| Even religion, however, does not abide by this indifference of the two sides. God creates in order to reveal himself creation is the revelation of God. But for stones, plants, and animals there is no God, but only for man; so that Nature exists for the sake of man, and man purely for the sake of God. God glorifies himself in man: man is the pride of God. God indeed knows himself even without man; but so long as there is no other me, so long is he only a possible, conceptional person. First when a difference from God, a non-divine is posited, is God conscious of himself; first when he knows what is not God, does he know what it is to be God, does he know the bliss of his Godhead. First in the positing of what is other than himself, of the world, does God posit himself as God. Is God almighty without creation? No! Omnipotence first realises, proves itself in creation. What is a power, a property, which does not exhibit, attest itself? What is a force which affects nothing? a light that does not illuminate? a wisdom which knows nothing, i.e., nothing, real? And what is omnipotence, what all other divine attributes, if man does not exist? Man is nothing without God; but also, God is nothing without man; [�God can as little do without us as we without him.��Predigten etzlieher Lehrer, &., p. 16. See also on this subject�Strauss, Christl. Glaubensl. B. i. � 47, and the author's work entitled, P. Bayle, pp. 104, 107.] for only in man is God an object as God; only in man is he God. The various qualities of man first give difference, which is the ground of reality in God. The physical qualities of man make God a physical being�God the Father, who is the creator of Nature, i.e., the personified, anthropomorphised essence of Nature; [�This temporal, transitory life in this world (i.e., natural life) we have through God, who is the almighty Creator of heaven and earth. But the eternal untransitory life we have through the Passion and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ a Lord over that life.��Luther (Th. xvi. s. 459).] the intellectual qualities of man make God an intellectual being, the moral, a moral being. Human misery is the triumph of divine compassion; sorrow for sin is the delight of the divine holiness. Life, fire, emotion comes into God only through man. With the stubborn sinner God is angry; over the repentant sinner he rejoices. Man is the revealed God: in man the divine essence first realises and unfolds itself. In the creation of Nature God goes out of himself, he has relation to what is other than himself, but in man he returns into himself:�man knows God, because in him God finds and knows himself, feels himself as God. Where there is no pressure, no want, there is no feeling;�and feeling is alone real knowledge. Who can know compassion without having felt the want of it? justice without the experience of injustice? happiness without the experience of distress? You must feel what a thing is; otherwise you will never learn to know it. It is in man that the divine properties first become feeling, i.e., man is the self-feeling of God;�and the feeling of God is the real God; for the qualities of God are indeed only real qualities, realities, as felt by man,�as feelings. If the experience of human misery were outside of God, in a being personally separate from him, compassion also would not be in God, and we should hence have again the Being destitute of qualities, or more correctly the nothing, which God was before man or without man. For example:�Whether I be a good or sympathetic being�for that alone is good which gives, imparts itself, bonum est communicativum sui,�is unknown to me before the opportunity presents itself of showing goodness to another being. Only in the act of imparting do I experience the happiness of beneficence, the joy of generosity, of liberality. But is this joy apart from the joy of the recipient? No; I rejoice because he rejoices. I feel the wretchedness of another, I suffer with him; in alleviating his wretchedness, I alleviate my own;�sympathy with suffering is itself suffering. The joyful feeling of the giver is only the reflex, the self-consciousness of the joy in the receiver. Their joy is a common feeling which accordingly makes itself visible in the union of ban of lips. So it is here. Just as the feeling of human misery is human, so the feeling of divine compassion is human. It is only a sense of the poverty of finiteness that gives a sense of the bliss of infiniteness. Where the one is not, the other is not. The two are inseparable,�inseparable the feeling of God as God, and the feeling of man as man, inseparable the knowledge of man and the self-knowledge of God. God is a Self only in the human self,�only in the human power of discrimination, in the principle of difference that lies in the human being. Thus compassion is only felt as a me, a self, a force, i.e., as something special, through its opposite. The opposite of God gives qualities to God, realises him, makes him a Self. God is God, only through that which is not God. Herein we have also the mystery of Jacob B�hme's doctrine. It must only be borne in mind that Jacob B�hme, as a mystic and theologian, places outside of man the feelings in which the divine being first realises himself, passes from nothing to something, to a qualitative being apart from the feelings of man (at least in imagination),�and that he makes them objective in the form of natural qualities, but in such a way that these qualities still only represent the impressions made on his feelings. It will then be obvious that what the empirical religious consciousness first posits with the real creation of Nature and of man, the mystical consciousness places before the creation in the premundane God, in doing which, however, it does away with the reality of the creation. For if God has what is not-God, already in himself, he has no need first to create what is not-God in order to be God. The creation of the world is here a pure superfluity, or rather an impossibility; this God for very reality does not come to reality; he is already in himself the full and restless world. This is especially true of Schelling's doctrine of God, who though made up of innumerable potencies is yet thoroughly impotent. Far more reasonable, therefore, is the empirical religious consciousness, which makes God reveal, i.e., realise himself in real man, real nature, and according to which man is created purely for the praise and glory of God. That is to say, man is the mouth of God, which articulates and accentuates the divine qualities as human feelings. God wills that he be honoured, praised. Why? because the passion of man for God is the self-consciousness of God. Nevertheless, the religious consciousness separates these two properly inseparable sides, since by means of the idea of personality it makes God and man independent existences. Now the Hegelian speculation identifies the two sides, but so as to leave the old contradiction still at the foundation.�it is therefore only the consistent carrying out, the completion of a religious truth. The learned mob was so blind in its hatred towards Hegel as not to perceive that his doctrine, at least in this relation, does not in fact contradict religion.�that it contradicts it only in the same way as, in general, a developed, consequent process of thought contradicts an undeveloped, inconsequent, but nevertheless radically identical conception. | |
