Section II

the personality of man

The existence of personality in man is accompanied by individuality. So long as man lives in a savage and brute-like state, he seems to be, more or less, a mere exemplar of his species. It is said to be difficult to distinguish one countenance from another among the wild hordes inhabiting the steppes of Northern Asia. The peculiar nature of man is in this instance still hidden, and he appears merely a savage creature, or, to speak more correctly, a creature who has become savage. And yet these faces, void as they are of expression, recognise each other: the dawning of individuality, at all events, exists. The more, however, man receives the blessing of education, and especially the consecration of religious awakening, the more is individual life developed in him. That infinite singularity becomes apparent, which distinguishes him as a being elevated above the rank of a mere exemplar, and characterizes each man as a hitherto non-existent type of humanity. The certainty of immortality is contained in this singularity. For it is through this that he is a new, a special, a definite purpose of God, an eternal determination of the divine will. With the annihilation of a distinct individuality we should impute a want of determination to God. But the individuality and personality of man are ever mutually developed. It is only because he is an individual that he is a person; and it is only in the infinite definiteness and isolation of his being that infinite generality can appear. It is in the property of individuality that creature existence attains that silvery brightness of spirituality which testifies that the universal, and the voice of God in the universal, can now be resounded by the metal of which it is composed. The sharply defined figure of the crystal is an image of individuality, the sun-light reflected therein an image of personality. The more a man perceives, faithfully preserves, and sincerely develops the peculiarity, the inmost depths of his nature, the more does the fulness of the Spirit, the glory of God, the richness of His world, begin to be manifested in him. Individuality is therefore the eternal form, or even the form of the Eternal. This is the stone against which the prevailing philosophy of the day stumbles and is confounded. She regards the individual as only a limitation of the general. According to her premises, the evil cleaving to substance, the evil of the world, viewed according to Manichean notions, has taken refuge in the form of the spiritual. In her view, all is divine; only the eternal characteristics, the mystic lines which the human countenance forms by its constant expressiveness, these are fatal to her. In her opinion, substance is limited in its divine flow by those lines which form the individual life. It must burst these boundaries and break through their opposition.¹ As the boy plucks the flower to get at its scent, as the spiritualist would destroy the letter to find the spirit, so does this last and most subtle Manichean view of nature shatter that eternal form of the spirit, individuality, to advance universal being in its triumphal progress through the ages. Since it makes man originate from a process of nature, he must inevitably sink again into nature. As is the gaining, so is the spending: ‘Light come, light go.’ But because this view lacks the eternal determination of the spirit, it lacks also the Eternal Spirit Himself. That dark obscure substance in a state of constant fermentation, which is neither self-possessing, self-penetrating, nor self-determined, can neither appear in personality, nor form a real individual. Such philosophy is a stranger to the conception of the eternal.

In the perfect or divine-human life, the contrast of individuality and personality must be manifested in all its heavenly purity. Here we see a man who is never lost and dispersed in mere creature-hood, who never obliterates the constant characteristics of his being; who ever most distinctly expresses in his spiritual nature the eternal appointment of God. He continues true to himself, and therefore faithful to God. His voice was an echo of that purity which it had by the divine appointment; therefore a call of the Father, an announcement of salvation from God Himself. It was thus that Christ appeared to us. He plainly declared His nature and the mission resulting from it, and stamped the intrinsic value of His nature with an impression of most sacred and faithful distinctness. He asserted His spirituality in the presence of all nature. And what was the result? All nature began to shine with spiritual brightness in the mirror of His spirit; the birds of heaven and the lilies of the field became, through Him, thoughts of God. He contended for, and victoriously maintained, against the whole world, the sanctuary of His divine Sonship; and therefore did the whole world, in its ruin and in its call to blessedness, begin to shine with the light of His love and righteousness. His faithfulness to His individuality was also exhibited in this, that He showed to His Father His whole heart, even its grief, that He did not obliterate this distinct feature of His nature in an enthusiastic heroism, which would have hindered the glorification of the Father in Him. By the solemn earnestness which consecrated the place on which He stood, He transformed the whole world into a sanctuary of God; by the constant energy with which He lived in the present, He transformed all ages; by the manner in which He laid hold of passing events, He consecrated them into symbols of the world’s history. Yes, the glory of the personal life flowing from Him transfigures both earth and heaven. But while it may be said that He attained His personality in the infinite distinctness of His individuality, the converse is equally true, that He found the unchanging constancy of His nature in His continual and entire submission to the Father. It was by plunging into the sun of personality, that the eagle-like glance bestowed upon Him was developed. And this view of the matter is also the more correct one. What He saw the Father do, that did He as the Son; and it was by finding Himself in the bosom of the Father, that He felt and knew Himself to be the Son.

In the personality of Christ is manifested the personality of the Father. When it is said, the eternal Being is light in Himself, in Him is no darkness at all, He possesses, He penetrates, He surveys, He wills absolutely,-what is this but to say that He has personality? God is the most decidedly personal being, much more so than man, because He cherishes nature not as a necessity to His spirit, but as a form of manifestation for His spirit. But if personality stands in polar relation to individuality, how can God be personal? Do we then say that God, who is the source of all individual, as well as of all personal life, is not an individual? His personality is the eternal light of His Spirit, in its self-determining agency; its antitheses are those eternal determinations (Bestimmtheiten) which He cherishes in His being, and which are summed up in that one general determination, in that character of His being, in His Son.² If, then, these determinations appear in time, they are not therefore absolutely temporal. With the nature of Christ, eternity appears in time, because the Spirit of God, which embraces all times, is manifested in Him; and in proportion as He awakens personality in men, does He awaken eternity in them.

But the personality of Christ not only manifests the eternal personality of the Father, but also proclaims the produced (werdende) personality of men. For Christ exhibits in His life the destination of humanity, its inmost depths, which are to be absolved, delivered, and perfected through Him. And thus by His appearing there is also proclaimed the Church, in which the Spirit of life is ever elevating that which is perishable to the light of the imperishable, and glorifying nature as well as mankind. His personality is the pledge to His Church of a future, in which, through its development and perfection, all the obscurities of nature, all the dark mysteries of evil, shall be pervaded by the light of their manifested relation to eternity, and sanctified to the service of God. The Eternal Spirit, as the all-ordaining Being, ordaining Himself in all, is the source of all personal life, the personality of the Father, or even the fatherly personality. The same Spirit, as the Being whose existence is determined with infinite delicacy and sharpness, and who in this determinateness is the Being knowing Himself free, the Blessed One, is the reflection of the Father’s glory, the personality of the Son. But the same Spirit, as the Spirit of liberty, bringing back this determinateness of the Son and of His members to the self-determining agency of the Father, through whose presence God is present in His people, so that their life is sunk and lost in His, is the personality of the Holy Ghost, or also the Holy Spirit of personal life, who sanctifies the world, and makes it an offering to God. The special province of the Spirit’s operations is the Church, whose several individualities, notwithstanding their infinite diversity, and even by the organic relations of that diversity, form one organism, and at the same time one great collection of individualities.

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Notes

1. The notions Individuality and Personality express, according to our view, the nature of spirit in a polar relation. Individuality is the point in which spirit comes forth and distinctly manifests itself in nature; personality is the circle by means of which it embraces heaven and earth, and perceives God that it may manifest Him. The mutilation of these notions is connected with all the morbid inclination to abstract generality, to the dark depths of indistinguishable substance, prevalent in these days; and its presence may be traced, like that of a devouring worm, in the principles and tendencies of the new theology. It is evident from the above quotation, that Hegel had not discovered the true notion of an individuality corresponding with personality. Michelet, in his Lectures on the Personality of God, &c., seems for a moment to touch upon the true significance of individuality, p. 84: ‘The true relation of the general and the particular is therefore merely a looking at both sides at once. The particular does but add another definite peculiarity to the contents of the absolutely general, by which peculiarity it is itself distinguishable from other particulars of the same species, just as separate ideas exclude each other through their peculiarities. Particularity is consequently the richest,’ &c. Individuality, however, is not mere particularity, and the general is not so poor as to increase in contents through the particular, as this author thinks. Hence an unsatisfactory conception of individuality is already announced. ‘It is the principle of individuation,—that addition made to generality and speciality,—which forms the great variety, and the distinctive characteristics of individuals. And since the addition is non-essential, all that is great and true in individuals belongs to them by reason of their species.’ The principle of individuation, then, that ‘anonym,’ as Göthe calls it, is here an addition, and again this addition is non-essential. It is evident that this non-essential addition is incapable of constituting a human race at all corresponding to the ideal. On the contrary, it is really the millstone hung round the neck of the subject, to draw it down into the depth of annihilation. ‘The general process of species, therefore, consists in withdrawing from one series of peculiarities to appear in others. Peculiarity is eternal; peculiar beings, on the contrary, disappear.’ Cieszkowsky also seems, in his work Gott und Palingenesie, p. 40, to define incorrectly the relation between individuality and personality, though he maintains the immortality of personality against Michelet. With him individuality is ‘the natural, the indifferent, the co-existent, the inflexible, the incidental, the limited, the most peculiar peculiarity,³—that which not only cleaves to materiality, but also underlies it.’ According to Snellmann, Versuch einer spekulativen Entwickelung der Idee der Persönlichkeit, p. 43, ‘an individual is a being which thus ever excludes another, but even thereby becomes ever another.’ The contrast between the general and the individual being thus designated, in the strongest terms, an unending one, we may well be surprised to find the whole contrast so soon entirely at an end, p. 49: ‘The spirit is not distinguished, as the Ego, from the matter of the consciousness; it is not that it has this matter, but that it is this matter. There is here, then, no distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness, but both are directly one. For the spirit, as pure self-consciousness, as the Ego, which moreover has the matter of the consciousness, is not a definite one, an exclusive individual.’ This indistinguishable identity (and therefore sameness) of consciousness and self-consciousness is, according to p. 242, the idea of personality. This personality is consequently the monotonous spirit, or rather non-spirit, which comes to itself when first in thought, and afterwards temporally, in natural death, it abolishes subjectivity (244). Feuerbach carries on the degradation of the subjective to the perishable to a degree which shows a hatred of it: ‘It is not love which completely fills my spirit; I am leaving room for my unloving nature by thinking of God as a subject, distinct from His attributes. The notion of a personal self-existent Being is anything but identical with the notion of love; it is rather something beyond and without love. Hence it is necessary that I should at one time part with the notion of love, at another, with the notion of the subject’ (Das Wesen des Christenthums, p. 360). Göschel, on the contrary, arrives, by the same premises as Hegel, at the conviction, that it is in the nature of the notion of the Ego, as Ego, as spirit, that the individual Ego is not lost in it, but continues to live and think in it. ‘The Ego, in its distinctness from nature, is just this, it is equal to itself. Ego = Ego. Therefore the death of the Ego in the Ego is a contradictory idea’ (Beiträge zur spekulativen Theologie von Gott und dem Menschen, &c., p. 24). The same author expresses the principle, ‘Nothing so much pertains to personality as individuality, and indeed the individuality of the subject’ (p. 58). ‘The connection is as follows: personality is the highest form of individuality, the pervasive glorification and manifestation of self-existence; on the other hand, subjective individuality, or independence, is the matter and condition of personality.’ Here, then, the polar relation between individuality and personality is expressed. The remarks made by Strauss (Leben Jesu, p. 735) against the Church doctrine of Christ, or of the union of the divine and human natures in Him, fundamentally oppose the true notion of personality in general. He appeals to Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre, 2, §§ 96-98, where he finds the expression, that the divine and human natures are united in Christ, difficult and barren. Schleiermacher argues specially against the Church doctrine, which receives two wills in Christ, and remarks that, in this case, we must come to a similar decision with respect to the understanding. Strauss seems, fairly enough, to claim for his assertion the arguments of Schleiermacher, according to which there is said to be something absolutely inconceivable in the Church notion of the God-man. Schleiermacher does not give its full significance to the notion of individuality; consequently he uses a christological expression (p. 56) which even Noëtus or Eutyches might have appropriated. ‘The existence of God in the Redeemer is laid down as a primary force from which all agency proceeds, and by which all impulses are connected: what is human, however, only forms the organism for this force, and is related thereto, as being both its receptive and its expositive system.’ But how should this organism of Christ have been able, without a will, to receive and exhibit the will of God? And the same reasoning applies to the understanding. Is the understanding of two men, whose agency is alternately employed, a double one? But as little is it a single one. The understanding and the will, as well as all that is spiritual, all that is personal, bear within themselves the contrast of the objective and the subjective, whose diversity is explained in identity, and their identity in diversity.

The misconception of the personality of the individual, exhibits itself in two extremes which, though exhibiting a mortal aversion, are yet intrinsically united. The one extreme is the tendency of Jesuitism, as an emanation of the Manichean and ascetic aversion to the individual and its corporeity, which has obscured the Romish Church. The other extreme is the tendency of Communism, resting upon the Manichean and pantheistic aversion to the personal and its perpetual definite peculiarity. The annihilation of personality is the final aim of both these tendencies. In the first case, the most unconditional obedience to the general of the order, the most colossal sectarianism, is to extinguish all individuality. Lamennais, in his treatise Affaires de Rome, has some excellent remarks on this subject. The Church of Rome exhibits an increasing tendency to establish this principle. Lacordaire expresses himself in the Semeur (No. 23, 1843) in the following manner: ‘Ce que Dieu vous demande, c’est de sacrifier votre conviction flottante, uniquement bassée sur vos passions et vos prejugés à la conviction une, sainte, et perpetuelle de la cité de Dieu; c’est l’abjuration de la cité du monde pour l’adhésion complête et libre à l’autorité religieuse, pour la soumission à l’hierarchie et à l’Église; c’est de vous dire une bonne fois à vous-même: Eh bien c’en est fait, je me donne à une raison souveraine, immuable, plus haute que la mienne; moi, atôme miserable, je m’assieds enfin las et confondu sur ce roi inebranlable, qui a pour appui la main de Dieu, et pour garantie de sa durée, son invariable promesse! Ainsi pénétrés de votre nullité individuelle vous rentrerez dans la vie générale.’ It might be added: dans la grande nullité, qui results d’une telle composition de pures nullités. On this side, man is required to sacrifice his personality to the mere hierarchy, the historical majority; on the other, to the multitude, the momentary majority, without the prospect of receiving it back free and transformed, which is the result of the surrender of the life to God. This sacrifice is demanded, because sectarianism, as such, is a gloomy and demoniacal power, which can only be formed by trampling down individuality, a thick cloud in which the beautiful and separate colours of natural life form but one dingy mixture. How bright, on the contrary, is the glory of the true Church, as displayed in her adornment of sanctified individualities and their varied endowments! From this one fundamental mutilation, there arise, in the courses of the two above-named extremes, a series of mutilations: the mutilation of the rights of property, of marriage, of the State, of the Church.

2. An individual is a creature which cannot suffer the dissolution of its own proper nature by any dissolution of its outward constituents, which no storm of death can strip of the mighty unity formed by its existence. The word persona means, first, the mask worn by an actor, then, the character which he represents, and, lastly, an individual, in his characteristic significance. The word personality cannot certainly be referred immediately to personare, in such a sense as to make it denote how the general resounds through the individual. But when Snellmann (p. 1 of his Collected Works) calls this ingenious explanation, far-fetched and unsatisfactory, he forgets that the voice of the actor resounds from the mask, and the general life, represented by poetry, from the dramatic character; that the meaning of the character, moreover, is to express general life in its mature determinateness. It is, at all events, a characteristic trait of pure personality, that the infinite resounds through it.⁴

1) The true being of man is rather his deed; in this his individuality becomes actual, and it is this which puts an end to the intention in both its aspects. First, as a substantial, passive existence : individuality presents itself in action as the negative nature which is only in so far as it puts an end to existence. Then, again, the deed puts an end to the unutterableness of the intention in presence of the self-conscious individuality, which, in the intention, is infinitely defined and defineable. In the fully formed deed this worthless infinity is annihilated.—Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 242. Such statements consist with the crude ideas of the author on Physiognomy.

2) ὃς ὄιν-χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως αὐτοῦ, Heb. i. 13.

3) Certainly the ever singular.

4) [This subject is pursued, and treated in opposition to Strauss, in Müller's Doctrine of Sin, ii. 159, &c.—ED.]