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Christianity and Paganism

by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

 

Every man has some kind of religion: that is, a supreme Truth by which he measures all his judgments -- a supreme Will by which he measures all his endeavors. These everyone has who is at one with himself, who is everywhere decidedly the same. But the worth of such a religion and the honor due to it, and to him who has become one with it, cannot be determined by its amount. It's quality alone decides friendship, a higher value than to another. At bottom every religion is anti-Christian which makes the form the thing, the letter, the substance. Such a materialistic religion, in order to be consistent, ought to maintain a material infallibility.

There are but two religions -- Christianity and Paganism -- the worship of God and Idolatry. A third, between the two, is not possible. Where Idolatry ends, there Christianity begins; and where Idolatry begins, there Christianity ends. Thus the apparent contradiction is done away with between the two propositions -- "Whoso is not against me is for me," and "Whoso is not for me is against me."

As all men are by nature liars, so all men are by nature idolators -- drawn to the visible and averse to the invisible. Hamann called the body the first-born, because God first made a clod of earth, and then breathed into it a breath of life. The formation of the earth-clod and the spirit are both of God, but only the spirit is from God; and only on account of the spirit is man said to be made after the likeness of God. ... Since man cannot do without the letter -- images and parables -- no more than he can dispense with time, which is incidental to the finite, though both shall cease -- I honor the letter, so long as there is a breath of life in it, for that breath's sake.

 

Excerpted from Christianity and Paganism, by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi



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