The Ripening Dark God of Modernity: Religion and Creativity in Rainer Maria Rilke’s and Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Writings

Abstract

This chapter discusses Rainer Maria Rilke’s and Lou Andreas-Salomé’s sustained interest in the connection between religious experience and individual subjectivity. It explores the parallels between Andreas-Salomé’s essays on the philosophy and psychology of religion and Rilke’s poetic works. Focusing on Visions of Christ, The Book of Hours, and The Life of Mary, it demonstrates that Rilke, like Andreas-Salomé and modernist theologians, saw ‘inner life’ as the pivot of religion. At the same time, while modernist theologians postulated a reform of Western Christianity, Rilke and Andreas-Salomé considered it to have lost the vitality that could still be found in Russian Orthodoxy. Drawing on the portrayal of Moscow as the Third Rome and Russia as a mediator between the West and the East, which was theorised by the philosophers Vladimir Solovyov and Nicolas Berdyaev, Rilke and Andreas-Salomé portrayed Russian Orthodoxy through an orientalised and feminised form of mysticism to be juxtaposed with the masculine rationality represented by Western Christianity. Orthodox rituals, in particular icon veneration, provided them with a way to connect religious and aesthetic experience and conceptualise the relationship between individual experience and inherited tradition.