhaps more later. Here I will only say that some of these young people were the pale-complexioned “candidate” type, some robust as peasants, some also distinguished figures who obviously came from good academic circles. But they were all theologians, and conducted themselves as such with a decent and godly cheerfulness. How one can be a theologian, how in the spiritual climate of the present day one comes on the idea of choosing this calling, unless, indeed, it were simply by the operation of family tradition, they did not say, and for my part it would have been tactless and prying to cross-examine them. A forthright question on the subject could at most have been in place and had any chance of results in the course of a students’ evening jollification, when tongues and brains were loosened and livened by drink. But of course the members of Winfried were superior; they condemned not only duelling but also “boozing,” and so they were always sober—that is, they were inaccessible to questions they might not like to answer. They knew that State and Church needed ghostly officers, and they were preparing themselves for that career. Theology was to them something given—and something historically given it certainly is.
I had to put up with it too, when Adrian took it in the same way, although it pained me that regardless of our friendship, rooted in early days as it was, he no more permitted the question than did his comrades. That shows how little he let one approach him; what fixed bounds he set to intimacy. But did I not say that I had found his choice of a profession significant and characteristic? Have I not explained it with the word “Kaisersaschern”? Often I called the thought to my aid when the problem of Adrian’s field of study plagued me. I said to myself that both of us had shown ourselves true children of that corner of German antiquity where we had been brought up, I as humanist and he as theologian. And when I looked round in our new circle I found that our theatre had indeed broadened but not essentially changed.
CHAPTER XII
Halle was, if not a metropolis, at least a large city, with more than two hundred thousand inhabitants. Yet despite all the modern volume of its traffic, it did not, at least in the heart of the town, where we both lived, belie its lofty antiquity. My “shop,” as we students said, was in the Hansastrasse, a narrow lane behind the Church of St. Moritz, which might well have run its anachronistic course in Kaisersaschern. Adrian had found an alcoved room in a gabled dwelling-house in the Market Square, renting from the elderly widow of an official during the two years of his stay. He had a view of the square, the mediaeval City Hall, the Gothic Marienldrche, whose domed towers were connected by a sort of Bridge of Sighs; the separate “Red Tower,” a very remarkable structure, also in Gothic style; the statue of Roland and the bronze statue of Handel. The room was not much more than adequate, with some slight indication of middle-class amenity in the shape of a red plush cover on the square table in front of the sofa, where his books lay and he drank his breakfast coffee. He had supplemented the arrangements with a rented cottage piano always strewn with sheets of music, some written by himself. On the wall above the piano was an arithmetical diagram fastened with drawing-pins, something he had found in a second-hand shop: a so-called magic square, such as appears also in Dürer’s Melancolia, along with the hour-glass, the circle, the scale, the polyhedron, and other symbols. Here as there, the figure was divided into sixteen Arabic-numbered fields, in such a way that number one was in the right-hand lower corner, sixteen in the upper left; and the magic, or the oddity, simply consisted in the fact that the sum of these numerals, however you added them, straight down, crosswise, or diagonally, always came to thirty-four. What the principle was upon which this magic uniformity rested I never made out, but by virtue of the prominent place Adrian had given it over the piano, it always attracted the eye, and I believe I never visited his room without giving a quick glance, slanting up or straight down and testing once more the invariable, incredible result.
Between my quarters and Adrian’s there was a going to and fro as once between the Blessed Messengers and his uncle’s house: evenings after theatre, concert, or a meeting of the Winfried Verein, also in the mornings when one of us fetched the other to the university and before we set out we compared out notebooks. Philosophy, the regular course for the first examination in theology, was the point at which our two programs coincided, and both of us had put ourselves down with Kolonat Nonnenmacher, then one of the luminaries of the University of Halle. With great brilliance and elan he discussed the pre-Socratic, the Ionian natural philosophers, Anaximander, and more extendedly Pythagoras, in the course of which discussion a good deal of Aristotle came in, since it is almost entirely through the Stagirite that we learn of the Pythagorean theory of the universe. We listened, we wrote down; from time to time we looked up into the mildly smiling face of the white-maned professor, as we heard this early cosmological conception of a stern and pious spirit, who elevated his fundamental passion, mathematics, abstract proportion, number, to the principle of the origin and existence of the world; who, standing opposite All-Nature as an initiate, a dedicated one, first addressed her with a great gesture as “Cosmos,” as order and harmony, as the interval-system of the spheres, sounding beyond the range of the senses. Number, and the relation of numbers, as constituting an all-embracing concept of being and moral value: it was highly impressive, how the beautiful, the exact, the moral, here solemnly flowed together to comprise the idea of authority which animated the Pythagorean order, the esoteric school of religious renewal of life, of silent obedience and strict subjection under the “Autos epha.” I must chide myself for being tactless, because involuntarily I glanced at Adrian at such words, to read his look. Or rather it became tactless simply because of the discomfort, the red, averted face, with which he met my gaze. He did not love personal glances, he altogether refused to entertain them or respond to them, and it is hard to understand why I, aware though I was of this peculiarity, could not always resist looking at him. By so doing I threw away the possibility of talking objectively afterwards, without embarrassment, on topics to which my wordless look had given a personal reference.
So much the better when I had resisted such temptation and practised the discretion he exacted. How well, for instance, we talked, going home after Nonnenmacher’s class, about that immortal thinker, influential down the millennia, to whose mediation and sense of history we owe our knowledge of the Pythagorean conception of the world! Aristotle’s doctrine of
matter and form enchanted us; matter as the potential, possible, that presses towards form in order to realize itself; form as the moving unmoved, that is mind and soul, the soul of the existing that urges it to self-realization, self-completion in the phenomenon; thus of the entelechy, which, a part of eternity, penetrates and animates the body, manifests itself shapingly in the organic and guides its motive-power, knows its goal, watches over its destiny. Nonnenmacher had spoken beautifully and impressively about these intuitions, and Adrian appeared extraordinarily impressed thereby. “When,” he said, “theology declares that the soul is from God, that is philosophically right, for as the principle which shapes the single manifestations, it is a part of the pure form of all being, comes from the eternally self-contemplating contemplation which we call God… I believe I understand what Aristotle meant by the word ‘entelechy.’ It is the angel of the individual, the genius of his life, in whose all-knowing guidance it gladly confides. What we call prayer is really the statement of this confidence, a notice-giving or invocation. But prayer it is correctly called, because it is at bottom God whom we thus address.”
I could only think: May thine own angel prove himself faithful and wise!
How I enjoyed hearing this course of lectures at Adrian’s side! But the theological ones, which I-though not regularly-attended on his account, were for me a more doubtful pleasure; and I went to them only in order not to be cut off from what occupied him. In the curriculum of a theology student in the first years the emphasis is on history and exegesis, history of the Church and of dogma, Assyriology and a variety of special subjects. The middle years belong to systematics; that is to say, to the philosophy of religion, ethics, and apologetics. At the end come the practical disciplines, the science of preaching, catechesis, the care of souls, Church law, and the science of Church government. But academic freedom leaves much room for personal preference, and Adrian made use of it to throw over the regular order, devoting himself from the first to systematics, out of general intellectual interest, of course, which in this field comes most to account; but also because its professor, Ehrenfried Kumpf, was the “meatiest” lecturer in the whole university and had altogether the largest attendance from students of all years, not only theological ones. I said indeed that we both heard Church history from Kegel, but those were comparatively dull hours, and the tedious Kegel could by no means vie with Kumpf.
The latter was very much what the students called a “powerful personality”; even I could not forgo a certain admiration for his temperament, though I did not like him in the least and have never been able to believe that Adrian was not at times unpleasantly impressed by his crude heartiness, though he did not make fun of him openly. Powerful he certainly was, in his physical person; a big, full-bodied, massive man with hands like cushions, a thundering voice, and an underlip that protruded slightly from much talking and tended to spit and sputter. It is true that Kumpf usually read his lecture from a printed textbook, his own production; but his glory was the so-called “extra punches” which he interpolated, delivered with his fists thrust into his vertical trouser-pockets past the flung-back frock coat, as he stumped up and down on his platform. Thanks to their spontaneity, bluntness, coarse and hearty good humour, and picturesquely archaic style, they were uncommonly popular with the students. It was his way-to quote him-to say a thing “in good round terms, no mealy-mouthing” or “in good old German, without mincing matters.” Instead of “gradually” he said “by a little and a little”; instead of “I hope” he said “I hope and trow”; he never spoke of the Bible otherwise than as Godes Boke. He said “There’s foul work” instead of “There’s something wrong.” Of somebody who, in his view, was involved in scientific error, he said “He’s in the wrong pew”; of a vicious man: “he spends his life like the beasts of the field.” He loved expressions like: “He that will eat the kernel must crack the nut”; or “It pricketh betimes that will be a sharp thorn.” Mediaeval oaths like “Gogs wownds,” by “Goggys bodye,” even “by the guts of Goliath” came easily to his lips and-especially the last-were received by the students with lusty tramplings.
Theologically speaking, Kumpf was a representative of that middle-of-the-road conservatism with critical and liberal traits to which I have referred. As a student he was, as he told us in his peripatetic extempores, dead set on classical literature and philosophy, and boasted of having known by heart all of Schiller’s and Goethe’s “weightier” works. But then something had come over him, connected with the revival movement of the middle of the previous century, and the Pauline gospel of sin and justification made him turn away from aesthetic humanism. One must be a born theologian to estimate properly such spiritual destinies and Damascus experiences. Kumpf had convinced himself that our thinking too is a broken reed and needs justification, and precisely this was the basis of his liberalism, for it led him to see in dogmatism an intellectual form of phariseeism. Thus he had arrived at criticism of dogma by a route opposite to that of Descartes, to whom, on the contrary, the self-certainty of the consciousness, the cogitare, seemed more legitimate than all scholastic authority. Here we have the difference between theological and philosophical sanctions. Kumpf had found his in a blithe and hearty trust in God, and reproduced it before us hearers “in good old German words.” He was not only anti-pharisaic, anti-dogmatic, but also anti-metaphysical, with a position addressed entirely to ethics and theoretic knowledge, a proponent of the morally based ideal of personality and mightily opposed to the pietistic divorce of world and religion; secularly religious, indeed, and ready for healthy enjoyment, an affirmer of culture, especially of German culture, for on every occasion he showed himself to be a nationalist of the Luther stamp, out of whole cloth. He could say of a man nothing worse than that he thought and taught like a “flatulent furriner.” Red as a turkey-cock with rage, he might add: “And may the Divel shit on him, Amen!”-which again was greeted with loud stampings of applause.