From the nursery and school to the world of thought! From gruesome pictures and poetry of the enigma of eternity to the solution in systems of the philosophers and theologians. From Rist of the Thirty Years’ War to Spinoza with imperturbable philosophic calm—such was the great change through which many a German child passed—Spinoza who won his deepest insight into life by viewing all things sub specie aeternitatis. Or from Rist to Schleiermacher, who unveiled the august mystery of humanness as eternity in the heart—as eternity internal, dynamic, living, present, not external, mechanical, fixed, and future. It was the great transition from orthodoxy to romanticism.
Or else from all these men to Friedrich Nietzsche, him that was the godless one, who, in the end of the ages, also sang a song, a new song, of eternity. He both celebrated eternity in song and made no problem of it. He lived it and loved it as his first and truest love—plighted his soul’s troth in unwavering loyalty: “Denn ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit!” From dull and gloomy dreams and anxious fears did this eternity awaken him, from mortal ills did it redeem his life. Nietzsche had wistfully peered into the world’s enigmatic darkness, his seeking and skeptical soul had chafed over the riddles and contradictions of life—no meaning, he cried, in this senseless play of life and death, truth and error; and only illusion and folly in all that men called joy and sorrow. There came to him, then, revelation of a new, of an eternal life. The present, with all the kaleidoscopic changes of life’s little day, makes ready its own recurrence, each part of time being but a ring linked with the next, the whole becoming the ring of eternity, the true marriage ring of humanity—the seal and stay of an eternal bond between man and Ever-creative, Ever-reincarnating Life!
Ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit. Perfect love casts out fear. This is the eternity of love. The godless one would lead the German heart, and all hearts, from “Donnerworte” and “Schwerte,” from the fear of eternity to the love of eternity.
That is what Nietzsche would do. But is such an undertaking worth while in a day like ours? What does man care about eternity—his life so swift and short that he does not know on one day what he did or thought or wanted the day before? His treasures in time, will not his heart be there also, seeking its right and content there? Money ruling the world, time ruling money, why talk of eternity at all? A jolly hour, a sprig of mirth plucked by the way, is not that what the man of modern culture longs for, is it not enough to satisfy such longing as his? The earth overpopulated as it is with Augenblicksmenschen, as Nietzsche would say, and not with Ewigkeitsmenschen, why recall the love and hope of a long lost past?
Such queries may give us pause, but they may not stampede us. We may not forget that Professor Münsterberg, of Harvard, has written a great book bearing the impressive title, The Eternal Values. Nor may we be blind to the evidence that the thought so clearly and singularly espoused by the bearers of the better ideals of our new time is that of the imminent and constant eternity in the human heart, as unfolded by Spinoza and Schleiermacher and Nietzsche. Indeed, the question as to what values are eternal values, this eternity question, is central in our modern culture. Very superficial indeed would be our evaluation of modern life, most un-understood indeed would be the riddle of the soul of this life, did we ignore the ever clearer, ever mightier longing for eternity in this soul’s abyss, and the unification of all deeper spirits upon the high task of giving an eternal content to our culture.
By taking some illustrations, one can see the need to supply the latter profound view to the former superficial judgment, if one is to do justice to the new movements of life in the modern world.
There is your modern poet. At first sight he seems to lack the illumination of that eternal light which never was on land or sea. You see the scorching sun beating upon the lone pilgrim as he plods through the burning sand to a goalless goal. You see faded, pale shadows. You do not meet with an idea that makes you feel that the poet yearns to interpret some eternal thought to this life of ours. Instead, life speaks only of itself and from itself. This is an abomination in the eyes of those who call themselves Ewigkeitsmenschen. They call it naturalistic, materialistic art. They upbraid an era in which a poet may dare to dissociate his poetry from the eternal ideal. Then you look again, you read more carefully, and you see the whole matter differently. The eternity that men claimed for their thought is indeed gone. But eternity itself, the eternity of life, that is not gone, that abides. This realistic man of modern poetry, the more really he is apprehended, stands before us as the embodiment of a necessity, a necessity that transcends the individual, yet lives and weaves in him, a necessity that enunciates the law of life in the destiny of the individual—power of darkness or dawn of a new day! But necessity, law of life, this is but another name for eternity.
And there again is your modern painter. He, too, presents us with a bit, often a tiny bit, of reality, of nature. A rotten trunk of some old tree; a dilapidated hut on a ledge; some God-forsaken nook of earth, lost and forgotten of man; a bent and broken man with his hoe; some poor wretch with pistol against his skull; some traveller bleeding unbandaged by the roadside—there they all are in the galleries of our modern realism. But look again, and you will see that the keen observant eye of your artist serves an artist’s heart, seeks and finds eternity, and directs our slower vision to the eternal mystery he has found, the most inspiring of all mysteries—viz., greatness in the least and lowest, glory and beauty in the offensive and repellant, invaluable human worth and nobility in the depraved and downtrodden!
There also is your man of science as he moves out along new paths. Storming the sky, unlocking all the eternities so long sought for behind the world, what does the scientist’s supreme power and consecration consist in but his steadfast and strenuous search for eternity? He not only seeks, he finds. He finds eternal life and eternal love in the daintiest fern, in the tiniest lichen. In the very dust beneath our feet he descries what was there before men were at all. He points us to men as they emerge from the unplumbed æonian abyss, bearing in their bodies still visible and tangible traces of an eternal life. He reveals an eternal content of being in all that lives and weaves and moves.
Truly, if there is no sign of an eternity in which we live, there is no sign of an eternity at all. But if you were to bring to its simplest and truest expression all that is great and overmastering in the life of the human spirit today, you would then have once again the exultant Zarathustra song: “Ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit!” All that lends true worth to the life that now is and is to be, is contained in this song. A present eternity we seek as the one thing needful. What we love must be near us, we must feel it and grasp it. Be it never so remote, it is the magic of love to bring the remote nigh our hearts, or, better still, to conquer space and time, so that there is no near and no far, only a life and love that is eternal!