Eugen Dühring: Elimination of All Judaic Elements, Chapter Four, Fifth Point
Ausscheidung alles Judäerthums, Kapitel Vier, Fünfter Punkt
Source Material: German Scan | German Corrected
Editor’s Note: This work is part of a series; refer to Table of Contents.
Fifth Point:
Mode of conception in Nordic divine stories. Moral advantages of the German worldview as expressed in religion. Incompatibility with the corresponding conceptions of Judaism and Israeli Christianity.
To supplement the traits specifically known of the Germans, the entire Nordic mythology of gods and heroes can also serve. However, the main focus here is on highlighting a single circumstance.
As with the Greeks, so too with the Nordic peoples, the world of gods is neither final nor absolute. It is a collection of idealized figures, some tied to natural objects, others directly to human qualities. The multiplicity and relative freedom of the individual divine powers correspond to the diversity of the real world and constitute a fundamental trait that favorably distinguishes the Indo-Germanic peoples from the Jews with their unnatural, indeed illogical monopoly of a single god.
To this advantage belongs also a second one, according to which the gods are not everything and not the highest. This stands out particularly in the Nordic tales of the gods. Here there are even mortal gods, like Balder, who suffer death, and furthermore, in the battle with the giants, there is a downfall of the gods that leads to a new creation of the world. In the background of all divine poetry, and more powerful than all the gods, are forces related to the collective fate of all things, and there is no lack of—albeit obscure—hints of a kind of justice that transcends all things, gods, and humans alike.
As for the individual Nordic divine figures themselves, there is a noble human idealization here, something entirely absent from the Jewish conception of the divine. The latter is barren; for Jehovah himself has some Jewish traits, but these hardly beautiful or noble attributes are, moreover, assigned solely to the domineering side.
The surrounding angels and the accompanying devils are likewise quite colorless and abstract, so that very little of the truly human is found in Jewish mythology—and that little not in idealization, but in distortion, or even in connection with animal faces, such as those of the cherubim.
Admittedly, this flaw also brings an advantage; for what kind of images would there have been if the Jews had possessed the formative and creative imagination to paint a counterpart of their precious selves in all directions! What, for example, would have come of it if, alongside Aphrodite and Freya, a Jewish goddess of love had also come into being?
The immersion in the basest sensual greed, which already in antiquity constituted the offensive character trait of the Jewish tribe, would have produced a figure in which the Jewish affinity for the aesthetically repulsive would have shaped the already poor content into a veritable monster.
One need only think of the love poetry of the Hebrews in the Old Testament and the delightful similes in which the noses of the beloved objects are compared to towers on Lebanon and celebrated in a truly oriental manner!
It is fortunate, then, that for Jewish painting and sculpture there were not merely limits, but that such things, due to a lack of vivid and creative imagination, scarcely existed at all! Otherwise, alongside the Greek Athena, there might even have been a Jewish counterpart, which, of course, would not have personified wisdom but only Jewish cunning.
But enough of this play with divine puppets, which deserves our attention only insofar as, even in the play of a people’s childhood, the beautiful and noble predispositions—or their opposites—already reveal themselves.
The barren divine phantoms and misconceptions of the Jews speak just as much to the nature of the Jewish character and predispositions as the beautiful and vibrant creations of Hellenic imagination or the robust and substantial figures of Nordic conception speak to the ability and character of the Greeks and the Germans.
In a stage where humanity is earnestly preparing to set aside the play with divine puppets—whether large or small, many or few—the childhood memories retain meaning only in that their initial traits confirm what mature humanity exhibits, or must exhibit, in terms of qualities beyond playful adornment.
Thus, the interest lies not in the puppet-like nature of earlier spiritual expressions, but in the spiritual constitution itself, which, with its elements of reality, underlay that play and persists even when that play entirely ceases.
The Germanic, and specifically the German, spirit have, in their ancestral divine creations, expressed their way of thinking and feeling, demonstrating more logical sense and harmonious character than is contained in Judaism and the Christianity that sprang from it.
Aptly, the Nordic peoples left nature as it is, subjecting it neither to a servitude of gods nor to a divine enslavement, just as they did not regard themselves as made for servile conditions.
Moreover, through the multiplicity of divine figures, they preserved a relative independence of the various aspects of the human. Similar to the Greeks, a free harmony entered their conception of the world and its parts, and no oriental servile form of religion distorted their worldview and outlook on life.
Beyond this, however, a deeper moral character than that found among the Greeks came to expression, bringing more seriousness and dignity into the tales of the gods.
However, this most important trait, which concerns the moral distinction of the Germanic spirit, has most unmistakably proven its enduring significance when it later contributed to transforming Israeli Christianity into a Germanic one.
The Germans would never have endured the imported religion for long if they had not shaped it to some extent according to their own moral views. How, for example, could the Jewish-Christian concept of faith—expressed in the New Testament through a Greek word that also means fidelity—have appealed to them, when it signified merely a slavish, authoritarian acceptance of otherworldly promises from a person and submission to that person!
The latter is indeed the original meaning of faith in Christ; but the Germans substituted their own nobler concepts of trust and fidelity, thereby improving the Jewish-Christian tradition—albeit in contradiction to its own essence.
Thus, for those who truly think religiously, trust in God in the German sense has been a state of mind to which nothing comparable could properly correspond on Israeli soil, because the heartfelt sincerity from which such trust alone can spring was lacking there.
In the particular nature of such conceptions, the differences in the heart and character of nations are reflected. When the German believes and trusts, it is—much like his fidelity in general—a different and far stronger bond than when a Persian or another Semite, and especially a Jew, pretends to do something similar.
It matters little whether belief and trust are expressly directed toward something divine, toward humans, or, in pure conception, toward the workings and order of things in general. In all these cases, it is the character disposition that determines the moral form of that affection.
Even when the fatherly relationship is incorporated into the concept of God, the German conceives it in the likeness of his own better family relationships, not according to the assumptions of that Jewish commandment of advantageous obedience to parents.
Likewise, he does not conceive it according to that Christian-Jewish notion in which the Lord and Father, out of anger toward the Jewish people, demands the sacrifice of the Son.
But with this, we already enter into specifically theological conceptions that today no longer hold the slightest significance. When the German once allowed himself to wrestle with them, he nonetheless always resisted their Israeli meaning and wished to find in them only his own, better way of understanding.
He did the same in other respects as well. He always felt that the Israeli way of thinking, even in the New Testament, imposed something alien to his homeland and tribe. His better moral thoughts and feelings resisted, though initially they could only react instinctively with their own substance within the foreign infection, against the unavoidable contagion.
Thus arose those mixed conceptions, which one might call Germanic Christianity, but perhaps more accurately Germanisms within Christianity. These Germanisms, however, are also the only aspects of the historically transmitted religion that still hold a living interest for us.
Consider, for example, the exemplary nature of the relationship between human beings as a model for the conception of the relationship to gods or to a god.
From the outset, the Jew conceived his god not only as a Jew with corresponding tribal characteristics but also arranged his dealings with him in exactly the way a Jew typically interacts and establishes relationships. Jewish customs and principles were, in this case, figuratively reflected in the actions and relationships between Jehovah and his people.
This explains everything in the Old Testament, and most of what is presented in the New Testament, regarding the relationship of the Jews to their Lord—thus, in general, the fundamental religious relationship.
Consider, by contrast, that the way a German relates morally and socially to another German, and to humans in general, also determines how he shapes his relationship to a god, whether it be his own or a foreign one.
The relationship of fidelity and trust that the German seeks and cultivates with other people can only be complete where it is mutual. For this reason, fidelity is a quality that is not merely exercised on one side but is also demanded of the other party.
Thus, the trait of fidelity and reliability enters into the very concept of God, and into all the relationships that the German imagines between himself and his god, there comes the same mutually binding element of benevolent trust.
Since the bond of fidelity is possible only between people who align in this essential character trait, the relationship between the German and the Israeli must ultimately reveal the corresponding incompatibility of their respective religious traditions.
The German’s attempt to transfer his own better morality into foreign religious conceptions had to first reshape them, but then make the contradiction and the impossibility of thorough change palpable, and will finally lead to the resolve to entirely reject the foreign as incompatible with the better.