A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism
by
Paul Tillich,
Carl E. Braaten (Editor)
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Previously published in two separate volumes entitled
Paperback, 550 pages
Published November 15th 1972 by Touchstone
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URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tillich
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CHAPTER
II The Enlightenment and Its Problems
A. Tim NATURE OP ENLJCH-1T.NMENT
Now we must go to the
fundamental principles of the Enlightenment. We will not be speaking directly
of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century, such as Hobbes (really
seventeenth century) and Hume in England, Lessing and Kant in Germany, and
Rousseau and Voltaire in France, but we will be describing the fundamental
principles of the Enlightenment. Most of our academic life is based on these
principles.
1. The Kantian Definition of
Autonomy
We
will be discussing four main concepts, without going into the details of their
application. The first of these is "autonomy." In order to
introduce this concept, I will indicate how Kant understood it in the latter
part of the eighteenth century. Kant defined enlightenment (Aufklarung) as
man's conquering the state of immaturity so far as he is responsible for it.
Immaturity, he said, is the inability to use one's own reason without the
guidance of somebody else. Immaturity of this kind is caused by ourselves. It
is rooted in the lack of resoluteness and courage to use reason without the
guidance of another person. The free use of reason is the essence of
enlightenment. Now that is a very adequate description of what autonomy means.
Kant pointed out how much more
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 321
comfortably one lives if
one has guardians, of whatever kind they may be, whether religious, political,
philosophical, or educational ones. But it was his intention to drive men out
of their security under the guidance of other people. For him this security
contradicts the true nature of man.
That
is the meaning of the idea of autonomy in the light of Kant's words. He could
say that this is the fundamental principle of enlightenment, the autonomy of
reason in every individual human being. The word "autonomy" needs
some interpretation. It is derived from two Greek words, autos, which
means "self," and noinos, which means "law."
Autonomy means being a law to oneself. The law is not outside of us, but inside
as our true being. This Greek origin of the word shows clearly that autonomy is
the opposite of arbitrariness or willfulness. Autonomy is not lawless
subjectivity. Kant emphasized this when he said that the essential nature of
the human will is the law of reason. Every deviation from it hurts the
essential nature of the will itself. It is the law implicit in man's rational
structure. It has implications for the theoretical as well as for the practical
side of man's activities. It refers to knowledge as well as to the arts, to the
development of personality as well as to community. Everything which belongs to
man's nature shares in his rational structure. Man is autonomous. The law of
aesthetic fulfillment (works of art), of cognitive fulfillment (scientific
inquiry), of personal fulfillment in a mature personality, of community
fulfillment in principles of justice—all these belong to reason and are based
on the autonomy of reason in every human being.
I
must warn you about some distorted statements on autonomy. There are
theological books of the neo-orthodox movement, for example, which attack
autonomy as a revolt against God. They identify it with individual willfulness
and arbitrariness. In doing this they distort the meaning of autonomy. Man's
autonomy does not stand against the word or will of God—as if God's will were
something opposed to man's created goodness and its fulfillment. We could
define autonomy as the memory which man has of his own created goodness.
Autonomy is man's living in the law of reason in all realms of his spiritual
activity. Many philosophers of the Enlightenment identified autonomy with the
divine will and were in no way critical of this identification. But for the
322 A History of Christian Thought
individual man
it means the courage to think; it means the courage to use one's rational
powers. This becomes even more clear when we look at the opposite term, namely,
"heteronomy."
The word "heteronomy" also comes from two Greek words, heteros,
which means "strange" or "foreign," and nomos, which
means "law." Now the whole thing is turned around. It is not autonomy
but ultimately heteronomy that involves willfulness and arbitrariness. Why?
Because if we should obey a strange authority, even if it were to come from
God, it would go against the will of our own created goodness, and we would be
subjecting ourselves to something that is not pure reason within us, such as
our desires, our strivings, or the pleasure principle, and the like. Then we
are looking for the security of a foreign authority which deprives us of the
courage to use our reason because of the fear of punishment or of falling into
insoluble problems. So we come to the surprising result that heteronomy is
ultimately the attempt to escape fear, not by courage but by subjection to an
authority which gives us security. In this sense heteronomy indirectly appeals
to the pleasure principle and denies our own rational structure. Kant, for
instance, was very much aware even before Freud and modern psychotherapy that
religious heteronomy also subjects men to strange laws—whether heter-onomy in
relation to the church or the Bible—and that men follow these laws driven by
fear. This means that ultimately they are being driven by the pleasure
principle, subverting the created goodness of man's rational structure.
In this sense all religious authority can become heteronomous. Of
course, the heteronomy disappears in the moment in which it is transformed
into theonomy (divine law). Theonomy implies our own personal experience of
the presence of the divine Spirit within us, witnessing to the Bible or to the
church. It is very interesting that Calvin who sounds so heteronomously
authoritarian in many of his utterances was the one who most clearly stated
that the Bible can be our authority only when the divine Spirit witnesses to it
(the testiinonium Sancti Spiritus internum). Where this inner witness is
lacking, the authority of the Bible has no meaning. Obedience to its authority
would be mere external subjection and not inward personal experience. In
autonomy one
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 323
follows the
natural law of God implanted in our own being, and if we experience the truth
of this law in the Bible or in the church, then we are still autonomous, but
with the dimension of the theonomous in us at the same time. If we do not have
this experience, then we follow in authoritarian subjection as immature
persons, searching for security by avoiding the anxieties of punishment and
danger. Autonomy which is aware of its divine ground is theonomy; but autonomy
without the theonomous dimension degenerates into mere humanism.
Heteronomy has been broken in our time, and this is a dangerous thing.
Men are always looking for the security of heteronomy, especially the masses of
men. The breaking up of ecclesiastical heteronomy means that the masses of
people run to other heteronomies, such as the totalitarian systems, sectarian
fanaticism, or fundamentalistic narrowness, thus closing themselves off from
the whole development of autonomous thought in modern times.
In the light of these principles you can understand why the Enlightenment
was one of the greatest of all revolutions. Socially it was a bourgeois
revolution. But spiritually it was the revolution of man's autonomous
potentialities over against heteronomous powers which were no longer
convincing. But don't misunderstand me! As long as people in the Middle Ages
lived in these traditions without criticizing them—just as we breathe air
without knowing it—then it is still theonomy. But as soon as the human mind
began to ask questions at the end of the Middle Ages, then the great problem
arose. The church responded by using all its power heteronomously to suppress
the questioning mind which was no longer at ease in the atmosphere of
ecclesiastical tradition and could no longer regard it as self-evident.
Something new had taken place. Man became aware of his power of radical
questioning. What should then be done? Should we try to suppress autonomous
thought, as the church tried to do by means of the Inquisition, or should we do
something else? Should we attempt to find within autonomy the dimension of
theonomy, namely, the religious dimension, without weakening autonomous
thought? This is what Schleiermacher and Hegel tried to do. The problem is
still alive today. We cannot surrender autonomy, but neither can we live in an
empty autonomy, because then we are in
324 A History
of Christian Thought
danger of grasping
securities given by false authorities and totalitarian powers.
$ * * $ * * * *
Question:'
In your definition of theonomy you mentioned the experiences of the presence
of the inner divine Spirit which witnesses to the Bible and church. Would you
describe this Spirit more fully so that I could recognize it in myself? Or if
it is self-authenticating, how does one cultivate or achieve this Spirit?
Answer:
Now this is a mixture of theology and counseling. But let me say one thing. It
is obvious that if we speak of the Spirit working within us, it is
self-authenticating. By what else could it be authenticated? If by some other
authority, why would we acknowledge that authority? Because the Spirit tells us
to. Then we are back with the Spirit. This was Calvin's idea, for example, when
he spoke about the authority of the Bible. The divine Spirit witnesses to the
content of the Bible, and in this way the Bible can become an authority. Only
through the witness of the Spirit can the Bible cease to be a merely external
authority. There is, however, a problem in Calvin's theology at this point.
Does the Spirit witness to the particular contents of the Bible, so that this
witness is happening while reading the Bible, or does the Spirit witness to the
Bible as such, so that after this the Bible becomes in itself an authority? It
was the latter understanding which became predominant in Calvinistic Orthodoxy,
and from there came into Lutheranism also, and thus became the principle of authority
in Orthodoxy as a whole. I can repeat something I said before. If the divine
Spirit witnesses to the Bible as such, without any consideration of the
particular contents, then in principle anybody can write a theology. This leads
us to the idea of a theologia irregenetorum, a theology of those who are
not reborn. But if it is the particular content that is being attested by the
Spirit, then you must be existentially
1
Editor's Note: As was Tillich's custom, he requested that students submit
questions for him to answer before the start of the lecture. His answers
invariably would interweave historical and systematic aspects of the subject.
The editor has selected a few of the questions and answers, both to allow
Tillich to sharpen his own presentation of a subject and to retain the
atmosphere of the classroom situation.
The Enlightenment and its
Problems 325
involved in the content
of the Bible in every moment of reading it. You must at least be participating
in such a way that the Spirit works in you and witnesses to the truth of the
biblical message. But you also ask, if the Spirit is self-authenticating, what
can I do to receive it? This question cannot be answered, for if I did succeed
in answering it, then I would be giving you a method for forcing God upon you.
But God destroys every such method even as he destroys our moral self-righteousness.
The only answer which can be given is to remain open to the impacts of
life—which may come from others, or from reading the Bible, or services of the
church or acts of love—through which God may work upon us. In listening and
waiting we may experience the Spirit, but more than this cannot be said. There
is no valid method at all for forcing God upon us.
* * * * * * * * * * 2.
Concepts of Reason
Now
we come to another equally important concept, the concept of reason. Here also
much semantic clarity is needed in order to purify our image of the past. This
is a very difficult concept and we can take but a few steps in attempting to
interpret what this word means.
It
certainly does not mean what is usually implied in all our talk about reason
and/or revelation. If I can succeed in preventing you from jumping into
discussions about reason against revelation before you clearly define the
meaning of the terms, then this lecture will not have been in vain. In ordinary
language reason is very highly respected. But it has a much narrower meaning
than it had in the Enlightenment and in the previous history of the Western
world. Today it means the calculation of the businessman, the analysis of the
natural scientist, and the construction of the engineer. These three aspects
determine the concept of reason. It would be therefore historically inaccurate
to use this modem concept of reason as the model for understanding what the
Enlightenment means by reason. When we speak of the "Age of Reason"
we cannot restrict reason to its modem analytic and synthetic senses.
326 A History of Christian Thought
I will distinguish four different concepts of reason, and discuss them point
by point.
a. Universal Reason: The first concept of, reason has the
meaning of the universal logos. Logos is the Greek word for reason. But
it also means "word." In Heraclitus and in Stoicism logos means both
word and reason. The Greeks asked the question how the human word and human
language are able to grasp reality. Their answer was that the logos, the
universal form and principle of everything created, is both in reality as a
whole and in the human mind. The word is meaningful when men use it because it
can grasp reality. The opposite is also true. Reality grasps the human mind, so
that men can speak to and about reality.
That is the logos concept of reason. This concept appears and reappears
everywhere in Christian theology as a first principle. It is a principle of
order and structure in all realities. As the Fourth Gospel says, "All
things were made through him [i.e., the Logos], and without him was not
anything made that was made" (John 1:3, Rsv). The Logos is the principle
through which God created the world. This is a fundamental insight of all
classical theology. Reality and mind have a logos structure. As a structure of
reality and mind, logos includes our power of knowledge, our ethical awareness
or conscience, and our aesthetic intuition. These are all expressions of the
logos in us. (Immanuel Kant wrote the critiques of pure or theoretical reason
and practical reason, and the neo-Kantian school added the aesthetic reason as
a third, uniting the practical and the theoretical). Reason or logos is
therefore in the tree, for instance, as well as in the man who names the tree
and describes the image of tree-ness which reappears in every individual tree.
This is possible only because there is a structure in the tree which man is
able to grasp by his mind, or, since this is always mutual, his mind is grasped
by the structure.
The universe has been created by an intelligent power, the divine
ground, and since the world has been intelligently built, intelligence can
grasp it. We can grasp the world intelligently because it has been created
intelligently. It has a structure. This is equally valid in philosophy as well
as in theology. There is no conflict here in regard to the theological or
philosophical use of this concept of reason. There is a
The Enlightenment and its
Problems 327
necessary logos element
in all theology. Any theology which does not have an understanding of the
universal character of the logos structure of the world, and that means of
reason in the sense of logos, becomes barbaric and ceases to be theology. When
the logos element in theo-logy disappears, theology becomes a fanatical
repetition of biblical passages without endeavoring to understand their
meaning.
What
we have just described is a feature of that dualistic heresy which divorces
creation and redemption, and sets them in contradiction to each other. Creation
contains the logos, and if redemption contradicts creation, then God
contradicts himself. Then we have a good God and a bad God, the good God of
redemption and the bad God of creation. The church in the early centuries was
almost destroyed in the fight for the goodness of creation, that is, for the
logos structure of reality as a whole. The church finally overcame the
temptation to accept a dualism by regarding it as a demonic temptation, demonic
because the characteristic of the demonic is the split in the divinity between
the good and the bad God. Yet this heresy continues to appear in Christianity. It
was especially strong in the earlier period of neo-orthodoxy.2
But
the same thing appears in other less refined or sophisticated forms. There is
much of this dualistic heresy in existentialist literature which describes the
"question" but does not give an "answer," leaving the world
to the devil, so to speak.
b.
Critical Reason: The logos concept of reason was not the most important in the
eighteenth century, although it was definitely a presupposition of that piety
which praised the glory of creation. Rather, the second concept of reason,
namely, critical reason, was the more effective. In the name of critical reason
the way was prepared for the French Revolution, which transformed the world.
Before that the American Revolution occurred, uniting religious and rational
dimensions in the Constitution. That is its greatness. But in the French
Revolution, because of the conflict with Catholicism, reason became radical and
even
2 Editor's Note: Tillich
expressed his delight with the apparent turn in Karl Barth's thinking
represented in the little book, The Humanity of God. He inter-e eted
this as a hopeful sign of a new attempt to overcome th danger of settin g Ee
God of redemption against the God of creation, and also as an emphasis which
makes contact with his own thinking that always starts with the human
situation.
328 A History of Christian Thought
antireligious.
It brought about the destruction of the old institutions controlled by the
heteronomous authorities of both church and state.
We must understand what this critical reason was. It was not a calculating
reason which decides whether to do this or that, depending on which is more
advantageous. Rather, it was a full, passionate, revolutionary emphasis on
man's essential goodness in the name of the priici-pie of justice. The
revolutionary bourgeois fought against feudalism and the authoritarian
churches. Unlike our present-day analytic and critical reason, he had a
passionate belief in the logos structure of reality, and was convinced that the
human mind is able to re-establish this structure by transforming society. We
could therefore call it revolutionary reason as well as critical reason.
Because of its religious depths this critical revolutionary reason overcame the
prejudices of the feudal order, the heteronomous subjection of people both by the
state and the church. It could do so because it spoke in the name of
truth and justice. The philosophers of the Enlightenment were extremely
passionate. They were not positivists; they were not interested in merely
collecting facts which had no meaning for the revolutionary program. They
became martyrs for the passion which they felt was given by the divine logos
within them. It would be good if both in the East and in the West there
would be more of this revolutionary reason. Both in Russia and in America it
has been suppressed by the positivistic observation of facts, without that
passion for the logos which is the manifestation of the divine in mind and
reality.
c. Intuitive Reason: Then I come to a third concept of reason. I call it
intuitive reason, which is used by all philosophers somehow or other in all
periods. Formerly it was identified with Plato's idea of the intuition of the
essences, and particularly of the universal essences of the good and the true.
Today we have another term for it. We call it phenomenological. This is a
school of philosophy which ultimately goes back to Platonism and which has many
roots in the Middle Ages, perhaps especially in the Franciscan tradition. Its
basic assumption is that the human mind has power to intuit essences. In
looking at a red object at this moment, a red shirt or dress, the mind can
experience the essence of redness. The essence of redness appears in a
particular object and can be grasped by the mind. This I call intuitive reason.
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 329
Today
reason and intuition are placed in contrast to each other, but they should not
be. Intuitive reason is a nonanalytic reason which expresses itself in terms of
descriptions. To understand the structures of life and spirit, we must use this
descriptive method. Intuitive reason means looking at meanings, trying to
understand them, and not analyzing objects, be it psychical or physical
objects. That is another kind of reason. We use intuitive reason all the time
in dealing with the world, when we see the universal in the particular, without
asking analytic questions, or relational questions, etc. Whenever we are
discussing meanings, as we are doing in this very lecture, we are in the realm
of intuitive reason, as Plato also was in his dialogues. When he tried to
discuss what virtue, courage, or fortitude are, then he used this intuitive
method. This is most explicit in his early dialogues. When we want to know what
fortitude is, then we look at examples, examples to which an ordinary meaning
of the language leads us. We compare these examples, and from these examples we
finally get a universal concept which covers the different examples and shows
their point of identity.
In
modem philosophy this is called the phenomenological method. This method is
absolutely necessary for all the humanities. The understanding of meanings in
all literature, theology, or philosophy is dependent on the use of this
method. Philosophically it has been restated, but not invented, by Edmund
Husserl (1859-1938) in his Logical Investi-gations3 around
1900. He was a predecessor of existentialism. That puts us in the interesting
situation that existentialism has been generally accepted, but not its
predecessor. Yet we find that today some of the philosophical minds among the
psychoanalysts who first accepted exis-tertialism as the philosophical
foundation of their work are now going back to phenomenology (or intuitive
reason), realizing that without that method, existentialism would not be able
to utter one word.
d.
Technical Reason: This brings me to the last concept of reason, to its
predominant meaning today, namely, to technical reason. It analyzes reality
into its smallest elements, and then construes out of them other things, larger
things. We see this kind of reason at work in Einstein in terms of mathematical
physics. Yet there was also a strong element of
8Logische Untersuehungen (Halle M. Niemeyer, 1900).
330 A History
of Christian Thought
intuitive reason in
Einstein. Einstein himself tried to describe the relation between the
intuitive and analytic elements in his own processes of thinking. Besides these
there was the critical element, exemplified in Einstein's political activities.
Here he followed the eighteenth-century understanding of reason. He knew what
justice means from reason, but of course he used a different kind of reason in
his scientific discoveries. He also knew of the logos character of reason. In a
published discussion between Einstein and myself on the idea of God,4
Einstein said that the miracle of the structure of reality is what he called
the divine. This was 50 per cent of what I would also call the logos concept.
So
you see that the greatest representative of technical reason was aware of other
dimensions of reason. The power of technical reason is its ability to analyze
reality and to construct tools out of it. An extreme example of its use is
logical positivism. What it says is merely analytic; it is a tool used mostly
in order to produce other tools. We should not despise technical reason. We all
live from it. Theologians especially should not despise it if they wish to
remain theologians. Even the analytic form of thought used in argumentation
must be kept pure. In discussions we should never replace logic by emotion or by
a heteronomous acceptance of religious authorities. We must use it equally as
fully and rigorously as those who are not aware of the other forms of reason,
only we must use it in awareness that there are four fundamental forms of what
we call reason.
3. The Concept of Nature
Next
we turn to the concept of nature. This is necessary in view of the conflict
that was going on throughout the eighteenth century between naturalism and
supernaturalism. Supernaturalistic theology attempted to save the tradition by
means of the same tools which naturalism used in trying to transform the
tradition. Therefore, we must ask what this concept of nature meant during
these controversies. I can tell you autobiographically that one of my first
scientific inquiries into theology—which was my Habilitationsschrift—dealt with
the concept
Cf.
Paul Tillich, "Science and Theology: A Discussion with Einstein," Theology
of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 331
of naturalism and
supernaturalism in the period before Schleier-macher.5 Out of this study I gained
insight into the intricacies of the concept of nature in these discussions,
which has influenced my thinking.
There
are two fundamental concepts of nature which I distinguish, the material and
the formal concept of nature. The material concept refers to things in nature,
usually to subhuman or nonhuman things. This is what we usually call nature,
all the realities that are the subject matter of physics, biology, botany, etc.
The formal concept of nature refers to human beings, but of course man's body
belongs as well to the material concept; it is as natural as any animal body.
But it contains a different element. It has mind or spirit. Following from
man's being as mind and spirit is the fact that man has a history. So nature
and history are placed into contrast.
We
are using the material concept of nature when we ask questions about whether
nature is also fallen, whether nature can be saved, or when we speak about
going out into nature, or when we discuss whether nature is only an object of
our control, subject to our technical activities, or whether nature is such
that man can commune with it. In all these cases we point to the material
concept of nature. But there is quite a different concept, and this one has
even more theological significance. It is the concept of the natural, coming
from Greek thinking, from the word physis, which has to do with growth.
The opposite of this is noinos, which is something produced by human
will, such as institutions of society, conventional rules and laws, everything
that is not produced by natural growth, but produced by people who transform
what is grown. This distinction helps us to understand better the social
criticism which came out of the critical schools of philosophy after Socrates,
the Cynics, Hedonists, and also the Stoics. Their concept of natural law as
that which we have within us by birth was the basis for their criticism of all
that was arbitrary in society.
In
all the literature of the Western world, from the Greek to the medieval sources
and perhaps up to the seventeenth century, when you
5
Der Begriff des Ubernatürlichen, sein da1ektischer Charakter und des
Prinzip der ldentität, dargestelh an der supranaturaListischen Theologie vor
Schleier,nacher (1915).
332 A History of Christian Thought
see the term
"natural law," it very rarely means "physical law," law as
discovered by physics. Usually it means rational law, particularly the law of
morals or the law of cognitive reason, that is, the rules of logic. All this is
called natural law; it is man's true nature. The law of the logos of which I
spoke before embraces both nature outside of man and man himself. It is given
by creation, and therefore it is called natural.
In
order to make meaningful theological statements about nature or naturalism, it
is necessary to distinguish these two concepts of nature. Related to the
concept of the natural which we have just discussed are two other concepts, the
unnatural and the supernatural. The unnatural is simply the perversion of the
nature of a given thing. On the other hand, the supernatural is not supposed to
be unnatural. It is supposed to be higher in power and value than the natural.
It is a higher sphere which can enter into and interfere with the sphere of the
natural. The supernatural interferes both with nature outside and with man's
mental and spiritual activities. The mind or spirit of man (spirit with a small
"s" of course) belongs to the realm of the natural, not in the
material but in the formal sense of nature. Man's mind transcends the material
sense by the very fact he is able to use language and to create tools.
The
concept of the supernatural raises a theological problem. What does it mean to
say that there is a sphere higher in power and value than the human sphere?
What does it mean to say that the supernatural sphere can interfere with the
human sphere? In what sense is the idea of interference justified? If God
interferes with the natural which exists by his act of creation, does this not
lead to a demonic split in the divine nature? Does God interfere and if so, in
what sense? These are problems with which all theology has to deal, including
modern theology. They were the problems of Hegel and Schleiermacher, both of
whom tried to develop a theology which transcended naturalism and supernaturalism.
These problems are also involved in modern theology whether we are discussing
the doctrine of God, christology, soteriology, or eschatology.
4. The Concept of Harmony
Now
we come to a fourth concept, the concept of harmony. This concept is part of
the fundamental faith of the Enlightenment. In my terminology we could call
harmony its ultimate concern. All the phiios‑
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 333
ophers of the Enlightenment
use this concept directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly. All of them
elaborated their systems under the guidance of this principle. Our first remark
about it has to be semantic. Today harmony may have a musical connotation,
which it always has bad and should have. But it has also deteriorated to mean
"nice," when we speak of a nice harmonious family life. Of course,
harmony understood in this way was not the ultimate concern of the great
philosophers of the Enlightenment.
Harmony in the philosophy of the Enlightenment is a paradoxical concept.
This means that it must always be qualified by the words "in spite
of." The ancient Pythagoreans spoke of a universal harmony, of a cosmic
harmony, but in spite of every individual thing and every individual human
being seemingly going their own way. Yet, through all there was an overarching
harmony. The Greek word cosmos which we translate by universe originally meant
beauty and harmony. The Pythagoreans discovered mathematical formulae for the
musical harmonies. They believed in the harmony of the sounds produced by the
movement of the stars. Therefore they spoke of a cosmic harmony of the spheres,
each of which has a different sound, but all together creating a harmonious
sound. If you delete the half-poetic, mythological element from such ideas,
then you can say that they had a universal, ecstatic interpretation of
reality. Of course, the Pythagoreans also knew that there is a split in
reality, which they symbolized by the split between the even and the odd
numbers. The odd numbers represent the good, the even numbers the bad, because
the odd numbers are perfect. They are finished; the even numbers can be divided
and are therefore unfinished. For all Greek thinking the finished is the good,
the unfinished is the bad.
This concept of harmony was carried into the Platonic—Christian idea of
providence. Plato was the first who philosophically made this a central
concept. It is also a fundamental concept of Christian theology, and even more
of Christian daily life. The daily life of the Christian believer is largely
determined by providence. Ordinary Christians find in their faith in providence
a kind of ultimate security in the vicissitudes of their lives. But this
fundamental Christian idea of providence became secularized in the
Enlightenment. Now it was formulated in terms of harmony.
334 A History of Christian Thought
The Christian idea of providence does not contain the mechanical notion
that God has ordered everything once upon a time, and that now he sits on his
throne and sleeps while the world goes its way. The Reformers had to light
tremendously against this distortion of the idea of providence. Rather,
providence means that God is creating in every moment, and directing everything
in history toward an ultimate fulfillment in the kingdom of God. Then you have
the "in spite of" element. In spite of human finitude, in spite of
human estrangement from God, God determines every moment so that in it an
experience of the ultimate is possible, so that in the whole texture of good
and evil in history the divine aim will finally come to prevail. Providence
does not work mechanically, but it directs and guides. For the individual human
being, providence means that in every moment of the time process, there is the
possibility of reaching toward the kingdom of God. This is the Christian
concept, which is so important for the personal life of the religious man and
for all Christians everywhere. To anticipate things a bit—this is also a fundamental
concept of the Ritschlian theology.
Even when the idea of providence is secularized in the Enlightenment,
certain traits of it are preserved, especially the "in spite of"
element. Christianity emphasizes that in spite of sin and error, something meaningful
can be done in history by the providential guidance of God. The
philosophies of the Enlightenment also maintained this aspect. It was applied
by them to all realms of life. The first clear expression of this in the
secular realm can be seen in the area of economics. It was expressed by Adam
Smith (1723-1790) of the Manchester School of Economics in his idea of harmony.
The idea is that in spite of the fact that everyone may be motivated by the
profit interest, each one out for his own profit, in the end the total aims of
production and consumption will be reached according to some hidden law. With
many qualifications, this idea also underlies the theory of modern American
capitalism. There is this basic belief in harmony. In spite of the fact that producer,
seller, and buyer fight with each other, each bargaining for the greatest
possible profit or for the best deal, somehow the laws of economics will be at
work behind their backs in such a way that the best interests of all concerned
and of the whole society will be satisfied.
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 335
Of course, history has shown that this seemingly mysterious law of the
harmony of interests working behind the backs of individuals in society who act
for profit in their economic life has helped to eliminate the poverty which was
still existing in the eighteenth century in all Western countries. Without this
belief in the hidden law of harmony, the Manchester theory would have never
arisen and worked as it did.
The same principle is valid in politics. According to the philosophers
of the Enlightenment, democracy presupposes that if every person follows his
own reasoning, a general consensus or a majority will can be formed which is to
the advantage of all. Then the minority should be prepared to acknowledge that
the will of the majority was the true will of the whole, the volonté
génrale—the mystical concept of Rousseau who distinguishes the volonté
générale, the general will, from the will of all. The majority does not
represent the will of all, because there is the opposition, but it represents
the general will, the true will which is driving toward the best interests of
the group as a whole.
Now you can see immediately the consequence of this belief in harmony.
If there is no belief in this harmony, democracy cannot work, for the minority
will not accept the validity of the decision of the majority. There is plenty
of evidence of this in some of the South American countries. As soon as a
democratic majority appears which is disliked by the military leaders, they
instigate a putsch to overthrow the government. This is the chief
characteristic of the negation of democracy. As soon as there is no belief in
harmony, that is, in the provideh-tial validity of the majority decision, then
democracy is impossible.—When I was in Japan, I was often asked by Japanese
intellectuals to give lectures on the religious foundations of democracy,
because they have the same problem. They have a democracy too, but they know
how much it is threatened when a strong minority will not accept the concept
of the general will, of providential harmony.
We have the same concept applied in the field of education. Education
is necessary to produce the political maturity required for people to
acknowledge the principle of harmony in democracy. The belief is that education
can develop the potentialities of every individual in such a way that finally a
good society will come out of it. This was the belief which induced the people
of the Enlightenment to create public schools,
336 A History of Christian Thought
which had not
existed up to that time. There had been only upper class schools or church
schools where the people were subjected to the preaching and teaching of the
church. But the Enlightenment created public schools which became the center of
culture.—I was astonished when I came to this country to find how seriously
education is taken here, much more seriously than in any European country that
I know. The reason For this is that the belief in harmony is much stronger.—In
any case, public schools were founded under the influence of the philosophy of
the Enlightenment.
Even God was pictured as an educator. It was believed that God educates
mankind in stages and that now in our great century, namely, the eighteenth
century, the century of Enlightenment, the age of maturity has dawned. God has
finally reached his educational aim. The classical expression of this idea was
given by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), the German poet, philosopher,
and theologian, and the greatest representative of German Enlightenment, in his
little book, The Education of the Human Race.6 This book will
give you more insight into the Enlightenment than perhaps anything else, from
the point of view of the feeling for the meaning of life.
Another area in which the principle of harmony was applied was in
epistemology, the theory of knowledge. It is very clear in John Locke
(1632-1704) and is behind practically all empiricism. For here there is the
belief that the chaotic impressions which come to us from reality will find a
way to produce in our minds a meaningful image of reality, making knowledge and
action possible. This presupposes a law of harmony working within us. It is
interesting to notice how secure, how dogmatically sure many empiricists are
that the law of harmony in this respect really works.
The most profound expression of this idea of harmony in philosophy is to
be found in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), the German philosopher. The
whole classical period of German and European philosophy in general is to a
great extent dependent on him. He was great enough at the same time so that he
can now be the beloved figure of present-day analytic philosophers because he
had the splendid idea of
6 Lessing's Theological Writings, translated by Henry Chadwick
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957).
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 337
describing all
reality in terms of a logical calculus! Leibniz used the term
"harmony," and spoke of a pre-established harmony which makes the
operations of reality in all realms possible. The philosophical background of
this idea is the Cartesian (Descartes) separation of extended things or
material bodies (res extensa) from thinking substances or the ego (soul)
(res cogitans), raising the question of the possibility of the
communication between the two. The answer was found in a third reality, which
is God. In God the communication of soul with body takes place. Our soul has no
direct communication with our body. Our thinking can influence our body through
the medium of the transcendent unity of both body and mind in the divine
ground.
Now Leibniz carried through this idea in an interesting fashion. In the
history of philosophy you learned about monads, meaning "one" in
Greek. Monads cannot communicate directly with each other; they are separated
from each other by the body. Nevertheless, we as individual monads can talk to
each other. How is this possible? Only by a preestablished harmony which goes
to the divine ground of both you and me. Leibniz expressed this idea in the
phrase, "Monads do not have windows and doors." This means that the
individual human being is closed within himself. This theory of monads has been
interpreted—rightly I think—as a symbolic expression of the dissolution of the
medieval community into the atomized society of modern times.
In any case the question was: "How is communication of one being
with another possible?" The answer was by a pre-established harmony behind
our individual lives. Every individual monad, you and I, has the whole universe
within himself. Every individual is a microcosm. But each of us embodies the
universe in differing degrees of clarity. We are supposed to develop it to the
highest possible clarity, but potentially we know and possess everything. The
development of this potentiality is the infinite task of every monad. This is
Leibniz' idea, his metaphysical formulation of the concept of harmony. This
theory, however, which seems somewhat fantastic to us, had a tremendous
influence on the thinking of the Enlightenment and on later philosophy.
In Protestantism we have the religious counterpart to this concept of
harmony. The Protestant idea was that religion or Christianity has no need of a
central authority which gives all the answers, either by coun‑
338 A History of Christian Thought
cils or popes.
On the other hand, the fact that the church held councils was an expression of
the principle of harmony, for the assumption prevailed that the majority
opinion of the council was the expression of the divine Spirit. Of course,
Protestantism also had an authority, one formal principle as it was called
later on, namely, the Bible. The idea that the Bible can have an impact on
every individual reader through the divine Spirit is an expression of the
principle of harmony. The principle of harmony is at work behind the backs of
the individual Bible readers, making possible a universal harmony and the
existence of the church. In spite of the numerous denominational differences
and theological conflicts in Protestantism, it is believed that there is still such
a thing as Protestantism. There is, to be sure, no visible form of unity,
despite the World Council of Churches; Protestants are divided, and yet it is
possible to distinguish Protestantism from Eastern Orthodoxy, or Roman
Catholicism, or humanism, and from all other religions. There is some kind of
unity; this belief is an expression of the principle of harmony, but it is
always accompanied by an "in spite of" qualification.
After running through all of these applications of the principle of
harmony, I hope you can see that when the central supernatural authority was
removed, and the individualizaton and conflict in reality remain, then the only
possible answer there can be, both in religion and culture, both in economics
and politics, both in epistemology and physics, is the principle of a
presupposed harmony which produces indirectly what was supposed to be produced
directly by a divine interference or by an inner-historical, all-uniting
authority such as existed in the medieval Roman Church. This supernatural
authority was now replaced by the principle, of harmony. This finally led to
another question: What if the harmony does not work? This is the existentialist
question which began with the second period of Romanticism in the beginning of
the nineteenth century, and runs throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
We still have in the majority of our intellectuals, the bearers of our
intellectual life, this kind of paradoxical optimism that is identical with the
concept of harmony. We have it in Freudianism and Marxism; we have it in our
ordinary democratic humanism; we have it in everything that is called
liberalism in economics and politics. Yet, it is not the same
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 339
as it was in the
eighteenth century. Many things have happened in the meantime. The theological
development of the last century and a half has been looking for an answer to
the question: What if the principle of harmony does not work?
Question:
Please distinguish between your definition of reason in the sense of universal
logos and the Enlightenment concept of harmony.
Answer:
These two do not lie on the same level so it is difficult to make a
distinction. But I can speak about the relation between them. The logos type of
reason refers to the intelligible, meaningful structure of reality in its
essential character; the concept of harmony refers to the dynamics of actual
existence, that is, the way in which different tendencies in time and space
are united in terms of harmony. That is, in spite of the arbitrariness of
individuals, the universal outcome of the historical movement is positive and
meaningful. So roughly we can say that while logos deals with the formal
structure of reality in its essential nature, harmony deals with the dynamics
of existence in time and space with all its ambiguities. Very simply, the one
is structure, the other is dynamic movement.
Question:
You have stated that one of the key doctrines of the Enlightenment was the
harmony of man's mind with the eternal Logos. In what respects is this doctrine
similar to or different from the rofnantic doctrine of the infinite within the
finite? If they are similar, to what extent is the romantic movement a return
to the basic Enlightenment doctrine after its destruction by Kant?
Answer:
Now here there is a presupposition which is simply not factual. I have stated
that oneof the key doctrines of the Enlightenment was the harmony of man's of
with
the eternal Logos. I think you must have misunderstood it by 180 degrees. What
I really said was that the harmony of the Enlightenment is not the harmony of
the mind and has nothing to do with what we call harmony today, harmony in the
sense of the restfulness of the mind, of sitting in a beautiful garden, looking
at the flowers and feeling harmony between oneself and nature. This question
perhaps shows that I was not emphatic enough in distin‑
340 A History of Christian Thought
guishing this
concept of harmony in the Enlightenment from its sentimentalization. So I must
try again.
Now harmony is a paradoxical concept. You are not harmonious.
There is no harmony in your mind at all. You are not in harmony with God. You
are in opposition to him and you fight with him. But nevertheless, behind your
back destiny or providence is guiding reality in such a way that it turns out
best for you in the end. This means that you are brought back to God or to
yourself in spite of everything. The principle of harmony in the Enlightenment
can only be understood in terms of this "in spite of." It is best to
think of the Manchester School of Economics for an illustration. Both the
seller and the buyer fight for their own profits. The two meet in the market,
and in their struggle for their own profit, a kind of transitory equilibrium
results which brings about the greatest profit for the whole society. The
individual is thinking of his own advantage, but the whole society is being
served "in spite of" that. Therefore we have the idea that private
vices are public benefits. Although you are very greedy, and you don't want to
pay a penny more to this seller than you have to, and although he has the same
feeling toward you and fights against you, somehow behind your backs a harmony
is brought about through the guidance of providence. This is the paradox of
providence. Destiny or God, or the dialectical process in Hegel or Marx, does
something of which you are not aware. Although you are greedy and disagreeable,
the outcome is finally the best for all concerned. I gave you examples of this
in all the other realms. In democracy, for example, despite all the
name-calling in the political campaigns and all the promises made by candidates
which they don't for a moment intend to fulfill, there is a volonté générale
that emerges. Although nobody knows what the true will of society is,
through the democratic process such a thing emerges. After the voting has been
completed, the majority decision represents the true and general will of the
society as a whole.
So the idea of harmony has nothing to do with niceness. Nor does it mean
that the human mind and the eternal Logos are identical. The Enlightenment had
no such idea at all. It only had the idea that reason, the logos type of
reason, shows man the fundamental principles of justice. And if these
fundamental principles of justice are violated, as the Enlightenment felt they
were violated in the feudalistic society,
The Enlightenment and its
Problems 341
then the
Enlightenment fought against social abuses in the name of the principles of
natural law which belong to the human mind. But there was no mystical union of
man and God, no presence of the infinite in the finite as in Nicholas of Cusa.
Only one thing in this question is right, namely, that mysticism and
rationalism are not contradictory, but that rationalism lives from the
fundamental mystical principle of identity, the principle of the presence of
the structure of truth in the depths of the human mind. This point in the
question is indeed right. There is such a relationship. But no enlightened
philosopher would have accepted Spinoza. They all rejected Spinoza, and Spinoza
is the real heir of Nicholas of Cusa and the mystical tradition of the Western
world. For Voltaire, Rousseau, and other representatives of the Enlightenment,
the subject-object scheme is decisive. However, they realized that in man's
natural structure there is an awareness of justice. In the name of this justice
they could fight against the distortions in society.
* * * * * * * * * *
B. THE ATrITUDE OF THE
ENLIGHTENED MAN
After having dealt with four great concepts of the
Enlightenment—autonomy, reason, nature, and harmony—we will discuss the
attitude of the men of the Enlightenment, of the great bearers of the
development of the Enlightenment and its consequences up to the present time.
1. His Bourgeois Character
First let me make a sociological statement. The enlightened man is a
bourgeois. Bourgeois is a French word, the French equivalent of the Burger
in German, which means "he who lives inside the walls of the
town." He is quite different from the medieval man. He is supposed to be
calculating and reasonable. In the Middle Ages the self-confidence,
self-consciousness, and self-evaluation of a human being were not rooted in his
rational powers—reason in the largest sense—but rooted instead in his ability
to deal with the situation into which he was put by a transcendent destiny. The
medieval man had his particular place in
342 A History of Christian Thought
society,
whether as emperor or as beggar or as someone who occupied a station in life
between these two extremes. Each place had a direct relationship to ultimate
reality. The function of the emperor was to unite the body of Christendom all
over the known world. The function of the beggar was to give the people an
occasion for acts of charity and in this way help to save their souls. Everyone
in between had the same feeling of having a special place. This was a
hierarchical order of society—holy orders one above the other, represented both
in heaven and on earth. This concept came from the great mystic, Dionysius the
Areopagite (ca A.D.500). It was taken into the Middle Ages by the
scholastics in order to describe the place where everyone stands in life, including
not only the ecclesiastical hierarchy but also the secular, political, and
social hierarchies. The corollary of this in the Lutheran Reformation was the
concept of vocation. Everyone had his place by divine calling (vocatio) where
God placed him. There he shall stay and not try to break out of this situation.
This vertical orientation of the totality of life in the Middle Ages
stands in direct opposition to the horizontal outline of the bourgeois society
of the Enlightenment. The bourgeois wants to analyze and transform the whole of
reality in order to control it. The horizontal line is decisive in his work,
and he wants to control it by calculation. As a businessman he must calculate.
If he does not, he loses. This calculation means that he must go beyond the
place where he happens to find himself now. He does not accept the status quo.
This again demands knowledge of reality. Reality far beyond his limited place
must be known in order to be calculated and controlled. One must presuppose
that nature is regular and that reality has some calculable patterns. So the
bourgeois had a calculating attitude, and to him nature and reality as a whole
appeared to be made up of regular patterns on which he could rely and which
make his business decisions possible.
2. His Ideal of a Reasonable
Religion
Irrational elements which interfere with a calcuable pattern of reality
must therefore be excluded. This means that the irrational elements of religion
must be eliminated. The bourgeois needs a reasonable religion
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 343
which views God
as lying behind the whole of life's processes. God has made the world and now
it follows its own laws. He does not interfere any more. Every interference
would mean a loss of calculability. No such interferences are acceptable and
all special revelations have to be denied.
Thus all the boundary-line concepts of life were denied because they
disturb the calculating and controlling activities of man in relation to
reality. For instance, death is removed as an interfering power in the
progressive thought of controlling reality. The classical understanding of
death in the vertical line, which views man's life as coming from eternity and
going back to it, had to disappear. In the bourgeois theological preaching,
even in Roman Catholicism in the early eighteenth century, the preaching on
death was removed. The great conflict between Pascal and the Jesuits involved
the issue of the victory of the bourgeois society in removing death and guilt
and hell from preaching. The Jesuits were on the side of bourgeois society.
Jesuitism at that time gave the bourgeoisie a good conscience in breaking out
of the vertical line into the horizontal by removing the boundary-line
situations in classical theology. Traditional threats in terms of death and
ultimate judgment were omitted. They were not in good taste. It is not in good
taste to speak to people about death. In modern American society too one avoids
speaking of death. One does not die; one just passes away. Death is not convenient
for progressive society. It means the end of man's control and calculations and
the end of inner-worldly purposes.
An even stronger attack is made on the idea of original sin. There was
not only the very justifiable criticism of the superstitious and literalistic
way this doctrine had been preached in connection with the story of Paradise,
but it was also criticized because it conflicted with the belief in the
progressive improvement of the human situation on earth. Most of present-day
humanism still follows the Enlightenment in this criticism. It was a great
event in theology when Reinhold Niebuhr succeeded in making an inroad on this
prevailing view of humanism. Of course, he received support from the
existentialist style of the twentieth century in which we are living. Despite
that, the humanistic assumption of a progressive improvement in the human
situation is still very much alive.
The fear of
hell was also dismissed. The fear of death is actually the
344 A History of Christian Thought
fear of hell;
therefore, this concept was removed. Its symbolic meaning disappeared.
The consequence of this was that its opposite was also
re‑
moved, not only
the mythological symbolism of heaven, but also the idea of grace as such. Grace
is an action which comes from outside man's autonomous activities, and
therefore for Kant it was an expression of something heteronomous. For since it
comes from outside, it undercuts the autonomous power of man. What remained
then was a reasonable religion, as Kant called it.7 In this reasonable religion
prayer was also removed, because prayer relates one to that which transcends
oneself. This relationship fell under strong suspicion by the enlightened
people. Kant said that if someone is caught by surprise while praying, he would
feel ashamed. He felt that it was not dignified for autonomous men who control
the world and possess the power of reason to be found in the situation of
prayer.
Thus the existential elements
of finitude, despair, anxiety, as well as
of grace, were set aside. What
was left was the reasonable religion of progress, belief in a transcendent God
who exists alongside of reality, and who does not do much in the world after he
has created it. In this world left to its own powers moral demands remain,
morals in terms of bourgeois righteousness and stability. Belief in the
immortality of the soul also remains, namely, the ability of man to continue
his improvement progressively after death.
3. His Common-sense Morality
A basic element of the morality
of the enlightened man is tolerance.
The enlightened bourgeois man is
tolerant. His understanding of tolerance was conditioned by the religious wars.
His profound disgust of the murderous and destructive forms of these wars—which
in Germany killed half of the population during the Thirty Years' War (1618‑
1648)—caused him to deny the
absolute claims of the church. The spirit of tolerance was perhaps first
produced by the Reformation. But it was not until after the bloody religious
wars had demonstrated the
7 Cf. Immanuel Kant's book, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone,
translated by T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1960).
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 345
impossibility
of reuniting the churches that the secular powers took over and forced
tolerance upon them.
A second reason for tolerance besides the political one arose out of the
sectarian, spiritualistic movements of the Reformation period. They placed strong
emphasis upon the belief that every individual is immediately related to God.
No one type of relationship has the right to deny other possible types of
relationships with God. This same feeling underlies much of American religious
life. The Bible and tradition become secondary in comparison with the divine
Spirit with whom each individual is immediately related.
A third reason has to do with the rise of the secular state. The state
became increasingly secular because it had to transcend the split between the
churches. It could not succeed in identifying itself with one of them. Now an
interesting problem arose, which is stated clearly by John Locke. Could there
be a complete tolerance? Can one be tolerant of the Catholics, for example,
when they are on principle intolerant, especially when they possess the power?
John Locke said no. Catholics should not be tolerated. Nor should atheists be
tolerated, he thought. For the whole system of morality in society is based on
the belief in God as the moral lawgiver and judge. If this belief disappears
then the whole system collapses. Here we see that basic limits are set to
tolerance even by its champions.
We were discussing tolerance as an element in the attitude of
eighteenth-century bourgeois society, classically expressed in Locke's writings
on tolerance. We pointed out that tolerance has its background in the
experience of the seventeenth century, the century of the terrible religious
wars which almost destroyed Europe. When it was seen that neither the Protestants
nor the Catholics could gain a decisive victory, the secularized state had to
intervene, identifying itself with neither religious group. Tolerance toward
different religious traditions grew out of this experience of the cruel and
destructive religious wars. Such wars are always the most bloody because in
them an unconditional concern expresses itself in a particular way, and this
particular way then assumes the ultimacy which is supposed to be expressed by
that concern, but which is not identical with it. This results in the
demonization of religion in its worst form.
346 A History of Christian Thought
We
have the same phenomenon in our century, the struggle of the quasireligions
with their tendency of totally eradicating the enemy on account of an absolute,
unconditional faith in the concrete and particular expressions of their
ultimate concern. The wars between Nazism and Communism within the nations and
between the nations, as well as the spirit of absolutism which runs through the
cold war between liberal humanism in the West and totalitarianism in parts of
the East—these are modern forms of this phenomenon. We see the horror resulting
from the demonic elevation of something finite to absolute validity. I call it
demonic because individuals and nations become possessed and are driven to
destroy everything which stands in their way. And sine this is done on a finite
basis, they are themselves ultimately led to self-destruction. These are the
dialectics of the demonic. The demonic expresses itself first in the realm of
the concrete religions, in France between the Catholics and the Huguenots and
in all the rest of Europe between Catholics and Protestants. Each side is
unaware of the fact that God is greater than any particular form in which his
manifestation appears. Against this situation it is understandable that the
idea of tolerance should arise, and be championed by the secular power. In a
Europe which was almost destroyed, the secular state brought salvation from
religious fanaticism, and was supported in this principle of tolerance by the
religious mystical idea of the immediacy of each individual before God. So much
for the idea of tolerance, which was not an unlimited tolerance, as we said,
because, at least for Locke, the Catholics and the atheists had to be excluded,
the Catholics because they were intolerant on principle, and the atheists
because they denied the religious foundations of tolerance.
We
come now to another characteristic of the bourgeois moral life, the element of
discipline. The whole bourgeois culture is based on the repression of those
elements which were allowed in the aristocratic society of feudal times. In
part this sense of moral discipline goes back to Calvinism. Calvinism itself
came from a city, Geneva, in which the factor of discipline was fundamental. In
the aristocratic society, at least in the upper classes—but also among the
peasants as the works of the Dutch painters of peasant scenes in the
seventeenth century show—there was an acceptance of enjoyment in life, an
expression of vitality in
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 347
the more
primitive directions of erotic play, the desire for intoxication to elevate the
feeling of vitality, but also the sense of beauty in the arts and the glory of
nature as in ancient Greece. The more aristocratic a position someone held, the
greater possibility he had of expressing all forms of heightened vitality. The
aristocrats were not only the big land owners, but also the patricians in the
medieval and late medieval cities.
In bourgeois society all this was denied, partly in the name of religion
and partly—and these are always interdependent—in the name of the needs of the
sociological and economic structure of the bourgeois order. All this had to be
restricted and repressed for the sake of the purpose of transforthing reality
through work. This work required discipline and self-control. This is connected
with Protestantism also in another way. Protestantism had abolished the
monastic form of asceticism. It was the monumental attack on monasticism by
Luther and Calvin and all the Reformers which destroyed the monastic form of
asceticism as a valid religious order of life. But now in Protestantism a
different form of asceticism arose, an inner-worldly—not extra-worldly as in
monasticism —asceticism of labor and of laboring people who produce the
technical means for transforming reality in the service of mankind. It was Max
Weber (1864-1920), the great German sociologist, who described this
inner-worldly form of Protestant asceticism.8 The idea of the kingdom of God,
so important for Calvinistic thinking, took on the connotation of working for
the transformation of nature for the sake of mankind.
In this light we can understand such things as the fourteen-hour
workday, both by those workers who received only the minimum of subsistence and
by the owners who worked even harder and longer but received the profits. Thus
work, discipline, and self-control formed the heart of the ethical principles
of bourgeois society. The forms of economic existence of bourgeois society were
undergirded by this inner-worldly asceticism for the sake of the kingdom of
God.
It is instructive to study those cases where this type of bourgeois
self-discipline disintegrates. As soon as it starts to disintegrate, the whole
system begins to crumble. We have economic-historical inquiries into
nineteenth-century Germany showing what happens with the gradual
8The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scnbner's
Sons, 1930).
348 A History of Christian Thought
victory of the
bourgeois society. This victory was delayed in Germany, for Germany was under
feudal power much longer than France, England, Holland, and Belgium, but finally
toward the end of the nineteenth century the bourgeoisie became victorious
also in Germany. There one can see the following sociological law at work,
although such laws are never strict because human freedom can change them.
First of all, the producers of the great corporations and enterprises were as a
rule subjected to a Strict discipline of work. In the second generation this
discipline was continued, but now on a more luxurious basis. Then the third
generation, enjoying a much higher standard of living, became what is known as
playboys in this country. In Germany they sought the luxuries of life, giving
expression both to the sensual and artistic forms of vitality. Perhaps they
collected paintings or built great mansions. This law of the three generations
which helps to analyze bourgeois society shows that when repression is not
enforced any more and when there exists simultaneously an ascetic form of
dedication to labor, you have the beginning of the disintegration of the
pillars of this society.
4. His Subjective Feeling
One of the words we meet most often in the literature of the eighteenth
century is the word "tears." Everybody weeps; everybody cries in
ecstasy of despair or happiness. Whenever scenes of happiness are described,
people shed tears; they cannot help it. What does this mean? This was the
century of reason, and yet there was sentimentality. How are they related to
each other? There is an alliance of two poles. People wept about everything
which remained after the principles of reason were actualized. Rationalism says
that emotional elements should be excluded from rationality. Emotions are
irrelevant to the serious things of life, such as the production and
merchandising of bourgeois industry. So when the emotions are excluded from
reason and are not subject to the criteria of logic, the result is that they
run wild and end in all kinds of uncontrolled emotionalism. This happens in
human beings of the twentieth century too. People who are complete rationalists
in the realm of thought fall into uncontrolled emotionalism in their personal
life. If man is split into two parts, into the rational and the emotional,
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 349
the result will
be the absence of reason from his emotions. A dangerous situation develops when
emotionalism is connected with ignorance. One of the dangers in this country is
all of the ignorant emotionalism that has been created by the cold war
propaganda, for one day it may explode in the wrong way and destroy many of the
democratic institutions. This is the danger of all the fascist movements from
McCarthyism to its current forms. We should also realize that if the
philosophers remain in their closed spheres of mere logical inquiry of logic,
and do not go into the relevant problems of life, then they abandon the reality
of our existence to movements which unite emotionalism and ignorance.
C. INTRINSIC CorrLIcrs OI ENLIGHTENMENT
Now we must deal with conflict within the Enlightenment itself. It is
important to see these to understand the concurrent theological development.
There are conflicts in the Enlightenment, and our usual gray image of the
period is not at all true. In reality the period of the Enlightenment is
infinitely more rich than our gray image of it would indicate. Actually no
period in history should be seen as monolithic. If we look at the Renaissance
and think that every peasant in southern Bavaria was a bearer of the
sixteenth-century Renaissance, then we are imagining a ridiculous thing. There
were only a few thousand people in all Europe who brought about the
Renaissance. But these were the people who were conscious of the situation and
who became the intellectual leaders of the future. So neither the Renaissance
nor any of the following periods was monolithic.
In the period of the Enlightenment there were continually underground
movements, underground because only occasionally did they come clearly to the
surface and revolt against the surface situation. But these reactive movements
never became really dominant; they were never able to prevent the final victory
of the bourgeoisie, either in the intellectual life or in the economic life,
which was the most important in bourgeois society, either in political
revolutions or in religious consequences. They did not overcome the optimistic
and progressivistic attitude of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, they were
there and made
350 A History of Christian Thought
their
appearance when the victorious bourgeoisie suffered internal conflicts,
preparing the way for the new situation of the twentieth century. We must
mention them also because they played a tremendous role in later theological
discussions.
1. Cosmic Pessimism
The first one I want to mention is the underground of cosmic pessimism
in the whole Enlightenment. This was the reaction to natural events of
catastrophic proportions. What was the attitude of the eighteenth-century
theologians? It was what I would call teleological optimism. Telos means
aim or purpose in Greek. There was a basic optimism toward the divine purpose
in creating the world. What was the purpose of God? It was to make the universe
in such a way that all things would work together for the good of man. The
descriptions of the Enlightenment theologians of the divine wisdom always
portrayed God as a wonderful technician who made the best possible machine for
the glory and well-being of man. For this purpose he created the sun and the
moon. He took care that the sun does not shine at night so man can sleep. In
every least little thing one saw the wisdom and goodness of God in creating the
best possible world for man's purpose. Everything was teleological and had a
purpose for the human race. Why should one not be optimistic and
progressivistic and enjoy everything that God in his wisdom created for man's
good?
But then something happened. That was the earthquake of Lisbon in the
middle of the eighteenth century which killed quite a number of people.
Compared with the horrors of the twentieth century that perhaps cannot mean
very much to us. But at that time, when there were fewer human beings and a
higher culture, that is, a higher evaluation of human beings, it came as a
tremendous shock. Sixty thousand people were killed by this earthquake in
Lisbon. This was a catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions to a period in which
God was considered as having created the world for the purpose of serving man.
This event was in part responsible for the shaking of the optimism and progressivism
of the eighteenth century. Also it symbolized in a dramatic way
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 351
what everyone
knew can happen at any time, but which can easily be glossed over.
It is interesting to see how the philosophers were shaken. It was an
event which greatly influenced Goethe (1740-1832) in the early years of his
life. It was after this earthquake that Voltaire (1694-1778), the classical
representative of the French Enlightenment, wrote the deeply pessimistic novel,
Candide, which ends with the advice to retire to one's garden and
withdraw from the horrors of world history.
Such things were not able to inhibit the continuing progress of
bourgeois society out of which later came the evolutionary ideas of the nineteenth
century. in any case this pessimism was latent and could come into the
foreground as a powerful philosophical movement, as it did in the later
Schelling (1775-1854) and Schopenhauer (17881860). But the dominant philosophy
of the Enlightenment was basically optimistic, and was most characteristically
expressed by Leibniz in his principle of theodicy. The word
"theodicy" comes from the two Greek words, theos meaning God
and dike meaning justice. Theodicy thus means "justifying God for
the evils in the world."
Leibniz' theodicy was, however, much more profound than the use of it by
the optimistic philosophy of the Enlightenment. His idea was that if God would
create a finite world, he would not be able to overcome the limits connected
with finitude. God had to accept these limits of finitude and the various types
of evil that go along with it. This is a risk he had to take. Assuming then
that God was to create a world at all, it would naturally be—as our world
actually is—the best of all possible worlds. This phrase became a slogan, and
when the pessimistic reactions set in, this phrase was used ironically. Look at
Lisbon and the sixty thousand dead people, and who will speak of the best of
all possible worlds? This was the reaction. But of course it was unfair to a
great philosophy. This often happens. The same thing happened to Hegel. What
Leibniz really meant was not that the world was all good, but that if there is
to be a world at all, then this is the least evil or the best possible world,
because God cannot make a finite world absolutely good. That is to say,
finitude has within itself the necessity of evil.
This fundamental philosophical problem will reflect itself in all the
theologians of the nineteenth century. They will deal with the problem
352 A History of Christian Thought
of theodicy. The world
that God created is good, but because it is finite, the world cannot be
perfect. Leibniz' phrase was singled out, distorted and placed against him with
bitter irony.
2. Cultural Vices
Another
question: How does progress come about in bourgeois society? Here a very
interesting paradox was seen by some of the philosophers of the Enlightenment,
and in particular by Rousseau (1712-1778). In his first book9
Rousseau dealt with the question: Have the sciences and the arts contributed in
a positive way to the morals of society? The question itself was formulated by
the Academy of Sciences for a literary contest, and Rousseau won the prize. The
question itself indicated that some skepticism about the glory of civilization
had cropped up among the intellectuals of French society. Rousseau's answer
was, No, the arts and sciences have not contributed either to the morality or
to the happiness of mankind. What they really do is to advance immorality, not
in the narrow sense in which we often use it, but in the wider sense of ethical
development and sensitivity, or rather, their opposites, antiethical
development and insensitivity.
Rousseau
alleged that in the new state of society the increase in the pleasure of a few
has become the basis for the misery of the many. He did not have in mind only
the bourgeois society, but instead the whole development of civilization since
primitive times. The advance of the sciences and technical productivity has
produced a much sharper division in society between the "haves" and
the "have nots" in comparison with the earlier period. The earlier
period becomes the "lost paradise" for Rousseau, and the seemingly
progressive culture becomes the negative state. This situation has been
brought about by the establishment of private property, which is something that
did not exist in the earlier period. So Rousseau gave a vivid description of
the eighteenth-century political and economic situation before the French
Revolution, namely, on the one hand luxury and laziness, and on the other hand
exploitation and misery. Therefore Rousseau questioned the belief in the
progressive development of morality through civilization. Is cultural progress
good?
9 Discours sur les sciences et
les arts (1750).
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 353
No! Is modern
progressive society better because it has the arts and sciences in comparison
with the natural state of the savages, the noble savages as they were later
called? And many answered with Rousseau, No! So let us go back to the primitive
state of nature.
In these views Rousseau proved to be a double prophet. In his political
writings he was the father of the French Revolution and the spokesman of the
bourgeois society. Nobody foreshadowed the French Revolution so powerfully and
representatively as Rousseau. But with his critical attitude toward progress in
civilization, he became the predecessor of Romanticism, the period which
followed the Enlightenment and which fought to overcome it. The interesting
thing is that Rousseau represented both at the same time. Indeed, the great
fulfillers of the Enlightenment were at the same time the conquerors of it.
There was David Hume in England, Immanuel Kant in Germany, and Rousseau in France.
As great representatives and fulfillers of the Enlightenment, they were somehow
at the same time its conquerors. Therefore, we have been speaking of the
intrinsic conflicts of the Enlightenment. It is especially clear in the case
of Rousseau. The father of the French Revolution was at the same time the
predecessor of Romanticism.
3. Personal Vices
Then another problem arose. If we have a society of economic exchange
that is dependent on selling and buying, it happens that human desires must be
aroused to make such selling and buying possible. Thus an antipuritan
principle developed in the midst of the Enlightenment and bourgeois discipline.
If everybody should work and no one should buy and use the products of
industry, there would soon be no work to do and the whole system would
collapse. Therefore, it is not only good but essential to arouse in people the
desire for goods. This resulted in the introduction of the pleasure principle
as a dynamic into bourgeois society in opposition to the original Calvinistic
and early bourgeois principle of work with its ascetic character. To put it in
a formula one can say that private vices are public goods. We will see
how this was exhibited in England by Mandeville.
We must say something about the philosophical
presupposition of the
354 A History of Christian Thought
ethics of
eudaemonism which developed after the ascetic period of bourgeois society.
Often we use the word "materialism." It is used today in cold war
propaganda, for the Communists are considered to be materialists. The people
who use this term in propaganda do not bother with its meaning, otherwise their
passion for propaganda might decrease—and that would be a pity! But here in an
academic room we must try to find out what materialism really means.
There are many different forms of materialism. Marxist materialism, for
example, is entirely different from the French materialism of the eighteenth
century. This latter is a particular type, namely, an ontological or
metaphysical materialism—one of the ideas against which Marx fought most
ardently. But there was an eighteenth-century philosopher very much worth
studying because theological ethics up to today has tried so hard to refute
ideas like his. This man's name is Helvétius (1715-1771), which in Latin simply means
"Swiss." Helvétius was a Frenchman and a representative of
materialism. He had the idea that the only principle by which man acts is that
of self-love. He does not try very hard to analyze what this self-love is, but
basically it means that nobody desires objects for their own sake. Helvétius'
psychology was that every person loves things only for his own pleasure. There
is no foundation for the idea of a moral conscience which distinguishes between
good and bad. The conscience is the result of punishment. So he formulated the
thesis: "Remorse begins where impunity ends." That means that you
repent for what you have done only if you are punished, but if you get away
with it, there is no remorse. Psychologically, this is true to a great extent,
but it is not always true, and it is not true as a matter of principle.
According to Helvétius the greatest men are those with the greatest passions
and with the power to satisfy them. Even if everything were equal in education,
opportunity, and talent, there would remain the difference in passion. This
power of passion would make all the difference in the world.
This element of power is one of the most important underground elements
of the Enlightenment. It was largely repressed and kept underground.
Machiavelli (1469-1527) was taboo in the eighteenth century as in the two preceding centuries,
not because he was wrong but because those who acted according to his
principles suppressed his
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 355
theory. All possible
forms of power were allowed, even poison and murder, with recourse to the
ideological consolation that it is good for the state. All of the politicians
were Machiavellian, but his ideas were not expressed. If they had expressed his
ideas, they would have undercut their own power. It is only effective when it
is done without talking about it. So the struggle for power was a real
underground element of the eighteenth century. A nineteenth-century philosopher
came along and did what Machiavelli did, not in a diplomatic political form,
but in a more universal metaphysical form. This was Friedrich Nietzsche with
his idea of "will to power." Nietzsche blew the lid off the Enlightenment
and brought this power element out into the open. He was one of the main
forerunners of the existentialist philosophy of the twentieth century.
Of
course, on this basis religion was denied. The power of the priest is based on
the stupid credulity of the masses. Nietzsche also had to deny the church
because it condemned passion as sin; whereas for him the great passions are
what accomplish the most. The really great virtues which finally do the most
for everybody are virtues of passion. Religion contradicts these passions and
pleasures which are accessible to everyone; religion demands repression, so
drop religion.
4. Progress Based on Immorality
Out
of the underground of the Enlightenment a demonic naturalism arose, but could
not come to the surface before the end of the eighteenth century. A large part
of it was expressed in sexual ideas. In England it was expressed in a more
philosophical way: Progress is based on immorality, on the negation of ethical
principles. This idea was also in Helvétius, but it was formulated
philosophically by Bernard de Mandeville (1670-1733). Like the Manchester
theory of economics he held that because of necessity of economic exchange, it
is best for the whole society if everyone follows his own pleasure instincts.
Progress depends on those people who have a great desire for luxury and who are
able to buy items of luxury for themselves. If we keep in mind that these ideas
developed on the soil of English puritanism which for a long time had
suppressed pleasure, we can appreciate the intrinsic conflict
356 A History of Christian Thought
which resulted
from now glorifying the strivings for luxury out of economic necessities. If
the groups which indulged in luxury were to be eliminated, all social progress
would break down. If privilege and status were negated, economy would be
retarded. Thus the proposition was advanced that the private vices of the
powerful individuals who desired luxury, glory, and social status are the
forces which keep the whole machinery of capitalistic society moving.
If we study these things, we see that the eighteenth-century society was
anything but monolithic. The problems which we have come to know under the
label of the existentialist analysis of the human predicament were part of the
underground of the Enlightenment, and were there ready to come to the foreground
later.
D. Trnl FULFILLERS AND CRITICS OF
ENLIGHTENMENT
Now let us deal with the three men to whom we referred earlier as the
fulfillers and conquerors of the Enlightenment, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant.
1. Rousseau, the French
Revolution, and Romanticism
I do not think I need to say much more about Rousseau as the father of
the French Revolution. His principles led both to the American and to the
French Revolution. They were the principles of natural reason. It was the use
of critical reason, as I called it, derived ultimately from the Stoics, which
made Rousseau the philosopher of the French Revolution. It was the application
of the belief in harmony, that the will of the majority is the true will of
society and the best for it. But in Rousseau we also have the other concept of
nature. You remember that I spoke of the two concepts of nature, the material
and the formal. The material concept of nature refers to nature outside of man,
but includes man's physical body. The formal concept refers, for instance, to
man's natural spirit. Rousseau as the father of the French Revolution was using
the formal concept of nature when he identified nature with reason. He derived
his notion of the natural or the rational from the idea of an original
paradisiacal state of mankind, the state of original communism. He did not use
the word "communism" but spoke rather of the "absence
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 357
of private
property" among the savages. Here nature existed in prera-tional form, in
the form of the natural community of all beings together —a nature-produced
ecology, as it is called today, where man is a part of the whole nature. This
notion was intensified by the sentimentality about which I spoke, this longing
to go back to nature. You can see this illustrated in Versailles if you visit
the Petit Trianon which was built in order to play shepherd and shepherdess.
This is a mixture of frivolity and a longing to escape civilization. It was
Rousseauism that was expressed in these impressive buildings. One can see a
strange combination of the two concepts of reason. There is the critical reason
which laid the foundation for the revolutionary philosophy of the French
Revolution, as well as for some of the fundamental principles of the American
Constitution, and alongside of this there is the romantic sentimental longing
for nature outside of men in which, as he believed, the "natural"
was embodied thousands of years ago before the beginning of civilization. With
this second aspect of Rousseau's thinking, the Enlightenment philosophy which
undergirded the French Revolution was conquered by the Romanticism of the
following period. So we have in Rousseau both the fulfillment and the conquest
of the principle of reason in the eighteenth century.
2. Hume, the History of Religion,
and Positivism
Now we come to the second thinker in whom I see the fulfillment and
conquest of the Enlightenment. He is David Hume in England (1711-1776). The
trends of the Enlightenment which were expressed in classic form by John Locke
came to an end in Hume. In his epistemology he criticized the confidence of
the Enlightenment in its rational principles. He undercut the certainty of
belief in the validity of what we have called the intuitive and critical
concepts of reason. And along with this he undercut the metaphysical
foundations of natural law on which the Enlightenment depended.
The main religious concepts of the Enlightenment theology were God,
freedom, and immortality. Hume undercut them by his fundamental epistemological
skepticism. He represented a way of criticizing the rational certainty of the
Enlightenment, which in England was felt
358 A History of Christian Thought
like a death
blow. Hume defeated the great attempt of modem men to treat all the
problems of life on the basis of reason in its different meanings. In this
respect he can be considered an important point of departure for what we call
positivism in modern philosophy.
The bourgeoisie had conquered its foes in the various revolutions and
was now increasing its position of power. If the principles by which the
bourgeoisie gained power would still be valid in this situation, they could
become threatening to the victorious bourgeoisie itself. Therefore, critical
reason was replaced by a positivistic acceptance of observing and calculating
reason. This signifies the great change from the critical passion of the great
thinkers of the Enlightenment to the positivism of nominalistic philosophy in
modern times. What does positivism mean after all? It means accepting what is
positively given as such, observing and describing it without trying to
criticize it or without trying to make a constructive system out of it. We have
then in Hume a great change which became important also for the continent of
Europe through Hume's impact on Kant.
This changed orientation is significant for the situation in the three
countries which were the leading contexts of modern philosophical development:
France, Great Britain, and Germany. in the France of Rousseau's time we have
reason fighting and struggling against tradition up to the French Revolution.
France was Catholic and the Enlightenment was nourished in part by the
critical attitude of Freemasonry. Even today it splits the French mind into
those who follow the Catholic Church and those who fight against it. The great
struggles in the beginning of this century between church and state in France,
the radical separation in every respect, and the inner division of the whole
nation are understandable only on the basis of the leading ideas of the Enlightenment
which conflicted with the authoritarian system of the Roman Church, and not
only with its authority, but also with its content. There are not many
symptoms in the last fifty years of French history which suggest that this
tremendous split can be overcome through a synthesis. That is the French
situation even today.
The British situation is determined by Hume's positivistic attitude.
Hume never attacked the established church, but he did attack the belief that
you can justify it by reason. From the point of view of reason
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 359
there was a
thoroughgoing skepticism over against all the symbols of Christianity, but
without that radical and hateful attack which took place in France. This also
characterizes the situation in England today. We have there two attitudes which
do not openly light against each other, but which run beside each other, almost
without touching each other. On the one hand, there is the established church
with all its traditions and symbolism guarded over by the Queen, the symbol of
the empire, of the past, but not a real power. On the other hand, there is the
majority of the intelligentsia which goes its own way without really attacking
the established church but also without uniting with any of its traditional
symbols. No synthesis is attempted. That is why the contribution of the
established church in Great Britain to systematic theology is almost
nonexistent. For some reason this does not apply equally to the Scottish
Church. But in French Catholicism, especially in some of its apologetic works,
a great contribution was made to theology. Also nineteenth-century German
theology made a great contribution because of its urgent need to find a
synthesis.
Now in these days there is an interesting thing happening in England,
something which I have become aware of recently because in a way I am involved
in it. A book has appeared written by Bishop John Robinson of Woolwich, with
the title Honest to God.10 Those of you who read the section
on religion in Time magazine have no doubt heard of it. This was also
the way in which I first heard of it before the Bishop sent me the book. He
develops theological thoughts which were born in the German situation and which
seek an answer to the conflicts between the religious tradition and the modem
secular mind. Robinson refers a great deal to my writings and to the writings
of Bonhoeffer, the theologian martyred by the Nazis, who wrote letters from
prison.11 In these letters Bonhoeffer dealt with the same problem
that I have dealt with in all my books, namely, the problem of seeking a solution
to the conflicts between the religious tradition and the modern mind.
Robin-son's formulations provoked much resistance because they undercut the
traditionalism of the church. The church never took seriously the prob‑
10 Philadelphia: The Westminster
Press, 1963.
11 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, translated
by Reginald H. Fuller (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953).
360 A History of Christian Thought
lem of finding
a union of tradition with the modem mind and of showing the significance of the
traditional symbols to modern man. And so a great shock was produced in the
church by this book. Of course, in the British situation there have been some
rare exceptions, like Archbishop Temple, who tried to take in some of the
basic ideas of continental theology. But on the whole what has been
characteristic of the British situation is the unwillingness to sacrifice the
security of its liturgically founded tradition for the sake of radical
theological thought. Therefore, it has not given answers to the questions
implied in the existence of modern man.
3. Kant, Moral Religion, and
Radical Evil
I must now concentrate on Germany which has done far more than any other
country for Protestant theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of
course, I must include Switzerland because linguistically and theologically it
belongs to the same situation. Karl Barth, for example, was for many years a
professor of theology in Germany before he went back to Switzerland.
The man who was decisive for the theology of the nineteenth century,
perhaps even more than Hegel or Schleiermacher, is Kant (17241804). He is the
third of these three great figures who fulfilled and conquered the
Enlightenment.
Kant followed Hume in his epistemological criticism of a philosophy
which assumes that the religious ideas of God, freedom, and immortality can be
established by rational arguments. This is impossible for the basic reason that
man is finite. The finite mind is not able to reach the infinite. Almost
everyone in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries accepted this criticism as a
presupposition. You will not find a theologian who has not accepted it, or
modified it, and attempted to save what could be saved of natural theology
after Kant's tremendous attack on it. Even a man like Karl Barth who is so
firmly rooted in the classical tradition has fully accepted the Kantian
criticism of natural theology.
The basis of this criticism of natural theology is Kant's doctrine of
the categorical structure of the human mind. The categories of thought and
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 361
the forms of
intuition, time and space, constitute the structure of man's finitude, and
therefore these categories are valid only for the understanding of the
interrelations of finite things. If one transcends the finite things and their
interrelations, then the categories of causality, substance, quantity and
quality, etc., are not valid. The immediate consequence of this is that you
cannot make God a first cause or a universal substance. These categories are
valid for physical or other scientific calculations; they must be presupposed.
In fact, they are presupposed by everybody. Even Hume who criticizes them
presupposes them in his criticism. Nevertheless, you cannot go beyond them. The
category of causality, for example, is a description of the interrelation of
finite experiences. Time is the main form of finitude by its transitoriness, by
the impossibility of fixing it in one moment. If you fix this moment, time is
already gone. If the categories are not used in the realm of phenomena, those
things which appear in time and space, they cannot be used at all. This means
that the use of the concepts of God, freedom, and immortality is impossible in
terms of rational structure, as natural theology tried to do.
This criticism is so fundamental and radical that Kant has been called
the destroyer of the whole rational theology of the Enlightenment. But there is
another implication in it. The first philosophical lecture I heard in my life
was delivered by Julius Kaftan (1848-1926), the systematic theologian of the
University of Berlin. I was perhaps sixteen years old and still in the Gymnasium.
in Germany there is no college, but there is a Gymnasium which takes
you till the eighteenth year, and then you go directly into the university. I
was fascinated by this lecture and never forgot it. It was an
oversimplification, but a very impressive one which had a great deal of truth
in it. Kaftan at this time was the leading authority of the Kantian-Ritschlian
school of theology. He said that there are three great philosophers and there
are three great Christian groups: The Greek Orthodox whose philosopher's name
is Plato; the Roman Catholics whose philosopher's name is Aristotle; and the
Protestants whose philosopher's name is Kant. Now this alone would be very
interesting because now in the ecumenical movement Plato, Aristotle, and Kant
may come together to join in a heavenly disputation. However this may be, what
is the basis for the statement that Kant is the philoso‑
362 A History
of Christian Thought
pher of Protestantism?
The real basis is the fact that he is the philosopher who saw most clearly and
sharply the finitude of man and man's inability of breaking through the limits
of his finitude to that which transcends it, namely, to the infinite.
Kant's
doctrine of categories and of time and space as the structure of man's mind, a
structure which construes the world of the finite for him but beyond which man
cannot go, is what gives him a certain kind of humility before reality. This
humility is also found in empirical philosophy which accepts the empirically
given phenomena. But in Kant it goes much deeper existentially than in ordinary
empirical philosophy.
We
are finite and must therefore accept our finitude. The Protestant idea that we
can come to God only through God, that only grace can overcome guilt, sin, and
our estrangement from God, and not we ourselves, and no good works can help
us, this idea can be extended also to the realm of thought. We cannot break
through to God even in the realm of thought. He must come to us. This was a
very fundamental change in contrast to the metaphysical arrogance of the
Enlightenment which believed in the power of reason—all the different forms of
reason —to place man immediately in the presence of the Divine. Now men were in
a prison, so to speak. Kant had placed man in the prison of finitude. All
attempts to escape—which characterize both mysticism and rationalism—are in
vain. The only thing we can do is to accept our finitude. Certainly in this way
Kant represents to a great extent the attitude of Protestantism.
But
could this be all? Is man nothing more than finite? Can philoso-phy
hilosophy even speak of finitude if
there is not a point at which man transcends it? Animals are finite, but they
do not know it. They are not above finitude at any point. Then Kant wrote his
second critique, the critique of practical reason. This dealt with the idea of
the moral imperative. He called it the categorical or unconditional
imperative. Here there is a breakthrough, not in the realm of theoretical
thought but in terms of the experience of the unconditional command of the
moral imperative. The breakthrough does not go directly to God. Kant gave an
argument for the existence of God which falls under his own criticism and was
never really accepted. But he showed one thing, that in the finite structure of
our being there is a point of unconditional validity.
The Enlightenment and Its
Problems 363
This point is the moral
imperative and the experience of its unconditional character.
So
we have no certainty about God or freedom or eternal life, but we have the
certainty of belonging to something unconditional which we can experience as
such. It is obvious that Kant did not have in mind particular contents of the
moral imperative. He was educated enough in terms of ethnology to know the vast
differences of content in the moral imperative from culture to culture. But the
commanding form of this imperative, its unconditional character, is independent
of any particular content. Thus not the content of the moral imperative but its
radical form is what gives Kant the feeling of a breakthrough to that which
transcends the prison of finitude in which the human mind has been placed by
theoretical reason.
Another
thing appeared in Kant's philosophy which came as a shock to his
contemporaries, even to people who, like Goethe, had transcended the
Enlightenment. The unconditional command of the moral imperative is given to
us. But we who live in time and space have not taken it into our actual will.
Although it is our essential will, that which makes our will the true will, our
actual will is perverted. The principle of action or the maxim, as Kant called it,
according to which we act is perverted. This he called the radical evil in man.
Now remember that the most passionate point of attack of the Enlightenment
against Christianity dealt with the doctrine of original sin, or of radical
evil, as Kant called it, or of universal tragic estrangement, as I prefer to
call it. Radical evil means that evil goes to the radix, meaning
"root" in Latin. Radical evil means that in the root of human
existence there is a perversion of man's essential will.
Kant's
idea of radical evil was an unforgivable sin from the point of view of the
Enlightenment. Kant was attacked very much because he said this. But Kant was
followed later on by several who even deepened it and carried it through to the
early sources of existentialism, namely, the second period of Schelling the
philosopher. Here we find in Kant a deviation from the Enlightenment that is
very radical. Kant elaborated these ideas in his book, Religion within the
Limits of Reason Alone, into a whole philosophy of religion. Or I would
simply call it a little systematic theology. This systematic theology underlies
much of what is
364 A History of Christian Thought
going on in
America even today, for Kant's ideas were developed further by Ritschl and his
school and were transmitted into American theology by Walter Rauschenbusch
(1861-1918) and the Social Gospel movement. This movement was still very
powerful up to the years before the second World War when Reinhold Niebuhr
attacked it.
We must now briefly present a picture of Kant's theological ideas. Kant
conceives of history as the ongoing struggle between evil, radical evil, and
good. The good principle is present in mankind; it is identical with man's
essential nature, which is good. It has appeared in the Christ who represents
this essential goodness of men over against its perversion by radical evil. In
the Christ the perversion was overcome; the unity of God and man was
re-established. The victory over the evil principle by Jesus is the beginning
of the kingdom of God on earth. The church is the invisible body of those who
are determined by essential reason and who take into themselves the power of
reunion with God. The transition from the invisible church to something very
mixed in the empirical churches is unavoidable. But the empirical church must
always be criticized by the standard of the essential church of pure reason.
For Kant this criticism is very radical, so radical that it is actually a
negation of the empirical church. The empirical church is seen by him as a
group ruled by superstitions and subjected to ecclesiastical authorities.
There-fore
herefore every individual
belonging to the essential church should try to overcome this visible church
which destroys autonomy by heteronomous authority and destroys reason by
superstitions. Everybody should try, and the church as a whole should try, to
overcome these elements.
The sharpest attack was made against the priestly rule of the church.
This for Kant was the absolute opposite of the autonomous rule of reason. From
Kant's point of view all elements of immediacy between God and man were to be
eliminated. I indicated this already when I spoke of his criticism of the
arguments for the existence of God. Now we can see that there is a certain
religious type which expresses itself here in Kant. He allows no room for the
presence of the divine Spirit in the human spirit with its ecstatic
implications. The mystical presence of the divine is radically denied. In the
Ritschlian school which was influenced by Kant, the most radical attack on
mysticism ever made in the history of Christianity was carried out by Ritschl
and his disciples,
The Enlightenment and Its Problems 365
including
Harnack, the greatest figure of this school. What we are left with is a
consistent type of finitude in which only the moral imperative elevates man
above animal existence. Morality gives him dignity, and the struggle between
good and evil is a moral one in which elements like grace and prayer are
denied.
Grace supposedly devaluates man's autonomous freedom for good and evil,
and prayer is an ecstatic experience of which one would be ashamed if someone
caught him in the act by surprise. This was Kant's fundamental feeling. And, of
course, ecstasy in nature itself, for which we have the word miracle, is an
encroachment upon the universal essential structure of reality. What remains
is a philosophy of the kingdom of God. This kingdom is identical with the
establishment of the moral man on earth. This notion includes not only
individual morality, but also social justice and peace on earth. Kant wrote a
classic little book on eternal peace which became the basis of the religion
which influenced the Social Gospel movement at the end of the last and the
beginning of this century.
Kant wrote a third critique, the Critique of Judgment. Here he tried with great caution
to escape the prison of finitude. His followers in the classical period of German
philosophy took it as a way out. From Kant's point of view it would be better
to say that he was only enlarging and beautifying the prison, but not really
breaking through it. But his followers considered it a breakthrough. In this Critique
of Judgment Kant tried to bring together the
two divergent critiques of reason, theoretical and practical reason. He showed
possible unions between the two. These cannot, however, be affirmed
assertively, but only in terms of possibility, or better, as a human vision of
realities without knowing that the realities really correspond to the vision.
In this Critique Kant developed his notion of nature. Thereby he
became the father of modern Gestalt theory reflected in all forms of
organicism, and in the arts. In these two realms Kant saw that judgments are
possible, the judgment that nature is an organism as a whole and in the organic
structures and the judgment that in art there is an inner aim in every
representation of meaning. Kant did not say that nature is actually like this,
but always added a qualification in terms of an "as if" (als oh). He
was completely overwhelmed by the Newtonian
366 A History of Christian Thought
natural laws, by the
mathematical, scientific approach to nature. But he said that although the real
nature with which we have to deal is the nature of Newtonian physics, we can
nevertheless consider nature as if there were structures, meaningful
structures, or organisms, and as if the whole universe had the character of an organic structure
of this kind.
So Kant, with caution and great restriction, introduced a principle
which was picked up by Romantic philosophy as a main principle for its
philosophy of nature, only minus the "as if." That is the big
difference. From the presuppositions of Kant's prison of finitude you can only
say "as if," but if at several points you can break through this
prison, then you might be able to say what nature or reality really is like.
This was the watershed between critical philosophy and later ontological philosophy.
Thus Kant stands like Rousseau and Hume as a fulfiller and critic of
German Enlightenment. His greatness is that he understood man's creaturely
finitude, of course, on the basis of his half-pietistic Protestantism. The
pietistic element was removed, but existentialism and pietism have much to do
with each other. I am reminded of the atheistic sermon which Heidegger once
gave us in his pietistic categories. At any rate Kant was praised by all the
theologians of the nineteenth century for establishing the insight into man's
creaturely finitude, or as we would say today, into man's existential
situation. But the human mind and the human soul could not remain on this
level. Therefore, all movements of the nineteenth century, although based on
Kant, would try to go beyond him. In my student years there was a slogan often
repeated: Understanding Kant means transcending Kant. We all try to do this,
and I will be showing you various ways in which theology has tried to do it.
