The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine

by Heinrich Heine

...Lessing was the prophet who from the New Testament pointed towards the Third Testament. I have called him the successor of Luther; and it is in this character that I have to speak of him here. Of his influence on German art I shall speak hereafter. On this he effected a wholesome reform, not only through his criticism, but also through his example; and this latter phase of his activity is generally made the most prominent, and is the most discussed. But, viewed from our present standpoint, his philosophical and theological battles are to us more important than all his dramas, or his dramaturgy. His dramas, however, like all his writings, have a social import, and Nathan the Wise is in reality not only a good play, but also a philosophical, theological treatise in support of the doctrine of a pure theism. For Lessing, art was a tribune, and when he was thrust from the pulpit or the professor's chair he sprang on to the stage, speaking out more boldly, and gaining a more numerous audience.

I say that Lessing continued the work of Luther. After Luther had freed us from the yoke of tradition and had exalted the Bible as the only well-spring of Christianity, there ensued a rigid word-service, and the letter of the Bible ruled just as tyrannically as once did tradition. Lessing contributed the most to the emancipation from the tyranny of the letter.

Lessing died in Brunswick, in the year 1781, misunderstood, hated, and denounced. In the same year there was published at Königsberg the Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant. With this book there begins in Germany an intellectual revolution, which offers the most wonderful analogies to the material revolution in France, and which to the profound thinker must appear equally important. It develops the same phases, and between the two there exists a very remarkable parallelism. On both sides of the Rhine we behold the same rupture with the past: it is loudly proclaimed that all reverence for tradition is at an end. As in France no privilege, so in Germany no thought is tolerated without proving its right to exist: nothing is taken for granted. And as in France fell the monarchy, the keystone of the old social system, so in Germany fell theism, the keystone of the intellectual ancien régime.

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It is horrible when the bodies which we have created ask of us a soul. But it is still more horrible, more terrible, more uncanny, to create a soul, which craves a body and pursues us with that demand. The idea which we have thought is such a soul, and it allows us no peace until we have given it a body, until we have brought it into actual being. The thought seems to become deed; the word, flesh. And, strange! man, like the God of the Bible, needs but to speak his thought, and the world shapes itself accordingly: light dawns, or darkness descends; the waters separate themselves from the dry land, and even wild beasts appear. The universe is but the signature of the word.

Mark this, ye haughty men of action. Ye are naught but the unconscious servants of the men of thought, who, oftentimes in the humblest obscurity, have marked out your tasks for you with the utmost exactitude. Maximilian Robespierre was only the hand of Jean Jacques Rousseau—the bloody hand that from the womb of time drew forth the body whose soul Rousseau had created. Did the restless anxiety that embittered the life of Jean Jacques arise from a foreboding that his thoughts would require such a midwife to bring them into the world?

Old Fontenelle was perhaps in the right when he declared, "If I carried all the ideas of this world in my closed hand, I should take good heed not to open it." For my part, I think differently. If I held all the ideas of the world in my hand, I might perhaps implore you to hew off my hand at once, but in no case would I long keep it closed. I am not adapted to be a jailor of thoughts. By Heaven! I would set them free. Even if they assumed the most threatening shapes and swept through all lands like a band of mad Bacchantes; even if with their thyrsus staffs they should strike down our most innocent flowers; even if they should break into our hospitals and chase the sick old world from its bed! It would certainly grieve me sadly, and I myself should come to harm. For, alas! I too belong to that sick old world; and the poet says rightly that scoffing at our own crutches does not enable us to walk any the better. I am the most sick among you all, and the most to be pitied, for I know what health is. But you know it not, you enviable ones. You can die without noticing it yourselves. Yes, many of you have already been dead for these many years, and you think that now only does the true life begin. When I contradict such madness, then they become enraged against me, and rail at me, and, horrible! the corpses spring on me and reproach me; and more even than their revilings does their mouldy odour oppress me. Avaunt, ye spectres! I am speaking of one whose very name possesses an exorcising power: I speak of Immanuel Kant.

It is said that the spirits of darkness tremble with affright when they behold the sword of an executioner. How, then, must they stand aghast when confronted with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason! This book is the sword with which, in Germany, theism was decapitated.

To be candid, you French are tame and moderate compared with us Germans. At the most, you have slain a king; and he had already lost his head before he was beheaded. And withal you must drum so much, and shout, and stamp, so that the whole world was shaken by the tumult. It is really awarding Maximilian Robespierre too much honour to compare him with Immanuel Kant. Maximilian Robespierre, the great citizen of the Rue Saint Honoré, did truly have an attack of destructive fury when the monarchy was concerned, and he writhed terribly enough in his regicidal epilepsy; but as soon as the Supreme Being was mentioned, he wiped the white foam from his mouth and the blood from his hands, put on his blue Sunday coat with the bright buttons, and attached a bouquet of flowers to his broad coat-lapel.

The life-history of Immanuel Kant is difficult to write, for he had neither a life nor a history. He lived a mechanical, orderly, almost abstract, bachelor life, in a quiet little side-street of Königsberg, an old city near the north-east boundary of Germany. I believe that the great clock of the cathedral did not perform its daily work more dispassionately, more regularly, than its countryman, Immanuel Kant. Rising, coffee-drinking, writing, collegiate lectures, dining, walking—each had its set time. And when Immanuel Kant, in his grey coat, cane in hand, appeared at the door of his house, and strolled towards the small linden avenue, which is still called "the philosopher's walk," the neighbours knew it was exactly half-past four. Eight times he promenaded up and down, during all seasons; and when the weather was gloomy, or the grey clouds threatened rain, his old servant Lampe was seen plodding anxiously after, with a large umbrella under his arm, like a symbol of Providence.