redemption from evil to Physics and Chemistry.” [1045W-{11/80}What Boots This Knowledge – First Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 256]
[1046W-{11/80}What Boots This Knowledge – First Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 256]
[P. 256] {anti-FEUER/NIET} {SCHOP} “Take Goethe, who held Christ for problematical, but the good God for wholly proven, albeit retaining the liberty to discover the latter in Nature after his own fashion; which led to all manner of physical assays and experiments, whose continued pursuit was bound, in turn, to lead the present reigning human intellect to the result that there’s no God whatever, but only ‘Force and Matter.’ “ [1046W-{11/80}What Boots This Knowledge – First Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 256]
[1047W-{11/80}What Boots This Knowledge – First Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 259-260]
[P. 259] {FEUER} {SCHOP} “Impossible, that commandments here should bringabout a knowledge only to be woken in the natural man by proper guidance to an understanding of the natural descent of all that lives. – The surest, nay, in our opinion almost the only thing to lead to this, would be a wise employment of the Schopenhauerian philosophy, whose outcome, to the shame of every earlier philosophic system, is the recognition of a moral meaning of the world; which crown of all Knowledge might then be practically realised [P. 260] through Schopenhauer’s Ethics. Only the love that springs from pity, and carries its compassion to the utmost breaking of self-will, is the redeeming Christian Love, in which Faith and Hope are both included of themselves … .” [1047W-{11/80}What Boots This Knowledge – First Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 259-260]
[1048W-{11/80}What Boots This Knowledge – First Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 260-261]
[P. 260] {anti-FEUER/NIET} {SCHOP} To people harassed by the arrogance of our chemists and physicists, and who begin to hold themselves for weak of brain if they shrink from accepting a resolution of the world into ‘force and matter,’ – to them it were no less an act of charity, could we show them from the works of our philosopher what clumsy things are those same ‘molecules and atoms.’ {FEUER} {SCHOP} But what an untold boon could we bring to men affrighted on the onehand by the thunders of the Church, and driven to desperation by our physicists on the other, could we fit into the lofty edifice of ‘Love, Faith, and Hope’ a vivid knowledge of the ideality of that world our only present mode of apperception maps out by laws of Time and Space; then would each question of the troubled spirit after the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of the ‘other world’ be recognised as answerable by nothing but a blissful smile. For if there be an answer to these so infinitely weighty-seeming questions, our philosopher has given it with insurpassable beauty and precision in that phrase which [P. 261] he merely meant, in a measure, to define the ideality of Space and Time: ‘Peace, rest and happiness dwell there alone there is no When, no Where.
{FEUER} {SCHOP} Yet the Folk – from whom we stand so lamentably far, alas! – demands a realistic notion of divine eternity in the affirmative sense, such as Theology herself can only give
