The essence of Christianity:
Gets it right straight away. Man lifts his mind to God and that mind marks him off from the brute. Fido lifts his mind up to man. Consciousness however is the difference. Man can think of his own special features as man, as a species.
There are those classics that you are always seeing mentioned that you eventually get a sense of what they are about suspecting all the time that this may be a simplistic opinion. Eventually you come across the real substantial thing in its antique weight and the challenge to now acquaint yourself with its authentic presence is unavoidable. Digitally that occurs more often as the libraries of the world disgorge themselves into your laptop.
“Man is himself at once I and thou; he can put himself in the place of another, for this reason, that to him his species,”
Yes absolutely and here is the source of the Buberesque ‘I and Thou’ of course. But following that is the plangent note of the Sanathana Dharma.
“Religion being identical with the distinctive characteristic of man, is then identical with self-consciousness—with the consciousness which man has of his nature. But religion, expressed generally, is consciousness of the infinite; thus it is and can be nothing else than the consciousness which man has of his own—not finite and limited, but infinite nature.”
So many insights: ‘the limit of the nature is also the limit of the consciousness’. What I sense from this book is a profound religious intuition that there is a linkage between the nature of man and that of the Divine. We are by nature god centred. These intuitions could only be understood by him as antithetical to Lutheranism. An impersonal deity or a projection of the personal, a nullity, was not acceptable.
Everything is reflected back at you - what is personal e.g. the will comes back as will as such. “The power of the object of feeling is the power of feeling itself; the power of the object of the “ is the power of the intellect itself”. I see that we are moving towards th idea that the divine that bounces back to us is the divine in ourselves. Prevenient transcendent grace is therefore tapping into our own power. This is I think his direction of travel and it is a terra incognita and there be dragons for the Protestant Christian. “We can affirm nothing without affirming ourselves”
The central question: is he alienated from his own insight? Did the truth that man finds the divine within himself become excogitated into the Absolute then being the mere projection of this divinity? The transcendent being nullified also has the effect of a like fate for the immanent. Denying the transcendent cuts the atomised individual off from grace. Agnosticism followed fast by atheism ensues. One might say after T.S. Eliot — ‘he had the experience but missed the meaning’.
