Wiley

Society for the Scientific Study of Religion

Surrender and Religion
Author(s): Kurt H. Wolff
Source: Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1962), pp. 36-50
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Society for the Scientific Study of Religion
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SURRENDER AND RELIGION* 1

KURT H. WOLFF
Department of Sociology
Brandeis University

religion is faith concerning man's

fate, how can this faith find expression
today? This is a historical question: for
all that will follow about shedding received notions and holding tradition in
abeyance, this tradition, this received
notion of the relevance of history, of
man's historicity, cannot be done without
in assessing surrender and hence its relevance for religion.
There are some expectations, in particular two, that the title of this paper
may raise but that are false; they should
be dissipated at once. One, there will
be no discussion of the social aspects of
religion. Nor will there be any comparison between the analysis of surrender
and innumerable extant comments on
related phenomena, such as religious or
mystical experiences.

If

* Revision of a paper read at the 21st meet

Ing of the Society for the Scientific Study of
Religion, Cambridge,Mass., 27 September1961.
1 Earlier related writings have had the benefit of critical comments by Josephine L. Burroughs, Reinhard Bendix, and James N.
Spuhler. They are reflected in this paper, and
I am grateful for them to their authors. I am
also indebted to Gordon W. Allport, Josephine
L. Burroughs, Murray Krieger, and Dorothy
Lee for very pertinent comments on an earlier
draft of this paper, and to students in a Senior
Tutorial in Sociology at Brandeis in the Fall
of 1961, especially Larry Friedlander, Karl
Johnson, Susan Menzer, CharlesNichols, Deborah Rothenberg, and Elinor Seidman, for
most serious questions on surrender and some
of its implications, which I have tried to accommodate in a revision of this text.

I
In this late historical phase, when
there even is a sense in which we
might be past history, or might soon be
past history, religion may well appear
as the mood embraced in an effort to
come to terms with two unanswerable
questions-it is the phase in our history
in which we know that these questions
are unanswerable. The first is: "What
am I doing, anyway?" And the shudder
of it leads to the second: "Who am I,
anyway?" This is to say: what can I
truly believe about my fate?
There is an obvious sense, of course,
in which these questions can be answered:
I am doing this or that, yesterday I
did such and such, tomorrow I expect
to do so and so; and: I am a man or a
woman, so many feet tall, of such and
such age, nationality, occupation, religious affiliation. That is, they can be
answered as they are understood by common sense and by science; and there are
still answers even to causal questions
that, in turn, we may ask of these answers
that common sense and science give us:
why I am doing what I am doing, am as
tall as I am, have the occupation I have,
and so on-we seek answers to these
new questions with the help of various
disciplines; and if we do not find them,
it is not because there are no answers,
but because we do not know enough; it
is not because the questions in themselves are unanswerable.
"What am I doing?" and "Who am
I ?", however, are unanswerable if we ask,
not common-sensically or scientifically,

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SURRENDER AND RELIGION

but in the sense that alone counts-that
so much counts alone that in the light
of it, common sense and science emerge
as the crutches for our everyday locomotion that they are, no matter how indispensable for us and how deeply stirring
every discovery of their use, and their
every use itself, may be.
The sense that alone counts is the sense
we all are familiar with but ordinarily,
in our need and craving for the routine
that is vouchsaved us by common sense
and science, wish to avoid. We know
this sense whenever we are confronted
by the inadequacy of routine-whether
this confrontation comes to us as a shock
or as a reminder. We may then ask:
"What is the meaning of what I am doing?
What is the meaning of my being the
person that common sense and science
can so well describe and explain?" And
in trying to answer, we may recall what
tradition in religion, philosophy, art has
to offer, and rest content. In this case,
we have our answers; our questions thus
do not strike us as unanswerable. On
the other hand, however, we may find
that tradition does not provide answers.
It may not, because we do not know
tradition or relevant tradition. Or-and
this is historically the more important
case-it may not because, although we
know it, we find that if we examine
ourselves with all the honesty we can
muster, we cannot take it as an answer.
The reason why this second case is historically the more important is that, unlike
the first, it cannot be remedied by learning: to get acquainted with tradition or
relevant tradition will not avail, since
we know already but find our knowledge
unavailing; we find that tradition is not
an answer but a source of new questions,
chief among them the question why there
is no answer.

In this situation, the questions "What

am I doing, anyway?" and "Who am I,
anyway?" are indeed unanswerable, and
religion may be invented-I use the term
advisedly-as the mood embraced in an

37

effort to come to terms with them. At

this time in our history, we may well
experience the shock of recognizing that
common sense is not only truth universal but a mixture of universal truth and
rationalization in its name, which is abused thereby; and that science is not only
the extension and systematization of that
truth but a mixture of the extended and
systematized truth of common sense and
the projection of Western metaphysics
and history into time and space unqualified. Now this second ingredient, this
rationalization and projection, in common sense and science have been laid
bare. They have been laid bare, first
by totalitarianism, a catastrophe out of
what for so many looked like a blue sky,
and then by the possibility of the sudden
and irrevocable end of mankind, which
for so many-or perhaps by now for not
quite so many any more-looked and
looks like the but distantly horrible cloud
over Hiroshima, reflected in a sky merely
overcast by the tension between the
Soviet Union and the United States.
This suggests two things. One, again,
a historical meaning of the meaning of
religion; and two, this meaning, at a
time when there is a significant sense
in which tradition will no longer do, as
the invention of the search for the invention that enables us to come to terms
with the question of the fate of man
which the demise of tradition has shown
to be unanswerable-with the two questions, "What am I doing?" and "Who
am I?"
"Invention" comes from in-venire, to
come into, to come upon; and at once,
recalling and affirming the meaning of
this word, I have recalled and affirmed
an element of tradition, gotten hold of
a thread that connects this, until a moment ago, discontinuous time with a past
time, a past enormous. I have come
upon this past, our past. Religion as the
invention of the search for the invention: religion as that which has come
upon the search, the search for the path

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SURRENDER AND RELIGION

38

that comes upon whatever it may be

that allows us to come to terms with
those unanswerable questions. Yet "to
come to terms with" is an anticipatory
phrasing: we do not know its terms. It
could mean that we are in a position
to answer what prior to engaging in the
search was unanswerable; in this case,
we should find an answer to questions
that had appreared unanswerable. But
it could also mean that in the search we
so transform ourselves as for these questions to disappear, at least in their urgency. In this case, they would no longer
haunt us, and from haunted we would
have become what we could not anticipate but would take a chance on finding
out only through the search; then we
would do what we are doing and be who
we are, though we might very well not
know it, that is, not be able to answer
the questions that sent us on our search;
yet we would no longer be haunted by
them in their unanswerability.
This search is what I call "surrender,"
even "unconditional surrender"; I also
call it "total experience." But it is very
important to realize that these terms
apply to any such search-to any such
"search for invention," to repeat an awkward and thus far perhaps even misleading phrase-not only to the search occasioned by running up against the questions of what I am doing and who I am.
Nor-and this is saying the same thing
from a different perspective-is surrender
a religious experience, any more than it
is an artistic, philosophical, scientific one;
germinally it is all of these, but it is
undifferentiated-total, precisely. As a
matter of fact, the longer part of this
paper will deal with surrender without
reference to religion, the occasion that
brought it up but will be recognized
only toward the end.
II
A man may come upon, may invent,
the very notion of surrender on the conviction that he can no longer move tradi-

tionally; if he did, he would continue being

true to tradition, however critical he might
be; his expereience would build on it,
develop it, continue it. But as it is, there
is no continuity of tradition; he is thrown
back on himself. Yet this self is what
he shares with mankind; out of which
all tradition, even the crumbled one,
has come; and thus, this also is the time
when the only hope for tradition to make
a new beginning is to be in earnest about
its end, rather than thinking of it as a
patient who may survive or who may
die. To the best of his ability, such a
man must suspend it; he must "bracket"
received notions.
This itself is a traditional idea: we
recall: "Except a corn of wheat ... die

it bringeth forth much fruit" (.John 12:

24); or "For whosoever will save his life
shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his
life ..., the same shall save it" (Luke 9:

24); or Goethe's
Und so lang du das nicht hast,
Dieses: Stirb und werdel
Bist du nur ein trfiber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.2

"And as long as you don't know this:

this 'Die and become!,' you are only a
dubious guest on this dark earth." And
indeed, surrender, whether it be called
"conversion," "transformation," "metamorphosis,""enchantment,""inspiration,"
"mystical union," "break-through," or
however, has been described in the religious literature, philosophy, poetry, and
fiction of many periods and cultures.
Yes, we know of it; we know it as tradition; but this does not help us because,
whatever our questions, tradition is not
our answer but only its own, St. John's,
St. Luke's, or the Bible's or the New
Testament's, or Goethe's, whose ever.
We have to invent our own, and we shall
not be able to, except in awareness that
we have no answer in tradition.
2

Johann Wolfgang
Sehnsucht" (1814).

von

Goethe,

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"Selige

SURRENDER AND RELIGION

Follow a few, almost random descriptions of instances of surrender, even
though
neither they nor additional
ones could insure the conveyance of its
meaning. The reason is that instances
can always be argued: "All that can be
proved can also be disputed," as Georg
Simmel said; "Only the unprovable is
indisputable. "3
The first passage is from C. P. Snow's

novel The Search:

Then I was carried beyond pleasure...
My own triumph and delight and success
were there, but they seemed insignificant
beside this tranquil ecstasy.
It was
as though I had looked for a truth outside
myself, and finding it had become for a
moment part of the truth I sought; as
though all the world, the atoms and the
stars, were wonderfully clear and close
to me, and I to them, so that we were part
of a lucidity more tremendous than any
mystery.
I had never known that such a moment
could exist....
Since then I have never quite regained it.
But one effect will stay with me as long as
I live; once, when I was young, I used to sneer
at the mystics who have described the experience of being at one with God and part
of the unity of things. After that afternoon,
I did not want to laugh again; for though I
should have interpreted the experiencedifferently, I thought I knew what they meant.4
Here is a scientist who experiences
what he calls "tranquil ecstasy," resulting from the fact, as we are told immediately before the passage quoted, that
an important experiment of his had been
confirmed. But, really, we do not know,
and the narrator may not know, whether
8 Georg Simmel, Fragmenteund Aufsdtzeaus
dem Nachlass und Veroffentlichungen der letzten Jahre, ed. Gertrud Kantorowicz, Munich,
1923, p. 4; quoted in The Sociology of Georg
Simmel, trans., ed. and with an introduction
by Kurt H. Wolff, Glencoe, Illinois, 1950, p. xx.
4 C. P. Snow, The Search (1934, 1958), Signet
Books, 1960, pp. 112-113.

39

it was this confirmation that resulted

in the tranquil ecstasy that made him
understand experiences reported by mystics: might it not instead have led to
pleasure, satisfaction, joy, a feeling of
The
triumph, or many other things?
narrator was not seeking surrender but
was surprised, taken, sought, caught by
it; it was unexpected, nor did he expect
its result, or the result he reports, the
understanding of the mystic. He did not
reflect on received notions, on traditions,
and elaborate; it was a total experience:
there was no manifest connection with
his previous life, and what other connections he discovered were unanticipated. There was something new.
The second report comes from a wholly
different source, Henry Miller's Tropic
of Capricorn:
As I passed the doorman holding the torn
stub in my hand, the lights were dimmed
and the curtain went up. I stood a moment
slightly dazed by the sudden darkness. As
the curtain slowly rose I had the feeling that
throughout the ages man had always been
mysteriouslystilled by this briefmomentwhich
preludes the spectacle. I could feel the curtain rising in man ... I was standing in
my own presence bathed in a luminous reality. I turned my eyes away from the stage
and beheld the marble staircase which I
should take to go to my seat in the balcony.
I saw a man slowly mounting the steps, his
hand laid across the balustrade. The man
could have been myself, the old self which
had been sleepwalking ever since I was born.
My eye didn't take in the entire staircase,
just the few steps which the man had climbed
or was climbing in the moment that I took
it all in. The man never reached the top of
the stairs and his hand was never removed
from the marble balustrade. I felt the
curtain descend and for another few moments
I was behind the scenes moving amidst the
sets, like the property man suddenly roused
from his sleep and not sure whether he is still
dreaming or looking at a dream which is
being enacted on the stage ....

I saw only

that which was alivel the rest faded out

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SURRENDER

40

AND

in a penumbra. And it was in order to keep

the world alive that I rushed home
without waiting to see the performanceand
sat down to describe the little patch of
staircase which is imperishable5.
"I was standing in my own presence
bathed in a luminous
only that which was

reality. ... I saw

... And it
alivel

was in order to keep the world alive that

I rushed home... and sat down to describe
the little patch of staircase which is
imperishable. " Here is another aspect
of surrender: the encounter with indubitable reality that must be held on to lest
the world perish. Again, there was no
reason, intelligible to the experiencer,
why the vision of that patch of staircase
should be at once the occasion and the
consummation of surrender, nor any expectation that resulting from it should
be the encounter with that compelling
more than why in the prereality-any
vious example its result should have
been to understand the mystic's experience
of being at one with God.
What may be called the ostensive occasion of surrender in the third example,
taken from James Agee's Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men, is the contemplation of a lamp.
The light in this room is of a lamp. Its
flame in the glass is of the dry, silent and
famished delicateness of the latest lateness
of the night, and of such ultimate, such
holiness of silence and peace that all on
earth and within extremest remembrance
seems suspended upon it in perfection as
upon reflective water: and I feel that if I
can by utter quietness succeed in not disturbing this silence, in not so much as touching this plain of water, I can tell you anything within realm of God, whatsoever it
may be, that I wish to tell you, and that
what so ever it may be, you will not be
able to help but understand it.6
5 Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (1939),
Paris, 1952, pp. 296-297.
6 James Agee and WalkerEvans, Let Us Now
Praise FamousMen (1941), Boston, 1960, p. 51.

RELIGION

What is new here, or at least was not

explicit in the two previous examples,
is the experiencer's certainty of full communication with his fellow men: as long
as his experience lasts, he can convey
anything, and he who listens cannot help
but understand. Man, whoever he may
be, when thrown back on what he really
is, is thrown back on what he shares with
mankind.
III
This is extraordinary, however; it is
not routine. Ordinarily, man is not
thrown back on himself but lives by habit
and tradition, viable or vicarious; precisely, by routine. As Hugo von Hofmannsthal put it: "The whole soul is
never one, save in ecstasy." "Where is
your Self to be found? Always in the
deepest enchantment that you have experienced."7 Why this should be so is
answered by S0ren Kierkegaard: the
reason is that "a self, every instant it
exists, is in process of becoming, for the
self ... does not actually exist, it is only

that which it is to become."8 Both Hofmannsthal and Kierkegaard, however different in other respects, converge on
finding man ordinarily scattered, dispersed, variously and unevenly engaged,
whereas in surrender, in total experience,
all his aspects, characteristics, potentialities fuse into one, this one the actual
person, the self, that is merely foreshadowed in the scatter. Thus, surrendering,
I becomewhat otherwise I am only potentially, although, as Kierkegaard says, this
state is never reached definitively. In total
experience I come (relatively) to be, while
ordinarily I only act, function, operate.
7

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Buch der Freunde:

Tagebuch-Aufzeichnungen (1922), in Selected

Prose, trans. Mary Hottinger and James Stern,
introduction by Hermann Broch, New York,
1952, p. 356.
8 S0ren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death
(1849), trans. with an introduction by Walter
Lowrie, Princeton, 1941, p. 44.

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SURRENDER AND RELIGION

41

Similarly, Ortega y Gasset. "Life," he

First, the word itself. It has a military
writes,
connotation, "unconditional surrender"
is a chaos in which one is lost. The indi- referring to military defeat; and there
vidual suspects this, but is frightenedat find- is the sound of passivity, of "giving up."
ing himself face to face with this terrible Let us try substitute words that may
reality, and tries to cover it over with a come to mind. Would "abandonment"
curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. do? No; it suggests a dissoluteness that
It does not worry him that his "ideas" are is quite alien to surrender. "Exposure?"
not true, he uses them as trenches for the But this has a gratuitous ring of exhibitiondefense of his existence, as scarecrows to ism. "Devotion"or "dedication?"But these
frighten away reality.9
limit the meaning of surrender to an
attitude and inappropriately introduce a
That is to say, "ideas" that stand between
moral note. "Penetration?" But this is
man and his surrender; causes or contents,
misleading in its masculinity and in its
received notions, traditions that vitiate
failure to indicate devotion or dedicasurrender because they are not suspendideas are "not tion, the involvement of the whole person.
ed or "bracketed"-such
true." The implication, of course, is that
"Laying oneself open" or "laying the
cards on the table?" But these, too,
ideas may be true: namely, when they
exist, not as hindrances or conditions of tell only part of the story; the one, unsurrender, not against surrender, but in conditionality; the other, honesty. "SurI cannot help but trust
render" seems best. It is a rich word,
spite of it-as
does the idea of man's historicity-or
connoting some of the meanings of the
if they exist because of surrender, emergterms just reviewed and some other meanings, including, precisely in its military
ing from it, arising out of it. In this last
connotation, a fine ironical one that has
case, they are not so much ideas in the
customary or even the proper sense of to do with politics and, once again,with
the term as what may be called finds or, our moment in history.
The seminal meaning of "surrender"is
indeed, inventions.
They are the catch
are caught or "cognitive love," in the sense in which
of the surrender-they
this term is redundant for "love"-"The
found, "come upon," "come into," "inventact of love is, like the act of faith, a
ed." And in fact, here is how the passage
surrender; and I believe that the one
from Ortega continues:
As this is the simple truth-that to live conditions the other."11 This meaning of
is to feel oneself lost-he who accepts it has cognitive love is seminal because all the
already begun to find himself, to be on firm other meanings grow from it.12 Major
ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, among them are: total involvement, sushe will look around for something to which to pension of received notions, pertinence
cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolu- of everything, identification, and risk of
tely sincere,because it is a question of his sal- being hurt.'3
vation, will cause him to bring order into
11 MorrisL. West, The Devil's Advocate(1959)
the chaos of his life. These are the only
genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked.10 Dell, 1960, p. 319.
12 In the following exposition of them, I have
IV
been much stinmulatedby an unpublished meNow, as to some of the meanings of morandum (August, 1951) by David Bakan,
"Some Elaborations of the Meaning of the
"surrender. "
Concept of Surrender."
9 Josd Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the
13 The first four have close parallels
to some of the criteria for a mature reliMasses (1930), Mentor Books, p. 115.
10 Ibid., p. 116; my italics.
gion developed by Gordon W. Allport in

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42

SURRENDER AND RELIGION

-(1) Total Involvement.-In surrender

man becomes totally involved, involved
undifferentiatedly and indistinguishably,
with himself, with his act or state, and
with his object or partner-just as when
we say that the lover is totally involved
in his love, the phrase undifferentiatedly
and indistinguishably refers to the lover
himself, to the act or state, and to his
beloved. "Then for the first time,"
Tolstoy wrote of Levin and Kitty in Anna
Karenin, "he clearly understood ... that

he was not simply close to her, but that

he could not tell where he ended and
she began."'14In both surrender and love,
differentiation between subject, act, and
object disappears-an example of the
suspension of even essential categories
among our received notions.'5
But does total involvement not drive
the person who would know almost irresistibly into error? Does not love make
blind? The answers to these questions
are in the negative; but the questions
warn us not to confuse surrender with
his The Individual and His Religion, New York,
1950; see especially Chapter III.
14 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin (1878), trans.
Rosemary Edmonds, Penguin Books, 1954, p.
508.
15 Cf. the description of the "fourth state of"
Vedantic "understanding" in Heinrich Zimmer,
Philosophies of India, ed. Joseph Campbell
(1951), Meridian Books, 1956, pp. 432-433.There is a particular dimension of involvement
that can here only be recorded, not examined.
It is the certainty of full communication referred to in the passage from James Agee. It may
occur, presumably, both in surrender in the
presence of another person and in the recall
of one's surrender vis-A-vis another person and
other persons. The phenomenon calls for the
analysis of the change in the relation between
the surrenderer or recaller and the other, as
well as the others, and of the nature of that
other and those others. It is a clue to the
relevance of surrender for social organization,
which I can merely signal in this paper (see
in text below).

fanaticism, dogmatism, giving in to the

"need for closure"; and love, with infatuation-"love," to repeat, must be understood as short for "cognitive love," which
makes one see, not blind.
Like love, surrender is a state of high
tension or concentration, an undifferentiated state in which "anything can happen."
But as far as the surrendereris concerned,
whatever may happen brings him closer
to what he potentially is. The painter
who surrenders as he paints, for instance,
may find his catch to be (among any
number of other things) a new painting;
or the insight that he is not really a
painter but rather a scientist; or a scientific paper. If surrender, becoming what
one potentially is, means such change as
in the latter two instances, we speak of
conversion, which may be a catch of
surrender. Otherwise the observation applies that the artist is a less unconditional surrendererthan the ordinary man.
The reason is that, unlike the ordinary
man, he surrenders as a maker, as one
who makes a work of art; and this puts
a severe qualification on his surrender.
Obviously, the surrenderer who has
faith that, surrendering, he may know,
would betray the very idea of surrender,
as well as his own act of surrendering,
if he gave up his faith in case he should
find that his catch is something other
than what he would previously have called
knowledge. In order to ascertain what
it is, he must inspect it; and surrender
must be distinguished from testing the
catch. At this stage in the process of
knowing-when he examines his catchhe ends the suspension of received notions that characterizes the earlier stage,
surrender itself, and tests as many of
them for their bearing on his catch, and
vice versa, as he can.
Surrender and discussion of it, such
as this, are, of course, two different things.
But a moment's reflection on the fact
that there is a relation between them
will bring out a further characteristic of
the cognitive component of surrender.

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SURRENDER

AND

That is to say, one can push talking

about surrender to the point of engaging
in a collective experiment with surrender
-for instance, in the classroom. In this
case, the catch of the surrender is a
method brought into the everyday world.
The peculiarity of this method, however,
is that it is oriented, is open, toward
its own origin; that at any time it may
doubt itself, be ready to abandon itself,
to return to the ground from which it
sprang, in short, to retransform itself
into surrender. It thus is self-correcting
and, therefore, in the spirit, of the essence, of knowledge.
(2) Suspension of Received Notions.We just reminded ourselves that in surrender, man suspends, to the best of his
ability, his belief in received notions that
he thinks may in any way bear on his
exploration-that in surrender he finds
that, to the best of his ability, his received notions get suspended. His belief
in them here refers to the plausibility
of theories, the appropriateness of concepts, the validity of assumptions and generalizations, and the like. He does not
know, and finds it wholly irrelevant to ask,
whether whatever it may be he is exploring
is something to which his received notions
of whatever sort are adequate-only his
catch, if anything, will tell him. He tries
to pull himself up by his own boot straps;
he is in an "extreme situation"; he cannot
distinguish between doubt and certainty,
truth and falsehood, getting closer to his
catch and moving away from it, between
fact and theory, hypothesis, metaphor,
image, poetry, and many other things
that are ordinarily distinguished with
great plausibility; above all, he does not
know whether he knows, whether he is,
one might put it, under duress or under
necessity. This is another meaning of the
observation that surrender is an undifferentiated state-except, again, in the
artist's case, for the differentiation injected into his surrender by the element
of making. At any rate, when some sort
of order reappears, the person knows that

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43

he is emerging from surrender, and as

he emerges, he tries to recognize what
differentiation there is.
(3) Pertinence of Everything.-In love,
the lover finds anything about his beloved
of interest; in surrender, man assumes
all that comes to his attention to be
pertinent. One of the difficulties of coming up to the expectation that this characteristic of surrender involves lies in keeping pace with what comes to one's attention, in recording it.
At the same time, there is in love and
in surrender exclusive concentration: on
the beloved and on the moment of surrender-all else disappears. "Everything
is pertinent" thus also entails the loss
of all that does not emergeas "everything,"
quanwhich in its quantity-but
tity is irrelevant-is overwhelming. It
would appear that to open oneself requires or entails that all but that toward
which opening occurs be shut off; but
also, that the experience of love or surrender, of opening oneself, enlarges one's
capacity to love, to surrender, to open
oneself, that it makes one more sensitive,
more aware.
Since received notions, including theory,
select, to say that everything is pertinent
is another way of saying that received
notions are suspended-and in both versions, it is essential to recall the addition:
"to the best of the surrenderer'sability."
Suspension of received notionF and procedure on the assumption that everything
is pertinent are relative to the surrenderer: he is more or less capable to "let
go," "lay himself open," perceive, notice,
reflect on-as just one example, compare
Freud's self-analysis with probably most
other people's.
(4) Identification.-"Surrender" also
connotes "identification"-identification
with whatever or whomever the surrenderer feels he surrenders to. "Identification" is a problem, on the one hand, in
psychology, including the psychology of
love-as well as in love itself; on the other,
in hermeneutics generally. Within our

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44

SURRENDER

AND

present context, we have to say only

that identification must be understood
or construed-analytically, not psychologically-as the aim of surrender, but not
of the catch. It cannot be the aim of
the catch, because if it were, the surrendderer would not want to know but, indeed,
to identify, become assimilated, go native,
or otherwise change-as far as any knowledge for others is concerned, simply
change, without any accretion to their
knowledge. The surrenderer who wants
to know must examine his catch so that
he can tell others about it (here it is
relevant to remember the quotation from
James Agee); if identification itself were
the catch, he could not. The lover must
lose himself to find himself, not to lose
himself.
(5) Risk of Being Hurt.-This last
meaning is distinguished from the previous ones for two reasons. One is that
it applies not only to surrender but also
to action on insight gained in surrender,
to action on the catch. The other is
obvious, namely that it applies to experiences and activities other than surrender and catch: I may get hurt on any
number of accasions, for any number of
reasons. Still, the risk of being hurt is
a meaning of surrender: since the person
who can surrender can and wants to
change, he is willing to sustain injury.
And in both surrendering and acting
on the catch, he may be hurt in various
ways, the risks having their sources in
various dimensions of the person. Above
all, perhaps, they have their sources in his
orientation, including what he may hold
to be his fundamental assumptions; in
his defenses; and in his social relations,
including his prestige and his relations
to various persons variously connected
with him. Surrender thus involves the
danger of what may be called orientational injuries, defense injuries, and social injuries. Yet the surrenderer conceives of these and others as signs of
further insight and involvement. These
injuries come, or threaten to come, not

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from any desire to be hurt or to hurt,

not from any desire to hurt, whether
himself or others. Surrender has nothing
to do with masochism or sadism, even
though the passive ring of the term might
suggest the former, while one of its cognates, "penetration," could connote the
latter. Here, again, we do well to recall
the lover: he, too, is bound to take risks
of being hurt in many ways.
Finally, as to the irony of "surrender":
it is, simply, its opposition to our official
contemporary Western, and potentially
worldwide, consciousness, in which the
relation to the world is not surrender
but mastery, control, efficiency, handling,
manipulation. This relation is "virile,"
rather than womanly, which is another
connotation of "surrender":we tend to
think of woman, not of man, as surrendering, as giving-if man does, he forfeits his virility, he becomes effeminate.
Among other implications, "surrender"
thus has both a sexual and a political
one, and much of the thrust of either
lies in its combination with the other.
The first points to a redefinition of man
and woman and their relation, including
love, but not only love; among the many
kindred names that come to mind here,
D. H. Lawrence's is perhaps most obvious
and important. The second, the political
implication, points to a redefinition of
politics-if a quick, big leap be permitted, it may be said that it points to
its redefinition through an analysis of
the possibilities of nonviolence at this
time in our history. The combination of
the two, sexual and political, urges, if
it does not yield, a more general interpretation of our time, whereby important
insights into the relations between sex
and politics by such writers as the early
Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, or
Herbert Marcuse, Erik H. Erikson, and
Norman A. Brown would be most pertinent. In any event, the irony of "surrender" as a "revolutionary idea," that
is, one born out of surrender itself, lies
iniits appearing to be merely "subversive."

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SURRENDER AND RELIGION

I said that the idea of surrender has

been invented; that we live in a time
when religion is invented as the mood
embraced in an effort to come to terms
with the unanswerable questions of what
I am doing and who I am; that "invention" comes from invenire; and, in commenting on the first passage from Ortega,
that ideas are true when they are the
catch of surrender, when they are
come upon, come into, invented, There
is more to "invention." It is, as we have
just repeated, synonymous with "catch".
But as "surrender"has a feminine connotation, "invention" has a masculine one
(as does "penetrate," we recalled). Yet
"to come into," most poignantly in the
tabooed "come," referring to the orgasm
of man and woman, has a bi-sexual
flavor: it is the same that "surrender"
intends, even though it does not have it
in linguistic custom. And if we remember
another near-synonym that I mentioned
realize
casually-"break-through"-we
two other connotations of "surrender,"
one neutral as to sex, the other bisexual.
The first is that of triumph or conquest,
namely, of the forces, whether in the
environment or the person himself, that
obstruct surrender,that prevent man from
becoming what he potentially is. The
other is that of victory over limitations,
the breaking down of the wall, of this or
that prohibition, claim, requirement, demand; saying Yes where the non-self,
the other-than-self, says No, and No
where it says Yes-it is the feeling, the
experience, of "Lift up your heads, 0 ye
gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting
doors; and the King of glory shall come
in" (Psalm 24: 7).
Yet in "invention," the catch, there
is a masculine bias, as compared with
the bisexuality of "surrender"or "breakthrough," the love that precedes it. And
there is a reason for this. Its clue lies
in the synonymity of "invention"
and "catch," the result of surrender, sur-

45

render transformed, love transformed, into the object "catch" or "invention." If

surrender is being, its transformation into
a result, into an object, partakes of making. If it is thinking (to use a distinction made and made much of by Hannah
Arendt'6) -and here we must also recall the affective component of thinking
-then to catch or invent also and necessarily partakes of communicating. But
to make, to communicate, and to engage
in such closely related activities as organizing (if only "organizingmy thoughts",
presenting, clarifying, fashioning, polishing, and the like, are, as Arendt points out,
essentially the activities of homo faber,
man the maker, who has been historically,
and is perhaps more than historically,
a man, not a woman. "Invention" and
"catch" do indeed belong to the same
image of man against whose mastering,
controlling, efficient, handling, manipulatory aspects surrender argues. They do
not, however, and probably cannot, argue
against the universally human source of
the phenomena to which they refermaking: whatever else men and women
have always and everywhere done, they
have made things. Making may or may
not be man's male principle, or one of
them.
Man, the being who can surrender and
catch or invent, is inventive, as well as
capable of being invented. It follows
that we can answer the question: What
phenomena should man expect to do
justice to only by invention, rather than,
say, by describing, defining, or transforming into crosspoints of uniformities? The
answer is: man -in contrast to all other
objects in the universe-to whom, in
in his inventiveness and inventedness, he,
in his own, that is to say, every single
individual in his own inventiveness and
inventedness, can never fully relate by
description, definition, or translation into
a point on no matter how multidimen16 In Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition,
Chicago, 1958.

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46

SURRENDER

AND

sional a matrix of uniformities. Nor can

he in this fashion ever fully relate
to that which is characteristic of any
man, including himself: to his inventions,
to their occasions, to his ideas born out
of surrender, to his efforts to surrender
and catch, to the record of these efforts.
Thus, man and that which is characteristic of man are the phenomena man can
expect to do justice to only by invention,
by surrender and catch-as we see in
this phase of our history.
Yet surrender, of course, cannot be
commanded-it may, or may not, occur on
any occasion. If it does not on the occasion,
say, of a landscape, the landscape is not
hurt; but if it does not on the occasion
of a person, both that person and the
non-surrendererare hurt, if only in comparison with who they might have become
had it occurred. Thus there is continual
hurt among human beings, and the desire
to reduce it infuses reverence, charity,
and faith regarding man and men, and
curiosity as to what I can honestly hold
about man and men.
This consideration can lead from surrender as an individual phenomenonwhich is its only aspect explored in this
paper-to the light that surrenderthrows
on social organization. I can only mention three other, very heterogeneous
avenues that yet point in the same direction. If I hold, as in honesty I must,
that I can accept somebody's ideas as
true only if my surrender confirms them
-if they are my catch-then how is society possible? And: there is a sense,
that calls for elucidation, in which the
catch of love is the child. Finally: how
must social science and social philosophy be revised in the light of the idea of
surrender?
As "invention"is a synonym of "catch,"
"total experience," as I have mentioned,
is a synonym of "surrender." We have
seen that the military connotation of
"surrender" actually implies a polemic
against the official contemporary consciousness of control. Similarly, the as-

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sociation of "total" with "totalitarianism"

is directed against the latter, which is
so intimately related to that consciousness. Nor do such other predicates of
''experience"as ''crucial,""critical," ''germinal," and the like convey one of the
salient characteristics of total experiences, their undifferentiatedness, their suspension of all previous classification.
Hence the name.
By realizing the political, historical relevance of "total," we are once more being
drawn into politics and history. Just as
our official consciousness is opposed to
surrender as the relation to the world, so
it also has all but lost any meaning of
"total" or "absolute" except as terror,
the terror that millions of human beings
have experienced under totalitarianism,
and the rumors of that terror that has
poisoned, and been planted in, even larger
populations. Total experiences and their
designation by this term oppose to terror,
to this monstrous caricature of the absolute, ridiculously and horribly enacted
by the secret police, magnified in atomic
explosion, lived through, and not, in the
attrition of concentration-and slave-labor
camps, and felt and sensed in untraceably
many, even untraceable, forms-total experiences oppose to all this an image of
man for whom the absolute is not only
terror but also home, for whom "extreme
situation" calls forth not only his death
but also his greatness.
The fear of the total or absolute is
very much older than its objectification
in totalitarianism and its totalitarian organization. We do not have to go far
back, however, to meet it, for instance,
in the fear of not being elect, of not
being "at one with God," in the distrust
of everyting less than God, in the fascination for this very reason by everything
less than God; later, and until and very
much now, in the obsession with control,
mastery, disposal, with all their discontent,
that I have mentioned before. In our
largely unacknowledged or suppressed
desire for totality-for that which is cer-

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SURRENDER AND RELIGION

itan, necessary, absolute, incontrovertible-we are afraid of not finding it. In
our wavering between the terror of despair and the ease of numbness that we
cannot really accept, we have long been
feeding on the partial, uncertain, contingent, relative, disprovable, changing,
comparative, different. We may thus
have lost the courage, even the idea, of
total experience, of unconditional surrender, and instead of attaining it, union,
fusion, oneness, are adjusted, neurotic,
in-sane, suicidal. It is the feeling of total
experience that is total; its catch, its
cognitive yield, can never exhaust the
experience, but only approximate it. The
experience recedes from the surrenderer
like water from the net, and challengeshim
to explore it, to invent. This is
because, in Erich Frank's words, "'what
can be comprehended is not yet God.'
[And] thus it may be permissible to make
the paradoxical statemant that the real
proof of God is the agonized attempt to
deny God."''7 Or in Paul Tillich's words:
"The courage to be is rooted in the God
who appears when God has disappeared
in the anxiety of doubt."'8 Once more:
in total experience, in surrender, there
is the dialectic of "die and become."
VI
We have just come to a point in our
discussion of surrender, invention, total
experience, where we have found it appropriate to quote two passages on modern
man's relation to God. These passages
are couched in what our tradition has
it are religious terms; they recall received
religious notions. Some people may indeed want to talk about surrender in
this mode; they may wish to interpret
it in what to them are religious terms.
But, once more: interpreting surrender
17

Erich Frank, Philosophical Understanding

aid Religious Truth, London, New York,
Toronto, 1945, p. 43.
18 Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be, New
Haven, 1952, p. 190.

47

is not the same as surrendering;we must

not lose sight of this difference. We must
also recall that surrender, since it is a
total experience, cannot be identified
with a religious experience, any more
than with an artistic, aesthetic, philosophical, moral, scientific, or any other
differentiated one. These presumably refer to experiences in which a person, suddenly or slowly, comes to grasp the meaning, essence, nature, or an aspect, element,
an implication of art, beauty or ugliness,
philosophy, good or evil, science, and so
on. He has an illumination concerning
these things, which are the occasions or
the catch of his surrender; but surrender
itself is not limited to any of them; it
would not be surrender if it were; nor,
as we have seen before, is the connection
between occasion and catch necessarily or
even probably traceable-certainly not
to the experiencer himself.
No, the relation between surrender aud
religion is not clarified by entertaining
the notion that surrender is a religious
experience; on the contrary, this is a
dead end. We must take another road.
Let us start equipped with two observations that we have made before and
that are more closely related to one another than we have thus far seen. One we
have just recalled: that surrender involves the dialectic of "die and become";
the other was that it involves the risk
of being hurt. We go from here. As a
total experience, surrender involves all
that is negative, such as uncertainty,
danger, evil-and the negative, surely,
is not exhausted by the dangers of orientational injuries, defense injuries, and social injuries that were mentioned. There
is more to the negative than these dangers.
Above all, there is the danger of false
surrender, which is to say, surrender to
an idea or cause that makes surrender
conditional on it, on achieving it or merely
becoming accustomed to it-an idea or
cause which, for this reason, is "not true."
It is not, because it has not been invented,
but was there prior to surrender, was not

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SURRENDER

AND

"suspended" or "bracketed." It was no

catch; rather, it had not been let go.
Thus, "surrenderto an idea or a cause"
is false surrender because it is not surrender, is not unconditional surrender.
But now we must ask: how unconditional can unconditional surrender be?
What does it mean to say that it involves
the "whole"person? I am not now asking
this question in its psychological sense,
which refers to a person's maturity,
strength, and similar attributes. Nor am
I raising an epistemological question concerning, say, the distribution of a person's
notions of the world between, on the
one hand, his view of the world and,
on the other, the world's structure independent of this view. All I have suggested in my discussion of surrender
that is of epistemological relevance has
been my stress on the undifferentiated
nature of this experience, which also refers
of course, to the disappearance in it of
the separation between subject and object (as I indicated before) or between
knower and known; and this would suggest a Kantian or neo-Kantian, rather
than a Humian, view of epistemology.
No, what I am asking now is to what
extent it is possible for any person at all
to shed his received notions: does he not
consist of these notions, do they not
make him what he is? Does "unconditional surrender" not suddenly look like
disintegration, like in-sanity? How can
I say that its seminal meaning is cognitive
love; that in surrender I am thrown back
on myself; that in it and through it I
become what otherwise I am only potentially; that in surrender I am, while ordinarily I only act, function, operate;
and, even, that what I am thrown back
on in surrender is that which I share
with mankind? Am I insane in denying
that surrender is insanity and, on the
contrary, affirming that it is sanation?
The danger of false surrender can be
avoided-in anticipation, by thinking
about it, and, in retrospect, by new surrender. But now we have moved from

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considering the danger of false surrender

to recognizing the danger of surrender
itself-and this danger, of course, cannot
be avoided in the ways the other can.
The disintegration, the insanity of the person cannot be avoided by realizing that
in surrendering he risks it, but only, or
so it seems, by avoiding surrender itself.
But I have tried to show the urgency of
surrender in the breakdown of tradition.
Thus, on the one hand, it seems that we
must avoid surrender like the fire of
insanity; on the other, we crave it like
the balm of sanation. How resolve this
paradox of our historical situation? How
withstand and overcome this dilemma?
The answer is: by faith; by the very
faith that is the catch of surrender,
whatever else its catch may be, because
it is confirmed by surrender, being the
one element of tradition-I do not call it a
received notion-that
the surrenderer
cannot bracket; if he did, he would indeed disintegrate, cease to be, instead
of be, as he has the faith that in surrender
he may, rather than not. It is the faith
that in surrender I become what otherwise I am only potentially; I am while
ordinarily I only act, function, operate;
and being thrown back on myself, I share
what I am thrown back on with mankind.
The idea of surrender is a traditional
idea, is among our received notions, and
we recalled one of its expressions:
"For whosoever will save his life shall
lose it: but whosoever will lose his life...,
the same shall save it. " There was an
omission, however, from the second part
of this quotation: we did not recall the
words "for my sake." Let us now consider this clause. It suggests that if life
is to be saved, it must be lost to a cause.
If we posit this cause as surrender itself
we realize that "surrender" is not only
an experience but also an attitude which
seeks that experience. It then becomes
tautologous and inconsequential to say
that the cause, which is surrender,makes
surrender conditional on it, on man's
achieving it or merely becoming accus-

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SURRENDER

AND

tomed to it. But even without identifying

the cause of Christ with surrender, the
understanding still is that the cause
does not vitiate surrender, because it
is capable of being invented in surrender,
of being its catch, no matter how unconditional its initial suspension may be; it
is an idea born out of surrender, an "idea
of the shipwrecked." The reason is that
the person who surrenders to this cause
moves on the faith in surrender. In its
essence this faith may be formulated as
faith in surrenderbecause of faith in man
as the being that can surrenderand catch.
This faith, and the catch of surrender
on it alone, and not on any other element
of tradition, are the phenomena that in
this stage of man's history articulate
themselves as that which is common to
mankind. Ideas born out of surrender
on this faith thus assume, and by assuming prove, man's continuity and fellowship, just as their acceptance reflects
the conviction of man's continuity and
fellowship. On the other hand, faith is
not possible in ideas not born out of
surrender: such ideas are not true, making surrender conditional on them and
thus impossible, because they are incapable of being invented in surrender,
since they are incompatible with faith
in surrender and in man as the being
that can surrender and catch. They are,
therefore, incapable of being tested in
new surrender, of standing up before an
attitude that seeks surrender; they are
incompatible with the conviction of
man's continuity and fellowship.
This faith that is the basis of surrender
is religious, that is, faith concerning man's
fate. The confession of this faith in the
attainability of surrender and catch is
made with "fear and trembling," because
it is made as it must try to find the thin
rope between-to use traditional terms
-the pride of the belief of being in grace
and the sin of despair; between assuming
one's surrenderto be as close to surrender
as possible, and giving up.
Why should I have this faith in sur-

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49

render, in which man becomes what he

potentially is, if ordinarily he is "scattered, dispersed, variously and unevenly
engaged?" Why should my faith not be
based on man in his ordinary mode?
Why ought man to be what he potentially
is? The answer is my conviction that
scatter, and failure and refusal to surrender, are not part of the essence of
man because I cannot honestly regard
them as part of my own essence. I can
act as if they were, and may indeed so
act all my life, or almost all my life, but
I cannot defend them by insight, by my
feeling at its most honest, and I am
convinced of the reality or truth of immediate feeling. It is this conviction
which allows me to distinguish, for instance, between a neurotic act and an
act that is true to myself; or, perhaps,
between an idea born out of "capture"the "catch" as that which I "capture"and one born out of surrender.
I may examine my faith by observing
how good a witness to it I am, how
often and on what kinds of occasions I
can remain true to myself, rather than
giving in to the temptation of refusing
to surrender. A perfect saint, such as
has never lived, would never be tempted.
The number and kinds of occasions in
the face of which I can remain true may
well increase with each occasion in the
face of which I have remained true. If
this is so, it might suggest that I aproach
sainthood as I accumulate instances of
surrender. But the only thing that matters about such a vista is that I must
not strive for sainthood. If I did, I would
contradict the very meaning of surrender,
which is to what I potentially am but
do not know, but have faith in being
able to surrender to. Surrender to the
aim of sainthood would be submission
to a fixed rule, to a content or cause,
which, making surrender conditional on
achieving it, destroys surrender. Sainthood worthy of man is not striven for
but invented, the catch of surrender.
The question of how good a witness to

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AND

my faith I am thus must not mean unworthy fear concerning my sainthood,

but the fear concerning my being true
to myself, to my immediate feeling.
This, then, is the relation between religion and surrender. Surrenderis grounded in the faith in surrender and in man
as the being that is capable of surrender
and catch-in a faith that tries to steer
clear of the pride of believing to be in
grace and of the sin of despair. This
faith is based, in turn, on the conviction
that surrender is of the essence of man
and that I therefore must engage in it-a
conviction accompanied by the fear lest
I act less appropriately on it, be less of
a witness to it, be less true to myself
and thus to man than, surrendering, I
know that I ought to and can.
Hence we can clarify the meaning of
what I said in the beginning: that in
this phase of our history, religion is
invented as the mood embraced in an
effort to come to terms with two questions
that we have learned are unanwerable,

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what I am doing, and who I am-in short,

with the question of man's fate. We recognize religion as faith concerning man's
fate, and surrender, rather than tradition, as that act which we must engage
in, as that state we must strive for, if
we would know. But this is to say that
we must invent. We know that we must
come upon, but we do not know what.19
19 After writing this paper, I read Paul Tillich's Dynamics of Faith (1957; Harper Torchbook, 1958), which contains many thoughts
strikingly similar to those that I have tried
to express here. Among the major differences
between Tillich's discussion of faith and mine
of surrenderare the much lighter weight Tillich
gives to the historical, political, and social
components of his view of faith than
I give to them in my view of surrender,
and his failure to bracket Protestantism. For
further aspects of the relations between surrenderand religion, Tillich's is a most important statement

COMMENT
HANS HOFMANN
Harvard Divinity School

The reader of the foregoing article must

constantly remind himself that Kurt
Wolff speaks here of surrenderin a very
specific sense, different from what is commonly meant by surrender.The readerwho
wants to understand Wolff fully in order
to reap the complete benefit of his insights
and conclusions must resolutely suspend
or surrender his own, traditional notions
of surrender. As the author has explicitly
assured me, he believes and implies in
his article that surrenderis in itself meaningful, unconditioned by anything that
precedes or follows from it, as surrender
is equally unconditioned by the circumstances in which it takes place. This
means that surrender, in Wolff's sense,
is not determined by what is sur-

rendered, why it is surrendered,or to what

end it is surrendered. Surrender,for Wolff,
authenticates itself and is its own judge.
Since, in this article, Professor Wolff
has related his kind of surrender to religion, the reader must also become clear
in regard to what Wolff means by religion. He has told me that when he speaks
positively of religion, he thinks of a kind
of a mystical experience-its catch being
an attitude of surrender which escapes
and defies doctrinal and cultic explication. Hence, such a religion does not
lend itself well to becoming organized or
institutionalized.
Naturally, it is difficult for someone
trained as a Christian systematic theologian to respond congenially to this

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