belief in creation out of nothing, and vice versa; the latter, therefore, can have no other significance than that of Providence as just developed, and it has actually no other. Religion sufficiently expresses this by making man the end of creation. All things exist, not for their own sake, but for the sake of man. He who, like the pious Christian naturalists, pronounces this to be pride, declares Christianity itself to be pride; for to say that the material world exists for the sake of man, implies infinitely less than to say that God—or at least, if we follow Paul, a being who is almost God, scarcely to be distinguished from God—becomes man for the sake of men.
But if man is the end of creation, he is also the true cause of creation, for the end is the principle of action. The distinction between man as the end of creation, and man as its cause, is only that the cause is the latent, inner man, the essential man, whereas the end is the self-evident, empirical, individual man,—that man recognises himself as the end of creation, but not as the cause, because he distinguishes the cause, the essence from himself as another personal being.[1] But this other being, this creative principle, is in fact nothing else than his subjective nature separated from the limits of individuality and materiality, i.e., of objectivity, unlimited will, personality posited out of all connexion with the world,—which by creation, i.e., the positing of the world, of objectivity, of another, as a dependent, finite, non-essential existence, gives itself the certainty of its exclusive reality. The point in question in the Creation is not the truth and reality of the world, but the truth and reality of personality, of subjectivity in distinction from the world. The point in question is the personality of God; but the personality of God is the
- ↑ In Clemens Alex. (Coh. ad Gentes) there is an interesting passage. It runs in the Latin translation (the bad Augsburg edition, 1778) thus:—“At nos ante mundi constitutionem fuimus, ratione futurae nostrae productionis, in ipso Deo quodammodo tum præexistentes. Divini igitur Verbi sive Rationis, nos creaturæ rationales sumus, et per eum primi esse dicimur, quoniam in principio erat verbum.” Yet more decidedly, however, has Christian mysticism declared the human nature to be the creative principle, the ground of the world. “Man, who, before time was, existed in eternity, works with God all the works that God wrought a thousand years ago, and now, after a thousand years, still works.” “All creatures have sprung forth through man.”—Predigten, vor u. zu Tauleri Zeiten. (Ed. c. p. 5, p. 119).
