The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse (1932)

For our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country and something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times. (27)

I didn’t set out this week to read a mystic novel by the German author Herman Hesse, but the book sort of fell into my lap. Perhaps my subconscious wanted me to read it? Perhaps Freud was right? Ha. Perhaps I shouldn’t joke.

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Early Put-offs

In this short, strange tale, we follow a man who remembers a trip from long ago, a journey he had taken as a member of some fanciful, mystical brotherhood called the League. This amalgam of religions exists as a secretive club whose quest pursues self-knowledge and the unknowns of the universe.

This expedition to the East was not only mine and now; this procession of believers and disciples had always and incessantly been moving towards the East, towards the Home of Light. (12)

I really wanted to put the book down early on, especially as I read Part I and the author’s explanation for why he joined this journey. Everything was just so weird, so abnormal to my general reading tastes that I hated just about every word. From his pursuit of beautiful Fatima’s love to the fact that their goal was not a place but “everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times” (27). In the words of my beloved mother: “Barf.” But the book is so short, a mere 123 pages in my edition, that I figured I should just plug away with it. And I’m glad I did.

While this book is as strange as I’ve said, it’s also an allegory that morphs from a random oddity into a picture of life and man’s constant, ageless pursuit of knowledge. There’s even hints of Christianity within (sometimes not only hints but direct, albeit twisted concepts from Scripture) that, if nothing else, caused me to pause and think. In fact, I wrote in the margin of my book somewhere near the end:

Perhaps all religions can find insight into their own beliefs through this fake, mystical religion, but I wonder about Christianity. It’s there but it’s twisted, and Hesse never quite comes close enough to the truth, because something is lacking: The Holy Spirit, the indwelling guarantee of the Christian faith.

While I could probably dissect this book in many ways, I choose now to stick with just this one dissection, of how certain elements almost ascend to Christian doctrine, but not quite. But first, let me recount the second half of the story.

Further Summary of The Journey to the East

Parts Two and Three place the man’s initial Journey with the League (Part One) into perspective. All along the trail, the League appeared to have been a compact group traveling towards the East together yet also for their own personal reasons. A servant joined them, Leo, that background person on whom everyone depended but few ever acknowledged. Then one day, this servant disappeared, and the entire group slowly began to disintegrate through infighting, selfishness, doubt, and despair. Only upon his recollection did our hero realize that Leo had served as some sort of thread for their group. Once the group disbanded, all hope for ever finding the truths of the universe seemed lost. Eventually the hero made his way back to Germany, despondent yet hoping at least to write a history of the League that posterity might someday require.

At some point down the road, however, the man noticed Leo in his own town. Leo, apparently not recognizing our protagonist, didn’t really give him the time of day, but he didn’t shoo him away either. He allowed the man to join him when he walked his dog and visited a house of worship. But the dog hated the man, and when Leo went in to pray, the man simply waited outside, feeling the whole thing a nuisance. When later our hero learns not only that the League is still alive and well, but also that Leo is himself the President of the League, the man realizes that his whole experience since Leo’s disappearance had been a test which he has miserably failed.

The man then stands before the League, as a criminal stands before a judge and jury. He attempts to defend his actions, stating that he alone had understood the League and that he alone could seek to record their story so it wouldn’t be lost to history, yet throughout his interrogation he realizes what a fool he’d been. He had been a traitor to the League. He knew nothing. He stood at the mercy of the court. He was forced to let them determine his fate.

Ultimately they sentence him to the Archives Room where he must read the full accounts of his own life, including not only a record of his own actions, but the books that other League members had written about him, accusing him of desertion and worse. And that’s about where the book ends.

Almost Christian, but Not Quite

Now, many aspects of this story do sound a whole lot like Christian doctrine, yet not quite. I’d like to discuss a few of them here.

First is the character, Leo. On the surface, Leo (Lion) represents Jesus, that unseen Servant on Whom we all depend yet whom few acknowledge. He is the President. He is the Judge. He calls His followers but never forces Himself upon us. He knows our secret hearts. Without Him we fail, for apart from Him, we can do nothing. When He leaves, we’re left in deep despair. He is the Thread that holds it all together.

But dig just a tiny bit deeper, and the correlation fails: Jesus did leave, as Leo left, yet He didn’t sneak away. And since He left, His Church has continued. Why? Because He didn’t leave us Comfortless! Because He sent His Spirit to dwell within us, so that forever and always we remain inseparable from Him Who bought us with His own precious blood and brought us from darkness into Light.

This failure identified in Leo is paramount, because it separates Christianity from all other religions and cults. Every religion might be able to view its leader or god in the image of Leo, but just like Leo in the story, those leaders departed—and they ain’t coming back. No religious leader but Jesus has promised to provide the indwelling Spirit of God to His followers until He returns! Those hopeless followers of falsehood depend solely upon their memories of something past and upon their own merit, their own efforts for any hope in the future. Just as Leo departed and left our hero comfortless only to watch him from some ethereal realm, so have all religious leaders departed with promises of something better down the road, mere words un-backed by their actual presence or power. Only Jesus, the Son of God, remains with His people as the indwelling Spirit until He returns bodily to gather us to Himself, for only Jesus is God.

Second is the sad fact that some “followers of Jesus,” people who have but tasted the Spirit while never having truly enjoyed Him, come to the point where their efforts at submission and belief fail them and they simply cannot continue the charade any longer. Hesse writes of such former League members this way:

Repentance alone does not help. Grace cannot be bought with repentance; it cannot be bought at all. A similar things has already happened to many other people; great and famous men have shared the same fate as this young man. Once in their youth the light shone for them; they saw the light and followed the star, but then came reason and the mockery of the world; then came faint-heartedness and apparent failure; then came weariness and disillusionment, and so they lost their way again, they became blind again. Some of them have spent the rest of their lives looking for us again, but could not find us. They have then told the world that our League is only a petty legend and people should not be misled by it. Others have become out deadly enemies and have abused and harmed the League in every possible way.” (21-22)

While I do not believe that any true follower of Christ can ever lose his salvation (my own passage of assurance is John 10:27-30), I do believe that many “Christians” out there have been fooling themselves since childhood, or since whenever, about their relationship to the Savior, as if the salvation they once had is something that they themselves control. Such people have sadly been fooled by the Father of Lies himself to think that they have done enough to become children of God—that they “Have Decided to Follow Jesus”—when it’s really just been a façade, a game, a lie from the beginning. I know many such people from my school and college days, children from Christian homes who have been told since they were four that they “prayed the prayer,” but who have never truly understood the Gospel that God so freely gives. They put all their stock in some decision they made a long while ago, not in the actual saving grace of God. No matter what Hesse had in mind when he wrote about such people, I think he hit the nail right on the head with this passage.

Third is the terrifying anticipation all humanity has for the coming judgment from our omniscient and almighty God. Do you know the story, “The Room”? It’s the one about a man who’s taken to an archival room filled with index cards naming every sinful deed he’d ever committed, though in the end, Jesus takes it all away. [Interestingly enough, the story was written by Joshua Harris, who may be a very case-in-point of the above] Hermann Hesse introduces a similar concept here when our hero accepts his punishment to head to the archives and to read all that’s ever been written about him. The illustration is ultimately the same, but the hopeless and fearful expressions Hesse uses are terrifying in their simplicity.

Who could bear it? No one could, but all those whose names are not written in the Lamb’s Book of Life will! How terrifying, because we know that in man dwells no good thing! Even the best of memories will be wrought with bad news, with sin, with damnation. The hero in this tale knew it to be true, and yet this was his fate, his Purgatory. This was what he faced, and yet he ostensibly knew that a light shone at the end of his tunnel. In reality, however, no such light exists for the damned. Cast into the outer darkness, they will face that punishment, that torment forever. Hesse’s illustration sounds similar, but it’s literally the polar opposite of the Truth. That catalog room isn’t one’s punishment until maturity: it’s Hell itself.

Finally, I want to bring out a phrase Hesse uses as a call-back to the words John the Baptist used about Jesus in John 3:30, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Hesse twists the phrase this way, as he describes two statues, one of our hero and the other of Leo, as they melt before his eyes:

I perceived that my image was in the process of adding to and flowing into Leo’s, nourishing and strengthening it. It seemed that, in time, all the substance from one image would flow into the other and only one would remain: Leo. He must grow, and I must disappear. (123)

As great as this sounds in theory, it’s Eastern Mysticism in the extreme. It’s “the everywhere and nowhere, the union of all times” that I quoted earlier. It’s pantheism. It’s heresy. It’s dangerous.

Conclusion

Like with James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh, The Journey to the East is a story with just enough Christian imagery and verbiage to fool the fools and the non-discerning. While it’s made me think and while I have to admit the story grew on me and I liked it the more I read it, I also acknowledge that it’s just the sort of story to affect a young believer’s thinking away from the Truth.

It’s fiction, but it’s deceptive. It’s just a story, but like all great literature, it plants seeds in the mind that can only grow into weeds of doubt and false hope. For that reason, I can’t really recommend it to the average Christian reader. If you like your philosophy or fantasy and you’ve got a solid, biblical head on your shoulders, it might be a fun read, but C.S. Lewis‘ stuff from about the same time period is better and, at least, centered more on the True Christ, not Leo, his tiny and flawed stand-in.

©2020 E.T.