RAINER MARIA RILKE

wanted to be borne by many individuals. In the crowd each one
is so small that he cannot lay hands upon the building of God.
But the individual who advances towards Him gazes into his
countenance and reaches certainly up to his shoulder. And is
mighty in face of Him. And is important for God. And this it is
which best buoys me up : that I must be great in order to benefit
his greatness, that I must be simple in order not to confuse Him,
and that my being solemn somewhere borders on his solem-
nity . .. (Journal Oct. 4th 1900). A thoroughly Kierkegaardian
feature of Rilke’s religious thought was his passionate denial of
the easy accessibility of God : “O ye men, when they bring you
God, the good docile dogs who have fetched him at risk of their
lives, then take him and fling him out again into immensity.
For God is not to be brought to the shore by the good docile dogs.
He is not in danger upon his surging waters, and a great wave
that is still to come will lift him on to the land which is worthy
of him” (Journal March 1901). His son-in-law Carl Sieber says
that what particularly repelled him was the notion that “we
carry God about with us like small change” (Introduction to
Two Letters about God). Sieber goes on to quote Rilke’s answer to
a query of Ellen Key in 1904, that after the difficult experiences
of his life he had come to believe that those people were right
who felt and said at a certain period of development of their
spirit that there was no God and never could have been one.
“But”, said Rilke, “this recognition is something infinitely
affirmative for me, for now all fear that he might be used up and
perished is removed from me, now I know that he will be. He
will be, and those who are solitary and withdraw from time are
building him, building him with their heart, their head and their
hands . . .” (op. cit., loc. cit.).

Rilke has often been termed a mystic, and though Keyserling
always insisted that he was nothing of the kind, there is much in
the Book of Hours that finds a close parallel in other writers of the
German mystical tradition. The poem beginning “What wilt
thou do, God, if I die:” recalls Angelus Silesius’ “I know that
without me God cannot live an instant”’, and Meister Eckhart’s
paradox ““God needs me as much as I need him”, as well as the
Lady Julian’s lovely saying that “We are God’s bliss, for in us

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