"....from unconsciousness to consciousness, from primitive impersonality to personality and from personality to sanctity which is transcendence, a higher impersonality, the gift of the 'me' acquired, enriched and harmonized by so much labor. And beyond this, there are heights of which it is not opportune to speak, since language has its bounds." (Petru Dumitriu, Incognito)
This is one of three quotations that a friend has placed at the head of the manuscript of her proposed (and excellent) book on the German psychologist and spiritual writer, Karl Graf von Durckheim, that I have been re-reading.
It reminded me of how we had become friends. Margaret had come to offer a lecture at the annual Eckhart conference in Oxford on Eckhart's profound influence on the development of Durckheim's thought (and as a therapist, practice).
After her lucid and illuminating lecture, I found myself sitting next to her at lunch. She had a somewhat daunting demeanor as if she was about to examine you: both for your knowledge and for the clarity of your conscience. However, in the course of her lecture, she had referred to the virtually unknown novel (in the English speaking world) by the Romanian novelist, Petru Dumitriu, that I deeply loved and was delighted to find that someone else knew.
This rare occasion sparked a deeply felt exchange between both of us: 'You know him too!' we delightedly exclaimed and plunged headlong into the talk.
It is a novel that successfully accomplishes what Dostoyevsky failed to do: to write a novel that portrays a credible saint. A portrayal that enfleshes precisely the journey outlined in the quotation above from Sebastian's shapeshifting adolescence to a character forged in war and the rapidly disillusioned idealism of post-war communism to the transcendence revealed by a mystical transformation in the hardship of prison; and, the subsequent practice of everyday compassion.
It does this, never deviating from the 'realism' of its narrative form, and immersed within a fully fleshed tale of a family as it progresses from complacent landed wealth to the new sharper edges of life under communism. On the way, it manages to be one of the most devastating critiques of communist life lived at the level of the Party that I have read; and, a very bare novel of war.
All this accomplished by an author who was resolutely an atheist though one pursued, rather haunted, by the absence of God.
An absence that revealed itself early when as a child his sister died:
"I wept aloud as I cried to God. I implored him not to let my sister die. No response. Silence. No one there . . . all that existed was nothing but solitude, sadness, abandonment. I had no faith to lose, for I had never had faith. I still do not have it. I do not believe in God. I cannot deny the blinding proof of his absence. That absence of God: I have experienced it so many times; ever since the day when my cry went unanswered, ever since the day when I saw a small animal die before my eyes; and going on to the deaths of my family; my dead friends, the war dead, the prisoners of war, the victims of torture."
And yet pursued too by something akin to grace - an experience that keeps breaking him open, as it does Sebastian in Incognito, to both a wholeness that composes him, and enfolds him in the unity of the world; and, which drives him to compassion: the everyday practice of loving-kindness, quietly, really, without any ideological support, except its concrete 'thusness'.
"The love of God should work counter to the experience of Evil, just as prayer should work counter to the evidence of the absence of God."
He was, in the words that the cultural commentator, Morris Berman used for himself, a 'mystical atheist'. Sebastian in Incognito was what that might become: a saint in an age without God.
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