LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

He enjoyeth without end”. Parallel passages may easily be found
in the writings of Tauler and St John of the Cross. That great
mystical utterance, the final lyric of the second part of Faust, has
expressed perfectly, and for ever, the hopelessness of the poet’s
task in striving to express the Beyond in terms of the Here.
Elsewhere Goethe had written : “The highest, the most excellent
thing in man is . . . without form, and we should guard against
representing it otherwise than in noble action” (Elective Affinities,
Pt. II, ch. 7). Rilke was a natural worshipper, and in places came
near to sharing Goethe’s view that ““the finest achievement for a
thinker is to have fathomed what may be fathomed, and quietly
to adore the unfathomable”. The mystics are mostly sublime
stammerers, and their descriptions must be mainly negative;
absolute mysticism precludes artistic expression absolutely.
Rilke tried in the Book of Hours to express God in an infinite
variety of terms, and he swings from complete transcendence to
complete immanence. At one time God seems to be only the
“dark”, the “mysterious”, the “subtle”; then suddenly he is
the “Neighbour God”, nearer indeed than neighbour—closer to
us, as Mohammed used to say, than our jugular vein. But in later
years “‘you would hardly ever hear me name him, there exists
an indescribable discretion between us, and where once was near-
ness and permeation, are stretched new distances, as in the atom,
which modern science also conceives as a universe in microcosm’’
(Letters 1921-1926, pp. 95-6). Finally, God seems to withdraw
entirely from the Here, and to belong only to the Beyond ; he
becomes totaliter aliter, and Rilke looks upon him as a being that
does not return our love (here he was carrying on the tradition
of Spinoza’s ““ Qui deum amat, conari non potest, ut Deus ipsum
contra amet”’, and the words that Goethe puts into the mouth
of his Philine, “If I love thee, what is that to thee 2”).

Rilke had no sympathy for, and seemingly no understanding
of, the notions of original sin, sacrifice and redemption. “Religion
is something infinitely simple, simple-minded! It is no know-
ledge, no content of feeling, it is no duty and no renunciation,
it is no limitation : but in the entire expanse of the universe it
is: a direction of the heart” (Letfers 1921-1926, p. 65). He
rejected the idea of mediation, and told Kassner that “Christ

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