“I prefer the cynicism of the Catholic Church to the pharisaism of the Communist Church. We Catholics judge…”
“Bravo for the obsessive plural. I kiss you, my love.”
“Don’t be a clown, Jorge. I’m telling you, we judge the crimes of the Church because they’re betraying a promise already carried out, an obligation: the imitation of Christ. The Communists can’t judge the crimes of their church because they feel it would betray a promise that is to be carried out in the future. That is still not incarnate.”
“Are you planning to enter a religious order? Am I going to have to become a Don Juan to seduce you in a convent?”
“Don’t joke. And keep your hands to yourself, Don Juan.”
“No, I’m not joking. If I’m following you correctly, this Christian purity that requires obedience to Jesus’ teachings can only be put into practice if you withdraw to a convent.
“No, it must be practiced in the world. Besides, how could I become a nun after knowing you?”
Together they’d taken Husserl’s courses with an almost sacred devotion. They studied with the master but without realizing his power, because Husserl guided them so discreetly, keeping them independent of him, motivated by him but free thanks to the wings he gave them.
“Let’s see now, George, what does Husserl mean when he talks about regional psychology?”
“I think he’s referring to the way of being concrete that emotions, acts, and understanding have. What he’s asking us to do is to suspend our opinion as long as we don’t see all those proofs as original phenomena-in flesh and bone, as he says. First we open our eyes wide to see what’s around us in our so-called region,
They walked a lot at night through the old university city right up to where the Black Forest begins, exploring the walls of the Gothic cathedral, getting lost in the medieval landscapes, crossing the bridges over the Dreisam as it rushes to join the Rhine.
Freiburg was like an ancient stone queen with her feet in the water and a crown of pines. The two students strolled around it, elaborating and reelaborating the lessons of the day, arm in arm at first, later hand in hand, astonished that Husserl himself was elaborating. He was nervous and noble, with a very high forehead that cleared the way for a concerned brow and menacing eyebrows, his straight nose sniffing out ideas, and his long beard and mustache covering wide lips, as wide as those of some philosophic animal, a mutant that had emerged from the nourishing water of the first creation onto an unknown land, committed to enunciating more ideas than those that fit in a speech. Husserl’s words could not keep pace with his thought.
Everyone called him “the master.” Naked in the eyes of his students, he proposed to them a philosophy without dogma or conclusions, open at all times to rectification and to the criticism of the professor and his students. Everyone knew that the Husserl of Freiburg was not the Husserl of Halle, where he had invented phenomenology on the basis of a simple proposal: first we accept experience, then we think. Nor was he the Husserl of Gottingen, who had focused his attention on
“I don’t understand, George. He’s asking us to reduce phenomena to pure consciousness, to a kind of cellar beneath which it cannot be reduced further. Can’t we excavate more, go deeper?”
“Well, I think that nature, the body, and the mind are in that cellar, as you call it. And that’s quite a lot.
As if he were reading his students’ thoughts with his hawklike eyes, which contrasted so savagely with his stiff butterfly collar, his shirt-front, his vest crossed by a watch chain, his old-fashioned black frock coat, his trousers that tended to hang over his short black boots, Husserl told them that after the Great War, Europe’s spiritual world had collapsed, and that if he was preaching a reduction of thought to the very foundations of the mind and of nature, it was only the better to renovate European life, history, society, and language.
“I can’t conceive of a world without Europe or Europe without Germany. A European Germany that would he part of the best Europe has promised to the world. I’m not, ladies and gentlemen, creating an abstract philosophy. I’m firmly rooted in the best we’ve done. That which can survive us. Our culture. That which can inspire your children and grandchildren. I won’t see it. That’s why I teach it.”
Then Raquel and Jorge went out to celebrate in a jolly student
They aroused laughter, sympathy, commotion, and shouts: When are you getting married? Can two philosophers get along in bed? Is it true you’re going to name your first son Socrates? Oh, intersubjectivity, come to me, let me interpenetrate you!
They went to the cathedral after running their amazed, intelligent, and sensual eyes over the outside, and discovered, in that famous minster, finished at the dawn of the sixteenth century, a perfect illustration of what concerned them, as if Husserl’s lessons had returned not to complement but to revive the tympanum of original sin which here, on one flank of the cathedral, preceded the Creation shown on the archivault. This told us that the Creation redeemed sin and left it behind; the Fall was not the consequence of Creation. There is no Fall, the Freiburg lovers told each other, there is Origin and then there is Creation.
On the west side of the cathedral, Satan, posing as the Prince of the World, leads a procession that walks away not only from original sin but from divine Creation. Facing this satanic procession, the main door of the cathedral opens, and it is there, not outside but inside, or rather at the very entrance to the interior, that Redemption is described and declared.
They went through that door, and almost as if at communion, kneeling next to each other, without any fear of seeming ridiculous, they prayed aloud:
The Nazis forced Husserl out of Freiburg and out of Germany. The old exile continued teaching in Vienna and Prague, with the Wehrmacht always one step behind him. They allowed him to return to die in his beloved Freiburg, but the philosopher had said, “In the heart of every Jew there is absolutism and martyrdom.” By contrast, his disciple Edith Stein, who became a Carmelite nun after renouncing Israel and converting to Christianity, would say that same year: “Disasters will rain on Germany when God avenges the atrocities committed against the Jews.” It was the year of Kristallnacht, on November 9, organized by Goebbels to destroy synagogues, Jewish businesses, and Jews. Hitler announced his intention to annihilate the Jewish race in Europe once and for all.
It was the same year that Jorge Maura met Laura Diaz in Mexico and Raquel Mendes-Aleman, with the Star of David sewn to her bosom, greeted the SS in the streets with the shout “Christ be blessed!” which she repeated on the ground, bloody, kicked, and punched. “Christ be blessed!”
On March 3, 1939, the
