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Surrender and Religion Author(s): Kurt H. Wolff Source: Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1962), pp. 36-50Published by: on behalf of Wiley Society for the Scientific Study of ReligionStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1384091Accessed: 06-10-2015 09:10 UTC

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SURRENDER AND RELIGION * 1

KURT H. WOLFF Department of Sociology

Brandeis University

If religion is faith concerning man's fate, how can this faith find expression

today? This is a historical question: for all that will follow about shedding received notions and holding tradition in abeyance, this tradition, this received notion of the relevance of history, of man's historicity, cannot be done without in assessing surrender and hence its relevance for religion.

There are some expectations, in particular two, that the title of this paper may raise but that are false; they should be dissipated at once. One, there will be no discussion of the social aspects of religion. Nor will there be any compari- son between the analysis of surrender and innumerable extant comments on related phenomena, such as religious or mystical experiences.

* Revision of a paper read at the 21st meet Ing of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Cambridge, Mass., 27 September 1961.

1 Earlier related writings have had the benefit of critical comments by Josephine L. Bur- roughs, Reinhard Bendix, and James N. Spuhler. They are reflected in this paper, and I am grateful for them to their authors. I am also indebted to Gordon W. Allport, Josephine L. Burroughs, Murray Krieger, and Dorothy Lee for very pertinent comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and to students in a Senior Tutorial in Sociology at Brandeis in the Fall of 1961, especially Larry Friedlander, Karl Johnson, Susan Menzer, Charles Nichols, Deb- orah Rothenberg, and Elinor Seidman, for most serious questions on surrender and some of its implications, which I have tried to ac- commodate in a revision of this text.

I

In this late historical phase, when there even is a sense in which we might be past history, or might soon be past history, religion may well appear as the mood embraced in an effort to come to terms with two unanswerable questions-it is the phase in our history in which we know that these questions are unanswerable. The first is: "What am I doing, anyway?" And the shudder of it leads to the second: "Who am I, anyway?" This is to say: what can I truly believe about my fate?

There is an obvious sense, of course, in which these questions can be answered: I am doing this or that, yesterday I did such and such, tomorrow I expect to do so and so; and: I am a man or a woman, so many feet tall, of such and such age, nationality, occupation, religious affiliation. That is, they can be answered as they are understood by common sense and by science; and there are still answers even to causal questions that, in turn, we may ask of these answers that common sense and science give us: why I am doing what I am doing, am as tall as I am, have the occupation I have, and so on-we seek answers to these new questions with the help of various disciplines; and if we do not find them, it is not because there are no answers, but because we do not know enough; it is not because the questions in themselves are unanswerable.

"What am I doing?" and "Who am I ?", however, are unanswerable if we ask, not common-sensically or scientifically,



SURRENDER AND RELIGION 37

but in the sense that alone counts-that so much counts alone that in the light of it, common sense and science emerge as the crutches for our everyday locomo- tion that they are, no matter how indis- pensable for us and how deeply stirring every discovery of their use, and their every use itself, may be.

The sense that alone counts is the sense we all are familiar with but ordinarily, in our need and craving for the routine that is vouchsaved us by common sense and science, wish to avoid. We know this sense whenever we are confronted by the inadequacy of routine-whether this confrontation comes to us as a shock or as a reminder. We may then ask: "What is the meaning of what I am doing? What is the meaning of my being the person that common sense and science can so well describe and explain?" And in trying to answer, we may recall what tradition in religion, philosophy, art has to offer, and rest content. In this case, we have our answers; our questions thus do not strike us as unanswerable. On the other hand, however, we may find that tradition does not provide answers. It may not, because we do not know tradition or relevant tradition. Or-and this is historically the more important case-it may not because, although we know it, we find that if we examine ourselves with all the honesty we can muster, we cannot take it as an answer. The reason why this second case is historically the more important is that, unlike the first, it cannot be remedied by learn- ing: to get acquainted with tradition or relevant tradition will not avail, since we know already but find our knowledge unavailing; we find that tradition is not an answer but a source of new questions, chief among them the question why there is no answer.

In this situation, the questions "What am I doing, anyway?" and "Who am I, anyway?" are indeed unanswerable, and religion may be invented-I use the term advisedly-as the mood embraced in an

effort to come to terms with them. At this time in our history, we may well experience the shock of recognizing that common sense is not only truth universal but a mixture of universal truth and rationalization in its name, which is abus- ed thereby; and that science is not only the extension and systematization of that truth but a mixture of the extended and systematized truth of common sense and the projection of Western metaphysics and history into time and space unquali- fied. Now this second ingredient, this rationalization and projection, in common sense and science have been laid bare. They have been laid bare, first by totalitarianism, a catastrophe out of what for so many looked like a blue sky, and then by the possibility of the sudden and irrevocable end of mankind, which for so many-or perhaps by now for not quite so many any more-looked and looks like the but distantly horrible cloud over Hiroshima, reflected in a sky merely overcast by the tension between the Soviet Union and the United States.

This suggests two things. One, again, a historical meaning of the meaning of religion; and two, this meaning, at a time when there is a significant sense in which tradition will no longer do, as the invention of the search for the invention that enables us to come to terms with the question of the fate of man which the demise of tradition has shown to be unanswerable-with the two questions, "What am I doing?" and "Who am I?"

"Invention" comes from in-venire, to come into, to come upon; and at once, recalling and affirming the meaning of this word, I have recalled and affirmed an element of tradition, gotten hold of a thread that connects this, until a moment ago, discontinuous time with a past time, a past enormous. I have come upon this past, our past. Religion as the invention of the search for the invention: religion as that which has come upon the search, the search for the path



38 SURRENDER AND RELIGION

that comes upon whatever it may be that allows us to come to terms with those unanswerable questions. Yet "to come to terms with" is an anticipatory phrasing: we do not know its terms. It could mean that we are in a position to answer what prior to engaging in the search was unanswerable; in this case, we should find an answer to questions that had appreared unanswerable. But it could also mean that in the search we so transform ourselves as for these questions to disappear, at least in their urgency. In this case, they would no longer haunt us, and from haunted we would have become what we could not antici- pate but would take a chance on finding out only through the search; then we would do what we are doing and be who we are, though we might very well not know it, that is, not be able to answer the questions that sent us on our search; yet we would no longer be haunted by them in their unanswerability.

This search is what I call "surrender," even "unconditional surrender"; I also call it "total experience." But it is very important to realize that these terms apply to any such search-to any such "search for invention," to repeat an awk- ward and thus far perhaps even misleading phrase-not only to the search occa- sioned by running up against the questions of what I am doing and who I am. Nor-and this is saying the same thing from a different perspective-is surrender a religious experience, any more than it is an artistic, philosophical, scientific one; germinally it is all of these, but it is undifferentiated-total, precisely. As a matter of fact, the longer part of this paper will deal with surrender without reference to religion, the occasion that brought it up but will be recognized only toward the end.

II

A man may come upon, may invent, the very notion of surrender on the conviction that he can no longer move tradi-

tionally; if he did, he would continue being true to tradition, however critical he might be; his expereience would build on it, develop it, continue it. But as it is, there is no continuity of tradition; he is thrown back on himself. Yet this self is what he shares with mankind; out of which all tradition, even the crumbled one, has come; and thus, this also is the time when the only hope for tradition to make a new beginning is to be in earnest about its end, rather than thinking of it as a patient who may survive or who may die. To the best of his ability, such a man must suspend it; he must "bracket" received notions.

This itself is a traditional idea: we recall: "Except a corn of wheat ... die it bringeth forth much fruit" (.John 12: 24); or "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life ..., the same shall save it" (Luke 9: 24); or Goethe's

Und so lang du das nicht hast, Dieses: Stirb und werdel Bist du nur ein trfiber Gast Auf der dunklen Erde.2

"And as long as you don't know this: this 'Die and become!,' you are only a dubious guest on this dark earth." And indeed, surrender, whether it be called "conversion," "transformation," "meta- morphosis," "enchantment," "inspiration," "mystical union," "break-through," or however, has been described in the religious literature, philosophy, poetry, and fiction of many periods and cultures. Yes, we know of it; we know it as tradition; but this does not help us because, whatever our questions, tradition is not our answer but only its own, St. John's, St. Luke's, or the Bible's or the New Testament's, or Goethe's, whose ever. We have to invent our own, and we shall not be able to, except in awareness that we have no answer in tradition.

2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Selige Sehnsucht" (1814).




Follow a few, almost random descrip- tions of instances of surrender, even though neither they nor additional ones could insure the conveyance of its meaning. The reason is that instances can always be argued: "All that can be proved can also be disputed," as Georg Simmel said; "Only the unprovable is indisputable. "3

The first passage is from C. P. Snow's novel The Search:

Then I was carried beyond pleasure... My own triumph and delight and success were there, but they seemed insignificant beside this tranquil ecstasy. It was as though I had looked for a truth outside myself, and finding it had become for a moment part of the truth I sought; as though all the world, the atoms and the stars, were wonderfully clear and close to me, and I to them, so that we were part of a lucidity more tremendous than any mystery.

I had never known that such a moment could exist....

Since then I have never quite regained it. But one effect will stay with me as long as I live; once, when I was young, I used to sneer at the mystics who have described the experience of being at one with God and part of the unity of things. After that afternoon, I did not want to laugh again; for though I should have interpreted the experience differ- ently, I thought I knew what they meant.4 Here is a scientist who experiences

what he calls "tranquil ecstasy," resulting from the fact, as we are told imme- diately before the passage quoted, that an important experiment of his had been confirmed. But, really, we do not know, and the narrator may not know, whether

it was this confirmation that resulted in the tranquil ecstasy that made him understand experiences reported by mystics: might it not instead have led to pleasure, satisfaction, joy, a feeling of triumph, or many other things? The narrator was not seeking surrender but was surprised, taken, sought, caught by it; it was unexpected, nor did he expect its result, or the result he reports, the understanding of the mystic. He did not reflect on received notions, on traditions, and elaborate; it was a total experience: there was no manifest connection with his previous life, and what other con- nections he discovered were unanticipat- ed. There was something new.

The second report comes from a wholly different source, Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn:

As I passed the doorman holding the torn stub in my hand, the lights were dimmed and the curtain went up. I stood a moment slightly dazed by the sudden darkness. As the curtain slowly rose I had the feeling that throughout the ages man had always been mysteriously stilled by this brief moment which preludes the spectacle. I could feel the curtain rising in man ... I was standing in my own presence bathed in a luminous reality. I turned my eyes away from the stage and beheld the marble staircase which I should take to go to my seat in the balcony. I saw a man slowly mounting the steps, his hand laid across the balustrade. The man could have been myself, the old self which had been sleepwalking ever since I was born. My eye didn't take in the entire staircase, just the few steps which the man had climbed or was climbing in the moment that I took it all in. The man never reached the top of the stairs and his hand was never removed from the marble balustrade. I felt the curtain descend and for another few moments I was behind the scenes moving amidst the sets, like the property man suddenly roused from his sleep and not sure whether he is still dreaming or looking at a dream which is being enacted on the stage .... I saw only that which was alivel the rest faded out

8 Georg Simmel, Fragmente und Aufsdtze aus dem Nachlass und Veroffentlichungen der letz- ten Jahre, ed. Gertrud Kantorowicz, Munich, 1923, p. 4; quoted in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans., ed. and with an introduction by Kurt H. Wolff, Glencoe, Illinois, 1950, p. xx.

4 C. P. Snow, The Search (1934, 1958), Signet Books, 1960, pp. 112-113.




in a penumbra. And it was in order to keep the world alive that I rushed home without waiting to see the performance and sat down to describe the little patch of staircase which is imperishable5. "I was standing in my own presence

bathed in a luminous reality. ... I saw only that which was alivel ... And it was in order to keep the world alive that I rushed home... and sat down to describe the little patch of staircase which is imperishable. " Here is another aspect of surrender: the encounter with indubit- able reality that must be held on to lest the world perish. Again, there was no reason, intelligible to the experiencer, why the vision of that patch of staircase should be at once the occasion and the consummation of surrender, nor any expectation that resulting from it should be the encounter with that compelling reality-any more than why in the previous example its result should have been to understand the mystic's experience of being at one with God.

What may be called the ostensive occasion of surrender in the third example, taken from James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is the contempla- tion of a lamp.

The light in this room is of a lamp. Its flame in the glass is of the dry, silent and famished delicateness of the latest lateness of the night, and of such ultimate, such holiness of silence and peace that all on earth and within extremest remembrance seems suspended upon it in perfection as upon reflective water: and I feel that if I can by utter quietness succeed in not dis- turbing this silence, in not so much as touch- ing this plain of water, I can tell you anything within realm of God, whatsoever it may be, that I wish to tell you, and that what so ever it may be, you will not be able to help but understand it.6

What is new here, or at least was not explicit in the two previous examples, is the experiencer's certainty of full communication with his fellow men: as long as his experience lasts, he can convey anything, and he who listens cannot help but understand. Man, whoever he may be, when thrown back on what he really is, is thrown back on what he shares with mankind.

III

This is extraordinary, however; it is not routine. Ordinarily, man is not thrown back on himself but lives by habit and tradition, viable or vicarious; precisely, by routine. As Hugo von Hof- mannsthal put it: "The whole soul is never one, save in ecstasy." "Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced. "7 Why this should be so is answered by S0ren Kierkegaard: the reason is that "a self, every instant it exists, is in process of becoming, for the self ... does not actually exist, it is only that which it is to become."8 Both Hof- mannsthal and Kierkegaard, however different in other respects, converge on finding man ordinarily scattered, dispersed, variously and unevenly engaged, whereas in surrender, in total experience, all his aspects, characteristics, poten- tialities fuse into one, this one the actual person, the self, that is merely foreshadow- ed in the scatter. Thus, surrendering, I become what otherwise I am only potentially, although, as Kierkegaard says, this state is never reached definitively. In total experience I come (relatively) to be, while ordinarily I only act, function, operate.

5 Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (1939), Paris, 1952, pp. 296-297.

6 James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Boston, 1960, p. 51.

7 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Buch der Freunde: Tagebuch-Aufzeichnungen (1922), in Selected Prose, trans. Mary Hottinger and James Stern, introduction by Hermann Broch, New York, 1952, p. 356.

8 S0ren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (1849), trans. with an introduction by Walter Lowrie, Princeton, 1941, p. 44.




Similarly, Ortega y Gasset. "Life," he writes,

is a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his "ideas" are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.9

That is to say, "ideas" that stand between man and his surrender; causes or contents, received notions, traditions that vitiate surrender because they are not suspended or "bracketed"-such ideas are "not true." The implication, of course, is that ideas may be true: namely, when they exist, not as hindrances or conditions of surrender, not against surrender, but in spite of it-as I cannot help but trust does the idea of man's historicity-or if they exist because of surrender, emerging from it, arising out of it. In this last case, they are not so much ideas in the customary or even the proper sense of the term as what may be called finds or, indeed, inventions. They are the catch of the surrender-they are caught or found, "come upon," "come into," "invented." And in fact, here is how the passage from Ortega continues:

As this is the simple truth-that to live is to feel oneself lost-he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolu- tely sincere, because it is a question of his sal- vation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked.10

IV

Now, as to some of the meanings of "surrender. "

First, the word itself. It has a military connotation, "unconditional surrender" referring to military defeat; and there is the sound of passivity, of "giving up." Let us try substitute words that may come to mind. Would "abandonment" do? No; it suggests a dissoluteness that is quite alien to surrender. "Exposure?" But this has a gratuitous ring of exhibition- ism. "Devotion" or "dedication ? " But these limit the meaning of surrender to an attitude and inappropriately introduce a moral note. "Penetration?" But this is misleading in its masculinity and in its failure to indicate devotion or dedication, the involvement of the whole person. "Laying oneself open" or "laying the cards on the table?" But these, too, tell only part of the story; the one, un- conditionality; the other, honesty. "Sur- render" seems best. It is a rich word, connoting some of the meanings of the terms just reviewed and some other meanings, including, precisely in its military connotation, a fine ironical one that has to do with politics and, once again,with our moment in history.

The seminal meaning of "surrender" is "cognitive love," in the sense in which this term is redundant for "love"-"The act of love is, like the act of faith, a surrender; and I believe that the one conditions the other."11 This meaning of cognitive love is seminal because all the other meanings grow from it.12 Major among them are: total involvement, suspension of received notions, pertinence of everything, identification, and risk of being hurt.'3

9 Josd Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930), Mentor Books, p. 115.

10 Ibid., p. 116; my italics.

11 Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate (1959) Dell, 1960, p. 319.

12 In the following exposition of them, I have been much stinmulated by an unpublished me- morandum (August, 1951) by David Bakan, "Some Elaborations of the Meaning of the Concept of Surrender."

13 The first four have close parallels to some of the criteria for a mature reli-

gion developed by Gordon W. Allport in




-(1) Total Involvement.-In surrender man becomes totally involved, involved undifferentiatedly and indistinguishably, with himself, with his act or state, and with his object or partner-just as when we say that the lover is totally involved in his love, the phrase undifferentiatedly and indistinguishably refers to the lover himself, to the act or state, and to his beloved. "Then for the first time," Tolstoy wrote of Levin and Kitty in Anna Karenin, "he clearly understood ... that he was not simply close to her, but that he could not tell where he ended and she began."'14 In both surrender and love, differentiation between subject, act, and object disappears-an example of the suspension of even essential categories among our received notions.'5

But does total involvement not drive the person who would know almost ir- resistibly into error? Does not love make blind? The answers to these questions are in the negative; but the questions warn us not to confuse surrender with

fanaticism, dogmatism, giving in to the "need for closure"; and love, with infat- uation-"love," to repeat, must be understood as short for "cognitive love," which makes one see, not blind.

Like love, surrender is a state of high tension or concentration, an undifferentiated state in which "anything can happen." But as far as the surrenderer is concerned, whatever may happen brings him closer to what he potentially is. The painter who surrenders as he paints, for instance, may find his catch to be (among any number of other things) a new painting; or the insight that he is not really a painter but rather a scientist; or a scientific paper. If surrender, becoming what one potentially is, means such change as in the latter two instances, we speak of conversion, which may be a catch of surrender. Otherwise the observation applies that the artist is a less unconditional surrenderer than the ordinary man. The reason is that, unlike the ordinary man, he surrenders as a maker, as one who makes a work of art; and this puts a severe qualification on his surrender.

Obviously, the surrenderer who has faith that, surrendering, he may know, would betray the very idea of surrender, as well as his own act of surrendering, if he gave up his faith in case he should find that his catch is something other than what he would previously have called knowledge. In order to ascertain what it is, he must inspect it; and surrender must be distinguished from testing the catch. At this stage in the process of knowing-when he examines his catch- he ends the suspension of received notions that characterizes the earlier stage, surrender itself, and tests as many of them for their bearing on his catch, and vice versa, as he can.

Surrender and discussion of it, such as this, are, of course, two different things. But a moment's reflection on the fact that there is a relation between them will bring out a further characteristic of the cognitive component of surrender.

his The Individual and His Religion, New York, 1950; see especially Chapter III.

14 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin (1878), trans. Rosemary Edmonds, Penguin Books, 1954, p. 508.

15 Cf. the description of the "fourth state of" Vedantic "understanding" in Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India, ed. Joseph Campbell (1951), Meridian Books, 1956, pp. 432-433.- There is a particular dimension of involvement that can here only be recorded, not examined. It is the certainty of full communication refer- red to in the passage from James Agee. It may occur, presumably, both in surrender in the presence of another person and in the recall of one's surrender vis-A-vis another person and other persons. The phenomenon calls for the analysis of the change in the relation between the surrenderer or recaller and the other, as well as the others, and of the nature of that other and those others. It is a clue to the relevance of surrender for social organization, which I can merely signal in this paper (see in text below).




That is to say, one can push talking about surrender to the point of engaging in a collective experiment with surrender -for instance, in the classroom. In this case, the catch of the surrender is a method brought into the everyday world. The peculiarity of this method, however, is that it is oriented, is open, toward its own origin; that at any time it may doubt itself, be ready to abandon itself, to return to the ground from which it sprang, in short, to retransform itself into surrender. It thus is self-correcting and, therefore, in the spirit, of the essence, of knowledge.

(2) Suspension of Received Notions.- We just reminded ourselves that in surrender, man suspends, to the best of his ability, his belief in received notions that he thinks may in any way bear on his exploration-that in surrender he finds that, to the best of his ability, his received notions get suspended. His belief in them here refers to the plausibility of theories, the appropriateness of con- cepts, the validity of assumptions and gen- eralizations, and the like. He does not know, and finds it wholly irrelevant to ask, whether whatever it may be he is exploring is something to which his received notions of whatever sort are adequate-only his catch, if anything, will tell him. He tries to pull himself up by his own boot straps; he is in an "extreme situation"; he cannot distinguish between doubt and certainty, truth and falsehood, getting closer to his catch and moving away from it, between fact and theory, hypothesis, metaphor, image, poetry, and many other things that are ordinarily distinguished with great plausibility; above all, he does not know whether he knows, whether he is, one might put it, under duress or under necessity. This is another meaning of the observation that surrender is an undifferentiated state-except, again, in the artist's case, for the differentiation in- jected into his surrender by the element of making. At any rate, when some sort of order reappears, the person knows that

he is emerging from surrender, and as he emerges, he tries to recognize what differentiation there is.

(3) Pertinence of Everything.-In love, the lover finds anything about his beloved of interest; in surrender, man assumes all that comes to his attention to be pertinent. One of the difficulties of com- ing up to the expectation that this characteristic of surrender involves lies in keep- ing pace with what comes to one's attention, in recording it.

At the same time, there is in love and in surrender exclusive concentration: on the beloved and on the moment of surrender-all else disappears. "Everything is pertinent" thus also entails the loss of all that does not emerge as "everything," which in its quantity-but quantity is irrelevant-is overwhelming. It would appear that to open oneself re- quires or entails that all but that toward which opening occurs be shut off; but also, that the experience of love or surrender, of opening oneself, enlarges one's capacity to love, to surrender, to open oneself, that it makes one more sensitive, more aware.

Since received notions, including theory, select, to say that everything is pertinent is another way of saying that received notions are suspended-and in both vers- ions, it is essential to recall the addition: "to the best of the surrenderer's ability." Suspension of received notionF and pro- cedure on the assumption that everything is pertinent are relative to the surrenderer: he is more or less capable to "let go," "lay himself open," perceive, notice, reflect on-as just one example, compare Freud's self-analysis with probably most other people's.

(4) Identification.-"Surrender" also connotes "identification"-identification with whatever or whomever the surrenderer feels he surrenders to. "Identifica- tion" is a problem, on the one hand, in psychology, including the psychology of love-as well as in love itself; on the other, in hermeneutics generally. Within our




present context, we have to say only that identification must be understood or construed-analytically, not psycholo- gically-as the aim of surrender, but not of the catch. It cannot be the aim of the catch, because if it were, the surrend- derer would not want to know but, indeed, to identify, become assimilated, go native, or otherwise change-as far as any knowledge for others is concerned, simply change, without any accretion to their knowledge. The surrenderer who wants to know must examine his catch so that he can tell others about it (here it is relevant to remember the quotation from James Agee); if identification itself were the catch, he could not. The lover must lose himself to find himself, not to lose himself.

(5) Risk of Being Hurt.-This last meaning is distinguished from the previous ones for two reasons. One is that it applies not only to surrender but also to action on insight gained in surrender, to action on the catch. The other is obvious, namely that it applies to experiences and activities other than surrender and catch: I may get hurt on any number of accasions, for any number of reasons. Still, the risk of being hurt is a meaning of surrender: since the person who can surrender can and wants to change, he is willing to sustain injury. And in both surrendering and acting on the catch, he may be hurt in various ways, the risks having their sources in various dimensions of the person. Above all, perhaps, they have their sources in his orientation, including what he may hold to be his fundamental assumptions; in his defenses; and in his social relations, including his prestige and his relations to various persons variously connected with him. Surrender thus involves the danger of what may be called orienta- tional injuries, defense injuries, and social injuries. Yet the surrenderer con- ceives of these and others as signs of further insight and involvement. These injuries come, or threaten to come, not

from any desire to be hurt or to hurt, not from any desire to hurt, whether himself or others. Surrender has nothing to do with masochism or sadism, even though the passive ring of the term might suggest the former, while one of its cog- nates, "penetration," could connote the latter. Here, again, we do well to recall the lover: he, too, is bound to take risks of being hurt in many ways.

Finally, as to the irony of "surrender": it is, simply, its opposition to our official contemporary Western, and potentially worldwide, consciousness, in which the relation to the world is not surrender but mastery, control, efficiency, handling, manipulation. This relation is "virile," rather than womanly, which is another connotation of "surrender": we tend to think of woman, not of man, as surrendering, as giving-if man does, he for- feits his virility, he becomes effeminate. Among other implications, "surrender" thus has both a sexual and a political one, and much of the thrust of either lies in its combination with the other. The first points to a redefinition of man and woman and their relation, including love, but not only love; among the many kindred names that come to mind here, D. H. Lawrence's is perhaps most obvious and important. The second, the political implication, points to a redefinition of politics-if a quick, big leap be per- mitted, it may be said that it points to its redefinition through an analysis of the possibilities of nonviolence at this time in our history. The combination of the two, sexual and political, urges, if it does not yield, a more general inter- pretation of our time, whereby important insights into the relations between sex and politics by such writers as the early Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, or Herbert Marcuse, Erik H. Erikson, and Norman A. Brown would be most pertinent. In any event, the irony of "surrender" as a "revolutionary idea," that is, one born out of surrender itself, lies ini its appearing to be merely "subversive. "




v

I said that the idea of surrender has been invented; that we live in a time when religion is invented as the mood embraced in an effort to come to terms with the unanswerable questions of what I am doing and who I am; that "invention" comes from invenire; and, in com- menting on the first passage from Ortega, that ideas are true when they are the catch of surrender, when they are come upon, come into, invented, There is more to "invention." It is, as we have just repeated, synonymous with "catch". But as "surrender" has a feminine connotation, "invention" has a masculine one (as does "penetrate," we recalled). Yet "to come into," most poignantly in the tabooed "come," referring to the orgasm of man and woman, has a bi-sexual flavor: it is the same that "surrender" intends, even though it does not have it in linguistic custom. And if we remember another near-synonym that I mentioned casually-"break-through"-we realize two other connotations of "surrender," one neutral as to sex, the other bisexual. The first is that of triumph or conquest, namely, of the forces, whether in the environment or the person himself, that obstruct surrender, that prevent man from becoming what he potentially is. The other is that of victory over limitations, the breaking down of the wall, of this or that prohibition, claim, requirement, de- mand; saying Yes where the non-self, the other-than-self, says No, and No where it says Yes-it is the feeling, the experience, of "Lift up your heads, 0 ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in" (Psalm 24: 7).

Yet in "invention," the catch, there is a masculine bias, as compared with the bisexuality of "surrender" or "break- through," the love that precedes it. And there is a reason for this. Its clue lies in the synonymity of "invention" and "catch," the result of surrender, sur-

render transformed, love transformed, in- to the object "catch" or "invention." If surrender is being, its transformation into a result, into an object, partakes of making. If it is thinking (to use a distinc- tion made and made much of by Hannah Arendt'6) -and here we must also recall the affective component of thinking -then to catch or invent also and necessarily partakes of communicating. But to make, to communicate, and to engage in such closely related activities as organizing (if only "organizing my thoughts", presenting, clarifying, fashioning, polish- ing, and the like, are, as Arendt points out, essentially the activities of homo faber, man the maker, who has been historically, and is perhaps more than historically, a man, not a woman. "Invention" and "catch" do indeed belong to the same image of man against whose mastering, controlling, efficient, handling, manipula- tory aspects surrender argues. They do not, however, and probably cannot, argue against the universally human source of the phenomena to which they refer- making: whatever else men and women have always and everywhere done, they have made things. Making may or may not be man's male principle, or one of them.

Man, the being who can surrender and catch or invent, is inventive, as well as capable of being invented. It follows that we can answer the question: What phenomena should man expect to do justice to only by invention, rather than, say, by describing, defining, or transform- ing into crosspoints of uniformities? The answer is: man -in contrast to all other objects in the universe-to whom, in in his inventiveness and inventedness, he, in his own, that is to say, every single individual in his own inventiveness and inventedness, can never fully relate by description, definition, or translation into a point on no matter how multidimen-

16 In Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, 1958.




sional a matrix of uniformities. Nor can he in this fashion ever fully relate to that which is characteristic of any man, including himself: to his inventions, to their occasions, to his ideas born out of surrender, to his efforts to surrender and catch, to the record of these efforts. Thus, man and that which is characteristic of man are the phenomena man can expect to do justice to only by invention, by surrender and catch-as we see in this phase of our history.

Yet surrender, of course, cannot be commanded-it may, or may not, occur on any occasion. If it does not on the occasion, say, of a landscape, the landscape is not hurt; but if it does not on the occasion of a person, both that person and the non-surrenderer are hurt, if only in com- parison with who they might have become had it occurred. Thus there is continual hurt among human beings, and the desire to reduce it infuses reverence, charity, and faith regarding man and men, and curiosity as to what I can honestly hold about man and men.

This consideration can lead from surrender as an individual phenomenon- which is its only aspect explored in this paper-to the light that surrender throws on social organization. I can only men- tion three other, very heterogeneous avenues that yet point in the same direc- tion. If I hold, as in honesty I must, that I can accept somebody's ideas as true only if my surrender confirms them -if they are my catch-then how is society possible? And: there is a sense, that calls for elucidation, in which the catch of love is the child. Finally: how must social science and social philosophy be revised in the light of the idea of surrender ?

As "invention" is a synonym of "catch," "total experience," as I have mentioned, is a synonym of "surrender." We have seen that the military connotation of "surrender" actually implies a polemic against the official contemporary consciousness of control. Similarly, the as-

sociation of "total" with "totalitarianism" is directed against the latter, which is so intimately related to that consciousness. Nor do such other predicates of ''experience" as ''crucial," "critical," ''ger- minal," and the like convey one of the salient characteristics of total experiences, their undifferentiatedness, their suspension of all previous classification. Hence the name.

By realizing the political, historical relevance of "total," we are once more being drawn into politics and history. Just as our official consciousness is opposed to surrender as the relation to the world, so it also has all but lost any meaning of "total" or "absolute" except as terror, the terror that millions of human beings have experienced under totalitarianism, and the rumors of that terror that has poisoned, and been planted in, even larger populations. Total experiences and their designation by this term oppose to terror, to this monstrous caricature of the absolute, ridiculously and horribly enacted by the secret police, magnified in atomic explosion, lived through, and not, in the attrition of concentration -and slave-labor camps, and felt and sensed in untraceably many, even untraceable, forms-total experiences oppose to all this an image of man for whom the absolute is not only terror but also home, for whom "extreme situation" calls forth not only his death but also his greatness.

The fear of the total or absolute is very much older than its objectification in totalitarianism and its totalitarian organization. We do not have to go far back, however, to meet it, for instance, in the fear of not being elect, of not being "at one with God," in the distrust of everyting less than God, in the fascina- tion for this very reason by everything less than God; later, and until and very much now, in the obsession with control, mastery, disposal, with all their discontent, that I have mentioned before. In our largely unacknowledged or suppressed desire for totality-for that which is cer-




itan, necessary, absolute, incontroverti- ble-we are afraid of not finding it. In our wavering between the terror of despair and the ease of numbness that we cannot really accept, we have long been feeding on the partial, uncertain, con- tingent, relative, disprovable, changing, comparative, different. We may thus have lost the courage, even the idea, of total experience, of unconditional surrender, and instead of attaining it, union, fusion, oneness, are adjusted, neurotic, in-sane, suicidal. It is the feeling of total experience that is total; its catch, its cognitive yield, can never exhaust the experience, but only approximate it. The experience recedes from the surrenderer like water from the net, and challengeshim to explore it, to invent. This is because, in Erich Frank's words, "'what can be comprehended is not yet God.' [And] thus it may be permissible to make the paradoxical statemant that the real proof of God is the agonized attempt to deny God."''7 Or in Paul Tillich's words: "The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."'8 Once more: in total experience, in surrender, there is the dialectic of "die and become."

VI

We have just come to a point in our discussion of surrender, invention, total experience, where we have found it ap- propriate to quote two passages on modern man's relation to God. These passages are couched in what our tradition has it are religious terms; they recall received religious notions. Some people may indeed want to talk about surrender in this mode; they may wish to interpret it in what to them are religious terms. But, once more: interpreting surrender

is not the same as surrendering; we must not lose sight of this difference. We must also recall that surrender, since it is a total experience, cannot be identified with a religious experience, any more than with an artistic, aesthetic, philosophical, moral, scientific, or any other differentiated one. These presumably refer to experiences in which a person, suddenly or slowly, comes to grasp the meaning, essence, nature, or an aspect, element, an implication of art, beauty or ugliness, philosophy, good or evil, science, and so on. He has an illumination concerning these things, which are the occasions or the catch of his surrender; but surrender itself is not limited to any of them; it would not be surrender if it were; nor, as we have seen before, is the connection between occasion and catch necessarily or even probably traceable-certainly not to the experiencer himself.

No, the relation between surrender aud religion is not clarified by entertaining the notion that surrender is a religious experience; on the contrary, this is a dead end. We must take another road. Let us start equipped with two obser- vations that we have made before and that are more closely related to one another than we have thus far seen. One we have just recalled: that surrender involves the dialectic of "die and become"; the other was that it involves the risk of being hurt. We go from here. As a total experience, surrender involves all that is negative, such as uncertainty, danger, evil-and the negative, surely, is not exhausted by the dangers of orien- tational injuries, defense injuries, and social injuries that were mentioned. There is more to the negative than these dangers. Above all, there is the danger of false surrender, which is to say, surrender to an idea or cause that makes surrender conditional on it, on achieving it or merely becoming accustomed to it-an idea or cause which, for this reason, is "not true." It is not, because it has not been invented, but was there prior to surrender, was not

17 Erich Frank, Philosophical Understanding aid Religious Truth, London, New York, Toronto, 1945, p. 43.

18 Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be, New Haven, 1952, p. 190.




"suspended" or "bracketed." It was no catch; rather, it had not been let go. Thus, "surrender to an idea or a cause" is false surrender because it is not surrender, is not unconditional surrender.

But now we must ask: how unconditional can unconditional surrender be? What does it mean to say that it involves the "whole" person? I am not now asking this question in its psychological sense, which refers to a person's maturity, strength, and similar attributes. Nor am I raising an epistemological question concerning, say, the distribution of a person's notions of the world between, on the one hand, his view of the world and, on the other, the world's structure in- dependent of this view. All I have sug- gested in my discussion of surrender that is of epistemological relevance has been my stress on the undifferentiated nature of this experience, which also refers of course, to the disappearance in it of the separation between subject and object (as I indicated before) or between knower and known; and this would suggest a Kantian or neo-Kantian, rather than a Humian, view of epistemology. No, what I am asking now is to what extent it is possible for any person at all to shed his received notions: does he not consist of these notions, do they not make him what he is? Does "unconditional surrender" not suddenly look like disintegration, like in-sanity? How can I say that its seminal meaning is cognitive love; that in surrender I am thrown back on myself; that in it and through it I become what otherwise I am only potentially; that in surrender I am, while ordinarily I only act, function, operate; and, even, that what I am thrown back on in surrender is that which I share with mankind? Am I insane in denying that surrender is insanity and, on the contrary, affirming that it is sanation?

The danger of false surrender can be avoided-in anticipation, by thinking about it, and, in retrospect, by new surrender. But now we have moved from

considering the danger of false surrender to recognizing the danger of surrender itself-and this danger, of course, cannot be avoided in the ways the other can. The disintegration, the insanity of the person cannot be avoided by realizing that in surrendering he risks it, but only, or so it seems, by avoiding surrender itself. But I have tried to show the urgency of surrender in the breakdown of tradition. Thus, on the one hand, it seems that we must avoid surrender like the fire of insanity; on the other, we crave it like the balm of sanation. How resolve this paradox of our historical situation? How withstand and overcome this dilemma?

The answer is: by faith; by the very faith that is the catch of surrender, whatever else its catch may be, because it is confirmed by surrender, being the one element of tradition-I do not call it a received notion-that the surrenderer cannot bracket; if he did, he would indeed disintegrate, cease to be, instead of be, as he has the faith that in surrender he may, rather than not. It is the faith that in surrender I become what otherwise I am only potentially; I am while ordinarily I only act, function, operate; and being thrown back on myself, I share what I am thrown back on with mankind.

The idea of surrender is a traditional idea, is among our received notions, and we recalled one of its expressions: "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life..., the same shall save it. " There was an omission, however, from the second part of this quotation: we did not recall the words "for my sake." Let us now con- sider this clause. It suggests that if life is to be saved, it must be lost to a cause. If we posit this cause as surrender itself we realize that "surrender" is not only an experience but also an attitude which seeks that experience. It then becomes tautologous and inconsequential to say that the cause, which is surrender, makes surrender conditional on it, on man's achieving it or merely becoming accus-




tomed to it. But even without identifying the cause of Christ with surrender, the understanding still is that the cause does not vitiate surrender, because it is capable of being invented in surrender, of being its catch, no matter how unconditional its initial suspension may be; it is an idea born out of surrender, an "idea of the shipwrecked." The reason is that the person who surrenders to this cause moves on the faith in surrender. In its essence this faith may be formulated as faith in surrender because of faith in man as the being that can surrender and catch.

This faith, and the catch of surrender on it alone, and not on any other element of tradition, are the phenomena that in this stage of man's history articulate themselves as that which is common to mankind. Ideas born out of surrender on this faith thus assume, and by assuming prove, man's continuity and fellowship, just as their acceptance reflects the conviction of man's continuity and fellowship. On the other hand, faith is not possible in ideas not born out of surrender: such ideas are not true, making surrender conditional on them and thus impossible, because they are incapable of being invented in surrender, since they are incompatible with faith in surrender and in man as the being that can surrender and catch. They are, therefore, incapable of being tested in new surrender, of standing up before an attitude that seeks surrender; they are incompatible with the conviction of man's continuity and fellowship.

This faith that is the basis of surrender is religious, that is, faith concerning man's fate. The confession of this faith in the attainability of surrender and catch is made with "fear and trembling," because it is made as it must try to find the thin rope between-to use traditional terms -the pride of the belief of being in grace and the sin of despair; between assuming one's surrender to be as close to surrender as possible, and giving up.

Why should I have this faith in sur-

render, in which man becomes what he potentially is, if ordinarily he is "scattered, dispersed, variously and unevenly engaged?" Why should my faith not be based on man in his ordinary mode? Why ought man to be what he potentially is? The answer is my conviction that scatter, and failure and refusal to surrender, are not part of the essence of man because I cannot honestly regard them as part of my own essence. I can act as if they were, and may indeed so act all my life, or almost all my life, but I cannot defend them by insight, by my feeling at its most honest, and I am convinced of the reality or truth of immediate feeling. It is this conviction which allows me to distinguish, for instance, between a neurotic act and an act that is true to myself; or, perhaps, between an idea born out of "capture"- the "catch" as that which I "capture"- and one born out of surrender.

I may examine my faith by observing how good a witness to it I am, how often and on what kinds of occasions I can remain true to myself, rather than giving in to the temptation of refusing to surrender. A perfect saint, such as has never lived, would never be tempted. The number and kinds of occasions in the face of which I can remain true may well increase with each occasion in the face of which I have remained true. If this is so, it might suggest that I aproach sainthood as I accumulate instances of surrender. But the only thing that mat- ters about such a vista is that I must not strive for sainthood. If I did, I would contradict the very meaning of surrender, which is to what I potentially am but do not know, but have faith in being able to surrender to. Surrender to the aim of sainthood would be submission to a fixed rule, to a content or cause, which, making surrender conditional on achieving it, destroys surrender. Saint- hood worthy of man is not striven for but invented, the catch of surrender. The question of how good a witness to




my faith I am thus must not mean un- worthy fear concerning my sainthood, but the fear concerning my being true to myself, to my immediate feeling.

This, then, is the relation between religion and surrender. Surrender is ground- ed in the faith in surrender and in man as the being that is capable of surrender and catch-in a faith that tries to steer clear of the pride of believing to be in grace and of the sin of despair. This faith is based, in turn, on the conviction that surrender is of the essence of man and that I therefore must engage in it-a conviction accompanied by the fear lest I act less appropriately on it, be less of a witness to it, be less true to myself and thus to man than, surrendering, I know that I ought to and can.

Hence we can clarify the meaning of what I said in the beginning: that in this phase of our history, religion is invented as the mood embraced in an effort to come to terms with two questions that we have learned are unanwerable,

what I am doing, and who I am-in short, with the question of man's fate. We recognize religion as faith concerning man's fate, and surrender, rather than tradition, as that act which we must engage in, as that state we must strive for, if we would know. But this is to say that we must invent. We know that we must come upon, but we do not know what.19

19 After writing this paper, I read Paul Til- lich's Dynamics of Faith (1957; Harper Torch- book, 1958), which contains many thoughts strikingly similar to those that I have tried to express here. Among the major differences between Tillich's discussion of faith and mine of surrender are the much lighter weight Tillich gives to the historical, political, and social components of his view of faith than I give to them in my view of surrender, and his failure to bracket Protestantism. For further aspects of the relations between sur- renderand religion, Tillich's is a most important statement

COMMENT HANS HOFMANN

Harvard Divinity School

The reader of the foregoing article must constantly remind himself that Kurt

Wolff speaks here of surrender in a very specific sense, different from what is com- monly meant by surrender. The reader who wants to understand Wolff fully in order to reap the complete benefit of his insights and conclusions must resolutely suspend or surrender his own, traditional notions of surrender. As the author has explicitly assured me, he believes and implies in his article that surrender is in itself mean- ingful, unconditioned by anything that precedes or follows from it, as surrender is equally unconditioned by the circum- stances in which it takes place. This means that surrender, in Wolff's sense, is not determined by what is sur-

rendered, why it is surrendered, or to what end it is surrendered. Surrender, for Wolff, authenticates itself and is its own judge.

Since, in this article, Professor Wolff has related his kind of surrender to religion, the reader must also become clear in regard to what Wolff means by religion. He has told me that when he speaks positively of religion, he thinks of a kind of a mystical experience-its catch being an attitude of surrender which escapes and defies doctrinal and cultic explica- tion. Hence, such a religion does not lend itself well to becoming organized or institutionalized.

Naturally, it is difficult for someone trained as a Christian systematic theo- logian to respond congenially to this



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