In Luther’s soteriology, God’s grace appears as the mediation between human weakness and divine perfection—an opposed pair not unrelated to the Being in actuality and Being in potentiality of Jaurès’s French thesis. What Jaurès finds most interesting in Luther’s doctrine of grace, in other words, is its dialectical quality. Glossing Luther, Jaurès writes:
We must distinguish between the revealed God and the hidden God, that is to say between the Word of God and God himself. God by his Word calls all men to salvation; but God, by his will, pushes some toward salvation, some toward death. And this is not injustice, because it is not ours to judge God or to truly account for the rules of his justice. There are three levels of truth, like three kinds of light: the light of nature, the light of grace, and the light of divine glory. In the light of nature, we are offended to see how often liars and impious men succeed in this worldly life. But in the light of grace, we see that life on earth is only a part of human life, and that beyond this a reward has been reserved for the just, a punishment for the impious. Why has God predestined some to what is good and others to what is bad? In the light of grace, we still cannot comprehend clearly, and we can only stammer unthinkingly that justice has been violated. But when we are allowed to enter into the heart of the radiant glory of the invisible God, then the divine will appear fully just and good to us. (PTA, 388)
For Luther, the world of suffering, of injustice, of sin and alienation that is immediately present before us is not utterly disconnected from the complete joy, perfect justice, and absolute unity of divine glory that is hidden from us. But the brokenness of the world is not the only truth about the world: human beings can experience grace. For Luther, grace—the content of the revealed Word of God—is something we experience here, within the world, although we can only comprehend that grace if we understand it as the mediation of that which remains beyond our sight and grasp. Grace is an intimation of the divine. It shapes and illuminates life in this world, even while the world remains broken and sinful. This is not so different from saying that Being’s potentiality grounds Being’s actuality. What Luther contributes here is the emphatically dialectical notion of a mediation between two poles, whatever names we might give them. Luther’s doctrine of grace suggests to Jaurès that, in politics as in religion, the ideal for which we long can be continually present with us despite its perpetual absence from us.
This dialectic—or, better, this paradox—of the presence of the absent is what fascinates Jaurès about Luther’s moments of biblical literalism. Luther insists that the Garden of Eden was a real place in the Middle East containing an actual Tree of Life because he wants to hold on to the idea that “it is not in unknown or fictional places but in the world itself” that the “struggle for good or evil” happens. Thus the centrality for Luther of the doctrine of incarnation: “What is Christ if not God himself present within the nature of things and of the visible world?” Luther believes that “human life renewed in Christ is impelled toward immortality, permeated with immortality, as if with a divine infection,” writes Jaurès (PTA, 391). This means that
just as Luther does not want to abstract and isolate the human will from divinity, so he refuses to separate and isolate justice from the nature of things and from the nature of the visible world. Justice will not be accomplished outside nature or outside the things of the visible world, but in the world itself, corrected and amended. Justice will not shine forth in the cold regions of death, but in life itself; it will blend into the light of the visible sun. Justice is wrapped up in and interwoven with the things of the world. . . . Heaven will be made anew, earth will be formed anew—not a theological heaven, not a phantasmagoric image of the earth, but a real heaven, a true earth. We need not say: Justice is in the other world and outside this world. Justice will shine one day under the sun of the living, and under the visible sky. Truly, can we not recognize here the spirit of socialism, which works to bring justice into life itself? (PTA, 390–91)
Jaurès has introduced a curious ambiguity here. It is not clear whether the shining justice that he anticipates will be perfect justice. Will the establishment of socialism be like the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, or is socialism the mediation of an ideal that remains as distant as Luther’s hidden God? Jaurès’s reading of Luther up to this point would suggest the latter. But when he turns to the political implications of Luther’s theology, Jaurès chooses not to remind his readers of what he has elsewhere written: that the battle is never wholly won.
Jaurès writes considerably more about Luther than about Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Lassalle, or Marx.56 The essential ideas of his Latin thesis have already been developed in the section on Luther; he has now to show the way those ideas were worked out through the tradition as a whole.
Kant’s contribution to the development of German socialism, Jaurès writes, lies in his dialectical restatement of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract theory (PTA, 404–5).57 Jaurès remarks that Kant’s emphasis on liberty is such that one could almost take him for “a French philosophe full of the revolutionary spirit and trusting solely in liberty,” except for the fact that Kant accords a “great majesty to the state,” as no philosophe would do. Bridging Rousseau and Luther, Kant argues that a social pact—that is, a power outside the individual person—makes a society based on free will possible and that civil society must in turn leave individual liberty intact. Kant shows that Rousseau’s idea of a social contract “acquires its maximum force and effective power” in the modern representative republic and in the future prospect of universal peace through a federation of republics (PTA, 404–6). In this way, Kant is able to “reconcile the ideals of French philosophy and Prussian monarchy”—that is, the principles of individual liberty and state power (PTA, 400). Most French republicans would have been too wary of state power to accept that it could further liberty, but, to Jaurès, this is the most interesting element of Kant’s political thought. What Kant has shown, Jaurès writes, is that “individualism and socialism are not opposed to each other as if they were essentially contradictory.” Instead, in Kant’s dialectical argument “they are brought together and reconciled” (PTA, 406–8).
Fichte seems to Jaurès to be an “amplified” Kant. What is only a “germ of socialism” in Kant’s work becomes in Fichte’s the idea of full-blown “collectivism” and the argument that the state should secure citizens’ economic well-being. A social contract must deal with property rights, Fichte argues, but it can make provisions for property rights only if every citizen has a claim on society’s wealth—otherwise, some participants in the contract will have to give up something for nothing, violating the precept that Rousseau finds central to the validity of the contract (PTA, 409–12). Where French Opportunists and Radicals would be content to let great social inequalities coexist with the Third Republic’s democratic institutions, Jaurès wants to take from Fichte the idea that a democracy without substantial social equality is not very democratic after all.
Jaurès admires both Kant and Fichte for making the study of history subordinate to “the demands of justice in the present.” To Marx, this would seem a weakness: “Marx justifies the need for collectivism less by its justice than by the historical destiny of social evolution. He is eager to mock those like Fichte, who ceaselessly invoke human dignity and eternal justice.” But Fichte understands something that has also become important in Jaurès’s own conception of political life. Precisely because Fichte’s method of thinking about politics has turned him toward the present and toward questions of justice, he does not rest his hopes on a drastic political change at some point in the future or accept forms of action that might in themselves be unjust. Rather than pushing for “rash action,” Fichte understands that “slowness and temporizing do not mean inaction and apathy.” For Fichte,