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 perfection; God as Christ is the sum of all
human misery. The heathen philosophers celebrated activity, especially
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
philosophy; so, on the other hand, Christ, the God of the Christians,
is the passio pura, pure suffering--the highest metaphysical thought,
the être suprême of the heart. For what makes more impression on the
heart than suffering? especially the suffering of one who considered
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 nature
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 as the free imagination or intelligence;
it has a passive, receptive relation to what it produces; all that
proceeds from it seems to it given from without, takes it by violence,
works with the force of irresistible necessity. 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 substance 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 theological dogmas and contradictions.
For, according to the principles which we have already developed, that
which in religion is the predicate 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 divinely, is a God to men. [38]
The Passion of Christ, however, represents not only moral, voluntary
suffering, the suffering of love, the power of sacrificing self for
the good of others; it represents 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: "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." [39]
Christ is in this respect the self-confession of human sensibility. In
opposition to the heathen, and in particular the stoical principle,
with its rigorous energy of will and self-sustainedness, the Christian
involves the consciousness 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. [40] 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 are 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 soul, the inmost nature of their
God. The God expressed 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 repentance and
yearning. Thus tears are the light-reflecting drops which mirror the
nature of the Christian's God. But a God who has pleasure in tears,
expresses 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 reconciled 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 enduring impression, than the perfect tense which expresses
the fact of redemption. The redemption 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 object 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 corrupt earth, which was the theatre
of his suffering? [41] 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 remembrance to me, or even
an object of rejoicing, because it has purchased my salvation? Who
can think so--who can wish to be exempt from the sufferings of his God?
The Christian religion is the religion of suffering. [42] 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, psychologically, 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 licentious religious images of the heathens provoked and
authorised 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 without a heart. The mystery of the suffering
God is therefore the mystery of feeling, sensibility. A suffering
God is a feeling, sensitive God. [43] But the proposition: God is a
feeling Being, is only the religious periphrase of the proposition:
feeling is absolute, divine 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 would 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 necessity to breathe out his feelings
in song; so, by a like necessity, he in religious sighs and tears
streams forth the nature of feeling as an objective, divine nature.
Religion is human nature reflected, mirrored in itself. 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 because 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. God
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 without feeling is an empty, abstract, negative God, i.e.,
nothing; because that is wanting to him which is precious and sacred
to man. God is for man the commonplace book where he registers his
highest feelings and thoughts, the genealogical tree on which are
entered 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 preserve tenaciously all that we
have gathered, not to trust anything to the waves of forgetfulness,
to the chance of 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 commonplace book, a nucleus of aggregation, has an aim,
and having an aim he has firm standing-ground. Not 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, i.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 spiritual 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; aimlessness 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 virtue. He who has an aim, an aim which is in itself true and
essential, has, eo 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 reason, in the sense of the universal, the only true love.