Between Gnosticism and Jehovah: The Dilemma in Kafka's Religious Attitude

Abstract

IKAKFA WAS CERTAINLY not religious in a conventional dogmatic sense. One of his few statements about God, for instance, suggests that belief in a personal God may be the cover under which man's faith in something indestructible in himself is concealed-a view which resembles Feuerbach's humanism rather than theistic religion.' Kafka views his lack of religion as symptomatic of his historical situation: have not been led into life like Kierkegaard by the already heavily drooping hand of Christianity and I have not, like the Zionists, still caught the last corer of the Jewish prayer shawl that is flying away. I am end or beginning (H 121). The great religions of the Western world themselves appear from this perspective as historical phenomena, not as absolute truths. Kafka mocks religion where, as in the case of his father's remnants ofJudaism, it has been reduced to social convention and meaningless ritual. He found the obligatory visits to the synagogue of his childhood an occasion for boredom relieved by the comedy of the spectacle (H 197 98). Hugo Bergmann, Kafka's friend from his school days, attests to Kafka's inclination toward atheism and recalls that his own faith was threatened by Kafka's arguments against the existence of God (Bergmann 742)arguments which Kafka himself also remembers in his diary. His strong and growing interest in Judaism, ever since the profound encounter with the Warsaw Yiddish Theater group in Prague in 1911, seems often more ethnically, morally, and existentially motivated rather than religious, a concern with rootedness in a communal way of life rather than with God.2