nature alone has suffered for me, Christ is a poor Saviour to me; in that case, he needs a Saviour himself.” And thus, out of the need for salvation, is postulated something transcending human nature, a being different from man. But no sooner is this being postulated than there arises the yearning of man after himself, after his own nature, and man is immediately re-established. “Here is God, who is not man and never yet became man. But this is not a God for me. . . . That would be a miserable Christ to me, who. . . . should be nothing but a purely separate God and divine person. . . . without humanity. No, my friend, where thou givest me God, thou must give me humanity too.”[1]
In religion man seeks contentment; religion is his highest good. But how could he find consolation and peace in God, if God were an essentially different being? How can I share the peace of a being if I am not of the same nature with him? If his nature is different from mine, his peace is essentially different,—it is no peace for me. How then can I become a partaker of his peace, if I am not a partaker of his nature; but how can I be a partaker of his nature if I am really of a different nature? Every being experiences peace only in its own element, only in the conditions of its own nature. Thus, if man feels peace in God, he feels it only because in God he first attains his true nature, because here, for the first time, he is with himself, because everything in which he hitherto sought peace, and which he hitherto mistook for his nature, was alien to him. Hence, if man is to find contentment in God, he must find himself in God. “No one will taste of God, but as He wills, namely—in the humanity of Christ; and if thou dost not find God thus, thou wilt never have rest.”[2] “Everything finds rest on the place in which it was born. The place where I was born is God. God is my father-land. Have I a father in God? Yes, I have not only a father, but I have myself in Him; before I lived in myself, I lived already in God.”[3]
A God, therefore, who expresses only the nature of the understanding, does not satisfy religion, is not the God of religion.
