his arms, riding furiously on horseback to bring the boy to safety, and chased by the Erlkönig, the Elf King, the figure of Death, who sings beguilingly to the boy in a voice that only the child can hear:
Du liebes Kind, komm, geh’ mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele, spiel ich mit dir,
Manch bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand.
(Darling child, come away with me!
Such beautiful games I can play with you,
So many colorful flowers on the beach,
My mother has many a golden robe.)
The music grows in intensity as the father speeds for safety, but Death’s seductive song is faster, his blandishments richer, and the boy is so desirable. The child cries that the Elf King has grabbed him, the anguished father arrives at his destination, and . . . “in seinem Armen das Kind war tot” (“in his arms, the child was dead”). In one stroke of youthful genius, Romanticism in music had begun.
Des Teufels Lustschloss may never have found its place in the operatic repertory (nor has any other Schubert stage work). It is important nevertheless for what it tells us about the state of European theatrical thinking at the beginning of the philosophically tumultuous, watershed nineteenth century—what the taste of the audience was and what effect the work had upon later generations of creative artists. A straight line runs from the penultimate sequence of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with its whiff of the diabolical, and the entirety of The Magic Flute, with its battle between good and evil, through Schubert’s youthful works to Meyerbeer’s Parisian spectacular, Robert le diable, and Marschner’s supernatural Hans Heiling, and ahead to the spooky German landscapes of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, the haunted seacoast of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, and right through to the end of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung cycle—which is to say, the end of the world.
Or, to put it another way, these operas convey mankind’s innate desire to come face to face with the hidden forces behind our origins: good and evil, Heaven and Hell, God and Satan. From this primal conflict emerges our yearning for dramatic narrative and the daemonic in art (“daemonic” in the sense of uncanny or supernatural)—signposts pointing the way toward a meaning of life that science (which rejects the daemonic) cannot provide, if only we pay attention and follow where they lead.
The more the hero tries to avoid his fate, the more it rushes toward him. This paradox is the dilemma of modern Western man emerging from the abattoir of the twentieth century’s battlefields, understandably shell-shocked and conflict-averse, and it is also one of the central themes of every tale from Gilgamesh to Disney’s animated version of Tarzan. Only by embracing his doom—to use the old English word—and facing down his greatest fears, fears far more terrifying than the actual combat will eventually prove, can he overcome his broken humanity and become godlike.
We like to think that, as Aristotle teaches in his doctrine of mimesis, art imitates life, that our all-too-human creations of drama, poetry, theater, and literature are reflections of the human condition, scenes glimpsed through the glass darkly of imperfect understanding. But what if the opposite is true? That far from being mere imitations of deeper truths, art is born deep in the unconscious and shaped according to historical principles of structure and expression, and is God’s way of leading humanity to a deeper understanding of its own essential nature and potential, and of its own fate? What if art is not so much imitation or reflection as it is revelation and pathway? What if it reveals deeper truths about the essence of humanity than narrow science ever could; and that the twentieth century’s belief in the primacy of materialism (invested with such explanatory numen as to become indistinguishable from faith) has misaligned the natural order and imbued us with a false consciousness of reality (to use a Marxist term)?
Art, as I will argue in these pages, is the gift from God, the sole true medium of truth. The nineteenth-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel famously declared that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” meaning that in growing from embryo to adult, the individual organism goes through stages that mimic the evolutionary stages of the species. The stages that an individual passes through in his lifespan from fertilized egg to maturity (ontogeny), will “recapitulate,” Haeckel theorized, all the stages that the species itself passed through in the course of evolution (phylogeny). But perhaps it is, in an artistic and religious sense, precisely the opposite: It is phylogeny that recapitulates ontogeny. The evolutionary development of the species—its teleology—was adumbrated in the first moment of life. Think of art, therefore, as the Big Bang Theory applied to the soul instead of the body; by imagining the creative process in reverse, we can approach the instant of our origins and then beyond.
The key to time travel is to move faster than the speed of light, for from the movement of light (at 186,000 miles per second) comes our notion of time; to travel faster than light moves us not through space but back in time. Rolling the Big Bang all the way back would end, at least temporarily, in the winking out of a spark, and then nothing: infinite, eternal void, no space, no time, no being. But if that is true, then where did the spark come from? Or has the universe, as current theory is now beginning to favor, existed eternally, raising the possibility that the universe is itself God?
It’s a question that artists have been trying to answer longer than scientists have. “Ich schreite kaum, doch wähn’ ich mich schon weit” (“I’ve hardly taken a step, yet it seems I’ve already traveled far”), observes the “perfect fool” Parsifal to Gurnemanz in the first act of Wagner’s eponymous opera. “Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit,” replies Gurnemanz (“You see, my son, here time becomes space”). The context is Parsifal’s search for the Holy Grail—the lasting symbol of man’s quest for truth and something that he can attain only in a transcendental dimension where time and space are one and the same thing.
The search for the originating spark of creation lies at the center of the human experiment, in just about every facet of study, whether called religion, philosophy, science, or art. It sits at the heart of every human culture, no matter how primitive or sophisticated. Indeed, cultures at the fringes of each extreme resemble one another in at least one salient way: They reject other forms of knowledge in an attempt to believe in something. A cargo cult on a remote Pacific island bears a very close resemblance to, say, the global-warming cult of the Western sophisticates; both believe passionately in simplistic cause and apparent effect, and neither wants to hear contradictory evidence, even of the plainest kind.
Nor is it any accident that the quest myth is basic to every society, whether told around tribal campfires or in Hollywood tentpole movies. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell limns the universal “monomyth” (what I am calling the ur-Narrative) this way: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” The quest has many apparently different objectives, but in reality there is only one: salvation.
The quest for the Grail—the chalice that held Christ’s holy blood, the physical manifestation of the sacrifice on the cross and the redemption of God’s promise—is the theme of one of Western civilization’s most venerable narratives, essential to every redemptive fantasy. Whether it is a physical object or an abstract idea, a thing or person—and it is instructive that Parsifal asks Gurnemanz “Wer ist der Gral?” or, “Who [not what] is the Grail?”—the Grail is that which may be sought but never fully understood, a goal receding at speeds faster than light the closer we approach it, a secret knowledge that can be
