[705W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 28-30]
[P. 28] {anti-FEUER} “The intrinsic distortion of Religion’s fundamental essence, beheld through divine revelation, that is to say of the true root-essence incommunicable per se to ordinary knowledge, is hence undoubtedly engendered in the first instance by the aforesaid difficulty in the wording of its Dogma; but this distortion first becomes actual and perceptible from the moment when the Dogma’s nature is dragged before the tribune of common causal apprehension. The resulting vitiation of Religion itself, whose holy of holies is just the indubitable Dogma that blesses through an inward Faith, is brought about by the ineluctable requirement to defend that Dogma against the assaults of common human apprehension, to explain and make it seizable to the latter. This requirement grows more pressing in degree as Religion, which had its primal fount within the deepest chasms of the world-fleeing heart, comes once again into a relation with the State. (…) [P. 29] {anti-FEUER} On the other hand the hopelessly materialistic, industrially commonplace, entirely un-Goded aspect of the modern world is debitable to the counter eagerness of the common practical understanding to construe religious Dogma by laws of cause-and-effect deduced from the phenomena of natural and social life, and to fling aside whatever rebelled against that mode of explanation as a reasonless chimera. (…)
{FEUER} But does this mean that Religion itself has ceased? –
{FEUER} No, no! It lives, but only at its primal source and sole true dwelling-place, within the deepest, holiest inner chamber of the Individual; there whither never yet has surged a conflict of the rationalist and supranaturalist, the Clergy and the State. For this is the essence of true [P. 30] Religion: that, away from the cheating show of the daytide world, it shines in the night of man’s inmost heart, with a light quite other than the world-sun’s light, and visible nowhence save from out that depth.
{FEUER} ‘Tis thus indeed! Profoundest knowledge teaches us that only in the innerchamber of our heart, in nowise from the world presented to us without, can true assuagement come to us.” [705W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 28-30]
[706W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 30]
[P. 30] {FEUER} {SCHOP} “Our organs of perception of the outer world ARE merely destined for discovering the means wherewith to satisfy the individual unit’s need, that unit which feels so single and so needy in face of just this world; with the selfsame organs we cannot possibly perceive the basic Oneness of all being; it is allowed us solely by the new cognitive faculty that is suddenly awoken in us, as if through Grace, so soon as ever the vanity of the world comes home to our inner consciousness on any kind of path.” [706W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 30]
[707W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 32]
[P. 32] {FEUER} {SCHOP} “Now the great, the truly noble spirit is distinguished from the common organisation of everyday by this; to it every, often the seemingly most trivial, incident of life and world-intercourse is capable of swiftly displaying its widest correlation with the essential root-phenomena of all existence, thus of showing Life and the World themselves in their true, their terribly earnest meaning. The naïve, ordinary man – accustomed merely to seize the outmost side of such events, the side of practical service for the moment’s need – when once this awful earnestness suddenly reveals itself to him through an unaccustomed juncture, falls into such consternation that
