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But I must devote a few words to another figure among our teachers; the equivocal nature of this man intrigued me, so that I remember him better than all the rest. He was Privat-docent Eberhard Schleppfuss, who for two semesters at this time lectured at Halle among the venia legendi and then disappeared from the scene, I know not whither. Schleppfuss was a creature of hardly average height, puny in figure, wrapped in a black cape or mantle instead of an overcoat, which closed at the throat with a little metal chain. With it he wore a sort of soft hat with the brim turned up at the sides, rather like a Jesuit’s. When we students greeted him on the street he would take it off with a very sweeping bow and say: “Your humble servant!” It seemed to me that he really did drag one foot, but people disputed it; I could not always be sure of it when I saw him walk, and would rather ascribe my impression to a subconscious association with his name. It was not in any case so far-fetched, considering the nature of his two-hour lectures. I do not remember precisely how they were listed. In matter certainly they were a little vague, they might have been called lectures on the psychology of religion—and very probably were. The material was “exclusive” in its nature, not important for examinations, and only a handful of intellectual and more or less revolutionary-minded students, ten or twelve, attended it. I wondered, indeed, that there were no more, for Schleppfuss’s offering was interesting enough to arouse a more extended curiosity. But the occasion went to prove that even the piquant forfeits its popularity when accompanied by demands on the intellect.

I have already said that theology by its very nature tends and under given circumstances always will tend to become dæmonology. Schleppfuss was a good instance of the thing I mean, of a very advanced and intellectual kind, for his dæmonic conception of God and the universe was illuminated by psychology and thus made acceptable, yes, even attractive, to the modern scientific mind. His delivery contributed to the effect, for it was entirely calculated to impress the young. It was impromptu, well expressed, without effort or break, smooth as though prepared for the press, with faintly ironical turns of phrase; and he spoke not from the platform but somewhere at one side, half-sitting on the balustrade, the ends of his fingers interlaced in his lap, with the thumbs spread out, and his parted little beard moving up and down. Between it and the twisted moustaches one saw his pointed teeth like tiny splinters. Professor Kumpf’s good out-and-out ways with the Devil were child’s play compared to the psychological actuality with which Schleppfuss invested the Destroyer, that personified falling-away from God. For he received, if I may so express myself, dialectically speaking, the blasphemous and offensive into the divine and hell into the empyrean; declared the vicious to be a necessary and inseparable concomitant of the holy, and the holy a constant satanic temptation, an almost irresistible challenge to violation.

He demonstrated this by instances from the Christian Middle Ages, the classical period of religious rule over the life and spirit of man, and in particular from its ultimate century; thus from a time of complete harmony between ecclesiastical judge and delinquent, between inquisitor and witch on the fact of the betrayal of God, of the alliance with the Devil, the frightful partnership with demons. The provocation to vice proceeding from the sacrosanct was the essential thing about it, it was the thing itself, betrayed for instance in the characterization by apostates of the Virgin as “the fat woman,” or by extraordinarily vulgar interpolations, abominable filthinesses, which the Devil made them mutter to themselves at the celebration of the Mass. Dr. Schleppfuss, with his fingers interlaced, repeated them word for word; I refrain from doing so myself, on grounds of good taste, but am not reproaching him for paying scientific exactitude its due. It was odd, all the same, to see the students conscientiously writing that sort of thing down in their notebooks. According to Schleppfuss all this—evil, the Evil One himself—was a necessary emanation and inevitable accompaniment of the Holy Existence of God, so that vice did not consist in itself but got its satisfaction from the defilement of virtue, without which it would have been rootless; in other words, it consisted in the enjoyment of freedom, the possibility of sinning, which was inherent in the act of creation itself.

Herein was expressed a certain logical incompleteness of the All-powerfulness and All-goodness of God; for what He had not been able to do was to produce in the creature, in that which He had liberated out of Himself and which was now outside Him, the incapacity for sin. That would have meant denying to the created being the free will to turn away from God—which would have been an incomplete creation, yes, positively not a creation at all, but a surrender on the part of God. God’s logical dilemma had consisted in this: that He had been incapable of giving the creature, the human being and the angel, both independent choice, in other words free will, and at the same time the gift of not being able to sin. Piety and virtue, then, consisted in making a good use, that is to say no use at all, of the freedom which God had to grant the creature as such—and that, indeed, if you listened to Schleppfuss, was a little as though this non-use of freedom meant a certain existential weakening, a diminution of the intensity of being, in the creature outside of God.

Freedom. How extraordinary the word sounded, in Schleppfuss’s mouth! Yes, certainly it had a religious emphasis, he spoke as a theologian, and he spoke by no means with contempt. On the contrary, he pointed out the high degree of significance which must be ascribed by God to this idea, when He had preferred to expose men and angels to sin rather than withhold freedom from them. Good, then freedom was the opposite of inborn sinlessness, freedom meant the choice of keeping faith with God, or having traffic with demons and being able to mutter beastlinesses at the Mass. That was a definition suggested by the psychology of religion. But freedom has before now played a role, perhaps of less intellectual significance and yet not lacking in seriousness, in the life of the peoples of the earth and in historical conflicts. It does so at this moment—as I write down this description of a life—in the war now raging, and as I in my retreat like to believe, not least in the souls and thoughts of our German people, upon whom, under the domination of the most audacious licence, is dawning perhaps for the first time in their lives a notion of the importance of freedom. Well, we had not got so far by then. The question of freedom was, or seemed, in our student days, not a burning one, and Dr. Schleppfuss might give to the word the meaning that suited the frame of his lecture and leave any other meanings on one side. If only I had had the impression that he did leave them on one side; that absorbed in his psychology of religion he was not mindful of them! But he was mindful of them; I could not shake off the conviction. And his theological definition of freedom was an apologia and a polemic against the “more modern,” that is to say more insipid, more ordinary ideas, which his hearers might associate with them. See, he seemed to say, we have the word too, it is at our service, don’t think that it only occurs in your dictionaries and that your idea of it is the only one dictated by reason. Freedom is a very great thing, the condition of creation, that which prevented God making us proof against falling away from Him. Freedom is the freedom to sin, and piety consists in making no use of it out of love for God, who had to give it.

Thus he developed his theme: somewhat tendentiously, somewhat maliciously, if I do not deceive myself. In short, it irritated me. I don’t like it when a person wants the whole show; takes the word out of his opponent’s mouth, turns it round, and confuses ideas with it. That is done today with the utmost audacity; it is the main ground of my retirement. Certain people should not speak of freedom, reason, humanity; on grounds of scrupulosity, they should leave such words alone. But precisely about humanity did Schleppfuss speak, just that—of course in the sense of the “classic centuries of belief” on whose spiritual constitution he based his psychological discussion. Clearly it was important to him to make it understood that humanity was no invention of the free spirit, that not to it alone did this idea belong, for that it had always existed. For example, the activities of the Inquisition were animated by the most touching humanity. A woman, he related, had been taken, in that “classic” time, tried and reduced to ashes, who for full six years had had knowledge of an incubus, at the very side of her sleeping husband, three times a week, preferably on holy days. She had promised the Devil that after seven years she would belong to him body and soul. But she had been lucky: for just before the end of the term God in his loving-kindness made her fall into the hands of the Inquisition, and even under a slight degree of the question she had made a full and touchingly penitent confession, so that in all probability she obtained pardon from God. Willingly indeed did she go to her death, with the express declaration that even if she were freed she would prefer the stake, in order to escape from the power of the demon, so repugnant had her life become to her through her subjection to her filthy sin. But what beautiful unanimity of culture spoke in this harmonious accord between the judge and the delinquent and what warm humanity in the satisfaction at snatching through fire this soul from the Devil at the very last minute and securing for it the pardon of God!

Schleppfuss drew our attention to this picture, he summoned us to observe not only what else humanity could be but also what it actually was. It would have been to no purpose to bring in another word from the vocabulary of the free-thinker and to speak of hopeless superstition. Schleppfuss knew how to use this word too, in the name of the “classic” centuries, to whom it was far from unknown. That woman with the incubus had surrendered to senseless superstition and to nothing else. For she had fallen away from God, fallen away from faith, and that was superstition. Superstition did not mean belief in demons and incubi, it meant having to do with them for harm, inviting the pestilence and expecting from them what is only to be expected from God. Superstition meant credulity, easy belief in the suggestions and instigations of the enemy of the human race; the conception covered all the chants, invocations, and conjuring formulæ, all the letting oneself in with the black arts, the vices and crimes, the flagellum hæreticorum fascinariorum, the illusiones dæmonum. Thus might one define the word “superstition,” thus it had been defined, and after all it was interesting to see how man can use words and what he can get out of them.

Of course the dialectic association of evil with goodness and holiness played an important role in the theodicy, the vindication of God in view of the existence of evil, which occupied much space in Schleppfuss’s course. Evil contributed to the wholeness of the universe, without it the universe would not have been complete; therefore God permitted it, for He was consummate and must therefore will the consummate—not in the sense of the consummately good but in the sense of All-sidedness and reciprocal enlargement of life. Evil was far more evil if good existed; good was far more good if evil existed; yes, perhaps—one might disagree about this—evil would not be evil at all if not for the good, good not good at all if not for evil. St. Augustine, at least, had gone so far as to say that the function of the bad was to make the good stand out more strongly; that it pleased the more and was the more lovely, the more it was compared with the bad. At this point indeed Thomism had intervened, with a warning that it was dangerous to believe that God wanted evil to happen. God neither wanted that nor did He want evil not to happen; rather He permitted, without willing or not-willing, the rule of evil, and that was advantageous to the completeness of the whole. But it was aberration to assert that God permitted evil on account of the good; for nothing was to be considered good except it corresponded to the idea “good” in itself, and not by accident. Anyhow, said Schleppfuss, the problem of the absolute good and beautiful came up here, the good and beautiful without reference to the evil and ugly—the problem of quality without comparison. Where comparison falls away, he said, the measure falls away too, and one cannot speak of heavy or light, of large or small. The good and beautiful would then be divested of all but being, unqualified, which would be very like not-being, and perhaps not preferable to it.

We wrote that down in our notebooks, that we might go home more or less cheered. The real vindication of God, in view of the pains of creation, so we added, to Schleppfuss’s dictation, consisted in His power to bring good out of evil. This characteristic certainly demanded, to the glory of God, practical use, and it could not reveal itself if God had not made over the creature to sin. In that case the universe would be deprived of that good which God knew how to create out of sin, suffering, and vice, and the angels would have had less occasion for songs of praise. Now indeed arose, the other way round, as history continually teaches, out of good much evil, so that God, to prevent it, had also to prevent the good, and altogether might not let the world alone. Yet this would have contradicted His existence as creator; and therefore He had to create the world as it is—namely, saturated with evil—that is to say, to leave it open in part to dæmonic influences.

It never became quite clear whether these were actually Schleppfuss’s own dogmas which he delivered to us, or whether he was simply concerned with familiarizing us with the psychology of the classic centuries of faith. Certainly he would not have been a theologian without showing himself sympathetic with such a psychology. But the reason I wondered why more young men were not attracted to his lectures was this: that whenever the subject was the power of demons over human life, sex always played a prominent role. How could it have been otherwise? The dæmonic character of this sphere was a chief appurtenance of the “classical psychology,” for there it formed the favourite arena of the demons, the given point of attack for God’s adversary, the enemy and corrupter. For God had conceded him greater magic power over the venereal act than over any other human activity; not only on account of the outward indecency of the commission of this act, but above all because the depravity of the first father passed over as original sin to the whole human race. The act of procreation, characterized by æsthetic disgustingness, was the expression and the vehicle of original sin—what wonder that the Devil had been left an especially free hand in it? Not for nothing had the angel said to Tobias: “Over them who are given to lewdness the demon wins power.” For the power of the demons lay in the loins of man, and these were meant, where the Evangelist said: “When a strong man armed watcheth his palace, his goods remain in peace.” That was of course to be interpreted sexually; such a meaning was always to be deduced from enigmatic sayings, and keen-eared piety always heard it in them.

But it was astonishing how lax the angelic watch had always been in the case of God’s saints, at least so far as “peace” came in question. The book of the Holy Fathers was full of accounts to the effect that even while defying all fleshly lust, they have been tempted by the lust after women, past the bounds of belief. “There was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan, to buffet me.” That was an admission, made to the Corinthians, and though the writer possibly meant something else by it, the falling sickness or the like, in any case the godly interpreted it in their own way and were probably right after all, for their instinct very likely did not err when it darkly referred to the demon of sex in connection with the temptations that assailed the mind. The temptation that one withstood was indeed no sin; it was merely a proof of virtue. And yet the line between temptation and sin was hard to draw, for was not temptation already the raging of sin in the blood, and in the very state of fleshly desire did there not lie much concession to evil? Here again the dialectical unity of good and evil came out, for holiness was unthinkable without temptation, it measured itself against the frightfulness of the temptation, against a man’s sin-potential.

But from whom came the temptation? Who was to be cursed on its account? It was easy to say that it came from the Devil. He was its source, but the curse had to do with its object. The object, the instrumentum of the Tempter, was woman. She was also, and by that token, indeed, the instrument of holiness, since holiness did not exist without raging lust for sin. But the thanks she got had a bitter taste. Rather the remarkable and profoundly significant thing was that though the human being, both male and female, was endowed with sex, and although the localization of the dæmonic in the loins fitted the man better than the woman, yet the whole curse of fleshliness, of slavery to sex, was laid upon the woman. There was even a saying: “A beautiful woman is like a gold ring in the nose of the sow.” Flow much of that sort of thing, in past ages, has not been said and felt most profoundly about woman! It had to do with the concupiscence of the flesh in general; but was equated with that of the female, so that the fleshliness of the man was put down to her account as well. Hence the words: “I found the woman bitterer than death, and even a good woman is subject to the covetousness of the flesh.”

One might have asked: and the good man too? And the holy man quite especially so? Yes, but that was the influence of the woman, who represented the collective concupiscence of the world. Sex was her domain, and how should she not, who was called femina, which came half from fidus and half from minus—that is, of lesser faith—why should she not be on evil and familiar footing with the obscene spirits who populated this field, and quite particularly suspect of intercourse with them, of witchcraft? There was the instance of that married woman who next to her trusting, slumbering spouse had carried on with an incubus, and that for years on end. Of course there were not only incubi but also succubi, and in fact an abandoned youth of the classical period lived with an idol, whose diabolic jealousy he was in the end to experience. For after some years, and more on practical grounds than out of real inclination, he had married a respectable woman, but had been prevented from consummating his marriage because the idol had always come and lain down between them. Then the wife in justifiable wrath had left him, and for the rest of his life he had seen himself confined to the unaccommodating idol.

Even more telling, Schleppfuss thought, for the psychological situation, was the restriction imposed upon a youth of that same period: it had come upon him by no fault of his own, through female witchcraft, and tragic indeed had been the means of his release. As a comment upon the studies I pursued in common with Adrian I will briefly recount the tale, on which Privat-docent Schleppfuss dwelt with considerable wit and relish.

At Merseburg near Constance, toward the end of the fifteenth century, there lived an honest young fellow, Heinz Klöpfgeissel by name and cooper by calling, quite sound and well-built. He loved and was loved by a maiden named Bärbel, only daughter of a widowed sexton, and wished to marry her, but the young couple’s desire met with her father’s opposition, for Klöpfgeissel was poor, and the sexton insisted on a considerable setting-up in life, and that he should be a master in his trade before he gave him his daughter. But the desires of the young people had proved stronger than their patience and the couple had prematurely become a pair. And every night, when the sexton went to ring the bell, Klöpfgeissel slipped in to his Bärbel and their embraces made each find the other the most glorious thing on earth.

Thus things stood when one day the cooper and some lively companions went to Constance to a church dedication and they had a good day and were a bit beyond themselves, so they decided to go to some women. It was not to Klöpfgeissel’s mind, he did not want to go with them. But the others jeered at him for an old maid and egged him on with taunts against his honour and hints that all was not right with him; and as he could not stand that, and had drunk just as much beer as the others besides, he let himself be talked round, said: “Ho-ho, I know better than that,” and went up with the others into the stews.

But now it came about that he suffered such frightful chagrin that he did not know what sort of face to put on. For against all expectation things went wrong with him with the slut, a Hungarian woman it was, he could give no account of himself at all, he was just not there, and his fury was unbounded, his fright as well. For the creature not only laughed at him, but shook her head and gave it as her view that there must be something wrong, it certainly had a bad smell, when a fine lusty chap like him all of a sudden was just not up to it, he must be possessed, somebody must have given him something—and so on. He paid her a goodly sum so that she would say nothing, and went home greatly cast down.

As soon as he could, though not without misgiving, he made a rendezvous with his Bärbel, and while the sexton was ringing his bell they had a perfect hour together. He found his manly honour restored and should have been well content. For aside from the one and only he cared for no one, and why should he care about himself save only for her? But he had been uneasy in his mind ever since that one failure; it gnawed at him, he felt he must make another test: just once and never again, play false to his dearest and best. So he sought secretly for a chance to test himself—himself and her too, for he could cherish no misgiving about himself that did not end in slight, even tender, yet anxious suspicion of her upon whom his soul hung.

Now, it so fell out that he had to tighten the hoops of two casks in the wine-cellar of the inn landlord, a sickly pot-belly, and the man’s wife, a comely wench, still pretty fresh, went down with him to watch him work. She patted his arm, put hers beside it to compare, and so demeaned herself that it would have been impossible to repulse her, save that his flesh, in all the willingness of his spirit, was entirely unable, and he had to say he was not in the humour, and he was in a hurry, and her husband would be coming downstairs, and then to take to his heels, hearing her scornful laughter behind him and owing her a debt which no stout fellow should ever refuse to pay.

He was deeply injured and bewildered about himself, but about himself not only; for the suspicion that even after the first mishap had lodged in his mind now entirely filled him, and he had no more doubt that he was indeed “possessed.” And so, because the healing of a poor soul and the honour of his flesh as well were at stake, he went to the priest and told him everything in his ear through the little grating: how he was bewitched, how he was unable, how he was prevented with everybody but one, and how about all that and had the Church any maternal advice to give against such injury.

Now, at that time and in that locality the pestilence of witchcraft, accompanied by much wantonness, sin, and vice instigated by the enemy of the human race, and abhorrent to the Divine Majesty, had been gravely widespread, and stern watchfulness had been made the duty of all shepherds of souls. The priest, all too familiar with this kind of mischief, and men being tampered with in their best strength, went to the higher authorities with Klöpfgeissel’s confession. The sexton’s daughter was arrested and examined, and confessed, truly and sincerely, that in the anguish of her heart over the faithfulness of the young man, lest he be filched from her before he was hers before God and man, she had procured from an old bath-woman a specific, a salve, said to be made of the fat of an infant dead unbaptized, with which she had anointed her Heinz on the back while embracing him, tracing a certain figure thereon, only in order to bind him to herself. Next the bathing-woman was interrogated, who denied it stoutly. She had to be brought before the civil authorities for the application of methods of questioning which did not become the Church; and under some pressure the expected came to light. The old woman had in fact a compact with the Devil, who appeared to her in the guise of a monk with goat’s feet and persuaded her to deny with frightful curses the Godhead and the Christian faith, in return for which he gave her directions for making not only that love unction but also other shameful panaceas, among them a fat, smeared with which a piece of wood would instantly rise with the sorcerer into the air. The ceremonies by which the Evil One had sealed his pact with the old crone came out bit by bit under repeated pressure, and were hair-raising.

Everything now depended upon the question: how far was the salvation of the deceived one involved by her receiving and using the unholy preparation? Unhappily for the sexton’s daughter the old woman deposed that the Dragon had laid upon her to make many converts. For every human being she brought to him by betraying it to the use of his gifts, he would make her somewhat more secure against the everlasting flames; so that after assiduous marshalling of converts she would be armed with an asbestos buckler against the flames of hell.—This was Bärbel’s undoing. The need to save her soul from eternal damnation, to tear her from the Devil’s claws by yielding her body to the flames, was perfectly apparent. And since on account of the increasing ravages of corruption an example was bitterly needed, the two witches, the old one and the young, were burned at the stake, one beside the other on the open square. Heinz Klöpfgeissel, the bewitched one, stood in the throng of spectators with his head bared, murmuring prayers. The shrieks of his beloved, choked by smoke and unrecognizable with hoarseness, seemed to him like the voice of the Demon, croaking as against his will he issued from her. From that hour the vile inhibition was lifted from him, for no sooner was his love reduced to ashes than he recovered the sinfully alienated free use of his manhood.

I have never forgotten this revolting tale, so characteristic of the tone of Schleppfuss’s course, nor have I ever been able to be quite cool about it. Among us, between Adrian and me, as well as in discussions in Winfried it was much talked about; but neither in him, who was always taciturn about his teachers and what they said, nor in his theological fellow-students did I succeed in rousing the amount of indignation which would have satisfied my own anger at the anecdote, especially against Klöpfgeissel. Even today in my thoughts I address him breathing vengeance and call him a prize ass in every sense of the word. Why did the donkey have to tell? Why had he to test himself on other women when he had the one he loved, loved obviously so much that it made him cold and “impotent” with others? What does “impotent” mean in this connection, when with the one he loved he had all the potency of love? Love is certainly a kind of noble selectiveness of sexuality, and if it is natural that sexual activity should decline in the absence of love, yet it is nothing less than unnatural if it does so in the presence and face of love. In any case, Bärbel had fixed and “restricted” her Heinz—not by means of any devil’s hocus-pocus but by the charm she had for him and the will by which she held him as by a spell against other temptations. That this protection in its strength and influence on the youth’s nature was psychologically reinforced by the magic salve and the girl’s belief in it, I am prepared to accept, though it does seem to me simpler and more correct to look at the matter from his side and to make the selective feeling given by his love responsible for the inhibition over which he was so stupidly upset. But this point of view too includes the recognition of a certain natural wonder-working of the spiritual, its power to affect and modify the organic and corporeal in a decisive way—and this so to speak magic side of the thing it was, of course, that Schleppfuss purposely emphasized in his comments on the Klöpfgeissel case.

He did it in a quasi-humanistic sense, in order to magnify the lofty idea which those supposedly sinister centuries had had of the choice constitution of the human body. They had considered it nobler than all other earthly combinations of matter, and in its power of variation through the spiritual had seen the expression of its aristocracy, its high rank in the hierarchy of bodies. It got cold or hot through fear or anger, thin with affliction; blossomed in joy; a mere feeling of disgust could produce a physiological reaction like that of bad food, the mere sight of a dish of strawberries could make the skin of an allergic person break out; yes, sickness and death could follow purely mental operations. But it was only a step—though a necessary one—from this insight into the power of the mind to alter its own and accompanying physical matter, to the conviction, supported by ample human experience, that mind, whether wilfully or not, was able, that is by magic, to alter another person’s physical substance. In other words, the reality of magic, of dæmonic influence and bewitchment, was corroborated; and phenomena such as the evil eye, a complex of experience concentrated in the saga of the death-dealing eye of the basilisk, were rescued from the realm of so-called superstition. It would have been culpable inhumanity to deny that an impure soul could produce by a mere look, whether deliberate or not, physically harmful effects in others, for instance in little children, whose tender substance was especially susceptible to the poison of such an eye.

Thus Schleppfuss in his exclusive course—exclusive because it was both intellectual and questionable. Questionable: a capital word, I have always ascribed a high philological value to it. It challenges one both to go in to and to avoid; anyhow to a very cautious going-in; and it stands in the double light of the remarkable and the disreputable, either in a thing—or in a man.

In our bow to Schleppfuss when we met him in the street or in the corridors of the university we expressed all the respect with which the high intellectual plane of his lectures inspired us hour by hour; but he on his side took off his hat with a still deeper flourish than ours and said: “Your humble servant.”