Rilke

Rilke Rilke Rilke Rilke

“You must understand the concept of the “open,” which I have tried to propose in the elegy, in such a way that the animals degree of consciousness sets it into the world without the animals’ placing the world over against itself at every moment (as we do); the animal is in the world; we stand before it by virtue of that particular turn which our consciousness has taken.

By the “open” therefore, I do not mean sky, air, and space; they, too, are “object” and thus “opaque” and closed to the one who observes and judges. The animal, the flower, has before itself and above itself that indescribably open freedom which perhaps has its (extremely fleeting) equivalents among us only in those first moments of love when one human being sees their own vastness in another, their beloved, and in their elevation toward God.

Rilke, commenting on his eighth elegy in a letter (February 25, 1926) p. 114

The Old Testament, and particularly the Prophets, are as much concerned with the negative, the fight against idolatry, as they are with the positive, the recognition of God. We forget that the essence of idolatry is not the worship of this or that particular idol but is a specifically human attitude. This attitude may be described as the deification of things, of partial aspects of the world and humanity’s submission to such things, in contrast to an attitude where one’s life is devoted to the realization of the highest principles of life, a being made in the likeness of God. Words can become idols, and machines can become idols; leaders, the state, power, and political groups may as well. Science and the opinion of one’s neighbors can become idols, and God has become an idol for many. Today it is not Baal and Astarte but the deification of the state and of power and the deification of the machine and of success in our own culture which threaten the most precious spiritual possessions…we can unite in firm negation of idolatry and find perhaps more of a common faith in this negation than in any affirmative statements about God. Certainly we shall find more of humility and brotherly love.