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 earthly 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"1 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 live 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 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 as 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 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,2
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 other-worldly; 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 Feuerbach3 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;4 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."5
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,6 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."7 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?