[1023W-{6-8/80}Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 217]
[P. 217] {FEUER} {anti-FEUER} {SCHOP} “We have nothing to do with the astoundingly varied attempts of speculative human reason to explain the nature of this Son of the God, who walked on earth and suffered shame: where the greater miracle had been revealed in train of that manifestation, the reversal of the will-to-live which all believers experienced in themselves, it already embraced that other marvel, the divinity of the herald of salvation. The very shape of the Divine had presented itself in anthropomorphic guise; it was the body of the quintessence of all pitying Love, stretched out upon the cross of pain and suffering. A – symbol? – beckoning to the highest pity, to worship of suffering, to imitation of this breaking of all self-seeking Will: nay, a picture, a very effigy! In this and its effect upon the human heart, lies all the spell whereby the Church soon made the Graeco-Roman world her own. But what was bound to prove her ruin, and lead at last to the very louder ‘Atheism’ of our day, was the tyrant-prompted thought of tracing back this Godliness upon the cross to the Jewish ‘Creator of heaven and earth,’ a wrathful God of Punishment who seemed to promise greater power than the self-offering, all-loving Saviour of the Poor. That God was doomed by Art … .” [1023W-{6-8/80}Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 217]
[1024W-{6-8/80}Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 217-218]
[P. 217] {FEUER} “As though impelled by an artistic need, leaving Jehova the ‘Father’ to shift for himself, Belief devised the necessary miracle of the Saviour’s birth by a Mother who, [P. 218] not herself a goddess, became divine through her virginal conception of a son without human contact, against the laws of Nature. A thought of infinite depth, expressed in form of miracle. … the mystery of motherhood without natural fecundation can only be traced to the greater miracle, the birth of the God himself: for in this the Denial-of-the-world is revealed by a life pre-figuratively offered up for its redemption. As the saviour himself was recognised as sinless, nay, incapable of sin, it followed that in him the Will must have been completely broken ere ever he was born, so that he could no more suffer, but only feel for others’ sufferings; and the root hereof was necessarily to be found in a birth that issued, not from the Will-to-live, but from the Will-to-redeem.” [1024W-{6-8/80}Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 217-218]
[1025W-{6-8/80}Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 219-220]
[P. 219] {FEUER} “Yet another dogma was to offer itself to the artist’s phantasy, and one on which the Church at last seemed to set more store than on that of Redemption through Love. The World-overcomer was called to be World-judge. From the arm of his virgin mother the divine child had bent his searching gaze upon the world, and, piercing all its tempting show, had recognised its true estate as [P. 220] death-avoiding, death-accurst. Under the redeemer’s sway, this world of greed and hate durst not abide; to the downtrod poor, whom he called to free themselves through suffering and compassion, to meet him in his Father’s kingdom, he must show this world in the scales of justice, its own weight dragging it down to the slough of sin. From the sun-drenched heights of those fair hills on which he loved to preach salvation to the multitude in images and parables, whereby alone could he gain the understanding of his ‘poor,’ he pointed to the gruesome death-vale of ‘Gehenna’’; thither, upon the day of judgment, should avarice and murder be condemned, to fleer at one another in despair. Tartarus, Inferno, Hela, all places of post-mortem punishment of wicked men and cowards, were found again in this ‘Gehenna’; and to our day the
