On the other hand, I encountered Christianity in a unique and rigid form, decisive in my life, a meager and transitory form now outdated and almost extinct.  I encountered it as pietistically tinged Protestantism, and the experience was deep and strong: the lives of my grandparents and parents were entirely controlled by the Kingdom of God and stood in its service.  That men should see their lives as a loan from God, and try to live them not on egoistic impulse but as service and sacrifice to God, this chief experience and inheritance of my childhood has strongly influenced my life.  I have never taken the “world” and worldly people quite seriously, and I do it less and less with the years.  But however grand and noble this Christianity as lived by my elders was – as service and sacrifice, as community and commitment — the confessional and in part sectarian forms in which we children came to know it were very early questionable in my eyes and in part completely intolerable.  There are many verses spoken and sung that even at that time offended the poet in me, and as my first childhood came to an end I was by no means ignorant of how much persons like my father and grand-father suffered and agonized because they did not have, like Catholics, a firmly established creed and dogma, an approved ritual, a genuine, true Church. 

The fact that the so-called Protestant Church did not exist, that rather it had fallen apart, into a great number of small established churches, that the history of these churches and their overlords, the Protestant princes, was no nobler than that of the despised Popish Church, that, furthermore, almost all true Christianity and true devotion to the Kingdom of God were not to be found in these boring by-way churches, but in even more obscure, though for that very reason inspired and active, conventicles of more dubious and transitory form — all this was no secret to me in my fairly early youth, although in my father’s house the established churches and their traditional forms were always mentioned with reverence (a reverence which I felt was not wholly genuine and early grew doubtful of).  And as a matter of fact during my whole Christian youth I did not derive any sort of religious experience from the Church.  The personal family meditations and prayers, my parents’ conduct of life, their royal poverty, their open hand for misery, their brotherliness toward fellow Christians, their concern about the heathen, the whole in- spired heroism of their Christian lives clearly got its nourishment from reading the Bible and not from the Church, and the divine services on Sunday; the Confirmation class and instruction in the Catechism brought me no sense of religious feeling. 

Now in comparison with this narrow and pinched form of Christianity, with these somewhat mawkish hymns, these generally so boring ministers and sermons, the world of Indian religion and poetry was frankly far more inviting.  Here no such oppressive narrowness, no smell of the sober gray paint of pulpits or of pietistic Bible hours; my imagination had room, I could welcome without resistance the first messages that reached me from the world of India and they have continued all my life to have their effect on me. 

Later on, my own personal religion often changed in form, never suddenly in the sense of a conversion but always slowly as growth and development.  The fact that my Siddhartha puts not knowledge but love ahead of everything, that he rejects dogma and makes the experience of unity the central point, may be interpreted as a swinging back toward Christianity, yes, as a truly Protestant characteristic. 

The Chinese spiritual world did not become known to me until later than the Hindu one, and this produced new developments; the classical Chinese concept of virtue, which allowed me to see Confucius and Socrates as brothers, and the hidden wisdom of Lao-tse with its mystic dynamism influenced me greatly.  A later wave of Christian influence came through my association with certain Catholics of high spiritual rank, especially my friend Hugo Ball, whose relentless criticism of the Reformation I could acknowledge without, however, becoming a Catholic.  At that time I also saw something of the business and politics of the Catholics, and I perceived how a character of the purity and greatness of Hugo Ball was made use of by his Church and its political representatives, now for propaganda purposes according to expediency, now dropped, now repudiated.  Obviously this Church too was no ideal place for religion, obviously here there were also at work the struggling and pretension, the quarreling and the rude push for power, obviously here too Christian life preferred to withdraw into privacy and concealment. 

And so in my religious life Christianity plays by no means the only role, but nevertheless a commanding one, more a mystic Cbristianity than an ecclesiastical one, and it lives not without conflict but nevertheless without warfare beside a more Hindu-Asiatic-colored faith whose single dogma is the concept of unity.  I have never lived without religion and could not live for a single day without it, but all my life long I have done without a church.  The separate churches divided by creeds and politics have always seemed to me, and most of all during the World War, like caricatures of nationalism, and the inability of the Protestant sects to achieve a supra-denominational unity was to me always an accusatory symbol of German inability to unite.  In earlier years such thoughts prompted me to look with some awe and a certain degree of envy toward the Roman Catholic Church, and my Protestant yearning for an enduring form, for tradition, for a manifestation of the spirit even today aids me in retaining my reverence for this greatest cultural structure of the West.  But this admirable Catholic Church is in my eyes only worthy of this reverence at a distance, and as soon as I approach, it has a smell, like every human institution, a strong smell of blood and power, of politics and secrecy.  Nevertheless occasionally I envy the Catholic his opportunity of saying his prayers before the altar instead of in a narrow room, and making his confession through the orifice of the confessional instead of always simply laying it bare to the irony of his lonely self-criticism.