(Excerpt from CHAPTER THREE)

"God as a Being of the Intellect"

Religion is the division of man from himself: it sets God before him as a being opposed to himself. God is not what man is, and man is not what God is. God is the infinite and man the finite; God is perfect, man imperfect; God eternal, man temporal; God almighty, man powerless; God holy, man sinful. God and man are opposites: God is the absolutely positive, the sum of all realities, man the absolutely negative, the sum of all nothingness. But in religion man objectifies his own hidden essence.

It must therefore be demonstrated that this opposition, this division between God and man, with which religion begins, is a division of man from his own essence. The inner necessity of this proof already follows from the fact that, if the divine being, which is the object of religion, were truly different from the being of man, then no division could take place at all. If God were truly another being, then what would his perfection have to do with me? Division takes place only between two beings who have entered into conflict with one another, but who must, and can, be one, so that essentially, in truth, they are one. For this general reason alone, therefore, that being with which man feels divided must be a being inherent in him, but at the same time a being of a different nature from that being or power which gives him the feeling, the consciousness, of reconciliation, of unity with God or, which is the same thing, with himself. This being is none other than the intellect — Reason or understanding.

God as the opposite of man, conceived as non-human, that is, as a personal human-like being, is the objectified essence of the intellect. The pure, perfect, complete divine being is the self-consciousness of the intellect, the consciousness of the intellect of its own perfection. The intellect knows nothing of the passions of the heart; it has no desires, no passions, no needs, and for this very reason it has no deficiencies and weaknesses such as the heart has. Purely intellectual people, people who represent and personify for us the essence of the intellect, although in a one-sided, but precisely for that reason characteristic, manner, are above the emotional sufferings, passions and extremes of emotional people; they are not passionately absorbed by any finite, that is, any particular object; they are not "mortgaged"; they are free. "To need nothing, and through this lack of need to resemble the immortal gods"; "not to submit to things but to subject things"; "all is vanity" — these and similar sayings are the slogans of abstract intellectual people. The intellect is the neutral, indifferent, incorruptible, undazzled essence within us — the pure, passionless light of thought. It is the categorical, impartial consciousness of the thing as a thing, because it itself is of objective nature; the consciousness of the thing without contradictions, because it itself is the unity without contradictions, the source of logical identity; the consciousness of law, necessity, rule and measure, because it itself is the activity of law, the necessity of the nature of things as self-activity, the rule of rules, the absolute measure, the measure of measures. Only through the intellect can man judge and act in contradiction to his most intimate human, that is, personal feelings, when God, law, necessity or justice requires it. A father who judges his own son guilty and, as a judge, condemns him to death can do so only as an intellectual, not as an emotional, man.

The intellect shows us the errors and weaknesses even of those we love — even our own. For this reason it so often places us in painful conflict with ourselves, with our heart. We do not want to give the intellect its due; out of mercy and leniency, we do not want to carry out its true but harsh, impartial judgment. The intellect is the particular capacity of the species; the heart represents particular cases, individuals, while the intellect represents general cases; it is the superhuman, that is, the transpersonal and impersonal power, the essentiality within man. Only through the intellect and within the intellect does man have the power to abstract from himself, that is, from his subjective, personal essence, and rise to general concepts and relations, to separate the object from the impressions it makes upon the emotions, to consider it in and for itself, without relation to man. Philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, physics, in short, science in general, is the real proof, because it is the product, of this truly infinite and divine activity.

Consequently, religious anthropomorphisms also contradict the intellect; the intellect denies them to God, renounces them. But this God free of anthropomorphisms, impartial and passionless, is nothing other than the very objective essence of the intellect. God as God, that is, as non-finite, non-human, non-materially determined, non-sensory being, is simply the object of the intellect.