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repeat them here. It is also impossible to drive the demonic factor of economics down to the
plane of general sinfulness, with religious-moral categories such as Mammonism, in order to
separate the technical quality of capitalism from it. The depth of the demonic is just this, that
the meaningful and meaningless elements in it are inseparably combined. Thereupon rests its
inevitability, its surpassing power, in the face of which all moralizing is doomed to
impotence. The sinfulness to which the service of Mammon also belongs, is indeed the
general presupposition of every demonry. But real demonry if this word is to have any
special content-occurs only in connection with a positive, sustaining, creative-destructive
power.
This is true also of the last great demonry of the present, nationalism. To all pacifism of
impotence, to all mysticism and to a rationalistic bourgeois or proletarian internationalism
must be said first of all that: the national impulses of the bourgeois era were the only ones
which had, and to a great extent still have, the strength to offer resistance to the technical
economization of the whole of Occidental existence. They constantly break through pure
rationality. They create a vital, immediate consciousness, which is still but slightly
disintegrated by intellectualism and again and again stirs up estheticism. At the same time it
preserves the consciousness from complete meaninglessness by filling it with concrete
symbols. National things receive sacral untouchability and ritual dignity. But just there
demonization begins. With the creative-supporting forces, destructive ones combine: the lie
with which the self-righteousness of one nation distorts the true picture of its own and foreign
reality; the violation, which makes other nations an object whose own essence and
independent might is despised and downtrodden; the murder, which in the name of the god
pledged to the nation is consecrated to holy war. Beyond this, it is the peculiarity of the
national demonry of our time that it has subjected itself to capitalism. The nations entered the
World War as capitalistic groups of power; and the chief bearers of the will for war were at
the same time the bearers of the capitalistic domination in their own nation; not from any
personal demonry, but themselves supported by the demonic figure of capitalism which they
represent. Thus the social demonry of the present is revealed in its duality, in its immense
supporting and destructive strength. Shattered for a moment, it is at present on the point of re-
establishing itself, in order better to sustain and better to destroy.
There is no way which could be invented to overcome the demonries, spiritual and social. The
question of ways and means is the question of intellectualism, thus even as a question grown
out of the demonic situation and strengthening the demon with each answer. Demonry breaks
down only before divinity, the possessed state before the state of grace, the destructive before
redeeming fate. It is probably possible and in accordance with the prophetic spirit to see in the
events of a time signs of redeeming fate, and it is necessary and absolutely demanded to
unveil the demon and to seek and use all the weapons of resistance; but there is no certainty of
success, for there is no certainty that a finite reality, even if it be Christian culture, is
indestructible. The demon inspires such a false certainty. There is only one certainty, that the
demonic is overcome in eternity, that in eternity the demonic is depth of the divine and in
unity with divine clarity. Only in view of the eternal may one speak of overcoming the
demonic, not in the view of any time, a past or future. But that we can regard the eternal in
this way, that we need not grant the demon the same right as the divine and therewith the
higher, the only right, that we need not, in the face of the world, grant the ultimate victory to
the negation, to the abyss, to meaninglessness that and that alone is the salvation in finite
time, which again and again becomes reality; that is the fundamental destruction of demonic
dominance over the world.
II: Kairos and Logos
When one considers the development of philosophy from the Renaissance to the present, from [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]