Part 3 (2/2)

The break with the world is completely carried through by the Skeptics.

My entire relation to the world is ”worthless and truthless.” Timon says, ”The feelings and thoughts which we draw from the world contain no truth.” ”What is truth?” cries Pilate. According to Pyrrho's doctrine the world is neither good nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly, etc., but these are _predicates_ which I give it. Timon says that ”in itself nothing is either good or bad, but man only _thinks_ of it thus or thus”; to face the world only _ataraxia_ (unmovedness) and _aphasia_ (speechlessness--or, in other words, isolated _inwardness_) are left.

There is ”no longer any truth to be recognized” in the world; things contradict themselves; thoughts about things are without distinction (good and bad are all the same, so that what one calls good another finds bad); here the recognition of ”truth” is at an end, and only the _man without power of recognition_, the _man_ who finds in the world nothing to recognize, is left, and this man just leaves the truth-vacant world where it is and takes no account of it.

So antiquity gets trough with the _world of things_, the order of the world, the world as a whole; but to the order of the world, or the things of this world, belong not only nature, but all relations in which man sees himself placed by nature, _e. g._ the family, the community,--in short, the so-called ”natural bonds.” With the _world of the spirit_ Christianity then begins. The man who still faces the world _armed_ is the ancient, the--_heathen_ (to which cla.s.s the Jew, too, as non-Christian, belongs); the man who has come to be led by nothing but his ”heart's pleasure,” the interest he takes, his fellow-feeling, his--_spirit_, is the modern, the--Christian.

As the ancients worked toward the _conquest of the world_ and strove to release man from the heavy trammels of connection with _other things_, at last they came also to the dissolution of the State and giving preference to everything private. Of course community, family, etc., as _natural_ relations, are burdensome hindrances which diminish my _spiritual freedom_.

II.--THE MODERNS

”If any man be in Christ, he is a _new creature_; the old is pa.s.sed 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 a.s.serted 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 n.o.body, 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, emanc.i.p.ated 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 _G.o.d_, 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 G.o.d whom the ancients bequeathed to them, back of the G.o.d 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 G.o.dhead,” 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, the Son of Man,” is the first to utter the word that the spirit, _i. e._ he, G.o.d, has to do with nothing earthly and no earthly relations.h.i.+p, but solely with the spirit and spiritual relations.h.i.+ps.

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 succ.u.mbing 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.

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