「西方の人」のゲーテと聖霊

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate notion of the “Holy Spirit” in Ryunosuke Akutagawa’swork, The Man of the West, by focusing on Goethe’s statement. By writing about essence of the Spirit, Akutagawa mentioned about “Daemon” originally noted byGoethe. Akutagawa denied the essence of the Spirit in the Bible, and regarded the Spirit as a “destiny”which is a governing power of humans’ existence and behaviors with no relation to humans’ will. It isquite evident that his such notion was influenced by Goethe’s statement, which is written that anythingthat is similar to accident but neither devilish nor angelic is “damonisch”. Therefore, Akutagawamentioned that the Spirit, i.e. a destiny, cannot be understood with the earthly concepts such as goodnessor evilness; rather, he thought that it can be understood with what exceeds such earthly concepts. However, Akutagawa mentioned about a theory of “Genius and Insanity”, proposed by apsychopathologist, Lombroso, as if he himself sympathized with such theory, and possible reason for thismight be because he considered a genetic relationship between himself and his mother, who was alunatic. Eventually, through this study, a precursor of the destined life by “Jesus in Akutagawa” was ableto be noticed.