Page:Essence of Christianity (1854).djvu/106

 CHAPTER IX.

THE MYSTERY OF MYSTICISM OR OF NATURE IN GOD.

material for the criticism of cosmogonic and theogonic fancies is furnished in the doctrine—revived by Schelling and drawn from Jacob Böhme—of eternal Nature in God.

God is pure spirit, clear self-consciousness, moral personality; Nature, on the contrary, is, at least partially, confused, dark, desolate, immoral, or to say no more, unmoral. But it is self-contradictory that the impure should proceed from the pure, darkness from light. How then can we remove these obvious difficulties in the way of assigning a divine origin to Nature? Only by positing this impurity, this darkness in God, by distinguishing in God himself a principle of light and a principle of darkness. In other words, we can only explain the origin of darkness by renouncing the idea of origin, and presupposing darkness as existing from the beginning.

But that which is dark in Nature is the irrational, the material,—Nature strictly, as distinguished from intelligence. Hence the simple meaning of this doctrine is, that Nature, Matter, cannot be explained as a result of intelligence; on the contrary, it is the basis of intelligence, the basis of personality, without itself having any basis; spirit without Nature is an unreal abstraction; consciousness developes itself only out of Nature. But this materialistic doctrine is veiled in a mystical yet attractive obscurity, inasmuch as it is not expressed in the clear, simple language of reason, but emphatically enunciated in that consecrated word of the emotions—God. If the light in God springs out of the darkness in God, this is only because it is involved in the idea of light in general, that it illuminates