[1] “Hylarius ... Si quis innascibilem et sine initio dicat filium, quasi duo sine principio et duo innascibilia, et duo innata dicens, duos faciat Deos, anathema sit. Caput autem quod est principium Christi, Deus.... Filium innascibilem confiteri impiissimum est.”—Petrus Lomb. Sent. l. i. dist. 31, c. 4. [↑]
[2] It is therefore mere self-delusion to suppose that the hypothesis of a creation explains the existence of the world. [↑]
CHAPTER IX.
THE MYSTERY OF MYSTICISM, OR OF NATURE IN GOD.
Interesting material for the criticism of cosmogonic and theogonic fancies is furnished in the doctrine—revived by Schelling and drawn from Jacob Böhme—of eternal Nature in God.
God is pure spirit, clear self-consciousness, moral personality; Nature, on the contrary, is, at least partially, confused, dark, desolate, immoral, or to say no more, unmoral. But it is self-contradictory that the impure should proceed from the pure, darkness from light. How then can we remove these obvious difficulties in the way of assigning a divine origin to Nature? Only by positing this impurity, this darkness in God, by distinguishing in God himself a principle of light and a principle of darkness. In other words, we can only explain the origin of darkness by renouncing the idea of origin, and presupposing darkness as existing from the beginning.[1]
But that which is dark in Nature is the irrational, the material, Nature strictly, as distinguished from intelligence. Hence the simple meaning of this doctrine is, that Nature, Matter, cannot be explained as a result of intelligence; on the contrary, it is the basis of intelligence, the basis of personality, without itself having any basis; spirit without Nature is an unreal abstraction; consciousness develops itself only out of Nature. But this materialistic doctrine is veiled in a mystical yet attractive obscurity, inasmuch as it is not expressed in the clear, simple language of reason, but emphatically enunciated in that consecrated word of the emotions—God. If the light in God springs out of the darkness in God, this is only because it is involved in the idea of light in general, that it illuminates darkness, thus presupposing darkness, not making it. If then God is once subjected to a general law,—as he must necessarily be unless he be made the arena of conflict for the most senseless notions,—if self-consciousness in God as well as in itself, as in general, is evolved from a principle in Nature, why is not this natural principle abstracted from God? That which is a law of consciousness in itself is a law for the consciousness of every personal being, whether man, angel, demon, God, or whatever else thou mayest conceive to thyself as a being. To what then, seen in their true light, do the two principles in God reduce themselves? The one to Nature, at least to Nature as it exists in the conception, abstracted from its reality; the other to mind, consciousness, personality. The one half, the reverse side, thou dost not name God, but only the obverse side, on which he presents to thee mind, consciousness: thus his specific essence, that whereby he is God, is mind, intelligence, consciousness. Why then dost thou make that which is properly the subject in God as God, i.e., as mind, into a mere predicate, as if God existed as God apart from mind, from consciousness? Why, but because thou art enslaved by mystical religious speculation, because the primary principle in thee is the imagination, thought being only secondary and serving but to throw into formulæ the products of the imagination,—because thou feelest at ease and at home only in the deceptive twilight of mysticism.
Mysticism is deuteroscopy—a fabrication of phrases having a double meaning. The mystic speculates concerning the essence of Nature or of man, but under, and by means of, the supposition that he is speculating concerning another, a personal being, distinct from both. The mystic has the same objects as the plain, self-conscious thinker; but the real object is regarded by the mystic, not as itself, but as an imaginary being, and hence the imaginary object is to him the real object. Thus here, in the mystical doctrine of the two principles in God, the real object is pathology, the imaginary one, theology; i.e., pathology is converted into theology. There would be nothing to urge against this, if consciously real pathology were recognised and expressed as theology; indeed, it is precisely our task to show that theology is nothing else than an unconscious, esoteric pathology, anthropology, and psychology, and that therefore real anthropology, real pathology, and real psychology have far more claim to the name of theology than has theology itself, because this is nothing more than an imaginary psychology and anthropology. But this doctrine or theory is supposed—and for this reason it is mystical and fantastic—to be not pathology, but theology, in the old or ordinary sense of the word; it is supposed that we have here unfolded to us the life of a Being distinct from us, while nevertheless it is only our own nature which is unfolded, though at the same time again shut up from us by the fact that this nature is represented as inhering in another being. The mystic philosopher supposes that in God, not in us human individuals,—that would be far too trivial a truth,—reason first appears after the Passion of Nature;—that not man, but God, has wrestled himself out of the obscurity of confused feelings and impulses into the clearness of knowledge; that not in our subjective, limited mode of conception, but in God himself, the nervous tremors of darkness precede the joyful consciousness of light; in short, he supposes that his theory presents not a history of human throes, but a history of the development, i.e., the throes of God—for developments (or transitions) are birth-struggles. But, alas! this supposition itself belongs only to the pathological element.
If, therefore, the cosmogonic process presents to us the Light of the power of distinction as belonging to the divine essence; so, on the other hand, the Night or Nature in God represents to us the Pensées confuses of Leibnitz as divine powers. But the Pensées confuses—confused, obscure conceptions and thoughts, or more correctly images—represent the flesh, matter;—a pure intelligence, separate from matter, has only clear, free thoughts, no obscure, i.e., fleshly ideas, no material images, exciting the imagination and setting the blood in commotion. The Night in God, therefore, implies nothing else than this: God is not only a spiritual, but also a material, corporeal, fleshly being; but as man is man, and receives his designation, in virtue not of his fleshly nature, but of his mind, so is it with God.