is one thing and not another; that is to say, it involves certain specific attributes. But if God is everything, how can He still possess a distinguishable character? On the other hand, if He does have a character, He can only be the ego of a subjective, limited world. Moreover, what kind of character or what kind of personality does He have? Everything depends on that, for unless one knows the answer one cannot establish a relationship to Him.
I felt the strongest resistance to imagining God by analogy with my own ego. That seemed to me boundlessly arrogant, if not downright blasphemous. My ego was, in any case, difficult enough for me to grasp. In the first place, I was aware that it consisted of two contradictory aspects: No. 1 and No. 2. Second, in both its aspects my ego was extremely limited, subject to all possible self-deceptions and errors, moods, emotions, passions, and sins. It suffered far more defeats than triumphs, was childish, vain, self-seeking, defiant, in need of love, covetous, unjust, sensitive, lazy, irresponsible, and so on. To my sorrow it lacked many of the virtues and talents I admired and envied in others. How could this be the analogy according to which we were to imagine the nature of God?
Eagerly I looked up the other characteristics of God, and found them all listed in the way familiar to me from my instruction for confirmation. I found that according to Article 172 “the most immediate expression of the supramundane nature of God is (1) negative; His invisibility to men,” etc., “and (2) positive; His dwelling in Heaven,” etc. This was disastrous, for at once there rushed to my mind that blasphemous vision which God directly or indirectly (i.e., via the devil) had imposed on my will.
Article 183 informed me that “God’s supramundane nature with regard to the moral world” consists in His “justice,” which is not merely “judicial” but is also “an expression of His holy being.” I had hoped that this paragraph would say something about God’s dark aspects which were giving me so much trouble: His vindictiveness, His dangerous wrathfulness, His incomprehensible conduct towards the creatures His omnipotence had made, whose inadequacies He must know by virtue of that same omnipotence, and whom, moreover, it pleased Him to lead astray, or at least to test, even though He knew in advance the outcome of His experiments. What, indeed, was God’s character? What would we say of a human personality who behaved in this manner? I did not dare to think this question out to its conclusion. And then I read that God, “although sufficient unto Himself and needing nothing outside Himself,” had created the world “out of His satisfaction,” and “as a natural world has filled it with His goodness and as a moral world desires to fill it with His love.”
At first I pondered over the perplexing word “satisfaction.” Satisfaction with what or with whom? Obviously with the world, for He had looked upon His work and called it good. But it was just that I had never understood. Certainly the world is immeasurably beautiful, but it is quite as horrible. In a small village in the country, where there are few people and nothing happens, “old age, disease, and death” are experienced more intensely, in greater detail and more nakedly than elsewhere. Although I was not yet sixteen years old I had seen a great deal of the reality of the life of man and beast, and in church and school I had heard enough of the sufferings and corruption of the world. God could at most have felt “satisfaction” with paradise, but then He Himself had taken good care that the glory of paradise should not last too long by planting in it that poisonous serpent, the devil. Had He taken satisfaction in that too? I felt certain that Biedermann did not mean this, but was simply babbling on in that mindless way that characterised religious instruction, not even aware that he was writing nonsense. As I saw it, it was not at all unreasonable to suppose that God, for all that He probably did not feel any such cruel satisfaction in the unmerited sufferings of man and beast, had nevertheless intended to create a world of contradictions in which one creature devoured another and life meant simply being born to die. The “wonderful harmonies” of natural law looked to me more like a chaos tamed by fearful effort, and the “eternal” starry firmament with its predetermined orbits seemed plainly an accumulation of random bodies without order or meaning. For no one could really see the constellations people spoke about. They were mere arbitrary configurations.
I either did not see or gravely doubted that God filled the natural world with His goodness. This, apparently, was another of those points which must not be reasoned about but must be believed. In fact, if God is the highest good, why is the world, His creation, so imperfect, so corrupt, so pitiable? “Obviously it has been infected and thrown into confusion by the devil,” I thought. But the devil, too, was a creature of God. I had to read up on the devil. He seemed to be highly important after all. I again opened Biedermann’s book on Christian dogmatics and looked for the answer to this burning question. What were the reasons for suffering, imperfection, and evil? I could find nothing.
That finished it for me. This weighty tome on dogmatics was nothing but fancy drivel; worse still, it was a fraud or a specimen of uncommon stupidity whose sole aim was to obscure the truth. I was disillusioned and even indignant, and once more seized with pity for my father, who had fallen victim to this mumbo-jumbo.
But somewhere and at some time there must have been people who sought the truth as I was doing, who thought rationally and did not wish to deceive themselves and others and deny the sorrowful reality of the world. It was about this time that my mother, or rather, her No. 2 personality, suddenly and without preamble said, “You must read Goethe’s Faust one of these days.” We had a handsome edition of Goethe, and I picked out Faust. It poured into my soul like a miraculous balm. “Here at last,” I thought, “is someone who takes the devil seriously and even concludes a blood pact with him — with the adversary who has the power to frustrate God’s plan to make a perfect world.” I regretted Faust’s behaviour, for to my mind he should not have been so one-sided and so easily tricked. He should have been cleverer and also more moral. How childish he was to gamble away his soul so frivolously! Faust was plainly a bit of a windbag. I had the impression that the weight of the drama and its significance lay chiefly on the side of Mephistopheles. It would not have grieved me if Faust’s soul had gone to hell. He deserved it. I did not like the idea of the “cheated devil” at the end, for after all Mephistopheles had been anything but a stupid devil, and it was contrary to logic for him to be tricked by silly little angels. Mephistopheles seemed to me cheated in quite a different sense: he had not received his promised rights because Faust, that somewhat characterless fellow, had carried his swindle through right into the Hereafter. There, admittedly, his puerility came to light, but, as I saw it, he did not deserve the initiation into the great mysteries. I would have given him a taste of purgatorial fires. The real problem, it seemed to me, lay with Mephistopheles, whose whole figure made the deepest impression on me, and who, I vaguely sensed, had a relationship to the mystery of the Mothers.5 At any rate Mephistopheles and the great initiation at the end remained for me a wonderful and mysterious experience on the fringes of my conscious world.
At last I had found confirmation that there were or had been people who saw evil and its universal power, and — more important — the mysterious role it played in delivering man from darkness and suffering. To that extent Goethe became, in my eyes, a prophet. But I could not forgive him for having dismissed Mephistopheles by a mere trick, by a bit of jiggery-pokery. For me that was too theological, too frivolous and irresponsible, and I was deeply sorry that Geothe too had fallen for those cunning devices by which evil is rendered innocuous.
In reading the drama I had discovered that Faust had been a philosopher of sorts, and although he turned away from philosophy, he had obviously learned from it a certain receptivity to the truth. Hitherto I had heard virtually nothing of philosophy, and now a new hope dawned. Perhaps, I thought, there were philosophers who had grappled with these questions and could shed light on them for me.
Since there were no philosophers in my father’s library — they were suspect because they thought — I had to content myself with Krug’s General Dictionary of the Philosophical Sciences, second edition, 1832. I plunged forthwith into the article on God. To my discontent it began with the etymology of the word “God,” which, it said, “incontestably” derived from “good” and signified the ens
