No More Learning

But the highest question of this investigation returns yet again. God has been considered thus far as a self-revealing being. But how, then, does he relate to this revelation as a moral being? Is reve- lation an action that ensues with blind and unconscious necessity or is it a free and conscious act? And if it is the latter, how does God as a moral being relate to evil, the possibility and actuality of which de- pend on the self-revelation? If he willed the latter, did he also will evil, and how is this willing to be reconciled with the holiness and highest
perfection in God, or, as commonly expressed, how, given the fact of evil [wegen des Bo? sen], is God to be justified?
The preliminary question in fact seems to have been decided by the foregoing due to the freedom of God in the self-revelation. If God were for us a merely logical abstraction, then everything would have to proceed from him with logical necessity as well; he himself would be, as it were, only the highest law from which all things flow out, but without personhood [Personalita? t] and consciousness of personhood.
* A young man who, probably like many others now, is too arrogant to walk along the honest path of Kant and is yet incapable of lifting himself up to a level that is actually better, blathers about aesthetics [a? sthetisch irreredet], has already announced such a grounding of morality through aesthetics. With such advances perhaps something serious too will come of the Kant- ian joke that Euclid should be considered a somewhat ponderous introduc- tion to drawing.
But we have explained God as a living unity of forces; and if personal- ity [Perso? nlichkeit] is founded, according to our previous explana- tion, on the connection between a self-determining [selbsta? ndig] being and a basis independent of him, then, similarly, because both of these completely | saturate the other and are but one being, God is the highest personality through the connection of the ideal principle in him with the (relative to it) independent ground, since basis and things existing in him necessarily unify themselves in one absolute existence; or also, if the living unity of both is spirit, then, as their ab- solute bond, God is spirit in the eminent and absolute understanding. It is so certain that the personality in him is grounded only through the bond of God with nature that, by contrast, the God of pure ideal- ism, as well as the God of pure realism, is necessarily an impersonal being, of which the concepts of Spinoza and Fichte are the clearest proofs. But, because in God there is an independent ground of reality and, hence, two equally eternal beginnings of self-revelation, God also must be considered in regard to his freedom in relation to both. The first beginning for the creation is the yearning of the One to give birth to itself or the will of the ground. The second is the will of love, whereby the word is spoken out into nature and through which God first makes himself personal. 85 That is why the will of the ground can- not be free in the sense in which the will of love is. It is not a con- scious will nor one connected with reflection, although it is also not a completely unconscious one that moves according to blind, mechan- ical necessity; but it is rather of intermediate nature, as desire or ap- petite, and is most readily comparable to the beautiful urge of a na- ture in becoming that strives to unfold itself and whose inner movements are involuntary (cannot be omitted), without there being a feeling of compulsion in them. Plainly free or conscious will is, how- ever, the will of love, precisely because it is what it is: the revelation that results from it is action and act. The whole of nature tells us that it in no way exists by virtue of a merely geometrical necessity; in it there is not simply pure reason but personality and spirit (as we likely distinguish the rational author from one possessing wit); other- wise the geometrical understanding that has ruled for so long would have long ago had to penetrate into nature and prove its idol of gen- eral and eternal natural laws to a greater degree than has | occurred thus far, whereas it has had to recognize the irrational relation of na- ture to itself rather more every day. The creation is not an occurrence
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but an act. There are no results from general laws; rather, God, that is, the person of God, is the general law, and everything that happens, happens by virtue of the personality of God, not according to some abstract necessity that we in acting would not tolerate, to say nothing of God. In the Leibnizian philosophy, which is ruled far too much by the spirit of abstraction, the recognition of laws of nature as morally, but not geometrically, necessary, and just as little arbitrary, is one of its most pleasing aspects. "I have found," says Leibniz, "that the laws which are actually to be proved in nature are still not absolutely de- monstrable, but this is also not necessary. Though they can be proved in various ways, yet something must always be presupposed which is not entirely geometrically necessary. Hence, these laws are the proof of a highest, intelligent, and free being against the system of absolute necessity. They are neither entirely necessary (in this ab- stract understanding), nor entirely arbitrary, but rather stand in the middle as laws that are derived from a perfect wisdom which is above all things. "* The highest striving of the dynamic mode of ex- planation is nothing else than this reduction of natural laws to mind, spirit and will.
In order to define the relation of God as a moral being to the world, general cognition of freedom in creation nevertheless does not reach far enough; moreover, the question still remains whether the act of self-revelation was free in the sense that all consequences of it were foreseen in God? But this too is necessarily to be affirmed; for the will to revelation would not itself be living if no other will turning back into the inner realm of being did not oppose it: but in this holding-in- itself [An-sich-halten] emerges a reflexive picture of all that is impli- citly contained in the essence in which God ideally realizes himself or, what is the same thing, recognizes himself beforehand in his | be- coming real. Thus, since there is a tendency in God working against the will to revelation, love, and goodness or the communicativum sui [self-evidence] must predominate so that there may be revelation; and this, the decision, only really completes the concept of revelation as a conscious and morally free act.
Notwithstanding this concept, and, although the action of revela- tion in God is necessary only morally or in regard to goodness and love, the notion remains of God's deliberating with himself or of a
* Tentam. Theod. Opp. T. I, pp. 365, 366.
choice among various possible worlds, a notion that is groundless and untenable. To the contrary, just as soon as the closer determina- tion of a moral necessity is added, the proposition is utterly undeni- able: that everything proceeds from the divine nature with absolute necessity, that everything which is possible by virtue of this nature must also be actual, and what is not actual also must be morally im- possible. Spinozism is by no means in error because of the claim that there is such an unshakable necessity in God, but rather because it takes this necessity to be impersonal and inanimate. For, since this system grasps altogether only one side of the absolute--namely the real one or the extent to which God functions only in the ground-- these propositions indeed lead to a blind necessity bereft of under- standing [verstandlos]. But if God is essentially love and goodness, then what is morally necessary in him also follows with a truly meta- physical necessity. If choice in the truest understanding were re- quired for complete freedom in God, then one would still have to go on further. For, there would only then have been perfect freedom of choice, if God also had been able to create a less complete world than was possible according to all conditions. Likewise, since nothing is so inconsistent that it also has not been put forth once, it has been claimed by some and in seriousness--not merely like the Castilian King Alphonso, whose well-known utterance concerned only the then dominant Ptolemaic system--that, if he wanted to, God could have created a better world than this one. 86 Thus the arguments [Gru? nde] against the unity of possibility and actuality | in God are derived as well from the wholly formal concept of possibility, that everything is possible which is not self-contradictory; for example, in the well- known objection that all coherently imagined novels must be actual occurrences. Even Spinoza did not have such a merely formal con- cept; all possibility is valid for him only in relation to divine perfec- tion; and Leibniz accepts this concept obviously merely in order to stress a choice in God and thereby distance himself as far as possible from Spinoza. "God chooses," he says, "among possibilities and for that reason chooses freely without necessitation: only then would there be no choice, no freedom, if only one thing were possible. " If nothing more is lacking for freedom than such an empty possibility, it can be admitted that formally, or without having regard to the divine way of being [Wesenheit], infinite things were and still are possible; but this entails wanting to claim divine freedom through a concept
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that is in itself false and is possible merely in our understanding, not in God, in whom disregard for his essence or perfections can likely not be thought. With respect to the plurality of possible worlds, an anarchy in itself, as is, according to our explanation, the original movement of the ground, seems to offer an infinity of possibilities, like material that has not yet been formed but can receive all forms; and if, for instance, the possibility of several worlds should be based on this material, then it would only need to be remarked that surely no such possibility would follow in regard to God since the ground is not to be called God, and God according to his perfection can only will one thing. But by no means is this anarchy also to be thought as if there were no archetype [Urtypus] in the ground containing the only possible world according to God's essence, which in the actual crea- tion is raised from potency into action [zum Aktus] only through divi- sion, regulation of forces and exclusion of the darkening or hindering anarchy. In the divine understanding itself, however, as in primeval [uranfa? nglich] wisdom in which God realizes himself ideally or as archetype [urbildlich], there is only one possible world as there is only one God. |
In the divine understanding there is a system; yet God himself is not a system, but rather a life; and the answer to the question as to [wegen] the possibility of evil in regard to God, for the sake of which the foregoing has been set out, also lies in this fact alone. All exis- tence demands a condition so that it may become real, namely per- sonal, existence. Even God's existence could not be personal without such a condition except that he has this condition within and not out- side himself. He cannot abolish the condition because he would oth- erwise have to abolish himself; he can come to terms with the condi- tion only through love and subordinate it to himself for his glorification. There would also be a ground of darkness in God, if he had not made the condition into his own, bound himself to it as one and for the sake of absolute personality. Man never gains control over the condition, although in evil he strives to do so; it is only lent to him, and is independent from him; hence, his personality and self- hood can never rise to full actuality [zum Aktus]. This is the sadness that clings to all finite life: and, even if there is in God at least a rela- tively independent condition, there is a source of sadness in him that can, however, never come into actuality, but rather serves only the eternal joy of overcoming. Hence, the veil of dejection that is spread
over all nature, the deep indestructible melancholy of all life. Joy must have suffering, suffering must be transfigured in joy. Hence, what comes from the mere condition or the ground, does not come from God, although it is necessary for his existence. But it cannot also be said that evil comes from the ground or that the will of the ground is the originator of evil. For evil can always only arise in the innermost will of our own heart and is never accomplished without our own act. The solicitation by the ground or the reaction against that which is beyond creaturely existence [das U? berkreatu? rliche] awakens only the appetite for creaturely existence or the individual will; but this reaction awakens it only so that there may be an inde- pendent ground for the good and so that it may be overtaken and penetrated by the good. For aroused selfhood is not evil in itself but only to the extent that it has completely | torn itself away from its op- posite, the light or the universal will. But exactly this renunciation of the good alone is sin. Activated selfhood is necessary for the rigor of life; without it there would be sheer death, a falling asleep of the good; for, where there is no struggle, there is no life. Therefore only the reviving of life is the will of the ground, not evil immediately and in itself. If the human will includes love in activated selfhood and sub- ordinates itself to the light as the general will, then actual goodness first arises, having become perceptible through the rigor proper to the will. Therefore in the good the reaction of the ground is an acting in favor of the good, in evil it is an acting in favor of evil, as scripture says: In pious things you are pious, and in perverted ones you are perverse. 87 Good without active selfhood is itself inactive good. The same thing that becomes evil through the will of the creature (if it tears itself completely free in order to be for itself), is in itself good as long as it remains wrapped up in the good and in the ground. Only selfhood that has been overcome, thus brought back from activity to potentiality, is the good and, as having been overtaken by the good, it also remains in the good from then on according to its potency. Were there no root of cold in the body, warm could not be felt. To think an attracting and repelling force for itself is impossible, for against what should that which repels act if that which attracts provides no resis- tance, or against what should that which attracts act, if it does not have in itself at the same time something that repels? Hence it is en- tirely correct to say dialectically: good and evil are the same thing only seen from different sides, or evil is in itself, that is, considered in
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the root of its identity, the good, just as the good, to the contrary, considered in its turning from itself [Entzweiung] or non-identity, is evil. For this reason the statement is also entirely correct that, whoever has neither the material nor the force in himself to do evil, is also not fit for good, of which we have seen plenty of examples in our own time. The passions against which our negative morality wages war are forces of which each has a common root with its | corre- sponding virtue. The soul of all hate is love, and in the most violent wrath only the stillness of the most inner centrum, attacked and ex- cited, shows itself. In appropriate measure and organic equilibrium the passions are the strength of virtue itself and its immediate tools. "If the passions are the limbs of dishonor," says the excellent J. G. Hamann, "do they--because of this--cease to be weapons of man- hood? Do you understand the letter of reason more cleverly than the allegorizing chamberlain of the Alexandrian church understood that of scripture, who castrated himself for the sake of the kingdom of heaven? The prince of this era makes those who do themselves the greatest evil into his cherished ones. His court (the devil's) jesters are the worst enemies of beautiful nature which, admittedly, has Cor- ybants and Galli as priests of the belly, but strong spirits for its true admirers. "*,88 Then may only those whose philosophy is made more for a gynaeceum than for the Academy or the Palaestra of the Lyceum not bring these dialectical propositions before the public who, mis- understanding the latter just as they themselves do, sees in them an abolition of all distinction of right from wrong, of good from evil, and before whom these propositions belong as little as, for instance, the propositions of the ancient dialecticians, of Zeno and the other Eleatic thinkers, belonged before the forum of shallow devotees of beauty [Scho? ngeister]. 89
The arousal of self-will occurs only so that love in man may find a material or opposition in which it may realize itself. To the extent that selfhood is the principle of evil in its breaking away [Lossagung], the ground does indeed arouse the possible principle of evil, yet not evil itself and not for the sake of evil. 90 But even this arousal occurs not according to the free will of God, who does not move in the ground according to this will or his heart, but rather only according to his own properties.
* Cloverleaf of Hellenistic Letters II, p. 196.
Whoever might thus claim that God himself willed evil, would have to seek the basis for this claim in the act of self-revelation as creation, just as it has also often been thought that he | who willed the world must have willed evil as well. Solely because God brought order to the disorderly offspring of chaos and proclaimed [ausgesprochen] his eternal unity into nature, he opposed darkness and posited the word as a constant centrum and eternal beacon against the anarchical movement of the principle bereft of understanding. The will to crea- tion was therefore immediately only a will to give birth to the light and the good along with it; but evil did not come into consideration in this will, neither as means nor even, as Leibniz says, as the conditio sine qua non of the greatest possible perfection of the world. *,91 It was neither the object of a divine decision nor, and much less so, of a permission. The question, however, of why God, since he necessarily foresaw that evil would follow at least as a companion from the self- revelation, did not prefer not to reveal himself at all, does not in fact deserve any reply. For this would be precisely as much as to say that, in order that there could be no opposition to love, there should be no love itself, that is, the absolutely positive should be sacrificed to what has existence only as an opposite, the eternal to the merely tem- poral. We have already explained that the self-revelation in God would have to be considered not as an unconditionally arbitrary, but rather as a morally necessary, act in which love and goodness over- come absolute inwardness. Thus if God had not revealed himself for the sake of evil, evil would have triumphed over the good and love. The Leibnizian concept of evil as conditio sine qua non can | only be applied to the ground so that the latter arouse the creaturely will (the possible principle of evil) as the condition under which alone the will to love could be realized. We have likewise already shown why God
* Tentam. Theod. P. 139: Ex his concludendum est, Deum antecedenter velle omne bonum in se, velle consequenter optimum tanquam finem; indifferens et malum physicum tanquam medium; sed velle tantum permittere malum morale, tanquam conditionem, sine qua non obtineretur optimum, ita nim- irum, ut malum nonnisi titulo necessitatis hypotheticae, id ipsum cum op- timo connectentis, admittatur. --p. 292: Quod ad vitium attinet, superius ostensum est, illud non esse objectum decreti divini, tanquam medium, sed tanquam conditionem sine qua non-- et ideo duntaxat permitti. These two passages contain the core of the entire Leibnizian theodicy.
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does not now resist the will of the ground or abolish it. This would be precisely as much as to say that God would abolish the condition of his existence, that is, his own personality. Thus, in order that there be no evil, there would have to be no God himself.
Another objection, which relates not merely to this view but rather to every metaphysics, is this: even if God did not want evil, he in fact continues to be active in the sinner and gives him the strength to ac- complish evil. With appropriate qualification [Unterscheidung], this point is, then, entirely to be admitted. The primal ground of existence also continues to be active in evil as health continues to be active in disease, and even the most dissolute and false life still remains and moves within God to the extent that he is the ground of existence. But it [this life] perceives him as consuming fury [Grimm] and is posited by the attraction of the ground itself in an ever higher tension against unity until it arrives at self-destruction and final crisis. 92
After all this the question always remains: Will evil end and how? Does creation have a final purpose at all, and, if this is so, why is it not reached immediately, why does what is perfect not exist right from the beginning? There is no answer to these questions other than that which has already been given: because God is a life, not merely a Being. All life has a destiny, however, and is subject to suffering and becoming. God has thus freely subordinated himself to this as well, ever since he first separated the world of light from that of darkness in order to become personal. Being becomes aware of itself only in becoming. In Being there is admittedly no becoming; rather, in the lat- ter, Being itself is again posited as eternity; but, in its realization by opposition, it is necessarily a becoming. Without the concept of a hu- manly suffering God, one which is common to all mysteries and spir- itual religions of earliest time, all of history would be incomprehen- sible; scripture also | distinguishes periods of revelation and posits as a distant future the time when God will be all in all things, that is, when he will be fully realized. The first period of creation is, as has been shown earlier, the birth of the light. The light or the ideal princi- ple is, as the eternal opposite of the dark principle, the creating word which delivers [erlo? st] the life hidden in the ground from non-Being and lifts it from potentiality [Potenz] into actuality [zum Aktus]. The spirit rises above the word, and spirit is the first being which unifies the world of darkness with that of the light and subordinates both principles to its realization and personality. Yet, the ground reacts
against this unity and asserts the initial duality, but only toward ever greater increase and toward the final separation of good from evil. The will of the ground must remain in its freedom until all this may be fulfilled and become actual. If the will of the ground were vanquished earlier, the good would remain hidden in it together with evil. But the good should be raised out of the darkness into actuality in order to live with God everlastingly, whereas evil should be separated from the good in order to be cast out eternally into non-Being. For this is the final purpose of creation that, whatever could not be for itself, should be for itself in so far as it is raised out of the darkness into ex- istence as a ground that is independent of God. Hence the necessity of birth and death. God yields the ideas that were in him without in- dependent life to selfhood and to what does not have Being so that, when called to life from the latter, they may be in him once again as independently existing [beings]. *,93 In its freedom, the ground there- fore effects separation and judgment [krisis] and, precisely in doing so, the complete actualization of God. For evil, when it is entirely sep- arate from good, also no longer exists as evil. It could only have been active through the (misused) good that was in it without its being conscious of it. In life, it still savored the forces of external nature with which it attempted to create and still had an | indirect participa- tion in the goodness of God. But in dying it is separated from every- thing good and, indeed, it remains behind as desire, as an eternal hunger and thirst for actuality, yet it is unable to step out of potential- ity. Its state is thus a state of non-Being, a state of constant consump- tion of activity or of that which strives to be active in it. For that rea- son it also does not require in any way a reconstitution of evil to goodness (of the return [Wiederbringung] of all things) for realization of the idea of a final, all-encompassing perfection; for evil is only evil to the extent that it exceeds potentiality, but, reduced to non-Being or the state of potency, it is what it always should be, basis, subordinate and, as such, no longer in contradiction with God's holiness or love. Hence, the end of revelation is casting out evil from the good, the ex- planation of evil as complete unreality. By contrast, the good, hav- ing risen out of the ground, is linked in eternal unity with the original good; those born out of darkness into the light join themselves to the ideal principle as limbs to a body in which the ideal principle is fully
* Philosophy and Religion (Tu? bingen, 1804), p. 73.
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realized and now a wholly personal being. As long as the initial dual- ity lasted, the creating word ruled in the ground, and this period of creation goes through all up to the end. But if the duality is destroyed through separation, the word, or the ideal principle, subordinates it- self, and the real principle that has become one with it, communally to spirit, and the latter, as divine consciousness, lives in the same way in both principles; as the scripture says about Christ: He must rule until all his enemies lie under his feet. 94 The last enemy to be abolished is death (for death was only necessary for the separation, the good must die in order to separate itself from evil, and evil must do so in order to separate itself from good). But when everything will be subordinate to him, then the son will also subordinate himself just as quickly to him who has subordinated all to the son, so that God may be all in all. For even the spirit is not yet the highest thing; it is but spirit or the breath | of love. Yet love is the highest. It is what ex- isted, then, before the ground and before that which exists (as separ- ate) but not yet as love, rather--how should we describe it?
Here we finally reach the highest point of the entire investigation. For a long time already we have heard the question: What end should serve this primary distinction between being in so far as it is ground and in so far as it exists? For there is either no common point of contact for both, in which case we must declare ourselves in favor of absolute dualism, or there is such a point; thus, both coincide once again in the final analysis. We have, then, one being [Ein Wesen] for all oppositions, an absolute identity of light and darkness, good and evil, and for all the inconsistent results to which any rational system falls prey and which have long been manifest in this system too.
We have already explained what we assume in the first respect: there must be a being before all ground and before all that exists, thus generally before any duality--how can we call it anything other than the original ground or the non-ground [Ungrund]? Since it precedes all opposites, these cannot be distinguishable in it nor can they be present in any way. Therefore, it cannot be described as the identity of opposites; it can only be described as the absolute indifference [In- differenz] of both. 95 Most people forget, when they come to that point of examination where they must recognize a disappearance of all op- posites, that these have now really disappeared, and they once again predicate the opposites as such as arising from the indifference which had emerged precisely due to their total cessation. Indifference
is not a product of opposites, nor are they implicitly contained in it, but rather indifference is its own being separate from all opposition, a being against which all opposites ruin themselves, that is nothing else than their very not-Being [Nichtsein] and that, for this reason, also has no predicate, except as the very lacking of a predicate, without it being on that account a nothingness or non-thing. Therefore they ei- ther posit indifference actually in the non-ground that precedes any ground; thus they have | neither good nor evil--(for we are leaving aside for the moment the fact that raising the opposition between good and evil up to this standpoint is generally impermissible)--and also cannot predicate of it either the former or the latter or even both at the same time, or they posit good and evil and, thus, they also posit at once duality and therefore already no longer posit the non-ground or indifference. Let the following be said as a commentary to the lat- ter point! Real and ideal, darkness and light, as we otherwise want to describe the two principles, can never be predicated of the non- ground as opposites. But nothing hinders that they be predicated of it as non-opposites, that is, in disjunction and each for itself whereby, however, precisely duality (the actual two-ness [Zweiheit] of princi- ples) is posited. There is nothing in the non-ground itself by which this would be hindered. For, precisely because it relates to both as total indifference, it is neutral toward both. Were it the absolute iden- tity of both, it could be both only at the same time, that is, both would have to be predicated of it as opposites and thereby would themselves be one again. Duality (which is something entirely different from op- position, even though we should have used both synonymously up to now since we had not yet reached this point in the investigation) breaks forth therefore immediately from the Neither-Nor, or indiffer- ence, and without indifference, that is, without a non-ground, there would be no two-ness of principles. Therefore, instead of abolishing this distinction once again, as was thought, the non-ground rather posits and confirms it. Far from the distinction between the ground and that which exists having been merely logical, or one called on as a heuristic aid and again found to be artificial in the end, it has shown itself rather as a very real distinction that from the highest standpoint was first correctly proved and fully grasped.
Following this dialectical discussion, we can explain ourselves therefore entirely concretely in the following manner. The being of the ground, as of that which exists, can only be | that which comes
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before all ground, thus, the absolute considered merely in itself, the non-ground. But, as proved, it cannot be this in any other way than in so far as it divides into two equally eternal beginnings, not that it can be both at once, but that it is in each in the same way, thus in each the whole, or its own being. But the non-ground divides itself into the two exactly equal beginnings, only so that the two, which could not exist simultaneously or be one in it as the non-ground, become one through love, that is, it divides itself only so that there may be life and love and personal existence. For love is neither in indifference nor where opposites are linked which require linkage for [their] Being, but rather (to repeat a phrase which has already been said) this is the secret of love, that it links such things of which each could exist for itself, yet does not and cannot exist without the other. *,96 For this rea- son as duality comes to be in the non-ground, love comes to be as well, linking that which exists (that which is ideal) with the ground for existence. But the ground remains free and independent from the word until the final, total separation. Then it dissolves itself, as the in- itial yearning does in man when he crosses over to clarity and, as an enduring being, grounds himself, in that everything true and good in this yearning is raised into bright consciousness; but everything else, namely, the false and unclean, is locked away forever in the darkness as the eternally dark ground of selfhood, as caput mortuum [lit: "dead head"; lifeless source] of his life process and as potency left behind that can never emerge into actuality [zum Aktus]. Then everything is subordinate to spirit. In spirit that which exists is one with the ground for existence; in it both really are present at the same time, or it is the absolute identity of both. Above spirit, however, is the initial non-ground that is no longer indifference (neutrality) and yet not the identity of both principles, but rather a general unity that is the same for all and yet gripped by nothing that is free from all and yet a benef- icence acting in all, in a word, love, which is all in all. |
Whoever thus would want to say (as before): there is in this system one principle for everything; it is one and the same being that rules in the dark ground of nature and in eternal clarity, one and the same that effects the hardness and discreteness of things and unity and gentleness, the very same that reigns with the will of love in the
* "Aphorisms on Natural Philosophy," in the Annuals of Medicine as Science. Vol. I, No. I. Aphor. 162, 163.
good and the will of wrath in evil--although he says that all entirely correctly, he should not forget that the one being divides itself in two sorts of being in its two ways of acting, that it is in one merely ground for existence and in the other merely being (and, for that reason only ideal); and, further, that only God as spirit is the absolute identity of both principles, but only because and to the degree that both are sub- ordinated to his personality.
97 But whoever were to find an absolute identity of good and evil in this final, highest point of view, would show his complete ignorance in so far as good and evil absolutely do not form an original opposition, but least of all a duality. Duality is where two beings actually stand opposed to each other. Evil is, how- ever, not a being, but rather a non-being [Unwesen] that has reality only in opposition and not in itself. Precisely for that reason absolute identity is prior to evil as well, because the latter can appear only in opposition to it. Hence, evil also cannot be grasped through absolute identity but is eternally excluded and cast out from it. *
Whoever finally would want to name this system pantheism, be- cause all oppositions disappear considered simply in relation to the absolute, may also be granted this indulgence. ? ,98 We are pleased | to
* From this it is clear how unusual it is to demand that the opposition of good and evil be explained right away from the first principles. Admittedly, anyone must talk in this way who takes good and evil for a real duality and dualism for the most perfect system.
? NoonecanagreemorethantheauthorwiththewishwhichMr. Fr. Schlegel expresses in the Heidelberg Annuals, vol. 2, p. 242, that the unmanly pan- theist fraud in Germany might cease, especially since Mr. S. also adds to it aesthetic delusion and conceit, and to the extent that | we may at the same time include in this swindle opinion as to the exclusively rational charac- ter of Spinozism. It is in fact very easy to arouse false opinion, even a fraud, in Germany where a philosophical system becomes the object of a literary industry, and so many, to whom nature has not granted understanding even for everyday things, believe themselves called to join in the philo- sophical endeavor [mitphilosophieren]. One can at least take comfort in the awareness of never having personally favored the fraud or encouraged it with helpful support, but rather of being able to say with Erasmus (as little else as one may have in common with him): semper solus esse volui, nihilque pejus odi quam juratos et factiosos [I always wanted to be alone, and nothing more did I hate than conspirators and factionists]. The author
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allow to everyone their way of making the age and what it holds coher- ent. The name does not do it; it depends on the matter. The vanity of a polemic based on philosophical systems grasped in a general way against a specific one that can of course have numerous points in common with them and, hence, has been confused with all of them, but that has its own proper definitions in each particular point--we have already touched on the vanity of such a polemic in the introduc- tion to this treatise. Thus it can be said succinctly that a system teaches the immanence of things in God; and yet, for example, nothing would be said thereby in regard to us even though it could not exactly be called untrue. For we have sufficiently shown that all natural be- ings have mere Being in the ground or in the initial yearning that has not yet achieved unity with the understanding, that they are there- fore merely peripheral | beings in relation to God. Only man is in God and capable of freedom exactly through this Being-in-God [in-Gott- Sein]. He alone is a being of the centrum [ein Centralwesen] and, for that reason, he should also remain in the centrum. All things are created in it just as God only accepts nature and ties it to himself through man. Nature is the first or old Testament, since things are still outside of the centrum and, hence, subject to the law. Man is the begin- ning of the new covenant through which as mediator, since he is him- self tied to God, God (after the last division) also accepts nature and makes it into himself. Man is hence the redeemer of nature toward
has never wished through the founding of a sect to take away from others and, least of all, from himself the freedom of investigation in which he has declared himself still engaged and probably will always declare himself en- gaged. In the future, he will also maintain the course that he has taken in the present treatise where, even if the external form of a dialogue is lack- ing, everything arises as a sort of dialogue. Many things here could have been more sharply defined and treated less casually, many protected more explicitly from misinterpretation. The author has refrained from doing so partially on purpose. Whoever will and cannot accept it from him thus, should accept nothing from him at all and seek other sources. But perhaps unsolicited successors and opponents will grant this treatise the respect they showed the earlier, related text, Philosophy and Religion, through their total ignoring of it, to which the former were persuaded certainly less by the threatening words of the preface or the manner of presentation than by the content itself.
which all typology [Vorbilder] in nature aims. The word that is ful- filled in human beings is in nature as a dark, prophetic (not yet fully pronounced) word. Hence, the portents [Vorbedeutungen] that con- tain in themselves no interpretation and are explained only by man. Hence, the general finality99 of causes that, likewise, becomes under- standable only from this point of view. Whoever now overlooks or ig- nores all these intermediary definitions has no difficulty with refuta- tion. Merely historical critique is in fact a comfortable matter. In the course of this, one need expend nothing of oneself, one's own capital, and can observe fittingly the Caute, per Deos! incede, latet ignis sub ce- nere doloso [Proceed with caution, by the gods! --fire hides under the treacherous ash]. 100 But, in the course of this, arbitrary and untried presuppositions are unavoidable. Thus, in order to prove that there are only two manners of explaining evil--the dualistic, according to which there is assumed an evil fundamental being [Grundwesen], no matter with which modifications, under or next to the good one, and the Kabbalistic, according to which evil is explained through emana- tion and distancing--and that every other system therefore must abolish the distinction between good and evil; in order to prove this, nothing less would be required than the full power of a deeply thought-out and thoroughly developed philosophy. In a system, every concept has its definite place where it is alone valid and which also determines its meaning as well as its limitation. Whoever now does not examine the inner core [das Innere], but lifts only the most general concepts out of their context--how may he judge the whole correctly? Thus we have shown | the particular point of the system where the concept of indifference is indeed the only possible concept of the absolute. If it is now taken generally, the whole is distorted, and it also follows then that this system abolishes the personality of the highest being. We have been hitherto silent about this frequently heard accusation as about many others, but believe that we have es- tablished the first clear concept of personality in this treatise. In the non-ground or indifference there is admittedly no personality. But is the beginning point really the whole? Now we challenge those who have made such an accusation with ease to present us in contrast, ac- cording to their views, with even the most exiguous understanding [das geringste Versta? ndliche] about this concept. Overall we find rather that they claim the personality of God is incomprehensible and in no way to be made understandable, and they are also entirely
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right to do so in so far as they hold precisely those abstract systems in which all personality is utterly impossible for the only rationally consistent ones, which is also presumably the reason they attribute the like to anyone who does not condemn science and reason. By contrast, we are of the opinion that a clear, rational view must be pos- sible precisely from the highest concepts in so far as only in this way can they really be our own, accepted in ourselves and eternally grounded. Indeed, we go even further and hold, with Lessing himself, that the development of revealed truths into truths of reason is sim- ply necessary, if the human race is to be helped thereby. *,101 We are likewise convinced that reason is fully adequate to expose every pos- sible error (in genuinely spiritual matters) and that the inquisitorial demeanor in the judgment of philosophical systems is entirely super- fluous. ? To transfer an absolute dualism of good and evil to history whereby either the one or the other principle prevails in all manifes- tations and works of the human spirit, whereby there are only two systems | and two religions, one absolutely good and another simply evil; further, the opinion that everything began in purity and simplic- ity and all subsequent developments (that were of course necessary in order to reveal the particular aspects contained in the first unity and thereby to reveal the unity fully itself) were only decay and falsifi- cation--while this whole view serves critique as a powerful sword of Alexander with which to chop the Gordian knot in two effortlessly everywhere, it introduces into history, however, a thoroughly illiberal and highly reductive point of view. There was a time that preceded this separation; and one worldview and religion which, although op- posed to the absolute one, sprang forth from its own ground and not from a falsification of the first one. 102 Paganism is, taken historically, as original as Christianity and, although only a ground and basis of something higher, it is not derived from anything else.
These reflections lead back to our point of beginning. A system that contradicts the most holy feelings, character and moral con- sciousness, can never be called, at least in this respect, a system of reason, but rather only one of non-reason [Unvernunft]. To the
* Education of the Human Race, Para. 76.
? Especially when on the other hand one wants to speak only of viewpoints
[Ansichten], where one should be speaking of truths that alone tend to- ward salvation.
contrary, a system in which reason really recognized itself, would have to unify all demands of the spirit as well as those of the heart and those of the moral feeling as well as those of the most rigorous understanding. The polemic against reason and science does in fact allow for a certain elevated generality which dispenses with exact concepts so that we can guess more easily its intentions than its defi- nite meaning. However, we fear that even if we did fathom its definite meaning, we would not come upon anything extraordinary. For, no matter how high we place reason, we do not believe, for example, that anyone may be virtuous or a hero or generally a great human being on the basis of pure reason, indeed, not even, according to the familiar phrase, that the human race can be propagated by it. 103 Only in personality is there life, and all personality rests on a dark ground that indeed must therefore be the ground of cognition as well. But it is only the understanding that develops what is hidden and contained in this ground | merely potentialiter [potentially] and raises it to actu- ality [zum Aktus]. This can only occur through division, thus through science and dialectic, of which we are convinced that they alone will hold fixed and bring permanently to cognition the system which has been there more often than we think but has always again slipped away, hovering before us and not yet fully grasped by anyone. As in life we actually have faith only in powerful understanding and most frequently miss all tender feeling in those who always show off their feelings, so selfhood, having reduced things merely to feeling, also cannot win in us any trust where one is dealing with truth and cogni- tion. Feeling is glorious if it remains in the ground, but it is not so when it steps into daylight, wanting to make itself into a being and to rule. If, according to Franz Baader's striking views, the drive to know is most analogous with the reproductive drive,*,104 then there is something in cognition analogous to discipline and shame and, con- versely, also a lack of discipline and shamelessness, a kind of faun-like appetite that samples everything without the seriousness and with- out the love to build or shape something. The bond of our personality is spirit, and if only the active linking of both principles can become creative and productive [erzeugend], then inspiration in the genuine sense is the active principle of every productive [erzeugenden] and
* One should see the treatise on this matter in the Annuals for Medicine, Vol. III, No. 1, p. 113.
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formative art or science. Every inspiration expresses itself in a defi- nite way; and thus there is also one that expresses itself through a di- alectical artistic drive, a genuinely scientific inspiration. For that rea- son there is also a dialectical philosophy that, defined as science, is distinctly separate, for example, from poetry and religion, and some- thing that stands entirely for itself but is not identical with everything possible in turn, one after another, as those claim who presently labor to blend everything with everything else in so many writings. It is said that reflection is hostile to the idea [Idee]; but it is exactly the highest triumph of truth that it may emerge victorious from the most extreme division | and separation. Reason is in man that which, ac- cording to the mystics, the primum passivum [first passivity] or initial wisdom is in God in which all things are together and yet distinct, identical and yet free each in its own way. 105 Reason is not activity, like spirit, nor is it the absolute identity of both principles of cogni- tion, but rather indifference; the measure and, so to speak, the gen- eral place of truth, the peaceful site in which primordial wisdom is re- ceived, in accordance with which, as if looking away toward the archetype [Urbild], understanding should develop. On the one hand, philosophy receives its name from love, as the general inspiring prin- ciple, on the other hand, from this original wisdom which is her genu- ine goal.
If the dialectical principle, that is, the understanding which is dif- ferentiating but thereby organically ordering and shaping things in conjunction with the archetype by which it steers itself, is withdrawn from philosophy so that it no longer has in itself either measure or rule, then nothing else is left to philosophy but to orient itself histori- cally and to take the tradition as its source and plumb line to which it had recourse earlier with a similar result. Then it is time, as one in- tended to ground our poetry through acquaintance with the litera- ture [Dichtungen] of all nations, to seek for philosophy a historical norm and basis as well. We harbor the greatest respect for the pro- found significance of historical research and believe we have shown that the almost general opinion that man only gradually raised him- self up from the dullness of animal instinct to reason is not our own. 106 Nevertheless we believe that the truth may lie closer and that we should seek solutions for the problems that trouble our time first in ourselves and on our own territory before we turn to such distant sources. The time of purely historical belief is past, if the possibility
of immediate cognition is granted [gegeben]. We have an older revela- tion than any written one--nature. The latter contains a typology [Vorbilder] that no man has yet interpreted, whereas the written one received its fulfillment and interpretation long ago. If the understand- ing of this unwritten revelation were made manifest, the only | true system of religion and science would appear not in the poorly assem- bled state of a few philosophical and critical concepts, but rather at once in the full brilliance of truth and nature. It is not the time to rouse old oppositions once again, but rather to seek that which lies outside of, and beyond, all opposition.
The present treatise will be followed by a series of others in which the entirety of the ideal part of philosophy will gradually be presented.
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SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The purpose of the following supplementary texts is to provide a se- lection of important texts that we think offer a useful background to the Philosophical Investigations but are not readily available in En- glish translation; indeed, we believe that the text from Baader is made available in English here for the first time. We have organized these texts around two broad conceptual streams that have a major impact on both the conceptual and rhetorical structure of the Philo- sophical Investigations. The first of these may be referred to as the "theosophical" stream while the second deals with the tension between reason and revelation that emerged with greatest clarity in the so-called Pantheismusstreit of the 1780s but which was preceded and prefigured by Lessing's earlier polemic with Goeze of which Lessing's enigmatic text, "A Parable," is but one notable product. While the texts are merely a selection--others could have been cho- sen to fulfill the same purpose--we believe that they are well-suited for this purpose both due to their brevity and considerable concen- tration of thought.
Theosophical Texts
Under this grouping we include two texts, one by Jacob Boehme, the other by Franz Xaver von Baader.
Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) is one of the most important figures in the German tradition of speculative mysticism, and he had a tremen- dous influence not only on Schelling but on a veritable pantheon of German thinkers from Leibniz to Hegel. The text we include here in its entirety, the Mysterium Pansophicum (1620), gives a compressed overview of Boehme's erotically charged mystical thought while pre- senting in its own highly specific context a concept that has major im- portance for the Philosophical Investigations, the "non-ground. "1
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Franz Xaver von Baader (1765-1841) was a contemporary of Schelling and one of the latter's closer associates after his relocation to Munich in 1806. There seems to have been a rather intense intellec- tual collaboration between the two, of which the text included here, "On the Assertion that There Can Be No Wicked Use of Reason" (1807), would seem to provide ample evidence. This text affirms one of the crucial aspects of the Philosophical Investigations, its emphasis on evil not as a deficiency or surrender to sensuality, to the "animal" in man, but rather as very much a positive force, one that expresses a perverse "humanization" of ostensibly animal ends through the sup- posed perfections of man, foremost among which is the "heavenly light" of reason.
Pantheism Texts
Under this grouping we include four texts, one each by Gotthold Eph- raim Lessing and Johann Gottfried Herder and two by Friedrich Hein- rich Jacobi.
These texts all center around an issue of great complexity and amplitude in late eighteenth-century German thought, the authority of reason and, more generally, the authority of reason in relation to faith, the notorious contest between Athens and Jerusalem, revived by the propagation of Enlightenment ideals among German thinkers in the latter half of the eighteenth century. This contest plays an ex- tremely important role in Schelling's philosophical thought and in the Philosophical Investigations since, despite all misleading appear- ances, Schelling never sought to abandon the authority of reason for revelation and, in this respect, became one of Jacobi's most fero- cious critics. Rather, when Schelling seeks to defend system, as he does in the Philosophical Investigations, he is seeking to defend rea- son against its enemies and, of course, against its most formidable enemy, evil, which could be said to draw more to revelation and dis- gust with reason than any other fact of human life--this is the sense in which Schelling's defense of reason is also very much a theodicy of reason.
We have included a remarkable text by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) called "The Parable" (1778). As noted previously, this text forms part of a larger polemic with the orthodox Lutheran pastor
SUPPLEMENTARYTEXTS | INTRODUCTORYNOTE | 83
Johann Melchior Goeze, the senior representative of the Hamburg clergy, over the authority of the Bible. In essence, the argument turned on the fundamental question of whether the Bible reveals truths that are unassailable by reason because they are revealed or not. Lessing took the side of reason, suggesting that the Bible could be criticized on a rational basis without necessarily undermining faith, that objec- tions against the Bible were not in themselves objections against faith but that some standard (namely, a rational one) of critique was neces- sary--here Lessing's choice was for rational, natural theology and not revelation, for a way of reading the Bible more closely (if covertly) linked to Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise. Among other things, "The Parable" reflects this critique and the dangers of revelation whose tyrannical inconstancy may entail very dangerous conse- quences for the "quite exceptional architecture" of the whole.
In this sense, "The Parable" represents the kernel of a rationalist critique of the emphasis on revelation, the "leap of faith" or salto mor- tale that marks the contribution to German thought of Friedrich Hein- rich Jacobi (1743-1819). The two texts we include here, excerpts from Jacobi's famous book, On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn (1785), and from additions made to the second edition of the same book, which appeared in 1789, give a reasonably clear indication of Jacobi's position and suggest his importance for Schelling as an opponent to be overcome.
Jacobi's book relates several conversations with Lessing, whom Jacobi had met in 1780, and, in doing so, it intentionally suggests that Lessing was a Spinozist. This suggestion was shocking and disorient- ing for Jacobi's contemporaries; it launched one of the great intellec- tual tumults of the late eighteenth century, the so-called Pantheismus- streit or the "pantheism debate," which engaged all the foremost minds of that extraordinarily fecund period including Goethe, Kant, Hamann, and Herder. 2 This revelation had such force because in the peculiar milieu of late eighteenth-century German intellectual life, "Spinozism" meant "Pantheism," which in turn meant a rationalist atheism. The debate over Lessing's adherence to Spinozism or pantheism became a debate over the authority of reason and, ulti- mately, a debate over the value of Enlightenment that in various mu- tations and different terms has continued practically unabated down to the present day. One of Schelling's more remarkable exhibitions of intellectual virtuosity are his opening comments in the Philosophical
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Investigations on the concept of pantheism where he develops--in avowed opposition to Spinoza--a concept of rationality that has much to do with his philosophy of nature; this concept emphasizes dynamic tension and interplay, the constant activity of opposed forces, a dialectic rather than axiomatic model of rationality.
In this respect, we thought it appropriate to provide a brief excerpt from Johann Gottfried Herder's God. Some Conversations (1787) as the final one in this group. Herder (1744-1803) wrote this text as his rather late entry into the pantheism debate. This excerpt exemplifies Herder's organic and dynamic sense of the structure of the whole, a way of characterizing the whole that is everywhere evident in Schell- ing; it also provides an important backdrop to the fundamental rela- tion between ground and existence which is so central to the Philo- sophical Investigations and which Schelling claims to have derived from the natural philosophy of his day, that is, from his own earlier work in that area. Moreover, we chose an excerpt from Herder be- cause his considerable influence on Schelling has been relatively undervalued. 3
JACOB BOEHME
Mysterium Pansophicum
Or Thorough Report on the Earthly and Heavenly Mysterium1
The First Text
Summaries
The eternal ground of magia forms in itself since there is nothing, para.
The non-ground is an eternal nothing but forms an eternal beginning as a craving [Sucht]. For the nothing is a craving for something. And since there is also nothing that may give something, the craving is it- self the giving of that which is indeed also a nothing as merely a desir- ing [begehrende] craving. And that is the eternal primal state of magia which forms in itself since there is nothing. It forms something from nothing, and that just in itself and, since indeed the same craving is also a nothing as only a mere will, the will has nothing and is also nothing that may give itself something; and it has also no place where it could find or rest itself.
The Second Text
Summaries
The nothing is a craving, that forms in itself the will to something, para. 1. The will, however, is a spirit and a magus and is caused by the craving, 2. whence nature and the spirit of nature is to be conceived [ersinnen], 3.
Whereas a craving thus exists now in nothing, it makes the will into something for itself. And the same will is a spirit as a thought that
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sets forth from craving and is the craving's seeker, for the will finds its mother as the craving. Now, the same will is a magus in its mother, since it found something in the nothing as its mother. And because it found its mother, it now has a dwelling place.
2. And understand herein how the will is a spirit and different from desiring craving. For the will is an insentient and unknowing life, but the craving is found by the will and is a being [Wesen] in the will. Now it is recognized that the craving is a magia and the will is a magus, and that the will is larger than its mother who gives it. For the will is the master in the mother, and the mother is recognized as silent and the will as a life without origin; and because indeed the craving is a cause of the will but without cognition and understanding, and the will is the craving's understanding.
3. Thus we briefly present nature and the spirit of nature--what has been eternally without primal state--for you to consider and find thus that the will as the spirit has no place for its rest; but the craving is its own place and the will is bound to it and yet is also not held fast [ergriffen].
The Third Text
Summaries
The will is the eternal omnipotence and rules over the craving and gov- erns the life of craving, paras. 1, 2. The eternal will-spirit is God, 3, 4.
Whereas the eternal will is thus free from the craving, and the craving is, however, not free from the will, for the will rules over the craving; thus we recognize the will as the eternal omnipotence. For it has no equal; and though the craving is in fact an arousal of attraction or de- sire, it is, however, without understanding, and it has a life but with- out intelligence.
2. Now the will governs the life of craving and acts on the life as it sees fit. And if the will does something it is yet not recognized until the same being reveals itself with the will, that it becomes a being in the will's life; thus is recognized what the will has formed.
3. And we thus recognize the eternal will-spirit as God and the stir- ring life of the craving as nature. For there is nothing prior, and both
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are without beginning; and each is the cause for the other and an eternal bond.
4. And thus is the spirit of the will an eternal knowledge of the non- ground, and the life of the craving an eternal being of the will.
The Fourth Text
Summaries
The craving is a desiring, para. 1. and desiring is an attracting, 2. The will takes, since nothing is, and becomes pregnant, 3. and gives birth in itself, 4. namely, a word or echo, 5. and inaugurates the intelligible life of magia, 6. The threefold spirit is its master: the word its residence, 7, 8. and stands in the middle as a heart, ibid. Thus is God and nature from eternity, 9.
Whereas the craving is thus desire and the same desire is a life, then the same desiring life goes forward within the craving, and is always pregnant with the craving.
2. And desire is an austere attraction and yet has nothing but itself as the eternity without ground; now it conceives magically as its own desire toward substance.
3. For the will takes now, since nothing is; it is master and posses- sor, it is itself not a being [Wesen] and yet rules in the being. And the being makes the will desirous [begehrend], namely of the being. And thus the will then becomes desirous in itself, it is thus magical and impregnates itself as with spirit without being, for it is in the primal state only spirit. Thus it makes in its imagination only spirit and be- comes pregnant with spirit as the eternal knowing [Wissenheit] of the non-ground, in omnipotence of the life without being.
4. And thus the will is then pregnant, the act of giving birth hap- pens in itself and lives in itself. For the life-essence of the other can- not take hold of this impregnation and cannot be its holder. There- fore, the impregnation must happen in itself and be its own holder as a son in eternal spirit.
5. And because this impregnation has no being, so it is a voice or an echo as a word of spirit, and it remains in the primal state of spirit, for it otherwise has no residence other than in the primal state of spirit.
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6. And a will is still in this word, a will that wants to go out into a being, and the same will is the original will's life, which goes out from the giving birth as from the mouth of will into the life of magia as into nature. And the will inaugurates the unintelligible life of magia--that it is a mysterium--because an understanding lies essentially within and receives therefore an essential spirit, since every essence is an arcanum or a mysterium of a whole being. And therefore the will exists in the concept as an unfathomable miracle of eternity, since many lives are born without number; and yet everything together is just one being [Ein Wesen].
7. And the threefold spirit without being is its master and possessor, and since it does not possess the nature-being it thus lives in itself.
8. The word is its centrum or residence and stands in the middle as a heart. And the spirit of the word--which originally came into being in the first will--inaugurates [ero? ffnet] the miracles of the essential life, that there are thus two mysteria: one in the spirit-life and one in the essential life. And the spirit-life is recognized as God and also rightly so called; and the essential life is recognized as nature-life, which would have no understanding if the spirit or the spirit-life were not desiring, in which desiring the divine being as the eternal word and heart of God is always and eternally born, and from which the de- siring will goes out eternally as its spirit into the nature-life and in all of this inaugurates the mysterium from the essences [Essentien] and in the essences, so that there are thus two lives and also two beings from and in one united, eternal, and unfathomable original condition.