The Essence of Christianity

Belief in the Resurrection of Jesus springs from the subjective human desire “for an immediate certainty of his personal existence after death” (90). Jesus’s resurrection represents a much more tangible victory over death than the abstract idea of immortality. The Resurrection unites life and death into one transcendent idea, as does the teaching on the “virgin” birth. As the Catholic faith teaches the sanctity of both marriage and celibacy, the mystery of the miraculous conception and birth makes sense of these contradictory ideas. Protestantism’s break from Catholicism marked a shift away from mystery and toward rationalism, as seen in the Protestant tendency to disregard aspects of the Christian faith regarding the Virgin Mary; thus, Protestantism begins to break down the mystery that holds various tensions together.

The mystery of the redeemer illustrates humans’ desire to be rescued; to be acted upon is better than to act. Law and attempts at self-redemption are ineffectual; the work of the redeemer is to set an example that acts upon “the feelings and imagination. In short, example has magical, i.e., sense-affecting powers; for the magical or involuntary force of attraction is an essential property, as of matter in general, so in particular of that which affects the senses” (94). Laws force human beings to strive to follow them under their own power, but examples serve to imperceptibly bring humans into line.

This is where the mystery of faith intersects with the idea of a redeemer and a personal God—the miracle of faith frees the subject from any exterior and objective standard (the law), and makes room for the subject’s feelings to be influenced. The person of Christ is the manifestation of the soul’s desire to see God and thus witness human omnipotence. Christ provides the opportunity to know God personally.

Christianity, thanks to the person of Christ, allows humanity to untether itself from nature. “Heathenism” is the desire to be tied to nature and limited by it. Christianity is the liberation from nature, but it falls into the opposite error: “The ancients sacrificed the individual to the species; the Christians sacrificed the species to the individual” (99). According to the “heathen” worldview, the human being is part of a whole, individually unimportant. To be a Christian, on the other hand, is to view the human being as totally distinct from the whole, more important in its own individuality.

With this perspective, one sees that the idea of God is in fact the idea of the whole species of humanity wrapped up in a single being called God. Thus, the universal becomes the unique attribute of the one divine entity. This understanding extends to the idea of immortality, another differentiating aspect between Christianity and “heathenism.” The “heathen” view casts immortality on the species as a whole, sustained by the succession of individual lives. Christians, casting their divine entity in place of the species, and projecting all universal attributes on this one being, similarly view their own individuality—as they do God’s—as immortal, replacing the immortality of the species with the immortality of the individual. Christ comes to be the redeemer to illuminate this fundamental truth.

In the ancient world, concepts of “virginity” and celibacy were seen as in conflict with immortality, since they worked against the continuation of the human species. In Christianity, however, this is not the case since immortality is a personal attainment: “The individual man attains his end by himself alone; he attains it in God,—God is himself the attained goal, the realised highest aim of humanity” (104). From a Christian perspective, the goal of eternal life allows the importance and relevance of the present earthly life to fade into oblivion. This life holds no importance when held up against the fulfillment of heaven.

Advancing from this position, one sees why Christianity devalues worldly pleasures, which ultimately pass away. If death is the means by which one attains heaven, then mortification of the body—putting the body to death in a certain way—becomes a kind of moral law:

Moral death is the necessary anticipation of natural death; I say necessary, for it would be the extreme of immorality to attribute the obtaining of heaven to physical death, which is no moral act, but a natural one common to man and the brute. Death must therefore be exalted into a moral, a spontaneous act (105).

In heaven, all manner of things pertaining to the human species will be cast aside—sexuality, procreation, nourishment, and growth—and the individual will be elevated: “Heaven is nothing but the idea of the true, the good, the valid,—of that which ought to be” (109), but only for the individual.

The existence of heaven is the existence of a state of being that liberates the human being from the limitations imposed by an earthly, contingent existence: “Heaven is nothing else than life liberated from the conditions of the species, supernatural, sexless, absolutely subjective life” (109). When death occurs and the individual is liberated from this life, they will personally experience the idea of God that they have longed for on earth.

The idea of God exists on earth as a desire, as faith. In heaven, however, God will not be an object of faith but something actually possessed: “Our own future existence, which, while we are in this world, in this body, is a separate, objective existence,—is God: God is the idea of the species, which will be first realised, individualised in the other world” (111). Heaven is God, who is actually the subjective experience of human transcendence and perfection. The afterlife unites humanity with what they love and desire most.