The assertion that the spirit must give life to the mere letter is certainly more definitely stated as that spirit has only to expound what is given, i.e. it must leave the actual sense of what is immediately contained in the words. We must, however, be far behind in culture if we do not see the fallacy in the attitude here adopted. To expound without the individual spirit, as though the sense were one entirely given, is impossible. To elucidate signifies to make clear, and it must be made clear to me; this can be done by nothing excepting what was already present in me. It must be in conformity with my subjective judgment, the necessities of my knowledge, of my apprehension, of my heart, &c.; thus only is it for me. We find what we look for, and just because I make it clear to myself, I make my conception, my thought, a factor in it; otherwise it is a dead and external thing, which is not present for me at all. It is hence very difficult to make clear to ourselves those foreign religions which lie far below our spiritual needs; but yet they touch a side of my spiritual necessities and standpoints, although it is but a dim and sensuous side. Thus when we talk of “making clear,” we conceal the real matter in a word; but if this word itself is made clear we find nothing in it but the fact that the spirit which is in man desires therein to recognize itself, and that it cannot know anything which does not rest in him. Thus have men made of the Bible what may be called a nose of wax. This man finds this thing, the other man that; what was secure now shows itself as insecure, because it is considered by the subjective spirit.
In this regard the nature of the text describing the method in which the first manifestation of Christianity took place, must be remarked upon; it cannot as yet expressly contain that which rests in the principle of Christianity, but only somewhat of an anticipation of what spirit is and will know as true. This also is expressly said in the text itself. Christ says: “If I depart, I will send the Comforter, the Holy Ghost.... He will guide you into all truth,” He—and not Christ’s earthly presence nor His spoken words. It was only to be after Him, and after His teaching through the text, that the Spirit was to come into the Apostles, and that they were to become full of the Spirit. It might almost be said that when Christianity is carried back to its first appearing, it is brought down to the level of unspirituality, for Christ Himself says that the Spirit will not come until He Himself has departed. In the text of the first manifestation of Christianity we, on the other hand, see Christ only as the Messiah, or under the more explicit designation of a mere teacher; for His friends and apostles He is a present man whom they can perceive by the senses, and who does not yet hold to them the relationship of the Holy Ghost. His friends have seen Him, heard His doctrine, seen His miracles, and have thereby been brought to believe in Him. But Christ Himself sternly rebukes those who demand miracles of Him; if He thus be made as God to man, God in the heart of man, He cannot have a sensuous and immediate presence. The Dalai-lama, in the form of a sensuous man, is God to the inhabitants of Thibet, but in the Christian principle, where God dwells in the hearts of men, He cannot be present to them in sensuous form.
The second point then is that the sensuous and present form must disappear, so that it may be taken into the Mnemosyne, into the realm of popular conception; then for the first time can the spiritual consciousness, the spiritual relation, enter in. To the question of whither Christ has gone, the answer is given, “He sits on the right hand of God,” which signifies that it is only now that God can be known as this concrete One, as the One who has the other moment, His Son (λόγος, σοφία), in Himself. Thus to know what is the principle of Christianity as truth, the truth of the Idea of spirit must be known as concrete spirit, and this is the form peculiar to the Fathers of the Church. With this the idea that the abstractly divine breaks up and has broken up within itself, first began to appear. This other moment in the divine must not, however, be grasped in the mode of an intelligible world, or, as we certainly have it in the ordinary conception, of a kingdom of heaven with many angels, who are also finite, limited, thus approaching closer to humanity. But it is not sufficient that the concrete moment should be known in God, for the further knowledge is requisite that Christ is an actual present man. This moment of Christ’s actual present humanity is of immense importance to Christianity, because it is the union of the most tremendous opposites. This higher conception could not have been present in the text, in the first manifestation; the greatness of the Idea could only come in later on, after the Spirit had perfected the Idea.
That the revelation of Christ has this significance is the belief of Christians, while the profane, immediate and direct significance of this history is that Christ was a mere prophet and met the fate of all the prophets in being misunderstood. But the fact that it has the significance given by us is known through the Spirit, for the Spirit is revealed in this history. This history is the Notion, the Idea of Spirit itself, and the world-history has in it found its end, which is in this immediate way to know the truth. It is therefore the Spirit which so comprehends that history, and at the time of Pentecost this is shown in an immediate and evident manner. For before this time the Apostles did not know the infinite significance of Christ; they did not yet know that this is the infinite history of God; they had believed in Him, but not yet as seeing in Him this infinite truth.
This is the truth which the Fathers developed; the general relation of the first Christian Church to Philosophy is hereby given. On the one hand, the philosophic Idea has been transplanted into this religion; on the other, this moment in the Idea—according to which the latter breaks up within itself into wisdom, the active Logos, the Son of God, &c., but yet in so doing remains in universality—has been brought to a culmination in subjectivity, and further in the sensuous immediate individuality and present existence of a human individual appearing in time and space. These two elements are essentially intermingled in this Christian system, the Idea itself, and secondly the form as it presents itself through its connection with a single individuality present in time and space. To the Fathers this history had thus the Idea as its principle; the true Idea of the Spirit was consequently to them likewise in the determinate form of history. But the Idea was not yet, as such, separated from history; because the Church thus held to this Idea in historic form, it determined the doctrines. This, then, is the general character of the time.
From this Idea as comprehended through the Spirit, many so-called heresies arose in the first centuries after Christ. Among such heretics must be included those of the Gnostics who take the Christian literature as their basis, but give a spiritual significance to everything therein present. For they did not remain at this historical form of the Idea of Spirit, since they interpreted the history and deprived it of its historical value. The reflections which they introduced are, as we have seen (Vol. II., pp. 396-399), to a greater or less extent such as are to be found in the philosophy of the Alexandrians or of Philo. In conformity with their principles they adopted a speculative attitude, but they proceeded into extravagances both of the imagination and morality, although in this dim fantastic region the elements which we found in history may always be recognized. But the form of immediate existence, an essential moment in Christ, is by them etherealized into a universal thought, so that the determination of the individual as a ‘this’ disappears. The Docetæ, for example, said that Christ had only a phantom body, a phantom life; yet in such assertions thought still constituted the background. The Gnostics were thus antagonistic to the Western Church, and, like Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, this last strove hard against Gnosticism, because it remained in what is general, grasped the conception in the form of imagination, and because this conception was opposed to that of Christ in the Flesh (Χριστὸς ἐν σαρκί).[1] The Church, on the contrary, held to the definite form of personality as the principle of concrete actuality.
From the East other forms of opposition in the principles than those we mentioned in connection with the Gnostics have been introduced, namely, Light and Darkness, Good and Evil. But more particularly has this Parsee opposition emerged in Manichæism, in which God, as the Light opposes the evil, non-existent (οὐκ ὄν), the ὕλη, the material, self-annihilating. Evil is that which contains contradiction in itself: the powers of evil (ὕλη), given over to themselves and raging in blind enmity against one another, were met by a gleam from the Kingdom of Light and thereby attracted, and this light pacified the powers of evil, so as to cause them to cease from strife and unite together in order to penetrate into the Kingdom of Light. As an inducement to make them so act, in order to weaken and mitigate their blind fury through a power operating irresistibly, and in order to bring about their final overthrow, and the universal supremacy of light, of life, of the soul, the Father of Light delivered over one of the powers of good. That is the world-soul (ψυχὴ ἁπάντων); it was swallowed up by the material, and this intermixture is the basis of the whole creation. Hence the soul is everywhere disseminated, and in the dead husk it is everywhere working and striving in man, the microcosm, as in the universe, the macrocosm, but with unequal power; for where beauty reveals itself, the Light-principle, the soul, obtains the mastery over matter, but in the ugly, the hateful, it is subordinate, and matter is the conqueror. This captive soul Mani likewise called the Son of Man—that is, of the primitive man, the heavenly man, of Adam Kadmon. But only a part of the Light-principle which was destined to strive with the Kingdom of Evil is in this manner delivered over; being too weak, it incurred the danger of being vanquished, and had to deliver over to matter a part of its armour, this soul. The part of the soul which had not suffered through such intermingling with matter, but had raised itself freely to heaven, works from above for the purification of the imprisoned souls, its kindred portions of light; and that is Jesus, the Son of Man, in so far as he has not suffered (ἀπαθής), as distinguished from the suffering Son of Man, the soul confined within the universe. But that delivering soul remains in the second and visible light which is still distinguished from the first and unapproachable, having its seat there, and by means of sun and moon exercising influence in the purification of nature. To Mani the whole course of the physical as of the spiritual world appears as a process of purification by means of this soul. The captive principle of Light required to be raised from the cycle of metempsychosis to an immediate re-union with the Kingdom of Light. Hence the pure heavenly soul came down to earth and appeared in the semblance of human form in order to reach to the suffering soul (to the νοῦς παθητικός of Aristotle?) a helping hand. The Manichæans also express themselves to the effect that God, the Good, goes forth, illumines, and thus produces an intelligible world. What comes third is Spirit as turning round, establishing the unity of the second and first, and experiencing feeling, and this feeling is Love. This heresy fully recognizes the Idea, but does away with the form of individual existence in which the Idea is presented in the Christian religion. The crucifixion of Christ is consequently taken as merely a semblance, as allegorical only, simply an image. That merely phantom crucifixion of the non-suffering Jesus, the fellow-suffering, only imaginary certainly, of the soul unmingled with matter, shows forth the actual suffering of the captive soul. Thus as the forces of Darkness could exercise no power over Christ, they must also show themselves powerless over the soul allied thereto. With the Manichæans originates the conception of a Jesus who is crucified in all the world and in the soul; the crucifixion of Christ thus mystically signifies only the wounds of our suffering souls. Through vegetation the particles of light were held fast, and thus held fast they were brought forth as plants. The earth becoming fruitful brings forth the suffering (patibilis) Jesus, who is the life and salvation of men and is crucified on every tree. The νοῦς which appeared in Jesus signifies all things.[2] The Church has likewise made a principal point of asserting the unity of the divine and human nature. But because this unity in the Christian religion attained to conceiving consciousness, human nature was in its actuality taken as ‘this,’ and not merely in an allegorical or philosophic sense.
Now if, on the one hand, the essential matter with the orthodox Fathers who opposed themselves to these Gnostic speculations, is the fact that they held firmly to the definite form of an objectively conceived Christ, on the other hand they attacked the Arians and all that pertain to them; for these recognize the individual as manifested, but do not place the Person of Christ in connection with the separation, with the breaking up of the divine Idea. They took Christ to be a man, accorded to Him indeed a higher nature, not, however, making Him a moment of God, of Spirit itself. The Arians did not indeed go so far as the Socinians, who accepted Christ merely as a man of noble nature, a teacher, and so on; this sect hence did not form part of the Church at all, being simply heathen. But still the Arians, since they did not recognize God in Christ, did away with the idea of the Trinity, and consequently with the principle of all speculative philosophy. The according to Him of a higher nature is likewise a hollow mockery which cannot satisfy us; as against this the Fathers accordingly asserted the unity of the divine and human nature, which has come to consciousness in the individual members of the Church, and this is a point of fundamental importance. The Pelagians again, denied original sin, and maintained that man has by nature sufficient virtue and religion. But man should not be what he is by nature; he should be spiritual. And thus this doctrine is likewise excluded as heretical. Therefore the Church was ruled by Spirit, to enable it to hold to the determinations of the Idea, though always in the historic form. This is the philosophy of the Fathers; they produced the Church, as the developed Spirit required a developed doctrine, and nothing is so out of place as the endeavour or desire of some men of the present day to lead the Church back to her original form.
What follows thirdly is that the Idea permeates reality, is immanent therein, that not only is there a multitude of believing hearts, but that from the heart, just as the natural law rules over a sensuous world, a higher life of the world, a kingdom, is constituted—the reconciliation of God with Himself is accomplished in the world, and not as a heavenly kingdom that is beyond. This community is the kingdom of God upon earth in the Church; “Where two or three are gathered together in my name,” says Christ, “there am I in the midst of them.” The Idea is only for spirit, for subjective consciousness, in so far as it realizes itself in actuality, and thus it not only has to bring itself to perfection in the heart, but has to perfect itself also into a kingdom of actual consciousness. The Idea which man, self-consciousness, should recognize, must become altogether objective to him, so that he may truly apprehend himself as spirit and the Spirit, and then that he may be spiritual in a spiritual, and not in an emotional way. The first objectification is found in the first immediate consciousness of the Idea, where it appeared as an individual object, as the individual existence of a man. The second objectivity is the spiritual worship and communion extended to the Church. We might imagine a universal community of Love, a world of piety and holiness, a world of brotherly kindness, of innocent little lambs and pretty triflings with things spiritual, a divine republic, a heaven upon earth. But this is not supposed to come to pass on earth; that imagination is relegated to heaven, i.e. to some other place, that is to say, it is put off until death. Each living actuality directs his feelings, actions, and affairs in a very different way from this. On the appearance of Christianity it is first of all said: “My kingdom is not of this world;” but the realization has and ought to be in the present world. In other words the laws, customs, constitutions, and all that belongs to the actuality of spiritual consciousness should be rational. The kingdom of rational actuality is quite a different one, and must be organized and developed thinkingly and with understanding; the moment of the self-conscious freedom of the individual must maintain its rights against objective truth and objective command. This, then, is the true and actual objectivity of mind in the form of an actual temporal existence as state, just as Philosophy is the objectivity of thought which comes to us in the form of universality. Such objectivity cannot be in the beginning, but must come forth after being worked upon by mind and thought.
In Christianity these absolute claims of the intellectual world and of spirit had become the universal consciousness. Christianity proceeded from Judaism, from self-conscious abjectness and depression. This feeling of nothingness has from the beginning characterized the Jews; a sense of desolation, an abjectness where no reason was, has possession of their life and consciousness. This single point has later on, and in its proper time, become a matter of universal history, and into this element of the nullity of actuality the whole world has raised itself, passing out of this principle indeed, but also into the kingdom of Thought, because that nothingness has transformed itself into what is positively reconciled. This is a second creation which came to pass after the first; in it Mind became aware of itself as I = I, that is, as self-consciousness. This second creation has first of all appeared in self-consciousness equally directly in the form of a sensuous world, in the form of a sensuous consciousness. As much of the Notion as has entered in was adopted by the Fathers from the philosophers already mentioned; their Trinity, in so far as a rational thought, and not a mere ordinary conception, comes from these, and certain other ideas also. But what mainly distinguishes them is the fact that for the Christian this intelligible world had likewise this immediate sensuous truth of an ordinary course of events—a form which it must have and retain for the majority of men.