“Some Aphorisms about Deism and Religion” (in Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, edited by Reinhard Lauth and Hans Gliwitzky (Stuttgartt/ Bad Canstatt, 1962 ff), Series II, vol. 1, pp. 287-97.

 

[Ed: I have included only one (*) of the four brief notes Fichte added to Aphorisms]

From the Year 1790

  1. The Christian religion is built on some simple principles, assumed to be recognized. Beyond this no further investigation can be conducted.

  2. In order to determine precisely the content of this religion, one must first seek these principles. From them everything else follows through the most correct conclusions in the clearest connections. A collection of these, without the slightest admixture of philosophical reasoning, would be a canon of this religion.

  3. It regards God only insofar as he can have a relationship to human beings. Investigations about his objective existence are cut off.

  4. It seems to be a general need of the human being to seek in his God certain characteristics which the first step to speculation must deny him. Speculation will show him God as an immutable being capable of no passion; and his heart demands a God who allows himself to be entreated, who feels sympathy and friendship. Speculation shows him a being who has no point of contact in common with him or with any finite being; and he wants a God with whom he can communicate, with whom he can engage in mutual modification.

  5. The religions of Jesus and even the Jewish religion – in the beginning more and thereafter in stages less –use anthropomorphism to satisfy this need of the heart.

  6. This means sufficed only until the reason of human beings elevated itself to a more consequential concept of the Divinity. It does not suit a religion for all times and peoples. In the Christian religion, which wanted to be such, a system of mediation was chosen.

  7. To Jesus are attributed all characteristics of God which can relate to human being; he is made the God of human beings. Beyond that, on the objective being of Jesus, all investigations are cut off.

  8. To Jesus are also attributed those characteristics which the heart of the human being seeks in his God without his understanding finding them: - sympathy, heartfelt friendship, the capacity to be moved. A standpoint of the Apostles: He is sought after everywhere, so that he may learn to be merciful, and so forth. But concerning the way in which this tender humanity coexists with his higher divine characteristics, investigations are cut off.

  9. It was a principle of the old religions, and also of the more recent ones so far as I am familiar with them, that there is sin, and that the sinner cannot approach God without certain reconciliations. A proof  that this principle is grounded in the feeling of non-speculating mankind.

  10. The Christian religion presumes this principle as a principle of feeling, without entering into the how of it and into its objective validity. – Whoever wishes to be a Christian needs no other kind of reconciliation: through the religion founded by the death of Jesus, the way to the mercy of God is opened to everyone who believes in it in his heart. Whoever feels the need for a reconciliation sacrifice regards this death as his. – That is what the Apostles seem to me to say.

  11. If one proceeds from these principles, everything in the religion appears in the most correct connection; if one goes further in his investigation, one becomes entangled in endless difficulties and contradictions.

  12. These first principles of the religion are grounded more in feelings than in convictions: in the need to unite with God; in the feeling of one’s suffering in sin and one’s culpability, etc. Hence the Christian religion appears to be determined more for the heart than for the understanding; it does not wish to force itself through demonstrations, it wants to be sought from need; it appears to be a religion of good and simple souls. – The strong do not need the doctor, but rather the weak need him – I have come to call sinners to atonement – and such expressions – Hence the darkness that swirls around it and should swirl around it; hence it is that any possible means of a forceful persuasion, for example, the appearance of Jesus before the entire Jewish nation after his resurrection, the desired signs from Heaven, and so on – was not used.

  13. It is noteworthy that in the first century uneducated Apostles cut off their investigations precisely  where Kant, the greatest thinker of  the eighteenth century, certainly without regard for their having done so, draws the boundaries – at the investigation of the objective being of God; at the investigations about freedom, imputation, guilt and punishment.

  14. If one transgresses these boundaries, but without letting his investigation take its free course; if at the outset of the thought process one has established beforehand the goal one wishes to reach, so as to unite as much as possible speculation with the utterances of religion: then there arises a house built in the air from very loosely connected materials - in the case of a Crusius, fearful and less capable of fantasy, a religious philosophy, and in the case of  more recent bolder and cleverer theologians a philosophical religion, or a Deism that is not even good for much. With this kind of work, moreover, one makes oneself suspicious of not going to work very honorably.

  15. If one proceeds straight ahead with his deliberations, without looking left or right or caring where one will end: then one comes, it appears to me, with certainty* to the following results:

  1. there is an eternal Being, whose existence, and whose way of existing, is necessary

  2. the world came into existence according to and through the eternal and necessary thoughts of this Being

  3. any change in this world is determined as it is by a sufficient cause. – The first cause of any change is the Original Thought of the Divinity

  4. Thus each thinking and feeling being must also necessarily exist as it exists. – Neither his action nor his suffering can, without contradiction,  be other that what it is.

  5. What ordinary human sensibility calls sin arises from the necessary, greater or smaller limitation of finite beings. It has necessary effects on the situation of this being, which are just as necessary as the existence of the Divinity and thus ineradicable.

* I know that the philosophers who reach other conclusions can demonstrate theirs just as sharply; but I also know that in the continuing series of their conclusions they sometimes pause in order to begin a new series, with new principles which are to be found somewhere else. So, for example, for the most sharp-witted defender of freedom who ever was, the one in Kant’s Antinomies, etc., the concept of freedom comes from a completely different source (from feeling, for example), and in his proof he does nothing more than justify and explain it: since on the contrary, in the undisturbed course of conclusions from the first principles of human knowledge a concept of this kind would never arise.

  1. This pure deistic system does not contradict the Christian religion, but rather allows it its entire subjective validity; it does not falsify it, since it nowhere comes into collision with it; it does not have a harmful influence on morality, but rather, for the person who entirely disregards it, has a thoroughly useful influence on morality; it does not prevent honoring [Christianity] as the best popular religion, and recommending it with the greatest warmth – if one has a little Consequenz and a certain sensitivity - to those who need it: but it has the effect of a certain inflexibility, and, for one’s own person, prevents participation in the pleasant feelings that flow from religion.

  2. Nonetheless there can be certain moments when the heart takes revenge on speculation; when it turns with hot desire to this God recognized as inexorable, as if he would change his great plan because of an individual: when the feeling for visible help, an almost undeniable wish to be heard in prayer throws the entire system into disorder – and, if the feeling of displeasing God in sin is general – when a pressing desire for reconciliation arises.

  3. How should one deal with such a man? In the field of  speculation he appears to be impregnable. He is not to be moved with proofs of the Christian religion; since he will grant these very willingly, if only one can prove them to him; but he appeals to the impossibility of applying them to him as an individual. He can see the advantages which he loses as a result; he can wish for them with the hottest desire; but it is impossible for him to believe. The only means of escape for him would be to cut himself off from those speculations over the boundary line. But can he do that when he wants to? If the deceptiveness of these speculations is proven to him ever so persuasively - can he do it? Can he do it if this way of thinking is already natural to him, if it is already interwoven with the entire turn of his spirit? ----

Next: The Exercises

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

~
top of
page

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

~
top of
page

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

~
top of
page

 

 

 

 

 

 

~
top of
page