Herder rightly perceived that the ends of humanity cannot be external to but must be realised in its
existence
as a whole, so that no part can ever be merely a means to an end outside but
?
?
Pleiderer - Development of Theology in Germany since Kant
of mankind under the combined action of natural and spiritual forces in history.
In England Shaftes bury's philosophy of the moral sense had been the counterpart
of Hume's intellectual scepticism, and in France Rousseau's Gospel of Nature, that of Voltaire's Enlightenment ; in the
same way in Germany Kant's analyzing thought was supple mented by the synthetic intuitions of Herder, and subjective idealism, with its limitation to the analysis of the conscious ness of the subject, by historical realism, with its eager atten tion to the laws of human nature in the whole course of history. Each of these modes of thought is evidently the complement of the other ; and the right combination and fusion of the two was the problem bequeathed by the 18th century, then clos ing, to the philosophy of the 19th, a problem the solution of which is still far from completed. In order to understand what is really new in the thought of the 19th century, we must look at it as the synthesis of these two contrary tendencies, which occupied the second half of the 18th century.
A concise account of Herder's position it is not easy to give, for two reasons ; firstly, because his style has more of the poetical, emotional, and rhetorical element than the clearness and precision of science ; and secondly, because his views, especially on religious questions, underwent repeated modifi
development
? ? ? 2 2 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
cations in the course of his literary labours. One unvarying
drift does indeed pervade all these variations -- a protest
against the arrogance and poverty of the popular Aufkldrung, which would let nothing pass but what was amenable to the calculations of the common understanding, and, without any sense for appreciating the productive forces and manifold phenomena of human history, sought to force all truth into the meagre moulds of its abstract intellectual conception. As a true disciple of Hamann and Rousseau, Herder abhorred this arid, levelling rationalism ; he sought to understand the unity of all the powers of man's soul and the special nature of his habits of feeling ; hence what interested him in poetry and
was not the abstract rule, the artificial form of the schools, the doctrines of the Church, but the living feelings as they found natural expression in the songs of the people and the poetical picture-language of the oldest religious records. As in poetry he preferred the primitive strength and beauty of the songs of the people to the classicality of the schools, so
in religion he set the strength and beauty of the Bible above the dogmatism of the Churches ; for this very reason it was to him insufferable to see the Rationalists trying to thrust their rigid intellectuality into the Bible, and by their artificial inter pretations dilute and dissipate both its religious strength and its poetic charm. Herder throughout remained perfectly true to himself in rejecting the Rationalists' arbitrary and unnatural treatment of the language of the Bible, and in demanding of the reader a loving sympathy with the special characteristics of the Biblical writers, so as to catch their enthusiasm and
reproduce their poetical picture-language. He thereby ren dered lasting service, striking the most decisive blow at the subjective arbitrariness of the Rationalistic methods of inter pretation, and preparing the way for the really scientific, objective, and historical methods of Biblical study followed in our own time.
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that within the boundary lines of this position Herder wavered. During the earlier and later periods of his life (in Riga and Weimar respectively), his appreciation of the aesthetic beauty and ideal truth of the Bible never kept him from criticising it in the same fashion as the poetical literature and religious legends of other nations, or from explaining it in accordance with the psychological and historical conditions of its origin ; so that
religion
? ? ? ? Ch. II. ] HERDER.
23
he was compelled not to regard these legends, the rise of which could be historically traced, as direct revelations of God with objective truth. In one of his earliest works, the fragment, Von Entstehung und Fortpflanzung der ersten Re- ligionsbegriffe, he adopts Hume's view, that fear was the mother of religion, and that the earliest religion consisted in the superstitious worship of harmful and beneficent deities, to appease the wrath and win the favour of whom, men felt bound to offer prayers, sacrifices, and ceremonies. When, however,
needs,
mankind had provided for their most pressing they began to speculate about the origin of things,
and to embody their ideas in cosmogonies and genealogies ; thus the first rude religion, the name of which is in almost all languages derived from fear, was followed by a kind of historico-physical philosophy. The question of the origin of the world received a mystical answer ; these primitive legends took a completely national and local form ; they were clothed in the rich figurative language of the senses ; they became mythological poems. It is the work of the science of religion to study the spirit of these mythological poems as charac teristic products of the individual nations. As a contribution to this object, Herder wrote his Archdologie der Hebrder, which combined in a common view his researches in the earliest history of poetry and in the origins of religion. He nowhere speaks in this work of a supernatural revelation ; in
the first chapters of Genesis he sees a national religious poem,
which must be understood, like Homer, in accordance with
its original spirit and meaning without any dogmatic bias. We must transplant ourselves into Eastern habits of thought in order to understand this poetical philosophy of nature ; but light is also thrown upon it by similar imagery in modern poetry, in Ossian, Shakespeare, and Klopstock. To treat this Oriental national poetry as dogma, is contrary to all canons of taste and reason ; it involves a violation of the natural difference in the various mental faculties, mutilates
the intuitive emotions no less than the reason, and confounds
together all classes of philosophy and knowledge. God gives us no revelation concerning natural science or metaphysics, except by means of the power bestowed by Him upon the human mind, of penetrating by its own force ever deeper into the nature of His creation.
While these views are identical with those of Herder's
? ? ? ? 24 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
most mature works, written while in Weimar, they differ appreciably from the position he held during the middle
period of his life (while in Biickeburg). From being the
aesthetic archaeologist of literature he then became more and
more the apologist of the supernatural. In his essay on Die dlteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts, which be longs to this period, he still regards the account of the creation in Genesis as a poem, but now it is a divine, and not a human poem ; it is no longer an Oriental myth, but a divine revelation. He does indeed still lay great stress upon the sense-intuition of nature, that the sight of the dawning day, which was in the prophet's mind but in order that this everyday image might be interpreted as the type of the creation of the world, the prophet must also have heard
the voice of a teacher, which could only have been that of God himself. Thus positive teaching of God found at the beginning of all human history, and remains the super natural spring from which all human wisdom and poetry take their rise. Even language, the natural origin of which
Herder had himself expounded with much penetration, now attributed to direct divine revelation, to definite instruction given by God. This original revelation his view, the fundamental fact, the antithesis, as he vehemently proclaims, of all the artificial ideas and hypothesis of philosophy he himself forgetting, however, that this so-called fundamental fact itself only an hypothesis, and mainly distinguished from others by boldly leaving the paths of sober empirical
investigation to take refuge in the region of miracle, where imagination usurps the place of thought. With this essay on Genesis we may compare a work which appeared soon after Erlduterungen zum neuen Testament aus einer neueroffneten morgenldndischen Quelle, in which the New Testament interpreted by the Zendavesta, Christ and his Apostles, as
Herder assumes, being versed in the wisdom of the Chaldees.
This work, like the last, contains a defence of the
natural element in the Bible on the lines of Lavater main tains that all the miracles, from the miraculous birth of Jesus to his ascension, were facts, though in such a way that everywhere prominence given to the spiritual truth of the narrative. Herder did not reflect that this truth would not be affected the narrative were not actual history, but poetry and legend the spiritual truth and beauty of a story was to
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;
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? Ch. II. ] HERDER.
25
him a direct guarantee of its historical reality, or rather
appeared indistinguishable from it to his poetical imagination, which was then at all events without the checks of the critical
"
Here, as in the old Testament, he has failed to grasp the critical conception intermediate between poetry and faith--
the conception of the myth. "
That in giving the rein absolutely to the anti-rationalistic
or mystical side of his nature, Herder could go so far as to renounce his earlier scientific and critical views, can be easily
explained by his peculiar temperament and the influence of friends, both male and female, while he was at Blickeburg ; and it would be quite wrong to think, with Hettner, of any conscious compromise from impure motives. We may, in fact, say with Haym, that only by this " mystical and enthu siastic method of interpretation," was it possible to regain the lost appreciation of religion as such, of the profoundly inward force of the chief truths of Christianity, and of the original meaning of the ancient words of our faith. Nevertheless, we shall also do well to call to mind, with Julian Schmidt, the old truth that all trifling with words must be avenged. This
of Herder's, in which aesthetic taste combined with the noblest feeling and ideal pathos to drown the calm voice of critical reason, was indubitably the beginning of that irra tional movement which was carried farther by Romanticism and blossomed forth luxuriantly in the reactionary theology of our century. But it is all the more interesting to observe how Herder again rescued himself from this sandbank upon which so many suffered shipwreck, and regained the right track marked out for him by his true genius. It was under the leadership of Lessing and Spinoza that he accomplished this, though the altered surroundings of his position in Weimar materially assisted the change. Herder had been engaged in a friendly correspondence with Lessing for nearly two years; and when, in February 1 78 1 , the news of Les
intellect. As his biographer, Haym, aptly remarks : rightly insists that we ought to read the New Testament in the spirit of the New Testament itself, with a feeling and sense of the greatness of its contents. But the greatness, the deep religious and moral power of these writings, is too much for him ; it carries him away and overpowers him. He loses in consequence all the freedom in regard to these writings which he had allowed himself in regard to poetical works.
mysticism
He
? ? ? ? 2 6 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
sing's death came upon him as a painful shock, he paid a tribute to the memory of his friend, in which in enthusiastic terms he eulogised him as " a noble truth-seeker, truth-finder, and truth-champion," to whose nature no vice was so foreign as cringing hypocrisy, false courtesy, or, above all, that weari some, sleepy rest in half the truth, which from the first eats like rust and canker into men's minds, in all branches of knowledge and inquiry. This was Herder's formal renuncia tion of theological fanaticism of every kind, not excepting that which had disfigured his own writings of the Biickeburg
To the same date belongs the renewal of friendly relations between Herder and Goethe, with its productive mutual stimulus, as well as their study in common of the
philosophy of Spinoza.
Jacobi had hoped to gain Herder as an ally in the cam
paign against Spinozism, having previously made a like attempt with Lessing ; but the disappointment of his hopes was even more decisive in Herder's case than it had been in
period.
? Herder confessed to him, that since he had busied himself with philosophy he had become more and more con vinced of the truth of Lessing's saying, that as a matter of fact no other philosophy than Spinoza's was quite consistent with itself. Not that he could in everything agree with Spinoza, whose ideas were always undeveloped whenever his relations with Descartes were unduly close. But Spinoza did not deserve the traditional prejudice against him, which rested upon a misunderstanding of his philosophy. The first mis take of the opponents of Spinoza, is to suppose he looks on God as a nonentity, an abstract conception. On the contrary, Spinoza's God is the most real and most active unity, who alone says to himself, " I am that I am, and shall be in all
Lessing's.
the changes of my manifestations what I shall be. " " What you people mean by ' existence outside the world ' I do not understand. If God does not exist in the world, everywhere without measure, wholly and individually, he exists nowhere. Outside the world there is no space ; space is an abstraction from experience, and arises when a world arises for us.
Limited personality is not less inapplicable to an infinite Being, personality being to our minds inseparable from limi tation. In God this illusion disappears ; he is the highest, most truly living, and most active One. God is not the world,
and the world is not God ; of this there can be no doubt.
? ? ? Ch II] HERDER. 27
But nothing can be gained, it seems to me, from your extra and supra. When we speak of God, we must forget all our idola of space and time, else our best efforts will be fruitless. " The sense in which he himself wished Spinoza's philosophy to be understood, and in which he could make it his own, was expounded by Herder in a little treatise entitled, Gott: Einige
Gesprliche iiber Spinoza's System (1787). He admits, in the first place, that the ideas inherited from Cartesius, of Sub stance, Attributes, and Modes are unsatisfactory, and that the mathematical method of proof is a mistake. These ideas must have life put into them by Leibnitz's idea of Force. God must therefore be conceived as "the underived, original, and universal force, underlying and including all forces, most active
Being"; attributes, as organic forces in which the Deity manifests himself ; and all things, as the modifications or active expressions, of the divine force. God, as the eternal original Force, possesses not only infinite force of thought, but also of operation ; in him, therefore, existence, operation, and thought, or power, wisdom, and goodness, are indivisibly one. He is therefore as far removed from blind necessity as from any inoperative "deliberation and consultation, caprice, and velleity. " Anthropomorphic conceptions of this kind were, with Leibnitz, merely the popular garb of his Theodicy, but his successors made them of prime importance, and the basis of all those physico- theological systems which resulted there from, which sought to reduce everything to the arbitrary will of God, and to break the golden chain of nature, in order to separate a few phenomena from the rest, and see, at this or that point, an electric flash of arbitrary divine purpose. All these delusions, in relation to which the holy name of God ought not to be misused, are escaped by the modest student of nature, who, though he does not divulge to us particular measures decided on in the council-chambers of the divine Will, observes instead the composition of actual things and the laws implanted in their nature. While apparently forgetting the purposes of God, he seeks and finds God in his totality, in every object and point of creation, i. e. , in everything an essential truth, harmony, and beauty, without which it would not and could not exist. Whoever could show men the laws of nature, how what we see of the so-called animate and in animate creation works, lives, and acts according to an inner
the result of the interaction of forces in definite
? necessity,
? ? -
? 28 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
would promote the noblest admiration, love, and reverence for God, far more than the man who, as knowing the counsels of God, preached that we have feet in order to walk, and eyes in order to see, etc. Every true law of nature discovered would thus be also a discovered rule of the eternal divine Intelligence, whose thought alone can be truth, and whose activity reality.
We thus see that Herder's conception of God is a combina tion of Spinoza's monism with Leibnitz's theism ; Spinoza's substance becomes operative thinking force ; his modes of substance become living forces, resembling Leibnitz's monads, but operative as well as perceptive, whose harmony is there fore no longer, as in Leibnitz, pre-established, but is inherent in the actual interaction of the forces. With Spinoza, Herder rejects the external teleology of particular arbitrary purposes, but with Leibnitz he recognises in necessity according to law the internal adaptation of things to ends, in the laws of nature the thoughts of God, in the golden chain of nature the divine wisdom and goodness. Thus, Spinoza's natural istic mechanical system is transformed into a theistic opti mism, on the lines of Leibnitz and Shaftesbury. These two thinkers are also followed in Herder's ethical demand -- " the attainment of the law of noble and beautiful necessity," and
the performance of duty as if it were not duty but nature, happiness thus being included in virtue. Finally, Herder's doctrine of God comprehends also his doctrine of immor tality and his philosophy of history, becoming a completely optimistic system. If all life is force, death must everywhere be only apparent death, merely the destruction of some ap pearance ; in ceaseless motion and eternal palingenesia, force
and the interaction of forces carry on their work ; but the persistence of force is inconceivable without progress. In the kingdom of God there is no standing still, still less any going back ; it is a necessary law, that chaos should become order, and latent capacities forces in operation.
In these thoughts, which Herder gathered from the three philosophers, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Shaftesbury, as the quintessence of their systems, he found a conception of the world in which he could rest ; and he was strengthened in his belief by the complete and unconditional assent of Goethe.
From the standpoint of these views, shared and continually discussed by the two friends, Herder's principal work, the
organs,
? ? ? ? Ch. II. ] HERDER. 29
Ideen zur Philosophic der Geschichte ( 1 784 - 1 79 1 ), was written. The leading thought of the work that man the connecting link of two worlds. On the one hand, he the child of earth, the highest of its organic products on the other, a citizen of the spiritual world of freedom. The book begins, therefore, with a description of the earth, of its posi tion in the universe, and of the stages of the operations of its organic forces -- from the plant to the animal, from the lower to the higher animals, and finally to man. With all the great differences in these single organisms, nature seems "to have formed them all after one chief type of organization and
man seems to be, as were, the central figure of the animal world, i. e. , the most fully developed form which the essen tial characteristics of all the species around him are exquisitely combined. " His upright carriage man's most distinctive characteristic, upon which depend the dexterity of his hands, his power of language, and also his rationality for his reason
not inborn like our instincts, but the acquired due propor tion between his powers, senses, and instincts. But man
the highest member of progressive series of organic forces, which have constructed the body as their organ, his
development cannot end with his appearance upon the earth for the humanity to which we are destined incompletely realised upon earth, the end for which we exist points to higher forms of development beyond our earthly life under other cosmical conditions, for which we are to prepare our selves by cultivating the spiritual part of our nature, by striving after truth, goodness, and godlike beauty. From
this glance at man's future development, Herder returns to the description of his historical development on earth and the stress which he lays on its dependence upon natural conditions
so marked as to seem, taken by itself, almost pure natural
ism, to which, on the other hand, completely supernaturalistic declarations form a strange contrast. Man stands in a double relation of dependence, on the one hand to nature, and on the other to the culture and traditions of society. But whence came the first germs of the latter Herder cannot find in the natural development of man's rationality a satisfactory answer to this question, but has recourse to an education by higher superhuman influences the Elohim were the instruc tors of man, and from them he received language, the germ of all culture. This transition from natural to super-
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;
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30 BASTS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
natural explanation shows the insufficiency of that one-sided empiricism, which will not, like Kant, regard reason as origi nating action, but only as a passive power of receptivity ; hence it can only explain the first possession and employment
of reason by deriving it from foreign mystical sources.
Herder proceeds to depict the life of the nations in his
tory, and shows how each nation strove to fulfil the common
destiny of man by attaining to humanity and happiness in the special way determined by its natural character and geo graphical position. As to the details we need only draw atten tion to the strangely unfavourable judgment passed upon the Jewish nation, whose religious superiority to other nations is outweighed by its want of political culture and of any real sense of honour and freedom. In the description of the Greeks, on the contrary, prominence is given to the bright points -- their services to art and science and all human culture. So, too, in describing Christianity, Herder does indeed pay a tribute of the warmest admiration to the person of Jesus as the prophet of the truest humanity ; but on the other hand
he lays such great emphasis upon the human errors, abuses,
and corruptions incorporated with the Christian religion ever since its first diffusion, he so decisively condemns the ecclesias-
tical system of dogmas and state Christianity, and in particular takes so adverse a view of the middle ages, as a time of the darkest barbarism and inhumanity, that he almost seems to have adopted in this connection the standpoint of the Auf-
kldrung, which he had before so passionately denounced. The extent to which he still differed from it we shall see later on, when we come to the final account of his religious views ; but it is in any case undeniable that the point of view of the Ideen is not the same as that of his earlier writings. This may be corroborated by a glance at the general principles of his philosophy of history.
Herder wishes us to look at the history of mankind as "simply the natural history of man's powers, actions, and impulses in relation to their time and place. " Supernatural
forces and arbitrary fictitious purposes may no more be intro duced into the study of history than into that of natural science ; in both alike all phenomena must be explained by their causes, not by any hypothetical ends. " The God whom
I seek in history, must be the same as the God in nature ; for man is only a small part of the universe, and his history, like
? /
t
? ? ? 'Ch. II. ] HERDER. 3 1
that of the grub, is closely interwoven with the cell in which he lives. In this history therefore all the laws of nature in volved in the nature of the case, must have validity ; and so far from setting them aside, God, having established them, reveals himself in them in their mighty power with a beauty unchanging, wise, and beneficent. " That things take place from the necessity of natural law involves instead of excluding an inner teleology. The most general law of nature, which holds good also in history, is that out of confusion order should arise, the conservative forces outweighing the destructive ones. All life aims at producing a maximum and a proportion of the forces that mutually limit each other, this being the condition of the perfection and happiness of individuals, nations, and the race. All disturbances of this effort to find a condition of stable equilibrium are always in the end counter acted ; for in the struggle amongst the individual forces and impulses, reason and fairness only last and are established by the force of their own gravity. Hence we may hope " that wherever men dwell, there will one day dwell rational and happy men, happy not only by their own reason, but also by the common rationality of all their brethren. " According to these views, the end of man's development, to be gained by
conflict and struggle, is a maximum and a rational harmony of all his forces, together with the resulting happiness ; but we also find other statements which seem to make the object of nature to consist in that happiness which is found every where in every living thing, viz. , simple consciousness of its own existence. "If happiness is to be found upon earth, it is in every sentient being. Nature has exhausted all possible human forms upon the earth, in order that she might have for each of them, in its time and place, some pleasure with which to allure mortals through life. It is wrong to hold up one ideal to mankind, as if all earlier generations before they reached the ideal were to be branded with the stigma of im perfection. Nature everywhere contrives that with the need there shall arise the possibility of its satisfaction. Those nations to whom we think nature was but a cruel step-mother, were perhaps the best-loved children ; cheerfulness, often combined with thoughtlessness, a lively feeling of their own well-being, constituted their happiness, destiny, and enjoyment of life. Neither our head nor our heart was made for an
infinite variety of thoughts and feelings. How much too
? ? ? ? .
small would be the plan of creation, if every individual had been created for what we call culture. "
It cannot be denied that these sentences represent a na turalism like that of Rousseau, the logical result of which would be to deprive culture of all value in comparison with nature, and history of any divine purpose. But they do not
Herder's whole position ; they only contain a re action, carried to extremes, against the contrary one-sided view of Kant. Kant had met Herder's Ideen with his own Ideen zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbiirgerlicher Absicht (1784), according to which, the end of history consists in an ideal condition of single States and cosmopolitan so ciety, to be attained by means of the conflicts and sacrifices of the generations ; he had himself felt it to be a difficulty in this view that the older generations seem to perform their weary labour only for the sake of those coming after them, the latest only enjoying the good fortune of dwelling in the building at which so long a line of their ancestors had worked with no object in view. What accentuates the harshness of this view
that, according to Kant himself, the ideal goal never to be attained, reason being able to control but never to destroy the tendency to evil in the race. We must acknowledge the
of Herder's dissatisfaction with this view of Kant's the doom of men to the lot of Tantalus in this form, to be ever striving after the unattainable with eternally fruitless toil, would, Herder contends, be unworthy both of man, --who, as Kant also insists, ought never to be merely a means but always at the same time an end himself, --and of the Creator, who could not deceive us by holding out a mere dream of purpose. On the other hand, Kant was indisputably right in
asserting (as against Rousseau and Herder) that the final end of mankind can only be an ideal of moral culture, not the
32
BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
represent
? justice
physical happiness
of a state of nature, which would not
essentially differ from the condition of animals. Kant was
right in conceiving the end of humanity as consisting in an
ideal of society demanded by reason and to be realised by means of freedom but his view of this ideal was too much an abstraction, the mere form of social life, and the mere
Thou shalt to which no reality ever corresponds.
Herder rightly perceived that the ends of humanity cannot be external to but must be realised in its existence as a whole, so that no part can ever be merely a means to an end outside but
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;
in
;
is,
is
? Ch. II. ] HERDER.
33
he thus incurred the danger of taking too low a view of the end and allowing the ideal of reason to sink to a life according to nature. The solution of this antinomy can only be found in the perception of the truth, that reason attains its absolute ends in an infinite series of relative ideals, which are each realised in the proper place and produce corresponding rela tive forms of happiness, while their imperfections act as incentives to the attainment of ever loftier ideals. By this conception of a development of reason itself in the course of human history, Hegel effected the synthesis of these con flicting views, a synthesis which Herder doubtless himself had vaguely caught sight of. We see from this instructive example how much critical idealism and historical realism (or the theory of evolution) mutually need each other to supply their defects.
The antagonism between Herder and Kant, which first
? appears in the department of the philosophy of history, Herder carried into all the chief points of the Kantian philo sophy in his later writings (" Metakritik" ; " Kalligone" ;
" Von Religion, Lehrmeinungen und Gebrduclien"). It is worth while to look at this a little more closely, as character istically illustrating the two sides of modern thought. Herder wishes to substitute for Kant's critique of the reason a physiology of the cognitive faculties, which would explain the evolution of the higher from the lower faculties. He rejects the distinction between a purely receptive sensibility and a purely spontaneous understanding, as also that between the simple matter of experience and the d priori forms of perception --space and time. These last, in Herder's view the result of actual experience, being an abstraction from its contents ; in themselves they are the objective forms in which forces work and manifest themselves to us. Our sense-per ceptions are not given us as a chaotic multiplicity which our spontaneity only afterwards and arbitrarily unifies without
reference to the object ; on the contrary, our senses, by virtue of their own organic structure, give us a multiplicity reduced to an ordered unity inherent in the object itself, recognised, not created by us. Hence the understanding is not so spe cifically different from the sense-organism as Kant main tained, but operates as judgment and classification in all sense-perceptions and in memory, not excepting even the lowest sensation ; it is the same primary force of nature, show-
G. T. D-
? ? ? 34
BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
ing itself here less clearly, there more distinctly and actively, now in separate, then in a connected series of operations. So too in the distinction between phenomena and noumena, Herder can only see a delusion of the imagination, since the true noumena must not be conceived as outside and behind the phenomena, but as within and of them, viz. , as the or ganising forces in organic processes ; to look for " the thing-in- itself " behind the phenomenal world, is to look for the wood behind the trees. Again, Herder is equally unable to follow Kant in assigning freedom and necessity to the intelligible and phenomenal worlds respectively ; on the contrary, the two are the inseparable elements of the very nature of all living force. In so far as forces act according to their own nature, they are free ; in so far as they are limited by other similarly free acting forces, there arise higher equations, which we call laws of nature ; these do not destroy freely
acting forces, but presuppose them. Thus human freedom also is only the highest force of our nature, which is free in so far as by virtue of its self-determination it obeys our nature's laws. On the other hand, it would be mere con fusion of thought to imagine a causality outside causality and a nature outside nature. Specially emphatic is Herder's con demnation of the way in which Kant, in the dialectic of pure reason, represents the idea of God as an illusion, which is afterwards required again by the practical reason ; as if be sides the reason which proscribed this fiction there were a second reason which could command its return from banish ment in the realm of the fabulous. This, says Herder, is
? juggling with reason, and can neither lead to real conviction nor to pure morality ; for a God thus postulated is no God at all, but only a last resource for a destitute moral system, while his existence is as problematical to the speculative reason as the man in the moon. But to reason not divided
against itself God is certainly no problematical distant Being, whose
existence must first be artificially inferred, or, failing this, be made a moral postulate. " On the contrary, he is the primal Being, recognised by the reason as given in all being, the primal force in all forces, the supreme reason of the world. If there is a reason which and knows that its own cause, there also a supreme reason which and knows that
the cause of the unity of all things. "
This the same line of thought as we found in Herder's
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is
is
is,
it is,
? Ch. II. ] HERDER.
35
essay on Spinoza. It does not essentially differ from Kant's suggestion, in his Critique of Judgment, as to the divine basis of the reign of law and purpose in the natural and moral worlds. A reconciliation of the two points of view would, therefore, seem not impossible, especially when we remember Herder's statement elsewhere, that natural science only leads to the conception of nature as the totality of order and form, not directly to that God whom the religious mind desires to find in creation, because he would satisfy its longing for life and well-being. This involves the admission that the re ligious ideal of God and the metaphysical idea of a first cause answer to the needs of two different sides of our mind, which must not be directly identified. This was the truth contained
in Kant's distinction between the ideal of the practical reason and the speculative idea of the unconditioned ; Kant's error, against which Herder with good reason protested, lay in representing this valid distinction as a deep and apparently impassable gulf. This is characteristic generally of the whole antagonism between the two men ; the whole truth is nowhere wholly on one side , each is strong just where the other is weak. Kant's critical and analytical method was met
? by Herder's bold, synthetical intuitions. In order to ensure to
the mind its active share in all cognition, Kant had ban ished its object to the dim, incognisable distance of das Dingansich. Herder replied to this subjective theory by maintaining that all cognition is only the recognition of what is necessarily presupposed as given. Kant had separated the various functions of the mind in cognition ; Herder
their unbroken connection as members in the evolution of one and the same force. But Herder's theory of cognition never ceased to vacillate in an ill-defined way between a naive realism and a rational idealism. He slurred over the antitheses, which Kant had laboured scientific ally to solve, by the help of an indefinite intermediate idea. Herder's attempted correction of Kant could be accomplished only by starting from his critical philosophy and using its resources. This was, and still the task of
post- Kantian philosophy.
Having thus reviewed Herder's philosophical position in its
maturest stage, we come next to consider the form assumed by his theory of religion in accordance with it. He expounded his theory in series of works, dealing partly with the Bible,
emphasised
? ? a
is,
? 36 basis of modern theology. [Bk. i.
partly with dogmatic theology, between the years 1793 and 1797. Their basal idea is much more nearly related to Kant's philosophy of religion than Herder, in the heat of his polemic,
was able to see. The real difference that Kant's rational ism was softened by Herder's rich humanism, and brought by the help of history nearer to ecclesiastical Christianity. Chris tianity the ideal religion, and religion ideal humanity. This the ruling idea in these theological writings of the last period of Herder's life. But in order to effect this equalisation of religion and humanity, he does not, like Kant, work from above downwards he does not construct a religion " within the limits of reason," but he works upwards by the method of historical study. had always been one of his fundamental convictions that Christianity a history, an actual fact, an object of experience, and that can therefore be only rightly understood by the aid of its historical documents-- through the
Bible. Hence the study of the Bible the Alpha and Omega of all theological studies. This view he had expressed with eager enthusiastic warmth in his early Notes on the New
Testament and his Letters on the Study of Theology. But now, while still remaining quite true to and as before giving an aesthetic interpretation of the Gospels which halts mid-way between rationalism and supernaturalism, an unmistakable change has taken place in his method of exegesis. His in terest the Gospel narratives had formerly been that of the
? but he now at the same time the critical historian, investigating the origin of the Gospels and their re
lation to each other. Herder thus followed Semler, Lessing, and Eichhorn in that scientific examination of the documents of early Christianity which was fraught with such important
consequences to the theology of our century and though he was still prejudiced in favour of the traditional authors of the Gospels, he nevertheless rich subtle observations, espe cially with regard to the chronological order of the Gospels. His keen eye discovered in the Gospel of Mark the oldest written form of the apostolic tradition next order he placed the Gospel of the Hebrews. Both of these were used as authorities by the Hellenist Luke writing his history and only subsequently appeared the Greek Gospel of Matthew, consisting of a free translation and amplification of the Gospel of the Hebrews. Last of all came the Gospel of John, as " the echo of the older Gospels higher key. " In the
religious apologist
? ? in a
in in
it
;
;
is it,
is, is
in ;
is
;
It ;
is
in
is
is
it is
? Ch. II. ] HERDER.
Apostle John wished not only to expound, but also to purify the Palestine gospel-tradition ; hence he narrated only a few miracles, and even these only as symbols of the permanent miracle of the person of Christ. Whilst the earlier Gospels had still represented Christ as the Son of God in the narrower sense, John sought to teach the higher conception of the Son of God and Saviour of the world, and for this purpose made his whole Gospel systematically the Gospel of the Spirit.
This is really a just description of the Fourth Gospel. But a Gospel written with a dogmatic purpose, and standing in so close a connection with the speculative movements of its time, as Herder shows to be the case with this, cannot be an his
torical authority for the life of Jesus. Obvious as this infer ence was drawn neither by Herder nor by Schleiermacher after him and may be added that the latter was inferior to his predecessor in insight into the peculiar character of this Gospel. The inability to draw this conclusion was due in both cases to sympathy, as idealistic theologians, with the spiritual Gospel which converts history into ideas and ideas into history, and thus, in sense, furnishes the modern theologian with a pattern for his semi-allegorical, semi-apologetical interpretation of the Gospel narratives as " symbolic facts. " For this reason
Herder, like Schleiermacher, entertained a pronounced pre ference for John's Gospel, because, --assuming its apostolic authorship, --he thought he found the justification of his own procedure in interpreting the gospel history harmony with his free idealising feeling, and in attributing everything repugnant to to the national and temporal limitations of the narrators. Herder does not, true, carry this principle out so consistently as Schleiermacher. In relation to the gospel miracles, he still unable to get beyond strange
vacillation between their symbolical interpretation and ad herence to their real historical character. He quite agrees with Lessing, that the truth of a doctrine cannot be dependent upon miracle. " Was necessary for fire to fall from heaven
2000 years ago in order that we may now see the bright sun Must the laws of nature have been then suspended, we are now to be convinced of the internal necessity, truth, and beauty of the moral and spiritual kingdom " Nevertheless, Herder still regards at all events the three miracles " of the Baptism, Transfiguration, and Resurrection of Christ as the three bright spots in the celestial authentication of the con-
? ? ? ?
if
?
a
in
it
it is
a
it
it is
in it
;
is, it
? 38
BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bio I.
secrated one;" for, he characteristically continues, "they have a secret advocate in the human heart. " Since the stories of the miraculous appealed to his feelings and aesthetic taste, he suppressed the doubts of his intellect, which had embraced, as we have seen above, a philosophical view of the world in which there was no place for miracles. It is not allowable, therefore, to explain this surprising hesitancy and want of clearness in Herder's treatment of the Biblical miracles simply on the principle of accommodation, or from his fear of the de structive tendencies of the time ; but the reason of it must be found in his whole mode of thought. It was always such an essential peculiarity of his nature to look at ideas and actual facts in closest conjunction, that he was unable in the case of Biblical traditions to critically separate ideal contents from historical realities ; in fact, he could scarcely understand that this was required by science. Instead of explaining the re pugnant points in the miraculous narratives and dogmatic con ceptions of the Biblical writers by reference to their psycho logical origin in the religious and poetical motives of the
narrators or the community, Herder had recourse to a time- honoured substitute for scientific criticism ; involuntarily and unconsciously he recast the language of the Bible in the mould of his own, he allegorised. The result of this procedure was essentially the same as the " moral interpretation of the Bible " demanded by Kant. Herder's fierce opposition to this latter only proves that he did not see the divergence of his rational istic interpretation from the original sense of the text. The Christs of the Synoptists, and of John, and of Paul, freed respectively from the outer coverings of Nationality, of Alex andrian speculation, and of Pharisaic dogmatism, were all made together to teach his Christianity of humanity, because he was under the honest impression that he was thereby only translating the meaning of the Biblical writers into the language of our own time. This self-deception, though fatal to the scientific value of his Biblical labours, was really use ful, and perhaps necessary to the practical success of his attempted reconciliation of ecclesiastical traditions and modern culture. Moreover, with all this, Herder was the immediate precursor and kindred spirit of Schleiermacher, whose in
fluence in the reconstruction of dogma was also closely con nected with the weakness of his historical criticism.
Like Lessing, Herder drew a distinction between Christ's
? ? ? ? Ch. II. ] HERDER. 39
religion and the religion of which Christ is the object. Christ's religion is the rule of salvation, supplied by the teaching and life of Jesus in the perfect and universally valid form, viz. ,
" The knowledge of God as the Father, of man as his instru ment, of man's weakness as an object of grace and help, of the divine in man, of the strength, purity, and nobility, which must be roused and nourished. Love, therefore, --pre- venient, pure, uniting, active, -- is the only way of deliverance from all evils that oppress man, the only motive power capable
of establishing a kingdom of God among men. " Precisely this, according to Herder, was the ruling idea of Jesus, and the object of his life. " In his heart was written : God is my Father and the Father of all men ; all men are brothers. To this religion of humanity he dedicated his life, which he was ready wholly to offer up, if his religion might be that of all men. For it concerns the fundamental nature of our race -- both its
and final destiny. Through it the weaknesses of mankind serve to call forth a nobler power ; every oppressive evil, human wickedness even, becomes an incentive to its own defeat. The truest humanity breathes in the few speeches of Jesus which have come down to us ; it is nothing else than humanity which he manifested in his life, and sealed by his death, just as the chosen name by which he called himself was the Son of Man. As a spiritual saviour of his race, he sought to train up men of God, who would labour from pure motives for the good of others and reign by their patience as kings in the realm of truth and kindness. An object such as this must evidently be the sole purpose of providence with our race ; and all the wise and good on earth must and will co-operate to this end, in proportion to the pureness of their thought and endeavour ; for what other ideal could man have of perfection and happiness on earth, save this universally operative humanity ? "
According to Herder, therefore, the distinctive character of Jesus was, that he bore in his heart the ideal of man as the child of God, exemplified it in his life and death for our imitation, and at the same time trained up men of God and established a society of them, a kingdom of God among men, in which will be realised the purpose of providence with our race. The " Divine Sonship " of Christ is only another expression for this ideal " man of God," who knows God as his Father and all men as his brethren, and in self-sacrificing devotion to the
? original
? ? ? 40 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
good of men passively and actively fulfils the will of God. Was not this fundamentally Kant's meaning when he de scribed Jesus as the pre-eminent representative example of the idea of a race of men well-pleasing to God ? Herder, indeed, strongly denounced Kant's theory as " a romance, a mass of misleading fictions, an ignoble perversion of Scripture," etc. ; but this denunciation was doubtless primarily due to the mistaken notion that Kant had wished to substitute a personified idea for the historic Jesus. Herder's mistake was rendered possible by Kant's method of expounding his posi tion, as his constructive rationalism led him to start from the idea, and to connect the historical person of Jesus with it only as an example ; while Herder started from the historical person as the source of the Christian religion of humanity, and portrayed the idea as the essence of the manifestation of this person. The latter method is undoubtedly more advan tageous from the theological point of view ; but we must not deny the philosopher the right of starting from the idea, with its basis in the reason, and of accentuating the distinction be
tween it and the historical person in whom it is presented
for imitation, though it does not derive from him its ultimate
origin.
Again, just as Kant had distinguished the pure moral faith
of the reason from the "statutory" faith of the Church, so Her der distinguishes the religion of Christ, identical with the pure religion of humanity, from the religion of which Christ was the object, or the " doctrines" about the two natures in Christ, the legal conflict between Christ and Belial, the satisfaction made by Christ's death, etc. Of these ecclesiastical dogmas,
Herder speaks much more contemptuously than Kant, calling them childish questions, old second-hand phrases, masquerade and hypocrisy ; for Kant had found a meaning even in these doctrines, by interpreting them as symbols of the inner pro cesses of moral feeling. Herder's harsh judgment is no doubt to be partially explained by his practical experience as teacher, which showed him how many continue to cling to these husks of dogma, and so never reach the true kernel itself. But it
was more especially the consequence of the optimism inherited by Herder from Leibnitz, Shaftesbury, and Rousseau, and shared by Goethe ; he was convinced of the essential good ness of human nature, and could only look upon evil as a shadow, a weakness, which would of itself disappear with the
? ? ? ? Ch. II. ] . HERDER. 41
development of man's powers. Like Goethe, Herder was incapable of appreciating the profound difference between idea
and actuality, duty and inclination, or the struggle of the good and the bad principle, which was so important in Kant's ethics and religious philosophy. Hence both of them found Kant's doctrine of a " radical evil," which formed the basis of his moral interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement and justification, an incomprehensible stumbling-block. As the natural consequence of this unqualified antagonism to the dogmas of sin and salvation Herder found himself unable to explain them ; he regarded them as purely " arbitrary doc trines, having nothing to do with religion, which is an affair of the heart," and even as " the tomb of religion. " Herder did not sufficiently consider that they could never have arisen and influenced the Church, if they had not been the product and the expression, --however imperfect, --of the heart's religious energies, experiences, and needs ; and this to a large extent explains the insignificance of Herder's direct influence on theology. Schleiermacher, on the other hand, whose philo sophic views generally approached much more nearly Herder's than Kant's, was nevertheless able to adopt and assimilate the doctrines of sin and salvation, and was for this very reason in a position to carry out that reconstruction of Protestant theology at which Herder aimed.
Herder approaches Schleiermacher most nearly in his doc trine of the Holy Spirit, expounded in his discussion of the third article of the Apostles' Creed, in the essays, Vom Geist des Christenthums, and Von Religion und Lehrmeinungen.
By tracing historically the development of the idea of Holy Spirit, he shows that its meaning in Christianity is nothing else than the spirit of Christ, as animating and guiding the Chris tian Church and uniting all nations in the Kingdom of God. He places it in contrast, not less to the dogmatic conception of a personal principle inspiring man from without, than to the philosophical idea of an autonomous legislation of the reason.
The idea of magical inspiration he had already strongly pro tested against in his Briefc fiber das Studium der 1 heologie.
Inspiration must not be conceived as either the depression or as the wild exaltation of our mental powers. "Can He who made the eye be compelled to blind us in order that we may see ? Can the Spirit, who animates creation and all our powers, destroy them in order that in their stead he may pro
? ? ? ? 42
BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
duce light within us? " On the contrary, inspiration and en lightenment are the awakening of the noblest powers of the mind ; perfectly undisturbed contemplation, calmest self-pos session, the most quietly effective truth, clear thoughts, en lightened views, happy resolves, pure actions -- these are the noblest gifts of the Spirit. The purest stage of revelation is to see things as they are, face to face, without figures and dreams. Least of all may we look for dark fanaticism in the revelation of him whom John calls light-giving Reason mani fested on earth. His revelation, i. e. , the truth which he clearly saw and uttered, was deliverance from everything unnatural, the restoration of mankind to the full use of its powers. Wherefore what we have to do is to turn from everything unnatural, from all magic, all bibliolatry, to nature and truth, which is also the spirit of the Bible.
But, on the other hand, it is precisely this nature and truth which Herder cannot find in the abstractions of philosophy. " That egoism which of itself issues commands and derives all its power to obey the law from the might of its own proud formal dictatorship, can hardly be the Spirit of God ; for in a formal legislation without contents, there is neither might nor blessedness, neither life nor spirit. But it is life that impels thee to what thou oughtest to do and to be. As in the realm of nature a universal law assigns to each impulse its limits, the observance of which limits leads to enjoyment, their dis regard to discomfort ; so the same law must be operative in the realm of man's spiritual impulses. Here too watches a bene ficent spirit within us, awakening our slumbering powers, aveng ing their misuse, and saving us from excess. You may call it reason, conscience, etc. ; the wise have ever recognised it as a voice of God. " It was this pure impulse in man which was aroused by Christianity, not by the inculcation of virtue, for thereby no impulse is roused, but by awakening love. Every man has within him a good spirit, a divine voice, a canon and criterion of truth ; not as a universal legislation for all rational beings, but, as a definite and perfectly individual ideal of what he himself is and ought to be. To become conscious of this
ideal, to acknowledge to obey its active impulse and con trolling limitations, this living virtue in each finds him self united to others fellowship of mutual activity, for no impulse acts in isolation, and the noblest characteristic in man, the impulse of all impulses, love, the basis of all social life.
? ? ? is
in
a is it,
;
it
?
of Hume's intellectual scepticism, and in France Rousseau's Gospel of Nature, that of Voltaire's Enlightenment ; in the
same way in Germany Kant's analyzing thought was supple mented by the synthetic intuitions of Herder, and subjective idealism, with its limitation to the analysis of the conscious ness of the subject, by historical realism, with its eager atten tion to the laws of human nature in the whole course of history. Each of these modes of thought is evidently the complement of the other ; and the right combination and fusion of the two was the problem bequeathed by the 18th century, then clos ing, to the philosophy of the 19th, a problem the solution of which is still far from completed. In order to understand what is really new in the thought of the 19th century, we must look at it as the synthesis of these two contrary tendencies, which occupied the second half of the 18th century.
A concise account of Herder's position it is not easy to give, for two reasons ; firstly, because his style has more of the poetical, emotional, and rhetorical element than the clearness and precision of science ; and secondly, because his views, especially on religious questions, underwent repeated modifi
development
? ? ? 2 2 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
cations in the course of his literary labours. One unvarying
drift does indeed pervade all these variations -- a protest
against the arrogance and poverty of the popular Aufkldrung, which would let nothing pass but what was amenable to the calculations of the common understanding, and, without any sense for appreciating the productive forces and manifold phenomena of human history, sought to force all truth into the meagre moulds of its abstract intellectual conception. As a true disciple of Hamann and Rousseau, Herder abhorred this arid, levelling rationalism ; he sought to understand the unity of all the powers of man's soul and the special nature of his habits of feeling ; hence what interested him in poetry and
was not the abstract rule, the artificial form of the schools, the doctrines of the Church, but the living feelings as they found natural expression in the songs of the people and the poetical picture-language of the oldest religious records. As in poetry he preferred the primitive strength and beauty of the songs of the people to the classicality of the schools, so
in religion he set the strength and beauty of the Bible above the dogmatism of the Churches ; for this very reason it was to him insufferable to see the Rationalists trying to thrust their rigid intellectuality into the Bible, and by their artificial inter pretations dilute and dissipate both its religious strength and its poetic charm. Herder throughout remained perfectly true to himself in rejecting the Rationalists' arbitrary and unnatural treatment of the language of the Bible, and in demanding of the reader a loving sympathy with the special characteristics of the Biblical writers, so as to catch their enthusiasm and
reproduce their poetical picture-language. He thereby ren dered lasting service, striking the most decisive blow at the subjective arbitrariness of the Rationalistic methods of inter pretation, and preparing the way for the really scientific, objective, and historical methods of Biblical study followed in our own time.
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that within the boundary lines of this position Herder wavered. During the earlier and later periods of his life (in Riga and Weimar respectively), his appreciation of the aesthetic beauty and ideal truth of the Bible never kept him from criticising it in the same fashion as the poetical literature and religious legends of other nations, or from explaining it in accordance with the psychological and historical conditions of its origin ; so that
religion
? ? ? ? Ch. II. ] HERDER.
23
he was compelled not to regard these legends, the rise of which could be historically traced, as direct revelations of God with objective truth. In one of his earliest works, the fragment, Von Entstehung und Fortpflanzung der ersten Re- ligionsbegriffe, he adopts Hume's view, that fear was the mother of religion, and that the earliest religion consisted in the superstitious worship of harmful and beneficent deities, to appease the wrath and win the favour of whom, men felt bound to offer prayers, sacrifices, and ceremonies. When, however,
needs,
mankind had provided for their most pressing they began to speculate about the origin of things,
and to embody their ideas in cosmogonies and genealogies ; thus the first rude religion, the name of which is in almost all languages derived from fear, was followed by a kind of historico-physical philosophy. The question of the origin of the world received a mystical answer ; these primitive legends took a completely national and local form ; they were clothed in the rich figurative language of the senses ; they became mythological poems. It is the work of the science of religion to study the spirit of these mythological poems as charac teristic products of the individual nations. As a contribution to this object, Herder wrote his Archdologie der Hebrder, which combined in a common view his researches in the earliest history of poetry and in the origins of religion. He nowhere speaks in this work of a supernatural revelation ; in
the first chapters of Genesis he sees a national religious poem,
which must be understood, like Homer, in accordance with
its original spirit and meaning without any dogmatic bias. We must transplant ourselves into Eastern habits of thought in order to understand this poetical philosophy of nature ; but light is also thrown upon it by similar imagery in modern poetry, in Ossian, Shakespeare, and Klopstock. To treat this Oriental national poetry as dogma, is contrary to all canons of taste and reason ; it involves a violation of the natural difference in the various mental faculties, mutilates
the intuitive emotions no less than the reason, and confounds
together all classes of philosophy and knowledge. God gives us no revelation concerning natural science or metaphysics, except by means of the power bestowed by Him upon the human mind, of penetrating by its own force ever deeper into the nature of His creation.
While these views are identical with those of Herder's
? ? ? ? 24 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
most mature works, written while in Weimar, they differ appreciably from the position he held during the middle
period of his life (while in Biickeburg). From being the
aesthetic archaeologist of literature he then became more and
more the apologist of the supernatural. In his essay on Die dlteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts, which be longs to this period, he still regards the account of the creation in Genesis as a poem, but now it is a divine, and not a human poem ; it is no longer an Oriental myth, but a divine revelation. He does indeed still lay great stress upon the sense-intuition of nature, that the sight of the dawning day, which was in the prophet's mind but in order that this everyday image might be interpreted as the type of the creation of the world, the prophet must also have heard
the voice of a teacher, which could only have been that of God himself. Thus positive teaching of God found at the beginning of all human history, and remains the super natural spring from which all human wisdom and poetry take their rise. Even language, the natural origin of which
Herder had himself expounded with much penetration, now attributed to direct divine revelation, to definite instruction given by God. This original revelation his view, the fundamental fact, the antithesis, as he vehemently proclaims, of all the artificial ideas and hypothesis of philosophy he himself forgetting, however, that this so-called fundamental fact itself only an hypothesis, and mainly distinguished from others by boldly leaving the paths of sober empirical
investigation to take refuge in the region of miracle, where imagination usurps the place of thought. With this essay on Genesis we may compare a work which appeared soon after Erlduterungen zum neuen Testament aus einer neueroffneten morgenldndischen Quelle, in which the New Testament interpreted by the Zendavesta, Christ and his Apostles, as
Herder assumes, being versed in the wisdom of the Chaldees.
This work, like the last, contains a defence of the
natural element in the Bible on the lines of Lavater main tains that all the miracles, from the miraculous birth of Jesus to his ascension, were facts, though in such a way that everywhere prominence given to the spiritual truth of the narrative. Herder did not reflect that this truth would not be affected the narrative were not actual history, but poetry and legend the spiritual truth and beauty of a story was to
? super
? ? ;
if
is
; it
is is
is :
is
is
is, ;
;
is, in
? Ch. II. ] HERDER.
25
him a direct guarantee of its historical reality, or rather
appeared indistinguishable from it to his poetical imagination, which was then at all events without the checks of the critical
"
Here, as in the old Testament, he has failed to grasp the critical conception intermediate between poetry and faith--
the conception of the myth. "
That in giving the rein absolutely to the anti-rationalistic
or mystical side of his nature, Herder could go so far as to renounce his earlier scientific and critical views, can be easily
explained by his peculiar temperament and the influence of friends, both male and female, while he was at Blickeburg ; and it would be quite wrong to think, with Hettner, of any conscious compromise from impure motives. We may, in fact, say with Haym, that only by this " mystical and enthu siastic method of interpretation," was it possible to regain the lost appreciation of religion as such, of the profoundly inward force of the chief truths of Christianity, and of the original meaning of the ancient words of our faith. Nevertheless, we shall also do well to call to mind, with Julian Schmidt, the old truth that all trifling with words must be avenged. This
of Herder's, in which aesthetic taste combined with the noblest feeling and ideal pathos to drown the calm voice of critical reason, was indubitably the beginning of that irra tional movement which was carried farther by Romanticism and blossomed forth luxuriantly in the reactionary theology of our century. But it is all the more interesting to observe how Herder again rescued himself from this sandbank upon which so many suffered shipwreck, and regained the right track marked out for him by his true genius. It was under the leadership of Lessing and Spinoza that he accomplished this, though the altered surroundings of his position in Weimar materially assisted the change. Herder had been engaged in a friendly correspondence with Lessing for nearly two years; and when, in February 1 78 1 , the news of Les
intellect. As his biographer, Haym, aptly remarks : rightly insists that we ought to read the New Testament in the spirit of the New Testament itself, with a feeling and sense of the greatness of its contents. But the greatness, the deep religious and moral power of these writings, is too much for him ; it carries him away and overpowers him. He loses in consequence all the freedom in regard to these writings which he had allowed himself in regard to poetical works.
mysticism
He
? ? ? ? 2 6 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
sing's death came upon him as a painful shock, he paid a tribute to the memory of his friend, in which in enthusiastic terms he eulogised him as " a noble truth-seeker, truth-finder, and truth-champion," to whose nature no vice was so foreign as cringing hypocrisy, false courtesy, or, above all, that weari some, sleepy rest in half the truth, which from the first eats like rust and canker into men's minds, in all branches of knowledge and inquiry. This was Herder's formal renuncia tion of theological fanaticism of every kind, not excepting that which had disfigured his own writings of the Biickeburg
To the same date belongs the renewal of friendly relations between Herder and Goethe, with its productive mutual stimulus, as well as their study in common of the
philosophy of Spinoza.
Jacobi had hoped to gain Herder as an ally in the cam
paign against Spinozism, having previously made a like attempt with Lessing ; but the disappointment of his hopes was even more decisive in Herder's case than it had been in
period.
? Herder confessed to him, that since he had busied himself with philosophy he had become more and more con vinced of the truth of Lessing's saying, that as a matter of fact no other philosophy than Spinoza's was quite consistent with itself. Not that he could in everything agree with Spinoza, whose ideas were always undeveloped whenever his relations with Descartes were unduly close. But Spinoza did not deserve the traditional prejudice against him, which rested upon a misunderstanding of his philosophy. The first mis take of the opponents of Spinoza, is to suppose he looks on God as a nonentity, an abstract conception. On the contrary, Spinoza's God is the most real and most active unity, who alone says to himself, " I am that I am, and shall be in all
Lessing's.
the changes of my manifestations what I shall be. " " What you people mean by ' existence outside the world ' I do not understand. If God does not exist in the world, everywhere without measure, wholly and individually, he exists nowhere. Outside the world there is no space ; space is an abstraction from experience, and arises when a world arises for us.
Limited personality is not less inapplicable to an infinite Being, personality being to our minds inseparable from limi tation. In God this illusion disappears ; he is the highest, most truly living, and most active One. God is not the world,
and the world is not God ; of this there can be no doubt.
? ? ? Ch II] HERDER. 27
But nothing can be gained, it seems to me, from your extra and supra. When we speak of God, we must forget all our idola of space and time, else our best efforts will be fruitless. " The sense in which he himself wished Spinoza's philosophy to be understood, and in which he could make it his own, was expounded by Herder in a little treatise entitled, Gott: Einige
Gesprliche iiber Spinoza's System (1787). He admits, in the first place, that the ideas inherited from Cartesius, of Sub stance, Attributes, and Modes are unsatisfactory, and that the mathematical method of proof is a mistake. These ideas must have life put into them by Leibnitz's idea of Force. God must therefore be conceived as "the underived, original, and universal force, underlying and including all forces, most active
Being"; attributes, as organic forces in which the Deity manifests himself ; and all things, as the modifications or active expressions, of the divine force. God, as the eternal original Force, possesses not only infinite force of thought, but also of operation ; in him, therefore, existence, operation, and thought, or power, wisdom, and goodness, are indivisibly one. He is therefore as far removed from blind necessity as from any inoperative "deliberation and consultation, caprice, and velleity. " Anthropomorphic conceptions of this kind were, with Leibnitz, merely the popular garb of his Theodicy, but his successors made them of prime importance, and the basis of all those physico- theological systems which resulted there from, which sought to reduce everything to the arbitrary will of God, and to break the golden chain of nature, in order to separate a few phenomena from the rest, and see, at this or that point, an electric flash of arbitrary divine purpose. All these delusions, in relation to which the holy name of God ought not to be misused, are escaped by the modest student of nature, who, though he does not divulge to us particular measures decided on in the council-chambers of the divine Will, observes instead the composition of actual things and the laws implanted in their nature. While apparently forgetting the purposes of God, he seeks and finds God in his totality, in every object and point of creation, i. e. , in everything an essential truth, harmony, and beauty, without which it would not and could not exist. Whoever could show men the laws of nature, how what we see of the so-called animate and in animate creation works, lives, and acts according to an inner
the result of the interaction of forces in definite
? necessity,
? ? -
? 28 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
would promote the noblest admiration, love, and reverence for God, far more than the man who, as knowing the counsels of God, preached that we have feet in order to walk, and eyes in order to see, etc. Every true law of nature discovered would thus be also a discovered rule of the eternal divine Intelligence, whose thought alone can be truth, and whose activity reality.
We thus see that Herder's conception of God is a combina tion of Spinoza's monism with Leibnitz's theism ; Spinoza's substance becomes operative thinking force ; his modes of substance become living forces, resembling Leibnitz's monads, but operative as well as perceptive, whose harmony is there fore no longer, as in Leibnitz, pre-established, but is inherent in the actual interaction of the forces. With Spinoza, Herder rejects the external teleology of particular arbitrary purposes, but with Leibnitz he recognises in necessity according to law the internal adaptation of things to ends, in the laws of nature the thoughts of God, in the golden chain of nature the divine wisdom and goodness. Thus, Spinoza's natural istic mechanical system is transformed into a theistic opti mism, on the lines of Leibnitz and Shaftesbury. These two thinkers are also followed in Herder's ethical demand -- " the attainment of the law of noble and beautiful necessity," and
the performance of duty as if it were not duty but nature, happiness thus being included in virtue. Finally, Herder's doctrine of God comprehends also his doctrine of immor tality and his philosophy of history, becoming a completely optimistic system. If all life is force, death must everywhere be only apparent death, merely the destruction of some ap pearance ; in ceaseless motion and eternal palingenesia, force
and the interaction of forces carry on their work ; but the persistence of force is inconceivable without progress. In the kingdom of God there is no standing still, still less any going back ; it is a necessary law, that chaos should become order, and latent capacities forces in operation.
In these thoughts, which Herder gathered from the three philosophers, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Shaftesbury, as the quintessence of their systems, he found a conception of the world in which he could rest ; and he was strengthened in his belief by the complete and unconditional assent of Goethe.
From the standpoint of these views, shared and continually discussed by the two friends, Herder's principal work, the
organs,
? ? ? ? Ch. II. ] HERDER. 29
Ideen zur Philosophic der Geschichte ( 1 784 - 1 79 1 ), was written. The leading thought of the work that man the connecting link of two worlds. On the one hand, he the child of earth, the highest of its organic products on the other, a citizen of the spiritual world of freedom. The book begins, therefore, with a description of the earth, of its posi tion in the universe, and of the stages of the operations of its organic forces -- from the plant to the animal, from the lower to the higher animals, and finally to man. With all the great differences in these single organisms, nature seems "to have formed them all after one chief type of organization and
man seems to be, as were, the central figure of the animal world, i. e. , the most fully developed form which the essen tial characteristics of all the species around him are exquisitely combined. " His upright carriage man's most distinctive characteristic, upon which depend the dexterity of his hands, his power of language, and also his rationality for his reason
not inborn like our instincts, but the acquired due propor tion between his powers, senses, and instincts. But man
the highest member of progressive series of organic forces, which have constructed the body as their organ, his
development cannot end with his appearance upon the earth for the humanity to which we are destined incompletely realised upon earth, the end for which we exist points to higher forms of development beyond our earthly life under other cosmical conditions, for which we are to prepare our selves by cultivating the spiritual part of our nature, by striving after truth, goodness, and godlike beauty. From
this glance at man's future development, Herder returns to the description of his historical development on earth and the stress which he lays on its dependence upon natural conditions
so marked as to seem, taken by itself, almost pure natural
ism, to which, on the other hand, completely supernaturalistic declarations form a strange contrast. Man stands in a double relation of dependence, on the one hand to nature, and on the other to the culture and traditions of society. But whence came the first germs of the latter Herder cannot find in the natural development of man's rationality a satisfactory answer to this question, but has recourse to an education by higher superhuman influences the Elohim were the instruc tors of man, and from them he received language, the germ of all culture. This transition from natural to super-
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;
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;
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30 BASTS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
natural explanation shows the insufficiency of that one-sided empiricism, which will not, like Kant, regard reason as origi nating action, but only as a passive power of receptivity ; hence it can only explain the first possession and employment
of reason by deriving it from foreign mystical sources.
Herder proceeds to depict the life of the nations in his
tory, and shows how each nation strove to fulfil the common
destiny of man by attaining to humanity and happiness in the special way determined by its natural character and geo graphical position. As to the details we need only draw atten tion to the strangely unfavourable judgment passed upon the Jewish nation, whose religious superiority to other nations is outweighed by its want of political culture and of any real sense of honour and freedom. In the description of the Greeks, on the contrary, prominence is given to the bright points -- their services to art and science and all human culture. So, too, in describing Christianity, Herder does indeed pay a tribute of the warmest admiration to the person of Jesus as the prophet of the truest humanity ; but on the other hand
he lays such great emphasis upon the human errors, abuses,
and corruptions incorporated with the Christian religion ever since its first diffusion, he so decisively condemns the ecclesias-
tical system of dogmas and state Christianity, and in particular takes so adverse a view of the middle ages, as a time of the darkest barbarism and inhumanity, that he almost seems to have adopted in this connection the standpoint of the Auf-
kldrung, which he had before so passionately denounced. The extent to which he still differed from it we shall see later on, when we come to the final account of his religious views ; but it is in any case undeniable that the point of view of the Ideen is not the same as that of his earlier writings. This may be corroborated by a glance at the general principles of his philosophy of history.
Herder wishes us to look at the history of mankind as "simply the natural history of man's powers, actions, and impulses in relation to their time and place. " Supernatural
forces and arbitrary fictitious purposes may no more be intro duced into the study of history than into that of natural science ; in both alike all phenomena must be explained by their causes, not by any hypothetical ends. " The God whom
I seek in history, must be the same as the God in nature ; for man is only a small part of the universe, and his history, like
? /
t
? ? ? 'Ch. II. ] HERDER. 3 1
that of the grub, is closely interwoven with the cell in which he lives. In this history therefore all the laws of nature in volved in the nature of the case, must have validity ; and so far from setting them aside, God, having established them, reveals himself in them in their mighty power with a beauty unchanging, wise, and beneficent. " That things take place from the necessity of natural law involves instead of excluding an inner teleology. The most general law of nature, which holds good also in history, is that out of confusion order should arise, the conservative forces outweighing the destructive ones. All life aims at producing a maximum and a proportion of the forces that mutually limit each other, this being the condition of the perfection and happiness of individuals, nations, and the race. All disturbances of this effort to find a condition of stable equilibrium are always in the end counter acted ; for in the struggle amongst the individual forces and impulses, reason and fairness only last and are established by the force of their own gravity. Hence we may hope " that wherever men dwell, there will one day dwell rational and happy men, happy not only by their own reason, but also by the common rationality of all their brethren. " According to these views, the end of man's development, to be gained by
conflict and struggle, is a maximum and a rational harmony of all his forces, together with the resulting happiness ; but we also find other statements which seem to make the object of nature to consist in that happiness which is found every where in every living thing, viz. , simple consciousness of its own existence. "If happiness is to be found upon earth, it is in every sentient being. Nature has exhausted all possible human forms upon the earth, in order that she might have for each of them, in its time and place, some pleasure with which to allure mortals through life. It is wrong to hold up one ideal to mankind, as if all earlier generations before they reached the ideal were to be branded with the stigma of im perfection. Nature everywhere contrives that with the need there shall arise the possibility of its satisfaction. Those nations to whom we think nature was but a cruel step-mother, were perhaps the best-loved children ; cheerfulness, often combined with thoughtlessness, a lively feeling of their own well-being, constituted their happiness, destiny, and enjoyment of life. Neither our head nor our heart was made for an
infinite variety of thoughts and feelings. How much too
? ? ? ? .
small would be the plan of creation, if every individual had been created for what we call culture. "
It cannot be denied that these sentences represent a na turalism like that of Rousseau, the logical result of which would be to deprive culture of all value in comparison with nature, and history of any divine purpose. But they do not
Herder's whole position ; they only contain a re action, carried to extremes, against the contrary one-sided view of Kant. Kant had met Herder's Ideen with his own Ideen zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbiirgerlicher Absicht (1784), according to which, the end of history consists in an ideal condition of single States and cosmopolitan so ciety, to be attained by means of the conflicts and sacrifices of the generations ; he had himself felt it to be a difficulty in this view that the older generations seem to perform their weary labour only for the sake of those coming after them, the latest only enjoying the good fortune of dwelling in the building at which so long a line of their ancestors had worked with no object in view. What accentuates the harshness of this view
that, according to Kant himself, the ideal goal never to be attained, reason being able to control but never to destroy the tendency to evil in the race. We must acknowledge the
of Herder's dissatisfaction with this view of Kant's the doom of men to the lot of Tantalus in this form, to be ever striving after the unattainable with eternally fruitless toil, would, Herder contends, be unworthy both of man, --who, as Kant also insists, ought never to be merely a means but always at the same time an end himself, --and of the Creator, who could not deceive us by holding out a mere dream of purpose. On the other hand, Kant was indisputably right in
asserting (as against Rousseau and Herder) that the final end of mankind can only be an ideal of moral culture, not the
32
BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
represent
? justice
physical happiness
of a state of nature, which would not
essentially differ from the condition of animals. Kant was
right in conceiving the end of humanity as consisting in an
ideal of society demanded by reason and to be realised by means of freedom but his view of this ideal was too much an abstraction, the mere form of social life, and the mere
Thou shalt to which no reality ever corresponds.
Herder rightly perceived that the ends of humanity cannot be external to but must be realised in its existence as a whole, so that no part can ever be merely a means to an end outside but
? ? it ;
it,
;
in
;
is,
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? Ch. II. ] HERDER.
33
he thus incurred the danger of taking too low a view of the end and allowing the ideal of reason to sink to a life according to nature. The solution of this antinomy can only be found in the perception of the truth, that reason attains its absolute ends in an infinite series of relative ideals, which are each realised in the proper place and produce corresponding rela tive forms of happiness, while their imperfections act as incentives to the attainment of ever loftier ideals. By this conception of a development of reason itself in the course of human history, Hegel effected the synthesis of these con flicting views, a synthesis which Herder doubtless himself had vaguely caught sight of. We see from this instructive example how much critical idealism and historical realism (or the theory of evolution) mutually need each other to supply their defects.
The antagonism between Herder and Kant, which first
? appears in the department of the philosophy of history, Herder carried into all the chief points of the Kantian philo sophy in his later writings (" Metakritik" ; " Kalligone" ;
" Von Religion, Lehrmeinungen und Gebrduclien"). It is worth while to look at this a little more closely, as character istically illustrating the two sides of modern thought. Herder wishes to substitute for Kant's critique of the reason a physiology of the cognitive faculties, which would explain the evolution of the higher from the lower faculties. He rejects the distinction between a purely receptive sensibility and a purely spontaneous understanding, as also that between the simple matter of experience and the d priori forms of perception --space and time. These last, in Herder's view the result of actual experience, being an abstraction from its contents ; in themselves they are the objective forms in which forces work and manifest themselves to us. Our sense-per ceptions are not given us as a chaotic multiplicity which our spontaneity only afterwards and arbitrarily unifies without
reference to the object ; on the contrary, our senses, by virtue of their own organic structure, give us a multiplicity reduced to an ordered unity inherent in the object itself, recognised, not created by us. Hence the understanding is not so spe cifically different from the sense-organism as Kant main tained, but operates as judgment and classification in all sense-perceptions and in memory, not excepting even the lowest sensation ; it is the same primary force of nature, show-
G. T. D-
? ? ? 34
BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
ing itself here less clearly, there more distinctly and actively, now in separate, then in a connected series of operations. So too in the distinction between phenomena and noumena, Herder can only see a delusion of the imagination, since the true noumena must not be conceived as outside and behind the phenomena, but as within and of them, viz. , as the or ganising forces in organic processes ; to look for " the thing-in- itself " behind the phenomenal world, is to look for the wood behind the trees. Again, Herder is equally unable to follow Kant in assigning freedom and necessity to the intelligible and phenomenal worlds respectively ; on the contrary, the two are the inseparable elements of the very nature of all living force. In so far as forces act according to their own nature, they are free ; in so far as they are limited by other similarly free acting forces, there arise higher equations, which we call laws of nature ; these do not destroy freely
acting forces, but presuppose them. Thus human freedom also is only the highest force of our nature, which is free in so far as by virtue of its self-determination it obeys our nature's laws. On the other hand, it would be mere con fusion of thought to imagine a causality outside causality and a nature outside nature. Specially emphatic is Herder's con demnation of the way in which Kant, in the dialectic of pure reason, represents the idea of God as an illusion, which is afterwards required again by the practical reason ; as if be sides the reason which proscribed this fiction there were a second reason which could command its return from banish ment in the realm of the fabulous. This, says Herder, is
? juggling with reason, and can neither lead to real conviction nor to pure morality ; for a God thus postulated is no God at all, but only a last resource for a destitute moral system, while his existence is as problematical to the speculative reason as the man in the moon. But to reason not divided
against itself God is certainly no problematical distant Being, whose
existence must first be artificially inferred, or, failing this, be made a moral postulate. " On the contrary, he is the primal Being, recognised by the reason as given in all being, the primal force in all forces, the supreme reason of the world. If there is a reason which and knows that its own cause, there also a supreme reason which and knows that
the cause of the unity of all things. "
This the same line of thought as we found in Herder's
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is
is
is,
it is,
? Ch. II. ] HERDER.
35
essay on Spinoza. It does not essentially differ from Kant's suggestion, in his Critique of Judgment, as to the divine basis of the reign of law and purpose in the natural and moral worlds. A reconciliation of the two points of view would, therefore, seem not impossible, especially when we remember Herder's statement elsewhere, that natural science only leads to the conception of nature as the totality of order and form, not directly to that God whom the religious mind desires to find in creation, because he would satisfy its longing for life and well-being. This involves the admission that the re ligious ideal of God and the metaphysical idea of a first cause answer to the needs of two different sides of our mind, which must not be directly identified. This was the truth contained
in Kant's distinction between the ideal of the practical reason and the speculative idea of the unconditioned ; Kant's error, against which Herder with good reason protested, lay in representing this valid distinction as a deep and apparently impassable gulf. This is characteristic generally of the whole antagonism between the two men ; the whole truth is nowhere wholly on one side , each is strong just where the other is weak. Kant's critical and analytical method was met
? by Herder's bold, synthetical intuitions. In order to ensure to
the mind its active share in all cognition, Kant had ban ished its object to the dim, incognisable distance of das Dingansich. Herder replied to this subjective theory by maintaining that all cognition is only the recognition of what is necessarily presupposed as given. Kant had separated the various functions of the mind in cognition ; Herder
their unbroken connection as members in the evolution of one and the same force. But Herder's theory of cognition never ceased to vacillate in an ill-defined way between a naive realism and a rational idealism. He slurred over the antitheses, which Kant had laboured scientific ally to solve, by the help of an indefinite intermediate idea. Herder's attempted correction of Kant could be accomplished only by starting from his critical philosophy and using its resources. This was, and still the task of
post- Kantian philosophy.
Having thus reviewed Herder's philosophical position in its
maturest stage, we come next to consider the form assumed by his theory of religion in accordance with it. He expounded his theory in series of works, dealing partly with the Bible,
emphasised
? ? a
is,
? 36 basis of modern theology. [Bk. i.
partly with dogmatic theology, between the years 1793 and 1797. Their basal idea is much more nearly related to Kant's philosophy of religion than Herder, in the heat of his polemic,
was able to see. The real difference that Kant's rational ism was softened by Herder's rich humanism, and brought by the help of history nearer to ecclesiastical Christianity. Chris tianity the ideal religion, and religion ideal humanity. This the ruling idea in these theological writings of the last period of Herder's life. But in order to effect this equalisation of religion and humanity, he does not, like Kant, work from above downwards he does not construct a religion " within the limits of reason," but he works upwards by the method of historical study. had always been one of his fundamental convictions that Christianity a history, an actual fact, an object of experience, and that can therefore be only rightly understood by the aid of its historical documents-- through the
Bible. Hence the study of the Bible the Alpha and Omega of all theological studies. This view he had expressed with eager enthusiastic warmth in his early Notes on the New
Testament and his Letters on the Study of Theology. But now, while still remaining quite true to and as before giving an aesthetic interpretation of the Gospels which halts mid-way between rationalism and supernaturalism, an unmistakable change has taken place in his method of exegesis. His in terest the Gospel narratives had formerly been that of the
? but he now at the same time the critical historian, investigating the origin of the Gospels and their re
lation to each other. Herder thus followed Semler, Lessing, and Eichhorn in that scientific examination of the documents of early Christianity which was fraught with such important
consequences to the theology of our century and though he was still prejudiced in favour of the traditional authors of the Gospels, he nevertheless rich subtle observations, espe cially with regard to the chronological order of the Gospels. His keen eye discovered in the Gospel of Mark the oldest written form of the apostolic tradition next order he placed the Gospel of the Hebrews. Both of these were used as authorities by the Hellenist Luke writing his history and only subsequently appeared the Greek Gospel of Matthew, consisting of a free translation and amplification of the Gospel of the Hebrews. Last of all came the Gospel of John, as " the echo of the older Gospels higher key. " In the
religious apologist
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it
;
;
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;
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? Ch. II. ] HERDER.
Apostle John wished not only to expound, but also to purify the Palestine gospel-tradition ; hence he narrated only a few miracles, and even these only as symbols of the permanent miracle of the person of Christ. Whilst the earlier Gospels had still represented Christ as the Son of God in the narrower sense, John sought to teach the higher conception of the Son of God and Saviour of the world, and for this purpose made his whole Gospel systematically the Gospel of the Spirit.
This is really a just description of the Fourth Gospel. But a Gospel written with a dogmatic purpose, and standing in so close a connection with the speculative movements of its time, as Herder shows to be the case with this, cannot be an his
torical authority for the life of Jesus. Obvious as this infer ence was drawn neither by Herder nor by Schleiermacher after him and may be added that the latter was inferior to his predecessor in insight into the peculiar character of this Gospel. The inability to draw this conclusion was due in both cases to sympathy, as idealistic theologians, with the spiritual Gospel which converts history into ideas and ideas into history, and thus, in sense, furnishes the modern theologian with a pattern for his semi-allegorical, semi-apologetical interpretation of the Gospel narratives as " symbolic facts. " For this reason
Herder, like Schleiermacher, entertained a pronounced pre ference for John's Gospel, because, --assuming its apostolic authorship, --he thought he found the justification of his own procedure in interpreting the gospel history harmony with his free idealising feeling, and in attributing everything repugnant to to the national and temporal limitations of the narrators. Herder does not, true, carry this principle out so consistently as Schleiermacher. In relation to the gospel miracles, he still unable to get beyond strange
vacillation between their symbolical interpretation and ad herence to their real historical character. He quite agrees with Lessing, that the truth of a doctrine cannot be dependent upon miracle. " Was necessary for fire to fall from heaven
2000 years ago in order that we may now see the bright sun Must the laws of nature have been then suspended, we are now to be convinced of the internal necessity, truth, and beauty of the moral and spiritual kingdom " Nevertheless, Herder still regards at all events the three miracles " of the Baptism, Transfiguration, and Resurrection of Christ as the three bright spots in the celestial authentication of the con-
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if
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it is
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it
it is
in it
;
is, it
? 38
BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bio I.
secrated one;" for, he characteristically continues, "they have a secret advocate in the human heart. " Since the stories of the miraculous appealed to his feelings and aesthetic taste, he suppressed the doubts of his intellect, which had embraced, as we have seen above, a philosophical view of the world in which there was no place for miracles. It is not allowable, therefore, to explain this surprising hesitancy and want of clearness in Herder's treatment of the Biblical miracles simply on the principle of accommodation, or from his fear of the de structive tendencies of the time ; but the reason of it must be found in his whole mode of thought. It was always such an essential peculiarity of his nature to look at ideas and actual facts in closest conjunction, that he was unable in the case of Biblical traditions to critically separate ideal contents from historical realities ; in fact, he could scarcely understand that this was required by science. Instead of explaining the re pugnant points in the miraculous narratives and dogmatic con ceptions of the Biblical writers by reference to their psycho logical origin in the religious and poetical motives of the
narrators or the community, Herder had recourse to a time- honoured substitute for scientific criticism ; involuntarily and unconsciously he recast the language of the Bible in the mould of his own, he allegorised. The result of this procedure was essentially the same as the " moral interpretation of the Bible " demanded by Kant. Herder's fierce opposition to this latter only proves that he did not see the divergence of his rational istic interpretation from the original sense of the text. The Christs of the Synoptists, and of John, and of Paul, freed respectively from the outer coverings of Nationality, of Alex andrian speculation, and of Pharisaic dogmatism, were all made together to teach his Christianity of humanity, because he was under the honest impression that he was thereby only translating the meaning of the Biblical writers into the language of our own time. This self-deception, though fatal to the scientific value of his Biblical labours, was really use ful, and perhaps necessary to the practical success of his attempted reconciliation of ecclesiastical traditions and modern culture. Moreover, with all this, Herder was the immediate precursor and kindred spirit of Schleiermacher, whose in
fluence in the reconstruction of dogma was also closely con nected with the weakness of his historical criticism.
Like Lessing, Herder drew a distinction between Christ's
? ? ? ? Ch. II. ] HERDER. 39
religion and the religion of which Christ is the object. Christ's religion is the rule of salvation, supplied by the teaching and life of Jesus in the perfect and universally valid form, viz. ,
" The knowledge of God as the Father, of man as his instru ment, of man's weakness as an object of grace and help, of the divine in man, of the strength, purity, and nobility, which must be roused and nourished. Love, therefore, --pre- venient, pure, uniting, active, -- is the only way of deliverance from all evils that oppress man, the only motive power capable
of establishing a kingdom of God among men. " Precisely this, according to Herder, was the ruling idea of Jesus, and the object of his life. " In his heart was written : God is my Father and the Father of all men ; all men are brothers. To this religion of humanity he dedicated his life, which he was ready wholly to offer up, if his religion might be that of all men. For it concerns the fundamental nature of our race -- both its
and final destiny. Through it the weaknesses of mankind serve to call forth a nobler power ; every oppressive evil, human wickedness even, becomes an incentive to its own defeat. The truest humanity breathes in the few speeches of Jesus which have come down to us ; it is nothing else than humanity which he manifested in his life, and sealed by his death, just as the chosen name by which he called himself was the Son of Man. As a spiritual saviour of his race, he sought to train up men of God, who would labour from pure motives for the good of others and reign by their patience as kings in the realm of truth and kindness. An object such as this must evidently be the sole purpose of providence with our race ; and all the wise and good on earth must and will co-operate to this end, in proportion to the pureness of their thought and endeavour ; for what other ideal could man have of perfection and happiness on earth, save this universally operative humanity ? "
According to Herder, therefore, the distinctive character of Jesus was, that he bore in his heart the ideal of man as the child of God, exemplified it in his life and death for our imitation, and at the same time trained up men of God and established a society of them, a kingdom of God among men, in which will be realised the purpose of providence with our race. The " Divine Sonship " of Christ is only another expression for this ideal " man of God," who knows God as his Father and all men as his brethren, and in self-sacrificing devotion to the
? original
? ? ? 40 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
good of men passively and actively fulfils the will of God. Was not this fundamentally Kant's meaning when he de scribed Jesus as the pre-eminent representative example of the idea of a race of men well-pleasing to God ? Herder, indeed, strongly denounced Kant's theory as " a romance, a mass of misleading fictions, an ignoble perversion of Scripture," etc. ; but this denunciation was doubtless primarily due to the mistaken notion that Kant had wished to substitute a personified idea for the historic Jesus. Herder's mistake was rendered possible by Kant's method of expounding his posi tion, as his constructive rationalism led him to start from the idea, and to connect the historical person of Jesus with it only as an example ; while Herder started from the historical person as the source of the Christian religion of humanity, and portrayed the idea as the essence of the manifestation of this person. The latter method is undoubtedly more advan tageous from the theological point of view ; but we must not deny the philosopher the right of starting from the idea, with its basis in the reason, and of accentuating the distinction be
tween it and the historical person in whom it is presented
for imitation, though it does not derive from him its ultimate
origin.
Again, just as Kant had distinguished the pure moral faith
of the reason from the "statutory" faith of the Church, so Her der distinguishes the religion of Christ, identical with the pure religion of humanity, from the religion of which Christ was the object, or the " doctrines" about the two natures in Christ, the legal conflict between Christ and Belial, the satisfaction made by Christ's death, etc. Of these ecclesiastical dogmas,
Herder speaks much more contemptuously than Kant, calling them childish questions, old second-hand phrases, masquerade and hypocrisy ; for Kant had found a meaning even in these doctrines, by interpreting them as symbols of the inner pro cesses of moral feeling. Herder's harsh judgment is no doubt to be partially explained by his practical experience as teacher, which showed him how many continue to cling to these husks of dogma, and so never reach the true kernel itself. But it
was more especially the consequence of the optimism inherited by Herder from Leibnitz, Shaftesbury, and Rousseau, and shared by Goethe ; he was convinced of the essential good ness of human nature, and could only look upon evil as a shadow, a weakness, which would of itself disappear with the
? ? ? ? Ch. II. ] . HERDER. 41
development of man's powers. Like Goethe, Herder was incapable of appreciating the profound difference between idea
and actuality, duty and inclination, or the struggle of the good and the bad principle, which was so important in Kant's ethics and religious philosophy. Hence both of them found Kant's doctrine of a " radical evil," which formed the basis of his moral interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement and justification, an incomprehensible stumbling-block. As the natural consequence of this unqualified antagonism to the dogmas of sin and salvation Herder found himself unable to explain them ; he regarded them as purely " arbitrary doc trines, having nothing to do with religion, which is an affair of the heart," and even as " the tomb of religion. " Herder did not sufficiently consider that they could never have arisen and influenced the Church, if they had not been the product and the expression, --however imperfect, --of the heart's religious energies, experiences, and needs ; and this to a large extent explains the insignificance of Herder's direct influence on theology. Schleiermacher, on the other hand, whose philo sophic views generally approached much more nearly Herder's than Kant's, was nevertheless able to adopt and assimilate the doctrines of sin and salvation, and was for this very reason in a position to carry out that reconstruction of Protestant theology at which Herder aimed.
Herder approaches Schleiermacher most nearly in his doc trine of the Holy Spirit, expounded in his discussion of the third article of the Apostles' Creed, in the essays, Vom Geist des Christenthums, and Von Religion und Lehrmeinungen.
By tracing historically the development of the idea of Holy Spirit, he shows that its meaning in Christianity is nothing else than the spirit of Christ, as animating and guiding the Chris tian Church and uniting all nations in the Kingdom of God. He places it in contrast, not less to the dogmatic conception of a personal principle inspiring man from without, than to the philosophical idea of an autonomous legislation of the reason.
The idea of magical inspiration he had already strongly pro tested against in his Briefc fiber das Studium der 1 heologie.
Inspiration must not be conceived as either the depression or as the wild exaltation of our mental powers. "Can He who made the eye be compelled to blind us in order that we may see ? Can the Spirit, who animates creation and all our powers, destroy them in order that in their stead he may pro
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BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
duce light within us? " On the contrary, inspiration and en lightenment are the awakening of the noblest powers of the mind ; perfectly undisturbed contemplation, calmest self-pos session, the most quietly effective truth, clear thoughts, en lightened views, happy resolves, pure actions -- these are the noblest gifts of the Spirit. The purest stage of revelation is to see things as they are, face to face, without figures and dreams. Least of all may we look for dark fanaticism in the revelation of him whom John calls light-giving Reason mani fested on earth. His revelation, i. e. , the truth which he clearly saw and uttered, was deliverance from everything unnatural, the restoration of mankind to the full use of its powers. Wherefore what we have to do is to turn from everything unnatural, from all magic, all bibliolatry, to nature and truth, which is also the spirit of the Bible.
But, on the other hand, it is precisely this nature and truth which Herder cannot find in the abstractions of philosophy. " That egoism which of itself issues commands and derives all its power to obey the law from the might of its own proud formal dictatorship, can hardly be the Spirit of God ; for in a formal legislation without contents, there is neither might nor blessedness, neither life nor spirit. But it is life that impels thee to what thou oughtest to do and to be. As in the realm of nature a universal law assigns to each impulse its limits, the observance of which limits leads to enjoyment, their dis regard to discomfort ; so the same law must be operative in the realm of man's spiritual impulses. Here too watches a bene ficent spirit within us, awakening our slumbering powers, aveng ing their misuse, and saving us from excess. You may call it reason, conscience, etc. ; the wise have ever recognised it as a voice of God. " It was this pure impulse in man which was aroused by Christianity, not by the inculcation of virtue, for thereby no impulse is roused, but by awakening love. Every man has within him a good spirit, a divine voice, a canon and criterion of truth ; not as a universal legislation for all rational beings, but, as a definite and perfectly individual ideal of what he himself is and ought to be. To become conscious of this
ideal, to acknowledge to obey its active impulse and con trolling limitations, this living virtue in each finds him self united to others fellowship of mutual activity, for no impulse acts in isolation, and the noblest characteristic in man, the impulse of all impulses, love, the basis of all social life.
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