Pre-Christian and Christian times pursue opposite goals; the former
wants to idealize the real, the latter to realize the ideal; the former
seeks the "holy spirit," the latter the "glorified body." Hence the
former closes with insensitiveness to the real, with "contempt for the
world"; the latter will end with the casting off of the ideal, with
"contempt for the spirit."
The opposition of the real and the ideal is an irreconcilable one, and
the one can never become the other: if the ideal became the real, it
would no longer be the ideal; and, if the real became the ideal, the
ideal alone would be, but not at all the real. The opposition of the two
is not to be vanquished otherwise than if _some one_ annihilates both.
Only in this "some one," the third party, does the opposition find its
end; otherwise idea and reality will ever fail to coincide. The idea
cannot be so realized as to remain idea, but is realized only when it
dies as idea; and it is the same with the real.
But now we have before us in the ancients adherents of the idea, in the
moderns adherents of reality. Neither can get clear of the opposition,
and both pine only, the one party for the spirit, and, when this
craving of the ancient world seemed to be satisfied and this spirit to
have come, the others immediately for the secularization of this spirit
again, which must forever remain a "pious wish."
The pious wish of the ancients was _sanctity_, the pious wish of the
moderns is _corporeity_. But, as antiquity had to go down if its longing
was to be satisfied (for it consisted only in the longing), so too
corporeity can never be attained within the ring of Christianness. As
the trait of sanctification or purification goes through the old world
(the washings, etc.), so that of incorporation goes through the
Christian world: God plunges down into this world, becomes flesh, and
wants to redeem it, _i. e._ fill it with himself; but, since he is "the
idea" or "the spirit," people (_e. g._ Hegel) in the end introduce the
idea into everything, into the world, and prove "that the idea is, that
reason is, in everything." "Man" corresponds in the culture of to-day to
what the heathen Stoics set up as "the wise man"; the latter, like the
former, a--_fleshless_ being. The unreal "wise man," this bodiless "holy
one" of the Stoics, became a real person, a bodily "Holy One," in God
_made flesh_; the unreal "man," the bodiless ego, will become real in
the _corporeal ego_, in me.
There winds its way through Christianity the question about the
"existence of God," which, taken up ever and ever again, gives testimony
that the craving for existence, corporeity, personality, reality, was
incessantly busying the heart because it never found a satisfying
solution. At last the question about the existence of God fell, but only
to rise up again in the proposition that the "divine" had existence
(Feuerbach). But this too has no existence, and neither will the last
refuge, that the "purely human" is realizable, afford shelter much
longer. No idea has existence, for none is capable of corporeity. The
scholastic contention of realism and nominalism has the same content; in
short, this spins itself out through all Christian history, and cannot
end _in_ it.
The world of Christians is working at _realizing ideas_ in the
individual relations of life, the institutions and laws of the Church
and the State; but they make resistance, and always keep back something
unembodied (unrealizable). Nevertheless this embodiment is restlessly
rushed after, no matter in what degree _corporeity_ constantly fails to
result.
For realities matter little to the realizer, but it matters everything
that they be realizations of the idea. Hence he is ever examining anew
whether the realized does in truth have the idea, its kernel, dwelling
in it; and in testing the real he at the same time tests the idea,
whether it is realizable as he thinks it, or is only thought by him
incorrectly, and for that reason unfeasibly.
The Christian is no longer to care for family, State, etc., as
_existences_; Christians are not to sacrifice themselves for these
"divine things" like the ancients, but these are only to be utilized to
make the _spirit alive_ in them. The _real_ family has become
indifferent, and there is to arise out of it an _ideal_ one which would
then be the "truly real," a sacred family, blessed by God, or, according
to the liberal way of thinking, a "rational" family. With the ancients
family, State, fatherland, etc., is divine as a thing _extant_; with
the moderns it is still awaiting divinity, as extant it is only sinful,
earthly, and has still to be "redeemed," _i. e._ to become truly real.
This has the following meaning: The family, etc., is not the extant and
real, but the divine, the idea, is extant and real; whether _this_
family will make itself real by taking up the truly real, the idea, is
still unsettled. It is not the individual's task to serve the family as
the divine, but, reversely, to serve the divine and to bring to it the
still undivine family, _i. e._ to subject everything in the idea's name,
to set up the idea's banner everywhere, to bring the idea to real
efficacy.
But, since the concern of Christianity, as of antiquity, is for the
_divine_, they always come out at this again on their opposite ways. At
the end of heathenism the divine becomes the _extramundane_, at the end
of Christianity the _intramundane_. Antiquity does not succeed in
putting it entirely outside the world, and, when Christianity
accomplishes this task, the divine instantly longs to get back into the
world and wants to "redeem" the world. But within Christianity it does
not and cannot come to this, that the divine as _intramundane_ should
really become the _mundane itself_: there is enough left that does and
must maintain itself unpenetrated as the "bad," irrational, accidental,
"egoistic," the "mundane" in the bad sense. Christianity begins with
God's becoming man, and carries on its work of conversion and redemption
through all time in order to prepare for God a reception in all men and
in everything human, and to penetrate everything with the spirit: it
sticks to preparing a place for the "spirit."
When the accent was at last laid on Man or mankind, it was again the
idea that they "_pronounced eternal_." "Man does not die!" They thought
they had now found the reality of the idea: _Man_ is the I of history,
of the world's history; it is he, this _ideal_, that really develops,
_i. e._ _realizes_, himself. He is the really real and corporeal one,
for history is his body, in which individuals are only members. Christ
is the I of the world's history, even of the pre-Christian; in modern
apprehension it is man, the figure of Christ has developed into the
_figure of man_: man as such, man absolutely, is the "central point" of
history. In "man" the imaginary beginning returns again; for "man" is as
imaginary as Christ is. "Man," as the I of the world's history, closes
the cycle of Christian apprehensions.
Christianity's magic circle would be broken if the strained relation
between existence and calling, _i. e._ between me as I am and me as I
should be, ceased; it persists only as the longing of the idea for its
bodiliness, and vanishes with the relaxing separation of the two: only
when the idea remains--idea, as man or mankind is indeed a bodiless
idea, is Christianity still extant. The corporeal idea, the corporeal or
"completed" spirit, floats before the Christian as "the end of the days"
or as the "goal of history"; it is not present time to him.
The individual can only have a part in the founding of the Kingdom of
God, or, according to the modern notion of the same thing, in the
development and history of humanity; and only so far as he has a part
in it does a Christian, or according to the modern expression human,
value pertain to him; for the rest he is dust and a worm-bag.
That the individual is of himself a world's history, and possesses his
property in the rest of the world's history, goes beyond what is
Christian. To the Christian the world's history is the higher thing,
because it is the history of Christ or "man"; to the egoist only _his_
history has value, because he wants to develop only _himself_, not the
mankind-idea, not God's plan, not the purposes of Providence, not
liberty, and the like. He does not look upon himself as a tool of the
idea or a vessel of God, he recognizes no calling, he does not fancy
that he exists for the further development of mankind and that he must
contribute his mite to it, but he lives himself out, careless of how
well or ill humanity may fare thereby. If it were not open to confusion
with the idea that a state of nature is to be praised, one might recall
Lenau's "Three Gypsies."--What, am I in the world to realize ideas? To
do my part by my citizenship, say, toward the realization of the idea
"State," or by marriage, as husband and father, to bring the idea of the
family into an existence? What does such a calling concern me! I live
after a calling as little as the flower grows and gives fragrance after
a calling.
The ideal "Man" is _realized_ when the Christian apprehension turns
about and becomes the proposition, "I, this unique one, am man." The
conceptual question, "what is man?"--has then changed into the personal
question, "who is man?" With "what" the concept was sought for, in order
to realize it; with "who" it is no longer any question at all, but the
answer is personally on hand at once in the asker: the question answers
itself.
They say of God, "Names name thee not." That holds good of me: no
_concept_ expresses me, nothing that is designated as my essence
exhausts me; they are only names. Likewise they say of God that he is
perfect and has no calling to strive after perfection. That too holds
good of me alone.
I am _owner_ of my might, and I am so when I know myself as _unique_. In
the _unique one_ the owner himself returns into his creative nothing,
out of which he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it
man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales only before the sun
of this consciousness. If I concern myself for myself,[242] the unique
one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who
consumes himself, and I may say: