«du siehst, daß ich ein sucher bin» in the footsteps of ... · also j. ferreiro, rilke y san...

Emilia Di Rocco

«Du siehst, daß Ich ein Sucher bin»In the footsteps of Augustine: Rilke reads the «Confessions»

STRUMENTI CRITICI / a. XXXII, n. 2, maggio-agosto 2017

In July 1911, upon sending his mother Sophie a copy of St Au-gustine’s Confessions as a present, Rilke writes the following lines:

Let not time lead you astray: what is far, what is near?How this heart found the way to its Lord, can we not overhear?As it moves us and reaches us over so much that has been,we reach, it maybe, our own soul, the forever serene1.

The allusions to some of the tenets of Augustinian thought in this book inscription2, together with the references in two letters from 1911 addressed to Lili Schalk and Anton von Kippenberg, testify to Rilke’s life-long interest in Augustine of Hippo. In the years following the publication of the Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, the Confessions can be numbered among those books that the poet can’t do without. Together with the Bible and the writings of Jens Peter Jacobsen3, St Augustine’s work can be considered among those books that are always among his effects4.

Emilia Di Rocco, Sapienza Università di Roma, Facoltà di Lettere e filosofia, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma, [email protected]

1 R.M. Rilke, Poems 1906 to 1926, translated with and introduction by J.B. Leishman, London, The Hogarth Press, 1957, p. 126. All quotations from Rilke’s poems are from this edition, unless otherwise stated.

2 Besides the reference to time, there is an almost direct echo from a passage in the Confessions (XIII, ix, 10) in the second line.

3 On this see R.M. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, translated, edited and with notes by C. Louth, Introduction by L. Hyde, London, Penguin, 2012, p. 10.

4 A. Stahl offers an interesting survey of Rilke’s engagement with Augustine of Hippo in his «Salus tua ego sum». Rilke (1875-1926) liest die «Confessiones» des heiligen Augus-tinus», in N. Fischer (hrsg.), Augustinus. Spuren und Spiegelungen seines Denkens, Ham-burg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 2009, 2 voll., vol. 2, pp. 229-52. On Rilke and St Augustine see

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However, we will search almost in vain for direct quotations or explicit reminiscences of Augustine in Die Aufzeichnungen or in Rilke’s poetry. The influence of the Confessions reveals itself into the deeper structures of the novel and his poems, it enlivens the poetical texture and offers an interesting perspective from which we can study one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.

To start along the almost unexplored path of Rilke’s reading of Augustine means to touch upon the role of God in his poetry, even more so when we bear in mind that this has been considered a “discourse on God” as well as an “address to God”5. So intense and ubiquitous is the presence of God in his poetry, that with a certain degree of confidence Rilke can be viewed as a God-haunt-ed man and a “God seeker” , just like Augustine6.

Although his acquaintance with the Confessions dates back to his early youth, 1911 proves to be a crucial year for Rilke’s reading of St Augustine, mainly when we consider the deep poetic crisis that he experienced after Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, and that 1912 sees the birth of the first three poems of the Duineser Elegien. As the three letters mentioned above suggest, we have to look at the correspondence for 1911 and 1913 to start mapping out the importance of the Confessiones for Rilke7. We also have to take into account Petrarch’s epistle to Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, since on three occasions the future author of the Sonnets to Orpheus mentions the bishop of Hippo in connection with it8.

also J. Ferreiro, Rilke y San Agustin, cuadernos taurus 71, Madrid, Taurus Ediciones S. A., 1972.

5 In this regard see the stimulating essays in the volume edited by N. Fischer, «Gott» in der Dichtung Rainer Maria Rilkes, Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 2014, especially those by Norbert Fischer’s.

6 See O’Connell, Conversion, p. 17 on Augustine; for Rilke as a God seeker see G. Schiwy, Rilke und die Religion, Frankfurt a.M., Insel Verlag, 2006. Rilke portrays himself as God seeker in the Book of Hours, «Die Dichter haben dich verstreut» and Stephan Zweig uses the expression «Verse eines Gottsuchers» in his review of The Book of Hours.

7 See also the letter to his mother from Africa (19 December, 1910), where Rilke refers to Carthage, Augustine’s fatherland, as the place where early Christianity took roots.

8 Epistolae Familiares, IV, i. As Tina Simon writes, Rilke read Petrarch secretely (Rilke als Leser. Untersuchungen zum Rezeptionsverhalten. Ein Beitrag der Seitbegegnung des Dich-ters während des ersten Weltkriegs, Frankfurt a. M.-Wien, Peter Lang, 2001, p. 137), and the only witness to this reading is the poet’s request to have two volumes of Petrarch sent. On Rilke and Petrarch see also E. Polledri, Petrarca spricht Deutsch? Aneignung, Transfor-mation, Metamorphose des Fremden ins Eigene, in G. Drews-Sylla, E. Dütschke, H. Leon-tiy, E. Polledri (hrsg.), Konstruierte Normalitäten-Normale Abweichungen, Wiesbaden, VS Verlag, 2010, pp. 137-152, on Rilke, pp. 141-145; T. Fitzon, Petrarca um 1900: Aneignung-Anverwandlung-Abkehr, in A. Aurnhammer (hrsg.), Francesco Petrarca in Deutschland, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2010, pp. 539-562. Before 1911 Rilke refers to Augustine

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Thinking of his life experience in Egypt9, in a letter to Lili Schalk the poet writes:

it would have served me right if everywhere before the greatest external objects I had opened Saint Augustine to the passage that strikes home to Petrarch when, up there on Mount Ventoux, opening with curiosity the familiar little book, he finds nothing but the reproach of turning his eyes from himself to mountains, oceans and distances10.

Two years later, on 30 December 1913, Rilke refers to the Ital-ian epistle once again. Remembering the first time he read that letter, he writes that in his long lonely evenings he understands that the Italian poet describes an event of the soul so intense that in those moments he would like to be transformed and return to himself. All he can find instead is a sterile heart falling into pieces in the vast forest of childhood11.

On the basis of these correspondence, the author of the Can-zoniere seems to open up the way to Augustine for his German colleague. If we accept this hypothesis, we have to look at the spe-cific passage in Book X of the Confessions recalled by Petrarch in his epistle. Meditating on the «vast and infinite profundity» of memory, Augustine asks:

Who has plumbed its bottom? This power is that of my mind and is a natural endowment, but I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am. Is the mind, then, too restricted to compass itself, so that we have to ask what is that element of itself which it fails to grasp? Surely that cannot be external to itself; it must be within the mind. How then can it fail to grasp it? This question moves me to great astonishment. Amazement grips me. People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars. But in themselves they are uninterested. They experience no surprise that when I was speaking of all these things, I was not seeing them with my eyes. On the other hand, I would not have spoken of them unless the mountains and waves and rivers and stars (which I have seen) and the ocean (which I believe on the reports of others) I

in his essay on Rodin (1903), where the bishop of Hippo is mentioned with reference to childhood, one of the main subjects of the Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge.

9 The trip in Egypt took place between November 1910 and March 1911.10 May 14, 1911 in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1910-1926, translated by J. Bannard

Greene and M.D. Herter Norton, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1969, pp. 23-26, p. 25.

11 December 30, 1913 in R.M. Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1907 bis 1914, herausgege-ben von R. Sieber-Rilke und C. Sieber, Leipzig, Insel Verlag, 1939, pp. 338-43, p. 340.

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could see inwardly with dimensions just as great as if I were actually looking at them outside my mind12.

According to the author wonder and sight are strongly linked in man’s experience of the natural world. Astonishment can lead man to forget himself in front of the beauty and greatness of the natural world, and can be a spur to inquiry and self-knowledge. Moreover, being the result of a «speechless, but nonetheless, elo-quent astonishment»13, for the believers wonder can also be the starting point of the search for God and for His praise.

The Latin text, however – and consequently Rilke’s reference to it via Petrarch – becomes significant for man’s turning towards the Weltinnenraum14. This is even more true if we accept with Fis-cher that behind Augustine’s passage, there could be a veiled allu-sion to Plato’s Phaedrus where Socrates maintains that it seems to him ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters before he knows himself15.

Following in the footsteps of his predecessors, by recalling the Italian epistle the poet of the Sonnets to Orpheus draws our atten-tion to one of the main tenets of Augustinian thought, the idea that what man needs lies intus and that the road from the lower to the higher world passes through man’s inner self. This hints at the shift from the work of the eyes to that of the heart that Rilke formulates in Wendung. This fundamental change bespeaks a dif-ferent mode of knowledge that is specific to each man and is not focused on the objects (that are public and common) but on the activity of knowing.

Although it was published in 1927, Turning-Point was actually written in 1914 and it arose out of the reworking of the last stanza

12 Augustine, Confessions, X, viii, translated with an Introduction and Notes by Henry Chadwick, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 187. All quotations are from this edition.

13 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B650, translated and edited by P. Guyer, A.W. Wood, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 579.

14 To the above quoted passage from the Confessions we could add what Augustine writes in the De vera religione (xxxix, 72): «Noli foras ire, in teipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas». For Rilke, however, we cannot say that “veritas” inevitably means (coincides with) God as for Augustine and that to turn inwards necessarily means to be drawn upward.

15 Plato, Phaedrus, 229e. See Fischer’s commentary to that passage in Book X of the Confessions, Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 2006, pp. 129-130. This happens in a section where the philosopher underlines the importance of divine inspiration and possession in a dialogue devoted to love.


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of another one, Waldteich, weicher. Both poems resonate with echoes from Augustine’s passage in the Confessions. In Waldteich, weicher the relationship between the world of nature and the in-ner world of the I forms the kernel of the poem. The «inward-looking woodland-pool» of the opening line becomes the «pool at rest within» in the third stanza, both symbols of two worlds that are connected by the action of gazing and revolve around the concept of love. This process reaches its climax at the end:

Oh, the world’s remote from my existence, unless all that transparency outside me, as though it always meant to be inside me, gleams from afar into me gladsomely16.

Unless a gleam of the “appearency” of the outside world shines into the inner self of the I, the distance between the two cannot be bridged. As the poet wrote in the first version of these lines, the penetration of external appearances into the heart of man to find its joy – «as if following a silent smell» – is at the basis of man’s «Wesen zur Welt». All this becomes even more significant when we consider that the first draft of the concluding verses of Waldteich was intended as the opening of Wendung, and we read it against the grain of Rilke’s explicatory note to those lines. This once again points to the relationship between external and in-ternal: «So that love toils replace my out-ward looking gaze that wears me out and strips me of everything»17.

Turning-Point thematises the connection between the outer and the inner self by building on the seminal line of develop-ment that Rilke had already set at the time of the Narcissus poems (1913)18. Lou Andreas Salomé describes this process in her reply to the poet’s letter announcing the «curious poem […] that […] represents that turning which surely must come if I am to live, and you will understand its meaning»19. Salomé presents the change

16 Rilke, Poems 1906-1926, pp. 181-182, p. 182.17 Quoted in R.M. Rilke, Poesie II (1908-1926), a cura di G. Baioni, commento di A.

Lavagetto, Torino, Einaudi-Gallimard, Biblioteca della Pléiade, 1995, p. 783.18 The image of the woodland-pool in Waldteich suggests the myth of Narcissus, which

becomes all the more important in this context since it is connected to man’s knowledge of himself.

19 June 20, 1914, in Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé The Correspondence, translated by E. Snow and M. Winkler, New York-London, W.W. Norton & Co., 2006, pp.

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as something which has been in store for a long time, and lays emphasis on the eyes that

wanted to love, [and] blasted the boundaries set for them. […] Left only to them-selves in their [the eyes’] arduous searchings, beyond the bounds of that which, in their normal function, they needed only to convey to the mind, – they could in their gazing only become more corporeal and – confusing, as it were, the more subterranean processes with those consummated at the visibly open and observ-able surface – lead only to strange forms of torment; for the “hearth-work” to be done on what had previously been only artistically gazed upon would have to occur in some innermost region were it to succeed.

At the end of the conflict between the body and the eyes, where the latter suffered in their «honest effort», «the full heart-beat entered into this rhythm of the great love that transforms outside and inside into completely new union, that comprehends suddenly its entire treasure»20.

This is one of the best explanations given for the development of Rilke’s poetics in these years. In describing the dialectics be-tween the “work of the eyes” and the “work of the heart” almost certainly Augustine and Petrarch were among the poet’s sources of inspiration. Wendung is the natural port of arrival of a long and difficult process of growth during which the future author of the Duino Elegies becomes aware of the possibility of a new meta-physics of presence founded on gazing, where visual perception and consciousness enhance each other. From this point of view, as Karlheinz Stierle writes with reference to the epistle to Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, to look at the natural world becomes an «astonishing “spectaculum”»21. The experience is similar to the one Rilke had during his trips to Egypt and Spain, and to the one he describes in his Letter from a Young Worker in a passage that resounds with echoes from Augustine22. In the correspondence

242-244, p. 242. See also Lavagetto’s commentary to the Italian edition of the Narcissus poems (Poesie II, pp. 769-772).

20 Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé The Correspondence, pp. 245-246, p. 245.

21 K. Stierle, Un «experimentum crucis»: La salita al monte ventoso, in Id., La vita e i tempi del Petrarca. Alle origini della moderna coscienza europea, Venezia, Marsilio, 2007, pp. 304-328, p. 317.

22 «What is granted and conceded to us here […] [is] something that fills us with hap-piness, completely and right to the outer margins of our senses! To make the proper use of things, that’s what it comes down to. To take the Here and Now in one’s hand, lovingly, with the heart, full of wonder, as, provisionally, the one thing we have: that is at once […] the gist of God’s great user’s guide, this is what Saint Francis of Assisi meant to record in


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with Magda von Hattingberg, the poet of the Sonnets to Orpheus reveals the mysterious way towards the Weltinnenraum that will eventually lead to the Duino Elegies. On 1 February, 1914 Rilke explains how he learned to see during his visits to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin and links his experience in front of the bust Amenophis IV to an event that took place in Egypt. Here, in the desert, at night, when the moon was shedding light on the unend-ing landscape, while he was staring at the Sphinx his existence overflowed his conscience and he lived an extraordinary experi-ence. It was just like when looking at the landscape by the sea, or at the sky on a starry night, we are convinced of the existence of connections and consonances that we wouldn’t be able to under-stand. On that occasion the face of the Sphinx, although partly destroyed, had assumed the habit of the cosmos, and in front of it Rilke felt that he had to «arrive at places in [his] amazement where [he] had never been before»23 in order to understand that experience. When this happens, and if greatness were to reveal itself to him, then like Petrarch on top of Mount Ventoux, in front of the beauty of nature, the poet should seek refuge in the abyss of his soul that – although unexplored – would undoubtedly appear to be a lot more familiar than foreign places24. Contemplating the landscape, which takes the mind beyond the horizon of the visible world into an imaginary realm, Rilke reaches the threshold of his inner self where greatness reveals itself to him.

These are only the first steps towards a development that will eventually lead the future author of the Duino Elegies to the dis-covery of the Weltinnenraum, a concept that has significant analo-gies with the Augustinian idea that Petrarch recalls in his epistle25. Turnin-point is a sort of unavoidable step along this path, because in it Rilke sets the direction towards a new poetology that can go beyond the supremacy of the visual principle to reach that real

his hymn to the sun which as he lay dying he thought more splendid than the cross, whose only purpose in standing there was to point towards the sun». Letter from a Young Worker, in R.M. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, pp. 54-55.

23 February 1, 1914, in Rilke and Benvenuta. An Intimate Correspondence, edited by Magda von Hattinberg (Benvenuta), transl. by J. Agee, New York, Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1987, pp. 7-11, p. 9. A similar experience is described also when Rilke writes to Magda about his stay in Ronda Spain.

24 R.M. Rilke, Del giovane poeta, in Id., Tutti gli scritti sull’arte e sulla letteratura, a cura di E. Polledri, testo tedesco a fronte, Milano, Bompiani, 2008, pp. 1014-1029, p. 1023, from now on quoted as Tutti gli scritti.

25 See E. Polledri’s commentary in R.M. Rilke, Tutti gli scritti, p. 1232.

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knowledge to be attained only through love, because the heart-work starts in our innermost “region”. Wendung clears the fog that up to this point has shrouded the poet’s path, and reveals a «newly conquered domain, one whose boundaries are still beyond one’s ken, its compass extending farther than one could walk». It is a new start, one that has been made possible by the conquest of this new realm, where «deep down, all art begins again with renewed force, arises as from its primordial origins»26.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: Learning to See

This new beginning – of which Rilke is completely aware as we can infer from his reply to Lou on 26 June, 191427 – is framed in Augustinian terms, possibly mediated by Petrarch’s epistle, and depends on «learning to see». The foundations and the direction of this development are laid in the very first pages of The Note-books of Malte Laurids Brigge. Here the protagonist writes: «I am learning to see. Why, I cannot say, but all things enter more deeply into me; nor do the impressions remain at the level where they used to cease. There is a place within me of which I knew nothing. I do not know what happens there»28.

It will take some time for the poet to «learn to see» and be-fore he will open up his awareness into a new breath-taking realm, into his innermost regions. During this period and the deep crea-tive crisis that characterizes Rilke’s life after the publication of the Malte, the translation of the first 12 chapters of the Confessions (and of the very first lines of Petrarch’s Epistle) testify to his un-ceasing interest in the Bishop of Hippo. Within this context the letter to Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro reveals all its importance to Rilke as the extraordinary evidence of a dramatic and intense confrontation of man with his conscience29. It becomes, thus, even

26 Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé The Correspondence, p. 246.27 Ibidem, pp. 248-252, p. 248: «God knows how far the poem ‘Turning’ precedes the

onset of those new circumstances, I am far behind, God knows if such complete turn can still be worked at all, since the obstinate inner forces continue to abuse and exhaust each other in the most horrific misunderstandings».

28 R.M. Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, translated and edited by M. Hulse, London, Penguin, 2009, p. 4.

29 Stierle, La vita e i tempi del Petrarca. Alle origini della moderna coscienza europea, p. 328.


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more significant as the place where, marking a new era in the his-tory of seeing, the Italian poet emphasises the power of gaze30. Malte, in fact, experiences something similar to Petrarch’s “cu-piditas videndi”, and probably it will not be by chance that he notes down his willingness to learn to see in the very first pages of Die Aufzeichnungen.

The way Malte Laurids Brigge organizes the chaotic and frag-mentary experiences of life in a coherent narrative structure is reminiscent of Augustine’s in the Confessions. In the novel the protagonist’s situation is halfway through between that of Petrar-ch and that of Augustine. He doesn’t note down the events of his life from the vantage point of somebody who has already lived through them, as the Bishop of Hippo does, but at the same time with his memory he goes back to his past, and to facts that still have a bearing on the present. The desire for knowledge com-pels Malte, like Augustine, to look deeply into the abyss of his consciousness which is the space of memory. This yearning corre-sponds to his exploration of his own inner self, the world and God through an uninterrupted conversation with Him. It is a constitu-ent element of the search for God described by Augustine. From this point of view, as a “Search for the real life” Book 10 of the Confessions helps to put the entire novel into the right perspec-tive31. Moreover, if we think that Rilke’s edition of the Confessions ended with Book 10, the “Legend” of the prodigal son at the end of the novel becomes even more meaningful, especially when we consider that Die Aufzeichnungen can be read as Malte’s own (and Rilke’s) Confessions32. An interplay between the exterior and the interior spiritual world emerges as one of the crucial elements in Rilke’s poetics. Both the physical world and experience are neces-sary to conceive and understand the dark abyss of the inner self and fill its empty space with images coming from the outside33.

«Sehen-Lernen» has a “programmatic” character for Rilke’s poetry and prose work after 1899, as both August Stahl and Man-

30 Ibidem, p. 312.31 Suche nach dem wahren Leben is the title of Norbert Fischer’s seminal commentary

to Book 10 of the Confessions (cit.), with fruitful and stimulating hints about Rilke’s poetry.32 Rilke used Hertling’s edition of the Confessions (Die Bekenntnisse des heiligen Au-

gustinus, Freiburg i. B., Herderische Verlagshandlung, 1910) together with a French edi-tion side by side with the Latin text.

33 Stierle, La vita e i tempi del Petrarca. Alle origini della moderna coscienza europea, p. 323.

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fred Engel rightly emphasise in their commentary34. However, whilst I agree with Engel on the different meaning of this new task that the poet sets to himself after he “meets” the works of Auguste Rodin and Paul Cézanne, I also believe that Rilke’s interest in The Confession has a bearing on this particular aspect as well as on the entire novel, as Norbert Fischer has demonstrated35. The «Learn-ing to see» section inaugurates a process that starts with Malte’s awareness of a place within himself undiscovered until that mo-ment, and culminates years later in Rilke’s shift from the work of the eyes to the heart-work36. The final and highest results of this significant development will be the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.

A cluster of meanings that resembles Augustine’s stance alerts the reader to a possible wish for transcendence suggested as early as the «Sehen lernen» paragraph37. This doesn’t lead, however, to «frustrated attempts at Plotinian ecstasy»38, or to any sort of mystical experience as we might find in the Confessions. Yet the narrative is interspersed with hints that point in that direction and increase towards the end of the novel as Malte’s thoughts focus with increasing insistence on God. In the paragraph that precedes the rewriting of the parable of the prodigal son, the protagonist wonders on Abelone and her possible relationship with God. Abe-lone’s truthful heart – he writes – failed «to recognize that God

34 For «learning to see» as a programmatic principle see Stahl’s comments on this in A. Stahl, Rilke Kommentar zu den Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, zur erzählerischen Prosa, zu den essayistischen Schriften und zum dramatischen Werk, Müunchen, Winkler Verlag, 1979, p. 161. In his edition of the novel (Stuttgart, Reclam, 1997, pp. 330-331) Manfred Engel identifies «learning to see» as one of the poet’s task in his poetry of the “middle period”.

35 N. Fischer, «Mein Gott, fiel es mir mit Ungestüm ein, so bist du also». Sämtliche Fundstellen zum Wort “Gott” in MLB mit kurzem Kontext und erläuternden Anmerkungen, in Id., «Gott» in der Dichtung Rainer Maria Rilkes, pp. 234-256.

36 In the novel the narrator remarks that this is just the beginning of a learning process that will take time before being accomplished (p. 5).

37 The Confessions VII, x, 16 and see the commentary to the Italian edition (Milano, Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, Mondadori, 1997, voll. 5, III, pp. 202-203). Given Augustine’s strong philosophical affinity with it, this inevitably also touches upon Neoplatonism, which surfaces now and again in the works of the German poet. As regards Rilke’s interest in Neoplatonism and Plotin, see K. Korrigan, Reading Plotinus: A Practical Introduction to Neoplatonism, West Lafayette (IN), Purdue University Press, 2005, see esp. pp. 123, 209-213; see also P. Dronke, Tradition and Innovation in Medieval Western Colour-Imagery, in Id., The Medieval Poet and His World, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984, pp. 55-103.

38 The expression comes from chapter III of P. Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confes-sions de Saint Augustin, Paris, E. de Boccard, 1950, pp. 157-167.


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is only a direction love takes»; she needn’t have feared that «He would love her in return», because «this superior lover» practises restraints and «quietly holds back His own pleasure so that we, slow as we are, may come to all our hearts are capable of»39.

In this context the quotation of Mechthild of Magdeburg, Te-resa of Avila and the Blessed Rose of Lima point towards the ec-stasy of the mystics40. These references suggest a reading of the novel as a modern version of the medieval «meditative ascent» that aligns it with Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Comme-dia41. Although the exterior journey is not as explicit and as linear as those of his medieval predecessors, Malte’s quest also unfolds in stages, each of which represents a different level of discourse, and – if not with divine vision – culminates at least with a glimpse of the godhead in the rewriting of Luke’s parable of the prodigal son.

The presence of Mechthild of Magdeburg, Teresa of Avila and the Blessed Rose of Lima hint at a direction where God coincides with love, whereby He becomes the consuming fire that inflames the heart of the mystics: «(To be loved means to be consumed by fire. To love is to glow bright with an inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to endure)»42. Malte (and the prod-igal son with him, to whom we might add Rilke), however, stops short of the mystic ecstasy, he lies in wait on the threshold of the

39 Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, p. 160. The whole paragraph could have been inspired by Augustine who – like Meister Eckhart later – also believed that God is not an object of love. See Fischer (hrsg.), «Gott» in der Dichtung Rainer Maria Rilkes, p. 81.

40 Rilke was a fond reader of the mystics, an interest that increased after his trip to Spain and his reading of Ribadeneira. On Rilke and mysticism P. Bishop, Rilke: Thought and Mysticism, in The Cambridge Companion to Rilke, edited by K. Leeder and R. Vilain, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 159-173, and M. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Mystik der Moderne. Die visionäre Äesthetik der deutschen Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart, 1989, ch. 3, Ekstatisches Schreiben: Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge’ (1910), pp. 62-107, pp. 103-104.

41 The expression «meditative ascent» comes from the title of Robert McMahon’s book, Understanding the Medieval Meditative Ascent. Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, Dante (Washington, The Catholic University of America Press, 2006) where it is defined as «both the journey itself and the written work describing it, both the form of the quest itself and the literary form narrating it» (p. 2). Following McMahon’s discourse we can read Malte’s «meditative ascent» as it unfolds in stages where keywords, images and motifs acquire new meanings at each different stage. Seen from this viewpoint Die Aufzeichnungen can be considered within that same framework based on the neoplatonic paradigm of the exitus-reditus scheme that McMahon proposes for Augustine, Anselm and Boethius. Although God’s grace is absent from Malte’s meditative ascent, there is still, however, some sort of dialectic of human seeking and divine drawing as the rewriting of the parable of the prodigal son suggests.

42 Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, p. 161.

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“vision”, of the “union” with God. The surprising and unforeseen end of the novel – and of the legend of the prodigal son – portrays a man who exists between climax and end, confident in his spirit-ual identity and in the coming of God43. In this regard, interesting implications emerge when we realise that like Augustine’s Confes-sions (significantly ending with the word aperietur), the Notebooks is an open text that leaves the door open for meaning and for God44. Malte’s story ends in silence and, following to some ex-tent the Bishop of Hippo, the ending of the novel resembles that of Christian autobiography45. Malte’s one way conversation with God is past and done with: after the last attempt – the rewriting of legend of the prodigal son – silence follows. His and the prodigal’s internal ear are disposed to hear God’s eternal word, that is to wel-come his eternal and infinite love, «But He [is] not yet willing»46.

Paragraph 70 of the novel is a turning point in Malte’s quest. It resounds with echoes from the Confessions, especially from those sections where Augustine meditates on man’s remoteness from God and presents this as man’s attitude towards Him. Two points require special attention, when we look at the Latin text in search of a possible path that reaches to the Notebooks. First of all, on some occasions the Latin Father of the Church links man’s distance from God and His love for the human being in a binding knot. Second: the terminology of distance, that the author uses throughout his book (as for instance the frequent use of longe and its derivatives demonstrate), increases in those chapters where he refers to the parable of the prodigal son and is connected to the idea of peregrinatio. These two issues become particularly mean-ingful for Die Aufzeichnungen as the narrative approaches its end. In this regard, the allusions to the Confessions are even more sig-

43 Compare Confessions, X, 65. 44 C.T. Mathewes, The Liberation of Questioning in Augustine’s Confessions, «Journal

of the American Academy of Religion», 70 (2002), pp. 539-560. Following C.D. Schrock (Consolation in Medieval Narrative. Augustinian Authority and Open Form, New York, Pal-grave, 2015, p. 33) it would be interesting to see to what extent Rilke accepts Augustine’s invitation to use an anticlimactic structure of history (whether sacred or not) in order to provide consolation for his novel’s lack of closure, bearing in mind not only that the para-digm provided by the Bishop of Hippo was a model to medieval narratives of the self, but also that Rilke was a good reader of medieval mystics.

45 Confessions XI, vi, 8, 2-10; see J. Freccero, Dante. The Poetics of Conversion, edited with an Introduction by R. Jacoff, Cambridge-London, Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 27.

46 Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, p. 167.


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nificant when we consider the above mentioned paragraph as an introduction to Rilke’s “legend” of the prodigal son. Section 70, in fact, not only anticipates motives that are recalled in the conclud-ing chapter, but it is also the last but one step of Malte’s meditative ascent and the key to his “conversion” from the outside world to the world within (Der Weltinnenraum). It is the culmination of the learning to see process that eventually leads to the discovery of that light which resides within the soul and enables the eye to per-ceive47. The parallel with Augustine is even more striking when we consider with Charles Taylor that for him grace restores the capac-ity to see that the eye has lost48. Although grace is never mentioned in Die Aufzeichnungen, Malte’s thoughts on God and the conclud-ing paragraph seem to point in this direction. The rewriting of the parable of the prodigal, shifting the focus from the outside world of objects of the protagonist’s life to his inner world, confirms that to learn to see means to concentrate on the activity of know-ing, that is to look to the self and take up a «reflexive stance»49.

Given its Christian overtones and the references to the mys-tics, paragraph 70 places Malte’s experience in the wake of the Christian-Platonist tradition, just before the rewriting of one of the most famous parables of the New Testament. The retelling of the story of the prodigal son is Malte’s/Rilke’s personal and origi-nal way to find at least a possible path for his meditative ascent to God by passing “in interiore homine” to accomplish the learning to see process. This is confirmed by the many resemblances be-tween the legend and the rest of the novel in terms of recurring images and motives. If we take Malte’s life in Paris as his descent into hell, his personal “regio dissimilitudinis”, then the rewriting of the parable marks a conversion, a new point of departure. It is Brigge’s way of “coming to himself” and “climbing” to the light to return to the father. Shifting his focus from the outside world onto his desire and strife for knowledge and self-knowledge, the prodigal – and the protagonist of the novel – doesn’t go outward, he returns into himself instead, because there the truth dwells. In this Rilke agrees with both Petrarch and Augustine on the need to

47 Agostino, De Genesi ad Litteram Imperfectus Liber, 5.24.48 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA,

Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 139. 49 Ibidem, p. 130.

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go back to the inward man, and follows St Augustine’s advice in Of True Religion: «Do not go abroad. Return within yourself. In the inward man dwells Truth»50.

However, the point is: which truth and whose truth? This is the question that lies at the heart of Rilke’s possible use of the Confes-sions in the Notebooks. We may read the answer in the prodigal’s (and in Malte’s) experience, considered as one of the fruit of that revolution started by the Bishop of Hippo with regard to the mak-ing of the modern identity. The protagonist of the “legend” has fol-lowed in the footsteps of Augustine at least to get a glimpse of the presence of God not so much in the world, as in the intimacy of self-presence, at the very foundation of the self. He has discovered – with Malte – that God is a direction of love and that to search for Him means to search for self-knowledge. This is one of the ways in which throughout the novel the protagonist gives voice to a de-sire for knowledge that, being based on “dolor et labor”51 as the constitutive elements of human life, very much resembles that of the Confessions. The years Rilke’s prodigal spends as shepherd co-incide with the period of his life when he embarks on the «long, silent, aimless labour of loving God», hoping that «his wish might be granted», but being aware of the «great remoteness of God»52. The description of the humiliating apprenticeship that forces the prodigal to «wriggle his tortuous way like a worm» to enter into his inward self in order to learn to love, recalls the protagonist’s stance in the Confessions53. Here Augustine’s quaerere and invenire – the two verbs structuring his itinerary as a search for knowledge with-in revelation and Christian belief – coincide and become relevant for the theme of recognition which is the climax of the prodigal’s story54. Malte, however, has no certainties, all he can do is to hope

that his wish might be granted. His whole nature, which during his long solitude was grown prescient and unerring, promised him that He to whom his thinking now tended was capable of loving, with a penetrating, radiant love. But even as

50 De vera religione, XXXIX, 72: «Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas». Engl. transl. in Augustine, Of True Religion, introduction by L.O. Mink, translation by J.H.S. Burleigh, Chicago, Henry Regney, 1959, p. 69.

51 Confessions, X, xxviii, 39.52 Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, p. 165.53 Confessions X, xvi. 54 On quaerere e invenire in the Confessions see L.F. Pizzolato, Il I Libro delle ‘Con-

fessiones’ di Agostino: ai primordi della ‘Confessio’, in Le Confessioni di Agostino d’Ippona. Libri I-II, Palermo, Edizioni «Augustinus» 1984, pp. 9-78


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he longed to be loved at last with such mastery, his sensibility, accustomed to distances, apprehended the great remoteness of God55.

At the end of the Notebooks the Father may not be feeling to love his son, but at least He has opened the inward man (the prod-igal’s and Malte’s) to Him, has restored his son’s capacity to see and made him aware that He is «interior intimo meo et superior summo meo»56.

This confirms that Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge is a remarkable chapter of Rilke’s discourse on God and address to God, primarily when we consider it within the larger context of the poet’s life experience and of his oeuvre. As such, the novel can be read as the poet’s personal and original rewriting of the Confessions, the narrative structure of which the novel du-plicates57. Like Augustine’s work, Rilke’s ends with Scripture. As the last three books of the Confessions are devoted to a commen-tary to the Book of Genesis, the final section of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge rewrites the parable of the prodigal son from the gospel of Luke and places the protagonist (as well as Malte) in a «region of unlikeness» that resembles the one in which Au-gustine finds himself in book seven of his work. There is, however, a significant difference between Augustine – the protagonist of the Confessions – and Malte. While the first, even in his darkest periods, never doubts about the action of God in his life and His love for mankind, Malte has somehow to discover God and love, and even when this happens, he reaches no certainty. Similarities between the two works, however, reach deeper into the very heart of Rilke’s novel. After the climax in Section 70, like books IX and X of the Confessions, the legend of the prodigal son describes an experience qualitatively different from that of the frustrated vi-sionary of the preceding sections. In Paragraph 71 Malte, just like Augustine in the above mentioned books, looses «the role of sub-ject in what heretofore has been a self-focused narrative. Autobi-ography converts to exemplarity»58.

As a piece of autobiographical writing that tells the story of an individual quest in the modern world, Malte’s pilgrimage in the

55 Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, p. 165.56 Confessions, III, vi, 11.57 The hint comes from Schrock, Consolation in Medieval Narrative, p. 26.58 Ibidem.

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capital of the XIXth century takes the shape of a peregrinatio ani-mae within which God appears as the sole interlocutor of the pro-tagonist and the ultimate aim of his quest. Parallels between the Latin and the German work, however, do not end here. Following Schrock’s argument on Augustine59, we can say with a certain de-gree of confidence that in The Notebooks memory emerges as «an organ of interpretation» through which past events are assembled in a final shape to be known fully once they are silent and com-plete. Just as in the Confessions, in the novel «understanding is necessarily involved in time and complete only when the physical presence or important event has receded into the absence of the past»60. Without delving into an analysis that would require more space than that allowed for this essay, I only wish to recall briefly here two episodes that illustrate this point: Malte’s description of his relationship with his mother, and his memories of the death of his grandfather, count Brahe. In both cases the present becomes a function of the mind, and as a time of understanding, it «dilates to encompass past (the present of the past) and future (the pre-sent of the future), because only in the mind can present, past, and future be available simultaneously»61. If the Latin Father of the Church, as Schrock maintains, «proved particularly useful to later accounts of the self because it could describe the self through context», and if he «is widely credited with originating or greatly advancing the concept of individual interior subjectivity»62, then Rilke in this novel has been one of his best interpreters. Their ways part, however, as to the context within which the self has to recognize itself. For the German poet «Christ, Christ’s body the church, Christ’s body the Eucharist, the voices of the Bible»63 do not represent the context of broader ontological categories where the self knows itself anymore. In the Notebooks this has been re-placed by the world, the modern town of the beginning of the XXth century, and by human secular institutions.

59 Ibidem, pp. 26-7.60 Ibidem, p. 27.61 Ibidem.62 Ibidem.63 Ibidem.


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Rilke’s personal quest for God

The parallel between the Confessiones and Die Aufzeichnun-gen reaches further when we consider that Rilke identifies himself with Malte, and that, like the protagonist of the Latin text, he also sees himself (and the main character of his novel) as a prodigal son, at least in a period of his life64. From this point of view, the end of the novel, the prodigal’s (and Malte’s as well as Rilke’s) awareness of and waiting for the love of God, is the functional climax of the story as well as of the poet’s life and career up to this point. Making sense of what had gone before, the surprising and unforeseen finale of Malte’s “meditative ascent” offers an interest-ing perspective from which we can look at the “Wendung” that takes place in the poetry of Rilke after The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. The “legend” and its concluding paragraph place the future poetics of the author of the Duino Elegies on a different ontological plane65. Section 71 culminates Malte’s experience of life in Paris, and Rilke’s experience of poetry. The new direction that stems from a new way of looking at reality and, accordingly, the importance attached to the Weltinnenraum wouldn’t have been possible, had the poet not «met» the «prodigal» Augustine. Thanks to the Confessions and to Luke’s parable, Malte’s random wandering in his region of unlikeness is converted in a linear cau-sality that coincides with the discovery of God as a «direction love takes, and not [as] an object of love»66.

When we take into account an autobiographical reading of Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, we can apply Malte’s experience in Paris to Rilke’s own, and read the novel as the poet’s personal way of coming to terms with his stay in Paris. Retracing Augustine’s epistemological narrative, like Dante in the Comme-dia, and the prodigal son in the legend, Malte/Rilke approaches a transcendent autobiographical perspective that depends on the relationship between the author and the protagonist of the novel67.

64 In time Rilke recognizes that Malte has to be understood as a negative example of what a poet shouldn’t be, and that therefore the Notebooks should be read «gegen den Strom» (Letter to Artur Hospelt, February 11, 1912, in R.M. Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1907 bis 1914, pp. 205-7, p. 206).

65 See Schrock Consolation in Medieval Narrative, p. 19.66 Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, p. 160.67 Freccero, Dante. The Poetics of Conversion, p. 25.

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The Confessions are ultimately a fundamental part of those ma-terials that, together with “his” books, the poet uses to provide meaning for his life and, above all, for his poetic career, as his correspondence suggests. From this point of view The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge are an important chapter in Rilke’s expe-rience of poetry and have been read as a sort of “spiritual” and “intellectual” autobiography. They are his «region of unlikeness» from which he moves a first step towards his personal quarere and invenire, towards that poetic turning that will lead him to the po-etry of the Duineser Elegien and Die Sonette an Orpheus. In order for this to happen, the division between the protagonist and the author will have to be “almost ontologically real”, as it was for both Augustine and Dante, whose conversion, as John Freccero writes, «was tantamount to a death of their former selves and the beginning of a new life»68. Malte’s experience resembles that of the protagonist of the Confessions, and the legend of the prodigal suggests the idea of conversion. We cannot go as far as to maintain that for Rilke – as for Dante – the distance between the protago-nist of the novel and the author is gradually closed until the two coincide at the end. If Malte doesn’t «become metamorphosed into the poet», undoubtedly Rilke’s letters (dating back to the years of composition and immediately after its publication) give more than a hint that he saw himself in the main character of his novel and, moreover, considered himself a prodigal son69. If the protagonist of the legend remains on the threshold, hoping that God will come, at the end of the Notebooks Rilke will have to find his way out of this «regio dissimilitudinis». The crisis following the publication of the novel, as well as the poet’s attempt at trans-lating Augustine are a significant advance on the path that eventu-ally will lead him on the threshold of that new life he had already glimpsed at in The Departure of the Prodigal Son.

If we look at Rilke’s poetic development from this point of view, we are able to assess the long and tremendous shadow Au-gustine casts on his poetical works and the Saint’s importance for the famous Wendung that characterizes his poetics. The reading and partial translation of the Confessions during the crisis that fol-

68 Ibidem.69 Among Rilke’s correspondence see at least his letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé dated

30 June 1903, 15 January, 1904, and 28 December 1911.


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lows the publication of the novel is a climax that assigns mean-ing to what has come before and will come after. Most probably without Rilke’s «subcutaneous relationship»70 with Augustine the “turning” that has given us the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus would have taken a completely different direction.

However, Rilke’s interest in Augustine doesn’t start with the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. As he claims in his famous let-ter to Witold von Hulewicz, the “essential premises” of his “An-rede Gottes” «were already given in the Book of Hours»71. Besides the few almost direct echoes, in Das Stunden-Buch pilgrimage emerges as the structuring principle of the spiritual quest of the monk and it revolves around the two cornerstones of quaerere and invenire, just like in Augustine’s Confessiones.

Since the very first lines the monk’s conversation with God re-veals the nuanced presence of the Latin text as we can read in the following lines from «I believe in all that’s unspoken still» in The Book of Monastic Life:

With this swift-borne stream of this sweeping riverthat in wide arms into the broad sea flows,with this returning that ever grows,I would confess you, proclaim you, as neverman knew or knows72.

The use of “bekennen” in the last but one line of the Ger-man text73 is a clear allusion to the Bishop of Hippo’s work and it sheds a significant light on Das Stunden-Buch because like Augus-tine at the beginning of his book, so the monk here declares his aim: to “confess” God. Moreover, when we couple this verb with «wiederkehren» in the preceding line, the fundamental paradigm of the Confessions emerges and qualifies the monk’s and Rilke’s

70 I owe this expression to N. Fischer, Rilkes Zugang zur Religion. Gegen die Hypothese seiner «Immanenz-Gläubigkeit», in N. Fischer (hrsg.), «Gott» in der Dichtung Rainer Maria Rilkes, pp. 69-105, p. 72.

71 To Witold von Hulewicz, November 13, 1925, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1910-1926, pp. 371-372, p. 372.

72 Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Hours, I, 12, translated by A.L. Peck, with an Introduction by E.C. Mason, London, The Hogarth Press, 1961, p. 50.

73 «Mit diesem Hinfluten, mit diesem Münden/ in breiten Armen ins offene Meer, / mit dieser wachsenden Wiederkehr/will ich dich bekennen, will ich dich verkünden /wie keiner vorher» (R.M. Rilke, Das Stunden-Buch, in Rilke Werke Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bänden. Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, hrsg. M. Engel und U. Fülleborn, Frankfurt a. M., Insel 1996, p. 162).

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spiritual quest as a return to God through confession to and “re-cognition” of God as well as His proclamation (verkünden). Rilke recognizes himself – like Augustine in the Confessions – as God seeker when he writes: «Du siehst, daß ich ein Sucher bin» in Die Dichter haben dich verstreut74, and it is here that the poet’s lifetime quest for God actually starts75. It may well be that, as Pascal wro-te, «You would not seek me if you did not possess me. Therefore be not troubled»76, but actually Rilke was troubled and he had to embark on the «long, silent, aimless labour of loving God», being aware of His «great remoteness». He had to «wriggle his tortuous way like a worm» into his inner self in order for a bifurcation to grow in his voice,

this side a cry, that side a fragrancy:the one for his approach makes preparation;the other for my lonely desolationvision and bliss and angel too must be77.

The reading and partial translation of Augustine’s Confessions are the cornerstone along the way that takes the poet from Das Stunden-Buch to the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, because in the end «Praising is what matters»78.

Emilia Di Rocco, ‘Du siehst, daß Ich ein Sucher bin’. In the Footsteps of Augustine: Rilke Reads the ‘Confessions’

Together with the Bible and the writings of Jens Peter Jacobsen, St Augustine’s Confessions can be numbered among those books that Rilke cannot do without. They are certainly the focus of the poet’s attention in the years following the pub-lication of the Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Although his acquain-tance with the Confessions dates back to his early youth, as his letters reveal, 1911

74 «That I’m a seeker none dispute» in «By poets you’ve been fragmented so» (The Book of Hours, I, 55). On Rilke as Good seeker, besides Schiwy, Rilke und die Religion, see also N. Fischer, Rilkes Zugang zur Religion, in Fischer (hrsg.), «Gott» in der Dichtung Rainer Maria Rilkes, pp. 79-80.

75 Rilke’s trips to Russia and his experience of God there are fundamental for his spiri-tual quest, of course, and they overlap with his interest in Augustine. For the importance of Russia in Rilke’s poetics see his letters to Elena Voronina (9 June, 1899) and L.O. Pasternak (10 April,1900) as well as his Letter to a Young Friend (17 March, 1926).

76 Pascal, Pensees, 929, translated by A.J. Krailsheimer, London, Penguin, 1966, p. 320.77 Book of Hours, III, 11, «I’d praise him. As an army’s stately motion», p. 124.78 R.M. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, I, vii, in R.M. Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets

to Orpheus, edited and translated by S. Mitchell, New York, Vintage Books, 2009, p. 95.


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proves to be a crucial year for Rilke’s reading of St Augustine. The essay focuses on Rilke as a reader of the Confessions in the Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge and explores the poet’s personal quest for God within the context of his correspondence and his poetry.

Keywords: Rainer Maria Rilke, Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, St Au-gustine’s Confessions, Poetry.

«du siehst, daß ich ein sucher bin» in the footsteps of ... · also j. ferreiro, rilke y san...

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