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 insensitivity 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,
e. g., 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 today 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, 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, 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,
e. g., 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, etc.
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,
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,1 the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory,
mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say:
All things are nothing to me.2