People are free from the exercise of power by monarchs. They are free from the exercise of power by churches. They are free from the exercise of power by superstition and charlatanry.
Thanks be to the Enlightenment! Freedom!
Perhaps there was once a well-meaning monarch somewhere. The one under whom people could live in peace and happiness. The one they loved, the one they could entrust themselves to in the knowledge of his wisdom and goodness. Perhaps… Perhaps there were also Christians who could bestow blessings. Who could take away the pain of the burdened one and let him perceive the truth of security in spiritual strength…. And perhaps there were also people who could look deeper than others. Who could look a little further into eternity and infinity and give answers to the questioner and healing to the sick…. Perhaps there was once such a thing…
Would have been good to promote all this, wouldn’t it? (Also the monarch. Even that one, dear freedom-loving individuals. It is so delicious to entrust oneself to the guidance of a wise and well-meaning monarch… It builds character…) But the Enlightenment thinkers, intoxicated with freedom and reason and their faith in matter, could not distinguish. They knew only: freedom! Of man. Of the spirit. Of the individual!
What do we have now? What followed from this, from this spirit? An arena in which everyone has to be an individual and in which he rows his arms and legs, drifting in a vacuum. A system that has been wrought around him, in which he is forced to promote his basest instincts in order to fight mercilessly against his fellow individuals or, better, against counter-individuals. He who knows within himself (and yet no longer knows it) that he is so much more. Who needs soul guidance, for he can then act and shine divinely. For that is what he was made for! But he must slaughter. For a Lord who does not love him. Who makes man not love himself. He must strive to become a little master himself, to succumb to power. Because otherwise, the others will do it! An eternal struggle for – freedom? No. For naked survival.
Freedom, which includes everyone (and everything), does not exist without knowledge of the divine. Nor, for that matter, does brotherhood… Without knowledge of the spiritual, only hatred remains. And really only hate. In whatever disguise and under whatever name and in whatever interpretation it may appear. And the system of hatred is materialism. Is now capitalism. And it, hatred, it knows no limit and it includes everything. For there is only him, the individual. And everything apart from him is alien to him. And in the end, it is also alien to itself.
The Enlightenment thinkers did not grasp the world. The Enlighteners already had their own skilful, secret master at that time, who clogged up their sense of soul. And they did not see him, the secret, the evil smirking master, and talked absurdly, deludedly, self-righteously and supposedly so cleverly about freedom, freedom, freedom.
But man’s true freedom is in his freedom from the fear of death, in his freedom from hatred and in his freedom from the limitations imposed by his material existence.
But that might have been a little too much freedom for the secret, evil smirking Lord to want to make the blinded enlighteners aware of….