Even those who are hostile to that and certainly do not wish it breathe in the spirit of Christianity together with the immortal spirit of the old classical culture, and if anyone were to succeed in separating out these two elements from the living air which envelops the inner man, then not much would be left over with which one might still eke out a spiritual life. But even if we wanted to reassure ourselves happily about this calling to be the followers of antiquity, if we would only make up our minds to take the calling as something right, urgent, serious, and great, and would recognize in this urgency our designated and unique privilege, nonetheless we would find it necessary to ask whether it must always be our purpose to be pupils of a declining antiquity . At some time or other we might be permitted to aim our goal somewhat higher and further, at some time or other we might permit ourselves to praise ourselves for having reworked so fruitfully and splendidly the Alexandrian-Roman culture in ourselves also through our universal history, so that now, as the most noble reward we might set ourselves the still more monumental task of getting back behind and above this Alexandrian world and seeking out our models of the courageous gaze in the ancient Greek original world of the great, the natural, and the human. If we Germans were nothing but followers, then by looking at such a culture as a legacy appropriately ours, there could be nothing greater or prouder for us than to be its followers. Such late arrivals naturally live an ironic existence.
Destruction follows closely on the heels of their limping passage through life.
They shudder in the face of that, when they derive enjoyment from the past, for they are living memorials, and yet their thoughts are senseless without someone to inherit them. So the dark premonition envelops them that their life may be an injustice, for no future life can set it right. I believe that there has been no dangerous variation or change in German culture in this century which has not become more dangerous through the monstrous influence of the philosophy of Hegel, an influence which continues to flow right up to the present. However, this God became intelligible and comprehensible inside Hegelian brain cases and has already ascended all the dialectically possible steps of His being right up to that self-revelation. Thus, for Hegel the summit and end point of the world process coincided with his own individual existence in Berlin.