theology itself, because this is nothing more than an imaginary psychology and anthropology. But this doctrine or theory is supposed—and for this reason it is mystical and fantastic—to be not pathology, but theology, in the old or ordinary sense of the word; it is supposed that we have here unfolded to us the life of a Being distinct from us, while nevertheless it is only our own nature which is unfolded, though at the same time again shut up from us by the fact that this nature is represented as inhering in another being. The mystic philosopher supposes that in God, not in us human individuals,—that would be far too trivial a truth,—reason first appears after the Passion of Nature;—that not man, but God, has wrestled himself out of the obscurity of confused feelings and impulses into the clearness of knowledge; that not in our subjective, limited mode of conception, but in God himself, the nervous tremors of darkness precede the joyful consciousness of light; in short, he supposes that his theory presents not a history of human throes, but a history of the development, i.e., the throes of God—for developments (or transitions) are birth-struggles. But, alas! this supposition itself belongs only to the pathological element.
If, therefore, the cosmogonic process presents to us the Light of the power of distinction as belonging to the divine essence; so, on the other hand, the Night or Nature in God, represents to us the Pensées confuses of Leibnitz as divine powers. But the Pensées confuses—confused, obscure conceptions and thoughts, or more correctly images—represent the flesh, matter;—a pure intelligence, separate from matter, has only clear, free thoughts, no obscure, i.e., fleshly ideas, no material images, exciting the imagination and setting the blood in commotion. The Night in God, therefore, implies nothing else than this: God is not only a spiritual but also a material, corporeal, fleshly being; but as man is man, and receives his designation, in virtue not of his fleshly nature, but of his mind, so is it with God.
But the mystic philosopher expresses this only in obscure, mystical, indefinite, dissembling images. Instead of the rude, but hence all the more precise and striking expression, flesh, it substitutes the equivocal, abstract words, nature and ground. “As nothing is before or out of God, he must have the ground of his existence in himself. This all philosophies say, but they speak of this ground as a mere idea, without making it
