34.
If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is
this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities,
as “truths”mdash;that he saw everything else,
everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs,
as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God”
does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite
individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set
free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest
sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,”
and of the “sonship of God.” Nothing could he more un-Christian
than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a person,
of a “kingdom of God” that is to come, of a “kingdom of
heaven” beyond, and of a “son of God” as the second
person of the Trinity. All this—if I may be forgiven the phrase—is
like thrusting one's fist into the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels:
a disrespect for symbols amounting to world-historical cynicism. . . .
But it is nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols
“Father” and “Son”mdash;not, of course, to every
one—: the word “Son” expresses entrance into the
feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude),
and “Father” expresses that feeling itself—the
sensation of eternity and of perfection.—I am ashamed to remind you
of what the church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon
story[1] at the threshold of the Christian
“faith”? And a dogma of “immaculate conception” for
good measure? . . —And thereby it has robbed conception of its
immaculateness—
The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not
something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.”
The whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death
is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite
different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The “hour
of death” isnot a Christian idea—”hours,” time,
the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of “glad
tidings.” . . .
The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for:
it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at
a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is
everywhere and it is nowhere. . . .
Footnotes
[1]
. Amphytrion was the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns. His wife
was Alcmene. During his absence she was visited by Zeus, and bore Heracles.
