(γ) Thirdly, it is to be observed that in the kind of examples with which we are now dealing it is not merely the existence of Nature and immediate finite conditions which is affected by this attitude of self-abnegation and endurance, but the impulse of the soul is transported by such feelings to an extreme point of this heavenly rapture to such an extent, in fact, that what is merely human and of the world, even when it is essentially beyond reproach on ethical or rational grounds, is none the less thrust behind and scorned. In other words, just in proportion as the Spirit, which here makes vivid to itself the idea of its conversion, is in the first instance deficient in an educated sense, to that extent it will with so much the more uncontrollable and logical frenzy—the entire force of its piety being concentrated on this one object—turn its back on everything which as finite opposes this bare and abstract infinitude of its religious fanaticism, that is to say, on every definite human emotion, all the manifold ethical impulses, relations, and obligations of the heart. For the moral life of the family, the bonds of friendship, of blood, of love, of the State, and a man's calling, every one of them belong to the things of the world; and all that is of the world, in so far as it is not as yet suffused with the absolute conceptions of faith and developed in unity and harmony with the same, appears to this form of abstract spiritual intensity of the soul of faith so far from being something acceptable to its emotional life and sense of obligation, that it is, on the contrary, a thing of no worth at all, and therefore both hostile and hurtful to its religious state. The moral organism of the human world is consequently not as yet respected, because its significant features and duties are not as yet recognized as necessary, integrated members in the concatenation of an essentially rational reality, in which nothing, it is true, ought to assert itself in a one-sided and independent isolation, yet, none the less, as an essential factor in the organic process, must be maintained as such and not be sacrificed. In this respect the religious reconciliation remains itself one-sided, and declares itself in the truly simple heart as an intensity of belief which is deficient in comprehensiveness, that is, as the piety of the self-secluded soul, which has not yet attained in its growth to the fully expanded self-reliance of maturity, and to conviction based on genuine insight and circumspection. When the force of a soul deficient in these qualities maintains its opposition to the world which is thus treated in a purely negative way, and forcefully breaks loose from all human ties, even though they may originally be the very closest, we can only characterize such conduct as the rawness of Spirit and a barbaric result of the power of abstraction, which is simply repulsive. So we may say that though from the point of view of the religious consciousness, as we find it to-day, it is indeed possible to honour, and to honour highly, this opening germ of religiosity in such representations, if, however, such a pious tendency proceeds to such lengths that we find it advancing to lay siege to what is both essentially rational and moral, then, so far from sympathizing with such a fanaticism of sanctity, we can only protest that a kind of abnegation such as this, which casts off from itself, shatters and treads upon that which is independently justifiable, and even sacred, appears to us both immoral in itself and subversive of the very type of religion it represents. There are many legends, tales, and poems which deal with this extreme form of the pious craze. We have, for example, the tale of a man who, though full of tenderness for his wife and family, and, moreover, beloved by all his friends, leaves his home and makes a pilgrimage. When at last he returns home in the guise of a beggar he refuses to disclose his identity. Alms are given him, and out of compassion a permanent lodging provided under the stairs. In this plight he lives for twenty years; he sees the grief of his family on his account, and only declares who he is on his death-bed. This kind of thing, which we are asked to revere as sanctity, is, of course, merely the egotism of a fanatic which revolts us. This long endurance of renunciation may remind us of the distrait nature of those penances, which the Hindoos voluntarily impose on themselves on religious grounds. But the endurance of the Hindoo has a very different significance. In that case a man deliberately places himself in a condition of vacuum and unconsciousness; in the case which we are now considering the pain, and the deliberate consciousness and feeling of the same is the real object, which it is assumed will be attained with just so much more purity as the suffering is associated with the consciousness of the value of and devotion to the severities which are accepted, and is, moreover, united with a vision for ever concentrated on the renunciation thus made. The richer the heart which takes on itself the burden of such ordeals, the nobler the content of its own possessions, and yet withal believes that it is bound to condemn them as of no merit, just so much the more difficult grows the task of reconciliation, and the more prone it is to bring about the most terrible convulsions and the most raving distraction. Indeed, to our vision, it is clear enough that a soul such as this, which is only at home in a world which, however full of ideas, is not the world of common experience, and which consequently only feels its grasp slipping from the stable and paramount centres of activity and aims of this our actual world, ay, and although it be with heart and soul held in and associated with that world, yet regards all that is moral there simply as something which contradicts its absolute destination—we can only say that such a soul, both in its self-inflicted sufferings and its renunciations, is from the rational point of view simply mad, so mad that we can neither feel any profound compassion for it, nor propose any means of liberation. What is lamentably lacking to a mode of life of this kind is an object of real substance and valid significance; what it proposes to secure is an aim wholly personal, an object sought for by the individual for himself alone, for the salvation of his own soul, for his own blessedness. Few are likely to concern themselves very deeply whether an individual, at any rate one of this type, is or ever will be happy[238].
(b) The inward Penance and Conversion
The kind of representation, in the same general class of cases which we shall now contrast with the one above examined, turns aside from the extremity of merely bodily suffering, as it is also from a further point of view more indifferent to the purely negative impulse directed against what is essentially just and right in the actual conditions of the world; the material of such representations consequently, both in respect to its content and its form, opens up a ground which is more conformable with ideal art. And this ground is the conversion of the inner life of the soul, which only here seeks to express itself in its spiritual pain, and its change of heart. Here, therefore, we find in the first place that we have no more of those ever repeated horrors and barbarities of pain inflicted on man's poor body: and, secondly, that which we have referred to as the barbarian religiosity of the soul no longer holds fast to its antagonism as against the purely ethical aspects of humanity in order to trample under iron foot in the abstraction of its purely conceptive satisfaction[239], and in the pain of an absolute renunciation that other kind of sensuous enjoyment; for the most part its attention is now solely directed against what is in fact sinful, criminal, and evil in human Nature. We find here a lofty assurance that faith, this spiritual impulse towards God, is capable of converting the past action, even though it be a sin or a crime, into something alien to the man who perpetrated it, washing it away in fact. This withdrawal out of evil, that wholly negative condition, which is realized in the individual by the subjective volition and spirit at once scorning and confounding itself under its former state of evil—this return to the positive which is now self-established as the only real in contrast to the former state of sinfulness, is the truly infinite content of religious love, the presence and actuality of absolute Spirit in the individual soul itself. The feeling of the stability and endurability of the personal existence, which through God, to which it addresses itself, triumphs over evil, and in so far as it is thus mediated with Him is aware of itself as one with Him, produces as its effect the fruition and blessedness of contemplating God, it is true, in the first instance as the absolute Other in His opposition to the sin inherent in finite existence, but further of knowing this Infinite Presence as identical with me as this particular person, of knowing, in short, that I carry this self-consciousness of God, as the seat of my own personality, that is to say, my own self-consciousness, as certainly as I carry the sense of my own self-identity. Such a revolution takes place no doubt entirely within the shrine of the soul, and belongs, therefore, rather to religion than art: for the reason, however, that it is the intimate movement of the soul, which pre-eminently makes itself master of this act of conversion, and also is able to throw a gleam of light through the external embodiment, a plastic art such as painting can also claim to make visible the history of such conversions. If it attempts, however, to depict the entire course of events which belong to such a transition, much that is very far from being beautiful may readily appear in the result, because in such a case both that which is sinful and repulsive requires to be depicted, as, for example, in the story of the prodigal son. Painting, therefore, achieves its greatest success when it concentrates the act of conversion into one picture where that is the prevailing motive, and pays little or no attention to the previous course of events. The ordinary presentations of Mary Magdelene may be noted as an admirable example of this kind of work, and particularly in the hands of the old Italian masters has been treated in a way both excellent in itself and throughout consistently with fine Art. She is depicted here both in the characterization of her soul and her external presence as the fair sinner, in whom the sin no less than the sanctity is intended to exercise a sort of fascination on the spectator. But at the same time neither sin nor sanctity are treated with any great intensity. She is forgiven much because she has loved much, and her forgiveness is in a measure the portion both of her love and her beauty. And what affects us most of all in this picture is this, that she makes for herself a conscience as it were out of her love, and robed in the beauty of her sensitive soul pours forth her sorrow in a flood of tears. We are not led to feel that the fact that she has loved so much is her error, but rather that her fair and fascinating folly is this, namely, that she believes herself to be a sinner,[240] for her exquisitely sensitive beauty only leaves us the impression that in her love she is both noble and profound.
(c) Miracles and Legends
The final aspect, which is closely associated with the two above considered, and is frequently asserted as a concomitant of both, is that of miracle. It plays in fact an important part throughout this stage of our inquiry. In this connection we may define miracle as the conversion-history of the immediate existence of Nature. Such reality lies before us as a commonplace, contingent existence. This finite substance is touched by the hand of God, which, in so far as it strikes upon what is purely external and particular, breaks it up, transmutes it into something entirely different, interrupting what in ordinary parlance we call the natural course of things. To bring before us the soul arrested by such inexplicable phenomena, in which it imagines it recognizes the presence of the Divine, vanquished, in short, in its ordinary view of finite events, this is the main subject-matter of a host of legends. In fact, however, the Divine can only touch and dominate Nature as Reason, that is, in the unalterable laws of Nature herself, as implanted therein by God, and the Divine has no occasion to exploit Himself in the supreme sense of this term in particular circumstances and modes of causation which run contrary to these laws of Nature, for it is only the eternal laws and determinations of reason which apply in any real sense to Nature. From another point of view legends frequently carry with them quite unnecessarily an amount of matter which is abstruse, out of taste, senseless, and ridiculous, inasmuch as the intention is that both intellect and heart should be stimulated to believe in the presence and activity of God by precisely those things which are essentially irrational, false, and heathenish. The consequent emotion, piety, and conversion of the soul may even then awake our interest, but in that case it is only on the one side, namely, that of the soul: so soon as that enters into relation with somewhat else outside it, and the idea is that this external correlative shall effect the conversion of the heart, then we inevitably require that such should not be wholly a meaningless and irrational sequence of events.
Such, then, would be the fundamental divisions of the substantive content at this particular stage of our inquiry, regarding that content as the self-subsistent Nature of God, or in its aspect as a spiritual process, through which and in which He is Spirit. We have here the absolute object, which art neither creates nor reveals out of itself, but which it has received from religion which it approaches with the conviction that it is essentially true that it may express and represent the same conformably to its modes. It is the content of the believing, yearning soul, which is intrinsically the infinite totality itself, so that for it the external medium remains to a more or less degree outside it, or a matter of indifference, and is unable to be brought completely into harmony with that inner life. And for this reason it frequently presents a repellent material which art finds itself unable wholly to subdue to its aims.
[224] Nicht aufnehmend. Not ready to absorb extraneous matter.
[225] This of course is an opinion which may be strongly contested in its application to particular artists.