Postscript.—Two doctrines must be distinguished from the proposition here laid down: on the one hand, that known as the doctrine of the Best World; and on the other, the assertion that there was a perfection of the world which can be called original, though not in the sense used above, but in the sense that prior to its present condition it endured for a period of time and afterwards became changed into its present imperfect condition.

The doctrine of the Best World originally belongs, especially since Leibniz, to the so-called natural or rational theology, and thus did not arise as a statement about the religious consciousness but as a product of speculation. Hence there would have been no mention of it here if various theologians ⁴ had not taken it over in the same form into Christian Dogmatics. The doctrine is concerned not only with what lies at the basis of temporal existence but with temporal existence itself, in which it is impossible to separate between the historical (i.e. the activity of the human spirit) and the natural (i.e. the activity of physical forces); and it maintains that, notwithstanding all the mists and imperfections of the world, no greater amount of being and of well-being could have been attained. It is true, our two doctrines also imply the position that, since the entire course of time can only be an unbroken activity of the whole original perfection, the final result must be an absolute satisfaction, and similarly each moment, taken in the whole, satisfactory as an approximation. But this conviction, issuing as it does solely from the religious consciousness, has no need to be introduced into speculative theology exactly as it has been taken up into Christian Dogmatics. So far as the latter is concerned we must stop at the affirmation that the world is good, and can make no use of the formula that it is the best; and this because the former assertion signifies far more than the latter.⁵ The latter expression is connected with the idea (which we have already rejected) of many worlds all originally equally possible with the one which actually came into existence, and also it seeks to represent the entire course of time in the actual world as the result of mediate divine knowledge (the idea of which we have also rejected), so that the whole productive activity of God is assumed to be selective and therefore secondary.

The second doctrine is to be found in the tradition of most peoples—the fable of a Golden Age previous to actual history. The essential element in it is always the belief that the world was then of such a character as to assure satisfaction to man apart from any need on his part to develop self-activity. Something similar—but with the addition that, if this state had endured, man would not have died—has been found in the brief Old Testament indications of the life of Paradise,⁶ which do not, however, indicate an age but only a relatively short period in the life of the first man. Thus, first of all, we should have to settle the conflict over interpretation which has been waged so long, whether actual history is meant to be recorded there, and hence whether there is a question of a temporal condition or not. If the narrative is historical it would as such have no place here, except in so far as such a temporal condition (it may be held) presupposes as its ground another original perfection which has been transformed into the one just described, from which such a temporal process could no longer follow; or else, it may be argued, the original perfection described here underlay the narrative, but now is no longer to be assumed. The latter view has never been maintained, and would be contradicted by the fact that the historical process nowhere presents anything but functions of the original perfection as above described. But the former view must be considered. Now, if it necessarily implies that the original perfection of the world has not remained the same, it fails to maintain the unity of the whole world-order in its relation to the Creation and the continuity of the divine Preservation. But apart from this undeniable and fundamental error, it follows further that God approved that initial state even with respect to that part which was capable of deterioration and was in fact to deteriorate. Moreover, it seems contradictory that those fundamental conditions under which the Redeemer was actually ordained to come into the world and establish the invincible Kingdom of God should be less perfect than those under which the first man came into the world, since far greater things were to come to pass in the former case than in the latter. If now we examine this alleged primordial state of the world, we shall find that it is in contradiction with the divine commission to man; for man could only attain to dominion over the earth by the development of his powers, and the constitution of the world, which occasioned this development and which implies a receptivity for the influence of those developed powers, must be contemporaneous with the divine command. Lastly, if history is essential to the fashioning of the world by man, then from this point of view the narrative belongs solely to pre-history, and its real content is simply that an adaptation of nature for the existence of the human organism preceded all development of human powers, and that on our planet the very significant detrimental differences in this adaptation could only come to light with the dissemination and further development of the human race. And if perhaps it may be concluded also from the narrative that there were at one time no hostile contacts in the animal kingdom ⁷ and nothing at all injurious or useless to mankind,⁸ it does not by any means follow that this applied also outside the place where man originally lived, nor even that later this place lost its peculiar advantages.

If, however, the result of exegetical inquiry should be that no actual history is recounted in this passage, and if the story therefore is to be regarded as a kind of poetry, it would come up for consideration here in so far as it either contained a direct utterance of the religious consciousness or was occasioned by it. Its statements about the origin of sin do not concern us. Even the connexion between sin and evil and sin and death, on which it evidently proceeds, does not in and for itself need to be discussed here; only, with reference to the doctrine of the perfection of the world set forth above, the following observations should be made. Even if we accepted absolutely the idea that apart from sin there would have been neither evil nor death, it would by no means follow from this that the earth must originally have been adapted to an enduring condition of sinlessness; evil and death may none the less have been preordained as certainly as God foreknew sin. And other points must be considered. If we think away the gradual decay of organic powers, the possibility that the organism may be destroyed by external forces of nature, and disappearance through death, what we are thinking of is no longer beings of our kind, while yet real human history would only begin when all these things were present. Again, care for the preservation of life and the avoidance of what would disturb it, which is conditioned by mortality, is among the most powerful motives of human development, so that through mortality and the evils which are associated with it more human activities due to our relations with the external world have been developed than could be expected without mortality, and (assuming that the totality of human life increases rather than diminishes) the death of individuals does not lessen the fitness of the world for man’s dominion over it, nor is it thereby hindered in the development of its wealth of means of stimulation. Finally, enduring sinlessness would have stood out far more strongly and conspicuously if man, unimpeded in the development and use of his powers, bore evil, and, combining God-consciousness with love of his race, overcame the impulse to cling to his own life and accepted death. In view of all this, no reason can well remain for doubting that the original perfection of the world relatively to man was at the beginning no other than what we have here described, and that neither the Old Testament story ⁹ nor the relevant indications in the writings of the New Testament ¹⁰ compel us to hold that man was created immortal, or that, with alteration in his nature, the whole arrangement of the earth relatively to him was altered as well.

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Footnotes

1. See § 9, I and § 11. ↩

2. Gen. 1²⁸. ↩

3. Gen. 1²⁶. ↩

4. See, among others, Michaelis, Th. Dogm., § 55. ↩

5. Cf. § 54, 2. ↩

6. Gen. 2⁸ᶠ. ↩

7. Gen. 2¹⁹ does not go quite so far. ↩

8. Ibid. ver. 16; that is, if the tree (ver. 17) was not in itself harmful. ↩

9. Gen. 2¹⁷. ↩

10. Rom. 5¹², based on Gen. 2¹⁷, just as little excludes the possibility that Adam may have been created mortal; and 1 Cor. 15⁵⁶ actually indicates death as such as existing before the advent of sin. ↩