I was seized with the most vehement pity for my father. All at once I understood the tragedy of his profession and his life. He was struggling with a death whose existence he could not admit. An abyss had opened between him and me, and I saw no possibility of ever bridging it, for it was infinite in extent. I could not plunge my dear and generous father, who in so many matters left me to myself and had never tyrannised over me, into that despair and sacrilege which were necessary for an experience of divine grace. Only God could do that. I had no right to; it would be inhuman. God is not human, I thought; that is His greatness, that nothing human impinges on Him. He is kind and terrible — both at once — and is therefore a great peril from which everyone naturally tries to save himself. People cling one-sidedly to His love and goodness, for fear they will fall victim to the tempter and destroyer. Jesus, too, had noticed that, and had therefore taught: “Lead us not into temptation.”
My sense of union with the church and with the human world, so far as I knew it, was shattered. I had, so it seemed to me, suffered the greatest defeat of my life. The religious outlook which I imagined constituted my sole meaningful relation with the universe had disintegrated; I could no longer participate in the general faith, but found myself involved in something inexpressible, in my secret, which I could share with no one. It was terrible and — this was the worst of it — vulgar and ridiculous also, a diabolical mockery.
I began to ponder: What must one think of God? I had not invented that thought about God and the cathedral, still less the dream that had befallen me at the age of three. A stronger will than mine had imposed both on me. Had nature been responsible? But nature was nothing other than the will of the Creator. Nor did it help to accuse the devil, for he too was a creature of God. God alone was real — annihilating fire and an indescribable grace.
What about the failure of the Communion to affect me? Was that my own failure? I had prepared for it in all earnestness, had hoped for an experience of grace and illumination, and nothing had happened. God had been absent. For God’s sake I now found myself cut off from the Church and from my father’s and everybody else’s faith. In so far as they all represented the Christian religion, I was an outsider. This knowledge filled me with a sadness which was to overshadow all the years until the time I entered the university.
I began looking in my father’s relatively modest library — which in those days seemed impressive to me — for books that would tell me what was known about God. At first I found only the traditional conceptions, but not what I was seeking — a writer who thought independently. At last I hit upon Biedermann’s Christliche Dogmatik, published in 1869. Here, apparently, was a man who thought for himself, who worked out his own views. I learned from him that religion was “a spiritual act consisting in man’s establishing his own relationship to God.” I disagreed with that, for I understood religion as something that God did to me; it was an act on His part, to which I must simply yield, for He was the stronger. My “religion” recognised no human relationship to God, for how could anyone relate to something so little known as God? I must know more about God in order to establish a relationship to him. In Biedermann’s chapter on “The Nature of God” I found that God showed Himself to be a “personality to be conceived after the analogy of the human ego: the unique, utterly supramundane ego who embraces the entire cosmos.”
As far as I knew the Bible, this definition seemed to fit. God has a personality and is the ego of the universe, just as I myself am the ego of my psychic and physical being. But here I encountered a formidable obstacle. Personality, after all, surely signifies character. Now, character is one thing and not another; that is to say, it involves certain specific attributes. But if God is everything, how can He still possess a distinguishable character? On the other hand, if He does have a character, He can only be the ego of a subjective, limited world. Moreover, what kind of character or what kind of personality does He have? Everything depends on that, for unless one knows the answer one cannot establish a relationship to Him.
I felt the strongest resistance to imagining God by analogy with my own ego. That seemed to me boundlessly arrogant, if not downright blasphemous. My ego was, in any case, difficult enough for me to grasp. In the first place, I was aware that it consisted of two contradictory aspects: No. 1 and No. 2. Second, in both its aspects my ego was extremely limited, subject to all possible self-deceptions and errors, moods, emotions, passions, and sins. It suffered far more defeats than triumphs, was childish, vain, self-seeking, defiant, in need of love, covetous, unjust, sensitive, lazy, irresponsible, and so on. To my sorrow it lacked many of the virtues and talents I admired and envied in others. How could this be the analogy according to which we were to imagine the nature of God?
Eagerly I looked up the other characteristics of God, and found them all listed in the way familiar to me from my instruction for confirmation. I found that according to Article 172 “the most immediate expression of the supramundane nature of God is (1) negative; His invisibility to men,” etc., “and (2) positive; His dwelling in Heaven,” etc. This was disastrous, for at once there rushed to my mind that blasphemous vision which God directly or indirectly (i.e., via the devil) had imposed on my will.
Article 183 informed me that “God’s supramundane nature with regard to the moral world” consists in His “justice,” which is not merely “judicial” but is also “an expression of His holy being.” I had hoped that this paragraph would say something about God’s dark aspects which were giving me so much trouble: His vindictiveness, His dangerous wrathfulness, His incomprehensible conduct towards the creatures His omnipotence had made, whose inadequacies He must know by virtue of that same omnipotence, and whom, moreover, it pleased Him to lead astray, or at least to test, even though He knew in advance the outcome of His experiments. What, indeed, was God’s character? What would we say of a human personality who behaved in this manner? I did not dare to think this question out to its conclusion. And then I read that God, “although sufficient unto Himself and needing nothing outside Himself,” had created the world “out of His satisfaction,” and “as a natural world has filled it with His goodness and as a moral world desires to fill it with His love.”
At first I pondered over the perplexing word “satisfaction.” Satisfaction with what or with whom? Obviously with the world, for He had looked upon His work and called it good. But it was just that I had never understood. Certainly the world is immeasurably beautiful, but it is quite as horrible. In a small village in the country, where there are few people and nothing happens, “old age, disease, and death” are experienced more intensely, in greater detail and more nakedly than elsewhere. Although I was not yet sixteen years old I had seen a great deal of the reality of the life of man and beast, and in church and school I had heard enough of the sufferings and corruption of the world. God could at most have felt “satisfaction” with paradise, but then He Himself had taken good care that the glory of paradise should not last too long by planting in it that poisonous serpent, the devil. Had He taken satisfaction in that too? I felt certain that Biedermann did not mean this, but was simply babbling on in that mindless way that characterised religious instruction, not even aware that he was writing nonsense. As I saw it, it was not at all unreasonable to suppose that God, for all that He probably did not feel any such cruel satisfaction in the unmerited sufferings of man and beast, had nevertheless intended to create a world of contradictions in which one creature devoured another and life meant simply being born to die. The “wonderful harmonies” of natural law looked to me more like a chaos tamed by fearful effort, and the “eternal” starry firmament with its predetermined orbits seemed plainly an accumulation of random bodies without order or meaning. For no one could really see the constellations people spoke about. They were mere arbitrary configurations.
I either did not see or gravely doubted that God filled the natural world with His goodness. This, apparently, was another of those points which must not be reasoned about but must be believed. In fact, if God is the highest good, why is the world, His creation, so imperfect, so corrupt, so pitiable? “Obviously it has been infected and thrown into confusion by the devil,” I thought. But the devil, too, was a creature of God. I had to read up on the devil. He seemed to be highly important after all. I again opened Biedermann’s book on Christian dogmatics and looked for the answer to this burning question. What were the reasons for