present, or rather a verb into a substantive; how should I separate the one from the other? God is the existence corresponding to my wishes and feelings: he is the just one, the good, who fulfils my wishes. Nature, this world, is an existence which contradicts my wishes, my feelings. Here it is not as it ought to be; this world passes away: but God is existence as it ought to be. God fulfils my wishes;—this is only a popular personification of the position: God is the fulfiller, i.e., the reality, the fulfilment of my wishes.[1] But heaven is the existence adequate to my wishes, my longing;[2] thus, there is no distinction between God and heaven. God is the power by which man realizes his eternal happiness; God is the absolute personality in which all individual persons have the certainty of their blessedness and immortality; God is to subjectivity the highest, last certainty of its absolute truth and essentiality.
The doctrine of immortality is the final doctrine of religion; its testament, in which it declares its last wishes. Here therefore it speaks out undisguisedly what it has hitherto suppressed. If elsewhere the religious soul concerns itself with the existence of another being, here it openly considers only its own existence; if elsewhere in religion man makes his existence dependent on the existence of God, he here makes the reality of God dependent on his own reality; and thus what elsewhere is a primitive, immediate truth to him, is here a derivative, secondary truth: if I am not immortal, God is not God; if there is no immortality, there is no God;—a conclusion already drawn by the apostle Paul. If we do not rise again, then Christ is not risen, and all is vain. Let us eat and drink. It is certainly possible to do away with what is apparently or really objectionable in the popular argumentation, by avoiding the inferential form; but this can only be done by making immortality an analytic instead of a synthetic truth, so as to show that the very idea of God as absolute personality or
- ↑ “Si bonum est habere corpus incorruptibile, quare hoc facturam Deum volumas desperere?”—Augustinus (Opp. Antwerp, 1700, T. v. p. 698).
- ↑ “Quare dicitur spiritale corpus, nisi quia ad nutum spiritus serviet? Nihil tibi contradicet ex te, nihil in te rebellabit adversus te . . . . Ubi volueris, eris . . . . Credere enim debemus talia corpora nos habituros, ut ubi velimus, quando voluerimus, ibi simus.”—Augustinus (1. c. p. 703, 705). “Nihil indecorum ibi erit, summa pax erit, nihil discordans, nihil monstruosum, nihil quod offendat adspectum.” (1. c. 707). “Nisi beatus, non vivit ut vult.” (De Civ. Dei, 1. 14, c. 25).
