lira m Rjfgjfjf H HI 11 IHf I II If LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 00017440^13 I xV . - \ X cP u •v .- 1 p ^ /, V .# ' «,**'% / . " < "V / - " ^ i> /O THE ESSENCE OP CHRISTIANITY, BY LUDWIG FEUERBACH. SrtmslatA frnra tjrt irafo mine 1 carry with me, the old omnia mea mecum porto^ I cannot, Ettas I appropriate. 1 have many things outride myself, which 1 cannot convey either in my pocket or my la-ad, but which nevorlho- 1 look upOQ afl belonging to mo. not indeed a.- a mere man — a view not now in question— Uit PREFACE. 5 philosopher. I am nothing but a natural philosopher in the domain of mind ; and the natural philosopher can do nothing without instruments, without material means. In this character I have written the present work, which consequently contains nothing else than the principle of a new philosophy verified practically, i. e., in concreto, in application to a special object, but an object which has a universal significance: namely, to religion, in which this principle is exhibited, deve- loped and thoroughly carried out. This philosophy is essentiallv distinguished from the systems hitherto prevalent, in that it corresponds to the real, complete nature of man; but for that very reason it is antago- nistic to minds perverted and crippled by a superhu- man, i. e., anti-human, anti-natural religion and specu- lation. It does not, as I have already said elsewhere, regard the pen as the only fit organ for the revelation of truth, but the eye and ear, the hand and foot; it does not identify the idea of the fact with the fact itself, so as to reduce real existence to an existence on paper, but it separates the two, and precisely by this separation attains to the fact itself; it recognises as the true thing, not the thing as it is an object of the abstract reason, but as an object of the real, com- plete man, and hence as it is itself a real, complete thing. This philosophy does not rest on an Under- standing per se, on an absolute, nameless understand- ing, belonging one knows not to whom, but on the understanding of man ; — though not, I grant, on that of man enervated by speculation and dogma ; — and it speaks the language of men, not an empty, unknown tongue. Yes, both in substance and in speech, it places philosophy in the negation of philosophy, i. e., it declares that alone to be the true philosophy which is converted in succum et sanguinem, which is incarnate in Man ; and hence it finds its highest triumph in the fact that to all dull and pedantic minds, which place the essence of philosophy in the show of philosophy, it appears to be no philosophy at all. 6 PREFACE. This philosophy has for its principle, not the Sub- stance of Spinoza, not the ego of Kant and Fichte, not the Absolute Identity of Schelling, not the Absolute Mind of Hegel, in short, no abstract, merely concep- tional being, but a real being, the true Ens realissimum — man ; its principle, therefore, is in the highest de- gree positive and real. It generates thought from the opposite of thought, from Matter, from existence, from the senses ; it has relation to its object first through the senses, i. e., passively, before defining it in thought. Hence my work, as a specimen of this philosophy, so far from being a production to be placed in the category of Speculation, — although in another point of view it is the true, the incarnate result of prior philosophical systems, — is the direct opposite of speculation, nay, puts an end to it by explaining it. Speculation makes religion say only what it has itself thought, and expressed far better than religion ; it assigns a meaning to religion without any reference to the actual meaning of religion; it does not look be- yond itself. I, on the contrary, let religion itself speak; I constitute myself only its listener and interpreter, not its prompter. Xot to invent, but to discover, " to un- veil existence," has been my sole object; to see cor- rectly, my sole endeavour. It is not I, but religion that worShips man, although religion, or rather theo- logy, denies this ; it is not I, an insignificant indivi- dual, but religion itself that says: God is man, man is God; it is not I, but religion that denies the God who is not mail, but only an ens ratio?iis, — since it makes God become man, and then constitutes this God, not distinguished from man, having a human form, human feelings and human thoughts, the object of its worship and veneration. I havjB only found the key to the cipher of the Christian religion, only extricated its true meaning from the web of contradictions and de- lusions called theology; — but in doing so I have cer- tainly committed a sacrilege. If th< rcfore my work native, in , atheistic, lei it be remembered PREFACE. 7 that atheism — at least in the sense of this work — is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in inten- tion or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature. Or let it be proved that the historical as well as the rational argu- ments of my work are false ; let them be refuted — not, however, 1 entreat, by judicial denunciations, or theological jeremiads, by the trite phrases of specula- tion, or other pitiful expedients for which I have no name, but by reasons, and such reasons as I have not already thoroughly answered. Certainly, my work is negative, destructive; but, be it observed, only in relation to the inhuman, not to the human elements of religion. It is therefore divided into two parts, of which the first is, as to its main idea, positive, the second, including the appendix, not wholly but in the main, negative; in both, how- ever, the same positions are proved, only in a different or rather opposite manner. The first exhibits religion in its essence, its truth, the second exhibits it in its contradictions ; the first is development, the second polemic; thus the one is, according to the nature of the case, calmer, the other more vehement. Develop- ment advances gently, contest impetuously ; for deve- lopment is self-contented at every stage, contest only at the last blow. Development is deliberate, but contest resolute. Development is light, contest fire. Hence results a difference between the two parts even as to their form. Thus in the first part I show that the true sense of Theology is Anthropology, and there is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature, and, consequently, no distinction between the divine and human subject : I say conse- quently, for wherever, as is especially the case in theo- logy, the predicates are not accidents, but express the essence of the subject, there is no distinction between subject and predicate, the one can be put in the place 8 PREFACE. of the other ; on which point I refer the reader to the Analytics of Aristotle, or even merely to the Intro- duction of Porphyry. In the second part, on the other hand, I show that the distinction which is made, or rather supposed to be made, between the theological and anthropological predicates, resolves itself into an absurdity. Here is a striking example. In the first part I prove that the Son of God is in religion a real son, the son of God in the same sense in which man is the son of man, and I find therein the truth, the essence of religion, that it conceives and affirms a profoundly human relation as a divine relation ; on the other hand, in the second part I show that the Son of God — not indeed in religion, but in theology, which is the reflec- tion of religion upon itself, — is not a son in the natural, human sense, but in an entirely different manner, con- tradictory to Nature and reason, and therefore absurd, and I find in this negation of human sense and the hu- man understanding, the negation of religion. Accord- ingly the first part is the direct, the second the indirect! proof, that theology is antropology : hence the second part necessarily has reference to the first ; it has no independent significance ; its only aim is to show, that the sense in which religion is interpreted in the pre- vious part of the work must be the true one, because the contrary is absurd. In brief, in the first part I am chiefly concerned with religion, in the second with theology: I say chiefly, for it was impossible to exclude theology from the first part, or religion from the second . A mere glance will show that my investigation includes speculative theology or philosophy, and not, as lias been here and there erroneously supposed, common theology only, a kind of trash from which 1 rather keep as cical- as possible, (though, for the rest, I am Btifficiently well acquainted with it,) confining myself always to the most essential, strict and necessary definition of the object,* and hence to that definition which gives to an * For example, in considering the Mcrsments, I limit myself to two*, for, in the strictest Lather, t. xrii, p. 658), there ere no more. PREFACE. 9 object the most general interest, and raises it above the sphere of theology. But it is with theology that I have to do, not with theologians \ for I can only undertake to characterize what is primary, — the ori- ginal, not the copy, principles, not persons, species, not individuals, objects of history, not objects of the chroni- que scandaleuse. If my work contained only the second part, it would be perfectly just to accuse it of a negative tendency, to represent the proposition : Religion is nothing, is an absurdity, as its essential purport. But I by no means say (that were an easy task !) : God is nothing, the Trinity is nothing, the Word of God is nothing, &c; I only show that they are not that which the illusions of theology make them, — -not foreign, but native myste- ries, the mysteries of human nature ; I show that reli- gion takes the apparent, the superficial in Nature and humanity, for the essential, and hence conceives their true essence as a separate, special existence : that con- sequently, religion, in the definitions which it gives of God, e. g., of the Word of God, — at least in those de- finitions which are not negative in the sense above al- luded to, — only defines or makes objective the true na- ture of the human word. The reproach that according to my book, religion is an absurdity, a nullity, a pure illusion, would be well-founded only if, according to it, that into which I resolve religion, which I prove to be its true object and substance, namely man, — anthro^ pology, were an absurdity, a nullity, a pure illusion. But so far from giving a trivial or even a subordinate significance to anthropology, — a significance which is assigned to it only just so long as a theology stands above it and in opposition to it, — I, on the contrary, while reducing theology to anthropology exalt an- thropology into theology, very much as Christianity, while lowering God into man, made man into God , though, it is true, this human God was by a further process made a transcendental, imaginary God, remote from man. Hence it is obvious that I do not take the a3 10 PREFACE. word anthropology in the sense of the Hegelian or of any other philosophy, but in an infinitely higher and more general sense. Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality ; we only see real things in the entrancing splendour of imagin- ation and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity. Hence I do nothing more to religion — and to speculative philosophy and theology also — than to open its eyes, or rather to turn its gaze from the internal towards the external, i. e., I change the object as it is in the imagination into the object as it is in reality. But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, this change, inasmuch as it does away with illusion, is an ab- solute annihilation, or at least a reckless profanation ; for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Xay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest de- gree of sacredness. Religion has disappeared, and for it has been substituted, even among Protestants, the appearance of religion — the Church — in order at least that "the faith 77 may be imparted to the ignorant and indiscriminating multitude ; that faith being still the Christian, because the Christian churches stand now as they did a thousand years ago, and now, as formerly, the external signs of the faitli arc in rogue. That which has no longer any existence in faitli (the faith of tin' modern world is only an ostensible faith, a faith which does not believe what it fancies that it believes, and is only an undecided, pusillanimous unbelief- ) is still to pasfi current as opinion: that which is no longer -acred in itself and in truth, is still at lea8t to seem sacred. Hence the simulated religious indignation of the pre- Ben1 age, the age of 9hows and illusion, concerning PKEFACE. 11 my analysis, especially of the Sacraments. But let it not be demanded of an author who proposes to himself as his goal not the favour of his contemporaries, but only the truth, the unveiled, naked truth, that he should have or feign respect towards an empty ap- pearance, especially as the object which underlies this appearance is in itself the culminating point of reli- gion, i. e., the point at which the religious slides into the irreligious. Thus much in justification, not in excuse, of my analysis of the Sacraments. With regard to the true bearing of my analysis of the sacraments, especially as presented in the conclud- ing chapter, I only remark, that I therein illustrate by a palpable and visible example the essential purport, the peculiar theme of my work, that I therein call upon the senses themselves to witness to the truth of my ana- lysis and my ideas, and demonstrate ad oculos, ad factum, ad gustum, what I have taught ad captum throughout the previous pages. As, namely, the water of Baptism, the wine and bread of the Lord's Supper, taken in their natural power and significance, are and effect infinitely more than in a supernaturalistic, illusory significance; so the object of religion in general, conceived in the sense of this work, i. e., the anthropological sense, is infinitely more productive and real, both in theory and practice, than when accepted in the sense of theo- logy. For as that which is or is supposed to be im- parted in the water, bread, and wine, over and above these natural substances themselves, is something in the imagination only, but in truth, in reality, nothing; so also the object of religion in general, the Divine essence, in distinction from the essence of Nature and Humanity, — that is to say, if its attributes, as under- standing, love, &c, are and signify something else than these attributes as they belong to man and Nature, — is only something in the imagination, but in truth and reality nothing. Therefore — this is the moral of the fable — we should not, as is the case in theology and speculative philosophy, make real beings and 12 PREFACE. things into arbitrary signs, vehicles, symbols, or pre dicates of a distinct, transcendant, absolute, i. e. y ab- stract being; but we shoud accept and understand them in the significance which they have in themselves, which is identical with their qualities, with those conditions which make them what they are : — thus only do we obtain the key to a real theory and practice. I, in fact, put in the place of the barren baptismal water, the beneficent effect of real water. How " watery," how trivial ! Yes, indeed, very trivial. But so Marriage, in its time, was a very trivial truth, which Luther, on the ground of his natural good sense, maintained in opposition to the seemingly holy illusion of celibacy. But while I thus view water as a real thing, I at the same time intend it as a vehicle, an image, an example, a symbol, of the " unholy" spirit of my Avork, just as the water of Baptism — the object of my analysis — is at once literal and symbolical water. It is the same with bread and wine. Malignity has hence drawn the con- clusion that bathing, eating and drinking are the sum- ma summarum, the positive result of my work. I make no other reply than this : if the whole of religion is contained in the Sacraments, and there are conse- quently no other religious acts than those which are performed in Baptism and the Lord's Supper ; then I grant that the entire purport and positive result of my work are bathing, eating and drinking, sinqp this work is nothing but a faithful, rigid historico-philosopl^ical analysis of religion — the revelation of religion to it- self, the awakening of religion to self-consciousness. I say an historico-philosopliical analysis, in distinction from a merely historical analysis oi' Christianity. The historical critic — such a one Cor example, as Pauincr or Grhillany — show- that the Lord's Supper is a rite lineally descended from the ancient Culms of human sacrifice; thai Ojnce : instead of bretyd and wine, human flesh and Mood wore partaken. I. on the con- trary, take as the object of my analysis and reduction only the Christian significance of the rite, that view PREFACE. 13 of it which is sanctioned in Christianity, and I proceed on the supposition that only that significance which a dogma or institution has in Christianity (of course in ancient Christianity, not in modern,) whether it may present itself in other religions or not, is also the true origin of that dogma or institution in so far as it is Christian. Again, the historical critic, as, for example, Lutzelberger, shows that the narratives of the miracles of Christ resolve themselves into contradictions and absurdities, that they are later fabrications, and that consequently Christ was no miracle-worker nor, in general, that which he is represented to be in the Bible. I, on the other hand, do not inquire, what the real, natural Christ was or may have been in distinction from what he has been made or has become in Super- naturalism ; on the contrary, I accept the Christ of religion, but I show that this superhuman being is no- thing else than a product and reflex of the supernatural human mind. I do not ask whether this or that, or any miracle can happen or not ; I only show what miracle is, and I show it not a priori, but by examples of mir- acles, narrated in the Bible as real events ; in doing so, however, I answer or rather preclude the question as to the possibility or reality or necessity of miracle. Thus much concerning the distinction between me and the historical critics who have attacked Christianity. As regards my relation to Strauss and Bruno Bauer, in company with whom I am constantly named, I merely point out here that the distinction between our works is sufficiently indicated by the distinction between their objects, which is implied even in the title-page. Bauer takes for the object of his criticism the evangelical history, i. e., biblical Christianity, or rather biblical theology ; Strauss, the System of Christian Doctrine and the Life of Jesus, (which may also be included under the title of Christian Doctrine, i. e., dogmatic Christianity or rather dogmatic theo- logy; I, Christianity in general, L e., the Christian religion, and consequently, only Christian philosophy 1-i PREFACE. or theology. Hence I take my citations chiefly from men in whom Christianity was not merely a theory or a dogma, not merely theology, but religion. My prin- cipal theme is Christianity, is Religion, as it is the immediate object, the immediate nature, of man. Erudi- tion and philosophy arc to me only the means by which I bring to light the treasure hid in man. I must further mention that the circulation which my work has had amongst the public at large, was neither desired nor expected by me. It is true that I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e, that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one. Hence, in all my works as well as in the present one, I have made the utmost clearness, sim- plicity and defmiteness, a law to myself, so that they may be understood, at least in the main, by every cultivated and thinking man. But notwithstanding this, my work can be appreciated and fully understood only by the scholar, that is to say, by the scholar who loves truth, who is capable of forming a judgment, who is above the notions and prejudices of the learned and unlearned vulgar ; for although a thoroughly inde- pendent production, it has yet its necessary logical basis in history. J very frequently refer to this or thai historical phenomenon without expressly designa- ting it, thinking this superfluous; and such references can be Understood by the scholar alone. Thus, for example, in the very firs! chapter, where 1 develope the necessary consequences of the stand-point of Peel- ing, I allude to Jacob] ami Sehleierimmher ; in the Second chapter 1 allude chiefly to Kant ism, Scepticism PREFACE. 15 Theism, Materialism and Pantheism ; in the chapter on the " Stand-point of Religion," where I discuss the contradictions between the religious or theological and the physical or natural-philosophical view of Nature, I refer to philosophy in the age of orthodoxy, and especially to the philosophy of Descartes and Leibnitz, in which this contradiction presents itself in a peculiarly characteristic manner. The reader, there- fore, who is unacquainted with the historical facts and ideas presupposed in my work, will fail to perceive on what my arguments and ideas hinge ; no wonder if my positions often appear to him baseless, however firm the footing on which they stand. It is true that the subject of my work is of universal human interest ; moreover, its fundamental ideas, though not in the form in which they are here expressed, or in which they could be expressed under existing circumstances, will one day become the common property of mankind : for nothing is opposed to them in the present day but empty, powerless illusions and prejudices in contra- diction with the true nature of man. But in consider- ing this subject in the first instance, I was under the necessity of treating it as a matter of science, of philo- sophy ; and in rectifying the aberrations of Religion, Theology, and Speculation, I was naturally obliged to use their expressions, and even to appear to speculate, or — which is the same thing — to turn theologian my- self, while I nevertheless only analyse speculation, i. e., reduce theology to anthropology. My work, as I said before, contains, and applies in the concrete, the prin- ciple of a new philosophy suited — not to the schools, but — to man. Yes, it contains that principle, but only by evolving it out of the very core of religion ; hence, be it said in passing, the new philosophy can no longer, like the old Catholic and modern Protestant scholas- ticism, fall into the temptation to prove its agreement with religion by its agreement with Christian dogmas; on the contrary, being evolved from the nature of re- ligion, it has in itself the true essence of religion, — 16 PREFACE. is. in its very quality as a philosophy, a religion also. But a work which considers ideas in their genesis and explains and demonstrates them in strict sequence, is, by the very form which this purpose imposes upon it, unsuited to popular reading. Lastly, as a supplement to this work with regard to many apparently unvindicated positions, I refer to my articles in the Dexdsches Jahrbuch, January and Febru- ary, 1842. to my critiques and Char aider 1st iken des modernen After-christenthums^ in previous numbers of the same periodical, and to my earlier works, espe- cially the following : — P. Bayle. Em Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Menschheit, Ausbach, 1838, and Philosophie und Christenthum, Mannheim, 1839. In these works. I have sketched, with a few sharp touches, the historical solution of Christianity, and have shown that Christianity has in fact long vanish- ed, not only from the Reason but from the Life of mankind, that it is nothing more than a fixed idea, in flagra/nt contradiction with our Fire and Life Assur- ance companies, our rail-roads and steam-carriages, our picture and- sculpture galleries, our military and industrial schools, our theatres and scientific museums. LUDWIG FEUERBACH. Bruckbcrg, Feb. 14, 1843. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER PAQB I. § 1. The Essential Nature of Man 19 I. § 2. The Essence of Religion considered generally ... 32 Part I. THE TRUE OR ANTHROPOLOGICAL ESSENCE OF RELIGION. II. God as a Being of the Understanding 56 III. God as a Moral Being, or Law . 70 IV. The Mystery of the Incarnation ; or, God as Love, as a Being of the Heart 77 V. The Mystery of the Suffering God 88 VI. The Mystery of the Trinity and the Mother of God . . . 95 VII. The Mystery of the Logos and Divine Image 106 VIII. The Mystery of the Cosmogonical Principle in God . . .114 IX. The Mystery of Mysticism, or Nature in God 122 X. The Mystery of Providence and Creation out of Nothing . 139 XI. The Significance of the Creation in Judaism 152 XII. The Omnipotence of Feeling, or the Mystery of Prayer . 162 XIII. The Mystery of Faith— the Mystery of Miracle .... 170 XIV. The Mystery of the Resurrection and of the Miraculus Con- ception ..... 181 XV. The Mystery of the Christian Christ, or the Personal God 187 XVI. The Distinction between Christianity and Heathenism . 199 XVII. The Significance of Voluntary Celibacy and Monachism . 211 XVIII. The Christian Heaven, or Personal Immortality . . 222 18 CONTENTS. Part II. THE FALSE OR THEOLOGICAL ESSENCE OF RELIGION. CHAPTER PAGB XIX. The Essential Stand-point of Religion 240 XX. The Contradiction in the Existence of God 254 XXI. The Contradiction in the Revelation of God 263 XXII. The Contradiction in the Nature of God in general . . . 273 XXni. The Contradiction in the Speculative Doctrine of God . . 288 XXIV. The Contradiction in the Trinity 295 XXV. The Contradiction in the Sacraments 300 XXVI. The Contradiction of Faith and Love 313 XXVII. Concluding Application 340 APPENDIX. • ECTION 1. The Religious Emotions purely Human 351 2. God is Feeling released from Limits 353 3. God is the highest Feeling of Self 355 4. Distinction between the Pantheistic and Personal God . . . 35 G 5. Nature without interest for Christians 361 6. In God Man is his own Object 364 7. Christianity the Religion of Suffering 368 8. Mystery of the Trinity 370 9. Creation out of nothing 376 10. Egoism of the Israelitish Religion 378 1.1. The Idea of Providence 379 12. Contradiction of Faith and Reason 387 13. The Resurrection of Christ 391 14. The Christian a Supermundane Being 392 1 5. The Celibate and Monachism 393 1C. The Christian Heaven 405 1 7. What Faith denies on Earth it affirms in Heaven 407 18. Contradictions in the Sacrament! • . . . . 409 19. Contradiction of Faith and Love 412 20. Results of the Principle of Faith 422 21. Contradiction of tho God-Man 482 22. Anthropology the MysU-ry of Theology 439 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. § 1. The Essential Nature of Man. Religion has its base in the essential difference be- tween man and the brute — the brutes have no religion. It is true that the old uncritical writers on natural history attributed to the elephant, among other laud- able qualities, the virtue of religiousness ; but the re- ligion of elephants belongs to the realm of fable. Cu- vier, one of the greatest authorities on the animal kingdom, assigns, on the strength of his personal ob- servations, no higher grade of intelligence to the ele- phant than to the dog. But what is this essential difference between man and the brute ? The most simple, general, and also the most popular answer to this question is — conscious- ness : — but consciousness in the strict sense ; for the consciousness implied in the feeling of self as an indi- vidual, in discrimination by the senses, in the percep- tion and even judgment of outward things according to definite sensible signs, cannot be denied to the brutes. Consciousness in the strictest sense is present only in a being to whom his species, his essential na- ture, is an object of thought. The brute is indeed conscious of himself as an individual — and he has ac- 20 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. cordingly the feeling of self as the common centre of successive sensations — but not as a species : hence, he is without that consciousness which in its nature, as in its name, is akin to science. Where there is this higher consciousness there is a capability of science. Science is the cognizance of species. In practical life we have to do with individuals ; in science, with spe- cies. But only a being to whom his own species, his own nature, is an object of thought, can make the essential nature of other things or beings an object of thought. Hence the brute has only a simple, man a twofold life : in the brute, the inner life is one with the outer; man has both an inner and an outer life. The inner life of man is the life which has relation to his species, to his general, as distinguished from his individual, nature. Man thinks — that is, he converses with him- self. The brute can exercise no function which has relation to his species without another individual ex- ternal to itself; but man can perform the functions of thought and speech, which strictly imply such a rela- tion, apart from another individual. Man is himself at once I and thou; he can put himself in the place of another, for this reason, that to him his species, his essential nature, and not merely his individuality, is an object of thought. Religion being identical with the distinctive cha- racteristic of man, is then identical with self-conscious- -with the consciousness which man lias of his nature. But religion, expressed generally, is con- sciousness of the infinite ; thus it is and can be nothing else than the consciousness which man has of his own — not finite and limited, but infinite nature. A really finite being has not even the faintest adumbration, still lese consciousness, of an infinite being, for the Limit of the oature is also the limit of the conscious- ness. The consciousness of the caterpillar, whose life is confined to a particular species 01 plant, does not extend itself beyond this aarrow domain. It does, THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF MAN. 21 indeed, discriminate between this plant and other plants, but more it knows not. A consciousness so limited, but on account of that very limitation so in- fallible, we do not call consciousness, but instinct. Consciousness, in the strict or proper sense, is iden- tical with consciousness of the infinite ; a limited con- sciousness is no consciousness ; consciousness is essen- tially infinite in its nature.* The consciousness of the infinite is nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness ; or, in the conscious- ness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature. What, then, is the nature of man, of which he is conscious, or what constitutes the specific distinction, the proper humanity of man ?f Season, Will, Affection. To a complete man belong the power of thought, the power of will, the power of affection. The power of thought is the light of the intellect, the power of will is energy of character, the power of affection is love. Eeason, love, force of will, are perfections — the per- fections of the human being- — nay, more, they are ab- solute perfections of being. To will, to love, to think, are the highest powers, are the absolute nature of man as man, and the basis of his existence. Man exists to think, to love, to will. Now that which is the end, the ultimate aim, is also the true basis and principle of a being. But what is the end of reason ? Reason. Of love ? Love. Of will ? Freedom of the will. We think for the sake of thinking ; love for the sake of * Objectum intellectus esse illimitatum sive omne verum ac, ut lo- quuntur, omne ens ut ens, ex eo constat, quod ad nullum non genus reram extenditur, nullumque est, cujus cognoscendi capax non sit, licet ob varia obstacula multa sint, quas re ipsa, non norit. — Gassendi (Opp. Omn. Phys). f The obtuse materialist says : "Man is distinguished from the brute only by consciousness — he is an animal with consciousness superadded ;" not reflecting, that in a being which awakes to consciousness, there takes place a qualitative change, a differentiation of the entire nature. For the rest, our words are by no means intended to depreciate the nature of the lower animals. This is not the place to enter further into that question. 22 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. loving; will for the sake of willing — L e., that we may be free. True existence is thinking, loving, willing existence. That alone is true, perfect, divine, which exists for its own sake. But such is love, such is reason, such is will. The divine trinity in man, above the individual man, is the unity of reason, love, will. Reason, Will, Love, are not powers which man possesses, for he is nothing without them, he is what he is only by them ; they are the constituent elements of his nature, which he neither has nor makes, the animating, determining, governing powers — divine, absolute powers — to which he can oppose no re- sistance.* How can the feeling man resist feeling, the loving one love, the rational one reason? Who has not ex- perienced the overwhelming power of melody ? And what else is the power of melody but the power of feeling ? Music is the language of feeling ; melody is audible feeling — feeling communicating itself. Who has not experienced the power of love, or at least heard of it? Which is the stronger — love or the in- dividual man? Js it man that possesses love, or is it not much rather love that possesses man? When love impels a man to suffer death even joyfully for the be- loved one, is this death-conquering power his own in- dividual power, or is it not rather the power of love? And who that ever truly thought lias not experienced that quiet, subtle power — the power of thought? When thou sinkest into deep reflection, forgetting thy- self and what is around thee, dost thou govern reason, or is it not reason which governs and absorbs thee? Scientific enthusiasm — is it not the most glorious triumph of intellect over thee? The desire of know- ledge — is it not a simply irresistible, and all-conquer- ing power? And when thou suppresses! a passion, renouncest a habit, in short, achievesl a victory over thyself, is this victorious power thy own personal * "Toute opinion i -t usez forte poor N ffcire expoeer au prix do U vie." — .Montaigne. THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF MAN. 23 power, or is it not rather the energy of will, the force of morality, which seizes the mastery of thee, and fills thee with indignation against thyself and thy indi- vidual weaknesses ? Man is nothing without an object. The great models of humanity, such men as reveal to us what man is capable of, have attested the truth of this proposition by their lives. They had only one dominant passion — the realization of the aim which was the essential object of their activity. But the object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject's own, but objective, nature. If it be an object common to several individuals of the same species, but under various conditions, it is still, at least as to the form under which it presents itself to each of them according to their respective modifications, their own, but objective, nature. Thus the Sun is the common object of the planets, but it is an object to Mercury, to Venus, to Saturn, to Uranus, under other conditions than to the Earth. Each planet has its own sun. The Sun which lights and warms Uranus has no physical (only an astro- nomical, scientific) existence for the earth ; and not only does the Sun appear different, but it really is another sun on Uranus than on the Earth. The re- lation of the Sun to the Earth is therefore at the same time a relation of the Earth to itself, or to its own nature, for the measure of the size and of the intensity of light which the Sun possesses as the object of the Earth, is the measure of the distance, which determines the peculiar nature of the Earth. Hence each planet has in its sun the mirror of its own nature. In the object which he contemplates, therefore, man becomes acquainted with himself; consciousness of the objective is the self-consciousness of man. We know the man by the object, by his conception of what is external to himself ; in it his nature becomes evident ; this object is his manifested nature, his true objective ego. And this is true not merely of spiritual, 24 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. but also of sensuous objects. Even the objects which are the most remote from man, because they are objects to him, and to the extent to which they are so, are revelations of human nature. Even the moon, the sun, the stars, call to man Tv26v asavtov. That he sees them, and so sees them, is an evidence of his own nature. The animal is sensible only of the beam which imme- diately effects life ; while man perceives the ray, to him physically indifferent, of the remotest star. Man alone has purely intellectual, disinterested joys and passions ; the eye of man alone keeps theoretic festi- vals. The eye which looks into the starry heavens, which gazes at that light, alike useless and harmless, having nothing in common with the earth and its ne- cessities — this eye sees in that light its own nature, its own origin. The eye is heavenly in its nature. Hence man elevates himself above the earth only with the eye ; hence theory begins with the contemplation of the heavens. The first philosophers were astro- nomers. It is the heavens that admonish man of his destination, and remind him that he is destined not merely to action, but also to contemplation. The absolute to man is his own nature. The power of the object over him is therefore the power of his own nature. Thus the power of the object of feeling is the power of feeling itself; the power of the object of the intellect is the power of the intellect itself; the power of the object of the will is the power of the will itself. The man who is affected by musical sounds, is governed by feeling ; by the feeling, that is. which finds its corresponding element in musical sounds. But it is not melody as such, it is only melody preg- nant with meaning and emotion, which has power over feeling. Pqcling is only acted on by that which con- vey.- feeling, i. c. by itself, its own nature. Thus also the will ; thus, and infinitely more, the intellect. What- ever kind of object, therefore, we are at any time con- scious of, we arc always at the same time conscious of our own nature; we can affirm nothing without affirm- THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OP MAN. ' 25 ing ourselves. And since to will, to feel, to think, are perfections, essences, realities, it is impossible that in- tellect, feeling, and will should feel or perceive them selves as limited, finite powers, i. e., as worthless, as nothing. For finiteness and nothingness are identical ; finiteness is only a euphemism for nothingness. Finite- ness is the metaphysical, the theoretical — nothingness the pathological, practical expression. What is finite to the understanding is nothing to the heart. But it is impossible that we should be conscious of will, feel- ing, and intellect, as finite powers, because every per- fect existence, every original power and essence, is the immediate verification and affirmation of itself. It is impossible to love, will, or think, without perceiving these activities to be perfections — impossible to feel that one is a loving, willing, thinking being, without experiencing an infinite joy therein. Consciousness consists in a being becoming objective to itself; hence it is nothing apart, nothing distinct from the being which is conscious of itself. How could it otherwise become conscious of itself? It is therefore impossible to be conscious of a perfection as an imperfection, im- possible to feel feeling limited, to think thought limited. Consciousness is self-verification, self-affirmation, self-love, joy in one's own perfection. Consciousness is the characteristic mark of a perfect nature ; it exists only in a self-sufficing, complete being. Even human vanity attests this truth. A man looks in the glass; he has complacency in his appearance. This compla- cency is a necessary, involuntary consequence of the completeness, the beauty of his form. A beautiful form is satisfied in itself; it has necessarily joy in it- self — in self-contemplation. This complacency becomes vanity only when a man piques himself on his form as being his individual form, not when he admires it as a specimen of human beauty in general. It is fitting that he should admire it thus ; he can conceive no form more beautiful, more sublime than the human. * Assn- * Homini liomine nihil pukhrins. (Cie. de Nat. D. 1. i.) And this is 26 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. redly every being loves itself, its existence — and fitly so. To exist is a good. Quidquid essentia dignum est, scientia dignum est. Everything that exists has value, is a being of distinction — at least this is true of the species : hence it asserts, maintains itself. But the highest form of self-assertion, the form which is itself a superiority, a perfection, a bliss, a good, is con- sciousness. Every limitation of the reason, or in general of the nature of man, rests on a delusion, an error. It is true that the human being, as an individual, can and must — herein consists his distinction from the brute — feel and recognise himself to be limited ; but he can become conscious of his limits, his finiteness, only be- cause the perfection, the infinitude of his species is perceived by him, whether as an object of feeling, of conscience, or of the thinking consciousness. If he makes his own limitations the limitations of the species, this arises from the mistake that he identifies himself immediately with the species — amistake which is intimately connected with the individual's love of ease, sloth, vanity, and egotism. For a limitation which I know to be merely mine humiliates, shames, and per- turbs me. Hence to free myself from this feeling of shame, from this state of dissatisfaction, I convert the limits of my individuality into the limits of human na- ture in general. What is incomprehensible to me is incomprehensible to others ; why should I trouble my- self further? it is no fault of mine; my understanding is not to blame, but the understanding of the race. But it is a ludicrous and even culpable error to define as finite and limited what constitutes the essence of man, the nature of Ills species, which is the absolute nature of the individual. Every being is sufficient to itself. No being can deny itself, i. e., its own nature ; no bo- no ugD of limitation, for he regards other beings :i- beautiful besi [ea liim- ptlf; In- delights in th<- beautiful f..nn> of animals, in the beautiful forms of plants, in the beauty of nature in general. But only the absolul perfect formj can delight without envy in the forms of other Uinge. THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF MAN. 27 ing is a limited one to itself. Rather, every being is in and by itself infinite — has its God, its highest con- ceivable being, in itself. Every limit of a being is cognisable only by another being out of and above him. The life of the ephemera is extraordinarily short in comparison with that . of longer lived crea tures ; but nevertheless, for the ephemera this short life is as long as a life of years to others. The leaf on which the caterpillar lives is for it a world, an infinite space. That which makes a being what it is — is its talent, its power, its wealth, its adornment. How can it possibly hold its existence non-existence, its wealth poverty, its talent incapacity? If the plants had eyes, taste and judgment, each plant would declare its own flower the most beautiful ; for its comprehension, its taste, would reach no farther than its natural power of production. What the productive power of its nature has brought forth as the highest, that must also its taste, its judg- ment, recognise and affirm as the highest. What the nature affirms, the understanding, the taste, the judg- ment, cannot deny ; otherwise the understanding, the judgment, would no longer be the understanding and judgment of this particular being, but of some other. The measure of the nature is also the measure of the understanding. If the nature is limited, so also is the feeling, so also is the understanding. But to a limited being its limited understanding is not felt to be a limitation ; on the contrary, it is perfectly happy and contented with this understanding ; it regards it, praises and values it, as a glorious, divine power ; and the limited understanding, on its part, values the limit- ed nature whose understanding it is. Each is exactly adapted to the other ; how should they be at issue with each other? A being's understanding is its sphere of vision. As far as thou seest, so far extends thy nature ; and conversely. The eye of the brute reaches no farther than its needs, and its nature no farther than its needs. And so far as thy nature reaches, 28 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. so far reaches thy unlimited self-consciousness, so far art thou God. The discrepancy between the under- standing and the nature, between the power of con- ception and the power of production in the human con- sciousness, on the one hand is merely individual signi- ficance and has not a universal application ; and, on the other hand, it is only apparent. He who having written a bad poem knows it to be bad, is in his intel- ligence, and therefore in his nature, not so limited as he who, having written a bad poem, admires it and thinks it good. It follows, that if thou thinkest the infinite, thou per- ceivest and affirmest the infinitude of the power of thought ; if thou feelest the infinite, thou feelest and affirmest the infinitude of the power of feeling. The object of the intellect is intellect objective to itself; the object of feeling is feeling objective to itself. If thou hast no sensibility, no feeling for music, thou perceivest in the finest music nothing more than in the wind that whistles by thy ear, or than in the brook which rushes past thy feet. What then is it which acts on thee when thou art affected by melody ? What dost thou per- ceive in it ? What else than the voice of thy own heart ? Feeling speaks only to feeling ; feeling is comprehen- sible only by feeling, that is, by itself — for this reason, that the object of feeling is nothing else than feeling. Mu.sic is a monologue of emotion. But the dialogue of philosophy also is in truth only a monologue of the in- tellect ; thought speaks only to thought. The splen- dours of the crystal charm the sense; but the intel- lect is interested only in the laws of crystallization. The intellectual only is the object of the intellect. All therefore which, in the point of view of meta- physical, transcendental speculation and religion, has the significance only of the secondary, the subjective, the medium, the organ, — has in truth the significance * " ']'!.•• understanding i> percipient only of understanding, and what proceeds thence.* 1 — Reimarua (Wahrh. der NaturL Religion, iv. Abth. | THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF MAN. 29 of the primary, of the essence, of the object itself. If, for example, feeling is the essential organ of religion, the nature of God is nothing else than an expression of the nature of feeling. The true but latent sense of the phrase, " Feeling is the organ of the divine," is, feeling is the noblest, the most excellent, i. e., the divine, in man. How couldst thou perceive the divine by feeling, if feeling were not itself divine in its na- ture? The divine assuredly is known only by means of the divine — God is known only by himself. The divine nature which is discerned by feeling, is in truth nothing else than feeling enraptured, in ecstasy with itself— feeling intoxicated with joy, blissful in its own plenitude. It is already clear from this that where feeling is held, to be the organ of the infinite, the subjective essence of religion, — the external data of religion lose their objective value. And thus, since feeling has been held the cardinal principle in religion, the doc- trines of Christianity, formerly so sacred, have lost their importance. If from this point of view some value is still conceded to Christian ideas, it is a value springing entirely from the relation they bear to feel- ing ; if another object would excite the same emotions, it would be just as welcome. But the object of re- ligious feeling is become a matter of indifference, only because when once feeling has been pronounced to be the subjective essence of religion, it in fact is also the objective essence of religion, though it may not be de- clared, at least directly, to be such. I say directly ; for indirectly this is certainly admitted, when it is declared that feeling, as such, is religious, and thus the distinction between specifically religious and ir- religious, or at least non-religious, feelings, is abo- lished, — a necessary consequence of the point of view in which feeling only is regarded as the organ of the » divine. For on what other ground than that of its essence, its nature, dost thou hold feeling to be the organ of the infinite, the divine being? And is not 30 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. the nature of feeling in general, also the nature of every special feeling, be its object what it may ? What, then, makes this feeling religious? A given object? Xot at all ; for this object is itself a religious one only when it is not an object of the cold understanding or memory, but of feeling. What then ? The nature of feeling — a nature of which every special feeling, with- out distinction of objects, partakes. Thus, feeling is pronounced to be religious, simply because it is feeling; the ground of its religiousness is ite own nature — lies in itself. But is not feeling thereby declared to be it- self the absolute, the divine? If feeling in itself is good, religious, i. e., holy, divine, has not feeling its God in itself? But if, notwithstanding, thou wilt posit an object ot feeling, but at the same time seekcst to express thy feeling truly, without introducing by thy reflection any foreign element, what remains to thee but to dis- tinguish between thy individual feeling and the general nature of feeling ; — to separate the universal in feeling from the disturbing, adulterating influences with which feeling is bound up in thee, under thy individual con- ditions ? Hence what thou canst alone contemplate, declare to be the infinite, and define as its essence, is merely the nature of feeling. Thou hast thus no other definition of God than this ; God is pure, unlimited, free Feeling: Every other God, whom thou supposest, is a God thrust upon thy feeling from without. Feeling is atheistic in the sense of the orthodox belief, which attaches religion to an external object; it denies an objective God — it is itself God. In this point of view, only the negation of feeling is the negation of God. Thou art simply too cowardly or too narrow to con- fess in words what thy feeling tacitly affirms. Fettered by outward considerations, still in bondage to vulgar empiricism, incapable of comprehending the spiritual grandeur of feeling, thou art terrified before the reli-i -ions atheism of thv heart. By this fear thou dc- Btroyest the unity of thy feeling with itself, in imagin- THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF MAN. 31 ing to thyself an objective being distinct from thy feeling, and thus necessarily sinking back into the old questions and doubts — is there a God or not?-- questions and doubts which vanish, nay, are impos- sible, where feeling is defined as the essence of re- ligion. Feeling is thy own inward power, but at the same time a power distinct from thee, and independent of thee ; it is in thee, above thee : it is itself that which constitutes the objective in thee — thy own being which impresses thee as another being : in short, thy God. How wilt thou then distinguish from this objective being within thee another objective being ? how wilt thou get beyond thy feeling ? But feeling has here been adduced only as an example. It is the same with every other po^er, faculty, poten- tiality, reality, activity — the name is indifferent — which is defined as the essential organ of any object. Whatever is a subjective expression of a nature is simultaneously also its objective expression. Man cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means of the imagination conceive individuals of . another so-called higher kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature ; the conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his own nature — qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself. There may certainly be thinking beings besides men on the other planets of our solar system. But by the supposition of such beings we do not change our stand- ing point — we extend our conceptions quantitatively. not qualitatively. For as surely as on the other planets there are the same laws of motion, so surely are there the same laws of perception and thought as here. In fact, we people the other planets, not that we may place there different beings from ourselves, but more beings of our own or of a similar nature.* * Verisimile est, non minus quam geometriae, etiam musiese oblecta- tionem ad plures quam ad nos pertinere. Positis enim aliis terris atque 32 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. § 2. The Essence of Religion considered generally. What we have hitherto been maintaining generally, even with regard to sensational impressions, of the relation between subject and object, applies especially to the relation between the subject and the religious object. In the perceptions of the senses consciousness of the object is distinguishable from consciousness of self; but in religion, consciousness of the object and self- consciousness coincide. The object of the senses is out of man, the religious object is within him, and therefore as little forsakes him as his self-consciousness or his conscience ; it is the intimate, the closest object. ;i God.'' says Augustine, for example, " is nearer, more related to us, and therefore more easily known by us, than sensible, corporeal things."* The object of the senses is in itself indifferent — independent of the dis- p >sition or of the judgment ; but the object of religion is a selected object; the most excellent, the first, the supreme being ; it essentially prc-supposes a critical judgment, a discrimination between the divine and the non-divine, between that which is worthy of adoration and that which is not worthy. \ And here may be applied, without any limitation, the proposition: the :l of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively. Such as are a man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, 80 much and no more has his God. [bus ratione ot audita pollentibus, cur tantum his nostris contigis- la ex Bono percipi poti t? — < brisk Bugenius. theor, 1. \.) * 1 1 I Litteram, 1. v. <•. ii;. a aon cogitat, prim so debcro Peum noese^ qnnnj ■. — M. Minucii Felicia Octaviamis, c 24. THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 33 Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God thou knowest the man, and by the man his God ; the two are iden- tical. Whatever is God to a man, that is his heart and soul ; and conversely, God is the manifested in- ward nature, the expressed self of a man, — religion the solemn unveiling of a man's hidden treasures the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets. But when religion — consciousness of God — is desig- nated as the self-consciousness of man, this is not to be understood as affirming that the religious man is di- rectly aware of this identity ; for, on the contrary, ignorance of it is fundamental to the peculiar nature of religion. To preclude this misconception, it is better to say. religion is man's earliest and also indirect form of self-knowledge. Hence, religion everywhere pre- cedes philosophy, as in the history of the race, so also in that of the individual. Man first of all sees his nature as if out o/himself, before he finds it in himself. His own nature is in the first instance contemplated by him as that of another being. Eeligion is the child- like condition of humanity ; but the child sees his na- ture — man — out of himself ; in childhood a man is an object to himself, under the form of another man. Hence the historical progress of religion consists in this : that what by an earlier religion was regarded as objective, is now recognised as subjective ; that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshipped as God is now perceived to be something human. What was at first religion becomes at a later period idolatry; man is seen to have adored his own nature. Man has given objectivity to himself, but has not recognised the object as his own nature : a later religion takes this forward step ; every advance in religion is there- fore a deeper self-knowledge. But every particular religion, while it pronounces its predecessors idola- trous, excepts itself — and necessarily so, otherwise it would no longer be religion — from the fate, the com- b 3 34 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. raon nature of all religions : it imputes only to other religions what is the fault, if fault it be, of religion in general. Because it has a different object, a different tenour, because it has transcended the ideas of pre- • ceding religions, it erroneously supposes itself exalted above the necessary eternal laws which constitute the essence of religion — it fancies its object, its ideas, to be superhuman. But the essence of religion, thus hidden from the religious, is evident to the thinker, by whom religion is viewed objectively, which it cannot be by its votaries. And it is our task to show that the antithesis of divine and human is altogether illu- sory, that it is nothing else than the antithesis between the human nature in general, and the human individual: that, consequently, the object and contents of the Christian religion are altogether human. Religion, at least the Chiistian, -is the relation of man to himself, or more correctly to his own nature ?. e., his subjective nature);* but a relation to it, viewed as a nature apart from his own. The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made — objective — i. e., contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attri- butes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature. f In relation to the attributes, the predicates, of the Divine Being, this is admitted without hesitation, but by no means in relation to the subject of these predi- cates. The negation of the subject is held to be irre- * The meaning of till ^ parenthetic limitation -will be dear in the aeqneL f Lea perfections de Dien Bont cellea de nofl Bines, m:iis il lea possede Bans borne* — il y a <-n nous quelqne puissance, qnelque connaissance, quelqne bonte\ mala ettea sent tontea entiersen Dien. — Leibnitz, (Theod. e.) Nihil in anima ease pntemna eximium, quod Qonetiam divine naturae pro priuin sit — Qnidqnid a 1 >eo aliennm extra definitionem anima.*. iplinarnm omnium j ol- clirnaV i im ae ipsnrn norit, Doom THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 35 ligion, nay, atheism; though not so the negation of the predicates. But that which has no predicates or qualities, has no effect upon me; that which has no effect upon me, has no existence for me. To deny all the qualities of a being is equivalent to denying the being himself. A being without qualities is one which cannot become an object to the mind ; and such a being is virtually non-existent. Where man deprives God of all qualities, God is no longer anything more to him than a negative being. To the truly religious man, God is not a being without qualities, because to him he is a positive, real being. The theory that God cannot be defined, and consequently cannot be known by man, is therefore the offspring of recent times, a product of modern unbelief. As reason is and can be pronounced finite only where man regards sensual enjoyment, or religious emotion, or aesthetic contemplation, or moral senti- ment, as the absolute, the true ; so the proposition that God is unknowable or undefinable can only be enun- ciated and become fixed as a dogma, where this object has no longer any interest for the intellect ; where the real, the positive, alone has any hold on man, where the real alone has for him the significance of the essen- tial, of the absolute, divine object, but where at the same time, in contradiction with this purely worldly tendency, there yet exist some old remains of re- ligiousness. On the ground that Gcd is unknowable, man excuses himself to what is yet remaining of his religious conscience for his forgetfulness of God, his absorption in the world : he denies God practically by his conduct, — the world has possession of all his thoughts and inclinations, — but he does not deny him theoretically, he does not attack his existence ; he lets that rest. But this existence does not affect or in- commode him ; it is a merely negative existence, an existence without existence, a self-contradictory exis- tence, — a state of being, which, as to its effects, is not distinguishable from non-beinsr. The denial of de* 36 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. terminate, positive predicates concerning the divine nature, is nothing else than a denial of religion, with, however, an appearance of religion in its favour, so that it is not recognised as a denial ; it is simply a subtle, disguised atheism. The alleged religious horror of limiting God by positive predicates, is only the irreligious wish to know nothing more of God, to banish God from the mind. Pread of limitation is dread of existence. All real existence, i. e., all existence which is truly such, is qualitative, determinate existence. He who earnestly believes in the Divine existence, is not shocked at the attributing even of gross sensuous qual- ities to God. He who dreads an existence that may give offence, who shrinks from the grossncss of a posi- tive predicate, may as well renounce existence alto- gether. A God who is injured by determinate quali- ties has not the courage and the strength to exist. Qualities are the fire, the vital breath, the oxygen, the salt of existence. An existence in general, an existence without qualities, is an insipidity, an absurdity. But there can be no more in God, than is supplied by re- ligion. Only where man loses his taste for religion, and thus religion itself becomes insipid, does the exis- tence of God become an insipid existence — an existence without qualities. There is, however, a still milder way of denying the Divine predicates than the direct one just described. admitted that the predicates of the divine nature are finite, and, more particularly, human qualities, but their rejection is rejected ; they are even taken under protection, because i1 is necessary to man to have a definite conception of God. and since he is man, lie can form qo other than a human conception of him. In relation to God, it is said, these predicates are certainly without, any objective validity ; but to me, if he is to exist for me. he cannol appear otherwise than as lie appear tome, namely, as a being with attributes to the human. Bui this distinction between what God is in himself, and what he is for me, destroys THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 37 the peace of religion, and is besides in itself an un- founded and untenable distinction. I cannot know whether God is something else in himself or for him- self, than he is for me ; what he is to me, is to me all that he is. For me, there lies in these predicates un- der which he exists for me, what he is in himself, his very nature ; he is for me what he can alone ever be for me. The religious man finds perfect satisfaction in that which God is in relation to himself ; of any other relation he knows nothing, for God is to him what he can alone be to man. In the distinction above stated, man takes a point of view above himself, i. e., above his nature, the absolute .measure of his being ; but this transcendentalism is only an illusion ; for I can make the distinction between the object as it is in itself, and the object as it is for me, only where an object can really appear otherwise to me, not where it appears to me such as the absolute measure of my nature determines it to appear — such as it must appear to me. It is true that I may have a merely subjective conception, i. e., one which does not arise out of the general constitution of my species ; but if my conception is determined by the constitution of my species, the distinction between what an object is in itself, and what it is for me ceases ; for this conception is itself an abso- lute one. The measure of the species is the absolute measure, law, and criterion of man. And, indeed, religion has the conviction that its conceptions, its predicates of God, are such as every man ought to have, and must have, if he would have the true ones — that they are the conceptions necessary to human nature ; nay, further, that they are objectively true, represent- ing God as he is. To every religion the gods of other religions are only notions concerning God, but its own conception ol God is to it God himself, the true God — God such as he is in himself. Religion is satisfied only with a complete Deity, a God without reservation ; it will not have a mere phantasm of God; it demands God 38 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. himself. Religion gives up its own existence when it gives up the nature of God ; it is no longer a truth, when it renounces the possession of the true God. Scepticism is the arch-enemy of religion ; but the dis- tinction between object and conception — between God as he is in himself, and God as he is for me, is a scep- tical distinction, and therefore an irreligious one. That which is to man the self-existent, the highest being, to which he can conceive nothing higher — that is to him the Divine being. How then should he in- quire concerning this being, what He is in himself? If God were an object to the bird, he would be a winged being : the bird knows nothing higher, nothing more blissful, than the winged condition. How ludicrous would it be if this bird pronounced : to me God appears as a bird, but what he is in himself I know not. To the bird the highest nature is the bird-nature ; take from him the conception of this, and you take from him the conception of the highest being. How, then, could he ask whether God in himself were winged? To ask whether God is in himself what he is for me, is to ask whether God is God, is to lift oneself above one's God, to rise up against him. Wherever, therefore, this idea, that the religious predicates are only anthropomorphisms, has taken — ion of a man, there lias doubt, has unbelief ob- tained the mastery of faith. And it is only the incon- sequence of faint-heartcdness and intellectual imbeci- lity which does not proceed from this idea to the formal negation of the predicates, and from thence to the ne- gation of the subject to which they relate. If thou doubtest the objective truth of the predicates, thou must also doubt the objective truth of the subject whose predicates they are. If thy predicates are anthro- pomorphisms, the subject of them is an anthropomor- phism too. [f love, goodness, personality, 8tc, are human attributes, so also is the subject which thou pre-supposest, the existence of God, the belief thai there is a God, an anthropomorphism— a pre-supposi- THE ESSENCE OF KELIGION. 39 tion purely human. Whence knowest thou that the belief in a God at all is not a limitation of man's mode of conception? Higher beings — and thou supposest such — are perhaps so blest in themselves, so at unity with themselves, that they are not hung in suspense between themselves and a yet higher being. To know God and not oneself to be God, to know blessedness, and not oneself to enjoy it, is a state of disunity, of unhappiness. Higher beings know nothing of this unhappiness ; they have no conception of that which they are not. Thou believest in love as a divine attribute because thou thyself lovest ; thou believest that God is a wise, benevolent being, because thou knowest nothing better in thyself than benevolence and wisdom; and thou believest that God exists, that therefore he is a subject ■ — whatever exists is a subject, whether it be defined as substance, person, essence, or otherwise — because thou thyself existest, art thyself a subject. Thou knowest no higher human good, than to love, than to be good and wise ; and even so thou knowest no higher happi- ness than to exist, to be a subject ; for the conscious- ness of all reality, of all bliss, is for thee bound up in the consciousness of being a subject, of existing. God is an existence, a subject to thee, for the same reason that he is to thee a wise, a blessed, a personal being. The distinction between the divine predicates and the divine subject is only this, that to thee the subject, the existence, does not appear an anthropomorphism, be- cause the conception of it is necessarily involved in thy own existence as a subject, whereas the predicates do appear anthropomorphisms, because their necessity - — the necessity that God should be conscious, wise, good, &c. — is not an immediate necessity, identical with the being of man, but is evolved by his self-con- sciousness, by the activity of his thought. I am a subject, I exist, whether I be wise or unwise, good or bad. To exist is to man the first datum ; it constitutes the very idea of the subject ; it is presupposed by the predicates 40 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. Hence, man relinquishes the predicates, but the exis- tence of God is to him a settled, irrefragable, abso- lutely certain, objective truth. But, nevertheless, this distinction is merely an apparent one. The necessity of the subject lies only in the necessity of the predicate. Thou art a subject only in so far as thou art a human subject ; the certainty and reality of thy existence lie only in the certainty and reality of thy human attri- butes. What the subject is, lies only in the predicate ; the predicate is the truth of the subject — the subject only the personified, existing predicate, the predicate conceived as existing. Subject and predicate are dis- tinguished only as existence and essence. The nega- tion of the predicates is therefore the negation of the subject. What remains of the human subject when abstracted from the human attributes? Even in the language of common life the divine predicates — Pro- vidence, Omniscience, Omnipotence — are put for the divine subject. The certainty of the existence of God. of which it has been said that it is as certain, nay, more certain to man than his own existence, depends only on the certainty of the qualities of God' — it is in itself no immediate certainty. To the Christian the existence of the Christian God only is a certainty ; to the heathen that of the heathen God only. The heathen did not doubt the existence of Jupiter, because he took no offence at the nature of Jupiter, because he could con- ceive of God under no other qualities, because to him qualities were a certainty, a divine reality. The reality of the predicate is the sole guarantee of exis- tence. Whatever man conceives to be true, he immediately conceives to be real (thai is, to have an objective existence), because, originally, only the real is true to him- -true in opposition to what is merely conceived, dreamed, imagined. Tin 1 id^a of being, of existence, is the original idea of truth ; or, originally, man makes truth d< ]•< adent on queni Ij , exisl THE ESSENCE OP RELIGION. 41 dependent on truth. Now God is the nature of man regarded as absolute truth, — the truth of man ; but God, or, what is the same thing, religion, is as various as are the conditions under which man conceives this his nature, regards it as the highest being. These conditions, then, under which man conceives God, are to him the truth, and for that reason they are also the highest existence, or rather they are existence itself ; for only the emphatic, the highest existence, is exist- ence, and deserves this name. Therefore, God is an existent, real being, on the very same ground that he is a particular, definite being ; for the qualities of God are nothing else than the essential qualities of man himself; and a particular man is what, he is, has his existence, his reality, only in his particular con- ditions. Take away from the Greek the quality of being Greek, and you take away his existence. On this ground, it is true that for a definite positive reli- gion — that is, relatively — the certainty of the exist- ence of God is immediate; for just as involuntarily, as necessarily, as the Greek was a Greek, so necessarily were his gods Greek beings, so necessarily were they real, existent beings. Eeligion is that conception of the nature of the world and of man which is essential to, i. e. 9 identical with, a man's nature. But man does not stand above this his necessary conception ; on the contrary, it stands above him; it animates, determines, governs him. The necessity of a proof, of a middle term to unite qualities with existence, the possibility of a doubt, is abolished. Only that which is apart from my own being is capable of being doubted by me. How then can I doubt of God, who is my being? To doubt of God is to doubt of myself. Only when God is thought of abstractly, when his predicates are the result of philosophic abstraction, arises the dis- tinction or separation between subject and predicate, existence and nature — arises the fiction that the exist- ence or the subject is something else than the predi- cate, something immediate, indubitable, in distinction 42 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. from the predicate, which is held to be doubtful. But this is only a fiction. A God who has abstract predi- cates has also an abstract existence. Existence, being, varies with varying qualities. The identity of the subject and predicate is clearly evidenced by the progressive development of religion, which is identical with the progressive development of human culture. So long as man is in a mere state of nature, so long is his god a mere nature-god — a per- sonification of some natural force. Where man inha- bits houses, he also encloses his gods in temples. The temple is only a manifestation of the value which man attaches to beautiful buildings. Temples in honour of religion are in truth temples in honour of architec- ture. With the emerging of man from a state of sa- vagery and wildness to one of culture, with the dis- tinction between what is fitting for man and what is not fitting, arises simultaneously the distinction be- tween that which is fitting and that which is not fitting for God. God is the idea of majesty, of the highest dignity : the religious sentiment is the sentiment of su- preme fitness. The later morecultured artists of Geece were the first to embody in the statues of the gods the ideas of dignity, of spiritual grandeur, of imperturb- able repose and sereniiy. But why were these quali- ties in their view attributes, predicates of God? Be- cause they were in themselves regarded by the Greeks as divinities. Why did those artists exclude all dis- gusting and low passions? Because they perceived them to be unbecoming, unworthy, unhuman, and con- sequently ungodlike. The Homeric gods eat and drink; — that implies : eating and drinking is a divine plea- sure. Physical strength is an attribute of the Homeric u r o(>([ than that thp former is an object of faith, of conception, of imagination, uliilc the Lata sn i bjeel of immediate, that is, msible perception. In this life, and in the next, he is thi God; but in he is incomprehensible, in the other, com* THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 47 these two, infinitely more is said than in the nameless innumerable predicates ; for they express something definite, in them I have something. But substance is too indifferent, too apathetic, to be something ; that is, to have qualities and passions; that it may not be something, it is rather nothing. Now, when it is shown that what the subject is, lies entirely in the attributes of the subject; that is, that the predicate is the true subject ; it is also proved that if the divine predicates are attributes of the hu- man nature, the subject of those predicates is also of the human nature. But the divine predicates are partly general, partly personal. The general predicates are the metaphysical, but these serve only as external points of support to religion ; they are not the charac- teristic definitions of religion. It is the personal pre- dicates alone which constitute the essence of religion — in which the Divine Being is the object of religion. Such are. for example, that God is a Person, that he is the moral Law-giver, the Father of mankind, the Holy One, the Just, the Good, the Merciful. It is however at once clear, or it will at least be clear in the sequel, with regard to these and other definitions, that, especially as applied to a personality, they are purely human definitions, and that consequently man in religion — in his relation to God — is in relation to his own nature ; for to the religious sentiment these predicates are not mere conceptions, mere images, which man forms of God, to be distinguished from that which God is in himself, but truths, facts, realities. Religion knows nothing of anthropomorphisms ; to it they are not anthropomorphisms. It is the very essence of religion, that to it these definitions express the na- ture of God. They are pronounced to be images only by the understanding, which reflects on religion, and which while defending them yet before its own tri- bunal denies them. But to the religious sentiment God is a real Father, real Love and Mercy ; for to it he is a real, living, personal being, and therefore his 48 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. attributes are also living and personal. Nay, the de- finitions which are the most sufficing to the religious sentiment, are precisely those which give the most offence to the understanding, and which in the process of reflection on religion it denies. Religion is essen- tially emotion ; hence, objectively also, emotion is to it necessarily of a divine nature. Even anger appears to it an emotion not unworthy of God, provided only there be a religious motive at the foundation of this anger. But here it is also essential to observe, and this phenomenon is an extremely remarkable one, character- ising the very core of religion, that in proportion as the divine subject is in reality human, the greater is the apparent difference between God and man ; that is. the more, by reflection on religion, by theology, is the identity of the divine and human denied, and the human, considered as such, is depreciated.* The rea- son of this is, that as what is positive in the conception of the divine being can only be human, the conception of man, as an object of consciousness can only be negative. To enrich God, man must become poor ; that God may be all, man must be nothing. But he. desires to be nothing in himself, because what he takes from himself is not lost to him, since it is preserved in God. Man has his beinir in'God ; why then should he have it in himself? Where is the necessity of po- siting the same thing twice, of having it twice ? What man withdraws from himself, what lie renounces in himself, he only enjoys in an incomparably higher and fuller measure in God. The monks made a vow of chastity to God; they mortified die sexual passion in themselves, bul there- * Inter crcatorcm et creataram doii potest banta similitudo notari, qoin militudo notanda. — Later. Cone. can. 2. (Summa ni/.:i. Ajitw. IH i he last distinction n man and God, between tin- finite and infinite nature, to which imagination soars, i- the distinction between Somel I 'i- <»m1v in N'.itlii: THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 49 fore they had in Heaven, in the Virgin Mary, the image of woman — an image of love. They could the more easily dispense with real woman, in proportion as an ideal woman was an object of love to them. The greater the importance they attached to the denial of sensuality, the greater the importance of the Heavenly Virgin for them : she was to them In the place of Christ, in the stead of God. The more the sensual tendencies are renounced, the more sensual is the God to whom they are sacrificed. For whatever is made an offering to God has an especial value attached to it ; in it God is supposed to have especial pleasure. That which is the highest in the estimation of man, is naturally the highest in the estimation of his God — what pleases man, pleases God also. The Hebrews did not offer to Jehovah unclean, ill-conditioned ani- mals ; on the contrary, those which they most highly prized, which they themselves ate, were also the food of God (cibus Dei, Levit. iii. 2.) Wherever, therefore, the denial of the sensual delights is made a special offering, a sacrifice well-pleasing to God, there the highest value is attached to the senses, and the sensua- lity which has been renounced is unconsciously restor- ed, in the fact that God takes the place of the ma- terial delights which have been renounced. The nun weds herself to God ; she has a heavenly bridegroom, the monk a heavenly bride. But the heavenly virgin is only a sensible presentation of a general truth, having relation to the essence of religion. Man denies as to himself only what he attributes to God. Eeligion abstracts from man, from the world ; but it can only abstract from the limitations, from the phenomena, in short, from the negative, not from the essence, the po- sitive, of the world and humanity : hence, in the very abstraction and negation it must recover that from which it abstracts, or believes itself to abstract. And thus, in reality, whatever religion consciously denies — always supposing that what is denied by it is some- thing essential, true, and consequently incapable of c 50 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. being ultimately denied — it unconsciously restores in God. Thus, in religion man denies his reason ; of him- self lie knows nothing of God, his thoughts are only worldly, earthly ; he can only believe what God re- veals to him. But on this account the thoughts of God are human, earthly thoughts : like man, He has plans in his mind, he accommodates himself to circum- stances and grades of intelligence, like a tutor with his pupils ; he calculates closely the effect of his gifts and revelations ; he observes man in all his doings ; he knows all things, even the most earthly, the com- monest, the most trivial. In brief, man in relation to God denies his own knowledge, his own thoughts, that he may place them in God. Man gives up his personality ; but in return, God, the Almighty, infinite, unlimited being, is a person; he denies human dignity, the human ego ; but in return God is to him a selfish, egotistical being, who in all things seeks only Himself, his own honour, his own ends ; he represents God as simply seeking the satisfaction of his own selfishness, while yet He frowns on that of every other being; his God is the very luxury of egotism.* Religion further denies goodness as a quality of human nature ; man is wicked, corrupt, incapable of good ; but on the other hand, God is only good — the Good Being. Man's na- ture demands as an object goodness, personified as God ; but is it not hereby declared that goodness is an essential tendency of man ? If my heart is wicked, ray understanding perverted, how can I perceive and feel the holy to be holy, the good to be good? Could I perceive the beauty of a fine picture, if my mind were aesthetically an absolute piece of perversion? Though I may not be a painter, though I may not have the power ol* producing what is beautiful myself, I must yel have aesthetic feeling, aesthetic comprehension, since * Gli i pins :iiaa! DeuB qntiin omnea creatures. "God can only love himself, Can only think of himself, vaw only w < >rk for himself. I iting man, G i ends, hia own glory," &c. — Vid. 1*. d( r Philos. a. Menschh. p. LO 1-107 THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 51 I perceive the beauty that is presented to me exter- nally. Either goodness does not exist at all for man, or, if it does exist, therein is revealed to the individual man the holiness and goodness of human nature. That which is absolutely opposed to my nature, to which I am united by no bond of sympathy, is not even con- ceivable or perceptible by me. The Holy is in oppo- sition to me only as regards the modifications of my personality, but as regards my fundamental nature it is in unity with me. The Holy is a reproach to my sinfulness ; in it I recognise myself as a sinner ; but in so doing, while I blame myself, I acknowledge what I am not, but ought to be, and what, for that very rea- son, I according to my destination, can be ; for an " ought" which has no corresponding capability, does not affect me, is a ludicrous chimsera without any true relation to my mental constitution. But when I ac- knowledge goodness as my destination, as my law, I acknowledge it, whether consciously or unconsciously, as my own nature. Another nature than my own, one different in quality, cannot touch me. I can perceive sin as sin, only when I perceive it to be a contradic- tion of myself with myself — that is, of my personality with my fundamental nature. As a contradiction of the absolute, considered as another being, the feeling of sin is inexplicable, unmeaning. The distinction between Augustinianism and Pela- gianism consists only in this, that the former expresses after the manner of religion what the latter expresses after the manner of rationalism. Both say the same thing, both vindicate the goodness of man ; but Pela- gianism does it directly, in a rationalistic and moral form, Augustinianism indirectly, in a mystical, that is, a religious form.* For that which is given to man's * Pelagianism denies God, religion — isti tantam tribuunt protestatem voluntati, ut pietati auferant orationem. (Augustin de Nat. et Grat. cont. Pelagram, c. 58.) It has only the Creator, i. e., Nature, as a basis, not the Saviour, the true God of the religious sentiment — in a word, it denies God ; but, as a consequence of this, it elevates man into a God, c2 52 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. God, is in truth given to man himself; what a man declares concerning God, he in truth declares con- cerning himself. Augustinianism would be a truth, and a truth opposed to Pelagianism, only if man had the devil for his God, and with the consciousness that he was the devil, honoured, reverenced, and worship- ped him as the highest being. But so long as man adores a good being as his God, so long does he con- template in God the goodness of his own nature. As with the doctrine of the radical corruption of human nature, so is it with the identical doctrine, that man can do nothing good, i. c, in truth, nothing of himself — by his own strength. For the denial of hu- man strength and spontaneous moral activity to be true, the moral activity of God must also be denied; and we must say, with the oriental nihilist or pantheist : the Divine being is absolutely without will or action, indifferent, knowing nothing of the discrimination be- tween evil and good. But he who defines God as an active being, and not only so, but as morally active and morally critical, — as a being who loves, works, and rewards good, punishes, rejects, and condemns evil, — he who thus defines God, only in appearance denies human activity, in fact making it the highest, the most real activity. He who makes God act humanly, declares human activity to be divine ; he says : a god who is not active, and not morally or humanly active, is no god ; and thus he makes the idea of the Godhead dependent on the idea of activity, that is, of human activity, for a higher he knows not. .Man — this is the mystery of religion — projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself ': makes him a being not needing God, self-sufficing, independent. i d this subject Luther against Erasmus and Augustine, 1. <•. c. 88.) Augustinianism denies man ; but, as a consequence of this, it reduces God t<» tin- level of man, even to the ignominy of the cross, for the sake of man. The former puts man in the place of God, the Latter nuts God in the place of man; both lead to the Bame result — the distinction is only appar* - illusion. Align tmianism is onjy an inverted Pela- wbat to tliu latter is a Bubject, La to the former an object THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 53 an object* to this projected image of himself thus con- vert ed into a subject ; he thinks of himself, is an object to himself, but as the object of an object, of another being than himself. Thus here. Man is an object to God. That man is good or evil is not indifferent to God ; no ! He has a lively, profound interest in man's being good; he wills that man should be good, happy, for without goodness there is no happiness. Thus the religious man virtually retracts the nothingness of human activity, by making his dispositions and actions an object to God, by making man the end of God — for that which is an object to the mind is an end in action ; by making the divine activity a means of hu- man salvation. God acts, that man may be good and happy. Thus man, while he is apparently humiliated to the lowest degree, is in truth exalted to the highest. Thus, in and through God, man has in view himself alone. It is true that man places the aim of his action in God, but God has no other aim of action than the moral and eternal salvation of man : thus man has in fact no other aim than himself. The divine activity is not distinct from the human. How could the divine activity work on me as its object, nay, work in me, if it were essentially different from me ; how could it have a human aim, the aim of ameliorating and blessing man, if it were not itself human? Does not the purpose determine the nature of the act ? When man makes his moral improvement an aim to himself, he has divine resolutions, divine projects ; but also, when God seeks the salvation of man, He has human ends and a human mode of acti- vity, corresponding to these ends. Thus in God man has only his own activity as an object. But, for the * The religious, the original mode in which man becomes objective to himself, is (as is clearly enough explained in this work) to he distin- guished from the mode in which this occurs in reflection and speculation ; the latter is voluntary, the former involuntary, necessary — as necessary as art, as speech. With the progress of time, it is true, theology coin* cides with religion. 54 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. very reason that he regards his own activity as objec- tive, goodness only as an object, he necessarily re- ceives the impulse, the motive, not from himself, but from his object. He contemplates his nature as ex- ternal to himself, and this nature as goodness ; thus it is self-evident, it is mere tautology to say, that the impulse to good comes only from thence where he places the good. God is the highest subjectivity of man abstracted from himself ; hence man can do nothing of himself, all goodness comes from God. The more subjective God is, the more completely does man divest himself of his subjectivity, because God is, per se, his relin- quished self, the possession of which he however again vindicates to himself. As the action of the arteries drives the blood into the extremities, and the action of the veins brings it back again, as life in general con- sists in a perpetual systole and diastole; so is it inTeli- gion. In the religious systole man propels his own nature from himself, he throws himself outward ; in the reli- gious diastole he receives the rejected nature into his heart again. God alone is the being who acts of him- self, — this is the force of repulsion in religion ; God is the being who acts in me, with me, through me, upon me, for me, is the principle of my salvation, of my good dispositions and actions, consequently my own good principle and nature, — this is the force of attraction in religion. The course of religious development which has been generally indicated, consists specifically in this, that man abstracts more and more from God, and attri- butes more and more to himself. This is especially apparent in the belief in revelation. That which to a later age or a cultured people is given by nature or reason, is to an earlier age, or to a yet uncultured people, given by God. Every tendency of man, how- over natural— even the impulse of cleanliness, was con- ceived by the Israelites as a positive divine ordinance. From this example we again Bee that God is lowered, THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 55 is conceived more entirely on the type of ordinary hu- manity, in proportion as man detracts from himself. How can the self-humiliation of man go further than when he disclaims the capability of fulfilling spon- taneously the requirements of common decency ?* The Christian religion, on the other hand, distinguished the impulses and passions of man according to their quality, their character ; it represented only good emotions, good dispositions, good thoughts, as revela- tions, operations, — that is, as dispositions, feelings, thoughts, — of God ; for what God reveals is a quality of God himself: that of which the heart is full, over- flows the lips, as is the effect such is the cause, as the revelation, such the being who reveals himself. A God who reveals himself in good dispositions is a God whose essential attribute is only moral perfection. The Christian religion distinguishes inward moral purity from external physical purity ; the Israelites identified the two.f In relation to the Israelitish religion, the Christian, religion is one of criticism and freedom. The Israelite trusted himself to do nothing except what was commanded by God, he was without will even in external things ; the authority of religion extended it- self even to his food. The Christian religion, on the other hand, in all these external things, made man de- pendent on himself, i. e«, placed in man what the Israel- ite placed out of himself, in God. Israel is the most complete presentation of positivism in religion. In re- lation to the Israelite, the Christian is an esprit fort, a free-thinker. Thus do things change. What yes- terday was still religion, is no longer such to-day ; and what to-day is atheism, to-morrow will be religion. * Deut. xxiii. 12, 13. f See, for example, Gen. xxxv. 2 ; Levit. xi. 44 ; xx. 26 ; and the Commentary of JLe Clerc on these passages. 56 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. PAET I. THE TRUE OR ANTHROPOLOGICAL ESSENCE OF RELIGION. CHAPTER II. GOD AS A BEING OF THE UNDERSTANDING. Religion is the disuniting of man from himself: he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself. God is not what man is — man is not what God is. God is the infinite, man the finite being ; God is perfect, man imperfect ; God eternal, man temporal ; God almighty, man weak ; God holy, man sinful. God and man are extremes : God is the absolutely positive, the sum of all realities ; man the absolutely negative, comprehen- ding all negations. But in religion man contemplates his own latent nature. Hence it must be shown that this antithesis, this differencing of God and man, with which religion begins, is a differencing of man with his own nature. The inherent necessity of this proof is at once ap- parent from this — that, if the divine nature, which is the object of religion, were really different from the re of man, a division, a disunion could not take place, [f God is really a different being from myself, why should his perfection trouble me? Disunion exists only between beings who arc at variance, but who ought to be one, who can be one and who consequently in nature, in truth, ure one. On this general ground, GOD AS A BEING OF THE UNDERSTANDING. 57 then, the nature with which man feels himself in dis- union, must be inborn, immanent in himself, but at the same time it must be of a different character from that nature or power which gives him the feeling, the con- sciousness of reconciliation, of union with God, or, what is the same thing, with himself. This nature is nothing else than the intelligence — the reason or the understanding. God is the anti- thesis of man, as a being not human, L e., not perso- nally human, is the objective nature of the understand- ing. The pure, perfect divine nature is the self-con- sciousness of the understanding, the consciousness which the understanding has of its own perfection. The understanding knows nothing of the sufferings of the heart ; it has no desires, no passions, no wants, and for that reason, no deficiences and weaknesses, as the heart has. Men in whom the intellect predominates, who with one-sided but all the more characteristic de- finiteness, embody, and personify for us the nature of the understanding, are free from the anguish of the heart, from the passions, the excesses of the man who has strong emotions ; they are not passionately inter- ested in any finite, i. e., particular object ; they do not give themselves in pledge ; they are free. " To want nothing, and by this freedom from wants to become like the immortal Gods ;"— "not to subject ourselves to things but things to us ;" — " all is vanity ;" — these and similar sayings are the mottoes of the men who are governed by abstract understanding. The under- standing is that part of our nature which is neutral, impassible, not to be bribed, not subject to illusions — the pure, passionless light of the intelligence. It is the categorical, impartial consciousness of the fact as fact, because it is itself of an objective nature. It is the consciousness of the uncontradictory, because it is itself the uncontradictory unity, the source of logical identity. It is the consciousness of law, necessity, rule, measure, because it is itself the activity of law, the necessity of the nature of things under the form of c3 58 THE ESSENCE OP CHRISTIANITY. spontaneous activity, the rule of rules, the absolute measure, the measure of measures. Only by the under- standing can man judge and act in contradiction with his dearest human, that is, personal feelings, when the God of the understanding, — law, necessity, right, — commands it. The father who as a judge condemns his own son to death because he knows him to be guilty, can do this only as a rational not as an emo- tional being. The understanding shews us the faults and weaknesses even of our beloved ones ; it shews us even our own. It is for this reason that it so often throws us into painful collision with ourselves, with our own hearts. We do not like to give reason the upper hand : we are too tender to ourselves to carry out the true, but hard, relentless verdict of the under- standing. The understanding is the power which has relation to species : the heart represents particular cir- cumstances, individuals, — the understanding, general circumstances, universals ; it is the superhuman, i. e., the impersonal power in man. Only by and in the understanding has man the power of abstraction from himself, from his subjective being, — of exalting him- self to general ideas and relations, of distinguishing the object from the impressions which it produces on his feelings, of regarding it in and by itself without reference to human personality. Philosophy, mathe- matics, astronomy, physics, in short, science in general, i.- the practical proof, because it is the product, of this truly infinite and divine activity, lxeligious anthropo- morphisms, therefore, are in contradiction with the understanding : it repudiates their application to God ; it denies them. But this God, free from anthropomor- phisms, impartial, passionless, is nothing else than the nature of the understanding itselfregarded as objective. God as God, that is, as a being not finite, net human, not materially conditioned, not phenomenal, is only an object of thought. Me is the incorporeal, formless, in- comprehensible — the abstract, negative being: he is known, t. e., becomes an object, only bj abstraction GOD AS k BEING OF THE UNDERSTANDING. 59 and negation (via negationis). Why? Because he is nothing but the objective nature of the thinking power, or in general, of the power or activity, name it what you will, whereby man is conscious of reason, of mind, of intelligence. There is no other spirit, that is, (for the idea of spirit is simply the idea of thought, of in- telligence, of understanding, every other spirit being a spectre of the imagination,) no other intelligence which man can believe in or conceive, than that in- telligence which enlightens him, which is active in him. He can do nothing more than separate the intelligence from the limitations of his own individuality. The "infi- nite spirit," in distinction from the finite, is therefore nothing else than the intelligence disengaged from the limits of individuality and corporeality, — for individu- ality and corporeality are inseparable, — intelligence posited in and by itself. God, said the schoolmen, the Christian fathers, and long before them the heathen phi- losophers, — God is immaterial essence, intelligence, spi- rit, pure understanding. Of God as God, no image can be made ; but canst thou frame an image of mind? Has mind a form ? Is not its activity the most inexplicable, the most incapable of representation? God is incom- prehensible ; but knowest thou the nature of the intelli- gence ? Hast thou searched out the mysterious ope- ration of thought, the hidden nature of self-conscious- ness ? Is not self-consciousness the enigma of enigmas ? Did not the old mystics, schoolmen, and fathers long ago compare the incomprehensibility of the divine nature with that of the human intelligence, and thus, in truth, identify the nature of God with the nature of man ?* God as God — as a purely thinkable being, * Augustine, in his work Contra A cademicos, which he wrote when he was still in some measure a heathen, says (1. iii. c. 12), that the highest good of man consists in the mind, or in the reason. On the other hand, in his Libr. Retractationum, which he wrote as a distinguished Christian and theologian, he revises (1. i. c. 1) this declaration as follows : — Verius dixissem in Deo. Ipso enim mens fruitur, ut beata sit, tanquam summo bono suo. But is there any distinction here ? Where my highest good is, is not there my nature also ? 60 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY an object of the intellect, — is thus nothing else than the reason in its utmost intensification become objec- tive to itself. It is asked what is the understanding or the reason ? The answer is found in the idea of God. Everything must express itself, reveal itself, make itself objective, affirm itself. God is the reason expressing, affirming itself as the highest existence. To the imagination, the reason is the revelation of God ; but to the reason, God is the revelation of the reason ; since what reason is, what it can do, is first made ob- jective in God. God is a need of the intelligence, a necessary thought — the highest degree of the thinking power. " The reason cannot rest in sensuous things ; 7; it can find contentment only when it penetrates to the highest, first, necessary being, which can be an object to the reason alone. Why? Because with the con- ception of this being it first completes itself, because only in the idea of the highest nature is the highest nature of reason existent, the highest step of the think- ing power attained ; and it is a general truth, that we feel a blank, a void, a want in ourselves, and are con- sequently unhappy and unsatisfied, so long as we have not come to the last degree of a power, to that quo nihil maju8 cog it art potest, — so long as we cannot bring our inborn capacity for this or that art, this or that science, to the utmost proficiency. For only in the highest proficiency is art truly art; only in its highest degree is thought truly thought, reason. Only when thy thought is God, dost thou truly think, rigorously Bpeaking; for only God is the realized, consummate, asted thinking power. Thus in conceiving God, man first conceives reason as it truly is, though by means <>r tie* imagination he conceives this divine na- ture a- distinct from reason, because as a being affected by external things he is accustomed always to dis- tinguish the object from the conception of it. And hen* lie applies th<' same process f<> the conception of the reason, thus. Cor an existence in reason, in thought, substituting an existence in \ pare anal time, from which GOD AS A BEING OF THE UNDEESTANDIXG. 61 he had, nevertheless, previously abstracted it. God, as a metaphysical being, is the intelligence satisfied in itself, or rather, conversely, the intelligence satis- fied in itself, thinking itself as the absolute being, is God as a metaphysical being. Hence all metaphysical predicates of God are real predicates only when they are recognised as belonging to thought, to intelligence, to the understanding. The understanding is that which conditionates and co-ordinates all things, that which places all things in reci- procal dependence and connexion, because it is itself immediate and unconditioned : it inquires for the cause of all things, because it has its own ground and end in itself. Only that which itself is nothing deduced, nothing derived, can deduce and construct, can regard all besides itself as derived ; just as only that which exists for its own sake can view and treat other things as means and instruments. The understanding is thus the original, primitive being. The understanding de- rives all things from God, as the first cause, it finds the world, without an intelligent cause, given over to senseless, aimless chance ; that is, it finds only in it- self, in its own nature, the efficient and the final cause of the world — the existence of the world is only then clear and comprehensible when it sees the explanation of that existence in the source of all clear and intelli- gible ideas, L e., in itself. The being that works with design, towards certain ends, i. e., with understanding, is alone the being that to the understanding has imme- diate certitude, self-evidence. Hence that which of it- self has no designs, no purpose, must have the cause of its existence in the design of another, and that an intelligent being. And thus the understanding posits its own nature as the causal, first, premundane exis- tence : i. e., being in rank the first, but in time the last, it makes itself the first in time also. The understanding is to itself the criterion of all reality. That which is opposed to the understanding, that which is self-contradictory, is nothing j that which 62 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. contradicts reason, contradicts God. For example, it is a contradiction of reason to connect with the idea of the highest reality the limitations of definite time and place ; and hence reason denies these of G-od, as contradicting his nature. The reason can only believe in a God who is accordant with its own nature, in a God who is not beneath its own dignity, who on the contrary is a realization of its own nature : L e., the reason believes only in itself, in the absolute reality of its own nature. The reason is not dependent on God, but God on the reason. Even in the age of miracles and faith in authority, the understanding constitutes itself, at least formally, the criterion of divinity. God is all and can do all, it was said, by virtue of his omnipo- tence ; but nevertheless he is nothing and he can do nothing which contradicts himself, i. e., reason. Even omnipotence cannot do what is contrary to reason. Thus above the divine omnipotence stands the higher power of reason ; above the nature of God the nature of the understanding, as the criterion of that which is to be affirmed and denied of God, the criterion of the positive and negative. Canst thou believe in a God who is an unreasonable and wicked being ? No, in- deed ; but why not? Because it is in contradiction with thy understanding to accept a wicked and unrea- sonable being as divine. What then dost thou affirm, what is an object to thee, in God? Thy own under- standing. God is thy highest idea, the supreme effort of thy understanding, thy highestpower of thought. God is the sum of all realities, /. c, the sum of all affirmations of the understanding. That which I re cognize i:i the understanding as essential, I place in God as existent: God /'-.what the understanding thinks as the highest. But in what I perceive to be essential, is revealed the nature of my understanding i shown the power of my thinking faculty. Thus th' 1 understanding is the ens realissimum, the most real being <>(' the <>!nto-theology, "we cannot conceive GOD AS A BEING OF THE UNDERSTANDING. 63 God otherwise than by attributing to him without limit all the real qualities which we find in ourselves.* Our positive, essential qualities, our realities, are therefore the realities of God, but in us they exist with, in God without, limits. But what then with- draws the limits from the realities, what does away with the limits ? The understanding. What, accord- ing to this, is the nature conceived without limits, but the nature of the understanding releasing, abstracting itself from all limits? As thou thinkest God, such is thy thought ;^-the measure of thy God is the measure of thy understanding. If thou conceivest God as limited, thy understanding is limited ; if thou conceivest God as unlimited, thy understanding is unlimited. If, for example, thou conceivest God as a corporeal being, corporeality is the boundary, the limit of thy under- standing, thou canst conceive nothing without a body; if on the contrary thou cleniest corporeality of God, this is a corroboration and proof of the freedom of thy understanding from the limitation of corporeality. In the unlimited divine nature thou representest only thy unlimited understanding. And when thou declarest this unlimited being the ultimate essence, the highest being, thou sayest in reality nothing else than this: the etre supreme, the highest being, is the under- standing. The understanding is further the self-subsistent and independent being. That which has no understanding is not self-subsistent, is dependent. A man without understanding is a man without will. He who has no understanding allows himself to be deceived, imposed upon, used as an instrument by others. How shall he whose understanding is the tool of another, have an independent will ? Only he who thinks, is free and independent. It is only by the understanding that man reduces the things around and beneath him to mere means of his own existence. In general : that * Kant Voiles, iiber d. philos. Religioual. Leipzig. 1817. p. 39. 64 . THE ESSEXCE OF CHRISTIANITY. only is self-subsistent and independent which is an end to itself, an object to itself. That which is an end and object to itself, is for the very reason — in so far as it is an object to itself — no longer a means and object for another being. To be without understand- ing is, in one word, to exist for another, — to be an object : to have understanding is to exist for oneself, ■ — to be a subject. But that which no longer exists for another, but for itself, rejects all dependence on ano- ther being. It is true, we, as physical beings, depend on the beings external to us, even as to the modifica- tions of thought ; but in so far as we think, in the ac- tivity of the understanding as such, we are dependent on no other being. Activity of thought is spontaneous activity. " When I think, I am conscious that my ec/o in me thinks, and not some other thing. I conclude, therefore, that this thinking in me does not inhere in another thing outside of me, but in myself, conse- quently that I am a substance, i. e., that I exist by my- self, without being a predicate of another being."* Although we always need the air, yet as natural philo- • sophers we convert the air from an object of our phy- sical need into an object of the self-sufficing activity of thought, L e., into a mere thing for us. In breath- ing I am the object of the air, the air the subject; but when I make the air an object of thought, of investi- gation, when I analyze it, I reverse this relation, — I make myself the subject, the air an object. But that which is the object of another being is dependent. Thus the plant is dependent on air and light, that is, it is an object for air and light, not for itself. It is true that air and light are reciprocally an object for the plant. Physical life, in general, ia nothing else than this perpetual interchange of the objective and Bubjective relation. We consume the air, and arc consumed by it; we enjoy, and are enjoyed. The understanding alone eiyoys all things without being * Kant, L < . I . 80. GOD AS A BEING OF THE UNDERSTANDING. 65 itself enjoyed ; it is the self-enjoying, self sufficing exist- ence — the absolute subject — the subject which cannot be reduced to the object of another being, because it makes all things objects, predicates of itself, — which comprehends all things in itself because it is itself not a thing, because it is free from all things. That is dependent, the possibility of whose existence lies out of itself ; that is independent which has the possibility of its existence in itself. Life therefore involves the contradiction of an existence at once de- pendent and independent, — the contradiction that its possibility lies both in itself and out of itself. The understanding alone is free from this and other contra- dictions of life ; it is the essence perfectly self-subsis- tent, perfectly at one with itself, perfectly self-existent.* Thinking is existence in self ; life, as differenced from thought, existence out of self ; life is to give from one- self, thought is to take into oneself. Existence out of self is the world, existence in self is God. To think is to be God. The act of thought, as such, is the freedom of the immortal gods from all external limitations and necessities of life. The unity of the understanding is the unity of God. To the understanding the consciousness of its unity and universality is essential ; the understanding is itself nothing else than the consciousness of itself as absolute identity, L e., that which is accordant with the under- standing is to it an absolute, universally valid, law ; it is impossible to the understanding to think that what is self-contradictory, false, irrational, can any- where be true, and, conversely, that what is true, ra- tional, can anywhere be false and irrational. " There may be intelligent beings who are not like me, and * To guard against mistake I observe, that I do not apply to the un- derstanding the expression, self-subsistent essence, and other terms of a like character, in my own sense, but that I am here placing myself on the stand-point of onto-theology, of metaphysical theology in general, in order to shew that metaphysics is resolvable into psychology, that tho onto-theological predicates are merely predicates of the understanding. 66 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. vet I am certain that there arc no intelligent beings who know laws and truths different from those which I recognise ; for every mind necessarily sees that two and two make four, and that one must prefer one's friend to one's dog.''* Of an essentially different un- derstanding from that which affirms itself in man, I have not the remotest conception, the faintest adum- bration. On the contrary, every understanding which I posit as different from my own, is only a position of my own understanding, u e., an idea of my own, a con- ception which falls within my power of thought, and thus expresses my understanding. What I think, that I myself do. of course only in purely intellectual mat- ters ; what I think of as united, I unite : what I think of as distinct, I distinguish ; what I think of as abo- lished, as negatived, that I myself abolish and negative. For example, if I conceive an understanding in which the intuition or reality of the object is immediately united with the thought of it, I actually unite it; my understanding or my imagination is itself the power of uniting these distinct or opposite ideas. How would it be possible for me to conceive them united — whether this conception be clear or confused — if I did not unite them in myself? But whatever may be the conditions of the understanding which a given human individual may suppose as distinguished from his own, this other understanding is only the understanding which exists in man in general — the understanding conceived apart from the limits of this particular in- dividual. Unity is involved in the idea of the under- standing. The impossibility for the understanding to think two supreme beings, two infinite substances, two Gods, is the impossibility lor the understanding to contradict itself, to deny its own nature, to think of itself as divided. * Bfalebraache. author^ Gasehichte der Ph£lo& I. Bd. • ,'• ;ili!ii diversa ab hac rati"!" censeretwqae injustum lestam Ln Jove nut If arte, quod apud ooa jnstum ac prseclanun }ia>»« tur ? I \t ri.-iniile nee omnio posaibile. — Chr. Hugenii (Coemotheoroe, lib, i.) GOD AS A BEING OF THE UNDERSTANDING. 67 The understanding is the infinite being. Infinitude is immediately involved in unity, and finiteness in plurality. Finiteness — in the metaphysical sense — rests on the distinction of the existence from the essence, of the individual from the species ; infinitude, on the unity of existence and essence. Hence, that is finite which can be compared with other beings of the same species ; that is infinite which has nothing like itself, which consequently does not stand as an indi- vidual under a species, but is species and individual in one, essence and existence in one. But such is the understanding ; it has its essence in itself, consequently, it has nothing together with or external to itself which can be ranged beside it ; it is incapable of being com- pared, because it is itself the source of all combinations and comparisons ; immeasurable, because it is the mea- sure of all measures, — we measure all things by the understanding alone ; it can be circumscribed by no higher generalization, it can be ranged under no spe- cies, because it is itself the principle of all generaliz- ing, of all classification, because it circumscribes all things and beings. The definitions which the specu- lative philosophers and theologians give of God, as the being in whom existence and essence are not sep- arable, who himself is all the attributes which he has, so that predicate and subject are with him identical, — all these definitions are thus ideas drawn solely from the nature of the understanding. Lastly, the understanding or the reason is the ne- cessary being. Reason exists because only the exist- ence of the reason is reason ; because, if there were no reason, no consciousness, all would be nothing ; exist- ence would be equivalent to non-existence. Conscious- ness first founds the distinction between existence and non-existence. In consciousness is first revealed the value of existence, the value of nature. Why, in ge- neral, does something exist? why does the world exist? on the simple ground that if something did not exist, nothing would exist ; if reason did not exist, there 68 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. would be only unreason ; thus the world exists because it is an absurdity that the world should not exist. In the absurdity of its non-existence is found the true reason of its existence, in the groundlessness of the supposition that it were not, the reason that it is. Nothing, non-existence, is aimless, nonsensical, irra- tional. Existence alone has an aim, a foundation, rationality; existence is, because only existence is reason and truth ; existence is the absolute necessity. What is the cause of conscious existence, of life? The need of life. But to whom is it a need? To that which does not live. It is not a being who saw that made the eye : to one who saw already, to what pur- pose would be the eye ? No ! only the being who saw not needed the eye. We are all come into the world without the operation of knowledge and will ; but we are come that knowledge and will may exist. Whence, then, came the world? Out of necessity ; not out of a necessity which lies in another being distinct from it- self — that is a pure contradiction, — but out of its own inherent necessity ; out of the necessity of necessity ; because without the world there would be no necessity; without necessity, no reason, no understanding. The nothing, out of which the world came, is nothing with- out the world. It is true that thus, negativity, as the speculative philosophers express themselves — nothing is the cause of the world ; — but a nothing which abo- lishes itself, i. e., a nothing which could not have existed if there had been no world. It is true that the world springs out of a want, out of privation, but it is false speculation to make this privation an ontological being: this want is simply the want which lies in the supposed non-existence of the world. Thus the world is only necessary out of itself and through itself. But the ne- cessity of the world is the necessity of reason. The reason, as the sum of all realities, — for what are all the glorias of the world without light, much more ex- ternal light without, internal lighl ? -the reason is the most indispensable being — the profonndest and most GOD AS A BEING OF THE UNDERSTANDING. 69 essential necessity. In the reason first lies the self- consciousness of existence, self-conscious existence ; in the reason is first revealed the end, the meaning of existence. Reason is existence objective to itself as its own end ; the ultimate tendency of things. That which is an object to itself is the highest, the final being : that which has power over itself is almighty. 70 THE ESSENCE OP CHRISTIANITY. CHAPTER III. GOD AS A MORAL BEING, OR LAW. God as God — the infinite, universal, non-anthropo- morphic being of the understanding, has no more significance for religion than a fundamental general principle has for a special science ; it is merely the ultimate point of support, — as it were, the mathema- tical point, of religion. The consciousness of human limitation or nothingness which is united with the idea of this being, is by no means a religious consciousness ; on the contrary, it characterizes sceptics, materialists, and pantheists. The belief in God — at least in the God of religion — is only lost where, as in scepticism, pantheism, and materialism, the belief in man is lost, at least in man such as he is presupposed in religion. As little then as religion has any influential belief in the nothingness of man,* so little has it any influential belief in that abstract being with which the conscious- ness of this nothingness is united. The vital elements of religion are those only which make man an object to man. To deny man, is to deny religion. It certainly is the interest of religion that its object should be distinct from man ; but it is also, nay, yet more its interest, that this object should have human attributes. That he should be a distinct being concerns his existence only ; but that he should be human con- cerns his essence. If he be of a different nature, how * In religion, the representation or expression of die nothingness of manfc I is the anger of God ; for as the love of God is thes£ firm&tion, hit anger Is the negation of man. But even this anger U not taken in es d . . . U not really angry. II*- is not thoroughly renwhen w* think thai he is angry, and punishes." — Lu- T. viii. ].. 208.) GOD AS A MORAL BEING, OR LAW. 71 can his existence or non-existence be of any importance to man ? How can lie take so profound an interest in an existence in which his own nature has no partici- pation ? To give an example. "When I believe that the human nature alone has suffered for me, Christ is a poor Saviour to me ; in that case, he needs a Saviour him- self." And thus, out of the need for salvation, is pos- tulated something transcending human nature, a being different from man. But no sooner is this being pos- tulated than there arises the yearning of man after himself, after his own nature, and man is immediately re-established. "Here is God, who is not man and never yet became man. But this is not a God for me That would be a miserable Christ to me, who should be nothing but a purely separate God and divine person without humanity. No, my friend, where thou givest me God, thou must give me humanity too."* In religion man seeks contentment; religion is his highest good. But how could he find consolation and peace in God, if God were an essentially different being ? How can I share the peace of a being if I am not of the same nature with him ? If his nature is different from mine, his peace is essentially different, — it is no peace for me. How then can I become a partaker of his peace, if I am not a partaker of his nature ; but how can I be a partaker of his nature if I am really of a different nature ? Every being experiences peace only in its own element, only in the conditions of its own nature. Thus, if man feels peace in God, he feels it only because in God he first attains his true nature, because here, for the first time, he is with himself, be- cause everything in which he hitherto sought peace, and which he hitherto mistook for his nature, was alien to him. Hence, if man is to find contentment in God, he must find himself in God. M No one will taste of God, * Luther, Concordienhueli, Art. 8. Erklar. 72 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. but as He wills, namely — in the humanity of Christ ; and if thou dost not find God thus, thou wilt never have rest/ 1 " "Everything finds rest on the place in which it was born. The place where I was born is God. God is my father-land. Have I a father in God ? Yes, I have not only a father, but I have myself in Him ; before I lived in myself, I lived already in God."f A God, therefore, who expresses only the nature of the understanding, does not satisfy religion, is not the God of religion. The understanding is interested not only in man, but in the things out of man, in universal Nature. The intellectual man forgets even himself in the contemplation of Nature. The Christians scorned the pagan philosophers because, instead of thinking of themselves, of their own salvation, they had thought only of things out of themselves. The Christian thinks only of himself. By the understanding an insect is contemplated with as much enthusiasm as the image of God — man. The understanding is the absolute indif- ference and identity of all things and beings. It is not Christianity, not religious enthusiasm, but the enthu- siasm of the understanding that we have to thank for botany, mineralogy, zoology, physics, and astronomy. The understanding is universal, pantheistic, the love of the universe ; but the grand characteristic of religion, and of the Christian religion especially, is, that it is thoroughly anthropotheistic, the exclusive love of man for himself, the exclusive self-affirmation of the human nature, that is, of subjective human nature ; for it is true that the understanding also affirms the nature of man, but it is his objective nature, which has reference to the object for the sake of the object, and the mani- festation of which is science. Hence it must be some- thing entirely different from the nature of the under- * Luther. (S&mmtliche Schriften ondWerke. Leipzig, L729, foLT. ill. p. 589. [1 U according to this edition that references ;ire given throughout the present work.) f Predigten etzlicher Lehrer vor and zu Taaleri Zeiten, Saniburg, 1621, p. 81. GOD AS A MORAL BEING, OR LAW. 73 standing which is an object to man in religion, if he is to find contentment therein, and this something will necessarily he the very kernel of religion. Of all the attributes which the understanding assigns to God, that which in religion, and especially in the Christian religion, has the pre-eminence, is moral per- fection. But God as a morally perfect being is nothing else than the realized idea, the fulfilled law of morality, the moral nature of man posited as the absolute being ; man's own nature, for the moral God requires man to be as He himself is : Be ye holy for I am holy ; man's own conscience, for how could he otherwise tremble before the divine Being, accuse himself before him, and make him the judge of his inmost thoughts and feelings ? But the consciousness of the absolutely perfect moral nature, especially as an abstract being separate from man, leaves us cold and empty, because we feel the distance, the chasm between ourselves and this being ; — it is a dispiriting consciousness, for it is the con- sciousness of our personal nothingness, and of the kind which is the most acutely felt — moral nothingness. The consciousness of the divine omnipotence and eter- nity in opposition to my limitation in space and time does not afflict me : for omnipotence does not command me to be myself omnipotent ; eternity, to be myself eter- nal. But I cannot have the idea of moral perfection without at the same time being conscious of it as a law for me. Moral perfection depends, at least for the moral consciousness, not on the nature, but on the will — it is a perfection of will, perfect will. I cannot con- ceive perfect will, the will which is in unison with law, which is itself law, without at the same time regarding it as an object of will, i.e., as an obligation for myself. The conception of the morally perfect being, is no merely theoretical, inert conception, but a practical one, calling me to action, to imitation, throwing me into strife, into disunion with myself; for while it proclaims to me what I ought to be, it also tells me to my face, without any flattery, what I am not. And D 74 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. religion renders this disunion all the more painful,* all the more terrible, that it sets man's own nature before him as a separate nature, and moreover as a personal being, who hates and curses sinners, and excludes them from his grace, the source of all salvation and hap- piness. Now, by what means does man deliver himself from this state of disunion between himself and the perfect being, from the painful consciousness of sin, from the distressing sense of his own nothingness ? How does he blunt the fatal sting of sin ? Only by this ; that he is conscious of love as the highest, the absolute power and truth, that he regards the Divine Being not only as a law, as a moral being, as a being of the understan- ding ; but also as a loving, tender, even subjective hu- man being (that is, as having sympathy with indi- vidual man.) The understanding judges only according to the stringency of law ; the heart accommodates itself, is considerate, lenient, relenting, xa*' a v d ? ^ov t No man is sufficient for the law which moral perfection sets be- fore us ; but for that reason, neither is the law suffi- cient for man, for the heart. The law condemns ; the heart has compassion even on the sinner. The law affirms me only as an abstract being, — love, as a real being. Love gives me the consciousness that I am a man ; the law only the consciousness that I am a sin- ner, that I am worthless. t The law holds man in bondage ; love makes him free. Love hs the middle term, the substantial bond, the principle of reconciliation between the perfect and the imperfect, the sinless and sinful being, the universal * "That which, in our own judgment, derogates from our seltaonceit, humiliates us. Thus the moral (aw inevitably humiliates every man, when he compares with it the Beusual tendency of his nature. — Kant, Kritik. tier nrakt. Vemunit. Fourth edition, p. 182. f Omnes peccavimus Parricidse cum lege cssperunt et illis facinus poena monstravit — Seneca. "The law destroys us. w — Luther, (Tl.. xvi. s, 820.) GOD AS A MORAL BEING, OR LAW. 75 and the individual, the divine and the human. Love is God himself, and apart from it there is no God. Love makes man God, and God man. Love strength- ens the weak, and weakens the strong, abases the high and raises the lowly, idealizes matter and materializes spirit. Love is the true unity of God and man, of spirit and nature. In love common nature is spirit, and the pre-eminent spirit is nature. Love is to deny spirit from the point of view of spirit, to deny matter from the point of view of matter. Love is materialism ; immaterial love is a chimsera. In the longing of love after the distant object, the abstract idealist involunta- rily confirms the truth of sensuousness. But love is also the idealism of nature, love is also spirit, esprit. Love alone makes the nightingale a songstress ; love alone gives the plant its corolla. And what wonders does not love work in our social life ! What faith, creed, opinion separates, love unites. Love even, hu- morously enough, identifies the high noblesse with the people. What the old mystics said of God, that he is the highest and yet the commonest being, applies in truth to love, and that not a visionary, imaginary love — no ! a real love, a love which has flesh and blood, which • vibrates as an almighty force through all living. Yes, it applies only to the love which has flesh and blood, for only this can absolve from the sins which flesh and blood commit. A merely moral being cannot forgive what is contrary to the law of morality. That which denies the law, is denied by the law. The moral judge, who does not infuse human blood into his judg- ment, judges the sinner relentlessly, inexorably. Since, then, God is regarded as a sin-pardoning being, he is posited, not indeed as an unmoral, but as more than a moral being — in a word, as a human being. The ne- gation or annulling of sin is the negation of abstract moral rectitude, — the positing of love, mercy, sensuous life. Not abstract beings — no ! only sensuous, living peings, are merciful. Mercy is the justice of sensuous d2 76 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. life.* Hence, God does not forgive the sins of men as the abstract God of the understanding, but as man, as the God made flesh, the visible God. God as man sins not, it is true, but he knows, he takes on himself, the sufferings, the wants, the needs of sensuous beings. The blood of Christ cleanses us from our sins in the eyes of God ; it is only his human blood that makes God merciful, allays his anger ; that is, our sins are forgiven us, because we are no abstract beings, but creatures of flesh and blood.t * " Das Rechtsgefuhl der Sinnlichkeit." f " This, my God and- Lord, has taken upon him my nature, flesh and "blood such as I have, and has heen tempted and has suffered in all things like me, but without sin ; therefore he can have pity on my weakness. — Hebrews v. Luther (Th. xvi. s. 533.) " The deeper we can bring Christ into the flesh the better." — (Ibid. s. 565.) " God liimself, when he is dealt with out of Christ, is a terrible God, for no consolation is found in him, but pure anger and disfavour." — (Th. xv. s. 298.) THE MYSTERY OF THE INCARNATION. 77 CHAPTER IV, THE MYSTERY OF THE INCARNATION, OR GOD AS LOVE, AS A BEING OF THE HEART. It is the consciousness of love by which man reconciles himself with God, or rather with his own nature as represented in the moral law. The consciousness of the divine love, or what is the same thing, the contem- plation of God as human, is the mystery of the Incar- nation. The Incarnation is nothing else than the practical, material manifestation of the human nature of God. God did not become man for his own sake ; the need, the want of man — a want which still exists in the religious sentiment — was the cause of the Incar- nation. God became man out of mercy : thus he was in himself already a human God before he became an actual man ; for humai want, human misery, went to his heart. The Incarnation was a tear of the divine compassion, and hence it was only the visible advent of a Being having human feelings, and therefore essen- tially human. If in the Incarnation we stop short at the fact of God becoming man, it certainly appears a surprising, inexplicable, marvellous event. But the incarnate God is only the apparent manifestation of deified man ; for the descent of God to man is necessarily preceded by the exaltation of man to God. Man was already in God, was already God himself, before God became man, i. e., showed himself as man.* How otherwise * " Such descriptions as those in which the Scriptures speak of God as of a man, and ascribe to him all that is human, are very sweet and comforting — namely, that he talks with us as a friend, and of such thing? 78 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. could God have become man? The old maxim, ex ni- hilo, nil al fit, is applicable here also. A king who has not the welfare of his subjects at heart, who while seated on his throne does not mentally live with them in their dwellings, who, in feeling, is not, as the peo- ple say, " a common man," such a king will not de- scend bodily from his throne to make his people happy by his personal presence. Thus, has not the subject risen to be a king, before the king descends to be a subject? And if the subject feels himself honoured and made happy by the personal presence of his king, does this feeling refer merely to the bodily presence, and not rather to the manifestation of the disposition. of the philanthropic nature which is the cause of the appearance ? But that which in the truth of religion is the cause, takes in the consciousness of religion the form of a consequence ; and so here the raising of man to God is made a consequence of the humiliation or descent of God to man. God, says religion, made himself human that he might make man divine.* That which is mysterious and incomprehensible, i. e., contradictory, in the proposition, " God is or becomes a man," arises only from the mingling or confusion of the idea or definitions of the universal, unlimited, me- taphysical being with the idea of the religious God, /. e.j the conditions of the understanding with the con- ditions of the heart, the emotive nature; a confusion which is the greatest hindrance to the correct know- of religion. But in fact the idea of the Incar- nation is nothing more than the human/orr/iof a God, as men are wont to talk of with each other, and lie rejoices, sorrows, and Buffers, like a man, for the sake of the mystery of the future humanity of Christ"— Luther (T. ii. p. 834). * " Dens Ix.m.) facta* est, nt homo Den^ Beret," — Angosturas (Serm. p, p. 371, o. I), [n Luther, however, (T. L p. 834,) there is a ■ which indicates the true relation. When Moses called man :' God, the likeness of God," he meant, says Luther, ob- scurely to intimate thai "God was I i become man." Thus here the in- carnation of God is clearly enough represented as. a consequence of the hion of man. THE MYSTERY OF THE INCARNATION. 79 who already in his nature, in the profoundest depths of his soul, is a merciful and therefore a human God. The form given to this truth in the doctrine of the church is, that it was not the first person of the God- head who was incarnate, but the second, who is the representative of man in and before God ; the second person being however in reality, as will be shown, the sole, true, first person in religion. And it is only apart from this distinction of persons, that the God- man appears mysterious, incomprehensible, " specula- tive f for, considered in connexion with it, the Incar- nation is a necessary, nay, a self-evident consequence. The allegation, therefore, that the Incarnation is a purely empirical fact, w T hich could be made known only by means of a revelation in the theological sense, betrays the most crass religious materialism ; for the Incarnation is a conclusion which rests on a very com- prehensible premiss. But it is equally perverse to attempt to deduce the Incarnation from purely specu- lative, L e,, metaphysical, abstract grounds ; for meta- physics apply only to the first person of the Godhead, who does not become incarnate, who is not a dramatic person. Such a deduction would at the utmost be jus- tifiable if it were meant consciously to deduce from metaphysics the negation of metaphysics. This example clearly exhibits the distinction be- tween the method of our philosophy, and that of the old speculative philosophy. The former does not philosophize concerning the Incarnation as a peculiar, stupendous mystery, after the manner of speculation dazzled by mystical splendour ; on the contrary it destroys the illusive supposition of a peculiar super- natural mystery ; it criticises the dogma and reduces it to its natural elements, immanent in man, to its originating principle and central point — love. The dogma presents to us two things — God and love. God is love : but what does that mean? Is God some thins: besides love? a being distinct from love? 80 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. Is it as if I said of an affectionate human being, he is love itself? Certainly; otherwise I must give up the name God, which expresses a special personal being, a subject in distinction from the predicate. Thus love is made something apart : God out of love sent his only-begotten Son. Here love recedes and sinks into insignificance in the dark background — God. It be- comes merely a personal, though an essential, attribute; hence it receives both in theory and in feeling, both objectively and subjectively, the rank simply of a predicate, not that of a subject, of the substance ; it shrinks out of observation as a collateral, an accident ; at one moment it presents itself to me as something essential, at another, it vanishes again. God appears to me in another form besides that of love ; in the form of omnipotence, of a severe power not bound by love, a power in which, though in a smaller degree, the devils participate. So long as love is not exalted into a substance, into an essence, so long there lurks in the background of love a subject, who even without love is something by himself, an unloving monster, a diabolical being, whose personality separable and actually separated from love, delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers, — the phantom of religious fanaticism. Nevertheless the essential idea of the Incarnation, though enveloped in the night of the religious consciousness, is love. Love determined God to the renunciation of his divinity."" Xot because of his Godhead as such, according to which he is the subject in the proposition — God is love, but * It w;is in this sense that the old uncompromising enthusiastic faith celebrated the Incarnation. Amor triumphat de Deo, says St. Bernard. And only in tin* ^onse of a real M-li-ivnuneiation, self-negation of the God- head, lies the reality, the vit of tin? Incarnation; although this self-nega- tion is in itself merely a conception of tin; imagination, for. Looked at in broad daylight, God does not negative himself in the Incarnation, hut he himself as that which In- is, as a human being. The fabrications which modern rationalistic orthodoxy and pietistic rationalism have ad- vanced concerning tie- [ncarnation, in opposition to the rapturous concept US "1" ancient faith, do not deserve to be mentioned, ttill lets controvert d. THE MYSTERY OF THE INCARNATION. 81 because of his love, of the predicate, is it that he re- nounced his Godhead ; thus love is a higher power and truth than Deity. Love conquers God. It was love to which God sacrificed his divine majesty. And what sort of love was that? another than ours ? than that to which we sacrifice life and fortune ? Was it the love of himself? of himself as God? No! it was love to man. But is not love to man human love? Can I love man without loving him humanly, without loving him as he himself loves, if he truly loves? Would not love be otherwise a devilish love ? The devil too loves man, but not for man's sake — for his own ; thus he loves man out of egotism, to aggrandize himself, to extend his power. But God loves man for man's sake, i. e., that he may make him good, happy, blessed. Does he not then love man, as the true man loves his fellow ? Has love a plural ? Is it not everywhere like itself? What then is the true unfalsified import of the Incar- nation, but absolute, pure love, without adjunct, with- out a distinction between divine and human love? For though there is also a self-interested love among men, still the true human love, which is alone worthy of this name, is that which impels the sacrifice of self to another. Who then is our Saviour and Redeemer ? God or Love? Love ; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As God has re- nounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God ; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and, in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God — the evil being — of religious fanaticism. While, however, we have laid open this nucleus of truth in the Incarnation, we have at the same time ex- hibited the dogma in its falsity, we have reduced the apparently supernatural and super-rational mystery to a simple truth inherent in human nature : — a truth which does not belong to the Christian religion alone, but which, implicitly at least, belongs more or less to d3 62 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. every religion as such. For every religion which has any claim to the name, presupposes that God is not indifferent to the beings who worship him, that there- fore what is human is not alien to him, that, as an ob- ject of human veneration, he is a human God. Every prayer discloses the secret of the Incarnation, every prayer is in fact an incarnation of God. In prayer I involve God in human distress. I make him a particip* ator in my sorrows and wants. God is not deaf to my complaints : he has compassion on me ; hence he renounces his divine majesty, his exaltation above all that is finite and human ; he becomes a man with man ; for if he listens to me, and pities me, he is affected by my sufferings. God loves man — L e., God suffers from man. Love does not exist without sympathy, sym- pathy does not exist without suffering in common. Havel any sympathy for a being without feeling? No 1 I feel only for that which has feeling — only for that which partakes of my nature, for that in which I feel myself whose sufferings I myself suffer. Sympathy presupposes a like nature. The Incarnation Provi- dence, prayer, are the expression of this identity of nature in God and man.* It is true that theology, which is pre-occupied with the metaphysical attributes of eternity, unconditioned- . unrhangeableness, and the like abstractions, which express the nature of the understanding, — theo- logy denies the possibility that God should suffer, but i doing it denies the truth of religion,! For re- imufl afhVi Deum miserieonlia no^tH ct non solum respicere tiam numerate stillulas, sicut seriptam in 1'salnio I. VI. Fflitu . fncitur senso miseriarum ncx-tramm." — Melanc- tlionis et aliorurn (Deolam. T. iii. p. 286, p. 450). f St Bernard resorts to a charmingly Bophistica] play of words: — i ni proprium est misereri — Sup. ( ■'. 5trmo26.) Af wion were not ■■•■. it ifl true, the sufiering of the heart. But • thy sympathising heart ? No love, no suffering. /.. the some or suffering, is the universal heart, the common I THE MYSTERY OF THE INCARNATION. 83 ligion — the religious man in the act of devotion, be- lieves in a real sympathy of the divine being in his sufferings and wants, believes that the will of God can be determined by the fervour of prayer, i. e., by the force of feeling, believes in a real, present fulfilment of his desire, wrought by prayer. The truly religious man unhesitatingly assigns his own feelings to God ; God is to him a heart susceptible to all that is human. The heart can betake itself only to the heart ; feeling can appeal only to feeling ; it finds consolation in it- self, in its own nature alone. The notion that the fulfilment of prayer has been determined from eternity, that it was originally in- cluded in the plan of creation, is the empty, absurd fiction of a mechanical mode of thought, which is in absolute contradiction with the nature of religion. " We need," says Lavater somewhere, and quite cor- rectly according to the religious sentiment, " an arbi- trary God. 77 Besides, even according to this fiction, God is just as much a being determined by man, as in the real, present fulfilment consequent on the power of prayer ; the only difference is, that the contradic- tion with the unchangeableness and unconditioned- ness of God — that which constitutes the difficulty — is thrown back into the deceptive "distance of the past or of eternity. Whether God decides on the fulfilment of my prayer now, on the immediate occasion of my offering it, or whether he did decide on it long ago, is fundamentally the same thing. It is the greatest inconsequence to reject the idea of a God who can be determined by prayer, that is, by the force of feeling, as an unworthy anthropomorphic idea. If we once believe in a being who is an object of veneration, an object of prayer, an object of affec- tion, who is providential, who takes care of man, — in a Providence, which is not conceivable without love, — in a being, therefore, who is loving, whose motive of action is love ; we also believe in a being, who has, if not an anatomical, yet a psychical human heart. 84 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. The religious mind, as has been said, places everything in God, excepting that alone which it despises. The Christians certainly gave their God no attributes which contradicted their own moral ideas, but they gave him without hesitation, and of necessity, the emotions of love, of compassion. And the love which the religious mind places in God is not an illusory, imaginary love, but a real, true love. God is loved and loves again ; the divine love is only human love made objective, affirming itself. In God love is ab- sorbed in itself as its own ultimate truth. It may be objected to the import here assigned to the Incarnation, that the Christian Incarnation is alto- gether peculiar, that at least it is different (which is quite true in certain respects, as will hereafter be ap- parent) from the incarnations of the heathen deities, whether Greek or Indian. These latter are mere products of men or deified men ; but in Christianity is given the idea of the true God : here the union of the divine nature with the human is first significant and i; speculative. n Jupiter transforms himself into a bull : the heathen incarnations are mere fancies. In paganism there is no more in the nature of God than in his incarnate manifestation ; in Christianity, on the contrary, it is God, a separate, superhuman being, who appears as man. But this objection is refuted by the remark already made, that even the premiss of the Christian Incarnation contains the human nature. God loves man ; moreover God has a Son ; God is a i;i tut)* : the relations of humanity are not excluded from God; the human is not remote from God, not unknown to him. Thus here also there is nothing more in the nature of God than in the incarnate mani- festation of God. In the Incarnation religion only confesses, what in reflection on itself, as theology, it will not admit; namely, that God is an altogether human being. The [ncarnation, the mystery of the "Godman," is therefore no mysterious composition of contraries, no synthetic fact, a.- it is regarded by the THE MYSTERY OF THE INCARNATION. 85 speculative religious philosophy, which has a particu- lar delight in contradiction ; it is an analytic fact, — a human word with a human meaning. If there be a contradiction here, it lies before the incarnation and out of it ; in the union of providence, of love, with deity ; for if this love is a real love, it is not essen- tially different from our love, — there are only our limitations to be abstracted from it ; and thus the In- carnation is only the strongest, deepest, most palpable, open-hearted expression of this providence, this love. Love knows not how to make its object happier than by rejoicing it with its personal presence, by letting itself be seen. To see the invisible benefactor face to face is the most ardent desire of love. To see is a divine act. Happiness lies in the mere sight of the beloved one. The glance is the certainty of love. And the Incarnation has no other significance, no other effect, than the indubitable certitude of the love of God to man. Love remains, but the incarnation upon the earth passes away: the appearance was limited by time and place, accessible to few ; but the essence, the nature which was manifested, is eternal and univer- sal. We can no longer believe in the manifestation for its own sake, but only for the sake of the thing manifested ; for us there remains no immediate pre- sence but that of love. The clearest, most irrefragable proof, that man in religion contemplates himself as the object of the divine Being, as the end of the divine activity, that thus in religion he has relation only to his own nature, only to himself, — the clearest, most irrefragable proof of this is the love of God to man, the basis and central point of religion. God for the sake of man empties himself of his Godhead, lays aside his Godhead. Herein lies the elevating influence of the Incarnation ; the highest, the perfect being humiliates, lowers himself for the sake of man. Hence, in God I learn to esti- mate my own nature ; I have value in the sight of God ; the divine significance of my nature is become 86 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. evident to me. How can the worth of man be more strongly expressed than when God, for man's sake, becomes a man, when man is the end, the object of the divine love ? The love of God to man is an essential condition of the divine Being : God is a God who loves me — who loves man in general. Here lies the em- phasis, the fundamental feeling of religion. The love of God makes me loving ; the love of God to man is the cause of man's love to God ; the divine love causes, awakens human love. " We love God because he first loved us." What, then, is it that I love in God? Love : love to man. . But when I love and worship the love with which God loves man, do I not love man ; is not my love of God, though, indirectly, love of man? If God loves man, is not man, then, the very substance of God ? That which I love — is it not my iramost being? Have I a heart when I do not love? No ! love only is the heart of man. But what is love without the thing loved ? Thus what I love is my heart, the substance of my being, my nature. Why does man grieve — why does he lose pleasure in life, when he has lost the beloved object ? Why ? be- cause with the beloved object he has lost his heart, the activity of his affections, the principle of life. Thus, if God loves man, man is the heart of God — the wel- fare of man his deepest anxiety. If man, then, is the object of God, is not man, in God, an object to him- self? is not the content of the divine nature the human nature? If God is love, is not the essential content of this love, man ? Is not the love of God to man — th€ basis and central point of religion — the love of man to himself made an object, contemplated as the highest objective truth, as the highest Being to man? Js not then the proposition, " God loves man" an orien- talism (religion is essentially oriental), which in plain speech means, the highest is the love of man? The truth to which, by means of analysis, we have here reduced the mystery of the Incarnation, has also been recognised even in the religious consciousness THE MYSTERY OF THE INCARNATION. 87 Thus Luther, for example, says, " He who can truly conceive such a thing (namely, the incarnation of God) in his heart, should, for the sake of the flesh and blood which sits at the right hand of God, bear love to all flesh and blood here upon the earth, and never more be able to be angry with any man. The gentle man- hood of Christ our God, should at a glance fill all hearts with joy, so that never more could an angry, unfriendly thought come therein — yea, every man ought, out of great joy, to be tender to his fellow-man, for the sake of that our flesh and blood." " This is a fact which should move us to great joy and blissful hope, that we are thus honoured above all creatures, even above the angels, so that we can with truth boast, ■ — my own flesh and blood sits at the right hand ot God, and reigns over all. Such honour has no creature, not even an angel. This ought to be a furnace that should melt us all into one heart, and should create such a fervour in us men that we should heartily love each other." But that which in the truth of religion is the essence of th§ fable, the chief thing, is to the religious consciousness only the moral of the fable, a collateral thing. 88 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. CHAPTER V. THE MYSTERY OF THE SUFFERING GOD. An essential condition of the incarnate, or, what is the same thing, the human God, namely, Christ, is the Passion. Love attests itself by suffering. All thoughts and feelings which are immediately associated with Christ, concentrate themselves in the idea of the Passion. God as God is the sum of all human perfec- tion ; God as Christ is the sum of all human misery. The heathen philosophers celebrated activity, espe- cially the spontaneous activity of the intelligence, as the highest, the divine; the Christians consecrated passivity, even placing it in God. If God as actus purus, as pure activity, is the God of abstract philo- sophy ; so, on the other hand, Christ, the God of the Christians, is the passio pur a, pure suffering — the high- est metaphysical thought, the etre supreme, of the heart. For what makes more impression on the heart than suffering? especially the suffering of one who consi- dered in himself is free from suffering, exalted above it; — the suffering of the innocent, endured purely for the good of others, the suffering of love, — self-sacrifice ? But for the very reason that the history of the Passion is the history which most deeply affects the human heart, or let us rather say the heart, in general — for it would be a ludicrous mistake in man to attempt to conceive any other heart than the human, — it follows undeniably that nothing else is expressed in that history, nothing else is made an object in it, but the lmt ure of the heart, — that it is not an invention of the understanding or the poetic faculty, but of the heart. The heart, however, does not invent in the same way a& the free imagination or intelligence ; it has a passive, THE MYSTERY OF THE SUFFERING GOD. 89 receptive relation to what it produces ; all that pro- ceeds from it seems to it given from without, takes it by violence, works with the force of irresistible ne- cessity. The heart overcomes, masters man ; he who is once in its power is possessed as it were by his demon, by his God. The heart knows no other God, no more excellent being than itself, than a God whose name may indeed be another, but whose nature, whose sub- stance, is the nature of the heart. And out of the heart, out of the inward impulse to do good, to live and die for man, out of the divine instinct of benevolence which desires to make all happy, and excludes none, not even the most abandoned and abject, out of the moral duty of benevolence in the highest sense, as having become an inward necessity, i. e., a movement of the heart, — out of the human nature, therefore, as it reveals itself through the heart, has sprung what is best, what is true in Christianity — its essence purified from theo- logical dogmas and contradictions. For, according to the principles which we have already developed, that which in religion is the pre- dicate, we must make the subject, and that which in religion is a subject we must make a predicate, thus inverting the oracles of religion ; and by this means we arrive at the truth. God suffers — suffering is the predicate — but for men, for others, not for himself. What does that mean in plain speech? nothing else than this : to suffer for others is divine ; he who suffers for others, who lays down his life for them, acts di- vinely, is a God to men.* The passion of Christ, however, represents not only * Religion speaks by example. Example is the law of religion. What Christ did, is law. Christ suffered for others ; therefore, we should do likewise. " Qua? necessitas fuit ut sic exinaniret se, sic humiliaret se, sic abbreviaret se Dominus majestatis ; nisi ut vos similiter faciatis ?" — Bernardus (in Die nat. Domini). "We ought studiously to consider the example of Christ That would move us and incite us, so that we from our hearts should willingly help and serve other people, even though it might be hard, and we must suffer on account of it." — Luther (T. xv p. 40). 90 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. moral, voluntary suffering, the suffering of love, the power of sacrificing self for the good of others ; it re- presents also suffering as such, suffering in so far as it is an expression of passibility in general. The Christian religion is so little superhuman, that it even sanctions human weakness. The heathen philosopher, on hearing tidings of the death of his child, exclaims : u I knew that he was mortal.'' Christ, on the contrary, — at least in the Bible, — sheds tears over the death of Lazarus, a death which he nevertheless knew to be only an apparent one. While Socrates empties the cup of poison with unshaken soul, Christ exclaims : "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me."* Christ is in this respect the self-confession of human sensi- bility. In opposition to the heathen, and in particular the stoical principle, with its rigorous energy of will and self-sustainedness, the Christian involves the con- sciousness of his own sensitiveness and susceptibility in the consciousness of God ; he finds it, if only it be no sinful weakness, not denied, not condemned in God. To suffer is the highest command of Christianity — the history of Christianity is the history of the Passion of Humanity. While amongst the heathens the shout of sensual pleasure mingled itself in the worship of the gods, amongst the Christians, we mean of course the ancient Christians, God is served with sighs and tears.t But as where sounds of sensual pleasure make a part of the cultus, it is a sensual God, a God of life, who is worshipped, as indeed these shouts of joy arc only a symbolical definition of the nature of the gods to whom this jubilation is acceptable ; so also the sighs of Christians are tones which proceed from the inmost * " Haerent plerique hoc loco. Egoautem boh solum exensandnm non puto, Bed ctiaui trasquam magia pietatem ejus majestatemqne dexniror. Minufl enim contcderal mihi, nisi meuxn anacepiaaet affectum. Ergo pro me dolait, qui pro se nihil habuit, qtiod doleret." — Ambrosias (Exposit. in Lucsa K\\ 1. x. c 22), f "Quaiido enim illi (Deo) appropinqtiare auderenma in sua. impaaa* biltiate manenti ?" — Bernardo* (Tract, dc ariL GracL HumiL ct Superb. THE MYSTERY OP THE SUFFERING GOD. 91 soul, the inmost nature of their God. The God ex- pressed by the cultus, whether this be an external, or, as with the Christians, an inward spiritual worship, — not the God of sophistical theology, — is the true God of man. But the Christians, we mean of course the ancient Christians, believed that they rendered the highest honour to their God by tears, the tears of re- pentance and yearning. Thus tears are the light-re- flecting drops which mirror the nature of the Christ- ian's God. But a God who has pleasure in tears, ex- presses nothing else than the nature of the heart. It is true that the theory of the Christian religion says : Christ has done all for us, has redeemed us, has recon- ciled us with God ; and from hence the inference may be drawn : Let us be of a joyful mind and disposition ; what need have we to trouble ourselves as to how we shall reconcile ourselves with God? we are reconciled already. But the imperfect tense in which the fact of suffering is expressed, makes a deeper, a more endur- ing impression, than the perfect tense which expresses the fact of redemption. The redemtion is only the result of the suffering ; the suffering is the cause of the redemption. Hence the suffering takes deeper root in the feelings ; the suffering makes itself an ob- ject of imitation ; — not so the redemption. If God himself suffered for my sake, how can I be joyful, how can I allow myself any gladness, at least on this cor- rupt earth, which was the theatre of his suffering ?* Ought I to fare better than God? Ought I not, then, to make his sufferings my own? Is not what God my Lord does, my model ? Or shall I share only the gain, and not the cost also ? Do I know merely that he has redeemed me ? Do I not also know the history of his suffering? Should it be an object of cold remem- brance to me, or even an object of rejoicing, because it has purchased my salvation? Who can think so — * "Dens mens pendet in patibulo et ego voluptati operam dabo?" (Form. Hon. Vitas. Among the spnrions writings of St. Bernard.) "Memoria cru- cifixi crncifigat in te camem tuam." — Joh. Gerhard (Medit. sacra?-, M. 37). 92 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. who can wish to be exempt from the sufferings of his God? The Christian religion is the religion of suffering.* The images of the crucified one which we still meet with in all churches, represent not the Saviour, but only the crucified, the suffering Christ. Even the self-crucifixions among the Christians are, psycholo- gically, a deep-rooted consequence of their religious views. How should not he who has always the image of the crucified one in his mind, at length contract the desire to crucify either himself or another? At least we have as good a warrant for this conclusion as Augustine and other fathers of the church for their reproach against the heathen religion, that the licen- tious religious images of the heathens provoked and authorized licentiousness. God suffers, means in truth nothing else than : God is a heart. The heart is the source, the centre of all suffering. A being without suffering is a being with- out a heart. The mystery of the suffering God is therefore the mystery of feeling, sensibility. A suffer- ing God is a feeling, sensitive God.f But the propo- sition : God is a feeling Being, is only the religious periphrase of the proposition : feeling is absolute, di- vine in its nature. Man has the consciousness not only of a spring of activity, but also of a spring of suffering in himself. I feel ; and I feel feeling (not merely will and thought, which are only too often in opposition to me and my feelings), as belonging to my essential being, and, though the source of all sufferings and sorrows, as a glorious, divine power and perfection. What w^ould man be without feeling ? It'is the musical power in man. But what would man be without music? Just as man has a musical faculty and feels an inward necessi- * " It is Letter to Suffer evil, than to do good." — Lu£her(T. it. B, IT).) f " Pati voliiit, ut coinp.'iti diaceret, miser fieri, nl miaereri dieceret. w — ■ Bernhard (de Grad.) ll Bfiaeiere oostri, quoniam oarnia imberillitatcm, tu ip^c cam paasus, experttu cs." — demons Alex, Psedag. 1. i. c. b. THE MYSTERY OF THE SUFFERING GOD. 93 ty to breathe out his feelings in song ; so, by a like ne- cessity, he in religious sighs and tears, streams forth the nature of feeling as an objective, divine nature. Religion is human nature reflected, mirrored in it- self. That which exists has necessarily a pleasure, a joy in itself, loves itself, and loves itself justly ; to blame it because it loves itself is to reproach it be- cause it exists. To exist is to assert oneself, to affirm oneself, to love oneself ; he to whom life is a burthen, rids himself of it. Where, therefore, feeling is not depreciated and repressed, as with the Stoics, where existence is awarded to it, there also is religious power and significance already conceded to it, there also is it already exalted to that stage in which it can mirror and reflect itself, in which it can project its own image as God. G od is the mirror of man. That which has essential value for man, which he esteems the perfect, the excellent, in which he has true delight, — that alone is God to him. If feeling seems to thee a glorious attribute, it is then, per se, a divine attribute to thee. Therefore, the feeling, sensitive man believes only in a feeling, sensitive God, i. e., he believes only in the truth of his own existence and nature, for he can believe in nothing else than that which is involved in his own nature. His faith is the consciousness of that which is holy to him ; but that alone is holy to man which lies deepest within him, which is most peculiarly his own, the basis, the essence of his individuality. To the feeling man a God with- out feeling is an empty, abstract, negative God, i. e., nothing ; because that is wanting to him which is pre- cious and sacred to man. God is for man the com- mon-place book where he registers his highest feelings and thoughts, the genealogical tree on which are enter- ed the names that are dearest and most sacred to him. It is a sign of an undiscriminating good nature, a womanish instinct, to gather together and then to pre- serve tenaciously all that we have gathered, not to trust anything to the waves of forgetfulness, to the chance of 94 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. memory, in short not to trust ourselves and learn to know what really has value for us. The freethinker is liable to the danger of an unregulated, dissolute life. The religious man, who binds together all things in one, does not lose himself in sensuality ; but for that reason he is exposed to the danger of illiberality, of spiritual selfishness and greed. Therefore, to the religious man at least, the irreligious or un-religious man appears lawless, arbitrary, haughty, frivolous ; not because that which is sacred to the former is not also in itself sacred to the latter, but only because that which the un-religious man holds in his head merely, the religious man places out of and above himself as an object, and hence recognises in himself the relation of a formal subordination. The religious man, having a common-place book, a nucleus of aggra- gation, has an aim, and having an aim he has firm standing-ground. Xot mere will as such, not vague knowledge — only activity with a purpose, which is the union of theoretic and practical activity, gives man a moral basis and support, i. e., character. Every man, therefore, must place before himself a God, t\ e., an aim, a purpose. The aim is the conscious, voluntary, essential impulse of life, the glance of genius, the focus of self-knowledge, — the unity of the material and spi- ritual in the individual man. He who has an aim, has a law over him; he does not merely guide himself; he is guided. He who has no aim. has no home, no sanctuary ; aimlessncss is the greatest unhappiness. Even he who has only common aims, gets on better, though he may not be better, than he who has no aim. An aim sets limits ; but limits are the mentors of vir- tue He who has an aim, an aim which is in itself true and essential, has, to ipso, a religion, if not in the narrow sense of common pietism, yet — and this is the only point to be considered — in the sense of rea- son, in the sen.-e of the universal, the only true love. THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY. 95 CHAPTER VI. THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY AND THE MOTHER OF GOD. If a God without feeling, without a capability of suf- fering, will not suffice to man as a feeling, suffering being, neither will a God with feeling only, a God without intelligence and will. Only a being who comprises in himself the whole man can satisfy the whole man. Man's consciousness of himself in his to- tality is the consciousness of the Trinity. The Tri- nity knits together the qualities or powers, which were before regarded separately, into unity, and thereby reduces the universal being of the under- standing, i. e., God as God, to a special being, a spe- cial faculty. That which theology designates as the image, the similitude of the Trinity, we must take as the thing itself, the essence, the archetype, the original ; by this means we shall solve the enigma. The so-called images by which it has been sought to illustrate the Trinity, and make it comprehensible, are, principally: mind, understanding, memory, will, love — mens, intel- lect us, memoria, voluntas, amor or caritas. God thinks, God loves ; and, moreover, he thinks, he loves himself; the object thought, known, loved, is God himself. The objectivity of self-consciousness is the first thing we meet with in the Trinity. Self-con- sciousness necessarily urges itself upon man as some- thing absolute. Existence is for him one with self- consciousness ; existence with self-consciousness is for him existence simply. If I do not know that I exist, 96 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. it is all one whether I exist or not. Self-conscious- ness is for man — is, in fact, in itself — absolute. A God who knows not his own existence, a God without con- sciousness, i3 no God. Man cannot conceive himself as without consciousness ; hence he cannot conceive God as without it. The divine self-consciousness is nothing else than the consciousness of consciousness as an absolute or divine essence. But this explanation is by no means exhaustive. On the contrary, we should be proceeding very arbi- trarily if we sought to reduce and limit the mystery of the Trinity to the proposition just lain down. Con- sciousness, understanding, will, love, in the sense of abstract essences or qualities, belong only to abstract philosophy. But religion is man's consciousness of himself in his concrete or living totality, in which the identity of self-consciousness exists only as the pregnant, complete unity of / and thou. Religion, at least the Christian, is abstraction from the world ; it is essentially inward. The religious man leads a life withdrawn from the world, hidden in God, still, void of worldly joy. He separates himself from the world, not only in the ordinary sense, according to which the renunciation of the world belongs to every true, earnest man, but also in that wider sense which science gives to the word, when it calls itself world- wisdom (icelt-weislteit ;) but he thus separates himself, only because God is a Being separate from the world, an extra and supramundane Being, — L e„ abstractly and philosophically expressed, the non-existence of the world. God as an extramundane being, is how- ever nothing else than the nature of man, withdrawn from the world and concentrated in itself, freed from all worldly ties and entanglements, transporting itself above the world, and positing itself in this condition as a real objective being; or, nothing else than the consciousness of the power to abstract oneself from all thai is external, and to live for and with oneself alone, under the form which this power takes in rcli THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY. 97 gion, namely, that of a being distinct, apart from man.* God as God, as a simple being, is the being absolutely alone, solitary — absolute solitude and seli- sufficingness ; for that only can be solitary which is self-sufficing. To be able to be solitary is a sign of character and thinking power. Solitude is the want of the thinker, society the want of the heart. We can think alone, but we can love only with another. In love we are dependent, for it is the need of another being ; we are independent only in the solitary act of thought. Solitude is selfsufficingness. But from a solitary God the essential need of dua- lity, of love, of community, of the real, completed self- consciousness, of the alter ego, is excluded. This want is therefore satisfied by religion thus : in the still soli- tude of the divine being is placed another, a second, different from God as to personality, but identical with him in essence, — God the Son, in distinction from God the Father. God the Father is J, God the Son Thou, The I is understanding, the Thou love. But Love with understanding and understanding with love, is mind, and mind is the totality of man as such — the total man. Participated life is alone true, self-satisfying, divine life : — this simple thought, this truth, natural, imma- nent in man, is the secret, the supernatural mystery of the Trinity. But religion expresses this truth, as it does every other, in an indirect manner, i. e., inverse- ly, for it here makes a general truth into a particular one, the true subject into a predicate, when it says : God is a participated life, a life of love and friendship. " Dei essentia est extra omnes creaturas, sicut ab aeterno fait Dens in se ipso ; ab omnibns ergo creatnris amorem tnnm abstrabas." — Jobn Gerhard (Medit. sacras, M. 31). " If thon wonldst have the Creator, thon mnst do without the creature. The less of the creature, the more of God. Therefore, abjure all creatures, with all their consolations."— J. Tauler (Postilla. Hamburg, 1621, p. 312). " If a man cannot say in his heart with truth : God and I are alone in the world — there is no- thing else, — he has no peace in himself." — G. Arnold (Von Verschmii* hung der Welt. Wahre Abbild der Ersten Christen, L. 4, c. 2, § 7). 98 . THE ESSENCE OP CHRISTIANITY. The third person in the Trinity expresses nothing further than the love of the two divine Persons towards each other ; it is the unity of the Son and the Father, the idea of community, strangely enough regarded in its turn as a special personal being. The Holy Spirit owes its personal existence only to a name, a word. The earliest Fathers of the Church are well known to have identified the Spirit with the Son. Even later, its dogmatic personality wants con- sistency. He is the love with which God loves himself and man, and on the other hand, he is the love with which man loves God and men. Thus he is the iden tity of God and man, made objective according to the usual mode of thought in religion, namely, as in itself a distinct being. But for us this unity or identity is already involved in the idea of the Father, and yet more in that of the Son. Hence we need not make the Holy Spirit a separate object of our analysis. Only this one remark further. In so far as the Holy Spirit represents the subjective phase, he is properly the re- presentation of the religious sentiment to itself, the representation of religious emotion, of religious en- thusiasm, or the personification, the rendering objective of religion in religion. The Holy Spirit is therefore the sighing creature, the yearning of the creature after God. But that there are in fact only two Persons in the Trinity, the third representing, as has been said, only love, is involved in this, that to the strict idea of love two suffice. With two we have the principle of multi- plicity and all its essential results. Two is the prin- ciple of multiplicity, and can therefore stand as its complete substitute. If several persons were posited the force of love would only be weakened — it would be dispersed. But love and the heart are identical ; the heart is no Bpecial power ; it is the man who love-, and in 80 far as he loves. The Second Person is therefore the self-assertion of the human hear! as the principle of duality, of participated life,- -itia warmth ; THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY. 99 the Father is light, although light was chiefly a pre- dicate of the Son, because in him the Godhead first became clear, comprehensible. But notwithstanding this, light as a super- terrestrial element may be ascribed to the Father, the representative of the Godhead as such, the cold being of the intelligence ; and warmth, as a terrestrial element, to the Son. God as the Son first gives warmth to man ; here God, from an object of the intellectual eye, of the indifferent sense of light, becomes an object of feeling, of affection, of enthusiasm, of rapture ; but only because the Son is himself nothing else than the glow of love, enthusiasm.* God as the Son is the primitive incarnation, the primitive self-re- nunciation of God, the negation of God in God ; for as the Son he is a finite being, because he exists ab alio, he has a source, whereas the Father has no source, he exists a se. Thus in the second Person the essential attribute of the Godhead, the attribute of self-exist- ence, is given up. But God the Father himself begets the Son ; thus he renounces his rigorous, exclusive di- vinity ; he humiliates, lowers himself, evolves within himself the principle of finiteness, of dependent exist- ence ; in the Son he becomes man, not indeed, in the first instance, as to the outward form, but as to the inward nature. And for this reason it is as the Son that God first becomes the object of man, the object of feeling, of the heart. The heart comprehends only what springs from the heart. From the character of the subjective disposi- tion and impressions the conclusion is infallible as to the character of the object. The pure, free under- standing denies the Son, — not so the understanding determined by feeling, overshadowed by the heart ; on the contrary, it finds in the Son the depths of the God- head, because in him it finds feeling, which in and by itself is something dark, obscure, and therefore appears * " Exigit ergo Deus timeri ut Dominus, honorari lit pater, ut sponsus amari. Quid in I113 prsestat quid eminet ? — Amor." Bernardus (Sup. Cant. Serin. 83). 2E 100 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. to man a mystery. The Son lays hold on the heart, because the true Father of the divine Son is the human heart," and the Son himself nothing else than the di- vine heart, t. e., the human heart become objective to itself as a divine Being. A God, who has not in himself the quality of finite- ness, the principle of concrete existence, the essence of the feeling of dependence, is no God for a finite, con- crete being. The religious man cannot love a God who has not the essence of love in himself, neither can man, or, in general, any finite being be an object to a God who has not in himself the ground, the principle of finiteness. To such a God there is wanting the sense, the understanding, the sympathy for finiteness. How can God be the Father of men, how can he love other beings subordinate to himself, if he has not in himself a subordinate being, a Son, if he does not know what love is, so to speak, from his own experience, — in relation to himself? The single man takes far less interest in the family sorrows of another than he who himself has family ties. Thus God the Father loves men only in the Son and for the sake of the Son. The love to man is derived from the love to the Son. The Father and Son in the Trinity are therefore father and son not in a figurative sense, but in a strictly literal sense. The Father is a real father in relation to the Son, the Son is a real son in relation to the Father, or to God as the Father. The essential per- sonal distinction between them consists only in this, that the one begets, the other is begotten. If this na- tural empirical condition is taken away, their personal existence and reality are annihilated. The Christians — we mean of course the Christians of former days, who would with difficulty recognise the worldly, fri- volous, pagan Christians of the modern world as their brethren in Christ — substituted for the natural love * .]■,, spirit of Catholicism — in distinction from Pro- I rindple is the masculine God, the masculine spirit— motMer of God. THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY. 101 and unity immanent in man, a purely religious love and unity ; they rejected the real life of the family, the intimate bond of love which is naturally moral, as an undiyine, unheavenly, i. e., in truth, a worthless thing. But in compensation they had a Father and Son in God, who embraced each other with heartfelt love, with that intense love which natural relationship alone inspires. On this account the mystery of the Trinity was to the ancient Christians an object of unbounded wonder, enthusiasm and rapture, because here the satis- faction of those profoundest human wants which in reality, in life, they denied, became to them an object of contemplation in God." It was therefore quite in order, that to complete the divine family, the bond of love between Father and Son, a third, and that a feminine person, was received into heaven ; for the personality of the Holy Spirit is a too vague and precarious — a too obviously poetic personification of the mutual love of the Father and Son, to serve as the third complementary being. It is true that the Virgin Mary was not so placed between the Father and Son as to imply that the Father had begotten the Son through her, because the sexual rela- tion was regarded by the Christians as something un- holy and sinful ; but it is enough that the maternal principle was associated with the Father and Son. It is in fact difficult to perceive why the Mother should be something unholy, L e., unworthy of God, when once God is Father and Son. Though it is held that the Father is not a Father in the natural sense — that, on the contrary, the Divine generation is quite different from the natural and human — still he remains a Father, and a real, not a nominal or symbolical Father, in relation to the Son. And the idea of the Mother of God, which now appears so strange to us, is therefore not really more strange or paradoxical, * " Dum Patris et Filii proprietates cornmunionemque delectabilem intueor, nihil delect abilius in illis invenio, quam mutnum amoris affectum." — Anselnms (in Rixner's Gesch. d. Phil. II. B. Anh. p. 18). THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 102 than the idea of the Son of God, is not more in contra- diction with the general, abstract definition of God than the Sonship. On the contrary, the Virgin Mary fits in perfectly with the relations of the Trinity, since she conceives without man the Son whom the Father begets without woman ;* so that thus the Holy Virgin is a necessary, inherently requisite antithesis to the Father in the bosom of the Trinity. Moreover we have, if not in concreto and explicitly, yet in abstrocto and implicitly, the feminine principle already in the Son. The Son is the mild, gentle, forgiving, concili- ating being — the womanly sentiment of God. God, as the Father, is the generator, the active, the principle of masculine spontaneity; but the Son is begotten, without himself begetting, Bens genitus, the passive, suffering, receptive being ; he receives his existence from the Father. The Son, as a Son, of course not as God, is dependent on the Father, subject to his author- ity. The Son is thus the feminine feeling of depen- dence in the Godhead : the Son implicitly urges upon us the need of a real feminine being t The son — I mean the natural, human son — considered as such, is an intermediate being between the masculine nature of the father and the feminine nature of the mother ; he is, as it were, still half a man, half a woman, inasmuch as he has not the full, rigorous consciousness of independence which characterizes the man, and feels himself drawn rather to the mother than to the father. The love of the son to the mother is the first love of the masculine being for the feminine. The love of man to woman, the love of the youth for the maiden, receives its religious — its sole truly religious conse- * M Xatus est de Patre semper et matre semel ; de Patre sine sexu, de matre sine nan. Apod pa trem quippe defuit concipientM uterus ; spud m defeat wminaotu unplexuc* — Angosturas (Sernt. ad. pop. p. :;:•_'. c. 1. Ed. Bened Antw. 1701). | I: Jewish mysticism, God, according to one school, is a masculine, the Boly Spirit a feminine principle, out of whose intermixture arose the Son, lad with him the world. Gfintaer, Jahrb. . Walchii, Hist. Contr. dr. ct Lai. de Proc. Spir. S -Tenie, 1751. THE MYSTERY OF THE LOGOS. 107 to me. I turn to the saint, not because the saint is dependent on God, but because God is dependent on the saint, because God is determined and ruled by the prayers, L e., by the wish or heart of the saint. The distinctions which the Catholic theologians made be- tween latreia, doulia, and liyperdoulia, are absurd, groundless sophisms. The God in the background of the Mediator is only an abstract, inert conception, the conception or idea of the Godhead in general ; and it is not to reconcile us with this idea, but to remove it, to a distance, to negative it, because it is no object for religion, that the Mediator interposes.* God above the Mediator is nothing else than the cold understand- ing above the heart, like Fate above the Olympic gods. Man, as an emotional and sensuous being, is govern- ed and made happy only by images, by sensible repre- sentations. Mind presenting itself as at once type- creating, emotional, and sensuous, is the imagination. The second Person in God, who is in truth the first person in religion, is the nature of the imagination made objective. The definitions of the second Person are principally images or symbols ; and these images do not proceed from man's incapability of conceiving the object otherwise than symbolically, — which is an altogether false interpretation, — but the thing cannot be conceived otherwise than symbolically because the thing itself is a symbol or image. The Son is there- fore expressly called the Image of God ; his essence is that he is an image — the representation of God, the visible glory of the invisible God. The Son is the satisfaction of the need for mental images, the nature of the imaginative activity in man made objective as an absolute, divine activity. Man makes to himself * This is expressed very significantly in the Incarnation. God re- nounces, denies his majesty, power, and infinity, in order to become a man ; i.e., man denies the God who is not himself a man, and only affirms the God who affirms man. Exinanivit, says St. Bernard, majestate et po- tentia, non bonitate et misericordia. That which cannot he renounced, cannot be denied, is thus the Divine goodness and mercy, i.e., the sel£ affirmation of the human heart.. 108 THE ESSENCE OP CHRISTIANITY. an image of God, i. e., he converts the abstract Being of the reason, the Being of the thinking poorer, into an object of sense or imagination." But he places this image in God himself, because his want would not be satisfied if he did not regard this image as an objective reality, if it were nothing more for him than a subjec- tive image, separate from God, — a mere figment devised by man, And it is in fact no devised, no arbitrary image ; for it expresses the necessity of the imagination, the necessity of affirming the imagination as a divine power. The Son is the reflected splendour of the imagination, the image dearest to the heart ; but for the very reason that he is only an object of the imag- ination, he is only the nature of the imagination made objective.! It is clear from this, how blinded by prejudice dog- matic speculation is, when, entirely overlooking the inward genesis of the Son of God as the Image of God, it demonstrates the Son as a metaphysical ens, as an object of thought, whereas the Son is a declension, a falling off from the metaphysical idea of the Godhead ; — a falling off, however, which religion naturally places in God himself, in order to justify it, and not to feel it as a falling off. The Son is the chief and ultimate principle of image worship, for he is the image of God ; and the image necessarily takes the place of the thing. The adoration of the saint in his image, is the adora- tion of the image as the saint. Wherever the image is the essential expression, the organ of religion, there also it is the essence of religion. The Council of Nice adduced amongst other grounds for the religious use of images, the authority of Gre- gory of Nyssa, who said that he could never look at * It is obvious that the Image of God has also another signification, jr, that the personal, visible man is God himself. But here the osidered simply as an imi f Let the reader only consider, for example, the Transfignration, th« Resurrection, and the Ascension of Christ THE MYSTERY OF THE LOGOS. 109 an image which represented the sacrifice of Isaac wi th- ou t being moved to tears, because it so vividly brought before him that event in sacred history. But the effect of the represented object is not the effect of the object as such, but the effect of the representation. The holy object is simply the haze of holiness in which the image veils its mysterious power. The religious object is only a pretext, by means of which art or imagination can exercise its dominion over men unhindered. For the religious consciousness, it is true, the sacredness of the image is associated, and necessarily so, only with the sacredness of the object ; but the religious con- sciousness is not the measure of truth. Indeed, the Church itself, while insisting on the distinction be- tween the image and the object of the image, and deny- ing that the worship is paid to the image, has at the same time made at least an indirect admission of the truth, by itself declaring the sacredness of the image.* But the ultimate, highest principle of image-worship is the worship of the Image of God in God. The Son, who is the " brightness of His glory, the express image of His person," is the entrancing splendour of the ima- gination, which only manifests itself in visible images. Both to inward and outward contemplation the repre- sentation of Christ, the Image of God, was the image of images. The images of the saints are only optical multiplications of one and the same image. The specu- lative deduction of the Image of God is therefore nothing more than an unconscious deduction and estab- lishing of image-worship ; for the sanction of the principle is also the sanction of its necessary conse- quences ; the sanction of the archetype is the sanction of its semblance. If God has an image of himself, why should not I have an image of God ? If God loves his * " Sacram imaginem Domini nostri Jesu Christi et omnium Salvatoris aequo honore cum libro sanctorum evangeliorum adorari decernimus . . . Dignum est enim ut . . . . propter honor em qui ad principia refertur, etiam derivative imagines honorentur et adorentur." — Gener. Const. Cone, viii. Art. 10. Can. 3. 110 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. Image as himself, why should not I also love the Image of God as I love God himself? If the Image of God is God himself, why should not the image of the saint be the saint himself? If it is no supersition to believe that the image which God makes of himself, is no image, no mere conception, but a substance, a person, — why should it be a supersition to believe that the image of the saint is the sensitive substance of the saint ? The I mage of God weeps and bleeds ; why then should not the image a saint also weep and bleed ? Does the distinction lie in the fact that the image of the saint is a product of the hands ? Why, the hands did not make this image, but the mind which animated the hands, the imagination ; and if God makes an image of himself, that also is only a product of the imagina- tion. Or does the distinction proceed from this, that the Image of God is produced by God himself, whereas the image of the saint is made by another? Why, the image of the saint is also a product of the saint him- self : for he appears to the artist ; the artist only re- presents him as he appears. Connected with the nature of the image is another definition of the Second Person, namely, that he is the Word of God. A Word in an abstract image, the imaginary thing, or, in so far as everything is ultimately an object of the thinking power, it is the imagined thought : hence, men when they know the word, the name for a thing, fancy that they know the thing also. Words are a result of the imagination. Sleepers who dream vividly, and invalids who are delirious, speak. The power of speech is a poetic talent. Brutes do not speak because they have no poetic faculty. Thought expresses itself only by images ; the power by which thought expresses itself is the imagination; the imagination expressing itself is speech. He who speaks, lays under a spell, fascinates those to whom he speaks ; but the power of words is the power of imagination. Therefore to the ancients, as children of the imagination, the Word was THE MYSTERY OF THE LOGOS. Ill a being — a mysterious, magically powerful being. Even the Christians, and not only the vulgar among them, but also the learned, the Fathers of the Church, attached to the mere name Christ, mysterious powers of healing.* And in the present day the common people still believe that it is possible to bewitch men by mere words. Whence comes this ascription of imaginary influences to words? Simply from this, that words themselves are only a result of the imagina- tion, and hence have the effect of a narcotic on man, imprison him under the power of the imagination. Words possess a revolutionizing force ; words govern mankind. Words are held sacred; while the things of reason and truth are decried. The affirming or making objective of the nature of the imagination is therefore directly connected with the affirming or making objective of the nature of speech, of the Word. Man has not only an instinct, an internal necessity, which impels him to think, to perceive, to imagine ; he has also the impulse to speak, to utter, impart his thoughts. A divine impulse this ■ — a divine power, the power of words. The word is the imaged, revealed, radiating, lustrous, enlightening thought. The word is the light of the world. The word guides to all truth, unfolds all mysteries, reveals the unseen, makes present the past and the future, de- fines the infinite, perpetuates the transient. Men pass away, the word remains ; the word is life and truth. ,A11 power is given to the word : the word makes the blind see and the lame walk, heals the sick, and brings the dead to life ; — the word works miracles, and the only rational miracles. The word is the gospel, the paraclete of mankind. To convince thyself of the divine nature of speech, imagine thyself alone and for- saken, yet acquainted with language; and imagine thyself further hearing for the first time the word of a * " Tanta certe vis nomini Jesu inest contra dsemones, ut nonnunqiiam etiam a malis nominatum Bit efficax." — Origenes adv. Celsum, 1. i,j see also 1. iii. 112 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. human being : would not this word seem to thee angelic, would it not sound like the voice of God himself, like heavenly music ? Words are not really less rich, less pregnant than music, though music seems to say more, and appears deeper and richer than words, for this reason simply, that it is invested with that preposses- sion, that illusion. The Word has power to redeem, to reconcile, to bless, to make free. The sins which we confess are forgiven us by virtue of the divine power of the word. The dying man who gives forth in speech his long-con- cealed sins, departs reconciled. The forgiveness of sins lies in the confession of sins. The sorrows which we confide to our friend are already half healed. Whenever we speak of a subject, the passions which it has excited in us are allayed ; we see more clearly ; the object of anger, of vexation, of sorrow, appears to us in a light in which we perceive the unwor thin ess of those passions. If we are in darkness and doubt on any matter, we need only speak of it ; — often in the very moment in which we Open our lips to consult a friend, the doubts and difficulties disappear. The word makes man free. He who cannot express himself is a slave. Hence, excessive passion, excessive joy, exces- sive grief, are speechless. To speak is an act of free- dom ; the word is freedom. Justly therefore is language held to be the root of culture ; where language is cul- tivated, man is cultivated. The barbarism of the middle ages disappeared before the revival of language. As we can conceive nothing else as a Divine Being than the Rational which we think, the Good which we love, the Beautiful which we perceive ; so we know no higher spiritually operative power and expression of power, than the power of the Word** God is the sum of all reality. All that man feels or knows as a reality, * "God r<- Y to us, as the Speaker, "who has, in himself, an eternal uncreated Word, thereby he created the world and all things, with slight Labour, namely with speech, *<> that to God it is not more dlfficnlt to create than it is to us to name." — Luther, t. i. p. 802. THE MYSTERY OF THE LOGOS. 113 he must place in God or regard as God. Eeligion must therefore be conscious of the power of the word as a divine power. The Word of God is the divinity of the word, as it becomes an object to man within the sphere of religion, — the true nature of the human word. The Word of God is supposed to be distin- guished from the human word in that it is no transient breath, but an imparted being. But does not the word of man also contain the being of man, his imparted self, — at least when it is a true word ? Thus religion takes the appearance of the human word for its essence ; hence it necessarily conceives the true nature of the Word to be a special being, distinct from the human word. 114 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. CHAPTER VIII. THE MYSTERY OF THE COSMOGONIOAL PRINCIPLE IN GOD. The second Person, as God revealing, manifesting, declaring himself {Dens se elicit), is the world-creating principle in God. But this means nothing else than that the second Person is intermediate between the nou- menal nature of God and the phenomenal nature of the world, that he is the divine principle of the finite, of that which is distinguished from God. The second Person as begotten, as not a se, not existing in him- self, has the fundamental condition of the finite in him- self.* But at the same time, he is not yet a real finite Being, posited out of God ; on the contrary, he is still identical with God, — as identical as the son is with the father, the son being indeed another person, but still of like nature with the father. The second Per- son, therefore, does not represent to us the pure idea of the Godhead, but neither does he represent the pure idea of humanity, or of reality in general : he is an intermediate Being between the two opposites. The opposition of the noumenal or invisible divine nature and the phenomenal or vi^le nature of the world, is however nothing else than the opposition between the nature of abstraction and the nature of * " Hvlarius. . . . , Si quia innascibilem et sine initio dicat filium, anad duo sine principle et duo innascibilia, et duo innate dicens, duos fari;tt Deos, anathema sir. Caput autem quod est prindpium Christ!, . . . I'iliuin innascibilem oonfiteri impiissimuxn est." — Petrus Lomb. Sent. L i. (list. 81. c. 4. THE MYSTERY OF THE COSMOGONICAL PRINCIPLE. 115 perception ; but that which connects abstraction with perception is the imagination : consequently, the transition from God to the world by means of the second Person, is only the form in which religion makes objective the transition from abstraction to perception by means of the imagination. It is the imagination alone by which man neutralizes the oppo- sition between God and the world All religious cosmogonies are products of the imagination. Every being, intermediate between God and the world, let it be defined how it may, is a being of the imagina- tion. The psychological truth and necessity which lies at the foundation of all these theogonies and cos- mogonies, is the truth and necessity of the imagina- tion as a middle term between the abstract and concrete. And the task of philosophy, in investigat- ing this subject, is to comprehend the relation of the imagination to the reason, — the genesis of the image by means of which an object of thought becomes an object of sense, of feeling. But the nature of the imagination is the complete, exhaustive truth of the cosmogonic principle, only where the antithesis of God and the world expresses nothing but the indefinite antithesis of the noumenal, invisible, incomprehensible Being, God, and the visi- ble, tangible existence of the world. If, on the other hand, the cosmogonic being is conceived and expressed abstractly, as is the case in religious speculation, we have also to recognise a more abstract psychological truth as its foundation. The world is not God ; it is other than God, the opposite of God, or at least that which is different from God. But that which is different from God, cannot have come immediately from God, but only from a distinction of God in God. The second Person is God distinguishing himself from himself in himself, setting himself opposite to himself, hence being an object to himself. The self-distinguishing Of God from himself is the ground of that which is different 116 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. from himself, and thus self-consciousness is the origin of the world. God first thinks the world in thinking himself: to think oneself is to beget oneself, to think the world is to create the world. Begetting precedes creating. The idea of the production of the world, of another being who is not God, is attained through the idea of the production of another being who is like God. This cosmogonical process is nothing else than the mystic paraphrase of a psychological process, nothing else than the unity of consciousness and self-conscious- ness, made objective. God thinks himself: — thus he is self-conscious. God is self-consciousness posited as an object, as a being ; but inasmuch as he knows him- self, thinks himself, he also thinks another than himself; for to know oneself is to distinguish oneself from ano- ther, whether this be a possible, merely conceptional, or a real being. Thus the world — at least the possibility, the idea of the world — is posited with consciousness, or rather conveyed in it. The Son, i.e., God thought by himself, objective to himself, the original reflection of God, the other God, is the principle of Creation. The truth which lies at the foundation of this is the nature of man : the identity of his self-consciousness with his consciousness of another who is identical with himself, and of another who is not identical with himself. And the second, the other who is of like nature, is neces- sarily the middle term between the first and third. The idea of another in general, of one who is essen- tially different from me arises to me first through the idea of one who is essentially like me. Consciousness of the world is the consciousness of my limitation ; if I knew nothing of a world, I should know nothing of limits : but the consciousness of my limitation stands in contradiction with the impulse of my egoism towards unlimitedncss. Thus from egoism conceived as absolute (God is the absolute Self) I can- not pass immediately to its opposite; I must intro- duce, preclude, moderate this contradiction by the THE MYSTERY OF THE COSMOGONICAL PRINCIPLE. 117 consciousness of a being who is indeed another, and in so far gives me the perception of my limitation, but in such a way as at the same time to affirm my own nature, make my nature objective to me. The con- sciousness of the world is a humiliating consciousness; the Creation was an " act of humility f but the first stone against which the pride of egoism stumbles, is the thou, the alter ego. The ego first steels its glance in the eye of a thou, before it endures the contemplation of a being which does not reflect its own image. My fellow-man is the bond between me and the world. I am, and I feel myself, dependent on the world, because I first feel myself dependent on other men. If I did not need man, I should not need the world. I recon- cile myself with the world only through my fellow- man. Without other men, the world would be for me not only dead and empty, but meaningless. Only through his fellow does man become clear to himself and self-conscious ; but only when I am clear to my- self, does the world become clear to me. A man exist- ing absolutely alone, would lose himself without any sense of his individuality in the ocean of Nature ; he would neither comprehend himself as man, nor Nature as Nature. The first object of man is man. The sense of Nature, which opens to us the consciousness of the world as a world, is a later product ; for it first arises through the distinction of man from himself. The natural philosophers of Greece were preceded by the so-called seven Sages, whose wisdom had immediate reference to human life only. The ego, then, attains to consciousness of the world through consciousness of the thou. Thus man is the God of man. That he is, he has to thank Nature ; that he is man, he has to thank man ; spiritually as well as physically, he can achieve nothing without his fellow-man. Pour hands can do more than two ; but also, four eyes can see more than two. And this com- bined power is distinguished not only in quantity but also in quality from that which is solitary. In isola- 118 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. tion human power is limited, in combination it is infinite. The knowledge of a single man is limited, but reason, science, is unlimited, for it is a common act of mankind ; and it is so, not only because innu- merable men co-operate in the construction of science, but also in the more profound sense, that the scientific genius of a particular age comprehends in itself the thinking powers of the preceding age, though it modifies them in accordance with its own special cha- racter. Wit, acumen, imagination, feeling as distin- guished from sensation, reason as a subjective faculty, — all these so-called powers of the soul, are powers of humanity, not of man as an individual ; they are pro- ducts of culture, products of human society. Only where man has contact and friction with his fellow- man are wit and sagacity kindled ; hence there is more wit in the town than in the country, more in great towns than in small ones. Only where man suns and warms himself in the proximity of man, arise feeling and imagination. Love, which requires mutuality, is the spring of poetry ; and only where man communi- cates with man, only in speech, a social act, awakes reason. To ask a question and to answer, are the first acts of thought. Thought originally demands two. It is not until man has reached an advanced stage of culture that he can double himself, so as to play the part of another within himself. To think and to speak are therefore with all ancient and sensuous na- tions, identical ; they think only in speaking ; their thought is only conversation. The common people, v. c. people in whom the power of abstraction has not been developed, are still incapable of understanding what is written if they do not read it audibly, if they do not pronounce what they read. In this point of viewllobbes correctly enough derives the understand- ing of man from bis cars! Reduced to abstract logica] categories, the creative principle in God expresses nothing further than the tautological proposition : tlie different can only pro- THE MYSTERY OF THE COSMOGONICAL PRINCIPLE. 119 ceed from a principle of difference, not from a simple being. , However the Christian philosophers and theo- logians insisted on the creation of the world out of nothing, they were unable altogether to evade the old axiom — "nothing comes from nothing/ 7 because it expresses a law of thought. It is true that they sup- posed no real matter as the principle of the diversity of material things, but they made the Divine understand- ing (and the Son is the wisdom, the science, the under- standing of the Father) — as that which comprehends within itself all things, as spiritual matter — the prin- ciple of real matter. The distinction between the heathen eternity of matter and the Christian creation in this respect, is only that the heathens ascribed to the world a real, objective eternity, whereas the Christians gave it an invisible, immaterial eternity. Things were, before they existed positively, — not, in- deed, as an object of sense, but of the subjective under- standing. The Christians, whose principle is that of absolute subjectivity ,conceive all things as effected only through this principle. The matter posited by their subjective thought, conceptional, subjective matter, is therefore to them the first matter,— far more excellent than real, objective matter. Nevertheless , this dis- tinction is only a distinction in the mode of existence. The world is eternal in God. Or did it spring up in him as a sudden idea, a caprice? Certainly man can conceive this too ; but, in doing so, he deifies nothing but his own irrationality. If, on the contrary, I abide by reason, I can only derive the world from its essence, its idea, i. e., one mode of its existence from another mode ; in other words, I can derive the world only from itself. The world has its basis in itself, as has every thing in the world which has a claim to the name of species. The differentia specified, the peculiar character, that by which a given being is what it is, is always in the ordinary sense inexplicable, undedu- cible, is through itself, has its cause in itselt. The distinction between the world and God as the 120 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. creator of the world, is therefore only a formal one The nature of God — for the divine understanding, that which comprehends within itself all things, is the divine nature itself; hence God, inasmuch as he thinks and knows himself, thinks and knows at the same time the world and all things — the nature of God is nothing else than the abstract, thought nature of the world ; the nature of the world nothing else than the real, con- crete, perceptible nature of God. Hence, creation is nothing more than a formal act ; for that which, before the creation, was an object of thought, of the under- standing, is by creation simply made an object of sense, its ideal contents continuing the same ; although it remains absolutely inexplicable how a real material thing can spring out of a pure thought.* So it is with plurality and difference — if we reduce the world to these abstract categories — in opposition to the unity and identity of the Divine nature. Real difference can be derived only from a being which has a principle of difference in itself. But I posit dif- ference in the orginal being, because I have origi- nally found difference as a positive reality. Wherever difference is in itself nothing, there also no difference is conceived in the principle of things. I posit differ- ence as an essential category, as a truth, where I derive it from the original being, and vice versa : the two propositions are identical. The rational expres- sion is this : Difference lies as necessarily in the reason as identity. But as difference is a positive condition of the rea- son, I cannot deduce it without presupposing it ; I cannot explain it except by itself, because it is an ori- ginal, self-luminous, self-attesting reality. Through what means arises the world, that which is distinguish- ed from God? through the distinguishing of God from himself in himself. God thinks himself, he is an object to himself; he distinguishes himself from him- * It i- th e refore mere Belf-delusion to suppose that the hypothesis of a Creation explains the existence of the world, THE MYSTERY OF THE COSMOGONICAL PRINCIPLE. 121 self. Hence this distinction, the world, arises only from a distinction of another kind, the external dis tinction from an internal one, the static distinction from a dynamic one, — from an act of distinction : thus I establish difference only through itself; i. e., it is an original concept, a ne plus ultra of my thbught, a law, a necessity, a truth. The last distinction that I can think, is the distinction of a being from and in itself. The distinction of one being from another is self-evi- dent, is already implied in their existence, is a palpa- ble truth : they are two. But I first establish differ- ence for thought when I discern it in one and the same being, when I unite it with the law of identity. Herein lies the ultimate truth of difference. The cos- mogonic principle in God, reduced to its last elements, is nothing else than the act of thought in its simplest forms, made objective. If I remove difference from God, he gives me no material for thought ; he ceases to be an object of thought ; for difference is an essen- tial principle of thought. And if I consequently place difference in God, what else do I establish, what else do I make an object, than the truth and necessity of this principle of thought ? 122 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. CHAPTER IX. THE MYSTERY OF MYSTICISM OR OF NATURE IN GOD. Interesting material for the criticism of cosmogonic theogonic fancies is furnished in the doctrine — revived by Schelling and drawn from Jacob Boehme — of eternal Nature in God. God is pure spirit, clear self-consciousness, moral personality ; Nature, on the contrary, is, at least parti- ally, confused, dark, desolate, immoral, or to say no more, unmoral. But it is self-contradictory that the impure should proceed from the pure, darkness from light. How then can we remove these obvious diffi- culties in the way of assigning a divine origin to Nature ? Only by positing this impurity, this dark- ness in God, by distinguishing in God himself a prin- ciple of light and a principle of darkness. In other words, we can only explain the origin of darkness by renouncing the idea of origin, and presupposing dark- ness as existing from the beginning.* But that which is dark in Nature is the irrational, the material, — Nature strictly, as distinguished from intel- ligence. Eence the simple meaning of this doctrine is, that Nature,Ma1 ter, cannot be explained as a resultofin- telligence;on the contrary, it is the basis of intelligence, the basis of personality, without itself having any basis ; * It is beside our pnr] U cross mystical theory. We ■e, that darkness can be explained only when it is de- rived from light ; that the derivation of the darkness in Nature from Light appears an impossibility only when if. is n«'f ] crceived that even in dark- • light, that • in Nature is not an ab- iwen I by li THE MYSTERY OF MYSTICISM. 123 spirit without Nature is an unreal abstraction ; con- sciousness developes itself only out of Nature. But this materialistic doctrine is veiled in a mystical yet attrac- tive obscurity, inasmuch as it is not expressed in the clear, simple language of reason, but emphatically enun- ciated in that consecrated word of the emotions — God. If the light in God springs out of the darkness in God, this is only because it is involved in the idea of light in general, that it illuminates darkness, thus presuppos- ing darkness, not making it. If then God is once sub- jected to a general law, — as he must necessarily be unless he be made the arena of conflict for the most senseless notions, — if self-consciousness in God as well as in itself, as in general, is evolved from a principle in Nature, why is not this natural principle abstracted from God ? That which is a law of consciousness in itself, is a law for the consciousness of every personal being, whether man, angel, demon, God, or whatever else thou mayest conceive to thyself as a being. To what then, seen in their true light, do the two prin- ciples in God reduce themselves ? The one to Nature, at least to Nature as it exists in the conception, ab- stracted from its reality ; the other to mind, conscious- ness, personality. The one half, the reverse side, thou dost not name God, but only the obverse side, on which he presents to thee mind, consciousness : thus his specific essence, that whereby he is God, is mind, intelligence, consciousness. Why then dost thou make that which is properly the subject in God as God, L e., as mind, into a mere predicate, as if God existed as God apart from mind, from consciousness ? Why, but because thou art enslaved by mystical religious specu- lation, because the primary principle in thee is the imagination, thought being only secondary and serving but to throw into formulae the products of the imagina- tion, — because thou feelest at ease and at home only in the deceptive twilight of mysticism. Mysticism is deuteroscopy — a fabrication of phrases having a double meaning. The mystic speculates con- f2 124 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. cerning the essence of Nature or of man, but under, and by means of, the supposition that he is speculating concerning another, a personal being, distinct from both. The mystic has the same objects as the plain, self-conscious thinker ; but the real object is regarded by the mystic, not as itself, but as an imaginary being, and hence the imaginary object is to him the real ob- ject. Thus here, in the mystical" doctrine of the two principles in God, the real object is pathology, the imaginary one, theology ; i. e., pathology is converted into theology. There would be nothing to urge against this, if, consciously, real pathology were recognised and expressed as theology ; indeed, it is precisely our task to show that theology is nothing else than an un- conscious, esoteric pathology, anthropology, and psy- chology, and that therefore real anthropology, real pathology, and real psychology have far more claim to the name of theology, than has theology itself, be- cause this is nothing more than an imaginary psycho- logy and anthropology. But this doctrine or theory is supposed — and for this reason it is mystical and fantastic— to be not pathology, but theology, in the old or ordinary sense of the word ; it is supposed that we have here unfolded to us the life of a Being distinct from us, while nevertheless it is only our own nature which is unfolded, though at the same time again shut up from us by the fact that this nature is represented as inhering in another being. The mystic philosopher supposes that in God, not in us human individuals, — that would be far too trivial a truth, — reason first appears after the Passion of Nature ; — that not man, but God, has wrestled himself out of the obscurity of confused feelings and impulses into the clearness of knowledge; that not in our subjective, limited mode of conception, but in God himself, the nervous tremors of darkness precede the joyful consciousness of light; in Bhort, he Biipposes that his theory presents not a history of human throes, bnt a history of the develop- ment, /. e., the throes of God — for developments (or THE MYSTERY OF MYSTICISM. 125 transitions) are birth-struggles. But alas ! this suppo- sition itself belongs only to the pathological element. If, therefore, the cosmogonic process presents to us the Light of the power of distinction as belonging to the divine essence ; so, on the other hand, the Night or Nature in God, represents to us the Pensees confuses of Leibnitz as divine powers. But the Pensees confuses — confused, obscure conceptions and thoughts, or more correctly images, represent the flesh, matter ; — a pure intelligence, separate from matter, has only clear, free thoughts, no obscure, i. e., fleshly ideas, no material images, exciting the imagination and setting the blood in commotion. The Night in God, therefore, implies nothing else than this : God is not only a spiritual but also a material, corporeal, fleshly being ; but as man is man, and receives his designation, in virtue not of his fleshly nature, but of his mind, so is it with God. But the mystic philosopher expresses this only in obscure, mystical, indefinite, dissembling images. In- stead of the rude, but hence all the more precise and striking expression, flesh, it substitutes the equivocal, abstract words, nature and ground. "As nothing is before or out of God, he must have the ground of his existence in himself. This all philosophies say, but they speak of this ground as a mere idea, without making it something real. This ground of his exist- ence which God has in himself, is not God considered absolutely, i. e., in so far as he exists ; it is only the ground of his existence. It is Nature — in God ; an existence inseparable from him. it is true, but still distinct. Analogically (?), this relation may be illus- trated by gravitation and light in nature." But this ground is the non-intelligent in God. " That which is the commencement of an intelligence (in itself) cannot also be intelligent." "In the strict sense, intelligence is born of this unintelligent principle. Without this antecedent darkness there is no reality of the Creator." '" With abstract ideas of God as actus pur issimus, such as were laid down by the older philosophy, or such as 126 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. the modern, out of anxiety to remove God far from Nature, is always reproducing, we can effect nothing. God is something more real than a mere moral order of the world, and has quite another and a more living motive power in himself than is ascribed to him by the jejune subtilty of abstract idealists. Idealism, if it has not a living realism as its basis, is as empty and abstract a system as that of Leibnitz or Spinoza, or as any other dogmatic system." " So long as the God of modern theism remains the simple, supposed purely essential but in fact nonessential Being that all modern systems make him, so long as a real duality is not re- cognised in God, and a limiting, negativing force, opposed to the expansive affirming force, so long will the denial of a personal God be scientific honesty." " All consciousness is concentration, is a gathering to- gether, a collecting of oneself. This negativing force by which a being turns back upon itself, is the true force of personality, the force of egoism." " How should there be a fear of God, if there were no strength in him? But that there should be something in God, which is mere force and strength, cannot be held as- tonishing if only it be not maintained that he is this alone and nothing besides."* But what then is force and strength which is merely such, if not corporeal force and strength? Dost thou know any power which stands at thy command, in distinction from the power of kindness and reason, besides muscular power? If thou canst effect nothing through kindness and the arguments of reason, force is what thou must take refuge in. But canst thou "effect" anything without strong arms and lists? Js there known to thee, in distinction from the power of the moral order of the world, "another and more living motive power" than the lever of the criminal court? Is not Nature without body also an " empty, abstract" idea, a "jejune Bubtility?" Is not the mystery ofNa- * SchelKng, Qebei dasWesea der Menschlieheo Freiheit, 429, 482, 427. Denkma] Jocobi's, ft. 62, 97-99. THE MYSTERY OF MYSTICISM. 127 ture the mystery of corporeality ? Is not the system of a u living realism 77 the system of the organized body ? Is there, in general, any other force, the opposite of intelligence, than the force of flesh and blood, — any other strength of Nature than the strength of the fleshly impulses ? And the strongest of the impulses of Nature, is it not the sexual feeling ? Who does not remember the old proverb : "Amare et sapere vix Deo compeiit?" So that if we would posit in God a Na- ture, an existence opposed to the light of intelligence, • — can we think of a more living, a more real anti- thesis, than that of amare and sapere, of spirit and flesh, of freedom and the sexual impulse ? Personality, individuality, consciousness, without Nature, is nothing ; or, which is the same thing, an empty, unsubstantial abstraction. But Nature, as has been shown and is obvious, is nothing without corpore- ality. The body alone is that negativing, limiting, concentrating, circumscribing force, without which no personality is conceivable. Take away from thy per- sonality its body, and thou takest away that which holds it together. The body is the basis, the subject of personality. Only by the body, is a real personality distinguished from the imaginary one of a spectre. What sort of abstract, vague, empty personalities should we be,, if we had not the property of impenetra- bility, — if in the same place, in the same form in which we are, others might stand at the same time? Only by the exclusion of others from the space it occupies, does personality, prove itself to be real. But a body does not exist without flesh and blood. Flesh and blood is life, and life alone is corporeal reality. But flesh and blood is nothing without the oxygen of sexual distinction. The distinction of sex is not superficial, or limited to certain parts of the body ; it is an essen- tial one : it penetrates bones and marrow. The sub- stance of man, is manhood ; that of woman, woman- hood. However spiritual and super-sensual the man may be, he remains always a mar ; and it is the same 128 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. with the woman. Hence personality is nothing with- out distinction of sex ; personality is essentially dis- tinguished into masculine and feminine. Where there is no thou, there is no /; but the distinctinction bet- ween / and thou, the fundamental condition of all per- sonality, of all consciousness, is only real, liying, ardent, when felt as the distinction between man and woman. The thou between man and woman has quite another sound, than the monotonous thou between friends. Nature in distinction from personality can signify nothing else than difference of sex. A personal being apart from Nature is nothing else than a being without sex, and conversely. Nature is said to be predicated of God, " in the sense in which it is said of a man, that he is of a strong, healthy nature." But what is more feeble, what more insupportable, what more con- trary to Nature than a person without sex, or a person, who in character, manners, or feelings, denies sex? What is virtue, the excellence of man as man ? Man- hood. Of man as woman? Womanhood. But man exists only as man and woman. The strength, the healthiness of man, consists therefore in this : that as a woman, he be truly woman ; as man, truly man. Thou repudiatest " the horror of all that is real, which sup- poses the spiritual to be polluted by contact with the real." Repudiate then before all, thy own horror for the distinction of sex. If God is not polluted by Na- ture, neither is he polluted by being associated with the idea of sex. In renouncing sex, thou renouncest thy whole principle. A moral God apart from Nature is without basis; bui the basis of morality is the dis- tinction of sex. Even the brute is capable of self-sacri- ficing love in virtue of the Bexual distinction. All the glory of Nature, all its power, all its wisdom and pro- fundity, concentrates and individualizes itself in dis- tinction of Bex. Why then dost thou shrink from nam- ing the nature of God by its true name? Evidently, only because thou hast a general horror of things in THE MYSTERY OF MYSTICISM. 129 their truth and reality ; because thou lookest at all things through the deceptive vapours of mysticism. For this very reason then, because Nature in God is only a delusive, unsubstantial appearance, a fantastic ghost of Nature, — for it is based, as we have said, not on flesh and blood, not. on a real ground, — this attempt to establish a personal God is once more a failure, and I, too, conclude with the words, " the denial of a per- sonal God will be scientific honesty": — and, I add, scientific truth, so long as it is not declared and shown in unequivocal terms, first a priori, on speculative grounds, that form, place, corporeality, and sex, do not contradict the idea of the Godhead ; and secondly, a posteriori, — for the reality of a personal being, is sustained only on empirical grounds, — what sort of form God has, where he exists, — in heaven, — and lastly, of what sex he is. Let the profound, speculative religious philosophers of Germany courageously shake off the embarrassing remnant of rationalism which yet clings to them, in flagrant contradiction with their true character ; and let them complete their system, by converting the mystical " potence n of Nature in God into a really powerful, generating God. The doctrine of Nature in God is borrowed from Jacob Boehme. But in the original it has a far deeper and more interesting significance, than in its second modernized and emasculated edition. Jacob Boehme has a profoundly religious mind. Religion is the centre of his life and thought. But at the same time, the significance which has been given to Nature in modern times — by the study of natural science, by Spinozism, materialism, empiricism — has taken possession of his religious sentiment. He has opened his senses to Na- ture, thrown a glance into her mysterious being ; but it alarms him ; and he cannot harmonize this terror at Nature with his religious conceptions. "When I looked into the great depths of this world, and at the sun and stars, also at the clouds, also at the rain and f3 130 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. snow, and considered in my mind the whole creation of this world ; then I found in all things evil and good, love and anger. — in unreasoning things, such as wood, stone, earth, and the elements, as well as in men and beasts But because I found that in all things there was good and evil, in the elements as well as in the creatures, and that it goes as well in the world with the godless as with the pious, also that the barbarous nations possess the best lands, and have more prosperity than the godly ; I was therefore altogether melancholy and extremely troubled, and the Scriptures could not console me, though almost all well known to me ; and therewith assuredly the devil was not idle, for he often thrust upon me heathenish thoughts, of which I will here be silent. "* But while his mind seized with fearful earnestness the dark side of Nature, which did not harmonize with the religious idea of a heavenly Creator, he was on the other hand raptur- ously affected by her resplendent aspects. Jacob Boehme has a sense for nature. He preconceives, nay, he feels the joys of the mineralogist, of the botanist, of the chemist — the joys of " godless Natural science. v He is enraptured by the splendour of jewels, the tones of metals, the hues and odours of plants, the beauty and gentleness of many animals. In another place, speaking of the revelation of God in the phenomena of light, the process by which ' ; there arises in the God- head the wondrous and beautiful structure of the heavens in various colours and kinds, and every spirit shows itself in its form specially,"' he says, "I can com- pare it with nothing but with the noblest precious Btone8,8achas the rul>y, emerald, epidote, onyx, sapphire, diamond, jasper, hyacinth, amethyst, beryl, sardine, carbuncle, and the like.' 7 Elsewhere: "But regard- ijj'_r the precious .-tones, such as the carbuncle, ruby, emerald, epidote, onyx, and the like, which arc the very best, these have the very same origin — the flash * Kernhafti •'. Bfthme: Amsterdam, 1718, THE MYSTERY OF MYSTICISM. 131 of light in love. For that flash is "born in tenderness, and is the heart in the centre of the Fountain-spirit, wherefore those stones also are mild, powerful, and lovely. 7? It is evident that Jacob Boehme had no bad taste in mineralogy ; that he had delight in flowers also, and consequently a faculty for botany, is proved by the following passages among others : — " The hea- venly powers gave birth to heavenly joy-giving fruits and colours, to all sorts of trees and shrubs, whereupon grows the beauteous and lovely fruit of life : also there spring up in these powers all sorts of flowers with beauteous heavenly colours and scents. Their taste is various, in each according to its quality and kind, al- together holy, divine, and joy-giving.' ; rt If thou de- sirest to contemplate the heavenly, divine pomp and glory, as they are, and to know what sort of products, pleasure, or joys there are above : look diligently at this world, at the varieties of fruits and plants that grow upon the earth, — trees, shrubs, vegetables, roots, flowers, oils, wines, corn, and everything that is there, and that thy heart can search out. All this is an image of the heavenly poinp."* A despotic fiat could not suffice as an explanation of the origin of Nature to Jacob Boehme ; Nature appealed too strongly to his senses, and lay too near his heart ; hence he sought for a natural explanation of Nature ; but he necessarily found no other ground of explanation than those qualities of Nature which made the strongest impression on him. Jacob Boehme — this is his essential character — is a mystical natural philosopher, a theosophic Vulcanist and Neptunist,t for according to him, " all things had their origin in fire and water. ?; Nature had fascinated Jacob's re- * L. c. p. 480, 338, 340, 323. f The Philosophies teutonicus walked physically as well as mentally on volcanic ground. " The town of Gorlitz is paved throughout with pure basalt." — Charpentier, Mineral Geographie der Chursachsischen Lande, p. 19. 132 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. ligious sentiments, — not in Tain did lie receive his mystical light from the shining of tin utensils ; but the religious sentiment works only within itself ; it has not the force, not the courage, to press forward to the examination of things in their reality ; it looks at all things through the medium of religion, it sees all in God, L e., in the entrancing, soul-possessing splendour of the imagination, it sees all in images and as an image. But Nature affected his mind in an opposite manner ; hence he must place this opposition in God himself, — for the supposition of two independently existing, opposite, original principles would have afflicted his religious sentiment : — he must distinguish in God himself, a gentle, beneficent element, and a fierce consuming one. Everything fiery, bitter, harsh, contracting, dark, cold, comes from a divine harshness and bitterness ; everything mild, lustrous, warming, tender, soft, yielding, from a mild, soft, luminous quality in God. " Thus are the creatures on the earth, in the water, and in the air, each creature out of its own science, out of good and evil .... As one sees before one's eyes that there are good and evil crea- tures ; as venomous beasts and serpents from the centre of the nature of darkness, from the power of the fierce quality, which only want to dwell in darkness, abiding in caves and hiding themselves from the sun. By each animal's food and dwelling we see whence they have sprung, for every creature needs to dwell with its mother, and yearns after her, as is plain to the sight.' 7 ' ; Gold, silver, precious stones, and all bright metal, has it- origin in the light, which appeared before the times of anger/' <$cc. " Everything which in the sub- •».• of this world is yielding, soft, and thin, is flow- ing, and gives itself forth, and the ground and origin of it is in the eternal Unity, for unity ever Hows forth from itself;* for in the nature of things not dense, as water and air, we can understand no susceptibility or * L '. p. 168, 617, I THE MYSTERY OF MYSTICISM. 133 pain, they being one in themselves. In short, heaven is as rich as the earth. Everything that is on this earth, is in heaven,* all that is in Nature is in God. But in the latter it is divine, heavenly ; in the former, earthly, visible, external, material, but yet the same." " When I write of trees, shrubs and fruits, thou must not understand me of earthly things, such as are in this world ; for it is not my meaning, that in heaven there grows a dead, hard, wooden tree, or a stone of earthly qualities. No : my meaning is heavenly and spiritual, but yet truthful and literal ; thus, I mean no other things than what I write in the letters of the alphabet ; i. e., in heaven there are the same trees and flowers, but the trees in heaven are the trees which bloom and exhale in my imagination, without making coarse material impressions upon me; the trees on earth are the trees which I perceive through my senses. The distinction is the distinction between imagination and perception. "It is not my undertaking," says Jacob Boehme himself, ' ; to describe the course of all stars, their place and name, or how they have yearly their conjunction or opposition, or quadrate, or the like, — what they do yearly and hourly, — which through long years has been discovered by wise, skilful, inge- nious men, by diligent contemplation and observation, and deep thought and calculation. I have not learned and studied these things, and leave scholars to treat of them, but my undertaking is to write according to the spirit and thought, not according to sight. "t The doctrine of Nature in God aims, by naturalism, * According to Swedenborg, the angels in heaven have clothes and dwellings. " Their dwellings are altogether such as the dwellings or houses on earth, hut far more beautiful ; there are apartments, rooms, and sleeping chambers therein in great number, and entrance-courts, and round about gardens, flowers, meadows, and fields." (E. v. S. auserlesene Schriften, 1 Th. Frankf. a, M. 1776, p. 190, and 96.) Thus to the mystic this world is the other world : but for that reason the other world is this world. f L. c. p. 339, p. 69. 134 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. to establish theism, especially the theism which regards the Supreme Being as a personal being. But personal theism conceives God as a personal being, separate from all material things ; it excludes from him all de- velopment, because that is nothing else than the self- separation of a being from circumstances and condi- tions which do not correspond to its true idea. And this does not take place in God, because in him be- ginning, end, middle, are not to be distinguished, — because he is at once what he is, is from the beginning what he is to be, what he can be ; he is the pure unity of existence and essence, reality and idea, act and will. Deus suum esse est. Herein theism accords with the essence of religion. All religions, however positive they may be, rest on abstraction ; they are distinguished only in that form which the abstraction is made. Even the Homeric gods, with all their living strength and likeness to man, are abstract forms ; they have bodies, like men, but bodies from which the limitations and difficulties of the human body are eliminated. The idea of a divine being is essentially an abstracted, dis- tilled idea. It is obvious that this abstraction is no arbitrary one, but is determined by the essential stand- point of man. As he is, as he thinks, so docs he make his abstraction. The abstraction expresses a judgment, — an affirma- tive and a negative one at the same time, praise and blame. What man praises and approves, that is God to him j* what he blames, condemns, is the non-divine. Religion is 3, judgment. The most essential condition in religion — in the idea of the divine being — is accor- dingly the discrimination of the praiseworthy from the blameworthy, of the perfect from the imperfect: in a word, of the positive from the negative. Hie niltu- itself Consists in nothing else than in the con- tinual renewal of the origin of religion — a solemnizing * " Qaidquid enirn anna qnisqae roper enters eolil ! hoc illi Deus est»* • - I. cplan. in Epist Paul] a both directly and indirectly declared m this work. ]>ut arbitrarinesa lb, in met, the will of the emotions, their external mani- festation of foree. THE MYSTERY OF PROVIDENCE. 141 self could not have attained ; and in proof of this, appeal has been made to the fact that the Pagan phi- losophers represented the world to have been formed by the Divine Reason out of already existing matter. But this supernatural principle is no other than the principle of subjectivity, which in Christianity exalt- ed itself to an unlimited, universal monarchy; whereas the ancient philosophers were not subjective enough to regard the absolutely subjective being as the exclu- sively absolute being, because they limited subjecti- vity by the contemplation of the world or reality — because to them the world was a truth. Creation out of nothing, is identical with miracle, is one with Providence ; for the idea of Providence — originally, in its true religious significance, in which it is not yet infringed upon and limited by the unbe- lieving understanding — is one with the idea of mira- cle. The proof of Providence is miracle.* Belief in Providence is belief in a power to which all things stand at command to be used according to its plea- sure, in opposition to which all the power of reality is nothing. Providence cancels the laws of Nature ; it interrupts the course of necessity, the iron bond which inevitably binds effects to causes; in short, it is the same unlimited, all powerful will, that called the world into existence out of nothing. Miracle is a creatio ex nihilo. He who turns water into wine, makes wine out of nothing, for the constituents of wine are not found in water ; otherwise, the produc- tion of wine would not be a miraculous, but a natural act. The only attestation, the only proof of Provi- dence is miracle. Thus Providence is an expression of the same idea as creation out of nothing. Creation out of nothing can only be understood and explained in connexion with Providence ; for miracle properly implies nothing more than that the miracle worker is * " Certissimum divinse providentise testimonium praebent miracula." — H. Grotius (de Vent. Rel. Christ. 1. i. § 13). 142 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. the same as he who brought forth all things by his mere will — God the Creator. But Providence has relation essentially to man. It is for man's sake that Providence makes of things whatever it pleases : it is for man's sake that it super- sedes the authority and reality of a law otherwise omnipotent. The admiration of Providence in Nature, especially in the animal kingdom, is nothing else than an admiration of Nature, and therefore belongs merely to naturalism, though to a religious naturalism ;* for in Nature is revealed only natural, not divine Provi- dence — not Providence as it is an object to religion. Religious Providence reveals itself only in miracles — especially in the miracle of the Incarnation, the central point of religion. But we nowhere read that God, for the sake of brutes, became a brute — the very idea of this is, in the eyes of religion, impious and un- godly ; or that God ever performed a miracle for the sake of animals or plants. On the contrary, we read that a poor fig-tree, because it bore no fruit at a time when it could not bear it, was cursed, purely in order to give men an example of the power of faith over Nature ; — and again, that when the tormenting devils were driven out of men, they were driven into brutes. It is true we also read : " No sparrow falls to the ground without your Father ;" but these sparrows have no more worth and importance than the hairs on the head of a man, which are all numbered. Apart from instinct, the brute has no other guardian spirit no other Providence, than its senses or its organs in general. A bird which loses its eyes has lost its * It is true that religious naturalism, or the acknowledgment of the Divine in Nature', Is also an element of the Christian religion, and yet more of the Mosaic, which was bo friendly to animals. — But it is by no means the characteristic, the Christian tendency of the Christian religion. 'I'll.- ( Ihristian, the religious Providence, i- quite another than that which clothes the lilies and i'val^ the ravens. The natural Providence lets a man sink in the Water, il In- has not learned tO 8Wim; hut the Christian, the religious Providence, Leads him with the hand of omnipotence over th v. at' r unharmed. THE MYSTERY OP PROVIDENCE. 143 guardian angel; it necessarily goes to destruction if no miracle happens. We read indeed that a raven brought food to the prophet Elijah, but not (at least to my knowledge) that an animal was supported by other than natural means. But if a man believes that he also has no other Providence than the powers of his race — his senses and understanding, — he is in the eyes of religion, and of all those who speak the lan- guage of religion, an irreligious man • because he be- lieves only in a natural Providence, and a natural Providence is in the eyes of religion as good as none. Hence Providence has relation essentially to men, and even among men only to the religious. a God is the Saviour of all men, but especially of them that be- lieve." It belongs, like religion, only to man ; it is intended to express the essential distinction of man from the brute, to rescue man from the tyranny of the forces of Nature. Jonah in the whale, Daniel in the den of lions, are examples of the manner in which Providence distinguishes (religious) men from brutes. If therefore the Providence which manifests itself in the organs with which animals catch and devour their prey, and which is so greatly admired by Christian naturalists, is a truth, the Providence of the Bible, the Providence of religion, is a falsehood ; and vice versa. What pitiable and at the same time ludicrous hypocrisy is the attempt to do homage to hot h, to Nature and the the Bible at once ! How does Nature contradict the Bible ! How does the Bible contradict Nature ! The God of Nature reveals himself by giving to the lion strength and appropriate organs in order that, for the preservation of his life, he may in case of necessity kill and devour even a human being ; the God of the Bible reveals himself by interposing his own aid to rescue the human being from the jaws of the lion !* Providence is a privilege of man. It expresses the * In this contrast of the religions, or biblical, and the natural Provi- dence, the author had especially in view the vapid, narrow theology of the English natural philosophers. 144 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. value of man, in distinction from other natural beings and things ; it exempts him from the connexion of the universe. Providence is the conviction of man of the infinite value of his existence. — a conviction in which he renounces faith in the reality of external things ; it is the idealism of religion. Faith in Providence is therefore identical with faith in personal immortality; save only, that in the latter the infinite value of exist- ence is expressed in relation to time, as infinite dura- tion. He who prefers no special claims, who is indif- ferent about himself, who identifies himself with the world, who sees himself as a part merged in the whole, — such a one believes in no Providence, i. e., in no special Providence; but only special Providence is Providence in the sens.e of religion. Faith in Provi- dence is faith in one's own worth, the faith of man in himself; hence the beneficent consequences of this faith, but hence also false humility, religious arro- gance, which, it is true, does not rely on itself, but only because it commits the care of itself to the bless- ed God. God concerns himself about me ; he has in view my happiness, my salvation ; he wills that I shall be blest ; but that is my will also : thus, my interest is God's interest, my own will is God's will, my own aim is God's aim, — God's love for me nothing else than my self-love deified. Thus when I believe in Providence, in what do I believe but in the divine reality and significance of my own being? But where Providence is believed in, belief in God is made dependent on belief in Providence. He who denies that there is a Providence, denies that there is a I rod, or — what is the same thing — that God is God ; for a God who is not the Providence of man, is a con- temptible God, a God who is wanting in the divinest, most adorable attribute. Consequently, the belief in God is nothing but the belief in human dignity,* the * " Qui Decs negant, nobflitatem generis humani deetrmmt." — Bacon (Seem. Fidel, 10). THE MYSTERY OP PROVIDENCE. 145 belief in the absolute reality and significance of the human nature. But belief in a (religious) Providence is belief in creation out of nothing, and vice versa : the latter, therefore, can have no other significance than that of Providence as just developed, and it has actually no other. Eeligion sufficiently expresses this by making man the end of creation. All things exist, not for their own sake, but for the sake of man. He who, like the pious Christian naturalists, pronounces this to be pride, declares Christianity itself to be pride ; for to say that the material world exists for the sake of man, implies infinitely less than to say that God — or at least, if we follow Paul, a being who is almost God, scarcely to be distinguished from God — becomes man for the sake of men. But if man is the end of creation, he is also the true cause of creation, for the end is the principle of action. The distinction between man as the end of creation, and man as its cause, is only that the cause is the latent, inner man, the essential man, whereas the end is the self-evident, empirical, individual man, — that man recognises himself as the end of creation, but not as the cause, because he distinguishes the cause, the essence from himself as another personal being.* But this other being, this creative principle, is in fact no- thing else than his subjective nature separated from the limits of individuality and materiality, i. e., of objectivity, unlimited will, personality posited out of all connexion with the world, — which by creation, i. e., * In Clemens Alex. (Coh. ad Gentes) there is an interesting passage. It runs in the Latin translation (the had Augshurgh edition, 1778) thus : — ** At nos ante mundi constitutionem fuimus, ratione futuras nostras pro- ductions, in ipso. Deo quodammodo turn praeexistentes. Divini igitur Verhi sive Rationis, nos creaturae rationales sumus, et per eum primi esse decimur, quoniam in principio erat verhum." Yet more decidedly, however, has Christian mysticism declared the human nature to he the creative principle, the ground of the world. ' f Man, who, hefore time was, existed in eternity, works with God all the works that God wrought a thousand years ago, and now, after a thousand years, still works." " All creatures have sprung forth through man."— -fredigten, vor u. zu Tauleri Zeiten. (Ed. c. p. 5. p, 119.) Q 146 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. the positing of the world, of objectivity, of another, aa a cMpendent, finite, non-essential existence, gives itself the certainty of its exclusive reality. The point in question in the Creation is not the truth and reality of the world, but the truth and reality of personality, of subjectivity in distinction from the world. The point in question is the personality of God ; but the personality of God is the personality of man freed from all the conditions and limitations of Nature. Hence the fervent interest in the Creation, the horror of all pantheistic cosmogonies. The Creation, like the idea of a personal God in general, is not a scientific, but a personal matter ; not an object of the free intelligence, but of the feelings ; for the point on which it hinges is only the guarantee, the last conceivable pro f of and demonstration of personality or subjectivity as an essence quite apart, having nothing in common with Nature, a supra-and extramundane entity.* Man distinguishes himself from Nature. This dis- tinction of his is his God : the distinguishing of God from Nature is nothing else than the distinguishing of man from Nature. The antithesis of pantheism and personalism resolves itself into the question : is the nature of man transcendental or immanent, supra- naturalistic or naturalistic ? The speculations and con- troversies concerning the personality or impersonality of God are therefore fruitless, idle uncritical, and odious; for the speculatists, especially those who maintain the personality, do not call the thing by the right name ; they put the light under a bushel. While they in truth speculate only concerning themselves, only in the interest of their own instinct of self-pre- servation ; they yet will not allow that they are split- ting their brains only about themselves; they specu- * li lined why all attempts of speculative theology and of Ired philosophy to make the transition from God to the wcrld, or to derive the world Gram God, have failed and must fail. Namely, be- canM they are fundamentally false, from being made in ignorance of tho idea on which the I ally tarns. THE MYSTERY OP PROVIDENCE. 147 late under the delusion that they are searching out the mysteries of another being. Pantheism identifies man with Nature, whether with its visible appear- ance, or its abstract essence. Personalism isolates, separates him from Nature ; converts him from a part into the whole, into an absolute essence by himself. This is the distinction. If, therefore, you would be clear on these subjects, exchange your mystical, per- verted anthropology, which you call theology, for real anthropology, and speculate in the light of conscious- ness and Nature concerning the difference or identity of the human essence with the essence of Nature. You yourselves admit that the essence of the pantheistical God is nothing but the essence of Nature. Why, then, will you only see the mote in the eyes of your oppo- nents, and not observe the very obvious beam in your own eyes ? why make yourselves an exception to a universally valid law ? Admit that your personal God is nothing else than your own personal nature, that while you believe in and construct your supra-and extra-natural God, you believe in and construct no- thing else than the supra-and extranaturalism of your own self. In the Creation, as everywhere else, the true prin- ciple is concealed by the intermingling of universal, metaphysical, and even pantheistic definitions. But one need only be attentive to the closer definitions to convince oneself that the true principle of creation is the self-affirmation of subjectivity in distinction from Nature. God produces the world outside himself; at first it is only an idea, a plan, a resolve ; now it be- comes an act, and therewith it steps forth out of God as a distinct and, relatively at least, a self-subsistent object. But just so subjectivity in general, which distinguishes itself from the world, which takes itself for an essence distijwt Jgom the world, posits the world out of itself as a separate existence, indeed, this posit- ing out of self, and the distinguishing of self, is one act. When therefore the world is posited outside of g 2 148 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. God, God is posited by himself, is distinguished from the world. What else then is God but your subjec- tive nature, when the world is separated from it?* It is true that when astute reflection intervenes, the dis- tinction between extra and intra is disavowed as a finite and human (?) distinction. But to the dis- avowal by the understanding, which in relation to re- ligion is pure misunderstanding, no credit is due. If it is meant seriously, it destroys the foundation of the religious consciousness ; it does away with the possi- bility, the very principle of the creation, for this rests solely on the reality of the above mentioned distinc- tion. Moreover, the effect of the creation, all its majesty for the feelings and the imagination, is quite lost, if the production of the world out of God is not taken in the real sense. What is it to make, to create, to produce, but to make that which in the first in- stance is only subjective, and so far invisible, non- existent, into something objective, perceptible, so that other beings besides me may know and enjoy it, and thus to put something out of myself, to make it dis- tinct from myself? Where there is no reality or pos- sibility of an existence external to me, there can be no question of making or creating. God is eternal, but the world had a commencement; God was, when as yet the world was not ; God is invisible, not cogni- zable by the senses, but the world is visible, palpable, material, and therefore outside of God ; for how can the material as such, body, matter, be in God ? The * It is not admissible to urge against this the omnipresenee of God, the existence of God in nil things, or the existence of things in God. For, apart from the consideration that the future destruction of the world expresses clearly enough its existence outside of God, i. e., its non- divinenesa, God is in a ipecial manner only iii man ; but I am at homo only where I am specially at home. "Nowhere is God properly God, hut in the soul. In all creatures there is something of God; hut in the soul God exists completely, for it is his resting-place." — Predigten etzlicher Lehrer, &c., p. l!>. And the existence of things in God, especially where it h:is no pantheistic significance) and any such is here excluded, is equally an idea without reality, and does not express the special sonti* mentfl of religion. THE MYSTERY OF PROVIDENCE. 149 world exists outside of God, in the same sense in which a tree, an animal, the world in general, exists outside of my conception, outside of myself, is an existence distinct from subjectivity. Hence, only when such an external existence is admitted, as it was by the older philosophers and theologians, have we the genuine, unmixed doctrine of the religious consciousness. The speculative theologians and philosophers of modern times, on the contrary, foist in all sorts of pantheistic definitions, although they deny the principle of pan- theism ; and the result of this process is simply an abso- lutely self-contradictory, insupportable fabrication of their own. Thus the creation of the world expresses nothing else than subjectivity, assuring itself of its own reality and infinity through the consciousness that the world is created, is a product of will, i. e., a dependent, powerless, unsubstantial existence. The " nothing 77 out of which the world was produced, is a still inhe- rent nothingness. When thou sayest the world was made out of nothing, thou conceivest the world itself as nothing, thou clearest away from thy head all the limits to thy imagination, to thy feelings, to thy will, for the world is the limitation of thy will, of thy desire ; the world alone obstructs thy soul ; it alone is the wall of separation between thee and God, — thy beatified, perfected nature. Thus, subjectively, thou annihilates t the world \ thou thinkest God by himself, L e., abso- lutely unlimited subjectivity, the subjectivity or soul which enjoys itself alone, which needs not the world, which knows nothing of the painful bonds of matter. In the inmost depths of thy soul thou wouldest rather there were no world, for where the world is, there is matter, and where there is matter there is weight and resistance, space and time, limitation and necessity. Nevertheless, there is a world, there is matter. How dost thou escape from the dilemma of this contradic- tion ? How dost thou expel the world from thy con- sciousness, that it may not disturb thee in the bcati 150 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. tude of the unlimited soul ? Only by making the world itself a product of will, by giving it an arbitrary exist- ence always hovering between existence and non- existence, always awaiting its annihilation. Certainly the act of creation does not suffice to explain the exist- ence of the world or matter (the two are not separa- ble), but it is a total misconception to demand this of it, for the fundamental idea of the creation is this : there is to be no world, no matter ; and hence its end is daily looked forward to with longing. The world in its truth does not here exist at all, it is regarded only as the obstruction, the limitation of subjectivity ; how could the world in its truth and reality be deduced from a principle which denies the world ? In order to recognise the above developed signi- ficance of the creation as the true one, it is only ne- cessary seriously to consider the fact, that the chief point in the creation is not the production of earth and water, plants and animals, for which indeed there is no God, but the production of personal beings — of spirits, according to the ordinary phrase. God is the idea of personality as itself a person, subjectivity exist- ing in itself apart from the world, existing for self alone, without wants, posited as absolute existence, the me without a tlice. But as absolute existence for self alone contradicts the idea of true life, the idea of love; as self-consciousness is essentially united with the consciousness of a thee, as solitude cannot, at least in perpetuity, preserve itself from tedium and unifor- mity ; thought immediately proceeds from the divine Being to other conscious beings, and expands the idea of personality which was at first condensed in one being to a plurality of persons.* If the person is con- ceived physically, as a real man, in which form he is a being with wants, he appears first at the end of the physical world, when the conditions of his existence * Hera ifl also the point where the Creation represents to as not only the Divine power, hut also the Divinelove. u Quia bonne est (Deus), Bumus." (Angoetin.) In the beginning, before the world, God was? THE MYSTERY OP PROVIDENCE. 151 are present, — as the goal of creation. If, on the other hand, man is conceived abstractly as a person, as is the case in religious speculation, this circuit is dispen- sed with, and the task is the direct deduction of the person, L e. T the self-demonstration, the ultimate self- verification of the human personality. It is true that the divine personality is distinguished in every possi- ble way from the human in order to veil their iden- tity ; but these distinctions arc either purely fantastic, or they are mere assertions, devices which exhibit the invalidity of the attempted deduction. All positive grounds of the creation reduce themselves only to the conditions, to the grounds, which urge upon the me the consciousness of the necessity of another personal being. Speculate as much as you will, you will never derive your personality from God, if you have not be- forehand introduced it, if God himself be not already the idea of your personality, your own subjective nature. alone. " Ante omnia Dens erat solus, ipsi sibi et man dus locus et omnia. Solus autem ; quia nihil extrinsecus prater ipsum. (Tertullian.) But there is no higher happiness than to make another happy, bliss lies in the act of imparting. And only joy, only love imparts. Hence man conceives imparting love as the principle of existence. " Extasis boni non sinit ipsum manere in se ipso." (Dionysius A.) Everything posi- tive establishes, attests itself, only by itself. The divine love is the joy of life, establishing itself, affirming itself. But the highest self-conscious- ness of life, the supreme joy of life is the love which confers happiness, God is the bliss of existence. 152 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. CHAPTER XI. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CREATION IN JUDAISM. The doctrine of the Creation sprang out of Judaism ; indeed, it is the characteristic, the fundamental doc- trine of the Jewish religion. The principle which lies at its foundation is, however, not so much the principle of subjectivity as of egoism. The doctrine of the Creation in its characteristic significance arises only on that stand-point where man in practice makes Na- ture merely the servant of his will and needs, and hence in thought also degrades it to a mere machine, a pro- duct of the will. JYoic its existence is intelligible to him, since he explains and interprets it out of himself, in accordance with his own feelings and notions. The question, Whence is Nature or the world? presupposes wonder that it exists, or the question, Why does it exist? But this wonder, this question, arises only where man has separated himself from Nature and made it a mere object of will. The author of the Book of Wisdom says truly of the heathens, that, "for ad- miration of the beauty of the world they did not raise themselves to the idea of the Creator. * ; To him who thai Nature is lovely, it appears an end in itself, it has the ground of its existence in itself: in him t lie question, Why does it exist? docs not arise. Nature and God are identified in his consciou.-ness, his per- ception, of the world. Nature, as it impresses hifl 3, has indeed had an Qfljgin, has been produced, but not created in tin* religious sense, is not an arbi- trary product. And by this origin he implies nothing THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CREATION. 153 evil ; originating involves for him nothing impure, un- divine ; he conceives his gods themselves as having had an origin. The generative force is to him the primal force : he posits, therefore, as the ground of Nature, a force of Nature, — a real, present, visibly active force, as the ground of reality. Thus does man think where his relation to the world is aesthetic or theoretic, (for the theoretic view was originally the aesthetic view, the prima pkilosophia,) where the idea of the world is to him the idea of the Cosmos, of ma- jesty, of deity itself. Only where such a theory was the fundamental principle could there be conceived and expressed such a thought as that of Anaxagoras : — man is born to behold the world.* The stand-point of theory is the stand-point of harmony with the world. The subjective activity, that in which man contents himself, allows himself free play, is here the sensuous imagination alone. Satisfied with this, he lets Nature subsist in peace, and constructs his castles in the air, his poetical cosmogonies, only out of natural materials. When, on the contrary, man places himself only on the practical stand-point and looks at the world from thence, making the practical stand-point the theoreti- cal one also, he is in disunion with Nature ; he makes Nature the abject vassal of his selfish interest, of his practical egoism. The theoretic expression of this egoistical, practical view, according to which Nature is in itself nothing, is this : Nature or the world is made, created, the product of a command. God said, Let the world be, and straightway the world presented itself at His bidding. t * In Diogenes (L. 1. ii. c. iii. § 6), it is literally, "for the contempla- tion of the snn, the moon and the heavens." Similar ideas were held hy other philosophers. Thus the Stoics also said : — " Ipse antem homo ortus est ad mundum contemplandum et imitandum." — Cic. (de Nat.) f " Hebrad nnmen verbo quidquid videtur emciens describunt et quasi imperio omnia creata tradunt, nt facilitatem in eo quod vnlt emoiendo, summamque ejus in omnia potentiam ostendant." — Ps. xxxiii. 6. "Verbo Jehovse cceli facti sunt." — Ps. cxlviii. 5. "Ille jussit eaque creata sunt." •—J. Clericus (Comment, in Mosem. Genes, i. 3). g3 154 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. Utilism is the essential theory of Judaism. The belief in a special Divine Providence is the character- istic belief of Judaism ; belief in Providence is belief in miracle ; but belief in miracle exists where Nature is regarded only as an object of arbitrariness, of egoism, which uses Nature only as an instrument of its own will and pleasure. "Water divides or rolls it- self together like a firm mass, dust is changed into lice, a staff into a serpent, rivers into blood, a rock into a fountain ; in the same place it is both light and dark at once, the sun now stands still, now goes back- ward. And all these contradictions of Nature happen for the welfare of Israel, purely at the command of Jehovah, who troubles himself about nothing but Israel, who is nothing but the personified selfishness of the Israelitish people, to the exclusion of all other nations, • — absolute intolerance, the secret essence of mono- theism. The Greeks looked at Nature with the theoretic sense ; they heard heavenly music in the harmonious course of the stars ; they saw Nature rise from the foam of the all producing ocean as Venus Anadyomene. The Israelites, on the contrary, opened to Nature only the gastric sense ; their taste for Nature lay only in the palate ; their consciousness of God in eating manna. The Greek addicted himself to polite studies, to the fine arts, to philosophy ; the Israelite did not rise above the alimentary view of theology. "At even ye shall eat flesh, and in the morning ye shall be filled with bread ; and ye shall know that I am the Lord your God."* "And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, 'If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will irive me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my lather's house in peace, than shall the Lord be my God."t Eating is the most BOlemn act or the initiation of the Jewish religion. In eating the Israelite celebrates and renews the act of * Exod. xvi. 12. f (Jen. xxviii. 20. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CREATION. 155 creation ; in eating man declares Nature to be an in- significant object. When the seventy elders ascended the mountain with Moses, " they saw God ; and when they had seen God, they ate and drank. 7; * Thus with them what the sight of the Supreme Being heightened was the appetite for food. The Jews have maintained their peculiarity to this clay. Their principle, their God, is the most practical principle in the world, — namely, egoism : and more- over egoism in the form of religion. Egoism is the God who will not let his servants come to shame. Egoism is essentially monotheistic, for it lias only one, only self, as its end. Egoism strengthens cohesion, concentrates man on himself, gives him a consistent principle of life ; but it makes him theoretically narrow, because indifferent to all which does not relate to the well-being of self. Hence science, like art, arises only out of polytheism, for polytheism is the frank, open, unenvying sense of all that is beautiful and good with- out distinction, the sense of the world, of the universe. The Greeks looked abroad into the wide world that they might extend their sphere of vision ; the Jews to this day pray with their faces turned towards Jeru- salem. In the Israelites, monotheistic egoism excluded the free theoretic tendency. Solomon, it is true, sur- passed " all the children of the east" in understanding and wisdom, and spoke (treated, agebat) moreover "of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall/ 7 and also of " beasts and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes" (1 Kings iv. 30, 34). But it must be added that Solomon did not serve Jehovah with his whole heart ; he did homage to strange gods and strange women ; and thus he had the polytheistic sentiment and taste. The polytheistic sentiment, I repeat, is the foundation of science and art. The significance which nature in general had for * Exod. xxiv. 10, 11. " Tan turn abest ut mortui sint, ut contra con- vivium hilares celebrarint." — Clericus. 15G THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. the Hebrews is one with their idea of its origin. The mode in which the genesis of a thing is explained is the candid expression of opinion, of sentiment respect- ing it. If it be thought meanly of, so also is its origin. Men used to suppose that insects, Terrain, sprang from carrion, and other rubbish. It was not because they derived vermin from so uninviting a source, that they thought contemptuously of them ; but, on the contrary, because they thought thus, because the nature of vermin appeared to them so vile, they imagined an origin corresponding to this nature, a vile origin. To the Jews Nature was a mere means towards achieving the end of egoism, a mere object of will. But the ideal, the idol of the egoistic will is that Will which has un- limited command, which requires no means in order to attain its end, to realize its object, which immedi- ately by itself, i. e., by pure will, calls into existence whatever it pleases. It pains the egoist that the satis- faction of his wishes and need is only to be attained immediately, that for him there is a chasm between the wish and its realization, between the object in the imagination and the object in reality. Hence, in order to relieve this pain, to make himself free from the limits of reality, he supposes as the true, the highest being, one who brings forth an object by the mere I WILL. For this reason, Nature, the world, was to the Hebrews the product of a dictatorial word, of a cate- gorical imperative, of a magic fiat. To that which has no essential existence for me in theory, I assign no theoretic, no positive ground. By referring it to Will I only enforce its theoretic nullity. What we despi.se we do not honour with a glance: that which is observed has importance: contemplation ig respect. Whatever is looked at fetters by secret forcee of attraction, overpowers, by the spell which it upon the eye, the criminal arrogance of that Will which socks only to subject nil things to itself. Whatever makes an impression on the iheorc tic sense, on the reason, withdraws itself from the dominion oJ THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CREATION. 157 the egoistic Will : it reacts, it presents resistence. That which devastating egoism devotes to death, benignant theory restores to life. The much-belied doctrine of the heathen philosophers concerning the eternity of matter, or the world, thus implies nothing more than that Nature was to them a theoretic reality.* The heathens were idolaters, that is, they contempleted Nature ; they did nothing else than what the profoundly Christian nations do at this day, when they make nature an object of their admi- ration, of their indefatigable investigation. "But the heathens actually worshipped natural objects. 77 Cer- tainly ; for worship is only the childish, the religious form of contemplation. Contemplation and worship are not essentially distinguished. That which I con- template I humble myself before, I consecrate to it my noblest possession, my heart, my intelligence, as an offering. The natural philosopher also falls on his knees before Nature when, at the risk of his life, he snatches from some precipice a lichen, an insect, or a stone, to glorify it in the light of contemplation, and give it an eternal existence in the memory of scientific humanity. The study of Nature is the worship of Na- ture — idolatry in the sense of the Israelitish and Christian God ; and idolatry is simply man 7 s primitive contemplation of nature ; for religion is nothing else than man's primitive and therefore childish, popular, but prejudiced, unemancipated consciousness of himself and of Nature. The Hebrews, on the other hand, raised themselves from the worship of idols to the worship of God, from the creature to the Creator ; L e., they raised themselves from the theoretic view of Nature, which fascinated the idolaters, to the purely practical view which subjects Nature only to the ends of egoism. " And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto * It is well known, however, that their opinions on this point were various. (See e. g. Aristoteles de Ccelo, 1. i. c. 10.) But their difference is a subordinate one, since the creative agency itself is with them a more or less cosmical being. 158 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. heaven, and when thou seest the sun, the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldst be driven to worship them and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided unto [?. e., bestowed upon, larcjitus est] all nations under the whole heaven."* Thus, the creation out of nothing, L e., the creation as a purely imperious act, had its origin only in the unfathomable depth of Hebrew egoism. On this ground, also, the creation out of nothing is no object of philosophy ; — at least in any other way than it is so here ; — for it cuts away the root of all true speculation, presents no grappling-point to thought, to theory ; theoretically considered, it is a baseless air- built doctrine, which originated solely in the need to give a warrant to utilism, to egoism, which contains and expresses nothing but the command to make Na- ture — not an object of thought, of contemplation, but — an object of utilization. The more empty it is, how- ever, for natural philosophy, the more profound is its " speculative n significance ; for just because it has no theoretic fulcrum, it allows to the speculatist infinite room for the play of arbitrary, groundless interpre- tation. It is in the history of dogma and speculation as in the history of states. World-old usages, laws, and in- stitutions, continue to drag out their existence long after they have lost their true meaning. What has once existed will not be denied the right to exist for ever ; what was once good, claims to be good for all times. At this period of superannuation come the in- terpreters, the speculatists, and talk of the profound sense, because they no longer know the true onc.t * Dent. iv. 11). — " Licet enim ea, qusa sunt in ooelo, non Bint liominum artincia, at hominom tamen gratia condita raerunt. Ne quis igitur solem ndoret, sod Bolis effectorem deaidexet.' 1 — Clemens Alex. (Con. ad f the "absolute religion;* 1 for with regard t-> «>rli<-r religions they hold np the ideas and customs which rcre fon itid of which wi do not know the original meaning and hip the urine THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CREATION. 159 Thus, religious speculation deals with the dogmas, torn from the connexion in which alone they have any true meaning ; instead of tracing them back critically to their true origin, it makes the secondary primitive, and the primitive secondary. To it God is the first ; man the second. Thus it inverts the natural order ot things ! In reality, the first is man, the second the nature of man made objective, namely, God. Only in later times, in which religion is already become flesh and blood, can it be said — as God is, so is man : al- though, indeed, this proposition never amounts to any- thing more than tautology. But in the origin of re- ligion it is otherwise ; and it is only in the origin ot a thing that we can discern its true nature. Man first unconsciously and involuntarily creates God in his own image, and after this God consciously and volun- tarily creates man in his own image. This is especially confirmed by the development of the Israelitish reli- gion. Hence the position of theological one-sidedness, that the revelation of God holds an even pace with the development of the human race. Naturally ; for the revelation of God is nothing else than the revelation, the self-unfolding of human nature. The supra-natura- listic egoism of the Jews did not proceed from the Creator, but conversely, the latter from the former ; in the creation the Israelite justified his egoism at the bar of his reason. It is true, and it may be readily understood on simply practical grounds, that even the Israelite could not, as a man, withdraw himself from the theoretic contemplation and admiration of Nature. But in cele- brating the power and greatness of Nature, he cele- brates only the power and greatness of Jehovah. And the power of Jehovah has exhibited itself with the most glory, in the miracles which it has wrought in favour of Israel. Hence, in the celebration of this of cows, which the Parsees and Hindoos drink that they may obtain for- giveness of sins, is not more ludicrous than to worship the comb or a shred of the garment of the Mother of God. 160 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. power the Israelite lias always reference ultimately to himself; he extols the greatness of Nature only for the same reason that the conqueror magnifies the strength of his opponent, in order thereby to heighten his own self-complacency, to make his own fame more illustrious. Great and mighty is Nature, which Je- hovah has created, but yet mightier, yet greater, is Israel's self-estimation. For his sake the sun stands still ; for his sake, according to Philo, the earth quaked at the delivery of the law ; in short, for his sake all nature alters its course. " For the whole creature in his proper kind, was fashioned again anew, serving the peculiar commandments that were given unto them, that thy children might be kept without hurt,"* According to Philo, God gave Moses power over the whole of Nature ; all the elements obeyed him as the Lord of Nature.t Israel's requirement is the omni- potent law of the world, Israel's need the fate of the universe. Jehovah is Israel's consciousness of the sa- credness and necessity of his own existence, — a ne- cessity before which the existence of Nature, the exist- ence of other nations vanishes into nothing ; Jehovah is the solus populi, the salvation of Israel, to which everything that stands in its way must be sacrificed ; Jehovah is exclusive, monarchical arrogance, the anni- hilating flash of anger in the vindictive glance of destroying Israel ; in a word, Jehovah is the ego of Israel, which regards itself as the end and aim, the Lord of Nature. Thus, in the power of Nature the Israelite celebrates the power of Jehovah, and in the power of Jehovah the power of his own self-conscious- ness. 4 ' Blessed be God ! God is our help, God is our salvation. " — " Jehovah is my strength. }i — " God him- self hearkened to the word of Joshua, for Jehovah himself fought for Israel." — "Jehovah is a God of war," If, in the course of time, the idea of Jehovah ex- panded itself in individual minds, and his love was extended, as by the writer of the book of Jonah, to * WiftcL xi: I f See Gfrorer'e Philo. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CKEATION. 161 man in general, this does not belong to the esssential character of the Israelitish religion. The God of the fathers, to whom the most precious recollections are attached, the ancient historical God, remains always the foundation of a religion.* * We may here observe, that certainly the admiration of the power and glory of God in general, and so of Jehovah, as manifested in Nature, is in fact, though not in the consciousness of the Israelite, only admira- tion of the power and glory of Nature. (See, on this subject, P. Bayle, Ein Beitrag, Sfc, p. 25 — 29.) But to prove this formally lies out of out plan, since we here confine ourselves to Christianity, i. e., the adoration of God in man (Deum colimus per Christum. Tertullian. Apolog. c. 21), Nevertheless, the principle of this proof is stated in the present work. 162 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. CHAPTER XII. THE OMNIPOTENCE OF FEELING, OR THE MYSTERY OF PRAYER. Israel is the historical definition of the specific nature of the religious consciousness, save only that here this consciousness was circumscribed by the limits of a particular, a national interest. Hence, we need only let these limits fall, and we have the Christian reli- gion. Judaism is worldly Christianity ; Christianity, spiritual Judaism. The Christian religion is the Jewish religion purified from national egoism, and yet at the same time it is certainly another, a new reli- gion ; for every reformation, every purification, pro- duces — especially in religious matters, where even the trivial beeomes important — an essential change. To the Jew, the Israelite was the mediator, the bond be- tween God and man ; in his relation to Jehovah he relied on his character of Israelite ; Jehovah himself was nothing else than the self-consciousness of Israel made objective as the absolute being, the national conscience, the universal law, the central point of the political system.* If we let fall the limits of nation- ality, we obtain — instead of the Israelite — man. As in Jehovah the Israelite personified his national exist- ence, so in God the Christian personified his subjec- tive human nature, freed from the limits of nationality. As Israel made the wants of his national existence the law of the world, as, under the dominance of theso wauls, he deified even his political viudictiveness : so * " Tho. greatest part of Hebrew poetry, which is often held to beonlj ■pilitlial, U political." — Herder. THE MYSTEEY OF PRAYER. 163 the Christian made the requirements of human feeling the absolute powers and laws of the world. The miracles of Christianity, which belong just as essen- tially to its characterization, as the miracles of the Old Testament to that of Judaism, have not the wel- fare of a nation for their object, but the welfare of man : — that is, indeed, only of man considered as Christian ; for Christianity, in contradiction with the genuine universal human heart, recognised man only under the condition, the limitation, of belief in Christ. But this fatal limitation will be discussed further on. Christianity has spiritualised the egoism of Judaism into subjectivity (though even within Christianity this subjectivity is again expressed as pure egoism), has changed the desire for earthly happiness, the goal of the Israelitish religion, into the longing for heavenly bliss, which is the goal of Christianity. The highest idea, the God of a political community, of a people whose political system expresses itself in the form of religion, is Law, the consciousness of the law as an absolute divine power ; the highest idea, the God of unpolitical, unworldly feeling is Love ; the love which brings all the treasures and glories in heaven and upon earth as an offering to the beloved, the love whose law is the wish of the beloved one, and whose power is the unlimited power of the imagina- tion of intellectual miracle-working, God is the Love that satisfies our wishes, our emo- tional wants ; he is himself the realized wish of the heart, the wish exalted to the certainty of its fulfil- ment, of its reality, to that undoubting certainty be- fore which no contradiction of the understanding, no difficulty of experience or of the external world main- tains its ground. Certainty is the highest power for man ; that which is certain to him is the essential, the divine. " God is love :" this, the supreme dictum of Christianity, only expresses the certainty which human feeling has of itself, as the alone essential, L e., absolute divine power, the certainty that the inmost 164 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. wishes of the heart have objective validity and reality, that there are no limits, no positive obstacles to human feeling, that the whole world, with all its pomp and glory, is nothing weighed against human feeling. God is love : that is, feeling is the God of man, nay, God absolutely, the Absolute Being. God is the nature of human feeling, unlimited, pure feeling, made objective. God is the optative of the human heart transformed into the tempusfinitum. the certain, bliss- ful " is/' — the unrestricted omnipotence of feeling, prayer hearing itself, feeling perceiving itself, the echo of our cry of anguish. Pain must give itself utterance ; involuntarily the artist seizes the lute, that he may breathe out his sufferings in its tones. He soothes his sorrow by making it audible to himself, by making it objective ; he lightens the burden which weighs upon his heart, by communicating it to the air, by making his sorrow a general existence. But nature listens not to the plaints of man, it is callous to his sorrows. Hence man turns away from Nature, from all visible objects. He turns within, that here, shel- tered and hidden from the inexorable powers, he may find audience for his griefs. Here he utters his op- pressive secrets ; here he gives vent to his stifled sighs. This open-air of the heart, this outspoken secret, this uttered sorrow of the soul, is God. God is a tear of love, shed in the deepest concealment, over human misery. " God is an unutterable sigh, lying in the depths of the heart j w * this saying is the most remark- able, the profoundest, truest expression of Christian mysticism. The ultimate essence of religion is revealed by the simplest act of religion — prayer ; an act which implies at least afi much as the dogma of the Incarnation, al- though religious speculation stands amazed at this, as the greatest of mysteries. Not, certainly, the prayer before and after meals, the ritual of animal egoism, * Scba.-tian Frank von Word in Zinkgrcfs ApOphthegmata dcutschcr Nation. THE MYSTERY OF PRAYER. 165 but the prayer pregnant with sorrow, the prayer of disconsolate love, the prayer which expresses the power of the heart that crushes man to the ground, the prayer which begins in despair and ends in rapture. In prayer, man addresses God with the word* of intimate affection — Thou : he thus declares articu- lately that God is his alter ego : he confesses to God as the being nearest to him, his most secret thoughts, his deepest wishes, which otherwise he shrinks from uttering. But he expresses these wishes in the confi- dence, in the certainty that they will be fulfilled. How could he apply to a being that had no ear for his complaints ? Thus what is prayer but the wish of the heart expressed with confidence in its fulfil- ment ? * what else is the being that fulfils these wish- es but human affection, the human soul, giving ear to itself, approving itself, unhesitatingly affirming itself? The man who does not exclude from his mind the idea of the world, the idea that every thing here must be sought intermediately, that every effect has its natural cause, that a wish is only to be attained when it is made an end and the corresponding means are put in- to operation — such a man does not pray : he only works ; he transforms his attainable wishes into ob- jects of real activity ; other wishes which he recog- nises as purely subjective, he denies, or regards as simply subjective, pious aspirations. In other words, he limits, he conditionates liis being by the world, as * It would be an imbecile objection, to say that God fulfils only those wishes, those prayers, which are uttered in his name, or in the interest of the church of Christ, in short, only the wishes which are accordant with his wlQ ; for the will of God is the will of man, or rather God has the power, man the will : God makes men happy, but man wills that he may be happy. A particular wish may not be granted ; but that is of no consequence, if only the species, the essential tendency is accepted. The pious soul whose prayer has failed, consoles himself, therefore, by thinking that its fulfilment would not have been salutary for him. " Nullo igitur modo vota aut preces sunt irrita? ant infmgiferse et recte dicitur, in petitione rerum corporalium aliquando Deum exaudire nos, non ad voluntatem nostram, sed ad solutem." — Oratio de Precatione, in Declamat, Melancthonis, T. iii. 166 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. a member of which he conceives himself ; he "bounds his wishes by the idea of necessity. In prayer, on the contrary, man excludes from his mind the world, and with it all thoughts of intermediateness and depend- ence ; he makes his wishes — the concerns of his heart, objects of the independent, omnipotent, absolute being, i.e., he affirms them without limitation. God is the affirmation * of human feeling ; prayer is the uncondi- tional confidence of human feeling in the absolute identity of the subjective and objective, the certainty that the power of the heart is greater than the power of nature, that the heart's need is absolute necessity, the Fate of the world. Prayer alters the course ot Nature ; it determines God to bring forth an effect in contradiction with the laws of Nature. Prayer is the absolute relation of the human heart to itself, to its own nature ; in prayer, man forgets that there exists a limit to his wishes, and is happy in this forgetful- ness. Prayer is the self-division of man into two beings, — a dialogue of man with himself, with his heart. It is essential to the effectiveness of prayer that it be audibly, intelligibly, energetically expressed. Invol- untarily prayer wells forth in sound ; the struggling heart bursts the barrier of the closed lips. But audi- ble prayer is only prayer revealing its nature ; prayer is virtually, if not actually, speech, — the Latin word oratio signifies both ; in prayer, man speaks undis- guisedly of that which weighs upon him, which affects him closely ; he makes his heart objective ; — hence the moral power of prayer. Concentration, it is said, is the condition of prayer : but it is more than a condi- tion ; prayer is itself concentration, — the dismissal ot all distracting ideas, of all disturbing influences from without, retirement within oneself, in order to have relation only with one's own being. Only a trusting, open, hearty, fervent, prayer is said to help ; but this help lies In the prayer itself. As everywhere in reli * Ja-wcrt THE MYSTERY OF PRAYER. 167 gion the subjective, the secondary, the conditionating, is the prima causa, the objective fact ; so here, these subjective qualities are the objective nature of prayer itself. * It is an extremely superficial view of prayer to re- gard it as an expression of the sense of dependence. It certainly expresses such a sense, but the dependence is that of man on his own heart, on his own feeling. He who feels himself only dependent, does not open his mouth in prayer ; the sense of dependence robs him of the desire, the courage for it ; for the sense of de- pendence is the sense of need. Prayer has its root rather in the unconditional trust of the heart, un- troubled by all thought of compulsive need, that its concerns are objects of the absolute Being, that the almighty, infinite nature of the Father of men, is a sympathetic, tender, loving nature, and that thus the dearest, most sacred emotions of man are divine reali- ties. But the child does not feel itself dependent on the father as a father ; rather, he has in the father the feeling of his own strength, the consciousness of his own worth, the guarantee of his existence, the certainty of the fulfilment of his wishes ; on the father rests the burden of care ; the child, on the contrary, lives care- less and happy in reliance on the father, his visible guardian spirit, who desires nothing but the child's welfare and happiness. The father makes the child an end, and himself the means of its existence. The child, in asking something of its father, does not ap- * Also, on subjective grounds social prayer is more effectual than isolated prayer. Community enhances the force of emotion, heightens confidence. What we are unable to do alone, we are able to do with others. The sense of solitude is the sense of limitation : the sense of community is the sense of freedom. Hence it is that men, when threat- ened by the destructive powers of nature, crowd together. " Multorum preces impossibile est, ut non impetrent, inquit Ambrosius .... SanctaB orationis fervoir quanto inter plures collectior tanto ardet diutius ac in- tensius cor divinum penetrat Negatur singularitati, quod concedi- tur charitati." — Sacra Hist, de Gentis Hebr. ort'-i, P. Paul Vfezgcr Aug. Vind. 1 700, pp. 668, 669. 168 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. ply to hiro. as a being distinct from itself, a master, a person in general, but it applies to him in so far as he is dependent on, and determined by his paternal feel- ing, his love for his child. * The entreaty is only an expression of the force which the child exercises over the father ; if, indeed, the word force is appropriate here, since the force of the child is nothing more than the force of the father's own heart. Speech has the same form both for entreaty and command, namely, the imperative. And the imperative of love has infinitely more power than that of despotism. Love does not command ; love needs but gently to intimate its wishes, to be certain of their fulfilment ; the despot must throw compulsion even into the tones of his voice in order to make other beings, in themselves uncaring for him, the executors of his wishes. The imperative of love works with electro-magnetic power ; that of despotism with the mechanical power of a wooden telegraph. The most intimate epithet of God in pray- ed is the word "Father," the most intimate, because in it man is in relation to the absolute nature as to his own ; the word Father is the expression of the closest, the most intense identity, — the expression in which lies the pledge that my wishes will be fulfilled, the guarantee of my salvation. The omnipotence to which man turns in prayer is nothing but the Omnipo- tence of Goodness, which, for the sake of the salvation of man, makes the impossible possible ; — is, in truth, nothing else than the omnipotence of the heart, of feeling, which breaks through all the limits of the un- derstanding, which soars above all the boundaries of Nature, which wills that there be nothing else than f"< -ling, nothing that contradicts the heart. Faith in omnipotence is faith in the unreality of the external world, of objectivity, — faith in the absolute reality of man's emotional nature: the essence of omnipotence * In the excellent work, ThearUhropo^ eim l'< fih von Apkorismen (Zurich, the i«l<-;i of the sense of dependence, of omnipotence, of piayen and of lore, is admirably developed. THE MYSTERY OF PRAYER. 169 is simply the essence of feeling. Omnipotence is the power before which no law, no external condition, avails or subsists ; but this power is the emotional nature, which feels every determination, every law, to be a limit, a restraint, and for that reason dismisses it. Omnipotence does nothing more than accomplish the will of the feelings. In prayer man turns to the Omnipotence of Goodness ; — which simply means, that in prayer man adores his own heart, regards his own feelings as absolute. 170 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. CHAPTER XIII. THE MYSTERY OF FAITH— THE MYSTERY OF MIRACLE. Faith in the power of prayer — and only where a power, an objective power, is ascribed to it, is prayer still a religious truth, — is identical with faith in miraculous power : and faith in miracles is identical with the essence of faith in general. Faith alone prays ; the prayer of faith is alone effectual. But faith is nothing else than confidence in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws of nature and reason, — that is, of natural reason. The specific ob- ject of faith therefore is miracle ; faith is the belief in miracle ; faith and miracle are absolutely inseparable. That which is objectively miracle, or miraculous power, is subjectively faith ; miracle is the outward aspect of faith, faith the inward soul of miracle; faith is the miracle of mind, the miracle of feeling, which merely becomes objective in external miracles. To faith no- thing is impossible, and miracle only gives actuality to this omnipotence of faith : miracles are but a visible example of what faith can effect. Unlimitedness, super- naturalness, exaltation of feeling, — transcendence is the essence of faith. Faith has reference only to things which, in contradiction with the limits or laws of Nature and reason, give objective reality to human feelings and human desires. Faith unfetters the wishes of subjectivity from the bonds of natural Lfers \\ hat nature and reason deny ; hen< e ii makes man happy, for it satisfies bis most personal And true faith is discompo od by no doubt. THE MYSTERY OF FAITH. 171 Doubt arises only where I go out of myself, overstep the bounds of my personality, concede reality and a right of suffrage to that which is distinct from myself ; — where I know myself to be a subjective, L e., a limited being, and seek to widen my limits by admit- ing things external to myself. But in faith the very principle of doubt is annulled ; for to faith the sub- jective is in and by itself the objective — nay, the ab- solute. Faith is nothing else than belief in the absolute reality of subjectivity. " Faith is that courage in the heart which trusts for all good to God. Such a faith, in which the heart places its reliance on God alone, is enjoined by God in the first commandment, where he says, I am the Lord thy God That is, I alone will be thy God, thou shalt seek no other God ; I will help thee out of all trouble. Thou shalt not think that I am an enemy to thee, and will not help thee. When thou thinkest so, thou makest me in thine heart into another God than I am. Wherefore hold it for certain that I am willing to be merciful to thee." — "As thou behavest thyself, so does God behave. If thou thinkest that he is angry with thee, He is angry ; if thou thinkest that He is unmerciful, and will cast thee into hell, He is so. As thou believest of God, so is He to thee. 77 — " If thou believest it, thou hast it ; but if thou believest not, thou hast none of it. " — " Therefore, as we believe, so does it happen to us. If we regard him as our God, He will not be our devil. But if we regard him not as our God, then truly he is not our God, but must be a consuming fire. " — " By unbelief we make God a devil. "* Thus, if I believe in a God, I have a God, i. e., faith in God is the God of man. If God is such, what- ever it may be, as I believe Him, what else is the na- ture of God than the nature of faith ? Is it possible for thee to believe in a God who regards thee favour- ably, if thou dost not regard thyself favourably, if thou despairest of man, if he is nothing to thee ? What * Luther (T. xv. p. 282. T. xvi. pp. 491—493). tt9, 172 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. else then is the being of God but the being of man, the absolute self-love of man ? If thou believest that God is for thee, thou believest that nothing is or can be against thee, that nothing contradicts thee. But if thou believest that nothing is or can be against thee, thou believest — what? — nothing less than that thou art God.* That God is another being is only illusion, only imagination. In declaring that God is for thee, thou declarest that he is thy own being. What then is faith but the infinite self-certainty of man, the un- doubting certainty that his own subjective being is the objective, absolute being, the being of beings? Faith does not limit itself by the idea of a world, a universe, a necessity. For faith there is nothing but God, u e., limitless subjectivity. Where faith rises the world sinks, nay, has already sunk into no- thing. Faith in the real annihilation of the world — in an immediately approaching, a mentally present annihilation of this world, a world antagonistic to the wishes of the Christian, is therefore a phenomenon be- longing to the inmost essence of Christianity ; a faith which is not properly separable from the other elements of Christian belief, and with the renunciation of which, true, positive Christianity is renounced and denied.*!* * " God is Almighty ; but he who believes, is a God." Luther (in Chr. Kapps Chinstus u. die Weltgeschichte, s. 11). In another place Luther calls faith the " Creator of the Godhead;" it is true that he immediately adds, as he must necessarily do on his stand-point, the following limita- tion : — " Not that it creates anything in the divine, eternal Being, but that it creates that Being in us." (T. xi. p. 161.) f This belief is so essential to the Bible, that without it the biblical writers ran scarcely be understood. The passage, 2 Pet. iii. 8, as is evident from the. tenor of the whole chapter, says nothing in opposition to an immediate destr ucti on of the world; for though with the Lord a thou- sand years are as one day, yet at tin: same time one day is as a thousand years, and therefore ths world may, even by to-morrow, no longer exist. That in the Bible a very near end of the world La expected and prophesied, although the day and hour are not determined, only falsehood or blind- an deny. — Seeon this subject Luetzelberger. Hence religious Christ- ians, in almost all times have helieved that the destruction of the world i- near at hand — Lnther for example, often says that "the last day is not THE MYSTERY OF FAITH. 173 The essence of faith, as may be confirmed by an ex- amination of its"ttbjects down to the minutest speciality, is the idea that that which man wishes actually is : he wishes to be immortal, therefore he is immortal ; he wishes for the existence of a being who can do every- thing which is impossible to Nature and reason, there- fore such a being exists ; he wishes for a world which corresponds to the desires #f the heart, a world of un- limited subjectivity, i. e., of unperturbed feeling, of uninterrupted bliss, while nevertheless there exists a world the opposite of that subjective one, and hence this world must pass away, — as necessarily pass away as God, or absolute subjectivity, must remain. Faith, love, hope, are the Christian Trinity. Hope has re- lation to the fulfilment of the promises, the wishes which are not yet fulfilled, but which are to be ful- filled ; love has relation to the Being who gives and fulfils these promises ; faith to the promises, the wishes, which are already fulfilled, which are historical facts. Miracle is an essential object of Christianity, an essential article of faith. But what is miracle ? A supranaturalistic wish realized — nothing more. The apostle Paul illustrates the nature of Christian faith by the example of Abraham. Abraham could not, in a natural way, ever hope for posterity ; Jehovah never- theless promised it to him out of special favour ; and Abraham believed in spite of Nature. Hence this faith was reckoned to him as righteousness, as merit ; for it implies great force of subjectivity to accept as certain something in contradiction with experience, at least with rational, normal experience. But what was the object of this divine promise? Posterity : the ob- ject of a human wish. And in what did Abraham be- lieve when he believed in Jehovah ? In a Being who far off," (e. g. T. xvi. p. 26) ; — or at least their souls have longed for the end of the world, though they have prudently left it undecided whether it be near or distant. See Augustin (de Fine Saculi ad Hesychium c. 13). 174 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. can do everything, and can fulfil all wishes. " Is any- thing too hard for the Lord?"* But why do we go so far back as to Abraham ? We have the most striking examples much nearer to us. Miracle feeds the hungry, cures men born blind, deaf, and lame, rescues from fatal diseases, and even raises the dead at the prayer of relatives. Thus it satisfies human wishes, — and wishes which, though not always intrinsically like the wish for the restoration of the dead, yet in so far as they appeal to miraculous power, to miraculous aid, are transcendental, supranaturalistic. But miracle is distinguished from that mode of satis- fying human wishes and needs which is in accordance with Nature and reason, in this respect, that it satis- fies the wishes of men in a way corresponding to the nature of wishes — in the most desirable way. Wishes own no restraint, no law, no time ; they would be ful- filled without delay on the instant. And behold! miracle is as rapid as a wish is impatient. Miraculous power realizes human wishes in a moment, at one stroke, without any hindrance. That the sick should become well is no miracle ; but that they should become so immediately, at a mere word of command, — that is the mystery of miracle. Thus it is not in its product or object that miraculous agency is distinguished from the agency of nature and reason, but only in its mode and process ; for if miraculous power were to effect something absolutely new, never before beheld, never conceived, or not even conceivable, it would be practi- cally proved to be an essentially different, and at the same time objective agency. But the agency which in essence, in substance, is natural and accordant with the forms of the senses, and which is supernatural, Bupersensual, only in the mode or process, is the agency of the imagination. The power of miracle is therefore nothing else than the power el" tin 4 imagination. Miraculous agency, is agency directed to an end. The yearning after the departed Lazarus, the do- * Clcn. xviii. 14. THE MYSTERY OF FAITH. 175 sire of his relatives to possess him again, was the motive of the miraculous resuscitation ; the satis- faction of this wish, the end. It is true that the mira- cle happened " for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby ; " but the message sent to the Master by the sisters of Lazarus, " Behold, he whom thou lovest, is sick," and the tears which Jesus shed, vindicate for the miracle a human origin and end. The meaning is : to that power which can awaken the dead, no human wish is impossible to ac- complish. * And the glory of the Son consists in this : that he is acknowledged and reverenced as the being who is able to do what man is unable, but wishes to do. Activity towards an end, is well known to de- scribe a circle : in the end it returns upon its begin- ning. But miraculous agency is distinguished from the ordinary realization of an object, in that it realizes the end without means, that it effects an immediate identity of the wish and its fulfilment ; that conse- quently it describes a circle, not in a curved, but in a straight line, that is, the shortest line. A circle in a straight line is the mathematical symbol of miracle. The attempt to construct a circle with a straight line, would not be more ridiculous than the attempt to deduce miracle philosophically. To reason, miracle is absurd, inconceivable ; as inconceivable as wooden iron, or a circle without a periphery. Before it is discussed whether a miracle can happen, let it be shown that miracle L e,, the inconceivable, is con- ceivable. * " To the whole world it is impossible to raise the dead, hut to the Lord Christ, not only is it not impossible, hut it is no trouble or labour to him This Christ did as a witness and a sign, that he can and will raise from death. He does it not at all times and to every one ..... It is enough that he has done it a few times ; the rest he leaves to the last day." — Luther (T. xvi. p. 518). The positive, essential sig- niiicence of miracle is therefore that the divine nature is the human nature. Miracles confirm, authenticate doctrine. What doctrine ? Simply this, that God is a Saviour of men, their Redeemer out of all trouble, i. e., a being'correspending to the wants and wishes of man, ancf 176 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. What suggests to man the notion that miracle is conceivable is, that miracle is represented as an event perceptible by the senses, and hence man cheats his reason by material images which screen the contra- diction. The miracle of the turning of water into wine, for example, implies in fact nothing else than that water is wine, — nothing else than that two abso- lutely contradictory predicates or subjects are identi- cal ; for in the hand of the miracle-worker there is no distinction between the two substances ; the transfor- mation is only the visible appearance of this identity of two contradictories. But the transformation con- ceals the contradiction, because the natural conception of change is interposed. Here, however, is no gradual, no natural, or, so to speak, organic change ; but an absolute, immaterial one ; a pure creatio ex nihilo. In the mysterious and momentous act of miraculous pow- er, in the act which constitutes the miracle, water is suddenly and imperceptibly wine : which is equivalent to saying that iron is wood, or wooden iron. The miraculous act — and miracle is only a transient act — is therefore not an object of thought, for it nulli- fies the very principle of thought; but it is just as little an object of sense, an object of real or even pos- sible experience. Water is indeed an object of sense, and wine also ; I first see water, and then wine ; but the miracle itself, that which makes this water sudden- ly wine, — this, not being a natural process, but a pure perfect without any antecedent imperfect, without any modus, without way or means, is no object of real, or even of possible experience. Miracle is a thing of the imagination ; and on that very account is it so agree- able: for the innmination is the faculty which alone corresponds to personal feeling, because it sols aside all limits, all laws which are painful to the feel- ings, and thus makes objective to man the immediate, absolutely unlimited satisfaction of his subjective therefore a human being. What the God-man declares in words, mira- cle demonstrate.-* ad oculos by deeds. THE MYSTERY OF FAITH. 177 wishes.* Accordance with subjective inclination, is the essential characteristic of miracle. It is true that miracle produces also an awful, agitating impression, so far as it expresses a power which nothing can resist, — the power of the imagination. But this im- pression lies only in the transient miraculous act the abiding, essential impression is the agreeable one. At the moment in which the beloved Lazarus is raised up, the surrounding relatives and friends are awe- struck at the extraordinary, almighty power which transforms the dead into the living ; but soon the re- latives fall into the arms of the risen one, and lead him with tears of joy to his home, there to celebrate a festival of rejoicing. Miracle springs out of feeling, and has its end in feeling. Even in the traditional representation it does not deny its origin ; the repre- sentation which gratifies the feelings is alone the ade- quate one. Who can fail to recognise in the narrative of the resurrection of Lazarus, the tender, pleasing, legendary tone ? t Miracle is agreeable, because, as has been said, it satisfies the wishes of man without labour, without effort. Labour is unimpassioned, unbelieving, rationalistic ; for man here makes his existence depend- ent on activity directed to an end, which activity again is itself determined solely by the idea of the objective world. But feeling does not at all trouble itself about the objective world ; it does no go out of or beyond itself; it is happy in itself. The element of culture, the northern principle of self-renunciation, is wanting to the emotional nature. The Apostles and Evange- lists were no scientifically cultivated men. Culture, * This satisfaction is certainty so far limited, that it is united to re- ligion, to faith in God: a remark which however is so obvious as to be superfluous. But this limitation is in fact no limitation, for God him- self is unlimited, absolutely satisfied, self-contented human feeling. \ The legends of Catholicism — of course only the best, the really pleasing ones — are, as it were, only the echo of the key-note which pre- dominates in this New Testament narrative. Miracle might be fitly de- fined as religious humour. Catholicism especially has developed miracle en this its humourous side. h3 178 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. in general, is nothing else than the exaltation of the individual above his subjectivity to objective univer- sal ideas, to the contemplation of the world. The Apostles were men of the people ; the people live only in themselves, in their feelings : therefore Christianity took possession of the people. Vox populi vox Bel. Did Christianity conquer a single philosopher, histo- rian, or poet, of the classical period? The philoso- phers who went over to Christianity were feeble, contemptible philosophers. All who had yet the classic spirit in them were hostile, or at least indiffer- ent to Christianity. The decline of culture was iden- tical with the victory of Christianity. The classic spirit, the spirit of culture, limits itself by laws, — not indeed by arbitrary, finite laws, but by inherently true and valid ones ; it is determined by the necessity the truth of the nature of things : in a word, it is the objective spirit. In place of this, there entered with Christianity the principle of unlimited, extravagant, fanatical, supra-naturalistic subjectivity ; a principle intrinsically opposed to that of science, of culture. * With Christianity man lost the capability of conceiv- ing himself as a part of Nature, of the universe. As long as true, unfeigned, unfalsified, uncompromising Christianity existed, as long as Christianity was a living, practical truth, so long did real miracles hap- pen : and they necessarily happened, for faith in dead, historical, past miracles is itself a dead faith, the first Btep towards unbelief, or rather the first and therefore the timid, uncandid, servile mode in which unbelief in miracle finds vent. But where miracles happen, all definite forms melt in the golden haze of imagination and feeling ; there the world, reality, is no truth ; * Culture id the sense in which it is here taken. It is highly charac- teristic of Christianity, and a popular proof of our positions, that the only langnajge in which the Divine Spirit was and is held to reveal him- sell in Christianity, is not the language of a Sophocles or a Plato, of art and philosophy, but the vague, unformed, crudely emotional language ol tLe Bible. THE MYSTERY OF FAITH. 179 there the miracle-working, emotional, u e., subjective being, is held to be alone the objective, real being. To the merely emotional man the imagination is immediately, without his willing or knowing it, the highest, the dominant activity ; and being the highest, it is the activity of God, the creative activity. To him feeling is an immediate truth and reality ; he cannot abstract himself from his feelings, he cannot get beyond them : and equally real is his imagination. The ima- gination is not to him what it is to us men of active understanding, who distinguish it as subjective from objective cognition ; it is immediately identical with himself, with his feelings, and since it is identical with his being, it is his essential, objective, necessary view >of things. For us, indeed, imagination is an arbitrary activity ; but where man has not imbibed the principle of culture, of theory, where he lives and moves only in flis feelings, the imagination is an immediate, involun- tary activity. The explanation of miracles by feeling and imagin- ation is regarded by many in the present day as super- ficial. But let any one transport himself to the time when living, present miracles were believed in ; when the reality of things without us was as yet no sacred article of faith ; when men were so void of any theo- retic interest in the world, that they from day to day looked forward to its destruction ; when they lived only in the rapturous prospect and hope of heaven, that is, in the imagination of it (for whatever heaven may be, for them, so long as they were on earth, it existed only in the imagination) ; when this imagina- tion was not a fiction but a truth, nay, the eternal, alone abiding truth, not an inert, idle source of conso- lation, but a practical moral principle determining ac- tions, a principle to which men joyfully sacrificed real life, the real world with all its glories ; — let him trans- port himself to those times and he must himself be very superficial to pronounce the psychological genesis of miracles superficial. It is no valid objection that 180 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. miracles have happened, or are supposed to have happened, in the presence of whole assemblies : no man was independent, all were filled with exalted suprana- turalistic ideas and feelings ; all were animated by the same faith, the same hope, the same hallucinations. And who does not know that there are common or similar dreams, common or similar visions, especially among impassioned individuals who are closely united and restricted to their own circle ? But be that as it may. If the explanation of miracles by feeling and imagination is superficial, the charge of superficiality falls not on the explainer but on that which he ex- plains, namely, on miracle ; for, seen in clear daylight, miracle presents absolutely nothing else than the sor- cery of the imagination, which satisfies without contra- diction all the wishes of the heart.* * Many miracles may really have had originally a physical or physio- logical phenomenon as their foundation. But we are here considering only the religious significance and genesis of miracle. THE MYSTERY OF THE RESURRECTION. 183 CHAPTER XIY. THE MYSTERY OF THE RESURRECTION AND OF THE MIRACULOUS CONCEPTION. The quality of being agreeable to subjective inclina tion belongs not only to practical miracles, in which it is conspicuous, as they have immediate reference to the interest or wish of the human individual ; it be- longs also to theoretical, or more properly dogmatic miracles, and hence to the Resurrection and the Mira- culous Conception. Man, at least in a state of ordinary well-being, has the wish not to die. This wish is originally identical with the instinct of self-preservation. Whatever lives seeks to maintain itself, to continue alive, and conse- quently not to die. Subsequently, when reflection and feeling are developed under the urgency of life, espe- cially of social and political life, this primary negative wish becomes the positive wish for a life, and that a better life, after death. But this wish involves the further wish for the certainty of its fulfilment. Reason can afford no such certainty. It has therefore been said that all proofs of immortality are insufficient, and even that unassisted reason is not capable of appre- hending it, still less of proving it. And with justice ; for reason furnishes only general proofs ; it cannot give the certainty of any personal immortality, and it is precisely this certainty which is desired. Such a certainty requires an immediate personal assurance, a practical demonstration. This can only be given to me by the fact of a dead person, whose death has been previously certified, rising again from the grave ; and 182 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. lie must be no indifferent person, but on the contrary the type and representative of all others, so that his resurrection also may be the type, the guarantee of theirs. The resurrection of Christ is therefore the satisfied desire of man for an immediate certainty of his personal existence after death, — personal immor- tality as a sensible, indubitable fact. Immortality was with the heathen philosophers a question in which the personal interest was only a collateral point. They concerned themselves chiefly with the nature of the soul, of mind, of the vital prin- ciple. The immortality of the vital principle by no means involves the idea, not to mention the certainty, of personal immortality. Hence the vagueness, dis- crepancy, and dubiousness with which the ancients express themselves on this subject. The Christians, on the contrary, i%the undoubting certainty that their personal, self-flattering wishes will be fulfilled, L e., in the certainty of the divine nature of their emotions, the truth and unassailableness of their subjective feel- ings, converted that which to the ancients was a theo- retic problem, into an immediate fact, — converted a theoretic, and in itself open question, into a matter of conscience, the denial of which was equivalent to the high treason of atheism. He who denies the resur- rection denies the resurrection of Christ, but he who denies the resurrection of Christ denies Christ himself, and he who denies Christ denies God. Thus did " spiritual " Christianity unspiritualizc what was spir- itual! To the Christians the immortality of the rea- son, of the soul, was far too abstract and negative ; they had at heart only a personal immortality, such as would gratify their feelings ; and the guarantee of this lies in a bodily resurrection alone. The resurrection of the l">dy is the highest triumph of Christianity over the sublime, but certainly abstract spirituality and ob- jectivity of the ancients. For this reason the idea of the ressurrection could never be assimilated by the pagan mind. THE MYSTERY OF TEE RESURRECTION. 183 As the Resurrection, which terminates the sacred history, (to the Christian not a mere history, but the truth itself,) is a realized wish, so also is that which commences it, namely, the Miraculous Conception, though this has relation not so much to an immediately personal interest as to a particular subjective feeling. The more man alienates himself from Nature, the more subjective, L e., supranatural, or antinatural, is his view of things, the greater the horror he has of Nature, or at least of those natural objects and pro- cesses which displease his imagination, which affect him disagreeably.* The free, objective man doubtless finds things repugnant and distasteful in Nature, but he re- gards them as natural, inevitable results, and under this conviction he subdues his feeling as a merely sub- jective and untrue one. On the contrary, the subjective man, who lives only in the feelings and imagination, regards these things with a quite peculiar aversion. He has the eye of that unhappy foundling, who even in looking at the loveliest flower could pay attention only to the little " black beetle," which crawled over it, and who by this perversity of perception had his enjoyment in the sight of flowers always embittered. Moreover, the subjective man makes his feelings the measure, the standard of what ought to be. That which does not please him, which offends his transcendental, suprana- tural, or antinatural feelings, ought not to be. Even if that which pleases him cannot exist without being associated with that which displeases him, the subjec- * " If Adam had not fallen into sin, nothing would have been known of the cruelty of wolves, lions, hears, &c., and there would not have been in all creation anything vexatious and dangerous to man . . . . ; no thorns, or thistles, or diseases . . . . ; his brow would not have been wrinkled ; no foot, or hand, or other member of the body wonld have been feeble or in- firm." — " But now, since the Fall, we all know and feel what a fury lurks in our flesh, which not only burns and rages with lust and desire, but also loathes, when once obtained, the very thing it has desired. But this is the fault of original sin, which has polluted all creatures ; wherefore I believe that before the Fall the sun was much brighter, water mu^h clearer, and the land much richer, and fuller of aU sorts of plants." - Luther (T. I s. 322, 323, 329, 337.) 184: THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. tive man is not guided by the wearisome laws of logic and physics but by the self-will of the imagination ; hence he drops what is disagreeable in a fact, and holds fast alone what is agreeable. Thus the Idea of the pure, holy Virgin pleases him ; still he is also pleased with the idea of the Mother, but only of the Mother who already carries the infant on her arms. Virginity in itself is to him the highest moral idea, the cornu copia of his supranaturalistic feelings and ideas, his personified sense of honour and of shame before common nature.* Nevertheless, there stirs in his bosom a natural feeling also, the compassionate feeling which makes the Mother beloved. What then is to be done in this difficulty of the heart, in this con- flict between a natural and a supranatural feeling? The supra-naturalist must unite the two, must comprise in one and the same subject two predicates which ex- clude each other. t what a plenitude of agreeable, sweet, super sensual, sensual eiLOtions lies in this com- bination ? Here we have the key to the contradiction in Catho- licism, that at the same time marriage is holy, and celibacy is holy. This simply realizes, as a practical contradiction, the dogmatic contradiction of the Virgin Mother. But this wondrous union of virginity and maternity, contradicting nature and reason, but in the highest degree accordant with the feelings andimagin- * M Tantnm denique abest ineosti cupido, ut nonnnllis rubori sit etiam pudica conjunctm." — ML Felicia, Oct. c. 31. One Father was so extra- ordinarily chaste that he had never seen a woman's face, nay, he dreaded even touching himself, u se quoque ipsum attingere quodammodo horro- h;it."' Another Father had bo fine an olfactory sense in this matter, that on the approach of an unchaste person he perceived an insupportable odour. — Bayle (Diet. Art. Mariana Rem. ('.). But the supreme, the di- vine principle of this hyperphysicaJ delicacy, ia the Virgin Mary ; hence the Catholics name her Virginum Gloria, Virginitatia corona, Virgini- pus et forma puritatis, Virginum vexillifera, Virginitatia magistra, Virginum prima, Virginitatia primiceria. f a Salve sancta parens, enixa puerpera [legem, a lia matris babens cum nrginitatia honore." 1 1). oL & boL M.i zgi r. t. i\. p. \o2. THE MYSTERY OF THE RESURRECTION. 185 ation, is no product of Catholicism ; it lies already in the twofold part which marriage plays in the Bible, especially in the view of the Apostle Paul. The super- natural conception of Christ is a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, a doctrine which expresses its inmost dogmatic essence, and which rests on the same founda- tion as all other miracles and articles of faith. As death, which the philosopher, the man of science, the free objective thinker in general, accepts as a natural necessity, and as indeed all the limits of nature, which are impediments to feeling, but to reason are rational laws, were repugnant to the Christians, and were set aside by them through the supposed agency of miracu- lous power ; so, necessarily, they had an equal repug- nance to the natural process of generation, and super- seded it by miracle. The Miraculous Conception is not less welcome than the Resurrection, to all believ- ers ; for it was the first step towards the purification of mankind, polluted by sin and nature. Only because the God-man was not infected with original sin, could he, the pure one, purify mankind in the eyes of God, to whom the natural process of generation was an object of aversion, because he himself is nothing else but su- pernatural feeling. Even the arid Protestant orthodoxy, so arbitrary in its criticism, regarded the conception of the Gocl- producing Virgin, as a great, adorable, amazing, holy mystery of faith, transcending reason.* But with the Protestants, who confined the speciality of the Christ- ian to the domain of faith, and with whom, in life, it was allowable to be a man, even this mystery had only a dogmatic, and no longer a practical significance ; they did not allow it to interfere with their desire of marriage. With the Catholics, and with all the old, uncompromising, uncritical Christians, that which was a mystery of faith, was a mystery of life, of morality.t * See e. g. J. D. Winckler, Pliilolog. Lactant. s. Brunsviga?., 1754, pp. 247—254. f See on tbis subject Philos. und Christenthum, by L. Feuerbach. 186 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. Catholic morality is Christian, mystical ; Prostcstant morality was, in its very beginning, rationalistic. Protestant morality is, and was, a carnal mingling of the Christian with the man, the natural, political, civil, social man, or whatever else he may be called in dis- tinction from the Christian ; Catholic morality cher- ished in its heart the mystery of the unspotted virginity. Catholic morality was the Mater dolorosa : Protestant morality a comely, fruitful matron. Protestantism is from beginning to end the contradiction between faith and loye ; for which very reason it lias been the source, or at least the condition, of freedom. Just because the mystery of the Virgo Deipara had with the Protestants a place only in theory, or rather in dogma, and no longer in practice, they declared that it was impossible to express oneself with sufficient care and reserye con- cerning it, and that it ought not to be made an object of speculation. That which is denied in practice has no true basis and durability in man, is a mere spectre of the mind ; and hence it is withdrawn from the inyestigation of the understanding. .Ghosts do not brook daylight. Even the later doctrine, (which, howcycr, had been already enunciated in a letter to St. Bernard, who re- jects it.) that Mary herself was conceived without taint of original sin, is by no means a " strange school-bred doctrine, 77 as it is called by a modern historian. That which gives birth to a miracle, which brings forth God, must itself be of miraculous, divine origin, or nature. How could Mary have had the honour of being over- shadowed by the Holy Ghost, if she had not been from the first pure? Could the Holy Ghost take up his <'il>o