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RAINER MARIA RILKE

was in his way”. “The notion of our being sinful and needing
redemption as the presupposition of our finding God is in-
creasingly repugnant to a heart that has comprehended the earth.
It is not sinfulness and earthly error, but on the contrary man’s
pure nature that grows into essential consciousness; sin is cer-
tainly the most wonderful détour to God,—but why should they
go on their wanderings who have never left him : The strong,
inwardly quivering bridge of the mediator has meaning only
where the gulf between God and ourselves is admitted—, but
this very gulf is full of the darkness of God, and where a man
experiences it let him climb down and howl there (that is more
necessary than crossing it). It is the man who had even the gulf
as his dwelling place that the heavens, which were always
potentially his, will turn to meet, and to him will return every-
thing deep and inwardly belonging to the Here, which the
Church has fraudulently converted to the Beyond ; all the angels
decide, in songs of praise, for earth™ (Letters 1921-1926, p. 186).
He was not interested in eschatology. He rejected earthly renun-
ciation for the sake of heavenly reward, himself preaching, and
practising, a life that was neither ascetic nor apolaustic. He dis-
liked what he conceived to be the Catholic denigration of this
world as a mere ancillary of the world to come ; he believed it
to be man’s task to transform and above all to praise this world—
a task which he personally performed with humility, pertinacity
and an almost Hegelian justification of the thing which is. “Since
my productiveness proceeds in the final analysis from the most
immediate admiration of life, from the daily inexhaustible
amazement at it (how else should I have come to create:), I
should regard it as a lie to refuse even for a moment its flow
towards me ; every such denial must in the end find expression
as hardness within the sphere of art itself, and so bring its revenge,
however much that art may gain potentially thereby ; for who
could be quite open and consenting in so sensitive a sphere, if he
has a distrustful, reserved and uneasy attitude towards life!”
(Letters 1914-1921, p. 381). But he did profoundly understand
prayer, and “the mystery of the kneeling, of the deeply-kneeling
man—the fact that he is spiritually greater than the man who
stands” ; and it is primarily because of this understanding that

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