Should our observer, while visiting the Protestant city, make a final visit to its university, he will find there the thoughts, which hitherto he had but vaguely felt, clothed in scientific language. There they meet his gaze, defined sharply on the pedestal of Research as the Modern Philosophy, protected, often exclusively privileged, by the state license of teaching. It is the modern scientific view of the world, the only one that men of modern times may hold. From here it is to find its way to wider circles.
Man, we are told by a pupil of Feuerbach, in accord with his master's teaching, man is man's god. And only by the enthronement of this human god can the super-human and ultra-human God be made superfluous. What Christianity was and claimed to be in times gone by, that now is claimed by humanity. The being which man in religion and theology reveres, continues Jodl with Feuerbach, is his own being, the essence of his own desires and ideals. If you eliminate from this conception all that is mere fancy and contrary to the laws of nature, what is left is a cultural ideal of civilization, a refined humanity, which will become a reality by its own independent strength and labour (Ludwig Feuerbach, 1904, 111 f., 194). The greatest achievement of modern times, says another panegyrist of emancipated humanity, is the deliverance from the traditional bondage of a direct revelation Neither revelation nor redemption approach man from without; he is bound rather to struggle for his perfection by his own strength. What he knows about God, nature, and his own self, is of his own doing. He is in reality the measure of all things, of those that are, and why they are; of those that are not, and why they are not.Of his dignity as an image of God, he has therefore not lost anything; on the contrary, he has come nearer to his resemblance to God, his highest end, by his consciousness of being self-existent and of having the destiny to produce everything of himself; from a receptive being he has become a spontaneous one; he has at last come to a clear knowledge of his own real importance and destiny (Spicker, Der Kampf zweier Weltanschauungen, 1898, 134).
Hence not to make man religious, to quote again the above-mentioned exponent of modern wisdom of life, but to educate, to promote culture among all classes and professions, this is the task of the present time. Religion cannot therefore be the watchword of a progressive humanity; neither the religion of the past nor the religion that is to be looked for in the future, but ethics (Jodl, ibid., 108, 112). Ethics, to be sure, the fundamental principles of which are not the commandments of God, by the keeping of which we are to reach our eternal happiness, but human laws, which are observed for the sake of man. Morality and religion, we are told, shall no longer give us a narrow ladder on which we, each one for himself, climb to the heights of the other world; we are vaulting a majestic dome above this earth under which the generations come and go, succeeding each other in continuous procession The day will come when the rays of thought which are now dawning upon the highest and freest mountain-tops will bring the light of noonday down to mankind. Woe to us, if from these high mountain-tops, where the bare rocks no longer take life and fecundity from the heavens, the sad desert of estrangement from God should extend into the fresh green of the valleys!
The central ideas of the humanitarian view of the world appear again, though under different form, among Freemasons and free-thinkers, agitators for free religion and free schools. It is well known that Freemasonry has emblazoned humanity upon its standard. One word of the highest meaning, so wrote an official authority some years ago, contains in itself the principle, the purpose, and the whole tenor of Freemasonry, this word is humanity. Humanity is indeed everything to us. What is humanity? It is all, and only that, which is human (Freiburger Ritual, 24. Pachtler, Der Goetze der Humanitaet, 1875, 249 f.). That which is essentially human is the sublime, divine, and the only Christian ideal, adds another authority, addressing the aspirant to Freemasonry. Leave behind you in the world your different church-formulas when you enter our temple, but let there always be with you the sense for what is holy in man, the religion which alone makes us happy (Latomia, 1868, p. 167, Pachtler, 248). As early as 1823 the Zeitschrift fuer Freimauereiwrote: We should be accused of idolatry should we personify the idea of humanity in the way in which the Divinity is usually personified. This is indeed our reason for withholding from the eyes of profane persons the humanitarian cult, till the time has come when, from east to west, from noon to midnight, its high ideal will be pondered and its cult propagated everywhere (Pachtler, 255).
The time has already come when the rays of thought that dawned upon the mountain-tops are descending into the valley. The Twenty-second Convention of German Free-religionists, at Goerlitz, at the end of May, 1907, passed this resolution: The Convention sees one of its chief tasks in the alliance of all anti-clericals and free-thinkers, and tries by united effort to obtain this common end and interest by promoting culture, liberty of mind, and humanitarianism.There was, moreover, taken up for discussion the thesis: Free-religionists reject the teaching that declares man lost by original sin, unable to raise himself of his own strength and reason, that directs him to revelation, redemption, and grace from above.
This view of the world finds its most characteristic expression in pantheism, which, though expressed in various and often fantastic forms, is eminently the religion of modern man. From this gloomy depth of autotheism the apotheosis of man and his earthly life, the modern consciousness of freedom, draws its strength and determination.
To find this modern view of man expressed in the language of consistent radicalism, let us hear Fr. Nietzsche, the most modern of all philosophers. His ideal is the transcendental man, who knows that God is dead, that now there is no bar to stepping forth in unrestricted freedom to superhuman greatness and independence. To this masterman, who deems himself superior to others, everything is licit that serves his egotism and will, everything that will promote his interest to the disadvantage of the rabble; probity is cowardice! But now this god is dead. Ye superior men, this god was your greatest danger. Thus spoke Zarathustra. Only since this god is buried do you begin to rise. Now at length the great Noon is in its zenith. Now the superior man becomes master. Onward and upward, then, ye superior men! At last the mountain of man's future is in travail. God is dead; let the superior man arise and live. (Also sprach Zarathustra, W. W. VI, 418.) And, in the consciousness that the Christian religion condemns this self-exaltation, he breaks out in this blasphemous charge: I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great internal corruption I call it the one immortal, disgraceful, blot on mankind (Antichrist, W. W. VIII, 313). This is independent humanity in the cloak of fanaticism. Nietzsche has carried the modern view of the world to its final consequences; the autonomous man has developed into the god-like superman who carries into effect the behest: Ye shall be as gods; his code of ethics is that of the autocrat who is above the notions of good and bad.
And let no one deceive himself, writes an intelligent observer of the times, the spirit of our time is attuned to Nietzsche's idea. Consciously or unconsciously this sentiment dominates more minds than many a man learned in the wisdom of the schools may dream of. Did Nietzsche create this spirit? Certainly not: he grew out of it, he has only given it a philosophical setting. Nietzsche would never have caused that tremendous sensation, never have gathered around him his enthusiastic followers, had not the soil been prepared. As it was, he appeared to his men as the Messiah in the fulness of time. He, too, in his own way loosened the tongue of the dumb and opened the eyes of the blind. The veiled anti-Christian spirit, the unconscious religious and ethical nihilism, which no one before dared profess openly, though it was hatching in the minds, now had found its master, its scientific system (Von Grotthuss, Tuermer, VII, 1905, 79). It is, asserts Wundt, the new ideal of free personality, dependent on precarious moods and chance influences, that has found in Nietzsche's philosophy a fantastic expression (Ethik, ed. 3. 1905, p. 522).
The Autonomous Man
Now we have a clearer idea of modern freedom. It is known as autonomism. The individual wants to be a law to himself, his own court of last appeal; he wants to develop his personality, feeling, desires, and thought, independently of all authority. Too long, it is said, have man's aspirations been directed upward, away from things, of this world, to a supernatural world. Religion and Church seek to determine his thought and desire, to subject him to dogma. Too long has he clung like a child to the apron-strings of authority. Man has at last awoken to self-consciousness and to a sense of his own dignity, after a period of estrangement, so to say, from himself; he has become himself again, as the poet sang when the century of the illuminati was closing:
How beautiful, with palm of victory,
O man, thou standest at the century's close,
The mightiest son thy Time has given birth,
By reason free, by law and precept strong,
Alike in meekness great and treasure rich,
So long unknown concealed within thy breast.
Yes, man has discovered the treasure that long lay hidden in his breast, the seed and bud that longed to burst forth into life and blossom. Now the motto is: Independent self-development; no more restraint, but living out one's personality. The eagle is not given wings to be bound down upon the earth; nor does the bud come forth never to unfold. Full freedom, therefore, too, for everything human! And modern man leaps to the fatal conclusion: therefore all interference of external authority is unjust, is force, constraint upon my being; the same error that boys fall into when life begins to tingle with its fulness of strength. Being ignorant of their nature, they feel any kind of dependence a chain; only themselves, their judgments and desires, are law. Just so modern man, in his deplorable want of self-knowledge, fails to see how he is cutting himself off from the source and support of life; how he is pulling himself out by the roots from the soil whence he derives his strength; how, left to his own littleness, he withers away; how, abandoned to his own diseased nature, he condemns himself to intellectual decay.
Autonomism, individualism, independent personality these have become the ideals that permeate the man of this age, and influence the thought of thousands without their knowing it.
The well-known, Protestant, theologian, A. Sabatier, writes: It is not difficult to find the common principle to which all the expressions and tendencies of the spirit of modern times can be reduced in any field whatever. One word expresses it the word, autonomy. By autonomy I understand the firm confidence, which the mind of man has attained in his present stage of development, that he contains in himself his own rule of life and norm of thought, and that he harbours the ardent desire of realizing himself by obeying his own law (La Religion de la Culture moderne, 10).
Modern times, writes R. Eucken, have changed the position of the human subject it has become to them the centre of his life and the ultimate end of his endeavours (Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 112 (1898), 165 s.). Still clearer are the following words of G. Spicker: Man depended formerly either on nature or on revelation, or on both at once; now it is just the opposite: man is in every way, theoretically as well as practically, an autonomist. If anything can denote clearly the characteristic difference between the modern and the old scholastic view, it is this absolute, subjective, standpoint. As we in principle do not intend to depend on any objectivity or authority, there is nothing left but the autonomy of the subject (Der Kampf zweier Weltanschauungen (1898), 143, 145).
A noted apostle of modern freedom exclaims enthusiastically:
This after all is freedom: an unconditional appreciation of human greatness, no matter how it asserts itself. This greatest happiness, as Goethe called it, the humanists have restored to us. Henceforth we must with all our strength retain it. Whoever wants to rob us of it, even should he descend from heaven, is our deadliest enemy. (H. St. Chamberlain.)
It is true, of course, that man should strive for perfection of self in every respect; for the harmonious development of all the faculties and good inclinations of his own being, and, in this sense, for a nobler humanity; he should also develop and assert his own peculiar disposition and originality, so far as they are in order, and thus promote a healthy individualism. But all this he should do within the moral bonds of his created and limited nature, being convinced that only by keeping within the right limits of his being can he develop his ability and personality harmoniously; he dare not reach out, in reckless venture after independence, to free himself from God and his eternal end, and from the yoke of truth; he dare not transform the divine sovereignty into the distorted image of created autotheism.
He who professes a Christian view of the world, can see in such a view of man and his freedom only an utter misunderstanding of human nature and an overthrow of the right order of things. This overthrow, again, can only produce calamity, interior and exterior disorder. Woe to the planet that feels its orbit a tyrannical restraint, and leaves it to move in sovereign freedom through the universe! It will move along free, and free will it go to ruin. Woe to the speeding train that leaves its track; it will speed on free, but invariably dash itself to pieces! A nature that abandons the prescribed safeguards can only degenerate into a wild sprout. We shall see how these principles have actually become in modern intellectual life the principles of negation and intellectual degeneration.
St. Augustine states the history of mankind in the following, thoughtful words: A twofold love divides mankind into the City of the World and the City of God. Man's self-love and his self-exaltation pushed to the contempt of God constitute the City of the World; but the love of God pushed to contempt of self is the foundation of the City of God. (Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo, terrenam scilicet amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei, coelestem vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui. De civ. Dei XIV, 28.) Thus St. Augustine, while contemplating the time when the war between heathenism and Christianity was raging. The same spectacle is presented to our own eyes to-day, probably more thoroughly than ever before in history.