A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism
by
Paul Tillich,
Carl E. Braaten (Editor)
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Previously published in two separate volumes entitled
Paperback, 550 pages
Published November 15th 1972 by Touchstone
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URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tillich
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CHAPTER
IV The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis
have
shown you the parts which were brought into Hegel's great synthesis. I did not
go into the several philosophical elements, how much of Kantianism, how much of
Spinozism, how much of the Goethe-Schelling dynamic transformation of Spinoza,
how much of Romanticism, etc., are to be found in Hegel. They are all there.
But for the purposes of this course I dealt predominantly with the synthesis so
far as it had a bearing on the Christian tradition. I have tried to stress how
important it was for him to try to create this synthesis. It is a question
which is still with us. Can we be schizophrenic forever, living with a split
consciousness? Can we be split between the Christian tradition, on the one
hand, and the creative concepts and symbols of the modern mind, on the other
hand? If that is impossible, how is a genuine synthesis possible? After the
breakdown of Hegel's synthesis numerous new attempts were made to reconstruct a
synthesis, all of them dependent on Hegel, but none possessing the universality
and historical power of Hegel's system.
A. THE SPLIT IN THE HEGELIAN
SCHOOL
How
did the split in Hegel's school take place? Hegel's interpretation of Christ
took for granted the historical reality of the biblical image of the Christ. He
did not doubt it. His interpretation also stressed the symbolic meaning of the
universal essential unity between God and
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 433
man. So his
interpretation included both reality and symbol. Something happened, however,
which seemed to undercut the historical side of that interpretation. The
question arose: Can we rely on the historical reports concerning the Christ?
Such historical criticism was much older than the period in which Hegel lived.
Historical criticism existed since the deistic movement in England, and since
the eighteenth-century conflict between rationalism and supernaturalism. But
now a new element was introduced by Hegel.
1. The Historical Problem:
Strauss and Baur
In
the eighteenth century the question was whether the reports about the life of
Jesus were true or false. The Christian theologians were bent on showing that
much of the historical material could be vindicated in face of historical
criticism. Some of the critics tried to show that almost nothing remains as
historically reliable. Others argued on the basis of Hegel's point of view that
even though the reports are not historically reliable, they do not for that
reason lose their religious value. It does not matter if there is so much
uncertainty regarding the biblical records of the life of Jesus, they may
nevertheless have symbolic value. The concept of symbol came from Schelling and
Hegel, and was not intended to prejudice the historical question. It was simply
a different kind of language from ordinary empirical language.
David
Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) drew
out all the consequences from previous historical criticism when he wrote his Life
of Jesus (1835).' It
came like lightning and thunder striking the great synthesis ad all those who
felt safe in it. Strauss showed that the authors of the Gospels were not those
traditionally thought to be the authors. But more, he tried to show that the
stories of the birth and the resurrection of Jesus are symbols expressing the
eternal identity of what is essential in Jesus and God. This was felt as a
tremendous shock. For decades later scholars tried to refute Strauss's Life
of Jesus, and, of course, there were many points in it that proved to be
invalid in the light of more research.
1 The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, translated from the 4th German
edition by George Eliot (London: Chapman Brothers, 1846).
434 A History of Christian Thought
But the problem
which Strauss raised to the fore in the life of the church could never be
removed.
A footnote on Strauss's later development: It contains something tragic.
Later he wrote another Life of Jesus,2 this one for the German people,
as he said. Here he developed the typical world view of the victorious
bourgeoisie, not of the great aggressive bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century,
but of the positivistic materialistic bourgeoisie which had become victorious
in the nineteenth century, and which he represented. This is characterized by a
calculating attitude toward the world, a basic materialistic interpretation of
reality, and moral rules derived from the bourgeois Conventions. I mention this
because of the tremendous attack which Friedrich Nietzsche made against Strauss
in the name of the forces of creative life. He attacked this bourgeoisie resting
undisturbed in its own finitude.
This has a lot to do with Gospel criticism, for from his bourgeois point
of view Strauss eliminated the in-breaking of the divine into the human, of the
infinite into the finite. The infinite was adapted to the finite. The image of
Christ which Strauss and many later biographers produced was that of a
domesticated divinity, domesticated for the sake of the untroubled life of the
bourgeois society in calculating and controlling the finite reality. Here
Nietzsche was the prophetic victor over Struss, even more than any theologian.
But this was not the end of the story. The development was furthered by
a pupil of Hegel, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), who founded the
Tubingen school which dealt especially with New Testament research. He tried
to apply the Hegelian concepts of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis to the
early development of Christianity. The thesis was the early Jewish-Christian
communities; the antithesis the pagan, Christian, Pauline line of thought (he emphasized
very much the struggle between Peter and Paul over the necessity of
circumcision, in which Paul prevailed, opening the way for Christianity to
conquer the pagan world); the synthesis of the Petrine and the Pauline types of
Christianity was the Johannine. In this point Baur was very much in
2Das Leben Jesu für des deutsche Volk bearbeitet (Leipzig: 1864). The English
translation is The Life of Jesus for the People (London: Williams and
Norgate, 1879).
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 435
the tradition
of classical German philosophy. All of these philosophers, Kant, Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel, were great lovers of the fourth Gospel, because of the
gnostic terminology in this Gospel, especially the logos term. Baur's
interpretation of Christianity was very important and influential, however
justifiable or unjustifiable his theory may be from a historical point of view.
In the face of the orthodox view of a literally inspired Bible, Baur showed how
these biblical writings were created in an historical way. The idea of a
creative development which was going on in the church and which produced the
Scriptures has changed our whole relation to the Bible. The whole development
of historical criticism was later to maintain some form of Baur's sense of the
historical emergence of the biblical writings over against the view of a
mechanically dictated and inspired Word of God, as if God were dictating to a
stenographer at a typewriter.
2. The Anthropological Problem:
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)
It was Feuerbach who launched an anthropological criticism against
Hegel's philosophy of religion. He himself was very much influenced by Hegel
before turning against him. Hegel had said that man is that being in whom God
recognizes himself. In man's knowledge of God, God comes to know himself. There
is thus no knowledge of God apart fiom that knowledge of him which is in man.
Now Feuerbach, under the influence of Western naturalism,. materialism, and
psychologism, said that Hegel must be turned around. God is nothing else than a
projection of man's awareness of his own infinity. You see that this is simply
turning Hegel upside down. For Hegel God comes to himself in man; for Feuerbach
man creates God in himself. These are two quite different views. Here we have
Feuerbach's theory of projection. The word "projection" is widely
used today. All education deals with methods of projection; Freudian thought
interprets God as a human projection, as a father image, etc. But Feuerbach was
much profounder. I recommend to all of you who have just discovered Freud's
theory of projection to go back to Feuerbach; he had a real theory of
projection.
What does projection mean in a technical sense? It means putting an
image on a screen. In order to do this, you need a screen. But I always
436 A History of Christian Thought
miss the screen
in modern thinking about projection. Granted, God is the projection of
the father experience in us; he is the image of it. But why is this image
itself God? Who is the screen onto which this image is projected? To this
Feuerbach has an answer. He says that man's experience of his infinity, the
infinite will to live, the infinite intensity of love, etc., makes it possible
for him to have a screen upon which to project images. This, of course, makes
sense, and from the point of view of the philosophy of religion one can agree
with all projection theories which are as old as Xenophanes, almost six hundred
years before Christ. This means that the concrete image, the concrete symbolism
applied to the infinite, is determined by our situation and by our relation to
our own infinity. This is meaningful. Of course, it is not sufficient, but in
any case Fcuerbach saw much better than so many seemingly educated people of
today that if you have a theory of projection, you must explain why the images
are projected on just this screen, and why the result is something
infinite, that is, the divine, the unconditional, the absolute. Where does that
come from? The father is not absolute. Nothing that we have in ourselves, in
our finite structure, is absolute. Only if there is an awareness of
something unconditional or infinite within us can we understand why the
projected images have to be divine figures or symbols. So in the terms
of the greatest theoreticians of projection, I ci*ticize the modern theories of
projection which circulate in popular unreflective thought. Here you have a
weapon with which to face this popular talk about projection.
Feuerbach did something here which Marx acknowledged as the final and definitive
criticism of religion. We cannot understand Karl Marx without understanding his
relation to Feuexbach. He said that Feuer-bach solved the problem of religion
once for all. Religion is a projection. It is something subjective in us which
we put into the sky of the absolute. But then he went one step beyond
Feuerbach. He said that Feuerbach did a great job, but he did not go far
enough. He did not explain why projection was done at all, and this, Marx said,
cannot be explained in terms of the individual man. This can only be explained
in terms of the social existence of men, and more particularly in the class
situation of men. Religion is the escape of those who are oppressed by the
upper classes into an imaginary fulfillment in the realm of the
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 437
absolute. Marx's
negation of religion is a result of his understanding of the social condition
of man.
Here
you see the great influence these ideas have had. The anti-religious attitude
of almost half of present-day mankind is rooted in this seemingly professorial
struggle between Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, with both of the latter coming
from Hegel. Feuerbach turned Hegel upside down, and then Marx introduced the
sociological element. The projection of the transcendent world is the
projection of the disinherited in this world. This was such a powerful argument
that it convinced the masses of people. It took more than one hundred years
before the labor movements in Europe were able to overcome this Feuerbach-Marxian
argument against Hegel's attempt to unite Christianity and the modern mind.
These
people whom I have mentioned are called the Hegelian left wing. Against them
stood theologians who belonged to the Hegelian right wing: Marheineke,
Biedermann, Pileiderer. They tried to show that it is possible under Hegelian
presuppositions to have a tenable and justifiable Christian theology.
B. SCHELLING'S CBITICISM oF HEGEL
We
have been discussing some of Hegel's critics, people like Feuer-bach and Marx.
I come now to that critic whom I consider to be the most fundamental
philosophically and theologically, and perhaps most important for our
intellectual life today. The first great existentialist critic of essentialist
thinking since Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who was in a way the predecessor of
all existentialists, was Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854). We have to remember
that he was prior to Kierkegaard. In fact Kierkegaard attended Schelling's
Berlin lectures in the middle of the nineteenth century, and used many of
Schelling's categories in his fight against Hegel.
I
know that the name of this man Schelling is almost unknown in this country.
There are several reasons for this. One of the reasons is that Schelling,
together with Fichte, is a bridge between Kant and Hegel. After you have
reached the other side of the bridge, you tend
438 A History of Christian Thought
often to forget
the bridge itself. Kant is the one who began German classical philosophy, and
Hegel is the end. All this happened in no more than half a century. But during
this half century Fichte and Schelling were working, first continuing Kant, and
then giving basic thoughts to Hegel. Of course, they were not mere bridges
between Kant and Hegel. They were independent philosophers having an influence
reaching beyond Hegel up to our time. I recall the unforgettable moment when by
chance I came into possession of the very rare first edition of the collected
works of Schelling in a bookstore on my way to the University of Berlin.
I had no money, but I bought it anyway, and this spending of nonexistent money
was probably more important than all the other nonexistent or sometimes
existing money that I have spent. For what I learned from Schelling became
determinative of my own philosophical and theological development.
I have told you already how Schelling synthesized or combined Kant's
critical epistemology and Spinoza's mystical ontology. But Schelling as more
than this synthess. In some way Goethe did that too. But Schelling became the
philosopher of Romanticism. He represented not only the beginning of romantic
thinking in the philosophy of nature. There were elements of this already in
Fichte and even in Kant's third Critique where he introduced the Gestalt
theory of biological understanding of life. But Schelling kept pace with
the different changing periods of Romanticism, and the decisive turning point
was when Romanticism started to become existentialism. In this sense Schelling
is far more than a bridge between Kant and Hegel. Long after Hegel's death, he
was the greatest critic of Hegel. In Schelling the second phase of Romanticism
became existentialist. He arrived finally at an understanding of reality which
radically contradicted his former period. This happened through philosophical
experiences, understanding of religion, and profound participation in life
within himself and around him. He did not, however, abolish what Hegel and he
had done before. He preserved a philosophy of essence. Against this he put the
philosophy of existence. Existentialism is not a philosophy which can stand on
its own legs. Actually it has no legs. It is always based on a vision of the
essential structure of reality. In this sense it is based on essentialism, and
cannot live without it. If you say that man is evil, you must have a, concept
of
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 439
man in his
essential goodness, otherwise the word "evil" would not make any
sense. Without the distinction between good and evil the words themselves lose
their meaning. And if you say that man's structure is distorted in time and
space, or that it is "fallen," then you must have something from
which he is fallen. You must have some structure which is distorted in time and
space. So mere existentialism does not exist. But it can be the main emphasis
of a philosophical work and even of a whole period in philosophy. In
Schelling's later years it was the main emphasis, although essentialism was
presupposed, but not developed. This is also true of our philosophers and
poets. I can best illustrate this in terms of the present-day saint of
existentialism, the novelist Kafka. In him you will not find that essentialism
is explained, but you will always find that it is implicit and presupposed. For
without this he could not even describe the futile search for meaning in the
novel, The Castle, or the horrible experience of a guilt of which he is
not conscious in his other novel, The Trial. The essentialist
understanding of the human situation is behind it, behind the existentialist
description. You find this everywhere. If in T. S. Eliot you have the age of
anxiety described, this presupposes the possibility of not having anxiety in
the radical sense in which he describes it. Thus all existentialism presupposes
that from which it breaks away, namely, essentialism. You have it wonderfully
expressed in Pascal who relates the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to both
man's greatness and his misery.
Now in his earlier periods, Schelling developed to the extreme the
Spinozistic principle, the principle of the ontological unity of everything in
the eternal substance. This principle of identity is very hard to understand by
people educated in nominalistic thinking, as you all are, Whether you know it
or not. The nominalistic mind is a mind which sees particulars and relations of
particulars, and which uses exclusively logical and scientific methods to get
at particulars. The very question of an ultimate identity is very difficult to
comprehend. But at least one historical fact should be realized, namely, that
by far the greatest part of mankind is not nominalistic, that all Asian
religions are based on the principle of identity, and that Greek philosophy
from the very beginning started with it when Parmenides said, "Where
there is being, there is also the logos of being." This means that the
word can grasp
440 A History
of Christian Thought
being, that the rational
structure makes it possible for us to speak about being, and we can use words
meaningfully.
Now
this fundamental principle underlies the whole history of Christian thought.
All the church fathers presupposed this Parmenidean idea, only enriching it by
trinitarian symbolism. Where God is, there is his Logos, and they are
one in the dynamic creativity of the Spirit. It is a necessary idea because it
explains something which all thinking presupposes. The presupposition is that
there is truth and that truth can be reached by us. In order to have truth, in
order to make a true judgment; the subject who makes the judgment and the thing
about which the judgment is made must, so to speak, be at one and the same
place. They must come together. We use the word "grasp" for this. You
must "grasp" the structure of reality. But in order to reach the
object, there must be a fundamental belongingness of the subject to the object.
This is the one side of the principle of identity, namely, that subject and
object are not absolutely separated, that although they are separated in our
finite existence, they belong essentially together. There is an eternal unity
between them.
The
other side of the concept of identity is the problem of the one and the many.
This is the great Platonic problem. How is it possible that the many are
diverse, but nevertheless form the unity of a cosmos, of a world, of a
universe? Even in the word "universe" the word "one" is
contained. How is that possible? Again the answer is that there must be an
original unity of the one and the many. The principle of identity says that the
one substance—Spinoza calls it substance, a very powerful and originally
Aristotelian and Scholastic term—makes togetherness possible in the same time
and the same space. Without the one substance there could not be causal
connections between things, and there couldn't be substantial union and
separation of different substances. This latter point is emphasized especially
in the Asian religions. I remember a really Spinozistic argument used by a high
priest in a Buddhist monastery. In discussing the question of how community is
possible between human beings, he
said that if every human being has his own substance, then community is
impossible. They are eternally
separated. I answered that human
community is possible only if individuals have their independent
substance—substance means, of course, standing upon oneself—otherwise there is
no community, but only
The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 441
identity. 'Where there
is no separation, there is no community either. It was with this argument that
I left Japan, in the last important discussion I had there.
The
philosophers of identity argued that there must be an underlying identity. I
would never deny this, for if we were absolute strangers to each other, if
there were no element of identity in the common substance of our being human,
we could not speak to each other. We would not be able to have any form of
community. It is the emphasis on diversity which separates the Western from the
Eastern world. It was of the greatest importance that Christianity came from
Judaism. In Judaism the individual personality has personal responsibility
before the eternal God, and is not dissolved into the identity of everything as
in Asia.
These
problems in the history of religion are also the problems which preoccupied a
philosopher like Schelling. Under the influence of Spinoza he was grasped by
the one substance, by that which is beyond subject and object, beyond spirit
and matter. His whole philosophy of nature was an attempt to show the
indwelling of the potential spirit in all natural objects and how it comes to
its fulfillment in man. The romantic philosophy of nature is nothing else than
a carrying out of the program of Nicholas of Cusa, the presence of the infinite
in the finite, and the program of Spinoza, the one substance in all its
modifications, and Schelling's own program, the presence of the spiritual in
the material. Thus the philosophy of nature becomes in Schelling a system of
intuitions, in a half-philosophical, half-aesthetic way, of the power of being
in nature, a power which is beyond the separation of the spiritual and the
material.
Now
a modem scientist might say that this is all imagination or aesthetic fancy and
has nothing to do with his work. But not all modern scientists would say this.
I know scientists in biology and psychology of the Gestalt school who
follow in the line of Schelling, although they have to reject his concrete
results. In any case Schelling is the initiator of this romantic philosophy of
nature, and because of it he became famous in his mid-twenties. At that time he
was the most famous of the German philosophers, with the exception of Fichte,
and was better known than Hegel who started much later and developed quite
slowly.
In Schelling's philosophy nature
is construed dynamically and thus
442 A History of Christian Thought
also
anti-Spinozistically. In Spinoza nature is presented geometrically whereas in
Schelling it is presented partly biologically and partly psychologically. In
this construction the process of nature proceeds from the lowest to the highest
forms of nature, and finally to man in terms of a contrast of two principles.
He called the one principle the unconscious and the other the conscious. He
tried to show how slowly in all different forms of nature consciousness
develops until it comes to man where it becomes self-consciousness. Then a new
development starts, the development of culture and history. Schelling's
discovery of the unconscious was, however, a rediscovery, because the
philosophers of nature in the Renaissance, Paraclsus and Boehme, around A.D.
1600 already knew about the unconscious element in man and even applied it to
both God and nature.
Many of you probably believe that the unconscious is the discovery of
Freud. Freud's merit is not the discovery of this concept, but the application
of it in terms of a scientific method derived from medical psychology. The
concept itself goes back to Schelling, not directly, but by way of
Schopenhauer, the voluntaristic philosopher and critic of Hegel, and by way of
Eduard von Hartmann who wrote a whole book on the philosophy of the
unconscious. And it is possible to show that this book was known to Freud. This
is then one element in Schelling's philosophy of nature which has survived and
is still valid. In Kant and Fichte you find the predominance of practical
reason, of the moral imperative. Religion is only an appendix to the moral
imperative. It is at best a tool to express the unconditional character of the
moral imperative. The philosophy of Fichte is concerned with the morally
deciding self, the ego, the "ich" as he called it, which is
completely separate from nature. Nature is only the material which man must use
in himself, in his body which is nature, and outside of himself in his
surroundings, in order to actualize the moral imperative. Nature has no meaning
in itself. So here with a kind of holy wrath Schelling turned against Fichte
and said, "It is a blasphemy of the Creator to think that nature is only
there in order to be the material for our moral glory; nature has the divine
glory in itself." In this way he was brought to the philosophy of nature.
But there is an even deeper consequence of this term. This is the turn
toward the concept of grace over against the concept of law. If nature,
The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 443
which makes no
conscious decision and has no moral imperative, has within itself the divine
presence, then the divine presence is not only dependent on our moral action.
It is prior in the development of reality, and it is also subsequent to our
moral action. It is below and above the moral imperative. Schelling's
philosophy or theology was very much a doctrine of grace, stressing the given
divine reality before our merits and before our moral acts. So natural
philosophy was a way of rediscovering grace over against the moralism of the
Enlightenment. This was one of the great achievements of Romanticism for
theology. Here I would say that because American Protestantism has never had a
romantic period, aside from a few individuals, it has preserved up to today a
religion in which the enlightened moralistic attitude is predominant, and the
concept of grace is quite strange. The teachings of Jesus are moral or
doctrinal laws. You will not hear very much in sermons in this country about
the presence of the divine preceding all that we do. Another consequence of
this is the disappearance of sacramental feeling. Sacramental thinking is
meaningful only if the infinite is present in the finite, if the finite is not
only subject to the commands of the infinite but has in itself saving powers,
powers of the presence of the divine. This is a rediscovery of Romanticism. Of
course, it was present in the whole sacramental experience of the early
church, but to a great extent it was lost in the Reformation criticism, and
then finally lost in the Enlightenment which based itself only on the
imperative.
So now we have a whole new vision based on the principle of identity.
Later Schelling went beyond the philosophy of nature to a philosophical
understanding of reality through the arts. The aesthetic element broke through
in full power. During his period of aesthetic idealism he made the arts the
substitute for religion. Artistic intuition is the way in which we see God. The
divine comes to us through the arts. Neither the biblical miracles nor any
other are the manifestation of God, but every work of art is the great miracle
of the full revelation of the divine substance.
After Schelling had become famous for his philosophy of nature, then
developed his philosophy of aesthetic intuition, he finished this period by
something which he called the philosophy of identity. Here the principle which
was underlying all his periods was expressed, not in
444 A History of Christian Thought
a geometrical
but in a logical way, and in a way which was the extreme fulfillment of what
Spinoza intended. This represented the end of essentialism in Schelling's
development. For Schelling 1809 was an important year because of the death of
Caroline Schlegel, the wife of his friend Schlegel, the famous translator of
Shakespeare. Schelling married her. She was one of the great women of
Romanticism. Her letters are a classical document of that period. Her premature
death was a tremendous catastrophe for Schelling. Shortly after this two things
came out. One was the dialogue Clara in which he used the Platonic form
of the dialogue to develop the idea that eternal life means the
essentialization of what we are in our essential being as seen by God. It is
not a continuation of existence in time and space but participation in eternity
with what we are essentially. But more important for the history of man's spiritual
life was his writing on human freedom.3 This is probably his most
important work because here the concept of freedom breaks into the concept of
identity. Freedom, of course, presupposes the possibility of choice. Identity
as such is eternally fulfilled. So David Friedrich Strauss could say of
Schelling that the principle of freedom drove him out of the restfulness of the
principle of identity, which was spelled out in his System of Philosophy, as he called it. Here he had
spoken like Spinoza of the eternal restfulness, not running for a purpose, but
receiving the power of being directly by contemplation.
But then something happened. If you read the two books, The System of Philosophy, which is his philosophy of
identity, and then Of Human Freedom, you feel that you have entered a new world. What had happened was his
personal experience of the death of Caroline. But the logic of thought also
played a part, the necessity of explaining manifoldness and diversity, and life
itself which goes out of identity into alteration and wants to return to
itself. How could this be explained? How can we explain that we are living here
in time and space in continuous action, as we do, if there is an eternal ground
in which the substance which is in all of us lies in eternal rest. The
explanation was given in terms of freedom. Freedom breaks gut of identity. Here
he used
Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Of Human Freedom, translated by James
Gutman (Chicago The Open Court Publishing Co., 1936).
The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 445
the imagery of his
philosophy of nature. He construed two or three principles in the ground of the
divine, the unconscious or dark principle, the principle of will which is able
to contradict itself, on the one hand, and the principle of logos, or the
principle of light, on the other hand. There is here the possibility that the
unconscious will, the drive in the depths of the divine life, might break away
from the identity. But it cannot do so in the divine life itself. The spiritual
unity of the two principles keeps them always together. But in man, in the
creature, it can break away. In the creature freedom can turn against its own
divine substance, its own divine ground. So the myth of the fall is interpreted
by him, following the line of Plato, through Origen and Boehme, as the
transcendent fall. The fall is not something which happened once upon a time,
but something which happens all the time, in all creatures. This fall is the
breaking away from the creative ground from which we come in the power of
freedom.
This
was expressed by Schelling in terms of the problem of good and evil. He showed
that the possibility of good and evil is given in God. Evil is possible because
the will in the divine ground is able to contradict itself. But in God it
never comes to a disruption. Only the free decision of the creature to turn
against its created ground accounts for evil. The principles are eternally in
union in God, the abysmal depth in the divine life, the prerational development
of the will, the principle of the logos or light or reason or structure or
meaning, and their unity which he calls the spirit. These three principles are
in the divine life, but in the divine life the finite which is present is
unable to break away. The unity of the principles can be disrupted only in
creatures. This is something which you can find in empirical terminology in
Freud and in every modern psychotherapeutic book of profound formulations. You
can find it most openly expressed in Jung's writings, and more hiddenly in
Freud when he speaks of eros and thanatos, love and death. In
Schelling it appeared in the highest abstraction in the fundamental vision of
the nature of the will in relation to the nature of the structure. If you run
ahead into the nineteenth century, you will discover the influence of these
ideas everywhere. The whole of French voluntarism up to Bergson was dependent
on these ideas; in Germany Schopen-hauer and Nietzsche were equally dependent
on them, and they have
446 A History of Christian Thought
had a great
effect on the philosophy of Whitehead up to the present time, especially in
Charles Hartshorne, the main representative of the Whiteheadian school. So
these ideas have had a great influence on history-making personalities.
The influence on theology was not less decisive. Some of the great
theologians in the nineteenth century worked in the line of Schelling. But
Schelling never rested. After this breakthrough he became silent for many
years. In his old age he was called to Berlin in order to fight against the
left-wing Hegelians. Many important people attended these lectures in the
middle of the nineteenth century. The most important was Soren Kierkegaard, a
transcription of whose notes on Schelling's Berlin lectures is to be found in
the Copenhagen library in Denmark. This latest period reflected in Schelling's
Berlin lectures is a tragic period. These lectures were prematurely published
by an enemy of his and, of course, poorly published, which made him many
critics, some of them even contemptuous of his work. But what he did is
nevertheless worthy of careful study because there is hardly one category in
twentieth-century existentialist poetry, literature, philosophy, and indirectly
the visual arts, which you cannot find in these lectures. They are to be found
in the last four volumes of his collected works. And when people like Friedrich
Trendelenburg (1802-1872) and Kierke-gaard criticized Hegel's logic, and his
confusion of dialectics and history, they were doing what Schelling had done
more fully in his latest works.
In these latest writings you will find a distinction between two types
of philosophy, negative and positive philosophy. Negative philosophy is
philosophy of identity or essentialism. He called it negative because it
abstracts from the concrete situation as all science has to do. it does not
imply a negative evaluation of this philosophy, but refers to the method of
abstraction. You abstract from the concrete situation until you come to the
essential structures of reality, the essence of man, the essence of animals,
the essence of mind, of body, etc. Negative philosophy deals with the realm of
ideas, as Plato called it. But negative philosophy does not say anything about
what is positively given. The essence of man does not say anything about the
fact that man does exist in time and space. The term "positive
philosophy" expresses the same thing that we call existentialism today. It
deals with the positive, the actual situation
The Breakdown of the tlniversa!
Synthesis 447
in time and
space. This is not possible without the negative side, the essential structure
of reality. There could not be a tree if there were not the structure of
treehood eternally even before trees existed, and even after trees go out of
existence on earth altogether. The same is true of man. The essence of man is
eternally given before any man appeared on earth. It is potentially or
essentially given, but it is not actually or existentially given. So here we
are at a great turning point of philosophical thinking. Now Schelling as a
philosopher described man's existential situation. We are then in the second
period of Romanticism. The unconscious has pushed toward the surface. The
demonic elements in the underground of life and of human existence have become
manifest. This can even be called a kind of empiricism. Schelling sometimes
called it higher empiricism, higher because it takes things not simply in terms
of their scientific laboratory appearances, but in correlation with their
essential nature. Thus he arrives at all these categories now current in
existentialist literature. We have the problem of anxiety dealt with, the
problem of the relation between the unconscious and the conscious, the problem
of guilt, the problem of the demonic, etc. Here the observation of things, and
not the development of their rational structure, becomes decisive.
What is said against much of twentieth-century existentialism can be
said of his philosophy. It is pessimistic. But the term "pessimism"
should be avoided because that refers to an emotional reaction. Philosophy
cannot be pessimistic. Only a perscin can be pessimistic in his psycho-logical
sychological attitude. This
philosophy describes the situation, the conflict between essence and existence,
and this conflict is expressed in the concepts of existentialist literature.
But Schelling not only asks the existentialist questions; he also tries
to give religious answers to them. This he does in terms of the classical
Christian tradition. He is much nearer to Orthodoxy, whereas Kierke-gaard is
nearer to Pietism and the theology of revivalism, if we can use that term. In
any case, for Schelling it is Lutheran Orthodoxy which offers the answers to
the existentialist questions. This answer is given in a powerful vision of the
history of religion. Here he has given a key, to me and many others, to the
meaning of the history of religion. The history of religion cannot simply be
explained in psychological terms. It
448 A History of Christian Thought
has to do with
powers of reality which grasp the unconscious, or which come out of the
unconscious and grasp the consciousness of men and produce the symbolism in the
history of religion. Of course, he had to use the limited knowledge available
to him at that time about the history of religion. He knew much more of this
than Hegel, and was himself responsible for the later intensive development in
the religious-historical studies of Friedrich Muller (1823-1900), But what
Schelling did know was interpreted by him not in terms of meaningless imagination
or in terms of subjective psychological projection, but in terms of powers of
being which grasp the human mind itself. These go through man's psyche, his
soul, through his conscious and unconscious mind, but they do not derive from
it. They come from the roots men have in the depths of reality itself.
So the different types of religions express the different powers of
being by which men are grasped. The terrible sacrifices in religion, the
tremendous seriousness in the history of religions, the fact that religion is
the most glorious and the most cruel part of man's history, all this is
understandable only if religion is not a matter of wishful thinking, but is a
matter of powers of being which men encounter. In this light he explains the
inner struggle, the terrible struggles in the history of religion.
This brings my consideration of Schelling to an end. You see that he can
be considered the main and the most powerful critic of Hegel, not a critic who breaks
out into a merely naturalistic or secularistic opposition to the great
synthesis, but one who offers motives for a new synthesis on the basis of his
criticism.
C. THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL AND ITS
THEOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES
Most of the theological movements in the nineteenth century began as
critical theology, critical of the great synthesis. Theologies and philosophies
do not fall like hailstones from heaven, but are prepared in the movement of
history, and in all the realms of this movement, sociological, political, as
well as religious. Now I come to the religious background of the conservative
criticism of Hegel.
The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 449
1. The Nature of the European Revival
There
was around 1830 a movement called the "awakening move-ment"4
which swept throughout Europe like a storm. It was not confined to Europe, for
at about the same time there was the revivalist movement in America. It touched
Fiance, Germany, and Switzerland. In England it was somehow connected with the
revival of the Catholic element in the Church of England. Everywhere
individuals and small groups were grasped by a new understanding of the problem
of human existence and the meaning of the Christian message for them. Usually
they would gather around the Bible in small groups. This movement was not
restricted to any special sociological groups, although by this time the labor
movement was heading in a different direction. It was very strongly represented
among the landed aristocracy in East Germany and in Europe generally, among the
small peasants in southwestern Germany, and among bourgeois people in other
European countries; it was often connected with romantic reactions against the
Enlightenment; it was rooted in what I would call the law of nature, valid in
both physical and spiritual dimensions, the law, namely, that there can be no
vacuum, no void. Where there is an empty space, it will be filled. The
Enlightenment with its consequences, especially its materialistic trends in
France and later in Germany, created a feeling of a vacuum in the spiritual
life. The preaching of the Enlightenment was a kind of lecturing on all
possible subjects, agricultural, technical, political, or psychological, but
the dimension of the ultimate was lacking. So into this empty space an intense
pietistic movement stressing conversion entered and filled it with a warm
spirit of vital piety. When I began my studies in the University of Halle in
1904, now in the East Zone of Germany, I was a pupil of the greatest personality
of this faculty, Martin Kähler. He was an unusual personality, standing within
the classic-romantic tradition. He told us that when he was a young man he knew
his Goethe by heart. He was filled with the traditions of German classical
poetry, literature, and philosophy. Then this movement of revivalism grasped
him, and he was converted in the literal sense of "being turned
In German, die
Er-weckungsbewegung.
450 A History of Christian Thought
around."
He became a biblical theologian with the highest spiritual power over us. There
in Halle one could see the influence of this movement. In the student
corporations at the University—what are called fraternities here—the leading
activities centered around dueling and drinking. Revivalism changed all this.
Some fraternities were set up on definitely Christian principles, forbidding
excessive drinking and dueling between students. This was the great side in the
revivalist movement. This was still visible in the fraternity of which I became
a member in 1904. The Christian principles were taken in utter seriousness.
One of the most common topics of discussion was: Can you be a member of such a
group if you are in doubt? In one of the meetings of all the Christian
fraternities all over Germany and Switzerland I formulated the statement that
the foundation is not dependent on us, but on the Christian principle. The
individual person doubts, or he does not doubt, and his doubt might even be
very radical, but if he takes very seriously the problem of his doubt and his
faith, and struggles with the problem of the loss of faith in him, then he is a
member of our fraternity. Ever since as a professor of theology I have told my
students that faith embraces itself and the doubt about itself. Younger and
older ministers have had to be told the same thing. When Martin Kahler was in
his seventies and lecturing on the principle of justification by grace through
faith, he told us: Do not think that at my age one becomes a fully serene,
mature, believing, and regenerated human being. The inner struggle is going on
to the last day no matter how old one becomes. This means that his pietism was
not a perfectionist pietism, as it often became on Calvinist soil. Rather it was
a typically Lutheran type of pietism in which the paradox of justification by
grace through faith, Cod's acceptance of the unacceptable ones, is a
fundamental principle.
So here is a motive for theology which looks a bit different from others
we have discussed. Out of this some interesting things came. In this second
wave of pietism, as in the first one (cf. Zinzendorf and the Moravians, the
Wesley brothers and the Methodists) the missionary interest became important.
It is interesting that in both the original pietist reaction against Orthodoxy
and the second pietist reaction against the Enlightenment there arose a renewed
missionary zeal. In the power
The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 451
of their
experience those grasped by the revivalist movements wanted to communicate that
power to paganism all over the world. So in the thirties a new theology of
missions arose. It was a limited one. The main idea was still as in early
pietism to save souls out of all nations. Just as the conversion experience was
an individual one, so the missionary activity was individualistic in character.
It had the idea of converting as many pagans as possible to rescue them from
eternal damnation. There was, however, one new element in the
nineteenth-century missionary zeal. It was directed not only to the pagans
outside of Christendom, to non-Christians and Jews, but also to those at home.
This was home missions or "inner missions," as it was called in
Germany. This was particularly interesting because it was connected with a
strong feeling of social responsibility for the disinherited people.
The way in which this idea of social responsibility developed was
interesting. On Lutheran soil it was impossible to have revolutionary movements
as could happen on Calvinist or radical-evangelical soil. Yet, this Lutheran
pietism was very much interested in the social conditions of the masses in the
beginning of the industrial revolution. But it did not have the revolutionary
idea of changing the structure of society. It only worked to help the victims
of the social conditions. The revolutionary idea was taken over by the
socialists, and later in the twentieth century, by the communists. We find the
germ of this revolutionary idea already in Thomas Münzer, the leader of the
peasant revolt in the Reformation period. Thomas Münzer is a very interesting
phenomenon. He did not say that we must change society as such, but that we
must give the poor people who are enslaved in work, day and night without
interruption, the possibility of reading the Bible, and of having spiritual
experiences, experiences of the Spirit. He had observed in the small towns of
Saxony where some early capitalist forms of production were used in the
factories that these people had no Sunday, insufficient hours of rest and
sleep, no chance for an education, no schools, no reading or writing. His
socialist ideas came out of this observation of the spiritual situation of the
urban working classes, and of the peasant classes.
The reasoning of the nineteenth-century revivalist movement was the
same. The healthy part of society should give help to the sick part. The
452 A History of Christian Thought
sick part is
composed of the laboring people who were exploited in those victorious days of
a ruthless capitalism. But home mission was still basically conceived of as
conversion of those who were estranged from the church. Indeed the laboring
masses were completely estranged from the churches. There was no call for
revolution. Revolution was out of the question on Lutheran soil. But there was
the call to assume the responsibility of helping the other classes to
understand spiritual values of which they were being deprived by their life
situation. I cannot develop here all the sociological background—the conditions
of the agricultural workers, out of which all the city workers originally came,
because there was no industry, and when the industry started, they came from
the villages, but in the villages the lowest classes were already estranged
from the churches, because the churches were always on the side of the upper
classes.
This sense of social responsibility was certainly important, but it was
not enough. The members of the church were given the feeling that it was enough
to exercise personal charity toward unfortunate individuals. This in itself,
however, served to estrange church people from a real understanding of the new
sociological situation created by the industrial revolution. Therefore, in
spite of the feeling of revivalism and social responsibility for the
disinherited people, the rise of socialism and communism could not be prevented
in Europe, because it was not seen that individual help was entirely fruitless
in relation to the masses of industrial workers who soon numbered in the
millions. No individual help could possibly cope with this situation.
To anticipate what happened much later, I would like to say a few words
about the religious socialist movement of the twentieth century. This movement
tried to combine two elements: on the one hand, a sense of social
responsibility for the laboring, disinherited masses, which characterized the
theology and piety of the awakening movement, and on the other hand, taking
seriously the transformed sociological situation, by not thinking only in
terms of individual relations, but accepting the analyses of the social
situation of the French and German socialists, especially the profoundest of
them made by Karl Marx. So the religious socialist movement combined the
heritage of nineteenth-century revivalism and the rise of socialism. When we
founded this movement in
The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 453
Germany after the first
World War, we were deeply aware that the social attitudes of the revivalist
people and of the Ritschlians, who thought on an individualistic basis, were
inadequate to the new situation described by the socialist writers as a
complete dehumanization, a Verdinglichung, a thingification, an
objectification of the masses of people. They were transformed from being persons
into being objects of working power which could be bought. They had to sell
themselves in order to survive. The quarters in which they lived were not slums
in the modem sense, but they were bare of anything human. I remember my horror
when I went into the living quarters of the working people in Cities like
Berlin or in the Ruhr country where the largest industry is concentrated, and
saw the kind of dehumanized existence these people endured. Our response to
this situation came in the form of combining the revivalist tradition of social
responsibility and the sociological analysis of the socialist writers,
especially Marx and Engels.
2. The Theology of Repristination
There
were still other consequences of the awakening movement, especially a revival
of traditional theology. The pupils of Schleier-macher, Hegel, and Schelling
had produced a theology of mediation, which combined the rediscovered biblical
reality with the concerns of the modern mind. But alongside of this theology of
mediation there arose a theology of restoration or of repristination, or as we
would call it today, a conservative theology as over against a liberal
theology. This repristination theology was a radical return to and rediscovery
of the orthodox tradition. The theologians in this movement did not produce
many new theological thoughts, but they did one valuable thing for us. They
opened up the treasures of classical Orthodoxy. I say this even though I am
completely opposed to a theology of repristination, for I wish that every
student would learn in Latin the classical formulations of Protestant Orthodox
theology. Then he would be as educated as the Roman Catholic theologians who
know their Thomas Aquinas or their Suarez or some other classical theologian.
Then, of course, one can go beyond that. But to go beyond without having been
within Orthodoxy is not a wholesome attitude. But this is what has happened
more and
454 A History of Christian Thought
more. So I say
now that the one good thing that the theology of re-pristination did for us was
to show forth the treasures of the past as matters which still concern us. It
still concerns me what Johann Gerhard or other great Protestant scholastics
said about a given doctrine. They knew many of our problems and offered
solutions which we should not simply forget. Besides, they were not unlearned
as our present-day fundamentalists who are direct products of revivalism, but
without theological education. It is a fundamentalism based simply on piety and
on biblical interpretation which is ignorant of the way in which the Bible was
written and came into existence. So you cannot compare classical Orthodoxy with
fundamentalism. But in any case, a repristination theology could not last,
because history does not run backward but forward.
This restoration theology was an expression of the dissolution of the
great synthesis. These forms of Orthodoxy despised what had happened since the
Enlightenment. They went back to classical Orthodoxy. They did not accept the
historical criticism of the biblical literature. They took the Bible literally.
They even believed that the Pentateuch was written by Moses, even though one of
the books tells about his death. Such absurdities are always the consequence of
the doctrine of literal inspiration. This view could not and did not last. The
real bearers of the development in theology were the theologians of mediation,
people like Martin Kähler and the theologians of the Ritschlian school.
3. Natural Science and the Fight
over Darwinism
Another attack against the great synthesis came from the direction of
modern science. Schelling's philosophy of nature and Hegel's mechanical
application of the categories of man's spirit to nature produced the great
reaction of empirical science. Empirical science followed the method of
analysis and synthesis, as we have it in the physical sciences, the
mathematical structure of nature as a presupposition, the mechanical movement
as the metaphysical background, the Newtonian ideas about natural laws, in
short, a mechanical naturalism in all realms, especially in physics and
medicine. This movement came to its direct
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 455
expression in
Darwinism, which is worth considering from the point of view of Christian
theology.
This mechanical or mechanistic naturalism threatened Christian theology
and so Christian theology had to do the work of defense.—There are other kinds
of naturalism, the vitalistic naturalism of Nietzsche, the dynamic naturalism
of Bergson and Whitehead. This mechanistic naturalism we sometimes call
materialistic, but the term "materialism" itself has three different
meanings, so I do not use it here.—In any case, Christian theology became a
theology of retreat and defense in the face of this mechanistic naturalism.
This was true of the Ritschlian theology, the theology of mediation or
apologetic theology, and of most of the theological books that were written in
the second half of the nineteenth century. Christian theology was like an army
retreating in face of an advancing army. With every new breakthrough of the
advancing army, in this case modern science, Christian theology would attempt
to protect the Christian tradition which still remained intact. Then a new
breakthrough would make the previous defense untenable, and so another retreat
and setting up a new defense would be necessary. This went on and on.
This whole spectacle, this fight between science and religion, has
brought contempt upon the term "apologetic." It was a poor form of
apologetic. The first great shock which had to be accepted was the Copernican
world view. Galileo, the greatest representative of this idea, was forced by
the Inquisition to recant, but his recanting did not help the church at all.
Soon the theologians had to accept the Copernican world view. Then there was
Newton's mechanics of bodies moving according to eternal natural laws; the
concept of natural law was established and philosophically formulated by Kant.
This prevented thinking about interferences of a divine being; God was placed
alongside the world, and not permitted to interfere with it. Then theology
came to the defense of miracles, the idea of the possibility of divine
interferences, which of course presupposes a miserable concept of God who would
have to destroy his creation in order to do his work of salvation. But this was
the apologetic situation. Then another retreat was required because the defense
of miracles in this way was untenable. A further shock came with the idea of
evolution. Then a six-day
456 A History of Christian Thought
creation was
defended, then abandoned. Evolution said that life has developed out of the
inorganic realm. Then where is God? According to the traditional idea of
creation God has created the organic forms; they have not developed out of the
inorganic forms. Therefore, a particular work of God's creation must be
postulated and on this thin thread the whole apologetic position was suspended.
There was the lacuna in scientific knowledge, for science was not able to show
how the organic developed out of the inorganic. Theologians enjoyed this
lacuna, for they could place God in this gap left by science. Where science
could not work any more, God was put to work, so to speak. God filled the gaps
left by science.
That was an unworthy idea of God. The position was indefensible so
theologians had to withdraw again. But one last point was kcpt. That is the
creation of man. Here the Roman Church still sticks to the idea that even if
the evolutionary process is as presupposed by biology today, there is still one
point that cannot be explained biologically, namely, the immortal soul which
God has given man, the higher animal, at some moment in the process of
evolution. This was and still is a last defense against science, but this last
defense is not tenable either, for it presupposes a substance, the soul, which
is a separate form from the form of the body. But in the Aristotelian sense,
the soul is the form of the body and you cannot separate them. Moreover, the
concept of eternal life has nothing to do with such a dualistic construction of
an immortal soul put at one moment into man's body. When this last defense is
given up, science has conquered all apologetic positions. And this is a good
thing. Then the situation must be seen in an absolutely new way. Science lives
and works in another dimension and therefore cannot interfere with the
religious symbols of creation, fulfillment, forgiveness, and incarnation, nor
can religion interfere with scientific statements. No scientific statement
about the way in which living beings have come into existence or how the first
cell developed out of large molecules can have direct bearing on theology.
Indirectly, of course, everything is a concern of theology. For when science
describes the way in which life is construed and is developed, then indirectly
it says something about God, the creative ground of life, but not in terms of
an interference of a highest being in the processes of nature.
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 457
This whole struggle between science and religion is no doubt in the past
for you. But it was not so when I began the study of theology. At that time
apologetic theology was full of confidence that science would never find a way
of showing the development from, let us say, the original mud to the first
cell. But science can show this to a great extent, perhaps not fully, but this
is a matter of experiment. Theology does not need to put God to work to fill an
empty space in our scientific knowledge.
The struggle over Darwin dealt not only with this general evolutionary
idea, but more concretely with the genesis of man. The "monkey trial"
was a last remnant of this struggle which was so prominent in the nineteenth
century. It was a great shock which the church had to absorb after the initial
shocks of the Copernican revolution and the Newtonian idea of natural law. I
may be wrong, but I believe that aside from some literalists in the South or in
the Bible belt no one in the younger generation or among theologians is
involved in this conflict any longer. People presuppose that science has to go
its way, and that the religious dimension is different from the scientific. But
in the nineteenth century this affair disrupted the faith of millions of
people. The laborers who read the socialist literature decided negatively
against religion; they looked at religion as always interfering in the arena of
scientific discussions. And when religion did this, it was a lost cause. It
has taken over a half a century to overcome the antireligious attitude among
the scientists and the antiscientific attitude among the religious people. If
we are out of this situation now, I hope we never return to it. And we should
avoid remnants of this kind of apologetics today. For instance, we should not
try to base our doctrine of freedom on Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy,
as if to say that since there is some element of indeterminacy in nature, we
can speak of freedom. Perhaps tomorrow this principle will be replaced by
another, and then your whole wonderful apologetic collapses, and you join the
retreating army of apologists. The theologians of the twentieth century should
learn this lesson from the nineteenth century. You cannot apologetically
establish symbols which belong to the dimension of the ultimate upon a
description of finite relations.
You can speak of the structure of
nature, as I have done in the third
458 A History of Christian Thought
volume of Systematic Theology,
through all the realms of the natural. But this is not done for apologetic
purposes, but is in line with Thomas Aquinas' statement that he who knows
anything, knows something about Cod. Whatever we know in any realm bears
witness to the creative ground of it. In this sense we must deal with
statements of science. But we must do so also in another sense. For the work of
the scientists is of the highest theological interest insofar as it reveals the
logos of being, the inner structure of reality, which is not in opposition to
the Logos which has appeared in the Christ, but is the same Logos. Therefore,
in this sense the witness of science is the witness to God. This is the right
relationship and is not one of fighting against each other in terms of
unjustified interferences.
D. KJERXEGAABD'S EXISTENTIAL
THEOLOGY
Soren
Kierkegaard must also be dealt with as a contributor to the breakdown of the
universal synthesis, although his greatest influence has been exercised in our
time rather than in his own. He made a new start based on a combination of an
existentialist philosophy and a pietistic, revivalistic theological criticism
of the great synthesis. More specifically, he combined Lutheran pietism of the
revivalist type, including the orthodox content of revivalism, with the
categories of Schelling's existentialism. Although he denied Schelling's
solution, he took over the categories. His criticism, together with that of
Marx and Nietzsche, is historically most important. But none of these three
became influential in world-historical terms in the nineteenth century.
Kierkegaard was largely a forgotten individual in his century. I recall with
pride how as students of theology in Halle we came into contact with
Kierkegaard's thought through translations made by an isolated individual in
Würt-temberg. In the years 1905-1907 we were grasped by Kierkegaard. It was a
very great experience. We could not accept the theological orthodoxy of
repristination. We could not accept especially those "posi-tive"—in
the special sense of "conservative"—theologians who disregarded the
historical-critical school. For this was valid science which was carried on by
this school. It cannot be denied if honest research is conducted into the
historical foundations of the New Testament.
The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 459
But
on the other hand we had a feeling of moralistic distortion and amystical
emptiness, an emptiness in which the warmth of the mystical presence of the
divine, was missing, as in the whole Ritschlian school. We were not grasped by
this moralism. We did not find in it the depths of the consciousness of guilt
as classical theology had always had. So we were extremely happy when we
encountered Kierkegaard. It was this combination of intense piety which went
into the depths of human existence and the philosophical greatness which he had
received from Hegel that made him so important for us. The real critical point
would be the denial that Hegel's idea of reconciliation is a genuine reconciliation.
Man is not reconciled by the reconciliation in the philosopher's head. We will
hear the same thing from Marx later on.
We
could discuss Kierkegaard in connection with the existentialist movement of the
twentieth century, because he became effective only in our own century.
Nevertheless, in the structure of this course I prefer to Place him in his own
historical place where he represents one of the decisive criticisms of Hegel's
great synthesis. We will discuss him fairly thoroughly, and you can take this
discussion not only as a treatment of nineteenth-century theological thought,
but also of twentieth-century theology, for while he wrote in the nineteenth
century, his real influence has been significant in the twentieth century.
Later we will see similar situations with regard to two other thinkers who were
not inner-ecclesiastical representatives of theology, but anti-ecclesiastical
representatives. They are Marx, especially in his earlier existentialist
protest against Hegel, and then Friedrich Nietzsche, who followed Schopenhaner.
You
may be a little surprised that I do not deal more with the theological
movements within the church of this period. The reason I do not is that they
are not as important as the great critics of Hegel for our own situation. These
critics are more fundamental for our theological situation today than are the
theologians of mediation. There are some rare exceptions, as for example my own
teacher Martin Kahler in Halle. The real impact came from people outside. Of
course, Kierkegaard was religiously inside, but as a critic of the church he
was perhaps even more radical than Marx and Nietzsche put together.
Kierkegaard has become
the fashion in three respects: (a) Reli‑
460 A History of Christian Thought
giously, which
is most justified, because his religious writings are as valid today as they
were when they were written. (b) As the inspiration for the dialectical
theology, called neo-orthodoxy in this country. In Europe it is usually called
dialectical, which shows its relation to Hegel, for this term is the main
principle of Hegel's thinking. (c) As the inspiration for Heidegger, the
philosopher who has given the name existentialism to the whole movement which
derives from Kierkegaard.
I. Kierkegaard's Criticism of
Hegel
As in the case of most of the anti-Hegelians, Kierkegaard's criticism is
based on the concept of reconciliation. For Hegel the world is reconciled in
the mind of the philosopher of religion who has gone through the different
forms of man's spiritual life the subjective spirit (which is the psychological
side), the objective spirit (the social-ethical and political side), and the
absolute spirit (art, religion, and philosophy). The philosopher lives in all
of them. He is deeply in the religious realm; he lives in the aesthetic realm;
and on the basis of the religious realm he conceptualizes what is myth and
symbol in religion. Out of all this he develops his philosophy of religion. In
this way he mirrors in his mind the final synthesis after the whole world
process has gone through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The divine mind,
the absolute mind, comes to its rest on the basis of religion within the mind
of the philosopher who achieves his highest power when he becomes a philosopher
of religion, conceptualizing the symbols of the religious life. This is for
Hegel reconciliation. This reconciliation in the mind of the philosopher was
the point attacked by all those whom I have mentioned—Schelling, Feuerbach,
pietists, and natural scientists. They all said the world is unreconciled. The
theologians went back to Immanuel Kant and said the prison of finitude is not
pierced, not even by Hegel's great attempt. The reconciliation of the finite
and the infinite has not yet happened.
Kierkegaard did the same thing in a particular way. In the system of
essences reconciliation might be possible, he argued, but the system of
essences is not the reality in which we are living. We are living in the realm
of existence, and in the realm of existence reconciliation has not yet
happened. Existence is the place of decision between good and evil.
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 461
Man is in the
tragic situation, in the tragic unavoidability of evil. This contradiction in
existence means that Hegel is seen as confusing essentialist fulfillment with
existential unfulflilment or estrangement. I told you that estrangement or
alienation is one of the terms which Hegel created, but which is then turned
against him. Nature is estranged spirit for Hegel; the material reality is
self-estranged spirit. Now Kierkegaard said that mankind is in this state of
estrangement, and Hegel's construction of a continuous series of syntheses in
which the negativity of antithesis is overcome in the world process is true
only with respect to the essential realm. Symbolically we could perhaps say
that it goes on only in the inner life of Cod. But Kierkegaard emphasized that
estrangement is our situation. Only in the inner divine life is there
reconciliation, but not in our situation.
Hegel had described the inner divine life in his great logic. The logic
is the science of essences in their highest abstraction and their inner
dialectical relationship. Then the logicians came along. The man who is very
important for the criticism of all essentialism is Trendelenburg. Kierkegaard
was dependent on him for his logical criticism of Hegel. His criticism was that
the logical process is not a real process; it is not a process in time; it is
only a description of logical relations. What Hegel did was to confuse the
dialectical process of logic with the actual movement in history. While
reconciliation is always a reality in the dialectical process of divine life,
it is not a reality in the external process of human existence. So from the
logical point of view Hegel was criticized for his fundamental confusion of
essence and existence.
Hegel was not able to understand the human situation in terms of anxiety
and despair. Kierkegaard could not follow Hegel; all his life he possessed a
melancholic disposition. This melancholy of which he often spoke was associated
with a curse which his father made against God, and he felt that the reaction
to this blasphemy of his father was upon him and never left him free. The point
is that such a personality was able to discover things which were not so deeply
felt by a character as Hegel, who existed in a bourgeois situation, who felt
psychologically more safe and was able to conquer the negative and tragic
elements of life which he saw.
462 A History of Christian Thought
2. Ethical Existence and the Human Situation (Anxiety, Despair)
One of the main points connected with Kierkegaard's melancholic personal
condition and his feeling of unreconciled reality was his experience of the
lonely individual. Here again we have an anticipation of present-day
existentialism. The individual stands in solitude before God and the process of
the world cannot liberate him from the tremendous responsibility by which he
lives in the situation. Again and again he said that the last reality is the
deciding individual, the individual who in freedom must decide for good or
evil. We find nothing of this in Hegel. It is very interesting that Hegel who
was so universal in his thinking and all-embracing never developed personal
ethics. His ethics are objectivist; he subsumed ethics under philosophy of
history and philosophy of law. Ethics of family, ethics of state, of comj-nunity,
of culture, all that is in Hegel, but not ethics which has to do with the
personal decision of the individual. This was already an element in Schelling's
attack against Hegel, but it was stressed more by Kierkegaard than by anybody
else.
What is the reason for this experience of solitude? It is due to human
finitude in estrangement. It is not the finitude which is identical with the
infinite, but it is separated finitude, finitude standing upon itself in the
individual person. As long as the identity principle was decisive, it was
possible to overcome the anxiety of finitude, of having to die, by the
experience of being united with the infinite. But this answer was not possible
for Kierkegaard. So he tried to show why we are in anxiety because of being
finite and in despair because of being in separated finitude. The first is his
description of anxiety and the second is his description of despair. There are
two writings which every theologian must read. Both are comparatively short: The
Concept of Dread and The Sickness Unto Death.5 I have always criticized the
title of the English translation of The Concept of Dread, because dread is different from
anxiety. Dread has in it the connotation of something sudden,
5 Soren Kierkegaard, The Concert of Dread, translated by
Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944); and The
Sickness Unto Death, translated by Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1941).
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 463
whereas what
Kierkegaard describes is an ontological state of man. But now in English the
term "anxiety" has generally replaced "dread" to describe
this state which Kierkegaard has in mind. The Concept of Dread, in any
case, is a fundamental book on the theory of anxiety. It has been more fully
developed by others, so that now there is a vast literature on the subject,
including the works of people like Freud, Rollo May, et al.
Kierkegaard wrote about two kinds of anxiety. The first is connected with
his theory of the fall. He symbolized this with the biblical myth of Adam and
Eve, and found profound psychological insight there. This is the anxiety of
actualizing one's own freedom, which is a double anxiety: the anxiety of not
actualizing it, of being restricted and of not coming into real existence, and
the anxiety of actualizing it, with the knowledge of the possibility of losing
one's identity. This is not a description of an original historical Adam, but
of the Adam in every one of us, as the word "Adam" means. in this
double anxiety of actualizing oneself and of being afraid to actualize oneself,
every adolescent finds himself with respect to sex, his relation to his
parents, to the political tradition in which he lives, etc. It is always the question
of actualizing or not actualizing one's potentialities.
Finally the decision is made for actualizing oneself, and this is
simultaneously the fall. But after the fall there is another anxiety, because
the fall, like every trespassing of limits, produces guilt. The anxiety of
guilt at its extreme point is despair. This despair is described in The
Sickness Unto Death. This sickness unto death is present in all human
beings. This condition is described with the help of many Hegelian categories,
as the conflict between spirit and matter in man, man having finite spirit, man
experiencing the conflict in himself, having the desire to get rid of himself,
and of being unable to commit suicide because the guilt consciousness makes it
clear that suicide cannot help you to escape the situation in which you are.
One thing ought to be kept in mind, and that is that the term "guilt"
means both the objective state of being guilty for something that is
wrong, and the subjective state of feeling guilty. To confuse these two
states can be very bad, for example, when many psychoanalysts say that we must
abolish guilt. That is very ambiguous, for what they really have to overcome is
464 A History of Christian Thought
misplaced guilt
feeling, which is one of the worst mental diseases. But this can be done only
if they manage to bring the patient to the point where he faces up to his real
state of being guilty, his true guilt in the objective sense. We must make a
clear distinction between guilt and guilt feeling. Guilt feelings may be very
misleading. In neurotic and psychotic conditions they are always misplaced. One
of the defenses of the neurotic is to insist on misplaced guilt feeling because
he cannot face reality and his own real guilt. This real guilt is his estrangement
from the ultimate that expresses itself in actual acts directed against his own
true being.
3. The Nature of Faith (the Leap
and Existential Truth)
There is no escape from the sickness unto death; therefore, something
must happen which cannot be mediated in logical terms. You cannot derive it
from anything in you; it must come to you; it must be given to you. Here the
doctrine of the "leap" appears in Kierkegaard. It has already
appeared, in fact, in his description of the fall. Anxiety brings man before a
decision, for or against actualizing himself. This decision is a leap; it
cannot be logically derived. Sin cannot be derived in any way. If it is
derived, then it is not sin any more but necessity. Here we can recall what I
said about Schleiermacher for whom sin is the necessary result of the
inadequacies of our spiritual life in relation to our physical life. That makes
sin a necessity, and thus takes the sharpness of guilt away from sin.
Kierkegaard repudiates this notion of sin. For him the fall of man is a leap of
an irrational kind, of a kind which cannot be derived in terms of logical
necessity.
But there is the opposite leap, the leap of faith. You cannot derive this
either from your situation. You cannot overcome the sickness unto death, the
anxiety of estrangement. This can only be done by faith. Faith therefore has
the character of a nonrational jump in Kierkegaard. He speaks of the leap from
the point of view of the individual. He is so well nourished on Hegelian
dialectics that he builds up a dialectic of spheres. Between these spheres
there is a leap. That is non-Hegelian. But the spheres themselves follow each
other hierarchically, and that is truly Hegelian. There are three steps
or spheres. You can also call them
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 465
stages, but they are not
so much stages following each other in time as levels lying above each other in
space, and coexisting all the time in ordinary human beings. These levels or
stages are the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Man lives within all
of them, but the decisive thing is how they are related to each other and which
one is predominant for him.
Kierkegaard's
description of the aesthetic stage was perhaps the most brilliant thing he did.
His Diary of the Seducer, often abused for other purposes,
is the most complete description of the aesthetic stage in its complete
actualization. Also his analysis of Mozart's Don Juan is a great work of
literary criticism, philosophy, and theology all in one. The characteristic of
the aesthetic stage is the lack of involvement, detachment from existence. It
has nothing to do with aesthetics as such or with the arts. Of course, this
attitude of mere detachment and of noninvolvement in the situation can take
place in relation to music, literature, and the visual arts; but it can also be
found in the theoretical or in the cognitive relation to reality. Cognition can
have the merely aesthetic attitude of noninvolved detachment. I am afraid this
is seen as the ideal even in many humanities courses in the universities. To be
sure, there are elements of mere detachment in every scholarly inquiry;
detachment will be necessary when dealing with dates, places, and connections,
etc., but as soon as you come to interpretation, detachment will be reduced by
existential participation. Otherwise you cannot understand reality; you do not
"stand under" the reality.
Hegel
was regarded somehow as a symbol of the aesthetic attitude, and so were the
romantics. Because of their aesthetic detachment they took all the cultural
contents on the basis of a nonexistential attitude, a lack of involvement. When
I came to this country and first used the word aestheticism in a lecture, a
colleague of mine at Columbia University told me not to use that word in
describing Americans. That is a typical European phenomenon. Americans are
activists and not aestheti-cists. Now I do not believe this is true. I think
there is quite a lot of this aesthetic detachment even in popular culture. It
is present in the buying and selling of cultural goods—I spoke about this on
the occasion of Time Magazine's fortieth anniversary—in which you often
see a nonparticipating, nonexistential attitude. Here Kierkegaard's criticism
466 A History of Christian Thought
would be valid.
Perhaps on the whole this is not a very great danger among the American
intelligentsia. My observation has been that they jump very quickly out of the
detached aesthetic attitude—in all lectures and discussions, in philosophy and
the arts—to the question, "What shall we do?" This attitude was
described by Kierkegaard as the attitude of the ethical stage.
In the ethical stage the attitude of detachment is impossible.
Kierke-gaard had a concept of the demonic which means self-seclusion. This
belongs to the aesthetic stage, not going out of oneself, but using everyone
and everything for one's own aesthetic satisfaction. Opposed to this demonic
self-seclusion is love. Love opens up and brings one out of self-seclusion, and
in doing so conquers the demonic. This character of love leads to the relations
of love. Here Kierkegaard accepted Hegel's objective ethics—the ethics of
family, of vocation, of state, etc. In the aesthetic stage sex produces
isolation; in the ethical stage love overcomes isolation and generates
responsibility. The seducer is the symbol of irresponsibility with respect to
the other one, for the other one is manipulated only aesthetically. Only through
responsibility can the ethical stage be reached.
It is interesting as a biographical fact that Kierkegaard never reached
two of the decisive things that he attributed to this stage, that is, family
and vocation. He lived from some income as a writer, but he never had an
official vocation, either in the church or outside of it. And he had this
tragic experience with his fiancée, Regina Olson, whom he loved dearly. But
because of the inablity to transcend his self-seclusion, his melancholic state,
he finally dissolved the relationship, and never really overcame the guilt
connected with it.
Then Kierkegaard dealt with the religious stage. The religious stage is
beyond both the aesthetic and the ethical and is expressed in relation to that
which interests us infinitely or which produces infinite passion. You recall
that I told you about Hegel's two concepts: interest and passion. Hegel's
critics took these terms from him and then used them in their criticism of him.
Hegel said that without interest and passion nothing great has ever happened in
history. This notion was now taken over by Kierkegaard into the religious
situation and by Marx into the quasi-religion of the nineteenth-century
revolutionary movement.
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 467
Religion
has within itself two possibilities, identity and contrast. The principle of
identity is based on mysticism, the identity of the infinite and the finite;
and the principle of distance is based on estrangement, the finitude and the
guilt of the human situation. We have discussed this often in these lectures.
We saw this especially in the contrast between Spinoza and Kant, Spinoza the
representative of the principle of identity and Kant the representative of
critical detachment. This duality which permeates all human existence and
thought is also present in Kierkegaard's description of the two types of
religion. He calls these two types "religiousness A" and
"religiousness B," but a more powerful way of expressing the same
thing is to use the names of "Socrates" and "Jesus." Both
of them have something in common. Both of them are existentialists in their
approach to God. Neither is simply a teacher who communicates ideas or contents
of knowledge. They are the greatest teachers in human history because they were
existential. This means they did not communicate contents, but did something to
persons. They did not write anything, but they have produced more disciples
than anybody else who has ever written anything. All four Greek schools of
philosophy were pupils of Socrates who never wrote a thing, and Christianity is
the result of Jesus who never wrote anything.
That
alone shows the person-to-person situation, the complete existential
involvement of these two types of religiousness. But then there arises the great
difference. Religiousness A or the religion of Socrates presupposes that truth
is present within every human being. The fundamental truths are in man
himself. The dialectical or existential teacher has only to evoke them from
man. Socrates does this in two ways. The one is irony. This concept is in the
best tradition of Romanticism of which I spoke. This means that every special
content of which a person is sure is subjected to radical questioning until its
insecurity is revealed. Nothing remains as self-evident. In Plato's dialogues
Socrates is the leader of the discussions, and he applies irony to the Sophists
who know everything, who are the scholars of their time. The Socratic
questioning undercut their scholarly self-consciousness, their belief in their
infallibility. Socrates did the same thing with the craftsmen, the
businessmen, and the aristocratic people who were his followers. The other way
is midwifery. This means that the existential teacher brings to birth what
468 A History of Christian Thought
is already
inside a person, helps him to Find the truth in himself, and does not simply
tell him the truth. This presupposes the Platonic idea that man's soul has an
eternal relation to all the essences of things. So knowledge is a matter of
memory. The famous example given in Plato's dialogue Meno is of the
slave who is asked about the Pythagorean proposition of the three angles of a
triangle, and although he is completely uneducated, he is able to understand
it because of the mathematical evidences within him. This is not produced in
him by external teaching. This is indeed true of geometry and algebra. Everyone
can experience in himself the evidence of such things, but this is not true of
certain other things. This then led to the resistance of the empirical school
against Socrates and Plato, on the one hand, and leads to the other religious
type represented by Jesus, on the other hand.
Both Socrates and Jesus communicate indirectly, as Kierkegaard says, but
they do not have textbook knowledge of any kind. By indirect communication
Socrates brings to consciousness what is in man. Therefore, he is called a
religious teacher. I am in full agreement with that. I think it is ridiculous
to say that Socrates is a philosopher and Jesus is religious, or perhaps a
religionist, a really blasphemous term. Both of them deal with man in his
existential situation from the point of view of the meaning of life and of
ultimate concern. They do it existentially. In this sense we can call Socrates
the founder of liberal humanism, as one of the quasi-religions. Now, if the
difference between Socrates and Jesus is not that of the difference between
philosophy and religion—which is absolute nonsense here—then what is the
difference? The difference is that the indirect ironical teacher, Socrates,
does not transform the totality of the being of the other person. This is done
only in religiousness B, by the teacher who is at the same time the Savior, who
helps the person whom he teaches in terms of healing and liberating. Here
another type of consciousness comes into existence. According to this idea, God
is not in man. Man is separated from God by estrangement. Therefore God must
come to man from outside, and address him. God comes to man in the Christ.
God is not the paradoxical presence in the individual, but he is present
outside of man in the Christ. Nobody can derive the coming of the Christ from
the human situation. This is another leap, the leap of
The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 469
God into time through
the sending of his Son. This cannot be derived from man, but is given to him.
This makes Jesus the teacher into the Savior of men. While Socrates is the
great existential teacher, Jesus is both the teacher and the Savior who
transforms man.
In
this way the religious stage has within itself a tension. Hegel's
interpretation of the Christ was in the line of Platonism. In Hegel the eternal
essential unity of God and man is represented in a complete way in the Christ,
but it is also present in every individual. For Kierkegaard God comes from the
outside or from above. Here you see immediately the starting point of Karl
Barth. According to him, you cannot start with man, not even in terms of
questioning. You must start with God who comes to man. The human situation is
not such that you can find in man's predicament the question which may lead to
the religious answer. In terms of this conviction Barth criticizes my own
systematic theology, which in this sense is un-Kierkegaardian. This idea of God
coming to man totally from the outside had great religious power, but I would
say that its religious power is disproportional to its philosophical power, to
the power of thought. It cannot be carried out in such a way. But that is not
the point here. The point is that you see the bridge from Kierke-gaard to Barth
and neo-orthodoxy in the idea of God coming to man from above and from outside
him, with no point of contact in man. When Emil Brunner wanted to say that
there must be some point of contact, Barth answered with his passionate
"No"—this famous essay in which he defends his idea of the absolute
otherness of God outside of man. Now, I do not believe this idea can be
maintained, but, in any case, negatively speaking, it had great religious
power.
This
is connected with a concept of truth that has to do with the metaphor of leap.
This truth is quite different from the objective truth in the scientific sense.
So Kierkegaard makes the following statement, which gives the gist of all his
philosophical and theological authorship: "Truth is the objective
uncertainty held fast in the most personal passionate experience. This is the
truth, the highest truth attainable for the existing individual." Here he
defines faith as well as truth, for this is just the leap of faith. A very
important element is what he calls the objective uncertainty. This means that
theology is not based on objective certainty. A merely objective certainty, as
Hegel wanted to reach, is not
470 A History of Christian Thought
adequate to the
situation between God and man. This would be possible only if the individual
had already entered the system of essences, the essential structure of reality.
But he has not; he is outside of it, as God is outside of him. Therefore,
objective certainty in religion is impossible; faith remains objectively
uncertain. Truth in the realm of the objective scientific approach is not
existential truth. Kierkegaard would not deny the possibility of scientific
truth, but this is the truth of detachment. It is not the truth of involvement;
it is not existential truth. Existential truth is objective uncertainty and
personal, passionate experience or subjective certainty, but a certainty which
can never be objectified. It is the certainty of the leap.
This subjective certainty of the leap of faith is always under criticism
and attack, and therefore Kierkegaard speaks of holding fast to it in a
passionate way. In personal existence there is passionate inner movement, and
in the power of this passion we have the only truth which is existentially
important for us. This is the most significant thing in the world, the question
of "to be or not to be." It is the ultimate concern about
man's eternal destiny, the question of the meaning of life. This is, of course,
different from the truth we approach in terms of approxi-mative scientific
objectivity. If we use the term "subjectivity" in connection with
Kierkegaard's idea of existential truth, then please avoid the mistake of
equating it with willfulness. This is the connotation the word has today.
Therefore, it is so difficult to understand a man like Kierke-gaard and
practically all classical philosophers. Subject means what it says, something
standing upon itself, sub-jectum, that which underlies. Man is a sub-jectum,
one who stands upon himself, and not an oh-jectum, an object which
is in opposition to a subject looking at it. If man is this, then he becomes a
thing. This is the sickness of our time. The protest of subjectivity does not
mean the protest of willfulness. It means the protest of freedom, of the
creative individual, of personality, of man who is in the tragic situation of
having to decide in a state of estrangement, in the human predicament. In these
ideas we have almost the whole summary of Kierkegaard's theology.
But then Kierkegaard goes beyond this to the question: What can be done
to give content to this situation? With respect to the content we must say that
not much can be found of it in Kierkegaard. He was not a
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 471
constructive
theologian, and he could not be, because one can be a constructive theologian
only if he is not only existentially interested and passionate, but also has an
essentialist vision of the structure of reality. Without this, systematic
theology is impossible. So we find very little content in the theological or
religious writings of Kierkegaard. We have only a continuous repetition of the
term "paradox"—leap is simply another word for paradox, that which
cannot be derived, that which is irrational and surprising.
There is, however, one content to which he refers all the time, and this
is the appearance of the Christ. Thus the leap which is necessary to overcome
the situation of doubt and despair is the leap into the reality of the Christ.
He states this in a very unusual, paradoxical, and theologically questionable
form. He says that only one thing matters: In the year A.D. 30 God sent the
Christ for my salvation. I do not need any more theology; I do not need to know
the results of historical criticism. It is enough to know that one thing. Into
this I have to leap. Then we must ask: Can we solve the problem which
historical criticism has opened up by a theology of the leap? I do not believe
it is possible. Philosophically the question is this: In which direction am I
to leap? You can leap in all directions, but if you have a direction in mind,
you already have some knowledge, so it is not a pure leap anymore. If you are
in complete darkness and jump without knowing in what direction you are
jumping, then you can land anyhere, maybe even on the place from which you
jumped. The danger in this concept is asking someone to jump without showing
him the direction. Then we have more than subjectivity and paradox; we have
willfulness and arbitrariness; we have complete contingency. But if you already
know in which direction to jump, in the direction of Christ, for example, then
you must have a reason for this. This reason may be some experience with him,
some historical knowledge, some image of him from church tradition, etc., but
in any case, you have some content. The mere name alone does not say anything.
And if you have these things, you are already in the tradition of theology and
the church, and it is not a sheer leap any more. This is a problem which we
have to say Kierkegaard left completely unsolved. His statement that you have
to leap over two thousand years to the year A.D. 30 is simply unrealistic,
because nobody can do that. The intellec‑
472 A History of Christian Thought
tual leap, or
the emotional-intellectual leap, which you are supposed to make with your whole
self, is conditioned by two thousand years of church and cultural history. You
cannot do that without using contemporary language, and you use language even
though you are silent, for internally you speak whenever you are thinking. When
you make such a leap, you are using the language of the 1960's, and so you are
dependent on the two preceding millennia. It is an illusion to think we can
become contemporary with Christ insofar as the historical Jesus is the Christ.
We can be contemporary with the Christ only in the way described by the apostle
Paul, that is, insofar as the Christ is the Spirit, for the Spirit is present
within and beyond the intervening centuries. But this is something else.
Kierkegaard wanted to solve the problem of historical criticism by this concept
of contemporaneity. You can do this if you take contemporaneity in the Pauline
sense of the divine Spirit present to us, and showing the face of Jesus as the
Christ. But you cannot escape historical criticism by becoming contemporaneous
with Jesus himself. This is the fundamental criticism which we must make from a
theological point of view.
4. Criticism of Theology and
Church
We have still to discuss Kierkegaard's critical attitudes toward theology
and the church.' One can almost say that when Kierkegaard deals with the church
or theology, the image which he presents is more a caricature than a fair
description. In particular the ecclesiastical office was an object of
criticism. He attacked the fact that the minister becomes an employee like all
other employees, with special duties and economic securities. This position of
the minister, especially its bourgeois elements, of having a career, getting
married, raising children, while at the same time proclaiming the impossible
possibility of the Christ is for Kierke-gaard involved in a self-contradiction.
But Kierkegaard does not indicate how this conflict might be solved. Certainly
it is a reality, and for Kierkegaard a reality which contradicts the
absoluteness of the essence of Christianity. One cannot take this as an
objectively valid criticism,
6Cf. Kierkegaard's Attack upon 'Christendom,' translated by Walter
Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944).
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 473
because if one
did, then one would have to abolish every church office. If the office is not
abolished, it is inevitable that the laws of sociology will make themselves
felt and influence the form of the office and those who hold it.
The same thing is true of his attacks on theology. He attacks theology
because it is an objectifying attempt to construct a well-formulated system out
of the existential paradox. Here again the inadequacy of the situation of the
theologian is marvelously expressed, but in terms of a caricature. On the other
hand, the question is whether theology is a necessary service of the church. If
it is—and it has always been that as long as Christianity has existed; there is
theology in Paul and John—then the question arises: Can the theological task be
united with the paradox of the Christian message in a different way? When
Kierkegaard speaks about the theologian in his attack on theology, he
sarcastically suggests: Since Christ was born, let us establish a chair in
theology dealing with the birth of. Christ; Christ was crucified, so let us
make a full professorship for the crucifixion of Christ; Christ has risen, so
let us make an associate professorship, etc. This kind of comical attack on
theology makes a great impact on anyone who reads it, whether he is a
theologian or not. But if it is taken as more than a reminder, if it is taken
as a prescription, it means the abolition of theology.
The truth which we can gain from this kind of criticism of theology is
the truth of the inadequacy of the objectifying attitude in existential
matters. This refers both to the ministry and to theology. In the ministry
there is the objectifying factor, the factor of a sociological structure in analogy
with all sociological structures. In theology there is a structure of thought
in analogy with all structures of thought. This reminder is, of course, of
great importance. The minister and the theologian should be forever reminded of
the inadequacy, and not only that but also of the necessity of what they are
doing. The impossible possibility, as Reinhold Niebuhr, I believe, following
Kierkegaard has expressed it, is incarnated in the position of the minister and
the theologian. For something which is a matter of paradox, contrary to all
expectation, is brought into a form of existence comparable to any other object
in time and space. But this is the whole paradoxical situation of the church in
the world. You can also express it by saying that the Christian religion is one
of the
474 A History of Christian Thought
many sections
of human culture, but at the same time stands vertically in relation to
everything which is culture. From this you can draw the conclusion that
Christianity should be removed from every cultural relationship, but if you try
to do that, you will find it impossible. The very words you use in order to do
it are dependent on the culture from which you will try to detach Christianity.
On the other hand, if you do not see the vertical aspect, if Christianity is
merely for a class of human beings who are blasphemously called religionists
and becomes merely a part of the whole culture, this may be very useful for
undergirding patriotism, but the paradox is lost.
Here we face a conflict which is as real, permanent, and insoluble for
us as it was for Kierkegaard. Since in Denmark at Kierkegaard's time there was
a sophisticated theology of mediation, the prophetic voice could hardly be
heard any more. Kierkegaard became the prophetic voice. The prophet always
speaks from the vertical dimension and does not care about what happens in the
horizontal dimension. But then Kierkegaard became a part of the horizontal;
he became the father of existentialist philosophy, of neo-orthodox theology,
and of much depth psychology. Thus he was taken into culture just as the
prophets of Israel who, after they had spoken their paradoxical, prophetic word
out of the vertical, became religious reformers, and were responsible, for
example, for the concentration of the cult in Jerusalem because of the cultic
abuses in other places. So out of the vertical there comes a new horizontal
line, that is, a new cultural actualization of the prophetic word. This cannot
be avoided. Therefore, there is need for the prophetic word again and again
which makes us aware that the situation of every servant of religion is a
paradoxical one and is in a sense impossible. Kierkegaard's word was not
accepted widely in his time, but when people in the beginning of the twentieth
century realized the coming earthquake of this century, Kierkegaard's voice
could be heard again.
Question: You summarized Kierkegaard's understanding of Socrates. Do you
consider this a correct interpretation of Socrates, or does it contain features
peculiar to Kierkegaard?
Answer: First, I would say that it contains features peculiar to Plato.
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 475
We do not know
how much it has to do with the historical Socrates. It is parallel to the
relation between the Synoptic Gospels and the fourth Gospel. The fourth Gospel
has its analogy in Plato, and the Synoptic Gospels in Xenophon. Perhaps neither
is right from a strictly historical point of view. But this is the way that a
great historical figure appears to us. What is historically decisive is the
impact a figure has on those who are with him. So here is a strict analogy
between Socrates and Jesus, neither of whom wrote anything.
We know them only through their impact on their disciples, and this
impact makes them not only historically significant, but also symbolic figures,
figures in whom a symbol or archetype is embodied. Through this elevation to
the status of a symbol the figure continues to influence history.
Now the Socrates of Plato certainly does what Kierkegaard says in
connection with the Socratic irony and the Socratic maieutic or midwifery. The
irony destroys that which one believes he knows, and the maieutic method is a
way of bringing thoughts out of someone which are implicit in the depths of his
soul. These two parts are certainly there in the Socrates whom Plato presents.
How high the probability is of the historical accuracy of Plato's picture of
Socrates is something that has been discussed for two thousand years. It cannot
be said with certainty how much of Plato's image of Socrates is based on the
actual Socrates himself. Scholars try to determine that, and with our modem
methods of historical research we can perhaps come very near to the historical
truth. We find that it is likely that the historical Socrates was not as banal
as Xenophon makes him, but neither was he a pupil of Plato; it was the other
way around.
But Kierkegaard is right in making another fundamental distinction. We
spoke about religiousness A and religiousness B. Religiousness A is a religion
in which the divine is present in every human being immediately and can be
found in the depths of his being. This is basically a mystical form of
religious experience, with God in us, the infinite within the finite. We
showed how the whole modern development is dependent on this principle which
was most sharply expressed by Nicholas of Cusa, the principle of the
coincidence of the infinite and the finite in every finite thing. On the other
hand, in religiousness B the
476 A History of Christian Thought
basic point is the separation,
the estrangement. This means that there is a gap between the divine and
the human, so that man needs more than a midwife like Socrates who
brings out of us what we already have within us; something new must come from
the outside. The Savior or the Christ must come. This is the difference between
Jesus and Socrates. Jesus is not only the existential teacher as Socrates; he
is also the Savior who overcomes the gap between Cod and man. I think you have
realized that the dialectic between these two principles is important in my own
theological lectures, the dialectic between the principle of identity or the
coincidence of the infinite and the finite in every person and the principle of
a revelatory communication from outside, which is both revelatory and saving or
transforming. Revelation in Kierkegaard's sense is not the communication of
doctrines or knowledge about God. That is a badly distorted concept of
revelation. But revelation is the self-manifestation of the divine to a human
being which has transforming power. Both the symbolic and the doctrinal
statements which arise out of the revelatory experience are secondary.
* * * * * * * * * *
E. P0LmcAL RADICALISM AND ITS
THEOL0CICAL SIcNIFIccE
What I will do now is perhaps surprising to you. I want to give you here
the theology of the most successful of all theologians since the Reformation,
namely, Karl Marx. I will consider him as a theologian. And I will show you
that without doing this, it is impossible to understand the history of the
twentieth century and large sections of the late nineteenth century. If you
consider him only as a political leader or as a great economist, which he also
was, or as a great sociologist, which he was even more, then you cannot
understand from what sources the power came which transformed the whole world
and conquered nearly half of it in the twentieth century. How can Marx have
been a theologian in view of the fact that every word he said is connected with
the split in humanity which he is largely responsible for having produced? Yet,
there is a deep gap between the original Karl Marx and what is going on now in
Russia or China, although the historical effects of his work are manifest in
these countries.
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 477
1. The Bourgeois Radicals
There
was in the time that Marx was starting his work a group of people whom we can
call liberal radicals. On the basis of the principle of autonomy in bourgeois
society a liberal radicalism developed. A man whose name you should at least
know is Max Stirner (1806-1856) who wrote a book entitled The Individual and
His Right.7 In this very radical book he tried to remove all the
overarching norms which traditional society, including the Enlightenment, had
imposed on people. Very similarly to Kierkegaard he placed the individual in
the center, but unlike Kierkegaard it was the individual without any
relationship to God, but only to himself, and therefore without any norm. This
was one of the things which produced the resistance of Marx. For this reason I
must mention Max Stirner here. He was a neurotic personality and an extremist.
Of course, as a mere individual he could not survive for one day without being
dependent on others who provided for him. But this is not important for him; he
forgets it. The absolute autonomy of the individual is described by him in
almost ecstatic words.
Now
you can imagine that Marx with his analytic knowledge of society would be full
of aggressive irony against such an idea. He knew of the economically
productive society, about the peasant and the grocery store, etc., and could
not abstract from them as the neurotic bohemian could do so easily. And the
beatniks of today who attack society forget the fact that it is the basis of
their whole existence every minute. The same is true of Kierkegaard. The church
which he attacked so radically, with its tradition within culture, was the
basis of his statement that in the years A.D. 1-30 God came to man. Without the
tradition of the church which produced both the Bible and the church nothing
would have come to Kierkegaard, and his whole relationship to God would not
have been possible. This is an idea that you should remember when someone
attacks "organized religion"—a bad term—and says, I am very
religious, but I am against organized religion. That is nonsense. It is
nonsense because in his personal religiousness—excuse this terrible word—he is
dependent on the tradition of the church for
7
Max Stirner is the pseudonym of Johann Kasper Schmidt, author of Der Einzige
und sein Eigentum (Leipzig: 0. Wigand, 1901).
478 A History of Christian Thought
every word,
every symbol that he might use in prayer, in contemplation or mystical
experience. Without the community of speaking, there is no speaking whatsoever,
and without an inner speaking, there is no spiritual life whatsoever. In this
way it is easy to refute these attacks against organized religion. You can and
should attack the forms and the ways in which it may be organized, but to use
the term "organized religion" as name-calling is totally senseless.
It simply shows lack of thought, and is usually rooted in bad experiences in
childhood or more likely in Sunday School, which is one of the great
laboratories in which Christian faith is expelled from children.
2. Marx's Relation to 14egel and
Feuerbach
Now we must start with Marx's relation to Hegel and Feuerbach. He was a
pupil of Hegel. Feuerbach, another pupil of Hegel, had put Hegel on his feet
after he had been standing on his head, as Marx said. Hegel believed that
reality is identical with the head of the philosopher. Feuerbach showed that
the philosopher like everybody else is dependent on the material conditions of
life. So Feuerbach developed a materialistic or naturalistic doctrine
of man—man's dependence on his senses, etc. Marx said that Feuerbach had done
the main thing; he had criticized Hegel's explanation of religion. Marx felt
that he did not have to do that any more. But he had to criticize Feuerbach's
materialistic ontology, and Feuerbach's idea that being is individual being,
that the individual as such is the one who is decisive for the whole situation.
Marx's criticism of Feuerbach held that materialism is not much better than
idealism. It is a little bit better because idealism is merely ideology without
any basis in reality. Materialism is closer to reality. But if only the
individual is considered in the materialistic philosophy, then it is as bad as
idealism. For its universal concept of man is abstracted from the individual
and overleaps the social conditions in which man finds himself.
So Marx attacked both the materialists and the idealists. In regard to
the term "Marxist materialism" it would be much better to leave that
to the propagandists who use and confuse three different meanings of
materialism in order to carry on their propaganda. But that has nothing
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 479
to do with
historical truth and an academic education. So it is better for you to
understand that there are three meanings of materialism.
a.
The one is the ontological or metaphysical materialism. You find this in
Feuerbach who derives everything in nature from the movements of atoms in terms
of calculable mechanical causality. It is a theory which has not often been
represented in history. Present-day naturalism in America is certainly not
materialism. Metaphysical materialism is also called reductionist naturalism,
whereby reductionism means reducing everything to the mechanical movement of
atoms and molecules. This is an obsolete philosophy. It existed in Europe at
the end of the nineteenth century; also it existed in France at the end of the
eighteenth century in the French encyclopedists of the pre-Revolution period;
and it has existed only very rarely in this country. But on the whole it is a
philosophy which has been overcome, and is very remote from Marxism.
b.
Then there is ethical materialism, which means being interested only in
material goods, in money, etc. When someone is called a materialist in
propaganda, no clear distinction is made between ethical and metaphysical
materialism. If Marxism is called materialistic, for example, the trick of
propaganda is to leave the impression of an ethical materialism. In reality,
however, the original socialist movement and also the kind of communism you find
in the original Marx attacked the materialism of the bourgeois society, where
everything was dependent on buying and selling, on profit, etc. So Marxism was
just the opposite. Now the critics of the materialism of the bourgeois society
are called materialists, usually with the connotation of ethical materialism,
of being interested only in material goods.
c.
Historical materialism is the third type. This means that the whole
historical process is ultimately dependent on the ways of economic production.
This is Marxist materialism. It should be called historical or economic
materialism. It is quite
different from the other two meanings.
Marx deals with the question of the individual and society. This was not
so new in France, England, and Holland, but it was very new in Germany. In
Germany the social structure was always taken for granted as something ordained
by God. This was in accordance with Lutheran doctrine. Sociological analysis
was avoided. Sociology had been fully developed in France in the nineteenth century
before German scholars
480 A History of Christian Thought
even started to think
sociologically. Marx received his sociological view partly from France and
partly from his insight into the miserable social conditions of large sections
of people in Europe. Man is not man as an individual. The idea of the
individual existing by himself is an illusion. This sounds quite different from
Kierkegaard and Stirner. But Marx saw that we are really members of a social
group. It is impossible to abstract ourselves from sociological reality. So he
criticized Hegel and Feuerbach because they did not see individual men as
members of a social structure. What is needed is an analysis of the social
structure and the individual's place within it.
3. Marx's View of the Human Situation (Alienation)
Like
Kierkegaard, Marx speaks of the estranged situation of man in the social
structure of the bourgeois society. He uses the word "alienation" (Entfremdung)
not from the point of view of the individual but of society. In Ilegel
estrangement means the absolute Spirit goes over into nature, becoming
estranged from itself. In Kierkegaard it means the fall of man, the transition
by a leap from innocence into knowledge and tragedy. In Marx it means the
structure of the capitalist society.
Marx's
description of modern society is of great importance. If we as theologians
speak of original sin, for example, and are not aware of the problems of
estrangement in the social situation, then we cannot really address people in
their actual situation in everyday life. For Marx estrangement means that the
social situation results in dehumanization. When he speaks of mankind in the
future, he speaks of true humanism. He looks forward to a situation in which
true humanism is not a pleasure merely for the cultured few; humanism is not
the possession of cultural goods either. He looks for the re-establishment of a
true, humanity to replace the dehumanization in an estranged society. The main
thing in the idea of dehumanization is that man has become a cog within the
great process of production and consumption. In the process of production the
individual worker has become a thing, a tool, or a commodity which is bought
and sold on the market. The individual must sell himself in order to live.
These descriptions imply that man
is essentially not an object, not a
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 481
thing, but a
person. Man is not the tool but the highest end or aim. He is not a commodity
but the inner telos for everything that is done. Man is the inner
meaning and aim. Marx's description of dehumanization or the particular form of
estrangement that existed in capitalist society completely contradicts what he
had inherited from classical humanism. He saw no reconciliation. In historical
reality there is only dehumanization and estrangement. Out of this came the
power to change the situation. When Marx in the Communist Manifesto spoke
about the liberation of the masses from their chains, these chains were the
powers of dehumanization produced by the working conditions of capitalist
society. Consequently, the essential character of man is lost. Man on both
sides of the class conflict is distorted by the conditions of existence. Only
if these conditions are removed can we know what man truly is. Christian
theology says that we can know what man essentially is because essential man
has appeared in the conditions of existence in the Christ.
Estrangement refers not only to human relations, characterized by the
cleavage between classes, but also to the relation of man to nature. The eros
element has been taken away. Nature is only the stuff out of which tools are
made, and by means of the tools consumer goods are manufactured. Nature itself
has ceased to be a subject with which we as subjects can be united in terms of
eros, the love which sees in nature the inner power of being, the ground of
being which is creatively active through nature. In the industrial society we
make nature only the material out of which to make things for buying and
selling.
4. Marx's Doctrine of Ideology
and His Attack on Religion
Ideology is another extremely important concept for theology. What is
ideology? The word itself is older than Marx. It was used, for instance, by
Napoleon when he criticized professors for being ideologists instead of being
practical statesmen and generals. The word has a history which remains
ambiguous even today. Ideology can be a neutral word, meaning simply the system
of ideas which one can develop. Every group or class has such a system of
ideas. But ideology can also mean—becoming then the most dangerous weapon in
the class struggle—the
482 A History of Christian Thought
unconscious production of ideas
which justify the will-to-power of a ruling group. This is mostly an
unconscious production, but it can be used in a conscious way.
Marx used this word "ideology" as a weapon. It was probably
his sharpest weapon against the ideas of the ruling classes with which the
churches were allied. All the great European churches, the Orthodox, the
Lutheran, and the Episcopalian, were on the side of the ruling classes. The
Roman Catholic Church was better in this respect for it had preserved a
tradition of social feeling and social analysis from its classical medieval
period.
A term which we used in our daily language that is very close to the
meaning of ideology is rationalization. We speak of the rationalization of
individuals who use ideas to justify the power they hold over other persons or
to justify their indulgence in certain kinds of pleasures. Applied to social
groups rationalization becomes ideology. This is a very important theological
concept. Every Christian and every church should always be suspicious of their
own ideologies which they use to justify their own traditional
self-satisfactions. Every church should be suspicious of itself lest it
formulate truths only as an expression of its will-to-power.
This notion of ideology is used by Marx to supplement Feuerbach's
criticism of religion. He says that in principle Feuerbach succeeded in
removing religion, but his criticism was not founded on sociological analysis.
Marx says that the religious symbolism of a transcendent fulfillment (of heaven
or immortality) is not merely the hope of every human being, but is the
invention of the ruling classes to prevent the masses from seeking fulfillment
in this life. Their attention is diverted to a so-called life hereafter. This
is formulated in the famous phrase that religion is the opiate of the people.
He simply means that if you have the assurance of an eternal fulfillment, you
will not fight in a revolutionary way for the temporal fulfillment of man on earth.
Now I do not think that this is true. It is very similar to the way that
Kierkegaard criticized the church of his time. It is the radicalism of the
prophetic word. But then, of course, this same idea has to be applied to Marx
himself and to all the movement which followed him. Then we must ask: What
about the ideological character of the ideologies of the
The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 483
victorious revolutionary
movements? Are they not also expressions of a new will-to-power? When we see
what has happened to the Marxist ideas in Soviet Russia, we must immediately
answer in the affirmative. The ruling classes in Russia maintain ideologies
derived from Marx to keep themselves in power, although their ideas have only
an indirect connection with Marx. There is the ideological element in the will
to maintain themselves in power. The reason for this is that Marx lacked a
vertical criticism against himself. This is the same situation that we have in
all Communist countries, the lack of a vertical criticism. On the horizontal
they have a lot of truth, but they cannot put this under the criticism of the
vertical, because they have cut it off. Nobody can do that completely, but they
have done it to a great extent. The danger in our culture is that we do the
same thing with less radical and revolutionary methods, but with the more
refined and sophisticated methods of mass culture.
A
great gap between the churches and the labor movements in Europe developed. The
churches were the representatives of the ideologies which kept the ruling
classes in power over against the working masses. This was the tragic
situation. It is a great thing that in America this tragedy has happened on a
much smaller scale. But in Europe it has led to the radical antireligious and
anti-Christian attitudes of all labor movements, not only of the Communists but
also of the social demo-crats.
emocrats. It was not the "bad
atheists"—as propagandists call them—who were responsible for this; it was
the fact that the European churches, Orthodox, Lutheran, and Episcopalian, were
without social sensitivity and direction. They were diredted toward their own
actualization; they were directed toward liturgical or dogmatic efforts and
refinements, but the social problem was left to divine providence. The Czarist
ruling classes, the German imperial ruling classes, and the British ruling
classes were not in contact with what was going on in the working classes
either. In Great Britain the situation was much milder, and therefore Great
Britain never had a Marxist revolution. Nevertheless, the situation was very
similar.
This
situation can be seen the world over. On the one side there is a theology of
mere horizontal fulfillment, with the kingdom of God being identified with the
classless society or with a continuous transformation
484 A History of Christian Thought
of society as
in the British Labor party and in German social democracy. On the other side
are the churches with their theology which has a vertical dimension. But a few
things have happened which attempt to bridge the gap. In England there was a
religious socialist movement very early; whether it called itself by that name
or not, its ideas were the same. Then in Germany there was a religious
socialist movement which came from some prophetic personalities in Switzerland.
But nothing of this existed in Germany before the first World War.
I remember the great churches in the workers' quarters in Berlin.
Workers did not enter the church except for baptism, marriage, and the funeral.
The churches provided some glorification of these events. But any inner
relation to the churches did not exist. To a typical Lutheran minister of that
time I said: The workers cannot hear the Christian message. You must do it
differently. You cannot expect that they will come into the churches. His
answer was: They hear the church bells ringing every Sunday morning, and if
they do not come to the church services, they will feel guilty. But they did
not hear anything, and they did not know anything. They had no relation to the
religious symbols of the tradition. The Lutheran attitude was that the people
can come to hear the Christian message in the church. At least the people hear
the bell ringing, and that is enough. If they do not come, they will be
rejected by God. Fortunately, this attitude has ceased to exist. But it was
this kind of attitude which produced the tremendous gap between the church and
the laboring classes. Religious socialism tried to close that gap.
5. Marx's Political
Existentialism
The existentialist element in Marx is very great. His concept of truth
has a similarity to Kierkegaard's. Truth is truth for human existence, truth
which concerns our life-situation. We said that Kierkegaard defined truth as an
objective uncertainty passionately held. Marx defines truth in terms of the gap
between theory and practice. That is to say, truth must be related to the
social situation. A philosophical theory which is not involved in the social
situation is not true. We have something of this in pragmatism and in John
Dewey. There are in fact
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 485
great similarities
between existentialism and pragmatism. One of the things which has made John Dewey
the great educator in this country is his insistence that all knowledge must be
united with practical activities in the educational process. This was even
more basic for Marx. We cannot know the truth about the human situation without
existential participation in the social structure in which we are living. We
cannot have truth outside the actuality of the human situation. Therefore, in
our period of history one must participate in the proletarian situation in
order to understand the depths of estrangement. Here we must cautiously avoid
a mistaken idea. In Marx there is no glorification of the proletariat. The
revolutionary movements made the proletariat the messiah, the savior, so to
speak, not because the proletarians are such wonderful people—Marx never
believed that; he knew them—but because they stood at a particular point in
history which involved them in a class struggle, and through this struggle a
new reality might come into existence. Marx knew that the class split distorted
both sides in the situation. Men were made into objects. The leading bourgeois
and the working masses are in the same boat with respect to dehumanization. But
the proletariat had one advantage. They experienced the estrangement in such a
way that they would be forced to revolt. The proletarians are the blessed, in
the sense of the Beatitudes, for they exist on the extreme negative edge of the
class situation. So in the Marxist criticism of society a biblical truth has
been applied to an analysis of the social situation. When one speaks about the
saving power of the proletariat, this does not mean that the proletariat is
good and the others are bad. Marx's friend Engels was a big businessman, a
capitalist. But the structure of the situation puts the proletariat on the lowest
level where the need for revolution is felt. Through its revolutionary role it
is thought to be the saving power.
6. The Prophetic Element in Marx
We
cannot miss the messianic note in Marx's writings. Especially in the earlier
writings we hear the voice of a modern secular prophet. He speaks like the old
prophets of Israel. Marx as a Jew was in the tradition of Jewish criticism
which had lasted through the millennia. His wrath
486 A History of Christian Thought
against the
reality as he saw it had something of the old prophetic wrath in it, although
it was distorted by propagandistic elements as happens in
every political leader.
Nevertheless we cannot overlook the prophetic element in his whole work. When
the prophets spoke to Israel, even when they spoke about the other nations, the
whole weight of their attack was directed also against their own nation. They
saw that their word did not transform their own nation. So, they said, the
wrath of God would strike Israel. Especially Jeremiah was aware of this. But
there is also the promise of God. It could not come to naught; it would come to
fulfillment. So the prophets had the idea of the remnant, the small group which
would be the bearer of the divine promise.
The idea of a remnant is not the idea of only the prophets. Everybody
who speaks prophetically to a large group or to a nation has such an idea.
Without such an idea you would be driven to despair and forced to give up. But
you do not need to give up, because there is the remnant. The word "remnant"
means those who are left over, those who do not adore the idols, who do not do injustices,
etc. in the larger sense this word means those few within the group who are
conscious of the situation and who therefore become the bearers of the future
development. This idea of the remnant restricts to a certain extent the
messianism of the proletariat. In the last analysis it is not the whole
proletariat, but the leading groups in it, the vanguards, who are decisive. So
a simple identification of the proletariat with messianism is limited by the
fact that it is those who are the vanguards who have a messianic role. These
vanguards are not always even members of the proletariat. They are people like
Marx and Engels who come from the intelligentsia or the upper classes and have
broken through their own ideological self-seclusion. They have learned what is
going on in history and can join the vanguards.
The difference between Marx's secularized prophetism and that of the
Jewish prophets is that the latter always kept in mind the vertical line and
did not rely either on human groups or on logical or economic necessities of
development, as Marx did. They ultimately relied on God, and this was lacking
in the modern secularized movement. Certainly, this movement is quasi-religious.
It is not pseudo-religious, for pseudo-religious means "deceptive" or
"lying." But it is quasi-religious because it
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 487
has in itself
the structure of prophetism, but with one differenée—the transcendent, the
vertical line, has been lost.
The tragic thing is that the revolutionary movements in Europe, Asia,
and Africa originally came from a prophetic message, but when they became
victorious, they did not apply their own criticism against themselves. They
could not do it, because they had nothing above themselves. The Communists in
Russia answer all the problems in the East-West discussion without showing the
element of ultimate self-criticism. Of course, there is much self-criticism in
individual groups in Communist countries, There are individuals who confess
they have sinned. But they have always sinned against the party; there is
nothing higher than the party; the party cannot err; the party is infallible.
The lack of the transcendent line is the reason for the tragic situation that
the revolutionary movement which set out to liberate a whole social class has
resulted in a new slavery, the totalitarian slavery as we have it today in the
Communist systems. This is a world-historical tragedy. Similar things have
happened before in history. Consider, for example, how the movement of Jesus
Christ resulted in the church of the Inquisition in the later Middle Ages. All
these tragic transformations come about because of the lack of the
self-criticism derived from the vertical line. When the church did not judge
itself any longer in terms of the vertical line, something like the Inquisition
could happen. The Marxist movement was not able to judge itself because of its
whole actual structure, and so it could become the social group which we now
identify as Stalinism. In this form everything for which the original groups
were struggling became suppressed and distorted. It is in our century that we
can best see the tragic reality of man's estrangement in the social realm.
F. VOLUNTARISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY
OP Lnn
Now I come to the last of the movements which contributed to the
collapse of the great syntheses of Schleiermacher and Hegel. This movement is
voluntarism, a term derived from voluntas, the Latin word for
"will." Voluntarism is a philosophy in which the element of will is
decisive. It began in the nineteenth century with Schelling who in his earlier
years was a philosopher of the will before he became the
488 A History of Christian Thought
philosopher of nature.
For him will is original being. It is being itself. We can describe being most
adequately in terms of will. Being is not a thing; it is not a
person; it is will. This idea of will refers to what is often called today
"unconscious instinct." But the word "instinct" should be
dropped if you are translating Freud. The word "drive" should be used
instead. Man has no death instinct. That is a misuse of the word
"instinct." But man does have the death drive in himself.
Voluntarism
is one of the great lines of thought in the history of philosophy and theology,
which has been in continual tension with the other great line of thought which
goes back to Aristotle and includes among others Thomas Aquinas, the
nominalists, the British empiricists, Kant, to a great extent Schelling and
Hegel, and modern language analysis. These two lines of thought have made the
Western philosophical movements full of life and tension. In naming Thomas
Aquinas we should also mention immediately Duns Scotus and William of Ockham as
his voluntaristic opponents.
1. Schopenhauer's Idea of the
Will
From
Schelling we come to Scbopenhauer. What impressed him was not Hegel's great synthesis
nor Schelling's philosophy of identity, but rather Schelling's doctrine of
will. Usually he is considered as the first representative of voluntarism in
nineteenth-century thought. He combined with his voluntarism a deep pessimism.
He is always quoted if one speaks of philosophical pessimism. But voluntarism
is not necessarily pessimism, as we shall see in Nietzsche, his great pupil and
critic.
Not
only Schopenhauer's temperament but also his personal destiny must be kept in
view. He lived in the overwhelming shadow of Hegel and never really came into
his own during his lifetime. His famous book, The World as Will and Idea,8
became known only very late. It had a tremendous influence in the second half
of the nineteenth century and through Freud in our own century. The most
important pupil of Schopenhauer was Nietzsche. The line then runs from
Nietzsche to Bergson, the French voluntarist, Heidegger and Sartre, and to
White‑
8
Translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London Trübner and Co., 1883-86).
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 489
head, the great
metaphysician of our century. All this came from the powerful voluntaristic
element in Schelling, but became generally influential only later through
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
To understand
this nineteenth-century movement it is helpful to go far back for a moment.
Where does voluntarism come from? Its first clear appearance is in Augustine,
who embodies the element of will in his own personal character in a much more
dynamic way than it appears in most of the Greek philosophers and writers.
Augustine is the philosopher of will, and especially of that will which is
love. The substance of all reality for him is will. He could have written
Schell-ings statement that original being is will, but since it deals with the
creation of God he calls it love. Love is original being; the power of love is
the substance in everything that is. This love (amor) loves itself (amor
amoris), the self-affirmation of the will which is divine love.
In
the Middle Ages Augustine's ideas were represented by the great Franciscan
theologians, while the Dominican theologians represented Aristotle's ideas. The
tensions between these two in the thirteenth century represent the high point
in medieval thought. In the Franciscan school will precedes intellect. In the
Aristotelian-Thomistic school, or Dominican school, intellect precedes will.
This is not a vague statement about man's psychology; it is always meant
ontologically. That means that in God himself, in the creative ground of being,
either will or intellect is the primary power. In this course we have dealt
mainly with people who represent the primacy of the intellect. This is very
much the case in German classical philosophy. It is also predominant in the eighteenth
century, with some exceptions. The priority which Kant gave to practical reason
represents a breakthrough of the element of will. In Schelling we have a
complete breakthrough, and also in Fichte. But throughout that period the
emphasis on intellect was predominant. Now in the thirteenth century
Bonaventura was one of the great Franciscans in whom will was the decisive
thing, that is, will as love. He was a great mystic and also an early general
of the Franciscan order. This mysticism of love goes back also to Saint
Francis. Standing in radical opposition to Thomas Aquinas was Duns Scotus,
himself a Franciscan, and the greatest critical mind of the whole Middle Ages
and one of the most important philosophical minds of the Western world. Both
Thomas and
490 A History of Christian Thought
Scotus lived in the
thirteenth century. Scotus defined God as will and nothing other than will. In
another Franciscan, William Ockham, this became an irrational will. Ockham is
the father of nominalistic philosophy of the later Middle Ages. There was an earlier
nominalistic movement about which Abelard and Anseim of Canterbury were
fighting.
If
God is sheer will, he can do what he wants. He has within himself no
intellectual limits. There is no logos structure which would prevent him from
doing what he wants. The world is in every moment dependent on something
absolutely unknown. Ultimately nothing in the world can be calculated. Only
insofar as it is ordered by God can it be calculated, but God can withdraw both
the natural and the moral orders. If he wanted, he could make murder good, and
love bad. The theology of Martin Luther was influenced by nominalism, although
not really dependent on it. Luther himself was a voluntarist and had in himself
much of the Dionysian awareness of the underground of life in man. He was a
great depth psychologist before our present-day depth psychologists. He had
insight into the demonic forces in the world and in man. As the legends tell
us, he had to fight continuously against the demonic forces in himself, during
the attacks which he called Anfech-tungen. When he described these
demonic attacks—perhaps the best translation of Anfechtungen—he said
that one moment in this situation of absolute despair, which is an element of
the demonic attack, is worse than hell itself.
I
must mention several other bridges to nineteenth-century voluntarism. There
was the philosopher and shoemaker, Jacob Boehme, who saw in his visions the
full demonic power, the will element, in God himself. He called it the nature
of God and saw that element in God which contradicts the light in God, the
logos in God, the wisdom and truth in God. He understood the conflict in the
divine life, the tension between these two elements. This tension makes the
divine life not simply a sheer actuality (aclus rurus) as in
Aristotle, but a dynamic process with the potentiality for conflict. In God
this inner conflict is always victoriously overcome, but in creatures it breaks
out destructively as well as creatively.
Boehme
had a great influence on Schelling's ideas concerning the
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 491
inner life of
Cod. If all this sounds very mythological, then read the books of Charles
Hartshorne, A. N. Whitehead, and Henri Bergson. They were all influenced by
Boehme (who himself was dependent on Luther's voluntarism) and Schelling. Even
Hegel was to some extent dependent on Boehme.
One of the ways in which you can envisage the Western world in its
philosophical and theological developments is in terms of this tension between
the merely Apollonian—this means putting intellect over against will as the
decisive thing in man—and the combination of the Apollonian and the
Dionysian—which puts the will in the center and the intellect as a secondary
force over against will. If this is said about man, it is also said about God,
both in the Middle Ages and in modern theology. So we have here a very dynamic
picture of Western philosophical development. It is important for us to know
about this, because we are still in the midst of it. This struggle is still
going on, for example, between the Whiteheadian school and the philosophy of
logical analysis.
That gives you the historical perspective. But let us go into a few
other considerations here. First the term "will." It is very
important that in all these men you understand what the idea of will means. If
you examine a text on psychology, you will find that usually will is derived
from other elements, the vital drive, on the one hand, and the intellect, on
the other hand. It is presented as a secondary phenomenon and primarily as a
conscious phenomenon. If will is taken in this way, it is impossible to
understand how will can be identified with being itself. How can there be will
in stones and crystals and plants and animals? They have no consciousness; they
have no purpose which is directed by an intellect expressing itself in
language, using universals, etc. But this is not what will means if it is
understood in an ontological sense. Will is the dynamics in all forms of life.
Only in man does it become conscious will. If I decide to go to my office after
this lecture, that is a conscious act of my will. In voluntaristic philosophy
will is not restricted to a conscious psychological act. You cannot derive the
meaning of will from man's psychological experience of himself as a consciously
willing being. Nevertheless, the word must be used. Will for these ontologists
appears in man as conscious will, in animals as instinct or drives—these appear
also in man—in plants as urges, and in material reality as trends
492 A History of Christian Thought
such as
gravitation, etc. If you understand will as the dynamic element in all reality,
then it makes sense.
The term "intellect" is also subject to misunderstanding. The
idea as the ontologists have used it does not refer to the I.Q. of the college
boy. Intellect comes from the Latin "inter-legere," to read
between. To read between means to be in something, to be in the reality and
reading it, being aware of it. That means participating in the form of things.
Readable things have a form. The substance, the dynamics, you cannot read; they
are dark; they are the drives. Reading, which is here meant metaphorically, is
only possible where there is form. The word "understanding" has a
similar metaphorical meaning. Standing under or reading between have the same
meaning. They refer to a position in which we are in the reality itself and are
able to become aware of its particular form. This awareness we call cognition.
Schopenhauer's idea is that will, unconscious will, drives toward the
actualization of that which it is willing, and since it can never reach it, it
reacts with the desire for death. This is a concept which we also find in
Freud's death tendency or death drive which is derived from the always
unsatisfactory fulfillment of our will. The will never gets what it wills. Out
of this the dissatisfaction with life arises. According to Schopenhauer this
drives the will to ever new attempts to fulfill its desire and ever new
impossibilities of doing it. Life is a restless driving toward fulfillment
which can never be attained. The result is the disgust of life, a deep
dissatisfaction with every fulfillment. in all the, volun-tarists the sexual
drive plays a great role—from unfulfillment to fulfillment, then to ever new
fulfillment. The restlessness of these drives leads finally to a desire to come
to rest by not willing any more.
With this idea something very important for the history of Western
civilization occurred. Schopenhauer discovered Buddhism and in it the idea of
the will to self-negation, the will to bring one's will to rest by not willing
any longer. Of course, Schopenhauer was not a historian but a philosopher and
as such identified his own philosophy with the fundamental Indian idea that
blessedness is the resignation of the individual will, the overcoming of the
self in a formless self, as the Zen-Buddhists call it, or the return into the
Brahman principles, the eternal ones, as the Hindus call it. From this the
ascetic tendency in life is
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 493
derived. Schopenhauer did
not follow along in this point, but anyway he introduced these ideas into the
Western world where they have had an influence up to now.
Schopenhauer
made one exception to his general view, and this Placed him in line with the
romantic philosophy of his time. He said that when we hear music we are able to
come to rest in time and space. Music was for him the anticipatory salvation of
the restless will. In music the will comes to rest, but since one cannot always
be listening to music, one must finally tend toward the ultimate salvation
which happens only in the moment of death. Schopenhauer is to be considered as
the man who overcame in many people the progressivistic optimism of Hegel and
prepared the way for the existentialist pessimism of the twentieth century.
2. Nietzsche's idea of
Will-To-Power
Even
more important than Schopenhauer for the twentieth century and the theological
situation is Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a pupil of Schopenhauer. He used the
word "life" rather than "will." Life is essentially will,
but a special kind of will. It goes in quite the opposite direction from
Schopenhauer's will. It is not the will which brings itself to rest and ceases
to will, but it is the will which Nietzsche calls will-to-power.
First
we must say something about this word "power." I have already had to
rescue the word "will" from the misunderstanding that it is merely a
psychological phenomenon; rather, it is the universal driving dynamics of all
life processes. Now I must rescue the word "power" in Nietzsche from
a similar misunderstanding. For him power is the self-affirmation of being.
Will-to-power means will to affirm one's power of living, the will to affirm
one's own individual existence. In man this will-to-power becomes will to personal
and social power. That is not the primary concept, but it is a part of the
whole concept. This power has nothing to do with Nazism, with its irrational
power. It is the power of the best; only the power over oneself can give one
social power. If one is not able to exercise the aristocratic self-restriction,
then one's power will decay. So the abuse of it by the vulgar Nazi movement has
nothing to
494 A History of Christian Thought
do with
Nietzsche's vision of will-to-power. It is one of the tragedies that this great
symbol created by Nietzsche should become something devilish in the mouths of
vulgar people.
Nietzsche's style is oracular in contrast to Hegel's dialectical philosophy.
He is one of the great fragmentists in the history of literature. Fragments can
be very powerful. In the pre-Socratics we have almost only fragments. In part
this is an accident of history, for much of the early pagan literature was
destroyed by Christian fanaticism and later by Islamic fanaticism. But in any
case these fragments are in themselves complete, understandable, and full of
mystery. The same is true of the fragments of Nietzsche. He tells us that he
wrote them at a time of an inspired state of mind. He also wrote great poetry.
Nietzsche knew of the ambiguity in all life. He knew of the creative and
destructive elements which are always present in every life process. If you
want to find out about his idea of God, do not look first to his statement that
"God is dead." Read instead the last fragments of The Will To Power,°
which is a collection of fragments. It is not a book in itself. The last
fragment describes the divine demonic character of life in formulations which
show the ambiguity, the greatness, and the destructiveness of life. He asks us
to affirm this life in its great ambiguity. Out of this he then has another
kind of God, a God in which the demonic underground, the Dionysian underground,
is clearly visible. The victory of the element of rationality or of meaning is
not as clear as in other philosophers like Kant or Hegel, Hume or Locke, but
there is an opening up of vitality, and its half-creative, half-destructive
power.
3. Nietzsche's Doctrine of Resentment
Now where do the norms of life come from? Nietzsche has a theory very
similar to that of Feuerbach and Marx. This is his theory of resentment. The
Jewish-Christian idea of justice, the Greek-Christian idea of logos, and the
Christian idea of love are all ideas which result from the resentment of the
masses against the aristocratic rulers. It is the revolution of resentment.
This is the same type of thing that Marx
Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici
(London: T. N. Foulis, 1913-14).
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 495
called ideology
when he derived the Christian and generally religious ideas and values from the
state of negativity of the masses of people to whom the upper classes promised
a fulfillment in a transcendent heaven. Marx used this word as a powerful weapon
in the revolution. And psychoanalysis shows how individuals use rationalization
to justify drives in themselves which they want to maintain or fulfill. So
Nietzsche added a third concept, that of resentment. These three concepts have
had tremendous power because they are really revealing of the human situation.
The concept of rationalization shows how the individual man tries to
give reasons in a system of values for his natural drives of eros and
will-to-power. Freud with his empirical methodology discovered how little our
conscious life represents what we actually are. This was a revolution in our
climate of thought in the twentieth century; it undercut the bourgeois and
puritan moralistic conventions in all Western countries, and in particular the
Protestant-dominated countries. Most of you belong to the third generation of
this revolution, but I belonged to the first generation; I tried to show what
it means for Protestant theology that not the surface consciousness but the
underground of human existence is decisive in human experience and relations.
The concept of ideology revealed the interest of the ruling classes in
preserving their power by producing a transcendent system to divert the masses
from their immediate situation of disinheritance. We see the same thing today
going on in the underdeveloped countries where there are revolutionary
tendencies. They often look at our democratic ideas, which are rooted partly in
Stoicism and partly in the Old Testament, as an ideology of the Western world
to maintain its predominance and to introduce its values.
In Nietzsche's psychology of resentment all the ideas of justice,
equality, democracy, liberalism, etc., are born out of the resentment of the
masses, and the most powerful bearers of this resentment are the religions of
Judaism and Christianity. Therefore, this resentment functions in the exact
opposite way from Marx's notion of ideology. The ideas produced by resentment
are an attack against the ruling classes, while in Marx the ideological system
is a weapon of the ruling classes to keep the others down.
One especially interesting idea
in Nietzsche is his attack on the
496 A History of Christian Thought
Christian idea
of love. The idea of love is indeed a great problem. First of all, in the
modern languages we do not have the distinctions we have in Greek. Epithumia
is the vital drive (in Latin this is libido, the word used by
Freud); philia is the friendship type of love, the person-to-person
relationship; eros is the creative, cultural love toward the good, the
true, and the beautiful; agape is the word used in the New Testament
meaning the acceptance of the other one as a person, which includes the
principle of justice. It is the power of reuniting with the other person as one
standing on the same ultimate ground, and therefore he is the object of
acceptance, forgiveness, and transformation. That is the Christian idea of agape.
Now this agape was sentimentalized long before our time. It was
sentimentalized in Romanticism. The concept of Christian love could hardly be
distinguished from sentimental desire or from pity. Especially pity was
identified with the Christian idea of love. So charity replaced love in the
sense in which I have just defined it. Against all this Nietzsche fought with
the will to the self-affirmation of life. He is the greatest critic, not of the
Christian idea of love, although he thinks it is the Christian idea of love,
but of the sentimentalized idea of love, where love is reduced to compassion.
In the name of power, the will-to-power, self-affirmation of life, he fights
against this idea which undercuts the strong life.
Nietzsche made a good point which we ought to remember in our preaching
of love. He said, you speak of selfless love and want to sacrifice yourself to
the other one, but this is only a way for the weak person to creep under the
protection of somebody else. Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst, has called this
wrong kind of love which Nietzsche attacked "symbiotic love"—from syn
and bios, meaning "living together." This is a love of
the weak man for the other one who once lived from his strength, and it is a
form of love which exploits the other one. This kind of self-surrender has the
unconscious desire for exploitation. This is what Nietzsche was actually fighting
against. We should not forget this when speaking of love in Christianity. Love
can mean any of these four things which are distinguished in Greek, and
therefore it does not mean anything unless we explain in what sense we are
using the word. Usually it is connected with a sentimentalized type of love.
The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 497
Nietzsche was also interested very much in music. He was a great friend
of Richard Wagner, the great composer and bridge to modem music. But one of the
most interesting events was the break between Nietzsche and Wagner. They were
friends, but gradually Nietzsche noticed in Wagner the restoration of a
religion of sentimentality. As far as I remember the final break happened in
connection with Wagner's Parsifal, the romantic sentimentalization of
the myth of the representative suffering. Here Nietzsche with his
will-to-power, the will of self-affirmation of life, reacted with radicalism
and intensity. If you keep in mind that Hitler was a great lover of Wagner's
music, you have a clue to how far away Nazism is from Nietzsche's philosophy,
although words like "will-to-power" and "superman" sound as
if they were a preparation for Nazism. Somehow they actually were, but not in
the mind of Nietzsche, just as Marx was a preparation for Stalin, but not in
the intention of Marx. These are tragedies in history.
4. The "Death of God"
and the New Ideal of Man
The concept of the "death of God" is a half-poetic,
half-prophetic symbol. What does it mean? Ordinarily one would think that it
means simply the spread of atheism, whatever that word means. But this is not
the point in interpreting Nietzsche. Nietzsche did not repeat the atheistic or
naturalistic criticism of the theistic idea of God. He accepted just as Marx
did Feuerbach's criticism of religion. But Nietzsche meant that when the
traditional idea of God falls, something else must fall along with it. The
system of ethical values on which society is based fell, and this is the
important consequence of this symbol of the death of God. Of course, this is a
symbol, for it can only mean that God is dead as far as man's consciousness of
him is concerned. The idea that God in himself is dead would be absurd. The
idea is rather that in man the consciousness of an ultimate in the traditional
sense has died. The result is—and this confirms this interpretation—that
somebody else must replace God as the bearer of the system of traditional
values. This is man. In the past man had to hear the "thou shalt" and
the "thou shalt not" as that which is derived from God or an
objective system of values. But now this is gone. So in place of this Nietzsche
put man who says "I
498 A History of Christian Thought
will." Man
no longer says "I shall" because of God, but he says "I
will" because I will. I act because I will and I decide what is good or
evil.
This idea has many implications. One of them is Nietzsche's famous
phrase, 'the transvaluation of all values." All the traditional values
must be replaced by other ones. Not any transcendent authority does this, but
man does it. Who is this man? Does this not imply a tremendous overestimation
of man's greatness? Certainly Nietzsche did not think very highly of man. The
mass man who appeared with the industrialization of the European countries was
full of resentment; he was weak; he surrendered to the powerful; he produced
ideologies which promise him happiness in heaven because he cannot have it on
earth. That is man as Nietzsche knew him. So it is not this man, this mass man,
who can say "I will." It is the superior man. Nietzsche speaks of the
(Jberinensch, which could be translated as superman, except that this
has become a character in the funny papers. Other suggestions have been made:
higher man or superior man, or simply using the foreign word tIber-,nensch. Perhaps
superior man is the best.
Where does this superior man come from? He comes from the development of
mankind in a Darwinian sense. When you study Nietzsche you should not forget
that this was the time in which Darwinism reached its high point. He simply
accepted Darwin's idea of the selective process of life in which the weaker species
are annihilated and the stronger ones survive to produce still stronger ones.
This evolutionary idea of Darwin is the background to Nietzsche's idea of the
superior man. Of course, in all evolutionary thinking there is an image of a
higher man, of mankind being on a higher level. But Nietzsche did not think
merely of an educational, spiritual development of mankind from lower to higher
levels of moral education and ethical life, as has usually been thought of in
the Western world. Nietzsche would accept this idea too, but he took Darwin in
a much more literal and naturalistic way. The superior man is also stronger
physically. He is a man straight in body and soul, as he said. In some of his
metaphors, this man is even the wild beast, but the wild beast on the human
level, not irrational, but powerful, representing a new type of existence in
which man is not like the mass man of the present day.
The question has often been asked
whether if there is evolution, does
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 499
the evolution cease with
man? Why should it cease with man, and not go beyond him? There are two
possible answers. The one answer is that in man the biological possibilities on
earth are exhausted; no higher developments can follow. If there is to be any
further development, then it must happen in the realm of the mind or soul or
spirit of man. But in any case, it is an inner development of man, and not of a
bodily kind. Of course, logically this cannot be proved. It presupposes that
there is no possibility of a higher bodily development on earth. If this
presupposition is not accepted, Nietzsche would be justified. The superior men
are the strong ones, full of unbroken vitality, shaped by strict
self-discipline, indeed the very ideal of the aristocratic personality. In
contrast to them there is the one symbolized in his expression "the last
man." His description of the last man is the antitype to the superior man.
He is the man who knows everything, but does not care for anything—half-sleepy,
half-indifferent, completely conformist, and full of abandoned creativity. He
is like the caricature of the "organization man" described in current
sociological literature. The mass man avoids at all costs being controversial;
therefore he accepts subjection to conformism in all respects. He is
disinterested, without any ultimate concern, bored, cynical, empty. All of
these descriptions are given in a poetic way by Nietzsche. This is what he
calls the nihilism toward which our culture is running.
These
ideas have had world-historical consequences. Not only Nazism, but also Fascism
used the symbol of the powerful man with the strong self-affirmation of life in
himself and in his group. When Fascism and Nazism and early Communism used
Nietzsche's categories, they did it with the feeling that the coming nihilism
of which Nietzsche spoke would make mankind into a herd of higher animals
without creativity, satisfied merely with food and clothes, etc. So this
ideology was welcomed by the Fascists and the Nazis. They often used Nietzsche,
but they left out one thing. They left out the spiritual aspect. Nietzsche's
idea of the superior man includes the bodily and the spiritual or the mental.
One of the Nazi leaders said that when he hears the word "spirit" he
takes out his pistol, because he felt that this implied the diminution of
vitality and creativity. Such ideas were behind the Nazi movement. But do not
imagine that we can derive Nazism from
500 A History of Christian Thought
Nietzsche, or
from Luther or Hegel for that matter, although some of Nietzsche's formulations
have a similarity to the Nazi ideology. But this was only a vulgarization and
distortion of ideas which these great men had.
For Nietzsche the idea of the higher race is the aristocratic idea which
you can find in all races and nations. It is the vertical idea of racial
superiority. It comes from the medieval ideal of the aristocratic personality
shaped by strict self-discipline. But in Nazism there was the horizontal idea
of race, the idea that a particular biological race is superior to others. Then
a particular nation or a particular race, like the Nordic race, becomes the
group of superior men. Everything becomes vulgar. In this light you can
understand better the quasi-religious demonry of Nazism. It was in opposition
to the danger of the industrial society symbolized in the idea of the last man
who only looks at things with cynicism and without eros.
Nietzsche's affirmation of life goes beyond all this to a classical metaphysical
idea, or mythological idea, expressed by the Stoics, the idea of the eternal
return. This is the idea that history does not run ahead but returns to its
beginning. This is the classical Greek idea of eternal return. It means that
everything that happens now happens an infinite number of times. In Thus
Spake Zarathustra he described the moment as a door which opens in both
directions. In every moment there is a repetition of infinite moments.
Everything that happens happens an infinite number of times. This again is
symbolic and mythological. If we ask about its meaning, it means the
eternalization of the moment. The moment is eternal, not by the presence of
eternal life in it, however, as in Schleiermacher and in my own thinking,
following the fourth Gospel's idea of eternal life, but for Nietzsche it is a
circle. The eternalization of transitory moments means that everything has
happened before and will happen again an infinite number of times. It is one of
the attempts to understand eternity on the basis of a non-mechanical dynamic
naturalism. Religiously it is an affirmation of the eternal meaning of every
moment and of everything in every moment. It is eternity not in terms of a
hereafter, not in terms of the unique moment into which the eternal breaks, but
in terms of any point in a circle from which the circle may start and to which
it may return. This
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 501
is the famous idea of
the eternal return. What is decisive in it is the affirmation of life. Nietzsche
expresses this by having Zarathustra teach his disciples to say that in the
experience of death they will affirm every moment of it. This is Nietzsche's
eschatology; this is his hope. Although his life was full of misery, in
opposition to this he affirmed it infinitely.
All
these ideas have had a great influence on the thinking of our time insofar as
it deals with problems of ultimate concern. They have influenced many
theologians, at least insofar as they try to answer this form of eschatology by
some other form, and to show the difference. They have had infinite importance
for all preaching which contains apologetic elements. For here was a man who
was not holding to a mechanistic, materialistic form of naturalism. It was an
ecstatic naturalism. When we use the word "naturalism" we should be
clear about what type we have in mind. Today we call the mechanistic or
materialistic typ of naturalism a reductive naturalism in which everything is
reduced to the movement of atoms. It denies that mind and life have any
independent reality. They are supposed to be epiphenomenal; phenomenal because
they exist and you cannot deny that there is life and spirit; and epi because
they are secondary and superficial, and not a part of any substantial reality.
That is not a profound philosophy at all. But it is only one form of
naturalism. Nietzsche represented quite another one which was great, although
presented in a half-demonic form.
Question:
You have given a description of Nietzsche, but not a criticism of him. Would
you please do so?
Answer:
I would like to do so, although this would be a long story if my criticism
would take in all the elements of his thought. But let me start with his
concept of the will-to-power. I told you that Nietzsche's idea of the will-to-power
does not use the terms "will" and "power" in the ordinary
sense. Rather, it is the urge toward life in everything that is, even beyond
the organic life. It is a metaphysical concept. For the nonhuman dimension the
word "urge" would even be more adequate. And "power" is not
social, political, or economic power, but rather the self-affirmation of life,
not only in the sense of preserving life, but of the
502 A History of Christian Thought
further
development of life. In this respect, Nietzsche's idea is an adequate
description of life processes as we can observe them in ourselves and in
nature, so no criticism is needed. But insofar as the world of norms in
relation to the will-to-power is lost in Nietzsche, criticism proves to be
necessary. It is precisely this lack of normative principles which has made it
possible for the Nazis to misuse Nietzsche. Nietzsche himself had the
aristocratic norms. His ideal was the republic of Venice in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The Strict self-discipline which was characteristic of
all members of the aristocratic class was his ideal. So there was not only
arbitrariness but also discipline. But this discipline had no norms which
could be applied to men as a whole. Therefore, people like Heidegger could
simply replace the older norms which, according to Nietzsche himself, have
disappeared with the death of Cod. I spoke about this last time. Heidegger
replaced them by the resolve, the decision to do something without any norm, as
Nietzsche also did. Since there is no norm, there is only my will, and this is
the highest norm. This "I will" of Nietzsche, his highest norm, is
not able to provide criteria for good and evil, so Nietzsche could write his
little book, Beyond Good and Evil. This is the one criticism, the lack
of norms. The result of this lack is apparent, for it provided the possibility
of misusing Nietzsche's idea for the sake of an irrational will-to-power as in
a phenomenon like Nazism.
I would also have to criticize his doctrine of the eternal return. His
idea is a return to the classical circular notion of repetitious time. There is
a lack of novelty, of the really new. True, Nietzsche did have a strong
emphasis on the new in history. He could speak of the renewal of all values,
the transvaluation of values, and the coming of the superior man. There the
concept of the new is present. But this happens only within a particular
segment of the circle. Nothing absolutely new is created. A symbol such as the
kingdom of God as the aim of history is very remote from Nietzsche. Nietzsche
denied Augustine's idea that time is running toward something and not toward a
point from which it has started. That is, time is going in circles. This was a
relapse in Nietzsche, and an inconsistent relapse because he also had the Darwinian
notion of movement from lower to higher forms of life in history.
The Breakdown of the Universal
Synthesis 503
A third Criticism would have to focus on the idea of the superior man.
The biological increase of perfection in man would not increase the heights of
man's spirit. The biological development of man has come to a point from which
a new development has started, namely, the development of man's spiritual
self-realization in terms of culture, religion, and ethics. This new series of
developments cannot be enhanced by any further improvement of bodily existence.
One could say that with respect to nature, man is an end, just as with respect
to history, the kingdom of God is an end. Nietzsche was driven by naturalism to
a misunderstanding of the new beginning which was inaugurated in life when the
first man used the first word to describe the universal.
Then we can also say that his idea of the death of God is only
relatively true. For the God of the tradition is still alive and Nietzsche
himself introduced another God, this divine-demonic being which he called life.
I referred you to the last collection of fragments in his Will to Power.
It gives an ecstatic vision of the irrationality and paradoxical character of
life as a whole, and calls for obedience to this life by affirming it as it is.
He certainly is not atheistic in the popular nonsensical term. But he has a
different God than the God of the religious tradition, especially of the
Christian tradition. This holds true as well of the Asian tradition. He denied
the Asian tradition when he denied Schopenhauer who introduced the Asian
tradition into the Western world. He denied both traditions. Yet, I would say
that the presupposition of his negation is an awareness of eternity, and this
awareness of eternity was as much alive in him as in every human being.
I could also go into his theory of resentment and theory of morality,
which is self-contradictory, because the aristocratic groups which imposed
their ethics upon the masses had their own ethical norms independent of
individual willfulness. Nietzsche is an irrational prophet, a naturalistic
prophet. But Christian theologians can learn very much from him. I regretted
nothing so much as the fact that he could be so misused by Nazism. For this
reason he lost much of his significance in Germany, and probably also in other
countries.
