Was this his will for the conquistadorial absolute? Did he want to outdo his foremost models? Did he mean his conquests to exceed even theirs? His close friend Hans Sachs observed that "in the execution of his duty he was untiring and unbending, hard and sharp like steel, a'good hater' close to the limits of vindictiveness."
"He reminded me of a conqueror," said Theodore Dreiser, who never met the man but knew him percipiently through his books, "a conqueror that has taken a city, entered its age-old prisons and there generously proceeded to release from their gloomy and rusted cells the prisoners of formulae, faiths, and illusions which have wracked and worn men for thousands and thousands of years…"
Such a chieftain might be flexible in strategy; he might array himself in sovereign, iron calm. But he must never compromise his purpose by one-thousandth of an inch. Freud usually aspired to all of these traits. But not during that Roman September of 1913. Not during those feckless weeks before his return to Vienna. It was Europe's last peaceful September before an irremediable explosion. It was the aftermath of his clenched confrontation with Jung. Back and forth Freud went along the via Cavour on his daily pilgrimages to Moses. Back and forth strode the doctor from Vienna with his graying beard and his conquistadorial bent. Peculiarly enough, he was trying to walk his way toward the idea of an unconquistadorial moderation; a moderation he saw embodied in Michelangelo's marble.
***
The statue in San Pietro represents a leader at a moment of imperious fury: Moses, just descended from Mount Sinai, finds Israel dancing around the Golden Calf (a totem!) and is about to dash the Tablets of the Law to pieces. Yet Freud, staring and staring at the curve and thrust of that enormous body, the fall of its robe, the curling of its fingers, reaches a startlingly different conclusion:
I used to sit in front of the statue in the expectation that I should see how it would start up on its raised foot, hurl the Tablets to the ground, and let fly its wrath. Nothing of the kind happened. Instead the stone image became more and more transfixed, an almost oppressively solemn serenity radiated from it, and I was obliged to realize that something was shown here that could stay without change; that this Moses would keep sitting like this in his wrath forever…
But why should Michelangelo rein in this most unbiblical Moses? Because (writes Freud),
Michelangelo modified the theme of the broken tablets; he does not let Moses break the Tablets in his wrath, but makes him be influenced by the danger that they might be broken and makes him pacify that wrath, or at any rate prevent it from becoming an act. In this way he had added something new and human to the figure of Moses, so that the giant frame with its tremendous physical power becomes only a concrete expression of the highest mental achievement that is possible in a man, that of struggling successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted himself.
This Moses in Freud's essay "Moses of Michelangelo" is very different from the magisterial avenger in Exodus. And this is a very different Freud, acclaiming nothing less than repression.
But the surprise does not end here. Apart from inverting psychoanalysis, the essay ignores the Freudian approach altogether. Freud himself called it a "nonanalytic child" of his pen. He had no interest, when he wrote it, later in 1913, in probing deeper motives for Michelangelo's variation of the Moses theme. He doesn't dredge for disguised emotions. He deals, rather, with an overt political aim. Freud reasons that by presenting a restrained Moses, Michelangelo was warning the leader who had originally commissioned the statue, namely Pope Julius II, who
attempted to realize great and mighty ends, especially designs on a large scale. The Pope was a man of action and he had a definite purpose, which was to unite Italy under Papal supremacy. He desired to bring about singlehanded what was not to happen for several centuries, and then only through the conjunction of many alien forces; and he worked with impatience in the short span of authority allowed him and used violent means.
The conquistadorial temper confessed to by Freud and observed in him by others-here Freud describes it in a negative context. The conqueror-Pope deserves Michelangelo's reproof.
And Moses, the martial pontiff of the Jews; Moses of the headlong valor; Moses, slayer of Egyptians and drowner of Pharaoh's army; Moses, the smasher of God's tablets; Moses who smote pagans the way General Conrad wanted to smite Serbs; Moses who ground the Golden Calf to bits and made the Israelites drink of it; Moses who had the Levites kill three thousand idolators-what happened to him?
Before Freud's eyes he vanished in the hot dust of Rome. In his stead rises a prophet who heroically resists his own vehemence.
It was in the spirit of the other Moses that Freud decided to end his summer hesitation over the war with Jung. He would forgo even the passive countermove of resigning from the Psycho-Analytical Association of which Jung remained the official head. As his paladin, Ernest Jones, wrote later, Freud would do anything he possibly could at this point to avoid an open schism at which the opponents of psychoanalysis could rejoice. Like his Moses he "pacified his wrath or at any rate prevented it from becoming an act… he struggled successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he had devoted himself." For the sake of psychoanalysis he decided to wait things out quietly, at least for a while, at the end of the world's last calm summer.
On Sunday August 3, 1913, the Austrian resort of Bregenz marked its summer season with an unusual climax. It took place on the spacious promenade winding along the foothills that cup the eastern end of Lake Constance by the Swiss border. Many Viennese spent their summer holidays at this scenic, tonic spot, far from the urban dog days. With other tourists they strolled above the leafy shoreline to enjoy the view and the breeze of Central Europe's largest lake.
On August 3, however, the promenade drew a crowd extraordinarily large even for a weekend blessed by golden weather. On that Sunday the International Peace Conference held an open-air mass meeting there. Seven thousand pacifists converged on the lakefront, not only from the AustroHungarian Empire but from Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and France. Some 5,000 vacationers became their impromptu comrades. They heard the Viennese Socialist leader Karl Renner (Trotsky's debating partner at the Cafe Central and later first Chancellor of the first Austrian Republic in 1918 as well as first President of the second Austrian Republic in 1945). Renner talked about the timeliness of the occasion. Just a few days earlier the latest little Balkan war had ended. The Bulgarians, in full retreat, had signed an armistice with the Serbs, the Rumanians, and the Greeks. Hostilities had lasted less than a month. Yet Renner emphasized that modern weaponry could expedite a bloodbath very fast. For Bulgaria alone, a country of just over four million, the dead and wounded were estimated to exceed 150,000. In a war involving major powers like Austria, whole generations of young men would turn into corpses or into physical and mental cripples.
Therefore, said Renner, this latest peace just made in the Balkans was a peace that should make people think. It was an uneasy peace. At the Bucharest Conference where the victors' terms were to be signed into a treaty, the Serbs would emerge as the chief gainers. A strengthened Serbia might aggravate tensions at Austria's southeastern border. Belgrade and Vienna might goad each other into the most dangerous bravado. Because men had invented such efficient murder machines, peace had become more precious than ever. The life-saving necessity for peace was coming home to more and more people. That so many had gathered here for the cause of peace was a fact as bright as the lakeside sun.