I certainly do not wish to consider as witnesses of my inner and living faith the scribes and pharisees of our age, men who turn the dear holy Bible into a cold twaddle that destroys heart and soul...Only I do not like to give myself and my heart where it is misunderstood; so I am wont to keep silence before those who are theologians by profession..., just as much as before those who do not wish to know anything at all of the whole business because every kind of religion, which is after all the first and final need of man, has been marred for them from their earliest days by the dead letter and by the appalling command to believe.—Friedrich Hölderlin, Werke (January 1799)
Monday, April 11, 2011
The Dead Letter and the Appalling Command
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Wilco - "Theologians" (2005)
ReplyDeleteIt is true that theologians have done very little work on the nature of the cherry ghost's soul. There is a potential dissertation here.
ReplyDeleteI just came across this passage in a 1959 lecture by Aldous Huxley:
ReplyDelete"We find a number of remarks about language in relation to religion in the epistles of St. Paul---remarks the more curious when one reflects that it is precisely the language of St. Paul's epistles which has dominated the whole Christian scene for nineteen hundred years. Paul says, in one well-known phrase, 'The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life' (2 Corinthians 3:6). And, 'We should serve in the newness of the spirit and not in the oldness of the letter' (Romans 7:6)."