Statement On Christianity
‘‘Truth, how holy are you! How do you live in the heart of it all, God, as his dear child!’’
Like everything that is great and beautiful, but also everything bitterly heavy and harsh, the World War of 1914/18 has exhausted the German people, drawing deep furrows through their soul. A religious inward-turning was to be observed in a great number of people, even if, as in all peoples of the world, there was no lack of those who turned completely to the sole eye-existence and inwardly silted up. Yet, their impact was not to become permanent. But from the depths of the German soul, new springs emerged, tore the people up, turned disaster into salvation, defeat into victory. The new challenge that is upon us should only draw the conclusion, provide to us the probation and prove that we can also cope with a victory from our new attitude of mind, that remembrance is not tied only to national misfortune.
The self-reflection only accelerated what had been in progress for decades and took its time, as it is not about the opinion of the individual, but the consanguine community that, as a unit of a higher order, struggles for expressions of its being. Ultimately, it is understandable that the cognition of humanity did not immediately follow the insight of Copernicus and that it was reluctant to lose supposedly solid ground under its feet. But when the Church faced the realization of how infinitely greater creation is than our human conception of it, it was not at all about reverence, i.e., religion, but about clinging to the traditional. Statics resisted dynamics. (Our fate throughout Germany today is no different from that of those individual spiritual heroes!) However, it is in the nature of dynamics that it can be inhibited but not stopped. The reactions of the German nation’s body to invading foreign bodies are the same and continue from Luther to Kant and Goethe and to Adolf Hitler. A young plant germ struggles victoriously through burdening weights and even through a hostile blanket of snow.
If painful or even pernicious aberrations are to be avoided, it is important not only to strive for the healthy in spiritual matters, but also to see clearly, as far as this may be given to the present without any distance from current events. Which are the harmful intruders and what is their damaging effect?
Our knowledge of the things and connections of this wonderful world has expanded more and more from decade to decade. The worldview unfolds with inspiring speed, it also enhances the coexistence of all people and races. Can the pioneer of the human spirit, which is the religious experience of the world, even under such circumstances, still step on the spot? For centuries now we have been certain that the ‘‘heaven’’ is an optical illusion in the excess brightness of daylight, at night the unfathomable depth and majesty of the universe of stars appears. We only use the word in the religious-poetic sense, like so many linguistic antiquities in a lofty mood. The youthful organism goes through the stages of generation development for a short period of time; we do not yet need to make the separation for the child; we can leave it at the old terms without leading in the wrong direction. The fulfilled human being who can see and sense, however, absolutely needs the whole harmony of his worldview and must not tolerate the dichotomy between insight and belief. What had happened in the age of Copernicus was repeated in the decades around Darwin and still rises continuously to this day: Neither the earth nor man should be “robbed” of their special position outside the rest of the world, regardless of whether the unity and sublimity of the world experienced an unimagined increase and thus also the possibility of religious inner life. The churches, aware that they cannot stop, are trying with great effort to slow down the path of knowledge.
So inevitably the truth of knowledge had to break away from the truth of faith, indeed, instead of following it, hasten ahead. The conflict became painful. The cheapest solution was to forget one half, to devote oneself entirely to mysticism or exclusively to rationalism. Now there was a new division of national unity, new pain, new dangers. Two camps began to cut themselves off from each other, avoiding contact. Outside of monastic seclusion, it is difficult to withdraw into the purely religious. Hence, it was the majority who, turning away from the Church, adopted an a- or even anti-religious stance.
In both directions the tremors caused by the World War brought extreme proportions; disgust for all non-mystical clarity on the one hand (anthroposophy, world ice theory, radiation craze and divining rod, etc.), God-less and spiritless movement on the other. The positions had to be subjected to an assessment.
Amid chaotic proliferation, a pure worldview that encompasses all areas of human existence grew suddenly, steeply and strongly. With the force of nature, it draws ever wider circles under its spell. Followers flock to it from both these described as from all other camps. And now they are faced with the imperative to melt their dichotomy in the synthetic embers or to forego the solid ground that they hoped to step on as a rescue! Even the supposedly hostile forces and strivings have found their common riverbed under the slogans “social” and “national”, in which the waters that once were flowing separately, yes against each other, can no longer be told apart! But no compromise brought the miracle. But the higher point of view, from which what previously opposites come together in the unity of a higher order, like those fighting one another grow together into kin, the kin into a tribe, the tribes into a nation. Anyone who can clearly define heat and light and work out the differences is doing good scientific work. Only he who sees the law above the manifold brings the great deed, brings opposites to a common denominator, grasps the wave motion as the higher unity.
The new testing of Germany through a harsh fate dictates that the diversity of our being should not be erased, but that what is diverging should be straightened out.
Definitio fit per genus proximum et differentiam specificam = Determination of essence takes place by working out what is common to related phenomena and what is distinct from the species. According to this old philosopher principle, even if it was not laid down in classical Latin, Linnaeus had inimitably clearly structured and named the animal and plant world, and gave every living being its genus and species. If there are possibilities to point out boundaries between faith and knowledge, God-seeking and world-affirming, then the attempt to capture a uniform circumference as the ultimate equivalent is a patriotic duty!
Those who immerse themselves in nature and can feel the full, immense depth of her miracles and to grasp the full sovereignty of the problems, will go through a school of reverence that none of the churches on earth can put up with. In the face of such fullness and greatness of law and order, the desire to find satisfaction with mere mechanistic-material dissolution soon fades away. One may imagine the ruling powers and call them what one wants, name is irrelevant! But not wanting to feel them would be an utter waste. Metaphysical urge rises out of the natural scientific, but it remains in what is genuinely human and especially Germanic. To see the human being as a member of the whole of nature very intimately, to find the all-governing laws of nature valid for him, especially also for the relationships of human beings, particularly blood relatives, is a religious experience, makes it easy to joyfully affirm those laws, them to yourself to take as a guideline even for the folkish life and thus to advance out of the conditionality and bondage of all creatures into the voluntary, into the noblest form of humanity. This way the German nation in its new movement (the eternally moving makes us so uncomfortable for our peace-loving neighbors!), In the application of recognized laws of the world of organisms to community life, could experience a deeply inner elevation, even religious consecration.
This movement, free from traditional ecclesiastical forms and therefore suspicious to some, is decreed as neo-pagan. Like some other mockery words and insults, the name may once appear as an honor. But the danger lurks for one to think of himself as sublime, to move away from those who think or feel differently, to have fissures torn open, where just now happy agreement took place and enabled political miracles. It is thus necessary for both parties to openly determine in German camraderie what differences exist, whether and to what extent agreement is possible, that is, what binds us together. After, in Protestantism, the German spirit made a first attempt to find its way back to its peculiarity from alien forms and lines of thought, over the centuries both denominations have only learned to live side by side, because neither was given a substantial preponderance. Under no circumstances can it now be a matter of setting up a third counter-pope for two popes or even just of letting one arise. The task is to be taken much deeper, carries a far greater responsibility. The Führer’s example teaches how fighting and defense can be reconciled with winning from within. Socialism was not included in the program out of feigning tactics; and May 1 was recognized on a much higher level as a celebration of labor. It is not a trickery of ours either! Yes, the party program, the anniversary of which has just been celebrated, also has goals in this area. Loyalty to the Führer forbids us to make the task as easy as possible! What is “positive” in Christianity?
It is not only the conviction of an honest person who thinks differently that is sacred to us Germans. The fact that Christianity, once it was introduced, was accepted more deeply and fervently in Germany than anywhere else, that it had been the holy guiding star of our ancestors for almost a thousand years, should suffice not to deny it our awe. With Christianity as a motif, the German spirit and cultural will has produced immeasurably great creations of eternal value. German cathedrals, the insertion of churches, chapels, individual crosses in the German landscape, poetry, painting and visual arts in incalculable richness, church music from the most delicious chorales to Bach’s inexhaustible sound works are among the most noble cultural assets of our nation and would not be without the deep emotional inspiration of Christianity. Yet, the amalgamation was not so perfect to prevent terrible aberrations, disharmonies revealed themselves in the most painful way.
It was not until after Napoleonic times that the nations began to recognize and perceive themselves more as their own beings, that the foreignness in Christian doctrine also had to come to mind in a disturbing way. In the long run, missionary attempts to declare this doctrine as binding on all human beings could only confirm the racial bondage of our individual traits to the righteous. Moreover, it is unmistakable that, as in the physical, there are not only peculiarities of kinship, tribe, nation, race in all their orders of degree, but also in the spiritual-emotional characteristics of species and / or genus. They are not typically Christian, they are found in Buddhism, Mohammedanism and of course also in the noble pagan (e.g., Greek). It is precisely for this reason that we will find common ground between the currents that are moving our people now. Without such traits it would be completely unthinkable that the doctrine coming from the outside could have found such popularity in the religiously so demanding German people.
Today we feel very strongly what makes us “strong inside”. The doctrine of man’s sinfulness, the assertion that he is “wicked from his youth”, is blasphemy in our ears against their Creator. Together with the commandment of contrition, the only lasting hope of redemption out of non-self-doing, it is the school of the inferiority complex, of resignation and thus of inaction. On the other hand, one should not simply place cheap pride in origin and being, but rather in a creative-positive “never-being-satisfied” with oneself and its performance, the indestructible will to develop and strengthen one’s own personality, but as a member in the whole and for its best. Only self-confidence creates the preconditions for forging one’s own happiness, which of course can only be there to contribute to the elevation of the blood community (the “highest moment” of Faust).
Apart from many other things, the defilement of the most sacred miracles in the expression of an immaculate conception is completely unbearable for the Germanic kind, which would like to absolve not through a real miracle but sorcery of a “guilt” of motherhood which is highest to us. The earth as a valley of tears, nature as sinful and low, these are imaginative foreign germs that make our blood boil in feverish heat. From these we wish to purify ourselves and future generations. For it is precisely there that we behold the most noble revelations of the divine.
But then all the sooner will an echo reawaken in us that was lost. Yes, maybe only then will we get a reasonably clear view of our tremendous experience of the present. Our German house has been built with the greatest participation of Christianity. And yet it turns out more and more that it was not built into the essence. It served as scaffolding, the construction of which itself depends on the building plan. German farmers, landscape, ruins on paintings of New Testamentary content are witnesses to the measure of approximation. Another substance, if not the same, could have provided similar assistance. Even if it is not possible to remove the built-in material after the Volksreich of the Germans has been brought to the scaffolding festival by its greatest master builder, which only then its entire architecture becomes accessible to the viewer, the observation of a difference of character can take place without any bitterness, yes, even with adoring gratitude. This may make it easier for some people to take part in the work.
In addition, however, parallels can be found in the structure of the building and the scaffolding, without which its use would have been completely unthinkable. Far be it from us to even indirectly raise a reproach against our ancestors, as if they had made use of useless means!
In the true-German idea of Christmas I see a Teutonic-stubborn defiance towards hostile natural powers. Let us put ourselves back in times without windows, artificial light, stoves, without all our liberation from the tutelage of the outside world: Let us try to imagine what Nordic winter meant in such circumstances. Certainly, the day of the return of light had to be joyfully welcomed and celebrated. But man made far more of it. Against the darkness, the frost, the dampness, the poverty of food and the hostility to traffic of the long nights he triumphantly set his highest festival of light, warmth, comfort, overflowing joy and family happiness. He was greater than his fate, not only shaped his environment, but created his own captive world within. German history has often testified to that hard but good school, not least in the last three decades.
Did the story of an underage child of poor parents in a socially almost hopeless situation, threatened and persecuted by the state power that, by virtue of its own inner being, soar to the creator and conqueror of a world, fit so badly?
The turnaround that started from there is unmistakable for all time. Instead of the original natural selfishness, there is empathy towards others, the teaching of the power of love, which we also worship. To the struggle for the existence of the individual against all, to the care of the ego comes the understanding of you. How could a world have been conquered, especially the culturally highest, if something fundamentally new had not raised people above their previous level? It was not the individuals but the relationships between them that became important, no longer just instinctively, but in a closed vision of the world. “Common good over self-interest” is not a Christian word, but it lies in the direction, goes even beyond that goal, has an inner kinship. The social idea in the new German design is far more than the Samaritan Tertiary and its benevolence and God-pleasing. A new, reconciling roof is stretched over the you and the “I” that recedes before it in the later expansion of church doctrine up to self-renunciation and self-surrender, the “us”! In it there is an increased obligation, it is at the same time scientifically supported by the knowledge of modern biology. On a higher level the person returns to the self, which he again freely and joyfully affirms, to personality as “the greatest happiness of the children of man”. But he is faced with new tasks. The individual should consolidate himself with all devotion, only not for his own sake, but as a link in a chain that is of no use if every part is not rounded off and reliably solid, out of responsibility towards his blood community. To surpass inferiority, to boot out the foreign is not a feat. To acknowledge what was, and yet to grow beyond, to do it better than the great and exalted past, that is a true goal! We do not fully appreciate the Führer’s deed if we place it next to many others. This deed is unique, leads after 2000 years to take again at least a step, at least to see. This requires an understanding of the terrain in which it took place, but also of such steps that led to it before us.
-Essay by E. Henning from Deutscher Glaube, May 1940, p. 8, Translation done by @DerGiftpilz