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123 LECTURE EIGHT [XI 175] We may now articulate it as fact, and also the revelation has born witness to it, that a spiritual power, God, ruled over the time of the still unified and undivided human race, a God who restrained the free dispersal, a God who kept the development of the human race on the first level of Being that is divided by mere natural or tribal differences, but which otherwise is completely uniform—a condition that indeed alone would be correctly called the state of nature. And, certainly, just this time was also the much glorified golden age, of which, even in the farthest distance from it, the memory has remained for the human race, even for the one long divided into peoples or nations —where, namely, as the Platonic story that flowed from the same memory says, God himself was their guardian and head, and because he shepherded them, there werea no societal laws. For as the shepherd does not allow his flock to scatter, God, acting as a powerful force of attraction, held humanity , with gentle but irresistible power, enclosed in the sphere in which he deemed it appropriate to hold them. Notice indeed the Platonic expression that God himself was their head. Thus at that time God was not imparted to men through a doctrine, through a philosophy [Wissenschaft]; the relation was a real one and for that reason could only be a relation [XI 176] to God in his actuality, not to God in his essence, and thus also not to the true God. For the actual God is not immediately also the true God—like we even still attribute to him whom we look upon, in another respect, as a godless one, a relation to God in his actuality, but not to God in his truth, to whom on the contrary he is completely alienated. The God of pre-historical time is an actual, real God, and in him also the true God Is, but not known as such. Thus humanity worshipped what it did not know, to which it had no ideal (free) relation, but rather only a real relation. Christ says to the Samaritans (as is well known, these were seen by the Jews as heathens, so thus fundamentally he says of the heathens): “You worship what you do not know, we—the Jews, as monotheists , who have a relation to the true God as such—we worship what we know” (know at least as something to come). The true God, God as such, only can be in knowledge, and in complete contrast with a well-known word little reflected upon, but in agreement with the words of Christ, we must say: the God who would not be known would be no God. From the very beginning monotheism has existed only as a doctrine and knowledge [Wissenschaft], and never merely as a doctrine in general, but rather as one codified in script and preserved in holy books; and even those who presuppose of mythology a knowledge of the true God are obliged to think this monotheism as doctrine, even as system. Those who worship the true God—that is, God in his truth— can, as Christ says, only worship him conjointly in spirit, and this relation can only be a free one; as, however, that relation to God outside his truth, as it is accepted in polytheism and mythology, can only be an unfree one. Once man has fallen out of the essential relation to God,b which also could only be a relation to God in his essence, that is, in his truth [XI 177], the way that humanity followed in mythology is not a contingent one, but rather a necessary one, when it was determined of humanity to attain the goal only through this way. The goal, however, is that intended by providence. Seen from this standpoint it was divine providence itself that had given to the human race that relative One as first head and guardian; humanity was dependent on this [One] and, as it were, set under his discipline. Even for the chosen people [Geschlecht] the God of the pre-historical time is only the bridle or restraint, through which it is held by the true God. Their knowledge of the true God is not a natural one, and for just this reason also not a static one, but rather is always only becoming because the true God himself is for consciousness not the existing one...

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