Doctor Faustus (16 page)

His liberalism, that is, was not based on humanistic distrust of dogma, but on religious doubt of the reliability of our thinking. It did not prevent him from believing stoutly in revelation, nor indeed from being on a very familiar footing with the Devil, if also, of course, the reverse of a cordial one. I cannot and would not inquire how far he believed in the personal existence of the Great Adversary. I only say to myself that wherever theology is, and certainly in so “meaty” a personality as Ehrenfried Kumpf, there too the devil belongs to the picture and asserts his complementary reality to that of God. It is easy to say that a modern theologian takes him “symbolically.” In my view theology cannot be modern-one may reckon that to its advantage, of course-and as for symbolism, I cannot see why one should take hell more symbolically than heaven. The people have certainly never done so. Always the crass, obscenely comic figure of the “divel” has been nearer to them than the Eternal Majesty; and Kumpf, in his way, was a man of the people. When he spoke with relish of the “everlasting fire and brimstone” and of “hell’s bottomless pit,” that picturesque form, while slightly comic, at least carried more conviction than ordinary words would have done. One did not at all get the impression that he was speaking symbolically, but rather that this was “good plain German, with nothing mealy-mouthed about it.” It was the same with Satan himself. I did say that Kumpf, as a scholar and man of science, made concessions to criticism in the matter of literal faith in the Bible, and at least by fits and starts “abandoned” much, with a great air of intellectual respectability. But at bottom he saw the Arch-Deceiver, the Wicked Fiend capitally at work on the reason itself and seldom referred to him without adding: “
Si Diabolus non esset mendax et homicidal
” He appeared reluctant to name him straight out, preferring to say “Divel” or “Debbie”; sometimes “the great old Serpent,” or, with literary relish, “Timothy Tempter.” But just this half-jesting, half-shrinking avoidance had something of a grim and reluctant recognition about it. And he had at command still other pithy and forgotten epithets, some homely and some classic, such as: Old Blackie, Abaddon, Belial, also Master Dicis-et-non-facis, Black Kaspar, the old Serpent and the Father of Lies. They did, in a half-humorous way, express his highly personal and intimate animosity to the Great Adversary.

After Adrian and I had paid our formal call, we were now and again invited by Kumpf to his house, and took supper with him, his wife, and their two daughters, who had glaringly red cheeks and hair first wet and then so tightly plaited that it stuck straight out from their heads. One of them said grace while the rest of us bowed our heads discreetly over our plates. Then the master of the house, expatiating the while on God and the world, the Church, the university, politics, and even art and the theatre, in unmistakable imitation of Luther’s
Table Talk
, laced powerfully into the meat and drink, as an example to us and in token that he had nothing against the healthy and cultured enjoyment of the good things of this world. He repeatedly urged us to fall to, not to despise the good gifts of God, the leg of mutton, the elder-blossom Moselle. After the sweet, to our horror, he, took a guitar from the wall, pushed away from the table, flung one leg across the other, and sang in his booming voice, to the twanging of the strings: “To Wander is the Miller’s Joy,” “Lutzow’s Wild Reckless Ride,” “The Lorelei,” “
Gaudeamus Igitur
,” “Wine, Women, and Song.” Yes, it had to come, and it came. He shouted it out, and before our faces he took his plump wife round the waist. Then with his fat forefinger he pointed to a dark corner where the rays of the shaded lamp over the supper-table did not fall— “Look”! he cried. “There he stands in the corner, the mocking-bird, the make-bate, the malcontent, the sad, bad guest, and cannot stand it to see us merry in God with feasting and song. But he shall not harm us, the arch-villain, with his sly fiery arrows!
Apage!
” he thundered, seized a roll and flung it into the dark corner. After this he took his instrument again and sang: “He who the world will joyous rove.”

All this was pretty awful, and I take it Adrian must have thought so too, though his pride prevented him from exposing his teacher. However, when we went home after that fight with the Devil, he had such a fit of laughter in the street that it only gradually subsided with the diversion of his thoughts.

CHAPTER XIII

B
ut I must devote a few words to another figure among our teachers; the equivocal nature of this man intrigued me, so that I remember him better than all the rest. He was Privat-docent Eberhard Schleppfuss, who for two semesters at this time lectured at Halle among the
venia legendi
and then disappeared from the scene, I know not whither. Schleppfuss was a creature of hardly average height, puny in figure, wrapped in a black cape or mantle instead of an overcoat, which closed at the throat with a little metal chain. With it he wore a sort of soft hat with the brim turned up at the sides, rather like a Jesuit’s. When we students greeted him on the street he would take it off with a very sweeping bow and say: “Your humble servant!” It seemed to me that he really did drag one foot, but people disputed it; I could not always be sure of it when I saw him walk, and would rather ascribe my impression to a subconscious association with his name. It was not in any case so far-fetched, considering the nature of his two-hour lectures. I do not remember precisely how they were listed. In matter certainly they were a little vague, they might have been called lectures on the psychology of religion—and very probably were. The material was “exclusive” in its nature, not important for examinations, and only a handful of intellectual and more or less revolutionary-minded students, ten or twelve, attended it. I wondered, indeed, that there were no more, for Schleppfuss’s offering was interesting enough to arouse a more extended curiosity. But the occasion went to prove that even the piquant forfeits its popularity when accompanied by demands on the intellect. I have already said that theology by its very nature tends and under given circumstances always will tend to become daemonology. Schleppfuss was a good instance of the thing I mean, of a very advanced and intellectual kind, for his daemonic conception of God and the universe was illuminated by psychology and thus made acceptable, yes, even attractive, to the modern scientific mind. His delivery contributed to the effect, for it was entirely calculated to impress the young. It was impromptu, well expressed, without effort or break, smooth as though prepared for the press, with faintly ironical turns of phrase; and he spoke not from the platform but somewhere at one side, half-sitting on the balustrade, the ends of his fingers interlaced in his lap, with the thumbs spread out, and his parted little beard moving up and down. Between it and the twisted moustaches one saw his pointed teeth like tiny splinters. Professor Kumpfs good out-and-out ways with the Devil were child’s play compared to the psychological actuality with which Schleppfuss invested the Destroyer, that personified falling-away from God. For he received, if I may so express myself, dialectically speaking, the blasphemous and offensive into the divine and hell into the empyrean; declared the vicious to be a necessary and inseparable concomitant of the holy, and the holy a constant satanic temptation, an almost irresistible challenge to violation.

He demonstrated this by instances from the Christian Middle Ages, the classical period of religious rule over the life and spirit of man, and in particular from its ultimate century; thus from a time of complete harmony between ecclesiastical judge and delinquent, between inquisitor and witch on the fact of the betrayal of God, of the alliance with the Devil, the frightful partnership with demons. The provocation to vice proceeding from the sacrosanct was the essential thing about it, it was the thing itself, betrayed for instance in the characterization by apostates of the Virgin as “the fat woman,” or by extraordinarily vulgar interpolations, abominable filthinesses, which the Devil made them mutter to themselves at the celebration of the Mass. Dr. Schleppfuss, with his fingers interlaced, repeated them word for word; I refrain from doing so myself, on grounds of good taste, but am not reproaching him for paying scientific exactitude its due. It was odd, all the same, to see the students conscientiously writing that sort of thing down in their notebooks. According to Schleppfuss all this—evil, the Evil One himself—was a necessary emanation and inevitable accompaniment of the Holy Existence of God, so that vice did not consist in itself but got its satisfaction from the defilement of virtue, without which it would have been rootless; in other words, it consisted in the enjoyment of freedom, the possibility of sinning, which was inherent in the act of creation itself.

Herein was expressed a certain logical incompleteness of the All-powerfulness and All-goodness of God; for what He had not been able to do was to produce in the creature, in that which He had liberated out of Himself and which was now outside Him, the incapacity for sin. That would have meant denying to the created being the free will to turn away from God—which would have been an incomplete creation, yes, positively not a creation at all, but a surrender on the part of God. God’s logical dilemma had consisted in this: that He had been incapable of giving the creature, the human being and the angel, both independent choice, in other words free will, and at the same time the gift of not being able to sin. Piety and virtue, then, consisted in making a good use, that is to say no use at all, of the freedom which God had to grant the creature as such—and that, indeed, if you listened to Schleppfuss, was a little as though this non-use of freedom meant a certain existential weakening, a diminution of the intensity of being, in the creature outside of God.

Freedom. How extraordinary the word sounded, in Schleppfuss’s mouth! Yes, certainly it had a religious emphasis, he spoke as a theologian, and he spoke by no means with contempt. On the contrary, he pointed out the high degree of significance which must be ascribed by God to this idea, when He had preferred to expose men and angels to sin rather than withhold freedom from them. Good, then freedom was the opposite of inborn sinlessness, freedom meant the choice of keeping faith with God, or having traffic with demons and being able to mutter beastlinesses at the Mass. That was a definition suggested by the psychology of religion. But freedom has before now played a role, perhaps of less intellectual significance and yet not lacking in seriousness, in the life of the peoples of the earth and in historical conflicts. It does so at this momentas I write down this description of a life—in the war now raging, and as I in my retreat like to believe, not least in the souls and thoughts of our German people, upon whom, under the domination of the most audacious licence, is dawning perhaps for the first time in their lives a notion of the importance of freedom. Well, we had not got so far by then. The question of freedom was, or seemed, in our student days, not a burning one and Dr. Schleppfuss might give to the word the meaning that suited the frame of his lecture and leave any other meanings on one side. If only I had had the impression that he did leave them on one side; that absorbed in his psychology of religion he was not mindful of them! But he was mindful of them; I could not shake off the conviction. And his theological definition of freedom was an apologia and a polemic against the “more modern,” that is to say more insipid, more ordinary ideas, which his hearers might associate with them. See, he seemed to say, we have the word too, it is at our service, don’t think that it only occurs in your dictionaries and that your idea of it is the only one dictated by reason. Freedom is a very great thing, the condition of creation, that which prevented God making us proof against falling away from Him. Freedom is the freedom to sin, and piety consists in making no use of it out of love for God, who had to give it.

Thus he developed his theme: somewhat tendentiously, somewhat maliciously, if I do not deceive myself. In short, it irritated me. I don’t like it when a person wants the whole show; takes the word out of his opponent’s mouth, turns it round, and confuses ideas with it. That is done today with the utmost audacity; it is the main ground of my retirement. Certain people should not speak of freedom, reason, humanity; on grounds of scrupulosity, they should leave such words alone. But precisely about humanity did Schleppfuss speak, just that—of course in the sense of the “classic centuries of belief” on whose spiritual constitution he based his psychological discussion. Clearly it was important to him to make it understood that humanity was no invention of the free spirit, that not to it alone did this idea belong, for that it had always existed. For example, the activities of the Inquisition were animated by the most touching humanity. A woman, he related, had been taken, in that “classic” time, tried and reduced to ashes, who for full six years had had knowledge of an incubus, at the very side of her sleeping husband, three times a week, preferably on holy days. She had promised the Devil that after seven years she would belong to him body and soul. But she had been lucky: for just before the end of the term God in his loving-kindness made her fall into the hands of the Inquisition, and even under a slight degree of the question she had made a full and touchingly penitent confession, so that in all probability she obtained pardon from God. Willingly indeed did she go to her death, with the express declaration that even if she were freed she would prefer the stake, in order to escape from the power of the demon, so repugnant had her life become to her through her subjection to her filthy sin. But what beautiful unanimity of culture spoke in this harmonious accord between the judge and the delinquent and what warm humanity in the satisfaction at snatching through fire his soul from the Devil at the very last minute and securing for it the pardon of God!

Schleppfuss drew our attention to this picture, he summoned us to observe not only what else humanity could be but also what it actually was. It would have been to no purpose to bring in another word from the vocabulary of the free-thinker and to speak of hopeless superstition. Schleppfuss knew how to use this word too, in the name of the “classic” centuries, to whom it was far from unknown. That woman with the incubus had surrendered to senseless superstition and to nothing else. For she had fallen away from God, fallen away from faith, and that was superstition. Superstition did not mean belief in demons and incubi, it meant having to do with them for harm, inviting the pestilence and expecting from them what is only to be expected from God. Superstition meant credulity, easy belief in the suggestions and instigations of the enemy of the human race; the conception covered all the chants, invocations, and conjuring formulae, all the letting oneself in with the black arts, the vices and crimes, the
flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum,
the
illusiones daemonum
. Thus might one define the word “superstition,” thus it had been defined, and after all it was interesting to see how man can use words and what he can get out of them.