MARTIN at this point was not yet a professional religionist. He was still an ordinary, if educated, young man. Even his educated status he was about to forfeit in principle; for in entering the hostel between the outer and the inner wall of the monastery, he renounced the educational distinction which he had earned on the outside. And were he to be admitted to the inside, he could have no assurance that he would be able to continue his career as an intellectual. The guardians of the order would be obliged first to disabuse him of any idea he might have that worldly distinction could penetrate the threshold of the cloister. It can be assumed that the Erfurt Augustinians, belonging to the stricter congregation of the observant orders of Saxony, were somewhat more determined to make this clear than many other orders which had become repositories for the supernumerary sons of the German nobility, or retreats for scholasticists. On the other hand, these guardians were in all probability quite unimpressed with the story of the thunderstorm, although later, when they knew Martin better, some of them were obliged to recognize the sincerity of a call in him, or, at any rate, the eeriness of an uncommon motivation. Now, however, there was no rushing, but rather a cautious playing for time and for a search for clues to the applicant’s spiritual and mental state.
So, he was less than somebody in any category; he was more nobody than at any other time. And in the anonymous period immediately ahead of him he found decided happiness—for a while. This may seem rather understandable to those who see Luther either as a bland young man and gifted good fellow under God’s orders to proceed as told, or as a very sick young man in search of a spiritual hospital for lack of a mental one. Our own sense of the inner economy of a man, however, insists that in this interim, this quiet before the real storm, we must account as well as we can for some of the psychological problems inherent in the historical fact that this same young man, only a decade later, emerged as his time’s greatest orator, publicist, showman, and spiritual dictator. We can only account for this fact by assuming a fierce, if as yet quite dumb, struggle in him between destructive and constructive forces, and between regressive and progressive alternatives—all in balance at this time.
Before we leave his childhood behind, therefore, I will discuss here, in an intermediary chapter, the dimensions of identity diffusion. This will lead us to a few common denominators and in fact, the lowest ones, present in this young great man and in other young men in history and in case histories. The base line to which we hold at the beginning of this chapter may at times seem all too base, especially to readers who are not familiar with the developments to be reported in the second half of this book: the deep personal regression which accompanied Martin’s progress into manhood and into theology; and the forces of wrath which he unleashed even as he freed new voices of faith. The story of the fit in the choir has prepared us for the pathological dimension in the spiritual struggle to come. We shall enlarge on this dimension in the direction of desperate patienthood and then in that of fanatic leadership; and finally, discuss a theme which these two conditions have in common: childhood lost.
It is probable that in all historical periods some—and by no means the least gifted—young people do not survive their moratorium; they seek death or oblivion, or die in spirit. Martin must have seen such death of mind and spirit in some of his brethren, and came to feel close to it more than once. Those who face the abyss only to disappear we will, of course, never know; and once in a while we should shed a tear for those who took some unborn protest, some unformed idea, and sometimes just one lonely soul, with them. They chose to face nothingness rather than to submit to a faith that, to them, had become a cant of pious words; a collective will, that cloaked only collective impotence; a conscience which expended itself in a stickling for empty forms; a reason that was a chatter of commonplaces; and a kind of work that was meaningless busy-work. I am speaking of those “outsiders” who go their lone way, not those who come back to poison the world further with a mystical literature which exhorts man to shun reality and stay outside, like Onan.
Some today seek psychiatric help—strange young creatures of pride and despair, of sick minds and good values, of good minds and fractured perspectives. Often, of course, therapists can only note that their pride in not having wanted to adjust is a cover up for not having been able to do so from way back. But not always, by any means. Sometimes a fierce pride of long standing can be detected which makes it very hard to decide whether the inability to adjust to a given available environment, with the means demanded by that environment, had not also meant an unwillingness to forgo the nourishment of latent needs deeply felt to be essential to the true development of an identity. The therapeutic problem in such cases transcends the questions of what environment a young person should have adjusted to and why he was not able to do so, and rather concerns a delineation of those means of adaptation which the patient can afford to employ without losing an inner coherence. Once he knows his cure and his goal, he must become well enough to make the “environment” adapt to him—an intrinsic part of human adaptation which has been lost sight of in popularized versions of Darwinian and Freudian imagery.
The fact that psychiatric treatment today has become a sanctioned form of moratorium in some countries and classes does not mean, of course, that the diagnoses which go with the treatment exhaust the problem at hand. On the contrary; the diagnoses merely serve to circumscribe the existing dangers of malignancy and to point up warning signals not to be taken lightly under any circumstances. But we are concerned in this book with a general delineation of a life crisis, a delineation which is indispensable to the search for avenues of therapy, and for an understanding of the ego’s task at the height of youth.
That extreme form of identity diffusion which leads to significant arrest and regression is characterized most of all by a mistrustful difficulty with mere living in time. Time is made to stand still by the device of ignoring the usual alternation of day and night, of more active and less active periods, of periods given more to work and talk with other people, and of those given over to isolation, rumination, and musical receivership. There also may be a general slowing up that can verge on catatonic states. It is as if the young person were waiting for some event, or some person, to sweep him out of this state by promising him, instead of the reassuring routine and practice of most men’s time, a vast utopian view that would make the very disposition of time worthwhile. Unless recruited outright, however, by an ideological movement in need of needy youths, such an individual cannot sustain any one Utopian view for long. Martin was recruited into a system rigidly regimenting time; we will see what he did with this Utopia.
There is, of course, also a tortuous self-consciousness, characterized at one time by shame over what one is already sure one is, and at another time by doubt as to what one may become. A person with this self-consciousness often cannot work, not because he is not gifted and adept, but because his standards preclude any approach that does not lead to being outstanding; while at the same time these standards do not permit him to compete, to defeat others. He thus is excluded from apprenticeships and discipleships which define duties, sanction competition and, as it were, provide a status of moratorium. For these reasons Martin had not been able to continue his studies, although his later capacity for work was, most of the time, phenomenal.
Most of all, this kind of person must shy away from intimacy. Any physical closeness, with either sex, arouses at the same time both an impulse to merge with the other person and a fear of losing autonomy and individuation. In fact, there is a sense of bisexual diffusion which makes such a young person unsure about how to touch another person sexually or affectionately. The contrast between the exalted sexual fusion of his autoerotic dreams and the complete sense of isolation in the presence of the other sex is catastrophic. Here again, whatever sexual moratorium the society’s mores offer most young people in a given setting cannot be shared by the patient, whether it is determined abstinence, sexual play without genital encounter, or genital engagement without affection or responsibility.
We know nothing about Martin’s relations to girls before he entered the monastery, but we do have hints of autoerotic scruples. which returned later much intensified. We know also that his father wanted him to marry early; and it is quite probable that it was this double commitment to career and marriage which Martin had to escape at all cost. Music, at such times, can be a very important means of socializing and yet of communing with one’s emotions: and Martin was a master in using music as a bridge to others, and also as a means of creating distance.
Finally, the use of sharp repudiation, so eagerly indulged in by intolerant youth in an effort to bolster its collective identity with a harsh denunciation of some other “kind,” be it on a religious, racial, or social basis, is blunted in such a person. He alternates between extreme self-repudiation and a snobbish disdain for all groups—except perhaps, for memberships whose true roots and obligations are completely outside his reach. One thinks of the “classical” yearnings of young Europeans or of the appeal which foreign totalitarian parties have for some young Americans, as do the lofty teachings of Eastern mystics. Here the need to search for total and final values can often be met only under the condition that these values be foreign to everything one has been taught; we have already indicated that Martin’s very participation in a most traditional monasticism ran counter to his father’s secular aspirations. We will call all self-images, even those of a highly idealistic nature, which are diametrically opposed to the dominant values of an individual’s upbringing, parts of a negative identity—meaning an identity which he has been warned not to become, which he can become only with a divided heart, but which he nevertheless finds himself compelled to become, protesting his wholeheartedness. Obviously such rebellion can serve high adventure, and when joined to a great collective trend of rebellion (as happened with Martin) can rejuvenate as it repudiates. In malignant cases, however, the search for a negative identity soon exhausts social resources; in fact, no rebellious movement, not even a self-respecting delinquent gang, would consider taking such an individual as a member. For he rebels and surrenders on the spur of the moment, and cannot be relied on to be honestly asocial unto death.
When such young people become patients, they illustrate the depth of regression which can ensue from an identity-crisis, either because the identity-elements they were offered as children were not coherent—so that one may speak of a defect in this connection—or because they face a perplexing set of present circumstances which amounts to an acute state of ideological undernourishment. The most dramatic characteristic of work with such patients is their tendency to make intense and yet contradictory demands of the psychotherapist. In this they truly regress; for either openly or covertly they expect from the therapist the kind of omniscience an infant attributes to his mother when he seems to assume that she should have prevented the table from hitting him, or at any rate from being hard and sharp; or that she should be able to hold him firmly and to let him go freely at the same time, that is, at a time when he himself does not know which he wants. But even the paradoxical form which the patient’s demands, to his own chagrin, can take concerns his very essence as an individual. He wants to have the right to act like nobody, and yet to be treated as quite a somebody; he wants to fuse with the therapist in order to derive from him everything the parents were or are not; yet he is afraid to be devoured by an identification with the therapist. The outstanding quality of these patients is totalism, a to be or not to be which makes every matter of differences a matter of mutually exclusive essences; every question mark a matter of forfeited existence; every error or oversight, eternal treason. All of this narrows down to something like Jacob’s struggle with the angel, a wrestling for a benediction which is to lead to the patient’s conviction that he is an alive person, and, as such, has a life before him, and a right to it. For less, such patients will not settle. I have called this the “rockbottom” attitude, and explained it as the sign of a perverted and precocious integrity, an attempt to find that immutable bedrock on which the struggle for a new existence can safely begin and be assured of a future. The patient desperately demands that the psychotherapist become for him as immediate and as close, as exclusive and as circumspect, as generous and as self-denying, a counterplayer as only a mother of an infant child can be. It is clear that these patients want to be reborn in identity and to have another chance at becoming once-born, but this time on their own terms. Needless to say, we can offer the patient nothing but our willingness to jointly face the odds that are the lot of all of us.
Where so-called schizophrenic processes take over, the rockbottom attitude is expressed in a strange evolutionary imagery. Total feeling becomes dehumanized, and eventually even de-mammalized. These patients can feel like a crab or a shellfish or a mollusk, or even abandon what life and movement there is on the lowest animal level and become a lonely twisted tree on the ledge of a stormy rock, or the rock, or just the ledge out in nowhere. I must leave the psychiatric discussion of this to another publication; here it suffices to say, that at no other time in life can severe regression to a play with nothingness appear in such systematized form, and yet be, as it were, experimental, an adventure in reaching inner rock bottom to find something firm to stand on. Here the therapist cannot be optimistic enough about the possibility of making contact with the patient’s untapped inner resources; on the other hand, it is also true that he cannot be pessimistic enough in the sustained apprehension that a mishap might cause the patient to remain at the rock bottom, and deplete the energy available for his re-emergence.
Other patients cling to a make-believe order of compulsive scrupulosity and of obsessive rumination. They insist on what seems like almost mock order for the world of man, a caricature of logic and consistency; Martin is a classical example of this. The eyes of such young people are often lifeless and out of contact; then they suddenly scan your face for its sincerity or even its mere presence; these patients, who according to popular judgment could be said to be “not quite there” most of the time, are all too suddenly and flamingly there. They can appear as remote, as lifeless, as impenetrable, as they say they feel; and yet, there are those moments of mutual recognition when they do seem to trust themselves and you, and when their smile can be as totally present and rewarding as only an infant’s first smiles of seeming recognition. But at this point the struggle just begins—as, indeed, does the infant’s.
In this brief and impressionistic picture I have, for the sake of their common symptoms, lumped together men of different times and of different type, not hesitating to prejudice the case for the great young man to whom this book is devoted. But I wonder whether many readers will have read this account without having a sense of recognition. Either they themselves have felt and acted like this at one time, or they have been such a person’s counter-player: his parent or teacher, his friend or young spouse. Perhaps this recognition will help us to know Martin better and marvel the more at his self-transcendance.
2
Centuries later, there appeared in Germany another young man who radically underbid Martin in his choice of temporary Nothingness; a young man who likewise re-emerged from his moratorium as a leader of the German nation, matching Luther little in constructiveness, and outdoing him totally in systematic political destructiveness. This man, of course, was Adolf Hitler. Of his childhood we know little beyond that which he offered the world as part of his propagandistic autobiography Let us now see what kind of a young man he was.
Young Adolf, so the only friend of his youth, August Kubizek, reports1 was also subject to an occasional “good hiding” by his father, who combined the petty authoritarianism of a small official with a general shiftlessness and an inclination toward adultery, alcohol, and brutality—that is, at home, where he could afford it. This father, himself the illegitimate son of a poor servant girl, was determined to make a civil servant out of the son, obviously with the implication that he should climb to the top in this narrow hierarchy. But Adolf would have none of it, as he repeats with the stubborn monotony of a propaganda drum in Mein Kampf. His friend says he never spoke disrespectfully of this father; but he went his own way, which was at least negatively defined by the conviction that no school or occupation within the system could contain him. On the positive side, there was a strange preoccupation:
When Adolf and I strolled through the familiar streets of the good, old town [Linz, Austria]—all peace, quiet and harmony—my friend would sometimes be taken by a certain mood and begin to change everything he saw. That house there was in a wrong position; it would have to be demolished. There was an empty plot which could be built up instead. That street needed a correction in order to give a more compact impression. Away with this horrible, completely bungled tenement block! Let’s have a free vista to the Castle. Thus he was always rebuilding the town….2 He gave his whole self to his imaginary building and was completely carried away by it. Once he had conceived an idea he was like one possessed. Nothing else existed for him—he was oblivious to time, sleep and hunger…. He could never walk through the streets without being provoked by what he saw. Usually he carried around in his head, at the same time, half a dozen different building projects, and sometimes I could not help feeling that all the buildings of the town were lined up in his brain like a giant panorama…. He felt responsible for everything that was being built. I often got confused and could not distinguish whether he was talking about a building that existed or one that was to be created. But to him it did not make any difference; the actual construction was only a matter of secondary importance…. The old theatre was inadequate in every respect, and some art lovers in Linz had founded a Society to promote the construction of a modern theatre. Adolf immediately joined this society and took part in a competition for ideas. He worked for months on his plans and drafts and was seriously convinced that his suggestions would be accepted. His anger was beyond measure when the Society smashed all his hopes by giving up the idea of a new building and, instead, had the old one renovated.3
Outwardly, this seeking for a new path showed itself in dangerous fits of depression. I knew only too well those moods of his, which were in sharp contrast to his ecstatic dedication and activity, and realized that I couldn’t help him. At such times he was inaccessible, uncommunicative and distant. It might happen that we didn’t meet at all for a day or two. If I tried to see him at home, his mother would receive me with great surprise. “Adolf has gone out,” she would say, “he must be looking for you.” Actually, Adolf would wander around aimlessly and alone for days and nights in the fields and forests surrounding the town. When I met him at last, he was obviously glad to have me with him. But when I asked him what was wrong, his only answer would be, “Leave me alone,” or a brusque, “I don’t know myself.”4
The two friends later moved to Vienna, where Adolf failed to be accepted either in art school or in the school of architecture. But he soon began to “rebuild the Hofburg,” the castle of the Austrian emperors, and conceived large-scale plans for workers’ houses, meanwhile exhorting his friend, his “one audience” (as Freud called Fliess) first with Wagnerian, then with socialist, and finally with anti-Semitic, harangues.
But suddenly, he disappeared. His last letter to Kubizek makes violent fun of the opera-house commission of Linz. He was then nineteen. In his abject poverty, he must have lived in the lowliest hostels for migrants and bums. At any rate, he shunned his family and Kubizek.
About his emergence, decades later, as an ex-corporal and ex-war-neurotic of the German Army, a revolutionary and avenger, and eventually a dictator, Kubizek has only this to say:
What the fifteen-year-old planned, the fifty-year-old carried out, often, as for instance in the case of the new bridge over the Danube, as faithfully as though only a few weeks, instead of decades, lay between planning and execution. The plan existed; then came influence and power and the plan became reality. This happened with uncanny regularity as though the fifteen-year-old had taken it for granted that one day he would possess the necessary power and means. Indeed, the plans which that unknown boy had drawn up for the rebuilding of his home town, Linz, are identical to the last detail with the Town Planning Scheme which was inaugurated after 1938.5
Kubizek’s memoirs concerned the young Hitler. The aging one, according to H. R. Trevor-Roper,6 having laid waste to half of Europe,
dreamed of an elegant retirement in Linz. While Germany was crumbling in ruins, he occupied himself with ever more elaborate architectural plans. He was not (as his enemies said) redesigning Buckingham Palace for his own use; he was envisaging a new opera-house and a new picture gallery for Linz.
But when the end was close and certain, the builder turned into a fanatic destroyer. As his most beloved and most gifted protégé, Speer (himself an architect and then in charge of German war industry) put it:
He was deliberately attempting to let the people perish with himself. He no longer knew any moral boundaries; a man to whom the end of his own life meant the end of everything.7
Speer quickly sabotaged Hitler’s orders for the destruction of German industry, a piece of high treason for which Hitler forgave him with a tear a few days before he killed himself. Speer concludes:
I suspect that he was not happy with his “mission”; that he would rather have been an architect than a politician. He often clearly expressed his aversion from politics, and even more from military matters. He disclosed his intention of withdrawing after the war from state affairs, to build himself a large house in Linz, and there to end his days…. He would then be soon forgotten and left to himself…. Apart from Fräulein Braun he would take no one with him…. Such were Hitler’s day dreams in 1939.8
And Trevor-Roper reports that in 1945, when he visited Hitler’s Berlin bunker, the last headquarters of the Third Reich and the scene of Hitler’s suicide, he found one room still full of illustrated books on opera-house architecture.9
This account illustrates the eerie balance between destructiveness and constructiveness, between suicidal Nothingness and dictatorial Allness, in a young man who at fifteen “felt responsible for everything that was being built,” that is, was dominated by an overweening conscience and a kind of premature integrity such as characterizes all ideological leaders; he had selected, with deadly obsessiveness, his medium of salvation: architecture. Maybe, maybe, if he had been permitted to build, he would not have destroyed. Many a delinquency, on a smaller scale, begins by society’s denial of the one gift on which a destructive individual’s precarious identity depends—for instance, Prew’s bugle in From Here to Eternity. But in the end, Linz and history had to be rebuilt together; and indeed, shortly after World War II had broken out, Hitler ordered the rebuilding of Linz to begin. Now and again, history does seem to permit a man the joint fulfillment of national hopes and of his own provincial and personal strivings.
I will not go into the symbolism of Hitler’s urge to build except to say that his shiftless and brutal father had consistently denied the mother a steady residence; one must read how Adolf took care of his mother when she wasted away from breast cancer to get an inkling of this young man’s desperate urge to cure. But it would take a very extensive analysis, indeed, to indicate in what way a single boy can daydream his way into history and emerge a sinister genius, and how a whole nation becomes ready to accept the emotive power of that genius as a hope of fulfillment for its national aspirations and as a warrant for national criminality.
Demolishing and rebuilding real houses and cities was the original obsession of this man, outlasting the most systematic destruction of men and values. One would like to believe that great men of other, more “abstract” aspirations—in science or theology, say—are totally removed from any comparison with men of political and of destructive military action. While we learn to mistrust power seekers, we glorify men of science, determined to consider their role in making machines of destruction possible as a historical accident which they surely did not desire when they directed their genius to the mastery of physical forces. However, if one scans the whole period of nationalism and invention which Luther helped to herald and which Hitler helped to bring to its global crisis, one may well want to reconsider the relationship between the will to master totally, in any form, and the will to destroy. Leonardo, the creator of the immortal da Vincian smile, was also an inveterate tinkerer with war machines; on occasion he caught himself, and relegated a design to the bottom of a deep drawer. Today, however, only large-scale reconsideration of conscious aims and unconscious motives can help us.
The memoirs of young Hitler’s friend indicate an almost pitiful fear on the part of the future dictator that he might be nothing. He had to challenge this possibility by being deliberately and totally anonymous; and only out of this self-chosen nothingness could he become everything. Allness or nothingness, then, is the motto of such men; but what specific gifts and what extraordinary opportunities permit them to impose this alternative on whole nations and periods—of this we know little.
Hitler was a totalitarian leader. In his middle thirties Luther became the leader of a rebellion, too; and we will later point out trends in him which may have prepared his nation for the acceptance of a leader like Hitler. In the meantime, however, his moratorium was one of shared anonymity: he became Father Martinus in a brotherhood which cultivated collective self-denial in the face of eternity. For him, the struggle between destruction and construction would be fought out on theological grounds. Existential justification was his chosen text, and he applied it to the hometown level of his father, as well as to the cosmic level of his church.
Politics is the most inclusive means of creating a world order in this world; theology is the most systematic attempt to deal with man’s existential nothingness by establishing a metaphysical Allness. The monastery, in its original conception, is a systematic training for the complete acceptance of earthly nothingness in the hope of partaking of that allness. The aim of monasticism is to decrease the wish and the will to master and to destroy to an absolute minimum. “I was holy,” Luther said, “I killed nobody but myself.”10 To this end, the monastery offers methods of making a meditative descent into the inner shafts of mental existence, from which the aspirant emerges with the gold of faith or with gems of wisdom. These shafts, however, are psychological as well as meditative; they lead not only into the depths of adult inner experience, but also downward into our more primitive layers, and backward into our infantile beginnings. We must try to make this clear before we encounter the imagery of Martin’s theological struggles, so that we can build a bridge between the historical condition of greatness and its precondition in individual childhood. Ideological leaders, so it seems, are subject to excessive fears which they can master only by reshaping the thoughts of their contemporaries; while those contemporaries are always glad to have their thoughts shaped by those who so desperately care to do so. Born leaders seem to fear only more consciously what in some form everybody fears in the depths of his inner life; and they convincingly claim to have an answer.
3
In his Shaping of the Modern Mind, the historian Crane Brinton reports a psychological observation. He introduces it with the kind of virginal apology observers often use to divorce themselves from the professional psychology they so heartily distrust: “To be provocative I shall say all normal people are metaphysicians; all have some desire to locate themselves in a ‘system,’ a ‘universe,’ a ‘process’ transcending at least the immediate give-and-take between the individual and his environment; for all normal people the conscious lack or frustration of some such understanding will result in a kind of metaphysical anxiety.”11Then he tells this story:
I recall a conversation among adults with a five-year-old boy present, listening, but not quite actively in the talk. Something came up which gave the boy the coveted chance to wedge his way into the adults’ world. The father let the boy have his say, and then remarked offhand, “This was seven years ago, before you were born, before you were even conceived.” The boy’s face went suddenly empty, and in a moment he burst into tears. It is hazardous to try to reconstruct what went on in his mind, but there is no doubt that something in those words shocked him deeply. “Before you were born” he almost certainly could, like all children of his age, take in his stride; but though like most progressive parents his had probably already tried to present him with the facts of life, the “before you were even conceived” must have thrown him quite off his stride, left him confronted not merely with a puzzle, with a problem like the hundreds he had to tackle daily, but with a fundamental mystery. For the moment, he was alone in the universe—indeed, without a universe; his was a grave metaphysical anxiety.
Let us look at this episode of psychopathology of everyday child life, and at its interpretation. I shall say first that this little boy’s particular reaction must have been overdetermined. His age suggests that he may have been doubtful as well as sensitive about the way in which he was created; and his father may have seemed to him to be bragging just a bit too much in company, and reacting to his son’s intrusion into the conversation by using the word “conceived,” which emphasized his own role in the child’s emergence from nothingness. The little boy, then, was up against a number of “fundamental mysteries.” Let us not forget that his father, probably too civilized to be harsh in an ordinary way, played God rather impolitely and at the same time emphasized his prerogatives in regard to the mother by referring to the boy’s conception. But it must be admitted (and this is the reason why I found this little story arresting) that there may well be something in the boy’s anxiety which is not quite explained either by a sudden impairment of his self-esteem, by anger with the overweening father, or by discomfort over the biological riddle of the act of conception. If this something is to be called “metaphysical,” it can only mean that the boy’s mind may suddenly have comprehended the limitations of physical existence. We can always counter any doubts about our biological origin with ordinary defenses and typical phantasies; but we are helpless against the recurrent discovery of the icy fact that at one time we did not exist at all—particularly helpless when as children we are acutely deprived of parental sponsorship. It is even probable that much of the preoccupation with mysterious origins which occurs in infantile phantasies and in the myths of peoples is an attempt to cover up, with questions of whence and how, the “metaphysical” riddle of existence as such.
What Brinton, extending to the boy an intellectual courtesy, calls “metaphysical anxiety,” is like an ego-chill, a shudder which comes from the sudden awareness that our nonexistence—and thus our utter dependence on a creator who may choose to be impolite—is entirely possible. Ordinarily we feel this shudder only in moments when a shock forces us to step back from ourselves, and we do not have the necessary time or equipment to recover instantaneously a position from which to view ourselves again as persistent units subject to our own logical operations. Where man cannot establish himself as the thinking one (who therefore is), he may experience a sense of panic; which is at the bottom of our myth-making, our metaphysical speculation, and our artificial creation of “ideal” realities in which we become and remain the central reality.
The sense of identity, which is not wanting in most adults, prevents such feelings of panic. To be adult means among other things to see one’s own life in continuous perspective, both in retrospect and in prospect. By accepting some definition as to who he is, usually on the basis of a function in an economy, a place in the sequence of generations, and a status in the structure of society, the adult is able to selectively reconstruct his past in such a way that, step for step, it seems to have planned him, or better, he seems to have planned it. In this sense, psychologically we do choose our parents, our family history, and the history of our kings, heroes, and gods. By malting them our own, we maneuver ourselves into the inner position of proprietors, of creators. If we are able to weather the repeated crises throughout childhood and youth, and become ourselves the begetters and protectors of children, then most of us become too busy for metaphysical questions. Yet, unconsciously, we are by no means sure, not just that we are the begetters of a particular child, which we mostly can convince ourselves of reasonably well, but that in any respect we can be a first cause, a causa causans. This doubt helps to make us overevaluate those jealousies and rivalries, those racial and personal myths, those ethnocentricities and egocentricities, that make us feel that if we are more caused than causing, at least we are a link in a chain which we can proudly affirm and thus, somehow will.
We are able to feel like a causa causans if we accept the inevitable in such a way that it becomes ornamented with some special pride—pride in our power to resign ourselves, or pride in the inevitable as something so patently good that we surely would have chosen it if it had not chosen us. If adult man, then, ever comes close to an ego-chill, he has available automatic recourse to a context in which he is needed, or in which others will him so that he may will them, or in which he has mastered some technique which brings visible returns. He forgets the sacrifices which he has to make to achieve this functional relatedness to other occupants of his cultural universe. He forgets that he achieved the capacity for faith by learning to overcome feelings of utter abandonment and mistrust; the sense of free will by resigning himself to a mutual limitation of wills; relative peace of conscience by submitting to, and even incorporating into himself, some harsh self-judgments; the enjoyment of reason by forgetting how many things he wanted to solve and could not; and the satisfaction of duty by accepting a limited position and its obligations in his technology. In all these areas he learns to develop a sense of individual mastery from his ability to adapt himself to a social system which has managed to orchestrate religion, law, morals, and technic; he derives from the accrual of his sacrifices a coherent measure of historical identity. He can further enhance this feeling of identity by partaking of the arts and sciences with all their grandiose displays of magic omnipotence. Deep down he believes that a Toscanini writes the works he conducts, nay, creates them out of the orchestra while he is conducting; and that an Einstein creates the cosmic laws which he predicts.
The child is not yet in possession of such a seemingly self-sustaining universe; and he often is not willing, before he is forced to, to suffer all the adult sacrifices. He may therefore develop deep anxieties; and these, especially when they are interwoven with psychosexual phantasies, belong to the best documented phenomena in psychoanalytic literature. Psychoanalysis has emphasized and systematized the sexual search of childhood and youth, elaborating on the way sexual and aggressive drives and contents are repressed and disguised, to reappear subsequently in impulsive acts and in compulsive self-restraints. But psychoanalysis has not charted the extent to which these drives and contents owe their intensity and exclusivity to sudden depreciations of the ego and of material available as buildingstones for a future identity. The child does have his parents, however; if they are halfway worth the name, their presence will define for him both the creative extent and the secure limitations of his life tasks.
The one most exposed to the problem of his existential identity is the late adolescent. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a very late adolescent with a premature, royal integrity, and still deeply involved with his oedipal conflicts, poses the question of “to be or not to be” as a sublime choice. The introspective late adolescent, trying to free himself from parents who made and partially determined him, and trying also to face membership in wider institutions, which he has not as yet made his own, often has a hard time convincing himself that he has chosen his past and is the choser of his future. Moved by his ravenous sexuality, his commanding aggressive power, and his encompassing intellect, he is tempted to make premature choices, or to drift passively. When he is able to make few choices, they have a greater finality because they decide his estate: peasant, miner, or leaseholder in Hans’ inventory, lawyer or monk in Martin’s. When he must make many choices, as he does in our society, they may provoke a false sense of freedom, of indefinite time in which to experiment, and thus lead to moments in which it becomes suddenly clear to him that even in playing around he has been typed, and in trying things out, become committed to them.
Whether or not all this comes upon the young person suddenly and traumatically depends on his society. Some cultures prepare him in childhood and youth by symbolic ceremonials which convincingly anticipate all these ego-dangers; some cultures limit and retard his awareness, and so fortify him against all suddenness; others offer magic rites and confirmations which make him a member of a group with a strongly predefined identity; while others teach him social and technological methods of mastering dangerous forces which take the forms of enemies, animals, and machines. In each case the young person finds himself part of a universal framework which reaches back into an established tradition, and promises a definable future. But in a time of rapid change, be it the disintegration of the old or the advancement of the new, the meaning of confirmation changes. Some ceremonies and graduations, while ancient and profound, no longer speak to young people; others, while sensible and modern, are somehow not magic enough to provide that superlative shudder which alone touches on the mystery of experience. Many young people, eager for an image of the future, find the confirmations and ceremonies offered by their parents’ churches, clubs, or orders designed more for their parents’ spiritual uplift than for their own. Others go along with the make-believe identities proffered in many occupational and professional schools, but find that streamlined adaptiveness proves brittle in the face of new crises. What academic institutions teach and preach often has little to do with the immediate inner needs and outer prospects of young people.
Today this problem faces us most painfully on that frontier where leaderless and unguided youth attempts to confirm itself in sporadic riots and other excesses which offer to those who have temporarily lost, or never had, meaningful confirmation in the approved ways of their fathers, an identity based on a defiant testing of what is most marginal to the adult world. The mocking grandiosity of their gang names (“Black Barons,” “Junior Bishops,” “Navahoes,” “Saints”), their insignia, sometimes even tattooed into the skin, and their defiant behavior clearly indicate an attempt to emulate that which gives other people the background of a group identity: a real family, nobility, a proud history—and religion.
4
Nietzsche’s fitting diagnosis that Luther wanted to speak to God directly and without a trace of embarrassment describes Martin’s more personal and more impatient version of St. Paul’s “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.”12 But Martin’s search, as his whole treatment of the thunderstorm shows, was also younger and sadder: “He who sees God as angry does not see Him rightly but looks upon a curtain, as if a dark cloud had been drawn across His face.”13
It would be much too easy (although some stalwart opponents of all interpretation would consider even this easiest and most obvious explanation far-fetched) that Hans’ son was seeking in religion what he could not find in Hans.
The search for mutual recognition, the meeting face to face, is an aspect in his and in all religion which we must consider if we are to understand the deepest nostalgia of lonely youth. True lovers know this, and they often postpone the self-loss feared in the sexual fusion in order that each may gain more identity in the other’s glance. What it means not to be able to behold a face in mutual affirmation can be learned from young patients, who, unable to love, see, in their more regressed states, the face of the therapist disintegrate before their horrified eyes, and feel themselves fall apart into fragments of oblivion. One young man patient drew and painted dozens of women’s faces, cracked like broken vases, faded like worn flowers, with hard and ungiving eyes, or with eyes like stars, steely and blinking, far away; only when he had painted a whole and healthy face did he know that he could be cured, and that he was a painter. As one studies such symptoms and works them through in therapeutic encounters,14 one can only become convinced of the astonishing fact that these patients have partially regressed to a stage in the second part of the first year and that they are trying to recover what was then achieved by the concordance of cognitive and emotional maturation—namely, the recognition of the facial features of familiar persons, the joy of feeling recognized when they come, and the sorrow of feeling disapproved of when they frown; and, then the gradual mastery of the horror of the strange face.15
It is remarkable to behold how in the infant’s development into a human being with the capacity for a firm “object-relationship”—the ability to love in an individualized sense—growing cognitive ability and maturing emotional response early converge on the face. An infant of two to three months will smile even at half a face; he will even smile at half a painted dummy face, if that half is the upper half of the face, is fully represented, and has at least two clearly defined points or circles for eyes; more the infant does not need, but he will not smile for less. Gradually, however, other conditions are added, such as the outline of a (not necessarily smiling) mouth; and only toward the eighth month does the child energetically indicate that certainly no dummy and not even a smiling face as such can make him respond with maximum recognition; from then on he will only respond to familiar people who act as he has learned to expect—and act friendly. But with this recognition of familiarity and friendliness also comes the awareness of strangeness and anger; not because the child, as many parents feel, has suddenly become fearful, but because he now “knows,” he has an investment in those who are committed to his care, and he fears the loss of that investment and the forfeiture of that commitment. The activity which begins with something akin to a small animal’s inborn response to minimum cues develops, through the gradual recognition of the human face and its expression, to that degree of social discrimination and sensitivity which marks the human being. And once he has made the investment in humanity and its learning processes, the human child knows fears and anxieties quite unthinkable in the small animal which, if it survives at all, has its environment cut out for it as a field of relatively simple and repetitive signs and techniques.
Mothers, of course, and people with motherly responses, like to think that when even a small baby smiles, he is recognizing them individually as the only possible maternal person, as the mother. This, up to a point, is good. For the timespan of man’s dependence on the personal and cultural style of the person or persons who first take care of him is very long: and the firmness of his early ego-development depends on the inner consistency of the style of that person. Therefore, the establishment of a mutual “fixation”—of a binding need for mutual recognition between mother and child—is essential. In fact, the infant’s instinctive smile seems to have exactly that purpose which is its crowning effect, namely, that the adult feels recognized, and in return expresses recognition in the form of loving and providing. In the beginning are the generous breast and the eyes that care. Could this be one of the countenances which religion promises us we shall see again, at the end and in another world? Is there an ethology of religion?
Those who fail in their once-bornness, we said, want to have another chance at being born. It often seems as though they want to be made over by the same mothers who give physical birth to them; but this, as we can now see, would be too literal an assumption. For that “first birth,” to which all of their symptoms are related, is the emergence of their consciousness as individuals, a consciousness born from the interplay of recognitions. Whoever is the maternal attendant to that early phase is man’s first “environment,” and whatever environment is then first experienced as such remains associated with “mother.” On the security of that first polarisation of a self and a maternal matrix are built all subsequent securities. “Mother” is the person (or the persons) who knows how to convincingly offer provision and screening: the provisions of food, warmth, stimulation in answer to the infant’s searching mouth, skin, and senses; and the screening of the quality and quantity of. his intake so as to avoid both over- and under-stimulation. The new human being, therefore, experiences his appetites and aversions together with the personal care (and care means provision and caution) he gets. They form his first world; but so do those moments when he feels uncared for, alone with his discomfort and his rage. For these, however, he has at his disposal signals with an immediate appeal to the mother, which sooner or later bring more or less response from her: the regularity and predictability of her responses are the infant’s first world order, the original paradise of provision. During the first year of life, the reality of the provider thus gradually emerges from the original matrix as a coherent experience, a verified fact, a sound investment of love and trust—and the infant has matured enough to experience coherently, verify reasonably, and invest courageously.
This bipolarity of recognition is the basis of all social experience. Let nobody say that it is only the beginning, it passes, and it is, after all, childish. Man is not organized like an archaeological mound, in layers; as he grows he makes the past part of all future, and every environment, as he once experienced it, part of the present environment. Dreams and dreamlike moments, when analysed, always reveal the myriad past experiences which are waiting outside the gates of consciousness to mingle with present impressions. Man at all times wants to be sure that the original bipolarity is intact, especially when he feels tired, doubtful, unsure, alone—a fact which has been utilized by both theology and psychoanalysis.
In that first relationship man learns something which most individuals who survive and remain sane can take for granted most of the time. Only psychiatrists, priests, and born philosophers know how sorely that something can be missed. I have called this early treasure “basic trust”; it is the first psychosocial trait and the fundament of all others. Basic trust in mutuality is that original “optimism,” that assumption that “somebody is there,” without which we cannot live. In situations in which such basic trust cannot develop in early infancy because of a defect in the child or in the maternal environment, children die mentally. They do not respond nor learn; they do not assimilate their food and fail to defend themselves against infection, and often they die physically as well as mentally.16
One may well claim for that earliest meeting of a perceiving subject with a perceived object (which, in turn seems to “recognize” the subject) the beginning of all sense of identity; this meeting thus becomes the anchor-point for all the developments which culminate, at the end of adolescence, in the establishment of psychosocial identity. At that point, an ideological formula, intelligible both in terms of individual development and of significant tradition, must do for the young person what the mother did for the infant: provide nutriment for the soul as well as for the stomach, and screen the environment so that vigorous growth may meet what it can manage.
Of all the ideological systems, however, only religion restores the earliest sense of appeal to a Provider, a Providence. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, no prayer indicates this more clearly than “The Lord make His Face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace”; and no prayerful attitude better than the uplifted face, hopeful of being recognized. The Lord’s countenance is apt to loom too sternly, and His son’s on the cross to show the enigmatic quality of total abandonment in sacrifice; but painters and sculptors fashion a faintly smiling face for the Madonna, graciously inclined toward the infant, who responds with peace and gaiety until, in the Renaissance, he stands up and, fully confident, motions away from her. We can see the search for the same smile of peace in the work of Eastern painters and sculptors, although their Buddhas seem closer to being the over-all parent and the child, all in one. It is art, the work of the visually gifted and the visually driven, in conjunction with religion, which puts such emphasis on the face; thought expresses the original symbiotic unity as a state of being firmly and yet flexibly held, imbedded in a Way.
One must work with children who cannot learn to say I, although they are otherwise healthy, and beautiful, and even soulful, to know what a triumph that common gift of “I” is, and how much it depends on the capacity to feel affirmed by maternal recognition. One basic task of all religions is to reaffirm that first relationship, for we have in us deep down a lifelong mistrustful remembrance of that truly meta-physical anxiety; meta—“behind,” “beyond”—here means “before,” “way back,” “at the beginning.” One basic form of heroic asceticism, therefore, one way of liberating man from his existential delimitations, is to retrace the steps of the development of the I, to forego even object relations in the most primitive sense, to step down and back to the borderline where the I emerged from its matrix. Much of Western monasticism concentrates on prayer and atonement, but the Eastern form cultivates the art of deliberate self-loss: Zen-Buddhism is probably its most systematic form.
“I did not know the Christchild any more,” (non novi puellum) Luther said later,17 in characterizing the sadness of his youth: he had lost his childhood. In a moment of terror he appealed, not to the Madonna, but to his father’s occupational saint, St. Anne. But he always objected to the Madonna’s mediation in the then popular scheme of religion. He wanted God’s recognition. A long way stretched ahead of him before he was able to experience, through Christ rather than through Mary, the relevance of the theme of mother and child in addition to that of father and son. Then he could say that Christ was defined by two images: one of an infant lying in a manger, “hanging on a virgin’s tits,” (hanget an einer Jungfrau Zitzen); and one of a man sitting at his Father’s right hand.18
5
But what destroyed in our infantile past, and what destroys in the depth of our adult present, that original unity which provides the imagery of our supreme hopes?
All religions and most philosophers agree that it is will—the mere will to live, thoughtless and cruel self-will. In one of the few passionate passages of his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James describes specifically one of the manifestations of the will to live:
The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily through long years of the foretime hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to their victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to-day. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is literally right reaction on the situation.
It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical resource.19
The tenor of this mood is immediately convincing. It is the mood of severe melancholy, intensified tristitia, one would almost say tristitia with teeth in it. James, at this point, takes recourse to the “geologic times” far behind us, and to the reptiles way below us—creatures who devour one another without sin and are not condemned for it by any religion. He also quotes the playfully cruel domestic cat, who shares with man an ecology of intermediary human institutions. The cat does not feed itself in direct interdependence with a sector of nature, but receives food, as man does, as a result of a social division of tool-labor. The cat’s relation to the mouse has thus lost the innocence of ecological interdependence, and the cat’s needs are refined, like ours.
James is clinically and genetically correct, when he connects the horror of the devouring will to live with the content and the disposition of melancholia. For in melancholia, it is the human being’s horror of his own avaricious and sadistic orality which he tires of, withdraws from, wishes often to end even by putting an end to himself. This is not the orality of the first, the toothless and dependent, stage; it is the orality of the tooth-stage and all that develops within it, especially the prestages of what later becomes “biting” human conscience. There is, it would seem, no intrinsic reason for man’s feeling more guilty or more evil because he employs, enjoys, and learns to adapt his gradually maturing organs, were it not for the basic division of good and bad which, in some dark way, establishes itself very early. The image of a paradise of innocence is part of the individual’s past as much as the race’s. Paradise was lost when man, not satisfied with an arrangement in which he could pluck from the trees all he needed for upkeep, wanted more, wanted to have and to know the forbidden—and bit into it. Thus he came to know good and evil. It is said that after that he worked in the sweat of his brow. But it must be added that he also began to invent tools in order to wrest from nature what it would not just give. He “knew” at the price of losing innocence; he became autonomous at the price of shame and gained independent initiative at the price of guilt. Next to primary peace, then, secondary appeasement is a great infantile source of religious affect and imagery.
In a strange counterpart to the quotation from James, Luther later pictured God himself as a devourer, as if the wilful sinner could expect to find in God’s demeanor a mirror of his own avarice, just as the uplifted face of the believer finds a countenance inclined and full of grace: “He gorges us, with great eagerness and wrath … he is an avaricious, a gluttonous (fressige) fire.”20 Thus, in the set of god-images in which the countenance of the godhood mirrors the human face, God’s face takes on the toothy and fiery expression of the devil, or the expressions of countless ceremonial masks. All these wrathful countenances mirror man’s own rapacious orality which destroys the innocent trust of that first symbiotic orality when mouth and breast, glance and face, are one.
There is a bizarre counterpart to this imagery of one face mirroring another. We have already indicated that in Luther’s more popular imagery, the behind is the devil’s magic face. He imprints it on a location as his official signature, he exposes it to man’s view to provoke him; and he himself cannot stand to have man’s defiant behind (and the odors emanating therefrom) brought into the vicinity of his face. To show the behind, then, is the utmost of defiance, as any number of colloquialisms in Luther’s expanding rhetoric suggest.
This set of images, too, has an infantile model, in what Freud called the “anal” stage of psychosexual development, a stage originating in the child’s sensual experiences in that fascinating part of his body which faces away from him, and which excretes what he learns to consider dirty, smelly, and poisonous. In supplementing Freud’s scheme of infantile psychosexual stages I have suggested a psychosocial scheme in which the stage characterized by Freud’s anality also serves to establish psychosocial autonomy which can and does mean independence, but does and can also mean defiance, stubbornness, self-insistence. What in the oral stage is basic mistrust, in the anal becomes shame, the loss of social innocence, the blushing awareness that one can “lose face,” have “too much cheek,” and suffer the wish to be invisible, to sink into the ground. Defiance, obviously, is shame’s opposite; and it makes sense that the wilful exposure of the behind came to mean a defiant gesture of shamelessness; to face the devil in this position means to offer him the other set of cheeks. No doubt when Martin learned to speak up, much that he had to say to the devil was fueled by a highly-compressed store of defiance consisting of what he had been unable to say to his father and to his teachers; in due time he said it all, with a vengeance, to the Pope.
The Luder family, while traditional in structure, offered an extreme degree of moralistic paternalism, and, quite probably, a minimum degree of that compensatory free-for-all of small and highly satisfying delinquencies which barnyard, street, or park can provide for lucky children. The father’s prohibitory presence, and the anticipation of his punishment seem to have pervaded the family milieu, which thus became an ideal breeding ground for the most pervasive form of the Oedipus complex—the ambivalent interplay of rivalry with the father, admiration for him, and fear of him which puts such a heavy burden of guilt and inferiority on all spontaneous initiative and on all phantasy. Where rebellion and deviousness are thus successfully undercut, and where, on the other hand, the father’s alcoholic, sexual, and cruel self-indulgence obviously break through his moralistic mask, a child can only develop a precocious conscience, a precocious self-steering, and eventually an obsessive mixture of obedience and rebelliousness. Hans Luder was a “jealous God,” one who probably interfered early with the mother’s attempt to teach her children how to be before he taught them how to strive. It was probably his father’s challenging injunction against the little boy’s bond with his mother which made it impossible for Martin to accept the intercession of the holy Mary. But when a father usurps motherhood, he puts an additional and unbearable burden on that second of man’s great nostalgias, which cannot be described better than it was by Thomas Wolfe:
From the beginning … the idea, the central legend that I wished my book to express—had not changed. And this central idea was this: the deepest search in life, it seemed to me, the thing that in one way or another was central to all living was man’s search to find a father, not merely the father of his flesh, not merely the lost father of his youth, but the image of a strength and wisdom external to his need and superior to his hunger, to which the belief and power of his own life could be united.21
At first, of course, fathers are non-mothers, the other kind of person. They may be part of the maternal environment, but their specificity is experienced only later—when, exactly, I cannot say. Freud’s oedipal father has clarified much, but, as sudden clarifications do, he has also obscured much. True, fathers are impressive as the mothers’ powerful counterplayers in contexts not quite knowable, and yet deeply desirable and awe-provoking. But they are also importantly involved in the awakening of the child’s identity. Fathers, it appears, were there before we were, they were strong when we were weak, they saw us before we saw them; not being mothers—that is, beings who make the care of babies their business—they love us differently, more dangerously. Here, I think, is the origin of an idea attested to by myths, dreams, and symptoms, namely, that the fathers (as some animal fathers do) could have annihilated us before we became strong enough to appear as their rivals. Much of the thanks we bring to potentially wrathful gods (who, we think, know our thoughts) is really thanks for their generosity in suffering us to live at all. Thus, we owe our fathers two lives; one by way of conception (which even the most enlightened children can visualize only very late in childhood); the other by way of a voluntary sponsorship, of a paternal love.
In anxiety and confusion, children often seem to take refuge from their fathers by turning back to their mothers. But this occurs only if the fathers are not there enough, or not there in the right way. For children become aware of the attributes of maleness, and learn to love men’s physical touch and guiding voice, at about the time when they have the first courage for an autonomous existence—autonomous from the maternal matrix in which they only seem to want to remain forever. Fathers, if they know how to hold and guide a child, function somewhat like guardians of the child’s autonomous existence. Something passes from the man’s bodily presence into the child’s budding self—and I believe that the idea of communion, that is, of partaking of a man’s body, would not be such a simple and reassuring matter for so many were it not for that early experience. Who never felt thus generated, “grown,” as an individual by his father or fathers, always feels half annihilated, and may perhaps be forced to seek a father in the mother—a role for which the mother, if she assumes it, is blamed afterwards. For there is something which only a father can do, which is, I think, to balance the threatening and forbidding aspects of his appearance and impression with the guardianship of the guiding voice. Next to the recognition bestowed by the gracious face, the affirmation of the guiding voice is a prime element of man’s sense of identity. Here the question is not so much whether in the judgment of others the father is a good model or a bad one, but whether or not he is tangible and affirmative. Intangibly good fathers are the worst.
As we grow beyond our early childhood, more and more classes of men become the “fathers” of our newly-acquired insights and techniques: grandfathers, uncles, neighbors, and fatherly teachers. If we call such fathers “father-surrogates,” we empty an important function of its true significance in an effort to understand its potential perversion; this may lead us, as therapists, to cut off our own noses in order to present impersonal enough faces for our patients’ father-transferences. We should study what, if not fathers, we really are; for men who wash their hands of their function in the life of youth are as evil, even if by default, as the “bad” fathers whom they despise. In their youth children need, in addition to fathers who will guard the beginnings of their identities, guarantors of their established identity; in this only the luckiest personal father can participate. If he insists on a monopoly in this regard, as Hans did, he asks for rebellion, smouldering or flaming.
We will meet all of these fathers in Martin’s life, some on earth and some in heaven, some in Hans’ return performances, and some in strikingly new thoughts. In the meantime, we may recognize another basic arrangement of the human and the divine face in the combination of the sinner who feels so totally guilty that he wants to hide his face, to be totally nobody, and his counterpart, the God who turns his back, who looks away into the eternal darkness—the terrible, the hidden God.
Just because Martin’s case makes the interpretive step from the punishing father to the avenging God so easy, it was necessary, in this interim chapter, to remind ourselves what other nostalgias and mortal fears may have been enveloped in his sadness.