warned! The book is an inconceivably impressive sharpening of the commandment ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain’. If it is read and understood, the normal effect would be that ninety-nine per cent of us all will remain caught in its net and will make the discovery that it is impossible for anyone really to be such a thing as a theologian. And the few who escape must leave behind them so much beloved trash, so many dear illusions and practical, all too practical, naïvetés, that they find themselves freezing afterwards and know not where to turn for shelter.
All of us who are at all content with our calling will see the book printed and read with the same discomfort with which a normal physician views Weressajew’s Bekenntnisse eines Arztes (Confessions of a Physician). For it is a dangerous book, a book filled with the apocalyptic air of judgement. It is a balance sheet, a book which calls the comprehending reader away from the fleshpots of Egypt into the desert, to a place of durance where he can neither lie nor sit nor stand, but must of necessity keep moving, where he can neither gain nor possess, nor feast, nor distribute, but only hunger and thirst, seek, ask, and knock. That place recalls the words of the ‘Cherubic Wanderer’. ‘The foxes have holes and the fowls of the air their nests, but the Son of Man has not where to lay his head.’ All who wish to avoid this place should leave this book unread.
But perhaps the impressions and experiences of the last years have shown us that we have been living until now in a house built on sand; and that theology—if this venture ‘Theology’ is to continue longer to exist—would do better to clench its teeth and take the road to the desert. In view of the general situation, that would be more fitting than the unchilled confidence with which in many places men continue to assume the possibility of being theologians—as if it were nothing extraordinary.
Some of us are not wholly surprised by Overbeck’s revelations. We rejoice at this book. We greet it gladly in the hope that it will raise up comrades for us in our loneliness. For it will not be easy for some men of integrity to kick against these pricks. To all of us without exception, the book has some serious words to say.
I
The editor leaves it to the reader to decide whether on the basis of the material before him he will choose to regard Overbeck as a sceptic or as an inspired critic. Actually Overbeck stands just on the boundary between the two. And one side of his nature (if one can speak of two sides) will be comprehensible only through the other.
If one understands him, as his contemporaries did and as Bernoulli prefers, as a sceptic, one must at least call him as Bernoulli does ‘a happy, loving, doubter’ (p. xix). If he is understood, as I myself think is more rewarding, as standing guard ‘at the threshold of metaphysical possibilities’ (p. xxxvi), then his position must be labelled that of an ‘inspired critic’. In either case the reader must be able to separate sharply the irreconcilable antitheses of death and life, the world and the kingdom of heaven, and then again to see them both as one, before he can evaluate the concealed power of this unique spirit. For ‘this was a man and to be a man means to be a fighter’.
Decisive for any insight into Overbeck’s fundamental position are the sections ‘Concerning the Investigation of Super-History’ (Urgeschichte) (pp. 20–8) and ‘Of Myself and of Death’ (pp. 287–300). In the light of what is said here must be judged what is said (pp. 1–77) about the Bible and original Christianity (Urchristentum). All else in the book is application and illustration.
Two points, which are at once gateways and ends, determine and characterize, according to Overbeck, the being of man and of humanity. With the term ‘Super-History’ (Urgeschichte) or ‘creation-history’, he designates the one; with the term ‘death’, the other. Out of the supra-temporal, unknowable, inconceivable super-history which is composed wholly of beginnings, in which the boundaries dividing the individual from the whole are still fluid, we have come. To the single, inconceivably important moment of death in which our life enters the sphere of the unknown where, throughout our life-time, exists all which is beyond the world known to us, we go (pp. 20–1, 297). We have perhaps looked too deeply into the cause of things, we know too much about all things, even about those most hidden and unattainable, about the things of which we can actually know nothing at all, the last things. ‘We cannot escape this knowledge and we must live with it’ (pp. 293, 300).
What lies between these two ends, these ‘last things’, is the world, our world, the comprehensible world which has been given us. Whatever is or can be ‘historical’ is by its very nature (eo ipso) part of this world. For ‘historical’ means ‘subject to time’ (p. 242). And whatever is subject to time is limited, is relative, and is made manifest as world by the ‘last things’ of which we are now cognizant, whether we will or not. ‘It is in no way possible to concede to the Pharisees a kingdom of God already appearing among them, wholly on this side of the end’ (on Luke 17:20–1, p. 47). Frankly, in order to comprehend this world, so far as that is our aim, we do better not to step out of it; we should avoid even ‘the slightest breath of theology’ (p. 5), and as successors of the Rationalists, remain, with the resolute prudence of the true realist (p. xxviii), within its boundaries, the boundaries of humanity (p. 241).
If we cannot defend the things of this world and if none of the relationships in which we walk the earth can withstand the criticism which reduces the whole to relativity, we can still love them and we need take the criticism no more seriously than it deserves (pp. 29, 248). But this (fractured!) love for the things of this world does not originate in religion; it rests, even the smallest fraction of it, on our own action. Its ‘natural basis can of course be designated by the term God by anyone who knows what he is talking about’ (p. 249). The ‘capacity for ecstasy’ is by no means disregarded as ‘the source of the power of culture’ (p. xxviii) by the Rationalists with whom Oberbeck liked to align himself, as a sort of anonymous upstart, beside Kant, Goethe, and Lichtenberg (p. 136).
If the concept of death marks the limit of human knowledge, so it must also signify its transcendental origin. It can ‘serve us as an irresistible broom for sweeping out all the lies and shams that plague our earthly life’. If the command to remember death (memento mori) when rightly understood affects our life for good (p. 297), then we must ascribe to it a peculiarly creative and fruitful meaning. ‘Death creates life as well as destroying it’ (p. 247). Without a ‘tiny drop of ecstasy’ (p. 182), rationalism would not be the living, all-embracing principle that Overbeck understands it to be. For it happens that just this ‘tiny drop’ is the source of the stream. The two great unknowns, super-history and death, are exactly the hinges on which the ‘sceptical’ world-view hangs! ‘We men really go forward only when we launch ourselves from time to time into the air and we live our lives under conditions which do not permit us to shirk that experience’ (p. 77). ‘The man who actually and resolutely depends upon himself in this world, must have the courage to depend upon nothing’ (p. 286).
But such a man must reckon seriously with this ‘nothing’, and the tiny drop of ecstasy must be genuine; it must not be confused with mysticism, romanticism, and pietism—although ‘Pietism is for me the only form of Christianity under which a personal relation to Christianity would be possible for me’ (p. 179). For ‘a human individual can never expect to discover in himself a substitute for God.… Self-surrender is no sure road to God, but the (mystic-romantic-pietistic!) idea of man’s ever finding God in himself is still more hopeless’ (p. 286).
‘The essential quality in Overbeck was not intellectual but elemental. He was constantly “out of bounds”; and this was not a matter of stepping across a line in some small area; it was an impressive and genuine advance, a violent invasion. In his criticism, the jagged ledges of bared thought leave free the vista of the hidden valley below, green in the springtime.’ So Bernoulli says felicitously (p. xix); but unfortunately he somewhat obscures this important insight by the psychological trappings with which he decorates
