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9 B28p 59-12260 Earth Protestant thought: from

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Erotestant thought: from Rousseau to Ritschl

PROTESTANT THOUGHT
FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

PROTESTANT THOUGHT:
FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL
being the translation of eleven chapters of

DIE PROTESTANTISCHE THEOLOGIE

IM

19.

JAHRHUNDERT

KARL EARTH

Harper

&

Brothers

Publishers

New York

Translated by Brian Cozens from eleven chapters of DIE PROTESTANTISGHE THEOLOGIE IM 1 9. JAHRHUNDERT, Evangelischer Verlag A.G., Zollikon, Zurich, Switzerland, 1952.

Translation revised by H. H. Hartwell and the editorial Press. staff of the

SGM

SGM PRESS LTD 1959

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

CONTENTS
Introduction

MAN

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

n
58
118

II

ROUSSEAU
LESSING

III

IV

KANT

150
197

V HERDER
VI
VII
VIII

NOVALIS

225
268

HEGEL
SCHLEIERMACHER

306
355
362

IX FEUERBAGH

STRAUSS

XI RITSGHL
Appendix
List of English Translations

390

399

423

Index of Names
Index of Subjects

427
43 1

INTRODUCTION
WHEN
Karl Earth decided to become a systematic theologian, Protestant historical scholarship lost a man who was potentially the greatest historian of doctrine since Adolf von Harnack. One need not subscribe

axiom of the historical relativists that 'today's dogmatics is tomorrow's history of dogma' to wonder what new insights into the making of Christian creeds and systems might have come from this immense historical and theological talent if Earth had devoted a lifetime to research in the sources of the history of Christian thought. The many historical excursuses in Earth's Chunk Dogmatics, dealing with the history of everything from the doctrine of the angels to the picture of Judas Iscariot, bear witness to the breadth of his erudition and to the depth of his understanding. And the detailed
to the cynical

Earth prepared in 1931 illustrates his ability to get at the meaning of a historical text by means of careful exegesis, word study, and the examination of its
historical

on Anselm's proof for the

commentary

existence of

God which

and cultural context. Yet Earth's most significant contribution

to his historical theology

is

undoubtedly Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert, which, like his book on Anselm, owed its origins to Earth's classroom at Bonn. After much gossip, both oral and written, to the effect that Barthian theology was unable to stimulate its disciples in the direction of historical thinking, these two books proved that in his own case, at least, Karl Earth was still enough a pupil of Adolf von Harnack to enter into the theological work of his predecessors with sympathy and perception. Whether or not the epigoni of the Barthian school can manifest a similar capacity for historical imagination without measuring all
is

theology past and present by the norm of their master's Church Dogmatics quite another question and, incidentally, a question left unanswered by the historical work that has come from this generation. Certain it

is,

however, that Earth's treatment of the 'ontological argument' in

Anselm and, even more, his narrative of the rise of theological liberalism from Schleiermacher to Ritschl gave the lie to the caricature of Earth's position that most of his critics and not a few of his disciples had foisted upon the theological public in Britain and America. An introduction like the present one can perhaps render no better service than to point out some of the features in this book that do not correspond to the caricature and that set it off from much of the literature
that has arisen in the history of the history of theology.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Perhaps the most striking feature of the chapters presented here is their willingness to treat the theologians of the past on their own terms.

Anyone who

expects Karl Earth the dogmatician to become the judge when he functions as a historian of theology will find, to his surprise, that Earth has made a genuine effort to comprehend the theologians of the nineteenth century from within their

of the quick and the dead

own frame

of reference. With his historical evaluations one will feel

obliged to argue now and again. Thus it seems to me a vast exaggeration when Earth says of the obscure Reformed theologian, Hermann Friedrich Kohlbriigge (1803-1875): 'We have not been to

tempted

evaluate a single one of the theologians discussed here according to the criterion of "reformer". It is an indication of Kohlbrugge's greatness that in his case this [evaluation] is unavoidable.' Earth's affinities for

Kohlbrugge's thought or Kohlbrugge's affinities for Earth's thought! seem here to have outweighed his historical judgment. But even here he is trying to assess the past as the past wished to be assessed, not as a 9 supercilious modern or 'post-modern theologian thinks the past

ought to be assessed. Despite the critical judgments which Earth expresses throughout the book, there are no 'good guys' or 'bad guys' in this history of theology, but only serious-minded thinkers.

my knowledge, never been accused! But the reason lies in Earth's insistence upon the issue of right and wrong in Christian doctrine, in this instance his realization of what is right and wrong in the Christian doctrine of the Church* As he put it in the introduction to the German edition, *I believe one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. And if I seriously intend to listen to a theologian of the past whether it be Schleiermacher or Ritschl or anyone else then I must mean this "I believe"
this obligation by private is, regardless of inspiration! myriad opinions I must include these people in the Christian Church. And in view of the fact that I

The reason for this fairness is not, as it has sometimes been in historians of theology, that Karl Earth is indifferent to the issue of right and wrong in Christian doctrine. Of this he has, to

seriously, unless I

have been released from

That

my

myself, together with

Church

solely

on the

even to doubt about the Christian

theological work, belong to the Christian basis of forgiveness, I have no right to deny or that they were as fundamentally concerned as I

my

am

faith.'

He
e

therefore uses that

same introduction

to warn his listeners against the tendency to see the history of theology from Schleiermacher through Ritschl to Troeltsch, Seeberg, and Holl as a 'long detour' at whose end the dialectical theology' appears as the 'deliverance from all ills which had long been awaited and expected, but which had repeatedly failed to materialize'. From all indications it would seem that such a warning was and still is in place. Also in place is Earth's disclosure that theology can never escape a

g with and that it has not dialogue philosophy, managed to escape it when it has pretended to ignore philosophy. The chapters on Kant and Hegel presented here are, in the first place, helpful introductions to the

INTRODUCTION

thought of Kant and Hegel. As such, they deserve the attention of

readers

who are interested in the history of German idealism. Earth's corrections of the standard manuals on this history, especially of those
by
Liitgert

essays

main

and Korff, are both implicit and explicit throughout his on the philosophical background of the nineteenth century. His
however,
is

interest,

in the religious thought of the

German

idealists

and in their influence upon theology. With the insights presented in this book the reader should be able to discern the religious
motifs that might otherwise escape his attention in the writings of Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, etc. He should be able also to identify the presuppositions which the theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including and especially Karl Earth, have taken over from Kant and from other philosophers. By his conscientious study of the philosophers Earth has once more reminded theologians of the unfinished business between theology and which did not

philosophy reach a settlement, but only a moratorium, during the one hundred and twenty-five years between Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone and Earth's The Epistle to the Romans. Closely related to this recognition of philosophy as the inescapable, if not always welcome, partner of theology is Earth's sensitive portrayal of culture as the inescapable, and often more welcome, setting of theology. The chapter on Rousseau, which was engaging the author just at the time that Hitler rose to power, ranks with the finest writing that Earth has done for sheer grasp, good humour, and insight. After such a chapter it is no shock to find Earth an enthusiastic interpreter of Mozart and even of Michelangelo. Nor is it accurate when some critics of Earth dismiss these forays into art and culture as the stunts of a

merely trying to show that he can do it too if he wants must be admitted that the humor in most of these essays does lend some plausibility to such an interpretation. This is, rather, Earth's way of paying tribute to the subtle tension between expression and limitation that has characterized great art and that has been
poseur
to
is

who

though

it

those romantics in whom aesthetics and theology to conspired produce a yearning for the Eternal. It would have been instructive and illuminating if Earth had written for this volume the

absent

among

chapter on Goethe which he had been considering. Even though one wish very strongly, as I do, that Earth's theology gave more attention to the positive significance of the art, the music, and the liturgy of the Church in precisely this connexion, one must still be

may

impressed by the comprehension he manifests for the sweep and the charm of spirits like Rousseau and Novalis.

10

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

With all
this historical, philosophical,

and cultural orientation, howand never lets his reader forget, that he is a theologian. He probes the men and materials before him for their theological meaning. As he says in his essay on Schleiermacher, the nineteenth century was the era in which men theologized mightily by writing histories of theology. But 'what decides whether theology is possible as a science is not whether theologians read sources, observe historical facts as such, and uncover the nature of historical relationAnd as the essay on ships, but whether they can think dogmatically'.
ever,

Karl Earth never

forgets,

Schleiermacher demonstrates, perhaps better than any other chapter

in this book, Earth remains a theologian who can think dogmatically also in his evaluations of the giants of the past. The chapter on Ritschl must, it seems to me, be a disappointment to any reader who has been

led

side the polemics. It has

by the preceding chapters to expect both fairness and clarity alongbeen said with some justification that in this chapter Earth has treated Ritschl as Ritschl treated the Pietists. But perhaps H, R. Mackintosh's bon mot of twenty years ago is still valid 'Ritschl at the moment belongs, like Tennyson, to the "middle distance" too far for gratitude, too near for reverence.' Perhaps, too, a new
: :

emphasis upon historical honesty among theologians, symbolized by this book, will eventually give Ritschl his due. If this volume helps to destroy the caricature of Earth which has been current among so many otherwise informed people, it may impress upon them a principle which, properly applied, can correct the historical errors there may be in this volume: one can never understand any theologian through reading about him, for there is finally no substitute for the study of the theologian himself. As this is true of Earth, so it is true of the men whom Earth describes. This history of
theology will thus perform
its

assignment

if it

makes

its

readers in-

terested (or irritated) enough to open their minds to their fathers and brethren as well as to their second cousins and even more distant
relatives

who have spoken

to

Karl Earth and through Karl Earth,

That

is

ultimately the assignment of any history of theology,

JAROSLAV PELIKAN
The
University of Chicago

February, 1959

MAN
IN 1720

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

work
Verniin/tige Gedancken
alien

there appeared the famous

von

Gott, der Welt

und

der Seele des

Menschen auch

Dingen

tiberhaupt den

1 Liebhabern der Wahrheit mitgetheilet von Christian Wotffen. Its frontispiece shows a sun whose powerful rays pierce a mass of black clouds, and

spread light upon mountains, forests, towns and villages. The aureole of this sun is obviously not considered to be insupportable to the human gaze, for it takes the form of an exceedingly friendly and
pleasantly smiling human face, whose owner seems to be extremely pleased to see the clouds in the heavens and the shadows on the earth
dissipate everywhere.

In view of the logic, psychology, cosmology and theology which this book expounds, it is very understandable, and largely in harmony with the author's spirit, that the spiritual movement, whose document the book is, should be termed the Enlightenment, that Enlightenment has been understood to mean man's optimistic effort to master life by means of his understanding ('thoughts'), and finally that the
age of that movement, the eighteenth century, has been classified, praised or blamed a parte potion as the age of Enlightenment and that of this kind of Enlightenment. The man of the eighteenth century would then be the champion against prejudices and passions, against

and hypocrisy, ignorance and superstition, intolerance, partiality and fanaticism; he would honour wisdom and virtue, reason and nature; he would seek his 'pleasure' by finding 'happiness in the fulfilment of duty, and he would seem to see the supreme goal of the
vice
9

understanding (and therefore of man) as 'utility', personal and general 'welfare', and the supreme spiritual gift as the possession of 'taste' and
'wit', and to see man also as a somewhat tepid, but always very assured and busy believer in God, freedom and immortality. The man of the eighteenth century would then be such as Gottsched, Nicolai and Basedow, as they lived on in the memory of the men of
i Reasonable Thoughts on God, the World and the Human Soul, and All things in General, communicated to the Lovers of Truth by Christian Wolff.

12

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

would be

the Sturm und Drang, and as indeed they were, in large measure. He like Wagner, the familiar in Goethe's Faust who was so
severely judged by his master ('That this dry creeping fellow should disturb this wealth of visions !'), the enemy of all history, enthusiasm,

poetry, mystery, as Novalis described

him

in Die Christmheit oder

Europa (Christendom or Europe). Or even he would be like that 'divinely Chinese optimist' to whom Kierkegaard in Begriff der Ironie

(The Concept of Irony) has raised a frightening

little

monument.

What are we to

say of

all this ?

Certainly, that kind of

man did

exist

in the eighteenth century, and perhaps every more or less typical eighteenth-century man in his own way had something of him in himself.

and
on.

his successors

But we must not forget that the likeness even of Christian Wolff is only partially caught in these pictures or carica-

and in the slogans of optimism, moralism, intellectualism and so And, moreover, Christian Wolff and his like were not the only bearers of Enlightenment. Voltaire, who was assuredly one, was at any rate no Wagner. Alongside Wagner, Goethe, as Korffjustly points out/ set Mephistopheles, a figure of Enlightenment, who was not very think of the resignation in which Frederick the optimistic, a sceptic Great ended in whom the Enlightenment doubts itself, or at least
tures

reaches enlightenment about

itself.

But even Mephistopheles is not the only alternative to Wagner, Mozart's Magic Flute, first performed in 1791, is certainly also a classic document of the Enlightenment. Here too the group of symbols, sun, light, darkness, plays a decisive part. But who would think of Nicolaior Voltaire in connexion with its mysticism of initiation and its message of the power of music to lead man triumphantly through the night of death? Or what have the architecture and the park of Bruhl castle to do with the spirit of Wagner and Mephistopheles? And has not, as again Korff points out, Faust himself, the man of Goethe's time, by a partially almost insensible transition emerged from the man of the Enlightenment, so that we must give the latter the credit for having
after all contained his successor in

embryo ?

We

shall

come

to this in

our discussion of Rousseau, Lessing and Kant. But if this is so, what would become of the definition which has been
indefatigably repeated

by the

historians of theology (Stephan, Hoff-

mann and

others), and even maintained by Korff (I, 24), of the Enlightenment as 'culture of the understanding', as 'rationalism', a

rationalism to be happily replaced in Goethe's time by a new 'irrationalism* ? And how could this pattern fit the great Leibnitz, called 'the
* Geist der Goethezeit

(The

Spirit of the

Age of Goethe),

I,

31.

MAN

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

it

13

father of the Enlightenment 3 ?

Would not show a very poor understanding of him, to appeal to an irrational completion of his rationalism ? As if he of all people did not understand this dialectic very well For it was the problem of his whole thought and life to overcome that
!

pattern.

However when we call Leibnitz the pre-eminent representative of his century, must we not continue to ask whether the whole concept of 'Enlightenment the whole picture of the sun piercing the clouds, is
9

enough to characterize one aspect of the century even on the widest possible interpretation. Could we not with almost as much justice call
it

istics

the century of mystery? Is it not one of the remarkable characterof that century that the darkness, that is, the the order and
spirit,

disorder of the Middle Ages, to which on the one hand it so eagerly opposed the light of reason and virtue, was something which on the

other hand

it both desired and confirmed? Did it not seek freedom and, in the very search for what it understood by freedom, again and again re-create the old unfreedom? could one reduce without remainder

How

say, the will of Frederick the

Great to the denominator 'Enlightenment' ? Even in Goethe's time, beside the learned student of Gottingen, and the worldly-wise student of Leipzig, there was still to be found the unbroken rowdy and drunkard of Jena, whom the poet and minister had sometimes to call to order in the theatre at Weimar, in a voice of thunder and with the threat of the Hussars. All three types are true children of the age. But even apart from these connexions with the past, what is the
significance for the Enlightenment that an institution so characteristic of its spirit as the order of Freemasons : founded in 1717, should assume

that,

the form of an introduction to a mystery religion? One must in fact say on closer inspection, the century possessed, somewhere in the midst of its consciousness, in spite of and besides its cult of light, but

also in the end in relation to it a peculiar and widespread and various knowledge and pursuit of the mysterious. The century did not only have its philosophers (in the traditional sense as well as in its own

special understanding of the word),

its

historians
its

and

naturalists, its

princely and

its

commoner

philanthropists,

schoolmasters and

journalists, but also (entirely out of its own peculiar genius) its mystics and enthusiasts and pietists, its Rosicrucians and illuminati, its alits Swedenborg and Cagliostro and Casanova. Count Zinzendorf read and treasured his Pierre Bayle, but this obviously did not in the least hinder him from singing and spreading the praise of the Lamb. The most eminent scientists of the time, such as the biologist Albrecht von Haller and the mathematician Leonhard

chemists and quacks,

14

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

Euler, were also serious and convinced defenders of traditional Christianity. In the struggle which was fought out at the end of the seven-

XIV about Quietde Guyon and Fenelon on the one side and Bossuet on the other, typical tendencies of our very age were found on both sides. But what did either of them have to do with 'Enlightenment' ? Of course, this expression does have and retains its interpretive significance. But if we really want to see and understand the time from Louis XIV to the French Revolution in its totality, then we must not designate the period as a whole as the Enlightenment', but rather interpret it in a more comprehensive way. It is and remains a fact which
teenth century in the closest entourage of Louis
ism, with

Madame

we cannot
it

and above

ignore that the Sturm und Drang, idealism and romanticism, all Goethe himself, in dealing with that time, understood as 'Enlightenment', and that predominantly in the narrower sense

of the term. But I do not see

how we can

understand that discussion

by simply appropriating its own terms; rather we must grasp the background and the circumstances in which they have their relative importance. Above all, I do not see how we can reach a theological understanding of the whole situation except by such a procedure. The sixth volume of Walter Goetz's Propyltien-Weltgeschichte (Propylaen Universal History, 1931), which deals with this period, is entitled Das Zjeitalter des Absotutismus (The Age of Absolutism). This
description probably refers to the well-known structure of the political as well as of order of that period, so characteristic of Louis

XIV

Frederick the Great and Joseph II. But political structure is at all times and was therefore also at that time no more than an expression

of the order of life, the ideal of life in general. 'Absolutism' in general can obviously mean a system of life based upon the belief in the omni-

potence of

human

powers.

Man, who
his
it

discovers his

ability, the potentiality

dormant in

humanity, that

own power and is, his human

and
absolute, I

being as such, and looks upon

as the final, the real

mean

something 'detached', self-justifying, with its own authority and power, which he can therefore set in motion in all directions and
as

without any restraint this man is absolute man* And this absolute man, whether he is called Louis XIV or Frederick the Great or Voltaire, whether he lives the obscure life of a philistine with secret
revolutionary thoughts or of a friend of letters with liberal religious or even sceptical tendencies, or of a lady in her castle devoted to the

mysticism of Tersteegen, or whether he sails the seas with James Cook or is a watchmaker in Geneva making tiny but useful improvements in the products of his handiwork for the nature and the degree of the

15 expression he gives to his life is not what matters, nor the extent of his knowledge of how much he shares in the general movement of the time, all that matters is the thing itself this absolute man is eighteenth-

MAN

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

century man, who appears to us more or less distinctly, more or less open or veiled in conventional drapings, in all the human faces of that century which are so different amongst themselves.

We

can see

this

man

even in Leibnitz, to some extent.

He can be

of the Enlightenment, but not necessarily, and above all not necessarily in the narrower sense of the term. He is primarily the discoverer, the believer, and the exploiter of the miracle of human power. As such he can be a man of the Enlightenment, but he can also for he does not need instruction from us about the necessity and beauty of the 'irrational' become something different: and quite

man

Wagner

Mephistopheles and Faust in one, not forgetting: also Nathan and Saladin, Goetz and Egmont, and a 'sensitive soul', Moor the Robber, Don Carlos, and many others. We shall speak in following chapters of the Christianity of this man of the form which theology takes in his world. For the moment he interests us for his own sake, for his sheer
Absolutism' : this comprehensive key-word which we going to enquire into clearly indicates a programme. But where there is a programme, there is also a problem. And where there is a problem we find ourselves recalled, in one way or another, to a reality beyond the scope of programmes. A problem means limits and

humanity.
are

now

contradiction, perhaps self-contradiction. This is certainly what find when we try to come to closer grips with the material which have provisionally described as 'absolutism'.

we we

the

Let us begin with some external facts. Eighteenth-century man was man who could no longer remain ignorant of the significance of

the fact that Copernicus

and

rich earth of his, the theatre of his deeds

Galileo were right, that this vast and was not the centre of the

universe, but a grain of dust amid countless others in this universe, and who clearly saw the consequences of all this. What did this really

apocalyptic revolution in his picture of the universe mean for man? An unprecedented and boundless humiliation of man? No, said the man of the eighteenth century, who was not the first to gain this knowledge, but certainly the first to realize it fully and completely; no, man is all
the greater for
sense, too, for
this,

man is in the centre of all things, in. a quite different

this revolutionary truth by his and to think it abstractly, again to consider and penetrate a world which had expanded overnight into infinity and without

he was able to discover

own

resources

anything

else

having changed, without

his

having to pay for

it

in

any

l6

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

clearly

the world was even more and properly so his world! and yet it is a fact that the answer to his humiliation was those philosophical systems of rationalism, empiricism and scepticism which made men even more self-confident. The geocentric picture of the universe was replaced as a matter of course by the anthro-

way:

now

It is paradoxical

pocentric.

And European man

to the old earth, one

of the eighteenth century was also, in relation whose world had become immeasurably greater

more as a matter of As with Gopernicus's discovery, so too he became fully conscious of the discovery of Columbus and all that followed it in west and east and south. Atlases and travel books became an indispensable part of the more serious literature, even in bourgeois houses, afterwards in the world outside and that already in the seventeenth century there had been a continuous succession of seizures of new territories following the example of the Spaniards and Portuguese (stimulated by the rising capitalist trade) these new possessions were ceaselessly expanded, defended, consolidated, and exploited, making ever fresh demands on the mother countries, and though with recessions and disappointments in individual instances yet leading on the whole to
course, as his world.
;

and who

nevertheless claimed this world too, even

ever fresh successes. Holland

to

whom

still

in 1669 belonged two-

thirds of all seafaring vessels though gradually being overtaken by England, led this enterprise in the company of France, while from

1683 to 1717 the Electorate of Brandenburg possessed a colony on the to 1727 there was also an Austrian East India Company in Ostend. Nothing is more characteristic of this extension of the European horizon and power than the fact that the

Gold Coast, and from 1720

and what indeed made them possible, and the possession of slaves. Moral scruples, let alone Christian ones, were so little in evidence that it was even possible to say without contradiction of the flourishing town of Liverpool that it was built on the skulls of negroes. It was in that same England though Dutchmen and Frenchmen did not behave differently that Milton wrote his Paradise Lost and Bunyan his Pilgrim's Progress, and Lord Shaftesbury, on the other hand, developed the heroic-aesthetic idealism of his Virtuoso. The absolute man can and does do both. One must see the significance of this double activity: while Gellert was writing his Odes and Kant his Critique of Pure Reason, while Goethe was writing his letters to Frau von Stein, and even later, the two things were actually being done simultaneously by absolute man: piety was practised at home, reason was criticized, truth was primarily the
attraction of oversea possessions, slave trade

MAN
made
into poetry

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

17

into truth, while abroad slaves were being hunted and sold. The absolute man can really do both. But even within Europe space had both enlarged and diminished. It had enlarged, in the sense that from the time of Peter the Great Russia, from

and poetry

being an unknown entity, had become one which was at least approximately known. It had diminished, in the sense that ever-increasing trade had brought nations and lands perceptibly nearer to one another,

and that
at least

'irrational

had become a part of education and even a truly necessity for many people. 'One' must have been to Paris once. 'One begins to wish to see Italy. Not everyone, but
travel
9
5

some daring spirits make for the extreme north, or for Alpine peaks. Mutual visits among like-minded people living far away from each other become one of the most important means of intellectual exchange. Pietists and Moravians led the way in that respect, showing themways to be very modern men. But even without leaving one's own town the entirely new possibility was discovered of meeting in a salon, with tea and tobacco acquiring a by no means negligible sociological significance. Lastly, the rise of the printed newspaper, and of the most beloved journals of philosophy, art, literature, and culture of all kinds, meant the spread from place to place of new thoughts, which were none the less effective because they were conveyed in an impersonal way. So Europe, its countries and its cities, became smaller, more easily seen as a whole, more easily penetrated.
selves in this detail as well as in other

And so man too grew in this space in the sense that he unmistakably became more and more master of his existence, though the
Further, eighteenth-century man began to become conscious of his for science, and of his power through science. The development

space too grew larger and larger.

power

at the Renaissance,

which had been hindered and reduced

for almost

one hundred and

began to make which was only apparently disunited but was in essentials united, began to be conscious and more forcibly than before of a capacity for thinking which was responsible to no other authority than himself. This free thought he once more finds related to nature which was just as freely observed. Mathematics were once more discovered by him to be the bridge which carried him across in both directions, from concept to intuition, from intuition to concept. Logic, observation and mathematics were the three decisive elements of the absolute power now
disclosed in science. This absoluteness is symbolized in the undeniable reparation of these elements from the universities, which had hitherto

years through the period of religious wars, now immense strides. Once again man, led by a philosophy,
fifty

FROM ROtJSSEAU TO RITSGHL

ranked as the places of science. There did not exist a court with any pretensions which did not at this time found an academy to be the nursery of free research. Even the smallest courts supported at least a local historian, and established a library, a museum of coins and natural history. This free pursuit of science was also followed by the well-to-do bourgeois families in the towns, and in many a manor house and manse in the country. The ideal of a science of history and of
natural science, without presuppositions and possessing supreme intellectual dignity in virtue of this very absence of presuppositions, was so firmly established in the minds of that century that it is hard for us to

imagine the intensity with which they pursued their

activities

under

the spell of that idea: reading, collecting, observing, experimenting and also perhaps indulging in many a scientific fantasy. And all this

went on in

circles

which long

since have learned to spend their leisure

again in very different ways. I take as one example for

many

the

Wurtemberg parson

Philipp

Mattaeus Hahn, a good theologian, in

his

way, of the school of Bengel

and Oetinger. He contrived an astronomical machine of the universe which was much admired, and even respectfully examined by the
emperor Joseph II. It also contained a device for stopping it in the year 1836, when, according to Bengel's calculations, the return of Christ and the beginning of the millennium was expected. It is characteristic
scientific objects

of the time that alongside the study of the natural world the favourite were primarily the study of the nature and activity of

human soul, human customs, and habits new and old, among 9 savages as well as civilized peoples, the 'spirit of laws , as in the title of Montesquieu's famous book, and the various historical possibilities
the

of education, culture, government and society. The proper study of mankind is man', said Pope, expressing the conscious or unconscious idea of the whole century in its pursuit of science. The desire to

know was

so serious that

men

understood only too well what the old

sophists meant, and the best minds understood Socrates and Plato as well. Those who deplore the 'intellectualism' of that time should at
least

be clear that the

had been
influence

so long neglected,

human capacity for acquiring knowledge, which now began to spread in every sphere like a

stream running along dry beds, and produced a movement from whose no clear mind could withdraw. And that the achievements of the time were considerable is seen in the fact that even now every
without exception, has its historical foundations irx the eighteenth century. But the amazing scientific spirit of that time which confronts us here was unquestionably one of the manifestations of
science,

MAN

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

IQ

all-conquering, absolute man, who expressed himself also and with special effect in this field of human activity.

Here we may also suitably call to mind the achievements of modern technique which also come from this time. The curve of progress in
not yet risen as steeply as it was to do in the nineteenth dates. In 1684 Hooke invented the optical in telegraph, 1690 Papin, a Frenchman, invented the steam cylinder with which, in 1707, he attempted, though without success, to sail a
this field has

century. Here are some

steam-boat on the river Fulda. The invention of springs for coaches in 1706 made the popular activity of travelling more comfortable. In 1714
Fahrenheit constructed his mercury thermometer. In 1718 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu tried to introduce the practice of inoculation for smallpox, and in the same year Leopold von Dessau invented the iron loading-rod for guns. Metal-boring machines appeared in 1720, accurate spinning machines in 1738. The idea of steam heat appears in 1745. In 1747 sugar was produced from beets. In 1751 the Frenchman Chamette invented a gun which was loaded from the rear, in 1764 James Watt invented the steam engine. In 1 770 Priestley discovered oxygen. In 1780 Galvani made his decisive discoveries in electricity. In

1782 the brothers Montgolfier offered Paris the sight of the balloon flight. In 1786 gas for lighting purposes was first made.

first

In almost every case

we are seeing the first

efforts

of individual bold

pioneers who were followed by the rest of the world only with hesitation, and whose efforts to a large extent were only properly applied much

And Germany, in this as in the matter of colonies, was obviously laggard. If we are to understand the feeling of life which surged through the whole of Europe, we must not underestimate the signifilater.

cance of the hopeful excitement which was also stirred by these

discoveries too; here too
is

manifested the existence of the absolute

man, the man almost capable of anything. Yet more significant than science and technique was undoubtedly the
is political experience of the period. Perhaps eighteenth-century in this respect best described negatively: he is the who no longer

man

man

has an emperor. Of course, it was not till 1803 that the old empire actually broke up, in the external sense. But inwardly it had already

broken up,

we can even

say, during the Thirty

tainly clearly in the wars with Louis

XIV,

powerlessness.
itself

The image of the Holy Roman on the mind of the young Goethe at the imperial coronation of Joseph II in 1765, and later in a practical form during his work at the imperial supreme law court in Wetzlar, was clearly that of an

Years War and cerwhich it showed its Empire which impressed

in

SO

FROM ROUSSEAtJ TO RITSCHL

interesting, honourable, but entirely outdated old age, incapable of any action. The French Revolution was not necessary in order to destroy

the real old order in Europe. It was already destroyed long before this Revolution, which was a revolution from below, took place. The Revolution was not the cause but the necessary effect of the destruction.

For the Empire had been,

cohesion and order

ideally, the guarantee, as the means of the among large and small political units of which it was of the composed, hierarchy of relationships which had grown up between these various units. The guarantee of this hierarchy was not

a one-way matter, it was not only the guarantee of the might of the higher classes against the lower, but also the guarantee of the right of the lower against the higher. The Empire was the concrete veto on any
still,

kind of political absolutism. It represented imperfectly enough, but it did represent, while spanning the oppositions of higher and lower in the individual political units a third factor, which excluded

encroachments within these orders. That is why it was the Holy Roman Empire. So the end of the Empire necessarily meant the beginning of absolutism. That was shown both in the separation, in 1648, of the aristocratic republics of Switzerland from the Empire, and in the

German

principalities.

The

beginning of absolutism in France also

coincides with the practical end of the

Empire in Germany. The old

French kingdom had corresponded exactly to the German Empire, with its supreme authority both respecting and guaranteeing the
existing distances and competences and relationships in a political world with manifold forms. With the extinction of the imperial ideal this French kingdom also came to an end. Only after that was a

monarch

like

Louis

XIV possible. He

was one type of the

politically

absolute man. Politically, absolutism means the determination of law by that class in the state which in contrast to the others possesses the
effective power. The first type of this absolutism was created when the highest class after the effective elimination of the emperor, namely, that of the princes or the city oligarchs, used their actual power to identify with their own will the law of the political unit which had

been entrusted to their leadership.

When

the king, against the backc

ground of this identification, calls himself king by the grace of God', no personal religious uprightness or humility which may reside in this
office can alter the fact God. 'By the grace of God' should mean that he bears the power in common submission with the people before a power which is superior to them both, and therefore that he also recognizes the rights of the people. The concrete form of that

kind of confession regarding the origin of his

is

that he

in effect

made

to

be

like

MAN

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

21

superior power had been the Empire. With its fall the prince became absolute and the people were deprived of their rights, while 'by the grace of God' simply masked the prince's resemblance to God. That is

the meaning of Louis XIV's famous remark ''Vital c'est molP It is the declaration of the prince, needing no other grounds than those of his actual power to assume the status of law, that right in the state, and the freedom guaranteed by it, are the right established by me, and the freedom guaranteed by me. The first party to suffer from this was the nobility. It was against their power, that is, against their ancient good
right, that the

directed. This

'revolution from above' which now started was first was the meaning of the home policy of Richelieu, of Mazarin and of Louis XIV, and in Germany, in a specially classic

new

form, of the Great Elector of Brandenburg. Besides this, of course, princely absolutism struck also at the middle

who had been steadily rising since the end of the Middle Ages, at the peasants, who in the sixteenth century had demanded their rights in vain the first serious sign of the decay of the imperial idea.
classes,

and

But it is significant in every respect that there could also on occasion be manifested a certain agreement, a deep community of interests between the absolute prince and the citizens, the class which nourished the rest of society. It is at any rate a fact that this age saw not only the rise of the princes but also though on a different plane, that of economics and education the rise of the citizens on an unprecedented scale. Tor reasons of state the princes conceived the idea of a proand gradually brought them up.' 1 Why did ductive bourgeois class the absolute prince need the power of the unitary state for whose sake he had first to destroy the rights of the nobility? The first answer can only be that he needed this power because wishing to be an absolute prince, and having in effect no emperor over him he needed more power. He needed the unitary state, and in it a relatively prosperous bourgeoisie which could provide a regular flow of money to him. He needed money because he needed a standing army which was always at his disposal. He needed the army because his power was 'territorial'.,
.

as we

now say, with other territories

alongside

it.

The existence of other

territories

openly contradicts the idea of an absolute prince, but this state of affairs could be improved by inheritance, by marriage, by acquisition an(j the ultima ratio by wars of conquest. And because the other means

had

were the natural method. became, therefore, a latent principle. It is not surprising that open war again and again broke out. What is surprising is that it did
their strict limitations, wars of conquest

War

Propylaen-Weltgeschichte, 6, p. 277.

22

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

not happen more frequently. Absolute politics of this kind are outwardly dynastic, cabinet politics; but by an inward necessity, sooner
or later they lead to a policy of conquest. This is the way the securing of internal power, that is, a unitary state by revolution from above, with a view to external power which was followed by the king of

France in the eighteenth century, as well as by the aristocrats of Berne and the great and petty potentates of Germany, among whom the emperor was now only one among the rest, later to be called logically, though absurdly emperor of Austria. Only the clever English perhaps one of the few nations really gifted
politically

foresaw in time

the folly of this development, though they were just as penetrated by the spirit of absolutism as the rest, and introduced checks which spared

them the catastrophe

to which the system by its nature must lead. This political absolutism from above has, as is known, two variants. They have in fact crossed and mingled in many ways; their roots are one, but they may be clearly distinguished. The principle 'through

power

to power' had of course also a non-military aspect. This could consist in the princely display of splendour and pomp at which Louis was so inventive, even creative, setting a baleful example which

XIV

was widely followed. The name of

Versailles has thrice

had great

historical significance resulting in grave consequences. The first time it was as the prototype and symbol of a princely attitude to life and

form of life, based on unqualified power. From

brilliance, like the glory

this life there

flowed a

of a god, into architecture, the gardens and parks, the decoration in the houses, into comforts and enjoyments of every kind, but above all into the transitory but all the more intoxicating splendour of the festivities. Far beyond the boundaries of France there arose small and miniature imitations of Versailles whose princely

and noble inhabitants attempted, with more or and taste, to emulate Louis XIV.
Louis

less

luck and dignity

After his death the Regent Philip of Orleans, then Louis' grandson, XV, in Germany Augustus the Strong of Saxony, Eberhard

Ludwig, Karl Alexander, and Karl Eugen of Wurtemberg, Max Emanuel and Karl Theodor of Bavaria, Ludwig IX of Hesse, and many others, were absolute princes of this kind. The notorious immorality, even debauchery, the just as notorious financial transactions, and
all these courts, was perhaps not the necessary, but as has happened in all similar phenomena in history the practical, consequence of the representation which one thought to be owing and that not without some logic to the conception of the prince by divine right.

the scandalous arbitrariness of justice at

23 idea inevitably presupposed great demands upon the economy of the country, which were made with an astonishing unconcern not to speak of the sons of Hesse and Brunswick who were sold out of hand

MAN

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The

to America! And ironically enough the command was in fact often not in the hands of its true possessor, but largely and for all to see in those of a woman sometimes, admittedly, in those of a woman far from unfitted for such an office, but in a derivative sense can her rule

only 9 ever have been described as by the grace of God But all these things cannot and must not blind us to the tremendous stimulus imparted to
.

war, should really have been the logical consequence of the general principle 'through power to power and of dynastic cabinet politics. If it had not been for the Sun-king's notion of the unfolding of power and the relative enervation which was involved herein, Louis himself and all the other God-kings might well with the absolute power they had
3

by the fantastic burgeoning of absolutism. that the luxury these potentates cultivated, forget though so dubious in many respects, acted in practice as a safety valve and corrective against the possibility of a universal state of which
artistic life

economic and

Neither must

we

arrogated have reduced Europe to even greater disasters than those they did in fact cause. Lastly it should be added that anyone who failed to sense not only the pathos imparted by lavishness of ideas, space and materials, but the underlying, unending and truly insatiable yearning in the midst of sensual delight which emanates from every line and form of the art of the age would be guilty of badly misunderstanding

monuments of that time which still hold a meaning for us. It is this eternal yearning which is the style's inmost beauty, a beauty peculiarly moving for all the horror which is
sometimes apt to seize the beholder. Besides this kind of political absolutism there was another, going by
the

those artistic and architectural

name

power

of enlightened absolutism. It is possible for the 'through to power' principle to manifest itself in depth rather than in

extent, rationally rather

than
social

aesthetically.

In that case

it

takes the

in the technical advance of civilization, in agriculture, industry and in the economic sphere in general, in health measures and policies designed to benefit the population as a whole. There are attempts to improve the state of the law,

form of experiments in

reform

but also to advance the

of education

arts and sciences, to raise the general standard in short all sorts of measures tending to the so-called 'welfare' of the subjects of the state. In chastising a Jew, Frederick

William I says: 'You should love me rather than fear me, love me, 5 I say! As Frederick the Great's famous remark shows, the absolute

524

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

also cherish the

monarch can
*It is

wish to be the

first

servant of the state*.

our duty to sacrifice ourselves for the public good' this was a mot of Louis XIV already, and as proof that it was not just a bon mot one

might point to the extensive official activities in the cultural field of his minister Jean Baptiste Colbert, who is too easily overlooked beside the more eye-catching figures of a Louvois or of the various great ladies
of Louis' court. Circumstances permitting the absolute

monarch might

then, in startling contrast to his princely contemporaries, assume the rough aspect of a king of ancient Rome or Sparta, as did Frederick

William I of Prussia, or like Joseph II epitomize affability at all costs and an idealism verging upon folly; or, as in Joseph Emmerich, elector of Mayence, he might take the astonishing form of a wise prince of an ecclesiastical state, at once open-minded enough to accept progress in every form; or, finally, as with Frederick the Great he might be that almost legendary figure, the 'Sage of Sans Souci' seeming to have his whole existence centred around a philosophy stripped of illusion yet rigid upon certain moral points, its purpose being to enable him to be all the more detached in attending to the business of providing, maintaining and furthering law, order and progress among the people he

happened to be governing. Sarastro, Mozart's strange character in The Magic Flute, combines elements from all these figures. And we need only be reminded of Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, the sovereign who was served by Goethe, to see how sometimes the entire zest for life of the one kind of prince could be reconciled with the earnest
zeal of the second. It
is

needless to state that this second interpretation

of the art of kingship at this time and the achievements which sprang from it command great respect. But let us not forget that although there

may be absolutists in the performing of good

that. It is thus

they are absolutists for all with the 'enlightened' absolutism of which we have

been speaking. We must appreciate this particularly in the classic case of Frederick the Great. In the preface to his Histoire de mon temps he wrote in reflective mood: 'I trust that posterity will do me justice and understand how to distinguish the king in me from the philosopher, the decent from the political man.' Indeed: as king he is no less a 'soldier king' than his father, and no less a dynastic cabinet politician than Louis XIV, although and in that he wants to be king and philosopher and a decent man simultaneously. Temper as one may Lessing's harsh judgment that the Prussia of Frederick the Great was 'the most slavish
right to

country in Europe' and that 'Berlin freedom* consisted solely in the c hawk as many anti-religious imbecilities as one wishes', there

MAN
is still

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

25

anything nected with the army, e.g. the administration of justice in the army. There is no blinking the fact, either, that Frederick's state had to be a welfare state a Frederick naturally sees farther than the usual run of
despots in order to be precisely as welfare state a state worshipping power, an absolute state. The fact remains that the measure of wisdom and rectitude with which the king happened to be endowed, together with the limitations imposed these his

no escaping the fact that the enlightenment which Frederick desired had absolutely nothing to do with freedom as freedom of the press, for example, it was a hollow pretence, and it was a foregone conclusion that freedom was not conapplied to the army or

upon qualities by highly individual character, his taste and his whims limitations common to every mortal had the significance of destiny for his people, his country and for every individual within his realms a destiny which like God could bless or and could do punish, might cherish or
destroy, so without let of appeal to to thank

any higher law. Lessing certainly had nothing

King Frederick for, nor did his loyal subject Immanuel Kant, nor did Leonhard Euler, and they were all misjudged for reasons which they and all the people they lived among had to accept as if these reasons represented the impenetrable will of God. The things he found uninteresting just didn't interest him, and the things he didn't like he 5 just didn't like. The remark about the first servant of the state is good, but what practical significance has it if this very first servant is alone from first to last in decreeing every policy of state, if every counsellor, be wise as he may, must ever fear him like a slave? The same might equally be said of Joseph II and his entirely well-intentioned and
e

frequently beneficial innovations. He did much for his people and had in mind to do much more. But once again the highly personal limits of his circumspection and temperament were, like those of fate, the limits of the goodness and usefulness of the things his radicalism had created. His achievements stood with him. It was inevitable that with him they

should also
successor,
9

fall

to

make way

for the will of his equally absolutist

to have different objects. In short 'enlightened' absolutism also consisted essentially in 'revolution from

which chanced

above , and could provide no substitute for what the imperial idea had once stood for, or had been intended to stand for: the policy, which not
only exercises dominion, but bestows freedom, which not only dispenses favours, but establishes justice, and establishes it by means of
justice,

a policy whereby the best possible is done for the people with the people, and therefore as a matter of principle just as much through the people as through the king; a policy therefore in whose eyes as a

26

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

matter of principle no person is merely an object; again, a policy subject not only to an abstract responsibility, but to a concrete one a policy
therefore which might well deserve the title, 'by the grace of God'. Those who do not happen to be in power, who are subjected to an absolute

monarch, whether he be enlightened or unenlightened, are bound to him with that rather distant and nervous awe exemplified in the form of the great prayer of the Church at Basle to be found in the liturgy of 1752, a prayer to be offered for 'the wise and worshipful first
look upon
citizens, counsellors,
district

judges and officials of our Christian town and 'Guide them, O Lord, with the spirit of wisdom and understanding, with good counsel and courage, with the knowledge and fear of thy holy name, that in their care we may lead a peaceful of Basle
3
:

life in all honour and righteousness/ of course possible to question whether that other policy, pursued in the Middle Ages in the name of the imperial ideal, ever became a reality anywhere. But there was at least a chance that it might be

and quiet
It is

it was still at least an active point of reference (questionable in itself but at least fairly well-defined) within the framework of the imperial ideal. It was when this fell away that the realization of such

realized while

a policy became impossible. For when the prince's power was made absolute, a step which brought with it the death of the imperial ideal, the prerequisite of such a policy, the very notion of a concrete responsibility, of a higher authority, was removed also, and in its place there arose the state without a master, or alternatively the state governed by an arbitrary master, beneath whose sway, even if he were the best of all possible monarchs, justice was a matter of pure chance. We have taken the one kind of political absolutist, the absolute prince, as the first for discussion. The second kind, his perfectly legitibrother, his alter ego, following in his footsteps as inevitably as the darkness following the light, as the thunder following the lightning, is the absolute revolutionary or perhaps it would be better to say, since

mate

was already a revolutionary the revolutionary from below, the representative of the lower class, who conceiving those above him to have injured him in his rights, and even to have deprived him
his predecessor

of them, takes steps to defend himself by snatching the power lying in the hands of the governing princes in order that he might now determine without let of appeal what is right and just, because he in his turn has the power in his hands. The rSles are reversed. Whereas before it had been the prince who had declared himself to be identical

with the state, it was now the people, the 'nation', as it at this time began to be called, who assumed the title by means of a simple inversion of

MAN

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

27

Louis XIV's dictum. This happened true to type in Paris on the iyth June, 1789. The representatives of the so-called third estate, who were,

be it remembered, the delegates of that section of the population of France which was in the overwhelming majority, formed themselves into a 'National Assembly and three days later declared with a collective oath, that they were determined in the teeth of all opposition never to disband until they had given the state a new constitution.
9

Everything that happened afterwards, up to the execution of Louis XVI and beyond, was a direct result of this event. Its inner logic is, however, as follows. (We shall restrict ourselves in the following to the two classic revolutionary documents, the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America of June 1776 and the Statement of

Human and Civil Rights ratified by the French National Assembly in August 1789). According to the revolutionary doctrine there exists a self-evident truth which can and must be recognized and announced
en presence et sous les auspices de VHre supreme:
1. All men are equal, i.e. created with equal rights (Am.), or alternatively (as in the Fr.), born with equal rights. 2. These equal rights are of nature, inalienable, sacred (Fr.), en-

dowed by
3.

their creator (Am.).

Their names are freedom, property, security and the right to

protect oneself from violence (Fr.) or: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (Am.). The French statement goes on to make a special point

of saying that freedom consists in being able to do anything which does not harm anybody and is not as such forbidden by law. And it also
considers the right to property important enough to describe it in a special last article as inviolable et sacrL 4. It is in order to protect these rights that governments are instituted

among men (Am.). Le but de

droits
.

toute association publique est la conservation des

de I'homme (Fr.).
derive their just
toute

5.

Governments

governed. Le principe de
nation.

souverainite' reside

authority from the consent of the essentiellement dans la

All authority exercised by individuals or corporate bodies stems expressly from the people (en imane expresstmenf). 6. The law is V expression de la volonte ginfoale so all must have a part

in

making it, all are equal in its eyes and every office and honour for which it provides are as a matter of principle open to all. to the aims 7. Whenever a form of government becomes injurious
of the
state, i.e. to

the upholding of the rights aforementioned

it is

the

people's right to remove it and replace it by a government more conducive to their safety and happiness. It will be advisable not to proceed too

28
hastily in such

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

an
is

event, but once it has become plain that a governseeking to establish absolute despotism it is not only the citizen's right but his duty to free himself of its yoke. The subtle differences of emphasis revealed by a comparison of these

ment

two documents are of considerable

clearly distinctive

interest: the

French version

is

by

virtue of the fact that, apart from the mention

of the

supreme in the preamble, the theological note has entirely disappeared, together with the implicit notion still to be found in the
Stre

American document that at least in the beginning there could have been a 'government among men' that was not created by the will of the people* a notion that the revolution itself was not only the exercising of a right, but something like the fulfilment of a duty; that this right and duty was of a transitory nature, and that while the authority of a government might rest upon the consent of a people, this was not quite the same thing as the people's will. In contrast to this the French statement is explicit in taking the state to be an association, its sovereignty to be the sovereignty of the nation as a whole, and the authority
of its laws to be contained in the will of all, i.e. in the generality of the individual possessors of the human rights. The Calvinism gone to seed of the American document still distinguishes itself favourably from the
Catholicism gone to seed of the French one. But these fine variations of meaning only reveal the sources and aims common to both versions.

They both think of the state in terms of the individual, or the sum of the individuals forming a nation. Both of them show that those who drew them up imagine that they were standing before an ultimate reality, and indeed before a reality beyond which no man would ever
Face to face with the supreme Being, or self-evidently, man knows according to both documents that he has a right to life, liberty, property and so on. For the sake of these universal rights it is necessary to
see.
state, and this state comes into being and subsists by virtue of general recognition of these universal rights, and in case of need, should it be found that this right is in effect being suppressed, by the strength

have a

of the majority it is actively called into being. It is this which forms the revolution. Such was the line of thought upon which the third
estate in 1789

based

its

declaration that

it

was

identical with the

'nation

and resolved come what might

is

to undertake the transforma-

tion of the state.

This then
the

the essentially unanimous confession of faith of the

second kind of absolutist in

kind,

politics, diametrically opposed to the first enlightened or unenlightened princely absolutist. Diametrically opposed? Indeed he is, and yet he is himself confined within

MAN
the same vicious
in which
title
it

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The Declaration
and
des droits de

2Q

circle.
first

was

printed

Vhomme> in the form sold in Paris in 1789, bears over its

a picture of the radiant eye of God, enclosed within the usual triangle, which even here calls to mind the Trinity. At the foot of the page, admittedly, there are to be found the words, Uozil supreme de la raison qui vient de dissiper Us nuages qui V obscurcissaient. But beneath the title there is the ingenious symbol of a snake biting its own tail. The
snake, unfortunately, is not explained but it can hardly have any other meaning but that the time was ripe for doing the same as the princely absolutist had done though in reverse: Uetat c'est moi! That section of
:

society which holds the power (or that which at the moment is striving to acquire it) determines according to its own particular standards what
is

he?

He knows what is right! Why shouldn't he knows, shouldn't he determine for the whole? He needs only to overcome his diffidence to place his conception of freedom, life, property, etc., on the absolute plane with the greatest of ease: and what is there then left to him but to place his will also on a level with them? All this the ancien regime had also done, the only
right for society as a whole.

And why,

if

difference being that

it

9 employed the phrase 'by the grace of God ,

whereas the revolutionary spoke rather more badly of the Creator, or simply maintained that everything relating to the subject was naturel, inviolable, sacri> and self-evident. Thus on both sides the same thing

happens the same usurpation and entry into the same vicious circle. There are as we saw fine distinctions of attitude also within this new kind of absolutism; it is possible within the revolution from below to adhere more to the conservative or more to the radical side. It is possible
:

to place the individual as such, who forms the state, more in the centre of things, or the nation which unites within itself all individuals: this

means that there

will

now be a

liberal

movement with a

nationalist

antagonist, and a liberal-nationalist movement at any point between the two. In short, the nineteenth century can now begin. Occasionally, as in the time of the restoration, and as was perhaps
as
its

movement

inevitable in

any monarchy

it

has also been

known

to

happen

in

modern

republic a feeling of repugnance against the whole state of things created by the French Revolution, a romantic nostalgia for monarchical absolutism and for the glorious days before 1789 might

spring to life and begin to take effect over against both liberalism and nationalism, and in their efforts to combat this reactionary tendency both the liberals and the nationalists would find themselves compelled
to invoke ever more and anew the exalted spirit of 1776 and 1789, and oppose reaction by being themselves reactionary. And so one way or

3O

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

the other, whether people prefer the 'Marseillaise' or the 'March of Hohenfriedberg', or even if they wish to combine both in one anthem, the snake is for ever biting its own tail. One way or another, either as individuals or, taken collectively, as a nation, the men who assume that they have 'rights' and experience the desire to assert them by violence stand, almost like God, very much alone, thrown upon themselves in

a way for which, with due regard for the imperfections of the human state, there was never any true necessity. The empire, it is true,

was a concrete political authority, but its authority was higher than the state, and therefore had once made the absolute state impossible in any form; again, it had once in spite of all its political ambiguity not been completely without eschatological significance, drawing attention to the existence of a law that neither princes nor peoples could give themselves, and that therefore they could not play off one against
1

the other; all this, however, is completely foreign to the political world of the eighteenth century. Has man, either as a prince or as man generally, really

such a right as the political absolutist thinks he

is

justified

in assuming, whether he tends to the left or the right? Is it really 'right* which they seize in each particular case? Does not right cease
to be right whenever it is seized ? Is not right possible only in a relationship which presupposes peace and excludes the thought of revolution because its basis is a commandment? Is it not this relationship

which alone forms the

as
it

basis for distinguishing the bearer of office just

alone forms the basis for the equality of all men? It is of course a relationship which, when destroyed, makes revolution and counterrevolution an absolute necessity, because when it is destroyed everything is bound to become absolute and abstract, and all things fall together like a pile of skittles. It was in fact the destruction of this relationship in the eighteenth century which made inevitable the
that

appearance of the two kinds of political absolutism, the appearance, is, of the possibility of taking the law into one's own hand and

making the state omnipotent. The first kind and the last! And what is more the consternation and the lamentings of the legitimists were very much misplaced the second kind was brought about by the first. For political man as he appeared upon the scene in 1789 had been the same man for a long time before, albeit in a different guise. The whole century in fact thought as he did; and so did even the circles which were
to fall victim to the revolution.

The
is

conspirator against himself. If this

will never

tyrant will secretly always be a not realized the lightning outbreak

of this upheaval and its tremendous repercussions throughout Europe be understood. By virtue of the same fiction of the contract

MAN
which
their rule, they

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

31

constitutes the state

now

whereby the kings of Europe had justified found that rule had been snatched from them

again. They themselves, as we saw, had encouraged the growth of the bourgeois, not because they loved him, but because they needed

him.

him

And now he was there, just as they had wanted him and shaped to be, except that at this point he suddenly found that he could

do with a little more of the liberte, propritte, happiness, etc., which the others accorded themselves in such generous measure more than the others were in fact ready to grant him and except for the fact that the bourgeois now suddenly discovered that he was in the majority, and that he had only to reach out and seize the to achieve what he
power

wanted forthwith. Upon which, of

apparent that he

who

course, it became immediately invokes death to tyrants is also always some-

thing of a tyrant himself and will reveal himself to be one soon enough. To show not only the connexion, but the essential unity of the

things
cast

we have been discussing it will be significant if in

glance at the political philosophy which
first

conclusion
all

we

of

nourished the

princely absolutist and then provided an equal delight to the palate of the bourgeois. It was truly not without good cause that their tastes were
similar. It
it is is the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which stems, from well in back the seventeenth, but is in effect standard for true, the whole of the eighteenth century. According to his teaching in de

cive

part of Leviathan the significance of the state is as follows: the ultimate reality to be reckoned with in man is his instinct to preserve himself and enjoy his life accordingly. He follows this instinct in everything he does, and he is perfectly right to do so. Nature has in actual
fact given to all men the same claim to all things, the only restraining factor being that to bring this instinct into play indiscriminately would benefit no one, as its necessary consequence would be universal
rest, will

war. Reason, therefore, backed by the fear of death and the desire for counsel man to adopt self-imposed restrictions. Thus sub-

jective right in itself seeks an objective kind of right, which is created by way of a transference of law (translatio iuris). Agreement is reached

and each one of the

parties transfers
is

a part of his

rights to the state.

The

state,

however,

a persona

civilis,

representing the unity of the

pactis plurium

general will and possessing power over all: persona una, unius voluntas ex hominum pro voluntate habenda est ipsorum omnium. In return

person affords all men protection, and with it promises to each his own: Suum cuique! and in so doing provides the first possibility for all to live a truly human life. Who is this single person? According to Hobbes he can just as easily be represented by monarchy as by an
this single

32

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

The

aristocracy or a democracy. (His personal choice was for a monarchy.) only essential thing is that he should be understood as being one
is law subject to no condition, and who is alone in and what is determining sanctioning good and what is bad. There exists nothing either good or bad in itself apart from the state, but the is law the citizen's as public conscience, just originally it emerged thence.

person, whose will

exists only in respect to the Church, i.e. in respect to the that of remains the inevitable fear of the unseen question powers. But, while the subject is permitted to adopt what attitude he pleases to the
is a fear of invisible powers which is officially sanctioned and from which, as from the faith which is right in all circumstances, it is superstitious to deviate from which to deviate would not only mean superstition, but revolution, and which therefore cannot be tolerated. Thus speaks Hobbes. It is usual in this context to make mention of John Locke's Two Treatises on Civil Government (1690). But his political philosophy would seem to be of less significance than Hobbes', because in it the philosophy of revolution from below, the doctrine that force has its source in the people, already preponderates and makes his work one-

Free thought

Church, there
state,

by the

rises

sided. Hobbes' political philosophy is great by virtue of the fact that it above this antithesis and is therefore capable of presenting a com-

prehensive view of the ideology of politics obtaining in his time. Hobbes' train of thought leads like a corridor to princely or to bourgeois absolutism, to the arrogation of God-like powers in politics by the individual or by the community, as Hobbes himself says: to the

omnipotent monarchy or to the omnipotent republic. Either way it is essentially the same process. In actual fact the eighteenth century took both courses, and it is this which is characteristic for the political
experience
it

gathered.

have considered the political problem presented by the eighteenth century in particular detail because it is from the political angle that the eighteenth century can be seen most clearly as a whole. Let
us

We

now proceed
life

aspects

which present a

to the attempt to comprehend it under two other less definite picture the inner and outer forms

imparted to

by
its

man

By

that external form,

cular element in

he lived at that time. which life has in any age I mean that particultural aims and achievements which is evinced
as
its

fairly consistently
is

throughout

possible to identify, with

some

precision,

various expressions. Consequently it from the documents of any

spirit

one of the expressions of this element, the tendency, nature and

MAN

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

33

of its other expressions, and so of the culture of the time as a whole. If there is such an external cast for the eighteenth century, and one that we can identify, it is perhaps most allowable to comprehend it in terms
of a striving to reduce everything to an absolute form. Inanimate nature especially, in all its realms, but man's somatic existence too, the sound
that could be spontaneously called forth, with all the possibilities for coloration and different rhythmic patterns which it presented, human
all its adaptability as a means of expression, social intercourse, individual development and the individual in relation to society all this abundance of things provided is in the eyes of eigh-

language in

teenth-century man a mass of raw material, of which he believes himself to be the master. This material he confronts as he who has all the knowledge: knowledge of the form, the intrinsically right, fitting, worthy, beautiful form for which all the things provided are clearly intended to be the material, for which they are obviously crying out, and into

which, as

is plain, they must be brought with all the speed, artistry and energy man has at his command. It is easy to become ironical about this, but we must fight against the temptation if we wish to understand

the true irony contained in such

an

attitude.

Eighteenth-century man, at least at the higher levels of society, had very close ties with nature, and they were far from being simply of the

kind which lead

man

to study nature scientifically

and

exploit

it

for

gain; they could also be felt and enjoyed aesthetically. It is however a rationalized, but rather a humanized let it not be said too quickly nature, a nature which has been put to rights and formed in accordance

with man's sensibility and enjoyment, an idealized, and most preferably

a visibly idealized nature, which is meant the stream as a fountain, the and tidy pond, the wood as a park reduced to visible order, the field and the bushes and flowers as a garden, the tree shaped with the garden-shears, all these things reduced to harmony, which
:

lake as a clean

inevitably means to geometry, more or less; the tamed, groomed and trained animals, shepherds and shepherdesses whose nice prettiness

and grace really left them no alternative but to turn eventually into those little porcelain figures; a nature which even after the grooming it has had to endure is really beautiful only when there is a Greek
temple, a statue or a bust somewhere about which quite unequivocally serves as a reminder of the lords of creation. It was the time of Goethe

which brought about a decisive inner change here but the external change took much longer and was slower in asserting itself: it would seem, as we can see from the Elective Affinities, for instance, that the game of 'creating nature in the eighteenth-century sense was indulged
9

34

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

in for a long time and on a grand scale in Weimar too. The man who an attitude to nature such as this must be unusually conscious expresses and certain that he knows how he feels and that his is valid in
feeling

the sense that

the true feeling. The same determined and absolute will for form is conveyed by the architecture of the time. The domineering way in which building materials were handled is evidenced in works like the stairway of Briihl castle. Stone may no be nor stone, longer iron, iron, nor wood, wood.
it is

Every material must be transposed (hence the particular fondness that arose at this time for plaster, so obedient to the forming hand !) according to the imaginative though lucid and logical form, which man felt he ought to impose upon space. This form was that of the perception which he held significant and valuable enough to its
justify

projection
to
cities

into the materials, regardless of everything in

them contrary
whole

its

in those days not with the help of a natural rise in the or followground ing the course of a river, as the builder of the older towns had built

own

nature.

Think too of the way they dared

to build

them, but as in Karlsruhe,

deliberate use of the ruler
to that

Mannheim and Ludwigsburg, with a fully and compasses and with a mathematical and extent harmonious form in mind, absolute enough to be capable

of taking shape not only in one building or group of buildings, but on occasion in complete towns. And in this there is as little true contrast
relative immoderacy of the so-called almost wildly sweeping and intersecting lines, its exuberant ornamentation, and its human and angel statuary imbued with the whole gamut of the human passions, and the Rococo modera-

in the attitude to
style,

life

between the

Baroque

with

its

tion

which tended

to revert to

a kind of tranquil cheerfulness or cheerful

is

tranquillity, as there is contrast in the attitude to life

absolutist

and

his enlightened counterpart, as there

of the ordinary for that matter

between pietism and rationalism. The buildings which are most characteristic of that time are precisely those which represent the transitional period between the two styles, and it is only from theirx that either can begin to be understood. It is just as irrelevant to condemn the one on the grounds that it is bombastic and overladen as to con-

which took itself entirely seriously and whose entire striving was therefore for an adequate means of expression. What other age has dared to make architecture of its inmost heart to the extent that this one did? But this was an age which simply had to, for its inmost heart was precisely this idea of man as one taking hold of everything about him and
feeling

demn the other for being stiff and affected, unless we have ated in both the boldness of feeling behind them

first

appreci-

subjecting

MAN
it

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

so big

35

to his will. It

is

an idea

and

so ill-starred that

we do

better,

especially

when

and stay silent, well come to mind.

It
still

confronted by the art it bodied forth, to see and hear instead of saying the ail-too obvious things which might

must also be granted to eighteenth-century man that he did not, in accordance with the same absolute will for form, spare himself his own personal outer appearance, either. have only to think of

We

the fashion of the eighteenth century. There is no need for me here to describe the dress, the coiffure, both for men and for women, the forms

of intercourse, sociability, play and dancing. One cannot look too attentively at the portraits of the time, the contemporary illustrations of historical and social

and also at the caricatures, if one is bent was exactly that these people who thus adorned and comported themselves were trying to express (unconsciously, and therefore all the more revealingly, as is always the case with fashion). What they were certainly not trying to say was that like the lilies of the field we should not care for our attire. And they were certainly not saying that no man can increase his height by an ell. What they were expressing the whole time, from top to toe in actual fact, was this: that man carries in his soul an image of himself which in comparison with his actual figure is still much more noble, much more graceful and much more perfect, and that he is not at a loss for means to externalize this image and render it visible. No age, perhaps, has made
life, it

upon

finding out

what

this confession of faith so systematically as

man

of the eighteenth

We need only note the following: when man, as happened at that time, proceeded to take himself (that is to say, his idea of himself) seriously, in the grand
century.

As

to

its results,

they need not concern us here.

manner, without humour, but with a certain logic, all the things emerged which now cause us astonishment in the matter of men's and women's dress and in the manners of the age. Man felt bound to weigh himself down in these respects with all the burdens and discomforts which an absolute will for form apparently demands but at the same time he was able to achieve all the dignity and charm to which eighteenth-century man did without doubt achieve.

Man in the eighteenth century affirms his attitude to nature and to material objects in his relationship to history, and the world of much more profound contrasts inherent in it. H. Hoffmann is quite right to
protest against the habit of describing the time of the Enlightenment as deficient in a sense of history, and to refute it by pointing out what close attention the eighteenth century in particular bestowed upon the

near and the distant past, the industry and care with which

it

pursued

36

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

fields.

researches in these
true,

But in one important sense the accusation

is

and not disprovable by a reminder of the historical research done in the eighteenth century, a reminder which far from discrediting the accusation in fact corroborates it. H. Hoffmann says it himself: in that century began that highly problematical affair which we call 'critical study of history But what else can this mean but that it was in the eighteenth century that man began axiomatically to credit himself with being superior to the past, and assumed a standpoint in relation to it whence he found it possible to set himself up as a
5
.

judge over past events according

describe
its

to fixed principles, as well as to

own report? And the at least as of these fixed applied by the typical principles, yardstick observer of history living at that age, has the inevitable effect of turning
deeds and to substantiate history's
stick

that judgment of the past into an extremely radical one. For the yardis quite simply the man of the present with his complete trust in

his

own powers

of discernment and judgment, with his feeling for

freedom, his desire for intellectual conquest, his

supreme moral self-confidence.

What

historical facts, even,

urge to form and his can be

true except those which to the man of the age seem psychologically and physiologically probable, or at any rate not improbable? How, in face of such a firm certainty about what was psychologically and
physiologically probable and improbable could eighteenth-century man conceive of the existence of historical riddles and secrets ? And what
else in fact

reveals itself to
'You'll

could the past consist of than either of light, in so far as it be a preparation and mount for the ever-better present

great diversion, to steep myself in ages pardon me it is since see how to long past; prudent men did think before us, and how much further since we have advanced' or simply of darkness a

my

warning counter-example and as such, if you like, a welcome counterexample in so far as the past had not yet sensed the right road to the future, or had even actively opposed it. The third thing which this attitude precluded was that the historian should take history seriously as a force outside himself, which had it in its power to contradict him and which spoke to him with authority. One way or another the historian himself said that which he considered history might seriously be allowed to say, and, being his own advocate, he dared to set forth both aspects of what he alleged history to have said, its admonitory and
its

encouraging aspect.

What was
tion,

to antiquity, to the

when it was applied Middle Ages, and also to the time of the Reformaand indeed to the immediate past? An answer is to be found in
the inevitable effect of this criterion

MAN
Gottfried Arnold's

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The

37

Unparteiische Kirchen-und Ketzerhistorie

(Unbiased

author, according to the 'wishes most that love preface heartily might settle my spirits in this work to a sweet harmony and tranquillity, so that all my sentiments

History of Churches and Heresies).

might be held as far as is possible in perfect balance and that every 9 requisite of a proper, true historian might be conferred upon me . It was Arnold's wish to maintain an attitude of detachment towards the
view of history held in earlier times, which had been dictated by church dogma, and he was in fact thoroughly successful. It was this which

made him

all

the

more
his

certain

and unconditional in elevating

to the

sympathizers' mystically inclined Christian belief, whence he arrived very naturally at the conclusion that the whole history of the Church after the time of the 'first Love*,
is, after the end of the first century, was with very few exceptions c one single, monstrous decline: a hotchpotch of violence and error', as Goethe quite rightly later put it when describing his impressions of the book. It is fundamentally the same evil eye with which not only the

measure of all things

own and his

that

Encyclopaedists and Voltaire (in his history of Louis XIV, for instance),

but also the German disciples of the Enlightenment later saw and mastered history, the only difference between them being in the distribution of light and shade. And this way of mastering history was also
axiomatic in cases where the modern consciousness gave the beholder of history a wider scope than was possible for Arnold or Voltaire, for

example.

It

was employed whenever

historians

found

it

fitting to

abstract from the past all sorts of exemplary heroic tales; in particular

from

classical antiquity, preferably for instance, from the history of Sparta, but also from Reformation history. It must be said of this race of historians, those who seemed to dismiss the past either in whole or in

part as one whole night of wickedness and folly, as well as those who lavished all their love and praise upon one particular aspect of it, that although as a race they were very learned in historical matters, they

were

modern
But

same time singularly uninstructed, simply because their self-consciousness as such made them basically unteachable* they were far from imagining themselves impoverished by this
at the

attitude,

by the abandonment of all attempt

at historical objectivity.

On

the contrary; they felt themselves to be enriched and powerful. It was again the sovereign will for form that looked upon history, as it

did upon nature, as just so much raw material; which was therefore not at all *unhistorical but simply found only raw material, only light and shade, which obviously were the light and shade of its own deeds and
9

aspirations.

3^
If

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

we remember

this we cannot be surprised that the eighteenth century was most emphatically also a century of educational theories. The new educational points of view which distinguished it

decisively

from the preceding age gradually asserted themselves in this century. All those who were active in this field in the manner of their age: the long line from A. H. Francke on the one hand to J. B. Basedow on the other, were agreed about these ideas. They can be summarized as follows: 1. There was now an ever-growing conviction that education is a business resting upon a possibility over which mankind has been given complete command. It follows that it can and must be made the subject of particular thought. There is now a belief in teaching the teacher, so that it was this age which saw the beginnings of a real literature on the theory of education and the beginnings of a real education for
teachers: the
2.
first

teachers' training colleges.

There was now the conviction that the young person can be introduced to actual life through the medium of a comprehensive education. He can be brought to 'true godliness and Christian wisdom 9 (A. H. Francke). Thus the study of ancient languages and of antiquity in general, which had been the alpha and omega of the teaching of had now to to the of the motherprevious times, give place study of modern and French of in and even tongue, languages particular, more to technical studies including manual and physical training of all kinds only to be deliberately taken up again in the course of a later development from a completely new point of view a development similarly characteristic of our own time. This was that the classical writers were, after all, the greatest people and the noblest spirits who have ever lived' and from them could be learned criteria for both art and ethics, facility in expression and a host of good maxims which improve both the will and the understanding (Matthias Gesner, 1691-1761). As to what precisely was meant by the 'real life* to which the children were to be introduced; this was a point concerning which there was a divergence of opinion between the educators of the pietistic and those of the enlightened school. They did however agree that this introduction was a matter over which they were quite capable of taking
control.

There was now also the conviction that a communicable method exists. Hence mirroring the two philosophic doctrines that dominated the age on the one hand the more or less
3.

of correct education

correctly understood Socratic method, that of imparting the desired knowledge by skilfully eliciting it from the children themselves through questioning, and on the other the principle of demonstration and

MAN
many ways. 4. The faith

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

39
fruit in

handicrafts-teaching, were now discovered and made to bear

of educators in the possibility of teaching was now such that they believed just as it was believed possible to take man generally as a completely explicable object of study

that they, as adults,

have it in their power to see the child as a child, and to understand and treat it as such. Hence the of methods and experiments designed spate
approach the child in a childlike way carefully it to the desired goal by a wise descent to its own and as these were then underthought feeling, stood, by all sorts of ingenious punishments and amiably enticing
suited to the child in
its

to enable the teacher to

various ages, to bring

rewards,

by

bringing

home

disguising the dire process of learning as a merry game, by to it as and therefore all the unobtrusively as
possible,

least, already the 'century of the child This is perhaps one of the most noteworthy manifestations of its absolute will for form: that it so confidently believes that it understands that greatest of mysteries presented to man, the child.
3
.

more effectively, the 'moral of the story' both in theory and in practice. Thus the eighteenth century really was, in this sense at

5. People were now so completely convinced that the attempt to educate is both feasible and worthwhile that wanted no one to be they without its benefits. This is shown by the fact that the state now

began

to take

some

interest in schools.

The

enlightened of the absolute

princes, Frederick II

Frederick William

and Joseph II chiefly, but their predecessors and Maria Theresa too, included schools in their

programmes for the betterment of the state, making them one of their most important points and providing very extensively for them. It was
Fenelon (De F Education des jilles) who had for the first time in 1687 pointed out in principle the importance of education for the female sex too, and in 1698 it was A. H. Francke once again who was the first to advance to the founding of a 'Gynaeceurn? In 1717 Frederick William I
'.

introduced compulsory schooling for all in Prussia, and during his reign two thousand new schools came into being. Thus the government school now became an accepted principle. It now came to be regarded as being an essential general part in a person that he can be educated,

and therefore that

imposed
if

it is every person's duty (a duty which must be need be) that he should allow himself to be educated.

6. Finally, the sense of conviction concerning aims, possibilities and achievements in this field was so strong that education progressively dared to esteem itself more and more independent of, even
to,

the revealed gospel; the school, in fact,

felt

nay superior superior to the Church.

4O
*

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

What's more exalted than the teacher ?' At first for a long time humbly, but then with mounting self-assurance, and finally turning the tables and attempting to snatch the highest honour himself, the schoolmaster

now

steps

up

beside the parish priest as one

offer to all

own, something special

to say

and

who has something of his something different and indeed much better the world his immortal prototype, this very
:

J. B. Basedow,

not for nothing looked upon the doctrine of the his as Holy Trinity personal enemy. And if all the other convictions of the age about education are valid then it must in fact be admitted
that education
it

who

is a task in itself. This does then prompt the question might not in fact be the superior task: as opposed to the proclamation of the Gospel, the real and true one of the two, and whether it might not be as well for the Church first to make room for the school next to it, then to regard it with respect, and then to look up to it even

whether

more
ing

respectfully before finally, conscious of its

own

superfluity, allow-

be completely merged with it, or alternatively itself becoming a school, just one more educational establishment among
itself to

many
its

others.

The commanding way

the age took up the problem of education has

equivalent in the freedom with which it treated the problem of the forming of associations. Let us bear in mind that all the associations
that

had

existed until then

by

necessity,

might be described as associations formed such as the natural communion of marriage and family

life,

the professional association of the guild and the corporation, and the associations, partly geographical, partly political, of the village, the township and the state. Embracing all the others, and not so much formed as instituted, the community of the Church, and that of the

empire

too,

which found

its

ultimate sanction in the Church, united in

the Corpus Christianum, stood guarantor for the necessity of all those other associations which had come into being

and
by

sanctity

necessity.

And

the sole voluntary institution which the

Church did

actually

men's and women's orders, by virtue of its integration in the Church, as a deliberately sanctioned exception hedged about with every imaginable proviso, could ultimately serve only to prove the rule. Its purport was that while there might well be ordines there was in. fact no such thing as a societas. The fact that the Jesuit
create, the Catholic

Jesu and not that of an ordo, whole form and conduct, was one of the seeds of a course of development which found its full fruition in the eighteenth century. The discovery had been made that association could be created, and indeed that association in its true and really

order specifically assumed the

title Societas

and showed

itself to

be a

societas

by

its

MAN
living sense

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

41

be created. The old obligatory institutions, the Church included, now began to lose their influence in a way most peculiarly their own and who would claim to be able to give the final reasons? Imperceptibly but irresistibly they began to sink in the esteem of ever more numerous groups of people to the point where they came to be looked upon as the simple product of nature and history with which one must of course comply, but which could not be sufficient; to the point where they were regarded as the mere visible sign
to

had

worthy

of community all too visible, in fact and for this very reason not to be considered its true expression. Within, beyond and beside
the old institutions,
it

was

felt,

one must seek

to find the proper, true 3

community, and right through them all discover, work and build that proper community. Once again it is the expression of the age's absolute will for form, a will to which all the things we find existing about us are mere material to be moulded by man. The meaning of a societas, as distinct from an ordo, is Gesellschqft, that is to say it is an association of companions who meet by their own free choice, independently of the old institutions, seeming to respect them, but inwardly, in some way and at some point doing quite the reverse united by some common feeling, and for the achievement of some common aim. This feeling, it was thought, did not pulse, or at any
living, invisible

rate only feebly pulsed, in the members of the old institutions, and men no longer expected or little expected the old institutions to strive
after and achieve that aim, whereas in the new, free associations they were in good heart and full of confidence on both counts. It is now that we hear 'He is a prince but more, he is man!* in The Magic Flute. And it is now that the name 'Brother' becomes a freely conferred title

of honour.

principle,

mean? It means that an entirely new dividing new way of distinguishing between the lower and higher orders of men, between those who should be taken seriously and those it is safe to ignore, was now coming into effect whereby the old distinctions became relative. The man who does not belong to the same family, class, state or Church could now become an associate and hence a friend, and hence a brother, as and when he belongs to
does this

What

an

entirely

common views and common aims; and the man belonging to the same family, class, state, and Church can be reduced to one of the anonymous herd, the ignorant masses, as and when he is
the sacred circle of

not included, but shut out from the new, free society's point of view. We have already seen how significantly the theory of man's right to form free associations had affected his conception of the state, and how,

4$

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

once

it had taken effect, the political development which led either to monarchical or to liberal-national absolutism was possible. Or was it

rather that absolutism formed the root for the

tion?

new

theory of associa-

was absolutism, which expressed itself in the may, idea that association could be created in the form of a community of
as
it
it

Be that

and aims, and that this community was the true, real and one. It was a completely non-political manifestation of absolutliving ism, and indeed deliberately non-political a belief in the limitless
feeling

nature of man's capacities, and in this, as it were, personal and private form absolutism experienced in the forming of associations now began
in all manner of ways to underpin (or shall the ramparts of the old social institutions.
Suffice
it

we say rather, undermine?)

to say that this

new, free form of association

now

existed,

to prove itself characteristic of man in the eighteenth century. It established itself at every point within the old institutions and, if the

and was

truth be known, set

them

their limits. It provided at least a

temporary

refuge against a feeling that the old institutions were inadequate it was available whenever the outside world became too cold and
desolate.

But within

it

one could await better times, and in expectation

of a better future do

many things in the company of fellow-conspirators,

and make many preparations against the day. It was a complete world within the world, in which, in contrast to those living outside, men confronted whatever else might happen, God or destiny or the future
face to face, directly and not indirectly directly by virtue of the fact that the place for the encounter had been freely chosen, a place which after all was invested with the entire strength of human community. It was this course of development that gave birth, or rebirth, to a

counterpart of the Society of Jesus, secular, but only too similar to it in kind. That counterpart originated from a body scarcely distinguishable from the regular orders, the 'Bauhiitten' (the corporation of the
builders) of the

Middle Ages; the order of Freemasons,

all

bathed in

the splendour of the invisible, and for this very reason, the real and true Church, the veritable Church of mankind. Here long before the
revolution, the enlightened of the absolute princes, Frederick the Great at their head, had begun to join with their bourgeois antagonists in the

peaceful building of temples. *The search for truth, a life of virtue, heartfelt love for God and man; let these our watchword be!' the

masons' song declaims.

patient and discreet!' is is there than that contained in the

this

again, in The Magic Flute, be steadfast, the cry to the adept. And what other comment

And

our plan, does but demean the

same work: 'Who finds no joy in name of man!' ? But the uniting

influence

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY and momentum of the esoteric doctrines imbuing

IN

MAN

43
the lodges

widespread than

of the eighteenth century must be construed as greater and more may appear from such professions of faith, whose

purpose was after all to pave the way and dispel the general disquiet. Let us hear what Goethe was already saying on the subject (in his Symbolum of 1815):

The mason's
Is life's

searching

whole mirror; The aims he strives for

The perfect seeming Of human behaviour.

The
times imparting Their joy and sorrow

Are slow
But not

to follow,

We hasten onward.
In awesome distance

desisting

A veil hangs gleaming;

Above the beaming

And tombs And

The

Soft stars' insistence, are beneath.

closer, see! they invest

Regard them

With

heroes' breast stealthy terror

And

solemn

feeling.

But beyond are sounding

The phantom voices. The masters' voices:

Delay not in aiding The powers of good!

Here crowns are woven

In endless

A gift of abundance
To

silence,

We conjure you, hope! 1

And why should it surprise us. It utterly exhilarating to countless people to know that this was in fact the matter, and that it could now be contemplated
This was the heart of the matter.

garland the chosen!

must have been

regardless of state boundaries, church precincts or any class distinctions, in an association which had arisen freely and stood freely; that
1 Cf.

Appendix p. 399.

44
is

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

a league of free men, and therefore in a league which was Anyone, however, who sought still stronger forms of communal secrecy or secret community could find what he was looking for by joining with the Rosicrucians, just as anyone who had determined upon a more energetic offensive against the existing powers of Church and state could find an answer to his needs in the society of the Illuminati. If, on the other hand, he desired less mysticism, something a little less potent and inspired by more practical feeling and aims, he could engage in what appealed to him in one of the numerous societies for the furtherance of knowledge and the common good which were springing up. A further point to notice in this connexion is that the old universities now found new rivals as centres of research in the academies instituted in accordance with social theory. Neither must we forget that the eighteenth century was the time which saw the formation of the student associations in the ideological and sociological form which still characterizes them today. He who guides the stars in the canopy of the heavens' now had many banners to hold. And of course we must on no account overlook here the pietistic movements and especially the founding of the Moravian brethren. Surely the end of all things for the first time, at any rate on German soil but with a
to say, in

genuinely fraternal.

universality unprecedented even elsewhere, they implemented the idea of a free connexion between all the churches, based on their common

This notion was the all-absorbing interest of Count Zinzendorf. Especially in the first half of the century, everyone who seriously wished to be a Christian, whether or not he was one of the Moravian brotherhood, felt himself a little at home, not in Wittenberg, not in Geneva, but in the invisible Philadelphia which was yet
love of the Saviour
.

everywhere assuming tangible form. In spite of all the diversity of their forms it is impossible not to recognize the single unifying intention,
spirit

feeling

and conviction underlying all this building of free associations of and aim: the conviction that it is possible to create community.

the exact parallel to the conviction that it is possible to educate. formed community, not that already known and in existence, which is alone in possession of the truth, and therefore of the
is

This
It
is

this freely

future

or of the joyful, assured prospect of the future. We might well ask ourselves whether the French Revolution would not have broken

out very much sooner, had not these convictions and the numerous bodies they created satisfied for a time so many desires tending towards an absolutist sociology, and in so doing temporarily tied up or engaged so many energies in relatively harmless activities.

A quick glance at the field of eighteenth-century language, literature

MAN

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

shape

45

and poetry will show us that it too was subject to the absolutism of the will for form as the which did most to phenomenon the

picture

presented by the life of the time. The decisive event here we are of course speaking of the time before Goethe was, I suppose, the allembracing claim made on behalf of the mother tongue in opposition to the language of antiquity which had dominated the cultural life in
the Middle Ages and continued to do so even well into the seventeenth century. It was now the mother tongue which was explored, given literary and poetic form, moulded and developed in all its possibilities. This also started happening at first simply because people had become aware that in this sphere there was an enormous mass of raw material
to hand, which was clearly inviting conquest, mastery and the imposition of form. They had become aware of an unknown land in the

proximity and the fact that it had up to then been untouched tempted a generation of such expansive sensibilities simply by virtue of the law of the horror vacuL The wildness and barbaric lack of form of
closest
this

land

now

bilities at

gradually became a source of shame, but the hands of those with the impulse to

its

rich possi-

activity

seemed

to

give promise of limitlessly fruitful fields. It is well known that it was France in the great era of Louis which preceded the other nations in transforming the vernacular with all its possibilities into a classical language. The fact that the measure

XIV

and model of the classical style which the great French formal masters took as their weapon in the task was none other than that provided by antiquity, is a subject apart. They were in something of a hurry and took up the rules of form where they found them. The inner relationship of the French genius with the Latin genius in particular made this
form the choice that seemed by

And

far the most natural and obvious one. the energy of the highly original and peculiar French will to impose form did ultimately prove strong enough to produce a classicism

which, even by the aid of a borrowed instrument, succeeded in emerging as something new and peculiarly French, a structure now in its turn impressive enough to serve as a model for the same development to which the German language was subjected at a somewhat later date.

There are no doubt profound

discuss,

reasons,

which

this is

not the place to

why German
:

century produced no classical forms why it produced no Racine, Gorneille or Moliere, but only a Johann Christian Gottsched, who in spite of the noteworthy collaboration of his spouse Luise Adelgunde Viktoria, ne'e .Kulmus,

literature in the first half of the eighteenth classical literature but only works imitating

found

it

quite impossible to achieve fame as a poet,

and was only of

46

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

note as a professor of the German language. But it was not, as it happened, his sterile subservience to French models which in the new period beginning with Klopstock and Lessing gave rise to the violent
reaction against the aims he pursued and the works he wrote. It was, on the contrary, the very thing French classicism, so ingenious in its

own way, and the patently uninspired German classical style had common which made his work significant, and later an object

in

of

hatred; the conviction, that the language should and could be mastered, c the will to achieve a German 'art of language' (grammar), art of
speaking' (rhetoric) and art of composition' (poetics), as the titles of Gottsched's chief works typically indicated. Gottsched wanted to make
Leipzig, of all places, for Germany what Paris was to France: a central forum in questions of good taste relating to German language, literature and poetry. The fact that it only managed to become a 'little Paris', as we may still learn among other things from Goethe'fe Faust, does not, however unfortunate this may have been, seriously afiect the issue. The true issue was Gottsched's supreme and ail-too supreme confidence in the German artistic will as such; and it was this that first called J. J. Breitinger of Zurich another professor and then the entire body of inspired youth, into the lists against him. It was his misfortune even if it was certainly no accident that he was doomed to compromise his cause by an ail-too conspicuous personal vanity, which led him to play the dictator in his Paris on the river Pleisse, that he was plunged ail-too deeply into the shadow of the Titans who were following after him, and that he was therefore doomed even at the height of his fame, to be transformed into a kind of comic figure. But his widely-ranging endeavours on behalf of the early and earliest language and literature of the Germans can bear witness, in a way that
c

commands a certain respect, to the professorial but sincere earnestness with which he furthered his cause. We have mentioned Gottsched here as the typical exponent of the German classical style, which together
with French classicism, provides evidence of the dictatorial manner that eighteenth-century man was bold enough to adopt also in his approach to work in the literary sphere.

Let us
life

now conclude our survey of the external form imparted to the of the age by a few reflections upon its music. Here we touch upon

a region which we have to confess is extraordinarily difficult to com prehend even a little, either historically or in any other kind of thought. It is, however, the fact that, with everything else, this century was musical as well and perhaps above all else; more musical certainly than any age that had gone before and perhaps than any since. And

MAN
there
is

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

way in which it was musical

47

something in the

which is so charac-

if we wish to understand this cannot some reference to it. We can simply escape making study the history of a past age, we can contemplate its architectural and other works of art, its portraits and its dress, and we can read the books it gave us, but we cannot hear the voices of the people then living and this imposes a tremendous limitation upon our under-

teristic

of the whole spirit of the age, that

spirit

we

standing

except as they are transcribed and laid before us in their music in so far as it has been handed down to us. Is not this form of communication perhaps the most intimate we can hope for from a

past age? How many extraordinary generalizations and judgments on the eighteenth century would have been quite out of the question if only those who made them had recalled that this was also the century

of Bach and Handel, Gluck and Haydn, and had remembered just a few notes from the works of any one of them before once again setting pen to paper with their diffusions on the 'one-sided intellectual
civilization' of that

age and various other catchwords. For Frederick

the Great was not only the victor of the battle of Leuthen or the friend of Voltaire, and not only the intellectual author of the Prussian national code of laws. All this
is no doubt very important, but Frederick was also an ardent flute player and we may at least ask whether there should not be intensive historical study with the task of

investigating whether he might not have been this than in anything else he did. intently,

more

truly himself in

nay devotedly, people practised music at this time, and what may show even more clearly how intensely musical they were how intently they listened. But in the attempt to see them in this aspect of their nature, we must be careful
to concede

How

to anyone fore brook

who

them their own kind of musicality. This discussion is barred is familiar only with the modern world and will thereno argument in taking as his yardstick the lyricism of Beet-

hoven or Schubert who simply are part of this completely different to anyone whose ideas in assessing J. S. Bach are like those of Richard Wagner: 'Bach is like the sphinx. The noble head struggling forth from the periwig resembles the human face in its first emergence from the animal body. On the other hand it is barred too to anyone who thinks Bach should be revered as a true saint of Protestantism, and immediately imagines that he hears in the Passions and Cantatas a complete expression of Luther's theology, and then again to

modern world;

anyone who applies to him the saying, in itself unanswerable, that like all great music Bach's is truly human and therefore timeless. It is moreover debatable whether a true modern feeling for music, would treat the

48

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

true musicality of a former age in this way. Would it not rather seek to discover and honour its timelessness within and not outside the very
qualities

a part of its age ? way then the problems which present themselves are such that we can only briefly touch upon them. I would consider it suitable to take as our starting point the fact that all the
it

which made

If we hold this to be the true

minor musicians of the eighteenth century and the great ones, and perhaps especially the great ones, were not either in their own sight or in that of their contemporaries what we today describe as artists or
composers, but quite simply craftsmen of the profession concerned with honouring God and delighting the heart of man a profession which
:

primarily consisted in the mastery of one or of several musical instruments. And the significant fact we must realize is that the musician of
its

the eighteenth century preferred these instruments to be the piano or predecessors current at that time, and the organ; the instruments, which were polyphonic in intention. Art was in those days still most

Art was proficiency. It was famous, and kept him famous as he was the object of Frederick the time old Bach' to when, right up
definitely the product of technical ability.
this proficiency

which

first

made Bach
c

the Great's admiration. It was this proficiency which made the young Mozart the wonder of Europe. But at that time the art of composing

was looked upon by great and small merely as a means of applying, of widening and deepening the scope of the art of professional musicianship, as a means of proving the perfected skill which, in this as in all
things, reveals the master.

Not sensibility, not

experience, not mystique

and not Protestantism, but art as a skill, as proficiency in the manipulation of the most exacting rules not without 'invention', certainly, as it was then called, but invention continually inventing a new necessity, invention in the expression not so much of what the composer himself found personally stimulating, but rather of general laws this was needed to write a fugue. And the quality which distinguished a good fugue from a bad one in composition and performance was, in the opinion of no less a man than Bach himself, the art which was revealed in the craftsman's skill. The beautiful, so to speak, had to follow as a matter of course (unsought and not to be sought in the abstract) from that which was properly done from the craftsman's point of view. Inspiration on the composer's part was also essential. What emerged would certainly be 'beautiful' too. But an informed admirer like Frederick the Great would admire only the beauty of the skill and style which the work causes to become audible, and not, specifically not,
the beauty of the piece in
itself.

The

steadfast conviction that art,

MAN
understood in
of the time*
this

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

49

way, would of itself result in the glory of God and the delight of the soul was the first quality peculiar to the typical music

tised? I should say that

But what was the mastery which these musicians sought and pracit consisted of the sovereign attitude which they had first of all towards the instrument producing the sounds and then to the abundance of possibilities inherent in these sounds. It
^

was the full and joyous awareness of this sovereignty which made them prefer the polyphonic instruments and polyphonic composition. It was for them a question of humanizing, so to speak, the rough amorphous mass of possible sounds of forcing, it not imposing and
stamping upon but rather the law known to each individual human being, the order of sounds which he 'invents', i.e. finds already within himself as an objectively valid order until there is no

any individual

style as such,

was

longer merely sound, but sound existing as musical tone. Further, it for them a question of evolving harmony from the confused mass of possible combinations of sounds and, from the equally confused mass of possible sequences of sounds, that was henceforth something
to

be a singing cosmos, put forth by man and penetrating space. The can do that, who knows the law involved in doing it, and also knows how to handle them in spite of their deep secrecy and bewildering diversity, is a maestro. Bach did not consider himself a genius, nor did his contemporaries, as is well known, treat him as one. But both he and they were united in the awareness that he was a master of his

man who

just described, and it was this which they appreciated in him. Making music means subjecting the sound to the laws. That is the second peculiarity of the music of the time: the straightforward way its practitioners believed as a matter of course in the existence of these laws, in the possibility of their being recognized

art in the sense

we have

and applied; and the absolutely impartial way they applied them. We can then go on to ask in what way we can understand this way of making music as serving the glory of God and the delight of the soul in the spirit of the age, and what precisely we should take to be its whole aim and extent? My answer would be that the whole aim and extent of this music was really immaculate playing, not in spite of, but
because of the virtuosity expected both in the art of composition and the art of execution. This cannot be said in the same way of the music of any other century. Once this mastery of the world of sound had been
achieved, eighteenth-century music-making, with its background of exacting labour, seemed to assume a form which enabled it to attain
in an even

more unqualified way a

totally superior

and

at the

same

5O

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

time totally disinterested ability to deal with the possibilities of that world. Res severa verum gaudium! It was only on the basis of this crafts-

man's mastery of the art of transforming the world of sounds into music that the game of making music could be played. But on the basis of this transformation and re-creation it could be played with assurance and in accordance with the laws of necessity. And it was this playing which was looked upon as the be-all and end-all of the entire process. Here and only here the beauty of the music as such was accorded any place. For its beauty consisted in the freedom founded upon subjection to the law, the freedom upon which we hear the musician embark. It was Goethe who said perhaps the profoundest thing it is possible to say about Bach's music: 'As if the eternal harmony were discoursing with itself, as might perhaps have happened in the bosom of the Lord just before the Creation; so I was moved inwardly and felt that I no longer needed ears, nor eyes the least of all, nor any other senses.' Let the words: just before the Creation' be noted. There is as we know a passage in the Bible according to which something like a conversation of the eternal harmony with itself takes place, just before the Creation, with a similar reference to playing, i.e. Prov. 8.27-31: 'When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: when he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep when he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: then was I by him, as a master workman:
c
:

delight continually, playing always before him; playing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.' Would it not be the revelation of a supreme will for form, a will for form

and had

manifesting perhaps only in this sphere its utmost absolutism, if the music of the eighteenth century sought to emulate the wisdom even of the Creator in
its

results
all

us to forget
earlier

music is

and in the abandonment and superiority which cause the craftsmanship behind it ? Be that as it may, all still too much involved in the struggle to subdue the raw

material of musical sound, and it must be said that the later music, from Beethoven onwards, desired and loved the world of sound too
little for its own sake, to be capable of looking upon it in the same unequivocal way as a game. The music of the eighteenth century, the music of absolutism, plays, and for this reason it is in a peculiar way

beautiful
too.

and that not only in its great exponents but

is

in

its

minor ones

Something of the glow of freedom which

sphere rests

this particular

upon

all

who come

peculiar to this age in to our mind, be they

German,

Italian or French.

MAN
There
is

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

else in the

51

realm of music which is still greater, something or at any rate more eloquent than this freedom. It makes its appearance whenever the riddle of human existence appears over against full musical freedom; for it is impossible to explore and resolve this riddle
completely by any earthly play. When this happens the play of the sounds which have become entirely transformed into musical tone,

which have been quite humanized, breaks

shore. It
is still

like the sea against a rocky the sea, not the infinite sea, which after all only seems or hearing of infinite, but the sea bounded, as it truly is. If my view the matter is correct, this cannot be said either of Each or Handel, or of Gluck or Haydn. As musicians they were naive children of their

century. Their music

sight.

is

like the sea at a point

all

where no shore

is

in

the things which distinguished the musicians of the eighteenth century from all those who had gone before and from all those who came after, but who had in addi-

There was one musician who had

tion something entirely personal to himself: the sadness or horror inherent in the knowledge of the border before which absolutist man,

even and particularly when cutting his finest figure, stands in blissful unawareness. Like his Don Giovanni, he heard the footfall of the visitor
of stone. But, also like Don Giovanni, he did not allow himself to be betrayed into simply forgetting to go on playing in the stony visitor's
presence. He still fully belonged to the eighteenth century and was nevertheless already one of the men of the time of transition of whom it
will

story proper. I

be our chief task to speak in this survey of the antecedents am referring to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

to

our

Before

we proceed,

almost at once, to the subject of our next chapter

form of the inner life of eighteenth-century man. I mean, the thing which is regularly recurrent in the make-up of the great number of individuals of that time who are known to us, and which is therefore characteristic in the attitude they ultimately seem to adopt towards themselves, the world, and the Deity. I do not think we shall be guilty of being too schematic if we surmise that such a common denominator, let us say a psychological common denominators, exists in visible and comprehensible form in every epoch of human, events that is recognizable as a unity, such as the eighteenth century, and to which the existence of all those who shared in such a time can in some sense ultimately be reduced, in spite of the abundance of variety and contradiction that may exist. It is an inner analogue to the form of their outward life. With both of them together we can find no actual explanation, certainly, but an instructive light upon the historical
shall discuss the

we

52

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

experiences (of which we have spoken in the first half of our chapter) of man at this time. Let us first try to state in simple terms what there
is still left
1.

to see:

All the people

who

are truly representative of the eighteenth

century have a naively strong conviction that their self-awareness as human beings is superior to the totality of those things which differ

which are in some way outside it. They know that the things some way by means of human apprehension, willing and feeling. Their relation to them is a free one and they, the men, are the masters. It was not for nothing that one of the favourite figures in the literature of the time was Robinson Crusoe, the man thrown completely upon his own resources, who in spite of this and for this very reason was able to take care of himself so

from

it,

outside can certainly be got at in

triumphantly.
2. Corresponding to this subjective conviction there is the objective one, that this outside world of things is in itself suited and even planned,

and appointed in a manner which cannot be sufficiently wondered at to become the object and scene of this expansion of human selfawareness. 'The world is good' means it is good as the object and scene of the deeds of men. 3. In view of this admirable concordance between the inner and the

man of the eighteenth century believed (with few exceptions) in a God who is common lord of both of them, but who of course stands nearer to man and the human world. God is the quintessence, the perfection, unapproached and unapproachable, of that
outer world the

wisdom and goodness with which man is confident enough to approach the world, and which clearly meets him in the world. God is the highest motive as regards the degree of reasonableness which man and the world can produce, for what is possible in the advancement of knowledge, the extension of the sphere of the will and a deepening of the feelings on man's part, and further revelations on the part of the universe. And at the same time God is the highest quietive in respect to the effective limits of human self-consciousness which are to be conceded: these limits are as
altogether insoluble. 4. Man knows that he

much a part of it in itself as imposed by the mysteries of the universe which are as yet unsolved or might prove
is

substance
is spirit,

as,

the

God
is

significant for

linked with, and ultimately of the same him in this double function. God
all these things,

man is spirit too. God is mighty and so is man. God is wise and
man. But he is
than God. Man's

benevolent, and so
less perfect

way of being

of course, infinitely these things is confused and

MAN

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

53

fragmentary, but it is the same way. And hence that which outside in the world man finds already imbued with reason, or makes reasonable

by the
5.

exercise of his will,

is

also, in all its imperfection,

of one

substance with God.

The

conviction that

God

exists thus justified

is

and ensured the

conviction that

human

self-awareness

superior both in the valiant

enthusiasm which is necessary to it and in its equally necessary humble acquiescence. This conviction concerning man rests firmly on the conviction about God. The latter, it is true, does not in itself rest firmly upon anything, and it must for this reason from time to time be reaffirmed, if only for the sake of the other conviction. The conviction that God exists and holds must from time to time be

sway

guaranteed anew. How is this to be done? The proof will be conveyed by a renewed confirmation of the existence of this wonderful concordance between man and the world he inhabits. It is this means that

justified

and

man will once again be fired with a belief in God, and it is this renewed
confirmation which must serve as instrument of the theodicy. 6. The theodicy that is, the renewed confirmation of this concordance, which
also
is

by

be established

actually experiences it. But he experiences it in taking up the normal position which he must take up in relation to the world at large, i.e. in acting virtuously. For he can act thus, and in doing so he experiences and apprehends this concordance and in it God, and in God the

that

man

necessary for the sake of the anthropodicy can indeed theoretically, but the decisive factor will always be

necessary motive

The
7.

and quietive governing his own mode of existence. theoretical theodicy is only a paraphrasing of this practical one.
But what

is meant by acting virtuously? Fulfilling the will of Certainly, but what is the will of God that must be fulfilled? Clearly a correct understanding of ourselves and a correct understand-

God?

ing of the world is bound to tell us what virtuous conduct is, as surely as both the world and we ourselves are sprung from God. The correct
understanding, will, however, be the natural way of understanding, that is to say, the understanding of ourselves and of the world in their
is

quality as sprung from God. within our power) to tell us

We must therefore allow Nature (and this what is good. We need only allow our-

selves to

be told by subjective reason, as the elemental voice within every man, and by objective reason, as the elemental voice speaking to every man. For the right understanding of these voices we have only,
for they are assuredly plain to us
to talk of them or alternrealize that

if at all

atively able to

be instructed about them in order to

we

are quite

remember what they say. He who hears the voice of reason and

54
obeys

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

it is acting virtuously and thus finds the theodicy he was seeking and together with it the anthropodicy he was more truly seeking. But has not man in fact asked himself and himself given the answer he apparently really wished to hear from some other source? This is

the question of which, thus expressed, man in the eighteenth century was not aware. This was the absolutism also inherent in his inner

he assumed it to be self-evident that in taking himand himself answering the account, and then acting in obedience to it he was also showing the existence of God, justifying and guaranteeing anew his relationship with God and thereby affirming that his own existence was possible. He believed even in this
attitude to
life;

self to account,

inmost place we find him a prey to a strange vicious circle that by virtue of the reality of his own existence he could vouch for God and in
so doing for the possible existence of God. This secret of his inward attitude in outline.

may have been

the

We can now call to mind a historical connexion. The eighteenth century was without doubt a revival (a very peculiar one, admittedly) of the sixteenth-century Renaissance, or, if you would rather, a recrudescence of that Renaissance.
stood in its widest sense.
life

The

nature of this Renaissance

latter to

is

however explained by the idea of humanism, the

be under-

And the idea of humanism was that the perfect consisted in the complete autarchy of rational man in a rational world on the basis of the existence and dominion of a Deity guaranteethis association

and thus too man's complete autarchy. It was transsoil of Northern Europe in the late middle ages and became the ideal of England, France and Germany: from antiquity we should say, from late antiquity, and more precisely still, from that spiritual world which had found its philosophical exponents in the schools which were in conflict and yet only too united of the so-called Stoics and the so-called Epicureans. This humanism had been thrust into the background at first by the Reformation and the upheavals which followed it, but it had always remained alive, especially in England. And in Germany too it had only, so to speak, hibernated. For it was a fact which was bound to have some effect
ing planted from antiquity into the
eventually, so that only too faithfully in accordance with the instructions of Melanchthon himself a whole series of generations of future

age on Cicero and Plutarch, and then again on Plutarch and Cicero, ad infinitum. This
seed was

educated

theologians, philosophers, lawyers, scientists and statesmen men had been fed at the most impressionable

and other

now

sprouting.

There are no doubt deeper reasons why

it

MAN

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

55

chose this particular time to sprout, but there is no disputing the fact that the inner attitude to life of the eighteenth century, reduced to its
simplest formula, ultimately consisted only of the fact that Cicero and Plutarch were now taken seriously. The attitude of mind of eighteenth-

century man makes it quite clear that the man, the citizen, the hero, the sage, the virtuous and the pious man he held before his mind's eye

model and his measure, as the frame into which he set his own picture, was the man of late pre-Christian or extra-Christian antiquity of quite a definite stamp the Stoic with a dash and sometimes with a lot more than just a dash of Epicureanism in his make-up. If it is to make sense, the title 'the philosophical century which has been applied to the eighteenth century can only mean that at this time there were hundreds and thousands of people everywhere to whom philosophy was what it had been to countless numbers of people in the time of the emperors of Rome, namely a practical teaching of life, nay more: a whole attitude to life based on this complete authority of rational man in a rational world with a religious background. In the 'philosopher of
as his
:
3

Sans Souci*

this historical

connexion, his place in philosophy some-

where in the middle between Zeno and Epicurus, is quite plain for all to see. But it is also possible to recognize immediately a successor to Seneca and Epictetus in a man as devout and pious in his way as Gellert. And the young Goethe was still firmly rooted in this same soil, and on his own confession started from there for the rest of his way. And strangely enough it continually reappears, either in hidden or in
patent form, in the utterances of many a
pietist.

The

purest form to which this

new humanism

rose already

is

in the

early eighteenth century its transfigured form, so to speak was embodied in the personality and philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz. This is not the place even to attempt to represent and assess

have just given, I have continually had the thought of this man in mind. It is the thought of a man who was at the same time one of the most typical and one of the most individual men of his age. His life's work represents as in a microcosm all the tendencies of his time, showing how numerous and yet at the same time how similar they were. If we prefer to put it another way, he was in a great
it.

Throughout the outline

manner and most comprehensively what nearly all were capable of being only in a small way and in

his contemporaries

particular.

He was

philosopher, theologian, lawyer, politician, courtier, mathematician, was fairly well possessed naturalist, historian and linguist in one, and of the same detailed knowledge, and achieved the same success, in all

of them. At one

moment he was planning

to lay before Louis

XIV

56

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

the Napoleonic idea of a conquest of Egypt, the so-called consilium Aegyptiacumi and at another conducting a violent political pamphlet

German emperor and empire against this he invented a calculating machine moment At one same king. very and at another he was at least the co-inventor of the modern infinitesimal calculus. For years he was concerned with the problem of whether it would not be better to drive the pumps in the Hanoverian mines in the Harz Mountains by windmills instead of with water. He then wrote a history of the Guelphs based on the widest possible research into the historical sources. At one moment he formed a plan for the conversion of the heathen and at another he conceived one, and
war
in the defence of the

brought about negotiations based upon it, for the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant Churches, or at least of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches. At one moment he was able to write a pre-history of the Earth, and at the next to found, together with many others, the
Prussian Academy of the Sciences which is still in existence today. As a most genuine philosopher of the age, he never presented his
philosophical teaching in the form of a system, but only in fragments of information quickly and surely set down while actually at grips with one or other of his contemporaries or, as with his theodicy, at the

personal wish of a woman of enquiring mind, Queen Sophia Charlotte of Prussia. But it was in this philosophical teaching that, in pursuing lines ofthought which were highly original and endowed with a splendour
all

of their

own he at

the inner attitude to

the same time most perfectly revealed the ideal of life which prevailed in his time. Or are we mis-

we can recognize eighteenth-century man in Leibnitz' teaching of the monad, for instance ? This simple and utterly individual, indeed unique spiritual substance is the fountain-head of all
taken in thinking that

The utterly self-sufficient monad is an emanation, an image, a God himself and is therefore nowhere limited by things outside it, but only in its own being; which has no windows, and changes only by its inner principle, its own most peculiar striving;
reality.

mirror of

which

is

always the best

it is

possible for

it

to be,
its

and which can

therefore transform itself

peculiar nature; but it cannot be destroyed, cannot perish, and is immortal like God himself who created it? And do we not meet again that wonderful

by the tendency of

own most

concordance of

man

with the world surrounding him

when we hear

from Leibnitz that between the monads themselves, but also between the monads and the bodies together with which they are effected, there exists a pre-established harmony (harmonie prtttablie)? That
there
is

a pre-established harmony between body and soul, between

MAN

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

57

form and extension, between the purposive and effective cause, between the dynamic and the mathematical principle, between verites de raison and verites defait, between chance and necessity, between the sphere of wisdom and the sphere of energy, and between grace and nature? That this is like the harmony between two synchronized clocks
constructed in the most artificial manner imaginable for this very purpose; that therefore the relationship of the monads to one another and to the physical world is a piece of work worthy of God, and of God alone? Do we not meet God again, God who guarantees and
justifies

that concordance

in the teaching that it is in fact God who is the creator of this best of all possible worlds as a whole, but that he allows each monad to be the best it possibly can and should
be,

and therefore

man

whose world

is

the best possible one because

this

it is
is

the most suited

to the building of his

the

spirit,

and

that

kingdom? Surely kingdom the kingdom of means of the spirits of which each individual one is
whole?

summoned

to be, after his fashion in his particular place, the whole,

this

and the king of

And

is

not the converse question which

inevitably arises here,

namely the question concerning the truth of the existence and dominion of God, who vouches for the whole and for

the single parts in the whole, answered by way of referring man to himself? Do we not find a theodicy here which decisively refers man
to himself? I mean, a converse question and a theodicy in the form of the direct call to man to accept both freely and humbly his individu-

and the position it occupies in the plan of the whole, to fill this position as if only God and the soul existed (the soul willed by God precisely in its self-determination and autonomy), and thus to disality

cover that the physical and the moral evil in the world which he imagines to be actively opposed to him contain in truth nothing
positive,

an

but are, so to speak, only a shadow fleeing before the light; inevitable result of the term of life imposed upon all things which

the whole which

its

are not God, but as such a determining factor also for the harmony of God created? And may we not ask, to return to the

whether all this does not represent Stoicism in most sublime form, in a form more sublime than ever existed in ancient Greece and Rome; a Stoicism which is a triumph of humanism, which can itself find the answer to every question and seems not to
historical connexion,

know

Christianity

of a question which might be posed to it? The shape which was bound to take in this world, which spiritually perhaps
shall

found its liveliest and most eloquent embodiment in Leibnitz, we have to discuss.

II

ROUSSEAU
century, begins which we call the age of Goethe, the age which presented Protestant theology after Schleiermacher with the problem with which it chose to concern itself, and which also largely supplied

WITH Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the middle of the eighteenth

the

new age

the answer

it

thought fit to give.

The new age in the middle of the

eigh-

teenth century! There are two things implied here from which follow significant principles which must be borne in mind in interpreting

Rousseau. Not to understand him as a child of his century, who for all his individuality could not help but participate very energetically
general and characteristic trends, would be But we would be understanding him even falsely. less if we failed to realize that it was precisely as a child of his century that he fought, passionately and radically, against its most typical tendencies, and consummated a completely different new movement in opposition to them. We must be so careful in assessing him because as an event he contains a paradox. He was not merely incidentally a man of the eighteenth century. He was one very definitely, in a way which made him both bolder and more consistent than almost all those about him, and it was precisely in this way that he contradicted and rose above eighteenth-century man and, on the other hand, he contradicted and rose above eighteenth-century man in no other way than this that it was in Rousseau himself that eighteenth-century man achieved fulfilment. There are similar things which we shall have to say later of Lessing and Kant. They must be stated with particular emphasis in the case of Rousseau because as a historical figure he is attacked much more from both sides; and indeed he is much more open
after his

own fashion
him

in

its

to understand

to attack.
It is very easy to see Rousseau almost involuntarily from the standpoint and according to the standards of his own age. For this age lives on in us, and Rousseau contradicted it so flatly that it is still

possible for us simply to take his contemporaries idea of him and assessment of him for our own. And what then remains but Rousseau

59 the dreamer, Rousseau the idler, the the barren critic of subjectivist, civilization, the author of a voluminous treatise on education who consigned his five illegitimate children to the Foundlings' Home without ever seeing or wishing to see them again, the author of the Contrat
Social

ROUSSEAU

who

private life was quite incapable of keeping on good terms for any length of time with anyone, however well-intentioned towards him he might be? Anyone
is inclined to dismiss Rousseau lightly for these and other similar obvious reasons, for these moral reasons, let us say, is in a position to claim that he has indeed understood the eighteenth century perfectly. But he has completely failed to understand Rousseau. For it was just in

citizen or

who had not the faintest notion of how to fit a member of any society and who even in

himself to be a

way that all his typical contemporaries understood him; the only thing they did not understand was that Rousseau was still ultimately and at the deepest level at one with them in and in spite of this deviation of his from all they held most holy, and for which they condemned him. He was in fact at one with them as the man in whom all they held most holy was given a future; he had experienced their inmost feelings, the spirit of the old time in a completely new way had reproduced it in a new form and was proclaiming it in a new language; he was the man in whose deviation the time should have been able to
this

recognize, for all

its astonishing nature, the embodiment of its own hopes. He was recognized as such in and in spite of his deviation by those of his contemporaries who were not but who as

merely typical, contemporaries also bore within them the restlessness of a coming era. In and in spite of his deviation they recognized him as the best exponent of their age.

On the other hand it is very easy to assess Rousseau from the standpoint and according to the standards of our own time, for instance, in so far as our time now in many ways presents a complete contrast to the eighteenth century. For Rousseau was so completely a man of the eighteenth century! What is easier for us than to see in his teaching that human nature was fundamentally good, the height and apotheosis

of the Pelagian humanism which was triumphant in the eighteenth century; in the educational teaching of his Emile, which ultimately
last

consisted simply in liberating the child in the right way and was the word of that optimism in educational theory which distinguished

that century before all others ; and in his teaching of the social contract, above all the individualism and rationalism which knew of no history,
i.e.

boldly wished to

make

history solely

which there was nothing given, no

destiny,

and alone and according to and hence no inequality,

6O

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

What is
easier

in the last resort there exists neither sin nor than to dismiss Rousseau on the grounds that we have dismissed the ideals of the French Revolution, of which, as we well know, he was thought to be the chief expounder ? What is easier than to regard him as the really classic example of absolutist man, who

and no authority because

grace?

belongs for us to the past, to the eighteenth-century past? But if we did this we would only show that while we might have understood ourselves

we had once

would be overlooking the

again completely failed to understand Rousseau. For we fact that Rousseau's humanism had the

significance of a revolutionary attack upon that which had been esteemed and cultivated as humanism since the Renaissance; that the

man's

final dislike,

which again and again

rises to

the surface, was

reserved for precisely the spirit of his time which was incorporated in the philosophy of men like Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert and Hume;

that both his political and educational theories were not intended to be a continuation of, but a radical challenge to the political and educational theories of his time

there

is

and at

and were indeed understood in this sense; that something lyrical behind his theories of politics and education, the back of this an attitude to life and a feeling for life which

surely have their place in the line of development leading from Louis to the French Revolution only in so far as they represent a break-

XIV

through, or an attempt, at least, to break through it. While Rousseau had the same aims as those who followed this line of development he was
also developing in quite another direction. From that position he then actually rejected the aims of the line of development from Louis

to the French Revolution.

He

is

the

first

of those

men

of

XIV whom it

said that the nature of eighteenth-century man, which they did not completely discard, which indeed they perhaps brought to the point where it could be truly honoured, had been reduced in them to

must be

nothing but a loose outer garment. Anyone who embarks upon an attack upon Rousseau's individualism and rationalism must realize that

men, including Hegel and Goethe. A of view which was not on principle also relevant to Hegel and Goethe could hardly touch Rousseau either. If he was an individualist and a rationalist then he was these things in exactly the same sense as they were and it was not the eighteenth-century sense. Rousseau was already a man of the new era,
this involves attacking all these

criticism of Rousseau

from

this point

in eighteenth-century garb. I can make plain the paradoxical conjunction of both these ages in Rousseau by means of an example which should be all the more con-

vincing because

it is

fairly far

removed from the subject of our chief

ROUSSEAU

6l

question, the theological problem, and from the other favourite fields of those who engage in research into Rousseau. Rousseau once wrote the

on the nature of genius in music: 'Do not, young artist, ask what genius is! If you have it then you will sense what it is within yourself. And if you have not genius you will never understand it.
following
its art. It paints in the pictures that it sees. It makes even silence eloquent. It conveys ideas in the form of feeling, feeling by means of accent. And in giving expression to passions it awakens them in the depths of the heart. Through it desire itself acquires new charms; the sadness it awakens calls forth cries of anguish. It burns unceasingly yet never consumes itself. It can burningly express the frost and ice; even in depicting the horrors of death it sustains within its soul that sense of life which never forsakes it, and communicates it to the hearts which

Musical genius subjects the whole universe to

all

harmonious sounds

Naples the masterpieces of Leo, Durante, Jommelli and PergolesL If your eyes fill with tears, if you feel your heart violently beat, if you are shaken by sobs and breathless with delight, then find yourself a poet and set to

are capable of feeling it. But alas it can say nothing to those who have its seed within them, and its wonders do little to impress those who cannot emulate them. You want to know whether some spark of this consuming fire glows within you? Hasten then, fly, to and hear
!

not

and you will create by his example: that and soon other eyes will pay you the tribute of the tears the masters have caused yours to shed. But if the charms of this great art leave you unmoved, if you feel no ecstasy nor delight, if you find merely beautiful that which should move you to the depths of
work;
his genius will fire yours
is

what the genius

does,

your being, how dare you ask the meaning of genius? The sacred name should not so much as pass your lips, low creature that are. What

you

possible concern of yours to feeling it: confine yourself to

know

You would be incapable of French music.' The passage is to be

it?

found in Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musigue, which he published in 1 764, a book of instructive articles under the headings of the technical and
scientific

musical terms. For Rousseau's profession, in so far as he can be said to have had one in regard to society, might best be described as

that of musician, in the craftsmanlike meaning of the word which was typical of the eighteenth century. He acquired a certain significance in the history of French opera through his Le Devin du which was
Village,

actually given a performance before Louis pation as a musician, outwardly at least,

XV in

752. His chief occu-

was quite simply that of copying scores, and it was thus that he earned or supplemented his living during whole periods of his life. As a young man he invented a

62

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

musical orthography and urged
its

new

acceptance publicly, albeit in

vain.

And we know

that until he was well advanced in years he

was

fond of singing for his own amusement, accompanying himself on the spinet. And then there was the technical and scientific aspect of the matter which the dictionary presents. So far nothing in Rousseau's musicality exceeds the limits which we have come to know were
characteristic in this field of the old time.

But then suddenly in the

middle of

this dictionary

we
is

masculine!), of which there

find this article Genie s.m. (substantive only one thing to be said: this is not the

eighteenth century any more, it is not the genius of Bach nor the genius of Haydn (quite apart from the fact that a book of instruction
in accordance with their

way of making music could scarcely have contained an article on 'genius' at all), it is not Mozart either, but it is unmistakably Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn, line for line. Music which holds the universe in thrall, which reflects ideas in the

form of feeling, which aims at expressing and awakening the passions, which as feeling for life addresses itself in a mysterious way to the feeling for life, music which does not wish to be understood as beautiful, but as enchanting and only in a delirium, music which according to whether it moves one or not, reveals a kind of predestination to blessedness or damnation all that might very well be found in Schleiermacher's Address
on Religion, but not in any book previous to the age of Goethe, nor in any heart or head either. Anyone who read this article in those days was immediately called upon in the field of music to decide whether to receive

perfectly must, him, have belonged to both the old and to the new age. I should like now to give a short account of Rousseau's life, as some knowledge of it is indispensable if we are to understand his work and
like

the new message, that art is prophetic of feeling, as something rich with new promise or as something in the nature of a declaration of war; and whether he should welcome or hate it accordingly. Anyone who found himself in a position to agree with Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born the son of a clockGeneva on a8th June 1712. His early education was pietistic in spirit. The first things he read were Plutarch and the heroic novels of the seventeenth century. At the of sixteen he ran from the age away engraver to whom he had been apprenticed and also abandoned his native city. He became a Roman Catholic in Turin in order to live,

its significance.

maker

in

but not without having gained his knowledge of the Roman Catholic Church through people who made a great impression upon him; and shortly afterwards he came under the influence of Fran$oise Louise de Warens, n6e de la Tour, from the Canton of Vaud. She was twelve

ROUSSEAU
years older than he, and influenced certain extent throughout his whole

63

him over a long period, and to a life. Like him rooted in Pietism,

and like him' a convert, she seems to have presented an extraordinary mixture of theoretical free-thought and practical devotion she fled across the lake from Vevey taking with her Bayle's Dictionnairel She also combined the highest degree of spirituality and deep moral feeling with an almost incomprehensible thoughtlessness in erotic matters
in

any case, an amazing personality. In the last lines which Rousseau ever set on paper, shortly before his death, he still thought of her as la meilleure desfemmes and dedicated words to her memory. From moving

1 728 to 1 741 he kept abandoning all sorts of positions (as house-servant, music teacher, private tutor and government employee) in order to return to her. The last three years formed the climax of this period. He spent them with Madame de Warens on her estate, Les Gharmettes, near Chambery. It was these years also which seem to have been most

truly those of his education, using the word in was at this time and at this time only that he was

narrower sense. It fully himself, as he puts it in that last description of his association with Madame de Warens doing in perfect freedom only those things which he enjoyed doing, in
its
:

life,

the quiet of solitude, in the close proximity to nature afforded by country and in the presence and possession of a woman after his own heart.
siecle de vie.'1

J'ai joui d'un

The

year 1741 saw the end of this

idyll.

Rousseau moved

to Paris.

the friendship of several intellectual life of Paris at that time: Voltaire, Diderot, Grimm, Hoibach and Buffon. It was during these years that he was probably in
closest
last.

He made the acquaintance and even won of the men who were most influential in the

A stay

ended

spirit of the age. But this close association did not in Venice as secretary to the French Ambassador there unhappily. The year 1745 saw the beginning of his association

touch with the

with Therese Le Vasseur, which forms a remarkable parallel to that between Goethe and Ghristiane Vulpius, in particular also in this
respect that he also raised it later to the status of a legitimate marriage. The decisive turning-point in Rousseau's life was in fact the year of

Goethe's birth, 1749.

It was in that year that the Dijon academy set the question for a prize dissertation: 'Has the advance of the sciences and the arts helped to destroy or to purify moral standards? Rousseau later described the effect the question alone had upon him in a style which bears all the hall-marks of an account of a religious conversion: he
9

1 Reveries dupromenewr solitaire, Xme. promenade. (Enures completes de J.-J. Rousseau> Basle 1793-95* Vol. 20, p. 341.

64

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

read the announcement of the question for a prize competition in a newspaper while he was on the way to visit his friend Diderot, who was at that time in prison in Vincennes. lf ever anything resembled a sudden inspiration it was the emotion which arose in me as I read
c

once my mind seemed dazzled by a thousand lights, a ideas presented themselves there at the same instant of fertile throng with a force and a confusion which plunged me into a state of inexpressible excitement; my head swam with a dizziness akin to drunkenthis: all at

was oppressed by the violence of my beating heart and by a swelling of my breast; being unable to draw breath any more while walking, I threw myself down beneath one of the trees beside the avenue, and lay there for half an hour so agitated that on picking myself up again I found my whole shirt-front wet with the tears I had
ness. I

not even noticed shedding.' 1 Diderot has given us a slightly different account of the event, maintaining not only that he made Rousseau
acquainted with the question which had been set, but that he also suggested the answer which Rousseau afterwards gave. But however it came about it was not in Diderot's life that the question was seized

upon and the answer provided, but in Rousseau's. He himself said of answer that it gave the lie to everything which was an object of wonder to his age and that he was therefore prepared for its universal rejection. The answer ran: the sciences and the arts have always
his

been harmful

to morality because they have always decomposed and destroyed the natural virtue of the human heart, and also the virtues of the good citizen which spring from it. Rousseau's expectations were at first disappointed. dared to outrage his

Or rather: the expected disavowal of the man who own time in such a manner, then, as at all times,

first

took the form of admiration and enthusiastic applause of the

novelty of the thing he had produced, and of the brilliance with which, like all those who have something really new to say, he had

been able to say it. The dissertation received the prize in 1 750 and its author was famous at a blow, although, or perhaps directly because, his work found no lack of distinguished opponents. But he nevertheless demonstrated that he took his own thesis seriously by giving up the bourgeois employment in which he was then engaged in order henceforth to procure by copying scores both the inner peace and the economic freedom necessary to further reflection and literary production, and signalizing his entrance upon a monk-like existence in his outward appearance too, by laying aside the usual sword, white stockings and wig, and above all his watch he could not rejoice
1 Letters to Maleskerbes, 12. I. 1762, Basle edition,

Vol.

6, p. 245.

ROUSSEAU
enough had brought him
later in the liberating effect
c

65
his soul

upon and assuming a good coarse, coat of cloth Later, for reasons of health, or rather of illness, he exchanged this garment for the dress of an Armenian, and it was thus clad that he busied the tongues and eyes of his contemporaries and has lived on in history. 'A great revolution took place within me, a different moral world revealed itself to my gaze, and caused me to see the absurdity of human pre1 Solitude now became a necessity of life for him which judice.' could not be denied, because it was the quintessence of that which had been revealed to him as the one necessary thing, and which he now believed he should announce to his time at large. For solitude means a retreat into the original, simple and natural form of human existence in obedience to the dictates of the heart, such as he himself had come blissfully and unforgettably to know, in approximation at least, in Madame de Warens orchard, and such as he thought he would sur9
.

which just

this act

mise to be the
forms of
hidden.

lost status integritatis>

human

culture

and

the essential thing underlying the society which are never anything but

In 1754 he once again answered a prize question set by the Dijon 2 academy: Concerning the origins and reasons of inequality among men. The answer, more radical than his first one, was as follows: The natural
state of man (qui tfexisteplus, qui n'apeut-efrepointexisteet qui probablement rfexislera jamais] is the state in which no man has need of any other,

bad purposes, neither in friendship nor enmity, because, sitting peacefully beneath an oak and drinking water from a spring, he is outwardly free of all tools and inwardly free of all
neither for good nor for

and reflection, with property and the cultivabecomes a social being. The first man who staked out a piece of land and dared to say: this belongs to me! and found people foolish enough to believe him was the founder of bourgeois society.' It is precisely at this point and thus with society itself that inequality begins, but inequality means the possibility of unfreedom, tyranny and slavery, the possibility of the fateful amour propre in opposition to the neutral, and for this reason innocent, natural and good amour desoi~m$me; it means greed, and evil passion. Presupposing the inequality which has now obtruded there is now no other way of protecting each man from his neighbour except by the second-best possibility, which is only a second-best possibility, of the contract of the state, which by the establishment of positive law tries to a certain extent at least to make
reflection. It
is

with

tools

tion of the soil that he

1 Rev. gme. prom., Basle ed., Vol. 20, p. 202. 2 GEuvres deJ.-J. Rousseau^ Amsterdam 1769, Vol. 2.

66

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

for

amends

what has been

lost for

natural law of that

vSritable jeunesse

ever by man's abandonment of du monde. Voltaire's well-known

mocking phrase, that Rousseau made him feel like going down on all fours, while supplying the most obvious comment there is to make to all this, completely fails as an attack upon Rousseau's position. Where is the famous Revenons a la nature! ? I have never been able to find it in any of Rousseau's writings. It was not the return to this natural law which was the sense of what Rousseau considered to be his insight here and the conclusion he drew from it, but rather the necessity of basing positive law upon the natural law, that is to say, of keeping the natural law in view as an ideal when establishing the positive law and not starting from a natural law which was no true natural law at all, the right of the strongest, for instance. Hence there was no contradiction involved in Rousseau's dedicating the work in question to the municipal council of Geneva, his native town, of which he says that its political constitution was still the best of all those in existence, so that if he were not a citizen of Geneva already it would certainly be his wish to be allowed to become one. His next work, the Discours sur Ufaonomie politique, 1 in 1755, shows us that he has quite logically taken the next step by advancing to a discussion of the positive doctrine of the state: he now expressly presupposes man's sociability and the right to property. But man's original equality and freedom should not be lost sight of. The state is thus to be understood as arising out of and being sustained by and on behalf of the general will (volonte generale), in which one stands for all, but all also stand for one, and in which therefore it is the law that establishes and ensures freedom just as freedom establishes and guarantees the law. The wisdom of a government consists in its (i) teaching the people to love the state, i.e. the law as something which is their most
its

personal concern; (2) making it clear to the citizen that the state with laws is his mother, who wants only what is best for him. His own
existence
is

a part of the existence of his native country; indeed cormust must take care that the burdens which the state imposes upon the individual do truly not exceed the extent of the sacrifice which it is fitting each should make for his participation in the general will. This is to be accomplished by means of a just financial and taxation policy, which, especially, must be enforceable among the higher members of the
rectly understood the two are identical. Thus he may and indeed love it as in the best sense he loves himself; (3) the government
society.
1

Amsterdam

ed., Vol. 2.

ROUSSEAU

67

Incidentally, Rousseau had returned to Geneva in 1754 and had renounced his conversion. He would have stayed there but that his sojourn in his native town was marred for him by the proximity in Ferney of Voltaire and the prospect of the conflicts to which this might give rise. He therefore returned to Paris. The time from the day of his return until 1762 was on the one hand the period of his most important literary labours and on the other a time of difficult personal entanglements from which, in spite of his principles, he found it impossible to free himself. Their effect was to make his belief in his principles still
stronger.

Two more

feminine influences came into his

life:

Madame

d'Epinay, who probably loved him but whom he was not in a position to love, pressed him with the gift of a home which she intended to

prepare for him in a country house which she called a hermitage, as well as with the duty she made conditional upon it that he should
participate in the social

and intellectual life she cultivated. In her house

he came

know her sister-in-law, Madame d'Houdetot, and in her, bound already by another love as she was, the great love of his life. He
to

not only respected the other bond, but in admiration of the love which he encountered in it, loved Madame d'Houdetot as one who was so

bound and thus denied to him. But his connexion with his circle, one of whose chief members, unhappily for Rousseau, was the German Friedrich Melchior Grimm, was terminated by an open break, and Rousseau moved to Montmorency castle, owned by the Duke of Luxembourg and his wife, where he was permitted to live as he liked. It was here in 1 758 that he wrote the great Open Letter to d'Alembert. 1 D'Alembert, in the Encyclopaedia article 'Geneva had proposed to the citizens of that town that the introduction of a theatre might be desirable, a suggestion which at once made Rousseau espouse the cause of the Calvinist tradition which in this matter was still unbroken
9

in his native town.

The necessary occasions for a people's pleasure should also be presented in union with the infallible voice of Nature, and Rousseau thought he could show that this was better achieved by a
continuance and development of the old Genevan customs and behaviour than by that useless and corrupting modern institution, the
theatre.

Voltaire, who perfectly agreed with d'Alembert, treated Rousseau from then on as if he were a madman, and found a way of annoying both him and the old city of Geneva by opening a theatre just outside the town boundaries, which did then in fact contribute to the death of the tradition originated by Calvin and defended by Rousseau. In 1760 Rousseau published his 'Proposal fora lasting peace' 2
1

Amsterdam

ed., Vol. 3.

Amsterdam

ed. a Vol. a.

68

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

fact written rather earlier,

which was in

writings of the

and had been inspired by the Saint Pierre. This political work too reckons quite realistically with the existence of the state based on power politics and with the likelihood of rivalry between such states. It was

Abbe de

however Rousseau's aim to confine this rivalry within its proper limits, and he points to the Droit public germanique, to the Holy Roman Empire, that is, which was still an active force in Germany, he says, and a far more important idea than the Germans themselves realized. What was needed to avoid further war was a way of making war impossible by rendering it useless. And this could be achieved by establishing a confederation what he had in mind was without doubt the very idea of a Pan-Europe or United States of Europe which we have in mind today a confederation including all the sovereign states of Europe, from the Holy Roman Empire to the Republic of Venice, from the Tsar to the Pope, with a central government presided over in turn by each member of the league, with its Supreme Court of Law, with a common army to oppose the Turk or any other external or for that matter internal enemy of the Union, which was above the state, with a guarantee to each member state that its borders and sovereignty within them, and its freedom of movement within them, would be respected on the basis of the Peace of Westphalia, together with a strict prohibition of an armed attack by one member state uponanother. All that was required to allow the implementation of the project was the consent of the sovereigns concerned and in demanding this, Rousseau says, he is not imagining that they would have to be good, noble and selfless men, intent upon the general well-being for humanitarian reasons. Thus the usual observation that it is the sinfulness of human nature which makes the realization of such a plan impossible does not apply to Rousseau. He only presupposes, he says, the kind of man who is sensible enough to wish for something that will be useful for
him.
it
If, however, his project should prove incapable of fulfilment, let not be said that it was merely fanciful: c'est que les hommes sent insenses

et que Jest

une sorte defolie d*etre sage au milieu desfous,

of the three great literary ventures upon which Rousseau embarked during these years was the epistolary novel Julie ou la nouvelle Helotse, which was written between 1 757 and 1 759 and carried
first

The

the sub-title:
1

Lettres de deux amans, habitans d* une petite mile au pied des

Alpes.
if

The little town is Vevey, home of Madame de Warens. But even

unhappy and

the true hero of the story, Saint Preux, the lover, at first happy then finally resigned is, as is doubtless the case, Rousseau
1

Amsterdam

ed., Vols. 4-6.

ROUSSEAU
is

69

was widely assumed at himself, Julie the time, but a pure invention of Rousseau's heart and imagination, the quintessence of his dreams in regard to the woman he desired, in whom he believed without possessing or even knowing her. So we find Rousseau, in this as in no other of his works, thrown on his own resources as the lyric poet who inwardly torn can yet find satisfaction by putting into poetry what his suffering meant to him before, when he was inconsolable a God had given him the power to tell what he had suffered and this is the way by which he guards himself against this
d'

not

Madame

Houdetot, as

sorrow.

of the preface are as follows: Big cities need theatres and corrupted nations need novels. I know the moral habits

The opening words

of

my

time,

and therefore

have published these

letters.

Why

did I

not live in an era

fire?' Here also which we also encounter in Rousseau's political writings. We have to take note here of a dialectic both of form and content. It is without doubt his intention to give expression in these love-letters to the voice of the heart that is to say, here, to the power of love which is absolutely free and strong, and which binds and frees not only as a force of nature, but by virtue of the whole dignity owned by the original human nature. And thus in the first part of the work we see the two lovers, who, because of their station in society, love without hope, drawn to one another in defiance of the world like steel to the magnet, like the magnet to the steel. But Rousseau is aware that here, as in other things, the state in which complete obedience to the voice of the heart is the normal thing, has been lost and that it is therefore no longer the sole determining factor. Here too his desire is not for a return or advance to a state of nature, which would in this case perhaps be the sphere of free-love. The laws of society are valid and continue to be recognized even if they are on occasion infringed. Hence in fact the free motions

when I would have had to throw them into the then we are well involved in the complex of problems

of the power of love are, even in this first part of the novel, everywhere interrupted and held in check by insights and principles which are also those of the lovers themselves, and especially of the women involved, and which are put forward with due emphasis by both. And when
Julie subsequently becomes the wife of another this is not only accepted by both as their fate, albeit in the course of a severe inner conflict, but

a new inevitable law to which their love (which is, howis now subject. Rousseau has his hero respect this law so much that the second half of the book becomes a very hymn to the praise of marriage and the family, these states, of course, representing

honoured

as

ever, undiminished)

7O

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

not the fulfilment but the limit of the power of erotic love. We are reminded of the tendency which moved Goethe too in writing the Elective Affinities. It is just that the death of Julie, with which the work closes, and the energetic denial of the possibility that Saint Preux, reduced now to solitude, might himself marry, make it quite clear that an honest outward recognition of the social order is not capable of reducing by one iota the strength contained in the inner truth of the power of love, which is outwardly condemned as impossible. The second dialectic of the book, that of form, arises directly from the dialectic of content. Why does Rousseau think that in a better time than his own he would have had to burn the book instead of being able to publish it? Why does he even go on to say in his preface that a chaste girl should abstain from reading it at sight of the title alone? If she did not do this, but read only one page, she would be showing by this act that she was not chaste, but une file perdue, in which case she might just as well read the whole thing straight through. What does this mean? It apparently means that the representation of this broken power of love broken by the necessary recognition of the law is the only way in which it can be written about in that century, that is to say, within modern European society, and cannot be a pure comment upon love, as it should really be presented to a young girl and as Rousseau would really like to write it. Just as he would like to withhold the theatre from the good city of Geneva, so he would like to withhold from a girl who perhaps still has a belief in love the only novel, rebus sic stantibus, which it was possible for him to write. The novel cannot be chaste precisely because it must allow the conventions to triumph outwardly over love and can

show love only as it is inhibited by convention. Rousseau's contemporaries positively devoured the Nouvelle Helo'ise. He once told the story of a lady who, while engaged in reading it, was due to attend
therefore

a function to which she had been invited. She let the coach wait for hours before her door and finally read on in the coach until four o'clock in the morning, finishing the book only at daybreak. How did the people of Rousseau's time interpret and misinterpret the dual dialectic which the work contained? It must be admitted that of all Rousseau's

works the Nouvelle Helolse

feel

is

the obscurest in

its

intention,

and yet we

to say that of all his works it is the one which it was most necessary for him to write and which most directly reveals his personal dialectic. And about this work in particular we can most definitely

bound

say that neither those people who were outraged at its sublime lasciviousness nor much less those who revelled in it succeeded in under-

standing what was actually taking place there: the rapturous shout of

ROUSSEAU
the

71

man who had discovered himself deep down beneath all the human contrivance in which the age believed with such a passionate
ardour, and the same man's cry of despair at finding that he cannot and does not wish to escape human contrivance, and is thus at a loss
to

know what to do with himself, simply because beyond all human contrivance he had only discovered himself. Such was the new Heloise. And such was the complete Rousseau.

The second work of

social ou Principes

parts. This work best-known of Rousseau's writings, could not have become the political ogre it in fact was for many people, on the strength of its title alone, if only they had taken the trouble to read it in its place within the scheme of Rousseau's work as a whole and with an understanding of his

this period was the great treatise Du contrat da droit politique, 1 1762, which was divided into four in particular which today is perhaps relatively the

peculiar position in relation to his own age. It is not true to say that its author makes the mistake ofdeducing the state from the abstract principles

of the liberty and equality of the individual, while ignoring the realities of human history. Indeed the very first lines of the book, which are
there for
as

he

is,

arises

all to read, state that it is Rousseau's aim to understand man and the laws as they can be. The demand for political justice from the insight into the original freedom and equality of indi-

vidual

men but

this

demand itself constitutes

calls

in Rousseau's doctrine of

state only the weft introduced into the

'historical' factor

warp of the undeniably very

est nilibre, et par-tout il est

which he

here

'interest'

present no longer natural state (Vhomme

or Advantage' in man's dans

:

lesfers, at once master and slave) which here also Rousseau presupposes as only the second-best state, his survival demands a convention, a means

of regulating the mutual relationship between the lordly slaves or slavish masters. This convention is fundamentally and generally that

which Rousseau calls the force exerted by society (Contrat social), and the point which he is trying to make in his doctrine of the state is this: that this convention, which he admits is necessary, things being as they are, should not be arrived at without due consideration for the demands ofjustice, i.e. without any thought being given to man's original state of freedom and equality. 'I seek to unite what the law allows with that which interest prescribes, so that justice and what is expedient might not ever remain divided,' It is thus nonsensical to say, as P. Wernle says 2 that we find ourselves transferred in the Contrat social from the atmosphere of freedom, the pure inwardness and lyrical
1

Amsterdam

ed., Vol. 2.

2 Vol. a, 63.

72

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

subjectivity of the Nouvelle Heloise into a completely different world, that, namely, of the Jacobin state governed by compulsion. For the
Nouvelle Heloise does not simply convey the 'atmosphere of freedom' any more than the Contrat social is simply an account of the 'state with

compulsory rule
arising

The theory and practice of the form of government from the French Revolution the theory as laid down, for
.

of 1789 although instance, in the Declaration of the Rights of later in time (post hoc non propter hoc!} belonged just as much to the time before Rousseau as did the theory and practice of the absolute

Man

monarchy of

his

time.

Likewise in the opening pages Rousseau

presents, in opposition to force from above and the force from below which repels it, the social order (Fordre social} as a superior order whose e right, although not a 'natural' one, is nevertheless holy'. Might, while

may very well be able to create facts, can never create right. Even the power which is ordained of God is, in so far as it is in fact only might, not necessarily right. And an agreement such as Hobbes had in
it

mind, in which nothing but authority is given to the one side and nothing but the will to obey to the other, would not be an agreement at all and would destroy the idea of man as one capable of political 1 action, and indeed the idea of man altogether. The problem of the state is rather how to bring about a union between men which by its corporate might shields every individual in such a manner that he is at once one with the whole and yet free, and free i.e. obeying himself
alone

by

virtue of this very consent.

The

basic act

which represents

the answer to this problem is an act of submission, the complete transference by the individual of all his rights to the community as such. It

by everyone giving himself completely not to somebody and not to all as the sum of every individual, but to all as the public person which has arisen by their union it is precisely by this act that the weft ofjustice is introduced into the warp of interest, which, rebus sic stantibus, is what is needed to make an agreement possible: for it is by the one giving himself to all that the only possible form of freedom and equality, rebus sic stantibus, is preserved by him and by all. Participation in the volontf generate which arises in this way thus essentially consists in an act of submission and distinguishes the citoyen> civtSy iroXiTqs' from the mere bourgeois. And the presence of such a
is

precisely
all

but to

general will distinguishes the cM9 civitas, ir6Xt,$, the rdpublique or the corps politique from the mere ville: understood in the passive sense it is identical with the concept of the state, in the active sense it is identical

with the idea of the sovereign, and understood in

1

its

relation to

its

1,3-4-

ROUSSEAU
it is

73

identical with the idea of power, puissance. The whole equals who as individuals are united in the state or as sovereign of those body in their own right is the people, and individuals as such are citoyens
to the laws of the state. 1

because they share in the sovereignty and sujets because they are subject The sovereign can therefore by his nature never act in a way which would be harmful to his subjects, but only in their favour, just as the citizen by his nature can never be against his
sovereign, but only for him, and, moreover, if he understands his freedom rightly, can imagine the constraint which the sovereign imposes only
as leading to his, the citizen's, own freedom. 2 For: 'Freedom consists in an obedience to the law which has been self-imposed.' The citizen will therefore subordinate himself, both in the rights to which he is entitled as

regards his own person and in his property rights as a landowner, to the right of the generality. He will, that is to say, regard himself only as a guardian and trustee appointed by the generality, and in this way he is the

owner of these rights, possesseur of his person and property. 3 The sovereignty which is based on such precepts is essentially nontransferable, i.e. it can be exercised by certain individuals but cannot
legitimate

be irrevocably conferred upon certain individuals. 4 And it is essentially indivisible, i.e. it cannot be split into a legislative power and an executive power effectively separate from it. 5 According to Rousseau the formation of political parties constitutes an injury to the rights of
the sovereign or state. 6 The sovereign power over the individual is limited because while the sovereign can command the services of the
individual in every respect

even the sacrifice of his life (capital punishment and warl) he can command them only as a sovereign, i.e. on behalf of the generality. 7 The way in which these services can be commanded is regulated by the law, whereby a people lays down its rules for itself. 8 We would, of course have to be gods and not men in order to recognize the laws which are best in all circumstances, since the law which was to be imposed upon a man and which was at the same time to proceed from him would have to be powerful enough to bring about nothing more nor less than his transformation from a mere
individual into a social being. The esprit social which was the law's intention must have been in effect even while the law was being set up.
Blessed are the peoples to whom it was granted, like Israel, to hear a 9 Moses, or, like Geneva, to hear a Calvin! It is necessary when enlegislating for a particular people to take into most careful consideration the special nature of the people and country, and to

gaged in

11,6.

*I,7.
7

31,8-Q.
II, 4-5. 8

4H,!.
II, 6.
9

511,2.
II, 7 .

II,

3.

74

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

is its

appreciate what exactly

state of historical

development.

It is this

1 appreciation which distinguishes the true legislator from the tyrant. In any case it is essential that the legislative power, the power, that is, which brings a certain law into force, should, as a matter of principle, be the people, whether it be for constitutional, civil, or

criminal law. 2

Concerning government as such the situation

is

somewhat

different.

The government,
the sovereign,
i.e.

it is

not sovereign either, but derives from from the people. But it is truly thus derived, i.e. as
true,
is

servant of the sovereign

it is a link endowed with its own real existence between the people as the generality of citizens and the people as the generality of subjects. It receives from the people as representing the sovereign the commands which it has to pass on to the

and

its

own

will

people as representing the state; but

receiving

it is

and imparting spontaneously that

precisely in its quality of it is for its own part a

subject not indeed of the sovereign power, but in exercising the 3 sovereign power as the sovereign intends. As to the form which the exercise of this power should take, this according to Rousseau depends most of all upon the size of the state in question and upon the material

resources at

its

disposal: a large

and prosperous

state requires a strong

form of government and therefore one where all the power resides in the hands of one person, the monarchical form in other words; in a state more limited in means and extent the exercise of power can safely be placed in the hands of several people, so that an aristocracy would be found suitable; the affairs of a small and impoverished state can be conducted more or less directly by the people itself, and so could be a democracy. In historical reality the form of government will inevitably be some sort of mixture of these three. 4 But Rousseau's inclination, quite apart from this practical distinction, was never for a more or less
pure democracy:
II

rfajamais

existe de veritable democratie et il n'en existera

jamaisy he states very definitely; it is only very seldom that the right conditions for it exist, and the dangers of constant internal unrest are
far too great with this

form of government.

S'il

avoit

un peuple de

dieuK) il se gouverneroit democratiquement.

vient

Un

gouvernement

si parfait ne con~

political liberalism evidently

pas a des hommes.* But the Jacobins and the modern exponents of thought otherwise. Rousseau it is true, also

finds several objections to the aristocratic system and a great many to the system of monarchy. For it will not be in the personal interest of a king to regard the plenitude of power with which he is entrusted as

merely expressive of the

i

volonti gSnSrale as
3

he ought

to.

Another
6

evil is

II, 8-1 1.

I2 .

ni,

i.

III, 2-3.

III, 4.

ROUSSEAU

75

that he will not actually rule personally, but through his ministers; and yet another the fatal fact that the monarchy is hereditary, which

means that it is possible for a child, a monster or an idiot suddenly to become king. And lastly there is the fact that the continuity of government is in no way ensured every time the throne changes hands. Rousseau would like to see this better preserved, as it is with a senate like that of Venice or Berne. 1 How is a good government to be recognized ? Not by the form of government, for the same form of government can be the best possible for one people and the worst possible for
another.
prosperity of the people?

abroad ?
it is

By the magnificence of the government then, perhaps, or the Or by the preservation of peace at home and No, says Rousseau in all sincerity, not by these things, but
:

quite simply
this

by the increase in population of the territory in question which will show that men have achieved what they intended in

forsaking the state of nature for the social state, namely the collective preservation of their life, even if it should perhaps be attained in

violence and bloodshed. 2

circumstances of the utmost general wretchedness and possibly of great The abuse of government and subsequent death of the state always occurs at the point where the state loses its

meaning because the convention upon which it is based has been 3 mangled by the establishment of some kind of tyranny. But tyrannical also is the conception of the legislative power which causes a people's chosen emissaries to feel and behave like representatives (reprSsentants) of the people, instead of feeling and behaving -just like the wielders of
the executive power
like their delegates (commissionaires}.

The instant

a people appoints representatives for itself it is no longer free; it is no longer even a people. For the instant a man, thinking of his representative in parliament, can say, politics are nothing to do with me, the state as such is doomed. Rousseau also very logically maintained that the institution of taxes was a more than dubious substitute for its
underlying institution of co-operative labour (la corvee] > which was alone worthy of a true dtL* Thus we can hardly defend or attack what

we know

today as the parliamentary system as something towards

which Rousseau's ideas might have been tending. If a people adopts a system of government embracing a legislative and an executive power,
then
this does not, according to Rousseau, signify the concluding of a second social contract (just as on the other hand the social contract as

such did not for him, as Hobbes thought, simply mean the appointment of a government), but the execution of the first and only contract,
beside which there can be no other. In the course of that execution
i

III, 5-6.

9,

in,

io-i

i.

ni, 14-15.

76

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

is

the people, far from retiring into inactivity,

it
1 possibly can be. it From this follows that

and remains

as active as

by an

it is impossible for the sovereign to determine irrevocable act either the form of government or which people

are to be entrusted with it. These things must again and again be made the subject of his free decision. The instance of the general will which has again and again to be consulted, i.e. the will of the body politic

or of the people as such, is proof against destruction by any attempt of the government to seize excessive power or any attempt by individual citizens to set up a state within the state. 2 This general will is by no
is

means the will of the majority; the only purpose served by the majority to determine what the general will actually is on a given point. The purpose of the vote is not to ask the citizen whether he is in agreement with a certain law or not, but to ask him whether in his opinion this
law

life

is in accordance with the general will. The healthier the political of a country is the more its political decisions will come under the sign of unanimity. But anyone who has entered into the social con-

tract has thereby expressed his readiness to accept in advance also those decisions which are not passed unanimously or which run counter

to his convictions or interest. In this event

he has perhaps erred in

his convictions or in his

he will not say to himself that judgment of the

matter in question, but that he has probably erred in his assessment of the general will, and he will not wish, for the sake of his own freedom,
is based upon the true general will, for the result to be different. Rousseau at this point applauds the custom of the old republic of Genoa, which was to inscribe the very word

which, properly understood,

over the gates of prisons and on the chains of those condemned to service in the galleys 'Cette application de la devise est belle et juste 9 It is precisely for freedom's sake, and for the sake of his own freedom,
libertas
.

who has encountered the severity of the law makes his to the prison or the galley! 8 As for elections, Rousseau is inclined to prefer the method of electing by lot, so that it may be quite clear that
that the citizen

way

appointment to an official post is not a distinction, but signifies the imposition of a special burden for the citizen concerned, an imposition which in any case in a complete democracy if such a thing existed

would be best to leave to pure chance. 4 Finally, in accordance with strict logic, Rousseau finds it possible to attribute a good significance even to the two very illiberal political institutions of dictatorship and
it

all

censorship. It is the will of the people to preserve the life of the state in circumstances. But it is possible for circumstances to arise in which
1

III,

6.

IV,

i.

IV,

2.

IV,

3.

ROUSSEAU

77

the existing laws, which cannot perhaps be changed immediately, become a danger to the state. In such cases the people's sovereignty

must in
for a

its

own

interest

be suspended, or alternatively suspend

itself

moment, by being temporarily placed in the hands of one or more persons, a state of affairs which can of course only be transitional if it is not to degenerate into a form of tyranny. And according to Rousseau the formation and cultivation of public opinion (opinion publique) in questions of morals and taste is no less a political matter and thus the government's task, than the formation and protection of the laws. The task of a wise censorship in the way in which it has always been exercised by princes and magistrates of note, would be not to create, sway and determine public opinion in these matters, but certainly to ascertain it and give it expression, and by thus propounding the laws which
are unwritten constantly provide the written laws with the support 1 they need.

civile,

Rousseau ends the book with a strange disquisition on la religion which is, it must be admitted, also remarkable for its inconsistencies and lack of careful thought. According to him religion and politics originally went hand in hand; every people had its gods in having its state, and lost them when its state was lost. The message of Jesus about the kingdom which is part of another world dispelled this unity. The pagan persecutors of the early Christians were not completely wrong in
scenting political rebellion in the proclamation of this kingdom. With the Roman Papacy it actually became rebellion. The Church managed to establish itself as a political body in its own right, independent of

the

state, setting

up a new

social contract

based on the benefit of

the threat of excommunication (un chef d'ceuvre en politique!} whose power has proved itself to be greater even than that of the civil contract. are faced with the two interrelated facts that the

communion and

We

state has always

has in effect

had need of some religious basis, and that Christianity always been more harmful than beneficial to the state.
first,

We

should really, thinks Rousseau, distinguish,

human

religion,

which he describes as the purely inward cult of the highest God, which has no visible manifestation in a Church, which is bound up with the recognition of the eternal duties imposed by morality, and which he thinks he may identify with the 'pure and simple religion of the Gospel'
or with the 'true theism' or with the 'natural religious right' (droit divin naturel)i and, secondly, the national religion of pre-Christian

dogma and

times, the positive religious right (droit divin civil ou positif) whose cult were prescribed by the law and made the duty of the
i

IV, 6-7.

78

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

citizen; and, thirdly, priestly religion^ which demands of a man that he should recognize two separate sources of law, two governments and two fatherlands, and thus makes it difficult for him to be believer and

citizen at once;
is

a religious right for which, according to Rousseau, there no name whatsoever (he expressly states that he is referring to Roman Catholicism) and which he therefore declines to discuss further. 'Anything which shatters social unity is worthless. Every institution which sets a man at loggerheads with himself is worthless.' It seems at first that there are all sorts of things to be said in favour of national religion, of the theocracy, from the political point of view. But it is based upon a lie, makes peoples as such intolerant in matters of religion, and places in the hands of those thus incensed the dreadful weapons at the disposal of the power-state. Thus we must dismiss it also from its place in the discussion. There remains human religion, 'Christianity, not that current today, but the quite different Christianity of the Gospel', the 'holy, sublime and true religion'. If only it were not for its one bad failing: that it is incapable, without being essentially connected with a state on earth, of lending strength to the laws of a state on earth, but must rather loose the hearts of the citizens from their state as it does from all earthly things. It is said, that a people composed of true Christians would form the most perfect society. But should it not be borne in mind that a society of true Christians would no longer be a human society at all ? And even assuming the possibility of such a society, would not that 'deep indifference' with which it is alone possible for a Christian, whose homeland is not upon
this earth, to discharge his duties in the state, would not the ease, with which he can accept bad conditions too, would not his fear of becoming intoxicated with the glory of his country, would not his

readiness to

bow beneath

the hard yoke of God, would not

all

these

things be bound eventually to constitute a danger to the state in spite of all the good political results which they may have as well ? Will not

Christian soldiers believe not in victory but in God,

and

will they

then achieve what the pagan Romans achieved? Is it not inevitable that they should fare badly in face of so inspired an enemy ? Is there in fact any such thing as a 'Christian soldier' ? Is not a 'holy war' an impossibility from the Christian standpoint? Is there a 'Christian
state' (une rtpublique chretienne) ?

Or does not each of these words exclude

the other? Is not Christianity with its teaching of submission and dependence an ail-too favourable prerequisite for tyranny, which has
in fact never neglected to exploit it accordingly? Thus, according to Rousseau, this third possibility, that of human religion, must also be

ROUSSEAU

79

ruled out of the discussion. But the fact remains, that the state needs a religion, in order that its citizens might love their duties. It thus deprofession of faith (une profession de foi purement civile), by the state itself, containing the sentiments de sociability (the convictions on whose account a general will is necessary) without which it is not possible either to be a good citizen or a loyal
civil

mands of them a

to be formulated

subject. It demands a dogma concerning the existence of a mighty, wise, beneficent guiding and providing Deity, a future life with rewards

and punishments, the sacred nature of the social contract and the Laws; are to be few, simple and clear but in order not to give rise to theological dispute on no account too closely defined or even provided with a commentary. All else is conjecture (opinions] and this is no concern of the state or of the citizen of the state as such, and the individual should be left to ponder it freely. Anyone who does not accept this civil religion is to be banished; anyone who, after he has accepted it, behaves in a manner contrary to it commits the crime of giving the lie to the law and is to be punished by death. And every intolerant religious form is excluded at the outset, for wherever the principle 'without the Church there is no salvation' is thought valid, an
its articles

alien sovereign
political affairs

power

is

in fact set

(in questions

up within the state in worldly concerning contracts of marriage, for

example), which

which the

is set higher than the state, and constitutes an attack can meet only by being for its own part intolerant. The only course for every honest man (tout honnete homme) is to renounce the Roman Catholic Church. Such are the last words in this book of the former convert Rousseau. 1

state

hero's mental

Rousseau's third chief work of this period, a novel tracing growth and development and entitled Emile ou

its

De

r education (lySs) 2 is also an answer to the problem of how human life should be moulded in spite of and in its quality of being far removed

from

its original and natural state. But now the problem is presented in individual microcosmic form. It is now the moulding of a single life

which is in question. Rousseau had been approached by a worried mother for advice in matters affecting education the few short precepts he originally gave then grew into the now famous work which embraces five whole books. It begins with the words A11 things are good as they proceed from the hands of the Author of all things; all things degenerate in the hands of man. Man wants nothing to be as nature has made it, not even man. Because this is the present state of all things the child and the adolescent cannot simply be left alone, but are in
:

IV,

8.

Amsterdam

ed., Vols. 7-8.

8O

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

need of education. But the significance of this education must then be,
in contrast to
all the demands of society, class and future profession which are meant to influence the young, and in contrast to the existing customs and prevailing ideas of the adults surrounding the child: educating him to be a man, and indeed an homme abstrait^- a man, that is, who is as free as possible, and as far as possible acts in accordance

with his true nature.

feed their infants themselves

the book is that mothers should and not wrap them in swaddling clothes The child's education is meant to provide him with room for himself, for the way of life which the child himself must shape and bring to perfection. Vivre est U metier que je lui veux apprendre.* Such an education
!

The first lesson which we learn from

will therefore

have to consist in taking care that the child

is

allowed to

develop as freely as possible those potentialities lying dormant within him which are quite distinct from the external factors which help to

determine and influence

it,

in ensuring that he can acquire his

own

experience as freely as possible, and ensuring finally that he should be allowed to come to terms in the most natural way possible with the historical factors conditioning his existence. That is why Emile, the

model Rousseau uses to present his ideas, is brought up far removed from society, in the country, and indeed he is educated from infancy not by his parents, but by a tutor. The first aim of education is to free the child of fear, commanding greed and bad behaviour by disposing of the false attitude to the things which can awaken such feelings. The child should be made aware automatically, so to speak, of the moral concepts of obedience, duty and obligation and further of virtue by himself experiencing his own strength and weakness, and necessity and compulsion. Learning and reading should be allowed to proceed from the child's interest in things around it, which is to be aroused first, and on no account should this sequence be reversed. Thus the development and exercise of the five senses is far more important at first than book learning. Instruction proper then follows quite simply upon the child's curiosity and its growing desire for knowledge, and therefore takes as its subject the things by which the child is surrounded, the house, the garden and the stars in the sky, and only finally the books, the first and most important of these being Robinson Crusoe, because like Crusoe the child should arrive at the point where it can decide his requirements for himself and be able to set about procuring them. It is to encourage him in this that Emile is given handicraft lessons even while he is still very young. Only when he is past fifteen is it time to introduce him to
1
1, p. 12.

I, p. ii.

ROUSSEAU

8l

foreign languages, and to history also, with the aim of paving the way for him to form an independent moral judgment on the basis not of the false speech, but of the deeds of men. And similarly his religious instruction is not to introduce him to the catechism of one particular faith but to enable him to choose that religion to which the best use of his reason must necessarily lead him. The purpose of a stay in the city is to allow the pupil to clarify and establish in opposition to the bad taste prevailing there, be it understood his own feeling for the truly beautiful. And then he is to be made acquainted with classical literature too. But the time when he becomes engaged and the first years of
his marriage, are also part of the period of his education, a fact rather surprising in retrospect as we learn in the fifth book that Rousseau did

not think a corresponding education, far from the parental home and society, necessary for the female sex, but considered the instilling at

knowledge of music, housekeeping and sewing, the and an unfeigned propriety sufficient for a girl. The essential things to be demanded of a wife are that she should please her husband and have learnt how to make life pleasant for him. The part of the book which really determined its reception was the Confession of faith of a Vicar of Savoy* which was interpolated in the fourth section. The Vicar is a cleric of the type which Rousseau had encountered in Savoy during his stormy youth, and into whose mouth he now put his own theology, or philosophy of religion. Some bon sens, a love of truth and a simple heart, in short la bonne foi, i.e. an opinion honestly held, seem to him to be the sufficient prerequisites of such an undertaking: he is confident that even any error into which he might fall could not be attributed to him as a crime provided he has adhered to these principles. Neither the Church's call to faith nor any philosophy, be it systematic or sceptical, the confession begins, can allay the mistrust of all truth in the heart for the immediate reason that those representing the Church or a philosophy are far too zealous and fundlittle

home, of a

virtue of cleanliness

amentally lacking in objectivity in wishing others to accept their own opinions as the right ones. I must therefore begin at the very beginning. I start by establishing my own existence and with the fact that I am
related to a being distinct from myself by virtue of the twofold, the passive and the active power of feeling and judging. Judgment is

something other than feeling: in judging I am. not passive but active in relation to the things about me. In judging I attribute something to

them:

existence, size,

number,

relationship, etc.,

something which

know not

only by awareness of the object concerned but from within 1 Amsterdam ed., Vol. 8, pp. 138.

82

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

myself. But I must now attribute exactly the same activity to the objects themselves: it is freedom and not only necessity in the movement by which
I

do I know this? I know it from direct experiapprehend them. ence. Je vous dirai, queje le sais, parce queje le sens. It is of my own free will that I make this present motion of my arm. No artifice of reasoning
this certainty within me. It is plus fort que tout Evidence; autant vaudroit meprouver queje rfexistepas (p. 28). But if now, as I suppose, the universe is not, like myself, a living being, and if movement does

How

can destroy

not reside in the world as a whole and is even less a property of matter, then I am provided with my first dogma or article of faith, in explanation of the

movement in the world, as: the recognition of a will which moves the world from outside. And from my insight into the causal and teleological connexion between all forms of movement, by virtue of which each single movement can at any time be considered as central

to every other, I

am given to
is

recognize that this will

is

is

endowed with

intelligence will and therefore, as

and wisdom. The Being which

this

possessed of this highest

Penetre de
)

apparent, of this highest ability, and which

therefore exists in itself

Being

I call

God.

mon

insuffisance

je ne raisonnerai la sur nature de sois le sentiment de ses rapjamais Dieu, queje rfy force par avec moi are nature herself to ports (p. 39). evidently taught by marvel at him, to worship and love him: a feeling of thankfulness

(note what theological principle comes

to light here

We

towards him
itself first

the consequence of our love for ourselves which suggests But what a contrast there is, in the world created by God, between the peace and happiness of nature and the chaos of the world of men! For man is the slave of his senses and passions. But he is not only that. He is also free, capable, that is, of elevating himself to the
is

of

all.

he can judge of what is true, so he he who was created in the image of God, judge of what is good, and experience the desire to live up to this judgment. Thus moral evil and the physical evil which follows it stem from us, not from God, and not from our God-created nature. Take away our calamitous progress, take away our mistakes and our vices, take away the work of man, and all is good! Sois juste et tu seras heureux! (p. 51). And if in spite of this I see the wicked triumph and the just man suffer? It is precisely this which affords me proof of the immortality of the soul, of man's
can
also,

level of the 'eternal truths'. Just as

thinking nature, the dissolution of which is inconceivable to me, and whose preservation God owes less (!) to the deserts of man than to his own goodness (one senses none the less in this fateful sentence something like a lingering echo of the theology of old Geneva, in Rousseau's
recalling here

Psalm

15, verse

'Not unto us,

Lord, not unto

us,

ROUSSEAU
but unto thy

gg

give glory!' p. 55). But Hell, the punishment of the wicked which corresponds to the heavenly reward of the good, I should not be inclined to seek in some everlasting Beyond, but in the hearts of the wicked, and then for is not the wicked man also my brother? rather hope for peace for them too in the world to come. I

name

should consider spirituality, eternity, wisdom, goodness and righteousness, as qualities of God, to be absolute and attributable only to him as the Creator and therefore not think that are to be they comprehended by means of my corresponding notions of them. I shall say to him: 'Being of all beings, I am, because thou art; in thinking of thee without cease I understand also my own origin. And that is the noblest use to

which
I

am

has

my faculty of reason can be put, in recognizing that beside thee But to what else shall I now devote my life? Nature inscribed it in indelible characters upon my heart: Tout ce queje
as nothing.'

sens Stre bien est bien; tout ce queje sens Stre

mal est mal (p. 60). For if good is must dwell within us for ever and cannot be lost. To be good, then, must simply mean to be healthy, i.e. to be in a state
really good, then it

corresponding to the nature of goodness.

How

could admiration for

good deeds and men, and revulsion at the sight of evil, be possible for all of us, how could pity be possible even for the criminal, if we were wicked in the depths of our nature, if we did not stem from goodness? Thus the form of the moral imperative can only be: obeissons d la
Mature! (p. 65). In the depths of our souls (aufond des times) over and beyond all our principles, there dwells always an agent which passes judgment: the conscience, not as a prejudice, and not as an idea we have had grafted on to us by education and custom, but as an evidently innate a priori of all moral ideas which has manifested itself in the

manners and history of every people

de connaitre
.
.

at every time.

Nous

sentons avant

qui

les

Quoique toutes nos idees nous viennent du dehors, les sentiment, Exister pour nous c'est sentir apprecient sont au-dedans de nous. .
. .
.

Nous avons eu des sentiments avant des idles (p. 69). This sentiment, however, which is innate and thus inseparable from our existence, and which
enables us to recognize good, and spurn evil, is in fact the conscience. 'Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct; immortal and celestial voice;

assured guide of a being

telligent

who

is

and

free; infallible judge

resemble God; it is you who are responsible for the excellence of and the morality of his actions; without you I sense nothing within me which raises me above brute creation, except the unhappy privilege of straying from error to error by means of a gift of perception which is unregulated, and a gift of reason which has no principle.
his nature

man

ignorant and pressed hard, but inof good and evil, it is you who make

84

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

praised,

Heaven be

we

are

now

delivered from all the terrifying

apparatus of philosophy. We can be men without being scholars! (p. 71). Why then are there so few men who heed this guide? This is
simply because he speaks the language of nature, which the whole world conspires to have us forget. But does the man exist who has not
at least once in his life yielded to the tug of the heart which is so natural and sweet and not in doing this found virtue lovable in spite of the
difficulties it presents ?

But what is virtue ? What

is

goodness ?

It is

placing oneself in relation

to the whole, instead of placing the whole in relation to oneself, as the wicked do. The wicked man makes himself the centre of all things,

the good man fits himself into an order where God is the centre of all created things, and these form the periphery about him. I put myself

of my

own

free will at

to the fulfilment of his will,

God's disposal as his work and as his instrument and it is in this legitimate use of my freedom
(p. 76). If a

that I have at once

evil instead

my desert and my reward

I shall

man chooses

of goodness that is attributable to the man himself, and most certainly not to God. But in this event the choice of good also

depends upon myself alone.

be

fortified

and held in

this

good

choice by contemplating and meditating upon the universe, not with the aim of idly systematizing, but of worshipping and marvelling at its author. I have nothing to ask of him. What, even, should I ask for?

For miracles on my behalf? I, who yet love his order of things as it is immutable? Such a prayer would merit punishment! Or am I to pray for strength to desire the good and to do it? How should I ask for something he has given me already: namely conscience, reason and freedom! He demands of me that my will should be otherwise than it is it is not I who have to demand it of him! 'O good and merciful God, fount ofjustice and truth In my trust in thee my heart's supreme desire is that thy will be done. In allying my will to thine I am doing as thou dost, and acquiescing in thy goodness; I feel that I am partaking in advance of the supreme joy which is the reward of such a will' (p. 79). I certainly have cause to doubt myself. Certainly I am not infallible. Certainly all the views I hold could be so many lies. But I have done what I could; how could I be held guilty for not having achieved
!

more?
But how is all this now in relation to revelation, Scripture and dogma ? the answer to this must also be determined by the reasoning power of each individual: cherchez la verite vous-meme! Is any other religion but the natural religion, which has just been developed,
It is certain that

really necessary?

Am

I likely to

incur guilt in simply following the

ROUSSEAU

85

light which God himself has given me in my reason and conscience? What truth or injunction which is important to the glory of God, the
this course?

miss in following of the Deity come to us through our reason alone. Gaze upon the spectacle of nature, give heed to the inner voice. Has not God said everything to our eyes, our
I possibly
c

good of society or

my own advantage could Our most sublime notions

What is there left for men to tell us?' What will their revelations serve but to reduce God (p. 82). purpose to an ail-too human form? What purpose their dogmas but to create new obscurity? They have made man haughty, intolerant and cruel,
conscience and our judgment?

and brought war instead of peace to the earth. Je me demande a quoi bon tout cela sans savoir me repondre. If we had only ever heeded what God says in the heart of man there would only be one religion on earth,
which
that?
the religion, namely, of the heart. But now every man, when asked is the true religion, answers mine! And how does he know

God

has said so! he replies.

And how

does he

know

that

God

parson told me, and he should know. But have we not a right to demand that the true religion should be can distinguished by means of some quite unmistakable criterion?
has said that?

My

How

be expected to believe on the authority of a man, who after all is in exactly the same position as myself? 'When I believe what he says, I don't believe it because he says it, but because he proves it. The evidence provided by men is therefore fundamentally nothing but that given me by my own reason and adds nothing to the natural means of recognizing the truth which God has given me.' Apdtre de la ve'rite', qu'avez votes done a me dire dontje ne reste pas lejuge? God has spoken to man, you say. Bold words, indeed! But why then have I not heard him? Why has he apparently spoken only to certain other men? Why must I above all else believe again in the miracles which
I

are to attest that these

men

are speaking the truth?

des

And why

be-

fore all else in the books in

which these miracles have

toujours

by men!

been handed down

toujours des

to

us? Quoi!

temoignages humains?

hommes, qui me rapportent ce que d'autres hommes ont rapporte? Que d* hommes entre Dieu et moil (p. 88). Must I now ponder, compare and verify ? Gould God really not spare me this labour ? How learned

I must be to seek through the whole of antiquity, nay through the entire world for the truth of the prophecies, revelations and miraculous events which are claimed What critical abilities I must possess to distinguish the true documents from the false, to weigh the theses and countertheses against each other, the originals and translations, the reliable and not so reliable historical witnesses! And all this as a mere preliminary
!

86
to deciding

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

whether the reported miracles are really miracles, the reported prophecies really prophecies. For there are also seeming miracles and prophecies which have some natural explanation. And when I have found the confirmation of their authenticity, then that in
its

turn is but a preliminary to the question: just why did God select such means for the confirmation of his word, as if he were purposely
avoiding the simplest method, means which are themselves so much in need of confirmation? Is it credible that God should have given such signs to this or that particular man, and in so doing have

made

all

the rest of

mankind dependent upon them?

Is it

not too

strange that every sect ultimately calls such signs to witness, so that all things considered if all things were correct there must have been more miraculous events than natural onesl And so that we should

regard it as the greatest wonder of all if somewhere at some time no miracle should come to pass among some group of persecuted fanatics
1

No, many worthy of him (p. 90). Why do they not happen now in the broad light of day ? Why did they all take place somewhere in a dark corner ? Why are such and such a number of eye-witnesses necessary to make them credible? And even if they were credible to us, has not the Devil also worked miracles, according to the Bible itself? Is the true doctrine not once again necessary to prove the true miracle, which we were told
should for its
ever, in

I believe in

God

too

much

to believe in so

miracles un-

own part prove the true doctrine? The latter must, howany event be recognizable by bearing the sacred character of
c

the divine', i.e. by the fact that it at the very least does not contradict the basic concepts of natural religion which it has brought with it. wrathful, jealous, vengeful, factious God I could not acknowledge

as being my God He is not the good, gentle God my reason has already revealed to me. Further I would beg leave to demand of the dogmas
:

to

of a revealed religion that they should be clearer, simpler and easier comprehend than those of natural religion, and not perhaps even

contradictory. 'The God whom I worship does not dwell in the shadows; he has not given me understanding to forbid me to use it. To demand of me that I should subject my reason is to insult its Author. servant of truth would not tyrannize over my

more mysterious and

reason but enlighten it (p. 93). These then are my principles in testing a revealed religion. But would it then be enough to test one of the revealed religions in this manner?

To be

religious faction,

all of them, and into every comparing and weighing them one against the other, not only by means of their literature but in our own person ? Have

fair

should

we

not have to look into

advance for their religion? Have Christian and listened quietly to what the other has to say? regard as damned the millions of the heathen,

87 we, for instance, done justice to the Jews and the arguments they

ROUSSEAU

Mohammedan

ever

reached? What guilt has the heathen incurred who happens to die on the evening before the arrival of the first mission to his district? What fault is it of his that he knew nothing of what is supposed to have happened in Jerusalem on the other side of the globe eighteen hundred
years ago? That same Jerusalem, incidentally, where the people even today seem no better placed as regards that event than he himself!

How injustice can we whom no mission has yet

And what allegedly revealed religion is there to which the same objections could not be raised! (p. 108). If there were really only one religion which alone is able to grant salvation then, since everyone must test for himself in this matter, it would be everyone's first duty, regardless of age or sex, to ask all these questions and institute the enquiries necessary to answer them. The earth would be swarming with pilgrims wandering in all directions at vast expense and under the greatest difficulties in order to test their religions and find the true one. Then farewell to craftsmanship, art and science, and every social
employment. There would then be no striving except for the true religion. And the best that could happen would be that the healthiest, the most zealous, the shrewdest and oldest man will get far enough to discover
in his old age in retrospect which religion he should have taken as his guide in life. Anyone rejecting this method must grant the son of the

Turk the

right he concedes to the son of the Christian: the right to abide by his father's religion without being threatened with perdition.

So far as I myself am concerned, I can reject this method because I have decided to take as my one and only guide the book of Nature which lies open before the eyes of all men, that is at my disposal come what may as a source for the recognition of God, and from which I learn more than all men can teach me (p. no).
is, however, neither approving nor disapproving, but one of respectful doubt: I see that there is much to be said for the various religions, but also that there is much to be said against them. Once again, I do not consider myself infallible. But I must think for myself. It may be that someone who can declare himself for a particular religion is gifted with better powers of

My

attitude to the allegedly revealed religions

judgment than I. Thus I certainly condemn no man, but I can imitate no man either: it is just that his judgment, superlative as it may be in itself, is not my judgment. This must be also my attitude in relation to
Christianity.
*I

gladly confess that the majesty of the Bible evokes

my

88

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

admiration, that the sanctity of the Gospel speaks to my heart. Philosophers for all their splendour are small beside it. Can a book at once so sublime and so simple be the work of men ? Can he whom it describes

be a mere man? Is his speech that of the enthusiast or of the ambitious founder of a sect ? How sweet, how pure his ways (quelle douceur., quelle
!

puretS dans ses mceurs/)

1

What moving
!

grace

(quelle grdce touchante] in his

teachings How noble his maxims! (quelle elevation dans ses maximes!) How wise his discourses What aptness, finesse and justice in his answers

What command
5

sufferings!

(p.

of his passions What strength and self-denial in his 112). Socrates cannot be compared with him, for just
!

was something quite new in his surroundings whereas Socrates' was but the affirmation of familiar Greek virtues so his death was incomparably much harder than Socrates'
as certainly as his morality

death. Si la vie et la mart de Socrate sont d'un Sage, la vie et la mort de Jesus sont d*un Dieu. His story cannot have been invented. In that event its inventors would have had to be more astonishing than their invention. But it

must be admitted that

this

Gospel

is

also full of things not

worthy of

belief, contrary to reason,

and unacceptable. As far as these are concerned one can only withdraw to the attitude of silent but non-committal
life

good for the dogmas in so far as they are not C or to morality. I look upon all the individual religions as salutary institutions in so far as they are in each country the uniform means of public worship. Their reasons for being as they are may be in
relevant to
peuple) or in

respect. This also holds

the climate, in the government, in the spirit of the people (genie du some other local cause which might make the one preferable

to the other, according to the time and the place. I believe they are all good provided they allow God to be worshipped in a fitting manner,

that

is

to say
will
its

by rendering God the

any

essential service of the heart'

(p. 114).

God

certainly not reject

service rendered

unto him,

the Vicar of Savoy declares, I shall make it my task to discharge my duties as a Roman Catholic priest, and especially those of the Mass, which formerly I took lightly,

whatever

outward form.

And now,

with

all

exactly as the

the inner conviction and outward punctiliousness I can muster, Church prescribes, and to invest the words of the sacraall
*

rny belief in the highest Being. Whatever there is about this inconceivable mystery (the sacrament), I am not afraid that I shall be punished at the day of judgment for having profaned it in my
heart.'

ments with

the

the rest I shall obey the spirit of the Gospel more than of the spirit Church, and therefore preach virtue to men, and dogma only in so far as it is of help to them in that respect. But one

And for

ROUSSEAU
dogma
which
I shall
is

89

keep from them altogether, namely that of intolerance, cruel and immoral. Thus I shall play no part in attempts to

convert people who hold another faith (p. n6f). The Protestant who has become a Roman Catholic is to be advised to return to the religion

of his forefathers

we do not know

if

Rousseau was in

fact so advised

by a

Catholic priest if only because it is morally still the and intellectually still the most modest of religions. In any case purest the true duties of religion are independent of the human religious
institutions.

Roman

The

this sense that the saying

only essential thing is the culte interieur, and it is in no virtue without faith may well be valid
e
5

(p. 122). The teachings of philosophical scepticism and atheism which threaten us are just as bad as the teaching which we have to expect from the Churches. As they are even more dogmatic in their approach

than the Church, they deprive man of everything he finds worthy of reverence, and thus rob the unhappy of their last comfort, the happy of their only warning, the criminal of the chance that he will repent, and the virtuous of hope. Fanaticism is at least a great passion, whereas
this

philosophy

is

tolerant only because of its indifference to good,

and

creates a state of quiet which can only be called the quiet of death. Both extremes of superstition and unbelief are therefore to be avoided
(p. 126).

'Dare to profess a belief in

God

to the philosophers; dare to

preach humanity to the intolerant !' such is the confession of faith of the Vicar of Savoy and the confession of faith of J.-J. Rousseau. It was this part ofEmile which was to prove disastrous for the life of its author. Both Church and State found cause to take action with some speed after the book had appeared, particularly because of this section. Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, promulgated a severe pastoral letter against Entile. As a result of a decision and order by the Parliamentary Court of Justice in Paris the book was publicly burned on nth June 1762 and an order was made for the arrest of its author. The latter step, however, was a vain one, for Rousseau's influential friends had caused him to flee in good time. At first he wanted to return to his native land, but on reaching Swiss soil he was horrified to learn that his book had been condemned and burned in his Protestant native city, Geneva, as well, and that he was threatened with arrest there too. These events were a turning-point in Rousseau's inner life. From then dates the decline in his inward frame of mind and attitude which threw him on to the defensive, breeding pessimism, misanthropy and even persecution mania. Rousseau was never, even in his early youth, what might be called well-balanced. Judging by his own account of his life one can distinctly see the beginnings of a mental crisis already in

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

between 1756 and 1762. From 1762 onwards he became in his own eyes increasingly the misunderstood, persecuted and suffering Jean-Jacques. He now imagined all the dishonesty and
his personal experiences

prevarication,

all

the harshness and cruelty,

all

the injustice, intoler-

spite of which he had so often accused man in his fall from the state of nature, to be an attack directed against himself personally.

ance and

In the beginning it was of course a real attack to which he was subjected, an actual attempt at injury, which occupied his mind for some time an attack by the Catholic and Protestant Churches, which had after all themselves been assailed by the remarks of the Vicar of Savoy, with the aim of defending themselves against his ideas. But he became progressively less conscious of this, so that he did not, as might have been expected, become specifically anti-clericaL He lost sight, so to
speak, of this particular foe, that is to say, of the Church, in the ranks of the general front which he imagined was aligned against him, consisting

of philosophers, academicians, literary men, politicians, the

educated and uneducated public in general, and in short

man

as

he

was

at that time, the

same

in all these varied forms.

Contemporary

man did not understand him because he understood him only too well,
because he felt that Rousseau was arraigning him, and for this reason hated and persecuted the arraigner. That is why Jean-Jacques was now, at every turn and no matter with whom, a prey to a passionate mistrust which was likely to flare up at every second, a suspicion that he was being victimized, that he was faced by a general conspiracy, systematically conducted from the highest places and employing the

most cunning methods. That is why from now until the end of his life he worked himself more and more into the rdle of the righteous sufferer,
indeed into a kind of Christ-character, a rdle in which it would doubtless not have been possible for him to suffer subjectively more severely than he did if it had not been a merely assumed role. And indeed it was

what Rousseau had to endure in the years was in fact hard and harsh. It was just that he 1762 immediately insisted on investing his experiences with the character of a myth and suffering them accordingly, whereas the conditions of life he had to endure taken by themselves were not in fact of an unprecedently dreadful kind, as compared with those of other genuine martyrs.
not entirely assumed
after

not of significance merely as a source of but constitutes together with the problems it presents the background without which we should fail to understand the man who is seemingly so optimistic in the things he wrote from 1 756 to 1 762, so completely in accord with his age, even hastening
is

This inner development

clinical biographical data,

ROUSSEAU
impetuously before
i

who saw
fate

it along the path it was treading. This was the man himself as the hated and hating enemy of this age. But it was only gradually that this came to light, under the weight of the blows of

which later fell upon him. It was with the feeling that with the confession of faith of the Vicar of of all Savoy, things, he had written 1 the best and most worthwhile book of the century that he fled from
felt he was the only man in France who believed had then the feeling: ma carritre estfinie. Prevented from returning to the town of his birth, and banished also from the Bernese territory, where he had at first set foot at Yverdon, he turned to the principality of Neuenburg, which was at that time Prussian. He

Paris.

Indeed he then

in God. 2 But he also

sent a letter to Frederick the Great beginning with the words: 'Sire, I have said many bad things about you and shall probably say more', and shortly afterwards thanked him in a second letter for the

asylum

which had been granted him by bluntly demanding that he should put an end to the Seven Years War. 3 He did in fact find at first at

Neuenburg that the Prussian governor, Field-Marshal von Keith, was well disposed towards him, and found a lodging at Metiers in the Val de Travers. It was from here that he settled his score with his
opponents in Paris, in the letter to Monseigneur de Beaumont 4 which appeared in November 1762, and with those in Geneva in the Letters from the Mountain in 1764^ The core of the charges made against him by both sides had been that he denied revelation in favour of natural religion, or in favour of human reason. It is obvious that

Rousseau was in the stronger position polemically not only with the Archbishop but with the theologians of Geneva, because they were both, the former with his Thomistic 'reason just as much as
revelation',

the pupils of one J. A. Turrettini, with their rational orthodoxy, treading the same path which he had after all only naively and logically trodden to its end in his profession defoi, and because it
latter,

and the

was fairly easy for him to show taking into account the moral enthusiasm of his age that he, with his untroubled rationalism and Pelagianism was only doing honestly, completely and logically what they were doing half-heartedly and certainly not for any good reason. It was he he, the true, Christian simple,

and

disciple of Jesus

who

truth-and-virtue-loving retorted to the Archbishop, 6 and

who

said

to the

Genevans that he understood what the Reformation was:

1 Letter to Beaumont, Amsterdam ed., Vol. 9, p. 53. 2 Letter of yth June, 1762, Basle ed, Vol. 26, pp. if.
3 Letters

4
6

Amsterdam
Vol.

of September ed., Vol.

and October
o.
6

1762, Basle ed., Vol. 27, pp. 47f. Vol. q, second half.

9, first half,

p. 54,

92

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

namely the interpretation of the Bible on the sole basis of free conscience and free reason. 1 As for the things both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant sides complained about in his attitude to revelation but also to the doctrine of original sin, to Christ and miracles, his position was unassailable, not because he was right, but because his opponents were not so right in all these things as to be entitled and able to put him in the wrong. The triumph of the answer this logical rationalist and Pelagian was capable of giving especially to the Genevans was payment for the course which Protestant theology had pursued since the beginning of the century. It was in fact only by acting hypo-critically or in great self-deception that the Geneva of the younger Turrettini could find cause for the burning of Emile. We can understand to some extent the anger with which Rousseau, applying his teaching that in an emergency it was possible to contract out of the social contract, informed Geneva in 1763 that he intended henceforth
renounce his rights as its citizen. 2 But this counter-offensive now made Neuchatel too attentive to his person and heresies. The local priest at Metiers, F. G. de Montmollin, with whom Rousseau had at first been on good terms, and who had even
to

him to take Holy Communion, turned from opponent. Behind him there was the assembled clergy of Neuchatel as a class, behind them again the theologians of Geneva and Berne, and behind them the mighty arm of these two
at his

own request

allowed

him and became

his

states.

And remarkably enough

Voltaire, of all people,

it is most probable that among others had a hand from Ferney in the hounding of

Rousseau which was now to be resumed. In the night of 6th to 7th Sep1 765, the irate villagers of Metiers bombarded his lodging with stones and he had to take flight again. He thought he had already found a new sanctuary on St Peter's Island, which belonged to the town of Berne, in the Lake of Biel. The two months of autumn which he spent there must once again have been a climax, reminiscent of the time at
tember,

Chambery

in his remarkably intimate relationship to plants, animals,

landscape and atmosphere. The winter was just beginning when the high bailiff of the neighbouring district of Nidau informed him that the Council of Berne had evicted him from here also. And only a day later he was disappointed once again in thinking that he had found a refuge, at least for the winter, in the town of Biel. He left Switzerland on 3ist October, 1765. The fate that was prepared for him in that year by Geneva, Neuchatel and Berne can in no way be described as a glorious page in the
1

Vol.

9,

second

half,

pp. 42f.

Amsterdam

ed.,

Vol. 36, p. 58.

ROUSSEAU
history of the

93

Reformed Churches there. Rousseau was invited by Frederick the Great to come to Prussia, but preferred, to his great subsequent regret, to go to England. The philosopher David Hume had encouraged him to do so, and introduced him into English society, found somewhere for him to live in Wootton in Derbyshire and even managed to procure for him a fairly generous pension from^the King. It was at this time that the disturbance of his mental balance was to become visible in an unmistakable way. For he suddenly rounded on

Hume
seen,

himself, without any justification whatsoever as far as can be and accused him of being the one who was the worst-disposed of all towards him, and of being engaged on behalf of his extensive league of enemies in making his mental and physical life utterly impossible. At last he broke with Hume, an action which, judged by anything like normal standards, made no sense at all. Rousseau abruptly rejected

the offer of the royal pension. From afar his friends in France pleaded with him in vain. The only thing they achieved was to fall within the sphere of his mistrust themselves; Rousseau thought they were probably

involved in the general conspiracy against him too. Nevertheless, it was during his stay in England that he wrote the

an autobiography which had in with Augustine's work of the same name an utter frankness and a very deliberate method of presentation. Strangely enough this first part, the history of Rousseau's life until 1 741, until the parting with
first

part of his famous Confessions

',

common

Warens, gives us in content and mood a perfect picture of one reconciled and content with God and the world, and above all with himself. Engrossed in this period of his past its author seems to have forgotten all the unpleasantness and hallucinations of his present. There he finds himself once again in a state of nature, so to speak, before entering into society and thus in innocence of all wickedness and evil. Thus we are surprised, and yet we should not really be at all surprised when we read later on, at the beginning of the second part, that he wrote the first in a state of most tranquil and happy composure. This could not be said of the second part if only because its subject was the years of activity and conflict which brought him towards all
the sufferings of the present.

Madame

Rousseau returned to France in 1767, where for the last eleven years life, afflicted by bodily ills as well, he was scarcely heeded by those about him, much less menaced, but was inwardly condemned to the most painful instability and torment. In 1768 he married his Th6rese Le Vasseur, prompted probably more by gratitude for her
of his

94
loyalty than

FROM ROUSSEAU TO

R.ITSCHL

by love. He lived first at one place and then at another, himself maintaining by the proceeds from his books and by the scorewhich was the strange object of his affection, at the same time copying
pursuing the tranquil pleasure he received from dabbling in botany, and generally going for walks and yet more walks, a pastime of which he never tired. But inwardly he was still and now more than ever a
volcano. He could not be kept in any one place for long, for everywhere he

At the same time he was charged to bursting point with the indictment against a humanity which he imagined he had seen through to the very depths of its stupidity and wickedness, and he could not but conceive of himself, his own existence, as its quite special victim. Apart from completing his Confessions in the manner just alluded to one very contrary to their beginning and writing a book on botany,
lived in fear of snares.

composed at this time the strange dialogues Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques in which he talks with a third party about himself, his sad and disputed position, his character and his works: always with the
also

he

intention of pointing out this general conspiracy against him,

cruelty

its

and senselessness, and of making protest upon protest against the society which thus misused him, and of begging over and beyond this for the right to his own existence and for the right to have room to move and be heard which it implied. He has done this in a way which, in spite of all its overtones of vanity and self-pity and all the headshakings it calls forth, instinctively moves the reader. He had the fantastic plan of placing this work on the high altar of Notre Dame,
entrusting
it

to 'Eternal Providence', together with a letter to the

same, so that it would be sure to be passed on to posterity, but he found himself it was 24th February, 1 776 forestalled in some mysterious

manner.

He

man, who made

that

eventually entrusted it to the care of a travelling Englishits existence publicly known after his death. It would

not be true to say of this manifestly pathological piece of writing either, it is solely of biographical interest. How often have the Control
Social

and Emile been misconstrued by people who understood nothing of the vibrant sensitiveness or of the tensed-up bitterness or of the con-

suming longing for peace and yet for love, too, as they were in this man, and which he expressed in so defenceless and exposed and therefore in so concrete a form perhaps only in this impossible polemic of his old age. But above all it must not be forgotten that this was not his last work, and that the mood in which he wrote it was not the one in which he departed this life. The idea that Rousseau committed suicide, which was believed for some time in the eighteenth century, has long since been proved to be without foundation.

ROUSSEAU
It

95

may

yet

it

only have been a relatively short time before his death, but came: a time in which the state of conflict and tension he had

experienced for fifteen years (he himself states this figure several times) was eased somewhat at least, and when at least something of the inner peace of which he had so often defiantly boasted and to which he had at once given the lie by the unrest in which he lived, seemed somehow to have become a reality after all. This last time saw the writing ofLes riveries dupromeneur solitaire, in which he endeavours once again, for the third time now since the Confessions, to look back upon his life and to see and understand himself. In form, language and content these reveries may well be described as Rousseau's most beautiful piece of writing. They have this quality for the simple reason perhaps, if not for any other, that he did not write them with the idea of publishing them, but only for himself, and thus dispensed with all, or nearly all, rhetoric. It is certainly the most moving of all his works. Once again and now in a somehow still truer and more form than in the
Confessions

man

that had had such a singular significance for him. Or did they only now assume the quite specific glow which his words about them emanate

tangible to catch in these calmer observations of the old something like a reflection or echo of the young days at Ghambery

we seem

even now? Did he only now endow them with of creative act of remembrance ? Be that as it
that
lies
it is

this

splendour in a kind

these reveries that bring his

life

may one is tempted to say full circle. The great struggle

moment of stinging him into pain or anger and yet rumbling in the distance like a receding only thunderstorm, settled into its place in his life as a whole. Was it not his wish to be alone with nature in
every
those days around 1740? The man of 1778 was alone with nature; he had achieved this very differently, and by way of quite different sufferings

behind him, not done away with, not settled, it is true, but unforgotten, still alive within him, still part of the present, still capable at

and disappointments from those he then imagined were in store for him. In the meantime he had also paid his due to life in society, to life in its unnatural form. He paid it in daring and because he had dared
life,

in obedience to a highly necessary but also highly because he had dared to oppose to it as a corrective, dangerous impulse, and indeed as a secret court of judgment, the other life, the life of nature and solitude, and had dared, as a missionary coming from the true homeland of all life, to direct it into another course, namely that

to challenge this

leading back to its origins. He had failed in this mission. He himself had been plunged into the condition he had wished to destroy, had been caught in the bonds from which he had sought to set society free. He

96
let

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

himself be infected to the point of madness by the thing he said we should on no account allow to infect us. But he let himself be infected

so thoroughly, he took the perverted life of society and its unnaturalness so bitterly and radically to heart, that of necessity he yet found himself in the end back where he had started. He had only to lay down

the weapons of the battle with society, the weapons which, after

all, it

pained him grievously to use, to find that, as in a re-awakening, he was once again thrown back upon solitude, upon himself and into the realm of nature. From here he now made no more warlike excursions. Now he only dreamed of his quarrel. The reality was peace the peace following defeat, but peace all the same. Thus he let all his
experiences pass before his mind's eye once again, but he could linger only upon those which were of ineffable beauty: those at Chambery,

on St

Peter's Island,

and a few

in the neighbourhood of Paris.

We

should not wonder at finding everything which gives us cause for astonishment in Rousseau contained once more in this last work of
his.

His childish vanity, naive egotism, downright ruthless moral

optimism, his desire to have people tell him he is right, his rationalism and Pelagianism; all these are still there and bear new fruit

on nearly every page of

this his final

work. There
it.

heightened religious feeling or of anything like

is no trace of Rousseau never

reformed or even improved. He is unmistakably the old sinner JeanJacques even in this his finest piece of writing, and there could be every reason to find this calm after the storm, this lonely peace, with himself

and nature his sole companions, which formed the final tenor of his days, more suspect from a theological point of view than all the rest of his life. But it might be more fitting for us not to brandish any theological weapons at this point. Rousseau stands too rounded and complete before us rounded and complete precisely in the complete vulnerability of his attitude and teaching for us not to be glad to remain silent. If we understand what Rousseau seems never to have understood; that no one can live from anything but forgiveness, then we cannot be interested in establishing a fact which it is all too easy to establish; namely that this man was certainly a sinner of a quite unusual
fact

Nobody commands us to follow in his footsteps. It might in be advisable not to. All the less reason for us to feel that it is our duty to throw a stone at him. It might even seriously be doubted, whether the man who does not feel impelled to hail him as a figure
order.

all its tragi-comic doubtful quality being somehow the things which moved him so violently is doing him any kind ofjustice. Rousseau died in Erm6nonville on 2nd July, 1778.

lovable for

moved by

ROUSSEAU

97

a brief consideration of the significance of the phenomenon of Rousseau, for the question which here concerns us. If

We shall now turn to

we are to see all that is to be seen on this subject, it is essential above all we should choose our point of departure correctly. Even judging simply by what we have heard of his life it could not possibly be right to level the charge against him that his great literary fight, the fight which
that

much, was a fight against the Catholic and the orthodox ones from his point of view, that is. The Rousseau of the Vicar of Savoy, the letter to Beaumont, and the Letters from the Mountain is and this is in itself significant enough
to affect his life so

was

Protestant theologians

the

fulfiller

standing, the

of the religion and theology of the human heart and underman who boldly trod the path of eighteenth-century

theology to

its end in advance of all the orthodox. As such the things he says are final, and it is because of this that in this respect too the world strains to catch every word he says, and that in this respect too he evokes such passionate applause and opposition. But he does not say

any

first things, any new things. It is certainly inherent in the one uttering the new word that he should at the same time be the one uttering the last old word, but if we now wish to hear Rousseau as the

speaker of the
rdle as

this

new word we must not persist in listening to him in his a fighter for religious progress and freedom. For we have seen how matter did not play the commanding part in his own mind which

the theologian viewing his work is tempted to ascribe to it. Further, we must certainly not have as points of departure the political and

educational structures he planned in the Contract and in Entile, and what might be called the morality of the Nouvelle HMoise. It was, to be sure, an inner necessity for Rousseau to dare to erect these structures. They were more directly connected with what he essentially had to say and with what was new in him, because they were more positively connected with it than was his opposition to the old denominational Churches. In them he used his new and essential
characteristics to contribute as far as ever they could to the striving of his own time. It is no wonder that with such a basis they com-

and

pletely dwarfed the contributions of most of his contemporaries, that, even taking into account the nature of his age, they had the
effect of

a revelation. But they were in

fact his contribution to the

striving of his time and as such did not represent the dawning of a new era or the essential thing he had to say. They were, as we saw, sugges-

how a second-best solution might be reached, which Rousseau had become resigned to making. It is precisely the resignation behind them which is without doubt part of the secret of their effect. But it also
tions as to

98
directs

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

our gaze to things beyond it. In this respect too Rousseau, seen the from point of view of his own time, might well have uttered conclusive words, but it was precisely because they were the last words that they were not yet, or perhaps no longer, the first, the new word which

he meant by them and which he

We

might now

feel

lyricism of immediate

actually wanted to utter. make our point of departure the to tempted for himself and the world about him feeling

which sounds

especially in Rousseau's autobiographical works, but also in the Nouvelle Hilo1se\ man's lonely communion with nature which formed the beginning and ending of Rousseau's course in life. Fairly

shrewd commentators have often stopped there. Why should this not prove to be the gateway leading directly to his secret? Why should it not be the vantage-point which yields a clear view forward to Goethe, Idealism and Romanticism? This side of his life and work must certainly be understood and appreciated before one can understand and appreciate how he could yet write the Contract and Emile and become a pioneer of the new human religion. But this side too of Rousseau's life and work can still be interpreted as a last word of the old time, of the age of absolutism, which in point of fact it was. We have constantly stressed the point that the age of Goethe, of which Rousseau was the first great representative, was also the peak of eighteenth-century absolutism. But it was not only its peak but also its end. There is not only continuity between it and the eighteenth century but also discontinuity, a break, and I am inclined to think that it is this break, as it

was completed, in the last assessment, simply in Rousseau's biography, in his more or less patholqgical method of existing as such, which is the
essential thing

we have to

consider in him. I think that this

is

the point

of departure from which everything else about him which singled him out from his contemporaries first becomes clear, clear as something

new which was

already contained in this age as a coming age an age struggling to be born. From the point of view of Rousseau's biography, of his own idea

it would be completely impossible he himself felt the contrast so violently to conceive of his being the culmination and last word of the era of absolutism. This need not, however, deceive us into thinking that he was not that as welL It does compel us however

of himself,

to think of

him from another angle at the same time. It was not just an impudent lout who fled from his apprenticeship in Geneva in 1728, but at the same time someone who was quite aware of what he wanted, whose intention it was to escape from the bourgeois moral world of his century. It was not merely from some form of ethical chaos,

ROUSSEAU

99

but from an inner world which was strange and new to the accustomed behaviour and ideals of his time that Rousseau returned from Madame de Warens' orchard to Paris society in 1741; he returned not merely as a somewhat useless and unpractical dreamer, but at the same time
as the apostle of a new kind of historical reality, which, admittedly, could not at first find any place in his time. It was not only a delight

in a cleverly discovered and pointed antithesis which led him in the answer to the prize dissertation question of the Dijon academy in 1 750
to begin his impetuous onslaught upon the value of art and science. It was a force which was actually alive within him, sharply opposing

the things which his time most greatly and highly esteemed. It is not only by listening to the psychologists and psychiatrists that we shall

reach an understanding of the fifteen years' persecution mania which followed 17612; it is not just a case of someone with a grudge against life on whom we must bestow our pity: no matter how delusory
these years,

Rousseau's grounds for hating and for thinking he was hated were in it was a delusion which had some meaning in so far as it
represented a protest in him against the entire inner and outer structure of life in his time, a protest which made itself very definitely felt, and

one which within this structure had perhaps inevitably first to make a delusion. It is just from here that we cast an involuntary glance in the direction of Goethe. In the first days of December 1777, six months, that is, before Rousseau's death, Goethe made his 'Winter journey in the Harz', and amongst the verses in which he poetically
itself felt as

described

it,

there are to be found the following: 1

'Easy following Fortune's Carriage; one of that Leisurely train on the

'

Re-made highway concluding

The monarch's

entry.

O, how cure his torments To whom balm is now poison ?

Who
'

drank in his hatred In fulsome delight! First spurned, now despising,

Consuming in
His

secret

own true

merit

In tortured self-love. But who walks there apart? His path is lost in the bushes,

The foliage
1

noiseldssly
p. 400.

Closes behind him, For original see Appendix,

100

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

The grasses unbend, The void engulfs him.
If,

Father of Love, there be

One note of Thy psaltery To his ear attuned Then cheer his heart!
Clear his clouded gaze

That

thirsting
!

he may see
springs

The thousand
In the desert

Every word could not only refer and be addressed to Friedrich it not Plessing, who was its actual subject, but to Rousseau. But would also have been relevant to Goethe's Werther, and to his Faust, the man ^who no longer knew what to make of art and science, as he reached
for the phial of poison early on the morning of Easter day? And therefore relevant to Goethe himself in his early days and perhaps not only as he was in his early days? What else are his Gotz von Berlichingen

and Schiller's Karl Moor but Rousseau translated into manly, and leroic terms with a capacity for action, a transformation of the prolesting, the deluded Rousseau? To be sure, Goethe and his age stand
at a point beyond the conflict and tension in which Rousseau was involved. Anyone who can thus take him as a poetic subject has

absorbed him and his protest and delusion, his 'Storm and

Stress';

they are no longer something vital, but something which has been overcome. But Goethe would not have been Goethe if he had not passed through the period of storm and stress himself, if he had not
it within him all the days of his life as a protest which, although no longer vital to him, was yet part of him and had taken shape within him; as a madness which had found rest and peace if Goethe had not himself been a Rousseau, albeit a victorious and comforted Rousseau, but a Rousseau none the less and if Goethe had not been the man who,

carried

while he brought the eighteenth century to its culmination, was yet its most embittered opponent. Indeed, we have seen that at the very time when Goethe was writing those lines Rousseau himself was at
least

on the way

The

contrast between the

to achieving for his part the comfort they offered. two men, which must certainly not be over-

is a contrast within a homogeneity which is more important and more powerful than the contrast, and they belong together at any rate also in their contrast with the eighteenth century. Thus the days of bitterness which Rousseau tasted to their end, his illness, were not even in themselves matters of pure chance. The time he lived in was

looked,

ROUSSEAU
his disease,

IOI

and the

fact that the age that

arrived, the time of which

sick fashion but

was to come had not yet Goethe then became the master not only in a
in a healthy fashion: the master in whom by good health. Without Rousseau's nega-

much more

the sickness was overcome

tion the affirmation of this

new time would

not have been possible.

Rousseau's cups of bitterness had something of the nature of birthpangs and it is for this reason that they are the primary and essential thing to which we should devote our attention in studying him,
especially if it is our aim to understand to approach his time through him.

him

in relation to his time,

and

The break
personal
for
life

form

indicated by the broken quality of Rousseau's own represents, however, the breaking of the absolutist will which came to pass in him. This is, first of all, the significance

of Rousseau as a phenomenon: here was a man who could not share the general joy which inspired his age, the joy in man's intellectual,
technical

and moral

capacities.

A man

who

could not produce the

general unquestioning confidence in all that European society had so far achieved, but who on the contrary dissociated himself from it, so to

man who speak, instead of naively taking part in these achievements. measured the whole of these achievements against another Whole,
and who from
that angle

was

in a position to regard

it

with feelings of

estrangement, bewilderment, disquiet and revulsion. A man who looking at it from that angle was not only not impressed by this world, who not only had objections to certain of its features, but who regarded
this

whole world

as such as the cause of his suffering,

and

as such felt

compelled to reject it wholly. He felt all this and yet at the same time he felt that he was the advocate, protector and avenger of his
fellow-man, this very man who finds cause for triumph in the sum of his achievements and in the possession of the capacities which made

them

possible, who rejoiced so heartily in them and was so sure that he was on the right path and should go further and further along it.

Rousseau's protest reveals how self-contradictory the attitude of his fellow-man was. Driven by a demoniac or foolish spirit arising out of some depth of his being which was at first completely inexplicable

he hurled
but

his

impeachment
it

at society

but no,

it

was not

his charge,

had drowned and not heeded. It was that the life of society, ruled as it was by this capacity for civilization and this will for form was no real human life at all, no life in accordance with man's essential quality and nature, but signified rather its complete perversion and destruction; that it was not the heaven it pretended and told itself it was, but a hell. He could see no way of accepting
society's

own, which

102

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

any compromise. His only possible course was radically to deny the spiritual and intellectual, the moral and social forms which, unshaken by the Lisbon earthquake, held sway in Europe from 1750 to
1760. From the world in which Voltaire was a great man Rousseau, shaken to the depths of his being, could only withdraw, depart into the wilderness, into madness, put on fanciful Armenian clothing, marry Therese Le Vasseur, copy scores and go plant-gathering. Anyone who was a friend of this world could be no friend of his, even if his name was David Hume, and were he ever so well-disposed, or what passes for well-disposed, towards him. Let all his contemporaries reject him indeed they must reject him, it cannot be otherwise. The time would come when he would be understood in his last years Rousseau continually consoled himself with this, his prophecy.

And
matter

in considering all this we must always bear in mind that, no how often it seemed so to Rousseau himself, he was not fighting

of decaagainst any particular abuses of his time, any particular signs dence, folly or vice, not against those aspects of its spirit which were

wrong, but against its spirit as a whole, not against the weaknesses of its civilization but against its civilization as such, not against its negative aspects but against the positive ones. That is why it was a struggle which was at once so embittered and so completely hopeless, and not be precisely why he could 'not remain hidden from his time,- could it as though he were some eccentric of the kind we have by ignored
always had with us.
interest in
It

was

for this reason that his time took such

this interest

an

him

whether

took the form of scorn and

derision or was manifested as a friendly and sympathetic attention to what he had to say is another question. But his time could not dissociate itself from him, for the simple reason that he belonged to it. He spoke to it from its heart, just because he explained to it its own inner conflict. If Rousseau had been willing and able, he could have brought about a quite different, tranquil, honourable and harmonious end to his life as a respected, nay revered critic and fighter within society

with a
beliefs

critical

of his time. It

but somehow regulated relationship to the cultural is worth remembering that he did not seek and

did not accept any such formal outward kind of truce. He was not drawn by interest in what he was saying, no matter how warmly this interest might be expressed, but treated those who showed friendship

towards him like enemies, maintaining his solitariness and therefore his protest not only in substance but also in form. His sense and interpretation of the contrast between himself and his time was as sharp
as that. It

was in

this that his

madness

consisted. All things considered

ROUSSEAU
madness. In face of this

103

we cannot help admitting that in its own way it was at least a pertinent
might now seem rather remarkable that Rousseau's we have mentioned a political theory in the Contract, an educational programme in Emile, an interpretation of love and marriage in the Nouvelle Heloise. And I presume we can and must add, a construction of his
it

literary life-work should chiefly consist in the great structures

:

own

life

in the Confessions

and other autobiographical works. In

all

these undertakings in themselves, and in the most important features of the way in which they were executed, we certainly can and must interpret him from the trends of his time, as being at one with it and as

intending and desiring the same things which it wanted and intended. Or was it not the case that also here, in an even bolder and more
consequential form than existed at the average cultural level of his time, the contemporary absolutist will for form was at work, whose

he not

enemy Rousseau had fallen in and

yet appointed and declared himself to be? Has well and truly fallen in with the Philistines in

spite of all things ?

There are three primary arguments to discount this 1. Rousseau betrays the fact that he is a thoroughgoing
:

critic

of his

by the manifest unity of the anthropological theme running through all his writings. He was obviously never tempted to enter the fields of applied science or historical research. The things which did tempt him were art and natural science. But the thing which really cried out to him was man. The never-ending subject of his meditations was man, and, moreover in this respect Rousseau is not unlike Socrates man in relation to the problems he has to face in moulding his own peculiar existence. The results of these meditations he expressed at the very point where his time believed it had already essentially grasped and accordingly
his life

age in his literary work as well as in

three or four spheres which stood out in such a way as to seem, at least relatively, still rather new, strange, Utopian, and indeed revolutionary. While he undertook formally something that could also be and was in fact done he nevertheless drew patterns and created figures think by others,
all

could handle everything. 2. Rousseau, in setting his contributions to the beside those of his contemporaries, said things in

human problem

sufficiently bizarre

he presented as his own which stood out in a way when they were compared with what the others intended and achieved. It is true that the Contract and Ernie, usually and the Nouvelle Heloise too in its way are genuine
especially of the figure

eighteenth-century

IO4
creations,

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

but it is also true that they are infused with an ardour which the rest of contemporary political, educational and erotic literature did not know in this degree, nor in this kind.
3.

In contributing with these works to the achievements of his time

and sharing through them his time's will to shape and mould, Rousseau made no secret of the fact that he intended even his boldest proposals
to be regarded only as suggestions as to how second-best solutions might be reached. The typical man of the eighteenth century, while he was ready to admit that his insight and strength were imperfect,

assumed as a matter of principle that he could yet want and achieve He saw in principle only the one dimension of the possible, even when he knew that in practice he could not achieve all that it contains. Rousseau saw the second dimension, composed of the things it is not possible for man to achieve hie et nunc, and which therefore could not be taken as part of the programme. The man of whom Rousseau was speaking, whom he wished to help mould his life, was not the man in a state of nature whom he really has in mind, but man in society. Rousseau, as we have shown, was already resigned to this fact before he started to write the Contract, Emile and the Nouvelle
the best.
Heloise, but least perhaps in the Confessions, without trying to conceal the fact that he was nevertheless not resigned the whole time; that is,

ultimately, after

all,

from

this standpoint does

it is this

he has man in a state of nature in mind and only he speak on the problem of man in society.
it

Truly

extraordinary kind of resignation, resting as

does

upon a most determined non-resignation, that lends his work the fire and impetus which distinguish it from everything else that was written in his time. It is precisely this kind of writing, where the author consciously refrains from giving of his best, which often has an electrifying effect which is absent from the works of many writers when they are in fact earnestly and passionately trying to write at their best. These then
are the arguments against simply ranging Rousseau's works alongside those typical of the eighteenth century. All the same, it must be maintained here that such a classification
is

possible. The same Rousseau who raised the anthropological problem in its ethical aspects, as a forerunner of Kant, in a situation when nobody had seen a problem there at all; the same Rousseau whose undertakings were so revolutionary in their effect for the very reason that behind them there is the recognition of a realm to which the only answer can be one of resignation; the same Rousseau said the
last

word concerning eighteenth-century

absolutism. It

Rousseau that we see that clearly and

how this

is precisely in absolutism, to be true,

ROUSSEAU
is

105

and broken by a new insight, only finally to assume another form in which it would continue to survive and enter the spirit of the new age, the age of Goethe. The two dimensions of Rousseau's anthropology come about only in this way, that he distinguishes between man in nature and man in society. According to Rousseau it was man's transition from this one to the other which constituted what might be called the Fall. And it is because Rousseau was aware of this irrevocable transition, yet declared himself by his suggestion for fallen man, i.e. man in society, and yet on the other hand never lost sight for one moment of the significance of the lost state before the Fall, which he saw as being condemnatory but at the same time indicative of the way we ought to go, that his doctrines of politics and education acquired this fire, this weight and impetus. But the word 'fall' in the biblical sense is not really the right one to describe this transition, however sharply Rousseau felt the contrast it implies, and however sharply this feeling distinguished him from his intellectual environment, whose way of thinking was one-dimensional. Rousseau very seriously takes it to be a transition from a good state to one less good, but not however severely he may condemn and describe this state a transition from good to evil. But where in actual fact do these things have their source and
restricted

now being

domain, the

possibilities of lying, tyranny, injustice, cruelty, intolerance, the effects of which Rousseau had found to be so powerful in

human

society, as it really

is,

which made him

suffer so,

and which

caused him to attack society so radically? Wherever they may be, they are not in man, is the answer we must give, to be in agreement with

him. They seem rather to be something with which man is faced, mere possibilities existing somewhere outside him. Man's downfall and
misfortune consisted in his reaching within and becoming obsessed with them, so to speak, as they became real, at the moment when he

went over from the

one.

individual, natural state to the social, historical

But this reaching within and becoming obsessed in no way alters the fact that man is fundamentally, essentially and naturally good, and has remained so. It is certainly true that his natural goodness
does not prevent

him from becoming

less

good. But even while he

is

deteriorating his natural goodness remains. In common with the whole of the eighteenth century Rousseau was a confirmed Pelagian, a
will:

declared opponent of the Church doctrine of original sin and no free man can in fact be wicked and is wicked times without number;

but he

is

never essentially wicked and need not be

so.

He may well do

IO6
evil

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

but he is not evil. The charge to be brought against man is relevant only in a certain connexion, namely to his existence in society, which brings with it all the evil possibilities we have mentioned. More
pre-

only to this connexion as such, or more particularly, to society as such. The charge is levelled against the community at large. When applied to the individual the charge loses its force and becomes a warning against the community at large. It does not apply to man himself, man as such. In him it encounters rather a natural
goodness, to which an appeal can be made. literally if we describe this transition from
society in Rousseau's sense, as

cisely, it is relevant

Thus it must not be taken

fall

neither sins

when he undergoes this

it.

man in nature to man in brought about by sin. His man transition, nor is he fallen when he

has undergone

merely changed in a regrettable way. He has merely acquired a new, lamentable characteristic while remaining substantially unchanged. He does evil, it is true, but he is still free to do good. Rousseau was so energetic in pursuing this idea, so naive in
taking

He has

it as his constant premise and in declaiming it, that he drew unwelcome attention to himself even in his own Pelagian century, and became a kind of martyr to Pelagianism, persecuted by a Roman Catholic and Protestant Church both of which, however they had both been on the slippery slope for some time themselves in this respect had little enough to show him either as an example or as a

Rousseau distinguished himself so much in this respect it might well seem to us that he, the great opponent of the optimism of his century, was the most optimistic of all its optimists. While he is challenging the customs, institutions, ideals and
defence.
particularly that

philosophical dicta of his time,

its

entire will for

form and

all its results

he yet
things.

is

all

himself,

who
is

the more consistently able to affirm his belief in man after all is the subject, the creator and master of all these
is able to construct so boldly, and to make such and thoroughly optimistic proposals in the fields of

That
politics

why he

ruthlessly logical

and education. It is true that the second-best possibilities to which he devoted himself here were different from the
best ones, but even his discussion of the second-best possibilities consistently conveys an underlying faith in man as one who is funda-

impossible

mentally good, to whom one need only appeal, who has only to be provided with the necessary scope, who has only to be freed as far as possible from the temptations and burdens of to see in
society,

him

appear

forthwith the natural miracle of virtue, even on his present plane in the midst of society as it actually is.

ROUSSEAU
The
tension which
is

107

peculiar to Rousseau's teaching, in virtue of

between two dimensions, consists only however of the man himself, between the possibility and its particular realization at any time, between man as he is in his heart or hearts and his actual inner life, between what is truly human and man as he is in practice. It was this distinction which Rousseau discovered, and with it the great problem of critical idealism as it was
his distinction

difference, native to

later seen

hand with

and developed by Kant, less passionately, but on the other far greater precision and insight. And Rousseau's teaching

teaching recognizes
teaching none the

operates with the tension designated by this distinction. But since his this distinction only in man himself, since man's

is not affected by it, the end-effect of his and we shall have to say the same of Kant later is less like an augmented and heightened triumph of man, or triumph of man's capacities, which to this extent makes it a solemn repetition and confirmation of the great eighteenth-century thesis.

capacity for doing good

Rousseau believed that in politics we can count upon the volonte gdnlrale of which he speaks being actually present and active in the consciousness of the individual citizen.

He

completed

his education, will actually

have become

believed that his Emile, 'having his own educator.

He
can

believed that a conflict such as he described in the Nouvelle Helozse really be solved in the manner he suggests. Why does he believe

and

that all these things are possible? Because his citizen, his Emile, his pair of lovers, St Preux and Julie, are
beings,

human

even in the
is

status

corruptionis>

fundamentally good simply because the

corruption of this state

only relative corruption.

Rousseau expressed all this in its plainest and most comprehensible form in his autobiographical works. He was in no doubt about his faults and bad habits, and the candour with which he confessed them
really leaves nothing to
self

be desired. He made no bones of accusing himof extreme weakness where his inclinations were concerned, of a

laziness to

which he again and again succumbed, of frivolity, and even of downright viciousness. As an old man he was still in all seriousness concerned about an act of meanness he had committed in his youth. 1 If it were really the recognition and confession of sin in concrete form

which was

all-important, then we should have to grant that his are a perfect model. But the other side to the matter is that Confessions at the same time as he was confessing his sins, Rousseau,

scarcely

ever neglected to point out to us that in the midst of and in spite of everything he had a good heart, to enumerate and vaunt the excellent
1 Rfa. jme. promenade, Basle ecL,

Vol. 20, pp. 219, 232.

IO8

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

qualities of his true character, the qualities of his inner nature which people did not understand, to emphasize the good intentions which had

been behind nearly everything he had done, and either to present

failings as

his

merely negative aspects of his virtues (e.g. his indolence as a manifestation of his great love of freedom, which would have him
act always only in response to his very own most deeply personal impulses) or to trace them as regrettable reactions to even more regrettable behaviour prevalent in the world about him. It is scarcely possible to find in these confessions an example of a truly undialectical

piece of self-accusation, apart from the

just mentioned.

memory of his youth we have Another exception may be the fact that he did not tell Madame de Warens the whole truth about his faithfulness to her, at a 1 meeting with her in later years. On the other hand it is quite possible to find more than one passage where he declares that it was always his 2 pride that his misfortune had been undeserved. And there is more than one passage where he quite openly declares that by and large, all his faults, etc., considered, he could not help considering himself the best of all men. 3 Bearing all this in mind, is it not perhaps possible

after all to interpret his delusion, his persecution mania, as expressing the only too complete correspondence of his spirit with the spirit of his age? Be that as it may, the church doctrine of original sin has

force

seldom, I believe, been denied with such disconcerting candour and and in so directly personal a way. The secret that man is good, blurted out so expansively and with such assurance, was bound to appear suspicious even to the many just men of the time who by and

large were as hard-boiled as Rousseau himself. But the people who became angry with him in that respect branded themselves by the

very fact of their anger as backward, as lacking in understanding of their own time. Anyone who was moving with the times was bound to be thankful to Rousseau, and was thankful to him because he had
finally said the last

momentum and
after all.

word, because he had so ruthlessly lent such language to that which they all felt and wanted

Seen from this aspect Rousseau, in the constructions of his main works was not so much a critic and reformer of his time as its leader, its most eloquent tongue, its most perfect culmination. And in so far as the whole new age which made its appearance with him would follow

him in this, would not get beyond the distinction between man in his heart of hearts and his actual inner life, between human possibility
1

Conf. Basle ed. s Vol. ai, p. 198. Conf. 22, 74; Rev. 20, 265.

on/. 21,

252.

ROUSSEAU
and
rag to
actuality, in so far as the doctrine of original sin it too, in so far as it too would believe that
it

would be

as a red

believe

perhaps in a

way which was

still

far

good, and more comprehensive, far

is

man

more logical and far more suited to genius; thus far this new age too would only be a culmination of the old one in spite of all the break with what had gone before. Is there any difference between Rousseau's Confessions and Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit except that in Goethe all the opposition of good and evil, which in Rousseau still seems to be
indicating something like two worlds,
is

dissolved into the progression

of a single development which is both inwardly and outwardly not accidental but necessary, so that all the self-justification which still
rings through so naively in

Rousseau can disappear in Goethe, to be is almost, but not quite, selfsatisfied ? Is there any difference except that the same good man who in Rousseau was seeking himself has in Goethe joyfully found himself? It is the fact that this seeking and finding should become a problem at all which is the new thing distinguishing the age of Goethe from the eighteenth century. For the eighteenth century, rejoicing in its command of all things, had not asked after this, after man himself, for all the importance man had assumed for it. But did the new quality of the age of Goethe signify anything except that man's command was now regarded as much wider: as including man's command over himself? Within this new element Rousseau's Pelagianism would then be to Goethe's as promise is to fulfilment. And we could then certainly interpret this new spirit as a whole as that of the eighteenth century reborn, and for the first time assuming classic stature, risen like the phoenix from the ashes. But we would be failing to understand Rousseau's or Goethe's Pelagianism if we simply ascribed it, as theologians have so often done, to a lightness of conscience, and therefore judged it, so to speak, as a moral deficiency. The decisive factor we must take into account in considering Rousseau's belief in the goodness of man, held with a firmness astonishing even to such a time as his, and the wholehearted support for this view which the age of Goethe then lent him all along, is the fact that this new age, and Rousseau as one of the first within it, had made a completely new discovery in the realm of anthropology, and that it was this same discovery which underlay its contention that man was good, its rejection of the dogma of original sin, and such selfreplaced by a self-representation which

but which

appreciations as those of Rousseau, so moving to us now in their naivete'; also underlay Goethe's glorified vision of his own existence

and development. From

this fact it follows also that

what we might

110
call

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

optimism of the new age was not only incomparably more powerbut ful, essentially different from what might strike us as being optimism in those belonging to the age which was then drawing to its close.
natural goodness of man which Rousseau claimed exists is definitely not in any simple or direct sense that which we are in the habit of

The

moral goodness, freedom from evil impulses, freedom from kinds of temptation, and freedom to respect the feelings of our fellow-men. And hence his self-praise is not in any simple or direct sense moral self-praise. The goodness of which he speaks is of course
calling
all

moral goodness too Rousseau imagined that he was good-hearted truly and particularly also in this respect. But his kind of goodness was not primarily moral goodness. If Rousseau believed that his heart was good he did so because he imagined that in the midst of a society whose whole striving and interest were directed outwards, he had discovered quite
:

anew that man has a heart, and what the human heart actually is. The

man himself, discounting everything he produces or which confronts him as an alien existence or as the work of alien hands. This is what Rousseau has found: himself. And this is what he holds to be good and even precious: the fact that he exists and does not notexist, precisely as the man he is, situated precisely as he is in fact situated. A whole world revealed itself to him when he gazed into himself. He did not do this in the manner of the individualism of his time, which looked within in order to go out again at once into the outside world, desiring to apprehend, form and conquer. Rousseau intended to linger there because he had recognized that in it he possessed his own unique world full of unique forms of truth and beauty. Existence was not just a predicate, not entirely a matter of how I conduct myself towards the outerworld. It was definitely not just acting and suffering. Existence was a beautiful, rich and lively inner life of its own, so beautiful, rich and lively that anyone who has once discovered it no longer attributes any worth to any life which differs from it, and can only have and love anything different from it as it is connected with this life; but he really could have and love it now in
heart is simply the
this connexion. Existence was, so to speak, the realm of the middle, the mean. It was the paradise of the happy and at the same time the secure haven of the unhappy. It was the dependable norm for all the distinctions and choices that are necessary in life, and a norm which functioned as it were automatically. Man existing, being himself as Rousseau more than once said, was in God's presence and like him. If a state exists where the soul can find a secure place which can contain it whole, a place secure enough that it can find complete rest in it and can

ROUSSEAU
collect

III

again the forces of its being in

it,

without needing to recall the

past, nor encroach upon the future, a place where time is as nothing to the soul and the present lasts for ever, without making its duration

noticeable and without leaving any after-effects, a place where the soul is without any other feeling, be it privation or pleasure, joy or
pain, fear or desire, except for that of existence, if there is such a state and if this feeling can fill the soul utterly, while it lasts he who is
It would not be an imperfect, poor found in the pleasures of life, but a happiness which is sufficient, perfect and full, leaving no void in the soul which the soul experiences the need to fill. Such is the state in which I often found myself on St Peter's Island during my solitary day-

enjoying

it

can

call

himself happy.

and

relative happiness, like that

dreams, sitting sometimes in my boat, which I simply let drift as the waters took it, or sitting sometimes on the shore of the troubled lake, or
beside a river

murmuring over the pebbles. What does one enjoy in moment? One enjoys nothing exterior to oneself, nothing except oneself and one's own existence; while it lasts one is self-sufficient, like God. The feeling of existing stripped of all other emotions is in itself a
such a
precious feeling of peace and security, which would alone be quite enough to make one's existence sweet and dear. 1
discovered, and it was unlike the outside world, in himself, or rather discovered it as himself, and found it good, once again unlike the outside world, that he says that man is good naturally, in and in spite of all
is

This then

the

new world which Rousseau

it,

because he discovered

which Rousseau so often pointed out as the true source and eternal law of human life, is very simply man himself, as distinct from man as he is in his circumstances, as he is in his works, as he is determined by other people. That is why at the end of his life Rousseau is able to speak thankfully even of the hard fate which befell him in the shape of the persecution he imagined was being meted out to him. It was this fate, he said, which in sundering him violently from the outside world, had forced him to withdraw into himself still more in2 tensively and now even more than ever before. On St Peter's Island he even felt able to wish he were prisoner, 3 indeed it seemed to him that a stay in the Bastille, in a dungeon where there were no objects to
things. Nature,

catch the eye, might not be at all unpleasant. 4 But this renunciation of things external particularly, must be interpreted<asvery dialectic in intention, if we wish to gain a true picture .of the realm of anthropology as discovered by Rousseau. Terms like subjectivism and solipsism would describe badly what Rousseau means.
1 Rev. 20, 255f. *

Rfo t 20j 203

RJV%

20j 346.

* Rfo. 20, 257.

112

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

He was, as we saw in the confession just quoted, not in a dungeon at all,

but surrounded by the delights of nature, and he knows and admits that in effect he cannot do without this partner, the object, at least in this form. No, even the most insignificant object has the power to rouse his imagination and thereby to move him to the depths of his being (Conf. 19, 158). He calls himself une dme expansive, a soul which simply
will

influence other beings by its feelings and existence. 1 He actually goes so far as to say that it was only in withdrawing into himself and precisely thereby that he first learned to appreciate and

and must

absorb external Nature, which previously he had allowed to affect him only in its entirety, in its concrete form, in the diversity of its scents, colours and forms. 2 That is why in old age he took up his botanical studies again after he had for a time given them up because he had tired of

them.

He

started right
all his

from the beginning again long

all his

after

he had

given away

books. 3 It was, to be sure, only botany he took up again. He rejected with horror the suggestion that he should engage also in mineralogy or zoology, explaining that
herbaria and sold

man can approach the study of earth and animals only in such an unpleasant way that this was in itselfproofenough that in these sciences man was much too far removed from the will of nature, and therefore from
was only the plant world, he said, which had any immediate man as he truly is. But it is by no means his desire to practise botany systematically and still less with any practical end in view; he just wants to indulge in it as a quietly loving friend of the trees, flowers and grasses, to rejoice without any desire or object in nature's system, of which man cannot become the master because he at once feels himself identical with it, with the whole of Nature, accordingly as he gazes and accordingly as he directly absorbs its reality. To
himself. It

contact with

the very attentive, very loyal observer the actual contours of the various single things out there which only just now had been concrete merge

one another again. They cease for him to be single things. Nature becomes a whole again, and man cannot help but feel himself at one with the whole. Thus the single object makes an appearance certainly, but only to disappear again. 4 It is thus that Rousseau can still say that he feels as if he were brtilant d' amour sans objet. 5 He yearns for a kind of
into

happiness sans ensavoir demSlerl'objet.* He thinks itis again the limitation imposed upon him to the feelings of his own heart which alone enables

him to taste the sweetness ofexistence 7 and believes he can draw nourishment from his personal substance whichseems to him inexhaustible. 8 M'y
1
5

R&. 20, 287. Conf. 20, 75.

20, 28of.

*RSv. 20, 201.

20, 277f. 7 20, 300.

20, 257, 281, 287. 8 20, 302.

ROUSSEAU
voild tranquille

113
infortunj, mats impassible

comme
It

Dim

au fond de Vabyme^ pauvre mortel meme. 1

certainly not be right to play off the one group of these remarks about the object against the other. Rousseau needs and does not need the object, he affirms the object and denies it. Both attitudes

would

are equally essential to the 'ecstasy' of his sense of existing. It is a question with this sense of existing of there being a complete cycle,, which

must on principle be uninterrupted. It is this very cycle from the ego to the object and back again, in which, however, the ego gives to the motion its direction, force and measure, which forms the life of the inner world discovered by Rousseau. We must surely call it ultimately

an inner world, an anthropological province: that province in which man, before he takes up any attitude to anything, and before he knows and acts, is immediately aware both of himself and of his relation to an outer world, in such a manner that he is just as able to absorb the second awareness, that of the object, in the awareness of self, as he is
to allow the awareness of the object to proceed from the awareness of self in the first place. He is capable here, in his heart, in his sense of
existing, of being non-identical

with the outside world, and yet again

is

identical with

it.

It is

because the world Rousseau discovered

the

world of this human capacity that we must ultimately call it an inner world, an anthropological province. It is usual in the history of literature and ideas to find this circumstance expressed by means of the assertion that Rousseau, and the age of Goethe which followed him, had looked beyond knowledge and action and discovered their common source, feeling, which they also considered to be the true central organ of the human roind. But he must realize that by Teeling' is meant the capacity to project consciously, the capacity to assume this dialectical relationship with the outside world, with the object. While feeling, man enjoys himself passively, and rejoices even in an existence which, while different from his own, is yet in contact with it. But in feeling he also has the desire to extend his own existence to include this other existence, and it is thus especially when he is feeling that man becomes and remains truly himself. There is absolutely no question of his perhaps allowing the objects to approach him indiscriminately, allowing himself to be affected and dominated by them without restraint. Nor certainly will he allow himself to fall into that kind of activist individualism, in which man attempts to become the master of the object. With feeling and it is this which makes for the intoxicating grandeur of the human capacity which has
.

20, 176.

114

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

been discovered here, and for the mature wisdom of him who is aware ofit it is always a question ofthe superior freedom inherent in being able to make contact with objects and yet being able to part from them again, to be separate from them and yet able to make contact with them again and again. The man who is feeling has respect for the object, does not, that is, attempt to interfere with it in its quality as an object. He does not allow it to approach too near, and keeps his distance from it in his
turn.

nothing but respect for his own existence, which the same feeling, the existence which may enrich experienced by itself from the object, but may not become submerged in it, and that

But

this respect is

is

why this respect cannot prevent man, in passing from the diastole to the systole, from completely equating the object with himself again. 'To tend nature in oneself, oneself in nature* as Goethe later put it,
is

signifies

the revolution of an eccentric wheel, in which the apparent distance of the periphery from the centre is all the more decisively transformed with the next half-turn into the closest proximity.

Goethe was destined to do more honour to the object than Rousseau, engaging not only in botany, but in mineralogy and zoology too, and many other kinds of natural science, without Rousseau's fear, seemingly so childish of offending nature

would

and thereby himself. Goethe once again bring historical man into the sphere of the objective world in which he showed interest, the sphere from which he had in the end completely vanished, with Rousseau at least. And Goethe would
also

listen to

what the world of objects has to say in a manner incomparably more composed, more earnest and more patient, would be incomparably more receptive and more cautious in the attempt to extend his

own

existence to include other beings. But for all that Goethe's world

would not be

different from the inner world discovered by Rousseau, the world containing the simultaneous capacity to take the object completely seriously and not take it seriously at all, the world contain-

ing a sovereignty beside which the achievement of the eighteenth century in mastering the object might well seem a lamentably halfhearted attempt, simply because it did not yet have this freedom. It is

only

when man

is

capable of controlling his capacity to influence

employing it, when he is in fact comme Dieu m$me, unaffected by the claims of the object upon him and unaffected by his feelings towards it, that he stands for the first time invested with a true power in the world of things. In this too Rousseau and Goethe were in accord, but whereas Rousseau seems like a novice, agitated, spasmodic and confused, Goethe was calm,
objects, capable of employing or of not
impassible

ROUSSEAU
superior,

115

composed and lucid. And yet there was a certain selective, reserved and chance quality about Rousseau's attitude to the object which is characteristic of Goethe too: there were certain in
things

mime, supreme refinement, preserving the formalities. And this is how and why he was occasionally free to overlook and forget the non-identity between it and himself. It is not that Goethe's simply in an awareness of
identity

nature even, let alone in history and in life, which Goethe also did not wish to see or know, because did not accord with his essential they being. He did not wish to offend nature either, if only so that nature should not offend him. He also moved through the world of things, not coyly like Rousseau, but impassible comme Dieu with a

secret consists;

there

it is of Rousseauhad been monists long before their lifetime; monism just as much as the dualism of spirit and nature is from the point of view of Rousseau and Goethe a stupidly one-sided view. Their secret is in

it is

just as little true of

Goethe

as

fact

a much greater one, consisting in the freedom to alternate between the awareness of identity and the awareness of non-identity, or in being able to experience both as a unity in their own spirit-nature.

There can be no doubt that Rousseau already knew about this spiritnature. There is already something of the great peace imparted by this Goethean concept in Rousseau's confusion. Thus what Rousseau referred to ambiguously and confusingly enough as 'nature is really spirit-nature. It was the one positive thing which threw him, as the only one with any knowledge of this matter, into his conflict with
3

his age:

twenty or thirty years later he would have been able to find a thousand people who shared his knowledge. He was referring to human spirit-nature when he said that man is good and therefore capable of the fantastic things we have justheard about. The eighteenth century did not understand itself for as long as it failed to understand

splendid, radiant and at the same time profound Pelagianism Rousseau was offering it. But to a great extent it understood itself and equally Rousseau much better than Rousseau himself imagined in his prophetic solitude. At the points where this happened the new age had

what a

already
all this

dawned in the middle of the old.

was to have upon the theological problem
as
it

We can now go on to state, in the briefest manner possible, what effect

existed at this
also

time. Rousseau's attack

upon the absolutism of his age could

i.e.

have

signified a protest against his age's peculiar absolutist,

moralizing,

intellectualizing, individualizing treatment of the Christian question,

and thus against the way theology had developed in his time. The opening up of this second dimension, which is so characteristic of his

Il6

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

thinking, could have signified the opening up of a new understanding of sin, grace, revelation and reconciliation. Rousseau opposed his time in a

revolutionary enough to make us wonder whether this solitary fighter and sufferer might not in the last assessment simply have been someone in whose ears the word 'God' rang in quite an

way

unprecedented way. Or are we wrong in being tempted to see in Rousseau, as he was when he made his first public appearance in Paris back in 1 749-50, one inspired by a touch of the hem of the mantle of the prophet Amos ? Not even the vision which called him was missing, nor persecution, nor the prophet's vicarious suffering. Even at the time of his madness everything had something of the quality of a call being
answered, of revelation, inspiration and the inescapable earnestness of the Divine. Even his contemporaries observed this very clearly and he

was not lacking in supporters who acknowledged reverently enthusiastically quite apart from the fact that this was his own that he had rediscovered and proclaimed once again the opinion
certainly

and

true Christianity. It is not for us either to confirm or deny that his was the true Christmust however establish that in the very way he understood ianity. Christianity he did not deviate from the typical thought of his time,

We

man who putting the famous neologand truly in the shade pursued this thought to its conclusion in a highly radical way. That was what was theologically new about Rousseau: the fact that he broke completely with the doctrine of original sin, which had long been under fire from all sides, and with the conception of revelation also generally threatened for a long time, as an event which was something apart from the inherent development of humanity. Rousseau took both, sin and grace, as being relative movements within human reality, movements in which man, naturally good and persisting in this state of natural goodness, remains assured
but here also he was merely the
ians of his time well

new gift to theology ultimately consists in very widening of the concept of reason by means of the discovery of man's spirit-nature, for which objectivity and non-objectivity, nonof his freedom. Rousseau's
this

identity

and

identity

become

reciprocal

and interchangeable

ideas.

theological significance of this discovery was nothing less than the settlement of the conflict between reason and revelation, since by it

The

man was encouraged to look upon himself alternately now as reason and now as revelation. For this it was not first necessary that the word
'God' should take on a new sound. It was enough that the word *Man' had now for the first time acquired its full, whole tone. Far from contradicting the theological absolutism of its time, Rousseau's

ROUSSEAU
doctrine was
last

117
that this theology should at

meant

to convey a
also

demand

understand

itself rightly, i.e. truly

understand

man

as

one who

in his true
times. This

humanity can

command

the true God.

Eighteenth-century theology was always thirty years behind the was borne out also in the case of Rousseau. It accounts for the grotesque fact that Rousseau was martyred by an 'orthodoxy' not
it seemed to him and to his other secular contempmust not allow ourselves to be blinded by this spectacle into not realizing that Rousseau did not actually oppose the theology of his time, but only rushed on far ahead of it. He himself prophesied that the theology of his Vicar of Savoy would rise again to a great future. From what we know of the development of the theology of the schools at that time no gift of prophecy was necessary to predict this

half so sinister as
oraries.

We

fact.

The theology
still

doctrine,

of the Vicar of Savoy was, of course, like Rousseau's capable of being enriched, deepened and improved in

many ways. Simply in the form he first gave it it did not win through. But taking it as it then was we can say in advance that it was indeed
bound
to have a great future. It is from Rousseau onwards and originating from Rousseau that the thing called theological rationalism, in the full sense of the term, exists: a theology for which the Christian
spirit is identical

with the truly humane spirit, as it is inalienably and tangibly present to us in that depth of the ratio in that inmost anthropological province. Such is the significance of Rousseau for the history
but of Rousseau only as the first harbinger of the age of Goethe: he represented the invitation extended to theology to join forces in determined fashion with this determined rationalism.
of theology

Ill

LESSING
THE two things we had to say as a preliminary to discussing Rousseau
we must
emphasize of Lessing: he was on the one hand a perfect man of the eighteenth century and on the other a complete stranger to his age. There are none of the century's peculiarities of interest and desire which we cannot find again in Lessing. So far as theology especially is concerned, we find, just as with Rousalso

and perfecting

which are rather forcibly drawn, and insights and attempts "at expression which are terminated abruptly, and hang in the air, as it were, just waiting for some completely wise, completely free-minded person to pronounce and formulate them, to rank henceseau, only conclusions

forth as definite achievements in the history of

human thought. The of the will for form with its unconditional philosophy Enlightenment, in morality, and resulting respect for the all-embracing power of
natural logic,
its

unquestioning acceptance of the 'view of

life

built

up on

this logic

and on natural experience, Lessing

effortlessly

under-

stood and was able to take as his standpoint without the slightest difficulty, as a self-evident point of departure for every advance.
It was right to draw a parallel between the character and achievement of Lessing, and that of Frederick the Great. No one, in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century, at any rate, afforded so

an example of the spirit of the age as these two men. But whilst Lessing represented this age in its most mature form, he also left it behind him. The course of his life, subject to frequent change, outwardly so unrewarding, so often beset by disaster, and no less violent in its way than Rousseau's, already shows that fundamentally he also could not find himself within the limitations imposed by the order, the customs and possibilities of his time. His dealings
classic

with Frederick the Great, for instance, in great contrast to what they could and should have been ran their course in the form of a fundamental mutual misunderstanding: Lessing, like so many of his younger
contemporaries, honoured and celebrated a fictional, Frederick, not the real one as he lived and had his being at

mythical

Potsdam ;

LESSING
and thus
it

Iig

was inevitable that in

his turn the real Frederick should

be

completely unable to recognize flesh of his flesh and spirit of his spirit in Lessing. While Lessing was still a young man he had quarrelled with the great Voltaire (we remember Rousseau's relations with the

same person) and in later years, in spite of all he undoubtedly owed him a critic, he became objectively his most bitter opponent. He likewise became the opponent of his of the compatriot Gottsched, in
as
spite fact that the aims they were striving for were related. In theology he came to oppose not only people like Goeze and the orthodox church-

only because their radicalism interested him from the standpoint of method, and supported them only to reject them eventually dialectically, just as he abandoned the position of the apologists who opposed Reimarus. And even though he did to the last remain the friend of the last
great

men, but Semler, and those who shared Sender's neological views; further he lent his support to the achievements of Reimarus

support harmlessly theistic interpretation of Spinoza against Heinrich Friedrich Jacobi. With or without Spinoza, Lessing had certainly long been on the road which led to Goethe, to in an at rate
interpreting God,

Enlightenment philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn of Berlin, it is nevertheless more than likely that Mendelssohn was fundamentally mistaken in thinking he could command of his own Lessing's services in

any

cosm and macrocosm, Lessing in

their

microalthough he was everywhere aligned with the front rank of his contemporaries, and functioned as
fact,

quite untheistic

way

as the

immanent

principle of the

human

play tendencies to which this fact gives rise. In recent years more than one commentator has appraised Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) as a specifically masculine genius. There
is

We

most eloquent and respected spokesman, had likewise broken at away every point from the positions they characteristically occupied. must also understand him in relation to the of the dialectic of

we

certainly something illuminating about this remark, especially when read Lessing after Rousseau. The two have in common the

discovery of the second dimension we were talking about, the discovery

desire. Lessing

of human existence as such, as distinct from what man can know and was more of a scholar than Rousseau. He was, like

Rousseau, a moralist. Moreover he had, like Rousseau, the knowledge of something beyond science and morals. He spoke of the heart and of feelings less often and with less emphasis than Rousseau, but he, too, did refer to them, especially at decisive points. The sober did
Lessing not advance to that revolution of the heart against science and morals which Rousseau so stormily implemented; therefore he did not come to

I2O

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

the self-analytical reveries and constructions, nor, for the same reason, to the educational and political ones, which are so characteristic of

Rousseau. Coming from Rousseau to Lessing

is like

emerging from the

twilight into a clear daylight, almost painful in its intensity. But the knowledge of that inner place of existence and of its significance as the source

of the whole, the enjoyment of freedom in one's relation to the outside world which springs from this knowledge; these things are also
typical of Lessing.

For him,

too, the ultimate reality

is

this free, stirring

communion of the ego with the object,

retains and regains the mastery. But which typifies Rousseau consists in a withdrawal from without to within from the object to the ego, Lessing rejoices in this same freedom as the freedom to make contact, the freedom to act. Whereas Rousseau above all always seems to be wanting to draw back from the thing facing him, Lessing rather seemed as if he were constantly wanting to seek it out, without mistaking the tension to which this attitude gives rise, and

in which, however, the ego ever whereas the use of this freedom

without relapsing into the naive individualism of his older contemporaries. Rousseau was the lyric poet, and Lessing the dramatist. This is what might perhaps be meant by the reference to his 'masculinity'. But common to both Rousseau and Lessing was the standpoint of a wider, deeper rationalism, a rationalism deepened in the direction

own

of an independent and permanently independent awareness of one's existence. It was the same new feeling for life which in the midst

which

of the eighteenth century triumphed both in Rousseau's revulsion, easily affects us as being childish, and in the maturely tragic
quality of Lessing's life. It is thus not merely by chance that

it was the drama and the theory drama which outwardly formed the peak of Lessing's life achievement. The drama was for him the highest genre of the poetic art, and therefore of art in general, because, as he intended to show in the con-

of the

tinuation of his Laocoon which he never wrote, 'all art should strive to be a direct representation of nature, and poetry, which can depict

and represent only indirectly, only by means of words, rises solely in drama to a true modelling or imitation of life, to developing actions, and to effective speeches, feelings and passions'. 1 What interested Lessing so much about the drama in particular was therefore (as he taught in opposition to the French classical dramatists and together with Sophocles and Shakespeare) that it is to be defined as the poetic representation of an action, whose parts should be formed by their presentation into a unity in such a way that they are bound to appear
the
1

Scherer-Walzel, p. 353.

LESSING
the nature of the
therefore, that

121

alone and in their relation to one another as a necessary expression of human characters taking part; in such a manner,

what

is

actually presented

is

the inner

life

of these

which must evoke in the spectator feelings of sympathy and of compassion, and compel him to the admission that in the same situation, and at the same stage of such a passion, he would have been bound to act in exactly the same way. Lessing thought that the drama should not arouse mere wonder at this or that sad or merry event, and that it should not therefore present such events to men at all as events but as revelations, and by this method of presencharacters, the sight of

tation evoke feelings of sympathy in others, that is, make these others participate in the action which was being presented. For this reason Lessing gave to his own dramas that proximity of the subject to life,

that firmness in the construction and execution of his plots, that pregnant quality in the dialogue, which made his contemporaries sense
that there was something quite new about them. This was an art which suddenly dared to take as its real object the nature of man himself, which is subject to so many varied influences, as it is seen in the unfolding of human actions. In this conception of art we have before us at the same time the deepest meaning of Lessing's conception of life: his particular problem and theme was man, but man in action, or to

the other way, action, but action always as human action. we can very well transfer our gaze directly to Lessing's contribution to the history of Protestant theology, which is of especial

put

it

At

this point

interest to us.

The son of a pastor in Saxony, he played a part in theology both in his youth and when he was older. It was not only an incidental one but fraught with such passion and with such an extensive
knowledge of the subject that it is very much open to question whether was not here, rather than in the field of art and the theory of art that his true central interest lay. In the last ten years of his life at any rate
theological matters claimed his attention, outwardly as well, as nothing else did. have in our possession a whole series of very characteristic

it

We

and fragments on church history and the philosophy of religion which he wrote when he was still quite young. The decisive step it has perhaps rather exaggeratedly been called *one of the most important events in the history of the Protestant church and theology' 1 came in the years 1774-8. Lessing published a series of fragments which he alleged he had found among the shelves of the Wolfenbiittel library, of which he was in charge, from the Apologie oder Schutzschriftfur die vernunftiessays

gen Verehrer Gottes (Apology or defence for the reasonable worshippers of

i

Scherer-W., p. 357.

122
3

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

God) written in 1767 by Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Professor of Oriental Languages in Hamburg, who was born in 1694 an<^ died in 1768. He was probably given this manuscript, which its author did not intend to have published,, by the dead man's sister, Elise Reimarus, a gifted woman who also numbered Mendelssohn and Jacobi among her friends. The fragments published by Lessing developed in an intensity which until then, in Germany at least, had been absent from public discussion of the matter, a fundamental denial of the necessity and possibility of all revelation and especially of the biblical Christian
revelation

when

seen against the background of the implemented con-

ception of a purely natural religion, a religion, that is, representing a universal, timelessly valid human possibility, such as forms the basis of

every historical, positive and allegedly revealed religion and which is more or less decayed in all of them and to which, therefore, a reasonable worship of God must now go back whatever its present position

may

be. It

was

essentially the

same reduction which we know from

Rousseau's confession of the Vicar of Savoy, written a short time before.

Lessing provided this publication with a continuous commentary in which, as its title, Contrasts, states, he expressed his material denial of much that Reimarus presented, but also his partial agreement with it,

and above all his belief that the problem which Reimarus had raised was highly important from a fundamental and methodological point of view. The violent polemical repercussions which the publication
immediately called forth provided him with a favourable opportunity, in the famous series of polemics in which he gave his further views on the subject, Uber dm Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft (Concerning the
spirit and the power), Das Testament Johannis (St John's Gospel), Sine Duplik (A Rejoinder), Eine Parabel (A Parable), Axiomata, Anti-Goeze, etc., of engaging less in a defence of Reimarus than in an

proof of the

attack

upon and exposure of Reimarus' opponents.

It

was the

censor's

Brunswick which put a stop to the continuation of the fragments and to the further development of the dispute in 1778. This could not, however, prevent Lessing in 1779 from giving classic expression, in Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), his most mature dramatic work, to his notions concerning the relationship between
office at

natural and positive religion which had matured in the course of the struggle he had been engaged in. The series of theses, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race), published in

1780, which belong with Nathan, are a last systematic exposition of the same ideas. Their genuineness as Lessing's work is in

dispute. Their content, however, coincides so exactly with the views

LESSING

123

Lessing expressed elsewhere that the question as to whether and to what extent he perhaps allowed someone else to speak as a witness, as he in fact loved to do, is for all practical purposes an idle one-. (It is considered
that his collaborator was most likely the

young farmer Albrecht

Thaer.)
If we wish to understand Lessing's aims as a theologian we must proceed from the fact that every one of the positions of the theological

neologians of that time, up to and including the thoroughgoing neologism of a man like Reimarus, which tended to turn into rationalism, were also contained and preserved in Lessing's own position. His early
theological works testify that here he had his origins. But Nathan and the Education still show this very plainly. It would be possible to put a

upon Lessing's theology which would show him to have been simply a particularly bold and advanced but ultimately typical neologian. Lessing was one when already in his younger days he was of the opinion that the Christian religion was not something 'that should be taken on trust and belief from one's parents'. 1
construction

man like you does not Stay in the station birth by chance Accords him: or if he stays, he stays From choice, by reason of his insight 2
is still

Just as Lessing in 1751 already thought

the view expressed by Saladin to Nathan (Act III, Scene 5). e it a great thing to think for
c

oneself and challenge accepted prejudice', to convince oneself of one's belief, and indeed by the method of a comparative testing of the

various religions in the form of a religious discussion, the form in which, twenty-five years later, he actually presented it in Nathan* so in 1 760

he exhorted himself with the words: l say to myself, submit to this investigation like an honest man! Look everywhere with your own
eyes! Distort nothing! Embellish nothing! Let your conclusions flow as they will! Do not impede, do not attempt to guide their course!' 4

and

so in 1778

still

he declares

it

his

duty to

test

with his

own

eyes,

quid liquidum

sit in

causa Christianorum.*

We hear the typical moralistic

eighteenth century in the
e

young

refrain of the entire theology of the Lessing's angry growl at the supposed

believer,

who

has memorized and

quoted from:

who

utters, often

without undergoes to church

standing them, the principles of Christian doctrine,

1 Letter to his father, 1749,
I, p. 8.

who

Lessing's Theokgische Schriften, ed.

Q Gross,

2
3

original, see Appendix, p. 400. Theologische Schriftm> I, 25.33 (Theological Writings). Ibid., I, 222. 5 Ibid., IV, 1 66.

For

124

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

and takes part in every ceremony because it is customary*, at that 'majority of people' who show by their 'comportment' 'what proper Christians they are'. 1 And we hear this refrain again when Nathan
(Act
I, 2)

breaks into the famous words:

That

it's

But do you comprehend far easier to be in ecstasies

feeblest

Than to act well? How willingly the Welcome ecstasy, but to escape And be they of their object unaware The task of being virtuous in life? 2

We
of the

hear the well-known neological rejection and re-interpretation 3 dogma of original sin in hearing that its truth consists in the

fact that

man at the first and lowest stage of his humanity was simply not sufficiently master of his actions to be able to act in accordance with moral laws, or in hearing 4 of original sin that it consists in the
power of our sensual desires, our dark imagination over all knowledge be it ever so clear', a power which we have it in us' to weaken and which we can even use just as much for the doing of good
'superior
e e

doing of evil'. The characters in Nathan are thus accordingly the (with exception perhaps of the odious patriarch) all splendid, lovable people, 6 well able to take comfort even after their less glorious
as for the

deeds:

Why should
For
is it

be ashamed of a mistake?

not

my firm resolve to right it? 6

For the same reason the truth of the doctrine of the atonement through the Son of God is therefore held to consist simply in God's giving moral laws to man, in spite of man's original incapacity for them, out of consideration for his Son; but this, according to Lessing,

means out of consideration for his own perfection, the perfection which annuls individual man's imperfection, and thus in his not excluding man from the prospect of moral blessedness. For the doctrine of justification

by

faith Lessing

can altogether find only the angrily derisive

cry: to faith 'you give the keys of heaven and hell, and sufficient good fortune to make for virtue, so that by the skin of your teeth you can

make virtue into some sort of companion to faith With you the worship
!

of sacred chimeras makes blessed without righteousness, but not 7 righteousness without the worship. What a delusion!'
For original, see Appendix, p. 401. (Education of the Human Race), para. 74. * In the Theologische Schnften (Theological Writings), II, 265^ 6 6 Scherer-W., p. 363. Nathan, V, 5; cf. Appendix, p. 401.
3 7

1 Letters to his father^ 1749, I, 8. In the Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts

Theokgical Writings,

I, 39!".

LESSING

125

Ghristology to go with this has as its main tenet the affirmation of a 'Religion of Christ' most clearly and plainly contained in the

The

Gospels

knew and

'The religion of Christ is the religion which Christ himself practised as a man; which every man can have in common

with him; which every man must wish more and more to have in common with him, the more sublime and lovable he conceives the character of Christ as a mere human being to have been.' The Christian
c

religion

on the other hand, is something quite different, consisting , essentially in the acceptance of the belief that Christ was more than a

mere human

being. It is inconceivable, says Lessing in this fragment, that anyone could hold these two religions simultaneously. 1 Also most genuinely in the style of the eighteenth century, having become typical since Gottfried Arnold, are the young Lessing's ventures

upon

all sorts

of 'saving' actions,

i.e.

his defence of certain historical

figures

which the writers of official Protestant church history were alleged to have treated badly: the Renaissance philosopher Cardanus,
Cochleus, the

Roman Catholic writer of polemics,

who embraced

the anti-Trinitarian

Adam

Neuser,

the Islamic faith in the second half of

the sixteenth century, and other similar figures. In a piece of 1 750, about the Moravian brethren, which he unfortunately only managed to begin, Lessing glowingly compared this community with Socrates,
as opposed to his pupils Plato and Aristotle, who had already fallen short of the simplicity of their master; with Descartes, as opposed to Newton and Leibnitz, philosophers who simply filled the head but left

the heart empty, with the 'simple, light and lively religion of Adam as opposed to the religion ofJudaism, with the Christianity of Christ and of the
first

century as opposed to that of the Middle Ages, with the be-

ginning of the Reformation as opposed to everything which had followed the dispute about the Eucharist', 2 And the historical phenomena which
traditional church history usually accords a positive value, he treats with sound neological scepticism and malice in just the opposite manner.

When was
It pleased

not

all

ear as often as

The

story of heroes of your faith? Have I not ever Gladly paid their deeds the constant tribute Of my wonder, their sufferings the tribute

you to recount the

Of my
I

tears? Their faith, I must confess, never found their most heroic part 3
as

we hear Nathan's ward Recha, who,

1

in two faiths, saying to Daja, her nurse.

8

we know, has been brought up And the young Lessing does not
Ibid., I, 204^ Appendix, p. 401.

Nathan, III,

Theological Writings, IV, 248f. i. For original, see

126

IROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

shrink from stating that he has noticed that amongst the much praised early Christian heroes there had been some who deserved the name of
fools or

madmen

rather than that of martyrs and he makes no secret

of his belief that a bee in somebody's bonnet can achieve as much as the truth in all its glory. 1 Concerning the persecutions of the early Christians he remarks that they were never so general or official as they have
often been represented and, moreover, he thinks he is right to ask whether the Christians were really quite without blame in the matter. Did

they not deserve to be punished for their nocturnal gatherings, which gave offence and were after all forbidden in Rome ? 'Since their religion

running to

demand such meetings, why were they always meet each other? Why these night-gatherings of whole hordes of people of every age and sex? They were bound to be suspect to any good police force.' And their love-feasts! 'What was the point of
did not in the least

these sacred revels?' 2 And then again, in his Rettung des Cochleus (Deliverance of Cochleus) in 1754 Lessing makes it quite apparent that in
his

opinion the sixteenth-century Reformation too, for all the infinite good it may have done, rests historically on a 'monks' quarrel', the one between the Augustinian and the Dominican orders. 3 Relevant
here
is

caricature

the caricature of the Patriarch in Nathan, and also the other on which it is based, that of his enemy Melchior Goeze,

figure
.

which in

Lessing's polemics belongs as

much

to fiction as to

truth.

But behind this criticism of dogma and of church history there stands,
however, a criticism of the concept of revelation as such no less definitely than with a man like Reimarus. Lessing holds that man's only duty
that can in any real sense
religion', i.e. to recognize

him, and to

be called a duty, is to practise 'natural God, to form only the noblest conceptions of bear these in mind in all his thoughts and deeds. It then

became necessary, purely sociologically, 'conventionally', for people within this one natural religion to come to some agreement concerning certain things and concepts, and to attribute to the concepts and things
thus singled out the same force and necessity which the naturally perceived religious truths had of themselves. 'From the' religion of nature

a positive religion had to be constructed, just as a positive law had been made out of the natural one.' 'This positive religion acquired its
sanction by the respect accorded to its founder, who alleged that the conventional element in this religion came just as certainly from God,

only indirectly through himself, as its essentials came directly through the reasoning powers in each one of us.' The inner truth of a positive
1

Theological Writings, I, 35.

ibid., I, 23 if.

ibid.,

I,

8af.

LESSING
religion as such cannot consist of anything but
bility.
its

137

'All positive
9

and revealed

practical indispensareligions are thus equally true and

equally false

equally true to the extent that an agreement concerning

everywhere necessary, and equally false as far as every such convention signified a weakening and suppression of the essentials. 'The best positive or revealed religion is the one containing the fewest conventional additions to natural religion and least limits the good effects of natural religion.' 1 His tone in 1760 is much more malicious still, and reminiscent of the Voltairean style in religious criticism: This is the real artifice of a founder of a religion. He must not say: "Corne, I want to teach you a new religion!" Such a speech evokes dread in his audience. He begins

non-essentials

was

by instilling scruples against the accepted religion, and instilling them in confidence, like a man who has his friend's welfare at heart. This rise to assertions.

The

cavilling gives assertions give rise to voluntary dissociations, first in trifles

and

then ultimately embracing the whole. The religious founder's most difficult task is to procure his first dozen followers, really blind, obedient, enthusiastic followers. But once he has them, his work
to

go

much

better.

Who

begins

is

there, believing himself inspired,

who

will not gladly in his turn inspire? It is always the most ignorant, the most simple who are most busy at it ... Especially the women 1 It is

too well

known how
the

and
to

sects, like

first

surpassingly well all the heads of new religions founder ... in paradise, have understood how
e

they recognize themselves, so they call them mysteries, a word which refutes itself. I will not name these mysteries to you, but simply say that they are like the ones which give rise to the most sweeping and material notions of everything that is divine. They are the ones which never allow the common people to think of their Creator in a becoming
fashion.

use of them.' 2 Corresponding to this historical denigration of is the factual one Lessing presented in 1754: They all refer to higher revelations which have not even been proved possible. They want truths to have been received through these which might be truths perhaps in another possible world, but not in ours. This
revelation there

make

mind away to all sorts of a monster, which you call faith.' 3 That is why Lessing's judgment of miracles is exactly the same as the one we can find in his edition of Reimarus' works. 4 It is that: 'Only those men need to perform miracles, who wish to convince us of in-

They

are the ones which tempt the

it

barren reflections and create for

conceivable things, in order to

make

1 Uber die Entstehung der geqffenbarten Religion (Concerning the origin of revealed religion), 1755-60; Theological Writings, I, 21 of. * 3 i bid . i 4, Ibid., I, 2 3 4f. of. ibid., II, 387. 9 } 3g<

inconceivable things conceivable

128

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

by means of miracles. But those who have nothing to present but teachings, whose touchstone every man carries with him do not need
them. 1
asks

And

that

is

why

the foolish Christian

woman

Daja,

when
to

she

what harm there is

in attributing

an unexpected deliverance

an

angel rather than to a man and thereby feeling all the nearer to God, the first inconceivable cause^ of such an event, receives from the wise Nathan the answer
:

and nought but pride! The pot fain be lifted from the fire With silver tongs, to think itself more precious. Bah! And what's the harm, you ask, the harm? What good is it, I might but ask in turn For your 'To feel oneself the nearer yet To God' is folly or a blasphemy. 2 it's harmful utterly. It only harms
Pride!

Of iron would

It is

harmful in

fact

and

at this

we have

beginning of this line of Lessing's thought because ecstasize where he should quite simply do good.

arrived once again at the it leads man to

The existence of this line of thought, and the entirely unequivocal and decided way in which Lessing expresses it, must be borne in mind. One must, however, note simply that it was precisely the most pungent of the passages written by the young Lessing and quoted beforehand which was published from the papers found after his death, and the ones, therefore, which strictly speaking, while he thought them and committed them to paper, were never actually uttered by him. And we must above all be clear that here it is a question of only one line of
Lessing's theological thought.
this

Anyone wishing to

attribute to

him only

much as it who overlooked could anyone altogether. Lessing speak quite differently
one
line of thought

would be misunderstanding him just

differently. Friedrich Nicolai, his

as

and did speak quite

friend, once

Enlightened

wrote of him, as one

who knew him well

too clear-cut, and

tolerate anything

which was

all

'Lessing could not was in the habit, in

:

polite or learned discussion, of espousing the weaker cause or the one whose opposite someone was trying to assert' and he adds the lovely

friends will still recall that during the he always supported Prussia at social gatherings in Leipzig, and in Berlin the cause of Saxony. He was thus an object of heartfelt hatred to the true patriots in both places, who, as is well3 known, were a trifle fierce while the war lasted.' Lessing the dramatist was doubtless glad to keep this attitude, not only in society, but also
illustration:

'Many of Lessing's

Seven Years

War

Theological Writings,

I,

2 Nathan, I, 2. For original, see 40. 3 Theological Writings, IV, 367.

Appendix, p. 401.

LESSING
as

129

a writer, and indeed as a theological writer particularly. The impression which this attitude made must, in his lifetime at least and especially among free thinkers, have been that of a conservative thinker rather than that of a free thinker. No, we hear him declaring
just as definitely, although after what has gone before something different might have been expected, that what he means and intends is

'What a pity where his or knows reason where his nobody really quite Christianity are' 1 we hear him mocking. No, he has no love at all for the people whose leader we were just thinking we should have to take him to be, the 'new-fangled clergy, who are far too little theologians and not 2 nearly philosophers enough'. But certainly he wished to be a disciple of the Enlightenment, also, and especially, in matters affecting religion, 'I should despise myself if my scribblings were devoted to any end but that of helping to further these great intentions. But do leave me my own way in which I think I can do this.' 3
precisely not the Reasonable Christianity' of his time.

What

is

there then about his

own way,

in opposition to that of the

so abruptly dismissed? neologians neither as theologians nor as philosophers ?

protests, over against

now

Why

do they please him

What can he mean when he

well-intentioned towards

Goeze, that he is no
c

less

the Lutheran Church than Goeze

to the 'great wanted to prove Christianity to

when he, too, thinks he can appeal Luther? The more insistently one man man' misjudged

me, the more doubtful I became. and wilfully triumphantly another sought to trample it underfoot the more inclined I felt like upholding it, in my completely heart at least.' 4 What is the meaning of this defiance of Lessing's towards that standpoint too, and in particular the point where we thought we saw him stand himself, without any qualification whatso-

The more

ever? The answer sounds enigmatic enough, but is highly typical of Lessing: The freemason quietly waits for the sun to begin to shine and lets the lamps burn as long as they are willing and able to burn to put out the lamps and take note, when they are put out,
that the candle-ends
is

must be relit, or even be replaced by others this not the freemason's concern.' 5 'Take care, more capable individual, you who paw the ground and are aglow on reaching the last page of the first primer (the Jewish-Christian revelation!), take care not to let
your weaker school-fellows feel what you are sensing or already beginning to see. Until these weaker school-fellows have caught up with
i

Theological Writings, II, 103.

s Letters to his brother,

2 Letters to Nicolai, 1777, II, n. * Theological Writings, IV, 169. 1774, II, 11. 5 Ernst and Folk, 5.

I3O

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

you, turn back the pages of this primer again, and find out whether what you take to be the result of mere expressions of method, makeshifts

of the teaching system, is not perhaps something more. 91 Or concretely, about the relation between orthodoxy and neology: I should not wish the impure water, which has long been unusable,
C

to be kept;

it to be poured away before do not want it poured away simply and the to in manure. And child be bathed thereafter unthinkingly, what else is the new-fashioned theology, as compared with orthodoxy, but manure as compared with dirty water? ... I beg of you, dear brother, enquire just a little more closely into this point, and look rather less at what our new theologians reject than at what they want to put in its place! I agree with you that our old system of religion is

it is

only that I should not wish

I

we know where we can get purer;

false,

but cannot agree with you in saying that

it is

a makeshift con-

trived

by bunglers and pseudo-philosophers. I know of nothing else in the world where men have shown and practised their judgment more than in this. It is the new system of religion which is intended to replace it which is a bunglers' and pseudo-philosophers' makeshift and it has at the same time far more influence over reason and philosophy than
the old one presumes to exercise. And yet you take it amiss that I defend the old system? My neighbour's house is on the point of collapsing.
it down I will willingly help him. But he wants to it ... by means entailing the complete ruin of and support up my house. He must stop this or I shall take care of his collapsing house as if it were my own.' 2 These were Lessing's reasons for remaining largely silent, after the

If he wants to pull
it

prop

manner of the freemason, about

wise

his objections to
it is

orthodoxy

The

man

cannot speak about the things

better he should keep

They were also his reasons for actually taking up from time to time the cause of the orthodoxy which was under attack, or of the old system of dogma, to the horror of his Enlightenment friends. There can be no doubt: Lessing considered the orthodox position, he considered the whole Jewish-Christian revelation upon which this
position rests, not to be something that is absolute but something we can in principle rise above. It is not the rising sun, but a man-made
it is

to himself'. 8

lamp, burning for the time being, which will later be extinguished; to be likened to impure water, to a house in need of reconstruction. It is not the final terrible truth that mankind must and indeed shall

know
1

for his salvation,

but only a
3

first

primer intended to prepare

2
2.

The Education of the Human Race, paras. 68-9.

Ernst and Folk,

Theological Writings, II,

I if.

LESSING

131

man
he is

for the final truth. Lessing is aware that in this critical insight at one with the neologians. He thinks that he too knows everything
is

be known in this respect. But that the sun might already and clean water at hand, that the tottering house could be transformed into a new one by the addition of a supporting wall these things he denied. In other words he denied that the JewishChristian revelation had in fact already been superseded and relieved of its task by something better. It is still better and stronger than the
there
to

be

risen,

reasonable Christianity of the neologians, provided it is properly represented. This Christianity of reason, which is no longer Christian

and not yet reasonable,

this critical insight

is a hybrid. Thus there is no point in putting already into practice and in wanting already to

dispense with the first primer. There would only be sense in this if something better had already come, if the sun had already risen, if

pure water were already at hand,

molished.
that this

The poverty

is

if the old house could really be deoffered in place of revelation proves not the case; that revelation is not yet finished with. The

of what

is

wise man, the freemason, in Lessing's sense, will therefore not join in the neologians direct attack on the Church and on dogma, although he
5

knows

all that they know. He hopes. He is quite sure of himself and his cause: 'The development of revealed truths into truths of reason is 31 c Or could it be that the human race is destined necessary at all costs.

never to arrive at these highest stages of enlightenment and purity? Never? Never? Let me not think such blasphemy, all-bountiful

Lord!

individual.

aim, with the race no less than with the educated is educated for something.' 2 'The time will certainly come, the time of a new, eternal gospel, which is 3 promised to us even in the primers of the New Covenant.* It is however precisely the wise man, who knows and hopes for this, who can wait.

Education has

its
is

That which

Go your imperceptible way, eternal Providence! Just do not let me Do not let me despair of you because of this imperceptibility despair of you even if it should seem to me that your steps are leading
e
!

It is not true that the shortest line is always the straight backwards You have so much to carry with you upon your everlasting way, so many digressions to make from the path And what if it were as good as arranged that the big, slow-turning wheel which is bringing the race nearer to perfection, could only be set in motion by smaller, faster wheels, each one of which contributes its own individual effort to this cause?' 4 From this it almost necessarily follows that Lessing was bound to have a positive interest in revelation, for all that he completely saw,
!

one.

Ed., para. 76.

Ibid., paras. 81-2.

Ibid, para. 86.

Ibid., paras. 91-2.

*3 2

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

admitted and stated that the nature of that interest was relative. From found himself placed in a position where he not only could tolerate the belief in revelation and accept it as fact, but was able to ponder on it and express himself on
this standpoint Lessing quite honestly

how, rebus sic stantibus, it might most properly be represented. This firstly makes plain the concern which prompted Lessing in the dispute of the Fragments. In it he was in his way really wellintentioned towards the Lutheran Church, without, for all that, being less well-intentioned towards the Enlightenment. As a wise disciple of
the Enlightenment, who paradoxically but very subtly does not consider the straight line to be the shortest line, who knows of those
digressions eternal Providence must make, in order to set in motion for its own part the smaller, faster wheels which move the big, slow

one, he can, no, must in fact have the interests of the Lutheran Church at heart. It was Lessing and nobody else who honestly knew himself to be
qualified and called to offer it some good advice. This was Lessing's desire in the dispute of the Fragments: he wanted, from the lofty watchtower of the wise man of the Enlightenment, of the true freemason, to

give the Church, Christianity and Christian theology some good advice. He thought it could certainly be surpassed and he thought it was certain
to be surpassed in the future, but he wanted to advise it on how it should conduct itself as something which was for the moment not surpassed,
so that

by

its

behaviour

it

should prove that

it

was not yet surpassed.

Lessing was interested in Reimarus' critique of all revelation including the Christian revelation. It interested him as a sign of the times.

His dramatic conception of history perhaps contained certain traces of chiliasm, for a certain passage in Cardanus seems to have made a great impression upon him. It said: Necesse est anno Christi millesimo
octingentesimo magnam mutationem futuram esse in Christi lege, 'that in the 1 year 1800 a great change will come about in the Christian religion'. It is not impossible that in view of this prophecy Lessing held that the

coming of the last things was near, as far as the completion he mentions of the education of the human race and the actual surpassing of revelation were concerned. Be that as it may Lessing was not interested in Reimarus in the way that Reimarus was bound to interest the common run of men of the Enlightenment. He was not interested in him as the implementer of a simple advance along the way to overtaking the belief in revelation it was precisely the idea that such an advance could come about simply by means of criticism that Lessing denied. But Lessing was certainly interested in Reimarus as the provider of an
:

Theological Writings,

IV, 25of.

LESSING

133

opportunity in the face of which the belief in revelation, in so far as it was not yet surpassed, must prove itself in its temporary truth and

a chemical test, so to speak, to which the belief in revelaChurch and theology must react in a certain way, inasmuch as their last hour had not yet struck. It was to this extent that Reimarus really interested Lessing for the Church's sake. It was to this end that he addressed the theologians in the dispute of the Fragments. And what excited and angered him to the astonishing extent to which he was angered and excited in the course of this dispute was the fact that he thought that they were not reacting in the only way possible; they were failing to grasp what was being asked of them and what their answer should be, failing to understand themselves and their own cause, neglecting the favourable time, the great opportunity that was offered them to prove themselves. And now he, the man of the Enlightenment, the one who is convinced that all revealed truth will hereafter be transformed and merged into the truth of reason he has to tell the theologians how they must behave if in actual fact things have not progressed so farl That, in Lessing's eyes, was the problem, the fierce humour and bitter tragedy of the dispute of the
validity; as
tion, the

Fragments. What then was essential about the Fragments of Reimarus? For Lessing it was the fact that they represented a historian's historical
attack

upon the

historical reality

and

possibility of revelation.

Does

this historian

know, Lessing asks, that revelation assuming that such a thing exists cannot in any circumstance be denied historically as a historical quantity? But in this matter Lessing has to do not with Reimarus but with the Lutheran theologians. That is why he is immeasurably more concerned with the other question: Do these theologians know that revelation cannot ever be affirmed, justified and defended historically as a historical quantity? Lessing was the man who held that revelation can be surpassed in principle, who knew the
objections against
its

historical reality

and

possibility as well as

Reim-

arus did, and who was not at a loss, as we have seen, to produce all kinds of natural explanations for the things the Church declared were

phenomena of revelation. But he thought he knew enough about the

fact

matter to say that revelation should at all events be interpreted as a proved in itself, i.e. not as one which can be either proved or attacked historically, but as one which is certain in itself. He thought
that in this he was in agreement with the older theology, i.e. the orthodoxy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which was in the

habit of presenting the historical proof only incidentally and without

134

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

it

emphasis, and was not of the opinion that revelation as such by these means.

could and should prove

Lessing, however, did not find himself in agreement with the theology

time, not even, especially not, with the allegedly orthodox This theology. theology replied to the historical criticism of revelation with a historical defence. This, Lessing maintained, was to the detri1

of his

own

ment and obviously in misunderstanding of its own cause; Lessing called it a 'theological innovation*, and it was the essence of his complaint against Melchior Goeze that the latter made himself guilty of that innovation It was against this, and ultimately only against this,
!

that Lessing directed his polemic in this fight. 'They should be ashamed, these men who have the promise of their divine Teacher, that his

Church
enough

shall

to believe that this

not be overcome by the gates of hell, and are foolish cannot otherwise come about than by their

2 overcoming the gates of hell themselves I* 'When will they cease to want to hang nothing less than the whole of eternity on a spider's thread! No, scholastic dogmatics have never inflicted such grievous wounds upon religion, as that which the historical exposition of the

'Great God, it is to this mire, to this mire, even if there are perhaps some few specks of gold beneath it, that my neighbour in boldness and defiance transfers the completed
Scriptures
is

now daily inflicting.' 3

edifice of his faith! . . . God! God! what things men can found a faith upon, by which they hope to achieve eternal happiness!' 4 Lessing likens the theological apologists to the inhabitants of a palace,

my

oddly constructed to be sure but quite habitable,

architect,

who each

possess
first

different plans of the building, which, they claim, derive

from the

which they do not understand and which seem to contradict each other. They are continually quarrelling about which is the right one. Some few, laughingly, and to the annoyance of the others, do not take part in this quarrel, but content themselves with rejoicing at the fact that they are actually allowed to live in this palace, whatever its plan may be. 'Once, when the quarrel about the plans was not so much settled as dormant, once upon a time at the midnight hour the
voice of the watchmen suddenly rang out: "Fire! Fire in the palace!"

And what took place? Everyone started up from his bed, and everyone
what he believed
as if the fire were not in the palace but in his own home ran to get to be his most precious possession his plan. "If we can only save that!" each one thought; "the palace can burn nowhere
as
it

more truly than

1

stands described here!" So each one ran with his

first

plan into the street,

where he

of all wanted to show the others on

n, 287.
3

Theological Writings, III, 107.

2 i bi d.,

Ibid., Ill, 34.

Ibid., Ill, 8gf.

LESSING

135

his plan where the palace was supposed to be burning instead of hastening to save the palace. "Look, neighbour! Here's where it's

Here's where

here!"

we can best get at the fire!" "Or here rather, neighbour, "What are you two talking about? It's burning here!" "What

burning!

would

matter if it was burning there? But the fire is certainly here!" it out here if you like, I'm not going to!" "Nor am I going to put it out there!" "And nor am I going to put it out there!"
it

"You can put

And while they were busily arguing the palace, if it had been on fire, might very well have been burned to the ground. But the startled watchmen had mistaken the northern lights for a conflagration.' 1 Let the historical
proofs of revelation rest where they will! 'Would it be a great misfortune if they were put back again into the corner of the arsenal they

occupied

which the theological apologists work like spiders' webs, mire, a paper plan, and ultimately downright dangerous to religion? Because they divert the question of the truth and reality of revelation on to a track which is the very one where it cannot with certainty be answered. Historical proof of revelation means the historical proof of prophecies fulfilled and miracles which actually came to pass. But this proof cannot serve as proof of revelation. For the certainty which would have to be contained in a proof of revelation would necessarily be lacking in such a historical proof. 'Fulfilled prophecies which I myself experience are one thing, and fulfilled prophecies of which I know from history only that others claim to have experienced them, are another. Miracles which I see with my own eyes and have the opportunity to test are one thing, and miracles, of which I know from history only that others claim that they have seen and tested are another.' 3 The most reliable information about the latter does not therefore make my knowledge of it more reliable than it is possible for knowledge based on historical data to be; it is not possible to place more confidence in it than we are generally entitled to place in any truth shown by history. For no historical truth, even when it is supplied with the best evidence, can be demonstrated. But if no historical truth can be demonstrated, then neither can it in turn be used to demone

Why

years ago?' are the reasons with

fifty

Why

are they superfluous, even harmful?

strate anything'. 4

I should adapt all my metaphysical and moral notions accordingly ... if that is not a pertfiuns l$ a\Xo yeW, then I do not know what else Aristotle can have meant by the term'. 5
i

and granting that it is such and to demand of me that

'To jump over' with this historical truth assuming 'into a completely different class of truths,

Theological Writings, III,

g 5 f.

Ibid., Ill, I If.

Ibid., Ill, 34. * Ibid., Ill, I 3 .

Ibid

ni

'

Q f> y

136

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

and

'That, that, I say, is the nasty big ditch I cannot get over, often earnestly as I have tried the jump. If anyone can help me over, let

him

do

so; I

beg him, beseech him

to

do

so.

By me he can reap a reward

in heaven.' 1

And now for Lessing's positive thesis, the better suggestion he thinks he can make to theology. This lament about the impossibility of passing over from the historical proof to the faith of revelation is in fact not genuine. Lessing could perfectly well do without what he represented in those sentences as being inaccessible to him, and he wished to make
it

clear to the theologians that it is not only inaccessible but also superfluous for them, and that for the sake of their own cause they
Is the situation such that *I should hold a geometrical theorem to be true not because it can be demonstrated, but because it can be found in Euclid?' 'The fact that it is to be found in Euclid can prejudice us in favour of its truth as much as it will. But it is one thing to believe a truth on the strength of a prejudice, and another to believe a truth for its own sake.' 2 The learned theologian may finally be left in a state of embarrassment as a historian by an attack like that of

should give it up.

Reimarus. 'But the Christian too? Most certainly not! Only possibly to the theologian might it be a cause for confusion to see the supports with which he wanted to shore up religion shaken, the buttresses cast down with which, God willing, he had so beautifully secured it. But
of what concern to the Christian are the hypotheses and accounts and
proofs of this man ? For the Christian it is simply there, the Christianity he feels to be so true, in which he feels himself so blessed. When the
paralytic
e

is

undergoing the beneficent shock of the electric current,

what does he care whether Franklin or Nollet is right, or neither of them?' 3 lf I see these fruits ripening and ripened before me, should I not eat my fill of them, not perhaps because I deny, or doubt the pious old legend that the hand which scattered the seed for this fruit must be washed seven times in snails' blood at every throw; but have merely left it consigned to its proper place? What do I care,
whether the tale is true or not: the fruit is delicious. Supposing there were a great, useful mathematical truth, arrived at by its author by a palpably false conclusion. (If there are no such truths they might well exist.) Would I be denying this truth, would I be refusing to make use of it: would I be an ungrateful blasphemer against the author, if I did not wish to use his acuteness elsewhere, and did not think that his acuteness elsewhere could be used to prove that the false conclusion by which he had stumbled on the truth could not be a false conclusion
*

Theological Writings, III, itf.

Ibid., Ill, 127.

ibid., II, 261.

LESSING
at all?
31

137

who doubts certain proofs of a matter doubts the matter itself. Anyone who as much as points his 2 finger in this direction is as guilty as an assassin.' 'He who has a more
'not act as if someone

One should

Christian heart than head

is

not deterred in the slightest by these

objections, because he feels 'what others are content only to think, because he at all events could dispense with all the Bible. He is the

confident victor

who
is

leaves the fortresses alone

The

theologian strongpoints on the border

country.
33

the anxious soldier

who

and captures the land. runs his head against the

hardly anything of the

and in so doing

sees

We must now try to find out more precisely what Lessing means when he speaks of this 'victor'. We have not yet quoted the bestknown of the various formulations in which Lessing has expressed his
belief in the superiority of Christianity over all historical polemics, or alternatively in the fact that it cannot be proved by any historical

apologetics. It runs: 'Accidental historical truths can never become 34 proofs for necessary truths of reason. This sentence does not say in Lessing's context it cannot say what Fichte later said 'It is only the
:

Metaphysical and on no account the Historical, which makes blessed.* 9 Lessing does not maintain that the 'necessary truths of reason are self-evident, certain without regard to time and space, and that history
has no significance in their knowledge. In the dispute of the Fragments he most definitely took it as his premise that the education of the human
race was not yet complete, and that revelation, a historical way of knowledge (as distinct from the continual present without regard to

time and space of the necessary truths of reason) was therefore still possible, indeed necessary. Lessing it is true, is aware of one proof of Christianity, i.e. a growth of a knowledge of God through Christ, through present-day man's
this proof must be 'the proof of the spirit and the power' as the title of the famous writing of 1777 runs, from which comes the famous sentence just quoted. 'Accidental truths of history', which as such cannot become proofs of necessary truths of reason, are, in the context of this writing, to be

encounter with the Christian tradition. But

understood as such particular, concretely unique historical truths, about which I am merely informed by others, which are merely handed

down to me as true. I have not myself encountered them, I have not myself experienced them as true. Truths of history can indeed become proof for me of necessary truths of reason, but only when they are
not merely 'accidental' historical truths, but have become convincing
*
Theological Writings, III, 14.
Ibid., Ill, 107.
3

Ibid., Ill, 122.

Ibid., Ill, 12.

38

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

as historical truths,

to

necessary to me.

have become necessary, and indeed directly which are merely handed down and attested have as such not this power of proof, no matter how well they have been handed down and how definitely attested they are. Historical (from orope'a>) is, that which I must first make part of my own experience by investigation, and which is therefore in the first place not experienced by me. Historical truth as such, the truth which is in need of such investigation and is not yet part of my own experience, cannot be the legitimate and fully-authorized messenger of the truth

me

The

historical truths

the truth which necessarily imposes itself upon my ultimately certain. Historical truth, if it were to have this significance for me, would have to come to me by other means, not c as historicaP and not as Accidental truth', not as requiring my investii.e.

of revelation,

reason, which

is

and thus not at all merely as truth which has been handed down, and further by no means in such a way, that there should be any question at all of the problem of the 'nasty big ditch 'It is impossible for a revealed religion which rests upon human testimony, to afford an undoubted assurance in anything.' 1 There is, according to Lessing,
gation,
3
.

another way.

With Lessing we have seen how at the decisive point the concepts Experience', 'heart', and the image of the 'beneficent shock of the electric current' occur. This is what he would have us understand as the 'proof of the spirit and the power'. It is not as historical
'feeling',

truth but through experience, that the historical element in Christianity assumes the power of proof for Christianity itself, and that, of
historical truth, necessary truths

of reason are proved.

by way The way

of

way from historical truth to the heart ofpresent-day man.Thefact that this way exists is the positive side ofthe negative sentence we quoted. Lessing knows very well about historical
is

Lessing's victor

the direct

which can become proof of necessary truths of reason in this manner. From Luther's writings he appealed to the spirit of Luther; 2 likewise from the letter of the Bible to the spirit of the Bible, and from
truths
3 the Bible as such to religion, which was in existence before the Bible, from the facts narrated in the Books of the Bible to the principles of the Christian teaching, which do not all rest upon facts, 4 from the miracles worked by Christ and his disciples to e the miracle of religion itself, which is still continuing in its effects', 5 and finally from the

Gospel

of St John to St John's testimony: 'Little children, love one another I' 6 and, as we have already seen, from the Christian religion to the
Theological Writings, * Ibid., Ill,

IV, 253.

u8.

Ibid 14O 5Ibid.,III,3 3 f.

jbid., II,

27 if.

III,

1 1

6 Ibid. ? III, 14.

3 * f.

LESSING
1

139

religion of Christ himself. 'Surely in Hamburg nobody will any longer wish to dispute with me the whole difference between gross

No: 'the historical words are the vehicle of the prophetic must be possible for everything the Evangelists and Apostles have written to be lost again, and for the religion they
words'. 3
c

and

net?' 2

lt

taught to remain notwithstanding. Religion is not true because the Evangelists and Apostles taught it, but they taught it because it is true.

The

tradition handed down to us in writing must be explicable by its inner truth, and no written tradition can give it inner truth if it does not contain any.' 4 'Within the last seventeen hundred years has
first, the only spring never flowed, has it never found its way into other writings? Has it never and nowhere found its way into other

the

writings in its original purity and healing quality? Must every Christian without exception draw from this spring and this spring alone?' 5 Goeze had asked Lessing whether he thought that without the presence and tradition of the books of the New Testament there would
left in the world of what Christ had done and taught. answers: God preserve me from ever holding the teachings of Lessing Christ in such little esteem, that I should dare to answer this question
e

be any trace

quite directly with no! No, I should not say this "no" you
say,

want me to an angel from heaven were prompting me to do so, let alone when it is only a Lutheran pastor who is trying to put the word
even
if

in

my mouth.' 6 We are not worse, but better off than the Christians of the second generation, in whose time the eye-witnesses were still
present. 'We are abundantly compensated for the passing of the eyewitnesses by something which it was impossible for the eye-witnesses

to have.

They had only the ground before them, upon which, convinced

firmness, they dared to erect a great edifice. And we, we have before us this great edifice itself, complete.' 7 The inner truth which no written tradition can give to Christianity and which Christianity

of

its

it 8 the inner truth, on the one hand, comes from before the written tradition and, on the other hand, has its place behind it, in the 'edifice' of the whole of Christian history, which we see standing before our eyes. This inner truth is not a kind of wax nose that every knave can mould as he likes to fit his own face; it is the fact of revelation which speaks directly and with certainty to us ourselves, to our hearts. It is something, that is, which is capable of being

therefore cannot derive from

fi

felt

and experienced. Because there is such a foundation for Christianity before and after the Bible, and because the Christianity resting
*

Theological Writings, IV, 248f. Ibid., II, 262, III, 120, I25f.
7

2
5

Ibid., Ill, 108. ibid., Ill, 128.

*

ibid., Ill, 112. Ibid., Ill, 118.

Ibid., Ill, 32.

ibid., Ill, 129.

14

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

objections raised against

on this foundation is the essential, the true one,

the historical element in religion as for instance indications of contradictory passages in the various Gospels, and doubts cast as to this or that report of a miracle are on principle irrelevant. 1 And for this reason

the theologian should not try to impose his learned study of the Bible, with the pros and cons of his conclusions, upon the Christian as 2 something which is of decisive importance for his religion.

view in mind Lessing among other things two historical upheld hypotheses which very significantly explain what he wanted. First, he assumed that there must have been an original Gospel, written in Hebrew, older than that of St Matthew,
this theological

With

also

as the earliest of the Synoptic

3 Gospel Writers

the historical truth

with the power of proof

before the Bible! Secondly, he held that the regulafidei, the confession of faith (also in itself, incidentally, older than the New Testament) was the rock upon which the Church of Christ

was afterwards

built

and not upon the Scriptures 4

the historical

truth with the power of proof after the Bible! This teaching of the proof of the truth of Christianity, which must be brought as a 'proof of the spirit and the power*, Lessing would no

doubt

also have us recognize as the meaning of the famous fable of the three rings in Nathan.* Here also it is a matter of the proof of the truth of Christianity, but not now as regards the problems presented by Christian history itself studied for its own sake, as in the polemics

against Goeze. Now it is studied in relation to the fact that the history of Christianity, as a relative phenomenon, is a part of the universal
history of religion, together with several other religions. Is Christianity, the other religions, really the true religion, or, as was to be said later, the absolute religion? And how should the justi-

when ranked with

fication for his claim

is

show

itself, if

and in

so far as

it is

justified?

That

the theological question which is discussed in Nathan. The fable of the three rings is as follows: In an ancient family it is the custom for the father to give his favourite son a ring for his inheritance, a ring possessing the miraculous power of making whoever owns beloved in the sight of God and man. One father, in this family,

it

has three sons whom he loves equally. In order to hurt none of them he has two perfect imitations of the true ring made, which even he cannot detect and gives each of the three sons his blessing, and qne of the rings, and dies. What happens then is obvious, of course. Each of
the three sons considers that the other two are deceivers.
*
3

Theological Writings, II, 5582; III, 24, 132. * Ibid., IV, iigf. Ibid., Ill, 215.

2
6

Ibid., Ill, 129.

Nathan, III,

7.

LESSING
They search, dispute, lament. In vain; the proper ring could not Be found; 'twas hid as well almost As the true faith from us today, 1

141

The

three sons hasten to the magistrate:

And each swore to the judge He had the ring directly from his father's hand And this, of course, was true! 2
The judge then
true ring
is

has a timely recollection of the miraculous power the

said to have :

This must

Decide The
!

rings, if false, will surely not

Whom you do love the most. No word ? The rings'

Effect is just within, does not project ? Each loves himself the most all three of you Are then deceived deceivers All the rings Are false the real one was doubtless lost. Your father had the three rings made
!

Possess this gift! Say,

two of you, forthwith

To
The

hide the

loss

and make

it

good.
is

judge, however, like Lessing himself,

not disposed to

make

practical use of this critical opinion, which simply deprives the question of which is the real ring of its object. Apart from this judgment of
his (which was, if it

one he could
offer:

give), or rather instead of it

had been simply a question of judgment, the only he had a "piece of advice to
5

The matter simply

My counsel is, you should accept

as it stands. If each
his father's

Received his ring from

hand

Then let him think The real one. 4

It

his

own is

without doubt

might

hits

also be the case, the judge now reflects and in so reflecting upon the cause of the whole problem, which the fable pre-supposes

as true that the true ring has not been lost, but is there, unrecognizable together with two false ones by the father's own will. How then could judgment be passed ? The counsel just mentioned can, however, very

well be given, and explained in the following manner:

So be it then! Let each one seek the unbought love that's free From prejudice, as promised by the ring
!

1 3

For For

original, cf. Appendix, p. 401. original, cf. Appendix., p. 402.

For

4 For original,

original, cf.
cf.

Appendix, p. 401. Appendix, p. 402.

142

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

Each
strive in contest to reveal

A heart-felt tolerance, good works

!

Strength!

And

the jewel's aid this force by gentleness,

and deep Submission to God's will And should the powers Dwelling in the stones then come to light among

Your childrens' childrens' heirs, I then, when Thousand thousand years are past, invite them Once again before this judgment-seat. A wiser man will then sit here and speak. Now go your ways! Thus quoth the modest judge. 1
According to
rings is one will
to

second opinion of the judge, be it noted, one of the in fact genuine, and the decision about which is the genuine
this

be made at some future time

in a thousand thousand years,

be

when

sure, in a time completely inaccessible to us by a wiser judge, in fact the power of this genuine ring has in the meantime 'come
5
.

to light

the proof of the

In other words: a true faith does exist, and this faith will bring spirit and the power, and it is then that the judgment,
is

upon what

really the truth in religious history

which

is

at present

impossible will

be passed. At the present time, however, this cannot come about. The contemporary student of religious history must declare, with Saladin in the play:

The thousand thousand

Are not
For the present
yet past.

Nathan, cherished Nathan! years of this your judge His judgment-seat is not

My own. 2
it is

only possible to advise the devotees of every

religion, the Christian religion included, that they should assume the alleged miraculous power of their faith to be real, and act in a way that

will foster

it. That is, they must be what people who have this miraculous power must be, with 'gentleness, a heart-felt tolerance, good works and deep submission to God's will', without themselves doing injury to

for it. It will not

the prejudice inherent in their faith, but also without consideration be this contest of virtue which will decide the argument

but the miraculous power of true faith, which is not now discoverable as such. But this contest of virtue is the only possibility which can at
present be
will certainly

recommended to all participants, for the miraculous power be revealed as a fostering of virtue which makes men beloved in the sight of God and man. There are two elements in the thought of the play which seem to be

new. The first that strikes us is just this indication of right, that is, virtuous conduct which is in accordance with the miraculous power of the
1

For

original,

cf.

Appendix, p. 402.

For

original, cf.

Appendix, p. 402-3.

143 true faith, which encourages, and even aids it. In the of the dispute Fragments, in the passages most relevant to this question, Lessing always spoke of the experience which had to be acquired. Now we are expressly told, that whichever faith presents itself by experience as the true one, this experience will in all circumstances be an experience of a moral kind. The man who is beloved in the sight of God and man, as is promised to the true believer, will in all circumstances be a man

LESSING

who

graced by definite specifiable virtues, who is triumphant in the spheres where they are exercised. Another striking element is the expressly stated assumption in the parable of the rings that one of the positive historical religions, unidentiis

among them all, will show itself, by means of the and the power, to be the true one, and can and must ultimately come to be judged as such. The judge's decision, in the fable, was to give his advice, instead of his judgment, which would inevitably have amounted to a non liquet and stamped all three of the brothers as 'deceived deceivers'. In giving preference therefore to the second possible view of the matter over the first, which was also possible in principle, he opts without knowing it, only sensing it, although the author knows for the true view in opposition to the false one: the true ring was in fact not lost. His counsel rests upon this second view which he prefers and is in accordance with the facts. And that is precisely why no proclamation of a universal religion comes about in
fiable as
it is

now

proof of the

spirit

Nathan. It

is

true

we hear Nathan

sighing at the beginning:

Are Jew and Christian Jew and Christian first And not first men? Oh! if only from among Your kind I'd found one more who is content To bear the simple name of man! 1

We hear the same Nathan soliloquizing, however, just before the scene
of the rings:
It

does not do to be an arrant Jew,

less to

But even

be no Jew at

all.

But Saladin too declares

later on:
I

have never wished

to find

The same bark growing upon every tree. 3 And the Templar likewise knows that he who is thought to stand
declares he stands

above
It's

all parties,

in fact supports

and a party too:

1 3

Since this fact is simply so, 4 rightly so, I trow. 2 cf. Nathan* II, 5; Appendix, p. 403. ibid., Ill, 6j cf. Appendix, * Ibid., IV, 4; cf. Appendix, p. 403. ibid., IV, i ; cf. Appendix,

p. 403. p. 403.

144

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

is

The meaning of this conservative aspect of the conclusions presented in

the play
tive historical religions

of course to be found in the assumption that one of the posiwe do not, admittedly, know which is the

true one and will show itself as such. Because this

is so, there would be no sense in changing one's own religion to which one belongs after all for one of the others, and even less in changing it for some kind of

universal religion.

These two seeming innovations in Nathan can, however, be taken only as elucidating Lessing's basic position, which we know already. The really significant thing is that we find Lessing the theologian in Nathan
too,

and

in Nathan particularly, in the benignly superior

rdle

of the

poised upon the lofty watch-tower of the man who he is not so completely tied to any one of the positive religions that he is bound
counsellor
to consider
it

to

be the only true one.

On

He considers the whole formed by the concrete historical plan or succession of these religions to be so meaningful, and reckons so completely with the inner teleology of this whole, that it is for him certain that one of these religions will prove to be the true one and in doing so justify the whole of which it was a part. But the circle is complete he feels himself bound to maintain in the face of all opposition, that the superiority of this one religion the thousand thousand years of this your judge are not yet past has not yet emerged in a manner making it ripe for judgment, and it can therefore for the time being not be made valid in practice. He points out, with this proviso, that the experience of the true religion
e 9

so completely inimical to any of them that of the question for it to be the true religion.

the other hand, he is not he would think it out

will manifest itself,

come what may, in the practice of the quite definite moral virtues he mentions and thus he points to this practice of virtue as the most promising path, rebus sic stantibus, which every religion
can and should tread. We must be clear in our minds that
(it

this is Lessing's standpoint simply more clearly recognizable in Nathan) when giving counsel to the Lutheran Church in the dispute of the Fragments. He
is

who

gives counsel here, does not stand

faith in revelation

but adopts

this

on the ground of the Lutheran ground for a certain accidental reason

and a higher insight.

in this

way by

He is given the certain accidental reason for acting the fact that he happened to be born on the ground of

Lutheran Christianity. The higher insight which leads him to take this fact seriously is not by any means the truth of the Lutheran faith in revelation itself. It is his comprehensive knowledge of the great connexion between the parts of the whole of history, which is moving

LESSING
towards a
stages
final decision,

145
after all

and within which there happen to be

and stopping places, i.e. such provisional decisions as that for the truth of the Lutheran faith in revelation, within which, since it is
so,

everyone must make some such kind of preliminary decision, in accordance with the occasion of his birth and education. Let each think his own is without doubt the real ring.'
6

this sense Lessing 'believes'. Nothing but this provisional deciand not, for instance, the necessity for the final decision upon the whole of religious history, does bind him to this particular faith of this particular Church. He knows that we cannot know of the true faith, but that we can only simply assume that some one faith is the true one. This, in fact, he does. And, of course, he knows that his

In

sion,

choice

may

not be without good cause; that his ring

may

perhaps

really be the genuine one. It certainly does not seem out of the question to him that the Lutheran Church itself might at some time show itself

to

be the true Church and

is

that he

religion. It is because this chance exists concerned about the Lutheran Church and thinks it worth

the trouble to give it good counsel, to put its theologians to the test. For the same reason he can become quite angry with them when they fail in this test, and do not accept or understand his advice. He does
this,

be

it

certain that such a chance exists, for

well understood, because of that chancel He knows for he knows for certain of the related

meaning which exists between all such preliminary decisions. Because he knows this he knows for certain that history has a purpose and that
one of these preliminary decisions will approximate most closely to it will be directly responsible for the transition to the age of the new, everlasting gospel and thus prove itself in the sight of the other preliminary decisions to be the true one. Lessing gave the Lutheran Church advice from this watch-tower of
history's purpose; that

the philosophy of history. Does his advice differ in content and in purport from that of the philosopher of history, from that of the wise

judge in the parable of the rings?

the heart:
it is

We have seen that this

advice con-

sisted in the indication of experience, the lessons of life, the feelings

and

something which reaches and touches us directly, as something which immediately enlightens and enters into us, that historical truth becomes revelation and proves that it has the force of
as

the necessary truth of reason. The advice of the judge in the parable of the rings also consisted in the pointing out of the self-proving

miraculous power of the genuine ring. One thing is certain: Lessing was here not pointing out to the Lutheran Church that which, at any rate in its origins and confessional writings, it had understood as

146

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

9

revelation; he was not pointing to the 'miraculous power with which God, as the Lord of history, espouses the cause of historical man in a
historical encounter

which

man comes

to share directly. This inter-

pretation of Leasing' s Proof of the Spirit and the Power from the dispute of the Fragments, which in certain passages is not an impossible one (just as with Rousseau), is shown to be completely out of the

question when the Proof is seen beside Nathan the Wise and beside the Education of the Human Race. Within history, in which there are the
various religions, and in which there is also a Lutheran Church, there are only human pre-decisions, and human affirmation of this or that
historical possibility.

But there

is

no encounter with God

decisively

intervening from outside or above, and demanding faith as man's final decision to obey; no revelation in the sense in which the Lutheran Church had understood it before the eighteenth century. According to

Lessing no Church sense to witness. It

ing's

and no
is

religion can or may call revelation in this precisely revelation in this sense which, in Less-

view of history, is utterly precluded. Now this means that the polemics of the dispute of the Fragments, occasionally so instructive and amusing to read, are in their essential passages without doubt arguments against just this conception of revelation. For in their essential principles they are not relevant, as according to the pro-

gramme they should be,

to the historical apologists

who

desire to prove

historically the revealed character of certain historical truths, but they are relevant to the notion that the Holy Scriptures are the authorita-

tive

document

for the historical truth

which to the Church

is

identical

with revelation. This, however, means that the polemics are relevant to the authoritarian character, upheld by this notion, of what the Church
calls revelation, its

character as historical truth which descends from a above, particular truth stepping in from outside in distinction from all other historical truth; a truth which is, indeed, uniquely qualified. For that is the character which the Protestant doctrine of Scripture

concretely ascribes to revelation. And it is precisely the Protestant doctrine of Scripture that Lessing is trying to juggle away, with all the means at his disposal, in

favour of this historical truth with the power of proof which exists before and after the Bible, in favour of the prophetic word which is not bound up with the vehicle of the historical word, in favour of the
original gospel and of the regula fidei, in favour of the spirit and the inner truth and the 'ever-continuing miracle of religion itself 9 , in

favour of the whole

seeks to achieve this

'edifice*

of the Christian Church. In short he

end in unison with

Roman

Catholicism,

and the

LESSING
whole of Protestant modernism (and
as

147

quite obvious heralds of the programme of Protestant in of history favour modernism) itself as distinct from and as the Lord of is inwho against history, delibly denoted precisely by the Protestant doctrine of the Scriptures. With Lessing there is no such thing as a Lord of within
first
^

one of the

history

history.

Indeed he discusses miraculous powers and events experienced or recounted in history, the 'grateful shock of the electric current* and the like, he believes it possible of the that such positive
religions

things

could actually come to

genuinely even, be the genuine, the true religion, he shows enough trust in Lutheranism in spite of everything to urge its believers to let the
empirical

come to pass so that one of them and at last show itself to might finally
pa*ss,

in their sphere, and

nature of the historical fact which gives the Church its foundation be the decisive factor. But in discussing these things he is thinking simply of possibilities within history, which can and may be reckoned with and pointed out, but which are all subject to the that it is
proviso ultimately impossible to pass any judgment upon their truth or genuineness. History in revelation; this is the principle denied by the Protestant doctrine of Scripture, but upheld by Lessing, the counsellor of the Lutheran Church. The meaning of revelation in Lessing's sense was the successive or simultaneous working-out of the
possibi-

proper to and inherent in historical humanity. Revelation is the "education which the human race has undergone and is under1 going still'. Education, however, does not give man anything he might not also take from within himself; it is just that it gives him more quickly and easily what he might have from within himself. Revelation
lities
e

giving him 9 2 the most important of these The concise parallel to things sooner these sentences, in themselves already concise, is quite simply the fact that the judge in the fable of the rings knows as a matter of course wherein the quality of being beloved of God and man, promised to the owner of the genuine ring, will at all events consist: it will consist

itself

too therefore does not give man anything which would not also discover; it is just that it
.

human

reason
is

left to

gave and

in a moral virtuousness

which can be most

directly specified. If this

is

the 'proof of the spirit and the power 9 whether it is so, triumphantly brought by the one religion or by the other but the event, in which humanity in fact arrives at that which is the goal
is

what then

required by its own nature, the realization of its possibilities. Can a Lord of history exist in these circumstances, even solely as a Lord over history? Lessing speaks of 'God 9 as the educator of the
1

Ed,, para. 2.

Ibid., para. 4.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

human
race.

He

accomplished in

this education.

speaks of the steps of 'eternal Providence* which are But he can also (as in the foreword to

the Education) simply speak of the course visible in the history of the religions, 'which is the one and only thing by which human under-

standing everywhere can develop itself, and is meant to develop itself, even further'. This is new in Lessing as opposed to the other neologians the fact that for him such a 'course of does and it was in
:

history

exist,

all

probability this discovery, the discovery of the dramatic quality active in history, which gave him the courage to utter the old word

with a new solemnity as a description of this course. But make any difference to his interpretation of this 'course' whether we say 'God or whether we say 'human understanding in the significant places, and whether we interpret revelation as being education by an educator or self-education or even more simply development, and
'revelation'
it

does

thus allow the Lord of history to coincide with history itself, or alternatively with its subject, with the humanity educating, or alternatively,

developing itself? It is difficult to say in what respect there is meant to be a distinction, and perhaps it is only a part of Lessing's freemason's wisdom that he did not go so far as to say openly that it really does not

make any

difference. As Lessing, in Minna von Barnhelm, presented the noble Tellheim, the surly Just, the faithful Werner and the thankful 'Lady in mourning', and in Nathan the Christian Templar, the Mohammedan Sultan and the Jewish merchant, the highest law to which all

these figures are subject, in the one play just as much as in the other, apparently: 'Act in accordance with your individual

is

perfections!'

(as Lessing put it in formulating the categorical imperative in a 1 9 strange early work of his ), and in each of them it is a 'course which welds these figures into a dramatic unity. Is it actually a God which is necessary in Minna and in Nathan to set these characters in motion either in isolation or in their relationship one to another? Is not the

thought of a God in both of them bound to appear like that of a fifth wheel on a carriage? Is not all that is necessary in both of them a poet and thinker, perhaps, a playwright of genius? To put it differently: is man not, in the one play just as much as in the other, best understood

when he

is understood as being sufficient unto himself? Did Lessing even count upon God's final word really concerning the dramas and

drama of human history, after having in principle cut God off from every word previous to the last word spoken, or to be spoken, within
this history? Is it not

a fact that Lessing's has no need of God in any event?

i Tk. Wr., I, 217.

man

is self-sufficient,

and

LESSING

149

And now

in conclusion let us quote the

most famous words which

Lessing wrote, without comment, since they of themselves best bring the proof of Lessing's spirit and of his power. They are to be found in
the polemic
C

1 Rejoinder, written in I778.

A man's worth does not consist in the truth any one man may happen to have in his possession, or thinks he has in his possession, but in the honest endeavour he has brought to bear in his attempt to discover the truth. For it is not by the possession of truth but by the search for the truth that his powers are enlarged, which alone go to make for his ever-increasing perfection. Possession makes men placid, indolent and
proud.
'If

God were
left just

in his
to
it

holding all the truth that exists in his right hand, and the one ever-active urge to find the truth, even if attached were the condition that I should always and forever be going
!

astray,

and said to me, "Choose 1" I should humbly fall upon his left * hand and say "Father, give Pure truth is surely only for thee alone !"
:

Th. Wr., Ill, 26.

IV
KANT
IT was in the year of Lessing s death, 1781, that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason appeared. What was the significance of this man and of this work? In connexion with our observations in this book our answer must simply be that it was in this man and in this work that the eighteenth century saw, understood and affirmed itself in its own limitations. Itself in its limitations In saying this we are saying that Kant, like Rousseau and Lessing, stands at the turning-point of his age. We must, however, immediately add that he does this because in him just this one simple thing happens. There is no disclosure of a new dimension, no discovery of new provinces and powers, as with Rousseau and Lessing if that were the point, we might very well find that Kant after Rousseau and Lessing might appear to us to be a reactionary but just this one simple thing: the century's coming to an understanding
I.
1 9

its limitations. With Kant only this one simple and for this reason he stands, in effect, much more thing happened much more basically, comprehensively and more radically, and, in historical terms, much more interestingly and more significantly at

of itself

but of itself in

the turning-point of his age. The singularity of Kant's position can be seen already by the fact

comprehensive and typical in both directions as it is, it is a solitary one. Just as on the one hand he lent the eighteenth-century
that,

a pregnancy of expression which, for all the connexions he has of him an incomparable figure, so on the other hand in makes here, of every connexion, as a surmounter of this spirit he does not align spite
spirit

himself with the companion figures of the new age the line of succession leading from Rousseau by way of Lessing and Herder to

by himself in this respect he can only be Goethe after him a stumbling-block and rock of offence compared also in the new age, someone determinedly pursuing his own course, more feared than loved, a prophet whom almost everyone even among those who wanted to go forward with him had first to re-interpret
stands
to

Romanticism.

He

before they could do anything with him.

KANT
singularity position can also be seen, particularly in his special position in relation to the theological problem: he and only he was in fact the man, also here, and here in the particular, in

The

of Kant's

whom

the century saw

'itself

Peru brought into

Nobody from China to the open the theological viewpoint, thought and
its

in

own

limitations

intent of the eighteenth century with so much determination, in such concrete and logical terms with so unemotional a clarity (in contrast to Rousseau), and with such an candour contrast

unfreemasonly

(in

to Lessing) as he did. There clearly that this theological

limits
different.

was moreover nobody at all who saw so thought and intent were one, given their

by a theological possibility not only relatively but absolutely Kant personally never considered passing these limits for one moment. He did really stand with both feet within them. And yet he saw them, no matter how deprecatingly, how Rousseau polemically. and Lessing and later Herder, Schleiermacher and Hegel did not see them. Of Goethe too we must probably say that he did not see them.
It is

fundamentally impossible to conduct a conversation with them

this altogether different theological possi-

from the point of view of

bility,

did not recognize it as a distinct opposite of they simply their own possibility, because it simply did not exist for them as an opposite. Kant, however, recognized this other possibility, even though
it

because

distant periphery of his thought. He recognized it as an force which he rejected, but still as an opposing force, as opposing an instance which he dismissed in practice but not in principle, as an instance, that is, which he was not capable of including in his own
position.

was at a

like Lessing, call

to Holy Communion, did not, Luther to witness. Instead, when the university of Konigsberg was proceeding in solemn procession from the Great Hall to the church for the university service on the dies academicus Kant used

Kant did not, like Rousseau, go

away from the procession just as it was entering the church, make his way round the church instead, and go home. We have before us in all his writings the same refreshingly unequivocal attitude. With such a man a conversation from the other point of view, from the point of view of a completely different theology, is possible, because it is precisely when it is seen from there that it has quite definite outlines. The confusion of both worlds, which is more or less
ostentatiously to step
likely to lead

one astray with everybody else, is almost impossible with Kant. Particularly in our field he points beyond the relative distinction between the old and the new time which concerns us here. And he
points

In a

beyond what is common to them both. little essay he wrote in the year 1784, Kant

gives the following

152

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

first
is

answer in the

few decisive sentences to the question of the title, Enlightenment?': 'The Enlightenment represents man's emergence from a self-inflicted state of minority. A minor is one who is incapable of making use of his understanding without guidance from someone else. This minority is self-inflicted whenever its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in a lack of the determination and courage to make use of it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! Have the courage to make use of your own understanding, is therefore

'What

the watchword of the Enlightenment.' Nobody saw, the way that Kant did what this mature, courageous
use of his

knew or

said in

own

understanding looks

like,

what

his

man who makes position is and how

he conducts himself. Nobody strikes us as so worthy of belief and so honourable as he does when he baldly announces the advent of this kind of man, and when he naively expresses the conviction that his own present, as the time of this man, is without doubt the best of all the 1 ages which have gone before. Perhaps the reason for this is simply that nobody really lived the life of the man Kant had in mind as economically and as existentially as it was possible for Kant himself to live it, as he lived it in his study and during the measured walks he took in the town he never left in all his days. It was the life of one who vigorously, indefatigably, and in every respect made use of all his human capacities. But the deeper and more significant reason why he strikes us in this way is the fact that the naivete with which he praised his time and the man of his time, and the complete and unquestioning way in which he embodied this man in his own person were based upon a most scrupulous and calculated testing of these capacities, upon a most logical carrying to its conclusion of the 'emergence from minority', upon a complete understanding of the problems with which as well and particularly the man who makes use of his own understanding
is

faced.

Kant inspires our awe as a representative of the spirit of the eighteenth century. We cannot help feeling that in him this spirit has not only reached maturity and beyond. In him, we feel, this spirit is not
itself in a riotous way; it does not merely beyond itself in enthusiastic or poetic fervour and it does not become a prey to Mephistophelean self-mockery. It has quite simply come to terms with itself; it therefore knows where it stands and it has thus acquired humility. With Kant we do not find any narrow-

merely at loggerheads with

strive

minded, ignorant
1

self-satisfaction

within the confines of this

spirit,

Die Religion imerkalb der Grensyn der

p. 197, quot.

Reason Alone),

from 2nd

blossen Vernunft (Religion ed., 1794.

within the Bounds of

KANT
neither do

153

any exuberant, lawless unrest in the face of these confines, according to the prescription: Any fence we find we'll crash

we

find

What

else are fences for,

now?

Any lamps we

find we'll

smash
are
lit,

Our lights
In Kant

we trow

we

find this spirit at

a point beyond

self-satisfaction

and

rebellion in being

what

it is,

namely,

distinct, existing in history as it

self-conscious,

does, keeping within its confines, being completely itself and completely and in its limits. In its limits, as they are understood by

Kant, something of humanity's limits in general, and at this something of wisdom seems to become visible. In Kant's philosophy, as in the music of Mozart, there is something of the calm and majesty of death

which seems suddenly to loom up from afar to oppose the eighteenthcentury spirit. That is why, in Kant, thrown completely back upon humility, it shines forth once again in its full splendour. That is why it

commands our respect. In a more important passage than the one previously quoted 1 Kant gave another answer to the question about the meaning of his time or rather he gave the same answer in more fundamental and significant terms: 'Our age is the true age of criticism, to which all things must be subjected.* In the way Kant meant it this was an interpretation or
here
characterization of the age completely new to his contemporaries, and was, strictly speaking, only applicable to one single man of the age, namely to Kant himself. In Kant's sense 'criticism' does not mean a

kind of knowledge fundamentally consisting in the total or partial negation of another merely alleged or at any rate disputable piece of knowledge. Criticism in Kant's sense does not consist in casting doubt

upon or denying

certain propositions, or alternatively certain things

contained in these propositions, which are declared to be objects of knowledge. He could not, it is true, embark upon or set forth his own

kind of criticism without using the usual kind of criticism as well. But
his

own

criticism

is

essentially quite different

from

it: it is

criticism

of knowledge itself and of knowledge as such. This does not mean that it is a complete or partial denial of the possibility, validity and

worth of the human method of forming knowledge* Even if it was David Hume, the 'sceptic', who by Kant's own admission first roused him from his 'dogmatic slumbers', i.e. first shook him in his untested
1

Critique

of Pure Reason,

ist ed.,

Preface V.

154

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

assumption that human knowledge was possible and valid, this does not mean that Kant intended to pursue the same road as Hume, i.e.
that he intended to
challenging of this assumption his actual been goal. guilty of misunderstanding him who have truly taken him to be a kind of super-sceptic, who have looked upon him as

make the

Those have

the 'all-annihilating one', as far as the reality of knowledge, the reality of science and morality, art and religion are concerned: and have

regarded him as the

contemplates civilization from outside, to so values, speak, in order to provide it, on his own initiative, with a new basis, or in order to refrain resignedly from the

man who

and challenges its

possibility of giving it

basis.

Kant

himself, although

he compared

his enterprise with that of

Copernicus, or rather precisely because he made this comparison, looked upon it as anything but a venture in criticism in this sense.

Kant was not Rousseau, and Rousseau himself cannot be understood only in this sense. In Kant's eyes civilization has its basis. For him
civilization, the

and in

achievement of his age, the achievement which is also particular the achievement of human knowledge in all these

fields, is

an event beyond question.

It is this

event that provides

him

with the ground upon which he stands. His investigation does not seek to answer the question of whether this achievement has any basis, but the question as to what its basis is. It seeks to establish the method of
this civilization: it seeks, in so far as this civilization
is

firstly

and

lastly

that of the Enlightenment, to bring about an enlightenment of the Enlightenment about itself, so that, safe from all misunderstanding of
itself, it

might thenceforward adopt a

it

certain, sure

and tranquil

course.

man who has come of age, whom he believes he can recognize and may praise in Enlightenment man, does not use his understanding wilfully and as he thinks fit, now that he has
Kant
intends to see to

that the

mustered the courage to use it at

make
use
it

his understanding the object of

it

that he should understand

This does not mean that he should a sceptical mistrust. It means and thus, knowing about it, for this reason
all.

calmly and surely and constantly. And the courage (Mut) demanded here from him is not meant to be arrogance (Hochmufy, let
alone faintheartedness (Schwachmut), but
lying

midway between

the

humility (Demuf), enabling man to subject himself to a searching criticism of his capacities which will show him the right course and

two

which, precisely because it is searching and showing the right course, will clarify and confirm his ability to subject himself to, and, once he
has done
this, to

be guided by the
is

results

of this

self-criticism.

The

critique of reason

reason arriving at an understanding of

itself. Its

KANT
is

155

not by any means that of a denial; it is rather, in the most pathos explicit manner possible, that of an affirmation of reason. Kant is not
Jacobi.

Kant

is

not

Hamann

or Claudius or Lavater.

Kant

is

Kant

and

nothing at all to do with a weariness of civilization or a weariness of the Enlightenment. Kant both has and demands an almost unconditional faith in reason. But the only kind of
his critique of reason has

reason he considers worthy of his trust is the reason which has first of all come to be reasonable as regards itself. The meaning of his critique

of reason consists in the attempt to bring

this

kind of reason into

prominence.

The essential quality of eighteenth-century man before Kant was a joyful affirmation of the actual capacity of human reason, which stood, so it seemed, as an incontrovertible fact visible to all in the irresistible
forward march of natural and technical science, of historical knowledge, and surely also of moral feeling. As a true child of his age Kant is also to be found among the joyfully participating admirers of this
process. He conceives and announces his teaching as one who is engaged in furthering this process, as one who is to a great extent himself

actively concerned with it. It is well known that with the astronomical theory which shares his name and that of Laplace he intervened
significantly in the sphere of natural science, and with his shrewd and he was, so to speak, always present whenever there was something to be seen. He never stood apart but always

lively spectator's eye

was always in the middle of the real intellectual movement of a phenomenon in human history will never again be forgotten, because it has revealed a disposition and capacity for betterment in human nature.' 1 This he said of the French Revolution, the outbreak and development of which he followed with the closest attention and with an almost boyish sympathy and expectancy, in this resembling only too closely a contemporary like Lavater, from whom he was in every other respect totally dissimilar. But we must note that only because and in so far as it reveals a disposition and capacity in
faced,
his age. 'Such

affirm the tendency of his time. 'It is already a beginning of the reign of the good principle and a sign "that the kingdom of heaven is at hand", even if only the fundamentals of its

human nature does Kant

be commonly known. For something is already present in the world of the understanding, and the roots, from which alone it can spring, have already established themselves everywhere, although the complete development of its appearance in the world of
constitution
to
1 Streit der

come

Fdkultdtm (Dispute of the Faculties) Vol. 460 of the Phil. Libr.,

and

ed.,

P- 135-

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

the senses
in the unforeseeable future.' 1 Kant, faced by the actual capacity for human reason as manifested in the trends of science
still lies

and morality, of art and religion in his time, is not interested in this actual capacity in itself and as such, but in the deeper actuality of this capacity in principle. Faced with what reason has into
brought
interested only in its a priori capacity for achieving these things; faced with the accidental historical aspect of civilization he seeks
is

he

being

instead

makes

is essential and necessary about it, the quality which an unforgettable phenomenon. And now the question he asks is about the nature of this basic capacity, about the definite order and structure of this necessity, about

what

it

into

the laws governing its essential quality, without perception of which the actual capacity could not in the long run remain certain of its
objectives and its course. Treatise on Method* He
his great main work a have said the same of his other three main works and of the lesser works which accompanied them. Man has come of age. But in what does man's majority consist? Only Kant, the perfect man of the eighteenth century, could dare to accept the assumption which underlay this question: the assumption that

Thus he himself called

also

might

reason
a

is

right in

its

activity, as

an

actual capacity, as

and in

so far as,

preceding necessarily rests upon itself. But the question which was put on the basis of this assumption, the question, about this e as and in so far as , in bringing the spirit of the age to its culmination, also overcomes it.
priori,

its

activity, it
3

The Enlightenment before Kant was the absolute and boundless selfaffirmation of reason, which, as such an affirmation, was ultimately bound to be uncertain of itself. Even if we wish to characterize Kant's
intellectual quality lightenment as in

and that of the time

a certain sense

after

him

as part of the
it is

En-

we not only can but must

now

and bounded self-affirmation of reason, critical time sure of itself, to the extent that it possesses these qualities. That is what is new in Kant. And it is also a new side of the intellectuality of the nineteenth century, as opposed to that of the
all

at

events a relative
for the
first

and now

eighteenth. The actual capacity of human reason was destined to march onward in this new century, in which Kant himself, grown tired, and the balance of his mind somewhat disturbed, was to live only for a few years. It was destined to assume quite different dimensions from those of which Kant could have any idea; there would be quite different and ever-increasing occasion for the self-consciousness which
i

ReL, 225. Critique of Pure Reason,

2nd

ed., Pref.

XXII.

KANT

157

distinguished the old Enlightenment and which was also alive in

Kant. But from now onwards, from Kant onwards, all self-affirmation of human reason would be asked, and would continually have to bear with 'being' asked, whether it in fact rests upon a true maturity. And everyone who used this reason would be asked from now on whether
his use of it

reason,

an

might not perhaps just be sophistry masquerading as uncritical adventure of the understanding prompted by

obscure feelings. With Kant and from Kant onwards the human use of reason has left the broad way and finds itself within the 'strait gate'. 1
also, and particularly, true of theology. From now on theology would no longer be able to formulate its tenets, no matter on what foundation it might base them, without having acquired a clear conception of the method of reason, which it also uses in the construction of its tenets. Any theology which had not at least faced this question and presented its credentials was backward, from now on, superseded in its relation to the age, no matter how valuable or worthless it might otherwise be; it would not be the theology of the new century which was just coming into being. Further, it would in any case be typical of

This was

the theology of the new century to absorb the idea of the critique of reason, in a vastly different form perhaps from that of Kant himself, but in consideration, nevertheless, of the problem which Kant raised.
It cannot be our concern here to develop even at moderate length Kant's critique of reason in its historical course and philosophical content. We shall content ourselves with establishing what its result

was and with

establishing

its

two basic trends, which have an

especially

important bearing upon theology. The one has its goal in the insight into the ideal character of all knowledge achieved by pure reason. (From it the way of thought Kant founded and which was developed directly after him acquired
the ambiguous title of 'Idealism'; 'Criticism' or 'Rationalism' are terms which would have typified much more clearly and compreledge
is,

hensively all that Kant, at any rate, wanted.) By pure rational knowKant means that necessary knowledge which refers not to what

but to an object that transcends all experience, to what must be 5 and only in this sense 'is This pure rational knowledge which is necessary since it accompanies and directs all empirical knowledge in substance Kant here simply follows the metaphysics of his time is the knowledge of the ideas of God, freedom and immortality. It is clearly in the realm of this knowledge of ideas, the realm of metaphysics, that there take place all the reason's misconceptions and deceptions about
.

Critique

of Practical Reason,

ist ed., p. 163.

158
itself.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

To clarify and lay foundations for this knowledge of ideas, and to provide in this sense a criticism of it, is the task of the Critique of Pure Reason. That is why Kant gave its distinctive title to the, as he intended, popular compendium with which he at once followed up the longer
work: Prolegomena
science.
to

any future metaphysics which can possibly pretend

to

be a

Empirical knowledge is not knowledge of ideas and knowledge of ideas is not empirical knowledge, indissolubly interconnected as they are that is what, above all, human reason must make clear to itself,
itself.

in order to understand

Empirical knowledge is constituted by intuition (Anschauung immediate perception) and the Understanding, the two forms of knowledge peculiar to human reason. Their object cannot be the thing-initself 5 that is a thing manifest to us in its essential nature; but is the thing as it is given and comprehended by virtue of these two forms of knowledge. Their object is given to us under the forms of space and time, so that its existence and characteristics become to us intuitively evident. We comprehend however its existence and characteristics by means of the Categories or forms of the Understanding which correspond to the forms of intuition (the forms of space and time). By means of the Categories of the Understanding we attempt to think what we have intuited. Genuine empirical knowledge is achieved when there is a concrete unity of intuition and concepts. This is what corresponds to the transcendental act of apperception, that is to what underlies this
e

achievement, the synthetic a priori determining principle of our reason. Only empirical knowledge is genuine theoretical, rational knowledge, that is, knowledge of what exists. For only in the unity of intuition and
concepts
is

there knowledge of what exists.

would be blind, so and this is the by the Kantian teaching concepts without intuition are empty, that is, they cannot be made to yield any knowledge of what exists. When assertions or denials about what exists are made by means of forming concepts which lack any actual or
intuition without concepts aspect of the matter emphasized

As

at least possible intuition, the illusion of genuine theoretical knowledge and not the reality is achieved. For there is wanting any basis in transcendental apperception and thus any test of

pure rationality. This illusion will very soon produce difficulties in its train by developing antinomies, necessary self-contradictions in which at once such a desire for ideal knowledge of a merely conceptual kind will be entangled. Examples are the contradiction between the assumption of a First Cause and that of a regressus in infinitum; or that between the

assumption of human free-will and the assumption that there is no such

KANT

159

thing. So far as the objects of intuition and the Understanding, of empirical knowledge, are concerned, God, Freedom and Immortality are not objects of our knowledge. That means: they are not objects of our theoretical knowledge. They are not to be comprehended simply as existent reality. Only sophistry can present them and treat of

metaphysical cosmology, psychology and one understands by it a theoretical knowtheology ledge of objects, the concepts of which must be devoid of corresponding intuitions. They are impossible 'since for determining our ideas of the supersensible we have no material whatever, and we must derive this latter from things in the world of sense, which is absolutely inadequate for such an Object'. 1 All theoretical proofs and disproofs of God's existence, for example, fail equally, since the propositions, 'God exists' and 'God does not exist', can express in their theoretical meaning only the illusion of knowledge and not knowledge. For they apply the Category of being, positively and negatively, to an object which lacks intuition. God is a limiting concept, a regulative idea, a pure thing of thought. We imagine that when we assert or deny God's existence we have said something about God. In fact to speak of existence or non-existence is per se not to speak of God.
as such. Metaphysics
is

them

impossible, if

Be it well understood: the significance of this, the negative aspect, of Kant's endeavour to bring reason to an understanding of itself, does not consist in an attempt to dispute or even only cast doubt upon the
metaphysical reality or unreality of God, freedom and immortality. It certainly does consist in criticism of the means by which they are

known, in the attempt to demonstrate that this knowledge is that of pure reason, that its nature is strictly ideal; and in the making of the proviso, that it may on no account claim to be theoretical knowledge. There is, however, a second aspect, a positive aspect to Kant's undertaking. According to Kant knowledge by pure reason is also and in particular true knowledge by reason, however necessary it is to all empirical knowledge. Reason must, however, learn to understand itself as pure reason. It will not have come to an understanding of itself so long as it imagines itself merely to be theoretical reason and not active, practical reason. In Kant's teaching 'practical reason'
is

not a second kind of reason existing beside the theoretical form; it is rather that the one kind of reason, which is also theoretical, is also and> it must actually be said, primarily, practical reason. Surely the union
of intuition and concept, whence empirical knowledge derives
1

its

Critique

ofJudgment, 3rd

German ed.,

p. 453; transl.

by

J.

H. Bernard, 2nd

ed.,

p. 403.

l6o

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

reality, is in fact action, practice,

having its basis in transcendental apperception. It is in this act as such that man is laid hold of not only by the being of things, i.e. by nature in its reality in time and space, but beyond this and above all by the thing that must be,

hidden from us as a 'thing in itself' which is, as a thing, undiscoverable; by the world of freedom which limits time and space and resolves them in itself. I am laid hold of, to use the words of Kant's famous passage, 1 not only by the star-strewn heavens above me, but also, at the same time, and chiefly, by the moral law within me. Abstract man, the man who is held to be a creature of theoretical reason, is not the real man. I am not a real man, a real creature of reason, simply by virtue of this capacity I have for perceiving things in time and space, but this capacity for perceiving things in time and space is itself based upon the true and essential reasoning capacity, namely that by which I perceive necessity and law, in such a way that law and necessity are imposed upon me as a person who acts. God, freedom and immortality these ideas which in their regulative use are indispensable also in empirical knowledge cannot be perceived in dbstracto, i.e. by contemplation in isolation, but they can be perceived in concrete,
in and with thefact that their true contemplation in practice that the true thing is accomplished, the accomplished; which theory accompanies, provides the basis for and contains within
i.e.
is

in actual fact. It

is

it is

itself all

empirical knowledge but which now also rises truly legitimately above it. They have no truth in a theory by itself.

and

which

Their truth is contained in the truth of the will for good, beside *it is not possible to conceive of anything anywhere in the world, or, indeed, outside it which could be taken as good without restriction'. 2 The will for good is a will not governed by any object, nor
significantly

its

guided by any desire or end or authority, but subject by decision to the categorical imperative of duty, in its quality as the rule for that which is universally valid, as the quintessence of

own

the law, as the voice from the world of freedom Kant alludes to. Pure reason, reason as the capacity for knowing ideas, is practical reason. Knowledge by pure reason too, the true knowledge of God, freedom and
immortality,
is

knowledge by practical reason, as

it

is

implicitly

accomplished in the deed performed in accordance with duty, and knowledge by practical reason is knowledge by pure reason. The act

performed in accordance with the will for good, the moral

1

act, is

not

V, 161. Grundlegung z&r Mefapkysik der Sitten (Background for a Metaphysics of Morals), Phil. Libr., vol. 41, p. 10.
Critique of Practical Reason,

KANT

l6l

possible without, but comprises, not the establishment but certainly the presupposition Kant's word for these, not a very happy choice
linguistically,

was

every experience and yet knowledge are true: There

1.

that all these ideas which transcend 'postulates' for their own part comprise all empirical
are:

The
is,

that

pre-supposition of the truth of the idea of Goda of the truth, of an ultimate unity of nature and freedom, of that which is

with that which must be, and thus of duty and desire. 2. The pre-supposition of the truth of the idea of freedom, of the idea, that is, that our moral existence is superior in its origins to our
natural one.
3. The pre-supposition of the truth of the idea of immortality) of the idea, that is, of the infinite convergence of the two lines upon

which our existence

runs.

(this, however, means truth in general, in so far as the truth of things is comprised in the truth of ideas) is practical truth, truth, that is, which is perceived in the form of such pre-suppo-

The

truth of ideas

sitions

(Kant

says, in

the form of 'postulates') which are accomplished

in the moral act. As theoretical knowledge (whose objects can only be objects of experience), knowledge by pure reason is impossible,

having its inevitable, true and sure basis in the knowledge of ideas, a knowledge which cannot be affirmed or denied, but which can certainly be believed, and believed, furthermore, as something jointly based with the moral demands on reason, as something, therefore, which is to be believed to be reasonable. It is impossible to bring forward the proof of God as an ontological, cosmological or ideological proof, as ultimately the school of Wolff still wanted to bring it. The proof of God is ever to be adduced as a demonstration of the presupposition that is assumed in deciding to accept the commandment of the inscrutable
Law-giver, in subjecting oneself to the judgment of the inscrutable Judge. It must be brought forward as a moral proof of God.

There is, therefore, according to Kant, one knowledge of God, namely

that one which lay a practical basis and meaning: 'After the analogy with an understanding I can very well conceive of a super-sensory
.
. .

Being, without however wishing to perceive him thereby theoretically; if, namely, this definition of his causality concerns an effect in the world

containing an intention which is morally necessary but which sensory beings are incapable of implementing; since then a knowledge of God and of God's existence (theology) is possible by means of qualities, and
definitions of his causality, attributed to

him simply by

analogy, the

which

(sc.

existence) in

its

practical aspect, but then again only in

l2
respect to

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

its practical (i.e. moral) aspect, has all the reality anyone 31 might wish for. The critique is therefore meant to have brought honour, and not discredit, to knowledge by pure reason in particular Kant
:

does not think that in clarifying the relationship of knowledge by pure reason to empirical perception he has destroyed metaphysics, but rather that he has first and foremost made it possible as a science:
is

metaphysics as knowledge by means of practical reason. That then the true use of pure reason as it at last and finally emerged from the fire of Kant's critique of reason.

As a result of this teaching theology, at least as much as philosophy and every other branch of learning at that time, found itself faced with
the problem of determining its future attitude to Kant's critique of reason in the formation of its peculiar and necessary propositions. Kant,

however, did not

first

wait for the theologians to declare their attitude

but immediately advanced to meet them in accordance with the careful thought and precision he devoted to all his work by dictating his own terms for peace, i.e. by giving an
to his philosophy,
explicit and exhaustive explanation of the way he thought this attitude should be formed. These terms for peace are contained in his philosophy of religion, set down in his fourth main work, Religion Within the Limits

of Reason Alone (1793), to which in 1798, with the Dispute of the Faculties (which, significantly, concerns only the dispute between the philosophical and theological faculties!), he added a rider which was meant
to emphasize and enjoin upon them what he had said in the previous work. It is to these works and to the very categorical proposal made to theology in them that we have now to devote our attention. It is possible to distinguish in Kant's dictation of peace terms -just as with every such dictated peace, however severe between what the

dictator definitely wants, and what he does not necessarily require, according to his explicit or tacit explanation of his terms but leaves to the discretion and decision of the second party to the contract, until he

has seen how things are going, at any rate. We cannot therefore explore all the possibilities of characterizing Kant's theology and describing
its

historical significance simply by explaining and assessing the content of his teaching, or alternatively of his terms for peace as they stand. shall have to pay strict attention also to the passages where the philosopher has not expressed his own opinion, or has not stated any

We

first

conclusion, but has merely left the question open. It is fitting to set out in pursuit of what Kant in his works expressly stated and definitely
his discussion of the theological problem.
3

wanted in

We shall then in

Critique ofjudg., 482, cf. 424, footnote, 434, 472.

KANT
conclusion examine the other things, those

l63

upon which he was strikingly

unwilling to express himself either explicitly or tacitly, and in which, therefore, he did not wish to act as a dictator towards theology.
are Kant's aims as a philosopher of religion? The answer we must give is a double one: he wants on the one hand, as a philosopher,

What

i.e.

as the advocate of

human

reason in the general sense

to

seeking to understand itself and is thus self-critical too and theology as religion's mouth-piece of the significance of the fact that it too is a matter in which reason plays its part, an additional at all events, just as as it too at least makes use of reason
certainly part, in the establishment of its propositions.

which is remind religion

And on

the other hand, once

again as a philosopher, he wants to assess religion as a phenomenon of reason, as a cultural manifestation, in so far at least as it is these all the things; he wants to make it intelligible within the frame-work of
reason, to construct it by applying the general all civilization. The theological propositions are to principles pertaining at all events also, those of reason. And reason for its part has the idea

other

phenomena of

of a religion' 1 as something which is, at all events, also peculiar to it. In respect to theology philosophy therefore has on the one hand the
task of critically examining in principle theology's 'interpretations', i.e. the tenets calling revelation to witness. 2 This at all events theology

cannot disallow:

The
is

philosophical faculty

the theological faculty's proud claim that its handmaid (which still leaves open the

her question as to whether the latter carries her mistresses' torch before or her train after her) can be conceded only so long as the maid is not
driven out or gagged.' 3 Kant is bold enough to make the suggestion that candidates for theology should be compelled upon completion of
their instruction in theology proper, biblical theology, to hear a special lecture upon purely philosophical religious teaching, as something 4 necessary to their complete preparation. *It doesn't matter whether
this
feel that

makes the theologian agree with the philosopher or makes him he must defeat his arguments, so long as he only hears him.' We shall hear what there is to hear for the theologian on this
the other hand, however, the philosopher is bound to feel it important for his own sake to form some coherent idea of those things
e

subject.

On

in the Bible, the text of a religion which is held to have been revealed, c which can also be perceived by reason alone', 5 and to seek that meaning in the Scripture which is in harmony with the holiest of reason's
* First draft

Foreword

of the Foreword to the Rel. to the ist ed. of the JfoL XIX.

* Loc.
5

3 cit. Disp. of the Foes., 67. Disp. of the Foes., 44.

164
5

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

1
.

The revealed or church faith, the positive religion, conteachings tains the inner, smaller circle, 2 Kant says (but he means to say: as the
shell contains the kernel). It is this religion of reason as such, or the inner circle of positive religion, where it too is comprehensible as a

and only in so far as it is here comprehensible as a religion ofreason too, which interests the philosopher. It is in this respect that the philosopher is interested in positive religion as such too. It and
religion of reason,
it

alone

(sc.

religion.

the religion of reason) is the object of the philosophy of Only seemingly does the latter trespass upon theology's
its

own part, for instance, basing its arguments upon the Bible; only seemingly because it does this simply quotations from and at most to affirm its own tenets relevant to this inner to explain,
ground, in for
circle. It is

on

principle concerned with Christianity in particular

and

the documents of Christianity only as an example, in order to reveal by it the sole conditions 'whereby the idea of a religion can be rea3

lized',

i.e.

in order to

demonstrate by such examples the universal

truth of religion. Such then, in very general terms, are the two aims expressed in the title 'Religion within the limits of reason alone'. This title does not at

imply that religion exists solely within the limits of reason. It does, however, state that religion at all events is to be contemplated also within the limits of reason alone, and secondly that within the limits of reason alone religion too is to be contemplated. In this it must be borne in mind that reason alone' must in no circumstances be confused with
all
e

pure' reason, the capacity for the knowledge of ideas, but stands in contrast to the reason illuminated by revelation, the reason which

and concretely. Kant's undertaking in the philois not concerned with this last kind of reason as such of religion sophy and in itself. The contemplation of revelation, or alternatively of the
believes positively

reason which believes positively and concretely as such and in itself, has for the philosopher the significance of contemplating the border beyond which he feels, declares and conducts himself as one not competent, as a spectator, as a member of another faculty which is not qualified to judge of the matter, giving way respectfully and a little maliciously to the theologian, not contesting what he says, but not

expressing agreement either, interested, but disclaiming all responsibility, waiting to see whether the other, the theologian, will find the desire and the courage really to take up the position which is his due
as the proclaimer of revelation, of religion, that
i 3
is,

within and without

Rd.,

2 Foreword to the 2nd ed. i isf. ReL, XXIf. Second draft of the Foreword to the Rd.

KANT
the limits of reason alone. Such

165

is the strange restriction of the problems dealt with in Kant's philosophy of religion, concerning which we shall have several things to say later. Let us turn first of all to the details

of the Kantian teaching of religion within the limits of reason alone, within the reason, that is, which in respect of any kind of positive faith

based on revelation is, so to speak, merely a void, but which, precisely because of this, is the necessary form in all reason too which is filled by
faith

based on revelation.
e

his standpoint in the philosophy of religion 9 1 In order not to misunderstand him, rationalism pure sense which this word normally has when the narrower misled by being we use it, we must once again reflect that with Kant ratio, reason, does

Kant himself described

as being that of

human capacity but to determined decisively even, by practice. It is precisely Kant's 'rationalism' which remains untouched by the arguments it is customary to raise against 'intellectualism'. Taking Herder or Rousseau as one's guide it is possible to attack Kant's rationalism for its narrowness, as the Romantics who followed them did in fact attack it. But it is precisely as intellectualism that it is impossible to condemn it. Kant is only carrying out an analysis of the problematical notion of 'religion within the limits of reason alone' when he explains his
not refer to the isolated theoretical, intellectual
that

human capacity which is,

'purely rationalistic' standpoint

by saying that

as far as the latter

is

concerned the reality of a divine revelation is indeed 'admitted', left undecided, that is, as a possible answer to a question which is deliberately not put but which is merely alluded to, but that it must also be affirmed that it is not necessary to religion (within the limits that .) such a revelation should be known and assumed to be real. 2 Religion
.

(within

.) is

'knowledge of all our

41
.

duties as

divine

commandment' 3 or,

conversely,

it is

'that faith which sees

of

all

9 worship of the Divine

man's morality as the essential part Religion, the religion of reason as we

shall

now always call it, using Kant's own abbreviation, is distinguished

as the

from morals
in
its

primary use of reason not in its content but merely it represents morals in a certain connexion, inasmuch, namely, as it gives to the idea of God which is evolved from morality itself an influence upon the human will for the fulfilment of
form, inasmuch as

every

human

duty.

'When morality knows

in the holiness of

its

law

an object worthy of the

greatest esteem, it (morality) represents the cause of that law's fulfilment on the level of religion at its highest as

an
1
5

object of adoration
ReL, 23 if.
Ibid., 77.
2

and

it

appears in

its

majesty.'
4

This then, the

LOG. ci t
6

3 Crit.

Foreword

ofjudg., 477; ReL, 229. to the ist ed. of the ReL, Xf.

Disp. of the Foes., 93.

l66

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

6

fact that morality in religion appears in its majesty', is the formal distinction, i.e. the sole possible distinction, between religion and morals

as such. 'Morality inevitably leads to religion,

itself into

and in

so doing extends

the idea of a moral legislator possessed of power and existing

is

outside man.' 1
itself necessary to this extension of morality, to the higher plane. The movement from morality emergence upon to religion consists in fact in the moral mode of thought of reason itself,

Revelation

not in

this

belief that those things are true which are inaccessible to theoretical knowledge, in the belief that the ideas, and especially and most decisively the idea of God, are true, the belief which comes

namely in the

about implicitly, which is pre-supposed, in every act performed in accordance with a genuine will for good. And just as it is not an object that can be proved theoretically which we accord this supposition of
truth,

we are not bound either by any external authority to that suppo-

sition, but accomplish it spontaneously, in accordance with the laws of freedom.' 2 Kant expressly declared that while indeed it had a dubious c sound it was by no means reprehensible to say that every man makes

a God for himself, and indeed, according to moral concepts, must make a God for himself, in order to worship in him the One who made him'. He has to be in a position to measure the God who is, perhaps, proclaimed to him or who, perhaps, even reveals himself to him, against an ideal conception of God which he has set up for himself,
.

in order

(it is

former as God. 3

surely only thus that it is possible!) to recognize the He must therefore have already perceived God

directly and in himself before any act of revelation has taken place. Kant finds himself in agreement with Augustine's teaching that the

knowledge of God is a recollection of a notion of God which has already dwelt within our reason beforehand, because it has always been within us from the very beginning. And that is why he is not afraid to speak expressly a thing impossible even on the basis of the teaching of Augustine of the 'God within ourselves', who must be the authentic

we do not understand anyone but the one who speaks with us through our own reason'. 4 We shall certainly not find any criterion in the sphere of our experience by means of which a revelation which is thus encountered, as experience, might be distinguished from other experiences, and which might be perceived as revelation as distinct from these. Tor if God really spoke to man, he would never be able to know that it was in
interpreter of all revelation, 'because
. .
.

1 Loc. 3

cit.,

IX.

ReL, 257.

2 Grit, ofjudg., 462. Disp. of the Foes., 9 i .

KANT
fact

167
is

God who was

speaking to him. It

that

man

should grasp the Infinite

it

from, sensory beings, permissible to characterize such experience, difficult and impossible as it seems to us to exalt it to the level of empirical knowledge on account of its incomprehensibility, as divine revelation, since in order to do this we should already have to have some prior know-

tinguish neither is

him

an utterly impossible demand One by means of his senses, disand perceive him thereby. 31 But

ledge of what revelation is, and of what God is. 'It might at most be allowed, that man had had some inner experience of a change which he was at a loss to account for other than by a miracle, an experience, therefore, of something supernatural. But an experience concerning which he cannot even be certain whether it was in fact an experience, because (being supernatural) it cannot be reduced to any rule partaking of the nature of our understanding, and thus substantiated, is an interpretation of certain sensations we do not know what to make of,

and concerning which we do not know whether, as something belonging to knowledge, they have a real object, or whether they are mere fantasy. The wish to feel the direct influence of the Deity as such is a self-contradictory piece of presumption, since the idea of the Deity has its seat in reason alone.' 2
If then there is no empirical criterion, and therefore no empirical knowledge either, of true revelation of the true God, this criterion can only ever be perceived by its 'correspondence with that which reason declares to be proper for God', 3 and it should now be clear where in fact we must look judging always from the standpoint of the
religion

of reason
thing.

for the true, original revelation, if we

true miracle of revelation, or, at least, what is the highest wondered at in the founding of the religion of reason is reason itself in its own eyes, as moral reason, namely There is in fact

The

might speak of such a

degree to be

something within us which we can never cease from wondering at, once we have looked well upon it, and this is the thing which at the same time exalts mankind ideally to a dignity which one would not
expect in

man

as comprising objects of experience', 'the superiority',

man in us over the sensory', the moral 4 inseparable from humanity. 'The incompreof this hensibility disposition which proclaims our divine origin must 5 affect the mind with the force of an inspiration.' It is the object of our 'which can only ever increase, the longer one highest wonder, gazes upon this true (and not invented) ideal; so that those men can well be
namely,
'of the super-sensory

disposition in us

which

is

1
JDisp.

of the Foes., logf.

i^

IO2

3 Ibid

l68

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

pardoned who, misled by its incomprehensibility, consider this supersensory quality in man, because it is practical, to be supernatural, something, that is, which does not lie in our power at all and belong to us as our own, but which is rather to be ascribed to the influence of another and higher spirit; in which belief they are, however, very much
at fault'. 1
see, then, upon the one hand the inspiration, resides within ourselves, in so far as the idea of humanity

We

whose object and therefore

this

moral disposition reside within us too; and, upon the other, the 'influence of another, higher spirit*. It is between these two, between
9

the notions of a disposition proclaiming a divine origin on the one hand, and 'revelation' on the other, between the 'supersensory' and the

between the things which can be and the which be supposed, runs, in matters not supposed things may the of reason. concerning religion Anyone who speaks of revelation is the of reason asunder, for he is bursting asunder bursting religion 'mere' reason, he is speaking of something which cannot be an object
'supernatural', that the exact border

of empirical knowledge. The critical philosophy of religion cannot therefore speak of revelation. This, then, is Kant's 'pure rationalism'
in this matter.

From the point of view of religion which has its foundation in reason
itself, i.e.

the religion which refers to this disposition to be discovered in ourselves, the following may be said concerning positive, allegedly revealed, statutory religion, in so far as it, also at any rate, presents
:

a phenomenon of reason, and is to be judged as such it rests, as from the religion of reason, upon *a teaching which has been on to us'. 2 It is 'based upon facts'. 3 It is a 'historical faith'. 4 passed It has need, in so far as it has its basis in books, of the control of historical science. 5 In consequence 'its validity is always only of a paritself as

distinct

ticular kind' it is valid, that is to say, only for those who have been reached by the history upon which it rests. Its knowledge is not necessary and uniform, but accidental and diverse, it is not per se the one,
6 pure religious faith which should distinguish the one true Church. Such a historical faith is, however, as such not a living, not a salutary 7 faith, and is therefore not necessary either. It is 'dead in itself. The

idea that

'it is

our duty and

essential to salvation, is superstition'. 8

Those who represent it are in error in attempting to take 'its statutes (even if they were divine revelations) to be essential parts of religion,
1

Disp, of the Foes., 104. ibid., 91. Ibid., 194. Ibid., 167; 7 RcL, 161; cf. Disp. oftheFacs., 113.
5

cf.

3 * ReL, 145. Ibid., 161. 154; Disp. of the Foes., 91. 8 Disp. of the Foes., 112.

KANT

169

thereby foisting rationalism upon empiricism in matters of faith [Kant means foisting the necessary quality of reason itself upon the

and thus representing that which

necessary in
itself'.
1
e

empirically determined nature of the reason which positively believes], is merely accidental as something
9

For in itself, looked upon as a confession, it contains nothing which might have moral value for us 2 Historical knowledge, which bears no inner relationship valid for all to the betterment of mankind, has its place among the things (adiaphora) which may or may not be believed, which each one may treat in the manner he finds most edifying to himself'. 3 Kant does not, however, wish to say outright that revelation is
.
e

therefore completely unnecessary and superfluous. 4 He does, admittedly, say quite openly that it is a consequence of a special weakness in
nature, that the religion of reason can never be relied upon to the extent it certainly deserves, namely to the extent of the foundation 5 of a Church upon it alone 5 But since this is once and for all so, the
.

human

a Church must be determined, in contrast to this religion a priori, as religion a posteriori or as religion in concrete, as a 'working-out* of the former's demands, 6 as a 'means to its furtherance , 7 as its Vehicle' as Kant was especially fond of saying. 8 Dogma might, for instance, be honoured as the 'shell which has served to set the religion of reason publicly in motion. 9 Taking the ideal case it might so be that the revealed and the natural religion were one and the same, in the case, namely, 'when the positive religion is so constituted, that men might and should have been able to discover it for themselves by the sole use of their reason, albeit they would not have discovered it so early or in such large numbers as is expected of them, so that at a certain time and in a certain place a revelation of the same might be wise and very advantageous to the human race; a revelation made, however, in such wise that all men thenceforth, once the religion thus introduced is there, and has been made publicly known, can convince themselves of its truth by their own inner resources and by their own
faith of
5

subjectively

reason. In this case the religion is objectively a natural one, although it is a revealed religion, for which reason also it is the

former

name which

truly befits

it.'

10

in this case too. This supposition that the revealed

1

Thus pure rationalism prevails and the natural

3 2 Ibid., 47; Disp. of the Facs.> 82. ReL, 161. Disp. of the Foes., 93. 6 First draft of the Foreword to the ReL 6 Rel, 145. Disp. of the Foes., 50. 7 Rel., 148, 250. 8 Vehicle* means a 'conducting subIbid., 152, 153; Disp. of the Foes., 78, 91, 95 stance', and is a technical term which was used in pharmaceutics at Kant's time. 10 *Rel., 118. Ibid., 233.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

is, in Kant's opinion, true of thus the Christian Christianity. preaching has also at any rate the task of presenting the biblical teaching of the faith in the form in which we can develop it from within ourselves by means of reason. 1

religion

might be one and the same,

And

What there is to be said, from the point of view of Kant's conception of the problem of a 'religion of reason', concerning the significance of the Bible can now to a certain extent already be foreseen. There is above all this to be said that the Bible too, like religion itself, 'is made
up of two unequal parts; the "canon", which contains the pure religious faith, and the "organon" or "vehicle", containing the church faith which allegedly rests upon revelation 2 The thing which
9
.

affirms

its
is

reason)
it,

truth (judged always from the standpoint of the religion of e not the especial learnedness in divinity 3 of those who wrote

but the popular effect of its popular content, and it is precisely thereby that it betrays itself as an affirmation 'from the pure spring of the universal religion of reason, which dwells with every common man'. 3 This acknowledged effect which it has of 'giving rise to religion
in

human hearts' surely has its quite simple explanation as the 'effect of nature and result of progressive moral civilization in the general course of Providence'. And it is precisely because this effect is ultimately the effect of the religion of reason itself that it is independent of all
historical

and

critical investigation

of the Bible.

May

the latter even

be

'greatly or little lacking in items of so-called historical proof, the

its

moral content yet justifies the pronouncement, were a divine revelation deserves to be preserved, used in moral questions and employed as a manual for redivine nature of
'that the Bible just as if it
4

ligion'.

Since this
exegesis

is

the position in respect of the authority of the Bible,

its

must consist in a thorough 'interpretation' of the Bible 'into a meaning which concords with the general practical rule of a religion of reason. For the theoretical element in the church faith cannot hold any interest for us from a moral point of view, if its effects do not tend to the fulfilment of every human duty as a divine commandment'. Even if this exegesis then 'often seems forced, and often really is so too', it is nevertheless resolutely to be preferred to a literal but morally

man of Scripture is subordinate to the the interpreter of the Scripture, should the occasion arise, is quite entitled to 'convey 9 the true teaching of the religion of reason into the Bible, if by any chance he does not find it
5 insignificant one.

The

learned

6 interpreter of Scripture.

And

Disp. of the Facs. 3 105. * in.

Ibid.,

Ibid., 78.
*

ReL, 158.

3 Ibid., Ibid., 162.

10.

KANT
'Passages in the Scripture containing teachings which, while they are theoretical and proclaimed sacred, yet transcend every concept of reason (even the moral one), may be interpreted to practical reason's advantage, but those containing tenets which contradict practical reason must be thus interpreted.' 2 The words 'He that believeth and is
there.
1

baptized shall be saved' (Mark 16.16), for example, must not be and historically. 3 'It is therefore only the doctrinal exegesis, which does not seek (empirically) to know what sort of meaning the holy author might have attached to his words, but to know with what sort of teaching reason (a priori} can support the Bible, in regard to morals, with a scriptural saying giving occasion for its text, which is the sole evangelical-biblical method of instruction for the
interpreted literally
people.' And it is precisely this interpretation, Kant thinks, which is in e fact the authentic one, i.e. it is thus that God would have his will as

revealed in the Bible understood

'The

God who

our

own reason
and

speaks to us through
is

(reason practical in

what concerns morals)

an infal-

lible

universally comprehensible interpreter of this his word.* 4

6 'The God who is within us is the interpreter.' Such therefore is the doctrine of the Scriptures and such is the interpretative method (Henneneutics) of pure rationalism.

What form will the

Christology of this teaching take? It

is

Kant (and indeed typical of him in a way which is also entirely to his credit) that the name Jesus or Christ never, so far as I can see, flowed
from
his

typical of

pen in any of his writings, and that he even found a way of avoiding it in the numerous quotations from the Bible which he used

in the 'Religion within'. He allows him to appear only as the 'teacher of the Gospel', as the 'founder of the Church', as Son or Ambassador of God, and of course as the preacher too who is legitimized by the content (in accordance with reason) of his preaching, and who is therefore on principle subordinate to it. He grants him that, seen historically, he brought about *a complete revolution' among the race of men, in respect of religion, at least. 6 But Kant's interest did not
stop here. He was also interested in the Christological dogma and tried to derive a meaning, his own meaning, of course, from it. There is even a Kantian doctrine of the Trinity, held together by the idea of love, in so far as one 'can' (!) worship in God: firstly, the loving one,
loves with the love inspired by his being well-pleased morally with mankind (in so far as man lives up to his holy law), as the Father; secondly, representation in the idea of humanity which is begotten
i

who

Disp, of the Foes., Ibid, 114.

2 i\$& 16. 5 Ibid., 91.

ibid., ' 84. 4

Jtt,

79.

I7 2

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

and loved by him himself, as the Son; thirdly, his wisdom, in which he bestows his favour upon those who fulfil this condition, as the Holy Ghost. 1

The

specifically Christological doctrine

is

which the incarnate Son of God

of Kant takes a form in interpreted as 'the idea set before

us for our emulation' of moral perfection, an idea which as such cannot be any created thing, but only God's only begotten son. 2 cannot

We

conceive of the 'ideal of the humanity in whom God other than as it is contained 'in the idea of a man who
.
.

is is

well-pleased'

prepared not
. . .

only himself, to exercise every human duty . but also, although tempted, to take upon himself every suffering, even a shameful death
for the best

good of the world and for the

3 sake, even, of his enemies'.

principle, however, this ideal does not require any historical realization, either, in order to be an example, but it, too, as such resides already in our reason, and even if its historical realization must on
its true and original source is still to be found in 'Even the Saint of the Gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection, before he can be perceived as such; he too says of himself Wherefore do ye call me (whom you see) good ? No one is good (is the archetype of goodness) but the one God (whom you do not see). But whence do we derive the notion that God represents the highest good? Solely from the idea, which reason a priori traces of moral perfection and inseparably links with the notion of a

On

principle be possible,

reason

itself.

free will'. 4 This 'archetype residing in our reason' which we use to 3 'attribute to the phenomenon Jesus, is 'the true object of the faith which

so that we have no reason to suppose in Jesus anything but the example of a life well pleasing to God, i.e., however, 'a man of natural origin An exaltation over our frailty, such as would be postulated by a different kind of pronouncement concerning him3 would even
saves',
5
9
.

actually

impede the practical application of the idea which he

6

preached.

Thusjf, according to Kant, something corresponding to what is 'Word in the prologue to St John's Gospel exists, there is certainly, according to him, no suggestion that this Word might by any chance have become flesh. To the religion of reason the Son of God is not a man, but 'the abstraction of humanity'. 7 Thus the belief
called the
9

him should not rest upon miracles either, the demand for which is rather to be characterized as 'moral disbelief', 8 which the man guided by reason does not consider as a possible factor in the present at all,
in
i 5 Rtl.,

220

ReL, 175.

Ibid., 73. Ibid., 79.

*
?

ibid., 75.

Basisfor a Metaph. of Morals, 29. * Rel. Disp. of the Foes., 81. 9 77, 116.

KANT

173

but only at best as something belonging to the distant past 1 and which at all events cannot have any other significance but that of 'effects of
nature',

and not
above

Son of God,
suffering

2 that, therefore, of objects of belief. The work of the however, in so far as it exceeds his teaching his vicarious

all

is,

according to the one passage in Kant, to be

interpreted as meaning that from a moral point of view intelligible man is in God's eyes different from empirical man; that as the latter's vicar he
carries empirical man's guilt incurred by sin, meets the demands of the highest justice through suffering and death and is therefore his Saviour, so that empirical man, in so far as he is yet identical with intelligible

man, can hope

is

to

3 appear before his Judge as one vindicated by him.

According to the other,

interpreted as

less

profound, passage the vicarious suffering

meaning that Jesus by his death 'represented the good principle, mankind, namely, in its moral perfection, as an example to be imitated by everyone* and thus made visible 'the freedom of the children of heaven and the slavery of a mere son of earth in the most

4 striking contrast'.

The

belief in Christ, the Christian belief,

whereby

a person becomes well pleasing to God, must therefore, according to Kant, consist in placing in oneself the well-founded confidence that c one will, while subject to similar temptations and sufferings . un.

waveringly cling to the archetype of humanity and remain true to his

example in
It

faithful imitation'. 5

that, as

has to do with the primacy Kant bestows upon practical reason compared for instance with Lessing, he takes a quite strikingly

systematic interest in the notion of the Church. It is here for the first time that something becomes visible of the borders of the conception

The reign of the good principle of humanity demands and makes necessary as he puts in at this point the setting-up and spreading of a 'society in accordance with the laws of virtue and for the purpose of the same'. 6 This demand, however, presupposes a higher moral being beyond the insufficiency of the 7 individuals, upon which this demand is made a supreme law-giver and universal searcher of hearts, a moral world-ruler. 8 It would be 'against all reason to say that the kingdom of God should be instituted God himself must be the originator of his kingdom'. 9 'The by men. creation of a moral people of God is therefore a work the execution of which cannot be expected of men, but only of God himself.' Kant hastens to add that this still does not permit man 'to be inactive in the expectation of this work and to allow Providence to reign'. 'He must
of the problem peculiar to him.
.
. .

i
6

RtL,

18.

Ibid,, 129.

Ibid., 124. ? Ibid., 136.

Ibid., g8f. 8 Ibid., isSf.

Ibid.,
9

i raf.

Ibid, 76.

Ibid., 227.

174

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

rather proceed as if everything depended on him, and it is only upon this condition that he dare hope that a higher wisdom will allow his

well-meaning
is

efforts

to blossom into fulfilment

9
.

As God,

as the

the creator of the constitution of this kingdom, thus men founder, as its members and free citizens are at all events the creators of its
organization.
visible
2

Ideally this

3 kingdom coincides with the Church;

e

empirically, as the

diminished at the hands of men into an institution, Church, which, ... so far as the means for the setting-up of such an entity are
it is

concerned,
sentient

is

human

very restricted, according to the limits imposed upon a nature 4 But from its identity with the invisible
9
.

Church, there yet result certain demands upon the

entire

visible

Church, the

meaning of which is to make the invisible Church as visible as possible in it. These are unmistakably the well-known predicates of the
old Christian conception of the Church: ecclesia una sancta catholica et apostolica; which Kant has in mind when he says: (i) that only those elements in the Church should be considered essential, which must

union into one single Church; 5 (2) that only morality, but not superstition and enthusiasm, might be the
necessarily lead to a universal
6 principle of ecclesiastical union; (3) that this

Church must

distin-

guish itself from a political entity by its tendency to achieve unanimity in all men, by its tendency to be an ethical entity in which only the

and not the catholicismus one particular church faith as the universal one, may hold the reins of government; 7 and (4) that its constitution must be inalterable, and only its administration alterable, the accidental order which adapts itself in accordance with the demands of time and place. 8 This inalterable constitution of the Church is the work of God and of God alone. But Kant saw clearly enough and he thought practically enough, that 'if there is simply no means of
pure
religious faith, the catholicismus rationalis,
hierarckicus,

whose aim

is

to establish

arranging things otherwise regarding the fact that the pure religious faith has need of a statutory church faith as its vehicle, that there must

which, even if it
inalterable,

be, as against this divine constitution, a statute on the human side, is not to be considered as divinely statutory, is yet an equivalent raised publicly to the status of a basic law; a humanly

humanly

qualified statute, as

it

were the Scripture, beside

:

which, however, no tradition and no symbols must then be

set

up

as

equal to
i

it

in value. 9

2 3 * ReL, 141. ibid., 227. ibid., 142. ibid., 141. e Ibid., 143; Disp. of the Foes., 91, 96. ReL, 143. 7 9 Ibid., 143; Disp. of the Foes., 93. Rel, i^f. Ibid., I43f., 150, 152.

KANT
I say that

175

something of the borders of Kant's conception of the visible here. This it is possible to say, but more cannot become problem be said. Kant, in wishing to show that the conception of the Church is
rationally necessary, and in passing swiftly (a thing we are already accustomed to in him) from the proposition that God alone can be the

founder of the Church to the other, that

in the

man must therefore proceed Church as if everything depended upon him alone suddenly speaks of the Church in its visible form in quite different tones and with a quite different emphasis, surely, from that with which we heard him speak of the parallel notions of positive religion, the Bible and the
is

historical Christ. It

here precisely not the divine constitution alone

which

is

rationally necessary, but,

on

principle, the

human

organiza-

tion of the

the fact the

kingdom of God also, even if Kant does establish here, too, that this kingdom dwindles in the process into an institution
subject to the limitations of sentient

and becomes
first

human

nature. For

time unequivocally in this philosophy of religion he says that the concretion, the thing which he otherwise treats above all with suspicion or at least as a mere adiaphoron, is on principle necessary,

and that

it is

worth the trouble

The

fact that

Kant did

in fact do

to devote serious thought to it in itself. this, to a certain extent at least, is

evidenced by the qualified significance he yet attributed in particular to the Bible within this concretion. And what are we to think when we

hear him declare in respect to the constitution, not of the invisible civitas Dei y but of the concrete, visible Church, that it must not, according to its principles, be similar to a political constitution, must not, therefore, be either monarchical (papal) or aristocratic (episcopal),
or democratic (after the fashion of the 'sectarian Illuminat?}, but 'might best be compared with that of a household (family) under a common,
albeit invisible
will,

and

at the

moral Father, inasmuch as his holy Son, who knows his same time stands in blood-relationship to all its mem-

his father's will more clearly known to honour the Father in him, and thus enter into a 1 voluntary, universal and perpetual union of the heart one with another'. it is Is this still the Church of the religion of mere reason? If it is, certainly at the same time a picture of the Christian conception of the Church showing no lack of careful study. And if the philosopher should answer that it is precisely in this that the occasional happy coincidence of the Christian with the reasonable element comes to light, we could then ask in return whether it was in fact the reasonable element which
bers, represents

him by making

them,

who

therefore

served as the archetype in this construction, the Christian element

144-

176

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

serving only as an example or vehicle, or whether perhaps things turned out differently from what Kant planned and intended, whether
within.

he might have used the text of a religion other than that of his religion And even if all these questions could be controverted, it might still be affirmed that it was precisely at this point, where the
. .
.

that this coincidence of the Christian

gaze of the philosopher turned to the phenomenon of the Church, and the reasonable must have

met him in a

quite particularly pregnant fashion. observation that the conception of the problem contained in Kant's philosophy of religion in fact has its frontiers, and the supposi-

The

he could or would not say more, with this conof the ception problem, in his philosophy of religion than it was, quite simply, possible for him to say, once he had chosen it as the instrument
tion this implies, that
for his

work this observation and supposition are confirmed when we turn finally to the decisive part of his teaching of the religion of reason: to his reflections on the complex of questions which directly concern the
reality

of religion in the individual man, and which therefore directly

concern the reality of practical reason in the human will for good, the will, that is, which is in accordance with the law, and which thus contains the knowledge of God and the hope in him. Kant did not try to evade this question. He makes its discussion the starting-point for his
philosophy of religion, even, and thus it comes about that the reader of the 'Religion within . . .' his first contemporary readers found it so, too finds himself at once confronted in the very first pages by the most
difficult questions of interpretation. One certainly does not expect, having a knowledge of Kant's ethics from his earlier writings, and

looking at the rest of the contents of his teaching of religion after this beginning, to be met here immediately on the doorstep with a detailed
trine. It

doctrine of the problem of evil, and above all with that kind of docis in fact the last thing one would expect.

'The lament that the world

begins.

is

wicked

is

as old as history',

Kant

develops the biblical form of this 'lament', without, surprisingly, attempting to criticize or dissociate himself from it in any way, and then goes on to oppose it to the 'heroic' belief 'held, perhaps, only
alists',

He

by philosophers and, in our

time, especially

by education-

world is constantly (albeit almost imperceptibly) advancing from worse to better', and that there is a corresponding disposition in human nature, and therefore a kind of a priori necessary superiority of good in us. Kant, however, objects that this belief is certainly not drawn from experience. The history of every age speaks
'that the

strongly

against

it

and

it

is

'presumably merely

a benevolent

KANT

177

pre-supposition of the moralists, from Seneca to Rousseau, made in an effort to encourage the cultivation of the germ of good which perhaps

To anyone who knows Kant this is indeed a legitimate cause for surprise. We saw that he held the view that his time was the best there had ever been, and saw his joyful appreciation of the historical advance of the human life ofthe spirit. Even in the Dispute of the Faculties we find in that request still the remark that it is no merely wellmeaning and for practical purposes expedient proposition, but one which is tenable also, having regard to the strictest theory, in face of all
resides within us'. 1
c

unbelievers, that the

state

human race has always been advancing to

do
so ... a fact

a better

and

will continue to

which reveals a prospect into

an unforeseeable time; always provided that the first revolutionary epoch of nature, which buried only the animals and plants, is not followed by a second which will also include the human race, so that other creatures may walk upon this stage'. 2 But in this passage too Kant means something quite different from the 'heroic* or even 'wellis

meaning' conviction held by all moralists from Seneca to Rousseau; he in fact simply thinking of the actual decrease of merely outward violence, the increase of lawfulness, of beneficence, etc., of the trend in politics, even, towards a 'society of world-citizens', of the victory of
democratic principle, and the gradual elimination of war (against which he always expressed himself in the strongest terms); 3 as optimistically enough, we are now tempted to say he imagined all
these things to be coming.

He is, however, explicitly not thinking of a progress 'consisting in an extension of man's moral basis, . for which a kind of re-creation
. .

would be required'. 4 He expects this progress to be achieved 'not by what happens from below to above, but by what happens from above to below*. To bring this progress about by the education of youth, for instance, namely to an intellectual and moral civilization, 'strengthened by the teaching of religion', is a plan which
(supernatural influence)

Kant considers 'has very little hope of meeting with the desired success'
Instead he sees this progress train of ideas in Rousseau

5
.

we have

met, by the way, with a similar

primarily in part upon lightened self-interest of men and peoples. Such is the foreground. The background, however, has as its basis not an advance in reason, but a
c

quite dispassionately, as being founded the love of honour, and in part upon the en-

invisible to us, is wisdom descending from above (which, when 6 called Providence)'. This fiat denial of an actual moral progress in
it is

1 ReL 2 9 sf. Disp. of the Foes., i$$L 6 Ibid., 140. *Disp. of the Foes., 139.

ReL> 30; Disp. of the Foes., 132, 141

6

Ibid., 141.

178

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

of reason alone', a denial made history, of a progress 'within the limits Kant which in face of the importance yet certainly attached to this very of his act and idea of progress; this founding what he recognizes as
progress

other

upon eudemonism on the one hand and providence on the both of them motives which clearly have no indigenous claim

to belong to the teaching of the religion of reason as such these things here. present us with the first riddle we have to face this in wish Kant's all at indeed not It is beginning to the 'Religion

within

views he had

on the side of the moral pessimists whose of all presented. His intention is stated rather in the * title to the first part of the work, which runs: Concerning the inherence of the evil principle together with the good.' It is, however, let us reflect: the inherence of an evil printhis inherence
. .

.'

to place himself
first

precisely

which evidently prevents him from ciple together with the good! he of moral the existence progress in its true sense (because affirming
sees, in

whose 'extension would be in come to were if a such about, an evil principle firmly progress question rooted together with the good) it is precisely this inherence, which Kant believes he must assert here, which presents us with a second and
the very moral foundation
itself,

with the greater riddle. 'The inherence of the evil principle together that fact mean it did in Kant that is thus it and means good' surely
in the same incomprehensible freedom of reason in which the good, lawful will can be made actual, its great opposite, a will for evil, can be

made

manifest too.

This was, perhaps, implied in the philosophy of practical reason as Kant had represented it prior to 1793, but not, at all events, expressly stated. How startling were the effects of his statement of it now upon

can be seen by Goethe's outburst in a letter to Herder (yth June 1 793, from the camp near Mainz) in which he said that Kant, 'had criminally smeared his philosopher's cloak with the
his contemporaries

shameful stain of radical evil, after it had taken him a long human life to cleanse it from many a dirty prejudice, so that Christians too might yet be enticed to kiss its hem'. It is not the fact that the philosopher
takes evil into account at
all,

and emphatically, which was which philosopher could do otherwise? but certainly the manner in evil he takes it into account, i.e. that he speaks of an principle and therefore of a source of evil within reason, and of a radical form of evil in this sense. It might once again well be asked whether Kant has
here not, willy-nilly, incurred the guilt of falling in with the scandal and have folly of the Christian-dogmatic teaching. Surely, he could

or the fact that he does this earnestly and is astonishing here what moral

KANT

179

remained on the broad highway of the usual philosophical interpretation of the notion of evil, which was also largely usual for theology too, and therefore he could have allowed evil to appear as the opposite of

good just as sensuality appears as the opposite of reason, and folly as the opposite of wisdom, proceeding then to explain evil in the way of the Augustinian teaching, from which in other respects, he is not quite removed, as a privatio boni. It may be asked whether it
seriously

might

not have been more befitting to Kant's whole starting-point, and, at all events, to the conception of the problem underlying his philosophy of religion if he had in fact so treated it. Instead of this he now embarks upon a polemic against the Stoics, of all people, because they had sought to find the foe in the natural inclinations, which after all, considered in themselves

and for themselves, were yet good, and by no means were to be stamped out. They had summoned up wisdom against
of calling
it

folly, instead

to aid against the malice of the

human

heart,

against the

much more

concealing itself declares himself in due form for the words of St Paul in Ephesians 6.12 Tor we wrestle not against flesh and blood (the natural inclination),

dangerous, because, as it were, invisible foe, behind reason. 1 In opposition to the Stoics Kant
:

but against principalities and powers

The

essence of wickedness,

Kant

tells

2 against spiritual wickedness.' us in interpreting the biblical

story of the Fall, consists firstly in doubting the strictness of the commandment itself, then in giving it the new of a commandment

meaning

to self-love, and finally in the subsequent over-emphasis of the sensual impulses in the maxims, i.e. the fundamental orientation to which
3 this undue emphasis, is for ever subject. describes wickedness elsewhere as being primarily the weakness of the human heart, the frailty of human nature in respect to the decision to perform the act which is in accordance with the law he

man's conduct, governed by

Kant

is present with me; but how to then as the self-interest in good which man is able to link moral and amoral motives, and thus deceive himself, and finally as the malevolence in which he is able to acquiesce 4 to the amoral motives made tangible in this manner. 'Man is wicked, i.e. he is aware of the moral law and has yet incorporated the (occa6 sional) deviation from it in his maxims.'

quotes here

Romans
which

7.18:
is

Tor

to will

perform that

I find not';

On the basis of this primary frailty or self-interest or malevolence, which Kant himself describes as thepeccatum originarium and concerning which he declares himself in agreement with another saying of St Paul,
Romans
.

5.12:
2

In

Adam we
3

have

all

sinned' 6
5

on the

basis of this
Ibid., 45.

67f.

Ibid., 72.

Ibid., 44f.

Ibid., 2 if.

Ibid., a6f.

io

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

pre-supposition all man's actions (in so far as the freedom to do good has not snatched some place for itself) are to be described as wicked.

For 'the first incurring of guilt remains, even if the second (the wicked 1 Yet another quotation from St Paul deed) be very often avoided makes its appearance here Romans 14.23: 'For whatsoever is not of faith (of the moral law as the sole motive-force) is sin.' Man can and must then, even if he only does good deeds the accidental coincidence with the law helps him then not at all nevertheless be wicked. 2 It is a question of a bent for wickedness'/ of a guilt which is inborn because it can be shown to have been in man just as early as the use of freedom in any form was in him, 4 of an 'attitude which is part of his nature' that was not merely acquired with the passage of time, 5 of 'an inscrutable reason for the acceptance of maxims which are counter to the 6 law', which typifies man as such and the human species. That the
5
.

freedom just
that
it

manifestation, the actualization of this evil principle concerns human as much as does obedience to the law, that we are accountit,

able and responsible for

as

Kant emphatically
it is

must be thought of as something which

all

points out, and possible to over-

this only serves to confirm the original and inscrutable of this evil principle, a quality comparable to and vying with quality that of the freedom to do good. It is called 'radical evil', however,

come,

a corruption at the very source, a corruption of the chief maxims. It cannot actually be rooted out by human since this could only be achieved by means of endeavour, any means of a betterment at source precisely by means maxims, good by of the good maxims which are threatened and annulled by this
because
it is

subjective basis for all

principle!

To say that this doctrine of radical evil is in the nature of a 'foreign body' in the Kantian teaching is a possibility so obvious in interpreting his work, and one which has been presented so often, that simply for this reason one is unwilling to concur in it. It would perhaps not be a foreign body at all if it were part of a total survey given from the
Kantian point of view, a survey which we must say Kant neglected to give, both to his own time and to us, and which, considering his position, he was bound to refrain from giving; a total survey embracing not only the truly wide horizon of the field he in fact chose as presenting his problem, but also the horizon of the neighbouring fields upon its borders, and not merely regarding these as marking its limits. It cannot, however, well be denied and to this extent we cannot dissociate
i 5 Rel., 25.

ibid., 24<

3
7

Ibid., 14.

Ibid,

7.

ibid., 27. Ibid., 46f., 42.

4=

ibi^
*

3 6f.
Ibid., 35.

KANT
ourselves

l8l

from the general judgment just mentioned that the closed and rounded quality of the Kantian system as it stands, i.e. the rounded quality of the Kantian conception of reason and of the
religion of reason as postulated in his philosophy of religion, is disturbed by the doctrine of radical evil. That this is so is shown in the

developments which this teaching brought about in the further course of the Kantian philosophy of religion. If it should be so that the notion of evil must in all seriousness be accepted as a concept of reason, which, even if it greatly conflicts with the general plan, must yet be considered as necessary; if there is really an evil of reason, an a priori evil, an evil principle, opposing the law of reason; and if, as the title of the second part of Kant's book says, a 'Conflict between the good and the evil principle for the mastery of mankind' must take place, then we are at liberty to ask whether Kant's doctrine of this conflict, of religious of reality being the
reality

man's redemption, might not, at least, and perhaps should, have been cast in a mould entirely different from the one which they did in fact receive. Is it possible with impunity to be so far in agreement with $t Paul as Kant after all was in his
his doctrine of

this conflict,

and

doctrine of sin? Indeed the fact that he did go so far in this respect, as we have just discovered, also affects his doctrine of salvation. In this conceptions like those of vicarious atonement, justification,
re-birth

and even

predestination,

make

forgiveness, their appearance here, like

strange visitors from another world, upon the horizon of a philosophy of religion, without there being any attempt to disguise the mystery that is implied in them. They are greeted with a mixture of under-

standing and surprise, of request and a respectful shaking of heads, and they are acknowledged somehow as conceptions which are at any rate possible, as indicative of open questions, at the least.

One is apt to wonder, arriving at this point by way of Kant's doctrine of radical evil, why Kant does not seize upon this subject even more
forcefully.

But then again we should not really feel any surprise at all in view of the rest of the general purport of this doctrine of religion and of the philosophical frame within which it is set that this does
not happen, and that these concepts, for all the reverence with which they are treated, are in effect eliminated in so far as Kant finds that their mystery cannot subsequently be resolved in terms of practical
reason, or, wherever

new meaning

Kant thinks this possible, they are simply given a as concepts of reason, in accordance with the method of
to.

interpretation (hermeneutics) already referred this is doubtless to show that here, too, the

The

end-effect of all

problem-concept which

*&2

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

is

was postulated
it

victorious at the last; only the difficulty of carrying

through to victory in this field too has been plainly revealed, and its limited nature has once again, and here most palpably, been made
the limitation imposed by problems in other fields which Kant avoided, but which were only avoided by him, and not refuted. Let us once again go into detail. Kant felt himself able to repeat also in the later parts of his book the proposition that *Man as we know
4

visible

him
e

is

corrupt and not by any means in himself a

fit

subject for this

what may be inferred from this, too: How it is possible for a man who is by nature wicked to make himself good is something which passes all our comprehension; for how can a
to state

1 holy law'.

He goes on

with

2 corrupt tree bear good fruit?' Passes all our comprehension! It is this statement that these conceptions of the biblical and church doctrine of salvation come within the sphere of Kant's observation, commanding, as it were, consideration of themselves. That someone, should become ... a morally good man (one wellhowever, .
e .
.

mind; by can come into being only by means of a kind of rebirth, like that achievable by a new creation (John 3.5; cf. Gen. 1.2) and by a change of heart. 33 Kant knows that it is to conceive

pleasing to God) ... is something which cannot be accomplished by gradual reform so long as the basis of man's maxims remains impure, but which must rather be brought about a revolution in his

and a new

man

possible

of guilt-laden humanity being granted absolution by divine justice only provided that humanity undergoes a complete change of heart, 4 and that the revolutionary change in man's way of thinking must not only correspond to the reform of his disposition which is to be demanded 6 of man but must precede it on principle that man would have to put on a new man'. 5 Kant also knows, however, that observation of his previous course of life can never provide man with the conviction that such a change has taken place, and that he could never have an

immediate awareness of
heart (the subjective
himself'. 6
first

it

either, since 'the

basis for his

maxims)

is

depth of the human unfathomable to man

goes on to say that we can only hope at least to arrive on the which leads there (to righteousness in God's way sight, that is) by the employment of our own powers: for only that can be morally good which can be attributed to us as performed by ourselves; we can, however, only hope for even such a being on the way' since, and in so far as, this way has already been 'pointed out' to us by a disposition
e
c

Kant

el. 9

216.

Ibid., 102.

j 49 . Ibid, 55.

3 e

I?
ibid., 61.

KANT
that
is

183

fundamentally improved'. The quality our deeds have of being well-pleasing to God can with us in our earthly life' but also perhaps in all future ages and in all possible worlds only ever be
e

is coming into being, and we cannot base any claim we are right upon what we ourselves know of our deeds. From what we know of ourselves the prosecutor in us must rather always demand the sentence of damnation. 'It is therefore always only a

something that
that

sentence of judgment prompted by mercy, albeit one

completely

in accordance with everlasting righteousness, if we are relieved of all 2 responsibility for the sake of the goodness contained in our faith.'
It is solely in the idea,

known only to God, of the improved

disposition,

that justice can be done to eternal righteousness. It is this ideal righteousness which is thus our righteousness, and not the righteousness of a disposition which us! It will therefore 'always

we might

actually find present within

is

remain a righteousness which

not

our own'. 3

Does Kant after all perhaps know what justification is, in the sense of the Reformation? This question at least one cannot possibly escape, after carefully analysing the multifariously involved utterances of this, the work of his old age and it is inescapable at this point in particular.
It is, of course, impossible, in face of the Kantian re-interpretation, of the Ghristological dogma, to answer this question in the affirmative.

But how can

it be denied, when it is so plain that it was none the less precisely the Christological dogma by means of which he has here interpreted the text, that text, he alleges, which was the only one which

him of practical reason? Kant, it is true, very strongly denies the validity of all 'expiations' which seek to replace this 'change of heart' as the true and decisive, but also at the same time noninterested

human deed, be they of the atoning or of the sacramental kind ; he rejects all invocations and promises of adoration, even that ofthe
intuitive

vicarious ideal of the

Son of God, because this

ideal

must be taken up

into our disposition in order to intercede for us in place of the failure to act. In Konigsberg, for example, where he lived near the castle,

which

also served as a prison,

Kant was angered by the loud and

persistent hymn-singing of the prisoners, which was particularly irksome to him in the summer, when he liked to philosophize with his

window
souls

open, and complained to the town-president about the 'stentorian devotions of those hypocrites in the gaol', the salvation of whose

be imperilled even if 'they listened to themselves behind shuttered windows and then even without shouting at

would

certainly not
i

ReL, 61.

Ibid., 101,

Ibid., 83.

184

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

3 .

the tops of their voices 1 'Everything that man imagines he can do to win favour in God's sight over and above living the good life is mere 9 religious illusion and mock-service of God.

But note
ness:
C

I say:

how the continuation of this very sentence, for all its sharpWhat man thinks he can do; for whether there is not

something more, beyond everything we can do, something residing in the mystery of the highest wisdom, which only God can do, to make men well-pleasing in his sight, is not negatived thereby.' 2 For 'one

cannot prove either that this is impossible, since freedom itself, although it contains no supernatural element as a concept, yet remains just as
incomprehensible to
us,

natural, which one active but defective determination of the same'. 3 In 1789 Kant wrote the following to Jung-Stilling: 'You also do very well to seek the final
is

what concerns its possibility, as the supertempted to embrace as a substitute for the selfin

for

mind of yours which is striving for a sure basis in the Gospel, that immortal guide of true and doctrine hope not which is wisdom, only met by a reason which has brought its a to completion, but whence reason also acquires a new speculation
satisfaction for that

light in respect to that which,

field, still

even when
it,

remains hidden from

it has marked out its entire and from which it is still in need of

instruction.' 4

Kant, it is true, takes as it were a step backwards at this point with truly remarkable alarm, with alarm, one is tempted to say, which is worthy of imitation: in the conflict between his duty and his incapacity

man

finds himself

drawn
e

to the belief in

a moral world-

ruler's helping or

of a

secret,

shaping hand, and now the abyss opens before him the secret of what part God plays in this respect: of whether
all is

be attributed to him, and if so, what in particular'. 5 'This idea is one that knows no bounds, and it is moreover salutary that we should keep at a reverent distance from it as from a thing which is sacred.' What cause is there for alarm here? Kant, of course, feared above all, from an actual vindication of the 'idea* of God's autonomous action, the result that it might 'make us all incapable of
anything at
to

any use of our reason, or encourage the indolent habit of expecting in 6 passive ease from above that which we should seek in ourselves'. But he also further saw and above all did so with great clearness, that that 'which God alone can do to make us into men well-pleasing in his sight must be to forgive; it is forgiveness which must be the decisive justification of man who, as we know him, is corrupt. But it is precisely
9
,

Vorlander, Life oflmmanuel Kant, p. 138.

Gorres.,

XI,

10.

Rel., 261.

Ibid, 297.

JRel.,

210.

Ibid., 298.

KANT

185

of divine forgiveness that Kant says that 'an immediate divine revelation in the comforting utterance: "thy sins are forgiven thee", would

be a super-sensory experience, because it is impossible 1 And he saw moreover with an equal clarity that the notion of a historical faith that justifies, i.e. one achieving this unfathomable improvement of
.

mankind fundamentally,

just as

much

as the notion of vicarious

atonement as the object of this faith "ultimately leads to the conception of an absolute divine decree: God "hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth" ', which, as Kant at one
point says, 'represents,
rule for
if
:

taken
'It

literally,

the

salto mortale

of reason',

whereas elsewhere he says

must

at all events refer to

us.'

a wisdom the
2

which

is

utterly

and completely hidden from

point that Kant resolutely turns back. 'God has revealed us to nothing concerning these secrets, and cannot reveal anything either, simply because we should not understand it.' certainly
It is at this

We

understand the individual words, but not what the words are saying. And even a supernatural prompting could not at all alter the fact that
it

'cannot inhere in us at
it'.

all,

since the nature of our understanding

is

incapable of

atonement and

Grace, miracle, the mysteries of the call to faith, of of election, and the possibility of means of grace, are

'Parerga of religion within the limits of reason alone' as the methodically very illuminating expression runs; 'they do not belong within it, but are yet adjacent to it. Reason, in the knowledge of its incapacity to

moral requirements, extends itself to extravagant ideas, which could supply this need, without, however, appropriating them as its own extended possession. Reason does not dispute the possibility or
satisfy its

in

reality of the objects of these ideas; it is just that it its maxims for thought and action.' 4

cannot include them

It should be clear from the foregoing that Kant, whenever and wherever he did not tend to characterize these parerga simply by remaining

was forced to have recourse to the method of re-interpreting them in order to point them out. He adopts two ways of re-interpreting justification. The first is the way which has over and over again been trodden through the ages, by Augustine first and latterly by Holl and
silent,

his disciples: the indirect equation of divine justification with the

event of the good human will, the interpretation of the imperfectly good human deed as a larva of the perfectly good reality of the divine grace. 'If by nature (in its practical significance) we understand the capacity to achieve any certain aims by our own strength, then grace
1

Disp. oftheFacs., 90.

*ReL, 217.

ReL, ifff., 217; Disp. of the Foes., 83.

Ibid., 63.

l86
is

nothing

else

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL but human nature, in so far as man

is

determined to

actions by his own inner, but super-sensory principle (his conception ofhis duty), which we imagine to be the impulse to do good imparted to us

by the Godhead, the basis for which we have not ourselves laid down in us, and which therefore we imagine to be grace. 31 "A yearning for the kingdom of God" if only one were assured of the immutability of such a feeling( !) will be tantamount to knowing that one is already in
'

2 possession of this kingdom.' The Comforter (paraclete), whenever our transgressions trouble us by reason of their persistence 9 , is e the good

and pure disposition (which may be called a good spirit which governs 3 us) of which we are aware'. And rebirth is the 'revolution of the mode of thought', the 'foundation of a character', in which man 'reverses the supreme basis for his maxims, on account of which he was a wicked man, by one single immutable decision , so that he puts on a new man', and becomes *a subject receptive to good'. A 'reform of the disposition must then correspond to this revolution, a reform, that is, which consists in a gradual but constant advance from worse to better, which is taken by God to have been completed in consideration of the
5
c

revolution which has supplied the basis for it. 4 have only to think of Kant 5 s aforementioned explanation, that it is rather the idea of the

We

which shall justify us, and precisely not a disposition of which we are aware, precisely not the 'foundation of a character' which is conceivable as something which we can achieve ourselves, in order to see the seam hiding a tear which is palpably ill-mended here. 'If only one were assured of the immutability of such a feeling!' But how then is man to be able to recognize in his empirical goodness any analogy even, and thus any guarantee, for his intelligible goodness, his quality of
disposition

being well-pleasing to God? What the belief in divine justification should achieve in view of the radical evil, according to Kant's own
premises,
it

terpretation, that

manifestly cannot achieve in this interpretation (an inis, which is bound to a good disposition that is to
established).

be empirically

Kant's other re-interpretation of justification is in its groundwork identical with that known to us from the old Catholic Church of the second and third centuries, from the Greek fathers, and especially

from the Franciscan scholasticism of the late Middle Ages: each one of us must do as much as is in his power (facere quod in se est) to become a better man. He may then hope that what lies beyond his capacity will be supplied by a higher power which is aiding him. This can come
about, according to Kant, without
1
it

Disp. of the Foes., 85.

Rel, 86f.

being necessary for us to know in 4 Ibij 3 ib v 54f^ 35, ia., 9 if.

KANT
what
sists

187
it

this extra

help consists

and how

takes effect. 1

Whether

it

con-

in a diminution of the obstacles standing in the way of the will for good, or in positive aid for this will, man must previously make himself

worthy of it and he must also, which is, after all, no mean thing either, be prepared at all events to accept this aid of his own accord. 2 Of the two conditions for salvation, the belief in the atonement which interthe belief that
the good
front
life,

cedes for the transgressions we ourselves cannot make amends for, and we can in future become well-pleasing to God by living

and the

the second must in all circumstances be placed in the forefirst, as a reinforcement of our determination to stand on

in the background. 3 "The right course, is not to proceed from the receiving of grace to virtue, but rather from virtue to the

our

own feet,

4 receiving of grace.' It is clear that it is this doctrine of grace or the Augustinian one or a combination of the two (with Kant they frequently merge with one another), or, in short, the Roman Catholic, the decidedly non-refor-

matory doctrine of grace which emerges as the result of these reinterpretations, and which also doubtless accords with the true line of Kant's undertaking, or, to put it more cautiously, with that of Kant's philosophy of religion. Where else is a doctrine of salvation to end, which is intended to be anthropology and nothing but anthropology, even if it does have as its background a metaphysics with an ethical foundation where else could it end, but in the twofold possibility
of the

Roman

Catholic doctrine of salvation? Kant's emergence

into the Augustinian mystic teaching of the dual picture of reality and into the vulgar Pelagian doctrine of justification by words is no
less

necessary after its fashion than the emergence of Lessing's theology of history into the Roman Catholic principle of tradition. These roads

must
then,

all

lead to

Rome! Those features in Kant's philosophy of religion,

especially which are relevant to this last point, which have struck us as being upsetting to the general plan, can certainly only be adjudged deviations which have their origin in another field of magnetic force, and not peculiarities of Kant's own system, as Kant himself wished it to be understood. We must be well on our

and those

guard against the desire to re-interpret Kant, according to the rules of his own hermeneutics, as if what he said and meant were at bottom the same as what Luther and Calvin said and meant. It is, however, no re-interpretation for us to note the presence of these deviations, the deviations which occur precisely at the most significant point:
1
3

ReL, 62, 262 ; Disp. of the Foes., 86 * Ibid, 1 68, 173, 284. Ibid., 314.

ReL, 47f.

l88

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

are 'parerga of religion* which, according to Kant's own explanation, abut upon the 'religion within the limits of reason alone'. And in
this, incidentally,

we

are certainly at liberty to take this 'abutting' as

clash.

implying not only adjacency but a

To

summarize: Kant's philosophy of religion has the significance

to interpret religion, too, as a necessary phenomenon of in reason, pursuance of his general undertaking of the critique of an reason; attempt, that is to say, to reduce it to a capacity a priori and

of an attempt

measure its concretely empirical content against this capacity as if this were its inner law. Kant interprets religion by means of the two most significant results of his general critique of reason the ideal and practical nature of all knowledge by pure reason. Since it is reason itself which has alone been able to perform the critique of reason and has thus supplied those results of the critique of reason which have now become
:

taken for granted by the very starting-point of this of religion, and by the conception of the problem it is supphilosophy to involve, that it is the agent of reason, man, that is, who, just posed
criteria, it is already

as he is the measure of all things, is here thought of and provided for as the measure of religion, too: of its practical and theoretical possibilities, and also, and in particular, as God's measure. This conception of the

problem proves itself faultlessly in execution for precisely as long as it merely a matter of its own development, of drawing the limits, that is, between it and the notion of a revealed positive religion, between it
is

and the
merely

authority of the Bible

when
it

this authority is

conceived as a

historical one,

and between
of God

and the merely

flesh

historically con-

confronting man. Kant's unfolded over against these notions in such a way that he shows, or alternatively affirms, in each case that the allegedly revealed knowledge of God which is claimed along these lines bears a

ceived instance of a
is

Word

made

programme

relation to the ideally practical knowledge of God by pure reason akin to that of a vehicle to the actual remedial substance; it is to be under-

stood, that is, in comparison with the other, as something only relatively necessary, as something which in case of conflict is always to be understood from the standpoint of and to be measured by the ideally practical knowledge of

God by pure

reason,

and not the other way

round.
It first struck us, however, in the discussion of the notion of the

to place a positively form of the notion of the organization of the kingdom of God, or alternatively, of the visibility of the Church, in close
historical factor, in the

Church that Kant himself feels he has occasion

KANT

l8g

proximity anyway to the tunelessly reasonable necessity of his conception of religion. It struck us that the necessity of this conception of
religion

seemed

to

show, in
3

tionship to
religion.

the 'statute

this context even, at least a strong relaof the positively historical., the Christian

We were secondly surprised to find that Kant is unable to speak of the reality of religion in the individual without at once introducing a principle which in the rest of his analysis of what generally appertains
up to view, a principle but which yet, surprisingly, precisely as such against reason, the of to order reasonable belongs things, the principle of radical evil. And thirdly it struck us in Kant's teaching of atonement, that he,
is

to reason

not, at all events explicitly, held

which

is

the philosopher, cannot help but acknowledge the presence, at the back at least of the atonement by one's own good deed, which, according to
his teaching, is apparently the only possible kind, of certain problems of another order; these problems are concentrated in the notion of grace, mysteries which he leaves undiscussed, as parerga of the religion of

reason, or attempts to

make accessible to a degree by re-interpretation;

still

but whatever his treatment, Kant upon the religion of reason.

acknowledges that they 'abut'

With this we return to the introductory sentence, in which we said that the dictation of peace terms with which Kant, commandingly enough, advanced upon theology, does at least contain a certain gap.
Seen in relation to the entire Kantian plan this gap doubtless signifies the presence of a certain inconsistency. The inconsistency becomes visible in the execution of the Kantian enterprise the conception of the
:

problem which Kant takes as his instrument cannot be equally triumphant all along the line. For the Kantian enterprise consists in a great
. . then' sentence: if the reality of religion is confined to that which, as religion within the limits of reason alone, is subjected to the selfcritique of reason, then religion is that which is fitting to the ideally practical nature of pure reason, and that only. It is in the execution of

'if

the 'then' part of the sentence that the inconsistency shows itself. I say, shows itself, and the question now is, whether it could show itself if it was not somehow contained in the *if part too, in the premise. This once again might have two meanings: it can mean, firstly
'

that the premise

it,

Kant made

is,

in the

way

in which he fashioned

perhaps not complete, but in need of improvement. It could, however, also mean that there is an entirely different premise apart from and opposing the one made by Kant, which he has not made at all, and which yet should have been made. According to the place at which the

I9O

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

source of the error

is sought three possibilities arise, then as now, for the of the understanding theological relevance of Kant's teaching: First theology can take the Kantian premise just as it is as its stand-

point; the premise that the criteria Kant took from his philosophy are correct, complete, and that they really set the standard, in order then, with this as its basis, to execute the Kantian programme in a way which
is

somewhat different after all from that of Kant himself, be it in an even more compact way, or in an even freer way, moving in the latter case in the direction of the gaps existing in Kant's own work. We find

following this line of development, firstly the so-called rationalistic theologians, at the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half of

the nineteenth, whose only completely thorough-going representative of note was in fact Wegscheider of Halle; and then much later and of a
quite different stamp, as a result of the great Kant-revival of the second half of the nineteenth century, A. Ritschl, and particularly distinct

among

his pupils

W. Herrmann.

Secondly, theology now convinced that the Kantian premise should not be accepted just as it is can, while it indeed affirms it in what

concerns method, subject it to an immanent critique. For it can undertake to broaden and enrich the conception of reason which forms the premise by pointing out that there is yet another capacity a priori which is part of the necessities of human reason, apart from the

and practical ones: the capacity of feeling, as Schleiermacher put it, or that of "presentiment as de Wette preferred to express it, linking up with the philosophers Jacobi and Fries. It is this second possibility, that of correcting Kant's conception of the problem a correction which was then of course bound to bring about also a change in the execution of the programme which became characteristic of the stamp of theology in the nineteenth century, and in partheoretical
5

of the so-called conservative or positive theology, just as much as of the so-called liberal theology of this century. Both these first possibilities have it in common that theology desires in principle
ticular,

Kantian terms for peace, and to enter into negotiait be upon the conditions he has laid down for their execution, or upon the actual terms for peace themselves. It is in pursuing these two lines of development that nineteenth-century theology is destined to be the direct continuation of the
to keep to the
tions, merely,

with their dictator, whether

theology of the Enlightenment.

third possibility, which also clearly exists, was not taken seriously into account throughout the whole of the nineteenth century, the possibility, namely, of at least questioning not only the application

The

KANT
of the Kantian conception of the problem, but that conception

igi
itself,

therefore the autocracy and its competence to judge human reason in relation to the religious problem. It might perhaps well be

and

possible to concur with an untroubled mind in the premise of Kant's undertaking, be it in the form set down by Kant, or in its corrected

form, but at the same time have it emphatically understood that this premise is not the only one to be made in an objective treatment of the
religious problem. It might be possible to object that with the problem 9 conceived as 'religion within the limits of reason alone only the one

side of the problem,

namely

not the other

side, the significant

religion as a human function, is seen, and point to which this function is related
s

and whence
tical

it springs, the dealings, namely, of a God who is not idenwith the quintessence of human reason, with the God in ourselves' thus restricting the validity of the enquiry in a manner which must

also of necessity adversely affect the presentation of the first side, the interpretation of this human function. This third possibility would, in a word, consist in theology resigning itself to stand on its own feet in

for

relation to philosophy, in theology recognizing the point of departure its method in revelation, just as decidedly as philosophy sees its point of departure in reason, and in theology conducting, therefore, a

dialogue with philosophy, and not, wrapping itself up in the mantle of philosophy, a quasi-philosophical monologue. It can only be said of this third possibility, which becomes visible on the borders of the

Kantian philosophy of religion, that it is at all events observed by Hegel and by several of his pupils in theology I am thinking of Marheineke in the first half of the nineteenth century and of I. A. Dorner in the second further that it was tackled by certain outsiders
(often, unfortunately, without taking sufficiently into account the problems as raised by the Kantian enquiry), again, that it was more or less clearly aimed at by the conservative schools (which for the rest were under the influence of Schleiermacher) as part of their teaching, but that right up to our own time it could not get the better of the actual trend of the time, which at first took its course from Schleier-

macher (with the detour via Ritschl) to Troeltsch. There remains for us, in our study of Kant, the task of ascertaining whether, and if so, in what respect the prospect of this third possibility might really present itself even from Kant's own standpoint. We shall now make no further reference to the inconsistencies we have been
discussing in his philosophy of religion. They speak for themselves in this respect, in their unmistakable equivocality, at least. It would
also

be better for us to renounce the bold attempt to try to understand

ig2

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

better than, he understood himself, to renounce the wish, that is, and construct a philosophy of religion from the philosophy of

Kant

to deduce

Kant, other than that with which he himself thought he should and could crown his work in the field of theology. The question as to whether this might not be possible is a permissible one, but even assuming that the question of the theological significance of such an improved philosophy of religion based on Kant were clarified, the task of developing it would at all events be one of a purely philosophical kind. Philosophy, however, is in itself a strict study covering a vast field, and it is not for the theologian to conduct himself as if he were in a position to propound a philosophy, as if this were some subsidiary part of his office, and to pull a philosopher's work to pieces, especially if that philosopher happens to be Kant. We shall remain, therefore, within the framework of an immanent interpretation of Kant, of the Kant who, upon the border between philosophy and theology and in that he was not able to avoid taking half a step over this border, did in effect intrude upon theological matters as a philosopher. In remaining true to this Kant, and in taking him as he presented himself, we are enabled to establish the fact that he yet said several things upon this border which might at least have led theology to take this third way into consideration too, together with that leading from Wegscheiderto Ritschland Herrmann and that leading from Schleiermacher
to Troeltsch.

we have seen, with the notion of the Church as his startingpondered the possibility of the Bible having a position and significance, which, even if it were not 'divinely statutory' would yet be extraordinary and qualified, and he went on from this to ponder also the possibility of a theology which would be different from the philosophical theology he himself was propounding. He explicitly calls this other theology, which limits philosophical theology, biblical theology', and it is his wish that the affairs of this biblical theology should not be allowed to mingle with those of philosophy. He wants rather to form for it a definite distinct idea as befits its own peculiar nature. 1 For Kant the possibility for such a discipline or faculty, which
Kant, as
point,
c

theological in the narrower and specific sense, is given, first of all formally, simply with the existence of the Church which has its foundation in the Bible. Philosophy would be exceeding its rights if it were
is

by any chance

to proceed to the formation of

a Church, to a special

philosophical preaching, on the basis of its own understanding of 2 religion. Philosophy does not offer itself as a rival to theology, but as a 1 2 First draft of the Foreword to the ReL Disp. of the Foes., 63.

KANT
'friend
1

193

and companion'. 'A minister of a Church is bound to convey his message, to those he is teaching the catechism, and to his congregation, according to the symbol of the Church he is serving.' Kant disputes the idea that a minister's task as an office-holder is dependent upon any historical-philosophical convictions he might hold as one learned in the subject. A preacher would be bound to abandon his office for this reason, only if he should find something flatly in contradiction of the 'inner religion', as he must understand it as a philosopher, in the teachings of his Church, but not if these teachings do
not happen to correspond exactly with his historical-philosophical convictions. Even if such a conflict between the office-holder and the scholar in him should take place, the scholar can always explain that
it is

not completely impossible for 'truth to lie hidden in the things he has to represent in the Church as one holding office. 2

And

with

this

we have

arrived already at what, according to Kant,

constitutes the material possibility of a biblical theology. Kant guards against the reproach that it seems as if his critical religious teaching is

presuming to dispute revelation. This is not his intention, 'since it might be after all, that the teachings of revelation stem from men 3 supernaturally inspired'. He does not wish to assert that in matters of religion reason is sufficient unto itself, but acknowledges (let us think once again at this point of that letter to Jung-Stilling) that
reason, after
it has established in religion those things which it is fitted to establish as such, 'must await the arrival of everything else, which

to

must be added beyond its capacity, without reason being permitted know in what it consists, from the supernatural helping hand of heaven'. 4 'Even at that point where philosophical theology seems to

accept principles in opposition to those of biblical theology, e.g. in respect of the teaching concerning miracles, it confesses and proves that it does not assert them as objective principles, but only as subjective ones;

they must, that make use of our

leave

and in so them without

is, be understood as maxims, when we merely wish to own (human) reason in judging of theological matters; doing we do not dispute the miracles themselves, but merely

restraint to the biblical theologian, in so far as

he

wishes to judge solely as a biblical theologian and scorns any alliance with philosophy.' 5 What Kant does dispute is the idea that the reality

and possibility of revelation, its availability as data for human reason and its perception by human reason, are things which can be accounted
1
3

Second

draft.

Was

ist

Disp. of the Foes., 44; cf. Rel, 87. 6 Draft of Writings to a TheoL Faculty,

Aufklanrng? *
1

(What

is

Enlightenment?),

9.

Letters, II,

No. 542.

793.

194
for

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

by

philosophical means, the idea that over and beyond the philoof sophy religion there is a philosophy of revelation and of faith, and that by its theology might be represented, or make its position secure. At the same time, however, he disputes the philosopher's right to

deny

revelation because

cannot be accounted for by philosophical means. He therefore advises both the theologian and the philosopher 'not to indulge his curiosity in those things which do not pertain to his office and of which in general he understands nothing'. For him theology is a
it

body , which he quite plainly instructs to do precisely those in matters of religion which philosophy dare not do, and to rethings frain from doing precisely those things which philosophy is bound to do. What may theology not do? It may not 'interfere in the free profession of philosophy and attempt to prove or refute its principles of
'privileged

just as philosophy for its own part cannot pass any definitive judgment upon the 1 authority and exposition of the Scriptures. Theology 'does not speak to the laws of the and a according of pure priori knowable
all,

belief least of

by philosophy',

has to resign

itself that it

religion

and set itself down upon the bench of philosophy'. 2 It may not, in what concerns the fulfilment of the divine commandments in our will ... by any means count upon nature, upon man's own moral capacity (virtue), that is'. The interpretive method of 'giving another meaning to something' is forbidden for theology: theology cannot be entitled to give the sayings of the Scripture a meaning which does not exactly suit what is expressed in
it

reason, for in so doing

would debase

itself

them; with a moral meaning, for instance', 'and since there is no human expounder of the Scripture authorized by God, the biblical theologian must rely upon a supernatural enlightenment of the understanding by a Spirit which guides into all the truth, rather than concede that reason intervenes'. 'The biblical theologian as such cannot and not
prove that
himself spoke through the Bible, since this is a matter of historical fact, and thus belongs to the 3 philosophical faculty.' He must, as Kant at one point says, certainly not without malice, as a

God

may

pure

(purus, putus) biblical theologian,

be

'still

uninfected with the accursed

and philosophy'. 4 What, on the other hand, should theology do? The answer: 'The biblical theologian is really the scribe of the Church faith, which rests upon statutes; laws, that is to say, which 5 stem from the arbitrary choice of another authority.' Theology 'speaks according to statutory prescriptions for belief which are contained in a book, preferably called the Bible; contained, that is, in a
free spirit of reason
1 First draft of the 2 Foreword to the ReL Disp. of the Foes., 106 3 * * Ibid., 62. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 77.

KANT

195

codex of the revelation of an Old and New Covenant of men with God, which was joined many hundreds of years ago, and whose authentication as a historical faith (and not, particularly not, as a
faith, for that might also be drawn from philosophy) should be expected from the effects of the reading of the Bible upon the surely 1 human heart rather than from proofs'. 'The biblical theologian proves that God exists by means of the fact that he has spoken in the

moral

Bible.

He may, in the question of the realization of the will for good, count only upon grace, 'which, however, man cannot hope to partake of in any other way than by virtue of a faith which fervently transforms
9

which faith itself he can, however, in his turn expect of with these premises it has: the Church, the Bible, Theology, grace'. historical revelation, and grace, should allow itself to be ranked together with other branches of learning and content itself with the
his heart;
2

influence

it can acquire as such by its own dignity.* Such was the advice Kant had to give to the theologian. What com-

ment should we make upon it ? We should certainly not forget that it was to some extent conditioned by the historical events of Kant's time, and that it must be understood accordingly. His philosophy of religion was written subject to the pressure, or in the shadow, at least, of Wollner's edict of religion. We must therefore certainly bear in mind the fact that he was prevented from developing a decidedly anti-theological absolutism by restraints imposed from without, too. But he cannot be understood solely from this point of view either, unless we intend to question his character in a way for which we have no reason. Once again we must not fail to appreciate that kind of philosophical irony with which Kant carried out this deeply serious segregation of the matters in which the two faculties were to be considered competent, on the basis of which he finds himself after all, unexpectedly in a
position to allocate to a biblical theology its place beside philosophy. But what is the ultimate significance of this irony? Perhaps the placing of philosophy and theology side by side is after all a matter which
too! It

cannot be spoken of without irony and from the theological side is only to be regretted that there was apparently no one among

Kant's theological contemporaries who had the insight, the courage and the humour expressly to draw the great man's attention, in all
respect, to the

mutual quality of this

as
it

Be this, however,
there
is

may: looking

relationship. at the matter purely objectively

just the

one question as to whether, behind Kant's segregation

*
3

2 Disp. of the Foes., 107, Ibid., 62. Second draft of the Foreword to the Rel

ig6

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

of the philosophical and theological function, with or without irony, an insight lies hidden, which had, and still has, a right to be heard, an insight which, it is true, was of no direct usefulness within the framework of Kant's undertaking, but one in which that determination of the place of theology might well have its deep and justified reason. We do not overlook the fact that with more than one of the passages
just quoted Kant may have laughed up his sleeve as he wrote them, happy not to be in the shoes of such a 'biblical theologian', and that for his part he need not take up his uninvitingly portrayed position.

But it cannot be maintained that the old gentleman's smile by any chance detracts from the weight of the train of thought which was becoming visible as he wrote, whether he would have it so or not.
cannot see, however, why the smile of the old man should impair the importance of his train of thought, which willy-nilly becomes visible. Again we cannot see why his determination of theology's place should not be right simply because the place he indicates for
the theologian is in fact such that in it the theologian seen from c the point of view of a philosophy attentive to the concerns of mere

We

must right at the outset feel himself threatened and also probably an object of ridicule. It is only necessary to take quite seriously what Kant said half in mockery, in order to hear something very significant, even though we reserve in every respect our right to
reason'

object to his formulations.

pure reason has said something very

telling

him

in all

not the case that the philosopher of significant to the theologian in succinctness that 'The biblical theologian proves that God
is it

Or

exists by

means of the fact that he has spoken in

the Bible* ?

HERDER
during the time when Kant was painstakingly enin the gaged writing Critique of Reason other, completely different men had long been at work, who in a more daring and sweeping way than
I.
it

BEFORE and

was given to Kant were bringing the spirit and cast of thought of the eighteenth century to its culmination, and ultimately overcoming it. They were so different from Kant that turning to them after studying
like

him is
were

suddenly finding oneself in another world, even though they

his contemporaries, and their assumptions and aims were ultimately the same as his. Kant's way of pursuing the path of the En-

lightenment to
his severity

its

and

end, his striving for basing everything on principle, asceticism, the very method which led to a glimpse of

new

horizons beyond the Enlightenment and beyond the eighteenth century generally, were bound to have a limited appeal. It needed too much patient study and too little prejudice to discover that his work

not only signified the fulfilment of the old era, but paved the way into a new one. Kant's works are so demanding that the majority even of his present-day readers remain unaware of the fact that his cold
deliberateness was capable of hiding more enthusiasm than is to be found in any number of frankly enthusiastic proclamations. The air at the goal to which Kant's path finally led seemed too rarefied and chill; the gateway to the knowledge of the last things formed solely by the twin pillars of pure and practical reason, to which he pointed in conclusion, too narrow; the demand that we should actually persevere beneath this narrow portal to metaphysics, too inhuman. Further, even if Kant was well-acquainted with the message of the Christian Church, or at any rate acutely conscious of its significance, we cannot deny that it figured too imprecisely and too insignificantly in his scheme of things
for his philosophical system to

appear as necessary, meaningful and promising from the Christian point of view as it might otherwise well have done. Thus it happened that Kant's work as a whole did not satisfy his
contemporararies, however impossible they found
it

to

escape

its

igo

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

Kant was
respected, admired

influence in detail.

and praised by

all.

Herder himself in
of Kant's

his formative years experienced the exalting effects personality as a thinker and a teacher,, an influence which

continued to affect his work even

when he was

both direct and

days
goal:
it

indirect,

upon

his

devoting it to attacks, former master. But even in those

was probably only

its

in detail and in

relatively few people who read Kant's work entirety, let alone truly accompanied him to his

and Herder was most definitely not one of them. In the very act of Kant his fellows began to chafe and argue against his conclusions, without always having used his guidance to think them out
praising

for themselves.

They tried to circumvent him, imagining that they could turn his findings, and especially the negative ones, to a far richer and more fruitful purpose, and that they were already in a position to
advance beyond him and put him behind them. The most that Kant
could promise for the possibility of uncovering the secret of the existence of man and of the universe an activity to be performed by man him-

self had been his indication that only an ideal knowledge by pure reason understanding itself solely in the form of practical reason was possible. This was not enough to satisfy the yearning of the eighteenth century. No one, it is true, was capable of refuting the deductions of

Kant's

logic,

and

still less

those of his ethics, which

had shaped the

of his logic and determined its limits. But the yearnings mounted like a flood against the barrier of Kant's conclusion that the
final expression

man should now actually conin thinking the action, and that rational knowledge should be confined within such narrow limits. Was it not the case that Kant himself in reaching this conclusion,
knowledge of the
sist

last things possible to

action,

in thinking the

he had defined it, had once again, and more than ever, secret, the unfathomable and yet undeniable secret, of man as he really is and of the real world? Had he not himself proved by this that reason knows and pursues also a way different from the one he had described as the only one? Do we live only in the interlacing of idea and action which seems to be Kant's single preoccupation, or do we not begin to live until we reach that stage ? Does not man again and again push forward to the utmost limits of the possible, to the
as

and reason

encountered the

himself and the

source of things, to the 'mothers', and to truth, and in doing so discover self's absolute power? Does he not do this also in

ways entirely different from the one described by Kant as the only one ? Must thought and speech allow themselves, dare they allow themselves, to be restricted to the sphere of learning and morality, and to the postulates and hopes possible and necessary within the limitations of

HERDER
those two spheres ?
itself to

199

Was

this not

wrongly allowing a fount of reason

become choked, allowing a justification for human speech to be wrongly suppressed? Could it really be that we dare not recognize and may not speak of the very thing which is our true and ultimate source of life, beyond this interlacing of idea and action? Did this not mean that Kant had overlooked the most decisive, the deepest and most comprehensive possibility open to mankind, and that his philosophy, signifying a calamitous impoverishment, was therefore in need of the speediest re-orientation, a process which would, however, by no means injure its truth and greatness within its own particular field ? Was there no other, better fulfilment of the Enlightenment in prospect, apart from and beyond that offered by Kant, and with it a different, better and new self-understanding of the eighteenth-century spirit?

Was

not the sapere aude capable of being interpreted far more deeply than Kant had interpreted it ? It was in discussing Lessing, in connexion with his reflections upon the significance of the historical element in Christianity, that we came
across the concepts 'experience' and 'feeling , and the image of the decisive 'grateful shock of the electric current'. Lessing was sufficiently a representative of the Enlightenment, sufficiently a Kantian in ad9

vance of Kant, one is tempted to say, to refrain from pursuing this line of enquiry, from interpreting experience and feeling as means to an
limits of

end, and reaching out after all to grasp the plain truth beyond the human reason. It was Lessing's desire to leave pure truth to

God, experience and feeling notwithstanding, and to be himself conhave already heard what Kant thought tent with striving after it. of the idea of introducing the concepts of experience and feeling into the teachings of religion: who is to convince us that an experience is

We

we
is

even really an experience, if, as is the case with religious experience, are unable to derive it from any principle of our understanding? 'The wish to feel the direct influence of the Godhead as such
a self-contradictory piece of presumption.' 1 'Feeling is something entirely personal, and no one can assume its presence in others, which

means that it cannot be taken as a touchstone for the truth of revelation.

does not teach us anything at all, consisting as it does merely in the effect of pain or pleasure upon one particular person, and cannot 2 possibly form the basis for any knowledge at all.'
It

successful ignoring of this objection which formed the starting-point for the circumvention of Kant. That circumvention would be embarked upon with a low obeisance to his genius. It could
It

was the

Disp. of the Facs., 103.

ReL, 165^

2OO

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

his

be perfectly reconciled with

methodological starting-point, his en-

quiry concerning the 'capacity' of the human mind, and also with the answer he discovered, the interlacing of idea and action. It was possible
for those carrying out the outflanking movement to declare that they merely wished thought and action to be looked upon as relative things,

considered in relation to experience, within the totality of phenomenon, of human reason that has to be taken into account; that they were only proclaiming that which we sense immediately as a source of knowledge

of a higher order. They could let the Kantian concepts of science and moral philosophy stand, grant their validity, as they were, in their rigour and more or less understood, and content themselves with saying that Kant had merely overrated their significance, depriving

them of their force by making evident the possibility of a

quite different

kind of intellectual activity and communication, a far more fruitful and much more promising one, that, namely, which is founded upon
experience and feeling, upon the lessons of life. In actual fact this reducing of thought and action to a position of merely relative importance, and the award of pride of place to experience, had appeared

upon the European scene long since,

Jacques Rousseau.
It

in the person

and writings ofJean-

was when German philosophy with typical German thoroughness, took its stand as a matter of principle in the position Rousseau had discovered that the success of the circumvention of Kant

became

inevitable.

The master
Herder.
writers'.
first

in the art of circumventing

Kant was Johann

Gottfried

He has been called the 'theologian among the classical He was also truly a classical theologian, because he was the

possible

to discover in convincing manner a way of making a theology which was able to bypass Kant. The possibility which Lessing

was too cautious to exploit, and which, according to Kant, was forbidden, is to Herder a joyous event, in the course of which, as I. A. Dorner has well expressed it, 1 his mind stands like a help-meet beside

mind of Lessing. Herder's significance for those theoafter him can scarcely be rated highly enough. Without him the work of Schleiermacher and de Wette would have been impossible, and also the peculiar pathos of the course of theology in the nineteenth century. Without Herder there would have been no Erlangen group and no school of religious history. But for Herder there would have been no Troeltsch. There are three different ways of characterizing Herder's significance for theology and the emergence of his philosophy of religion to take its place beside Kant's. I make the
the masculine
logians

who came

1 Geschichte der protestantischen Theologie

(History of Protestant Theology), p. 737,

HERDER

SOI

distinction without discussing the relative merits of each, but simply to help make the situation clear: 1. If Kant's philosophy of religion, because of the supreme place

consistently accorded in

it

to the

autonomy of reason, was a work of

the hubris of the Enlightenment turning a somersault, then the reaction instigated by Herder brought about its nemesis with incredible
rapidity and force. 2. If Kant's philosophy of religion, by the way it juggled away every revelation presenting itself to mankind, constituted a danger, tempta-

tion and difficulty for Christian theology, then it was Herder's incredibly sudden and forceful arrival as its saviour which rescued it, temporarily

at least, from all its troubles. 3. If Kant's philosophy of religion, because of the clarity with which it at all events recognized and established the limits of humanity,

represented a unique opportunity for theology to call itself to order and to recollect certain fundamental theological premises, then it was

Herder, by his sudden and powerful influence, who took care that such an act of recollection did not at once take place.

Be that as it may: it was Herder who restored forthwith to theology the scope of its activities which Kant had apparently reduced to a painfully small space. It was thanks to Herder that the overcoming of
the Enlightenment did not merely signify, as it did with Lessing, the overcoming of a system of polemic and apology without objects, by a reminder of the autonomy of ultimate knowledge; nor, as it did with

Kant, the subjection of a freely proliferating speculation by arguments to prove that this ultimate knowledge was limited both ideally and
practically.

With Herder the vanquishing of the Enlightenment inmeans the vanquishing of the supremacy of logic and ethics in general, of the categories of the understanding and of the categorical imperative as well, by means of the discovery of feeling and experience, the discovery that there is a form of knowledge and speech which arises directly from the events of life. This not only saved the discovery of man as the measure of all things which was common to Rousseau, Lessing and Kant, and to the eighteenth century as a whole, and ensured its passage into the new era, but meant that it was in turn immensely enriched and strengthened by the discovery of another
fluence
potentiality inherent in man himself. Let us suppose religion should prove to be a matter of immediate feeling and immediate experience,

perhaps in direct contrast to science and morality, and more deeply rooted than these; again, let us suppose religion should prove to
contain the deepest meaning of the faculty for recording and applying

2O2

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

the teachings of life, and thereby also the deepest meaning of the processes of thinking and willing. In this case does not the man who proclaims this truth, by virtue of an equal, nay a superior consciousness of
self,

take his place beside the man of the Enlightenment, beside the proclaimer of science and moral philosophy, and even beside the philosopher of self-criticizing reason? If this should be so then it erases

the

he held

memory of Kant's smile as he presented theology with a task which to be impossible. Then it is possible once again to be a theo-

logian, on the heights, and above and beyond the Enlightenment! 'I see no reason why theologians should not be just as open-minded and cheerful in their subject as students of the other branches of learning.

Theology

is

in a certain

way the most

liberal of all the arts, a free

gift of God to mankind, and one which has aided him in the acquisition of all the liberal benefits of reason, high-minded virtue and enlightenment. It was the theologians who were the fathers of human reason,

and of the human mind and heart. It was from the sacred grove of theology that the first sages, law-givers and poets went forth, and it was only much later that the most diverse and lucid studies emerged from
. The divine the old form of theology like flowers from the bud. revelation is the red sky of morning, the spring sun-rise for the human
.

What

race, full of the spring's promise of light, warmth and abundance of life. has this to do with the theologian's depressed and morose

expression; as if this expression were in some way inseparable from the Bible and theology, as the beggar is from his sack?* 1 What tones are these, and what a language 1 And Herder wrote this seven years before

the appearance of Kant's critique of religion. There can be no mistaking the fact that this was a new wind, swelling the sail from another
quarter. He who speaks in this manner, remember, was one of the most celebrated thinkers and poets writing in the German language, whose

influence gave an unprecedented stimulus not only to theology, but to history, the history of literature, and to natural science, even, as well;

the General Superintendent (1776-1803) of Weimar, of all places, he occupied the pulpit beneath which Goethe ought to have sat at least

from time to time. But there was really no need for all these reminders to make us properly aware of what seems to have been here at stake. Herder's thinking underwent a long series of changes in the course of its development: from Kant to Hamann, Hamann to Leibnitz, Leibnitz to Spinoza, and when he was old (a sure sign that he might have pursued
1
e Brief
d. Stud.

Theol. betr. (Letters

concerning the Study of Theology), Herder's

iSyyff., vol. 10, 277!".

complete works, ed. B. Suphan, Berlin,

HERDER
his previous

2O3

path a little too hastily at times) there was a kind of weary return which brought him back close to the Enlightenment. We shall not stop to discuss this development here, but we shall try rather to get a rough idea, first of the general compass of Herder's thought, and then
of the

way he
II.

applied
I

it

to theology.

am not here to
live!

To

And

think! to rejoice! 1

To

be!

To

feel!

Thus Herder in the poem St Johanns Nachtstraum (St John's Night's 2 Dream), written while he was at Biickeburg during the years lyyi-S, which has as its theme the idea that man is entirely alone, and yet not alone, in Mother Nature's great enchanted arbour. The middle and
fixed thing between the two poles of this paradox, of this mysterious being

alone and not alone,

ing,
least
life

is

and joy and

all

nothing other than man's being, which is feelthese things at once and not thought, or at
!

And even if it should happen to be thought, the thought of one particular being, the language of the soul, being that of some person or other at a particular time and place, at a single point of the great process willed and created by God: the soul
not primarily thought
it is

then

which which

and and unique glowing spark of God'. Syllogisms can teach me nothing where it is a question of the first entry of truth into the mind, which syllogisms merely develop the great spirit which breathes upon once it has been received me and shows me the mark of one hand in great and small, and uniform laws in the visible and the invisible, is my seal of truth.' 3 That
is

formed by

its

place as a link in the chain of this process,

c

is yet,

like the fire-fly, the original

is one aspect of my being, my being alone, recognized by me by virtue of the inspiration of this great spirit. 'All God's works have this in

that although they are parts of a whole too great for us to comprehend, they nevertheless all singly are a whole in themselves and bear the stamp of the divine character of their destiny.' God the allwise does not compose any abstract world of shadows in each one of his children he loves and feels himself with a father's feeling, as if each were the only one in his world'. 4 The most fundamental basis for our existence is individual, in our feelings just as much as in our thoughts.' 5

common,

original, cf. Appendix, p. 403. Stephan, Herder's Philosophy, Phil. libr., Vol. 112, p. 249. 3 Vom Erkemen und Empjmden der menschlichen Seele (Concerning the Feeling of the Human Soul), 1778, p. 51.
2

For

Knowing and

4 Idem zur Philosophic der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for a Philosophy of the

History of Mankind), p. 139. 6 The Soul, 75.

2O4

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

Forget your ego, but yet never lose Yourself. It is the greatest gift bounteous heaven can bestow. 1

A
Such
is

being alone.

The

other side, however,

is

the quality of not

being alone:

To live alone? The fire-fly is not alone. And becoming what it will be
Will ne'er be so!

And

I,

rejoice?

Alone?

Great Mother Nature!

none to

tell

beautiful you are In the love-heat of summer! Having none to share with me The music of creation, none to hear The wheels' soft hum nor see the angel

How

fly,

With me imagine immortality! Dream it together and together

This earthly
life!

taste

Thy
Continuing in
declare:

In friendliness embrace! wondrous Mother Nature! 2 noblest spark,

this vein,

Herder

finds himself able roundly to

If peace your

aim then

fly,

O friend, that worst

Of enemies,
!

the personality!

Rouse up But no, your soul is not your own, You're integrated in the great, good All!

What were you otherwise? Not self; for each And every drop of blood, each cell and every
Thought and impulse of your heart and mind.

Each word that

On loan,
By

issues from your lips, your very Countenance are not your own, but yours

for passing use. It's thus

man goes

stealth; inconstant, ever-altered, bears wealth of alien source throughout his years.

'Tis only

when

In

all

men's

souls, overlooks

Of self, when

the mind, which seeks to live the narrow bounds heart beats with a thousand more

1 Self, 256; cf. Appendix, p. 403. 2 St John's Night's Dream, pp. 249f.;

cf.

Appendix,

p.

403.

HERDER
That you are made immortal, powerful,
Like

205

God

invisible, the

Nameless One.

So

let

us quell the spirit

and

effects

Of T, and let the better Thou and He and We to

banish

it

In gentleness, and slowly free from

I's

Harsh call; and may the first of all our work Be self-forgetfulness! It's only thus Our deeds will prosper, and each act be sweet. 1
But the two aspects of our being, the quality of being alone and of not
being alone, and everything they imply, belong together. They always again, and are one in experience. Herder has the same view of the whole of sensate nature, man and the animals and all the

become one

lower orders, as he has of the universe: both are moved and quickened by an influence like that of an advancing and receding tide. 'Man is

made

to receive

and to
his

In the well-being of

give, to strive and rejoice, to do and suffer. body he assimilates and gives forth again,

conceives easily and achieves an ease in re-imparting what he has absorbed. He does gentle violence to nature, and she in her turn to

him.

It is this attraction

and

diffusion, activity
is

and

rest,

which are the

source of health and happiness.' 2 It

their combination

really the unity of all these things,

and combined effect and mutual dependence, every seeming contradiction, which is the secret throughout preserved of man's experience of himself which forms the hard core of Herder's thought. Our senses reach their object and the objects our senses through the medium of the questing spirit which seethes in us. The
incomprehensible heavenly being which brings me all things and unites it is this all things in me might also well be called flame or ether

being in whom we must place our trust, in whom we must believe in the act of knowing, for 'unity, if God's hand be not at work here, where
be?' 3 If we pay heed to know his works it is impossible for us not to sense on the one hand everywhere a similarity with ourselves in

could

it

the great spectacle of nature as a living force; not to imbue everything with our own feelings, 'whether the truth of this analogy is a merely human one or not ("so long as I am on this earth I have no knowledge

of any truth higher than the

to seek,

human one"), and on the other hand not implement and work out the analogy of our own nature with

the Creator's, our likeness in his image'. 4 Herder thought of this working out of the image of God in ourselves,
1

Das

Ich

(The Ego);
3

cf.

Appendix,

Ibid., 62, 64, 65,

2 p. 404. * Ibid., 5 of.

The

Soul, 54.

2O6

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

so to speak, as a passing through a gateway: if we keep our minds and spirits open to the influences of the world, which is God's world, then

God, as it were, of our own accord. 'The law of nature will not change solely on your account: but the more you recognize nature's perfection, goodness and beauty, the more her living frame will mould you after the model of the Godhead in your earthly 1 It was life.* for this reason that Herder was a great believer in the potentialities of modern science. 'The more the true study of physics increases, the further we shall emerge from the regions of blind force and lawlessness into those where a goodness and beauty which are 2 stable in themselves rule with a most wise necessity.' Necessity, according to Herder, is transformed in man's cognition of it into perfection, goodness and beauty. In human life also, and indeed in human life in particular, it is a question of accepting, discovering and truly

we come

to resemble

implementing what

Herder's attitude of is absolutely necessary. 'fervent delight' in feeling the 'balm contained in the laws of human 3 nature, and watching it spread among men against their will' is far,
'Stimulation

far

removed from Kant's. Far removed from Kant he declares: is the mainspring of our existence, and must remain so

even in the case of the cognition of the highest things. What inclination is there which is not susceptible of being enriched by the knowledge and love of God and our neighbour, so as to produce effects all the more noble, sure and strong? The dross is consumed, but the
or passion
true gold shall remain. Every force and capacity for stimulation lying dormant within me shall awake and work solely in the spirit of him

created me.' 4 Therefore: 'Let no one despair concerning the purpose and effect of his existence; the more order it contains, the more

who
it

will act in accordance with the laws of nature, the surer will

be

its

Like God, it works in an almighty way, and cannot help but reduce to order a state of chaos surrounding it, and dispel darkness that there be light: it causes everything with which it comes into contact, and even, to a greater or lesser degree, everything hostile which it
effects*

encounters to assume the beauty of its

own form.' 5 The soul,

'the queen,

whose thoughts and wishes are enthroned within us' 6 'is the image of the Godhead and seeks to stamp everything about her with this image:
she creates unity out of diversity, brings forth truth out of untruth, serene activity and achievement out of restless ease, and all the time it is as if she turned her gaze inward and with the joyous feeling, "I

am
1

the daughter of God, and his image" said to herself:

2

Ideas, 124.

God, 206. 5 God, 242.

Ideas, 163. 6 Soid, 66.

* The

Soul, 72.

HERDER

207

1 "Let us!", and holding sway, were engaged in asserting her will.' It is fitting, particularly at this point where we are trying to determine the concept which underlay all Herder's thought, that we should

allow him to speak for himself at somewhat greater length. The fact that the piece is a poem is essential to his view of the matter. He wrote the following, entitled Die Schopfung (The Creation) also during the time

he was

at

Buckeburg
God's creation,

now

complete,

Pauses, silent yet awhile, Looks within and fails to find

What

is

creator,

what

created;

Seeketh one whose mind delights. Source of joy unto himself, Seeketh one who God-like gazing Shineth all creation back! Inward, outward. And himself Radiates fatherly, reigns supreme Is a maker like his God! See, this is what God's creation Seeketh, having reached its goal, Transmits sense to what it misses And behold, man-God-exists
!

New-formed creature, how to call you? Teach me, Lord, God of creation! But it's I, it is myself Who became God's image here! I, like God Creation's scheme Fills me and expands, finds focus, Gathers force the end is joy, Great rejoicing and fulfilment. I, like God! At this my soul Self-exploring, finds, conceives me! Re-creates itself and acts Freely, feels how free its God. I, like God! In kingly pride Beats my heart, and brotherhood. All life here is one, and man
!

Feels himself the friend of all. Feels himself full of compassion, Reaches even to the flower,

To

the goal of man's God-seeming, Far and wide welds all in love, Reaches ever deeper, higher,
I,

the focal point of all,

all

Who filleth

Flow through
1

all

things and it's I things in himself!

Soul, 68.

The

2O8

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

To
Is

the meanest of God's creatures

I

The harmony

My sense extends and feels and tastes

of every creature

one with me, yes, I am they! Sound of earth's ecstatic choir Flew on high through me and came To the ear of God, took shape, Grew to thought and deed and man. Godly counsel, man, is in theel Feel thyself and thou wilt make That creation feels itself! Feel thyself and thou wilt feel God is in thee and God feels That in thee alone he is As no sun or animal can feel him l Thus fulfilling himself in self!
.

it quite clear to us that the most significant concept with this despiser of the syllogism we should rather say, the perhaps most significant word, or sound, even of Herder's thought, can be c nothing but humanity. just as our way of knowing is only human, and must be so if it is to be right, so our will can only be human too;

This makes

something which arises from and is full of human feeling. It is humanity which is the noble standard by which we know and act.' 2 'Man has no more noble word to describe him than man itself, in which the image of the Creator of our earth, as it was possible for him to become visible here, lives reproduced. We have simply to outline his form to arrive at an idea of his noblest duties. 93 Indoingthis, however, we must once again bear in mind the aforementioned rhythm of attraction and diffusion and not by any chance confuse individual man as such with this human standard. *Look upon the whole of nature, behold the great analogy of the creation! Everything senses itself and its kind: life intermingles with life. Every string vibrates to its own note, each fibre intertwines with its neighbour, animal feels in harmony with animal;
feel in harmony with man? Our feeling for ourbe the conditio sine qua non, the ballast which gives us but a necessary means, stability, not an end, but a means to an end for it is and must ever be true that we love our neighbour only as we love ourselves. How can we be true to others if we are not true to ourselves? The degree of our sense of self is at the same time the measure of our feeling for others for it is only ourself that we can as it were 4 It is in absorbing the love of the project into the feelings of others.' Creator and imparting love to others by means of the self, and in

why

should not

man

selves should only

For original,

cf.

Appendix, pp. 404-5.

The Sotil,

72.

Ideas,

16.

* The Soul* 7sf.

HERDER
continuing in this assured course, that the true definition of the
6

209

moral 1 sense, of conscience, consists.' It is the sphere of humanity, the realm of these propensities and their development, which is the true kingdom of God on earth, the state which has all men as its citizens. Happy he who can help to extend it, for it signifies the human creation in its 2 true, inward sense.' But the extension of this kingdom is the history of the human race.
.
.

interests.

That is why it is at this point that history becomes the chief of Herder's That is why he proceeded to enquire into the origin of language, into the spirit of Hebrew poetry, and of Oriental verse in general, and why he was one of the first to study the old German folk-song. That is why he laments and condemns the Enlightenment's complete absence of understanding for history, and why he twice attempted to write a philosophy of history, in those days an unprecedentedly novel undertaking (the first, in 1774, according to a more original method, but one less comprehensive than that of the Ideas of 1784-91 which have become famous). That is why, by dint of considerable devoted study and receptivity he was also one of the first to appreciate the achievements of the European Middle Ages, an era the Enlightenment dismissed as one shrouded in darkness and barbarity, 3 and why it was given him to discover that the Reformation, and Luther in particular, represented an event of considerable importance, a view which, strange as this may seem to us, had likewise been completely lost sight of in the eighteenth century, 4 It was just those aspects of history which had made it particularly suspect, and an object of hatred even, to the Enlightenment, precisely those which the eighteenth century, in its
tendency to absolutism, looked upon as the most irreconcilable with its tenets, that Herder illuminated and emphasized with love and care,
counselling his contemporaries to esteem and respect them as the very ones which were absolutely essential to the concept of history. The
ideas
1
.

he put forward were: That the significance of history

it is *a

is

the principle of individualiza-

tion:

pure natural history of human energies, deeds and im6 pulses, according to time and place'. 'Set down upon the earth living human forces together with certain local and temporal circumstances,
the changes of human history take place.' 6 2. History is composed of facts: in it humanity is not just an idea, a teaching or a kind of poetry, but in one way or another that which hap-

and

all

pens,
1

no matter how simple or obscure a form the event may

Soul, 72.

take. It
g$f.

The

Ibid.,

Ideas, 147. i oof.

Audi

eine Philosophic
6

(Also

a Philosophy),

Ideas, 145.

Ibid., 148.

210
is

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

it

precisely this factual quality of history which,

6

seems, suggests to

Herder the depth of obscure feelings, forces and urges' to which he wished to draw his contemporaries' attention as important sources of
creative power. 1
3. The wondrous nature of historical reality in its varying content, at the intersection of the co-ordinates of time and space, which is changing and fortuitous, and yet not fortuitous, but necessary in its fortuity:

wondrousness, in which at every point a miracle too lies hidden, the madness or half-madness which produces the greatest changes in the world and which must be given scope and allowed to have its way from
its

time to time, without being either incensed or provoked. 2

4. Most important: history means tradition. As historical beings we are not monads, but links in a chain, drops of water in a stream, the living cells of a growing organism; not the autonomous subject exer-

cising thought

and

couraging

its first

but the mother suckling the infant and enattempts at speech, the father of the child, who has
will,

fought and suffered to safeguard its inheritance, and the child itself, whose most intimate possession in its totality is at once only what it
receives

from the father and mother

e

it is

these

who become of interest

mind of pure Why when my sole wish is to be human, and when in knowledge and belief I am just what I am in my being, drifting like a wave in the sea
to the thinker in historical terms.

should I become a

reason

of history? 93

There can be no disputing the significance of these discoveries, made by Herder as they were in complete defiance of the extreme opposite views prevailing in the time before him. And how often have they been discovered again since Herder's time and proclaimed anew as the principles most precious and most fundamental to theology in particular!

may
and

Talk in any way you please, just a little unguardedly, but it be, perfectly logically in the 'rationalistic' Kantian tradition, you will suddenly and inevitably find that you are consciously or

unconsciously getting an answer which is entirely indebted to Herder's way of thinking, conjuring up his conception of history. It is as if his
genius
like

had been given the task of continually appearing behind Kant's a shadow; sometimes as a necessary corrective, but sometimes like

when
for
1

a rather excitable schoolmaster, which, of course, was just what Kant, properly understood, did not require. Herder's genius (whether

good or bad
The
Soul, 59.

it is

no part of our task to decide), the new and

Furtherance of Humanity),

Suphan,

Brief"e zur Befordermg der Humanitat (Letters for the 17, 23 if. 3 Br. Theol. (Letters concerning the Study of

Theology), Suphan, 10, 290.

HERDER

211

epoch-making quality of his mind, is precisely his complete, loving and devoted understanding of the concrete reality of history. It was none other than Goethe who, long after Herder's death, wrote the most affectionate and understanding description we have of him, in the
Maskenzuge (Masked Processions)

A man sublime,
The

intent upon discerning diverse emanations of the mind, Attentive to each sound, each word returning From each of sources countless in their kind, Both old and new exploring in his quest, He studies all things; spirit slow to rest.

And
The

And
The

And all he heard held both delight and lesson; And mood and action harmonized in one.
pain, A sudden discord or unhoped-for rest,

thus he hears the music of the nations, things that move them in their native air, hears recounted all the good traditions, generations* gift that all hold dear.

Events that

oft

bring ease and often

Have
Thus

ever found a similar expression In every tongue that ever man possessed.
sings the bard, thus myth and saga say us now as much as in their day.

And move

When
Is

The song

crags are veiled in gloom, and heavily born the dread lament of phantom shapes; Or when with sun-beams on the open sea

sublime of ecstasy escapes Their heart is pure 'twas only what we ought Each one of us to seek, the human things, they sought.

Wherever

it

was hid he could reveal

it,

In solemn garb or

With highest sense of time to come he'd Humanity be our eternal lay.
Alas that he's no longer here to see The sorest evils healed by its decree!

lightly clad in play

seal it:

concerns history, too, Herder shouted what Lessing had whispered. History, for him, is nothing else but living experience understood in the macrocosmic and universal sense, instead of, as previously,

In what

and individual one. That is why, if I may make use of a phrase adapted by a present-day theologian from Luther, God and history are for him part and parcel of the same thing. That is why the acquisition of a feeling for history constitutes the task and the hope to
in the microcosmic
1

Jubilee ed., vol.

9,

350; for original,

cf.

Appendix, p. 406.

212

FROM ROUSSEAtf TO RITSGHL

which he directs mankind: 'Our body decays in the grave, and that which bears our name is soon a shadow on earth; only when merged in the voice of God, in the tradition, that is, which shapes the future, can we actively live on, as an unconscious influence, even, in the souls of our
fellow-beings', in the golden thread of
c

man's store of knowledge, in which the human figure vanishes, it is true, but the human spirit 1 survives, as a constant and undying force'. And civilization, which is the task and source of hope for mankind as a whole, is 'the tradition of an education'. 2 It is because he finds God in living experience, and this is based upon self-experience, which is itself embedded in the communal experience of history, that Herder is implicitly and unequivocally optimistic in his general view of history, and of its course and development but in a very different way from Kant, who on principle gave these same ideas a very fragmentary treatment. Kant's doctrine of radical evil did not
appeal to Herder any more than
it

did to Goethe.

He fairly shouts

the

view that
exists that

all evil is

could be

merely negative: 'In God's kingdom nothing evil described as real. Everything evil is as if it were

We, however, call hindrances or contradictions or transitions Viewed properly even whereas none of them deserve the name evil, our mistakes have a good purpose; for they soon reveal themselves as
nothing.
such, and by pointing the contrast, help those who commit them to find the way to more light, and purer goodness and truth and they do

not do this haphazardly, but according to the eternal laws of reason, order and goodness.' 3 'No force can be lost, for what meaning could
there be in the words, a force is lost?' 4 'Death brings life; individual decease furthers a higher order, and in physical nature nothing is really lost. Can it be otherwise in moral nature, the true nature, where all the
5 main-springs and sources of power are housed?' Because this is so Herder finds in history 'progress, progressive development, even if no single thing should profit therefrom. Great

the scene of a guiding intention on earth! even if it is not given us to see the final intention, scene of the Godhead, even if visible only through gaps in the isolated parts of the action, and
things are in store!
.
.
. .

amid

their ruins'. 6 'The course of history shows that with the

growth

of true humanity the destroying daemons of the human race have 7 actually decreased.' Herder was for instance of the optimistic but
strangely naive opinion (Schleiermacher later thought so too) that
1
2 Ideas, i4if. ibid., 138. 6 Letters the concerning Study of Theology, 6 Also a 7 Phil, 194. Ideas, 161.

God, 246f.

Ideas, 128.

Suphan,

10,

346;

cf.

God, 246.

213 e even war was in the process of the more it becoming humanized, becomes a studied art, and especially the more technical inventions
It cannot be said that this optimism of Herder's was based entirely in this world. Its prolongation into a kind of beyond, however, is brought about by the cry to the man standing terrified beit'.

HERDER

contribute to

fore death, the frontier of his existence: 'What the Giver of all into being, lives that which is a force is a force

life calls

everlastingly, in its

eternal

harmony with everything

else.' 2 'If

we

look back and see

how

behind us everything seems to have ripened and developed towards the coming of man, and how, with his the first promise and coming, propensity of that which he is meant to be, and of the image which

upon

he was

carefully modelled, are present within him, then we are bound to conclude that man also must pass onward if all nature's perfect order

and

all

dismissed as

the evidence that she has a goal and intention are not to be an empty illusion.' 3 There is therefore a passing onward

in store for us; even our earthly blessedness and virtue are merely an education, a journey and an instrument provided the order of nature

and the postulate based upon it are not in fact an illusion. 4 'All man's doubt and despair concerning the confounding of goodness in history, and its scarcely perceptible advance, have their origin in the fact that the unhappy wanderer is only able to see a very short part of the way
before him.' 5

The fact that this very short part of the way happens to coincide exactly with the unhappy" wanderer's one brief life on earth, and that in view of this fact Herder's optimistic idea of a cosmic embodiment, 'with great things in store', of the various causes of unhappiness was likely to be a poor consolation for those in need of comfort, seems to have worried him and most of his contemporaries very
little,

so far, at least, as can be judged

Herder found no
tempted

from his writings. In his own life justification for his optimism, and one is almost to describe it as a consoling fact that he should have ended

his life deeply disillusioned, not to say embittered, in

a state of mind completely belying the trend of the ideas just described. It should be clear that on the basis of those presuppositions Herder,

was said as an introduction, brought theology relief when it was hard pressed, gave it a chance, even, to survive and continue to remain active, and provided it with convenient and practical handholds. This will be the subject of our further discussion.
as
III. What is religion? 'Religion is man's humanity in its highest form.' This weighty sentence 6 says in a nutshell all there is to be said,
i
Ideas, i64f. Ibid., 129. Ibid, 133. 4 Cf. Letters concerning the Study of Theology> Suphan, 10, 397.

Ideas,

66.

Ibid., 122.

214

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

too might have written this sentence; but

Kant

how sublime, or how to be how clear but, also, is the meaning just, meagre, unmistakably Kant would have attached to it, as compared with the deeply generous but also of course generously ambiguous significance lent it by Herder! Let us at once hear a somewhat more detailed definition, in

we are here in fact in another world: looked even when upon solely as an exercise of the under'Religion, is the highest humanity, the most sublime flowering of the standing,
order to convince ourselves that

human

soul. It is an exercise of the human heart and the purest direction of its capabilities and energies.' 1 Herder, to begin with, has the following idea of the genesis of this sublime flower: 'As soon as man

learned to use his understanding when being stimulated ever so slightly, as soon, that is, as his vision of the world became different from that of
the animals, he was bound to surmise the existence of invisible, mighty
beings which helped or harmed him.. These he sought to make his friends, or to keep as his friends, and thus religion, whether true or
false, right

counsel of a
religion,

or wrong, became the teacher of mankind, the comfort and 2 True life so full of darkness, danger and perplexity.'
{

however,

is

a childlike service of God, an imitation of the

highest and most beautiful qualities in the human image, and hence that which affords the deepest satisfaction, the most effective goodness
is nothing easier than to pass on from this point to the concept of revelation. The notion of man free of revelation, as Kant ultimately tried to conceive him, is impossible from the very outset

and human love*. 3 To Herder there

within the framework of Herder's thought. Man's distinguishing quality is the fact that he stands within history. And religious man's
chief distinguishing quality too is the fact that he stands within history. Tacts form the basis for every divine element in religion, and religion

can only be represented in

history, indeed it

must

itself

continually

become living history.' 4 We do not know what we were, and there are no physical data available to us to tell us what we shall be. Analogy forsakes us upon both sides. Thus history must truly take the place of arguments, and this history provides the record and commentary of revelation. Standing within history also means on principle standing in
the stream of revelation. 'Here also tradition is the transmitting mother, of its religion and sacred rites as of its language and civilization.' 5
1 Cf.

Dorner,

Geschichte der Protestantischen Theologie (History

of Protestant Theology),

73 ?'^
2
3
Ideas, 123.

4 Letters concerning

Ibid., 124.

the Study

of Theology, Suphan, X, 257.

Ideas, 143.

HERDER
The
fact,

215

however, that we stand within tradition forms part of the notion of our existence. How often after Herder and up to our own

be

times theology has thought further along these lines, without, it must said, always carefully considering whether the path it was treading

might perhaps end in a cul-de-sac Herder's meaning was this: 'If we are now bent upon taking experience as our guide, then we observe
\

that the soul does not contrive, know or perceive anything of itself but what its world contributes from within and without, and what the fin-

ger of God assigns it. Nothing returns to it from the Platonic realm of a previous world; it has not chosen to appear in the position it occupies, and does not itself know how it arrived there. One thing, however, it

does know, or should know, which is that it perceives only those things which this position reveals to it, and that there is nothing in the idea

of the soul as the

self-sufficient

mirror of the universe, or of the endless

upward

of its positive power in omnipotent selfhood. It is in a school of the Godhead which it has not itself prescribed; it must make
flight

use of the impulses, senses, powers and opportunities it has received by a happy and unmerited inheritance, or else it withdraws into a desert

where

its divine strength falters and falls. It seems to me, therefore, that abstract egotism, even if this be but an academic phrase, runs counter to truth and the apparent course of nature.' 1 In how many

studies, where sat theologians who would willingly have believed at that time but were chagrined to find themselves at a loss to answer what

Kant had pointed

like

out, must such words have been joyful tidings and a breath of morning air! Man's existence, according to Herder,
its

with

historical quality, comprises his participation in

God's revela-

tion in a

manner which is without doubt the most

its
e

direct possible.

With

Herder nature in of the Godhead.

ls

development is the action and speech there on this account no Godhead, or is it not
historical
is

precisely the Godhead which 2 invisibly in all its works?'

at play so exhaustively, uniformly

and

We may not in these circumstances expect from Herder any precise answer about a criterion of the true religion and revelation. How, in face of the exhaustive, uniform and invisible deity, could there be any criteria? The dispute between reason and revelation, in the form in
which
it so greatly occupied Lessing and Kant, has its place on the borders of Herder's field of vision. He prefers to speak of it metaphorically as, for instance, that both are surely gifts from God and as

such could not be opposed to one another, since two presents are better than onel Revelation is the mother, and reason the daughter she has
1

The

Soul, Gyf.

2 Also

a phil., 92.

2l6
educated:
6

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

The mother cannot be

against the daughter, and the she the should is have no wish to be against the right sort, daughter, if 31 is to be mother. Humanity compared with the outline of a statue,
itself.
c

hidden in the deep, dark marble. The marble cannot hew and shape 'Tradition and teaching, reason and experience should do this.' 2 Or: the book of sacred nature and of conscience was slowly unfolded, ordered and explained by the commentary of tradition.' 3 In the last quotation it is not even entirely clear whether it is reason which is
looked

upon

as the

tion as the elucidating

In his later

book which provides the foundations, and revelacommentary, or vice-versa. Herder came close again, strangely enough, to years

Kant's and Lessing's view, the Enlightenment view of the primacy of reason. And there can be no doubt that in his evaluation of Christianity

embodying the highest humanity, this quality giving it he measured it, fundamentally, in sound Enlightenment truth, of the ideal fashion, by humanity already postulated and known, and then he found Christianity, in inspired fashion, but from the wellknown lofty watch-tower, to be in accordance with this ideal. The view most characteristic of Herder at the summit of his course is, I think, that in which reason and revelation preserve a mutual balance like the two arms of a see-saw, in a harmony resulting from equal tension, a relationship which cannot be explained intellectually, only experienced, and one therefore which leaves the question open, or disperses it in the gusty whirling of the spirit. We must get used to the idea that with Herder and with the whole line of theological development which
as the religion
its

began with him there is not that burning interest in the question of which we might at first expect where the establishment of a working basis for a theology is at stake which had to come to terms with
truth

Kant of all people. Herder's theology

finds the reality of revelation so

conclusively in living experience or history, in feeling or practical knowledge, that it thought it could dispense with the enquiry into its
legitimacy. lt
is an inner token of the truth of religion that it is utterly and completely human, that it neither senses nor broods, but thinks and acts, and bestows the power and the means for thought and action. Its
e

knowledge is
life.

alive, the
is

If there

a universal

sum of all its knowledge and sensations is human reason and sensation, then

eternal
it is

in

religion

and

it is

precisely this

of religion.' 4
This position could

which forms the most neglected aspect

to reflect
2

mean that theology was preparing

Suphan, Suphan,
10, sSsf. 10, 295.

upon

1 Letters concerning the Study of Theology, 3 Letters concerning the Study of Theology,

Ideas, 147. * jfo Soul, 86.

HERDER
its

217

knowledge, upon the independence, in authority and in faith, of revelation. may ask whether that may not be the ultimate significance of Herder's obscure utterances upon this point. For
basis for

own

We

from time to time we find nuances in his writings which lead us to conclude that the thought was not quite foreign to him that revelation
might not only signify the revelation of humanity, but also at least the revelation of a majestic claim to Lordship made upon mankind. I am thinking of the way he rejected the juggling away of the miracles in the Bible, stating as his reason that 'these miraculous facia cannot be reasoned away by any conclusion of our practical knowledge, nor can the analogy they themselves contain be defeated by any analogy drawn from our lives 1 I am thinking further of how he gave the Christian
5
.

Church the task of 'preaching God's will, not our own, presenting his theme, and not our theme', and of the great energy with which he therefore maintained that the homily was the only form of sermon suited to the subject, and brought good reasons in support of this view. 2 To Herder the sovereignty of a revealed religion over all forms of apologetics and polemic was also apparent: Tacts can only be documented and preserved by facts; the best proof of Christianity is thus Christianity itself, its foundation and preservation, and most of all its representation in innocence, active hope and in the life such as Christ lived.' 3 'Shun disputes about religion like the plague: for there can be no disputing about that which is truly religion. It cannot be either proved or disproved by argument any more than we can hear light or depict spirit. The spirit of Christianity flees dispute and strife/ 4 But we must ask, in face of such statements which perhaps may be
understood as being full of promise, whether it is not obvious that reflection of theology upon the presuppositions peculiar to it, has

become bogged down in its first stage, in the hasty equation, that is, of revelation and history, of revelation and experience. We must ask
whether the enquiry of pure rationalism concerning the independence in authority and in faith of revelation thus affirmed could in the long run fail to come, or be suppressed and whether Herder's own emergence
in the neighbourhood of the Enlightenment position does not, clearly, at least show one thing: that in principle he no more succeeded in over-

coming the Enlightenment than Kant did in his philosophy of religion. In other words, is the extent to which Herder actually overcame the Enlightenment any greater than that we have encountered in Kant and Lessing, in spite of the fact that his was a different approach? We
1 Letters concerning the Study of Theology, Suphan, 10, 164. 4 3 2 Ibid., 10, 260, Ibid., 10, iy2f. Ibid., i7f.

n,

2l8

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

can even wonder whether we could not say that Kant and Lessing overcame the Enlightenment more fundamentally than Herder, in so far as they, especially Kant, after all at least saw and acknowledged, in a much more basic fashion, the problem of a realm beyond the human
one, containing a truth incomprehensible to us. In the theology of Herder, the saviour of theology and prophet of the religion of God, on

the other hand, with

religion and

and human,

impetuous equation of human experience, of the quality of being in the image of God revelation, the quality of the Divine, that problem of a realm beyond the
its

continually threatens, in spite of several starts in another direction, to founder completely inside this human world. It is enough
c

that Herder decided upon Christianity as the true religion, the genuine religion of God, which honours the father as his child and loves him in
his children
9
.

bound

It is clear that Herder's general assumptions were first and foremost to give him an entirely new key to the Bible. Whatever we may

hold of Herder's conception of the Bible, it must be conceded and this was something new in the world of learning of those days that at all events he read the Bible lovingly and with delight, and that he certainly showed many people how to read it as he did. His approach was this and how could it be otherwise? the more human (in the best sense of the word) the way in which we read the Word of God, the closer do we approach to the goal of the divine Author, who made men in his image and acts humanly for us in all the works and acts of beneficence in which he reveals himself to us as God. In supposing that this book was written in heaven and not on earth, by angels and not by men, we do not do him honour, but outrage and harm. 2 It should be read, just so that we may be convinced of its divine qualitVj with eyes and ears as human as those we devote to the study of Horace,

Homer, Sophocles or Plato. Nothing unnatural is of God, the things most supernaturally divine become the most natural, for God adapts himself to the creature with whom he speaks: On the other hand we
should quite simply desist from all reflections about the inspiration of the Bible. I am far more inclined to acknowledge, sense and apply in
c

living fashion the divine element in these writings, than to dispute and ponder its actual form and nature in the souls of those who wrote it, or

on their tongues, or in their pens or pencils. Flee, my friend, the scholastic whims and subtle speculations upon this subject, the sweepings of
old barbaric schools, which will often destroy for you the best natural impression of the spirit of these writings. From the moment when you
1 Letters concerning the Study of Theology,

Suphan,

10, 246.

Ibid., 10, yf.

HERDER

2ig

bar yourself up at the bottom of a precipice and help to weave a web of philosophical questions and distinctions, instead of spider's
enjoying and applying a healthy view and the living divine effects, the spirit of these writings will depart from you. It is a natural, free, happy and childlike spirit, and it does not love such caverns

and

servile examinations. If

you do not hear the sound of

its

foot-

the arrival of a friend or loved one but slavishly steps as heralding seek to measure and grope out its stride, then you will not hear it
1

corning.'
It is plain that

behind these sentences

and they too have been

enthusiastically repeated, in countless variations, for more than a hundred years there is Herder's axiom that in the entire analogy of
2 nature the deity has never acted other than through nature. It cannot be said out of hand that it was essentially Herder's object here to arrive at an aesthetic appraisal of the Bible, in so far at least as 'aesthetic', in

accordance with normal usage, would be taken to mean the same as 5 Even if he did without doubt read the Bible also from this 'artistic
.

and wanted to have it read thus, this was nevertheless point of view, his end. He was capable of calling the discovery of the to means a only
element in the Bible in which he himself played a part, 'tinsel', poetical e in tones of contempt, and whoever turns a Gospel of Christ into a novel has done injury to heart, even if he has done so with the most

my

l would very deplore you, my friend, if, being unconvinced of the historical truth of the earliest Christian history, you were to remain a student of 4 theology.' Herder's aim, in the Bible as everywhere, was to discover

s beautiful novel in the world'.

He

expressly declares:

much

the 'course of history', the 'spirit of God', which with him means that which was so peculiar, actual and miraculous that it could not have

been invented,
this

as it

people
6

Israel,

was received and handed down as tradition by and later by the apostles; 5 'God's course over the
felt

nations.'

the importance, as the true which, much later, was called the religious 'personality', and proclaimed with particular emphasis by Carlyle, in a completely different sense from that in which Herder

In

this

connexion Herder already

focal point of revelation, of that feature

conceived of it. 'God works upon earth in no other way than through men.' 7 'Religion is dead in a group where it has no great and chosen the dead profession of faith, dead customs, pedantic living examples;
1 Letters concerning the Study of Theology, * Ibid., 10, 3 218. 169.

Suphan,
5
7

10,

1456

2 Also a phil., 92.

Ibid., 10,

Ibid., 10,

139^ 143 and n,

167.

Also a phU., 104.

Ideas, 141.

220

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

learning and the splitting of hairs, even if it were to perform its work in the original language and upon the lips of the founders, can neither
represent nor replace this daughter of heaven, who must be alive in men, or she is no more.' 1

Already Herder recommends further that we should distinguish in the Bible between the letter and the spirit, between teaching and life. c What is written is after all only a copy of what is spoken. 5 It is necessary to bear in

mind that behind the test of the Bible there was the and living speech listening, and that the oldest books of the Scriptures are young compared with the beginnings of the human race. 2 'Never let yourself be diverted from the one truth in the Bible by the way in which its teachings are dressed from the one truth which lives in all its teachings as their soul. ... In every case the dress is only a means to the teaching; the truth itself is the end, and only weaklings forget the end for the dress.' 3 This is the sense in which it is true that history is the basis of the Bible, 'the roots and trunk of the tree out of which the teachings spread like branches, upon which the duties grow like the flowers and fruit'. 4 This is the sense in which 'the basis for the whole of Christianity is historical event and the pure comprehension of the same plain simple faith actively expressed'. 5 The apostles' "joyousness both in life and death came solely from the fact that they had, from sheer necessity, at the command of God, to preach a true history they had themselves seen, especially that of the resurrection. It was the very simplicity of this teaching as a certain fact which they had experienced themselves which contributed most to the revolution Christianity
6 brought about.' And now we can already anticipate what Herder will have to say to us about Christ. 'As a spiritual saviour of his race he sought to form men

the laws to which they were subject, because of would further the good of others and, even 7 suffering, would reign like kings in the realm of truth and goodness.' That he is this saviour is perceived by the fact that the human quality

of

God who, whatever

pure
principles,

their

in him speaks to the human quality in all of us. In no other way ! Herder had a strong aversion to the Christology of the Early Church, which

sought to determine in monastic terms what no human reason will ever be able to determine and thus obscured the 'healthy view' of the life of
Jesus as it was presented by the Evangelists, without any such definition of terms. hundred years before Harnack Herder already declares: 'Our Protestant Church has nothing to do with this Greek,

The

Soul, 79.

2 Letters
5

Ibid., 10, 258.

concerning the Study Ibid., 10, 171.

of Theology, Su., 10, aSsf. Ibid, 11,9. 6 7 Ideas, 172, Ibid., 10, i6$L

HERDER
monkish
tration
*

221

In opposition to it he already recommends concenthe figure which was later called the 'historical Jesus' upon divine phantom walking upon earth is something I dare not imitate
illusion.
: .

in thought or deed

theologian the

human

thus for every Christian and for every Christian Christ is not some image in the clouds to be

gazed at in wonder, but a perfect example upon earth for our imitation instruction. Every written work which develops historically and represents morally this perfect example, the figure of the purest man on earth, is an evangelical book. On the other hand, all scholastic

and

sophistry which contrives to turn

it into something calculated to dazzle, something devoid of humanity, is diametrically opposed to the spirit of the writings of the New Testament and harmful to it.' 1 But how does it come about that here, and particularly here, humanity as the

messenger of divine truth speaks to humanity? Here too Herder's general canon of the theory of knowledge must be applied, and this means, on the one hand, that it must be believed, that is to say, it
c

must be experienced and sensed and shuns every form of linguistic and abstract divination. If an object of which we have not dreamed, from which we have hoped for nothing, suddenly reveals itself in such close proximity to ourselves that the most secret impulses
generalization

of our heart willingly obey it, as the tops of the grasses are moved by the wind, and the iron filings by the magnet, what is there here that we should ponder upon, or debate with argument.' 2 And, on the other hand, it means that the appeal takes root in the universal and

pre-known ideal by which Jesus is measured, and which he was found fit. Herder did this especially over against the person of Jesus. It is self-evident that an intention of this kind (such as is manifested in the intention of Jesus in his earthly life) must be the sole aim of Providence towards our race, an aim to which all wise and good people on earth must and will contribute the more nobly they think and strive; for what other ideal of his perfection and blessedness on earth could man have except this pure humanity with its universal
to
effect? 3
It is of course the first of these two arguments which is typical of Herder, whereas the second, which yet again employs the idea of the Platonic recollection, of humanity as something abstractly divined, is

to

be construed
But
it is

as

an unavoidable

re-insurance in the style of the

link with a secret
is

Enlightenment.
precisely in the

form of this unavoidable

2

a priori

mode

of thought that the theory of experience

Study of Theology, Su., 10, 238f.

characteristic
3 Ideas, 172.

1 Letters concerning the

The Soul, 60.

222

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

it

means something of, something other than mere It seems if what somehow as is meant is the experience. autonomy and in faith which belief derives its from independence object, and only from its object. With Herder, as I said, one is always tempted to construe such pronouncements as evidence of an insight which truly and
different

of Herder, and not only of Herder. Obviously

from what it

is

in fact speaking

finally explodes the

Enlightenment conception of

religion. It is in-

structive to find that Herder, on his quite different course, was just as unable as Kant had been to avoid talking sometimes in such a way that

a conception of things that could and must have directed nineteenthcentury theology along quite different lines, seems to have been staring them in the face, just waiting to be taken hold of. But with Herder, as with Kant, we should be mistaken hi assuming that such a decisively different conception had actually come home to him. For Herder's theory does not in fact extend beyond experience as such. He is far

from basing theological knowledge upon the object of experience but it quite definitely upon experience as such. For the historical objectivity to which he appeals is quite definitely different from the objectivity which would, for instance, have to be taken into account in a theology of faith. The thing which interests him about faith is its assumedly intuitive form in sensation; and what interests him concerning the object of faith is its assumedly tangible and demonstrable
bases
effect

in the state of mind already prevailing in the believing subject. 'Rebirth and faith are the principle, the true energizing force, the vital 1 spark of a new creature for a new heavenly existence.' And thus dog-

matics are for

race, relating to its spiritual

beautiful, significant

him a system of the most sublime truths and eternal blessedness

9

for the
.
.

human

the most

and true philosophy . has been reached, however, then the referring back to reason, the anamnesis, the appeal to the pre-known or to philosophy, has in actual fact become inevitable. At this point theology yet again

Once

this point

is

expressly appears in the garb of a philosophy, at which its claim that it the most beautiful, significant and true philosophy is clearly at the outset one very debatable assertion among others. such a footing theology will not be able on principle to reject and deplore criticism

On

from a philosophy which has itself become critical. The dispute of the faculties cannot by any means be decided by mere assertions. And so theology abandons, together with its peculiar duty towards its special object, a duty which could perhaps be the secret of a legitimate constituting of this discipline, also the peculiar dignity which might
1 Letters concerning the

Study of Theology, Su., 10, 355.

Ibid., 10, 279.

HERDER
perhaps accrue to
object.
it

5223

if it

honestly sought to

be a science of

this

Thus the honour Herder won for theology seems from the outset to be at best an ambiguous one, and beset by perils. His theological point of departure is in itself, as a counter-blast to Kant's pure rationalism and the rationalism of the eighteenth century in general, understandable, and historically necessary. To be sure, Kant too had not been able to offer a true solution. But the counter-blast was set afoot in a dimension in which it was bound to be exposed to a possibly lethal counter-blast from the other side, in a sphere where pure rationalism was simply master and would in all probability again and again achieve the mastery. Whoever speaks of humanity, experience, history and ultimately Herder and the scores of theologians after him who were supposed to be vanquishing Kant did not speak of anything else does not, it is true, only speak of 'understanding'. But he too speaks of 'reason', and he who says reason must be prepared to give an account of himself before self-criticizing reason. Ultimately and at the deepest level, therefore, will anything remain for him but a retreat to the religion of reason, which Kant had worked out neatly enough in all conscience? A retreat upon which he would after all not be able to escape the temptations and dangers which outcast understanding will
set in his

And

path then we must

!

still

ask whether

it is

not more clearly apparent

from the standpoint of

this self-critical reason (as the authoritative

position in all circumstances primary to experience and history) in what a true counter-blast to pure rationalism, one that would destroy

the sphere in which

it

held undisputed sway, would consist.

The

question arises whether

Kant did not understand

better than

Herder

what theology,
be. I

in pure contrast to pure rationalism at all events, might have said that Kant understood what the idea of a Church was, a knowledge which enabled him to understand what theology might be in certain circumstances in which he himself, admittedly, had no desire to be placed. And I further dare to say that Kant understood what grace was, in the sense of the Church of the Reformation. Without making use of this understanding He was purely a philosopher and his philosophy is not in the least dressed in the garb of theology. But all
I

the same, Kant would not at all events have let pass the attempt to dismiss the Christology of the Early Church as a Greek monks' illusion. How different things would be if it could be said of Herder, the in-

by Schleiermacher,

augurator of typical nineteenth-century theology before its inauguration that he too understood what Church and grace

224

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

!

were But

this

can be said of Herder only with the greatest of reserva-

tions, in spite of every recognition of the great significance of what he set out to do. if in theology it should perhaps be above all a

And

matter of this understanding it is not for us to decide upon this here then the fiery dawn of a new age which it was many people's desire to see in Herder may after all have been perhaps only the transient glow of a Bengal light.

VI
NOVALIS
I. ROM ANTIC ISM was not the most profound, the most radical or the most mature form of the great intellectual movement which fulfilled and surpassed the Enlightenment and the eighteenth century generally,

and established the typical way of thinking of the nineteenth century. Not the most profound: this was in all likelihood the philosophy of Kant. Not the most radical, which we shall come to discover in Hegel. Not the most mature, which we should have to recognize in the wisdom of life of the one and only Goethe. But of all these forms of that great intellectual movement Romanticism probably expressed this movement in its most characteristic and representative form; that in which the general trend was most clearly apparent. Nowhere, probably, were the final aims of the Enlightenment expressed in a form so plastic as to tend almost to caricature, as in this most angry and most thoroughgoing of all the protests against it. And nowhere was the secret of the man of the dawning nineteenth century, of his strength and weakness, of his greatness and of his faults expressed in so plastic a form as to be almost a caricature, as in this very part-manifestation of the great eruption which was establishing the new basis, this manifestion which, after flaring up briefly, was itself in its turn dispatched and extinguished. It was dispatched and extinguished with even greater fury and derision than that with which Romanticism itself had once imagined it could dispatch and extinguish the Enlightenment. There is a French bon mot, which says, scratch the Russian, and you rouse the Tartar. It could equally be said of 'modern man that you have only to scratch him to discover the Romantic. 'Modern man', and not present-day man! What manner of men are we? The question is one which, for the present, cannot be answered historically. I refer to the 'modern man' who once, in a manner typical of the apogee of the nineteenth century, thus consciously and euphorically described himself, who was at his height approximately between the years 1870 and 1914, and who served in theology as a point of orientation already for Ritschl and still for Troeltsch. He was something of a positivist
9

25*6

PROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

capitalist

philosopher, this

Manchester

modern man, a coldly calculating technician, a and Marxist socialist, an exact natural scientist,

relativist historian

and impressionist artist and in all these things he was apparently worlds removed from the world of Romanticism. But we must not allow ourselves to be led astray by the changed decor. The melancholy sound of the post-horn and the ruined castle by moonlight, the fairy princess, the blue flower and the fountains dreamily playing in the splendour of the summer night these are the things which not without cause first spring to our minds at mention of the word Romanticism. They are however nothing more than the stageproperties of Romanticism as it first was, which to comprehend does not mean that we have understood the true game that was played here for all that they are certainly part of the game in their way. It was possible to go on playing it with a completely different set of properties and that is what happened. To illustrate what I mean I shall just mention the names of five men who lived at the height of the age of this modern man: Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Haeckel, Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Naumann all five of them certainly modern men to the core, and representative of their time. But at the same time each of them was in his way a solitary, a modern man in a somehow original way, and just because of this all the more representative of the hidden striving of his age, which was apparently so far removed from Romanticism. None of the five of them can truly be understood hi
terms of Kant, or Hegel, or Goethe; but, if they are to be understood at all as stemming from this in turning-point time, then only in terms of Romanticism. And the golden base of which with
shines forth

Romanticism, from beneath various washes of another colour, is not only their secret. There can surely be little doubt that ultimately and finally, when its spirit matured, the unromantic century was after all bound to have its Eugen Diederich Publishing House and its youth movement, and that the last German emperor, if all our understanding of him is not an illusion, was bound, like his great-uncle Frederick William IV, to be 'a Romantic upon the throne of the Caesars'.

them

It

is precisely for this reason that we cannot pass over Romanticism in our attempt to discover the elements of the general intellectual structure of the century.

has just been said applies however to nineteenth-century as well. It left Romanticism theology behind, but could not escape it. Somehow in the last resort it is also Romantic theology. In so far as
it

What

was ruled and determined by Schleiermacher there

this

prove

preliminary point.

And

it is

is no need to not for nothing that the entire

NOVALIS
era ends where
it

227

had begun: with a renaissance of Schleiermacher. I of now the modern man of the turn of the century, as he spoke just a point of orientation already for Ritschl and still for provided Troeltsch. It should, however, be said that Troeltsch understood this modern man considerably better than Ritschl. Ritschl took him far too seriously as a positivist, etc. This was rather like making the blue flower and the post-horn wholly characteristic of the man living around 1800. This was one of the reasons that the school of Ritschl was unable to survive any longer than it did. It is well worth noting how Ritschl's most reliable pupil, W. Herrmann, was already unable to get on without leaning heavily upon none other than the young, Romantic Schleiermacher. The victorious element in the teaching of Troeltsch, however, certainly rested last and not least upon the fact that he took up Schleiermacher's programme once again and placed a conception in the centre of his philosophy of religion, which was basically the Romantic one. The decisive main stream of nineteenthcentury theology cannot therefore be explained in terms of Herder
alone.

What does stem from Herder in the newer theology is all that which can be brought under the heading of psychologism and historicism,
its

history

methodical point of departure in the correlation 'experience 3 G. Wobbermin, for instance, the inventor of the religious.

psychological

circle,

and extremely
from
him,

might easily be described as a very schoolmasterly dull Herder. But if with Herder himself the departure

this correlation was in the nature of a reaction, a counter-blow at Kant's pure rationalism, in the theology following him, but not only

it rests upon the attempt at a more essential, profound and superior understanding of this rationalism; it overcame it, or thought to have overcome it, in passing through it. It sets out from the correlation

'experience

history', after previously setting out

way which was assumed

to be, or actually was,

with Kant (but in a more profound than

Kant's) from a synthesis which (assumedly or actually) surpassed, transcended this correlation. It was probably this synthesis too which

Herder meant, when he spoke, as, for instance, in his work on the soul, of the spirit. It was possibly also what he was getting at as the true

meaning of such outpourings as the Hymn to the Creation, for instance. But Herder was too involved in the mere reaction to Kant to be able to gain a clear sight of this Above and Beyond of experience and history. He was too involved in it to be able to prevent himself, whenever he was speaking of the spirit or the soul and its likeness in God's image, or of humanity, from sliding off into the psychological and

228
historical,

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

or from falling back into the very a
priori

methods he was

trying to combat. It was this which was bound to put him straightaway at a disadvantage not only with Kant; but also with those who, like

Herder himself, were seeking to rise above the Kantian position. The deeper source of the newer theology which in its method is linked with Herder is, however. Romanticism. Thus regarding theology itself we have occasion to concern ourselves with Romanticism. We shall do so

who was by no means only a Romantic, and whose Romanticism we must measure against Romanticism in its pure form in order to understand it. I have taken Novalis (whose real name was Friedrich von Hardenberg) as my particular example just because he represents in a uniquely pure way the intentions and achievement of this entire group and
before approaching Schleiermacher,

not because the theological aspect is particularly clear in his work. He did not, like Rousseau, write a Vicar of Savoy, nor, like Lessing, theological polemics or a Nathan:, nor, like Kant, did he write a philosophy of religion. And he did not, like Herder, engage in biblical studies. His
direct utterances concerning the

problem of religion are few, and,

particular weight beside his much detailed remarks relating to every other conceivable 'province' of human intellectual life, as the favourite expression then was. Even his famous Sacred Songs would not in themselves be

outwardly at

least,

they carry no

more emphatic and

him a place in a history of theology. But he does belong there because he, and really he alone, of all his fellows, succeeded in exposing the meaning of Romanticism with a certain unequivocality and finality, and with a clarity that demands judgment. It is possible to master Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, Brentano and Eichendorff, but with Novalis it is not so easy. He proclaimed the concern of Romanticism in a form in which it must at least be heard.
sufficient to secure

We cannot dispose of Romanticism without

But that
is

disposing of Novalis.

what has not happened up to now. It has been said of that he alone of all the Romantics has assured for him, rightly himself, through all the numerous changes of outlook of the nineteenth century, 'a singularly certain succ& d'estime** We might well add that leaving Schleiermacher out for the moment, Novalis is the only Romantic whose work goes on seeming relevant and new. He is the poet whom we cannot silence by any historical relativizing, any more than we can silence Kant who "was so different in that way. And it must further be said that we shall perhaps only be able to of a
precisely

true Neo-roxaanticism for all time

i

when Romanticism

is

speak once again

viii.

Bolsche, Myalls' Ausgao. Werke (Novalis' Selected Works) Leipzig, 1903, p.

NOVALIS
seriously taken
spirit.

229
it

up

in the sense that Novalis understood

and in

his

The

fact that

peculiar significance of Novalis is closely bound up with the he can scarcely be said to have given the world a true life-

work. Those of his works we do possess are a little book of poems. The Apprentices ofSais, a story of natural philosophy, a sketch in the

philentitled Christendom or Europe, the unrevised first part of a biographical novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, planned on a grand scale in the style of Wilhelm Meister, some at a continuation

osophy of history

attempts 1 of this work and finally a chaotic collection of 'Fragments',

i.e.

isolated thoughts set

Fundamentally consumption in 1801 at the age of twenty-nine. The lament for the work which by his premature death he was forced to owe his time and all time is understandable. But it is at least open to question whether he has not precisely thereby, in this beginning, which remained a
beginning like Wackenroder, his older contemporary and sharer of the same fate said everything he had to say in a way truer and more essential than that in which he would have said it in a long
life,

at varying length for later use. all these works are fragments. Novalis died of

down

reason

which would have brought him beyond this beginning. Another why he is the pure type of the Romantic is that the Romantic

him any length or breadth but remained almost a mathematical point. Perhaps Romanticism is something which should not achieve length and breadth, but which should flare up in this meteoric way if it is to bring forth its concern in a manner impressive and worthy of credence. Would it be possible for a Romanticism
principle hardly achieved in

which acquired length and breadth to end anywhere but in the psychologism and historicism of Herder, or back again in the pure rationalism of Kant? Thus it might be that the old saying that those whom the gods love die young has in more than one sense been vindicated here. I am reminded of a scarcely more recent parallel in the history of theology;

by the Wurttemberg revivalist preacher, Ludwig Hofacker, also, at thirty, at the most fruitful moment of his life, and when he had but given promise of his best, was snatched away as by the scythe. Is it chance that his sermons are still read today a thing we can very rarely say of sermons, and particularly of those of the past and that for the most part their effect is topical and relevant! The revivalism too which incidentally was certainly not unconnected with Romanticism was ill-suited to the Consistorial Councillor-type

that provided

who

1 Classified Collection edited

by Ernst Kamnitzer, Dresden, 1929.

230
length

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

and breadth it acquired

in the figures of Hofacker's longer-lived in middle of the the century. How completely different years colleagues Schleiermacher's Addresses on Religion would seem to us if their author

had not the good fortune to be able to carry out, in his further thirty-five years of life, the programme he announced in them or should we say if he had not had the misfortune to have to carry it out No wonder Schleiermacher's contemporaries and followers among the contemporaries, Klaus Harms and among the followers, W. Herrmann, for instance again and again tend, so to speak, to shut their eyes to the later, more mature Schleiermacher, and to cling in nostalgic delight to the younger figure in its Romantic purity, which Schleiermacher himself, continuing in his life and influence, simply could not preserve. Perhaps this message was such that it could only sound strong and worthy of belief if it was proclaimed for a short time and abruptly
!

terminated.

The second feature about Novalis, which he reveals in a manner both relevant to the moment and decisive for an understanding of the time which came after him, is the uniquely exact way in which he stands between the ages and between the great problems of the two ages. W. Bolsche wrote of him: *Of all the figures of the great epoch of Goethe, he is the one who most plainly stands upon the border between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. He is bathed
simultaneously in the light of the setting and of the rising sun. He stands in this magic dual splendour as if steeped in an artificial glow.

an immeasurably concentrated figure, crowned and somea little bowed by the richness of the hour.' 1 But not only the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are finely divided in him. Again and again we find ourselves compelled to ask, within the problemcomplex of the old and the new age which moves him: Is it philosophy or is it art which is really his true sphere? And if it is both, if his
...
is

He

times also

particular

problem

is

this philosophical art

in fact the merging of the one with the other, is or artistic philosophy really directed towards

that he

nature or towards history? And if once again the answer should be is concerned with an attempt at a synthesis, is the personal expression of this synthesis love in the sense of the Platonic eros, or

agape in the sense of the Christianity of Augustine and Roman Catholicfrom ism, the direct love for the distant object or the love

emanating

being answered by love and loved again and therefore religion? And if yet again it should be a question of a synthesis, then will the word cpoesy*, with which Novalis is in the habit of
i

this distant object

Bolschc,

V.

NOVALIS

231

defining the creative centre and unity of all these antitheses, remain comprehensively and decisively valid here also? Will it be Mary or

be Christ Novalis sang the praise of both of them who will keep the central position? It is possible to decide all these questions either way with equal degrees of probability. It is just the way these questions remain open which is typical of Novalis, and of him alone in this fashion, and which makes him in particular into the pure type of the Romantic. Pure Romanticism is truly the border between the eighwill it
:

teenth and nineteenth centuries as

the border between philosophy and art, between nature and history, and between love and religion.
it is

Their border? Romanticism imagines it to be their unity. But strangely enough it is only in actually revealing their borders that it can actually make it plain that it is their unity which it has in mind. It is pure Romanticism only in so far as it draws up its programme, and not by carrying it out. It is surely no mere chance that the life-work of the last
great Romantic in theology, Ernst Troeltsch, consisted chiefly in the proclamation and ever-renewed proclamation of programmes. Pure

Romanticism must not wish to extend itself in such a way as to become a science or action, or the science and action of which it is capable will signify its disloyalty to itself. Romanticism is pure as yearning, and only as yearning. That is why Novalis is a pure Romantic, That is why we can scarcely refute and dispose of him. And that is why he is scarcely to be imitated. That is why through him Romanticism became something which was perhaps unassailable, but which is perhaps also never to be recalled. Just in this way it became a word which continues to speak to us in
It

an incomprehensibly real and relevant way. has spoken also, and spoken in particular, to the theology ofthe new age. How could it have been otherwise? Possibilities seemed to offer
time Herder's somewhat tumultuously inaugurated attempt to come to terms with Kant. Here there was something more than Herder. From this point it was for the first time possible to free Herder from the cul-de-sac in which he had landed himself. Only this

themselves here to theology particularly, which held promise of making

fruitful for the first

was Schleiermacher's point of departure.

II. We shall in the first place consider the world of Novalis's thought, irrespective of its theological content. The form in which we find it in his literary remains and which in its incompleteness is its final and perhaps its most perfect form, is like a field of early corn in

the spring: open to the view and yet with much that remains hidden from sight. This is also true because in its rather unfixed state of early

232

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

it

development

delights,

but can also confuse those who would know

it

at every step in its naturalness, in the apparent secret of a creative life which is reflected and represented there. And the way in which it does
this is rare in

what usually confronts us

as

mere

literary reality,

and

unique even within the writings of the Romantics, of which we could generally say this. For the desire to proclaim the miracle of creative
life,

this is identical
all

not without expressing openly the underlying thought that with the secret of the Creator, is something essential to
its

the Romantic movement. This intention also leaves

mark upon

the language of Romanticism and its mode of presentation. The course of Schleiermacher's thought and his systematic method also has something of the
life

plant, for instance, and this make for its recurring beauty

of a great organism, of a gigantic tropical climbingis not the least of the qualities which

Eichendorff, too, seem to breathe

loved so

much seem

to

and power of attraction. The novels of the fairy tales which the Romantics bud and blossom before our eyes. What is

uniquely moving in Novalis is the state of early development, of first germination, in which all his thoughts are to be found and in which they speak all the more eloquently of the creative power which is indeed their true object. We find here no world-tree, with its roots, trunk and spreading branches; here there is truly only a blue flower

which, to be true, is in the process (but only in the process !) of develop1 ing into a world-tree, a pretentious lack of pretentiousness, against

which we can say everything and nothing, which we should perhaps only look upon, and which perhaps, for all our doubts, we must simply like in order to understand it. I venture to speak in these unusual terms

we may be concerned here with the very heart of nineteenthcentury theology, because it is perhaps just in Novalis that the question of the understanding of the entire age, and of the entire age of the
because

Church, with which we are here concerned, is posed with an urgency which compels us to final decisions. It is, I think, impossible to give an account of the world of Novalis's thought; only Novalis himself could do it if he returned among us. We can only make an attempt at a general survey, without claiming to present everything there is to be seen, much less interpret it all. We shall do this by attempting to see some of the systems of co-ordinates which, all at different levels, seem to weave a criss-cross pattern in Novalis's thought. I have already mentioned the antithetic unities which seem to me to be the most significant in that respect: art and philosophy, nature and history, love and religion. We shall finally
i

BoJsche, IV.

NOVALIS
come

233

to speak of a last antithesis, which raises the problem as to whether it is likewise to be understood as an antithetic unity, or as a

disjunctive antithesis, as an either or: I should like to describe this last one as the Mary-Christ antithesis.

The

first

three antitheses are antithetic unities because each of them

has an exact and therefore neutral and therefore superior centre. This neutral centre is common to all of them: the three systems of coordinates intersect, therefore, in such a manner that their points of intersection coincide. Or if instead of conceiving each of them as consisting of

two straight lines intersecting at right-angles, we imagine each of them as the two end-points of a straight line, then in this case these straight lines are to be understood as diameters of a circle^ which as such can only intersect at one point. We would be completely mistaken if we thought that this mathematical description of the teaching of the blue flower is one ill-suited to
it

and contrary

to

its

character.

No

better. It is precisely in its affinity

with the

description could in fact suit it spirit of mathematics that

the spirit of the blue flower is no stranger on the threshold of the century of the exact sciences. Pure Romanticism regards itself as something of the strictest objectivity: 'The Romantic studies life as the painter, the musician and the engineer study colour, sound and power.

a careful study of life which is the making of the Romantic.' 1 And it is precisely mathematics which is completely in keeping with this objectivity and care: A necessary postulate to the conception of mathematics is its complete applicability ... its basis is the intimate
It is
C

connexion, the sympathy of the universe ... its relationships are world relationships true mathematics is the true element of the magician ... in music it appears formally as revelation, as creative idealism ... all enjoyment is musical and therefore mathematical the true mathematician is an enthusiast per se; without enthusiasm there is no mathematics. The life of the gods is mathematics. All ambassadors of the gods must be mathematicians. Pure mathematics is religion. Mathematics can be arrived at only through a theophany. Mathematicians are the only happy people anyone who does not pick up a book of mathematics with reverence and read it as if it were a divine book will not understand it.* 2 'Every true system must be similar in form to the numerical system the qualitative system or the denominator system too.' 3 Let us return to the subject in hand. It should be clear that the fact that this neutral superior centre of these antitheses is a common one
. .
. . .

Fragments, Kamnitzer, 1,9412.

Ibid., 940.

Ibid., 107.

234
will give rise to

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

an abundance of mutual
antithetic unities

relationships, and indeed of between the antitheses themselves too, so that, strictly speaking, with each single antithesis it is not only its two poles and its centre which we have to reckon, but because this centre is also the centre of all the others, we have at once indirectly to take all the

new

others into account.

i. Poesy. Novalis sometimes, in accord with Fichte, defined this centre as the ego, which is confronted by the non-ego, the universe, consisting in the unity of every object of sense, but in such a manner

that the positing of the ego is to be understood as a positing of the 1 universe, and the positing of the universe as a positing of the ego. 'It makes no difference whether I posit the universe in myself or myself in

the universe/ 2

'It is all
3

one whether

we

suit ourselves to things or suit

things to ourselves.' That is why Novalis can say: 'One succeeded he lifted the veil of the goddess at Sais But what did he see? He saw wonder of wonders himself', 4 as well as, in the fairy tale of Hyacinth

and Rosebud in the

Apprentices
9 ,

of Sais having the youth

who

is

seeking

the same 'mother of things

find not himself this time but his

Rosebud,

abandoned and yet loving and beloved. 5 Novalis, therefore, advancing beyond Fichte, defined this centre better and more peculiarly as the life which consists precisely in its defiance of the attempt to comprehend it, because it has its being beyond the ego and non-ego, being and non-being, composed of synthesis, thesis and antithesis and yet nothing of all three. 6 Life is 'the stuff that truly and absolutely binds everything
5

together . At the point where he defines the centre as poesy Novalis speaks in terms which are completely characteristic of him and quite original.
that which is truly and absolutely actual. That is the core of 8 philosophy. The more poetic a thing is the truer it is.' Novalis the understood concept of poesy primarily in its original sense of

'Poesy

is

my

rot-gens,

work, creation. 'The poetic philosopher

is

en etat de createur
10

absolu?*

posits subject, predicate and copula simultaneously. 'Transcendental poetics treats of the spirit before it becomes spirit.' 11
is

He

'The poet

omniscient, he

a priori the inventor of symptoms.' 12 The true poet is is a real world in miniature. 513 It is precisely for this
is

reason that poetry

admittedly ultimately 'something completely

personal and therefore indescribable and indefinable. Anyone who does not immediately know and feel what poesy is can never have any
5

* 157. Ibid., 429. Ibid, 439. Bolscbe, HI, 95. 6 ? Ibi * Ibid, I, i 48f. Frag., 649. d., 506. Ibid., 1,871. 10 11 12 Ibid, 53. Ibid, 54. Ibid, 1,890. Ibid, 1,908. is Ibid, 1,909.
3

NOVALIS
conception of
genius,
it instilled

235
poet, the true poet, he of 'It is the poets, those rare

into him.' 1

The

and no other, is the true man: nomadic men, who pass from time to time through our dwellingplaces and everywhere renew the old and venerable service of mankind and of its first gods, of the stars, spring, love, happiness, fertility, health and gladness; they who are in this life already the possessors of a heavenly peace and not driven hither and thither by any foolish
desires,

only breathe in the scent of earthly

thus becoming

fruits

without consuming

them and

irrevocably to the underworld. They are free visitors, whose golden foot steps gently and whose presence causes all men to spread involuntary wings. poet, like a good king,

bound

is

to

be discerned by the joy and

it is

clarity of his countenance,

and he

alone

who rightly bears the name of a sage.' 2

9

Thus poetry by no means coincides with art and for this reason it would not be fitting in discussing Novalis to speak of 'aestheticism in
the customary meaning of the word. Poetry, according to Novalis, is certainly also art, but is at the same time distinct in principle from all
itself

art, as the art of expression by means of the word. It distinguishes from painting on its right and music on its left by the fact that what it does is in no way produced with tools and hands. 'The eye and the ear perceive nothing of it ... it is all achieved inwardly . through words the poet presents us with an unknown splendid world for our perception. Past and future times, countless human figures, wonderful regions and the strangest occasions rise up in us as if from deep caverns and tear us away from the known present. We hear unfamiliar words and are yet aware of what they should mean. The utterances of the poet exercise a magic power; the familiar words, too, 93 appear in delightful assonance and bemuse the enchanted hearer. This, according to Novalis, is in fact, the essence of Romantic poetry: its way of 'pleasantly surprising art, of making an object strange, and 4 But this is something only poetry can .'. yet familiar and attractive do of all the arts, or which all other arts can do only in so far as they, too, are poetic. Making the stange familiar by means of making the

other

familiar strange; this

is nothing else but the rhythm of ego and non-ego, the rhythm of life itself, in which Novalis imagines he has discovered the essential nature of poesy, and of the creative process in general.

That

is

why

poetry

is

the secret not only of this or that person, but

c

the secret of

man in general. that poesy has a particular

1
3

lt is

a very bad thing, Klingsohr

that poets form their

said,

name and

own

2 Heinrick v. Frag., 1,887. Ofterdingen, Bolsche, II, 79. Ibid., Bolsche, II, <ng. ^Frag., 1,94.1.

236
profession.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

There is nothing at all special about it. It is the way of acting human mind. Does not every man give birth to poetry

peculiar to the

and
e

1 aspiration at every instant?' Transcendental poesy comprises all transcendental functions and in fact contains the transcendental

altogether.

The transcendental poet is transcendental man altogether. 92

life or, significantly,

To

summarize, the concept of the ego or of

poesy, and, therefore, the concept of the neutral superior centre is, with Novalis, to be defined as the endless becoming outward of endless

inwardness, or also as the endless becoming inward of endless outwardness, in the way that these processes both can and should and do
in fact take place in the

human act of living. It is a principle which is not only systematic, which does not only organize, but which is a creative principle that we have thereby come to know. All other
one creative principle, and are is why it and it alone can stand neutral and superior as the centre of all of them. Novalis stated his notion of this principle in a manner entirely and uncannily characterof him, in describing
it finally

principles are applications of this identical with it in substance. That

istic

also as

a magic

in general, as a magician. 3 poet, return to the question this raises in our third section.

and thus

man

We

principle, shall

and the
have to

There can be no mistaking the particular affinity of this or have already heard that the two poetic magic principle with art. do not simply coincide. But the poet in whom Novalis perceives the true man is yet, primarily at any rate, also the poet in the narrower sense of the word, one identifying him also as one of various kinds of
2. Art.

We

artist.

upon

the development of our effectiveness. 54 "The artist stands the man as the statue upon its pedestal.' 5 And on the other hand:

Art

is

"The poet uses things and words like the keys of a musical instrument.' 6 'The beautiful is the visible /car* egoxtfv.*'7 'Beauty is objective goodc ness.' 8 ln every genuine art a spirit is realized produced from within the world of the spirits.' 9 And for this reason there also exists an artistic realism. In his doctrine of art especially, Novalis is very far from wishing to throw open the flood-gates of an unrestrained imconfused mediacy. The poet cannot be cool and composed enough. babble results if a tearing storm rages in the breast and the attention is dissolved in a quivering abandonment of thought the true state of
C

mind

is like

the light, just as calm and sensitive, just as elastic and

penetrable, just as powerful and imperceptibly effective as this precious element, which distributes itself upon every object in fine gradations
* Heinrich v. Ofterdingen, 5

Bolsche, II, 97.

7

*Frag.9 1,875.
8

Ibid., 669.
9

Ibid., 1,778.

Ibid., 1,904.

Ibid., 1,788.

Ibid., 1,792.

Ibid., 1,771. Ibid., 1,793.

NOVALIS

5237

of intensity and allows them to appear each one in delightful diversity. The poet is pure steel, just as sensitive as a fragile thread of glass and

hard

mere enjoyment it ceases to be poesy. A poet must not idly wander about all day and go hunting after images and states of feeling. That is the wrong way entirely. A pure and open state of mind, skill in reflection and observation, and an adroitness in transforming all his abilities into an activity which in its turn enlivens the mind, and keeping them there; such are the demands
of our
art.' 1 It is

as the unpliant 'pebble'. practised ... as a strict art. As

'Poesy requires above all to be

only upon this condition that the identification of life

with art, art with poesy, is valid. With this we have already cast a glance

from

art at the thing which makes it possible and orders it, the power of thought: without philosophy there can be no perfect poetry.
3. Philosophy.

an apparent one and

'The division between the poet and the thinker is only is harmful to both. It is a sign of disease and a

diseased constitution.' 2 Philosophy is only feeling when it is dreaming. 3 This statement is not meant in any derogatory sense. Dreaming, for

the pure Romantic, is something to be treated in all earnestness. Philosophy is in its original form feeling. It treats of an object which
all

cannot be learned, of no object, that is to say. That sets it apart from the other sciences, which have as their objects things which can be

learned. Philosophy is the reflected feeling, based on the self-consciousness of the ego, or, 4 seen objectively, it is the proving of things by
relating

them with the self-consciousness of the ego, in which man 5 perceives the absolute basis for his own existence. All philosophy begins at the point where the philosopher philosophizes himself, i.e. at once consumes and renews himself. 6 In this we further perceive the
sophy
connexion between philosophy and poesy. 'In its truest sense philois a caress, an attestation of the most fervent love of reflection,
of the absolute joy in wisdom.' 7 'Philosophy
8
is

actually nostalgia,
c

an

urge to be at home everywhere.' It coincides, in the act of overleaping 9 c lt also, like the itself, with the original point, with the genesis of life.
activity of genius in general,

'There
itself.'

is

no philosophy
it is

in

not susceptible of description.' 10 And: concrete, because philosophy is intelligence

is

precisely because philosophy in its perfect form is nothing else but poesy that it must now come together with art in the narrower sense, must conceive of itself as art, the art of 'producing all

11

And

our ideas in accordance with an absolute

artistic

idea and of evolving

2 1 Heinrich v. Frag., 1,907. Ofterdingm, Bolsche, II, gaf. 5 3 Ibid,, 65. ^Frag., 64. Appr. of Sots, Bolsche, I, 152.

Ibid, 95.

fl

10

ibid., 69. Ibid., 73.

Ibid., 70. " Ibid., 77.

Ibid, 95.

238

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

spirit,

by way of thinking a world-system a priori from the depths of our

of using the organ of thought actively for the representation of a world to be comprehended only in thought'. 1 'The poet closes the procession just as he opened it. If the task of the philosopher is only to order
everything and put it in its place, the poet loosens every bond. . . 2 Poesy is the key to philosophy.' Thus we are directed back from the
.

second pole of this antithesis to the first one again. 4. Nature. Corresponding to the antithesis of art and philosophy on
the ontological there
is

the antithesis of nature and history on the ontic

c

plane. Nature is 'the quintessence of that which moves us'. It is that wonderful community into which our body introduces us and which

we come
It is *an

to

know according

Aeolian harp, it is over are the keys to higher strings in ourselves'. 4 "Where is the man," cried the youth with sparkling eyes, "whose heart does not leap with
e

and capacities 3 a musical instrument whose sounds moreto the body's facilities
.

delight when the inmost life of nature enters his mind in all its abundance, and when, at this, that mighty feeling, for which language has

no other name but love and desire, expands within him, like a strong, all-releasing vapour, and he sinks trembling with sweet anguish into the dark, alluring womb of nature, his poor personality being consumed in the breaking waves of delight, and nothing remaining but a focal
point in the immeasurable procreative power, a sucking whirlpool in the vast ocean.'" 5 With Novalis, as his Fragments in particular show,

such dithyrambs have as their background a true abundance of observations in natural science, drawn especially from the fields of

and chemistry, psychology and medicine. The essential qualities required of a true naturalist are a long and unrelenting association with the object of his study, free and ingenious observation, an attention to the slightest indications and tendencies, an inner 6 poetic life, practised senses, and a simple and God-fearing mind.' The most significant of these requirements is, however, once again,
biology,

physics

"The spirit of nature has appeared at its purest reading or hearing true poems one feels an inner understanding of nature moving there, and hovers like nature's heavenly body, at once in it and over it. The naturalist and the poet,
life'.

the 'inner poetic

in poems.

Upon

in that they speak a common language, have ever revealed themselves to be as one race and people.' 7
It is precisely at this point,
i

however, that one

3
Apfir.
I,

is

tempted to see the

I,

Frag., 1,793.
5

Ibid., 1*875.

of Sens, Bolsche,
6

154.

Appr. ofScds, Bolscke, 7 Ibid., Boische,

160. 141.

Ibid., Bolsche, I, 144.

I,

339 which is observed threatened, in spite of the realism which Novalis recommends here, too, by the stormy eros of the observing subject. And if this be in doubt then the balance of the rhythm of this
objectivity of that
entire system of thought is threatened also! There is a disturbing note in Novalis's proclamation: The secret leads inwards. path Eternity with its worlds, the past and the future, is within us, or nowhere.' 1

NOVALIS

'What need have we of laboriously journeying through the muddy world of visible things? For the purer world lies within us within this fountain-head. It is here that the real meaning of the great, variegated,
confused spectacle is revealed; and if, full of these sights, we step into the realm of nature, everything there is familiar to us, and we have a sure knowledge of every form. have no need of any long research;

We

a light comparison, a few lines traced in the sand, are enough to ensure our understanding. Thus all things are like a great book to us, for which we have the key, and nothing takes us by surprise, because we know in advance the way the great clock-work runs.' 2 The study of nature seems to be dispensed with also, the instant it is laid down, when
the following figure appears among the apprentices at Sais, who we are at first tempted to think are in an academy of the natural sciences: 'One of them was a child still, and no sooner was he there than he

The child had big dark eyes with sky-blue depths, his skin glowed like a Uly, and his curly hair was like wisps of cloud at the coming of evening. His voice pierced all our hearts. would fain have given him our flowers, stones and feathers, everything. There was an infinite gravity in his smile and when he was there our spirits were strangely exalted. "One he will come back
to take over the lessons.

wanted him

We

again," said the teacher,

C{

more

lessons.

"3

day and dwell among us, and then there will be no

do not know whether Novalis would have continued further which was not without its dangers, or whether he along have more might nearly approached the great maturity of Goethe's outlook upon nature. What is certainly intended, even in such striking passages, is, however, the proclamation of the referring back of the perception which is directed outwards to the principle of the centre. This is achieved by the proclamation of the necessary counter-pole to this world of nature, which presses in upon man in an overwhelming
this course,

We

way. This counter-pole of nature coincides, however, in Novalis, with history. For it is not enough to be able to improvise upon nature, as upon a great musical instrument. It is only the man who understands the history of nature, its dimension of depth in time who understands
*

593-

Appr. of SMS, Bolsche,

I, 146.

Ibid., Bolsche, I, 138.

24O

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

nature. History, however, means mind, as it is opposed to nature in the "counter-image of humanity'. Nature would not be divine if it did not
also

have a history, did not also have a spirit. 'In order to comprehend nature one must allow nature to grow inwardly in its entire sequence ... it is comprehensible only as the instrument and medium of the
91 acquiescence of reasonable beings. Novalis seems after all to have had nothing else in mind but what Goethe said about the relationship

between the inner and outer world in the contemplation of nature, however unguardedly and tempestuously he may have spoken of it. 5. History. It is now clear to us why Henrich von Ofterdingen, when journeying to fetch his bride, should have to meet nature and history one after the other in the shapes of a miner and a hermit. Nature and history are in very fact opposed to one another in an antithetic unity. In history, too, according to Novalis, in so far as it is now to be taken especially into account, man seeks and finds the ego in the non-ego, the familiar in the strange. It is characteristic of Novalis that with nature it is primarily a question of finding, and with history, of seeking the great X, the x which is his subject the whole time. Once again there can be no mistaking the fact that the concept of a historical realism, which now truly seeks the familiar in the strange, is not unknown to Novalis. But far more important to him than an assessment ofthe significance of exact research into the details of history is here once again the polemic against its degeneration, against every study of history which is merely analytic, unphilosophic, unpoetic, and the canon that 'a student of history must also of necessity be a poet', and the assertion that there is more truth in the fanciful tales of the poets than in the learned chronicles. 2 A few verses from the Hymns to the Might might best show the pure Romantic's approach to history:

What
With
all

seek
is

we in this world below our love and duty?

worthless, let
it

The

old

How

go!

shall the

O sad, forlorn and out of time

new bring beauty?

Who warmly love the golden Prime.

When men the Father's hand and
Felt, his

The golden Prime, when senses light In upward flames were glowing;
sight

When high and

And
1

own presence knowing;

simple thought was rife, time showed forth the perfect life.
I, i$jf.

Appr. ofSais, Bolsche,

2 Hemrich

D.

Ofterdingen, Bolsche, II, 71.

NOVALIS
The golden Prime, when blossomed The primal races flourished;
full

24-r

And

children tried in death's pained school vision cherished, And though life joyous accents spake Yet many a heart for love would break.

The heavenly

The golden Prime, when glowing young God came himself revealing, In sweet love-life went men among And died young for their healing;
Nor drove he pain and
grief away That he might dearer with us stay.

Restless the golden Prime we see In night's dark shade enveloped; Nor stilled our burning thirst will be By all in time developed, But we to home must also go

To

see that holy season's flow.

What still keeps back our late The dear ones long are waiting;
Nought's
left for
is

return?

Their graves shut in life's utmost bourne, And all is sad and sating;
us to seek again,
is

The
It

heart

worn, the world

vain. 1

the last verse especially, how greatly, and once menacingly, for the equilibrium which seems to have been intended throughout this system of thought, poesy becomes master of this object, too: master to such a degree that the creative, ail-too

becomes

clear, in

again how

man finds himself driven more and more to the edge of an in the of appalling loneliness. Novalis was capable of saying abyss minor: the in in the was verses also what said, quoted, just major key
creative

When signs and

For
all

When Know When life to

figures cease to be created things the key; they who do but kiss and sing more than sages' reckoning;

shall attain in creation reign; When light and shade, no longer single, In genuine splendour intermingle, And man in tales and poems sees The world's eternal histories,

freedom

And freedom

Then
*

this corrupted state will flee Before a secret word's decree. 2

2

Hymns

to the

Night, Bolsche,

I,

30; for original,

cf.

cf.

Appendix, p. 407
p. 408.

Ibid., Bolsche, II, 143; for original,

Appendix,

242

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

impression of an uncanny threat to creative man who is of capable achieving such a break-through, is conveyed also in the sole example of historical art Novalis has left to Christendom us, the
essay
or Europe, written in
1

The same

799.

In it he draws a mighty circle from the boldly

idealized, or perhaps imagined, picture of the peaceable

and friendly Church of the Middle the single Ages, through Reformation, which declared a revolutionary government permanent, profanely identified the boundaries of the Church with those of the state, and introduced
the highly alien secular science of philology into affairs of religion, on to the farthest point of the orbit, which in so far as it is the farthest point already heralds the return, the Enlightenment, with its hatred of the Church, the Bible, faith, enthusiasm and poesy, and back
finally

to the time just then coining, that of the resurrection, the conception of a new Messiah, in which one Brother in particular is described and

lauded as the 'heart-beat of a new

i.e. religion, *a
c

age', who has made for the Holy one, new veil', which clingingly betrays the divine mould of her limbs and yet veils her more chastely than any other Novalis awaits the revelation of this new age and with it the coming to life of
9

Christianity, the bringing of

every

field,

'When?

awakenment and peace to Europe in from the convocation of a Venerable European council3 and when most likely? That is not the question. Just be
.

patient, the time will

come, must come, the holy time of lasting peace,

when the new Jerusalem shall be the capital city of the world; and until
this day, be cheerful and courageous amid the dangers of the time, sharers of faith; proclaim with word and deed the holy Gospel, and remain faithful unto death to the true eternal faith.' 1 Once

my

we

again

simply does not speak in tones worthy of credence. And we ask ourselves once again whether, if he had lived longer, Novalis would have proceeded further along these lines, or whether from this point he would have

Romantic standing in affecting isolation, and ask ourselves whether it might not be that his need is sprung from a tragic guilt; whether a view which has so largely renounced the ability to see could in fact end anywhere but in this convulsive which hope
see the pure

found his way forward or back to an ultimate historical wisdom. Suffice it to say that here the problem of history is at all events passionately felt to be a problem, and poesy, man's creative inward world, has shown itself to be the key to this book of mysteries as well.
6. Love. What art and philosophy are on the ontological plane, and nature and history on the ontic one, love and religion are on the personal or ethical plane. It becomes even more difficult than before to
*

Bolsche,

1,

135.

NOVALIS
distinguish the antitheses to some extent, both from the creative centre.

243

among themselves, and

It is part of the quality of Novalis as a phenomenon that his utterances concerning love in the most obvious sense have not the breadth which one might perhaps expect. Novalis was of little experience in the

sphere of sexual love. His engagement to Sophie von Kuhn only really acquired significance for his work by her early death. And his second

engagement to Julie von Charpentier never became greatly significant either in his life or in his writings. But the intensity of the few things he said upon this cardinal theme of all poetry speaks all the more plainly
for that. According to Novalis sexual love is the decisive event in human life because it is the revealed secret of reciprocal effect. Love is
e

a mysterious flowing together of our most secret and most peculiar

1

being'.

It is

a question in

life,

in

all art

and philosophy, in nature and

history, of ego and non-ego. Novalis, however, advancing beyond Fichte, wished to have the non-ego understood as Thou. It is, he finds,

precisely love which is lacking in Fichte. Love understands the non-ego as Thou in understanding it as beloved and loving Thou and conse2 3 quently as the 'centre-point of a paradise*, as the "object of all objects'; consequently the propositions are valid that *love is the most highly

actual thing, the primal basis , 4 'the final goal of world history, the Amen of the universe'. 5 'I do not know what love is, but one thing I can tell you; I feel as if I were only now beginning to live.
3

My

Matilda, for the

first

time
!

I sense

I am. deeply you shame me For it is Without you I should be nothing. What is a spirit without a heaven, and you are the heaven which contains me and bears me up. I can conceive nothing of eternity, but should think that must be eternity which I feel when I think of you. Yes Matilda, we are immortal because we love each other.' Thus we hear the lovers speaking in Heinrich von Ofterdingen.* But what is decisive in this representation of

means to be immortal. only through you that I am what

it

what

How

love

all, the way the lovers find each other for themselves, in which, simultaneously looking at and beyond each other, they each discover in the object of their gaze the new secret
is

not, after

but the

way

world of poesy.

A darkling pathway love did tread,

Seen by the

moon

alone,

The shadows

realm, unfolded wide, Fantastically shone.

1 Heinrich
o.

Ofterdingen, Bolsche, II, 100. 5 Ibid., 1,745. Ibid., 1,677.

Frag., 1,257. 6

Ibid., 1,260.

Bolsche, II, 98.

244

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL An azure mist with golden edge

And
Her
Around her hung in play eager Fancy bore her fast Oe'r stream and land away.
full

and teeming

breast rose

up

In wondrous

A presagement of future bliss

1 Bespoke the ardent glow.

spirit-flow;

The eros which is the subject of this poem has become the divine Eros is at any rate no longer merely that eros which unites two human beings. For when this eros reaches its goal the human couple, the man and the woman, have vanished in the eternally-human, that the one has
y

or

for

found in the other, the romance is lost in the purely Romantic quality, whose sake alone the romance shall and may exist, and the truth
then,
is

that

Love's kingdom now is opened full And Fable 'gins to ply her wheel; To primal play each nature turns, To speak with tongues each spirit burns. And thus the world's great feeling looms,

Moves everywhere,

forever blooms.

For each thing to all else must strive, One through the other grow and thrive; Each one is shadowed forth in all While it itself with them is blending, Eager to their deeps doth fall, Its own peculiar being mending, And myriad thoughts to life doth call. The world's a dream, and dream the world. 2

And therefore by virtue of this passage through the creative centre the counter-pole must always shine forth in love, too, in magical identity with love itself. That is why the lovers' conversation goes on as
*O beloved, heaven has given you to me to worship. I pray to you, you are the saint who carries my wishes to the ear of God, through whom he reveals himself to me, through whom he declares to me the abundance of his love. What is religion but an unlimited understanding, an eternal union of loving hearts? Where two are gathered together he is there. It is through you that I have to draw breath forfollows:

ever;

my

breast will never cease to

draw you

in.

You

are the divine

splendour, eternal life in most alluring guise ... I swear to be yours 3 eternally, Matilda, as truly as love, God's presence, is with us.' That is
1

Hemrich

v. Ofterdingen, Bolsche, II, 107; for original, cf. Appendix, p. 408. 3 Ibid., Bolsche, II, 1126; for original, cf. Appendix, pp. 408-9. Ibid., II, g8f.

NOVALIS

245

why Novalis himself was able to write in his diary: 'I feel religion for Sophie not love. Absolute love, independent of the heart, based upon
faith;
7.

such
2

is religion.'

'Through absolute will love can be transformed into were already prepared for that sentence. Like art and religion.' like the study of nature and history, and like love, religion philosophy, for Novalis is without doubt in the first place a work of man, something to do with Romantic civilization. 'There is as yet no religion. First of all a lodge for training in true religion must be founded. Do you believe that religion exists? Religion must be made and put forward 3 by the union of a number of people.' The concept of God is achieved 'from the union of every capacity for feeling 'by means of a moral 4 revelation, a moral miracle of centralization'. For the finding of God an intermediate link is of course necessary. But this intermediate link must be chosen by ourselves, and this choice must be free. Regarding
Religion.

We

the intermediary as God himself is idolatry. The intermediary is the organ of the Godhead, its sensory manifestation, and Novalis declares

himself a believer in Pantheism in the sense that he wishes to under-

stand by it the idea that everything can be the organ of the Godhead, the intermediary, if I exalt it to that position. He rejects monotheism,

which

seeks to acknowledge only one such organ, but believes

it

possible to unite pantheism

and monotheism by making the monotheist

intermediary the intermediary of the intermediate world of pantheism, 5 through it centring this world, as it were. I believe that it is these very sentences which justify my tracing of the line, in the introduction, from
Novalis via Schleiermacher to Troeltsch. That is why we now find that 6 Novalis furthermore thinks that the Bible is still in process of growing.

'The history of every

man is intended to be a Bible;

7

will
is

A Bible

is

the highest task of authorship.'

'There

be a Bible no religion that

9
:

would not be Christianity. 98 'Our whole life is service of God.' 9 No wonder Novalis speaks of 'the infinite sadness of religion 'If we are to 910 No wonder he has given love God he must be in need of succour. of the Lord's Supper, the us, one might well say, an absurd philosophy noted existence of which could not be well enough by the present-day
adherents of symbolism. Its climax
daily
is

contained in the sentence: 'Thus

enjoy the genius of nature, and thus each meal becomes a commemorative one, a meal which changes our soul just as it sustains our body, a mysterious means of transfiguration and deification on

we

i *

Frag., 47. Ibid., 1,688.

6
9

Ibid., 1,746. Ibid., 1,707.

Ibid., 1,733.

3
7

Ibid, 1,676.
747-

4 Ibid., 1,679.
Ibid., 1,714.

Ibid., Ill, 202. 10 Ibid- x

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

earth, of

a quickening intercourse with that which

this

lives absolutely/ 1

Let us hear

philosophy in its entirety in the following hymn, taken

from the Sacred Songs:

Few men know The mystery of love.

Feeling contentless Appetite and thirst.

The Holy Communion's

Divine significance Is a riddle to our earthly senses; But he who once Drew breath of life From warm beloved lips,

Whose heart in trembling Waves was melted By the sacred glow; Whose eye was opened

To

survey the endless

And

Ground of heaven Shall eat of his body

drink of his blood

Who

Eternally.

has guessed the high Purpose of earthly flesh? Who can say he Understands the blood?
All will

One flesh, The blessed

be body once,
pair

In holy blood imbued.

O that the world-sea

forth
is

Might now redden,

The rock break

In fragrant

flesh!

The sweet

repast

never ended,

Love never will be satisfied, Never enough his own

Can it possess The loved one. Constantly more

Even deeper,

tender

lips

Transform the joy to something

closer.

A more intense desire

Besets the soul,

Hungrier, more thirsty Grows the heart:

.,

1,766.

NOVALIS
And thus the joy of love endures From eternity to eternity.
If they of sober mind Did taste it, though but once, They would forsake their all

247

And join us at the table For those who yearn.

Fulness of love

set

The never-empty table. They would see the endless

And praise the fare Of body and blood. 1

If we are justified in speaking of a hubris of the Enlightenment, then
it is

here, in the magic religious teaching of pure Romanticism, that it broke out, and if perchance it was precisely the religious teaching of pure Romanticism which was to become the esoteric secret of nineteenth-century religious teaching, then it is just in this event that the uninterrupted connexion with eighteenth-century absolutism would stand revealed. It is surely clear, indeed Novalis says it himself, that
is the teaching of love, of heavenly love indeed, but of love nevertheless. For all this, however, we should not perhaps bear him ill-will, in the last assessment, not even in a survey such as this. For precisely at this point a final problem obtrudes, a heterogeneous line of thinking providing a point of vantage from which we can

his teaching of religion

see

how

cannot say
it

that indeed we his teaching on religion, if it does not annul at all events calls into question in significant fashion his

entire teaching, and, further, poesy as the last word of this teaching, as celebrates its ultimate triumph in this religious teaching particularly.
III.

Somewhere among
sometimes
i

Novalis's mathematical fragments there

little

is
e

enclosed in brackets the

is
i

sentence, fraught with meaning:

God

oo

sometimes
'

^ sometimes

o.'

In the 'some-

times

oo

sometimes

Romanticism, while the

contained the whole ideology of pure added 'sometimes o' contains its whole
is

problem. i of course represents the given quality of the ego or of life, or the and reality of poesy, in which the individual affirms, engages, possesses oo i of this signifies by enjoys himself. And the multiplying and dividing the rhythm of transforming things inwards and outwards, of gathering

and deployment, of things becoming familiar and strange, in which poesy, and with it the individual, and with him the ultimately real,
1

Bolsche

I, ysf.;

for original, cf.

Appendix, pp. 409-10,

*Frag. 3 909.

248

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

it God, is actual. Seen from the opposite pole, seen, that is, through the constant i, which is to be thought of as transparent, art and philosophy, nature and history, love and religion can just as well signify i x oo as ~; the creative subject can just as well give his life, himself, the highest, as the least value, without, however for even infinity cannot arrive higher than the highest once the basis i is postulated abandoning or even only endangering his substance and therefore himself, in scaling the value either up or down. The extreme is reached now on the one side and now on the other philosophy seems to be merged and to disappear in art, art in philosophy, love in religion and religion in love. But it always only reaches the extreme, and care is taken that there is always a safe return from whichever extreme it may be. The creative subject plays and dances, on a high wire in peril of its life, to be true, but it dances well, and will for this

and with

reason not
this
Its

fall

infinite sadness.

in spite of everything. It achieves infinite rejoicing and But that is all it does achieve. And why should not
oo

X, which can sometimes be i X beauty surely cannot be in dispute.

and sometimes
a

It is surely

dancer, this perpetuum mobile, a God whom to a human life truly rich enough, and in view of whom it might seem folly to begin to look out for another. Who needs yet more if he has
that,

be God? God at least, this serve as God might make

-

having himself as a premise of the whole? could Novalis have been thinking of when he added that God could also be o? The sentence could of course be intended to convey

What

the negation: 'and there

no other God beside this dancer, that is, whom we have in having ourselves. Does not Romanticism truly seem to wish to raise itself to a denial of this other God ? And if this is not its
is

wish,

is

after all, in saying it, have set up the notion of this other God, even if merely as a notion which is denied, and have placed it beside the true notion of God, the notion of God the dancer? And it now seems after all that it is not this negation which the sentence 9 is meant to signify. Novalis placed that third 'sometimes beside the

Romanticism? But even mean that, would it not

not this denial necessarily contained in the natural sequence of if the sentence 'God is o' were intended to

two in too disinterested and unpolemic a fashion for that. He seems have intended it in the same positive sense: God can also be o, just as he is sometimes i x oo , sometimes ~.
first

to

Do we not look upon Novalis in this as we would look

who,

upon someone

for the sake of perfection or caution or beauty, or for some other reason, has walled up a bomb in the cellar of his house, with a fuse runis

ning up to his writing desk? Let us hope there

no accident! The

NOVALIS

249

concept o is a dangerous thing to play about with. For o is certainly not merely a harmless little point which is passed through between eo or i and i, between oo, or between i x oo and ^.

Novalis himself defined o as the 'positive non-determinate 1 o stands at least as an emphatic question, not beside but above and below the i,
.

cutting through the whole series of numbers perpendicularly from above; above and below the i as it is above and below the million and

the billion, and above infinity even. What would it avail the i if it were to gain the whole world, of what avail to it would be infinity, of what avail any addition, multiplication and scaling-up, and (assuming that it might be even more beautiful the other way round) any subtraction, dividing and scaling down, if it were not the i but the o which is the ultimate reality? And together with the million and the billion, and with infinity, the i stands in the light or shade of the o. o is the end or the beginning, not the i and not infinity either, whether it be infinity scaled up or down, o, if we have interpreted the i x oo and correctly as a mathematical formulation of the Romantic dialectic, is the equally exact mathematical formulation of the question which opposes the premise of the Romantic dialectic, this idea that we have ourselves. And now this o is to be thought equivalent to God, or at all events a possible equivalent to God. What weight the o which
confronts the
oo , sometimes , sometimes o mean? The third part evidently means a ^erajSaertsels aAAo yevos-, conceived in a manner which could not be more energetic or more dangerous. It signifies the most radical splitting-up of the notion 'God', who is the subject of the whole sentence. God is then on the one hand the x that can be everything between the extreme
5

What

i acquires in face of this possibility! does the sentence 'God is sometimes i x

values

i x oo and -^, on the basis, be it well understood, that would be God the dancer. And God is then, on the other hand, the y which opposes this very basis i as an irremovable question and exclamation mark: it stands in opposition and does not dance at all (as x can dance between art and philosophy, between nature and history, between love and religion), thej which stands there like the visitor of stone in Don

irae
its

Giovanni or like the Christmas angel among the shepherds, as the dies or as the day of resurrection, in short, as the end of time whatever

equal

may be.

In standing there

God either makes the whole dance

completely impossible: 'Thou hidest thy face, and they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust* or he makes it possible: Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created:
1

Frag., 910.

25O

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

there

and thou renewest the face of the earth.' What is to become of x, if is also ajy ? x and y cannot be God in the same sense, and if they are God at all then they are God as differently as heaven and earth are different, as something and nothing, as creator and creature are different. Only one of the two can be the true God, God in the ultimate, true
sense.

secret of this decision

or perhaps as the a revelation, as upon Mount Carmel: 'and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God/ We are not in any position, either as regards Novalis or any other person, to be able to know or say whether this decision or revelation has or has not taken place in his life, will and thought. But there can be no mistaking that the question of the o and the question of the God y underlying it played a definite
part in his
indications that this

A decision must be made between these two,

and thought. And there are more eloquent was so than this Sometimes o', which he wrote down so smoothly and without perhaps giving the matter overmuch
life,

will

thought.

There was in fact a very universally human factor which played a very special part in the life of Novalis, and one which stands in close 5 relationship to this 'sometimes o : namely, death. It was of special

him first because his own early demise was brought about by an incurable disease, so that for him death cast its shadow a long way before. Its second and chief significance for him was, however, the fact that in the spring of 1797 a remarkable repetition of Dante's experience with Beatrice he lost his intended wife, Sophie von Kiihn, whom he had met three years before, when she was thirteen years old,
significance for

and fallen in love with immediately. We have already seen how, as was indeed inevitable in the light of all Novalis's set theories, his erotic relationship with this girl was irresistibly sublimated and
transfigured,

At her death, however, it became characteristic of this love, that being that of someone himself doomed, it should become a love for a dead person. It is safe
still

even while she was

alive, into

religious one.

to say that the poet's second engagement, biographically so curious,

which took place scarcely a year afterwards, is the best proof of the incomparable way in which this first relationship was set apart in his mind set apart in such a manner that a second relationship of a quite different order was possible and even perhaps necessary beside it. Let it be noted that more or less work which we have from every completed
Heinrich

Novalis: the Apprentices at Sais, Christendom or Europe, the beginning of von, the to the and the Sacred was Ofterdingen, Hymns Night
Songs,

written in the years 1798-1801, and therefore stands already in the shadow or light of this experience, or of the insight which the poet

NOVALIS
owed

251

to this experience. It cannot, therefore, he said that this insight, falling like a frost in a spring night, beat or destroyed another tendency;
instead, just as it precedes in time all Novalis's work which has some pretence to a finished form, so it was the beginning of this work, in

principle

and in content. Upon it stands everything, the entire of poesy, which, anticipating, we have studied on its own. teaching It is the high wire upon which, with Novalis, the dance of the
Romantic dialectic what he was.
takes place. It

was the thing that made Novalis

What is the nature of this insight ? It can be described by a linking up with the previously quoted definition of the concept o: it is a question of the insight into the 'positive non-determinate' of the ego, of life,
of poesy. The Romantic doctrine of poesy proceeds, to begin with, from the point of determination i in poesy man posits himself as the ultimate reality. It is upon this basis that he dares to establish the Romantic doctrine of poesy, upon this basis that he makes i x oo and -^ == God. But the secret wisdom which Novalis acquired in 1797
:

beyond this point of determination i there takes place the Let it be noted: positive non-determinate; I non-determinate positive this border, this Beyond of the Romantic synthesis requires therefore
says that

to

be construed not merely negatively, but

field

positively. It

seems as

if

new

of at least equally serious problems were unfolding itself, above this synthesis and its problems. It seems For it is precisely this which we do not know, and we must take good care not to feel tempted
1

to decide positively (just as

this

little

as

we can decide negatively) whether

of problems really disclosed itself to Novalis's thought; whether a shaking of the somnambulist feeling of security with which we seethe pure Romantic going his purely Romantic way, took place, therefield

new

fore, or not. It

may also be that as a result ofthis insight he felt himselfyet

more confirmed and strengthened
he succeeded in
itself to

again,

all

the

in this security. It

is

also possible that

religion, to the

death which revealed

him

relating the antithesis of life and beyond the antithesis of love and

Romantic

synthesis.

He may have

succeeded in dis-

solving death 'in a play of harmonies', in 'pointing to it as an arabesque in the poetry of each individual life', as Bolsche has approvingly remarked. 1 It may also be that the figure before whom he apparently desires to clasp his hands, having come up against this positive must frontier, was after all only that of Mary and not of Christ.

We

content ourselves with establishing the fact that it could, none the less, have been otherwise: it might also be (and judging by the nature of
1

Op.

cit.,

p. xxxviii.

252

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

the matter there are no strong indications against this) that a perception of a radically different kind had announced itself, that the Romantic
synthesis in the entire splendour of its self-given sense of security yet ultimately bore -within it a great, fundamental and inescapable flaw, capable of shaking, challenging, and even of destroying it, and
that, therefore,
it

was

after all Christ

and not Mary

whom

Novalis

encountered at

this frontier.

facts of the matter are these: In the Hymns to the Night Novalis his of that in the conflict between the speaks discovery Daylight, the most beloved of all the miraculous manifestations of space by those and the Night, the sacred, ineffable, living and endowed with sense

The

mysterious Night,

it is

the latter which should be accorded pride of

place and greater honour.

A human heart,
Dark Night?

Have you

too

What do you keep

Beneath your cloak

That moves my soul With unseen power ?

A precious balm.
You And

You do appear but fearful The poppies in your Hand dispense

In sweet delirium
spread the heavy magic of your wings. give us dark

Ineffable delight, Secret as yourself.

Joys which give us Sense of heaven.

How poor and

Is

childish

the light
its gaudy things, blessed a relief

With

How
The
For

day's departure.

this alone, then, Since the Night steals

These your servants, Did you sow,

from you

the widths of space, globes Proclaiming your omnipotence, Your return In the time when you are far. I think the endless eyes

Among

The gleaming

NOVALIS
More heavenly
That Night
unveils within us these resplendent stars, In that vastness. 1

253

Than

How

did he

come

to

make

this

discovery?

The

following

hymn

in

prose gives us the answer:

'Once, when I was shedding bitter tears, hope melted in grief and drained away, and I stood lonely by a barren mound that concealed in a small, dark space her who was my life, lonely as no one else had ever
been, driven by unspeakable fear, without strength, remaining nothing but a thought of wretchedness, as I looked about me for help,

powerless to

move

either forward or back,

extinct life with infinite longing, there

from the heights of my

and clung to the fleeting, came from the distant blue, former happiness a twilight tremor, and all at

once the birth-bond, the fetters of light, were broken, earthly splendour fled away, and with it my mourning. My sadness was gathered into a new, unfathomable world. You, excitement of the night, slumber of heaven, did fall upon me. My surroundings rose softly upwards, above them hovered my liberated, new-born spirit. The mound became a cloud of dust, and through it I beheld the transfigured features of my

adored one. Eternity lay in her eyes, I seized her hands and the tears sparkling, unbreakable band. Millennia vanished into the distance like blown storm clouds. Upon her neck I wept enrapturing tears in tribute to this new life that was the first dream in you. It passed, but left its reflected glow, the eternal, unshakable belief in the

became a

2 night-sky and its sun, the beloved.' NovaHs did not then renounce the world of light as a result of this

discovery and change of attitude. On the contrary: doubly reflected negation which is in question here.

it is

Platonic,

Gladly will I move With busy hands,

And

ever look to see

Where you need me,

Praise the utter glory Of your splendour,
Tirelessly pursue

The wonderful

contrivance

Of your work.
Gladly I observe

The meaning
1 2

course
cf.

Hymns

to the

Night, Bolsche, I, 14; for original,

Appendix, pp. 410-1 1.

Ibid., Bolsche, I, 17.

254

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

Of your
great glowing
regularity

Measurer of time.

Plumb the

Offerees And the rules Of the fantastic play Of spaces numberless

And
But

all their

periods.

my most inward heart

Remains the

And
For night

thrall of night of her daughter, Creative love. 1

Why

is at once the secret, the true principle of the world of light. are they who do not know it fools? Because they do not know its creative significance for the world of light especially:

They do not

feel

you

Of the almond tree And in the brown juice They do not know
That
it is

In the grape's gold flood. In the magic oil,

of the poppy.

hovers round The gentle maiden's bosom, And makes a heaven of her womb Do not divine

Who

you

That you come towards them from ancient

Revealing heaven, Bear the key To the dwellings of the blessed, The silent messenger Of never-ending mysteries. 2

tales

Novalis sings the praises of Night as the highproclaimer of a holy world, as the nurturer of blissful love:

You come,
It is night

beloved

The earthly path is ended And you are mine again.

My soul is entranced

We
1 2

I look into your deep, dark eyes, Revealing nought but love and blessedness. sink upon the altar of the Night

Upon
Hymns
to ike

the gentle couch

cf. Appendix, pp. 41 1-12. Appendix, p. 412.

Night, Bolsche, I, 18; for original,

Ibid., Bolsche, I, i6j for original, cf.

NOVALIS
The

255

And

veil falls. fired by the

warm embrace

The limpid glow transpires Of the sweet sacrifice. 1

that, of course, is the earthly love which has already been purified by heavenly love, which has passed through the catharsis of death; it is only from the night that the world of light and its love acquires its possibility and truth; and even then it is possible and true only in a very preliminary sense and in the light of this its own transcendence *A heavenly weariness now never more forsakes me. The way to the holy sepulchre was long and toilsome and the cross was heavy. He whose lips have once been moistened by the limpid wave which flows

But

in the

hill's

dark

womb

invisible to

common

earthly sense, the hill at

aloft

whose

foot the earth's sea breaks;

he who has stood

upon

this

border mountain of the world and gazed across at the new country, the dwelling-place of Night; truly he does not return to the turmoil of
the world, to the country where light reigns and constant unrest has its abode. He builds humble lodgings, huts of peace, up there, yearns and

most welcome hour draws him down earthly element rises to the surface and is washed down from the height, but that which was made holy by the touch of love flows liberated in hidden channels to the land on the
loves, gazes across, until the

into the spring's source.

The

other side, where, like clouds, it intermingles with departed loves.' 2 That the Night which the poet thus extols is the night of death, as

we just found

suggested, is something which finds direct expression in that very artistic part of Novalis's poetry written in the form of a mythical history. Life was once:

An endless feast Of gods and men.

In childlike awe Each race revered

The
But there
is

As the highest thing

rupts this feast:

tender, precious flame in the world. 3

irrestistibly,

one thing which mars and

irreparably inter-

One thought alone was there, Which, its dread form amid gay revels showing, Did sudden fill their heart with horror wild; Nor means had all the gods within their knowing
1

2
3

Hymns

to the Night, Bolsche, I, I5f.; for original, cfl Appendix, p. 412. Ibid., Bolsche I, 17*1 Ibid., Bolsche, I, 22; for original, cf. Appendix, p. 413.

256

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

To
men's troubled mind with comfort mild; Mysterious ill the spectre e'er went sowing; Nor prayer subdued his rage, nor gift beguiled; For Death it was who all their merry cheer Suppressed, with pain and anguish and with tears.
still

and impassioned breast beautify the mask of dying, pallid youth puts out the light and rests, The end as gentle as a harp's low sighing And memory melts mid shadow-waves 5 cool crests, The poet sang, to this sad need replying. But still unfathomed was the endless Night, The awful symbol of a far-off might. 1

With daring

Man sought to

spirit

Until the great reversal of death actually

came about:

The night became The fruitful womb Of revelations

*

The deep
Fertile

divining

wisdom
East
perceive millennium's dawn. 2
describes as follows :

Of the
Did
Christ was born

first

The new
and
lived,

an event which Novalis

heart

A lonely flower unfolding,

Turned towards

The heavenly

The glowing source of love, The Father's countenance sublime

Resting on the loving-earnest mother's
Breast,

which dreamed of blessedness.

The growing child's prophetic gaze, With fervour to ensure divinity,

Was turned towards the future, To his loved ones, future

Not caring
Bearers of his name, for the earthly Fate in store.
soon,

Around him
Love

Miraculously drawn by
all-powerful

The child-like hearts assembled. A new and unknown life

1 2

Hymns

to the

Night, Bolsche, I,

aaf.,-

for original,

Ibid., Bolsche, I, 24; for original, cf.

cf. Appendix, p. 413. Appendix, p. 413.

NOVALIS
Grew up like flowers Where he was From his loving lips Undying words
divine
1

257

And

tidings most rejoicing Fell like sparks

Of a

spirit.

And

then Novalis causes this wondrous child to be addressed by a minstrel hailing from a far-off shore, and who then joyfully journeys onward to Hindustan, as follows
:

art thou who all these years hast stood In thought inclined o'er graves of mortal beings; A sign of comfort in dark solitude. And of a higher manhood's glad beginning; That which hath made our soul so long to pine Now draws us hence, sweet aspirations winning. In death eternal life hath been revealed, And thou art Death, by thee we first are healed. 2

The youth

For while Christ

anguish,
is

is dying, while his holy mouth, drawn in dreadful draining the dark cup of suffering, the birth hour of the new

world

is

drawing near him.

Awakened

to

new

He ascended to the height Of this new world made young

The
old world that

glory,

again;

had died with him With his own hand he buried In the empty tomb; And set upon it with almighty strength The stone which no force can remove. 3

Long ages since Have passed Thy new creation grew

:

A multitude has followed thee

In
faith

In ever-greater glory. From out of misery and pain

and longing

And
And

in loyalty.

reign with thee with the holy virgin In the realm of love, And serve within the temple Of Death that is in heaven. 4

They

to the Night, Bolsche, I, 28; for original, cf. Appendix, pp. 413-14. Ibid., Bolsche, I, 25; for original, cf. Appendix, p. 414. 3 Ibid., Bolsche, I, 25f.; for original, cf. Appendix, pp. 414-15. 4 Ibid., Bolsche, I, 27; for original, cf. Appendix, p. 415.

Hymns

258

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

Death sounds
his bridal call;

The lamps are brightly flaring; The virgins stand preparing With oil in full for all; If on the ear came falling The far sound of thy train.

And
To
In

all

the stars were calling

tone!

With human tongue and

thee,

Oh

A thousand hearts are sent,

this

Mary, hallowed,

dark world and shadowed

are bent.

On thee their thoughts

By

They hope for gracious healing With joy more fully guessed,
thee 'pressed, holy Mary,

Upon
By no
Each

thy faithful breast.

cold grave

A faithful love,
still

now weepeth

forlorn;

love's sweet rites keepeth,

From none will they be torn. From heaven cherubs thronging

Hold watch upon our

To

heart; soften our sad longing

fires

Her

doth Night impart.

life is

hasting above, Now greater longings tasting With sense transformed in love. The starry host shall sink then

Content, our
endless

To

life

To bright and living wine. The golden draught we drink then, And stars ourselves shall shine.
released lives woundless, separation more; While life swells free and boundless As a sea without a shore. One night of glad elation, One hymn that cannot die, The sun of all creation 1 Is the face of the Most High.

Love

No

in conclusion there follows that song of triumph in a minor from we have already quoted those verses of painful nostalgia which key
for the wonderful 'golden Prime'
1
:

And now

Hymns

to the

Night, Bolsche, I, 28-9; for original,

cf.

Appendix, pp. 415-16.

NOVALIS

259

Down
Are

into earth's dark bosom,

down!
frown.

From realms of light departing; The sting of pain, wild tortured

signs of happy starting; The slender bark will bear us o'er Like lightning, to the heavenly shore.

Eternal Night!

Then

praised be thou!

Be praised eternal slumber; The day has made us warm; pale now Press cares we cannot number; No more 'tis joy abroad to roam, We rise to seek the Father's home.
the soul's own sweetest Bride, the Beloved Rejoice! the evening glimmers wide., To hearts by sorrow proved; dream breaks all our bonds apart, And sinks us in the Father's heart! 1

Down to

To Jesus,

And now once again in truly triumphant tones the 'Song of the Dead' in Heinrich von Ofterdingen can ring out:
with us grew life from love; Closely like the elements Do we mingle Being's waves, Pounding heart with heart. Longingly the waves divide For the strife of elements Is the highest life of love, And the very heart of hearts.
First

Whispered

Hear we
Ever

talk of gentle wishes only, we are gazing into eyes transfigured

Tasting nought but mouth and kiss. All that we are only touching Change to balmy fruits and glowing, Change to soft and tender bosoms, Sacrifice to bold desire.

The

desire

is

On the lover to

ever springing,

be

clinging,
flinging,

Round him all our spirit One with him to be

Ardent impulse ever heeding

To consume in turn

each other,

On each
1

Only nourished, only feeding

other's ecstasy.
I,

Hymns

to the

Night, Bolsche,

29-31

for original,

cf.

Appendix, pp. 416-17.

260

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

And
in flood

we

forth are gushing,

In a secret manner flowing To the ocean of all living In the One profound; And from out his heart while rushing, To our circle backward going.
Spirit of the highest striving Dips within our eddying round.

Know that we in

O could men, our future partners,

all their

joyance,

To

Are about them and do share All the bliss which they do taste, They would burn with glad upbuoyance
desert the
life

so hollow
haste.

O, the hours away are streaming;

Come, beloved, hither

And thy
The Hymns to
content
is

the word of life discover: Turn around but once. Soon will all thy power be over, Borrowed light away be flying, Soon art fettered, O earth-spirit,

And

Help to fetter the earth-spirit, Learn to understand death's meaning

time of empire past. 1

the

songs to the Virgin

Night and this Song of the Dead are balanced by the two Mary and the thirteen Sacred Songs. Their thoughtfirst

apparently the same as that of the

two works, the only

difference being that now, instead of the ideas, night and death, it is the ideas, Mary and Christ, which occurred in the mythical-historical

turn of the

first

train of thought,

which acquire central importance,

so

one-sidedly, being indeed the sole subject of emphasis. It is, however, precisely at this particular point inevitable, in face of this specifically religious, and indeed Christian writing by Novalis, that this entire final

that, accordingly, the positive, aflfrrmatory significance of the entire new insight is stressed even more strongly and

problem

which he
in

raises should once again itself become

highly problematical, in

so far as the Song of the Dead has not already made it so : problematical its ultimate seriousness as regards the genuineness of the transcen-

dence which, seemingly, makes itself noticeable here, and as regards the solidity of the ground upon which all the rest of his work, as a thinker and poet, is here seen to be Has the 'awful of a
standing.
far-off might' in death
1 Heinrick
z>.

become

visible

symbol with such complete clarity here

Appendix, pp. 417-18.

Ofterdingen, Bolsche, II, 144-6; for original, cf.

NOVALIS

526l

that the thought of the overcoming of death does not have the significance ofa renewed attempt to beautify the gruesome mask of dying, with

daring
loudly,

spirit

faith in the love for Christ

and impassioned breast ? Be that as it may it is now the which overcomes death, which is declared and with spirit and persistence.

What would

have been without thee? be without thee? Dark fear and anguish were about me, In all the world alone I'd be. No certain love had I been proving;
I

O what would

I not

The

future,

When sorrows To whom had

But
if

an abyss concealed; deep my heart were moving

I

my

care revealed ?

now

Has shown

Christ, himself revealing, to me the truth, the way;

The

light of life, past all concealing. Drives anxious darkness fast away:

With him

And

is manhood crowned by duty, through him doth glorious show; Ev'n in the north all India's beauty Must round this loved one joyous blow. 1

fate

Of the
One

thousand hours of gladness

Which I found amid life's sadness One doth still supreme abide;
'mid thousand sorrows growing my heart its highest knowing: Who for me hath lived and died. 2

Taught
If I

do but have him, rim

If he is but mine, If even to the grave's dark His trust I ne'er resign,

Naught I'll know of sadness, 3 Only worship, love and gladness.

all this things seem remarkably easy for the at it is here all events lover; remarkably easy to forget the passage from the abyss which he claims he has made in saying such things. For him there is no problem as to whether Christ is there for him to have; he

It

must be said that in

takes

it

completely for granted that he can take hold of him.

He died, yet with each day's appearing He and his love are heard anew,
1 Heinrick v. Ofterdingen, Bolsche, I, 61
;

2
3

Ibid., Bolsche, I, 65; for original, Ibid., Bolsche, I, 66; for original,

cf. cf.

for original, cf. Appendix, p. 418. Appendix, pp. 418-19. Appendix, p. 419.

262

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

We

And fold him

can approach whate'er the place. in a fond embrace. 1

Boldly seize those hands appealing, By his radiant face be won;

Turn to him with all thy As a flower to the sun

feeling

If thou but turn to him, thy whole heart showing. He'll prove thy faithful bride, his heart bestowing. 2

That he is there for Christ, contain no problem either

:

too,

is

something which seems to him to

its

Then conquered

sin did lose

terror,

And joyous every step was now; And this pure faith to guard from

We wreathed about the

And by
it life

error, children's brow.

new-consecrated

Flowed onward like a blessed dream; And by eternal love elated. The glad farewell no death did seem. 3

We

have already heard that 'the virgins stand preparing, with

If I

oil in

full for all'.

do but have him.

The world as well I gain. Happy as the heavenly boy

That holds the Virgin's train. Rapt in contemplation I'm safe from earthly consternation. 4
It is

only in respect to other people that some doubt or question can

If all

arise:

were

faithless proving,

Yet

faithful I'd remain,

That gratitude unmoving Ne'er die on earth again.

Oft I go bitter weeping,

That thou in pain hast While those thou lov'st

died,
forgetting,

Have not thy

No fame wert thou here gaining And no-one thinks thereon.

But
I:
1 Heinrich v. Ofterdingen, Bolsche, I, 65; for original, cf. 2 Ibid., Bolsche, I, 64; cf. Appendix, p. 419.
3

Thy Thy

love descried; love alone constraining great work thou hast done;

Appendix, p. 419.

Ibid., Bolsche, I, 63; for original, Ibid., Bolsche, I, 66; for original,

cf. cf.

Appendix, p. 419. Appendix, pp. 419-20.

NOVALIS
I

263

have
all

felt

O leave me not again;

Let

thy goodness,

the love that binds

me

To thee for aye remain. And yet may all high thinking

And

Look heavenward for its rest; Men, brothers, in love sinking

falling

on thy

breast. 1
is

And thus

after the fashion of the others this question also

resolved in

the most direct

manner imaginable:

And bring the wanderers gently in. And even in the darkest by-ways
Let love's glad call the faithful win; For heaven is now on earth appearing, In faith we can behold it plain;

O go ye out o'er all the highways,

To
For he
really

all it

opens

who

With us the truth

are loving that shall remain. 2

seems to be present everywhere and to offer himself to in a manner which will never admit of the smallest doubt always that he is in fact there to be taken:

man

I see thee in a

Mary, lovably expressed, But none of them can equal that

I find
I

Oh

thousand pictures,

My A

upon my soul impressed. only know that since I saw thee heart has banished earthly strife ; heaven of undreamed-of sweetness

Holds

my mind

eternally.

Our eyes behold the Saviour true, The Saviour lights those eyes anew;
His head the
fairest flowers

adorn,

From which he shines

like smiling

morn.

He

the star, he is the sun; The fount whence streams eternal run; From herb and stone and sea and light Shines forth his radiant vision bright.
is

His child-like heart, supreme affection,

Are universal in

their action.

He hugs
With

himself, unconscious, blest, 4 endless power to every breast.

1 Heinnch v. Ofterdingen, Bolsche, I, 67; for original, cf. Appendix, p. 420. 2 Ibid., Bolsche, I, 63 ; for original, cf. Appendix, p. 420. 3 Ibid., Bolsche, I, 61 ; for original, cf. Appendix, pp. 420-1. 4 Ibid., Bolsche, I, yaf.; for original, cf. Appendix, p. 421.

264

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

And we might

well at this point call to mind again the hymn of the Lord's Supper, with its interpretation of the communion with Christ into the communion with the non-ego in general.

become remarkably ripe for the This is not without its more doubtful aspects. For it is hymn-book. certainly the modern hymn-book he has become ripe for. The Christian song we hear him singing is certainly not the first person plural song
In
short: Novalis has suddenly

of the Reformation, praising the great deeds of the Lord, but a species, and perhaps the most pronounced species, of the first person singular

song which has advanced mightily since 1 600, in which the congregation thinks to find edification by letting each individual say and sing that he has felt the hand of God in such and such a way, and how his works have been of benefit to him, to him, to him.

We wonder where death is now, a figure full of menace, warning and

promise,
far as

who

after all confronts too this entire Christian heaven, in so

part of earthly experience. Can it perhaps be that the poet does not intend to express this opposition as something so dangerous,
it is

so critical, so full of promise, as

sages? Has not

And

can

it

he seems to portray it in several pasdeath, after all, been resolved in a play of harmonies? e be thus resolved ? Can the positive non-determinate be
3

included in such a manner; can it, after all, carried away by a powerful 'enthusiasm for Night', be included in the point of determination i ? Was

the poet's whole meaning no more serious than in this way when he spoke of the visitor, 'its dread form amid gay revels showing' ? Can

one dispose of him by simply, in the twinkling of an eye, giving him the name of Christ ? And what has Christ become, if he is deemed just

good enough
different?

to appear as a mythical

symbol

or

is

the poet's meaning

a question of replacing the negac tive by the positive sign? If it is possible to mention 'Jesus' and the sweet 9 bride in the same breath and sense? If the name Mary can simply be
at this point,
it is

where

set

in this

down with equal meaning for the name Jesus ? If he is omnipresent way and only seems to have been waiting for the inclination of our hearts, to become our own? Has the poet really seen the majestic

i x eo and -^ on the one hand, and o on the between the god x and the godjp, or has it for a long time, or even from the outset, been submerged in the unity of the one true God #? Is there a knowledge here of the decision between Baal and Jehovah, or has not Baal been chosen unconsciously a long time previouslyan act suppressing from the outset, perhaps, the question which

distance between the

other,

flashed into the

mind like lightning? Was Novalis in the Hymns to the and in the Sacred Songs singing another melody or was he not Night

NOVALIS

265

rather singing the same one as he usually sang an octave deeper: the song of the magic identity between the ego and the non-ego, with Night now additionally included, with death now additionally included, with Christ himself now additionally included ? These things we can only ask. And we are not entitled to ask them as if perhaps we knew the answer. We do not know it. But in order to understand Novalis we

must

ask, sharply, remorselessly.

much symbolic force in the the of the meaning opposing of Christ and Mary. question concerning If the Sacred Songs, in spite of all the talk of Christ, are, in the final and decisive assessment, songs to the Virgin Mary, then that would mean
The
question
is

concentrated with

that Novalis has in fact succeeded in understanding death too, and death in particular, as a 'romanticizing principle', as he once said, 1 as

the ultimate principle of this great process of things growing more strange and more familiar, in making it part of the reality of this dancing god, and in including Christ too in the train of Dionysus.

For

if

Mary

is

the final

word

Mary

in the sense of Roman Catholic

Church

to God, capable of participating in God. The creature thus described can at most be regarded with fervour, at most
also

enough what is above, open

with

doctrine, to which, upon this point, Novalis was receptive then that means that the final word is the creature open to

infinite sadness

but by no means worshipped. In what conCatholic Church doctrine too in fact

is still

cerns Mariology the

Roman

whatever

else

may be said of it
new religion

confined within the frame of the

c

of immanence, which one hundred years The meaning of Star of the sea, I greet called Romanticism. was ago 9 thee may well be one of wondrous beauty, but is not sufficient to make

ancient and ever

plain the decision or the revelation.

referred to
Christ.

Everything would be different if the Sacred Songs could really be by the title they lay claim to, that, namely, of songs of

As we have seen, however, there is a great deal which argues against this. But once again we do not have the final right not to recognize them as what they claim to be. Behind them lies a life that might well have known, and seems to have known, enough of the 'dreadful

awaken in us. Thousands and thousands of people over the last hundred years have believed that in these poems they have heard a most genuine testimony. Who would argue that they have not really heard it? The fact that our confession and testimony, for serious reasons, perhaps, cannot be this one is another question. At all
g.,

anguish' to compel us at all the doubts it might

all

events to respect

its

confession of faith, for

660.

266

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

events the simple fact that Novalis wrote these Sacred Songs (and in such quantity, too, in relation to the sum-total of his output) is evidence that his gaze
subject,

was in some way

fixed

upon the point which forms

their

cannot be explained as the conwhom things Christian also became a symbol, as has often been said. Certainly that aspect is also part of the matter. But the emphasis with which here just things Christian become
fixed so strongly that duct of the pure Romantic, for
it

and

to the critical concept of death,

a symbol, and the proximity in which things Christian find themselves would still remain striking and singube that in the last resort the riddle if final must our even lar, judgment of death has been juggled away once more and that Christianity has yet again been interpreted in humanistic terms. In that event we should be compelled to say that pure Romanticism, in order to mark out the
field containing its particular

problem, had inevitably to approach

extremely close to this other quite different field of problems. And now let us once again consider that Novalis's confession of faith

and testimony is known

to us only in the incomplete form in which the twenty-nine-year-old poet left it at his death. Truly it is much more question than answer! Novalis relates of the hero ofHeinrich von Ofterdingen that, in the cave of the hermit,

who personifies history, he came book an old containing pictures, and written in a foreign lanupon guage. To his astonishment he suddenly found amongst its diverse pictures a picture of himself: he saw his likeness, in fact, in different situations. 'Towards the end it seemed to him that he looked bigger and nobler. The guitar lay in his arms and the countess handed him a garland. He saw himself at the imperial court, on shipboard, now in close embrace with a slender and beautiful maiden, now fighting with fierce-looking men, and again engaged in friendly conversation with Saracens and Moors. Frequently he was accompanied by a man of grave aspect. He felt a deep reverence for this august form, and was glad to see himself arm in arm with him. The last pictures were dark and incomprehensible; yet some of the shapes of his dream surprised him with the most intense rapture. The conclusion of the book, it seemed, was missing. This upset Heinrich considerably, and he wished for nothing more earnestly than to have and be able to read the whole book. He looked over the pictures repeatedly and was startled when he heard the company return. He was beset by a strange feeling of shame.

He did not dare make known his discovery, closed the book, and merely asked the hermit generally about its title and language. He learned that it was in the tongue of Provence. It is long since I have read it,
said the hermit; I

do not now remember

its

contents very distinctly.

NOVALIS
As
far as I

5267

can
life,

of a poet's
all its

a romance relating the wonderful fortune recollect, wherein the art of poesy is represented and extolled in
it is

various relations.
I

The

conclusion

is

missing to the manuscript,

.
.

which

brought with

me

from Jerusalem.

51
,

conclusion to this manuscript is missing. It is missing in every respect. And in so far as we all, as children of the age which began with
Novalis, have something of the Romantic, or at least, it is to be hoped, the pure Romantic, in our blood, the same might well be said of us
too. This manuscript cannot have a conclusion, the best that can be said of it.
1

The

and

that, perhaps,

is

H.

v.

Ofterdingen, Bolsche, II, 77.

VII
HEGEL
I

T is well known that Hegel was of the opinion that his philosophy, unlike that of his predecessors from Descartes to Fichte, should be understood not as a stage, a particular period in the development of
the course of the history of philosophy in general, leading to heaven knows where, but as the final culmination of this history, uniting and doing away with all previous knowledge within itself. The ridicule,
regretful or malicious with which historians of of Hegel's, the astonishment philosophy generally describe this view or pathological sense of self-importgreeting such an almost mythical in eke seems to have shown that he had ance in a man who everything

open or subdued,

intelligence, the gratification at the thought that after Hegel's success in thus assessing his own work nobody else would dare to of lack a thing again all these attitudes are fundamentally both such say

some

petty and irrelevant.

For fundamentally the astonishing thing is not that Hegel believed be an unsurpassable climax and culmination. It is that he was not right in thinking that after him the development was possible of a school of positivism, of pessimism and even of materialism, of Neo-Kantianism and whatever else the other modern philosophies
his philosophy to
called. The astonishing thing is that nineteenth-century man did not acknowledge that his concern in the realm of thought, his basic intellectual concern, had truly achieved ultimate recognition in Hegel's philosophy. It was astonishing that he broke out and made off in all

may be

had happened, and that he was not content with pondering Hegel's wisdom, at most constantly re-formulating it, perhaps cautiously correcting certain weaker parts, and for the rest thankfully applying it in everything. Why did Hegel not become for the Protestant world something similar to what Thomas Aquinas was for Roman Catholicism? How could it come to pass that, very soon after Hegel's death and ever more plainly from the middle of the century onwards, it was exactly his achievement which began to be looked upon, with a pitying smile, as representing something which
directions as if nothing

HEGEL 269 was in the main already superseded ? This happened, though the same people who pitied his achievement were still secretly drawing intellectual sustenance from certain isolated elements of his thought. How
did
it

come about that as

Hegelianism openly found

bittered in tone

early as the eighteen-sixties those who professed it necessary to be defiant, not to say em-

as for instance in the foreword of

Biedermann's

Dogmatics? How did it come to pass that pure Hegelians, Michelet, for instance (from 1829 to l8 93 a lecturer at Berlin), became a species as rare as the ibex and were close to being figures of fun? And how is
is but one of many other from being generally recognized, even in a limited way, as the one true and necessary renaissance as according to Georg Lasson, for instance, one of the faithful few, it should inevitably be? That is what is astonishing. That Hegel, at all events outwardly, should temporarily at least appear to have been put so much in the
it

that the Hegel renaissance in our day too

renaissances

and

is

far

wrong by the events of history; that is the amazing fact. If the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries formed a unity in such a way that the nineteenth century was the fulfilment ofthe eighteenth, then it was Hegel

who represented this unity in his philosophy as no other man did. Is it not in Hegel that the man who is free from all the ties of tradition and from all conflict with tradition, who rejoices equally in reason and in
history, as Lessing,
still groping and uncertain, had set him upon the not in Hegel that this man has for the first time achieved complete, clear and certain self-awareness? Is it not Hegel who exploited and made fruitful to the last detail Kant's great discovery of

stage

is it

human capacity for reason? Is it not the extremely vulnerable attempt to form an opposition to Kant's real or supposed one-sidedness, as it had been undertaken
the transcendent nature of the

he in

whom

by Herder and
Is it

others like him,

is

came most

legitimately into

its

own?

the great systematizer and apologist of the concern of Romanticism, of the discovery of Romanticism, of the immediacy of the creative individuality, and of the dialectic of the way

not he

who

above

all

his life

every promise, and was

moves? Was not Hegel he who should come as the fulfiller of it worth waiting for another after he had

come?
Such was the view of the new age itself, in the early days at least, in the years between 1820 and 1830, which were so remarkable in every respect. It was at such a time that the Prussian state, just strugin things German and gling to power, and preparing to take the lead
perhaps European, called Hegel to its first chair of philosophy at Berlin, and that the liveliest students from all Germany, and with them

270
the educated of

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

all ages,

flocked to hear

which we can

scarcely form any idea today. Again,

him with an enthusiasm of it was at such a

time that learned literature in every sphere spoke something of his language, and that philosophy, and thus fundamentally concentrated knowledge in general, was actually thought to be synonymous with
Hegel's philosophy, with a naivete that almost succeeds in becoming c credible again. Was Hegelianism really just another ism among and
9

before

fashion in dress?

it something comparable to a new was regarded afterwards. But if all things do not deceive us it was precisely when it was utterly and completely ruled by Hegel that the new age best understood itself, and it was then at all events that it best knew what it wanted. It was the first sign that the new time was growing old, the first

and

after

many

others ?
is

Was
it

That

how

harbinger, we might perhaps say, of the catastrophe of 1914, the first hint that men were themselves beginning to doubt their own desires,
unfaithful to Hegel, who had only just been glorishould not have happened. In making Hegelianism the subject of irony they were making themselves the subject of irony. In rejecting

when they became

fied. It

Messiah they were rejecting the whole promise, the very thing they themselves had thought to have received as a promise. In doing so they declared their belief that the first culmination and overcoming of the
this

Enlightenment, as
that a

it

reached

its

peak in Hegel, had not succeeded,

new start had to be made, a return behind Idealism and Romanticism. They declared their belief that the inheritance of the Enlightenment must be entered into once again, with the claim that they were and capable of entering into it as the generation of 1770-1800, and with the risk that this time they might perhaps not attain either to the overcoming of the Enlightenment, which they
as competent

sought, or to a true culmination of it.

did this second attempt succeed half as well as the first which first half of the century was still chiefly under the sign of the first approach culminating in Hegel. In the second

And

had been given up? The

half of the century the desire was to go behind Idealism and Romanticism to link up with the Enlightenment again and make a
better job of things. Today we are already, to a certain extent at least, in a position to survey the scene as a whole: can there be any question that the intellectual atmosphere of the first half of the century was distinguished from the second not only by a far greater sense of self-

importance but also by a far higher standard, intrinsic value and dignity? We need only compare the representative figures of the two eras in our own field, the field of theology, the two church fathers,

HEGEL

271

Schleiermacher and Ritschl, to be shocked at once at the era of meaner things, of smaller stature, which has manifestly arrived. The resurgence
of the exact sciences, both natural and historical, to which this new age, the supposedly adult period of the nineteenth century, can lay claim as
its title

of particular honour, was after all a modest substitute for the and confidence in matters of principle with which the basis was clarity laid between 1820 and 1830, a basis which was later to be abandoned, and with which, even into the forties, people worked at the German universities. It was a meagre consolation for the deep resignation with which as early as 1870 the more far-sighted representatives of this second era, like Frank Overbeck, for instance, did their work, aware that the new time had completely lost the ground beneath its feet. In the eighties and nineties this resignation began to lay itself like a

upon all intellectual life, in spite of the thinly chirping pathos to which this age, too, on occasion was once more capable of
paralysing spell
rising.

At all events, and despite the outward splendour of the era of Kaiser Wilhelm which was just beginning, there can be no suggestion that a second spiritual peak was reached like that around 1830. Hegel's professorial chair was now occupied by Friedrich Paulsen; Schleiermacher's by Julius Kaftan, and in F. G. Baur's place Adolf von Harnack now determined how things stood with the 'essence of
Christianity'.

And

with

all

due respect

for

such

figures, that is

different matter, if

become tired Hegel and the age of the superseding of Hegel are related as is the battle of Sedan to the battle of the Marne. This time, too, there was an abundance of victorious bulletins, but something had gone wrong at the top, and there was a premonition that things would turn out badly. The century had denied its truest and most genuine son and since then it no longer had a good conscience or any true joyousness or any impetus. It would have liked very much to achieve these things, but it could not. Looking back became its typical attitude of mind, a somewhat aimless and unrelated looking back to various periods of the remote past, a historical stocktaking. It drew its sustenance from memories drawn from earlier centuries, but without taking the opportunity to make them material for a new basis; it did so impelled more by curiosity than by an inner affinity with the concerns of these earlier

we think of their specific weight. The century had and somehow sad for all its enforced jollity. The age of

ages. The century reproached its own youth for having been neglectful particularly of this, for having been far too unhistorically-minded completely overlooking the fact that in its youthful days it was not only

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

young, but dared to take itself seriously, dared to live from its own resources, and could therefore afford the enthusiasm, the poesy, and
the sense of self-importance, too, which it now looked back upon with a senile smile. It did not reflect that in those early days, even though it had less curiosity about history, the century perhaps thought and
lived truly historically in a better sense, because it was claimed by history, because it was engaged in conversation with history. But how-

ever

we may judge

all

that in

its details,

a synthesis, and with

it

definite feeling for the needs of the age, such as

was peculiar

to the age

of Hegel, was not achieved again once people thought they had left the age of Hegel behind them. In turning away from Hegel the age acknowledged that, having reached the summit of its desires and

what

achievements, it was dissatisfied with itself, that this was after all not it had intended. It set Hegel aside and tried again, but did not

bound to be even
to be.

even reach such a peak a second time, and thus manifestly it was less satisfied than it was before, although it pretended

Where

does the fault

lie ?

receive this impression. If

it is

In Hegel ? Those who study him will not a question of doing what the entire

it

nineteenth century evidently wanted to do, then Hegel apparently did as well as it could possibly be done. Or is the reason that afterwards

the age of the great men was past, that there was no genius present in the second half of the century to carry out the better things which the

century it seems had in mind in turning away from Hegel? But it is always a bad sign when people can find nothing to say but that unfortunately the right people were lacking. This should be said either

always or never. Every age, perhaps, has the great men it deserves, and does not have those it does not deserve. The question only remains,

whether

it

was a hidden flaw in the

will of the

age

itself,

perfect as

the expression was that it had found in Hegel, which was the reason why it could not find any satisfaction in Hegel and therefore not in
itself,

and yet could not find any way of improving upon and surpassing Hegel, and therefore itself. It might of course be possible that Hegelianism indeed represented

in classic form the concern of the nineteenth century, but precisely as such came to reveal the limited nature of this concern, and the fact
it was impossible to proceed from it to the settlement of every other question of truth. And that for that reason it was, curiously, condemned. The rejection of Hegel might have been the fig-leaf with which man

that

at this time sought to hide what he himself was aware of as his pudendum from his own sight, from the sight of others and from the sight of

HEGEL
God.
It

273

might of course be that Hegel was in fact the Messiah, the fulfilment of the age, as he himself thought, and was held to be in the
eighteen-twenties, but this fulfilment the fulfilment of the promises which

would have been after all only had been received, and as they

had been received, whereas better or at any rate different promises, which we thought we could see round the edges of the pictures of Lessing, Kant, Herder and Novalis, and which could be much more
clearly indicated in
exist either for

many

other manifestations of the time, did not

Hegel or for his contemporaries (in the narrower sense of the word). These latter promises did not receive their fulfilment in Hegel either, but were at best only reaffirmed as promises. It is possible that different needs made necessary new promises, different from those which figure centrally in the pictures we have so far studied, and which now in fact seem to be fulfilled in Hegel. It is possible, moreover, that these different promises are in fact present, even if at the edge, indistinct,

and in the form of open questions, presented by Kant and Novalis as glimpses beyond the border: problems which were suppressed, which did not get their fair share of attention, and which were
calling for treatment. Hegel, fulfilling what he could, did certainly not provide an answer to these problems, except for the fact that with him they are perhaps suppressed and did not get their fair share of attention in a particularly obvious way. If all this was the case, then both the

triumph and the tragedy of Hegelianism were meaningful, seen in

relation to history.

There would then have to be a break with the idea of a historical moving in a straight line, which was so important to Hegel particularly; and it would then have to be acknowledged that a time like the nineteenth century can also take some guilt upon itself for the way it worked out its own peculiar concern: the guilt incurred by the neglect, the overlooking, the covering up and denying of other concerns by the existence of which it was bound to feel itself hindered, limited and channelled in asserting its own concern; again, the guilt
progress
for a crime against the truth in not allowing such hindering, limiting and channelling to take place, but rather all too constantly affirming and asserting itself; a guilt all the more manifest the more classically

the will of an age is expressed in its leaders and heroes. It is a guilt which must sooner or later be paid for, and which, naturally, will be

paid for above

Avill,

all

by

its

leaders

and

heroes,

by those

in

whom

the age

itself was great. It will

be paid for

first

in such a

way that the age itself

and

by

degrees, or all at once, find the greatness of these leaders

heroes (and hidden in it its

own greatness) unworthy of trust, repugnant,

274

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

and rotten. This of course need not mean at all (and in the case of Hegel and the nineteenth century it did not mean at all) that the age itself has done penance and is about to perform a volte-face. What
it

does signify, objectively, is that judgment is about to be passed, that the inner impossibility of the crime committed is about to come to light, and that the way will then be free for remembering forgotten things, resuming neglected things, facing the problems which have

been suppressed, and in so doing honouring the truth. The fact that this in its turn cannot be achieved without guilt is something that will perhaps be granted by this new age more willingly than Hegel himself
granted
it

new age would

in relation to the age preceding him. Perhaps in fact the prefer to dispense from the outset with the idea of

historical progress.

But precisely in this way will it then be possible become aware of the concern of the preceding age, in our to really case that of the age of Hegel, without failing to realize that that time
is

truly past.

Everything
thesis, for

past,

we have said so far must admittedly be put in parenwe do not know whether the age of Hegel is in fact entirely even if we should, in all seriousness, consider it to be so as far as

we ourselves are concerned. It was only in the course of centuries that Thomas Aquinas acquired the position at present accorded him in the Roman Catholic world. It may be that the dawn of the true age of
Hegel is still something that will take place in the future. But that would

mean that we are in fact standing only at the beginning of the era of the man whom we here provisionally described as the man of the nineteenth century. The fact that people were weary of Hegel in the second half
period, brought about

of the nineteenth century would then have to be judged a restingby a state of weakness in modern man, because he had not quite comprehended his salvation at that juncture. And the
denial of Hegel,

which to us today perhaps seems necessary in a more

it did to man in the second half of the nineteenth century, would then have to be understood as a reactionary current approaching the point where it will be annihilated or at least

comprehensive sense than

rendered harmless, a current which might then only hope for its concern to reach fulfilment at a much later time. The day ofjudgment and
of freedom, which somewhat boldly perhaps we previously set in the past, would then lie in a possibly distant future. Anyone who is aware

of serious considerations which cannot receive justice at Hegel's hands, and which in fact Hegel suppresses, will not hesitate, while simultaneously paying his due respects to Hegel as a spirit of undoubted greatness and as the spirit of our time too, to associate himself now

already

HEGEL

375

with the necessary protest against him and against this time ofours, even if it is as the supporter of what is already a lost cause. Whether the age of Hegel is already past or whether it is still to come and to come even more than ever before, cannot perhaps be decided, and it is not
necessary for us to
I.

know

for certain.

Hegel's philosophy
it

is

the philosophy of

self-confidence.

It

was

at once postulated and affirmed this principle, which this age in particular found to the highest degree comprehensible, that it seemed so suited to its time, that it was so much a fulfilment in relation

because

to

what the whole century

applied,

felt

as

because

this principle, for all the artistry

a promise within itself. It was with which it was developed

seemed so philosophy seemed so convincing was that Hegel dared in all earnestness to pursue this simple principle, which every true contemporary in some way agreed with, to its ultimate conclusion and with all imaginable faithfulness. Anyone who has once understood that here we have a man who absolutely and undeviatingly believes in himself, who can doubt everything because he does not for a moment doubt himself, and who knows everything for the simple reason that he has complete trust in his own selfknowledge anyone who has once understood that, has at least the key to this labyrinth, even if he cannot avoid the trouble of finding his own way about it. It is a question of philosophy and thus of the selfconfidence ofthinking man. Hegel puts his confidence in the idea that his thinking and the things which are thought by him are equivalent, i.e., that his thinking is completely present in the things thought by him, and
so startlingly simple that this philosophy

and

was

grand and

fruitful.

And

the reason

why HegeFs

that the things thought by him are completely present in his thinking. He trusts that these two things are equivalent because he trusts and this is the secret of his secret in their identity which comes about

The identity which exists between our thinking and what is thought, in so far as it is achieved in the act of thinking, is, with Hegel, called mind. So Hegel's brand of self-confidence is also confidence in mind which for its own part is one with God and the same with God. The characteristic thing about this, however, is that the confidence in mind or in God must also to the fullest extent and in ultimate seriousness be self-confidence, because there is likewise and in the same sense a final identity between Self and mind, as there is in general between thinking and the thing thought.
in the performance of the act of thinking.
It is the

and

to

summon people

purpose of Hegel's philosophy to proclaim this confidence, to it. He does these things because he does not

276
conceive of

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

it as a personal distinction to have occasion for such confidence, since there is no kind of inspiration or individual enlightenment behind it, because it is meant to be understood utterly and

completely as confidence in universal

human

reason,

the reason

known

and available to everyone. Here Hegel takes up the inheritance of the Enlightenment in fulfilment of the concern of the whole movement between himself and the Enlightenment, but also criticizing and correcting the courses it had taken acting in an independent direct relationship to the Enlightenment. In affirming this equivalence and final identity of things within and things without, of ego and non-ego, of the familiar and unfamiliar,
:

Hegel affirms the insight of Romanticism. Of the minds we have studied here he is unquestionably most akin to Novalis. For just three years (Jena, 1801-3) he was closely associated with Schelling, the true philosopher of Romanticism, and even though he turned away from Schelling later this did not mean that he had rejected the things Romanticism wanted, but that he was attempting to provide for it a better system and apologetics than that of Schelling. He found the Romantic synthesis and identity to be lacking in a firm and universally valid basis. It seemed to him that the truth and force of this synthesis was imperilled by the mere appeal to poetry, to creative experience, to the individual genius. That was why he was also Schleiermacher's
determined opponent and opposed his metaphysics of feeling, and the doctrine of faith which called this instance to witness. For him it is a
question of understanding the synthesis which he also affirmed as Novalis, as Schelling, and as Schleiermacher wanted it to be, as solid knowledge, as a free, conscious and responsible act of the capacity for

which is in principle always and everywhere present in man and can be appealed to. Hegel of course also affirms Herder's ideal of humanity and his experience of totality. He it was who put into effect the testament of Herder, and further, of Lessing, by his very thorough inclusion of history in the concept of reason. It has been regarded as Hegel's greatest achievement that in his concept of reason, which also embraced historical reality, he finally and justifiably overcame the dualism of transcendental and historical-empirical thought, the dualism of the
reason,

and the accidental truths of history, of destiny which had already been disputed by Herder. This was, however, the case because he actually achieved it within his concept of reason, and not by referring to some intuitive and emotional Beyond, which could not be apprehended, but only experienced! It is in fact
eternal truth of reason

and the

idea,

HEGEL

277

Hegel's criticism of Romanticism, solely and entirely, which distinguishes him from Herder. Hegel believed in the possibility, legiti-

macy and sovereignty of pure thought. He was never so fiercely aggressive

when, rightly or wrongly, he thought he could detect, behind the appeal to such supposedly given and yet inapprehensible instances, an example of lazy thinking, or fear of thinking, or mistrust of the power
as

of thought.

He would have had only the greatest contempt for a collective concept, like that, for instance, of the irrational, as it was evolved by a later age. It was not in a capitulation of the reasonable to

the real, as to something which was unreasonable, or against reason, that he sought and found a way of overcoming the dichotomy which

Herder had

all

the reasonable

is

too tumultuously disputed, but in the knowledge that just as real as the real is reasonable.

And Hegel

of course also affirmed Kant's transcendentalism.

He

did so in the same sense that Fichte did; following in his footsteps, but excluding, admittedly, the specifically ethical turn Fichte had given to his affirmation. Reason critically understanding itself is reason

which

is self-established and liberated, which is now as a matter of principle the master of all things. But just for this reason Kant's critique of knowledge seems to Hegel to have after all rather the

character of a carter's job, that had to be done sometime but could not have any lasting significance. It was in him to ridicule the demand for a theory of knowledge by saying there was as much sense in it as the demand of the Gascon who did not want to go into the water before he could swim. The interests of the theory of knowledge, he said, were best served in the act of a truly rational knowledge. lf we are not to go to philosophy, to rational thought, before we have rationally known reason, then we can do nothing at all, for it is only in knowing that we rationally apprehend. Rational activity cannot be investigated before we are rationally active. In philosophy reason is for reason.' 1 In this act of rational knowledge the Kantian distinctions between the knowledge of ideas and empirical knowledge on the one hand, and between
c

theoretical

and

practical

knowledge on the other,

also fall

away, as

necessary but secondary preliminary stages of mere reflection. All knowledge comprehending and surpassing these distinctions, is

knowledge of God. True

from the outset physics, is as such also the true metaphysics, the metaphysics of the mind which unites within itself thinking and the thing thought the true metalogic, including

physics in mind. It

is

unnecessary to point out that Hegel's reaction to

1 Vorlesungen uber die Phitosophie der Religion (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion), ed. Lasson, Philosophische Bibliothek, Vols. 59-63, 1, 57f.

27&

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

certain elements of Kant's teaching, like his theory of postulates, for instance, or his theory of the theoretical unactuality of all knowledge of ultimate things, or his distinction between the religion of reason and
historical religion, could only

be one of sovereign displeasure. From is looked back upon as a manikin loyally improvising his resources, however sadly limited by the cave in which he plies his handiwork. Kant receives an honourable mention, and Fichte, as the man who with his teaching of the ego was the first to understand Kant better than he understood himself, receives a crown of oak: but we should on no account allow either of them to detain us. The distinction between knowledge and the thing in itself, between ego and non-ego is a provisional matter. Upon this point Hegel proceeds with Herder and Romanticism. Hegel's direct, independent Unking-up with the Enlightenment was done in this way: the confidence of the Enlightenment in the right and the power of rational thought was naive, untested and therefore unsecured, stuck fast in half-truths and open to all kinds of counter-blows. Hegel called this confidence in the right and power of rational thought to self-awareness, worked out and defended its deepest truth vis-d-vis its own weaknesses as vis-d-vis its attackers, and in so doing exalted it from the level of a one-sided view of the world to a comprehensive world principle. We cannot of course name Hegel in the same breath as Christian Wolff, but we can liken him to Leibnitz, corrected and supplemented by Spinoza, the secret patron saint of all enlightened
Hegel's standpoint the good

Kant

opponents of the Enlightenment. Hegel is the Enlightenment philosopher with an entirely good conscience, with a completely protected rear. These things the earlier philosophy of the Enlightenment did not have. Somehow it was still not at peace, it was still at loggerheads with
the object as the object confronted it, in history particularly, with an irksome refusal to be dismissed. The reality of destiny, to which it shut its eyes, stood like a shadow behind it. That is why the fight
against

the Enlightenment was bound to emerge from the Enlightenment itself, as we saw it break out in Lessing's discovery of historical experience,
in Kant's teaching of radical evil and of the primacy of practical reason, in Herder's protest against pure rationalism and in his enraptured hearkening to the voices of the peoples, and in the Romantic
discovery of the immediacy of the individual. The Enlightenment had no safeguard against this assault upon it by opponents who were themselves enlightened, and it was therefore also ultimately unsecured
against the never entirely suppressed opposition of such of its opponents as, in a manner which was not in tune with the age, did not even

HEGEL

279

meet it upon its own ground. It was unsecured because the watchword 'Have the courage to use your own understanding' could only ring true when the idea of one's own understanding* was so deepened that the conflict with the object, the ignoring of history, and shutting one's eyes to the reality of destiny was superfluous, because all these things, the object, history and destiny, were included in it. God must not any longer be an offence or foolishness to one's 'own understanding'. The individual understanding had to learn to recognize that it must not be so diffident and defiant in understanding itself merely as individual
e

understanding or merely as individual understanding, but that it must understand itself as the one and only reason which is already prevented

from quarrelling with God, and which cannot be either openly or

secretly atheistic, because as the

one true reason of man

it is eo ipso

also

the reason of God, a generic object which when thought out to its conclusion must necessarily be transformed into the generic subject,

and in fact finally thus transformed. Because to Hegel the rational was and the historical rational, he completely and finally disposed of the God who had somehow stood in opposition to reason, who was in some way an offence and a foolishness to reason, and who could
historical

perhaps be denied through reason. He did not do this by denying him, and not even by denying that he stood in opposition, but by making the
offence

and

foolishness of this opposition relative,

relationship with

God was something which was

by seeing that
it

was

also provisional,

by seeing that this necessary but which could finally be resolved in the

peace of reason, which is at once and as such the peace that is higher than all reason. That is what is fundamentally new about Hegel in relation to the Enlightenment, and in it Hegel brought the Enlighten-

ment

in its old form to honour in a way of which dared to dream.

it

would never have

And

this

makes

for the peculiar

it

of self-confidence;
rationalizing
pious. It
is

momentum of HegePs philosophy does not allow itself to be surpassed in cold-blooded

by any worldling, nor in depth of feeling by the most Titanism to the highest degree and at the same time to the
at once

it

The .^-confidence it proclaims and to which and as such confidence in God, a qualified confidence, a most true and most actual confidence, imbued with the entire mystery and majesty of true confidence in God. Its intention is to give the honour as expressly as possible to God and not to man; and this it expresses quite directly and consistently not only in the form of a most naive human ^Zf-confidence, but also in this form, as explicitly as possible. Every formal peculiarity of Hegel's philosophy can be
highest degree humility.

summons is

280

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

understood when seen in this light. The method of thinking which is based upon the identity of confidence in God and self-confidence must become one that never fails, which is inexhaustible. As the result of the thought which is based upon this identity a system must emerge, a

complete settling of the account with knowledge and the striking of a balance with truth. Based upon this identity questions which remain open, which play so large a part in Kant's philosophy of religion, for instance, simply cannot arise. Here problems are simply there in order that they may be raised and settled with all certainty. With this identity as the basis for his thought Hegel is able and indeed bound to be present himself as the man who has an implicit knowledge of everything, and is empowered to hale everyone before his judgment-seat. Based upon this identity there must be here a fierceness of controversy which is only
possible otherwise in the form of a rabies theologorum.
it is

Wondrous to relate,

accompanied by a fundamentally conciliatory spirit, and an openmindedness towards all things. Of this spirit one is at first tempted to
believe that
it is thinkable only on assumptions which are to some extent theological. If all theology seems at first to pale beside this philosophy, then the reason is not that it confounds and disperses

theology in a particularly dangerous and victorious way. Hegel had no thought of undertaking any such unfriendly task, and at bottom he remained throughout his life a loyal son of the Tubingen seminary. It
is

rather that everything that seems to give theology its particular splendour and special dignity appears to be looked after and honoured by this philosophy in a way incomparably better than that achieved by

the theologians themselves (with the possible exception of Thomas Aquinas). Theology, taken care of once and for all, is here not surpassed
in the act of this philosophy, but in fact surpasses itself. Only someone who does not understand Hegel's philosophy can miss its peculiar greatness. Again and again we find we must think three

we

times before contradicting it, because we might find that everything are tempted to say in contradiction of it has already been said

within

it,

and provided with the best

looked at in
that
is

ways:

first,

itself,

because

possible answer. It is great in two it has seized upon and imple-

mented an idea

relative truth of which

once simple and all-embracing, the at least done this so energetically, that whatever attitude we adopt towards it we cannot help hearing it and coming to terms with it. It is possible to bypass Fichte and Schelling, but it is as impossible to pass by Hegel as it is to pass by Kant. And the promissory nature of the truth Hegel enunciated and the
at
is

self-evident. It has

ease with which

it

lends itself to equalization will perhaps be even

HEGEL
e

28l

greater than in the case of Kant for someone who, as a theologian, must finally say No' to Hegel.

The other
is

not at

all

great quality in Hegel's philosophy is the very fact that it the accidental discovery of one particular, gifted individual

this is what Hegel, in contrast to Schelling, did not wish to be but the mighty and impressive voice of an entire era, the voice of modern man, or of the man who, from 1700 to 1914, was called modern man.

'Philosophy does not stand above its age in such a way that it is something completely different in kind from the things which generally
condition the age; one spirit, rather, moves through the realm both of reality and of philosophical thought; it is only that the latter is the
true self-understanding of the real. Or it is one movement which bears along the age and its philosophy. The only difference is that the things which condition the age still appear as accidental, are not yet
justified

and thus can

still

stand in unreconciled, inimical contrast to

the truly essential content of the age, whereas philosophy, as the justification of the principle, is also the general tranquillizer and
reconciler.' 1

it is

Quite apart from the intrinsic weight of the thought Hegel represents, impossible to pass him by, simply because we cannot pass by that modern man. We must not be led astray by the fact that modern man

became
even
if

unfaithful to Hegel.

He meant and means what

he

did, ungratefully enough, blushing,

Hegel meant, ashamed, and with a

smile of embarrassment, turn away from Hegel; after Hegel, to his applause at first, had said that which he himself wished to say in a

thousand tongues, but which he simply could not say nearly so well. Self-confidence, qualified as confidence in God, confidence in God given concrete form as self-confidence where is the man who, with the blood of this modern man in his veins, would not listen to this and hear the finest and deepest echo of his own voice? If we wish to take this modern man seriously, to hear him and put his desires on record if we wish to take ourselves seriously /card crajojca, but in the best and deepest sense ofwhat must ultimately come under the notion of adpg, then Hegel also must be taken seriously. That is why it is fitting that he should have a place of honour in our investigation of the foundations of
nineteenth-century theology. We ourselves are involuntarily thinking along Hegelian lines when we state that his greatness as a thinker consists in the objective and historical significance, the reasonableness

and reality of his teaching, which are all present in equal measure, and which form a unity of mysterious clarity.
1 Phil. ofRel., Lasson, I, 53.

282
II.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

is the philosophy of selfof all, the philosophy of the confidence of thinking man in the dignity, strength and value of his thought. And man, according to Hegel, cannot understand himself more deeply, more

We have

said that Hegel's philosophy

confidence. It

is, first

exactly, more definitely, than simply as thinking man. It is in thinking and in thinking alone that he is different from the animals, that he is,

as

man,

himself.

Thus

in trusting in the dignity, strength

and value of
his trust in
qualities in

thought he is in the most fundamental sense putting humanity, in his own dignity, strength and value. These
his

his thought are based

it is

truly both

an

upon the fact that the act of his thinking, provided act of thinking, and an act of thinking, is identical with

the event of reason, or of the concept or the idea or the mind. With Hegel all those things are synonymous, and indeed they are all synonyms for the reality of all reality, which is one and the same as God.

Reason understood in this sense is absolute reason, the concept in this sense the absolute concept, truth the absolute truth, the idea the absolute idea, mind the absolute mind. By absolute is meant set free from all,
definitely all limitations,

such as apply to history in relative contrast to reason, but also to reason in relative contrast to history, to Being in relative contrast to the concept, but also to the concept in relative contrast

to Being, to reality in relative contrast to truth, but also to truth in relative contrast to reality, to experience in relative contrast to the idea, but also

to the idea in relative contrast to experience, to finite nature in contrast to infinite mind, but also to infinite mind in relative contrast to finite

nature.

The

dignity, strength

value, called into question by any contrast, since they unite all contrasts within themselves, since they are in themselves in motion and at rest, since they stand in and of themselves, or rather set themselves up.
It is

and

and its synonyms are absolute and value. That is to say, they are dignity, strength which are not limited by any contrast, which cannot be
qualities of absolute reason

by

only that

it is

virtue of the fact that the act of human thinking provided truly both an act of thinking, and an act of thinking is
it

identical with the event of reason, that

merits this confidence, in

its

dignity, strength and value, a confidence which is therefore absolute, and not to be led astray by any quality of contrast, for this reason it is the
is the secret of Hegel's philosophy. Identical with the event of reason, we say. And that really is the key to everything; that reason, truth, concept, idea, mind, God himself are understood as an event, and, moreover, only as an event.

occasion for the absolute self-confidence which

They cease to be what they are

what they
are,
is

as soon as the event, in which they are of as thought interrupted, as soon as a state is thought

HEGEL
of in
its

283

synonyms are life, moveGod is in his divine God ment, process. action, revelation, creaonly as an absolute tion, reconciliation, redemption; act, as actus purus. He
all its
is

place. Essentially reason and

a graven image as soon as he becomes identified with one single moment, made absolute, of this activity. And reason, likewise, is unreason as soon as the process in which it is reason is thought of at any

stage as something stationary,

is

when any

of the

moments of its motion

Just because of this it is only the act of human knowing as such which deserves the confidence Hegel speaks of, because it alone is identical with the act of reason itself, and thus
itself.

identified with reason

partakes of the absolute qualities of dignity, strength and value. Hence as soon as we seek to understand by reason something other than the

which it is itself, the act in which the idea is idea, the mind mind, shall inevitably be guilty of treating Hegel with the grossest etc., misunderstanding. The picture he had before his mind's eye in his great
act in

we

apotheosis of thinking, the picture of speculative philosophy in his sense, is not one that could be reproduced by means of a drawing in
points, lines

and outlines, however much the hints of this picture which himself gives over and over again seem to invite such treatment. Hegel Even in speaking of the Hegelian system we must not think of a rigid, stable construction. Relevant here is the fact that Hegel's terminology
in fact not so unambiguous as one might expect, especially from one logic as he did, and it is certainly not as clear as the

is

who worshipped

reader might wish. Anyone who has studied the textbooks of the history of philosophy and then begins to read Hegel, finds himself continually

nonplussed and bewildered by the so unlike the textbooks overlapping in the application of the individual terms the master allowed
himself, for all the consistency of what

he wanted

to say

and did in fact

yet somehow it seems fitting, this freedom which brings with say. it the notorious obscurity of Hegel's writing and which does in fact

And

cause considerable suffering in the reader. From page to page Hegel does in fact wrest from us the possibility to compromise for ourselves a
tranquil picture of his views.

again and again, and anyone

lines, quantities

and
us.

are only to look, and look thinks he sees stable points and relationships, is not in fact seeing what Hegel is

With him we

who

seeking to

show

nevertheless

Hegel sees life, the lifeof reason, of themind, oftruth, admittedly, but life, in the full movement of life. Only a kaleidoscope or the

moving film of the cinematograph could offer the visual quality that would be required. What is here called a system is the exact recollection of the observed fulness of life. It is only in the form of this recollection

284
that
it

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

has permanency and validity, and only when the recollection event, a continual re-creation of the picture itself. And what
this recollection, is

is itself

makes this system a system, that gives the order and

through the whole of

regularity running nothing but the rhythm of life itself, recognized as running through the fulness of history. This rhythm, considered in itself, is the regularity inherent in the system, its

heart-beat, as
thesis

it

were. It

is

the famous dialectical method of thesis, anti-

synthesis, in pursuit of which Hegel described, or rather reconstructed, in constantly new and changing aspects and insights the event of reason as the sole object of knowledge and learning. That
this object is in fact

and

to say that the

an event, the event pure and simple, is as much as method here must be the one and all (Eins und Alles)
.

Anyone unwilling to allow himself to be seized by the rhythm of the method, anyone seeking to acquire wisdom while standing instead of
moving, would remain in ignorance, would not achieve the
glimpse of this object.
slightest

Nothing is more characteristic of the Hegelian system of knowledge than the fact that upon its highest pinnacle, where it becomes knowledge of knowledge, i.e. knowledge knowing of itself, it is impossible for it to have any other content but simply the history of philosophy, the account of its continuing self-exposition, in which all individual developments, coming full circle, can only be stages along the road to the absolute philosophy reached in Hegel himself. But that which
knowledge
is explicitly

upon

this

topmost pinnacle as the history of

philosophy, the philosophy completed in Hegel, it is implicitly all along the line: the knowledge of history and the history of knowledge, the
history of truth, the history of God, as Hegel was able to say: the philosophy of history. History here has entered so thoroughly into
reason, philosophy has so basically become the philosophy of history, that reason, the object of philosophy itself, has become history utterly

and completely,

that reason cannot understand itself other than as

its

own history, and that, from the opposite point of view, it is in a position
to recognize itself at once in all history in some stage of its life-process, and also in its entirety, so far as the study permits us to divine the whole.
It is a matter of the production of self-movement of the thoughtcontent in the consciousness of the thinking subject. It is not a matter of reproduction! The Hegelian way of looking is the looking of a spectator only in so far as it is in fact in principle and exclusively theory,

Granting this premise, and setting aside Kierkegaard's objection that with it the spectator might by chance have forgotten himself, that is, the practical reality of his existence, then
thinking consciousness.

HEGEL
for
it is

285

also in order (only too much in order!) that the human Hegel whilst subject, looking in this manner, stands by no means apart as if
it

were not concerned.

is

It is in his

looking and only in his looking T:hat

there

and only in his looking that something the something seen is produced. And the thing seen actually has its reality in the fact that it is produced as the thing seen in the looking of the human subject. Man cannot participate more energetically (within
seen. It is in his looking

transferred from the floor of the theatre

the frame-work of theoretical possibility) 3 he cannot be more forcefully on to the stage than in this
theory.

But what is the meaning of this self-movement of the thought-content which is identical with the self-movement of the thinking subject? In this we must most particularly bear in mind Hegel's dialectical method. Reason is concept, i.e. reason conceives, reaches within itself, and, in
completely penetrating, embraces reality within itself, embraces it so much that reality is reality only within reason, only as conceived
reality.

That, however,

is

not simply so;

it

comes about. The concept,

to

exact, the absolute concept, is event. Its absoluteness is not a result to be discovered somehow and somewhere but is the absolute-

be

ness, the unlimited necessity

of its execution.

And

the self-execution in

which the concept is an absolute concept, brings itself about according to Hegel, in an endless circling, in a triple beat in which we are meant to perceive the very rhythm or heart-beat of the Hegelian system. Here we have to deal with Hegel's boldest and most weighty innovation. This movement comes about because of the fact that the concept does
not so

much exclude the concept that contradicts it,

as the

fundamental

axiom of the whole of western logic had previously held, but includes it. It comes about because the contradiction of the concept, far from neutralizing it, is on the contrary a necessary moment of the concept itself. As an absolute concept the concept not only can but must 'swing over' to its opposite, 'release its opposite, as Hegel puts it. It must do this not, it is true, in order to allow this opposite as such to stand and be valid, but in order to have it swing over forthwith into a second opposite, and finally and thirdly, that it might adjust and reconcile both in itself, call both back into itself again, and dispose of them within itself. 'Dispose' here does not have the meaning of tollere, but of
9

conservare, so that
is

the 'play

Hegel's

own name

for the process

It

that

now finished can and must

begin again immediately.

must begin

again because it is only in its eternal self-execution that the concept is the absolute concept, the concept which is unlimited and unsurpassable in dignity, strength and value, which is absolute reason, the mind, the

286
idea,

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

God himself. The concept is therefore absolute, it is God, in such a way that in being and remaining the dictum it is also always the contra-dictum, and always the contradiction of the contradiction and always the reconciliation and the higher unity of both thesis, antithesis,
:

synthesis subjective-finite, objective-infinite, absolute-eternal being in itself and of itself, existing in and of itself, and however else the three

Hegel are generally described. Speculative thinking is defined as: 'dissolving something real and setting it in opposition to itself in such a way that the differences as
dialectical stages in

determined by one's thinking are set in opposition and the object is conceived as a unity of both'. 1 All truth is to be found in the ceaseless
completion of this circle, all error is contained in stopping and staying at one of the moments of the concept, which are necessary as stages, but are thought of not as points to be stopped at but as points to be
passed through. Error, lying and sin, with Hegel, can only signify obstinate one-sidedness, a blind lingering and stopping which represents a departure from obedience to the self-movement of the concept. There is no limitation or exaggeration, no folly or wickedness in the

whole range of real human thinking, from that of the most distant times and places, right up to what is taking place here and now in the philosopher's study, which would not be in principle included in the rational quality of the concept which conceives all reality within itself. Even that which is most questionable in itself can appear in this context as the exponent of the mind. It was in this sense that Hegel wrote in 1806, after the battle ofJena: *I saw the Emperor, this worldsoul, riding out through the town to go on reconnaissance; it is indeed a wonderful feeling to see such a person who, concentrated here upon one spot, sitting on a horse, reaches out over the world and rules it.' 2 In this sense Hegel could even speak of the Devil in tones of unfeigned admiration. But precisely in being made relative in this way that onesidedness is shown its limits, and the means of rising above it is displayed. Tout comprendre c*est tout pardonner! From the height occupied by the concept a soft and reconciling light can be shed upon everything and everyone, and even more than that tout comprendre c*est tout admirer^

might well be added to the saying to embrace Hegel's meaning. But must be said at the same time that one-sidedness must submit to being seen and described as such, to being shown up in its merely relative necessity and in the badness of its habit of stopping and staying. It must be content to be summoned and aroused to go on by the magic
it
1 Phil ofRel, Lasson, I, 33. 2 "Oberweg, Geschichte der Philosophie (History of Philosophy),

IV, 85.

HEGEL
wand
of self-knowledge, which
is

287

knowledge of God. Theodicy and categorical imperative, the discovery of the meaning of all history, and one's own continuation of meaningful history, to put it in terms of
as such

Christian dogma, justification

and

sanctification, coincide perfectly

within the act of this knowledge, at whatever stage it is completed, and whatever point the individual takes as his point of departure if only this departure from the realm of one-sidedness comes about. And
forthwith, as soon as this departure
is

made, an outlook in principle

presents

itself, is

made

possible

and

real

upon the

entire inner

life

of

the concept or of the idea or of the mind.

The Hegelian

universal

wisdom
the

is

there, like Pallas

this

moment

Athene sprung from the head of Jupiter* from one-sidedness, and with it the entry departure

into the self-movement of the concept, has

science, the one and only science, must be:
1
.

come about. Accordingly

2.

Proceeding from immediacy to objectivity natural philosophy. Passing into the non-immediacy of reflection, of imagination
:

logic
3. Turning back into itself, as pure knowledge taken up once again into the higher unity of these opposites: the philosophy of

mind.

In accordance with the same principle of motion logic forms

itself into

the teaching of Being at the first stage, into that of Essence at the second, and at the third and highest stage into that of the concept
sciences

natural philosophy forms itself into mechanics, physics and organic the philosophy of mind forms itself into the teaching of subjective, objective and absolute mind.

Leaving logic and natural philosophy, which are always divided and sub-divided according to the same principle, let us further note from the ordering of the philosophy of mind, which represents the third and
decisive

moment

of the whole course, that Hegel understands by the

teaching of the subjective mind psychology in its most comprehensive sense; by the teaching of objective mind, once again in the most

comprehensive sense,

ethics,

which in

its

highest stage unfolds into the

teaching of the family, the society and characteristic of Hegel at the highest level, the State. Finally the teaching of absolute mind moves from aesthetics via the philosophy of religion to this philosophy
is

the history of philosophy, in which Hegel's own teaching understood as the crown and conclusion of a development which had taken place over three thousand years.
/car'ef op??,

That, presented in the roughest outline,

is

what may be

called the

288

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Hegelian system of knowledge. Involuntarily we ask ourselves at what place in the wide ramifications of this structure we could look for the central point, the decisive concern of Hegel's thought. It might be reckoned as logic, in so far as logic has its peak in the doctrine of the concept, which plays a decisive part throughout. But we learn just as well, or better, of the most significant qualities of the concept of the
concept, which
life
is,

admittedly, central to the entire teaching,

and of its

and activity, in different places, where it from the place where its life as such forms the

lives its life, as distinct

centre of the discussion. of seems to be one the less significant parts of his system, Hegel's logic or at all events one which is less heeded and effective than many others.

Natural philosophy has no clear claim for consideration either: it must be the result of personality that the strength of Schelling and Goethe, a receptiveness for nature, did not constitute Hegel's strength to the same extent, Someone whose view of the history of mind is predominantly political will be inclined and also justified in his way, whether
stressing
it

State, with

positively or negatively, to see the Hegelian teaching of the its singular conservative streak, as the master's most

significant achievement.

But

this doctrine
is

and necessary consequence,

probably more

of the State, as a possible characteristic of than

enlightening about Hegel's actual intentions. It is usual, then, to lay claim to his philosophy of history, which in the system follows upon the

teaching of the State, as constituting Hegel's most significant thought. It is true, and was revealed already in his youth (Berne), that his

was incomparably greater than that which he showed, for instance, in research in the natural sciences. But the fact that his philosophy as a whole is the philosophy of history, philinterest in historical matters
rate,

osophy of the history of God, is more important, in principle at any than the expositions, given under this particular title, of reason in

history, of world-history as the judgment of the world, and of this historical reason as having had its childhood in the oriental world, its

time of adolescence and adulthood in the world of Greece and Rome, and its mature old age now in the Germanic world, however stimulating and important these ideas may be in themselves. Hegel's scheme of aesthetics is also certainly highly typical. In it, in opposition to the
symbolical art of the East, whose characteristic form is architecture, and to the classic art of Greece, whose characteristic form is sculpture,
in so far as in

there appears the 'romantic' art of Christendom as the higher unity, it for the first time the spiritual element, infinite sub-

jectivity, is said to

said to take place,

predominate, and a reaching of art beyond itself is whose characteristic forms are painting, music and

HEGEL

289

poetry, of which, once again, the last takes up the totality of all forms within itself. At this point Hegel's connexion with Romanticism be-

comes palpably clear, but clear also is his going beyond Romanticism. This is shown in the view he held that the appearance of Goethe meant the beginning of a complete revolution, in terms of what had gone before, in the sphere of art. All the same, once again it cannot be said that Hegel's thought was actually centred in his teaching of art more than anywhere else. Likewise the history of philosophy, which forms the summit of the whole, should probably be looked upon more as the characteristic exponent than as the organizing centre of the whole. Finally, if anyone has wanted to find this whole in Hegel's philosophy of religion, it must indeed be said that here, where it is expressly a question of the things which clearly claim to be the last things, the nerve of all that Hegel wanted is laid bare as nowhere else. Once again, however, it cannot be said that Hegel attached particular importance to this philosophy of religion. It is for him one concern

among many others, antithesis to the thesis of aesthetics, subordinate to the synthesis of philosophy; no more and no less. The fact that the philosophy of religion, too, is a motive force and this particular motive
force in the self-movement of the mind,

but

makes it relatively important, important as a motive force in this movement which in some way embraces the others. We shall ultimately understand Hegel best by believing him that, even if he does not speak with the same weight everywhere, he does after all wish to speak quite weightily absolutely everywhere, and not merely at certain points. Fundamentally there can be no centre here at the expense of a periphery. Or rather: the centre moves with the
it is

definitely not

thinker himself; it is always at the point where the self-movement of the mind in the consciousness of the thinking subject is taking place.

There

is

forthwith

no outer thing that drawn into this movement could not become the most inward; there is no second to the last or

third to the last thing that could not here forthwith acquire the tone and central significance of the last. Where the triple beat of thesis,

and synthesis rings out and it rings out everywhere the Hegelian universal wisdom resembles one of those old villages of weavers or lace-workers where once, day after day, the sound of the same machines could be heard from every house: where this rhythm sounds there is the whole and the centre of this philosophy, possessed of the greatest strength within the smallest space. It is not this or that discipline, not a particular aspect of life or of learning, not that of the State either, or of history, or of religion, which is here in itself the
antithesis

29

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

organizing centre. The only centre is the method which is to be applied and proves true in every discipline and in every field of life

and

learning.

could perhaps go a step further and say that the really vital interest, the true life-force of the Hegelian method of thinking,, does not lie even in the peculiar nature of this method as such, that it is
this particular

One

method of the triple beat which is given by the division and re-union of the concept. It is of course significant, and will concern us further, that what Hegel wanted and was capable of found and was bound to find expression in this particular method. But Hegel's will and achievement itself does not consist in the invention of the dialectical method as such, but in the invention of a universal method altogether. That is what makes for Hegel's genius, what makes him typically modern, and suited to his time: the fact that he dared to want to invent
such a method, a key to open every lock, a lever to set every wheel working at once, an observation tower from which not only all the lands of the earth, but the third and seventh heavens, too, can be surveyed at a
glance.

That was the characteristic and specific desire and achievement of Hegel: the invention of a rule for thinking whereby one can arrive at the thought and its rule itself just as much as at the things in

themselves as the object of thought, at the problems of natural reality just as much as at the incomparably harder concreteness of history, at the secret of art just as much as at the texts of the Bible, which was completely affirmed as revelation, at the most primitive paths of the

human psyche just as much as

was a

at the decisions of the

Lord himself. This

rule of thinking which meant that riddles exist only to be seen through at once from above and solved. Hegel's method makes it

to have to overlook, suppress or forget nothing, seemingly nothing at all. It enabled him to be open, free and just in all directions. By virtue of it he could meet every request and complaint, no matter how alien it was to him, with the answer that it had already
possible for

him

been taken into consideration in its place, or at any rate could be considered. It enabled

him to understand

everything great, true, beautiful

and good as singly connected nay more than that, as one. By it he could somehow comprehend and welcome all imperfect things too,
the defiant resistance of the Devil not excepted, in the positive quality of this unity, and would take them up and affirm them on the condition
that they allowed their place to be pointed out to of life and therefore in the system of knowledge.
Is

them

in the process

not a principle which promises and

offers

such things, which

emits such force and splendour, really the quintessence of dignity,

HEGEL

Sgi

strength and value? Does thinking not merit confidence, if its principle is shown to be identical with this principle? Is self-confidence, the highest possible self-confidence, not possible and necessary if we ourselves are capable of thinking thus, and of thinking this? Once again we are confronted by the mystery: why did not modern man once and for all stretch out his hand and take this key to every lock which Hegel's method offered him? Even if Hegel's method was disputable, and the system unfolded by it what did that matter? How could modern man, how dared he let it drop before another had been invented which, even if in a better way, perhaps, promised and offered at least the same and was just as universal, just as superior and fertile, just as possible to

apply as Hegel's? It is of course true that the philosophers both before and after Hegel believed they, too, could make keys to fit every lock. But how one-sided, how abstract or material were the offerings which

were made before Hegel, how many questions of truth, even those held by someone like Kant, seemed to be simply brushed aside And why was
!

it

not noticed that the attempts made after Hegel, although they sought to achieve the same, once more fell short of Hegel's achievement, that

they all have the significance of being mere relapses into the one-sided modes of thinking which Hegel had overcome? Again: how, after
pessimism, neo-Kantianism Gould Hegel's picture, once it had really existed, be forgotten again? Could the prodigal son, once he had returned to his father's house, and had eaten of the fatted calf, really depart again and fill his belly abroad with husks? Or was it in fact not his father's house to which he then had returned? Had he become the victim of a second great illusion when this picture, Hegel's picture, which seemed perfectly to correspond with and to gratify his own desire, became real? Did the self-confidence which was presented to him, by this picture prove finally to be without strength or foundation? If so, then it was certainly not because of the failings which might be part of the Hegelian system as a historical quantity, as they are part of every other, nor because of the questionable things by which the Hegelian method, in the peculiarity of its nature, might be surrounded. Failings and doubtful points of detail can be no reason for rejecting a scheme such as this. In the depths of the consciousness of the time a violent shock must have befallen the will common both to Hegel and to it, the attempt to make a key to every lock must itself have come under suspicion, a deep resignation must have been born not only as far as the How of the Hegelian method was concerned, but also as regards its That, as

Hegel,

could materialism, positivism,

become

possible ?

2Q2

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

regards the possibility of such a universal method at all. There is no other way of explaining the retreats which now began in every sector of the front. The natural scientists withdrew into their laboratories. The
historians retired to

how was

and and upon the history of religion in general. There is no other way of accounting for the complete bursting asunder of the Universitas litterarum which Hegel had once again saved. It was not only that people had happened to tire of Hegel, but that had become they fundamentally weary of the path which leads to a
universal knowledge in general.

a consideration of the none-too-subtle question: in those days? The philosophers fell back upon psychology the theory of knowledge, the theologians upon the historical Jesus
it

They were frightened by the ideal that had been achieved, and it seems that they could not think of anything else to do but to drop it. They contented themselves once again with knowing this or that, rejoiced to think that their knowledge was at all events much greater than that of the eighteenth century, and they gave up the idea of knowing one thing, the whole, with those who wanted to surpass the eighteenth century. From this time on their habit of speaking of a scientific method as if it were a unity was but a fond illusion. Fundamentally from this time on not only theology and the other sciences but philosophy and the other sciences, even the science of history and
the natural sciences among themselves, stood again helplessly confronting one another. The time was now beginning when the more people talked of method the less they could be content with any method
at all, however well founded and worked out it might be; and the more the method, the one method that alone would allow them to speak of a single science, a single culture, was conspicuous by its absence. The

self-confidence of modern man which still wanted to assert itself and seems to assert itself even in these changed circumstances, could only be a broken self-confidence. Anyone seeking to look at the intellectual
situation of the age after

Hegel as an advance upon the age of Hegel and the possibility of interpreting it thus is not precluded will not be able to seek this advance in the line in which the Enlightenment and the surpassing of the Enlightenment took its course up to and
himself
including Hegel. Measured by this
line, in

the light of the question of

whether we have advanced along this line, the intellectual development which has taken place since Hegel can only be regarded as a decline and a retrogression. The two questions with which we began will now have
perhaps

become

clearer:

Why did Hegel meet with no belief? Why did not his

philosophy of self-confidence, a self-confidence which was unbroken

HEGEL
because
it

293

homogenous method, assert itself and win through ? Was not his offer, even if he had been in fundamental error, still better, incomparably better as a fulfilment of the promise in which modern man still claimed he believed, than everything that came after? Or should the time of its effectiveness which we can survey perhaps be still too short? Is the time only coming, in which Hegel will meet with belief, in which his offer will be accepted ?
itself,

was founded in

in a

and surpasser of the Enlightenbetween reason and revelation, between a purely worldly awareness of civilization and Christianity, between the God in us and the God in Christ, to a highly satisfactory conclusion. Is it any wonder that Hegel found a following above all among theologians? It seemed that after a long winter a theological spring had come such as had never been known. What had now become of all the arguments against theology which it had had openly or secretly
III.

Hegel

is

also the great perfecter

ment because he brought the great

conflict

to face since the time of Descartes, indeed for even longer, since the men of the Middle Ages who had disputed revelation? All criticism of reve-

was evidence of a lamentable one-sidedness, and the wretched which Kant and Lessing were still prepared to grant it validity were also evidence of one-sidedness; these were all murderous attempts upon the wealth and depth of the truth. Hegel put down each and every one of them. In a most thorough fashion Hegel himself showed the disturbers of the peace, and not least the theologians who were capitulating to them, who was master. He produced a philosophy, as we have seen, in which theology seemed to be taken better care of than in theology itself. Because of such a finite perception of the Divine, of that which is in and of itself because of this finite conception of the
lation
limits within

absolute content
ianity

it

has

come

to pass that the basic teachings of Christ-

have for the most part vanished from dogmatics. It is now philosophy, not alone, but chiefly, which is essentially orthodox; it is philosophy which maintains and safeguards the tenets which have ever been valid, the basic truths of Christianity. 51 'Much more of dogmatics has been preserved in philosophy than in dogmatics in 2 theology itself.' For it is a fact 'that the content of philosophy, its requirement and interest, is also completely that of religion; its object is eternal truth, nothing else but God and the explanation of God,
Philosophy, in explaining religion,
is

only explaining

itself,

and in

explaining itself.it explains religion . . . Thus religion and philosophy 3 . . coincide philosophy is itself in fact an act of divine worship'.
.

i Phti.

ofRel, Lasson, III,

126.

Ibid., I, 40.

Ibid,

1, 129.

*94

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

solidarity,

dould theology demand more than such a declaration of

indeed of a complete identity of interests from its ancient foe? And the fascination of the form of this declaration lay in the fact that at last, at last it did not mean what the philosophizing of theology had

meant during the Enlightenment, and what it had still meant with Kant. There was no de-historicizing, no forsaking of what had once actually happened in history in favour of the tunelessly rational. It
at long last the historical element in Christianity was not only brought into a tolerable relationship with the rational one, a relationship to some extent in accordance with its dignity, but that it was actually exalted to the position of the most significant factor,

meant that

that the universal quality, reason

historically.

itself,

The concern which Herder

was understood entirely particularly had expressed

was given the most thorough consideration here. Anyone who thinks that he can help theology by establishing an organic relationship between revelation, faith and history, should be quite clear in his mind that it has long ago received this help from Hegel. And with history it was dogma, mystery, and primarily those teachings of Christianity which were most profound and most inaccessible to rationalism, which were splendidly rehabilitated by Hegel's philosophy of religion and which were honoured and received protection against the assaults of philosophy and of the faint-hearted among the theologians themselves.

The
culture,

offer

here

made

was, however, not only that to help save

The Middle Ages had possessed a uniform which even the Reformation had not destroyed. What did destroy it was the relentless progress of the intellectual movement of the Renaissance, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The emancipation of culture from the Church which compelled the Church's emancipation from culture seemed an accomplished fact. The entire
Christianity, or theology.

of the Enlightenment, but the struggle against the Enlightenment, too, had had the effect of widening this rift. It meant a threat not only to the Church, but also, truly, to culture. In spite of Kant and in spite of Goethe there could be no really quietened cultural
intellectual surge

conscience, no assured self-confidence for

modern man,

so long as

religion was behind him in the rile of an insulted enemy. mere 'treaty' such as Schleiermacher wanted to propose to the opposing parties,

along 'let us depart in peace' lines, and suggesting that faith must not hinder scientific research and that scientific research must not exclude belief such a treaty could truly not suffice here. It did not restore what had been lost since the Middle of the human and Ages, the
unity

the Divine. It
himself,

still

caused

HEGEL man to appear

295
as

spirit divided within

and still set up in opposition to free thinking a threateningly independent authority. At the back of Schleiermacher's proposed treaty was admittedly something quite similar to the Hegelian declaration of solidarity, and indeed of an identity of interests, as we shall see. But Schleiermacher, with his teaching of the feelings as the
and basis of religion, remained too deeply rooted in Romanticism be able to make clear the unity he too had in mind. This decisive achievement was something of which the speculative idealism of Hegel could alone be capable, and it did not fail in bringing it about. How indeed could it have been otherwise, after all we have seen of it? Hegel wanted to do justice to both sides, with an equity and a circumspection such as none had summoned before him. He wanted to be a modern man, without forsaking or conceding anything, and we must also credit his other desire, his wish to be a Christian, and indeed a Lutheran Christian, without forsaking or conceding anything. He acted as a true attorney, or judge, rather, between the two parties. He had therefore to make demands of both parties. In his these
seat

to

eyes

demands required no sacrifice, nor any compromise or concession. They rather required, upon both sides, a deeper, more radical understanding of its own case by each party, an achievement of greater selfawareness, and upon this basis the arrival at mutual understanding, at a new mutual recognition. It was perhaps the strongest expression of Hegel's self-confidence that he felt able to point out this basis and make the demands upon both sides which rested upon it. These demands were finally rejected by both sides. Modern man, without knowing of a better unity than that proposed by Hegel, yet split himself once again, as oil and water separate, into the Christian and the man. The grip whereby Hegel sought to unite him in himself turned out to be premature, too strong, or too weak, even, to prevent the centripetal forces of both sides from once again shattering the unity. That was probably

the deepest, and perhaps the tragic meaning of the catastrophe of Hegelianism. Let us begin with the demand which Hegel's philosophy of religion made upon modern cultural awareness. Hegel certainly made this
to its own best advantage, as its own advocate, but also as its in so far as, in the depths of which it had no judge, knowledge, he sought to understand it at the same time as Christian self-awareness.

demand

Hegel interpreted modern cultural awareness to

itself in an unprecedented fashion by saying that at the deepest and ultimate level it was concerned with the claim of truth. This claim takes a form possible

296
only

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

if the truth is God, and God is the Master of men. This is the meaning of the Hegelian apotheosis of thinking, thinking as distinct from mere feeling; this is the meaning of Hegel's intellectualism, which has so often been condemned man lives from the truth, and only from the truth. Truth is his God, whom he dares not forsake if he is to remain human. Truth is necessary to him, and, indeed, necessary to him in its unity, in its entirety, in the divine rigour inherent in it. Such was the claim which Hegel hurled at modern man more forcibly than any theologian, at any rate, had done for centuries, although it was without
:

doubt fundamentally a theological claim, 'Our subject', the Philosophy of Religion begins, is that which is utterly truthful, that which is truth itself, the region, where every mystery in the world, every contradiction
e

confronting deeper thought, every emotional pain, is resolved, the 1 region of eternal truth and eternal peace, absolute truth itself.* The and had the since Enlightenment, thinking Enlightenment, admittedly
also

been concerned with truth, but where was

it

concerned in

this

manner with the imperious and indeed imperialistic claim of truth, with the premise that it, and ultimately it alone, formed the agenda? Where was it concerned with this unity, entirety, rigour, and divinity of truth? 'Knowledge is not only knowing that an object is, but knowing also what it is, and not only knowing in general what it is, and having a certain knowledge and certainty of it, but knowing of
it, of its content, in which the necessity of the between these things determining it is known.' 2 The simple principle of philosophical knowledge itself should now be 'that our consciousness knows immediately of God, that knowing of the existence of God is a matter of utter human certainty . that reason is the place of the spirit where God reveals himself to man'. 3 'God is not a concept, but the concept. 54 Will modern man recognize his joy in truth, his quest

that which determines

relations

for truth, his fanaticism for truth (we are reminded of Lessing) in this looking-glass? Will he put up with being taken so seriously, with being thus seized upon in his penchant for truth? Will he affirm that it was

just this, something of such deadly seriousness, which was the object of his intention and desire ? Or will he shrink back before the last things, to him as his own; before the discovery of the revelatory nature of absolute truth and all real knowledge, and still, now as ever, seek to fall humbly into the left hand of God, instead of

which are pointed out

exalting his thinking to a divine service, as is here demanded of him? Hegel's demand consists secondly in his insistence on having truth

and with
i Phil.

it

knowledge most
I, i.

strictly

understood as a movement, as a
s

ofRel, Lasson,

Ibid. a

I, 50.

Ibid., I, 49.

Ibid., Ill, 42.

HEGEL
history. Science to Hegel

297

means knowing and he enforces this definition with an adamant consistency and exclusiveness. Science is present only

self is this

in the deed, in the event. The concept, the idea, the mind, event not anything outside this event. Science

God himis

applied

method, and that means the applied method of truth itself, the method of God which lays claim to man in the ultimate sense. This science cannot have assured results, cannot pause for rest after achieving its discoveries. It cannot proceed from axioms unsurpassable in their certainty, from established presuppositions which lie behind it. It is nothing less than everything which is in question, and everything must continually be in question, the ultimate included, for the ultimate too, in the self-movement of truth, must ever and again become the first. This understanding, too, of truth towards all truths apparently rests upon a theological premise. The truth can only be so menacing, so disquieting, all truths can only be so unstable, all science can only be so relativized, if truth, as Hegel constantly assumes, is identical with

God

himself. Will
all

modern man

suffer this threat,

permanent in

its

certain science, this dissolution of all science into the act of knowing, into method ? Will he acknowledge that Hegel has told him nothing new, but has only described the actual situation of modern

nature, to

all his research into truth ? Or will he hide his eyes and not be willing to admit this after all ? Will he turn away in disgust at having the background to his actions thus disclosed, and devote himself anew

man in

to his positive, exact, detailed

convinced that one can have a wonderful

it

work in history and the natural sciences, trip on Lake Constance when is frozen, without having to think every instant where one is going ? And Hegel's demand consists thirdly in the fact that he asserts the

contradiction as the law of truth understood as history. It consists in the fact that he thought he could show that the dialectical method was the one which alone exhausted and comprised the truth. The truth is

the

God, God, however, is God only in actu. This means for Hegel, only as God who is Three in One, the eternal process which consists in something distinguishing its parts, separating them, and absorbing

them

into itself again. Life itself is not a unity resting in itself, but a non-a, in despite of the whole of western logic. It is, quite simply, the task of logic and of science with it to order itself according to life, and not the task of life to adapt itself to logic. The

perpetual a

is

unity of truth and no one fought for it more vigorously than Hegel the unity of contradictions, more, the reconciliation which is effected between them. It is their reconciliation, but also the establishment of

their basis, their necessity,

and

their adjustment

and

dissolving. It

is

298

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

not in the setting aside of contradictions, but in the act of making them relative that the absoluteness of mind consists. This means that it exists
in the

thinking, object

mutual relationship between the contradictions of being and and idea, nature and spirit, object and subject, etc., the relationship they have both among themselves and with their higher unity, the unity which must, however, forthwith emit them again, and in fact itself set them up. Looked at from this point of view, too, Hegel's demand can be
understood only as a theological one. His doctrine of the Trinity, unsatisfactory as it may be from the theological point of view, is anything but a retrospective adaptation of his philosophy to comply with
the wishes of the theologians.

The

leading theologians of Hegel's time

had absolutely no desire for a renewal of the doctrine of the Trinity, and least of all for such a one as Hegel's, which threatened to place them yet again and now more than ever in conflict with all single-line logic. In propounding it Hegel was theologizing in his own way, alone and acknowledging no master, against the philosophers and against the theologians. The meaning of his dialectic method is apparent, much
clearer than Schleiermacher's meaning, for instance, since Hegel in contrast to Schleiermacher presented his method under the sign of a necessary and certain knowledge of truth : the knowledge of the Creator

of heaven and earth, of the Lord over light and darkness, over life and death. Knowledge of God could be the knowledge of irreconcilable
contradictions

and their eternal vanquishing in the mind. Knowledge of

is

God

could

mean

the peace that

this

the passage through the contradictions of reason to higher than all reason, and the emergence into these

Knowledge of God could make and necessary. It is a question of whether the definitions with which Hegel surrounded his method allow us to recognize that which he intended and achieved, as knowledge of God. There can be no denying that knowledge of God was what he meant, and that he was speaking from very close to the heart of the matter. But once again: will modern man tolerate such a theological invasion, and one of such a particularly menacing aspect ? Will he recognize himself in this looking-glass ? Was it really this which he had wanted and intended? Or had not Hegel already understood him in far too deep and far too Christian a way, by demanding of him that he should thus found his philosophy upon theology, and eventually allow his philosophy to be transformed into theology ? This partner, modern cultural awareness, did in fact let Hegel down.
contradictions in comforted despair.

method

possible

It neither

sought to understand

itself

thus in

its

own depth, nor

did

it

HEGEL
want

299

way

to be reconciled in this depth with Christian awareness in such a as Hegel thought it should be. not? Because the demand was

Why

too great,

its

and how

it

conditions too theological? That in fact is how it was felt is usually represented. It could also have been for the other

reason, that the

demand was
little

still

not too much, but too

belief.

theology in

not radical enough, that there was it, for it to seem worthy of

This leads us to the other demand, the demand which Hegel's

philosophy of religion presented to theology. We must first of all establish that with what we have come to know as his Christian opposite to modern consciousness, Hegel had something of decisive and lasting importance to say, or to recall, to theology, and not only to the
theology of his age. what theology is not

is

theology which is jostled by philosophy and just the one which has often forgotten and still

forgets that truth should not concern

it less than philosophy but, on the contrary, much more. It should not be concerned with manifestations of life in general, with some kind of expressions, declarations, avowals, assertions and symbols attempting to express the inexpressible in some

form or another, nor with a kind of verbal music-making, nor with a description of conditions and circumstances, nor even with a view of essentials, however deep, but with truth, with a kind of knowledge which does not have its foundation in some kind of given thing, as
such, but in the link of this given thing with the final origin of everything given. If theology does not speak the truth in this sense, then in

what

sense can
itself

it

assert that

it is

speaking of

God? Can

it

perhaps

from the earnestness with which Hegel equated the knowledge of truth and the knowledge of God? Dare it fall short of Hegel in this respect, if it is not to stand for all the supposed independence of its source of knowledge in the shadow of philosophy, philoabsolve

whose

sophy being regarded as something much more important. A theology basis was merely historical, merely psychological, merely phenomenological, could in fact stand in this questionable shadow. And did not nineteenth-century theology to a large extent stand indeed
in this

shadow when and after it passed by Secondly, theology too and theology reminded by Hegel of the possibility that event; that it might always be recognized

Hegel's doctrine? in particular was

and

is

the truth might be history, and discovered in actuality

less

and not

otherwise. Theology might

and should have known, not

well but better than Hegel, that its knowledge, its knowledge in particular, was only possible in the form of a strict obedience to the self-

movement of

truth,

and

therefore as a knowledge

which was

itself

30O

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

It

moved.

could

let itself

be reminded by Hegel that the source of

knowledge of Reformation theology, at all events, had been the Word, the Word of God, the word of truth. But this also means, the event of

God, the event of truth.

event at which the

An

event that comes and goes, like a passing

thunder-shower (Luther), like the angel at the pool of Bethesda, an

man for whom it is to be an event must be present; an event, which by repetition, and by man's renewal of his presence, must ever become event anew. Should not theology have let itself be reminded, by what Hegel had said to it and beyond what he said to it,
of the biblical concept of revelation, of the
to our knowledge,

God who

presents himself

and can be known, only as the Living God? Did not theology fall short of Hegel in this respect as well, instead of of truth, surpassing him? Did it not, together with his strict concept also lose sight of the concept of real history ? Could this loss be made good by the fact that, in the time which followed, theology was capable of surpassing Hegel by means of an understanding of the historical as such that was in fact more extensive than his? Of what use to theology was all knowledge of reported history, that of the Bible too, and of the Bible in particular, if at the same time it was incapable of recognizing
real history, of recognizing the Living

God ?

Thirdly and
it

finally,

Hegel to allow itself to become involved once again in the discussion on the rational and historical qualities of Christianity. More than that how could it allow itself to be pushed into the problem of the natural world and the world of the spirit?
:

tradictory nature of its possible for theology after

theology was reminded by Hegel of the conown particular knowledge. How on earth was

How was
just as if

it

possible for

it

to enter into the fight against materialism,

it

stood and

fell

with the spirituality materialism was attack-

ing? How was it possible for all its hopes and plans to be directed towards finding a humble refuge beneath the sheltering wings of the so-called science of the spirit ? How was it possible for theology to be
exactly at the same point again around 1900, at which Kant had arrived a hundred years before, at an a priori way of thinking, within

was well housed and secured in producing a method ? Could it not have understood Hegel better than he perhaps understood himself? Could it not have understood, namely, that Hegel with his concept of mind, must wittingly, or unwittingly have been thinking of the Creator of heaven and earth, the Lord over nature and spirit, precisely by virtue of the unity and opposition of dictum and contra-dictum^ in which Hegel had the spirit conceiving itself and being real? Did the theologians, if they knew
which
it

imagined

it

special, religious a priori

HEGEL

3OI

about God, need to be so superstitiously respectful of natural science,

and so eager to present themselves as scientists of the spirit, as they were so typically for the theology of that period in the second half
of the nineteenth century? And if they knew about God ought they to have allowed the other Hegelian synthesis, that of reason and history in Christianity itself, to be wrested from them again? Was it really
impossible to take up and make fruitful the entire Hegelian concept of the synthesis, so soon as it was taken seriously, more seriously perhaps

than Hegel himself took

it,

with the realization that

it

could be a

question only of the incomprehensible synthesis of God? Doubtless, theology could and can learn something from Hegel as
well. It looks as if theology
it

had neglected something here, and certainly has no occasion to assume an attitude of alarm and hostility to any

renaissance of Hegel which might come about. It might then perhaps open its eyes more than the first time to the most highly positive

element in

this philosophy, to
it.

what

significant in

It

might perhaps

is theologically at least indirectly for that very reason be more capable

than the

first

With
fact

this

we come

time of avoiding its undeniable pit-falls and temptations. to the other thing we must say here. It may in

be that the Hegelian demand is unacceptable to theology for good it can only become acceptable and salutary to theology if it is very vigorously translated and transformed. In order to
reasons, or rather that

keep sight of the complete picture we shall once again take as our guide the three landmarks of Hegelian thinking which we have already singled
out: truth, the

moving cognition of truth, and the

dialectical character

of this movement.

The first question which arises is whether the Hegelian concept of truth can do justice to theology. Hegel thinks of truth as the thinking which is conceived as the pinnacle and centre of humanity. But has
humanity
this

centre?

Has

it

any such centre

at all?

Does not

man

always exist at the invisible intersection of his thinking and willing? Did not Kant's doctrine of the primacy of practical reason at least put forward a reminder of this unity in man? Was it not this with which
truly concerned? It

Schleiermacher's teaching of the central significance of feeling was was a reminder Hegel was right in this which

should of course not be allowed, by discrediting thinking, to lead to a vitiation of the notion of truth, but one which must protect the notion
itself

of truth from one-sided theorizing. Is a theory of truth which builds up upon the inner logic of a thought which is divorced from
practice still the theory of man as he really is, the theory of his truth? Can the theory of truth be any other theory but the theory of human

3O2
practice?

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

From the point of view of theology perhaps it really cannot. But then doubt arises about the uninhibited way in which Hegel, at two
decisive turning-points, used to think further, unperturbed

where a theory of practice would be bound to

stop,

and

at points precisely in

doing so prove itself as a theory of truth. Hegel in his paraphrase of the relation of man to God did not call a halt before the concept of sin. He included it in the unity and necessity of mind. He sought it in the finite nature of man as such, and in the freedom of mind. He thought he could see one point whence it could be understood at once as fate and as guilt, and at one and the same time the poison-cup of death and the fountain-head of reconciliation. 1 He thought he could understand sin as a 'point to be passed through in a moment or longer'. 2 He accordingly
understood reconciliation not as an incomprehensibly new beginning, but simply as a continuation of the one eventual course of truth, which
is

to

'The idea of mind is this: The divine nature be the unity of divine and human nature. itself is but this to be the Absolute Mind, that is to say, to be the 53 unity of the divine and human nature. The consciousness of reconciliation 'completes religion as the knowledge of God as mind; for he is mind in the differentiation and return which we have seen in the idea, which implies that the unity of divine and human nature is not only
.

identical with the existence of God himself.

significant in determining

human nature, but equally so in determining divine nature'. 4 If the basis of theology for knowledge should be revein sin,

lation;
is lost

and of revelation should be the revelation of God to man who and the revelation of God's incomprehensible reconciling, then here, where we seem to be permitted to think beyond the mystery of evil and salvation, and where it seems to be permitted and possible to solve in this way this dual mystery we have before us another basis for knowledge, a concept of truth which cannot be acceptable to theology. That leads us to something further. The Hegelian self-movement of
is

truth

subject,

identical with the self-movement of the thinking of the human and in so far as the human subject is to be considered entirely
is

himself while he

thinking,

it is

identical with the self-movement of

this subject altogether.

The Hegelian doctrine

of the Trinity coincides

with the basic principles of Hegelian logic, which is at the same time quite explicitly the basic principle of Hegelian anthropology and the Hegelian teaching of life. *God is this: to distinguish oneself from
oneself, to be object to oneself, but to be completely identical with oneself in this distinction.' 6 Certainly, but Hegel might just as well have
i

Philosophy of Religion, III, 1 10. * Ibid., Ill, 131. Ibid., Ill, 6.

Ibid., Ill, 105.

Ibid., Ill, 38.

is this Hegel did not dispute the and historical nature of revelation, the uniqueness of Christ; rather he emphatically affirmed it. But with Hegel God and man can never confront one another in a relationship which is actual and indissoluble, a word, a new word revelatory in the strict sense, cannot pass between them; it cannot be uttered and cannot be heeded. It is only in so far as 'everything which exists for consciousness is objective to it that there is an objectivity of revelation. Everything must come to us in an outward way'. 1 Revelation therefore, like all knowledge of whatever kind, also passes through objectivity, inasmuch as knowledge also comprises the moment of perception. And this objectivity, and similarly and to the same degree the objectivity of revelation, is

said that knowledge

positive

HEGEL and man is this.

anything but indissoluble. It is distinguished as a stage of revelation upon the level of the mere 'imagination', which it is the task of philosophy, as being the delegated authority of mind, to raise to the form of thought as the form suited to the reality of rnind. This also means, however, 2 that philosophy has to reduce it to its purely logical content, even if, now as before, those who are still immature are still allowed to perceive pure thought in the form of the imagination. Reason, whose ordained
is to perform this operation, and which must set about performing without being able to stop, is just as much divine revelation as is the 3 imagination. When God manifests himself the philosopher of religion has already understood him in the preliminaries of this act, and he already has the lever in his hand which he has only to depress to advance from God's act of revealing to the higher level of God being manifest, in which every given thing, all duality, is annulled, all speaking and listening has lost its object and been transformed again into pure knowing, the knowing of the human subject, as it originally proceeded from him. Hegel's living God he saw God's aliveness well,

task it
it

and saw it better than many theologians

so far as this living
stractly thinking a real at all,

is

actually the living

man. In
ab-

man is only after all thinking man, and this man might be a man who is merely thought, and
it is

not

man

possible that this living

God,

too,

HegePs God,

a merely thinking and merely thought God, before whom real man would stand as before an idol, or as before a nothing. At all events he would stand in boundless loneliness, 'without a God in the world The
is
9
.

self-movement of truth would have to be detached from the self-movement of man and here it is equated with it with the utmost explicitness and rigour of logic to be justly regarded as the self-movement of God.
i

Philosophy of Religion, III, 19.

ibid., I, 67.

ibid., I, 54.

304

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

And the third thing there is to be said is that the identification of God with the dialectical method, even if it did not signify that he was identified with man's act of life, implies a scarcely acceptable limitation, even abolition of God's sovereignty, which makes even more questionable the designation of that which Hegel calls mind, idea, reason, etc., as God. This God, the God of Hegel is at the least his own prisoner.

hends himself

things, he finally and at the highest level compreand too, by virtue of the fact that he does this in the consciousness of man, everything God is and does will be and is understood from the point of view of man, as God's own necessity. Revelation can now no longer be a free act of God; God, rather, must function as

Comprehending

all

we see him function in revelation.

C

It is necessary to him to reveal himmind which is not manifest is not a mind.' 1 'God is utterly manifest.' 2 The finite consciousness, which partakes of revelation, thus
self.

shows

itself as

a motive power in the concept, in the process of

is

God

himself. Creation

Church is Church; and it is this alone which first makes it possible for him to be mind and God. If he were not the mind of the Church he would not be God. And he is God only in so far as he is the mind of the Church. I am necessary to God. That is the basis of Hegel's confidence in God, and the reason why this confidence can immediately and without further ado be understood as self-confidence as well, and why it did thus understand itself. Hegel, in making the dialectical method of logic the
essential nature of

necessary, and reconciliation too is necessary. The necessary to God himself, for in it he can be the mind of the

God, made impossible the knowledge of the actual

dialectic of grace, which has its foundation in the freedom of God. Upon the basis of this dialectic the attempt to speak of a necessity to

which God himself is supposed to be subject would be radically impossible. But at all events the dialectic in which we ourselves exist, a method which we are ourselves at all times capable of using this is
this

not the actual dialectic of grace. Hegel did not open the gate-way of knowledge to theology, and it seems that it remained closed to his
perception too. That cant of the doubts about
is

own

probably the weightiest and most

signifi-

him which might be

raised from the theo-

logical point of view. The two points previously mentioned, the singletrack nature of his concept of truth and the confusion of human with

divine self-movement also have their origin in this: in the failure to recognize that God is free one might perhaps say in all succinctness:

in the failure to recognize double predestination. They have their origin in the fact that Hegel's dialectic cannot, by theology at all
i

Philosophy of Religion, III, 35.

Ibid., Ill, 6.

HEGEL 2O5 be events, acknowledged as a dialectic which could be accepted in all

seriousness.

Theology was just as incapable of accepting Hegel's philosophy as was modern cultural awareness. Of course it cannot be said that it

him at that time because it knew better and because it clearly recognized the things which were unacceptable to it in his teaching. It would only have been able to do that if it had previously allowed
rejected
itself to

rejected

be taught by him much more thoroughly. Ultimately theology him merely for the same reasons which also made him unacceptable to modern cultural awareness. Who knows whether it was not in fact the genuinely theological element in Hegel which made it shrink back? Conversely, openly or secretly, it adopted at any rate enough of the very things that were questionable about him, without being able to overcome their effects by means of his genuine insights. Theology had, and still has, no occasion to throw stones at Hegel, as if it had not trodden the same path as he, only not in so firm or so logical a manner as he did. When we come to consider Schleiermacher we shall have to ask very seriously whether his secret is a different one from that of Hegel, only that with Hegel it might be a secret which was to a great extent more respectable and at all events more instructive than that of Schleiermacher. And we shall also find traces of
strong

Hegel elsewhere and not only among Hegelians, but in places where people considered themselves to be far above Hegelianism. All too much had he, the misunderstood one, taught those things which his whole century, and the theologians of his century as well had at heart. Would modern man and the modern theologian have understood him better and accorded him a better reception, if there had not been these known theological objections to be raised against him, if he had at once gone one step further all along the line, and if he had at once been a little more in earnest from the theological point of view ? Many and great things would then have assumed a different aspect in the intellectual life of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and perhaps in their political and economic life too. But in that case Hegel would not have been Hegel, and we must therefore be content to understand him as the man he was: as a great problem and a great disappointment, but perhaps also a great promise.

VIII

SCHLEIERMAGHER
elder Gass, impressed by a reading of Schleiermacher's Doctrine 1 of Faith once wrote to its author saying: 'There is no one who can make me waver in my belief that your dogmatics herald a new era, not only in this one discipline, but in the whole study of theology in
2 general' And A. Neander went even further, saying to his students on the day after Schleiermacher's death: Trom him a new period in the

THE

Church will one day take its origin. These prophecies have been fulfilled. The first place in a history of the theology of the most recent times belongs and will always belong to Schleiermacher, and he has no rival. It has often been pointed out that Schleiermacher did not found any school. This assertion can be robbed of some of its force by mention of the names of his successors in Berlin, August Twesten, Karl Immanuel Nitzsch of Bremen, and Alexander Schweizer of Zurich. But they are correct in so far as Schleiermacher's significance lies beyond these beginnings of a school in his name. What he said of Frederick the Great in his Academy address entitled 'What goes to make a great man' applies also to himself: He did not found a school, but an era.' 3 The man who
history of the
c

published an essay in 1907 called Schleiermacher der Kirchenvater des ig. Jahrhunderts (Schleiermacher, the Church-father of the Nineteenth
Century), was speaking the historical truth. The nineteenth century brought with it many deviations from Schleiermacher, and many
protests against

him; often his ideas were distorted to the point of unrecognizability, and he was often overlooked and forgotten. But in

the theological field it was nevertheless his century. After describing all sorts of curves, both and it none the less always returned great small, to him. His influence did not decrease, it increased as time went on, and his views established themselves more and more. He was studied,
1
dargestellt

the Evangelical Church). References in this chapter to the Doctrine of Faith (Glaubenslehre) are to this work, known in England as The Christian Faith.
2
3

Der christliche Glaube, nach den Grundsdtzen der Evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhang (The Christian Faith, systematically set forth according to the principles of

Briejwechsel (Correspondence), ed. W. Gass, Berlin 1852, p. 195. Philosophised Werke (Philosophical Works), Berlin 1835, III, 83.

SGHLEIERMAGHER
honoured and made
fruitful

307

in 1910 than in 1830, when people outside the closest circle of his acquaintances had no hesitation in naming him in the same breath with theologians like Daub,

much more

Marheineke, Bretschneider and others

like

them. Even

if at this time,

when he was producing

his greatest

work, he doubtless stood in the

shadow of Hegel (when the young D. F. Strauss, just arrived in Berlin on the journey customary for Tubingen seminarists, heard in Schleiermacher's study of Hegel's sudden death he wounded him with the unreflecting painful words: 'But it was on his account that I came
here') his star rose all the brighter after the fairly rapid passing of the

age of Hegelianism. From that time on, after the stimulation of Hegel had, partly rightly and partly wrongly, been withdrawn, only Schleiermacher could be the saviour. The great exception, the original school
of Ritschl, was also but a proof of this fact. And it is truly a sign of the extraordinary extent of his influence that E. Brunner, in 1924, was the
first

man

writing against Schleiermacher whose premises were really

free of him!). Until

him (even if they were perhaps only relatively then every attack had shown such a close similarity of content with his own writings that an effective antithesis had been impossible. Nobody can say today whether we have really overcome his influence, or whether we are still at heart children of his age, for all
different, really free of

the protest against him, which now, admittedly, has increased in volume and is carried out according to basic principles. If we ask ourselves how it was that Schleiermacher could become so

much our and perhaps really still our man of destiny, we are once again faced by the mystery of the great man, which possibly consists in the indissoluble unity of his timeless individual power on the one hand, and on the other of the temporal, historical conditions into which he

We have no occasion to adopt the style of that man Liilmann, who in his work on Schleiermacher the church-father of the nineteenth century' referred to Schleiermacher as a 'gigantic personwas placed.

and then, as if this were not enough, as a 'priest and prophet in one person and a king in the realm of the mind' (p. 12). But it is
ality',

impossible to consider Schleiermacher thoroughly without being very

strongly impressed. Indeed one is more strongly impressed every time one does consider him by the wealth and magnitude of the tasks he
set himself,

by the moral and intellectual equipment with which he approached them, by the manly steadfastness with which he trod the path he had once embarked upon right to the end as he had entered upon it, unheedful of the favour or disfavour of each passing decade and by the artistry which he displayed, playfully, and endowing it by this very

308

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

playfulness with the ultimate gravity of all true art an artistry he showed in all he did, almost down to his last Sunday sermon. have

We

to

do with a hero, the

theology. Anyone who figure radiated and still does

but seldom bestowed upon has never noticed anything of the splendour this
like of
is

which

I am almost tempted to say, who has honourably pass on to other and possibly better ways, but let him never raise so much as a finger against Schleiermacher. Anyone who has never loved here, and is not in a position to love again and again may not hate here either. H. Scholz wrote with

never succumbed to

it

may

perfect truth of the Doctrine of Faith: 'Schleiermacher did not succeed in everything; but his achievement as a whole is so great, that the

would be a corresponding counter-achievement, not a and indeed the man who could not only criticize Schleiermacher but measure himself against him, have not yet appeared. Let it be said in warning that with every step which exceeds careful listening and the careful
only threat to
it
1 cavilling criticism of detail.' This counter-achievement,

asking of questions one may, not inevitably but very easily, make oneself look ridiculous. That is the first thing there is to be said about the secret of Schleiermacher's peculiar position: the drawing of attention to Schleiermacher himself, who indeed won for theology a little more honour in the circle of the classic writers than the good Herder

had done before him.

The
merits

other thing
is

we have

to

to

remember

his time,

become acquainted in the first

do in trying to assess Schleiermacher's with some outlines of which we have part of this book. We may bear in mind

Lessing's advances in the direction of the concepts 'history' and 'experience', or the straits into which theology had been driven by

Kant's philosophy of religion, or the concern which Herder, stammering rather than saying anything of real importance, produced in opposition to Kant. We may remember the discoveries in the mysterious wealth of the centre, on the basis of which Novalis, rather suddenly as we saw, attempted to proclaim Christianity with a new voice, together with much mathematics and love and poetry, or the greatness and downfall of Hegel's philosophy. Positively or negatively we can

draw

lines

from everywhere leading to Schleiermacher; from every

point we can come to understand that for his century he was not one among many others, with his theology and philosophy of religion, but
that
it

time. I

was possible for him to have the significance of the fulness of do not say it was inevitable that he should have this significance,

1 Christenttm und Wissenschaft in Schleiermachers Glaubenslehre (Christianity and Learning in Schleiermacher's Doctrine of Faith), 1911, p. 201.

SCHLEIERMACHER

309

but possible. Whether the century understood itself rightly in thinking it heard the liberating word from Schleierrnacher, whether it might not have been possible to gain further insights of an entirely different kind from all the points which Schleiermacher had touched upon that is a different question. With all the figures we have so far considered

we have tried not only to look from them to Schleiermacher, but wherever possible to look from them to points beyond Schleiermacher, to look out for the possible answers to the questions raised there which Schleiermacher just did not provide. But one thing is certain, that this century could and did hear from Schleiermacher a
liberating word, in some way an answering word. If it is not in itself e certain that the man who has done justice to the best men of his age

has lived for

all

time

it is

beyond doubt that Schleiermacher, in the

theological sphere, really did do justice to the best men of his age. And for that reason he did really live, for that age at all events, and still
lives,

in so far as

we might
is

He will in fact live for

of the Church. That
as regards content,
life

perhaps still find ourselves within this age. every age, if we construe his age, too, as an age the other thing that must be said here.

We shall now attempt to look at some of the most important motifs,

which played their part throughout while Schleierwork came into being, and which must be borne in mind throughout the appraisal of it. We shall attempt both to see them and to see them in relation to each other.
macher's
I. The factor which is decisive in making a theology theology does not belong to the motifs whose presence can be asserted or denied in anyone's work. Even of Luther or Calvin it cannot simply be said that they represented and proclaimed the Christian faith, the Gospel. The

Article

Gospel in the full sense of the word, according to the Confessio Augustana, V, is represented and proclaimed ubi et quando visum est Deo, not at the point where, applying this or that yardstick, we feel we can
affirm the Christian quality of a theology or philosophy however superficially or thoroughly we are observing. The Christian quality of a theology does not belong to the motifs of a theology which can be

vouched for, just because it is always the motif, with Calvin and Luther too, which is to be questioned. It is not on the same plane with the motifs of a theology that can truly be vouched for. I say all this in opposition to Brunner. He plays off 'the Christian faith as a solid
9

quantity against the other effective motifs in Schleiermacher's work in a way which, carried to its logical conclusion, would mean that the Christian quality would inevitably have to be denied to the theology

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

of Luther and Calvin as well.
decisive one, one

Upon this point, which is admittedly a can only speak of indications. This also applies to Schleiermacher with whom we are possibly more tempted to ask questions than with Luther and Calvin, and one must then, in order to be fair, not only treat the positive indications as seriously as the negative ones, but even more seriously, provided one wishes to treat with Schleiermacher also within the sphere of the Church and not elsewhere. However weighty the questions we wish to put we must reckon without reserve with the fact that Schleiermacher was a Christian theologian at all events as well. We must remain true to the indications which support this fact. I do not mean to say that we should consider
that these indications go to prove it. Led by these indications we should, however, believe it of him, just as we are led by indications

which are perhaps

stronger, to believe it of Luther and Calvin. I should like to point out four things which should be considered here:
(a) Schleiermacher, who proved by distinguished achievements in the field of philosophy, and above all of philology, that he had a mind which offered him other great possibilities, chose theology in his youth
life's profession. He allowed himself to be led still deeper into it, into Enlightenment theology at first, as a result of the denouement of his relationship to his father and the Moravian brethren. He did not

as his

allow himself to be led out of it again either by all the intensive investigationhe then began of the intellecual life of the time, which was indeed unfavourable to theology, or by an intensive study of the history of
philosophy, of Plato especially. And we cannot overlook the fact that he felt himself responsible for the interest of the Christian Church in this very field of learning, in answering the question of truth which was
directed also at Christian preaching. must remember that he dedicated to this interest what was after all a considerable part, and

We

and time he had

this interest.

quantitatively at all events the greatest part, of the strength and work it in his power to dedicate. must not overlook

We

these things even if

we

feel that

he was not the best

man

to protect

(b) We cannot be mindful enough of the fact that Schleiermacher was not one of those theologians who are in the habit, under some pretext or other, of dissociating themselves from the most difficult and decisive theological situation, that in which the theologian, without security of any kind, must prove himself solely as a theologian. I refer

man in the pulpit. Schleiermacher did not only not avoid this most exposed position, but actually sought it, throughout
to the situation of the

SCHLEIERMACHER 311 his life, as the place for his own office'. 1 He sought it 'with enthusiasm*,
c

one of his friends avowed in 1804, almost with astonishment. 2 More than one of the pupils of his who understood him best have testified,
as

and Dilthey, his biographer, has added his historical testimony to their contemporary one, that it was precisely in his sermons that Schleiermacher's characteristic desires and achievements were made evident at any rate in their liveliest and most impressive form. To be true, it
sounds terrible to us to hear Schleiermacher's pupil Sydow praise his

sermons because they presented the outloook of a highly-gifted and thoroughly educated personality in the moments of its most noble 3 expression of life'. But we must not be prevented by that and the even

more enraptured

effusions of the dreadful Bettina

von Arnim from

seeing what there is to see here. Whatever may be said of and against the content of these famous sermons, one thing is certain. It is that in

accordance with the sound Reformed tradition from which he sprang, Schleiermacher saw the Kirchen-regiment (Church polity), for which theology provides the premise, as consisting essentially in the office of
the preacher, and that he did not only declare himself consistently for this belief theoretically, but equalling Luther and Calvin in uninterrupted practice

without, be it said, achieving extraordinary Those who know what preaching and academic work involve should be truly impressed by the fact that together with all the

outward

success.

perform

other things that claimed his attention, Schleiermacher managed to this office year in and year out, almost every Sunday. Nobody

who does not feel impelled to do it, which at any rate is remarkable. All the questionable things we learn from the Addresses on Religion and The Doctrine of Faith about Schleiermacher's fundamental
does that
idea of this office: namely that the decisive factor is a 'self-imparting of the preacher cannot alter the fact that Schleiermacher performed this office with a noteworthy loyalty, whether or not his idea of it was
correct.
9

did not make things (c) In academic theology, too, Schleiermacher easy for himself. In the history of Protestant theology the nineteenth century brought with it the none too dignified sight of a general flight, of those heads that were wisest, into the study of history. From the safe, distant regions of the history of religion, the Church, dogma and the

mind

a gentle exercise, if one has the necesat all sary equipment. Schleiermacher set a different example in this,
the practice of theology
is
1 Schleiermacher 93

en (Schleiermacher's Life in Letters), Berlin, 1859-63, Leben in Brief

8

II, 16.

Letters, III,

376.

Predigten (Sermons),

VII, p.

viii,

3*2
events.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

What
decides whether theology

is possible as a science is not whether theologians read sources, observe historical facts as such, and uncover the nature of historical relationships, but whether they can

think dogmatically. Schleiermacher attempted to show that theology was possible as a science by writing his dogmatics it was really his

only large work, apart from his lectures. Questionably enough, he called it a Doctrine of Faith and conceived of it as a historical discipline. At bottom it is perhaps more apologetics than what, by pointing to its better part, could be understood as comprising a doctrine of faith. It
raises

a most urgent question whether with these very dogmatics theology was not consigned to a branch of the general science of the mind, so that the historicizing of theology was most thoroughly prepared for. But all this does not alter the fact that Schleiermacher at
least attacked the

problem of theology at the point where it must be be attacked at all with a basic consideration on what the Church may, can and should teach in its prevailing present, in connexion with the biblical norm upon the one side and with the
attacked
if it is to
:

Church's past upon the other. must compare Schleiermacher's attitude with the thorough distraction with which Troeltsch was a

We

must set the doctrine of faith of theologian a hundred years later. the one beside that of the other, in order to discover which of them had
his

We

work completely

at heart.

at heart, and which of them had it definitely less Then we can grant Schleiermacher what even the most

upon the theological content of his work must grant: that he was deeply in earnest, not only concerning theology in general, but in the trouble he took to safeguard the specifically theological quality of theology. (d) One thing at all events must be said of the content of Schleiernegative judgment

macher's theology: he did at least see the danger of a theology which

its essentially apologetic in its approach iihpending metamorphosis into a philosophy; and if there was one thing he fought almost desperately against as an academic theologian, it was this danger. He saw

is

what the offence was wherewith he had to present philosophy, or at least the philosophy of his own time, if he wanted to be a theologian, and he did in fact dare to offend it in this It is the of
also

way.

problem

Christology which is here at stake. It can be asked whether what he wanted to say about the relation of God and man could possibly be said also in the form of Christology. And it can, moreover, be asked

whether Christology can possibly serve as the form for what Schleiermacher wanted to say. The Christology is the great disturbing element in Schleiermacher's doctrine of faith, not a very effective disturbance,

SCHLEIERMACHER

313

perhaps, but a disturbance all the same. What he wanted to say might perhaps have been said better, more lucidly and more concisely, if he

had been able to say it in the form of a circle with one centre, instead of as an ellipse with two foci. But Schleiermacher could not avoid this
element of disturbance.

He

could not present his views in any other

did. Jesus of Nazareth
fits

way; he had to present them as he

desperately

badly into this theology of the historical 'composite life* of humanity, a 'composite life' which is really after all fundamentally self-sufficient; in Schleiermacher's sermons, too, Jesus only plays the striking r6le he does because, one is tempted to think, he is simply there. He obviously
gives Schleiermacher, the professor and preacher, a great deal of trouble! But nevertheless he is in fact there. And the professor and preacher goes to this trouble, swims ceaselessly against his own current,
artifices

and wishes under all circumstances, and be it at the cost of certain and sophistries, to be a Ghristocentric theologian. Whether he
is,

really

who can say? Perhaps

became
all

speculation he

Perhaps after all Perhaps after all he transformed

in fleeing from one kind of philosophic the more deeply embroiled in another. he avoided the offence of a real Ghristology.
pistis into gnosis.

There

is

much

to

support this view. Schleiermacher, as we know, on his death-bed celebrated Holy Communion with his family: with water instead of wine, which the doctor had forbidden him to drink, and recalling that
Christ, in blessing wine, had also blessed water. It can be asked whether the water in the wine was blessed in order that in the last resort it could

when

take the place of wine, or whether it all ceases to be the Lord's Supper the one is exchanged for the other in this way. But there can be

no doubt of the fact that Schleiermacher wanted to celebrate the Holy Communion. He wanted in his Christology, whose content might perhaps be compared with the water, to proclaim Christ. And the fervour with which he did it, as a dogmatician and preacher, is also beyond all doubt in the minds of all who know him. If anyone was most deeply in earnest in this matter then it was Schleiermacher. That cannot of course be regarded as a last word upon the subject; the theological question of truth must remain open here as everywhere, even in the face of the greatest personal sincerity. But we must bear in mind the phenomenon of this personal sincerity, which cannot be overlooked, just as we must bear in mind the other indications. Ultimately we can only believe that Schleiermacher, too, was a Christian theologian; that, I repeat, is something he has in common with Luther and Calvin and (lest it be forgotten!), upon the lower
plane, with
all

of us.

3I4
II.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

The

quality of being a Christian is the motif in Schleiermacher's for which there are indeed indications that it is theology present, but which we cannot vouch for and the presence of which, therefore, with him as with all other theologians, we can and must take

ultimately

upon

trust.

But the second motif which we shall now discuss is one that can without doubt be vouched for. At the same time as he sought to be a Christian theologian Schleiermacher also felt responsible I should like to understand and weigh this as earnestly as possible for the
intellectual

man was born at the

we must not seek to

and moral foundations of the cultural world into which a end of the eighteenth century. He wanted in all

modern man as well as a Christian theologian decide whether he was striving for the former aim with the same or perhaps with even greater earnestness than that with which he sought to be a Christian theologian, at any rate he did so with similar earnestness. The fact that in his famous first work he addressed himself to the educated among the is despisers of
circumstances to be a
religion

something which would have been characteristic of his own position, even if he had not at once, in the first lines of the book, emphasized that 'one of those who have raised themselves above the common level

and are steeped in the wisdom of the century' here demanded their With him his participation in the cultural awareness of his time, and indeed his participation in its deepest possible content, in its strictest possible form and liveliest expression, was a deeply serious concern which was not suspended for an instant. But it was not only his passive participation as an educated person, but also his
attention.

himself educated, as one who helped sustain this cultural awareness which is here in question. He affirmed its presence in feeling that he had received a call to struggle, together with his best contemporaries, for an ever-increasing depth in its content, for an ever-greater strictness of its form, for an ever-greater liveliness of its
expression. He took part in the philosophy, science, politics, social life and art of his time as if they were his own concern, as the man who was responsible in all these fields, the man who was called to achieve

tion as one

who

participa-

and
this

to lead in the general achievement.

man, the

man moved by
a theologian
so,

this concern.

He wants to be and is entirely And he wants to be and is

this

man

also as

and perhaps even more

and indeed in the pulpit just as much, than in the professorial chair. It was

only in his time, the time which fulfilled and overcame, overcame and fulfilled the Enlightenment, that this personal union became possible: beyond Rousseau's outbreaks, beyond
Lessing's struggles.

SGHLEIERMAGHER
beyond Kant's
fulfilled

315
it

critique, in the

time which found

Hegel's synthetic philosophy as its that time of his, in realizing the possibility of the theologian's being at the same time entirely a modern man, with a good, and not

possible to take sign. Schleiermacher so wonderfully

with a divided conscience. How, as a modern man, he was at once a theologian with a good conscience, is something that will be discussed later, under Point 3. For the time being we shall continue to discuss the first thing: the fact that Schleiermacher was a theologian did not hinder him in the

from also wanting, seeking and effecting, all the things that, wisely understood, were best in what the non-theological world of his time was wanting, seeking and effecting. He did not do this retrospectslightest
ively, trotting

behind the times, as theologians so often do, but in advance of the time, as a born man of the age, and, further, as 'one dedicated to the achievement of a better future'. To say that it did not
6

him in the slightest' is to put it much too mildly. Precisely because he was a theologian, and precisely upon the basis of his interpretation of Christianity he felt himself compelled to be a modern man with all his heart, with all his feelings, and with all his strength. He did not achieve any synthesis; he lived from a unity which had been
hinder

completed for him, he loved this modern man in himself and in the others with all the strength of a love which is just as sincere as it is a
matter of course. And thus we find him at the turn of the century among the Romantics, the Berlin hospital chaplain, who yet found it possible also to come and go in the intellectually advanced circles of the capital
without acquiring that rather unfortunate flavour of the clever eighteenth-century abbe as one who, honestly and as a matter of course,

belonged there.

much

And thus we find him at Halle, devoting at least as attention to his translation of Plato and researches into this

philosopher, as to his studies of St Paul and the beginnings of his dogmatics, inspired to the writing of his Weihnachtsfeier (Celebration of

things.

Christmas), as he himself attests, by having heard a flute concerto, of all And so we find him at the height of his career, in the years
1809-34, in Berlin once again, at least as

much at home in the Academy

of the Sciences as in his pulpit in the Church of the Holy Trinity. Schleiermacher, so to speak, had no distance to go from the one concern to the other, from the one activity to the other. By birth and upits innermost sanctuary his theology is cultural theology: in religion itself which is the true object of his theology, it is the exaltation of life in the most comprehensive sense, the exaltation, unfolding,

bringing in

transfiguration, ennobling of the individual

and

social

human

life

3*6

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

which is atstake. Civilization as the triumph of the spirit over nature is the most peculiar work of Christianity, just as the quality of being a Christian is for its own part the crown of a thoroughly civilized consciousness.

utterly

The kingdom of God, according to Schleiermacher, is and unequivocally identical with the advance of civilization. The way in which Schleiermacher himself realized in his own person this idea of religion and Christianity, as researcher, teacher, author and preacher, and what he was as an intellectually and morally thoroughly educated person, what an opus ingens the Doctrine of Faith was, for instance, which was in its way of intellectual achievement possibly completely unique: all these things are in fact so far above the average that to anyone who does not know them one can only say that he should go and learn here what civilization might be. It is very necessary for theologians that they should have ever before them a clear and lively notion of it, in order to make sure that they do not
talk nonsense
if,

unlike Schleiermacher, they seek to find the secret of

all culture.

Christianity at

some point beyond

But what interests us here is the principle Schleiermacher proclaimed along these lines to others, to the Church, and to society. Above all, it is clear that as a theologian Schleiermacher is relentlessly in earnest down to the last line, in the material sense, too, about thinking and speaking in terms of the premises achieved by the philosophy and history and natural science of his day, and on no account in any others. In the case of the conflict between the Christian and the modern quality of his thoughts this can lead to concealments and ambiguities in his writings. There is in fact no lack of them in his Doctrine of Faith and in his sermons. But we can be assured that within this certain element of obscurity whatever becomes of the Christian quality the feeling of responsibility for modernity was at all events consistently
maintained, either openly or secretly. Schleiermacher did not permit himself any real concessions from this sense of responsibility to any
other claim. This participation of his in

modern

cultural awareness

was not only an actual one and not only a defensive one. He did not only advocate modern civilization, but proclaimed and demanded it. In order to become acquainted with Schleiermacher we must not neglect to take as our guide the Philosophical Ethics and the Christian Morality, and above all the sermons as well as the well-known Address and the Doctrine of Faith. We must do this if only because in these better-known works it is not nearly so clear as in the former writings that Schleiermacher as a theologian wanted something quite definite from his hearers and readers, something in relation to which everything

SGHLEIERMAGHER
else

317

he propounded was only in the nature of a means to an end, as the lever is to the load to be moved. What did he want ? He wanted to draw men into the movement of education, the exaltation of life, which at bottom is the religious, the Christian movement. I venture to assert that Schleiermacher's entire
philosophy of religion, and therefore his entire teaching of the nature of religion and Christianity, the things we first think of when his name
is

mentioned, was something secondary, auxiliary to the consolidation of this true concern of his, the ethical one. The fact that, in academic

theory, he ranked theology below ethics, is but an expression of this state of affairs. With Schleiermacher it is not a matter of doctrine, nor

of his particular doctrine, or a matter of his particular doctrine only for the sake of the end to be achieved; with him it is a matter of life.

The life he means

playing
itself

is not, as a superficial observer might suppose, a life out in the inwardness of the soul, a life which takes pleasure in itself, and is essentially passive, a mystical introspection. This might well be the impression given by the famous introduction

to the Doctrine of Faith, to the Doctrine of Faith

and perhaps also by the Addresses on Religion. But it must not be forgotten that in the Addresses and in the introduction
it is

a question of Schleiermacher's apologetic

representation of religion, and not actually of his objective one. And we must not overlook the remarkable Paragraph 9 in the introduction
to the Doctrine of Faith where Christianity is suddenly described contrary to all the expectations the reader acquires from the previous paragraphs as a theological religion, one, that is, which is deter-

mined

in the direction of activity, in

which the consciousness of God

is

entirely related to the sum-total of the states of activity in the idea of a

kingdom of God. After the apologetic beginning of the introduction

such a description of Christianity as the highest religion should have been impossible: the feeling of complete dependence, which had been the definition of religion in this beginning, could only have found its
fulfilment in the aesthetic, i.e. passive type of religion. It is by deviating in this way that Schleiermacher returns to the understanding of Christ-

ianity

he presented when he was concerned with

it

objectively,

and not

apologetically. must therefore take the greatest exception to Brunner for completely failing, as the very title of his book Die Mystik und das Wort (Mysticism and the Word) shows, to look in the place where Schleier-

We

macher was
influence.

truly at home, the place whence he exercised his decisive For just as Schleiermacher did not seek to identify Christianity with mysticism (although this was in fact what he did achieve as

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

an
apologist) but with the movement of civilization, so the theology of the nineteenth century which took over from him is least characterized by its affinity to mysticism, and most definitely by its unqualified

and direct affirmation of modern cultural consciousness. Schleiermacher's entire intellectual attitude, as we have it in his writings, and
as it must personally have influenced his contemporaries, is, after all, so completely unlike that of a mystic. This can best be observed in Schleiermacher's doctrine of prayer, which no pious person with a true

bent for mysticism could accept. For the moment of withdrawal into self, the gathering of internal forces, the severing of connexion with the outside world, the achievement of a pure stillness, which he describes

one aspect in the process of prayer, and describes, be it said, with great power, is only the beginning of transition to a quite different activity. In seeking and finding God in prayer man reaches, as it were, the watershed between receptivity and self-activity. In reaching it he has already passed beyond it, and he also once again finds himself, now more than ever, upon the ground of his own free, creative activity. In prayer there takes place, as it were, a crystallization of religious life into a particular act of life, which is forthwith dispersed and dissolved again, at the climax of this process, in the communion with God, in which the general act of life can and should take place, and will take
as the

place again after this concentration. It is only for the sake of this second state that Schleiermacher describes the first one. He prays because he

wants to work; he is a mystic because without mysticism there could not be any civilization. Thus, Schleiermacher does not seek this particular act of life as such,

but its dispersal and dissolution for the benefit

of the general act of life taking place in the communion with God. The prayer of this moment is the anticipation of the enhanced will for civilization of the next. It
is

the homo

religiosus

himself who

sense involved in the process of education.

He must

is in the deepest pass through the

but he must really only pass through it, and quickly and without delay just at the point where the true mystic likes to stop and likes best of all to stop finally, in the pure conmystical sanctuary

and oneness of God and the soul; it is here that Schleiermacher unmistakably urges us speedily onwards, from the act of introversion to the act of forming, from contemplation to construction. If Schleiermacher considers the first step to be important, then he undeniably sees the second as being even more important and the first
frontation
is

important only for the sake of the second. It is here, in this tendency towards an ethical interpretation, that I am moreover tempted to see
the true cause of the undogmatic character, using the

word

in

its

usual

SGHLEIERMAGHER
sense,

319
anti-

and indeed the anti-dogmatic,

anti-intellectualizing,

doctrinal character of Schleiermacher's theology. What strikes us in a study of Schleiermacher's sermons is the fact that whenever he engages

in true polemics these are always directed against the same three things: against all over-assessment of the importance of religious doctrine and of the religious word altogether, against every kind of
particular religious excitement, and against the tendency associated with this, to religious sectarianism of individuals or whole groups. This must not only and not ultimately be understood as arising out of Schleiermacher's concept of religion, which does, it is true, coincide with that of mystical theology, but definitely as the result of the
teleological, activistic intention of his theology, which affirms civilization. Schleiermacher's favourite interpretation of biblical miracle was
it was the prophecy of the astonishing victory of spirit over the natural world, which was being fulfilled more and more in human history, and especially in the present, and was thus, far from being

that

important in itself or in need of repetition, the incitement for us to devote our energies to the achievement of this victory.

In

this

connexion Schleiermacher

first

and above

all

celebrated the

state as

the guardian of order and of peace. Although throughout his life he supported the idea that the Church should be independent of the state this did not mean at all that he thought that the Church
particularly, as the free community of those moved by religious feeling, should not affirm, tackle and further in the most ideal sense those
desires

which had already found

their powerful

embodiment in the

modern state. Schleiermacher no less than Hegel admired and loved the modern Prussianism, and cherished and proclaimed the myth of Sans Souci. But his whole frame of mind in his relation to the state, was incomparably more liberal than Hegel's, and the idea of progress he proclaimed, in this as in everything, was much more in the nature of an ethical demand than it was with Hegel, although with Schleiermacher too it was at the same time borne up by the glorification of a
victorious historical destiny. Together with Fichte, Arndt, Scharnhorst and others Schleiermacher, in the years 1806-13, as is well known,

became through his sermons in a way quite different from that of Goethe and Hegel one of the educators of the generation which sustained the wars of freedom, and some of the unpleasantness this generation had to face in the time of the Students' Association movement affected him also.

The second

ethical point that Schleiermacher constantly stressed in

his sermons concerned the civil profession in the exercise of

which the

32O
Christian
his
is

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

called to prove himself as such.

own

fashion,

Of this motif it

Here Schleiermacher, after was taking up a motif of the Lutheran Reformation. has often been said quite wrongly that it was first given
Ritschl.

And it did not matter to Testament texts into their opposites when he wanted to state this motif once more. Schleiermacher's third sphere of interest embraces the problems of marriage and family life, to which, even as early as in his Romantic period, he devoted a penetrating attention, and to which in 1818 he dedicated his famous Household Sermons, which we may, I think, be justified in taking as a perfect example of what Schleiermacher meant
renewed prominence by Albrecht
Schleiermacher to turn the clearest

New

by the

exalting, ennobling and transfiguring of human life. Fourthly, there is the social problem, mentioned here with special emphasis because there is scarcely any mention of it in the literature on

Schleiermacher. This must have been an object of his strong concern, expecially in his last years, in connexion with the events of the July
revolution.

Within the frame of an outlook which today would probably be described as that of Social Liberalism he appealed very definitely and courageously to the sense of responsibility of the upper classes towards those placed at a material disadvantage by the advance

of civilization.
insurance,

He

and in

social services (as

expressed his belief in economic equality, in social a right, and not as a benefit!). He

demanded a shortening of the hours of work for the lower classes. He gave numerous warnings of the possible dangerous consequences of
a further uncorrected social development. These are things which the great revivalist preachers of his time did not say, and did not even see. We need not mention the complacency with which the Church in general confronted the development which

had its origin in these things Whether his social ideas would have been
!

adequate for the then incipient great conflict between the giants Capital and Labour is another question. But it is in order for us to ask whether one or two things might not perhaps have turned out differently if the educated German public, and if, for example, Schleierrnacher's candidate for confirmation, Otto von Bismarck, had really heard and taken to
heart what Schleiermacher evidently wished to say upon this subject. So much, then, about Schleiermacher's positive concerns, the things that can definitely be verified, and which at all events we must see to

understand his theology.III. Apologetics is

an attempt

to

show by means of thought and

speech that the determining principles of philosophy and of historical

SGHLEIERMAGHER
and natural research
at

33!

in time certainly do not preclude, even if they do not directly require, the tenets of theology, which are founded upon revelation and upon faith respectively. bold

some given point

apologetics proves to a particular generation the intellectual necessity of the theological principles taken from the Bible or from church dogma

more cautious apologetics proves at least their intellecAbout the extent and content of these principles of course vary among the apologists themselves, and opinions may within the same period of time. We found that Schleiermacher wanted to be a Christian theologian, and we found that he wanted, come what may, to be a thinking man
or from both; a
tual possibility.

of his time. These two facts inevitably led to his third concern for apologetics. He formulated the apologetic question, in a famous passage
in his open letter to Liicke, 1 as follows: 'Shall the knot of history be thus loosed Christianity with barbarism and learning with unbelief?' It is clear that his only answer to this question can be, No. His interest
:

in both Christianity and learning was so great that he even considered the appeal to the origins of the Protestant Church suitable material to

help underline this No, and thus continues, several pages later lf the Reformation, from whose first beginnings our Church took its life, has not the aim of establishing an eternal covenant between the living faith
:

and scientific research, which is free to explore upon all sides and works for itself independently, so that faith does not hinder research, and
research does not preclude faith: if it has not this aim then it is not adequate for the needs of our age and we require another Reformation,

no matter how, and as a result of what struggles it may develop. I am, however, firmly convinced that the basis for this covenant was already laid in those days, and that all that is needed is to bring about a more definite awareness on our part of that task in order to be able to
achieve
it.'

The

intention of achieving this task,

is

and thus

fulfilling

the contract

in question,

certainly the

first

clear motif

meeting the reader

who

traditionally begins with the Addresses on Religion, and perhaps also attempts to work his way into the Doctrine of Faith by way of studying
its

great introduction. I think I have shown that this intention must not be understood as a primary motif; and even less primary are the objective views about the understanding of Christianity which we shall
to speak of later, which have of necessity emerged from this secondary theological intention of Schleiermacher's. But let us not be

come

mistaken: anyone convinced, as Schleiermacher was, that he must, as a

1

Ed. Mulert, 1908, p. 37.

Mul., 40.

322

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Christian theologian, affirm and proclaim the insights and ethos of modern man, must similarly have been convinced that he could and should, as a modern man, be a Christian theologian. It was doubtless only in his maturity, in the two works on ethics and in the sermons, particularly those of his old age, that what he primarily and truly

wanted achieved clear predominance.

It is

none the less understandable,

however, that not only in the theological work of his youth, in which he first had to prepare the way for what he really wanted, but also in the

most

significant part of his

introduction

summa theologica and such, in he was bound to be concerned with stating

fact, is

the

this

second

conviction, that is, with performing the apologetic task. If we first enquire quite generally into the standpoint which Schleier-

macher as an apologist of religion and Christianity sought to take up and did take up, then the first thing we find is certainly that the approach to this task meant for him a certain relaxation of, and indeed detachment from, the essential theological task of interpreting and
proclaiming Christianity however, in general, he might conceive of and execute this task. He declared quite plainly already in the first section of the first paragraph of the Doctrine of Faith 'that all the propositions which will occur here cannot be in themselves also dogmatic

The standpoint of the Schleiermacher who later, from Paragraph 32 onwards, was to present the Christian doctrine of faith, and himself represent the Christian faith, is different from that of the Schleierones'.

macher who in Paragraphs 1-31 is explaining what the Christian faith and the teaching of the Christian faith can and should be about.
Paragraphs 1-31 of the Doctrine of Faith are written in precisely the

same sense as the theological work of his youth, the Address on Religion. But what does 'on religion' mean? It need not mean at all that they are
not also talks
out
is

basic intention,

of religion, but this in fact, according to their actual precisely what they are not. While still a young man,

Schleiermacher wanted to show the educated among the despisers of religion that by virtue of their education they are enabled and summoned to understand the nature of religion better than it has been

understood previously; and further that it is worthwhile taking note of the nature of religion. Further, that with religion it is a question of the realization of an original, universal and necessary disposition of mankind as such. Further, that of the forms of religion the Christian religion
is

relatively the highest, the most dignified and the purest. Further, that the intellectual situation of the time, particularly in Germany, is especially favourable to the recognition of these statements and thus to a rebirth of religion among them, the educated. In brief, the speaker

SCHLEIERMACHER
on
religion seeks

333

an admission from the educated people to whom he is that in general and the Christian religion in parreligion speaking ticular is the highest value in life, something which is not only possible, but real and necessary beside science, art, the Fatherland, etc., something which is already existing in latent form, and only requiring their correct recognition; and that civilization without religion, without
the Christian religion,
is

not a complete

civilization.

standpoint from which Schleiermacher could speak in these terms, and could speak of the nature and value of religion, is evidently the following. Schleiermacher was not now concerned, directly at

The

from the

but with the phenomenon of religion as seen something which is to be interpreted, understood, perhaps misunderstood, and perhaps better understood from the outside. Just as he was about to proclaim Christianity he realized to his sorrow that his fellow men of the day were not listening at all, or at best shaking their heads over what he had to say. So he left the text he has already turned to in the Bible to take care of itself for a moment,
least,
itself,

with the thing

outside,

and

as

and came down from the pulpit again to debate first of all with his congregation which for this particular moment transformed itself into an audience. He did this in order to make plausible in advance, apart from what he was going to say later, the possibility and necessity of saying it; in order to convince them that religion, Christianity and the Church were not at all the insignificant or absurd things they considered them to be, and that they should, if they did but understand
themselves aright, give this phenomenon a joyous welcome. The possibility of taking up this second standpoint, different from that of the proclaimer of Christianity, evidently had a certain prerequisite.

Anyone who

awareness which at

first is

seeks to negotiate between faith and a cultural assumed to be unbelieving, and then bring

about a lasting covenant between them must, at all events while he is doing this, take up a position which is in principle beyond that of both parties, a superior position, from which he can understand both parties and be the just advocate of both. He must, even if he himself belongs to one side at least carry a white flag in his hand when approaching the other for a parley; he cannot at that moment be

engaged

as

a combatant.

To put it

unmetaphorically: as long as he

is

an

apologist the theologian must renounce his theological function. In so far as the apologist approaches the educated among the despisers

of religion from the standpoint of theology he must not desire to speak only from faith and with only the faith of his hearers in view. He must
present himself to

them in a part which

is

provided for in their

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

categories,

which

really occurs or

can occur there.

To judge from

Schleiermacher's early work, the part which the apologist, the speaker on religion, must play is that of the virtuoso in religion. Faced by the

Romantics, Fichte, Schelling and the others Schleiermacher would have felt incapable of negotiating simply as a theologian, as a preacher. But why should the religious virtuoso not be possible within their field of
vision as well, together with the virtuosi of philosophy, of art, of should he not exist within the general frame of virtuomorality?

Why

sity

upon the Church, his ecclesiastical dogma? No. But can he refer to a special kind of virtuosity which had previously not been well known or recognized as such, can he refer to the inner irresistible necessity of
office, his ministry, the Bible,
e

in life?

Can he base

his claim

my

nature' ?

Can he

indispensable at

base his claim upon the notion of a 'mediator', first, in matters affecting a particular newly-inter-

preted universal concern of mankind, upon the possibility of an ideally understood priesthood, a religious heroism? Why not? From this
position the educated

man could and had to and did allow himself to be spoken to. In his later works Schleiermacher made legitimate the apologist as the confidant also of the opposite side, in an objective way not so
much replacing his former merely personal legitimization as supporting
and
establishing it. It
its

but he did show

true that he did not show the reality of theology, possibility and necessity: the space for theology in a
is

comprehensive system of learning. He supported true theology by a philosophical theology, which was meant to demonstrate that the existence of Churches not the Christian Church in particular, nor

any particular Church was an element necessary to the development of the human mind', and not by any means an 'aberration 1 And he saw this philosophical theology as founded for its own part in a philosophy of religion which in its turn can be shown to be an integrant
5 .

feature of ethics

ethics as the science of the principles of history as opposed to those of nature. That is why the introduction to the Doctrim of Faith, as Schleiermacher expressly states, proceeded by means of arguments taken first from ethics, secondly from the philosophy of

religion and thirdly from apologetics as a branch of what Schleiermacher called philosophical theology. Set in this relationship concretely Christian theology becomes possible as the positive science of this particular Church and its faith. This entire construction, however, evidently implies no more than that which Schleiermacher had already
1

Kurze Darstellwg des

theol. Studittms

(Short Account of the Study of Theology)

para. 22.

SGHLEIERMAGHER

325

said in the Addresses on Religion about the legitimation of the theologian

and his playing the part of the apologist respectively: that together with other virtuosi there are also religious virtuosi who may, like the others in principle justly allow themselves to be seen and heard, according to the judgment also of people who do not profess this virtuosity. The preaching of the Church is no more an aberration one might also say, an offence than any other human possibility which can be accounted for in its nature and value from the point of view of ethics as the science of the principles of history. This white flag, which the theologian must carry as an apologist,

means of course for the theologian himself that in so far apologist he must, as Schleiermacher once more expressly
his point of departure (standpoint)

as

he

is

an

states,

take

above Christianity

(in the logical

community of pious 1 an As is a believers. he or not Christian apologist people theologian but a moral philosopher and philosopher of religion. He suspends to
that extent his attitude to Christianity, and his judgment of the truth or even absoluteness of the Christian revelation. Together with the

sense of the word) in the general concept of the

other educated people he looks upon Christianity as being on the same level as the other 'pious communities', as being subject to the points of

view from which pious communities' are to be regarded here. He therefore regards the Christian Church too as *a community which arises only as a result of free human actions, and can only continue to 2 exist by the same means'. The time will come for him to return completely to his subject and speak as a Christian theologian. Then he will no longer speak on religion, but ex qfficio out 0f religion. Then the nature

and value of
necessity will

religion

and

Christianity in

its

own

no longer

interest him.

That

will

be the time for

inner logic and all the

things there are still to be said about the concept of the Church and which have to be said also in a completely different way. As an apologist he must say the other things, he must regard the Church as a

pious community which has arisen and lives from human freedom, and has to demonstrate its possibility and necessity as such a community.

But what now, according to Schleiermacher, is the meaning of the apologetic act that is to be carried out from this place? What kind of lasting contract is to be concluded from it? At the beginning we
distinguished a bolder
task.

and a more cautious approach to the apologetic question about which of these two types Schleiermacher's apologetics belongs to cannot be definitely answered.

The

1 Short Account, para. 33; Doctrine of Faith, ist ed., para. 6. 2 Doctrine of Faith, and ed., para. 2. 2.

326

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

At first it might seem as if with Schleiermacher it could only be a question of the second, the more cautious kind of apologetics, which seeks to show only the intellectual possibility of the principles of
Christianity.

In the Open

Letter to Liicke 1

Schleiermacher says that his

aim in writing the Doctrine ofFaith was to show 'that every dogma truly representing an element of our Christian awareness can also be formulated in such a

way

that

it

leaves us uninvolved with science'. In fact

Schleiermacher's labours in apologetics can largely be understood along the following lines. He is as a modern man and therefore as a thinker

and
an

religion

therefore as a moral philosopher and therefore as a philosopher of and therefore as a philosophical theologian and therefore as

apologist and therefore finally as a dogmatist determined on no account to interpret Christianity in such a way that his interpreted statements can come into conflict with the methods and principles of the philosophy and the historical and scientific research of his time.

Schleiermacher's activity as a cautious' apologist, and the proof that he was such an apologist consists chiefly in the fact that he himself

wrote

dogmatics in such a way that even to someone not so well acquainted with the subject it must be self-evident as something at all
his

events thinkable. The peculiar aesthetic language of the Addresses should already be understood as apologetics in this sense. With this language, more musical than argumentative as Schleiermacher himself once said, he adapted himself to the language which the people he was
addressing, chiefly the Romantics,

spoke themselves.

The very form

is

be

sufficiently

admired,

happened to love and which they of the Doctrine of Faith, which cannot also apologetic in this sense. Its strict,

artistically ingenious

and defend the content of the work, to speak and which is, however, above all distinctly apologetic in this sense is the objective form in which the content of religion and later of the Christian faith is presented, both here and in the Addresses. Here the theologian is not only concerned with his subjectmatter but as a mediator also with his readers. Indeed he is concerned with readers of a certain intellectual make-up and tendency which is accepted from the beginning by the theologian qua apologist. This is revealed at every turn by the fact that this representation of Christianity systematically removes, or is at all events intended to remove (of course he cannot judge in advance the effect of this) each and every stumblingblock which their own intellectual make-up and tendency might
testify for
it.

lectual quality of this an argument, to justify

system and the rigid discipline and high intelwork are doubtless in themselves meant to form

The

feature

MuL,

40.

337 prepare for them in such a representation. Christianity is interpreted in such a way that it acquires room this of that it

SCHLEIERMACHER
by

way

interpretation,

acquires room in the kind of thinking which is assumed to be authoritative by Schleiermacher's contemporaries, without causing any friction. Whether his readers move into this cleared space, whether they are able
consider and accept this willing unexceptionable representation of Christianity as part of their own thought; that is of course a question that cannot be answered. But Christianity is prepared for them in such a way that in the author's eyes there no exists obstacle in
to

and

longer

any

And now the significance of the fact that the apologist as apologist has to take as his point of departure a point above Christianity becomes clear. It certainly does not mean in itself that for once in a way the apologist has to think like a heathen or atheist in order to convince
it

principle, against the occupation of this space. There must now be other reasons, reasons which are not essential from the standpoint of the cultural awareness as such, which if fail to do this. guide them, they

heathens or atheists of the excellence of Christianity. De facto, of course, can mean this. It should, however, only mean but this, of course, is in fact meaning quite a lot that the is a master of apologist complete
Christianity, in a position, as it were, to look into it from above just as much as modern cultural awareness is; able to elicit its nature and
assess its value. Without having to worry about prejudicing the content of Christianity itself he is in a position to take a pencil to the stock of doctrine he has inherited and boldly 'erase and alter what in

might

untimely fashion
living faith in
science'. 1
its

oppress the apparatus of dogma and hamper the attempt to walk hand in hand with onward-marching
(!)

'Schleiermacher attacked the task of apologetics in the confidence that he knew what Christianity was, and could not be

brought to depart from this basic feeling by any church doctrine, no matter how well established the latter was.' 2 It is not right to accuse Schleiermacher of consciously betraying Christianity to science, to the
flict

cultural outlook of his time, by always saying between the two, that civilization was right

when

there was a conand traditional Christiis

anity wrong.

The only

alternative, however, if this accusation

it
is

to be

to say that as an apologist of Christianity Schleiermacher really played upon it as a virtuoso plays upon his fiddle: he played the notes and airs which, if they did not

avoided

and we must avoid

cause his hearers to rejoice, could at least be acceptable to them. Schleiermacher did not speak as a responsible servant of Christianity
but, like a true virtuoso, as a free master of it.
1

Scholz, p. 122.

Ibid., p. 121.

328

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Thus the great possibility which has arisen in classic form in Schleiermacher the apologist is that the anxious care to conserve, the advocacy of Christianity at all costs, which had still characterized the apologetics

even of the Enlightenment period, can be abandoned. Christican be mastered at least in so far as, using the insight we have anity into its nature and value, we can treat, control and rule the Bible and dogma with unrestricted freedom. It is possible to be a Christian and theologian as one is a philosopher or artist that is, one can also approach the material of theology in a creative and systematic way, illuminating it in principle, penetrating and forming it out of one's very own power. Like the other secrets of life this secret too can be interpreted. The interpreter need not take into account the fact that it might perhaps be seeking to interpret itself and that the Bible and dogma might perhaps be binding pointers for the understanding of this self-interpretation.
:

And so,

creatively forming and interpreting in this manner, and therefore knowing in advance just as much about Christianity as Christianity
itself, it is

indeed possible to be a Christian and a theologian also as a

is,

modern man.
so to speak, immanent and negative, and in its point against the Christian tradition turns practice essentially in fact the type of cautious apologetics. But after and would be of itself,

This apologetics

all it represents only one side of the picture which we can see here. The other appears already in the Addresses and is still present in the Doctrine of Faith. It is represented by an admittedly strictly limited approach

towards a positive proof, an approach towards showing the intellectual necessity of the principles of Christianity. An approach in that direction, I say, and more it is not permissible to say without saying something
quite

wrong and completely out of keeping with Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher did not give theology or the principles of Christianity

a speculative basis. He did not, that is, conceive of them and treat them as principles to be derived necessarily from the idea of human knowledge. This, as expressed in a much-admired review which he wrote as early as 1803, was what separated him most decisively from Schelling, not to mention Hegel. Schleiermacher, it is true, also had his
system of pure knowledge (as presented in his philosophical ethics and in his dialectics), but in this system knowledge and being are set in opposition in such a way that they are held together objectively only by
idea,

the idea of God, and subjectively only by the feeling correlative to this accompanying all knowledge and action; or, rather, by the
dialectician's

knowledge of this correlation. In so far as

this synthesis

of God and feeling as a bracket beyond the antithesis of knowledge and

SGHLEIERMACHER
being
exists for

339

a philosopher of identity, to doctrine of the approximating Schelling's point of identity as the at which the ideal and the real are seen to be as one, and appoint
is

Schleiermacher, he too

proximating also to Hegel's philosophy of the mind as the synthesis of logic and natural philosophy. But Schleiermacher did not, like Schelling, consider possible as a proof of Christianity a speculative theology
as the science of the point of identity, nor did he, like Hegel consider a philosophy of religion, replacing theology, as the penultimate stage at least in the dialectic of absolute mind, possible as such a proof. l shall never be able to accept the idea that my belief in Christ stems from
e

1 knowledge or philosophy, whichever philosophy it might be.' We ascertained while discussing Hegel that this rejection of speculation on Schleiermacher's part also has something to do with the fact that he was not very interested in the truth of theological tenets as such. For he was in the first place interested in the active life of religion, and then in feeling as the true seat of this life, and only thirdly in the tenets by means of which this life always in fundamentally imperfect form expresses itself. Schleiermacher quenched his intellectual thirst for truth as a philosopher in fields remote from his theological statements. But this alone is not enough to explain his lack of interest in speculative theology. There is something in him which protests in

favour of the peculiar and underivable nature of these very tenets, against the omnipotence of deduction in the thinking of his contemporaries just mentioned, against the elimination of high arbitraris

which might possibly, from one side, at any rate, be the key to 2 Christianity, as he expressed it in his argument against Schelling. And he fears that a theology which is capable of being understood and
ness',

based upon philosophical terms would lead to the introduction of

the un-Christian opposition of an esoteric and an exoteric teaching, of a gnosis ranked higher than pistis, a 'hierarchy of speculation'. 8 He wished the assertions of the Doctrine of Faith not of the introduction,
of course, but of the part which contained the proper representation to be understood as 'quite simply and honestly solely empirical' (p. 21). The representation itself was meant simultaneously to be the vindication of the Doctrine of Faith, Tor everything in it can only be vindicated by being represented as a correct statement of Christian self-awareness'
(p. 56).

But

all

the same, this empiricism

is

that of a science, not rough

and unscientific. If it were otherwise, Schleiermacher explains, he would personally, if faced with the choice, decide for a speculative
1

Open

letter to Lticke,

Open

Mul., a8f. Letter to Liicke,

Letters,

IV, 586.

Mul.,

sgf.

33

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

vindication of religion, although with the gravest misgivings (p. 39). But Schleiermacher is not faced by this choice. His representation of

the Christian faith to be true, does not rest upon the basis of a highest knowledge of God, whose more or less adequate expression it claimed to be. To this extent his apologetics are not of the bolder type, seeking
to give positive proof.

Schleiermacher's representation of faith certainly rests, however, upon the basis of a highest knowledge of human feeling or immediate
self-awareness in
its correlation to God, upon the basis of a highest and value of faith and the diversity of ways of of the nature knowledge believing altogether. It is not the Christian religion, but certainly the

type to which this phenomenon belongs, religion as a necessary manifestation of human intellectual life, which is for Schleiermacher an
object of speculative knowledge of an a priori kind.

And

this

knowledge

does not only provide him with a frame within which to establish the nature of the Christian religion as empirically understood, but
also with

extent he

a yardstick by which its value can be measured. To that is in a position to discover and present and he did this

Faith

much as in the Introduction to the Doctrine of not only the necessity of religion, in terms of the science of mind, as completely determined human self-awareness, but also the superiority, relatively at least, of Christianity, as regards its nature and
in the Addresses just as
value,

when compared with the other religions. Without that highest unity of intuition and feeling, as Schleiermacher said in the Addresses, or without the feeling of utter dependence, as he puts it in the Doctrine
of Faith, cultural awareness would be incomplete, a headless torso. Of the various historical forms this feeling has taken it is the Christian one, the Christian faith, which is the highest and most perfect. It is not
the absolute form, the one which
highest
well.
is

and most
as

perfect

among many which

alone true, but it is indeed the are relatively true as

this

In so far
his

Schleiermacher considers he can show

without

fear of objection, to the extent that, as

was previously shown, he thinks

dogmatics upon philosophical theology, philosophical theology upon a philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of religion upon ethics as the universal science of mind, he also not directly, but
certainly in an indirect way proves the intellectual necessity of the tenets of Christianity. It is a question of the intellectual necessity

he can base

which is possible within the framework of his system, which is essentially more restrained than those of Schelling and Hegel. It is a question of a relative determined, indirect intellectual necessity of thought to accord with his more cautious conception of speculative identity. The

SGHLEIERMAGHER
latter,

331

however, is quite definitely in question and to this extent Schleiermacher in fact has as his chief support cautious and negative apologetics but also, without entrusting too much of his weight to them, toys with the bolder, positive kind. And it is not to see this
impossible

background the by means of the science of mind that Schleiermacher is able to form this doctrine of faith into an apologetics in the way we have previously described: by means of this bold virtuoso playing on the instrument of Christianity, by this complete freedom in the handling of the store of Christian tradition, and by the brilliance of the system he applied to it. If Schleiermacher did not descend from this height above Christianity how should he be able to appear as a virtuoso and master of Christianity? Thus the
having
positive vindication of the doctrine of faith
e 5

relationship as reversed, with positive apologetics as the it must as his certainly be said that it is only by

main prop. For

of understanding the significance of this third, this apologetic, is to imagine him pacing to continue with the image of the two props alternately supported by one of them and using the other in order to take a step forward. And can

best

way

motif in

his theology,

nobody

deny

that this particular traveller did in fact advance most vigorously

upon

his

way,

after his fashion.

illuminate the necessity of the two motifs of the content from yet another angle. The two motifs of the content, which we shall assess in conclusion, are experience and history. It is between these two poles that Schleier-

IV. Before proceeding to consider the two motifs in Schleiermacher's theology which were almost bound to attitude he takes in his apologetics, I should like to call again to yet another of its formal features, which will

the content of
arise

from the

attention once

macher's interpretation of Christianity takes its course, because these two poles are also the secret of his general concept of religion; because,

an apologetic interpretation of Christianity, it cannot take any other course but one lying between two poles. But why must the secret of his general concept of religion be that of these two poles in particular?
as

Why

must

his philosophy of religion

particular polarity,

and ethics present him with and why must there be this polarity at all?

this

Here we must reflect that Schleiermacher, the Christian apologist, was not only one educated and educating in his time, but that his
origins in this respect lay first with the Moravian brethren and secondly with the Romantic school. Both these facts mean that for Schleiermacher being educated and educating must definitely mean mediation mediation, uniting vision, synthesis, and peace not only between this

332

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

opposite, but ultimately between
all,

and that

even between the most

pronounced opposites. Schleiermacher sprang from the Moravian brethren, and was certainly correct in once saying of himself that all
his life

he had been a "Moravian of a higher order', to the extent that he had become familiar there with a Christian standpoint which was
in principle synthetic, with a Christianity beyond the historical differentiations of Christianity, with the bold idea of a union before

union comprising the various confessions merely as various choirs or divisions of the one Church of Christ and at the same time with the bold idea of a Christianity in which the Saviour and the individual soul as well as the Saviour and the Christian communion were brought, in a correlation quite definitely compared to a form of play, into a
synoptic, mediated, polar relationship. And Schleiermacher, passing briefly through the Enlightenment, went from the Moravian brethren
to Romanticism.
centre,

We have already seen what a part the principle of the which was announced already in Herder, played with Novalis. It was the moving principle, in method, with Holderlin too, and with Schelling and Hegel. Without this principle there would have been no speculative idealism, and no philosophy of identity. Schleiermacher applied it not in Hegel's way, but in his own way, to theology. In doing so he could call to witness the procedure of the Moravian brethren. What he made of it, however, subject as he was to the powerful stimulus of Romantic philosophy, was not a Moravianism merely of a
higher, but of the highest order.
It is

his

life,

probably no mere coincidence that precisely in the last years of when he was preparing to publish his Dialectics, there was one

notion and concern which dominated every other in Schleiermacher's sermons. It can be characterized by the word 'peace*. If he is zealous as a preacher we have already considered this from another angle then he is zealous in attacking everything which can divide the Church,
or can set the individual hearer at loggerheads with himself, because it calls to mind the idea of irreconcilable contradictions. There are no

such irreconcilable contradictions and therefore there cannot and may not be any unpeaceful state either in general or in particular, outwardly
religious

or inwardly. Schleiermacher dealt with the most diverse moral and themes from the point of view that the truth lies in the middle,

in reconciliation, in the point of no distinction, in the 'simplicity of the mind of Jesus', in 'common feeling', in the 'equalizing common note'

between the supposed opposites, and that we must see the relative nature of the opposites, the fact that their quality as opposites is only provisional and capable of being annulled. That is why Schleiermacher

SGHLEIERMAGHER
does not like the Old Testament

333

because he saw in the notion of the

he thought prevailed there the division between heaven between grace and sin, which is removed in Christ, and may not be renewed again. That is why he has little liking for the figure of John the Baptist in the New Testament either. 'The one word of peace does in fact contain everything', he once declaimed. 1 The divine Spirit or communion with God or the kingdom of God is, according to his express declaration, the One from which the two proceeded, and into which they must again be converted. This helps us to understand why Schleiermacher claimed so emphatically that his Doctrine of Faith was the first dogmatics at all events of the Prussian Union, and why the union between the Reformed Churches and the Lutherans was to him something which was indeed

Law which
and
earth,

decisively necessary.

And

his further strongly

marked aim over and

above

this

parties,

union was the uniting of the orthodox-pietist and rationalist which were coming into ever-sharper conflict in the twenties,
It was as

within the United Evangelical Church.

a result of this tendency

that the Doctrine of Faith did not take another form which, according to Schleiermacher's explanation, it might have taken, 2 and which might have decisively increased its influence and usefulness to the Church.

The Doctrine

ofFaith is divided, as we know, into a first part, consisting of the generally religious premises (the Christian ones included, it is true) and a second specifically Christian (Christological-soteriological)
part. Schleiermacher

pondered the idea of reversing this relationship, which at least approximated to a natural theology, and upon which the eye of the reader must first alight, to the end, as a kind of epilogue, as a definite a posteriori. He did not do this partly in order not to lend his support to the 'forcing out from our church membership of those worthy men who are called rationalists, and he did not want to do this 'for natural fear that the little boat in which we are all sailing might capsize'. 3 He thought that he was thereby serving peace and by doing this was also serving the Church
of moving the
first

part,

and God

himself.

politics,

calls peace in his sermons and in church however, coincides in content with the ultimate and highest principle, both in form and in content, of his philosophic teaching.

What

Schleiermacher

This teaching is characterized by a method of division and unification of all principles. He carries it through by dealing with subject and
object,

speculative
i

knowledge and being, reason and nature, ethics and physics, and empirical knowledge, and everywhere the transitions, 3 2 Ibid., 44. Sermons, III, 468. Open Letter to Lucke, MuL, 46.

334

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

in contrast to those of Hegel's dialectic, are flowing from the one opposite to the other, and are quantitative. The truth once again in contrast to Hegel is not to be found in some definable third thing, but in the indefinable centre between the first and the second, at the point

where peace reigns, a point to which from all sides only approximations are possible. In feeling and for figurative thought and speech, which
is

of course inadequate out of feeling, peace exists also between the ultimate and highest contradiction, that between the infinite and therefore identical being and knowledge of God and our finite and therefore divided, non-identical being and knowledge. World-wisdom

and world do not, it is true, coincide in an absolute knowledge, as they do with Hegel, but Schleiermacher does in fact have his dialectic, as knowledge of a unity which can be felt, i.e. of the presence of God felt in human awareness. Seen from this aspect the principle of the centre is at once identical with the strongest and most decisive lever of Schleiermacher's apologetics. The Moravian and Romantic was bound to have recourse to this kind of apologetics and to no other! From here we can also gain an insight into the essential content of the two loci classici in Schleiermacher's theological doctrine of principles the second Address on religion and Paragraphs 3 and 4 of the Doctrine
:

ofFaith. In the second Address religion is described as the moment of the unity of intuition and feeling, which takes place beyond all thought and action. Intuition is the receptive, and feeling the spontaneous side of
the act of awareness, in which man in his finite quality comes to partake, as Schleiermacher put it at this time, of the infinite quality of the universe. Intuition and feeling is the opposition of that which
affects religiously,

and the

state

coming of

this opposition,

the

One

of being affected religiously. The overin the middle of these two, is the
.

esential nature of religion. 'Intuition without feeling is nothing . feeling without intuition is likewise nothing: both are only anything if

and because they are originally one and undivided.* 1 Paragraphs 3 and 4 of the Doctrine of Faith state, however, that: 'The piety which is the basis of all church communions (and which is therefore common to them all, and underlies all expressions of piety, no matter how diverse
these may be) is, looked at purely in itself, neither a piece of knowledge nor an action, but a determination of feeling or of immediate selfawareness. It is that determination by virtue of which man is aware of his own self as utterly dependent or what comes to the same thing as in connexion with God.' What Schleiermacher expressed in the Address by means of the dual
1

Addresses, pp. yaf.

335 concept of intuition and feeling he characterizes here by means of the concept of feeling, which has now been widened and comprises the moment of intuition, in which that which that which
affects,

SCHLEIERMAGHER

explains

the origin of man's utter dependence is already posited. Because feeling in itself is the victorious centre between knowledge and action, because, in contrast to these functions, it is itself the true self-awareness and by virtue of this fact alone is at least the subjective representative of truth; again, because feeling as pious feeling is man's feeling of utter dependence, i.e. the feeling of his connexion with God, Schleier-

macher's theology is the theology of feeling, or to put it more exactly, the theology of pious feeling, or the of theology awareness, or to put it more exactly, the theology of pious self-awareness. That is Schleier-

why

only hope, does not only expect, does not only worship, but is this centre, this peace which passeth all understanding. That is why for Schleier-

macher in 1832 found that the text of St John, 1.51 'Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man was expressly affirmed 'by the most perfect and blissful experience of a faithful spirit', for which there is no longer any division between heaven and earth. 1 Piety does not only seek, does not
:

macher proclaiming God means proclaiming one's own piety, that is why for him preaching consists essentially of a self-imparting by the
preacher.

And since what is to be proclaimed here is indeed a determination, but a determination of feeling, Schleiermacher gives to the Word, and with the Word, to intellectual truth, only a position of secondary importance. The tenets of the Christian faith are simply only 'conceptions
2 of states of mind of Christian piety, represented in speech'. The tenets are only derivatives of the original thing, the inner state. 3 The divine

soft silence

Talk about religion will one day be succeeded by the of holy virgins'. 4 Of the three modes of speech, the poetical, the oratorical and the didactic, the poetical is the highest; and what is higher than all of them together, and better, is music.
is

ineffable.

'Singing piety is the piety which ascends most directly and most 5 gloriously to heaven.' Thus theology, if only because it is merely the human word, and only, of all its forms, the didactic human word, is free, capable of transformation, and relatively not bound

non-binding

in respect to its subject. That is why Schleiermacher finds it possible to adapt his theology so carefully to the educated awareness of his time,

without worrying too

1

much

or nearly so

much about whether

his

Sermons, III, iGyf. 4

Addresses, gf.

2 Doctrine of Faith, para. 15. 3 Open Letter to Lucke, MuL, 34. * Christmas Celebration, Phil. Libr., Vol. x 17, p. 23.

33^

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

is

theology was -doing justice to

for

its subject, to Christianity. That is why more nor less than the 'representation of nothing the opinion of the Church 1 a branch of the church lore of the present, paraphrasing historically and empirically in systematic order the reality of the pronouncements, which are possible and necessary at the

him dogmatics

time, of the spirit affected by the Christian religion. Truth in the strictly intellectual, expressible sense, which

is

because

of these very qualities only the provisional truth, remains the concern of philosophy; truth in the ultimate, decisive, but also ineffable sense
is

reserved for mute feeling, the feeling which in the best event sings,
as

and only

last resort,

and then inadequately,

all

speaks. Schleier-

macher's real and serious opinion was that

ments were

and meant

theological pronouncestrictly theological to the extent that they were intended to be received as pronouncements of religious feeling,

referring to this feeling itself and to nothing else. Or, to put it negatively, that they declined in theological severity in proportion as they referred as pronouncements upon some human knowledge or action simul-

taneously to the objects of human knowledge or action. It is precisely as they enter upon the field of what is objective and to that extent
expressible, that they become, according to Schleiermacher, potentially inadequate, as it were, by having lost their sure footing, the centre which represents the peaceful, ineffable truth.

made inadequate by these very

by the Romantic
special

This fear of objective and expressible pronouncements which are qualities, a fear which was determined

principle of the centre, now provides the basis for a methodic teaching in the Doctrine of the Faith, which is typical of Schleiermacher's theology as few other things are. I refer to the teaching

of the three forms of dogmatic tenets. These, according to para. 30 of the Doctrine of Faith, can either be conceived of as descriptions of human states of mind or as notions of divine qualities or ways of behaving, or as pronouncements about certain ways in which the world is constituted. The feeling of utter dependence is never present in itself

and

isolated. It

is

in such a

way that

present as real awareness filling out time, and always it is linked with a time-filling, sensory form of self-

Thus in the first place every formula for the feeling of utter dependence as such must at the same time be a formula for a certain
awareness.

a certain human state of mind. Every such of form self-awareness must, however, be made to refer to a sensory certain form of the world, such as typifies this form, this time-factor of self-awareness; i.e. it must be made to refer to something outside
state of self-awareness,
1 Doctrine

of Faith) para. 19, suppl.

SCHLEIERMAGHER
self-awareness, to a certain

237

Thus in the second place every formula for the feeling of utter dependence which is real in this sensory form can at the same time be a formula for the world, as it is real in this particular modification. And now the feeling of utter dependence is not what it is in and of itself, for God too is posited in self-awareness: thus the formula of utter deconcerning the
not-self.

form of the

feeling

pendence can at the same time be understood as a formula for God himself. To express it more simply, and in a concentrated form, in a little variation on the theme of pious self-awareness: from intellectual

upon pious -^-awareness there emerge the statements concerning the pious state of mind as such and in itself. From reflection upon pious self-awareness there emerge the statements about the world.
emerge statements about of group statements, which always form the first section, the actual corpus of the exposition, in the individual subdivisions of the Doctrine of Faith, Schleiermacher calls the dogmatic basic form, because their content necessarily rests upon pure selfexperience, whereas the content of the statements about the world and

reflection

From

reflections

upon

pious self-awareness

God. The form of the

first

God

sense or as

could in themselves always be understood either in the scientific an expression of metaphysical speculation. For this reason

must show that they are true theological statements by referring back to the first form of statements, i.e. that they can ultimately likewise be understood as pure pronouncements upon the religious state of mind and for this reason also, looked at according
to their form, they are called tenets of the dogmatic subsidiary forms. The groups of statements upon the qualities of God and features of the

these latter statements

world which come within these subsidiary forms always form the second and third sections in the individual sub-divisions of the Doctrine
Faith in the
it were intended to present the content of the Doctrine of form of a table, then, taking the longitudinal section of the whole, these second and third sections would have to be placed to left and right on either side of their respective first sections. This method means that the doctrine of God, for instance, extends throughout the whole work and is only finished when the book is finished. In the section on The way the world is constituted in relation to redemption*

of Faith. If

the entire doctrine of election, of the Holy Spirit, of the Church and the whole of eschatology is dealt with.

These are
It

just

some of the

singular features this

method

involves.

must, however, be said that as a method it accords very well with the intention and spirit of the whole book. And Schleiermacher, without actually achieving this, wanted to advance even further in this

33^
direction.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

When he began to busy himself with the new edition in 1829 he considered the possibility, as is shown by para. 30 of the second edition and above all by the second open letter to Lizcke, of cutting out the two subsidiary forms in favour of the main form, because they were 'superfluous really, in the strict sense'. 1 That, he expressly states, would be dogmatics in the peculiar form it had fashioned for itself in him. 2 He had, however, not done this, he says, in order to preserve, for one thing, the 'historical attitude and 'church character' of his work, and further in order not to let slip the possibility of a critique and reduction of the doctrine of God, cosmology and anthropology as contained in the old dogmatics. These are reasons which cannot be
9

described as very weighty or very much a question of principle. Schleiermacher takes leave of these unexecuted thoughts with a reminiscence
taken, this time, from the Old Testament, that of the dying Moses' C sight of the land of Canaan. I rejoice at least', he concludes in writing e to Liicke, in the conviction that I have seen from afar at least the form
for a freer

future ideal

3 way of treating our teaching of faith.' This of this would thus in the consist treatment, way Canaan, of even the the semblance of idea that the disappearance subject of

and

livelier

dogmatics was anything else but human states of mind. This semblance has not entirely disappeared in the form in which Schleiermacher left
his

work. But even so Schleiermacher approached very near to his ideal,

fact that

and the
were,

we know from

may

console us in

his own pen what his true intentions some measure for the imperfection of what he

actually achieved.

V. In conclusion let us enquire about the objective basic motifs of content in Schleiermacher's theology. have called it a theology of feeling, of awareness. Thus we have already named one of these motifs

We

of content, and indeed the one which is the original, primary and characteristic motif of content of this theology, and we have elucidated
it

in the foregoing.

The

great formal principle of Schleiermacher's theology

is

at the

same time its material principle. Christian pious self-awareness contemplates and describes itself: that is in principle the be-all and end-all of this theology. But what is this Christian pious self-awareness? The
principle of mediation we have discussed already hints that the definition of Schleiermacher's theology as the theology of feeling or awareness cannot in any case imply that the formal and material principle of this theology is human feeling or awareness in such a way that this
i

Mul., 47f.

Ibid., 49.

SCHLEIERMACHER
feeling is understood as an indivisible unity. For it is a certain feeling, the feeling of piety, which is referred to. Feeling or awareness is here the centre in such a way that it distinguishes itself from another feeling or awareness outside it, in such a way that it shares its own unity voluntarily, as it were, with this other feeling or awareness, that it allows itself to oppose this other feeling or awareness in relative tension and is what it is only in the mediation between itself and the other feeling or awareness, and not in a with itself. This

pure identity

must

only as the result of the premises of Schleiermacher's dialectic, according to which there is no pure identity in finite selfawareness. And Schleiermacher was after all a Christian theologian to the extent that it was clear to him, and remained clear to him, that theology must in some sense have two motifs of content, that it must speak of God and man, of man and God. As has now become plain, man,
if

in fact be so,

Schleiermacher, three hundred years after the Reformation, now says, religion or piety. But Reformers did not neglect to split as it were their theological centre

self-awareness, determined namely as pious self-awareness, for Schleiermacher the central subject of his theological thought. In the very places where the theology of the Reformation had said 'the Gospel' or 'the Word of God 5 or 'Christ'

human

was doubtless

and

to oppose

it

by something

relatively different

from it. They powercorrelate of faith,

fully confronted the

Word

of

God
its

with the

human

even though

this correlate

had

basis entirely in the

Word

of God,

and was created and sustained by the Word of God. And

in a similar

way

sense that in that case

Schleiermacher's theology, too, is not centred in one point, in the it would not be aware of any other motif. Since

by birth and upbringing he thinks in terms of man, just as the Reformers had thought in terms of God, this second motif with him must manifestly be identical with, or be the same in intention, as that which
was primarily
It is

for

them: God, Christ, revelation or what you

will.

noteworthy that, by acknowledging the dualism of two basic

theological motifs, Schleiermacher, in principle, enters into the course of Trinitarian theological thinking together with the Reformers. Even
if
this, the fact must not be overlooked in the assessment of his undertaking. Trinitarian thinking compels theology even a theology which cannot perhaps do much directly with the idea of the Trinity to be completely in earnest about the thought of God in at
:

he does not go beyond

least two places first, at the point where it is a question of God's action in regard to man, and, secondly, at the point where it is a question of man's action in regard to God. It is aware of God as the Word of the

Father which is spoken to man and as the Spirit of the Father and of the

$4

Word which

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL enables man to hear the Word. It cannot

seek to have

merely one centre, one subject, just because its subject is God. To the extent that it sought to resolve itself into a mere teaching of God's action in regard to man, into a pure teaching of the Word, it would

become metaphysics. And

to the extent that

it

sought to resolve

itself

into a teaching of man's action in regard to God, into a pure teaching of the Spirit, it would become mysticism. The one, however, would be
just as little a pure teaching of the

Word of God,

as the other

would be

Spirit of God. A pure teaching of the Word will take into account the Holy Spirit as the divine reality in which the Word is heard, just as a pure teaching of the Spirit of the Son will take into

a pure teaching of the

account the

Word

of

God

as the divine reality in

this

which the Word

is

thought in mind that the Reformers the of the Word of God in its correlation with faith teaching propagated as the work of the Holy Spirit in man.
given to us. It

was with

Schleiermacher reversed the order of this thought. What interests him is the question of man's action in regard to God. We must not condemn him for this out of hand. If we call to mind the entire situation of theology in the modern world then we shall find it understandable that it fastened upon the point which had come to the centre of the entire thought of modern man. This point was simply man himself. This shifting of interest did not necessarily have to mean man without God, man in his own world. It could also mean man in the presence of

God, his action over against God's action. genuine, proper theology could be built up from such a starting-point. We may ask the question whether it was a good thing that Schleiermacher adapted himself to the trend of the time in this way and took up his position at the spot

where he was invited to do so by the prevalence ofthe Copernican world-

by its execution during the Enlightenment, by Kant, by Goethe, by Romanticism, and by Hegel. There was in fact no need for the Copernican conception of the universe to acquire the significance of a command that theology should
picture,

in future be anthropocentric theology. It might perhaps have been both more spirited and wiser to take up and carry through the Re-

formed theology of the

Word more than ever at this time, in instructive

opposition to the trend ofthe age. For indeed this Reformed theology had not been founded upon and conditioned by the Ptolemaic conception

of the universe and, as a pure theology of the Word,

it

offered oppor-

tunity enough to do justice to the tendency of the age by an honest doctrine of the Holy Spirit and of faith. There was ambiguity in the fact that theology took the trend of the times as a command which must

SGHLEIERMACHER

34!

be followed as a matter of course, and in its inability to do justice to the tendency of the age other than by becoming anthropocentric in accordance with the changed picture of the universe. The suspicion arises whether this does not betray the fact that theology forgot its own theme
over against all world-views. But this reversal of theology's way of looking at things was not necessarily bound to mean that theology was now no longer theology, or had even become the enemy of true
theology. Again, a genuine, proper theology could be built up from such a starting-point. Theology could remain true to its own theme
it went with the times and thus completed this reversal. What Schleiermacher constructed by means of his theology of awareness by planting himself in the centre which for the Reformers had been a

while

subsidiary centre, could be the pure theology of the Holy Spirit; the teaching of man brought face to face with God by God, of man

granted grace by grace. If it was

much

this, then as a theology it was just as which was orientated in the opposite direction, the theocentric, Reformed theology. The fact that Schleiermacher intended it as such (even if he did not perhaps execute it in this way) is revealed by the fact that he is very much aware of a second centre beside his original one, and seeks to grant it its full validity. In doing so he enters in principle into the course of Trinitarian thinking. The only question can now be, whether he will be in a position, in Trinitarian terms, to recognize and ensure as much validity for the divinity of the Logos, which forms for him this second centre, as for the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which is his actual centre or rather is apparently meant by what he presents as his actual centre. Will this show if it is not only intended to be, but if it is in truth the divinity of the Holy Spirit which forms this actual centre of his? Reformation theology, starting in reverse fashion, from the Logos, passes this test: as a theology of the Word it is at once a theology of the Holy Spirit to such a degree that it can largely be understood as a theology of faith too, and it is this very fact which proves that it is the divine Word that

justified as the theology

forms
test,

true centre. Will Schleiermacher's theology also pass this thus proving that for all the great reversal which is its startingits

compared with Reformed theology, its proceedings are theologically unexceptionable? Here we must make two preliminary
point,
as

points
i.

task of taking into account this second motif and making it valid, which Schleiermacher does not wish to avoid, is an unmistakable source of embarrassment and care to him and something he finds

The

particularly strenuous.

The

car must certainly continue to run, and

it

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

does in fact do so where in this theology and proclamation it is a question of speaking of Christ, of divine action as such, of the Word, and of the objective moment of salvation. But to speak in the technical terms of the motor-car from time to time the second,
hill-climbing

gear has to be engaged. This is betrayed to the layman as well because of the increased noise, from the suggesting a greater strain,

coming

dialectic

mechanism.

it emerges from the Christmas of 1805 that in fact Christ is, and is intended to remain, the subject of the celebration of Christmas. The exaltation of the religious disposition, which is there in the first place, certain and blessed in itself, is never questioned in the slightest, But at the same time this

In some way or other, for instance,

Celebration

other motif, after having been questioned at the outset, must first be worked out and established by means of difficult considerations which encounter all sorts of significant doubts. Similarly in the Addresses and in the Doctrine of Faith and the sermons there can be no mistaking that
for Schleiennacher the theologian, the historical element in religion, the objective motif, the Lord Jesus, is a problem child, one which

certainly must be brought to honour, to honour but which is still a

apologist,
is

and which

is

somehow brought

problem

child. Schleiermacher, the

forced to go to considerable trouble to understand and present this on the one hand in such a form that it is as far as possible safeguarded from the objections of modern awareness, thinking in anthropocentric terms. He has to work on the image of Christ provided by the Biblical and dogmatic tradition like a sculptor working a block of marble, in order to produce the statue, the particular Christ who might be considered adequate from this point of view. And he has to

go to similar trouble to show that seen from the basic fact of pious feeling the figure, now made unassailable, which is the product of his Christology is really important and necessary; and that we should not, as might be thought, be just as well-off without it. He succeeds in both both in working out a tolerably modernized things, Christology, and
in showing, in tolerably convincing fashion, that this Christology is indispensable. He does not succeed without sometimes resorting to artifice. He does not succeed in a which is consistently nor

perhaps

way

ultimately convincing succeeds somehow. It

labour in apologetics

and worthy of credence. But all the same, he is just that it was a piece of extremely hard and this is a shadow which remains come what

necessary to bring about this success. This cannot be said of the Reformation in regard to its subsidiary centre. It would be absurd to of Luther's doctrine of

may which was

say

faith

tji?it it

SGHLEIERMAGHER
had
in itself cost

343

him

a particular dialectic exertion.

is

From

the outset

possible the divinity of the Spirit.

he can and must speak with an inner objective not of Christ but of faith too. necessity only With Luther the divinity of the Logos demands in the most direct way
is

his teaching of the

Word

so constituted that

motifs

which forms the centre-point. Luther certainly did not speak as an apologist of what for him was the second motif. He neither needed to model the concept of faith to comply with a certain world view, nor did he need
to work out the indispensable nature of this concept. The concept of faith, rather, is already posited, both in its content and in its range, in and with his conception of the Word, and all his theological labour could only be devoted to showing this right, which stood firm from the outset and inwardly, and the self-evident dignity of what for him was the second motif. It is impossible, mutatis mutandis, to say this of Schleiermacher's theology. Whatever else we may think about it, it is impossible to dispute the fact that it is a product of art. This fact alone is sufficient
first

there

is

The relationship between the two open, self-evident, and alive, although as with Schleiermacher a difference of emphasis, in that here it is the first one

to cause us at least to

wonder whether in his theology the divinity of the Logos is pre-supposed as unequivocally as the Reformers posited the divinity of the Spirit, and whether, if this was not the case, the divinity of the Spirit which seemingly formed the centre of his theology was really the divinity of the Holy Spirit.
the difficulties with which he was faced by his in acknowledgment principle of the second motif Schleiermacher used the principle of mediation, which we have already considered as the most significant formal motif of his theology. But why is it so difficult
2.

To overcome

for

him to acknowledge and ensure the validity of this second motif? Because apparently it did not escape him that the first and the second motifs were, in the Reformed theology at all events, related to each other in such a way, and were opposed to each other in such strict distinction, as the Incarnation of the Word and the pouring out of the

Holy Spirit are, or, to go still higher, as the second and third persons of Godhead as such oppose each other. In this opposition both were strictly characterized as moments of the divine revelation and protected, each by its correlation with the other, from being confused with
the

mode

of

human

this opposition,

because

cognition. Schleiermacher could not acquiesce in it was not his intention at all strictly to

characterize these

being confused with a

two moments as revelation, nor to protect them from mode of human cognition. As an apologist he
strictly as

was bound

to

be interested in understanding revelation not

344
a

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

way
that
it

revelation, but in such a

might

also

be comprehensible

as

cognition. As an apologist he was thus bound to look upon this opposition as an inconvenience, and to look for a means of overcoming it. And the means he found was this principle of

mode

of

human

mediation.

The efficacy of this principle is at once shown by the fact that Schleiermacher presents as the theme of theology, as seen from the anthropocentric point of view, not the outpouring of the Holy Spirit this might in itself have been possible but religious consciousness as such. Faith understood in this way, not as God's revelation, but as
man's experience, allowed, nay demanded, that the second objective moment should be understood accordingly, i.e. not presupposing a strict opposition to the first, and not as a correlate to the concept of the
to this

understood in the Trinitarian sense, but as a correlate It was in accordance with the line of thought pursued by Kant and Lessing that Schleiermacher allowed his first

Holy

Spirit, as

human experience.

moment,

as the psychological one, to be opposed by his second moment as the historical one. Historical knowledge, too, is a mode of human cognition, even if it is a different one from that of

psychological

great Schleiermacher had in acknowledging and explaining his second motif was determined by the old teaching of the divinity of the Logos and of the Spirit. After he had mastered this teaching by interpreting it in the relationship of the historical to the psychological, there then remained the smaller difficulty of bringing these two
difficulty

knowledge. Between these two motifs mediation is possible. Seeing them together cannot be altogether out of the question. The

into connexion with one another, that

sing's big ditch,

and showing element in Christianity was more than a temporal vehicle of timeless reasonable truth. Because of his principle of mediation, he was able to show this better than Herder had attempted before him. For
it is

things to say of overcoming Lesin opposition to Kant that the historical

is

a question of nothing but carrying out Herder's programme. In carrying out this programme, in demonstrating that faith and Christ, equated with experience and history, are the foci of an ellipse,

basically

Schleiermacher turns the Christian relationship of man with God into possibility. It is apparent because a mode of human cognition corresponds to it on both sides, because these two

an apparent human

into a peaceful, mediating relationship, and because they were thus treated by Schleiermacher. They are not in fact related in this way in the theology ofthe Reformation, and they are not subjected to such an interpretation there, The
^

modes can be brought

SCHLEIERMACHER
sole

345

mediation which enters into consideration there is the recognition of the Father in the Son through the Spirit in the strict irreducible opposition of these 'persons' in the Godhead. This mediation cannot be
as a mode of human cognition. It is unusable in But the apologetics. question is whether the theological concern can be preserved, other than at the expense of the interest of apologetics. And conversely the question must be asked whether with Schleiermacher the concern of apologetics has not been preserved at the

made comprehensible

was anthropocentric

expense of that of theology. The fact that Schleiermacher's theology is not in itself a sufficient justification for this
question, let alone that this fact should be

made

the subject of a re-

proach. What certainly does make this question necessary is the way Schleiermacher immunized the concept of revelation, as he has done

by this interpretation, and the way in which he made possible for himself the mediation between his anthropological centre and
the
other,

the

pretation. Let us

Christological centre, by means of this internow try to see in concrete fashion how this came

about.

In order to describe the way Schleiermacher understood we have used the image of the ellipse with its two foci. This image must be supplemented by the further remark that the ellipse tends to become a circle, so that its two foci have the tendency to coincide in one centre-point. But at the same time it is unlikely that this centre-point will lie mid-way between the two foci, since the power of attraction of the first focus is from the outset much stronger than that of the second, and since the second, once the circle has been achieved, might perhaps have vanished altogether,
(a)

the relationship between the two motifs

having succumbed entirely to the

of Christ and Christians and
primarily has in

first.

When

Schleiermacher speaks

mind

is

mutual relationship, what he neither the one nor the other, but one single
their
9

concept embracing both, namely the 'composite life , humanity, the history of 'human nature'. In this history it is a question of the 'redemption' of human nature. This redemption, however, is at the same

time

its fulfilment. It is a question of the furtherance of its 'higher life', of its gradual ascent from the sensory to the spiritual state, from a dim to a powerful consciousness of God. To this extent it is a question of its

approach to the way in which man was originally determined, which was thrown into question by sin. Piety is the condition of being involved in this approach. And if this approach is that which is brought
about by Christ then the condition of Christian piety is that of complete piety in as much as the approach which is brought about by Christ is

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

the most complete of all. For the dignity of Christ consists in a consciousness of God which is utterly powerful, which precludes all sin, and which is posited together with Christ's self-consciousness. The statement that religious consciousness is Christian consciousness is as

much

as to say that it refers to Christ, which in turn is as much as to say that what is real in Christ in its original and perfect form ('archeis likewise gradually imparted to this consciousness. That is redemption through Christ. Redemption is the higher human life of the Christian, which did not have its beginning with the creation, nor in Adam, but perfecting and crowning creation, first in Christ, and

types'),

which now
the
life

also reaches the Christian as an impulse, as movement, as of the spirit of Christ in his Church. That Schleiermacher put the historical element before the psychois

logical at first seems plain: the first influences and the second influenced. But this does not prevent Schleiermacher from

summarizing

the whole

inevitably disconcerting us at the first glance in the title 'Concerning the state of the Christian, in so far as he is aware of the
3

divine grace', as if Christology for all that were merely a smaller circle within the greater one described as 'the state of the Christian , etc. Is it not so ? Does Christ mean significantly more to Schleiermacher than

a special and admittedly most important way of more nearly determining the state of the Christian? Schleiermacher himself does not seem to think it a vain question to ask whether the exaltation of life, as the
process in which we are involved, might not be primary, and the figure of Christ merely the symbol, the reflex, projected back into history, of this original light. This is asserted without contradiction by one of the speakers in the Christmas Celebration. Nor does the other question which was also raised in the Christmas Celebration seem a vain one. I refer to the one as being whether the figure of Christ is anything but the historical point of departure, discovered in retrospect, of that unity of the human and the divine, such as comes about in the self-consciousness of humanity as such. If this putting Christ before Christians is to

stand (and at all events Schleiermacher declares this to be his intention), then according to the way he approaches the problem these

must surely be asked and

together with
distinction
is

it

questions open. This giving of precedence, and the distinction of the two motifs, is relative. The
left

made, but as soon as the point is reached where the between the two distinguished motifs is to be relationship represented, it becomes that their distinction is conceived as a fluid one. It plain
is

fluid within the composite by Christ. But this is in

phenomenon of the higher life inaugurated

process of developing within ourselves, within

SGHLEIERMACHER

347

the composite phenomenon of the single effect of Christ, which embraces his effect just as much as our being affected. Where the one begins and the other leaves off is something as difficult to determine as the question of where with Novalis, art begins and philosophy leaves off, where religion begins and where love leaves off. Redemption,
transition

according to para. 11, 2 of the Doctrine of Faith, is, passively, man's from the bad state of restricted activity of the higher selfconsciousness to the better one of a relative liberation; actively aid given to him to this end by another.
it is

the

and this 'aid* can in fact be distinguished only one from the other. Even if Schleiermacher, too, finds that there exists between them an opposition as between what is and what should be, between receiving and giving, between the continuation
This
'transition'

relatively the

and the beginning, the imitation and the prototype, the general and the particular, we do not lose sight for an instant of the fact that these antitheses are mediated: that they are mediated by means of their
belonging together in the comprehensible composite phenomenon of the higher life. At some point or other they must coincide. And it is only with the prospect of this final coincidence and from this point of

no

distinction that they are distinguished at

all. It is this

our speaking of the mystic element in Schleiermacher.

It also

which justifies makes it

fitting for us to recall in this context Schleiermacher's

proximity to Hegel. His placing of things in opposition is as seriously meant as Eckhart's distinction between God and the soul, as Hegel's distinction

between thesis and anti-thesis. It is meant as seriously as any opposition can be meant whose elimination is pre-supposed and which is therefore bound to come about. Anyone who is in a position to focus Christ and the Christian together, as a composite phenomenon, manifestly knows of a third thing above both, and will thus be capable of distinguishing between them in this manner, only relatively; and putting one before the other is bound to remain questionable in principle, even if he wishes
to

do
(b)

so

and does in fact do

so.

According to Schleiermacher Christ is the Revealer and Redeemer in so far as he effects the higher life. It is this idea of effecting the higher life which we must now investigate. In it Christ, as the
cause,

The

obviously distinguished from the higher life in us, as the 'higher life' means: the development of our existence, and
is

effect.

since

our existence significantly comes about in our consciousness of our existence, or self-consciousness, our self-consciousness, however, being
significantly

determined as pious self-consciousness the development of our piety. In so far Christ should be the cause of our piety. Piety,

34^

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

is

according to Schleiermacher's general definition,

nothing but the

feeling of an effect, the feeling of utter dependence. Consciousness of this utter dependence of ours is the same thing as consciousness of our

connexion with God. According to para. 4 of the Doctrine ofFaithm&n knows that in respect to the world he is relatively free and relatively dependent. If in this relative freedom and dependence in respect to the world he feels that he is at the same time utterly dependent upon something else, which is not the world, then he is pious; he is aware of his connexion with God. The other thing, the Whence of our being, in respect to which we feel that we are utterly dependent, is God. But we cannot actually say 'in respect to which , since feeling, in contrast to knowledge and action, has not anything standing in opposition to it,
9

has not any object. It is only in the feeling of his effect that God is given to us as a cause, and not in any other way. If he were given to us
in

some other way, if he were given to us in some way as an object, then a counter-effect on our part would come about too, in respect of him, so

and not utter dependence. should then not be dealing with God, but with the world. God, therefore, is not given to us as an object. God signifies rather one of several factors
that there would be freedom

We

shaping man's feeling, and it is this factor upon which we 'throw back its being determined as pious feeling. The consciousness of God thus remains 'shut up' in feeling, so that the expression of the idea 'God'
9

itself,

cannot signify anything else but the expression of feeling concerning the most immediate self-reflection. And this quality of God as

not being given as an object, to represent the Whence of our being is, according to Schleiermacher's express declaration, identical with God's 'original revelation'. With the utter dependence of his being, which
pertains to man as it does to everything which is in being, he is also given, as a man, immediate self-consciousness, which is engaged in the
process of

becoming awareness of God; he

is

thus given God,

is

and

his

piety is only the advance of this process which existence as such.

peculiar to his

human

This determination of God's quality as the cause, as seen within the general conception of religion previously posited seems to present Ghristology with the following dilemma. Either Schleiermacher's view
of the matter allows and demands that we should substitute Christ in the very place where he was speaking of God. This would then decide the fact that 'Christ' is not to be understood as an objective quantity,

Whence
itself.

but only as this factor which also determines feeling itself, as the of our existence that cannot be distinguished from our feeling

For

as

an objective quantity Christ could not be that upon which

SCHLEIERMACHER
we

349

are utterly dependent, and thus could not be God. Hence he can only be this other thing in our feeling itself, upon which we "throw back'
its determination as pious feeling. Thus in speaking of him we are speaking immediately of our feeling itself. Thus he is identical with this quality God has of being given, by virtue of which self-consciousness

with

quite naturally becomes consciousness of God. And he is identical this original revelation of God, which precedes all history, and is given with our existence itself. It would therefore be impossible to

speak of a distinction between him and pious feeling as the self-consciousness

which becomes consciousness of God, especially if his were to be treated seriously. Or on the other hand Schleiermacher's view allows and demands that we should at all events understand Christ as an objective quantity, and thus distinguish him from
divinity

pious feeling as such; that

we

should not equate him with the timeless

original revelation, but grant him his historical individuality and think of him in this individuality as a temporal point of reference for pious
feeling. This,

that he

is

however, directly implies that he is part of the world, i.e. of the quintessence of all that in relation to which we have

relative freedom,

and upon which, therefore, we are only relatively dependent. This is to deny the only thing which, according to Schleiermacher's way of thinking, could be his Godhead for all that, within the world, this figure might represent a highest point, a point, perhaps,
of unique excellence, significance and effect he is in this case the climax, the possibly incommensurable climax of the divine power in

mankind

as such,

and hence the stimulator, the possibly incommensur-

able stimulator of the divine power in all others. His ability to stimulate and the others' ability to be stimulated is then, however, not seated in
himself, but in the hidden higher thing, in the consciousness and possession of God, as the bearer of which he would ultimately, even if in a particularly distinguished way, be aligned with everyone else.

possibilities.

Schleiermacher did not opt for the first, but for the second of these He renounced the idea of a purely speculative Christology, but precisely in so doing, according to the premises of his conception of religion, he was bound to renounce the idea of the Deity of Christ or, to put it differently, to understand the Deity of Christ as the incomparable climax and decisive stimulator within the composite

was not possible to arrive at an unequivocal opposition of Christ and Christians from this angle either. The antithesis between, the two is seen through even before it is elaborated, and cannot be a final one. The first thing, and therefore the final thing too is the unity between the two, and the point at which
life

of humanity.

And

it

35
this unity

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

can be perceived is not by any means Christ, but the Christthe of Christ being in principle a view back towards him. view ian, are bound to ask a question concerning the entire concept of

We

Christ's 'effecting',

Schleiermacher
Christ

first

of the relationship of cause and effect, which called upon in order to describe the relationship
in general,

between God and

and the
its

view of

relationship between whether this concept, in question certain naturalism, is not already right from the outset a
Christian.

man

and then the

is

The

symbol for the fact that, according to the premise of his principle of mediation, Schleiermacher, while he wanted to accord precedence
two factors, and asserted that this precedence was in fact existed, incapable of putting this idea into effect with an like ultimate seriousness of intention. anything of This distinction Christ above Christians is that of the 'original (c) fact of the whole of Christianity, of the 'archetypal image', as Schleiermacher was also fond of saying. Christ is the principle of individuation of this religion. He is that power, formed in a certain way, which, thought of as determining and forming, makes this religion precisely what it is. For as Schleiermacher already said in the Addresses^ feeling
to the first of these
5

not without intuition. It is not without the stimulation provided by a certain something which affects religiously, by the action of which there comes about a certain state of being affected religiously. Outside
is is

of this correlation no religion exists. According to Schleiermacher there no religion in itself, no natural religion. Or to put it more exactly:

with the original divine revelation,

natural religion, that original state of being pious, which coincides is for ever real only in a definite, concrete and temporal way. It is in the Finite, in this or the other

There can be no
exponent of

concrete, temporal intuition that the Infinite for ever reveals itself. original divine revelation without the temporal

historical revelation. Religion begins with an incomprehensible fact, with something worthy of thought, with a single, isolated intuition in the sphere of nature, of history or of society, or also in the

own inner life. Religion is always real as positive only when one settles in one such form of central intuition that one acquires a fixed address and active citizen rights in the
sphere of a man's
is

religion. It

But this world is a perfect republic', in so far as none of the forms of central intuition which are possible in it excludes in principle even one of the others which are possible in it, and in so far,
religious world.

rather, as innumerable intuitions of different kinds, and therefore determinations of feeling, have their right, equal in principle, to exist

beside and after each other, as the 'glorious branches into which the

SGHLEIERMACHER
.

351

heavenly tree of the priestly art has distributed its crown and top 9 The one thing which reveals itself in all of them admittedly has its reality only in each individual one, in this or that positive religion. But because it is the individual one each is not for that reason the only one, since it has its truth only in the one thing which is also real in all the other
individual religions.
It is thus, according to para. 10 of the Doctrine of Faith, that the impulse proceeding from Christ imparts to Christianity colour and tone, historical breadth and the possibility for its existence. Religion in this determined impulse is real as Christian But its
religion.

truth,

its

content,
its

is

none the

less

at

highest level, in

its

nothing but the feeling of utter dependence, stamp as awareness of redemption. Revelation,

i.e.

here Christ, is the individualizing element in this religion, and to this extent the effective, realizing element. It has nothing to do with the antithesis between things true and false. All, and revelation is
no,
true. Revelation

the excitement of feeling in an individual, which, moving, conveys itself to others and thus allows a development from the religious individual to a religious a type, a religious
is

species,

religious

community, a Church. In the case of the Christian religion this dominating individual, who impresses himself upon all others and is effective in the after-effects of his spirit, is Christ. That was what Schleiermacher meant when he defended the 'high arbitrariness' of
Christianity against the attacks of Schelling. He fought against the in the natural religion of the Enlightenment: Christianity is not a universal religion of reason, it is positive, revelatory religion. But its positive quality, its character as revelation, is exhausted in the individuality it receives from the manifestation of Christ and his

same opponent

after-effects, Christ is

the archetypal image, the original source, the

original fact.
this religion,

These things mean that he is the historical beginning of this Church, and as such he is the beginning which is

decisive for every age. Christ as the archetypal image is primal, productive, singular, just as in other fields, that, however, of religion

included, every original image or archetype is primal, productive and singular. There is no doubt that Schleiermacher sought to assert

something
asserted

like the absoluteness of Christianity, and continually Strangely enough it was in the pulpit particularly that the problem again and again crossed his path: why Christ in particular? with Why can we not manage without him? Why can we not
it.

manage

someone

answer we have of higher

else? Perhaps with someone else who is yet to come? consists in the constantly repeated protestation that
life

The

everything

we have from

him.

352

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

There can be no doubt about the personal sincerity of this assertion. But it is just this which is in question whether this assertion can be considered as objectively valid, whether the strength of this assertion
can be some other strength beside that of the asserting believer himself, or of the composite life of the community of the Christian Church, from out of whose heritage the preaching believer speaks. Schleiermacher does not seem to be able to say that there is an eternal significance of Christ, an absoluteness of Christianity. At the back of even his most forceful protestations, unrevoked, and irrevocable, unless he is to abandon his basic premise, there stands the fact he established in the
Addresses that the basic outlook of every religion is in itself eternal, since it forms a supplementary part of the infinite whole of religion in

and strength general in which all things must be eternal. The sincerity of the distinction which pious feeling is inclined and determined until further notice to accord to Christ in relation to itself stands and falls
with the sincerity and strength of pious feeling
itself.

The

original fact

of Christ and the fact of my Christianity are links in a chain, and the relationship of mutual determination which links in a chain necessarily

have makes it plainly impossible to assume that the effect they have on one another cannot in principle be reversed. From this angle, too, the way Schleiermacher approaches his task makes it necessary for us to content ourselves with a distinction and an according of precedence which is relative, fluid, and challengeable in principle. The posing of the question of truth can at every instant become a danger to this
distinction.

To summarize: Schleiermacher's Christology has as its summit the indication of a quantitative superiority, dignity and significance in Christ as opposed to our own Christianity. This is as much as to say
that just because the point with Christ is that he has only an incomparably greater quantity of that which we see in ourselves as our Christianity, this indication is ultimately linked with the assertion, the
self-assertion,

of our

own

Christianity.

The two
is

foci of the ellipse

draw

relentlessly closer to

one another, and how

the dissolution and dis-

appearance of the objective moment in the subjective to be prevented? The Word is not so assured here in its independence in respect to faith as should be the case if this theology offaith were a true theology of the Holy Spirit. In

a proper theology of the Holy

Spirit there could

be no question of

dissolving the Word. Here, quite seriously, there is a question of such a dissolution. The only thing which prevents it is Schleiermacher's good
will in not allowing things to develop so far.

This good will must once

again be formally acknowledged, but that in no

way alters the fact that

SGHLEIERMAGHER
we

353

feel ourselves here in all seriousness threatened by this dissolution. Thus it seems necessary for us after all to begin to consider whether what has happened here is that it is not the Holy Spirit, but, as Schleiermacher claims, merely man's religious consciousness which has after all become the theme of theology. In some depth of his mind Schleiermacher must have intended otherwise. This different intention must then have become submerged in the stormy need of the apologist to

make
for

plain the working of the Holy Spirit in the familiar form of religious consciousness. And when he had done this the only thing left

him to do was to equate the objective moment, the Word, with the form, likewise familiar, of that which is historically effective and original, thus arriving at the relative opposition with which he could
do
justice to

modern

cultural consciousness, but possibly not to

Christianity.

Not in explanation, but

like to recall in conclusion yet

in order to illustrate this situation, I should another correspondence in Schleier-

macher's theology, the execution of which raises doubts similar to those which have just forced themselves upon us. I refer to his teaching
of sin and grace. What about this antithesis, forming as it does the theme, and providing the principle according to which the second part of the Doctrine ofFaith is divided ? According to the way Schleiermacher
himself explains it sin and grace are comprised together in the one outer bracket of the consciousness of redemption: sin as the restricted awareness of the higher life, as the absence of ease in originating
pious

moments of life, as the non-domination of the feeling of utter dependence and grace as the ease with which we are capable of

sciousness of

reading into the various sensory stimuli of self-consciousness conGod; consciousness of sin being at the same time that of a human deed, and consciousness of grace being at the same time that
of a divine impartation. There is no true Christian consciousness in which these two states would not be contained, in the relationship of

a More and Less, and thus once again in a quantitative relationship, and indeed in 'fluid differentiation'. Schleiermacher does not consider an objectless, absolute relationship with God, either in the negative or the positive sense, as a possibility that need be taken seriously into account. Our pious self-consciousness simply sways between these two extremes, sharing the inequalities (of development and restriction, pleasure and pain) of temporal life. The Christian is always aware of sin. and grace both in and with one another. That means that with Schleiermacher there can be no question of man's knowing that he is earnestly adjudged a sinner, and equally earnestly ultimately pardoned.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL And this, together with the absence of the vision of man which Luther and Calvin had in the teaching that man was in himself completely
354
sinful

and in Christ completely righteous, probably helps

to explain the

fact that

we cannot reckon, in Schleiermacher, with an ultimate opposition between God and man, between Christ and the Christian. The question as to how it was that Schleiermacher himself was not alarmed by this result, and how he could think as he did in fact think
that he was not destroying Reformation theology, but taking it up and continuing it in a way suited to his time; how he failed to notice

that his result challenged the decisive premise of all Christian theology in a way which had not been known, perhaps, since the days of the
this question presents us with a mystery which We can only establish that the classic representation solved. be cannot which the Christian doctrine found in the great moment when the resulted in spirit of the eighteenth century was fulfilled and overcome the development of an obscurity in its very statement, in the opposition of God and man, an obscurity within which every identifiable sign points to the fact that here man has alone remained master of the field to the extent that he alone is the subject, and Christ has become his predicate. The only consolation we can draw from this discovery is that this cannot be what the Christian Church intends, and therefore could not be what Schleiermacher intended either. The consolation we

ancient Gnostics

draw
is

at this point, a point decisive in the history of recent theology,

however provided by what is truly a maxim of faith and not a maxim of historical knowledge. That which is historically knowable would
leave us here ultimately without comfort.

IX
FEUERBACH
FEUERBAGH was an outsider; not a theologian, but a philosopher engaging in theology. There are few philosophers who have not at some time and in some way engaged in theology. But Feuerbach, the
philosopher, engaged in nothing but theology. 'Strictly speaking,
all

my

writings have only one aim, one sole motivation,

and one

sole

is religion and theology and everything connected with it', he once said. His love seems to have been an unhappy one, for in effect what he practised was anti-theology. But he practised it so

theme. This theme

knowledgeably, and with such relevance to the theological situation of his age, throwing such clear light upon it, and, moreover, in a way so
interesting in
itself,

that

we must allow him to

speak together with the

theologians.

Ludwig Feuerbach was born in Landshut in 1804, studied under Hegel, became a Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) at the University of Erlangen in 1828, and died near Nuremberg in 1872 as a private scholar. Of his numerous writings the most important are Das Wesen des Chnstentums (The Essence of Christianity) (1841) and Das Wesen der Religion (The Essence of Religion) (1851). His aim was a simple, but big one: he sought to take Schleiennacher and Hegel

Daub and

seriously, completely seriously, at the point

where they concurred in

asserting the non-objective quality of God. He wanted, that is, to turn theology, which itself seemed half-inclined towards the same goal,

completely and finally into anthropology; to turn the lovers of

God

into lovers of men, the worshippers into workers, the candidates for the life to come into students of the present life, the Christians into complete

men; he wanted
faith

from

really all, In his eyes even

to turn away from heaven towards the earth, towards love, from Christ towards ourselves, from all, but supernaturalism towards real life.

Kant, Fichte and Hegel are

still

supernaturalists, to

the extent that they are seeking the divine Being in reason, separately from man. The true man is not the xnan sundered from nature, abstracted from the world of the senses, but the man who is identical

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

with the
totality of his

body.

It is

man

in this sense

whom

Feuerbach

would

like to assist in acquiring his birthright. does not want to think as a thinker, but to think, as he expressly says, in 'existence 5 , i.e.

He

which he finds present, as himself, in the world, and co-existing with it. Only the distinction of I and Thou is real. And it is precisely in the experienced unity of this distinction that
man's essence is to be found. The concept of the object is nothing else but the concept of an objective I, and thus of a Thou. By the consciousness of the Thou I become conscious of the world, and with the
world, of myself.

as the living, actual being

And

this consciousness

is

imparted by means of the

senses; truth, reality, the world of the senses, and humanity are identical concepts. The secret of being is the secret of love in the most

comprehensive meaning of the word; which means that ultimately head, heart and stomach jointly seek and find one object. With this premise as his starting-point Feuerbach sets out to transform the theologians into anthropologists but this time in earnest. Feuerbach does not deny either God or theology. In denying the
existence of

an abstract divine Being, divorced from nature and man,

he

merely affirming God's nature as man's true nature. And in denying a false theology distinguishing theological and anthropological
is

is merely affirming anthropology as the true theology. The of Feuerbach's weight feeling is positive. He, too, is singing his MagniHe loves and praises man and his will for life, the will affirms, ficat.

tenets,

he

revealed in the needs, desires and ideals which prompt man to rise above his dependence, his limited and threatened state, to distinguish

between the valuable and the worthless, to struggle for what is valuable, and against what is worthless. And he affirms, loves and praises man's tendency to make absolute the reason, necessity and right of this will for life of his, and thus to become religious in the most diverse ways. Feuerbach would wish us only to perceive and acknowledge that the name of 'God', in which all man's highest, worthiest and most beloved names are concentrated, actually first sprang from the human heart, and that religion is thus in the deepest sense concerned with man himself; he would have us perceive and acknowledge that with God it is a question of man's own will for life, and not of a second, different
it. 'God, as the quintessence of all realities or nothing else but the quintessence, comprehensively summarized for the assistance of the limited individual, of the qualities of the human species, scattered among men, and manifesting them-

thing in opposition to
perfections,
is

selves in the course of

existence

is

world history.' The interest I feel in God's one with the interest I feel in my own existence, and indeed

FEUERBAGH
in

357

my own

everlasting existence,

and

this latter interest is fulfilled in

the consciousness of the species, the consciousness to which I exalt myself in positing God as existing. God is my hidden, assured existence

There is no quality or capacity God, which would not be better, or more simply conceived of as a quality and capacity of the human species, of man as such, which I have occasion in varying degrees to affirm, to aim at, and to believe in in my concrete existence as a man.
as
species.

a member of the

human

attributed

by theological dogmatics

to

Theology

itself

in fact admits in Christology that

God

is

entirely

human. He is human and this is the true Christ in the consciousness of the species, in which we actually partake together of redemption, peace and fellowship. The Word of God should be understood as the
divinity of the

human word,

in so far as

it is

a true word, a self-impart-

ing of the I to the Thou, and thus man's essential nature, and hence again the essence of God himself. Baptism and Holy Communion, in

which Feuerbach took an

especial interest, are manifestly a ceremonial recognition of the divinity and healing power of nature, the divinity of the objects of the pleasure of the senses. And thus the Holy Spirit is the personification of religion itself, the groaning of the creature, the

search afar? Behold, religious feeling's mirrored self. In short: the good things lie at hand! What man, contradicting and doing violence to himself a thousand times, seeks in and from a divine object

Why

these things are his own predicates, or alternatively those of his species. That is the liberating truth Feuerbach seeks to express, at a time

when,

he never tires of stressing, this truth has long since shown be self-evident, through the actual historical course which religion, the Church, and theology have taken. 'Theology has long since become anthropology from the moment when Protestantism itself, and Luther in particular, ceased to be interested in what God is in himself and became emphatically interested in what God is for man. Theology's course of development has irresistibly proceeded in such a
as
itself to
9

way

that

man has come more and more

come
its

to

renounce God, in propor-

it is an open secret that form has long since disappeared, not only from the sphere of reason, but also from the actual life of mankind; and that man's awakened self- consciousness has meant that Christianity in this form is no longer taken seriously. Religion exists. Religion is possible and necessary. But it is man who is the beginning, the middle and the end of religion man and man alone. Whatever else it may imply, this anti-theology of Feuerbach represents a question; a question put by him to the theology of his time, and

tion as he has

to proclaim himself.

And

Christianity in

theological

358

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

perhaps not only in his time. In our previous discussions we have seen how theology was influenced by the belief in humanity which was
developing in opposition to it and suffered itself to be driven into the corner of apologetics. We saw that its whole problem had become how to make religion, revelation and the relationship with God something

which could
at

also be understood as a necessary predicate of man, or any rate how to demonstrate that man had a potentiality, a capacity, for these things. To Feuerbach at all events the meaning of the question is whether the theologian, when he thus formulates the problem, is not after all affirming the thing in which the ascent of humanity seems to culminate in any case, namely man's apotheosis. It was in this sense that, making up his mind quickly and fully approving of it, he wanted to understand and adopt the true aim of that theology. If theology was to be understood in that sense, he wanted to be a theologian himself. Was he in fact completely in the wrong? Had not the theologians themselves tended to work in this same direction before him? We are reminded of Schleiermacher's doctrine of the relationship between God and pious excitement, which, as he expresses it, is manifestly not one which has lost all the characteristics of an encounter. We are reminded

further of Schleiermacher's doctrine of the three dogmatic forms, of which the second and third, the utterances concerning God and the

world, might just as well have been left out; and we are reminded of the same author's Christology and doctrine of atonement, seemingly projected back from the personal experience of the human subject. We

who had already caused the word 'anthropology' to be pronounced and adopted as a slogan within theological circles themselves. think of Hegel and his disciples, and of the might they
think too of de Wette,

We

bestow upon the human mind in its dialectic self-movement; a might which eventually and finally prevails over God too, and his revelation. We think of Tholuck, with his proclamation that it was the 'heart' which was the seat of divine wisdom in man. The question arises whether Feuerbach does not represent the point of intersection where all these lines converge, little as this may have been the intention of their originators; the question whether, taking into account the premises
established at that time, the drawing of this

unwelcome conclusion

be avoided; the question whether the theologians themselves could at least protest to this anti-theologian that he had mistaken their intentions, and that they were seeking something else. But it is not only in the relevance of what he said for his own time that Feuerbach is interesting. The question he represents becomes acute whenever incautious use is made in theology of mystical ideas,
could
effectively

FEUERBACH
of the union of

359

God and man;

other than in an

in fact, whenever these ideas are used eschatologically ensured connexion. And there is

something here which should give us Protestant theologians special food for thought. Feuerbach preferred to call to witness for his interpretation of Christianity, not his theological contemporaries but
faith, in

Luther of all people. First he called to witness Luther's concept of which faith had acquired the nature of a divine hypothesis, and might upon occasion be called the 'creator of the Godhead' in us. Secondly, and chiefly, he called upon Luther's Christology and doctrine of the Lord's Supper. Luther taught, with the over-emphasis of genius, that the Godhead should not be sought in heaven but on earth, in the man Jesus, and then again that Christ's nature as the God-Man should substantially be sought in the sacred elements of Holy Communion. And Lutheran orthodoxy has cast this inspired doctrine into the dogma of the communicatio idiomatum in genere mqjestatico, according to which the
predicates of the divine glory, omnipotence, omnipresence, eternity, etc., are to be attributed to the humanity, as such and in abstracto, of

Jesus;

and this it has expressly called the 'apotheosis* of Christ's humanity. In principle this clearly meant that the higher and lower positions, those of God and man, could be reversed. And what the

theologians of old

had seen

now, to more modern and even

capable of seeming proper for
for centuries

as being right for the person of Christ was less restrained speculating minds,

man

in general.

German

theology had

guarded itself perhaps all too rigidly against the Calvinist corrective, so that it was bound to become uncertain now whether the relationship with God had really in principle to be thought of as irreversible. Hegel, as we saw, emphatically declared that he was a good Lutheran, and so did Feuerbach, in his own way and upon his own level. In the light of Feuerbach's interpretation of Luther, we must ask whether it may not be advisable for us to reflect, as regards the non-reversibility of the relationship with God, upon some things which Luther, in establishing his doctrine, seems to have neglected to ponder. And today especially it should certainly be useful for us at least to be aware that the doctrine of I and Thou was put forward as early as 1840 in the strongest possible form, with Luther as its authority, as the true via regia of faith and revelation. But it was put forward, be it noted,
with
this particular interpretation.

question raised by Feuerbach further becomes acute at the point where it is opposed to all spiritualist understanding of Christianity. The very thing which might at first sight seem to be the weakness of Feuerbach's position,

The

namely

its

sensory

and natural quality

360

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

at

might

any rate be

also

its

particular strength. In speaking of man's

reality as consisting in the unity of head, heart and stomach, is obviously concerned with the same ideas as Menken. It

Feuerbach was man's

existence,

as he stressed with passionate exaggeration, interested him. He sought to have God's which man's sensory existence, life. This might have been a denial human into this Beyond transposed denial of God himself. But a denial or thus a and of God's Beyond

and indeed,

with human life might also neglect of the relationship of God's Beyond idealism and spirituala one-sided it is of denial a God; precisely signify

ism which might cause us in a particularly dangerous way to suspect that the teaching of God is a human illusion. The question arises whether it might not in fact be this whole man, soul and body, of

whom

Feuerbach clearly sought to speak, who really corresponds to God. The question arises whether Feuerbach, with his protest, might not after all have upon his side the radical Easter belief, the belief in the resurrection of the flesh, which prevailed in early Christendom and
still exists

today in the Eastern Churches. One thing is certain here the a common concern unites him with J. T. Beck and the two Blumhardts, and with the theology typical of Wiirttemberg as a whole. It is doubtful whether we can answer Feuerbach, who might upon this
:

fact that

fail to take this point also be in the stronger Christian position, if we concern fully into account. Perhaps, to serve as a basis whereby a

standpoint inwardly superior to Feuerbach's illusionism might be gained, a very real faith in resurrection corresponding to a real faith in God is
necessary.

Feuerbach's doctrine was possible because there were several things

which he

theology. It

failed to see, just like his contemporaries and opponents in was impossible for his contemporaries at any rate to point
It

out his mistakes to him.

just as basic

would have been possible

as those

and sweeping

to object, in terms Feuerbach himself used in speaking

of man and his existence, that 'man's essential being', the "consciousness of the species' which he made the measure of all things and in which he thought he saw man's true divinity, might be a supernatural

same way as Hegel's concept of reason, or any other abstraction. This objection was in fact raised by Max Stirner, a Hegelian living at the same time as Feuerbach, and tending even further to the left than Feuerbach himself. The true man, if he is to be
fiction in exactly the

thought of in completely existentialist terms, should surely be individual man. Like all the theologians of his time, Feuerbach discussed

man

in general,

and in attributing
about

divinity to

him

in his sense

had in

fact not said anything

man

as

he

is

in reality.

And

Feuerbach's

FEUERBAGH
tendency to
individual

361

make the two

largely interchangeable, so that

he speaks of

man as if he were man in general, and thus dares to attribute

divinity to the individual,

is evidently connected with the fact that he does not seem sincerely and earnestly to have taken cognizance either of the wickedness of the individual, or of the fact that this individual

must surely die. If he had been truly aware of this, then he might perhaps have seen the fictitious nature of this concept of generalized man. He would then perhaps have refrained from identifying God with

man, the

real

man, that

is,

who

remains

when

the element of abstrac-

tion has been stripped from him. But the theology of the time was not so fully aware of the individual, or of wickedness or death, that it could instruct Feuerbach upon these points. Its own hypotheses about

God were themselves too little affected by them. were similar to Feuerbach's, and upon this common way they his not defeat him. That was why the theology of rivals could ground his time found it ultimately possible to preserve itself in face of him, as it had preserved itself in face of D. F. Strauss, without summoning an
the relationship with

In

this

energetic cry of 'God preserve us!'

X
STRAUSS
at Ludwigsburg in Wiirttemberg on in Tubingen under the Supranaturalists, and studied January 1808, and Steudel Bengel (grandson of the famous Johann Albrecht of the same name), and under F. Chr. Baur, who was active there from 1826 onwards. He was also taught by Ecshenmayer, the mystic and mantic scholar. His studies in theology and philosophy led him 'from the steppes of Kant and his expounders to the more succulent pastures of

D. F. STRAUSS was born

natural philosophy', 1 to a highly personal union, that is, of the influences ofJakob Bohme, Schelling and Justinus Kerner (the author of the
Seherin von Prevorst

(Wise

Woman

of Prevorst)); then on to Schleier-

temporary goal, which he found in Hegel. 8s6, repeating his course at Tubingen, he wrote his Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (Life of Jesus, a Critical Treatment), a work which made him at once and for many years to come the most famous theologian in Germany and ensured that he would never in his life be considered for any post in the church or in the academic world. In the following years he published a series of polemics in which he sought to defend what he had written and yet was able to give it a milder tone. His appointment as professor of theology in Zurich in 1839 came to nothing owing to the opposition of the conservative element there. Zurich was forced to pension him off. At this he completed his denial of the Bible, Church and dogma, in the two-volume work Die christliche

macher and thence

In 1835 an(l
3C

to his

Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und in ihrem Kampfmit der modemen Wissensdiqft (The Christian Doctrine of Faith in its Historical Development and in its Conflict with Modern Science), (1840-1), and disappeared for a while from the theological arena, becoming a freelance journalist. This was the time of his unhappy marriage, which

ended in separation after four years, to the famous Bohemian singer Agnes Schebest, whose excessive jealousy made his life a misery. The memory of this marriage inflicted upon Strauss a melancholy he was never able to shake off again. Thus it was that his attempt, in 1848, to
i Gesammelte Schrifte (Collected

Works), 1876,

1, p.

125.

STRAUSS

363

enter politics brought him more grief than joy. In 1864 he felt compelled to enter into the theological discussion once more, which had

anew turn through the intervention of the Tubingen school, and wrote a second Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus), this time intended Tor the German people'. In 1865, with Die Halben und die Gan&n (The Halves and the Wholes) he attacked Schenkel's Life of Jesus and the liberal
taken
theology of the Protestant League; during the Franco-Prussian war he conducted a celebrated patriotic correspondence with his French counterpart, Ernest Renan, and concluded his theological writings

with Der die und der neue Glaube (The Old and the New Faith), in 1872, a work whose almost unanimous rejection in every camp embittered
the last days of his life, following as it did upon a long period of loneliness. He died in his native Ludwigsburg on 8th February, 1874.

We

shall first

character. Afterwards

attempt to draw a general picture of his theological we shall turn our attention to the practical

problem which will remain unforgettably connected with his name, and which he was the first to bring to the notice of theology with axiomatic an achievement parallel distinctness, especially in his first Life ofJesus to that of Feuerbach concerning the problem of religion I mean the
problem of God's revelation in history. 'Strauss must be loved in order to be understood', Albert Schweitzer has said. 1 As things stand, however, this can only mean that we must feel sympathy for him. Strauss is not a tragic figure. We must have sympathy for him chiefly because those things in his life which involuntarily give rise to honest regret in the beholder are unconnected with any great and albeit perhaps guilty aims and since they are rather

more

accidental in their nature than necessary, more trivial than daemonic, more liable to evoke head-shakings than fear, and because the sympathy without which we cannot in fact understand him, can scarcely ever be mixed with admiration for the way in which he
suffered, since this

once again evokes yet more pity for him, rather than any respect. But of course: sympathy here, particularly, cannot by any means mean the pity of the objective observer. It may well be that in David Friedrich Strauss, just because there was no tragic quality in him, a secret ailment of the whole of modern theology is focused and represented in a special way, so that it was not without justice that he was
probably the best-known and most influential theologian of the nineteenth century, in non-theological and non-church circles. may reflect upon the great practical problem he raised, which caused him to

We

1 Geschichte der Lebtn-Jesu-Forschung

(The Quest of the Historical Jesus), 1926,

p. 69.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

be so violently
rejected, and think how he effective counter to this rejection; we

was in fact unable

observe

to find

an

may

which was brought upon him truth he unwillingly represented, and on the other by the insufficiency and lack of fertility of his zeal for truth. these we
loneliness

and

in the grief on the one hand by the

him

Observing things involuntarily see not only him, but in a certain aspect the typical theologian of the century, so that we are not then content, like Hausrath, to establish that Strauss was 'essentially a pathological
5
.

figure Strauss's

most significant achievement lies in the historical sphere. It cannot be said that he was a historian in the sense that F. Chr. Baur was, nor one of such standing. He found it possible to write, as as
early

yth April, 1837:

a dry

one. I

beginning to find the manner of pure science was not really meant to be a scholar; I am much too
'I

am

dependent upon mood, and far too self-occupied.' Over and over again he made similar statements about himself. The discovery in historical method he undoubtedly made in his first Life ofJesus he hit upon more by chance than anything. This is shown by the fact that he did not abide by it, in its most decisive feature, in the second, in 1864, and indeed rather found means to adapt his method, in this very decisive feature, to the criticism that had been noised in respect of the first Life ofJesus. How did this come about? 'The mood was no longer there, in which I had written the book originally.' 2 The other, smaller historical works mostly biographical in content which we have from Strauss are not governed by the spirit of cohesive historical research either, or by an actual feeling for the past. In presenting Hutten or Voltaire, Frischlin or Schubert, he was much more concerned, once again upon his own

dream-image of his own existence than with the 'I am not a historian; with me everything has proceeded from dogmatic (or rather 3 anti-dogmatic) concerns/ The hero of a Strauss biography 'had to show intellectual had interests, to have intellectual accomplishments which could be pointed out, and indeed in a direction related to mine; he had to be facing the light, and freedom; an enemy of despots and the priesthood'. 4 Thus his serious attempt to write a biography of Luther was also bound to come to grief simply because he could not but consider Luther's concept of faith as 'something purely 5 irrational, and indeed horrible'. 'A man
historical material as such.
1 D Fr S rauss widdie Theologie n: ! Time), 1876, Vol. 2, p. 390.

confession, with the

seiner %eit
s
&

(D. Fr. Strauss

and the Theology 8/ of his

Works, I, p. 6. * Collected Works, I, p. 3 1

2 Collected

Letter of 22nd July, 1846. Letter of 24th December, 1857 .

STRAUSS
in

365

everything proceeds from the consciousness that he and all men are in themselves utterly depraved, and subject to eternal damnation, from which they can be redeemed only by the blood of Christ and their belief in its power a man with this consciousness as his core is so
alien, so incomprehensible to me, that I could never choose him as the hero of a biography. No matter what other qualities I might love and admire in him, this inmost consciousness of his is so repugnant to me that there could never be any of the question

whom

sympathy existing between him and myself which is indispensable between the biographer and his hero.' 1 Speaking in this way he had in fact, with hostile acumen, seen in Luther what the historians as a rule either cannot or will not see, but he was not himself a historian, Strauss has been called a speculative mind. This is true if we
only look upon Strauss not so much as one who thinks as one who broods, with a passionate, shrewd, and skilful, co-ordinating brooding. Upon points of detail Strauss was without doubt clever, amazingly clearsighted, stimulating

and often amusing

in description

and debate.

What he

completely lacked was the 'thinker's' ability to build up con-

secutively, to construct, to synthesize. In this respect he failed in a way which

rous no

less than,

three times in his

one of

his three

was nothing short of disastEach time it was when writing most important works. The first time was on the
life.

occasion of his
tradition,

first

Life of Jesus. This work, faithful to the Hegelian

really only intended as a critical analysis of the naive conception of Christ, as furnished by tradition, to be followed by a

was

the book.

speculative reconstruction of Christology as the true turning-point of The first part of the programme, the antithesis, was meticu-

lously executed.

What was

to

ever, the very part

which

be the actual positive achievement, howStrauss, according to a letter of the 6th

February, 1832, considered, strangely enough, to be the easiest, remained unwritten, apart from the often-quoted allusions to it in the final section of the second volume. The same thing happened again in 1840-1 in his Doctrine of Faith. What was intended and promised in the polemics preceding it was a positive representation of dogma following a critical reduction of dogmatics, a dogma
conclusively

by speculation, but justified too by this process, in the manner, perhaps, in which A. E. Biedermann later did it in the third part of his dogmatics. All Strauss was able to do, was to steer the ship of dogmatics carefully on to the rocks of a somewhat facile confrontation with Spinoza's and Hegel's philosophy and have it founder there
intellectualized
* Collected Works, I, p. 41.

366
with

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

all hands. The 1,400 pages of this second work were not followed by a positive second part either. The same inability to keep to a system was shown yet again in 1872 in The Old and the New Faith, in which Strauss finally achieved an exposition of the new faith, but in the form

of a journalistic conglomeration of a
little

little

Darwin, a

little

Goethe, a

Lessing, a

little

art criticism,

and a great deal of anonymous,

flatly

bourgeois morality so incoherent that one would suppose its author to have been forsaken by any idea of the form, even, of the art

of philosophy.
devastating

It

was indeed too easy for Nietzsche, in the well-known,

part of his Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen (Untimely to Observations), bring about the old man's literary and philosophical few before the latter met his physical end. Certainly a weeks demise,
first

there can be few who have thought more, more industriously, and more existentially than Strauss in their lives; but even more certainly he

was not a

thinker.

Furthermore, Strauss has been represented as the quasi-daemonic

type of cold, dry, intellectual logic, particularly by his opponents, and he has been made the object of a horrified amazement. And he himself,
in fact, seems to have thought that his strength lay in this direction. He imagined he had discovered in himself the gift of 'dialectic thought',

a substitute for the creative imagination which he lacked. 1 When he went on his first train-journey (between Heidelberg and Mannheim) in 1841, he had, according to a letter of 24th May, 1841, 'no fear, but the feeling that the governing principle of such inventions was most closely related to my own this abstraction, this tearinga of the individual universal away by might, such as occurs with these colossal, gigantic machines is exactly the same principle which we
as
.

is a logic proceeding, were, on rails, by consulting any piece of Strauss's work; the great declaration, of bankruptcy of The Christian Doctrine ofFaith, for instance.

represent in the study of knowledge'. can certainly gain the impression that here

We
it

as

But if we look at his life-work as a whole, we find the term 'spiral', which Hausrath used to describe it, too suggestive of a unity. At this time it was Feuerbach who was characterized by the intellectual logic of the things he wanted, and not Strauss, who wrote of himself on the 1 7th March, 1838, that 'every six years or so an old scholar dies off in me'. Strauss was clever, but not clever as F. Chr. Baur, who was able to lay hold of an idea, and pursue it singly in perhaps very varied form. Strauss was clever, rather, in a very illogical fashion, first in one way, and then in another, just as the cleverness happened to come as a
1 Collected Works, I, p. 12.

STRAUSS
result of all kinds of determining factors

367

which were of an outer rather than an inner nature. At the time when he was becoming a Hegelian, for example, he was able to preach in a faultlessly orthodox way and unobjectionably and successfully answer a prize question of the faculty
the
of Catholic Theology of Tubingen, mark you, upon the resurrection of flesh. 'With complete conviction I proved the resurrection of the

it

dead by exegesis and natural philosophy, and as I made the last point was clear to me that there was nothing in it at all.' 1 Between 1836 and 1840, in consideration of his outer situation too, he was prepared to make concessions, and to compromise about his Life of Jesus, the effects of which had surprised him himself. Then contrariwise in 1840, in anger about his experiences at the hands of the people of Zurich, he notoriously performed a reduction of the Doctrine ofFaith^ instead of a reconstruction, and in the same mood also took back his concessions concerning the Life of Jesus. Then as a private author he advocated a liberal Church and theology once again, in spite of his book of 1840-1. This in no way prevented him from attacking the Liberals from the rear in the sixties, once again chiefly because he had been personally disillusioned. This was precisely the most difficult time that liberalism had in church politics. It did not prevent him from playing off Hengstenberg against Schenkel, and thinking that this very work (The 3 Halves and the Wholes) was 'the best I have ever written in polemics 2 On top of all this he finally, after forty years as an idealist, fell among
.

the materialists

indeed

'like Karl Moor among the robbers' (Hausrath), and the scientific materialists, and of these among the Darwinists, of all people. Arrived at this point Strauss, the pupil of

among

Hegel, was finally unable to recall any argument against man's origin with the apes. Thus, with the best will in the world, we cannot say that Strauss's life-work has a particular tendency or character. The tendit does have is to take the line of the most obvious, of least resistance, of finding the easiest opportunity for striking out at theology or the Church, and justifying again and again the writer's own departure

ency

from their murky kingdom. One's final impression which is Hausrath's too, who was very well disposed to him does little to bear out
convincingly Strauss's realism. It
is

that, deprived of his

grounds for

feeling ill-used and given a respectable professorship somewhere, like all the others he would have been capable of different achievements

in questions of decisive importance, and certainly of taking another ultimate course. In these circumstances it is impossible for us to admire

him

as the
1

champion of intellectual

logic.
2 Collected Works, I, p. 62.

Letter of 8th February, 1838.

368

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

only

we come to the most important point. Strauss offered to his time the sight of the theologian who has become an unbeliever, for all to behold and without denying it. From 1839, at the latest, he wrathfully and zealously stood in opposition not only to
in fact do

And

now

God himself, like Michael Kohlhaas going to law, to finally continuing fight his case as an outlaw, having made of this his life's profession. And contending even beyond the grave, he dispute
the Church, but to

forbade any participation by a clergyman at his funeral already ten 1 years before the event. The denial he gave, as for instance in his

a very angry one. I have encircled and assaulted theism from every side, and bested the language of pantheism from an open position', he triumphs in a letter of ayth February, 2 1840. The chapter on the Church concludes with the frank declaration that theology today could only still be productive by carrying out the task of destruction. Its task at the present time was to demolish a building which no longer fitted in with the architectural plan for the new world, and to demolish it in such a way that, even if it was not
Doctrine of Faith,
is

truly

brought down upon the heads of its inhabitants, their gradual departure would be in part awaited, and in part accelerated. The study of theology, once the path to the ministry, was now the best way to

For as dogma was the outlook upon life of an idiot consciousness, theology being however the knowledge of this consciousness, this knowledge had at the present time become so critically

become

unfit for

it.

penetrating, owing to the influence of philosophy, that anyone arriving at such a science would of necessity abandon that of which it is a science, namely the outlook upon life of an idiot consciousness.

We
at

should soon be reaching the state where the only people who could still be considered for the office of clergymen would be religious idiots

and those

theologically self-taught, those speaking

and presiding

pietist gatherings.

'The religious chord in him gave forth no sound', Hausrath laments, considers it to be Strauss's greatest failing that he simply did not understand that religion was not a matter for thought, but for feeling: a way of sensing God, and tuning oneself to the world'. 3 If it had been a matter of feeling, sense and mood he would inevitably have been the

and
c

most

faithful theologian, for

with these things he was richly endowed,

indeed to the point of over-sensibility. If this had been in question, then we might still have held it to his credit that in the time before he became critical, at the end of the twenties, he too experienced a revival
it
1

was, after

all,

not for nothing that he lived at the same time as

1863.
2 Vol. 2, p. 624.
3

Letter of sand

May,

Op.

cit., I,

p. 6; II, p. 391.

STRAUSS

369

Ludwig Hofacker, Albert Knapp and the other fathers of Wiirttemberg neo-pietism and sang of it in a poem, the last verse of which runs:
Yes, be

Thou

sun,

and

I the tree,

Be Thou the streamlet on the lea, And I the grass-blade close to Thee; O let me ne'er be rich and mine
But only, Jesus, poor and Thine! 1
should be deceiving ourselves if the many angry words which Strauss put on paper about the Church and theology and everything that has to do with them were to tempt us to think straightaway of
those souls which, according to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, are hardened from eternity. Strauss did make such a markedly antiChristian impression upon not a few of his contemporaries. Above all he himself continually flirted with his unbelief in such a way that we cannot help taking the phenomenon into account. But I strongly
advise anyone who today is still perhaps tempted to behold in him something like the spirit which constantly denies, to read his The Old and the New Faith. For the impression this work gives is that this heretic and unbeliever, who appears to be so dreadful, is in fact basically nothing but a Central European rejoicing in his learning, but not, unfortunately, quite content with himself and the world about him. The hell which quite properly seems to contain him is more like a 'home, sweet home' or Gartenlaube* than an inferno such as Dante or the
cheerful Angelus Silesius

But hopeful gazing up to Thee;

We

saw and described. The book has four

parts
1.

Are we

still

Christians?

necessary for us to

Answer: No, because first it is no longer be Christians, and secondly, it does not suit us any

more.
2. Are we still religious? Answer: 'Yes or No, according to what you mean by religion.' And yet Yes, in so far as, in spite of Schopenhauer, we are happy in a feeling of dependence upon the All, for which in the face of such pessimists, we demand most decidedly the same piety as the

pious man of former times demanded for his God. 'Our feeling for the All reacts, if it is done injury, in absolutely religious fashion' 3 after
all,

then: Yes!

3. What is our conception of the world? Answer: We arrive at it by a free interpretation of Kant-Laplace, Lamarck, Darwin, Haeckel
1

1827 or 1828,

Collected Works,

2 Lit. : arbour; title of a once 3 Collected Works, VI, p. 97.

XII, p. 96. popular illustrated German family magazine

(Tr.)-

37
i.e.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

as infinite,

animated matter, engaged in an ascent to ever higher

forms.
4. How do we order our lives? Answer: In determining ourselves in accordance with the idea of the species' This is then elucidated by a

loosely-linked series of observations on the necessity of monogamy, but also on the right to divorce, on the justification for war and capital on the excellence of the feeling of nationalism as compared punishment,

with

cosmopolitanism, on the rights of the monarchy and nobility (although the author himself is proud that he is a bourgeois), on the
all

on the

dangers of a social democracy., on the sanctity of private property, and necessity for a corresponding limitation of the right of universal

suffrage. All this

is well in keeping with the fact that Strauss was so deeply shocked by the revolution of 1848, almost before it was there, as only a good Conservative could be at that time, and that he

expressly

yearned for the old police

Christoph Blumhardt fifty years later, he had, paradoxically, become a member of the Wiirttemberg Parliament, he spoke, upon the occasion of the shooting of Robert Blum, emphatically against a demonstration of that
parliament in his favour, and, finally, that he openly declared 2 that he would rather be governed in the Russian than in the democratic manner. In conclusion there is a description of how those for whom the book is supposed to have been written spend their Sunday, as distinct from those who profess the old faith: they do this with political discussions, and then with studies in history and natural science, with edification from Hermann and Dorothea, and finally with performances of works by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. A stimulant to mind and spirit, humour and imagination, such as leaves nothing to be desired. 3 Thus we live, thus we pass blissfully upon our
C

state';

further, that

when,

like

way we tell ourselves on reading this, was not the Antichrist by any means. And almost the last thing there is to be said about the
I'

Strauss,

non-tragic quality of his general attitude and this our sympathy is that he did not even have the
stature of a true evil heretic. It
is

is

just

qualifications

that the result of all his

by no means an appalling Promethean uproar, but for all

flat

what evokes and the negations was

his

which Nietzsche then poured such cruel scorn

1

denials of God always only this self-conscious intellectual bourgeois quality, which was always morose, without the slightest notion of all the true heights and depths of life, the bourgeois quality in its specific national German form at the sunset hour of the age of Goethe,
as the

attempted

upon embodiment of

Letter of isth April, 1848.

3 Collected

Letter of 26th February, 1852.

I 9 8f.

Works, VI, pp.

STRAUSS
the philistine of culture mens of Strauss's poetry:
I
e

371

9
.

quote in conclusion

two very good

speci-

longed to travel; now I do not leave. yet I do not know, if I shall stay. Certain it is that here's a foreign land And where my true one is, I cannot say. I think I once had children, two, and dear; But yet I know not if it was a dream. wife I spurned, if love to hatred turned, hatred turned to love, I do not know. Books I used to write, or so they say If they speak truth, or mock, I cannot tell. I hear, an unbeliever I am called: I know not if I am not rather pious. The thought of death has never caused me fear: I know not if I am not long since dead. 1

And

A A

He
She

to

whom
that I

thus lament

Knows
to

am not
I

whom
that I

lamenting; thus comment,

Knows

am not
dies;

Like a light

we

near fainting. fade today,

As a glow that

Slowly we are borne away, As a sound that flies.

May this final flicker, May this sound but be

Pure and clear However weak
for ever
it

be* 2

poems without a sense of sympathy must and may, however, be said that this is not the speech of the Antichrist; nor of Prometheus; nor of any true, perilous spirit of rebellion. It can in fact only be the speech, always a little haughty, and always a bit disillusioned, of the true nineteenth century. And if there are those who are perhaps inclined to admire and praise the 'truthfulness' of such language, and that of Strauss's language
certainly cannot read these
for

We

a fellow

human being.

It

3 altogether, then they should at all events grant that Albert Schweitzer was right in describing it as an 'uncreative truthfulness*.

to say about Strauss then the question, the admittedly serious question, with which we should have to take leave of him, could only be the one to which we have already alluded : whether If that

were

all

there

is

it

was not that with him something was nakedly revealed to the
1
2
3

light

1848, Collected Works, XII, p. 64; for orginal, cf. Appendix, p. 421. agth December, 1873, Collected Works, XII, p. 226; for original, cf. Appendix, p. 42^.

Op.

tit.,

p. 78.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

which remained more or
fortunate figures
so
less

hidden in those more

brilliant

and more

or those, rather,

who

did not lay themselves open

as he did, who were his close neighbours in theology and, whether the common hidden element in all nineteenth-century further, which became manifest with Strauss was not so much a theology sin of wickedness, but just one of an extraordinary weakness ? particular

much

But this does not conclude our discussion of Strauss and his significance for the theology of more recent times. We turn our attention now and here our task becomes more difficult to the author of the Life
of Jesus.
First, as

characteristic things
title,

a general appraisal of this work, I shall relate some of the which Strauss said in the second book with this the Life of Jesus of 1864. Paragraphs 33 and 34 are concerned

with 'the religious consciousness of Jesus'. Jesus's religious consciousness, Strauss begins,

his consciousness that

must have been there first, as the original thing, he was the Messiah being the form this religious

consciousness only subsequently took. According to the meaning of the Gospel according to St John, which could not be explained away,

Jesus considered himself as the personal divine

Word

which had been with God from

eternity,

which then became

of the Creator, man for a

while, for the sake of redemption, and then afterwards returned to God. cannot possibly suppose that Jesus really did this. For first,

We

in the accredited story no example of such a consciousness

us.

is

known

to

But if we were to meet a man with such consciousness, we should take him to be a half-wit or a deceiver. Jesus as described by St John, with his 'he that seeth me seeth him that sent me and *I and my Father are one', must inevitably be as contemptible to us as Louis XIV with his, I am the state'. The finer a man's religious sense is, the less he will be able to forget, for all the liveliness of his feelings, that in the equation between his human self-awareness and his awareness of God there is always an indivisible remainder. Thus we can do nothing with the speeches of the Christ of the Fourth Gospel. 'A Jesus who takes it upon himself to say such things does not exist as an object of historical
9 ,
S

study.'

Things are different

if

we

take the Synoptic Gospels as our

guide. Here we learn, from the that Jesus saw in him whom he

Sermon on the Mount, particularly, felt and conceived as God, and des-

cribed as the 'heavenly Father', 'indiscriminate goodness'. This indiscriminate goodness was manifestly the basic mood of his own nature. He was aware of his similarity with God in having such goodness, and
transferred
it

to

God

as the basic determining feature of the divine

STRAUSS
nature as well. If

373

are the children of this God, then they are brothers to one another, and to this extent Jesus's consciousness may also be described as a human mood of love transcending all the hindrances and limitations of human
life, a mood which then gave rise to an inner feeling of happiness, compared with which all outward joy and suffering was deprived of its meaning. Serene and cheerful, unbroken, and acting as the result of the delight and joyousness of a

men

beautiful nature, Jesus had, 'to use the poet's words, absorbed the Deity into his will', thus uniting in himself the best of the Hellenic and

of the Mosaic heritage. This harmonious composure of mind certainly did not come about in Jesus without violent exertion, but it certainly

came about

(as distinct

inner struggle.

He

from Paul, Augustine and Luther) without an appears as a fundamentally beautiful nature, whose

only development comes from within, which only needed to grow ever more clearly conscious of itself and to become ever firmer in itself, but

which did not need to turn back and apart from isolated waverings and errors, and the necessity for a progressive, earnest endeavour for self-vanquishment and renunciation begin any other life. This, according to the Strauss of 1864, was Jesus's religious consciousness, as
it

historically really was, according to the Synoptic Gospels. With regard to the Messianic form of this consciousness, too, which for all this cannot be removed from the Synoptics, Strauss was able to judge

at this time with understanding mildness: Did Jesus believe that he would come again in the clouds of the heavens ? . . Are we not thinking
.

too

in western fashion, if we cannot conceive of the conjunction of such an idea with great wisdom in an Oriental?' 1 What points of

much

view such deliberations might eventually have stimulated even in

respect of the Christology of St John's Gospel! Let us follow this with what Strauss finds to say in the final paragraphs, Nos. 99 and 100, of the same work, about the significance of
this Jesus for us.

Our

historical information concerning

him

is

in-

complete and uncertain. It is out of the question that faith and salvation can depend on things only the smallest part of which are not in doubt. And, in any case, it is a matter of principle that there should be no such dependence. 'Just as certainly as the destiny of man is a universal one and accessible to all, so the conditions upon which it is to be

must be accorded to every man' the perception of the goal must 'not only be an accidental one, a historical perception coming from without, but a necessary perception of reason, which each man can find in himself. The distinguishing of the historical from the ideal
achieved
.

* Letter of gth

November, 1862.

374

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL Christ, i.e. the original image of man as he should be, which resides
reason, and the transference of the
faith

in

human
first

which saves from the

is the imperative result of the more recent of mind. It is 'the continued development of the religion development of Christ to a religion of humanity, towards which all the nobler

to the second figure,

endeavour of our time is directed'. This does not imply that this original image, the ideal Christ, could be present in us to the same extent, if a historical Christ had never
lived

and

exercised his influence.

is

The

idea of

human

perfection, like

other ideas,

at first given to

man only

as a disposition,

which

is

then

gradually developed in its actual form. It is those who variously advance the human ideal, among whom Christ in every case predominates, who serve the development of this disposition. 'He intro-

duced features into this ideal which were previously lacking, or which had remained undeveloped, curbed others which opposed its universal validity, and by the religious form he gave it he bestowed upon it a higher consecration; by its embodiment in his own person, a most lively warmth.' Even if he was not the first or the last of his kind, and even if
important aspects of the
state,

human

ideal, e.g.

regard for the family, the

and art, are missing from his shaping of it, yet all the features with which it would be desirable to supplement this ideal can be added to his version of it in the happiest manner, 'if only we have once understood that Jesus's version is itself a human achievement, and thus something which is as in need of development as it is capable of

On the other hand, to conceive of Christ as the God-man can only hinder us in thus making fruitful his moral and religious greatness. The purpose of critical research into his life is therefore the removal of all
it'.

that which makes of him a more than human being. This is something which is a well-meant and at first perhaps beneficial illusion, but which,
in the long run, is harmful, and nowadays quite destructive. Critical research must also aim at the restoration of the picture of the historical

Jesus in his simple, human features, in so far as this can still be accomplished; and, for the good of their souls, the direction of men to the
ideal Christ, this pattern of moral perfection. Concerning this pattern the historical Jesus has indeed thrown light on several salient features, but as a disposition it just as surely belongs to the universal heritage of

task

further development and completion can only be the as a whole. This, then, according to the Strauss of 1864, * s *he significance of Jesus for us. To summarize: in 1864 Strauss thought that there was a historical
its

our species, as

and work of humanity

core to the

'life

of Jesus', which was shrouded in a veil of myth. With

STRAUSS
John
it

375

was a thick veil, with the Synoptics not so thick, but on the whole it was not impenetrable. It was difficult but not quite
to distinguish the core as such. This core consists in which made actual to a high degree the
religious disposition, and to this extent the disposition of as such. Together with others of its kind this personality should be assessed by us not, indeed, as the basis, in the strict sense, for our achievement of our human but

impossible

a human personality

man

destiny, certainly as the means towards this end. If Strauss had said this in his first and famous Life ofJesus in 1835-6, it would definitely not have become famous, and it would not have cost its author his which at that time place at the university. As

something could be regarded as having the attraction of a certain harmless novelty it would have brought him to the heaven of a university post in the usual way; and nothing would have been known of the
great

vexation which the

very day. In neither infamous nor famous. It might perhaps have got him his desired chair at the eleventh hour, as the document of a definite, but none the less only mildly sinning common or garden liberalism, which had, in the meantime, long become the common cry, if the stir which
the famously infamous book of 1835-6 had caused had not still lingered on and blinded the people of the time to the fact that the true offending

F. Strauss symbolizes in theology to this contrast to the first, Strauss's second Life of Jesus became

name D.

element of the first book, that of its method, had to all intents and purposes been removed in the second. For in principle and in method this second book was in fact a Life of Jesus of the kind any number of
others have written both before

and

after

him.

element in Christianity, that is, concretely, Christology, had admittedly given the founders of the theology of more recent times some trouble. But they had all managed to cope with it
historical

The

in one

way

conscious

and possessed of

or another. Quite naively they thought man could be religion, of the consciousness of God, the

experience of transcendence, the Christian quality within himself, as

something which was there and given, something which could be joyfully reckoned with. They thought man could be conscious and
possessed of the historical basis for religion in the same way, no matter whether one understood it like Schleiermacher, more as a historical

beginning, or, like Marheineke,

lastly, like

more

as a metaphysical origin, or

Tholuck and Menken

the 'Positives' of that time

more

as

the supernatural divine imparting of religion.

unquestioningly as
their belief that
it

They used history just as they used psychology. They were unquestioning in
was
possible truly to

assume in individual

man

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

like, for example, the feeling of utter dependence, with God as the content of its object. the other hand they were unquestioning in their belief that somewhere in the related whole of man's

something

On

history there might be something like a perfect archetypal image of this, man's own possession, something given, to which in accordance with the correlation between Christ and faith handed down by the Church

the thing given within man himself could equally calmly and surely be referred back. The Romanticism and the rationalism which allowed

the

men

of this age to discover the presence of God's miraculous

quality in their hearts, or God's reason in their heads, also enabled them to assume that this miracle or reason very had its

probably

absolute place in history too, and to state, in accordance with church tradition, that this place was in Jesus of Nazareth. The age which

could not produce and consume enough biographies and autobiographies to the glorification of that which the man of that time found within himself this same age inevitably hit upon the idea of a
Jesus,

Life of into effect, both before and after Strauss, with the daring peculiar to it for such undertakings in the most varied forms;

and put

it

and always with the assumption that the one was as possible as the other. In detail, it was possible to proceed in varied ways with this it was possible to read and evaluate the sources in the naively historical
:

method was chosen, one could did, give preference to the Gospel according to St John at the expense of the Synoptics. Or one
as Schleiermacher

or in the critically historical manner. If the latter

and Hase

could reverse this relationship as gradually became the accepted after Bretschneider's Probabilia of 1820. Then again it was possible to accord the rank of the oldest reporter among the Synoptics to Matthew, as Strauss did in 1864 and as F. Chr. Baur too wanted to do, or it was possible, as came to be the vogue at about the same time, to join the 'lions of St Mark', with or without assuming the existence of a source of sayings supplementing his Gospel. Or, like Eichhorn, one could think of an original Gospel which had been lost, or, as in Schleiermacher's theory of diegesis, which is once again becoming interesting today, of a great number of anecdotes and gnomic

method

singly as representing the

New Testament in its original form.

sayings circulating

it was possible to conceive of the relationship between the and the events reports reported, particularly as regards their largely miraculous nature, in such a way that one attempted to interpret them in some manner, i.e. to explain them as things which really happened. This could be done by juggling away the supernatural element in

Further,

the reports as misunderstanding of

all

previous exegesis, or as a

STRAUSS

377

misunderstanding of the reporters himself, thus evolving a life of Christ which could be concurred in even if one's name happened to be

Wegscheider

(this

was done in

classic fashion, for the rationalists,

by

Paulus of Heidelberg). Or one could take refuge (this was the course of the so-called supranaturalists, also that of Tholuck and Neander) in the allusion to all kinds of as yet unknown forces of nature, to the
hastening of natural processes, and above all to a dominion, incalculable in its effects, of mind over matter, as providing the explanation a
solution

which was assured of great

interest

decades,

when magnetism,

occultism,

and applause in those and everything connected with

them were the subject of a deep fascination. One could also proceed by mediating or combining these two methods. Schleiermacher, for instance, had a foot in both camps, being a supranaturalist as far as all the miracles of healing were concerned, and a rationalist, for example,
in the question ofJesus's resurrection, which he fairly openly explained as an awakening from a deep coma, in the pulpit too.

words 'poetry and 'poetic' also had a quite individual, and indeed, a good sound, one could bring in the concept of myth, the idea that a story did not really happen, but was invented to illustrate a religious truth. The concept of myth was introduced at about this time by de Wette, at first for research into the
Finally, since in those decades the

Old Testament. It was, however, ventured upon only hesitantly, and applied only to the stories of the childhood of Jesus and of his resurrection and then only by a few. It was possible to concede that the
historical events might largely be surrounded, and perhaps permeated to their very core by such myth, without being deceived that between the cloud at the foot and the cloud at the summit of the mountain there

was yet a great deal of the mountain visible in between, a lot of material which was no doubt historical, or which could at least be interpreted historically by either of these two methods. And then again differences were possible in the evaluation of the life of Jesus established in this way. It was possible to evolve a figure very similar to the God-man of the old dogmatics, and to which his soteriological predicates could be transferred with relative ease; the only difference was that the attempt was now made to understand this figure quite decisively as a divinely powerful one in the history of the world and of mankind as such. With Wegscheider, it was possible to revere in him the doctor divinus of the
truth of reason

common

to all

men, or with Schleiermacher, the pro-

ductive archetypal image of one's own experience or that of the Christian Church, or, as we have just heard in discussing the Strauss of
1864, the religious genius, to

whom

one could then perhaps again

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

ascribe, in retrospect, some of the predicates of the God-man. It was possible to present and illuminate the once-for-all-ness and necessity of the revelation which came about in none other than this once

Jesus

again with variations in strength, and by the use of various arguments. All these possible methods of writing a Life of Jesus are in part strikingly divergent, but there are five points which are agreed upon in all of them:
1.

As

faith has its reality in the

is

immanence of human

consciousness,

so

a connexion within the immanence of history. As we have faith in the same way as we have other capacities or experiences, so we have Christ in the same way, in principle, as we have other people. 2. We have Christ as a person of a distant by-gone time, in so far as we have 'sources' of his life. For the Gospels are sources. They were
its

correlation to Christ

written as such, or it is as such that they interest us; at any rate it is as sources that we now use them. can employ them as sources in the

We

same way even if perhaps we subject them to the same provisos as someone interested in the history of the kings of Rome would employ
the books of Livy. are seeking the historical Jesus for we want to have him 3. historically, as we have other historical personages. He can be distinguished from the sources (or how else, indeed, could they be sources?). He can be recognized according to the sources, from the sources, and upon the basis of the sources as he lived and as he was, at a certain time and in a certain place. He can be perceived as clearly or as dimly as we can perceive his the contemporary, emperor Tiberius. He stands and becomes visible behind the sources in such a in

We

way, not merely Matthew or John whom we have, but in truth Jesus, as 'the historical core of what they have imparted. 4. Jesus is a human personage who is in accessible to
:

fact, that historically it is

principle

historical

knowledge in precisely the same measure as Tiberius is accessible to it. The way in which he was conscious of himself is a form of self-consciousness which is at least conceivable, which is possible
perhaps not quite in the
in the

way in

way in which John presents it, but at any rate which it is shown in the much more innocuous Sermon on who knows,
too
!

the

Mount

but

the positive theologians say, perhaps as

depicted by John can, as has been shown, in some way come to terms with his miracles, with virgin birth and resurrection, divesting them of their true miraculous character by describing them as misunderstandings,

We

379 myth; or by somewhat enlarging ad hoc the concept of what is historical, calling historically real something one would never otherwise be prepared to call historically possible. In one way or the other: by regarding the miracle as a frame from which the content can be distinguished. The content, however, is the man Jesus, who was certainly a religious genius, and as such an extraordinary, an astonishing man, a man to be adored, but one who, like all men, is accessible to our understanding, and comprehensible as an object of historical knowledge. Let us constantly remind ourselves if something like the feeling of utter dependence can find a place in the picture we form of ourselves, then why cannot someone like Jesus

STRAUSS

hidden

secrets of nature, or as

Christ also find a place in our picture of history? It will be a Jesus reduced in stature and hammered into shape, perhaps, a Jesus who is perhaps a trifle groomed, domesticated and made when
practicable

the strange things which are said of him in the texts, even in the 'Life of Jesus' versions of positive theology. But it is
all

compared with

precisely in this way that he will find a place there, even if only just so that a historically immanent connexion between him and our faith

becomes possible in principle. 5. As a personage who is so possible and comprehensible historically Jesus in fact is of the highest value for us, as can once again be established historically. He is then a central person, or the central person, the man who was perfect to the extent that we can call him a revealer of God, and indeed the chief revealer, as Strauss too concedes in 1864, from among all those whom people believe they can thus designate apart from him. These then are the common assumptions for modern research into
the
of Jesus. Strauss' s Life of Jesus of 1864 no longer diverged from were concerned it no longer offended. For in it them; Strauss found a way of coping with the problem of Ghristology which
life

as far as they

was no better and no worse than that of any of the others. That was why it was not the famous Life of Jesus. That was why, although it could not further its author's reputation with the public and with the authorities, it did it no more damage either. That is why its only
significance for the history of theology is that it helps, by contrast, to illustrate what the name of D. F. Strauss really stands for. Let us turn our attention now to the author of the first Life ofJesus of 1835-6. The

name of D.
up

F. Strauss stands for

of this concerted

no more and no less than the breakingbody of opinion about research into the life of
its

Jesus, the protest against

method, the declaration that

is

its

entire

undertaking was impossible

to execute. This

important enough to

380

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

five

warrant a point by point demonstration with reference to the headings we have just drawn up.
1.

In 1835 Strauss demands from the biographer ofJesus, as his first duty, an observation and thinking which is without premises which is not, that is, burdened in advance by faith. If he really wants to write a biography of Jesus, if he wants to have Jesus as we can have other men, then he has to choose not faith, but an observation and thinking which has no interest in faith. For we cannot expect to find what we believe, as such, in history. And that which we wish to seek in history must as such be accessible to this disinterested observation and
thinking.

the historical

By making this distinction Strauss challenged from the outset immanence of the connexion between Christ and faith. It is now a question of whether the object of faith on the one side, and that of observation and thinking on the other, will prove to be one and
the same.
2. In 1835, condemned by every New Testament scholar who followed him, Strauss does not begin with a critique of the sources as such, by establishing the order of precedence of the four Gospels, or

dependence upon one another, or with hypotheses concerning original pre-manuscript sources or some such thing, as in fact as a historian it was his duty to do, and has been done universally since. Even afterwards he accorded the labours his colleagues directed to this end little more than an ironical scepticism. He himself mentions 1 that it was only seven years after his book appeared that he had the idea of a pasting together synopsis according to Luther's translation For him
their
!

John and Mark and i Corinthians 15 are all equally damned in advance when judged by the canon of critical historical thinking with which he approaches them, and which can be roughly formulated in the following questions: To what extent can what is recounted be reconciled with the logical, historical and physiological law, otherwise known and valid, governing all events ? To what extent can parallel reports really be reconciled with one another in what concerns time and place, the number and names of the participants in what is reported, in that which concerns the circumstances and material for these affairs themselves? And then, above all: To what extent does the
poetical character of

a representation or its content as far as it is contained also in other sources (e.g. in the Old Testament or in pagan

saga and myth) make its historical nature not unlikely ? We can imagine what the answer is: Upon all points, so to speak, the form of the New

Testament narrative

is
1

not that of a historical report, but simply that

Letter of 2 yth January, 1843.

STRAUSS
of a myth. So strong
these sources that he
is

381

Strauss's impression of the particular nature of makes their disqualification as historical sources

the starting-point for his method.

And

all

he has to say about them,

simply as regards their content, without testing them further as historical sources is that none of them, with the exception of scattered
remnants, stands firm before this canon, that they cannot derive from eye-witnesses and thus cannot come from the apostles, unless we care to
regard them as deceivers. 3. It is for this very reason

Strauss's first Life ofJesus so celebrated

and this was the chief thing which made and notorious that he not only

does not discover a 'historical core' to the life ofJesus, but does not even

begin to enquire after

possibility, as

it. He does not deny that a historical core is a Bruno Bauer did later, and as Kalthoff and Artur Drews have done in our century. But neither does he assert and demonstrate

a historical core to the

life

of Jesus. Strauss

is

not interested in
5

it.

His

work is purely critical. He is only concerned with showing the presence and origin of myth, whatever might be 'behind it. That is what went home to the hearers of 1835 and had an effect in all directions. Here as well it was only that something was being challenged. But it was challenged comprehensively and thoroughly: where was the possibility of a method which made the historical correlate of faith uncertain in the same way as Feuerbach's psychology of religion made from this its metaphysical correlate uncertain. The supporting staff could also be a reed to pierce the hand. That is why aspect, history the Strauss of 1835 ^ a<i everyone against him: from Hengstenberg to de Wette, who had yet himself admitted the enemy, the concept of myth, at least into the forecourt, into scientific research into the Old Testament. That is why the cry could now be heard even from those

who were
make

Strauss the explainer of

supposedly orthodox: Better Paulus the rationalist than myth Paulus, even if his interpretation did
!

things a trifle shabby, at least let everything stand as historical, whereas Strauss made everything, without exception, historically

uncertain.

may be easily understood, did not go to any trouble, work out a character picture of Jesus. He was lacking in the vision which perceives, to use WeinePs words 1 'that what truly gives human history its greatness, worth and power is the great personality of genius'. He had not yet read any Carlyle! Does not the problem of personality interest him at all? This can scarcely be maintained of a
4. Strauss, as

either, to

man who
1

afterwards, as a historian, preferred to occupy himself in the

Jesus im 19 Jahrhundert (Jesus in the Nineteenth Century), p. 42.

382
biographical

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

field.

Or perhaps he is not interested in the person of he Jesus? perhaps hampered by the fact that the Evangelists themselves are much more interested in something quite different from the actual character of Jesus, these miracles, for instance, which are the cause of so much offence? So that he thinks, perhaps, that he has no material for such a picture? Suffice it to say that the picture is not drawn. The very cause, that is to say, for the sake of which the other researchers into the life of Jesus, before and after Strauss, marched out with sword and lance, is neglected. Jesus should be accessible, understandable as a man, so that we could 'have' him, as we have other men. But Strauss's lack of concern and his silence upon this point made it seem as if Jesus were inaccessible and incomprehensible as a man, and as if we might not, therefore, be able thus to have him. 5. The Strauss of 1835 also quarrelled with the view that it was possible, with the instruments of observation and thinking, to ascribe

Or

is

to this historical

in particular, to Jesus of Nazareth, a a qualified highest value, unique and absolute quality. The final section of his second volume (1836), in which he expresses himself

phenomenon

upon this point, is so important for the history of theology, that here we him to speak for himself a little: If reality is ascribed to the idea of the unity of divine and human nature is this as much as to say that it must once have become real in one individual, as it was never again either before or since ? This is by no means the way in which the idea realizes itself, pouring out its whole abundance upon one example and begrudging itself to all others. Rather it likes to
should allow
unfold its wealth in a diversity of examples which complement each other, in the interchange of individualities one in decline, the other
rising.'

Humanity is the absolute, the true content of Christology. This content has been made to be attached to the person and history of
an individual

only, but this has been done for the subjective reason, that this individual, by his personality and the things which happened to him, became the occasion for the lifting of this content
first,

level of the

into the universal consciousness, and, secondly, that the intellectual world of former times, and of a nation at any time, is only

capable of contemplating the idea of humanity in the concrete figure of an individual. The knowledge we have acquired in our age,
.
.

however, can no longer suppress the awareness that the connexion with an individual is but the form of this teaching relating to a certain time and a certain people.
5

The
the

positive element in Strauss's position,

fifth point,

could and

still

which becomes can be disconcerting, and yet

visible in
it

cannot

STRAUSS

383

be overlooked that its negative side had enough weight behind it to lay the axe at the root of the naivete with which the rest of theology at that time thought it could master revelation in the same way as history in general is mastered. Something absolute as a part of world and of human history as such is a sword of lath. Strauss's book made this veryplain and well understood, and those who read it were shaken to the core, for it was precisely upon the card of history that they had staked no less than half their means, the other half being on that of religious
consciousness.

The situation was such that in running away from Feuer-

bach they ran

somehow

was a hundred years ago the deeply disturbing background to the history
:

straight into the arms of Strauss. And if they managed to escape Strauss they were still not free of Feuerbach. That the deeply disturbing feature of the state of theological discussion

of theology in

the ensuing decades. Strauss is also similar to Feuerbach in that he was equally devoid of humour, and similarly incapable
all

of criticizing his basic positive outlook, whereby his negations might

first

have acquired theological content. But unfortunately Strauss was unlike Feuerbach in that he was uncertain of his case in expressing
these epoch-making negations. in principle.

He was

in fact not certain of his case

When
all

Jesus set in, Strauss at

the storm of hostile reviews and works against his first Life of once (in his smaller pieces of this time and above

in the third edition of the

direction of the position in

book in 1838) began to retreat in the which we have found him in the Life of
all

Jesus of 1864.

He

does indeed hurl himself in his polemics, with

the

pungent pen, upon weaker opponents like Steudel, his former teacher at Tubingen, and grinds them to powder, but cannot avoid making important concessions to more serious representatives of the official theology, like Ullmann, Neander, and Tholuck. They

power of

his

relate particularly to the fifth point of the series we drew up. Strauss now suddenly recalls the saying of Hegel c ln the forefront of all actions
:

there stands an individual' and concedes

1
.

religion belongs to an incomparably higher sphere of human intellectual activity than science, art, etc., and that the man who has

That

achieved the highest in this sphere therefore does not stand upon the same plane as the others, but has a claim to stand at the centre-point
of the
2.

circle, in

That a higher

the closest proximity to the source itself; realization of the religious idea than Jesus cannot

historically
3.

be demonstrated;

ate

That the union of the human individual with God in his immediself-consciousness, and therefore God's becoming man in this

384
individual,

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

is not philosophically impossible, and that its reality is only a historical question. 1 In conjunction with this he is now also prepared in 1864, impressed

listen to

particularly by the works of F. Chr. Baur, he did not go so far again to a discussion concerning the genuineness and credibility of the

Gospel according to St John. We have no way of knowing whether a mind of the religious fervour of Jesus might not have been able in the reflex of the imagination to form the communion with God, of which he was aware, into a recollection of a former dwelling with God. 2 l would not venture to assert that there is anything in the
c
e

sayings in John

which would

decisively resist explanation partly as the

result of John's personality, and partly from the fact that he wrote the 3 Gospel at a very advanced age. The same weakening of the historical

canon makes

its effects felt

as regards the question of miracles.

Renewall

kinds of things historically possible which three years previously had only seemed comprehensible to him as myth. And it is in the Gospel of St John, of all things, that he too now thinks he can demonstrate a
split up into the three-fold synoptic scorn the harmonizing of the Gospels quite so much, which three years before he had so sharply proscribed. And, in a free version of Schleiermacher we are tempted to say, he now

ing his earlier interest in natural

philosophy Strauss

now finds

historical core,

which afterwards

account.

He

also does not

now

defines Christ along the lines that

he was

'the

man

in

whose

self-

appeared with an energy which thrust back to the infinitesimal minimum within the whole range of his mind and life all restraint upon this union; who
to this extent stands unique and unrivalled in world history. This does not mean that the religious consciousness which was first achieved and

consciousness the union of the

human and

the divine

first

expressed by
purification

him should be allowed and further development

54

to withhold itself in detail

in the progressive

from advance of the

human

spirit.

We

must be

negotiations with Zurich

clear about the significance of the fact that Strauss's and the disaster which befell him there came

about just at

this

period

when his critique was engaged in this backward

events, and embittered by the fact he was still not trusted (far from it indeed, for Tholuck, for instance, was now quite openly triumphant that the critic's once pure, clear voice was beginning to break, so that the distinct 'No' was now a quavering upon 'Yes and No') he then

movement! Influenced by these

that in spite of his concessions

Hausrath,

I,

304! and 324.

3

fi

Life of Jesus, third

Op.

cit, p. 741.

ed, Vol.

I, p.

539.

Op.

cit.,

p. 778.

STRAUSS

385

ab irato not only wrote his Doctrine of Faith, but undertook a restitutio ad integrum in the next editions of the Life of Jesus. He has done himself an

he has ground flaws into the blade of his own trusty sword, he now confesses in the fourth edition, and he restores the critical attitude of the first and second! It is all the stranger that in spite of this we should meet him again, in 1864, at the spot where we did meet him: upon the broad highway of research into the life of Jesus, engaged in an attempt to extract a historical core from the shell of the sources. And now the strangest thing of all. When he saw that this new course was making just as little impression upon the theological profession and the Church as that of 1838-9, he followed up his second retreat, in The Old and the New Faith of 1872 in which a section is also devoted to the life of Jesus, by a third advance. Here the true meaning, apparently, of the first and second advances too comes to light trivially but with a clarity which does not leave anything to be desired. As a historical man was Jesus such that he still determines our religious
injustice,

feeling? the old

man now

which

is

reliable

asks. He answers 'No', for we know too little about him 'Anyone who has once been made a god
!

has irrevocably lost his human quality. It is an empty illusion to imagine that accounts of a life which, like our Gospels, apply to a supernatural being, can ever provide, by any process whatsoever,
material for a natural, consistent and harmonious picture of a man or of C a life. 9 A11 the efforts of the most recent authors of works on the "Life

of Jesus", however

scriptural sources a

much they may lay claim to show by means of our human development, an arrival and growth of

insight and a gradual widening of comprehension in Jesus, show themselves by the absence of any supporting reference in the records ... to

be pieces of apologetic artifice devoid of any historical value.' 1 If there is anything historical at all to be taken from the Gospels, then it is the fact that Jesus, a mere man, expected to appear in the clouds of the heavens in the very near future, in inauguration of the kingdom of the Messiah proclaimed by him. It was this which made the decisive impression upon his disciples, and not any sermon upon pureness of heart or the love of God or our neighbours. According to our concepts he was a noble spiritual fanatic whom we do not seek to choose as the guide of our lives since he could only lead us astray, just as it was only
the manufacture of the idea of the resurrection of the slain master which saved his work at that time: a 'humbug of world-historical
2

proportions',

which did at

all

events bear witness to the strength

2

and

1 Collected

Works, VI, pp. 50f.

Op.

cit., p.

45.

386

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

made upon
his followers.

persistence of the impression he

By what
and

means? By the
of his

irrational

and

fantastic quality of his

own

nature,

the

own ideas, about which, incidentally, he perhaps had doubts at end. In face of these we must indeed mourn him, with regard to his

we

end, for the sake of the excellent qualities of his heart and striving. But cannot escape the judgment that 'such a fanatical expectation only 1 gets its just deserts if it comes to grief by ending in failure'.

Who

should seek to decide which was the genuine Strauss: the

trifle

Strauss of the two retreats or the Strauss of the three advances?

naive and a

boring liberal Strauss,

thing

or Strauss the savagely angry critic, is certain. The unmistakable feebleness of the
serves to

The who can however be talked to, who refuses to negotiate? One
first

figure only

throw into high relief the strength with which the second confronted theology with a series of questions upon which, just as with

Feuerbach's questions, it has not, right perhaps, adequately declared itself.

down

to the present day,

Once again we formulate them, in five points: 1. Is it not a fact that if we conceive of the Christian
tion

faith as

a rela-

which

is

historically
it

immanent, thereby making

faith a

matter of

history,

we

destroy

as faith?

New Testament records are useless as a pragmatically comprehensible picture of a man and of a life? For it is from the very first word that they seek to be something testimonies to a different, quite namely 'superhuman being*, corre2. Is it

not a fact that the

'sources' of

sponding feature by feature to the prophecies of the Old Testament, a being whose image must defy all historical reconstruction. 3. Is it not a fact that a 'historical Jesus' established behind the socalled sources,

and therefore quite independently of the witness of the

New Testament, can only be comprehended as such if we remove those

predicates of his which are essential to this witness: his consciousness of himself as the Messiah of Israel and as God's eternal Son, his proclamation of the kingdom of God and expectation that he would come
again, and his resurrection from the dead? Is it not a fact that the sentimental, moralizing description of character which is indispensable to the establishment of this figure has nothing at all to do with the faith

of the Apostles? 4. Is it not a fact that according to the representation in the Gospels the so-called personality of Jesus is so indissolubly linked with these
fatal

predicates that the historian aiming at a Life of Jesus cannot escape a dilemma ? He has either to undertake this erasure of the predicates
1

Op.

cit.,

p. 51.

STRAUSS
and give a moralizing interpretation,
of Jesus as a noble spiritual fanatic.
or, like Strauss,

387

He

he has to conceive must do this unless he prefers

to call a halt at the Early Church in Palestine as the last historically accessible date, and apply the concept of myth to everything or nearly

everything lying beyond it in which case he must at least take into account the possibility that Jesus never lived as Drews' thesis did. 5. Is it not a fact that the goal of historical research can at best only

be a historical Christ and that this implies a Christ who as a revealer of God can only be a relative Christ? Is it not a fact that such a Christ can only be a helper of those in need, who as such requires all sorts of associates,

and figures to supplement him, who at best could only be related a real, eternal revelation to mankind as a most high and perhaps ultimate symbol is related to the thing itself, who could on no account be the Word that became flesh, executing God's judgment upon us and
to

challenging us ourselves to make a decision? This is what D. F. Strauss asked theology, just as Feuerbach asked it whether the Godhead man sought and thought he had found in his
consciousness was anything but man's shadow as the plane of the idea of the Infinite.
Strauss
it

was projected upon

was no great theologian. It is precisely when we take him is when we hold him to his attitude in the first Life ofJesus, that seriously, the Doctrine ofFaith, and The, Old and the Mew Faith, that we are still bound
to conclude that his theology ultimately only consisted in the fact that he saw through a bad solution of the problem of theology, gave up any

further attempt to improve upon it, abandoned the theme of theology, and departed from the field of action. 'The only aim of all my theological writing

was

to free

me

from the black

folds of the cassock;

and

in this

succeeded perfectly.' 1 Blessed with a little impudence, any child can do the same, and we really have no occasion to worship such people as great theologians. The strangest thing of all is that this rather
it

cheap 'freeing from the folds' was never so successful that Strauss at any time really had any peace from theology, that he never really managed to put it behind him as something completely settled. The problem he had so ostentatiously abandoned pursued him to the last like a fate: and the more intensively it followed him the less he knew what to do about it. It was as if this problem had an interest in him.

He

lessly in

repaid this interest by meeting it coldly, unreceptively and helpsome way, but he could not, after all, detach himself from it

and he continually became excited about it. He was continually impelled to react always differently and always unsuitably but still
i Letter of ist October, 1843.

388
to react.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

He
could only suffer from
is

it. That was his misfortune. And be described as his greatness in might theology. It might have been better if many theologians, positively greater ones, both of his time and of other times, had suffered at least a little more from the problem of theology. The fact that Strauss, for all

that, negatively, it

true,

his determination to shake

it off,

in fact stood so passively

and helplessly

a unique way the urgency of this problem, and this is after all some justification for this man, a justification which is not quite so obvious for many who were more energetic in their approach
before
it,

reveals in

to the problem.

In conclusion, may I present yet another argument in apology for Strauss ? I am not unaware of its personal nature, but for the sake of
completeness I cannot hold it back. I am in fact not quite certain that Nietzsche's invectives have really said all there is to be said upon the 1 subject, not even in respect to the Gartenlaube into which Strauss

and in which he was probably at bottom most intimately seems worth remembering that in the midst of the calamitous song of praise which Strauss dedicated to 'culture' he again and c again avows, in a variety of ways that for our age the music of Mozart
finally fled,

at

home.

It

occupies the same position as Goethe does in poetry. He is 6 7rdvv 9 the universal genius. Next to him the best of the others only distinguish themselves by the fact that in them this or that single quality of mind

or aspect of art has been further developed, but just for that reason 2 developed one-sidedly.' Anyone who has understood that can be

pardoned much tastelessness and much childishly critical theology too. In this poor Strauss really seems to have chosen the better part, as against Nietzsche, who, as is well known, was the helpless slave of the
dreadful

Wagner

at the

Be

this as it
is

may.

It is

time of his great deriding of Strauss. simply the case that together with Feuerbach,

the theologian who was most significant for the situation of theology in the time after Schleiermacher's death. It is a fact that he and no other man has the merit of having put this question, the historical
Strauss

with such a grasp of the basic issue. Since then many and various ways; which was, it had not heard his question. Many people have not been able to overcome Strauss to this day; they have simply by-passed him, and to this very day are continually saying things which, if Strauss cannot be overcome, should no longer be said. I should now like to adapt the words of Albert Schweitzer, quoted
one, that
is,

to theology,

theology has talked round it in rather, evidence of the fact that

1 Lit. : arbour; title of a once 2 Letter of 5th March, 1868.

popular illustrated German family magazine. (Tr.)

STRAUSS

389

at the beginning, as follows: One must love the question Strauss raised, in order to understand it. It has been loved only by a few; most people

have feared it. To this extent the name of Strauss together with the name of Feuerbach signifies the bad conscience of the theology of more recent times. To this extent "Strauss was perhaps not so very wrong in 1 calling his first Life of Jesus' an inspired book'. And to this extent the fact that they did not make him a professor of theology, but self-righteously, and with an all-too-easy mind, banished him extra muros, was all things considered scandalous. I imply by this that Alexander Schweizer, I name him in particular as one of the positively 'great' at all events theologians of that time did not have the inner right to oppose
appointment to Zurich in 1839. Proper theology begins just where the difficulties disclosed by Strauss and Feuerbach are seen and then laughed at. Thus such men and their questions are 'loved Alexander Schweizer and his kind neither saw these difficulties, nor were they capable of this laughter. In such a situation, however, Straiiss could not and must not be pensioned off.
Strauss's

at the point
3

Collected Works, I, p. 4.

XI
RITSGHL
has been said of Ritschl that in the history of theology since Schleiermacher he is the only one who, in the true sense, has given birth to an
IT

epoch. This is not true because all the strivings proceeding from Schleiermacher, who was, despite all argument, the only one who in a very signifireally gave rise to an epoch, continued on their way cant fashion beside Ritschl, and were even more than ever taken up

again after him. As has already been said, Schleiermacher's influence was incomparably stronger in 1910 than in 1830, and one does not have to be a prophet to observe that if the older age of theology were to remain master of the field today, or conquer it anew, then it would do so

under the banner of Schleiermacher, or perhaps of Hegel, and on no account under that of Ritschl. Ritschl has the significance of an episode in more recent theology, and not, indeed not, that of an epoch. If it were possible for us to continue our account in the way in which it has been presented up to now, then we should have to depict Ritschl amid his contemporaries and opponents to left and right Luthardt, Frank and von Oettingen on the one side, and Biedermann and Lipsius on the other. We should, however, also have to point out, in the figure of
:

Lagarde,

who

also

belonged to

this generation, the

turn events took

and which brought everything once again immediately on to the course characterized by the name of Schleiermacher. We should then have to discuss the theologians born from the eighteenthirties to the eighteen-fifties, that is to say, Overbeck, Pfleiderer, and Ludemann on the one hand, and Cremer, Kahler, Schlatter, Ihmels and Seeberg on the other, who in the main only managed to speak, or were only heard, after RitschTs death; and we should have to show that
after Ritschl,

RitschFs followers, Schultz, Herrmann, Kaftan, Haering, Kirn, Kattenbusch, Harnack, Rade and others, who were also of this time, did not

dominate the picture quite so completely, even towards the end of the century, as the historians of RitschPs school would have us believe. And we should then have to study the complete return to the main tendency which Ritschl forsook, in those who were born in the sixties

RITSGHL
and
seventies,

391
1

910, and still are in part today, men like the band of historians led by Troeltsch; namely Gunkel, J. Weiss, Bousset, Heitmiiller, Wernle, and further the similarly orientated systematic scholars Otto and Wobbermin, men who are opposed from the right by E. Schaeder and G. Stange, a generation in which people like Johannes Miiller and Rittelmeyer, Kutter and Ragaz could not be overlooked either. In the development thus

who were the men of the day in

hinted at the school of Ritschl played the undoubtedly important rdle of a reaction. It is thus, however, and not as the beginning of a new epoch, that it distinguishes itself from the flood of events and personalities, and that we are thinking of its leader as we bring this account to
its

provisional close.

practical significance of this reaction is as follows. Ritschl rejected all the previous attempts to overcome the Enlightenment

The

which were Instead he

centrally determined by the tendency of Romanticism. energetically seized upon the theoretical and practical

philosophy of the Enlightenment in its perfected form. That is, he went back to Kant, but Kant quite definitely interpreted as an antimetaphysical moralist, by means of whom he thought he could understand

which grandly and inevitably made possible, or a practical ideal of life. In this his abandoning of all knowledge which could not be rendered comprehensible within this framework is seen properly as the characteristic thing about his theology, provided we hold up beside it the positive determination with which on the one hand he apprehends and affirms this practical ideal of life as such, and with which on the other he makes the of
Christianity as that
realized,

Christianity, the Bible

and

interpretation particularly the Reformation, serve the

to be blinded

founding and strengthening of this ideal. We must not allow ourselves by sight of the extensive material Ritschl drew from the
Bible

and the history of dogma to the fact that this, and ultimately this alone, was his chief concern. Nobody either before or since Ritschl, perhaps Wegscheider was the one exception has expressed the view as clearly as he, that modern man wishes above all to live in the best sense according to reason., and that the significance of Christianity for him can only be a great confirmation and strengthening of this very endeavour. One could of course ask whether this will, soberly and honestly expressed by Ritschl, was not universally present, somewhere
in the background of the theology of the whole century, except in certain outsiders, and whether all else was not more like an artificial

can ask fog surrounding this will than actually another will. whether the entire theological movement of the century resulted not at

We

392
all

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

an overcoming of the Enlightenment, of
himself, but in its fulfilment.
its

in

decisive interest of

man in

But even if we understand it in this way we should still have to admit that the production of this artificial fog on the part of others had at least betrayed people's disquiet who for all that did not in fact want to admit that this will is the truth or, at least, that it is the whole
truth. Ritschl,

stands with incredible clearness

on the other hand, feels no trace of this disquiet. He and firmness (truly with both feet)
5

upon the ground of his *ideal of life the very epitome of the nationalliberal German bourgeois of the age of Bismarck. That distinguishes him from those who went before him and from those who came after him. The passion with which he was attacked both from left and right is quite understandable this self-assurance of modern man was not to everyone's taste, even between 1860 and 1890 and quite under,

standable too was the fact that he and his school could not long sustain themselves, once the jubilation over Golumbus's trick with the

egg

had died away.

yet perhaps the views of those who stood to left and right of Ritschl, who went before and came after him, were not basically

And

very

was not hypocrisy, but this deeply-rooted disquiet which caused everyone before him and after him, and those on his left and right, to agree in the conviction that these views could not at any
different

from

his. It

rate be expressed in this way. Enlightenment had to be taken

The plan
up

for the
it

overcoming of the

again, after

had been postponed

they

for a while, while theologians were blinded by RitschPs simplification. The plan had to be taken up again with the risk that would have

up once again with Romanticism, and that they might perhaps not be able to find any better guidance from this source than the first generations of the century had done, with the risk that, far from
they might manage things even worse than their was RitschPs great merit that with his reaction he showed that it was possible to abandon the Schleiermacher-Hegel approach, and he thus for a moment clearly illuminated the of

to link

managing

this better,

predecessors. It

point departure for the complete development, the perfected Enlightenment; though he then showed in effect that if theology did not wish to place itself in far too exposed a position, it could only employ the Schleiermacher-Hegel approach upon the basis of this point of departure; that

a different approach would make necessary the choice of another point of departure, that it would, in fact make necessary a true overcoming of the Enlightenment. To this extent Ritschl is not at all a bad person with whom to conclude our account.

RITSGHL

393

Albrecht Benjamin Ritschl was born in Berlin in 1822, and went to the universities of Bonn, Halle, Berlin, Heidelberg and Tubingen. First, at Tubingen he became a historian in the manner of Baur. In 1846 he qualified as a lecturer at the University of Bonn. The second edition of his book Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche (The Origin of
the Old Catholic Church) in 1856 brought him into conflict with Baur.

He became an associate professor in 1852, a full professor in 1859, and was transferred as a systematic theologian to Gottingen in 1864, where from the end of the seventies onwards he was the head of the school bearing his name. He died in 1889. Chief consideration must be given to his two works, Rechtfertigung und Versohnung (Justification and Reconciliation), 1870-4, and Geschichte des Pietismus (The History of Pietism), 1 880-6. He set down his thoughts in condensed form in his
Unterricht in
der
christlichen

Religion), 1875,
Perfection),
editions.

m th e lecture

Religion

(Instruction

in

the

Christian
(Christian

Die

Christliche Vollkommenheit

1874 and in the treatise Theologie und Metaphysik (Theology and Metaphysics), 1881, all of which appeared in several

In order to understand Ritschl we must lay the emphasis upon the

final

word

of the

title

of his chief work.

it

Justification

and

Reconciliation.

With

Ritschl reconciliation, to put

life.

of human

It is

baldly, means the realized ideal the intended result of justification (Instruction, para.

46). All RitschPs thinking springs from this result. It is this result and this result alone in which he is interested. Completed reconciliation

him

consists in God's confronting the believer as his Father and justifying in his child-like feeling of utter trust, 1 giving him spiritual domi-

nion over the world and engaging him in the work in the kingdom of God. This state is the state of Christian perfection. Religiously it consists

in faith in divine providence, in humility, in patience and in prayer; morally it consists in activity in one's profession and in the e development of personal virtue. In it the individual person acquires

the value of a complete whole, which is superior ... to the value of the entire world'. 2 In Christian perfection a man's life becomes a life-

work accompanied by a

justified sense of one's

fection perpetually includes within itself c 3 imperfection, but he may in principle be comforted about this, since

work. 3 His peran insight into a certain

own

and action would not be possible if his imperfection were the final word that could be said of him. 4 "The quintessence of the task imposed upon man, which at the same time is his highest good and his own final
will
1 Instmction 9

para. 46.

Ibid., para. 59.

Ibid., p. i.

8 Christian Perfection, p. 13.

394
aim,
is

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

the kingdom of God, in which the love of one's neighbour
is

activated. 1

But the kingdom of God can only be lived for within the communities which have been naturally determined, particularly in the regular working activity of one's moral profession, and not outside
2 them, so that loyalty to one's profession is at once the true fulfilment of the model of Christ. 8 Where there is no reconciliation in this sense,

as the realization of the ideal of

sense

life, or where reconciliation in this no justification either. Ritschl finds he can express this, somewhat in the Pelagian manner, by calling man's conscious activity in reconciliation, and therefore in the kingdom of God and therefore in his profession, the 'condition' for the forgiveness of sins. 4 Or he can put it in an Augustinian way too, by simply equating the effect of grace and the impulse to corresponding self5 activity; good conduct and the effect of grace. But on no account may the balance for imperfection of moral conduct be sought in the certainty of justification or of the forgiveness of sins, but only in the resolve and
is

not activated, there

is

6 implementation of a greater endeavour to improve, whereas the meaning of the forgiveness of sins and of justification is entirely and

man in the position where this activity is possible and demanded. There must not therefore be any thinking or any action which is not directly, perfectly or imperfectly activity in the kingdom of God and thus activity in one's profession and the development of virtue. There must not be any action directed towards God which
alone that of placing
by-passes this activity.
It

was from

this standpoint that Ritschl

became the

ferocious op-

ponent of Pietism which he accused of returning to the tendency of monasticism and the opponent of all metaphysics in theology, which instead of holding solely to the effects of God which can be experienced, seeks to hold also, or indeed predominantly, to a God in himself. Again, it was from this standpoint that Ritschl became the opponent of mysticism as a religiosity which overleaps the will of God and of man. ChristCatholicism and every form of Anabaptists' faith is dispatched at one blow by virtue of the fact that they think they know of a Christianity, and perhaps indeed of a more
perfect Christianity beside that provided by the consciousness and realization in the moral sphere of the fact that we are children of God.
1
6
Instruction^ paras, sf.

ianity is an outlook upon life and immediate relationship with God.

it is

morality, but in

no way

is it

an

Roman

Justification
Instruction,

2 * Ibid, paras, ayf. 8 Ibid, para. 56. Ibid., paras. 456, and Reconciliation, III, para. 36; Instruction) paras. 39 and 55.

para. 46.

RITSGHL

395

According to Ritschl there should strictly speaking not be any Sunday, and no eternity either, or at any rate no silent eternity, and he did in
fact define God's eternity as the constancy of God's will for the creation and maintenance of his Church, overcoming the barrier

of time. 1
Justification
is

guarantee and realization, apprehended in

Reconciliation
is

related to reconciliation, thus understood, as the great faith, of this ideal of life.

event in the Christian Church as in the

is,

communion

of the faithful, and faith

in principle turns man only deed. It is man's deed, performed in opposition to the action taking place in the Kingdom of God. In content it is selfishness, or a

simply, faith in the divine justification which from a sinner into a non-sinner. 2 Sin is deed and

seeking after things which are of an inferior rank i.e. an upsetting of the scale of things. 8 In form it is enmity to God, and lack of reverence and trust. 4 Its consequence is a reduction of the right to be a child of

God, and, in conjunction with this, man's subjection to the evil as a freedom in achieving his life's goal. 5 In origin it is 6 ignorance, which is strengthened by the existence of a realm of sin, i.e. by the mutual effect of the sinful conduct of all men upon one 7 another, which with Ritschl takes the place of original sin. Justification does not mean the removal of the power of sin dominating the individual this must be combated and removed by the decision of the individual will, a process for which religious redemption can only pave the way. Justification rather means forgiveness. In this sense Ritschl understood and affirmed the Reformation doctrine of justification as forensic. The intercourse between God and man, terminated by sin, is resumed by God. Upon the basis of the conditions he has to fulfil man may, unhindered by guilt or the feeling of guilt, join in the building of the Kingdom of God as something which 8 is his own final goal. This forgiveness of God's and this permission granted to man which is based upon it are the particular possession of the Christian Church. In justification God assigns man his place in his Kingdom, in spite of man's sin and upon condition that he should now desist from it. In so doing he makes him into a Christian. And everything there is to be said about God, according to Ritschl, is comprised simply in the statement that God wants, creates and maintains the Church in which this possession is to be received, in which, that is, men are admitted to the Kingdom of God with this intention and in
restriction of his
1

Justification

and

Reconciliation, III,

para. 37;
*

Instruction,

para. 14.

4
6

Instruction, paras.

26 and 35.
5
7

Justification

and Reconciliation, III, p. 317.

8
Instruction, paras. 44f.

Ibid., Ill, para. 40. Ibid., para. 43.

Ibid., para. 42.

Ibid., para. 41.

396
this

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

manner; that is, in which they are called to be active in this kingdom. God is love. That is, he did not have to make man's true goal
into his
1

own goal, own. God with

nothing else but worships because it upholds his spiritual sense of his own worth against the restrictions imposed upon it by nature 2 His omnipotence is his 'care and presence of grace for pious men'. 3 His righteousness is the
5
.

is love, he has this goal originally as his to the fact that God's kingdom is indeed regard man's own goal God is 'the power which man

but, as he

logical

manner

in which he leads

them

to salvation. 4 His personality

gives evidence of the value which religion attributes to the spiritual 5 life of man. Similarly God's creation of the world has of course taken

place solely for the sake of the

Kingdom of God, i.e. for the sake of and to be is understood only in this sense. And goal, the idea of a wrath of God, and indeed even of a holiness of God which should be distinguished from his righteousness would manifestly imply a negation of his love and thus of man's own goal, and is therefore to be regarded as an idea which was already vanishing in the Old Testament, but which in the New Testament can only be maintained
men's

own

eschatologically, that

is,

only as a description of God's attitude towards

the unjust. 6

What distinguishes Christianity from every other religion is that it answers the question all religions ask. Man knows himself as part of the world and at the same time he is predisposed to spiritual personality.

How can he then establish the claim to dominion over the world which
based upon this predisposition, against the limitation imposed upon him by the world? 7 How can we, by appropriating the divine life, make assured the value of our spiritual life within its limiting involvement with nature or in the world ? 8 That is the meaning of an apologetics
is

of Christianity: to demonstrate this significance of Christianity for the realization of the ideal of human life to demonstrate that the Christian
idea of God is the first to offer the necessary connexion of ideas between our outlook upon life, which is dependent upon the perception of

nature with

all its limitations,

and

that therefore to this extent

and our necessary moral self-judgment it fills a gap which philosophy leaves

9 open, and must of necessity leave open. But the knowledge of God as the God of love, and thus as the

God
n.
i6f.

who
1
8

forgives sins,

who removes our

4

natural limitations,
2
6

who

admits

Justification
Instruction,

and Reconciliation) and Reconciliation,

8

para. 15.

6
7 9

III, p. 259. Ibid., para. 16.

Theology and Metaphysics, p.

Justification
Instruction,

para. 8.

Justification

and

III, p. 173. Ibid., II, paras. 12-15 Ibid., para. 59. Reconciliation, III, para. 27; Instruction, para. 29.

and

RITSGHL
us into his

397

kingdom and makes us his children, free, but also bound in to him this knowledge comes about in the form of a duty judgment which is completely different from all the judgments of science in the form, namely, of a value judgment. A value judgment is a judgment in which a certain aspect of being is expressed concerning a certain object
of human experience with regard to the value, i.e. the practical significance, which it has for man, a certain aspect of being which, apart

from

this practical significance,

object.

Now

the object of

human

could not be expressed concerning the experience which has for man the

value of Godhead, and concerning which, therefore, in a certain sense we can venture to pronounce: c Heis God' this object, and therefore
the occasion for the knowledge of God as the

God of love, is the historical

Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus, in himself being in surpassing fashion the bearer of grace as well as of dominion over the world 1 is the archetypal image of the humanity which is to be united in the

phenomenon

2 kingdom of God and

his vocation is simply to reveal the

this

God who

is

love.

vocation upon us, or in so far as we and his evaluate historical existence as an action revealing experience God, he is himself God. It is not through a command, and not through

In so

far as

he exercises

directly divine authority, but as a prophet: through his morally effective sayings and as priest: by the way in which his action is ready to serve,

that he exercises the munus regium as God and substantiates to us his divine right of dominion. He realizes his own goal which is identical

with God's
decisive

own goal, which, once again, is identical with our own goal.

and expression of this connexion that this value-judgment, which provides the basis for Christian theology as such, comes about; we obtain justification, that is, we obtain admission to the kingdom of God, that is, we obtain the realization of our own purpose of life in no other way but through Jesus in his Church; and thus and in this sense we have God in Christ. The rounded, transparent and compact quality of this train of thought makes it very understandable that Ritschl should have found followers and support. The reasons why he could not establish himself have already been alluded to and need not be repeated. There were very real reasons why all his contemporaries, apart from the adherents to his school, and the history of theology after him showed
It is in the recognition

to hold

themselves to be governed by the determination not to allow his words sway as the final and characteristic words of the entire age,

no matter how genuine and impressive they might be in their own way.
1
Instruction,

para. 24.

Ibid., para. 22.

APPENDIX
I.

MAN

IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Des Maurers Wandeln, Es gleicht dem Leben,

p. 43.

Goethe: Symbolum

Und

sein Bestreben,

Es gleicht dem Handeln Der Menschen auf Erden.

Die Zukunft decket

Schmerzen und Gliicke

Schrittweis

dem Blicke

Doch ungeschrecket
Dringen wir vorwarts.

Und

schwer und feme

Hangt eine Htille Mit Ehrfurcht. Stille

Ruhen oben

die Sterne

Und

unten die Graber.

sie

Betracht

genauer!

Und siehe, so melden Im Busen der Helden

Sich wandelnde Schauer

Und

ernste Gefuhle.

Doch rufen von driiben Die Stimmen der Geister Die Stimmen der Meister:
Versaumt nicht zu
iiben

DieKraftedesGuten!
Hier flechten sich Kronen
In ewiger Stille, Die sollen mit Fiille

Die Tatigen lohnen! Wir heissen euch hoffen.

40O

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

II.

ROUSSEAU

p. 99, Goethe: Harzreise im Winter, 1777

ist's folgen dem Wagen, Den Fortuna fuhrt, Wie der gemachliche Tross Auf gebesserten Wegen

Leicht

Hinter des Fiirsten Einzug.

Ach, wer heilet die Schmerzen Des, dem Balsam zu Gift ward ?

Der sich Menschenhass Aus der Fiille der Liebe trank! Erst verachtet, nun ein Verachter,
Zehrt er heimlich auf
Seinen eigenen Wert

In ungniigender Selbstsucht.

Aber

abseits,

wer

ist's ?

Ins Gebiisch verliert sich sein Pfad

Hinter ihm schlagen Die Str^uche zusarmnen, Das Gras steht wieder auf,

Die Ode verschlingt

ihn.

1st auf deinem Psalter, Vater der Liebe, ein Ton Seinem Ohre vernehmlich, So erquicke sein Herz Offne den umwolkten Blick Uber die tausend Quellen Neben dem Durstenden In der Wiiste!
!

III.
p. 123.

LESSING
Act
III,

from Nathan
Ein
Nicht stehen,

der Weise,

Scene 5

Mann wie du
wo

bleibt

da
bleibt,

der Zufall der Geburt

Ihn hingeworfen: oder wenn er

Bleibt er aus Einsicht, Grtinden,

Wahl

des Bessern.

APPENDIX
p. 124. ibid,.

4OI

Act

I,

Scene 2

Begreifst du aber Wieviel andachtig schwarmen leichter als Gut handeln ist? Wie gern der schlaffste Mensch

Andachtig schwarmt, um nur ist er zu Zeiten Sich schon der Absicht deutlich nicht bewusst nur gut handeln nicht zu mussen?

Um

p. 124. ibid.,

Act V, Scene 5
sollt

Was

ich eines Fehls

mich schamen? Hab

Ich nicht den festen Vorsatz, ihm zu bessern ?

p. 125. ibid.,

Act

III,

Scene

Wann war ich nicht

Gefiel,

ganz Ohr, so

oft es dir

von deinen Glaubenshelden mich Zu unterhalten? Hab'ich ihren Taten

Nicht
stets Bewunderung und ihren Leiden Nicht immer Thranen gern gezollt ? Ihr Glaube Schien freilich mir das Heldenmassigste An ihnen nie.

p. 128. ibid.,

Act

I,

Scene 2
nichts als Stolz!

Stolz!

und

Von Eisen will von

einer silbern

Der Topf Zange

!

Gern aus der Glut gehoben sein, um selbst Ein Topf von Silber sich zu diinken. Pah Und was es schadet, fragst du ? Was es schadet ? Was hilft es, diirft ich nur hinwieder fragen. Denn dein 'Sich Gott urn so viel naher fuhlen Ist Unsinn oder Gotteslasterung.
9

Allein es schadet; ja, es schadet allerdings.

p. 141.

Nathan

der Weise,

Act

III,

Scene 7 (The Fable of the Three Rings)

Man untersucht, man zankt, Man klagt. Umsonst; der rechte Ring
War
Uns
p. 141. ibid.
itzt

nicht erweislich; fast so unerweislich als der rechte Glaube.

schwur dem Richter Unmittelbar aus seines Vaters Hand Den Ring zu haben. Wie auch wahrl

Und jeder

4O2
p. 141. ibid.

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Das muss
Entscheiden!

Doch

die falschen Ringe werden das nicht konnen! Nun; wen lieben zwei

Derm

Von

euch am meisten? Macht, sagt an! Ihr schweigt? Die Ringe wirken nur zuriick? Und nicht Nach aussen? Jeder Kebt sich selber nur

Am meisten? O

so seid ihr alle drei

Betrogene Betriigerl Eure Ringe Sind alle drei nicht echt. Der echte Ring Vermutlich ging verloren. Den Verlust

Zu bergen, zu ersetzen, Hess der Vater Die drei fur einen machen.
p. 141. ibid.

Die Sache

aber der: ihr nehmt wie sie liegt. Hat von Euch jeder seinen Ring von seinem Vater So glaube jeder sich seinen Ring
ist

Mein Rat

vollig,

Den
pp.
141-52. ibid.

echten.

Wohlan!
Es
eifre

Von

jeder seiner unbestochnen. Vorurteilen freien Liebe nach!

Es strebe von euch jeder urn die Wette, Die Kraft des Steins in seinem Ring an

Tag

Zu

dieser Kraft mit Sanftmut legen! Mit herzlicher Vertraglichkeit, mit Wohlthun, Mit innigster Ergebenheit in Gott

Komme

Zu

Hilf

Und wenn sich dann der

Steine Krafte

Bei euren Kindes-Kindeskindern aussern:

So lad ich iiber tausend, tausend Jahre wiederum vor diesen Stuhl. Da wird Ein weisrer Mann auf diesem Stuhle sitzen Als ich und sprechen. Geht! So sagte der
Sie

bescheidne Richter.
p. 142. ibid.

Nathan, lieber Nathan! Die tausend, tausend Jahre deines Richters

APPENDIX
Sind noch nicht um. der meine.
p. 143. ibid,

403
1st

Sein Richterstuhl

nicht

Act II, Scene 5 Sind Christ und Jude eher Christ und Jude
I

Als

Mensch? Ah wenn ich einen mehr in Euch Gefunden hatte, dem es geniigt, ein Mensch
heissen!
III,

Zu
p. 143. ibid.,

Act

Scene 6

Stockjude sein

Und
p. 143. ibid.,

ganz und gar

zu wollen, geht schon nicht, nicht Jude, geht noch minder.

Act IV, Scene 4

Dass alien

Baume
i

Ich habe nie verlangt, eine Rinde wachse.

p. 143. ibid.,

Act IV, Scene

Weil das einmal so

Wird's so \vohl recht
sein.

ist,

V.
p. 203.

HERDER
sein!

from

St Johanns Nachtstraum

Bin nicht zu denken hier! Zu Zu leben! Mich zu freun!

p. 204. Selbst, p.

Zu

fuhlen!

256

Vergiss dein Ich; dich selbst verliere nie. Nichts Grossres konnt' aus ihrem Herzen dir

Die reiche Gottheit geben,

p. 204. St Johanns Nachtstraum, pp.

als

dich

selbst.

Zu

leben allein?

Der leuchtende
wird, was

Wurm ist nicht

allein,

er wird,

einst nicht allein sein!

Und mich freun?

Niemand zu
!

Allein?

sagen, wie schon im Sommerliebesbrande Mutter Natur du seist Schone Mutter Natur!

404

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Niemand zu haben, der mit mir
schwirren die Schopfung hore! gehn die leisen Rader und sehn den Engel fliegen und denken Unsterblichkeit Vereint sie denken und fiihlen das Erdeleben vereint uns driicken an Freundesherz o schone Mutter Natur,
I

Dein
p. 204.

edelster

Funke!

Das

Ich, pp. 252f. Willst du zur

Ruhe kommen, flieh, o Freund, Die argste Feindin, die Personlichkeit

1

Ermanne dich nein du

Dem
Was

3 gehorst nicht dir; All gehorest du. grossen, guten

warest du? Kein Ich. Ein jeder TropP In deinem Lebenssaft, in deinem Blut, Ein jedes Kugelchen, in deinem Geist Und Herzen jeder regende Gedank'.

Jedwedes Wort der Lippe, jeder Zug Des Angesichtes ist ein fremdes Gut Dir angeeignet, doch nur zum Gebrauch.
So, immer wechselnd, stets verandert, schleicht Der Eigner fremden Gutes durch die Welt. Nur wenn uneingedenk des engen Ichs

Dein Geist in alien Seelen lebt, dein Herz In tausend Herzen schlaget, dann bist du Ein ewiger, allwirkender, ein Gott, Und auch 5 wie Gott, unsichtbar-namenlos.
So lasset dann im Wirken und Gemut Das Ich uns mildern, dass das bessre Du Und Er und Wir und Ihr und Sie es sanft Ausloschen, und uns von der bosen Unart Des harten Ich unmerklich-sanft befrein.
In alien Pflichten
3

sei

uns erste Pflicht

suss ist jede Tat.

Vergessenheit sein selber! So gerat

Uns unser Werk und

pp. 207-8. Die Schdpfung, pp. 25of.

die Schopfung, itzt Harret, schweigt noch!

.
.

am

Ziel

Ihr Gefuhl

APPENDIX
Wandelt in

405

und vermisst Was Geschopf und Schopfer ist;

sich,

Suchet einen, der mit Geist

Schmeckt und was er ist, geneusst, Suchet, der mit Gottesblick

Alle Schopfung strahlt zuriickl

In In sich

sich,

strahl'

von sich. Und selbst und vaterlich

sich

Von sich Und wie

Sie

strahP

und walte frei Gott ein Schopfer sei!

suchet, jetzt

den

am

Ziel

Gottes Schopfung, wirft Gefuhl

In sich

dess,

was

sie vermisst,
!

Und

der Gott er ist Geschopf, wie nenn ich dich ? Gott der Schopfung, lehre mich! Doch ich bin, ich bin es ja, Dem dies Gottesbild geschah! Ich wie Gott Da tritt in mich Plan der Schopfung, weitet sich,

der

Mensch

Neu

Drangt zusammen und wird Macht! Endet froh und jauchtzt: vollbracht! Ich wie Gott Da tritt in sich Meine Seel und denket mich
1

Schaft sich

um und handelt frei,

Jehovah
sei.

Fuhlt, wie frei

Ich wie Gott! Da schlagt mein Herz Konigsmut und Bruderschmerz.

Alles
Fiihlt der

Leben hier vereint, Mensch sich aller Freund

Fuhlt sich Sinn voll Mitgefuhl Bis zur Pflanze, bis zum Ziel
Aller Menschengottlichkeit, Eint sich liebend weit und breit,
Bin's in

Immer tiefer, hoher. Ich dem die Schopfung sich

Und

Punktet, der in alles quillt der alles in sich fullt!

Bis zur letzten Schopfung hin Fiihlet, tastet, reicht mein Sinn!

Aller

Wesen Harmonic

406

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Mit mir
ja ich selbst bin sie Bin der eine Gottesklang, Der aus allem Lustgesang'
Aller Schopfung tont empor Und trat ein in Gottes Ohr,
9
!

Und ward Bild, Gedank' und Tat Und ward Mensch. Der Schopfung Rat,
Mensch,
ist

in dir! Fiihle dich

Und
N

die Schopfung fuhlet sich! Fiihle dich, so fuhlst du Gott

In

dir.

In dir fuhlt sich Gott,

fuhlt,

Wie ihn Sonn' und Tier nicht Wie er-sich in sich erzielt!
p. 21
1.

from Maskenzuge, by J.

W. v. Goethe

(Jubilee edition, Vol. 9,

P- 350)

Wie

Ein edler Mann, begierig, zu begriinden uberall des Menschen Sinn erpriesst, Horcht in die Welt, so Ton als Wort zu finden,

Das tausendquellig durch die Lander fliesst. Die altesten, die neuesten Regionen Durchwandelt er und lauscht in alien Zonen.

Und so von Volk zu Volke

Was jeden
Urvaters

hort er singen, in der Mutterluft geriihrt,

Er hort erzahlen, was von guten Dingen Wort dem Vater zugefuhrt. Das alles war Ergetzlichkeit und Lehre,
Gefuhl und Tat,
als

wenn

es eines ware.

bringen mag und was Geniige, Behend verwirrt und ungehofft vereint, Das haben tausend Sprach-und Redeziige,

Was Leiden

Vom

Paradies bis heute, gleich gemeint.

So singt der Barde, spricht Legend' und Sage, Wir fuhlen mit, als waren's unsre Tage.

Wenn schwarz

der Fels,

umhangen Atmosphare

Klage zwingt Dort heiterm Sonnenglanz im offnen Meere, Das hohe Lied entziickter Seele klingt
Sie meinen's gut

Zu Traumgebilden

diistrer

und fromm im Grund,

sie

wollten

Nur

Menschliches, was alle wollen sollten.

APPENDIX

407
aufzufinden,

Wo sich's versteckte, wusst

Im
Humanitat

er's

Ernsthaft verhtillt, verkleidet leicht als Spiel,

hochsten Sinn der Zukunft zu begriinden: sei unser ewig Ziel.

O, warum schaut er nicht, in diesen Tagen, Durch Menschlichkeit geheilt die schwersten Plagen.

VI.
pp. 240-1. from Hymnen an

NOVALIS
Bolsche,
I, p.

die Nacht,

30

auf dieser Welt Mit unserer Lieb und Treue Das Alte wird hintangestellt, Was kximmert uns das Neue?
sollen wir

Was

Einsam
heiss

Wer

steht und tiefbetriibt und fromm die Vorzeit

liebt.

Die Vorzeit, wo die Sinne licht In hohen Flamxnen brannten, Des Vaters Hand und Angesicht Des Menschen noch erkannten, Und hohen Sinns, einfaltiglich Noch mancher seinem Urbild glich.
Die Vorzeit,
Uralte

wo an Bliiten

reich

Stamme

prangten,

Und

Kinder fur das Himmelreich

Nach Qual und Tod verlangten; Und wenn auch Lust und Leben sprach, Doch rnanches Herz fiir Liebe brach.
Die Vorzeit, wo in Jugendglut selbst sich kundgegeben, Und fruhem Tod in Liebesmut Geweiht sein susses Leben, Und Angst und Schmerz nicht von sich Damit er uns nur teuer blieb.
Gott

trieb

Mit banger Sehnsucht sehn wir In dunkle Nacht gehiillet, Und bier auf dieser Welt wird nie

sie

Der

heisse Durst gestillet.

408

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

Wir

Um

miissen nach der Heimat gehn, diese heilge Zeit zu sehn.

Was halt noch unsre Riickkehr auf Die Liebsten ruhn schon lange.
Ihr Grab
schliesst

unsern Lebenslauf,

Nun wird uns weh und bange. Zu suchen haben wir nichts mehr
Das Herz
ist salt,

die Welt

ist leer.

p. 241. ibid., Bolsche, II, p. 142

Wenn nicht mehr

Sind
Schlxissel aller

Zahlen und Figuren

Kreaturen,

Wenn
Mehr

die, so singen oder kiissen, als die Tiefgelehrten wissen,

Wenn sich die Welt ins freie Leben Und in die Welt wird zuruckbegeben, Wenn dann sich wieder Licht und Schatten
Klarheit wieder gatten, in Marchen und Gedichten Erkennt die wahren Weltgeschichten, Dann fliegt vor einem geheimen Wort Das ganze verkehrte Wesen fort.
pp. 243-4. from Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Bolsche, II, p. 107

Zu echter Und man

Vom Monde
Und Und

Die Liebe ging auf dunkler Bahn nur erblickt,

seltsam aufgeschmuckt.
sie

Das Schattenreich war aufgetan,

Ein blauer Dunst umschwebte Mit einem goldnen Rand,
eilig

zog die Phantasie

Sie iiber

Strom und Land.

Es hob sich ihre voile Brust In wunderbarem Mut; Ein Vorgefuhl der kxinft'gen Lust
Besprach die wilde Glut.
p. 244.

from

ibid., Bolsche, II, p.

126

Der Liebe Reich ist aufgetan, Die Fabel fangt zu spinnen an.

APPENDIX
Das Urspiel jeder Natur beginnt, Auf kraftige Worte jedes sinnt.

409

Und
Alles

so das grosse

Weltgemut

Uberall sich regt und unendlich bluht.

muss ineinandergreifen,

Eins durch das andre gedeihn und reifen;

Jedes in alien dar sich stellt, Indem es sich mit ihnen vermischet

Und

gierig in ihre Tiefen

fallt,

Sein eigentiimliches Wesen erfrischet, Und tausend neue Gedanken erhalt.

Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt,

pp. 246-7. Hymne, Bolsche, I, pp. 73f. Wenige wissen

Das Geheimnis der Liebe

Fuhlen UnersEttlichkeit

Und

ewigen Durst. Des Abendmahls

Gottliche Bedeutung 1st den irdischen Sinnen Ratsel;

Aber wer jemals

Von heissen, geliebten Lippen Atem des Lebcns sog,

Wem heilige Glut

In zitternde Wellen das Herz schmolz,

Wem das Auge aufging,

Dass er des Himmels

Wird

Unergrundliche Tiefe mass, essen von seinem Leibe

Und trinken von seinem

Wer

Blute

Ewiglich. hat des irdischen Leibes

Hohen Sinn

erraten?

Wer kann
Einst
ist

sagen,

Dass er das Blut versteht?

dies Leib,

Bin Leib,

Im himmlischen Blute
Schwimmt das
selige Paar.

dass das

Weltmeer

410

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Schon
errotete,

Und
Nie

in duftiges Fleisch Aufquolle der Fels

!

sattigt die Liebe sich. Nicht innig, nicht eigen genug,

Kann sie haben den Geliebten. Von immer zarteren Lippen

Verwandelt wird das Genossene
Inniglicher und naher. Heissere Wollust

Durchbebt die

Seele,

Durstiger und hungriger Wird das Herz

:

Und so waret der Liebe Genuss Von Ewigkeit zu^Ewigkeit.

Hatten die Niichternen Einmal gekostet,
Alles verliessen sie 5

Und setzten sich zu uns An den Tisch der Sehnsucht,

Der nie
leer wird.

Sie erkennten der Liebe

Unendliche

Fiille

Und priesen die Nahrung Von Leib und Blut.

pp. 252-3. from Hymnen an
die

Nacht, Bolsche,

I, p. 14.

Hast auch du Ein menschliches Herz

DunkleNacht? haltst du Unter deinem Mantel, Das mir unsichtbar kraftig

Was

An die Seele geht ? Du scheinst nur furchtbar

Kostlicher Balsam

Trauft aus deiner Hand,

Aus dem Biindel Mohn.

In
siisser

Entfaltest

Und

Trunkenheit du die schweren Fliigel des Gemiits. schenkst uns Freuden

APPENDIX
Dunkel und unaussprechlich,
Heimlich, wie du selber Freuden, die uns
bist,

4H

Einen Himmel ahnen

lassen.

Wie arm und

kindisch

Diinkt mir das Licht

Mit seinen bunten Dingen,

Wie

erfreulich

und gesegnet

Des Tages Abschied. Also nur darum Weil die Nacht dir Abwendig macht die Dienenden, Saetest du In des Raumes Weiten Die leuchtenden Kugeln, Zu verkunden deine Allmacht, Deine Wiederkehr In den Zeilen deiner Entfernung. Himmlischer als jene blitzenden Sterne In jenen Weiten
Diinken uns die unendlichen Augen, Die die Nacht In uns geoffnet.
pp. 253-4.

from

ibid.,

Bolsche,

I, p.

18

Gern
Die

will ich

fleissigen

Hande

ruhren,

Uberall umschaun,

Wo

du mich

Ruhmen

brauchst, deines Glanzes

Voile Pracht,

Unverdrossen verfolgen Den schonen Zusammenhang Deines kiinstlichen Werks,

Gern betrachten

Den

sinnvollen

Gang

Deiner gewaltigen Leuchtenden Uhr,

Ergriinden der Krafte

Ebenmass

Und

die Regeln

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Des Wunderspiels
Unzahliger

Raume

Und ihrer

Zeiten.

Aber getreu der Nacht Bleibt mein geheimes Herz

Und ihrer Tochter,

Der
p. 254*

schaflfenden Liebe.

from

ibid., Bolsche, I, p.

16

Sie fiihlen dich nicht

In der goldnen Flut der Trauben. In des Mandelbaums

Wunderol Und im braunen

Sie wissen nicht,

Safte des

Mohns.

Dass du

es bist,

Der

des zarten

Madchens
Schoss macht

Busen umschwebt

Und zum Himmel den

Ahnen
nicht,

Dass aus alten Geschichten Du himmeloffnend entgegen

trittst

Und den

Schlussel tragst

Zu den Wohnungen der Seligen, Unendlicher Geheimnisse

Schweigender Bote.
pp. 254-5. from
ibid., Bolsche, I,

Du

pp. Geliebte kommst,

ist
ist
ist

Die Nacht
Entziickt

da meine Seele

der irdische Weg wieder mein Ich schaue dir ins tiefe, dunkle Auge, Sehe nichts als Lieb' und Seligkeit. Wir sinken auf der Nacht Altar Aufs weiche Lager
Voriiber

Und du

bist

Die

Htille fallt

angeziindet von dem warmen Entgliiht des siissen Opfers

Und

Druck

Reine Glut.

APPENDIX
pp. 255-6. from ibid., Bolsche, I, p. 22 Bin ewiges Fest Der Gotter und Menschen.

413

Und
Die

kindlich verehrten

Alle Geschlechter
zarte, kostliche

Flamme

Als das Hochste der Welt.

Nur

ein Gedanke wars, Der furchtbar zu den frohen Tischen

trat

Und

das Gemiit in wilde Schrecken

hiillte.

Hier wussten selbst die Gotter keinen Rat, Der das Gemxit mit sussem Troste fullte: Geheimnisvoll war dieses Unholds Pfad, Des Wut kein Flehn und keine Gabe stillte Es war der Tod, der dieses Lustgelag

Mit Angst und Schmerz und Tranen unterbrach.

Mit kuhnem Geist und hoher Sinnenglut Verschonte sich der Mensch die grause Larve, Ein blasser Jungling loscht das Licht und ruht Sanft ist das Ende, wie ein Wehn der Harfe
Erinnrung schmilzt in kiihler Schattenflut: Die Dichtung sangs dem traurigen Bedarfe. Doch unentratselt blieb die ew'ge Nacht, Das ernste Zeichen einer fernen Macht.
p. 256. ibid., Bolsche, I, p.

24 Die Nacht ward

Fruchtbarer Schoss

Der Offenbarungen

Des Morgenlandes Ahnende, bliitenreiche

Weisheit

Erkannte zuerst

Der neuen
pp. 256-7. ibid., Bolsche,
I,

Zeit Beginn.

p. 25

Einsam entfaltete Das himmlische Herz

sich

414

FROM ROUSSEAU TO
Zu

RITSGH3L

der Liebe Gliihenden Schoss Des Vaters hohen Antlitz zugewandt Und ruhend an dem ahnungsselgen Busen Der lieblichernsten Mutter. Mit vergotternder Inbrunst Schaute das weissagende Auge Des bliihenden Kindes Auf die Tage der Zukunft, Nach seinen Geliebten
a

Den

Sprossen seines Gotterstamms, Unbekiimmert iiber seiner Tage

Irdisches Schicksal.

Bald sammelten die kindlichsten Gemuter Von allmachtiger Liebe

Wundersam
Sich

ergriffen,

um ihn her.

Wie Blumen keimte

Ein neues, fremdes Leben In seiner Nahe
Unerschopfliche Worte der Botschaften frohlichste Fielen wie Funken Eines gottlichen Geistes Von seinen freundlichen Lippen.

Und

p. 257. ibid., Bolsche, I, pp.

Der Jiingling bist du, der seit langer Zeit Auf unsern Grabern steht in tiefem Sinnen,
Ein
trostlich

Der hohern Menschheit

Zeichen in der Dunkelheit, freudiges Beginnen;

Was

uns gesenkt in tiefe Traurigkeit 5 Zieht uns nut siisser Sehnsucht nun von hinnen, Im Tode ward das ewge Leben kund, Du bist der Tod und machst uns erst gesund.
I,

p. 257. ibid. a Bolsche,

p. 27.

neuer Gotterherrlichkeit Erwacht, auf die Hohe Der verjungten, neugebornen Welt, Begrub mit eigner Hand
stieg, in

Er

APPENDIX
Die
alte

415

mit ihm gestorbne Welt,

Und
Den

In die verlassne Hohle legte mit allmachtiger Kraft

Stein,

den keine Macht

28

erhebt, darauf.

p. 257. ibid., Bolsche, I, p.

Lange Zeiten
Entflossen seitdenx, Und in immer hoherm Glanze

Regte deine neue Schopfung Und Tausende zogen Aus Schmerzen und Qualen
Voll Glauben und Sehnsucht

sich.

Und Treue dir nach. Und walten mit dir Und der himmlischen Jungfrau Im Reiche der Liebe Und dienen im Tempel
Des himmlischen Todes.
p. 258. ibid., Bolsche, I, pp. 28-9

Zur Hochzeit ruft der Tod Die Lampen brennen helle.

Um Ol

ist

keine Not.

Die Jungfraun sind zur Stelle, Erklange doch die Feme

Von deinem Zuge schon, Und ruften uns die Sterne

Mit Menschenzung und Ton.

Nach dir, Maria, heben Schon tausend Herzen sich In diesem Schattenleben Verlangten sie nur dich. Sie hoffen zu genesen Mit ahmmgsvoller Lust,
Driickst

du

sie,

heiliges

Wesen,

An deine treue

Brust.

Nun weint an keinem Grabe Fur Schmerz, wer liebend glaubt

416

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Der Liebe siisse Habe Wird keinem nicht geraubt.

Von treuen Himmelskindern

Wird ihm
sein Herz bewacht. Die Sehnsucht ihm zu lindern, Begeistert ihn die Nacht.

Getrost, das

Zum

Leben schreitet Leben hin; ewgen

Glut geweitet Verklart sich unser Sinn. Die Sternwelt wird zerfliessen

Von innrer

Zum goldnen Lebenswein,

Wir werden

Und Und

sie geniessen, lichte Sterne sein.

ist

Die Lieb

freigegeben,

keine Trennung mehr. Es wogt das voile Leben Wie ein unendlich Meer Nur eine Nacht der Wonne

Und
Ist

Ein ewiges Gedicht unser aller Sonne

Gottes Angesicht.

p. 259. ibid., Bolsche, I, pp. 29-31

Hinunter in der Erde Schoss > aus des Lichtes Reichenl Der Schmerzen Wut und wilder Stoss Ist froher Abfahrt Zeichen.

Weg

Wir kommen
Geschwind

in

dem engen Kahn

an.

am Himmelsufer

Gelobt sei uns die ewge Nacht, Gelobt der ewge Schlummer, Wohl hat der Tag uns warm gemacht, Und welk der lange Kummer. Die Lust der Fremde ging uns aus, Zum Vater wollen wir nach Haus.
.

Hinunter zu der

stissen

Braut

Zu Jesus, dem

Geliebten!

APPENDIX

417

Dem

Abenddammrung graut Liebenden, Betriibten. Ein Traum bricht unsre Banden los, Und senkt uns in des Vaters Schoss.
v.

Getrost! Die

pp. 259-60. from Heinnch

Ofterdingen^ Bolsche, II, pp. 144-6

Uns ward

erst die Liebe,

Leben;

Innig, wie die Elemente,

Mischen wir des Daseins Fluten, Brausend Herz mit Herz.

Liistern scheiden sich die Fluten,

Denn
1st

der

Kampf der

Elemente

der Liebe hochstes Leben

des Herzens eignes Herz.

Und

Leiser Wiinsche susses Plaudern

Horen wir allein, und schauen Immerdar in sel'ge Augen, Schmecken nicht als Mund und Kuss. Alles, was wir nur beriihren, Wird zu heissen Balsamfriichten, Wird zu weichen zarten Briisten,
Opfer kiihner Lust.

Immer wachst und

bliiht

Verlangen

Am Geliebten festzuhangen,
Ihn im Innern zu empfangen, ihm zu sein. Seinem Durste nicht zu wehren, Sich im Wechsel zu verzehren, Von einander sich zu nahren^ Von einander nur allein.
Eins mit

Und

in dieser Flut ergiessen

Wir uns auf geheime Weise In den Ozean des Lebens

Tief in Gott hinein; Und aus seinem Herzen
fliessen

Wir

zuriick

zu unserm Kreise,
ein.

Und

der Geist des hochsten Strebens

Taucht in unsre Wirbel

4*8

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Konnten doch die Menschen wissen, Unsre kunftigen Genossen, Dass bei alien ihren Freuden
geschaftig sind: Jauchzend wiirden. sie verscheiden, Gern das bleiche Dasein missen,

Wir

Die Zeit

ist

bald verflossen,
!

Kommt,

doch geschwind Helft uns nur den Erdgeist binden, Lernt den Sinn des Todes fassen Und das Wort des Lebens finden: Einmal kehrt euch um. Deine Macht muss bald verschwinden, Dein erborgtes Licht verblassen, Werden dich in kurzem binden, Erdgeist, deine Zeit ist um.
Geliebte,
Geistliche Lieder,

p. 261.

from the

Bolsche,

I, p.

61

Was war ich ohne dich gewesen, Was wiird ich ohne 'dich nicht sein? Zu Furcht und Angsten auserlesen,
Stand ich in weiter Welt
allein.

Nichts wiisst ich sicher, was ich liebte, Die Zukunft war ein dunkler Schlund;

Und wenn mein Herz

sich tief betrubte,

Wem tat ich meine

p. 261. ibid., Bolsche,
I,

Sorge kund ?

p. 61

Hat

Und

Christus sich mir kundgegeben bin ich seiner erst gewiss,

Wie

verzehrt ein lichtes

Leben

Nicht schnell die bange Finsternis. Mit ihm bin ich erst Mensch geworden; Das Schicksal wird verklart durch ihn, Und Indien muss selbst im Norden den Geliebten frohlich bliihn.

Um

p. 261. ibid., BSlsche,

I,

p.

65

Unter tausend frohen Stunden, Die im Leben ich gefunden, Blieb nur eine mir getreu;

APPENDIX
Eine, wo in tausend Schmerzen Ich erfuhr in meinem Herzen

419

Wer fur mich

p. 261. ibid., Bolsche, I, p.

gestorben

sei.

66

Wenn ich ihn nur habe, Wenn er mein nur ist, Wenn mein Herz bis hin zum Grabe
Seine Treue nie vergisst:

Weiss ich nichts von Leide, Fiihle nichts, als Andacht, Lieb und Freude,
p. 262. ibid., Bolsche, I, p.

65

Er starb, und dennoch alle Tage Vernimmst du seine Lieb' und ihn,

Und kannst getrost in jeder Lage ihn zartlich in die Arme ziehn.
p. 262. ibid., Bolsche, I, p.

Greife dreist

64 nach seinen Handen,

Prage dir sein Antlitz ein, Musst dich immer nach ihm wenden Bliite nach dem Sonnenschein Wirst du nur das ganze Herz ihm zeigen, Bleibt er, wie ein treues Weib, dir eigen.
p, 262. ibid., Bolsche, I, p.

63 Seitdem verschwand bei uns die Sxinde,

frohlich

Und

wurde jeder

Schritt;

Man gab zum schonsten Angebinde

Den Kindern
Durch ihn
diesen Glauben mit.
geheiligt zog das Leben wie ein selger Traum, Voriiber, uad Lust ergeben, Lieb' Und, ewger Bemerkte man den Abschied kaum.
p. 262. ibid., Bolsche, I, p,

66

Wenn ich ihn nur habe, Hab ich auch die Welt,
Selig wie ein

Himmelsknabe,
Schleier halt.

Der der Jungfrau

42O

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Hingesenkt im Schauen Kann mir vor dem Irdischen nicht grauen.

pp. 262-3. ibid., Bolsche,

I,

p.

67

Wenn

untreu werden. So bleib ich dir doch treu; Dass Dankbarkeit auf Erden Nicht ausgestorben sei.
alle

Oft muss ich bitter weinen, Dass du gestorben bist, Und mancher von den Deinen

Von Liebe

Dich lebenslang vergisst. nur durchdrungen Hast du so viel getan, Und doch bist du verklungen

Und keiner

denkt daran.

Ich habe dich empfunden Ol lasse nicht von mir; Lass innig mich verbunden

Auf ewig

sein rnit dir.

Einst schauen meine Briider

Auch wieder himmelwarts

Und Und

sinken liebend nieder

fallen dir ans Herz.

p. 263. ibid., Bolsche, I, p. 62

Geht hinaus auf alien Wegen,

holt die Irrenden herein,

Und Und

Streckt jedern cure

Hand entgegen, ladet sie zu uns herein.

Der Himmel ist bei uns auf Erden, Im Glauben schauen wir ihn an
Die Einer Liebe mit uns werden,

Auch denen
p. 263. ibid., Bolsche, I, p. 61

ist

er aufgetan.

Ich sehe dich in tausend Bildern, Maria, lieblich ausgedriickt,

APPENDIX
Doch keins von alien kann dich schildern, Wie meine Seele dich erblickt. Ich weiss nur, dass der Welt Getummel
Seitdem mir wie ein

421

Und

ein

unnennbar

siisser

Traum verweht, Himmel

steht.

Mir ewig im Gemxite

p. 263. ibid., Bolsche, I, pp.

^L

Die Augen sehn den Heiland wohl, Und doch sind sie des Heilands voll. Von Blumen wird sein Haupt geschmuckt, Aus denen er selbst holdselig blickt.

Er ist der Stern, er ist die Sonn', Er ist des ew'gen Lebens Bronn, Aus Kraut und Stein und Meer und Licht Schimmert sein kindlich Angesicht.
In alien Dingen sein kindlich Tun, Seine heisse Liebe wird nimmer ruhn,

Er schmiege sich seiner unbewusst Unendlich fest an jede Brust.

X.
p. 371. Westostlich

STRAUSS
ich nicht,

Ich wollte reisen,

nun verreis'

ich bleiben werde, weiss ich nicht. Dass hier ich in der Fremde bin, ist sicher
:

Doch ob

Wo meine Heimat sei,

Ob
dies nicht bloss ein

das weiss ich nicht.

Ich mem', ich hatt' einmal zwei Hebe Kinder:

Traum

sei,

weiss ich nicht.

Ein Weib verstiess ich, ob zu Hass die Liebe, Ob Hass zu Liebe wurde, weiss ich nicht.
Sie sagen, Biicher hatt* ich einst geschrieben Ob's Wahrheit oder Spott ist, weiss ich nicht.
:

Unglaubig, hor' ich, nennen mich die Leute Ob ich nicht eher fromm sei, weiss ich nicht,

Nie hab ich vor

Ob

dem Tode mich gefurchtet: ich nicht langst gestorben, weiss ich nicht.
(1848, Gesammelte Schriften^ XII\ p. 64)

422
P- 37 1 '

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Wem ich dieses klage,

Weiss, ich klage nicht; Der ich dieses sage,
Fiihlt, ich

zage nicht.
verglimmen,

Heute

heisst's:

Wie

ein Licht verglimmt, In die Luft verschwimmen, ein

Wie

Ton verschwimmt.
und
rein,

Moge schwach wie immer,

Aber
hell

Dieser letzte Schimmer, Dieser Ton nur sein.

(29

December

1873, Gesam-

melte Schriften,

XII, p. 226)

LIST OF ENGLISH
readers

TRANSLATIONS

Quotations in the text are from original works. For the benefit of we append a list of English translations,

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

The Social Contract. Discourses. Introduction and Translation by G. D. H. Cole. Dent, 1955. Everyman Library. Confessions. Translated and with an Introduction by J. M. Cohen. Penguin Books, London, 1953. Confessions. Dent, London, 1931. Everyman Library. A Complete Dictionary of Music. Translated by W. Waring. Second edition, J. French, London, 1779. Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar. Translated from the French by Olive Schreiner. Eckler, 1889. The Reveries of a Solitary. G. Routledge & Sons, London, 1927. Eloisa or a series of original letters. Translated from the French. London,
1784.

On
18

the Inequality

Havard
Letters

of Mankind. Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar. Classics. Vol. 34. 1910.

Rousseau
to

The

from Jean-Jacques

Mme

d'Houdetot

October

GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING A Translation of Eine Parabel and

Goetze.

Other Writings by Lessing in Reply

to

Edited by I. Bernard. Trubner, London, 1862. The Education of the Human Race. Translated by F. W. Robertson. Kegan Paul & Co., London, 1896. Reprinted in Anthroposophy, London, 1927. Nathan the Wise, in A Selection of Lessing s Plays. Dent, London, 1930.
9

Also in Dramatic Works. G. Bell & Sons, London, 1888. Also translated by W. Jacks and introduced by Archdeacon Farrar. Maclehose & Sons, Glasgow, 1894. Also translated with an Introduction and Notes by M. G. Patrick Maxwell. The Scott Library, Vol. 99, 1892.
Lessing's Theological Writings. Selected

Everyman

Library.

and translated by Henry Chad1957.

wick. A.

and C. Black, London,

IMMANUEL KANT

A Critique of Pure Reason. Dent, London, 1934. Everyman Library. Translated by F. Max Muller. Macmillan & Co., New York, 1927.

42 4

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Another translation by Norman London, 1929.

Kemp

Smith. Macmillan

&

Co.,

Religion within the Boundary of Pure Reason. within the Limits of Reason. Translated

Edinburgh, 1838; Religion

by Theodore M. Green and

Prolegomena.

Hoyt H. Hudson. Open Court, Chicago/London, 1934. Simpkin and Marshall, 1819. Manchester University
Press, 1953.

A Critique of Judgment. Translated by James Creed Meredith, Clarendon

Press, Oxford, 1952, Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, and other Works on
the Theory of Ethics. Translated by T. K. Abbott. Longmans, Green, and Co. Ltd.,

London, 1927. The Moral Law or Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Translated and with notes by H. J. Paton. Hutchinson's University
Library, London, 1948.

NOVALIS
Hymns
to the

Night. Translated
Press, 1948.

by Mabel

Cotterel.

Phoenix

German and English,

Spiritual Songs.

Translated by G. Macdonald, London, 1876.

HEGEL
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.

Translated from the second

Sanderson. English and Foreign Philosophical Speirs Library, 1877. Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. Bonn's Library. George Bell Son, London, 1890.

edition

by

&

German

&

Early Theological Writing. Translated

by T. M. Knox. University of

Chicago

Press,

Chicago, 1948.

SGHLEIERMAGHER
Christmas Eve. Edinburgh, 1890. On Religion. Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. London, 1893; Harper Torch Books, New York, 1958, with Introduction by Rudolph

Otto.
Christian Faith in Outline. Translated by D. M. Baillie. W. F. Henderson, Edinburgh, 1922. The Christian Faith. Translated by H. R. Mackintosh and T. S. Stewart. T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1928.

The

FEUERBACH
The Essence of
Christianity. Translated by Marian Evans. Chapman's Quarterly Series, 1853; Harper Torch Books, New York, 1957, with Introduction by Karl Earth and Foreword by H. Richard Niebuhr,

LIST OF ENGLISH

TRANSLATIONS

425

STRAUSS
The Life of Jesus. Translated 9 Strauss New Life of Jesus.

by Marian Evans. London, 1846. Williams and Norgate, London and

Edinburgh, 1879. The Old Faith and the New. Authorized translation from the sixth edition by M. Blind. Asher & Co., London, 1873.

RITSGHL

A Critical History
1872.

of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation. Translated by J. S. Black. Edmonston and Douglas, Edinburgh,

Instruction in the Christian Religion.

Translated by Alice M. Swing and included in The Theology of Albrecht RitschL Longman & Co., New York, 1901. The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation. Translated and edited by H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay. T. and T,
Clark, Edinburgh, 1900.

INDEX OF NAMES
Albrecht, Johann, 362 d'Alembert, J. L., 60, 67 Amos, 116
Claudius, Matthias, 155 Gochleus,J., 125 Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 24 Columbus, Christopher, 16

Aquinas, Thomas, 268, 274, 280

Aristotle, 125, 135

Cook, James, 14
Copernicus, 15,
1

Arndt, E. M., 319

6,

154

Arnim, Bettina von, 31

Corneille, Pierre, 45

Arnold, Gottfried, 37, 125 Augustine, 93, 166, 185, 230, 373 Augustus the Strong (of Saxony), 22

Cremer, Herm., 390

Dante, Alighieri, 250, 369 Darwin, Charles, 366, 369 Daub, Karl, 307, 355 Descartes, Ren6, 125, 268, 293 Dessau, Leopold von, 19 Diderot, Denis, 60, 63, 64 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 311 Dorner, L A., 191, 200, 2i4ni Drews, Artur, 381 Durante, Francesco, 61

Bach,J. S., 47,48,49,50, 51 Basedow, J. B., n, 38, 40 Bauer, Bruno, 381

Baur, F. Chr., 271, 362, 364, 366, 376, 384. 393 Bayle, Pierre, 13, 63 Beaumont, Christophe de (Archbishop of Paris), 89, 91, 97 Beck,J, T., 360 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 47, 50, 62, 370 Bengel,J. A*, 18,362 Biedermann, A. E., 269, 365, 390 Bismarck, Otto von, 320, 392 Blum, Robert, 370 Blumhardt, Christoph, 360, 370 Blumhardt, J. C., 360 Bohme, Jakob, 362 Bolsche, W., 23off., 407-21
Bossuet, J. B., 14 Bousset, Wilhelm, 391
Breitinger, J. J., 46

Eberhard, Ludwig, 22 EichendorfT, Joseph, 228, 232 Eichhorn, J. G., 376 Epictetus, 55 Epicurus, 55 d'Epinay, Louise, 67
Euclid, 136

Euler, Leonhard, 14, 25

Fahrenheit, Gabriel D., 19 F&ielon, Francois, 14, 39 Fichte, J. G., 137, 234, 243, 268, 277,
278, 280, 319, 324, 355 Feuerbach, Ludwig, ch.

Brentano, G., 228

Bretschneider, K. G., 307, 376

IX

passim,

Brunner, E., 307, 309, 317 Buffon, G. L, L. de, 63

Bunyan, John, 16
Cagliostro, A., 13

363, 366, 381, 383, 387* 388, 389 Francke, A. H., 38, 39 Frank, F. H. R., 390

Franklin, Benjamin, 136 Frederick the Great, 12, 13, 14, 23,
24, 25, 42, 47, 48, 91, 93, 118, 119 Frederick William I (of Prussia), 23,

Calvin, John, 67, 73, 187, 309, 310,

3 IJ > 3^3.354 Cardanus, Hermann, 125, 132 Carlyle, Thomas, 219, 381 Casanova, Giacomo, 13 Chamette, 19 Charpentier, Julie von, 243 Cicero, 54, 55

rick

William II

(of Prussia),

39

Frederick William

IV

(of Prussia),

226
Fries,

J.F., 190

Frischlin,

Nikodemus, 364

428
Galileo, 15 Galvani, Luigi, 19

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Holl, Karl, 185

Homer, 218
Hooke, Robert, 19 Horace, 218

Gass, W., 306 Gellert, G. F., 16, 55 Gesner, Matthias, 38 Gluck, G. W., 47, 5i

Hume, David,

60, 93, 102, 153

Hutten, Ulrich von, 364

Ihmels, Ludwig, 390
Jacobi, Heinrich Friedrich, 119, 122, 155, 190 Jommelli, Niccolo, 61

Goethe, J. W.,
33:

12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 24, 43, 45 46 5 50, 55, 60, 62, 63, 70, 98, 99> ioo, i oi, 105, 109, 113, 114, 115, 117, 119, 150, 151, 178, 202, 211, 212, 225, 226, 230, 239, 240, 288, 289, 294, 319, 340, 366, 370, 388, 399, 400 Goetz, Walter, 14, 15 Goeze, Melchior, 119, 126, 129, 134, i39> 140 Gottsched, Johann Christian, 45, 46 Gottsched, Luise Adelgunde Viktoria,

Joseph II, 14, 18, 19, 24, 25, 39 Joseph Emmerich (Elector of Mayence), 24
Jung-Stilling, J. H., 184, 193

Grimm,

45, JI 9 Friedrich Melchior, 63

de, 14

Gunkel, Hermann, 391

Guyon, Jeanne Marie

Kaftan, Julius, 271, 390 Kahler, Martin, 390 Kalthoff, Albert, 381

Kant, Immanuel,

Haeckel, Ernst, 226, 369 Haering, T. von, 390

P. M., 18 Haller, Albrecht von, 13 Hamann, J. G., 155, 202 Handel, G. F., 47, 51 Friedrich Hardenberg,

12, 16, 25, 58, 104, 107, ch. TV passim, 197, 198, 199, 2OO, 201, 202, 2O6, 210, 212, 214,

Hahn,

von,

see

215, 226, 277, 300, 3^2,

2l6, 227, 278, 301, 3^9,

217, 2l8, 222, 223, 228, 229, 231, 269, 280, 281, 291, 293, 308, 315, 340, 344, 39i

225, 273; 294, 355,

Novalis

Harms, Klaus, 230 Harnack, Adolf von, 220, 271, 390

Hase, Karl, 376 Hausrath, Adolf, 364, 366, 367, 368 Haydn, Joseph, 47, 51, 370 Hegel, G. W. F., 60, 151, 191, 225,
307, 308, 328, 329, 330, 332, 334, 355, 358, 359. 3&>, 362, 383^ 39<>> 392 Wilhelm, 391 Hengstenberg, E. W., 367, 381 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 150, 151, 1653 178, ch. passim, 227, 228, 229, 231, 269, 273, 276, 277, 278, *94> 308, 332, 344, 403-7 Herrmann, W., 190, 192, 227, 230,
passim)

Karl Alexander (of Wurttemberg), 22 Karl August (of Saxe-Weimar), 24 Karl Eugen (of Wurttemberg), 22

KarlTheodor
Kattenbusch,

(of Bavaria), 22
F.,

390

Keith, Jakob von, 91

226, ch. 315, 319, 340, 347, 3 6 5, 367, Heitmuller,

VII

Kerner, Justinus, 362 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 12, 284 Kirn, Otto, 390 Klopstock, F. G., 46 Knapp, Albert, 369 Kohlhaas, Michael, 368

H. A., 12 Kuhn, Sophie von, 243, Kutter, Hermann, 391

Korff,

245, 250

390 Hobbes, Thomas, 31, 32, 72, 75 Hofacker, Ludwig, 229, 230, 369 Hoffmann, H., 12, 35, 36 Holbach, D. von, 63 Holderlin, Friedrich, 332

Lagarde, P. A. de, 390 Lamarck, J. B. de, 369 Laplace, P. S., 155, 369 Lasson, Georg, 269 Lavater, J. K., 155 Leibnitz, G. W., 12, 13, 15, 55, 56, 57, 125, 202, 278 Leo, Leonardo, 61

INDEX OF NAMES
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 12, 24, 25, 46, 58, ch. Ill passim, 150, 151, 173, 187, 199, 200, 201, 211, 215, 216, 217, 218, 228, 269, 273, 276, 278, 293, 296, 308, 314, 344, 366, 400, 401, 402, 403 Le Vasseur, Therese, 63, 93, 102 Lipsius, R. A., 390 Livy, 378

429

Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 12, ch. VI passim, 273, 276, 308,

332,347,407-21
Oetinger, F. C., 18 Oettingen, Alexander von, 390 Otto, Rudolf, 391 Overbeck, F., 271, 390

Locke, John, 32 Louis XIV, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27, 37, 45, 55, 60, 372 Louis XV, 22, 6 1 Louis XVI, 27

Papin, Denis, 19 Paulsen, Friedrich, 271 Paulus, H. E. G., 377, 381 Pergolesi, G. B., 61 Peter the Great, 17
Pfleiderer, Otto,

Lucke, Friedrich, 321, 326, 329, 335, 338 Liidemann, Hermann, 390 Ludwig IX (of Hesse), 22 Liilmann, Christian, 307 Luthardt, G. E., 390 Luther, Martin, 47, 129, 151, 187,
209, 2ii, 300, 309, 310, 311, 313, 342, 343, 354. 357, 359, 3^4, 3^5, 373, 380

390

Philip of Orleans, 22 Plato, 18, 125, 218, 3to, 315 Plessing, Friedrich, 100 Plutarch, 54, 55, 62 Pope, Alexander, 18
Priestley, Joseph, 19

Racine, Jean, 45 Rade, Martin, 390

Marheineke, P. K., 191, 307, 375

Max Emanuel

Maria Theresa, 39
Mazarin, Melanchthon, Philip, 54 Mendelssohn, Felix, 62 Mendelssohn, Moses, 1x9, 122 Menken, G. von, 360, 375
Michelet, K. L., 269 Milton, John, 1 6 Moliere,J.-B. P., 45
(of Bavaria), 22 Jules, 2 1

Ragaz, Leonhard, 391 Reimarus, Elise, 122, 136 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel,
122, 123, 126, 127, 132, 133 Renan, Ernest, 363

119,

Richelieu, A. J. du Plessis, 21 Ritschl, Albrecht, 190, 191, 192, 225, 227, 271, 307, 320, ch. XI passim, Rittelmeyer, Friedrich, 391 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 12, ch. II
passim, 118, 119, 120, 122, 146, 150, 151, 154, 165, 177, 200, 201, 228,

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 19

Montesquieu, Charles, 18
Montgolfier, Bruder, 19

314, 400

Montmollin, F. G. de, 92 Moses, 73, 338 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 48, 51, 62, 153, 370, 388 Mtiller, Johannes, 391

12, 24,

Naumann,
Neuser,

Friedrich, 226 Neander, A., 306, 377, 383

Schaeder, E., 391 Scharnhost, G. J. D. von, 319 Schebest, Agnes, 362 Schelling, F. W. J. von, 276, 280, 281, 288, 324, 328, 329, 330, 332, 35 1 , 362 Schenkel, Daniel, 367 Schiller, Friedrich von, 100 Schlatter, Adolf, 390
Schlegel, Friedrich, 228 Schleiermacher, F. E. D., 58, 62, 151, 190, 191, 192, 200, 212, 223, 227, 228, 230, 231, 232, 245, 271, 276, 294, 295, 298, 301, 305, ch. VIII
passim, 355, 358, 362, 375, 377, 384, 388, 390, 392

125 Newton, Isaac, 125 Nicolai, Friedrich, n, 12, 128 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 226, 366, 370,

Adam,

388
Nitzsch, Karl Immanuel, 306

376,

430
Scholz, H., 308

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSCHL

Tieck, Ludwig, 228 Tolstoy, Leo, 226 Troeltsch, Ernst, 191, I92 227, 231, 245, 312, 391 Turrettini, J. A., 91

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 369 Schubert, Franz, 47, 62, 364 Schulz, David, 390
Schweitzer, Albert, 363, 371, 388 Schweizer, Alexander, 306, 389 Seeberg, Reinhold, 390 Semler,J. S., 119 Seneca, 55, 177 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 16 Shakespeare, William, 120
Silesius,

200, 225,

Twesten, August, 306

Ullmann, Karl, 383

Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 12, 14, 37, 47, 60, 63, 67, 92, 102, 119, 127, 364 Vulpius, Christiane, 63

Angelus, 369

Socrates, 18, 88, 103, 125

Sophia Charlotte (Queen), 56 Sophocles, 120, 218

Spinoza, Benedictus de, 278, 365 Stange, C., 391 Stein, Charlotte von, 16 Stephan, Horst, 12 Steudel,J. C. F., 383 S timer, Max, 360
Strauss,
119,

202,

Wackenroder, W. H., 229 Wagner, Richard, 12, 15, 47, 226, 388 Warens, Frangoise Louise de, 62!*., 65,
68> 93, 99> 108

Watt, James, 19 Wegscheider, J. A. L., 190, 192, 377,

39 1 Weinel, Heinrich, 381

D.

F., 307, 361, ch.

X passim,
.

421-2

Swedenborg, Emanuel, 131 Sydow, K. L. A., 311

Tersteegen, Gerhard, 14 Thaer, Albrecht, 123 Tholuck, F. A., 358, 375, 377> 3 8 3>

Wette, 381

W.

7i>39i
L. de, 190, 200, 358, 377,

Wilhelm, Kaiser, 271

Wobbermin,

G., 227, 391 Wolff, Christian, 11, 12, 161, 278

384
Tiberius (Emperor), 378

Zeno, 55
Zinzendorf, N. L. (Count), 13, 44

INDEX OF SUBJECTS
Absolutism, 14^5 20,
22ff., 29, 30, 32,

Churches

of,

125, 332

42,50,54.98,
Aesthetics, 289

104, iisf.

America, 23, 28 Anabaptists, 394 Analogy, 161, 186, 205, 219 Anthropodicy, 53 Anthropology, 105, 187, 338, 355^ Antinomies, 158 Antithesis, 2846:*., 289
Apologetics, 137, 217, 312, 321, 324ff,, 33 *> 334, 358
Apologists, 134, 146

Deity of, 349 Gospel of, 219 Person of, 359

Religion, of, 125, 139 Self-consciousness of, 346

Uniqueness of, 303 Christmas, 315, 342

Christology, 125, i7if., 183, 220, 223,
3i2f., 342, 346, 352,

357, 365,

373, 379, 382

169 Apperception, 158, 160 a priori, 83, 156, 169, 181, 188, 300,
posteriori,

Church, 32, 37, 42, 79, 168, 173^., i92f. 294, 311, 324, 337, 362 and Education, 3gff.
}

invisible

and

visible, 174,

188

330
Art, 6 1, 87, 120, 23of., 235^, Arts, 202
248!".

Lutheran, 129, 132, Protestant, 321

i44ff.

Roman

Catholic, 56, 62, 79, 186, 265, 268

Assembly, National, 27
Association, form of free, 42 ff, Atonement, doctrine of, 124,
185, 187, 189,
181,

Churches, 56, 90, 97 Reformed, 93

Classicism, 45f.

358 80

Comforter, 186
communicatio idiomatum, 359

Author

(of all things),

Authority, 27, 30, 60, 72, 170, 194,

Communion, Holy,

92, 151, 246, 313,

395 Autobiography (of Rousseau), 93, 98,

103, 107

357, 359 Conscience, 83, 85 Consciousness, religious, 353 Contract, 65, 75

Baptism, 357
Bible, 86, 92, i38ff., 146,
164,
170,

188, 192, i94f., 2i8f., 242, 245,

290,321,324*328,362,391
Biology, 238
Birth, Virgin, 378

Botany, 94
Calvinism, 28
Capital, 320 Catechism, 81

Convention, social, 7 if. Conversion, 63 Cosmology, 11, 159, 338 Covenant, New, 131, 195 Old, 145 Creation, 50, 207, 395 brute, 83 new, 182 Creator, 29, 127, 205, 207!, 232, 298, 372 Criticism, 153, 157

Catholicism,

Roman,

78,

146,

230,

394
Cause, First, 158 Censorship, 76?. Chemistry, 238 Child, problem, 342
Christ, 137, 139, 257, a6off., 293, 313,

339, 342, 346, 355, 357

Dancing, 35 Daylight, 252 Dead, resurrection of, 367 Death, 212, 250, 255ff. Dependence, 330, 334^,' 348f., 353, 376 Devil, 86, 286, 290

432
Dialectic 3 269, 284
Disciples,

FROM ROUSSEATJ TO RITSGHL

communion with,
302
glory of, 49 grace of, 2of., 23, 26, 29

385

318, 333, 384 existence of, 53f., 57, 79, 159, 161,

Divinity, man's, 360

Divorce, 370

Dogma,
321,

85, 88, 126, 169, 287, 311,

324*326,328,362,391
if,,

image

of, 205f.,
of,

227

Dogmatics, 31 365

326, 330, 336, 338,

Kingdom
395 presence

188, 333, 386,

394^

knowledge

of,

298, 330, 334, 375,

10,

Drama,
Ego,

12 of.
38fF. 3 59,

Education, 21,
Election, 185 Electricity, 19

79^, 106
318

of,

the, 120, 131, 148, 234ff.,

qualities of, 83,

334 337

Son

of,

124, 171, 173

spirit of,

219

Empire, Holy Roman, I9f., 68 Enlightenment, nff., 35, 118, 129,

i32f., 152, I54f., i56f., 196, 199, 201, 209, 2l6f., 22lf., 225, 270, 278, 3H> 39^ Equality, 60, 71

will of, 25, 53,

217

Word

of,

188, 218, 300, 338, 357

yoke of, 78 God-Kings, 23

God-man, 359, 374, 377 Good, 176, 178

Goodness,
83f.,

Eros,

244

105, logf., 172, 186,

Eschatology, 30, 337, 359, 395 Eternity, 239, 247, 359, 395 Ethics, 176, 198, 201, 324, 328, 331 Eucharist, 125
Evil, 83,
1

2i3f., 220,

372

Gospel, 77f., 88, 138, 172, 184, 338 Fourth, 372f., 384

Proclamation

of,

40

10, i78ff.,

212

Existence, Ii2if., 119, 203, 206, 215, 284, 347: 356, 397
Faith, 81, 195, 219,242, 293, 321, 331, 343 ff., 386
article of, 82

Gospels, 140, 378, 385 Synoptic, 373, 375^ Government, 66, 74f.

Governments, 27 Grace, 57, 116, 185, 187, 195, 333, 353

Guilt,
179,

273

confession of, 35, 79, 81 doctrine of, 341

historical, 168

Harmony, pre-established, 57 Heaven, 124, 246, 252, 264, 298

object

of,

222

Kingdom

of,

155

Fall, the, 105, 179

Hell, 83, 124

Father, 171, 256, 339, 345, 372, 393 Feeling, 113, 138, 199, 201, 216, 276, 296, 330, 332, 334f-, 338f, 348, 350, 353 Flesh, resurrection of, 360
Forgiveness, 96, 181, i84f., 394^

Hermeneutics, 181, 187 Historicism, 227

History, 81, 83, 146, 213, 231, 240, 278, 324, 375 Church, 121, 126, 211

concept
critical

of, 2 off.

France, 6

Freedom, n,
Freemasons,

25, 50, 7 iff., 76, 157, i6of., 178, 274

13, 42, 129, 148

no,

Germany,
gnosis, 313,

2offL, 68,

118

study of, 36f. drama of, 148 Lord of, 147 philosophy of, 145, 284 Revelation in, 363 Holland, 16

329 Gnostics, 354 God, 11, 521!., 57, 72, 82, 116, 126,
128, i42ff., 147, 157, i6o, 166, i82ff., 199, 248, 275, 279, 303, 337, 34^, 353> 393

Humanism,

54, 57,

60
2i3f., 216, 221,

Humanity, 172, 208,

Christ's,
*>

227, 239, 374, 382

359

356, 359

INDEX OF SUBJECTS
Idealism, 14, 98, 157 Image, archetypal, 351, 376
eighteenth-century,
iiff.,

433
33, 104

Immortality, u, 82, 157, i6of., 204 Imperative, categorical, 160, 201 Individualism, 59^, no, 113, 120 Individuation, principle of, 350 Inequality, 65 Infinite, 350, 387 Injustice, 105
Intellectualism, 18 Intuition, I58f.

European, i6ff. Son of, 335 Mania, persecution, 99 Mary, 258, 260, 262, 264 Mary-Christ, 233 Mass, 88
Mathematics, 17, 233, 247 Medicine, 238 Messiah, 242, 270, 273, 372, 38 5 f. Metaphysics, 159, 162, 187, 277 Method, dialectical, 284^, 290, 297, 304 Socratic, 38

Irrationalism 12, 15, 277

Italy, 17

Jerusalem, 87
Jesuit, see

Order

Middle Ages, 13, 242,293^

Millennia, 253

26, 36, 42, 186, 209,

Jesus, 172, 221, 292, 313, 342, 372, 374, 376, 382, 385!*., 395
historical,
life of,

Millennium,

18,

256

386

Mind, Absolute, 302

philosophy of, 287, 329 Ministry, 324 Miracles, Ssf., 106, i27f., 136, 138, 167, 185, 193, 232, 319, 377,

372fF.

mind

of,

332

Jesus, Society Jew, 143, 148

religious consciousness of, 372f. of, 42, 259

Judaism, 125 Judge, 141, 173

382 Moderation, Rococo, 34

Modernism, Protestant, 147

274

Judgment,

8if., I4if.,

Mohammedan,

87, 148

Justice, 25f., 71, 182 Justification, 181, 184^, 287, 397

Monads, 52!, 210 Monarchy, igff.,

Monogamy, 370
King,
2off.

Monotheism, 245
157, 188, 198, 296,

Kingdom, 173
Knowledge,
329
criticism of, I53f., 162
historical, 169, 344, 354,

Morality, 156, iGsf., 201 Moravians, 17, 44, 310, 33 if.

Mother, 256
379

Mount, Sermon on
Music,

the, 372,

378

theory

of,

277, 292

6 if., 388 Mysteries, 127

46,

Labour, 320

Law,

20, 31, 7ofE, 78

moral, 179
natural, 66
positive,

66

Liberalism, Social, 320 Liberty, 71 Life, sis, 236, 283, 347, 353 Logic, n, 17, 35, 198, 201, 277, 285, 287, 297, soif. Logos, 341, 343f. Lordship, claim to, 217 Love, 214, 231, 235, 242ff., 245, 247, *49 *54> 356, 385* 395

Naturalism, 350 Nature, 33f., 53, 67, 69, 80, 82ff., 87, 95, 112, 114, 120, 126,213, 231, 238E, 298, 324, 355 God's 356

human,
laws
of,

179, 186,

356

206

mother, 204 Neo-Kantianism, 291 Neologism, i23f. Neology, 130 Neo-Romanticism, 228 Night, 240!, 252, 264 Non-ego, the, 2340% 243, 264
Novel, epistolary, 68f.

Man,

72, 84, 106, HO, 121, 142^, 147, 182, 201, 282, 295, 355

Numbers

(o to co

),

247ff.,

264

434
Omnipotence, 359 Omnipresence, 359
Order, Jesuit,
Society of

FROM ROUSSEAU TO RITSGHL

Reconciliation, 116, 283, 302, 394^

Objectivity, historical, 222

Redeemer, 347 Redemption, 346, 353, 357

See also
Jesus,

40.

Reformation,
39i

26f., 91, I25f., 183, 209, 223, 242, 264, 294, 321, 342, 344,

Orthodoxy, 117, 130, 133 Lutheran, 359

Papacy, 77 Pantheism, 245 Paradox, 203
Peace, 67, 96, 235, 319, 357 Pelagianism, 96, losf., 109, 115 Personality, 381, 395 Philosophy, 23of., 234, 237f., 248!*.,
268ff.

Religion, 85, 2i3f., 216, 222, 245f.,

278
politics, 77 Mystery, 13 natural, 77 philosophy of, 121,

and

i63fF., 168, 176, 179, i87f., i94f., 201, 217, 228, 280, 295, 299, 308, 324, 33of.

positive, 122, i26f., 164, 351,

priestly,

379

78

natural, 229, 287f. Philology, 242, 311 Physics, 206, 238, 277 Pietism, 34, 62, 394
Pietists, 17,

revealed, 86, 169

true, 87

Religions, other, 140, 143^ Renaissance, 17, 54, 60, 125

Responsibilities, 25f.

44

Piety, 345, 347f.

singing, 335
Pistis,

313, 329 Poesy, 234ff., 242, 251, 272 Poetry, 120, 235

Pope, the, 68
Portuguese, 16 Positivism, 291 Prayer, 318
Predestination, 181, 304, 369 Priesthood, 324 Progress, iyjf. 9 212, 274 Proof, historical, 170 Property, 66 Prophecies, 85f., 386 Providence, I3if., 148, 170, 173, 177,

Resurrection, 249, 378 Revealer, 347 Revelation, 84, 91, 116, 122, i29fF., i46f., 164, 166, 195, 2i4ff., 218, 293f., 321, 339

134 proof of, 135 objectivity of, 303 stream of, 214 teachings of, 193 Revolution, 2 if., 29 French, 20, 27, 29, 44, 60, 155
historical

historical criticism of,

Righteousness, i82f. Rights, 27, 72, 94

Romanticism,

221
Prussianism, 319 Psychologism, 227 Psychology, n, 159, 238, 375

14, 98, 150, 225^, 247, 251, 265, 276, 289, 315, 324, 326,

Rosicrucians, 13 Russia, 17 Russian, a, 225

Salvation, 79, 187, 274, 302 Sanctification, 287

Quietism, 14

Radicalism, 25 Rationalism, 12, 34,

sgf., 117, 157, 165, 168, 217, 223, 227, 294, 377

Reason, 53, 83, 85, 91, 116, 156^,

171, 185, 193, 200, 223, 26gff., 276, 282, 303, 355 critique of, 137
limits of, 164$. practical, 159, 197, 301 religion of, 189, 194 truths of, 137

Saviour, 332 Scholasticism, 186 Science, *7f., 87, 156, 20of., 239, 271, 29*> *97> 3*> 3*6 Scripture, 84, 134, 140, I7of., 174, 194, 220 Protestant doctrine of, 146^
Self, 275ff-

Self-awareness, 334!., 337^, 383 Self-confidence, 2751?,, 291, 304

INDEX OF SUBJECTS
Self-consciousness, 237, 347f., 353 Sin, 1 1 6, 262, 353, 394^ doctrine of original, 92, 105, 109,

435

116,333
Solipsism, 1 1 1 Solitude, 65, 95f., 102

New, isgf., 221, 320, 333, 380, 395 Theatre, 67, 69 Theodicy, 53 Theology, iisf., 132, 162, 300
Biblical, 163, 1941!.

Son, 34 4 f., 386 Soul, immortality of, 82 Sovereignty, 73 Space, 158, 1 60, 210, 252 Spaniards, 16
Spirit, 52,

eighteenth century, 97, 117, 123 method of, 157

Protestant, 58, 92, 121, 359 Reformed, 34of. Thesis, 284ff. Thou, 356, 359 Time, 158, 160, 210, 239

108, 168, 220, 298, 333, 343, 345fHoly, 337, 34of., 343^, 352f., 357
1 1

Transcendentalism, 277
Trinity, 29, 40, 171, 298, 302, 339,

Spirit-nature, State, 287f., 319 Christian, 78

5f.

doctrine

of, 66f.,

7 iff.

natural, 71 Stoicism, 57

344 Truth, 220, 255, 282, 284, 296f., 299, 30if., 336 historical, 135, I37f., 146 Tsar, the, 68 Turk, 68, 78

Sturm und Drang, 12, 14, 100 Supper, Lord's, 245, 264 Style, Baroque, 34 Subjectivism, in
Suicide, 94 Syllogisms, 203 Synthesis, 2841?., 301

Tyranny,

75, 77f.
i58f., 167, 223,

Understanding,

279

Unfreedom,

13,

65
19

War, Thirty Years,

Will, Absolute, 245
free,

158

Tartar, a, 225

general, 76

Teaching,

38ff.

Teleology, 144

Word,

Testament, Old, 333, 338, 380, 386

God's, 217 335, 340, 342f., 352, 372 Incarnation of the, 343

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