§ 155. Religion, in common with every content of the spirit, must pass
through three stages of feeling, conception, and comprehension. Whatever
may be the special character of any religion it cannot avoid this
psychological necessity, either in its general history or in the history
of the individual consciousness. The teacher must understand this
process, partly in order that he may make it easier to the youth, partly
that he may guard against the malformation of the religious feeling
which may arise through the fact of the youth's remaining in one stage
after he is ready for another and needs it. Pedagogics must therefore
lay out beforehand the philosophy of religion, on which alone can be
found the complete discussion of this idea.
§ 156. (1) Religion exists first as religious feeling. The person is
still immediately identical with the Divine, does not yet distinguish
himself from the absoluteness of his being, and is in so far determined
by it. In so far as he feels the divine, he is a mystery to himself.
This beginning is necessary. Religion cannot be produced in men from the
external side; its genesis belongs rather to the primitive depths in
which God himself and the individual soul are essentially one.
--The educator must not allow himself to suppose that he is able to
make a religion. Religion dwells originally in every individual soul,
for every one is born of God. Education can only aid the religious
feeling in its development. As far as regards the psychological form, it
was quite correct for Schleiermacher and his followers to characterize
the absoluteness of the religious feeling as the feeling of dependence,
for feeling is determined by that which it feels; it depends upon its
content. But in so far as God constitutes the content of the feeling,
there appears the opposite of all dependence or absolute emancipation. I
maintain this in opposition to Schleiermacher. Religion lifts man above
the finite, temporal and transitory, and frees him from the control of
the phenomenal world. Even the lowest form of religion does this; and
when it is said that Schleiermacher has been unjustly criticized for
this expression of dependence, this distinction is overlooked.--
§ 157. But religious feeling as such rises into something higher when
the spirit distinguishes the content of this religious feeling from any
other content which it also feels, represents it clearly to itself, and
places itself over against it formally as a free individual.
--But we must not understand that the religious feeling is destroyed in
this process; in rising to the form of distinct representation, it
remains at the same time as a necessary form of the Intelligence.--
§ 158. If the spirit is held back and prevented from passing out of the
simplicity of feeling into the act of distinguishing the perception from
what it becomes, the conception--if its efforts towards the forming of
this conception are continually re-dissolved into feeling, then feeling,
which was as the first step perfectly healthy and correct, will become
morbid and degenerate into a wretched mysticism. Education must,
therefore, make sure that this feeling is not destroyed by the progress
of its content into perception and conception on the side of
psychological form, but rather that it attains truth thereby.
§ 159. (2) Conception as the ideally transformed perception dissects
the religious content on its different sides, and follows each of these
to its consequence. Imagination controls the individual conceptions, but
by no means with that absoluteness which is often supposed; for each
picture has in itself its logical consequence to which imagination must
yield; e.g. if a religion represents God as an animal, or as half animal
and half man, or as man, each of these conceptions has in its
development its consequences for the imagination.
§ 160. We rise out of the stage of Conception when the spirit tries to
determine the universality of its content according to its necessity,
i.e. when it begins to think. The necessity of its pictures is a mere
presupposition for the imagination. The thinking activity, however,
recognizes not only the contradiction which exists between the sensuous,
limited form of the individual conception, and the absolute nature of
its content, but also the contradiction in which the conceptions find
themselves with respect to each other.
§ 161. If the spirit is prevented from passing out of the varied
pictures of conception to the supersensuous clearness and simplicity of
the thinking activity--if the content which it already begins to seize
as idea is again dissolved into the confusion of the picture-world, then
the religion of imagination, which was a perfectly proper form as the
second step, becomes perverted into some form of idolatry, either coarse
or refined. Education must therefore not oppose the thinking activity if
the latter undertakes to criticize religious conceptions; on the
contrary, it must guide this so that the discovery of the contradictions
which unavoidably adhere to sensuous form shall not mislead the youth
into the folly of throwing away, with the relative untruth of the form,
also the religious content in general.
--It is an error for educators to desire to keep the imagination apart
from religious feeling, but it is also an error to detain the mind,
which is on its formal side the activity of knowing, in the stage of
imagination, and to desire to condemn it thence into the service of
canonical allegories. The more, in opposition to this, it is possessed
with the charm of thinking, the more is it in danger of condemning the
content of religion itself as a mere fictitious conception. As a
transition-stage the religion of imagination is perfectly normal, and it
does not in the least impair freedom if, for example, one has
personified evil as a living Devil. The error does not lie in this, but
in the making absolute these determinate, æsthetic forms of religion.
The reaction of the thinking activity against such æsthetic absolutism
then undertakes in its negative absolutism to despise the content also,
as if it were a mere conception.--
§ 162. (3) In the thinking activity the spirit attains that form of the
religious content which is identical with that of its simple
consciousness, and above which there is no other for the intelligence as
theoretical. But we distinguish three varieties in this thinking
activity: the abstract, the reflective, and the speculative. The
Abstract gives us the religious content of consciousness in the form of
abstractions or dogmas, i.e. propositions which set up a definition as a
universal, and add to it another as the reason for its necessity. The
Reflective stage busies itself with the relation of dogmas to each
other, and with the search for the grounds on which their necessity must
rest. It is essentially critical, and hence skeptical. The explanation
of the dogmas, which is carried on in this process of reasoning and
skeptical investigation, is completed alone in speculative thinking,
which recognizes the free unity of the content and its form as its own
proper self-determination of the content, creating its own differences.
Education must know this stage of the intelligence, partly that it may
in advance preserve, in the midst of its changes, that repose which it
brings into the consciousness; partly that it may be able to lead to the
process of change itself, in accordance with the organic connection of
its phases. We should prevent the criticism of the abstract
understanding by the reflective stage as little as we should that of the
imagination by the thinking activity. But the stage of reflection is not
the last possibility of the thinking activity, although, in the variety
of its skepticism it often takes itself for such, and, with the
emptiness of mere negation to which it holds, often brings itself
forward into undesirable prominence. It becomes evident, in this view,
how very necessary for man, with respect to religion, is a genuine
philosophical culture, so that he may not lose the certainty of the
existence of the Absolute in the midst of the obstinacy of dogmas and
the changes of opinions.
§ 163. Education must then not fear the descent into dogmatic
abstraction, since this is an indispensable means for theoretical
culture in its totality, and the consciousness cannot dispense with it
in its history. But Education has, in the concrete, carefully to discern
in which of these stages of culture any particular consciousness may be.
For if for mankind as a race the fostering of philosophy is absolutely
necessary, it by no means follows that this necessity exists for each
individual. To children, to women, e.g. for all kinds of simple and
limited lives, the form of the religion of the imagination is well
suited, and the form of comprehension can come only relatively to them.
Education must not, then, desire powerfully and prematurely to develop
the thinking activity before the intelligence is really fully grown.
--The superficial thinking which many teachers demand in the sphere of
religion is no less impractical than the want of all guidance into
rightly ordered meditations on religious subjects. It is natural that
the lower form of intelligence should, in contrast with the higher,
appear to be frivolous, because it has no need of change of form as the
higher has, and on this account it looks upon the destruction of the
form of a picture or a dogma as the destruction of religion itself. In
our time the idea is very prevalent that the content itself must change
with the changing of the psychological form, and that therefore a
religion in the stage of feeling, of conception, and of comprehension,
can no longer be the same in its essence. These suppositions, which are
so popular, and are considered to be high philosophy, spring from the
superficiality of psychological inquiry.--
§ 164. The theoretical culture of the religious feeling endeavors
therefore with the freedom of philosophical criticism to elevate the
presupposition of Reason in the religious content to self-assured
insight by means of the proof of the necessity of its determinations.
This is the only reasonable pedagogical way not only to prevent the
degeneration of the religious consciousness into a miserable mysticism
or into frivolity, but also to remove these if they are already
existent.
--External seclusion avails nothing. The crises of the world-historical
changes in the religious consciousness find their way through the
thickest cloister walls; the philosopher Reinhold was a pupil of the
Jesuits, the philosopher Schad of the Benedictines.--