Martin Heidegger is notorious for his embrace of Nazism in the 1930s. Yet he was a luminous commentator on the religious substance of modern poetry. Perhaps because of his own misbegotten metaphysical aspirations, Heidegger could feel and understand the anguish of those who sought but could not secure the soul’s honest exaltation in a disenchanted world. The philosopher found himself drawn to poets whose yearnings, torments, and raptures represented the
modern desire for the marvelous at its most taxing reach and elusive grasp. To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the death of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Heidegger prepared a lecture titled “What Are Poets For?” Forbidden to offer public lectures at the university and deprived of his chair of philosophy, he delivered it to a select few in 1946. In this extended meditation, Heidegger considers the metaphysical implications, and more specifically the religious ones, of the poetry of Rilke and of Friedrich Hölderlin.
The philosopher takes his title from Hölderlin’s elegy Brod und Wein (“Bread and Wine”), which asks, “and what are poets for in a destitute time?” The poem is suffused with a lament for the departure of the enchantments of the ancient world. “Why does the sacred dance no longer rejoice? / Why no more does a god set his mark on man’s forehead?” The divine had come to “take on human appearance, / Comforter at the end, closing the heavenly feast.” Now, in our age, “we arrive too late.” The sacred remains “endlessly active,” but its doings are “over our heads, up in a different world.” The Word made flesh has banished the old gods, only to depart, leaving the poet to “solemnly sing of the wine-god,” to hymn small joys of “bread,” which “is fruit of the earth,” and in so doing prepare human hearts for the “kindled glow” of the god’s return.
Heidegger draws from Hölderlin’s poem a prophecy: “The world’s night is spreading its darkness. The era is defined by the god’s failure to arrive, by the ‘default of God.’” This default does not preclude the persistence of Christian belief among an ever smaller contingent of the faithful. Heidegger’s point is that God has become vague in most men’s eyes, on the verge of invisibility, and threatens to disappear altogether. The gods (the plural term evokes the full range of sacred meaning in traditional societies) have removed themselves from the scene, and all proof of their ever having been here is being erased by modernity’s scientific and technological mentality. “Not only have the gods and the god fled,” Heidegger warns, “but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. The time of the world’s night is the destitute time. . . . It has already grown so destitute, it can no longer discern the default of God as a default.”
In Heidegger’s account, the poet is called to confront the departure of the sacred. He is to “reach into the abyss,” and thereby prepare the way for re-enchantment, the god’s return. The philosopher does not come out and say so—to do so would complicate matters unduly—but there is holiness and there is holiness. “Bread and Wine” opens with images of “sated men” and the “day’s pleasure,” of life in the “busy market” and other distractions. We use the hustle and bustle and artifice of modern life to blunt the horror of a meaningless universe. If we leave behind these diversions and plunge into the “abyss,” we will at least become vulnerable to the aching desire for the source and summit of Being. This exposure, or what Heidegger calls “the unprotectedness of what is ventured,” offers a kind of sanctification, a negative one that opens our hearts.
If Heidegger was the philosopher most fascinated by poetry, Hölderlin was the poet most allured by philosophy. At the Stift, the Protestant seminary in Tübingen, he was fast friends with fellow students Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. Under their influence the poet became enamored of the pursuit of wisdom by application of the mind alone. (Hölderlin’s mother would long persist in her hope that the Lutheran ministry was his true calling, but it definitely was not. He would always launch himself toward the Most High in his own inimitable way.) Later, at the University of Jena, Hölderlin attended religiously the lectures of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the most seductive philosophy professor of the age and spokesman for the intellectually ambitious youth of the emerging German nation. The ironclad demands of pure rationality could not hold Höderlin, however, for he was meant to be a poet who wrote with his soul. And he knew it.
Hölderlin’s writings are those of an enthusiast, in the largest sense of that word. They are full of God, or rather the gods. Christ, Dionysus, and Heracles are joined together in his poems, a triumvirate of vanished divinities whom he recalls to something like life after death. Gods populate his odes and hymns the way lovely and willing women do the ballads and erotic knockabout of his contemporary Lord Byron.
Hölderlin aims to revive in men the powers they naturally felt in the days when they dwelt in the company of such deities. In “Dichtermuth” (“The Poet’s Courage”) he celebrates the high honor he has been granted in proclaiming the god that every man recognizes in his own fashion. The bearers of glad tidings are exhilarated by the presence of the human multitude whom they serve. (Here and elsewhere, I use Michael Hamburger’s translations.)
Where around us there breathe, teem those alive,
our kin,
We, their poets; and glad, friendly to every
man,
Trusting all. And how else for
Each of them could we
sing his god?
Poetry and prophecy are of a piece for Hölderlin. However, sometimes this highest vocation is fraught with uncertainty, and the poet-prophet must wait in loneliness for the “bright spirits” of the coming age to enter the scene; not even he can say when that coming age will show its face. In his gloomiest moods, Hölderlin is cast into outer darkness for daring to invoke the gods, who can be surly in their withdrawal. Worst of all, the mass of men, unfit for visitation by the heavenly powers, would rather not hear what Hölderlin has to say. They insist that it is better not to be reminded of what has been lost and cannot readily be recovered. Despite such trials, Hölderlin never loses faith or hope entirely. The purity of his calling sustains him in his demanding task.
His whipsawing between transport and desolation would eventually exact a terrible price. On the threshold of insanity after the death of the woman he loved, Hölderlin was accosted by Apollo as he walked along a country road, an encounter that changed his life, decidedly not for the better. The second half of his life can be called a posthumous existence. Abandoned by his mother, neglected by his sometime friends, subjected to brutal medical attention, he experienced the customary measure of misery available to psychotic sufferers in those psychiatrically benighted times.
Something like salvation arrived in the person of a Tübingen carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, an admirer of Hölderlin’s epistolary novel, Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece. Zimmer took the poet into his home and treated him with respect and wondrous kindness. Despite his diminished capacity, Hölderlin still composed poems occasionally, and some are heartbreaking. From “To Zimmer”: “What here we are, elsewhere a God amends / With harmonies, eternal recompense and peace.” Certain of his last poems he signed Scardanelli, and dated from centuries before. Mad as Hölderlin was, even these are resplendent with love for the natural world and gratitude for the human place in it.
Heidegger took inspiration from Hölderlin, but in his famous lecture he devoted painstaking attention to the spiritual lexicon of Rainer Maria Rilke. The greatest poet to write in German since Goethe, Rilke is famous for his angels. He believed himself born for an exalted role in the spiritual life of modern times, and he dedicated himself to his art with unstinting fervor. His friend the philosopher Rudolf Kassner said Rilke was a poet even while washing his hands.
Exacting powers superior to his own will and intellect visited Rilke on occasions of the utmost creative solemnity, and put him to work. As one learns from his biographer Ralph Freedman, during the composition in January 1912 of the Duineser Elegien (“Duino Elegies”), he informed the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, “I am writing like a madman. What does it matter? You’ll sense I had no choice. The voice that uses me is greater than I.” A few days later he likened his inspiration to that vouchsafed to St. John the Evangelist: He was taking “dictation . . . called down so stormily on this Patmos.”
The dictating voice would cut off when Rilke was not yet finished, and he would have to wait another decade before his sublime overseers saw fit to guide him to completion of the ten elegies. As an earnest of their wondrous intentions, they first granted him a remarkable sonnet sequence, Die Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus), the first part of which, comprising twenty-six poems, poured out of him in three days in February 1922. Then came the rest of the elegies, in an intense begetting spasm he described as a “boundless storm, a hurricane of the spirit.” In their afterglow he composed another group of Orphic sonnets, twenty-nine in eight days. Heidegger for his part, as befits a philosopher, was far less flamboyant in his remarks on the composition of what he calls Rilke’s “valid poetry,” which “concentrates and solidifies itself, patiently assembled, in two slim volumes, Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.”
One might scoff at Rilke’s profession of faith in his top-drawer creative connections if the results of these transports were not so stunning. His genius was Mozart-like in its irrepressibility, though unlike Mozart’s his output was intermittent—the spirits being unreliable about showing up for work. Much of the time Rilke spent writing was devoted not to poetry but to his copious, elegant, and thoughtful correspondence with numerous friends, some of them wealthy, titled, and beautiful women—and with his wife, the sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff, with whom he parted ways without divorcing a few years into their marriage, as they agreed, largely it seems at his instigation. He argued that each of them would best thrive artistically in solitude. Over the years Rilke traversed Europe from end to end in search of just the right place to be alone with his work, preferably a place not too remote from feminine companionship when some was desired.
Rilke’s mind turned readily to profound questions, which he aspired to probe to the glowing core. His life was an unending search for God. The effort to comprehend moral and natural evil and the universality of death tested Rilke’s intelligence and nerve, and here he relied on his own native buoyancy, which may have been greater than most people can muster when they find themselves pitched sink-or-swim into “the destructive element,” as Joseph Conrad called that portion of creation that is poised to kill you. The intellectual vogue for defiant unbelief, which has extended into our own time, never won Rilke as a whole-hearted adherent, but in certain respects he can be called a fellow traveler. He had uses for Nietzsche’s rebellion against Christianity: He took from that renegade thinker what served his purposes, and indeed we may say that he wrote in Nietzsche’s shadow, even when he clearly disagreed with the titan who boasted of philosophizing with a hammer and who smashed every piety like so much crockery.
Rilke was not afraid to do some demolition work himself, and like many iconoclasts he started young. He did most of his damage then, some of it lasting. His biographer Donald Prater finds that although Rilke remained firm in his faith in God, by the age of eighteen he had already jettisoned Christ, declaring a very Nietzschean antipathy for “the trap of Christianity,” with its bait of eternal life; he announced himself “satisfied with this one world.” (Prater provides a prose translation from some early poems, from which I draw my quotes.) Quite unlike Nietzsche, though, Rilke believed not in the will to power but in the power of love: “love is my religion.” Rilke could not love Christ or pray to him. “He was great, with noble aims. But one thing made him small—in excess of presumption he denied he was a simple human being. . . . Rather would he suffer and die on the cross—as a god. . . . [As] a man, he could have remained divinely great, only as God does he seem humanly small.”
In Visions of Christ, another youthful work never published in the poet’s lifetime, Rilke transported the failed redeemer to the turn of the twentieth century, and took his brief against his antagonist to the point of brazen and blasphemous contempt. As Christ lies with a prostitute, he intimates that his claims to be the son of God were pure braggadocio, and he gets what he thinks he deserves. “Why do you laugh? Yes, spit in my face, it is my desert. And my remorse. No, I am not he, I am no God.” Prater convincingly argues that Rilke’s rebellion against Christ was no passing phase, confounding those readers who have tried to turn him into “a poet-priest of fundamentally Christian belief.” Writing to Princess Marie from a small Spanish town in 1912, Rilke talked up his newfound respect for Islam—he had been reading the Qur’an—and his “almost rabid anti-Christianity.” “Like a river through a primeval mountain, [Muhammad] breaks his way through to the one God, with whom one can speak so magnificently every morning without the ‘Christ’ telephone, into which people continually shout: Hello, who’s there?—and no one answers.”
Yet for all Rilke’s boorish badmouthing of the religion he was born into—he was baptized a Roman Catholic in the Hapsburg city of Prague—he had in his heart an irreducible longing for God. He journeyed to Russia in 1899 in the company of the Russian-born Lou Andreas-Salomé. She was a married woman fourteen years older than Rilke, a formidable intellectual who had previously entranced Nietzsche and broken his heart by rejecting his marriage proposal. She was the love of Rilke’s life, though only briefly his lover. The trip reaffirmed Rilke’s natural piety, smitten as he was with the Russian soul, embodied in godly peasants, Tolstoy, and the bells of St. Basil’s tolling for Easter.
Upon returning home Rilke wrote, over the course of just a week, a book of tales, several set in Russia: Von lieben Gott und Anderes / an Grossen für Kinder erzählt (Of the Beloved God and Others, Told to Grownups for Children, currently translated as Stories of God). The stories extol simple belief, which children demonstrate with an instinctive ease that adults can rarely manage. Rilke offers basic instruction in elemental goodness. In one tale, a group of children decide that adults fail to show sufficient interest in God, who “is something we cannot do without,” and they designate a thimble as a divine stand-in and take turns reverently carrying God around in their pockets. In another tale, a shrewd soul promises to tell a story without God to an unbelieving schoolmaster, who prefers historical reality to idle talk about a non-existent deity. The story illustrates the virtue of charity, from which the schoolmaster, so proud of his intellect, draws a godless and clueless moral. But the children who hear the story along with him annoy the schoolmaster by insisting that it is very much about God. The omniscient narrator of the scene pronounces: “But of course the children must know!” The effect is an earnest endorsement of a very Christian sentiment from the avowed enemy of Christ.
In his voluminous writings, Rilke teaches that there are as many paths to knowledge of God as there are human souls. No poet takes a more varied approach to divinity than Rilke. From the trance-like attentiveness with which he examines a flower’s beauty; to the compassion that unites him with the “maimed” ones among the urban masses and casts into doubt the goodness of creation; to the moral challenge to “change your life,” issued by a mutilated archaic sculpture of Apollo; to the demythologizing ruthlessness he turns upon the crucified Christ, whose earthly mission is clearly a failure; to the lacerating insight that some men must welcome agony as their invitation to the divine love; to the understanding, inspired by the sight of a swan’s movement through the water, that death may prove the fulfillment of your very being, for who knows what might await you beyond this world, and you might glide through eternity as gracefully as the swan swims: The body of Rilke’s work encompasses a multitude of voices as rich in human complication as the great nineteenth-century Russian novels. All these voices address directly or implicitly the god he can only hope might still be in hailing distance.
In his career as a god-seeker, Rilke discovers how essential his solitary undertaking is and how desperately in need of his offerings his contemporaries are. Heidegger summarizes what Rilke has learned: “The time remains destitute not only because God is dead, but because mortals are hardly aware and capable even of their own mortality.” Rilke recognizes a besetting spiritual numbness. “Death withdraws into the enigmatic. The mystery of pain remains veiled. Love has not been learned.” And yet, “song still lingers over their destitute land. The singer’s word still keeps to the trace of the holy.” Despite our staggering incomprehension and even insensibility, the poet’s singing brings hope that men might eventually know that they live and die. But almost immediately, Heidegger retracts the proffered hope: “Even the trace of the holy becomes unrecognizable. It remains undecided whether we still experience the holy at the track leading to the godhead of the divine, or whether we now encounter no more than the trace of the holy.”
In the Duino Elegies, his masterpiece, Rilke comes close to leading us forward into the mystery at the world’s center, restoring and recovering the hope that the mystery might contain the divine. From the opening lines he calls upon superhuman agents that thrill with their beauty and terrify with their strangeness, for though we are familiar only with life on earth, these angels are at home in both the visible and invisible worlds, among the living and the dead, whom they sometimes cannot tell apart. “For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure, / and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains / to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.” As for divinity, human beings must be content only to receive intimations of its presence; anything more explicit would shatter us. “Not that you could bear / God’s voice—not at all. But listen to the wind’s breathing, / the unbroken news that takes shape out of silence.” (I have relied on the beautiful and mostly faithful translations of Edward Snow, though I have departed here or there, when he uses a fancy word where Rilke used a simple one.)
Even in his enthusiasms, Rilke remains shrewdly aware of human limitations. The limitation most painful and most exigent is the brevity and singularity of our earthly allotment, and in the Ninth Elegy Rilke rises to plainspoken eloquence in honor of our life right here and now: “Once for each thing, only once. Once and no more. And we, too, / only once. Never again. But to have been / once, even though only once: / this having been earthly seems lasting, beyond repeal.” To live as though the here and now were all we shall ever have is our preparation for what lies on the other side of death. He addresses the earth, the site of transformation where the visible dreams of becoming invisible someday: “Oh believe me, / you need no more of your Springs to win me—one, / just one, is already too rich for my blood. / Namelessly I’m wed to you forever. / You have always been right, and your most sacred tenet / is Death the intimate Friend.”
The Tenth Elegy is an excursion into the realm of the dead, where a soul recently arrived is introduced to his new existence by the Laments, the immemorial denizens of the next world, who lead him from the melancholy borderlands to within sight of the Font of Joy, which “among men becomes a powerful stream,” and then on to “the mountains of primeval grief,” where he climbs alone, “And no step echoes back from that soundless fate.” Being dead seems a pretty disheartening sequel to being alive. What we see of this new world bears some resemblance to Dante’s Purgatory, but we are not told what lies beyond the mountains. Instead the poem ends with a vision of the beauty of the earth:
But suppose the endlessly dead were to waken an image in us:
they might point to the catkins hanging
from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain
that falls on black earth in early Spring.
And we, who always think of happiness
rising, would feel the emotion
that almost confounds us
when a happy thing falls.
That the dead should conjure these images for the benefit of the living brings home the eternal gravity of the biblical Fall, which condemned men and women to know the awesome severity of inhuman nature and the inevitability of death. But for Rilke it is precisely this world, with its ever-dying loveliness, that men are to cherish above all. And what almost confounds us in this happy fall is the question whether the world is in fact fallen at all. The dangling catkins and the falling spring rain are here emblems of the primordial innocence of earthly life, which is not a vale of tears corrupted by human sin but remains exactly as God intended: the home he made for us and that we are meant to love, even as we prepare to leave it for a world beyond, where we may or may not ascend to lasting happiness. A world such as this neither needs nor wants a Redeemer, for it bears no taint of original sin. The God who presides over it is very different from the Christian God; indeed, his appointed emissary would be not Christ but rather someone like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, whose calling is to give the earth “a human meaning.”
In an interview toward the end of his life Heidegger famously observed, “Perhaps only a god can save us.” The gods summoned by Hölderlin and Rilke have likely saved very few, if any. The two poets are very modern souls with very modern peculiarities. But one need not turn to them for salvation or believe as they do in order to appreciate the excellence of their poetry and the seriousness of their spiritual lives. They are intimates of the abyss that Heidegger described as the native ground of poets in destitute times, with its savage refutation of whatever might offer relief or even fulfillment. Yet they recover their equilibrium sufficiently to rise to high praise of this world, of the world beyond, and of their ruling divinity and his ministering angelic spirits. Rilke is the greater poet, and perhaps the more antipathetic to the Christian believer, for his faith passed through the crucible of Nietzschean unbelief, whereby the love of Christ was burned away, leaving an ugly scar. Yet he wrote some of the most remarkable religious poems of the twentieth century, however unorthodox they might be, and his death-confronting, life-enhancing voice continues to sound powerfully as our time grows ever more destitute. The Duino Elegies might not be quite what we hope for from poetry by one of the master spirits of modernity—it falters by comparison with T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets—but we are grateful for beauty and consolation of this rare order wherever we happen to find it.
In the end, it is beauty and not truth that we find in Heidegger’s destitute poets. The crucial fact about the destitute time is that the human soul cannot bear too much nothing. We cannot help but seek, and, deprived of true religion, our time is one of the ersatz gods. Hölderlin and Rilke are not imitators of the real but creators of the unreal: The numinousness they promote is their own invention, born of a consuming need for something, anything, that might patch the god-shaped hole in their souls. As Heidegger himself observes (in the spirit of commendation), they are “sayers”—not seers. The solutions they contrive for the problem posed by the death of God are attractive confections of language. The damage they do is not obvious, as is that of the cure-alls proposed by secular philosophers, political men, and other physicians for our persistent spiritual malaise. These poets do not worship the golden calf of unending youth or regard the human beehive as the heavenly city on earth. But they are in the end idolaters, and their seductive loveliness, like Heidegger’s genius for conjuring with words, should not be mistaken for more than it is.
T. S. Eliot mordantly reflected that saying poetry will save us when religion is gone is like saying the wallpaper will save us when the walls have collapsed. Aesthetic bliss may point to the deepest human longing, but it does not fill it. Eliot knew the poet’s place. From youthful despair he came around to the realization that the true God has not retreated from our time. He remains available to those who seek him in prayer, observance, thought, and action.
Algis Valiunas is a fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Image by Caspar David Friedrich, public domain. Image cropped.
