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 religion. 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 religion; for every reformation, every purification,
produces--especially in religious matters, where even the trivial
becomes important--an essential change. To the Jew, the Israelite
was the mediator, the bond between 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. [92] If we let fall the
limits of nationality, we obtain--instead of the Israelite--man. As in
Jehovah the Israelite personified his national existence, so in God
the Christian personified his subjective 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 these wants,
he deified even his political vindictiveness; so the Christian made
the requirements of human feeling the absolute powers and laws of the
world. The miracles of Christianity, which belong just as essentially
to its characterisation as the miracles of the Old Testament to
that of Judaism, have not the welfare 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 imagination, of intellectual miracle-working.
God is the Love that satisfies our wishes, our emotional wants; he
is himself the realised wish of the heart, the wish exalted to the
certainty of its fulfilment, of its reality, to that undoubting
certainty before which no contradiction of the understanding,
no difficulty of experience or of the external world, maintains
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, i.e.,
absolute divine power, the certainty that the inmost 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 tempus finitum, the certain, blissful "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, sheltered
and hidden from the inexorable powers, he may find audience for his
griefs. Here he utters his oppressive 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;" [93] this saying is the most
remarkable, 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 as much as the dogma
of the Incarnation, although religious speculation stands amazed
at this, as the greatest of mysteries. Not, certainly, the prayer
before and after meals, the ritual of animal egoism, 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 articulately 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 confidence, 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 fulfilment? [94] what else is the being that
fulfils these wishes 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 everything 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 into operation--such a
man does not pray: he only works; he transforms his attainable wishes
into objects of real activity; other wishes which he recognises as
purely subjective he denies, or regards as simply subjective, pious
aspirations. In other words, he limits, he conditionates his being
by the world, as 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 dependence; 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 [95]
of human feeling; prayer is the unconditional 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 of 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 forgetfulness.
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. Involuntarily prayer wells forth in sound; the struggling
heart bursts the barrier of the closed lips. But audible prayer
is only prayer revealing its nature; prayer is virtually, if not
actually, speech,--the Latin word oratio signifies both: in prayer,
man speaks undisguisedly 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 condition; prayer is itself concentration,--the
dismissal of 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 religion 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. [96]
It is an extremely superficial view of prayer to regard 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 dependence is the sense of need. Prayer has
its root rather in the unconditional trust of the heart, untroubled
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 realities. 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 careless 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 apply to him 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 feeling, his love for his child. [97] 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 prayer 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 Omnipotence
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 understanding, which soars above all the boundaries of Nature,
which wills that there be nothing else than feeling, 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 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.