“How beautiful, with palm of victory,
O man, thou standest at the century's close,
The mightiest son thy Time has given birth,
By reason free, by law and precept strong,
Alike in meekness great and treasure rich,
So long unknown concealed within thy breast.”
Yes, man has discovered the treasure that long lay hidden in his breast, the seed and bud that longed to burst forth into life and blossom. Now the motto is: Independent self-development; no more restraint, but living out one's personality. The eagle is not given wings to be bound down upon the earth; nor does the bud come forth never to unfold. Full freedom, therefore, too, for everything human! And modern man leaps to the fatal conclusion: therefore all interference of external authority is unjust, is force, constraint upon my being; the same error that boys fall into when life begins to tingle with its fulness of strength. Being ignorant of their nature, they feel any kind of dependence a chain; only themselves, their judgments and desires, are law. Just so modern man, in his deplorable want of self-knowledge, fails to see how he is cutting himself off from the source and support of life; how he is pulling himself out by the roots from the soil whence he derives his strength; how, left to his own littleness, he withers away; how, abandoned to his own diseased nature, he condemns himself to intellectual decay.
Autonomism, individualism, independent personality – these have become the ideals that permeate the man of this age, and influence the thought of thousands without their knowing it.
The well-known, Protestant, theologian, A. Sabatier, writes: “It is not difficult to find the common principle to which all the expressions and tendencies of the spirit of modern times can be reduced in any field whatever. One word expresses it – the word, ‘autonomy.’ By autonomy I understand the firm confidence, which the mind of man has attained in his present stage of development, that he contains in himself his own rule of life and norm of thought, and that he harbours the ardent desire of realizing himself by obeying his own law” (La Religion de la Culture moderne, 10).
“Modern times,” writes R. Eucken, “have changed the position of the human subject … it has become to them the centre of his life and the ultimate end of his endeavours” (Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 112 (1898), 165 s.). Still clearer are the following words of G. Spicker: “Man depended formerly either on nature or on revelation, or on both at once; now it is just the opposite: man is in every way, theoretically as well as practically, an autonomist. If anything can denote clearly the characteristic difference between the modern and the old scholastic view, it is this absolute, subjective, standpoint.” “As we in principle do not intend to depend on any objectivity or authority, there is nothing left but the autonomy of the subject” (Der Kampf zweier Weltanschauungen (1898), 143, 145).
A noted apostle of modern freedom exclaims enthusiastically:
“This after all is freedom: an unconditional appreciation of human greatness, no matter how it asserts itself. This greatest happiness, as Goethe called it, the humanists have restored to us. Henceforth we must with all our strength retain it. Whoever wants to rob us of it, even should he descend from heaven, is our deadliest enemy.” (H. St. Chamberlain.)
It is true, of course, that man should strive for perfection of self in every respect; for the harmonious development of all the faculties and good inclinations of his own being, and, in this sense, for a nobler humanity; he should also develop and assert his own peculiar disposition and originality, so far as they are in order, and thus promote a healthy individualism. But all this he should do within the moral bonds of his created and limited nature, being convinced that only by keeping within the right limits of his being can he develop his ability and personality harmoniously; he dare not reach out, in reckless venture after independence, to free himself from God and his eternal end, and from the yoke of truth; he dare not transform the divine sovereignty into the distorted image of created autotheism.
He who professes a Christian view of the world, can see in such a view of man and his freedom only an utter misunderstanding of human nature and an overthrow of the right order of things. This overthrow, again, can only produce calamity, interior and exterior disorder. Woe to the planet that feels its orbit a tyrannical restraint, and leaves it to move in sovereign freedom through the universe! It will move along free, and free will it go to ruin. Woe to the speeding train that leaves its track; it will speed on free, but invariably dash itself to pieces! A nature that abandons the prescribed safeguards can only degenerate into a wild sprout. We shall see how these principles have actually become in modern intellectual life the principles of negation and intellectual degeneration.
St. Augustine states the history of mankind in the following, thoughtful words: “A twofold love divides mankind into the City of the World and the City of God. Man's self-love and his self-exaltation pushed to the contempt of God constitute the City of the World; but the love of God pushed to contempt of self is the foundation of the City of God.” (Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo, terrenam scilicet amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei, coelestem vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui. De civ. Dei XIV, 28.) Thus St. Augustine, while contemplating the time when the war between heathenism and Christianity was raging. The same spectacle is presented to our own eyes to-day, probably more thoroughly than ever before in history.
The Period of Man's Emancipation
The modern view of man and his freedom has shaped itself gradually in recent times; the present is ever the child of the past. The most important factor in this development was undoubtedly the Reformation. It emancipated man in the most important affair, religious life, from the authority of the Church, and made him independent. “All have the right to try and to judge what is right and wrong in belief,” so Luther told the Christian nobility of the German nation; “everybody shall according to his believing mind interpret the Scriptures, it is the duty of every believing Christian to espouse the faith, to understand and defend it, and to condemn all errors.” Protestantism means even to the modern man “the thinking mind's break with authority, a protest against being fettered by anything positive, the mind's return to itself from self-alienation” (Schwegler, Geschichte der Philosophie (1887), 167): “it puts out of joint the Christian Church organization, and overturns its supernatural foundation, quite against its will, but with an actual, and ever more plainly visible, effect” (E. Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus fuer die Entstehung der modernen Welt (1906), 29).
The first step towards full autonomy was taken with energy; the emancipation from external authority then progressed rapidly in the domain of politics, sociology, economy, and especially of religion, to the very elimination of everything supernatural. There came the English individualism of the seventeenth century. The liberty of “individual conviction,” termed also “tolerance,” in the sense of rejecting every authoritative interference in the sanctuary of man's thought and feeling, was extolled; of course at first only as the privilege of those who were intellectually superior. Soon the Deism of a Herbert of Cherbury and Locke was reached; it was the religion of natural reason, with belief in God and the obligation to moral action. Whatever is added by positive religions, and therefore by the Christian religion, is superfluous; hence not dogma, but freedom! Locke, indeed, denied to atheists state toleration; but J. Toland already advised full freedom of thought, even to the tolerance of atheism. In the year 1717 Freemasonry came into existence in England. Adam Smith originated the idea of a liberal political economy which frees the individual from all bond, even in the economic field. The views prevailing in England then exert great influence in France. Rousseau and Voltaire appear.
In France and Germany the enlightenment of the eighteenth century makes rapid strides in the direction of emancipation. “The enlightenment of the eighteenth century,” writes H. Heltner, “not only resumes the prematurely interrupted work of the sixteenth century, the Reformation, but carries it on independently, and in its own way. The thoughts and demands of the ‘enlightened’ are bolder and more aggressive, more unscrupulous and daring… With Luther