The Dead Christ Proclaims That There Is No God
In 1797, Jean Paul sensed, like rot underneath the garden, the impending spiritual destitution of modernity. The chapter “The Dead Christ Proclaims That There Is No God” from Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs offers the fading echoes of the mourning song never played. A vast distance spans between the time of Jean Paul and the period of pure childhood that he describes in his opening paragraph. In the act of looking back, he creates for himself the role of poetic historian, elucidating, through the prophetic vessel of the dream, not the actual future, but the invisible counterpart of what already has come pass. The choice to encounter the no longer resurrected “Dead Christ” is a symbolic declaration that the future holds no Messiah. One can only stand at the edge amongst the other dead and bear witness as one heavenly substrata supersedes the other; spiritual “fabric” is dissected into its scientific, dogmatic, “atomic” counterparts. Thus, looking backwards to Ragnarok denotes the writer’s necessary retreat from a civilization inevitably nearing its end and his movement into a realm of his own visionary hopes and machinations. The ending reveals this self-deception all too well in its romantic imagery of a softly setting sun, a ripe autumn land, and a soft and enigmatic music. Jean Paul could then only perceive the fact of death itself and not the violent series of wars and revolutions that would mark the entrance into the epoch of modernity. Yet it is hard not to love this elegiac piece of literature because of the sweeping lyricism and chilling clairvoyance of its prose. Miraculously, Jean Paul reproduces the faint waverings of a future traveling backwards through time, and it is a trivial criticism that he did not do so with the brutality required by the actual historical picture.
—Brandon Bien
When we are told in childhood that, at midnight, when sleep draws near to our souls and darkens our dreams, the dead arise from their sleep and in churches act out the masses of the living, we shudder then at death, on account of the dead; and in the loneliness of night we turn our eyes in terror from the tall windows of the silent church, fearful to examine whether their glitter comes from the moonlight, or from something else.
Childhood and its terrors, no less than its raptures, once again take on wings and brightness in our dreams, becoming radiant as glow-worms in the dark night of our soul. Snuff not these little flickering sparks! Allow us our dark and painful dreams; for they serve to make life’s bright lights brighter still. And what shall you give us in exchange for these dreams, which bear us up and away from beneath the roaring waterfall and back to the mountain-heights of childhood, where the stream of life is coursing smoothly and silently along, reflecting heaven in its surface, while flowing ever on towards chasms?
Henri Matisse, Sketch for Le Bonheur de vivre, 1905-6. Oil on cardboard. Barnes Foundation.
Once, on a summer evening, I lay upon a mountain in the sunlight, and fell asleep; and I dreamt that I awoke in a churchyard, having been awakened by the grinding of gears in the clocktower running down as it was striking eleven. I looked for the sun in the void night sky, for I supposed it eclipsed by the moon. And all the graves were open, and the iron doors of the charnel-house were opened and shut by invisible hands. Shadows cast by none were flitting about on the walls, while other shadows went upright in the open air. In the open coffins, there were none now asleep but the children. A grey, sultry fog hung in weighty folds in the sky, and a gigantic shadow was drawing it in like a net, gathering it ever nearer, closer, and hotter. High above, I heard the fall of distant avalanches; and beneath my feet, the first tremors of an immeasurable earthquake. The church was heaved and shaken to and fro by two terrific discords at battle within, beating in a stormy effort to attain harmonious resolution. Sometimes a grey glimmer flared on the windows, and molten by the glimmer, iron and lead ran down. The net of fog and the reeling earth drove me into the temple, at the door of which I saw two gleaming basilisks brooding in their poison-nests. I passed through strange and unknown shadows, marked by years and by centuries. These shadows stood all grouped around the altar; and in all of them, the breast throbbed and trembled in the place of the heart. One corpse alone, which had just been buried in the church, lay still on a pillow, and its breast heaved not, while a happy dream showed upon the smiling face; but at the entrance of one of the living he awoke, and smiled no more. He opened his heavy eyelids with a painful effort, but within there was no eye; and in the sleeping bosom, instead of a heart, was a wound. He lifted up his hands, and folded them in prayer; but his arms lengthened out and detached themselves from his body, and the folded hands fell down and apart. Aloft, on the church-dome, stood the dial-plate of Eternity; but figures there were none, and it was its own gnomon; only a black finger pointed to it, and the dead sought to read what time it showed.
William Blake, illustration of the first stanza of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard,” 1778. Watercolor. Wikimedia.
At this point, a lofty, noble form with an expression of eternal sorrow sank down from above and onto the altar, and all the dead exclaimed — “Christ! is there no God?” And he answered, “There is none!” The whole shadow of each dead one, not only the breast, now trembled, and one after another was torn by the trembling.
And Christ continued, saying, “I have traversed the worlds. I have ascended into suns, and flown with the milky ways through the great wastes of the sky; there is no God. And I descended to where the very shadow cast by Being dies out and ends, and I gazed out into the gulf beyond, and I cried out, “Father, where art Thou?” But there was no answer, save for the eternal storm that rages ever on, controlled by none; and towards the west, above the chasm, a gleaming rainbow hung, but there was no sun to give it birth, and so it sank and fell by drops into the gulf. And when I looked up to the boundless universe for the Divine eye, behold, it glared at me from out a socket, empty and bottomless. Over the face of chaos brooded Eternity, chewing and chewing on it forever. So shriek on, discords, shatter the shadows with your shrieking din, for He Is Not!”
Now the shadows grew pale and melted away, like the fog of a warm breath dissipating in air, and all was void. Then there arose and came into the temple — a terrible sight for the heart — the dead children, who had awakened in the churchyard, and they cast themselves before the noble form on the altar, and said, “Jesus, have we no Father?” He made answer, with streaming tears, “We are all orphans, you and I; we are all Fatherless.”
Thereupon the discords screeched more harshly; the shivering walls of the temple fell asunder, and the temple and the children sank down, and the earth and the sun followed, and the whole immeasurable universe fell rushing past us; while high upon an immeasurable summit Jesus stood dappled with a thousand suns and gazed down upon the sinking universe as if into a mine dug in the face of eternal, black night; the suns being miners’ lamps, the milky way, veins of silvery ore.
Frank Stella, [title not known], 1967. Lithograph on paper. Tate.
And when Christ beheld this grinding mass of worlds, the torch-dances of the heavenly ignes fatui, and the coral banks of throbbing hearts; and when he beheld how one sphere after another poured out its gleaming souls into the sea of death, as a drop of water strews gleaming lights upon the waves — then He, sublime, the highest of finite beings, lifted His gaze towards the nothingness and boundless void, saying, “O dead dumb nothingness! eternal, cold Necessity! O mad Chance! — when will you rend this fabric into atoms, and me as well? O Chance, you know not when you shall march with hurricanes in the swirling snowstorm of stars, extinguishing sun after sun, nor when the sparkling dew of the constellations will cease to glisten at your passing. Do ye know how every soul in this wide charnel of a universe is utterly alone? I am alone — none is with me. O Father! O Father! where is thine infinite bosom, that I may be at rest? Alas! if every being is its own father and creator, why cannot it also be its own destroying angel? ...Is this a man still near me? Wretched being! Your tiny life is the sigh of Nature, or the echo of that sigh. Your wavering forms are but reflections cast by a concave mirror trained on the dust-clouds enshrouding your world, made of the ashes of the dead. Peer down into the abyss over which these clouds of ash are floating past. A mist of worlds rises up from the sea of death; the future is a gathering cloud, the present a falling vapour. Do you see and know your earth?”
Here Christ looked down, and his eyes filled with tears, and he continued, “Alas! I too was once as you are — I was happy then, for I still had my infinite Father, and I could look up from the hills with joy to boundless heaven, I could cry even in the bitterness of death: ‘Father, take thy Son from out this bleeding, earthly shell, and lift Him to thy heart.’ Ah, ye too happy dwellers of earth, you still believe in Him. Your sun is perhaps setting at this hour, amid flowers and brilliance, and with tears you fall to your knees, and, lifting up your hands in rapturous joy, each of you cries aloud to the open heavens, ‘Oh Father, infinite and eternal, hear! Thou knowest me in all my littleness, even as Thou knowest all things, and Thou seest my wounds and sorrows, and Thou wilt receive me after death and soothe and heal them all.’ Alas, unhappy souls! For after death, these wounds will not be healed. But when the sad and weary lays down his worn and wounded frame on the earth to sleep towards a fairer, brighter morn that is all truth, goodness and joy — behold! he awakens in the midst of a howling chaos, in a night that is endless and everlasting; and no morning dawns, there is no healing hand, no everlasting Father. Oh, mortal, who standeth near, if still you live and breathe, worship and pray to Him, or else you shall lose Him for evermore.”
William Blake, “The Gambols of Ghosts According with their Affections Previous to the Final Judgment,” illustration for Robert Blair's poem The Grave, 1805. Watercolor. Wikimedia.
And as I fell down and gazed into the gleaming fabric of worlds, I beheld the coils of the giant serpent of eternity all wrapped round them; her mighty coils began to writhe, and then again tightened and contracted, girdling the universe twice as tight as before; she wound about all nature in thousandfolds, and crushed the many worlds together, and, grinding them, she squeezed the infinite temple into a tiny chapel churchyard — and everything turned narrow, dark, and terrible, and a bell-hammer was swinging, about to toll the ultimate hour of Time, and shatter the fabric of the universe into countless atoms — when my sleep came to an end, and I awoke.
And my soul wept for joy that it could still worship God — my gladness, and my weeping, and my faith — these were my prayer! And as I rose, the sun was shining low in the west, behind the ripe purple ears of corn, and casting in peace the reflection of its evening blushes over the sky where the little moon was rising, clear and cloudless in the east. And between heaven and earth, a gladsome, short-lived world was spreading its tiny wings, and, like myself, living in the eternal Father’s sight. And from nature, from every direction, there rose a music of peace and joy, a rich, soft and gentle harmony, like sweet vesper bells tolling, distantly.
J. M. W. Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, 1843. Oil on canvas. Wikimedia.
“The Dead Christ Proclaims That There Is No God” is a new version of “Rede des toten Christus vom Weltgebäude herab, dass kein Gott sei,” a chapter in Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs (1797), or Flower-, Fruit-, and Thorn-Pieces. The present version is a revised palimpsest of Edward Henry Noel’s and Alexander Ewing’s translations of the chapter in Jean Paul’s novel (respectively, London: Sampson Low, 1845; London: George Bell, 1895).
This version appears originally in Three Dreams by Jean Paul, Thomas De Quincey, and Laurence Sterne, available from Sublunary Editions as the first title in its Empyrean Series.
This arrangement of the text is © Jacob Siefring, 2021.
Brandon Bien — My goal in life is to buy a farm on the Northern California Coast overlooking the breakers crashing into the cliffs of the Pacific Ocean, write books, read my children War and Peace under the guise of a bed time story, and build the first ever laboratory for quantum linguistics.
