40. Knowledge of Nature and Knowledge of the Mind – From Wisdom to Faith

Life must be shaped according to ideals. Therefore, harmony between ideal and life must be possible.

Therefore, one should not say, as Harnack does: “Absolute value judgments are always created only by feeling and will”. No, the same life that creates plants and animates animals creates value judgments in man. If you cannot find the spiritual source of life in the silent stone, in the sprouting plant, then you will soon grow weary of believing in it in your own soul. If the laws of nature that your science investigates are something separate from you, and the laws that also give you value are likewise something separate, something separate from those, then you easily lose your certainty about the latter. Your scientific observation compels you to believe in the laws of nature; you must believe in them if you do not want to deny your eyes and ears and your mind. Do you know that the other, higher laws are just as firmly at work in the universe, which first flash in your soul, then you must say to yourselves: these are as true as those. And if you do not live your ideals, it is as if the sun did not follow its course. A sun that did not revolve in these orbits would disturb the course of the universe; a person who does not live his ideals disturbs it in the same way. And why do many not feel this disturbance? Because they do not see the same source in both. Because they separate their faith from their will. The child of this separation is indifference to faith.

There are enough of these indifferent people living among us today. They enjoy the light and warmth of the sun, they satisfy their everyday needs, which have been implanted in them by the laws of nature. And when they have done that, they may at most delight in superficial literature and art, which is nothing but a reflection and mirror image of these everyday needs. They shy away from the universal questions that have inspired the minds of humanity for thousands of years. They are not particularly moved when one speaks to them of the “eternal” needs of man, of what J. G. Fichte conceived as the “destiny of man”.

And why do they do so? Because they do not feel the same compelling force in the laws of the spirit as in those of physical existence. The feeling that the people have attached to the figure of Faust in the sixteenth century has taken on a different nature. Faust wanted to reach the spirit as a knower. But the people wanted to believe in the spirit. A spirit that wants to enter into knowledge is the devil's. For it wants to approach us enticingly like nature. But nature is sin.

That one is damned if one surrenders to the spirit, today's humanity does not believe like that of the sixteenth century. But the opinion has remained with it that one cannot recognize the spirit as one recognizes nature. If it cannot believe in it, then it becomes indifferent to it. Knowledge of nature therefore advances, and with it everything that is carried and developed by it. Knowledge of the spirit withers, and at most feeds on the sentiments of the fathers.

And it is not even mere indifference that causes our contemporaries to behave this way. If man seeks this source of life in the laws of his soul, he knows that without it creation would progress just as little undisturbed as cosmic development would progress just as little undisturbed if the sun did not follow its laws. Then the human being also feels that what the German mystic Angelus Silesius says is true:

God cannot make a single little worm without me: if I do not maintain it with him, it must collapse immediately.

Yes, just as the sun, when it leaves its orbit, disturbs the whole of creation, not only itself, so man disturbs the life of the little worm if he does not live according to the laws of his soul, his ideals. And from the realization that a source of life gives rise to our laws of life and to the laws of nature, there arises a cosmic responsibility for man. Lucifer is the significant symbol of the wisdom lying in the world, which is taken up by our knowledge. Only faith can reverently worship this wisdom. Is wisdom now to be an opponent of faith, Lucifer an adversary of God grasped in faith? It is true that faith is the light of the world; but knowledge can only be the bearer, the bringer of this light. And Lucifer means light-bearer. Man should not rest until his wisdom has brought him faith. Lucifer is to be the herald, not the adversary of God. Wisdom is to give birth to faith, to knowledge, to religion. —