to Jesus—let him walk that road, but not too quickly nor with too much assurance.
At the instant when things lose their immediate connexion with the last things, when the plain tie between the other side and this side ceases to bind, when any view other than the absolutely critical becomes possible for us, at that moment, which is all too similar to death, there begins the history of degeneration, church history. Overbeck even agrees with Zündel in his significant judgement that Paul already belongs in this second period; although it may be true that no one has really understood Paul who thinks today that he can share Paul’s opinions (p. 54), and equally true that Paul does not wholly lack important marks of the super-history (pp. 55–63).
But church history ‘stands actually between life and death, and to see it overweighted on the one side or the other depends solely on the situation and the arbitrary choice of the observer. History also continues life, even as it prepares death, (p. 21). But in any case, after the expectation of the Parousia had lost its reality, Christianity lost its youth and itself. It has become something wholly different; it has become a religion, an ‘ideological antidote’, as we must admit with Bernoulli. And ‘religion certainly shares with the world its origin from the human world’ (p. 74).
But Christianity will not be a religion, will not be in any sense an antidote—quite apart from the fact that such an antidote is of no use whatever to man. Man lives and must live from his certainty of the ‘last things’. And that is something very different.
III
Overbeck, unlike Kierkegaard, does not make his complaint against modern Christianity as himself an advocate of a true Christianity in opposition to a false (p. 279). He cannot assert forcibly enough that he is without any relation to Christianity of any kind. He claims for himself no religious mission. He holds so little of Christian belief that he never once counts himself among its believers! (p. 255). He will speak only of what he knows. And he expects (even apart from himself) no reform but only ‘a gentle fading away’ of Christianity (p. 68). He was early conditioned to regard even the religious struggles of the Reformation as pathological, even ‘without the stimulus of a serious hatred for Christianity and religion’ (p. 289).
But on our side, we know from his own words the significance it had for him when he thus placed himself ‘in the air’. Actually a more positive position does not exist than the mountain path he walks between the two chasms. His controlled, restrained pathos, as he steps forward, with the utmost knowledge of his subject, to give warning against the fictitious relationship between Christianity and the modern world, his far from ‘sceptical’ insight and reverence, and the urgency with which he speaks of those matters which merit it, the hopeless conflict of his whole life which was never fully resolved just because of his complete respect for reality, all these in the last analysis can be understood only as ‘Christian’, as a fragment of ‘super-history’. There hovers above this wholly critical book something of the peace of God that is higher than all reason—and perhaps this is all the more felt because its author did not at all so intend.
Yet it can even be debated whether Overbeck was more anxious to protect Christianity against the modern world or the modern world against Christianity. Bernoulli seems desirous of emphasizing the latter. Of course, Overbeck does both. But if his position is accurately portrayed at the end of the preface, where Bernoulli makes him stand guard on ‘the threshold of metaphysical possibilities’ (p. xxxvi), with the humanist culture in front of him and behind him Christianity, ‘the problem which puts all history in jeopardy, the problem whose nature is fundamentally enigmatic’ (p. 7)—it is a picture which inevitably reminds us of the Faustian ‘May the sun remain behind me’—then we may well be tempted to a different emphasis from Bernoulli’s.
It is not from humanist culture and it is not from Christianity that this theologian who does not wish to be a theologian comes. He comes rather from the elemental, the primary, the transcendental, the immediate expectation of the Parousia in the world, which stands behind Christianity (p. 291). From his words we catch a note of Jeremiah, however sternly it may be suppressed; under all the repression there is a sense of compulsion to act and to participate, which is not of this world. But we can be content with the sober statement that he was the guard of the boundary between here and there (the original), and not a mere observer.
The nature of ‘modern’ Christianity (it has always been determined to be ‘modern’) is therefore denatured, because in it the tension of contradiction is transformed into a normal relationship which must result in the corruption of both parts—humanity and Christianity (p. 68). Christianity has become such a problematical entity because it has lost the ‘force of the offensive thrust’ which it once wielded against the world, and therefore has also lost its victory over the world (pp. 65–6). But it has kept its impossible claim to advise man and direct him beyond himself. That claim, which has lost all validity since it is removed from the super-historical era with its unique possibilities, can only act as the wisdom which brings death (pp. 69, 279).
True Christianity and the world, since the loss of the immediate bond created by the expectation of the Parousia, can no longer understand each other nor be mutually understood. There is nothing which true Christianity rejects more firmly than a history in the world. Such Christianity never even thought of ‘the effect of Jesus on history’. His was the Spirit—and by that term Christianity meant something quite different (p. 68).
But nothing lies farther from the mind of the present day than belief in an imminent end of the world. The Christianity of today ‘has so little room left for the whole conception of the Return of Christ that it cannot even conceive it historically as belonging to the original Christianity; at the most it may admit its presence as a negligible factor (quantité négligeable)’ (p. 68). ‘A modern hat! Very good. That can conform to the fashion; but modern Christianity? Is not that quite different?… We who so judge are content with this truth; but the modern world around us is not and it speaks of modern and historical Christianity as realities to be taken seriously’ (p. 245). Historical Christianity (‘the religious community which developed into the Christian church out of the gospel as its pre-historic embryo’ p. 63) is in itself a contradiction.
‘Has Christianity brought a new era? Is the Christian form of dating, anno domini, based on actuality? Certainly not; for originally Christianity spoke of a new age only under a presupposition which has not been met, namely that the existing world was to perish and make room for a new world. For a moment that was a genuine expectation, and it has re-emerged now and again as such; but it has never become the historically established fact which alone could offer a real basis for a complete new calendar supposed to conform to facts. It is the world which has asserted itself—not the Christian expectation for the world; and therefore the alleged “Christian era” in it has always remained a figment of the imagination’ (p. 72). ‘The Christianity of all periods has always shown itself incapable of giving a universal message to the human world. It has helped only individuals and it has helped in no other way. In the community at all times a mediocre Christianity rules’ (p. 268).
‘A façade can lack an interior … on the other hand it is unendurable that an interior should present a false façade; and that is the case with present-day Christianity. But you cannot summon its interior as a witness against its exterior as though it could be found without it. And anyhow, no one has to listen to it.… Those representatives of Christianity who currently appeal to its “inner life” are its worst traitors’ (p. 71). For ‘the innermost and the real need of Christianity at the present time is the practice of it in life (Praxis). What Christianity lacks most in order to be able to assert itself in the world is evidence of its practical applicability in life’ (p. 274). ‘But our life is obviously not ruled by Christianity. In view of that, it is of little interest to proclaim how far it may rule the thoughts which are presented in writing. Modern Christianity itself performs only a grave-digger’s job, as by the sweat of its brow it widens the gulf between theory and practice.
‘Christian
