not know what He is, and therefore cannot start from Him. To take God as the starting-point would be to presuppose that we were able to state, and had stated, what God is in Himself as being the primary object. That assumption, however, permits us to speak merely of our relation to Him, to speak of religion and not of God Himself. It does not permit of the establishment of a theology, of a doctrine of God, though it certainly does allow of a doctrine of religion.
If there is not exactly any such doctrine, we at least hear much talk—an infinite amount of it, or rather, little talk with infinite repetitions—about religion, and therefore all the less about God Himself. This everlasting explanation of religion, of its necessity, its usefulness, and so on, together with the insignificant attempts to explain God, or the prohibition even of any attempt at explaining His nature, is a peculiar phenomenon of the culture of our time. We get off most easily when we rest contented with this standpoint, so that we have nothing before us but the barren characterisation of a relation in which our consciousness stands to God. As thus understood, religion means at least that our spirit comes into contact with this content, and our consciousness with this object, and is not merely, so to speak, a drawing out of the lines of longing into empty space, an act of perception which perceives nothing and finds nothing actually confronting it. Such a relation implies, at all events, this much, that we not only stand in a certain connection with God, but that God stands also in a certain connection with us. This zeal for religion expresses, hypothetically at least, something regarding our relation to God, if it does not express exclusively what would be the really logical outcome of the principle of the impossibility of knowing God. A one-sided relation, however, is not a relation at all. If, in fact, we are to understand by religion nothing more than a relation between ourselves and God, then God is left without any independent existence. God would, on this theory, exist in religion only, He would be something posited, something produced by us. The expression that God exists in religion only, an expression which is both frequently employed and found fault with, has, however, the true and important meaning that it belongs to the nature of God in His condition of complete and perfect independence that He should exist for the spirit of Man, and should communicate Himself to Man. The meaning here expressed is totally different from that previously referred to, according to which God is merely a postulate, a belief. God is, and gives Himself to men by coming into a relation with them. If this word is is limited to the expression of the truth that we do indeed know or recognise the fact that God is, but do not know what He is, and is thus used with a constantly recurring reflection on knowledge, then this would imply that no substantial qualities can be attributed to Him. Thus we should not have to say we know that God is, but could merely speak of is; for the word God introduces an idea, and consequently a substantial element, a content with definite characteristics, and apart from these God is an empty word. If in the language of this agnosticism (Nichtwissen) those characteristics to which we must still find it possible to refer are limited to express something negative—and for this the expression the Infinite is peculiarly appropriate, whether by it is meant the Infinite in general or those so-called attributes extended into infinity—then all that this gives us is merely indeterminate Being, abstraction, a kind of supreme or infinite Essence which is expressly our product, the product of abstraction, of thought, and does not get beyond being mere Understanding.
If, however, God is not thought of as existing in subjective knowledge merely, or in faith, but if it is seriously meant that He exists, that He exists for us, and has on His part a relation to us, and if we do not get beyond this merely formal characteristic, it is all the same implied that He communicates Himself to men, and this is to admit that God is not jealous. The Greeks of purely ancient times attributed jealousy to God when they represented Him as putting down all that was generally regarded as great and lofty, and as wishing to have and actually placing everything on a level. Plato and Aristotle were opposed to the idea of divine jealousy, and the Christian religion is still more opposed to it since it teaches that God humbled Himself even to taking on the form of a servant amongst men, that He revealed Himself to them; that, consequently, far from grudging men what is high, nay even what is highest, He, on the contrary, along with that very revelation, laid on them the command that they should know God, and at the same time indicated that this was Man’s highest duty. Without appealing to this part of the teaching of Christianity, we may take our stand on the fact that God is not jealous, and ask, Why should He not communicate Himself to Man? It is recorded that in Athens there was a law according to which any man who had a lighted candle and refused to allow another to light his at it, was to be punished with death. This kind of communication is illustrated even in connection with physical light, since it spreads and imparts itself to some other thing without itself diminishing or losing anything; and still more is it the nature of Spirit itself to remain in entire possession of what belongs to it, while giving another a share in what it possesses. We believe in God’s infinite goodness in Nature, since He gives up those natural things which He has called into existence in infinite profusion, to one another, and to Man in particular. And is He to bestow on Man what is thus merely material and which is also His, and withhold from him what is spiritual, and refuse to Man what alone can give him true value? It is as absurd to give such ideas a place in our thoughts as it is absurd to say of the Christian religion that by it God has been revealed to Man, and to maintain at the same time that what has been revealed is that He is not now revealed and has not been revealed.
On God’s part there can be no obstacle to a knowledge of Him through men. The idea that they are not able to know God must be abandoned when it is admitted that God has a relation to us, and since our spirit has a relation to Him, God exists for us, or, as it has been expressed, He communicates Himself and has revealed Himself. God reveals Himself, it is said, in Nature; but God cannot reveal Himself to Nature, to the stone, to the plant, to the animal, because God is Spirit; He can reveal Himself to Man only, who thinks and is Spirit. If there is no hindrance on God’s side to the knowledge of Him, then it is owing to human caprice, to an affectation of humility, or whatever you like to call it, that the finitude of knowledge, the human reason is put in contrast to the divine knowledge and the divine reason, and that the limits of human reason are asserted to be immovable and absolutely fixed. For what is here suggested is just that God is not jealous, but, on the contrary, has revealed and is revealing Himself; and we have here the more definite thought that it is not the so-called human reason with its limits which knows God, but the Spirit of God in Man, it is, to use the speculative expression previously employed, the self-consciousness of God which knows itself in the knowledge of Man.
This may suffice by way of calling attention to the main ideas which are floating about in the atmosphere of the culture of our time as representing the results of the “Enlightenment,” and of an understanding which calls itself reason. These are the ideas which directly meet us, to begin with, when we undertake to deal with the general subject of the knowledge of God. It was possible only to point out the fundamental moments of the worthlessness of those categories which are opposed to this knowledge, and not to justify this knowledge itself. This, as being the real knowledge of its object, must receive its justification along with the content.
Note.—The rendering of Nichtwissen in this Lecture by “Agnosticism” involves something of an anachronism, and is not technically strictly accurate; but we have no other English word which seems so well to suggest the meaning.—E.B.S.
Lecture 6
SIXTH LECTURE
All questions and investigations regarding the formal element in knowledge we for the present consider as settled or as put on one side. We at the same time escape the necessity of putting in a merely negative form the exposition of what is known as the metaphysical proofs of the existence of God. Criticism which leads to a negative result is not merely a sorry business, but, in confining itself to the task of showing that a certain content is vain, it is itself a vain exercise, an exertion of vanity. In defining those proofs as the grasping in thought of what we have called the elevation of the soul to God, we declared that in criticism we must directly reach an affirmative content.
And so, too, our treatment