Lecture V

Had anyone during the first centuries of Christianity spoken about proofs for the existence of God, as Anselm of Canterbury, people would not have known what was meant. In earlier times they would have known still less! For in the second or third century before Christ, to speak of proofs for the existence of God would have been as if someone sitting there in the first row were to stand up and I were to say: “Mr. X stands there,” and someone in the room were to assert “No, that must first be proved!” What man experienced as the divine was a Being of full reality standing before his soul. He was endowed with the faculty of perception for what he called divine; this God appears primitive and incomplete in the eyes of modern man. They could not get beyond the point they were then capable of reaching. But the men of that age had no desire to hear about proofs, for that would have seemed absurd. Man began to “prove” the existence of the divine when he had lost it, when it was no longer perceived by inner, spiritual perception. The introduction of proofs for the existence of God shows, if one looks at the facts impartially, that direct perception of the divine had been lost. But the moral impulses of that time were bound up with what was divine. Moral impulses of that time can no longer be regarded as moral impulses for today. When in the first third of the fifteenth century the faculty of perception of the divine-spiritual in the old sense was exhausted, perception of the moral also faded and all that remained was the traditional dogma of morals which men called “conscience.” But the term was always applied in the vaguest manner.