2021/10/11

9] A History of Christian Thought Tillich Ch 3 The Classic-Romantic Reaction against the Enlightenment

 A History of Christian Thought: Ch 3 The Classic-Romantic Reaction against the Enlightenment




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

by Paul TillichCarl E. Braaten (Editor)
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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
4. The Synthesis of State and Church 424
5.     Providence, History, and Theodicy 426
6.    The Christ as Reality and Symbol 430
7.     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 III The Classic-Romantic Reaction against the Enlightenment

NAT

e have discussed two figures from France, Voltaire, the classical representative, and Rousseau, the fulfiller and conqueror of the En­lightenment; and two from England, the classical figure, John Locke, and then the fulfiller and conqueror, David Hume. From Germany I have presented only the fulfiller and conqueror of the Enlightenment, Kant, but not the classical figure, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

A. LESSING, HISTORICAL CRITICISM, AND THE REDISCOVERY OF

SPINOZA

Lessing's was a very universal mind. He was a poet, dramatist, philosopher, and theologian. He stirred up one of the greatest storms in the history of Protestant theology, when as a librarian in a small Ger­man town he edited a book written by a historian, Reimarus.' Rei-marus started this modem search for the histofical Jesus. Lessing, the librarian, published certain of Reimarus' fragments of research on thelife of Jesus which he had conducted by applying radical historical criticism. It was very dangerous to publish them. Reimarus had already died, but his manuscript was in the hands of Lessing. The storm was tremendous when these fragments were published. The chief pastor of Hamburg, Goetze, tried to defend orthodoxy, with some good and some bad arguments. But the whole intellectual climate was irreversibly changed. No theologian could thereafter approach the documents of the story of Jesus without being aware of the questions asked by Reimarus concerning the reliability of the Synoptic Gospels.[368]

1 Hermann Samuel Reimarus' studies were published by Lessing after the death of Reimarus in 1768, in a collection called the Wolfenbi4ttel Fragments. The English translation is entitled The Object of Jesus and His Disciples, as Seen in the New Testament, edited by A. Voysey (1879). Cf. also Albert Schweitzer's book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the original German title of which is Von Reimarus zu Wrede.


Thus the fundamental problem of historical criticism arose in the middle of the eighteenth century. People were shocked in that time just as many lay people were shocked today when the Dead Sea Scrolls were published. Except for the fact that we know more about first-century Palestine, the situation is not basically different so far as theology is concerned. Lessing's courage to edit these radical fragments of research was one of the things which made him great.

Another important thing about Lessing is his classic expression of progressivistic thought about philosophy and religion in his little book, The Education of the Human Race. His idea was that mankind has ar­rived at the age of reason. The description of this reason as autonomous is very similar to the idea of the great prophet of the twelfth century, Joachim de Fiore, who prophesied the coming of an age of the divine Spirit in which everyone will be taught directly by the Spirit and no authorities will be needed any more. I told you about the intimate rela­tion between this kind of spirit-mysticism and rationalism. Well, Lessing is a great representative of this unity. The age of reason is for Lessing the actualization of the age of the Spirit. He refers directly to the move­ment of Joachim de Fiore as among his predecessors.

Another fascinating idea comes up in Lessing, as in other enlightened people of that age. That is the idea of reincarnation of men. People who had died before the age of reason had dawned would return so that they could participate in the fulfillment of true humanity. What seems to be a very irrational idea is used to answer a difficult problem for all progres-sivistic thinking. If we say that in the future sometime there will be an age of reason and peace and justice etc., we must ask about those who die before the coming of that age. Are they excluded from fuIfil1ment

Reaction Against Enlightenment  369

If there is no transcendent fulfillment, they are excluded. And for the people of the Enlightenment, of course, there was no fulfillment. At least, it was not as unambiguous as it was in the Christian tradition. So they had to answer in terms of time and space. The idea of rebirth or reincarnation was the only one which could help them.

Perhaps we can add still another thing about Lessing. He wrote a play, Nathan the Wise, which has been translated and often performed. In this play he describes the encounter between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The wise Jew is the hero of the whole play. The theme of the play is the relativism of religions. In the history of Christianity it was the encounter with Islam which brought the question of the relativism of Christianity itself to the fore. Christianity became fanatical because now it was threatened. Paganism did not represent a real religious threat, but Islam did, and conquered the eastern half of Christianity. This raised the question of the relation between these two historical religions.

Then a last point. On his deathbed, Lessing had a conversation with the philosopher Jacobi (1743-18 19)2 who played an important role at that time. After Lessing's death Jacobi published that in this conversa­tion Lessing had acknowledged a great admiration for Spinoza. Accord­ing to this report Lessing even went so far as to call himself a Spinozist. This was a scandal. At that time spiritual things were taken so seriously that the idea that a man like Lessing, the great figure of the Enlighten­ment, should have been a Spinozist came as a great shock. Spinoza was taboo, not only to Christian and Jewish Orthodoxy—he had been thrown out by the Jewish congregation in Amsterdam—but also to the Enlightenment, because the innermost center of Spinoza's thought, the volcano beneath his frozen geometrical system, was Jewish mysticism of the Middle Ages. This can be traced historically. If you read Spinoza's ethics not in terms of the validity of his definitions and conclusions which were given more geometrico (in geometrical fashion), as he called it, but in terms of the underlying passion, in terms of the highest aim which is placed before man, namely, to participate in the eternal love with which God loves himself, then you see how pertinent it is to speak of a mystical volcano hidden beneath a geometrically frozen sur­face.

The eventual result was that Spinoza was received more and more widely. Schleiermacher even wrote a hymn to Saint Spinoza. He really was a "saint" in his life as much as any Catholic saint ever was. Schlei-ermacher asked his contemporaries to sacrifice in thought and in feeling to this saint who was a lonely man, and in his loneliness was one of the deepest and greatest thinkers of all times. Yet all these men were Kant-ians. Kant's Copernican revolution, as he himself called it, had shaken all the philosophical foundations. How could Spinoza then be received on a Kantian basis?

2 F. H. Jacobi followed Kant in removing religious certainty from the sphere of reason to that of faith. He is often quoted for claiming to have been a "pagan with his head, but with his heart a Christian."

[370]

B. THE Synthesis OF SPINOZA AND KANT

The relation between Spinoza and Kant became the philosophical and theological problem. Why should this be so difficult? Well, on the one side is Spinoza's mystical pantheism, as it has sometimes been called. This is the idea that there is one eternal substance, and that everything that exists is but a mode of this substance. This universal substance has innumerable attributes, but we know only two of them, mind and extension, as Descartes, Spinoza's teacher, had said. This one substance is present in everything. Here we have what I would call the principle of identity. Everything has a point of identity in the eternal divine substance which underlies everything. The identity between the finite and the infinite is complete. It was this mystical background which accounts for the fascination which thinkers in the following periods up to today have had in Spinoza's philosophy. This is true of Goethe who was perhaps even closer to Spinoza than Lessing was.

Now against this mystical pantheistic system stands Kant's philoso­phy, which emphasizes the principle of distance, the principle of fini­tude which man must accept, the transcendence of the divine beyond man's grasp and lying outside his center. This finitude of man and his inability of ever reaching the infinite is the motive in all Kant's criti­cisms. So all of Kant's followers and the whole continental philosophy faced this problem: How to unite mysticism and the Protestant principle; how to unite the principle of identity, the participation of the divine ineach of us, and the principle of detachment, of moral obedience, with­out participation in the divine.[371]

My doctoral dissertation was about this tension. It focused on one particular man, Schelling, the predecessor, friend, and later enemy of liege1. I tried to discover how Schelling sought to solve the problem of this tension. The title of my book was Mystik uiul Schuldbewusstsein in Schellings philosophischer Entwicklung, 1912. Here you see these two things. More abstractly you can express it by the principle of iden­tity in relation to the principle of contrast, or even of contradiction, in a moral sense at least. Here we have the fundamental motives in attempt­ing to create the great synthesis following Kant. It started in part already during his lifetime, and then was fully developed after his death, coming to its conclusion in Hegel and Schleiermacher. Later the great synthesis was destroyed, partly at least in the name of the slogan "back to Kant." The slogan meant that we should give up the principle of identity, accept finitude and have a religion of moral obedience.

I call this the great synthesis of Kant and Spinoza, a synthesis which, of course, includes many other things. This is the synthesis of the principle of identity and the principle of detachment or contrast. The philosophers of Romanticism, and above all Schleiermacher, the great theologian of Romanticism, are all characterized by this attempt at synthesis. They were Protestant theologians; they had learned about Kant's destruction of natural theology; nobody doubted this any more. On the other hand they came from mystical traditions. For instance, Schleiermacher came from the tradition of Zinzendorfian pietism. All these theologians had the task of uniting these seemingly irreconcilable contrasts.

The dynamo of the history of theology ever since, going through the whole nineteenth century, is the tension between these two things. If you take a seminar on Karl Barth, you will see again the protest against mysticism, against any form of the principle of identity. But there are also theologies which come from the union of Kant and Spinoza.

Mysticism and Guilt-Consciousness in Sche fling's Philosophical Development (1912). This book has not been translated into English.

372            A History of Christian Thought

C. THE NATURE OF ROMANTICISM

Before we deal with Schleiermacher, we have to discuss what Romanticism is, in order to understand what people mean when they speak of Schleiermjcher as a romantic philosopher. Karl Barth, who dislikes Romanticism very much, has said that we are all romantics. That means that he was fair enough to acknowledge even his own dependence on the great anti-Enlightenment romantic tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In order to speak about the nature of Romanticism I first need, as always, to make a semantic statement. When I came to America, I heard Reinhold Niebuhr, my friend and colleague at Union Theological Seminary in New York speak of Romanticism in terms of what I usually called utopianism. Utopianism is the idea of a fulfilled society in the future and of an original, just society along the lines of Rousseau's idea of the noble savages. Niebuhr called this Romanticism. In con­tinental Europe nobody would have referred to utopianism by the term Romanticism, although certain elements in Rousseau, such as the senti­mental desire of returning to nature, had a relation to actual Roman­ticism. But the Romanticism of the main countries in which it appeared, of France, England, and Germany, is really quite different. Now I want to show you what some of the constitutive elements of Romanticism are, by asking, what made theologians and philosophers like Schelling, Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and Rothe all romanticists? What produced the great romantic poetry in Germany? How did Romanticism influence the naturalistic philosophy of the late nineteenth century of men like Nietzsche? And—this should not be forgotten—what produced the romantic music in people like Schubert and Schumann and up to Brahms?

1. The Infinite and Finite   [373]

 was born in 1401 at Cues (Cusa) on the Moselle. He is a very impor‑

tant man, but better known in the twentieth century than in the nine­teenth. In the nineteenth century under the power of neo-Kantian philosophy, Descartes was almost exclusively regarded as the founder of modern philosophy. But in our century it has become clear that we need to know more than merely the creator of the method of modern philoso­phy, namely, Descartes, who influenced both empiricism and rational­ism. We also need to know the one who represents the metaphysical foundations of the modern mind, and this man is Nicholas of Cusa.

The philosopher who helped to rediscover Nicholas of Cusa is Ernst Cassirer,4 who also came to this country with the help of Hitler. I myself learned of Nicholas of Cusa very early in my thinking through the influence he had on the line of thought which led to Schelling.

Very much like Descartes, this man was basically mathematically minded, but he used his mathematical education not in a methodological but in an ontological direction. His main principle was the coincidentia oppositorum (the coincidence of opposites), the coincidence of the finite and the infinite. In everything finite the infinite is present, namely, that power which is the creative unity of the universe as a whole. And in the same way the finite is in the infinite as a potentiality. In the world the divine is developed; in God the world is enveloped. The finite is in the infinite potentially; the infinite is in the finite actually. They are within each other. He expresses this in geometrical terms by saying that God, or better, the divine, is the center and the periphery of everything. He is in everything as the center, although he transcends everything; but he is also the periphery because he embraces everything. They are removed from him and at the same time he is in them.

It is very interesting that Martin Luther in his discussions of the presence of the divine in the sacramental materials of bread and wine used similar formulations, probably without any dependence on Nicholas of Cusa. It is doubtful that Luther knew him, but he had similar earlier sources available to him, that is, in German and ultimately neo‑Platonic mysticism.[374]  

4 Ernst Cassirer's books on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are entitled: Individual and Cosmos in the Philosophy of the Renaissance (1927); The Platonic Renaissance in England (1932); and The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932). 

Luther said that God is nearer to everything than anything is to itself. He is fully in every grain of sand, but the whole world cannot comprehend him. He transcends everything finite, al­though being in it. So we have here a common development and this common development underlies the modern mind in its ultimate con­cern, so to speak, in the fundamental principles of interpreting God and the world.

This represents a tremendous change from the common view that God is in heaven, but only his active powers are on earth. For Nicholas and for Luther on his mystical side—a mysticism which at first was open, but later hidden—they are within each other. The modern mind overleaps the strict dualism of a divine sphere in heaven and a human sphere on earth which developed in the later ancient world. The divine is not in some place alongside of the world or above the world, but is present in everything human and natural. In some respects one can say that modern naturalism was born out of the mystical idea of the coinci­dence of opposites. This was not simply a methodological approach to reality, rationalistic or empiricistic. Behind it was an experience that nature is not outside of creative reality, but is potentially before the creation in God—of course this is not meant temporally but logically—and then after the creation the divine is within it. This means that the finite is not only finite, but in some dimension it is also infinite and has the divine as its center and ground.

This principle of the relation between the finite and the infinite is the first principle of Romanticism on which everything else is dependent. Without it Romanticism and a theologian like Schleiermacher become completely unintelligible.

Now let me briefly indicate the line of thought coming from the early Renaissance (Nicholas of Cusa) and going into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The next person whom we must mention is Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the martyr of this Renaissance natural­ism. His was an ecstatic naturalism, not a calculating naturalism of subjecting nature to analysis and technology. Bruno repeatedly spoke about the enthusiasm for the universe, and this brought him to his death by the Inquisition. This could happen because the whole system of authority was based on the principle of detachment, of nonparticipation,the principle of authority, of mediation between God and man. The mystical inwardness of Nicholas of Cusa was not accepted. [375]

Nicholas of Cusa was able to be one of the most influential cardinals in Rome without being attacked, although he wrote something which was even more dangerous than almost anything that Giordano Bruno wrote, namely, De Pace Fidei.5 In this book he wrote about the peace of faith in heaven where there is an assembly in which it is taught that the Logos, the divine word, is present in every religion—in accordance with the interpretation of Paul—and that therefore the struggle between the religions is unnecessary. This idea of a peace based on something that transcends the particular expressions of the religions was a dangerous idea. It touched on an issue which had become burning ever since the encounter with Islam and the continuing theological discussion with Judaism in medieval Christianity. Nicholas could get away with holding such ideas in the early Renaissance, but Bruno became a victim of the counter-Reformation, perhaps because the church felt that his enthusi­astic naturalism would remove the divine out of reality.

In England we have Shaftesbury (1671-1713), a great representa­tive of the principle of harmony, who applied it to an organismic interpretation of nature. in Germany the most representative of this line of thought was not the philosopher Schelling, but the poet Goethe. Here again we see an enthusiasm for nature. Goethe expressed this not only in his poetry but also in his natural scientific inquiries which anticipated to a large extent the modern Gestalt theory. According to this theory nature is not a causal assemblage of isolated atoms, but is composed of structures. One must look for these structures, these original phenomena, in nature. In the psychological realm these are the archetypes of Hume. Both these original phenomena of Goethe and the archetypes of Hume go back to Plato's ideas or essences which transcend every empirical reality.

So we can say that in Goethe the motifs of Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, and the Earl of Shaftesbury were combined to form an image of reality which was overcome in the second half of the nine­teenth century by the empirical sciences. But there were continual reac‑tions to the empirical sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth cen­turies. There was Nietzsche, for example, an ecstatic naturalist like Giordano Bruno, but without the mystical elements.[376]   

5 On the Peace of Faith.

        

In Goethe the idea of the infinite in nature was certainly present, but it was present in a balance between the infinite and the finite. We call this the classical attitude of Goethe, a development which is altogether against the Enlightenment. In Goethe's attitude toward nature the Greek spirit is still alive, namely, the balance of elements in the classical form. Of course, in one sense this was not possible any more. All attempts on the basis of Christianity to return to Greece have proved to be failures. You cannot return. Modern humanism is and remains Chris­tian humanism, and the most anti-Christian of the humanists, people like Nietzsche, often happen to be sons of Protestant clergymen, as Nietzsche actually was. The Christian substance cannot be wholly lost. It is not by chance that many of the classical thinkers, like Schelling and others, came from the homes of Protestant ministers. The Protestant ministers in the rather barbaric Protestant countries in Northern Europe were the bearers of the higher culture. Often they were grasped by the spirit of Greece to such a degree that they wanted simply to return. But this is never possible.

In any case, the problem of the infinite and the finite was solved during Goethe's brief classical period. This was not the period of the later or early Goethe, but the middle-aged Goethe. It is an interesting thing that the classical periods are always like the upper edge of a roof; there is much which goes on before they can appear. There must be Enlightenment as in Greek sophism; there must be Sturm und Drang (storm and stress), a youth movement, then an intellectual movement. Only after these stages could Goethe come to his classical period. The same thing was true of Plato. The classical Plato is to be found in the middle dialogues. We find the same thing in Greek sculpture. The classical period endures only a short time between the archaic and the naturalistic period. Thus the classical period was represented only during a short period of Goethe's life. Then Romanticism broke through. Romanticism broke the classical balance of the infinite and the finite, by the dynamic power of the infinite which transcends every finite form.  [377]

Here we have another characteristic of fully developed Romanticism. In this sense we are all romantics, because our thinking is dynamic and does not want to bind itself to any given form. Behind this is Kant's doctrine of freedom which had a great influence on Romanticism, espe­cially in the form in which it was interpreted by Fichte (1762-1814) in his philosophy of the absolute ego. The ego is creative, and everything in the world is only a limit to the ego; but the innermost nature of reality is freedom. This he learned from Kant and his doctrine of practi­cal reason. Fichte construed the whole world as a fight between the principle of freedom in every individual self and the resistance of a nonego, an "id" as Freud would call it, against that freedom. This fight is going on all the time. Here you have the romantic dynamics breaking through every particular form. This has certain implications. Take, for instance, a social structure in which one lives today, a suburban struc­ture in America in the 1960's. How can one get beyond this structure? By imagination. Romanticism is a philosophy of imagination. He who is not able to transcend the given situation in which he lives through his own imagination finds himself imprisoned in that situation.

America never had a real period of Romanticism. It imported some­thing from England, but very little of Romanticism influenced the whole life of the educated people. This has had the consequence of underestimating the imagination, of drying out the imagination which alone can transcend the given state of things and conceive the infinite potentialities given in every moment. So you have here another conse­quence of the victory of the infinite over the finite. But this infinite was not, as it still was in Nicholas of Cusa, in the dimension of going up and going down, with the presence of the divine in the individual in a more or less static way, even if there was an enthusiasm for the cosmos. But modern Romanticism has behind itself the baroque period of the modern world, which had the dynamics which drive into the horizontal line. So this is not only the infinite above, but also the infinite ahead, presenting in each new moment an infinite variety of possibilities for new creativity. The idea of creativity, of cultural creativity, is a romantic element which has entered this country also. It is the Fichtean and generally romantic idea that culture is human creativity, and that this creativity is infinite in the horizontal line. [378]

We have here then the breaking through of the infinite against the balance it had in the classical criticism or negation of the Enlighten­ment, the romantic breakthrough of the balance into the horizontal line. This must be understood if we are to understand the basis for the rediscovery of history in Romanticism. The whole understanding of history is something which has to do with Romanticism. Before dealing with this we must deal with another point, the emotional and aesthetic elements in Romanticism.

2. The Emotional and the Aesthetic Elements in Romanticism

Romanticism is, as I said, against the Enlightenment. There is no lack of emotion in the Enlightenment, but it is subjective or sentimental emotion. We have the tears which are shed all the time. Romanticism is not sentimental because it does not have to complement, so to speak, the rationality of Enlightenment, the calculating and fighting critical reason. If the infinite is in everything finite, then the awareness of the infinite in the finite is intuitive. This is complete mysticism, or natural mysti­cism. Mystical intuition is not divorced from emotion; it objectifies emo­tion by taking it into the very act of intuition. In Romanticism there is the emotion which is not sentimental, but which is revealing and has the character of the Platonic eros. It is no mere coincidence that Schleiermacher was the great romantic translator of Plato. If you read this, you will see that it is a romantic interpretation of Plato. It is a sound translation, but translation is always interpretation.—Probably you have to be born German in order to feel this in the language which Schleiermacher uses.—It is the language of eros which runs through all of Schleiermacher's translation of Plato. It is the creative eros in which the emotional and the cognitive elements are united in the intuition of the infinite in the finite.

This has immediate consequences for the aesthetic element in Ro-manticism.

omanticism. Romanticism looks at the world through aesthetic categories. Kant had the natural scientific analysis of nature together with the moral imperative with its categorical or unconditional character. In his third critique, the Critique of Judgment, Kant found a principle for uniting the theoretical and the practical reason in the aesthetic intuitionof reality. In this he found that which transcends the scientific con­sideration of nature, the Newtonian as it was called at that time, as well as the moral principles. [379]

 The moral always commands while the theoreti­cal analyzes. Is there a union between them? Is there something in nature which, so to speak, fulfills the commands of the moral imperative and transcends the mere scientific analysis of nature? He discovered, as I told you, the organic in nature and the aesthetic in culture. It is what at that time could still be called the beautiful, but I would call it the expressive, in which the two are united.

Romanticism, therefore, used Kant's Critique of Judgment more than anything else because there Kant offered the possibility of accepting the fundamental restrictions of his previous Critiques and at the same time of going beyond them.

This means that romantic philosophy replaced religion by aesthetic intuition. Whenever you find the statement made by artists or in works on art that art is religion itself, you are in the sphere of the romantic tradition. For Schelling, in his aesthetic period, art is the great miracle, the unique miracle in all history. It is a miracle which would have to appear only once in the world to convince us of the presence of the ultimate. He calls this the identity transcending subject and object, transcending the theoretical and the practical. We find the same aesthetic intuition of the universe in Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion. Aesthetic intuition as participating intuition takes art seriously as revelatory.

3. The Turn to the Past and the Valuation of Tradition

The idea of the presence of the infinite in the finite gave Romanti­cism the possibility of a new relationship to the past. Here the conflict with Enlightenment was especially great. For the Enlightenment the past was more or less in bondage to superstition. Now that the age of reason has appeared the superstitions of the Middle Ages have dis­appeared. This was the Enlightenment's view of history. If you read Lessing's little writing on the education of mankind, you will find this idea that at the present time the age in which reason is victorious has begun. Romanticism, on the other hand, had a very different attitude

[380]         

toward the past. The infinite was also present in the past periods of history through expressive forms of life and their great symbols. They had their revelatory character also. This means that history, the histori­cal past, be taken seriously. Tradition could be important for Romanti­cism, whereas the Enlightenment was merely the critic of tradition, as Protestantism also was in some respects.

This new attitude toward history was very important for historiog­raphy. The great nineteenth-century historians were influenced by these romantic ideas. In the past the infinite is present; it has revealed itself in the Middle Ages as well as in Greece, and therefore the idea of a totally new beginning now in the age of reason appears fantastic. Goethe ridiculed this idea in his Faust, and so did all the romantics. Many of them tried to go back to the Middle Ages to re-establish its culture. They also applied their philosophical concept of the organic to society. They had the idea of an organic society. The French religious socialist, Saint-Simon (1760-1825), distinguished critical and organic periods in history. It was very easy to show that the Middle Ages formed an organic period. Everything had its special place and function in the organism. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, on the other hand, formed a critical period in which the organic structures were attacked, because of their deterioration in terms of tyranny, superstition, etc. Saint-Simon and the religious socialists expected the coming of a new organic period. Most of the later European religious socialist movements—and there have been many of them—have been dependent on this idea of an organic society over against the atomized mass society. This was the idea of Saint-Simon and his school; this was the idea of the later religious socialists in the various European countries, including the religious socialist movement in which I participated.°[381]

6 See below, for a discussion of Religious Socialism, PP.234-239.

 

Without the rediscovery of the organic in society and the presence of the divine in the past periods of history, these developments could not have happened. Here again I see something characteristic for the American situation which has had an almost unbroken tradition of Enlightenment up to today. Romanticism never really broke through into the American tradition. It has appeared in some literary manifesta­tions, but it has never been a transforming power as in Europe.

What in Europe was seen as politically conservative is here extreme liberalism, and what is here called liberalism is closer to socialism in Europe. The terminology and the feeling toward life are different. One of the conse­quences of this is that history has not been taken as seriously as it has been in Europe. Even the empirical historians of today do not take it very seriously; seriously means existentially significant for our own existence here and now. When the romantic historians dealt with classical Greece or the Middle Ages, they of course also wanted to discover the facts, but this was not their main interest. Their chief interest was in the meaning of past history for the self-interpretation of man today.

If these existential questions are not asked, the study of history merely deals with the facts of the past instead of dealing with our own situation in terms of the past. I believe that the resistance of American students against taking history seriously is due in part to the fact that Romanticism has never had a profound influence in this country. The American Constitution is a great political document of the Enlighten­ment; you do not find many romantic elements in it. This is not by chance. The Enlightenment feeling that a new beginning has been inaugurated is part of the American experience.

Therefore, the concept of conservatism is very ambiguous. In Europe conservatism is always associated with a romantic affirmation of the past. It means keeping the traditions, finding the infinite in the religious and cultural traditions of the past, longing for the Middle Ages, for primi­tive Christianity or Greek culture. The word "conservatism" in this country, on the other hand, does not have the same traditional meaning. It has more to do with the individualism of the capitalistic society. This would never be called conservatism in Europe. Thus it can happen that the term "conservatism" can be used for simple fascist movements, like the John Birch Society, as I learned during my two months in Cali­fornia. These movements have nothing to do with conservatism. They are based on the mass culture of the present and wish to exclude all liberal elements, not for the sake of the Middle Ages, or some similar epoch in the past, but for the sake of maintaining the rule of the upper classes in capitalistic society. It helps to know history to understand the meaning of terms we use so freely.[382]

4. The Quest for Unity and Authority

I said that Romanticism is a longing to return to the Middle Ages and its organic structure, but this organic structure is always identical with a hierarchical structure. It is interesting that there is some degree of nonauthoritarianism in the organic character of the larger cities, and only to a limited extent could we call it organic. On the whole the organic has a hierarchical character, which can easily be derived from the concept of the organic in nature. Man as an organism is also hierarchically construed; his centered self is the top of the hierarchy which directs everything. So the idea of the re-establishment of author­ity was a powerful element in Romanticism, and out of this came the reaction against the democratic tendencies of the American and French Revolutions. We see that reaction very clearly in the German type of Romanticism, but also in France. If you want to understand a figure like Charles de Gaulle, you must understand the romantic traditions and the desire for a hierarchically ruled organism which have broken out again and again in France.       -

The hierarchy was understood not so much as an isolated political hierarchy, but as a religious political hierarchy, a return to the reunion of the political and religious realms. Richard Rothe (1799-1867), for instance, a pupil of Schleiermacher, was very much interested in the idea of a culture in which church and state become identical again, just the opposite of the American principle of separation of church and state. The state would become the comprehensive form of all culture. We have the same thing in Hegel when he called the state the divine on earth. But this must not be misunderstood. If such men speak of the State as the divine on earth, or if Bonhoeffer speaks of the secular world and not the religious sphere as the real manifestation of the divine, then they are not thinking of the state as an administration in the hands of politicians. That is the liberal democratic concept of the state, presuppos­ing a separation of church and state. Instead they are thinking of the state as the unity of all cultural activities. This is a cultural concept of the state. The political side is less decisive than the religio-cultural side.

Reaction Against Enlightenment 383

Obviously, if you have this concept of state in mind, you can go back romantically to the Greek city-state in which there was no religion alongside political life. The whole political life was permeated with the presence of the gods and the functionaries of the city were also the priests. If you read the early fragments of Hegel, you will find a romantic description of the Greek city-state, involving the identity of state and church as a most important part of the whole idea. Novalis (1772-1801), one of the romantic poets, wrote a famous pamphlet or essay entitled Die Christenheit oder Europa7 in which he described this reunion of everything cultural within the religious in all Europe, overcoming the boundary lines separating European countries, and the re-establishment of a Europe in terms of a religio-political authority similar to the pope. Here in this essay Novalis described the image a romantic man had of the future society.

5. The Negative and the Demonic in Romanticism

Now let me say a few things about the negative and demonic side of Romanticism. The first thing that we must emphasize is that there are two periods in Romanticism. I learned this very early through my study of Schelling who in his own development is the prototype of these two lines. Schleiermacher and the early Schelling belong entirely to the first part, but then the later Schelling and Kierkegaard belong to the second part. Perhaps one can say that in the twenties of the nineteenth century the transition from the first to the second half occurred. The first period of Romanticism stressed the presence of the infinite in the finite. We will see what that means for Schleiermacher's development. in the second period something else happened. The depth dimension, the dimension of the infinite, reaches not only up to the divine, but also down to the demonic. This discovery by romantic poets and philos­ophers is extremely important for our situation because in this second period of Romanticism we have the pre-formation of almost all the ideas of twentieth-century existentialism.[384]

7Christianity or Europe, untranslated.

The existentialism of the twentieth century lives not only in terms ofKierkegaard, but also and primarily in terms of the second period of Schelling, who had a decisive influence on Kierkegaard and many others. Here the darkness in man's understanding and in the human situation becomes manifest. The concept of the unconscious is of decisive importance for the whole following century into our time. This concept is not an invention of Freud, as I think all of you know. It is actually older than the second period of Romanticism. We have it indirectly in people like Jacob Boehme and Franz Baader and others, but most important perhaps was its rediscovery and expression in Schelling's philosophy of nature. He construed the whole philosophy of nature as a conflict between an unconscious and a conscious principle. From this point much of Schopenhauer's philosophy of the unconscious will developed, and Freud discovered this category of the unconscious in Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), Schopenhauer's pupil. Then Freud developed it further in his psychological and empirical methods, bringing it into the center of our attention today. But the real discovery of the unconscious, and its expression in powerful philosophical terms against the Cartesian philosophy of consciousness, were the work of the second period of Romanticism.

Now the negative element became in Romanticism a demonic ele­ment. It reveals the demonic depths of the human soul, something of which the Enlightenment was only dimly aware. After the presence of the infinite in the finite was formulated, then the presence of the demonic in the finite was expressed. The struggle between the good and the bad principles in Kant's philosophy of religion now became the struggle between the divine and the demonic. In spite of all the naturalism which runs through the whole nineteenth centuly, we have a tremendously intense awareness of the demonic forces in reality during this same period, often in a way that was prophetic of the radical outbreak of these forces in our century.

Question: You spoke of Romanticism as the breaking-through of the infinite against the classical balance in the horizontal line. What do you mean by the horizontal line?[385]

Answer: This question reminds me of the fact that I neglected to

speak on one particular aspect of the romantic thinking, namely, the concept of irony. There is especially one man who is important for this. His name is Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), a friend of Schelling and a member of the Berlin circle of romanticists. Something typical of the romantic period was expressed in his attitude. That was irony. The word "irony" means that the infinite is superior to any finite concretion and drives beyond to another finite concretion. The ego of the romanti­cist in Schlegel's sense is free from bondage to the concrete situation. A concrete situation means both the spiritual situation, a concrete form of faith, and the situation in relation to human beings, for instance, sexual relations which played a great role in the romantic attitude, or the experience of ecstatically transcending any particular finite situation. All these things were implied in the romantic concept of irony. It must be understood in terms of the fundamental principle of the relation between the infinite and the finite. I said that in Goethe's classical period we have a balance, the desire to have a form in which the infinite is actualized in the finite, whereas Romanticism drives beyond any particular actualization of the infinite in a finite situation.

Now this romantic irony breaks through the sociological forms, for instance, the traditional Lutheran paternalism, the idea of the family, the relation of parents to children, the political stability, etc. All these forms now became questionable. Every special content in the traditions of the European countries became a matter of "yes" and "no." Irony does not mean simply an attack; there is a "yes" in it, but the "no" is pre­dominant. It always says "no" as well to a concrete solution to life's problems.

In these avant-garde romantic groups there was an ironical transcend­ing, a going beyond, the given forms of social existence. A consequence of this was the dissolution of traditional ethics. Wherever you find this, it has to do with this romantic ironical elevation of the individual subject beyond the given forms. But if this happens, then with the loss of concreteness a sense of emptiness sets in. Schlegel had the feeling that by undercutting the forms of life, the beliefs, the ethical ties to family, etc., a situation arises in which there is no content, no obligatory contents. This results in a feeling of emptiness with respect to the meaning of life. You see now that the central problem of the twentieth

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century, namely, the question of the meaning of life, the problem of emptiness in the younger generation, is not as original in our century as we are inclined to believe. It also came out very strongly in the second period of Romanticism. I can formulate the result in one sentence. Schlegel, the most refined critical representative of romantic irony, be­came a Roman Catholic. This means that out of the feeling of emptiness he gained the desire to subject himself to an authoritarian system in which the contents were already given to him. This is a radical situation which has been repeated again and again among the European intelli­gentsia, both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially after the World Wars, after the great catastrophes in Europe. Many people out of a sense of meaninglessness or lack of any contents which are normative, binding, and productive of community, etc., returned to the Roman Catholic Church as the embracing and protecting mother. This is what I meant by the breakthrough of Romanticism into the horizontal line. It is this dissatisfaction with any concrete situation, this ironical undercutting of everything, not in terms of a direct revolutionary attack, and not in order to transform reality as bourgeois society tried to do, but in terms of questioning, undercutting, etc., in terms of "yes" and "no."

We have much of this in Kierkegaard too. He was far from being a revolutionary. Politically he was conservative. But his ability to question every state of life he learned from the basic ironic attitude of Romanti­cism.

* * * * * * * * * *

D. THE CLASSICAL THEOLOGICAL SYNTHESIS: FRIEDRICH
SCHLEIERMACHER

We will devote a lecture or more to the discussion of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Everything we have lectured on so far is a necessary presupposition for understanding him. If you do not have this presupposition firmly in mind, but simply pick up some phrases from the textbooks, it would be better for you to forget about him altogether. Then it is meaningless; you cannot defend him and you cannot attack him either. If you attack him, it is all wrong, and if you

Reaction Against Enlightenment  387

try to defend him, you have no power to do so. You must understand an idea out of the sources from which it comes. You must know the negative implications, the struggle in which a person was involved, the enemies against which he fought, and the presuppositions which he accepted. If you do not know these things, everything becomes distorted when dealing with an important figure like Schleiermacher. That is the reason I did not begin with him in lecturing on Protestant theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the father of modern Protestant theology. This is his official title during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, until neo-orthodox theology tried to disinherit him, deprive him of his fatherhood, and make out of him a distorter of theology.

Now this is a serious problem, because in this conflict over Schleier-macher which took place during and after my student years, theology was faced with having to make a basic decision, whether the attempt to construct a synthesis out of all the elements in theology we have described is the right way, or whether a return to the orthodox tradition with some modernizations is the right way. If the latter method is followed, then of course Schleiermacher has to be abolished; but if the former, then Schleiermacher remains the founder of modern Protestant theology. So you have to make a decision about this. My decision, if I may anticipate, is thoroughly on the side of Schleiermacher, but with one qualification. Neither he nor Hegel, who was even greater and who tried the same thing, really succeeded. From their failure the orthodox groups of the nineteenth century and the neo-orthodox groups of the twentieth century have drawn the conclusion that it is impossible. But I draw the conclusion that it must be tried again, and if it cannot be tried again, then we had better abandon theology as a systematic enterprise and stick to the repetition of Bible passages, or at best, limiting theology to an interpretation of the Old and New Testaments.

But if systematic theology is to have any meaning, we must try again after the breakdown of the syntheses of both Schleiermacher and Hegel. In fact, it has been tried again, both later in the nineteenth century and now in the twentieth century, and even if we have here a continuous history of failures, that is no argument against systematic theology. This is part of the human situation which implies failure

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wherever there is risk and courage. Besides, out of these failures more insight has come than through the unfailing repetition of orthodox phraseologies. This is not said against Barth who has written a beautiful book about the theology of the nineteenth century, and also about philosophy and music in the eighteenth century. In this book he has wonderful sections on both Mozart and Schleiermacher. He is much more fair than all his neo-orthodox pupils and opponents. So this is not directly against Barth, but indirectly it is, because he has produced those pupils who do not share his greatness and have only inherited some elements of his earlier dictatorial attitude.

1. The Background of Schleiermacher's Thought

Schleiermacher represents what I call the great synthesis in the theological realm. Out of this attempt proceeded the whole of later Protestant theology, including its failures. But there is only one alterna­tive to life with failure, that is lifelessness without failure. Schleier-macher is supposed to be the victor over the Enlightenment in the theological realm. He did not deny the enlightened philosophy, but tried to overcome it on another level. For instance, he said that a true philosopher can be a true believer. He can combine piety and philos­ophy, and there was much piety in Schleiermacher from his early Moravian associations. He can combine piety with the courage of digging into the depths of philosophical thought. Or another word: The deepest philosophical thoughts are completely identical with my most intimate religious feeling.

This means that when we speak of him as the conqueror of the Enlightenment, we are not to think that he separated theology from philosophy, that he despised philosophy and excluded it from the theological enterprise. Enlightenment had reduced religion to the knowledge of God in terms of the arguments for his existence, or more exactly, to natural theology and to morality. The moral side was still very strong in Kant. Kant's philosophy of religion is an appendix to his philosophy of morals, and is determined by his practical philosophy. Religion is only a tool for the fulfillment of the moral imperative. Also the emphasis on knowledge in religion, the emphasis on natural the‑

Reaction Against Enlightenment  389

ology, is an element which contributed finally to the failure of Hegel's great and embracing synthesis.

The basis of the theology of the Enlightenment was the separation of God and the world, God and man. This was foreshadowed by English deism. The deism of the early eighteenth century in England followed the philosophy of John Locke. Deism was a philosophy of religion in which the existence of God was established by natural theology, but in such a way that he would not interfere with the activities of the bourgeois society. This was a necessary prerequisite for admitting the existence of God at all. If God interfered in some way, he could not be acknowledged. So he was placed alongside the world as the creator or as the watchmaker—to use other imagery—and after the watch has been made, it runs by itself without the continual intervention of the maker. The deists left men—that means the intellectual representatives of the producing and trading bourgeois society—to their own reason, and in particular to their calculating reason. If this is done, it is possible that by means of calculating and critical reason, the Christian tradition can be criticized. This they did in a radical way, even before Rousseau and Voltaire did it in France. Deism preceded them; It also preceded Hume's positivistic attitude of placing ieligion as the established church and the critical mind beside each other without scarcely ever touching.

These deists were a very interesting bunch of people, bunch, I say, because that is the way they were considered in England by the representatives of the aristocratic groups which cooperated with the high bourgeoisie and which did not like this kind of critical attitude. They were considered vulgar. It is still vulgar in England to criticize religion in the name of reason. You accept it as something positively given; perhaps you describe it sociologically, but you do not criticize it. It is not noble and aristocratic to do so. The consequence of this attitude was that the deistic thinkers, Toland and Tindal et. al., were considered to be operating on a lower level of reason, of reason that has run wild. And they did run wild. The title of one of the main deistic books, for instance, is Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) which removes all supernaturalistic and miraculous elements. They criticized the biblical literature and in a way were the inaugurators of historical criticism, producing results which anticipated much of the historical-critical theol‑

390            A History of Christian Thought

ogy in the modern time. Reimarus, for example, the man whose fragments Lessing published, was dependent on the English deists, and he created the revolution in thinking about the biblical sources in Germany. The rational idea of God in Voltaire and the French En­lightenment also came from the English deists. These deists were part of the background of Schleiermacher's theology. So you will find that he quite often refers to such typical theologians of the Enlightenment.

But there was another side. We spoke about this in connection with Spinoza. The fundamental principle that God exists alongside the world is shared by both the consistent rationalists and the supernaturalists. Against the deistic principle of God existing beside the world, either never interfering with it, as the rationalists said, or occasionally interfer­ing with it, as the supernaturalists said, we now have the principle of deus sive natura (God or nature) coming from John Scotus Eriugena, the great theologian of the ninth century who mediated mystical theology to later medieval theology. This principle reintroduced a quite different form of thinking about religion, the real antithesis to the Enlightenment. In discussing Romanticism we called it the principle of the infinite within the finite, the principle of the mutual within-each-otherness.

Spinoza, of course, was modified. It was not the geometrical Spinoza. Those who know a little about Spinoza know that he called his main work Ethics,8 but ethics more geometrico, ethics written by the use of the geometrical method. As a title this is in itself of greatest interest. He tried to use the all-powerful mathematical methods in discussing such subjects as metaphysics, ethics, and politics. All of this is presented in a way which makes the world into a geometrically describable whole. This was a very static concept of the world and of the divine ground of the world. He called this "the substance." In any case, this idea was founded on the principle of identity over against the principle of detachment and separation in the Enlightenment. God is here and now. He is in the depths of everything. He is not everything, as this much abused term "pantheism" says. Nobody has ever said that. It is absolute nonsense to say such a thing. It is better to avoid the term itself, but if it means

8Eclited with an introduction by James Gutman (New York: Hafner Publish­ing Co., 1949).

Reaction Against Enlightenment  391

anything at all, it means that the power of the divine is present in everything, that he is the ground and unity of everything, not that he is the sum of all particulars. I do not know any philosopher in the whole history of philosophy who has ever said that. Therefore the word "pantheism," which you can translate as "God is everything," is down­right misleading. I would wish that those who accuse Luther or myself of pantheism would define the term before using it. And, of course, Nicholas of Cusa, Schelling, Hegel and Nietzsche, and many others, are accused of pantheism. As if everybody who is not a supernaturalistic deist or a theist—and theism as the term is used in America today is nothing else than a supernaturalistic form of deism—is a pantheist. Whenever some people hear about the principle of identity, they say this is pantheism, which supposedly holds that God is this desk.

Now, of course, Luther would say that God is nearer to everything than it is to itself. He would say this even about the desk. You cannot deny that God is the creative ground of the desk, but to say that God is the combination of all desks and in addition all pens and men—this is absolute nonsense. The principle of identity means that God is the creative ground of everything. What I dislike is the easy way in which these phrases are used: theism is so wonderful and pantheism so hor­rible. This makes the understanding of the whole history of theology impossible.

2. His Concept of Religion as Feeling

The principle of identity in contrast to the principle of duality gave Schleiermacher the possibility of creating a new understanding of religion. This new understanding was first expressed in his famous book, On Religion, Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.9 This book is apolo­getic theology of the clearest kind. "Apologize" in Greek means answer­ing, answering before the court. For instance, if you are accused, an apology is what you say in your own defense. So apologetic theology is answering theology. I would say that every theology must somehow answer the questions in the human mind in every period, and the [392]  

apologetic element should never be neglected. Historically, Christian theology was created out of the apologetic needs of the church in the Roman Empire, politically answering the attacks of the pagans during the persecution of the Christians, and theologically answering the criticisms of the philosophers. This was answering theology, and the apologists who formed a particular school of theology in the second century represent more than a particular school. They represent the answering character of all Christian theology up to Augustine.

That is what Schleiermacher also did. He answered the despisers of religion among the cultured people, as the title of his book states. Then out of this apologetic theology new systematic possibilities arose. The argument of Schleiermacher's Speeches is as follows: Theoretical knowledge of the deistic type—whether rationalistic or supernatural-istic —and moral obedience of the Kantian type presuppose a disjunction between subject and object. Here I am, the subject, and over there is God, the object. He is merely an object for me, and I am an object for him. There is difference, detachment, and distance. But this difference has to be overcome in the power of the principle of identity. This identity is present within us. But now Schleiermacher made a great mistake. The term he used for the experience of this identity was "feeling." Religion is not theoretical knowledge; it is not moral action; religion is feeling, feeling of absolute dependence. This was a very questionable term, because immediately the psychologists came along and interpreted Schleiermacher's concept of feeling as a psychological function.

But "feeling" in Schleiermacher should not really be understood as subjective emotion. Rather, it is the impact of the universe upon us in the depths of our being which transcends subject and object. It is obvious that he means it in this sense. Therefore, instead of speaking of feeling, he could also speak of intuition of the universe, and this intui­tion he could describe as divination. This term is derived, of course, from "divine" and means awareness of the divine immediately. It means that there is an immediate awareness of that which is beyond subject and object, of the ground of everything within us. He made the great mistake of calling this feeling. And it is regrettable that a man like Hegel should misunderstand him, in view of the fact that both he and [393]

Schleiermacher were pupils of Schelling and both had experienced the meaning of the principle of identity. Hegel and. Schleiermacher, who were both at the University of Berlin, did not like each other. Hegel did what German philosophers and theologians have done so often: they interpret the foe, the one whom they attack, in pejorem partem, which means according to the worst possible meaning of what a man has said.

In this country, on the other hand, I have had the impression that the moderateness of the British spirit in theoretical discussion has produced the desire to understand the one with whom we disagree in meliorem paTtern, that is, in the best possible light. For this reason it is much easier to be a member of a theological faculty in America than in Germany. But it does have some shortcomings. Occasionally one has the feeling that theological matters are not taken as seriously as in Germany. This is perhaps the single qualification I have to make, but I would say, from the point of view of agape, I prefer the American attitude.

At any rate, the best evidence that when Schleiermacher spoke of feeling he did not mean subjective emotion is the fact that in his systematic theology, in The Christian Faith, he uses the expression "feeling of unconditional dependence." In the moment that these words are combined, the feeling of unconditional dependence, the psychological realm has been transcended. For everything in our feeling, understood in the psychological sense, is conditioned. It is a continuous stream of feelings, emotions, thoughts, wills, experiences. On the other hand, the element of the unconditional, wherever it appears, is quite different from subjective feeling.

Therefore, his own phrase, feeling of unconditional dependence,10 is a phrase which makes it quite apparent that this feeling is not the subjective feeling of the individual and that Hegel's criticism is unfair. The consequence of this in the German churches was an unfortunate misunderstanding also, for when religion was preached as feeling, the male section of the German congregations stopped going to church. When they were told that religion is not a matter of clear knowledge and moral action, but of feeling, they reacted. I can tell you this from my own participation in the nineteenth-century situation.

 

'°In German, "das Gefuhl der schlechthinnigen Abhängigkeit."

[394]

The churches became empty. Neither the youth nor the men were satisfied with feel­ing. They looked for sharp thought and moral significance in the sermons. When religion was reduced to feeling and weakened by sentimental hymns—instead of the great old hymns which had reli­gious power of the presence of the divine—people lost interest in the churches.

Schleiermacher's concept of religion as feeling had unfortunate con­sequences in this country too. When I discuss theology with antitheological colleagues, they are very happy if they can quote somebody who puts religion into a dark corner of mere subjective feeling. Religion is not dangerous there. They can use their scientific and political words, their ethical and logical analysis, etc., without regard to religion, and the churches can be removed to one side. They do not have to be taken very seriously for they deal with the realm of subjective feelings. We do not participate in such things, but if there are people who do have such desires, let them go to church. We do not mind. But in the moment in which they are confronted by a theology which interferes very much—not from the outside but from the inside—with the scientific process, political movements, and moral principles, and which wants to show that within all of them there is an ultimate concern, as I call it, or an unconditional dependence, as Schleiermacher called it, then these people react. Then they want to put religion back into the realm of feeling. And if theology itself, or religion itself, allows them to do this, they are doing a disservice. Such a preaching of religious feeling does a great disservice to religion.

Schleiermacher did not sufficiently protect himself from the criticism that this feeling is merely, as Freud called it, an oceanic feeling, that is, the feeling of the indefinite. It is really much more than this, and Schleiermacher has another point which makes this as clear as possible. He distinguishes two forms of unconditional dependence. The one is causal, which simply means being dependent on someone as a baby is dependent on its mother, or as we are dependent on the weather to some extent; the other is teleological dependence, which means, from the Greek telos, directed toward an aim, namely, the moral fulfillment of the moral imperative. This is important inasmuch as he classifies Christianity as a teleological type of religion, and not the ontological type like the mystical religions of Asia.

 [39]5

Teleological dependence has the unconditional character of the moral imperative. Now both elements are present, but according to Schleiermacher the dominant element in Western religion is the teleological-moral element. Here the Kantian influence is quite visible, and thus it is even more unfair to say that Schleiermacher's "feeling" is indefinite. It is very definite in the moral sense; it is also definite in the mystical sense. It is not subjective oceanic feeling.

This is the essence of what is called religious experience, the pres­ence of something unconditional beyond the knowing and acting of which we are aware. Of course, it also has an emotional element in it as everything does when a total person is involved, but this emotional element does not define the character of religion.

On this new basis Schleiermacher proposed that the discussion between the Enlightenment and Orthodoxy, between rationalism and supernaturalism, which was the modified form of Orthodoxy, could come to an end. Both sides are wrong on the basis of this new principle. Supernaturalism is wrong. Things like miraculous interventions of God, special inspirations and revelations are beneath the level of real religious experience. Those are objective events which can be looked at from the outside concerning the existence or nonexistence of which one can debate, but religion itself is immediacy, an immediate relation to the divine. Such external, objective events do not add anything to this fundamental experience of unconditional dependence or divination of the divine in the universe.

Consequently, the authorities which guarantee such supernatural interferences are also unnecessary. Every authority in religion, whether biblical or ecclesiastical, which makes such statements about interfer­ences is removed. This liberates modern science from religious inter­ferences. The supernaturalistic statement about the suspension of the laws of nature for the sake of miracles collapses completely.

But other things also collapse on this basis. The idea of an existing person called "God" and the idea of a continuation of life after the death of a conscious person, or the idea of immortality, collapse as well. This whole supernaturalistic heritage is denied by Schleiermacher in his Speeches. The way in which he restates the essence of this heritage in The Christian Faith is a question to which we will return later. [396]

The first radical and fundamental apologetic statement made by Schleiermacher is the following. The unity with God, participation in him, is not a matter of immortal life after death; it is not a matter of accepting a heavenly lawgiver; instead it is a matter of present participa­tion in eternal life. This is decisive. Here he follows the fourth Gospel. The classical German philosophers called this the true Gospel, not because they thought this Gospel contained, historically speaking, reli­able reports about Jesus—very soon they learned that this was not the case at all—but because the Gospel of John came closest to expressing principles which could overcome the conflict between rationalism and supernaturalism. This idea that eternal life is here and now, and not a continuation of life after death, is one of the main points they stressed. It is participation in eternity before time, in time, and after time, and that means also beyond time.

This same criticism turned against all mediators between God and man. The principle of identity and all mysticism were always very dangerous for the hierarchical systems, for priestly mediation between God and man. This was the case both in Catholicism and Protestantism. The Protestant Churches were just as hostile as the Roman Church was to the mystical groups, to the Quakers, for example, in whom the principle of identity was affirmed in some way. They were suspicious of mysticism because it offered men the possibility of immediate unity with the divine apart from the mediation of the church. So Schleiermacher reacted against priests and authorities; they were not necessary, because everybody is called to become a priest and to be filled with the divine Spirit. From this point of view you can understand the resistance of the church against all spirit-movements, against the movements in which the individual is immediate to God and driven by the Spirit himself. You can also understand the reason for the subjection of the Spirit, wherever it appears, to the letter of the Bible. The Reformers who origi­nally fought against the Roman Church in the power of the Spirit soon had great difficulties of their own in their struggle against the spirit-movements of the Reformation period. It is a good thing there were countries like Great Britain, the Netherlands, and America to which these representatives could flee from the severe persecutions of both the Roman and Reformation Churches. [397]

Instead of seeing religion as something mediated by the functions of the church, Schleiermacher saw it as the musical accompaniment of the special melodies of every life. In this poetic way he expresses the pres­ence of the religious concern, the ultimate concern, in every moment of life. It is, one may say, the typical idealistic anticipation of eternal life in which there is certainly no religion but in which God is present in every moment. He expresses the ideal which in the New Testament is spoken of as "praying without ceasing." If this is taken literally, it is nonsense. But if it is taken as it is meant, it makes a lot of sense. It means considering every moment of our secular life as filled with the divine presence, not pushing the presence into a Sunday service and otherwise forgetting it.

In order to experience the presence of the divine in the universe as Pythagoras did when he spoke of the harmony of the spheres in musical terms, each of which, while making a different tone, contributes symphonically to the harmony of the cosmos, we must first find that presence in ourselves. Humanity, of which each individual is a special and unique mirror, is the key to the universe. Without having the universe in ourselves we would never understand it. The center of the universe and of ourselves is divine, and with the presence of the infinite in ourselves we can re-cognize (I purposely underline the first syllable) in the universe the infinite which is within us. And what is the key to this in ourselves? He says it is love, but not love in the sense of agape, the Christian concept of love, but love in the Platonic sense of eros. Eros is the love which unites us with the good and the true and the beautiful and which drives us beyond the finite into the infinite.

Every period of human history expresses this encounter between the infinite in ourselves and in the whole universe in different images. The uniqueness of every individual and every period makes it necessary that there be many religions. The manifoldness of religions and the differ­ences in the same religious tradition during its different periods in history are basically the result of the infinite mirroring itself in ourselves and in the universe in always different ways. So the romantic spirit of Schleiermacher caused him to emphasize the concreteness of the histori­cal religions. This was a tremendous step beyond the enlightened idea of natural religion which reduced all religions to three principles: God, freedom, and immortality. The deistic views, whether of the rationalistic or supernaturalistic types, were overcome through the rediscovery of the richness, concreteness, and fullness of the particular religions. in this way Schleiermacher conquered by his principle of the immanence of the infinite in the finite the naturalistic, rationalistic, and supernatural­istic ways of abstracting from the concrete religions some principle which is supposed to be valid for all religions and which obliterates everything concrete in them. [398]

 

Without the valuation of individuality in the Renaissance and with­out the element of ecstatic intuition in Romanticism, all this would not have been possible. This is what enabled religious thought to find its way back to the positive religions. The whole Enlightenment was an extinction of the meaningfulness of the concrete or positive religion. Only abstract religious principles were left. On the basis of this redis­covery of the concrete, positive religions—positive means "historically given"—Schleiermacher proceeded further to emphasize a positive Christianity.

Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion (1799) were so successful that when the third edition (1821) was issued, he wrote in his introduction that instead of having to defend himself any more against the enlightened despisers of religion, he now had to fend off the orthodox fanatics who in the name of his defense of Christianity re­turned to the pre-Enlightenment orthodox tradition, and tried to extin­guish the whole development on which Schleiermacher had based his work.

3. His Positivistic Definition of Theology

Romanticism generally speaking was the bridge to an appreciation of the positively given. This was quite different from the English type of positivism. David Hume was a positivist out of empirical scientific considerations, out of a critical epistemology in which he thought that we have only given data or sense impressions. In continental Europe positivism was a child of Romanticism which valued the historically and traditionally given. When Schleiermacher wrote his book, The Chris­tian Faith, it is significant that he called it Glaubenslehre (the doctrine of faith). He did not call it "doctrine of God" which is what "theology"

Reaction Against Enlightenment 399

means. He did not dare to give it such a title, for what is positively given is the Christian faith as such. That is a given reality. You can find it in Zinzendorf's Moravian groups of piety to which he belonged for a period in his life, and you can find it in the churches everywhere. Thus systematic theology is the description of the faith as it is present in the Christian churches. That is a positivist foundation of theology. You do not first have to decide about the truths or untruths of religion in general or of Christianity in particular. You find Christianity given as an empirical fact in history, and then you have to describe the meaning of the symbols within it.

Theology is then positive knowledge of a historical reality. Schleier-macher made a very sharp distinction between this empirical positive theology and the so-called rational theology of the Enlightenment. And he goes even further. He says that Christian theology is the totality of those theoretical insights and practical rules without the possession and use of which no church government is possible. Now this definition is something unheard of in the development of theology. It is the clear transition from all kinds of rational theology to positive theology. In this definition the question of truth is completely absent. It is a highly positivistic conception of theology. I would call it a positivistic descrip­tion of some group which you find in history, whose existence you cannot deny. You can describe the ideas which are important in it and the rules which are accepted. Then you can educate young theologians who are called to be leaders in the church in the knowledge of those things which they are to practice later on. This is a positivism in which the question of truth is left out.

This positivistic character of theology becomes even more pronounced in the following idea. He distinguished philosophical, historical, and practical theology even as we do today, but with one difference. The difference is that dogmatics and ethics belong to historical theology, not to philosophical theology. They belong to historical theology because they are the systematic development of the doctrine which exists in the church or in a particular denomination at a given time. You cannot be more positivistic than that. This doctrine exists today, and the historian has only to describe it. This he calls systematic theology. This is a most conspicuous expression of positivism, and I can add that although it has

400            A History of Christian Thought

not survived, it has been very influential. Now we have both philosoph­ical theology and systematic theology, and both are distinguished from historical and practical theology. We have these four, or else we may take philosophical theology into systematic theology.

* * * * * * * *

Question: Granted that by feeling Schleiermacher did not mean subjective emotion, nevertheless, his Speeches are not unemotional in character, and having emotion is an undeniable part of being human. What is the role of the emotions in the religious life for you and Schleiermacher?

Answer: This is a very valid question in view of the ambiguity of the term "feeling" in Schleiermacher and much theology later on. Never­theless, it is obvious that Schleiermacher is here in the same situation as we all are. Nobody can exclude the element of feeling in any experience in which the total personality is involved, and in religion this is perhaps more true than in any other realm. It is certainly true that the response of our whole being in immediacy—which might be the right definition of feeling—can be seen in an earnest prayer or in the worship service of a community, or in listening to the prophetic word. This emotional element is there. Let us take an example from the arts. You are deeply grasped by a painting at which you are looking while visiting an art gallery; you are taken into it; you live in it and your emotions are strongly awakened. But if someone should say that your aesthetic experience is only an emotion, you would answer that it is more than that. If it were only emotion, it would not have this definite character which is given through this kind of painting. I recognize, in this moment in which I am emotionally moved, a dimension of reality of which otherwise I would never be aware, and a dimension in myself would never be opened up except through participation in the painting.

I would say the same thing about music. Music is often said to be completely in the realm of feeling. This is true, but it is a very special kind of feeling which is related to the particular musical figures and forms which make music a work of art. This also reveals to you a dimension of being, including your being, which would otherwise not be revealed if there were no musical impact on you. So we can say that

Reaction Against Enlightenment  401

although the emotional element is always present in experience of whatever kind, you cannot say that a certain experience is only emotion. Take the experience of love. You cannot say that love is emotion. Love has an element of emotion in it and very much so, but it is not an emotion. It is a reunion, as I would call it, of separated entities that belong to each other eternally. This experience cannot be identified with the personal reaction which we call feeling.

What Schleiermacher calls unconditional dependence in religion is certainly connected with a strong element of feeling. This feeling has been described by Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) in his The Idea of the Holy" as a feeling of being both fascinated and overwrought at the same time. These contrasting feelings are present. But they do not constitute the religious act as such. The appearing of the unconditional to you in the religious act is what constitutes the religious act. Usually I call it the unconditional concern in your very existence. This is a con­cern also of your mind; you ask about the truth of it; it is a concern of your will; you must do something if you experience it. It changes your whole existence. All these dimensions are implied. If it were only a feeling, it would be a detached aesthetic pleasure, and that would be all. Sometimes Schleiermacher has been misunderstood in this way, but that is not the real Schleiermacher.

In answering the question about Schleiermacher, I also answered the question about my own thinking, because I believe that his "uncondi­tional dependence" is only a slightly narrower way of saying "uncondi­tional concern." Unconditional concern does not emphasize the element of dependence in the way Schleiermacher does. However, it also tries to go beyond the subject-object scheme. It has the same basic motives and is an expression of a total experience, the experience of the holy. There is not a dogmatic difference, but chiefly a difference of connotation, between ultimate concern and feeling of absolute dependence.

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In our last discussion about Schleiermacher we dealt with his positiv­istic conception of Christian theology. We pointed out the astonishing fact that he subsumed dogmatics and ethics under historical theology

11 Translated by J. W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1923).

402            A History of Christian Thought

because they are the systematic development of the doctrine as it exists in a particular church at a particular time. This we call positivism; it is theology as a description of the empirically given reality of the Christian religion. But if this were all, then Schleiermacher would not have been a systematic theologian; he would have been a church historian dealing with the present conditions of the church.

But this positivistic feature is counterbalanced—in a logically unclear way—by the fact that Schleiermacher begins with a general concept of religious community as it is manifested universally in the history of humanity. From this he derives a concept of the essence of religion. This is no longer positivism. It is a philosophical analysis of the essence of a thing. This presupposes constructive judgment about what is essen­tial and what is not. His concept of the feeling of unconditional dependence is certainly a concept of a universal and philosophical type. He subjects Christianity to a concept of religion which at least by intent was not derived from Christianity but from the whole panorama of the world's religions. Actually, of course, the derivation which a philosopher of religion makes is always largely determined by the door through which he enters this panorama of religious reality in the world. In his case it is pietistic Christianity. In every philosophical concept of religion we can observe the traces of this entry way, namely, the philosopher's own religion. Nobody can abstract this subjective element from his definition, for in order to derive a concept from reality, one must be able to participate in the life of this reality. For example, one cannot develop a concept of the arts without being able to experience works of art.

The consequence of this is that Christianity becomes a religion among the religions. There are other religions besides Christianity. Usually, then, on this basis Christianity is described by Christian theologians as the highest, the truest, the most fulfilling of all religions. This is a very important point which has been to the fore in theological discussions during the last fifty years because of the Barthian challenge. When we look back into the history of Protestantism we find a book by Zwingli, the Swiss reformer, entitled De vera et falsa religione12 in which he describes Christianity as the true religion over against the false religions which have distorted the divine revelation (cf. Romans 1). But Paul in Romans did not speak of the Christian religion. [403]

12Huldreich Zwingli, On the True and False Religion.

He spoke of Christ. He would not say that the Christian religion is the decisive thing. It would be well to read Paul's letters to see how he attacked the Christian religion as it existed in his time. He attacked the Jewish-Christian (legalism) as well as the Gnostic distortions (lawlessness). This means that while Paul criticized all religions, he does not exempt Christianity from criticism. He does not put Christianity against the other religions. Rather, he puts Christ against every religion, even against the actual Christian religion as this was expressed in the congregations which he founded.

Now in Zwingli, also in the Reformers in general and in most orthodox theology, we find that this distinction between Christ and Christianity is not clearly carried out. If Christianity is put on the top, then one is bound to ask whether it does not stand under the same judgment as all other religions, in view of its own distortions. If we look at the history of idolatry, we will find that much of it has occurred in the name of Christianity. Actually, the absoluteness of Christianity, as Troeltsch called it, is not the absoluteness of the Christian religion, but of the Christ over against all religion. The superiority of Christianity lies in its witnessing against itself and all other religions in the name of the Christ. Barth has seen this difficulty, and for this reason he tends to avoid the concept of religion and does not want to apply it to Chris­tianity. But if this is done, it is another way of elevating the Christian religion, and not only the Christ above the other religions. I doubt that Barth really intends to do that.

However that may be, the concept of religion is needed because there is the empirical religious reality; there is a great similarity in all the actual religions. If you reject the word "religion," you must simply find another one in naming the given religious reality, the word "piety" or something like that. The term "religion" is, however, unavoidable. I can tell you of my own experience. In the early twenties I wrote an article with the title "The Conquest of the Concept of Religion in the Philos­ophy of Religion."13 This was very much in line with Barth's thinking, but even at that time I was aware that this can be done only if Chris‑tianity also is conquered as a religion in the philosophy of religion, and if there is something in religion which stands against religion. If this is not seen there is no real conquest.[404]

13 "Die Uberwindung des Religionsbegriffs in der Religionsphilosophie," Kant-Stu4ien. Berlin, XXVII, No. 3/41-1922, 446-469.

 But the impact of Barth on Germany was so great that when I returned to Germany in 1948, I was immedi­ately criticized by my friends for still using the word "religion." It had been, so to speak, eradicated from the theological discussion in Ger­many.

This situation has changed but there is still a resentment against the concept. I believe that this resentment is a self-deception, for then other terms are only substituted for the term "religion." What we need, however, is to be aware of the fact that the method of Schleiermacher, Troeltsch, Harnack, and others, is not sufficient, namely, first defining Christianity as a religion, and then saying it is the highest or absolute religion. What the Barthians do is equally wrong, to say that Chris­tianity is a revealed religion over against the others which are merely human attempts to come to God and are not based on revelation at all.

If we are to try to conquer the concept of religion which seems to relativize Christianity, we have to do it by putting the Christ against every religion, or God as manifesting his judgment in the cross against every religion, but not by elevating Christianity as a particular religion.

Now we have to deal with Schlciermachcr's understanding of the essence of religion. In all histories of theology he is regarded as the conqueror of the Enlightenment distortion of religion, where it was intellectualized and moralized. The negative side of Schiciermacher's definition of religion was that it is not essentially a thinking and an acting. The positive side is that religion is the feeling of unconditional dependence, the immediate consciousness of the unconditional in one's self, the immediate existential relation prior to the act of reflection, the immediacy of the awareness of the unconditional in our consciousness. All these terms point to the same reality of religious experience. Knowl­edge and action are consequences. Religious knowledge and religious action follow from this immediate awareness, but they are not the essence of religion. The immediate awareness of unconditional depen­dence transcends the mixed feelings of partial freedom and partial dependence which we have in our relation to the world. In all our relations to the world and to others there is this mixed feeling of

Reaction Against Enlightenment 405

freedom and dependence. If we are vitally powerful, we feel very much free in dealing with reality; if this feeling of freedom is reduced, then we feel our dependence on others and on all kinds of finite things. Now this whole realm of the experience of the finite is transcended in the awareness of the unconditional. If we speak of God, we can only say that this is the name for the whence of our unconditional dependence. Then God is not conceived of as an objectively given reality as another galaxy of stars. He transcends every finite relation and he is the ground of all of them. They are all unconditionally dependent on him.

If God were an object besides other objects, we could act upon him in terms of knowing and acting. This would mean that God could be proved. Such proofs could be verified and God could be moved by our activity. But God is not an object besides other objects. He is present in our immediate consciousness and all that we say about him are expres­sions of this immediacy. Schleiermacher is afraid that the term "person" as applied to God would make him an object subject to our cognitive and active dealings. So he uses the term "spirituality" instead of "per­sonality." Of course, in spirituality the personal element is implied. There is no spirit which is not at the same time the bearer of the person. But the concept of spirituality is better suited than personality in removing the danger of an objectifying distortion of the idea of God.

4. His Interpretation of Christianity

That is the philosophical concept of religion which underlies Schleiermacher's whole description of Christianity. In the long run this proved to be stronger than the positivistic element, that is, the mere acceptance of Christianity as an empirical reality to be described. Now we come to a section in his thought where he breaks through the positivistic element. This is his christology. When he explains why he thinks Christianity is the highest manifestation of the essence of religion, he says it is because Christianity has two characteristics which distinguish it from other religions. The first is what he calls ethical monotheism. This means that the unconditional dependence in religion is not primarily a physical dependence thought of in materialistic terms. It is not a mechanical dependence as in some of the distortions of theidea of predestination in Calvinist theology in which the religious symbol of predestination is confused with mechanical causality.  [406]

 This is not Schleiermacher's idea, although his idea of dependence has been clearly traced to Calvinistic influences. Christianity is not a religion in which the relation to Cod is that of physical or mechanical dependence, but is that of teleological dependence, a dependence on God as the giver of the law and showing the goal toward which we have to go. This teleological dependence means that God is the whence of our uncondi­tional moral imperative. Here you see clearly the Kantian element in him. It is not as in Schelling's philosophy of nature where men are dependent on the ultimate through nature.

The other thing which makes Christianity the highest religion is that everything is related to the Salvation by Jesus of Nazareth. Salvation has a very definite meaning for him. It is the transformation of a limited, inhibited, or distorted religious consciousness into a fully developed religious consciousness. That person is saved who has a fully developed religious consciousness. He is in continuous conscious communion with God. This is salvation. All eschatological symbolism is removed or must be reinterpreted. This work of salvation, this liberation of our religious consciousness from inhibition, limitation, and distortion, is done by Christ, who himself has the fully developed religious consciousness. Since he does not need salvation, he can become the Savior.

This does not mean that Jesus is a mere example for man. Rather, he is the Urbuld, the archetype, the original image, the representative of what man essentially is in unity with Cod. Here we have surprisingly high christological statements in Schleiermacher when we consider the universal concept of religion from which he started. This was possible because his own personal piety and his positivistic affirmation of Chris­tianity came to fulfillment. It is interesting that Emil Brunner in his book on Schleiermacher14 says that Schleiermacher's christological thinking is an interlude in his dogmatics; it does not fit into the whole system. It is a case of his piety breaking through his systematic prin­ciples. I do not think this is true because the positivistic element in Schleiermacher is genuine.

14 Die Mystik unã das Wort. Der Gegensatz zwischen moclerner Religions-auffassung und christliche,n Glauben (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1924).

[407]

 It is one of the ways of escaping theproblems of philosophy of religion which, on the other hand, are inescapable. Brunner is right only insofar as one can say generally of all Schleiermacher's thinking that there is a tension between the purely philosophical and the more positivistic approaches to Christianity. All the later schools had the same difficulty. The whole Ritschlian school, which was dependent on Schleiermacher, was strongly positivistic and biblical, on the one hand, and yet dependent on Kant's epistemology, on the Kantian philosophy of religion, on the other hand.

Without going into details concerning the individual doctrines of Schleiermacher, we can say a few words about the method which permeated the whole system. His theological method was to describe the content of the religious consciousness of the Christian as it is determined by the appearance of the Christ. Systematic theology or the system of doctrine is rational insofar as it creates a consistent system of thoughts which do not contradict each other, but are interdependent. He does this with all the means of refined theological dialectics. When he deals with special problems, such as Bible, Christ, sin, salvation, atonement, or whatever it may be, he first discusses the two opposing views, the one which is given in the classical tradition which he knew as well as a Protestant theologian must know it, and the other which is the En­lightenment criticism of seventeenth-century Orthodoxy. Then he tries to find a solution to the problem by looking at the Christian conscious­ness, which is of course determined by his own concept of religion.

The methodologically decisive thing is that theological propositions about God or the world or man are derived from man's existential participation in the ultimate, that is, from man's religious consciousness. These are valid statements, but not in the sense that everybody could make such statements about the latest discovery in physics or astronomy. The form of the statements is quite different. The difference in form arises from the fact of existential participation, as we would say today. This means that the qualities or characteristics which we attribute to God are expressions of our relation to him. As a follower of Calvin, he said that we cannot say anything about the essentia dci, God in his true essence. We can say something only on the basis of his relation to us which is manifest through revelatory experiences. This has implications for the doctrine of the trinity. A doctrine of an objective trinity as a transcendent object is impossible.

[408]

 The doctrine of the trinity is the fullest expression of man's relation to God. Each of the personae—you should not say persons because that means something else—is a repre­sentation of a certain way in which God is related to man and the world. Only in this way do the personae make any sense. Therefore he places the trinitarian symbols at the end of the whole system. The doctrine of the trinity stands at the end as the completed doctrine of God, after all particular relations—such as those dealing with sin and forgiveness, creation and death and eternal life, the presence of the Spirit in the church and in the individual Christian, etc.—have been positively described from the religious consciousness of Christians. After this has been done, the lines can be drawn up to the divine as such, which yields to us trinitarian Statements.

I follow the same method as Schleiermacher, but with one difference. I have two stages in drawing these trinitarian lines to God. The first is from the doctrine of the living God. The living God is always the trinitarian God, even before christology is possible, before the Christ has appeared. He who speaks of the living God is trinitarian even though he calls himself unitarian. In discussions with Unitarian students and colleagues at Harvard, I did not start with christology, but with the symbol of the living God. He is not a dead oneness in himself, a dead identity, but he goes out and returns. This defines the process of life everywhere. If we apply this symbolically to God, we are involved in trinitarian thinking. The numbers two or three or four—all of them appear in the history of Christian theology—are not decisive. But the movement of the divine, going out and returning to himself—this is decisive if we speak of a living God.

Now Schleiermacher did not use this possibility. He saw trinity only in relation to christology. But I believe that if one does not see it in connection with the idea of a living God, then the trinitarian sym­bolism, because it would be applied too late, becomes almost impossible to use. In being bound to the single event it easily becomes superstitious; in being related only to the historical Jesus it becomes only something to be observed. [409]

I will give you an example of why this is significant. If we today imagine the possibility of spiritual beings existing in other parts of the universe, the question arises as to the meaning of Christ for them. Then people who have an exclusively christologically oriented conception of the trinity would say that we must bring them the message of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ. This seems to me absurd. Instead, I would say that the divine Logos, the eternal Logos, the principle of God going out and manifesting himself, appears wherever there are spiritual beings, appears in their history as he has appeared in the center of human history. But what appears precedes human history. "Before Abraham was, I am."", This means that the universal Logos, the principle of the divine self-manifestation, is present in Jesus of Nazareth.

In spite of this limited criticism of Schleiermacher, I would say that the fundamental methodological notion that the trinity is not an a priori speculation about God is valid. The experience of the living God and the experience of the saving God both give rise to the trinitarian idea. This idea follows from the revelatory experience and cannot precede it. My main criticism of the Barthian method in his Church Dogmatics" is that he jumps, so to speak, directly into the doctrine of the trinity without starting from the human question. Here I am on the side of Schiciermacher in spite of my limited criticism.

Another point that must be mentioned is Schleiermacher's doctrine of sin. This was very influential. In this he followed the general trend of German classical philosophy and certainly of the Enlightenment. Ac­cording to this trend, sin is a shortcoming. It is not a "no" but a "not yet." Sin arises because of the discrepancy between the great speed of the evolutionary process in the biological development of mankind and the slower pace of moral and spiritual development of man. The biological development is far ahead of man's spiritual development. Sin is the "not yet" of man's spiritual development within an already fully developed bodily organism. The distance or the gap between these two processes is what we call sin. This condition is universal. It is the state of mankind universally. The Christ is then an anticipation of a state which lies ahead for all mankind. This makes sin in some way necessary and unavoidable. The idea of the fall is swallowed up by the idea of the evolutionary necessity of estrangement or sin.[410] 

15 John 8:58.

16 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. I, Pts. 1 and 2 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936).

          

 At this point later theolo­gians went back instead to Kant's idea of the original transcendent fall and the existentialists developed this on the basis of Schellings doctrine of freedom.

In many later developments, however, Schleiermacher's relativiza-tion of sin was predominant. I said that for Schleiermacher salvation is the presence of God in man, in man's consciousness, which is de­termined by the divine presence in all its relativities. Here we see the mystical background in Schleiermacher's philosophy, mystical not in the sense of "foggy" but in the sense of the presence of the infinite within the finite. So the Savior takes the faithful, those who belong to him and participate in him, into the strength of his consciousness of God. And the church is the community in which this consciousness of God is the determining power. However relative it is, however distorted and limited, the church has this as its principle. This brings us to the end of our discussion of Schleiermachcr's theology. Of course, it would be very interesting to go point by point into his various doctrines, but then this would be a course on Schleiermacher and not on the history of Protestant theology.

E. THE UNIVERSAL SYNTHESIS: GEORC W. F. HECEL

I must now come to the man who produced the great synthesis in philosophical terms. Schleiermacher is the great synthesis in theological terms. His colleague, Hegel, at the University of Berlin in the begin­ning of the nineteenth century, was the fulfillment of the synthesis in the philosophical realm. Both of these in their appearance and in their effects were immediately supraprovincial. Of course, their roots were in the German development, but the effects they had on others tran­scended the German limits and provincialisms. Schleiermacher's influ­ence on all Protestant theology is also visible in this country, and Hegel's influence extended not only into religion but into the political trans­formation of the world in the twentieth century; even the rise of existentialism against him bears the imprint of his thinking. So we can say that his great synthesis is the turning point for many of the actual problems of today, including world revolution and the East-West conflict. Neither Marx, nor Nietzsche, nor Kierkegaard, nor existen­tialism, nor the revolutionary movements, are understandable apart from seeing their direct or indirect dependence on Hegel. Even those who opposed him used his categories in their attacks on him. So Hegel is in some sense the center and the turning point, not of an inner-philosophi­cal school or an inner-theological way of thinking about religion, but of a world-historical movement which has directly or indirectly influenced our whole century.[411]

1. The Greatness and the Tragic Hybris of He gel's System

When we speak of Hegel's great synthesis in the realm of philosophy, this can be understood in two ways: first, the great synthesis of the cultural elements present in Western culture, and secondly, the syn­thesis of the conflicting polarities present in religious thought. I will describe him in both ways.

Before I can do that, however, the distorted image of Hegel must be removed. It would be far better for you to know nothing of Hegel than simply to know the usual caricature. If you have only this image of the noisy mill whose wheels are turning all the time—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—then it would be better not to know anything about him. When I gave my first lecture course in Frankfurt on Hegel, I spent the whole academic year, four hours a week, and got through only half of the material. At that time the early fragments of Hegel were dis-covered.17 These fragments offer the best help in purging our minds of the distorted image of Hegel. In Frankfurt at that time I tried to show my students that every great philosophy combines two elements. The one is its vitality, its lifeblood, its inner character; the other is the emergency situation out of which the philosophy grows. No great philosopher simply sat behind his desk, and said, "Let me now philoso­phize a bit between breakfast and lunch time." All philosophy has been a terrible struggle between divine and demonic forces, skepticism and faith, the possibility of affirming and of negating life. The question of the mystery of existence stands behind all who became creative philos­ophers and were not merely analysts or historians of philosophy.

17G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, translated by T. M. Knox, with an introduction, and fragments, translated by Richard Kroner (Chicago: Univer­sity of Chicago Press, 1948).

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In Hegel's fragments one thing stands out quite clearly, namely, that religion and politics formed the lifeblood of Hegel's thinking. It was religion of a supernatural kind in conflict with rationalism which he found disrupting the souls of students of theology and philosophy while he was a seminary student living in the Stift in Tubingen, Wurttem­berg. Besides religion there was the political situation determined by the French Revolution, on the one hand, and the tyranny of the German princes, on the other hand. And across the Channel there were the democratic beginnings of the British constitution.

These two things, religion and politics, came together very early in Hegel's philosophy of life. If you want to know what "philosophy of life" means in continental terminology—Lebensphilosophie in German can hardly be translated into English—you can read Hegel's fragments. Here among others you have a fragment on love which offers one of the deepest insights into the dynamics of the love relationship, not only on the human level, but in all living reality.

That is the one side in Hegel's thinking. But there was another element in Hegel as in every philosopher, namely, the method which became more and more predominant. His work on logic was in itself great, but its consequence was that gradually the earlier "philosophy of life" was covered over by a logical mechanism of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It is a great tragedy in the history of philosophy that this logical element became the decisive thing. For instance, in his encyclo­pedia we have the impression of a mill which always makes the same noise and goes through the same rhythm so that if a concept goes into the mill you know ahead of time what will come out of it. This is a strong element, and a disagreeable one, in Hegel. And I do not wish to hide it. But it is also fair to see what is the lifeblood and its conse­quences in a man's thinking. For Hegel this was in the religious and political realms.[413]

After these introductory words we will discuss the different periods which he wanted to unite in a great synthesis. Coming from the Enlightenment he witnessed the great struggle between the tradition of Orthodox Protestantism and the rationalistic criticism of it. So he hadthe problem of uniting traditional Christianity and the Enlightenment. But this was by no means all. He was also living in the period which we called the classical period. We spoke about it in connection with Goethe. It was a direct attempt to return to classical Greece both in the arts and in philosophy, and then indirectly in theology. This element of classicism was very strong in the early writings of Hegel when he described, for example, the ideal political system. He always described the ideal of the Greek polis, the city-state, in which religion and culture were united and in which the individual participated democratically in the whole life. So this had to be put into the right place in the great synthesis.

Then he went to the romantic period. He himself was strongly romantic in the beginning and dependent on Schelling. But because of his sober mind, he very soon separated himself from many of the emotional elements of Romanticism and even criticized them in his greatest published work, The Phenomenology of Mind.18 This title is an unfortunate translation of Die Phanoinenologie des Geistes, for Geist in German means "spirit." There we see another element being intro­duced, namely, the cause of the French Revolution. The students of the theological school in Tubingen participated in the French Revolution to the great anger of the ruling prince of Wurttemberg. Yet, they did not become revolutionaries because that is not the German temperament. Only in spirit did they become revolutionary, but not in a political way. Later on the revolutionaries came from another world, but using Hegelian categories.

If you look at all of these elements, you see how much is involved: Christian tradition, classical Greece, the Enlightenment, the move­ment of Romanticism. All these things had to be united into a universal synthesis. Nobody has attempted this so radically and with such a power of synthesis as Hegel. Although Kant was a more profound thinker in his critical way—this is a difficult judgment to make, but still possible—than Hegel, it was Hegel who more than Kant created an epoch in the history of philosophy, in the history of religion, and in politics.

Therefore, the breakdown of this great synthesis was a historic event. It was not simply an inner struggle between philosophical schools. [414]

18 Translated by J. B. Bailie (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1910).

This happens all the time, but sometimes such struggles can become of world-historical importance, as did the theological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries. The events which surround the rise and fall of Hegel's system transcend the situation of a conflict between schools. This is the greatness of Hegel's system, but often greatness and hybris go together. Hybris is a Greek word which is often translated as pride. But it should not be so translated because pride is a particular moral or antimoral attitude. It is possible to be without pride and full of hybris, extremely humble but in this humility remain in a state of hybris. The best translation is "self-elevation toward the realm of the divine." That is what it means in Greek tragedy. The great heroes are those who fall into hybris, who try to elevate themselves to the life of the gods, and who then are cast down by the tragic reaction of the divine powers.

This is the case with Hegel's system. It does not have primarily to do with the personal character of Hegel. There are others who have much more of this hybris, Schelling, for instance. It is in his fundamental idea itself in which the hybris is expressed, the idea that world history can possibly come to an end with one's own existence. The reason that Hegel was attacked from all sides and removed from the throne of providence on which he had placed himself was that the finished system cut off all openness to the future. Only God is on that throne and only God is able both to understand the past and to create the future. When Hegel tried to do both, then he was in the state of hybris, and this hybris was followed by the tragedy of his system.

Here you see that the history of philosophy is more than the history of some interesting ideas which people find to contradict in each other. The history of philosophy is the history of man's self-interpretation, and any such self-interpretation stands not only under the judgment of logic but also under the judgment of the meaning of existence as a whole. This is the responsibility of thinking and at the same time its greatness.

2. The Synthesis of God and Man (Mind and Person)

The synthesis of the divine and the human in Hegel's system is expressed in the doctrine of the absolute and the relative mind or Geist. Mind is a poor translation of Geist, but the word "spirit" is also full of difficulties. The word "spirit" has been reserved for religion and attrib­uted to God and divine things alone.[415]

 Man has been deprived of spirit, and has been divided into mind and body. This mutilation of the doctrine of man has had tremendous practical and theoretical conse­quences, making almost impossible a sound doctrine of man. We have psychology, we have biology, but we have no doctrine of man. And generally anthropology is—at least when I came to this country—a doctrine about the bones which have been left by the human race on the surface of the earth. Now we have in addition cultural anthropol­ogy. Buf this does not say anything about the essence of man, but only about the stages through which our former ancestors passed. It is also characterized by an especially disagreeable dogmatism regarding the concept of culture itself. Everything which man has created is explained in terms of a particular given culture. Since man is only a product of his culture, we cannot say anything about man universally nor anything about what distinguishes men from animals. But no cultural anthro­pologist tells you who has produced the culture, why cultures have changed, and what has happened in the context of the culture. So on the doctrine of man as man we are faced with special difficulties today.

Perhaps one of the ways in which we can try to overcome such difficulties is by reintroducing the concept of spirit, with a small "s" and not use this term for God alone with a capital "S." For if you cannot experience what spirit is in yourself, you cannot apply it symbolically or analogically to God either. When we have a doctrine of man as spirit, we must define spirit as the unity of mind and power, the unity of creativity—which makes human culture possible—and vitality—which is the life-power of man. Spirit is a dynamic concept. If you take away the power element of spirit, as you do by using only the concept of mind, what is left is simply intellectual movement. The intellectualiza­tion of the mental side of man results in placing the emotional element outside the intellect, in depriving us of what we find in Plato's doctrine of eros, namely, the unity of the emotional, the volitional, and the intellectual elements in the person as a whole; it results also in a loss of what is meant in the Christian concept of gnosis, as Paul used it, which means both knowledge and union. Knowing God means a union of man's spirit with the divine Spirit. It does not mean episteme, that is,

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detached scientific knowledge, inquiry into the structure of finite things. Gnosis always means union, and if the word were not so distorted today, we could say, mystical union, as Protestant Orthodoxy was still able to do. Mysticism means the experience of the union of the divine and the human.

So although Hegel's phenomenology of Geist has been translated as phenomenology of mind, we will, despite the terminological difficulties, translate Geist as spirit. For Hegel God is absolute spirit and man is relative spirit; or God is infinite spirit and man is finite spirit. To say that God is Spirit means that he is creative power, not creative power in a naturalistic sense of a mere objective process, but creative power united with mind, or perhaps better, with meaning. This creative power in union with meaning produces in men personal self-conscious­ness and creates through men culture, language, the arts, the state, philosophy, and religion. All these things are implied in the concept of the spirit. But if you speak of absolute mind, then you have to think of some highest intellect somewhere, a bodiless intellect, so to speak, a mind without power. However, according to the religious tradition, both Jewish and Christian, as well as many other religions, God is first of all the Almighty. He is power. He is unrestricted. He is infinite power. He is the power in all other powers, and he gives them the power to be. This element of power belongs to the concept of spirit. If you take this away by translating Geist with mind, it becomes impossible to under­stand the history of Protestant theology, or Hegel's system and his theological successors.

I have often said that I am a crusader for the rescuing of the word "spirit" with a small "s." We need the word. All other languages have it. In French we have esprit, in German Geist, in Hebrew ruach, in Latin Spiritus, and in Greek pneuma, but in English this word has been more or less lost, in part due to British empiricism and in part due to Des­cartes' division of man into intellect and body. In spite of all Descartes' greatness in creating the method of modern scientific and philosophical analysis, we must say that from the standpoint of the doctrine of man he has omitted the real center of man, which is between mind and body. Formerly this was called "soul"—a word which is now forbidden by the watchdogs of language in every university, because this word is con‑

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nected with sentimentality and has no scientific value; this despite the fact that it is the central concept in Aristotle's doctrine of man, namely, psyche, which must be translated by anima (Latin) or soul.

In any case, this is the bad situation in which we find ourselves, which makes it difficult to understand Hegel at this central point. Spirit is the creator of man as personality and of everything which through man as person can be created in culture, religion, and morality. This human spirit is the self-manifestation of the divine Spirit, and God is the absolute Spirit which is present and works through every finite spirit. To understand this we must go back to what I said about Hegel as a philosopher of life, of life processes. All life processes are manifesta­tions of the divine life, only they appear in time and space whereas in God they are in their essential nature. God actualizes his own potential­ities in time and space, through nature, through history, and through men. God finds himself in his personal character in man and his history, in the different forms of his historical actualization. God is not a person besides other persons. The absolute Spirit of which Hegel speaks is not a being beside the finite spirit, but in God its essential reality is given. In time and space it becomes actualized, yet at the same time estranged from its essential character.

Here we have the whole vision of the world as a process of the self-actualization of the divine essences in time and space. Therefore, everything in its essential nature is the self-expression of the divine life. This world process goes through nature and through the various actualizations of spirit. In man's spirit, particularly in man's artistic, religious, and philosophical creativity, God finds himself as he essen­tially is. God does not find himself in himself, but he comes to himself, to what he essentially is, through the world process, and finally through man and through man's consciousness of God. Here we have the old mystical idea that in man's knowledge of God, God knows himself, and in man's love of God, God loves himself. We found these ideas also in Spinoza, and therefore I emphasize so much that Spinoza is a geometri-cized Jewish mystic. In Hegel, however, we have these mystical ideas in a dynamic creative form and not in Spinoza's static geometrical form.

Hegel sees God as the bearer of the essential structures of all things. This makes him the great representative of essentialist philosophy, a

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philosophy which tries to understand the essences in all things as expressions of the divine self-manifestation in time and space. The later existentialist protest can only be understood as the reaction to this essentialist philosophy. Modern existentialism was born as a protest against Hegel's essentialism. Therefore, we must understand Hegel's essentialism, the essences as manifestations of the divine life. God in himself is the essence of every species of plants and animals, of the struc­tures of the atoms and stars, of the nature of man in which his inner­most center is manifest. All these are manifestations of the divine life as it is manifest in time and space.

Hegel cannot, therefore, conceive of God as a person beside other persons. Then he would be less than God. Then the world process, the structure of being, would be more than he, would be above him. God would then have a fate; he would be thrown into reality like the Greek gods who are subject to fate, who come and go, who are immortal with respect to a special structure of the cosmos, but who are born and die with this cosmos. But the God of Christianity is not less than the structure of reality. He has it in himself; it is his life. This fundamental change liberates the Christian man from the anxiety of destiny. You can observe the light against this idea already in the Greek tragedians who were fighting against gods who themselves were subject to fate and who therefore were inferior to man, because man is able to resist the univer­sal fate in the power of the logos. Man is beyond the fate and therefore beyond the gods. So God is not a person. He is spiritual, as I told you in connection with Schleiermacher, but he is not a person because that would subject him again to the fate of the Greek gods.

There is a point of identity between God and man insofar as God comes to self-consciousness in man, and insofar as man in his essential nature is contained together with everything in the inner life of God as potentiality. The process in which God creates the world and fulfills himself in the world is the means whereby the infinite abundance of the divine life grows in time and space. God is not a separate entity, some­thing finished in himself, but he belongs to the world, not as a part of it, but as the ground from which and to which all things exist. This is the synthesis of the divine and the human spirit. It was the point most attacked by the nineteenth-century theology of religious revivalism,

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which wanted to emphasize the person-to-person relationship and the difference between God and the world.

3. The Synthesis of Religion and Culture (Thought and Imagination)

Another synthesis which Hegel constructs is the synthesis between religion and culture. As a result of the basic idea of the relation of the absolute and the relative spirit, religion has a double meaning in Hegel. In one sense everything in its essential nature is rooted in the divine. In order to understand Hegel's synthesis of religion and culture, we must know what "nature" meant to him. Nicholas of Cusa's basic idea of the coincidence of the divine and the human in everything was certainly present in all of Hegel's philosophy. In nature the absolute Spirit is present. But it is present in terms of estrangement. Here we come to the very important twentieth-century concept of estrangement. It is the existentialist concept for what in religious symbolism is called the fall. This idea is applied by Hegel to nature. Nature is spirit, but estranged spirit, spirit not yet having achieved its true nature. God leaves himself, so to speak, in order to go over into estrangement. The important thing historically is that this concept which Hegel created was later used by his pupils against him. For Hegel developed a philosophy of reconcilia­tion, as we shall see, but his pupils said that there is no reconciliation. This statement that there is no reconciliation is the basic statement of existentialism. The world is not reconciled. The greatness of Hegel is that he created the categories in terms of which others could attack him. The tremendous importance of the concept of estrangement in Karl Marx's interpretation of capitalism is derived from Hegel, but then used against him. You cannot understand Marxism and its significance for the philosophical spirit of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without knowing that he took the concept of estrangement from Hegel only to attack him by means of it. Against Hegel he said, estrangement, yes, but reconciliation, no! The class situation shows that there is no reconciliation. Hegel said that in the state (Prussia) the political reconciliation and the social reconciliation do exist. Against this the existentialist revolt began.

Now in Hegel's system there is a transition from natural philosophy

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to logic. in Hegel's logic something interesting happens, which you must know in order to understand Kierkegaard's attack on Hegel's system. In his logic Hegel develops the essences of reality in terms of their logical abstraction. He does not speak of men, but man as an essence appears in Hegel's logic. He does not speak of quantities in reality, but the category of quantity appears in his logic. He does not speak of animals, but the category of animal life appears in his logic. So he has in his logic a fully developed system of the essential structure of reality without going into the actualization of these essences in time, space, and history. It is, so to speak, the description of the inner divine life. For this he even uses the symbolism of the trinity, God going out and returning to himself in his eternal life, in the life of the eternal essences, before anything has happened in time and space, before the categories and essences became actuality.

It is clear that we have here a philosophy of the inner divine life under the name of logic. Logic is here not semantics; it is not analytic logic, that is, a subjective power of man's mind. But like Aristotle's logic, it is a description of the structure of reality. However, in Aristotle as in all Greek thinking, it was a static description—the hierarchy of abstrac­tions, and then the conclusions. Hegel's logic describes the structure of the dynamic process of the inner divine life in which all realities in their essence are present, before they are actually in time and space.

Then the question arose: How does this all come to actuality? Here Hegel unites the idea of creation with the idea of the fall, and speaks of nature as the alienated or estranged spirit. The two words "alienation" and "estrangement" went on to play a great role in existentialist philosophy. In my opinion the two words mean the same thing, but I know that some philosophers prefer the word "alienation," perhaps because it is a bit more abstract. I myself have preferred to use the word "estrangement" because it contains the imagery of the stranger and the separation of people who once loved each other and belong essentially to each other. I think it is a more powerful term.

When Hegel says that nature is estranged spirit, estranged does not mean annihilated or altered. So the whole world process is seen by Hegel as a process of divine self-estrangement. This divine self-estrange­ment reminds us very much of the risk God took, according to Christian

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theology, when he created the world with the possibility of man's fall. Christian theology would say that God created the world in spite of the fact that he foresaw its estrangement and fall. In Calvinist theology God is said to have even decreed the fall. At any rate, this is the religious substance of Hegel's more logical statement of the alienation of the divine Spirit in nature.

Man's spirit develops out of nature going through many processes. In his encyclopedia Hegel presents a lengthy philosophy of nature. This is largely dependent on Schelling who on the basis of the synthesis of Kant and Spinoza, of which I spoke, developed the romantic element of nature. Schelling showed the inner powers of nature, the conscious and the unconscious. He was the first to use the term "unconscious" in philosophy, and through a special line of thought Freud received this term, and used it for empirical psychological purposes. But actually it comes from Schelling's philosophy of nature. What the romantic philosophers of nature wanted to show is that in nature spirit is struggling for its full actualization in man. You have the same idea in Teilbard de Chardin, the Jesuit, who wrote The Phenomenon of Man.19 It has many analogies to the romantic philosophy of nature and even to the classical if we consider Goethe a representative of the classical philosophy of nature. The great problem of this philosophy of nature was to show its relation to scientific research which had been going on vigorously ever since Galileo and Newton, first in astronomy, then in biology and physics. Hegel tried to take the results of scientific research into his system, as did also Schelling, who personally knew many of the best scientists of his time. But the danger is that if a preliminary result of scientific research is used in the formation of philosophical or theological statements, it tends to become fixed as something metaphysically true. Then the scientists resent this use of their scientific results because they know of the preliminary and tentative character of these results. The same day on which the philosopher writes down his philosophical interpretations of physics or biology, new insights are already being discovered in some laboratory which upon publication will make the philosopher's interpretations

19 Translated by Bernard Wall, with an Introduction by Julian Huxley (New York: Harper & Row, 1959).

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obsolete and invalid. This difficulty is always present. On the other hand, I know from personal encounter with physicists that they desire very much to have a philosophical evaluation and interpretation of what they are doing. So philosophy has a difficult task, but most contempo­rary philosophers settle for logical analysis of the scientific method, so as not to prejudice any results. But even this is precarious, for it may be that some new result will make necessary a change in method. So the only thing we can do is to say that the vision of a special level of considering nature must remain independent of the progress of natural sciences. This is what Teilhard de Chardin has done. He himself was a member of the expedition which discovered the skull of Pekin man or Sinanthropus, one of these prehistoric beings not yet man but in the series of development toward man. In spite of his very strict scientific training and work, he dared to have such a vision. In the third volume of my Systematic Theology I have tried something like this from the philosophical point of view, but I am aware of how precarious and dangerous it is. If, on the other hand, we do not try this, we remove God from nature, and if God is removed from nature, he gradually dis­appears altogether, because we are nature. We come from nature. If God has nothing to do with nature, he finally has nothing to do with our total being.

For Hegel man is born out of nature, and in man another phenome­non occurs; spirit comes to itself. In man Cod finds what he essentially is, namely, absolute spirit himself in a relative being, in a being which is biologically conditioned, but with the dimension of the spirit, of self-consciousness. Hegel distinguishes three dimensions or levels of spirit: (a) the subjective spirit, which is man's personal inner life. Psychology, for example, belongs to the doctrine of the subjective spirit; (b) the objective spirit, which is society, state, and family. The subject of ethics belongs here; (c) the absolute spirit, which is the full manifestation of God on the human level. Art, religion, and philosophy belong here.

This is very interesting in many respects. One dangerous thing in it is that ethics appears as philosophy of society. Ethics is connected with family, society, and state. Hegel's ethics is an objectivist ethics. It was at this point that Kierkegaard's most radical attack occurred, for Hegel understood ethics only from the point of view of the essential structure

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of man in society. He did not understand it as the decision of the individual personality with relation to himself and his society. Against this Kierkegaard placed his concept of the ethically deciding individual person. Because Hegel had no personal ethics in his system, Kierkegaard emphasized so much the decision of the individual personality. Hegel had only a system of social ethics in which the ethical relations of the individual person were developed, but the free, deciding individual did not appear in the system.

The next point has to do with the relation of religion to philosophy. Religion stands between aesthetics and philosophy. This also is impor­tant. In a special period of Schelling's development, the aesthetic was the great miracle of the divine self-manifestation. In the aesthetic vision the Kantian dualism between theoretical and practical reason was overcome. Even the state for Schelling was the great work of art, and the artistic creation was regarded as the real manifestation of the divine. Hegel saw that this is impossible because in all art there is an element of unreality. There is a seeming reconciliation, but only in the image, not in reality itself. So Hegel places art as a stage prior to religion, and religion beyond it as the substance. in his philosophy of religion—which was unfortunately never published by Hegel but is available only through several transcripts made by students of Hegel—we find one of the greatest evaluations of religion. Religion is for him the substance and center of life, that which makes everything sacred and gives every­thing its depths and heights.

But now something interesting happens. Philosophy is put above religion. To understand in what sense, you must first understand one thing in Hegel. In Hegel's hierarchy of natural philosophy—the subjec­tive spirit, the objective spirit, the absolute spirit—the higher level never abolishes the lower one. Man as spirit is still under the law of physics, the law of chemistry, the law of biology. These are three forms which he also distinguishes. You can see immediately how impossible this is from the point of view of modern atomic physics in which the distinction between the chemical and the physical is almost extin­guished. Be that as it may, for Hegel the higher does not abolish the lower. But the higher is an expression of the more perfect actualization of the absolute spirit in time and space. And so, if philosophy is higher

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than religion, it does not abolish religion. Religion remains for Hegel the substance of spiritual reality, that is, the relation to the absolute mind. Here he develops a whole history of religion in which all religions are put in their right place, and Christianity as the revealed religion is given the highest place.

What then is the difference between religion and philosophy? The difference lies in the form of our awareness of the relation to the absolute. In religion we think in images, in Vorstellungen, as he called them. Today we would speak rather of myths and symbols. Philosophy is able to interpret these images or symbols in terms of concepts (Be-griff a.) The conceptualization of the religious contents is the highest aim of philosophy. In this respect Hegel is very near to the way in which Western philosophy has always developed. We can follow this development with marvelous clarity in early Greek philosophy. First there were the myths, theogonies, stories of the genesis of the gods, then cosmogony, the genesis of the world, and then out of these religious myths the first great philosophical concepts were born. The history of philosophy shows this. So Hegel also believed that the philosophical concepts were universally born out of the mythological symbols of religion. In a real sense his own philosophy is philosophy of religion; but in a narrower sense philosophy of religion, connected with the church tradition, symbols and myths, has a special place in his system. In this way he unites the critical mind of philosophy with the intuitive symbolizing mind of religion by having philosophy provide the concep­tual form for the symbols of religion.

4. The Synthesis of State and Church

The third synthesis of which I want to speak is in the political realm, the synthesis of state and church. If you hear the word "state" used by Hegel and in romantic philosophy generally, you should not think of what is called "state" today in liberal democracy, that is, an abstract system of government. Therefore, the idea of keeping the state away from the economic and cultural contents of life is in this country quite different from what it was for all European countries. In Hegel's understanding state is the synthetic unity of all communal activities in a

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nation. It is the directing center of education, the arts, religion, economy, defense, administration, law, and of all things which belong to the realm of culture. If you take state in this sense you can better understand the expression Hegel once used that the state is the divine on earth. If you identify state, however, with the central administration, then this is almost blasphemy. It is an unfortunate expression, and has often been used against Hegel. What it means is the presence of God's self-realization in all cultural realms in time and space. The centered unity of this is the state, in the largest sense. If you take it in this sense too, the state is actually the church, because the state is not merely the administration, but the cultural life in all directions, including religion. Then it can be called the body of God on earth, so to speak.

But this expression is so unfortunate because it has been used con­sciously or unconsciously by the totalitarian ideologies as they developed in Germany, Russia, Italy, and elsewhere. So Hegel is often referred to in order to justify a centralist control of all political and economic life. This is not what Hegel meant at all. Administration is only one of the functions, and law is another, but none of them is meant in a totali­tarian way, although there lurked this danger in his formulation. For us the most important is the relation to the church. If we take Hegel's definition of state, then of course church and state are identical. Some of the theologians who followed Hegel thought it was clear that there should not be a particular church at all. The life of the nation and of the church should be identical. The influence of classicism is clear here because in the Greek city-states there was no independent "church" or cult separated from the life of the polis. So this became the ideal both for the philosophers and the theologians. One of the theologians, Wilhelm De Wette (1780-1849), said that the destiny of Christianity is no longer dependent on the church, but on the substance given in society and expressed in the form of the state. Substance stands here for spiritual substance, the creative ground out of which the life of a nation grows. Therefore state and church are no longer separated.

These ideas should not sound so strange. In public addresses in America we often hear, "We are a Christian nation." What does this mean? Certainly we are not a Christian nation in any empirical sense. We are extremely unchristian, as every nation is. Perhaps it means that

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in all our secular life and in the several expressions of our national life, there is a substance which has been shaped by Christianity. If under­stood in this sense, it can be right, but it is also very dangerous, especially when used in our anti-Communist propaganda. Then it is wrong, for no nation is ever simply Christian or godless, whatever theory its leaders may hold. Neither the one nor the other is true.

We are still involved in this problem as is most evident in some of the statements that Bonhoeffer made in his letters from prison. In these letters he stated that man has come to maturity, that the separation of the religious and cultural spheres should not be maintained any longer, that the church should know that it is not the only representative of the divine in history, but that the secular culture has an equal claim, and perhaps a more genuine claim in our time. This is the Hegelian concern repeated in these ideas, is culture something which stands beside the church? Shall the church stand aside from the autonomous development of culture? Should it be pushed into a corner where it loses its relevance for all of culture? Or should we instead understand the religious element in culture and the cultural element in religion, and attempt to drive toward a new unity as this existed in former centuries and cultures. This is the deeper meaning of the expression that the state is the divine on earth or of the identity of state and church.

5. Providence, History, and Theodicy

There is another point, a very important and decisive one, at which Hegel tries the great synthesis. That is the interpretation of history in terms of providence and theodicy, which is justification of God for the kind of world this is. Hegel followed Leibniz and the Enlightenment with their concept of the harmony of the universe. Harmony is a paradoxical concept also in Hegel. In spite of the contradictions of reality, in spite of individual willfulness and irrationality, the ultimate outcome of history is positive and is in line with the divine purpose. One can say that Hegel's interpretation of history is the application of the idea of providence in a secularized form, in a form in which the philosopher, so to speak, Sits on the throne of God, looking into his providential activities and describing them. In everything which hap‑

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pens Hegel can see the self-actualization of the absolute spirit, the divine ground of being itself. This means that somehow everything in history is divine revelation. He can say that history is reasonable, but reasonable according to the logos concept of reason, according to the principle of the divine self-manifestation in history, according to the universal principle of form in which the divine ground manifests itself.

On this basis Hegel made a statement which has been very much abused, misunderstood, and attacked by very clever philosophers. This is the statement that everything real is rational. Now every eight-year-old boy knows that not everything that is real is rational, but it took sixty-year-old philosophers at the end of the nineteenth century to show with their immense wisdom bow to refute Hegel. Then they could express with great feeling how superior they were to Hegel because they knew that there are many things in reality which are not reasonable. But they were not superior; they were only unable to understand the profound thought of the great mind. What Hegel said must first of all be thought of as a paradox. It is the paradox that in spite of the immense irration­ality in reality, of which be could speak again and again, there is nevertheless a hidden providential activity, namely, the self-manifesta­tion of the absolute Spirit through the irrational attitudes of all crea­tures and especially of people. This providential power in history works behind human activity, willing, and planning, and through man's rationality and irrationality. This idea has the same paradoxical charac­ter as the Christian doctrine of providence. In spite of tragic occurrences which Hegel also knew about, he did not despair of providence; nor did the early Christians under horrible persecutions. It is only if you speak of providence unparadoxically that you must despair. If you speak of it paradoxically, you can say that in spite of this or that, the mystery of life is behind everything that happens. Every individual is immediate to God in every moment and in every situation, and can reach his own fulfillment in time and above time.

But while the paradoxical element in Hegel's statement is obviously there, Hegel did not accept the mystery in the way in which Chris­tianity has always accepted it. Hegel knew why things happened as they did. He knew how the process of history unfolds. Therefore, he missed the one element in the Christian affirmation of the paradox of provi‑

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dence, the mystery about the particulars. He did not even discuss the particulars, but he believed he knew the general process as such. He constructed history as the actualization of the eternal essences or potentialities which are the divine life in their inner dialectical move­ment, the play of God within himself, so to speak. Here he developed the trinitarian symbolism within the divine life. These eternal essences are actualized in the historical process in time and space.

But how are they actualized? Here Hegel's almost tragic feeling in regard to history comes out in a way usually overlooked by his inter­preters. He said history is not the place for the happiness of the indi­vidual. The individual cannot be happy in history. History does not care about the individual. History goes its grand way from one idea or essence or potentiality within the divine life, actualizing itself, to the others. The bearers of these ideas are the social groups, the nations, and the states. Each nation, each cultural group, has its time in which a particular eternal idea, as it has been spelled out in Hegel's logic, becomes actual in time and space.

He said all this happens by passion and interest. Nothing in history happens without passion and interest. Here we have an insight of the existentialists which they received from Hegel and by means of which they attacked him. The term "interest" was used especially by Kierke-gaard in his attack against Hegel, while "passion" and, in the larger sense, will-to-power and economic will, were used by anti-Hegelians like the early Marx and Nietzsche. They were all dependent on the one against whom they fought, even in their use of terminology.

Hegel had a concept which gives strong expression to the "in spite of" character of his doctrine of history. This concept is "the cunning of the idea," a very mythological-sounding phrase. The cunning of the idea is the divine trick, so to speak, working behind the backs of those who are acting in history and bringing into existence something that is in line with a meaningful development of history. This idea makes it possible to understand figures like Hitler. In this respect Hegel is very near to Luther who understood figures like Attila the Hun and the leaders of the Turks during the invasions at the time of the Reformation as the "masks of God." They are the masks through whom God works out his purposes in history. This is also mythological imagery, similar to the

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cunning of the idea. Both point to the paradoxical character of the divine activity. By paradox we mean it in its original Greek sense, namely, against all expectation, contrary to our normal belief and opinion. In this sense Hegel's cunning of the idea and Luther's masks of God in world history are in the same line, So Hegel could say that he views history as the divine theodicy, the justification of God for the horrors of world history. Hegel said that there is no easy explanation of the negativities in history. We are not able to justify God, but the historical process justifies him. Or God justifies himself by the historical process in spite of the fact that this historical process is full of events which seem to contradict the divine purpose.

There is another important point in Hegel's interpretation of history, of the world process, and even of the inner dialectics of the divine life. It is the principle of negativity. I warned you about seeing Hegel chiefly in terms of the triadic dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. This can be a caricature of Hegel, but it happens to be a caricature for which he is largely responsible in his later writings, especially in his encyclopedia where it becomes often intolerable. Behind this there is Hegel's idea of the negative element in every life process. The negation drives the positive out of itself and reveals its inner potentialities. This, of course, is another idea taken up by existentialism. The problem of nonbeing in existentialism and in Heidegger is already in Hegel. The difference is that in Hegel the negative is not the continuous threat against the positive, but is overcome in the fulfilled synthesis. Here again Hegel is sitting on the throne of providence, always knowing the outcome. This is the hybris which brought Hegel's synthesis, despite its greatness, to its final dissolution. According to Hegel no life is possible without nega­tivity, otherwise the positive would remain within itself in dead iden­tity. Without alteration there is no life. The continuous process of life which goes out of itself and tries to return to itself has in itself the principle of negativity. Here is the deepest point in his theodicy, the necessity of the negative as an implication of life. It is also necessary to know this to understand the rise of existentialism later, and its opposi­tion to essentialism.

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6. The Christ as Reality and Symbol

Hegel tried to combine all the elements of his period with the basic Christian affirmation that Jesus is the Christ. The universal synthesis between Christianity and the modern mind stands and falls with the christological problem. For Hcgcl and all essentialists the problem is particularly difficult because Jesus, who is called the Christ, is first of all an individual. But at the same time he is supposed to be the universal individual. So the question arose: Can an individual be at the same time universal? This is the fight that has been going on since Hegel, and in some way also before him in the Enlightenment and mysticism. The problem has not been fully solved even today.

But Hegel tried to solve this problem. For him the essential identity of God and man in spite of actual separation and hostility is embodied in this one man Jesus who is for that reason called the Logos. He developed a christology in line with that principle formulated by Nicholas of Cusa of the mutual inherence of the finite and the infinite. In Jesus as the Christ the infinite is completely actualized in the finite; its very center is present in the center of this one finite man Jesus. Jesus therefore gave expression to that which is universal and which is potentially and essentially true of every human being, and in some way of every being. He is the self-manifestation of the absolute mind. Later revivalist or pietistic theology in Europe was to fight against this because for it the unique individuality and the personal relation to this individu­ality stand in the very center.

Several days ago I had a very interesting christological discussion with a colleague over the question: Is Jesus important for us as Mitmensch, that is, as a fellow human being with whom we can have a common relationship as human beings? Or is he important for us as the bearer of the Spirit? Now, it is my personal opinion that on this question Hegel is nearer to the understanding of Paul and the early church than the pietists with their jesuological way of being related to him. In any case, the problem brought up by Hegel is still a living problem and probably will remain so as long as there is a Christian Church.

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7. Eternity against Immortality

General piety very aggressively attacked Hegel's mystical and philo­sophical understanding of immortality. This attack is psychologically understandable. For it is obvious that individual immortality could not be affirmed within the system; it could not agree with the consistency of the system. We participate in the divine life as individuals through the historical process, and to the degree in which we participate in it, we participate in the divine life. This participation was called eternal life by Hegel, as well as by Schelling and the classical German philoso-phers.

hilosophers. They understood this concept of eternal life in opposition to individual immortality. They certainly could claim biblical support for this notion that immortality belongs to Cod alone, that man has no immortality in himself, not even before the fall according to biblical mythological symbolism. In paradise he could gain immortality only by eating from the tree of life, even as the gods themselves in the myths which underlie the biblical version.

So Hegel here expresses an idea which is in conflict with the feelings and desires of every individual, however profound it might be and however much it might be stressed in mysticism and philosophy. For this reason the philosophical criticism of Hegel found a great deal of popular support.