THE ENLIGHTENMENT
555
or when the messengers of the faith freed the Teutons from their
fear of the nature demons whom Christ had conquered. Perhaps
the clearing of the German forest first became possible when the
Christian missionaries had awakened in their converts the con–
sciousness that a man in God's hand is stronger than the powers of
darkness: civilizing progress depended upon this act of Christian
enlightenment.
Above all, an essential piece of enlightenment takes place when
Christian faith emancipates an individual from the collectivity,
shakes collective power, brings the individual back to himself, to his
conscience. To forsake father and mother for Christ's sake- with
this possibility the pre-Christian hegemony of the family was broken.
From the time that there is but
one
father, the Father in Heaven,
there is no more Roman paterfamilias with power of life and death
over his children. The same is true of race, of state, of people, of
every collectivity within society. The Christian faith enlightens man
concerning the limits of these collectivities: it makes it clear to him
that these collectivities have no "soul," but only live by the souls
of those who form them: that they are not powerful and sacrosanct
entities with a collective personality of their own but communities
made up of persons. This is in no sense harmful to these communities.
Experience shows that men who have once abjured the absolute
power of the family, of the mass, of the people, of the state, and
have no religious but an enlightened relation to these groups and
communities, serve them more faithfully and truly after this Chris–
tian enlightenment than those still "under the spell" of such col–
lectivities.
In practice, to be sure, Christians often spare themselves this
phase of enlightenment. They consider faith a conservative power
pure .and simple, and they consider an uncritical relation to a series
of human powers and authorities as precisely Christian. But these
Christians, even when they do right, only do something which the
heathen do too. Their basic attitude is that of
pietas-but
that is
also the attitude of the pious heathen. Christian piety in its essence
contains a critical phase: the Christian will first "devalue," dis–
intoxicate, relativize everything for Christ's sake, and then again
apply himself to it for Christ's sake. The new brightness which the
things of this world then acquire is often more luminous than
their
