In the Company of Rilke by Stephanie Dowrick

Author:Stephanie Dowrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Does this leave Rilke and his readers essentially Godless, then? Should we conclude that we tune into atavistic religious needs, human needs so urgent that they generate the God we are seeking? Are we, in truth, forsaken? No simple answers will be found in Rilke’s work.

In another letter, written exactly five years before his death, Rilke makes what might appear to be a significantly affirmative series of remarks about God’s “presence.” If this seems reassuring to some readers, however, then I fear that may be misplaced. And if it seems contradictory I would again suggest that a more accurate interpretation might be that it reflects an obsessive yearning that he never loses nor substantially denies, as well as an omnipresent ambivalence within his writing, to which I suspect many readers quite specifically respond. Rilke writes:Belief!—there is no such thing, I almost said. There is only—love. The forcing of the heart to hold this and that for true, which we commonly call belief, has no sense. First one has to find God somewhere, experience him as so infinitely, so utterly, so enormously present; then whatever one feels toward him—be it fear, be it astonishment, be it breathlessness, be it after all love—it hardly matters any more. But for belief, that compulsion to God, there is no room where one has begun with the discovery of God, in which there is then no stopping any more, at whatever point one may have begun.—And you, as a Jewess, with so much most spontaneous experience of God, with such ancient fear of God in your blood, should not have to bother about a “belief.” But simply feel his presence in yours.... You have, do not forget, one of the greatest gods of the universe in your descent, a God to whom one cannot just be converted at any time as to that Christian God, but a God to whom one belongs. . . .16

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