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Christian symbolism makes a major appearance. Pescara, who receives a wound in the side, is shown through his connection to an altarpiece in the Convent of the Holy Wounds to be a Christ symbol. Yet Pescara has no real religious beliefs, and the basic attitude of the story is one of doubt and skepticism. Regardless, Meyer seems deliberately to have left the Christ-figure interpretation of Pescara as a possibility. As Marianne Burkhard notes, the author seems to have been expressing his personal religious ambivalence.209 Shortly after completing Pescara, Meyer wrote: “For in spite of my efforts to escape Christianity…I feel [myself] being led back to It…regardless of any critical and philosophical knowledge.”210 We have seen ample reason why the presence of such a motivation would appeal to Freud.
Freud also read Meyer’s Der Heilige (The Saint), a fictionalized account of the life of St. Thomas a Becket.211 Here the story is set in a thoroughly medieval Christian world of monks, priests, and bishops. Again, Meyer’s treatment of his central figure’s motivation is ambiguous: Is Becket truly a religiously motivated saint, or just a subtle seeker of revenge on the king, his former friend? Throughout his stories, it is clear that Meyer was a master of ambiguous polarities set in a religious historical past: Renaissance versus Reformation; ancient pagan versus Christian; Catholic versus Protestant; simple piety versus complex skepticism. Meyer also often created a fusion of images and emotions from the past with those of the present—certainly another reason, no doubt, for his appeal to Freud. In any case, Meyer’s writings, with their Christian (typically, Roman Catholic) settings, are certainly more appropriate to a reader struggling with belief, or to an apostate Christian, than to a cool, secular scientist who went through life with no personal involvement in or need for religion. ConclusionThe wealth of material cited in regard to this approximately 20-year period of Freud’s early maturity reveals the deepest of religious preoccupations. Fond Pentecost greetings, longings for Rome, both conscious and unconscious desires for conversion, and enjoyment of ambiguous Christian literature were expressed by Freud time and time again. Yet these secret desires were held back from any kind of direct fulfillment. The psychological nature of Freud’s unconscious religious inhibition is the next issue for consideration. |