master told me a parable this morning—the story of three sons who loved their father so much that they gave up their lives for him, each in a different way. That was not what their father wanted for them, but they could not help it, he had so devoted himself to them. One gave up his life by trying to do everything right and going mad, another by running away and catching a fatal disease, the third by acquiring a name for himself that was not his own. But the saddest thing of all was that while they were living, the brothers could not abide one another, so intent was their focus on the father. And all died childless.
Matt 14:22–36. “O you little-believer, why do you doubt?”14 A little belief gets us into a lot of trouble. And so we sink before we can rise, because we are all littlebelievers at first. Even Peter, so full of himself—O Lord, let me do exactly as you are doing, whether it is walking on water or sitting with you at the right hand of the Father—sank like a stone.15
My master’s parable haunts me. He is too much like Peter, I fear, trying too hard to be the disciple who never disappoints, spurning established religion just as Jesus did, honoring the Father beyond all reason. More rain today.
June 11
Extremely damp and chilly today. Unpleasant outdoors, dark within. Even the gardener seems dispirited. Staying indoors by the fire I helped with the mending. I have learned so much in this household to make an honest woman—by that I mean a useful person—of myself. But my master’s influence, unlike that of his servants, takes me in a different direction—not exactly back to my childhood days spent in my father’s library with great curiosity but little sense of real purpose. No, with my master there is a sense of urgency, and not so much to know more as to be more. Book-learning is a paltry thing in comparison to—what? “Being” does not convey the quality, because we all in fact “are”—we exist, like it or not. But being—not exactly with a sense of purpose. Whatever it is, I feel it most in my master’s presence. Being with him I feel that being itself has new possibilities. And yet he barely takes note of my existence these days. He is mostly out on one of his infernal carriage rides,16 busy with his work, or sleeping off a night on the town.
Matt 15:1–20. “What goes into the mouth does not pollute the person, rather what comes out of the mouth pollutes the person . . . What comes out of the mouth, comes out of the heart.” A sinner knows what is in her heart and does not worry, therefore, about externals. Did Jesus really have such a grim view of humanity? He says nothing here about the good in people’s hearts. Maybe he does not want to get into a consideration of good and evil warring in people’s hearts; he just wants to keep the focus on the internal orientation of the conscious sinner, as opposed to the focus on externals which is typical of the unconscious sinner. Matthew must have been very angry at his own Jewish people who did not convert to Christianity. He makes it seem as though the non-Christian Jews have everything backward. I do not think Jesus could have hated his own people the way Matthew seems to. But then Jesus does say those who do not follow him are not his people. For a religious Jew, this statement is inconceivable. How angry was Jesus, I wonder.
June 12
More rain. Working my way through Faust (which I have read before but hardly remember) and finding Mephistopheles’ reputation for subtlety understated. Is he a mystic (“In the beginning was the void”), a Manichean, or merely evil? Merely evil seems the least profitable reading. Consider the following exchange with Faust.
Faust.
You call yourself a part, and yet you stand before me complete?
Mephistopheles.
The modest truth I tell you.
Though humanity, the little world of fools,
Ordinarily considers itself a totality;
I am a part of that part that in the beginning was everything,
A part of the darkness that gave birth to light,
The proud light, which henceforth Mother Night’s
Ancient rank and realm has troubled;
And yet it does not succeed, because however much it strives,
It remains imprisoned, stuck to bodies.17
Darkness prior to, superior to rebellious light—light shackled, like Prometheus on his rock, to form, while darkness, the void, floats free, unformed and uncreated. Is this darkness prior to creation not the very being of God, neither form nor formlessness, uncaptured by any concept, the inconceivable turbulence that so loudly confronted Job in his first silent and then discursive misery?
Faust’s response is essentially what my father taught me to call an ad hominem attack, blaming Mephistopheles for being too intellectual: “You cannot destroy anything on a large scale and so you begin on a small scale.” Faust, a doctor and professor of medieval medicine (he would have been a contemporary of Luther’s) is talking to and about himself. He wants no more of his suffocating study and small life-denying profession. Great irony here—no talk of medicine as healing, except that the good doctor is “healed” of his compulsion to acquire knowledge. What he wants is not knowledge but experience, the tiny bit that is “parceled out to the whole of humanity.” Parts and wholes again, but not exactly as Mephistopheles saw it.
Faust.
I will say to the moment: But stay a while! You are so beautiful!18
So much is said of Faust’s thirst for godlike knowledge (I too have repeated this silly error), but this is exactly wrong. Perhaps Eve has been similarly misread. It was experience she wanted, not a godlike knowledge, not a paradise with everything neatly labeled in Adam’s head, whose only claim to expertise was that he had arrived on the scene a few hours before she did. She wanted to experience the world as it had been given to Adam, before he “mastered” it.
Matt 15:21–29. The Canaanite woman cries out, “O Lord, you Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is plagued by a demon.” Jesus compares her, a gentile, to a little dog, and says the children’s food must not go to the dogs, but she reminds him that even the dogs are entitled to the table scraps.19 And so her daughter is healed “in that hour,” Scripture says, but I am thinking it was in that moment. A hint of sun.
June 13
One gets a glimpse of Genesis 8—the renewal of the world after the deluge—when after a week of steady rain, the sky is drained and the earth begins to dry out. People walk about with one another or their dogs and seem grateful simply not to have drowned, given up hope, or gone mad from the sheer grayness of everything. My master stayed in the last couple of days but still we do not see much of him. One encounter in the library—he asked me how my Faust was coming along, and I said nicely, thank you, but that I was getting a different impression reading it for the second time, that Faust was tired of books and wanted life. He seemed pleased to learn the play was not new to me—he knows a bit of my background from Emil, but not more than Emil saw fit to tell. My master said he would like to hear my impressions after I finish Part One. I asked why Part Two (which I have not read) is not included in the same volume as Part One, and he said that it was because it was written decades later and only published after Goethe’s death. It seems impossible to carry on a conversation in this house for more than five minutes
