God and His Being
or
Metaphysics
Negative Theology
Of God we know nothing. But this ignorance is ignorance of God. As such it is the beginning of our knowledge of him—the beginning and not the end. Ignorance as the end result of our knowledge was the basic idea of “negative theology.” This theology dismembered and abolished the existing assertions about God’s “attributes,” until the negative of all these attributes remained behind as God’s essence. Thus God could be defined only in his complete indefinability. This path leads from an existing Aught to Nought; at its end atheism and mysticism can shake hands. We do not take this path, but rather the opposite one from Nought to Aught. Our goal is not a negative concept, but on the contrary a highly positive one. We seek God, and will presently seek the world and man, precisely not within a one and universal total, as one concept among many. If that were our object, then indeed the negative theology of Nicholas of Cusa or of the sage of Koenigsberg would be the only scientific goal, for then the negative would already be established as the goal at the starting point of reasoning. One concept among many is always negative, at least vis-à-vis the others. And if it lays claim to unconditional validity, then science can only serve it with unconditional—nothingness! But precisely that presupposition of the one and universal All we have given up. We seek God, and will presently seek world and man, not as one concept among many, but rather for itself, dependent on itself alone, in its absolute actuality (if the expression is not subject to misunderstanding); in other words, precisely in its “positiveness.” It is for this reason that we must place the Nought of the sought-for concept at the beginning, must put it behind us. For in front of us there lies as goal an Aught: the reality of God.
THE TWO WAYS
God is therefore initially a Nought for us, his Nought. Two paths lead from the Nought to the Aught—or, more precisely from the Nought to what is not Nought, for we seek no Aught—the path of affirmation and the path of negation. The affirmation is the affirmation of the demonstrandum, the non-Nought; the negation is the negation of the given, the Nought. These two ways are as different from each other, as opposite as—well, as Yea and Nay. Their end points, too, are by no means identical with the one above designated as the demonstrandum. Rather they differ from one another—again as Yea from Nay. The Yea applies to the non-Nought, the Nay to the Nought. Like every affirmation through negation, affirmation of the non-Nought points to something infinite; negation of the Nought, like every negation, points to something limited, finite, definite. Accordingly, we behold the Aught in twofold guise and in twofold relationship to the Nought: once as its neighbor and once as its runaway. As neighbor of the Nought, the Aught is the whole fullness of all that “is” not Nought. In God, therefore—for apart from him we know of nothing here—it is the whole fullness of what “is” in him. As a runaway who just now has broken out of the prison of the Nought, on the other hand, the Aught is nothing more than the event of this liberation from the Nought. It is entirely defined by this its one experience; in God, therefore, to whom nothing can happen from without (at least here), it is wholly and solely: action. Thus essence issues forth from Nought without ceasing, while action breaks loose from it in sharp delimitation. One inquires after origins in the case of essence; after beginnings in the case of action.
METHODOLOGY
We have good reason not to go beyond these purely formal definitions here for the time being; we do not wish to anticipate. What has been said, however, will already become a little clearer if we regard, solely for purposes of comparison, the opposite process, that of becoming Nought. Here, too, two possibilities are given; the negation of the something—or, to replace this loaded expression with one today less narrowly defined—the negation of the Aught and the affirmation of the non-Aught, the Nought. The reversal is so exact that the Nay appears on the outbound path where the Yea appeared before, and vice versa. For the emergence of the Nought through the negation of the Aught, German has an expression which we have only to free from its narrower connotations in order to be able to employ it here: Verwesung [decomposition, literally destruction of the essence] designates negation of the Aught, just like the mystical term Entwesung [sublimation; literally removal of the essence]. For the affirmation of the Nought, however, language uses the term annihilation [Vernichtung]. In decomposition, in sublimation, the Nought originates in its infinite indefiniteness; neither the decomposing body nor the disintegrating soul strives for the Nought as something positive but solely for dissolution of their positive essence, which is no sooner accomplished than they empty into the amorphous night of the Nought. Mephistopheles, on the other hand, who veritably wills evil and who loves the ever-void, craves the Nought, and so the whole is bound to come down to—“annihilation.” Here, then, we behold the Nought, if not itself as something complex—for then it would be something definite and not Nought—yet as something accessible by several (different) paths and in opposite directions. And now perhaps we can better understand how different origins of the definite can exist in the undefined Nought, how the quiet stream of life can spring from the same darkly stagnant water as the gushing geyser of action.
Mark you, we are not speaking of a Nought in general, like the former philosophy which acknowledged only the All as its object. We know of no one and universal Nought, because we have divested ourselves of the presupposition of a one and universal All. We know only the individual Nought of the individual problem, a Nought which is therefore however not by any means defined, but only productive of definition. In our case this is the Nought of God. God is here our problem, our sub-ject and ob-ject. By beginning with his Nought we express just this, that he is to be for us initially nothing more than a problem. Thus we make of the Nought his presupposition and not perchance, as already noted at the beginning, the solution. We say as it were: if God exists, then the following is true of his Nought. By thus presupposing only that the Nought is the Nought of God, we are not led beyond the frame of this object by the consequences of this presupposition. To think that we have derived essence and action in general, say the essence of the world or the action directed to the world of man, in the welling forth of “essence” or the bursting forth of “action” would thus be quite wrong; it would be a relapse into the surmounted concept of the one and universal Nought. As long as we move within this hypothesizing limit of the Nought, all concepts remain within this limit; they remain under the law of If and Then without being able to step out of the magic circle. Essence, for example, can never mean anything but an essence within God; action can never refer to an object thought of as outside God. We do not get beyond pure reflections of God—as presently of the world and then of man—within himself. We have shattered the All: every fragment is now an All in itself. By immersing ourselves in this our fragmentary knowledge, we remain, in our journey into the Realm of the Mothers,1 slaves to the first command, the command to submerge. The ascent will come later, and with it the fusion of the piecework into the perfection of the new All.
Divine Nature
Yea is the beginning. Nay cannot be the beginning for it could only be a Nay of the Nought. This, however, would presuppose a negatable Nought, a Nay, therefore, that had already decided on a Yea. Therefore Yea is the beginning. Moreover it cannot be the Yea of the Nought, for it is the sense of our introduction of the Nought that it is not to be the result but on the contrary and exclusively the point of departure. It is not even the beginning. At most it is the beginning of our knowledge. The point is, it is really only the point of departure, and therefore simply incapable of being itself affirmed. Admittedly it is equally incapable of being negated, as already stated. It lies equally before Yea and Nay. It would be located before every beginning if it were located. But it is not “located.” It is only the virtual locus for the beginning of our knowledge. It is only the marker for the positing of the problem. We are careful to avoid naming it. It is no “somber basis” or anything else that can be named with Ekhart’s terms, or Boehme’s or Schelling’s. It does not exist in the beginning.
In the beginning is the Yea. And since the Yea cannot, as we said, refer to the Nought, it must refer to the non-Nought. This non-Nought is, however, not independently given, for nothing at all is given except for the Nought. Therefore the affirmation of the non-Nought circumscribes as inner limit the infinity of all that is not Nought. An infinity is affirmed: God’s infinite essence, his infinite actuality, his Physis.
ARCHETYPAL WORD
Such is the power of the Yea that it adheres everywhere, that it contains unlimited possibilities of reality. It is the arch-word of language, one of those which first make possible, not sentences, but any kind of sentence-forming words at all, words as parts of the sentence. Yea is not a part of a sentence, but neither is it a shorthand symbol for a sentence, although it can be employed as such. Rather it is the silent accompanist of all parts of a sentence, the confirmation, the “sic!” the “Amen” behind every word. It gives every word in the sentence its right to exist, it supplies the seat on which it may take its place, it “posits.” The first Yea in God establishes the divine essence for all infinity. And this first Yea is “in the beginning.”
SYMBOL
This first Yea implies a step on the road to the perfection of God; we can attempt to capture the step in familiar logico-mathematical symbols. Initially we will confine ourselves to the use of algebraic letters and the equal-sign. In the equation y=x, for example, y would designate the subject and the content of the statement, y that is to say, the grammatical subject, and x the predicate. Now ordinarily the affirmative protasis designates the subject, and the negating apodosis the predicate; here, however, where we are dealing with origins, it is just the other way around. The affirmation becomes the criterion of the primeval apodosis. The predicate is in the individual case always something individual, and therefore negative, but the apodosis, according to its original concept, is precisely positive: the pure Then. This “Then” then becomes furthermore a “Thus and not otherwise,” a fact that takes effect only when the “other” joins the original unicum. It is only by means of this transition to multiplicity that the apodosis turns into negation. And as the primeval apodosis occurs in the Yea, so the primeval protasis, the supposition of the original subject, occurs in the Nay. Each individual supposition of a subject is in itself merely a groundless position, but the original supposition, lying before everything individual, the presupposition, is negation, negation, that is, of the Nought. Every individual subject is simply “other,” other, that is, than the Nought. In the equation which we have to erect here, the Nay will thus come to stand to the left of the equal sign, the Yea to its right. With the simple x or y we symbolize complete unrelatedness; with y= we symbolize the relation of the subject to a predicate, the apodosis with a view to a protasis which is still to be assigned to it, with =x we symbolize the protasis with a view to an apodosis which it still has coming to it. In this symbolic language, we would therefore have to designate God’s physis, God’s utter and endlessly affirmed being by A—by A and not, say, by B or C—for it is endlessly affirmed; within the sphere peculiar to it and conditioned by its Nought, nothing precedes it that it might have to follow; nothing can precede it, since it is posited as infinite and not as finite. It is utter actuality, dormant but infinite. As yet we do not know whether a storm will overtake this quiet ocean of the intradivine physis and make its floodwaters swell, whether whirlpool and waves will form in its own lap to bring the placid surface into turbulent commotion. For the time being it is “A,” unmoved, infinite being.
Divine Freedom
Are we really ignorant as to which of the two possibilities will bring the placid surface into commotion, the storm from without or the whirlpool from within? True, we cannot tell anything from looking at the surface itself. But let us remember how this unmoved essence originated for us in the Yea, and how we just now explained by way of anticipating that the Yea always assumed the right side of the equation y=x, the “x” side. Thereby the decision already falls in favor of the former of the two possible sources of motion. The Yea contains nothing which strives beyond the Yea itself; it is the “then.” The commotion must therefore come from the Nay.
The Nay is just as original as the Yea. It does not presuppose the Yea. This or that derived Nay may make this presupposition, but the original Nay presupposes nothing but the Nought. It is the Nay of the Nought. Now of course it is true that it bursts forth directly from the Nought, bursts forth, that is, as its negation, and no Yea precedes it; but an affirmation does precede it. In other words: while it presupposes only the Nought, the Nought it presupposes is a Nought from which the Yea had to well forth, not a Nought with which it could have let the matter rest, not the eternal void which Mephistopheles cherishes. It is the Nought which was conceived of only as a Nought of knowledge, as a point of departure for reasoning about God, as the locus for posing the problem; it was not conceived of as positively posited Nought, nor as a “somber basis,” nor as the “abyss of the deity.” The original Nay is preceded, though not by the Yea itself, yet by the Nought from which affirmation had to come forth. Thus the Nay, without prejudice to the immediacy of its origin, is “younger” than the Yea. Non is not propter sic but post sic.
Nay is the original negation of Nought. Yea could not have remained attached to Nought because the latter provided it, so to speak, with no point of contact; repelled by Nought, Yea therefore cast itself upon the non-Nought and, thus freed to infinity from its point of departure, it placed the divine essence in the infinite realm of the non-Nought. Nay, however, is intertwined in closest bodily contact with the Nought. This close contact is now possible because the Nought had been left behind as finite through the prior infinite affirmation of the non-Nought. Thus the Nay finds its opponent directly in front of itself here. But the metaphor of a pair of wrestlers is misleading. There is no pair. This is a wrestling match not of two parties but of one: the Nought negates itself. It is only in self-negation that the “other,” the “opponent,” bursts forth out of it. And at the moment of its bursting forth, the Nay is rescued and liberated from the self-negating intertwining with the Nought. Now it takes shape as free, original Nay.
At this point it is necessary to put the question into precise focus again. We are inquiring into God. The self-negating Nought was the self-negating Nought of God; the Nay born of this self-negation is a Nay of God. The Yea in God was his infinite essence. His free Nay, shooting forth out of the negation of his Nought, is not in itself essence, for it contains no Yea; it is and remains pure Nay. It is not a “thus” but only a “not otherwise.” Thus it is always directed toward “otherwise,” it is always and only the “one,” the “one,” that is, as the “one” in God, before which everything else that is in God becomes a mere “other.” What is thus utterly “one,” this utter Nay to everything that is “other” than itself—what should we call it if not freedom? God’s freedom is born of the original negation of the Nought as that which is trained on everything else only as something else. God’s freedom is intrinsically a mighty Nay.
God’s essence, we have seen, was infinite Yea. That Yea left the Nought behind as something emptied of the infinite. The free Nay fought its way in original self-negation out of what had thus become finite. It bears the scars of the struggle during which it burst forth. It is infinite in its possibilities, in what it refers to, for it refers in the last analysis to everything. Everything is “other” for it, but it is itself ever “one,” ever limited, ever finite, just as it first burst forth in the self-negation of the Nought-become-finite. It bursts forth into all eternity, for all eternity is merely “other” for it, is merely infinite time for it. Over against what is thus always “other” for it, it is for all time the solitary, the ever new, the ever initial. Divine freedom confronts infinite divine essence as the finite configuration of action, albeit an action whose power is inexhaustible, an action which can ever anew pour itself out into the infinite out of its finite origin: an inexhaustible wellspring, not an infinite ocean. Essence is constituted once and for all “as is”; it confronts the freedom of action, a freedom revealing itself ever anew, but a freedom for which we cannot as yet contemplate any object other than the infinity of that everlasting essence. It is not freedom of God, for even now God is still a problem for us. It is divine freedom, freedom in God and with reference to God. Even now we know, as yet, nothing about God. We are still engaged in the piecework of knowledge, still at the stage of inquiring, not of answering.
SYMBOL
The piece we have just gained is divine freedom. Let us attempt to capture it in a symbol even as, above, we captured the divine essence. We must place divine freedom, as original Nay, on the left side of the future equation. It is, moreover, a Nay which, as original subject, reaches beyond itself with unlimited power—albeit, as we must repeatedly emphasize, beyond itself only within God. Thus its symbol will have to be formed on the pattern “y=.” And finally, although this freedom is finite in its ever-renewed uniqueness, it is infinite in its continuous novelty. Nothing can precede it for nothing exists beside it. It is ever unique but never a unicum. Therefore the symbol for this freedom turns out to be “A=.” Let us now demonstrate how this symbol of divine freedom joins with that of divine essence and how we thereby first arrive at the equation and with it the first answer to the inquiry into God.
Vitality of the God
Freedom points to something infinite. As freedom it is finite; but to the extent that its concern is with an infinite, it is infinite, infinite power or, to put it bluntly, infinite caprice. Only essence is available to it as the infinite object of its craving. But essence, such as it was symbolized by a bare letter without the equal-sign, contains no explicit direction, whether an active or a receptive one, which might strive toward that force. The divine essence maintains the infinite silence of pure existence, of voiceless actuality. It exists. Thus caprice seems able to fall upon essence without being summoned or dragged in. But in approaching essence, caprice nevertheless ends up in the magic circle of its inert being. This being does not emit any force toward caprice, and yet the latter feels its own force ebbing. With every step that takes it closer to essence, the infinite power (of caprice) senses a growing resistance, a resistance which would become infinite at the goal, at essence itself. For here the “It exists” of essence is abroad throughout, its “It is thus” is stretched out inertly and would swallow up the expressions of that power. At the focal point of the infinity of the inert Yea, the infinitely weakened power of the infinitely active Nay would be extinguished. This power is now no longer the original, infinite Nay, but already that Nay on the way to exercising its power on the inert Thus of the Yea. We must therefore capture it short of the end of the movement, that is, before the inertia of Thus-ness can operate as infinite inertia. For at that point the infinite power of the divine act so to speak enters the magnetic field of the divine essence, and while this power is still predominant over the inertia of that essence, it is already constrained by it. We designate this point as the point of divine obligation and fate, in contrast to the point of divine power and caprice. As divine freedom takes shape as caprice and power, so divine essence takes shape as obligation and fate. An infinite movement, starting from freedom, courses over into the realm of essence, and out of it there originates, in infinite spontaneous generation, the divine countenance which shatters broad Olympus with a quiver of its eyebrows, and whose brows are nonetheless furrowed with the knowledge of the saying of the Norns. Both infinite power in the free outpouring of Pathos and infinite constraint in the compulsion of Moira—both together form the vitality of the god.
ARCHETYPAL WORDS
We pause here a moment in order first to comprehend, if retroactively, the evidently decisive step which we have here taken over and beyond the bare Yea and bare Nay. We took the movement which brought us from Nay to Yea as self-evident; we did not inquire after the archetypal term which, corresponding to the Yea and Nay of the first two steps, guided this third step. The archetypal Yea had been the term of the original supposition; as such it was the silent partner of the activities which each word carries on in the proposition as a whole. The archetypal Nay likewise is active in every word of the proposition, not however, to the extent that this term is a statement, but insofar as it is the subject of statements; thus its very own place in the sentence, as already demonstrated, is with the subject. As “Thus,” the Yea confirms the individual word, that is, it assures it of an enduring “firm” value, independent of the relation which it assumes in regard to the other words within the sentence; the Nay, on the other hand, concerns itself precisely with this relation of the word to the sentence. As “not-otherwise” it “locates” this “locus” of the individual word, a locus which firmly fixes the peculiarity of each word over against the “others”—not its “firm” peculiarity but one dependent on the sentence as a whole, on the “other” components of the sentence. Let us take as an example initially two extreme cases, to wit, for the Yea, the statement nothing-but, the predicate adjective, and for the Nay the nothing-but subject of a statement, the subject noun. The word “free” has a specific sense regardless of whether it occurs in the sentence “man is created free, is free” or in the other sentence “man is not created to be free.” This motionless sense is the work of the secret Yea. On the other hand the word “man” is something quite different in the statement that he is a citizen of two worlds and when he is called a political animal. This diversity, created each time by the other members of the sentence which the one subject confronts, is the work of the secret Nay. And now as a concluding example, one that is anything but extreme: the word “until” always means the conclusion of a successively envisioned quantity. But in “until tomorrow” it refers to a stretch of time, a stretch of time in the future, while in “distant until the stars” it refers to a stretch of space. Incidentally, it might easily seem as though the “secret Yea” therefore had to precede the “secret Nay” in reality and not merely in conceptual sequence (as a possibility or affirmation), as though the “secret Nay” were therefore less original. But this impression is dispelled by the simple consideration that those hard-and-fast meanings of the words are in reality only derived from their context in the sentence. Accordingly this “fixity” does not really exist in the individual case; on the contrary, every new sentence context into which a word enters transforms the “constant” character of the word. Language, therefore, constantly renews itself in living speech.
We have just been speaking, quite ingenuously, of sentence and context. Actually, however, Yea and Nay never prepare more than the individual word, albeit in the case of Nay, already in its relationship to the sentence. The sentence itself first comes into being, first originates by virtue of the fact that the remarking, establishing Nay seeks to gain power over the confirming Yea.1 The sentence presupposes Yea and Nay, Thus and not-otherwise, and so does the smallest part of the sentence: the word in isolating languages, the combination of two words in agglutinative languages, the combination of stem and inflectional affix into one word in inflectional languages. Therewith we have the third of those archetypal words which, though not the equal of the other two in originality, for it presupposes both, yet for the first time helps both to a vital reality: the word “and.” “And” is the secret companion not of the individual word but of the verbal context. It is the keystone of the arch of the substructure over which the edifice of the logos of linguistic sense is erected. We came to know a first test of strength of this third archetypal word in the aforementioned answer to the inquiry into God which we had posed when we determined the Nought of our knowledge of God.
SYMBOL
The equation symbolizes what is, at least for the present, conclusive in this answer, the equation in which the paths leading to the answer have become invisible. By looking at the equation A=A, one can no longer tell whether it is constructed from A, A=, =A, or A. One can recognize no more in it than the pure originality and self-satisfaction of the god. He is dependent on nothing outside of himself, and appears to require nothing outside of himself:
God ethereal reigneth free,
But his mighty appetites
Nature’s law doth hold in check
— the law of his own nature. The interplay of forces which produced this vital figure of a god is submerged. Just for that reason, the equation symbolizes the immediate vitality of this figure, the vitality of the god.
The Olympus of Mythology
Of the god—for the time being. For the gods of antiquity are vital too, not only he whom we today designate as the living God. They are even, if you will, much more vital. For they are nothing if not vital. They are immortal. Death lies under their feet. Though they have not conquered death, death does not dare approach them. They grant him his validity in his own realm, even dispatch one of their number out of the immortal circle to rule over that realm. This is, then, the most unlimited dominion which they exercise—indeed the only dominion in the stricter sense. In the world of the living they do not reign, though they may intervene in it; they are living gods but not gods of what is alive. For that they would have to truly step outside themselves, and that would not agree with the easygoing vitality, the “easy-living” liveliness, of the Olympians. They direct a certain amount of systematic attention only to the task of keeping death distant from their immortal world. For the rest these gods live by themselves. Even their much-cited relationship to the “forces of nature” changes nothing in this respect. For the concept of nature as a realm with its own legality in contrast to a possible “supernatural” one does not yet exist at all. Nature means always the gods’ own nature. If a god is associated with a constellation or anything similar, he does not thereby become god of the constellation, as we would again and again imagine in a regressive application of our concept of nature; rather the constellation becomes a god or at least a part of the god. And if a magnetic field radiates outward from this divine sway of the constellations over all earthly occurrence, this occurrence is not thereby placed under the sway of the divine constellations, but rather it is, so to speak, elevated into that divine sphere, it becomes a part of this whole. It ceases to be independent, if ever it was independent; it becomes itself divine. The world of the gods remains a world unto itself forever, even if the gods encompass the whole world; the encompassed world in the latter event is not something unto itself, something into relationship with which the god must first enter, but, rather, precisely something divinely encompassed. Thus God is here without a world or, vice versa, this would be a world without gods, this world of gods who only live by themselves, if one would characterize this notion as a veritable Weltanschauung. And therewith we have enunciated the essence of what one may designate as the mythological conception of the world.
For this is the essence of myth: a life that knows nothing above and nothing beneath itself; a life—whether borne by gods, men, or things—without reigning gods; a life purely unto itself. The law of this life is the inner harmony of caprice and fate, a harmony that does not resound beyond itself, that constantly returns into itself. The freely flowing passion of the gods breaks on the internal dam of the somber law of his nature. The figures of myth are neither bare powers nor bare beings, for in neither form would they be vital. Only in the alternating current of passion and ordained fate do their highly vital traits emerge: baseless in hatred as in love, for there are no bases under their lives; without regard for man or thing, for there is no backward for them to glance at; their free outpouring unguided, constrained only by the verdict of fate; not absolved from their obligations by the free force of their passion; and withal, freedom and essence both one in the mysterious unity of the vital—this is the world of myth.
Asia: The Unmythical God
In the spirit of the mythological, God becomes a living god. This spirit draws its strength from that inclusiveness which itself is, in its turn, a consequence of the conclusiveness of this concept of God. Its weakness, too, is based on this conclusion, and its conclusive, product-like, but not productive, nature. But we must first emphasize its strength. The mythical was dominant in the religions of the Near East and Europe until their eclipse, and as a stage of development everywhere. As such it represents not a lower, but the higher form as against the “spiritual religions” of the Orient. It is not by coincidence that revelation, once it started on its way into the world, took the road to the West, not to the East. The living “gods of Greece” were worthier opponents of the living God than the phantoms of the Asiatic Orient. The deities of China as of India are massive structures made from the monoliths of primeval time which still protrude into our own times in the cults of “primitives.” The heaven of China is the concept of divine power raised to world-encompassing proportions, a power which, without emptying itself over the divine essence and thus transforming itself into divine vitality, integrated the entire All into the massive globe of its dominant caprice, not as something other, but rather as something enclosed in it, “inhabiting” it. Nowhere is the graphic sense of the idea of immanence as clear as in this Chinese apotheosis of the vault of heaven, outside of which there is—Nought. China’s god exhausts himself in the passage from the Nought to the all-encompassing power. Just so does India’s god exhaust himself on the road between the Nought and the pure, all-pervasive silence of essence, the divine physis. Never has the sound of divine freedom penetrated the tacit circle of the Brahmin; thus it itself remains dead, though filling all life and absorbing all life into itself. Viewed from the living figures of the gods of myths, these “deities”—a term favored by all those who flee the face of the living God for the mists of abstraction—are retrogressions into the elemental. How much this is the case is shown by a glance at the retroversions experienced by those same elemental foundations themselves. For, once begun, this course of regression does not cease until it has arrived near its outermost limit—near Nought.
The venerators of the Brahma profoundly enunciated his essentiality with the indefatigably repeated syllable of affirmation, which was supposed to unlock all his secrets. At the same time they recognized this one undifferentiated essence as the absorber of all multiplicity, of the self of all things. In doing so, however, they already witnessed the emergence of a new specification of essence behind the one undifferentiated Yea. It was identical with Yea in its denotation, but it connoted the infinite multiplicity that had been arrested in it. It was the Nay Nay. Thus Yea was recognized as the negation of the Nought. The infinitely countless “not thus, not thus” was therewith inserted into the one infinite Thus. The negated Nought was the essence of the deity. And from here there was only one more leap backward. If the leap was not to come to grief on the rocks of the Nought itself, it had to reach the last point still remaining between it and that non-Nought. In this neither-nor of Nought and non-Nought, however, we recognize once more that dizzying ultima ratio of Buddhism, that Nirvana which takes its place beyond God and gods and yet equally beyond the bare Nought, a place accessible even in imagination only by a mortal leap. Evidently nothing further exists here: it is something outermost; behind it there is only pure Nought. The first stop on the path leading from Nought to non-Nought is designated in this concept, however possible, by one last sublimation of all essence.
CHINA
The power of heaven, in which classical China believes, freed itself from Nought, like every active force, by simple negation. The multiplicity of things is not absorbed by this powerful, all-encompassing entity as is the self, and every self, by the Brahmin’s silence of the sea. Rather, this heaven encloses all by holding sway over all. Its power is action, its symbol the might which the male exercises over the female. Thus it expresses itself not as an infinite Yea, but rather as a Nay renewed with every moment against all and sundry enclosed within it. Here, too, an abstraction dared to leap backward behind this elemental abstraction well-nigh to the limit of everything elemental in the Nought. This abstraction had to substitute for God and gods a concept of a supreme power as godhead, a power which was distinguished from Nought only in that it relates to act and effect. But this relationship itself was solely one of—doing nothing. The Tao thus effects without acting, it is a god who keeps “quiet as a mouse” so that the world can move around him. It is entirely without essence; nothing exists in it in the way that every self, for example, “exists” in the Brahma. Rather it itself exists in everything, again not in the way that every self “exists” in the Brahma, that is, to use the analogy of the Upanishads, in the way that salt crystals exist in a solution. Rather—and again the analogies are highly indicative—in the way that the hub exists in spokes, or the window in a wall, or the empty space in a vessel. It is that which, by being “nothing,” makes a “something” usable, the unmoved mover of the movable. It is the non-act as the basis of the act. Here, too, we have again something outermost: the only possible form which atheism can assume if it is to be truly atheistic and if it is neither to become entangled in pantheism nor to be dissipated in pure nihilism, free of every special relationship to God and gods.
PRIMITIVE ATHEISM
To this day every structure into which reasoning about God may want to flee from the voice of the true God must thus be erected according to the plans here drafted in Nirvana and Tao. Only here is it secure from this voice—securus adversus deos as well as adversus Deum. There is no longer a path that leads back from here. The Nought is a firm peg: what is pegged to it cannot tear loose again. But this last abstraction about all divine life is unbearable for the living self of man and the living worlds of the nations and, accordingly, life in the long run ever regains its power over the escapist blandness of the abstraction. In short, it is the lot of the adherents of Buddha and Lao-tzu alike that a luxuriant heathenism again overtakes the adamantine monoliths of its non-ideas. And it is only for this reason that the ears of men, even within their sphere of influence, yet again become receptive to the voices from which those men once concealed themselves in the sound-proof chambers of Nirvana and Tao. For the voice of the living God echoes only where there is life, even if that life be intoxicated with gods and hostile to God. But the terror of God, which could not muster the courage to become fear of God, flees into the vacuum of the non-idea, and there that voice loses itself in the void. The gods of myth at least lived, albeit not beyond their walled-in realm. Even before the final sublimation into Nirvana and Tao, India’s god, like China’s, already shares this weakness of the gods of myth, this inability to live beyond oneself. But he is infinitely inferior to them in stopping halfway, in his incapacity for what breathes mightily out of the gods of myth: for life.
This wealth of life, full of contradictions, becomes possible through the self-containedness of the mythical world. For art it has remained operative outside of its original realm to the present day. Even today, all art is subject to the laws of the mythical world. A work of art must have that self-containedness unto itself, that indifference to everything beyond itself, that independence of higher laws, that freedom from baser duties which we recognized as peculiar to the world of myth. It is a basic requirement of the work of art that a tremor of the “mythical” emanate from its figures, even if they come clothed in our everyday habits. The work of art must be closed off by a crystalline wall from everything else that is not itself. Something like a breath of that “easy life” of the Olympian gods must hover over it, even if the existence that it mirrors is want and tears. Outer form, inner form, content is the threefold secret of the Beautiful; the first of these ideas, the miracle of outer form, the “what is beautiful, is blissful in itself,” has its origin in the metaphysical spirit of myth. The spirit of myth is the foundation of the realm of the beautiful.
The Twilight of the Gods
If ever God was to proceed beyond the vitality he has hitherto reached and become the living God of life, then the result attained so far on the path from the Nought would itself have in turn to become a Nought, a point of departure. The elements of power and obligation, of caprice and destiny, which flowed together into the figure of the living God, would have to part company anew. The apparently final result would have to become a fountainhead. A certain unrest had overtaken even the mythically directed theology of antiquity. It pressed for progress beyond the self-satisfied sphere of myth, and thus appeared to demand that reversal of the merely living into the life-giving. But it is indicative of the power of the mythological view that the efforts in this direction, both on the part of the mysteries and in the ideas of the great philosophers, always essayed the involvement of man and world in the sphere of the divine. Thus they ultimately had, just like myth, only the divine. The independence of the human and the worldly spheres was suspended both in the mysteries of apotheosis and in those concepts with which the philosophers bridged the gap between the divine and the human, the worldly spheres, but which led only from the latter to the former, never the other way around: the concepts of longing and love. This is equally true of the Greeks’ loving longing for the perfect, as of the Indians’ love of God. Now to ensnare God once more in the passion of love would have seemed a constriction of God, of the god whom one was proud to have just elevated to all-encompassing status by heaping all the noble qualities of the many gods on his one head. Though man might love God, God’s love for man could at most be an answer to man’s love, at most his just desert. It could not be a free gift, gracious beyond all measure of righteousness, nor the primeval force of the divine which elects and need not be entreated, which indeed anticipates all human love, and is the first to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf. And even where man thought he was attaining the highest form of love by renouncing all that was his own, all desires and appetites, as well as all ascetic exertion for God and by awaiting God’s grace in consummate resignation—as it happened precisely in those circles of the Indian Friends of God—then precisely this resignation was the achievement which man offered; it was not itself first a gift of God. Putting it another way, God’s love was not for the impenitent but for the perfect man. The doctrine of resignation to divine grace counted as a dangerous “secret of secrets,” never to be disclosed, it was taught, to those who do not venerate God, who demur against him, who do not castigate themselves. Yet precisely these lost, hardened, locked souls, these sinners, should be sought out by the love of a God who is not merely “amiable” but who himself loves, regardless of the love of man, nay, on the contrary, first arousing the love of man. But of course to this end it would be necessary for the infinite God to come more finitely close to man, more face-to-face with him, more proper–name to proper–name, than any sense of sensible men, any wisdom of wise men could ever admit. The gap between the human-worldly and the divine is indicated precisely in the ineradicability of personal names. It is beyond the power, ascetic or mystic, of men and the world to leap over. It is deeper and more real than any ascetic’s arrogance, any mystic’s conceit will ever admit in his despisal of the “sound and haze” of names earthly and heavenly. And it would, at the same time, have to be recognized and acknowledged as such.
Thus the essence of this mythical god remained accessible to the yearning of man and world, but only at a price: that man ceased to be man and world to be world. Man and the world were borne aloft on the wings of yearning into the consuming fire of apotheosis. So too this yearning, while bearing toward the divine, left the human and the worldly far below and by no means led it into the divine with a deeper love. For India’s Friends of God too, the act is only that which must not be evil, not that which must be good. And the divine nowhere overflows the limits of its individuality. Antiquity arrived at monism, but no more. World and man have to become God’s nature, have to submit to apotheosis, but God never lowers himself to them. He does not give of himself, does not love, does not have to love. For he keeps his physis to himself, and therefore remains what he is: the metaphysical.
1 See below, p. 87, note.
1 All the key verbs of this sentence represent etymological double-entendre’s in the original German which are impossible to reproduce in translation. On this other level, then, the sentence may be rendered: The sentence itself first comes to stand, first stands forth, by virtue of the fact that the localizing, fast-laying Nay seeks to gain power over the firming Yea. (Tr.)