notion of the ideas of this speculative theology, than of the results of
the New Testament exegesis of which we spoke above. All gradations are
here represented, from tender, conservative regard for the traditional
beliefs of the sects and the needs of the pious heart to the boldest
speculative interpretations and critical restrictions of dogma, which
utterly discard the historical form and hold fast only to a central
germinal truth. The present inquiry will restrict itself to those
representatives of this gnosis, who as a matter of principle grant
the greatest field of action to the rational development of dogma,
and represent its philosophical elaboration in its finest and most
complicated form. I shall attempt to signalise the ideas which may to-day
be designated as the most spiritualised expression of the Christian view
of the world.
And first let us hear a greater mind speak. In Ludwig Feuerbach’s essays
on the nature of religion and Christianity the following sentences occur:
“The Christian religion is the revealed inwardness, the objectively
expressed self of man; the contents of his highest aspirations; the
essence of man purified and freed from the limitations of individuality;
yet all subjectivised, that is intuited, known, and worshipped as a
separate, independent entity, wholly distinct from himself. Religion
is essentially dramatical. God himself is a dramatical creation, that
is to say, a personal being opposed to man. He who takes from religion
this idea, takes from it the gist of its being, and holds but the _caput
mortuum_ in his hands.”
These sentences of Feuerbach express with the greatest generality and
precision the innermost nature of the Christian view of the world. They
characterise excellently the point that cannot be given up without
destroying the religious view as such. What I refer to is dualism, the
dualism of the divine and the human, of the world beyond, and the world
that is, of holiness and sin; dualism conceived not merely as a mode of
view and of conceptual distinction, as a working contrariety in things
that by their nature are one, but as a metaphysical difference, an actual
contraposition of two worlds, of two kingdoms of existence, which are
totally separate, no matter how extensive the relations of the one to
the other may be. Only on such a supposition is that possible which
Feuerbach, with inimitable aptness, called “the dramatic element” of
religion. The history of humanity, the history of its religious life
particularly, is no monologue of humanity with itself into which life
and advancement enter solely through the multitude of the ideas created
by individuals within the race itself. It is an action or process in a
higher sense, an interactivity between two worlds, in which, it is true,
humanity, to a certain extent, shapes its own fortunes and destiny, but
at the same time is also constantly exposed to the interferences of a
power which stands beyond and above it and to which it has to accommodate
itself. And whatever artifices and care many of the representatives of
the modern gnosis may employ to conceal this fundamental assumption, and
to substitute for it the point of view of the immanence of this power
in the world, still any radical breach with it is impossible without
endangering the very foundations of the religious sense of humanity
itself.
The indispensability of this dualistic opposition and separation is
equally well exhibited whether we take as our starting-point the
existence of the world at large or the individual consciousness of man.
The religious mode of view knows of no other way of asserting the rights
and activity of the mind in the All than by making all existence assume
a personal life in an infinite, self-conscious, and ethically perfect
being. The emotions and experiences of one’s heart, its vacillations
between humility and exaltation, remorse at the consciousness of one’s
own imperfections, the inspired flight of the soul to higher realms of
existence, appear as the intercourse of man with some extraneous power,
allied to man and yet above him, in which the sum of all excellence to
which thought and experience have ever led man, has its eternal source.
These ideas constitute the point of view which is decisive of the history
of humanity, particularly in what concerns religion. The history of
religion is, in accordance with these ideas, conceived as a continuous
self-revelation of God in the world of man. True, this view seems to be
contradicted by the fact that the self-revelation of this infinitely good
power is effected in the case of by far the greater part of mankind in a
very insufficient manner—in the form, namely, of crude and superstitious
notions which stand in need of constant purification by reason. But the
explanation of this fact is sought in the idea of a divine pedagogical
training of the human race, and in the theory that religion is not an
immediate self-revelation of the absolute, but passes through the medium
of the human mind and consequently must be conditioned by its character.
Christianity, now, especially appears as the highest form of this
self-revelation of God in humanity, that is to say as the absolute
religion, which, in its historical forms, it is true, is as little
free from adscititious ornaments and transient obscurations as other
religions, yet in its essence can be as little improved as it can be
discarded. This innermost essence of Christianity the majority of the
representatives of this modern gnosis declare to be the conviction that
all men are from the beginning children of God. In this idea two things
are contained: submission to the will of God who is conceived as a
kind parent and who in pity and love does everything for the best; and
the imitation in our own thought and conduct of the ethical perfection
conceived incarnate in God. The entering of man into this relation is
designated the kingdom of God—a notion which constitutes the ideal goal
of history. The condition of mind on which the kingdom of God rests is
prefigured in a typical manner in the founder of the Christian religion.
His person and his life are a guarantee of the possibility of this ideal,
and exhibit at the same time the means of its accomplishment: namely, the
helping love of God, which has infused into this one individual the whole
plenitude of its being, so far as this is at all possible with human
capacities, that humanity may have in it a direct living picture of the
highest fulfilment of its religious and moral destiny. The historical
Christ is the ideal of humanity, supported and ensouled by the spirit of
God.
The modern gnosis here goes back to the Paulinian interpretation of the
Christ-idea. The consideration of the speculative difficulties of the
idea of the Trinity is thus rendered superfluous for it. This notion
is treated by the majority of its representatives simply as a dogmatic
antiquity; its place is taken by the modern ideas of a distinction
between the person of Jesus and the principle or spirit of Christianity,
which is synonymous with the contrast of the idea and its revelation,
the eternal and the temporal, of the inward essence and its historical
realisation. That it employs the notions of idea, principle, and essence
wholly in a Platonic sense, as the highest metaphysical realities, is
self-evident.
More distant still is the attitude which this speculative theology
assumes towards another idea which proceeded from the Rabbinical school
of thought of Paul: the notion of salvation or redemption in its
connection with the expiatory death of Christ. From these conceptions
of punitive suffering, of a vicarious atonement of God in his own
person—conceptions of such juristical refinement as to be wholly
unacceptable to modern modes of thought—the modern gnosis has upon the
whole resolutely turned away and taken refuge in that more spiritual
and more profound idea which in early Christian times the author of the
gospel of St. John promulgated. The death of Christ is redemptive only in
the sense in which Christ’s total history is redemptive, as the direct
and prefigurative incarnation of the true religious relation between God
and man. This is, it is true, applicable in a quite special sense to the
Death; for it was by this that the eternal truth was manifested, that not
only does all salvation accrue to man from the sacrifice of his own self
in duteous and patient love, but that all the life of God is an emanation
of this self-surrendering excellence, of this bliss of self-sacrifice.
Still, there is one thing that is common to all the representatives of
this movement as distinguished from the former, and that is this: they
do not content themselves with picturing the activity of Jesus Christ
in general outlines solely as one which is blessed and significant by
example and doctrine for humanity, but they assume a continuous and
active presence of the Christian principle in humanity, by means of
which the moral discord in individuals is overcome, and in the personal
spiritual life of individuals divine and human nature are united. This
is the most speculative interpretation we have of the old dogmatic
notion of redemption, which from its original character as a single
isolated phenomenon of history has here become the constant activity of a
Christian principle, and an ever-living precedent of Christian life.
It would be a prolix and wearisome task to go through in this way the
whole dogmatism of this speculative theology. The fundamental ideas which
we have discussed will suffice to show the manner in which, on the one
hand, it spiritualised the allegorical notions of popular Christianity,
but on the other left untouched the gist of the religious view and the
dramatical or dualistic opposition of the divine and human. The notions
of grace and sanctification, the notion of the church as a living,
organised instrument of salvation, spring directly and logically from
these fundamental ideas.
In the province of ethics this movement has a much easier task than the
churches based on the New Testament. As it seeks to establish, not a
primitive Christianity, but a modernised Christianity developed in the
spirit of recent times, there is no necessity of its being incommoded
by the ethical crudenesses of early Christianity, but it is in the
same position to work these crudenesses over critically as it did the
asperities of the old dogmas. It can assimilate most of what it needs
from modern philosophical ethics, and content itself with giving to what
it has thus borrowed a metaphysically religious background derived from
dogmatic traditions.
That this modern gnosis is in a constant state of vacillation with
respect to the practical things of life, is a necessary consequence of
its fundamental assumptions and of its position towards the doctrines
of the church. Its foremost representatives acknowledge without any
reserve that the true source from which religious emotions and sentiments
flow is the symbolic or imaginative faculty of man. The grandly simple
pictures in which the ancient Christian faith found satisfaction are
now in the course of time inevitably disintegrated by the critical
reason. The speculative theology itself proclaims that its vocation is
one of coöperation towards this end. But it maintains nevertheless that
the fruits of this work, the speculative interpretation of the dogmas,
their exaltation into the sphere of the Idea, are fit only for initiated
minds, and are caviare for the general. The general, the people, want
and will use religion in the form which its fancy has created, and it
cannot be revealed to it in any other. Progressive in its theories,
this gnosis is in its ecclesiastical practice thoroughly conservative.
It thinks two kinds of thought, and speaks two kinds of languages,
according as it finds itself in the pulpit or in the professorial chair.
And it is in just this procedure that it assumes a position which it is
very difficult to attack. He, who working for a sound and progressive
popular enlightenment on the ground of a unitary view of the world,
opposes the further use of the antiquated and effete allegories of the
old religions, is told that he is behind the times, and that religion,
nurtured by the spirit of modern science, has become something different
from what it formerly was. In very strict ecclesiastical quarters this
gnosis is looked at askance, and accused of insincerity, nay, of secret
alliance with unbelief; but the movement never allowed itself to be led
astray by these accusations, and has never failed to assert its right
of coöperation in the common work of the Christian church. For though
it pretends to be in the hands of the thinking theologian a means of
bringing into harmony the faith which he must confess and the thought
which he cannot abandon, it yet admits, that with the majority of mankind
the allegory will always remain an essential element of religion, and
that therefore the task of scientific theology can never be to destroy
these vessels of religion, but only to exercise a watchful care, that
with the form the spirit also may not be lost.
III.
The question now arises,—and this brings us back to the considerations
of the first part of this essay,—Does this rationalised Christianity of
to-day really meet the demands of science, and if it does not, is it in
the power of the modern scientific world-conception to furnish from its
own resources some substitute for the religious views of the past?
My answer to this question will be short and concise; for the existence
of _The Monist_, the fundamental idea of its management, and the
total character of the efforts which it has hitherto made, speak with
sufficient emphasis. And we may, therefore, with the greatest respect
for the scientific zeal and the personal ability of many of the
representatives of this mediatory theology, say, without further ado:
This rationalised Christianity of yours also is myth and symbol; it still
adheres to that “dramatic” division of the world which our imaginations
produced, and to the metaphysical dualism of God and man; it cannot
lift itself to a rigorous conception of the All in One, for which God
is in the same sense a simple function of human thought as thought is a
function of the human organism. The God on whom all depends in religion,
the God whose name is “Father,” the God of love and goodness, the God
from whom all great thoughts and all grand resolves spring, the God who
sanctifies us and lifts us above the earth—to displace this God from
the world in which he has no place, into the inward being of humanity
seems at this day so strange, nay, inconceivable, only because we have
accustomed ourselves (and down to the times of Mill and Feuerbach, even
strict monistic thinkers like Spinoza fell victims to this illusion) to
mingle together in the idea of God two wholly distinct ideas—the ideas,
namely, of nature and of an ethical ideal. To preserve this latter
inviolate, and to secure it from all encroachments of human caprice,
one thing alone seemed to the naïve dramatic modes of thought of early
times a competent safeguard: the ideal must in some locality be real; the
highest to which human thought and aspiration can exalt itself must be
sought and must exist in some superhuman reality. And what reality could
be better adapted to this than one on which even nature was conceived to
be dependent? The entire history of the development of the idea of God in
the Græco-Roman and Hebrew worlds, the confluence of these two streams
of thought in Christian speculation, exhibit in the clearest possible
manner these motives, which here I can only lightly touch upon.
But this combination of the law of nature and the law of ethics in the
idea of God, although solving some of the difficulties of humanity, has
plunged it into incomparably greater ones. Through all the centuries
of Christian thought a succession of desperate attempts may be traced
to establish a theodicy, that is to say, attempts to demonstrate the
existence in nature and in history of a God which harmonises with the
ethical ideal. Even Kant could undertake to demonstrate the “necessary
failure of all attempts at a theodicy,” and whoever might still have
entertained any doubt as to the correctness of this demonstration, such a
one must surely have been convinced of it by the scientific development
of the past century. That which was indissolubly welded together in
the Christian idea of God is to-day disintegrated into its component
elements. The Lord _above_ nature, the Spirit _behind_ nature, have been
rendered inconceivable by the modern notions of the conformity to law of
all natural occurrences and of the unity of all existence. The spirit
immanent in the All no thinker will deny, for this spirit manifests
itself in an indisputable manner in the fact that this All is a cosmos,
not a chaos, that not only the caprice of chance but also the laws of
necessity rule in it, and that the personal self-conscious mind springs
from its midst. But from this recognition of mind in the All, there is no
bridge that leads to the old idea of God. We cannot worship the All as a
moral ideal. We involve ourselves in absurd complications when we attempt
to derive the actions of natural events and their conformity to law from
ethical categories, and it is no less a desperate undertaking to imagine
that we can draw impulses for our moral thought and conduct from nature.
The adaptation of means to ends, the teleology, that rules in the All, is
veiled for us in the deepest obscurity. All that we can unravel of it has
no resemblance to that which, according to our notions, is ethical:
“_Denn unfühlend ist die Natur_,”
she does not know what love or mercy is; she knows only the omnipotent
power of universal laws; she knows only the rights of the whole, to
which she sacrifices with unconcern the individual; she revels in the
double pleasure of unceasing creation and unceasing destruction; she arms
unpityingly the strong against the weak; in crises of annihilation she
restores the disturbed equilibrium of things; but the palm of peace no
one has ever seen in her hand. And we? We stand amazed at her might and
greatness, at the plentitude of her powers of creation, at her myriad
play of forces, at the inexhaustible wealth of the relations with which
she binds being to being, creates and mediates contrarieties, and amidst
the most varied change and alternation, ever remains one and the same!
But our prototype, our God, she can never be. To him we must look up;
but on nature, despite her might, despite her stupendous grandeur, we
look down. She did not whisper in our ears that in us which is best and
highest. That did not come to us from heaven; _we ourselves_ won it
by hard struggles, by terribly severe, self-imposed discipline. It is
not _of_ nature; it is _above_ nature. Through _us_ something has come
into the world that before us did not exist—something that the most
exuberant creative magic, or nature’s grandest mechanical dreams, could
never replace. The day on which first a human being pressed his weaker
fellow-man to his breast and said, “Brother, not mine, but thy will be
done; I will give up my desires that thou also mayst be glad”; the day
on which man first lifted up his head and said, “Let us make the world
_good_ in the likeness of the picture that has become living in us, just
as it should be”; this is the great and sanctified day in the history of
our race on earth, the Christmas day on which God was born. But not as
the religious fancy has expressed it, the day on which God became man,
but the day on which man began to become God, that is the day on which he
began to feel spiritual powers in his breast that transcended his animal
impulses—powers to which the majority of humanity was still as remote as
heaven from earth.
This strict anthropological conception of God as the ideal which is
always newly creating itself in the struggles of humanity, which is no
Being but a Becoming, solves the innumerable difficulties which the idea
of God has hitherto placed in the way of rigorous scientific knowledge
and the construction of a unitary conception of the world. This God has
nothing to do with the All. We need not seek him in the All or behind the
All, and need not fear that any progress of our knowledge will make his
existence a matter of doubt with us. Concerning the real validity of this
idea we need not bother ourselves with more or less weak and insufficient
demonstrations: the whole history of humanity is evidence of it if we
but know how to rightly interpret it, and the stumbling block of the old
theological idea of God has become the corner-stone upon which the new
scientific conception is built.
Nature and human history the work of an omnipotent and all-kind being
that is mediately and immediately active in all events, nay, sacrificed
himself in his own person that he might realise in this world his
purposes! Compare the principle, the active force of this world-drama,
pictured by the religious fancy as the highest power, the highest wisdom,
and all-merciful love, with the real spectacle of the world! Is there
anywhere a more pronounced contradiction, an obscurer riddle, a more
inconceivable contrast between purpose and accomplishment? This world
of cruelty and woe, in which one creature feeds on the heart-blood of
another, in which here and there from seas of mud and dirt a form of
light springs up, in which every nobler production must be bought with
torrents of blood and tears; this revelation and self-manifestation of
God in humanity, which everywhere appears joined to definite historical
suppositions, which lacks all the conditions of true universality and of
indisputable evidence, so that instead of forming a means of union it
has become the source of dreadful contentions; this work of salvation
and sanctification which is so restricted in its effects that “the
kingdom of God” is still a dreamy vision of humanity, so restricted
that we still see the majority of men, despite the most extraordinary
supernatural dispositions, still remain far behind the simple ideals
of natural ethical commandments, that hate and dissension, cruelty and
selfishness, perform their unhallowed work—is this the work of infinite
power and infinite wisdom? What claims theodicy makes on human thought!
And how different the picture is, the moment we abandon the false
theocentric point of view and assume the anthropocentric! Instead of a
belief which all facts contradict—an idea which elucidates them all.
No one can say how we are to interpret facts as the work of a holy and
absolutely perfect being; but it can be shown, step by step, how in this,
our human world, more perfect things spring from imperfect things, moral
and mental laws from the blind play of natural forces and powers, the
conscious energy of will from blind and unreasonable impulse, law and
love of man from the selfishness and warring of all against all, and the
notion of the unity of the race from infinite disruption and disunion.
We must not allow ourselves to be led astray or discouraged here by the
changing undulations and tremendous crises of this battle for the good.
The ideal springs out of a dark abyss. The roots of our being are deep
laid in nature, yet we struggle to exalt ourselves above it. No wonder,
therefore, that time and again it draws us back.
The greatest and sublimest spectacle! A tragical one, one filled with
struggle and suffering, and yet one infinitely full of hope. For it shows
us the inexhaustible grandeur of the human mind; it shows us the good,
the ideal, as a tremendous real power, a power eternally becoming, surely
forming itself out of an infinitude of individual deeds, a power fully
incarnate in no one person, yet active and living in humanity. Not a
tangible activity, and yet one of the realest of facts. A supersensuous,
nay, if you will, a supernatural realm of thought; not the faded
reflection or shadow of a grandeur and power beyond us, but the fruit
of the noblest activities and powers of this given, existing world,
antagonised in life, but grand and powerful in thought; imperfect even in
its boldest flights, but bearing within it the germ of greater things to
come.