At the Time Wall - Ernst Jünger

Part Four

16

Catastrophe brings man to the point where he is ‘given over to the power of the gods’ and the fateful side of events turns out to be more powerful than the one he plans for and whose shadow he barely notices in good times.

The pessimism that arises after a disaster may be explained by the weakening of willpower, which has been overused. In many ways, however, he sees things more clearly than optimism after success. Pessimism may be limited to a specific case and lead to the idea that the plan was not sufficiently calculated and needs to be thought through more carefully. For example, after the sinking of the Titanic, a number of improvements were made in shipbuilding and navigation, but they did not prevent large ships from sinking again and again.

It can be observed that technological improvements only increased the scale of the disaster, even without taking into account the impact of war. Hence the deep pessimism directed against the form of planning in general as it has developed in our world. The question arises whether this web of human intentions does not need to be penetrated to make it more secure and durable, and whether it cannot be consolidated, deepened, and enclosed by fate.

This is surely the task of religions, which every sane person, even if he does not feel bound by them, will support in great conflicts – for example, where they are left to the atheistic rationalism of the plan in all its arrogance.

We cannot ignore the fact that vast numbers of people of all nations, races, and social classes, including all levels of intelligence, can no longer challenge religions. It is therefore safer to appeal to something deeper than religious affiliation, namely religious instinct. No one can exist without it, and that is why even in the most brilliant minds we can still find a curtain covering the sacred. He who knows this unspoken other, which longs to be named, holds the master key.

To this we must add that religions themselves are less and less able to satisfy the religious instinct, even less than secular authorities. There must be chief reasons for this, especially in the case of all cults, but this is not yet the place to deal with them.