interposes in life, but is merely placed at the summit of things, at the beginning of the world, as the First Cause. God created the world: this is all that is here retained of God. The past tense is necessary; for since that epoch the world pursues its course like a machine. The addition: He still creates, he is creating at this moment, is only the result of external reflection; the past tense adequately expresses the religious idea in this stage; for the spirit of religion is gone when the operation of God is reduced to a fecit or creavit. It is otherwise when the genuine religious consciousness says: The fecit is still to-day a facit. This, though here also it is a product of reflection, has nevertheless a legitimate meaning, because by the religious spirit God is really thought of as active.
Religion is abolished where the idea of the world, of so-called second causes, intrudes itself between God and man. Here a foreign element, the principle of intellectual culture, has insinuated itself, peace is broken, the harmony of religion, which lies only in the immediate connexion of man with God, is destroyed. Second causes are a capitulation of the unbelieving intellect with the still believing heart. It is true that, according to religion also, God works on man by means of other things and beings. But God alone is the cause, he alone is the active and efficient being. What a fellow-creature does, is in the view of religion done not by him, but by God. The other is only an appearance, a medium, a vehicle, not a cause. But the “second cause” is a miserable anomaly, neither an independent nor a dependent being: God, it is true, gives the first impulse, but then ensues the spontaneous activity of the second cause.[1]
Religion of itself, unadulterated by foreign elements, knows nothing of the existence of second causes; on the contrary, they are a stone of stumbling to it; for the realm of second causes, the sensible world, Nature, is precisely what separates man from God, although God as a real God, i.e., an external
- ↑ A kindred doctrine is that of the Concursus Dei, according to which, God not only gives the first impulse, but also co-operates in the agency of the second cause. For the rest, this doctrine is only a particular form of the contradictory dualism between God and Nature, which runs through the history of Christianity. On the subject of this remark, as of the whole paragraph, see Strauss: Die Christliche Glaubenslehre, B. ii. § 75, 76.
