such and such a kind of knowledge. Faith is incompatible with common immediate sensuous knowing, or with a higher knowledge of the same simple direct nature: and, because our knowledge of the highest is, in religion, not thus immediate, therefore we are said to have only faith; and faith is, by a confusion, supposed to exclude, not one kind of certainty, but all kinds. Whence the above mistake, which, however, has a truth in it.
Why is it then that faith is incompatible with sensuous knowledge? It is because, in religious language, faith is a rise beyond ‘this world,’ and a rise in which I stay here. What does this mean? Does it mean that the object must not be a part of the visible world? It means this, and more; faith implies the rise in thought, but not that only; it implies also the rise of the will to the object, which is not seen but thought. And this presupposes the practical separation for me of myself and the object. In the mere theoretic rise I do not think of myself, but only of the object: in faith I must also have myself before me; I must perceive the chasm between myself, as this or that unreal part of the unreal finite world, and at the same time must perceive the ideal-real object, which is all reality, and my true reality. And it is this presupposed consciousness of absolute separation (which, in terms of space or time, we express by ‘this world’ and the ‘other world’) which is necessary for faith, and which survives therein as a suppressed element. Hence, where this is not, faith can not be.
Faith then is the recognition of my true self in the religious object, and the identification of myself with that both by judgment and will; the determination to negate the self opposed to the object by making the whole self one with what it really is. It is, in a word, of the heart.[1] It is the belief that only the ideal is
- ↑ ‘True faith is no mere thought nor admission of the truth of a history.’ ‘The true Christian is not the man who knows history.’ ‘Christianity should know that faith is not merely a history or a science. To have faith is nought else than for a man to make his will one with God’s, and take up God’s word and might in his will, so that these twain, God’s will and man’s will, turn to one being and substance. Thereupon in the man Christ, in his passion, his dying, his death, and uprising, in his own humanity, is reckoned for righteousness, so that the man becomes Christ, that is after the spiritual man. . . . . He who teaches and wills otherwise is yet in the whoredom of Babylon.’—J. Böhme.
