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
contemplation of God as human, is the mystery of the Incarnation. 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 Incarnation. God became man out of
mercy: thus he was in himself already a human God before he became
an actual man; for human 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
essentially 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. [33] How
otherwise could God have become man? The old maxim, ex nihilo nihil
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
people say, "a common man," such a king will not descend 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. [34]
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, metaphysical being with the idea of the religious God,
i.e., the conditions of the understanding with the conditions of
the heart, the emotive nature; a confusion which is the greatest
hindrance to the correct knowledge of religion. But, in fact, the
idea of the Incarnation is nothing more than the human form of a God,
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 Godhead 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,
"speculative;" for, considered in connection with it, the Incarnation
is a necessary, nay, a self-evident consequence. The allegation,
therefore, that the Incarnation is a purely empirical fact, which 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 comprehensible premiss. But it is
equally perverse to attempt to deduce the Incarnation from purely
speculative, i.e., metaphysical, abstract grounds; for metaphysics
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 justifiable if it were meant consciously to deduce from
metaphysics the negation of metaphysics.
This example clearly exhibits the distinction between the method of our
philosophy and that of the old speculative philosophy. The former does
not philosophise 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
supernatural 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 something besides love? a being distinct
from love? 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 becomes 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. [35]
Not because of his Godhead as such, according to which he is the
subject in the proposition, God is love, but because of his love,
of the predicate, is it that he renounced 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 aggrandise 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 Incarnation but absolute,
pure love, without adjunct, without 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 renounced 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 exhibited 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 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 therefore what is
human is not alien to him, that, as an object 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 participator 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--i.e.,
God suffers from man. Love does not exist without sympathy, sympathy
does not exist without suffering in common. Have I any sympathy for
a being without feeling? No! 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, Providence, prayer, are the expression of
this identity of nature in God and man. [36]
It is true that theology, which is pre-occupied with the metaphysical
attributes of eternity, unconditionedness, unchangeableness,
and the like abstractions, which express the nature of the
understanding,--theology denies the possibility that God should
suffer, but in so doing it denies the truth of religion. [37] For
religion--the religious man in the act of devotion believes 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 itself,
in its own nature alone.
The notion that the fulfilment of prayer has been determined from
eternity, that it was originally included 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 correctly according to the religious
sentiment, "an arbitrary God." 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 contradiction with the unchangeableness and unconditionedness
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 affection,
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. 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 absorbed in itself as its own ultimate truth.
It may be objected to the import here assigned to the Incarnation,
that the Christian Incarnation is altogether peculiar, that at least
it is different (which is quite true in certain respects, as will
hereafter be apparent) 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 "speculative." 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 father; 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 manifestation 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 Incarnation, the mystery of the "God-man,"
is therefore no mysterious composition of contraries, no synthetic
fact, as it is regarded by the speculative religious philosophy,
which has a particular 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 essentially different from our love,--there are only our
limitations to be abstracted from it; and thus the Incarnation 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 universal. We can no longer believe
in the manifestation for its own sake, but only for the sake of the
thing manifested; for to us there remains no immediate presence 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 estimate my own nature; I have value
in the sight of God; the divine significance of my nature is become
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 emphasis, 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 inmost
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? because 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 welfare of man his deepest
anxiety. If man, then, is the object of God, is not man, in God,
an object to himself? 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--the 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? Is not
then the proposition, "God loves man" an orientalism (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. 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 manhood 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 of
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 the fable, the chief thing, is to the religious
consciousness only the moral of the fable, a collateral thing.