ideation, we can only apprehend as Wahn – {anti-FEUER} must have a source so sublime, so utterly incomparable with every other, that the only notion possible to be granted us of that source itself, in truth, must consist in our necessary inference of its existence from this its supernatural effect.” [702W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 24-25]
[703W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 25]
[P. 25] {anti-FEUER} “Whosoever thinks he has said the last word on the essence of the Christian faith when he styles it an attempted satisfaction of the most unbounded egoism, a kind of contract wherein the beneficiary is to obtain eternal, never-ending bliss on condition of abstinence [or ‘renunciation’ – Entsagung] and free-willed suffering in this relatively brief and fleeting life, he certainly has defined therewith the sort of notion alone accessible to unshaken human egoism, but nothing even distantly resembling the Wahn-transfigured concept proper to the actual practiser of free-willed suffering and renunciation. Through voluntary suffering and renunciation, on the contrary, man’s egoism is already practically upheaved, and he who chooses them, let his object be whate’er you please, is thereby raised already above all notions bound by Time and Space; for no longer can he seek a happiness that lies in Time and Space, e’en were they figured as eternal and immeasurable.” [703W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 25]
[704W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 27-28]
[P. 27] “We must assume that this conception, so indicibly beatifying in its effect, this idea which we can only rank under the category of Wahn, or better, this immediate vision seen by the Religious, to the ordinary human apprehension remains entirely foreign and unconveyable, in respect of both its substance and its form. What, on the other hand, is imparted thereof and thereon to the layman (den Profanen), to the people, can be nothing more than a kind of allegory; to wit, a rendering of the unspeakable, impalpable, and never understandable through [their] immediate intuition, into the speech of common life and of its only feasible form of knowledge, erroneous per se. In this sacred allegory an attempt is made to transmit to worldly minds (der weltlichen Vorstellung) the mystery of the divine revelation: but the only relation it can bear to what the Religious had immediately beheld, is the relation of the day-told dream to the actual dream of night. (…) {FEUER} If then, the record left upon our own mind by a deeply moving dream is strictly nothing but an allegorical paraphrase, whose intrinsic disagreement with the original remains a trouble to our waking consciousness; and therefore if the knowledge reaped by the hearer can at bottom be nothing but an essentially distorted image of that original: yet this [allegorical] message, in the case both of the dream and of the actually received divine revelation, remains the only possible way of proclaiming the thing received to the layman. Upon these lines is formed the Dogma; and this is the revelation’s only portion cognisable by the world, which it therefore has to take on authority, so as to become a partner, at least [P. 28] through Faith, in what its eye has never seen. Hence is Faith so strenuously commended to the Folk: the Religious, become a sharer in salvation through his own eye's beholding (durch eigen Anschauung), feels and knows that the layman, to whom the vision (die Anschauung) itself remains a stranger, has no path to knowledge of the Divine except the path of Faith; and this Faith, to be effectual, must be sincere, undoubting and unconditional, in measure as the Dogma embraces all the incomprehensible, and to common knowledge contradictory-seeming, conditioned by the incomparable difficulty of its wording.“ [704W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 27-28]
