Skip to main content

Peter Camenzind and Re-envisioned Christianity



I was inspired to re-read Hermann Hesse's novel, 'Peter Camenzind', after many years, having completed Barry Stephenson's admirable book, 'Veneration and Revolt: Hermann Hesse and Swabian Pietism'. Hesse is often seen simply to be in revolt against his family's perceived narrow and moralistic Protestantism. Its strictures were such that they triggered his adolescent revolt from his seminary and their persistent mishandling of his poetic aspiration deepened his antagonism towards them and their background culture.

The truth, as is often the way, was more complex. German Pietism often sat alongside a deep appreciation of the wider culture (and in the case of German Romanticism actively contributed to the development of that culture). Though German Pietism was arguably in its decline by the time of Hesse's birth, becoming more conservative and identified with state nationalism and bureaucracy, the strand with which Hesse's family identified had a greater breadth and retained its internationalist and quietist flavour towards politics. Stephenson convincingly shows that Hesse remained in lifelong dialogue with it, that it shaped many of his attitudes, positively as well as negatively; not least in ultimately bringing Hesse to describe himself as a Christian - though in Blake's terms, a Christian radical embracing a truth that ultimately was one and unitary, enfolding all authentic traditions. Stephenson's criticism is beautifully nuanced and a model of the interplay of religious, historical and literary study whose complexity I cannot contend with here but re-reading Peter Camenzind I could see its value.

Value not least because you realise how deeply Christian Camenzind is even if this is always perceived with a certain ironic detachment. Peter born in a high Alpine village lives a quasi-paradisical life steps out into the world of experience - of art, journalism, thwarted love - and returns to his Alpine world wiser yet suffused still with a bewildered innocence about the world's ultimate meaning. Yet the journey is a validated one, he would not have wished it otherwise and two patterns of revealed meaning abide.

The first is that of nature itself - the world into which we are born and connects each and every one of us. It is a world both majestic and grand, wholly itself, and yet one that can be greeted as 'brother', whose moods, whatever they are, can be welcomed. Here the archetype is St Francis with whom Peter is in love and whom he greets as a fellow spirit. St Francis embraces the world in all its diversity - light and dark - as companion. There is a self in all of us that steps beyond time and difference and sees unity in every particular moment.

The second is care for one another - beautiful when reciprocated but beautiful too when simply offered with no expected return. Peter comes to befriend and care for Boppi, a handicapped man, who initially repels him, and yet they become friends, companions on the way, until and into and through Boppi's death. But equally Peter returns to his village and cares for his father, whom in the past he has never loved, without regard for a returning affirmation, simply because here lies obligation freely entered into.

Thus does the book follow a transformed Pietist motif - paradise inhabited, lost to experience and regained in a recognition of a deeper, binding unity and in the service of others - the irony being that here there is no discussion of 'sin' of the need to break the will of the sinner into repentance - the patterning is a natural one, lived out of the self-propelled, reflective nature of a human being, being themselves, attuned to the natural gracing of meaning, not a busying anthropomorphic God. We are in the world of original blessing rather than original sin and God as the munificent holder of unity in diversity, striving with their creation towards wholeness, not an outside entity peering in judgementally (but that too, as William Blake found, was one of the possibilities of 'Pietism' too, as expressed in one of its mystical founders, Jacob Boheme).

It too is a book of the most wonderful descriptions of nature - in which we live and move and have our becoming - of mountains and lakes, of trees and flowers and, most especially, of clouds minutely observed in the ways in which they reveal the changing patterns of weather and time.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev