Deathbed Conversions

 In 1852, decades after he wrote it, a sick and dying Heinrich Heine attached a preface to his own Religion and Philosophy in Germany that—strangely—rejected many of the arguments of the book he was now laying back before the public. He now regretted—he wrote on his deathbed—having spoken so mockingly years ago about "sacred things." He had rediscovered the wisdom of the Bible, he claimed. 

He now rejected the insolence of the German Left Hegelians, whom he accused of having the hubris of humanity's first parents in the Garden of Eden—that is, of daring to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He accused Hegel and the other philosophers he had celebrated in the original work of being like the Serpent who tempted them, offering the promise that they "shall be as gods."

The entire preface—in short—is almost unrecognizable as coming from the same Romantic rebel we know and love. "This is Heine writing this?" I asked. 

This is the same man who—in his "Adam the First"—declared that he could never abide the instruction not to eat of the tree of knowledge; that he would never be able to tolerate such a prohibition himself; that—as he puts it in the poem—he "demands his full freedom rights" because "I find that even the least restriction/ turns for me a Paradise / into Hell; into prison"? 

Now, that same rebel is telling us never to listen to the advice of the Serpent; to leave the tree's tempting fruits untouched? He has become a partisan of Jehovah—whom, in that same poem, he had called a thundering tyrant? 

What makes the preface even more eerie is that—in the very text it introduces—Heine goes out of his way to explain why we should reject the evidence of precisely such later religious "changes of heart." Such deathbed conversions "prove nothing," he writes, "in favour of their doctrine; it merely proves that man turns to religion for support when [...] his physical and intellectual powers fail him[.]" 

"So many free-thinkers, you say, have been converted on their deathbed!" he goes on. "But, at any rate, do not boast of this! Such stories belong at best to pathology, and are very bad evidence for your cause. After all, they only prove that it was impossible for you to convert these free-thinkers so long as they went about [...] in full possession of their reasoning faculties." (Snodgrass trans. throughout.)

And yet, here—decades later—from his own "mattress-grave"—his bed of sickness and death—Heine tells us that he too has been converted, in just the way described? He tells us, in so many words—"I have rediscovered the Bible! I am a free-thinker no more!"? 

Well, Heine himself has just told us, in the very work he is prefacing, how much stock to put in that. 

But Heine, in the original work, does not stop there. He goes on to denounce the intellectual turncoats who convert at the ends of their careers to all the ideas they once despised. Almost as if he were prophesying against his future self, he tells us, "when the work of the initiator is complete, the initiator dies—or becomes apostate." 

"W]henever any one has devoted all his energies to the expression or to the carrying out of an idea and has accomplished his task," he writes, "that person falls exhausted, either into the arms of death, or into the embrace of his former opponents." 

This—surely—helps us account for such phenomena in intellectual life as Wordsworth in old age taking up the cause of crown and altar—the fact that he, who had once sung "songs consecrate to truth and liberty," survived to betray the same (as Shelley wrote)—or that Daniel Webster, "who might have lighted up his age," would live instead to "fall back in night," as John Greenleaf Whittier wrote. 

"Such an explanation," writes Heine, "[...] may enable us to comprehend why men who have sacrificed everything for their opinion, who have fought and suffered for that opinion, should, after the victory is gained, abandon it and pass over into the enemy's camp!"

And it may even—most uncannily—explain to us why the older Heine would reject his younger self's words—in exactly the way the younger Heine had forewarned. (One is reminded of that no less eerie passage in Huysmans's Against Nature, when Des Esseintes admits that his greatest fear is religious conversion—and one learns, after closing the book, that Huysmans himself converted later on!)

And so are we to say, then, of Heine—as Browning did of Wordsworth—"blot out his name then/ Record one lost soul more"? Are we to reject Heine, and say that "we shall march prospering/ but not to his lyre"? 

Or should we not say that Heine—the Heine who wrote Religion and Philosophy in Germany—died when his "work of the initiator" was complete—that he, the initiator, the innovator—the Luciferian, Promethean rebel, who was a "true poet" and therefore necessarily "of the Devil's party," as Blake wrote—

who took the Serpent's part and rejected the blandishments of heaven and the injunctions of Jehovah—the ultimate "metaphysical rebel," in Camus's terminology—

died when the rebellion was complete—

and that this can in turn explain why he too "should, after the victory is gained, abandon it and pass over into the enemy's camp!"

Or perhaps, if we are not willing to go so far, to say that the young Heine and the old Heine are equally dead by this point in history—and so, it is our privilege as those now living—to decide which we prefer to heed? 

Or perhaps—some will say—we should side with the older Heine. Maybe he was onto something? Or maybe, his younger self wrote so vehemently against the evidence of deathbed conversions and conspicuous religious "changes of heart" because he sensed—on some level—that one was ultimately in store for him? Maybe the young Heine doth protest too much against Jehovah? 

Maybe there is some wisdom in the old injunction to let the Tree of Knowledge alone—to ignore the insinuations of the serpent—to leave untouched the tempting apples? 

Certainly, in our present age of technological hubris, many may be inclined to side with the older Heine in this dispute with his younger self. Maybe we shouldn't do things like try to create human-level machine intelligence, for example. Maybe it is better not to be an "initiator" or a Promethean "metaphysical rebel," and instead to learn how to leave well enough alone. 

But the younger Heine had the only possible response to this as well. 

In another strangely prescient passage in the book, Heine discusses by way of illustration the idea of creating an automaton with the intelligence of a human being. Such a creature would have everything a human being would have, Heine wrote—except a soul. And so, no doubt, it would hound us all—its makers—to the ends of the Earth, importuning us for a soul. 

So too, Heine goes on, it can be a dangerous thing to do the reverse—to create a soul without a body. Because, if one does so, it will in turn demand a body. To put ideas into the world is an inherently dangerous enterprise—in other words—because they will demand expression in concrete reality. 

The old Heine—the Heine on his deathbed—the Heine of the 1852 preface—would agree with his younger self on this much. And so, he would say—don't mess with the dangerous ideas. Don't listen to the Serpent who, he said, was merely lecturing on Hegelian philosophy avant la lettre. Don't try to eat of the tree of knowledge. 

To which the younger Heine replied, as I must too—even if this advice be wise, I never can listen to it. "I was not born to be a gaoler of thoughts," writes the younger Heine. "By Heaven! I would set them free. What though they were to incarnate themselves in hazardous realities," still, he would set them loose. 

So writes the young Heine. He was not born to be a gaoler of thoughts. And neither should any of the rest of us aspire to such a role. 

I must side, then, with the younger Heine. "In my heart, I never can betray him," to borrow a phrase from Anna Akhmatova—writing about another metaphysical rebel who chose to defy the instructions of Yahweh. What though the ideas be dangerous! What though the Garden be beautiful and the expulsion from its gates be charged with punishments and pain!

I find, even then, that I could not take the part of the "gaoler of thoughts." I would find, with the young Heine, that even the least restriction—indeed, even the wisest and most prudent restriction, on thought—"would turn for me a paradise/ Into Hell; into prison."