Preface
PREFACE [XIII 589]
In these times everything is politics. The viewpoint of the religious is worlds (toto caelo [a whole heaven]) apart from this, just as the starting point and ultimate goal are also worlds (toto caelo) apart, since the political begins on earth in order to remain on earth, while the religious, taking its beginning from above, wants to transfigure and then to lift the earthly to heaven.
An impatient politician who hastily glances at these pages will certainly find only little for his upbuilding—so be it. If, however, he would kindly be a little patient, I am convinced that he, too, will become aware, even in the brief suggestions communicated on these pages, that the religious is the transfigured rendition of what a politician, provided he actually loves being a human being and loves humankind, has thought in his most blissful moment, even if he will find the religious too lofty and too ideal to be practical.
This cannot disturb the religious person, who certainly knows that Christianity is and is called the practical religion but also knows that the prototype and the relative prototypes normatively formed accordingly, each one separately, managed by their many years of exertion, work, and disinterestedness to become nothing in the world, laughed to scorn, insulted, etc.—which then to a politician must seem the peak of impracticality, whereas even a pagan and none other than antiquity’s “practical philosopher”76 was with heart and soul an avowed fervent lover of this impracticality.
But although “impractical,” yet the religious is eternity’s transfigured rendition of the most beautiful dream of politics. No politics has been able, no politics is able, no worldliness has been able, no worldliness is able to think through or to actualize to the ultimate consequences this idea: human-equality, human-likeness [Menneske-Lighed].77 To achieve perfect equality in the medium of world-likeness [Verds-Lighed], that is, in the medium that by nature is dissimilarity, and to achieve it in a world-like [XIII 590] [verds-ligt], that is, differentiating way, is eternally impossible, as one can see by the categories. If perfect equality, likeness, should be achieved, then worldliness would have to be completely eradicated, and when perfect equality, likeness, is achieved, worldliness [Verdslighed] ceases to be. But is it not, then, like an obsession, that worldliness has gotten the idea of wanting to force perfect equality, likeness, and to force it in a worldly way—in worldliness, world-likeness! Ultimately only the essentially religious can with the help of eternity effect human equality [Menneske-Lighed], the godly, the essential, the not-worldly, the true, the only possible human equality; and this is also why—be it said to its glorification—the essentially religious is the true humanity [Menneskelighed].
Yet just one word more, if I may. What the times demand—yes, who could ever finish figuring that out, now that worldliness has caught fire by spontaneous combustion caused and occasioned by the worldly friction of worldliness against worldliness. On the other hand, what the times in the deepest sense need can be totally and completely expressed in one single word—the times need: eternity. The misfortune of our age is precisely that it has become merely time by itself, temporality, which impatiently wants to hear nothing about eternity and subsequently, well-intentioned or furious, even wants to make the eternal utterly superfluous by means of a contrived imitation, which will never in all eternity succeed, because the more we think we are able to or harden our hearts to be able to dispense with the eternal, all the more do we stand basically in need of just that.
S. K.