such a predominant position that my theological views can only be worked
out to completeness by means of a more thorough study of philosophy, and
this course of study I am now going to prosecute uninterruptedly and
without concerning myself whether it leads me back to theology or not.”
Further on he says: “If I know myself rightly, my position in regard to
theology is that what interests me in theology causes offence, and what
does not cause offence is indifferent to me. For this reason I have
refrained from delivering lectures on theology.”
The philosophical faculty was not altogether pleased at the success of the
apostle of Hegel, and wished to have the right of the “Repetents” to
lecture on philosophy curtailed. The latter, however, took their stand
upon the tradition. Strauss was desired to intermit his lectures until the
matter should be settled. He would have liked best to end the situation by
entering the philosophical faculty. The other “Repetents,” however, begged
him not to do so, but to continue to champion their rights. It is possible
also that obstacles were placed in the way of his plan by the
philosophical faculty. However that may be, it was in any case not carried
through. Strauss was forced back upon theology.
According to Hase,(33) Strauss began his studies for the Life of Jesus by
writing a detailed critical review of his (Hase’s) text‐book. He sent this
to Berlin to the _Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik_, which,
however, refused it. His resolve to publish first, instead of the general
work on the genesis of Christian doctrine, a critical study on the life of
Jesus was doubtless determined by Schleiermacher’s lectures on this
subject. When in Berlin he had procured a copy of a lecture note‐book, and
the reading of it incited him to opposition.
Considering its character, the work was rapidly produced. He wrote it
sitting at the window of the Repetents’ room, which looks out upon the
gateway‐arch. When its two volumes appeared in 1835 the name of the author
was wholly unknown, except for some critical studies upon the Gospels.
This book, into which he had poured his youthful enthusiasm, rendered him
famous in a moment—and utterly destroyed his prospects. Among his
opponents the most prominent was Steudel, a member of the theological
faculty, who, as president of the _Stift_, made representations against
him to the Ministry, and succeeded in securing his removal from the post
of “Repetent.” The hopes which Strauss had placed upon his friends were
disappointed. Only two or three at most dared to publish anything in his
defence.
He first accepted a transfer to the post of Deputy‐professor at
Ludwigsburg, but in less than a year he was glad to give it up, and he
then returned to Stuttgart. There he lived for several years, busying
himself in the preparation of new editions of the Life of Jesus, and in
writing answers to the attacks which were made upon him.
Towards the end of the ’thirties he became conscious of a growing impulse
towards more positive views. The criticisms of his opponents had made some
impression upon him. The second volume of polemics was laid aside. In its
place appeared the third edition of the Life of Jesus, 1838‐1839,
containing a series of amazing concessions. Strauss explains that in
consequence of reading de Wette’s commentary and Neander’s Life of Jesus
he had begun to feel some hesitation about his former doubts regarding the
genuineness and credibility of the Fourth Gospel. The historic personality
of Jesus again began to take on intelligible outlines for him. These
inconsistencies he removed in the next edition, acknowledging that he did
not know how he could so have temporarily vacillated in his point of view.
The matter admits, however, of a psychological explanation. He longed for
peace, for he had suffered more than his enemies suspected or his friends
knew. The ban of the outlaw lay heavy upon his soul. In this spirit he
composed in 1839 the monologues entitled _Vergängliches und Bleibendes im
Christentum_ (“Transient and Permanent Elements in Christianity”), which
appeared again in the following year under the title _Friedliche Blätter_
(“Leaves of Peace”).
For a moment it seemed as though his rehabilitation would be accomplished.
In January 1839 the noble‐minded Hitzig succeeded in getting him appointed
to the vacant chair of dogmatics in Zurich. But the orthodox and pietist
parties protested so vehemently that the Government was obliged to revoke
the appointment. Strauss was pensioned off, without ever entering on his
office.
About that time his mother died. In 1841 he lost his father. When the
estate came to be settled up, it was found that his affairs were in a less
unsatisfactory condition than had been feared. Strauss was secure against
want. The success of his second great work, his “Christian Theology”
(published in 1840‐41), compensated him for his disappointment at Zurich.
In conception it is perhaps even greater than the Life of Jesus; and in
depth of thought it is to be classed with the most important contributions
to theology. In spite of that it never attracted so much attention as the
earlier work. Strauss continued to be known as the author of the Life of
Jesus. Any further ground of offence which he might give was regarded as
quite subsidiary.
And the book contains matter for offence in no common degree. The point to
which Strauss applies his criticism is the way in which the Christian
theology which grew out of the ideas of the ancient world has been brought
into harmony with the Christianity of rationalism and of speculative
philosophy. Either, to use his own expression, both are so finely
pulverised in the process—as in the case of Schleiermacher’s combination
of Spinozism with Christianity—that it needs a sharp eye to rediscover the
elements of the mixture; or the two are shaken together like water and
oil, in which case the semblance of combination is only maintained so long
as the shaking continues. For this crude procedure he desires to
substitute a better method, based upon a preliminary historical criticism
of dogma, in order that thought may no longer have to deal with the
present form of Church theology, but with the ideas which worked as living
forces in its formation.
This is brilliantly worked out in detail. The result is not a positive,
but a negative Hegelian theology. Religion is not concerned with supra‐
mundane beings and a divinely glorious future, but with present spiritual
realities which appear as “moments” in the eternal being and becoming of
Absolute Spirit. At the end of the second volume, where battle is joined
on the issue of personal immortality, all these ideas play their part in
the struggle. Personal immortality is finally rejected in every form, for
the critical reasons which Strauss had already set forth in the letters of
1832. Immortality is not something which stretches out into the future,
but simply and solely the present quality of the spirit, its inner
universality, its power of rising above everything finite to the Idea.
Here the thought of Hegel coincides with that of Schleiermacher. “The
saying of Schleiermacher, ‘In the midst of finitude to be one with the
Infinite, and to be eternal in a moment,’ is all that modern thought can
say about immortality.” But neither Schleiermacher nor Hegel was willing
to draw the natural inferences from their ultimate position, or at least
they did not give them any prominence.
It is not the application of the mythological explanation to the Gospel
history which irrevocably divides Strauss from the theologians, but the
question of personal immortality. It would be well for them if they had
only to deal with the Strauss of the Life of Jesus, and not with the
thinker who posed this question with inexorable trenchancy. They might
then face the future more calmly, relieved of the anxiety lest once more
Hegel and Schleiermacher might rise up in some pious but critical spirit,
not to speak smooth things, but to ask the ultimate questions, and might
force theology to fight its battle with Strauss all over again.
At the very time when Strauss was beginning to breathe freely once more,
had turned his back upon all attempts at compromise, and reconciled
himself to giving up teaching; and when, after settling his father’s
affairs, he had the certainty of being secure against penury; at that very
time he sowed for himself the seeds of a new, immitigable suffering by his
marriage with Agnese Schebest, the famous singer.
They were not made for one another. He could not look to her for any
sympathy with his plans, and she on her part was repelled by the pedantry
of his disposition. Housekeeping difficulties and the trials of a limited
income added another element of discord. They removed to Sontheim near
Heilbronn with the idea of learning to adapt themselves to one another far
from the distractions of the town; but that did not better matters. They
lived apart for a time, and after some years they procured a divorce,
custody of the children being assigned to the father. The lady took up her
residence in Stuttgart, and Strauss paid her an allowance up to her death
in 1870.
What he suffered may be read between the lines in the passage in “The Old
Faith and the New” where he speaks of the sacredness of marriage and the
admissibility of divorce. The wound bled inwardly. His mental powers were
disabled. At this time he wrote little. Only in the apologue “Julian the
Apostate, or the Romanticist on the throne of the Caesars”—that brilliant
satire upon Frederic William IV., written in 1847—is there a flash of the
old spirit.
But in spite of his antipathy to the romantic disposition of the King of
Prussia he entered the lists in 1848 on behalf of the efforts of the
smaller German states to form a united Germany, apart from Austria, under
the hegemony of Prussia. He did not suffer his political acumen to be
blunted either by personal antipathies or by particularism. The citizens
of Ludwigsburg wished to have him as their representative in the Frankfort
parliament, but the rural population, who were pietistic in sympathies,
defeated his candidature. Instead, his native town sent him to the
Würtemberg Chamber of Deputies. But here his philistinism came to the fore
again. The phrase‐mongering revolutionary party in the chamber disgusted
him. He saw himself more and more forced to the “right,” and was obliged
to act politically with men whose reactionary sympathies he was far from
sharing. His constituents, meanwhile, were thoroughly discontented with
his attitude. In the end the position became intolerable. It was also
painful to him to have to reside in Stuttgart, where he could not avoid
meeting the woman who had brought so much misery into his life. Further—he
himself mentions this point in his memoirs—he had no practice in speaking
without manuscript, and cut a poor figure as a debater. Then came the
“Blum Case.” Robert Blum, a revolutionary, had been shot by court martial
in Vienna. The Würtemberg Chamber desired to vote a public celebration of
his funeral. Strauss did not think there was any ground for making a hero
of this agitator, merely because he had been shot, and was not inclined to
blame the Austrian Government very severely for meting out summary justice
to a disturber of the peace. His attitude brought on him a vote of censure
from his constituents. When, subsequently, the President of the Chamber
called him to order for asserting that a previous speaker had “concealed
by sleight of hand” (_wegeskamotiert_, “juggled away”) an important point
in the debate, he refused to accept the vote of censure, resigned his
membership, and ceased to attend the diets. As he himself put it, he
“jumped out of the boat.” Then began a period of restless wandering,
during which he beguiled his time with literary work. He wrote, _inter
alia_, upon Lessing, Hutten, and Reimarus, rediscovering the last‐named
for his fellow‐countrymen.
At the end of the ’sixties he returned once more to theology. His “Life of
Jesus adapted for the German People” appeared in 1864. In the preface he
refers to Renan, and freely acknowledges the great merits of his work.
The Prusso‐Austrian war placed him in a difficult position. His historical
insight made it impossible for him to share the particularism of his
friends; on the contrary, he recognised that the way was now being
prepared for the realisation of his dream of 1848—an alliance of the
smaller German States under the hegemony of Prussia. As he made no secret
of his opinions, he had the bitter experience of receiving the cold
shoulder from men who had hitherto loyally stood by him.
In the year 1870 it was granted to him to become the spokesman of the
German people; through a publication on Voltaire which had appeared not
long before he had become acquainted with Renan. In a letter to Strauss,
written after the first battles, Renan made a passing allusion to these
great events. Strauss seized the opportunity to explain to him, in a
vigorous “open letter” of the 12th of August, Germany’s reason and
justification for going to war. Receiving an answer from Renan, he then,
in a second letter, of the 29th of September, took occasion to defend
Germany’s right to demand the cession of Alsace, not on the ground of its
having formerly been German territory, but for the defence of her natural
frontiers. The resounding echo evoked by these words, inspired, as they
were, by the enthusiasm of the moment, compensated him for much of the
obloquy which he had had to bear.
His last work, “The Old Faith and the New,” appeared in 1872. Once more,
as in the work on theology published in 1840‐1841, he puts to himself the
question, What is there of permanence in this artificial compound of
theology and philosophy, faith and thought? But he puts the question with
a certain bitterness, and shows himself too much under the influence of
Darwinism, by which his mind was at that time dominated. The Hegelian
system of thought, which served as a firm basis for the work of 1840, has
fallen in ruins. Strauss is alone with his own thoughts, endeavouring to
raise himself above the new scientific world‐view. His powers of thought,
never, for all his critical acumen, strong on the creative side, and now
impaired by age, were unequal to the task. There is no force and no
greatness in the book.
To the question, “Are we still Christians?” he answers, “No.” But to his
second question, “Have we still a religion?” he is prepared to give an
affirmative answer, if the assumption is granted that the feeling of
dependence, of self‐surrender, of inner freedom, which has sprung from the
pantheistic world‐view, can be called religion. But instead of developing
the idea of this deep inner freedom, and presenting religion in the form
in which he had experienced it, he believes himself obliged to offer some
new construction based upon Darwinism, and sets himself to answer the two
questions, “How are we to understand the world?” and “How are we to
regulate our lives?”—the form of the latter is somewhat lacking in
distinction—in a quite impersonal way. It is only the schoolmaster and
pedant in him—who was always at the elbow of the thinker even in his
greatest works—that finds expression here.
It was a dead book, in spite of the many editions which it went through,
and the battle which raged over it was, like the fiercest of the Homeric
battles, a combat over the dead.
The theologians declared Strauss bankrupt, and felt themselves rich
because they had made sure of not being ruined by a similar unimaginative
honesty. Friedrich Nietzsche, from the height of his would‐be
Schopenhauerian pessimism, mocked at the fallen hero.
Before the year was out Strauss began to suffer from an internal ulcer.
For many months he bore his sufferings with quiet resignation and inner
serenity, until on the 8th of February 1874, in his native town of
Ludwigsburg, death set him free.
A few weeks earlier, on the 29th of December 1873, his sufferings and his
thoughts received illuminating expression in the following poignant
verses:—
Wem ich dieses klage,
Weiss, ich klage nicht;
Der ich dieses sage,
Fühlt, ich zage nicht.
Heute heisst’s verglimmen,
Wie ein Licht verglimmt,
In die Luft verschwimmen,
Wie ein Ton verschwimmt.
Möge schwach wie immer,
Aber hell und rein,
Dieser letzte Schimmer
Dieser Ton nur sein.(34)
He was buried on a stormy February day.
VIII. STRAUSS’S FIRST “LIFE OF JESUS”
First edition, 1835 and 1836. 2 vols. 1480 pp.
The second edition was unaltered.
Third edition, with alterations, 1838‐1839.
Fourth edition, agreeing with the first, 1840.
Considered as a literary work, Strauss’s first Life of Jesus is one of the
most perfect things in the whole range of learned literature. In over
fourteen hundred pages he has not a superfluous phrase; his analysis
descends to the minutest details, but he does not lose his way among them;
the style is simple and picturesque, sometimes ironical, but always
dignified and distinguished.
In regard to the application of the mythological explanation to Holy
Scripture, Strauss points out that De Wette, Eichhorn, Gabler, and others
of his predecessors had long ago freely applied it to the Old Testament,
and that various attempts had been made to portray the life of Jesus in
accordance with the critical assumptions upon which his undertaking was
based. He mentions especially Usteri as one who had helped to prepare the
way for him. The distinction between Strauss and those who had preceded
him upon this path consists only in this, that prior to him the conception
of myth was neither truly grasped nor consistently applied. Its
application was confined to the account of Jesus’ coming into the world
and of His departure from it, while the real kernel of the evangelical
tradition—the sections from the Baptism to the Resurrection—was left
outside the field of its application. Myth formed, to use Strauss’s
illustration, the lofty gateways at the entrance to, and at the exit from,
the Gospel history; between these two lofty gateways lay the narrow and
crooked streets of the naturalistic explanation.
The principal obstacle, Strauss continues, which barred the way to a
comprehensive application of myth, consisted in the supposition that two
of our Gospels, Matthew and John, were reports of eyewitnesses; and a
further difficulty was the offence caused by the word myth, owing to its
associations with the heathen mythology. But that any of our Evangelists
was an eyewitness, or stood in such relations with eyewitnesses as to make
the intrusion of myth unthinkable, is a thesis which there is no extant
evidence sufficient to prove. Even though the earthly life of the Lord
falls within historic times, and even if only a generation be assumed to
have elapsed between His death and the composition of the Gospels; such a
period would be sufficient to allow the historical material to become
intermixed with myth. No sooner is a great man dead than legend is busy
with his life.
Then, too, the offence of the word myth disappears for any one who has
gained an insight into the essential character of religious myth. It is
nothing else than the clothing in historic form of religious ideas, shaped
by the unconsciously inventive power of legend, and embodied in a historic
personality. Even on a priori grounds we are almost compelled to assume
that the historic Jesus will meet us in the garb of old Testament
Messianic ideas and primitive Christian expectations.
The main distinction between Strauss and his predecessors consisted in the
fact that they asked themselves anxiously how much of the historical life
of Jesus would remain as a foundation for religion if they dared to apply
the conception of myth consistently, while for him this question had no
terrors. He claims in his preface that he possessed one advantage over all
the critical and learned theologians of his time without which nothing can
be accomplished in the domain of history—the inner emancipation of thought
and feeling in regard to certain religious and dogmatic prepossessions
which he had early attained as a result of his philosophic studies.
Hegel’s philosophy had set him free, giving him a clear conception of the
relationship of idea and reality, leading him to a higher plane of
Christological speculation, and opening his eyes to the mystic
interpenetration of finitude and infinity, God and man.
God‐manhood, the highest idea conceived by human thought, is actually
realised in the historic personality of Jesus. But while conventional
thinking supposes that this phenomenal realisation must be perfect, true
thought, which has attained by genuine critical reasoning to a higher
freedom, knows that no idea can realise itself perfectly on the historic
plane, and that its truth does not depend on the proof of its having
received perfect external representation, but that its perfection comes
about through that which the idea carries into history, or through the way
in which history is sublimated into idea. For this reason it is in the
last analysis indifferent to what extent God‐manhood has been realised in
the person of Jesus; the important thing is that the idea is now alive in
the common consciousness of those who have been prepared to receive it by
its manifestation in sensible form, and of whose thought and imagination
that historical personality took such complete possession, that for them
the unity of Godhood and manhood assumed in Him enters into the common
consciousness, and the “moments” which constitute the outward course of
His life reproduce themselves in them in a spiritual fashion.
A purely historical presentation of the life of Jesus was in that first
period wholly impossible; what was operative was a creative reminiscence
acting under the impulse of the idea which the personality of Jesus had
called to life among mankind. And this idea of God‐manhood, the
realisation of which in every personality is the ultimate goal of
humanity, is the eternal reality in the Person of Jesus, which no
criticism can destroy.
However far criticism may go in proving the reaction of the idea upon the
presentment of the historical course of the life of Jesus, the fact that
Jesus represented that idea and called it to life among mankind is
something real, something that no criticism can annul. It is alive
thenceforward—to this day, and for ever more.
It is in this emancipation of spirit, and in the consciousness that Jesus
as the creator of the religion of humanity is beyond the reach of
criticism, that Strauss goes to work, and batters down the rubble, assured
that his pick can make no impression on the stone. He sees evidence that
the time has come for this undertaking in the condition of exhaustion
which characterised contemporary theology. The supernaturalistic
explanation of the events of the life of Jesus had been followed by the
rationalistic, the one making everything supernatural, the other setting
itself to make all the events intelligible as natural occurrences. Each
had said all that it had to say. From their opposition now arises a new
solution—the mythological interpretation. This is a characteristic example
of the Hegelian method—the _synthesis_ of a _thesis_ represented by the
supernaturalistic explanation with an _antithesis_ represented by the
rationalistic interpretation.