The Sleepwalkers

by Hermann Broch

  It was clear: Esch was presenting an account, even although only a spiritual one, and the Major could not but think again of his steward sitting opposite him in the office with his accounts, and he thought too of the Polish farm-labourers, who were always trying to get the better of him. Was this man not threatening him with his Socialism? Perhaps it was something long forgotten that he repeated when he said:

  “Someone always rejects us, Herr Esch.”

  Esch had got up and, yielding to habit, had begun to walk with awkward strides up and down the room. The sharp vertical folds at either side of his mouth were still deeper than usual; how careworn he looks, thought the Major, incredible that this earnest man should be a tavern frequenter or a visitor to disreputable resorts, an emissary from the underworld. Can he be such a hypocrite? It was as impossible to imagine as that underworld itself.

  Esch planted himself directly in front of the Major:

  “Herr Major, to put it quite frankly … how can I fill my position when I’m not even clear whether our path might not be made plainer by accepting the Protestant faith.…”

  Now the Major could of course have responded that it was not one of an editor’s duties to solve theological problems,—but he was too much alarmed by Esch’s direct question to find any answer at all: it was not so unlike Huguenau’s entreaties to be given the army printing, and for a moment the figures of the two men seemed about to blend together again. The Major put up his hand to the Iron Cross on his breast and his bearing became official: was it fitting that he, an officer in a prominent position, should make proselytes? The Catholic Church counted after all as a sort of ally, and he would not have taken it upon him to induce an Austrian or a Bulgarian or a Turk to give up the ties binding him to his own state in favour of Germany. It was really annoying, the way that this Esch insisted on his pound of flesh, and yet again it was flattering and alluring; in this appeal to him was there not something of the faith that for ever renews and regenerates religion? But the Major still resisted, and begged to point out that, himself a Protestant, he did not feel competent to counsel a Catholic in matters of belief.

  Esch once more made a disdainful gesture with his hand,—that was beside the question: in the Major’s article it said that Christian must stand by Christian—so there was no difference between Catholic and Protestant Christianity, and the town priest paid little enough attention to such scruples.

  The Major did not reply. Was it really a net made out of his own words that was being drawn round him? with which this man wished to drag him down into the darkness and the pit? And yet it was as though a gentle hand were stretched out to lead him forth to the peaceful banks of quiet waters. He could not help thinking of the baptism in Jordan, and almost against his will he said:

  “There’s no rule in matters of faith, Herr Esch; faith is a natural fountain that springs up, as we are told in the Bible,” and then he added reflectively, “every one must come to know divine grace by himself.”

  Esch had turned his back discourteously on the Major; he stood at the window with his forehead pressed against the window pane. Now he turned round: his expression was grave, almost imploring:

  “Herr Major, it isn’t a question of rules … it’s a question of trust …” and after a little: “otherwise it would be …” he could not find the right word, “otherwise the paper would be no better than all the other papers … a corrupt Press … eyewash for demagogues … but you, Herr Major, wanted something different.…”

  Once more Major von Pasenow felt the sweetness of yielding, of being carried away; it was as though a silvery cloud sought to catch him up, floating over the spring streams. The security of trust! No, that man standing so seriously before him was no adventurer, no traitor, no unreliable Pole, not a man to carry your confidence over to the other side and there shamelessly and openly expose it. So at first hesitatingly, but becoming warmer as he went on, the Major began to speak of Luther’s teaching, in following which nobody need despair, nobody, Herr Esch! for everyone carried the divine spark somewhere in his soul, and—the strength with which Major von Pasenow felt this he was unable even to express—no one was shut out from grace, and everyone who was granted grace might go forth to preach redemption. And any man who looked deeply into his own heart would recognize the truth and the way; and Esch too would find his way to the light and follow it. “Be comforted, Herr Editor,” he said, “it will all turn out for the best.” And he would be glad to talk to Herr Esch again if Herr Esch should desire it and his own scanty leisure permitted—the Major had risen and reached Esch his hand across the desk—besides he would be coming presently to have a look over the publishing office of the Kur-Trier Herald. He nodded to Esch. Esch remained irresolutely standing, and the Major feared a speech of thanks. But he received no thanks, for Esch asked almost roughly: “And my friends?” The Major once more became slightly official: “Later, Herr Esch, later perhaps.” And Esch bowed awkwardly and retired.

  Nevertheless for a man so radically impetuous as Esch there was no hanging back after this. When a few days later—to the astonishment of everybody who heard of it, and that was presently the whole town—he joined the Protestant Church, it seemed to his ardent soul an act of homage to the Major at the same time.

  CHAPTER LV

  DISINTEGRATION OF VALUES (7)

  Historical Excursus.

  That criminal and rebellious age known as the Renaissance, that age in which the Christian scheme of values was broken in two halves, one Catholic and the other Protestant, that age in which with the falling asunder of the medieval organon a process of dissolution destined to go on for five centuries was inaugurated and the seeds of the modern world planted, that age at once of sowing and of first blossoming cannot be comprehensively subsumed either under its Protestantism or its individualism or its nationalism or its joyous sensuousness, or even under its revival of humanism and natural science: if that age, which in its style presented such an obvious appearance of unity, and is now regarded as a coherent whole, possessed a homogeneous spirit commensurable with that unity and producing that style, it is certainly not to be found in any one phenomenon selected from its various manifestations, not even in a phenomenon of such profound revolutionary force as Protestantism; rather must all these phenomena be referred to a common denominator, they must all possess a common root, and that root must have lain in the logical structure of thought itself, in that specific logic which penetrated and informed all the activities of the epoch.

  Now it may be asserted with some confidence that a sweeping revolution in the style of thinking—and the revolutionary aspect of all these phenomena entitles us to infer such a complete revolution in thinking—invariably results from the fact that thought has reached its provisional limit of infinity, that it is no longer able to resolve the antinomies of infinity by the old methods, and so is compelled to revise its own basic principles.

  We have before our own eyes a very clear example of such a process in the research into first principles of modern mathematics, which, starting from the antinomies of infinity, has achieved a revolution of mathematical method whose extent cannot yet be estimated. True, it is impossible to decide whether here we are dealing with a new revolution in thought, or with the final and definitive liquidation of medieval logic (probably with both). For not only has a residue of medieval values survived right up to our time, giving room for the assumption that its concomitant ways of thinking have also survived; it is to be remarked as well that the paradox of all antinomies and the very essence of the antinomies of infinity is the fact that they derive from the deductive method: but that means that they derive from theological method, for there is no world system of theology that is not deductive, in other words that does not seek by reason to deduce all phenomena from a supreme principle, from God; and in the last resort every form of Platonism is thus deductive theology. So even if the Platonic-theological content in the system of modern mathematics is not immediately visible, and perhaps must even
remain invisible while mathematics remains an adequate expression of the logic that prevails over mathematics as well as over everything else, yet there is a striking affinity between the antinomies of infinity postulated by mathematics and those of medieval scholasticism. The medieval discussion of the infinite, of course, did not take place on the mathematical plane (or only parenthetically, in cosmic speculations), but the “ethical” infinite, as one may venture to call it, such as is implied in the perennial problem of the infinite attributes of God, includes all the questions about actual and potential infinity and posits the same structural limitations that puzzle modern mathematics and provide its antinomies. In both cases the substance of the antinomy arises from the absoluteness with which logic is applied, an absoluteness that cannot be avoided so long as logic prevails, and that can be recognized only when the antinomian limits are reached. Among the scholastics this misleading absolutism found expression chiefly in the interpretation of symbols: the concreteness of the Church in its earthly and finite form that nevertheless claimed to be absolute could not but draw in its train a finite limitation of all symbolic forms, and though the result was a system of marvellous symbol-mirages, a system rising from symbol to symbol, overshadowed and bound in a magical unity by the heavenly-earthly, infinite-finite symbol of the Eucharist, yet it could not stave off inevitable collapse; for at its antinomian limits of infinity scholastic thought had to break down, to turn back and solve once more through dialectic the now finite Platonic idea, that is to say, to prepare the reaction towards Positivism, and to enter on that automatic development whose beginnings were already visible in the Aristotelian formation of the Church, and whose further progress, in spite of manifold attempts by the scholastics to hold it up (the theory of twofold truth, the quarrel between nominalists and realists, Occam’s new formulation of the theory of knowledge) could no longer be checked; scholastic thought had to founder on its own absolutism, its own antinomies of infinity,—its logic was abrogated.

  But thought corresponds to reality only for so long as its logicalness remains undisputed. This applies to all thinking, not merely to deductive dialectic (all the more as it is impossible to distinguish how much deduction is inherent in any act of thinking). It would be wrong, however, to say that deduction became suspect because people had suddenly learned to look at facts with different and better eyes; the exact reverse is the case: things are only regarded with different eyes once dialectic has broken down, and that breakdown occurs not at the point where thought interprets reality, since reality would go on indefinitely submitting itself to such interpretation, but anterior to that, in thought’s own province of logic, namely in face of the problems raised by infinity. The patience with which mankind suffers the authority of logic is simply inexhaustible and can be compared only to the imperturbable patience with which it submits to the art of medicine: and just as the human body confides itself to the most nonsensical medical cures, and is actually cured by them, so reality submits to the erection of the most impossible theoretic structures,—and so long as the theory does not itself declare its bankruptcy it will be supported with confidence, and reality will remain tractable. Only after bankruptcy has been openly declared does man begin to rub his eyes and look once more at reality; only then does he seek the source of knowledge in living experience instead of in ratiocination.

  These two phases of spiritual revolution can be clearly perceived in the declining years of the Middle Ages: the bankruptcy of scholastic dialectic, and thereafter the—truly Copernican—rotation of attention to the immediate object. Or, in other words, it is the change from Platonism to Positivism, from the speech of God to the language of things.

  Yet with this change from the centralization of an ecclesiastical organon to the multifariousness of direct experience, with this transition from the Platonic pattern of medieval theocracy to the positivist contemplation of the empirically given and endlessly shifting world, with this atomizing of a former whole, there had to be a concurrent atomizing of value-systems in so far as these were related to object-systems. In short, values are no longer determined by a central authority, but take their colouring from the object: what matters is no longer the conservation of Biblical cosmogony, but the “scientific” observation of natural objects and the experiments that can be carried out on them; the politician is no longer concerned to model a divine state, but to manage a newly autonomous political unit that makes inevitable the emergence of new and efficient political methods in the shape of Machiavellianism; the warrior is no longer concerned with absolute war, such as took concrete shape in the Crusades, but with earthly squabbles carried on with new-fangled and unchivalrous weapons, such as firearms; no longer is it Christendom as a whole that is in question, but only certain empirical groups of men held together by the external bond of national language; nor is it man as the member of an ecclesiastical organon that the new individualism studies, but man as an individual in himself with his individual significance; and lastly the aim of art is no longer solely and finally the glorification of the community of saints, but the faithful observation of the external world, that faithfulness of representation which constitutes the naturalism of the Renaissance. Yet worldly as this obsession with the immediate object may seem, even purely pagan as it perhaps struck people at the time, so pagan that the newly discovered ancients were joyfully invoked as confederates, the inner object forced itself upon men’s attention with no less violence than the outer, indeed the immediacy of experience in the Renaissance is perhaps most immediate of all in its introspection: with this inward turning of the eye, with this discovery of the divine spark in the soul, God, who hitherto had been allowed to manifest Himself only through the medium of an ecclesiastical Platonic hierarchy, now became the object of immediate mystical apprehension, the re-won assurer of divine grace,—and this extraordinary juxtaposition of the most extreme pagan worldliness with the most unconditional inwardness of Protestant mysticism, this co-existence of the most disparate tendencies within the same province of style, would certainly be quite inexplicable were it not that it can be referred to the common denominator of immediacy. Like all other phenomena of the Renaissance, and perhaps in still greater measure than the others, Protestantism is a phenomenon of immediacy.

  But yet another and very decisive characteristic of that epoch may here find its determining cause: the glorification of “action,” the phenomenon of the “deed,” which is so conspicuous in all expressions of life in the Renaissance, and not least in Protestantism; that nascent contempt for the word which tries to confine the function of language as far as possible to its autonomous realms of poetry and rhetoric, refusing it access to other spheres and substituting for it as sole operating factor the man who acts; that movement towards a dumbness which was to prepare the way for the dumbness of a whole world: all this stands in a relation which cannot be ignored to the disintegration of the world into separate value-systems, and follows from that changing-over to the language of things which, to keep the metaphor, is a dumb language. It is almost like a testimony to the fact that any understanding between the separate value-systems was superfluous, or as though such an understanding might falsify the severity and singleness of the language of things. The two great rational vehicles of understanding in the modern world, the language of science in mathematics and the language of money in book-keeping, both find their starting-point in the Renaissance, both arise from that single and exclusive concentration on a single value-system, from that esoteric theory of expression, which might be called ascetic in its severity. Yet such an attitude had little in common with the asceticism of Catholic monks, for unlike the latter it was not a means to an end, not a device for summoning ecstatic “aid,” but sprang from the singleness of action, of that “action” which was thenceforth accounted the sole unambiguous language and the sole determining force. So Protestantism also by its origin and its nature is an “action”; it presupposes a religiously active man, seeking God, finding God, a man endowed with the s
ame positive activity as the new scientific researcher, or, indeed, the new type of soldier or politician. Luther’s religion was through and through that of a man of action, and at bottom anything but contemplative. But even in the heart of the action, at the core of this matter-of-fact sense of actuality, there lay the same severity, the same categorical imperative of duty, the same exclusion of all other value-systems; that literally iconoclastic asceticism of a Calvin which one might almost call an epistemological asceticism, and which drove Erasmus to the point of insisting that music should be excluded from the service of God.

  Yet the Middle Ages too had recognized the force of action. And no matter how violently the new positivism recoiled from Platonic scholasticism, in referring the individual to the solitary authority of his ego it also laid bare the “positivist roots” of Platonism. The new Christianity did not merely protest, it reformed as well, it looked upon itself throughout as a Renaissance of the Christian idea; and although at first it had no theology, it developed later, on a more autonomous and restricted basis, a purely Platonic and idealistic theology: for that is what Kantian philosophy amounts to. So the orientation of values, the ethical imperative directing action, remained the same as in the Middle Ages, and indeed could not have changed, for value consists only in the effective will to value and to unconditionality—there are no values save absolute values. What had changed was the delimitation of the value-producing action: hitherto the intensity of human aspiration towards the absolute had been concentrated on the total value of the Christian organon; now, however, all the radicality of a self-dependent logic, all the severity of autonomy, was directed to each system of values separately, each value-system was raised to an absolute value of its own, and that vehemence was engendered which was to maintain these absolute values side by side in isolation without reference to each other, that vehemence which gives the age of the Renaissance its characteristic colouring.