THE NEW EUROPE
"Sub specie æternitatis."
The religious significance of the war is being discussed in all countries, and a whole literature has sprung up on the subject. Since the very dawn of culture and history death has had a significance, not merely ethical, but essentially religious. The altar, we are told, is but a slight transformation of the tomb. Death is the problem of life and of its meaning: it is that central point of light or darkness towards which all our thinking and striving tends; and as this war is a veritable orgy for the grim figure with the scythe, it forces upon us religious meditation. In common honesty we have to confess that the petty details and technicalities of war interest us to such an absorbing degree that only a relatively small part of our time is devoted to philosophic and religious thought. We are all strangely anxious to avoid speaking of death, though we all feel it so nearly. But, after all, this peculiar attitude is not a new one: it has merely been accentuated by the war.
Thoughts of death are intimately connected with the ultimate problems of the meaning and value of the individual life and of the life of communities. Can we detect a plan in the life of the individual or of society, and in the workings of history? Exactly two hundred years have elapsed since the death of Leibniz, one of the greatest thinkers of all times, and the last great modern philosopher who dared to trace out the divine design of the Creation. In his Théodicée this German thinker tried to justify the Logos of life and history. In the universe and in mankind he saw an eternal and predestined harmony: he thus accepted and followed up the noble thought of the Bohemian Comenius.
After Leibniz the philosophers no longer had the courage to attempt a justification of the Divinity: they resigned themselves to a study of historical facts, in the hope of detecting the divine purpose in the development of the nations and of mankind at large. History and the Philosophy of History became the favourite sciences, and still hold their ground to this day. And by a strange destiny it was the German followers of the great philosopher of Universal Harmony who sought to justify the Discord of War. Death on the battlefield has been glorified by them, and the primacy of the German nation and its world-power has been revealed
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