Germanic and other Occidental peoples, whose highest ideals are autonomy, freedom and independence, qualities to which they could not lay claim if God alone were capable of autonomous action.” [246F-LER: p. 159]
[247F-LER: p. 161]
“If God is the most eminent or principle cause, or rather the one and only cause, of the good things done to me by men – for only the first cause is truly a cause – how can I honor men, how can I feel obligated to those through whom God has favored me? They deserve no credit; not their own heart, their own being, but God has inclined them in my favor … .” [247F-LER: p. 161]
[248F-LER: p. 162]
“ … if you look on God as the true cause or purely and simply as the cause of the good – for only the first cause is the true cause – then do not deny that God is also the cause of the evil that is done men by other men or beings. (…) … if you refuse to honor man as a benefactor, you must also refuse to condemn him as an evildoer … . How absurd, and indeed how malicious, to deny man’s autonomy in one case and to recognize it in another, to dispose of the good a man does as the grace of God, but to hold man guilty of the evil he does.” [248F-LER: p. 162]
[249F-LER: p. 162-163]
[P. 162] “Just as the purposiveness of nature is simply a human, or rather, a theological [P. 163] expression for the profound and all-embracing coherence of nature, so the divine will or decision which supposedly endows each of us with certain inclinations, impulses, predispositions, and capacities is merely an anthropomorphism, a popular term for the context in which man has become what he is. (…) And explicitly or not, consciously or not, I accept this fate. I accept the necessity of being a part of my time; what I am by nature, without having willed it, I also will; I cannot wish to be something other than what I am, i.e., than what I essentially am. I may wish to modify certain secondary, accidental traits, but not my essential nature; my will is dependent on my nature and not the other way around; whether I like it or not, whether I know it or not, my will conforms to my nature; try as I may, my nature – that is, the essence of my individuality – does not conform to my will.” [249F-LER: p. 162-163]
[250F-LER: p. 164]
“ … man’s will is also contained in his essential being; he cannot break with his nature; even the wish fantasies which depart from it are determined by it; they may seem to go far afield, yet they always fall back on it, just as a stone thrown into the air falls back on the ground.” [250F-LER: p. 164]
[251F-LER: p. 164]
“ … much as I may owe to my own activity, my work, the exertion of my will, I have become what I am only in the context of this people, this country, this place, this century, this nature – only in the context of the environment, conditions, circumstances, and events that constitute my biography.
