We will leave speculators 21 out of account and simply assume the presence of sexual differentiation before the Fall, with the observation however that it did not strictly exist, because it does not exist in ignorance. In this respect we have support in the Scripture. — A In his innocence man was, in so far as he was spirit, a dreaming spirit. The synthesis therefore is not actual; for the combining factor is precisely the spirit, and this is not yet posited as spirit. In the animal sexual diversity can be developed instinctively; but in this way man cannot have it, precisely because he is a synthesis. The instant the spirit posits itself it posits the synthesis, but to posit the synthesis it must first permeate it differentially, and the extremest expression of the sensuous is precisely the sexual. This extreme man can attain only at the instant when the spirit bec omes actual. Before that timelhe is not an animal, but neither is heprop A erly a man. The instant he becomes a man he becomes such only by being at the same time an animal.
Sinfulness then is not sensuousness, not by any means; but without sin there is no sexuality, and without sexuality no history. >A perfect 44 CHAPTER I spirit has neither the one nor the other, hence also the sexual difference is annulled in the resurrection, and hence too no ang A el has history.
Even though the archangel Michael had recorded all the missions on which he was sent and which he performed, this nevertheless is not his history. The synthesis is first posited i n the sexual as a contradiction, but at the same time, like every contradiction, as a task, the history of which begins that very instant. This is the actuality which is preceded by the possibility of freedom. But the possibility of freedom does not consist in being able to choose the good or the evil. Such thoughtlessness has as little support in the Scripture as in philosophy.
Possibility means / can. In a logical system it is convenient enough to say that possibility passes over into actuality. In reality it is not so easy, and an intermediate determinant is necessary. This intermediate de- THE PRESUPPOSITION OF ORIGINAL SIN 45 terminant is dread, which no more explains the qualitative leap than it justifies it ethically. Dread is not a determinant of necessity, but neither is it of freedom; it is a trammeled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but trammeled, not by necessity but in itself. If sin has come into the world by necessity (which is a self-contradiction), then there is no dread. If sin has come into the world by an act of abstract liberum arbitrium (which no more existed at the beginning than it does at a later period of the world, for it is a non-sense to thought 22 ), neither in this case is there dread. To want to explain logically the entrance of sin into the world is a stupidity which could only occur to people who are comically anxious to get an explanation. If I were allowed to make a wish, I would wish that no reader might be profound enough to ask the question, "If then Adam had not sinned?" The moment reality is posited, possibility steps to one side as a nothing which serves as a temptation to all men devoid of thought. What a pity science cannot resolve to keep people under discipline and to keep itself in check! When someone asks a stupid question, we should take heed not to answer him, for if we do we are as stupid as the questioner. The foolishness of that question consists not so much in the question itself as in the fact that it is addressed to science. When one stays at home with it, like the shrewd Else 23 with her projects, and calls together like-minded friends, it is a sign that in some measure one has understood one's stupidity. Science cannot explain such things. Every science has its province either in immanent logic, or in an immanence within a transcendence which it cannot explain. Now sin is precisely that transcendence, that discrimen rerum, by which sin enters into the individual as an individual. In no other way does sin enter the world, and never has it entered otherwise. When the individual then is foolish enough to inquire about sin as about something irrelevant to him, he speaks as a fool; for either he does not know in the least what the question is about and cannot possibly learn to know it, or else he knows it and understands it, and knows too that no science can explain it. Nevertheless science has sometimes been accommodating enough to respond to sentimental wishes with deeply pondered hypotheses, which, as science itself admits, do not adequately explain. This is quite true, but the con- fusion is due to the fact that science did not energetically repel foolish questions, that on the contrary it confirmed superstitious people in the notion that some day there would come a scientific speculator who would be man enough to hit upon the right answer. They speak about sin coming into the world 6000 years ago, just as they speak about Nebuchadnezzar becoming an ox 4000 years ago. 24 When they conceive the case thus, what wonder the explanation is no better? That which in one sense is the simplest thing in the world, they have made the most difficult. That which 46 CHAPTER I the simplest man understands in his way, and quite rightly, for he understands that it is not exactly 6000 years ago sin came into the world, this thing science by the aid of the speculator's art has propounded as a prize question which has never yet been satisfactorily answered. How sin came into the world every man understands by himself alone; if he would learn it from another, he eo ipso misunderstands it. The only science which can do a little is psychology, which nevertheless concedes that it does not, that it can and will not, explain more. If any science could explain it, everything would be brought to confusion. That the man of science ought to forget himself is perfectly true, but for this reason it is so fortunate that sin is not a scientific problem, and therefore the man of science is no more obliged than is any speculator to forget how sin came into the world. If he would do that, if he would magnanimously forget himself, he with his zeal to explain humanity as a whole becomes just as ridiculous as the privy counselor who sacrificed himself to such a degree in leaving his visiting cards on Tom, Dick and Harry, that in doing so he finally forgot his own name. Or else his philosophical enthusiasm makes him so forgetful of himself that he is in need of an honest and sober wedded wife of whom he can ask as the bookseller Soldin 25 asked Rebecca when he also in enthusiastic self-forgetfulness had lost himself in the objectivity of twaddle, "Rebecca, is it I that am speaking?"
That the admired men of science in this respected generation to which I have the honor to belong will find this chapter exceedingly unscientific is a matter of course. In their concern for and search after the System they are naturally concerned, as the whole congregation knows, to find a place in it for sin too. Only let the congregation join in the search, or at least include these profound seekers in their pious intercessions; they will find the place as surely as he who hunts for the burning tow finds it when he takes no heed that it is burning his own hand.
Dread as Qjjgpiai^in Progressively ith sinfulness was posited sexuality. That same instant the history of the race begins. Since sinfulness moves by quantitative increments, T A T so does dread also. The consequence of original sin or of its piest/ice in the individual is dread, which only quantitatively is different from that of Adam. In the state of innocence, and of that we may speak in the case of the later man, original sin must have the dialectical ambiguity out of which guilt breaks forth in the qualitative leap. On the other hand, dread in the later individual can possibly be more reflective than in Adam, because the quantitative increment accumulated by the race now makes itself felt in him. Dread, however, is no more than it was before an imperfection in man; on the contrary, one may say that the more primitiveness a man has, the deeper is the dread, because the presupposition of sinfulness which his individual life supposes, since he enters indeed into the history of the race, must be appropriated. Sinfulness has thus acquired a great power, and original sin is growing. That there are people who do not notice any dread must be understood in the sense that Adam would have sensed none if he had been merely an animal.
— A > The later individual is like Adam a synthesis which must be sustained by spirit; but this synthesis is derived, and owing to that the history of the race is constantly posited by it. This accounts for the more or less dread in the later individual. His dread, however, is not a dread of sin, for the distinction between good and evil first comes about with the actuality of freedom. If this distinction is present, it is only a vague presentiment, which in the course of the history of the race may again mean a more or a less.
The fact that dread in the iater individual is more reflective as a consequence of his participation in the history of the race, comparable in a way to habit which is, as it were, man's second nature, yet not a new quality but only a quantitative progress — this fact, I say, is accounted for by the consideration that dread now enters the world with another significance. Sin entered by dread, but sin in turn brought dread with it. In point of fact the reality of sin is a reality which has no continuous endurance. On the one hand, the 48 CHAPTER I 48 CHAPTER I continuity of sin is the possibility which causes dread; on the other hand, the possibility of a salvation is a nothing which again the individual both loves and fears; for this is always the relation of possibility to individuality. It is only at the instant when salvation is actually posited that this dread is overcome. The longing of man and of the whole creation 1 is not, as men have sentimentally thought, a sweet longing, for merely in order that this might be so, sin must be disarmed. The man who will realize truly what the state of sin is, and how the expectation of salvation must be felt, will certainly concede this and will be a little bit embarrassed at aesthetic unembarfassment. Sin in man still has power so long as it is only a question of expectation, and naturally it construes this expectation hostilely. (This will be dealt with later. 2 ) When salvation is posited, dread is put behind, just as possibility is. With this it is not annihilated but now plays another role, if it is rightly used (cf. Chapter V).
The dread which sin brings with it exists in the strictest sense only when the individual himself posits sin, but nevertheless it is obscurely present as a more or less in the quantitative history of the race. Hence even here one will encounter the phenomenon that a man seems to become guilty merely for dread of himself, of which there could be no question in the case of Adam. That every individual becomes guilty only by his own act is never- theless perfectly certain; but the quantitative process involved in generation has here reached its maximum where it would have power to confuse every view if one does not hold fast to the difference already pointed out between the quantitative increment and the qualitative leap. This phenomenon will be dealt with later. Generally it is ignored. That is in fact the easiest way. Or it is construed sentimentally and emotionally with a cowardly sympathy which thanks God for not being like such a man, without comprehending that such an act of thanksgiving is treason against God and against oneself, and without reflecting that life has always in store analogous phenomena which perhaps one will not escape. Sympathy one must have; but this sympathy is genuine only when one knows oneself deeply and knows that what has happened to one man may happen to all. Only thus can one be of some utility to oneself and to others. The physician in an insane asylum who is foolish enough to believe that he is wise for all eternity and that his bit of reason is insured against all injury in life, is indeed in DREAD AS ORIGINAL SIN 49 a certain sense wiser than the crazy patients, but at the same time he is more foolish, and he surely will not heal many.
So then dread signifies two things: the dread in which the individual posits sin by the qualitative leap; and the dread which entered in along with sin, and which for this reason comes also into the world quantitatively every time an individual posits sin.
50 CHAPTER I It is not my purpose to write a learned work or to waste time looking up literary proof texts. Oftentimes the examples adduced in books on psychology lack the proper psychological-poetic authority. They stand there as isolated facts notarially attested, but precisely for this reason one does not know whether to laugh or weep at the attempt of such a lonely stickler to form some sort of a general rule. A man who with any degree of seriousness has concerned himself with psychology and psychological observations has acquired a general human pliability which makes him capable of being able to construct his example at once, one which, even though it has not authorization of the factual sort, has nevertheless a dif- ferent kind of authority. As the psychological observer ought to be more agile than the tightrope dancer in order to be able to insinuate himself under the skin of other people and to imitate their attitudes, as his silence in confidential moments ought to be seductive and voluptuous in order that the hidden thing may find pleasure in slipping out and chatting quietly with itself in this fictitious inattention and quiet, so he ought also to have a poetical primitiveness in his soul to be able to create at once the totality of the rufe out of that which in the individual is always present only partially and irregularly. Then when he has perfected himself he will not need to fetch his examples from literary repertoires and warmed- over, half-dead reminiscences but draws his observations directly and freshly from the water, still flopping and displaying the play of their colors. Neither will he need to run himself to death in order to make note of something. On the contrary, he will sit calmly in his chamber, like a detective who knows nevertheless everything that is going on. What he needs he is able to fashion at once; what he needs he has straightway at hand by virtue of his general practice, just as in a well-ordered house one does not need to go down to the street to fetch water but has it on his floor by high pressure. If he were to become doubtful, he is then so well oriented in human life and his glance is so inquisitorially sharp that he knows where he should seek and easily discover some individual or another who would be serviceable for his experiment. His observation will be as trustworthy as that of any other man, even though he does not support it with erudite quotations — for example, that in Saxony there was a peasant girl whom a physician had under observation, that in Rome there was an emperor of whom a historian relates, etc. — as though it were true that such things emerge only once every thousand years. What interest has it then for psychology? No, it is everywhere, occurs every day, if only an observer is there. His observation will have the stamp of freedom and the interest of reality, if he is prudent enough to verify it. To this end he imitates in his own person every mood, every psychic state, which he discovers in another. Thereupon he sees if he OBJECTIVE DREAD 51 cannot delude the other by his imitation, whether he can draw him into the further development which is his own creation by virtue of the idea. Thus if one would observe a passion, one has to choose one's individual. Then the thing is to be quiet silent, unobtrusive, so that one may lure the secret from him. Thereupon one practices what one has learned until one is able to deceive him. Thereupon one poetizes the passion and appears before him in passion's preternatural size. If this is done correctly, the individual will feel an indescribable relief and satisfaction, as does a demented man when one has found and poetically comprehended his fixed idea and then develops it further. If this does not succeed, the failure may be due to a fault in the operation, but it may also be due to the fact that the individual was a poor example.
§i Objective dread When we use the expression "objective dread" one might be led to think more especially of the dread felt by innocence, which is the reflex of freedom within itself at the thought of its possibility. To this notion it is not a sufficient objection that it overlooks the consideration that we have reached a different point in the investigation. It might be more serviceable to note that objective dread is here contrasted with subjective dread, and that this is a distinction which could not have been made in Adam's state of innocence. Taken in the strictest sense, subjective dread is the dread posited in the individual as the consequence of his sin. About that we shall speak in a subsequent chapter. But when the term is taken in this sense, the contrast with an objective dread vanishes, since dread manifests itself precisely as that which it is, namely, the subjective. The distinction between the subjective and the objective dread has its place therefore in the contemplation of the world and of the state of innocence of the later individual. The division occurs here in such a way that subjective dread now designates the dread which exists in the innocence of the individual, a dread which corresponds to that of Adam and yet is quantitatively different from Adam's by reason of the quantitative increment due to generation. By objective dread, on the other hand, we understand the reflection in the whole world of that sinfulness which is propagated by generation.
In §2 of the previous chapter it was observed that the proposition, "by Adam's sin came sinfulness into the world," contained an external reflection; here is the place to take up that expression again and examine what truth there may be in it. The instant Adam has posited sin our 52 CHAPTER I reflection leaves him and reflects upon the beginning of the sin of every subsequent individual; for now generation is posited. If by Adam's sin the sinfulness of the race is posited in the same sense that man's erect posture, etc., is due to him, then the concept of the individual is annulled. This has been shown in the foregoing discussion, where also a protest was made against the inquisitive experimentation which treats sin as a curiosity, and the dilemma was put that we must either imagine 1 a questioner who did not even know what he was questioning about, or else a questioner who knows it and whose pretended ignorance constitutes a new sin.
If now we hold fast to this, the expression I have referred to acquires a limited degree of truth. The first posits the quality. Adam, then, posits sin in himself but also for the race. But the concept of race is altogether too abstract to be capable of positing so concrete a category as sin, which precisely is posited by the fact that the individual himself posits it as the individual. Sinfulness in the race therefore is only a quantitative approximation, but it has its beginning in Adam. In this consists the great importance Adam has above every other individual in the race; and in this consists the truth of that expression. Even an orthodoxy which is willing to understand itself must concede this, for it teaches in fact that by Adam's sin nature as well as the human race falls under sin. But with relation to nature it surely will not do to say that sin had entered into it with the quality of sin.
By the fact then that sin came into the world, it acquired significance for the whole creation. This effect of sin in the nonhuman sphere of being I have called objective dread.
I can indicate what I mean by recalling the Scriptural expression in Romans 8:19; airoKapahoKia tt)? tcriaeaxi (the anxious longing of creation). For if there can properly be any question of anxious longing, it follows as a matter of course that the creation is in a state of imperfection. When one uses such expressions as longing, anxious longing, expectation, etc., one commonly overlooks the fact that they imply a precedent state, and hence that this is present and makes itself felt at the same time that longing develops. The state in which the expectant man is, he has not fallen into by accident, etc., so that he finds himself entirely strange in it, but he himself is at the same time producing it. The expression for such a longing is dread, for in dread the state out of which a man longs to be delivered announces itself, and it announces itself because longing alone is not enough to save the man.
The question in what sense the creation by reason of Adam's sin sank into perdition, or how it was that freedom, being posited by the fact that the misuse of it posited it, cast over the whole creation a reflection of OBJECTIVE DREAD 53 possibility and a shudder of complicity; in what sense this must occur because man is a synthesis whose extremest contrasts were posited and whose one contrast became precisely by man's sin a far more extreme contrast than it was before — all this finds no place in a psychological deliberation, but rather in dogmatics, in the doctrine of the Atonement, in the explanation of this the science of psychology explains the presup- position of sinfulness.* Surely this dread in the creation can rightly be called an objective dread. It was not produced by the creation but was produced by the fact that it is seen in an entirely different light which was shed upon it when by Adam's first sin sensuality was degraded to signify sinfulness and is constantly so degraded in so far as sin *It is in this way dogmatics must be planned. Every science must above all comprehend energetically its own proper beginning, and not live in a relation of prolix intercourse with the other sciences. If dogmatics begins by wanting to explain sinfulness, or by wanting to prove its reality, no dogmatic will ever come out of it, and its whole existence will become problematic and vague.
OBJECTIVE DREAD 53 OBJECTIVE DREAD 53 continues to come into the world. One easily sees that this interpretation has its eyes open also in this sense, that it parries the rationalistic view that the sensual itself is sinful. After sin has come into the world, and every time sin comes into the world, sensuality becomes sinful; but what becomes was not beforehand what it became. Fr. Baader has often protested against this proposition that man's pitiful condition, that the sensual as such, is sinfulness. If, however, one does not take care, one falls into Pelagianism on quite a different side. In point of fact, Fr. Baader 3 in his definition has not taken into account the history of the race. In the quantitative becoming of the race (therefore unessentially) sensuality is sinfulness; but it is not so in relation to the individual before he himself by positing sin again makes sensuality sinful.
Individual exponents 4 of the school of Schelling* have given special attention to the alterationf which has taken place in the creation by reason of sin. They have also spoken of the dread that * Schelling himself often talks about dread, wrath, anguish, suffering, etc. However, one ought always to maintain an attitude of distrust towards such words, in order not to confound the consequence of sin in the creation with what Schelling also designates as states of mind and feelings in God. As a matter of fact, by these expressions he designates, if I dare say so, the creative birth- pangs of the Deity. He indicates by figurative expressions what he himself has called "the negative" and which in Hegel 5 became "the negative more closely defined as the dialectical" ( n>w»v). The ambiguity appears also in Schelling, for he speaks of a melancholy 6 brooding over nature, and also of a sadness in the Deity. However, Schlegel's ruling thought for the most part is that dread, etc., designates principally the sufferings of the Deity trying to create. In Berlin he expressed the same thought still more definitely by comparing God with Goethe and Johannes von Muller, who only found themselves by producing; as he did also by calling attention to the fact that blessedness which is unable to impart itself is unblessedness. I mention this here because this saying of his has already been printed in a little pamphlet by Marheineke. 7 Marheineke would treat it ironically. That one should not do, for a vigorous and full-blooded anthropomorphism is worth a good deal. In fact, the fault is a different one, and by this example one may see how strange everything becomes when metaphysics and dogmatics are corrupted by treating dogmatics metaphysically and metaphysics dogmatically.
f [In Danish] the word "alteration" 8 expresses the ambiguity very well. In fact one uses the word in the sense of changing, distorting, bringing out of the original state (the thing becomes a different one) I but one also speaks of becoming altereret in the sense of becoming frightened, precisely because at bottom this is the first unavoidable consequence of change. So far as I know the word is not used at all in Latin, but curiously enough the word adulterate is used. The Frenchman says, "alterer les monnaies" and "etre a/tereWith us [in Denmark] the word is generally employed in everyday speech only in the sense of being afraid; and so one may hear the plain man say, "I was quite altereret." At least I have heard a street- vendor say it.
54 CHAPTER I is supposed to be in inanimate nature. However the effect is weakened by the fact that at one moment we seem to have before us a dictum of natural philosophy which is handled cleverly by the aid of dogmatics, at another moment a dogmatic definition which rejoices in a glamorous reflection from the marvelous discoveries of natural science.
But here I abruptly terminate a disquisition which for an instant has transgressed the bounds of the present investigation. In the form in which dread existed in Adam it has never again appeared, for by him sinfulness came into the world. Consequently that dread of his has now acquired two analogous expressions: objective dread in nature, and subjective dread in the individual — of which two the latter contains a more and the former a less than that dread in Adam.
§2 Subjective dread The more reflective we venture to assume dread is, the easier it might seem to get it to pass over into guilt. But here it is important not to let ourselves be beguiled by gradual approximations, but to hold fast to the fact that it is not a "more" which gives rise to the leap, and that the "easier" does not in truth make the explanation easier. If we do not hold fast to this, we run the risk of stumbling suddenly upon a phenomenon where everything goes so easily that the transition becomes a simple transition, or else the risk of never daring to bring our thought to a conclusion, because the purely empirical observation can never be finished. Therefore, even though the dread become more and more reflective, the guilt which breaks forth in dread by the qualitative leap retains nevertheless the same accountability as that of Adam, and dread retains the same ambiguity.
To wish to deny that every subsequent individual has or may be assumed to have had a state of innocence analogous to that of Adam, would not only offend every man but would abrogate all rational thought, because then there would be an individual who was not an individual but was related as a sample to the species, in spite of the fact that at the same time he would be viewed under the category of the individual, that is, as a guilty man.
One may liken dread to dizziness, down into the yawning ab vss becomes dizzy. But the reason for it is just as much his eye as it is the precipice. For suppose he had not looked down.
Thus dread is the dizziness of free dom which occurs when the spirit would posit the synthesis, and freedom then gazesdown into its own possibility, grasping at finiteness to sustain itself. In this, A dizziness SUBJECTIVE DREAD 55 freedom succumbs. Further than this psychology cannot - go and will not. That very-hstartt everything is changed, and when 3 freedom rises again it sees that it is guilty. Between these two m- r stants lies the leap, which no science has explained or can explain.