Part 18

It is clear from the beginning that this course of development really rests upon self-training, and usually takes its start in that period of life in which every earnest man is tired of the “fables of the world” and is in the same frame of mind in which Dante has his great poem begin with the words: “In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood astray;” or in which St. Theresa says: “My soul was submerged in the dream of earthly things, but it has pleased the Lord to awaken me from this slumber of death, and I beseech Him nevermore to let me fall back therein.” What education can do up to this point is, as regards the inner life, merely of a preparatory and prophylactic nature, and consists in keeping the young human being away from a wholly materialistic conception of the world, as well as from a merely formal religion, both of which would make difficult his later approach to a true philosophical and religious conviction. Such children as are educated in the natural sciences alone, as well as those who have heard of Christianity too early and too often, or have been trained to make use of religious expressions and forms mechanically (often against the grain), only rarely grow up to be men who later have the power of finding the way of peace. It is the especial task of education to keep the young soul free from the strain of immorality, and inclined toward a purer life than one that is based merely upon the senses. The soil on which the noble plant of a true religion should later take root and flourish is rendered unfit for that purpose by nothing so much as by the dominance of sensuality. The soaring-power of the spirit is thereby broken, and is regenerated again only with difficulty and partially, if at all. With this, we return to the thought already expressed elsewhere, that for the education of those who are to be given a higher culture (for the boys, at least, and probably also for their mothers and governesses and women teachers) the so-called classical education is indispensable, and on the whole to be preferred to the ordinary religious and moral instruction. Christianity then comes easily of itself, later on, if any one has honestly traversed this stage of instruction in the classical philosophy (which can not and should not be the final stage); and, as history has shown, Christianity bears its finest fruits upon a classical substratum. In particular, a classically educated spirit will never be able to sink into mere ecclesiasticism, and still less into the insipidities and the trivialities which, much as they are foreign to the great and noble nature of pristine Christianity, nevertheless, to its immense harm, cling to the quite common conception of it.

Besides, Christianity undoubtedly contains an element of alienation from the world, an element that can not be so suitable for the education of a young human being still intent upon the growth of all his intellectual faculties, as it is for the self-training that comes later. Indeed, one may go so far as to say that physical well-being (though by no means the highest form of feeling nor the highest destiny), and a certain human impulse to self-exaltation (which later finds its limit in the true humility of Christianity) are natural and even necessary to the growth of youth, and for this very reason the classical examples and ideals (and those of the Old Testament also, of course) fit in better with this period than do those of the Christian era. Only, the classical education must be adapted to the circumstances of the pupils’ environment, or this environment must itself be able to be elevated at the same time, or it will often make the pupils discontented with their lot. Indeed, it is even as Flattich rightly pointed out of old in the naïve words, “Youth must have its time of raging, though not wickedly so;” and for those who do not have this period in youth, it often comes afterward, only worse and more secretly.

When education has planted in the young human being a disposition inclined toward the ideal, and has begotten in him an aversion to all that is vulgar, together with some good life-habits, then it has performed its most important duty. At present, indeed, it wants to do more than this, but in reality it accomplishes less.

Two things must be made particularly clear to the young man at the conclusion of the first life-period: in the first place, within the limits of natural laws men attain to everything, so to speak, that they earnestly desire. Only, they must begin at the right time, must proceed in the right order, and must above all things not chase two hares at once. To become rich, renowned, learned, or virtuous, there is need in every case of a single-minded and orderly struggle that suffers no competition of some rival purpose. One must therefore know what one wants to be, and choose the right thing as early as possible. Then “the man grows, of himself, along with his greater aims.” Without these, he is vainly tempted to seek his development in the artificial forcing-beds of education.

The way in which this subjectivity (not wrong at the first) comes to an end is not one that can be exactly determined, either as to the time the end takes place or as to the cause that brings it about. The change usually begins with premonitions which eventually become strong impressions. These are often called forth merely by isolated words which sometimes have been spoken by men, apparently by chance, but are more frequently derived from reading. Books that fall into a man’s hand at just the right time are nowadays most frequently the instrumentality of the summons to a higher life. Many a time, also, the soul suddenly, in moments of elevation, sees itself transported to a quite different plane from that on which it really lives. It espies, as often happens to the mountain-wanderer, a new and beautiful region quite near before it, but which is still separated from its present standing-ground by a vast chasm, over which a bridge leads, but only far below in the depths.

In this period isolated experiences also occur which may be classed as strange, as hard to be described, and as by no means essential to development. On this point mystic writers say that there are three kinds of more intimate union with the divine: first, the quite regular kind (thus already understood in the Old Testament), that comes through submission and sincere love, a union that always remains open in its nature, that nothing can interrupt save a man’s own will contending against the will of God, and that is at once reëstablished as soon as the will is again accordant; second, an extraordinary kind, that comes through devout contemplation, which can not, however, be artificially produced, but which is only a yet greater affection of the heart, waiting in patience and humility for the response that God will perhaps give thereto; and lastly, a still more sensitive feeling of nearness to God, coming for the most part quite unexpectedly, but, of all the three, the least necessary and important for the progress of the inner life.

The end of the first stage of life is not satisfying--can not and should not be. All subjectivity is a form of thinking that ends in dissatisfaction, and the nobler the soul, the more quickly and deeply it falls into it. Along with this there very often comes a certain failure in the outer life, almost enigmatical; the cause is given in very picturesque language by an Israelitic prophet, Hosea, “I will hedge up the way with thorns, and I will make a fence against her, that she shall not find her paths.” It is the genuine mercy of God when every false way a man wishes to strike into is hedged with thorns; or when he, in another beautiful Israelitic simile, like a lily among thorns, can find his growth only straight upward. Those are the sorrows of youth for which later one is most thankful.

Nevertheless, because of these things a certain sadness masters the soul, and but few noteworthy men are to be found who have not temporarily suffered melancholy in their youth. Even at best, they live in the mood which Goethe depicts in the words:

So still and thoughtful? Something is lacking; freely confess. “Contented am I, but ’tis not well with me, nevertheless.”

But, as every brave young soul sees, life is not given us with the purpose that we may always be only “still and thoughtful,” nor that we may consume ourselves in disconsolate complaints or in the pessimism that wastes the soul’s powers. Those are the conditions that attend transition, and must appear. A new life must spring therefrom, but one feels, indeed, that a kind of death first lies between.

This is the surrender of the personal will, intent upon the selfish life; this will a man renounces with so much difficulty that Calvin was able to found upon this fact his doctrine of a formal predestination of some to this development of his true existence, and of others to a loss of it. But every such death, for those who bear within them the seed of an eternal life, is not the final goal, but the means to a new and higher development of life. Whoever is unable to hold fast to this hope with the tenacity with which Job clung to it, and yet is no longer able to find any satisfaction in the world of the senses, falls now into a gloomy asceticism which is forever shovelling at his grave; or into an idle dialogue (in diaries and letters) with his painful dissatisfaction with the universe; or into the confused Buddhistic longing for some Nirvana; or, finally, into one of the various other aberrations of the human spirit, which all agree only in considering the true way as an impossible or fantastic one.

At this point of life, for a time, the word of salvation is, Forward!

At about the middle of a man’s life, and often the most quickly in the case of the best and most successful lives, there comes a moment of dissatisfaction with all that has hitherto been attained. This is more frequently the case among the cultured than among the other classes, because the continuous struggle of the latter for existence partly spares them this dissatisfaction and more clearly shows the way to free themselves from it. When, at this time, any one stands quite at the exit-gates of earthly existence, all human concerns appear to him literally nothing worth, and he would never feel kindly toward them again, even in their highest activities, if the wisdom of this world did not bring him back into the belief that these are only morbid sensations that must be overcome by a feeling of robust vitality. This, to be sure, they must do, but not unless a real death of the selfish nature precedes; upon such a death the most in every human life depends, although this event does not always come to pass in just the same form. The same feeling, however, is present in all nobler souls, that they do not get forward with their “intentions to do better,” but daily find new hindrances in themselves and in the surrounding world; and that, in their own nature, what is lacking is not the dream, indeed, but the power of attaining an existence truly worthy of man. Those are conditions that often last for years; in their later period arise thoughts which, to some, make this process seem to resemble the ascent of a mountain.

But this ascending of the mountain does not always lead to the true summit it is designed for, even in the case of the best men, and in this respect, also, one is tempted to believe in predestination. Another mountain-peak which is sometimes attained is a noble scepticism, such as Gottfried Keller gives expression to in the touching words that, at some time or other in life, one must accustom himself to the thought of a real death, and that if he then gathers himself together, he does not become any the worse man therefor. Certainly not, only he is no perfectly satisfied man, with the thirst for truth and eternal life slaked; that is a goal which the most beautiful sceptical philosophy never reaches.

Doubting thought stands on a still higher plane in “The Holy Grail” of Tennyson:

“Thereafter, the dark warning of our King, That most of us would follow wandering fires, Came like a driving gloom across my mind: Then every evil word I had spoken once, And every evil thought I had thought of old, And every evil deed I ever did, Awoke and cried: ‘This Quest is not for thee.’”

Beyond this thought the most earnest and sincere souls would never get, if it were not for the solution which the English poet himself offers at the conclusion of his profound poem:

“Let visions of the night or of the day Come, as they will; and many a time they come, Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, This air that smites his forehead is not air But vision--yea, his very hand and foot--In moments when he feels he can not die, And knows himself no vision to himself, Nor the high God a vision, nor that One Who rose again.”

It is very strange that a matter that has been in existence for almost two thousand years, that has already busied the minds and hearts of millions of teachers and writers, and that has been borne with great cost and exertions over seas and preached to nations to whom it was unknown, has become unfamiliar in its own place of dominion and among the most cultured nations of the globe. Or can we asseverate that the spirit, or, let us say, even the thought, of Christianity is something that is generally known and acknowledged in our European states?

Far removed from this view, some within so-called Christendom, like the Roman procurator Festus, hold Christianity to be a sort of more or less harmless superstition concerning “one Jesus, who was dead, whom Paul affirmed to be alive”; others regard it as a society which it is the proper thing to belong to, without necessarily having any further interest in it; a third class looks upon it as a hierarchy of priests which, for reasons mostly external, they either reverence or abhor. To yet others it is a science called theology, to penetrate which there is need of very long courses of study and many examinations. And when they come to the particulars in the “structure of doctrine,” not many among the learned wholly agree as to what faith is, or mercy, or the significance of the “sacrifice of Christ,” whether there is predestination and eternal punishment, or a “restoration of all things,” or what are the methodical steps one must take, to be saved. Every one who ventures into these labyrinths of theological and philosophical thought, without at the same time possessing a very decided aspiration toward the highest truth and a very sound understanding of human nature, is apparently in danger of losing the one or the other. And so, thousands of the most cultured men of our day have, in fact, given up making any further trial of what seems to be joined with only trouble, contention, doubt, and renunciation of the natural enjoyments of life, only to lead, at the end, to nothing other than a kind of human slavery, without any better assurance than before. Christianity is now, for the greater part of Christians, a doctrine of the churches and the schools, which one listens to as long as one must, but from which a cultured man will inwardly free himself as quickly as possible, even if he still outwardly believes he must allow himself to fit into forms of the social life when once they have become historical.

The simple answer to this is that we can neither dispense with Christianity nor put something in its place. We do not know (and it would be useless to wish to discover) what would have become of the civilized world, if Christianity had not appeared in it when it did; but it is certain that we can no longer get away from it now, nor ignore it, but we must reckon with it as with something that will endure, yet can not be wholly explained by science. True, science can not be prevented from discovering, as completely as possible, everything that is knowable, or from extending the sphere of the knowable as widely as possible; that is its right and its duty. With this there goes, in the conception of particular minds, the supposition that everything is knowable that concerns mankind, or that, at any rate, everything can be made knowable in time. This is the basis of a considerable part of the courage and the perseverance found in scientific investigation. But just as little may it be forbidden us to doubt that men will ever succeed in completely fathoming human nature in all its relationships to the universal Being and in its connection with all things; but even so, it is the duty (and of cultured people most of all) nevertheless, to stand firm, and in particular to put away the presumption with which imperfect knowledge, or even mere hypotheses, are wont to be set up in the place of the inward conviction as to the existence and worth of super-sensual things.

Highly as humanity has cause to value science and its steady advance, it would, nevertheless, take a tremendous backward step, if one should be able to remove from the sphere of its life and from the motives of its actions everything that is not scientifically provable. This is the ideal of many educated people of our time, but it is a false and a very inadequate one.

Our knowledge is patchwork, and will remain such. We shall scarcely ever be able to know even everything that concerns ourselves. Nor do the strongest motives of our best actions spring from the sphere of knowledge; otherwise the most learned people must always be the most perfect, which is by no means the case. Our spiritual Ego is rooted rather in the Unexplainable, and experience shows that if this something unexplainable is ever taken from the Ego in questions of faith, it tries to make up for the loss by adopting some superstition or other.

Of all the objects of faith, however, faith in Christ is historically the best established, humanly the most intelligible, and as a matter of personal experience the most easily found to be true. If in any man it is not all this, truly and enduringly, then the cause lies in his own will, or absence of will, for which the Gospel of John finds the correct expression, “as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God.” Luther also truly says: “Because the expression ‘to trust God and serve Him’ must be so elastic that every man follows after his own thoughts, and one thinks so and the other thus, therefore He has fixed Himself to a certain place and to a certain person, since He wants to be found and met in such a way that one may not miss Him.” A man’s faith is, therefore, itself no force or power, else superstition must also be such, but all true power in spiritual things is the property of God. But he summons this power and makes its appearance upon earth possible.

Only, this is likewise true, that Christianity has no effect in a man whose spirit is unbroken, who has no inner humility, but then it remains an empty form at best. If it is then united with the office of teaching, or with some other pretension of a special position or distinction, it conduces to the man’s destruction. What is regarded in the outer life as an irreparable harm, “a broken existence,” a rent that runs through all the plans of life, is not at all such in the inner; on the contrary, that is the soil in which faith in Christ best prospers, and they of all men are most to be pitied who despair just at the moment when they find themselves in such a position and can not grasp how near they are to salvation.

From this moment of humility there enters into man the real regenerative power of the good, which springs from that true righteousness which “counts” with God.

His further journey is, on the one hand, much easier than is often represented, for nothing more is now required of the man for which he has not power and insight in sufficient measure, together with a gladness of hope that can no longer be wholly troubled, and with a special, personal guidance that lightens all. But, on the other hand, it is more difficult than is, in this first moment, believed. For life is yet far from its termination; indeed, now is its real starting-point, and there begins a long series of occurrences which all have the purpose of showing man his real nature more clearly than he was in position to bear earlier, and of gradually being no longer indulgent toward him in any respect, as was hitherto in great measure the case. For “Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with righteousness.” But all this happens only in the following, or even, now and then, in the final, period of life; before, it would have been quite impossible.

III