"If any man be in Christ, he is a _new creature_; the old is passed
away, behold, all is become _new_."[11]
As it was said above, "To the ancients the world was a truth," we must
say here, "To the moderns the spirit was a truth"; but here, as there,
we must not omit the supplement, "a truth whose untruth they tried to
get back of, and at last they really do."
A course similar to that which antiquity took may be demonstrated in
Christianity also, in that the _understanding_ was held a prisoner under
the dominion of the Christian dogmas up to the time preparatory to the
Reformation, but in the pre-Reformation century asserted itself
_sophistically_ and played heretical pranks with all tenets of the
faith. And the talk then was, especially in Italy and at the Roman
court, "If only the heart remains Christian-minded, the understanding
may go right on taking its pleasure."
Long before the Reformation people were so thoroughly accustomed to
fine-spun "wranglings" that the pope, and most others, looked on
Luther's appearance too as a mere "wrangling of monks" at first.
Humanism corresponds to Sophisticism, and, as in the time of the
Sophists Greek life stood in its fullest bloom (the Periclean age), so
the most brilliant things happened in the time of Humanism, or, as one
might perhaps also say, of Machiavellianism (printing, the New World,
etc.). At this time the heart was still far from wanting to relieve
itself of its Christian contents.
But finally the Reformation, like Socrates, took hold seriously of the
_heart_ itself, and since then hearts have kept growing visibly--more
unchristian. As with Luther people began to take the matter to heart,
the outcome of this step of the Reformation must be that the heart also
gets lightened of the heavy burden of Christian faith. The heart, from
day to day more unchristian, loses the contents with which it had busied
itself, till at last nothing but empty _warm-heartedness_ is left it,
the quite general love of men, the love of Man, the consciousness of
freedom, "self-consciousness."
Only so is Christianity complete, because it has become bald, withered,
and void of contents. There are now no contents whatever against which
the heart does not mutiny, unless indeed the heart unconsciously or
without "self-consciousness" lets them slip in. The heart _criticises_
to death with _hard-hearted_ mercilessness everything that wants to make
its way in, and is capable (except, as before, unconsciously or taken by
surprise) of no friendship, no love. What could there be in men to love,
since they are all alike "egoists," none of them _man_ as such, _i. e._
none _spirit_ only? The Christian loves only the spirit; but where could
one be found who should be really nothing but spirit?
To have a liking for the corporeal man with hide and hair,--why, that
would no longer be a "spiritual" warm-heartedness, it would be treason
against "pure" warm-heartedness, the "theoretical regard." For pure
warm-heartedness is by no means to be conceived as like that kindliness
that gives everybody a friendly hand-shake; on the contrary, pure
warm-heartedness is warm-hearted toward nobody, it is only a theoretical
interest, concern for man as man, not as a person. The person is
repulsive to it because of being "egoistic," because of not being that
abstraction, Man. But it is only for the abstraction that one can have a
theoretical regard. To pure warm-heartedness or pure theory men exist
only to be criticised, scoffed at, and thoroughly despised; to it, no
less than to the fanatical parson, they are only "filth" and other such
nice things.
Pushed to this extremity of disinterested warm-heartedness, we must
finally become conscious that the spirit, which alone the Christian
loves, is nothing; in other words, that the spirit is--a lie.
What has here been set down roughly, summarily, and doubtless as yet
incomprehensibly, will, it is to be hoped, become clear as we go on.
Let us take up the inheritance left by the ancients, and, as active
workmen, do with it as much as--can be done with it! The world lies
despised at our feet, far beneath us and our heaven, into which its
mighty arms are no longer thrust and its stupefying breath does not
come. Seductively as it may pose, it can delude nothing but our _sense_;
it cannot lead astray the spirit--and spirit alone, after all, we really
are. Having once got _back_ of things, the spirit has also got _above_
them, and become free from their bonds, emancipated supernal, free. So
speaks "spiritual freedom."
To the spirit which, after long toil, has got rid of the world, the
worldless spirit, nothing is left after the loss of the world and the
worldly but--the spirit and the spiritual.
Yet, as it has only moved away from the world and made of itself a being
_free from the world_, without being able really to annihilate the
world, this remains to it a stumbling-block that cannot be cleared away,
a discredited existence; and, as, on the other hand, it knows and
recognizes nothing but the spirit and the spiritual, it must perpetually
carry about with it the longing to spiritualize the world, _i. e._ to
redeem it from the "black list." Therefore, like a youth, it goes about
with plans for the redemption or improvement of the world.
The ancients, we saw, served the natural, the worldly, the natural order
of the world, but they incessantly asked themselves whether they could
not, then, relieve themselves of this service; and, when they had tired
themselves to death in ever-renewed attempts at revolt, then, among
their last sighs, was born to them the _God_, the "conqueror of the
world." All their doing had been nothing but _wisdom of the world_, an
effort to get back of the world and above it. And what is the wisdom of
the many following centuries? What did the moderns try to get back of?
No longer to get back of the world, for the ancients had accomplished
that; but back of the God whom the ancients bequeathed to them, back of
the God who "is spirit," back of everything that is the spirit's, the
spiritual. But the activity of the spirit, which "searches even the
depths of the Godhead," is _theology_. If the ancients have nothing to
show but wisdom of the world, the moderns never did nor do make their
way further than to theology. We shall see later that even the newest
revolts against God are nothing but the extremest efforts of "theology,"
_i. e._ theological insurrections.
§ 1.--THE SPIRIT
The realm of spirits is monstrously great, there is an infinite deal of
the spiritual; yet let us look and see what the spirit, this bequest of
the ancients, properly is.
Out of their birth-pangs it came forth, but they themselves could not
utter themselves as spirit; they could give birth to it, it itself must
speak. The "born God, the Son of Man," is the first to utter the word
that the spirit, _i. e._ he, God, has to do with nothing earthly and no
earthly relationship, but solely with the spirit and spiritual
relationships.
Is my courage, indestructible under all the world's blows, my
inflexibility and my obduracy, perchance already spirit in the full
sense, because the world cannot touch it? Why, then it would not yet be
at enmity with the world, and all its action would consist merely in not
succumbing to the world! No, so long as it does not busy itself with
itself alone, so long as it does not have to do with _its_ world, the
spiritual, alone, it is not _free_ spirit, but only the "spirit of this
world," the spirit fettered to it. The spirit is free spirit, _i. e._
really spirit, only in a world of _its own_; in "this," the world, it is
a stranger. Only through a spiritual world is the spirit really spirit,
for "this" world does not understand it and does not know how to keep
"the maiden from a foreign land"[12] from departing.
But where is it to get this spiritual world? Where but out of itself? It
must reveal itself; and the words that it speaks, the revelations in
which it unveils itself, these are _its_ world. As a visionary lives and
has _his_ world only in the visionary pictures that he himself creates,
as a crazy man generates for himself his own dream-world, without which
he could not be crazy, so the spirit must create for itself its spirit
world, and is not spirit till it creates it.
Thus its creations make it spirit, and by its creatures we know it, the
creator; in them it lives, they are its world.
Now, what is the spirit? It is the creator of a spiritual world! Even in
you and me people do not recognize spirit till they see that we have
appropriated to ourselves something spiritual,--_i. e._, though thoughts
may have been set before us, we have at least brought them to life in
ourselves; for, as long as we were children, the most edifying thoughts
might have been laid before us without our wishing, or being able to
reproduce them in ourselves. So the spirit also exists only when it
creates something spiritual; it is real only together with the
spiritual, its creature.
As, then, we know it by its works, the question is what these works are.
But the works or children of the spirit are nothing else but--spirits:
If I had before me Jews, Jews of the true metal, I should have to stop
here and leave them standing before this mystery as for almost two
thousand years they have remained standing before it, unbelieving and
without knowledge. But, as you, my dear reader, are at least not a
full-blooded Jew,--for such a one will not go astray as far as this,--we
will still go along a bit of road together, till perhaps you too turn
your back on me because I laugh in your face.
If somebody told you you were altogether spirit, you would take hold of
your body and not believe him, but answer: "I _have_ a spirit, no doubt,
but do not exist only as spirit, but am a man with a body." You would
still distinguish _yourself_ from "your spirit." "But," replies he, "it
is your destiny, even though now you are yet going about in the fetters
of the body, to be one day a 'blessed spirit,' and, however you may
conceive of the future aspect of your spirit, so much is yet certain,
that in death you will put off this body and yet keep yourself, _i. e._
your spirit, for all eternity; accordingly your spirit is the eternal
and true in you, the body only a dwelling here below, which you may
leave and perhaps exchange for another."
Now you believe him! For the present, indeed, _you_ are not spirit only;
but, when you emigrate from the mortal body, as one day you must, then
you will have to help yourself without the body, and therefore it is
needful that you be prudent and care in time for your proper self. "What
should it profit a man if he gained the whole world and yet suffered
damage in his soul?"
But, even granted that doubts, raised in the course of time against the
tenets of the Christian faith, have long since robbed you of faith in
the immortality of your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenet
undisturbed, and still ingenuously adhere to the one truth, that the
spirit is your better part, and that the spiritual has greater claims on
you than anything else. Despite all your atheism, in zeal against
_egoism_ you concur with the believers in immortality.
But whom do you think of under the name of egoist? A man who, instead of
living to an idea,--_i. e._ a spiritual thing--and sacrificing to it his
personal advantage, serves the latter. A good patriot, _e. g._, brings
his sacrifice to the altar of the fatherland; but it cannot be disputed
that the fatherland is an idea, since for beasts incapable of mind,[13]
or children as yet without mind, there is no fatherland and no
patriotism. Now, if any one does not approve himself as a good patriot,
he betrays his egoism with reference to the fatherland. And so the
matter stands in innumerable other cases: he who in human society takes
the benefit of a prerogative sins egoistically against the idea of
equality; he who exercises dominion is blamed as an egoist against the
idea of liberty,--etc.
You despise the egoist because he puts the spiritual in the background
as compared with the personal, and has his eyes on himself where you
would like to see him act to favor an idea. The distinction between you
is that he makes himself the central point, but you the spirit; or that
you cut your identity in two and exalt your "proper self," the spirit,
to be ruler of the paltrier remainder, while he will hear nothing of
this cutting in two, and pursues spiritual and material interests just
_as he pleases_. You think, to be sure, that you are falling foul of
those only who enter into no spiritual interest at all, but in fact you
curse at everybody who does not look on the spiritual interest as his
"true and highest" interest. You carry your knightly service for this
beauty so far that you affirm her to be the only beauty of the world.
You live not to _yourself_, but to your _spirit_ and to what is the
spirit's--_i. e._ ideas.
As the spirit exists only in its creating of the spiritual, let us take
a look about us for its first creation. If only it has accomplished
this, there follows thenceforth a natural propagation of creations, as
according to the myth only the first human beings needed to be created,
the rest of the race propagating of itself. The first creation, on the
other hand, must come forth "out of nothing,"--_i. e._, the spirit has
toward its realization nothing but itself, or rather it has not yet even
itself, but must create itself; hence its first creation is itself, _the
spirit_. Mystical as this sounds, we yet go through it as an every-day
experience. Are you a thinking being before you think? In creating the
first thought you create yourself, the thinking one; for you do not
think before you think a thought, _i. e._ have a thought. Is it not your
singing that first makes you a singer, your talking that makes you a
talker? Now, so too it is the production of the spiritual that first
makes you a spirit.
Meantime, as you distinguish _yourself_ from the thinker, singer, and
talker, so you no less distinguish yourself from the spirit, and feel
very clearly that you are something beside spirit. But, as in the
thinking ego hearing and sight easily vanish in the enthusiasm of
thought, so you also have been seized by the spirit-enthusiasm, and you
now long with all your might to become wholly spirit and to be dissolved
in spirit. The spirit is your _ideal_, the unattained, the otherworldly;
spirit is the name of your--god, "God is spirit."
Against all that is not spirit you are a zealot, and therefore you play
the zealot against _yourself_ who cannot get rid of a remainder of the
non-spiritual. Instead of saying, "I am _more_ than spirit," you say
with contrition, "I am less than spirit; and spirit, pure spirit, or the
spirit that is nothing but spirit, I can only think of, but am not; and,
since I am not it, it is another, exists as another, whom I call 'God'."
It lies in the nature of the case that the spirit that is to exist as
pure spirit must be an otherworldly one, for, since I am not it, it
follows that it can only be _outside_ me; since in any case a human
being is not fully comprehended in the concept "spirit," it follows that
the pure spirit, the spirit as such, can only be outside of men, beyond
the human world,--not earthly, but heavenly.
Only from this disunion in which I and the spirit lie; only because "I"
and "spirit" are not names for one and the same thing, but different
names for completely different things; only because I am not spirit and
spirit not I,--only from this do we get a quite tautological explanation
of the necessity that the spirit dwells in the other world, _i. e._ is
God.
But from this it also appears how thoroughly theological is the
liberation that Feuerbach[14] is laboring to give us. What he says is
that we had only mistaken our own essence, and therefore looked for it
in the other world, but that now, when we see that God was only our
human essence, we must recognize it again as ours and move it back out
of the other world into this. To God, who is spirit, Feuerbach gives the
name "Our Essence." Can we put up with this, that "Our Essence" is
brought into opposition to _us_,--that we are split into an essential
and an unessential self? Do we not therewith go back into the dreary
misery of seeing ourselves banished out of ourselves?
What have we gained, then, when for a variation we have transferred into
ourselves the divine outside us? _Are we_ that which is in us? As little
as we are that which is outside us. I am as little my heart as I am my
sweetheart, this "other self" of mine. Just because we are not the
spirit that dwells in us, just for that reason we had to take it and set
it outside us; it was not we, did not coincide with us, and therefore we
could not think of it as existing otherwise than outside us, on the
other side from us, in the other world.
With the strength of _despair_ Feuerbach clutches at the total substance
of Christianity, not to throw it away, no, to drag it to himself, to
draw it, the long-yearned-for, ever-distant, out of its heaven with a
last effort, and keep it by him forever. Is not that a clutch of the
uttermost despair, a clutch for life or death, and is it not at the
same time the Christian yearning and hungering for the other world? The
hero wants not to go into the other world, but to draw the other world
to him, and compel it to become this world! And since then has not all
the world, with more or less consciousness, been crying that "this
world" is the vital point, and heaven must come down on earth and be
experienced even here?
Let us, in brief, set Feuerbach's theological view and our contradiction
over against each other!
"The essence of man is man's supreme being;[15] now by religion, to be
sure, the _supreme being_ is called _God_ and regarded as an _objective_
essence, but in truth it is only man's own essence; and therefore the
turning point of the world's history is that henceforth no longer _God_,
but man, is to appear to man as God."[16]
To this we reply: The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but,
just because it is his _essence_ and not he himself, it remains quite
immaterial whether we see it outside him and view it as "God," or find
it in him and call it "Essence of Man" or "Man." _I_ am neither God nor
_Man_,[17] neither the supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it
is all one in the main whether I think of the essence as in me or
outside me. Nay, we really do always think of the supreme being as in
both kinds of otherworldliness, the inward and outward, at once; for
the "Spirit of God" is, according to the Christian view, also "our
spirit," and "dwells in us."[18] It dwells in heaven and dwells in us;
we poor things are just its "dwelling," and, if Feuerbach goes on to
destroy its heavenly dwelling and force it to move to us bag and
baggage, then we, its earthly apartments, will be badly overcrowded.
But after this digression (which, if we were at all proposing to work by
line and level, we should have had to save for later pages in order to
avoid repetition) we return to the spirit's first creation, the spirit
itself.
The spirit is something other than myself. But this other, what is it?
§ 2.--THE POSSESSED.
Have you ever seen a spirit? "No, not I, but my grandmother." Now, you
see, it's just so with me too; I myself haven't seen any, but my
grandmother had them running between her feet all sorts of ways, and out
of confidence in our grandmothers' honesty we believe in the existence
of spirits.
But had we no grandfathers then, and did they not shrug their shoulders
every time our grandmothers told about their ghosts? Yes, those were
unbelieving men who have harmed our good religion much, those
rationalists! We shall feel that! What else lies at the bottom of this
warm faith in ghosts, if not the faith in "the existence of spiritual
beings in general," and is not this latter itself disastrously unsettled
if saucy men of the understanding may disturb the former? The
Romanticists were quite conscious what a blow the very belief in God
suffered by the laying aside of the belief in spirits or ghosts, and
they tried to help us out of the baleful consequences not only by their
reawakened fairy world, but at last, and especially, by the "intrusion
of a higher world," by their somnambulists, prophetesses of Prevorst,
etc. The good believers and fathers of the church did not suspect that
with the belief in ghosts the foundation of religion was withdrawn, and
that since then it had been floating in the air. He who no longer
believes in any ghost needs only to travel on consistently in his
unbelief to see that there is no separate being at all concealed behind
things, no ghost or--what is naively reckoned as synonymous even in our
use of words--no "_spirit_."
"Spirits exist!" Look about in the world, and say for yourself whether a
spirit does not gaze upon you out of everything. Out of the lovely
little flower there speaks to you the spirit of the Creator, who has
shaped it so wonderfully; the stars proclaim the spirit that established
their order; from the mountain-tops a spirit of sublimity breathes down;
out of the waters a spirit of yearning murmurs up; and--out of men
millions of spirits speak. The mountains may sink, the flowers fade, the
world of stars fall in ruins, the men die--what matters the wreck of
these visible bodies? The spirit, the "invisible spirit," abides
eternally!
Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only _is_ haunted? Nay, it itself
"walks," it is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering
seeming-body of a spirit, it is a spook. What else should a ghost be,
then, than an apparent body, but real spirit? Well, the world is
"empty," is "naught," is only glamorous "semblance"; its truth is the
spirit alone; it is the seeming-body of a spirit.
Look out near or far, a _ghostly_ world surrounds you everywhere; you
are always having "apparitions" or visions. Everything that appears to
you is only the phantasm of an indwelling spirit, is a ghostly
"apparition"; the world is to you only a "world of appearances," behind
which the spirit walks. You "see spirits."
Are you perchance thinking of comparing yourself with the ancients, who
saw gods everywhere? Gods, my dear modern, are not spirits; gods do not
degrade the world to a semblance, and do not spiritualize it.
But to you the whole world is spiritualized, and has become an
enigmatical ghost; therefore do not wonder if you likewise find in
yourself nothing but a spook. Is not your body haunted by your spirit,
and is not the latter alone the true and real, the former only the
"transitory, naught" or a "semblance"? Are we not all ghosts, uncanny
beings that wait for "deliverance,"--to wit, "spirits"?
Since the spirit appeared in the world, since "the Word became flesh,"
since then the world has been spiritualized, enchanted, a spook.
You have spirit, for you have thoughts. What are your thoughts?
"Spiritual entities." Not things, then? "No, but the spirit of things,
the main point in all things, the inmost in them, their--idea."
Consequently what you think is not only your thought? "On the contrary,
it is that in the world which is most real, that which is properly to be
called true; it is the truth itself; if I only think truly, I think the
truth. I may, to be sure, err with regard to the truth, and _fail to
recognize_ it; but, if I _recognize_ truly, the object of my cognition
is the truth." So, I suppose, you strive at all times to recognize the
truth? "To me the truth is sacred. It may well happen that I find a
truth incomplete and replace it with a better, but _the_ truth I cannot
abrogate. I _believe_ in the truth, therefore I search in it; nothing
transcends it, it is eternal."
Sacred, eternal is the truth; it is the Sacred, the Eternal. But you,
who let yourself be filled and led by this sacred thing, are yourself
hallowed. Further, the sacred is not for your senses,--and you never as
a sensual man discover its trace,--but for your faith, or, more
definitely still, for your _spirit_; for it itself, you know, is a
spiritual thing, a spirit,--is spirit for the spirit.
The sacred is by no means so easily to be set aside as many at present
affirm, who no longer take this "unsuitable" word into their mouths. If
even in a single respect I am still _upbraided_ as an "egoist," there is
left the thought of something else which I should serve more than
myself, and which must be to me more important than everything; in
short, somewhat in which I should have to seek my true welfare,[19]
something--"sacred."[20] However human this sacred thing may look,
though it be the Human itself, that does not take away its sacredness,
but at most changes it from an unearthly to an earthly sacred thing,
from a divine one to a human.
Sacred things exist only for the egoist who does not acknowledge
himself, the _involuntary egoist_, for him who is always looking after
his own and yet does not count himself as the highest being, who serves
only himself and at the same time always thinks he is serving a higher
being, who knows nothing higher than himself and yet is infatuated about
something higher; in short, for the egoist who would like not to be an
egoist, and abases himself (_i. e._ combats his egoism), but at the same
time abases himself only for the sake of "being exalted," and therefore
of gratifying his egoism. Because he would like to cease to be an
egoist, he looks about in heaven and earth for higher beings to serve
and sacrifice himself to; but, however much he shakes and disciplines
himself, in the end he does all for his own sake, and the disreputable
egoism will not come off him. On this account I call him the involuntary
egoist.
His toil and care to get away from himself is nothing but the
misunderstood impulse to self-dissolution. If you are bound to your past
hour, if you must babble to-day because you babbled yesterday,[21] if
you can not transform yourself each instant, you feel yourself fettered
in slavery and benumbed. Therefore over each minute of your existence a
fresh minute of the future beckons to you, and, developing yourself, you
get away "from yourself,"--_i. e._ from the self that was at that
moment. As you are at each instant, you are your own creature, and in
this very "creature" you do not wish to lose yourself, the creator. You
are yourself a higher being than you are, and surpass yourself. But that
_you_ are the one who is higher than you,--_i. e._ that you are not only
creature, but likewise your creator,--just this, as an involuntary
egoist, you fail to recognize; and therefore the "higher essence" is to
you--an alien[22] essence. Every higher essence, such as truth, mankind,
etc., is an essence _over_ us.
Alienness is a criterion of the "sacred." In everything sacred there
lies something "uncanny," _i. e._ strange,[23] such as we are not quite
familiar and at home in. What is sacred to me is _not my own_; and if,
_e. g._ the property of others was not sacred to me, I should look on it
as _mine_, which I should take to myself when occasion offered. Or, on
the other side, if I regard the face of the Chinese emperor as sacred,
it remains strange to my eye, which I close at its appearance.
Why is an incontrovertible mathematical truth, which might even be
called eternal according to the common understanding of words,
not--sacred? Because it is not revealed, or not the revelation of a
higher being. If by revealed we understand only the so-called religious
truths, we go far astray, and entirely fail to recognize the breadth of
the concept "higher being." Atheists keep up their scoffing at the
higher being, which was also honored under the name of the "highest" or
_être suprême_, and trample in the dust one "proof of his existence"
after another without noticing that they themselves, out of need for a
higher being, only annihilate the old to make room for a new. Is "Man"
perchance not a higher essence than an individual man, and must not the
truths, rights, and ideas which result from the concept of him be
honored and--counted sacred, as revelations of this very concept? For,
even though we should abrogate again many a truth that seemed to be made
manifest by this concept, yet this would only evince a misunderstanding
on our part, without in the least degree harming the sacred concept
itself or taking their sacredness from those truths that must rightly be
looked upon as its revelations. _Man_ reaches beyond every individual
man, and yet--though he be "his essence"--is not in fact _his_ essence
(which rather would be as single[24] as he the individual himself), but
a general and "higher," yes, for atheists "the highest essence."[25]
And, as the divine revelations were not written down by God with his own
hand, but made public through "the Lord's instruments," so also the new
highest essence does not write out its revelations itself, but lets them
come to our knowledge through "true men." Only the new essence betrays,
in fact, a more spiritual style of conception than the old God, because
the latter was still represented in a sort of embodiedness or form,
while the undimmed spirituality of the new is retained, and no special
material body is fancied for it. And withal it does not lack corporeity,
which even takes on a yet more seductive appearance because it looks
more natural and mundane and consists in nothing less than in every
bodily man,--yes, or outright in "humanity" or "all men." Thereby the
spectralness of the spirit in a seeming-body has once again become
really solid and popular.
Sacred, then, is the highest essence and everything in which this
highest essence reveals or will reveal itself; but hallowed are they who
recognize this highest essence together with its own, _i. e._ together
with its revelations. The sacred hallows in turn its reverer, who by his
worship becomes himself a saint, as likewise what he does is saintly, a
saintly walk, saintly thoughts and actions, imaginations and
aspirations, etc.
It is easily understood that the conflict over what is revered as the
highest essence can be significant only so long as even the most
embittered opponents concede to each other the main point,--that there
is a highest essence to which worship or service is due. If one should
smile compassionately at the whole struggle over a highest essence, as a
Christian might at the war of words between a Shiite and a Sunnite or
between a Brahman and a Buddhist, then the hypothesis of a highest
essence would be null in his eyes, and the conflict on this basis an
idle play. Whether then the one God or the three in one, whether the
Lutheran God or the _être suprême_ or not God at all, but "Man," may
represent the highest essence, that makes no difference at all for him
who denies the highest essence itself, for in his eyes those servants of
a highest essence are one and all--pious people, the most raging atheist
not less than the most faith-filled Christian.
In the foremost place of the sacred,[26] then, stands the highest
essence and the faith in this essence, our "holy[27] faith."