Philosophical letters

�Philosophical letters� exposes in the form of epistolary exchanges various aesthetic matters. Schiller ends this essay with an intriguing form of the sublime: that of creation observed through freedom and life.

In October

You are gone, Raphael � and the beautiful Nature is fading away, yellow leaves are falling from the trees and a cloudy autumn fog lies, like a stretcher linen, above the waning landscape. Lonely, I wander through the melancholic surroundings, call out loudly your name and anger that my Raphael does not answer to me.

I have lived through your last embraces. The sad murmur of the carriage that transported you from here, died finally down in my ears. I, happy man, had already heaved a generous stack of earth above the joy of the past, and now, you rise, like your wandering spirit, anew in these surroundings and you remind yourself again to me in every of our beloved places of walk. These rocks, I have climbed by your side, by your side I have visited these immense perspectives.

In the dark sanctity of this beech, we brood, first, over the bold ideal of our friendship. It was here where we rolled together, for the first time, the family tree of the spirits and where Julius found such a close relatedness to Raphael. Here, there is not any spring, any bush, any hill where some memory of the vanished happiness troubled my peacefulness. Everything, everything hat conspired against my recovery. Wherever I go, I remind myself of the anxious image of our separation.

What have you done of me, Raphael? What has recently happened to me? Dangerous, great man! I would rather not have ever known or never lost you: Hurry back, come again on the wings of love or the tender edifice you have constructed will disappear. Could you dare, with your tender soul, to abandon the started work, still so far away from its completion? The pillars of your proud wisdom sway in my mind and heart, all the sumptuous palaces which you built, are falling, and the pressed worm spins sobbingly under the ruins.

Blessed paradisical time where I staggered through life still with closed eyes, as a drunk person � where all my curiosity and all my wishes returned again to the limits of my fatherly horizons � where a cheerful sunset augurs nothing great to me than a beautiful rising day � where a political newspaper reminded me of the world, the knell only of eternity, ghost stories only of an account of death, where I trembled still before a devil and hang the more sincerely onto divinity. I felt and was fortunate. Raphael has taught me how to think and I am on the way of regretting that my very own conception took place.

Conception? � No, that is only a word without a meaning which my reason cannot afford. There was a time where I knew nothing, where no one knew me, so people say, I did not exist. This time is not any more, so people say that I have been created. However, it is also the case of millions of persons, who, centuries before, existed, and of which people know nothing about now, and yet people say that they existed. How do we justify the right to accept the beginning and to refute the end?


The cessation of intellectual existences, people affirm, contradicts the infinite goodness. Was this infinite goodness created with the creation of the world? When there was a period where there was still not any spirit, hence, did the infinite goodness, indeed, really have not any effect on the preceding eternity? If the edifice of the world shows the perfection of the creator, hence, did perfection lack him before the creation of the world? However, such a supposition contradicts the idea of the achieved God, hence; there was not any creation � Where am I getting into, my Raphael? � Terrible confusion in my conclusions! I give in to a Creator, as soon as I believe in a God. Why do I need a God, if I can do without a Creator?

You have stolen from me the faith which has given me peace. You have taught me to despise, where I used to adore. Thousand things were so venerable to me, before your sad wisdom has removed them from me.

I saw a lot of people going to church; I heard their vigorous devotions uniting into a fraternal prayer � twice I stood before the bed of a dying person, saw twice � powerful illusion of religion! � the perspective of heaven triumphing over the fright of destruction and the fresh light of joy illuminating the fading eyes of the dying person.

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Author's Note

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