Catechism Of The Germanic Religion: Part Four
Second Section: The German Teaching Concerning God
“I am as great as God; He is as small as I am, he cannot be over me, nor I below him.”
-Angelino Silesius
“If God’s own power were not within us, how could we delight in the Divine?”
-Goethe
“I am God which nature raises in her bosom.”
-Schelling
Thesis 8
“God is a moral idea to which we are bound by the eternal creative force of Nature, which works in the world and man. Belief in an other-worldly God is not of Indo-Germanic but Semitic origin. This kind of God-Belief is not a condition of true religion and piety.”
Comments: What is an other-worldly God?
Such a belief has three feature:
- God created the world out of nothing
- The world was fallen and condemned and ‘quite other’ and worse than God
- The God who is not of this world shall be the judge of our deeds
These three features do not belong to a German-Nordic faith.
1. All Indo-Germanic people believe in an eternal, original, non-created world, as, for example the Greek Aristoteles. “In the German religion the Gods are born and grow up in the world and vanish with the world in which they rose.”
Similarly with the ancient Indian and Vedic religions. In the old Nordic religion, as Hermann Wirth has discovered, the being of God grows in the mother womb of the world. The German mysticism of the Middle Ages (Master Ekkehart) found the unity of God or the world (Pantheism). For Goethe, God and nature were equal and he rejected a God who only came from outside.
2. The hateful teaching of fallen man in the Scriptures and of the world is of non-German origin. It is the logical consequence of the construing a more perfect other world.
Whoever regards the world and nature as ‘fallen’ has wandered from the original German-Nordic faith and has become the victim of an alien, erroneous teaching.
3. “We are our own judges, our conscience and our people. A god of reward and punishments, a God of revenge apart from the world and man, as the Jews have Him, is a heathen, secular and immoral representation of god and the Divine Being.”
German religion rejects this Dualism:
“Our German view is of the unity of God and World in the sense of a creative self-development of God-Nature. The world carries its divine, living character in itself, not outside itself.”
Thesis 9
“In the lap of the divine, living world the knowing Being or Mind grows. Mind is a natural growth of the world of reality. It is not a finished thing at the beginning, but at the end of the height of world development.”
Comments: What is the Divine Living World?
The German Forefathers conceived the Cosmos as a world Oak Tree (Igdrasil), embracing all existence, blesses by sacred waters and on whose crown Odin was listening. This profound symbol has been developed in German history from the German tribes to Goethe. Faust called it ‘The Becoming, which ever lives and works’:
“This drive to be and the will to perfection is not only in the living world as in a biological creature, e.g., a plant, form blossom to fruit, but also as knowing Being and Mind, through which the divine form of the world is unveiled and becomes conscious of itself.”
Without the world there is no mind.
So called ‘pure minds’ or ‘pure intelligence’ are metaphysical phantasies and dream rejected by the penetrating knowledge of modern man. The knowing Being or Mind is Man. In plant and animal Mind is on the way. Stone and matter are most removed from the becoming mind.
“Whoever wants to find God’s place in the world must sweep away the erroneous teaching of 2,000 years of the nature of mind. Three principles are to be found in the natural teaching of mind:
- Mind without organic structure does not exist
- Mind which does not know of itself, is not yet mind
- Mind is a national growth in the world of reality. It is the German Teaching of God which fulfils the demand that we should ‘worship God in spirit and in truth’.
-excerpted from “The 25 Theses of the German Religion: A Catechism” by Ernst Bergmann (1936)
Excellent subject. Thank you.