151. Last Dilemma.

THUS By A Higher Mode of Argumentation, From the idea of God and man in their reciprocal relation, the truth of the conception which the Church forms of Christ appears to be confirmed, and we seem to be reconducted to the orthodox point of view, though by an inverted path: for while there, the truth of the conceptions of the Church concerning Christ is deduced from the correctness of the Gospel history; here, the veracity of the story is deduced from the truth of those conceptions. That which is rational is also real; the idea is not merely the moral imperative of Kant, but also an actuality. Proved to be an idea of the reason, the unity of the divine and human nature must also have an historical existence. The unity of God with man, says Marhcineke, was really and visibly manifested in the person of Jesus Christ; in him, according to Rosencranz, the divine power over nature was concentrated, he could not act otherwise than miraculously, and the working of miracles, which surprises us, was to him ntural. His resurrection, says Conradi, is the necessary sequel of the completion of his personality, and so little ought it to surprise us, that, on the contrary, we must rather have been surprised if it had not happened.

But do these deductions remove, the contradictions which have exhibited themselves in the doctrine of the Church, concerning the person and work of Christ? Vc need only compare the stricture.?, which Rosenkranz in his Review has passed on Schleicrmacher's criticism of the Christology of the Church, with what the same author proposes as a substitute in his Encyclopedia, in order to perceive, that the general propositions on the unity of the divine and human natures, do not in the least serve to explain ihe appearance of a person, in whom this unity existed individually, in an exclusive manner. Though I may conceive that the divine spirit in a state of renunciation and abasement becomes the human, and that the human nature in its return into and above itself becomes the divine; this does not help me to conceive more easily, how the divine and human natures can have constituted the distinct and yet united portions of an historical person. Though I may see the human mind in its unity with the divine, in the corse of the world's history, more and more completely establish itself as the power

^{P.895} which subdues nature; this is quite another thing, than to conceive a single man endowed with such power, for individual, voluntary acts. Lastly, from the truth, that the suppression of the natural existence is the resurrection of the spirit, can never be deduced the bodily resurrection of an individual.

We should thus have fallen back again to Kant's point of view, which we have ourselves found unsatisfactory; for if the idea have no corresponding reality, it is an empty obligation and ideal. But do we then deprive the idea of all reality? By no means: we reject only that which does not follow from the premises. If reality is ascribed to the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures, is this equivalent to the admission that this unity must actually have been once manifested, as it never had been, and never more will be, in one individual? This is indeed not the mode in which Idea realizes itself; it is not wont to lavish all its fulness on one exemplar, and be niggardly towards all othersf-to express itself perfectly in that one individual, and imperfectly in all the rest: it rather loves to distribute its riches among a multiplicity of exemplars which reciprocally complete each other-in the alternate appearance and suppression of a series of individuals. And is this no true realization of the ide? is not the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures a real one in a far higher sense, when I regard the whole race of mankind as its realization, than when I single out one man as such a realization? is not an incarnation of God from eternity, a truer one than an incarnation limited to a particular point of time?

This is the key to the whole of Christology, that, as subject of the predicate which the Church assigns to Christ, we place, instead of an individual, an idea; but an idea which has an existence in reality, not in the mind only, like that of Kant. In an individual, a God-man, the properties and functions which the Church ascribes to. Christ contradict themselves; in the idea of the race, they perfectly agree. Humanity is the union of the two natures-God become man, the infinite manifesting itself in the finite, and the finite spirit remembering its infinitude; it is the child of the visible Mother and the invisible Father, Nature and Spirit; it is the worker of miracles, in so far as in the course of human history the spirit more and more completely subjugates nature, both within and around man, until it lies before him as the inert matter on which he exercises his active power;:f it is the sinless existence, for the course of its development is a blameless one, pollution cleaves to the individul only, and does not touch the race or its history. It is Humanity that dies, rises, and ascends to heaven, for from the negation of its phenomenal life there ever proceeds a higher spiritual life; from the suppression of its mortality as a personal, national, ^{P.896} and terrestrial spirit, arises its union with the infinite spirit of the heavens. By faith in this Christ, especially in his death and resurrection, man is justified before God: that is, by the kindling within him of the idea of Humanity, the individual man participates in the divinely human life of the species. Now the main element of that idea is, that the negation of the merely natural and sensual life, which is itself the negation of the spirit, (the negation of negation, therefore,) is the sole way to true spiritual life.

This alone is the absolute sense of Christology: that it is annexed to the person and history of one individual, is a necessary result of the historical form which Christology has taken. Schleiermacher was quite right when he foreboded, that the speculative view would not leave much more of the historical person of the Saviour than was retained by the Ebionites. The phenomenal history of the individual, says Hegel, is only a starting point for the mind. Faith, in her early stages, is governed by the senses, and therefore contemplates a temporal history; what she holds to be true is the external, ordinary event, the evidence for which is of the historical, forensic kind a fact to be proved by the testimony of the senses, and the moral confidence inspired by the witnesses. But mind having once taken occasion by this external fact, to bring under its consciousness the idea of humanity as one with God, sees in the story only the presentation of that idea; the object of faith is completely changed; intead of a sensible, empirical fact, it has become a spiritual and divine idea, which has its confirmation no Longer in history but in philosophy. When the mind has thus gone beyond the sensible history, and entered into the domain of the absolute, the former ceases to be essential; it takes a subordinate place, above Avhich the spiritual truths suggested by the story stand self-supported; it becomes as the faint image of a dream which belongs only to the past, and does not, like the idea, share the permanence of the spirit which is absolutely present to itself. Even Luther subordinated the physical miracles to the spiritual, as the truly great miracles. And shall we interest ourselves more in the cure of some sick people in Galilee, than in the miracles of intellectual and moral life belonging to the history of the world in the increasing, the almost incredible dominion of man over nature in the irresistible force of ideas, to which no unintelligent matter, whatever its magnitude, can oppose ny enduring resistance? Shall isolated incidents, in themselves trivial, be more to us than the universal order of

^{P.897} events, simply because in the latter we presuppose, if we do not perceive a natural cause, in the former the contrary? This would be a direct contravention of the more enlightened sentiments of our own day, justly and conclusively expresseu by Schleiermacher. The interests of piety, says this theologian, can no longer require us so to conceive a fact, that by its dependence on God it is divested of the conditions which would belong to it as a link in the chain of nature; for we have outgrown the notion, that the divine omnipotence is more completely manifested in the interruption of the order of nature, than in its preservation. Thus if we know the incarnation, death and resurrection, the duplex negatio ajfinriat, as the eternal circulation, the infinitely repeated pulsation of the divine life; what special importance can attach to a single fact, which is but a mere sensible image of this unending process. Our age demands to be led in Christology to the idea in the fact, to the race in the individual: a theology which, in its doctrines on the Christ, stops short at him as an individual, is not properly a theology, but a homily.

In what relation, then, must the pulpit stand to theology, indeed, how is the continuance of a ministry in the Church possible when theology has reached this stage? This is the difficult question which presents itself to us in conclusion.