In his book Between Heaven and Earth, the late Franz Werfel wrote: "The stupidest of all inventions of nihilistic thinking is the so-called impersonal God. Confronted with this non-personal God, one is tempted to bless the personal non-God of the honest atheist; for the concept of a spiritless and senseless world created by nothing and by no one, and existing nevertheless, is for all its ghastliness, more acceptable than the idiotic notion of a kind of extra-mundane and autonomous power station that creates and feeds all things without ever at all having been invented or operated by a creative Mind. The impersonal God is the most wretched reflection of technologized and thought-weary brains, the modern old folks' home of senile pantheism."
These sentences betray such a misunderstanding of one of philosophy's basic metaphysical tenets that they call for a reply. We offer the most unstinted praise of Werfel's genius as a novelist and we consider his book The Song of Bernadette one of the finest permanent contributions to modern religio-mystical biography. But Werfel got out of his depth when he attempted to criticize this, the ultimate concept of all possible human concepts about God. For he brought to his thinking, albeit quite unconsciously, all the limitations of his otherwise gifted personality. We must remember that he was primarily a man of imagination, an artist to whom "forms" and "entities" are a necessity in the working of his mind. Consequently the idea of Void, which is Spirit in all its uttermost purity, remained impenetrable to him. To the philosopher, the privation of all things and even thoughts represents the only absolute emancipation from the limits set by matter time space and ego. Therefore it represents the only power which is really infinite and almighty. That is, it represents the only true God. Werfel unconsciously looked for a mental picture in his search for God because only such a picture, together with the ecstatic devotion it arouses, could give him, as an artist, the assurance of a real presence.
Werfel not only was incapable of accepting the concept of the Void but he also did not want to accept it. This was because he was, like so many artists, an emotionalist. Witness in proof of this assertion the three intellectually weak reasons he gives why a Jew should never become a formal convert to Christianity. When analysed, these reasons turn out to be nothing more than mere historical tradition-worship, passionate sentimentality.
-- Notebooks Category 14: The Arts in Culture > Chapter 4 : Reflections On Specific Arts > # 129
