Man has his existence and being either with his will, in other words, with his consent, or without it; in the latter case such an existence, embittered by inevitable sufferings of many kinds, would be a flagrant injustice. The ancients tried in vain to prove that virtue brings happiness, which is denied in experience. What was really at the root of the attempt of those philosophers was the assumed justice of the case; he who was without guilt ought to be free from suffering, and hence happy. But the serious and profound solution of the problem is to be found in the Christian doctrine that works do not justify.

Christianity teaches a heavy guilt of the human race through its existence itself, arising through the first human couple. According to the truth, the very origin of man himself is the act of his free will, and is accordingly identical with the Fall, and therefore the original sin, of which all others are the result, appeared already with man’s essentia and existentia. Augustine taught in his books De Libero Arbitrio that only as Adam before the Fall was man guiltless and had a free will, whereas for ever after he is involved in the necessity of sin. The law, in the biblical sense, always demands that we should change our conduct, while our essential nature would remain unchanged. But since this is impossible, Paul says that no one is justified before the law; we can be transferred from the state of sinfulness into that of freedom and salvation only by the new birth or regeneration in Jesus Christ, in consequence of the effect of grace, by virtue of which a new man arises, and the old man is abolished.

As long as our will is the same, our world cannot be other than it is. It is true that all men wish to be delivered from the state of suffering and death; they would like, as we say, to attain to eternal bliss, to enter the kingdom of heaven, but not on their own feet; they would like to be carried there by the course of nature. But this is impossible; for nature is only the copy, the shadow, of our will. Therefore, of course, she will never let us fall and become nothing; but she cannot bring us anywhere except always into nature again. Yet everyone experiences in his own life and death how precarious it is to exist as a part of nature. Accordingly, existence is certainly to be regarded as an error or mistake, to return from which is salvation; it bears this character throughout. In fact, nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist.

Now if we consider the will-to-live as a whole and objectively, we have to think of it, according to what has been said, as involved in a delusion. To return from this, and hence to deny its whole present endeavor, is what religions describe as self-denial or self-renunciation for the real self is the will-to-live. The moral virtues, hence justice and philanthropy spring from the fact that the will-to-live, seeing through the principium individuationis, recognizes itself again in all its phenomena; accordingly they are primarily a sign, a symptom, that the appearing will is no longer firmly held in that delusion, but that disillusionment already occurs. Conversely, injustice, wickedness, cruelty are signs of the opposite, that is, of deep entanglement in that delusion. For true righteousness, in- violable justice, that first and most important cardinal virtue, is so heavy a task, that whoever professes it unconditionally and from the bottom of his heart has to make sacrifices which soon deprive life of the sweetness required to make it enjoyable, and thereby turn the will from it, and thus lead to resignation. Yet the very thing that makes righteousness venerable is the sacrifices it costs; in trifles it is not admired. Its true nature really consists in the righteous man’s not throwing on others, by craft or force, the burdens and sorrows incidental to life, as is done by the unrighteous, but in his bearing what has fallen to his lot. In this way he has to endure un- diminished the full burden of the evil imposed on human life. In this way he has to endure undiminished the full burden of the evil imposed on human life. Justice thereby becomes a means for advancing the denial of the will-to-live, since want and suffering, those actual conditions of human life, are its consequence; but these lead to resignation. Clinging to life and its pleasures must now soon yield, and make way for a universal renunciation; consequently, there will come about the denial of the will. Now since, according to this, poverty, privations, and special sufferings of many kinds are produced by the most complete exercise of moral virtues, asceticism in the narrowest sense, the giving up of all property, the deliberate search for the unpleasant and repulsive, self-torture, fasting, the hairy garment, mortification of the flesh; all these are rejected by many as superfluous, and perhaps rightly so.

This teaching agrees with the Christian doctrine that is urged by Luther. This doctrine teaches that it is not works that save us, but only faith appearing through the effect of grace, and that therefore we can never be justified by our actions, but obtain forgiveness for our sins only by virtue of the merits of the Mediator. without such assumptions, Christianity would have to teach endless punishments for all, and hence that no salvation would be attained. Sinful works and their consequence must be annulled and annihilated at some time either by the pardon of another, or by the appearance of our own better knowledge, otherwise the world cannot hope for any salvation. The moral virtues are not really the ultimate end, but only a step towards it. In the Christian myth, this step is expressed by the eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and with this moral responsibility appears simultaneously with original sin. This original sin itself is in fact the affirmation of the will-to-live; on the other hand, the denial of this will, in consequence of the dawning of better knowledge, is salvation. Therefore, what is moral is to be found between these two; it accompanies man as a light on his path from the affirmation to the denial of the will, or, mythically, from the entrance of original sin to salvation through faith in the mediation of the incarnate God. But the Buddhists with complete frankness describe the matter only negatively as Nirvana, which is the negation of this world or of Samsara. If Nirvana is defined as nothing, this means only that Samsara contains no single element that could serve to define or construct Nirvana.

He will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now, and who consequently no longer takes any interest in his individual phenomenon, since in him knowledge has, so to speak, burnt up and consumed the will, so that there is no longer any will, any keen desire for individual existence, left in him. Individuality, of course, is inherent above all in the intellect; reflecting the phenomenon, the intellect is related thereto, and the phenomenon has the principium individuationis as its form. But individuality is also inherent in the will, in so far as the character is individual; yet this character itself is abolished in the denial of the will. Thus individuality is inherent in the will only in its affirmation, not in its denial. The holiness attaching to every purely moral action rests on the fact that ultimately such action springs from the immediate knowledge of the numerical identity of the inner nature of all living things. But this identity is really present only in the state of the denial of the will (Nirvana), as the affirmation of the will (Samsara) has for its form the phenomenal appearance of this in plurality and multiplicity. moral virtues spring from an awareness of that identity of all beings; this, however, lies not in the phenomenon, but in the thing-in-itself, in the root of all beings. If this is the case, then the virtuous action is a momentary passing through the point, the permanent return to which is the denial of the will-to-live.

The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. The mystic starts from his inner, positive, individual experience, in which he finds himself as the eternal and only being, and so on. Philosophy has its value and virtue in its rejection of all assumptions that cannot be substantiated, and in its acceptance as its data only of that which can be proved with certainty in the external world given by perception, in the forms constituting our intellect for the apprehension of the world, and in the consciousness of one’s own self common to all. For this reason it must remain cosmology, and cannot become theology. Its theme must restrict itself to the world; to express from every aspect what this world is, what it may be in its innermost nature, is all that it can honestly achieve. Now it is in keeping with this that, when my teaching reaches its highest point, it assumes a negative character, and so ends with a negation. Thus it can speak here only of what is denied or given up; but what is gained in place of this, what is laid hold of, it is forced (at the conclusion of the fourth book) to describe as nothing; and it can add only the consolation that it may be merely a relative, not an absolute, nothing. For, if something is no one of all the things that we know, then certainly it is for us in general nothing. Yet it still does not follow from this that it is nothing absolutely, namely that it must be nothing from every possible point of view and in every possible sense, but only that we are restricted to a wholly negative knowledge of it; and this may very well lie in the limitation of our point of view. Now it is precisely here that the mystic proceeds positively, and therefore, from this point, nothing is left but mysticism. All mysticism at the various stages of its initiation, draw this source gradually back into ourselves as the subject, and the adept at last recognizes with wonder and delight that he himself is it. he mysticism of the Sufis also expresses itself generally in this same spirit, principally as a reveling in the consciousness that we ourselves are the kernel of the world and the source of all existence, to which everything returns.

Quietism, i.e., the giving up of all willing, asceticism, i.e., intentional mortification of one’s own will, and mysticism, i.e., conscious- ness of the identity of one’s own inner being with that of all things, or with the kernel of the world, stand in the closest connexion, so that whoever professes one of them is gradually led to the acceptance of the others, even against his intention.

Not only the religions of the East, but also true Christianity has throughout this fundamental ascetic character that my philosophy explains as denial of the will-to-live, although Protestantism, especially in its present-day form, tries to keep this dark. Yet even the open enemies of Christianity who have appeared in most recent times have attributed to it the teaching of renunciation, self-denial, perfect chastity, and generally mortification of the will, and they have thoroughly demonstrated that such doctrines are essentially peculiar to original and genuine Christianity.

The ascetic tendency is certainly unmistakable in genuine and original Christianity, as it was developed in the writings of the Church Fathers from the kernel of the New Testament; this tendency is the highest point to which everything strives upwards. We find, as its principal teaching, the recommendation of genuine and pure celibacy (that first and most important step in the denial of the will-to-live) already expressed in the New Testament. In Christianity proper, marriage is regarded merely as a compromise with man’s sinful nature, as a concession, as something allowed to those who lack the strength to aspire to the highest, and as an expedient for preventing greater perdition.

The Old Testament is really foreign to Christianity proper; for in the New Testament the world is generally spoken of as something to which we do not belong, which we do not love, the ruler of which, in fact, is the devil. This agrees with the ascetic spirit of the denial of one’s self and the overcoming of the world. Like boundless love of one’s neighbor, even of one’s enemy, this spirit is the fundamental characteristic which Christianity has in common with Brahmanism and Buddhism, and which is evidence of their relationship.

By eliminating asceticism and its central point, the meritorious nature of celibacy, Protestantism has already given up the innermost kernel of Christianity, and to this extent is to be regarded as a breaking away from it. In our day, this has shown itself in the gradual transition of Protestantism into shallow rationalism, that modern Pelagianism. In the end, this results in a doctrine of a loving father who made the world, in order that things might go on very pleasantly in it, and who, if only we conform to his will in certain respects, will afterwards provide an even much pleasanter world. This may be a good religion for comfortable, married, and civilized Protestant parsons, but it is not Christianity. Christianity is the doctrine of the deep guilt of the human race by reason of its very existence, and of the heart’s intense longing for salvation therefrom. However, that salvation can be attained only by the heaviest sacrifices and the denial of one’s own self, hence by a complete reform of man’s nature.

Although, in essential respects, Christianity taught only what the whole of Asia knew already long before and even better, for Europe it was nevertheless a new and great revelation. In consequence of this, the spiritual tendency of European nations was entirely transformed. For it disclosed to them the metaphysical significance of existence, and accordingly taught them to look beyond the narrow, paltry, and ephemeral life on earth, and no longer to regard that as an end in itself, but as a state or condition of suffering, guilt, trial, struggle and purification, from which we can soar upwards to a better existence, inconceivable to us, by means of moral effort, severe renunciation, and the denial of our own self. Thus it taught the great truth of the affirmation and denial of the will-to-live in the garment of allegory by saying that, through the Fall of Adam, the curse had come upon all men, sin had come into the world, and guilt was inherited by all; but that through the sacrificial death of Jesus, on the other hand, all were purged of sin, the world was saved, guilt abolished, and justice appeased. But in order to understand the truth itself contained in this myth, we must regard human beings not merely in time as entities independent of one another, but must comprehend the (Platonic) Idea of man. The Fall of Adam represents man’s finite, animal, sinful nature, in respect of which he is just a being abandoned to limitation, sin, suffering, and death. On the other hand, the conduct, teaching, and death of Jesus Christ represent the eternal, supernatural side, the freedom, the salvation of man.

Therefore that great fundamental truth contained in Christianity as well as in Brahmanism and Buddhism, the need for salvation from an existence given up to suffering and death, and its attainability through the denial of the will, hence by a decided opposition to nature, is beyond all comparison the most important truth there can be. But it is at the same time entirely opposed to the natural tendency of mankind, and is difficult to grasp as regards its true grounds and motives; for, in fact, all that can be thought only generally and in the abstract is quite inaccessible to the great majority of people. Therefore, in order to bring that great truth into the sphere of practical application, a mythical vehicle for it was needed everywhere for this great majority. Philosophy is related to religions as a straight line is to several curves running near it, it reaches the truth directly, that which religions show under disguises, and reach in roundabout ways.

As an example, I wish to express the deepest mystery in Christianity, that is, trinity, into the fundamental conceptions of my philosophy. The Holy Ghost is the decided denial of the will-to-live; the person in whom this exhibits itself in concreto is the Son. He is identical with the will that affirms life, and thereby produces the phenomenon of this world of perception, i.e., with the Father, in so far as affirmation and denial are opposite acts of the same will.

Finally Schopenhauer listed some examples in the Bible about the appreciation of the outward suffering, in the parable of rich man and Lazarus, the story of the young man and the maxim about the camel and the eye of a needle. As Meister Eckhart says “Suffering is the fleetest animal that bears you to perfection.”

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