Because Protestantism broke the mediæval hierarchy, the opinion could
take root that hierarchy in general had been shattered by it, and it
could be wholly overlooked that it was precisely a "reformation," and so
a reinvigoration of the antiquated hierarchy. That mediæval hierarchy
had been only a weakly one, as it had to let all possible barbarism of
unsanctified things run on uncoerced beside it, and it was the
Reformation that first steeled the power of hierarchy. If Bruno Bauer
thinks:[55] "As the Reformation was mainly the abstract rending of the
religious principle from art, State, and science, and so its liberation
from those powers with which it had joined itself in the antiquity of
the church and in the hierarchy of the Middle Ages, so too the
theological and ecclesiastical movements which proceeded from the
Reformation are only the consistent carrying out of this abstraction of
the religious principle from the other powers of humanity," I regard
precisely the opposite as correct, and think that the dominion of
spirits, or freedom of mind (which comes to the same thing), was never
before so all-embracing and all-powerful, because the present one,
instead of rending the religious principle from art, State, and science,
lifted the latter altogether out of secularity into the "realm of
spirit" and made them religious.
Luther and Descartes have been appropriately put side by side in their
"He who believes is a God" and "I think, therefore I am" (_cogito, ergo
sum_). Man's heaven is _thought_,--mind. Everything can be wrested from
him, except thought, except faith. _Particular_ faith, like faith in
Zeus, Astarte, Jehovah, Allah, etc., may be destroyed, but faith itself
is indestructible. In thought is freedom. What I need and what I hunger
for is no longer granted to me by any _grace_, by the Virgin Mary, by
intercession of the saints, or by the binding and loosing church, but I
procure it for myself. In short, my being (the _sum_) is a living in the
heaven of thought, of mind, a _cogitare_. But I myself am nothing else
than mind, thinking mind (according to Descartes), believing mind
(according to Luther). My body I am not; my flesh may _suffer_ from
appetites or pains. I am not my flesh, but _I_ am _mind_, only mind.
This thought runs through the history of the Reformation till to-day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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