WRITING IN LIMA ON JUNE 25, 1979, where he had arrived to work on preproduction for Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog called Peru a “sleepy country at which God's wrath has cooled.” But two years later, after the arduous creation of a film in which a steamship was pulled over a mountain in the jungle, political controversy and financial catastrophe nearly ended production, and the indigenous extras threatened to kill the lead actor, the director described the weather as a heaven-sent curse: “Today (June 5, 1981) the rain came down at midday as God's scourge strikes the impious.” Despite his short-lived conversion to and longstanding fascination with Catholicism, Herzog's notes made during the making of Fitzcarraldo between 1979 and 1981 evoke the vengeful God of the Old Testament more often than the forgiving deity of the New. In Camisea in 1981, not long after eating maggots for dinner, and dealing with an exhausted Klaus Kinski as well as various equipment malfunctions, Herzog remarked: “I would gladly do without the bread for breaking, but please restore my lack of faith! I did not see God today. According to statistics, 85 percent of all existing species are beetles and insects of various sorts, so where are we on the scale of God's favor?”

In 1811 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling began keeping notes for an encyclopedic theory meant to explain God, nature, time, and man's relation to all three entities. In those notes, entitled Die Weltalter (The Ages of the World), the romantic philosopher equates God with a “holy madness” that expresses itself in a nature at once “drunken” and “senseless.” Schelling describes God himself as a “psychotic,” a “lonely, wild madness tearing itself apart.” In the prelude to Die Weltalter, Schelling writes that nature “seems to have a secret consuming poison within herself; but why does she transmit it to her children, so that they too are consumed? … Whence this universal, never-ending force of death?”5 His work on nature and religion consists in part of responses to eighteenthcentury scientific and philosophical developments, and also owes a debt to Baruch Spinoza's seventeenth-century assertion that “God” and “nature” denote one being. But Schelling also develops a distinctly romantic theory and style that is very much at home in the nineteenth century.