Copyright by Jacob Ivan Eidt 2004 The Dissertation Committee for Jacob Ivan Eidt Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Deus Absconditus: Gnosticism, the Secularization Process, and Philosophical Modernity in the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke Committee: Lars Gustafsson, Supervisor Kirsten Belgum, Co-Supervisor Lynn Wilkinson Herbert Hochberg Nina Berman Deus Absconditus: Gnosticism, the Secularization Process, and Philosophical Modernity in the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke by Jacob Ivan Eidt, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2004 Dedication/Dedicatoria Para Doña Jacoba Leiva de Rodriguez Fonseca. Por ella yo sueño con los angelitos. To my parents Jacob and Amanda for all of their love, support, encouragement and faith, without which I would not have gone far. And to Father Thomas J. Lalor, Dr. James Ronald Bartlett, and Dr. Joachim Pfeiffer for their inspiration and their example. Acknowledgements I would like to express my thanks and gratitude to Dr. Lars Gustafsson for his guidance and instruction, his poetic insight and most of all for his friendship. I would also like to thank the members of my committee Dr. Kirsten Belgum for her careful editing and constructive criticism as well as for her encouragement and engagement, Dr. Nina Berman for her help and interest in my research especially from so far away, Dr. Herbert Hochberg for his interdisciplinary openness and his patience in dealing with philosophical questions and literature, and Dr. Lynn Wilkinson for offering a comparativist view so central to my work. I would also like to thank Laura Sager for her patience, support, love and encouragement, which helped me more than she probably realizes, my friends Lara Ducate, Lisa Seidlitz, and the graduate students in the Department of Germanic Studies in Austin, who have made my stay in Austin a happy one, Soonnam Baek for her encouragement all the way from Korea, Victor Hugo Villarreal-Ramierez and Claudia Margarita Perez-Perez, who are always with me in spirit, the staff and students of the Texas Institute of English Proficiency, who also made my stay in Austin a happy and enriching experience, and of course my dear friends, Ivo Radeljic-Jakic, Alexei Rybakov, Michael Kleinherne, and Alessandra Nucifora, who are always close to my heart. v PREFACE Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of external signs, hands on to others feelings he has worked through, and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them – Leo Tolstoy Since my earliest contact with German Literature I have been especially drawn to the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). With the passage of time I find that this initial fascination has not diminished. Quite to the contrary it has, not unlike Rilke’s many metaphors and poetic images, grown and evolved into something quite different from that which it originally set out to be. This dissertation is surely a product of this ongoing interest in Rilke and it is motivated most clearly by what I see to be the philosophical dimension of Rilke’s work. The degree and popularity of Rilke’s poetry never ceases to astonish me. Rilke’s cross-cultural and cross-generational appeal is especially striking in my own personal experience. In my teaching of German to undergraduate students I often notice that they cite Rilke as the one German poet that they not only have heard of but also have actually read and enjoy. Something in Rilke seems to speak to them on a very personal level1. I recently offered an English translation of the Letters to a Young Poet to a Korean friend as a gift. She replied, “Oh Rilke! I’ve read him. His poems are very popular in Korea.” This also seems to be the case in Japan.2 These examples are of course personal and anecdotal, however, it is not my purpose to account for Rilke’s popularity. My point is that I see a genuine and apparently translatable interest in Rilke’s work not shared on such a global scale by other German-speaking poets of his time. And it is my 1 For Rilke’s pop-culture appeal in the U.S. see John Mood’s “From Cheers to Change” – The Pop Rilke in Bauschinger and Cocalis’ Rilke-Rezeptionen, Rilke Reconsidered, 1995. vi opinion that this fascination can be traced back, not to the beauty or innovation of his language (often lost in translation3) but to the force, relevance and accessibility of his ideas and images. I believe that it is the philosophical dimension of these ideas and images related to Gnostic ideas, and in particular the modern character of those Gnostic ideas, that makes Rilke so interesting for so many different people across so many different cultures. It is in any event the primary impetus for this dissertation and the motivation for my thoughts and ideas on the subject. My earliest discussions with Dr. Lars Gustafsson at the University of Texas about Rilke centered not only on specific historical-philosophical questions but also on the particular philosophical disposition that seems to emanate from the poems and their lyrical subject. There are numerous treatments of Rilke’s poetry that offer interpretations according to individual philosophers or specific schools of thought. But as Dr. Gustafsson has queried on many an occasion, “if Rilke poses the “same” philosophical question as another poet or thinker, can it really be entirely the same question?” I do not propose to find the exact thought that Rilke has in mind, however, Dr. Gustafsson’s observation lies at the heart of this study and it distinguishes it from other studies that have connected Rilke to philosophy. I believe that Rilke’s philosophical expression is unique and that it is fueled by certain not-so-unique Gnostic influences namely by the Gnostic notion of the Deus absconditus. However, before I can demonstrate this more clearly it is necessary to address the assumption that Rilke’s poetry does indeed have a philosophical dimension containing an identifiable structure. This seems to be an assumption that not everyone is prepared to make. This fact can be illustrated 2 For more on the popularity of Rilke in Asia see Mitzue Motoyoshi’s „Rilke in Japan und Japan in Rilke“ in Manfred Engel and Dieter Lamping’s Rilke und die Welt Literature, 1999. 3 For some insightful discussions on the difficulty of translating Rilke as well as a review of many of the English translations of Rilke’s poetry see William H. Gass’ Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, 1999. vii with the celebrated example of Romano Guardini’s interpretation and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s criticism of it, which is the starting point of this dissertation. viii Deus Absconditus: Gnosticism, the Secularization Process, and Philosophical Modernity in the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke Publication No._____________ Jacob Ivan Eidt, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2004 Supervisors: Lars Gustafsson and Kirsten Belgum This dissertation looks at the philosophical impact of the religious and historical phenomenon known as Gnosticism on the poetry and thought of Rainer Maria Rilke. At the center of Gnostic ideology and myth is a view of human existence as driven by a profound dualism, a dualism which is the result of warring opposites, often characterized in terms of good and evil and of the spiritual and the material. This perspective on the human condition is a defining moment for the secularization process, modern thought and modern aesthetics. Rilke’s re-incorporation of Gnostic motifs is not simply an adoption of the dualistic Gnostic world-view but represents a reaction to it within the greater development and articulation of modern consciousness. Both the intellectual climate of Rilke’s age and his own assimilation of certain tropes and motifs reveal a structural affinity with Gnostic ideology and myth. It is the Gnostic Deus ix absconditus that drives the thought behind the three connected figures of God, the angels, and Orpheus. This study looks at these favored tropes in light of the Gnostic tendencies that found their way into the culture of turn of the century Europe via philosophy. It offers a perspective on Rilke as a truly modern poet regarding the content and dynamic of his ideas. This project presents a cultural-philosophical approach toward Rilke, which differs from previous studies in its attempt to link the dynamic of philosophical ideas and cultural reception through the evolution of connected poetic figures. Unlike other studies that often assume a pre-existing philosophical context from which to view Rilke, this study seeks to define a philosophical context through Gnosticism and its relationship to notions of modernity. x Table of Contents INTRODUCTION................................................................................................... 1 Rilke and Philosophy ..................................................................................... 1 The Philosophical Contexts of Rilke Scholarship.......................................... 7 Methodological Considerations.................................................................... 18 Gnosticism as Method.................................................................................. 22 A New Philosophical Context: Gnosticism and Secularization .................. 28 The Secularization Process..........................................................................