"True anarchy is the unifying element of religion," wrote Novalis, whom the Servant of Justice in Moment of Freedom calls one of his favorite writers. We won't give a detailed exposition of the aphorism here, but will let it stand as an introduction to what we shall discuss in this chapter—namely, the relationship between anarchism and spirituality, between politics and metaphysics, as it finds expression in Bjørneboe's writings. For Bjørneboe the political and the metaphysical are not the antagonistic concepts which we commonly understand them to be in daily discourse; on the contrary there is here an intimate connection. The mere fact that the Servant of Justice declares himself to be an "anarcho-syndicalist" should indicate a link between a political and social attitude and an individual, inner cognitive experience. The Servant of Justice is not the only character in Bjørneboe's novels with such political leanings. The deeply religious boatswain Christian Hellmuth, mystic and Rosicrucian, is called an "anarcho-socialist" (The Sharks, 202 ). And Second Mate Jensen himself tells us that in quiet hours he immerses himself in the study of France's great anarchist, Louise Michel (170).

Nor was Bjørneboe averse to studying anarchistic ideas; he expresses himself about this on several occasions. Anarchism's intellectual origin is nihilism, he says in the essay "Anarchism . . . today?" (actually a talk given to the Student Union in 1971). The most radical form of anarchism is "anarcho-nihilism," he maintains, and he attempts to give a definition of the concept nihilist. The "bourgeois" definition of the nihilist as someone who wants only to tear down and destroy, the destructive annihilator, he cannot accept. In his eyes a nihilist is rather one who refuses to recognize inherited, hand-me-down, conventional truths, but on the contrary has a will to one's "own critical thinking—to empirical investigation." "Critical thinking" means for Bjørneboe an attitude where "nothing is sacred"—in other words, a revaluation of all existing values and truths.

It is plain as day that nihilism's, and anarchism's, cognitive basis is a radical individualism. Its very point of departure is thinking, the critical thought which revalues, i.e. "annihilates," all given facts. It is a process in which all "outward truths", all ideology, theory, abstraction, is peeled away. It is natural to understand this in the light of what in Moment of Freedom is called "individuation"—that is, the dialectic of rebirth which, through decimation of the outward and unauthentic ("carnal"), brings something new to life: a new truth (the "moment of truth"). This last—the dialectic element in the process —is important, because the danger in every form of nihilism is a "total annihilation," obliteration; in other words, nihilism defined as critical thinking can very well mean thought's solipcistic spiraling inward into chaos. And chaos, says Second Mate Jensen, is the reverse of anarchy (The Sharks, 203).

The anarchist's worldview thus comes into being ex nihilo. "I have based my case on nothing," wrote Max Stirner (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, 1844). With wonderful consistency Stirner develops a system of thought which puts the ego as the highest and egoism as the truest form of life. He mercilessly "annihilates" the ghosts (Geister) of existence: the Divine, humanity, society, patriotism, life-lies and self- deception. He declines to recognize anything outside the single, concrete ego —"the only one" (der Einzige). A free, sovereign individual can only build on himself. What is the object of my dealings with the world? he asks. He gives this answer: I want to enjoy it. I don't desire humanity's freedom and equality . . . . I desire only my own power over the world. This is a form of cognitive alchemy in which the ego exalts itself to the Godhead of its own existence. And with this background one can with some justification assert that Stirner is approaching mysticism. His consistent negation of the Divine makes him into a mystic of anti-metaphysics. The anarchist and the religious mystic stand close together in many ways because both, in their radical emphasis on the individual, sooner or later arrive either at the Divine or at nothingness. However, the boundaries are hair-fine here: mystics often speak of God as nothingness, or as Boehme paradoxically puts it: "He is nothing and everything." Where it all comes out is, as it were, independent of what this nothingness is, what substance it has. The question is whether the "critical thinking" in the cognitive process finally encounters a horror vacui—or if it at some point arrives at a "core of cores" [Rilke] which makes possible a movement out again from this nothingness. Everything stands or falls on which road the consciousness takes from this point—in short, whether the self is annihilated or reborn. Anarchism's unavoidable dilemma is formulated very precisely by Hans Jæger [Norwegian anarchist, 1854-1910] in his slogan "Metaphysics or suicide!"

Rudolf Steiner in the 1890s several times expressed his sympathy for anarchist ideas; at this time he also became acquainted with Max Stirner's thought through the anarchist John Henry Mackay (1864-1933), who had published a series of books on Stirner. Both Steiner and Mackay point out the correspondences between the ethical individualism which finds expression in [Steiner's] Die Philosophie der Freiheit (1894) and what Mackay in his book Die Anarchisten (1891) calls "individualistic anarchism." In an exchange of letters with Mackay beginning in 1898, Steiner does not scruple to call himself an "individualistic anarchist", and he defends the individual's right to completely free self-assertion; no one must hinder any person in letting his or her inherent powers and gifts develop. At the same time he takes strong exception to the spreading acts of violence and terrorism which the anarchists were responsible for. (63) Now the concept "anarchism" swiftly disappears from Steiner's vocabulary; around the turn of the century he orients himself toward theosophy, he develops his transcendental mysticism and arrays his philosophical teaching in mythological and occult garb. Nevertheless it is the "anarchistic" epistemological foundation in Die Philosophie der Freiheit which forms the basis for anarchistic attitudes and interests in some anthroposophical milieux to this very day (e.g. the circle around the magazine Arken). In elementary books on anthroposophy Steiner's relationship to anarchism either is not mentioned at all, or is treated in such a way that one almost gets the impression that it's a passing aberration. This latter, of course, has its background in Steiner's own discussion of this "anarchistic" phase in his memoirs, Mein Lebensgang. Here he writes most warmly of his friendship with Mackay, but at a distance of twenty-five years he nonetheless washes his hands when he calls his interest in Stirner a "spiritual test" and a "kind of abyss" in which his soul was torn down [so as to be put back together -Tr.].

Nor was Jens Bjørneboe unacquainted with Max Stirner's thought. He mentions him on a couple of occasions, most notably in Moment of Freedom, where the Servant of Justice tells us that Stirner is part of the traveling library which he always drags around with him in a suitcase. In a private letter from 1969 Bjørneboe discusses his political views and mentions briefly that they have their background in Stirner, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Proudhon, Berkmann, Goldmann, etc. I am, says Bjørneboe in the letter, an anarchist not only by temperament, but also by theoretical conviction— "I am a born anarchist, and will never be able to be anything else." (65) That Bjørneboe was an anarchist in the 1960s and 1970s is known to all who have concerned themselves with his writings. He declares his political conviction in a series of articles and speeches and in newspaper interviews, such as this in Arbeiderbladet (October 9, 1971): "I am an anarcho-nihilist. That means: a philosophical tendency which does not accept other points of view without first having satisfied oneself that they are correct." From this it can be seen that the author shares the political views of the anarchist characters in his novels from the period.

Now it is widely believed that Bjørneboe developed from being an anthroposophist and a conservative aesthete in the 1950s to becoming—only at a mature age—a political radical with socialist and anarchist leanings. The following statement is typical:

But in the 1950s he was himself an anthroposophist, and anthroposophy is well known to be a philosophical-religious movement with strong conservative tendencies. The main emphasis is on individual development . . . . It is only around the middle of the 1960s that he emerges as an anarchist.

Such a claim is utterly false and is due to ignorance about what anthroposophy is. On the contrary, anthroposophy in its pure form is revolutionary in the word's most literal sense, and will mean in practice a total upheaval of society with a basis in a new and different view of man. Steiner's ideas on pedagogy, politics, agriculture, medicine, etc., are often met with resistance precisely because they break so completely with the prevailing—i.e. conservative—opinion. It is also false to claim, as is alleged in the above citation, that Bjørneboe first emerged as an anarchist in the 1960s. His anarchist orientation is already evident in is first book, Poems (1951); here we find a long ode to Hans Jæger (Before the solstice—Hans Jæger in memoriam). One of the main motifs in the poem is what is called "Humanity's Meeting with Itself", a phrase which Bjørneboe has taken straight from Jæger's book The Anarchist's Bible [1906] . Thus he was occupied with this political opus around 1950. In a Dagbladet interview following his debut (October 19, 1951) Bjørneboe names, in addition to Olav Bull, two writers with whom he obviously feels a literary kinship: One is his great literary model Rainer Maria Rilke—the other is the anarchist Hans Jæger. We learn in the interview that Bjørneboe wrote the poem in memory of Jæger "because he was a true radical who wanted to get to the bottom of things, he was a troublemaker." Such a statement hardly attests to conservatism. Moreover, Jæger is also discussed in Jonas (p.196), where his slogan "Metaphysics or suicide" is cited. The same year that Jonas came out (1955) Bjørneboe published an article in the magazine Spektrum about Hans Jæger; it was a warm tribute to Norwegian radicalism's black sheep.

The same day that Bjørneboe discusses the radical and troublemaker Jæger in Dagbladet, he is also interviewed as a new poet in Verdens Gang, where he talks about anthroposophy and the need for a spiritualization of thought and of one's whole image of life. At first glance these two utterances may seem incompatible, since it's a truism that there is no connection between anthroposophy and spirituality on the one hand and anarchism and radicalism on the other. However, it should now be possible for us to discern the linkages here—in light of what we said above about the points of contact which exist on the epistemological plane between Steiner's philosophy and the nineteenth century's individualistic anarchism as it is expressed in, for example, Mackay and Stirner. That there is in fact a close connection between views of human nature and of society, between the individual and the collective bases of Bjørneboe's view of the world around him, is evident in two statements from the 1970s—statements which at first blush appear contradictory. The collective, political viewpoint comes out in the lecture "Anarchism . . . today?", where he maintains that "a society is a healthy society only to the degree that it exhibits anarchistic traits." We can contrast this statement with another, just as pregnant utterance from an interview on Norwegian television in April 1976; here Bjørneboe says that "you can't organize a society aright before you know what a human being is." (67) In an attempt to shed light on the writer's sociopolitical attitudes we permit ourselves to unite these two statements—let them form a symbiosis, as it were. Thus we suggest that his social vision can be summed up in the following formulation: Only to the degree that single individuals are conscious of what the human being's true essence is can they create a healthy society. We can safely use this formulation in the certainty that we are not unduly stretching the author's meaning; for precisely this message, this individualistic and anarchistic vision, permeates the trilogy about the History of Bestiality and The Sharks.

What is a human being? One might say that the last ten years of his life Bjørneboe devoted exclusively to delving into this problematic. And the answer he gives through his novels is clear enough: as human beings we are eternal spiritual beings whose task it is to become clear through experience that within ourselves we bear the seeds of existence's downfall or fulfillment—we ourselves decide to what degree we will create a healthy or a sick society, i.e. a humane or a bestial society. Thus we see that the metaphysical view of life which in Bjørneboe is inextricably tied to the individual's inner consciousness—which he calls individuation—is by no means divorced from what emerges as his social, political orientation, his utterances about collective social organization. Here there is no question of cognitive dissonance— rather of an inner necessity. But having demonstrated an anarchistic orientation in the young anthroposophist Bjørneboe, it is still right to make clear that this attitude becomes more explicit in the later years of the author's life—it becomes more politicized, as it were.

The claim that Bjørneboe was conservative in the 1950s is nonetheless interesting because it is the result of a very widespread misinterpretation of his writings. The misinterpretation is due to the following intellectual short-circuit: metaphysics and individualism equal conservatism, and are therefore irreconcilable with political radicalism and social activism. On the contrary, it is more correct to argue that Bjørneboe's social and political engagement during the last decade of his life is a result of his individualistic and anthroposophical orientation in the 1950s. Yes, his celebrated antiauthoritarian stance has its background in the ethical individualism which is the basis for Steiner's philosophy of freedom. The moral autonomy which Steiner defends leads inevitably to an activist engagement which on the political plane is realized in one form or another of anarchism. (Anarchism is always the mystic's political alternative.) For example, Steiner and Bjørneboe have completely congruent views on the state. Steiner, writing in 1898, maintains the following:

The modern state is . . . founded on violence and authority. The individualistic anarchist stands in a hostile relation to the state because it suppresses freedom . . . . The individualistic anarchist knows that spokesmen for authority always fall back on violence as a last resort. But he is convinced that all violence suppresses freedom. Therefore he fights against the State, which is based on violence. . . .

Bjørneboe formulated the problem thus in 1971:

This—the problem of personal intellectual and physical freedom versus the centralized state power or regime—is the only issue that matters today. It is here that anarchism's true essence is revealed. . . . The question is one of freedom versus centralized government power. . . .

The stages on the way toward freedom and justice . . . therefore always involve the dismantling or tearing down of every centralized power—be it governmental, ecclesiastical or scientific concentrations of power. (italics Bjørneboe's)

In the preceding chapter we posed the question of whether Bjørneboe is not defending isolationist view of man when he talks about becoming a stranger to oneself and moving away from others' opinion, others' morals, etc. We rejected this in a sense by elucidating the concept Gelassenheit, or what we called the problem of detachment—that is, that the moment of freedom leads to dispassion, to will-lessness —in other words a freedom from the animal and the bestial. The result is not isolation but a new fellowship, a fellowship grounded in spiritual perception. In what follows we shall try to pursue this a little further and with the help of anthroposophy go more deeply into the outward and social aspect of Bjørneboe's view of human nature.

Anthroposophy is—with the cautions I expressed earlier about its mystical character—a spiritual teaching which approaches the so-called mystique of personhood. Steiner does not defend a pure transcendental mysticism which implies a meditative turning away from the world. For Steiner too the goal is transcendence, but this goal is realized through an inner transformation—by the birth of Christ in the heart. And . . . such a spiritual epiphany leads not away from the world, but toward the world, where the person acts (e.g. takes the child by the hand) out of his transformed will and consciousness. It is a process of individual perception leading toward freedom. Such a view of man never has the collective, the people, the nation, the party, or dogma as its point of departure—but always the individual. The goal is never submission, heteronomy—but always absolute freedom, autonomy.

Given such an understanding of reality, freedom can only be realized through the individual and his consciousness of his own aloneness. On the political, societal plane this view of man ends up in an anarchist watchword: Free individuals are the fundamental precondition for a free and just society. The perception of reality thus develops on a plane of inner cognition—not on the plane of outward significance. An understanding of reality which has its basis in an ideology, in a set of dogmas or ideas, will in its "idealism" organize reality by opinions, party programs, statements of purpose, resolutions, etc. The essential thing then becomes what one thinks, not what one does. But an understanding of reality which is on the contrary grounded in inward experience, in the individual's own self, will as a natural consequence affect the whole person—head, heart, and limbs. The result is a transformed personality. Such a vision has action as its consequence, because there is no longer any opposition between thought and deed. "There can be no spiritual experience," says Steiner, "which does not affect our power to act. The essential thing is not to know something abstract about spiritual truths," he says—"but rather to carry them directly into life."

It is striking how Bjørneboe's biography shows us the picture of a transformed personality. He grew up in an upper-class milieu in Kristiansand and at the age of twenty came to Oslo as a decadent dandy who loved America. The rich man's son from the provinces acted the aristocrat and playboy, a conceited fop in tailored clothes. The Oscar Wilde-quoting aesthete and bohemian with a sense of elegance and style became an anthroposophist—and later a teacher at the Steiner School. Everybody understands that the leap from dandy to primary-school teacher is a great one. If you study the photographs of Bjørneboe from the early 1950s, you'll see immediately that something has happened to him: he's bursting with energy and enterprising spirit. Gone is the anemic, introverted and searching youth one can see in the pictures from during and immediately after the war (see the photos in Fredrick Wandrup's book Jens Bjørneboe). In the course of a very few years he has developed into an active, social powerhouse. Gradually over the years his engagement becomes more intense and his methods more uncouth; he emerges as social gadfly, agitator, pornographer and anarchist—in short: he becomes a cultural influence, the fireworks display that nobody could avoid noticing. But always he is an individualist and is difficult to place politically to the right or left. Of his moral freedom he is very jealous, he never runs others' errands—for, as he writes in 1966: "I write the truth which is my own truth, which only I know—because only I am I, and only I can see the world in my way."

That he was so very conservative in the 1950s is actually difficult to see, unless one means by conservative someone who admits to a metaphysical view of life and writes sonnets in Dano-Norwegian. Well, in that case he was conservative. But such an argument, which often comes from Marxist quarters, is hardly accurate and even less fruitful. Marxists are always frustrated when they have to evaluate Bjørneboe's literary contribution, quite simply because what they think is a left-socialist writer one minute turns out to be something different the next. And the stumbling block is always the individualistic and metaphysical, which you can never get around in Bjørneboe's books. In frustration one then resorts to rubrics such as "bourgeois" and "conservative," which are nothing but sheer moralism, i.e. a wish that Bjørneboe had been someone other than who he was and had written books with a different view of man and society. A typical example of such moralism is Sissel Halvorsen's article "Social criticism and metaphysics," in which she claims to find weaknesses in the polemic material in the trilogy about The History of Bestiality. These she ascribes to the fact that "social criticism is irreconcilable with what must be regarded as Bjørneboe's metaphysical and philosophical point of departure." In other words, a relevant social critique can only come from persons with a materialistic understanding of reality.

A similar frustration finds expression when certain literary analysts conclude by saying that Bjørneboe's social critique is not unequivocal, but ambivalent and ineffectual, or that he "vacillates between metaphysics and social science". Such claims are due solely to the fact that one hasn't understood the premises for Bjørneboe's view of society—one hasn't understood that in his opinion it is a fallacy to only to go after societal structures and social distortions. It is to begin at the wrong end. If the world is to be changed, we must turn toward our inner cosmos and conquer it—for "there lies the meaning, if there is one." [Powderhouse] This naturally doesn't mean that Bjørneboe is defending the existing social system—I'm still looking forward to seeing him characterized as a "pillar of society"!

For Bjørneboe there is nothing problematic in the fact that the fight for a better existence for humanity must in reality be waged on two fronts—an inner and an outer. This he says in no uncertain terms in the foreword to his poetry collection Ashes, Wind and Earth (1968):

The most obvious contradiction in what I have written since my debut in 1951, has been the tension between a strongly introverted, decidedly metaphysical leaning on the one side—and an equally strongly extroverted, polemic and documentary—revolutionary, in fact— engagement with contemporary issues on the other. For me there is no true opposition between these two extremes, and I have had no desire to erase the contradiction. (my italics.)

Thus there is, according to the author's own testimony, no real dichotomy between metaphysics and revolution—only an apparent one. There is a deep irony in the fact that this foreword is often cited in an attempt to demonstrate inner tensions and contradictions in his writings. Such attempts often conclude that Bjørneboe "felt a split in himself", and that he is marked by the opposition between "romanticism" and "realism". But as we have seen, it is not a matter of an opposition or a split, but of an inner necessity! There is an inner necessity in Bjørneboe's vision of reality which leads him toward a steadily stronger social and political engagement of an anarchistic nature. It is an inner necessity in his vision of reality which led to the fight against the authorities, the repressive power structure, and to the attacks on the prison system. It is due to an inner necessity in his vision of reality that in his first book Poems he pays tribute to the anarchist Hans Jæger, and that he makes his great mystics from the later novels immerse themselves in anarchist literature and declare themselves to be anarcho-syndicalists. The germ of all this lies in the anthroposophic view of life Bjørneboe embraces in the 1950s. The germ lies in his first book from 1951, and it is fully realized in his last book, The Sharks from 1974, which is a metaphysical, anthroposophical, revolutionary, mystical and anarchistic book.

The revolution which Bjørneboe predicts in the near future, the prophecy of Armageddon which is found in large parts of his oeuvre, is an anarchistic revolution in the sense that it is contingent on changes in individual attitudes. It is grounded in human hearts—here it has its source, its cause—not in external social or political relationships or in an ideology. Therefore when Bjørneboe in his article "Anarchism . . . today?" talks about political solutions having to come "from below, from the people" he doesn't mean the people as an abstract, manipulatable concept in the Marxist sense; he means quite simply the people as the sum of free individuals. Perhaps one will think it malapropos to drag the venerable Johan Sebastian Welhaven into this; nevertheless Bjørneboe's view of society is perfectly expressed in the following stanza of Welhaven's poem "The Watchword of the Times":

Only the power of truth in the soul of society
among God-filled, free individuals
can free the world of its old shackles
and lead the race forward toward happy times.

For Bjørneboe metaphysics and individualism are thus the precondition for his radical engagement in many areas—and in the political arena the choice for him was anarchism.

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