100.
No, the happiness of man, or, to speak more intelligibly, the possibility that he might fulfill his destiny, develop the powers implanted in him, and thus enjoy the corresponding measure of well-being, this happiness cannot possibly – and here the old Reimarus will forever be right – depend on the recognition of facts which hardly one in a thousand has carefully examined, and that person, too, is not able in the end to arrive at a certain conclusion. Instead, as surely as the human destiny is a universal one and attainable by all, the conditions to attain it, that is, outside of and prior to the will that moves in the direction of the goal, the knowledge of this goal itself must be given to every man; and this knowledge cannot be an accidental acquaintance with history coming from the outside, but is a necessary understanding of reason that every person can find in himself. That is the meaning of Spinoza’s profound saying that for the attainment of happiness it was not by any means necessary to known God in the flesh; but the matter was different with that eternal Son of God, namely divine wisdom, which appears in all things, especially in the human mind, and which was so excellently manifested in Jesus Christ: without it, nobody could attain happiness, because it alone teaches what is true and false, good and evil. Like Spinoza, Kant also distinguished from the historical person of Jesus the ideal of God-pleasing humanity that lies within human reason, or the ethical sense in all the purity that is possible in a worldly being dependent upon needs and inclinations. Raising oneself up to this ideal is the general duty of mankind; although we cannot conceive of this ideal any other way than in the picture of a perfect man, and even though it is not impossible that such a man once lived, since we are all supposed to resemble this ideal, what matters is not that we know of the existence of such a man or believe in it, but merely that we keep that ideal before us, recognize that it is obligatory, and strive to make ourselves like it.
This distinction between the historical and the ideal Christ, that is, the primal image in human reason of man as he is supposed to be, and the transfer of the salvific faith from the former to the latter, this is the indisputable result of the modern development of the mind; it is the forward development of the religion of Christ into the religion of humanity, at which all the nobler efforts of our time are directed. That many see in this an apostasy from Christianity, a denial of Christ, rests on a misunderstanding, for which the manner in which the philosophers – who made this distinction – express themselves, and maybe also their way of thinking, is partly responsible. For they speak as though the primal image of human perfection by which the individual is to be guided is given in reason once and for all; this creates the impression that this image – i.e., the ideal Christ – could be present in us exactly as it is right now even if a historical Christ had never lived and worked. But that is by no means how it really is. The idea of human perfection, like other ideas, is initially imparted to the human mind only as a potential that gradually takes shape through experience. It displays a different shape among different peoples, according to
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