who love themselves, who desire the outer world with eagerness
and longing and curiosity, who seek the things that flatter the
senses and not the things that further the Kingdom of Christ, who
will always build and strengthen what yet hath no foundation; for
everything falleth into nothingness that is not born of God.
Hold thyself to this short saying, for it meaneth much: Forsake all,
and thou findest all.
Bid farewell to every desire; then enterest thou upon rest. Let this
word never leave thy thoughts; bear it within thee day and night; and
when thou hast brought it to fulfilment, then shalt thou understand
all.
But this, O LORD, is not the work of a single day, nor is it child’s
play. In this shell lies the whole kernel of the perfection of those
who seek God.
SON, that must not frighten thee back, nor discourage thee, but
rather draw thee to climb upward to the higher goal, or at the least
to bear a longing thereto in thy heart. If thou wert already so far
on the way that thou wert free from all blind love to thyself, and
wert ready and prepared to obey every beck of thy fatherly superior
whom I have set over thee, then might mine eye rest with pleasure
upon thee, and thy whole life would flow along in peace and joy.
For as soon as thou no longer wishest this or that in thine own
self-conceit, but shalt have yielded thyself wholly to thy God
without gainsay and from the innermost depth of thy heart, and shalt
have laid down all thy wishes into the hand of God, from that moment
onward shalt thou be at rest, and shalt find thyself at one with God,
in that no other thing shall be to thee so agreeable and pleasing as
God’s pleasure.
Whoever hath thus, in simplicity of heart, swung his thoughts upward
to God, and hath loosed himself from the inordinate love or hate of
any created thing, he alone shall be fit and worthy to receive the
gift of devotion. For where the Lord findeth empty vessels, there He
layeth in his blessing. And the more completely any one looseneth his
heart from the love of that which perisheth, and the more completely
he maketh his own self to waste away under deepest disregard, by so
much the quicker cometh this mercy, by so much the deeper it presseth
in, and by so much the higher the free heart of man is lifted up.
Then the eyes of man are opened, then standeth he amazed in rapture,
then his whole heart is dilated, for the hand of the Lord is now
with him, and he hath given himself wholly and for all eternity into
His hand. Lo, thus is that man blest who seeketh God with his whole
heart, and letteth his spirit no longer cling to the things that
perish.
I
Everything spoken in this dialogue is wholly true; only it is not
merely not the work of a single day, but not even the work of a single
life-period; it is rather an uncompromising process of growth that can
not be hastened at will, but must gradually unfold itself in four great
stages and must furthermore be properly brought to maturity in each
separate period, if any real and beneficial good is to arise therefrom.
There may be no compulsion about it; a hastening of growth occurs only
in times of suffering; the first half of every task is mostly the
hardest; from that point onward it goes more quickly and easily to the
end.
The first stage is the seeking for a philosophy of life, and the
dissatisfaction with the usual conceptions of the universe: “How many
hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I
perish here with hunger!” The second is the turning to the eternal,
supernatural truth: “Look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the
earth; for I am God, and there is none else.” The third stage is the
new life which must gradually take shape therefrom, though falling
into many divisions. And the last has the promise of the prophet
Zechariah: “At evening time there shall be light.” Out of the first
stage the youthful man must pass with pure thoughts directed toward an
ideal, with no stigma of immorality upon his conscience, with pleasure
in work, and with a considerable amount of knowledge useful for his
life-calling. If the second period is rightly spent, it will be devoted
to the acquisition of three important things: position as a citizen of
the state, a worthy marriage, and a sound religious and philosophical
view of life. The third stage is that of the confirmation of this
view in the struggle of life; this stage forms the real work of life.
The fourth is the crowning of life with true success, and the final
transition to a larger sphere of activity.
It is clear from the beginning that this course of development really
rests upon self-training, and usually takes its start in that period of
life in which every earnest man is tired of the “fables of the world”
and is in the same frame of mind in which Dante has his great poem
begin with the words: “In the midway of this our mortal life, I found
me in a gloomy wood astray;” or in which St. Theresa says: “My soul was
submerged in the dream of earthly things, but it has pleased the Lord
to awaken me from this slumber of death, and I beseech Him nevermore
to let me fall back therein.” What education can do up to this point
is, as regards the inner life, merely of a preparatory and prophylactic
nature, and consists in keeping the young human being away from a
wholly materialistic conception of the world, as well as from a merely
formal religion, both of which would make difficult his later approach
to a true philosophical and religious conviction. Such children as are
educated in the natural sciences alone, as well as those who have heard
of Christianity too early and too often, or have been trained to make
use of religious expressions and forms mechanically (often against
the grain), only rarely grow up to be men who later have the power of
finding the way of peace. It is the especial task of education to keep
the young soul free from the strain of immorality, and inclined toward
a purer life than one that is based merely upon the senses. The soil
on which the noble plant of a true religion should later take root and
flourish is rendered unfit for that purpose by nothing so much as by
the dominance of sensuality. The soaring-power of the spirit is thereby
broken, and is regenerated again only with difficulty and partially,
if at all. With this, we return to the thought already expressed
elsewhere, that for the education of those who are to be given a higher
culture (for the boys, at least, and probably also for their mothers
and governesses and women teachers) the so-called classical education
is indispensable, and on the whole to be preferred to the ordinary
religious and moral instruction. Christianity then comes easily of
itself, later on, if any one has honestly traversed this stage of
instruction in the classical philosophy (which can not and should not
be the final stage); and, as history has shown, Christianity bears its
finest fruits upon a classical substratum. In particular, a classically
educated spirit will never be able to sink into mere ecclesiasticism,
and still less into the insipidities and the trivialities which,
much as they are foreign to the great and noble nature of pristine
Christianity, nevertheless, to its immense harm, cling to the quite
common conception of it.
Besides, Christianity undoubtedly contains an element of alienation
from the world, an element that can not be so suitable for the
education of a young human being still intent upon the growth of all
his intellectual faculties, as it is for the self-training that comes
later. Indeed, one may go so far as to say that physical well-being
(though by no means the highest form of feeling nor the highest
destiny), and a certain human impulse to self-exaltation (which later
finds its limit in the true humility of Christianity) are natural and
even necessary to the growth of youth, and for this very reason the
classical examples and ideals (and those of the Old Testament also, of
course) fit in better with this period than do those of the Christian
era. Only, the classical education must be adapted to the circumstances
of the pupils’ environment, or this environment must itself be able
to be elevated at the same time, or it will often make the pupils
discontented with their lot. Indeed, it is even as Flattich rightly
pointed out of old in the naïve words, “Youth must have its time of
raging, though not wickedly so;” and for those who do not have this
period in youth, it often comes afterward, only worse and more secretly.
When education has planted in the young human being a disposition
inclined toward the ideal, and has begotten in him an aversion to
all that is vulgar, together with some good life-habits, then it has
performed its most important duty. At present, indeed, it wants to do
more than this, but in reality it accomplishes less.
Two things must be made particularly clear to the young man at the
conclusion of the first life-period: in the first place, within the
limits of natural laws men attain to everything, so to speak, that
they earnestly desire. Only, they must begin at the right time, must
proceed in the right order, and must above all things not chase two
hares at once. To become rich, renowned, learned, or virtuous, there
is need in every case of a single-minded and orderly struggle that
suffers no competition of some rival purpose. One must therefore know
what one wants to be, and choose the right thing as early as possible.
Then “the man grows, of himself, along with his greater aims.” Without
these, he is vainly tempted to seek his development in the artificial
forcing-beds of education.
The way in which this subjectivity (not wrong at the first) comes to
an end is not one that can be exactly determined, either as to the
time the end takes place or as to the cause that brings it about. The
change usually begins with premonitions which eventually become strong
impressions. These are often called forth merely by isolated words
which sometimes have been spoken by men, apparently by chance, but are
more frequently derived from reading. Books that fall into a man’s hand
at just the right time are nowadays most frequently the instrumentality
of the summons to a higher life. Many a time, also, the soul suddenly,
in moments of elevation, sees itself transported to a quite different
plane from that on which it really lives. It espies, as often happens
to the mountain-wanderer, a new and beautiful region quite near before
it, but which is still separated from its present standing-ground by
a vast chasm, over which a bridge leads, but only far below in the
depths.
In this period isolated experiences also occur which may be classed
as strange, as hard to be described, and as by no means essential to
development. On this point mystic writers say that there are three
kinds of more intimate union with the divine: first, the quite regular
kind (thus already understood in the Old Testament), that comes through
submission and sincere love, a union that always remains open in its
nature, that nothing can interrupt save a man’s own will contending
against the will of God, and that is at once reëstablished as soon as
the will is again accordant; second, an extraordinary kind, that comes
through devout contemplation, which can not, however, be artificially
produced, but which is only a yet greater affection of the heart,
waiting in patience and humility for the response that God will perhaps
give thereto; and lastly, a still more sensitive feeling of nearness
to God, coming for the most part quite unexpectedly, but, of all the
three, the least necessary and important for the progress of the inner
life.
The end of the first stage of life is not satisfying--can not and
should not be. All subjectivity is a form of thinking that ends in
dissatisfaction, and the nobler the soul, the more quickly and deeply
it falls into it. Along with this there very often comes a certain
failure in the outer life, almost enigmatical; the cause is given in
very picturesque language by an Israelitic prophet, Hosea, “I will
hedge up the way with thorns, and I will make a fence against her, that
she shall not find her paths.” It is the genuine mercy of God when
every false way a man wishes to strike into is hedged with thorns; or
when he, in another beautiful Israelitic simile, like a lily among
thorns, can find his growth only straight upward. Those are the sorrows
of youth for which later one is most thankful.
Nevertheless, because of these things a certain sadness masters
the soul, and but few noteworthy men are to be found who have not
temporarily suffered melancholy in their youth. Even at best, they live
in the mood which Goethe depicts in the words:
_So still and thoughtful? Something is lacking; freely confess.
“Contented am I, but ’tis not well with me, nevertheless.”_
But, as every brave young soul sees, life is not given us with the
purpose that we may always be only “still and thoughtful,” nor that we
may consume ourselves in disconsolate complaints or in the pessimism
that wastes the soul’s powers. Those are the conditions that attend
transition, and must appear. A new life must spring therefrom, but one
feels, indeed, that a kind of death first lies between.
This is the surrender of the personal will, intent upon the selfish
life; this will a man renounces with so much difficulty that Calvin was
able to found upon this fact his doctrine of a formal predestination
of some to this development of his true existence, and of others to a
loss of it. But every such death, for those who bear within them the
seed of an eternal life, is not the final goal, but the means to a
new and higher development of life. Whoever is unable to hold fast to
this hope with the tenacity with which Job clung to it, and yet is no
longer able to find any satisfaction in the world of the senses, falls
now into a gloomy asceticism which is forever shovelling at his grave;
or into an idle dialogue (in diaries and letters) with his painful
dissatisfaction with the universe; or into the confused Buddhistic
longing for some Nirvana; or, finally, into one of the various other
aberrations of the human spirit, which all agree only in considering
the true way as an impossible or fantastic one.
At this point of life, for a time, the word of salvation is, Forward!
II
At about the middle of a man’s life, and often the most quickly in the
case of the best and most successful lives, there comes a moment of
dissatisfaction with all that has hitherto been attained. This is more
frequently the case among the cultured than among the other classes,
because the continuous struggle of the latter for existence partly
spares them this dissatisfaction and more clearly shows the way to
free themselves from it. When, at this time, any one stands quite at
the exit-gates of earthly existence, all human concerns appear to him
literally nothing worth, and he would never feel kindly toward them
again, even in their highest activities, if the wisdom of this world
did not bring him back into the belief that these are only morbid
sensations that must be overcome by a feeling of robust vitality.
This, to be sure, they must do, but not unless a real death of the
selfish nature precedes; upon such a death the most in every human life
depends, although this event does not always come to pass in just the
same form. The same feeling, however, is present in all nobler souls,
that they do not get forward with their “intentions to do better,”
but daily find new hindrances in themselves and in the surrounding
world; and that, in their own nature, what is lacking is not the dream,
indeed, but the _power_ of attaining an existence truly worthy of man.
Those are conditions that often last for years; in their later period
arise thoughts which, to some, make this process seem to resemble the
ascent of a mountain.
But this ascending of the mountain does not always lead to the true
summit it is designed for, even in the case of the best men, and in
this respect, also, one is tempted to believe in predestination.
Another mountain-peak which is sometimes attained is a noble
scepticism, such as Gottfried Keller gives expression to in the
touching words that, at some time or other in life, one must accustom
himself to the thought of a real death, and that if he then gathers
himself together, he does not become any the worse man therefor.
Certainly not, only he is no perfectly satisfied man, with the thirst
for truth and eternal life slaked; that is a goal which the most
beautiful sceptical philosophy never reaches.
Doubting thought stands on a still higher plane in “The Holy Grail” of
Tennyson:
“_Thereafter, the dark warning of our King,
That most of us would follow wandering fires,
Came like a driving gloom across my mind:
Then every evil word I had spoken once,
And every evil thought I had thought of old,
And every evil deed I ever did,
Awoke and cried: ‘This Quest is not for thee.’_”
Beyond this thought the most earnest and sincere souls would never get,
if it were not for the solution which the English poet himself offers
at the conclusion of his profound poem:
“_Let visions of the night or of the day
Come, as they will; and many a time they come,
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light,
This air that smites his forehead is not air
But vision--yea, his very hand and foot--In
moments when he feels he can not die,
And knows himself no vision to himself,
Nor the high God a vision, nor that One
Who rose again._”
It is very strange that a matter that has been in existence for almost
two thousand years, that has already busied the minds and hearts of
millions of teachers and writers, and that has been borne with great
cost and exertions over seas and preached to nations to whom it was
unknown, has become unfamiliar in its own place of dominion and among
the most cultured nations of the globe. Or can we asseverate that the
spirit, or, let us say, even the thought, of Christianity is something
that is generally known and acknowledged in our European states?
Far removed from this view, some within so-called Christendom, like
the Roman procurator Festus, hold Christianity to be a sort of more or
less harmless superstition concerning “one Jesus, who was dead, whom
Paul affirmed to be alive”; others regard it as a society which it is
the proper thing to belong to, without necessarily having any further
interest in it; a third class looks upon it as a hierarchy of priests
which, for reasons mostly external, they either reverence or abhor.
To yet others it is a science called theology, to penetrate which
there is need of very long courses of study and many examinations.
And when they come to the particulars in the “structure of doctrine,”
not many among the learned wholly agree as to what faith is, or
mercy, or the significance of the “sacrifice of Christ,” whether
there is predestination and eternal punishment, or a “restoration of
all things,” or what are the methodical steps one must take, to be
saved. Every one who ventures into these labyrinths of theological
and philosophical thought, without at the same time possessing a
very decided aspiration toward the highest truth and a very sound
understanding of human nature, is apparently in danger of losing the
one or the other. And so, thousands of the most cultured men of our day
have, in fact, given up making any further trial of what seems to be
joined with only trouble, contention, doubt, and renunciation of the
natural enjoyments of life, only to lead, at the end, to nothing other
than a kind of human slavery, without any better assurance than before.
Christianity is now, for the greater part of Christians, a doctrine of
the churches and the schools, which one listens to as long as one must,
but from which a cultured man will inwardly free himself as quickly as
possible, even if he still outwardly believes he must allow himself to
fit into forms of the social life when once they have become historical.
The simple answer to this is that we can neither dispense with
Christianity nor put something in its place. We do not know (and it
would be useless to wish to discover) what would have become of the
civilized world, if Christianity had not appeared in it when it did;
but it is certain that we can no longer get away from it now, nor
ignore it, but we must reckon with it as with something that will
endure, yet can not be wholly explained by science. True, science
can not be prevented from discovering, as completely as possible,
everything that is knowable, or from extending the sphere of the
knowable as widely as possible; that is its right and its duty. With
this there goes, in the conception of particular minds, the supposition
that everything is knowable that concerns mankind, or that, at any
rate, everything can be made knowable in time. This is the basis of
a considerable part of the courage and the perseverance found in
scientific investigation. But just as little may it be forbidden us to
doubt that men will ever succeed in completely fathoming human nature
in all its relationships to the universal Being and in its connection
with all things; but even so, it is the duty (and of cultured people
most of all) nevertheless, to stand firm, and in particular to put
away the presumption with which imperfect knowledge, or even mere
hypotheses, are wont to be set up in the place of the inward conviction
as to the existence and worth of super-sensual things.
Highly as humanity has cause to value science and its steady advance,
it would, nevertheless, take a tremendous backward step, if one should
be able to remove from the sphere of its life and from the motives of
its actions everything that is not scientifically provable. This is the
ideal of many educated people of our time, but it is a false and a very
inadequate one.
Our knowledge is patchwork, and will remain such. We shall scarcely
ever be able to know even everything that concerns ourselves. Nor
do the strongest motives of our best actions spring from the sphere
of knowledge; otherwise the most learned people must always be the
most perfect, which is by no means the case. Our spiritual Ego is
rooted rather in the Unexplainable, and experience shows that if this
something unexplainable is ever taken from the Ego in questions of
faith, it tries to make up for the loss by adopting some superstition
or other.
Of all the objects of faith, however, faith in Christ is historically
the best established, humanly the most intelligible, and as a matter
of personal experience the most easily found to be true. If in any
man it is not all this, truly and enduringly, then the cause lies in
his own will, or absence of will, for which the Gospel of John finds
the correct expression, “as many as received him, to them gave he the
right to become children of God.” Luther also truly says: “Because
the expression ‘to trust God and serve Him’ must be so elastic that
every man follows after his own thoughts, and one thinks so and the
other thus, therefore He has fixed Himself to a certain place and to a
certain person, since He wants to be found and met in such a way that
one may not miss Him.” A man’s faith is, therefore, itself no force
or power, else superstition must also be such, but all true power in
spiritual things is the property of God. But he summons this power and
makes its appearance upon earth possible.
Only, this is likewise true, that Christianity has no effect in a
man whose spirit is unbroken, who has no inner humility, but then it
remains an empty form at best. If it is then united with the office
of teaching, or with some other pretension of a special position or
distinction, it conduces to the man’s destruction. What is regarded in
the outer life as an irreparable harm, “a broken existence,” a rent
that runs through all the plans of life, is not at all such in the
inner; on the contrary, that is the soil in which faith in Christ best
prospers, and they of all men are most to be pitied who despair just
at the moment when they find themselves in such a position and can not
grasp how near they are to salvation.
From this moment of humility there enters into man the real
regenerative power of the good, which springs from that true
righteousness which “counts” with God.