No More Learning

That Schleiermacher's system is much more akin to Herder's than to those of Kant, Fichte, or Schelling, is an
indisputable fact, hitherto always overlooked only because Herder, standing mid-way between philosophers and theolo gians, has had the misfortune to be ignored by both parties as
not belonging to either of them. In his attack on the chief positions of Kant's theory of religion,--the transcendental postulates of freedom, immortality, and God, --we find Schleier- macher in his earliest writings fighting side by side with
Herder. As Herder had rejected a causality outside causality, and held freedom and necessity to be combined in the nature of the rational will, i. e. , the will determined by its own law (comp. ante, p. 34), so Schleiermacher, in an essay on
freedom, substituted for Kant's dualism a
determinism, according to which the will is determined by the nature of the conceptions at any time present in the mind as a whole. As Herder had condemned Kant's procedure in basing his postulate of God on the conception of the supreme good, so Schleiermacher, in a subtle analysis of this idea,1 showed the untenability of Kant's definition of it as the combination of virtue and happiness ; for happiness is by no means a conception of the pure reason, being conditioned by time and sensation, and hence cannot belong to the "supreme good," either in a future world or in this, for the "supreme good" means simply "the totality of what is possible by the laws of pure reason. " Moreover, as Schleiermacher elsewhere remarks, according to Kant's
which bases the belief in God and immortality upon impure motives derived from the interests of happiness, this belief must wane in good men as their motives wax in purity. Further, as Herder had resorted to an idealised Spinozism. as against the onesidedness of subjective idealism, so Schleiermacher felt the necessity of combining, as mutual correctives, Spinozism and the onesided idealism of Kant and Fichte which made the universe merely the reflection of our limitations, hoping thus to gain a " higher realism " as the foundation of religion. Thus Spinoza's cognitio Dei intuitiva
1 In Dilthey, Beilagen, pp. 10-15.
? argument,
psychological
? ? ? 46 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
lies at the root both of Herder's and Schleiermacher's
conception of religion. Herder teaches that our reason must
recognise God as the primal Being in all being, the primal Force in all forces, the supreme Reason in the world ; he speaks of "a feeling of the invisible in the visible, of the one in the many, of power in its effects, as the root of all ideas of the reason " to which we must trace back the origin of religion. With this, Schleiermacher almost verbally agrees, pronouncing the "contemplation of the universe," and "the feeling of the infinite in the finite " the pivot of religion. But at this point appears a significant difference. Herder failed definitely to distinguish the intuitive perception and recog nition of the revelation of God in the world and in men, either from thinking or in particular from moral willing and action ; hence he gives so wide a meaning to religion that it is in danger of being lost in the indefiniteness of ideal humanity, and to a large extent becomes equivalent to morality ; Schleiermacher, on the other hand, in order to ensure to religion its special sphere, drew so sharp a line between the immediate sight and feeling of the infinite and reflective thinking and the moral life, that religion seems to
be confined to the mystical emotions of the individual, and its influence on the thoughts and actions of men, and there with its power of forming communities, to be destroyed. With both thinkers religion is a matter of the heart, but it is so with Herder in the sense that the heart's emotion is one with conviction and purpose ; with Schleiermacher it is so in the sense that the heart with its emotions with draws into its own mystical depths, fearing any freezing contact with thought and purpose. This is the point of contact between Schleiermacher and Romanticism, in which the subjective idealism of philosophy had become the practical cultus of the ego, more specifically the apotheosis of the heart with its noble or ignoble feelings. Novalis was only expressing the views of Schleiermacher as he then was, when
he said, "Religion arises whenever the heart comes to feel
itself; when it makes itself into an ideal object, and all absolute
feeling is religious. "
In order to discover the origin of religion within the soul,
Schleiermacher, in the second Rede, refers to the moment prior to all definite consciousness, in which the universe comes into contact with our sensibility, when sense and object are
? ? ? ? Ch. III. ] SCHLEIERMACHER. 47
still one, not yet separated respectively into perception and feeling. In spite of the poetical description of this moment as " the direct betrothal, too holy for error or mistake, of the universe with the incarnate reason in creative,
productive embrace," we cannot understand why in it should lie the origin specially of religious states of mind, since this moment is simply that of the direct affection of the senses, which is
the source of all perception and sensation. This difficulty
is not solved by what follows : " So far as your feeling ex presses the life and being common to you and the universe,
it constitutes your piety ; your sensations, and the effects upon
you of all the life surrounding you, are all elements, and the
sole elements, of religion ; there is no feeling which is not religious, save such as indicates an unhealthy condition of life. " Here, as in the words of Novalis just quoted, feeling
and religion are simply identified ; and the facts are over- / looked, which can escape no impartial student of the religious
life, that there are feelings which, without being unhealthy, have nothing to do with religion, and that religion has an active side of conception and purpose, in addition to a passive
side of feeling.
But Schleiermacher speaks not only of feeling but also of
intuitions (Anschauungen), which in the first edition of the Reden hold the first place, even though afterwards subordi nated to feeling. The relation of the two is not clearly stated, but it is plain that Schleiermacher could not ignore the intuitions if he wished to state the definite contents of the religious consciousness, and not rest satisfied with the complete indefiniteness of feeling, The object of religious intuition is indeed the universe, yet not directly as such, but in its finite revelations in nature and human life. In nature it is not masses of natural or beautiful forms, but laws which reveal the divine unity and unchangeableness of the world, and which therefore affect us religiously. Yet there the question arises, whether the aesthetic view of nature is really so im material to religion, whether it does not affect the mind much sooner than the intellectual view ; further, whether the reign of law in nature is an object of direct intuition and not rather the result of reflective thought. The external world can only be understood by the internal, and this again only by the contemplation of self in the mirror of mankind at large; whilst the individual, when looked at from the moral point of view, is
? ? ? ? 48 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
isolated and found wanting, as measured by the standard of the ideal, religion discovers even here a characteristic life and wonderful harmony of the whole. Leaving the whole and contemplating himself, the devout man finds there too the marks of the highest and the lowest, a compendium of humanity. Further, even when intuition fails us, imaginative
can travel beyond nature and mankind, and reach further forms of the universe. With these intuitions are connected the religious feelings of humility, love, thank fulness, pity, remorse ; feelings which, Schleiermacher holds, do not belong to morality but only to religion, since they do not exist for the sake of some action, but are their own cause and end, as factors of the highest and most inward life. These feelings have a peculiar complexion in each religion, comparable with the different styles and tastes in music ; and the character of a religion is determined solely by this common element of
feeling, not by a system of propositions deducible from each other and capable of logical concatenation. For this very reason, everything in religion is equally true, as far as it is the pure product of feeling and has not yet been moulded by thought. The distinction of " true and false," therefore, does not apply to religion at all ; every religion is true in its own way, though it must not be forgotten that the whole realm of
religion is boundless, and can assume the most diverse shapes. Religion is never intolerant, but only religious systems. The mania for systems repudiates everything foreign to each,
while religion shuns the cold uniformity which would be fatal to its divine profusion. It is only the adherents of the dead letter, which religion rejects, that have filled the world with the tumult of religious controversies : they who have had a true vision of the Eternal were always peaceful souls, being either alone with themselves and the Infinite, or, if they looked around on others, gladly according to each his special characteristics. To a devout soul, religion makes everything holy and precious, even what is unholy and common, whether corresponding to its own thought and action or not ; for religion is the sworn foe of all pusillanimity and narrowness,
v / She cannot be held responsible for fanatical actions, simply because she does not of herself impel to action at all. Religious feeling is neither bound, nor permitted directly to influence action ; it rather invites to peaceful, absorbing enjoyment, than impels to external acts. Feelings and
presentiment
? ? ? ? Ch. III. ] SCHLEIERMACHER. 49
actions naturally form two concurrent series, " nothing should be done at the instigation of religion ; but every thing with religion ; religious feelings should accompany active life without intermission like a sacred melody. "
We see that Schleiermacher is here pleading the cause of
a mystical religion of the heart ; a religion which is satisfied
with the peaceful absorbing enjoyment of its own feelings, and does not think itself called upon to formulate either an intel- \ lectual truth or a consistent system of dogmas, or to take an active part in the world's life, thus with large-hearted toler ance giving free play to the thoughts and ways of mankind.
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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it is
it
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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
? ? is,
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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? ? ? 1/
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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
? ? is
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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;
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;
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it ;
it is
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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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;
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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
? ? in
is, in
is it,
it
; it
it is
; it
it
it
is ;
is
it is
it,
in
is,
is
;
is
in
in a
? Ch. IV. ] FICHTE. 6 1
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
? ? ? it is
in
in is
It
it,
is
it.
? 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.