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Volume IV · Page 386
| trial repeatedly pointed to the great
religious and moral law contained in the Ten Commandments of Moses. Nobody will
deny their binding character and no one can escape the sacred earnest of the
Commandments. But it would amount to misjudging reality if one would, in the
Books of Moses, ignore the descriptions of real history which in all its
frightfulness is said to have been ordered by the same God who transmitted the
Ten Commandments through Moses. It is not an empty religious phrase to say that
to God a thousand years are but a moment. Anyone familiar with history will
note that it is the outward customs and means that change in the course of the
centuries, but that in 1948 no ideas are conceived or discussed which were not
the living contents of Indian religious and philosophical systems, the Persian
and Egyptian mysteries, Greek philosophy, the political systems and battles of
the Greek city-states, of neo-platonic philosophy, of the large emotions of
early Christians, the Roman concepts of law and the state, of the great
impulses of the Catholic Church and of Protestantism. It would also mean misjudging reality if one spoke of the dark Middle Ages in the belief that in its wars the so-called modern age had become more humane than the Middle Ages, or than the even more distant times, the time of so-called barbarism. Every age has its moral aims, its ethical urge, and the stamina to create martyrs for its ideals. But, independent of these aims and forces, every age has been a piece of human history in which individuals and nations engaged in contest for their existence, for great or small aims, for individual or collective objectives, the outward shape of which in its degree of frightfulness essentially depended on inner and outer suffering, and the degree of sincerity in these contests. As subject and object of history man stands in the middle of the development formed by sincere or insincere impulses. Man will take one or the other side or will be driven on by one or the other side. If we meditate on the character of man we come to the conclusion that he who is animated by religious ethics and moral impulses and who tries to understand them in himself in order then to apply them to living history, perhaps comes closest to the concept of man. But as this aim and its practical fulfillment will never coincide, there always will be a tragic tension in the individual life between the religious and moral impulses and their application to real life, not only because individual man is limited in his power, but also because he lives in a world of powerful groups and social conditions which can wholly ignore his intentions and dispose over him. That tension extends and becomes cruder in the history of the nations, both in the living body of the nations themselves, as well as in the relations between |
