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8] A History of Christian Thought Paul Tillich Ch 2 The Enlightenment and Its Problems

 A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism by Paul Tillich | Goodreads





A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism

by
Paul Tillich,
Carl E. Braaten (Editor)
4.17 · Rating details · 245 ratings · 14 reviews
Previously published in two separate volumes entitled 
A history of Christian thought and Perspectives on 19th and 20th century Protestant theology.

Paperback, 550 pages
Published November 15th 1972 by Touchstone 
(first published January 1st 1968)
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URL  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tillich

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 The Concept of Dogma xxxvi

I]The Preparation for Christianity 1
A. The Kairos 1
B. The Universalism of the Roman Empire 2
C. Hellenistic Philosophy 3
1. Skepticism 3
2. The Platonic Tradition 6
3. The Stoics 7
4. Eclecticism 9
D. The Inter-Testamental Period 9
E. The Mystery Religions 13
F. The Method of the New Testament 14

II Theological Developments in the Ancient Church 17
A. The Apostolic Fathers 17
B. The Apologetic Movement 24
1. The Christian Philosophy 27
2. God and the Logos 29
C. Gnosticism 33
D. The Anti-Gnostic Fathers 37
1. The System of Authorities 38
2. The Montanist Reaction 40
3. God the Creator 41
4. The History of Salvation 43
5. Trinity and Cliristology 46
6. The Sacrament of Baptism 48
E. Neo-Platonism 50
F. Clement and Origen of Alexandria 55
1. Christianity and Philosophy 55
2. The Allegorical Method 57
3. The Doctrine of God 59
vi Contents
4. Christology 61
5. Eschatology 63
G. Dynamic and Modalistic Monarchianism 64
1. Paul of Samosata 65
2. Sabellius 66
H. The Trinitarian Controversy 68
1. Arianism 69
2. The Council of Nicaea 71
3. Athanasius and Marcellus 73
4. The Cappadocian Theologians 76
I. The Christological Problem 79
1. The Antiochean Theology 80
2. The Alexandrian Theology 84
3. The Council of Chalcedon 86
4. Leontius of Byzantium 88
J. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 90
K. Tertullian and Cyprian 98
'L. The Life and Thought of Augustine 103
1. The Development of Augustine 104
2. Augustine's Epistemology 111
3. The Idea of God 115
4. The Doctrine of Man 119
5. Philosophy of History 121
6. The Pelagian Controversy 122
7. The Doctrine of the Church 131

III Trends in the Middle Ages 134
A. Scholasticism, Mysticism, Biblicism 135
B. The Scholastic Method 137
C. Trends in Scholasticism 140
1. Dialectics and Tradition 140
2. Augustinianism and Aristotelianism 141
3. Thomism and Sootism 141
4. Nominalism and Realism 142
5. Pantheism and Church Doctrine 144
D. The Religious Forces 145
E. The Medieval Church 149
F. The Sacraments 154
G. Anselm of Canterbury 158
H. Abelard of Paris 167
I. Bernard of Clairvaux 172
J. Joachim of Floris 175

K. The Thirteenth Century 180
L. The Doctrines of Thomas Aquinas 192
M. William of Ockham 198
N. German Mysticism 201
0. The Pre-Reformers 203

IV Roman Catholicism from Trent to the Present 210
A. The Meaning of Counter-Reformation 210
B. The Doctrine of Authorities 211
C. The Doctrine of Sin 212
D. The Doctrine of Justification 213
E. The Sacraments 215
F. Papal Infallibility 218
C. Jansenism 221
II. Probahilism 223
1 11ccent Developments 224

V Ilir Iiiiiiigy iI Ihi Protestant Reformers 227
/\ Niiiiiiii I .iitIiii 227
I. Tho Itrukt Iiroiigii 227
2. I ,iiIlii'i ( iilirisrn of the Church 234
:i. I lh ( oiilIlit vlIIi iiiis,niis 237
I. Ilk Coidlicl wit ii tile Ivangelical Radicals 239
5. liii liii N I )O(t rules 242
a. iiie iihiical Principle 242
b. Sin and Faith 245
c. The Idea of God 247
d. The Doctrine of Christ 249
e. Church and State 251
B. Huldreich Zwingli 256
C. John Calvin 262
1. The Majesty of God 262
2. Providence and Predestination 264
3. The Christian Life 270
4. Church and State 272
5. The Authority of Scripture 274

VI The Development of Protestant Theology 276
A. The Period of Orthodoxy 276
1. Reason and Revelation 278
2. The Formal and Material Principles 280
B. Pietism 283
C. The Enlightenment 287

PART II
Introduction: Problem and Method 297

I Oscillating Emphases in Orthodoxy, Pietism,
and Rationalism 305
A. The Period of Orthodoxy 305
B. The Reaction of Pietism against Orthodoxy 311
C. The Rise of Rationalism 313

II The Enlightenment and its Problems 320
A. The Nature of Enlightenment 320
1. The Kantian Definition of Autonomy 320
2. Concepts of Reason 325
a. Universal Reason 326
b. Critical Reason 327
c. Intuitive Reason 328
d. Technical Reason 329
3. The Concept of Nature 330
4. The Concept of Harmony 332
B. The Attitude of the Enlightened Man 341
1. His Bourgeois Character 341
2. His Ideal of a Reasonable Religion 342
3. His Common-sense Morality 344
4. his Subjective Feeling 348
C. Intrinsic Conflicts of Enlightenment 349
1. Cosmic Pessimism 350
2. Cultural Vices 352
3. Personal Vices 353
4. Progress Based on Immorality 355
D. The Fulfillers and Critics of Enlightenment 356
1. Rousseau, The French Revolution, and Romanticism 356
1. Hume, The History of Religion, and Positivism 357
1. Kant, Moral Religion, and Radical Evil 360

III The Classic-Romantic Reaction against the
Enlightenment 367
A. Lessing, Historical Criticism, and the Rediscovery of Spinoza 367
B. The Synthesis of Spinoza and Kant 370

C. The Nature of Romanticism 372
1. The Infinite and Finite 372
2. The Emotional and the Aesthetic Elements in Romanticism 378
3. The Turn to the Past and the Valuation of Tradition 379
4. The Quest of Unity and Authority 382
5. The Negative and the Demonic in Romanticism 383

D. The Classical Theological Synthesis: Friedrich Schleiermacher 386
1. The Background of Schleicrmacher's Thought 388
2. His Concept of Religion as Feeling 391
3. His Positivistic Definition of Theology 398
4. His Interpretation of Christianity 405

E. The Universal Synthesis: Georg W. F. Hegel 410
1. The Greatness and the Tragic Hybris of Ilegels System 411
2. The Synthesis of God and Man (Mind and Person) 414
3. The Synthesis of Religion and Culture (Thought and  Imagination) 419
1. The Synthesis of State and Church 424
Providence, History, and Theodicy 426
The Christ as Reality and Symbol 430
Eternity against Immortality 431


IV The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 432

A. The Split in the Hegelian School 432
1. The Historical Problem: Strauss and Baur 423
1. The Anthropological Problem: Ludwig Feuerbach 435

B. Schelling's Criticism of Hegel 437

C. The Religious Revival and Its Theological Consequences 448
1. The Nature of the European Revival 449
2. The Theology of Repristination 453
1. Natural Science and the Fight over Darwinism 454

D. Kierkegaard's Existential Theology 458
1. Kierkegaard's Criticism of Hegel 460
2. Ethical Existence and the Human Situation (Anxiety, Despair) 462
3. The Nature of Faith (The Leap and Existential Truth) 464
4.  Criticism of Theology and Church 472

E. Political Radicalism and its Theological Significance 476
1. The Bourgeois Radicals 477
2. Marx's Relation to Hegel and Feuerbach 478
3. Marx's View of the Human Situation (Alienation) 480
4. Marx's Doctrine of Ideology and His Attack on Religion 481
5. Marx's Political Existentialism 484
6.    The Prophetic Element in Marx 485

F. Voluntarism and the Philosophy of Life 487
1. Schopenhatier's Idea of the Will 488
2. Nietzsche's Idea of Will-To-Power 493
3. Nietzsche's Doctrine of Resentment 494
1. The "Death of God" and the New Ideal of Man 497

V New Ways of Mediation 504
A. Experience and the Biblical Message 506
1. The Erlangen School 506
2. Martin Kähler 509
B. The "Back to Kant" Movement 511
C. Adolf von Harnack 515
D. Miscellaneous Movements in Theology 520
1. The Luther-Renaissance 520
2. Biblical Realism 520
3. Radical Criticism 521
4. Rudolf Bultmann 523
5. The History-of-Religions Approach 524
6. Ernst Troeltsch 526
7. Religious Socialism 530
8. Karl Barth 535
9. Existentialism 539
Index of Names 543
Index of Subjects 547
===

CHAPTER II The Enlightenment and Its Problems

A. Tim NATURE OP ENLJCH-1T.NMENT

Now we must go to the fundamental principles of the Enlighten­ment. We will not be speaking directly of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century, such as Hobbes (really seventeenth century) and Hume in England, Lessing and Kant in Germany, and Rousseau and Voltaire in France, but we will be describing the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment. Most of our academic life is based on these principles.

1. The Kantian Definition of Autonomy

We will be discussing four main concepts, without going into the details of their application. The first of these is "autonomy." In order to introduce this concept, I will indicate how Kant understood it in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Kant defined enlightenment (Aufklarung) as man's conquering the state of immaturity so far as he is responsible for it. Immaturity, he said, is the inability to use one's own reason without the guidance of somebody else. Immaturity of this kind is caused by ourselves. It is rooted in the lack of resoluteness and courage to use reason without the guidance of another person. The free use of reason is the essence of enlightenment. Now that is a very adequate description of what autonomy means. Kant pointed out how much more

The Enlightenment and Its Problems 321

comfortably one lives if one has guardians, of whatever kind they may be, whether religious, political, philosophical, or educational ones. But it was his intention to drive men out of their security under the guidance of other people. For him this security contradicts the true nature of man.

That is the meaning of the idea of autonomy in the light of Kant's words. He could say that this is the fundamental principle of enlighten­ment, the autonomy of reason in every individual human being. The word "autonomy" needs some interpretation. It is derived from two Greek words, autos, which means "self," and noinos, which means "law." Autonomy means being a law to oneself. The law is not outside of us, but inside as our true being. This Greek origin of the word shows clearly that autonomy is the opposite of arbitrariness or willfulness. Autonomy is not lawless subjectivity. Kant emphasized this when he said that the essential nature of the human will is the law of reason. Every deviation from it hurts the essential nature of the will itself. It is the law implicit in man's rational structure. It has implications for the theoretical as well as for the practical side of man's activities. It refers to knowledge as well as to the arts, to the development of personality as well as to community. Everything which belongs to man's nature shares in his rational structure. Man is autonomous. The law of aesthetic fulfillment (works of art), of cognitive fulfillment (scientific inquiry), of personal fulfillment in a mature personality, of community fulfillment in principles of justice—all these belong to reason and are based on the autonomy of reason in every human being.

I must warn you about some distorted statements on autonomy. There are theological books of the neo-orthodox movement, for example, which attack autonomy as a revolt against God. They identify it with indi­vidual willfulness and arbitrariness. In doing this they distort the meaning of autonomy. Man's autonomy does not stand against the word or will of God—as if God's will were something opposed to man's created goodness and its fulfillment. We could define autonomy as the memory which man has of his own created goodness. Autonomy is man's living in the law of reason in all realms of his spiritual activity. Many philosophers of the Enlightenment identified autonomy with the divine will and were in no way critical of this identification. But for the

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individual man it means the courage to think; it means the courage to use one's rational powers. This becomes even more clear when we look at the opposite term, namely, "heteronomy."

The word "heteronomy" also comes from two Greek words, heteros, which means "strange" or "foreign," and nomos, which means "law." Now the whole thing is turned around. It is not autonomy but ulti­mately heteronomy that involves willfulness and arbitrariness. Why? Because if we should obey a strange authority, even if it were to come from God, it would go against the will of our own created goodness, and we would be subjecting ourselves to something that is not pure reason within us, such as our desires, our strivings, or the pleasure principle, and the like. Then we are looking for the security of a foreign authority which deprives us of the courage to use our reason because of the fear of punishment or of falling into insoluble problems. So we come to the surprising result that heteronomy is ultimately the attempt to escape fear, not by courage but by subjection to an authority which gives us security. In this sense heteronomy indirectly appeals to the pleasure principle and denies our own rational structure. Kant, for instance, was very much aware even before Freud and modern psychotherapy that religious heteronomy also subjects men to strange laws—whether heter-onomy in relation to the church or the Bible—and that men follow these laws driven by fear. This means that ultimately they are being driven by the pleasure principle, subverting the created goodness of man's rational structure.

In this sense all religious authority can become heteronomous. Of course, the heteronomy disappears in the moment in which it is trans­formed into theonomy (divine law). Theonomy implies our own per­sonal experience of the presence of the divine Spirit within us, witness­ing to the Bible or to the church. It is very interesting that Calvin who sounds so heteronomously authoritarian in many of his utterances was the one who most clearly stated that the Bible can be our authority only when the divine Spirit witnesses to it (the testiinonium Sancti Spiritus internum). Where this inner witness is lacking, the authority of the Bible has no meaning. Obedience to its authority would be mere ex­ternal subjection and not inward personal experience. In autonomy one

The Enlightenment and Its Problems 323

follows the natural law of God implanted in our own being, and if we experience the truth of this law in the Bible or in the church, then we are still autonomous, but with the dimension of the theonomous in us at the same time. If we do not have this experience, then we follow in authoritarian subjection as immature persons, searching for security by avoiding the anxieties of punishment and danger. Autonomy which is aware of its divine ground is theonomy; but autonomy without the theonomous dimension degenerates into mere humanism.

Heteronomy has been broken in our time, and this is a dangerous thing. Men are always looking for the security of heteronomy, especially the masses of men. The breaking up of ecclesiastical heteronomy means that the masses of people run to other heteronomies, such as the totali­tarian systems, sectarian fanaticism, or fundamentalistic narrowness, thus closing themselves off from the whole development of autonomous thought in modern times.

In the light of these principles you can understand why the En­lightenment was one of the greatest of all revolutions. Socially it was a bourgeois revolution. But spiritually it was the revolution of man's autonomous potentialities over against heteronomous powers which were no longer convincing. But don't misunderstand me! As long as people in the Middle Ages lived in these traditions without criticizing them—just as we breathe air without knowing it—then it is still theonomy. But as soon as the human mind began to ask questions at the end of the Middle Ages, then the great problem arose. The church responded by using all its power heteronomously to suppress the questioning mind which was no longer at ease in the atmosphere of ecclesiastical tradition and could no longer regard it as self-evident. Something new had taken place. Man became aware of his power of radical questioning. What should then be done? Should we try to suppress autonomous thought, as the church tried to do by means of the Inquisition, or should we do something else? Should we attempt to find within autonomy the dimen­sion of theonomy, namely, the religious dimension, without weakening autonomous thought? This is what Schleiermacher and Hegel tried to do. The problem is still alive today. We cannot surrender autonomy, but neither can we live in an empty autonomy, because then we are in

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danger of grasping securities given by false authorities and totalitarian powers.

$ * * $ * * * *

Question:' In your definition of theonomy you mentioned the ex­periences of the presence of the inner divine Spirit which witnesses to the Bible and church. Would you describe this Spirit more fully so that I could recognize it in myself? Or if it is self-authenticating, how does one cultivate or achieve this Spirit?

Answer: Now this is a mixture of theology and counseling. But let me say one thing. It is obvious that if we speak of the Spirit working within us, it is self-authenticating. By what else could it be authenti­cated? If by some other authority, why would we acknowledge that authority? Because the Spirit tells us to. Then we are back with the Spirit. This was Calvin's idea, for example, when he spoke about the authority of the Bible. The divine Spirit witnesses to the content of the Bible, and in this way the Bible can become an authority. Only through the witness of the Spirit can the Bible cease to be a merely external authority. There is, however, a problem in Calvin's theology at this point. Does the Spirit witness to the particular contents of the Bible, so that this witness is happening while reading the Bible, or does the Spirit witness to the Bible as such, so that after this the Bible becomes in itself an authority? It was the latter understanding which became predominant in Calvinistic Orthodoxy, and from there came into Lutheranism also, and thus became the principle of authority in Orthodoxy as a whole. I can repeat something I said before. If the divine Spirit witnesses to the Bible as such, without any consideration of the particular contents, then in principle anybody can write a theology. This leads us to the idea of a theologia irregenetorum, a theology of those who are not reborn. But if it is the particular content that is being attested by the Spirit, then you must be existentially

1 Editor's Note: As was Tillich's custom, he requested that students submit questions for him to answer before the start of the lecture. His answers invariably would interweave historical and systematic aspects of the subject. The editor has selected a few of the questions and answers, both to allow Tillich to sharpen his own presentation of a subject and to retain the atmosphere of the classroom situation.

The Enlightenment and its Problems 325

involved in the content of the Bible in every moment of reading it. You must at least be participating in such a way that the Spirit works in you and witnesses to the truth of the biblical message. But you also ask, if the Spirit is self-authenticating, what can I do to receive it? This question cannot be answered, for if I did succeed in answering it, then I would be giving you a method for forcing God upon you. But God destroys every such method even as he destroys our moral self-righteous­ness. The only answer which can be given is to remain open to the impacts of life—which may come from others, or from reading the Bible, or services of the church or acts of love—through which God may work upon us. In listening and waiting we may experience the Spirit, but more than this cannot be said. There is no valid method at all for forcing God upon us.

* * * * * * * * * * 2. Concepts of Reason

Now we come to another equally important concept, the concept of reason. Here also much semantic clarity is needed in order to purify our image of the past. This is a very difficult concept and we can take but a few steps in attempting to interpret what this word means.

It certainly does not mean what is usually implied in all our talk about reason and/or revelation. If I can succeed in preventing you from jumping into discussions about reason against revelation before you clearly define the meaning of the terms, then this lecture will not have been in vain. In ordinary language reason is very highly respected. But it has a much narrower meaning than it had in the Enlightenment and in the previous history of the Western world. Today it means the calculation of the businessman, the analysis of the natural scientist, and the construction of the engineer. These three aspects determine the concept of reason. It would be therefore historically inaccurate to use this modem concept of reason as the model for understanding what the Enlightenment means by reason. When we speak of the "Age of Reason" we cannot restrict reason to its modem analytic and synthetic senses.

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I will distinguish four different concepts of reason, and discuss them point by point.

a. Universal Reason: The first concept of, reason has the meaning of the universal logos. Logos is the Greek word for reason. But it also means "word." In Heraclitus and in Stoicism logos means both word and reason. The Greeks asked the question how the human word and human language are able to grasp reality. Their answer was that the logos, the universal form and principle of everything created, is both in reality as a whole and in the human mind. The word is meaningful when men use it because it can grasp reality. The opposite is also true. Reality grasps the human mind, so that men can speak to and about reality.

That is the logos concept of reason. This concept appears and re­appears everywhere in Christian theology as a first principle. It is a principle of order and structure in all realities. As the Fourth Gospel says, "All things were made through him [i.e., the Logos], and without him was not anything made that was made" (John 1:3, Rsv). The Logos is the principle through which God created the world. This is a fundamental insight of all classical theology. Reality and mind have a logos structure. As a structure of reality and mind, logos includes our power of knowledge, our ethical awareness or conscience, and our aesthetic intuition. These are all expressions of the logos in us. (Im­manuel Kant wrote the critiques of pure or theoretical reason and practical reason, and the neo-Kantian school added the aesthetic reason as a third, uniting the practical and the theoretical). Reason or logos is therefore in the tree, for instance, as well as in the man who names the tree and describes the image of tree-ness which reappears in every individual tree. This is possible only because there is a structure in the tree which man is able to grasp by his mind, or, since this is always mutual, his mind is grasped by the structure.

The universe has been created by an intelligent power, the divine ground, and since the world has been intelligently built, intelligence can grasp it. We can grasp the world intelligently because it has been created intelligently. It has a structure. This is equally valid in philos­ophy as well as in theology. There is no conflict here in regard to the theological or philosophical use of this concept of reason. There is a

The Enlightenment and its Problems 327

necessary logos element in all theology. Any theology which does not have an understanding of the universal character of the logos structure of the world, and that means of reason in the sense of logos, becomes barbaric and ceases to be theology. When the logos element in theo-logy disappears, theology becomes a fanatical repetition of biblical passages without endeavoring to understand their meaning.

What we have just described is a feature of that dualistic heresy which divorces creation and redemption, and sets them in contradiction to each other. Creation contains the logos, and if redemption contradicts creation, then God contradicts himself. Then we have a good God and a bad God, the good God of redemption and the bad God of creation. The church in the early centuries was almost destroyed in the fight for the goodness of creation, that is, for the logos structure of reality as a whole. The church finally overcame the temptation to accept a dualism by regarding it as a demonic temptation, demonic because the characteristic of the demonic is the split in the divinity between the good and the bad God. Yet this heresy continues to appear in Christianity. It was espe­cially strong in the earlier period of neo-orthodoxy.2

But the same thing appears in other less refined or sophisticated forms. There is much of this dualistic heresy in existentialist literature which describes the "question" but does not give an "answer," leaving the world to the devil, so to speak.

b. Critical Reason: The logos concept of reason was not the most important in the eighteenth century, although it was definitely a pre­supposition of that piety which praised the glory of creation. Rather, the second concept of reason, namely, critical reason, was the more effective. In the name of critical reason the way was prepared for the French Revolution, which transformed the world. Before that the American Revolution occurred, uniting religious and rational dimensions in the Constitution. That is its greatness. But in the French Revolution, because of the conflict with Catholicism, reason became radical and even

2 Editor's Note: Tillich expressed his delight with the apparent turn in Karl Barth's thinking represented in the little book, The Humanity of God. He inter-e eted this as a hopeful sign of a new attempt to overcome th danger of settin g Ee God of redemption against the God of creation, and also as an emphasis which makes contact with his own thinking that always starts with the human situation.

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antireligious. It brought about the destruction of the old institutions controlled by the heteronomous authorities of both church and state.

We must understand what this critical reason was. It was not a calculating reason which decides whether to do this or that, depending on which is more advantageous. Rather, it was a full, passionate, revolu­tionary emphasis on man's essential goodness in the name of the priici-pie of justice. The revolutionary bourgeois fought against feudalism and the authoritarian churches. Unlike our present-day analytic and critical reason, he had a passionate belief in the logos structure of reality, and was convinced that the human mind is able to re-establish this structure by transforming society. We could therefore call it revolutionary reason as well as critical reason. Because of its religious depths this critical revolutionary reason overcame the prejudices of the feudal order, the heteronomous subjection of people both by the state and the church. It could do so because it spoke in the name of truth and justice. The philosophers of the Enlightenment were extremely passionate. They were not positivists; they were not interested in merely collecting facts which had no meaning for the revolutionary program. They became martyrs for the passion which they felt was given by the divine logos within them. It would be good if both in the East and in the West there would be more of this revolutionary reason. Both in Russia and in America it has been suppressed by the positivistic observation of facts, without that passion for the logos which is the manifestation of the divine in mind and reality.

c. Intuitive Reason: Then I come to a third concept of reason. I call it intuitive reason, which is used by all philosophers somehow or other in all periods. Formerly it was identified with Plato's idea of the intui­tion of the essences, and particularly of the universal essences of the good and the true. Today we have another term for it. We call it phenomenological. This is a school of philosophy which ultimately goes back to Platonism and which has many roots in the Middle Ages, perhaps especially in the Franciscan tradition. Its basic assumption is that the human mind has power to intuit essences. In looking at a red object at this moment, a red shirt or dress, the mind can experience the essence of redness. The essence of redness appears in a particular object and can be grasped by the mind. This I call intuitive reason.

The Enlightenment and Its Problems 329

Today reason and intuition are placed in contrast to each other, but they should not be. Intuitive reason is a nonanalytic reason which expresses itself in terms of descriptions. To understand the structures of life and spirit, we must use this descriptive method. Intuitive reason means looking at meanings, trying to understand them, and not analyz­ing objects, be it psychical or physical objects. That is another kind of reason. We use intuitive reason all the time in dealing with the world, when we see the universal in the particular, without asking analytic questions, or relational questions, etc. Whenever we are discussing meanings, as we are doing in this very lecture, we are in the realm of intuitive reason, as Plato also was in his dialogues. When he tried to discuss what virtue, courage, or fortitude are, then he used this intuitive method. This is most explicit in his early dialogues. When we want to know what fortitude is, then we look at examples, examples to which an ordinary meaning of the language leads us. We compare these examples, and from these examples we finally get a universal concept which covers the different examples and shows their point of identity.

In modem philosophy this is called the phenomenological method. This method is absolutely necessary for all the humanities. The under­standing of meanings in all literature, theology, or philosophy is depen­dent on the use of this method. Philosophically it has been restated, but not invented, by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) in his Logical Investi-gations3 around 1900. He was a predecessor of existentialism. That puts us in the interesting situation that existentialism has been generally accepted, but not its predecessor. Yet we find that today some of the philosophical minds among the psychoanalysts who first accepted exis-tertialism as the philosophical foundation of their work are now going back to phenomenology (or intuitive reason), realizing that without that method, existentialism would not be able to utter one word.

d. Technical Reason: This brings me to the last concept of reason, to its predominant meaning today, namely, to technical reason. It analyzes reality into its smallest elements, and then construes out of them other things, larger things. We see this kind of reason at work in Einstein in terms of mathematical physics. Yet there was also a strong element of

8Logische Untersuehungen (Halle M. Niemeyer, 1900).

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intuitive reason in Einstein. Einstein himself tried to describe the rela­tion between the intuitive and analytic elements in his own processes of thinking. Besides these there was the critical element, exemplified in Einstein's political activities. Here he followed the eighteenth-century understanding of reason. He knew what justice means from reason, but of course he used a different kind of reason in his scientific discoveries. He also knew of the logos character of reason. In a published discussion between Einstein and myself on the idea of God,4 Einstein said that the miracle of the structure of reality is what he called the divine. This was 50 per cent of what I would also call the logos concept.

So you see that the greatest representative of technical reason was aware of other dimensions of reason. The power of technical reason is its ability to analyze reality and to construct tools out of it. An extreme example of its use is logical positivism. What it says is merely analytic; it is a tool used mostly in order to produce other tools. We should not despise technical reason. We all live from it. Theologians especially should not despise it if they wish to remain theologians. Even the analytic form of thought used in argumentation must be kept pure. In discussions we should never replace logic by emotion or by a heterono­mous acceptance of religious authorities. We must use it equally as fully and rigorously as those who are not aware of the other forms of reason, only we must use it in awareness that there are four fundamental forms of what we call reason.

3. The Concept of Nature

Next we turn to the concept of nature. This is necessary in view of the conflict that was going on throughout the eighteenth century between naturalism and supernaturalism. Supernaturalistic theology attempted to save the tradition by means of the same tools which naturalism used in trying to transform the tradition. Therefore, we must ask what this concept of nature meant during these controversies. I can tell you autobiographically that one of my first scientific inquiries into theology—which was my Habilitationsschrift—dealt with the concept

Cf. Paul Tillich, "Science and Theology: A Discussion with Einstein," Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).

The Enlightenment and Its Problems 331

of naturalism and supernaturalism in the period before Schleier-macher.5 Out of this study I gained insight into the intricacies of the concept of nature in these discussions, which has influenced my thinking.

There are two fundamental concepts of nature which I distinguish, the material and the formal concept of nature. The material concept refers to things in nature, usually to subhuman or nonhuman things. This is what we usually call nature, all the realities that are the subject matter of physics, biology, botany, etc. The formal concept of nature refers to human beings, but of course man's body belongs as well to the material concept; it is as natural as any animal body. But it contains a different element. It has mind or spirit. Following from man's being as mind and spirit is the fact that man has a history. So nature and history are placed into contrast.

We are using the material concept of nature when we ask questions about whether nature is also fallen, whether nature can be saved, or when we speak about going out into nature, or when we discuss whether nature is only an object of our control, subject to our technical activities, or whether nature is such that man can commune with it. In all these cases we point to the material concept of nature. But there is quite a different concept, and this one has even more theological significance. It is the concept of the natural, coming from Greek thinking, from the word physis, which has to do with growth. The opposite of this is noinos, which is something produced by human will, such as institutions of society, conventional rules and laws, everything that is not produced by natural growth, but produced by people who transform what is grown. This distinction helps us to understand better the social criticism which came out of the critical schools of philosophy after Socrates, the Cynics, Hedonists, and also the Stoics. Their concept of natural law as that which we have within us by birth was the basis for their criticism of all that was arbitrary in society.

In all the literature of the Western world, from the Greek to the medieval sources and perhaps up to the seventeenth century, when you

5 Der Begriff des Ubernatürlichen, sein da1ektischer Charakter und des Prinzip der ldentität, dargestelh an der supranaturaListischen Theologie vor Schleier,nacher (1915).

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see the term "natural law," it very rarely means "physical law," law as discovered by physics. Usually it means rational law, particularly the law of morals or the law of cognitive reason, that is, the rules of logic. All this is called natural law; it is man's true nature. The law of the logos of which I spoke before embraces both nature outside of man and man himself. It is given by creation, and therefore it is called natural.

In order to make meaningful theological statements about nature or naturalism, it is necessary to distinguish these two concepts of nature. Related to the concept of the natural which we have just discussed are two other concepts, the unnatural and the supernatural. The unnatural is simply the perversion of the nature of a given thing. On the other hand, the supernatural is not supposed to be unnatural. It is supposed to be higher in power and value than the natural. It is a higher sphere which can enter into and interfere with the sphere of the natural. The supernatural interferes both with nature outside and with man's mental and spiritual activities. The mind or spirit of man (spirit with a small "s" of course) belongs to the realm of the natural, not in the material but in the formal sense of nature. Man's mind transcends the material sense by the very fact he is able to use language and to create tools.

The concept of the supernatural raises a theological problem. What does it mean to say that there is a sphere higher in power and value than the human sphere? What does it mean to say that the supernatural sphere can interfere with the human sphere? In what sense is the idea of interference justified? If God interferes with the natural which exists by his act of creation, does this not lead to a demonic split in the divine nature? Does God interfere and if so, in what sense? These are problems with which all theology has to deal, including modern theology. They were the problems of Hegel and Schleiermacher, both of whom tried to develop a theology which transcended naturalism and supernaturalism. These problems are also involved in modern theology whether we are discussing the doctrine of God, christology, soteriology, or eschatology.

4. The Concept of Harmony

Now we come to a fourth concept, the concept of harmony. This concept is part of the fundamental faith of the Enlightenment. In my terminology we could call harmony its ultimate concern. All the phiios‑

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ophers of the Enlightenment use this concept directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly. All of them elaborated their systems under the guidance of this principle. Our first remark about it has to be semantic. Today harmony may have a musical connotation, which it always has bad and should have. But it has also deteriorated to mean "nice," when we speak of a nice harmonious family life. Of course, harmony under­stood in this way was not the ultimate concern of the great philosophers of the Enlightenment.

Harmony in the philosophy of the Enlightenment is a paradoxical concept. This means that it must always be qualified by the words "in spite of." The ancient Pythagoreans spoke of a universal harmony, of a cosmic harmony, but in spite of every individual thing and every indi­vidual human being seemingly going their own way. Yet, through all there was an overarching harmony. The Greek word cosmos which we translate by universe originally meant beauty and harmony. The Pyth­agoreans discovered mathematical formulae for the musical harmonies. They believed in the harmony of the sounds produced by the movement of the stars. Therefore they spoke of a cosmic harmony of the spheres, each of which has a different sound, but all together creating a har­monious sound. If you delete the half-poetic, mythological element from such ideas, then you can say that they had a universal, ecstatic interpre­tation of reality. Of course, the Pythagoreans also knew that there is a split in reality, which they symbolized by the split between the even and the odd numbers. The odd numbers represent the good, the even numbers the bad, because the odd numbers are perfect. They are finished; the even numbers can be divided and are therefore unfinished. For all Greek thinking the finished is the good, the unfinished is the bad.

This concept of harmony was carried into the Platonic—Christian idea of providence. Plato was the first who philosophically made this a central concept. It is also a fundamental concept of Christian theology, and even more of Christian daily life. The daily life of the Christian believer is largely determined by providence. Ordinary Christians find in their faith in providence a kind of ultimate security in the vicissitudes of their lives. But this fundamental Christian idea of providence became secularized in the Enlightenment. Now it was formulated in terms of harmony.

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The Christian idea of providence does not contain the mechanical notion that God has ordered everything once upon a time, and that now he sits on his throne and sleeps while the world goes its way. The Reformers had to light tremendously against this distortion of the idea of providence. Rather, providence means that God is creating in every moment, and directing everything in history toward an ultimate fulfill­ment in the kingdom of God. Then you have the "in spite of" element. In spite of human finitude, in spite of human estrangement from God, God determines every moment so that in it an experience of the ultimate is possible, so that in the whole texture of good and evil in history the divine aim will finally come to prevail. Providence does not work mechanically, but it directs and guides. For the individual human being, providence means that in every moment of the time process, there is the possibility of reaching toward the kingdom of God. This is the Christian concept, which is so important for the personal life of the religious man and for all Christians everywhere. To anticipate things a bit—this is also a fundamental concept of the Ritschlian theology.

Even when the idea of providence is secularized in the Enlighten­ment, certain traits of it are preserved, especially the "in spite of" element. Christianity emphasizes that in spite of sin and error, some­thing meaningful can be done in history by the providential guidance of God. The philosophies of the Enlightenment also maintained this aspect. It was applied by them to all realms of life. The first clear expression of this in the secular realm can be seen in the area of economics. It was expressed by Adam Smith (1723-1790) of the Manchester School of Economics in his idea of harmony. The idea is that in spite of the fact that everyone may be motivated by the profit interest, each one out for his own profit, in the end the total aims of production and consumption will be reached according to some hidden law. With many qualifications, this idea also underlies the theory of modern American capitalism. There is this basic belief in harmony. In spite of the fact that producer, seller, and buyer fight with each other, each bargaining for the greatest possible profit or for the best deal, somehow the laws of economics will be at work behind their backs in such a way that the best interests of all concerned and of the whole society will be satisfied.

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Of course, history has shown that this seemingly mysterious law of the harmony of interests working behind the backs of individuals in society who act for profit in their economic life has helped to eliminate the poverty which was still existing in the eighteenth century in all Western countries. Without this belief in the hidden law of harmony, the Manchester theory would have never arisen and worked as it did.

The same principle is valid in politics. According to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, democracy presupposes that if every person follows his own reasoning, a general consensus or a majority will can be formed which is to the advantage of all. Then the minority should be prepared to acknowledge that the will of the majority was the true will of the whole, the volonté génrale—the mystical concept of Rousseau who distinguishes the volonté générale, the general will, from the will of all. The majority does not represent the will of all, because there is the opposition, but it represents the general will, the true will which is driving toward the best interests of the group as a whole.

Now you can see immediately the consequence of this belief in harmony. If there is no belief in this harmony, democracy cannot work, for the minority will not accept the validity of the decision of the majority. There is plenty of evidence of this in some of the South American countries. As soon as a democratic majority appears which is disliked by the military leaders, they instigate a putsch to overthrow the government. This is the chief characteristic of the negation of democ­racy. As soon as there is no belief in harmony, that is, in the provideh-tial validity of the majority decision, then democracy is impossible.—When I was in Japan, I was often asked by Japanese intellectuals to give lectures on the religious foundations of democracy, because they have the same problem. They have a democracy too, but they know how much it is threatened when a strong minority will not accept the con­cept of the general will, of providential harmony.

We have the same concept applied in the field of education. Educa­tion is necessary to produce the political maturity required for people to acknowledge the principle of harmony in democracy. The belief is that education can develop the potentialities of every individual in such a way that finally a good society will come out of it. This was the belief which induced the people of the Enlightenment to create public schools,

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which had not existed up to that time. There had been only upper class schools or church schools where the people were subjected to the preaching and teaching of the church. But the Enlightenment created public schools which became the center of culture.—I was astonished when I came to this country to find how seriously education is taken here, much more seriously than in any European country that I know. The reason For this is that the belief in harmony is much stronger.—In any case, public schools were founded under the influence of the philos­ophy of the Enlightenment.

Even God was pictured as an educator. It was believed that God educates mankind in stages and that now in our great century, namely, the eighteenth century, the century of Enlightenment, the age of maturity has dawned. God has finally reached his educational aim. The classical expression of this idea was given by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), the German poet, philosopher, and theologian, and the greatest representative of German Enlightenment, in his little book, The Education of the Human Race.6 This book will give you more insight into the Enlightenment than perhaps anything else, from the point of view of the feeling for the meaning of life.

Another area in which the principle of harmony was applied was in epistemology, the theory of knowledge. It is very clear in John Locke (1632-1704) and is behind practically all empiricism. For here there is the belief that the chaotic impressions which come to us from reality will find a way to produce in our minds a meaningful image of reality, making knowledge and action possible. This presupposes a law of harmony working within us. It is interesting to notice how secure, how dogmatically sure many empiricists are that the law of harmony in this respect really works.

The most profound expression of this idea of harmony in philosophy is to be found in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), the German philosopher. The whole classical period of German and European philosophy in general is to a great extent dependent on him. He was great enough at the same time so that he can now be the beloved figure of present-day analytic philosophers because he had the splendid idea of

6 Lessing's Theological Writings, translated by Henry Chadwick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957).

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describing all reality in terms of a logical calculus! Leibniz used the term "harmony," and spoke of a pre-established harmony which makes the operations of reality in all realms possible. The philosophical back­ground of this idea is the Cartesian (Descartes) separation of extended things or material bodies (res extensa) from thinking substances or the ego (soul) (res cogitans), raising the question of the possibility of the communication between the two. The answer was found in a third reality, which is God. In God the communication of soul with body takes place. Our soul has no direct communication with our body. Our thinking can influence our body through the medium of the transcen­dent unity of both body and mind in the divine ground.

Now Leibniz carried through this idea in an interesting fashion. In the history of philosophy you learned about monads, meaning "one" in Greek. Monads cannot communicate directly with each other; they are separated from each other by the body. Nevertheless, we as individual monads can talk to each other. How is this possible? Only by a pre­established harmony which goes to the divine ground of both you and me. Leibniz expressed this idea in the phrase, "Monads do not have windows and doors." This means that the individual human being is closed within himself. This theory of monads has been interpreted—rightly I think—as a symbolic expression of the dissolution of the medieval community into the atomized society of modern times.

In any case the question was: "How is communication of one being with another possible?" The answer was by a pre-established harmony behind our individual lives. Every individual monad, you and I, has the whole universe within himself. Every individual is a microcosm. But each of us embodies the universe in differing degrees of clarity. We are supposed to develop it to the highest possible clarity, but potentially we know and possess everything. The development of this potentiality is the infinite task of every monad. This is Leibniz' idea, his metaphysical formulation of the concept of harmony. This theory, however, which seems somewhat fantastic to us, had a tremendous influence on the thinking of the Enlightenment and on later philosophy.

In Protestantism we have the religious counterpart to this concept of harmony. The Protestant idea was that religion or Christianity has no need of a central authority which gives all the answers, either by coun‑

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cils or popes. On the other hand, the fact that the church held councils was an expression of the principle of harmony, for the assumption prevailed that the majority opinion of the council was the expression of the divine Spirit. Of course, Protestantism also had an authority, one formal principle as it was called later on, namely, the Bible. The idea that the Bible can have an impact on every individual reader through the divine Spirit is an expression of the principle of harmony. The principle of harmony is at work behind the backs of the individual Bible readers, making possible a universal harmony and the existence of the church. In spite of the numerous denominational differences and theological conflicts in Protestantism, it is believed that there is still such a thing as Protestantism. There is, to be sure, no visible form of unity, despite the World Council of Churches; Protestants are divided, and yet it is possible to distinguish Protestantism from Eastern Orthodoxy, or Roman Catholicism, or humanism, and from all other religions. There is some kind of unity; this belief is an expression of the principle of harmony, but it is always accompanied by an "in spite of" qualification.

After running through all of these applications of the principle of harmony, I hope you can see that when the central supernatural authority was removed, and the individualizaton and conflict in reality remain, then the only possible answer there can be, both in religion and culture, both in economics and politics, both in epistemology and physics, is the principle of a presupposed harmony which produces indirectly what was supposed to be produced directly by a divine inter­ference or by an inner-historical, all-uniting authority such as existed in the medieval Roman Church. This supernatural authority was now replaced by the principle, of harmony. This finally led to another question: What if the harmony does not work? This is the existentialist question which began with the second period of Romanticism in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and runs throughout the nine­teenth and twentieth centuries.

We still have in the majority of our intellectuals, the bearers of our intellectual life, this kind of paradoxical optimism that is identical with the concept of harmony. We have it in Freudianism and Marxism; we have it in our ordinary democratic humanism; we have it in everything that is called liberalism in economics and politics. Yet, it is not the same

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as it was in the eighteenth century. Many things have happened in the meantime. The theological development of the last century and a half has been looking for an answer to the question: What if the principle of harmony does not work?

Question: Please distinguish between your definition of reason in the sense of universal logos and the Enlightenment concept of harmony.

Answer: These two do not lie on the same level so it is difficult to make a distinction. But I can speak about the relation between them. The logos type of reason refers to the intelligible, meaningful structure of reality in its essential character; the concept of harmony refers to the dynamics of actual existence, that is, the way in which different ten­dencies in time and space are united in terms of harmony. That is, in spite of the arbitrariness of individuals, the universal outcome of the historical movement is positive and meaningful. So roughly we can say that while logos deals with the formal structure of reality in its essential nature, harmony deals with the dynamics of existence in time and space with all its ambiguities. Very simply, the one is structure, the other is dynamic movement.

Question: You have stated that one of the key doctrines of the Enlightenment was the harmony of man's mind with the eternal Logos. In what respects is this doctrine similar to or different from the rofnantic doctrine of the infinite within the finite? If they are similar, to what extent is the romantic movement a return to the basic Enlightenment doctrine after its destruction by Kant?

Answer: Now here there is a presupposition which is simply not factual. I have stated that oneof the key doctrines of the Enlightenment was the harmony of man's of

with the eternal Logos. I think you must have misunderstood it by 180 degrees. What I really said was that the harmony of the Enlightenment is not the harmony of the mind and has nothing to do with what we call harmony today, harmony in the sense of the restfulness of the mind, of sitting in a beautiful garden, looking at the flowers and feeling harmony between oneself and nature. This question perhaps shows that I was not emphatic enough in distin‑

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guishing this concept of harmony in the Enlightenment from its senti­mentalization. So I must try again.

Now harmony is a paradoxical concept. You are not harmonious. There is no harmony in your mind at all. You are not in harmony with God. You are in opposition to him and you fight with him. But never­theless, behind your back destiny or providence is guiding reality in such a way that it turns out best for you in the end. This means that you are brought back to God or to yourself in spite of everything. The principle of harmony in the Enlightenment can only be understood in terms of this "in spite of." It is best to think of the Manchester School of Economics for an illustration. Both the seller and the buyer fight for their own profits. The two meet in the market, and in their struggle for their own profit, a kind of transitory equilibrium results which brings about the greatest profit for the whole society. The individual is think­ing of his own advantage, but the whole society is being served "in spite of" that. Therefore we have the idea that private vices are public benefits. Although you are very greedy, and you don't want to pay a penny more to this seller than you have to, and although he has the same feeling toward you and fights against you, somehow behind your backs a harmony is brought about through the guidance of providence. This is the paradox of providence. Destiny or God, or the dialectical process in Hegel or Marx, does something of which you are not aware. Although you are greedy and disagreeable, the outcome is finally the best for all concerned. I gave you examples of this in all the other realms. In democracy, for example, despite all the name-calling in the political campaigns and all the promises made by candidates which they don't for a moment intend to fulfill, there is a volonté générale that emerges. Although nobody knows what the true will of society is, through the democratic process such a thing emerges. After the voting has been completed, the majority decision represents the true and general will of the society as a whole.

So the idea of harmony has nothing to do with niceness. Nor does it mean that the human mind and the eternal Logos are identical. The Enlightenment had no such idea at all. It only had the idea that reason, the logos type of reason, shows man the fundamental principles of justice. And if these fundamental principles of justice are violated, as the Enlightenment felt they were violated in the feudalistic society,

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then the Enlightenment fought against social abuses in the name of the principles of natural law which belong to the human mind. But there was no mystical union of man and God, no presence of the infinite in the finite as in Nicholas of Cusa.

Only one thing in this question is right, namely, that mysticism and rationalism are not contradictory, but that rationalism lives from the fundamental mystical principle of identity, the principle of the presence of the structure of truth in the depths of the human mind. This point in the question is indeed right. There is such a relationship. But no en­lightened philosopher would have accepted Spinoza. They all rejected Spinoza, and Spinoza is the real heir of Nicholas of Cusa and the mystical tradition of the Western world. For Voltaire, Rousseau, and other representatives of the Enlightenment, the subject-object scheme is decisive. However, they realized that in man's natural structure there is an awareness of justice. In the name of this justice they could fight against the distortions in society.

* * * * * * * * * *

B. THE ATrITUDE OF THE ENLIGHTENED MAN

After having dealt with four great concepts of the Enlightenment—autonomy, reason, nature, and harmony—we will discuss the attitude of the men of the Enlightenment, of the great bearers of the development of the Enlightenment and its consequences up to the present time.

1. His Bourgeois Character

First let me make a sociological statement. The enlightened man is a bourgeois. Bourgeois is a French word, the French equivalent of the Burger in German, which means "he who lives inside the walls of the town." He is quite different from the medieval man. He is supposed to be calculating and reasonable. In the Middle Ages the self-confidence, self-consciousness, and self-evaluation of a human being were not rooted in his rational powers—reason in the largest sense—but rooted instead in his ability to deal with the situation into which he was put by a transcendent destiny. The medieval man had his particular place in

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society, whether as emperor or as beggar or as someone who occupied a station in life between these two extremes. Each place had a direct relationship to ultimate reality. The function of the emperor was to unite the body of Christendom all over the known world. The function of the beggar was to give the people an occasion for acts of charity and in this way help to save their souls. Everyone in between had the same feeling of having a special place. This was a hierarchical order of society—holy orders one above the other, represented both in heaven and on earth. This concept came from the great mystic, Dionysius the Areopagite (ca A.D.500). It was taken into the Middle Ages by the scholastics in order to describe the place where everyone stands in life, including not only the ecclesiastical hierarchy but also the secular, political, and social hierarchies. The corollary of this in the Lutheran Reformation was the concept of vocation. Everyone had his place by divine calling (vocatio) where God placed him. There he shall stay and not try to break out of this situation.

This vertical orientation of the totality of life in the Middle Ages stands in direct opposition to the horizontal outline of the bourgeois society of the Enlightenment. The bourgeois wants to analyze and transform the whole of reality in order to control it. The horizontal line is decisive in his work, and he wants to control it by calculation. As a businessman he must calculate. If he does not, he loses. This calculation means that he must go beyond the place where he happens to find himself now. He does not accept the status quo. This again demands knowledge of reality. Reality far beyond his limited place must be known in order to be calculated and controlled. One must presuppose that nature is regular and that reality has some calculable patterns. So the bourgeois had a calculating attitude, and to him nature and reality as a whole appeared to be made up of regular patterns on which he could rely and which make his business decisions possible.

2. His Ideal of a Reasonable Religion

Irrational elements which interfere with a calcuable pattern of reality must therefore be excluded. This means that the irrational elements of religion must be eliminated. The bourgeois needs a reasonable religion

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which views God as lying behind the whole of life's processes. God has made the world and now it follows its own laws. He does not interfere any more. Every interference would mean a loss of calculability. No such interferences are acceptable and all special revelations have to be denied.

Thus all the boundary-line concepts of life were denied because they disturb the calculating and controlling activities of man in relation to reality. For instance, death is removed as an interfering power in the progressive thought of controlling reality. The classical understanding of death in the vertical line, which views man's life as coming from eter­nity and going back to it, had to disappear. In the bourgeois theological preaching, even in Roman Catholicism in the early eighteenth century, the preaching on death was removed. The great conflict between Pascal and the Jesuits involved the issue of the victory of the bourgeois society in removing death and guilt and hell from preaching. The Jesuits were on the side of bourgeois society. Jesuitism at that time gave the bour­geoisie a good conscience in breaking out of the vertical line into the horizontal by removing the boundary-line situations in classical theology. Traditional threats in terms of death and ultimate judgment were omitted. They were not in good taste. It is not in good taste to speak to people about death. In modern American society too one avoids speaking of death. One does not die; one just passes away. Death is not conve­nient for progressive society. It means the end of man's control and calculations and the end of inner-worldly purposes.

An even stronger attack is made on the idea of original sin. There was not only the very justifiable criticism of the superstitious and literalistic way this doctrine had been preached in connection with the story of Paradise, but it was also criticized because it conflicted with the belief in the progressive improvement of the human situation on earth. Most of present-day humanism still follows the Enlightenment in this criticism. It was a great event in theology when Reinhold Niebuhr succeeded in making an inroad on this prevailing view of humanism. Of course, he received support from the existentialist style of the twentieth century in which we are living. Despite that, the humanistic assumption of a progressive improvement in the human situation is still very much alive.

The fear of hell was also dismissed. The fear of death is actually the

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fear of hell; therefore, this concept was removed. Its symbolic meaning disappeared. The consequence of this was that its opposite was also

re‑

moved, not only the mythological symbolism of heaven, but also the idea of grace as such. Grace is an action which comes from outside man's autonomous activities, and therefore for Kant it was an expression of something heteronomous. For since it comes from outside, it undercuts the autonomous power of man. What remained then was a reasonable religion, as Kant called it.7 In this reasonable religion prayer was also re­moved, because prayer relates one to that which transcends oneself. This relationship fell under strong suspicion by the enlightened people. Kant said that if someone is caught by surprise while praying, he would feel ashamed. He felt that it was not dignified for autonomous men who con­trol the world and possess the power of reason to be found in the situa­tion of prayer.

Thus the existential elements of finitude, despair, anxiety, as well as

of grace, were set aside. What was left was the reasonable religion of progress, belief in a transcendent God who exists alongside of reality, and who does not do much in the world after he has created it. In this world left to its own powers moral demands remain, morals in terms of bourgeois righteousness and stability. Belief in the immortality of the soul also remains, namely, the ability of man to continue his improve­ment progressively after death.

3. His Common-sense Morality

A basic element of the morality of the enlightened man is tolerance.

The enlightened bourgeois man is tolerant. His understanding of tolerance was conditioned by the religious wars. His profound disgust of the murderous and destructive forms of these wars—which in Germany killed half of the population during the Thirty Years' War (1618‑

1648)—caused him to deny the absolute claims of the church. The spirit of tolerance was perhaps first produced by the Reformation. But it was not until after the bloody religious wars had demonstrated the

7 Cf. Immanuel Kant's book, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, translated by T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960).

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impossibility of reuniting the churches that the secular powers took over and forced tolerance upon them.

A second reason for tolerance besides the political one arose out of the sectarian, spiritualistic movements of the Reformation period. They placed strong emphasis upon the belief that every individual is immedi­ately related to God. No one type of relationship has the right to deny other possible types of relationships with God. This same feeling underlies much of American religious life. The Bible and tradition become secondary in comparison with the divine Spirit with whom each individual is immediately related.

A third reason has to do with the rise of the secular state. The state became increasingly secular because it had to transcend the split between the churches. It could not succeed in identifying itself with one of them. Now an interesting problem arose, which is stated clearly by John Locke. Could there be a complete tolerance? Can one be tolerant of the Catholics, for example, when they are on principle intolerant, especially when they possess the power? John Locke said no. Catholics should not be tolerated. Nor should atheists be tolerated, he thought. For the whole system of morality in society is based on the belief in God as the moral lawgiver and judge. If this belief disappears then the whole system collapses. Here we see that basic limits are set to tolerance even by its champions.

We were discussing tolerance as an element in the attitude of eighteenth-century bourgeois society, classically expressed in Locke's writings on tolerance. We pointed out that tolerance has its background in the experience of the seventeenth century, the century of the terrible religious wars which almost destroyed Europe. When it was seen that neither the Protestants nor the Catholics could gain a decisive victory, the secularized state had to intervene, identifying itself with neither religious group. Tolerance toward different religious traditions grew out of this experience of the cruel and destructive religious wars. Such wars are always the most bloody because in them an unconditional concern expresses itself in a particular way, and this particular way then assumes the ultimacy which is supposed to be expressed by that concern, but which is not identical with it. This results in the demonization of religion in its worst form.

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We have the same phenomenon in our century, the struggle of the quasireligions with their tendency of totally eradicating the enemy on account of an absolute, unconditional faith in the concrete and particu­lar expressions of their ultimate concern. The wars between Nazism and Communism within the nations and between the nations, as well as the spirit of absolutism which runs through the cold war between liberal humanism in the West and totalitarianism in parts of the East—these are modern forms of this phenomenon. We see the horror resulting from the demonic elevation of something finite to absolute validity. I call it demonic because individuals and nations become possessed and are driven to destroy everything which stands in their way. And sine this is done on a finite basis, they are themselves ultimately led to self-destruc­tion. These are the dialectics of the demonic. The demonic expresses itself first in the realm of the concrete religions, in France between the Catholics and the Huguenots and in all the rest of Europe between Catholics and Protestants. Each side is unaware of the fact that God is greater than any particular form in which his manifestation appears. Against this situation it is understandable that the idea of tolerance should arise, and be championed by the secular power. In a Europe which was almost destroyed, the secular state brought salvation from religious fanaticism, and was supported in this principle of tolerance by the religious mystical idea of the immediacy of each individual before God. So much for the idea of tolerance, which was not an unlimited tolerance, as we said, because, at least for Locke, the Catholics and the atheists had to be excluded, the Catholics because they were intolerant on principle, and the atheists because they denied the religious founda­tions of tolerance.

We come now to another characteristic of the bourgeois moral life, the element of discipline. The whole bourgeois culture is based on the repression of those elements which were allowed in the aristocratic society of feudal times. In part this sense of moral discipline goes back to Calvinism. Calvinism itself came from a city, Geneva, in which the factor of discipline was fundamental. In the aristocratic society, at least in the upper classes—but also among the peasants as the works of the Dutch painters of peasant scenes in the seventeenth century show—there was an acceptance of enjoyment in life, an expression of vitality in

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the more primitive directions of erotic play, the desire for intoxication to elevate the feeling of vitality, but also the sense of beauty in the arts and the glory of nature as in ancient Greece. The more aristocratic a position someone held, the greater possibility he had of expressing all forms of heightened vitality. The aristocrats were not only the big land owners, but also the patricians in the medieval and late medieval cities.

In bourgeois society all this was denied, partly in the name of religion and partly—and these are always interdependent—in the name of the needs of the sociological and economic structure of the bourgeois order. All this had to be restricted and repressed for the sake of the purpose of transforthing reality through work. This work required discipline and self-control. This is connected with Protestantism also in another way. Protestantism had abolished the monastic form of asceticism. It was the monumental attack on monasticism by Luther and Calvin and all the Reformers which destroyed the monastic form of asceticism as a valid religious order of life. But now in Protestantism a different form of asceticism arose, an inner-worldly—not extra-worldly as in monasticism —asceticism of labor and of laboring people who produce the technical means for transforming reality in the service of mankind. It was Max Weber (1864-1920), the great German sociologist, who described this inner-worldly form of Protestant asceticism.8 The idea of the kingdom of God, so important for Calvinistic thinking, took on the connotation of working for the transformation of nature for the sake of mankind.

In this light we can understand such things as the fourteen-hour workday, both by those workers who received only the minimum of subsistence and by the owners who worked even harder and longer but received the profits. Thus work, discipline, and self-control formed the heart of the ethical principles of bourgeois society. The forms of economic existence of bourgeois society were undergirded by this inner-worldly asceticism for the sake of the kingdom of God.

It is instructive to study those cases where this type of bourgeois self-discipline disintegrates. As soon as it starts to disintegrate, the whole system begins to crumble. We have economic-historical inquiries into nineteenth-century Germany showing what happens with the gradual

8The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scnbner's Sons, 1930).

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victory of the bourgeois society. This victory was delayed in Germany, for Germany was under feudal power much longer than France, Eng­land, Holland, and Belgium, but finally toward the end of the nine­teenth century the bourgeoisie became victorious also in Germany. There one can see the following sociological law at work, although such laws are never strict because human freedom can change them. First of all, the producers of the great corporations and enterprises were as a rule subjected to a Strict discipline of work. In the second generation this discipline was continued, but now on a more luxurious basis. Then the third generation, enjoying a much higher standard of living, became what is known as playboys in this country. In Germany they sought the luxuries of life, giving expression both to the sensual and artistic forms of vitality. Perhaps they collected paintings or built great mansions. This law of the three generations which helps to analyze bourgeois society shows that when repression is not enforced any more and when there exists simultaneously an ascetic form of dedication to labor, you have the beginning of the disintegration of the pillars of this society.

4. His Subjective Feeling

One of the words we meet most often in the literature of the eight­eenth century is the word "tears." Everybody weeps; everybody cries in ecstasy of despair or happiness. Whenever scenes of happiness are described, people shed tears; they cannot help it. What does this mean? This was the century of reason, and yet there was sentimentality. How are they related to each other? There is an alliance of two poles. People wept about everything which remained after the principles of reason were actualized. Rationalism says that emotional elements should be excluded from rationality. Emotions are irrelevant to the serious things of life, such as the production and merchandising of bourgeois industry. So when the emotions are excluded from reason and are not subject to the criteria of logic, the result is that they run wild and end in all kinds of uncontrolled emotionalism. This happens in human beings of the twentieth century too. People who are complete rationalists in the realm of thought fall into uncontrolled emotionalism in their personal life. If man is split into two parts, into the rational and the emotional,

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the result will be the absence of reason from his emotions. A dangerous situation develops when emotionalism is connected with ignorance. One of the dangers in this country is all of the ignorant emotionalism that has been created by the cold war propaganda, for one day it may explode in the wrong way and destroy many of the democratic institu­tions. This is the danger of all the fascist movements from McCarthyism to its current forms. We should also realize that if the philosophers remain in their closed spheres of mere logical inquiry of logic, and do not go into the relevant problems of life, then they abandon the reality of our existence to movements which unite emotionalism and ignorance.

C. INTRINSIC CorrLIcrs OI ENLIGHTENMENT

Now we must deal with conflict within the Enlightenment itself. It is important to see these to understand the concurrent theological devel­opment. There are conflicts in the Enlightenment, and our usual gray image of the period is not at all true. In reality the period of the Enlightenment is infinitely more rich than our gray image of it would indicate. Actually no period in history should be seen as monolithic. If we look at the Renaissance and think that every peasant in southern Bavaria was a bearer of the sixteenth-century Renaissance, then we are imagining a ridiculous thing. There were only a few thousand people in all Europe who brought about the Renaissance. But these were the people who were conscious of the situation and who became the intel­lectual leaders of the future. So neither the Renaissance nor any of the following periods was monolithic.

In the period of the Enlightenment there were continually under­ground movements, underground because only occasionally did they come clearly to the surface and revolt against the surface situation. But these reactive movements never became really dominant; they were never able to prevent the final victory of the bourgeoisie, either in the intellectual life or in the economic life, which was the most important in bourgeois society, either in political revolutions or in religious conse­quences. They did not overcome the optimistic and progressivistic atti­tude of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, they were there and made

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their appearance when the victorious bourgeoisie suffered internal con­flicts, preparing the way for the new situation of the twentieth century. We must mention them also because they played a tremendous role in later theological discussions.

1. Cosmic Pessimism

The first one I want to mention is the underground of cosmic pes­simism in the whole Enlightenment. This was the reaction to natural events of catastrophic proportions. What was the attitude of the eight­eenth-century theologians? It was what I would call teleological op­timism. Telos means aim or purpose in Greek. There was a basic optimism toward the divine purpose in creating the world. What was the purpose of God? It was to make the universe in such a way that all things would work together for the good of man. The descriptions of the Enlightenment theologians of the divine wisdom always portrayed God as a wonderful technician who made the best possible machine for the glory and well-being of man. For this purpose he created the sun and the moon. He took care that the sun does not shine at night so man can sleep. In every least little thing one saw the wisdom and goodness of God in creating the best possible world for man's purpose. Everything was teleological and had a purpose for the human race. Why should one not be optimistic and progressivistic and enjoy everything that God in his wisdom created for man's good?

But then something happened. That was the earthquake of Lisbon in the middle of the eighteenth century which killed quite a number of people. Compared with the horrors of the twentieth century that per­haps cannot mean very much to us. But at that time, when there were fewer human beings and a higher culture, that is, a higher evaluation of human beings, it came as a tremendous shock. Sixty thousand people were killed by this earthquake in Lisbon. This was a catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions to a period in which God was considered as having created the world for the purpose of serving man. This event was in part responsible for the shaking of the optimism and progres­sivism of the eighteenth century. Also it symbolized in a dramatic way

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what everyone knew can happen at any time, but which can easily be glossed over.

It is interesting to see how the philosophers were shaken. It was an event which greatly influenced Goethe (1740-1832) in the early years of his life. It was after this earthquake that Voltaire (1694-1778), the classical representative of the French Enlightenment, wrote the deeply pessimistic novel, Candide, which ends with the advice to retire to one's garden and withdraw from the horrors of world history.

Such things were not able to inhibit the continuing progress of bourgeois society out of which later came the evolutionary ideas of the nineteenth century. in any case this pessimism was latent and could come into the foreground as a powerful philosophical movement, as it did in the later Schelling (1775-1854) and Schopenhauer (1788­1860). But the dominant philosophy of the Enlightenment was basically optimistic, and was most characteristically expressed by Leibniz in his principle of theodicy. The word "theodicy" comes from the two Greek words, theos meaning God and dike meaning justice. Theodicy thus means "justifying God for the evils in the world."

Leibniz' theodicy was, however, much more profound than the use of it by the optimistic philosophy of the Enlightenment. His idea was that if God would create a finite world, he would not be able to overcome the limits connected with finitude. God had to accept these limits of finitude and the various types of evil that go along with it. This is a risk he had to take. Assuming then that God was to create a world at all, it would naturally be—as our world actually is—the best of all possible worlds. This phrase became a slogan, and when the pessimistic reactions set in, this phrase was used ironically. Look at Lisbon and the sixty thousand dead people, and who will speak of the best of all possible worlds? This was the reaction. But of course it was unfair to a great philosophy. This often happens. The same thing happened to Hegel. What Leibniz really meant was not that the world was all good, but that if there is to be a world at all, then this is the least evil or the best possible world, because God cannot make a finite world absolutely good. That is to say, finitude has within itself the necessity of evil.

This fundamental philosophical problem will reflect itself in all the theologians of the nineteenth century. They will deal with the problem

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of theodicy. The world that God created is good, but because it is finite, the world cannot be perfect. Leibniz' phrase was singled out, distorted and placed against him with bitter irony.

2. Cultural Vices

Another question: How does progress come about in bourgeois society? Here a very interesting paradox was seen by some of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, and in particular by Rousseau (1712-1778). In his first book9 Rousseau dealt with the question: Have the sciences and the arts contributed in a positive way to the morals of society? The question itself was formulated by the Academy of Sciences for a literary contest, and Rousseau won the prize. The question itself indicated that some skepticism about the glory of civilization had cropped up among the intellectuals of French society. Rousseau's answer was, No, the arts and sciences have not contributed either to the morality or to the happiness of mankind. What they really do is to advance immorality, not in the narrow sense in which we often use it, but in the wider sense of ethical development and sensitivity, or rather, their opposites, antiethical development and insensitivity.

Rousseau alleged that in the new state of society the increase in the pleasure of a few has become the basis for the misery of the many. He did not have in mind only the bourgeois society, but instead the whole development of civilization since primitive times. The advance of the sciences and technical productivity has produced a much sharper divi­sion in society between the "haves" and the "have nots" in comparison with the earlier period. The earlier period becomes the "lost paradise" for Rousseau, and the seemingly progressive culture becomes the nega­tive state. This situation has been brought about by the establishment of private property, which is something that did not exist in the earlier period. So Rousseau gave a vivid description of the eighteenth-century political and economic situation before the French Revolution, namely, on the one hand luxury and laziness, and on the other hand exploitation and misery. Therefore Rousseau questioned the belief in the progressive development of morality through civilization. Is cultural progress good?

9 Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750).

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No! Is modern progressive society better because it has the arts and sciences in comparison with the natural state of the savages, the noble savages as they were later called? And many answered with Rousseau, No! So let us go back to the primitive state of nature.

In these views Rousseau proved to be a double prophet. In his politi­cal writings he was the father of the French Revolution and the spokesman of the bourgeois society. Nobody foreshadowed the French Revolution so powerfully and representatively as Rousseau. But with his critical attitude toward progress in civilization, he became the predeces­sor of Romanticism, the period which followed the Enlightenment and which fought to overcome it. The interesting thing is that Rousseau represented both at the same time. Indeed, the great fulfillers of the Enlightenment were at the same time the conquerors of it. There was David Hume in England, Immanuel Kant in Germany, and Rousseau in France. As great representatives and fulfillers of the Enlightenment, they were somehow at the same time its conquerors. Therefore, we have been speaking of the intrinsic conflicts of the Enlightenment. It is espe­cially clear in the case of Rousseau. The father of the French Revolu­tion was at the same time the predecessor of Romanticism.

3. Personal Vices

Then another problem arose. If we have a society of economic exchange that is dependent on selling and buying, it happens that human desires must be aroused to make such selling and buying pos­sible. Thus an antipuritan principle developed in the midst of the Enlightenment and bourgeois discipline. If everybody should work and no one should buy and use the products of industry, there would soon be no work to do and the whole system would collapse. Therefore, it is not only good but essential to arouse in people the desire for goods. This resulted in the introduction of the pleasure principle as a dynamic into bourgeois society in opposition to the original Calvinistic and early bourgeois principle of work with its ascetic character. To put it in a formula one can say that private vices are public goods. We will see how this was exhibited in England by Mandeville.

We must say something about the philosophical presupposition of the

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ethics of eudaemonism which developed after the ascetic period of bour­geois society. Often we use the word "materialism." It is used today in cold war propaganda, for the Communists are considered to be material­ists. The people who use this term in propaganda do not bother with its meaning, otherwise their passion for propaganda might decrease—and that would be a pity! But here in an academic room we must try to find out what materialism really means.

There are many different forms of materialism. Marxist materialism, for example, is entirely different from the French materialism of the eighteenth century. This latter is a particular type, namely, an ontologi­cal or metaphysical materialism—one of the ideas against which Marx fought most ardently. But there was an eighteenth-century philosopher very much worth studying because theological ethics up to today has tried so hard to refute ideas like his. This man's name is Helvétius (1715-1771), which in Latin simply means "Swiss." Helvétius was a Frenchman and a representative of materialism. He had the idea that the only principle by which man acts is that of self-love. He does not try very hard to analyze what this self-love is, but basically it means that nobody desires objects for their own sake. Helvétius' psychology was that every person loves things only for his own pleasure. There is no foundation for the idea of a moral conscience which distinguishes be­tween good and bad. The conscience is the result of punishment. So he formulated the thesis: "Remorse begins where impunity ends." That means that you repent for what you have done only if you are punished, but if you get away with it, there is no remorse. Psychologically, this is true to a great extent, but it is not always true, and it is not true as a matter of principle. According to Helvétius the greatest men are those with the greatest passions and with the power to satisfy them. Even if everything were equal in education, opportunity, and talent, there would remain the difference in passion. This power of passion would make all the difference in the world.

This element of power is one of the most important underground elements of the Enlightenment. It was largely repressed and kept underground. Machiavelli (1469-1527) was taboo in the eighteenth century as in the two preceding centuries, not because he was wrong but because those who acted according to his principles suppressed his

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theory. All possible forms of power were allowed, even poison and murder, with recourse to the ideological consolation that it is good for the state. All of the politicians were Machiavellian, but his ideas were not expressed. If they had expressed his ideas, they would have under­cut their own power. It is only effective when it is done without talking about it. So the struggle for power was a real underground element of the eighteenth century. A nineteenth-century philosopher came along and did what Machiavelli did, not in a diplomatic political form, but in a more universal metaphysical form. This was Friedrich Nietzsche with his idea of "will to power." Nietzsche blew the lid off the Enlighten­ment and brought this power element out into the open. He was one of the main forerunners of the existentialist philosophy of the twentieth century.

Of course, on this basis religion was denied. The power of the priest is based on the stupid credulity of the masses. Nietzsche also had to deny the church because it condemned passion as sin; whereas for him the great passions are what accomplish the most. The really great virtues which finally do the most for everybody are virtues of passion. Religion contradicts these passions and pleasures which are accessible to every­one; religion demands repression, so drop religion.

4. Progress Based on Immorality

Out of the underground of the Enlightenment a demonic naturalism arose, but could not come to the surface before the end of the eighteenth century. A large part of it was expressed in sexual ideas. In England it was expressed in a more philosophical way: Progress is based on immorality, on the negation of ethical principles. This idea was also in Helvétius, but it was formulated philosophically by Bernard de Mandeville (1670-1733). Like the Manchester theory of economics he held that because of necessity of economic exchange, it is best for the whole society if everyone follows his own pleasure instincts. Progress depends on those people who have a great desire for luxury and who are able to buy items of luxury for themselves. If we keep in mind that these ideas developed on the soil of English puritanism which for a long time had suppressed pleasure, we can appreciate the intrinsic conflict

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which resulted from now glorifying the strivings for luxury out of economic necessities. If the groups which indulged in luxury were to be eliminated, all social progress would break down. If privilege and status were negated, economy would be retarded. Thus the proposition was ad­vanced that the private vices of the powerful individuals who desired luxury, glory, and social status are the forces which keep the whole machinery of capitalistic society moving.

If we study these things, we see that the eighteenth-century society was anything but monolithic. The problems which we have come to know under the label of the existentialist analysis of the human predica­ment were part of the underground of the Enlightenment, and were there ready to come to the foreground later.

D. Trnl FULFILLERS AND CRITICS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Now let us deal with the three men to whom we referred earlier as the fulfillers and conquerors of the Enlightenment, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant.

1. Rousseau, the French Revolution, and Romanticism

I do not think I need to say much more about Rousseau as the father of the French Revolution. His principles led both to the American and to the French Revolution. They were the principles of natural reason. It was the use of critical reason, as I called it, derived ultimately from the Stoics, which made Rousseau the philosopher of the French Revolution. It was the application of the belief in harmony, that the will of the majority is the true will of society and the best for it. But in Rousseau we also have the other concept of nature. You remember that I spoke of the two concepts of nature, the material and the formal. The material concept of nature refers to nature outside of man, but includes man's physical body. The formal concept refers, for instance, to man's natural spirit. Rousseau as the father of the French Revolution was using the formal concept of nature when he identified nature with reason. He derived his notion of the natural or the rational from the idea of an original paradisiacal state of mankind, the state of original communism. He did not use the word "communism" but spoke rather of the "absence

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of private property" among the savages. Here nature existed in prera-tional form, in the form of the natural community of all beings together —a nature-produced ecology, as it is called today, where man is a part of the whole nature. This notion was intensified by the sentimentality about which I spoke, this longing to go back to nature. You can see this illustrated in Versailles if you visit the Petit Trianon which was built in order to play shepherd and shepherdess. This is a mixture of frivolity and a longing to escape civilization. It was Rousseauism that was expressed in these impressive buildings. One can see a strange combination of the two concepts of reason. There is the critical reason which laid the foundation for the revolutionary philosophy of the French Revolution, as well as for some of the fundamental principles of the American Constitution, and alongside of this there is the romantic sentimental longing for nature outside of men in which, as he believed, the "natu­ral" was embodied thousands of years ago before the beginning of civili­zation. With this second aspect of Rousseau's thinking, the Enlighten­ment philosophy which undergirded the French Revolution was con­quered by the Romanticism of the following period. So we have in Rousseau both the fulfillment and the conquest of the principle of reason in the eighteenth century.

2. Hume, the History of Religion, and Positivism

Now we come to the second thinker in whom I see the fulfillment and conquest of the Enlightenment. He is David Hume in England (1711-1776). The trends of the Enlightenment which were expressed in classic form by John Locke came to an end in Hume. In his episte­mology he criticized the confidence of the Enlightenment in its rational principles. He undercut the certainty of belief in the validity of what we have called the intuitive and critical concepts of reason. And along with this he undercut the metaphysical foundations of natural law on which the Enlightenment depended.

The main religious concepts of the Enlightenment theology were God, freedom, and immortality. Hume undercut them by his funda­mental epistemological skepticism. He represented a way of criticizing the rational certainty of the Enlightenment, which in England was felt

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like a death blow. Hume defeated the great attempt of modem men to treat all the problems of life on the basis of reason in its different meanings. In this respect he can be considered an important point of departure for what we call positivism in modern philosophy.

The bourgeoisie had conquered its foes in the various revolutions and was now increasing its position of power. If the principles by which the bourgeoisie gained power would still be valid in this situation, they could become threatening to the victorious bourgeoisie itself. Therefore, critical reason was replaced by a positivistic acceptance of observing and calculating reason. This signifies the great change from the critical passion of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment to the positivism of nominalistic philosophy in modern times. What does positivism mean after all? It means accepting what is positively given as such, observing and describing it without trying to criticize it or without trying to make a constructive system out of it. We have then in Hume a great change which became important also for the continent of Europe through Hume's impact on Kant.

This changed orientation is significant for the situation in the three countries which were the leading contexts of modern philosophical development: France, Great Britain, and Germany. in the France of Rousseau's time we have reason fighting and struggling against tradition up to the French Revolution. France was Catholic and the Enlighten­ment was nourished in part by the critical attitude of Freemasonry. Even today it splits the French mind into those who follow the Catholic Church and those who fight against it. The great struggles in the begin­ning of this century between church and state in France, the radical separation in every respect, and the inner division of the whole nation are understandable only on the basis of the leading ideas of the En­lightenment which conflicted with the authoritarian system of the Roman Church, and not only with its authority, but also with its con­tent. There are not many symptoms in the last fifty years of French history which suggest that this tremendous split can be overcome through a synthesis. That is the French situation even today.

The British situation is determined by Hume's positivistic attitude. Hume never attacked the established church, but he did attack the belief that you can justify it by reason. From the point of view of reason

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there was a thoroughgoing skepticism over against all the symbols of Christianity, but without that radical and hateful attack which took place in France. This also characterizes the situation in England today. We have there two attitudes which do not openly light against each other, but which run beside each other, almost without touching each other. On the one hand, there is the established church with all its traditions and symbolism guarded over by the Queen, the symbol of the empire, of the past, but not a real power. On the other hand, there is the majority of the intelligentsia which goes its own way without really attacking the established church but also without uniting with any of its traditional symbols. No synthesis is attempted. That is why the contri­bution of the established church in Great Britain to systematic theology is almost nonexistent. For some reason this does not apply equally to the Scottish Church. But in French Catholicism, especially in some of its apologetic works, a great contribution was made to theology. Also nine­teenth-century German theology made a great contribution because of its urgent need to find a synthesis.

Now in these days there is an interesting thing happening in Eng­land, something which I have become aware of recently because in a way I am involved in it. A book has appeared written by Bishop John Robinson of Woolwich, with the title Honest to God.10 Those of you who read the section on religion in Time magazine have no doubt heard of it. This was also the way in which I first heard of it before the Bishop sent me the book. He develops theological thoughts which were born in the German situation and which seek an answer to the conflicts between the religious tradition and the modem secular mind. Robinson refers a great deal to my writings and to the writings of Bonhoeffer, the theologian martyred by the Nazis, who wrote letters from prison.11 In these letters Bonhoeffer dealt with the same problem that I have dealt with in all my books, namely, the problem of seeking a solution to the conflicts between the religious tradition and the modern mind. Robin-son's formulations provoked much resistance because they undercut the traditionalism of the church. The church never took seriously the prob‑

10 Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1963.

11 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, translated by Reginald H. Fuller (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953).

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lem of finding a union of tradition with the modem mind and of showing the significance of the traditional symbols to modern man. And so a great shock was produced in the church by this book. Of course, in the British situation there have been some rare exceptions, like Arch­bishop Temple, who tried to take in some of the basic ideas of con­tinental theology. But on the whole what has been characteristic of the British situation is the unwillingness to sacrifice the security of its liturgically founded tradition for the sake of radical theological thought. Therefore, it has not given answers to the questions implied in the existence of modern man.

3. Kant, Moral Religion, and Radical Evil

I must now concentrate on Germany which has done far more than any other country for Protestant theology in the nineteenth and twen­tieth centuries. Of course, I must include Switzerland because linguisti­cally and theologically it belongs to the same situation. Karl Barth, for example, was for many years a professor of theology in Germany before he went back to Switzerland.

The man who was decisive for the theology of the nineteenth cen­tury, perhaps even more than Hegel or Schleiermacher, is Kant (1724­1804). He is the third of these three great figures who fulfilled and conquered the Enlightenment.

Kant followed Hume in his epistemological criticism of a philosophy which assumes that the religious ideas of God, freedom, and immortality can be established by rational arguments. This is impossible for the basic reason that man is finite. The finite mind is not able to reach the infinite. Almost everyone in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries accepted this criticism as a presupposition. You will not find a theolo­gian who has not accepted it, or modified it, and attempted to save what could be saved of natural theology after Kant's tremendous attack on it. Even a man like Karl Barth who is so firmly rooted in the classical tradition has fully accepted the Kantian criticism of natural theology.

The basis of this criticism of natural theology is Kant's doctrine of the categorical structure of the human mind. The categories of thought and

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the forms of intuition, time and space, constitute the structure of man's finitude, and therefore these categories are valid only for the under­standing of the interrelations of finite things. If one transcends the finite things and their interrelations, then the categories of causality, sub­stance, quantity and quality, etc., are not valid. The immediate conse­quence of this is that you cannot make God a first cause or a universal substance. These categories are valid for physical or other scientific cal­culations; they must be presupposed. In fact, they are presupposed by everybody. Even Hume who criticizes them presupposes them in his criticism. Nevertheless, you cannot go beyond them. The category of causality, for example, is a description of the interrelation of finite experiences. Time is the main form of finitude by its transitoriness, by the impossibility of fixing it in one moment. If you fix this moment, time is already gone. If the categories are not used in the realm of phenomena, those things which appear in time and space, they cannot be used at all. This means that the use of the concepts of God, freedom, and immortality is impossible in terms of rational structure, as natural theology tried to do.

This criticism is so fundamental and radical that Kant has been called the destroyer of the whole rational theology of the Enlightenment. But there is another implication in it. The first philosophical lecture I heard in my life was delivered by Julius Kaftan (1848-1926), the systematic theologian of the University of Berlin. I was perhaps sixteen years old and still in the Gymnasium. in Germany there is no college, but there is a Gymnasium which takes you till the eighteenth year, and then you go directly into the university. I was fascinated by this lecture and never forgot it. It was an oversimplification, but a very impressive one which had a great deal of truth in it. Kaftan at this time was the leading authority of the Kantian-Ritschlian school of theology. He said that there are three great philosophers and there are three great Christian groups: The Greek Orthodox whose philosopher's name is Plato; the Roman Catholics whose philosopher's name is Aristotle; and the Protes­tants whose philosopher's name is Kant. Now this alone would be very interesting because now in the ecumenical movement Plato, Aristotle, and Kant may come together to join in a heavenly disputation. However this may be, what is the basis for the statement that Kant is the philoso‑

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pher of Protestantism? The real basis is the fact that he is the philoso­pher who saw most clearly and sharply the finitude of man and man's inability of breaking through the limits of his finitude to that which transcends it, namely, to the infinite.

Kant's doctrine of categories and of time and space as the structure of man's mind, a structure which construes the world of the finite for him but beyond which man cannot go, is what gives him a certain kind of humility before reality. This humility is also found in empirical phi­losophy which accepts the empirically given phenomena. But in Kant it goes much deeper existentially than in ordinary empirical philosophy.

We are finite and must therefore accept our finitude. The Protestant idea that we can come to God only through God, that only grace can overcome guilt, sin, and our estrangement from God, and not we our­selves, and no good works can help us, this idea can be extended also to the realm of thought. We cannot break through to God even in the realm of thought. He must come to us. This was a very fundamental change in contrast to the metaphysical arrogance of the Enlightenment which believed in the power of reason—all the different forms of reason —to place man immediately in the presence of the Divine. Now men were in a prison, so to speak. Kant had placed man in the prison of finitude. All attempts to escape—which characterize both mysticism and rationalism—are in vain. The only thing we can do is to accept our finitude. Certainly in this way Kant represents to a great extent the attitude of Protestantism.

But could this be all? Is man nothing more than finite? Can philoso-phy

hilosophy even speak of finitude if there is not a point at which man tran­scends it? Animals are finite, but they do not know it. They are not above finitude at any point. Then Kant wrote his second critique, the critique of practical reason. This dealt with the idea of the moral im­perative. He called it the categorical or unconditional imperative. Here there is a breakthrough, not in the realm of theoretical thought but in terms of the experience of the unconditional command of the moral imperative. The breakthrough does not go directly to God. Kant gave an argument for the existence of God which falls under his own criticism and was never really accepted. But he showed one thing, that in the finite structure of our being there is a point of unconditional validity.

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This point is the moral imperative and the experience of its uncondi­tional character.

So we have no certainty about God or freedom or eternal life, but we have the certainty of belonging to something unconditional which we can experience as such. It is obvious that Kant did not have in mind particular contents of the moral imperative. He was educated enough in terms of ethnology to know the vast differences of content in the moral imperative from culture to culture. But the commanding form of this imperative, its unconditional character, is independent of any particular content. Thus not the content of the moral imperative but its radical form is what gives Kant the feeling of a breakthrough to that which transcends the prison of finitude in which the human mind has been placed by theoretical reason.

Another thing appeared in Kant's philosophy which came as a shock to his contemporaries, even to people who, like Goethe, had transcended the Enlightenment. The unconditional command of the moral impera­tive is given to us. But we who live in time and space have not taken it into our actual will. Although it is our essential will, that which makes our will the true will, our actual will is perverted. The principle of action or the maxim, as Kant called it, according to which we act is perverted. This he called the radical evil in man. Now remember that the most passionate point of attack of the Enlightenment against Chris­tianity dealt with the doctrine of original sin, or of radical evil, as Kant called it, or of universal tragic estrangement, as I prefer to call it. Radical evil means that evil goes to the radix, meaning "root" in Latin. Radical evil means that in the root of human existence there is a perver­sion of man's essential will.

Kant's idea of radical evil was an unforgivable sin from the point of view of the Enlightenment. Kant was attacked very much because he said this. But Kant was followed later on by several who even deepened it and carried it through to the early sources of existentialism, namely, the second period of Schelling the philosopher. Here we find in Kant a deviation from the Enlightenment that is very radical. Kant elaborated these ideas in his book, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, into a whole philosophy of religion. Or I would simply call it a little systematic theology. This systematic theology underlies much of what is

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going on in America even today, for Kant's ideas were developed further by Ritschl and his school and were transmitted into American theology by Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) and the Social Gospel move­ment. This movement was still very powerful up to the years before the second World War when Reinhold Niebuhr attacked it.

We must now briefly present a picture of Kant's theological ideas. Kant conceives of history as the ongoing struggle between evil, radical evil, and good. The good principle is present in mankind; it is identical with man's essential nature, which is good. It has appeared in the Christ who represents this essential goodness of men over against its perversion by radical evil. In the Christ the perversion was overcome; the unity of God and man was re-established. The victory over the evil principle by Jesus is the beginning of the kingdom of God on earth. The church is the invisible body of those who are determined by essential reason and who take into themselves the power of reunion with God. The transi­tion from the invisible church to something very mixed in the empirical churches is unavoidable. But the empirical church must always be criti­cized by the standard of the essential church of pure reason. For Kant this criticism is very radical, so radical that it is actually a negation of the empirical church. The empirical church is seen by him as a group ruled by superstitions and subjected to ecclesiastical authorities. There-fore

herefore every individual belonging to the essential church should try to overcome this visible church which destroys autonomy by heteronomous authority and destroys reason by superstitions. Everybody should try, and the church as a whole should try, to overcome these elements.

The sharpest attack was made against the priestly rule of the church. This for Kant was the absolute opposite of the autonomous rule of reason. From Kant's point of view all elements of immediacy between God and man were to be eliminated. I indicated this already when I spoke of his criticism of the arguments for the existence of God. Now we can see that there is a certain religious type which expresses itself here in Kant. He allows no room for the presence of the divine Spirit in the human spirit with its ecstatic implications. The mystical presence of the divine is radically denied. In the Ritschlian school which was influ­enced by Kant, the most radical attack on mysticism ever made in the history of Christianity was carried out by Ritschl and his disciples,

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including Harnack, the greatest figure of this school. What we are left with is a consistent type of finitude in which only the moral imperative elevates man above animal existence. Morality gives him dignity, and the struggle between good and evil is a moral one in which elements like grace and prayer are denied.

Grace supposedly devaluates man's autonomous freedom for good and evil, and prayer is an ecstatic experience of which one would be ashamed if someone caught him in the act by surprise. This was Kant's fundamental feeling. And, of course, ecstasy in nature itself, for which we have the word miracle, is an encroachment upon the universal essen­tial structure of reality. What remains is a philosophy of the kingdom of God. This kingdom is identical with the establishment of the moral man on earth. This notion includes not only individual morality, but also social justice and peace on earth. Kant wrote a classic little book on eternal peace which became the basis of the religion which influenced the Social Gospel movement at the end of the last and the beginning of this century.

Kant wrote a third critique, the Critique of Judgment. Here he tried with great caution to escape the prison of finitude. His followers in the classical period of German philosophy took it as a way out. From Kant's point of view it would be better to say that he was only enlarging and beautifying the prison, but not really breaking through it. But his fol­lowers considered it a breakthrough. In this Critique of Judgment Kant tried to bring together the two divergent critiques of reason, theoretical and practical reason. He showed possible unions between the two. These cannot, however, be affirmed assertively, but only in terms of possibility, or better, as a human vision of realities without knowing that the realities really correspond to the vision.

In this Critique Kant developed his notion of nature. Thereby he became the father of modern Gestalt theory reflected in all forms of organicism, and in the arts. In these two realms Kant saw that judg­ments are possible, the judgment that nature is an organism as a whole and in the organic structures and the judgment that in art there is an inner aim in every representation of meaning. Kant did not say that nature is actually like this, but always added a qualification in terms of an "as if" (als oh). He was completely overwhelmed by the Newtonian

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natural laws, by the mathematical, scientific approach to nature. But he said that although the real nature with which we have to deal is the nature of Newtonian physics, we can nevertheless consider nature as if there were structures, meaningful structures, or organisms, and as if the whole universe had the character of an organic structure of this kind.

So Kant, with caution and great restriction, introduced a principle which was picked up by Romantic philosophy as a main principle for its philosophy of nature, only minus the "as if." That is the big difference. From the presuppositions of Kant's prison of finitude you can only say "as if," but if at several points you can break through this prison, then you might be able to say what nature or reality really is like. This was the watershed between critical philosophy and later ontological phi­losophy.

Thus Kant stands like Rousseau and Hume as a fulfiller and critic of German Enlightenment. His greatness is that he understood man's creaturely finitude, of course, on the basis of his half-pietistic Protes­tantism. The pietistic element was removed, but existentialism and pietism have much to do with each other. I am reminded of the atheistic sermon which Heidegger once gave us in his pietistic categories. At any rate Kant was praised by all the theologians of the nineteenth century for establishing the insight into man's creaturely finitude, or as we would say today, into man's existential situation. But the human mind and the human soul could not remain on this level. Therefore, all movements of the nineteenth century, although based on Kant, would try to go beyond him. In my student years there was a slogan often repeated: Understanding Kant means transcending Kant. We all try to do this, and I will be showing you various ways in which theology has tried to do it.