Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (902 page)

To the merely emotional man the imagination is immediately, without his willing or knowing it, the highest, the dominant activity; and being the highest, it is the activity of God, the creative activity. To him feeling is an immediate truth and reality; he cannot abstract himself from his feelings, he cannot get beyond them: and equally real is his imagination. The imagination is not to him what it is to us men of active understanding, who distinguish it as subjective from objective cognition; it is immediately identical with himself, with his feelings, and since it is identical with his being, it is his essential, objective, necessary view of things. For us, indeed, imagination is an arbitrary activity; but where man has not imbibed the principle of culture, of theory, where he lives and moves only in his feelings, the imagination is an immediate, involuntary activity.

The explanation of miracles by feeling and imagination is regarded by many in the present day as superficial. But let any one transport himself to the time when living, present miracles were believed in; when the reality of things without us was as yet no sacred article of faith; when men were so void of any theoretic interest in the world, that they from day to day looked forward to its destruction; when they lived only in the rapturous prospect and hope of heaven, that is, in the imagination of it (for whatever heaven may be, for them, so long as they were on earth, it existed only in the imagination); when this imagination was not a fiction but a truth, nay, the eternal, alone abiding truth, not an inert, idle source of consolation, but a practical moral principle determining actions, a principle to which men joyfully sacrificed real life, the real world with all its glories; — let him transport himself to those times and he must himself be very superficial to pronounce the psychological genesis of miracles superficial. It is no valid objection that miracles have happened, or are supposed to have happened, in the presence of whole assemblies: no man was independent, all were filled with exalted supranaturalistic ideas and feelings; all were animated by the same faith, the same hope, the same hallucinations. And who does not know that there are common or similar dreams, common or similar visions, especially among impassioned individuals who are closely united and restricted to their own circle? But be that as it may. If the explanation of miracles by feeling and imagination is superficial, the charge of superficiality falls not on the explainer but on that which he explains, namely, on miracle; for, seen in clear daylight, miracle presents absolutely nothing else than the sorcery of the imagination, which satisfies without contradiction all the wishes of the heart.

CHAPTER XIV
.

THE MYSTERY OF THE RESURRECTION AND OF THE MIRACULOUS CONCEPTION.

The
quality of being agreeable to subjective inclination belongs not only to practical miracles, in which it is conspicuous, as they have immediate reference to the interest or wish of the human individual; it belongs also to theoretical, or more properly dogmatic miracles, and hence to the Resurrection and the Miraculous Conception.

Man, at least in a state of ordinary well-being, has the wish not to die. This wish is originally identical with the instinct of self-preservation. Whatever lives seeks to maintain itself, to continue alive, and consequently not to die. Subsequently, when reflection and feeling are developed under the urgency of life, especially of social and political life, this primary negative wish becomes the positive wish for a life, and that a better life, after death. But this wish involves the further wish for the certainty of its fulfilment. Reason can afford no such certainty. It has therefore been said that all proofs of immortality are insufficient, and even that unassisted reason is not capable of apprehending it, still less of proving it. And with justice; for reason furnishes only general proofs; it cannot give the certainty of any personal immortality, and it is precisely this certainty which is desired. Such a certainty requires an immediate personal assurance, a practical demonstration. This can only be given to me by the fact of a dead person, whose death has been previously certified, rising again from the grave; and he must be no indifferent person, but on the contrary the type and representative of all others, so that his resurrection also may be the type, the guarantee of theirs. The resurrection of Christ is therefore the satisfied desire of man for an immediate certainty of his personal existence after death, — personal immortality as a sensible, indubitable fact.

Immortality was with the heathen philosophers a question in which the personal interest was only a collateral point. They concerned themselves chiefly with the nature of the soul, of mind, of the vital principle. The immortality of the vital principle by no means involves the idea, not to mention the certainty, of personal immortality. Hence the vagueness, discrepancy, and dubiousness with which the ancients express themselves on this subject. The Christians, on the contrary, in the undoubting certainty that their personal, self-flattering wishes will be fulfilled,
i.e
., in the certainty of the divine nature of their emotions, the truth and unassailableness of their subjective feelings, converted that which to the ancients was a theoretic problem, into an immediate fact, — converted a theoretic, and in itself open question, into a matter of conscience, the denial of which was equivalent to the high treason of atheism. He who denies the resurrection denies the resurrection of Christ, but he who denies the resurrection of Christ denies Christ himself, and he who denies Christ denies God. Thus did “spiritual” Christianity unspiritualize what was spiritual! To the Christians the immortality of the reason, of the soul, was far too abstract and negative; they had at heart only a personal immortality, such as would gratify their feelings; and the guarantee of this lies in a bodily resurrection alone. The resurrection of the body is the highest triumph of Christianity over the sublime, but certainly abstract spirituality and objectivity of the ancients. For this reason the idea of the resurrection could never be assimilated by the pagan mind.

As the Resurrection, which terminates the sacred history, (to the Christian not a mere history, but the truth itself,) is a realized wish, so also is that which commences it, namely, the Miraculous Conception, though this has relation not so much to an immediately personal interest as to a particular subjective feeling.

The more man alienates himself from Nature, the more subjective,
i.e
., supranatural, or antinatural, is his view of things, the greater the horror he has of Nature, or at least of those natural objects and processes which displease his imagination, which affect him disagreeably.
The free, objective man doubtless finds things repugnant and distasteful in Nature, but he regards them as natural, inevitable results, and under this conviction he subdues his feeling as a merely subjective and untrue one. On the contrary, the subjective man, who lives only in the feelings and imagination, regards these things with a quite peculiar aversion. He has the eye of that unhappy foundling, who even in looking at the loveliest flower could pay attention only to the little “black beetle,” which crawled over it, and who by this perversity of perception had his enjoyment in the sight of flowers always embittered. Moreover, the subjective man makes his feelings the measure, the standard of what ought to be. That which does not please him, which offends his transcendental, supranatural, or antinatural feelings, ought not to be. Even if that which pleases him cannot exist without being associated with that which displeases him, the subjective man is not guided by the wearisome laws of logic and physics but by the self-will of the imagination; hence he drops what is disagreeable in a fact, and holds fast alone what is agreeable. Thus the idea of the pure, holy Virgin pleases him; still he is also pleased with the idea of the Mother, but only of the Mother who already carries the infant on her arms.

Virginity in itself is to him the highest moral idea, the
cornu copiae
of his supranaturalistic feelings and ideas, his personified sense of honour and of shame before common nature.
Nevertheless, there stirs in his bosom a natural feeling also, the compassionate feeling which makes the Mother beloved. What then is to be done in this difficulty of the heart, in this conflict between a natural and a supranatural feeling? The supranaturalist must unite the two, must comprise in one and the same subject two predicates which exclude each other.
O what a plenitude of agreeable, sweet, supersensual, sensual emotions lies in this combination!

Here we have the key to the contradiction in Catholicism, that at the same time marriage is holy and celibacy is holy. This simply realizes, as a practical contradiction, the dogmatic contradiction of the Virgin Mother. But this wondrous union of virginity and maternity, contradicting Nature and reason, but in the highest degree accordant with the feelings and imagination, is no product of Catholicism; it lies already in the twofold part which marriage plays in the Bible, especially in the view of the Apostle Paul. The supernatural conception of Christ is a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, a doctrine which expresses its inmost dogmatic essence, and which rests on the same foundation as all other miracles and articles of faith. As death, which the philosopher, the man of science, the free objective thinker in general, accepts as a natural necessity, and as indeed all the limits of nature, which are impediments to feeling, but to reason are rational laws, were repugnant to the Christians, and were set aside by them through the supposed agency of miraculous power; so, necessarily, they had an equal repugnance to the natural process of generation, and superseded it by miracle. The Miraculous Conception is not less welcome than the Resurrection, to all believers; for it was the first step towards the purification of mankind, polluted by sin and Nature. Only because the God-man was not infected with original sin, could he, the pure one, purify mankind in the eyes of God, to whom the natural process of generation was an object of aversion, because he himself is nothing else but supranatural feeling.

Even the arid Protestant orthodoxy, so arbitrary in its criticism, regarded the conception of the God-producing Virgin, as a great, adorable, amazing, holy mystery of faith, transcending reason.
But with the Protestants, who confined the speciality of the Christian to the domain of faith, and with whom, in life, it was allowable to be a man, even this mystery had only a dogmatic, and no longer a practical significance; they did not allow it to interfere with their desire of marriage. With the Catholics, and with all the old, uncompromising, uncritical Christians, that which was a mystery of faith, was a mystery of life, of morality.
Catholic morality is Christian, mystical; Protestant morality was, in its very beginning, rationalistic. Protestant morality is, and was, a carnal mingling of the Christian with the man, the natural, political, civil, social man, or whatever else he may be called in distinction from the Christian; Catholic morality cherished in its heart the mystery of the unspotted virginity. Catholic morality was the
Mater dolorosa;
Protestant morality a comely, fruitful matron. Protestantism is from beginning to end the contradiction between faith and love; for which very reason it has been the source, or at least the condition, of freedom. Just because the mystery of the
Virgo Deipara
had with the Protestants a place only in theory, or rather in dogma, and no longer in practice, they declared that it was impossible to express oneself with sufficient care and reserve concerning it, and that it ought not to be made an object of speculation. That which is denied in practice has no true basis and durability in man, is a mere spectre of the mind; and hence it is withdrawn from the investigation of the understanding. Ghosts do not brook daylight.

Even the later doctrine, (which, however, had been already enunciated in a letter to St. Bernard, who rejects it,) that Mary herself was conceived without taint of original sin, is by no means a “strange school-bred doctrine,” as it is called by a modern historian. That which gives birth to a miracle, which brings forth God, must itself be of miraculous, divine origin, or nature. How could Mary have had the honour of being overshadowed by the Holy Ghost, if she had not been from the first pure? Could the Holy Ghost take up his abode in a body polluted by original sin? If the principle of Christianity, the miraculous birth of the Saviour, does not appear strange to you, why think strange the naive, well-meaning inferences of Catholicism?

CHAPTER XV
.

THE MYSTERY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHRIST, OR THE PERSONAL GOD.

The
fundamental dogmas of Christianity are realised wishes of the heart; — the essence of Christianity is the essence of human feeling. It is pleasanter to be passive than to act, to be redeemed and made free by another than to free oneself; pleasanter to make one’s salvation dependent on a person than on the force of one’s own spontaneity; pleasanter to set before oneself an object of love than an object of effort; pleasanter to know oneself beloved by God than merely to have that simple, natural self-love which is innate in all beings; pleasanter to see oneself imaged in the love-beaming eyes of another personal being, than to look into the concave mirror of self or into the cold depths of the ocean of Nature; pleasanter, in short, to allow oneself to be acted on by one’s own feeling as by another, but yet fundamentally identical being, than to regulate oneself by reason. Feeling is the oblique case of the
ego
, the
ego
in the accusative. The
ego
of Fichte is destitute of feeling, because the accusative is the same as the nominative, because it is indeclinable. But feeling or sentiment is the
ego
acted on by itself, and by itself as another being, — the passive
ego
. Feeling changes the active in man into the passive, and the passive into the active. To feeling, that which thinks is the thing thought, and the thing thought is that which thinks. Feeling is the dream of Nature; and there is nothing more blissful, nothing more profound than dreaming. But what is dreaming? The reversing of the waking consciousness. In dreaming, the active is the passive, the passive the active; in dreaming, I take the spontaneous action of my own mind for an action upon me from without, my emotions for events, my conceptions and sensations for true existences apart from myself. I suffer what I also perform. Dreaming is a double refraction of the rays of light; hence its indescribable charm. It is the same
ego
, the same being in dreaming as in waking; the only distinction is, that in waking, the
ego
acts on itself; whereas in dreaming, it is acted on by itself as by another being.
I think myself
— is a passionless, rationalistic position;
I am thought by God
, and think myself only as thought by God — is a position pregnant with feeling, religious. Feeling is a dream with the eyes open; religion the dream of waking consciousness: dreaming is the key to the mysteries of religion.

The highest law of feeling is the immediate unity of will and deed, of wishing and reality. This law is fulfilled by the Redeemer. As external miracles, in opposition to natural activity, realise immediately the physical wants and wishes of man; so the Redeemer, the Mediator, the God-man, in opposition to the moral spontaneity of the natural or rationalistic man, satisfies immediately the inward moral wants and wishes, since he dispenses man on his own side from any intermediate activity. What thou wishest is already effected. Thou desirest to win, to deserve happiness. Morality is the condition, the means of happiness. But thou canst not fulfil this condition; that is, in truth, thou needest not. That which thou seekest to do has already been done. Thou hast only to be passive, thou needest only believe, only enjoy. Thou desirest to make God favourable to thee, to appease his anger, to be at peace with thy conscience. But this peace exists already; this peace is the Mediator, the God-man. He is thy appeased conscience; he is the fulfilment of the law, and therewith the fulfilment of thy own wish and effort.

Therefore it is no longer the law, but the fulfiller of the law, who is the model, the guiding thread, the rule of thy life. He who fulfils the law annuls the law. The law has authority, has validity, only in relation to him who violates it. But he who perfectly fulfils the law says to it: What thou willest I spontaneously will, and what thou commandest I enforce by deeds; my life is the true, the living law. The fulfiller of the law, therefore, necessarily steps into the place of the law; moreover he becomes a new law, one whose yoke is light and easy. For in place of the merely imperative law, he presents himself as an example, as an object of love, of admiration and emulation, and thus becomes the Saviour from sin. The law does not give me the power to fulfil the law; no! it is hard and merciless; it only commands, without troubling itself whether I can fulfil it, or how I am to fulfil it; it leaves me to myself, without counsel or aid. But he who presents himself to me as an example, lights up my path, takes me by the hand, and imparts to me his own strength. The law lends no power of resisting sin, but example works miracles. The law is dead; but example animates, inspires, carries men involuntarily along with it. The law speaks only to the understanding, and sets itself directly in opposition to the instincts; example, on the contrary, appeals to a powerful instinct immediately connected with the activity of the senses, that of involuntary imitation. Example operates on the feelings and imagination. In short, example has magical,
i.e
., sense-affecting powers; for the magical or involuntary force of attraction is an essential property, as of matter in general, so in particular of that which affects the senses.

The ancients said that if virtue could become visible, its beauty would win and inspire all hearts. The Christians were so happy as to see even this wish fulfilled. The heathens had an unwritten, the Jews a written law; the Christians had a model — a visible, personal, living law, a law made flesh. Hence the joyfulness especially of the primitive Christians, hence the glory of Christianity that it alone contains and bestows the power to resist sin. And this glory is not to be denied it. Only it is to be observed that the power of the exemplar of virtue is not so much the power of virtue as the power of example in general; just as the power of religious music is not the power of religion, but the power of music;
and that therefore, though the image of virtue has virtuous actions as its consequences, these actions are destitute of the dispositions and motives of virtue. But this simple and true sense of the redeeming and reconciling power of example in distinction from the power of law, to which we have reduced the antithesis of the law and Christ, by no means expresses the full religious significance of the Christian redemption and reconciliation. In this everything reduces itself to the personal power of that miraculous intermediate being who is neither God alone nor man alone, but a man who is also God, and a God who is also man, and who can therefore only be comprehended in connection with the significance of miracle. In this, the miraculous Redeemer is nothing else than the realised wish of feeling to be free from the laws of morality,
i.e
., from the conditions to which virtue is united in the natural course of things; the realised wish to be freed from moral evils instantaneously, immediately, by a stroke of magic, that is, in an absolutely subjective, agreeable way. “The word of God,” says Luther, for example, “accomplishes all things swiftly, brings forgiveness of sins, and gives thee eternal life, and costs nothing more than that thou shouldst hear the word, and when thou hast heard it shouldst believe. If thou believest, thou hast it without pains, cost, delay, or difficulty.”
But that hearing of the word of God which is followed by faith is itself a “gift of God.” Thus faith is nothing else than a psychological miracle, a supernatural operation of God in man, as Luther likewise says. But man becomes free from sin and from the consciousness of guilt only through faith, — morality is dependent on faith, the virtues of the heathens are only splendid sins; thus he becomes morally free and good only through miracle.

That the idea of miraculous power is one with the idea of the intermediate being, at once divine and human, has historical proof in the fact that the miracles of the Old Testament, the delivery of the law, providence — all the elements which constitute the essence of religion, were in the later Judaism attributed to the Logos. In Philo, however, this Logos still hovers in the air between heaven and earth, now as abstract, now as concrete; that is, Philo vacillates between himself as a philosopher and himself as a religious Israelite, between the positive element of religion and the metaphysical idea of deity; but in such a way that even the abstract element is with him more or less invested with imaginative forms. In Christianity this Logos first attained perfect consistence,
i.e
., religion now concentrated itself exclusively on that element, that object, which is the basis of its essential difference. The Logos is the personified essence of religion. Hence the definition of God as the essence of feeling has its complete truth only in the Logos.

God as God is feeling as yet shut up, hidden; only Christ is the unclosed, open feeling or heart. In Christ feeling is first perfectly certain of itself, and assured beyond doubt of the truth and divinity of its own nature; for Christ denies nothing to feeling; he fulfils all its prayers. In God the soul is still silent as to what affects it most closely, — it only sighs; but in Christ it speaks out fully; here it has no longer any reserves. To him who only sighs, wishes are still attended with disquietude; he rather complains that what he wishes is not, than openly, positively declares what he wishes; he is still in doubt whether his wishes have the force of law. But in Christ, all anxiety of the soul vanishes; he is the sighing soul passed into a song of triumph over its complete satisfaction; he is the joyful certainty of feeling that its wishes hidden in God have truth and reality, the actual victory over death, over all the powers of the world and Nature, the resurrection no longer merely hoped for, but already accomplished; he is the heart released from all oppressive limits, from all sufferings, — the soul in perfect blessedness, the Godhead made visible.

To see God is the highest wish, the highest triumph of the heart. Christ is this wish, this triumph, fulfilled. God, as an object of thought only,
i.e
., God as God, is always a remote being; the relation to him is an abstract one, like that relation of friendship in which we stand to a man who is distant from us, and personally unknown to us. However his works, the proofs of love which he gives us, may make his nature present to us, there always remains an unfilled void, — the heart is unsatisfied, we long to see him. So long as we have not met a being face to face, we are always in doubt whether he be really such as we imagine him; actual presence alone gives final confidence, perfect repose. Christ is God known personally; Christ, therefore, is the blessed certainty that God is what the soul desires and needs him to be. God, as the object of prayer, is indeed already a human being, since he sympathizes with human misery, grants human wishes; but still he is not yet an object to the religious consciousness as a real man. Hence, only in Christ is the last wish of religion realised, the mystery of religious feeling solved: — solved however in the language of imagery proper to religion, for what God is in essence, that Christ is in actual appearance. So far the Christian religion may justly be called the absolute religion. That God, who in himself is nothing else than the nature of man, should also have a real existence as such, should be as man an object to the consciousness — this is the goal of religion; and this the Christian religion has attained in the incarnation of God, which is by no means a transitory act, for Christ remains man even after his ascension, — man in heart and man in form, only that his body is no longer an earthly one, liable to suffering.

The incarnations of the Deity with the orientals — the Hindoos, for example, have no such intense meaning as the Christian incarnation; just because they happen often they become indifferent, they lose their value. The manhood of God is his personality; the proposition, God is a personal being, means: God is a human being, God is a man. Personality is an abstraction, which has reality only in an actual man.
The idea which lies at the foundation of the incarnations of God is therefore infinitely better conveyed by one incarnation, one personality. Where God appears in several persons successively, these personalities are evanescent. What is required is a permanent, an exclusive personality. Where there are many incarnations, room is given for innumerable others; the imagination is not restrained; and even those incarnations which are already real pass into the category of the merely possible and conceivable, into the category of fancies or of mere appearances. But where one personality is exclusively believed in and contemplated, this at once impresses with the power of an historical personality; imagination is done away with, the freedom to imagine others is renounced. This one personality presses on me the belief in its reality. The characteristic of real personality is precisely exclusiveness, — the Leibnitzian principle of distinction, namely, that no one existence is exactly like another. The tone, the emphasis, with which the one personality is expressed, produces such an effect on the feelings, that it presents itself immediately as a real one, and is converted from an object of the imagination into an object of historical knowledge.

Longing is the
necessity
of feeling, and feeling longs for a personal God. But this longing after the personality of God is true, earnest, and profound only when it is the longing for one personality, when it is satisfied with one. With the plurality of persons the truth of the want vanishes, and personality becomes a mere luxury of the imagination. But that which operates with the force of necessity, operates with the force of reality on man. That which to the feelings is a necessary being, is to them immediately a real being. Longing says: There must be a personal God,
i.e
., it cannot be that there is not; satisfied feeling says: He is. The guarantee of his existence lies for feeling in its sense of the necessity of his existence the necessity of the satisfaction in the force of the want. Necessity knows no law besides itself; necessity breaks iron. Feeling knows no other necessity than its own, than the necessity of feeling, than longing; it holds in extreme horror the necessity of Nature, the necessity of reason. Thus to feeling, a subjective, sympathetic, personal God is necessary; but it demands one personality alone, and this an historical, real one. Only when it is satisfied in the unity of personality has feeling any concentration; plurality dissipates it.