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 Tillich, Carl E. Braaten (Editor)
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Published November 15th 1972 by Touchstone
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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 the
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
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 in
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,
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‑
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 intuition
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.°
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.
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?
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
386 A History of Christian Thought
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
388 A History of Christian Thought
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.
$ $ * $ $ $ $ $ $ $
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
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‑
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 the
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
[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
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.
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
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).
412
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.
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
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,
416 A History of Christian Thought
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‑
Reaction Against Enlightenment 417
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
418 A History of Christian Thought
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,
Reaction Against Enlightenment 419
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
420 A History of Christian Thought
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
Reaction Against Enlightenment 421
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).
422 A History of Christian Thought
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
Reaction Against Enlightenment 423
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
424 A History of Christian Thought
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
Reaction Against Enlightenment 425
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
426 A History of Christian Thought
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‑
Reaction Against Enlightenment 427
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‑
428 A History of Christian Thought
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
Reaction Against Enlightenment 429
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.
430 A History of Christian Thought
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.
Reaction Against Enlightenment 431
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.
