[Juenger-list] DIE SCHERE #71: Note 1: What is beyond is good but all attempts to be more specific will remain inadequate

[g.rebing@eplus-online.de (Rebing)]

DIE SCHERE #71: Note 1: What is beyond is good but all attempts to be more
specific will remain inadequate

I read this seemingly rambling and muted text as a call directed at the
author himself: to use restraint when speculating about the nature of what
is beyond time and death.

Earlier EJ had been more emphatic, if not more specific, about those
matters. In 1945, a year he did not expect to survive, death appeared to him
as a step onto the luminous side of being [»hinübertreten auf die andere,
die leuchtende Seite des Seins« STRAHLUNGEN III, 1 Jan. '45] or the gateway
to glory [»Tor der Herrlichkeit« ibid., 23 May, '45]. There is, however, a
strange instance in STRAHLUNGEN where EJ is, for an instant, much more
specific [see note 2].

In #71 he chooses a more restrained way of speaking, using a tone of
understatement [ »pleasant assumption«, »angenehme Vermutung«] and distance
[»conception of the Beyond«, »Jenseitsvorstellung«]. This should not deceive
the reader. The real agenda is again, in fact, as so often in this book, the
ultimate question of what comes after death. The last sentence of this text
says explicitly what has been at its center beginning with its first
sentence. It is the conception of the Beyond.

For EJ, it does not include the unpleasant assumptions of hell or purgatory.
He brushes them off elsewhere, citing Origenes: Omnium rerum finis erit
vitiorum abolitio [At the end of all things all sins will be disregarded.
Das Ende aller Dinge wird aller Schuld Vergessung sein.] [See note on #16].

Agreeable and hopeful ideas about what the existence beyond the wall of time
might hold in store for us are o.k. However, surmising and even attempting
to find out for oneself about occult matters is dangerous. This idea is to
be found in poetry and folklore. EJ takes it for granted and gives no
examples here.

Since the individual quest is dangerous, we are dependent on mediators like
Christ or Mohammed for learning about what is beyond the wall of time.
Emanuel Swedenborg, by the way, who presented himself as such a mediator and
offers indeed the most detailed stories about the life beyond, is perhaps
included here among the »false prophets«; EJ does not seem to have him ever
taken seriously and never mentions him, as far as I can see.

EJ here exalts the role of the true prophets, as he did earlier in this book
[cf #41]. But he is aware that not even the images the true prophets gave us
will satisfy for good. They will change, fade, be replaced by new ones
because they are not more than similes, images, hints. The Beyond cannot be
mirrored by any image or circumscribed by any concept, it will turn out to
be different.

It should be noted here that in spite of this caveat directed at himself, a
few years after publication of DIE SCHERE its author espoused formally one
of those imperfect approximations, namely the Jenseitsvorstellung the
Catholic Church has codified in its doctrine.