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Part 9 of 15 (Read all parts here)
The Birth of Spirit is the Realm of History
We have said much about the human capacity for evil, and the inclination towards it. But we must also speak of the opposing tendency, the inclination towards good. In what does it consist? Schelling writes that the “spirit of love” opposes a “higher ideal” to the tendency towards evil. “[Just] as selfhood in evil had made the light or the word its own and for that reason appears precisely as a higher ground of darkness, so must the word spoken in the world in opposition to evil assume humanity or selfhood and become personal itself.”[1] The spirit of love, he seems to be saying, assumes human form (or comes to expression in the human). Humanity is the carrier of this – of the word spoken in opposition to evil.
This is nothing other than the human capacity to recognize and consciously oppose the spirit of chaos – to deliberately work against chaos, disorder, and entropy and to foster order, form, and flourishing. Human spirit, as we have seen, can stand apart from both darkness and light, and can choose either. God recognizes himself in this independent human capacity to consciously oppose evil and to choose the light instead. It is important to always keep squarely in mind that God is the whole. Thus, though this human capacity to choose the light is indeed separate from God, in the sense of not being identifiable with him, it is nonetheless a development of the divine essence and is within God. Everything, of course, is within God, including what is not him (including the ground itself).
The further development of human spirit, Schelling tells us, is history. “The birth of spirit,” he writes, “is the realm of history as the birth of light is the realm of nature. The same periods of creation which are in the latter are also in the former; and one is the likeness and explanation of the other.”[2] History is the “likeness” of developing nature, and there are analogies between the periods of history and the stages of nature. What was the ground in the development of nature is the “germ and seed” from which a “higher world” is developed, a world that is the creation of human spirit – the world of culture and history. In other words, the dark principle is, as we have seen, active in the development of nature – but it is also the “germ and seed” from which culture and history are born. So that it is really evil – or, to be more precise, man’s capacity for good and evil – that moves history.
Schelling now sketches a fanciful and idiosyncratic theory of history which essentially has the status of a myth. He freely draws on perennial teachings concerning the “ages of the world,” especially those of Hesiod, weaving them together with Christian theosophical teachings. It is important to note that two years after the publication of the Freiheitsschrift, Schelling began work on a manuscript, never published during his lifetime, titled Die Weltalter, or The Ages of the World.
Schelling’s historical myth begins with an age that is recognizably “titanic.” He says that initially the ground of nature was “active alone” (i.e., by itself) for a long time, and that it “attempted a creation for itself with the divine powers it contained.” These attempts, however, were abortive since “the bond of love was missing” – by which he surely means that which draws together the ground with the light principle of form and order. The result was that these creations “again and again . . . sank back into chaos.”[3]] In a parenthetical comment, Schelling speculates that this is “perhaps indicated by the series of species that perished and did not return.” Here he is probably drawing on his knowledge of the fossilized remains of extinct animals.
A truly “enduring” creation came about only when “the word of love issued forth.” Nevertheless, Schelling notes that the spirit of love did not immediately reveal itself in history. Instead, God “perceived the will of the ground as the will for his revelation,” recognizing that the ground for his existence (i.e., his expression or revelation) would have to be a ground independent of him.[4] As a result, God allowed the ground to be independently active and, as a result, “set himself in motion only in accordance with his nature and not in accordance with his heart or with love.” (In this passage, Schelling is using “his nature” to refer to the ground of God’s being, i.e., the dark will.)
However, though the ground contains the whole of the divine being in potentia, the divine essence in the ground does not exhibit the unity or wholeness that can only come about when the dark principle is wedded to the light. Thus, Schelling states, rather mysteriously, that “only individual divine beings could preside over this being-active-for-itself [Für-sich-wirken] of the ground.”[5] The irresistible conclusion here is that Schelling is referring to the coming-into-being of multiple gods. This impression is seemingly confirmed by his next statement:
This primeval [uralt] time begins thus with the golden age of which only a frail memory in legend remains for modern mankind, a time of blessed indecision in which there was neither good nor evil; then there followed the time of the presiding gods and heroes or the omnipotence of nature in which the ground showed what for itself it had the capacity to do. At that time understanding and wisdom came to men only from the depths; the power of oracles flowing forth from the earth led and shaped their lives; all divine forces of the ground dominated the earth and sat as powerful princes on secure thrones.[6]
Drawing on Hesiod, Schelling clearly refers here to a golden age of “gods and heroes.” In this time, a fundamental innocence prevails. Note that Schelling does not say merely that it was a time without evil; he says that there was “neither good nor evil.” In other words, it was a time in which there was no possibility of a choice between good and evil; therefore, men were neither. We are left with the impression that this was a time of fundamental unconsciousness. However, it is unclear whether Schelling is referring to actual gods, or merely to the human production of mythic divinities.
That he may mean the latter is suggested by the following:
This appeared to be the time of the greatest exaltation of nature in the visible beauty of the gods [N.B.: Does he mean representations of the gods? – C.C.] and in all the brilliance of art and profound science until the principle active in the ground finally emerged as a world-conquering principle to subordinate everything to itself and establish a stable and enduring world empire.[7]
The latter part of this quote, which refers to the ground emerging as a “world-conquering principle” clearly alludes to Alexander the Great and to the subsequent ascendency of the Roman Empire. But what does the establishment of a world empire have to do with “the principle active in the ground”? Remember that the will of the ground is the will to self-expansion and self-affirmation, as well as the overcoming of otherness and exaltation of the self. It is thus intelligible as a will to conquer, or will to power. With such an example, Schelling illustrates how the ground is active in history.
However, the will of the ground can never produce, on its own, in separation from the light, a true and complete unification – of nations into an empire, or anything else. Thus, Schelling writes, “there comes the time when all this magnificence dissolves and, as if by a terrible sickness, the beautiful body of the previous world collapses and chaos finally emerges once again.”[8] This seems to be a reference to the Dark Ages, or Early Middle Ages. Schelling continues:
Already prior to this, and before complete collapse has set in, the presiding powers in this whole assume the nature of evil spirits just as the same forces, which in healthy times were beneficial guardians of life, become malignant and poisonous in nature as dissolution approaches; the belief in gods vanishes and a false magic, complete with incantations and theurgic formulas, strives to call the fleeing ones back and to mollify the evil spirits.[9]
Since earlier reference is made to “presiding” (waltenden) gods and heroes, we may take these to be the “presiding powers” (waltenden Mächte) referred to here. And what has now happened to them? They have assumed the form of evil spirits (böse Geister). Under Christianity, the old gods were reinterpreted, of course, as evil spirits or demons. But we have not yet arrived at the advent of Christianity in Schelling’s account of history, although the era in question is clearly the Hellenistic period. Instead, he seems to imply a literal transformation of the gods into maleficent beings. He refers to the “attractive force of the ground” as anticipating “the coming light.” What can Schelling mean by this? It becomes clear as the text proceeds that the coming light is the coming Christ.
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In response to the light, the ground “thrusts all forces out of indecision to meet the light in full conflict.” This is the point at which true evil emerges, opposing itself to the coming light with full ferocity. Note that what precipitates the emergence of evil is a reaction against the light. “Hence,” Schelling writes, “only in connection with the decisive emergence of the good, does evil also emerge quite decisively and as itself [als dieses].” But he says parenthetically that it is not as if evil “only arose then.” As we have seen, there is a force of primal evil active from the very beginning of creation. It is now the case, however, that the opposition has arrived through which “it alone [i.e., evil] can appear complete and as such.”[10] True evil is something more than merely a force of chaos or entropy. True, conscious evil emerges only in direct, conscious opposition to the good.
But what is it that calls forth the good, or, as Schelling puts it, the “coming light”? He states that “the very moment when the earth becomes for the second time desolate and empty” is the occasion for the birth of the “higher light of the spirit.” This light was present from the beginning but its revelation was limited. In order to oppose “personal and spiritual evil,” the spirit of light now appears “in the shape of a human person and as a mediator in order to reestablish the rapport between God and creation at the highest level.”[11] Needless to say, Schelling is referring to Christ.
Jesus holds out the promise of “salvation” through reestablishing the “relation of the ground to God.” Recall that evil consists in a choice of the will of the ground for its own sake, in separation from the light. The choice to follow Christ is the choice to bring the ground into accord with the light, by which it may function in a benign rather than a malignant manner. The choice of the darkness in separation from the light is, by definition, a purely personal choice: I, and I alone, may sever the two principles and allow the darkness to act for its own sake. Even if I am pressured to do this, I must still choose to succumb to that pressure. Thus, since “only what is personal can heal what is personal,” Schelling remarks that “God must become man so that man may return to God.” Returning to God means choosing the light.[12]
The advent of this time period is heralded by
a condition of clairvoyance which, through divine imposition, befalls individuals (as the organs chosen for this purpose), a time of signs and miracles in which divine forces counteract everywhere emergent demonic ones and mollifying unity counteracts the dispersion of forces.[13]
A new division of peoples and languages arises, and a new empire “in which the living word enters as a stable and constant centrum [center] in the struggle against chaos.” The above no doubt refers to the incarnation, rise of Christianity, decline of the Roman Empire, and the rise of Christendom. Finally, Schelling refers to the advent of the time (in and by means of Christendom) when history reveals its true nature as the unfolding of spirit. This continues “on to the end of the present time, in which God reveals himself as spirit, that is, as actu real [als actu wirklich].”[14] In keeping with Schelling’s earlier philosophy of history (as expressed, for example, in the 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism), this means that God is made real in history as human self-consciousness.
Schelling’s Reformulation of the Problem of Evil
Having offered us these rather murky historical reflections, Schelling goes on to raise a new question. “God,” he says, “has been considered thus far as a self-revealing being. But how, then, does he relate to this revelation as a moral being?” As we have seen, God’s self-revelation necessitates evil. Is this self-revelation the result of “blind and unconscious” necessity, or is it a “free and conscious” action?[15] If we assert that it was the latter, then does that mean that God also willed evil? And if God willed evil, then how can God be the most perfect being? Needless to say, Schelling is here re-stating the classical “problem of evil,” and he must now somehow provide an answer to it in terms of the metaphysics of the Freiheitsschrift.
This is no simple task. For one thing, though Schelling uses anthropomorphic language – speaking of God’s “free and conscious” choice – this must not be taken literally. To do so would be to conceive of a transcendent God confronting an exterior nature as other, and fashioning it. But for the Schelling of the Freiheitsschrift, God is the whole, who contains nature. Nevertheless, Schelling will offer us a conception of a “personal God,” though he radically transforms what is meant by “personality.” We have already noted that Schelling’s use of temporal language – speaking of the self-revelation of God as a series of events – must not be taken literally. His continual recourse to temporal and anthropomorphic language makes it very difficult to understand the central ideas of the essay.
Schelling says that he rejects the position that creation flows from God with some sort of logical necessity, for this would deny God “personality” (Personalität). He describes God as a “living unity of forces” and as “the highest personality.” This latter appellation is justified “through the connection of the ideal principle [in God] with the (relative to it) independent ground.”[16] This means that “personality” is closely connected – indeed, quite possibly identical with – what I characterized earlier as “individuality.” The individuality of things in nature is a result of the interpenetration of the light principle (of understanding, universality, or love) and the dark will of the ground. Without the dark principle, division and otherness – and, thus, individuality – could not exist. This basis of individuality exists independently of each created thing. But God is no different in this respect: recall that the ground is within God, yet not God. Thus, God’s personality also has an independent ground.
Schelling goes on to say that the personality in God is “grounded only through the bond of God with nature,” which is a somewhat different, but related claim.[17] What can he mean by it? First of all, he contrasts his conception of God with that of the “pure realism” of Spinoza and the “pure idealism” of Fichte, both of which make of God “an impersonal being.” Fichte had conceived of God as an impersonal, supersensible moral order, which led, quite justifiably, to the accusation that he was an atheist. The difference between Schelling’s theology and Spinoza’s is more difficult to discern, however, since both men take God to be the whole, which contains all of nature.
For Schelling, Spinoza’s conception of God remains impersonal because he fails to see that God’s existence requires a ground distinct from him, and that this ground is a will. It is impossible to separate will from personality or personhood. Further, while “extension” (i.e., physical reality) is one of the attributes of the God of Spinoza, those attributes are actually infinite and mostly unknowable to man. Thus, while God “contains” nature, for Spinoza, he winds up infinitely transcending physical reality, just as in the traditional theological conceptions.
By contrast, Schelling essentially holds that the entirety of nature – all things bright and beautiful, and all things dull and ugly – just is the personality of God. Schelling writes that
The whole of nature tells us that it in no way exists by virtue of a merely geometrical necessity [contra Spinoza]; in it there is not simply pure reason but personality and spirit (as we likely distinguish the rational author from one possessing wit); otherwise the geometrical understanding that has ruled for so long would have long ago had to penetrate into nature and prove its idol of general and eternal natural laws to a greater degree than has occurred thus far, whereas it has had to recognize the irrational relation of nature to itself rather more every day.[18]
Nature does not unfold, and God does not unfold, according to logical or geometrical necessity. One cannot “deduce” the bald eagle or the spikey urchin. The nature of nature is to be fundamentally creative, improvisational, unpredictable, and unnecessitated. And this just is the personality of God. In exactly the same way, my own peculiar and unpredictable conglomeration of mental habits, emotional complexes, tastes, quirks, aches and pains, etc., is my individuality, my personality. God is a whole, a one, internally differentiated into infinite quirks – fundamentally and irreducibly irrational, contingent, and “personal.”
Elaborating on this conception of divine personality, Schelling writes, “In the divine understanding there is a system; yet God himself is not a system, but rather a life.”[19] Here, two important things are happening. First, Schelling is returning to the issue of Spinozism-pantheism with which he began the treatise. Spinoza treats God as a system, just as his own philosophy is systematic. But Schelling regards this treatment of God as “lifeless.” To be sure, Spinoza conceives of God as the whole, but it is almost as if he sees the whole as a machine, and the beings it comprises as cogs.[20] In opposition to this, Schelling offers “organicism,” a conception of God which we discussed much earlier. God is not a system but a life. The whole is a living being comprised not of cogs but of “organs,” organically connected and interdependent parts.
A few pages later, Schelling makes the same point in the following way: “God is a life, not merely a being [ein Sein].”[21] What he has in mind by a “being,” as he makes clear a few lines later, is an eternal, unchanging being. Instead, as a life, God necessarily changes. Very early on in the essay, Schelling admonishes us against thinking of “things” (beings) as “immanent” within God. Instead of immanence, Schelling tells us that we should think in terms of becoming. This, too, is a way of expressing the concept of organicism. As I said much earlier, things are not simply “contained” within God, they “grow” within him. To truly understand God as a life, and the universe as “in” God, we must understand nature as coming to be in God through a process of growth or organic self-differentiation. This is simultaneously the becoming of being; the becoming of God.
After remarking that God is a life and not merely a being, Schelling states that “Being becomes aware of itself only in becoming.”[22] The ever-growing, burgeoning whole is suffused with consciousness. We must keep squarely in mind, however, that this consciousness is not that of some separated God gazing upon his creation. It is, rather, the consciousness of concrete, particular things in the world, in the whole, who, in their confrontation with the world around them, just are the embodied consciousness of God. This consciousness exists on a continuum, and its zenith is human spirit, in which a natural object, man, mirrors God, the whole, back to itself. Schelling does not stress this point in the Freiheitsschrift, as he does in his earlier philosophy, nevertheless it is clearly there.
Heidegger sees this clearly. He comments on a passage in which Schelling says we must bring the ground of God “humanly closer to us”[23]:
[W]ith this, Schelling only expresses what we have probably already had on the tip of our tongue for a long time with regard to the procedure of thought accomplished here: this whole project of divine being and being in general is accomplished by man. God is only the elevated form of man. The morphe of the anthropos is transformed, and what is transformed is asserted to be something else. In scholarly terms, this procedure is called “anthropomorphism.” One doesn’t need much acumen to find such “anthropomorphism” constantly in Schelling’s main treatise.[24]
In the next (but by no means final) installment, we will bring our exposition of Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift to a close.
Notes
[1] F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 44.
[2] Schelling, 44.
[3] Schelling, 45. I am particularly reminded here not so much of Hesiod but of the “Titanic” stages of the Norse cosmogony prior to the coming of the gods – which Schelling may very well not have known.
[4] Schelling, 45.
[5] Schelling, 45.
[6] Schelling, 45.
[7] Schelling, 45.
[8] Schelling, 45.
[9] Schelling, 45-46.
[10] Schelling, 46.
[11] Schelling, 46.
[12] Schelling, 46.
[13] Schelling, 46.
[14] Schelling, 46-47.
[15] Schelling, 58.
[16] Schelling, 59.
[17] Schelling, 59.
[18] Schelling, 59. My italics.
[19] Schelling, 62.
[20] Schelling, 20.
[21] Schelling, 66.
[22] Schelling, 66.
[23] Schelling, 28.
[24] Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 117. Heidegger goes on to express reservations about the use of the term “anthropomorphism,” which he places in scare quotes. Therefore, we should not take this as his final judgment about the metaphysics of the Freiheitsschrift, that it exhibits a pernicious “anthropomorphism.” Compare this to a passage that occurs in Heidegger’s 1941 lectures: “A superficial knowledge of Schelling’s Freedom Treatise already shows that an ‘anthropomorphism’ is at work, and indeed not behind the thinker’s back, but with his complete knowledge.” Heidegger, The Metaphysics of German Idealism, trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Rodrigo Therezo (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), 57.