The Essence of Christianity

CHAPTER XII.

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF FEELING, OR THE MYSTERY OF PRAYER

Israel is the historical definition of the specific nature of the religious consciousness, save only that here this consciousness was circumscribed by the limits of a particular, a national interest. Hence, we need only let these limits fall, and we have the Christian religion. Judaism is worldly Christianity; Christianity, spiritual Judaism. The Christian religion is the Jewish religion purified from national egoism, and yet at the same time it is certainly another, a new religion; for every reformation, every purification, produces – especially in religious matters, where even the trivial becomes important – an essential change. To the Jew, the Israelite was the mediator, the bond between God and man; in his relation to Jehovah he relied on his character of Israelite; Jehovah himself was nothing else than the self-consciousness of Israel made objective as the absolute being, the national conscience, the universal law, the central point of the political system.91 If we let fall the limits of nationality, we obtain – instead of the Israelite —man. As in Jehovah the Israelite personified his national existence, so in God the Christian personified his subjective human nature, freed from the limits of nationality. As Israel made the wants of his national existence the law of the world, as, under the dominance of these wants, he deified even his political vindictiveness; so the Christian made the requirements of human feeling the absolute powers and laws of the world. The miracles of Christianity, which belong just as essentially to its characterisation as the miracles of the Old Testament to that of Judaism, have not the welfare of a nation for their object, but the welfare of man: – that is, indeed, only of man considered as Christian; for Christianity, in contradiction with the genuine universal human heart, recognised man only under the condition, the limitation, of belief in Christ. But this fatal limitation will be discussed further on. Christianity has spiritualised the egoism of Judaism into subjectivity (though even within Christianity this subjectivity is again expressed as pure egoism), has changed the desire for earthly happiness, the goal of the Israelitish religion, into the longing for heavenly bliss, which is the goal of Christianity.

The highest idea, the God of a political community, of a people whose political system expresses itself in the form of religion, is Law, the consciousness of the law as an absolute divine power; the highest idea, the God of unpolitical, unworldly feeling is Love; the love which brings all the treasures and glories in heaven and upon earth as an offering to the beloved, the love whose law is the wish of the beloved one, and whose power is the unlimited power of the imagination, of intellectual miracle-working.

God is the Love that satisfies our wishes, our emotional wants; he is himself the realised wish of the heart, the wish exalted to the certainty of its fulfilment, of its reality, to that undoubting certainty before which no contradiction of the understanding, no difficulty of experience or of the external world, maintains its ground. Certainty is the highest power for man; that which is certain to him is the essential, the divine. “God is love:” this, the supreme dictum of Christianity, only expresses the certainty which human feeling has of itself, as the alone essential, i. e., absolute divine power, the certainty that the inmost wishes of the heart have objective validity and reality, that there are no limits, no positive obstacles to human feeling, that the whole world, with all its pomp and glory, is nothing weighed against human feeling. God is love: that is, feeling is the God of man, nay, God absolutely, the Absolute Being. God is the nature of human feeling, unlimited, pure feeling, made objective. God is the optative of the human heart transformed into the tempus finitum, the certain, blissful “IS,” – the unrestricted omnipotence of feeling, prayer hearing itself, feeling perceiving itself, the echo of our cry of anguish. Pain must give itself utterance; involuntarily the artist seizes the lute that he may breathe out his sufferings in its tones. He soothes his sorrow by making it audible to himself, by making it objective; he lightens the burden which weighs upon his heart by communicating it to the air, by making his sorrow a general existence. But nature listens not to the plaints of man, it is callous to his sorrows. Hence man turns away from Nature, from all visible objects. He turns within, that here, sheltered and hidden from the inexorable powers, he may find audience for his griefs. Here he utters his oppressive secrets; here he gives vent to his stifled sighs. This open-air of the heart, this outspoken secret, this uttered sorrow of the soul, is God. God is a tear of love, shed in the deepest concealment over human misery. “God is an unutterable sigh, lying in the depths of the heart;”92 this saying is the most remarkable, the profoundest, truest expression of Christian mysticism.

The ultimate essence of religion is revealed by the simplest act of religion – prayer; an act which implies at least as much as the dogma of the Incarnation, although religious speculation stands amazed at this, as the greatest of mysteries. Not, certainly, the prayer before and after meals, the ritual of animal egoism, but the prayer pregnant with sorrow, the prayer of disconsolate love, the prayer which expresses the power of the heart that crushes man to the ground, the prayer which begins in despair and ends in rapture.

In prayer, man addresses God with the word of intimate affection —Thou; he thus declares articulately that God is his alter ego; he confesses to God, as the being nearest to him, his most secret thoughts, his deepest wishes, which otherwise he shrinks from uttering. But he expresses these wishes in the confidence, in the certainty that they will be fulfilled. How could he apply to a being that had no ear for his complaints? Thus what is prayer but the wish of the heart expressed with confidence in its fulfilment?93 what else is the being that fulfils these wishes but human affection, the human soul, giving ear to itself, approving itself, unhesitatingly affirming itself? The man who does not exclude from his mind the idea of the world, the idea that everything here must be sought intermediately, that every effect has its natural cause, that a wish is only to be attained when it is made an end and the corresponding means are put into operation – such a man does not pray: he only works; he transforms his attainable wishes into objects of real activity; other wishes which he recognises as purely subjective he denies, or regards as simply subjective, pious aspirations. In other words, he limits, he conditionates his being by the world, as a member of which he conceives himself; he bounds his wishes by the idea of necessity. In prayer, on the contrary, man excludes from his mind the world, and with it all thoughts of intermediateness and dependence; he makes his wishes – the concerns of his heart, objects of the independent, omnipotent, absolute being, i. e., he affirms them without limitation. God is the affirmation94 of human feeling; prayer is the unconditional confidence of human feeling in the absolute identity of the subjective and objective, the certainty that the power of the heart is greater than the power of Nature, that the heart’s need is absolute necessity, the fate of the world. Prayer alters the course of Nature; it determines God to bring forth an effect in contradiction with the laws of Nature. Prayer is the absolute relation of the human heart to itself, to its own nature; in prayer, man forgets that there exists a limit to his wishes, and is happy in this forgetfulness.

Prayer is the self-division of man into two beings, – a dialogue of man with himself, with his heart. It is essential to the effectiveness of prayer that it be audibly, intelligibly, energetically expressed. Involuntarily prayer wells forth in sound; the struggling heart bursts the barrier of the closed lips. But audible prayer is only prayer revealing its nature; prayer is virtually, if not actually, speech, – the Latin word oratio signifies both: in prayer, man speaks undisguisedly of that which weighs upon him, which affects him closely; he makes his heart objective; – hence the moral power of prayer. Concentration, it is said, is the condition of prayer; but it is more than a condition; prayer is itself concentration, – the dismissal of all distracting ideas, of all disturbing influences from without, retirement within oneself, in order to have relation only with one’s own being. Only a trusting, open, hearty, fervent prayer is said to help; but this help lies in the prayer itself. As everywhere in religion the subjective, the secondary, the conditionating, is the prima causa, the objective fact; so here, these subjective qualities are the objective nature of prayer itself.95

It is an extremely superficial view of prayer to regard it as an expression of the sense of dependence. It certainly expresses such a sense, but the dependence is that of man on his own heart, on his own feeling. He who feels himself only dependent, does not open his mouth in prayer; the sense of dependence robs him of the desire, the courage for it, for the sense of dependence is the sense of need. Prayer has its root rather in the unconditional trust of the heart, untroubled by all thought of compulsive need, that its concerns are objects of the Absolute Being, that the almighty, infinite nature of the Father of men is a sympathetic, tender, loving nature, and that thus the dearest, most sacred emotions of man are divine realities. But the child does not feel itself dependent on the father as a father; rather, he has in the father the feeling of his own strength, the consciousness of his own worth, the guarantee of his existence, the certainty of the fulfilment of his wishes; on the father rests the burden of care; the child, on the contrary, lives careless and happy in reliance on the father, his visible guardian spirit, who desires nothing but the child’s welfare and happiness. The father makes the child an end, and himself the means of its existence. The child, in asking something of its father, does not apply to him as a being distinct from itself, a master, a person in general, but it applies to him in so far as he is dependent on, and determined by his paternal feeling, his love for his child.96 The entreaty is only an expression of the force which the child exercises over the father; if, indeed, the word force is appropriate here, since the force of the child is nothing more than the force of the father’s own heart. Speech has the same form both for entreaty and command, namely, the imperative. And the imperative of love has infinitely more power than that of despotism. Love does not command; love needs but gently to intimate its wishes to be certain of their fulfilment; the despot must throw compulsion even into the tones of his voice in order to make other beings, in themselves uncaring for him, the executors of his wishes. The imperative of love works with electro-magnetic power; that of despotism with the mechanical power of a wooden telegraph. The most intimate epithet of God in prayer is the word “Father;” the most intimate, because in it man is in relation to the absolute nature as to his own; the word “Father” is the expression of the closest, the most intense identity, – the expression in which lies the pledge that my wishes will be fulfilled, the guarantee of my salvation. The omnipotence to which man turns in prayer is nothing but the Omnipotence of Goodness, which, for the sake of the salvation of man, makes the impossible possible; – is, in truth, nothing else than the omnipotence of the heart, of feeling, which breaks through all the limits of the understanding, which soars above all the boundaries of Nature, which wills that there be nothing else than feeling, nothing that contradicts the heart. Faith in omnipotence is faith in the unreality of the external world, of objectivity, – faith in the absolute reality of man’s emotional nature: the essence of omnipotence is simply the essence of feeling. Omnipotence is the power before which no law, no external condition, avails or subsists; but this power is the emotional nature, which feels every determination, every law, to be a limit, a restraint, and for that reason dismisses it. Omnipotence does nothing more than accomplish the will of the feelings. In prayer man turns to the Omnipotence of Goodness; – which simply means, that in prayer man adores his own heart, regards his own feelings as absolute.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE MYSTERY OF FAITH – THE MYSTERY OF MIRACLE

Faith in the power of prayer – and only where a power, an objective power, is ascribed to it, is prayer still a religious truth – is identical with faith in miraculous power; and faith in miracles is identical with the essence of faith in general. Faith alone prays; the prayer of faith is alone effectual. But faith is nothing else than confidence in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws of Nature and reason, – that is, of natural reason. The specific object of faith, therefore, is miracle; faith is the belief in miracle; faith and miracle are absolutely inseparable. That which is objectively miracle or miraculous power is subjectively faith; miracle is the outward aspect of faith, faith the inward soul of miracle; faith is the miracle of mind, the miracle of feeling, which merely becomes objective in external miracles. To faith nothing is impossible, and miracle only gives actuality to this omnipotence of faith: miracles are but a visible example of what faith can effect. Unlimitedness, supernaturalness, exaltation of feeling, – transcendence is therefore the essence of faith. Faith has reference only to things which, in contradiction with the limits or laws of Nature and reason, give objective reality to human feelings and human desires. Faith unfetters the wishes of subjectivity from the bonds of natural reason; it confers what Nature and reason deny; hence it makes man happy, for it satisfies his most personal wishes. And true faith is discomposed by no doubt. Doubt arises only where I go out of myself, overstep the bounds of my personality, concede reality and a right of suffrage to that which is distinct from myself; – where I know myself to be a subjective, i.e., a limited being, and seek to widen my limits by admitting things external to myself. But in faith the very principle of doubt is annulled; for to faith the subjective is in and by itself the objective – nay, the absolute. Faith is nothing else than belief in the absolute reality of subjectivity.

“Faith is that courage in the heart which trusts for all good to God. Such a faith, in which the heart places its reliance on God alone, is enjoined by God in the first commandment, where he says, I am the Lord thy God… That is, I alone will be thy God; thou shalt seek no other God; I will help thee out of all trouble. Thou shalt not think that I am an enemy to thee, and will not help thee. When thou thinkest so, thou makest me in thine heart into another God than I am. Wherefore hold it for certain that I am willing to be merciful to thee.” – “As thou behavest thyself, so does God behave. If thou thinkest that he is angry with thee, he is angry; if thou thinkest that he is unmerciful and will cast thee into hell, he is so. As thou believest of God, so is he to thee.” – “If thou believest it, thou hast it; but if thou believest not, thou hast none of it.” – “Therefore, as we believe so does it happen to us. If we regard him as our God, he will not be our devil. But if we regard him not as our God, then truly he is not our God, but must be a consuming fire.” – “By unbelief we make God a devil.”97 Thus, if I believe in a God, I have a God, i. e., faith in God is the God of man. If God is such, whatever it may be, as I believe him, what else is the nature of God than the nature of faith? Is it possible for thee to believe in a God who regards thee favourably, if thou dost not regard thyself favourably, if thou despairest of man, if he is nothing to thee? What else then is the being of God but the being of man, the absolute self-love of man? If thou believest that God is for thee, thou believest that nothing is or can be against thee, that nothing contradicts thee. But if thou believest that nothing is or can be against thee, thou believest – what? – nothing less than that thou art God.98 That God is another being is only illusion, only imagination. In declaring that God is for thee, thou declarest that he is thy own being. What then is faith but the infinite self-certainty of man, the undoubting certainty that his own subjective being is the objective, absolute being, the being of beings?

Faith does not limit itself by the idea of a world, a universe, a necessity. For faith there is nothing but God, i. e., limitless subjectivity. Where faith rises the world sinks, nay, has already sunk into nothing. Faith in the real annihilation of the world – in an immediately approaching, a mentally present annihilation of this world, a world antagonistic to the wishes of the Christian, is therefore a phenomenon belonging to the inmost essence of Christianity; a faith which is not properly separable from the other elements of Christian belief, and with the renunciation of which, true, positive Christianity is renounced and denied.99 The essence of faith, as may be confirmed by an examination of its objects down to the minutest speciality, is the idea that that which man wishes actually is: he wishes to be immortal, therefore he is immortal; he wishes for the existence of a being who can do everything which is impossible to Nature and reason, therefore such a being exists; he wishes for a world which corresponds to the desires of the heart, a world of unlimited subjectivity, i. e., of unperturbed feeling, of uninterrupted bliss, while nevertheless there exists a world the opposite of that subjective one, and hence this world must pass away, – as necessarily pass away as God, or absolute subjectivity, must remain. Faith, love, hope, are the Christian Trinity. Hope has relation to the fulfilment of the promises, the wishes which are not yet fulfilled, but which are to be fulfilled; love has relation to the Being who gives and fulfils these promises; faith to the promises, the wishes, which are already fulfilled, which are historical facts.

Miracle is an essential object of Christianity, an essential article of faith. But what is miracle? A supranaturalistic wish realised – nothing more. The Apostle Paul illustrates the nature of Christian faith by the example of Abraham. Abraham could not, in a natural way, ever hope for posterity; Jehovah nevertheless promised it to him out of special favour, and Abraham believed in spite of Nature. Hence this faith was reckoned to him as righteousness, as merit; for it implies great force of subjectivity to accept as certain something in contradiction with experience, at least with rational, normal experience. But what was the object of this divine promise? Posterity, the object of a human wish. And in what did Abraham believe when he believed in Jehovah? In a Being who can do everything, and can fulfil all wishes. “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”100

But why do we go so far back as to Abraham? We have the most striking examples much nearer to us. Miracle feeds the hungry, cures men born blind, deaf, and lame, rescues from fatal diseases, and even raises the dead at the prayer of relatives. Thus it satisfies human wishes, and wishes which, though not always intrinsically like the wish for the restoration of the dead, yet in so far as they appeal to miraculous power, to miraculous aid, are transcendental, supranaturalistic. But miracle is distinguished from that mode of satisfying human wishes and needs which is in accordance with Nature and reason, in this respect, that it satisfies the wishes of men in a way corresponding to the nature of wishes – in the most desirable way. Wishes own no restraint, no law, no time; they would be fulfilled without delay on the instant. And behold! miracle is as rapid as a wish is impatient. Miraculous power realises human wishes in a moment, at one stroke, without any hindrance. That the sick should become well is no miracle; but that they should become so immediately, at a mere word of command, – that is the mystery of miracle. Thus it is not in its product or object that miraculous agency is distinguished from the agency of Nature and reason, but only in its mode and process; for if miraculous power were to effect something absolutely new, never before beheld, never conceived, or not even conceivable, it would be practically proved to be an essentially different, and at the same time objective, agency. But the agency which in essence, in substance, is natural and accordant with the forms of the senses, and which is supernatural, supersensual, only in the mode or process, is the agency of the imagination. The power of miracle is therefore nothing else than the power of the imagination.

Miraculous agency is agency directed to an end. The yearning after the departed Lazarus, the desire of his relatives to possess him again, was the motive of the miraculous resuscitation; the satisfaction of this wish, the end. It is true that the miracle happened “for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby;” but the message sent to the Master by the sisters of Lazarus, “Behold, he whom thou lovest is sick,” and the tears which Jesus shed, vindicate for the miracle a human origin and end. The meaning is: to that power which can awaken the dead no human wish is impossible to accomplish.101 And the glory of the Son consists in this: that he is acknowledged and reverenced as the being who is able to do what man is unable but wishes to do. Activity towards an end is well known to describe a circle: in the end it returns upon its beginning. But miraculous agency is distinguished from the ordinary realisation of an object in that it realises the end without means, that it effects an immediate identity of the wish and its fulfilment; that consequently it describes a circle, not in a curved, but in a straight line, that is, the shortest line. A circle in a straight line is the mathematical symbol of miracle. The attempt to construct a circle with a straight line would not be more ridiculous than the attempt to deduce miracle philosophically. To reason, miracle is absurd, inconceivable; as inconceivable as wooden iron or a circle without a periphery. Before it is discussed whether a miracle can happen, let it be shown that miracle, i.e., the inconceivable, is conceivable.

What suggests to man the notion that miracle is conceivable is that miracle is represented as an event perceptible by the senses, and hence man cheats his reason by material images which screen the contradiction. The miracle of the turning of water into wine, for example, implies in fact nothing else than that water is wine, – nothing else than that two absolutely contradictory predicates or subjects are identical; for in the hand of the miracle-worker there is no distinction between the two substances; the transformation is only the visible appearance of this identity of two contradictories. But the transformation conceals the contradiction, because the natural conception of change is interposed. Here, however, is no gradual, no natural, or, so to speak, organic change; but an absolute, immaterial one; a pure creatio ex nihilo. In the mysterious and momentous act of miraculous power, in the act which constitutes the miracle, water is suddenly and imperceptibly wine: which is equivalent to saying that iron is wood, or wooden iron.

The miraculous act – and miracle is only a transient act – is therefore not an object of thought, for it nullifies the very principle of thought; but it is just as little an object of sense, an object of real or even possible experience. Water is indeed an object of sense, and wine also; I first see water and then wine; but the miracle itself, that which makes this water suddenly wine, – this, not being a natural process, but a pure perfect without any antecedent imperfect, without any modus, without way or means, is no object of real, or even of possible experience. Miracle is a thing of the imagination; and on that very account is it so agreeable: for the imagination is the faculty which alone corresponds to personal feeling, because it sets aside all limits, all laws which are painful to the feelings, and thus makes objective to man the immediate, absolutely unlimited satisfaction of his subjective wishes.102 Accordance with subjective inclination is the essential characteristic of miracle. It is true that miracle produces also an awful, agitating impression, so far as it expresses a power which nothing can resist, – the power of the imagination. But this impression lies only in the transient miraculous act; the abiding, essential impression is the agreeable one. At the moment in which the beloved Lazarus is raised up, the surrounding relatives and friends are awestruck at the extraordinary, almighty power which transforms the dead into the living; but soon the relatives fall into the arms of the risen one, and lead him with tears of joy to his home, there to celebrate a festival of rejoicing. Miracle springs out of feeling, and has its end in feeling. Even in the traditional representation it does not deny its origin; the representation which gratifies the feelings is alone the adequate one. Who can fail to recognise in the narrative of the resurrection of Lazarus the tender, pleasing, legendary tone?103 Miracle is agreeable, because, as has been said, it satisfies the wishes of man without labour, without effort. Labour is unimpassioned, unbelieving, rationalistic; for man here makes his existence dependent on activity directed to an end, which activity again is itself determined solely by the idea of the objective world. But feeling does not at all trouble itself about the objective world; it does not go out of or beyond itself; it is happy in itself. The element of culture, the Northern principle of self-renunciation, is wanting to the emotional nature. The Apostles and Evangelists were no scientifically cultivated men. Culture, in general, is nothing else than the exaltation of the individual above his subjectivity to objective universal ideas, to the contemplation of the world. The Apostles were men of the people; the people live only in themselves, in their feelings; therefore Christianity took possession of the people. Vox populi vox Dei. Did Christianity conquer a single philosopher, historian, or poet of the classical period? The philosophers who went over to Christianity were feeble, contemptible philosophers. All who had yet the classic spirit in them were hostile, or at least indifferent to Christianity. The decline of culture was identical with the victory of Christianity. The classic spirit, the spirit of culture, limits itself by laws, – not indeed by arbitrary, finite laws, but by inherently true and valid ones; it is determined by the necessity, the truth of the nature of things; in a word, it is the objective spirit. In place of this, there entered with Christianity the principle of unlimited, extravagant, fanatical, supranaturalistic subjectivity; a principle intrinsically opposed to that of science, of culture.104 With Christianity man lost the capability of conceiving himself as a part of Nature, of the universe. As long as true, unfeigned, unfalsified, uncompromising Christianity existed, as long as Christianity was a living, practical truth, so long did real miracles happen; and they necessarily happened, for faith in dead, historical, past miracles is itself a dead faith, the first step towards unbelief, or rather the first and therefore the timid, uncandid, servile mode in which unbelief in miracle finds vent. But where miracles happen, all definite forms melt in the golden haze of imagination and feeling; there the world, reality, is no truth; there the miracle-working, emotional, i. e., subjective being, is held to be alone the objective, real being.