Two
Assimilation and the Emancipation of Historical Dissonance

Alexander L. Ringer

Few twentieth-century composers, if any, have been as closely examined by musical theorists in recent decades as Arnold Schoenberg, whose very name invariably evokes the "method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another" that in the wake of the World War II exerted such startling fascination on countless musical minds desperate for relief from their nagging creative malaise. Why, however, of all the great talents of his generation this largely self-taught descendant of a modest Austro-Hungarian Jewish family should have been the one to alter the course of twentieth-century music in such decisive ways remains a rather obvious, though admittedly complex, question that has hardly been seriously asked, let alone meaningfully answered. Indeed, were it not for some strikingly self-revelatory statements in Schoenberg's own published writings, what enabled him to pursue his lonely path so doggedly against all historical and purely aesthetic odds might yet be shrouded in even greater mystery than it undoubtedly is.

Talk of spiritual development seems rather beside the issue where an unreconstructed purist is concerned whose philosophical outlook barely changed in the course of a long creative life. The implication of some kind of steady evolution in Schoenberg's dauntless quest for truth simply does not square with his oft-expressed, unshakable, and infallibly proven faith in the essential immutability of all fundamental precepts. Organic change was a central aspect of his creative approach, sustained as much by the precipitous events of the disturbing times in which he lived as by that intangible inner necessity he felt compelled to obey. By the same token, however, that very quality served to reinforce the overarching sense of lawful unity at the heart of all of his varied artistic responses to a world in turmoil.

A relentless drive for unity and a well-nigh ascetic passion for self-imposed restraint emerged early on as hallmarks of Schoenberg's artistic per-

sonality. "At the very start I knew that restriction could be achieved by two methods, condensation and juxtaposition," he recalled in 1948.^[1] Seven years earlier he had conluded his University of California lecture titled "Composition with Twelve Tones" with the suggestion that "when Richard Wagner introduced his Leitmotiv — for the same purpose as that for which I introduced my Basic Set — he may have said: `Let there be unity.'"^[2] So consistently did this deeply embedded creed determine his work and thought that already in 1937 he felt compelled to tell an American audience: "I have not discontinued composing in the same style and in the same way as at the very beginning. The difference is only that I do it better now than before; it is more concentrated, more mature."^[3] But then, he had long since reached the conclusion that truly creative visions will always be conceived "in harmony with the Divine Model."^[4]

Schoenberg's absolute commitment to rigorous discipline and structural unification became in a sense a condition of inner survival, given the disquieting climate of psychological and social dissonance in which he grew up and spent the first quarter century of his productive life. What distinguished him more than anything else from other intellectually and artistically gifted contemporaries of similarly assimilated Jewish background was his remarkable ability to turn such shared sociocultural liabilities into decisive creative assets. Thus it was that his uncanny "emancipation" of the insidious "historical dissonance" affecting all but the most insensitive of "modern" Jews brought to full fruition what the much heralded emancipation of musical dissonance had merely promised: a seemingly inescapable element of perpetual unresolved tensions, unconditionally accepted as such, now furnished the liberating ethical wherewithal for aesthetic exploits of an entirely new order.

That this crucial feature has been so sorely neglected is no doubt due at least in part to the decidedly Gentile nature of historical musicology, a scholarly daughter of Romanticism raised on philological models at the behest of a thousand years of Christian musical civilization. Assimilated Jewish music historians, beginning with Gustav Mahler's close friend Guido Adler, readily fell into line, if only because the study of a Christian art did seem to call for Christian expertise and perspectives. Christianity had, after all, seen to it that Jews remained excluded from European musical life well into the nineteenth century. A musical past that was for all practical purposes judenrein hardly cried out for any intrinsically Jewish input. Then, too, historians almost by definition rely extensively on documentary evidence. Although Schoenberg's published essays do offer occasional hints regarding his general state of mind in certain contexts, they reveal little about his day-to-day preoccupations, let alone his more intimate musings. He did, of course, write copious notes to himself and from time to time made a personal matter the subject of a letter to a trusted friend. His dramatic ex-

change of letters with Vasili Kandinsky in April 1923, on the other hand, forms an exception in almost every way. For one, it reveals his profound consciousness of the assimilated Jew's historical dilemma in unusually forceful terms. Above all, however, the fearful predictions of the fate awaiting those unable or unwilling to draw the inescapable conclusions from their ominously dissonant existence turned out to be terrifyingly prophetic.

"What made young Arnold run" in this direction in the first place can only be inferred from what is generally known about turn-of-the-century Jewish Vienna in conjunction with the more specific conditions of his maturation into a feeling, thinking human being who was resolutely oriented toward action. Attempts to dig below the obvious surface are beset with interpretive pitfalls. Apart from the need for a host of "objective" data, any such attempt calls for a measure of empathy with Jewish culture, religious as well as secular, that is apt to elude even otherwise highly qualified scholars, for most of them are accustomed to dealing with musical works of art primarily in splendid isolation, as structural entities answering only to their own intrinsic laws. Musical anthropologists recognized long ago that as a form of symbolic behavior music is always inextricably bound up with the sociocultural factors that engender and nurture it; traditional musicology by contrast still prefers to leave "extraneous" considerations of this kind to general historians with a taste for the arts, whose comments may or may not be incorporated into the requisite erudite footnotes. Nor should it be forgotten that academic musicology treated the twentieth century until quite recently as a wayward stepchild preferably left to the care of professional theorists, not a few of whom turned out to be "note counters" of the sort that incurred Schoenberg's repeated wrath. Last but by no means least, anything smacking even remotely of Geistesgeschichte is bound to get short shrift this side of the Atlantic, where the historical falsifications and vilifications of National Socialist and Stalinist ideologists are still keenly remembered. As a historical phenomenon, however, Arnold Schoenberg, a victim as well as vocal opponent of these aberrations, can hardly be understood without proper reference to the humanistic premises and contributions of Geistesgeschichte. Surely, as long as familiarity with New England transcendentalism or American individualism is considered indispensable for a meaningful appraisal of Charles Ives and his particular mission, Arnold Schoenberg, his exact contemporary and eventual fellow American, deserves equally serious attention in equivalent Jewish terms.

The Schoenberg household differed very little from many others established in Vienna during the second half of the nineteenth century by Jews from the far-flung reaches of the empire seeking a better future in the big city. Though for the most part traditionally religious — Arnold Schoenberg's ancestry included rabbis as well as cantors — Vienna's Jews nevertheless succumbed quite readily to the lures of assimilation and, in more extreme

cases, equated the desired opening to Austrian society at large with wholesale renunciations — indeed, denunciations — of Jewish religious practices or customs. What religious observances Samuel Schönberg had endeavored to maintain apparently fell into disuse soon after his untimely death. His son's later helplessness in dealing with Hebrew texts would suggest that he lacked even that minimum of Jewish education generally accorded twelve-year-old boys in preparation of their first public reading from the Torah — the central part of the bar mitzvah ceremony, whereby they become full-fledged members of their religious community. Whether Arnold Schoenberg ever assumed his religious duties in this time-honored manner is still an open question. For all we know, his "confirmation" involved something like the family party described by Arthur Schnitzler, whose "modern" parents went out of their way to behave "like everybody else."^[5] Unfortunately, "everybody else" did not necessarily respond positively to those earnest strivings of a minority but recently emerged from centuries of involuntary separateness. Rising fears of "unfair competition" and, far worse, rumors about an alleged Jewish plot to bastardize the Aryan race (that mythical brainchild of post-Romantic apostles of purity touting misbegotten evolutionistic theories), not to speak of the still festering blood libel, continued to preclude broadly based social acceptance. The very improvements in the legal and material position of Central European Jewry, tokens of outward progress, also contained the seeds of ultimate destruction.

Arnold Schoenberg was barely seven years old when the German Reichstag seriously debated a proposal to rescind substantial portions of Jewish civil rights that had been granted less than two decades earlier. In imperial Russia the assassination of Czar Alexander II unleashed a chain of murderous pogroms. For who but those unholy servants of the Antichrist could have committed this heinous deed? Vienna witnessed the realization of one of Richard Wagner's fondest wishes when hundreds of Jews were among the many victims of the fire that engulfed the Ringtheater during the sold-out second performance of Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. Wagner, of course, had imagined a Jewish holocaust at a performance of Lessing's Nathan, the Wise.^[6] Still, he might have been cheered a few months after the Vienna disaster by the news that Dresden, the city where he had nurtured his incipient hatred of everything Jewish, was hosting the founding congress of organized political anti-Semitism. Actually, at that point Wagner himself began to have second thoughts, albeit too late. The aging sorcerer had clearly lost control, and his eager apprentices, boosted by the "scientific" claims of the new racism, lost no time setting in motion the notorious Antisemitenstreit of Berlin's leading historians. Eventually, not to be left behind, ranking French army officers staged the bogus treason trial of Captain Henri Dreyfus that turned the Viennese journalist and playwright Theodor Herzl, once like Gustav Mahler a proud member of Vienna's pan-German Wagner-

Association, into the progenitor of modern Zionism. Other Jewish activists meanwhile carried their fight against domestic anti-Semitism straight into the Austrian political arena. One of their most prominent leaders, Josef Bloch, even won a libel suit against a dangerous agitator fittingly answering to the name Rohling, who had publicly asserted that Jews killed Christians as a sacred duty mandated by the Talmud.

The novel phenomenon of Jews fighting back was hardly lost on Arnold Schoenberg, who heard the pros and cons passionately debated in his favorite coffeehouses no less than at home in Leopoldstadt. Here the events of this seemingly endless drama created far greater concern than, say, the unexpected failure of a Schnitzler play. Those hardworking Jewish residents were anything but strangers to anti-Semitic harassment, in particular from that traditionally bigoted section of the petite bourgeoisie that Adolf Hitler later gratefully remembered for its contribution to his early awareness of the pernicious Jewish influence on Austrian society. Hitler shrewdly linked that crucial awakening with his consuming hatred for the Hapsburg monarchy, which, unlike its Russian counterpart, was happy to take advantage of the Jewish population's talents and far-flung connections, the very qualities that had induced Joseph II in Mozart's day to issue his famous Toleranzpatent for the benefit of a limited number of economically "useful" Jews. Seen in this light, Arnold Schoenberg's occasional nostalgia for the Austrian imperial house betrayed a healthy dose of political realism rather than the simple reactionary tendencies often ascribed to him by left-leaning critics who view the world pointedly through non-Jewish glasses.

Socially suspended, as it were, between the interests of the state and the animosity of many of its citizens, not to mention that of the extremely powerful Roman Catholic clergy, Austria's Jews, while still barred from state employment by imperial decree, contributed far more than their proportional share to the free professions, whether medical, legal, literary, or artistic. But their very successes in these and a number of other walks of life encouraged a false sense of security that proved their undoing in the long run. In the meantime, though, growing numbers of conservative businessmen as well as radical intellectuals celebrated the consummation of their assimilation by deserting the Jewish community altogether. Some, like the famous Adler brothers, embraced socialism as a new religion that promised the elimination of all social distinctions, including those between Christians and Jews. Others, with more serious spiritual concerns but woefully ignorant of their own religious heritage, persuaded themselves that Judaism was too old-fashioned for the modern world and accepted Protestantism as a viable alternative to the official state church. Still, as Heinrich Heine put it when Jews were first led to believe that their future depended on rapid assimilation, if not outright conversion: Jewishness is not easily "washed off." This well-documented truth caused a few to carry the gospel of progress so

far as to agree in essence with Richard Wagner's conclusion, first stated in the final sentence of his "Judaism in Music," that it would be in the best interests of all concerned if the Jewish people once and for all vanished from the earth.

Arnold Schoenberg became a Protestant in 1898, presumably under the influence of his Lutheran friend Walter Pieau. However, this official act changed his overt religious behavior as little as did his solemn declaration of returning to the Jewish fold as a refugee in Paris thirty-five years later. Important Christian holidays had long since become festive occasions of a general nature, and nonbelievers, too, hoped for universal peace on earth. Thus nearly ten years after his baptism Schoenberg still bypassed the Gospels in favor of a nineteenth-century poem in his musical appeal for Friede auf Erden. Clearly none of the religious institutions of his time, let alone their often rather self-glorious representatives, proved a match for the spiritual challenges this genuine believer derived from his close reading of the Hebrew Bible, albeit in Martin Luther's German translation. Thrice alienated, much like his mentor Gustav Mahler — as a Jew among Austrians, a Christian among Jews, and a musical secessionist among his peers — he actually never ceased to identify with the manifest destiny of those ancient wanderers in the desert to whom, as he explained to his cousin Malvina at the mature age of sixteen, all civilization owed its moral and social foundations.^[7]

Earlier in the century, during those heady post-Napoleonic days when Central Europe's Jews expected confidently to join the majority culture, Heinrich Heine was only one brilliant representative of his generation to elect conversion as a token of sociopolitical progress. Some, among them Felix Mendelssohn, were taken to the baptismal font by anxious parents hoping to protect their youngsters from continuing anti-Jewish abuse. Others, like Adolf Bernhard Marx, turned Lutheran only after years of earnest soul searching. Typically, though, both Marx and Mendelssohn, who later became close friends, always regarded their Jewish roots with pride, drawing heavily upon the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, for lifelong inspiration. With his best-known work, Moses, Marx in fact anticipated Schoenberg not merely in writing his own oratorio text but, interestingly enough, also in allowing its composition a prolonged incubation period. Like Schoenberg, too, Marx was a prolific theorist and teacher whose devotion to the cause of Bach and Beethoven shaped the musical outlook of many a German composer. It was in fact the discovery of Mozart's Requiem and Handel's Messiah that induced him to study the Bible seriously for the first time, which ultimately led to his baptism — against the wish of a loving father who, despite his own distinctly rationalist leanings, remained loyal to his Jewish heritage. It is no wonder that under these by no means rare circumstances the younger Marx continued to be guided as much by "the

genuine message of Judaism" as by the spirit of the Gospels,^[8] the twin foundations of Schoenberg's early thought as well. And Schoenberg surely knew Marx's pioneering Beethoven studies, the first to stress the "Zug nach dem Ganzen " (drive toward the whole) as a central trait of all large-scale musical structures.^[9]

By the end of the nineteenth century, at any rate, it may well have looked as if

cultural commonality and occasional contact had shaped a common basis for the Jewish minority and the non-Jewish majority. Under these conditions the change of religion was no leap over an abyss. To many Jews, especially in the higher social, intellectual, and artistic circles, the conversion to Christianity marked the completion of their incorporation into the dominant culture, in the shaping of which they took part.^[10]

The majority population did not always see it that way, however, treating in particular Jews who had undergone baptism "without any religious experience" with a good deal of suspicion, if not outright cynicism. And lingering conflicts of this sort, personal as well as collective, inevitably reinforced the Jewish sense of existential dissonance, with often devastating consequences. Budding intellectuals unequipped to cope in more traditional terms often retreated into seemingly unassailable radical positions, while others, the precocious genius Otto Weininger among them, were driven to suicide once their irrational public expressions of self-hatred failed to provide tangible relief. Max Brod's protégé, the talented young composer Alfred Schreiber, did remain faithful to his Jewish background. But the dissonant clash of his hopes with the reality of the Jewish situation proved too much, and he, too, put an abrupt end to his budding creative life.

With growing interest Arnold Schoenberg, ever constructive in thought and deed, watched the rash of Jewish political activity — Josef Bloch's fight for official recognition of Austria's Jews as one of the empire's many minorities no less than Theodor Herzl's relentless efforts on behalf of an independent Jewish state in the biblical land of old. Ultimately he made his choices unswayed by any of the principals in the great debate surrounding the "Jewish question." Given the Viennese cultural scene of the early twentieth century, his personal and professional contacts naturally involved many individuals of Jewish descent whose thinking, speech, and general attitudes inevitably reflected the early impact of Jewish lore and customs, if only in their propensity for self-deprecating Jewish jokes. In short, one way or another Schoenberg confronted his Jewish origins every day. Had he wished to look the other way, the outside world would have interfered, though perhaps not always as brutally as in the summer of 1921 at Mattsee, the Austrian resort town that barred Jews under the new political order as it had under the old. Characteristically, Schoenberg refused the requested

proof that he and his family were proper Christians. Instead he accepted a Jewish friend's offer of sanctuary in Traunkirchen, where a surprised Josef Rufer first learned of the new method of composing with twelve tones. One wonders therefore whether the composer's rejoinder that this ensured Germany's musical supremacy for another hundred years did not in those circumstances contain a strong admixture of irony. At any rate, given the specific nature of the twelve-tone technique, it could hardly have referred to Wagner or even Brahms, whose "progressiveness" Schoenberg was yet to discover. More likely he had the melodic-rhythmic outlook of the same Johann Sebastian Bach in mind whom Joachim Quantz once cited in support of his prediction that German music would always be based on a mixed, as opposed to a uniquely national, style. Beethoven, the true executor of Bach's musical bequest as well as of that of the French Revolution, certainly proved the point. Schoenberg, pursuing that grand tradition further and further, for his part finally reached that step on his personal Jakobsleiter where air of another planet rendered conventional forces of musical gravity as inoperative as those historical dissonances in the despairing hearts and minds of so many of his contemporaries.

The chain of traumatic experiences from the Dreyfus trials through the humiliating Judenzählung of 1916 (the official census of Jewish soldiers in response to charges that Jews had managed to avoid their military duty; the census proved the opposite) on to Mattsee and beyond reflected a kind of perverse logic to which Schoenberg reacted, logically as always, with a thorough reevaluation of his own dissonant socioreligious past in light of the mandates of his artistic mission. As he told Kandinsky the year after Mattsee, the strength that permitted him to persevere on his chosen path came entirely from religion, "though without any organisational fetters."^[11] As evidence he referred to his Jakobsleiter text. Yet by 1923 it was no longer a generalized matter of faith:

For I have at last learnt the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year, and I shall not forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely even a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but I am a Jew."^[12]

In 1921 the London Times had managed to unmask the virulently anti-Semitic "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as nothing but a series of "clumsy plagiarisms," a thinly disguised parody of the 1865 French political pamphlet "Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu." But this hardly diminished the flow of anti-Semitic propaganda through a Gentile world looking for convenient scapegoats in the aftermath of a disastrous war.^[13] And Schoenberg's explicit statement that he was thenceforth perfectly content to be a Jew and no longer wished to be treated as an excep-

tion actually reflected a growing general tendency among artists and intellectuals of Jewish descent. The year 1921 saw no less than three major literary figures of decidedly different backgrounds and orientations reasserting their Jewish pride in print. Jakob Wassermann in a short but unsparing autobiographical essay entitled Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude, which he dedicated to his close friend Ferruccio Busoni, came to the firm conclusion that as long as the rest of the world was determined to find fault with them, regardless of what they did or did not do, the Jews would simply have to go it alone.^[14] Franz Kafka's friend Max Brod in his magisterial Heidentum, Christentum, Judentum drew attention to the disastrous consequences of the historical alliance of Christian otherworldliness and pagan materialism in comparison with the traditionally Jewish concerns for a dignified life in the present for all created in God's image.^[15] Finally, Jacob Klatzkin, taking issue with the emphasis of his own teacher, Hermann Cohen, on Judaism's worldwide messianic mission, in his Krisis und Entscheidung im Judentum insisted rather on land and language as indispensable prerequisites of any meaningful Jewish future.^[16] Not surprisingly, it was Klatzkin with whom Schoenberg corresponded while working on Der biblische Weg, the spoken drama spawned by the tragic events of an era that witnessed the brazen assassination of, among others, Walter Rathenau, the Jewish foreign minister on whose prestige and skill the fledgling Weimar Republic had placed so much hope for its future.

Unlike Hans Stuckenschmidt and, for that matter, Willi Reich, the late Michael Mäckelmann accepted the thesis of the paradigmatic significance of Schoenberg's Mattsee experience sufficiently to make it the starting point of his on the whole impressive doctoral dissertation. Inexplicably, though, he referred to that brief, if decisive, episode as a pogrom. In so doing he conveyed an erroneous impression not only of what actually happened but also of the nature and appropriateness of the composer's reaction.^[17] For, despite the fact that White Russian as well as Polish soldiers and peasants had turned on Jewish communities within their reach as soon as the Czarist and Hapsburg regimes collapsed, it was an act of mental rather than physical violence that sensitized Schoenberg to the fragility of the conditio judaica in post-World War I Europe.^[18] By then, to be sure, the name of the Cossack leader Petlura had become a symbol of rape, burning, looting, and the collective death of those who found themselves in the path of the undisciplined hordes roaming the Eastern European countryside in search of Jewish victims. On 16 June 1921, about the time Schoenberg and his family vainly sought peace and quiet in Mattsee, Koitschitz, a town near Minsk, suffered a grievous extension of the pogroms already visited upon Homel, Vitebsk, and Minsk itself. "The cruelty and barbarism can be gauged from the fact that while only fifty people were wounded, eighty-

seven Jews were killed, among them an infant and his mother . . . [and] a few women were violated," reported the American Jewish Committee. Nine days later an armed band

attacked the railroad station at Staravee, district of Bobrouisk, disarmed one of the two policemen, and robbed and pillaged the Jewish houses. They killed twelve Jews, including a boy of nine and a man of sixty, violated and killed a girl of nineteen, and wounded eleven Jews, among them two little girls.^[19]

In Poland roving bands of soldiers made a special practice of attacking Jews on trains and in railroad stations. It took a stern American protest for the army's commanders to issue an explicit countermanding order.

Like most of his friends and colleagues, Schoenberg had taken little notice of the misfortunes of those strange-looking Ostjuden from beyond the new Austrian Republic's eastern border. Thousands of impoverished refugees were passing through or had settled in Vienna, glad to have escaped with their lives. No doubt Schoenberg, too, had heard and perhaps even repeated derogatory stories about those wretched souls whose unfamiliar garb and behavior lent themselves to jokes in poor taste. He soon recognized, however, that these for the most part strictly Orthodox creatures were the ones who perpetuated what Adolf Bernhard Marx had called "the genuine message of Judaism," a message so firmly imprinted on his mind that nothing could erase it. Emanuel Swedenborg's Christian gnosticism, as the composer understood it from his reading of Balzac's Séraphita, may actually have reinforced long-standing cabalistic tendencies — for example, in its rejection of clear distinctions between the realms of nature and the spirit. If proof were needed for Schoenberg's intrinsically Talmudic modes of reasoning and acting, the very first sentence of his Harmonielehre of 1911 should do nicely. "Dieses Buch habe ich von meinen Schülern gelernt" (This book I learned from my students)^[20] amounts to a concise paraphrase of that wellknown saying attributed to Rabbi Chanina: "I learned much from my teachers, from my colleagues even more than from my teachers, but from my pupils more than from all of them together."^[21] Schoenberg's manner of teaching likewise recalls those rabbis of old, intensely engaged with their disciples in a never-ending search for new meanings and a better understanding of the Law's intricate meanings. As Schoenberg himself declared: "The teacher who does not exert himself because he tells only `what he knows,' does not exert his pupils either. Action must start with the teacher himself; his unrest must infect the pupils. Then they will search as he does."^[22]

If there was a trenchant difference between the author of the first edition of the Harmonielehre and that of the third, published in 1922, it reflected in no small measure the eternal lesson of the Jewish experience that words alone won't do — that, with survival at issue, thought must

be matched by action. As he pointedly asked Kandinsky, now clearly no longer oblivious to the plight of Eastern European Jews, "What is anti-Semitism to lead to if not to acts of violence? Is it so difficult to imagine that?"^[23] In August 1921 Adolf Hitler spoke before a gathering of the radical right on the subject "Why we are anti-Semites." Soon thereafter the Völkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the National-Socialist Workers Party, gleefully reported his solemn pledge not to rest until all Jews were safely locked up in concentration camps. And when the first storm-troop battalions took to the streets, the die was cast. Yet very few among Germany's intelligentsia appreciated the horrendous truth in Arnold Schoenberg's well-nigh clairvoyant apprehensions.

Irrevocably convinced that the historical experiment of assimilation was doomed to failure and that the sociocultural dissonance it had generated was likely to remain forever unresolved, Schoenberg unconditionally accepted the inner as well as outer contradictions of Jewish existence as fundamental aspects of the fate and mission of a unique people chosen, as he saw it, for the sake of a single abstract proposition: the divinely ordained idea of unity. In this, its emancipated form, historical dissonance became as effective a source of creative energy as it had been in the days of old, when the children of Israel chose to abandon Egypt's fleshpots for that "biblical road" which, though obviously fraught with dangers, also promised beyond sheer physical escape from the perennial pharaohs of this world a future truly consonant with the spiritual aspirations of those who, "having left behind everything material," wish only to be permitted to dream their ancient "dream of God."^[24]