§ 227. The system of National Education founded its first stage on the
substantial basis of the family-spirit; its second stage on the division
of the nation by means of division of labor which it makes permanent in
castes; its third stage presents the free opposition of the laity and
clergy; in its next phase it makes war, immortality, and trade, by
turns, its end; thirdly, it posits beauty, patriotic youth, and the
immediateness of individuality, as the essence of mankind, and at last
dissolves the unity of nationality in the consciousness that all nations
are really one since they are all human beings. In the intermixture of
races in the Roman world arises the conception of the human race, the
_genus humanum_. Education had become eclectic: the Roman legions
levelled the national distinctions. In the wavering of all objective
morality, the necessity of self-education in order to the formation of
character appeared ever more and more clearly; but the conception, which
lay at the foundation, was always, nevertheless, that of Roman, Greek,
or German education. But in the midst of these nations another system
had striven for development, and this did not base itself on the natural
connection of nationality, but made this, for the first time, only a
secondary thing, and made the direct relation of man to God its chief
idea. In this system God himself is the teacher. He manifests to man His
will as law, to which he must unconditionally conform for no other
reason than that He is the Lord, and man His servant, who can have no
other will than His. The obedience of man is therefore, in this system,
abstract until through experience he gradually attains to the knowledge
that the will of God has in it the very essence of his own will.
Descent, Talent, Events, Work, Beauty, Courage,--all these are
indifferent things compared with the subjection of the human to the
divine will. To be well-pleasing to God is almost the same as belief in
Him. Without this identity, what is natural in national descent is of no
value. According to its form of manifestation, Judaism is below the
Greek spirit. It is not beautiful, but rather grotesque. But in its
essence, as the religion of the contradiction between the idea and its
existence, it goes beyond nature, which it perceives to be established
by an absolute, conscious, and reasonable Will; while the Greek
concealed from himself only mythically his dependence on nature, on his
mother-earth. The Jews have been preserved in the midst of all other
culture by the elastic power of the thought of God as One who was free
from the control of nature. The Jews have a patriotism in common with
the Romans. The Maccabees, for example, were not inferior to the Romans
in greatness.
--Abraham is the genuine Jew because he is the genuinely faithful man.
He does not hesitate to obey the horrible and inhuman command of his
God. Circumcision was made the token of the national unity, but the
nation may assimilate members to itself from other nations through this
rite. The condition always lies in belief in a spiritual relation to
which the relation of nationality is secondary. The Jewish nation makes
proselytes, and these are widely different from the _Socii_ of the
Romans or the _Metoeci_ of the Athenians.--
§ 228. To the man who knows Nature to be the work of a single,
incomparable, rational Creator, she loses independence. He is negatively
freed from her control, and sees in her only an absolute means. As
opposed to the fanciful sensuous intuitions of Ethnicism, this seems to
be a backward step, but for the emancipation of man it is a progress. He
no longer fears Nature but her Lord, and admires Him so much that prose
rises to the dignity of poetry in his telological contemplation. Since
man stands over and beyond nature, education is directed to morality as
such, and spreads itself out in innumerable limitations, by means of
which the distinction of man from nature is expressly asserted as a
difference. The ceremonial law appears often arbitrary, but in its
prescriptions it gives man the satisfaction of placing himself as will
in relation to will. For example, if he is forbidden to eat any
specified part of an animal, the ground of this command is not merely
natural--it is the will of the Deity. Man learns therefore, in his
obedience to such directions, to free himself from his self-will, from
his natural desires. This exact outward conformity to subjectivity is
the beginning of wisdom, the purification of the will from all
individual egotism.
--The rational substance of the Law is found always in the Decalogue.
Many of our modern much-admired authors exhibit a superficiality
bordering on shallowness when they comment alone on the absurdity of the
miracles, and abstract from the profound depth of the moral struggle,
and from the practical rationality of the ten commandments.--
§ 229. Education in this theocratical system is on one side patriarchal.
The Family is very prominent, because it is considered to be a great
happiness for the individual to belong from his very earliest life to
the company of those who believe in the true God. On its other side it
is hierarchical, as its ceremonial law develops a special office, which
is to see that obedience is paid to its multifarious regulations. And,
because these are often perfectly arbitrary, Education must, above all,
practise the memory in learning them all, so that they may always be
remembered. The Jewish monotheism shares this necessity with the
superstition of ethnicism.
§ 230. But the technique proper of the mechanism is not the most
important pedagogical element of the theocracy. We find this in its
historical significance, since its history throughout has a pedagogical
character. For the people of God show us always, in their changing
intercourse with their God, a progress from the external to the
internal, from the lower to the higher, from the past to the future. Its
history, therefore, abounds in situations very interesting in a
pedagogical point of view, and in characters which are eternal models.
§ 231. (1) The will of God as the absolute authority is at first to
them, as law, external. But soon God adds to the command to obedience,
on one hand, the inducement of a promise of material prosperity, and on
the other hand the threat of material punishment. The fulfilment of the
law is also encouraged by reflection on the profit which it brings. But,
since these motives are all external, they rise finally into the insight
that the law is to be fulfilled, not on their account, but because it is
the will of the Lord; not alone because it is conducive to our
happiness, but also because it is in itself holy, and written in our
hearts: in other words, man proceeds from the abstract legality, through
the reflection of eudæmonism, to the internality of moral sentiment--the
course of all education.
--This last stand-point is especially represented in the excellent
Gnomic of Jesus Sirach--a book so rich in pedagogical insight, which
paints with master-strokes the relations of husband and wife, parents
and children, master and servants, friend and friend, enemy and enemy,
and the dignity of labor as well as the necessity of its division. This
priceless book forms a side-piece from the theocratic stand-point to the
_Republic_ of Plato and his laws on ethical government.--
§ 232. (2) The progress from the lower to the higher appeared in the
conquering of the natural individuality. Man, as the servant of Jehovah,
must have no will of his own; but selfish naturalness arrayed itself so
much the more vigorously against the abstract "Thou shalt," allowed
itself to descend into an abstraction from the Law, and often reached
the most unbridled extravagance. But since the Law in inexorable might
always remained the same, always persistent, in distinction from the
inequalities of the deed of man, it forced him to come back to it, and
to conform himself to its demands. Thus he learned criticism, thus he
rose from naturalness into spirit. This progress is at the same time a
progress from necessity to freedom, because criticism always gradually
opens a way for man into insight, so that he finds the will of God to be
the truth of his own self-determination. Because God is one and
absolute, there arises the expectation that His Will will become the
basis for the will of all nations and men. The criticism of the
understanding must recognize a contradiction in the fact that the will
of the true God is the law of only one nation; feared by other nations,
moreover, by reason of their very worship of God as a gloomy mystery,
and detested as _odium generis humani_. And thus is developed the
thought that the isolation of the believers will come to an end as soon
as the other nations recognize their faith as the true one, and are
received into it. Thus here, out of the deepest penetration of the soul
into itself, as among the Romans out of the fusion of nations, we see
appear the idea of the human race.
§ 233. (3) The progress from the past to the future unfolded the ideal
servant of God who fulfils all the Law, and so blots out the empirical
contradiction that the "Thou shalt" of the Law attains no adequate
actuality. This Prince of Peace, who shall gather all nations under his
banner, can therefore have no other thing predicated of him than
Holiness. He is not beautiful as the Greeks represented their ideal, not
brave and practical as was the venerated _Virtus_ of the Romans; he does
not place an infinite value on his individuality as the German does: but
he is represented as insignificant in appearance, as patient, as humble,
as he who, in order to reconcile the world, takes upon himself the
infirmities and disgrace of all others. The ethnical nations have only a
lost Paradise behind them; the Jews have one also before them. From this
belief in the Messiah who is to come, from the certainty which they have
of conquering with him, from the power of esteeming all things of small
importance in view of such a future, springs the indestructible nature
of the Jews. They ignore the fact that Christianity is the necessary
result of their own history. As the nation that is to be (_des
Seinsollens_), they are merely a historical nation, the nation among
nations, whose education--whenever the Jew has not changed and corrupted
its nature through modern culture--is still always patriarchal,
hierarchal, and mnemonic.