Letters on God and Letters to a Young Woman

Introduction to Letters on God

4 ✦ rainer maria rilke focused, one will become a co-laborer with God in the gradual process of transforming creation. The responsibility of recovering God’s presence in life does not fall to the church’s office bearers and to priests but to artists and poets, painters and sculptors. For Rilke, the artist’s role is that of priest and mediator between people, God, and creation. His or her responsibilities will entail the close observation of nature, intensive work, and diligent concentration. Creating an object of art will mean the kind of labor that lacks public recognition and applause. The artist should be prepared to suffer and seek solitude for the sake of the craft and sacrifice personal attachments and the comforts of a stable career. The artist will have served God well when the object of art is capable of allowing people to discover God by means of it. On his part, Rilke had given up steady employment, his marriage, and family life to fully devote himself to the art of poetry and writing. In formulating his views on God and the role of the artist as priest and mediator, Rilke drew inspiration from lectures on art and religion he had attended at the Universities of Munich and Berlin, his travels through Russia and Italy, his close observation of the sculptor Auguste Rodin in his Paris studio, and his numerous visits to churches, monasteries, museums, and sacred sites in Russia, Italy, and France. Rilke’s views on God were shaped by his Roman Catholic upbringing. The spiritual writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton says that Rilke was “a typical witness of a certain type of modern religious consciousness. He was not ‘godless.’ His heritage was profoundly Catholic and yet like so many of his contemporaries he found much that he could not accept in ordinary Catholic belief and practice,” so that “his poetic consciousness adopted a symbolic and spiritual idea of historic cycles in religious vitality.” These cycles, according to Merton, find God first in simplicity, then in building temples for God, and then, upon finding these temples empty and nearly de- letters on god ✦ 11 scribes critical life-changing experiences, and reflects on life’s meaning. The letter’s theme is a discussion of the nature of faith (though the word is not mentioned per se), of God, and of Christ. Most especially, it is a critique of the otherworldly orientation of Christianity, which has given Christians license to exploit and abuse the earth to their advantage. This otherworldly orientation has also emphasized Christ’s personal suffering on the cross so that people have missed recognizing Christ’s role as symbol and pointer to God’s presence and power within them. They have resisted that power as it makes itself felt even in its unjust, arbitrary, and ugly forms by placing it outside themselves and failing to surrender to it and receive it. Rilke has the worker say that it is of little use to seek God in the Jesus of two thousand years ago, because he lived then and we live now. Jesus’s role was to be index finger and role model in people’s God quest. Unfortunately, people have tended to crowd around the cross and failed to look in the direction to which the crossbars are pointing; namely, God. By unreservedly receiving and accepting life’s suffering, the heaviness within, and the concrete experience of life and death and joy and sorrow, symbolized by the cross and Christ’s suffering on it, we are directing our gaze toward God and begin maturing as on a tree whose ripe “fruit” we are and whose maturity will be to God’s benefit. In the letter of the young worker, Rilke also criticizes the church’s moralistic and life-negating stance in regard to the body, sexuality, and the experience of the sexual encounter. By denigrating or ignoring this side of human life, the church had failed to assist people in the one experience that most concretely and intimately allowed humans to feel close to God and to life’s mystery. Since the church had shied away from addressing the physical reality of sexuality, people were left to behave...