Adolf Holl - The Left Hand of God: A Biography of the Holy Spirit

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The composition of this work was begun in December 1993 and completed in December 1996. The epigraph on is taken from Adolf Holl, Wie ich ein Priester wurde, warum Jesus dagegen war und was dabei herausgekommen ist (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1992), p.59.

A N I MAGE B OOK
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The Left Hand of God was originally published in hardcover by Doubleday in November 1998.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the 1998 Doubleday hardcover edition as follows:
Holl, Adolf.
[Linke Hand Gottes. English]
The left hand of God: a biography of the Holy Spirit /by Adolf Holl; translated from the German by John Cullen.
p. cm.
1. Holy SpiritControversial literature. I. Title.
BT123.H6513 1998
231.3dc21 98-17994

eISBN: 978-0-307-81972-7
Copyright 1997 by Adolf Holl;
first published in the German language by List Verlag, Munich, Germany
English translation copyright 1998 by John Cullen

v3.1

Anyone who lays hands on a work written in one language and wrests from it a version written in another is glad of an opportunity to annotate, to explain, to compensate for inadequacies, to hedge his bets. The Left Hand of God, a densely packed and wide-ranging book, offers ample grounds for expatiation, but I shall mention only a couple of essential points.

The first of these is linguistic. In German, the Holy Spirit is called der Heilige Geist. As one might suspect, Geist is akin to the English word ghost, but neither spirit nor ghost, though possible translations, adequately reflects the spectrum of meanings that Geist has in German. These include mind, intellect, and wit, and thus the French esprit is a better rendering of Geist than any single word that English supplies. Geist has dispirited many translators from the GermanHegels Phnomenologie des Geistes, for example, has been Englished as both Phenomenology of Mind and Phenomenology of Spiritand one can but ask the reader to bear in mind the broader range of the original German word that is here generally rendered as spirit.

The second point concerns sources, attributions, and notes. Though his documentation is quite meticulous, Adolf Holl, like many European writers, makes very sparing use of quotation marks, and the reader must often guess which words are the authors own and which are those of the source hes quoting. Furthermore, Dr. Holl frequently follows a practice common in Catholic writings: he telescopes or conflates passages from his sources, sometimes making what he refers to in his notes as a montage, and he paraphrases many authors, including biblical ones. I have tried to indicate all directly quoted, unaltered citations by putting them within quotation marks or (less often) italicizing or indenting them; but all montages, conflations, rearrangements, paraphrases, and the like have been allowed to stand without indication in the body of the text, as they do in the original. While there is no separate bibliography, complete bibliographical information on each of the works cited appears in the Source Notes.

John Cullen, May 3, 1998

But when it calls,

theres only one thing to do.

In such cases

an answer is always expected.

for P.S.

FOR ANY HALFWAY SIGNIFICANT GOD ,
a thousand years pass in a trice. And therefore accounts of
the lives of particular divinitiesexamples of a forgotten
literary genremust necessarily range over longer periods of time
than what is required for biographies of historical figures.

The aretalogists, as those who wrote descriptions of the gods used to be called, did not wish to organize their material in a sequence of events passing from birth to death; they favored a thematic arrangement that followed the various well-known manifestations of the mighty divinity in whose honor they were writing.

Admittedly this pattern overlooks the fact that the world of the gods, too, is subject to the law of mortality. A walk into the nearest museum will show the dead gods whom nobody worships anymore. No one, therefore, can describe gods successfully without taking into account their origin and their passing.

It was granted to few divinities to move beyond the narrow provincialism of their beginnings and into a broad, polyglot cosmopolitanism. The Egyptian Osiris is one example; there were temples dedicated to him throughout the Roman Empire. Eventually he was driven out by the Hebrew Yahweh, whom Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship to this day as the absolute champion of all divine history.

Out of this same field proceeds the Spirit who, according to Christian belief, unites with the Father and the Son to form the Most Holy Trinity. It was he who seized the man Jesus and opened his mouth to announce the good news of the Gospel to the Jews. It was owing to the Holy Spirit that a few Galilean fishermen found the courage, after the Nazarenes death, to preach a world religion. Moreover, the Holy Spirit granted Christians sensational experiences, ecstasies and inspirations, which were then talked about and helped bring the evangel to the people.

The Holy Spirit is portrayed most often in animal form, in the shape of a dove, which places him beyond any human resemblance, in contrast to the Father and the Son and their familiar facial features.

The iconographic reticence concerning the depiction of the third divine Person corresponds to the distinct restraint exercised by the established Christian churches in their liturgical dealings with the Holy Spirit. Only very seldom are prayers directed to him personally, and but one feast a year, Pentecost, is celebrated in his name.

This gods traces are quite visible, however, in the history of heresies and wrongheadedness: among Syrian hermits, French perfecti, German mystics, English freethinkers, American Negro slaves, among artists and communists, eccentrics, feminists, and inventors. Again and again in such realms of experience, the spark of an effusive joy flashes out, momentary and fleeting. These are the moments when the divine in man makes itself manifest. According to an old tradition, the harp that is played at such times has ten strings.

I T WAS HIGH TIME FOR A NEW GOD. TO BE sure, the priests of Jupiter were busy as of old, maintaining good relations with the higher powers, and all around the Mediterranean the Divine Wife had her altars, where pilgrims submitted their petitions and the sick hoped for a miracle.