TEMPTATIONS OF DR. HOFFMANN
409
"I'll have to talk to you about that sometime," he said. We had
now reached the door of my apartment and after a few strained at–
tempts at civility we said good-by.
I felt ashamed immediately because it was clearly not my duty to
dissuade this boy and, furthermore, it was arrogant of me to take for .
granted that he and Dr. Hoffmann and the rest really didn't have
faith. I again thought of Dr. Hoffmann with his liberal magazines,
his devotion to radical causes, and I couldn't help but conclude that
no matter what the man believed his source of action was the as–
sumption that we are good or bad according to the luck of our worldly
situation. I remembered his pleasant, heavy face, his generous soci–
ability, and the singular brilliance with which he· was credited. In
thinking of him I realized that I had already begun to seek an explana–
tion for
his
religiosity, that I was treating it as an eccentric character
trait like, for instance, hypochondria. Though I had knl"Jwn him only
a few hours, I couldn't quite imagine him on
his
knees.
It took about a month for my friendship with the Hoffmanns to
become established. When I ran into them in the hall we arranged
meetings and after a while I felt completely at ease in their home-so
much so that I was closer to them than to anyone I knew in New
York that year. It wasn't altogether strange that our friendship de–
veloped so rapidly. Though they were involved in the ordinary social
obligations attendant upon a professorship and Dr. Hoffmann was
quite busy with his writings, his lectures, and his committees, they
still found time for me and kept asking me back. I discovered several
reasons for this and one was that Dr. Hoffmann, like many contem–
porary religious people, was not really happy unless he was in the
company of nonbelievers. Most of his colleagues and nearly all of his
students bored him. The students tended to look upon their work as
vocational training and Dr. Hoffmann often made little jokes about
the seminary as a place for acting lessons, since many of the boys
seemed more anxious to perfect their "delivery" than to pursue re–
ligious and philosophical studies. Also, I suspected he missed participa–
tion in political movements that had urgency and he used to tell me
about fist fights between the Nazi and anti-Nazi students in Germany
with such nostalgia that I wa<> rather astonished. He had been in
America since 1936 and was quite a success here, but one could not
fail to sense that his personality was far from fulfilled by his life. The
areas of emptiness he revealed struck me so deeply that I became
absorbed in his private life and often forgot the perplexing matter
