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Thomas Strässle

All Is Vanity

“Watch with care lest all thy piety hypocrisy be”: to modern ears, this is actually a rather curious title. Watch with care? “Make sure you’re back here for supper at six,” my mother would say when, on afternoons when I was free, I took my leave after lunch, announcing that I was going into the woods to play with my friends. As I understood it, “Make sure you’re back here at six” meant something like: it really would be good if you were back by then, because that is when we have supper, so please stick to our rules. And at the same time it meant: until then, you are free to do as you please.

This is, of course, a modern understanding of the German phrase “Siehe zu”, and perhaps your experience of this expression has been quite different from mine. And yet, even in Baroque usage, “Watch with care lest all thy piety hypocrisy be” is not the language of a commandment, not a sentence carved on stone tablets like “Thou shalt not kill” or “Thou shalt not commit adultery”, but the language of admonition, perhaps of exhortation, and thus of encouragement or even reassurance.

The biblical origin and context of this quotation from the Book of Sirach have already been wonderfully illuminated for us, so I would like to turn to another aspect: the question of sameness and difference between the inward and the outward. Without an inward and an outward, there can be neither hypocrisy nor its opposite: sincerity, honesty, truthfulness. “Those who are inwardly as they are outwardly / are called true Christians” are the opening words of the bass recitative in Bach’s cantata. “Those who are inwardly as they are outwardly”: is this really “merely” a religious ideal, or might it also serve as a secular maxim in an age as concerned with outward appearances as ours?

But was it ever any different? The possibility that the inward might not match the outward, that the exterior might give a misleading impression of the interior, is certainly a recurring theme in Baroque literature. There are countless images and analogies for it. Bach’s cantata offers a particularly vivid example. In the tenor aria we hear: “The appearance of false hypocrites / can be called Sodom’s apples / that are filled with filth / and from outside glisten splendidly.” This is stark and dramatic, but it is not unusual. The Baroque abounds in such analogies. And, tellingly, they almost always work in one direction: an attractive exterior may conceal a dreadful interior. The reverse hardly ever occurs, although it is perfectly conceivable that a dreadful exterior might conceal a noble interior. And perhaps this tells us rather a lot about humankind.

The problem of a possible discrepancy between outward appearance and inward reality arises above all where theological suspicion is stirred: the suspicion that someone may not be a true Christian. In Baroque literature, this primarily concerns texts of a satirical character, and these are by no means the least accomplished. At any rate, they are the ones we still tend to know today: think only of Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Abentheurlicher Simplicissimus Teutsch. Such texts might arouse the suspicion that their author merely wished to entertain people rather than edify them. They therefore very often contain passages intended to dispel precisely this suspicion, asserting that the attractive exterior is a deliberate strategy for drawing people in and then, without their noticing, administering the salutary teaching concealed within the text. Perhaps the most familiar image is that of a sugar-coated or gilded pill containing a healing substance which, ideally, the audience does not perceive as intrusive. In its deceptive effect, it is not unlike the apples of Sodom with their splendidly gleaming exterior.

The highest ideal, however, is that spiritual teaching should do more than merely leave the text’s flavour unimpaired: it should make that flavour possible in the first place. Only salt can achieve this, the sacred substance you all know from the Bible (“Ye are the salt of the earth”, and so forth), whose divinity is demonstrated by the fact that its name is written with three letters in the sacred languages of Hebrew, Greek and Latin: a sign of the Trinity. For Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, a celebrated author in his day, writes in one passage: “The poet should endeavour to intersperse sound moral precepts / and derive them from the subject itself / yet they should not be introduced in too far-fetched a manner. For this reason, some accuse the eloquent Seneca / of having sprinkled too much of this musk into his epistles / whose overpowering scent weakens rather than strengthens the reader’s mind. Others compare these moral precepts to seasoning / which, used sparingly and judiciously / makes food both wholesome and enjoyable / in which sense perhaps St Paul also says: that Christians’ speech should be seasoned with salt (that is, edifying teaching). But if too much of this seasoning is used / it is considered unhealthy and unpleasant to the palate.” Salt truly is a magical substance: if there is too little of it in a text (or in a dish), the result is bland. If there is too much, it is oversalted. But when the amount is exactly right, it is what makes the text savoury in the first place, without the salt itself, that is, the edifying teaching, remaining perceptible as a separate flavour. Instead, it enhances all the other flavours.

You see: when Bach’s cantata speaks of apples of Sodom filled with filth as a symbol of hypocrisy, this reflects a Baroque way of thinking about inward and outward that can take many different forms. It is therefore hardly surprising that Baroque literature is populated by so many hypocrites who outwardly pretend to be something they are not within. People who go through life with a “false heart”, to quote the cantata once again. One of the greatest hypocrites in Baroque literature is, of course, Simplicius Simplicissimus. Grimmelshausen’s novel is almost a fashion parade of the many garments in which hypocrisy can appear. Perhaps the funniest episode takes place not far from here, on the road to Einsiedeln. Simplicius accompanies his closest confidant, named Herzbruder, himself the very embodiment of sincerity, when the latter sets out on a pilgrimage to Einsiedeln for the most honourable of reasons. Simplicius’s reasons are not quite so honourable, and he also wants to buy two horses so that he can comfortably “see the Swiss Confederation, the only land where dear peace still flourishes”. But Herzbruder immediately talks him out of these foolish notions, and so the two of them walk from Schaffhausen via Zurich to Einsiedeln, wearing long black robes and equipped with pilgrims’ staffs and rosaries. One of them continually prays the rosary; the other delights in the glorious countryside, which seems to him like paradise on earth compared with Germany, ravaged by the Thirty Years’ War. He takes pleasure in splendid farmsteads whose stables are full of livestock, rejoices in the safe roads along which travellers can go about their business unmolested, and enjoys the inns full of merry company.

Only his feet hurt terribly, for Herzbruder has instructed him to fill his shoes with peas, since there can be no pilgrimage without suffering. But here, too, Simplicius finds a way out. Herzbruder is amazed by his endurance and praises him: “‘Brother, God has granted you great grace, that you can make such good progress despite the peas in your shoes.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘dearest Herzbruder, I boiled them; otherwise I could never have walked so far on them.’ ‘Oh, God have mercy,’ he replied, ‘what have you done?’” The contrast could hardly be brought into sharper dramatic focus: Herzbruder and the arch-hypocrite walk side by side, rather like the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke, one genuinely prepared to suffer, the other making life easier for himself and treating the pilgrimage as a kind of secular pleasure trip, however long and black his cloak may be. We really cannot say that his piety is free of hypocrisy.

But in view of this, let me return once more to my opening question: “Those who are inwardly as they are outwardly”: is this really “merely” a religious ideal, or might it also serve as a secular maxim in an age as concerned with outward appearances as ours?

What has always particularly fascinated me about Baroque literature is that it does not dwell on trivialities but turns its attention to the last things, taking the most radical imaginable view of the nothingness and transience of existence, almost obsessively fixated on them: vanitas vanitatum vanitas. There is a sonnet by Andreas Gryphius that ranks among the most beautiful poems in German literature. Perhaps you know it:

Wherever you look, you see only vanity on earth.
What one builds today, another tears down tomorrow:
Where cities stand now, there will be a meadow
On which a shepherd’s child will play among the flocks.

What now blooms so splendidly will soon be trampled underfoot.
What now boasts and defies will tomorrow be ash and bone;
Nothing lasts for ever, neither bronze nor marble.
Now fortune smiles upon us; soon afflictions thunder.

The glory of great deeds must vanish like a dream.
Can frail humanity, the plaything of time, endure?
Ah, what is all that we regard as precious

But mere nothingness, but shadows, dust and wind;
But a meadow flower that cannot be found again.
Yet no one wishes to contemplate what is eternal!

All is vanity: this is really the central proposition of the Baroque. What has always puzzled me and given me pause is how completely this notion of vanity ran counter to my sense of the word. Today, of course, the German word Eitelkeit means something entirely different from what it meant then: vanity as a desire to please and self-love, as self-display and self-absorption. This creates an exceedingly curious tension with Baroque vanity, with the nothingness of all earthly things and thus of our own existence. To this day, that curious tension gives me no peace: how can a meaning turn into its opposite? Is it even its opposite? How does one kind of vanity relate to the other? And how can the one exist at all in the face of the other?

Unfortunately, etymology is not particularly helpful: “From the biblical usage alles ist eitel (‘all is vanity’; cf. (omnia) est vanitas, Vulgate), the principal meaning in modern German develops: ‘concerned with making an impression, self-satisfied’.” Ultimately, this remains very unclear, and perhaps the tension between the two forms of vanity cannot be resolved at all. But when we allow them to collide, they reveal their true faces: one emphasises our nothingness, the other our “proud self-glorification”, as Bach’s cantata puts it. And so one might say: to be different inwardly from what one is outwardly, which always means being concerned with outward effect, with “gleaming splendidly on the outside”, points towards what we understand by vanity in the modern sense of a desire to please and to display ourselves. But what is this vanity in the face of the vanity of which the Baroque speaks? Nothing but “shadows, dust and wind”, to quote Andreas Gryphius once again.

And how quickly the false heart takes hold! Do you remember the excessive chromaticism in the opening chorale? Almost whenever the “false heart” is mentioned, the voice moves in semitone steps. It disrupts consonance, but it is also a sliding cut straight into the heart. What a beautiful example of how music and literature can complement one another.

“Watch with care lest all thy piety hypocrisy be”: hypocrisy takes at least two people, one who practises it and one for whose benefit it is practised. Whether the latter sees through it is an open question, unless that person is God; perhaps they are taken in. But the person practising hypocrisy certainly knows: they are doing it deliberately and with a purpose. And they must decide for themselves whether they can answer to themselves for it. That is the crucial point: responsibility towards oneself or, as one might also call it, self-respect. In an interview about social hypocrisy, Max Frisch once said: “You have to take responsibility for your own self-respect.” Few sentences I have read or heard in my life have struck me as so clearly true. No one can take care of your self-respect for you. The only authority that counts in this matter is yourself.