At the entrance of the modern time stands the "God-man." At its exit will only the God in the God-man evaporate? and can the God-man really die if only the God in him dies? They did not think of this question, and thought they were through when in our days they brought to a victorious end the work of the Illumination, the vanquishing of God; they did not notice that Man has killed God in order to become now—"sole God on high." The other world outside us is indeed brushed away, and the great undertaking of the Illuminators completed; but the other world in us has become a new heaven and calls us forth to renewed heaven-storming: God has had to give place, yet not to us, but to—Man. How can you believe that the God-man is dead before the Man in him, besides the God, is dead?
I
OWNNESS[104]
"Does not the spirit thirst for freedom?"—Alas, not my spirit alone, my body too thirsts for it hourly! When before the odorous castle-kitchen my nose tells my palate of the savory dishes that are being prepared therein, it feels a fearful pining at its dry bread; when my eyes tell the hardened back about soft down on which one may lie more delightfully than on its compressed straw, a suppressed rage seizes it; when—but let us not follow the pains further.—And you call that a longing for freedom? What do you want to become free from, then? From your hardtack and your straw bed? Then throw them away!—But that seems not to serve you: you want rather to have the freedom to enjoy delicious foods and downy beds. Are men to give you this "freedom,"—are they to permit it to you? You do not hope that from their philanthropy, because you know they all think like—you: each is the nearest to himself! How, therefore, do you mean to come to the enjoyment of those foods and beds? Evidently not otherwise than in making them your property!
If you think it over rightly, you do not want the freedom to have all these fine things, for with this freedom you still do not have them; you want really to have them, to call them yours and possess them as your property. Of what use is a freedom to you, indeed, if it brings in nothing? And, if you became free from everything, you would no longer have anything; for freedom is empty of substance. Whoso knows not how to make use of it, for him it has no value this useless permission; but how I make use of it depends on my personality.[105]
I have no objection to freedom, but I wish more than freedom for you: you should not merely be rid of what you do not want, you should also have what you want; you should not only be a "freeman," you should be an "owner" too.
Free—from what? Oh! what is there that cannot be shaken off? The yoke of serfdom, of sovereignty, of aristocracy and princes, the dominion of the desires and passions; yes, even the dominion of one's own will, of self-will, for the completest self-denial is nothing but freedom—freedom, to wit, from self-determination, from one's own self. And the craving for freedom as for something absolute, worthy of every praise, deprived us of ownness: it created self-denial. However, the freer I become, the more compulsion piles up before my eyes; and the more impotent I feel myself. The unfree son of the wilderness does not yet feel anything of all the limits that crowd a civilized man: he seems to himself freer than this latter. In the measure that I conquer freedom for myself I create for myself new bounds and new tasks: if I have invented railroads, I feel myself weak again because I cannot yet sail through the skies like the bird; and, if I have solved a problem whose obscurity disturbed my mind, at once there await me innumerable others, whose perplexities impede my progress, dim my free gaze, make the limits of my freedom painfully sensible to me. "Now that you have become free from sin, you have become servants of righteousness."[106] Republicans in their broad freedom, do they not become servants of the law? How true Christian hearts at all times longed to "become free," how they pined to see themselves delivered from the "bonds of this earth-life"! they looked out toward the land of freedom. ("The Jerusalem that is above is the freewoman; she is the mother of us all." Gal. 4. 26.)