Ulrich began to speak of the mischief of interpreting the kind of experiences they were talking about not only as if they involved a peculiar mental shift but as if some superhuman way of thinking were taking the place of the ordinary kind. Whether one called it divine illumination or, in the modern fashion, merely intuition, he considered it the main hindrance to real understanding. In his view nothing could be gained by yielding to fantasies that could not withstand the test of careful investigation. It’s like Icarus, he exclaimed, with his wings of wax that melt in the upper regions; if one wants to fly in reality, not just in dreams, one must learn to do it on metal wings.

And pointing to the books, he continued after a little while: “Those are Christian, Jewish, Indian, and Chinese testimonies, some of them separated by more than a thousand years. And yet in all of them one finds the same pattern of inner movement, diverging from the ordinary but consistent in itself. They differ among each other, almost precisely, only in particulars that stem from their connection with this or that school of theology and cosmic wisdom under whose protective roof they took shelter. Therefore, we may assume the existence of one specific additional, extraordinary condition of great importance, of which man is capable and which has deeper origins than the religions.

“The churches, on the other hand,” he added, “which is to say, the civilized communities of religious people, have always treated this condition with the kind of mistrust a bureaucrat has for the spirit of private enterprise. They have never recognized this rapturous mode of experience without reservation; on the contrary, they have directed great and apparently justified efforts toward replacing it with a regulated and intelligible morality. So the history of this condition resembles a progressive denial and dilution, something like the draining of a swamp.

“And when the spiritual dominion of the Church and its vocabulary became outdated, this condition of ours understandably came to be regarded as a chimera. Why should bourgeois culture have been more religious than the religious culture it replaced?! Under its aegis, the other condition has gone to the dogs, or rather it’s been reduced to the status of a dog that retrieves insights. A lot of people nowadays complain about rationality and want us to believe that in their wisest moments they think by means of a special faculty that is higher than reason. That is the last vestige, itself already a perfectly rationalistic, public thing; what’s left of the drained swamp has turned into hot air! And so, aside from a tolerated existence in poems, the only life granted to the ancient condition is during the first weeks of love among uneducated persons, where it is regarded as a passing confusion. Those are belated green leaves, so to speak, that occasionally sprout from the wood of beds and lecterns: but where it threatens to revert to its original luxuriant growth, it gets dug up and rooted out without mercy!”