The Classics of the World and Worldview

Spinozism is a worldview that seeks in God the reason for all world events, and for this reason derives all processes from eternal, necessary laws, just as mathematical truths are derived from principles. Such a worldview was not enough for Schelling. Like Spinoza, he also believed that all beings were in God; but, in his opinion, they are not determined by God alone, but rather by the ungodly within them. He accuses Spinoza of the “lifelessness of his system, the harshness of its form, the paucity of its concepts and expressions, the relentless severity of its determinations, which is perfectly compatible with its abstract approach.” Schelling therefore finds Spinoza's “mechanical view of nature” entirely logical. But nature does not show this consistency at all. "All of nature tells us that it is by no means there by mere geometric necessity; there is no pure reason in it, but personality and spirit [...], otherwise the geometric mind, which has reigned for so long, would have penetrated it long ago and its idol of universal and eternal laws of nature would have been proven more true than has been the case so far, since it must rather recognize the irrational relationship of nature to itself more and more every day." Just as man is not merely intellect and reason, but also combines other faculties and powers within himself, so, according to Schelling, this should also be the case with the divine primordial being. A God who is pure, unadulterated reason appears as personified mathematics; a God, on the other hand, who cannot proceed according to pure reason in his creation of the world, but must constantly struggle with the ungodly, can be conceived as “a wholly personal, living being.” His life bears the greatest analogy to that of humans. Just as humans seek to overcome the imperfect in themselves and strive for an ideal of perfection, so such a God is imagined as eternally struggling, whose activity is the progressive overcoming of the ungodly. Schelling compares Spinoza's God to the “oldest images of deities, which appeared all the more mysterious the less they displayed individual, living traits.” Schelling gives his God increasingly individual traits. He describes him as a human being when he says: “If we consider the terrible things in nature and the spirit world and the far greater things that a benevolent hand seems to cover us with, then we cannot doubt that the deity reigns over a world of horrors, and God, according to what is hidden from him and through him, can be called terrible and fearsome, not in the improper sense, but in the proper sense.”