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AN OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT SINCE KANT
BY
EDWARD CALDWELL MOORE
PARKMAN PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1912
TO
ADOLF HARNACK
ON HIS SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY
BY HIS FIRST AMERICAN PUPIL
PREFATORY NOTE
It is hoped that this book may serve as an outline for a larger work, in
which the Judgments here expressed may be supported in detail.
Especially, the author desires to treat the literature of the social
question and of the modernist movement with a fulness which has not been
possible within the limits of this sketch. The philosophy of religion
and the history of religions should have place, as also that estimate of
the essence of Christianity which is suggested by the contact of
Christianity with the living religions of the Orient.
PASQUE ISLAND, MASS.,
_July_ 28, 1911.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
A. INTRODUCTION. 1.
B. THE BACKGROUND. 23.
DEISM. 23.
RATIONALISM. 25.
PIETISM. 30.
ÆSTHETIC IDEALISM. 33.
CHAPTER II
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 39.
KANT. 39.
FICHTE. 55.
SCHELLING. 60.
HEGEL. 66.
CHAPTER III
THEOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION. 74.
SCHLEIERMACHER. 74.
RITSCHL AND THE RITSCHLIANS. 89
CHAPTER IV
THE CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL MOVEMENT. 110.
STRAUSS. 114.
BAUR. 118.
THE CANON. 123.
THE LIFE OF JESUS. 127.
THE OLD TESTAMENT. 130.
THE HISTORY OF DOCTRINE. 136.
HARNACK. 140.
CHAPTER V
THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE SCIENCES. 151.
POSITIVISM. 156.
NATURALISM AND AGNOSTICISM. 162.
EVOLUTION. 170.
MIRACLES. 175.
THE SOCIAL SCIENCES. 176.
CHAPTER VI
THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES; ACTION AND REACTION. 191.
THE POETS. 195.
COLERIDGE. 197.
THE ORIEL SCHOOL. 199.
ERSINE AND CAMPBELL. 201.
MAURICE. 204.
CHANNING. 205.
BUSHNELL. 207.
THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL. 211.
THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. 212.
NEWMAN. 214.
MODERNISM. 221.
ROBERTSON. 223.
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 224.
THE BROAD CHURCH. 224.
CARLYLE. 228.
EMERSON. 230.
ARNOLD. 232.
MARTINEAU. 234.
JAMES. 238.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 243.
CHAPTER I
A. INTRODUCTION
The Protestant Reformation marked an era both in life and thought for
the modern world. It ushered in a revolution in Europe. It established
distinctions and initiated tendencies which are still significant. These
distinctions have been significant not for Europe alone. They have had
influence also upon those continents which since the Reformation have
come under the dominion of Europeans. Yet few would now regard the
Reformation as epoch-making in the sense in which that pre-eminence has
been claimed. No one now esteems that it separates the modern from the
mediæval and ancient world in the manner once supposed. The perspective
of history makes it evident that large areas of life and thought
remained then untouched by the new spirit. Assumptions which had their
origin in feudal or even in classical culture continued unquestioned.
More than this, impulses in rational life and in the interpretation of
religion, which showed themselves with clearness in one and another of
the reformers themselves, were lost sight of, if not actually
repudiated, by their successors. It is possible to view many things in
the intellectual and religious life of the nineteenth century, even some
which Protestants have passionately reprobated, as but the taking up
again of clues which the reformers had let fall, the carrying out of
purposes of their movement which were partly hidden from themselves.
Men have asserted that the Renaissance inaugurated a period of paganism.
They have gloried that there supervened upon this paganism the religious
revival which the Reformation was. Even these men will, however, not
deny that it was the intellectual rejuvenation which made the religious
reformation possible or, at all events, effective. Nor can it be denied
that after the Revolution, in the Protestant communities the
intellectual element was thrust into the background. The practical and
devotional prevailed. Humanism was for a time shut out. There was more
room for it in the Roman Church than among Protestants. Again, the
Renaissance itself had been not so much an era of discovery of a new
intellectual and spiritual world. It had been, rather, the rediscovery
of valid principles of life in an ancient culture and civilisation. That
thorough-going review of the principles at the basis of all relations of
the life of man, which once seemed possible to Renaissance and
Reformation, was postponed to a much later date. When it did take place,
it was under far different auspices.
There is a remarkable unity in the history of Protestant thought in the
period from the Reformation to the end of the eighteenth century. There
is a still more surprising unity of Protestant thought in this period
with the thought of the mediæval and ancient Church. The basis and
methods are the same. Upon many points the conclusions are identical.
There was nothing of which the Protestant scholastics were more proud
than of their agreement with the Fathers of the early Church. They did
not perceive in how large degree they were at one with Christian
thinkers of the Roman communion as well. Few seem to have realised how
largely Catholic in principle Protestant thought has been. The
fundamental principles at the basis of the reasoning have been the same.
The notions of revelation and inspiration were identical. The idea of
authority was common to both, only the instance in which that authority
is lodged was different. The thoughts of God and man, of the world, of
creation, of providence and prayer, of the nature and means of
salvation, are similar. Newman was right in discovering that from the
first he had thought, only and always, in what he called Catholic terms.
It was veiled from him that many of those who ardently opposed him
thought in those same terms.
It is impossible to write upon the theme which this book sets itself
without using the terms Catholic and Protestant in the conventional
sense. The words stand for certain historic magnitudes. It is equally
impossible to conceal from ourselves how misleading the language often
is. The line between that which has been happily called the religion of
authority and the religion of the spirit does not run between Catholic
and Protestant. It runs through the middle of many Protestant bodies,
through the border only of some, and who will say that the Roman Church
knows nothing of this contrast? The sole use of recurrence here to the
historic distinction is to emphasise the fact that this distinction
stands for less than has commonly been supposed. In a large way the
history of Christian thought, from earliest times to the end of the
eighteenth century, presents a very striking unity.
In contrast with this, that modern reflection which has taken the
phenomenon known as religion and, specifically, that historic form of
religion known as Christianity, as its object, has indeed also slowly
revealed the fact that it is in possession of certain principles.
Furthermore, these principles, as they have emerged, have been felt to
be new and distinctive principles. They are essentially modern
principles. They are the principles which, taken together, differentiate
the thinker of the nineteenth century from all who have ever been before
him. They are principles which unite all thinkers at the end of the
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, in practically
every portion of the world, as they think of all subjects except
religion. It comes more and more to be felt that these principles must
be reckoned with in our thought concerning religion as well.
One of these principles is, for example, that of dealing in true
critical fashion with problems of history and literature. Long before
the end of the age of rationalism, this principle had been applied to
literature and history, other than those called sacred. The thorough
going application of this scientific method to the literatures and
history of the Old and New Testaments is almost wholly an achievement of
the nineteenth century. It has completely altered the view of revelation
and inspiration. The altered view of the nature of the documents of
revelation has had immeasurable consequences for dogma.
Another of these elements is the new view of nature and of man's
relation to nature. Certain notable discoveries in physics and astronomy
had proved possible of combination with traditional religion, as in the
case of Newton. Or again, they had proved impossible of combination with
any religion, as in the case of Laplace. The review of the religious and
Christian problem in the light of the ever increasing volume of
scientific discoveries--this is the new thing in the period which we
have undertaken to describe. A theory of nature as a totality, in which
man, not merely as physical, but even also as social and moral and
religious being, has place in a series which suggests no break, has
affected the doctrines of God and of man in a way which neither those
who revered nor those who repudiated religion at the beginning of the
nineteenth century could have imagined.
Another leading principle grows out of Kant's distinction of two worlds
and two orders of reason. That distinction issued in a new theory of
knowledge. It laid a new foundation for an idealistic construing of the
universe. In one way it was the answer of a profoundly religious nature
to the triviality and effrontery into which the great rationalistic
movement had run out. By it the philosopher gave standing forever to
much that prophets and mystics in every age had felt to be true, yet had
never been able to prove by any method which the ordered reasoning of
man had provided. Religion as feeling regained its place. Ethics was set
once more in the light of the eternal. The soul of man became the object
of a scientific study.
There have been thus indicated three, at least, of the larger factors
which enter into an interpretation of Christianity which may fairly be
said to be new in the nineteenth century. They are new in a sense in
which the intellectual elements entering into the reconsideration of
Christianity in the age of the Reformation were not new. They are
characteristic of the nineteenth century. They would naturally issue in
an interpretation of Christianity in the general context of the life and
thought of that century. The philosophical revolution inaugurated by
Kant, with the general drift toward monism in the interpretation of the
universe, separates from their forebears men who have lived since Kant,
by a greater interval than that which divided Kant from Plato. The
evolutionary view of nature, as developed from Schelling and Comte
through Darwin to Bergson, divides men now living from the
contemporaries of Kant in his youthful studies of nature, as those men
were not divided from the followers of Aristotle.
Of purpose, the phrase Christian thought has been interpreted as thought
concerning Christianity. The problem which this book essays is that of
an outline of the history of the thought which has been devoted, during
this period of marvellous progress, to that particular object in
consciousness and history which is known as Christianity. Christianity,
as object of the philosophical, critical, and scientific reflection of
the age--this it is which we propose to consider. Our religion as
affected in its interpretation by principles of thought which are
already widespread, and bid fair to become universal among educated
men--this it is which in this little volume we aim to discuss. The term
religious thought has not always had this significance. Philosophy of
religion has signified, often, a philosophising of which religion was,
so to say, the atmosphere. We cannot wonder if, in these circumstances,
to the minds of some, the atmosphere has seemed to hinder clearness of
vision. The whole subject of the philosophy of religion has within the
last few decades undergone a revival, since it has been accepted that
the aim is not to philosophise upon things in general in a religious
spirit. On the contrary, the aim is to consider religion itself, with
the best aid which current philosophy and science afford. In this sense
only can we give the study of religion and Christianity a place among
the sciences.
It remains true, now as always, that the majority, at all events, of
those who have thought profoundly concerning Christianity will be found
to have been Christian men. Religion is a form of consciousness. It will
be those who have had experience to which that consciousness
corresponds, whose judgments can be supposed to have weight. That remark
is true, for example, of æsthetic matters as well. To be a good judge of
music one must have musical feeling and experience. To speak with any
deeper reasonableness concerning faith, one must have faith. To think
profoundly concerning Christianity one needs to have had the Christian
experience. But this is very different from saying that to speak
worthily of the Christian religion, one must needs have made his own the
statements of religion which men of a former generation may have found
serviceable. The distinction between religion itself, on the one hand,
and the expression of religion in doctrines and rites, or the
application of religion through institutions, on the other hand, is in
itself one of the great achievements of the nineteenth century. It is
one which separates us from Christian men in previous centuries as
markedly as it does any other. It is a simple implication of the Kantian
theory of knowledge. The evidence for its validity has come through the
application of historical criticism to all the creeds. Mystics of all
ages have seen the truth from far. The fact that we may assume the
prevalence of this distinction among Christian men, and lay it at the
base of the discussion we propose, is assuredly one of the gains which
the nineteenth century has to record.
It follows that not all of the thinkers with whom we have to deal will
have been, in their own time, of the number of avowedly Christian men.
Some who have greatly furthered movements which in the end proved
fruitful for Christian thought, have been men who in their own time
alienated from professed and official religion. In the retrospect we
must often feel that their opposition to that which they took to be
religion was justifiable. Yet their identification of that with religion
itself, and their frank declaration of what they called their own
irreligion, was often a mistake. It was a mistake to which both they and
their opponents in due proportion contributed. A still larger class of
those with whom we have to do have indeed asserted for themselves a
personal adherence to Christianity. But their identification with
Christianity, or with a particular Christian Church, has been often
bitterly denied by those who bore official responsibility in the Church.
The heresy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next. There is
something perverse in Gottfried Arnold's maxim, that the true Church, in
any age, is to be found with those who have just been excommunicated
from the actual Church. However, the maxim points in the direction of a
truth. By far the larger part of those with whom we have to do have had
acknowledged relation to the Christian tradition and institution. They
were Christians and, at the same time, true children of the intellectual
life of their own age. They esteemed it not merely their privilege, but
also their duty, to endeavour to ponder anew the religious and Christian
problem, and to state that which they thought in a manner congruous with
the thoughts which the men of the age would naturally have concerning
other themes.
It has been to most of these men axiomatic that doctrine has only
relative truth. Doctrine is but a composite of the content of the
religious consciousness with materials which the intellect of a given
man or age or nation in the total view of life affords. As such,
doctrine is necessary and inevitable for all those who in any measure
live the life of the mind. But the condition of doctrine is its mobile,
its fluid and changing character. It is the combination of a more or
less stable and characteristic experience, with a reflection which,
exactly in proportion as it is genuine, is transformed from age to age,
is modified by qualities of race and, in the last analysis, differs with
individual men. Dogma is that portion of doctrine which has been
elevated by decree of ecclesiastical authority, or even only by common
consent, into an absoluteness which is altogether foreign to its nature.
It is that part of doctrine concerning which men have forgotten that it
had a history, and have decided that it shall have no more. In its very
notion dogma confounds a statement of truth, which must of necessity be
human, with the truth itself, which is divine. In its identification of
statement and truth it demands credence instead of faith. Men have
confounded doctrine and dogma; they have been taught so to do. They have
felt the history of Christian doctrine to be an unfruitful and
uninteresting theme. But the history of Christian thought would seek to
set forth the series of interpretations put, by successive generations,
upon the greatest of all human experiences, the experience of the
communion of men with God. These interpretations ray out at all edges
into the general intellectual life of the age. They draw one whole set
of their formative impulses from the general intellectual life of the
age. It is this relation of the progress of doctrine to the general
history of thought in the nineteenth century, which the writer designed
to emphasise in choosing the title of this work.
As was indicated in the closing paragraphs of the preceding volume of
this series, the issue of the age of rationalism had been for the cause
of religion on the whole a distressing one. The majority of those who
were resolved to follow reason were agreed in abjuring religion. That
they had, as it seems to us, but a meagre understanding of what religion
is, made little difference in their conclusion. Bishop Butler complains
in his _Analogy_ that religion was in his time hardly considered a
subject for discussion among reasonable men. Schleiermacher in the very
title of his _Discourses_ makes it plain that in Germany the situation
was not different. If the reasonable eschewed religious protests in
Germany, evangelicals in England, the men of the great revivals in
America, many of them, took up a corresponding position as towards the
life of reason, especially toward the use of reason in religion. The
sinister cast which the word rationalism bears in much of the popular
speech is evidence of this fact. To many minds it appeared as if one
could not be an adherent both of reason and of faith. That was a
contradiction which Kant, first of all in his own experience, and then
through his system of thought, did much to transcend. The deliverance
which he wrought has been compared to the deliverance which Luther in
his time achieved for those who had been in bondage to scholasticism in
the Roman Church. Although Kant has been dead a hundred years, both the
defence of religion and the assertion of the right of reason are still,
with many, on the ancient lines. There is no such strife between
rationality and belief as has been supposed. But the confidence of that
fact is still far from being shared by all Christians at the beginning
of the twentieth century. The course in reinterpretation and
readjustment of Christianity, which that calm conviction would imply, is
still far from being the one taken by all of those who bear the
Christian name. If it is permissible in the writing of a book like this
to have an aim besides that of the most objective delineation, the
author may perhaps be permitted to say that he writes with the earnest
hope that in some measure he may contribute also to the establishment of
an understanding upon which so much both for the Church and the world
depends.
We should say a word at this point as to the general relation of
religion and philosophy. We realise the evil which Kant first in
clearness pointed out. It was the evil of an apprehension which made the
study of religion a department of metaphysics. The tendency of that
apprehension was to do but scant justice to the historical content of
Christianity. Religion is an historical phenomenon. Especially is this
true of Christianity. It is a fact, or rather, a vast complex of facts.
It is a positive religion. It is connected with personalities, above all
with one transcendent personality, that of Jesus. It sprang out of
another religion which had already emerged into the light of
world-history. It has been associated for two thousand years with
portions of the race which have made achievements in culture and left
record of those achievements. It is the function of speculation to
interpret this phenomenon. When speculation is tempted to spin by its
own processes something which it would set beside this historic
magnitude or put in place of it, and still call that Christianity, we
must disallow the claim. It was the licence of its speculative
endeavour, and the identification of these endeavours with Christianity,
which finally discredited Hegelianism with religious men. Nor can it be
denied that theologians themselves have been sinners in this respect.
The disposition to regard Christianity as a revealed and divinely
authoritative metaphysic began early and continued long. When the
theologians also set out to interpret Christianity and end in offering
us a substitute, which, if it were acknowledged as absolute truth, would
do away with Christianity as historic fact, as little can we allow the
claim.
Again, Christianity exists not merely as a matter of history. It exists
also as a fact in living consciousness. It is the function of psychology
to investigate that consciousness. We must say that, accurately
speaking, there is no such thing as Christian philosophy. There are
philosophies, good or bad, current or obsolete. These are Christian only
in being applied to the history of Christianity and the content of the
Christian consciousness. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as
Christian consciousness. There is the human consciousness, operating
with and operated upon by the impulse of Christianity. It is the great
human experience from which we single out for investigation that part
which is concerned with religion, and call that the religious
experience. It is essential, therefore, that those general
investigations of human consciousness and experience, as such, which are
being carried on all about us should be reckoned with, if our Christian
life and thought are not altogether to fall out of touch with advancing
knowledge. For this reason we have misgiving about the position of some
followers of Ritschl. Their opinion, pushed to the limit, seems to mean
that we have nothing to do with philosophy, or with the advance of
science. Religion is a feeling of which he alone who possesses it can
give account. He alone who has it can appreciate such an account when
given. We acknowledge that religion is in part a feeling. But that
feeling must have rational justification. It must also have rational
guidance if it is to be saved from degenerating into fanaticism.
To say that we have nothing to do with philosophy ends in our having to
do with a bad philosophy. In that case we have a philosophy with which
we operate without having investigated it, instead of having one with
which we operate because we have investigated it. The philosophy of
which we are aware we have. The philosophy of which we are not aware has
us. No doubt, we may have religion without philosophy, but we cannot
formulate it even in the rudest way to ourselves, we cannot communicate
it in any way whatsoever to others, except in the terms of a philosophy.
In the general sense in which every man has a philosophy, this is merely
the deposit of the regnant notions of the time. It may be amended or
superseded, and our theology with it. Yet while it lasts it is our one
possible vehicle of expression. It is the interpreter and the critique
of what we have experienced. It is not open to a man to retreat within
himself and say, I am a Christian, I feel thus, I think so, these
thoughts are the content of Christianity. The consequence of that
position is that we make the religious experience to be no part of the
normal human experience. If we contend that the being a Christian is the
great human experience, that the religious life is the true human life,
we must pursue the opposite course. We must make the religious life
coherent with all the other phases and elements of life. If we would
contend that religious thought is the truest and deepest thought, we
must begin at this very point. We must make it conform absolutely to the
laws of all other thought. To contend for its isolation, as an area by
itself and a process subject only to its own laws, is to court the
judgment of men, that in its zeal to be Christian it has ceased to be
thought.
Our most profitable mode of procedure would seem to be this. We shall
seek to follow, as we may, those few main movements of thought marking
the nineteenth century which have immediate bearing upon our theme. We
shall try to register the effect which these movements have had upon
religious conceptions. It will not be possible at any point to do more
than to select typical examples. Perhaps the true method is that we
should go back to the beginnings of each one of these movements. We
should mark the emergence of a few great ideas. It is the emergence of
an idea which is dramatically interesting. It is the moment of emergence
in which that which is characteristic appears. Our subject is far too
complicated to permit that the ramifications of these influences should
be followed in detail. Modifications, subtractions, additions, the
reader must make for himself.
These main movements of thought are, as has been said, three in number.
We shall take them in their chronological order. There is first the
philosophical revolution which is commonly associated with the name of
Kant. If we were to seek with arbitrary exactitude to fix a date for the
beginning of this movement, this might be the year of the publication of
his first great work, _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_, in 1781.[1] Kant was
indeed himself, both intellectually and spiritually, the product of
tendencies which had long been gathering strength. He was the exponent
of ideas which in fragmentary way had been expressed by others, but he
gathered into himself in amazing fashion the impulses of his age. Out
from some portion of his works lead almost all the paths which
philosophical thinkers since his time have trod. One cannot say even of
his work, _Der Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft_,
1793, that it is the sole source, or even the greatest source, of his
influence upon religious thinking. But from the body of his work as a
whole, there came a new theory of knowledge which has changed completely
the notion of revelation. There came also a view of the universe as an
ideal unity which, especially as elaborated by Fichte, Schelling and
Hegel, has radically altered the traditional ideas of God, of man, of
nature and of their relations, the one to the other.
[Footnote 1: In the text the titles of books which are discussed are
given for the first time in the language in which they are written.
Books which are merely alluded to are mentioned in English.]
We shall have then, secondly, to note the historical and critical
movement. It is the effort to apply consistently and without fear the
maxims of historical and literary criticism to the documents of the Old
and New Testaments. With still greater arbitrariness, and yet with
appreciation of the significance of Strauss' endeavour, we might set as
the date of the full impact of this movement upon cherished religious
convictions, that of the publication of his _Leben Jesu_, 1835. This
movement has supported with abundant evidence the insight of the
philosophers as to the nature of revelation. It has shown that that
which we actually have in the Scriptures is just that which Kant, with
his reverence for the freedom of the human mind, had indicated that we
must have, if revelation is to be believed in at all. With this changed
view has come an altered attitude toward many statements which devout
men had held that they must accept as true, because these were found in
Scripture. With this changed view the whole history, whether of the
Jewish people or of Jesus and the origins of the Christian Church, has
been set in a new light.
In the third place, we shall have to deal with the influence of the
sciences of nature and of society, as these have been developed
throughout the whole course of the nineteenth century. If one must have
a date for an outstanding event in this portion of the history, perhaps
that of the publication of Darwin's _Origin of Species_, 1859, would
serve as well as any other. The principles of these sciences have come
to underlie in a great measure all the reflection of cultivated men in
our time. In amazing degree they have percolated, through elementary
instruction, through popular literature, and through the newspapers, to
the masses of mankind. They are recognised as the basis of a triumphant
material civilisation, which has made everything pertaining to the inner
and spiritual life seem remote. Through the social sciences there has
come an impulse to the transfer of emphasis from the individual to
society, the disposition to see everything in its social bearing, to do
everything in the light of its social antecedents and of its social
consequences. Here again we have to note the profoundest influence upon
religious conceptions. The very notion connected with the words
redemption and salvation appears to have been changed.
In the case of each of these particular movements the church, as the
organ of Christianity, has passed through a period of antagonism to
these influences, of fear of their consequences, of resistance to their
progress. In large portions of the church at the present moment the
protest is renewed. The substance of these modern teachings, which yet
seem to be the very warp and woof of the intellectual life of the modern
man, is repudiated and denounced. It is held to imperil the salvation of
the soul. It is pronounced impossible of combination with belief in a
divinely revealed truth concerning the universe and a saving faith for
men. In other churches, outside the churches, the forms in which men
hold their Christianity have been in large measure adjusted to the
results of these great movements of thought. They have, as these men
themselves believe, been immensely strengthened and made sure by those
very influences which were once considered dangerous.
In connection with this indication of the nature of our materials, we
have sought to say something of the time of emergence of the salient
elements. It may be in point also to give some intimation of the place
of their origins, that is to say, of the participation of the various
nationalities in this common task of the modern Christian world. That
international quality of scholarship which seems to us natural, is a
thing of very recent date. That a discovery should within a reasonable
interval become the property of all educated men, that scholars of one
nation should profit by that which the learned of another land have
done, appears to us a thing to be assumed. It has not always been so,
especially not in matters of religious faith. The Roman Church and the
Latin language gave to medieval Christian thought a certain
international character. Again the Renaissance and Reformation had a
certain world wide quality. The relations of the English Church in the
reigns of the last Tudors to Germany, Switzerland, and France are not to
be forgotten. But the life of the Protestant national churches in the
eighteenth century shows little of this trait. The barriers of language
counted for something. The provincialism of national churches and
denominational predilections counted for more.
In the philosophical movement we must begin with the Germans. The
movement of English thought known as deism was a distinct forerunner of
the rationalist movement, within the particular area of the discussion
of religion. However, it ran into the sand. The rationalist movement,
considered in its other aspects, never attained in England in the
eighteenth century the proportions which it assumed in France and
Germany. In France that movement ran its full course, both among the
learned and, equally, as a radical and revolutionary influence among the
unlearned. It had momentous practical consequences. In no sphere was it
more radical than in that of religion. Not in vain had Voltaire for
years cried, '_Écrasez l'infâme_,' and Rousseau preached that the youth
would all be wise and pure, if only the kind of education which he had
had in the religious schools were made impossible. There was for many
minds no alternative between clericalism and atheism. Quite logically,
therefore, after the downfall of the Republic and of the Empire there
set in a great reaction. Still it was simply a reversion to the absolute
religion of the Roman Catholic Church as set forth by the Jesuit party.
There was no real transcending of the rationalist movement in France in
the interest of religion. There has been no great constructive movement
in religious thought in France in the nineteenth century. There is
relatively little literature of our subject in the French language until
recent years.
In Germany, on the other hand, the rationalist movement had always had
over against it the great foil and counterpoise of the pietist movement.
Rationalism ran a much soberer course than in France. It was never a
revolutionary and destructive movement as in France. It was not a
dilettante and aristocratic movement as deism had been in England. It
was far more creative and constructive than elsewhere. Here also before
the end of the century it had run its course. Yet here the men who
transcended the rationalist movement and shaped the spiritual revival in
the beginning of the nineteenth century were men who had themselves been
trained in the bosom of the rationalist movement. They had appropriated
the benefits of it. They did not represent a violent reaction against
it, but a natural and inevitable progress within and beyond it. This it
was which gave to the Germans their leadership at the beginning of the
nineteenth century in the sphere of the intellectual life. It is worthy
of note that the great heroes of the intellectual life in Germany, in
the period of which we speak, were most of them deeply interested in the
problem of religion. The first man to bring to England the leaven of
this new spirit, and therewith to transcend the old philosophical
standpoint of Locke and Hume, was Coleridge with his _Aids to
Reflection_, published in 1825. But even after this impulse of Coleridge
the movement remained in England a sporadic and uncertain one. It had
nothing of the volume and conservativeness which belonged to it in
Germany.
Coleridge left among his literary remains a work published in 1840 under
the title of _Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_. What is here written
is largely upon the basis of intuition and forecast like that of Remarus
and Lessing a half-century earlier in Germany. Strauss and others were
already at work in Germany upon the problem of the New Testament, Vatke
and Reuss upon that of the Old. This was a different kind of labour, and
destined to have immeasurably greater significance. George Eliot's
maiden literary labour was the translation into English of Strauss'
first edition. But the results of that criticism were only slowly
appropriated by the English. The ostensible results were at first
radical and subversive in the extreme. They were fiercely repudiated in
Strauss' own country. Yet in the main there was acknowledgement of the
correctness of the principle for which Strauss had stood. Hardly before
the decade of the sixties was that method accepted in England in any
wider way, and hardly before the decade of the seventies in America.
Ronan was the first to set forth, in 1863, the historical and critical
problem in the new spirit, in a way that the wide public which read
French understood.
When we come to speak of the scientific movement it is not easy to say
where the leadership lay. Many Englishmen were in the first rank of
investigators and accumulators of material. The first attempt at a
systematisation of the results of the modern sciences was that of
Auguste Comte in his _Philosophie Positive_. This philosophy, however,
under its name of Positivism, exerted a far greater influence, both in
Comte's time and subsequently, in England than it did in France. Herbert
Spencer, after the middle of the decade of the sixties, essayed to do
something of the sort which Comte had attempted. He had far greater
advantages for the solution of the problem. Comte's foil in all of his
discussions of religion was the Catholicism of the south of France. None
the less, the religion which in his later years he created, bears
striking resemblance to that which in his earlier years he had sought to
destroy. Spencer's attitude toward religion was in his earlier work one
of more pronounced antagonism or, at least, of more complete agnosticism
than in later days he found requisite to the maintenance of his
scientific freedom and conscientiousness. Both of these men represent
the effort to construe the world, including man, from the point of view
of the natural and also of the social sciences, and to define the place
of religion in that view of the world which is thus set forth. The fact
that there had been no such philosophical readjustment in Great Britain
as in Germany, made the acceptance of the evolutionary theory of the
universe, which more and more the sciences enforced, slower and more
difficult. The period of resistance on the part of those interested in
religion extended far into the decade of the seventies.
A word may be added concerning America. The early settlers had been
proud of their connection with the English universities. An
extraordinary number of them, in Massachusetts at least, had been
Cambridge men. Yet a tradition of learning was later developed, which
was not without the traits of isolation natural in the circumstances.
The residence, for a time, even of a man like Berkeley in this country,
altered that but little. The clergy remained in singular degree the
educated and highly influential class. The churches had developed, in
consonance with their Puritan character, a theology and philosophy so
portentous in their conclusions, that we can without difficulty
understand the reaction which was brought about. Wesleyanism had
modified it in some portions of the country, but intensified it in
others. Deism apparently had had no great influence. When the
rationalist movement of the old world began to make itself felt, it was
at first largely through the influence of France. The religious life of
the country at the beginning of the nineteenth century was at a low ebb.
Men like Belaham and Priestley were known as apostles of a freer spirit
in the treatment of the problem of religion. Priestley came to
Pennsylvania in his exile. In the large, however, one may say that the
New England liberal movement, which came by and by to be called
Unitarian, was as truly American as was the orthodoxy to which it was
opposed. Channing reminds one often of Schleiermacher. There is no
evidence that he had learned from Schleiermacher. The liberal movement
by its very impetuosity gave a new lease of life to an orthodoxy which,
without that antagonism, would sooner have waned. The great revivals,
which were a benediction to the life of the country, were thought to
have closer relation to the theology of those who participated in them
than they had. The breach between the liberal and conservative
tendencies of religious thought in this country came at a time when the
philosophical reconstruction was already well under way in Europe. The
debate continued until long after the biblical-critical movement was in
progress. The controversy was conducted upon both sides in practically
total ignorance of these facts. There are traces upon both sides of that
insight which makes the mystic a discoverer in religion, before the
logic known to him will sustain the conclusion which he draws. There
will always be interest in the literature of a discussion conducted by
reverent and, in their own way, learned and original men. Yet there is a
pathos about the sturdy originality of good men expended upon a problem
which had been already solved. The men in either camp proceeded from
assumptions which are now impossible to the men of both. It was not
until after the Civil War that American students of theology began in
numbers to study in Germany. It is a much more recent thing that one may
assume the immediate reading of foreign books, or boast of current
contribution from American scholars to the labour of the world's thought
upon these themes.
We should make a great mistake if we supposed that the progress has been
an unceasing forward movement. Quite the contrary, in every aspect of it
the life of the early part of the nineteenth century presents the
spectacle of a great reaction. The resurgence of old ideas and forces
seems almost incredible. In the political world we are wont to attribute
this fact to the disillusionment which the French Revolution had
wrought, and the suffering which the Napoleonic Empire had entailed. The
reaction in the world of thought, and particularly of religious thought,
was, moreover, as marked as that in the world of deeds. The Roman Church
profited by this swing of the pendulum in the minds of men as much as
did the absolute State. Almost the first act of Pius VII. after his
return to Rome in 1814, was the revival of the Society of Jesus, which
had been after long agony in 1773 dissolved by the papacy itself. 'Altar
and throne' became the watchword of an ardent attempt at restoration of
all of that which millions had given their lives to do away. All too
easily, one who writes in sympathy with that which is conventionally
called progress may give the impression that our period is one in which
movement has been all in one direction. That is far from being true. One
whose very ideal of progress is that of movement in directions opposite
to those we have described may well say that the nineteenth century has
had its gifts for him as well. The life of mankind is too complex that
one should write of it with one exclusive standard as to loss and gain.
And whatever be one's standard the facts cannot be ignored.
The France of the thirties and the forties saw a liberal movement within
the Roman Church. The names of Lamennais, of Lacordaire, of Montalembert
and Ozanam, the title _l'Avenir_ occur to men's minds at once. Perhaps
there has never been in France a party more truly Catholic, more devout,
refined and tolerant, more fitted to heal the breach between the
cultivated and the Church. However, before the Second Empire, an end had
been made of that. It cannot be said that the French Church exactly
favoured the infallibility. It certainly did not stand against the
decree as in the old days it would have done. The decree of
infallibility is itself the greatest witness of the steady progress of
reaction in the Roman Church. That action, theoretically at least, does
away with even that measure of popular constitution in the Church to
which the end of the Middle Age had held fast without wavering, which
the mightiest of popes had not been able to abolish and the council of
Trent had not dared earnestly to debate. Whether the decree of 1870 is
viewed in the light of the _Syllabus of Errors_ of 1864, and again of
the _Encyclical_ of 1907, or whether the encyclicals are viewed in the
light of the decree, the fact remains that a power has been given to the
Curia against what has come to be called Modernism such as Innocent
never wielded against the heresies of his day. Meantime, so hostile are
exactly those peoples among whom Roman Catholicism has had full sway,
that it would almost appear that the hope of the Roman Church is in
those countries in which, in the sequence of the Reformation, a
religious tolerance obtains, which the Roman Church would have done
everything in its power to prevent.
Again, we should deceive ourselves if we supposed that the reaction had
been felt only in Roman Catholic lands. A minister of Prussia forbade
Kant to speak concerning religion. The Prussia of Frederick William III.
and of Frederick William IV. was almost as reactionary as if Metternich
had ruled in Berlin as well as in Vienna. The history of the censorship
of the press and of the repression of free thought in Germany until the
year 1848 is a sad chapter. The ruling influences in the Lutheran Church
in that era, practically throughout Germany, were reactionary. The
universities did indeed in large measure retain their ancient freedom.
But the church in which Hengstenberg could be a leader, and in which
staunch seventeenth-century Lutheranism could be effectively sustained,
was almost doomed to further that alienation between the life of piety
and the life of learning which is so much to be deplored. In the Church
the conservatives have to this moment largely triumphed. In the
theological faculties of the universities the liberals in the main have
held their own. The fact that both Church and faculties are
functionaries of the State is often cited as sure in the end to bring
about a solution of this unhappy state of things. For such a solution,
it must be owned, we wait.
The England of the period after 1815 had indeed no such cause for
reaction as obtained in France or even in Germany. The nation having had
its Revolution in the seventeenth century escaped that of the
eighteenth. Still the country was exhausted in the conflict against
Napoleon. Commercial, industrial and social problems agitated it. The
Church slumbered. For a time the liberal thought of England found
utterance mainly through the poets. By the decade of the thirties
movement had begun. The opinions of the Noetics in Oriel College,
Oxford, now seem distinctly mild. They were sufficient to awaken Newman
and Pusey, Froude, Keble, and the rest. Then followed the most
significant ecclesiastical movement which the Church of England in the
nineteenth century has seen, the Oxford or Tractarian movement, as it
has been called. There was conscious recurrence of a mind like that of
Newman to the Catholic position. He had never been able to conceive
religion in any other terms than those of dogma, or the Christian
assurance on any other basis than that of external authority. Nothing
could be franker than the antagonism of the movement, from its
inception, to the liberal spirit of the age. By inner logic Newman found
himself at last in the Roman Church. Yet the Anglo-Catholic movement is
to-day overwhelmingly in the ascendant in the English Church. The Broad
Churchmen of the middle of the century have had few successors. It is
the High Church which stands over against the great mass of the
dissenting churches which, taken in the large, can hardly be said to be
theologically more liberal than itself. It is the High Church which has
showed Franciscanlike devotion in the problems of social readjustment
which England to-day presents. It has shown in some part of its
constituency a power of assimilation of new philosophical, critical and
scientific views, which makes all comparison of it with the Roman Church
misleading. And yet it remains in its own consciousness Catholic to the
core.
In America also the vigour of onset of the liberalising forces at the
beginning of this century tended to provoke reaction. The alarm with
which the defection of so considerable a portion of the Puritan Church
was viewed gave coherence to the opposition. There were those who
devoutly held that the hope of religion lay in its further
liberalisation. Equally there were those who deeply felt that the
deliverance lay in resistance to liberalisation. One of the concrete
effects of the division of the churches was the separation of the
education of the clergy from the universities, the entrusting it to
isolated theological schools under denominational control. The system
has done less harm than might have been expected. Yet at present there
would appear to be a general movement of recurrence to the elder
tradition. The maintenance of the religious life is to some extent a
matter of nurture and observances, of religious habit and practice. This
truth is one which liberals, in their emphasis upon liberty and the
individual, are always in danger of overlooking. The great revivals of
religion in this century, like those of the century previous, have been
connected with a form of religious thought pronouncedly pietistic. The
building up of religious institutions in the new regions of the West,
and the participation of the churches of the country in missions, wear
predominantly this cast. Antecedently, one might have said that the lack
of ecclesiastical cohesion among the Christians of the land, the ease
with which a small group might split off for the furtherance of its own
particular view, would tend to liberalisation. It is doubtful whether
this is true. Isolation is not necessarily a condition of progress. The
emphasis upon trivial differences becomes rather a condition of their
permanence. The middle of the nineteenth century in the United States
was a period of intense denominationalism. That is synonymous with a
period of the stagnation of Christian thought. The religion of a people
absorbed in the practical is likely to be one which they at least
suppose to be a practical religion. In one age the most practical thing
will appear to men to be to escape hell, in another to further
socialism. The need of adjustment of religion to the great intellectual
life of the world comes with contact with that life. What strikes one in
the survey of the religious thought of the country, by and large, for a
century and a quarter, is not so much that it has been reactionary, as
that it has been stationary. Almost every other aspect of the life of
our country, including even that of religious life as distinguished from
religious thought, has gone ahead by leaps and bounds. This it is which
in a measure has created the tension which we feel.
B. THE BACKGROUND
Deism
In England before the end of the Civil War a movement for the
rationalisation of religion had begun to make itself felt. It was in
full force in the time of the Revolution of 1688. It had not altogether
spent itself by the middle of the eighteenth century. The movement has
borne the name of Deism. In so far as it had one watchword, this came to
be 'natural religion.' The antithesis had in mind was that to revealed
religion, as this had been set forth in the tradition of the Church, and
particularly under the bibliolatry of the Puritans. It is a witness to
the liberty of speech enjoyed by Englishmen in that day and to their
interest in religion, that such a movement could have arisen largely
among laymen who were often men of rank. It is an honour to the English
race that, in the period of the rising might of the rational spirit
throughout the western world, men should have sought at once to utilise
that force for the restatement of religion. Yet one may say quite simply
that this undertaking of the deists was premature. The time was not ripe
for the endeavour. The rationalist movement itself needed greater
breadth and deeper understanding of itself. Above all, it needed the
salutary correction of opposing principles before it could avail for
this delicate and difficult task. Religion is the most conservative of
human interests. Rationalism would be successful in establishing a new
interpretation of religion only after it had been successful in many
other fields. The arguments of the deists were never successfully
refuted. On the contrary, the striking thing is that their opponents,
the militant divines and writings of numberless volumes of 'Evidences
for Christianity,' had come to the same rational basis with the deists.
They referred even the most subtle questions to the pure reason, as no
one now would do. The deistical movement was not really defeated. It
largely compelled its opponents to adopt its methods. It left a deposit
which is more nearly rated at its worth at the present than it was in
its own time. But it ceased to command confidence, or even interest.
Samuel Johnson said, as to the publication of Bolingbroke's work by his
executor, three years after the author's death: 'It was a rusty old
blunderbuss, which he need not have been afraid to discharge himself,
instead of leaving a half-crown to a Scotchman to let it off after his
death.'
It is a great mistake, however, in describing the influence of
rationalism upon Christian thought to deal mainly with deism. English
deism made itself felt in France, as one may see in the case of
Voltaire. Kant was at one time deeply moved by some English writers who
would be assigned to this class. In a sense Kant showed traces of the
deistical view to the last. The centre of the rationalistic movement
had, however, long since passed from England to the Continent. The
religious problem was no longer its central problem. We quite fail to
appreciate what the nineteenth century owes to the eighteenth and to the
rationalist movement in general, unless we view this latter in a far
greater way.
Rationalism
In 1784 Kant wrote a tractate entitled, _Was ist Aufklärung?_ He said:
'Aufklärung is the advance of man beyond the stage of voluntary
immaturity. By immaturity is meant a man's inability to use his
understanding except under the guidance of another. The immaturity is
voluntary when the cause is not want of intelligence but of resolution.
_Sapere aude!_ "Dare to use thine own understanding," is therefore the
motto of free thought. If it be asked, "Do we live in a free-thinking
age?" the answer is, "No, but we live in an age of free thought." As
things are at present, men in general are very far from possessing, or
even from being able to acquire, the power of making a sure and right
use of their own understanding without the guidance of others. On the
other hand, we have clear indications that the field now lies,
nevertheless, open before them, to which they can freely make their way
and that the hindrances to general freedom of thought are gradually
becoming less. And again he says: 'If we wish to insure the true use of
the understanding by a method which is universally valid, we must first
critically examine the laws which are involved in the very nature of the
understanding itself. For the knowledge of a truth which is valid for
everyone is possible only when based on laws which are involved in the
nature of the human mind, as such, and have not been imported into it
from without through facts of experience, which must always be
accidental and conditional.'
There speaks, of course, the prophet of the new age which was to
transcend the old rationalist movement. Men had come to harp in
complacency upon reason. They had never inquired into the nature and
laws of action of the reason itself. Kant, though in fullest sympathy
with its fundamental principles, was yet aware of the excesses and
weaknesses in which the rationalist movement was running out. No man was
ever more truly a child of rationalism. No man has ever written, to whom
the human reason was more divine and inviolable. Yet no man ever had
greater reserves within himself which rationalism, as it had been, had
never touched. It was he, therefore, who could lay the foundations for a
new and nobler philosophy for the future. The word _Aufklärung_, which
the speech of the Fatherland furnished him, is a better word than ours.
It is a better word than the French _l'Illuminisme_, the Enlightenment.
Still we are apparently committed to the term Rationalism, although it
is not an altogether fortunate designation which the English-speaking
race has given to a tendency practically universal in the thinking of
Europe, from about 1650 to the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Historically, the rationalistic movement was the necessary preliminary
for the modern period of European civilization as distinguished from the
ecclesiastically and theologically determined culture which had
prevailed up to that time. It marks the great cleft between the ancient
and mediæval world of culture on the one hand and the modern world on
the other. The Reformation had but pushed ajar the door to the modern
world and then seemed in surprise and fear about to close it again. The
thread of the Renaissance was taken up again only in the Enlightenment.
The stream flowed underground which was yet to fertilise the modern
world.
We are here mainly concerned to note the breadth and universality of the
movement. It was a transformation of culture, a change in the principles
underlying civilisation, in all departments of life. It had indeed, as
one of its most general traits, the antagonism to ecclesiastical and
theological authority. Whatever it was doing, it was never without a
sidelong glance at religion. That was because the alleged divine right
of churches and states was the one might which it seemed everywhere
necessary to break. The conflict with ecclesiasticism, however, was
taken up also by Pietism, the other great spiritual force of the age.
This was in spite of the fact that the Pietists' view of religion was
the opposite of the rationalist view. Rationalism was characterised by
thorough-going antagonism to supernaturalism with all its consequences.
This arose from its zeal for the natural and the human, in a day when
all men, defenders and assailants of religion alike, accepted the dictum
that what was human could not be divine, the divine must necessarily be
the opposite of the human. In reality this general trait of opposition
to religion deceives us. It is superficial. In large part the
rationalists were willing to leave the question of religion on one side
if the ecclesiastics would let them alone. This is true in spite of the
fact that the pot-house rationalism of Germany and France in the
eighteenth century found the main butt of its ridicule in the priesthood
and the Church. On its sober side, in the studies of scholars, in the
bureaux of statesmen, in the laboratories of discoverers, it found more
solid work. It accomplished results which that other trivial aspect must
not hide from us.
Troeltsch first in our own day has given us a satisfactory account of
the vast achievement of the movement in every department of human
life.[2] It annihilated the theological notion of the State. In the
period after the Thirty Years' War men began to question what had been
the purpose of it all. Diplomacy freed itself from Jesuitical and papal
notions. It turned preponderantly to commercial and economic aims. A
secular view of the purpose of God in history began to prevail in all
classes of society. The Grand Monarque was ready to proclaim the divine
right of the State which was himself. Still, not until the period of his
dotage did that claim bear any relation to what even he would have
called religion. Publicists, both Catholic and Protestant, sought to
recur to the _lex naturæ_ in contradistinction with the old _lex
divina_. The natural rights of man, the rights of the people, the
rationally conditioned rights of the State, a natural, prudential,
utilitarian morality interested men. One of the consequences of this
theory of the State was a complete alteration in the thought of the
relation of State and Church. The nature of the Church itself as an
empirical institution in the midst of human society was subjected to the
same criticism with the State. Men saw the Church in a new light. As the
State was viewed as a kind of contract in men's social interest, so the
Church was regarded as but a voluntary association to care for their
religious interests. It was to be judged according to the practical
success with which it performed this function.
[Footnote 2: Troeltsch, Art. 'Aufklärung' in Herzog-Hauck,
_Realencylopädie_, 3 Aufl., Bd. ii., s. 225 f.]
Then also, in the economic and social field the rational spirit made
itself felt. Commerce and the growth of colonies, the extension of the
middle class, the redistribution of wealth, the growth of cities, the
dependence in relations of trade of one nation upon another, all these
things shook the ancient organisation of society. The industrial system
grew up upon the basis of a naturalistic theory of all economic
relations. Unlimited freedom in labour and in the use of capital were
claimed. There came a great revolution in public opinion upon all
matters of morals. The ferocity of religious wars, the cruelty of
religious controversies, the bigotry of the confessional, these all,
which, only a generation earlier, had been taken by long-suffering
humanity as if they had been matters of course, were now viewed with
contrition by the more exalted spirits and with contempt and
embitterment by the rest. Men said, if religion can give us not better
morality than this, it is high time we looked to the natural basis of
morality. Natural morality came to be the phrase ever on the lips of the
leading spirits. Too frequently they had come to look askance at the
morality of those who alleged a supernatural sanction for that which
they at least enjoined upon others. We come in this field also, as in
others, upon the assertion of the human as nobler and more beautiful
than that which had by the theologians been alleged to be divine. The
assertion came indeed to be made in ribald and blasphemous forms, but it
was not without a great measure of provocation.
Then there was the altered view of nature which came through the
scientific discoveries of the age. Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo,
Gassendi, Newton, are the fathers of the modern sciences. These are the
men who brought new worlds to our knowledge and new methods to our use.
That the sun does not move about the earth, that the earth is but a
speck in space, that heaven cannot be above nor hell beneath, these are
thoughts which have consequences. Instead of the old deductive method,
that of the mediæval Aristotelianism, which had been worse than
fruitless in the study of nature, men now set out with a great
enthusiasm to study facts, and to observe their laws. Modern optics,
acoustics, chemistry, geology, zoology, psychology and medicine, took
their rises within the period of which we speak. The influence was
indescribable. Newton might maintain his own simple piety side by side,
so to say, with his character, as a scientific man, though even he did
not escape the accusation of being a Unitarian. In the resistance which
official religion offered at every step to the advance of the sciences,
it is small wonder if natures less placid found the maintenance of their
ancestral faith too difficult. Natural science was deistic with Locke
and Voltaire, it was pantheistic in the antique sense with Shaftesbury,
it was pantheistic-mystical with Spinoza, spiritualistic with Descartes,
theistic with Leibnitz, materialistic with the men of the Encyclopædia.
It was orthodox with nobody. The miracle as traditionally defined became
impossible. At all events it became the millstone around the neck of the
apologists. The movement went to an extreme. All the evils of excess
upon this side from which we since have suffered were forecast. They
were in a measure called out by the evils and errors which had so long
reigned upon the other side.
Again, in the field of the writing of history and of the critique of
ancient literatures, the principles of rational criticism were worked
out and applied in all seriousness. Then these maxims began to be
applied, sometimes timidly and sometimes in scorn and shallowness, to
the sacred history and literature as well. To claim, as the defenders of
the faith were fain to do, that this one department of history was
exempt, was only to tempt historians to say that this was equivalent to
confession that we have not here to do with history at all.
Nor can we overlook the fact that the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries witnessed a great philosophical revival. Here again it is the
rationalist principle which is everywhere at work. The observations upon
nature, the new feeling concerning man, the vast complex of facts and
impulses which we have been able in these few words to suggest, demanded
a new philosophical treatment. The philosophy which now took its rise
was no longer the servant of theology. It was, at most, the friend, and
even possibly the enemy, of theology. Before the end of the rationalist
period it was the master of theology, though often wholly indifferent to
theology, exactly because of its sense of mastery. The great
philosophers of the eighteenth century, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, belong
with a part only of their work and tendency to the rationalist movement.
Still their work rested upon that which had already been done by Spinoza
and Malebranche, by Hobbes and Leibnitz, by Descartes and Bayle, by
Locke and Wolff, by Voltaire and the Encyclopædists. With all of the
contrasts among these men there are common elements. There is an ever
increasing antipathy to the thought of original sin and of supernatural
revelation, there is the confidence of human reason, the trust in the
will of man, the enthusiasm for the simple, the natural, the
intelligible and practical, the hatred of what was scholastic and, above
all, the repudiation of authority.
All these elements led, toward the end of the period, to the effort at
the construction of a really rational theology. Leibnitz and Lessing
both worked at that problem. However, not until after the labours of
Kant was it possible to utilise the results of the rationalist movement
for the reconstruction of theology. If evidence for this statement were
wanting, it could be abundantly given from the work of Herder. He was
younger than Kant, yet the latter seems to have exerted but slight
influence upon him. He earnestly desired to reinterpret Christianity in
the new light of his time, yet perhaps no part of his work is so futile.
Pietism
Allusion has been made to pietism. We have no need to set forth its own
achievements. We must recur to it merely as one of the influences which
made the transition from the century of rationalism to bear, in Germany,
an aspect different from that which it bore in any other land. Pietism
had at first much in common with rationalism. It shared with the latter
its opposition to the whole administration of religion established by
the State, its antagonism to the social distinctions which prevailed,
its individualism, its emphasis upon the practical. It was part of a
general religious reaction against ecclesiasticism, as were also
Jansenism in France, and Methodism in England, and the Whitefieldian
revival in America. But, through the character of Spener, and through
the peculiarity of German social relations, it gained an influence over
the educated classes, such as Methodism never had in England, nor, on
the whole, the Great Awakening in America. In virtue of this, German
pietism was able, among influential persons, to present victorious
opposition to the merely secular tendencies of the rationalistic
movement. In no small measure it breathed into that movement a religious
quality which in other lands was utterly lacking. It gave to it an
ethical seriousness from which in other places it had too often set
itself free.
In England there had followed upon the age of the great religious
conflict one of astounding ebb of spiritual interest. Men turned with
all energy to the political and economic interests of a wholly modern
civilisation. They retained, after a short period of friction, a smug
and latitudinarian orthodoxy, which Methodism did little to change. In
France not only was the Huguenot Church annihilated, but the Jansenist
movement was savagely suppressed. The tyranny of the Bourbon State and
the corruption of the Gallican Church which was so deeply identified
with it caused the rationalist movement to bear the trait of a
passionate opposition to religion. In the time of Pascal, Jansenism had
a moment when it bade fair to be to France what pietism was to Germany.
Later, in the anguish and isolation of the conflict the movement lost
its poise and intellectual quality. In Germany, even after the temporary
alliance of pietism and rationalism against the Church had been
transcended, and the length and breadth of their mutual antagonism had
been revealed, there remained a deep mutual respect and salutary
interaction. Obscurantists and sentimentalists might denounce
rationalism. Vulgar ranters like Dippel and Barth might defame religion.
That had little weight as compared with the fact that Klopstock, Hamann
and Herder, Jacobi, Goethe and Jean Paul, had all passed at some time
under the influence of pietism. Lessing learned from the Moravians the
undogmatic essence of religion. Schleiermacher was bred among the
devoted followers of Zinzendorf. Even the radicalism of Kant retained
from the teaching of his pietistic youth the stringency of its ethic,
the sense of the radical evil of human nature and of the categorical
imperative of duty. It would be hard to find anything to surpass his
testimony to the purity of character and spirit of his parents, or the
beauty of the home life in which he was bred. Such facts as these made
themselves felt both in the philosophy and in the poetry of the age. The
rationalist movement itself came to have an ethical and spiritual trait.
The triviality, the morbidness and superstition of pietism received
their just condemnation. But among the leaders of the nation in every
walk of life were some who felt the drawing to deal with ethical and
religious problems in the untrammelled fashion which the century had
taught.
We may be permitted to try to show the meaning of pietism by a concrete
example. No one can read the correspondence between the youthful
Schleiermacher and his loving but mistaken father, or again, the
lifelong correspondence of Schleiermacher with his sister, without
receiving, if he has any religion of his own, a touching impression of
what the pietistic religion meant. The father had long before, unknown
to the son, passed through the torments of the rational assault upon a
faith which was sacred to him. He had preached, through years, in the
misery of contradiction with himself. He had rescued his drowning soul
in the ark of the most intolerant confessional orthodoxy. In the crisis
of his son's life he pitiably concealed these facts. They should have
been the bond of sympathy. The son, a sorrowful little motherless boy,
was sent to the Moravian school at Niesky, and then to Barby. He was to
escape the contamination of the universities, and the woes through which
his father had passed. Even there the spirit of the age pursued him. The
precocious lad, in his loneliness, raised every question which the race
was wrestling with. He long concealed these facts, dreading to wound the
man he so revered. Then in a burst of filial candour, he threw himself
upon his father's mercy, only to be abused and measurelessly condemned.
He had his way. He resorted to Halle, turned his back on sacred things,
worked in titanic fashion at everything but the problem of religion. At
least he kept his life clean and his soul sensitive among the flagrantly
immoral who were all about him, even in the pietists' own university. He
laid the foundations for his future philosophical construction. He
bathed in the sentiments and sympathies, poetic, artistic and
humanitarian, of the romanticist movement. In his early Berlin period he
was almost swept from his feet by its flood. He rescued himself,
however, by his rationalism and romanticism into a breadth and power of
faith which made him the prophet of the new age. By him, for a
generation, men like-minded saved their souls. As one reads, one
realises that it was the pietists' religion which saved him, and which,
in another sense, he saved. His recollections of his instruction among
the Herrnhuter are full of beauty and pathos. His sister never advanced
a step upon the long road which he travelled. Yet his sympathy with her
remained unimpaired. The two poles of the life of the age are visible
here. The episode, full of exquisite personal charm, is a veritable
miniature of the first fifty years of the movement which we have to
record. No one did for England or for France what Schleiermacher had
done for the Fatherland.
Æsthetic Idealism
Besides pietism, the Germany of the end of the eighteenth century
possessed still another foil and counterpoise to its decadent
rationalism. This was the so-called æsthetic-idealistic movement, which
shades off into romanticism. The debt of Schleiermacher to that movement
has been already hinted at. It was the revolt of those who had this in
common with the pietists, that they hated and despised the outworn
rationalism. They thought they wanted no religion. It is open to us to
say that they misunderstood religion. It was this misunderstanding which
Schleiermacher sought to bring home to them. What religion they
understood, ecclesiasticism, Roman or Lutheran, or again, the banalities
and fanaticisms of middle-class pietism, they despised. Their war with
rationalism was not because it had deprived man of religion. It had been
equally destructive of another side of the life of feeling, the
æsthetic. Their war was not on behalf of the good, it was in the name of
the beautiful. Rationalism had starved the soul, it had minimised and
derided feeling. It had suppressed emotion. It had been fatal to art. It
was barren of poetry. It had had no sympathy with history and no
understanding of history. It had reduced everything to the process by
which two and two make four. The pietists said that the frenzy for
reason had made man oblivious of the element of the divine. The æsthetic
idealists said that it had been fatal to the element of the human. From
this point of view their movement has been called the new humanism. The
glamour of life was gone, they said. Mystery had vanished. And mystery
is the womb of every art. Rationalism had been absolutely uncreative,
only and always destructive. Rousseau had earlier uttered this wail in
France, and had greatly influenced certain minds in Germany. Shelley and
Keats were saying something of the sort in England. Even as to
Wordsworth, it may be an open question if his religion was not mainly
romanticism. All these men used language which had been conventionally
associated with religion, to describe this other emotion.
Rationalism had ended in proving deadly to ideals. This was true. But
men forgot for the moment how glorious an ideal it had once been to be
rational and to assert the rationality of the universe. Still the time
had come when, in Germany at all events, the great cry was, 'back to the
ideal.' It is curious that men always cry 'back' when they mean
'forward.' For it was not the old idealism, either religious or
æsthetic, which they were seeking. It was a new one in which the sober
fruits of rationalism should find place. Still, for the moment, as we
have seen, the air was full of the cry, 'back to the State by divine
right, back to the Church, back to the Middle Age, back to the beauty of
classical antiquity.' The poetry, the romance, the artistic criticism of
this movement set themselves free at a stroke from theological bondage
and from the externality of conventional ethics. It shook off the dust
of the doctrinaires. It ridiculed the petty utilitarianism which had
been the vogue. It had such an horizon as men had never dreamed before.
It owed that horizon to the rationalism it despised. From its new
elevation it surveyed all the great elements of the life of man. It saw
morals and religion, language and society, along with art and itself, as
the free and unconscious product through the ages, of the vitality of
the human spirit. It must be said that it neither solved nor put away
the ancient questions. Especially through its one-sided æstheticism it
veiled that element of dualism in the world which Kant clearly saw, and
we now see again, after a century which has sometimes leaned to easy
pantheism. However, it led to a study of the human soul and of all its
activities, which came closer to living nature than anything which the
world had yet seen.
To this group of æsthetic idealists belong, not to mention lesser names,
Lessing and Hamann and Winckelmann, but above all Herder and Goethe.
Herder was surely the finest spirit among the elder contemporaries of
Goethe. Bitterly hostile to the rationalists, he had been moved by
Rousseau to enthusiasm for the free creative life of the human spirit.
With Lessing he felt the worth of every art in and for itself, and the
greatness of life in its own fulfilment. He sets out from the analysis
of the poetic and artistic powers, the appreciation of which seemed to
him to be the key to the understanding of the spiritual world. Then
first he approaches the analysis of the ethical and religious feeling.
All the knowledge and insight thus gained he gathers together into a
history of the spiritual life of mankind. This life of the human spirit
comes forth everywhere from nature, is bound to nature. It constitutes
one whole with a nature which the devout soul calls God, and apprehends
within itself as the secret of all that it is and does. Even in the
period in which he had become passionately Christian, Herder never was
able to attain to a scientific establishing of his Christianity, or to
any sense of the specific aim of its development. He felt himself to be
separated from Kant by an impassable gulf. All the sharp antinomies
among which Kant moved, contrasts of that which is sensuous with that
which is reasonable, of experience with pure conception, of substance
and form in thought, of nature and freedom, of inclination and duty,
seemed to Herder grossly exaggerated, if not absolutely false. Sometimes
Herder speaks as if the end of life were simply the happiness which a
man gets out of the use of all his powers and out of the mere fact of
existence. Deeper is Kant's contention, that the true aim of life can be
only moral culture, even independent of happiness, or rather one must
find his noblest happiness in that moral culture.
At a period in his life when Herder had undergone conversion to court
orthodoxy at Bückeburg and threatened to throw away that for which his
life had stood, he was greatly helped by Goethe. The identification of
Herder with Christianity continued to be more deep and direct than that
of Goethe ever became, yet Goethe has also his measure of significance
for our theme. If he steadied Herder in his religious experience, he
steadied others in their poetical emotionalism and artistic
sentimentality, which were fast becoming vices of the time. The classic
repose of his spirit, his apparently unconscious illustration of the
ancient maxim, 'nothing too much,' was the more remarkable, because
there were few influences in the whole gamut of human life to which he
did not sooner or later surrender himself, few experiences which he did
not seek, few areas of thought upon which he did not enter. Systems and
theories were never much to his mind. A fact, even if it were
inexplicable, interested him much more. To the evolution of formal
thought in his age he held himself receptive rather than directing. He
kept, to the last, his own manner of brooding and creating, within the
limits of a poetic impressionableness which instinctively viewed the
material world and the life of the soul in substantially similar
fashion. There is something almost humorous in the way in which he
eagerly appropriated the results of the philosophising of his time, in
so far as he could use these to sustain his own positions, and
caustically rejected those which he could not thus use. He soon got by
heart the negative lessons of Voltaire and found, to use the words which
he puts into the mouth of Faust, that while it freed him from his
superstitions, at the same time it made the world empty and dismal
beyond endurance. In the mechanical philosophy which presented itself in
the _Système de la Nature_ as a positive substitute for his lost faith,
he found only that which filled his poet's soul with horror. 'It
appeared to us,' he says, 'so grey, so cimmerian and so dead that we
shuddered at it as at a ghost. We thought it the very quintessence of
old age. All was said to be necessary, and therefore there was no God.
Why not a necessity for a God to take its place among the other
necessities!' On the other hand, the ordinary teleological theology,
with its external architect of the world and its externally determined
designs, could not seem to Goethe more satisfactory than the mechanical
philosophy. He joined for a time in Rousseau's cry for the return to
nature. But Goethe was far too well balanced not to perceive that such a
cry may be the expression of a very artificial and sophisticated state
of mind. It begins indeed in the desire to throw off that which is
really oppressive. It ends in a fretful and reckless revolt against the
most necessary conditions of human life. Goethe lived long enough to see
in France that dissolution of all authority, whether of State or Church,
for which Rousseau had pined. He saw it result in the return of a
portion of mankind to what we now believe to have been their primitive
state, a state in which they were 'red in tooth and claw.' It was not
that paradisaic state of love and innocence, which, curiously enough,
both Rousseau and the theologians seem to have imagined was the
primitive state.
The thought of the discipline and renunciation of our lower nature in
order to the realisation of a higher nature of mankind is written upon
the very face of the second part of _Faust_. Certain passages in
_Dichtung_ and _Wahrheit_ are even more familiar. 'Our physical as well
as our social life, morality, custom, knowledge of the world,
philosophy, religion, even many an accidental occurrence in our daily
life, all tell us that we must renounce.' 'Renunciation, once for all,
in view of the eternal,' that was the lesson which he said made him feel
an atmosphere of peace breathed upon him. He perceived the supreme moral
prominence of certain Christian ideas, especially that of the atonement
as he interpreted it. 'It is altogether strange to me,' he writes to
Jacobi, 'that I, an old heathen, should see the cross planted in my own
garden, and hear Christ's blood preached without its offending me.'
Goethe's quarrel with Christianity was due to two causes. In the first
place, it was due to his viewing Christianity as mainly, if not
exclusively, a religion of the other world, as it has been called, a
religion whose God is not the principle of all life and nature and for
which nature and life are not divine. In the second place, it was due to
the prominence of the negative or ascetic element in Christianity as
commonly presented, to the fact that in that presentation the law of
self-sacrifice bore no relation to the law of self-realisation. In both
of these respects he would have found himself much more at home with the
apprehension of Christianity which we have inherited from the nineteenth
century. The programme of charity which he outlines in the _Wanderjahre_
as a substitute for religion would be taken to-day, so far as it goes,
as a rather moderate expression of the very spirit of the Christian
religion.