[Die Religion der Zukunft]
Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl[1]
“The old is dying and new life is blooming from the ruins.” (Schiller.)
There are many complaints today about the decline of religion. In France, denominational education is banned from the public schools because clerical rule is an obstacle to the prosperity of republican institutions, and in all countries the urge for liberty is stirring. Socialism is on the rise, respect for churchhood is on the wane, juvenile delinquents are on the rise at a terrifying rate, the morale of the big cities is appalling, the spirit of selfishness is pervasive in all classes, and anarchism is rampant like a bogeyman the country. The clergy, however, stand there powerless and try to save themselves by connecting with political parties, while some leading statesmen try in vain to maintain the old ecclesiastical systems, in which, to tell the truth, they themselves have no confidence.
On the surface, of course, things look unpleasant, but if we look a little deeper we shall find that religious feeling has by no means disappeared from the people, indeed it has not even diminished, only the forms in which it expresses itself are characteristic of it finds become too narrow; Even the often misunderstood and misguided urge for freedom has a religious feeling at its origin; for the human soul strives for individual growth and for the development of its powers. She tries to throw off the chains that prevent her from being independent; only there is still a general lack of the self-knowledge and self-control necessary for this independence. The emergence of numerous new religious sects also proves that the religious spirit is active, but that the traditional forms are no longer sufficient. In the future, too, this spirit will hardly be satisfied with a thoughtless acceptance of dogmas and articles of faith; because the desire for one’s own insight has already awakened too much as a result of increasing education.
The truth is omnipotent. As long as man doubts, he can err; but no reasonable man, once deeply felt and fully aware of a truth, will deny it or oppose it. This would be the “sin against the Holy Spirit.” If the churches could teach the truth to men in such a way that they fully felt and understood it, they would need no other support.
But no one can teach the truth but herself; one can only point the way to it. Self-knowledge of the truth comes from its revelation in our own inner life. Dogma is like a signpost that stands immobile in its place. It is not a leader who steps forward. It is the friend but also the enemy of religion; it shows the way, but if you get stuck on it, you won’t get any further. It embodies a truth, but it also constrains it into a rigid form that prevents it from spreading. Convenient as clinging to the form of dogma may be, because it saves the trouble of one’s own thinking, it cannot satisfy the light-seeking soul that desires to live and grow. “The letter kills; but the spirit gives life.”
As long as the popular belief in the Church teaches a God who has human weaknesses, or even one who entrusts his rule to the clergy and has no say in it himself, such a teaching will always meet with resistance from reason, feeling and understanding. I don’t think there is a real atheist; for even the atheist thinks he loves the truth, and the Bible teaches that God is the truth. It is thus only ignorance that speaks out of him. Nor will any reasonable man believe that there are effects without causes, and that the root cause of all existence is God; only it lies in the nature of things themselves and not in the distance, as the doctrine of the omnipresence of God also testifies. Even the uneducated man recognizes the rule of a law in nature, and that law works within her, and not at a distance. The immutable will of God is this law.
The ancient religion of wisdom of the Indians nowhere speaks of an extra-mundane, personal and consequently limited God. The “Brahma”, the universal deity and source of all existence, is neuter; only when Brahma appears as a creative force does it become Brahmā (male). The name Jehovah is composed of the five vowels I E O U A and represents the five tattvas or spiritual, creative forces in the universe, the letters of the word from which everything originated. Even in the beginning of Christianity the word “God” was a neuter word, and only later was the masculine article added. In the Greek original of the New Testament it says in the “Lord’s Prayer”:
Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς· i.e., “Our father, which art in heaven,” as has also been retained in English: “Our father, which art in heaven.” To dwell on this subject further would lead us too far into the realm of occult philosophy. Suffice it to say that the primal source of all created things may well be regarded as the “father” of all creatures and nature as the mother of all that is born, but that neither divinity nor nature is in itself a personality, albeit everything personal is born of nature, as the name says “nature,” from natus (born).
Every real clergyman, that is, everyone who has true spiritual knowledge knows all this, but not every theologian can comprehend this mystery, and popular church belief has a very limited concept of God, which is why the religion of very many people is also about their own “I,” rotates and is based on selfishness. There is always only talk of what God does for us, of the rewards we expect from him and of his punishments which we try to avoid, but little is said about what we should do for God said. It is as if we are the main thing and God is the secondary, as if God is there to serve us and we are not there to serve him. Love of God is spoken of, but in order to love God one must know him, and it seems that many of the pious love the benefits they hope of him much more than love himself. It seems that few people would care about God unless they thought they had something to hope for or fear from him.
As long as you look at God as something concrete and have ideas about him, you distance yourself from him. You don’t know him then, but the image you have of him. That is why the Bible also says that one should “not take any image” of God, i.e., don’t introduce yourself. But whoever does not know God and does not feel his omnipresence cannot love him either; for him the object of his supreme worship is his own beloved imaginary “I,” and he regards God at most as a means to an end, as an instrument for the fulfillment of his personal desires, and thereby God is made a servant of man. Thus the gate is opened to egoism; everyone thinks only of his own person.— “Apres nous le déluge.”[2] [Fr., “After us the deluge.”] This is the popular belief of those who do not understand the deeper mysteries, and the perverse religion of the past.
True Christianity, on the other hand, in agreement with all the major religious systems of the world, teaches that God is supreme in all and above all. He is the essence, the life, the power of everything, and we are nothing without him. All creatures are in themselves only appearances, like shadow images, produced by the light, and when the light eludes them they disappear. For the egoist, whether he is a churchgoer indulging in his imagination or an unbeliever, his personality is everything and God is nothing; God everything and he in himself nothing. Since God is the essence and origin of everything, he is also the true and innermost self in every human being. He is the great sole I and Lord of the universe, and the end of all existence is to come to that self-knowledge by which man becomes divine in nature. So the question for the religion of the future is to put that great, all-encompassing “I” in the place of the small, imaginary “I,” and to know that only he who really works for himself works for the advancement of mankind and of all creatures in the circle assigned to him.
So far it has only been said: “Christ died for me.”
“Jesus takes my sins upon himself”—etc. But in the future it will be: “What can I do to serve God?”—“How can I be active for him in the great work of evolution?”—Then one will see that he serves God best who works for the ennoblement and the good of mankind. Whoever lives only for his own person or family, stands at the point of view of the beast; those who live for the greater good join the ranks of the gods.
But in order to reach this level, enlightenment is required; reason must come to the aid of feeling and the concept of God must be broadened. We must learn to see that God is the true essence of all creatures and that we humans differ from one another only in our personalities, that consequently the highest interests of the whole are also the highest of each individual, and that we can do nothing better than to obey the laws that govern the whole.
Basically, religion in the true sense of the word is nothing other than the practical application of a higher natural science. It is about getting to know the spiritual forces in nature and using them. If we know and obey the laws of nature, then nature obeys us. When we know and obey the divine laws, we own the will and power of God, and our future is in our hands.
This is the religion of obedience and renunciation that Christ teaches. The opening of the personal will in the light of knowledge is just as little an annihilation of individuality as when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly or a spark becomes light. It is the way to perfection, the entrance to nirvana. God is the big I, man is the small one, God is the big circle, man is a small circle contained in it. When the big circle joins the small, the small becomes the big. It is not the drop of dew that is swallowed up by the sea, but it itself becomes the sea, spreading out in it and imparting its properties to it. If evolution were to end with the loss of individuality, it would be pointless. Its purpose, on the other hand, is the development of individual self-awareness so that the consciousness of God can be revealed in it. Then self-conceit is replaced by the light of true knowledge, the sphere of which is all the greater the more individuality has developed.
The power by which individuality is strengthened and self-delusion is overcome is love, but love without understanding is blind. A religion that is only a matter of feeling will easily go astray because the feeling is not always the right one. Then personal hobbies are taken for love. Likes and dislikes, sympathies and antipathies exercise their dominion; one thinks one loves an object, but in the end loves only the pleasure one gets from it or expects. True love, however, demands nothing for one’s own person; it is not greed, but sacrifice. She seeks to unite with the beloved object and to be absorbed in it. If you want to love God, you have to get to know him. Without knowledge of God, love is a world without light. The love of God is the love of truth, and truth can only be truly loved by those who know it.
If love is to be perfect, it must be permeated with knowledge, and for this purpose experience and knowledge serve. It is important to eliminate prejudices and wrong views and to acquire a correct world view through teaching. The true doctrine of religion is that which explains man’s relationship to God and nature and his position in the universe.
But knowledge alone is not enough for us either. Learning without love produces no ennobling. know-it-all fragmented; the brooding mind, which wants to dissect, analyze and classify everything, does not lead to true knowledge, but rather to the loss of the ability to recognize the unity of the big whole. Phantasms are the enemies of intuition. Love is the substance of all things; without them all knowledge is meaningless and belongs in the realm of the imagination. Love springs from touch and leads to union, which separates and removes empty observation.
What has ruined the ancient religious systems and fragmented the churches (and some modern societies) is not lack of knowledge but lack of love, and through lovelessness knowledge is lost. The philosophers of the ancient Greeks and Romans probably knew more than we do about the composition of the cosmos and the human constitution, the inhabitants of the central region, the astral plane, the afterlife and the like, but their mathematics and geometry could not save the gods.
Then came Christianity and replaced dry knowledge with love. It won hearts because it appealed not to the brain but to the heart; therefore hearts rejoiced in her, and she gained dominion over the world. Then dogma came and with it the lust for power and intolerance, the church with clergy, worldly rule, greed, persecution, cruelty, hatred, religious wars, courts of heretics, inquisition, torture, burning alive. The spirit fled, and the empty form shattered into pieces fighting each other.
But the spiritual spark continued to smolder in people’s hearts, and its light tried to break through in various ways. In the religion of the future, love will come to the aid of knowledge and knowledge of love, and both will complement each other. There, the true religious feeling will be combined with a deeper knowledge. Love is heavenly and descends, reason is earthly and ascends and from the union of the two is born true wisdom ✡︎. For a long time the “heaven” has descended to the “earth”, and the time is approaching when the “earth” will ascend to “heaven.” Then all the conditions about which one complains now and which one tries in vain to change by force will of themselves change for the better. Promoting the progress and ennobling of mankind is the task of every noble-minded person, and to do this by word and example should especially be the endeavor of every member of the Theosophical Society.
Notes:
[1] The Religion of the Future [Die Religion der Zukunft. Franz Hartmann, M.D. [Theosophischer Wegweiser 5, no. 1 (October 1902), 1-11] Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025}
[2] That is, what happens after our death does not concern us now. (D. Red.)