Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/437

Rh from his will, man remains rightly exposed to physical and mental suffering, even if he has practised all those virtues, thus is not happy. This follows from the eternal justice of which I have spoken in § 63 of the first volume. That, however, as St. Paul (Rom. iii. 21), Augustine, and Luther teach, works cannot justify, inasmuch as we all are and remain essentially sinners, ultimately rests upon the fact that, because operari sequitur esse, if we acted as we ought, we would necessarily be as we ought. But then we would require no salvation from our present condition, which not only Christianity but also Brahmanism and Buddhism (under the name which is expressed in English lay final emancipation) present as the highest goal, i.e., we would not need to become something quite different from, nay, the very opposite of what we are. Since, however, we are what we ought not to be, we also necessarily do what we ought not to do. Therefore we need a complete transformation of our mind and nature; i.e., the new birth, as the result of which salvation appears. Although the guilt lies in action, operari, yet the root of the guilt lies in our essentia et existentia, for out of these the operari necessarily proceeds, as I have shown in the prize essay on the freedom of the will. Accordingly our one true sin is really original sin. Now the Christian myth makes original sin first arise after man came into existence, and for this purpose ascribes to him, per impossibile, a free will. It does this, however, simply as myth. The inmost kernel and spirit of Christianity is identical with that of Brahmanism and Buddhism; they all teach a great guilt of the human race through its existence itself, only that Christianity does not proceed directly and frankly like these more ancient religions: thus does not make the guilt simply the result of existence itself, but makes it arise through the act of the first human pair. This was only possible under the fiction of a liberum arbitrium indifferentiæ, and only necessary on account of the Jewish fundamental dogma, in which that doctrine had