Which isn’t to say that Kafka was commenting pessimistically on the human relationship to the divine, or that this novel was, necessarily, an indictment of the hierarchical nature of the spiritual realm, for he was too great an artist for his work to be reducible to a single, unambiguous meaning, but that, at least on this occasion, he seemed convinced that certain dimensions of reality must remain inaccessible to us, or, anyway, accessible to us only at the discretion of an authority that it is beyond our power to grasp.