Examples in Hesse’s Fiction of the Development of “Spiritual Capital” in Hesse’s Works
The Glass Bead Game
Psychologists David B. King and Teresa L. DeCicco suggest that one’s spiritual abilities may “peak” in later life stages, “as death approaches,” with shifts in perceptions away from material interests towards a surpassing of the ego.
1David B. King and Teresa L. DeCicco, “A Viable Model and Self-Report Measure of Spiritual Intelligence,” International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 28 (2009): 68–85. King and DeCicco’s framework is built upon Howard Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences. See: Howard Gardner, “Frequently asked questions—Multiple intelligences and related educational topics,” https://howardgardner01.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/faq_march2013.pdf (accessed July 6, 2023). Here, the Hesse reader is reminded of the old Music Master from
The Glass Bead Game who introduces the young Joseph Knecht to the “spirit of music” in a duet they play together:
Joseph’s heart swelled with veneration, with love for the Master. His ear drank in the fugue; it seemed to him that he was hearing music for the first time in his life. Behind the music being created in his presence he sensed the world of Mind, the joy-giving harmony of law and freedom, of service and rule. He surrendered himself, and vowed to serve that world and this Master. In those few minutes he saw himself, and his life, saw the whole cosmos guided, ordered, and interpreted by the spirit of music.
2Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, trans. Richard and Clara Wilson (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1990), 55.We experience through Joseph, who is guided by the Music Master on the piano and his aura of spirituality, how time and space are altered, and his entire life course is unfolded to him in the playing of the fugue together. Joseph’s ego is transcended in the moment, and spirit and mind are revealed, as the music takes on the form of a meditation. He is profoundly changed by the communion of spirit triggered and nurtured by the old Master, as Hesse’s readers often were, as is evidenced in the letters written to Hesse, which I explore in more detail later. Knecht found his physical world magically illuminated: “Many years later Knecht told his pupil that when he stepped out of the building, he found the town and the world far more transformed and enchanted than if there had been garlands, and streamers, or displays of fireworks. He had experienced his vocation, which may surely be spoken of as a sacrament.”
3Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 55–56. Later the thirty-seven-year-old Joseph Knecht meets the now retired Music Master at his home in Monteporte as he travels back on his way to Waldzell from his two-year sojourn at the Benedictine monastery in Mariafels and notes the change in his appearance: “The fatigue had departed from his face; it was not that he had grown younger since resigning his office, but he definitely looked handsomer and more spiritualized.”
4Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 180. Later, after his appointment as Magister Ludi in Waldzell, Knecht asks the student Petrus, who had just arrived from Monteporte, about the Music Master’s well-being and he learns that the old man is “becoming, in the tranquillity of age, more and more spiritual, devout, dignified, and simple in heart.”
5Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 252. In Petrus’s description of the Music Master we see clearly how his spiritual capacities and abilities, in other words his spiritual intelligence, develops, his spiritual capital accumulates, and seems to “peak” in old age, and thus can be readily shared with the youthful Knecht through an unfolding of enlightened selfhood and through his exemplary way of living.
The Case of The Journey to the East—Spiritual Capital Unfolded into Agency in the World
In our second example, we see how spiritual intelligence and capital are experienced by a fictional community of mindful wayfarers on their journey through space and time. Hesse’s short novel
Die Morgenlandfahrt (The Journey to the East) was first published in German in 1932 against the backdrop of the political and cultural crisis at the end of the Weimar Republic. In
The Journey to the East Hesse describes a hierarchical community of spiritual wayfarers, The League of Pilgrims to the East, who journeyed “towards the East, but [they] also traveled into the Middle Ages and the Golden Age … the East was not only a country and something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times.”
6Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East, trans. Hilda Rosner (London: Peter Owen, 2007), 23–24. The magical, metaphorical journey liberates the wayfarers from the literal constrictions of time, space, and specific cultures in favor of the pursuit of a unity of aesthetic and spiritual ideals. The world opens up synchronously as the confines of time and space are lifted on the journey for past masters, actual people from the present, and even characters from Hesse’s other novels:
7Pablo from Steppenwolf; Klingsor from Klingsor’s Last Summer; Siddhartha from Hesse’s “Indian Tale” of the same name; and Goldmund from the novel Narcissus and Goldmund. I suggest that the story of the League is Hesse’s attempt to visualize and describe a transcultural community of spirit, comprised of wanderers on personal quests, who move in a metaphorical, timeless realm. However, ultimately, through the figure of Leo, who is both a leader and a humble servant, the ideal of concrete service to humanity is held high and is central to the story.
The Journey to the East thus moves away from the struggles of a solitary individual in a novel such as
Steppenwolf to address the problem of how we can overcome the loneliness of the spiritually oriented human in everyday life through the formation of a collective, sharing community of like-minded, spiritually inclined people.
The story itself revolves around the hero H.H. (of course, Hesse’s own initials) and his alter ego Leo, who is an emissary of the League. The first part of the story unfolds in a romantic dream-world of retrospection written from the memory of the first-person narrator (H.H.) in which, however, the wayfarers trace the same real journeys that Hesse undertook at different stages of his own life: from South Germany and Swabia, through Switzerland to “Monday-Village” (Montagnola). The story turns and descends from the level of magic with the disappearance of Leo in the Morbio Gorge, which is a planned test of the wayfarers’ loyalty to the ideals of the League and which questions the reality and actual existence of the League. The narrator struggles to recapture the elusive story. To both remain whole and to be re-admitted into the community, H.H. must find Leo, who personifies the central transcendent ideals of the League. Ultimately, finding Leo in the great hall of records of the League allows H.H. to discover his own identity and reality again in a symbolic denouement. Leo operates first as H.H.’s judge before an assembly and then finally appears transfigured as part of a translucent wooden or wax statue to which H.H. is also connected as the other figure, which means they are in fact two metaphorical, complementary polarities. H.H.’s figure flows into Leo’s: “He must grow, I must disappear.”
8Hesse, The Journey to the East, 93. Clearly, Leo is H.H.’s higher transcendental self. Leo lives in unison with the Earth’s creatures and in tune with the overarching spirit, thereby personifying the overcoming of the ego and exemplifying the embodied guiding spirit of service.
Another important aspect of the story is Hesse’s description of how a meaningful fellowship is created. In the first part of the story, the narrator’s group sets off on its travels and soon encounters other groups. The narrator describes the happiness that the pilgrims feel because of “the feeling of unity and a common goal.”
9Hesse, The Journey to the East, 13. An ideal setting, free from the relentless pressures of the modern world, is described, one in which no use is made of “contrivances which spring into existence in a world deluded by money, time and figures, and which drain life of all meaning; mechanical contrivances such as railways, watches and the like came chiefly into this category.”
10Hesse, The Journey to the East, 13. The technological developments of modernity are portrayed as
draining life of all meaning, as a process of alienation and distraction of the subject. The “heads-down generation” of people constantly checking their smartphones today would be a good example of the dependence on technology in our modern world.
11A. Ward, K. Duke, A. Gneezy, and Maarten Bos, “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity,” JACR 2, no. 2 (2017): 140–54. On the other hand, meaning is created as the narrator explains how the wayfarers “visited and honoured all sacred places and monuments, churches and consecrated tombstones which we came across on our way; chapels and altars were adorned with flowers; ruins were honoured with songs or silent contemplation; the dead were commemorated with music and prayers.”
12Hesse, The Journey to the East, 13. Here Hesse suggests how meaning is introduced into the world and how “grounded” spiritual ideals are concordant with metaphorical ones. The narrator of
The Journey to the East tells us that the East was “everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times.”
13Hesse, The Journey to the East, 24. In other words, the “East” symbolically represents both concrete reality and creative transcendence.
In the context of the short novel, spiritual ideals link the pilgrims, which generates a repository of shared spiritual capital. The journey becomes a process of personal transformation toward contentment and purpose in the world. Readers interacting with and reflecting upon Hesse’s works, particularly
The Journey to the East and
The Glass Bead Game, can become associated in Hermann Hesse societies,
14The most well-know Hermann Hesse society is the Internationale Hermann-Hesse-Gesellschaft in Calw, Germany, which holds colloquiums, publishes an annual Jahrbuch on the latest scholarly Hesse research and electronic newsletters. The society is closely linked to the Museo Hermann Hesse Montagnola in Switzerland and publicizes its program of events. through letter writing, and nowadays through online communities. This process helps to form global communities of like-minded readers interested in what Theodore Ziolkowski called “the eternal element of the human spirit.”
15Theodore Ziolkowski, The Novels of Hermann Hesse: A Study in Theme and Structure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 261. A text such as
The Journey to the East presents us with an ideal, in this case, that in a world buffeted by an empty onslaught of materiality, we can naturally cherish that which is substantial and sacred in the minds of human beings. As theologian and philosopher Martin Buber proposed, “it seems as though the spirit were really at home here in its human domicile.”
16Martin Buber, “Hermann Hesse in the Service of the Spirit,” in Hesse: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Theodore Ziolkowski (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 31.The Journey to the East demonstrates that both authorial imagination and, if immersed in the text, the reader’s imagination, are important factors in lifting the constraints of time and space, thus suggesting to us different perspectives of the world. Germanist Leslie Adelson argues that “literary imagination might play [a role] in altering the dimensions of contemporary experience.”
17Leslie A. Adelson, “Literary Imagination and the Future of Literary Studies,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 89, no. 4 (2015): 676. As the acceleration of social experience through instantaneous communication occurs under globalization,
18David Harvey calls this experience the “time-space compression” in which there is a “speed-up in the pace of life” thereby making spatial barriers seemingly “collapse inwards on us.” Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 239. the literary imagination can open new parameters for coping with the variety of new challenges we as readers experience in our daily lives—and, moreover, unite us in a collection of communities. Drawing on Kant’s
Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), Adelson points out the phenomena of “reproductive and productive imagination,” which are “two varieties of mental imaging,” whereby one “replicates the contents of previous perception,” and the other “somehow introduces novelty.”
19Adelson stresses, however, that Kant scholars do not see the function of human imagination, traditionally mediating between sense perception and conceptual understanding, as necessarily tied to a mental image in the original Kantian sense (Adelson, “Literary Imagination and the Future of Literary Studies,” 678). We should ask: how is our sense of perception being influenced when we read
The Journey to the East? Do we experience a feeling that the boundaries of time and space are being lifted and an impact on our perception of reality? Are the parameters of our perception of reality being shifted? I suggest that a committed reader of the text can enter into “productive” practice whereby the inner realm is translated to the outer in an act of creativity that impacts on social relations in order to promote the common good. The following example illustrates my point.