Part 31

Before we proceed to discuss the individual departments of life we may briefly consider the common task that is imposed upon them all by the distinctive condition of the time: they must become independent in relation to the earlier as well as to the more modern conceptions of them, and, if necessary, take up a conflict against both. The course of our investigation can have left no doubt with regard to the state of prostration of the older forms of life: the uncertainty affects the whole and the fundamental principles much more than it has ever done before. Formerly the struggle was concerned rather with individual departments or individual tendencies of life; it was carried on more in reference to the conception and meaning of fundamental truths than with regard to the validity of those truths themselves. The passionate struggles of the period of the Reformation left the fundamentals of Christianity untouched; in a similar manner the later attacks upon ecclesiastical religion usually had a basis of firm faith in morality, and derived their power more especially from it. To-day the authority of morality is just as seriously shaken as that of religion; and the conception of truth is itself in the same condition of uncertainty.

In this condition of things an appeal to history cannot be employed as proof of any position; a patchwork of our own and of something alien gives us still less a position above perplexity: there is no other way than to take up the problem with the means of the present itself. For this the acknowledgment of the independence of the spiritual life forms a fit foundation. The spiritual life is not dependent upon and fixed to particular temporal conditions; ever anew it can break forth spontaneously, and from the particularity of the time advance to eternal truths. It is to us a source of joy that a time has come again when we need not follow other paths, but must go our own; when nothing can bind us but that which has been approved by our own being and our own conviction. It is not necessary for a time such as this to take up an attitude of hostility towards the whole past; rather--and especially when it thinks worthily of itself--it will seek a friendly relationship with history. But this is possible only when the present has attained complete independence, and only from this independent position; only when an eternal content is revealed in that which history conveys to us. In opposition to submission to authority such a time makes a demand for unlimited freedom and complete spontaneity; such freedom and spontaneity are essential if life is again to find the truthfulness and the inner power that we so painfully miss.

Such a requirement of life and thought arising out of the immediate present may easily lead us to separate from those to whom the crisis does not seem so serious, and who believe that it is possible to transform the old in a quiet and inhostile manner into the new. The conflict will be far more acute with those who, with us, make the demand for an independent present; but who, by the conceptions of an independent present, freedom and spontaneity, understand something totally different from that which we ourselves understand by them from the point of view of an independent spiritual life. In all times of spiritual revival the freedom and immediacy which the spiritual life needs for itself have been usurped by mere man as though they were a right pertaining to him: and then it appears that only the complete emancipation of individuals, a severance of all connections, unconditional submission to the passing moment, are necessary in order to lead life to truth and greatness, and man to a glorious state of happiness. Such a movement cannot spread without making the antitheses of life appear less acute, concealing its problems and its depths, and falsely idealising man with all the contingency of his experience: with all the bustle of its preparation and all its agitation the movement must terminate in a state of spiritual destitution; it threatens life with inner destruction. With a modernity of this kind we have nothing in common.

We must, therefore, with all our power, wage war against the narrowly human and imaginary freedom on behalf of one that is genuine and spiritual: this conflict is exceptionally complicated and difficult, because real life does not make such a clear distinction between the genuine and the false as the conceptions do, but rather allows them to be confused. For this reason the conflict will be carried on not only on the right hand and on the left, but also against the confusion that obscures the great "either--or," without the distinct presence of which a spontaneous life does not acquire power and consciousness. A way must be found by which, notwithstanding manifold dangers and complications, we may advance to a life that combines depth with freedom, stability with movement: this is an inner necessity of the age, and once it is recognised and taken up as such, it will in some way be realised.

(a) RELIGION, MORALITY, EDUCATION

1. RELIGION

In no sphere of life is there more inner division and uncertainty at the present time than in that of religion. To one, the rejection of all religion seems to be indispensable to the sincerity of life and to the attainment of healthy conditions, because, as a pernicious legacy from past ages, it oppresses our life, confuses our thought, paralyses our power of activity, and provokes men to the greatest hatred of one another. To another, on the contrary, religion seems to be the only firm support in face of the needs and confusions of the age--the only thing that inwardly unites men and elevates each individual above himself, the only thing that reveals a depth in life and allows life to share in the infinite and the eternal. The adherents to each of these views show the greatest earnestness and zeal; we cannot treat the negation lightly and dispose of it with the convenient catchword "unbelief," if only for the reason that on the part of many this negative attitude is due to a sincere anxiety for the truthfulness of life. To rise above this conflict in regard to religion we must, in the first place, estimate the points at issue impartially; and nothing else is more called upon to do this than philosophy.

Philosophy will not make light of the prostration of religion; for a survey of history shows that the state of life has undergone a complete change since the epoch when religion exercised an undisputed supremacy. At that time the world and human life received all meaning and value from their relation to an invisible and supernatural order. The course of the Modern Age has made the world that surrounds us ever more significant, and since man has directed his activity upon this world, the world of faith has been allowed to recede more and more. The movement that led to our present position attained increasing power and consciousness through three stages: at the height of the Renaissance the divine was revered less in its world-transcendent sovereignty than in its world-pervading operation; then, the Pantheism of a speculative and æsthetic culture associated the world and God together in one reality; finally, in the investigation of inimitable nature and the formation of political and social relations the world of sense gives man so much to do, fetters his power so much, and gives him at the same time such a proud consciousness of this power, that the conception of a transcendent world fades entirely; and an Agnosticism that rejects as superfluous and unfruitful all reflection upon and care concerning such a world gains ground.

This change in the direction and in the disposition of life must itself have forced religion more or less out of the field of our attention. But it is fraught with far more dangers to religion that the work of the Modern Age in all its main tendencies is directed against the principles of the life upon which the development of religion rests. Modern natural science has dispossessed man of the central position that he formerly attributed to himself, and has deprived nature of its soul. The modern science of history, with its demonstration of ceaseless change in all that is human, has undermined the faith in an absolute truth. At the same time, with regard to the beginnings of Christianity, there is a wide divergence between the traditional conception of faith and the new conception obtained by historical research. The tendency of modern culture has been to make the increasing of power, in work upon things and in their control, the highest ideal; from the point of view of this ideal of impersonal power, the world of pure inwardness, the home of Christianity, has been able to appear to be simply a subjective and subsidiary accompaniment of the life-process. He who estimates rightly the fact that all these tendencies of modern life work together and strengthen one another cannot fail to recognise that they force religion from the centre of life to its circumference, and transform it from an impregnable fact into a difficult problem; they destroy that self-evidence of religion which previously made life secure and calm. If, however, religion no longer springs up in the consciousness of contemporaries from a necessity of their own life, it is not difficult to understand that the complications of the problem are too great for many of them; that the burden of obsolete forms over-balances the power of their own impulse, and thus, by a sudden revolution, to reject it seems the only way to save truth. Then religion seems to be only a delusion that arose in a past age--a delusion similar to astrology and alchemy; one which, in face of growing enlightenment, must ultimately be completely dispelled.

But if the philosophic treatment understands the negation rightly, it can only warn us against being hasty in our acceptance of it. To be sure, quite apart from all the caprice and purpose of man, the condition of life has become very much changed; but it was less the state of affairs itself that permitted the changes to clash so irreconcilably with religion than the interpretation which it received and the exclusiveness which was attributed to it. The decision in this matter has depended in particular upon what is called the spirit of the age, which is often nothing more than the inclination and disposition of man; such inclination, as history shows, may change into the direct opposite; it does not form a sure touchstone of truth.

These considerations, indeed, do not make much headway in opposition to the storm and stress of the movements of the age: that which operates far more strongly in favour of religion is the experience and the feeling that the attempted negation of religion by no means easily and directly solves the problem of life; and, further, that along with religion much becomes untenable to which even the modern man cannot lightly renounce all claim. Whatever there may be in religion, it has brought man into union with the deepest basis of reality, and at the same time revealed to him a life of pure inwardness: it has set a task for life as a whole and has given to life a meaning and a value; it has counteracted the lower impulses and the egoism of mere self-preservation; and has organised humanity spiritually. These aims have hardly become superfluous and worthless: even without religion, and after abandoning its principles, it would be necessary to accomplish these aims in other ways. It is in the attempts at reconstruction that the futility of the negation of religion becomes painfully evident. Phrases concerning the greatness and noble-mindedness of all that bear human features; a blind faith in the elevating power of intellectual enlightenment or even of external organisation; a confusion of thought which, unobserved, rejects and elevates its own principles, and so maintains in the conclusion that which it rejected in the premises; all these things can deceive him alone concerning the spiritual poverty and the complete powerlessness of what is offered in them, whose zeal in his antagonism to religion has deprived him of balance of feeling and impartiality of judgment. If it is inquired what content and value human life still retains after the surrender of all relation to the whole and of all inner relation, it will be recognised that the complete negation of religion consistently carried out must lead to an appalling convulsion of human existence as a whole.

But if such considerations counsel us to be cautious in regard to the negation of religion, they do not justify an adherence to its traditional form. The far-reaching changes of life that we are aware of cannot possibly be explained away or their significance lessened; they must be estimated, and brought into relation with religion. The boundary between the eternal and the temporal, the substance and the outward form in religion, has been made uncertain by these changes; in particular they forbid philosophy to treat the religious problem from the point of view of a dogmatic confession. The antithesis between Catholicism and Protestantism is the offspring of an age that preceded the development of modern culture, with all its deep-reaching revolutions. The main problem of religion at the time when the antithesis made its appearance was differently stated from the way in which we now state it. For then it was a question whether Christianity was to be formed from society or from personality; while to-day Christianity fights for its existence as a whole, and must defend its fundamental truths against a time in which activity is directed into other paths. The present antithesis cannot possibly be regarded as ultimately identical with the former one; and it is for this reason impossible to take up the present conflict concerning religion under the banner of a particular dogmatic confession. Such an ante-dating of the conflict also has the disadvantage that it prevents the great antitheses which are involved to-day both in Catholicism and Protestantism from being clearly displayed. Two different streams have been present in Catholicism from its beginning: to the one, the power of the ecclesiastical system is the main thing; while to the other, on the contrary, the religious disposition is of supreme importance. The influences of modern culture have increased this difference, both directly and indirectly, and, chiefly outside of Germany, there are signs of the beginning of a stronger movement towards a more inward Catholicism. Protestantism carries within it an antithesis of the old ecclesiastical form of religion, which adheres as much as possible to the state of things in the sixteenth century, and a form transformed by the Idealism in modern culture more into the universal, the free, the purely human, but also not infrequently into vagueness and superficial optimism. But so long as the bitterness of sectarian prejudice diverts the attention of men from the chief thing, these antitheses are not clearly expressed and energetically developed. There are serious contradictions involved in these views of religion, and they cannot be developed without giving rise to parties. Philosophy must strive with all its energy to bring it about that these parties shall be formed in relation to the present situation, and not from the point of view of a past age; and that the conflict shall be raised to a higher level, to truth and greatness, by bringing itself into relation with the needs of the age.

The task of philosophy is not limited to estimating as impartially as possible the state of things as we immediately experience it; that task also includes a positive treatment of the religious problem. That which is characteristic in the philosophy of life advocated in this treatise, Noëtism, as it might be called, must also find a definite expression and show what capacity it has, in the fulfilment of this task. In accordance with its fundamental relation to history, which has been much discussed, Noëtism cannot make history most important, even in religion, and cannot read into history as much as possible of what the present demands; it must regard any such procedure as a weakness and a half-truth. Noëtism must insist upon religion's justifying itself and establishing its reality before the tribunal of the spiritual life: only then can the truth that exists in history and that which, through progressive differentiation, promotes the cause of transcendent truth and brings it nearer to humanity as a whole, be elucidated. We have not for a moment lost sight of the fact that it is essential to religion to be related not to single individuals but to all; and that religion can evolve no power without compelling men to some kind of unity.

Now, for the treatment of the religious problem, Noëtism offers first a position from which demands are made compatible which are otherwise directly opposed to one another. Religion is concerned with experiences which at one and the same time must possess a universal character, belong to our own life, and be immediately accessible to each. The attempt of speculative philosophy to establish religion by deduction from the nature of the whole has the required universal character; but it introduces religion to the soul from outside, and remains a mere intellectual gain. The contrary attempt to base religion in the individual soul developed an inwardness; but this attempt shows that the soul does not know how to build up a world and to contrast it with the subject, to present this world as something transcendent; it makes no sure progress beyond the fluctuation and undulation of feeling. Only an independent spiritual life, inwardly present to us, elevates us above this division of subjective feeling and a transcendent world, and inaugurates universal experiences in our own domain. How with the spiritual life new realities are manifested; how a world-whole which transcends human existence becomes evident, has already been discussed, and it is not necessary to make any repetition here. Every acknowledgment of an independent spiritual life is favourable to religion in so far as this acknowledgment makes us clearly perceive the inadequacy, the illusoriness, and the vanity of all narrowly human conduct and occupation, its futility in matters both small and great. So long as attention is fixed on individual matters, and so long as we may expect some improvement in these in the present or in the future, we may not be aware of the futility of this conduct; but as soon as the situation is grasped as a whole and estimated as a whole, such human conduct is found to be entirely inadequate, these external aids are found wanting, and there remains only the inexorable "either--or": either the power of a new world is operative in man, and makes him strong outwardly and inwardly, or the whole life of man is spiritually lost--one great delusion, one great error.

If from the point of view of the spiritual life the contour of a new world is acquired, we may turn back to history, and ask how far it indicates a movement which tends in the direction of such a world. The spiritual life itself brings a distinctive standard for this inquiry: the fundamental fact is not a single factor within life, but the existence of a self-conscious whole of life, of a spiritual process itself. From the point of view of the spiritual life, the chief thing in religions will be the kind of life they reveal; what they make of the life-process; how through the relation to an absolute life they evolve the life-process to a higher stage. Only so far as they express this life-process, and not in themselves, are the doctrines and practices of religion of value.

If we apply this test to the individual religions, Christianity distinctly shows itself to be far superior to the others. More than any of the other religions, Christianity fulfils the demands which are made by the nature of the spiritual life and its relation to the world; and so far as Christianity satisfies these demands, but not in its historical form as a whole, it may assert itself to be absolute.

If Christianity as a religion of redemption requires that we should tear ourselves from the old world and aspire to a new one, this demand receives a distinctive significance by the more detailed conception which Christianity forms of it. As evil and that which is to be overcome is regarded not, as among the Hindus, as mere appearance, but as moral guilt, which disorganises the world, it is not the fundamental reality of the world but a particular conception of it that is rejected; and so there remains the possibility of life being given a positive character; and in this the main thing is not intellectual enlightenment, but radical moral renewal, an elevation into a world of love, grace, and reverence. This view of the world makes it impossible to base life simply upon affirmation or negation; but affirmation and negation must be present within it, and thus life is given an inner comprehensiveness and an inner movement which it would not otherwise possess. Christianity included the innermost basis of human life in this movement and transformation, since it not only regarded the divine as influencing the human by individual manifestations of its power, but proclaimed a complete union of both, and maintained this through its whole development. A wearied and exhausted age may have formulated this fundamental truth in the most unfortunate manner in the doctrine of the divine humanity of Christ; nevertheless, the effectiveness of the truth involved was not prevented by this. Only from the power of a conception of a union of the divine and the human can religion acquire the character of pure and complete inwardness, of a spiritual self-consciousness: otherwise the relation of the divine and the human remains a more or less external one. But this is not the place to trace how the Christian type of life has been visibly embodied in the course of history in the personality and the life of its founder, and in the common labours of centuries, in which the Semitic and Germanic natures have been harmonised, and great peoples and personalities have given their best to the world: here we may only remark further that the whole is not a work completed at one particular point in time, but a continuous task of all ages; and that, in the fundamental life transcending all mere time, a fixed standard is offered by which to test the achievement of all particular ages, and to differentiate the results of the work of history as far as they correspond with the fundamental character of religion. Religion must maintain the fundamental character of the life that it advocates, in face of all change in the state of culture, just as decidedly as for its development in detail it remains dependent upon the help of the work of culture.

Religion in the present, therefore, has great and difficult tasks. For one thing, religion must energetically maintain the supremacy, in opposition to modern culture, of the type of life that it advocates. The fact that there are points of direct antagonism between the religious type of life and modern culture ought neither to be denied nor in any way obscured. On the one hand, we have an ideal of a life of the pure inwardness of ethical disposition; on the other, the ideal of spiritual power: in the former the tendency is to personal, in the latter to impersonal life: in the one case there is a positive development only by a complete transformation; in the other the immediate impulse of life is the ruling motive power of the whole. It shows only superficiality and confusion to seek an agreeable compromise between these antitheses; for, in truth, either the one or the other must assume the guidance of the whole. The whole course of our investigation permits of no doubt as to our own attitude in this matter.