The philosophy of life, and philosophy of language, in a course of lectures. Friedrich von Schlegel
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of nature, and here and there to decipher a word or two of its hieroglyphical language, while at the same time streams of historical knowledge began to flow down from the remotest antiquity of the human race, confirming and setting in the clearest light the best of all that we had before possessed, and exciting a hope that we might, perhaps, be also able to understand the obscure hieroglyphics of our own age, and the fearful war of minds which is commencing in it.
Such is the course of things, or, rather, the higher Providence that rules therein; and it was to this, chiefly, that I wished to call your attention by this digression. Thus slow and gradual, but permanent, are the progressive steps in the growth and development of true human science, which is founded on experience—the internal as well as external, the higher as well as the lower—and on tradition, language, and revelation. But, on the contrary, that false, or, as I termed it at the outset, that unhuman and absolute knowledge, as it pretends to embrace all at once, and by one step to place us in full possession of the whole sum of human knowledge, so, ever fluctuating between being and non-being, it soon dissolves into thin air, and leaves nothing behind but a baseless void of absolute non-knowing. Ill would it fare with the knowledge of God and of divine things, if they were left to be discovered, and, as it were, first established by human reason. Even though, in such a case, the intellectual edifice were never so well built and compact, still, as it had originally issued out of man’s thoughts, it would be ever shaking before the doubt whether it were any thing better than an idea, or had any reality out of the human mind.
For this doubt is the foundation of all idealism, to which, often recurring under differing forms of error, it does but give a fresh creation and new shape. Even from this side, consequently, it is apparent that no living certainty and complete reality is attainable by it. Easy, in truth, were it from this position to evolve the ideas of the illimitable, and the infinite, and the absolute; and of such developments there is no lack. But they are at best but pure negations, which do not serve in the least to explain that which is most necessary for us to understand. Curious, indeed, should I be to see the process by which, out of this pet metaphysical idea of the absolute, any one positive notion of God—His patience, for example, and long-suffering—is to be deduced. Strange, too, must be the way in which alone it could carry out the proof that the absolute Deity, or as man prefers, it seems, to say, the Absolute, can not dispense with the possession of this attribute of patience, on which, however, before all others, it is important for man to insist. Moreover, this character of absoluteness is applied to the Deity in a manner which is altogether false and erroneous. That God, in the mode of his existence, is unlimited—that the First Cause is not dependent on, and can not be qualified by any other being, is self-evident, and is nothing but a mere identical proposition. But this character does not admit of being applied to his inner essence, or His essential attributes in relation to man and the whole creation. Wo to all men, nay, we might rather say, wo to all created beings, if God were really absolute—if, for instance, His justice, which, however, is the first and principal of all His attributes, were not manifoldly modified, limited, and conditioned by His goodness, His mercy, and His patience. Before such a justice of God, if it were at once to make such an unconditional manifestation of itself, the whole world in terror would sink in dust and ashes. But it is not so. Man does hope—he must believe—ay, we may go on and add, man does know, that the divine justice is not unconditional, but is in an eminent degree limited by His fatherly love and goodness.
No doubt, too, it must not, on the other hand, be forgotten, that the divine love and grace are also conditioned by the attribute of justice, what, however, in a certain effeminate theology of a recent day, seems to have been totally overlooked. However, this grave error of a too sentimental view of divine things is now pretty generally recognized as such, and, for the most part, abandoned. Moreover, it does not properly lie within the scope of our present disquisition. Now, the position that the justice and the grace of God mutually limit each other, involves nothing unintelligible, or, in this sense, inconceivable; as, however, is the case with the baseless phantom of the absolute, where the empty phrase becomes only the more unintelligible the more frequently it is repeated. How much more correct, in this respect, were the definitions and distinctions of the great philosophers of antiquity, especially the Pythagoreans. With them the limitless and the indeterminate were even the imperfect and the evil, and the former they regarded as the characteristic marks of the latter; while the fixedly definite and positive, which forms the very heart and core of personality, was with them identical with the good: and unquestionably, God’s personality—the fundamental notion, the proper and universal dogma of every religion that acknowledges the one true God—is the true center around which the whole inquiry revolves. For the question is, whether philosophy, while it allows this idea to stand indeed externally, and apparently—for even in Germany only one has been found bold enough to deny it expressly and without reserve—intends all the while to put it quietly aside, and secretly to entomb it by refusing to see in it any thing more than an illusion of the natural feelings. The point at issue is whether, by so teaching, philosophy is to come into direct collision with one of man’s most universal and deeply-rooted feelings, and to produce an eternal schism—an irreconcilable discord—not only between science and faith, but even between science and life. For to unsettle life, is even the necessary result of rationalism.
But let us now turn from the “Absolute” of reason to the personal God of the believers among all peoples and times. If, now, the knowledge of God be not a discovery of the reason, whose proper office is to analyze and investigate—if, on the contrary, we are only able to understand of Him so much as is given and imparted to us, then the matter assumes quite another aspect. If God has conferred a knowledge of Himself upon man—if He has spoken to him, has revealed Himself to him—as is the common tradition of all ancient nations, the more unanimously corroborated the older they are—then is the power to understand this divine communication given together and at the same time with it, even though we should be forced to allow that this intellectual capacity be limited by human frailty and extremely imperfect. To take our estimate of it as low as possible, we will conceive it to be something like the degree of intelligence with which a child eighteen months old understands its mother. Much it does not understand at all; other things it mistakes, or perhaps does not fully attend to, and its answers, too, are not much to the purpose; but something, nevertheless, it does understand—this we see clearly enough. On this point we should not be likely to be led astray, even though the theorist should wish to raise a doubt on the matter, by attempting to prove that the child could not properly understand its mother, since for that purpose it would be necessary for it to have previously learned thoroughly and methodically the elements of grammar. We believe, however, what, indeed, we see, that man’s power of understanding divine things is really very imperfect. For the relation between the child a year and a half old and its mother completely represents that of man to God, with the more than half-imperfect organs that are given him for this purpose—with his so manifoldly limited mind or spirit, which is a spark of heavenly light, indeed, but still only a spark—a drop out of the ocean of the infinite whole—and, moreover, with his half-soul. For half-soul we may and must call it in this respect, since with the one half it is turned to the earth, and still wholly fraternizes with the sensible world; while with the other it is directed to, and is percipient of, the divine. But such a childlike and humble docility will not satisfy the proud reason, and so it is ever turning again to the other absolute road of a false, imaginary, and unhuman knowledge. Fundamentally, however, those two words,[19] which alone man can be certain of with respect to God, would, since God invariably imparts to every creature its due measure, be quite enough, if only man would always rightly apply and faithfully preserve them.
Now, to this first hypothesis we might append the further question:—supposing that God has imparted a knowledge of Himself to mankind—has spoken to them, and revealed Himself to them—is it not highly probable that He has ordained some institution for the further propagation and diffusion of revealed truth, and also for the maintenance as well of its original integrity as also of the right interpretation of it? But I must content myself with merely advancing this question. I can not attempt to prosecute it in the present place; for its further consideration would carry us out of the established limits of philosophy into the domain of history, and it involves, moreover, the positive articles of faith.
But the previous question, whether the knowledge of God, which we