No More Learning

With all respect for this large-hearted humanity, we are compelled to ask two questions : Firstly, how far does the actual history of religion correspond to the description of it here given ? Has any vigorous religion ever actually abstained from laying claim to the exclusive possession of the truth, or
rom giving expression to its emotions in corresponding deeds, in energetic action upon the world ? Has not precisely the early youth of all religions, when their enthusiasm was most spontaneous and least controlled by reflection or confined in systems, been marked also by the most intolerant self-assur- ance, the most narrow exclusiveness, and the most passionate zeal in proselytising ? And is the vehemence, distinguishing disputes about religious dogmas from other conflicts of opinion, due really to intellectual thought, and not rather to the pathos of the emotions finding expression in these dogmas? If it be rejoined that it was not Schleiermacher' s object to describe the positive religions, but only the ideal religion, conceived by him as the goal of historical development, this would at once give rise to the further question, Can we accept it as characteristic of the ideal religion, that it should be the self- abandonment of each to the enjoyment of his individual feel ings, without seeking at all to influence the thought and action of individuals, to say nothing of the community ? In fact, the only conclusion to which we can come that this isolation,
favoured by Romanticism, of the emotional religion of the
individual heart not less impossible, psychologically, than unhistorical, inasmuch as destroys all the social elements by which religion has formed communities and become power in history. Schleiermacher, true, could not escape the necessity of offering an explanation of the facts of the actual formation of religious conceptions and religious societies, ac-
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? C. T.
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a
it is
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? 50
BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
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companying every religion ; but the way in which he does this serves rather to illustrate than to obviate the error of his
principle.
The dogmas and propositions which experience shows to
be connected with religion, are, according to Schleiermacher, simply the result of the comparison of the emotions, and the means of their expression and communication to others ; for religion itself they are not necessary, but are only an adven titious creation of reflection. A man may have a great deal of religion without the aid of such concepts as " miracle, in spiration, revelation," but reflection on and comparison of his religious feelings necessarily put them in his way. Hence they have an unlimited right in religion, but only as religious ex pressions for subjective states of feeling, the meaning of which must not be extended to the sphere of metaphysics or morals. " Miracle " is the religious name for an occurrence ; the re ligious man recognises miracles not in a few only, but in all occurrences. " Revelation " is any original and new com munication of the universe and its inmost life to man, giving birth" to a special class of intuitions and emotions. " Inspira tion signifies the feeling of higher enthusiasm and freedom. " Prophecy" is the presentiment foreshadowing and anticipat ing the further course of a present train of events. All these terms therefore denote subjective experiences essential to all religious life, and therefore present in some degree in every religious man. Hence, since each man can and ought to experience these things for himself, faith must not depend upon external authority, at any rate only temporarily. " Not every man who believes in sacred Scriptures has religion, but only he who has a living and direct understanding of them, and who, therefore, so far as he himself is concerned, can most
with them. " Finally, Schleiermacher dis cusses from the same point of view the concepts, God and
Immortality. These, too, he holds, are not presuppositions and conditions of religious feeling, but the product of reflection on it. Hence the form given to the concept of God is of secondary importance ; it depends upon the bent of the imagination, whether we think of the Spirit of the Universe as free personality, or give up the personal idea of the Deity, in humble consciousness of the limitations of personality ; in any case, whichever conception a man adopts, the main ques tion whether he has feeling of God, and this feeling of the
easily dispense
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a
? Ch. III. ] SCHLEIERMACHER. 5 1
Divine will always be better than his conception of it.
last point may certainly be conceded, although one may with good reason urge against the rest, that our idea of God is still of much greater importance to the content of religious
to its ethical character, than SchTeier- macher was willing to admit. ) To the ordinary idea of im
mortality our apologist for religion is not so much indifferent
as hostile ; it seems to him irreligious rather than religious,
as betraying a clinging to the finite form of existence, whereas personality ought rather even here to be renounced from love
to God, in order to live in the One and the All. "In the
midst of the finite to become one with the infinite, and to be
eternal in every moment, -- this is the immortality of religion. "
(We may let the mysticism of this view pass without sup- . posing that the last, or even a decisive, word has been pro-"-^ >>*( "
feeling, particularly
(The
? nounced on the question of immortality^
The third Discourse draws a very dark picture of the age
of the Aufkldrung, the shallow utilitarianism of which stifled
all sense of religion ; and the fourth proceeds to speak of
Church and priesthood, describing religious fellowship both as it is and as it ought to be. The actual Church Schleier- macher considers to be only an association of those who are still seeking religion, in which all are supposed to receive, and only one to give. It is therefore opposed in almost every
respect to the ideal religious community. Though indispens able at present as an institution for scholars and learners, it suffers under unavoidable defects ; the authority and the method of the transmission of religious doctrines inevitably produce sectarianism, superstition, adherence to ceremonies, and the distinction of priests and laity. All these evils are made intolerable, and the real ruin of the Church brought about by the interference of the State in the Church's life. Left to
itself, its imperfect condition would have led to the separation of the true Church, the living members uniting in small societies around leaders chosen by themselves. But these true inspired members were excluded by the connection of Church and State from the leadership of the community, and their place was unworthily filled by officially appointed teachers, whose duty was to educate the citizens in the habits of thought favourable to orderly government. Besides this, articles of belief were settled, and ceremonies enjoined, and the whole degraded into a political institution. This state of things cannot be main-
O^0,
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52 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
tained. " Away with all such connection between Church and State ! I shall continue, like Cato, to reiterate this oracle until the end, or until I see the connection annihilated. " With the end of our artificial culture and social system will have come a time when, as in the sacred youth of the world, no other society will be necessary to help men to be religious than that of the devout home. There will no longer be any distinct office of teacher, no difference between teacher and congre gation ; the calling of the minister will be a private occupation, the temple a private room, an assembly of likeminded friends will form the Church. Then only will the exalted fellowship of truly religious souls spread in all directions, as an academy of priests pursuing religion as an art and a study, as a circle of brothers united by the closest ties of sentiment and mutual
? Such was the ideal Church of Schleiermacher in his early years, an ideal in which Moravian mysticism is
combined with Romantic exaggeration in fantastic idealism. Herder, notwithstanding his equally great dislike of an official State Christianity, took a far more sober view of the functions
understanding.
of the Church in the moral education of the people.
The fifth Discourse treats of the Positive Religions. As something infinite, religion can exist in the world only under a multiplicity of specific manifestations, that in the various positive religions, and not as an empty abstraction, such as the
so-called " natural religion" would be. The preference given to the latter in his time, Schleiermacher thinks, was due simply to the fact, that those to whom religion general was ob noxious like that form of best which really not religion at all, and has the fewest of its characteristics. So-called " natural religion " commonly so refined away, and so nearly akin to metaphysics and ethics, as to exhibit few of the cha racteristic traits of religion. On the other hand, every positive religion has a specific individual character. The character of such a religion not determined by its share of the totality of religious views and feelings, for these may all be met with in some form every actual religion but each individual religion produced when some special view of the universe
made a centre-point, and everything else subordinated to it. In so far as each man can do this for himself, there would
naturally be as many individual religions as religious indi viduals. And, in fact, Schleiermacher explicitly says, Any man who can fix the date of the birth of his religion, and trace
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is
in
is
is
;
it
is in
is,
? Ch. III. ] SCHLEIERMACHER.
53
its origin to the direct action upon him of the Deity, i. e. , to " revelation," has his own special and real religion. Here everything is life and freedom and true natural development, whereas in " natural religion " everything is abstract, and its strength lies in the negation of what is positive and character istic ; it is like the soul that refused to come into the world, because it wished to be not a definite man, but man in general. This subjectivism, which resolves all connection between his torical religions into accidental individual phenomena, was afterwards abandoned by Schleiermacher himself when he sought to combine the claims of individuality with the import ant functions of the social element.
The development of religion Schleiermacher conceives as
following the successive stages (then erroneously accepted) of fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. In this connection he has occasion to speak of pantheism, which he does not regard as a special form of religion, but as a speculative theory, quite reconcilable with true religious feeling, as long as we do not understand by it a masked materialism. The fundamental idea of Judaism Schleiermacher holds to be retribution, which was only possible in the narrow field of a limited national community; its importance as preparatory to Christianity he rates very low. " I hate in religion this idea of historical relations ; eadh religion has its own eternal neces- ' sity, and has always its own independent origin"--a statement characteristic of Schleiermacher' s want of historical insight, a defect from which even his later theology is never quite free. The fundamental idea of Christianity he considers to be, that the corruption of the world, consisting in alienation from God,
is put an end to and a mediation is effected between the finite and God by individual points, scattered over the whole, in which both the Divine and the human are united. " Ruin and salvation, enmity and mediation, these are the two in separably connected fundamental relations underlying this habit of feeling, and determining the shape of the entire re ligious content and form of Christianity. " That presupposition of universal ungodliness is the cause of the polemical character and the sense of " sorrow " which, Schleiermacher thinks, are special characteristics of Christianity. But since Christianity at the same time discerns in history constantly new dispensa tions on the part of God for retrieving this ruin, ever higher revelations and mediators with a view of uniting the Divine
,
? ? ? ? 54
BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
and the human, it makes the history of religion itself the
material of religion and so raises religion as it were to a
higher power (just as, according to Schlegel, the poetry of Romanticism, by taking the given forms of poetry itself as its material, raises poetry to a higher power. ) Of the founder of Christianity it is further maintained, that the wonderful thing about him was not so much the purity of his moral doctrine, which only expressed what is common to him with all men who have attained to full spiritual consciousness, nor his character, combining exalted power with touching gentleness ; what was truly divine in him was the clearness of his idea of the neces sity of a mediation between everything finite and God, or of the necessity of redemption for man imprisoned in the finite.
" His consciousness of the directness of his knowledge of God and of his existence in God, and of his power of arousing it in others, was at the same time the consciousness of his medi atorial office and of his deity. " " But never," adds Schleier- macher, " did Jesus claim to be the only mediator" ; he never
? required men to accept his ideas for the sake of his person, but only the latter for the sake of the ideas ; he never repre sented the views and feelings which he communicated as the totality of religion, neither did his disciples ever wish to limit the absolute freedom of the revelation of the spirit ; and so
neither does the Bible forbid any other book to be or become a Bible too. Christianity will last for ever in so far as there will never be a time when no more mediators are needed ; but nevertheless it repudiates the claim to be the sole and sove reign form of religion ; it wishes to see other younger, and, if possible, stronger and nobler forms of religion springing up
beside and a prophetic mind could perhaps even now indi cate the point which must be the centre of communion with the Deity for future generations. This view of the possibility of a more perfect religion than Christianity Schleiermacher afterwards limited to continuous development within Chris
tianity itself, just as in his later Glaubenslehre he no longer regarded Christ as one mediator among several, but as the only one whose consciousness of God was perfect and of unceasing efficacy for the whole race.
We can easily understand that so original and paradoxical a work as these " Discourses on Religion " would arouse much opposition on all sides; the narrow circle of the author's Romantic friends only did meet with approval, and
? ? in it
a
it,
? Ch. III. ] SCHLEIERMACHER.
55
even there it was qualified. Of the various criticisms none was more common, or more just, than that Schleiermacher had overlooked the essential connection of religion with morality and the basis of its importance socially. But any one who was inclined on this account to accuse our apologist for reli gion of lacking true regard for ethics, was at once corrected by the appearance of his Monolagen (1800). supplying the moral philosophy corresponding to the religious philosophy of the Discourses. But the remarkable thing that while in the latter he taught a religion independent of morality, in the former he teaches a morality independent of religion. In both cases the formal principle remains the same, viz. , the self- contemplation of the ego, freed from all extraneous hypo theses and limitations, the ego contemplating within itself the forms of the spirit's life in their individual development and also in their general laws. But in the first work the object of self-contemplation was the ego as intuitive and emotional;, its passive relation to the universe being excited and de~ termined by impressions from in the second, the ego so far as conscious of its absolute freedom and shapes its internal as well as the external world by spontaneous action. In the one he teaches, with Spinoza, the complete dependence of everything finite upon the One Infinite; in the other he makes, like Fichte, the ego itself the creative whole, of which even the world only the self-created mirror. Common to both works the individualistic form given to the ideal in the one, required that every truly religious man should be
conscious of special revelations of the Deity, or feel himself a special mirror of the universe and the other that each man should, in a manner peculiar to himself, represent in his own person the nature of humanity and determine his inward and outward action by the law of his own individual life with a freedom unrestricted by anything external. Free and harmonious culture by the independent development of our own capacities and glad recognition of the peculiarities of others, such the principle of this theory of ethics, which
seeks to overcome the Kantian antithesis of duty and inclina tion by conceiving the moral law, not as universal imperative, but as arising each individual as a special vital impulse which need only be followed purely and uninterruptedly in order to contribute a chord to the harmony of the moral world. cannot be disputed that this aesthetic and humanis-
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56 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
tic ethical principle, adopted also by the Jacobis and Herder, Goethe and Schiller, embodies an important truth as against
the one-sided rigorism of Kant ; but it is equally indisputable that it does not contain the whole truth, and, if exclusively pursued, may lead to dangers of a different and more serious kind than did the Kantian ethics, especially when we re member the practical fruits of this principle in the circles of Romanticism, which cast their dark shadows even into Schleiermacher's life. The defects of the whole school may be stated in a few words : it fails to properly recognise the dependence of the individual on its historic conditions and the obligations of the individual towards the historic aims and objects of society. This indicates what is needed to supply subjective idealism with its true objective, i. e. , social, comple ment, and to correct the strange separation of religion and morals, as if unrelated to each other, inasmuch as religion shows the possibility of the reconciliation of both, as present ing in God the common source of individual freedom and social obligation.
The conversion of subjective into objective idealism was carried out by Kant's successors in various directions ; by
Fichte in the direction of Ethical Idealism, the original ethical atheism of which afterwards became a mystical pantheism ; by Schelling in the direction of a philosophy of nature, which was afterwards transformed into theosophy ; by Hegel in the form of Logical Idealism, with the incorporation of the theory of historical evolution. Since these systems as philosophical theories, especially the two last, affected theology in various ways, it will be necessary for us to take a brief survey of them,
? *<<? '
? ? ? CHAPTER IV.
J. g. fichte's ethical idealism.
The years at the close of the last century in which Herder wrote his books against Kant, and Schleiermacher his Dis courses on Religion and his Monologues, witnessed also the controversy on Fichte's atheism. This controversy was both the occasion of the philosopher's removal from Jena, the strong hold of the Kantian philosophy, to Berlin, the stronghold of
Romanticism, and, at the same time, of the reconstruction of
his philosophy. It was provoked by Fichte's essay, Ueber den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine gbttliche Weltregierung ( 1 798), in which he affirmed that faith in our ethical vocation and in the moral order of the world, as the necessary pre supposition for the accomplishment of our moral vocation in the world, is the only true faith, maintaining at the same time the impossibility of tracing this moral order back to God as its cause. Fichte followed in Kant's footsteps, in so far as the latter had based religious faith on faith in our moral vocation, which is at the same time the vocation of the world ; but whilst Kant made man's inability to bring nature into harmony with his moral vocation the ground of the postulate of God, to supply this want of human power, Fichte considered this postulate not only as superfluous, but even as impossible, since a God acting in the interests of happiness would appear desirable to the physical man only, but would do dishonour to our moral reason, and therefore be really an idol. Hence in his Ap
pellation an das Publikum gegen die Anklage des Atheismus (1799), Fichte declared that his accusers, who wished to have a God for the satisfaction of their desire for happiness, were the real atheists.
This rejection of Kant's dogmatic postulates was a necessary consequence of the logical rigour of Fichte's idealism, both practical and theoretical. From the autonomy of the practical reason he inferred that it was itself sufficient to work out its self-imposed aims, not needing to have its freedom supple*
? ? ? ? BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
58
merited by divine aid ; and he gave full effect to Kant's asser tion that the understanding legislates for nature ; he set aside the " thing-in-itself " which had in Kant confined the indepen dent activity of cognition by making it dependent on an object, and declared it the self-imposed limitation of the active ego. Thus the world which forms the content of our consciousness was made absolutely, in form and matter, the simple product of our consciousness, the unsubstantial image of our creative imagination. And just as the active ego, by its acts of reflec tion, is the free creator of its world, so its freedom or, what is identical with its moral vocation, also the end and pur pose of this world. The world, says Fichte, nothing but
" the material of our duty clothed in forms of sense," an object which, in itself unreal, only conceived by the ego as the inevitable material for the action of its moral freedom. This thorough-going subjective idealism quite reconcilable with ethical idealism as long as the non-ego created by the concep tion of the ego does not go beyond nature for whether this something real or only an unreal phantom of my imagination matters very little to ethical purpose and action might even seem conducive to the moral grandeur of mind to strip nature of its substantiality and degrade to the unreal and impotent product of the mind's representative functions. But what the non-ego include other human beings as well as nature Are these also, as belonging to the content of my consciousness, only the product of my consciousness, only the self-imposed limitation and means of the employment " of my freedom Without doubt this pronounced " solipsism would be the ultimate logical issue of subjective idealism but would also be the end of all moral convictions, for to theoreti cal solipsism could only correspond an unqualified practical egoism. extremely characteristic of Fichte's speculative thought, that was not any theoretical consideration, such as the objection of unsophisticated common sense, but simply and solely this moral abyss that quelled the proud daring of his subjective idealism, and led to the introduction of a trans cendental object.
We first meet with this change of view in the treatise on Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1800). In too the final result of the philosophy of pure knowledge still asserted to be, that the sense-world only the conception which all finite rational beings agree, depending upon the common
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;
it
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? Ch. IV. ] FICHTE. 59
limitation of their reason. But, he goes on to ask, what could limit reason except what is itself reason, and what could limit all finite reason except the infinite reason ? This universal agreement with regard to the world of sense, as the sphere of our duty, and hence our necessary and antecedently given starting-point, is as incomprehensible as our agreement with regard to the products of our mutual freedom, and is the result of the One eternal infinite Will. But in that case belief in our duty is really belief in God, his rationality and faithfulness ; he creates in our minds the feelings, perceptions, and laws of thought constituting the world of our consciousness. All our life is his life, our thoughts, so far as they are good and true, are thought in him. From this point of view the world too is seen in a new light : though the earlier idealism remains, with its negation of a dead mass, a material nature, and a blind destiny, it is no longer the ego that creates the world by its
but it is the life of God that is visible to the religious eye, no less in the outer than in the inner world ; the world is no longer the unreal shadow of my perfectly free and absolute ego, but the manifold appearance of the one divine life and light, of which I see the reflection within me and without, in the whole realm of kindred spirits with like con ceptions and feelings. In this way subjective idealism is transformed into a mystical pantheism, most nearly akin to that idealised Spinozism found in Herder and Schleiermacher. But what in Herder was put forward dogmatically in opposi tion to Kant's critical philosophy, is in Fichte the result of the logical following out of critical idealism itself. Fichte's philosophy fell in with the tendency of the time, and helped on new developments of thought, whilst Herder's had the stream against it and remained unnoticed.
Fichte's change of view necessarily gave quite a new shape to his theory of religion. His former stiff moralism, accord ing to which the only possible creed is a cheerful fulfilment of duty in active life, gave place to a religious mysticism quite averse to active life. In his Grundziigen des gegenwdrtigen Zeitalters (1804), where the stern condemnation of the Auf- kldrung follows quite the track of Romanticism, religion is said to consist, not in any form of action, but in the view of the world as the differentiated manifestation of the one divine
Being, or a metaphysic of the supersensible with the corres
? imagination,
ponding disposition
of the heart ; the love of the religious
? ? ? 60 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
man is rooted in the one divine basal life, and hence he is raised both above the imperative laws and the low pains of nature, and every moment he is in immediate full possession of eternal life with all its blessedness. The nature of religion is more fully expounded and more definitely marked off from ethics and metaphysics in the work Anweisung zum seligen Lcben (1806). In it Fichte distinguishes five ways of re garding the world : the lowest is the ordinary realistic view of the senses. The second is that of imperative law, finding the ground and purpose of the phenomenal world in a regu lative law (Kant's position). The view of true morality ranks higher ; according to the law not merely imperative, but
also creative, a vital impulse constituting the man swayed by the image and revelation of the divine Being (position of Jacobi and the great poets). The fourth view that of religion, which beholds in all manifestations of the true and good, the one life of God, and, by feeling, has experience of
as the power of holy life and love. Lastly, the fifth view
that of science, which raises the connection of the finite with the one divine life, directly felt in faith, into a matter of knowledge, and makes the object of clear conviction.
Religion shares with this scientific view of the world the characteristic of not being directly active but contemplative, peaceful view, remaining within the heart and not directly citing to any definite action religion however, superior to science this particular, that does not confine itself to con templation but becomes a practical energy, the will to do all and every duty as the will of God for us and in us religion
a word, the love of God, which man feels God within
him as a quickening spirit, and surrenders his whole personality to God. Fichte, true, describes this devout love of God,
just like Spinoza, as absorption into God, as being fused and blended with him, so that really God's own love to Himself, which becomes conscious in man in the form of
? God, Fichte's ethical idealism remains in so far intact, that the devout love of God by no means exhausted in inactive emotion or calm contemplation, but represented as the source of a joyful and active love of man " moral action
flows from as quietly and calmly as the light from the sun.
" But this love founded on religion does not love everything
man without distinction hates everything base and
feeling. But even as this mystical oneness with
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mean, but believes in the existence and the development of the divine germ in every man, and so becomes the source of glad and hopeful labour for the elevation of the human race. Thus this warm and optimistic enthusiasm for humanity, based upon religious feeling, formed in the end the meeting-point of
Kant's disciple Fichte and his opponent Herder ; and in pro portion as Schleiermacher rose above the aesthetic subjectivity of Romanticism, he too ranged himself definitely on their side; so that these three noble thinkers stand at the opening of the century as joint prophets of that truth which was to be the distinctive sign of the coming generations.
? ? ? ? CHAPTER V.
schelling's philosophy of nature and theosophy.
In the same year as Fichte's work on Die Bestimmung des Menschen, appeared Schelling's System des transcenden- talen Idealismus (1800), in which the objective idealism, first suggested in Fichte's work, was reduced to a system. This
also claimed to be idealism, for it enunciated the principle, that all knowledge must be deduced from consciousness, by making the action of intelligence the object of intellectual contemplation. But just as Fichte had dis tinguished the absolute from the finite ego, which he conceived as the differentiated manifestation of the one divine life, so Schelling's Intelligence, by whose action the world is to be explained, is not only the human but the absolute Intelligence, and its action is not simply to produce ideal conceptions but to create the real world of nature and history. On the other hand, this divine Intelligence must not be thought of as apart from that of the human ego, but is related to it as the whole to a part or the original to a copy ; and thus, Schelling holds, we can regard the functions of consciousness producing our ideal world as the copies and symbols of the forces and laws conditioning the generative process of the real world. If nature is visible spirit, and spirit is invisible nature, it appeared possible to explain the genesis of the real world, or nature outside us, by the contemplation of the action of the ego in forming propositions and definitions, in the same way as Fichte's theory of science ( Wissenschaftslehre) had explained the genesis of the world of consciousness. This is what
Schelling tried to do in the first part of his System des trans- cendentalen Idealismus. By the method of the Fichtean deduction of consciousness a philosophy of nature is pro pounded, in which the genesis of nature is traced in an
philosophy
? scale from the elemental forces of matter to the
ascending
with the action of human freedom in history. But in this
production of organic animal and conscious life. The second
part supplies the corresponding practical philosophy, dealing
? ? ? Ch. V. ] SCHELLING. 63
action of individual free agents law or necessity prevails un consciously, by means of which, from the play of the volition of individuals, there is ultimately produced an harmonious order, undesigned by them. This implies that all free action is ultimately based upon some common element guiding the orderly development of the whole. Such a synthesis, or pre- established harmony, of the subjective and objective, of conscious freedom and unconscious necessity, must depend
upon something higher than either, which can only be the absolute identity of both. It is the " eternally unconscious " which is the root of all intelligences and the basis of law and order in their freedom, but which, being absolutely simple, can never be the object of knowledge but only of faith. At no point in history is it visibly manifested, but it is revealed con tinually throughout its whole course. But can we not some where get a direct intuition of this harmony of freedom and necessity ? Certainly, answers Schelling, following Kant's Critique of Judgment, viz. . in art. In artistic creation conscious and unconscious action so far coincide that the artistic
product, though the work of freedom, is the end aimed at by nature's necessity. The infinite harmony striven after in the endless chain of historical acts, has become a finite manifesta tion in the beauty of the work of art. In aesthetic contem plation is objectively reflected the original identity of the conscious and unconscious, of nature and freedom, underlying all separations of them in consciousness.
When the absolute Identity had once been thus raised above the ego and nature as their higher unity and common basis, it was an easy step to formulate the new " Philosophy of
Identity," in which consciousness was no longer taken as the
starting-point, as in the transcendental philosophy, but the Absolute implied in Moreover, in his form of treatment Schelling went over from Kant to Dogmatism, as Fichte had gone over to Spinoza. As Spinoza his Ethics begins at once without any deduction, with the definition of Sub stance, order to draw deductions from so Schelling now starts with the proposition, that absolute reason the in difference of subjective and objective. the end of all antitheses, the world as the eternal and unchanging unity of the real and the ideal. Hence the Absolute cannot be grasped by reflection, by analytic or synthetic thought, but only by " intellectual intuition," which, as the copy of the
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It
it,
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? 64 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
absolute, is likewise itself the unity of the ideal and real. By this method, which he pronounces the only truly philosophic one, Schelling attempts to derive differentiated Being from the unity of the absolute Identity. That this attempt was fore doomed to failure is manifest ; if it lies at all within the range of our powers of knowledge, to trace the genesis of the world from the Absolute (which must be denied), this would in any case be rendered least possible by the assumption of this empty abstract conception of the Absolute as the simple in difference of opposites ; how by its means the rich variety of the real world could be explained, is quite inconceivable. This was felt soon after by Schelling himself, and it led him to a theosophic reconstruction of his philosophy of Identity, though he only replaced one error by another, or rather sub stituted mythological poetry for philosophic thought. Before following this further step of Schelling's, we must glance at his theory of religion, as developed from the more sober point of view of the philosophy of Identity.
In his treatise Methode des akademischen Studiums
(1803) Schelling has occasion to speak of religion, and treats unlike Schleiermacher, not from the subjective and psycho
logical, but from the objective and historical point of view. In accordance with the then universally accepted philosophy of
history, he makes history begin with a golden age of inno cence, the unity of man with nature. Thereupon followed, after a universal fall, the epoch of disruption between mind and nature, of the painful consciousness of misery and guilt. The reconciliation of this disruption by faith in Providence began with Christianity, the central idea of which God be come man, in the sense that "the eternal Son, born of the being of the Father of all things, the finite itself as in the eternal contemplation God, and which appears as a suffer ing God subject to the conditions of time, who in his highest manifestation, that in Christ, closes the world of the finite and opens that of the infinite, or the reign of the spirit. " The
Incarnation must not, therefore, be regarded as an individual event in time would in that case have no meaning, since God above all time but an incarnation from eternity and though Christ its highest point, and so also the be ginning of its complete realisation, the perfect intelligibility, as historical events, of the rise of Christianity and of the person Jesus remains unimpaired thereby. Thus Schelling
? ? ? is
;
is
of
is
it is
is
;
; it
it is
is
it,
? Ch. V. ] SCHELLTNG. 65
wishes in general clearly to distinguish the idea of Christianity, which can only be known from its entire history, from its first appearance as attested in the Biblical writings, and for this very reason advocates the free historical interpretation of these
Since the Christian idea is not dependent upon this one event, but is universal and absolute, it cannot, says Schelling, make any difference to its truth whether we consider the books of the Bible authentic or not, whether their narratives record actual events or Jewish myths, or even whether their matter conforms to the idea of Christianity or not ; if Christianity had not always been considered a
writings.
we should have made much more progress towards the historical appreciation of the important documents relating to its origin. The task before us
cannot be to restore these original forms, as the Aufkldrung supposes, but to set the eternal idea free from the wrappings which have hitherto enveloped and to enable its ideal kernel to shape for itself new forms in the spirit of the present, a task to which the existing relations of philosophy and poetry to
merely temporal phenomenon,
? In this distinction between the per manent idea Christianity and its perishable envelope, and in the demand for the free development of the former out of the latter, Schelling in complete agreement with Lessing and Herder, Kant, Fichte, and Schleiermacher but whilst these
thinkers found the idea of Christianity in moral or religious humanism, Schelling sought in a speculative theory of the relation of the finite to the infinite, and thus entered upon the disastrous path of the intellectualistic theory of religion which
was further developed by Hegel. Connected with this was
religion already point.
Christianity.
C. T.
of the value of the historical side of
Schelling's depreciation
Christianity, especially of the early Biblical records, which suffers him almost to sever all connection with ecclesiastical
Herder, with true instinct, had already pro tested against a similar error on the part of Kant and we shall see later that Schleiermacher's theology was indebted to this effort to effect a closer union between idea and history for
its superiority over the idealistic philosophy of religion and for its profounder influence on the life of the Church.
The problem of the explanation of the finite from the infinite never ceased to occupy Schelling after the formulation of his philosophy of identity 1801. The consciousness of his failure to solve already betrayed his treatise on
? ? F
;
it is
in
;
in
a
it
in is
it,
? 66 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
Philosophie und Religion (1804), where the genesis of the world from God is explained by the aid of the Platonic myth of the declension of the ideas or souls from the divine unity. That this explanation explains nothing is evident ; for the possibility of a declension presupposes the existence of the finite. The possibility of such a declension remained incon ceivable as long as the conception of the absolute was adhered to as pure and simple identity. An alteration of this concep tion was therefore necessary on internal grounds, but it was actually brought about by Schelling's study of the theosophy of Jakob Bohme, one of the fundamental principles of which was, that God is not a simple but a living unity, comprehend ing distinctions within itself. From this new point of view
Schelling wrote his Untersuchungen iiber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809). The indifference of opposites, he now teaches, is not as yet God's actual being, but only its primal source (or Urgrund, to use Bohme's term). This unity differentiates God himself into the antitheses of nature and intelligence, which only when combined constitute the actual life of God. Moreover, nature in God, as in us, pre cedes intelligence as its Basis, and without it personality is as little conceivable in God as in us ; for personality depends upon the combination of a self-contained principle with an in dependent Basis. This nature in God is as such simply a blind, unreasoning instinct. By it we can explain the residue of reality never resolvable into reason, the irregularities under lying all order in the world, as a chaos never wholly subdued.
The desire for reconciliation on the part of this dark Basis
reason, which, when united with the instinct of nature, becomes free, creative, almighty will, and reduces to order the forces of chaos. But since the blind will of this Basis continually reacts, and only gradually gives way to reason, the conversion of nature into spirit can only proceed by degrees in the various grades of the natural world. All beings, as springing from the dark Basis in God, have an individual will of their own ; but, as also originating in God's reason, a universal will. From the increase and disunion of these two forces in man results evil, which has thus poten tially its origin in the Basis of God, but actually in man's own act in separating himself from the Universal will by an act of self-determination out of time, and by that act simultaneously
? produces
determining
his individual character, which is manifested in
? ? ? Ch. V. ] SCHELLING. 67
his life in time. On the struggle of these two principles turns the world's history. After the primitive age of natural in nocence, the will of the Basis, or natural self-will, obtains the supremacy in the age of heathenism, till the divine light, or the word of the divine Reason, appears in a personal mediator for the restoration of the connection of creation with God. Then the struggle between the divine and daemoniacal king doms reaches its height; but in this struggle the physical glory of the old world passes away, and God reveals himself in the new world as the victorious spirit of the good. The goal of history is the reconciliation of the natural self-will and the universal will in love, which is the higher unity of both, and by which alone God can really be all in all.
While we must acknowledge that this theosophy contains
profound ideas, which have influenced theological and philo
sophical thinkers (Baader, Martensen, Rothe, Schopenhauer), we still cannot deny that these ideas are mixed up with much
mythological poetry, which fails to satisfy either philosophical thought or the religious consciousness. The notion of the divine Intelligence issuing from a dark Basis of nature and blind instinct grates upon religious feeling as a reminiscence of heathen theogonies, by which the spiritual and ethical purity of the Christian idea of God would be marred. This defect remains substantially uncorrected in the final form of Schelling's philosophy, though on this point the philosopher designedly adheres very closely to the terminology of ecclesi astical dogmatics. As this "philosophy of mythology and revelation " was only published after Schelling's death, about the middle of this century, and has had no influence upon the development of theology, any account of it is foreign to our
purpose.
? ? ? ? CHAPTER VI. hegel's logical evolutionary
idealism.
Hegel
agreed with his fellow Swabian and fellow-student that the
started from the earlier of Schelling's positions. He
subject of philosophy is not merely phenomena, or the con sciousness of the ego, but the Absolute, which unfolds the wealth of its content in the world of nature and history.
Hegel, however, conceived the Absolute, not as the " indif ference" of nature and spirit, but as spirit itself, which, as the rational source of nature, must be prior to nature ; while, as the self-existent spirit of the conscious subject, it must have proceeded from nature. Spinoza had conceived the Absolute as Substance, Fichte as Ego or Subject, while Schelling had blended these antitheses in his neutral " In difference. " Hegel agreed with Schelling in his neutralisation of opposites in the higher unity of the Absolute, but argued that this unity must not be simply asserted without proof, "as if shot from a pistol " ; but the thing needed was to show how Substance, or self-existent Reason, can become a subject, by evolving its correlate nature, and passing through generate itself as a subject or self-conscious spirit. Passive " indif ference," excluding opposites, thus changed into the self- development of spirit, passing through its opposite to a unity at once destroying and preserving the opposition. In con junction with this change in matter there an alteration in method. Hegel was indeed at one with Schelling as to the unsatisfactoriness of the philosophy of reflection, which pro ceeded from the antithesis of thought and being, and was accordingly incapable of apprehending being itself, and could never get beyond the antitheses of finite and infinite, appear ance and actual being, world and God. But he was as much opposed to the " intellectual intuition " which Schelling wished to substitute for rational reflection as the sole philosophical method. This intellectual intuition, which really an aesthetic condition of mind most nearly akin to Schleiermacher's reli
? ? ? is
is
is
it,
? Ch. VI. ] HEGEL. 69
gious intuition of the universe, cannot, Hegel argues, be the basis of philosophy, which is concerned with concepts, and
is therefore the matter of thought. Only philosophic thought must not be something abstract, perpetuating the antitheses in their hostile exclusiveness, but something concrete, resolv ing antitheses and tracing concepts in their process through their opposite. If thought, according to the philosophy of identity, is one with being, and if the essential nature of the absolute Spirit consists in living development, then, Hegel infers, the philosophic method of thought must also consist in the dialectical development of concepts ; hence the philosopher has to imitate in the dialectical method the self-development of the absolute Reason ; or, more strictly, his attitude is that of a spectator observing the objective active process of pure thought, this self- development of the absolute idea through the process of the world's self-genesis. All the capriciousness of merely subjective thinking is thereby excluded ; it is the logical necessity of absolute Reason, as it develops into reality, which is reproduced in the philosopher's " thought. " Herein, according to Hegel, consists the only truly rational thought, which combines the analytical reflection of the understanding with synthetic intuition, in order to carry the absolute unity of the one through the oppositions of the other up to the derivative unity of the "concrete idea. " Hegel thus supple mented and corrected Schelling's intuitive method by Fichte's dialectical reflection ; from Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre he took the general plan of his dialectic, the movement of thought through Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; but what in Fichte was the movement of the subjective consciousness to the formation of its ideal world, became in Hegel the movement of absolute Thought, the self-development of which into the world of actuality repeats itself in the movement of the dialec tical thought of the philosopher to the formation of his system.
Here, as in Fichte, the world is simply the product of the development of logical thought, though not, as in Fichte, of the thought of the ego, but of the absolute Spirit ; it is not subjective, but absolute logical idealism. But in contradis tinction to Schelling, for whom the Absolute was passive identity and intuition the method of philosophical knowledge, Hegel's logical idealism is at the same time evolutionary in two senses ; the actual is the evolution of the absolute Reason
? in and through nature and history, and philosophy is the
? ? S~
? 70 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
imitation of this evolution in the dialectical movement of ideas.
The Hegelian philosophy was the most logical and most fruitful working out of the idealism which proceeded from Kant's Critique ofPure Reason, which made the understanding the lawgiver of nature. It was natural that this philosophy should produce an immense impression upon its time, and that it should be looked upon as containing the solution of all problems. It gave the thinking mind the exalted conscious ness of perfectly comprehending the world, of fixing the place in its system of ideas for all the realities of nature and history, and of constructing a priori all the laws of phenomena in conformity with the laws of thought. And to the practical mind it gave the reassuring certainty that its sublimest ideas were not merely subjective postulates and imperatives never to be actually realised, but the eternal truths of reason, which, as the all-ruling Power, infallibly carries out its plans in the world of reality, and has realised itself in the past, and will continue to do so in the future. The proposition that the rational is actual, and the actual rational, expressed a more optimistic faith in the reign of reason in the world than any other philosophical system since Leibnitz had offered. In this ideal optimism a generation weary of endless discussion found the longed-for reconciliation of the intense but unprac- ticable and disappointed idealism of the 18th century with the actual forces of history, whose awful realities idealistic enthusiasts had been compelled, by the great events of the time, to remember and respect. If reason is everywhere the deepest basis and the guiding law of reality, it need no longer be looked for, as Kant taught, in a Golden Age of the future, in an Eternal Peace which seemed never coming, in a perfect condition of civil and political society, not as yet discovered ; and equally little in a Golden Age of the past,
in a happy state of nature, in which Rousseau and, to some
extent, even Herder, had revelled. From all such super
natural and extravagant speculations, toward which an age of enthusiasm had directed its gaze in hope or sorrow, to the disregard of the historical world, Hegel called his contem poraries back to the firm ground of the historical life of man, and showed them how a loving eye might there discover undreamed-of stores of rational ideas and working ideals, in which at all times and in every nation the sovereign Reason
? ? ? ? Ch. VI. ] HEGEL. 7 1
of the world had been able to attain its lofty ends, half uncon
sciously to man himself; though each end, as soon as reached,
must be seen to be but an imperfect stage in the development,
and must serve as means to a yet higher end. From this
standpoint a far profounder view could be taken of history,
and a far juster estimate formed of its varied phenomena. In
fact,
historical inquiry. The arbitrary treatment of details which, in the case of Hegel and his immediate disciples, crept in, under the influence of his philosophical idea, had of course to be corrected by more exact historians ; but the lasting gain is rich and manifold. It is a deeper insight into historical life generally, as an orderly development of the one common spirit of nations and ages, ruled by ideas, and aiming at necessary common ends ; it is a more penetrating glance, through the confused play of phenomena, into the essence of man and things, into the dominant thoughts which are the controlling motives underlying even the apparent discord of individual passions ; it is the unprejudiced appreciation of the necessity even of the oppositions and conflicts, the errors and passions of men, because, as Hegel says, with Heraclitus, war is the father of all things, and only through the strife of partial rights and one-sided truths can the whole truth of the idea gradually struggle into existence ; it is finally an intelligent reverence for the heroic figures in history, in whom is embodied the genius of nations or ages, who, as instruments of a higher
power, have roused the thought slumbering in the souls of all, have given it clear expression, and in mighty deed have sum moned it to life. No such historians as Leopold Ranke, or Thomas Carlyle, or Christian Ferdinand Baur are conceivable without the Hegelian philosophy of history.
This profoundly suggestive conception of history has been of especial service in the departments of religious and ecclesi astical historical study. Hegel teaches us to see in the
history of religion an orderly development of divine revela tion in man's consciousness of God, a development in which no point is wholly without truth, though none has the whole pure truth ; gradually divine truth reveals itself to the human consciousness in ever greater purity, but always veiled under imperfect conceptions and symbols. The positive religions are accordingly neither inventions of human caprice and cunning nor expressions of the accidental emotions of in
no other branch of study owes to Hegel so much as
? ? ? ? 72
BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
dividual devout souls ; but, like law and custom, art and science, they are necessary creations of the peculiar common spirit of the different nations, and can therefore be properly understood only in close connection with the general history of the development of human society. Christianity is so far an exception, that in it the spirit, not of a single nation only but of mankind as a whole, becomes conscious of its essential relation to God, and it is thus the absolute religion of revealed truth ; though in too, this truth always clothed and en veloped in conceptions which are more or less inadequate to the idea. When once the whole history of the pre-Christian and Christian religions conceived as the religious spirit the process of evolution, having divine reason for its source and human reason, --i. e. , man's true consciousness of his rela tion to God, -- for its end, the opposition between rational faith neglecting history and historic faith contrary to reason,--which was the point at issue between the Aufkldrung and its
opponents, -- then perceived to be a misleading abstraction which must be replaced by rational historic faith and historical rational faith. Thus Hegel's philosophy of religion, like his philosophy of law and history, seeks to reconcile the claims of personal freedom of thought with the claims of an authority that has grown up in the course of history and acquired valid ity in society seeks to mediate between subjective and objective reason, between personal liberty and reverence for the social forces of history.
We must not, however, omit to look at the dark as well as the bright side of Hegel's logical idealism. The assertion the rationality of everything actual was so one-sidedly opti mistic as necessarily to produce the reaction of Schopen
hauer's pessimism. Hegel's optimism led to a sluggish conservatism, a passive tolerance of the existing state of things simply because exists could be fair and tolerant towards all historical phenomena except the Aufkldrung and its rationalistic criticism of tradition its dislike of abstract subjectivism might be carried so far as to reinstate faith every authority, no matter how irrational and these results of his system were so obvious that, though not intended Hegel himself, they at once showed themselves his school and disastrously perpetuated and increased the confusion ideas produced by Romanticism. But apart from these prac tical consequences, the question arises, Is the foundation
? ? ? in
of of by in
of
in
;
;
is
it
it, is
; it
; it
is
? Ch. VI. ] HEGEL. 73
this absolute logical idealism sound ? Is the position tenable, that thought and being are identical and the whole world only the self-evolution of pure thought ? Hegel makes the transi tion from logic, the region of pure thought, to the world of reality by means of the proposition that the idea externates itself and evolves nature from itself as its correlate ; but this is really a phrase that explains nothing, to which Schelling
that it is impossible to deduce the real from a mere idea But if this proposition is untenable, the whole foundation of logical idealism is cut from
under the identification of the real evolution of the world with the logical evolution of ideas made impossible, the dialectical method based on the identification a failure, the whole system which stands or falls with this method doomed, and a radical reform of idealism unavoidable. To this extent the reaction of post- Hegelian empiricism was fully justified, provided only that did not go so far as again to deny alto gether the ideal element in knowledge and philosophy, and so surrender the lasting results of the Kantian critical philo sophy.