SOURCE: “Max Brod: A Study in Unity and Duality,” in Judaism, Vol. 14, No. 1, Winter, 1965, pp. 48-59.

[In the following essay, Weltsch examines paradoxes and contrasts in Brod's fiction.]

Shortly after he completed the following appreciation of his closest friend Max Brod, on the occasion of the latter's 80th birthday, Felix Weltsch died in Jerusalem on November 8, 1964, only a few weeks after having himself reached the age of 80. Of the trio of Kafka, Brod and Weltsch, whose unique friendship is reflected in Kafka's published Diaries and Letters, only Brod is now left.

Because of his modest manner, and also perhaps because of difficulties of language, Felix Weltsch, a remarkable philosophic writer of original ideas, has not been widely known outside of his own countries, pre-Hitler Czechoslovakia and post-Hitler Israel. In both countries he served as a librarian of high standing, at the National University Library in Prague and subsequently in Jerusalem. In the short-lived democratic republic of Czechoslovakia he was one of the acknowledged leaders of Zionist thought, educator of a whole generation through his weekly articles in the Zionist journal Selbstwehr, whose editor he was for twenty years until his emigration, together with Max Brod, on the very day in 1939 when Hitler's hordes occupied Prague. Politics, also in its topical aspect, was to him a steady subject of philosophical evaluation, and in his journalism he undertook to analyze every situation and every problem in a patient, thorough manner, revealing the principle involved and its moral and practical relevance. Felix Weltsch's great philosophical writings, too, are almost always concerned, in a direct or indirect way, with the fundamental problems of political behavior, as one of the cases where man is confronted with the task of reaching a decision—which immediately leads to the involved problems of the search for truth and of the scale of moral values.

After his first book Anschauung und Begriff (Perception and Concept), jointly written with Max Brod as a challenge to the then (1913) prevailing theory of knowledge, all of Felix Weltsch's works were devoted to the elucidation of the position of man within the existential dialectics of determinism and freedom, and its relationship to faith. Actually, Weltsch was a philosopher of religion, steadily occupied with the tension between the idea of man's dependence on God's grace and the meaning of ethics based on the responsibility of man in exerting the freedom of his own will. This is mainly discussed in his book Gnade und Freiheit (“Grace and Freedom”). As the origin of faith he defines what he calls Vertrauesentscheidung (“trusting decision”), which is the basic concept of his philosophy. All rational knowledge, too, actually presumes such an irrational act of accepting the belief in the possibility of truth. In Das Wagnis der Mitte (“The Venture of the Middle Way”), written under the impact of totalitarian doctrines, Weltsch draws the conclusions of his philosophy for the sphere of politics. Its main thesis is that all extremism necessarily leads to moral failure and to disaster, while the real task of man is the creative application of the Middle Way (while rejecting an easy superficial compromise). In this process he has to overcome the antimony arising out of the conflict of vital and moral forces, which both have their legitimate place in political interaction. Felix Weltsch's last major work, Natur, Sittlichkeit, Politik (“Nature, Ethics, Politics”), was published in a Hebrew translation by Mossad Bialik. His own philosophy of religion—and, indeed his irrepressible and lovable humor—is also reflected in his book Religion und Humor in Leben und Werk Franz Kafkas (“Religion and Humor in Franz Kafka's Life and Works”).

The present essay was translated from the original German by Harry Zohn, associate professor of German at Brandeis University, and translator of The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl.

Max Brod has, this past year, attained the venerable age of eighty, which the Mishnah characterizes as “full of glorious strength.” As one who has been associated with him through many decades of friendship, I should like to use this milestone occasion to consider his philosophical development. But, first, it might be appropriate to sketch in, for the general reader, some biographical details of Brod's happily long and productive life.

Max Brod was born in Prague, where he lived until his fifty-fifth year, pursuing his art and career as poet, philosopher, musician, and leading member of the literary group which also included Franz Kafka, Franz Werfel, and other eminent Central European writers. In the earlier part of his life, Brod earned his living as a civil official, as section chief in the Czech ministerial presidium. Later, he found more compatible employment as a theatre and music critic for the Prager Tageblatt. During the First World War he became a Zionist. A few hours before the Nazi occupation of Prague, he succeeded in escaping the city, and, with the zealously guarded suitcase containing Kafka's precious manuscripts, found his way to Palestine. He has remained ever since in Palestine-Israel, where he serves as drama adviser to the Habimah theatre and continues to pursue the artistic and intellectual goals to which his life has been dedicated.

Apart from the prodigious labors he has expended on the posthumous publication of Kafka's works, Max Brod has published many philosophical and bellettristic works of his own. Some of these have been devoted to Kafka: Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre (Franz Kafka's Faith and Teaching, 1948); Kafka als Wegweisende Gestalt (Kafka As Guide, 1959); and Verzweiflung und Erloesung im Werk Kafkas (Despair and Redemption in Kafka's Work, 1959). In 1947 he published a philosophical study Diesseits und Jenseits (This World and Beyond). He is also the author of a series of contemporary and historical novels: Galilei in Captivity (1948); Unambo (1949), a novel dealing with the Jewish-Arab war; the Jesus-novel The Master (1952); and others. Among his other important works are the story, “Breakthrough into the Miracle” (1962), and The Bartered Bride (1962), the biography of the lyricist of Smetana's opera. Finally, Brod has published his autobiography, under the title Combatative Life (1960), and is currently at work on a long-range project dealing with the life and work of the humanist Johannes Reuchlin, who figures significantly in the history of both Christianity and Jewry.

Max Brod's creativity is characterized by the great variety of his oeuvre: belles-lettres and philosophy, poetry and novels, essays and plays, works on epistemology and on the philosophy of religion, translations, literary and political articles, musical compositions, studies in musicology, Zionist polemics, drama and music criticism. Despite this rich variety, a very clear line may be discerned running through all his seemingly disparate works. Reduced to a concise formula, this may be called “duality striving for unity.” As a formula, this has all the customary advantages. The principal disadvantage is that it is a pattern which is meaningless unless suffused with concrete life. An advantage is the fact that it is a rule by which to recognize unity in fullness and manifoldness. Let it here be used in the latter sense, not as rigid result but as a flexible leitmotif of our investigation.

Even the cursory summary of Brod's works, as outlined above, reveals a duality, or, to use a term coined by Brod himself, a Zweigeleisigkeit (“double-track”). For he is both a poet and a philosopher, a writer and a musician, a drama critic and a music critic. This alone is enough to show the dual way in which Brod seeks to realize his longing to grasp the world and give it form. The duality becomes clearer still if one considers the themes and the nature of Brod's fictional works. Two entirely different types may be distinguished—historical novels and love novels—which differ from one another in construction, organization, and spirit. The great historical novels—The Redemption of Tycho Brahe, Reubeni, Prince of the Jews, Galilei Imprisoned, The Master, Poor Cicero—are punctuated by stories and novels that deal with strange amorous entanglements: the struggle against duality in the emotional lives of men. But the most important form in which we encounter duality is in the historical novels where there are not one but two protagonists, whose relationship to one another is distinctly analogous. Thus, alongside Tycho Brahe there is Johannes Kepler; alongside Reubeni, Shlomo Molcho; alongside Galilei, Del Medigo; and alongside Jesus, Judas.

This is a duality entirely different from the one so often encountered in Franz Kafka—those dual figures who strangely haunt Kafka's works, the hoboes, servants, messengers, guards, assistants, supervisors, hangmen. These dual figures actually represent no true duality. They hardly differ from each other, they have no relationship to each other; they have only a joint relationship to the protagonist. They look alike; they wear the same uniform; they have the same indivisible assignment. Basically, they are two only in a mathematical sense; in their function they are one. They owe their duality only to the prism of Kafkaesque humor which splits the cruel white light of fate's messenger into a more colorful, gayer duality. This is no duality striving toward unity; it is a oneness which merely assumes the outward appearance of duality.

Duality in Max Brod means something entirely different. It is not born of any poetic meta-realism but is quite real. The two heroes are the theme—not because in reality they are one but because they are a duality, i.e., antithetical. They are counterplayers—but as friends, not as enemies. There is a striking parallel in the contrast between all the dual heroes. Tycho Brahe, the great astronomer, is a man who faces the world, who is in the mainstream of events, struggling, striving, succumbing, rising again and fighting on, a man who takes on all devils, including those in his own soul—and all this in order to attain the good, to reach God. He is versatile, self-aware, prudent as well as passionate. He has his faults, but he is aware of them and combats them, for he knows himself well and keeps close watch on himself. The same could be said about the other parallel heroes—Reubeni, Galilei, Judas—and similarly with the counterplayers. Kepler, the friend and rival of Tycho, is his exact opposite: he does not face the world, he does not know it, even refuses to acknowledge it. He is anything but versatile, he does not spread himself too thin, but pursues a single goal single-mindedly. He, too, desires truth and goodness, but he does not have to fight for it; it drops into his lap. He has a much easier time of it than Tycho; he need not reflect about himself, so he does not attempt this, but lives unselfconsciously, like a flower or an angel. And without intending it, he harms his friend.

It is this contrast which recurs in somewhat modified form in all of Brod's novels. Molcho, too (in Reubeni), is of the elect—handsome, free of faults or sin. He venerates Reubeni as the Messiah and wishes only to do his work. But in the single-mindedness of his zeal for Reubeni he destroys the work of his master. He flies toward the light like a moth and is consumed: indeed, he is actually burned at the stake, dragging Reubeni along to perdition. In Galilei this relationship is varied once again. While Galilei is ready to make the strangest compromises in order to serve truth, Del Medigo takes the straight path. To be sure, he does not drag Galilei along to his doom, but he comes close to doing so.

Again and again, the versatile, self-aware, worldly man loves the naive, whole, pure one; the fighter loves the man to whom the Lord gives while he sleeps. He loves him because his opposite goes the way he himself would like to but cannot because he feels that this is not his style; he cannot “afford” purity because he has a job to do, and the course of events confirms that his feeling was right.

In Brod's Jesus-novel, The Master, this theme appears in yet another variation. Here Jesus, the pure, exceptional, whole man who wants to redeem mankind is faced by Judas Iscariot, who is viewed in the novel in a very unusual and original light: as a rationalistic, analytical, nihilistic thinker, who wants not to redeem mankind but to destroy it, because he regards it as an aberration of creation. There is another pair in this novel, actually the main figures of the plot: Jesus' foster-sister, Shoshana, a figure drawn in the most delicate hues; and the Greek Meleager, who is hopelessly in love with Shoshana. She is the parallel figure to Jesus—pure, unworldly, wholly surrendered to a goal—while the Greek is the self-assured, clear-thinking, all-surveying man who seeks in vain for oneness.

But the juxtaposition and opposition of two partners who help and hinder, illuminate and obscure each other, do not exhaust the motif of duality in the novels. It goes deeper, is developed further, and grows into the feature that actually distinguishes the two chief figures. The trait of duality best characterizes Tycho, Reubeni, Galilei, and Judas, whereas Kepler, Molcho, Del Medigo, Jesus, and Shoshana are best characterized by the trait of unity.

Tycho as well as Reubeni, Galilei, and Judas face their own selves as keen observers; they are highly self-aware men. Self-awareness, however, means a splitting of a man into subject and object—thus, a duality. It is easy to see, incidentally, that in this quality of his heroes Brod depicts his own self-awareness, his own observing, critical relationship to himself. Tycho, Reubeni, Galilei, and Judas are shaped from within, from the author's own experience; Kepler, Molcho, Del Medigo, Jesus are shaped from without, as ideal pictures. With Brod self-analysis is the most important means of literary creation. From his first novels to the present day, Brod's creativity has been in large measure diary-like, a monologue, a searching debate of the hero with himself—thus, a doubling, a duality. In these novels, the far more carefully worked out dimension of self-observation is almost invariably added to the vertical dimension of action; thus there are again two directions of development which are intertwined and affect each other.

In Tycho this quality is developed still further. Passion and prudence struggle within him. He desires truth, but success as well. He fights with the whole world, and yet his real goal is knowledge. It is similar with Galilei: he, too, desires knowledge, but he seeks fame as well. He wants to find truth, but is also greatly concerned with making the truth public—something that he tries to achieve through a piece of deception. But as soon as the stake becomes a serious threat, he betrays truth and recants. In Reubeni the problem is treated in moral terms. The theme here is good will and sin. To reach his great goal, Reubeni must resort to impure means. Strictly speaking, he is a deceiver who operates with lies; he wants to redeem through war. Thus he makes use of force and diplomacy as a means for realizing the highest moral aims, which is the most modern duality of human association.

So much for duality, which is, after all, only one aspect, the second being the striving for oneness. Duality is our reality, to be sure; but the striving for unity is our morality. Unity is the goal of all intellectual, moral, and artistic striving. God is one; truth is but one; so is the highest moral aim; and beauty is “unity in diversity.”

Basically, unity is what Brod, too, is seeking. Duality may be the reality we face, but the ideal is unity. That is why Brod must always place alongside his hero of reality the ideal hero of unity as an antithesis. To be sure, it always turns out that the ideal hero of oneness is not really a part of this world, that he is unable to affect it; the world passes him by. Yet he, the pure, whole hero, has Brod's admiration. The real, tormented, fragmented, divided hero, however, has his love. For precisely these men of duality have a great advantage over the men of unity: their striving for oneness. The others lack this striving, for they have received oneness as a gift.

Brod's heroes of duality usually seek oneness by trying to fashion their duality into an instrument for serving unity. Tycho uses his intelligence and his self-awareness to find the way to God; Galilei, a clever ruse to disseminate truth; whereas Reubeni employs force and deceit to save his people. But all these roads are dangerous; the means are treacherous. Duality refuses to be a handmaiden and rebels against the purpose for which it is being used; and the outcome of the struggle is uncertain. Representing an optimistic phase in Brod's development, Tycho succeeds in finding his way to God in an ecstatic experience. Galilei, transfigured by old age, finally attains to a spiritual equilibrium, not without the help of his daughter Maria Celeste, who in her own way represents undivided, undisturbed, self-contained faith in contrast to the split, temporally entangled Galilei. Reubeni, for his part, attempts what may be called a mathematical solution, a rationing of evil. He realizes that the world cannot go on without the participation of evil; that is the way things are, and one has to expect it. However, evil has a stubborn tendency to spread; thus one has to use all one's strength to tame and control it. One has to make use of it, but only minimally—evil as the minimum subsistence of good, as it were. The attempt to turn the duality of good and evil into the unity of good is a very risky one. Reubeni succumbs in this struggle. And it is profoundly tragic that the upsetting of this equilibrium and his downfall in the novel are accomplished by the very man of perfect unity, the man who knows no duality. As for Judas in The Master, he is a borderline case. Here duality leads to destruction by eliminating itself; the oneness which this duality finally aspires to is nothingness.

In one of his novels Brod attempts a solution by resolutely maintaining duality—that is, unity through an equilibrium of duality. It is the “double-track” theory: despite the impossibility, one must try to maintain a strong, honest co-existence of the contrasts within oneself. This is the doctrine of Brod's novel Stephan Rott, oder das Jahr der Entscheidung (Stephan Rott, or The Year of Decision). For Brod the “double-track” is made possible by the experience of insightful love, which transcends mere knowledge. Brod's guide on this road is Plato. Thus he has set out on the road which ushers in his later development.

This brings us to Brod's lifelong philosophical struggle with the problem of “unity and duality.” Just as his literary work is replete with this philosophical problem, so is his intellectual struggle for the philosophical road from duality to unity.

Brod's first philosophical work deals with a problem whose duality is expressed in the book's very title: Anschauung und Begriff (Perception and Concept). (A duality is also expressed by the fact that the book, unlike most philosophical works, has two authors—the second one being the present writer.) This epistemological work deals with the problem of the scientific concept coping with infinitely varied perception. The book demonstrates close relationships between perception and concept, but the duality remains nevertheless.

In his second philosophical work, Heidentum, Christentum, Judentum (“Paganism, Christianity, Judaism”), Brod turned to ethical and religious problems. These had finally seized hold of him after he had overcome an aesthetic youthful period of “indifferentism” (evident in his novel Schloss Nornepygge). At the very beginning of this book there is, as a point of departure for further intellectual flights, another dichotomy, a duality: the doctrine of edles und unedles Unglück, noble and ignoble misfortune. By noble misfortune Brod means the basic imperfection of man which is due to his finite, mortal being. This noble misfortune cannot be eliminated; it is an unalterable part of existence. Ignoble misfortune, on the other hand, derives from earthly imperfection which may be overcome under certain circumstances, such as social conditions, technical backwardness, production, disease, etc. Here man can and should help.

Upon closer analysis it turns out that noble misfortune again is rooted in duality, one that cannot be bridged. It is the chasm between finiteness and infinity, the distance between God and man, the difference between the relative and the absolute, between time and eternity—in short, all those things that Brod sums up in the words Diesseits und Jenseits (this world and the beyond). Again we face the question: How can man cope with this duality, i.e., how can he attain the oneness for which his spirit yearns?

According to Brod, there are three possibilities: affirmation of the here-and-now; negation of the here-and-now; and the Diesseitswunder (this-worldly miracle). The three great religious positions differ in accordance with these answers. Paganism affirms this world: it is good, we will continue it, and do not need any illusions about the beyond. This is the attitude not only of ancient paganism, including epicureanism, but also of the naturalistic faith in progress in all its shadings, including liberalism and Marxism. It is the faith that mankind will continue to develop on its natural course. Christianity, on the other hand, says: This world is basically evil; it has succumbed to original sin; in this world there is no true morality without help from the next world, and only in the beyond is there true redemption. The negative part of this doctrine—that there is no redemption in this life—is also the substance of the Eastern religions (Buddhism), as well as of nihilism of all kinds.

But there is a third mode as well, which says: To be sure, this world is imperfect, but through a miracle it can be made good. In this Brod sees the innermost core of Jewish religion: Messianism. Mankind can be redeemed here on earth, in the “world to come,” but not in the “other world”; and it is the task of men to participate in this, e.g., by eliminating ignoble misfortune. Max Brod takes a well-known Jewish legend as a symbol, the story of Shimon bar Yochai, who, having experienced a mystic union with God, set about creating useful social institutions in the land.

The philosophical significance of the Diesseitswunder is expressed in the following thought: The divine world is perfect, yet, next to it, the imperfect human world has value; more than that—and here the old Tycho motif, man as God's helpmate, breaks through again—although the divine world is perfect, an improvement in the earthly world means an enrichment even for that infinitely perfect world. With this the ambivalence, or duality, in the concept of noble and ignoble misfortune is resolved also, for such a distinction always faces the possible objection that the very existence of ignoble misfortune constitutes a noble misfortune. Through the Diesseitswunder this objection is invalidated. Although the existence of ignoble misfortune is in itself a noble misfortune, it is valuable in alleviating ignoble misfortune. So it is with sin: it is not hard to recognize in Reubeni's standpoint an ethical variation of the Diesseitswunder.

Thus everything would seem to be in good order; but it only seems so. The solution has a serious flaw: it is contradictory, a paradox. This means, simply, that the unity to which Brod strives to attain from duality is a duality after all: the duality of contradiction. The contradiction is a familiar one: progress in this world is to be an enrichment of the divine world. This means that the perfect becomes more perfect through the addition of something imperfect. But if something perfect can be made more perfect by something imperfect, it was never really perfect in the first place.

In his further development Brod has tried over and over again to work out this paradox. He suspects that it can never be eliminated, but at least it can be continually pushed further. This means a constant struggle, a struggle for unity within duality, constant failure and renewed efforts. This is presumably not the way of Max Brod alone but the fate of the human intellect generally. The characteristic thing for Brod is his conscientiousness toward both counterpoles, his loyalty to duality, even though he never ceases to strive for unity. He refuses to purchase oneness cheaply—neither through illusion nor obfuscation. He takes duality quite seriously. And this is the decisive thing about the entire problem. Certainly, we all desire oneness; all philosophies, all political programs do; but we want it too cheaply. The greatest danger to human development is the rapid eschatologization of political programs, be they economic-technical, national, racial, or anything else. This is the frightful way which sanctifies all means. The only way to avoid it is to take duality very seriously even as oneness is being striven for. This is Max Brod's problem. He refuses to surrender either of the two poles—the perfection of God or the value of imperfect man. With the same passion with which he holds on to duality he also tries to overcome it. In this struggle he propels himself onto ever higher levels of awareness.

Thus, in his philosophical work Diesseits und Jenseits he achieves his theodicy, a defense of God against the accusation that evil exists in the world. How can God permit evil, sin, Hitler and Auschwitz? First, Brod concerns himself with the customary attempts of theodicy as offered by religion and philosophy. He rejects them, because they do not do justice to the duality, because they take sides too soon. There are two possibilities. One is to question the perfection of God, that is, to deny either God's omnipotence or His infinite goodness. This leads one to the familiar concept of a “becoming” God, a God temporally progressing toward perfection. This, to be sure, does explain evil, for where there is only becoming there must of necessity be imperfections. Brod rejects this Weltanschauung. It runs counter to his experience of God, which to him is that of perfect deity.

This faith was not present from the beginning but evolved slowly in Brod's life and work. At first, pessimism and “indifferentism” prevailed. The first factor that led out of this circle was the experience of beauty; to this Brod's first books are dedicated. Next came the experience of love; and from these two experiences, which Brod regards as experiences of the infinite, there finally developed the view that in these very experiences lies perfection, whose reality and persuasiveness Brod does not doubt. He experiences this perfection on various occasions: it may shine forth for him “as a special situation revealing the ultimate of our existence, or as a beautiful face in which all the world's secrets seem to be expressed, or as a call to an action which bursts the bonds of the self, or as a scientific insight, one of those magic formulae of mathematics which make one's heart stand still because worlds of order open up, or as a delicate or exalted verse, a fictional character coming to life, or as music from eternity which nevertheless is new and never before known”—which is how Brod describes the guises in which “perfection” may appear. He further writes: “From this perfection which we experience and which cannot be argued away there arises our faith in God.” Imperfection runs counter to this experience. “The blissfulness with which we experience God's perfection would then, in the final analysis, turn out to be a mere illusion. That this can never be is implicit in the experience and its bliss, in the experience that here we have left behind the boundaries of erring and lying.”

Thus Brod rejects the method of impairing perfection. The other method of theodicy is the impairment of the other role, evil. Evil is in some way presented as not entirely real. It only seems evil to us, from the human point of view. From God's point of view, or from that of the “totality,” it is not evil at all. Only human weakness, or human perspective, is to blame for our regarding evil as real; thus it is only anthropomorphism. This is the way of almost all theodicies—of Spinoza, Leibnitz, Mendelssohn, Hegel, etc. Kierkegaard, to whom Brod devotes the most attention, also belongs to this group, because he supports God a priori and traces all evil to human guilt and sin.

Brod is dissatisfied with all these attempts to justify evil by divesting it of its reality. He will not have this pole of duality neglected or underestimated. He refuses to close his eyes to the evil in the world, for evil is real and cannot be argued away by any consideration for the “totality.” Brod sympathizes too much with the misery and horror of human misfortune, and the experience of human wickedness weighs too heavily upon him. In opposition to Kierkegaard, who would trace everything back to human guilt, Brod points to the evil in nature, to the survival of the more brutal, to pain and torment in the animal world of which man is blameless.

This leaves only the third way: To take seriously both poles of duality, divine perfection and the evil in the world, and to seek a unity despite everything. This bring us again to the Diesseitswunder which, to be sure, has acquired a new form in this most recent phase of Brod's thought. Brod has recognized that even the concept of the Diesseitswunder as expounded in Heidentum, Christentum, Judentum fails to do justice to God's perfection. If perfection can become more perfect through human action, then it simply was not perfect—and this contradicts the concept or, more important to Brod, the experience of perfection.

His conscientiousness toward the duality now precluded this attempt to achieve oneness. And so the next stage of his thought is reached: being and becoming are posited within God. The meaning of this new formulation is as follows: God contains not only infinite, perfect being, but also temporal becoming, that is, development, historical happenings, in which imperfect, finite, evil things must of necessity occur. “Since God is perfect,” Brod writes, “He cannot contain mere being, for mere being is unalterable. But this, rigid and lifeless, would be a flaw. Nor can God be merely becoming, for mere becoming, just alterability without support, is a flaw. Only if one concedes that being and becoming co-exist are all these flaws eliminated. In addition to being, perfection must also possess all the advantages of becoming, without any of its disadvantages.” These two antitheses “must be lodged in God; otherwise there would be a lack of the infinite variety of things, colors, and tones, or a lack of solidity, tangibility, intrinsic worth. Human understanding manages to see that this has to be so, that the two contrasts are immanent in God; this is reason's ultimate achievement. But human understanding knows nothing about how it can be, how this contradiction can exist within God, and in complete harmony, too; this exceeds the bounds of reason.”

“God created the world”—this is the end result of these thoughts which Brod always cautiously presents as possibilities or presentiments, not as exact knowledge—“because in addition to the fullness of all that was coming into being He also wanted to have the negative, cessation, finish, the irretrievably gone. In the world of becoming, the forms of becoming—which we must imagine also as being present in the world of being—acquire something new which they did not have in being: a second, heightened value—that of leave-taking. In this they shine forth in the most resplendent beauty—precisely because afterwards they sink into nothingness forever.”

But even this position is not satisfying. Can the negative aspects of the world of becoming in all metaphysical seriousness be assembled in God alongside being? Is this not just another impairment of perfection? Brod seeks to escape this result by answering that the dangers of becoming apply only to the created world, not to God Himself. For Brod will by no means identify the created world with God; he rejects pantheism. Despite everything God remains the God of love, the all-merciful and all-powerful. This is the capstone of Brod's theodicy.

And so, in the final analysis, the price that had to be paid for the justification of evil seems too high to Brod. “A great sadness,” he writes at the end of his book, “descends upon me when I reflect, as the final conclusion of my wisdom, that God wants to suffer—and that this and nothing else induced Him to create the world in which we live. But who can say that this world is such as to put us in a happy frame of mind? Yet my philosophy must be sharply differentiated from all varieties of pessimism—for two reasons [once more, his final loyalty to the duality!]: because despite everything a task remains for man, and also because the view of the perfect God is not blocked. Defying all the horrors of the becoming world, we must derive from this view the joy necessary to perform our duties, and from this joy the strength to complete our task.”

In detailing this intellectual struggle for the possibility of reconciling God and evil, on the basis of the concluding chapter of Diesseits und Jenseits, it has not been our intention to proclaim the end result which Brod has now arrived at as a final insight. Some may consider such a speculation as too daring; others will find that these reflections are wholly based on an “experience of perfection” which is subjective and—even more important—is interpreted subjectively; still others will raise the objection that Brod thus has only apparently progressed from duality to unity.

Our concern here has been not with the result but with the road which Max Brod has taken. It is the road of man as such, and here it stands out from the intellectual topography as a whole like a clear winding ribbon—because this road is outlined by a thinker with the great passion of a poet, a poet who is impelled by the intellectual problems posed by life.

A particularly characteristic feature, and one we have stressed often, has proved to be Brod's conscientiousness toward duality, his loyalty to the antithetic poles. He wants to avoid at any cost achieving oneness through a short-cut. Only when we neglect neither of the two poles of duality, when we trivialize or obfuscate neither one of them, can we approach true oneness. This is Brod's way of striving to progress from duality to unity. The oneness he has reached up to now is surely not definitive, but his road has been an exemplary one.