§ 164. The theoretical culture of the religious feeling endeavors therefore with the freedom of philosophical criticism to elevate the presupposition of Reason in the religious content to self-assured insight by means of the proof of the necessity of its determinations. This is the only reasonable pedagogical way not only to prevent the degeneration of the religious consciousness into a miserable mysticism or into frivolity, but also to remove these if they are already existent.
—External seclusion avails nothing. The crises of the world-historical changes in the religious consciousness find their way through the thickest cloister walls; the philosopher Reinhold was a pupil of the Jesuits, the philosopher Schad of the Benedictines.—
II. The Practical Process of Religious Culture.
§ 165. The theoretical culture is truly practical, for it gives man definite conceptions and thoughts of the Divine and his relation to him. But in a narrower sense that culture is practical which relates to the Will as such. Education has in this respect to distinguish (1) consecration—religious feeling in general,—(2) the induction of the youth into the forms of a positive religion, and (3) his reconciliation with his lot.
§ 166. (1) Religious feeling presupposes morality as an indispensable condition without which it cannot inculcate its ideas. But if man from a merely moral stand-point places himself in relation to the idea of Duty as such, the ethical religious stand-point differs from it in this, that it places the necessity of the Good as the self-determination of the divine Will and thus makes of practice a personal relation to God, changing the Good to the Holy and the Evil to Sin. Education must therefore first accustom the youth to the idea, that in doing the Good he unites himself with God as with the absolute Person, but that in doing Evil he separates himself from him. The feeling that he through his deed comes into contact with God himself, positively or negatively, deepens the moral conduct to an intense sensibility of the heart.
§ 167. (2) The religious sense which grows in the child that he has an uninterrupted personal relation to the Absolute as a person, constitutes the beginning of the practical forming of religion. The second step is the induction of the child into the objective forms of worship established in some positive religion. Through religious training the child learns to renounce his egotism; through attendance on religious services he learns to give expression to his religious feeling in prayer, in the use of symbols, and in church festivals. Education must, however, endeavor to retain freedom with regard to these forms, so that they shall not be confounded with Religion itself. Religion displays itself in these ceremonies, but they as mere forms are of value only in so far as they, while externalities, are manifestations of the spirit which produces them.
—If the mechanism of ceremonial forms is taken as religion itself, the service of God degenerates into the false service of religion, as Kant has designated it in Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason. Nothing is more destructive to the sensibility to all real religious culture than the want of earnestness with which prayers, readings from the Bible, attendance on church, the communion, &c., are often practised by teachers. But one must not conclude from this extreme that an ignorance of all sacred forms in general would be more desirable for the child.—
§ 168. (3) It is possible that a man on the stand-point of ecclesiastical religious observances may be fully contented; he may be fully occupied in them, and perfect his life thereby in perfect content. But by far the greater number of men will see themselves forced to experience the truth of religion in the hard vicissitudes of their lot, since they carry on some business, and with that business create for themselves a past whose consequences condition their future. They limit themselves through their deeds, whose involuntary-voluntary authors they become; involuntary in so far as they are challenged to the deeds from the totality of events, voluntary in so far as they undertake them and bring about an actual change in the world. The history of the individual man appears therefore on the one hand, if we consider its material, as the work of circumstances; but on the other hand, if we reflect on the form, as the act of a self-determining actor. Want of freedom (the being determined through the given situation) and freedom (the determination to the act) are united in actual life as something which is exactly so, and cannot become anything else as final. The essence of the spiritual being stands always over against this unavoidable limitation as that which is in itself infinite, which is beyond all history, because the absolute spirit, in and for itself, has no history. That which one calls his history is only the manifesting of himself, and his everlasting return out of this manifestation into himself an act which in absolute spirit coincides with the transcending of all manifestation. From the nature which belongs to him there arises for the individual spirit the impulse towards a holy life, i.e. the being freed from his history even in the midst of its process. He gratifies this impulse negatively through the considering of what has happened as past and gone, as that which lives now only ideally in the recollection; and positively through the positing of a new actual existence in which he strives to realize the idea of freedom which constitutes his necessity, as purer and higher than before. This constant new-birth out of the grave of the past to the life of a more beautiful future is the genuine reconciliation with destiny. The false reconciliation may assume different forms. It may abstain from all action because man through this limits himself and becomes responsible. This is to despair of freedom, which condemns the spirit to the loss of itself since its nature demands activity. The abstract quietism of the Indian penitents, of the Buddhists, of the fanatical ascetics, of the Protestant recluses, &c., is an error of this kind. The man may become indifferent about the ethical determinateness of his deeds. In this case he acts; but because he has no faith in the necessary connection of his deeds through the means of freedom, a connection which he would willingly ascribe to mere chance, he loses his spiritual essence. This is the error of indifference and of its frivolity, which denies the open mystery of the ruling of destiny. Education must therefore imbue man with respect for external movements of history and with confidence in the inexhaustibleness of the progressive human spirit, since only by producing better things can he affirmatively elevate himself above his past. This active acknowledgment of the necessity of freedom as the determining principle of destiny gives the highest satisfaction to which practical religious feeling may arrive, for blessedness develops itself in it—that blessedness which does not know that it is circumscribed by finitude and transitoriness, and which possesses the immortal courage to strive always anew for perfection with free resignation at its non-realization, so that happiness and misery, pleasure and pain, are conquered by the power of disinterested self-sacrifice.
—The escape from action in an artificial absence of all events in life, which often sinks to a veritable brutalizing of man, is the distinguishing feature of all monkish pedagogics. In our time there is especial need of a reconciliation between man and destiny, for all the world is discontented. The worst form of discontent is when one is, as the French say, blasé; though the word is not, as many fancy, derived originally from the French, but from the Greek βλαζειν, to wither. It is true that all culture passes through phases, each of which becomes momentarily and relatively wearisome, and that in so far one may be blasé in any age. But in modern times this state of feeling has increased to that of thorough disgust—disgust which nevertheless at the same time demands enjoyment. The one who is blasé has enjoyed everything, felt everything, mocked at everything. He has passed from the enjoyment of pleasure to sentimentality, i.e. to rioting in feeling; from sentimentality to irony with regard to feeling, and from this to the torment of feeling his entire weakness and emptiness as opposed to these. He ridicules this also, as if it were a consolation to him to fling away the universe like a squeezed lemon, and to be able to assert that in pure nothingness lies the truth of all things. And yet nevertheless this irony furnishes the point on which Education can fasten, in order to kindle anew in him the religious feeling, and to lead him back to a loving recognition of actuality, to a respect for his own history. The greatest difficulty which Education has to encounter here is the coquetry, the miserable eminence and self-satisfaction which have undermined the man and made him incapable of all simple and natural enjoyment. It is not too much to assert that many pupils of our Gymnasia are affected with this malady. Our literature is full of its products. It inveighs against its dissipation, and nevertheless at the same time cannot resist a certain kind of pleasure in it. Diabolical sentimentality!—
III. The Absolute Process of Religious Culture.