I have translated three articles by Franz von Baader.

I suggest that
they be read in the order listed:
1. Concerning the conflict of religious faith and knowledge as the
spiritual root of the decline of religious and political society in our
time as in every time (1833) [ber den Zwiespalt des Religisen
Glaubens und Wissens als die geistige Wurzel des Verfalls der
religisen und politischen Societt in unserer wie in jeder Zeit]
2. Concerning the Concept of Time (1818) [ber den Begriff der
Zeit]
3. Elementary concepts concerning Time: As Introduction to the
Philosophy of Society and History (1831) [Elementarbegriffe ber
die Zeit: als Einleitung zur Philosophie der Soziett und
Geschichte]
As far as I know, this is the first time that these articles have been
translated into English. Each article has endnotes that refer back
to my Studies of Herman Dooyeweerd.

Concerning the conflict of religious faith and knowledge as

the spiritual root of the decline of religious and political
societyin our time as in every time
[ber den Zwiespalt des Religisen Glaubens und Wissens
als die geistige Wurzel des Verfalls der religisen und
politischen Societtin unserer wie in jeder Zeit]
by Franz von Baader(1833)
Translation and Notes by J. Glenn Friesen 2004
The original can be found in Baader's Werke 1, 357-382
Translators Introduction

Baaders style of German is notoriously difficult. I have broken up

his very long sentences into many shorter sentences. Words in
round brackets are Baaders own parenthetical remarks. Those
portions of the text in square brackets are either the original
untranslated text, or additional words that I have inserted to make
sense of the text. In my own endnotes (which are distinguished
from Baaders), I have also made comparisons to the neoCalvinism of Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) and to the Christian
philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977). Baader
influenced both Kuyper and Dooyeweerd.

Baaders Text
In every era of time, the conquest of errors and lies, like the
conquest of crime and or revolt, does not only have the goal of
restoring the pure teaching, morality as innocence and social order
to the old threatened or wounded status quo, but it also has the
task, by weakening those powers, to enrich us with new powers,
as the spoils of victory. And it has the task to set up that which is
strong in place of what proves a failure, i.e. shows itself to be
weak. One therefore sees that the true preservation in each era
can only be obtained by an unrestrained further development
(growth)something that is already included in the concept of
temporal life. Its preeminent function is not just the removal of
obstacles, but rather in the subjugating [1] transformation of them
into serving and beneficial agents. Only in such a way can one
maintain himself in the center of each time, i.e. above it (the spirit
of the age or Zeitgeist). And only in this way can one hold within
the bounds of a lawsuit or trial(Reformatio fiat intra ecclesiam
[2])the necessary and continuing strife within and with time,
between the past and future, between the old and the new, as well
as that between the good and the bad. And it also allows us to
guard against a its breaking out in state that is lawless and lawopposing, i.e. anarchistic or revolutionary.[3]

What has here been said in a general sense, also applies in a

special way to religious society, and to Christian Doctrine.
Therefore one would be mistaken in thinking that by means of a
mere repair, i.e. through a mere restoration of the status quo of
the old Doctrine (perhaps of three centuries ago or even one
century ago), one could remedy the present disbelief prevailing in
Christendom or the general ignorance in knowledge of religion.[4]
For this disbelief and this ignorance are of a totally different nature
than they were in earlier times, and the new illness cannot be
repelled with the old prescription.
In reference to this aim it must first be observed that the decline
of religious belief and knowledge of which we are speaking,
necessarily makes itself known as a conflict between them. As is
known, this conflict [between faith and knowledge] was brought
about by the so-called Reformation, just as it has now established
itself in her, so that the illness cannot be radically remedied
except through the restoration of the old normal and harmonious
relation between religious belief and knowledge.[5]
As one knows, and as is also shown historically, every conflict is by
virtue of its nature related to a conflict between beliefs and actions
in that the actions separated from beliefs are not the correct
actions, beliefs separated from actions are not the correct beliefs,
just as knowledge separated from beliefs is not true knowledge,
and, beliefs separated from knowledge are not the right, true (i.e.
strong [6]) beliefs. Whether in single humans or in whole nations,
religious faith and knowledge can therefore only arise together in
equal measure, go forwards or backwards together, or decline
together. So in our time, we truly cannot rejoice about an increase
or progress of true and fundamental knowledge in comparison
with the decline of faith among faith-adverse rationalists, nor over
the increase in faith in comparison with the decline of knowledge
among knowledge-averse believers.[7] But we must lament just as
much over the general religious ignorance as a consequence of
the decline of faith, as we must lament the universality of disbelief

as a consequence of the decline of knowledge.

Now wherever a conflict has occurred, one must not hope to be
able to cure the ill by merely externally or in a one-sided way
coming to the help of one of the contraries. Rather it is only by
reviving and strengthening both sides together and from out of
their common center. That is, it is no less important to clarify
religious knowledge everywhere and in all branches of knowledge,
as it is to revive faith. There are those who are of the opinion that
one can free humans from their current partly bad, partly criminal
wills by means a bare non-knowing, instead of by means of a
good, thoroughgoing knowledge, in a battle with new errors and
new lies as well as with old stupidity and knowledge obtained in
indolence. But those who hold such an opinion will find themselves
caught in the same dangerous errors as those who are of the
opinion that one can not free humans from criminality and from sin
by the acquisition of virtue, but rather through returning them to a
state of innocence, which innocence is at the same time without
blame and without virtue. But such innocence, although it can and
should not be lost, nevertheless only becomes incapable of being
lost by the acquisition of virtue.
No individual human, just as no single nation, can stand still in
religious faith and knowledge without regressing in both (non
progredi est regredi [8]). The lack of this insight has brought forth
the bad and pernicious opinion, which hides under the cloak of
orthodoxy, that religious knowledge is necessarily and by its
nature something that stands still and does not need and is it not
capable [9] of any progress. This opinion can only be held by
putting a stop to growth. This wrong opinion is chiefly supposed by
our rationalists, St. Simonists, or however the opponents of
Christianity and the Christian Church may call themselves. It is as
if this opinion is one of the premisses granted them by the
theologians themselves. In this way they want to explain both
(Christianity and the Christian Church) as antiques, belonging to
history as something from the past, and therefore now deadall in

order to recommend to us their surrogates. That is why in our

times it is so much more necessary and dutiful to disseminate and
to hold fast to the insight into the inseparability of true
orthosophy (right knowledge [10]) with true orthodoxy (right
faith), as well as the insight that wherever an opposition appears
and is maintained between them, both have entered into a wrong
position with respect to each other, a position that is ruinous to
them, to the extent that both find themselves deformed. This
deformation [Entstellung] has increased at an accelerating rate
since the beginning of the Reformation. That is why if one could
hypothetically suddenly dissolve the external phenomenon of
Protestantism, but without eradicating its cause in the rootnamely
this deformation and the conflict of which we are speaking) the
Church would not as a result become better but rather worse.
Whereby I must nevertheless remark, if Protestantism has in fact
come forth from the dispute between religious knowledge and
faith, it must necessarily remain in existence as long as this
dispute continues to exist. But one must in no way consider
Protestantism to be a necessary, that is unavoidable event, or a
necessary moment in the history of the development of the
Church, just as little as one may assert this of the rationalism that
has set itself against this Church in place of the older
Protestantism. A Church, which moreover in accordance with its
mission, unites as little with liberalism (rationalism) as with
servility (obscurantism). The divine Word is the Principle of all true
evolution, and as such assists it everywhere. But in each region
where revolution has actually broken out (attaining socially
usurped power), this is only to be understood as the consequence
of a non-assisted, or badly assisted, or resisted good evolution.
[11]
In fact this illusion of a necessary and irreconcilable conflict
between religious faith and knowledge is really rooted in the
logical ignorance and the lack of clarity regarding knowledge, nonknowledge and faith in general. These three must accompany,
complete, guard and protect each otherneither less nor more

than in every other branch of human knowing and acting than is

the case in religious knowing and acting. In fact it would be just as
unreasonable to separate faith and knowledge from each other in
history, in politics, in industry etc. as in religion [12], or to set faith
and knowledge in an absolute antagonism, or to view them as
necessarily placed in such antagonism. Whereby it must be
remarked, something that even modern politicians seldom or
never notice, that when such a dispute between faith and
knowledge has entered a nation in its religion, it does not remain
there, for the same dispute is like an infection imparted to all
remaining spheres of its knowing, believing and acting. So an
individual human, just like an individual nation, in whom such a
dispute between his religious faith and knowledge has established
itself, must already be declared to be rotten at the core. For just as
Man stands trusting, believing and knowing in relation to God, so
he also stands to other humans (above and below), as well as to
nature. And it would not be hard to demonstrate, that the measure
of harmony or of discord of religious faith and knowledge in a
nation, as well as the strength or weakness of both, is its true
measure of life (Zoometer), instead of the stock exchange,
where the political materialist supposes it to be found.
We have asserted an almost universally present lack of clarity
about the relation of faith to knowledge among philosophers and
theologians. If this assertion is doubted, then one need only
consider that these philosophers and theologians have certainly
been able to say a lot to us about the relation of believing to
knowing, but less of the relation of believing to willing, although
the word to believe [Glauben] shows a direct relationship
between believing and willing in its kinship with the words to
promise [Geloben] and to betroth to [Verloben], so that the
apostle explains the knowledge of God as the reward allotted to
those who believe in and who seek God. And in the same sense,
Augustine says, Nemo credit nisi volens [no one believes except
voluntarily]. [13]

For faith has the same relation to intuitive vision [Schauen] and
knowledge [kennen] as the relation of touching the ground (selfsupport) to our free movement, or the relation of our motivation
(entering into the ground of movement) to our willing. And just as
one cannot move freely without touching the ground, and cannot
touch the ground without free movement, so one cannot use
reason [Vernunft] without being free to believe, and cannot believe
without making use of his reason. From this it follows that
everywhere that faith and knowledge [Wissen] appear to conflict
with or to retard each other, it is really only one belief that is
fighting with another belief [14] if a person has already used, and
has had to use his knowing ( raison) as a weapon to defend or to
attack this other belief.[15] In this sense, Paul says that the
wisdom or reason [Vernunft] of the believers in God and those who
have been enlightened by God appears as foolishness and
absurdity [Unvernunft] to the wisdom of the world or the reason of
the world.[16] And in the same sense one says that each passion
[Lust] seeks and makes its own cunning [List]. For example, just
as, because the irreligious spirit has no reason holding himself in
position, he is continually busy trying to make one, and he is in
this sense necessarily engaged in sophistry [vernunftelnd] or
being rationalistic. In this same striving of Tantalus he is an
unbeliever, i.e. one who is deficient in belief. [17] Furthermore, the
will of man, or the willing person does not, like God, make his own
ground of movement, and he does not even first acknowledge this
as something distinguished from him. Whereas the choosing
person in the true sense of this word knows that he is not solitary
[all-ein], but rather he chooses from among several grounds of
movement that are offered to him, and he decides among them.
Just in this way the seeing, intelligent person does not himself
make his faith (namely the object of his faith), although he
certainly decides for or against the one or the other. That means,
that the Spirit cannot see other than with and in his eye, and the
finite spirit with his partial eye does not see otherwise than
through his being placed into a central or universal eye. This being
placed into [Eingerckt-Sein] and being held may occur in a direct

way or may also take place through the help of another partial
eye, or through both at the same time. And so the individual
person, living within time, may close his Central Eye as little as his
partial eye; but he may however choose between the one and the
other, the Central and the partial eye, before he freely subjects
[sich subjizierend] himself to and enters one or the other of his
lights, guides, or pointers (wisdom).[18] This act of entering into
must be called free belief, which therefore also coincides with the
act of free subordination, just as one must call unbelief the act of
closing oneself up or of going out again [from oneself].
Many paradoxes may appear because of what has been said about
the choice of an eye as light; this is because one must already see
in order to choose his eye or his vision. I must say that just herein
lies that old error of the philosophers and their misunderstanding
with the theologians: namely that they do not want to know of any
other vision and knowing excepting the kind that that they have
without their cooperation, yes a kind of knowing that comes
against their will with compelling force and at the same time a
knowing that is compelled with force [19], and which arises from
out of a mere outward vision. This mere outward seeing is
possessed by humans in common with animals and which seems
to belong to the mechanical part of our knowing. It is the kind of
knowing that the French call exact: a knowing that, as is said,
comes and goes to a man without his will, and for which coming
and going he is really not responsible.
As against this we have referred to that double eye of the spirit,
which offers itself to humans in temporal life across and through
this involuntary [exact] seeing.[20] Humans actually give
themselves in faith to one or the other [of these eyes]. This giving
is successive [in time], and informs that person, so that temporal
death does not place him in one or the other kind of vision, but
only takes away the veil that had covered that vision. And what
had appeared in time to be an indefinitely continuing line is
formed to a closed sphere apparently around him. That is, the

temporal concept-less and present-less one thing after another

and one thing out of another [Auseinander und Nacheinander] will
become instead a non-temporal, permanent, and simultaneous
Presence. This Presence will be either above this external
periphery as an absolute center expanding in its periphery, or it
will be below it as the absolutely contradictory center,
compromised with its periphery. [21]
Moreover, when the Scriptures refer to this twofold eye of the
spirit [22]as the eye of light and the eye of darkness (as heavenly
and as infernal) [23], then one must not as is generally done,
understand by the word darkness merely a lack of vision, but
rather the entrance of an abnormal vision, which opposes itself to
the normal vision and which is therefore excluded from it. The
correct concept of such a negative spiritual vision is only correctly
understood when it is distinguished not only from the positive
spiritual vision but also from the merely external vision. In the
perfected positive spiritual vision, the inner and the external vision
completely correspond. But the dark or negative vision remains in
its Tantalus-like striving, wanting to make itself inwardly and
externally valid at the same time, but finding itself always caught
in the conflict or the non-identity of subjectivity and objectivity
(the being-collapsed-into-each-other and the becoming of the
center and of the periphery). This negative vision thus also is
distinguished from the merely external vision (peripheral or
temporal), which does not correspond to any inner (central) vision,
but which also does not contradict it, since it is merely external.
Because of this, the origin and continued existence of such merely
external vision can be understood only by the imperfectedness (or
the suspension of completion) of the positive or negative visions.
[24] That is, in its succession of one thing after another and one
thing out of another of its centrality and its peripherality. In
contrast, by joining this [centrality and peripherality] together in a
coherence, the one kind of vision as well as the other reaches its
completion and thereby goes from out of time.

The problem that must be solved by the philosophers and

theologians (in order to restore a satisfying theory of faith and
knowledge), is none other than to demonstrate [1] whom or rather
on (in) whom a person really believes in each case, [2] whom he
may or may not believe (especially in relation to his knowing
[Wissen]), and finally, [3] on whom he should or should not
believe, making use of his reason [Vernunft]. I say on whom and
not in what because at its basis, each belief is personal (moral),
and one cannot believe in a non-personal thing, and cannot truly
unite (promise) himself to the non-personal. For example, for a
person who says that he believes in and trusts in an impersonal
[selbstlosen] nature, it is not the so-called laws of nature that he
believes in, but rather in a personality and morality that he
demands or wishes of nature. If law is considered in and of itself,
abstracted from a law-Giver, it is then for Man an irresolute and
unfeeling law (lex est res surda et exorabilis [25]), accordingly
something inhuman. This view of law applies even more to moral
law than for natural law, as our moralists have for a long time
taken it as their first principle and have taught it to us as the
exclusive motive [26] of morality, but have hereby only
demonstrated their being separate and empty of God, or the
Godlessness of their moral system.
The support of my power of motion is itself something moving and
forceful, because my power can rest neither on something
powerless nor on something that is merely a resistance and which,
without giving me rest [Halt] only retards me [aufhlt]. And each
normal resistance, as negative assistance, must at the same time
show itself as positive assistance (as help). And furthermore, the
real ground of my willing can only itself be a will, because I can
take nothing to heart in either a good or bad sense that does not
come from a heart, and which itself is heart. Therefore, the
support (the Ground-Principle) of the free movement of my
intelligent nature must itself also be intelligent nature. And man
(like every creature who knows himself and others) only knows, in
that he knows himself to be known from one who is above him. His

knowing (his certainty as well as his conscience)[27] therefore

does not, as the rationalists suppose, come to him per
generationem aequivocam or from himself alone, but per
traducem, which means by being informed (not by being a part
of) [28], and by entering into an existing, completed or finished
vision [Schauen] and knowledge [Wissen] that stands a priori in
relation to him.[29] In this sense Malebranche was correct to
assert that we see everything in God, at least (to use this
expression in the more narrow sense that accords with the
Scriptures) we ought to see them in God, namely in that divine or
heavenly eye (of which we have spoken). In the Fall, man was
certainly deprived of this eye, but it was again opened to him, But
this also made it possible, through the merely external eye to
enter into the infernal or to come out from it again.
Descartes opposed this, and paved the way for atheism with his
Cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I am], in that Descartes
placed the reflection of the creature prior to the primal thought of
God. As against this, man can and should say nothing but:
I am seen, seen through, known, thought, understood [30],
therefore I see, know, think, and understand. I am willed, desired,
loved, therefore I am willing, desiring, loving or hating. I am acted
on, therefore I act.
The logicians, ethicists, physicists, who speak to us of the laws of
thought, willing and acting, should above all have explained to us
the meaning and the sense of the word law [Gesetz]. They should
have shown us that by law we may not understand anything
except the being placed or located [Gesetztsein, Lociertsein] of
the thinking, willing, acting humans from and in a higher being
(the primal Spirit). Man was to continue this thinking, willing and
acting [31] only in a reflected way and in a more inferior, external
region, just as this was originally shown to him. These logicians,
ethicists and physicists should have shown us that the more
carefully that man reflects on this primal thought, the more
forgetful of himself he wants to be in following this primal will, and

the more obediently he follows the actions of the primal action,

and he will to the same degree think more clearly, will more freely
and act more powerfully and without ceasing. But with their
abstract, nonliving and mechanical understanding of the law [32],
they [the logicians, etc.] have to a large extent done the opposite
of this, and they have thereby dissuaded people from making this
act of the heartof entering in faith into this primal thought, primal
will and primal actthe religious act as a whole. They have made it
difficult, if not impossible, for people insofar as they believe their
[the logicians, etc.] teachings, to make the prince of life free within
them, as the Scriptures say.[33] Instead of externally binding the
murderer (Barrabas), the most important consequence of their
teaching is that they have instead made him free and have bound
people in him.[34] How can one however reasonably hope to
remedy the disputes between faith and knowledge, and the
decline of religious and civil society, if one cannot set a better
teaching of the law against this teaching of the law that is partly
empty of God and partly opposed to God? How can one, I say,
especially in our time, hope for example to become free of the
burdensome supervision of students when one does not seriously
and in renewal take the trouble to ensure the supervision of and
the insight into these studies? Is not the tendency towards base
acts (to servility) of no less evil and irreligious nature than that of
the absolute autonomy and of shameless liberalism? And if these
two corruptions of human nature, expressing themselves in two
directions, are innate and inherited, it is still not to be denied, that
especially the youth are capable of awakening what is opposed to
this nature: the religious affects of humility and nobility, and that
for some time the dominant teachings have been qualified and
intended to accomplish exactly the opposite of this.
Endnotes
[1] JGF: Baader coins the word here subjicierendersubjugating,
from subject, make subject to.
[2] JGF: I am not sure of the reference, but the meaning seems to

be let there be reformation within the church. It therefore refers

to self-reformation.
[3] Baader's note 1: The conscious and voluntary bringing about of
such a lawless and law-opposing state of society is always (as is its
complicity) an offence against the confessed Sovereignty of the
Constitutional State, and the so-called Droit d'insurrection [right of
insurrection] is absurd. JGF: Baaders ideas, opposing a right of
revolution, are later echoed by the Anti-Revolutionary Party in the
Netherlands.
[4] Baader's note 2: Where this religious science [Wissenschaft]
remained standing still, it became superficial and without spirit.
And where it moved forward, it became destructive, so that our
knowledge of religious things today has become partly one with
too little or too narrow a content, and partly one with a bad
content.
[5] Baader's note 3: If now many Catholics and Protestants today
consider such a restoration to be impossible, their disbelief in its
feasibility serves the Antichrist, more than they believe.
[6] JGF: Baader likes to argue from presumed etymologies. He here
compares true [wahrhaft] with strong [wehrhaft].
[7] Baader's note 4: Whose agreement and sympathy are falsely
taken to be a proof of an invisible Church.
[8] JGF: non progredi est regredi: not to progress is to regress.
[9] Baader's note 5: Those who do not see any possibility of new
discoveries in religious knowledge, since these would not be
reconcilable with the permanence of dogmas, should be asked to
consider that these dogmas are principles of knowledge, from
which we should continually make new and further use, just as the
mathematician makes use of axioms, or as a gardener makes use
of the seeds entrusted to him.

[10] JGF: Although Rechtswissenschaft means jurisprudence, he

here uses the term Rechtwissenschaft or right knowledge or
science.
[11] Baader's note 6: In this sense Tertullian already observed that
each heresy has the goal to either invite the teaching of the
Church to a new advance (in knowing and believing), or to punish
it for its neglect of such an advance. The enormity of todays
heresies therefore discloses both the size of the demand and that
of the omission.
[12] Baader's note 7: As is known, the Scriptures equate the
relation of faith to sight with that of hope to experience. Yet the
comparison is not in the sense that the one merely dissolves the
other, but rather that both limit each other, or so that faith arises
from out of sight as well as that sight follows upon faith. From this
one can see the truth of our assertion, that faith and knowledge
can only decrease and increase together in temporal life.
[13] Baader's note 8: Just as one must say, Nemo vult, nisi videns
[No one wills unless he sees], because blind faith in the narrow
sense of the word would be a blind will. Faithful is the one who
sees [Trau, schau, wem] or vide, cui fidas. The expressions
blind faith and blind will obtain their correct meaning if one
takes the word to believe [Glauben] in its most general sense as
to promise [Geloben] or to enter in [Eingehen]. For it is namely
correct that a person may inwardly become aware of the
solicitation for such an entrance into or giving of oneself, as a
willing that is separated from knowledge just as much as an action
that is separated from both, although in normal circumstances this
separation should only show itself as a distinction within a unity.
[14] JGF: Similarly, Dooyeweerd says that if there were not this
battle of faiths, it should just be a matter of using logic and reason
to convince each other (NC I, 36).
[15] Baader's note 9: One can therefore say, Show may what you

do not believe in, and I will then show you in what you do believe
in; show me what you do not know, and I will then show you what
you know or purport to know; show me whom you do not serve
and I will show you whom you serve.
[16] JGF: The reference is to 1 Corinthians 3:19:
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.
[17] Baader's note 10: The insight is still lacking that it is just this
rationalism, as a making of ones own reason [Vernunft], that is
the root of modern making of constitutions, kings, religions and
churches, etc.
[18] JGF: There is a play on words between pointers [Weiser] and
wisdom [Weisheit].
[19] Baader's note 11: In regard to which one can say that these
philosophers try to preserve themselves from the truth as much as
possible.
[20] Baader's note 12: Just as this freedom of choice of the ground
of movement is not to be confused with the freedom or lack of
freedom of the will after entering into such a choice, so is the
freedom of choice of eye not to be confused with the freedom or
lack of freedom of vision in and with this eye.
[21] Baader's note 13: In Vol. IV of my Fermenta Cognitionis, I
have already shown that the concept of nature is not to be
separated from that of a supernature and an infranature, the
abyss [Abgrndigkeit). The first is that which is freedom of nature.
The latter designates being that is absolutely unfree of nature,
when the creature falls into it. I have moreover shown that this
freedom of nature and lack of freedom coincide with freedom of
time and space, as well as lack of freedom of time and space, as
well as with a being that is supra-material and one that is inframaterial. Finally, being in space and time expresses itself in a

nature, which finds itself placed and maintained from out of both
centers.
[22] JGF: The reference is to Matthew 6:22-23,
The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single,
thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy
whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in
thee be darkness, how great [is] that darkness!
[23] JGF: Cf. Kuyper, who says that after mans fall, the earth sank
below the level that it originally had. A part of the beauty of the
earth was taken away. Thereafter, the unsightly, the ugly and even
the demonic and the horrible began to reveal themselves as
powers, both in their spiritual as well as material existence. Kuyper
differentiates between mere ugliness and the truly horrible:
Where there is only the retreat [moving backwards] of former
beauty, we have the beginning of ugliness. But as soon as an
antithetical principle begins to work actively, there arises the
sporadic anticipation of the hellish and the horrible; this really
finds its own true region in the things that are under the earth, in
the [katachthonia][ " Het Calvinisme en de kunst," pp. 12 and 64
ft. 32.]
[24] Baader's note 14: In the Silberblick of ecstasy, as an
anticipation of this integrity, the heavenly eye glances through (if
only momentarily) the merely external vision, or the infernal eye
may also glance through the merely external vision. Shakespeare
uses the significant term for these moments. Eternal moments.
In our temporal life the inner and the outer Heavens, and the inner
and the outer Hell, only come together in a momentary way. But
when they do come together, it is most often the case that this
coming together is damaging to temporal life. So for example one
can find the cause of many suicides in this meeting of the inner
and external Hell.

[25] JGF: The maxim should read, lex, res surda, inexorabilis [law is
a deaf, inexorable thingincapable of being moved by entreaty].
[26] JGF: Triebfedermainspring or motive.
[27] JGF: [Gewissheit wie Gewissen]
[28] JGF: [durch Mitteilung (nicht durch Teilsein)]
[29] Baader's note 15: What is called Light in each region is itself
only the seeing of a primal seeing [Ursehenden], and the
philosophers should have considered, in accordance with the
proverb accidentia non migrant substantiis in substantias
[particularised qualities have a unique bearer in which they inhere;
no such quality then can inhere in two different entities]. Therefore
the one who sees cannot give away his seeing, nor one who wills
his willing, nor one who acts his acting; therefore he can make
another one participate in these only if that other participates in
and remains in his nature. In passing I would say that the
statement touched on here of the inseparability of the gift from
the giver is of special importance in the teaching concerning the
sacraments.
[30] Baader's note 16: As is known, Fichte with his I [Ich] and
Hegel with his Idea [Begrif] took the same point of departure as
Descartes. In Vol. 5 of the Revue Europene it is said of Hegel, that
he achieved great profit from anatomy in philosophy or of
philosophy. This expression is suspicious, since the spirit of our
age, having outlived his spirit, shows itself to have busied itself for
a long time with this anatomy (as critic), because of which such
dissection reports can be found in all branches of knowledge. Ubi
cadaveribi aquilae [wherever the carcass is, there will the eagles
be gathered together].
[31] JGF: Cf. Dooyeweerds three kinds of acts from out of our
supratemporal center.

[32] Baader's note 17: Our liberals, too hold to this abstract
concept of law. After they, as true purists, have distanced
themselves from all living and embodied carries and holders of it,
they have underlain it with their own individuality as a surrogate.
Therefore the more recent political doctrines of absolute autonomy
and anomie are only consequences of such abstract philosophical
teachings about the law. Moreover in order to find fault with just
one of the many examples of silliness that our moralists, in
renouncing religion, have let themselves come to be responsible
for, let me say that they completely overlook the coincidence of
the setting of the law [Stelling] with the form, and of the moral law
with the image of God. Or they completely overlook or fail to
realize that the moral imperative is really the advancement of the
image of God in Man.
[33] JGF: The reference seems to be to Acts 3:15
And killed the Prince of life, whom God hath raised from the dead;
whereof we are witnesses.
[34] Baader's note 18: Whomever I admit within myself and my
powers, his manifestation is made free, in and through myself.

Concerning the Concept of Time

[ber den Begriff der Zeit]
by Franz von Baader(1818)
Translation and Notes by J. Glenn Friesen 2004
The originals can be found in Baader's Werke 2, 47-94
Translators Introduction
Baaders style of German is notoriously difficult. I have broken up
his very long sentences into many shorter sentences. Words in

round brackets are Baaders own parenthetical remarks. Those

portions of the text in square brackets are either the original
untranslated text, or additional words that I have inserted to make
sense of the text. In translating this article, I have made use of
Baaders own translation of it into French entitled Sur le Tem[p]s
(1818). In my own endnotes (which are distinguished from
Baaders) I have also made comparisons to the neo-Calvinism of
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) and to the Christian philosophy of
Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977). Baader influenced both Kuyper
and Dooyeweerd. Baaders emphasis on our access to a direct,
unmediated Presence of the Center is in contrast to
postmodernisms denial of any unmediated experience or
Presence. Based on Baaders article on time, we can see how
postmodernism is only an extreme modernism.Introduction by
Baader [1]
The sensory action of the Spirit, more or less breaking through the
boundaries of time and space, has manifested and proved itself in
several somnambulists [2] in Germany. At this same moment, our
philosophy begins to see the light and to approach that most
complete insightthat in addition to this temporal region, there are
two other regions and classes of beings. The one region is above,
and the other region is below this time. Their existence and
effective influence, that is, their active interrelations both within
and with this temporal region can and should form again the field
of enquiry [Gegenstand] of our observations (and even our
experiments), just as these were observed by our ancestors. These
observations and experiments are just as convincing in their order
as those that take place in the purely temporal order. This is the
subject of the following work, which I hope will give us a clearer
understanding of the most fundamental problem of philosophy,
that of giving to us a complete theory of time. And I hope that it
will also facilitate the finding of a solution to this problem, and in
this way contribute to the well-being of the Spirit of man by a
lessening of the pain and the humiliation of his ignorance.

Schwabing by Munich, August 1818.

The complete movement or transformation accomplished by life
encloses itself; it circles in the three moments of origin, existence
and the return within.[3] Or in other words, of production
(descent), preservation (conservation) and of reintegration (as a
re-ascent).[4] It is in this sense that God is described in the
Scriptures as the Being who is, who was and who ever shall be.
Until now, eternity has mistakenly been understood as an
unmoving and static Presence; this mistake was made because it
was not seen that this Presence must contain within itself two
other times, the past and the future, in order to bring about a
completed existence [Existenz] or permanence within all three of
these dimensions. Therefore everything that is in eternity, that is
everything that is received into the completed (perfect or
absolute) lifefor that is the meaning of eternal lifemust be
regarded as always existing, as always having been, and as always
becoming to be. What is in eternity is thus regarded as always
resting in its movement, and always moving itself in its Rest, or as
always new and yet always the same. [5]
We may with St. Martin refer to this eternal time as the true
time. Until now, this true time has been opposed to time in its
narrower sense, which always lacks a present. In this [narrower]
time are found only two dimensions of the complete Ternar [6] of
Timethe past and the future, which proceed from it. And in this
[narrower] time, the emptiness of the Presence is filled by an
apparent
presence
[7]
(Praesentia
Phaenomenon).
This
appearance is an apparition in the full sense of the word.
Therefore we may call this time the appearance-time, in an even
deeper sense than one usually uses this expression.
But it is by no means an apparent presence that is directly
opposed to the true Presence; on the contrary, it is the absolute
negation of all true Presence. And the opposition between true
time and appearance-time is itself therefore only apparent. Or at

the very least, this opposition to true time is not direct, since a
direct opposition exists only between the first time [Eternity] and a
third time, which we must call false time.[9] In false time, all
beings exist only in the past [they lack both the present and the
future].
Appearance time is in fact dualistic; it rushes on in haste without
rest. In the final analysis, this dualism displays itself as the
consequence of a negative reaction, which opposes itself to the
perfect revelation of true Presence. But this reaction always finds
itself suppressed anew, so that it can never itself escape [from
true Presence] by its own means. [10] Its own presence can only
reveal itself in this negative way, that is, by the non-revelation of
this true Presence or true time.
The fire which here tries to open and to explode, is therefore not a
generating or nourishing fire [11] but a destroying one. In the
Scriptures it is referred to as the gnawing worm that never dies.
And the fact that this fire can be ignited constitutes the danger, or
what we may call the earnestness for each life that is created or
that proceeds from God [12] (Periculum vitae). [13]
The comparison that is frequently made is not incorrect,
comparing the movement of life in appearance-time with
movement in the periphery. As one knows, this movement in the
periphery only arises because neither the power that affirms or
fixes [setzt] the Center (Oneness), nor the opposing power that
annuls the Center, is in a position to make itself exclusively valid.
[14] This comparison [with the Idea of Center and periphery] must
be understood in an organic and not just a mechanical sense. The
comparison is much more instructive when the concepts of Center
and periphery are understood in their reciprocal relation in one
and the same organic system. For in just such an [organic] system,
it is only by means of the Rest, the being-placed [15] (le
posement) of the Center that the free motion in its periphery (its
outer nature) is effected. For each motion proceeds from the
Immovable. And it is only by the non-resting of the Center (i.e.

either its opening, or its disappearance) that the torment of

restraint of such free movement is effected. [16]
In between these two extremes is found a third state, the
movement in the periphery, which proceeds from a center [17]
external to this being, which moves the being in this way in the
periphery. Such movement is not supported [begrndet, appuy]
in the beings inner or proper center; therefore such movement is
not free. But neither is this movement restrained by the opening of
its other [infernal] center. And it is precisely this movement in the
periphery that characterizes appearance-time.
The Scriptures themselves refer us to such a theory of time (the
temporal world) in that they call the denying Spirit the liar and the
murderer from the beginning. [18] By beginning is meant the
beginning of the appearance-time. The beginning of this time is
nothing but the ending (cessation or suspension [19]) of true time.
And that which has in this way begun to pass away would not any
longer be capableat least by means of its own powerof ending
this passing away. [20]
Suppose that in the middle of a beings system there arises an
action that opposes and threatens the unity and effective harmony
of this system. We can understand that the rapport (or the
relation) of the center of such a system with this action can no
longer remain the same, and that it must change in the same
instant. If in the instant that this opposing action arises, the
effective being (Agens) finds itself in a direct or total relationship
with this Center, then this Center, in its Totality, will either react
directly upon and against this being in order to stop and to destroy
the action, or it will distance itself from that being. Such distancing
would certainly not be absolute, since an absolute distancing
would be an absolute annihilation, but rather relative, in other
words so that the rebellious being will no longer find itself in an
active, unmediated relation to the creative Center. [21] This being
will then be only externally supported and fulfilled by the Center,
so that the duration of such an agent or being will also be found to

be grounded in nothing but his external nature. In his inner nature,

this being will find himself in a continuing atrophy and will be able
to nothing except to continue to pass away or to sink lower. It is an
unrestrained inner passing away, corresponding to an unmoved
rigidity of being fixed in his outer nature, which is space. [22]
(Immanently understood, the sinking lower is only a circling).
In contrast, a being who, at the instant of such an action against
the unity of a system, does not find himself in a direct or total
relation to this unity at the moment of exercising such a
[rebellious] action, or an agent whose opposing action does not
directly attack the Center, but only indirectly, will not experience
the whole weight of the suppressing reaction of the Center.
Similarly, his distancing from the Center, and the destruction in his
innernessthe natural effect of this distancingwill then only be
indirect or partial.
It is precisely in this second situation that man finds himself in the
appearance-time, either face to face or below Divinity. And it is
instructive for us to develop certain characteristic qualities of this
[appearance] time. These qualities would otherwise be very dark
and incomprehensible, but when regarded from this standpoint,
they are very naturally explained.
First, if man can never find the total action of the Center in this
appearance-time, it follows that he can never totally find his God
insofar as he remains only in this time. Everything that presents
itself to him in this time and space tempts him to move from out of
this temporal region (either to his glorification or to his
damnation). For as one knows perfectly well in theory, although
one always forgets it in practice, it is always a delusion if man who
is always abused by time nevertheless believes in itin other
words if, when he cannot find something in one point or portion of
time of space, he continually hopes to find it in another point or
portion.
All so-called proofs for the existence of God, and in fact even all

worship that does not effectively move you out of time [23], will
never reveal to you this total God of Whom you feel the need.
Finally, since the nature of each fraction of Oneness is to diminish
in value in proportion to its increase in power, and by this
progression or growth to approach towards nothingness, we can
also see why each temporal being, since it is only a fraction of
Oneness and not a Totality in its being ordered (on account of
which it is in essence put-together and capable of disintegration)
[24], can only elevate itself to its potential insofar as it separates
itself more and more from this Central Unity. In its growth it more
and more de-creates [25] itself, which means grows old. And its
(temporal) life must itself lead it to death. [26]
Another more comforting consequence of this way of looking at
things is the following: namely, that in the concept of appearancetime itself is included the concept of a possible redemption or
reintegration. Therefore, temporal nature displays itself as the first
religion. It is compassionate Love that temporalizes with its erring
children. And elemental water, named by Steffens the tears of
nature, can on this basis also be called the first tears of Love.
The indirect communion of beings who are shut up within time
displays itself as a mediated communion.[27] In the same way,
like the thread of Ariadne, the Idea of a Mediator is offered to us
from the moment in which we first enter this time.
This mediated communion is more externalmore humiliated or
weighed downthan unmediated communion. It follows from this
that the Center itself, insofar as it maintains an active communion
with the degraded being, also finds Itself in a kind of humiliation or
degradation. We would be wrong to say that this humiliation is
anything but a descending emanation from this Center (amor
descendit).[28] By this emanation or descent, the Center makes
forms itself into an organ, yet without ceasing to remain as Center
or Principle. [29]
This emanation, by holding within (suspending) His developed

Powers, and His Glory (Philippians 2: 6,7) [30], by leaving

(expatriating Himself) from His Home, reduces Himself to the
humble state of a germ or root [31], in order to seed Himself in the
fallen beings, so that in their reascent or growth they [the fallen
beings] may again unite and lift up those Powersin and through
Himselfinto the true time [32], like the seed of a tree, which in its
collective-unity unites the scattered vegetative powers that were
dispersed and suppressed when they were scattered on the earth,
and which then carries them on high above the earth. Consider
here the concern and care of Love! [33]
For when this Center that has brought forth again brings forththat
is, when it goes deeper within its own being, in order to draw forth
this regenerating emanation, it finds that it is able in this way to
enter more deeply into the beings that are to be restored again.
After their restoration or reintegration, these beings will then be
more innerly united and elevated higher into their generative
Center than they were before their Fall or Falling-away. From then
on these beings will be inseparable [illabiles], incapable of falling
from their life in the Center. This is similar to how we see
organizing Nature always strengthen a damaged part of the
organism, making it less vulnerable to being wounded in the
future! Felix culpa! [34]
From this point of view we can see that the atheistor the one who
can be called the murderer of God because he sets himself against
the complete revelation of God within him [35]only denies the
inner revelation (which he calls the moral), but he does not deny
Gods outer revelation, which he calls natural law, fate, destiny.
Such a person who denies God can only be refuted by
demonstrating to him his own anomie (lawlessness or inner lack of
all laws).[36] In vain such a person sets himself against such
lawlessness by his own deceitful autonomysetting himself up as
giver of the law.[37] Or in other words, by demonstrating to him
that his inner separation from God is only his own work and the
consequence of his own fault.

The concept of time is closely related to that of weight.[38] In the

most general sense, we call something heavy that is inwardly
separated from its generating Principle and abandoned to itself. It
finds itself incapable of maintaining itself in existence [Dasein]. It
therefore needs external help, or an external carrier, in order to
obtain and to maintain a mediated communion with this Principle.
For without such communion, no preservation or permanence can
exist. And it seems important to hold fast to the identity of these
two concepts: the preservation of such a being and of its being
carried externally (or so to say, its being fulfilled).
The temporal being who is separated from his Center has nothing
more in himself.[39] [40] Since this being is no longer (inwardly)
fulfilled, it therefore must find within his own region the same
powerlessness to support (or to fulfill) his elements or factors in
their respective centers.[41] And it will be shown later how this
constitution of temporal beings has given rise to the theory of
atoms, which was taken by the Greek philosophers in a much
deeper sense than in our modern mechanistic philosophers since
Descartes. In fact, this striving, or the desire to separate itself
from its Center, whether by an explosion [42], or whether by
dissolution, continues in the same fallen beings. This takes place
either through the rebellious will to fly over the Center, or in the
abject will of subjecting oneself to a subordinate center [43]. Such
a person will feel either the same refractory [will] or abject will
arise in all moments of his particular region [Sphre]. For the
superior, carrying or elevating and founding Principle (the center
of gravity or ascent) is at the same time the unifying, essencegiving or embodying Principle for each being. [44]
For each being that has been separated from its creative Center,
and who has now fallen into a more outward (therefore more
narrow) region, we can establish the following steps in the ladder
for its possible reascent or reintegration:
1. Subordination or dissolution of the true coherence or the
superior embodiment, which also shows itself relatively in this

lower region as an embodiment in the order of the periphery. This

situation of disorder can be called the situation of abymation or
loss of ground.]
2. Immediately following this situation there is a powerful
collection, or an inferior or outward embodiment, which also
serves to fix on it a spirit of comprehension. This embodiment is
only possible by a sensitive, sensory and painful displacement of
its elements, because the being that embodies itself in this inferior
way has itself been displaced [versetzt, transpos]. This lower
embodiment serves:
a) For the reintegration of the scattered pieces of this being, and
at the same time a separation from those pieces that find
themselves in a collection opposed to nature.[45] In this wayby
reunification and separationthis being begins to embody itself in
a higher order.
b) As a weapon [46] and resistance against an action that might
oppose this higher re-embodiment, an action that strives to
embody or substantiate itself, but which always finds this striving
hindered by the fixed [gesetzliche] outward embodiment. Finally
3. After the goal of this lower embodiment is fulfilled, that is, after
the superior and now indissoluble embodiment is completed, the
lower embodiment must encounter death or dissolution, just like
the scaffolding collapses after a house is built. [47]
In a very true sense the proverb also tells us, that each being here
below has its time, which must end for it, whether it has made
good use of this passage through time for its higher embodiment
or whether it has done the opposite. This same time, that is, this
corruptible matter that is given to man in order to save his true
soulif he makes use of it as a sacrifice (Lev. 17:11) [48]exercises
a very distinct effect on a being that (or insofar as it) finds itself
already below time [in the infernal region]. St. Martin says
correctly that this external nature performs the function of

maintaining such a corrupt being in a continual dissolution, so that

evil can never take on nature or body. [49]
This inner inclination to fall and to pass away, will therefore make
itself noticeable in all temporal beings, although in different ways
depending on their original destination. These beings may by their
origin be destined only for an indirect communion [50] with the
creative Principle (which applies to all truly temporally created
beings). Or these beings, like Man, may by their origin be destined
for a direct and complete communion with God. [51] This is a
distinction that gives us insight that gives us the light to
distinguish between creation and emanation. For a created being
is really that which, if it proceeds from out of its generating
Principle, finds itself inwardly separated from it [that Principle] in
its action, which shows that it did not proceed in an unmediated
way from this Principle.[52] As against this, the emanated being is
that which proceeds directly from its Principle, and which enters or
can enter into a direct relation with it.
The first being [the created] is heavy in its original state, but not
the second [the emanated]. In its original state, the emanated
being finds its foundation within its own region [Sphre], although
it does not found itself (that is the prerogative of God alone, who is
the only one who founds Himself). Therefore the emanated being
does not know the need to proceed from out of himself, to seek his
foundation outside of himself. According to Genesis, man was
given the breath of Life, and is therefore not a creation but an
emanation. And this emanation was supposed to support and to
elevate to the height of uncreated beings all the rest that was
created of man [53] (and through man, all of creation. See Rom.
8:19 [54]). Now as a consequence of the Fall, man has buried this
divine Breath (divinae particulam aurae [55] ) under the ruins of
that part of him that was created. And thereby making himself
completely into a creature, he thereby made retrograde the ascent
and resurrection that God had intended and expected. This Breath
had to be awakened in him anew, so that the whole man could be
elevated from a natural and created human to a spiritual man and

finally to a Child of God (1 Cor. 15:45) [56]. For emanation stands

in the same relation to generation as does the manufacture of a
work to its creation. [57]
Our modern philosophers have also misunderstood this heaviness,
which they take in the most general sense, in that they confuse it
with the force of attraction. For surely each being that falls must
find itself outside of and below its own law, therefore in the
absolute darkness; and in its inner-ness, it does not in any way
comprehend the direction (the goal or the guide) of his movement
in a Present way. A Presence, which in on the contrary exactly
characterizes the movement of attraction, and which gives us the
basis for the clairvoyance of love, just like it gives the blinding of
each passion. For the one who is taken away by his passion finds
himself, as Christ says, in the darkness, and does not know
whereto he goes. [58]
I have already shown elsewhere this essential difference between
weight and attraction in all regions. [59] And in my forthcoming
work on religion it will be shown how this false way of regarding
heaviness or appearance-time must contribute to a darkening of
our insight into both scientific knowledge of external nature as well
as that of humans. And in fact, when one takes this word weight
in its active sense, as a weight that presses down on a being, then
it is clear, that just like the atmosphere presses down on only on
bodies that are empty of it, or which are not fulfilled by this
atmosphere, so also the Spirit [60], the divine atmosphere or the
Word, presses down on our souls only when they are empty of it,
or when they have closed the access to this Spirit or to these
Words, Atmosphere or Breath. It is in this sense St. Paul says that
we only stand under this law, and only experience its weight, when
the Spirit of this law does not fulfill us and does not support us.
[61]
It was an even greater error of several of our modern moralists,
whose head was the famous Kant, to base their morality only on
the imperative of the law, and to exclude the optativethat is to

identify our being as that which could only be held down by fear,
and without bringing us into relation or contact with the Being who
fulfills and contains through love. [62]
Therefore the moral philosophy of these moderns, like their
teaching about nature, can interest us only as much as reports of
a dissection of a corpse, for these moderns have applied their
attention and analyzing dismemberment ['Zergliederung] not less
to souls empty of life than to a nature without life.
Endnotes
[1] JGF: The French translation prefaces the article with the
following quotation from St. Martin: De lEsprit des Choses. Vol. II,
p. 266.
Tous ceux qui entrent dans la carrire sainte par de simple
vellits et non point par les profondeurs des grands principes et
de l'intelligence, se jtent sur les s. critures, et de prference sur
les vangiles et les livres sapientaux, parcequiils y trouvent des
fruits tous venues, et quils nont pas la peine de les cultiver pour
les faire natre; mais aussi, il est rare que la nourriture quils
prennent le pntre bien avant, tant quils ne cherchent pas
percer jusque dans le suc de larbre. Ils sont dans ce genre comme
les gens du monde qui sont accoutums sembaumer du parfum
des fleurs, et flatter leur got par toutes les productions de la
terre, sans connotre aucun des procds qui les ont fair crotre, et
sans verser la moindre sucur pour en dirige la culture. Mais aussi,
ils ne peuvent pas tre compts au rang des cultivateurs; leur
nourriture est prcaire et ils peuvent trs aisment se trouver au
dpourvu pour leur subsistance. Enfin, ils sortent du vritable tat
de lhomme, ou de ltat prophtique qui est la seule poque de
lcriture o lhomme soit une terre en culture.
[All those who enter into the holy active life by indecisive
intentions and not at all by means of the profundities of grand
principles and of intelligence, throw themselves on the Holy

Scriptures, with a preferences for the Gospels and the Books of

Wisdom, because they find there the fruits already given without
the trouble of cultivating them or making them grow. But it is also
rare that the food they take penetrates very far, as long as they do
not seek to tap into the sap of the tree. They are rather like those
men of the world who are accustomed to surround themselves
with the perfume of flowers, and to seduce their senses with all
the productions of the earth, without knowing any of the processes
that makes them grow, and without expending the least sweat in
the direction of their cultivation. But also, they may not be
counted in the rank of cultivators. Their nourishment is precarious,
and they could very easily find themselves without the means of
subsistence. Finally, they depart from the true state of man, the
prophetic state, which is the only period of written history where
man is a ground under cultivation.]
[2] JGF: The effect of suggestion on sleepwalkers, the use of
hypnotism or mesmerism made a huge impact throughout the
19th century. This continued into the 20th century, Dooyeweerd
refers to it in his student article from 1914, Neo-Mysticism and
Frederik van Eeden. He refers to van Eedens Studies, which
include essays on hypnotism and the experiments of the London
Psychical Society.
[3] JGF: Ausgangs, des Bestandes und des Widereingangs.
[4] JGF: Hervorbringung (des Herabsteigens), der Erhaltung
(Konservation)
und
der
Wiederausgleichung
(als
Wideraufsteigens). There is a similarity here to the Hindu idea of
Creation by Brahma, preservation by Vishnu and return by Shiva.
But Baader is very careful to avoid any pantheistic ideas of his
philosophy. He says that God alone founds himself. In other
articles, he is more explicit in his opposition to pantheism. For
Baader, our generation, preservation and return do not correspond
to Gods own dynamic movement within the Persons of the Trinity,
although the powers themselves may be the same [See note 32
for an analogy to the orthodox view of uncreated powers]

[5] Baader's note 1: In the divine region, the production has

always been, the preservation is always, and the reunification
(reintegration) will always be. Oeuvres posthumes de St. Martin,
Vol. II, p. 203. If we regard the essence of the spiritual man [See
note 56 below] as having sprung in an unmediated way from the
Godhead, then we must acknowledge it to be eternal, both in the
sense of a parte ante [an eternity which is past] as well as a parte
post [an eternity which is to come].
JGF: As will be seen, Baader distinguishes the divine region from
the eternal insofar as it applies to humans. Dooyeweerd does the
same. Dooyeweerd uses the medieval word aevum to
differentiate the human supratemporal from the divine Eternal.
[6] JGF: Ternar is a term that Baader frequently uses for a triad of
terms. The Trinity is the original triad or Ternar.
[7] JGF: Schein-Gegenwart, prsence apparente.
[8] Baader's note 2: If true Time has three dimensions, and
appearance-time has only two, then the false time can have only
one dimension.
JGF: Baader thus has three regions of time: the Eternal, the
temporal and the infernal (the realm of demons who have opposed
Gods Eternity in a final way).
[9] JGF: Baader speaks of manifestations in the temporal as
revelation. This is also found in Dooyeweerd, a fact that puzzled
Steen. Revelation is the relation of expression. See also revelation.
[10] JGF: This is the dualism: the opposition is itself opposed. There
is a religious dialectic of opposites that cannot come to any
resolution. Baader speaks of this elsewhere. It is also helpful in
understanding Dooyeweerds view of the religious dialectic in
dualistic Ground-Motives.

[11] JGF: Generation is related to the Eternal; nourishing or

sustaining is related to the temporal. This fire is purely infernal.
[12] Baader's note 3: Many of our modern philosophers seem to
have no concept of this danger of life, for they in fact seek the
beginning of life in this cessation or death (which should, as a
dangerous mystery, have always remained or rested in its latent
state). Unlike Prometheus, these modern philosophers do not want
to ignite their torch of life from the heavenly (higher, generating)
Fire. Instead, they want to ignite it from the infernal and
destroying fire. From this basic errorthe deification or
eternalization of appearance-timecomes their idea that the proof
of the immortality of the soul is based on its own capability for
infinite improvement. So this poor soul, pursued by its
perfectibility throughout all eternity, like the eternal wandering
Jew, must suffer the punishment of Tantalus of not ever being able
to rejoice in a completed existence and blessedness. Kant did not
escape from this thought in his proofs for the immortality of the
soul. Moreover, there is no other way to demonstrate the
immortality of mans integral being [Dasein, tre intgral] except
to develop true life within him. For from the moment that the
driving force of this Life is gained within him, there can no longer
be any doubt for him as to his immortality. That is, this [driving
force] brings with it the full realization of this Life. It is just as
impossible to doubt this as it would be for a tension-spring
(assuming it had consciousness) to doubt its elastic nature.
JGF: Baaders use of the word Triebkracht or driving force is
echoed in Dooyeweerds use of the word drijfkracht in referring to
the motive power of religious Ground Motives.
[13] JGF: The meaning of periculum vitae is lifes peril, but is
here used in the sense of Angst or dread. We associate dread
with Kierkegaards The Concept of Dread. But in that book he
makes explicit acknowledgement of Baaders influence. See also
Friedrich Kmmels article on Angst, where he discusses periculum
vitae. http://www.friedrich-kuemmel.de/doc/Angst.pdf

[14] JGF: Baaders view of our temporal world is that we have not
finally decided one way or the other whether we accept Gods law
or whether we will oppose it. The temporal is an in-between time,
preparing us for the end of time when that choice is fixed one way
or the other.
[15] JGF: Gesetztsein from Gesetz or law. Gestetztsein is being
placed under law, a being-fitted into the temporal. The Center
sets or fits the being in time, and there is movement within
the periphery of time. Versetztsein is being displaced into the
temporal. See below.
[16] Baader's note 4: This idea should be carefully considered: the
disappearance [Verschwinden] of the Center occurs by the
opening of a center that ought to have remained closed (because
each manifestation is limited by a corresponding occultation). For
this opening of that fire that destroys all substantiation, of which
we have just spoken, a fire which one also calls the consuming fire
of Angst and of the abyss, shows itself to be without a foundation
[entgrndet, abim]. Moreover, as we shall show in the sequel to
this article, especially in the note, Vorgetragene ganz
verstndlich machen, why this loss of foundation occurs through
the opening of his center. For the opening of this Center that ought
to have remained closed is only possible by the closing of that
which should remain open, that is by the closing of another
Center, the Center of Life of this being. The first center is called by
Jacob Boehme the center of nature; and we have him to thank
for the complete knowledge of the double center in each and
every being.
[17] JGF: what is an outer center? I believe that it is a center set
up by the creature in presumed autonomy; it is a presumed center
that results in a dualistic dialectic. This presumed center is neither
eternal nor yet fully infernal. As we shall see, Baader speaks of
autonomy in this way.
[18] JGF: The reference is to John 8:44

Ye are of [your] father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will
do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the
truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he
speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
Baader uses the expression protos pseudon. So does Dooyeweerd.
See protos pseudon.
[19] JGF: The German has aufheben or sublating of time. The
French uses suspendre.
[20] Baader's note 5: The famous antinomies of Kant or the
contradictions that entangle every being that finds itself in this
time and in this space, can of course be explained by the Fall and
by the displacement [Versetzung] of such a being (from out of the
Center of a region into its periphery). When therefore man, who
was originally destined to be supratemporal [ber dieser Zeit], or
in the Center itself of this temporal mantle [zeitlichen Hlle], but
now finds himself in its periphery, feels a resistance, a
contradiction, a continual opposition in each act of his true being,
how great must this resistance be for a being who was destined to
live in the true time, and who now finds himself below even
appearance-time, and in false time. In the second and third
volumes of his Judas Ischariot, Professor Daub gives us valuable
glimpses into the terrible situation of such a being.
JGF: The term zeitliche hlle can be found in Dooyeweerd as
tijdelijk mantel [temporal mantle]. The French translation uses
the words cette envelope temporelle.
[21] Baader's note 6: Observe that this only concerns a separation
of the action, and that the rebellious being continues inwardly,
through his essence, to be bound to God.
[22] Baader's note 7: Both time and space are explainable only by
the descent of a superior Being into a more limited region. That is
why an animal does not experience time. Although it lives in this

time (in our region), it did not descend into this region. The animal
is therefore not a displaced [versetztes, transpos] being. And that
is why the animal does not experience boredom.
[23] Baader's note 8: The imperishable need of our soul to wonder
is only its need to go from out of time. For true wonder is that
which raises us from out of this time and which, in ecstasy,
transports [entzckt] us. To wonder also means to practice
religious worship [Kultus].
[24] Baader's note 9: The reason that it is passive (Tableau naturel
2, p. 29). [This footnote appears only in the French translation].
[25] JGF: erschpfen, de-creates. In French, epuiser, exhausts.
[26] Baader's note 10: We are therefore correct to regard death as
natural for each being, which through its birth does not find itself
capable of placing himself in, or of retaining, complete communion
with Oneness. But it is not correct to regard death as natural for a
being, which in its origin was in no way destined to remain in the
region of fractions. See Wisdom of Solomon 1:13:
[For God did not make death, and takes no pleasure in the
destruction of any living thing; he created all things that they
might have being.]
The assertion is also correct that before the way was opened for us
from this time to the divine region, no one could see God and live.
This is not the place to develop another major truth, namely the
truth that it was originally man who was to maintain this indirect
communion between external nature and its creative Principle. But
in the Fall of man, when this thread was broken, external nature
was separated even more from its Principle. Therefore it can be
said that man again took the life from this nature, or that he made
it a widow.
[27] JGF: The mediation is from the temporal to the Central and

then to the temporal. This is the same idea of Baader's (although

in a different work by him), that Dooyeweerd marked and crossreferenced where it was quoted by Othmar Spann and Theodor
Litt. See my article, "Doooyeweerd, Spann and the Philosophy of
Totality, 70 Philosophia REformata, (2005), 1-22.
[28] JGF: amor descendit: love descends.
[29] Baader cites St. Martin: Esprit des choses, II, p. 152, tr.
Schubert II, 137:
Nous nous sortons nous mme de notre propre enceinte
spirituelleparticulire
lorsque
nour
dcouvrons
quelque
altrations en nous, soit au moral, soit au physique; nous nous
efforons de rtablir par notre puissance cnetrale les dgradations
que nour apercevons, et nous ne le pouvons quen prenant ainsi
en nous la place des facults qui ntoient quorganes et quen
remplissant leurs canaux avec toutes les puissances que nous
faisons maner de notre centre principe: mais remarquez que ceci
sopre sans cependant que notre centre principe vide et sans que
nous le quittions.
[We ourselves move out of our own, spiritually separate Sphere
[Sphre], when we become aware of a change in ourselves,
whether moral or physical; by our Central Power, we strive to
make whole again the degraded beings that we observe, and we
can only do that if we ourselves gather the authority of the
faculties in us, our organs. And if we fill their channels with all
Powers that we allow to flow out from our Central Principle: but
note that this occurs, without any emptying of our Central
Principle, and without our leaving it.]
Moreover, we should notice that only two faculties descended with
fallen Man: the faculties of willing and of acting. However
immutable Thought (the Power of setting Laws, or Wisdom) did not
descend with him.

JGF: Baader is not here saying that our reason was not fallen.
Rather, the immutable laws that govern the temporal are not
themselves fallen.
[30] JGF: Philippians 2:6,7 is the text that speaks of Christs
kenosis:
Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal
with God:But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him
the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men;
[31] JGF: Cf. Dooyeweerd: Christ as the New Root.
[32] JGF: The French translation here is unclear. It omits the
reference to the powers within the beings. The idea in the German
original is that Christ, in His kenosis, suspends His powers to enter
time. But these powers are then dispersed in time. In their
reascent or growth, the dispersed powers are reunited. And this
reuniting is both in Christ (who suspended the powers in the first
place) and through Christ (who enables this to happen). This idea
may be compared to the orthodox idea of the uncreated powers
within temporal reality. Michael Morbey has brilliantly compared
this idea of uncreated powers to Dooyeweerds temporal aspects.
The modal scale, which is known only in the dis-stasis or scattering
of theoretical thought, is also a ladder of ascent back to unity and
Totality, but in a deepened sense.
[33] JGF: See Ramon J. Betanzos: Franz von Baaders Philosophy of
Love (Vienna, Passagen Verlag, 1998). It is one of the few books
that include excerpts of Baaders work translated into English.
[34] JGF: Felix culpa [happy sin, or fortunate fall]. The phrase
comes from the Exultet of the Easter Vigil. It is traditionally
ascribed to Augustine, but many scholars believe it was written
earlier by St. Ambrose of Milan:
O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum

est! O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere

Redemptorem!
[O truly necessary sin of Adam, which by the death of Christ is
done away! O happy fault, which merited such and so great a
Redeemer!]
An interesting article showing the impact of this idea in art is by
Victor Y. Haines: The Iconography of the Felix Culpa
http://www.uwo.ca/english/florilegium/vol1/haines.html
[35] Baader's note 11: In my work ber den Blitz als Vater des
Lichts [Concerning Lightning as the Father of Light] I have shown
that the one who denies God, in stopping the generation of the
divine Light within him, really denies only the Son and not the
Father. Real atheism is the denial of the truth of Christianity.
[36] Baader's note 12: Non datur pax (subsistentia) impiis [peace
a common essenceis impossible for the impious]. JGF: I am not
sure where Baader derives this quotation. The idea seems to relate
peace or rest with ones universal essence or law.
[37] JGF: Baaders idea of autonomy was much appreciated by
Abraham Kuyper. Dooyeweerd also emphasizes the autonomous
nature of philosophical thinking that is opposed to God.
[38] Baader's note 13: We say that something weighs down on
another being or burdens it when that being is contained (or
comprehended) in the former in a way that it finds itself at the
same time suppressed in the development, or in the ascent of, its
powers. But we say that a being is heavy in itself when it lacks the
necessary powers to preserve itself in its native region (in its law),
and in this way cannot unfold itself [de sexpandre]. It is in this
passive sense that we will use the meaning of this word weight.
Our modern physicists have not always made this distinction, so
that they understand the center of gravity to refer both to the
collection of lack of power [Unmacht] of a heavy being as well as

the opposite meaningthe collection of powers of the supporting

center that carries and supports this lack of power. If in this way
one confuses the active Center of gravitation with the passive
center of gravitation in both physical and moral beings, then one
cannot see clearly in either one region or the other.
[39] Baader's note 14: It would be better to distinguish between
the so-called expanding [unfolding] powers and the contracting
(condensing or attracting) powers. St. Martin names the [former]
powers and [the latter] resistance. St. Martin thus distinguishes
between the supporting or fulfilling Power from the containing
Power [the resistance]. For whatever fulfills, carries on high, and
whatever empties, contains.
The perfect existence [Dasein] of each finite being supposes that
this being is contained or comprehended in its generating
Principle, and that this same Principle fulfills it. So this Principle is
its Law (its Circumscription, Umschreibung), which fulfills it. The
first action [the generating] must always precede the finite being
(as its true a priori). It must show itself as superior to and
independent from the action of the finite being. For every law is
characterized by this independence, priority and superiority. But
the fulfillment of this Law cannot take place without the action or
the cooperation of the finite being itself. And only through this
latter act [of fulfillment], through which the containing, generating
Principle also reveals itself as fulfilling or unfolding [Ausbreitung]
itself in the finite being, does the infinite Principle [the law]
comprehend itself by the mediation of these finite beings. For only
by means of the (organic) differentiation and uniting of the
containing power and the fulfilling power, which completes itself
by the mediation of these finite beings (creatures), is there then
repeated in this creature the differentiation and original unification
of the same powers which, as we know, produce the circular
movement and the sensation [Empfindung] of eternal Life in the
holy and original Ternar. Moreover, each finite being may be
regarded as a limitation [Begrenzung, abscission] of the All-

present, and it only occurs through the self-denial of the infinite

being, which creates or sets outaffirms or places [setzt]each
finite being. The infinite affirms or places [setzt] the finite being,
just as the giving of love is, at its basis, nothing other than an
affirmation of the beloved opposite [Gegenstandes] through a
denial of ones self.
There is therefore a holding within [Innehalten] (or renunciation)
[Verleugnung, suspension] by the infinite Beingas this
producing and generating Love. This Love awaits an answer from
the side of the generated being, the denial of his own finite self,
and by this negation the reaffirmation of the producing Being. And
it is only by this denial [of himself] by the produced being can he
reveal his own creative essence, in realizing and propagating the
image [of God]. If he does the opposite, then he will only reveal or
reproduce himself. John 1:13 [Which were born, not of blood, nor
of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man]
In this true sense, my friend von Meyer says in his Blttern fr
hhere Wahrheit, (Frankfurt: Brnner 1818 I, p. 76) that the
fulfillment of the existence of a created being (its Blessedness)
can only occur through the mutual and reciprocal sacrifice of the
Creator and the creature. If we look closely, we can see from this
remark that original sin was the misuse of this divine ability to
reproduce.
As to the theory of the containing power and the fulfilling power,
of which I have given the first elements, I must add, first: the
containing power is at the same time the representing and the
reflecting power. It gives the basis for what we call the mirror of a
being.
Second, several of our modern philosophers have noticed the
hostility between the containing power and the fulfilling power in
matter or in temporal beings. But these philosophers (e.g. Fichte)
have fallen into the error of seeing this hostility as original and
constitutive, instead of seeking the cause of this disorder and

hostile discord in the root of this temporal being. For a double

center forms the basis of each being, and reveals itself as a double
desire: (1) the longing of the being to remain within its own center
and (2) the desire to develop all of his powers therein, that is to
unfold himself or to go from out of itself. I say that this double
desire was in no way originally in a hostile opposition. On the
contrary, the one power seeks the other, because it needs the
other power in order to realize itself. That is, the containing power
needs the unfolding or comprehending power as its Gegenstand to
be unfolded. Without it there would be nothing that could be
contained or comprehended. And the unfolding power needs the
containing power as its Gegenstand to be unfolded. But when
these two powers mutually deny this service to each other, instead
of each developing the other, they then mutually restrict each
other. Such a beingthe temporal universethen displays the
expressive image of the staff of Hermes, with its separation of the
two snakes fighting each other. Or one may observe a third force
(that named after the ancient Hermes), maintaining the
equilibrium between water and fire for the preservation of the
body. The symbol of the staff of Mercury is therefore, as St. Martin
says, an inexhaustible field of knowledge and instruction. And our
philosophers, if they want to direct their attention anew to the
dualism of temporal beings, should strive to fathom the meaning
of this symbol
:
[40] JGF: This is a very important footnote and deserves close
study. Additions were made in the French translation, some of
which have been incorporated here. Other additions, such as the
French use of lespace infini for All-Gegenwart seem to miss the
point of the text, and have not been incorporated. Gegenstand
means that which is over-against. The French translation, son
sujet, does not adequately give this meaning.
See the next note for specific comments. For Baader the a priori is
ontical. See also Dooyeweerd's use of a priori.

The symbol on the staff of Hermes, with two serpents, should not
be confused with the Aesculapii staff, with only one snake, which is
a symbol for the art of healing or medicine.
The idea of discord in the Root is also essential to understanding
Dooyeweerd. Baader, following Boehme, speaks of this root as a
double Center, which can be directed either towards or against
God. Dooyeweerd speaks of it as a religious antithesis within the
Root.
[41] JGF: elements or factors are what Dooyeweerd calls
temporal aspects. The autonomous person tries to find a center
for the diversity of the temporal within his or her own selfhood and
not in the true Totality or Unity. This attempt is the absolutization
of the temporal, the attempt to find a false center.
[42] JGF: Baader himself was a mining engineer and was widely
recognized for his research regarding explosives.
[43] Baader's note 15: Therefore the separation from the center
makes itself known to the rebellious being as an oppressive force,
and for the being (man) who has fallen by temptation or attraction
to an inferior center, it is experienced as an inability or a
weakness. For the rebellious one has misused his power, and the
abject one has erred in weakness.
[44] Baader's note 16: The Sun is that which supports the earth,
and fulfills it with life, just as it supports all the planets in their
distances from her in a manner proportionate to the reflexion of
her solar powers. For this reflexion each planet is fixed by the Sun
as its fulcrum, and proceeds from the Sun. The opinion accepted
by our astronomers that the sun by its enormous mass seeks to
devour and to destroy the earth and planets, and that this is only
prevented by a blind centrifugal force (which no one knows what it
is or where it comes from)this opinion or manner of viewing the
solar system is the most unworthy that one could invent of its
grandeur and living harmony.

[45] JGF: The following quotation from St. Martins Le nouvel

homme, p. 20 is added to the French translation in reference to
collections made by the evil one:
Toute transposition fait ce quon nomme un composition, comme
la position normale fait la simplicit de ltre. Lhomme sous les
loix de sa matire est emprisonn et born de tous les cots: il a
fallu pour les lier ainsi, quon rassemblt, dans une sorte dunit,
les puissances, les forces et les facults quiil avoit laiss sortir de
lui-mme, et quil avoit dissmines dans toutes les rgions, pour
y oprer le dsordre de ses plans impies et mensongers. Lennemi
appuyer encore sur les chanes dont on la charg et cherche parl traiter, comme son jouet et sa victime celui quil a feint
autrefois de voulour traiter comme son ami. Mais ce double poids
raasemblant et concentrant, de plus en plus, dans une unit les
puissances et facults de lhomme, le rend dans sa privation
mme, une nouvelle image de cette unit quil auroit du
reprsenter dans ses justes dveloppemens: alors cette harmonie
concentre rcouvrant naturellement une sorte de rapport avec
lharmonie suprieure et libre, elle lattire insensiblement elle, et
elle en reoit les secours dont elle est susceptible selon la msure
gne et restreinte.
[Every transposition makes what one calls a composition, just as
the normal position makes the simplicity of being. The person
under the laws of his matter is imprisoned and limited on all sides:
in order to link them it is necessary that he gathers together, in a
sort of unity, the powers, the forces and the faculties that he had
allowed to escape from himself, and which he had disseminated in
all the regions in order to carry out there the disorder of his
impious and untrue plans. The enemy still supports on the chains
of which he has been placed in charge, and he seeks by them to
deal with, as his toy and his victim, the one whom he had
previously pretended to want to deal with as his friend. But this
double weight gathered together and concentrated, more and
more, in a unity of powers and faculties of man, provides back to

him in this deprivation itself, a new image of this unity which he

should have represented in his true development: therefore this
concentrated harmony, naturally collecting a kind of rapport with
the superior and free harmony, is imperceptibly attracted by it,
and it receives from it the help to which it is susceptible in a
hindered and restrained measure.]
[46] Baader's note 17: Once evil has arisen, it is impossible to
overthrow it so long as it remains in the condition of partiality or
division, just as an illness must reach its acme so that it can be
radically destroyed. One must therefore commence by allowing
evil to come out of its state of division so that is collects itself or
that it shows itself with uncovered head, so that one may capture
it. But this artificial embodiment proceeds only through the
outward embodiment I have spoken of in this text, and this ray of
light will suffice in order to make comprehensible how the good
Principle itself makes use of this outward embodiment, in order to
attract it to its opposite pole. That is, the head of the serpent,
which must be trampled upon by the Central Man, so that on their
side other humans can annihilate the limbs of this serpent.
JGF: The reference to trampling on the head of the serpent echoes
Genesis 3:15:
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between
thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt
bruise his heel.
JGF: The reference to the good Principle making use of evil by
directing it to the opposite pole seems to refer to the back and
forth dialectic that characterizes theoretical thought that seeks its
center within the temporal; this dialectic is itself a gift of Gods
grace.
[47] Baader's note 18 refers to 2 Cor. 5:1,
[For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were

dissolved, we have a building of god, a house not made with

hands, eternal in the heavens..]
We should notice, that this universal law for all embodiment
repeated itself for the Jews in their national embodiment and the
subsequent dissolution of this outward embodiment, after its [the
Jewish nations] goal (the unifying of the dispersed pieces of the
human soul) had been accomplished, or after this embodiment
could no longer serve the collecting. Solutio corporis fit cum
coagulatione spiritus, et coagulatio spiritus fit cum solutione
corporis [the dissolution of the body causes the coagulation of the
spirit, and the coagulation of the spirit causes the dissolution of
the body].
By the words Spirit and Body, we should not mean to designate
two elements of a being, but rather two beings from two different
regions, each one of whom has taken form in its region and shows
itself as embodied in this region. For embodiment, if taken in its
true and general meaning, means the fulfillment of the
development of a being. That which forms the Center of a thing
must also succeed in building its periphery. Vis ejus integra, si
conversus fuerit in terram [from Kunraths Latin version of the
Hermetic Emerald Table: Its force or power is entire if it be
converted into earth.]
JGF: The anti-Semitic remarks cannot be excused, but perhaps
explained by the fact that there was at this time no Jewish state.
[48] JGF: Lev. 17:11 says,
For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you
upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the
blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.
[49] Baader's note 19: Rather we can say, in the whole of
appearance-time it is only man who may open himself to perverse
being, that is, insofar as he opens himself to it. And external

nature can therefore be considered as a formidable and powerful

shield, by means of which the Creator keeps closed the mouth of
the father of lies, so that he cannot speak out his blasphemy
against God. And so that this dead and mortifying word, reverts
and returns to its creative center, which constitutes its perpetual
punishment. For each being must be nourished by and live from
that which it has itself generated. If nevertheless this corrupted
being by means of man enters into appearance time, the
Scriptures then speak of its complete judgment, as an Event
[Ereignis] which will enter in only at the end of this appearance
time. The concept of a cleansing fire [Purgatory] therefore includes
the continuance of the earthly dead man in his temporal mantle.
And the Orthodox Church is correct to make no strong separation
between Purgatory and Hell during the continuation of this
temporal world. For on one side, external nature in its integrity
opposes the perfect embodiment of evil. And this forces, so to say,
on the other side, a mediating action, such as we have discussed
in an earlier note, which draws evil out from its divided moments
or its organs, to let it work its plunder, in trying to drive it out from
its estate.
[50] JGF: The French has communication but the German is
Gemeinschaft.
[51] Baader's note 20: The direct or complete, total action is here
the Central action, which is more often referred to as the Word.
The original temporal work of primal Man was to gradually unite
within his being all rays of this central action (of the Word), and
therefore to let the Word become human within himself. A
becoming human which, as we know, God Himself undertook, after
man neglected his duty. Attempt therefore to understand this
original temporal work of man, letting the mystery of the
Incarnation of the Word approach you.
[52] Baader's note 21: Such a being is inwardly empty of Life (the
Central Action); that is, it lacks the Word. This being, heavy by its
nature, is also dumb and dark by its nature, or not able to speak or

to shine from out of itself. Such a being speaks (shines) only

insofar as man makes it to speak (shine) or to act. But we must
distinguish this passive dumbness and darkness from an active
dumbness and darkness, for there is a distinction between a nonmirror and a refractory mirror. Moreover the philosophers have
continually incorrectly understood the words external world. They
take this expression in the general sense in which one says, that
each thing must have an exterior as well as an interior.
For it is just the distinguishing and puzzling character of this outer
or external world that it is only thatonly externalor that it lacks
an inner fulfillment and foundation (a futility and an emptiness,
which constitutes the dumbness of this world). Therefore, if man
completely gives himself over to this external world, then it does
not only not nourish him inwardly, or leaves him empty, but it also
unceasingly draws man outwards, and empties him ever more, like
a true blood-sucker, or if the use of a new word is permitted, like a
heart-sucker. Therefore I said on p. 19 of my little work ber das
heil. Abendmahl [Concerning Holy Communion], that we find
ourselves in this world to be under the power of a being who does
not cease to eat our body and to drink our blood (our soul).
Finally, the person who completely identifies with or confuses
himself with this external world comes in the end to believe that
he himself has the same futile (empty or inwardly nothing) nature.
Unhappily, this is a belief that is only too common among our
modern philosophers who call themselves nature-philosophers. It
is the proton pseudos (the first and most basic error) of their
philosophy.
[53] JGF: According to Baader, part of man was emanated, part
created. Dooyeweerd also has a view of double creation of
humanity.
[54] JGF: Rom. 8:19 says:
For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the

manifestation of the sons of God.

[55] JGF: divinae particulam aurae means particle of divine
breath, from Horace: Satires II, 2, 77.
[56] JGF: 1 Cor. 15:45-47:
And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul;
the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.Howbeit that was not
first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that
which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth: the second man is
the Lord from heaven.As is the earthy, such are they also that are
earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are
heavenly. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that
which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual. The first
man is of the earth, earth: the second man is the Lord from
heaven.As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as
is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly.And as we
have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image
of the heavenly.]
[57] Baader's note 22: The Son is generated, the Spiritthe Being
that stands in an unmediated way under Divinityis breathed out
or emanated, and nature is created. That is why it is only through
the Son that man can participate in the divine generation so that
in turn the emanated Spirit may itself emanate and [mans]
created nature may itself create.
There is not one human who cannot convince himself of the truth
of our theory of heaviness every day and in each moment of his
life. For does he not feel himself freed from the relationship of
heaviness exactly to the extent that he again obtains a direct
communion with his Principle, that is, when he goes out from time
and elevates himself above it? If man rescues an illuminating truth
from out of the darkness of error and lies, if he rescues a living and
expansive power from out of the murdering power of egoism, or if
he frees a power in the ordering of active nature from out of the

chains of its physically inert and passive nature (a freeing that is

observed and carried out in magnetic operations), then he feels
his Root-Being elevate and unfold itself. But each opposing act
only oppresses and compresses him more, and makes him more
material, or so to say, oxidizes him.
[58] JGF: The reference seems to be to I John 2:11,
But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in
darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that
darkness hath blinded his eyes.
Similar words are attributed to Christ in John 10:35:
Then Jesus said unto them, Yet a little while is the light with you.
Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he
that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.
[59] Baaders note 23: Schellings Allegem. Zeitschrift von
Deutschen fr Deutsche, 1813, 1. Bd. 3 H., p.318. [Baader
published in Schellings journal]
[60] Baader's note 24: Insofar as this Spirit or this Word is only
over us or only outside of us, it is not in its place, and this
displacement (Metastasis) which reveals itself in a tension, causes
illness everywhere, as one knows. And it is this tension which
makes itself felt as the heaviness of which I have spoken. Electrical
tension gives us a very instructive example of this, for such a
tension can only be explained by a displacement or disorder in the
poles, although this concept has not yet been accepted by our
physicists. Moreover this electrical tension is only finished with a
shock or an impulse and with a spark or a flash, so it allows us to
prophesy at all times that the universal disorder will also end in a
flash, which is the completion of justice, or the universal
restoration of the poles.
[61] JGF: The reference appears to be to Romans 7:5-6,

For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by
the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.
But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein
we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not
[in] the oldness of the letter.
[62] Baader's note 25: In the final analysis, the act of founding or
of embodiment for each being resolves itself into two steps: in a
subordination and in an elevation. For a being can only find itself
founded insofar as it has obtained domination over what is natural
to it, which is comprehended in him and from him (Matt. 23:12)
[And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that
shall humble himself shall be exalted.] A being that has not made
lawful use of the power given to him since his origina being who
has not held within that innerness that should be held and remain
held in his inwardnesshas therefore opened that which should
have remained closed, and has also closed what should have
remained open for him. To such a being it would be futile for the
imperative to say that he should have kept this within, unless Love
had not itself come and again given to him this power necessary
for self-control, a power that was lost in the Fall. (Cf. J. Boehme:
Drei Prinzip. chapter 21, sections 20-21).
Moreover it is essential to note that this closing or sinking
[Vertiefung] takes place in the successive unfolding of the life of a
being (an unfolding, which constitutes his history). This unfolding
implies that what in a previous epoch constituted the higher (the
peak) of this being, in the following epoch must constitute the
lower or the basis. All the revolutions noted in the history of being
are therefore, as the expression says, only an overturning of this
order, or a new elevation of that which ought no longer to be
elevated. For example, the forming powers of the earth, if they
elevate themselves in a new epoch over and against the
organizations of which they should only form the foundation; or
the animal powers in humans, if they are elevated over the powers

of the Spirit. See Ggler: Darstellung der heiligen Schriften I.

section 112.

Elementary concepts concerning Time As Introduction to

the Philosophy of Society and History
[Elementarbegriffe ber die Zeit: als Einleitung zur
Philosophie der Soziett und Geschichte]
by Franz von Baader
(1831)
Translation and Notes by J. Glenn Friesen 2004
The original can be found in Baader's Werke 14, 29-54.
Quia tempus et mare non erit ampliusApok. X.6 [1][That time and
the sea should be no longer]Rev. 10:6
Translators Introduction
Baaders style of German is notoriously difficult. I have broken up
his very long sentences into many shorter sentences. Words in
round brackets are Baaders own parenthetical remarks. Those
portions of the text in square brackets are either the original
untranslated text, or additional words that I have inserted to make
sense of the text. All endnotes to this text are my own. These
endnotes also make comparisons to the neo-Calvinism of Abraham
Kuyper (1837-1920) and to the Christian philosophy of Herman
Dooyeweerd (1894-1977). Baader influenced both Kuyper and
Dooyeweerd. Dooyeweerd also had access to In my endnotes I
have also made comparisons to the philosophy of Herman
Dooyeweerd, who was evidently influenced by Baaders works,
and who had access to Die Herdflamme Sammlung der
gesellschaftswissenschaftlichen Grundwerke aller Zeiten und
Vlker. It included a volume on Baader edited by Johan Sauter. The

volume included this work, "Elementarbegriffe ber die Zeit.

Foreword by Baader
If complaints are made that the vital truths or doctrines of religion
are still so obscure, the fault is not so much the mysterious nature
of these truths. Rather, the fault is due more to the mystification
partly intentionalby certain philosophers. Although they put
themselves forward as being concerned with the Enlightenment,
they in fact seek only to spread obscurity with respect to these
religious doctrines. These so-called [soi-disants] philosophers deal
with us as we deal with children, when we hide something and
then behave towards them as if we are looking for it with them.
That is to say, they begin by clearing away our root convictions
(ides causes or mres)[2] as much as they can, [on the grounds
that they cannot be explained]. But in fact we can only explain
something from that which is itself inexplicable, just as all that
moves only moves from out of an immovable and is only moveable
within it. In other words, they mix up and confuse the inexplicable,
which is the ground of all explanation, with the explained, which
does not itself explain. By doing this, they make it no longer easy
for us to be able to obtain a knowledge of either one.
The current philosophical propositions concerning Eternity and
time provide a most significant example of this confusion. Here
more than anywhere else, the philosophical pronouncements
stand in the most glaring opposition and conflict to those of
religion. It occurs to almost no one to try to seek a reconciliation or
solution to this scandalous conflict. The following work should be
regarded as one such attempt. As with all of my works, my
purpose is that by keeping our philosophical contemplation
[Spekulation] [3] completely free, I will be able to bring about its
free union with religion. For Truth, which is itself free, disdains
ruling over others, who are also free beings. And the priest of Truth
should be neither a slave nor a eunuch. For there is in our hearts,
as Tauler says, a Center, in which no creature can enter by force
[eindringen]. So therefore no other human spirit should want to

force its entry into any other persons Spirit. Because of this, what
people say to each other should have no other goal except that of
mutual help, in order to become aware within oneself of what has
not been said, and what for humans is unutterable. For true
thoughts are only those that think themselves in and through us,
just as true prayer is that which itself speaks in and through us.
Schwabing by Munich, November 16, 1831
1
Our present philosophical propositions about the Absolute
generally mix up the concept of perfected being with that of
infinite being. A creature as such is imperfect. His concepts are
inadequate and non-corresponding, but are rather unfinished,
defective and bad, as long as he is himself unable to come to God.
This may be because God has invalidated him as an enemy
separated from Him, or because, please God, he has thrown
himself into the divine abyss, or groundlessness. The concept of
immanence or of the inexistence [Inexistenz] [4] of all things in
God (as omnimpotent, because omnitenens)[5] has been
pantheistically mixed up by these philosophers with the idea of
identity with God.
2
The concept of perfected (absolute or integral) being, understood
in and of itself, is that of coming together [Zusammenseins] (or of
simultaneity). It is the inseparability of enduring (of immovability
and unchangeability) and the continual-change-of oneself as
renewal. In this way, there is rest and motion, determinateness
(being placed by law) [6] and freedom, as reciprocals moving
within and then again proceeding outwards. But in the usual
abstraction of these reciprocals, motion is made to appear
incomprehensible and unstable, and rest is regarded as rigid and
lifeless.

Bossuet acknowledges the identity [of these reciprocals] when in

his Elevations sur les mysteres (I, 6) he speaks of the prodige
[extraordinary supernatural event, Ereignis]:
que le mouvement et le repos, choses si distinctes ne sont elans
le fond que la mme substance, laquelle se meut et qui se repose.
[that movement and rest, things so different, are at their basis
(an event of) the same substance, by which it moves itself and
rests itself.]
Nevertheless, in his exposition of the Ternar [7], Bossuet confuses
the being [Wesen] (tre) with the act. He identifies being with the
Father, knowledge with the Son and love with the Spirit, although
knowing (Schauen or beholding), willing (loving) and acting
constitute this Ternar, which like ourselves is just one and the
same being.[8] Bossuet consequently confuses the individuality
(or nature) of God with the Persons of God. For God exists in these
Persons as both indivisibile as well as unmixed. This helps us to
distinguish even the concept of the Divine [Personality] from the
creaturely personality, in that the creaturely personality only exists
as the simultaneous multiplication or distinguishing of nature or
individuality. But this gifted theologian [Bossuet] partly corrects
himself. In a following paragraph he distinguishes the generating
[zeugende] Wisdom (Father) from the generated (Son), just like
the distinction made by Thomas Aquinas or Jakob Boehme. By this
investigation one finds the distinction between these two [Father
and Son], as well as of the active (operative) Wisdom. This is
similar to the way that the Hebrew philosophy [Kabbalah] already
designates the third Sefiroth (Binah) as Intelligence (Verstand),
whose function it is to differentiatingly obtain Wisdom (Hochmah),
which in part corresponds to the Vernunft of modern [philosophy]).
[9]
For the same reason, Bossuets concept of happiness or bliss is
incomplete (because not fully Ternar-like). He speaks of its idea
and of love for it, but he forgets the active co-working of blessed

beings, without which there can be no bliss. For the sake of

completeness I mention here that St. Martin sets out a Ternar of
[1] Wonder, [2] of Worship (Adoration) and [3] of Obedience,
Effecting, Exercising or Procreation. The third part of this Ternar,
taken both immanently as well as emanently, is in fact an act of
obedience. And each act of worship (whether true or false) is
enclosed within this circle of wonder, of loving adoration and of
action.
Now only a free intelligence can wonder, since wonder is itself a
free giving of oneself (devouement). Because of this, an irrational,
unfree animal does not have the ability to wonder. And the devil
does not want to wonder. In this way one sees that the freeing and
holding free of intelligence is the first condition of worship.
3
There is therefore a coincidence of change as renewal with that of
permanent enduring. One can easily see that this coincidence
does not and cannot take place in our temporal life. The
coincidence has the appearance of a circling or continual return
(as a falling together of progress and regress). But for beings that
are carried in time, it there produces a genuine progress or
regress. Because of this we also, although usually unclearly,
connect our concepts of timesuch as origination (becoming) or of
passing away (perishing)with another concept, the nontemporal.
It is in this latter sense [the nontemporal] that we must
understand the expression, everything has its time. Everything
(which proceeds from out of Eternity) must make its way through
time, in order to thereafter again re-enter Eternity. Only from this
standpoint can one properly understand the concepts of old age
and rejuvenation, as they have occurred up to that time. The old
alchemists called the reduction or reintegration of a thing into its
principle its rejuvenation [making-young], for whatever stands
close to its Origin is young, and whatever is distant from its Origin
is old. This rejuvenation of a being is also to be understood as the

bursting out from (freeing from) its bonds of time (materiality).[10]

Because its aging began with its entrance into time. For as Meister
Eckhart says, the fetus begins to age, or ceases to be young, when
it begins to live temporally, and therefore it is already old enough
to die. The concepts of youth, immortality and integrity of being
coincide.
4
From the foregoing one can already see the radical error of most
philosophers, who mix up time and Eternity, and who speak of an
eternal time and of a temporal Eternity, just as Spinoza confuses
the Creator and creation; he wants to affirm their identity, but in
fact he denies both. What is false in this confusion, by which one
understands Eternity as only an infinitely protracted time,
becomes apparent when we consider that each time [as duration],
whether you take a large or a small [segment], always has both a
beginning and an end. And if one attempts to conceptualize this as
nontemporality, so that there is a continual severing of [discrete]
durations, that will still not show to us an eternal time.
5
Each defined now or here is intuited [geschaut] as a concept only
in the always and everywhere. We can therefore regard time
(duration) as a suspension of Eternity (the always). Or we can say
that time is related to Eternity as a part is related to a whole, a
whole that although divisible, is nevertheless not in actuality
already divided (as long as the whole has not been sublated
[aufgehoben]). [11]
In the second half of my Lectures concerning Speculative
Dogmatics I have already shown that the concept of that-which isput-together [Zusammengesetztheit] coincides with the concept of
the being-fitted-into [Versetztheit][12] of the elements of a being.
For everything in time and space is as such put-together, as well
as displaced (dislocated), both inwardly and outwardly.

6
If time is a suspension of Eternity, or insofar as it is a beingdisplaced [Versetzheit], this is a suspension of the normal
subjectedness to law [Gesetztheit]. The being-displaced is a beingput-together [Zusammengesetztheit]; it is therefore a non-unity
[Nichteinheit]. Therefore the character of everything temporal is
that which is not whole and not integral, and it must have within it
the dialectical progression towards the opposite [Jenseits]that is,
towards Integrity, Fullness or towards the Sufficiency of Being. This
restlessness is the necessary imperative of such a [temporal]
being.[13]
7
A second, no less common error concerning time lies in the lack of
insight that Being that is Eternal, Absolute and For-Itself can bring
forth in immediacy as its likeness and image only that which is in
the same way Eternal. It does not bring forth the temporal (that
which is being-placed and put-together). Therefore the primal
state [Urstand] of time, or of the temporal (material) universe
cannot be affirmed to be the original or unmediated production of
God.
Obscurely or clearly, this conviction rests at the basis of all
legends, myths, and poems about the primal state of time. They
all speak of an Event [Ereignis] that immediately precedes this
state and which in fact caused it [time]. If I here take the concept
of time as meaning the same as that of matter, I presuppose
that both (time and space) are only fitted-into [gesetzt] by means
of a material substance, without which they are abstractions.
8
In passing let us notice an ignorance of modern philosophy, that it
only affirms one mode [Weise] of production from the Absolute,
from which they can acknowledge only one mode of Inexistenz

within the Absolute of that which has been produced. As against

this, the oldest Hebrew philosophy [Kabbalah] affirms four worlds
or four productions from the Absolute (En Soph), namely:
1. the mundum archetypum [archetypal world] as an emanation
(Aziloth)2. the mundum angelicum [angelic world] as created
(Briah)3. the mundum sidereum [sidereal world] as formed
(Pezirah) and4. the mundum elementarem [elementary world] as
made (Asiah)
In support they refer to the verse from Isaiah 43:7:
in gloriam meam creavi eum, formavi eum et feci eum
[for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him, yea I
have made him] [KJV] [14]
Now the emanated production really first begins with the mundus
angelicus [angelic world], although the unfolding of the mundus
archetypus [archetypal world] constitutes the Ideals of Perfection.
From this also follows:
Finis coronat opus[The end crowns the work] [15]
Because of this, humanity [16], who appears last, is more closely
related to the mundum acrchetypus (the Sophia) than are the
created angels. The mundus archetypus has here the meaning of
gloria (doxa) dei [the Glory of God], or His Shekina. Therefore,
Isaiahs words cover all four worlds, within the meaning of the
Kabbalah.
Already included in this teaching is the affirmation that all created,
formed and made beings have their spiritual Root in the mundus
archetypus, so that without doubt Plato created his teaching of the
Ideas based on this philosophy [Kabbalah].
9

However most of our philosophers are very far from this insight,
that no temporal can immediately proceed from the Eternal. From
a Whole and from One can come no brokenness, no breach. From
the Giver of Law [Gesetzgeber] can come no being-displaced
[Versetztes]. From the One can come no being-put-together. These
philosophers, like our nature philosophers, instead turn this around
so that temporality or transience, and the materiality of such a
product are regarded as primitive and constitutive. And this error
hangs together with other errors, especially the following: they do
not see that from out of the Perfect there can only come directly
that which is perfect; but from this it does not follow that this
innate directly obtained perfection was already firmly fixed. For as
the Scriptures show, God made all things good, but they thereafter
became not good. [17] With some reflection, one can easily
understand, that an intelligent and free creature, brought into
integral Dasein [existence] without its own doing (or its own will),
cannot be established or confirmed in this integral Being without
its free cooperation. For what is truly one and unified can only
occur when there has been a fundamental or radical redemption of
that which is disunity, disintegration [Zersetzbarkeit] and being
displaced [Versetzbarkeit]. And what is truly light is only what has
been redeemed from darkness; what is truly living is only that
which has been redeemed from death (the posse mori [18]
according to Augustine).
The intelligent and free creature is still unstable [labile] in the first
stage of its being. And so, too are the non-intelligent creatures
who belong to him in the solidarity of Existenz.[19] They are
perishable, and they maintain their imperishability only insofar as
the intelligent creature [humanity] can win their stability
[Illabilitt], or confirm them in God. From this one can understand
the possibility of a fourfold relationship of intelligence with nonintelligent nature:
1. In the first, unmediated state, in which both [intelligent beings
and non-intelligent nature] are certainly united, but they have not

been established in this Unity. This state is one of innocence, both

for the intelligent beings and for nature, which has no selfhood
[20], or2. Both are bound to each other by an inner repulsion, or3.
Both are bound together outwardly, but inwardly they are
indifferent with respect to each other, and their repulsion is at
least suspended, or finally4. Both are truly and inseparably united.
10
A satisfying explanation about these two stages [unstable and
stable] for each created being is found only in the writings of the
cobbler from Grlitz, Jakob Boehme. Without this explanation we
can understand neither the proving temptation [21], nor the
rebirth (as second birth).[22] This also completely opens our
understanding concerning that mystery written about by Paul,
which consists of the fact that the Father has certainly
immediately created all beings, in order to send them His Son, a
sending that in relation to humanity is called a being begotten in
the Only-Begotten.[23] As the Scriptures say, we are not created
as children of God, but rather with the power to become children.
[24] This power was lost in the Fall and has now again been gained
for us by the Saviour. Moreover, Jakob Boehme has shown that we
can only pass through this twofold stage of creaturely being
(unmediated and mediated) when we have achieved the insight
that God Himself eternally, through his unmediated Being, enters
into His mediated and thereby perfected Being.
11
Boehme demonstrated how in God, the eternal ascent is mediated
by His eternal descent. But many German philosophers have
misunderstood the philosophical propositions of this researcher, in
that they attribute to God Himself what Jakob Boehme only wanted
to make known of the creature (or the creaturely). These critics
have taken the two moments of Gods entrance into integrated
Being [Dasein] as if they were separable moments, as they are in
the situation of the yet unproved creature. They did not view these

two moments as being one in their Ground (not indifferent). In this

[wrong] interpretation, Schelling spoke of a dark or obscure
Ground in God, and of a History, i.e. a Time for Him, namely as one
that is perfecting itself in and through creation. In the same sense,
Hegel spoke of creation as a falling away of the divine Idea from
itself. Daumer penetrated more deeply than his predecessors into
the mystery, in that he acknowledged a pre-worldly Event
[Ereignis] as an explanation of the primal state of the temporal
world. But Daumer also had this wrong interpretation [of the two
moments] when he spoke of a first product or issuance from the
Absolute, which because of its rebellious selfhood elevated itself to
Ahriman, whose precipitation or rather residue [caput mortuum
[25] gave the primal matter [prima materia] to Ormuzd (Adam
Kadmon [26]). But admittedly this does not explain how the
defeated Ahriman could give the inferior first-born Ormuzd so
much to do. In the Persian teaching at least, both are twin
brothers, and the great drama ends with the death, or at least the
complete weakening, of Ahriman, but does not begin with that
event.
I cannot help using this opportunity to censure another error of
modern German philosophy, which however is of an older date.
Non-intelligent nature, which has been separated from
Intelligence, and which is now only outwardly bound to it, becomes
materialized or de-spiritualized. In the same way, Intelligence, in
the same relationship, becomes de-naturalized [disembodied]. In
this situation both are not unified. They are only a composite, as
one correctly defines temporally living humans as being put
together out of body and soul.[27] The macrokosmos itself is put
together out of Spirit and nature. Now since Descartes, it has been
the radical error of German philosophers (e.g. Fichte, Schelling,
Hegel, etc.) that they regard this composition of intelligent and
non-intelligent nature, this dualism, as original, constitutive, and
therefore as inexplicable. So long as these philosophers cannot
free themselves from this fixed idea, they will make of religion

itself something that is a composite. In fact religion does not

accept this dualism as original and therefore sees it as
redeemable. But these philosophers will make of religion a timid
and meek appendage that gives thanks to philosophy for allowing
it to succeed at least half way in speaking of the religious
doctrines of Spirit and nature, or they may even give the
impression that philosophy is there to protect religion, somewhat
in the way that one speaks of the protection of religion by the
government.
12
As already remarked, it is only by its free co-operation that the
intelligent creature passes from its directly obtained mode of
being into its mediated one. One can therefore readily understand
the possibility of a twofold use of this freedom, and thereby a
twofold mediationeither for or against God.[28] If it is against
God, such a creature no longer wants to be the image of God, but
rather wants to make himself the image, having chosen to
effectively deny his creaturely elation to God, without however
being able to get rid of his constitutive imperative, of actually
being the image of God.
In relation to the twofold mediation [for or against God], I am
reminded that the error in Schellings teaching of a dark Ground in
the Absolute consists in the fact that in this teaching the darkness
is regarded as unmediated. But the darkness, just like light,
originates only through mediation. Therefore Boehme says that a
creature created in the light, once he has reverted to the
darkness, the negative mediation of his being, without being
identified with it, cannot directly return to the light or to the
positive mediation. Rather, it is only by the deeper cause of both
[light and darkness] that he either falls through the darkness or
that he can be again delivered from it. This assertion is also made
by religion, when it says that we can travel the path to rebirth only
holding the hand of the dreadful brother (Death).

Per crucem (ignem) ad lucem.[By means of the cross (fire) to the

light]
13
All legends and myths of all people speak of such a primal state of
the material world before the beginning of time, of an unmediated
preceding Event [Ereignis]. In this Event, some of the intelligences
created by God in Eternity turns towards him, having been tested
by him, and others turn against God, having made the decision to
make their selfhood absolute through wanting-to-makethemselves-image. They thereby became demons, whose
corruption understandably was not limited to themselves, but was
rather shared, more or less, with all beings found in their regions.
14
This twofold division of intelligences makes understandable the
appearance of a heaven and of a hell for them. But it does not
explain the origin of a temporal world. The directCentral or Total
opposition of a creature against God must also have as its
consequence a corresponding direct rejection from the side of
God. But this [rejection] is not the indirect, as it were crooked or
half-rejection, which undeniably makes itself noticeable in the
movement of time.[29] And this is only explainable by the
hypothesis that a creature, who enters time, or for whom time was
created, being neither directly for nor directly against God, but
rather being only without God, wants to follow the diagonal
between these two directions. The usual distinction between a
centripetal and a centrifugal direction must then be rectified, so
that the latter [centrifugal] can be a fleeing from the Center in two
senses: one can either fly over the middle (Center), or one can
sink into it.
15
Temporal life is characterized by this incompleteness, ambiguity,

indecisiveness or duality. And this [temporal life] ceases, just like

the incompleteness ceases and the creature makes either one or
the other direction exclusively his own, having made himself
thereby free or having escaped from these opposites. For the
creature has it in his power, in its progression through his time,
through his continued good choice, to make his incomplete but
good directionwhich is not yet a direct return to Godinto one that
is whole and direct, and to wholly redeem the opposite direction..
Or he can choose to do the reverse. In both of these cases they
[the opposites] will cease to be equally balanced in time (their
previous medium). If the ultimate determination is against God,
then such a creature will at the same time become specifically
heavier, and further, sink under time. One sees from this how the
free creature is himself building his heaven or his hell during his
action in time.
I have shown elsewhere how this freedom of choice of which we
are speaking, was originally given to the creature, and that he lost
it by its misuse, and that when he entered time it was again given
to him only in tenure [loan]. We may not, however, as most of our
moralists do, mix up this given freedom of choice with that which
is obtained by such decision. For just because this final or true
freedom, as de Lamennais says, only takes itself, and does not
give, God says, Choose! Lacordaire (cujus nomen leo) [whose
name is Leo] expresses wonderfully the respect that God shows to
human freedom, when he says:
rien dans le dessein de Dieu na t accompli var voie de
censure (prventive) et tout par voie repressive, et lenfer nexiste,
que parceque la censure (prventive) est impossible a Dieu mme,
ou parcequil a prfer du moins le regime de lenfer au regime de
la censure (prventive). (Melange catholiques 1, 250 in a section
on censorship).
[nothing in Gods design was accomplished by means of
censorship (preventive) and everything was done by the
repressive way, and hell only exits because censorship

(preventive) is impossible for God himself, or because he has

preferred the regime of hell to that of censorship (preventive).]
16
The construction of time given here certainly agrees with the
teachings of religion. For one sees in this way why temporal life
has a continual conflict of two tendencies or strivings, as well as
the continual preponderance of the one standing over the other,
as a result of the choosing and distinguishing acts of the creature
(which therefore in this act must be free or independent as against
both), as well as in a continuing separation between light and
darkness (which reciprocally develop each other in this formative
struggle [Formationsstreit]. Just as we can also the already given
above definition of time as a suspension of Eternity obtains its
corroboration , that this suspension (in relation to the creature)
holds good both for the Eternity that is above as well as that which
is under time. The integral manifestation of both of these
remained occult [hidden] in time itself.
Religion calls the appearance of both in their integral
manifestation the partial or general judgment, as the separation of
both. Moreover, each act of free choice is, as one can see, either
that of Light or of Hell, an act that frees either Christ or Barrabas.
The one who chooses enters either into free service or into
servitude, and each liberation is at the same time a binding, each
manifestation is at the same time an occultation. On this also rests
the distinction between good and bad liberalism. For here, too we
can distinguish the constitutive freedom of election of sovereigns
from the freedom or non-freedom that is extended to the governed
themselves.
17
The division of intelligent beings into beings of light and beings of
darkness does not explain the originaland continuingstate of
time. It does not need to be proved that a Fall of humanity within

time would explain the origin of time even less. The mission [of
humanity] in time already presupposes time, and it is clear that
the purpose of humanity in time was to be both above and within
time, to lead it in its movement and to protect it.
18
We know, or should know, that humanity was entrusted with the
Power of the Keys, in order to keep the supratemporal
[berzeitlichen] region open for the region of time, and to keep the
infratemporalthe region below timelocked. We also know that
humanity did it the other way round, as it were turning the key,
locking the supratemporal region and opening the entrance to the
region below time. The region below time elevated itself to the
region of time. This [infernal] elevation was in the same ratios as
the fall of humanity into time. It was then humanitys own fault for
setting the attacks of these dark powers within the temporal
region. One should therefore also know that neither the Fall of
Lucifer, nor the Fall of humanity into time, nor the usurping
elevation of the beings below time into the realm of time can
explain the primal state of time, although they do explain its
successive alterations, disruptions and revolutions.
19
The sought for explanation [of the primal state of time] is possible
only by the hypothesis that all of the intelligences did not just go
in two directions in relation to God, but rather were divided into
three. That part of the intelligences that did not turn either
towards God or away from God, but wanted only to be without
God, gave the occasion for the primal state of the temporal region.
I would refer the reader to Section 8 and to the mundus
archetypus of the Hebrews as the Central production of En Soph.
And for further reflection I would suggest that this temporal region
now become the abode of the higher and highest manifestations
of Godfirst in humans, and then in God-men. In the book of
Revelation we do not read of a twofold eternal region (the new

Heavens and the new earth) but of a threefold (the quaternary

City of God, or the Heavenly Jerusalem counts as the third region).
It is not here the place to develop these ideas further. We could
spend our time looking at stories of totally evil pre-human
intelligent beings, such as are related in the oldest legends, and I
am reminded of the Abbadonna in Klopstocks Messiah.[30]
20
This theory of the origin and the meaning of time does not exclude
any other theory of time, nor does it contradict it, provided that
one proceeds from the presupposition of the solidarity and
coherence of all the intelligences among themselves as well as
with the self-less nature that belongs to them (as their heritage),
and the separation and the casting out of nature (which separation
is performed by time).[31] The intelligences having fallen from
their first estate, they tried to again obtain this estate (nature).
But this is of course not possible without and through humanity,
since the stewardship of this domain which of which they had been
dispossessed had been transferred to humanity.[32] This truth
relates to the relation of solidarity of humanitys good or evil
conditions with the good or evil state of many beings. Humanitys
responsibility for this gives a dimension within time that must not
be overlooked. To make this further understandable, let me say a
few words here, especially about the high dignity and the virtuality
[33]of humanity and of the earth in the universe, in order to
vindicate the relation of both against their degradation by longstanding philosophical propositions.
21
For we must know that the position of the earth in the material
order corresponds to the position of humanity in the higher order.
And just as there is only one Human [Mensch] in the universe, so
also there is only one earth. Both, the Human and the earth, are
what the womb is for the womanthat mysterious place of work,

formation and transformation of the central being (tres principes)

and its becoming sensible [Sensibilisation]. Both fulfill the function
of the base in the universe, and one can say that just as the earth
effects (operates) on the physical stars, so humanity itself has this
function for the higher heavenly bodies. We therefore see both in a
relation of solidarity with their destiny, as in their functions. Just as
the fetus in the womb longs for its integration and the mother is
responsible for this, so one can say the same thing about
humanity and the earth in relation to all beings. They can seek
their integrity only from humanity and from the earth. Humanity
and the earth are also given those powers of separation by which
those beings are reintegrated and re-ascend. These beings must
win their reintegration in their passage through time, separating
themselves from the opposing powers. We also see that the
coming into being of humanity and the world has to do with all the
non-integral beings who were still capable of being integrated.
This applies to those beings who lost their integrity, as well as
those whose integrity was merely suspended. We also see here
how the fallen [gefallen] or fallen-back and withdrawn [gewichene]
world, just as fallen humanity, remain supratemporal [34] in order
to win or obtain their own regeneration by performing the service
of reintegration for these beings.
But when humanity itself became earthly through the Fall, it
became glebae adscriptus [bound to the soil] in relation to the
earth. This changed the mode of Humanitys relation to the earth.
This relation shows itself in the history of their reciprocal culture,
as is shown by worship itself, where the earth is always the
sacrificial altar. On this rests the mysterious love of homeland, the
honouring of graves, etc., just as all social institutions only
maintain their existence when they are founded in a possession of
land and when the earth is taken into account. As against this we
see the mobilization of modern times, which expresses the curse
and the flight [35] of Cain.
22

If we say that we give someone time and space, or take it way,

then we are referring to time as a means by which a specific goal
may be realized. We mean that by means of this realization, space
and time are fulfilled or completed [zurckgelegt]. That is, each
being that fulfills them, thereby succeeds in completing them, or
has made himself free from them. We can therefore regard time
and space as levels of evolution, or as laws of evolution [36] (that
which has been fitted [37] or positioned), from which these beings
must free themselves by their obtaining of power. Therefore, if a
being observes and fulfills these laws, these laws are shown to be
means to promote his evolution. But if they are not observed or if
he opposes them, these laws will turn against him and become
hindrances to his evolution.
Moreover, a being who finds himself within these locations [38] or
laws [can only complete them] insofar as these laws enter within
him [inne wird], by seeing them as opposite [Jenseits] and also
being aware in himself of the motive power [Trieb] and imperative
to complete them. An animal, which like humanity is within time,
and therefore is and lives in time, is therefore not aware of time in
the same way as humanity. An animal does not get bored. [39]
23
In order to obtain a theory of time (in its normality as well as in the
abnormality of its evolution), it is most important to notice that
each being, who enters a stage of evolution in the sense of a
definite law, receives the light and the ability that he needs in
order to fulfill this law, and through that fulfillment, obtains that
power or that moment of his existence [Existenz] that he needs in
order to progress and ascend from that law. Now if this necessary
function is not done, then the law remains, but the ability to fulfill
it, as well as the necessary light, both disappear. And for such a
careless being there then enters a darkness and a heaviness,
which continues to press down on him under the first [unfulfilled]
law, even when he enters the following higher laws. For time
advances, even if the human remains behind; time flies through

and over him, if not with him. For example, when Jesus appeared
among the Jews, they were already sunk low under their law, and
they were less than Jews.[40]
This darkening and heaviness makes understandable the need for
an outer light and an external carrier and guide [Fhrer]. [41]
24
When time advances in this [dark] way, admittedly through the
fault of the being who has been fitted within it, instead of
promoting evolution, it reacts upon him in a depressing way. And
so the question near to our hearts is, how and why this depression
or limitation [Hemmung] can be transformed again into a
furthering help. And we are shown immediately three principal
conditions for such a possible freeing again and salvation of
someone who has been directed backwards in his evolution, and
who has in his retrogression or even opposition become an
extracted [42] or rigid being.
25
The first of these conditions is the solidarity [43] (Unity or
Covenant) of the natures of both beingsnamely the freeing
helping being and the being that needs help in order to integrate,
between the Integrating and the integrable. Without this covenant,
the reversibility or derivation of their modes of being would not be
possible. This is required by the organic rapport, the solidarity or
the communio vitae [communion of life].
In Old German this Covenant was called Marriage. Hence the old
and the new Covenant, the old and the new marriage. We know
that plants enter into this community by the flowing in and out of
their sap, animals by their blood, etc. We know also that without
this so-called chemical or essential (natural) community, there can
be no rapport, no solidarity or sympathy. Such sympathy is also
observable where there is either a primitive continuity or where

through contact a secondary essential continuity is achieved.

26
The second of these conditions is that the helping being, the one
who furthers evolution and who frees, is not only himself free in
his evolution (for just as only the sick need a doctor, so must this
doctor be healthy), but the helping being must also stand in a
higher level of evolution than the stage to which the being
needing help has sunk or been pressed down. For example, a
being entering evolutionary stage b finds himself still in a and
sunk back in a to a1, the saving being cannot come from
region b, but must come from an even higher region b1. For
each step backwards, each banishment to the past, requires a
corresponding anticipation of the future, if the standstill
[Stckung] is to be sublated [aufgehoben].
For even an animal anticipates or shortens the time, when it
gathers together its muscle power, in order to make its spring (to
flee from an enemy). This helps us to understand what humans
can achieve by the anticipation and drawing inwards of the future.
It is in this context that we must understand the meaning of
Hamlets cry, My fate cries out, unhand me Gentlemen! It is in
this same meaning that God agrees with necessity [44].
27
The third condition of such a freeing mediation is that the freeing
mediator must hold onto (or suspend) his own full evolution to the
same extent and degree to which the being needing help finds
himself, so that he may be in a position to grasp him, to bear him
and to be able to work with him. Such a helping being must
therefore, for the good of the needy one, himself make a
retrograde motion, and empty himself from the full manifestation
of his own glory.[45]
Glorify me Father, with the clarity that I had with you, before you

sent me into the world. [46]

This retrogression is therefore grace, and all help comes from
above. Amor descendit, ut elevet [Love descends, in order to raise
up].
This help presupposes the cooperation of the one who is being
helped. Each true kind of attraction (whether of a good or evil
kind) therefore takes place in this reciprocity of action. It also
presupposes the comprehensible Presence (assistance [47]) of a
guide, that is, a leading or pointing atmosphere [Luft]. Physicists
since Newton have therefore incorrectly referred to weight as an
attraction, for in a fall there is no cooperation of the heavy body.
Furthermore, in these cases, the mover only lives through
[durchwohnen] the moved; the moved is subordinate to the mover
and completely uncomprehended by it. There is then only a onesided dwelling-through of the mover in the moved, and no
reciprocal dwelling within [Inwohnung] or dwelling beside
[Beiwohnen]. Therefore the motion of a weight is unfree, and the
motion of that which is drawn up [des Zuges] is free.
28
This free suspension by the helping being of the manifestation of
its integrity is for the good of the one needing help. It is an
offering up of oneself for the other. And in this we have seen the
concept of sacrifice in its greatest generality, and we have
especially understood it as connected with the concept of time. We
have seen this in the explanation given above that the origin or
beginning of time coincides with the cessation or the suspension
of full or integral Existenz.
29
In order to make clear this concept of Sacrifice and also of time, I
want to give two examples: (1) the process of enlightenment and
(2) Sacrificial Death. The first concerns instruction. There is no

doubt that, if I teach a student, who needs light and is worthy or

capable, and if I give him the light that he needs, then from my
side this is only accomplished if I keep my knowledge or my
intuition [Schauen] within me, but then let myself descend to the
level of his non-knowing. I offer myself to his dark obscurity, and
let it come towards me, taking its pain and its humiliation upon
myself, to go within him, so that he can be freed from them and
enter into my light.
30
The same process of derivation can also be shown in sacrificial
death. Through this alone the central Idea of Christianity may
receive that light that it yet lacks. For Origen and more recently
also Maistre has compared the death of the Saviour with the being
broken of a Vessel, through which a powerful spirit of Life became
free and then spread itself out. One should have noticed that in
itself, this freeing has no retroactive freeing action on those beings
who still remain bound in these same vessels. For such a freeing it
is not enough to have a lingering and remaining of the fleeting
Spirit. What is required is an entering into and a making-Himselfintelligible, an embodiment and a sowing of Himself in the beings
that are still bound. That is a voluntary suspension of His free
Existenz, for the benefit of a freeing of the needy beings from their
bound Existenz. Because of this we must say that when through
death the freeing Agent has Himself become free, and has
obtained the full power of His work, this work of freeing and
salvation has only just begun, and will only cease at the end of
time. Therefore the Eucharist shows forth the continuation of this
suspension or self-sacrifice, as I have set out in my Schrift ber die
Eucharistie, as well as in my 40 Stzen ber einer religisen Erotik,
as well as in my Schrift ber Segen und Fluch. I would also want to
show the relation of feeding (alimentation) to sacrifice. [48]
By my participation, I can free a feeling, a belief, a conviction, a
science, etc., from the bonds of its individuality. Through this
freeing it can win an objectivity that is independent of me or

others, i.e. a higher objectivity. It can then itself act (as freeing or
restraining) even without my actions. Sometimes it may act
against me and come back to me, like the word that I speak is no
longer my word. It is as if an all-present agency in the air took the
word within itself and made it its own, outside of me and without
me, and it then continues to exist for or against me. And the
person speaking can say that the words were taken out of his
mouth.
Now just as in that way something that is within me strives
towards the outside, so does that which stands outside of me work
back on myself. One sees how these inner and outer testimonies
continually try to mutually complete themselves.[49] Here we can
note what was said by the alchemists, that the child is
incomparably greater than his mother and that she really lives
from it, although the child has obtained its existence [Dasein] only
through the mother.
A being freed from these bonds has not lost his ability either to
limit or to expand himself (his manifestation) at will. It is rather the
reverse; this being has thereby won this ability for the first time,
the ability to limit his manifestation or appearance. For the freeing
of his essence from the bonds or limitations of time and space (i.e.
materiality) now allows his freedom of manifestation in each time
and in each place. Now, that which has become central in his
substance [Wesenheit] can change its action in the periphery, or
move in the periphery without having to move from a to e by
going through b. [here missing a simple piechart. With abcd
strung on top curve of wedge and e at lower apex]

Instead, it sublates its action a in an unmediated way from its

resting center c and then sets it out in an equally unmediated
way directly to e. [50]
To use a familiar example, a person is not free to begin to decide

that is, to make himself free from the chain of causality in time
and to make a new temporal row [of causation]unless in this act
he is able to dematerialize or to elevate to Centrality his physical
being, or to spiritualize it (however foreign this assertion may
sound to many of our spiritualistic moral philosophers). From this it
follows that a person in each free (moral or immoral) act
dematerializes or spiritualizes himself. Only the invisible, that is
non-illuminated, that which is not made visible by another, has the
ability to make itself visible. Only the silence, the not-spoken, has
the ability to cause itself to speak, and a being must therefore first
disappear from out of the row or region of things that are being
made visible (illuminated) in order to make an appearance as selfilluminated from out of his own region that makes visible. Only by
beholding [schauend] or knowing [wissend] Himself does the Spirit
behold (or know) others (or himself as his image). And only in
beholding others (his image) does He behold Himself. This holds
true for each self-illuminated being in each regionhe only makes
others visible under the circumstances of making himself visible.
To give another example demonstrating the law just set out, we
also see that those who are separated from the earthly [irdisch], or
who have obtained an existence [Existenz] free of time and space,
or who have ascended, have also obtained an incomparably
greater or broaderas well as more intensivepower of sensible
manifestation. We concede that the opposite is true for those who
have sunk [below time]. However, one must certainly have some
knowledge of these Non-allants in order to give information to
the so-called Revenants. [51]
31
Everything we have said about time is important for a theory of
time (without which no theory of history and therefore no theory of
society is possible). The beginning or the continuance or progress
of time can only be understood in terms of a voluntary suspension
of one or more integral beings (those who have obtained the
perfection of their Existenz), who for the sake of disintegrated

beings have entered into a relation of solidarity with them). This

means: we can understand time only as a sacrifice, and that is
why the Scriptures speak of a Lamb offered from the beginning of
time.[52] Moreover, time certainly actively advances, although to
be sure only as it is known in those smallest to largest periods with
the same signature of recurring stages, levels or epochs. And it is
the task of philosophy to demonstrate the principle for this, both
for individuals as well as for individual peoples and for collectivehumanity itself. This should be done both for the normal evolution
as well as for the abnormal which comes from the non-action or
reaction of people in their thoughtlessness or through their
wickedness; such an abnormality sets itself against the power of
evolution.
32
Now in relation to such a theory or philosophy of time, or of history
and society, the insight must above all be maintained that such a
theory of history is not possible without a history of revelation. For
revelation as such always involves the divination of nature or
anticipations of the future, and a drawing towards or away from
the temporal present. For, as already remarked in section 26,
everyone has within him, more or less, the power to draw towards
him the future, as the temporally still unborn Presence, as well as
to bring the deceased as Revenants into a rapport with those who
are still in temporal or earthly life. One must also know that
society as a whole (as Burke says, a social contract of all those
living on the earth together with all the deceased as well as the
yet unborn) can not progress if there do not continue to be people
to whom above all is transmitted (with or without their will), this
drawing in or anticipation of the future, and who likewise through
their own self extension of the same present (believing what they
do not yet see) [53], offering themselves as open to the influence
of the future, keeping their souls as flowing sacrificial blood. For
what is not yet effective in a lower region or, as is said, at hand
[vorhanden], is so already in a higher region, just as what in a

lower region has already passed away nevertheless still is in either

a higher or a deeper region. When for example, many hours before
an earthquake, dogs and horses behave as if they want to
reassure themselves in front of that which will later be thrown
over, i.e. as if the earth had already moved, they demonstrate by
this that this earthquake is already sidereally there and within
them, just as the atmospheric events are sidereally in the divining
barometer. In a similar sense, but one intended to refer to a higher
order of things, the Scriptures say that God does nothing that He
has not previously (auparavant) shown to his disciples [Vertrauten,
confidens] or prophets.[54] They really form the true youth of the
society of every era, insofar as that which is still temporally
unborn [and which the prophets see] yet unborn in time are still
younger than the youngest already temporally born.
Endnotes
[1] JGF: This seems to be a paraphrase of the Vulgate, which reads
et iuravit per viventem in saecula saeculorum qui creavit caelum
et ea quae in illo sunt et terram et ea quae in ea sunt et mare et
quae in eo sunt quia tempus amplius non erit.
[2] JGF: Baader himself uses the French words ides causes or
mres, as well as the other French words in round brackets.
[3] JGF: Baader wants to relate speculation to philosophy. In other
works, Baader connects his use of this word with specula or
mirror, and our being in the image of God.
[4] JGF: Inexistenz or inexistence is not the same as nonexistence. Baaders point here is that to have our existence in
God is not the same as to be identical with God.
Dooyeweerd has this same idea of Inexistenz. He refers to our
tendency towards an Origin as the ex-sistent character of our
heart. He says that religion is the ex-sistent condition in which the

ego is bound to its true or pretended firm ground. Even our

absolutizing shows this ex-sistent character of the religious center
of our existence. In the state of apostasy we attempt an
autonomous ex-sistere. We need to be pulled out of (ex-trahere)
this state by God in order to regain our true ex-sistent position (NC
I, 58, 59).
[5] JGF: as omnimpotent, because omnitenens, or all-powerful
because holding or containing all.
[6] JGF: Baader uses the word Gesetztheit from Gesetz or law.
Gods law is that which places or determines and limits created
reality in time. This is also Dooyeweerds law-idea, from which his
philosophy gets its name, De Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee, or "The
Philosophy of the Law-Idea"
[7] JGF: Ternar is a term that Baader frequently uses for a triad of
terms. The Trinity is the original triad or Ternar.
[8] JGF: Bossuets error seems to be to have identified being only
with the Father. But Being includes acting, knowing and willing
(loving).
[9] JGF: It has been pointed out that Baaders knowledge of
Kabbalah was fairly limited. He is correct that Binah (Intelligence,
understood as masculine) is the third sephirot in the Tree of Life.
Hochmah is the second sephirot, Wisdom, and is understood as
feminine. As the preceding sephirot, it contains the successive
ones, including Binah.
[10] JGF: Materiality is not to be understood in a dualistic way as
referring to some substance that is independent of our selfhood.
For Baader, the material is the temporal.
[11] JGF: Baader describes the process of sublation in his
Concerning the Concept of Time. First there is a differentiation
form the whole. there is then the analysis of these parts. Then the

differentiation is sublated to the Whole again.

[12] JGF: both of these words play on the meaning of Gesetz or
law. Dooyeweerd uses similar terminology. Dooyeweerd speaks of
our being "fitted-into" the temporal cosmos [gesteld zijn].
[13] JGF: Dooyeweerd speaks of God as self-sufficient, and of
creation as restless and not self-sufficient. Creation as meaning is
restless and points to the Origin which is absolute and selfsufficient (NC I, 10).
[14] JGF: Kabbalah interprets this verse as distinguishing among
created, formed and made. Dooyeweerd also sees at least a
double creation. Creation was of humanity as an undifferentiated
totality. Man's embodiment was a second stage. Dooyeweerd
speaks of the second stage not as a creation, but as the forming
of a previously existing and created material. He says that Gen. 2
speaks of becoming "living souls"that is the bodily forming
process. That is not creation, but giving form to "an already
existing material present in the temporal order." He criticizes a
historicistic interpretation wipes out the distinction between
creation and becoming and that sees creation as a temporal
event:
het principieel verschil tussen schepping (Gen. 1) en wording
(formering uit reeds voorhanden materiaal, Gen. 2) vervalt in dat
de schepping, als boven-creatuurlijk tot aanzijn roepen door het
Goddelijke Woord, binnen het creatuurlijk kader van het historisch
tijdsaspect wordt getrokken." ("Na vijf en dertig jaren," Philosophia
Reformata 36e jrg. 1e en 2e kwaartaal 1971, p. 1-10)
[the principal difference between creation (Genesis 1) and
becoming (the forming out of an already existing material, Gen. 2),
falls away in that the creation as a supra-creaturely calling to
existence [aanzijn] by the Divine Word, is brought within the
creaturely category of the historical aspect of time].

[15] JGF: a medieval proverb.

[16] I have translated Mensch as Humanity instead of man.
This is sometimes too cumbersome a construction, but it works in
this context. This kind of political correctness may be
anachronistic. But in any event, Baader viewed the primal human
as androgynous.
[17] JGF: The perfection was subject to the Fall.
[18] JGF: The reference is from Augustine: the immortalitas minor
became immortalitas major, or the posse non mori a non posse
mori. (City of God, Book XXII).
[19] JGF: Dooyeweerd has a similar view of the non-human
temporal world finding its center and existence within humanity,
its religious root. Just as our existence is only an ex-sistence in
God, the temporal world also has its existence in humanity as its
religious root. Dooyeweerd says that the image of God is the
radical unity of all the different temporal modalities in which they
coalesce (NC III, 69). The whole meaning of the temporal world is
integrally (i.e. completely) bound up and concentrated in this unity
(Roots 30). Our temporal world, in its meaning differentiation and
coherence, is bound to this religious root of humanity; it has no
meaning and therefore no reality apart from this root (WdW I, 65).
And even this religious root has no existence in itself, but exists
only as meaning and refers to its Origin, God.
[20] JGF: Dooyeweerd also says that it is only man who can have
cosmic and cosmological self-consciousness because only mans
cosmic temporal structure is founded in an individual religious root
transcending time, viz. his selfhood. (NC II, 480).
[21] JGF: The reference is to the Lords prayer, And lead us not
into temptation, (Matt. 6:13; Lk . 11:4).
[22] JGF: The reference is to being born again, (John 3:3,7; I

Peter 1:23).
[23] JGF: Paul has many references to our sons and heirs of God.
There seems to be a reference to two passages here. Gal. 4:4-7
speaks of God sending his Son that we might receive the adoption
of sons. And Col. 1:15-27 speaks of Christ as the firstborn of
every creature, by whom all things were created, and the
mystery of Christ in you.
[24] JGF: The reference is to John 1:12,
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become
the sons of God, [even] to them that believe on his name.
[25] JGF: caput mortuum is a term from alchemy, meaning the
residue after the process of distillation. All that is valuable has
already been removed.
[26] JGF: Baader is here combining Persian religion with Kabbalah.
Adam Kadmon is the first man in Kabbalistic thought.
[27] JGF: The reference is to those attempting to live entirely in the
periphery of time. The division between body and soul is not one
that is actual, or in Baaders words, not original or constitutive.
[28] JGF: Cf. the idea of the religious antithesis, as stated in Kuyper
and Dooyeweerd.
[29] JGF: In the temporal world there is not yet a total rejection of
God.
[30] JGF: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1748-1773). His epic poem
The Messiah is in 4 volumes and was written from 1748-73. It is
considered the first major modern work by a German poet.
Klopstock influenced Goethe. For an online version, see
http://www.ccel.org/w/winkworth/singers/htm/klopstok.htm.
The
following description is given of Abbadonna:

The "Messiah," which as we have seen occupied twenty-seven

years in its composition, is a poem in twenty cantos, written in
hexameters except where certain choral songs occur in the
unrhymed lyrical measures employed by Klopstock for his odes.
The action opens after the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when
the Messiah withdraws from the people, and alone on the Mount of
Olives renews His solemn vow to the Almighty Father to undertake
the work of Redemption; it closes when that work is completed,
and He sits down at the right hand of God. Around the central
figure of the God-man are grouped an infinite variety of spectators
and actors: angels and seraphs, among whom Eloa and Gabriel are
especially appointed to attend on the Divine Sufferer; evil spirits
who conspire against Him, but one of whom, Abbadonna, repents
and at last obtains mercy;
[31] JGF: Dooyeweerd also says that cosmic time splits up
temporal reality or nature.
[32] JGF: Dooyeweerd also sees humanity as the religious root of
temporal reality. When humanity fell, a New Root was required
Christ.
[33] JGF: I dont know whether this is the first use of the idea of
virtual reality. Virtual is here used in the sense of a representative
world contained in another. The analogies with the virtual reality of
cyberspace are interesting but cannot be explored here.
[34] JGF: Dooyeweerd has the idea of the continued
supratemporality of humanity. Both Baader and Dooyeweerd say
that humanity, after the fall, is both outside of and within time.
Dooyeweerd speaks of our temporal body as the temporal mantle
of functions of a supratemporal selfhood.
But it must be emphasized that Dooyeweerd does not share
Baaders idea of the earth standing outside of time. For him, the
earth and cosmos are entirely temporal. Dooyeweerd in fact calls
the temporal the earthly. But his rejection of Baaders idea can

explain why Dooyeweerd specifically says,

The cosmos itself cannot be called individual. It is not an actual
being. Its only temporal meaning-coherence is rather the
structural frame-work within which the individuality of temporal
things, events and societal relationships are only possible. (NC II,
594).
[35] JGF: Baader plays on the words curse [Fluch] and flight
[Flucht].
[36] JGF: Note that this was written 28 years prior to Darwins
Origin of Species (1859). Baaders view of these stages is that
beings need to be freed from them in their evolution or ascent.
[37] JGF: [Gesetztheiten]
[38] JGF: [Lokationen]. See his previous use of the word lociert in
relation to being displaced.
[39] JGF: The idea seems to be that animals, completely within
time, cannot stand over against time. Dooyeweerd shares this
idea. He says that conscious experience is a quite different thing
from the subjective undergoing of sense-impressions found in
animals (NC II, 539). It is only man who can have cosmic and
cosmological self-consciousness because only mans cosmic
temporal structure is founded in an individual religious root
transcending time, viz. his selfhood. Other creatures are exstatically absorbed by their temporal existence (NC II, 480).
[40] JGF: This anti-Semitic comment cannot be excused.
[41] JGF: The reference is to Christ.
[42] JGF: festgeranntena term from metallurgy.
[43] JGF [Gemeinschaftlichkeit]

[44] JGF: sich reimt from to rhyme. Used figuratively as "to

agree with."
[45] JGF: This is the kenosis.
[46] JGF: Baader is not always accurate in his quotations. The
reference reads:
And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the
glory which I had with thee before the world was. (John 17:5)
[47] JGF: Baader seems to be referring to the French word for
being present, assister.
[48] JGF: The relation between feeding and sacrifice is a very
Hindu conception as well.
[49] JGF: There is a kind of dialectic here. Dooyeweerd also speaks
of a good dialectic, as opposed to a religious dialectic based on a
dualism that cannot be overcome.
[50] JGF: For Dooyeweerd, all of our actions come out of our
supratemporal center (NC I, 32). In this center, all temporal
aspects also coincide in a radical unity (NC I, 106). Our actions
function in these aspects, so a change in either the type or
function of action must come from our center. Our supratemporal
center is also supraindividual:
The central and radical unity of our existence is at the same time
individual and supra-individual; that is to say, in the individual Iness it points beyond the individual ego toward that which makes
the whole of mankind spiritually one in root in creation, fall and
redemption (NC I, 60).
[51] JGF: The Non-allants are the non-returning, those
intelligences that have sunk below the temporal into the infernal.
In Baaders theory of time, the infernal has only a past, no present

or future. The so-called Revenants are those who can see into the
past because they are non-returning. [als revenants sich
erwisen, weil sie non-allants sind, Pasqualis Lehre, Werke 4,
118]. Baader says that the Central viewpoint of Totality allows us
to see both forwards and backwards in time, although different
people have differing gifts. Prophets see into the future; they show
us that the future is already here. Others represent the past and
show us (remember) that the past is still there (Werke 4, 117 fn). It
seems that the Revenants also see into the past, but that is
because they have chosen the infernal center, and not the Central
viewpoint of Totality.
I do not believe that Baader is referring to spiritualistic encounters
when he says that we must have some knowledge of Nonallants. Baader expressly discourages the opening of the infernal
center and occult practices. But like many of his contemporaries,
Baader was interested in the phenomena of sleepwalking and
hypnotism. Some of the cases that he observed did show evidence
of demonic (infernal) influence, whereas others demonstrated the
supratemporal Silberblick whereby the Central viewpoint of
Totality was achieved.
However, section 32 of this article does make reference to the
power of to bring the deceased as Revenants into a rapport with
those who are still in temporal or earthly life. If spiritualism is
intended by this reference to Revenants,' then this is certainly not
something that is found in Dooyeweerd. Although his early student
article shows that he had some knowledge of spiritualism, it forms
no part of Dooyeweerd's philosophy. It is interesting that this
section was edited out in Franz Hoffmans Lichtstrahlen, a
collection of excerpts from some of Baaders works. Hoffman was
the editor of Baaders Collected Works.
[52] JGF: The reference appears to be to Revelation 5:6
And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four
beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been

slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven
Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth.
[53] JGF: The reference is to Hebrews 11:1,
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of
things not seen.
[54] The reference seems to be to Amos 3:7,
Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret
unto his servants the prophets.