ROY FINCH
293
When the People-soul tries to live without the discipline of the Law
and only for national power, what are the consequences? In Biblical
times the prophets spoke of pursuing " false gods. " Today there is
no greater "false god" than the nation-state, particularly the
militaristic nation -state .
The " voice of the People " was repeatedly in the Bible
not
the
"voice of God. " In ancient times the Jews were not immune to the
idolatry of national power, the
hubris
of the collective ego. At the op–
posite extreme during the last two millenia they experienced what
they could understand as the Divine Wrath , producing the extraor–
dinary courage of submissiveness and martyrdom. The national
psyche has been strung between these two extremes , rather like the
son of a too-powerful Father , alternating between excessive sub–
missiveness and excessive self-assertion.
Hitlerism may be described as "pure demonism," a "national
soul " claiming complete autonomy and freedom from ethical
restraint , to the extent of taking upon itself even the power to deter–
mine what is human and what is not. In the absence of a
given
humanity, a genuinely religious humanism, nothing stood in the
way of this .
Steiner ' s novel captures the horrors of the Hitler demonism
through its setting in the South American jungles where , in this vi–
sion , human life is swamped by biological forces . Here everything
human is lost in malignant growth, death and decay.
It
is the ex–
tremism of the jungle in contrast to the extremism of the desert,
where all that is merely human is burned up by the purifying sun.
Steiner's jungle is the world of terror and darkness, not darkness as
the comforting feminine night, but Conrad's
Heart oj Darkness
and
Elie Wiesel's
Night.
Lionel Abel (who tells us in one of his essays that his father was
a Reform rabbi, from whose views he separated himself early in life)
keeps his distance from such speculations, as the ancient Confucian
scholars kept their distance from the dizzying Buddhist flights into
Nothingness , or the French
philosophes
from the murky waters of
theosophism . Lionel Abel, mercifully, is a man of reason, rather
than of miracles and authority, and does not set much store by
demons and hell.
Nevertheless Hitler existed; Buchenwald existed; scientific ex–
termination of human beings exists . (A Jewish writer has recently
said that Jewish suffering is different from other suffering, and we
see what he means . But is Black suffering different from other suffer–
ing? Is children ' s suffering? Or the suffering of the blind, the dis-
