"If any man be in Christ, he
is a new creature; the old is passed away, behold, all
is become new."1
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 warmheartedness
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"
warmheartedness, it would be treason against "pure"
warmheartedness, the "theoretical regard." For pure
warmheartedness is by no means to be conceived as like that kindliness
that gives everybody a
friendly hand-shake; on the contrary, pure warmheartedness 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 warmheartedness or
pure theory men exist only to be criticized, 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
warmheartedness, 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 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.