Here under follows the transcription of chapter 9B6 of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the 19th Century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1912.
 
Back to main page
The original text in German: Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts
DOWNLOAD the Foundations of the Nineteenth Century

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION BY LORD REDESDALE i v
AUTHOR‘S INTRODUCTION i lix

DIVISION I: THE LEGACY OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
INTRODUCTORY i 3
FIRST CHAPTER: HELLENIC ART AND PHILOSOPHY i 14
SECOND CHAPTER: ROMAN LAW i 93
THIRD CHAPTER: THE REVELATION OF CHRIST i 174

DIVISION II: THE HEIRS
INTRODUCTORY i 251
FOURTH CHAPTER: THE CHAOS i 258
FIFTH CHAPTER: THE ENTRANCE OF THE JEWS INTO WESTERN HISTORY i 329
SIXTH CHAPTER: THE ENTRANCE OF THE GERMANIC PEOPLE INTO HISTORY i 494

DIVISION III: THE STRUGGLE
INTRODUCTORY ii 3
SEVENTH CHAPTER: RELIGION ii 13
EIGHTH CHAPTER: STATE ii 139
NINTH CHAPTER: FROM THE YEAR 1200 TO THE YEAR 1800
A. The Teutons as Creators of a New Culture		 ii 187
B. Historical Survey ii 233
1. DISCOVERY ii 261
2. SCIENCE ii 293
3. INDUSTRY ii 329
4. POLITICAL ECONOMY ii 344
5. POLITICS AND CHURCH ii 365
6. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION ii 389
7. ART ii 495
INDEX ii 565

389

6. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION (From Francis of Assisi to Immanuel Kant).

THE TWO COURSES

    I have already given (p. 241) a definition of philosophy (Weltanschauung), and in this book I have frequently discussed religion; ‡ I have also called attention (p. 244) to the inseparability of the two ideas. I am far from maintaining the identity of philosophy and religion, for that would be a purely logical and formalistic undertaking, which is quite beyond my purpose; but I see that everywhere in our history philosophical speculation is rooted in religion, and in its full development aims at religion — and when on the one hand I contemplate national idiosyncrasies and on the other pass a succession of pre-eminent men in review before my mind's eye, I discover a whole series of relations between philosophy and religion, which show me that they are closely and organically connected: where the one is absent the other fails, where the one is strong and vigorous, so is the

    ‡ See especially vol. i. pp. 213 f., 411 f., 471.

390 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
other: a deeply religious man is a true philosopher (in the living, popular sense of the word), and those choice minds that rise to comprehensive, clear, philosophical views — a Roger Bacon, a Leonardo, a Bruno, a Kant, a Goethe — are not often ecclesiastically pious, but always strikingly “religious.“ We see, therefore, that philosophy and religion on the one hand further one another, and on the other hand are substitutes for, or complementary to, each other. On pp. 258-9 I wrote: In the want of a true religion springing from and corresponding to our individuality I see the greatest danger for the future of the Teuton, that is in him the heel of Achilles, whoever wounds him there, will lay him low. If we look closer, we shall see that the inadequacy of our ecclesiastical religion revealed itself, to begin with, in the invalidity of the philosophy which it presupposed; our earliest philosophers are all theologians and mostly honest ones, who pass through an inner struggle for truth, and truth always means the sincerity of views as determined by the special nature of the individual. Out of this struggle our Teutonic philosophy, which is absolutely new, gradually grew up. This development did not follow one straight line; the work was taken in hand simultaneously at most divergent points, as if in the building of a house, mason, carpenter, locksmith and painter each did his own work independently, troubling himself as little as possible about the others. It is the will of the architect that unites the essentially different aims; in this case instinct of race is the architect; the homo europaeus can only follow definite paths, and he, as Master, to the best of his power forces his path upon others who do not belong to him. I do not think that the structure is complete; I am not bound to any school, but take joy in the growth and development of the Teutonic work, and do what I can reverently to assimilate it. My task in this section is, in the most general

391 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
outlines, to show the growth and present condition of this Teutonic work. Here history again comes to its own; for while civilisation only fastens on to the past in order to destroy it and replace it by something new, and knowledge is, as it were, of no special time, the philosophical and religious development of seven hundred years is still alive, and it is, indeed, impossible to speak of to-day, without remembering that it is born of yesterday. Here everything is still in process of development; our philosophy and, above all, our religion, is the most incomplete feature of our whole life. Here, then, the historical method is forced upon us; it alone can enable us so to pick up and follow the various threads that the web of the tissue, as it was made over to us by the year 1800, shall be clearly seen and surveyed. *
    Ecclesiastical Christianity, purely as religion, consists, as I endeavoured to show in the seventh chapter, of unreconciled elements, so that we found Paul and Augustine involved in most serious contradictions. In Christianity, as a matter of fact, we are dealing not with a normal

    * I shall not copy what is to be found in the text-books on the history of philosophy, for the very reason that there is none that would suit my purpose here. But I should like once for all to refer to the well-known, excellent handbooks to which I owe much in my account. It is to be hoped that at no too distant date Paul Deussen‘s Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Religion will be so far advanced as at least partially to fill the gap which has been so keenly felt by me while writing this section. The very fact that he takes religion also into account proves Deussen‘s capacity to perform the task and his long study of Indian thought is a further guarantee. Meanwhile I recommend to the less experienced reader the short Skizze einer Geschichte der Lehre vom Idealen und Realen which begins the first volume of Schopenhauer‘s Parerga und Paralipomena; in a few pages it offers a brilliantly clear survey of Teutonic thought at its best, from Descartes to Kant and Schopenhauer. The best introduction to general philosophy that exists is in my opinion (and as far as my limited knowledge extends) Friedrich Albert Lange‘s Geschichte des Materialismus: this author takes a special point of view and hence the whole picture of European thought from Democritus to Hartmann becomes more vivid, and in the healthy atmosphere of a frank partiality challenging contradiction we breathe much more freely than under the hypocritical impartiality of masked Academic authorities.

392 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
religious philosophy, but with an artificial philosophy forcibly welded into unity. Now as soon as genuine philosophic thought began to be active — which was never the case with the Romans, but was bound to come with the advent of the Teuton — the nature of this faith full of contradictions violently asserted itself; and in fact it is a truly tragic spectacle to see noble minds like Scotus Erigena in the ninth, and Abelard in the twelfth century wriggle and turn in the hopeless struggle to bring the complex of faith which was forced upon them into harmony with themselves and with the demands of honest reason. Inasmuch as the Church dogmas were regarded as infallible, philosophy had henceforth two parts to choose between; it could openly admit the incompatibility of philosophy and theology — that was the course of truth; or it could deny the evidence of the senses, cheat itself and others, and by means of countless tricks and devices force the irreconcilable to be reconciled — this was the course of falsehood.
 
THE COURSE OF TRUTH

    The course of truth branches off almost from the first in different directions. It could lead to a daring, genuinely Pauline, anti-rationalistic theology, as Duns Scotus (1274-1308) and Occam (died 1343) show. It could bring about a systematic subordination of logic to intuitive feeling, and thus conduced to the rich variety of mystical philosophies, which, beginning with Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) and Eckhart (1260-1328), was to lead up to minds of such different character as Thomas à Kempis, the author of the Imitatio Christi (1380-1471), Paracelsus, the founder of scientific medicine (1493-1541), or Stahl, the founder of modern chemistry (1660-1734). * Or, on the other hand, this unswerving honesty could cause

    * See p. 322.

393 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
men to turn away from all special study of Christian theology and spur them on to acquire a comprehensive, free cosmogony; we see an indication of this in the encyclopaedist Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), it is then further developed in the Humanists, e.g., in Picus of Mirandola (1463-94), who considers the science of the Hellenes as divine a revelation as the books of the Jews, and consequently studies it with the fire of religious zeal. Finally, this path could lead the most profound philosophic intellects to test and reject the foundations of the theoretical philosophy then regarded as authoritative, in order to proceed, as free responsible men, to the construction of a new philosophy in harmony with our intellect and knowledge; this movement — the really “philosophical“ one — always starts in our case from the investigation of nature; its representatives are philosophers who study nature, or philosophic investigators; it begins with Roger Bacon (1214-1294), then slumbers for a long time, repressed by main force by the Church, but raises its head again when the natural sciences have developed strength, and runs a glorious course, from Campanella (perhaps the first man who consciously propounded a scientific theory of perception, 1568-1639) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626) to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) at the threshold of the nineteenth century. So manifold were the new paths opened up to the human spirit when it once faithfully followed its true nature. And by each of the courses mentioned a splendid harvest was garnered. Pauline theology gave birth to Church reform and political freedom; mysticism led to a deeper view of religion, and at the same time to reform and brilliant natural science; the awakened humanist desire for knowledge advanced genuine liberal culture, and the horizon of mankind was powerfully widened by the reconstruction of philosophy in the special sense on the basis of exact observation and critical, free

394 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
thought; while all scientific knowledge gained in depth and religious conceptions in the Teutonic sense began to undergo a complete transformation.
 
THE COURSE OF FALSEHOOD

    The other method, which I have designated the course of falsehood, remained absolutely barren of results; for here arbitrary caprice and capricious arbitrariness predominated. The very attempt to rationalise all religion, that is, to accommodate it to reason, and yet at the same time to bind and put thought under the yoke of faith, is a double crime against human nature. For such an attempt to succeed the delusive belief in dogmatism must first become a raving madness. A Church doctrine which had been patched together out of the most varying foreign alien elements, and which contradicted itself in the most essential points, had to be declared eternal, divine truth; a fragmentary, badly translated, often totally misunderstood, essentially individualistic, pre-Christian philosophy had to be declared infallible; for without these prodigious acceptations the attempt would never have succeeded. And so this theology and this philosophy, which had no connection with one another, were forced into wedlock and a monstrosity was imposed upon humanity as the absolute, all-embracing system to be unconditionally accepted. * In this path development followed a straight, short line; for, while divine truth is as manifold as the creatures in which it is reflected, the impious caprice of a human system, which lays down the law of “truth“ and carries it out with fire and sword, soon reaches its limit, and any further step would be a negation of itself. Anselm, who died in the year 1109, can be regarded as the author of this method, which gags thought and feeling; scarcely a hundred and fifty years after his death

    * See p. 178.

395 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274) and Ramon Lull (1234-1315) had brought the system to the highest perfection. Progress was in this case impossible. Such an absolute theological philosophy neither contained in itself the germ of any possible development, nor could it exercise a stimulating influence upon any branch of human intellectual activity, on the contrary, it necessarily signified an end. * It becomes clear how irrefutable this assertion is when we look at the frequently mentioned Bull Aeterni Patris, of August 4, 1879, which represents Thomas Aquinas as the unsurpassed, solely authoritative philosopher of the Roman view of life even for the present day; and, to make matters more complete, some lovers of the Absolute have lately put Ramon Lull with his Ars Magna even above Thomas. For Thomas, who was a thoroughly honest Teuton, possessed of brilliant intellectual gifts, and who had learned all that he really knew at the feet of the great Swabian Albert von Bollstadt, expressly admits that some few of the highest mysteries — e.g., the Trinity and the Incarnation — are incomprehensible to human reason. It is true he tries to explain this incomprehensibility by rational means, when he says that God intentionally made it so, that faith might be more meritorious. But he at least admits the incomprehensibility. Now Ramon does not admit this, for this Spaniard had learned in a different school, that of the Mohammedans, and had there imbibed the fundamental doctrine of Semitic religion that nothing can be incomprehensible, and so he undertakes to prove everything under the sun on grounds of reason. † He also makes the boastful claim that from his method (of rotary differently coloured disks with letters for the chief ideas)

    * See the remarks on “not-knowing“ as the source of all increase of experience, p. 272, and on the sterilising effects of universalism, p. 276.
    † Cf. vol. i. p. 414. It is very important to note in addition that Thomas Aquinas also must seek support from the Semites and in many passages links on to Jewish philosophers — Maimonides and others. See Dr. J. Guttmann: Das Verhältnis des Thomas von Aquino zum Judentum und zur jüdischen Litteratur (Göttingen 1891).

396 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
all sciences can be derived without the necessity of studying them. Thus absolutism is at the same moment perfected in two ways, by the earnest, ethically idealistic system of Thomas and by the faultlessly logical and consequently absurd doctrine of Ramon. I have already mentioned (p. 276) the judgment of the great Roger Bacon, who was a contemporary of both these misguided men, upon Thomas Aquinas; similar and just as much to the point was the opinion of Cardanus, the doctor, mathematician and philosopher, who had wasted much time on Ramon Lull — a marvellous master! he teaches all sciences without knowing a single one. *
    There is nothing to be gained by lingering over these delusions, although the fact that at the close of the nineteenth century we were solemnly called upon to turn about and choose this insincere course lends them a melancholy present interest. We prefer to turn to that long, magnificent series of splendid men who imposed no shackles on their inner nature, but in simple sincerity and dignity sought to know God and the world. I must, however, first make a remark on method.
 
SCHOLASTICISM

    In the grouping, which I have sketched above (into theologians, mystics, humanists and scientists), the usual conception of a “scholastic period“ completely disappears. And I really think that the notion may be dispensed with here, as being altogether superfluous, if not directly harmful, for the vivid comprehension of the philosophic and religious development of the Teutonic world; it is contrary to the motto from Goethe which I prefixed to this “Historical Survey,“ in that it unites what is heterogeneous and at the same time rends links

    * Here we are reminded of Rousseau‘s remark: “Quel plus sûr moyen de courir d‘erreurs en erreurs que la fureur de savoir tout?“ (Letter to Voltaire, 10. 9. 1755).

397 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
that belong to one single chain. Taken literally, scholastic means simply schoolman; the name should therefore be limited to men who derive their knowledge solely from books; in fact that is the sort of derogatory sense which the word has acquired in common parlance. But we may define more exactly. A predominance of dialectical hair-splitting to the disadvantage of observation — of the Theoretical to the disadvantage of the Practical — is what we call “scholastic“; every abstractly intellectual, purely logical construction seems to us to be “scholasticism,“ and every man who constructs such systems out of his head, or, as the German popular saying is, “Out of his little finger,“ is a scholastic. But when thus viewed the word has no historical value; there have been such scholastics at all times and there is a rich crop of them at the present day. From the historical point of view we generally regard the scholastics as a group of theologians, who for several centuries endeavoured to fix the relations between thought and the Church doctrine, which was now almost completely developed and rigidified. Such a grouping may be useful to the Church historian; it took the “Fathers“ a thousand years of bitter struggle to fix the dogmas; then for five hundred years there raged a violent dispute with regard to the manner in which these Church doctrines could be reconciled with the surrounding world, and especially with the nature of man, so far as this could be derived from Aristotle. Finally, however, the underground current of true humanity had undermined more and more seriously the rock of St. Peter, and the thunder of Martin Luther scattered the theologians; and so on one side and on the other a third period, that of the practical testing of principles, was introduced. As I have said above, from the point of view of the Church historian this may give a useful idea of scholasticism, but from the philosophic standpoint I find it exceedingly misleading, and for the history of our Teutonic culture it is utterly

398 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
useless. What, for example, is the sense of saying, as I find in all text-books, that Scotus Erigena is the founder of scholastic philosophy? Erigena! one of the greatest mystics of all times, who interprets the Bible, verse by verse, allegorically, who fastens directly on to Greek gnosticism * and like Origenes teaches that hell means the tortures of our own consciences, heaven their joys (De Divisione Naturae v. 36), that every man will at last be redeemed, “whether he has led a good or a wicked life“ (v. 39), that to understand eternity we must realise that “space and time are false ideas“ (iii. 9), &c. What connection is there between this daring Teuton † and Anselm or Thomas? Even if we look more closely at Abelard, who, as a pupil of Anselm and an incomparable dialectician, stands much nearer to the doctors named, we must observe that though he is animated by the same purpose — that of reconciling reason and theology — his method and results are so very different that it is quite ridiculous to class such contradictions together merely because of external points of contact. ‡ And what is the meaning of linking together Thomas Aquinas with Duns Scotus and Occam, the sworn opponents, the diametrical contradictions of the doctor angelicus? What is the use of trying to persuade us that it is merely a question of fine metaphysical differences between realism and nominalism? On the contrary, these metaphysical subtleties are merely the external shell, the real difference is the wide gulf that separates the one intellectual tendency from the other, the fact that different characters forge quite different weapons from the same metal. It is the duty of the historian to bring into evidence that which is not immediately clear to every one; to distinguish what seems uniform, while in reality it is essentially antago-

    * Cf. p. 129.
    † Cf. vol. i. p. 325.
    ‡ As I do not wish to repeat myself, I refer the reader to vol. i. pp. 501 f. and 244, note on Abelard.

399 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
nistic; to unite what seems contradictory but is fundamentally in agreement — as, for example, Duns Scotus and Eckhart. Martin Luther felt vividly and profoundly the difference between these various doctors; in a passage of his Table-talk he says: “Duns Scotus has written very well ... and has endeavoured to teach with good system and correctly. Occam was an intelligent and ingenious man .... Thomas Aquinas is a gossiping old washerwoman.“ * And is it not perfectly ridiculous when a Roger Bacon, the inventor of the telescope, the founder of scientific mathematics and philology, the proclaimer of genuine natural science, is thrown into the same class as those who pretended to know everything and consequently stopped Roger Bacon's mouth and threw him into prison? Finally I should like to ask: if Erigena is a scholastic and Amalrich also, how is it that Eckhart, who is manifestly under the power of both, is not one, although he is contemporary of Thomas and Duns? I know that the sole reason is the desire to form a new group, that of the Mystics, which shall lead up to Böhme and Angelus Silesius; and with this object in view Eckhart is violently separated from Erigena, Amalrich and Bonaventura! And that nothing may be wanting to show the artificiality of the system, the great Francis of Assisi is excluded altogether; the man who has exercised perhaps more influence upon the trend of thought than any one, the man to whose order Duns Scotus and Occam belong, to whom Roger Bacon, the regenerator of natural science, confesses his allegiance, and who, by the power of his personality, did more than any other to awaken mysticism to new life! This man, who is a real force in

    * I quote from the Jena edition, 1591, fol. 329; in the new wide-spread selections we do not find this passage nor the others “dealing with the Scholastics as a whole“ where Luther sighs when he thinks of his student days, when “fine, clever people were burdened with the hearing of useless teachings and the reading of useless books with strange, un-German, sophistical words....“

400 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
every field of culture — since he has stimulated art as powerfully as philosophy — is not even mentioned in the history of philosophy; this reveals the faultiness of the scheme which I am criticising, and at the same time the untenability of the idea that religion and philosophy are two fundamentally different things.
 
ROME AND ANTI-ROME

    My bridge will, I think, have been substantially advanced if I have succeeded in replacing this artificial scheme by a living discernment. Such a discernment must naturally in all cases be gained from living facts, not from theoretical deductions. We see here the very same struggle, the same revolt, as in other spheres; on the one hand the Roman ideal which grew out of the Chaos of Peoples, on the other Teutonic individuality. I have shown already that Rome can be satisfied in philosophy as in religion with nothing less than the unconditionally Absolute. The sacrifizio dell‘ intelletto is the first law which it imposes upon every thinking man. This too is perfectly logical and justifiable. That moral pre-eminence is not incompatible with it is proved by Thomas Aquinas himself. Endowed with that peculiar, fatal gift of the Teuton to sink himself in alien views, and, thanks to his greater capacities, to transfigure them and give them new life, Thomas Aquinas, who had drunk in the southern poison from childhood, devoted Teutonic science and power of conviction to the service of the Anti-Teutonic cause. In former ages the Teuton had produced soldiers and commanders to conquer their own nations, now they supplied the enemy with theologians and philosophers; for two thousand years this has steadily been going on. But every unprejudiced observer feels that such men as Thomas are doing violence to their own nature. I do not assert that they consciously and intentionally lie, though

401 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
that was and is often enough the case with men of lower calibre; but, fascinated by the lofty (and for a noble, misguided mind, actually holy) ideal of the Roman delusion, they fall a prey to suggestion and plunge into that view of life which destroys their personality and their dignity, just as the song-bird throws itself into the serpent's jaw. That is why I call this the way of falsehood. For whoever follows it sacrifices what he received from God, his own self; and in truth that is no trifle; Meister Eckhart, a good and learned Catholic, a Provincial of the Dominican Order, teaches us that man should not seek God outside himself — “Got ûzer sich selber nicht ensuoche“; * whoever therefore sacrifices his personality loses the God whom he could have found only within himself. Whoever, on the other hand, does not sacrifice his personality in his philosophy, manifestly follows the very opposite path no matter to what manner of opinions his character may impel him, and no matter whether he belong to the Catholic or to any other Church. A Duns Scotus, for example, is an absolutely fanatical priest, wholly devoted to the essential doctrines of Rome, such as justification by works — a hundred times more intolerant and onesided than Thomas Aquinas; yet every one of his words breathes the atmosphere of sincerity and of autonomous personality. This doctor subtilis, the greatest dialectician of the Church. exposes with contempt and holy indignation the whole tissue of pitiful sophism upon which Thomas has built up his artificial system. It is not true, as he points out, that the dogmas of the Church stand the test of reason, much less that, as Thomas had taught, they can be proved by reason to be necessary truths; even the so-called proofs of the existence of God and of

    * Pfeiffer‘s edition, 1857, p. 626. What is here uttered negatively is expressed in the fifty-third saying, concerning the seven grades of contemplative life, as a positive theory: “Unde sôder Mensch alsô in sich selber gât, sô vindet er got in ime selber“ (“If so man then enters into himself, he findeth God in himself“).

402 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
the immortality of the soul are wretched sophistries (see the Quaestiones subtilissimae); it is not the syllogism that is of value in religion, but faith only; it is not the understanding which forms the centre of human nature, but the will; voluntas superior intellectu! However intolerant from the ecclesiastical point of view Duns Scotus might personally be, the path that he trod led to freedom. And why? Because this Anglo-Saxon is absolutely sincere. He accepts without question all the doctrines of the Roman Church, even those which do violence to the Teutonic nature, but he despises all deceit. What Lutheran theologian of the eighteenth century would have dared to declare the existence of God to be incapable of philosophic proof? What persecutions had not Kant to suffer for this very thing? Scotus had long ago asserted it. And Scotus, by putting the Individual in the centre of his philosophy as “the one real thing,“ saves the personality; and that means the rescue of everything. Now this one example shows with special clearness that all those who follow the same path, the path of sincerity, are closely connected with one another; for what the theologian Scotus teaches is lived by the mystic Francis of Assisi: the will is the supreme thing, God is a direct perception, not a logical deduction, personality is the “greatest blessing“; Occam, on the other hand, a pupil of Scotus, and as zealous a dogmatist as his master, found it not only necessary to separate faith still more completely from knowledge, and to destroy rationalistic theology by proving that the most important Church dogmas are actually absurd, whereby he became a founder of the sciences of observation — but he also upheld the cause of the Kings in opposition to the Papal stool, that is, he fought for Teutonic nationalism against Roman universalism; at the same time he also stoutly upheld the rights of the Church against the interference of the Roman Pontifex — and for this he was thrown into

403 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
prison. Here, as we see, Politics, Science and Philosophy, in their later anti-Roman development, are directly connected with Theology.
    Even such hasty indications will, I think, suffice to convince the reader that the grouping which I suggest goes to the heart of the matter. This division has one great advantage, namely, that it is not limited to a few centuries, but permits us to survey at one glance the history of a thousand years, from Scotus Erigena to Arthur Schopenhauer. In the second place, derived as it is from living facts, it has the further advantage for our own practical life that it teaches us unlimited tolerance towards every sincere, genuinely Teutonic view; we do not inquire about the What of a particular Philosophy, but about the How; free or not free? personal or not personal? It is solely thus that we learn to draw a clear line between our own selves and the alien, and to oppose the latter with all our weapons at once and at all times, no matter how noble and unselfish and thoroughly Teutonic he may pretend to be. The enemy worms his way into our very souls. Was that not the case with Thomas Aquinas? And do we not see a similar phenomenon in the case of Leibniz and Hegel? The great Occam was called doctor invincibilis: may we live to see many doctores invincibiles taking part in the struggle which threatens our culture on all sides!
 
THE FOUR GROUPS

    The ground is now, I hope, sufficiently prepared to enable us to proceed methodically to consider the four groups of men who devoted their lives to the service of truth, without laying the flattering unction to their souls that they possessed or could fully grasp it; by their combined efforts the new philosophy of life has gradually assumed a more and more definite shape.

404 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
These groups are the theologians, the mystics, the humanists and the natural scientists, in which the last-named category the philosophers in the narrower sense of the word are included. For the sake of convenience we shall retain the groups thus established, but we must avoid attaching to such a definition any wider significance than that of a convenient and practical handle for our purpose, for the four classes merge into each other at a hundred points.
 
THE THEOLOGIANS

    Were it my intention to defend any artificial thesis, the group of the theologians would trouble me considerably; indeed I should be tortured with the feeling of my incompetence. But disregarding all technical details which may be beyond my comprehension, I need only open my eyes to see theologians of the character of Duns Scotus as direct pioneers of the Reformation, and not only of the Reformation — for that remained from a religious point of view a very unsatisfactory piece of patchwork, or, as Lamprecht optimistically says, “a leaven for the religious attitude of the future,“ — but also as the pioneers of a far-reaching movement of fundamental importance in the building up of a new Philosophy. We know what metaphysical acumen Kant employs in his Critique of Pure Reason to prove that “all attempts to establish a theology by the aid of speculation alone are fruitless and from their inner nature null and void“; * this proof was indispensable for the foundation of his philosophy; it was Kant, the all-destroyer, as Moses Mendelssohn fitly named him, who first shattered the sham edifice of Roman theology. The very earliest theologians, who followed the “way of truth“ had

    * See the section Critique of all Speculative Theology and also the last of the Prolegomena to every Future System of Metaphysics.

405 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
undertaken the same task. Duns Scotus and Occam were not of course in a position, as Kant was, to undermine the “sham edifice“ of the Church by the direct method of natural science, but for all practical purposes they had with adequate power of conviction attained exactly the same end, by the reductio ad absurdum of the hypothesis which was opposed to them. This fact was bound to lead with mathematical necessity to two immediate consequences: first, the freeing of reason with all that pertained to it from the service of theology, where it was of no use; secondly, the basing of religious faith upon another principle, since that of reason had proved useless. And in fact, as far as the freeing of reason is concerned, we already see Occam joining hands with Roger Bacon, a member of his own order, and demanding the empirical observation of nature; at the same time we see him enter the sphere of practical politics to demand wider personal and national freedom. This was a demand of freed reason, for fettered reason had tried to prove the universal Civitas Dei (in Occam's day by Dante's testimony) to be a divine institution. And in regard to the second point it is clear that, if the doctrines of religion find no guarantee in the reasoned conclusions of the brain, the theologian must endeavour with all the more energy to find this guarantee elsewhere, and the only available source was in the first place to be found in Holy Scripture. However paradoxical it may at first appear, it is nevertheless a fact that it was the violent, intolerant, narrow-minded orthodoxy of Scotus, in contrast to the occasionally almost free-thinking imperturbability of a Thomas, playing in a spirit of superiority with Augustinian contradictions, which pointed the way to emancipation from the Church. For the tendency of Thomas's thought, which the Roman Church so strongly supported, in reality emancipated it entirely from the doctrine of Christ.

406 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
The Church with its Church Fathers and Councils had already pressed itself so much into the foreground that the Gospel had seriously lost credit; now it was proved that the dogmas of faith “had to be so,“ as reason could at any moment demonstrate that this is a logical necessity. To refer further to Holy Scripture would be just as foolish as if a captain, on going to sea, were to take a few pailfuls of water from the river that feeds the ocean and throw them over the bowsprit, for fear he should not have sufficient depth of water. But even before Thomas Aquinas had started to build his Tower of Babel, many profoundly sensitive minds had felt that this tendency which the Romish Church had introduced in practice and Anselm in theory, meant the death of all sincere religion; the greatest of these was Francis of Assisi. Certainly this extraordinary man belongs to the group of the Mystics, but he also deserves mention here among the theologians, for it was from him that the champions of true Christian theology derived their inspiration. That, indeed, seems paradoxical, for no saint was less of a theologian than Francis; but it is an historical fact, and the paradox disappears when we see that it is his emphasising of the importance of the Gospel and of Jesus Christ that forms the connection. This layman, who forces his way into the Church, pushes the priesthood aside, and proclaims the Word of Christ to all people, represents a violent reaction on the part of men longing for religion, against the cold, incomprehensible, argumentative and stilted faith in dogma. Francis, who from youth had been subject to Waldensian influence, doubtless knew the Gospel well; * we should almost have said it was a miracle, did we not know it was the merest accident, that he was not burned as a heretic; his religion can be expressed in the words of Luther: “The law of Christ is not doctrine but life, not word

    * See p. 132 and cf. the conclusion of the note on p. 96.

407 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
but being, not sign but fullness itself.“ * The Gospel which Francis rescued from oblivion became the rock of refuge to which the northern theologians retired, when they had convinced themselves that theological rationalism was untenable and dangerous. And they did so with the passion of combative conviction, urged on by the example of Francis. Duns teaches in direct contrast to Thomas that the highest bliss of heaven will not be Knowing but Loving. The influence which such a tendency must in time acquire is clear; we have already seen how highly Scotus and Occam were esteemed by Luther, while he called Thomas a gossip. The recognition of the fundamental importance of the Biblical Word, the emphasising of the evangelical life in contrast to dogmatic doctrine must inevitably result. Even the more external movement of revolt against the pomp and greed and the whole worldly tendency of the Curia was so self-evident a conclusion from these premises, that we find even Occam attacking all these abuses, and Jacopone da Todi, the author of Stabat Mater, intellectually the most pre-eminent of the Italian Franciscans of the thirteenth century, calls upon men to revolt openly against Pope Boniface VIII., and for so doing has to spend the best years of his life in an underground prison. And though Duns Scotus himself emphasises the importance of works almost more than any one else, while in reference to grace and faith he is not prepared to go even as far as Thomas, it is only a very superficial thinker who sees in this anything specifically Roman, and does not realise that this very doctrine necessarily paves the way for that of Luther: for the whole aim of these Franciscans is to make will, and not formal orthodoxy, the central point of religion; this makes religion something lived, experienced, immediately present. As Luther says, “Faith is Will essentially good“; and in another

    * Von dem Missbrauch der Messe, Part III.

408 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
passage, “Faith is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, so that it could not but unceasingly do good.“ * Now this “Will,“ this “Doing“ are the things upon which Scotus and Occam, taught by Francis, lay all emphasis, and that, too, in contrast to a cold, academic creed. Certain much-read authors of the present day use the terms “faith“ and “good works“ in a most frivolous manner; without joining issue with those to whom the practice of falsehood seems a “good work,“ I ask every unbiased reader to consider Francis of Assisi and to say what is the essence of this personality. Every one must answer “the power of faith.“ He is faith incorporate: “not doctrine but life, not word but being.“ Read the history of his life. It was not priestly admonition, not sacramental consecration that led him to God, but the vision of the Cross in a ruined chapel near Assisi and Christ's message in the diligently studied Gospel. † And yet Francis — as also the Order which he founded — is rightly regarded by us as the special Apostle of good works. And now look at Martin Luther — the advocate of redemption by faith — and say whether he has done no works, whether on the contrary he did not consecrate his life to working, whether indeed he was not the very man who revealed to us the secret of good works, when he said they must be eitel freie Werke, “nothing but free works, done only to please God, not for the sake of piety ... for wherever they contain the false supplement and wrong-headed idea that we wish by works to become pious and blessed, they are not good but utterly culpable, for they are not free.“ ‡ The learned may shake their heads as they will, we laymen recognise the fact that a Francis of Assisi has led up to a Duns

    * Cf. The Vorrede auf die Epistel Pauli an die Römer.
    † See, for example, Paul Sabatier: Vie de S. François d‘Assise, 1896, chap. iv.
    ‡ Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen pp. 22, 25.

409 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
Scotus and the latter to a Martin Luther; for it is the impulse of freedom — the freeing of the personality that is at the root of this movement. The whole life of Francis is a revolt of the individual — against his family, against all society around him, against a thoroughly corrupt priesthood and a Church that had fallen away from Apostolic tradition; and while the priesthood prescribes to him definite paths as alone conducing to bliss, he undauntedly goes his own way and as a free man holds commune directly with his God. Such a view raised to the sphere of theological philosophy must needs lead to almost exclusive emphasising of freedom of will, and this is exactly what took place in the case of Scotus. We are bound to admit that the latter with his one-sided emphasising of liberum arbitrium shows less philosophic depth than his opponent Thomas, but all the more profundity in religion and (if I may so say) in politics. For hereby this theology succeeds — in direct contrast to Rome — in making the individual the central point in religion: “Christ is the door of salvation: it is for man to enter in or not!“ Now it is this accentuation of free personality that is the only important matter — not subtleties concerning grace and merit, faith and good works. This path led to an anti-Roman, anti-sacerdotal conception of the Church and to an altogether new religion which was spiritual, not historical and materialistic. That very soon became clear. Luther, the political hero, did indeed close the door for a long time against this natural and inevitable religious movement. Like Duns Scotus he too enveloped his healthy, strong, freedom-breathing perception in a tissue of over-subtle theological dogmas, and never freed himself from the historical and therefore intolerant conceptions of a faith which had grown out of Judaism; but this attitude gave him the right strength for the right work: in his struggle for the Fatherland and the dignity of the

410 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
Teutonic peoples he proved victorious, whereas his rigid, monkish theology broke like an earthen pitcher, being too small to hold all that he himself had poured into it. It was not till the nineteenth century that we again took those great theologians as our starting-point, to enable us to pursue the path to freedom even in the sphere of theology.
    Let us not under-estimate the value of the theologians for the development of our culture! Whoever with more knowledge than I possess makes a further study of what has here been briefly sketched will, I think, find the work of these men even up to our own times manifoldly blessed. A learned Roman theologian, Abelard, exclaims even in the twelfth century, “Si omnes patres sic, at ego non sic!“ * and it would be a good thing if a great many theologians of our century possessed the same courage. See what a Savonarola — the man whose fiery spirit inspired a Leonardo, a Michael Angelo, a Raphael — does for freedom, when from the pulpit he cries: † “Behold Rome, the head of the world, and from the head turn the eyes upon the limbs! from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head not one part is sound; we live among Christians, have interaction with them; but they are not Christians who are Christians in name only; it were truly better to live among the heathen!“ — this monk, I say, when he utters such words before thousands and seals them with his death at the stake, does more for freedom than a whole academy of free-thinkers; for freedom asserts itself not by opinions but by attitude, it is “not word, but being.“ So too, in the nineteenth century, a pious, inwardly religious Schleiermacher has certainly done more in the interests of a living, religious philosophy than a sceptical David Strauss.

    * Quoted from Schopenhauer: Über den Willen in der Natur (Section on Physische Astronomie).
    † Sermon at the Feast of the Epiphany, 1492.

411 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
THE MYSTICS

    The real High School of freedom from hieratic and historical shackles is mysticism, the philosophia teutonica, as it was called. * A mystical philosophy, when completely worked out, dissolves one dogmatic theory after another as allegory; what remains is pure symbol, for religion is then no longer a creed, a hope, a conviction, but an experience of life, an actual process, a direct state of mind. Lagarde somewhere says, “Religion is an unconditional present“; † this is the view of a mystic. The most perfect expression of absolutely mystical religion is found among the Aryan Indians; but scarcely a hair's-breadth separates our great Teutonic mystics from their Indian predecessors and contemporaries; only one thing really distinguishes them: Indian religion is genuinely Indo-Teutonic, mysticism finds in it a natural, universally recognised place, but there is no place for mysticism in such a conjunction as that of Semitic history with pseudo-Egyptian magic, and so it was and is at best merely tolerated, though mostly persecuted by our various sects. The Christian Churches are right from their point of view. Listen to the fifty-fourth saying of Meister Eckhart: “You know that all our perfection and all our bliss depends on this, that man should pass through and over all creation, all temporality and all being, and go into the depths which are unfathomable.“ That is essentially Indian and might be a quota-

    * Concerning the German people as a whole Lamprecht testifies that “the basis of its attitude to Christianity was mystical“ (Deutsche Geschichte, 2nd ed. vol. ii. p. 197). This was absolutely true till the introduction by Thomas Aquinas of obligatory rationalism, supplemented later by the materialism of the Jesuits.
    † The theologian Adalbert Merx says in his book, Idee und Grundlinien einer allgemeinen Geschichte der Mystik, 1893, p. 46: “One fact in mysticism is firmly established, that it so completely possesses, reveals and represents the fact or experience in religion, religion as a phenomenon ... that a real philosophy of religion without historical knowledge of mysticism is out of the question.“

412 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
tion from the Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad. No sophistry could succeed in proving a connection between this religion and Abrahamitic promises, and no honest man will deny that in a philosophy which rises above “creation“ and “temporality,“ the Fall and the Redemption must be merely symbols of an otherwise inexpressible truth of inner experience. The following passage from the forty-ninth Sermon of Eckhart is also apposite: “So long as I am this or that or have this or that, I am not all things and have not all things; but as soon as you decide that you are not, and have not, this or that, then you are everywhere; as soon, therefore, as you are neither this nor that, you are all things.“ * This is the doctrine of Ãtman, and to it the theology of Duns Scotus is just as irrelevant as that of Thomas Aquinas. Before leaving the subject, upon one thing I must insist. The religion of Jesus Christ was just such a mystical religion; His deeds and words prove it. His saying, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,“ † cannot be interpreted by empiricism or history.
    Naturally, I cannot here enter into a fuller exposition of mysticism, that would be seeking in a few lines to fathom human nature where it is “unfathomable“; my duty consists solely in so presenting the subject that even the uninitiated will at once perceive that it is the necessary tendency of mysticism to free men from ecclesiastical tenets. Fortunately — I may well say so — it is not the Teutonic nature to pursue thoughts to their last consequences, in other words, to let them tyrannise over us, and so we see Eckhart in spite of his Ãtman doctrine remaining a good Dominican — escaping the Inquisition, it is true, by the skin of his teeth ‡ — but

    * Pfeiffer's edition, p. 162.
    † See vol. i. p. 187.
    ‡ It was not till after his death that his doctrines were condemned as heretical and his writings so diligently destroyed by the Inquisition that most of them are lost.

413 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
signing all necessary orthodox confessions, and we never find that — in spite of all the recommendations of the sopor pacis (the sleep of peace) by Bonaventura (1221—1274) and others — quietism has with us as with the Indians drained the veins of life. For that reason I shall limit myself to the narrow compass of this chapter, and only briefly point out what a destructive influence the army of Mystics exercised on the alien traditional religion, and how on the other hand they did so much to create and promote a new philosophy in keeping with our individuality. Usually too little is made both of the negative and of the positive activity of these men.
    Very striking is, in the first place, their dislike for Jewish doctrines of religion; every Mystic is, whether he will or not, a born Anti-Semite. Pious minds like Bonaventura get over the difficulty by interpreting the whole Old Testament allegorically and giving a symbolical meaning to the borrowed mythical elements — a tendency which we find fully developed five hundred years earlier in Scotus Erigena, and which we may trace still further back, to Marcion and Origines. * But this does not satisfy those souls in their thirst after true religion. The strictly orthodox Thomas à Kempis prays with pathetic simplicity to God, “Let it not be Moses or the Prophets that speak to me, but speak thyself ... from them I hear words indeed, but the spirit is absent; what they say is beautiful, but it warms not the heart.“ † This feeling we meet with in almost all the Mystics, but nowhere so beautifully expressed as by the great Jacob Böhme (1575—1624). In regard to many passages in the Bible, after he has explained all that he can (e.g., the whole history of creation), symbolically and allegorically, and sees that he cannot proceed any further, he simply exclaims, “Here the eyes of Moses are veiled,“

    * See pp. 44 and 89.
    † De Imitatione Christi, Book III, chap. ii.

414 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
and goes on to interpret the matter freely in his own way! * The contradiction is more serious when we come to conceptions of heaven and especially of hell. To be quite candid, we must admit that the conception of hell is really the blot of shame upon ecclesiastical doctrine. Born amid the scum of raceless slaves in Asia Minor, nurtured during the hopelessly chaotic, ignorant, bestial centuries of the declining and fallen Roman Empire, it was always repulsive to noble minds, though but few were able to rise so completely above it as Origenes and that incomprehensibly great mind, Scotus Erigena. † We can easily comprehend how few could do so, for ecclesiastical Christianity had gradually grown into a religion of heaven and hell; everything else was of little moment. Take up any old chronicles you like, it is the fear of hell that has been the most effectual, generally the sole religious motive. The immense estates of the Church, her incalculable incomes from indulgences and suchlike, she owes almost solely to the fear of hell. At a later period the Jesuits, by frankly making this fear of hell the central point of all religion, ‡ acted quite logically and soon earned the reward of consistent sincerity; for heaven and hell, reward and punishment form to-day more than ever the real or at least the effectual basis of our Church ethics. §
    “Ôtez la crainte de l‘enfer à un chrétien, et vous lui

    * See, for example, Mysterium magnum, oder Erklärung über das erste Buch Mosis, chap. xix. § 1.
    † See pp. 48 and 129. The extraordinary popularity of Erigena's Division of Nature in the thirteenth century (see pp. 274 and 341) shows how universal was the longing to get rid of this frightful product of Oriental imagination. Luther, in spite of all orthodoxy, is often inclined to agree with Erigena, he, too, writes in his Vierzehn Trostmittel i. I., “Man has hell within himself.“
    ‡ See p. 111, &c.
    § The Jesuits are only more consistent than the others. I remember seeing a German girl of twelve years of age lying in convulsions after a lesson on religion. The Lutheran Duodecimo-Pope had inspired the innocent child with such terror of hell. Teachers of this kind should be cited before a criminal court.

415 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
ôterez sa croyance“, says Diderot not quite unjustly. * If we take all these facts into consideration, we shall comprehend what en effect must have been produced by the beautiful doctrine of Eckhart: “Were there no Hell and no Kingdom of Heaven, yet I would love God — Thee, Thou sweet father, and Thy sublime nature“; and, “The right, perfect essence of the Spirit is to love God for His own goodness, though there were no Heaven and no Hell.“ † Some fifty years later the unknown author of the Theologia deutsch, that splendid monument of German mysticism in Catholic garb, expresses himself still more definitely, for he entitles his tenth chapter, “How perfect men have lost their fear of hell and desire of heaven,“ and shows that perfection consists in freedom from these conceptions: “The freedom of those men is such that they have lost fear of pain or hell, and hope of reward or heaven, and live in pure submission and obedience to everlasting goodness, in the complete freedom of fervent love.“ It is scarcely necessary to prove that between this freedom and the “quaking fear,“ which Loyola holds to be the soul of religion, ‡ there is a gulf deeper and wider than that which separates planet from planet. There two radically different souls are speaking, a Teutonic and a non-Teutonic. § In the following chapter this “man of Frankfort,“ as he is called, goes on to say that there is no hell in the ordinary, popular sense of a future penitentiary, but that hell is a phenomenon of our present life. This priest is obviously

    * Pensées philosophiques, xvii.
    † Cf. the Twelfth Tractate and the glossary to it. Francis of Assisi also laid almost no stress on hell and very little on heaven (Sabatier, as above, p. 308).
    ‡ See vol. i. p. 569.
    § I remind the reader that Walfila could not translate the ideas hell and devil into Gothic, since this fortunate language knew no such conception (p. 111). Hell was the name of the friendly goddess of death, as also of her empire, and points etymologically to bergen (to hide), verhüllen (to conceal), but by no means to Infernum (Heyne); Teufel has been formed from Diabolus.

416 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
at one with Origenes and Erigena and comes to the conclusion that “hell passes away and heaven continues to exist.“ One further remark most emphatically characterises his opinion. He calls heaven and hell “two good, sure ways for man in this age,“ he assigns to neither of these “ways“ any preference over the other and expresses the opinion that “in hell a man may be quite at his ease and as safe as in heaven!“ This view, which we find in this form or in a similar form among other Mystics, e.g., Eckhart's pupils Tauler and Seuse, is especially often and clearly expressed by Jacob Böhme: it is the expression of a philosophy which has pursued the thought further, and is on the point of passing from a negative conclusion to a positive conception. Thus to the question, “Whither does the soul go when the body dies, be it blessed or condemned?“ he gives the answer, “The soul does not require to leave the body, but the external, mortal life and the body separated themselves from it. The soul has previously had heaven and hell within it ... for heaven and hell are everywhere present. It is merely a turning of the will towards the love of God or towards the wrath of God, and such may take place while the body is still alive.“ * Here nothing remains vague; for we manifestly stand with both feet on the foundation of a new religion; it is not new in so far as Böhme can point in this case to the words of Christ: “The Kingdom of God cometh not with outward signs“; “The world of angels is within the place (in loco) of this world“; † but it is a new religion as compared with all Church doctrines. In another passage he writes “The right, holy man, who is concealed in the visible man, is in Heaven as

    * Der Weg zu Christo, Book VI. §§ 36, 37. This conception is Indo-European and proves at once the race of the author. When the Persian Omar Khayyám sent out his soul to get knowledge, it returned with the news, “I myself am Heaven and Hell“ (Rubáiyát).
    † Mysterium magnum 8, 18.

417 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
well as God, and Heaven is in him.“ * And Böhme fearlessly goes further and denies the absolute difference between good and evil; the inner foundation of the soul, he says, is neither good nor bad, God himself is both: “He is himself all Existence, he is Good and Evil, Heaven and Earth, Light and Darkness“; † it is the will that first “distinguishes“ in the mass of indifferent actions, it is by the will that the action of the doer becomes good or evil. This is pure Indian doctrine; our theologians have long since and without difficulty proved that it simply contradicts the doctrine of the Christian Church. ‡
    While the mystics already named and the incalculable number of others who held similar views, whether Protestants or Catholics, remained inside the Church, without ever thinking how thoroughly they were undermining that toilsomely erected structure, there were large groups of Mystics who perhaps did not go so far in viewing the essence of religion in the light of inward experience as the Theologia deutsch and Jacob Böhme, or as the saintly Antoinette Bourignon (1616—80), who wished to unite all sects by abolishing the doctrines of Scripture and emphasising only the longing for God: but these teachers directly attacked all ecclesiasticism and priesthood, dogmas, scripture and sacrament. Thus Amalrich of Chartres (died 1209), Professor of Theology in Paris, rejected the whole Old Testament and all sacraments, and accepted only the direct revelation of God in the heart of each individual. This gave rise to the league of the “Brothers of the Free Spirit,“ which was, it seems, a rather licentious and outrageous society. Others again, like Johannes Wessel (1419—89) by greater moderation achieved greater success; Wessel is essentially a

    * Sendbrief dated 18.1.1618, § 10.
    † Mysterium magnum 8, 24.
    ‡ Cf., for example, the short work of Dr. Albert Peip: Jakob Böhme, 1860, p. 16 f.

418 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
mystic and regards religion as an inner, present experience, but in the figure of Christ he sees the divine motive power of this experience, and far from wishing to destroy the Church, which has handed down this valuable legacy, he desires to purify it by destroying the chimeras of Rome. Staupitz, the protector of Luther, holds very similar views. Men like these, who imperceptibly merge into the class of the theologians like Wyclif and Hus, are vigorous pioneers of the Reformation. Mysticism, in fact, had in so far a great deal to do with the Reformation, as Martin Luther in the depths of his heart was a mystic: he loved Eckhart and was responsible for the first printed edition of the Theologia deutsch; in particular, his central theory of present conversion by faith can only be understood through mysticism. On the other hand, he was annoyed by the “fanatics“ who would soon, he thought, have spoiled his life-work. Mystics like Thomas Münzer (1490—1525), who began by abusing the “delicately treading reformers“ and then openly revolted against all secular authority, have done more harm than anything else to the great political Church-reform. And even such noble men as Kaspar Schwenkfeld (1490—1561) merely frittered away their powers and awakened bitter passions by abandoning contemplative mysticism for practical Church reform. A Jacob Böhme, who quietly remains in the Church, but teaches that the sacraments (baptism and communion) are “not essentials“ of Christianity, effects much more. * The sphere of the genuine mystic's influence is within not without. Hence in

    * Cf. Der Weg zu Christo, Book V. chap. viii., and Von Christi Testament des Heiligen Abendmahles, chap. iv. § 24. “A proper Christian brings his holy Church with him into the congregation. His heart is the true Church, where he should worship. Though I go to church for a thousand years and to sacrament every week and be absolved daily: if I have not Christ in me, all is false and useless vanity, a worthless, futile thing, and not forgiveness of sins“ (Der Weg zu Christo, Book. V. chap. vi. § 16). Concerning preaching he says:

419 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
the sixteenth century we see the good Protestant tinker Bunyan and the pious Catholic priest Molinos doing more sound and lasting work than crowds of free-thinkers to free religion from narrowly ecclesiastical and coldly historical conceptions. Bunyan, who never harmed a soul, spent the greater part of his life in prison, a victim of Protestant intolerance; the gentle Molinos, hounded like a mad dog by the Jesuits, submitted in silence to the penances imposed by the Inquisition and died from their severity. The influence of both lasted, raising to a higher level the minds of religious men within the Churches; in this way they surely paved the way for secession.
    Now that I have indicated how mysticism in countless respects broke up and destroyed the un-Teutonic conceptions which had been forced upon us, it remains for me to indicate how infinitely stimulating and helpful the Mystics at all times were in the building up of our new world and our new Philosophy.
    Here we might be inclined to distinguish with Kant — who, like Luther, is closely bound up with the Mystics, though he might not wish to have much to do with them, — between “dreamers of reason“ and “dreamers of feeling.“ * For as a matter of fact, two distinct leading tendencies are noticeable, the one towards the Moral and Religious, the other rather to the Metaphysical. But it would be difficult to follow out the distinction, for metaphysics and religion can never be fully separated in the mind of the Teuton. How important, for example, is the complete transference of Good and Evil to the will, which on close inspection we find already indicated in Duns Scotus and clearly expressed in Eckhart and Jacob Böhme. For this the will must be free. Now

“The Holy Ghost preaches to the holy hearer from all creatures; in all that he sees he beholds a preacher of God“ (§ 14).
    * Traüme eines Geistersehers, &c., Part I. 3.

420 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
the feeling of necessity comes into all mysticism, since mysticism is closely bound up with nature, in which necessity is everywhere seen at work. * Hence Böhme at once calls nature “eternal,“ and denies its creation out of nothing: there he reasoned like a philosopher. But how to save freedom? Here, clearly, a moral and a metaphysical problem clutch at each other like two men drowning: and in fact things looked black till the great Kant, in whose hands the various threads which we are following — theology, mysticism, humanism and natural science — were joined, came to the rescue. It is only by the perception of the transcendental ideality of time and space that we can save freedom without fettering reason, that is, we can do so only by realising that our own being is not completely exhausted by the world of phenomena (including our own body), that rather there is a direct antagonism between the most indubitable experiences of our life and the world which we grasp with the senses and think with the brain. For example, in reference to freedom, Kant has laid down once for all the principle that “no reason can explain the possibility of freedom“; † for nature and freedom are contradictions; he who as an inveterate realist denies this will find that, if he follows out the question to its final consequences, “neither nature nor freedom remains.“ ‡ In presence of nature, freedom is simply unthinkable. “We understand quite well what freedom is in a practical connection, but in theory, so far as its nature is concerned, we cannot without contradiction even think of trying to understand it“; § for, “the fact that my will moves my arm is not more comprehensible to

    * Cf. the remarks on p. 240 f. (vol. i.)
    † Über die Fortschritte der Metaphysik III.
    ‡ Critique of Pure Reason (Explanation of the Cosmological Idea of Freedom).
    § Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Part 3, Div. 2, Point 3 of the General Note.

421 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
me than if some one were to say that my will could also hold back the moon in its course; the difference is merely this, that I experience the former, while the latter has never occurred to my senses.“ * But the former — the freedom of my will to move my arm — I experience, and hence in another passage Kant comes to the irrefutable conclusion: “I say now, every being that cannot act but under the idea of freedom is for that very reason practically and really free.“ † In such a work as this I must, of course, avoid all minute metaphysical discussion, though indeed nothing short of that would make the matter really clear and convincing, but I hope that I have said enough to make every one feel how closely religion and philosophy are here connected. Such a problem could never suggest itself to the Jews, since their observation of nature and of their own selves was never more than skin-deep, and they remained on the childish standpoint of empiricism hooded on both sides with blinkers; much less need we mention the refuse of humanity from Africa, Egypt and elsewhere, which helped to build up the Christian Church. In this sphere therefore — where the deepest secrets of the human mind were to be unlocked — a positive structure had to be built from the very foundations; for the Hellenes had contributed little ‡ to this purpose and the Indians were as yet unknown. Augustine — in his true nature a genuine mystic — had pointed the way by his remarks on the nature of time (p. 78), and likewise Abelard in regard to space (vol. i. p. 502), but it was the Mystics proper who first went to the root of the matter. They never grow tired of emphasising the ideality of time and space. “The moment contains eternity,“ says Eckhart more than once. Or again: “Everything that is in God is a present moment, without renewal

    * Träume eines Geistersehers, Teil 2, Hauptstück 3.
    † Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 3rd section.
    ‡ See vol. i. p. 85 f.

422 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
or future creation.“ * Here, as so often, the Silesian shoemaker is especially convincing, for with him such perceptions have lost almost all their abstract flavour and speak directly from the mind to the mind. If time is only a conditional form of experience, if God is in no way “subject to space“ † then Eternity is nothing future, we already grasp it perfectly and completely, and so Böhme says in his famous lines:
Weme ist Zeit wie Ewigkeit
Und Ewigkeit wie diese Zeit,
Der ist befreit von allem Streit. ‡
The other closely related problem of the simultaneous sway of freedom and necessity was likewise always present to the Mystics; they speak often of their “own“ mutable will in contrast to the “everlasting“ immutable will of necessity, and so forth; and though it was Kant who first solved the riddle, yet a contemporary of Jacob Böhme, the great “dreamer of feeling,“ approached very near to it. Giordano Bruno (1548—1600), one of the greatest “dreamers of reason“ of all times, propounds the paradox that freedom and necessity are synonymous! Here we see the audacity of true mystical thought; it is not restrained by the halter of purely formal logic, it looks outwards with the eye of the genuine investigator and admits that the law of nature is necessity, but then it probes its own inner soul and asserts “my law is freedom.“ § So much for the positive contribution of the Mystics to modern metaphysics.

    * Sermon 95, in Pfeiffer's edition.
    † Beschreibung der drei Prinzipien göttlichen Wesens, chap. xiv. § 85.
    ‡ Whoever regards time as eternity and eternity as present time is freed from all conflict.
    § Cf. De immenso et innumerabilibus I. II., and Del infinito, universo e mondi, towards the end of the First Dialogue. Here by the intuition of genius the same thing is discovered as was established two hundred years later by the brilliant critical judgment of Kant, who says: “Nature and freedom can be attributed without contradiction to the same thing, but in different connections, at one time to the thing as it appears at another to the thing itself.“ (Prolegomena, § 53).

423 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
    Still more important is the part they played in the establishment of a pure doctrine of morals. The most essential points have been already mentioned: ethical merit centred in Will, purely as such; religion not a matter of future reward and future punishment, but a present act, a grasping of Eternity at the present moment. This gives rise to an utterly different idea of sin, and consequently of virtue, from that which the Christian Church has inherited from Judaism. Thus Eckhart, for example, says: “That man cannot be called virtuous who does works as virtue commands, but only the man who does these works out of virtue; not by prayer can a heart become pure, but from a pure heart the pure prayer flows.“ * We find this thought in all Mystics in countless passages, it is the central point of their faith; it forms the kernel of Luther's religion; † it was most completely expressed by Kant, who says: “There is nothing in the world nor anything outside of it which can be termed absolutely and altogether good, except a good Will. A good Will is esteemed to be so not by the effect which it produces nor by its fitness for accomplishing any given end, but by its mere good volition, that is, it is good in itself ... even though it should happen that, owing to an unhappy conjunction of events or the scanty endowment of unkind nature, this good volition should be deprived of power to execute its benign intent, executing nothing and only retaining the good Will, still it would shine like a jewel in itself and by virtue

    * Spruch 43. Cf., too, Sermon 13, where he says that all works shall be done “without any why.“ “I say verily, as long as you do works not from an inward motive but for the sake of heaven or God or your eternal salvation, you are acting wrongly.“
    † Cf. the whole work on Die Freiheit eines Christenmenschen. How new and directly anti-Roman this thought appeared is very clear from Hans Sachs‘ Disputation zwischen einem Chorherrn und Schuchmacher (1524), in which the shoemaker especially defends, as being “Luther's idea,“ the doctrine that “good works are not done to gain heaven or from fear of hell.“

424 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
of its native lustre. The usefulness or fruitlessness of acts cannot add to or detract from this lustre.“ * Unfortunately, I must limit myself to this central point of Teutonic ethics; everything else is derived from it.
    But I must mention one thing more before taking leave of the Mystics — their influence upon natural science. Passionate love of nature is strongly marked in most of the Mystics, hence the extraordinary power of intuition which we notice in them. They frequently identify nature with God, often they put nature alongside of God as something Eternal, but they hardly ever fall into the hereditary error of the Christian Church, that of teaching men to despise and hate nature. It is true that Erigena is still so much under the influence of the Church Fathers that he regards the admiration of nature as a sin comparable to breach of marriage vows, † but how different is the view of Francis of Assisi! Read his famous Hymn to the Sun, which he wrote down shortly before his death as the last and complete expression of his feelings, and sang day and night till he died, to such a bright and cheerful melody that ecclesiastically pious souls were shocked at hearing it from a death-bed. ‡ Here he speaks of “mother“ earth, of his “brothers“ the sun, wind and fire, of his “sisters“ the moon, stars and water, of the many-coloured flowers and fruits, and lastly of his dear “sister,“ the morte corporale, and the whole closes with praise, blessing and thanks to the altissimu, bon signore. § In this last, most heartfelt hymn of praise

    * Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Division 1. Cf., too, the concluding part of the Träume eines Geistersehers, and especially the beautiful interpretation of the passage in Matthew XXV. 35-40, a proof that in the eyes of God only those actions have a value which a man performs without thinking of the possibility of reward. This interpretation is found in his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen, Section 4, Part I., close of first division.
    † De divisione naturae 5, 36.
    ‡ Sabatier, loc. cit. p. 382.
    § By this song Francis proves himself a pure Teuton in absolute

425 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
this holy man does not touch upon a single dogma of the Church. Few things are more instructive than a comparison between these outpourings of a man who had become altogether religious and now gathers his sinking strength to sing exultingly to all nature this rapturous unecclesiastical tat tvam asi * and the orthodox, soulless, cold confession of faith of the learned, experienced politician and theologian Dante in the twenty-fourth canto of his Paradiso. † Dante with his song closed an old, dead age, Francis began a new one. Jacob Böhme puts nature above Holy Scripture: “There is no book in which you will find more of divine wisdom than the book of nature spread before you in the form of a green and growing meadow; there you will see the wondrous power of God, you will smell and taste it, though it be but an image ... but to the searcher it is a beloved teacher, he will learn very much from it.“ ‡ This tendency of mind revolutionised our natural science. I need only refer to Paracelsus, whose importance in almost all the natural sciences is daily becoming more and more recognised. The great and enduring part of this remarkable man's work is not the discovery of facts — by his unfortunate connection with magic and alchemy he spread many absurd ideas — but the spirit with which he inspired natural science. Virchow, who is certainly not prejudiced in favour of mysticism, and who shows poor courage in calling Paracelsus a “charlatan,“ nevertheless expressly declares that it was he who delivered

contrast to Rome. Among the Aryan Indians we find farewell songs of pious men, which correspond almost word for word to that of Francis. Cf. the one translated by Herder in