CHAPTER XLVIII: On the Doctrine of the Denial of the Will-to-Live [1]
Man has his existence and being either with his will, in other words, with his consent, or without it; in the latter case such an existence, embittered by inevitable sufferings of many kinds, would be a flagrant injustice. The ancients, particularly the Stoics, and also the Peripatetics and Academics, laboured in vain to prove that virtue is enough to make life happy; experience loudly cried out against this. Although they were not clearly aware of it, what was really at the root of the attempt of those philosophers was the assumed justice of the case; he who was without guilt ought to be free from suffering, and hence happy. But the serious and profound solution of the problem is to be found in the Christian doctrine that works do not justify. Accordingly, although a man has practised all justice and philanthropy, consequently the , honestum, he is still not culpa omni carens [2] as Cicero imagines (Tusc., V, 1); but el delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido (Man's greatest offence is that he was born) as the poet Calderon, inspired by Christianity, has expressed it from a knowledge far profounder than was possessed by those wise men. Accordingly, that man comes into the world already involved in guilt can appear absurd only to the person who regards him as just having come from nothing, and as the work of another. Hence in consequence of this guilt, which must therefore have come from his will, man rightly remains abandoned to physical and mental sufferings, even when he has practised all those virtues, and so he is not happy. This follows from the eternal justice of which I spoke in § 63 of volume 1. However, as St. Paul (Rom. iii, 21 seqq.), Augustine, and Luther teach, works cannot justify, since we all are and remain essentially sinners. This is due in the last resort to the fact that, since operari sequitur esse, [3] if we acted as we ought to act, we should also necessarily be what we ought to be. But then we should not need any salvation from our present condition, and such salvation is represented as the highest goal not only by Christianity, but also by Brahmanism and Buddhism (under the name expressed in English by final emancipation); in other words, we should not need to become something quite different from, indeed the very opposite of, what we are. However, since we are what we ought not to be, we also necessarily do what we ought not to do. We therefore need a complete transformation of our nature and disposition, i.e., the new spiritual birth, regeneration, as the result of which salvation appears. Although the guilt lies in conduct, in the operari, yet the root of the guilt lies in our essentia et existentia [Google translate: the essence of existence], for the operari necessarily proceeds from these, as I have explained in the essay On the Freedom of the Will. Accordingly, original sin is really our only true sin. Now it is true that the Christian myth makes original sin arise only after man already existed, and for this purpose ascribes to him, per impossibile, a free will; it does this, however, simply as a myth. The innermost kernel and spirit of Christianity is identical with that of Brahmanism and Buddhism; they all teach a heavy guilt of the human race through its existence itself, only Christianity does not proceed in this respect directly and openly, like those more ancient religions. It represents the guilt not as being established simply by existence itself, but as arising through the act of the first human couple. This was possible only under the fiction of a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae [Google translate: Free choice of indifference], [4] and was necessary only on account of the Jewish fundamental dogma, into which that doctrine was here to be implanted. According to the truth, the very origin of man himself is the act of his free will, and is accordingly identical with the Fall, and therefore the original sin, of which all others are the result, appeared already with man's essentia and existentia; but the fundamental dogma of Judaism did not admit of such an explanation. Therefore Augustine taught in his books De Libero Arbitrio that only as Adam before the Fall was man guiltless and had a free will, whereas for ever after he is involved in the necessity of sin. The law, , in the biblical sense, always demands that we should change our conduct, while our essential nature would remain unchanged. But since this is impossible, Paul says that no one is justified before the law; we can be transferred from the state of sinfulness into that of freedom and salvation only by the new birth or regeneration in Jesus Christ, in consequence of the effect of grace, by virtue of which a new man arises, and the old man is abolished (in other words, a fundamental change of disposition). This is the Christian myth with regard to ethics. But of course Jewish theism, on to which the myth was grafted, must have received marvellous additions in order to attach itself to that myth. Here the fable of the Fall presented the only place for the graft of the old Indian stem. It is to be ascribed just to this forcibly surmounted difficulty that the Christian mysteries have obtained an appearance so strange and opposed to common sense. Such an appearance makes proselytizing more difficult; on this account and from an inability to grasp their profound meaning, Pelagianism, or present-day rationalism, rises up against them, and tries to explain them away by exegesis, but in this way it reduces Christianity to Judaism.
However, to speak without myth; as long as our will is the same, our world cannot be other than it is. It is true that all men wish to be delivered from the state of suffering and death; they would like, as we say, to attain to eternal bliss, to enter the kingdom of heaven, but not on their own feet; they would like to be carried there by the course of nature. But this is impossible; for nature is only the copy, the shadow, of our will. Therefore, of course, she will never let us fall and become nothing; but she cannot bring us anywhere except always into nature again. Yet everyone experiences in his own life and death how precarious it is to exist as a part of nature. Accordingly, existence is certainly to be regarded as an error or mistake, to return from which is salvation; it bears this character throughout. Therefore it is conceived in this sense by the ancient Samana religions, and also by real and original Christianity, although in a roundabout way. Even Judaism itself contains the germ of such a view, at any rate in the Fall of man; this is its redeeming feature. Only Greek paganism and Islam are wholly optimistic; therefore in the former the opposite tendency had to find expression at least in tragedy. In Islam, however, the most modern as well as the worst of all religions, this opposite tendency appeared as Sufism, that very fine phenomenon which is entirely Indian in spirit and origin, and has now continued to exist for over a thousand years. In fact, nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist. This, however, is the most important of all truths, and must therefore be stated, however much it stands in contrast with the present-day mode of European thought. On the other hand, it is nevertheless the most universally recognized fundamental truth in the whole of non-Mohammedan Asia, today as much as three thousand years ago.
Now if we consider the will-to-live as a whole and objectively, we have to think of it, according to what has been said, as involved in a delusion. To return from this, and hence to deny its whole present endeavour, is what religions describe as self-denial or self-renunciation, abnegatio sui ipsius; [5] for the real self is the will-to-live. The moral virtues, hence justice and philanthropy, if pure, spring, as I have shown, from the fact that the will-to-live, seeing through the principium individuationis, recognizes itself again in all its phenomena; accordingly they are primarily a sign, a symptom, that the appearing will is no longer firmly held in that delusion, but that disillusionment already occurs. Thus it might be said figuratively that the will already flaps its wings, in order to fly away from it. Conversely, injustice, wickedness, cruelty are signs of the opposite, that is, of deep entanglement in that delusion. But in the second place, these moral virtues are a means of advancing self-renunciation, and accordingly of denying the will-to-live. For true righteousness, inviolable justice, that first and most important cardinal virtue, is so heavy a task, that whoever professes it unconditionally and from the bottom of his heart has to make sacrifices which soon deprive life of the sweetness required to make it enjoyable, and thereby turn the will from it, and thus lead to resignation. Yet the very thing that makes righteousness venerable is the sacrifices it costs; in trifles it is not admired. Its true nature really consists in the righteous man's not throwing on others, by craft or force, the burdens and sorrows incidental to life, as is done by the unrighteous, but in his bearing what has fallen to his lot. In this way he has to endure undiminished the full burden of the evil imposed on human life. Justice thereby becomes a means for advancing the denial of the will-to-live, since want and suffering, those actual conditions of human life, are its consequence; but these lead to resignation. Caritas, the virtue of philanthropy which goes farther, certainly leads even more quickly to the same result. For on the strength of it, a person takes over also the sufferings that originally fall to the lot of others; he therefore appropriates to himself a greater share of these than would come to him as an individual in the ordinary course of things. He who is inspired by this virtue has again recognized in everyone else his own inner nature. In this way he now identifies his own lot with that of mankind in general; but this is a hard lot, namely that of striving, suffering, and dying. Therefore, whoever, by renouncing every accidental advantage, desires for himself no other lot than that of mankind in general, can no longer desire even this for any length of time. Clinging to life and its pleasures must now soon yield, and make way for a universal renunciation; consequently, there will come about the denial of the will. Now since, according to this, poverty, privations, and special sufferings of many kinds are produced by the most complete exercise of moral virtues, asceticism in the narrowest sense, the giving up of all property, the deliberate search for the unpleasant and repulsive, self-torture, fasting, the hairy garment, mortification of the flesh; all these are rejected by many as superfluous, and perhaps rightly so. Justice itself is the hairy garment that causes its owner constant hardship, and philanthropy that gives away what is necessary provides us with constant fasting.6 For this reason, Buddhism is free from that strict and excessive asceticism that plays a large part in Brahmanism, and thus from deliberate self-mortification. It rests content with the celibacy, voluntary poverty, humility, and obedience of the monks, with abstinence from animal food, as well as from all worldliness. Further, since the goal to which the moral virtues lead is the one here indicated, the Vedanta philosophy7 rightly says that, after the entrance of true knowledge with complete resignation in its train, and so after the arrival of the new birth, the morality or immorality of previous conduct becomes a matter of indifference; and it uses here the saying so often quoted by the Brahmans: Finditur nodus cordis, dissolvuntur omnes dubitationes, ejusque opera evanescunt, viso supremo illo (Sankara, sloka 32). [8] Now, however objectionable this view may be to many, to whom a reward in heaven or a punishment in hell is a much more satisfactory explanation of the ethical significance of human action, just as even the good Windischmann rejects that teaching with horror while expounding it; yet he who is able to get to the bottom of things will find that, in the end, this teaching agrees with the Christian doctrine that is urged especially by Luther. This doctrine teaches that it is not works that save us, but only faith appearing through the effect of grace, and that therefore we can never be justified by our actions, but obtain forgiveness for our sins only by virtue of the merits of the Mediator. In fact, it is easy to see that, without such assumptions, Christianity would have to teach endless punishments for all, and Brahmanism endless rebirths, and hence that no salvation would be attained by either. Sinful works and their consequence must be annulled and annihilated at some time either by the pardon of another, or by the appearance of our own better knowledge, otherwise the world cannot hope for any salvation; afterwards, however, these become a matter of indifference. This is also the , [9] the announcement of which is finally imposed by the already risen Christ on his Apostles as the sum of their mission (Luke, xxiv, 47). The moral virtues are not really the ultimate end, but only a step towards it. In the Christian myth, this step is expressed by the eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and with this moral responsibility appears simultaneously with original sin. This original sin itself is in fact the affirmation of the will-to-live; on the other hand, the denial of this will, in consequence of the dawning of better knowledge, is salvation. Therefore, what is moral is to be found between these two; it accompanies man as a light on his path from the affirmation to the denial of the will, or, mythically, from the entrance of original sin to salvation through faith in the mediation of the incarnate God (Avatar): or, according to the teaching of the Veda, through all the rebirths that are the consequence of the works in each case, until right knowledge appears, and with it salvation (final emancipation), Moksha, i.e., reunion with Brahma. But the Buddhists with complete frankness describe the matter only negatively as Nirvana, which is the negation of this world or of Samsara. If Nirvana is defined as nothing, this means only that Samsara contains no single element that could serve to define or construct Nirvana. For this reason the Jains, who differ from the Buddhists only in name, call the Brahmans who believe in the Vedas, Sabdapramans, a nickname supposed to signify that they believe on hearsay what cannot be known or proved (Asiatic Researches, Vol. VI, p. 474).
When certain ancient philosophers, such as Orpheus, the Pythagoreans, Plato (e.g., in the Phaedo, pp. 151, 183 seq., ed. Bip., and see Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, iii, p. 400 seq.), deplore the soul's connexion with the body, as the Apostle Paul does, and wish to be liberated from this connexion, we understand the real and true meaning of this complaint, in so far as we recognize in the second book that the body is the will itself, objectively perceived as spatial phenomenon.
In the hour of death, the decision is made whether man falls back into the womb of nature, or else no longer belongs to her, but --: we lack image, concept, and word for this opposite, just because all these are taken from the objectification of the will, and therefore belong to that objectification; consequently, they cannot in any way express its absolute opposite; accordingly, this remains for us a mere negation. However, the death of the individual is in each case the unweariedly repeated question of nature to the will-to-live: "Have you had enough? Do you wish to escape from me?" The individual life is short, so that the question may be put often enough. The ceremonies, prayers, and exhortations of the Brahmans at the time of death are conceived in this sense, as we find them preserved in several passages of the Upanishad. In just the same way, the Christian concern is for the proper employment of the hour of death by means of exhortation, confession, communion, and extreme unction; hence the Christian prayers for preservation from a sudden end. That many desire just such an end at the present day simply shows that they no longer stand at the Christian point of view, which is that of the denial of the will-to-live, but at that of its affirmation, which is the heathen.
However, he will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now, and who consequently no longer takes any interest in his individual phenomenon, since in him knowledge has, so to speak, burnt up and consumed the will, so that there is no longer any will, any keen desire for individual existence, left in him.
Individuality, of course, is inherent above all in the intellect; reflecting the phenomenon, the intellect is related thereto, and the phenomenon has the principium individuationis [Google translate: the individualization] as its form. But individuality is also inherent in the will, in so far as the character is individual; yet this character itself is abolished in the denial of the will. Thus individuality is inherent in the will only in its affirmation, not in its denial. The holiness attaching to every purely moral action rests on the fact that ultimately such action springs from the immediate knowledge of the numerical identity of the inner nature of all living things. [10] But this identity is really present only in the state of the denial of the will (Nirvana), as the affirmation of the will (Samsara) has for its form the phenomenal appearance of this in plurality and multiplicity. Affirmation of the will-to-live, the phenomenal world, diversity of all beings, individuality, egoism, hatred, wickedness, all spring from one root. In just the same way, on the other hand, the world as thing-in-itself, the identity of all beings, justice, righteousness, philanthropy, denial of the will-to-live, spring from one root. Now, as I have sufficiently shown, moral virtues spring from an awareness of that identity of all beings; this, however, lies not in the phenomenon, but in the thing-in-itself, in the root of all beings. If this is the case, then the virtuous action is a momentary passing through the point, the permanent return to which is the denial of the will-to-live.
It is a deduction from what has been said that we have no ground for assuming that there are even more perfect intelligences than those of human beings. For we see that this intelligence is already sufficient for imparting to the will that knowledge in consequence of which the will denies and abolishes itself. With this knowledge, individuality, and therefore intelligence, as being merely a tool of individual nature, of animal nature, cease. To us this will appear less objectionable when we consider that we cannot conceive even the most perfect possible intelligences, which we may tentatively assume for this purpose, as indeed continuing to exist throughout an endless time, a time that would prove to be much too poor to afford them constantly new objects worthy of them. Thus, because the inner essence of all things is at bottom identical, all knowledge of it is necessarily tautological. If this inner essence is once grasped, as it soon would be by those most perfect intelligences, what would be left for them but mere repetition and its tedium throughout endless time? Thus, even from this point of view, we are referred to the fact that the aim of all intelligence can only be reaction to a will; but since all willing is error, the last work of intelligence is to abolish willing, whose aims and ends it had hitherto served. Accordingly, even the most perfect intelligence possible can be only a transition stage to that which no knowledge can ever reach; in fact, such an intelligence, in the nature of things, can take only the place of the moment of attained, perfect insight.
In agreement with all these considerations, and with what was shown in the second book to be the origin of knowledge from the will, since knowledge is serviceable to the aims of the will, and in this way reflects the will in its affirmation, whereas true salvation lies in the denial of the will, we see all religions at their highest point end in mysticism and mysteries, that is to say, in darkness and veiled obscurity. These really indicate merely a blank spot for knowledge, the point where all knowledge necessarily ceases. Hence for thought this can be expressed only by negations, but for sense-perception it is indicated by symbolical signs, in temples by dim light and silence, in Brahmanism even by the required suspension of all thought and perception for the purpose of entering into the deepest communion with one's own self, by mentally uttering the mysterious Om. [*] In the widest sense, mysticism is every guidance to the immediate awareness of that which is not reached either by perception or conception, or generally by any knowledge. The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. The mystic starts from his inner, positive, individual experience, in which he finds himself as the eternal and only being, and so on. But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince. The philosopher, on the other hand, starts from what is common to all, the objective phenomenon lying before us all, and from the facts of self-consciousness as they are to be found in everyone. Therefore reflection on all this, and the combination of the data given in it, are his method; for this reason he is able to convince. He should therefore beware of falling into the way of the mystics, and, for instance, by assertion of intellectual intuitions, or of pretended immediate apprehensions of the faculty of reason, of trying to give in bright colours a positive knowledge of what is for ever inaccessible to all knowledge, or at most can be expressed only by a negation. Philosophy has its value and virtue in its rejection of all assumptions that cannot be substantiated, and in its acceptance as its data only of that which can be proved with certainty in the external world given by perception, in the forms constituting our intellect for the apprehension of the world, and in the consciousness of one's own self common to all. For this reason it must remain cosmology, and cannot become theology. Its theme must restrict itself to the world; to express from every aspect what this world is, what it may be in its innermost nature, is all that it can honestly achieve. Now it is in keeping with this that, when my teaching reaches its highest point, it assumes a negative character, and so ends with a negation. Thus it can speak here only of what is denied or given up; but what is gained in place of this, what is laid hold of, it is forced (at the conclusion of the fourth book) to describe as nothing; and it can add only the consolation that it may be merely a relative, not an absolute, nothing. For, if something is no one of all the things that we know, then certainly it is for us in general nothing. Yet it still does not follow from this that it is nothing absolutely, namely that it must be nothing from every possible point of view and in every possible sense, but only that we are restricted to a wholly negative knowledge of it; and this may very well lie in the limitation of our point of view. Now it is precisely here that the mystic proceeds positively, and therefore, from this point, nothing is left but mysticism. Anyone, however, who desires this kind of supplement to the negative knowledge to which alone philosophy can guide him, will find it in its most beautiful and richest form in the Oupnekhat, in the Enneads of Plotinus, in Scotus Erigena, in passages of Jacob Bohme, and especially in the wonderful work of Madame de Guyon, Les Torrens, and in Angelus Silesius, and finally also in the poems of the Sufis, of which Tholuck has given us one collection in Latin and another translation into German, and in many other works. The Sufis are the Gnostics of Islam; hence also Sarli describes them by an expression that is translated by "full of insight." Theism, calculated with reference to the capacity of the crowd, places the primary source of existence outside us, as an object. All mysticism, and so Sufism also, at the various stages of its initiation, draw this source gradually back into ourselves as the subject, and the adept at last recognizes with wonder and delight that he himself is it. We find this course of events expressed by Meister Eckhart, the father of German mysticism, not only in the form of a precept for the perfect ascetic "that he seek not God outside himself" (Eckhart's Works, edited by Pfeiffer, Vol. I, p. 626), but also exhibited extremely naively by the fact that, after Eckhart's spiritual daughter had experienced that conversion in herself, she sought him out, in order to cry out to him jubilantly: "Sir, rejoice with me, I have become God!" (loc. cit., p. 465). The mysticism of the Sufis also expresses itself generally in this same spirit, principally as a revelling in the consciousness that we ourselves are the kernel of the world and the source of all existence, to which everything returns.
Ibn Mansur Al Hallaj, the "Qu'ranic Christ," making the dangerous and fatal "ejaculation," 'ANA' L HAQ (I AM the Truth)
IF HALLAJ HAD SAID
"ALLAH AL HAZ -- GOD (IN HIS TRANSCENDENTAL ASPECT) IS THE
TRUTH, OR "HUWA AL HAQ" (HE IS THE TRUTH) IT WOULD HAVE BEEN
A COMMON STATEMENT. HOWEVER AL HALLAJ DECLARED THAT
GOD ALONE EXISTS: THEREFORE HE IS THE ONE SUBJECT AND THUS
HE ALONE CAN WITNESS HIS EXISTENCE.
-- Toward the One, by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
***
Take the famous utterance, 'I am God.' Some men reckon it as a great pretension; but 'I am Gael' is in fact a great humility. The man who says 'I am the servant of God' asserts that two exist, one himself and the other God. But he who says 'I am God' has naughted himself and cast himself to the winds. He says, 'I am God': that is, 'I am not, He is all, nothing has existence but God, I am pure non-entity, I am nothing.' In this the humility is greater.
-- Discourses of Rumi, translated by A. J. Arberry
***
[Gozer] Are you a God?
-- Ghostbusters, directed by Ivan Reitman
It is true that there also frequently occurs the call to give up all willing as the only way in which deliverance from individual existence and its sufferings is possible; yet it is subordinated and is required as something easy. In the mysticism of the Hindus, on the other hand, the latter side comes out much more strongly, and in Christian mysticism it is quite predominant, so that the pantheistic consciousness, essential to all mysticism, here appears only in a secondary way, in consequence of the giving up of all willing, as union with God. In keeping with this difference of conception Mohammedan mysticism has a very cheerful, Christian mysticism a melancholy and painful character, while that of the Hindus, standing above both, holds the mean in this respect.
Quietism, i.e., the giving up of all willing, asceticism, i.e., intentional mortification of one's own will, and mysticism, i.e., consciousness of the identity of one's own inner being with that of all things, or with the kernel of the world, stand in the closest connexion, so that whoever professes one of them is gradually led to the acceptance of the others, even against his intention. Nothing can be more surprising than the agreement among the writers who express those teachings, in spite of the greatest difference of their age, country, and religion, accompanied as it is by the absolute certainty and fervent assurance with which they state the permanence and consistency of their inner experience. They do not form some sect that adheres to, defends, and propagates a dogma theoretically popular and once adopted; on the contrary, they generally do not know of one another; in fact, the Indian, Christian, and Mohammedan mystics, quietists, and ascetics are different in every respect except in the inner meaning and spirit of their teachings. A most striking example of this is afforded by the comparison of Madame de Guyon's Torrens with the teaching of the Vedas, especially with the passage in the Oupnekhat, Vol. I, p. 63. This contains the substance of that French work in the briefest form, but accurately and even with the same figures of speech, and yet it could not possibly have been known to Madame de Guyon in 1680. In the German Theology (the only unmutilated edition, Stuttgart, 1851), it is said in Chapters 2 and 3 that the fall of the devil as well as that of Adam consisted in the fact that the one, like the other, had ascribed to himself I and me, mine and to me. On page 89 it says: "In true love there remains neither I nor me, mine, to me, thou, thine, and the like." In keeping with this, it says in the Kural, translated from the Tamil by Graul, p. 8: "The passion of the mind directed outwards and that of the I directed inwards cease" (cf. verse 346). And in the Manual of Buddhism by Spence Hardy, p. 258, the Buddha says: "My disciples, reject the idea that I am this or this is mine." If we turn from the forms, produced by external circumstances, and go to the root of things, we shall find generally that Sakya Mum and Meister Eckhart teach the same thing; only that the former dared to express his ideas plainly and positively, whereas the latter is obliged to clothe them in the garment of the Christian myth, and to adapt his expressions thereto. This goes to such lengths that with him the Christian myth is little more than a metaphorical language, in much the same way as the Hellenic myth is to the Neo-Platonists; he takes it throughout allegorically. In the same respect, it is noteworthy that the turning of St. Francis from prosperity to a beggar's life is entirely similar to the even greater step of the Buddha Sakya Mum from prince to beggar, and that accordingly the life of St. Francis, as well as the order founded by him, was only a kind of Sannyasi existence. In fact, it is worth mentioning that his relationship with the Indian spirit also appears in his great love for animals, and his frequent association with them, when he always calls them his sisters and brothers; and his beautiful Cantico is evidence of his inborn Indian spirit through the praise of the sun, moon, stars, wind, water, fire and earth. [11]
Even the Christian quietists must often have had little or no knowledge of one another, for example, Molinos and Madame de Guyon of Tauler and the German Theology, or Gichtel of the former. Likewise, the great difference of their culture, in that some of them, like Molinos, were learned, others, like Gichtel and many more, were illiterate, has no essential influence on their teachings. Their great inner agreement, together with the firmness and certainty of their utterances, proves all the more that they speak from actual inner experience, from an experience which is, of course, not accessible to everyone, but comes only to a favoured few. This experience has therefore been called the effect of grace, whose reality, however, is indubitable for the above reasons. But to understand all this we must read the mystics themselves, and not be content with second-hand reports; for everyone must himself be comprehended before we judge of him. Therefore I specially recommend for an acquaintance with quietism Meister Eckhart, the German Theology, Tauler, Madame de Guyon, Antoinette Bourignon, Bunyan, Molinos, [12] and Gichtel. As practical proofs of the deep seriousness of asceticism, Pascal's life edited by Reuchlin together with his history of Port Royal, and also the Histoire de Sainte Elisabeth by the Comte de Montalembert and La vie de Rance by Chateaubriand are also well worth reading; yet these by no means exhaust all that is important in this class. Whoever has read such works, and has compared their spirit with that of asceticism and quietism, as it runs through all the works of Brahmanism and Buddhism and speaks from every page, will admit that every philosophy, which, to be consistent, must reject that whole mode of thought, in that it declares the representatives of it to be impostors or madmen, must on this account necessarily be false. But all European systems, my own excepted, find themselves in this position. It must truly be a strange madness which, in circumstances and among persons of the widest possible difference, expressed itself with such agreement, and was, moreover, exalted to a principal teaching of their religion by the oldest and most numerous races on earth, by some three-quarters of all the inhabitants of Asia. But no philosophy can leave undecided the theme of quietism and asceticism, if the question is put to it, since this theme is in substance identical with that of all metaphysics and ethics. Here, then, is a point on which I expect and desire every philosophy with its optimism to express itself. And if, in the judgement of contemporaries, the paradoxical and unexampled agreement of my philosophy with quietism and asceticism appears as an obvious stumbling-block, yet I, on the other hand, see in this very agreement a proof of its sole accuracy and truth, and also a ground for explaining why it has been discreetly ignored and kept secret by Protestant universities.
For not only the religions of the East, but also true Christianity has throughout this fundamental ascetic character that my philosophy explains as denial of the will-to-live, although Protestantism, especially in its present-day form, tries to keep this dark. Yet even the open enemies of Christianity who have appeared in most recent times have attributed to it the teaching of renunciation, self-denial, perfect chastity, and generally mortification of the will, which they quite rightly describe by the name of "anticosmic tendency"; and they have thoroughly demonstrated that such doctrines are essentially peculiar to original and genuine Christianity. In this respect they are undeniably right; but they set up this very thing as an obvious and patent reproach to Christianity, whereas just in this are its deepest truth, its high value, and its sublime character to be found. Such an attitude is evidence of a mental obscurity to be explained only from the fact that the minds of those men, unfortunately like thousands of others at the present time in Germany, are completely ruined and for ever confused by that miserable Hegelism, that school of dulness, that centre of stupidity and ignorance, that mind-destroying, spurious wisdom that people are at last beginning to recognize as such. Admiration of this school will soon be left to the Danish Academy alone; in their eyes, indeed, that coarse and clumsy charlatan is a summus philosophus, for whom it takes the field:
Car ils suivront la creance et estude,
De l'ignorante et sotte multitude,
Dont le plus lourd sera recu pour juge. [13]
-- Rabelais
The ascetic tendency is certainly unmistakable in genuine and original Christianity, as it was developed in the writings of the Church Fathers from the kernel of the New Testament; this tendency is the highest point to which everything strives upwards. We find, as its principal teaching, the recommendation of genuine and pure celibacy (that first and most important step in the denial of the will-to-live) already expressed in the New Testament. [14] In his Life of Jesus (Vol. I, p. 618), Strauss also says with regard to the recommendation of celibacy given in Matthew xix, 11 seq. "That in order not to represent Jesus as saying anything running counter to present-day ideas, men hasten to introduce surreptitiously the idea that Jesus commends celibacy only with regard to the circumstances of the time, and in order to leave unfettered the activity of the Apostles; but in the context there is even less indication of this than there is in the kindred passage, I Cor. vii, 25 seq. On the contrary, we have here again one of the places where ascetic principles such as were widespread among the Essenes, and probably even more so among the Jews, appear in the teaching of Jesus also." This ascetic tendency later appears more decided than at the beginning, when, still looking for adherents, Christianity did not dare to pitch its demands too high; and by the beginning of the third century it is emphatically urged. In Christianity proper, marriage is regarded merely as a compromise with man's sinful nature, as a concession, as something allowed to those who lack the strength to aspire to the highest, and as an expedient for preventing greater perdition. In this sense, it receives the sanction of the Church so that the bond may be indissoluble. But celibacy and virginity are set up as the higher inspiration of Christianity, by which one enters into the ranks of the elect. Through these alone does one attain the victor's crown, which is indicated even at the present time by a wreath on the coffin of the unmarried, as also by the wreath laid aside by the bride on the day of her marriage.
A piece of evidence on this point, coming certainly from the earliest days of Christianity, is the pregnant answer of the Lord quoted by Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, iii, 6 and 9) from the Gospel of the Egyptians: (Salomae interroganti "Quousque vigebit mors?" Dominus "Quoadusque," inquit, "vos, mulieres, paritis"). (hoc est, quamdiu operabuntur cupiditates) [15] Clement adds (c. 9) with which he connects at once the famous passage, Rom. v, 12. Further, in c. 13, he quotes the words of Cassianus: (Cum interrogaret Salome, quando cognoscentur ea, de quibus interrogabat, ait Dominus: 'Quando pudoris indumentum conculcaveritis, et quando duo facta fuerint unum, et masculum cum femina nec masculum nec femineum.'), [16] in other words, when she no longer needs the veil of modesty, since all distinction of sex will have disappeared.
On this point the heretics have certainly gone farthest, thus the Tatianites or Encratites, the Gnostics, the Marcionites, the Montanists, Valentinians, and Cassians in the second century, yet only by their paying honour to truth with reckless consistency, and therefore teaching, according to the spirit of Christianity, complete abstinence, , whereas the Church prudently declared heresy all that ran counter to her far-seeing policy. Of the Tatianites Augustine says: Nuptias damnant, atque omnino pares eas fornicationibus aliisque corruptionibus faciunt: nec recipiunt in suum numerum conjugio utentem, sive marem, sive feminam. Non vescuntur carnibus, easque abominantur. (De haeresibus ad Quodvultdeum, haer. 25). [17] But even the orthodox fathers consider marriage in the light indicated above, and zealously preach complete abstinence, . Athanasius states as the cause of marriage: (Quia subjacemus condemnationi propatoris nostri; ... nam finis, a Deo praelatus, erat, nos non per nuptias et corruptionem fieri: sed transgressio mandati nuptias introduxit, propter legis violationem Adae. Exposit. in psalm. 50). [18] Tertullian calls marriage genus mali inferioris, ex indulgentia ortum (De Pudicitia, c. 16) and says: Matrimonium et stuprum est commixtio carnis; scilicet cujus concupiscentiam Dominus stupro adaequavit. Ergo, inquis, jam et primas, id est unas nuptias destruis? Nec immerito: quoniam et ipsae ex eo constant, quod est stuprum (De Exhortatione Castitatis, c. 9). [19] In fact, Augustine himself acknowledges entirely this teaching and all its results, since he says: Novi quosdam, qui murmurent: Quid si, inquiunt, omnes velint ab omni concubitu abstinere, unde subsistet genus humanum? Utinam omnes hoc vellent! dumtaxat in caritate, de corde puro, et conscientia bona, et fide non ficta: multo citius Dei civitas compleretur, et acceleraretur terminus mundi (De bono conjugali, c. 10). And again: Non vos ab hoc studio, quo multos ad imitandum vos excitatis, frangat querela vanorum, qui dicunt: Quomodo subsistet genus humanum, si omnes fuerint continentes? Quasi propter aliud retardetur hoc seculum, nisi ut impleatur praedestinatus numerus ille sanctorum, quo citius impleto, profecto nec terminus seculi differetur (De bono viduitatis, c. 23). [20] At the same time, we see that he identifies salvation with the end of the world. The remaining passages bearing on this point from the works of Augustine are found collected in the Confessio Augustiniana e D. Augustini operibus compilata a Hieronymo Torrense, 1610, under the headings De Matrimonio, De Coelibatu, and so on. From these anyone can convince himself that in old, genuine Christianity marriage was a mere concession; moreover that it was supposed to have only the begetting of children as its object; and that, on the other hand, total abstinence was the true virtue much to be preferred to marriage. To remove all doubts about the tendency of the Christianity we are discussing, I recommend for those who do not wish to go back to the sources, two works: Carove, Ueber das Colibatgesetz (1832), and Lind, De Coelibatu Christianorum per tria priora secula (Havniae [Copenhagen], 1839). But it is by no means the views of these writers themselves to which I refer, as these are opposed to mine, but simply the accounts and quotations carefully collected by them, which merit complete trust and confidence as being quite undesigning, just because these two authors are opponents of celibacy, the former a rationalistic Catholic, and the latter a Protestant theological student who speaks exactly like one. In the first-named work we find (Vol. I, p. 166), the following result expressed in that regard: "By virtue of the Church view, as it may be read in the canonical Church Fathers, in Synodal and Papal instructions, and in innumerable writings of orthodox Catholics, perpetual chastity is called a divine, heavenly, angelic virtue, and the obtaining of the assistance of divine grace for this purpose is made dependent on the earnest entreaty therefor. We have already shown that this Augustinian teaching is found expressed by Canisius and by the Council of Trent as the invariable belief of the Church. But that it has been retained till the present day as a dogma may be sufficiently established by the June 1831 number of the periodical Der Katholik. On p. 263 it says: 'In Catholicism the observance of a perpetual chastity, for God's sake, appears in itself as the highest merit of man. The view that the observance of perpetual chastity as an end in itself sanctifies and exalts man, is, as every instructed Catholic is convinced, deep-rooted in Christianity according to its spirit and its express precept. The Council of Trent has removed all possible doubt about this.' It must certainly be admitted by every unbiassed person not only that the teaching expressed by Der Katholik is really Catholic, but also that the arguments adduced may be absolutely irrefutable for a Catholic's faculty of reason, as they are drawn directly from the fundamental ecclesiastical view of the Church on life and its destiny." Further, it is said on p. 270 of the same work: "Although Paul describes the prohibition to marry as a false teaching, and the even more Judaistic author of the Epistle to the Hebrews enjoins that 'Marriage shall be honourable in all, and the marriage bed undefiled' (Hebr. xiii, 4), yet the main tendency of these two sacred writers must not on this account be misunderstood. To both virginity was perfection, marriage only a makeshift for the weaker, and only as such was it to be held inviolate. The highest endeavour, on the other hand, was directed to complete, material casting off of self. The self should turn away and refrain from everything that contributes only to its pleasure and to this only temporarily." Finally on p. 288: "We agree with the Abbe Zaccaria, who asserts that celibacy (not the law of celibacy) is derived above all from the teaching of Christ and of the Apostle Paul."