8. Doctor Faustus - chapter XIII part 2

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p101 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 moment -- as 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 license, 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.

I would rather say that “freedom” is a symptom of individuation, of our needing to consciously make choices rather than to simply act in accordance with nature. If we view the knowledge of good and evil as the gift of Prometheus or of Satan (as Christianity usually does) then God (and even Zeus) is off the hook for this. If, on the other hand, and like Goethe in Faust, we attribute it to God, then Schleppfuss is correct... but it was also Mephisto, in Faust, who made this same claim. But ignoring these quibbles, freedom is a necessary condition for morality.

p102 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...

[Story of woman tried and burned by the Inquisition for having “knowledge of” an incubus] 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 [devilish illusions]. 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.

p103 Of course the dialectic association of evil with goodness and holiness played an important role in the theodicy, the vindication of God in view of the existence of evil, which occupied much space in Schleppfuss’s course. Evil contributed to the wholeness of the universe, without it the universe would not have been complete; therefore God permitted it [see also HERE], for He was consummate and must therefore will the consummate -- not in the sense of the consummately good but in the sense of All-sidedness and reciprocal enlargement of life. Evil was far more evil if good existed; good was far more good if evil existed; yes, perhaps -- one might disagree about this -- evil would not be evil at all if not for the good, good not good at all if not for evil. St. Augustine, [but see also HERE] at least, had gone so far as to say that the function of the bad was to make the good stand out more strongly; that it pleased the more and was the more lovely, the more it was compared with the bad. At this point indeed Thomism had intervened, with a warning that it was dangerous to believe that God wanted evil to happen. God neither wanted that nor did He want evil not to happen; rather He permitted, without willing or not-willing, the rule of evil, and that was advantageous to the completeness of the whole. But it was aberration to assert that God permitted evil on account of the good; for nothing was to be considered good except it corresponded to the idea “good” in itself, and not by accident. Anyhow, said Schleppfuss, the problem of the absolute good and beautiful came up here, the good and beautiful without reference to the evil and ugly -- the problem of quality without comparison. Where comparison falls away, he said, the measure falls away too, and one cannot speak of heavy or light, of large or small. The good and beautiful would then be divested of all but being, unqualified, which would be very like not-being, and perhaps not preferable to it.

This talk of the “consummate” annoys me as it fails to go the next step and assert that to be truly consummate God has to confess to being the source of evil as well as of good. The Devil is God’s hand puppet. If all things come from God than there is no other alternative. And the consequence of such a view of God and Evil is precisely the divestment of good... the relegation of “good” to non-being in an unqualified universe. In such a universe “good” has no more inherent meaning than does “medium grey,” or even better, “white” (not as light but as a pigment).

p104 It never became quite clear whether these were actually Schleppfuss’s own dogmas which he delivered to us, or whether he was simply concerned with familiarizing us with the psychology of the classic centuries of faith. Certainly he would not have been a theologian without showing himself sympathetic with such a psychology. But the reason I wondered why more young men were not attracted to his lectures was this: that whenever the subject was the power of demons over human life, sex always played a prominent role. How could it have been otherwise? The daemonic character of this sphere was a chief appurtenance of the “classical psychology,” for there it formed the favorite arena of the demons, the given point of attack for God’s adversary, the enemy and corrupter. For God had conceded him greater magic power over the venereal act than over any other human activity; not only on account of the outward indecency of the commission of this act, but above all because the depravity of the first father passed over as original sin to the whole human race. The act of procreation, characterized by aesthetic disgustingness, was the expression and the vehicle of original sin -- what wonder that the Devil had been left an especially free hand in it? Not for nothing had the angel said to Tobias: “over them who are given to lewdness the demon wins power.” For the power of the demons lay in the loins of man, and these were meant, where the Evangelist said: “When a strong man armed watcheth his palace, his goods remain in peace.” That was of course to be interpreted sexually; such a meaning was always to be deducted from enigmatic sayings, and keen-eared piety always heard it in them.

It is a puzzle to me how we go from Genesis -- God creating man "male and female created he them" with instructions to "Be fruitful, and multiply" -- and then they're not supposed to use their naughty bits? And is the "aesthetic disgustingness" of procreation the view of Schleppfuss, God, Zeitblom, or of Mann? And the only thing worse than this anti-sex stuff is the "woman as tempter' nonsense that follows... but it is central to the story.

p105 But it was astonishing how lax the angelic watch had always been in the case of God’s saints... “There was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan, to buffet me.” That was an admission, made to the Corinthians, and though the writer possibly meant something else by it, the falling sickness or the like, in any case the godly interpreted it in their own way and were probably right after all, for their instinct very likely did not err when it darkly referred to the demon of sex in connection with the temptations that assail the mind. The temptation that one withstood was indeed no sin; it was merely a proof of virtue. And yet the line between temptation and sin was hard to draw, for was not temptation already the raging of sin in the blood, and in the very state of fleshly desire did there not lie much concession to evil? Here again the dialectical unity of good and evil came out, for holiness was unthinkable without temptation. it measured itself against the frightfulness of the temptation, against a man’s sin-potential.

I can't help seeing in this passage, "was not temptation already the raging of sin in the blood, and in the very state of fleshly desire did there not lie much concession to evil?" Hans Castorp's condition in most of The Magic Mountain. His steady fever is as much the symptom of his longing for Clavdia as of the tuberculosis that may or may not be coursing through his veins. And "Walpurgis Night" is his fall from Grace. This last observation more properly belongs with chapter XIX, but I'm sure you can already sense that it is coming.

Today the news carried a story of a suicide bombing in Africa. It’s gotten to the point that I don’t bother to even read these stories anymore. I might scan them to note how many were killed, who claimed responsibility, who was targeted (members of a different cult or people of the same cult who hold slightly different opinions on theological issues). This particular story I did read because the suicide “bomber” was a ten year old girl. The blast killed 19 people and injured more. Thinking about this act -- and it doesn’t really make much difference if the girl acted voluntarily or not -- reminded me of the discussion of “sin” above and of a point Richard Dawkins made about ethics in The God Delusion. Dawkins was countering the argument that we need religion to give us a sense of morality, to compel us to behave well rather than like sociopaths. He pointed out that the individuals carrying out the most vile and notorious acts of violence, and this bombing is just one of many examples, believe that they are acting morally and in accordance with religion. They believe themselves to be “good” people.

I think it’s safe to say that these religious bombers -- and the people who manipulate and control the actual cannon fodder bombers -- would heartily agree with what Schleppfuss says above about sin. While enthusiastically carrying out acts of astonishing (and random) violence, they worry about the temptation of the demonic female form. They obsess over sins I don’t even view as sins, while knee deep in the gore of (what I would consider) truly sinful acts. What is here called “sin” is really a battle one fights with one’s hormones. A battle for control of one’s “self.” This is a classic dualistic battle between the mind (or soul) and the body. The body has its own agenda (gene propagation, consistent with the command in Genesis to “Be fruitful, and multiply”) while the mind fights (or doesn’t fight) a perpetual battle to be the captain of its own fate.

It is worth noting here that Goethe (and Byron and Benjamin Constant) were not big fighters in this war against sin -- or if they did fight, they lost frequently. Mann was fighting a somewhat different war (it would seem) so he might have been more alive to this issue than Goethe.

This song so belongs here.

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