God reveals Himself, it is said, in Nature; but God cannot reveal Himself to Nature, to the stone, to the plant, to the animal, because God is Spirit; He can reveal Himself to Man only, who thinks and is Spirit. If there is no hindrance on God’s side to the knowledge of Him, then it is owing to human caprice, to an affectation of humility, or whatever you like to call it, that the finitude of knowledge, the human reason is put in contrast to the divine knowledge and the divine reason, and that the limits of human reason are asserted to be immovable and absolutely fixed. For what is here suggested is just that God is not jealous, but, on the contrary, has revealed and is revealing Himself; and we have here the more definite thought that it is not the so-called human reason with its limits which knows God, but the Spirit of God in Man, it is, to use the speculative expression previously employed, the self-consciousness of God which knows itself in the knowledge of Man.
This may suffice by way of calling attention to the main ideas which are floating about in the atmosphere of the culture of our time as representing the results of the “Enlightenment,” and of an understanding which calls itself reason. These are the ideas which directly meet us, to begin with, when we undertake to deal with the general subject of the knowledge of God. It was possible only to point out the fundamental moments of the worthlessness of those categories which are opposed to this knowledge, and not to justify this knowledge itself. This, as being the real knowledge of its object, must receive its justification along with the content.
Note.—The rendering of Nichtwissen in this Lecture by “Agnosticism” involves something of an anachronism, and is not technically strictly accurate; but we have no other English word which seems so well to suggest the meaning.—E.B.S.
