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p99 But 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 [permission to read] 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. [Basque?]
Ignatius of Loyola
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 dispute 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 [trailing foot]. 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.
As I read this I immediately saw in Schleppfuss a more modern Mephisto. But a Google search to get the exact translation of the name, turned up even more speculation,
...Parallel to the romantic theme of artistic genius stimulated by disease is the suggestion that Germany has signed a pact with the devil in the guise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, granting it temporary world power, but leading to military defeat and moral corruption.
The Faustian recklessness is reflected in the hero's name -- "kuhn" means bold and "Lever" is close enough to "Leben" or "life" to suggest that his name means "live boldly." The name thus translated alludes to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, another genius who succumbed to madness, probably also as a result of a syphilitic infection [now it is believed his was a genetic condition -- not unlike Adrian's migraines -- and not syphilis]. Mann used many of the details about Nietzsche's life and his final illness for the character of Adrian Leverkuhn... Still another figure behind Mann's protagonist is Martin Luther, the mercurial German monk who dared to challenge the authority of Roman Catholicism... Like Faust and Nietzsche, Luther is another titanic German figure with an ambivalent legacy, famous for his courage and notorious for his capacity for hatred and rage. He appears in caricature in the novel as one of Leverkuhn's theology professors, Ehrenfried Kumpf, who parodies Luther's language and gestures, but in a broader sense the spirit of Luther's early modern Germany lives on in the Saxon and Thuringian cities where Leverkuhn spent his formative years.
Faust, Nietsche, and Luther -- in a certain sense, Adrian Leverkuhn is all of these, which is to say that he represents Germany....
Perhaps it is too soon to introduce this material, but this isn’t a murder mystery to be spoiled and I think the more of this you are aware of as you read, the more you will get out of it.
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 illumined by psychology and thus made acceptable, yes even attractive, to a 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 Kumpf’s 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 necessity and inseparable concomitant of the holy, and the holy a constant satanic temptation, an almost irresistible challenge to violation.
p100 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 filthiness, 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.
My use of bold above calls attention to passages that will have reverberation in later chapters. But also, they are compelling in themselves. This relationship between good and evil is supremely problematic. They are dependent on each other. In what sense can one even be said to exist without the presence of the other?
And I cannot let the line, “ ...the Evil One himself -- was a necessary emanation and inevitable accompaniment of the Holy Existence of God...” pass without reminding the reader of the previous blog (Dark Goddesses} of how similar this sounds to the way Kali is a manifestation of “good” goddesses in a certain mood. Whether you look at life from an extra-ethical -- I would say Natural -- perspective or from a human perspective that includes concepts of “good” and “evil,” either “good” and “evil” are linked in an almost atomic (or a priori) bond, or neither exists in any meaningful way.
And that same prior-blog reader can also, I suspect, easily imagine Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault eagerly taking notes in Dr. Schleppfuss’s class. I can even hear those two murmuring “Freedom. Sinning, Yes!”
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 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.
While I like the sound of this “...in that which He liberated out of Himself and which was now outside Him...” -- in that it reminds me a bit of the Devi creation myth where we are literally created out of God in that She dreams our reality and that we are, of necessity, a part of Her. But I take issue with the morality, even though any assertion of amorality puts me dangerously close to Foucault, again. Still, morality (or better immorality), in the sense Schleppfuss is arguing for here is an illusion of our individuation... of our existing outside God.
But, for the sake of the story Mann is telling, this is crucial, and the Nietzsche references above surely apply here.
And now, for the first, but probably not the last, time. We will break in the middle of a chapter as there is far too much yummy stuff here to rush through.
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