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ii. The Moral Teaching of Jesus
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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T H E S P I R I T O F C H R I S T I A N I T Y of the fate which follows from the inevitable slip of a beautiful character; it can arouse horror alone. The fate of the Jewish people is the fate of Macberh who stepped out of nature itself, clung to alien Beings, and so in their service had to trample and slay everything holy in human nature, had at last to be forsaken by his gods (since these wcre objects and he their slave) and be dashed to pieces on his faith itself. [ยง ii. THE MORAL TEACHING OF JESUS : (a) THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT CONTRASTED WUH THE MOSAIC LAWAND WITH KANT'S ETHICS] (261) Jesus appeared shortly before the last crisis produced by the fermentation of the multiplex elements in the Jewish fate. In this time of inner fermentation, while these varied elements were developing until they became concentrated into a whole and until sheer oppositions and open war [whh Rome] were the result, several partial outbreaks preceded the final act.2gMen of commoner soul, though of strong passions, comprehended the fate of the Jewish people only partially; hence they were not calm enough either to let its waves carry them along passively and unconsciously and so just to swim with the tide or, alternatively, to await the further development necessary before a stronger power could be associated with their efforts. The result was that they outran the fermentation of the whole and fell without honor and without achievement . Jesus did not fight merely against one part of the Jewish fate; to have done so would have implied that he was himself in the toils of another part, and he was not; he set himself against the whole. Thus he was himself raised above it and tried to raise his people above it too. But enmities like those he sought to transcend can be overcome only by valor; they cannot be reconciled by love. Even 29. [In an earlier draft (Nohl, p. 385), Hegel wrote: "In the time of Jesus the Jewish people no longer prcsents the appearance of a whole. There are so many ideals and different types of life, so much unsatisfied striving for something new, that any confident and hopeful reformer is as assured of a following as he is of enemies."] [ 205 I E A R L Y T H E O L O G I C A L W R I T I N G S his sublime effort to overcome the whole of the Jewish fate must therefore have failed with his people, and he was bound to become its victim himself. Since Jesus had aligned himself with no aspect of the Jewish fate at all, his religion was bound to find a great reception not among his own people (for it was too much entangled in its fate) but in the rest of the world, among men who no longer had to defend or uphold any share of the fate in question.30 Rights which a man sacrificcs if he freely recognizes and cstablishes powers over himself, regulations which, in the spirit of Jesus, we might recognize as grounded in the living modification of human nature [i.e., in an individual human being] were simply commands for the Jews and positive throughout. The order in which the various kinds of Jewish laws (laws about worship, moral laws, and civil laws) are followed here is for them, therefore, (262) a strange and manufactured order, since religious, moral, and civil laws were all equally positive in Jewish eyes, and distinctions between these types are first introduced for the Jews as a result of the manner of Jesus' reaction to them. Over against commands which required a bare service of the Lord, a direct slavery, an obedience without joy, without pleasure or love, i.e., the commands in connection with the service of God, Jesus set their precise opposite, a human urge and so a human need. Religious practice is the most holy, the most beautiful, of all things; it is our endeavor to unify the discords necessitated by our development and our attempt to exhibit the unification in the ideal as fully existent, as no longer opposed to reality, and thus to express and confirm it in a deed. It follows that, if that spirit of beauty be lacking in religious actions, they are the most empty of all; they are the most senseless...