2. The Language of Poetry and of Revelation

2. The Language of Poetry and of Revelation.2. Die Sprache der Poesie und der Offenbarung.

When, quite recently still, a venerable scholar believes he finds the reason why the language of the prophets has in part something so dark and unintelligible about it merely in this: that the higher wisdom deliberately does not wish to unveil its plans for the future before everyone’s eyes, so that the party of obscurantism may not stifle beforehand the seed of the good still to come, or at least hold back what furthers its growth: this view will not altogether suffice. The higher hand has from the beginning always known how to find means of preserving the still tender seed in the midst of hostile designs, or of hiding it in a far-off Egypt, and from of old nothing has been so furthering and wholesome to its growth and thriving as precisely those plans that meant to suppress it. Besides this, the few whose consecrated eye understands those hieroglyphs have never been granted leave to keep silent. The other party, if only it cared to pay attention, would learn early enough as much as it needed to know for laying its fruitless counter-plans and counter-machines, and the final victory of truth over the lie would only be brought about all the faster by those hindrances, and only become all the more decisive and brilliant.

In a somewhat different respect my old teacher, in particularly dark political constellations, tends to assume with certainty that what the great mass, and among it especially the political wise men, in their insolent presumption, hold to be a settled matter, and already hope or fear as quite certain, will not happen; rather he then concludes precisely the opposite, and, so far as I know of him, has never yet been deceived in such conclusions, which are grounded on the stupidity of the human heart. The plans of the higher wisdom, he says, are something other than the plans and conclusions of feeble human wisdom: the two mostly run directly counter to each other, and that wisdom would be no higher wisdom at all if every brazenly stupid political wit could see through its intentions.