§ 165. The theoretical culture is truly practical, for it gives man
definite conceptions and thoughts of the Divine and his relation to him.
But in a narrower sense that culture is practical which relates to the
Will as such. Education has in this respect to distinguish (1)
consecration--religious feeling in general,--(2) the induction of the
youth into the forms of a positive religion, and (3) his reconciliation
with his lot.
§ 166. (1) Religious feeling presupposes morality as an indispensable
condition without which it cannot inculcate its ideas. But if man from a
merely moral stand-point places himself in relation to the idea of Duty
as such, the ethical religious stand-point differs from it in this, that
it places the necessity of the Good as the self-determination of the
divine Will and thus makes of practice a personal relation to God,
changing the Good to the Holy and the Evil to Sin. Education must
therefore first accustom the youth to the idea, that in doing the Good
he unites himself with God as with the absolute Person, but that in
doing Evil he separates himself from him. The feeling that he through
his deed comes into contact with God himself, positively or negatively,
deepens the moral conduct to an intense sensibility of the heart.
§ 167. (2) The religious sense which grows in the child that he has an
uninterrupted personal relation to the Absolute as a person, constitutes
the beginning of the practical forming of religion. The second step is
the induction of the child into the objective forms of worship
established in some positive religion. Through religious training the
child learns to renounce his egotism; through attendance on religious
services he learns to give expression to his religious feeling in
prayer, in the use of symbols, and in church festivals. Education must,
however, endeavor to retain freedom with regard to these forms, so that
they shall not be confounded with Religion itself. Religion displays
itself in these ceremonies, but they as mere forms are of value only in
so far as they, while externalities, are manifestations of the spirit
which produces them.
--If the mechanism of ceremonial forms is taken as religion itself, the
service of God degenerates into the false service of religion, as Kant
has designated it in _Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason_.
Nothing is more destructive to the sensibility to all real religious
culture than the want of earnestness with which prayers, readings from
the Bible, attendance on church, the communion, &c., are often practised
by teachers. But one must not conclude from this extreme that an
ignorance of all sacred forms in general would be more desirable for the
child.--
§ 168. (3) It is possible that a man on the stand-point of
ecclesiastical religious observances may be fully contented; he may be
fully occupied in them, and perfect his life thereby in perfect content.
But by far the greater number of men will see themselves forced to
experience the truth of religion in the hard vicissitudes of their lot,
since they carry on some business, and with that business create for
themselves a past whose consequences condition their future. They limit
themselves through their deeds, whose involuntary-voluntary authors they
become; involuntary in so far as they are challenged to the deeds from
the totality of events, voluntary in so far as they undertake them and
bring about an actual change in the world. The history of the individual
man appears therefore on the one hand, if we consider its material, as
the work of circumstances; but on the other hand, if we reflect on the
form, as the act of a self-determining actor. Want of freedom (the being
determined through the given situation) and freedom (the determination
to the act) are united in actual life as something which is exactly so,
and cannot become anything else as final. The essence of the spiritual
being stands always over against this unavoidable limitation as that
which is in itself infinite, which is beyond all history, because the
absolute spirit, in and for itself, has no history. That which one calls
his history is only the manifesting of himself, and his everlasting
return out of this manifestation into himself an act which in absolute
spirit coincides with the transcending of all manifestation. From the
nature which belongs to him there arises for the individual spirit the
impulse towards a holy life, i.e. the being freed from his history even
in the midst of its process. He gratifies this impulse negatively
through the considering of what has happened as past and gone, as that
which lives now only ideally in the recollection; and positively through
the positing of a new actual existence in which he strives to realize
the idea of freedom which constitutes his necessity, as purer and higher
than before. This constant new-birth out of the grave of the past to the
life of a more beautiful future is the genuine reconciliation with
destiny. The false reconciliation may assume different forms. It may
abstain from all action because man through this limits himself and
becomes responsible. This is to despair of freedom, which condemns the
spirit to the loss of itself since its nature demands activity. The
abstract quietism of the Indian penitents, of the Buddhists, of the
fanatical ascetics, of the Protestant recluses, &c., is an error of this
kind. The man may become indifferent about the ethical determinateness
of his deeds. In this case he acts; but because he has no faith in the
necessary connection of his deeds through the means of freedom, a
connection which he would willingly ascribe to mere chance, he loses his
spiritual essence. This is the error of indifference and of its
frivolity, which denies the open mystery of the ruling of destiny.
Education must therefore imbue man with respect for external movements
of history and with confidence in the inexhaustibleness of the
progressive human spirit, since only by producing better things can he
affirmatively elevate himself above his past. This active acknowledgment
of the necessity of freedom as the determining principle of destiny
gives the highest satisfaction to which practical religious feeling may
arrive, for blessedness develops itself in it--that blessedness which
does not know that it is circumscribed by finitude and transitoriness,
and which possesses the immortal courage to strive always anew for
perfection with free resignation at its non-realization, so that
happiness and misery, pleasure and pain, are conquered by the power of
disinterested self-sacrifice.
--The escape from action in an artificial absence of all events in
life, which often sinks to a veritable brutalizing of man, is the
distinguishing feature of all monkish pedagogics. In our time there is
especial need of a reconciliation between man and destiny, for all the
world is discontented. The worst form of discontent is when one is, as
the French say, _blasé_; though the word is not, as many fancy, derived
originally from the French, but from the Greek [Greek: blazein], to
wither. It is true that all culture passes through phases, each of which
becomes momentarily and relatively wearisome, and that in so far one may
be _blasé_ in any age. But in modern times this state of feeling has
increased to that of thorough disgust--disgust which nevertheless at the
same time demands enjoyment. The one who is _blasé_ has enjoyed
everything, felt everything, mocked at everything. He has passed from
the enjoyment of pleasure to sentimentality, i.e. to rioting in feeling;
from sentimentality to irony with regard to feeling, and from this to
the torment of feeling his entire weakness and emptiness as opposed to
these. He ridicules this also, as if it were a consolation to him to
fling away the universe like a squeezed lemon, and to be able to assert
that in pure nothingness lies the truth of all things. And yet
nevertheless this irony furnishes the point on which Education can
fasten, in order to kindle anew in him the religious feeling, and to
lead him back to a loving recognition of actuality, to a respect for his
own history. The greatest difficulty which Education has to encounter
here is the coquetry, the miserable eminence and self-satisfaction which
have undermined the man and made him incapable of all simple and natural
enjoyment. It is not too much to assert that many pupils of our
_Gymnasia_ are affected with this malady. Our literature is full of its
products. It inveighs against its dissipation, and nevertheless at the
same time cannot resist a certain kind of pleasure in it. Diabolical
sentimentality!--