Rilke In Cordoba

Since my visit to Cordoba I am of an almost violent anti-Christianity. I am reading the Koran, which in certain passages assumes a voice within me that I inhabit with as much force as the wind in a pipe organ. Here [in Spain] you think you are in a Christian country, but this is long over. It was Christian as long as one had the courage to commit murder a hundred steps outside of town where the countless modest stone crosses grow...Now boundless indifference reigns here: empty churches, forgotten churches, starving chapels--really one should no longer take a seat at this table after a meal's been finished and pretend that the finger bowls still lying about would contain nourishment. The fruit has been sucked dry; now it's time, to put it bluntly, to spit out the skins. And yet Protestants and American Christians always create a new brew with this tea that has been steeping for two millennia. Mohammad was certainly the closest alternative, bursting like a river through prehistoric mountains toward the one god with whom one can converse so magnificently every morning without the telephone "Christ" into which people continually call "Hello, who's there?" and there's no answer.

~ Rilke to Marie von Thurn und Taxis, December 17, 1921.



One wonders how Rilke could have visited Spain over four hundred years after the fall of Granada and continued to feel the vibrations of al-Andalus pulsing beneath the surface. Perhaps it was his disappointment with Catholic Christianity that shaped his sensibilities. Whatever it was, he minced no words.