of life, _not_ a new faith....

34.

If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this:
that he regarded only _subjective_ realities as realities, as
"truths"--that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal,
spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The
concept of "the Son of God" does not connote a concrete person in
history, an isolated and definite individual, but an "eternal" fact, a
psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing
is true, and in the highest sense, of the _God_ of this typical
symbolist, of the "kingdom of God," and of the "sonship of God." Nothing
could be more un-Christian than the _crude ecclesiastical_ notions of
God as a _person_, of a "kingdom of God" that is to come, of a "kingdom
of heaven" beyond, and of a "son of God" as the _second person_ of the
Trinity. All this--if I may be forgiven the phrase--is like thrusting
one's fist into the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect
for symbols amounting to _world-historical cynicism_.... But it is
nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols "Father" and
"Son"--not, of course, to every one--: the word "Son" expresses
_entrance_ into the feeling that there is a general transformation of
all things (beatitude), and "Father" expresses _that feeling
itself_--the sensation of eternity and of perfection.--I am ashamed to
remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism: has it not set
an Amphitryon story[13] at the threshold of the Christian "faith"? And a
dogma of "immaculate conception" for good measure?... _And thereby it
has robbed conception of its immaculateness_--

[13] Amphitryon was the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns.
His wife was Alcmene. During his absence she was visited by Zeus, and
bore Heracles.

The "kingdom of heaven" is a state of the heart--not something to come
"beyond the world" or "after death." The whole idea of natural death is
_absent_ from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is
absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world,
useful only as a symbol. The "hour of death" is _not_ a Christian
idea--"hours," time, the physical life and its crises have no existence
for the bearer of "glad tidings."... The "kingdom of God" is not
something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after
tomorrow, it is not going to come at a "millennium"--it is an experience
of the