SOURCE: Lou Andreas-Salomé, Gordon Fraser, 1984, pp. 74-86.

(Livingstone is an English educator and critic. In the following excerpt she assesses Andreas-Salomé's theories on the historical origins and development of religion.]

When Nietzsche encouraged Lou von Salomé to philosophise about religion, he was recognising an inclination she showed long before she met him. Faith and loss of faith had been her main childhood experience, history of religion had been her main study with both [Hendrik] Gillot and [Alois] Biedermann. She went on thinking about religion all her life. Her theories about art, love, femaleness and Russia are all closely related to her religious views. More specifically, though, during the years 1891-8, and still under Nietzsche's influence, she devoted eleven long essays to this subject.

Some of the essays are more scholarly, some more personal. All suffer from looseness of expression and structure; one would like to rewrite them concisely, put in paragraphing, and request some references and facts. She often talks of history, of developments and changes, without mentioning time or place, and sums up literatures without naming a book; she seems carried away by ideas too pressing to allow time for detail or proof. None the less, all are worth reading: in addition to their interest as part of a contemporary debate, there is in these writings a forthrightness and vitality which greatly commend them. Forthrightness is not a quality of Nietzsche's; if what Lou Andreas-Salomé took from Nietzsche was the confident glorification of the individual mind, the habit of thinking evolutionarily, and the assumption of a responsibility for 'culture', what eluded her in him was the whole of his irony and paradox. Nietzsche could praise intelligence while showing the ambiguity of all its achievements, but Lou was uncomplexly enthusiastic, and the uncritical confidence of her style gives, to put it mildly, a tolerant restfulness to ideas that in Nietzsche are utterly demanding.

Lou Andreas-Salomé's study of religion amounts to a study of religious feeling. The 'death of God' is central, for her argument usually starts from the conviction (still novel in her time) that 'God' has a history: he was born, he lived and he died. The big divergence from Nietzsche is that, in her theory, God also has an after-life. The object of faith has indeed disappeared (ceased to be believed in), but while it was there it caused the growth of feelings which would otherwise never have come into being, and these are the most valuable feelings we are capable of. Her concern is to describe and promote these feelings.

Like Nietzsche, she is dismayed at the banality with which some Bible critics and 'free-thinking' writers approach matters so serious as the shattering of a great tradition, and scornful of their inability to feel what they were doing. She would have shared the attitude of George Eliot, who had translated both Strauss and Feuerbach into English and been in the forefront of debates in England about Darwin, yet still said that to her 'the Development Theory and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes', and also that she cared 'only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now'. Lou, though, spoke less of a 'lasting meaning' than of an everchanging meaning, itself the product of change.

Lou's central ideas are set out in her first long article, 'Realism in Religion' (1891). The divine has a history, and its history has two stages: in the first the gods were created and were worshipped, though without the inner devotion that appears only in the second. First of all, man made God. Then the man-made God made plain man into godmade man—that is, into man with a need for God, a need not merely to explain the mysteries of nature but to satisfy the idealism that had developed in him through his evolving relationship with the God he had made.

This is not a concern with ethics; it is not a matter of people having changed through behaviour resulting from their faith, nor of evolution of feelings towards other people; it is solely a concern with the feelings that are addressed to the Deity and that survive its demise. This idea is elaborated repeatedly in Lou's essays on religion, as if she is forever engaging with something she can never finally express. Man creates gods. Then the gods influence man. Whereby it is most characteristic that she does not say 'the idea of the gods', or 'the idea of God', influences man.

The formulation is perhaps most succinct in her essay 'Jesus the Jew' a few years later:

If one starts from the human being instead of—as one used to—from the God, then one realises almost involuntarily that the actual religious phenomenon first comes to be present in the back-effect of a godhead—no matter how it arose—upon the person who believes in that godhead.

She was to become known as the propounder of the theory of the 'back-effect' (Riickwirkung). As late as 1955, Karl Kerenyi quotes this sentence (on which he bases a large part of his inquiry into the history of religion) and comments: 'Here that precise borderpoint is identified at which a science of religion becomes possible; at which the religious already exists … The science of religion begins with the concern with what Lou Salomé calls the "backeffect".'

This first article started with the need for a new approach to religion. No naive belief, nor positivist denial, nor the current matter-of-fact efforts to rescue something of Christianity for 'modern man': instead an approach which would start from the fact of religious experience—a 'psychology of religion', an exploration of the obscure areas of religious mood and impulse which are not (pace Paul Rée) explained away by their origination in error.

Lou discusses here a recent book about religious experience and dwells on two affective moments in the unnamed author's account of this: humility and pride. She has a lot to say about pride in this context. Christian writers usually stress humility—Rudolf Otto, for instance, speaks of 'creature-consciousness', the sense of one's own abasement, of being overpowered by something other than one-self, the feeling 'I am nought', and calls the feeling of identification of the personal self with the transcendent reality not 'pride' but 'bliss'. Lou Andreas-Salomé, by contrast, dwells on the exhilaration of the very swing from 'I am nought' to 'I am all'. Seeing it another way, from 'I am all' to 'I have all'; or again, in another image, of the friction between these opposite attitudes:

Neither the sincerest humility and self-prostration before an ideal conceived as divine, nor the most full and satisfying enjoyment of all self-assertive powers for themselves alone, is able to produce the religious affect. Only the two together in enigmatic self-contradiction yield that friction from which suddenly, hot and vivid, the flame leaps out.

She often uses pairs of words, like 'Demut 'and 'Hochmut' ('humility' and 'pride') and claims there is in all of us this inebriant seesawing between 'the awareness of weakness and helplessness in the face of all reality and the pride of being, as a human, in a certain sense superior to it all'. These combined, she says, make up our highest feeling, which is also described as 'the knowledge of our limit, and at that limit the exaltation that grows beyond it'.

This is not equally available to everyone. Fascinated with the idea that evolution means ever greater individuation, she sees the desire for God as an increasingly individual desire, leading to ever more individual God-creating. I make a God for me. So, as well as collective God-making, followed historically by the back-effect of the shared God upon people in general, there is also an individual Godmaking, with consequent lasting effect upon 'Me'. Indeed, the 'greater' the individual personality, the greater its capacity to pray to what is conceived as the holiest. Echoing her Tautenburg diary notes, she states:

The religious affect is thus also the characteristic sign of all great egoists—taking greatness here in the sense of a force, not as a mere selfish direction of the being.

This is what religion always is, she says, for it aims at 'egoism' and the individual, its chief and reckless question being 'What must I do to be blessed?' (In German, as in Russian, 'blessed' and 'blissful' are the same word.)

Lou sounds like Nietzsche when she upbraids her author for becoming too theoretical and adapting his own experience to the existing theology. One would like to take each thing he says he values and ask 'How do you stand in relation to this: was it the ladder for you to climb up by toward yourself… ?' and she quotes Zarathustra: 'Let yourself be in the deed, as the mother is in the child: let this be your word about virtue!' The conclusion of the essay is Nietzschean, too—a vehement page or so on most people's inability to care about what is going on. Religion is increasingly enfeebled, God is vanishing behind abstractions, and yet

Nothing is more amazing than the ease, even the pleasure, with which nearly every cultivated person of today is capable of swallowing down the vastest helping of doubts—so long as they're 'modern' ones—without getting the slightest spiritual discomfort from it; they are like conjurors who swallow swords.

And she adds:

May it tear us to bits! If only we were less conjurors and more real people who feel in their inner-most life the things that they think and do.

One has to keep in mind that what she laments is the disappearance not of faith, but of feeling. The courage to feel the loss of God is more creative than any clinging to His image, and only from courage will great personalities be born. By implication, the purpose of our existence is the production of great personalities; this is a part of Nietzsche's thought that she has made her own.

Between 'Realism in Religion' and the important 'Jesus the Jew' of 1896, Lou published five other articles on religion. Two were in 1892, the polemic 'Harnack and the Apostolic Creed' and the self-indulgent 'God-creation'. The latter is an autobiographical piece, less well argued than most. It could have been entitled 'self-creation', for it seems that the projecting of the self into an invisible being, wholly believed in as existing 'out there in the real', is what the 'religious' means; and the article is written in a spirit of somewhat complacent gratitude for having had, in infancy, the naive and sober certainty of the existence of—such a—God. It is hard to grasp that she is not saying that God is only a projection of the self. But the essay is anything but a coolly reductive exercise. When she says 'This involuntary blending and exchanging of the most intimate … with the most lofty—this conception of the intimate as the lofty, already contains the characteristic basic element of the religious', she is conceiving of that 'loftiest' as somehow really existent. If it slides out of the categories of subjective and objective, without clarity as to whether a third category is intended, or a transcending of these two, then this appears to be a non-definition essential to the experience.

'Harnack and the Apostolic Creed' is much more interesting and Nietzsche's influence is palpable in it. It praises the courageous, godless life and distinguishes between the few who can live such a life and the many who cannot. UnNietzschean, though, is the way Lou Andreas-Salomé does not scorn the 'many'; in fact the article is written in their defence, and for their protection. It is her response to a tract [Das Apostolische Glaubensbekemntnis, 1892] by the Protestant theologian, Adolf Harnack, just published in its fifteenth edition, widely on sale and a talking-point in many circles. As an inquiry into the origin and varied history of the apostolic creed, it angered the orthodox and delighted the free-thinkers. Andreas-Salomé, while approving of its historical approach, curiously enough argues for orthodoxy, and asserts that not only are Harnack's revelations unlikely to shake the rigours of orthodoxy, but they ought not to shake them.

Her argument is ingenious. Precisely because religious forms sprang up in consequence of human wishes and needs—because, that is, they are not about something objectively there (here she appears to say straight out that there is no God), they are vulnerable and might disappear; but religion is good for us, we evolve and deepen through it. Rigid, even petrified dogma, and all the firm traditional forms, far from being a deathly element, have been—and for some still are—essential to the preserving of religious life. Even Protestantism needs some orthodoxy. Those who talk of individual assent, moral uplift and spiritual transport, rather than of doctrine and formality, are confused about the way religion arises: need creates God, then God creates in His believers specific religious feelings, but those feelings are not felt by all to the same extent and at the same time. For instance, not by certain simple people, or by people in despair and suffering. What these people may need in addition to our efforts to do what we can to improve the conditions of their lives (and this is one of the few places where she says anything of this order) is the consolation and support of firm doctrine. So while the stronger and luckier no longer need it, it must be kept for the weaker and less fortunate. This may sound a little like the view of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, the benevolent dictator who, himself an atheist, spends his life promoting belief in God for the multitude who cannot do without it, only where he is burdened with anguish and the strain of keeping it all going, Lou's more developed and prosperous non-believer, who is to protect the belief for the others, is thought of as purely happy, the only true enjoyer of religion's natural and wonderful fruits. (Also, of course, she does not envisage either tyranny or Utopia.)

These true enjoyers should leave the church, she says, while (presumably) continuing to present church-protective arguments. Free-thinking has no business to be going on in the church. It damages the interests of the simple and the poor, and also dissuades stronger minds from leaving. Full of the enthusiasm they have gained from religion, these people should leave all beaten tracks and take their light into pathlessness (V as Weglose')—all the dark places the church knows nothing of. Again we hear Nietzsche: the highest daring is that which explores places never yet made habitable by any kind of meaning. Lou's paradoxical and optimistic variant of this is that the most valuable thing religion gives us is the courage to explore the dark places without its help. Truth, she says, is a more jealous God than the Judaeo-Christian one, and you have to be ready to be destroyed by it.

The early 'history of God' is developed in two subsequent studies: 'From the Beast to the God' (1893) outlines, among the early Semites, an evolution from tribal gods through animal totems to 'God' as 'king of the land'. 'The Problems of Islam', a year later, is an enthusiastic piece of scholarship (perhaps inspired by Andreas) arguing that the ancient Arabs, the very type of the original uncultivated human being, not yet religious, but lordly, proud and full of splendid virtues, were weakened by the humbling and levelling effects of the later Islamic culture; clearly with Nietzsche in mind, she writes of 'an original master morality and its destruction through the slave morality of religious culture.' Then, in 'On the Origin of Christianity' (1895), Lou is concerned with how the few plain facts of Jesus's life were transformed into legend and glory. But her main study of Jesus is the essay of 1896, which was to impress and influence Rilke.

'Jesus the Jew' re-states Lou Andreas-Salomé's main ideas and develops them to a new conclusion. The conclusion—which we are largely left to draw—is that Jesus belongs among the great unbelievers, the geniuses of unbelief.

Rehearsing her two stages in the life of God, she points out that while the first one is amazing enough, even more amazing is the second, when the idea of God may so drench someone's inner life that he grows into something greater than he could otherwise ever have been. By stressing Jesus's Jewishness—he was not the overcomer of Judaism but its sharpest expression—she is able to make him a forerunner of her great religious unbelievers. For, as a Jew, he believed God would manifest himself upon earth at the right time and believed this quite simply and practically—'The Jew did not brood over his God, he suffered and lived and felt', and trusted not in breath but in blood, that is not in a hereafter but in the keeping of divine promises on earth. Like some other martyrs, then, Jesus expected God's manifestation at the last moment: and at the last moment he found that it was not going to happen. He thus faced something far more terrible than did later Christian martyrs, for they were to die expecting Heaven, while he died expecting nothing. In this way she interprets the cry 'My God, why have you forsaken me?' as his really taking upon himself in that moment, just as we say he did, 'the suffering of all mankind'. For he suffered the suffering that lies in wait for us all when, having trusted in a personal God, we find out that there is none.

Although she does not explicitly connect Jesus with the ideal of the free-thinking genius, the conjunction of very great love with complete and sharply felt unbelief, and the fortitude in enduring the two together, suggest the connection. Jesus was essentially and solely the lonely genius, capable of the highest human feeling and so deep in it that nothing else mattered to him; he was not the founder of a new religion, although a new religion was, paradoxically, born of the events connected with him.

Religion in its whole truth and its whole illusion, embodied in a human being, bled away to death here on the cross, which, since then, strangely enough, has become the symbol of religion.

The Cross (she ends the essay), whatever it may mean in Christianity, should really remind us

that it is always only the individual, the great individual who attains the peaks of religion, its genuine blissfulness and its full tragedy. What he experiences up there, the crowd below does not learn.

After 'Jesus the Jew' Lou published four more long essays on religion. 'Egoism in Religion' (1899) is largely a replay of former themes, but three essays of 1897-8 offer interesting developments of them.

According to 'Religion and Culture' (1898), all cultural activities originated in religion like children from one mother; and each, as it grew up and away, ceased to need parental guidance, so that the lonely mother was thrown back on her own resources: that is, religion became specialised, concerned only with the belief in God and visibly separated off from the rest of life. But the 'children' carried an invisible aspect of religion further and further along with them, and this emerges at peak points in the lives of individuals. For:

Innumerable people have innumerable times applied the name God to something other than God; innumerable souls have let their most ardent pieties and enthusiasms overflow away from faith and into life… God is not God but only a symbol for all that in human life that is too intimate, intense and dear to be called by a human name.

Rather mysteriously, she says that religion's dream of salvation, the dream of God as the life of life, is perhaps only true and 'blessed-making' at the two extremes: deep below in the dark places where man was born as man, believing he derived from God; and high above on the summits of culture where he feels he is at last truly man—and gives birth to God.

Then, in part of 'From the History of God' (1897) and in most of 'On the Religious Affect' (1898), Lou Andreas-Salomé sets out what I will call her theory of sublime moods. Both these essays are written with an excitement that shows she is describing her own experiences. She is deeply convinced of the possibility of joy. Her tone is that of urging people to stop being dry-as-dust, to look upwards and to realise how intensely happy they could be. They should stop both protesting against old articles of faith and rehearsing old habits of belief, and should instead take a fresh look and see the whole phenomenon of religion anew, as someone might look again at his wintry old home in the spring.

'From the History of God' starts with another attack on the accommodations of the modern church to rationalism and science, and quotes Nietzsche's 'madman' [in The Gay Science] who cried out that 'we have killed God' and 'who will wipe this blood from us?'

It is followed by a weird account of the history of religion in five stages, unsupported by evidence. These she says go from intoxicated freedom in interpretation, through the demand for orthodoxy (not ossification but a necessary harness), then a stage of asceticism and self-humbling (which produces for the first time the 'objective godhead', or rather conceals for the first time its actually human origin), to another of mysticism, and finally to one of rationalism, in which the mysteries are put to the test of reason. After this nothing much is left but a dubious brew of allegory. Thus is the contemporary church—feeble and droughted. It is this rationalistic dreariness that is now contrasted with her account of what, in an age after the death of God, the religiously-inclined person could be having. Her own theory of sublime feelings is now presented as a contrast to the pettiness of those who couldn't care less about the death of God. The sublime feeling (a chief part of which is actually 'devotion') comes when external events, no longer speaking in their everyday voice, appear to reveal themselves as symbols, 'as if they were uttering something divine to us'. The man of a particular faith was able to give clear expression to this state; we cannot. None the less, at such moments of self-communion ['Einkehr und Sammlung'] we are totally concerned and participant; everything becomes unified, peaceful, profound. (Although Lou does not derive this mood from childhood or countryside, nor connect it with impulses to perform acts of kindness, there is an obvious similarity to many other accounts of an experienced quasi-religious peace, for example to Wordsworth's 'serene and blessed mood' in which 'with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / we see into the life of things'.) Now this mood, she declares, is not a sentimental reminiscence of faith, but a new growth from the soil from which all religion grows. And non-believers can in fact have intenser religious experience than believers, for the latter may be hindered by the weight of their fixed faith from daring 'to enter into all the hidden blisses where the faithless person frequently feels and experiences something'.

'On the Religious Affect' then proceeds to distinguish two basic states of mind. One kind is shared with people in general, the other is not. Above the stable, indubitable and universally shared everyday moments of our existences there tower, like mountain peaks over a great plain, our lofty moments of beauty and ecstasy, which are not shared, and which we don't feel any need to share, so confident are we of their reality:

Plains flow effortlessly into one another, but that which rises above the flat ground is separated—to the extent that it reaches upward—from neighbours and comrades; certainly the summits may be similar to each other in kind and in height, yet you will only get from the one to the other by a detour over the common ground and by climbing painfully up.

Despite their tremendous separateness, we feel in those moments that we are breathing 'the air of home'; what's more, we feel certain that others have their own such experiences, and without needing even to think about it (whether they do or not) we quite naturally seek to express that experience in words or deeds. Not, she stresses, for the sake of others, although it will turn out to have been expressed for them.

Mountain peaks are Nietzsche's frequent image, and when Lou writes here—

then come the individuals once again to one another and they recognise and greet one another, and there goes a laughter from summit to summit…

she echoes Nietzsche's 'republic of geniuses', in which 'one giant calls to another across the arid intervals of the ages, and, undisturbed by wanton noisy dwarfs creeping about beneath them, the lofty intercourse of spirits continues.'

Unlike Nietzsche, she also conceives of the most extreme individuality as a moving away into the experience of something no longer to be called self 'At these heights of our self we are released from ourselves.'

The essay culminates in prophecy. An epoch is to come in which all fragmentation and isolation will be overcome. A time of harmony and of blossoming when, instead of endlessly collecting pieces of new scientific knowledge like gathering gold coins into an enormous heap, we shall join together and begin to spend our wealth. All will come together 'and close into a whole, in art, science, ethics and life' and

there goes a laughter from summit to summit, as if what had seemed, not long past, to be shapeless mountain-ranges rising up meaninglessly here and there, and just as meaninglessly plunging down to the flat plain, were being quietly shaped and arranged into a gigantic human building, like a temple, with the immeasurable sky above it.

An impracticable vision, yet not a vision of Heaven or the end of time. It is conceived evolutionarily and relatively; for it, too, she says, will pass away, and we must not mind that this will happen. Just as she put it in Struggling for God, she says here:

What does it matter if late-following generations look back upon this as upon collapsed ruins and see in them only what we ourselves see in the highest dreams of past epochs: a mere symbol of our own highest dream?

Is this Lou Andreas-Salomé's equivalent of Nietzsche's 'eternal recurrence of all things'? She endures, and makes a part of her scheme, the thought of the inevitable disappearance of all things. Since she is certain that happiness and perfection are not only definitely coming in the future in all their fullness, but are already intimated, already being enjoyed; since she herself already enjoyed their intimations with a peace and security such as Nietzsche never knew; the thought of Disappearance must be a far more desolating one than that of Recurrence would be. It is impressive to see how she accepts temporality and transience with a wave of the hand, with a light gesture, an almost aesthetic flourish, at the end of this solemn, ecstatic essay.

On the central question Lou is never quite clear. She will build a complex argument leading to it but, reaching it, behaves as if it were not there: instead of the peak of a hill with a view all round, there is a cloud, into which she walks. I mean the question: given that we 'make' God, what can be meant by 'God's existence'? Does God exist or not? Repeatedly she argues that God came into being in the course of history, as the product of human wishing, willing, believing. Does it not follow that He is a figment, a fiction?

We postulate God, learn this was only a postulate, abandon it, but not before we have developed a whole range of valuable feelings in relation to it. That is, we have become religious beings, enriched and enabled. These feelings now need fresh objects, so we set up new ideals, something else to revere, love and work for—hence the best in our culture—and in our finest achievements we recreate God. For those who have not learnt that God was merely our postulate, the church with its dogma and mysteries should continue, but we luckier and cleverer ones already over-flow with the best it was able to give us, and can now bear to know it was a beneficial error. But when she comes to the point of saying God was an error, and there is no God without us, she doesn't say it. Instead it appears, without scrutiny, that there is no difference between emotion about God, and God. It seems that God is, wherever He is needed, and He is needed not only by the weak as a prop, but also by the strong as recipient of their gratitude.

It would be unendurable, indeed quite simply impossible… to be without him in those highest moments in which one does not wish to be consoled and raised up by someone else's help but only to relieve one's heart of a gratitude such as only a God can receive … However, at that point there never is such a lack, for there God is always.

It is true that in 'Religion and Culture' she does say God is not God but 'only a symbol' for everything that is 'too intimate, intense and dear to be called by a human name'; but thereupon the question is begged again: what is too dear, etc.? What are we aware of in those moments? If no human name, then surely no human thing? And what does the end of that essay mean, saying religion is 'true' at the two historical human extremes? True? If only she would say something like: reverence proves there must be something to be reverent to; or even that when we create God through feeling, this makes Him really be there. But though these things are what she seems to mean, she prefers to keep the matter just turbid enough to make the reader feel he is forever floundering.

In many other writings, Lou talked quite unproblematically of 'God' or—often—of 'der Gott' (the God: easier in German because of the normality of the phrase 'der liebe Gott' which English would have to render 'the good Lord' or 'the dear Lord'). She found it easy to say of the Russian peasants not merely that they were very religious but that they were 'filled with God' and to say 'I love this land because God is in it,' despite having spent the preceding eight years showing that God had died out. Sometimes she seemed to mean as pantheistic a concept as that God is 'everything': sunshine and meadows … Sometimes, that God is happiness, or is the renewal of our sense of self, or is the certainty of meaning, or even that necessary trust in the world's meaningfulness which accompanies moral goodness. All this ought to introduce confusion into her theory, since if the religious feelings can themselves be called God, then God does not die, but survives whole. Perhaps this is the explanation of the confusion. Or perhaps there are always, to our imperfect understanding, these two meanings of'God'; depending on-us, and not depending on us. If she meant this, then she was close to experiences related by Tolstoy, as when Levin (in Anna Karenina) suddenly understands what 'God' means when he hears someone described as 'living for God' because he lives unselfishly; or as when, at the end of Confession, tormented by the question of whether God exists, Tolstoy alternately thinks 'he does, he doesn't', till he notices that each 'he does' coincides with a sense of life and joy, each 'he doesn't' with despair and senselessness.

The difference for Lou is that she did not have corresponding moments of despair and loss of meaning—or at least did not utter them. Much of her writing about religion prompts us to place her in the category William James had in mind when he wrote [in The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902]:

In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. 'Cosmic emotion' inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I speak not of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong. We find such persons in every age, passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of the sinister theologies into which they may be born. From the outset their religion is one of union with the divine.

But we should also bear in mind that the philosopher she most admired in her youth was Spinoza, and what she later came to see herself as doing was emulating Spinoza's attempt to think the Absolute, to unite—in thought—God and Nature 'without supernaturalising the natural nor dragging the name of his God down to the level of things'.

Although it is true to say she does not discuss Spinoza in the essays on religion, he must have been a philosophical model no less than—and perhaps only reactivated by—Nietzsche (with his comparable attempt to 'think totally' and his greater contempt for those who did not do so). This must suggest more of an effort towards enthusiasm, a more conscious refusal to 'feel unhappiness' than would fit the healthy-minded worshipper described by William James. In her Journal of 1912, Lou writes of our coming to rediscover what 'more primitive people' always knew, namely that Joy is Perfection and she adds the name Spinoza in brackets. In fact what Spinoza wrote—in the passage she apparently has in mind—is not that joy is perfection, but that joy is 'the affect by which the mind crosses over to a greater perfection'. It is most telling that Lou, forgetting this, set up an equation between happiness and sublimity, while behind it lay, as she also really knew, something else: the long transition to happiness, the effort of aspiration to the sublime, which she had made so earnestly in her youth and which remains tacitly present in all her writings on religion.